Today (Thursday) is the final day to get your scene submissions in for Scene Showdown. If you’ve got a great scene, send it to me in PDF form at the e-mail below…
What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
The top 5 scenes go up tomorrow for voting.
Okay, time to give you some last minute scene-writing inspiration. I was watching the new Seth Rogen Apple show, “The Studio,” last night, which covers a new studio head trying to get good (translation: artistic) movies made inside a studio that wants him to make bad (translation: profitable) movies.
It’s a fun show. The first episode covers the current studio head getting fired and Seth Rogen’s character, Matt, replacing her. Matt wants to return to a time when studios made good movies, like The Godfather. The problem is, the studio’s primary financier, Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston), wants to make tons of money. In fact, he just acquired the rights to the Kool-Aid Man, believing he can do for their studio what Barbie did for Warner Brothers.
As Matt tries to figure out how he’s going to terminate any type of Kool-Aid franchise, he takes a meeting with his hero, Martin Scorsese, who says he wants to make a Jim Jones movie, about the real life cult leader who had all his followers drink a suicidal drink (some called it “kool-aid” at the time) that would allow them to ascend to the next plane of existence.
Seeing an opportunity to secure a Martin Scorsese film AND make a Kool-Aid movie for his boss, Matt buys Scorsese’s pitch in the room with only one condition – that the title of his Jim Jones movie be “Kool-Aid.” But reality hits Matt later on when Griffin starts asking for details about the movie, and Matt is forced to do the unthinkable – kill his hero’s project.
Bringing this back to the topic at hand, the show has a lot of good scenes, and I want to focus on one in particular because it’s the simplest version of a scene and yet an example of how even the simplest scenes can be great.
To set up the scene, Matt, who’s an upper level executive at the studio, just showed up at work to learn that Patty, the studio head, has been fired, and that their boss, Griffin Mill, wants to speak to Matt. Matt’s no dummy. He thinks that he could be replacing Patty.
This gives our hero the primary objective in the scene – he wants this job. That’s always the start of a strong scene. Also of note, this is a very important job. It’s the head of the studio. Matt has worked at this studio for 20 years. And the way it works in studios is when you’re one of the few up for the job, if you don’t get chosen, you almost always get fired.
So the stakes are sky high. And like I told you last week, the higher you turn up the stakes “dial,” the more intense your scene is going to feel.
Now, does anybody remember what you need next to have a good scene? I’ll help you out. You need conflict. So, how do you get conflict? You get it by placing another character in the scene who stands in the way of your hero getting his goal.
But before I explain to you how that happens, I want to point out that there is nuance to this equation. If you’re thinking in black and white terms, you’d have Griffin come into this scene and say, “I’m not giving you the job.”
But instead, Griffin comes into the scene and says, “I want to give you this job. But I’m worried about something. I hear that you like artsy-fartsy movies. And we can’t make artsy-fartsy movies. We need to make movies that make money. In fact,” he says, “I just bought the rights to the Kool-Aid Man.”
In this scene, the obstacle standing in the way of Matt achieving his goal is more internal than external. To accept the job means making the kinds of movies that he hates. Which means he has to decide if that’s really something he wants to do. Ultimately, he decides that becoming a studio head is too big of an opportunity to pass up and goes along with Griffin.
It’s a good scene. Cause it keeps things simple – two characters, there’s a want, there’s something in the way – and when you have that setup, writing a scene becomes easy. You can play around. It’s like having your plate, utensils, glass, and napkin already laid out for you. All you have to do is eat. And you can eat in whatever order you want.
Where writers struggle in scenes is when they don’t understand what each character in the scene wants and why.
Because you can go deeper into the scene makeup if you want. Yeah, the scene is centered around Matt and Matt’s objective. But it helps to know Griffin’s side too. What does he want? Why does he want it? The more you know about him, the better you can write his side of the scene (this is one of the key tips I teach in my dialogue book). But, in the end, if you set up those basic parameters of goal-obstacle-conflict, you should write a lot of winning scenes.
