Okay, here’s the beginning of my critique. Please understand everyone I’m not being especially harsh on Diogenes. This is exactly what I would be writing if this script came across my desk at work. Actually, this is a bit milder than what I would do professionally. Since I’m not marking up an actual manuscript, but just typing up notes I’m ignoring a lot of tiny things that I would flag if I were doing this for real.
In the future please use standard teleplay format. Merely centering the dialog instead of using proper tab stops makes it much more difficult to read.
Who is the opening quotation intended for? Will it be shown to the audience before the fade in? If not, why is it included in the script?
Some scene numbers would be nice. It would make it much easier to post critique. And, of course, it’s part of the standard format.
Tighten the senator’s opening line. It’s far too wordy.
“This is your moment.” – Would a 12-year-old really use this phrasing?
The senator’s second line is also too wordy. Tighten.
And the judge’s speech is too wordy as well. Seriously. This needs to be cut by about a third at least. Scanning ahead through the script I see that overall this is a pattern. Spoken dialog takes much longer to deliver than you think it does and long blocks of dialog wind up feeling dramatically slack. I’m not going to point out every instance in the future like I would if I were marking up an actual script, but I will revisit this point when it’s particularly bad.
“Can we get a medical professional please?” He’s yelling that? The phrasing of the line is at odds with the emotion of the person delivering it.
I’d cut the final exchange in the back and forth between Cuddy and House over the videogame. A little banter is fun but if you carry it on too long the scene starts to go slack. Try to keep the plot moving forward.
I’m not sure that “Republican” is the right word here. You want to set up the idea that she’s a hyper-moral fundamentalist, but Republican is too broad an umbrella. I’d consider rewriting the opening so that when the senator introduces her he talks about her iron-clad morals. Then you don’t have to worry about trying to set up her conservatism so close to where House is sneering at it.
“You must be the pill popping, drug addled doctor ….” The task was to write a script, not a parody of a script. Parody is easy, and a cheap cop-out. I hope this doesn’t become a pattern.
Here’s another good example of a line that’s too wordy: “Pleased to meet you, Sandra Tolliver. Nobody knows dirt better than political flaks. If you would be kind enough to provide us with an inventory of illicit drugs and sexual partners used by the patient, that would save a lot of time.” Two sentences worth of dialog follow this – they’re good stuff but they just revisit the same ground covered by the quote above. Tighten, tighten, tighten.
“You’re concerned about your campaign. What are you afraid is going to come out?” A good example of on-the-nose writing. There’s no subtlety in this flat declaration, no play. House is blunt, but he’s not flat. Rewrite so that House’s taunt is more offhand and less direct.
I don’t believe how fast House is jumping to the conclusions that he’s jumping to at this point. And this point he should be suspicious of the judge’s squeaky-clean reputation, not completely damning. It would also let write his dialog as more of an insinuation and a tease rather than a flat out declaration.
“Not all conservatives are hypocrites” – A conservative judge would never say this.
Again the back and forth between House and Tolliver probably goes on for one exchange too long.
“The drugs, the sex … the sex.” This construction only works if you have more things in the list. Come up with another vice or drop it.
“It’s not a cat, it’s a rat, my Hello Kitty purse.” The audience can see that it’s a Hello Kitty purse. Why are you mentioning it in the dialog? And shouldn’t House know what Hello Kitty it? Not knowing makes him seem a bit dim.
I absolutely don’t believe this scene. A conservative judge – a person used to accepting a large amount of deference and respect – is not going to just sit that and let House insult her … in front of her daughter, no less! And then talk to him about her sex life! Totally unbelievable. There are ways to set this up and have it work. You could have her rage at him and throw him out, then quietly confess something later when they’re alone because she’s frightened. Or he could do something to win her respect. Or he could gradually wear her down over several scenes by browbeating her. But your current set-up is not working.
“I didn’t say anything, I was just asking questions.” You’ve lost the thread of the characters here. Early in the scene House was totally antagonistic and accused the judge of some pretty horrible things. Which she took without fighting back. But now he suggests something much less awful – that her troubles are psychosomatic, and she fights back! And he backs down and gets defensive! Both characters have drifted away from the arc you established at the beginning of the scene.
“We have a very conscientious and scrupulous team.” Unnatural dialog Leave it at “He was just kidding about the pain.” and you have a good ending to the scene.
