Its trailer has made clapping the new “I see dead people.” But is the screenplay just a catch phrase and a few scares? Or does it offer more?

Genre: Horror
Premise: Based on a true story, a family moves into a farmhouse, only to realize that it’s haunted by a demon.
About: This is Saw (and Insidious) director James Wan’s new film. It’s apparently been getting great reviews from preview audiences, prompting the studio to move it up from a fall to a summer slot. It is loosely based on the exploits of renowned demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. Screenwriters Chad and Carey Hayes have written the remake of House Of Wax, The Reaping, and Whiteout. Before that they worked in TV for more than a decade, specializing on TV movies.
Writers: Chad and Carey Hayes
Details: 106 pages (Nov. 8, 2011 draft)

What is it about families moving into houses that’s led to so many horror movies? In the past couple of months, I’ve seen Sinister and Dark Skies and Mama, all movies about families living in (or moving into) houses where bad shit starts happening. You’d think that we’d get bored of it at some point. But for whatever reason, an undead entity violating the place where we’re supposed to feel safest gets us every time.

And therein lies the problem for us writers. Since this kind of story has been written about ad nausea, how in the world do you make it fresh? What can you possibly do to make it original? Which is why when I picked up The Conjuring, I was (ironically) skeptical. Even if the previews are getting everyone excited. Even if the studio thinks they have something special. How do you make a story like this different? I wanted to believe. But could The Conjuring make me?

Conjuring conjures up real-life “Demonologists” Ed and Lorraine Warren. These guys were the Lebron James of paranormal investigation back in the 70s. If you were like, “Yo Karen, I just saw a ghost in my closet.” It’s very likely the response would be, “Guess we better call the Warrens!” But the Warrens are getting tired of what they do. They’ve checked out thousands of these “hauntings” and they typically turn out to be someone stepping on a loose floor board while snacking on Fro Yo in the middle of the night. They want to start spending more time with their daughter, so they plan on exiting the paranormal business.

That is until they hear about the Perrons. The Perrons (Roger, Carolyn, and FIVE daughters), besides not being active participants of birth control, aren’t too happy with the new house they’ve purchased. One of their daughters is getting pulled by her feet while she sleeps. Another has an imaginary friend named ‘Rory.’ Another sees a creepy looking chick sitting on top of the armoire all the time. Oh, and when they play “Hide and Clap,” a game that’s not nearly as disgusting as it sounds, the spirits in the house end up playing too. That’s what really pisses them off. Haunting is fine. But when you start participating in games uninvited, that’s when we draw the line!!

So they bring the Warrens in (who strangely forget all that talk about retiring), who immediately agree there’s some bad shit going on in the house. But in order to get the house “officially” exorcised, they’re going to need approval from the Vatican. And the Vatican doesn’t do that shit unless you’ve got proof. Now they didn’t have fancy-schmancy video cameras back then, so they set up a bunch of bells on doors and still cameras.

What they learn is not good. They find out that the first owner of the house was a woman who was a witch condemned in the Salem Witch trials. But she was, like, a real one! She killed her child, saying the Devil wanted her to do it or something. This is why the spirit in the house is so powerful. She’s a damn witch! The Warrens, who once again, are used to dealing with loud plumbing as the source of people’s haunting, aren’t really prepared to deal with this, and soon find themselves, along with the Perrons, fighting for their lives.

Like I said, you need to come at the haunted house genre with something different or else it’s really hard to stand out in the spec market (and the movie market). The Hayes do so by focusing not on the haunted family, but the paranormal investigators tasked with solving the haunting. This approach had mixed results.

It’s definitely “different” to focus on the investigator side, but I thought what made a situation scary was characters being confronted with something they couldn’t understand and didn’t know how to deal with. Once the Warrens walk in, they calmly listen to all the problems and nonchalantly reply, “Oh yeah, that. That’s blah blah blah. It happens all the time.” I just got this feeling of safeness when they appeared and was no longer scared. And isn’t the point of a scary movie to be scared?

If you’re going to go that route, don’t you want your investigators to quickly learn they’re in way over their head so that once again, you have the classic scenario, “characters being confronted with something they can’t understand and don’t know how to deal with it?” That DOES end up happening, but not until the very end.

