Week 15 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge
Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Week 14 – The Climax
At the start of the year, we said we were going to write a script. This week, that dream becomes a reality. Because if you’ve been following the schedule I’ve laid out every Thursday, you are just 10 pages away from typing “FADE OUT.”
Technically speaking, these should be the easiest pages you’ve written all script. Chances are, you finished the climax last week. Or, if your climax bleeds into the final 10 pages, you’ve already got momentum going from last week so finishing up should be a cake walk.
But one thing I didn’t talk about last week, and something that’s likely to come up at the end of your climax, is THE CHOICE.
Last week was all about structuring your ending like a miniature movie – giving it that first act, second act, and third act.
However, there is something going on concurrently with that, which is the conclusion to your main character’s (or main supporting character’s) arc. Remember, at the beginning of your script, you will have created a character with a gigantic weakness. This weakness is known in some circles as “the fatal flaw.” It is the flaw that’s holding your character back in life – that’s keeping them from finding happiness.
Most flaws exist inside a person’s blind spot. That’s because a flaw is as much of who you are as any other attribute. So you don’t think of it as a weakness. It’s just “who you are.” You may be selfish, stubborn, a procrastinator, a coward, impulsive, a cynic, or indecisive, and have no idea.
I remember the first time somebody assigned a character flaw to me, telling me I was a perfectionist. I said, “What are you talking about? I’m not a perfectionist.” They then proceeded to give me five active examples of my perfectionism. I honestly had zero idea that was a flaw of mine until that moment.
So, most of the time, your hero won’t know their flaw. We, the writer will know it. Almost everyone who knows your hero will know it. But your hero won’t truly recognize this as a flaw until the climax. Until they’re faced with a CHOICE within the climax that gives them the option of either…
a) Continue to live their flawed life.
b) Overcome their flaw and change.
Interestingly enough, the answer isn’t always “b.” Sometimes your character will choose “a.” When they do, though, a price must be paid. You can’t have your hero remain flawed and not pay a price. So, in tragedies, the hero is given the big choice at the end, they choose to remain the same, and they usually die as a result.
But let’s get back to how this affects our ending.
You want to create a choice in the final “battle,” where the hero can either keep doing what they’ve always been doing or they can change. Keep in mind, that if you do this well, it will be the most powerful moment in your entire screenplay. This is the moment that is going to give your audience the feels. This is the moment where you can make people cry.
Three of the most common flaws that pop up around this time are: cowardice, selfishness, and a lack of belief in one’s self. So, you’d write a choice into the ending where the hero could either continue to be a coward or finally show bravery. We see this with George McFly in Back to the Future when he finally stands up to Biff and punches him in the face to save Lorraine.
In The Matrix, Neo has spent the entire movie not believing in himself. He doesn’t believe he’s “The One.” He’ll get into little spats with the agents but, at the end, he does what the group tells him to do – RUN. So in that final climactic moment where he gets cornered by the agents in a hallway, he has his CHOICE built around his flaw: He can continue not to believe in himself and run away. Or he can believe in himself and face the agents head on. Guess what he does?
Who’s the most selfish character in the original Star Wars? It’s Han Solo. He has a choice at the end of that movie. He can take the money and leave his allies high and dry or he can stay and fight and help them destroy the Death Star. In the end, his choice is to come back, shoot down Darth Vader, which allows Luke a clear shot at the Death Star.
That moment – that moment where the Millennium Falcon appears at the very last second to shoot down Darth Vader’s ship before Vader can take out Luke – is one of the single most exciting moments in movie history.
And the REASON that is is because it’s coming on the heels of a major character transformation. That’s the power that an expertly executed climactic character transformation can accomplish. That’s why this formula is so important.
I talk to so many writers who treat the act of finding a character flaw for their protagonist to be some kind of burden. They know that it’s something screenwriting books tell them they have to do and that’s the only reason they do it. But this is WHY you want to integrate a character flaw. It’s FOR CREATING MOMENTS LIKE THE ABOVE with Han Solo.
Cause you can’t create emotional beats in your climax if you haven’t set up any character transformations to happen. You can still come up with decent endings, especially if you’re good at plotting and paying off setups, which all good endings do. But if you want to come up with that ending that hits the reader in the gut, figure out a character flaw at the beginning of your writing process, explore that flaw throughout the movie, then pay it off here in the climactic scene.
