Should today’s scene have been included in the First Page Showdown? A lot of you thought so!
This week, I’ve been breaking down the top scenes in my Blood & Ink Screenwriting Contest. This is a contest writers had to pitch for—you had to come up with a good enough idea just to get in. Of 2500+ pitches, only 97 got through. Last weekend, I did a “showdown” for those 97 writers where they could compete to see who had the best first scene.
The six best scenes were featured on the site. However, Eldave, who’s in the contest, posted his scene in the comments section and got a ton of positive feedback, with many readers proclaiming he should’ve won!
Should he have?
Let’s find out!
I love the first three paragraphs of this page. They’re simple. They’re effective. They’re descriptive. They imply a strong sense of craft. I know, after reading these first three paragraphs, that I’m dealing with someone who’s written a lot of scripts. However, that’s not always an advantage. More on that in a sec.
When you read a lot, you come across patterns. Writers tend to make similar choices since we’re all drawing from the same pot of ideas. And it can be said that what a reader is looking for is a writer who disrupts the pattern. Not haphazardly. But with a plan.
So when I read this opening page, my first thought was, “It’s the old suicidal person on the other line scene and our heroine is going to save them.” It’s a scene pattern I’ve come across a lot.
Now, that doesn’t mean I’m tuned out. If the writer can give the main character a clever way to solve the problem, I’ll call the scene a success. Or if the scene goes in a different direction than I expected, that’s also appealing to me. So let’s see what happens.
When I read this second page, the big word that popped into my head was “competent.” The writing is very competent. It’s very professional. It’s doing the job.
But a screenplay needs something beyond competence. It needs a special quality, wherever that quality is going to come from. And when I read this page, this fear started to creep in that this scene was going to be adequate and nothing more. Because I feel like I’ve read hundreds of scenes just like it.
All of this is going through my head as I’m trying to decide if this scene is going to make the cut for the weekend.
This was probably the page where I decided this wasn’t going to make the cut. Because this is the page where our main character solves the problem. And my question is: what special or unique or clever thing did she do to solve the problem? As far as I can tell, nothing.
She just got the guy to stay there long enough so the cops could pick him up. Remember, when you’re introducing a character, you’re trying to create something the reader will either fall in love with or become fascinated by. Anything less, and the reader isn’t going to be interested in them.
I’ll give you an example. The famous Lethal Weapon Mel Gibson suicidal jumper scene. In that scene, a guy is about to jump off a building and Detective Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is tasked with stopping him. What does Riggs do? Instead of trying to stop him, he says, “Let’s do it!” The jumper is so confused he’s not sure how to react. Riggs keeps pushing him. Let’s do it. Let’s do it! And eventually, they jump!
It’s a scene that both goes against what we’re expecting and creates a fascinating character in the process.
Those are the kinds of things I’m looking for when I get introduced to characters.
The explanation of using the word “darling” didn’t make this feel any more clever. If the idea is that she goes against the handbook to save people, I’m down with that. But if sometimes using an unapproved word is breaking the rules, it’s the tamest rule-breaking I’ve ever seen. So much more could’ve been done here.
For example, if this would’ve been some incel lamenting the fact that no girls like him and Zoey exploited that to save his life by pretending to be romantically interested in him. Maybe even agreeing to go on a date with him if he stepped back, only to go cold the second the cops snatched him up, that’s a character I would’ve been interested in. But just calling someone ‘darling’ doesn’t move the needle for me.
In every script, I’m always looking for honesty. For truth. In other words, are the people in the story acting out truthful moments, saying truthful things? Or are they just puppets for the writer to say what he wants or do what he wants? The more I see of the latter, the more tuned out I become. The more I see of the former, the more invested I get.
I have a hard time believing this call center goes cuckoo over “the q word.” That feels made up to me. It feels like a lie a writer concocted. I want the truth. And I want the details of that truth.
Whenever I hand myself over to a writer, I want to be pulled into their world, to the specificity of that unique place. I just read this interview with James Cameron where he talks about how obsessive he is with every single little detail on Pandora. Which is a huge reason the movies work. The details feel like they could only exist in that specific reality.
I would’ve liked to see more of that specificity highlighted in this call center. It should almost feel like an alien planet. Because it is to someone who’s never been inside one before. And it’s up to the writer to convey that.
Essentially what’s happening here is that the scene is rebooting. It’s starting over. We’ve got a brand new call. And the good news is, there’s something different going on with this call. There’s something glitchy, both in the connection and the way that connection is interfering with the nearby electronics.
Yesterday we talked about dangling carrots. This is the first true carrot being dangled in this scene. And it’s taken me six pages to get here. I’m not saying that’s too long. I think if some of the issues I brought up earlier were improved, this moment would hit harder. But as you can tell, I’m on the fence with these pages. So this moment feels more like a Hail Mary to bring me back into the fold than a continuation of an organically building sequence.
The good news is, it’s a pretty big carrot, which is the right move. We’ve waited through a handful of pages of what was, essentially, exposition. We deserve a reward. So you have to make that reward plump and juicy.
For some reason, I’m only casually interested in this boy’s plight. I don’t know if it’s because the rest of the pages haven’t fully pulled me in or if it’s something with the boy himself. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because the scenario feels too obvious. First we have the drug addict tweaking out. Now we have the little child. None of these things feel different enough.
I can’t emphasize enough how much I read and, because of that, I read stuff like this all the time. Something that might help you guys is to put yourself in my head and ask, “Is this something Carson has probably seen a lot?” If the answer is yes, go back to the drawing board and write a scene that’s more original.
There’s a beat on this page that is the key to this entire scene living up to its promise. It’s when the boy says, “I got a bike. Santa already came.” And Zoey says, “Why would Santa have already—?”
This is supposed to be our introduction to the hook—the strange situation our operator finds herself in. Receiving calls from the future. But it’s such a blink-and-you-miss-it moment that it doesn’t register. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone reading this completely missed it.
Again, you’re trying to HOOK A READER. It’s one of the hardest things to do in the world. Reading takes work. So you need to give people a reason to do it. I would’ve built an entire page around the confusion surrounding what the boy is saying as opposed to just one half-line. Have him talking about several things that don’t make sense.
There’s this great sequence in Back to the Future where Marty is at his mother’s parents’ house in the past (1955), trying to find Doc. There are so many great lines in this scene, but my favorite is when Marty asks where Riverside Drive is. The dad says it’s on the other end of town, “a block past Maple.” Marty says, “A block past Maple? That’s John F. Kennedy Drive.” The dad looks at him like he’s crazy. “Who the hell is John F. Kennedy?” That dinner scene really mined the deliciousness of its concept – a kid getting stuck 30 years in the past with his young parents.
I get that Eldave doesn’t want to show his cards too soon, but you need to hook us here and this scene BARELY mines its hook. Even the scene at the house afterwards is rushed. You want to SLOW DOWN as we get to the house. Show that the cops believe someone is in danger. Have them carefully go up to the house, maybe even knock the door in when nobody answers. And they just see this family casually dining. That would’ve hit a lot harder.
To summarize, this scene was very competently written, but I think there were a lot of much stronger choices left on the table, which is the main reason it didn’t make the cut.
But as I said earlier this week, THIS IS FINE! Nobody writes a great first scene right off the bat. What often happens is, as you continue to write the rest of your screenplay and you understand your characters and world better, you go back to this scene with new information and improve upon it. I think this scene could be great. But it’s definitely at a 6 right now and it needs to be at a 9 by the time the script is finished.