Luckily, the script has a few really good scares. I don’t want to spoil them but let’s just say that you’ll never pull at a rope to see what’s at the end of it ever again after this film. And there’s a scene towards the end here that gives Chucky a run for his money.

Another thing that caught my attention were the kids. Presumably they based enough of this on a true story that they had to include all five girls. FIVE GIRLS. I found this interesting because writing five kids into any movie is a nightmare for a screenwriter. You not only have to keep track of where they are all the time (even during mundane moments) but how the hell are you going to build five girls, ages 8-18, and make all of them unique and interesting and memorable? You can’t. Which is why none of the girls here are memorable outside of their own unique haunting experience. It’s why you typically only see one or two kids in a story like this. Much easier to manage and build the character(s). Having said that, the five kids contributed to The Conjuring feeling slightly more unique than other haunted house flicks.

Structurally, the script was a mixed bag. The Hayes don’t seem to agree with Scriptshadow’s philosophy of adding urgency. There are lots of cuts of “1 month later” and “2 months later” that happen here, which unfortunately give the impression that the family isn’t in that much danger. If you can just wait two months for the Vatican’s permission to get an exorcism, then things can’t be THAT BAD, can they?

With that said, it’s okay to create a slow build in a haunted house flick, as long as the urgency jumps up for the final act. (spoiler) In this case, Carolyn gets possessed, and the fear is that she’ll murder her children. Obviously, at that point, characters have to act immediately. Still, they didn’t make this plot point as convincing as it could’ve been. So the ending didn’t have the punch that it could’ve had.

But when you put everything together, this script is better than the average horror script on the market. It has just enough originality to separate it from the competition, and the execution in most areas is strong. And it IS scary. You can see a lot of these scenes playing well in the theater, especially when things get ramped up in the third act. One final criticism though. I didn’t like the title card at the end that said, “The Warrens would become famous with their next case, the Amityville home.” That made me feel like I just watched the “second rate” version of their investigations. It’s cool to find out these two are more familiar to us than we know, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.

[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: If you don’t have some new scares, don’t bother writing a horror script. If all you’ve got is someone at the edge of the bed, an imaginary friend for the young child, or your character seeing someone in the mirror behind them, don’t bother. I was surprised then, that all of these things were present here. Luckily, there were some impressive original scares to help us forget them. But if I were you, I’d challenge yourself on every single scare. Ask if you can do something differently, something new, something better. Push yourself dammit. Not enough writers push themselves anymore.

Would it be blasphemous to admit that I don’t hold Jaws in the same high regard as the majority of the cinema-going public? That’s not to say I don’t like it. I actually enjoy the movie whenever I watch it. I just don’t think it’s AMAAAA-ZING. When you break it down, it’s actually a strange little screenplay. The goal here is to get rid of the shark. However, we have to wait for the final third of the film for the characters to physically go after that goal. I’m not sure we’d be able to wait that long in today’s market. As a result, a lot of the film takes place back in the town, where our police chief (Martin Brody) goes toe to toe with the Mayor on whether to close down the beach or not due to the attacks. While the characters ARE actively trying to solve the problem, they’re basically relegated to waiting for the next shark attack to happen. – The script itself has about as “Hollywood” a path as they come. Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel, was brought on to write the screenplay. Spielberg didn’t love his draft and hired numerous writers to punch it up, basically changing everything that comes before the final shark hunt. He also brought in comedy writers to make it funnier. Even Robert Shaw, who played Quint, rewrote a lot of dialogue. In the end, Carl Gottlieb got the “official” nod, punching up scenes daily on the set throughout the shoot. – The draft I’m reading is the “final” shooting draft, credited to Peter Benchley. Although much of it is what you see in the film, there are some differences here and there, which I may decide to include in the lessons.

1) Bonus points if your character’s fear is the opposite of his goal – Whatever your character’s goal is, make his fear the opposite of that. Here, Brody’s goal is to kill the shark. Therefore, his fear is that he’s afraid of water. It’s a simple yet effective way to create conflict within your hero’s pursuit.