“She’s lying about something.” Sure, but there needs to be something in the previous scene to give the audience that feeling too. The way it’s written it’s perfectly straightforward. There aren’t any undercurrents to it that give the audience the feeling that something is off, even if we’re not sure what. If this is the direction you’re going with the plot you need to rewrite the previous scene. Downplay the belligerence and make House’s jabs more probing. He’s not just being mean for the hell of it (although that’s part of it), he’s trying to put her off balance so something slips.
“What is this, LAW AND ORDER?” through “Come on, it’s sweeps.” Again, you’re lapsing into parody. Writing a joke version of House is easier than writing a straight version of House.
“I prefer to spend the day alone. It makes me thankful there aren’t any people there.” On the nose. And it’s not glib, despite what Wilson says. It’s just a dull statement of fact.
“You think if you make enough cynical jokes and tell yourself your holiday solitude is a choice, that maybe you can delude yourself into believing that you aren’t really lonely.” Try reading this aloud. What a mouthful. Rewrite with the actor’s delivery in mind.
“Yes, I birdied the first hole. All those mulligans really paid off.” To long. You want a short, punchy bit of dialog to punctuate House’s dismissal of Miller’s overtures of friendship. Dragging it out wrecks the rebuff.
…
I can go on and do the whole thing, if anyone cares. Basically, this is not a professional-quality script. The biggest problems are that it is way too wordy. Almost every line of dialog could be tightened and made sharper and shorter. And most of the exchanges between characters go on one beat too long.
The second major problem is that a lot of the dialog hasn’t been written with the actors in mind. It’s written as though its going to be read off the page, not spoken aloud. Some of the dialog is awkward or doesn’t align with the emotional tone that it will need to be delivered in.
The dialog in general is too direct. Good writing involves several different layers operating simultaneously – there’s surface banter, but underneath there are different levels of emotional play. (For example, when House is talking about making a birdie, but actually is dismissing Cuddy.) There’s not enough of that in this script.
Finally, the characterization isn’t holding steady. Motivations are unclear and the characters do and say things that don’t match up with what we know about their personalities.
It’s a good amateur effort, but it’s not production quality.
(BTW, Diogenes, it takes a lot of balls to put your work out for public critique like that. I admire you for that. And keep writng.)
FYI, Dio, when a manuscript comes back from editor it has the kinds of point by point critique Pochacco is doing. It can be deflating at first, but it’s just part of the process. I think his crit is fair and interesting, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be proud of what you’ve done.
Also, unless you know Fox is casting around for scab writers, I think you’d be better off investing your time in original writing projects instead of perfecting this one.
Congratulations. Everyone predicted you’d pull a rather assholish move like this and you came through with flying colors.
Did this thread really need a blow-by-blow of everything you think is wrong with Dio’s “not production quality script?” Of coruse it’s not production quality, it’s a first draft! And some of your “notes” are so far away from reality as to make me question just what kind of TV writing you actually do. You write for Til Death and you’re seriously bitter from all the bile flung at that show in the original thread, am I right?
I’ve only seen a few episodes of House in my life and while I thought it was a decent show, it’s nothing I feel the need to catch every week. But this episode would have been awesome. Good job Dio.
I believe my caustic response was deserved. If you hold a layman to an impossibly high standard then there are many professional script writers, who aren’t sticking their neck out, that would fail the challenge too. He did it on his own, without the benefit of experience or a professional research team. There are points I think could be improved too (like I do of most TV episodes I watch) but overall it’s plain this meets the standard set by previous episodes. If the vertical line spacing in the draft is correct or not is just an excuse to avoid facing the fact that a layman proved he could do as good a job as a professional script writer in his spare time. In my opinion.
I found it rather dull. There were no laugh-out-loud lines (House usually has 2 or 3 for me), the end was obvious right from the start (conservative pol hides politically embarrassing medical secret) and the heavyhanded moralizing was out of place on that show.
It was however, certainly good enough to pass on some of the lesser shows on TV, which IIRC was the bet.
And yes, it’s likely better than anything I’d have done in an equivalent timeframe.
Word. Dio did what he said he was going to do, well. He deserves congratulations, not a 26 point critique… as if he’s going to polish it into a TV quality formatted script. Give it a fucking rest, Pochacco. Dio was dared to do something, and he did it rather better than his critics believed he could. He’s not trying to sell this script to a studio, and there is really no reason for him to work on it beyond what he’s already done. Your nitpicking just comes off as sour grapes, your last line notwithstanding.
Dio, you did a great job. It was, in all ways but the most picayune, exactly what you said you’d deliver, and I enjoyed it a lot. Was it perfect? Who gives a fuck? Anyone who thinks Gregory House knows who Hello Kitty is ain’t worth your time.