It’s easy to forget that a movie should be an emotional experience. Viewers want to connect with the people leading them through the story. And just like we, as real-life people, like to see our friends and family overcome their weaknesses and become successful in life, so do we want to see these new “friends” of ours – these movie characters – overcome their flaws and become successful.
Movies really are a metaphor for life. That 2-hour experience feels like we’re living a life with these characters. So if you do your job, we will connect with and care about those characters, and want to see them win in the end. But not just win. CHANGE. When they change for the better, that’s what gets the feels flying into fifth gear.
After you finish your climax, it’s up to you how many more scenes you want to write. But the general rule is that you don’t want to stick around much longer. The viewer will start to get restless. They came here to see the main character win. The main character won. So they’re ready to leave. Some movies (Rocky) will end right there! But it’s okay to wrap up a few character relationships if you need to. I would say try to get out of your script after the climax within three scenes.
Time to bring the torch home!
We will celebrate next week after you’ve completed your script.
Then we can talk about rewriting.
It’s going to be a BLAST. :)
Genre: Comedy
Premise: When their embarrassing, sometimes filthy, possibly cancellable group chat falls into the wrong hands, a group of dudes must go on a madcap scavenger hunt around town to appease a mysterious blackmailer.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. The writers got their first big Hollywood job not long ago, writing Hotel Transylvania 4.
Writers: Amos Vernon and Nunzio Randazzo
Details: 120 pages
Donald Glover should be in this movie in some capacity.
I like this idea.
I like ideas that lean into recent culture.
I also like ideas that are relatable. When you read them, you nod your head, immediately understanding what the movie could be.
That’s how I felt when I read this logline. I’ve been on some pretty gnarly group texts. They can get saucy. Sometimes too saucy. What if one of those group texts got out into the ultra-senstive ecosystem that is America in 2024? It wouldn’t be pretty.
So that strikes me as a genuine high-stakes scenario.
Let’s find out what the writers did with it.
Studly Chance, Hipster Wyatt, Trainwreck Mitchell, and Preppy Dennis have been friends since high school. That’s when they started their group chat – Da Boyz. Cut to a decade later and they still have that group chat. It’s their favorite guilty pleasure. Whenever one of them wants to say something inappropriate that they cannot say in the world, they post in Da Boyz group chat, where they know it will be appreciated.
But the Boyz have a problem. Chance, who became an actor, has shot his first big movie, “Robo Zorro.” This is his coming out party. So he invites his friends to Hollywood to party on the weekend of the premiere. Chance has one request: We need to delete the group chat. There’s too much dirty crap on there. It’s the only thing in the world that can destroy his career. So the friends reluctantly have a funeral for the group chat.
They then get absolutely wasted and have the time of their lives at Chance’s house party. The next morning, however, they wake up and get a call. Some psycho has stolen Mitchell’s phone and has the group chat. Turns out stupid Mitchell didn’t delete the chat as instructed. And now texts are being released to TMZ.
Some of them are small: Chance stated in the group chat when he got the Robo Zorro audition that it was the dumbest sounding movie ever.
Some of them big: He only tried to get the role to get into the pants of Hollywood starlet Dipti Bardot, who has since become his girlfriend.
Our phone thief tells them that in order to prevent more leaked texts, they have to do what he says. So he tells them to go to the LA zoo and beat up a Komodo dragon. He tells them to go to the Dodgers game and pierce their nipples behind home plate. All of this while Chance’s publicist tears through the city trying to find the phone thief.
After a little detective work, they find out that the thief is an Andrew Tate type who they ran into at the party. Some crypto-loving gym rat who takes pictures with Bugatis and Samurai swords. Once they figure that out, they target his favorite 10 million dollar sword, thinking if they can steal it, they can make a trade for the phone. But nothing will prepare them for why this weirdo is actually doing this. They may know this man better than they think they do.
Blow Up The Chat starts out strong. I thought this early high school scene that introduces the group chat was funny. The teacher in the class has a rule that when students text, she reads the texts out loud to the class…
After that scene, I assumed the whole script would take place in high school cause why not? You just wrote a hilarious scene with a group of high school kids, proving you know how to make high school dialogue funny. Why move away from that? Stay with what’s working!