2) I’ve never seen a perfect marriage in a movie – Marriages are wrought with issues. Something’s always pulling on them, creating a problem that needs to be resolved. These problems usually fester underneath the relationship, un-talked about, creating subtext throughout the characters’ conversations. Here, Brody’s wife wants to leave this town. She wants a better life for them in a nicer place. But he wants to stay. And that grinds on their marriage. Always try and add some sort of issue to your hero’s marriage.

3) Use suspense to drive your story – As you know, I prefer a character goal to drive a story. Get the hero out there and after an objective and he’ll take the story with him. While it means a slower story, you can use suspense to drive your story as well. One way to do this is to link together a series of looming disasters. That’s essentially what drives the first 2 acts of Jaws. True, our characters are trying to find the shark and stop it, but what we’re really waiting for is that next shark kill.

4) Conflict is good. Forced conflict is bad. – Conflict is good, WHEN IT’S NATURAL. Audiences can feel when you’re trying too hard though – when you’re pushing some artificial conflict in there to juice up the story. In the book, Benchley had Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) have an affair with Brody’s wife. Everyone felt that would be too much and nixed it for the screenplay. Good choice. It would have detracted from the story instead of added to it. Any conflict that you add should feel organic and natural. If it feels like you’re adding conflict just to add conflict, you probably shouldn’t do it.

5) URGENCY ALERT – It’s a SIN not to include urgency in a blockbuster (popcorn) film. So in Jaws, our ticking time bomb is the 4th of July weekend. That’s the biggest weekend of the year, the weekend all the tourists show up. And it’s coming soon! Therefore, the film’s urgency comes from Brody needing to find and kill the shark before that weekend (even though he eventually fails to do so).

6) Where’s your Quint? – The more scripts I read, the more I realize that the best scripts have one extremely memorable character. Someone who stands out because he acts different, talks different, does his own thing – a character who sort lives in his own world as opposed to the one you’ve created. A character like Quint, or Hannibal, or Han Solo, or Lloyd Dobler, or Clementine, or Rod Tidwell or Jack Sparrow or Alonzo Harris. This character is almost always a secondary character. Find him and put everything you have into making him as unique as possible.

7) Prevent your hero’s task (goal) from being easy – A common mistake new writers make is allowing their heroes to do what they want unimpeded. As a writer, your job is to do the opposite. Look for ways to make your hero’s job tougher. So here, Brody learns that there’s a shark attack. Okay, simple solution. Close down the beach. The bad writer allows this to happen. The good writer introduces the mayor character, who tells our hero, “You can’t do that. That beach is our income.” Now our hero’s job becomes tougher. He can’t just close down the beach. He has to find and kill a shark.

8) “DON’T GO IN THERE!” – Again, dramatic irony is when we know something the characters do not. Any time you can create a scenario where the audience wants to get up and scream, “No, don’t go there!” Or “Get out of there!” or “Don’t do that!” to warn the characters, you’ve essentially created a great dramatic irony situation. The reason Jaws is inherently dramatic is because it’s driven by dramatic irony. We know the shark is coming to kill these unsuspecting beachgoers, but they have no idea.

9) Always place your problem at the worst possible time it could be – These shark attacks aren’t happening at the tail end of summer with a few scraggly beach-goers getting a last-second tan. It’s happening at THE BUSIEST TIME OF THE YEAR, making it the worst time this problem could’ve happened.

10) If a character is going to tell a story, it better be one hell of a story – Movies are about characters DOING THINGS. They’re not about characters TALKING ABOUT DOING THINGS. Therefore, don’t have your characters tell stories. I see so many amateur writers have characters tell stories that are so boring I want to cut my eyes out. So if you dare to bring your screenplay to a grinding halt while a character tells a story, it better be the best f&*%ing story in the universe! Quint’s famous monologue here about sitting in shark infested waters for 110 hours while everyone around him was eaten by sharks worked because it was a damn good story. Please don’t bother having your character tell their own story unless it’s as good as this one.

These are 10 tips from the movie “Jaws.” To get 500 more tips from movies as varied as “Aliens,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Hangover,” check out my book, Scriptshadow Secrets, on Amazon!

How to screw up a Hollywood film and an indie film all in one weekend.

