Generally, this is bullshit. It isn't a matter of what "bothers" a reader, it's a matter of whether there are flaws, stuff that violates known principles, protocols, elements of dramatic structure, conventions, and the generally accepted practices of form, or outright errors.
Any reader should identify essentially the same set of flaws as the next reader, especially those that are egregious. People doing coverage should not be operating on the basis of their own tastes or preferences, they should be operating against comprehensive knowledge of the form and the accepted practices and conventions of it and an assessment of whether the writer achieved his goals and wrote a compelling, entertaining drama.
Maybe I've done too much script consulting in my time.
Why do it then? What is the purpose?
Just to collect another $35?
Oh I understand all of this, I mean, this is not the first script competition I've ever entered and in fact I've probably entered 50 of them, perhaps even more, I lost count a long time ago. I've won some, placed high in others, and not placed at all in many.
What I didn't expect from BlueCat was a second go round, certanly a first in my experience. I assumed that the first go round was intended to identify major issues a script may have and provide an opportunity for the writer to fix those or at least work on them and get his work (more) ready for the contest.
I mean, why else would a contest even give notes and offer an opportunity to resubmit?
So I did that, even though the criticisms didn't really identify anything that was particularly noteworthy and were in fact pretty nit picky, as I have explained here.
And why would they hand the resubmitted script off to a different reader and send me another set of notes that bore no relationship to the first set? Couldn't that go on forever? Of course it could.
There was no indication at the outset that this would be the process. The indication was one set of notes, one resubmittal, and your done.
I'm sure as hell not going to rewrite based on the notes I got the second time around, which plainly came from someone who just skimmed the script. I'd be a fool to do that. And after all the years I've been at this game I'm no
dilettante who can't be objective about his work and see the flaws in it and accept that they exist when in fact they do.
I never enter a contest with an expectation of winning. I'm always happy to get a finish that's in the top ten per cent and even if that doesn't happen it's gotta be
c'est la vie yunno, that's just the nature of these kinds of competitions. Win some, lose some.
I'm going to let my submission stand as it is and I'll take whatever finish it may garner and not complain about it, it'll be whatever it'll be. But I'm not going into
any contest for $120. Eighty-five dollars is already too much in my book.
I appreciate your commentary, but man I have been here and done this a boatload of times so for the most part it'sd all pretty familiar geography to me. Except, this two times around the horn deal with BlueCat is not something that's within my experience, despite it being rather long and comprehensive. It just struck me as odd and not necessary.
C'est la vie! 
Okay, I want to try to respond constructively to some of the points that you've raised.
One might claim, in an ideal world, you'd be correct and every reader would point out the same fundamental flaws and issues.
But in another sense, you have to understand that this is, after all, an art and not a science. Readers not only bring their taste, they also bring a particular aesthetic approach to the art itself and, just as in the real world, what one critic may consider to be a good movie, another, using a different set of aesthetic criteria, may consider to be mediocre.
It isn't that one is right and other is wrong. They are simply approaching the work in different ways. It isn't simply a matter of taste. Even things that might strike one reader as egregious, might not strike another reader that way, in the same was as the absence (to take an example off the top of my head) as the lack of a clear narrative story in some later Fellini movies, might bother some critics, but obviously didn't bother others.
As to why they do it, that is something that should be very clear to you.
The reason that the readers in these contests read the scripts isn't for the purpose of providing you with a script analysis. That isn't the case in Blue Cat and it wasn't the case in the competition that I worked on.
We read the scripts in order to judge them for the contest. The entry fee that you paid wasn't intended to buy coverage or the services of a story analyst. It was intended to pay for the overall costs of the contest -- and if that involves a profit for those who set up the contest, that may very well be the case, but why shouldn't it be. Who ever said screenplay competitions were a charitable enterprise?
One thing for sure -- the people who are reading and commenting on the scripts aren't making any kind of a killing. Even if they got every cent of what you paid in your entrance fee, and that hardly seems likely, they'd still be earning a fraction of the going rate for doing coverage on a screenplay.
I suspect that Blue cat made the same sort decision that was made in the competion that I was part of. They figured that, since they had readers reading the scripts in order to evaluate them *for their competition* -- why not have those readers also pass on their opinions about those scripts, such as they were, onto the writers.
But the primary purpose of the reading is for the purposes of the competition -- not primarily for the writers.
The notes (like my brief conversations with the writers) are really a courtesy. a sort of extra benefit above and beyond what your entrance fee is buying -- which is participation in the contest.
And I must tell you that it seems very odd to me that if a script is rejected and the notes, as you indicate, are minor and nitpicky -- and while I don't know that there are semi-finals or anything like that, but I'm guessing that there was no suggestion that your script finished close to the top -- why would you imagine that making a handful of minor changes would make the difference between winning and losing?
That is, if a script is so good that it virtually wins, they're not going *not* give it the prize because of INT or INT.
So you have to say about reader's notes -- sometimes a reader can come up with useful "global" suggestions, and sometimes they can't. Sometimes script fixes are obvious and sometimes they're not.
But to assume that because a readers' notes consist of only A-F that that's the only thing that's wrong with your script so if I fix that and resubmit it -- shouldn't I win?
And maybe that's not what you're saying, but you somehow seem aggrieved that the result was the same.
And if you didn't believe that, if you figured that if you resubmitted what amounted to essentially the same script and that you'd lose again -- why did you do it?
So on some level, I think you might have harbored that hope -- and maybe Blue cat, in some sense encouraged that hope, although I don't necessarily think that they did so intentionally.
Finally, while I'm not in a position to question the road that anybody chooses to take -- who can say what might ultimately lead to success -- I seriously question whether devoting so much of your time and effort to this world of screenplay competitions might not ultimately be a self-defeating one.
The overwhelming majority of them, even if you win, mean nothing at all. They provide no access to professional opportunities. The victories carries no weight in the professional world. The criteria, for many contests, bear to resemblance to the criteria that professional producers and buyers of screenplays use in determining what they are going to buy.
So while you may be gaining a lot of experience, I wonder whether you might be gaining a lot of experiencing in a realm that has little do with the real world of selling screenplays to people who make movies.
Because, let's face it -- if you were doing that -- selling screenplays to people who make movies, you wouldn't be bothering with screenplay contests.
NMS