I thought it was obvious that a lot of the heavy handedness you mention was Dio winking at all the countless political and moral debates on the SDMB (and I agree with you there).
Before saying anything else. This script had absolutely nothing to do with the bet in the thread as initially envisioned. In that thread people talked about how writing was a small percentage of the work that has to be done by a member of the WGA. Rewrites, and working to please the suits, and the advertisers, and the specifics of athe overall goal of a show’s producer all are as important to their job as the actual writing. This script was an awesome thing that DtC did at behest of the OP, but the bet went by the wayside long beforehand. So, anyone crowing about how he “won” the bet is a moron at best. What he did do is really impressive! Answered a challenge and he did great work! I am sure DtC is proud of his work, and I am doubly sure that cricetus is glad he started this thread and urged his brother (or is it in law, I don’t know.) on.
I thought the script was really fun! Great job! It did get a bit preachy and heavyhanded in parts (I agreed with it and it felt myself wanting to disagree in spite of myself.) , but this was a script written by DtC, I think we had to expect a little bit of axe grinding Most of the characters seemed spot on, and there was a lot of fun snappy dialog. I did like House’s long con, and the entire Thanksgiving dinner subplot.
And if that layperson had merely claimed that he could produce a script, or a passable one, or even a good one, then your objection might have some merit. As you know full well though, DtC claimed a great deal more than that.
He also had a great deal more time, and none of the interference that industry insiders state to be common in their field. This is yet another reason why I think it’s foolish to declare that the debate has been “won” by either side.
I’m not alone in that observation. As pricciarp correctly states, it’s foolish to suggest that churning out a script – even an excellent one – says anything about the incompetence of TV writers or the ease of their task. Note that pricciar loved the script, yet even he/she acknowledges that ithe script “had absolutely nothing to do with the bet in the thread as initially envisioned.”
Good job on completing the script, Dio. There were some excellent quips in there.
I think you should consider applying your writing skills to playwriting. Your style suits it very well - you tend to be wordy and parenthetical-heavy (crime # 1 o’ newbies in screenwriting).
I won’t sit down and do a blow-by-blow analysis of your screenplay, since that wasn’t the purpose of this exercise and no matter what I do, I’m going to get my head chewed off. Good for you for finishing up the first attempt at a screenplay, though.
As my compadre above has said, it took guts to put it out there to be read. You definitely have writing talent and you should continue. This script would not survive beyond the first page on The Boss’ desk at work because of the the wordiness, the architecture and the way the acts are shaped. That said, it’s a valiant effort and for that, I commend you.
– for the record? Soooo not a republican… But I’ll be outside freezing my ass with my fellow writers, tonight, at a Rally in Uptown…
That’s how critique is done. I know you might find it hard to believe, but there’s no malice behind it. I rip stuff to shreds all the time and others return the favor for my work. One of the marks of a professional is not taking this sort of thing personally.
It’s interesting to see how this challenge has morphed over time. Originally it was the result of **Diogenes ** claiming that television writers were so bad as what they did that he, a smart amateur, could easily write something that was just as good. Now it seems to have turned into some self-actualization project where we’re all supposed to applaud because he gave it a good try.
I do think he gave it a good try, and that is worthy of applause. And if he spends a lot of time practicing and improving his skills I think he has the talent to be a good professional writer, if that’s what he wants to do. But I think this script as it stands now needs a lot of improvement before it rises to the level of a typical teleplay.
There’s probably some truth to that. You are, after all, a professional. As a casual TV viewer though, I think if you were to get the cast of House to act that out, I might not discern too much of a difference between it and a regular episode. And maybe that makes me uncritical. I think there is going to be a disconnect here between those that just watch and those that do, because the expectations of what the final product is are different.
I’m sure this has all been hashed out in the original thread, which I have only skimmed.
It was jus’ a’ight. Not horrible. Not great. Some pretty good lines, I thought.
One of the things I liked about West Wing was the ability of its writers, despite their own leftist leanings, to create a reasonably astue, talented, and eloquent character holding views opposing their own. Remember Ainsley Hayes? Here, Dio did a pretty good job writing a pretty typical House episode, but he made House too wise (and chatty) about his atheism, and the candidate too stupid about her faith. I don’t think House would say, “God just didn’t show up.” But if he did, a person of faith would normally respond, “He was there. He does not abandon us.” I rather think House would have hammered her with Jesus and why Christians are so unlike Him — so judgmental, quick to condemn, and whatnot. There was a good opportunity to probe whether Christ Himself condemned homosexuality. Anyway, it just didn’t seem clear to me why she learned the lesson she apparently learned about tolerance. There was really nothing House said that would be very meaningful to a person of faith.