Okay, that concludes today’s scene-writing lesson, guys. It’s time to get your scenes in! The clock is ticking!!
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: Waking up in a mysterious room, Emily faces a chilling ultimatum: she must decide which of three strangers to sacrifice before her ceiling descends, crushing her.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. The author, Michael Jones, is an Australian screenwriter.
Writer: Michael Jones
Details: 84 pages
I love these old school high concept spec scripts.
There’s something beautiful about big simple ideas.
This one actually feels kind of fresh in the same way that The Platform felt fresh.
So I was eager to see what “Crush” had in store for us. Let’s check it out.
35 year old Emily wakes up in a white room with concrete walls and a concrete ceiling. She tries to talk but for some reason she’s unable to. No sound comes out. Then three of the walls around her turn clear and she sees three other rooms.
In those rooms are 80 year old Vincent, 40-something mouthy Lucy, and 30 year old Earl. Those three *can* talk for some reason. So, naturally, they’re frustrated when they try to communicate with Emily and she can’t talk back.
All of a sudden, Emily’s ceiling dips from 14 feet high to 12 feet high. As she tries to figure out what that means, Earl points out that there are three Roman numerals on her floor – I, II, and III. Maybe standing on one of them does something.
The ceiling dips another two feet and Emily takes Earl’s advice and steps on one of the numbers. When she does, her ceiling ascends back up to the top, and Earl’s ceiling starts coming down. Except there’s no way to stop it. All three people watch as his ceiling lowers and mercilessly crushes him to death.
At the back of Emily’s room are 8 red lights. After Earl’s death, one of them turns yellow. Earl’s room is blocked from view and when it becomes clear again, Earl has been replaced by some dude named Matt. Lucy, quick to figure out what’s going on, pleads with Emily that she has a son. She can’t die. But, just like before, Emily’s ceiling starts dropping.
Vincent, realizing that his age is no asset in this game, volunteers himself to die. There’s no argument from everyone else and Emily crushes him. He’s then replaced by Sarah. But the focus shifts to Lucy and Matt, who begin squabbling about who deserves to live and die. Matt then catches Lucy in a lie (she changed her “son’s” name), which means she’s the next to go. Again, each time someone dies, one of the eight red lights turns yellow.
But a few people later, things get real. Next up in the fray is Emily’s mom, Ruby! Definitely can’t kill her so sorry Matt! But then Matt is replaced with David, Emily’s husband! And then in comes Emily’s son, Benny! After Emily is forced to start killing off her own family, those bodies are replaced with… random babies! What, ever, is Emily going to do!!?? Might she actually do the unthinkable and let HERSELF be crushed???
Three keys to any good sci-fi script are rules, mythology, and imagination. Imagination is probably the most important because people come to sci-fi movies to see things that they’ve never seen before. It’s why 2 billion dollars worth of people paid to see Avatar – giant blue aliens, floating waterfalls, and mechanized war outfits. So if you don’t have the imagination, nothing else will matter.
To Jones’ credit, I think that this script was fairly imaginative. The setup, in particular, was unique.
But don’t sleep on sci-fi rules. Rules are never sexy, like imagination, but if they become too elaborate, too confusing, they can easily sink a sci-fi script. And I see this happen ALL THE TIME. The writer gets so lost in their world that they have 2000 different rule-sets for what’s going on how the world operates. Does anybody understand the rules governing 2006’s Southland Tales? I sure don’t.
In contrast, the rules here were very simple. And the writer did a great job of setting them up. Her ceiling descends to kill her unless she kills someone else. The three numbers on the ground stood for the three other rooms. She steps on the room number of the person she wants to kill. And she has to do this eight times (shown by the 8 red lights at the back of her room) to complete the task.
The Platform had even simpler rules. People on each level get food. They can choose how much to leave for the people below them. Every few weeks, people randomly get shifted to new levels.
A simple rule set is usually where you want to be with sci-fi. Trust me. The more complex you make it, the messier the story is going to get.
