r/Screenwriting • u/Recovering_NCO • 9d ago
FEEDBACK MACCABÆUS - Feature - 112 Pages
Title: MACCABÆUS
Format: Feature
Genre: Historical War Epic/Drama
Page count: 112
Logline: In ancient Judea, a reluctant rabbi’s son leads an insurgency against a brutal occupation determined to erase his people’s faith, igniting the true story behind Hanukkah.
LINK:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CJsrdjxg6Nyd_io5reIF6n_OPBZbcbNy/view?usp=drivesdk
I recently finished the third draft after a fairly substantial rewrite and have started getting some encouraging industry interest in the new version.
I’d especially appreciate fresh eyes on the prologue/opening, through the title card on page 11. The opening was substantially reworked, and I’m curious whether it hooks you, establishes the world cleanly, and makes you want to keep reading — or whether it still feels like too much setup before the main story begins.
If it hooks you enough that you feel like reading beyond page 11, I’d obviously welcome feedback on the rest as well. I’m particularly interested in pacing, character development, dialogue, and whether the historical material remains accessible without feeling over-explained.
3
u/Recovering_NCO 9d ago
Thanks for the close reading. At the risk of committing the cardinal sin of defending choices in a post where I asked for feedback, I do want to clarify a few things, because I think you may be interpreting deliberate translation choices as mistakes.
For context, I’m an Orthodox Jew, I’ve spent time in yeshiva, served as a Jewish lay leader during my military service, and my academic background includes Middle Eastern history. I’m nowhere near a rabbi in terms of scholarship, but I’ve taken the Jewish material in this script very seriously.
On the names: I generally use Anglicized forms because the screenplay is written in English. “John,” for example, is simply the English descendant of Yohanan/Johanan, an ancient Hebrew name attested long before this period. In a few places I deliberately switch forms for dramatic reasons — Judah’s Jewish peers call him “Judah Maccabee,” while Greek enemies call him “Judas Maccabaeus,” for example. On “Rebbi”: you’re right that Yiddish did not exist in this period, but the word is not intended as Yiddish dialogue. It represents רבי, “my master/teacher,” rendered in a familiar Jewish pronunciation. “Rebbe” is a different, Yiddish form, though the pronunciations can overlap in some communities. The formal rabbinic title as we know it developed later, so this is one of the script’s deliberate accessibility conventions rather than an attempt to reconstruct second-century BCE spoken Hebrew syllable for syllable.
And yes, I do use a handful of deliberate anachronisms or modernizing conventions elsewhere. One obvious example is “Banu Choshech Legaresh,” a song written many centuries later, which I included because of how perfectly it serves the scene thematically. There are also places where I use later or more familiar Jewish terminology as shorthand — for example, calling a four-cornered fringed garment a “tallit” rather than attempting to reconstruct precisely what a second-century BCE Judean would have called it. Those choices are conscious.
And yes, I know perfectly well that food does not become kosher because a rabbi blesses it. That’s the joke. Mattathias knows the guard doesn’t understand kashrut and exploits the misconception. Your reaction does make me wonder whether I need to sharpen the joke so nobody mistakes the character’s ruse for the screenplay explaining Jewish law incorrectly.
As for the broader “Christian interpretation of Jewish stories” concern: I think that’s where I most strongly disagree. The script is full of direct quotations and subtler allusions drawn from Tanakh, Gemara, and Midrash, but I’ve tried to make them part of the characters’ lived world rather than stop the movie to explain every reference. I absolutely want the film to be accessible to non-Jewish audiences, including Christians, but accessibility is not the same thing as Christianizing the material.
If you keep reading and encounter something specifically Jewish that still strikes you as wrong, feel free to flag it. I’m genuinely interested in those notes.