Last year I checked out the Euphoria pilot and lasted about twenty minutes. Admittedly, I watched it at a time where I was exhausted by anything that was even remotely political. And while Euphoria isn’t a political show, it touched on some hot-button topics that were politically-adjacent enough to turn me off. So I bailed.
But when The Bachelor let me down by having one of the worst seasons in memory, a TV slot opened up in my schedule. So I gave Euphoria a second chance, sans the baggage I brought into it the first time. Stripped of any preconceived notions, I experienced a show that wasn’t just good. It was groundbreaking.
I’ll get into the writing in a second. But just from a directing perspective, this show was amazing. To be fair, the show must have an ungodly budget. Because there isn’t a single scene where they give a master, then two over-the-shoulders, and call it a day, like your typical TV drama.
If you’ve got two characters in a room, you’re going to have a drifting overhead camera. You’re going to have a musical dance number. You’re going to have a dream sequence. You’re going to have an elaborate lighting setup that took 72 hours to prep. Even close-ups are never static. They’re always moving in some way.
It’s got to take them 10 times as long to shoot one two-person dialogue scene than it takes the average production. Which is why it feels special.
When it comes to the writing, Euphoria reinforced the magical formula for making any act of fiction work. Whether it’s a TV show, a movie, even a Youtube sketch, the thing you have to get right IS THE CHARACTERS. If you create complex interesting watchable characters, you can get away with anything.
The lead character is Rue, a 17 year old drug addict. While Rue can be passive, she’s fascinating in that she’s so self-destructive. Every time she clears a hurdle, she falls back down five sets of stairs. She’s also the narrator of the story, which allows the writers to jump around all the different storylines easily. I see a lot of writers make the mistake of jumping around chaotically and expecting the reader to be able to keep up. If you’re going to do that, do what Euphoria does. Put a narrator in there to explain where we’re jumping and what’s going on.
Next up we have Jules, who’s a 17 year-old transgender girl who’s just moved into town. Rue becomes infatuated with how unique and free Jules is, and the two become fast friends. An early scene also has Jules setting up and engaging in an intense sexual session with a 45 year old man. It instantly sets this tone that Euphoria is going to be different from your average TV show. It does things you’re not supposed to do.
Let me take a quick detour here because this is an important point: When everyone’s doing the same thing, ask what you, as a writer, can do that’s different. The Euphoria writers clearly sat down and said, in a world where every teenage show ever lies about what high school is really like, we’re going to be the lone truthful voice. We’re not going to sanitize anything. We’re going to show the messiness. We’re going to show the secrets, even if they’re uncomfortable. And we’re not going to pull any punches. That decision alone is what made the writing in Euphoria 10x as impactful as any other show being written right now.
Our main guy character is Nate Jacobs, high school QB and the son of the man who had sex with Jules. Nate, like his father, has some questions about his sexuality, which makes for a very tortured character. When you’re writing any character, one of the things you should be looking for is internal conflict – something that the character is battling within themselves. When you do that, the character is always in a place of struggle. And struggle is more interesting to watch than stability.
The show also has a host of a great secondary characters. There’s the overweight junior, Barbie, who struggles with her appearance until she runs across the option to cam online, and becomes a success at the expense of a lot of twisted middle-aged men. There’s Cassie, the hot girl, who has zero self-esteem and lets men run roughshod over her.
There’s one of my favorites, Fezco, Rue’s drug dealer, who deals from his convenience store with his 10 year old step-brother, Ashtray. I at first saw these two as a gimmick. I mean, come on. A 10 year old drug dealer? But the first episode of season 2 that goes into the backstory of how Fezco and Ashtray came to be, was my favorite episode of the series by far.
And then you have Cal Jabobs, Nate’s dad, the one who had sex with Jules. When Cal realizes that Jules runs in the same circles as his son, his life becomes one giant act of squirming. He’s constantly trying to avoid getting exposed. And that storyline is one of the more entertaining ones in the show.
Outside of the characters, the reason I like this show so much is that it takes chances. Even though those chances don’t always pay off. I remember one episode where Rue’s mom reads a letter in front of the church about what it’s like to have a daughter who’s a drug addict, and the writers try to pull a Scorsese where, during different parts of the letter voice over, we’re cutting to different characters in the story dealing with their own issues that don’t line up at all with the letter the mom is reading. I’m sorry but the excruciating pain you went through when your daughter was on life support has nothing to do with Maddy and Nate’s break-up.
But it hits a lot more than it misses. There’s a scene in the second season where Barbie (the overweight girl) is searching for help for her self-esteem issues online and instead of just cutting to comments or Youtube videos on a laptop screen, the writers physically bring the online personalities into Barbie’s room. And they’re all making their plea. They’re all telling her how to be more confident. And it was just creative, you know. That’s all we’re asking for as viewers. We want to see something familiar presented in a fresh way. Cause that freshness is what elevates your material above the stuff on the CW.
