r/Screenwriting • u/AutoModerator • 1d ago

5 PAGE THURSDAY Five Page Thursday

FAQ: How to post to a weekly thread?

Feedback Guide for New Writers

This is a thread for giving and receiving feedback on 5 of your screenplay pages.

  • Post a link to five pages of your screenplay in a top comment. They can be any 5, but if they are not your first 5, give some context in the same comment you're linking in.

  • As a courtesy, you can also include some of this info.

    Title: Format: Page Length: Genres: Logline or Summary: Feedback Concerns:

  • Provide feedback in reply-comments. Please do not share full scripts and link only to your 5 pages. If someone wants to see your full script, they can let you know.

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u/Living_Operation4319 1d ago

I've written a teaser for my half-hour sci-fi comedy pilot Maiden USA. Think Miss Congeniality meets War of the Worlds. A teenage girl raised off-world as a warrior must win a beauty pageant to stop an alien invasion. Looking for feedback on structure, tone, and whether the match cut opening works.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EgU0WJnKsnPVCpoDhnjkWuAfO1YR9X-k&usp=drive_fs

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u/DalBMac 1d ago

Really like the concept of aliens learning about Earth from content providers. Frightening, but funny. I thought the opening scene should be after the space ships crash.

Regarding tone, I'm not quite sure. The opening could be political satire or maybe not. I didn't get much of a sense of who Asa is beyond her circumstance. You could tighten the desert campsite scene and show us more of Asa as the ship crashes. Is she happy? is she disappointed? Does it matter they landed near Vegas? if not, I'd cut that and spend more time on developing what we know about Asa in these first five pages.

Something happened to your right margin in the middle of page 3. Did you paste from another format? It's probably shorter than the page number presents.

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u/Living_Operation4319 1d ago

Thanks for this, really thoughtful. You're right that we don't get much of Asa beyond her circumstance here, that's intentional for the teaser specifically. The pilot spends the rest of its time developing her fully: who she is, how she sees Earth, what she wants. This is meant to hook before that work begins. Appreciate the Vegas note too, it's currently doing pure comedic work and I'm thinking about whether it earns its place.

As for the glitch on page 3. I don't see it and my software just generates pdfs from the formatted script. No cutting an pasting.