Watch most movies and you’ll often miss the hero’s motivation. Yet it’s clear right from the start. Most people think “Independence Day” is about the human race fighting back against aliens, but that’s not the real story. If you watch an early scene of “Independence Day,” you’ll find that the president (the hero) is being […]
Divide a 120-minute screenplay into four equal segments of 30-minutes and you can plot your villain’s story. In Act I (the first 30 minutes), the villain has started pursuing a goal but we don’t know what that goal might be. Somehow, this pursuit of a goal interferes with the hero’s life and jolts the hero […]
Divide a two hour (120 minute) screenplay into four Acts and you get four 30-minute segments. In Act I, you introduce your story. At the end of Act I, the hero enters a whole new world and that’s the whole point of Act IIa. Act IIa brings the hero into contact with an ally who […]
Forget about trying to come up with an original story. You won’t and you’ll simply waste your time. However, what you can do is come up with an original way to tell a story. If you can tell a story in a unique and intriguing way, that’s far more important than trying to come up […]
Nobody has time to read a complete screenplay. You could write the best screenplay in the world but nobody will want to read it. Since Hollywood needs new stories and ideas, the fast way to evaluate a screenplay is to evaluate its pitch. A pitch is nothing more than a short description of what your […]
Here’s the wrong way to look at writing a scene. Slap together a handful of exciting scenes and then spend the rest of your screenplay creating scenes that do nothing but setup the far more exciting scenes. If you do this approach (which far too many novices do), you’ll likely write a screenplay that’s 80% […]
Far too many novices write scenes that simply convey information. This is boring. Audiences (and readers) don’t want exposition. They want something that grabs their interest that also happens to provide exposition without them even knowing it. One way to make every scene more dynamic is to identify the expectations of every character in every […]
Here’s the number one mistake novices make in writing a screenplay. They fill their script with lots of scenes that serve no purpose other than to provide information to the reader and tell their story. That’s boring. Nobody wants to be told a story. That’s about as exciting as sitting through a dull lecture in […]
When in doubt, rely on irony to spice up your story. In “Titanic,” there’s irony that a woman feeling suicidal is stuck on the Titanic, which will sink in a few days, killing more than half the passengers and crew. In “Groundhog Day,” it’s ironic that the day the hero hates the most (reporting on […]
When writing any scene, ask yourself three questions: Why today? Why this person? Why this location? In the opening scene of “The Matrix,” there’s a short dialogue that explains why this scene is occurring today. It’s because they think they’ve found the chosen one (Neo). In this same opening scene, why focus on the woman […]