What’s great about this show is that it even gets the cheap stuff right. One of my favorite sequences is when Nate, who’s dating Maddy, brings Cassie into a bathroom at a party to have sex with her. Maddy realizes Nate (but not Cassie) is in the bathroom and starts banging on the door. There’s nowhere for Nate or Cassie to escape so they have to come up with a plan.
Nate has Cassie hide in the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn, and then goes out into the hall to placate Maddy. But Maddy needs to go the bathroom, so she blows by Nate and into the bathroom. Now Maddy is unknowingly in the bathroom with Cassie, who’s just had sex with her boyfriend.
When you create one of these situations, your job as a writer is MAKE THIS AS BAD AS POSSIBLE FOR YOUR CHARACTER. So that’s exactly what they do. When Maddy finishes and goes back into the hall (“Thank God,” we think! “Cassie is safe!”), another guy is waiting, and he asks Maddy if she wants to smoke a joint with him… you guessed it… back in the bathroom. She says yes, and now we’re right back in the bathroom with Cassie having to worry about two people instead of one.
I won’t get into the fine details of the scene but the writers add even more obstacles for Cassie to overcome, all of which are harrowing. It was such a simple scene. And yes, it was cheap. But it was captivating because the writing was so on-point.
I could go on about this show. The characters, the scene-writing, the risks it takes, the unpredictability of the narrative. It’s all great. And I have to give it to HBO because they are the Marvel of television. It’s them, and the next runner is 15 miles behind them. Whatever they’re doing over there needs to be researched and dissected because the quality they put out on a yearly basis is heads and tails above the competition.
Have any of you seen Euphoria? Curious to know what you like or dislike about it.
One of the more misunderstood sections of the script – the Refusal of the Call!
Day 1: Writing a Teaser
Day 2: Introducing Your Hero
Day 3: Setting up Your Hero’s Life
Day 8: Keeping Your Scenes Entertaining
Day 9: The Inciting Incident
So yesterday we dealt with the inciting incident, which typically takes place between pages 12-15. If you’re doing your math correctly, you know that there’s still 10 pages left before the end of your first act (page 25). Once you reach the second act, your character will go off on their journey, whether it’s to destroy the one ring, find the killer, win the big match, take down the Nazis, find the treasure, get their dream man, or whatever their goal is.
So the question is, what do you in the meantime? What do you do between pages 15-25? I recently watched a handful of first acts and I realized that the answer to that question isn’t as cut and dried as you’d think. Because, traditionally, this section is known as the “Refusal of the Call” section. But not every movie uses it for that purpose.
The idea behind the “Refusal of the Call” is that your hero has just had their life upended by the inciting incident. That’s a jarring moment for them. Imagine that you learned all of your life savings, which you’d been saving up for 25 years, was gone. You unknowingly invested it in a Ponzi scheme, which just got exposed.
It’s unlikely, mere minutes after you learned this, that you would hop into action and start hiring lawyers to try and get all your money back. Instead, you would probably be in shock. You would need a couple days before you could process what was going on. That’s how I want you to see the Refusal of the Call. It’s not so much an artificially constructed moment where the hero says, “I’m not going on this mission because there’s still 10 pages left in the act!” It’s an organic moment where the character struggles to comprehend what’s just happened.
In this moment, a character is motivated by shock, by fear, by the amount of work it will take to go on this journey. So their initial reaction is always going to be, “No thank you.” But then there comes a secondary development where it makes less sense to stay than it does to go. So your hero goes.
Unfortunately, I’ve found that every movie treats this section differently and I suspect it’s because the average screenwriter knows about act breaks and the inciting incident, but not much else. So a lot of writers will fudge this section. With that said, it usually doesn’t affect the movie because it’s only ten pages and we know, at the end of those pages, we arrive at the beginning of the adventure.
However, I did have a helpful realization when watching these first acts, which was, if the inciting incident lines up with your hero’s job, it doesn’t make sense for the hero to refuse the call. For example, Indiana Jones looks for ancient antiquities. Therefore, when his inciting incident comes (the government wants to hire him to find the Ark of the Covenant), it makes zero sense for him to say no. This is what he does. It’s his job. So of course he’s going to say yes.
Contrast this with Star Wars, where the inciting incident is Obi-Wan prompting R-2 to play Leia’s message, where she asks him to take R2 to Alderran. Traveling across the galaxy avoiding the Empire is not Luke’s job. Luke is a farmer. So it makes more sense for Luke to refuse the call, which he does.
