The Darkest Moonlight by Malcolm Bowman (scoob) - Sci Fi - The journey of psychic drifter Paul Reed, who must battle his demons and explore his past in order to discover his true destiny. 120 pages - pdf, format

Malcolm,

This script was a bold undertaking and you pulled it off well, IMO.   A lot of V.O's, flashbacks and montages, but I didn't mind.    You managed to maintain an element of mystery and suspense that a lot of scripts seem to lack.  

The ending was eerie.

Found a couple typos, but all in all, great job.   A+ for originality.

PS - I'm not too crazy about the 'theory of evolution" aspect, but oh well.   Fiction is fiction.    I also think you could come up with a better title.

Thank you Don for posting this extra quick and an extra thanks for posting the updated Malevolent II a few weeks ago. Much appreciated as always!

Thanks Screenrider for checking this one out, I'm delighted to have gotten a response so quick and pleased even more so that you seemed to have liked it?

I appreciate what you wrote about it being a bold undertaking a great deal so I'm grateful for those encouraging and understanding words.

I did expect this to get a majority of criticism should anyone read it because of my structure, usage of  voice overs, montages, series of shots etc. and I'm looking forward to any further response to it.  I'm given hope that you seemed to find them not so annoying.

The A+ for originality made my night.  Thanks for that

If you have a script on here , let me know and I'll check it out.

Thanks for reading Screenrider, it was a pleasant surprise.

I'm sure you'll get plenty of technical gurus who'll pick apart the nuts and bolts.  But when I read your script and then looked back at it as "a whole",  there's no denying it's creative, original and packed with tension.  

So again, good job.

Best of luck with it.

Sorry for asking this, but one of my main concerns was in the opening ten pages. It was regarding how I dealt with the agents and giving them names instead of AGENT #1 AGENT #2 or FAT AGENT, THIN AGENT... Was this scene confusing? Did it come across ok?

Thanks,

Malcolm,

You do a fair amount of reading here, so I wanted to return the favor.
I tried to hang in there, sorry to say I'm bowing out after 40 pages.
It seems you're definitely writing a big story here and that's tough.
But I feel like the story hasn't even started yet and its one third gone.
A ten page cataclysmic violent opening and then a thirty page voice over.
And I don't understand anything more than when I started.
Flashbacks with dream sequences and montage after montage back to voice over.
I can't keep it straight and Paul seems the only constant in the narrative.
There's about twenty pages of just how awful Paul's life is.
It's a lot to ask of a reader to press on when there's no plot for this long.
It's all back story, death, depression, drugs, broken homes, prostitution.
I'm sorry, perhaps there's something else of yours I could read for you.

Regards,
E.D.

Hey Brett,
Thank you so much for giving this a read, I really appreciate it. I'm sorry you didn't like it and had to give it a pass where you did, but that's completely understandable.

With the exception of SR above, I think you did well to get that far and I've kinda conceded the way I've written this may just irritate and frustrate readers and they would most likely give it a miss too. It might have been in my best interests to label this as surreal and that is uses nonlinear narrative on the logline but it may be safe to just call this an experiment that went wrong.

It is a pretty big story, more of a character study I suppose, and the back story is a constant. Using a POV aspect, things are meant to unravel as he discovers them, which means the plot takes quite a while to brew and only really makes sense at the end when everything introduced in the first act resolves in the third. At least it should!

But as you pointed out, it just may not be intriguing enough for some and moves too slow, so I will hold my hands up for that.

Thanks again for giving this a go. I appreciate the kind gesture and comments and look forward to reading the new draft for Red Sun when it pops up.

Malc

Quoted from Scoob Hey Brett, Thanks again for giving this a go. I appreciate the kind gesture and comments and unless you have any other features you'd like me to read, I'll check out Red Sun over the weekend. Thanks again Malc

Malcolm,

No problem.
Sometimes you have to write a story to find the story you want to write.
I'm sure the interesting tale you want to tell is in there somewhere.
And you can unearth it and bring it to life for others to appreciate.
As to Red Sun, I appreciate the gesture, but please wait.
A new draft of that feature will be posted soon.

Keep writing and rewriting!

Regards,
E.D.