Genre: Fantasy/Adventure
Premise: (from IMDB) The ancient war between humans and a race of giants is reignited when Jack, a young farmhand fighting for a kingdom and the love of a princess, opens a gateway between the two worlds.
About Giant Slayer: This film was directed by Bryan Singer, trying to get out of director jail after Superman Returns and Valkyrie. It was written by an interesting trio. Christopher MacQuarrie, who of course has been a big part of Singer’s career since The Usual Suspects. Dan Studney, a TV writer (he wrote the TV series version of Weird Science) who’s big feature credit is “Reefer Madness,” the musical. And finally Darren Lemke, who wrote Shrek: Forever After, which I believe is the fourth film in the series, though I called Dreamworks for confirmation on this and even they weren’t sure. While I can’t give you a timeline of every writer’s participation, my guess is that Lemke wrote the initial draft, Studney wrote another draft, and then when Singer was brought on as director, he used his go-to writer, McQuarrie, to get the script where he wanted it. The film came out this weekend and grossed an underwhelming 26 million dollars, a disastrous take for a product that cost 200 million to make.
About Stoker: Stoker was a hot script from 2011 that got everyone in town riled up. Imagine their surprise when it was revealed to be written by Wentworth Miller, the doofy lead actor in the 3 seasons too long Fox thriller, “Prison Break.” He’d written the script under a pseudonym so as not to be discriminated against (Oh, another actor who thinks he can write, eh!). It paid off as the script sold for mid six-figures. And if that wasn’t enough, legendary Korean director Chan-wook Park decided to make Stoker his first American film! Park is responsible for such classics as, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Oldboy.” The film stars Matthew Goode (Watchmen), Mia Wasikowska (Alice In Wonderland) and Nicole Kidman (Celebrities Addicted To Plastic Surgery).
Writers (Giant): Darren Lemke, Dan Studney and Christopher McQuarrie.
Details (Giant): 114 minutes long

What do you get when you couple Jack The Giant Slayer with Stoker?

A lot of disappointment.

However, that disappointment may not be distributed in the way you’d think it would be. We have some high quality craftsman working on both projects here (Singer and McQuarrie on one, Park on the other), yet you’d assume that the bedroom swallowing sinkhole would reside with the picture celebrating CGI giants. Not so fast. Stoker was easily the worst film I’ve seen all year. And “Giant Slayer” was kinda okay (even if Miss Scriptshadow called it “a flat piece of trash” – hey, what do girls know about giants, right?).

“Giant Slayer” follows our plucky peasant hero, Jack, sticking up for a young bullied woman (who turns out to be – SURPRISE! – the princess). He then gets swindled into trading some beans for his horse at the market, and comes home to get yelled at by some angry old dude with really bad teeth (his great uncle maybe?).

Later that night, the princess comes by to thank him, and one of those beans falls through the floor, landing in dirt. A storm follows and the roid bean sprouts. Like REALLY sprouts. The resulting gigantor plant shoots up into the air, taking the house, AND THE PRINCESS, with it! The king shows up the next day, wanting Jack to tell him where his daughter is, seemingly blind to the fact that there’s a thousand-feet in diameter bean-stalk behind them. Jack tells him the princess is up there with it, so the king sends his best climbers, and Jack, to go get her.

They make it to the top, where they discover a secret land in the sky that is home to giants. Not only do the giants capture our pint-sized crew, but learn that the bean stalk they came on heads down to Human-Land. Since everyone knows giants love the taste of humans, they decide to head down there to satiate a serious case of the human-munchies. The only problem is that Jack is one crafty little individual. And once he falls in love with the princess, he’ll do anything to save her, even if that means taking down giants, mother*&%er.

It’s funny. Last Thursday I was going to do an article about “writing the blockbuster.” Blockbusters are unique beasts. You approach them slightly differently from “traditional” scripts. Set-pieces become a huge part of your approach, so that was going to be a big part of the article.

But sadly, this blockbuster made the same mistake at script level as pretty much every other blockbuster I read. The setup is the best part. And then it falls off a cliff (no pun intended) becoming a mediocre, occasionally amusing piece of fluff. I’m not going to lie, I was excited to get to the giants. From what I’d seen in the previews, they looked amazing. That anticipation made the first act suspenseful, even if it amounted to your basic setup scenario of peasant-can’t-be-with-princess-cause-he’s-a-peasant.