Okay, so now that we know what the Refusal of the Call is, what do we do with those 10 pages? I hate to be vague, but while doing my research, I found you have all sorts of options with these pages. If we’re sticking to the letter of the law, a hero who doesn’t refuse the call (Indiana Jones) will have one or two prep scenes before going on the journey. For a hero who does refuse the call, they will enter a state of stasis, like I talked about above. They’re in shock. They’re in denial. We may show them trying to go back to their lives. But then a secondary event will happen (Luke’s aunt and uncle are killed) that forces them to go on the journey.
With that said, here are some first acts I watched where the refusal of the call was a little confusing.
First, I watched Crazy Stupid Love. This is the Steve Carrell (who plays Cal) movie where a family man is forced back onto the singles scene. The inciting incident actually occurs on page 4. That’s when Cal’s wife, Emily, tells him that she cheated on him and wants a divorce.
This creates a giant 20 page chasm before the end of the first act. So what do we do in that time? Well, Cal goes into a state of stasis. He’s in denial. He doesn’t understand a world where he’s not married. He drinks. He mopes. So he’s doing the proper “refusal of the call” checklist. But what I realized was that Crazy Stupid Love has a ton of characters to set up. It has to set up Jacob (Ryan Gosling), Cal’s daughter, Hannah (Emma Stone), the babysitter, the son, the wife. All of these characters have intricate storylines that need a lot of setup. So we’re cutting away to a lot of those characters, which easily fills up the time between inciting incident and second act. But, finally, on page 25, Jacob starts teaching Cal how to be a cool single guy, meaning we’re officially in the second act.
This is a long way of saying, the time between your inciting incident and second act can be used to set up other characters in their own scenes, away from the main character. We don’t always have to stay with the main character. This could also be a good place to introduce your antagonist. As long as your general theme of the page 15-25 section is stasis or resistance (from your main character), you’re good.
Another first act I watched was Shazam! And this one was a tough nut to crack because it doesn’t create the inciting incident moment you’d expect, which is for Billy Batson to find the costume and become Shazam. Instead, at minute 15, Billy, who’s an orphan without a home, is caught by the cops and placed into a foster care home with eight other orphans. So it’s really more of a character-driven inciting incident than it is a plot-driven one.
But the movie does embrace the refusal of the call. Billy is already planning his escape less than five minutes after he arrives at the home. On the first day of school, however, he’s attacked by bullies, runs for it, gets on the train, and the train goes into another dimension where he arrives at the Shazam cave and is turned into Shazam (at minute 30).
What I’m learning from watching these films is that the more key characters there are, the harder it is to line every plot beat up where it’s supposed to be. Because you have to cut away to 2, 3, sometimes 4 different characters and set up their storylines separate from your hero. That takes up pages, which is what screws up the model. That’s what happened with Shazam. They had to set up the Shazam god in the opener, then the main villain, the orphan family, the handicapped step-brother, Freddy. It was too much to deal with and stay on schedule.
Next up we have The Conjuring and boy was this one wonky. The story follows Roger and Carolyn who move into a new farm house with their family, only to learn that it’s haunted. In any “haunted house” movie, the inciting incident will be the homeowners realizing the house is haunted. That’s obvious.
But The Conjuring does this weird parallel co-heroes thing where, throughout the first act, we’re spending just as much time with Lorraine and Ed Warren, the ghost-hunters, as we are Roger and Carolyn. This pushes all of the haunted house plot beats back, making it hard to identify where the actual inciting incident is.
I would argue that it occurs at minute 15 when they find their dog dead. But they don’t necessarily know the house is haunted yet so I’m not convinced it is the inciting incident. To the screenplay’s credit, it keeps introducing scary moments that make us want to read more. For example, we get the famous blindfolded hide-and-go-seek game. We get the scene with the kids in their bedroom and one of them is telling the other that there’s someone standing right behind them, even though we can’t see anyone.
If I’m to take anything from that, it would be, as long as you keep dangling delicious carrots in front of the audience, they’ll want to keep watching, which will allow you to introduce your major plot points later than usual. But I would be careful about this. The Conjuring script never had to win a single reader over. It was developed in-house. Your script will need to win readers over, so the sooner you can hit those plot beats, like the inciting incident, the better.
That means aiming for a page 15, or slightly sooner, inciting incident. And then ten pages of stasis, reluctance, denial, as well as introducing other major characters in the script. It just feels right for the audience to have those scenes where the hero doesn’t want to go on the adventure. Because then the audience is thinking, “Oh no. What if they don’t go??” That doubt is what makes them finally agreeing to go on the journey that much more exciting.
I don’t want to downplay that last part because I think it’s the reason they invented the refusal of the call in the first place. A movie is supposed to take the audience on an emotional journey. That makes you take them all the way up, then all the way down, then back up, then down, up, down, up, down. Without the refusal of the call, we rob the audience of one of those big emotional swings. And those swings are powerful. Big emotional sways are what get people addicted to things.