Cause once they became adults, their interactions were never as funny as that first scene. We see this a lot, don’t we? Wasn’t this my exact note in the last two comedy scripts I reviewed? The first scenes were funny and then nothing was ever as funny after that.
This is a FIXABLE THING. It happens because we obsess over our first scene and make sure it’s amazing. But the idea is not then to say, “Okay, I can relax now.” No, that scene then has to be the bar by which you try to clear with all your subsequent scenes. You want to try and outdo yourself. Not set your Script Tesla on cruise control.
Most scripts are average purely because the writers don’t have that “bar-topping” attitude.
In addition to this, the script didn’t approach its plot correctly. For a large chunk of the movie, the characters aren’t even going after the goal – which is to find the thief and get the phone back. They’re taking his marching orders and doing wherever he says to do. Reactive characters rarely work. Imagine if, in The Hangover, our characters didn’t spend the first half of the movie trying to find Doug. But rather went off on some other adventure. It would drift. It would feel lost. That’s the equivalent of how this narrative feels.
I suppose you could argue that this villain has the phone and therefore has the control. So he’s going to use it. But that was another problem. I never felt the stakes of this story. If they didn’t do what he said, he would release more information? But he’s already released a bunch of information. What’s to make us believe that this next bunch of information he releases will be worse? We don’t know for sure. So we don’t feel the stakes.
The best scene in the movie is one where the writers finally recognize the power of their concept and lean into it. This is almost always where you find your best scenes – when you lean directly into your concept.
Once our villain has Da Boyz in front of him, he tells them, sure, I’ll give you the phone back. But first, I want to share with you your SIDE CHATS. Side chats? The guys all look at each other. What’s that mean? The villain then starts reading the chats that are happening without Dennis. Or without Chance. Or Wyatt. Or Mitchell. In these chats, the guys talk behind each others’ backs.
Now we’re actually getting into some conflict. We’re getting away from the surface level stuff and going deeper. It’s the kind of revelation that is specific to this concept – a group of people texting. I wish there were more thoughtful plot beats like this.
Cause I pretty much checked out when a scene was built around them having to pierce each others’ nipples. It just became so overtly goofy that I knew the characters were safe. That nothing mattered anymore. You can make a scene SO MUCH FUNNIER by upping the stakes. I didn’t understand why we went in the opposite direction.
I’m not Captain Delete It with Blow Up The Chat. But like a lot of comedy scripts I read, the writers are more focused on having fun than they are writing the best comedy possible. Comedy needs tight structure to set up the scenarios that are going to make us laugh. And here, especially with the zoo scene and Dodgers game, it felt like the writers came up with the idea a minute ago and wrote one draft and that was it. It didn’t feel like they really thought through all the comedy scenarios and asked, “Is this the funniest scenario I can write?”
So, sadly, it wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is the kind of concept where you need to ask if a dark comedy is a better vessel for the story than a straight comedy. This script always had one hand tied behind its back because it wasn’t willing to expose the kinds of texts that people would REALLY WRITE. The kind of texts that would REALLY CANCEL someone. But if you wrote this as a dark comedy, you could be more realistic about that stuff and have truly horrid texts. It would’ve been a different movie. But it would’ve been A WAY MORE TRUTHFUL MOVIE. And TRUTH is preferred in writing. Readers can tell when you’re fibbing.
This script has GSU for days. But does it have logic for hours??
Genre: Action
Premise: Following a severe, soon to be fatal, brain injury during a violent attack, an NYPD sergeant embarks on a harrowing journey of vengeance, which leaves her only a few hours of adrenaline-bursting consciousness to hunt down those who took her daughter and killed her husband before she dies.
About: Today’s writer, who got this script on last year’s Black List, has had some notable success as a TV scribe. He wrote on the Ridley Scott show, Raised by Wolves. He wrote on The Flash. And he wrote 19 episodes of the well-reviewed show, White Collar.
Writer: Julian Meiojas
Details: 110 pages
Alicia Vikander for Izzy?
A long time ago I wrote a time-travel script called “The Jump.”
It was about a guy whose wife disappears and he soon finds out she’s been kidnapped into the future. So he seeks out the people who can time jump and travels into the future to get her back.
For a variety of reasons (many of which weakened the script considerably), my main character was dying of a brain tumor. He only had a couple of days to live. The idea was, not only did he have to go to the future to rescue his wife. He had a limited time to do so, as his tumor was days away from killing him. But I always ran up against this issue of: if he was days away from dying of a brain tumor, how did he have all this energy to run around and save his wife?