However, once we get to Giant-Land, it becomes Boring Central. Remember, since the second act no longer has the advantage of anticipation (you’ve basically shown your cards, a.k.a. the Giants), the reader/audience must love the characters in order to stay interested. None of the characters here were lame. But none of them stood out either. If I was giving grades, almost every one of them would’ve received a “C.” They were all average.

This is a deadly combination when writing a screenplay. It’s the equivalent of a pilot losing access to his hydraulics as he comes in for a landing. A second act has WAY MORE slow moments than a first act does. So for those moments to be entertaining, you need interesting characters engaging in strong conflict. We had the conflict part (there was a bad guy wreaking havoc within the human team. Jack couldn’t have the princess because of the class difference) but BECAUSE THE CHARACTERS WERE SO AVERAGE we just didn’t care.

What nearly saved this movie was the ending. It was high caliber action set-pieces at their best. When the giants come down to our world and start hurling trees and windmills at our puny little counterparts, I was in awe. The giants looked great and the battle was inspired. The problem was, as I already mentioned, there was no one worth rooting for. Nobody stood out. Even the always good Stanley Tucci plays a boring villain. This simply isn’t worth your time unless you have a 12 year old son. Oh well.

BUT!

But. If someone’s put a gun to your head and told you you HAD to either watch Stoker or Giant Slayer, for the love of all that is holy, go see Giant Slayer. Stoker is abysmal. It’s terrible. It’s got an interesting backstory, a great director, but it’s just terrible. It’s the very definition of style over substance, which is what you’d assume I’d say about Giant Slayer. But here we obviously have a director who’s more interested in visual tricks and award-winning cinematography than, well, AN ACTUAL STORY!

That’s assuming there was a story. I haven’t read the script. I know Roger reviewed it a long time ago, but I skipped the synopsis due to spoilers. I mean, nobody in this movie utters a line that someone would say in real life. Everyone acts like they know they’re in a movie and therefore must say something poignant or eerie. That is when they DO talk. Because 95% of this movie is dedicated to Matthew Goode staring at people! I swear to you. That’s almost the entire movie. Someone says something, then cut to Matthew Goode staring at them in a really eeire way for 5 minutes.

What’s it about? The short answer is nothing. The long answer is… Disturbingly reclusive India has just lost her father, who’s mysteriously died in a car accident. So his brother, an uncle India never knew she had, shows up to offer the family support. He takes a particular interest in India, whom he tells, “I just want to be your friend.” Except there’s nothing friendly about his rape-stares, which would make even a Catholic priest uncomfortable.

People close to the family, like the grandma and an aunt, start dying mysteriously, and eventually India learns that her dear uncle is a crazy serial killer. Except India isn’t put off by this. She’s turned on by it! Like SERIOUSLY turned on. And she wants in. Complicating matters is her alcoholic mother, who makes daily shameless advances at her dead husband’s brother. When India sees this, she gets jealous, and we get a mother-daughter cat fight. Rreow!

KILL ME IF I EVER HAVE TO SEE THIS MOVIE AGAIN.

It was so bad. There was no plot, nothing driving the story forward besides the mystery uncle, which got boring after 10 minutes. That didn’t stop Miller and Park from stretching that mystery out for another 40 minutes though. But the real problem here was that nothing felt connected. Each scene felt like Park experimenting (a 5 minute trip down to the basement for ice cream becomes a celebration of dancing lights), and once he was done, he’d go on to the next experiment, regardless of whether those two scenes fit together. There’s a moment around the midpoint, for example, where India is at school. Since when did India attend school??? Nothing from the first 50 minutes indicated that India was in school at the time. That was a microcosm of the entire movie. No progression of story. No point to the story. Random shit popping up out of nowhere. Weird scenes completely dependent on mood and lighting.

Stoker is a mess of the highest order. At best it’s a master filmmaker making his dream student film. At worst it’s a distracted director trying to make sense of a pointless script. I would strongly recommend avoiding this film. It’s awful.