Finally, we have mythology. Why is all this happening? What’s the backstory here? This is where a lot of these higher concept scripts fall apart because there seems to be a correlation between big sexy ideas and an inability to explain them.
(Spoilers) This is Crush’s Achilles’ heel. About midway through the script, Emily tricks the powers that be to take her out of the room. She then makes a run for it, trying to escape. We’re in this big cavernous series of rooms and everyone she runs into is wearing masks. When she rips someone’s mask off, their face is deformed and they don’t have a nose. When she finally gets to a doorway out, she opens it and looks out into… space. So they’re all in space.
(Spoilers) Later, when Emily “wins” the game, she’s granted a meeting with the “master” guy, who seems to be an alien. He says they play this game repeatedly with humans to test their moral compass or something.
I mean… point blank, let’s be real. None of this shit makes sense. Space? Really? Masked deformed people running the ship? Huh? Some alien dude who likes to keep playing an ongoing game about choosing who lives and who dies. Despite having done thousands of games already. What else are you going to learn doing this one more time, exactly?
Mythology – the worldbuilding, backstory, and reasoning for why things are happening – needs to make sense. At the most basic level, it needs to be rational. If you can’t even make what’s happening rational, then it’s impossible to build a compelling story on top of that. The foundation is too shaky.
The thing with sci-fi is that you have those three unique traits and yet, even on top of those, you still need to get the drama right. Cause the human dramatic element is the thing we’re going to emotionally connect with. It’s the thing that makes a movie stick with us. And the writer didn’t get that right.
When it’s Emily, her mom, her husband, and her kid, that are left, the answer is easy. You have to kill the mom. The mom even agrees with that, which is another problem with this. Every family member who Emily has to kill tells Emily that they have to be killed. So there’s no conflict involved in killing them. Wouldn’t the scene between her and her husband be so much better if he was screaming at her NOT to kill him?
And then, after you get rid of the mom and the husband, you replace them with random babies. Look, I don’t want to kill babies either. But if you have to choose between killing a random baby and killing your blood and flesh son, 100% of the people in that situation are choosing to save their son. So how is it a dilemma?
This is something that frustrates me so much when I read screenplays – the writer creates a “dilemma” that isn’t difficult at all. The idea is to create a dilemma so even that the audience has no idea what the protagonist is going to choose. It’s Sophie’s Choice. That was the original 50/50 dilemma. These dilemmas ranged from 80/20 to 100/0. There was never a dilemma where I didn’t know what she should choose.
So, this one started off strong. But it fell under the weight of a weak mythology and weaker dramatic pieces. I can’t recommend it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t have your character do something stupid early on or we’re going to dislike them. Emily has her phone in this room. And when she can’t access something on it, she hurls it across the room in frustration (it ends up sliding underneath the doorway). If you’re stuck in a room with ceilings that come down and crush you, you do not hurl your one lifeline across the room! That’s the single dumbest thing you can do. And readers don’t like dumb characters.
Short story sale! They’re saying this is the next Gone Girl.
Genre: Mystery/Thriller (Short Story)
Premise: A young woman decides to impersonate a girl who went missing ten years ago, only to walk into a family that knows a lot more about the disappearance than they’re letting on.
About: Make sure to respond to Hollywood people who want to talk to you! If Joe Cote had gone with his first instinct, he would’ve ignored the opportunity that led to a short story sale and now Sydney Sweeney signing on to star in an adaptation of his Reddit story. Here’s some insight from a Daily Mail article: “The teacher [Cote] had been more than a little skeptical when he saw a Reddit message last spring from an alleged LA talent manager about a short story he’d posted four years earlier. He ignored that first query about ‘I pretended to be a missing girl,’ which he’d written in November 2020 in the apartment he shared with his cousin outside of Boston. But the manager followed up. ‘I remember checking with my girlfriend saying, “All right, well, I guess as long as I don’t give him too much personal information or give him my credit card information, I think I could maybe reply,”’ Cote said.
Writer: Joe Cote
Details: about 4000 words
Viral short story. Surprise Hollywood sale. Sydney Sweeney. Please let those three presents be under my tree this Christmas. For Joe Cote, however, Christmas has arrived.