These days, I would never have included the stupid brain tumor thing. I’ve realized, after reading thousands of scripts, that stuff like that overcomplicates what should be a simple narrative. If I could time travel in real life I’d go back and tell Past Carson to get rid of the brain tumor immediately.
The reason I bring it up is because today’s script is dealing with the same issue I was dealing with: how do you write a believable action movie around a highly mobile character whose sickness will kill her within hours?
Did Die Fast figure out the solution to that problem? Let’s find out.
Izzy is a 37 year old Brooklyn cop. She’s got a 14 year old daughter, Lola, who’s inherited her angry teenage rebellion stage a bit early. She’s getting in fights at school (in a very 2024 character beat, they are making fun of her sexuality). And boy would that get worse if she knew the truth about who her father was. He’s a famous bank robber who’s currently appealing a 60 year prison sentence.
Meanwhile, she’s dealing with her stepdad, David, who she kind of gets along with. Izzy and David are actually on the fence about whether they should tell Izzy the truth about her father when the two of them are attacked at their house. Some masked men want money although it’s not clear what money they’re talking about. They kill David and toss her out the window.
Three days later, Izzy wakes up in the hospital. She’s told that she has a critical brain injury and only has 5 hours to live. Even worse, the cops’ operating thesis is that SHE killed David. Luckily for Izzy, this unique brain injury allows for a final burst of energy before death. So Izzy is actually operating in an almost superhuman state. As soon as the doctors leave the room, she’s out of there.
Izzy only wants to accomplish two things before her death. One, go find her daughter, as she assumes that whoever came after her and David will come after Lola next. And two, get revenge on the people who killed her husband. This will be complicated by the fact that Izzy used to run with some sketchy cats before she became a cop. I’m not a psychic or anything but something tells me that bank robber dude had something to do with this. So get ready Bank Robber Dude. Izzy’s coming.
In regards to our “Is it possible to believably create an action character who’s hours away from dying” question, I must admit the writer did a good job.
Let’s be honest. There is no medical scenario on record that would support what happens to Izzy here. But with some fairly convincing exposition based on, what sounds like, sound research, I believed it enough to retain my suspension of disbelief.
So all’s good in the hood, right?
I would say more all’s average in the hood.
This movie is Crank. It’s a woman with a ticking time bomb in her head on a tear. And it’s hard to make a plotline that simple stand out.
However, we do have a recent comp that did stand out! I’m talking about David L. Williams’, “Clementine.”
So what was the difference between these two scripts that made that one so good and this one so average? The answers aren’t sexy. It comes back to nuts and bolts screenwriting.
David wrote a script meant to be enjoyed. Julian is writing a script that he’s trying to impress readers with.
What does that mean in layman’s terms? It means one guy is trying too hard.
Take a look at some of these lines from today’s script…
She finds an UNCONSCIOUS GUARD. Another gorehole mouth — the kiss of a shotgun’s ass. She pulse checks. Got it. Moves on.
Enter DET. OMAR NAZARIAN, 30s, fly-boy swag, but look close and you’ll see spit-up on this father-of-4’s Air Force 1s.
It’s overly specific try-hard too-cool-for-school writing, which often results in reader “double-takes” (the reader has to re-read sentences to understand them). When you’re writing a script like this one that is so reliant on its fast pace, double-take lines are script killers. Cause they create a stuttering effect that destroys the very pacing you’re going for.
The overwriting gets a little better as the script goes on. But not enough for my taste.
Also, I liked the character of Clementine more. Izzy was kind of annoying. She feels too written. Not authentic enough. Clementine felt like a real person.
How much you like the main character has an enormous effect on how you experience the rest of the story. In this case, if I had to give the Izzy character a 1 out of 10 rating for likability, I would give her a 6. With Clementine, I would give her a 9. That difference changes the ENTIRE WAY the reader experiences the script. Because when you like a character that much, you just care more about every story beat, every twist and turn, every character achievement.
Another thing that David did better was he put his characters in these situations that you thought there was NO WAY IN THE WORLD they were going to get out of. So you had to keep reading to find out if they would.