JACK THE GIANT SLAYER
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

STOKER
[x] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: (from “Giant Slayer”) Remember this. DO SOMETHING UNIQUE WITH YOUR CHARACTERS. Make them stand out in some way. Give them something we haven’t seen before in from movie characters. Or else they will be generic. And no matter how awesome your plot is, we won’t care because your characters are boring. Anticipation and story build-up might help us ignore this during the first act, but once the second act comes around – the act that depends on your characters – your story will die a quick death.

What I learned 2: (from “Stoker”). Make sure there’s a well-thought-out and compelling plot to your story. Your characters might be interesting as hell. But if we don’t know what the hell’s going on half the time or understand what their goals or motivations are, we’ll quickly get bored and check out on you.

Welcome to another round of Amateur Offerings Weekend, everyone!

This is your chance to discuss the week’s amateur scripts, offered originally in the Scriptshadow newsletter. The primary goal for this discussion is to find out which script(s) is the best candidate for a future Amateur Friday review. The secondary goal is to keep things positive in the comments with constructive criticism!

Below are the scripts up for review, along with the download links. Want to receive the scripts early? Head over to the Contact page, e-mail us, and “Opt In” to the newsletter.

Happy reading!

TITLE: The Last Bash
GENRE: Comedy
LOGLINE: Disenchanted husbands, unsatisfied with their married lives, make up a fiancée for their last remaining, single friend in order to throw the ultimate bachelor party, but the scheme goes awry when they’re forced to battle their reluctant pal and satisfy their suspicious wives who insist on meeting her.

TITLE: NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
GENRE: Action/Thriller
LOGLINE: When a corrupt narcotics detective wakes up strapped to a polygraph-triggered bomb, he must navigate the web of his own deceit for one day, without telling a lie.

TITLE: Hardcore 84
GENRE: Coming of Age/Drama
LOGLINE: In 1984 Los Angeles, teenage punk rockers come of age in an era when music and style were more than a trend, but a way of life. When Trench falls for London, a skinhead from Orange County, his attempts at romance fall short, sending him into a vicious circle of self-destruction.

TITLE: Song Bird
GENRE : Contained Thriller
LOGLINE: An agoraphobic woman begins to suspect her apartment neighbor is a killer.

TITLE: Social Media Ruined My Life (SMRML)
GENRE: High School Comedy
LOGLINE: A High School loser makes up an online girlfriend in order to
get revenge on his social media obsessed school.

They are as elusive as Adele snacking on carrots. And yet, they’re probably the most important part of your script. As you all know, a bad ending cancels out a good movie. And a bad movie can actually be saved by a good ending. That’s because the ending is the last thing the reader (or audience) leaves with. It’s the feeling they will take with them when talking to friends, when talking to co-workers, when going online. If you write a great ending, people will tell other people about your movie, and word-of-mouth will turn your film into a box office star. I still remember when The Sixth Sense came out. The ending of that film was so strong, the movie had virtually ZERO fall-off from week to week at the box office, which is basically unheard of for a wide-release.

So what’s the secret to these stress-inducing third act monsters? Gosh, I wish I knew. Then I could write an article about it and we could all become millionaires. While I may not have all the answers, I’ve got a pretty solid understanding of what makes an ending stick. And while it’s more difficult than following an IKEA instruction booklet, it isn’t as complex as one might think.

Basically, great endings can be broken down into two categories.

1) Something unexpected happens.
2) Our protagonist (or one of the other main characters) overcomes his flaw.

If you go back through your favorite endings, you will inevitably see the incorporation of one of these two techniques. The Sixth Sense – we find out that our hero is dead (unexpected). Star Wars – while trying to destroy the Death Star, Luke learns to believe in himself as Han learns to be selfless (overcoming flaws). The Shawshank Redemption – Our protagonist breaks out of prison (unexpected). In When Harry Met Sally, Harry realizes that the love of one woman is more rewarding than being with many women (overcoming flaw). In Silence Of The Lambs, Hannibal escapes (unexpected).

Now if you’re ambitious, you can try to do both of these things and get a real killer ending. Back To The Future has George McFly learning to stand up for himself (overcoming flaw) as well as Doc dying…then coming back to life (unexpected). That one-two punch of an emotional catharsis stacked on top of a “Holy shit!” surprise leaves us feeling about as charged as a human being can feel leaving a movie theater.