There are a lot of fun details about this sale but one of the biggest is that it took four years for someone in Hollywood to find the story and want to do something with it. That’s right. Joe Cote posted this short story in 2020. It only recently got noticed by someone of significance. Crazy!
Despite the waiting, however, it’s another reminder that you can’t get success unless you put your stuff out there. And the more places you put it out there, the better the chances are of someone seeing it. I’ve seen too many writers who are precious about their material and you just can’t be that way. YOU CAN’T! So get your stuff out there. Start by submitting to Scene Showdown, which happens THIS WEEK.
What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Our story begins in the third person, discussing the disappearance of Mikayla Murray from her Indiana home 10 years ago, when she was 18 years old. She was supposed to hang out with her young brother, James, that night but instead, drove off in her car and never returned.
The operating thesis had her college boyfriend involved somehow but nobody could prove it. After hashing out all backstory details in third person, the writer of the story then says, “She was about to return home after more than a decade. Because I’m Mikayla Murray, and I ran away that night to start a new life.”
It’s a little confusing at first. “Wait, you’re Mikayla, the missing girl?” No, as it turns out. She’s someone who’s about to impersonate Mikayla. Some of you may be making fun of me since the title is literally, “I pretended to be a missing girl so I could rob her family.” But I didn’t read that title going into this cause I wanted to experience the story fresh.
Anyways, Fake Mikayla, who we’re now experiencing in the first person (a distinctive difference from screenwriting, which is always in the third person), explains that she’s a homeless drifter who looks enough like Mikayla that she thinks she can fool the family long enough to get in, rob them, and then get out.
Mikayla shows up at “her family’s” doorstep and the mom immediately bursts into tears. As does the father. They can’t believe it’s true. It looks like Fake Mikayla’s plan is working! That is, until, she gets upstairs, alone, with James, her younger brother who’s now 17. Spoilers follow.
James starts yelling at her. You aren’t effing Mikayla! How do you know that, she replies. Because Mikayla is buried over there – he points outside to a gazebo in the back yard. And their dad put her there! Mikayla doesn’t have time to process this. James is grabbing his things and saying they need to leave NOW. Dad is going to kill them!
They jump out the back window and start running. The dad starts shooting at them. Fake Mikayla finds cover behind the gazebo and uses her lighter to light it on fire (I guess to distract the dad??). James starts freaking out. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!?” But Fake Mikayla doesn’t stick around to argue. She’s GONE GIRL.
Cut to several days later and we get an actual newspaper article explaining that the fire department was called to put out a fire and found the real Mikayla in a small room underneath the gazebo. Oh, and one other small detail. SHE WAS STILL ALIVE before the fire started. Duh-duh-duhhhhhhh.
A lot of writers come to me asking how to write a short story that Hollywood wants. Specifically, how long (short) should it be? The sweet spot seems to be between 4000-5000 words or, roughly, one fourth of a screenplay.
But that’s just a technical spec. The real struggle comes in determining the time frame of the story. How long should the story be in real life days?
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of consistency to that answer. My instinct is that you want a contained portion of time because that’s where you have the most control over the drama. The more you spread things out (over days, months, years) the more the story becomes a ‘montage’ rather than an actual story.
But then you look at another recent short story sale, The Third Parent, and that one spans five years, pausing in time, occasionally, to focus on a particularly gnarly experience with the story’s monster.
I will say this – unique scary monsters and twist endings appear to be good starting points if you want to sell anything to Hollywood, in screenplays or short stories.
Now, as for this particular story, was it any good? I’d say that, overall, yes, it was solid. The twist is fun. And I liked that we didn’t waste any time once she arrived at the house going through this whole “re-initiation” experience. You kinda have to do that sort of thing in the movie version of this. But when you’re trying to get people to turn the page, you gotta keep the story moving. And Cote does. We get RIGHT INTO IT with the brother telling her that they know she’s not Mikayla.