Okay, that’s it for this week. I hope you guys are all cooking along. Keep asking questions in the comments. Upvote questions you want answered. I will get to those in week 4.
Have a magical writing weekend!
Next First Act Post: Monday, March 14
Pages to write until next post: 5-6
Pages you should have completed by Monday: 20
The most exciting scene to write in a script? The inciting incident!
Day 1: Writing a Teaser
Day 2: Introducing Your Hero
Day 3: Setting up Your Hero’s Life
Day 8: Keeping Your Scenes Entertaining
Okay, let’s summarize where we are. So far, this is our page count…
Pages 1-5 — Teaser.
Pages 6-8 — Introduce your main character.
Page 9-14 — Set up your hero’s work life, family life, and social life.
A couple of notes here. You want to combine setup wherever possible. Therefore, when I say pages 6-8 are where you want to introduce your hero, that doesn’t mean you only have to introduce your hero in that scene. You can also introduce a second big character. Likewise, you don’t have to wait until page 9 to start setting up your hero’s work life. You can set up their work life when you introduce them.
Also, if you don’t use a teaser, this allows you 5 extra pages to play with in the opening act. Therefore, you can use those pages to more extensively set up your hero’s life. That’s the only downside of teasers, is they limit the amount of time you have to set things up. So be judicious about what kind of story you’re writing and decide if it’s the kind of movie that’s right for a teaser. If you have a ton to set up and, therefore, need pages, a teaser might not be for you.
This brings us to today’s topic, the inciting incident, which will usually occur between pages 12-15. This is assuming you’re using the traditional Hero’s Journey model. There’s no reason you can’t place your inciting incident on page 5, or even page 1. It all depends on what kind of movie you’re writing. However, for now, we’ll look at the inciting incident as it pertains to traditional structure.
So what is an inciting incident? The way I see it, the inciting incident is the beginning of the plot. Up until this point, your character has been existing in their world, oblivious to the machinations of what’s happening around them. But the inciting incident comes to their doorstep and says, “Here I am. You have to deal with me.”
This creates a situation where you hero must ACT. Which is a good thing when it comes to storytelling because the more active your hero is, the more exciting the story tends to be.
The wonderful thing about the inciting incident is that it sets up your GSU. It gives your hero his goal (solve the problem) which allows you to add some stakes (if he doesn’t, something bad happens to him) as well as some urgency (he must complete the task by [x many minutes/hours/days]).
I saw Shrek trending on Netflix yesterday. That movie has one of the clearest examples of an inciting incident. Shrek is minding his own business, living his best life in his swamp house. He’s got peace. He’s got quiet. Then – BAM! – he walks outside one evening to see his entire swamp invaded by fairy tale creatures. A gigantic problem has literally been dropped at his feet.
Mind you, this is another way to look at the inciting incident. It’s a PROBLEM. But not your everyday problem. It’s, up until this point in your hero’s life, the biggest problem they’ve ever had to deal with. If that isn’t the case, you’re probably focusing on the wrong moment in your hero’s life.
I rewatched Shang-Chi recently. That movie’s inciting incident occurs on the famous bus-attack scene. Shaun and Katy are minding their own business, heading to work, when some dudes try to steal the pendant around Shaun’s neck. Shaun beats everyone up and concludes that if bad guys are trying to steal his pendant, they’ll be trying to steal his sister’s pendant as well. So off he goes to warn her.
In the Netflix movie, “The Guilty,” starring Jake Gylenhaall as an emergency operator, the inciting incident is when he gets a strange call from a woman acting cagey. He eventually realizes she’s been kidnapped by her dangerous ex-husband and is pretending to call her daughter. A gigantic problem has been established. Jake now needs to figure out where this car is and get some cops to save her.
In It Follows, the inciting incident occurs after our lead, Jay (female), wakes up tied to a chair in a parking lot after having had sex with her date. Her date informs her of the rules. That she has to pass the curse on to the next person or else the previous curse-holders will come after her.
In Bird Box, we have Malorie (Sandra Bullock) going to the hospital with her friend, Jessica, for a pregnancy checkup. Afterwards, Jessica drives Malorie home. As she drives, Jessica starts freaking out then tries to kill them both in a crash. Talk about an intense inciting incident!
In Argo, the inciting incident occurs when there’s an uprising in Iran. A group of American governmental workers are stranded there and must hide out . This problem is dropped at the feet of our protagonists, back in America, who now must figure out a way to rescue them.
What’s interesting about this inciting incident is that it doesn’t so much happen to a single protagonist as it does an entire group of protagonists, as it’s going to take a team of Americans to get them out. I bring this up for anyone wondering if inciting incidents only work when there’s a single protagonist. No. An inciting incident is a giant problem introduced into the story. That problem could require one person to solve it or an entire group of people (see also: Avengers).
