Quote: niteowl @ February 4, 2008, 4:31 PM
I'm probably way too late to comment here (wanted to earlier but computers playing up) but...can I suggest James that you get comfortable and re-read this thread from the beginning. Because you seem to have been reacting to the posts as they come and have got stuck in defending your position which makes objectivity difficult.
You are well liked on here,your previous work has been mostly well recieved and no ones got it in for you. This sitcom is clearly very important to you and you've put a lot of time,effort and thought into it. What you dont have though is emotional distance. Everything from the characterizations to the jokes makes sense to you because you have so much detail in your head and you've 'lived with' this script. For example,the sirens joke in your original scene 1 made sense when you explained it but without that background info it didnt. We,like commissioners etc,are not mind readers-we can only go on whats on the page.
It's your right to shout everyone down and insist that this script has everything it needs and it's our problem if we dont 'get it'. But no ones being nasty in their critique here. The comments are valid and worth taking on board if you want to improve this. Your rewrite of scene 1 was an improvement and shows that you can make the material better without totally changing the style. Not accepting peoples rewrites is fine if you dont feel they fit but ignoring the overwhelming majority view that this isnt quite working yet is just going to leave you with a sitcom you love gathering dust in a drawer for eternity.
Its hell when you work so hard on something to find its not as well recieved as you know it should be. But theres no profit or feel-good factor in being a 'misunderstood genius'. Writers write,rewrite,scrap,rewrite,cull etc ad infinitum. Theres no room for sentiment and you do sometimes have to lose that ace joke or fantastic character in order to make the whole thing better. Re-read the thread James,work on something else for a while and come back to this when you're not so attached to it.Good luck.
A lot of the 'crit' has been rather unpleasant and personal; I certainly didn't enjoy being called "a **** with delusions of adequacy"; nor did I particularly enjoy being personally mocked in a parody of my own script. I have remained reasonably polite and have not 'rejected' all critique by any stretch of the imagination.
If the overall majority view of the script is that it's not very good, then I believe the overall majority view is wrong. Of course there's room for improvement and I can see that. But for some to say I can't write and that the script is relatively meritless is to my mind short-sighted.
There is almost an autistic tendency for many of the contributors on here to put in as many 'gags' as possible, no matter how poor, and to reject anything that is a written differently to what they, in their head, think makes a 'good' sitcom. It's a lack of vision. There is also a curious preponderance of people reflecting crit they received for their stuff onto my script, usually inappropriately.
I'm bored of being told that the people who don't like it are right, that I am wrong to believe in my script, and that I need to take a break from the script to see how lacking it is. So I'd prefer it if anyone with genuinely constructive actual criticism PM'd me, and that this thread died a death as all people are "banging on about" is how apparently over-protective I am of my script.