But there are all these little niggles that get in the way of this being much better. Spoilers abound. The dad is the bad guy here. But the writer never sets him up once. I’ll see writers do this thing where, especially with a short story, they don’t want to create any obvious suspects. With so few pages, they don’t want to risk the smart reader sussing things out.
But guess what? That’s your job as a mystery writer – to set up the eventual bad guy without the reader catching on. So for the dad to be his daughter’s captor came out of nowhere.
Also, we’re not clear at first WHY the dad did what he did. Questions are raised in the reddit thread and Joe Cote (acting as if this is a real-life story via /nosleep rules) explains that the dad had been terrified of his daughter running off with this college dude and no longer having control over her life – so he locked her in this secret backyard underground dungeon room to keep her here.
I mean…. That makes sense for six months. Maybe even a year. But ten years???? She’s 28 now and he’s still afraid to let her go out and live her life? I’m not saying that that scenario is impossible to buy into. But it’s such a stretch that it needs more explanation on the dad’s end. The dad has to be batshit crazy and we need to see that so that this ending makes sense.
Well, we know why FROM A STORY PERSPECTIVE. We need the twist ending of Real Mikayla being burned alive underneath the gazebo. But you can’t just make things happen in your story cause you want them to happen. THEY HAVE TO MAKE SENSE. So I would’ve liked a better explanation for that decision there.
Despite all this, I understand why this sold. It’s a cheap production with a marketable component (cold case) and a twist ending. Those SELL. They sell because they’re cheap to make and easy to market.
Read the short story yourself here!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You have to get your stuff out there! Think about it. Joe Cote could’ve easily decided, “Ehh, what’s the point? No one’s going to read it or care,” and not posted this. If he had done that, there’d be no sale. No movie. No future romance with Sydney Sweeney. It’s easy to not get your stuff out there. But there is literally zero upside to doing so. I want one of you guys to have the next big fun script/story sale. So let’s go!
So, this Friday was the much buzzed-about Severance finale. Word on the street was that it was better than even the beloved first season finale. Well, I binged the last three episodes and have, unfortunately, decided to terminate my show innie and no longer show up at the Severance offices.
There are a couple of reasons why, both screenwriting related. The first is the lack of variation in the tone of the show. It is sad slow scene after sad slow scene after sad slow scene after sad slow scene. Sure, the finale had a lot of craziness. But the three episodes before that made me want to commit show suicide with how slow and depressing they were.
Severance initially struck the perfect balance between ‘serious’ and ‘fun’ in that first season cause it had Dylan, who always provided levity. And it had this fun mystery component to it – a ragtag group of offbeat anti-heroes try to find a way out of a dungeon. But this new season was too slow and sad for my taste. The field trip episode and the “Harmony goes back to her hometown” episode destroyed the series for me. I only watched the last couple of episodes because I heard people saying the finale was so great.
The other reason the show isn’t for me is because it’s too intelligent. It’s rare that anyone says that these days. The Hollywood system seems to be designed to make sure stupidity reigns. But maybe this is why Apple TV is losing a billion dollars a year. Cause they don’t care about following the rules.
I don’t always understand what’s going on in the series or what’s at stake or what the rules are or what the heroes are trying to accomplish, and it takes away from my enjoyment. (Spoiler) In the last episode, I was struggling to understand which Mark was which and why he wanted one girl over the other and which of those versions wanted which of those girls, since every character had two versions of themselves (I think his wife actually had 26 versions of herself) that were constantly switching back and forth. Trying to figure out what was happening began to feel like work rather than fun.
By the way, I don’t begrudge anyone who loves this show. I admire how unique it is. I admire how many creative risks they take. But it’s too sad and too complex for me. That’s all. So say goodbye to Severed Carson. DING!
Back to Outie Carson!!!
And you know what Outie Carson loves? He looooovvveeeees White Lotus.