As I alluded to above, not every screenplay has to abide by the “inciting incident on page 12-15” rule. Believe it or not, The Hangover’s inciting incident occurs at the exact same moment we transition into the second act – the guys all wake up after a crazy night out with no recollection of what happened and a groom who’s disappeared.
The whole reason an inciting incident comes when it does is because the audience’s expectations are for something interesting to happen in those first 15 minutes. If you go 30 minutes without anything interesting happening, most modern audiences will tune you out. So it’s a big risk whenever you extend the inciting incident beyond page 15. The reason that The Hangover gets away with it (their inciting incident occurs on page 24) is because listening to our three leads squabble in the lead-up to the incident is so darn funny.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Cloverfield Lane. That movie starts out with its protagonist, Michelle, leaving her fiance, getting in her car, and driving back to her home state. While driving, her car is struck, she flips off the road, and wakes up in a cold dark room, chained to the wall. We have reached the problem, aka “the inciting incident,” just four pages into the story!
I have no issues with early inciting incidents. They work well in tense thrillers or horror script when you want to pull the reader in immediately. Just make sure you have enough “Richter scale” plot moments to balance out the rest of the screenplay. One of the reasons you typically wait until page 15 to introduce the inciting incident is because the reader knows you’re building up to a big moment and are willing to wait for it. If you go to that moment immediately, it’s the equivalent of bribing your kids with candy five minutes into a road trip. You’ve sort of used up your ‘ace in the hole.’
To me, the inciting incident is one of the most exciting scenes to write because it’s the whole reason you wrote the script in the first place. It introduces the plot, the concept, everything. And now we get to see how our hero deals with the problem. We’ll get into that (dealing with the problem) more in a bit. But this would be a good time to remind new writers that, as fun as the inciting incident is to write, it is not the end of your screenplay. It’s the beginning.
The inciting incident scene should not be the pinnacle of your screenplay because that means the pinnacle of your screenplay is happening on page 15. A good example of this is Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. I’m sure you remember the inciting incident in that film, where Tom Cruise and his family run down the street while a highway overpass crumbles behind them. After some cool shots of Tri-Pod aliens killing people, do you remember any imagery or scenes from the movie after that? I’m guessing you don’t. That’s because they made the inciting incident the pinnacle of the movie.
To summarize, the inciting incident occurs after you’ve set up your hero’s normal life, typically between pages 12-15, although that may change depending on the kind of movie you’re writing. The inciting incident creates a big problem in your hero’s life that he must deal with. It should be one of the biggest and most memorable scenes in the movie. But make sure not to make it the best scene. For every big scene that follows, use your inciting incident as the bar you’re trying to beat. That way your script gets better as it goes on as opposed to worse.
Next First Act Post: Thursday, March 10
Pages to write until next post: 2
Pages you should have completed after today’s assignment: 15
Today we learn the value of writing scenes that KEEP THE READER TURNING THE PAGES
Day 1: Writing a Teaser
Day 2: Introducing Your Hero
Day 3: Setting up Your Hero’s Life
This one is going to hurt.
I want you to take everything you’ve written so far AND THROW IT AWAY.
Okay, okay, okay. I’m kidding.
Sort of.
But mentally, I do need you to cross that bridge, because today’s post is about taking the mundane logical stuff that you’ve written and turning it into something fun and compelling. So far, you’ve been writing for yourself. Now, I want you to write for the reader.
A huge problem with first acts is that there’s so much to set up. You have to set up your four most important characters. You have to set up secondary characters. You have to set up your hero’s life. You have to set up the world your hero exists in. You have to set up the plot. You have to introduce some backstory. You sometimes have to set up rules (like in Source Code, the rules of the loop).
As a result, what a lot of writers do, without realizing it, is they write a first act that sets up all of these things then pat themselves on the back for doing so. Which they should. Setting up a bunch of stuff is hard. But if ALL YOU’RE DOING is setting things up, you’re not entertaining the reader, which means they never made it past page 10.
That’s what today’s post is about. It’s about writing entertaining scenes so that the reader wants to keep reading. What constitutes “entertaining?” Simple. Anything that makes the reader want to turn the page.
You can go about this in a couple of ways. You can write the boring version of all your first act scenes, focusing exclusively on setting everything up, then come back and rewrite each scene with a focus on entertainment. Or you can do both right away. Ask yourself what you need to set up in the scene then ask, how can I do that in the most entertaining way possible?
Luckily, we have a prototype film that does this exceptionally. The Matrix. Go watch The Matrix now. It’s free on HBO Max, if you have it. Pay attention to just how entertaining the first act is. Afterwards, you can come back here and look at how each scene not only sets things up, but keeps us entertained along the way.
