Life During Wartime by Mark A Bowes - Series, Drama - Rejected by friends, his career in tatters, an alcoholic, gay actor seeks refuge in a Palm Springs trailer park inhabited by Hollywood has-beens, where he struggles with sobriety, HIV, caring for his mentally declining mother, while confronting 80’s AIDS hysteria. 60 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Great title.

This is a nicely written script. Maybe a little too sitcom-ish and Lifetimey for my tastes, but definitely well written.

That said, a few points....

Quoted Text EXT. VACANT, BRILLIANT BLUE SKY - DAY

Not sure this qualifies as a scene heading. Technically, this ought to be description in the action line that follows the appropriate scene heading.

Quoted Text EXT. WIND TURBINE FIELD - DAY The sky is vacant, brilliant blue...

(etc.)

Quoted Text INT. SLEAZY, WEST HOLLYWOOD GAY BAR - DAY

That "sleazy" ought to be in the action line, not the scene heading.

Quoted Text INT. CEDARS SINAI MEDICAL / 5TH FLOOR NURSES STATION - DAY Puck slips by the NURSES station and into...

Maybe...

Quoted Text INT. CEDARS SINAI MEDICAL CENTER - DAY Puck slips by the fifth-floor nurses station and into...

Never been a fan of bolded scene headings, since too often they result in what I refer to as zebra scripts. I think that fits here.

Twenty pages in and it's still Puck speaking with people at various locations around SoCal. There's a market for celeb-based social melodrama but I'm not it. However, I'll try finishing this later today.

Okay, finished it.

You write really well. Even so, there are a few grammar and punctuation issues, writing 101 stuff that ought to have been caught in a pass.

Also, things like "He walks off", "He walks up", etc. feel badly out of place in an otherwise well written piece.

The dialogue is genuinely fun in places, but in others it too often made this feel like a sitcom or stage play, in the sense there are a lot of setups-payoffs. Despite that, I was never bored or especially irritated.

Story-wise, I'm sure this would appeal to a lot of people, but it left me waiting for something that never arrived. Then again, social drama was never my thing.

If you gave this a thorough going over to iron out the grammar, punctuation and other niggles this would definitely be a contender in somebody's book.

Nice work.

Mark, did this script progress any since you posted?

I feel it has real potential.