Meet the Maxwells
This is my Round 2 script for NYC Midnight’s 2021 screenwriting competition. My prompts this time were:
Historical fiction
A gang
A boater
I know: a hat as the main character? But I’m assuming they haven’t taken a turn for the surreal, and just mean someone who enjoys boating.
For the historical angle, I chose Victorian London: historical, but not so distant that I’d get too tangled up in avoiding anachronisms, or trying to get the language authentic. Plus it’s a dramatic milieu I’ve always enjoyed – from Dickens to Philip Pullman’s wonderful Sally Lockhart books (which were definitely an influence here.)
I also thought I’d try to pack as much action as I could into the eight-page limit. In doing so, I pared the words back pretty hard – risking a loss of clarity in the process. If you’ve a mind, I’d love to know if you got lost reading the script.
And I’ll let you know if this gets me through to the third and final round…
UPDATE
Reading the script back, I realised I should have expanded the final scene just slightly, to live up to the title and add information for the audience. So I’ve done that in a new version – downloadable here. It goes over the eight-page NYC Midnight limit (just), but as we’re past submission date, that no longer matters!