SCENE NUMBER 1 – TEASER
A teaser will be the easiest scene to make entertaining because that’s the function of the teaser. If your teaser isn’t one of the most entertaining scenes in the movie, I suggest you delete it. In The Matrix, we get Trinity being approached by a group of cops and mysterious men in suits. There’s mystery all over, which makes this a good time to remind you that when it comes to entertaining a reader, mystery is a great tool. Who are these men? Who is this girl who can run on walls and do death-defying stunts? Wait, did she just disappear in that phone booth? What’s going on? A reader isn’t just hooked after this teaser. They’re obsessed.
SCENE NUMBER 2 – WE MEET NEO
This is a scene a lot of writers would’ve tripped up on. You’ve had this giant teaser. You have to introduce your hero in a potentially ‘boring’ scene, since he’s home, by himself. This is, unfortunately, necessary, since we have to establish Neo as a loner, someone detached from the world. But the Wachowskis still keep the scene fun. Neo gets a mysterious message on his computer telling him to “follow the white rabbit.” When a group of partiers come to grab a hack Neo wrote, they ask him to come to the club with them and he says yes. Notice also that since there isn’t a lot the writers could’ve done in this scene (Neo alone in his room), they know to keep it short. If your scene isn’t as entertaining as it can be, shorten it up.
SCENE NUMBER 3 – NEO MEETS TRINITY
Another potentially boring scene. Two characters have to talk to each other. It’s very easy to make talking scenes boring. But here, the mysterious Trinity approaches Neo at the club. She plants some thoughts in his head, such as looking for something bigger. The Matrix. She can help him find it. It’s a short scene that keeps the mystery going. Again, the goal here is to get the reader to turn pages. That’s all we care about. And we want to turn the pages after Trinity, the badass we saw in the teaser, offers an opportunity to Neo to learn about the matrix. The matrix is, in essence, a mystery box. As long as it remains unopened, the reader will desperately want to learn more about it.
SCENE NUMBER 4 – NEO IS LATE
You will not have remembered this scene from The Matrix. But it’s a clever scene from a writing perspective. Let me tell you why. I read this type of scene a lot. It’s the scene where our hero, an office worker, has to talk to his boss about something, usually to set up all the work he has to do. In The Matrix, they use it as an opportunity to push the movie’s theme. The boss explains to Neo that everyone here is part of the whole. Individuality doesn’t work. Here’s the clever part, though, which helps turn a talky scene into something entertaining: Neo is late. So he’s getting scolded by the boss. This changes the tenor of the scene from “I’m setting up my hero’s workplace” to “A dramatically tense scene where my protagonist is being chastised.” It’s a small thing. But this is exactly what you should be doing. You shouldn’t just put two characters in a room to set up information. You have to find the dramatic angle that gives the scene an edge.
SCENE NUMBER 5 – NEO GETS A DELIVERY
This is ANOTHER scene that could’ve gotten boring quickly. It’s the first time we’re seeing Neo at his workplace. Writers could’ve gotten too wrapped up in what Neo was working on or who Neo worked with. The Wachowskis don’t bother with any of that. They have a FedEx guy deliver a confused Neo a package. Neo opens it. It’s a phone. It rings. On the phone is some dude named Morpheus, who informs Neo he’s going to help him avoid the three scary suited guys we saw in the opening scene. This begins a game of cat and mouse around the office that Neo eventually fails. Chase scenes or scenes where your character will have to hide: these situations have entertainment value baked in.
SCENE NUMBER 6 – THE INTERROGATION
The agents have now captured Neo and bring him back to the station, where they have some questions. It’s an interrogation scene that has some tricks up its sleeve to keep things extra-entertaining (Agent Smith makes Neo’s mouth disappear then inserts some sort of device in his body). Half of coming up with entertaining scenes is finding scenarios that do the work for you. Interrogation scenes are always tense so you know the scene is going to be entertaining. But notice how the Wachowskis keep building on the mystery. These strange agents seem to have these powers. They want to track Neo for some reason. There’s no way we’re not turning the page after these reveals. We have to see what happens next. As a comparison, I want you to go to the sixth scene in your script. Read it. Does it make the case that you MUST KEEP READING? If not, you can do better.
SCENE NUMBER 7 – THE CAR RIDE
After waking up and going outside, Morpheus’s team pick Neo up. Before Neo knows it, there’s a woman with a gun pointed at him telling him to take off his shirt. I mean look at how quickly these scenes jump into the good stuff. There’s no mindless dialogue. No setting up boring information we need to know. Each scene seems specifically designed to entertain first, exposition second. Next they pin Neo down and extract the tracker the agents put inside of him.