This night’s episode may as well have been titled “The Aftermath.” The entire episode focuses on the aftermath of the big party last night. For the three women friends, they’re dealing with Jacyln secretly sleeping with Valentin (despite Jaclyn encouraging Laurie to hook up with him all night). For poor Saxon, he’s got to deal with the drunken memory of hooking up with his brother – yikes. For Belinda, she finally slept with fellow masseuse, Pornchai. And Timothy, the father, was seconds away from committing suicide last night.
From a dramatic standpoint within the context of screenwriting, the aftermath is rarely interesting. Why? Because stories fly the highest when characters are going after things and being active. In the aftermath, characters are merely dealing with the memories of being active. And that can never be as compelling as the actual active stuff. Usually.
I say “usually” because there was a little movie called The Hangover built entirely around the aftermath. And I’m pretty sure that movie did okay. But note how it achieved that feat. It placed a ticking time bomb on the story (missing groom 24 hours before the wedding) that forced the characters to be active once again.
You can feel the problems present in this episode due to its dependence on the aftermath format. There’s a laziness to the scenes – a quiet slow pace (a lot of lying around) that doesn’t inspire a ton of plot movement.
The one plot development the show had was Piper’s visit to the Buddhist temple, where she’s hoping to study next year. But first she has to convince her parents, who will come along for the ride and meet the head monk. So, at least here, we have some activity. We have activity because we have a goal – Piper needs her parents to approve of the temple so they’ll send her here.
But let’s be honest. This is probably the weakest storyline in the series. So we don’t care that much. It’s a good reminder that the mechanics of storytelling can only do so much for you. You still have to create storylines we care about. And those boil down to inspired creative decisions, which Mike White is usually great at. But when you’re coming up with a dozen character storylines, some are, naturally, going to end up at the bottom.
What I did like about this storyline, though, was that the monk turned out to be helpful. We’ve been building up to this moment for six episodes and most writers probably would’ve made Piper’s meeting with the monk a disappointment. Maybe make him an asshole, or not care about her, or worse. Mike White does the unexpected, though, and has the monk be supportive, helpful, and even reenergize the dad.
The more I think about this episode, the stranger I find the decision behind episode five to be. Cause Mike White basically creates a mini-climax to the show. A lot happened last week. Which requires him to waste this entire sixth episode on rebooting everybody. I feel like there was a better way to do that. One way would’ve been to make the big party episode 4 instead. Cause that would’ve been midway through the season and a good “midpoint” plot marker. By making it episode 5, it throws the last three episodes out of balance.
There are two other lightweight attempts at adding some activity to the episode. The first is security guard Gaitok needing to get the gun back from Timothy, who covertly stole it a couple of days ago. And the second is Rick’s (Walton Goggins) Beijing trip where he’s attempting to orchestrate the murder of the man who killed his father.
In regards to Gaitok’s storyline, something about it isn’t revving on all cylinders. Technically, when I break it down, the stakes are high. Gaitok needs to retrieve the gun before his boss finds out because if his boss finds out, he’ll surely be fired. And, if he’s fired, there’s no way love-of-his-life, Mook, will go out with him.
And yet it never feels like he’s truly in danger of anything bad happening to him. There’s something missing from that storyline that makes the stakes feel low. One possibility is the “connect-the-dots” approach. This is when you build stakes around a series of dots that the reader must connect in order to understand the severity of the situation. For example: Joe has to let his daughter go to a concert (dot 1) so that he’s in good standing with her (dot 2), because she’s friends with another girl at school (dot 3) whose father happens to be the CEO of a compay Joe wants to work for (dot 4) that’s having an event he wants to be invited to (dot 5), etc. At a certain point, we lose interest in keeping track of the stakes. It’s always better if the stakes are upfront and clear.
As for Rick’s murder plan, that storyline actually has some potential but holy Moses is it developing slowly. Wow is that storyline moving at a snail’s pace.
All in all, it’s a tough episode for my idol, Mike White. He kind of painted himself in a corner, making his job difficult. But in spite of all this, I still think it was a solid episode. I’m fascinated by Saxson’s character and watching him realize what he did last night and how he’s going to mentally deal with that moving forward in his life.