However, those are just the broad strokes. When you get into the nitty gritty, there’s a lot more you have to plan for. First and foremost, you want to know your ending before you start writing your script. Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3, Star Wars VII) says he never writes a script without knowing his ending beforehand and I agree that that’s the way to go. The reason for this is that everything in your script should be pushing us towards our ending. And you can’t write that way if you don’t know what your ending is. Essentially, an ending is a series of payoffs for everything that’s come before it. So we need to know how it all concludes before we can set the stage for that moment.

In addition to this, you must understand the structure of the third act, as it is basically the container for your climax. In most scripts, your character is at his lowest point going into the third act. Whatever he’s been trying to do (his goal), he’s failed spectacularly at it. In other words, everything he’s been chasing has ended in disaster. So in Apollo 13, they’re stuck in this tiny capsule with barely any oxygen and all their controls destroyed. It’s as low as it can get. In that sense, you should look at the third act as a rebirth. It’s an opportunity for your character to regroup from his “lowest point” and give it one last shot.

As you may have expected, it’s also important that you have a strong character goal driving your story. And you’d like for that goal to be stated in the first act. In Indiana Jones, we establish in the first act that the goal is to get the Ark. In The King’s Speech, we establish in the first act that the goal for Birdy is to overcome his stutter so he can speak to his nation. Once you establish a strong character goal, an audience will be interested in seeing if your character can achieve that goal. But the real power in this is that a strong goal maps out your ending for you. That’s because the ending is the conclusion to the question: Does he achieve his goal or not? This is extremely important to understand. Strong character goals lead to the best endings.

Whenever you don’t have a clear goal driving your story, you won’t know what to do with your third act. That’s because nobody’s going after anything. And if nobody’s going after anything, it isn’t clear how the journey is supposed to resolve. Miss Scriptshadow and I rented “Liberal Arts” the other night and it was the perfect example of this. There was no goal in the movie. It was just characters talking to each other. So the writer, Josh Radnor, had no idea what to do with the ending. As a result, it just kind of petered out. That’s not the case with ALL goal-less scripts. When Harry Met Sally is a notable exception. But typically, without that clear goal, you’re not going to have a clue what to do with your climax.

Another important reason to incorporate a goal is that it allows you to place obstacles in front of it. These obstacles make the ending more interesting because they put our hero’s success in doubt. For example, in The Karate Kid, Daniel’s goal is to win the tournament. In the semi-finals, one of the Cobra contestants takes out his leg. This way, in the finals, he must fight on only one leg! That’s an obstacle! You’ll want to throw a few big whopper obstacles at your characters during the climax. The more you can put our hero’s success in doubt, the more entertaining the ending will be.

In addition to this, you’ll want to build an ending that specifically challenges your hero’s flaw. So if your hero’s flaw is that he’s a coward, build an ending where he’s challenged by a bully. If your hero’s flaw is that he’s selfish, build an ending where he can either save himself or save others. This is really important. If your ending doesn’t in some way challenge your hero’s fatal flaw, it will feel random. And if you don’t have a fatal flaw for your hero in the first place, your ending will feel empty. This of course requires that you know how to give your main character a flaw in the first place. There’s not enough room to go into that here, but I’m sure somebody will explain how to do it in the comments section if asked.

From there, as stated earlier, you’d like to come up with that one final unexpected surprise in your climax. This is something I can’t teach you. It’ll come down to you making a unique and interesting choice that the audience didn’t see coming. It doesn’t have to be a twist ending like The Sixth Sense. But SOMETHING unexpected should happen. The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters wasn’t a twist ending. But it was definitely unexpected and fun. Your ending should never be exactly what your audience expects. Even if they know your hero will win in the end, you should add something unique that makes getting to that point a surprise.

So let’s summarize the keys to writing a great ending.

1) Know your ending before you start.
2) Understand where your character’s at at the beginning of the third act (he should be at his lowest point).
3) Write a strong character goal into your central plot.
4) Introduce tons of obstacles into the climax.
5) Make sure your character has a fatal flaw.
6) Build in an ending that specifically challenges that fatal flaw.
7) Add something into the climax that the audience isn’t expecting.

There you have it. Now go write your kick-ass ending!

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