SCENE NUMBER 8 – NEO MEETS MORPHEUS
This is the most exposition-centered scene in the script so far. But the Wachowskis have done such a good job setting up Morpheus that, as readers, we’re all-in with this scene. Remember, not every scene is going to be entertaining in the same way. A car chase is different from a mystery is different from an argument is different from a suspenseful scenario. Here, the work for making the scene entertaining has already been done. We’ve built up Morpheus and, therefore, are thrilled to meet him. On top of that, we’re still curious what Morpheus wants from Neo, and how this all comes back to the matrix. Still, the Wachowskis look for ways to add even more entertainment. So instead of Morpheus saying, “Follow me,” and walking through a door into the Matrix, he gives Neo a choice, the red pill or the blue pill. It’s always entertaining to watch your hero make difficult choices, so it’s a great scenario to add to your scene. — Of course, after this scene, Neo crosses over into the real world and his second act adventure begins.
I can honestly say that there isn’t a single moment in the first act of The Matrix where I wasn’t invested, where I didn’t want to turn the pages. That’s what you’re aiming for with your first act. Yes, get all the relevant setup in there. But then go to work on every single scene, asking yourself, “How do I make this scene as entertaining as possible?” Think of each scene as its own short movie and you’ll have a head start. Because every movie needs to be entertaining.
If you can internalize this, you will be writing first acts that are tens if not hundreds of times better than 85% of the writers out there. Once a screenwriter learns how valuable even an eighth of a page is when it comes to, potentially, losing the reader, they make it their mission that no reader will ever be bored reading their screenplays again. And their screenplays become so much better as a result.
It’s time for you to make that jump.
Next First Act Post: Wednesday, March 9
Pages to write until next post: 2
Pages you should have completed after today’s assignment: 13
Genre: Superhero/Noir/Crime
Premise: When the Riddler starts leaving riddles at all of his murders taunting the Batman, the batster will have to team up with Catwoman to find him before he enacts his final sinister plan on the city.
About: Predictions were all over the map on how The Batman would open. Most were saying it would come in at 100 million. Well director Matt Reeves and his posse laugh at such predictions because The Batman made 128 million dollars this weekend! Stick that in your bat bowl. Reeves’ co-Writer, Peter Craig, burst onto the scene with 2010’s, “The Town.” He’s currently writing Gladiator 2 for Ridley Scott.
Writers: Matt Reeves & Peter Craig (‘Batman’ created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane).
Details: 3 hour running time!
I’ve heard that this Batman is the best Batman film EVER. Yes, even better than The Dark Knight. Could it be? These people are aware, I presume, that Robert Pattinson is playing Batman, right? I kid, I kid. Who doesn’t love themselves a little R. Patty, warts and all.
This is what makes Hollywood so amazing. They spend upwards of 3 million dollars to create a bat suit that makes a scrawny Pattinson look beefy. They get a good DP and gaffer in there to make sure the light is always hitting the suit in just the right way to make Pattison look menacing. Add a moody high quality score and choose an editor who knows how to edit around lousy takes and weird mannerisms. You do all that and now you have yourselves a convincing Batman.
But is it a good Batman? And has this Batman given us a good movie?
Okay, here’s today’s overly simplified summary of the movie. The Riddler kills the Mayor of Gotham. He also leaves a message for “Batman” that states the Mayor was dirty and so were a bunch of other Gotham politicians. We get the impression The Riddler isn’t done yet.
Police Lieutenant James Gordon has no choice but to bring the Batman in to comb over the crime scene. Afterwards, Batman looks over the riddle the Riddler left, which asks what do lying men do after they die. Batman answers “Lie Still,” in under a second, which gives him and Gordon a good chance of being on the next episode of Jeopardy.
After pestering the Penguin, who’s a club owner here, to tell him what he knows, Batman meets Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, and the two decide to team up. As the crime scenes and riddles stack up, Batman desperately tries to catch up to the Riddler. And just when he’s getting close, the Riddler comes to him, surrendering. Except it’s a ploy. Because what the Riddler is about to do next will determine whether he takes over the entire city.
The thing that comic book movies figured out is that they can keep these films alive by hijacking sub-genres and using them to build a mould around the superhero-y stuff. One of the reasons comic book movies started to get so bad in the 2000s was that they kept going the origin story route. Audiences had gotten so familiar with that structure, unfortunately, that every movie now felt familiar.
So superhero films started experimenting, even though they didn’t really know what they were doing. This gave us movies like Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns from 2006. It wasn’t an origin story but it kind of was. The film just never found its footing. Enter the sub-genre, a strategy that Marvel began implementing. You’ve got the Buddy Cop movie (Captain Marvel). You’ve got the Spy movie (Winter Soldier). You’ve got the John Hughes High School Comedy (Spider-Man: Homecoming ). This gave comic book movies a new life because now, you weren’t really going to see a comic book movie. You were going to see a high school comedy… with superheroes.
