By now you’ve had a chance to read the new script pages written by Jerry Lazar and maybe even start thinking about where you’ll take the story when you deliver your pages.

But what about the entries that didn’t make the final cut? Sooner or later I hope to get with Kevin and design a way to post some of the weekly runners-up on the site as well. For now, though, I’ll just point out what I liked about two of last week’s submissions and discuss why, despite their merit, they weren’t chosen for our script.

In Linda Jordan’s version, within seconds of Russ Napolitano taking over the mike at his Brentwood reception, he’s bumped off by an unseen assassin. Jordan, a longtime Angeleno now living in the Bay Area, quickly introduces a couple of detectives who presumably will become the story’s new protagonists. Their dialog is snappy and colorful, but I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to the mayor just yet.

Dianna Brown from Kokomo, Indiana (yep, they’ve heard about the Script Project there too), has Napolitano concoct a funny tale about how he stopped to assist with the control of a car fire on Vermont, thus explaining away the condition of his suit jacket, which actually got burned and trampled in considerably less heroic circumstances. We then see a man sitting in the tent’s shadows, figuring out from the mud on the mayor’s shoes and the burn pattern on his coat that he’s lying.

I liked Napolitano’s charm and resourcefulness and the way Dianna used a traffic motif to tie her scene to the previous one, but in the end I found the Mystery Man conceit to be a little too familiar and his unraveling of the mayor’s fabrication to be unexplained except in the author’s scene description.

There were other good entries too, but that was last week. We’ve got a few days to come up with something new that will set up more of our story while driving it forward and deepening its characters, all while maintaining a consistent tone. It’s a challenge, but we only need 1-5 pages.

And then it’ll be somebody else’s turn.