DEADLINE FOR THE LAST GREAT SCREENPLAY CONTEST IS JULY 4TH!!! JUST 10 DAYS AWAY!!!
This is the 3rd in my line of “How to Win The Last Great Screenplay Contest” articles. You can read the first one, on dialogue, here. Last week’s, on character, here. Today we’re going to talk about the second most important part of your screenplay: the ending. Or, to be more specific, the third act.
Why is this the “second” most important part? Because the first 10 pages are the most important part. If the reader doesn’t like those, it doesn’t matter what your ending looks like, cause they’ll never read it.
The reason I’m talking about the third act with just 10 days to go is that it is probably the section you’ll be spending the most time on. The first act of a screenplay gets the lion’s share of a screenwriter’s time. I’d guesstimate writers put 50% of their efforts into the first act, leaving only 50% for the second and third acts!
The third act, being at the very end of the screenplay, often gets neglected. And since it’s critical that your script go out with a bang, you should be spending a lot of your time in the lead up to our deadline making that ending great. For that reason, let’s discuss what you should be doing with your third act.
As a reminder, the end of your second act – which will take place around page 75 of a 100 page script, 82 of a 110 page script, and 90 of a 120 page script – needs to be the lowest point for your hero in his journey. What does this mean? It means that whatever your hero is trying to accomplish, this is the moment where it seems like all hope is lost. If it helps, there’s usually a death involved, if not directly then symbolically.
With Star Wars, it’s Obi-Wan dying. In Toy Story 4, it’s when the antique store doll, Gabby, is rejected by her ideal owner, Harmony. In JoJo Rabbit (major spoiler – WATCH THE MOVIE FIRST!), it’s when JoJo finds his mother hanging in the town square. In E.T., it’s when E.T. dies. In Deadpool, it’s when Ajax kidnaps Vanessa. It’s important in this moment that everything feel helpless, that it feel like there’s no chance our heroes will succeed.
For those of you who think these pre-mandated moments in a script are hogwash, let me explain why you’re doing this. Every movie should be an emotional roller-coaster. You want to bring the audience up, bring them back down, make them laugh, make them cry, make them angry, make them happy. This vacillation of emotion is highly addictive. It’s the same reason people get infatuated with lovers. It’s the ups and the downs and this constant intense emotional flow that you can’t get enough of. The idea with your ending is that you’re going to bring the audience up as high as you possibly can. So it only makes sense that, before you do that, you bring them as low as you can. That is what allows for the largest leap in emotion. The bigger the leap, the more memorable the experience will be.
A lot of people don’t know what to do after the “lowest point.” Well I’ve got good news for you. It’s simple. You give your hero 2-3 scenes to stew in their sadness, to feel sorry for themselves, and then they have a REBIRTH. The rebirth is them realizing that, even though the situation is impossible, they still have to try. They still have to go after the girl, even if she’s leaving for Australia in 20 minutes. They still must fight the bad guy, even if he’s effortlessly beat them five previous times. You still must try and destroy the Death Star, even if it requires a one in a million shot.
From there, what to do should be fairly clear. Your final twenty pages is going to be a mini-movie. You should have a clear goal (save Vanessa), clear stakes (if you don’t, she dies), and urgency (you only have until the end of the day). And, just like your script is divided into three acts, your ending will be divided into three acts.
We need a setup (this is where we set up the hero’s plan), the conflict (this is where the antagonist will try everything in his power to prevent the hero from succeeding), and the resolution (our hero either succeeds or fails).
A couple of additional pieces of advice. Your third act is where you’re going to pay off all your setups. So if you set up your hero as a guitar player and, at the end of the movie, the guitar player at the high school prom breaks his finger and can’t play but the band needs to play the song in order for your mom and dad to dance so that they can kiss on the dance floor, fall in love, get married, and you’re born (Back to the Future), well, this is the moment to pay that off. Marty was set up in act 1 as wanting to be a guitar player so he can stand in for the guitar player in this final scene.
Go crazy with setups and payoffs. As I’ve said here before, the biggest bang-for-your-buck screenwriting tool is the setup and payoff. Unless you completely botch them, they always work.
And, also, just like your script had a “lowest point,” your ending should have a “lowest point.” There needs to be a moment in the final battle, or car chase, or race to get the girl, where your hero fails. And it looks like the movie is over. That should be your goal. To make it look like YOUR HERO HAS LOST. This is the one final EMOTIONAL LOW you’re going to put your audience through so that when they leap up and defeat the villain, we get that goosebumps feeling that you can only get while watching a great movie.
I also want to point out that the more non-traditional your movie is, the harder it will be to institute this formula. This is why so many indie movies run into trouble with their endings. There was never a real character goal. And if there’s no character goal, it’s hard to know what your character should do at the end. The whole point of creating a character goal is to create a clear final ending where they either achieve the goal or don’t. So if you don’t have that, it can get complicated.
That’s not to say it’s impossible. Just that it’s harder. My advice to you would be to institute this formula as well as you can. And for the parts that don’t fit, follow the emotion. What you’re looking for in a great ending isn’t beating the bad guy. Sure, that’s all well and good. But the true magic of a great ending comes from an emotional beat, usually a character finally overcoming their flaw, or two characters who’ve been at odds with each other the entire movie finally coming together.
A good example of this is JoJo Rabbit. I would implore anybody here who hasn’t seen the movie to go watch it first due to spoilerage. It was my favorite movie of last year (I saw it after I made my 2019 Best Movies List, so it’s not on there). And a big reason for that was the ending, which, it turns out, is non-traditional.
JoJo Rabbit does not have a character goal that drives the film. He’s just living his life, which has been interrupted by the Jewish girl his mother has helped hide in the walls of the house. So a lot of the movie is about the conflict between those two characters.
What JoJo Rabbit did that was smart was it used the end of the war as a framing device to create its ending. Taika still used the “lowest point,” by killing off Jojo’s mother. And then he throws in Hitler’s suicide and the Americans rushing into the city to take out the Germans. This provides our big exciting ending even if our hero doesn’t have a goal to achieve.
And to provide the emotional catharsis that all good endings have, Taika creates two unanswered questions. One with Imaginary Hitler. What will JoJo do now that Imaginary Hitler is insisting he take out the Jewish girl living in his house. And two, what happens with Elsa (the Jewish girl)?
The final scene is JoJo going back to his house and letting her know she’s free. It’s an amazing scene because throughout the whole movie, her life was dependent on him. Now, he’s all alone. He has no parents. Nowhere to go. His life is dependent on her. She’s all he has left. Will she leave him? Or will they go off together?
I’m not going to pretend like endings are easy. But hopefully this has given you some framework to work with so that you can ace your ending. Good luck!
Next week, we’ll talk about what you can realistically achieve in a script with three days before a deadline!