There were also little moments I enjoyed, such as wife Victoria telling Timothy that if they ever lost all their money, she wouldn’t want to live. This is classic Screenwriting 201 stuff here, with dramatic irony driving the exchange. We know what Victoria doesn’t know yet. Which is that they *have* lost all their money. So seeing Patrick realize the effect this realization is going to have on his wife is fun stuff.
Look, Seasons 1 and 2 of The White Lotus are perfect television. I realized that could not be replicated a third time. But it’s still good. I care about a lot of these people and I’m excited to see how this ends.
Two episodes left!
By the way, everyone, THE SCENE SHOWDOWN IS THIS WEEK! You have until Thursday to get your scenes in. Here are the submission details.
What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
We’re getting close.
Next week is Scene Showdown!
What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
So I wanted to give you one last article to beef up your scene-writing skills. And the concept we’re going to tackle today is something called “The Scene Soundboard.”
I’m going to be upfront with you—I’m not an expert on soundboards by any stretch. However, I do understand that audio engineers work with these giant mixing boards packed with sliders, knobs, and controls. By adjusting specific faders or tweaking certain dials, they can manipulate the audio output.
The same thing is true with scene writing. You have these knobs. And you can either dial them up or dial them down and, by doing so, you change the intensity of the scene.
In order to understand how to do this, you must first understand how 90% of scenes are constructed. You have a character who wants something in the scene then you have a character who stands in the way of them getting it.
That person may actively not want to give it to them, or they may just obliviously be in the way. For example, on the former, a husband may want to hang out with his buddies tonight. Meanwhile, his wife wants him to come to her boss’s dinner party. The hubby’s goal is to hang out with his friends and his wife is actively trying to prevent that.
As for the latter, imagine a bank robber scoping out a bank for weaknesses (his goal) that he wants to rob later. There may be a bank manager who strolls up and starts annoyingly asking him if he wants to open an account at the bank. The manager doesn’t know this guy is casing the joint, yet he’s still in the way of our bank robber achieving his goal.
By the way, note how each situation changes the dialogue. In the first, the conversation is straightforward. The married couple is *literally* debating whether he should get to hang out with his friends. The conflict in the second conversation, meanwhile, is happening below the surface. Neither character is talking about what the protagonist actually wants to do, which means much of the focus of the scene is being conveyed through subtext.
But anyway, that’s not what today’s article is about.
Today’s article is about understanding how to amp up any scene with basic scene structure (a person who wants something and a person who stands in the way). Getting back to our original analogy, I want you to imagine this giant mixing board. On that board are these KNOBS. You can dial these knobs up a little, a medium amount, or a lot, depending on how much you want to juice up the scene.
These four knobs are…
Stakes
Resistance
Urgency
Emotion
The number one way to amp up a scene is, without question, stakes. The more that’s on the line in the scene, the more compelling the scene is going to be. It’s simple math.
Let’s say we have a character who’s going to steal something. Remember that Netflix movie, Emily the Criminal? Let’s say Emily has to steal a random guy’s wallet for her new boss. We have our goal (steal the wallet) and we have our stakes (she’s doing something illegal, which is dangerous, and the mark could potentially catch her in the act, creating a problematic situation).
But let’s say we get on our Screenplay Soundboard and dial up the stakes knob. Instead of having her try and steal a guy’s wallet, she tries to steal… A CAR. Now we’ve got some REAL consequences. Grand theft auto is no joke. And guess what? That’s the scene they went with in the movie and it ended up being the best scene. Coincidence? I don’t think so. That’s the power of dialing up the stakes knob.
Next, let’s look at resistance. Resistance is simply upping the knob that has the opposing character in the scene getting in the way of our hero achieving his goal. The more you turn this knob up, the more intense the interaction gets, which creates more conflict.
Let me use one of my favorite scenes ever as an example – Jerry Lundegaard meeting with the two criminals he’s hiring to kidnap his wife in the film, Fargo. Just like any scene, there was a way to write this scene with the resistance knob turned down. You could’ve made the kidnappers annoyed, but eager to get their money and, therefore, cooperative.