Here, every single time Izzy got in a tough situation, I knew without blinking she would be okay. There’s a scene where she takes on 10 guys in a hallway and I knew before the first one came at her that she was fine.
Look, I know that in 99.9% of movies, the hero makes it to the end. But there’s a special skill in screenwriting wherein, even though the reader inherently knows this, you have the ability to make them constantly DOUBT that it’s going to happen. And the way you do that is to put them in these scenarios that genuinely feel impossible to get out of. This script never passed that test.
Moving on to DIALOGUE…
This month I’m celebrating the release of my new dialogue book, The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written. So I wanted to cover some from Die Fast.
One of the things I talk about in the book is that certain genres aren’t conducive to writing dialogue. Fast-moving action films are squarely in that department. We see that here. There isn’t a lot of memorable dialogue and that’s because there’s no room for it.
Dialogue, I’ve learned, needs a runway to get going.
It’s hard to write good dialogue if all your dialogue scenes are three-quarters of a page long. There’s not enough runway to build a good conversation.
The only long dialogue scenes you get to write in these action scripts are exposition-driven. For example, there’s a scene late in the script where Izzy tells Lola the truth about her father. It’s a long scene but it’s all backstory. It’s not the kind of dialogue you can add flash or flair to. It’s just expository.
The good news is, if you’re bad at dialogue, then this is the perfect type of script for you to write. Because the dialogue requirements are minimal. You just need to know how to write exposition. Luckily, there’s an entire chapter about how to write great exposition in my book. So go buy it!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius’
What I learned: We’ve hit the tipping point for “ass-kicking girl” scripts. They’re done. There are too many of them out there and it’s diluted their entertainment value. Plus, they don’t do very well at the box office. The last hope is Ballerina, the John Wick spinoff movie. If that does well, they may have a second life. But if I were a writer right now who likes the action genre, I’m writing an “ass-kicking guy” script. Unless. UNLESS! You have a totally fresh new inventive take on the “ass-kicking girl” formula.
What I learned 2: How do you deal with difficult-to-buy-into scenarios such as people who can run around like Chris Hemsworth despite the fact that they’re supposedly going to drop dead in 5 hours? This script gives you a pretty good blueprint. Do as much research as possible to find the most convincing explanation for your wild scenario. Write a scene that incorporates that exposition. Then just GET THE F**K ON WITH YOUR SCRIPT. Don’t look back. Just go. Cause the more people think about it, the less they’ll believe it. So it’s best to address it as convincingly as you can, move on to the fun, and never stop. Cause if we’re having fun all the way through your story, we’re not thinking about the medical accuracy of your concept.
Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!
And I feel fine
The movie we were promised
Alex Garland’s “Civil War” pulled in 25 million dollars this weekend. On the surface, that seems like an average number. But when you look deeper, it’s staggeringly high.
This is independent studio A24’s biggest opening ever. The whole reason it’s an A24 film is that it’s an indie movie. Despite the way it promotes itself, which I’ll talk about in a bit, it’s a character piece about photojournalists. Most of the movie takes place away from the war. So, for a film like that to pull in 25 million dollars is gigantic. It rarely happens.
Now, I love Garland so I very much flirted with seeing this. But I ended up deciding not to. I’ll share with you why later. It does come down to a screenwriting choice Garland made, which is usually how it goes with me.
But before we talk about that, I wanted to discuss the marketing of this film. Cause the marketing is what allowed the film to achieve its unprecedented box office. And yet that marketing is deceptive.
It’s deceptive because this movie is not about a civil war. It’s about photojournalists. The negative reactions coming out of the film almost all revolve around the frustration of thinking they were going to get a movie about a civil war when, in actuality, they got a movie about how difficult it is to be a war photographer.
This is one of Hollywood’s best tricks. They know when they have a movie that if they marketed it honestly, nobody would show up. So they create a marketing campaign that promotes the aspects of the movie that are marketable, even if those elements are barely in the film.
They’ll even go so far as to misrepresent a movie if they fear that the truth will keep people out of the theater. They did this recently with the campaigns for both Mean Girls and The Color Purple. ZERO MENTION in the trailers of the films being musicals. Cause they feared that if people knew they were musicals, nobody would show up.
This becomes relevant to all screenwriters because, once you finish your screenplay, your job will be similar to the marketers’ jobs when promoting a movie – which is, you’ll have to send loglines to people and pitch people to get them to read your script.