The Batman continues this strategy, as it embraces “Film Noir” as its sub-genre. You’ve got a deep baritone Bruce Wayne, narrating the state of the city in the film’s opening scene. Every scene is painted in thick endless shadows. Characters don’t speak so much as pose and try to make the dialogue sound cool. And, most importantly, it all works. The Batman as a noir film is great.
But the screenplay… the screenplay is another story.
Sticking with this month’s theme, I was hyper-focused on the first act. And it pretty much followed the same blueprint I’ve laid out for all of you. We get our teaser, which is that the mayor is killed by The Riddler. Then we introduce our hero, The Batman, along with a couple of other characters. We establish the world (Gotham) they’re in, specifically the fact that crime is a big problem in the city, which is why Batman has gotten involved.
Batman’s intro, where he arrives to take down a group of bullies about to beat a subway rider into submission, quickly establishes that he’s a badass and takes his job of protecting the city seriously. We need to have a good feel for your hero after their first scene. The Batman succeeds in that regard.
The inciting incident is technically the mayor’s murder, which already happened in the teaser. But it doesn’t officially become the inciting incident until Batman is called to the murder with Gordon, and they inspect the crime scene. It is here where The Riddler’s game is introduced, adding a secondary element. Batman will have to solve the murder. But also solve Riddler’s larger puzzle.
Reeves’ decision to go this route was a wise one. When you have a universe as wide and varied as Gotham, which is home to a lot of characters, you risk the reader getting lost in all the noise. So you want a narrative that’s immediately understandable, something to counterbalance the huge complex world you’ll be tasked with bringing to life.
Utilizing one of the oldest story setups in the book – the murder investigation – is a great way to keep the story focused and, as a result, keep the reader clued in. While there were a few places in the movie where I had to think hard to remember what was going on, I was never confused, like I am with some of these movies that have 800 characters. This is because I always understood the core of Batman’s goal: Find the Riddler.
The problem with The Batman is that it thinks too highly itself and, therefore, doesn’t realize that its investigation is kinda bland. The rhythm of the story is too predictable. Go chase one clue, find a dead person with a riddle card attached to them, someone reads the riddle, Batman always answers the riddle within two seconds, this sends them to their next destination, where they find another dead person and another riddle. Which sends them to their next destination. And so on and so forth.
This would all be well and good if the characters were great. But the two most interesting characters, the Penguin and the Riddler, are given limited screen time, while their heroic counterparts, Batman and Catwoman, are given the majority of the time. And while our heroes are pretty cool, they’re not captivating enough for us to truly care about what’s going on.
This partly has to do with the noir genre itself as it often feels like characters aren’t talking to each other, so much as directly to the audience, delivering their lines as stylistically as possible. There’s a detached quality to the dialogue and the line-readings that speaks to the bigger problem with noir – which is that it always looks cool, but, emotionally, feels cold.
Which is a strange thing to say because everything else about the movie – the way it’s filmed, the way it’s lit, the way it’s designed – implies that it’s a much deeper comic book movie than you usually see. But it isn’t. It’s a cinematography class. It’s got costume design up the wazoo. But everything else in the film is skin deep.
Nobody’s going through any internal battles outside of some vague references to Bruce’s difficult childhood. Contrast this with Arthur Fleck in Joker, who’s so very desperate to connect with others. Who’s tasked with taking care of his aging mother. Who must battle a strange disorder daily (his spontaneous laughing). Who must fight off an inner rage. We really feel like Arthur is a person struggling through life. Batman, meanwhile, is just a guy who seems upset that there are a lot of criminals around.
This makes the three hour running time seem ridiculous. You can have that extra hour if you’re going to use it. But if all you’re going to do with that hour is turn 2 minute scenes into 4 minute scenes, and 5 minute scenes into 10 minute scenes, you’re killing your narrative’s momentum. There was this scene about two hours in where Bruce is talking to Alfred in the hospital and I swear it was 15 uninterrupted minutes of them droning on to each other.
I know we say for every Marvel movie, “That could’ve been shorter,” but in this case, it’s true. This movie could’ve lost an hour and it wouldn’t have affected the film AT ALL.
I do think it’s cool that Matt Reeves made this badass looking superhero flick peppering in a 90s edge that included “Seven” references and a Nirvana-inspired Bruce Wayne. But halfway through this movie, when I realized the investigation narrative was going to keep hitting the same beats over and over, I mentally checked out, watching the rest of the film with only a passing interest.
There’s good here. Just not enough of it.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The Reluctant Team-Up always works. This is when your hero reluctantly teams up with another character, as is the case here with Batman and Catwoman.