Those are my opinions, of course, and will differ from most people here probably. But still, I’m entitled. And so are you.
Good job on completing the script, Dio. Keep writing.
And I thought Pochacco was being helpful. Doesn’t offering line-by-line criticism mean that he took the project seriously? Shouldn’t writers crave criticism so they can improve?
No, he did it about as well I expected he would. It’s exactly the level of quality you’d expect from someone who is good with words but is unfamiliar with the form he’s working in. He’s made a number of beginner’s mistakes, which is to be expected, because he IS a beginner.
For example, as **Elenfair ** and I have both pointed out, it’s too wordy … way too wordy. It’s the sort of thing that isn’t obvious just reading it off the page, but if you actually heard it read out loud it would leap out at you. The scenes would feel like they were dragging and the characters would sound like they were repeating themselves. This is a common beginner’s mistake … I remember quite well being hammered for exactly the same thing the first time I wrote cutscene dialog. After months of rewrites I finally got better at it … and then I started getting hammered about something else.
And this is why the producers can’t just replace the writers at the drop of the hat. Writing professionally is a skilled craft. It takes time to learn all the tricks and techniques. It’s not some mystical pristhood that only a talented few can be admitted to. But neither is it utterly trivial to learn.
I kind of know where the TV writers are coming from, because I write children’s books. A lot of people think kids books are easy because they’re short and simple. (I write middle grade novels, not picture books, but once you mention kids books at all, most people assume you mean some cutesy rhyming thing for toddlers.) If someone said they could piss out a… oh, let’s say an American Girl book… I’d be a little defensive. Even if they’re commercial and formulaic, I know real people wrote them and made sacrifices to do it and went through a process that the person knew nothing about. For arguments sake, if that disagreement led to a person writing an American Girl book in a fortnight, and sharing it with me, and the result was choppy and messy but surprisingly good, I would hope at that point it wouldn’t be about me “winning” (because the book isn’t ready to send to copyediting by a damn sight) or “losing” (because the draft has potential as a bona fide American Girl book). I would hope the dialogue would just go to a level beyond school playground. We could talk as colleagues, discussing the manuscript as a work in progress*.
YMMV.
P.S., I think that’s what Pocha has done. As I said before, it reminded me of getting an editorial letter.
What if there is disagreement on this point? What then? Because frankly, before Dio went and published this thing, all anyone had to say was that his critics would be knee-jerk, that they wouldn’t admit it if he did a good job. But the knee jerk responses in here are from those who decided long ago that he was right and was going to do a good job. The absolute ire being directed at anyone who dares to suggest that this isn’t a professional quality teleplay - and it isn’t - is embarrassing.
Actually, as someone already said, he did it almost exactly well as I’d expect from an above average amateur writer with no experience in the medium in question. Which was the original point. Diogenes demonstrated that when an above average amateur writer attempts to take on a style with which he/she is unfamiliar, the results are rather short of what those with a unique skill in that type of writing can produce. Most certainly, the idea that Dio could simply “piss” a performance-quality script was solidly debunked.
For what it’s worth - not that this exercise was ever going to convince Dio of anything - an honest evaluation of the script should convince its author that his original point was misguided. I think this script ran afoul of a pretty significant problem: it’s very hard to write for characters that you yourself didn’t create. House, Wilson, Cuddy, Cameron - they are all people with unique voices, that were developed by other writers. Stepping into those voices and reproducing them is a difficult thing to accomplish. It’s one of the things that I’d imagine makes writing for serial television difficult. Diogenes’ Greg House sounds quite a bit like Diogenes’ Diogenes, as it were, and that may be clever and interesting and even at times funny, but it isn’t Greg House.
Y’know, re-reading that post makes me sound more critical than I had intended to be. Dio is an above average writer, that is clear - he is just not a professional-level screenwriter. It is possible that, if he practiced it sufficiently and had certain inherent skills that responded well to that practice, he could at some point become a professional-level screenwriter. Which is exactly what professional-level screenwriters have done. Which is why, to return to the source of the whole thing, the dismissal of the talent that they bring to the table, with which this whole thing began, is so foolish.
To be brutally honest, if so much TV wasn’t lousy at face value, you wouldn’t have to argue about how hard it is to make people realize how good it is.
Most of the characters seemed spot on, and there was a lot of fun snappy dialog. I did like House’s long con, and the entire Thanksgiving dinner subplot.