As someone who does around 300 logline consults a year, I am particularly savvy in this department of deception because, often, writers will come to me wanting the sexiest logline possible even though the script itself isn’t sexy. And I’ll help them because I know that a better logline means more read requests.
But I do have the conversation with each and every one of them where I say, “Next time, before you write your script, don’t write the boring version of the script then try to come up with an exciting logline afterwards. Write the exciting version of the script to begin with so that your logline will be an accurate representation of your script. That way you get the best of both worlds.”
Because, inevitably, what happens, is that even if you are able to trick the potential reader into reading your script, there’s a high likelihood that they will leave disappointed because the screenplay you promised them never materialized.
That’s why some people are coming out of this movie disappointed. The negative reviews are almost all the same: “What I was promised never showed up.”
On the flip side of this, this movie shows you the power of concept – and more specifically: TITLE. How the title of a script or a movie can have so much influence over potential readers/viewers.
If you’re an indie writer and you’re tired of writing your indie scripts that no one seems interested in, do what Garland does here: Find a big sexy subject matter then hide your indie story within it.
Imagine, for example, that Garland had written a movie about news photographers trying to get the perfect photograph of drug addicts in drug-infested cities in an attempt to bring attention to the problem and hopefully make a change.
Sounds very noble. Sounds very indie. Sounds like 5 people would show up.
So you can see the difference by changing “drug infested city” to “civil war.” That’s what smart indie writers do. They find that sexy subject matter so that their character-driven scripts have an actual shot at getting noticed.
Ironically, the reason I decided not to see the film was that I heard, ahead of time, that it was not about a civil war. That it was about photographers who just happened to be operating within a civil war. That didn’t sound like an interesting enough movie to me.
The movie we got
And the more I think about it, the more I think Garland made a mistake. This is a movie that, if it would’ve committed to the Civil War angle, it would’ve made twice as much money this weekend.
It’s a reminder that point-of-view is SO IMPORTANT when writing screenplays. Think about it. You have a modern-day American civil war movie. Think about how many points-of-view you have at your disposal. Is a photographer really the most interesting?
You could’ve gone with a suburban mother, a soldier on the front lines, an abandoned child, a spy, a medic, the president of the United States, a drone pilot, a hacker, a farmer, a survivalist, a drug addict, a black market trader, an Uber driver driving people out of the city to safety.
All of those options would’ve been more interesting than a photographer. I’m not even convinced photographers are a thing anymore. We’re way more enamored with videos taken on peoples’ phones in 2024 than we are some amazing picture. This isn’t 1968 yo. The more I think about it, the more flummoxed I am by Garland’s choice. He’s probably just really interested in photographers.
But my point is, whenever you’re writing a screenplay, that needs to be one of your primary objectives: figure out what point-of-view is best for this story. Cause, often, we’ll go with what feels easiest to us, or the most familiar. And those aren’t the best options.
I’m still happy for Garland. His movies, while always artistically challenging, rarely connect with audiences. And here, with his last movie ever, he gets his biggest box office payout.
Now Garland is going back to writing, re-building one of his original franchises: 28 Years Later. But don’t count Garland’s directing career out just yet. When you have a clear number 1 movie at the box office, some big people start knocking on your door. However, from what I understand, Garland hates directing more than anything. So he may be able to withstand these mega-offers.
Did any of you see Civil War? What did you think?
Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!
Week 14 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge
Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Okay, so, just to remind you, this entire surgical procedure we’re calling “writing a screenplay,” is approaching the endpoint. We’ve opted for the 110-page version. Which means that, after this week, we only have 10 pages left.
Where that leaves us is in the sweet spot of the climax.
It took me a long time to figure out how to approach the climax of a screenplay. Then, one day, it became as clear as the springs from which Evian gets its water.
A climax IS ITS OWN SCREENPLAY.
For that reason, it has its own beginning, middle, and end.
For those of you who don’t know what each of these sections stands for, let me remind you:
Beginning – Setup
Middle – Conflict
End – Resolution
For anyone who’s intimidated by this information, think of it this way. Almost every story you’ve ever told anyone – even if it was just a story to your husband about what happened to you at work – chances are you SET IT UP for them (“My boss called me into his office”), you then explained THE CONFLICT (“He said that Karen had accused me of stealing her work and taking credit for it”), before finally giving them the RESOLUTION (“I told him that Karen was a lying psycho who’s been trying to make me look bad to everyone. He apologized and said he’d have a long talk with her.”).