But that’s not the route the Coen brothers went. Instead, they turned up that resistance knob to 11, making the two kidnappers highly resistant to help Jerry. Carl is determined to get Jerry to admit he fucked up about the meeting time, leaving them sitting there around for an hour, and Psycho Gaear intermittently stares at Jerry like he’s going to kill him. This creates all sorts of conflict and makes Jerry’s goal much more challenging.
Again, a lesser writer would’ve made the two kidnappers annoying, but ultimately agreeable, so he could get what he wanted out of the scene and move on to the next one. The good screenwriter ups that resistance knob and makes it very uncertain whether Jerry is going to achieve his goal or not.
Moving on, let’s check out the urgency knob. The urgency knob is effective but, if we’re being honest, it’s the most simplistic of the four knobs. By upping this knob, you condense the amount of time that the protagonist has to achieve his goal in the scene.
So, let’s say you have a scene where a wife has a last minute change of plans and needs her husband to take their kid to school tomorrow. So they’re getting ready for bed, the wife puts forth the problem and what she needs from the husband, but he’s got his own big day tomorrow so he’s resistant.
Could you get a good scene out of this scenario? Sure, an okay one. You’ve got a character who wants something. You’ve got a character who’s resistant, which is going to create conflict. The stakes are pretty low, though, and there isn’t an obvious way to dial that knob up. So what can you do? Well, that’s when you bring in the urgency knob.
Instead of setting the scene at night, before they go to bed, where the two have all the time in the world, rewrite the variables so the wife finds out about the problem 5 minutes before she leaves for work. In other words, set the scene in the morning, with 5 minutes before everybody has to leave, and now the URGENCY of the situation is going to dial up the intensity of the scene considerably.
Lastly, we have the emotional knob. Now, the emotional knob is the hardest knob to play with. It’s way way up there in the far corner for a reason. Because unless you know what you’re doing, it can hurt you just as much as it can help you.
The way that you use the emotional knob is to move away from the logistics of the scene (goal, resistance, stakes, urgency) and go internal. Ask yourself what’s going on INSIDE the characters that could up the intensity of the scene.
There was this old teen comedy from the late 90s called Can’t Hardly Wait. It followed a bunch of characters throughout the night at a giant house party. One of the main subplots had these two characters, Denise and Kenny, both of whom were looking forward to the party for their own reasons, get stuck in the bathroom together all night.
Now, the directive for this subplot was, obviously, having these two characters fall for each other over the course of the movie. But let’s say you’re writing that story (or just a scene from that story), and the scene is dull. Whenever you go back to them, there’s something lacking. Stakes aren’t really relevant here. Urgency is a non-factor cause you want them here the whole movie. And resistance isn’t really relevant either cause neither character has the active goal (they’re both stuck in the same situation – neither of them wanting to be here).
Well, this is where you want to reach up as far as you can to the right side of the board and play with the emotional knob. Which is exactly what the writers do. They create this backstory with the characters where they used to be really great friends in middle school and then, when they reached high school, the guy moved on and got a whole new group of friends, leaving the girl behind.
Note how turning up this dial ups the conflict considerably. Now there’s this unspoken thing that one of the characters did to the other lingering under everything that they say. Now we’ve got a storyline we can keep coming back to, one that consistently gives us strong scenes.
And there you go. This is how you use your Scene Soundboard to dial up the intensity of scenes. And remember, like I said, you control the degree to which you turn up the knob. You can dial any of these knobs up a little or, depending on how intensely you want the scene to play out, a lot.
Believe it or not, you don’t always want to dial a scene up to 100. If every scene were 100, then no scene would stand out. But what you don’t want to do is write scenes where all the knobs are set to 0. And I see that far too often. As in, when I read an amateur script, 75% of the scenes are set to 0 on all four knobs. That’s unacceptable.
But that’s often because the writer doesn’t know about these knobs or how much power they have to create great scenes with them. Now you know. So, I give you permission to unleash these powers on the scenes you write for the showdown and the scenes you write for all your scripts going forward!
