1 out of 4 stars
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Mystified By Stephanie by Daniel A. Shea is a screenplay following the story’s protagonist, Dan—talented, though mostly deaf and facing adversity—from childhood to his rocky involvement with the military. Hopping through grade school, lip-reading lessons, and basic training, Dan and his friends, later to include his deranged girlfriend, Stephanie, find themselves living their most interesting lives.
The first couple of things I noticed about Mystified By Stephanie were the visually striking cover and that Daniel A. Shea, starting the story’s action off with a high-speed car chase gone wrong, had written himself into the story. I initially found this intriguing and soon found myself enjoying Shea’s method of storytelling—humor so ridiculous it could only be featured in cheesy, slow motion, perfect-song-for-the-occasion comedies; which I read often in the story. I felt that the song lyrics, during most scenes, added flavor where I felt it lacking, as did the array of personal and historical pictures/document scans scattered about the screenplay, reminding me of a photo album with interesting captions. Additionally, I found most scenes very easy to envision (thanks to the dialogue, not the stage directions) and that the story’s main characters—Dan, his best friend, Nicky, and Dan’s girlfriend, Stephanie—were well-depicted and entertaining.
Though, I was more massively frustrated throughout my reading by the lack of punctuation, grammar, and spelling correctness impairing my ability to read, enjoy, and understand the plotline. For instance, I encountered Shea’s first spelling mistake on the second page, and this problem ballooned from page three until the book’s close. I had, at first, let the lack of punctuation “slide” as reading was slow-going, but still understandable. However, I began to thirst for an edited version of the screenplay when I read, on page 13: “…ventriloquist trick of sort Japanese versions of the Godzilla movies actors mouths don’t match the words they’re saying.” As well as another extreme case on page 43, which read: “The unique painting the van is very is to identify.”
Along with my loose opinions that some comedic elements of the screenplay could have been stronger and the ending more understandable, other factors that further agitated me were Shea's repetition of words as well as pictures (so, inserting them out of context); making no indication of “speaker” over several blocks of dialogue; very frequently mis-formatting both stage directions and song lyrics (ex. missing brackets, sometimes written in lowercase letters like dialogue, etc.) which often made external action bleed confusingly into the dialogue; among several other things.
Finally, I was most concerned with whether the story was fictional or not. Shea’s introduction categorized the book under fiction, and yet, the characters, events, pictures, and document scans were all real enough to blur whatever fictional scenes there may have been. While there were certainly scenes that I doubted were real, the occasional pronoun slip-up—rather than the third person ‘Dan’ or ‘he’, Shea sometimes wrote ‘me,’ ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘I’—reinforced the fact that the screenplay was rather closely based off Shea’s personal experiences and wasn’t as strictly fictional as he had insisted.
This uncertainty greatly aggravated me while I read, leading me to a final rating of 1 out of 4 stars for this book. While the plot was unique and generally entertaining, Mystified By Stephanie suffered under its commanding lack of editing. I would loosely recommend this book to film enthusiasts looking for a comedic screenplay hoping to find its way to the big screen.
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Mystified By Stephanie
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