It’s the easiest way to tell a story. So it makes sense that we’re depending on this formula for our climax as well.
Therefore, almost everything you used to map out your 110 page screenplay, you’re going to use to map out your climax.
The first thing you have to do is figure out how long your climax is going to be. Since your third act in a 110 page screenplay is around 27 pages, the climax has to be less than that.
Because, before you get to the climax, you have three main beats that you’re trying to hit.
First beat: “Stop Crying and Get Up Off Your Keister”
Remember, at the end of the second act, your hero had fallen to his lowest point. Some level of death, either literal or metaphorical, had occurred. So, it wouldn’t make sense to jump from that to a big flashy climax.
You need a beat where they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and shift their internal momentum from “defeated” to “I’m going to give this one more shot.”
Second beat: “I Love It When A Plan Comes Together”
After they’ve defeated their whiney b**ching and are ready to fight again, they need to come up with an actual plan. You don’t roll up on the Death Star hoping to figure it out on the way. You need that moment where everyone sits down and they explain how to destroy the Death Star.
Third beat: “The Calm Before The Storm”
Most good stories give the audience one final beat before the climax that works as the “calm before the storm.” For example, in Avatar, before the Na’Vi go off and fight the humans, they convene at the big tree of life. They have a little pow-wow where they mentally prepare for what’s about to come and then off they go.
How long should these scenes be? Pretty short, but it will all depend on the movie and the story you’re telling. But I would say 2 pages tops each. So 6 pages in total.
Cause the way you gotta look at it is, you need a few beats after the climax as well, which is going to add pages to your third act. Maybe we have 6 pages AFTER the climax is over.
So let’s do our math = 27 pages – 6 pages (lead up to climax) – 6 pages (post climax).
That leaves us with about 15 pages for our climax. Which is optimal in my opinion. 15 pages gives us an adequate amount of time for a great climactic sequence.
I know some of you hate math but we gotta use it in order to understand how to set up our climax. Remember, like I said, the climax is its own miniature movie. It has a setup, a conflict, and a resolution. Since we now know our climax is 15 pages, we can divide that in the same way we divided our script = 25% for the setup, 50% for the conflict, and 25% for the resolution.
While this is a good guide, I’ve found that setups and resolutions in climaxes tend to be shorter, percentage-wise, than their full-script counterparts. So instead of being 25% in setup, it might be 15%. Instead of 25% for the resolution, it might be 10%.
That’s because the climax is really about the showdown between the protagonist and the antagonist. So that middle section of your climax — the CONFLICT – is the meat.
With that in mind, here’s what we get…
Climax Setup – 3 pages
Climax Conflict – 10 pages
Climax Resolution – 2 pages
I’m already hearing some of you groan. Carson! You can’t possibly distill art down into such a mathematical formula. You’re right. I’m not saying you have to follow this to a T. What I’m saying is, this is the way it’s done in most movies. Therefore, you should use it as a template. How much you want to stretch or condense or twist the template is up to you. But there’s one constant here I can promise you that you need: Which is that your climax needs form. It needs shape. And this is the best way to shape it.
In all the internet hype about an upcoming Happy Gilmore sequel, I watched the original movie recently and the climax follows this formula very closely. The final tournament day between Happy and Shooter is roughly 17 minutes, so a couple of minutes extra.
And that’s why I say these page-counts do have some flexibility to them. I mean, Titanic has a 45 minute climax. The film itself is also twice as long as a regular movie but, the point is, each movie will have its own needs.
The only other thing I want to highlight is that, within your climax, it needs to look like your hero LOST. Just like at the end of your second act, your hero had a “lowest point,” the same thing is going to happen at the end of your climax’s second act.
For example, in Happy Gilmore, as he lines up his final putt, which he needs to win the tournament, one of Shooter’s minions forces a giant TV stand to fall directly in the way of his shot, making an already difficult shot impossible.
In that moment, we think Happy Gilmore is dead. There’s nothing he can do to win this tournament anymore. You need that same moment in your climax.
Okay, we’re almost there, people! We conclude the writing of our first draft next week! Congrats to everyone who’s made it this far! :)
