The Utah Murder Project by Eric Dickson - Thriller - A psychotic cowboy holds an up and coming actress for ransom in Baird City, Utah. 117 pages - pdf, format

Eric ~

I commend your effort - it's not easy to write 120 pages of anything. And you write fairly well -  I liked your scene description and dialogue, with a few exceptions. You definitely have talent, keep at it.

The first problem is you like to direct on paper. Thankfully it's not as bad as some - there's not many blatant camera directions "Pan to, close up on, etc.." but you do use subheadings and capitalized words to "direct the eye", and you should leave things like credit sequences and main title displays out until the script is in production. These are things script readers will cringe at.

The second problem is structure. While you did a nice job with all the twists and turns, it's more like 120 pages of "and then this happens" than a well structured story. The first few pages reminded me of Jack Nicholson in "The Departed", but then we never see Pena again. The real story begins out in the desert when the police get involved, but still there's no main character. The closest thing to a protagonist, to me, is Harper, but she's buried amid all the other things going on until maybe 30 pages from the end. We're so busy trying to keep up with every new twist that it's impossible to see story or character.

The whole flashback scene with the girls, while it explains some things, is very "The Usual Suspects". I feel it's out of place, because it cheats the reader into thinking the two girls had nothing to do with their friend's kidnapping. It's already hard enough to keep up with what's going on without being deliberately misled.

The real red flag is the scene where the police are explaining to us what happened. If it's that difficult to figure out, having them tell us won't help.

To sum up, I enjoyed your writing, but I didn't enjoy the script. It took some effort to get through it once, and then I had to go through it again twice more to see if it all made sense.

The story isn't compelling enough to justify a rewrite - the only thing it has going for it are all the twists, but that just made a mess out of whatever story there was.