There's always other boys; there's always other boyfriends

The typical rule for the screenwriting blog about town is that you never, ever, ever, ever talk about your work in anything but the most general of terms because, heaven forfend, what if someone STOLE what you wrote?! (Of course, many have legal reasons, etc., but I own my own copyright, so I'm not as worried.)

Well, I'm not worried about that. I've got the copyright law on my side, and I'd like your advice, Internets. So over the next few weeks, I'm going to post a spec pilot I've written piece by piece and ask for your commentary. I'll talk about what I'm going for, what I think works, what I think doesn't work and what I would like to improve upon in the next draft.

A few words: If I find out you unfairly copied this and presented it as your own, I will first sue, then cut you. And I have sharp, sharp fingernails and an even sharper sense of the law.

Anyway.

I don't want to spoil what's about to go down, but what you're about to read is the most cliched thing ever. No. Really. It's about a prodigal son who returns home and has an old girlfriend who's mad at him and so on and so forth. Really, it's not my most original idea.

But, here's the thing. I love small town shows. Love 'em to pieces. And I love the HBO approach of taking an overexposed genre and then flipping it over to find the reality that exists within it (The Wire is nothing less than one episode of another cop show, spread out over a season -- well, I mean, it's OTHER things too, duh, but it's also what I described it as). The idea that became Custer, which you'll see below, first started to take form in the summer of 2003 when I lived in the titular town for a while. Now, if I talked a lot about the creative process that led to this script, I would pretty much give away the only twist I've got lurking in this thing, so I guess I won't discuss it other than to say that the idea hung out in my brain for a long while and collided with other ideas until it became a first draft.

That was the summer of 2005. This most recent draft was written this summer. I've been working on other stuff, but this is the best thing I've got going right now, so you get to see it.

So anyway. Since you've been properly warned.

This is the opening of the pilot. Everything that plays before the main titles. The show, like many small town shows, is about hyper-verbal people (and, in my defense, the town where I grew up was filled with same). But for the opening, I wanted to convey as much information as possible through visuals. What do you think of this technique? I like the way it flows, but I worry that it might lose some viewers, who will be required to remember a series of faces in a photograph (don't worry, I name them all explicitly later).

What's more, the dialogue in the one scene WITH extensive dialogue is pretty good, but it's not sparkling yet. It's our only chance to really see the main character in his element -- as someone who's NOT an asshole. Because he's not happy when he has to go home (prodigal, of course), and that's going to color his mood for the rest of the episode. To me, it's important that we see that he's not a TOTAL jerk all of the time, and I'm not sure that scene goes far enough in making us see that.

Some people who've read this wonder if by giving a girl we only see for one scene an interesting backstory (which, admittedly, is barely even hinted at), I throw the balance of the whole show off. But I like the idea that anyone in the show's universe COULD potentially carry a whole episode of the show (though I certainly don't intend to give, say, a doorman a soliloquy about his dead wife or something).

Finally, I really like where we leave our main character before the title screen. I think it perfectly encapsulates his relationship with his past.

So what do you think? Read the following 5.25 pages and let me know. Boring? Intriguing? Stuff I'm plagiarizing? Rip into me as much as you want, snowbirds.

Edit: It should be pointed out that I don't really expect to put this in my portfolio, but I DO hope to film it independently some time soon. So bear that in mind, especially if I've crafted a sequence that looks like it will cost millions of dollars. Furthermore, my apologies for the weird white overhang on all of the images. Don't know how to get rid of it in MS Paint.

Click on the pictures to make them big!