I don’t know about you. But one of the most frustrating things FOR ME coming up as a writer, eager to figure out this whole screenwriting thing, was understanding what agents and executives meant when they’d tell me my characters weren’t “three-dimensional.”

Some of the many ways I’d hear the criticism was that my characters were “flat,” or “uninspired,” or “bland,” or “forgettable.” But it would often come back to that common phrase, “They weren’t three-dimensional.”

So, when I got this criticism, I did what any determined aspiring screenwriter would do. I did an internet search for three-dimensional characters! What I got back was not good. In fact, if I could give any criticism to these results, it would be that they weren’t three-dimensional enough.

As the years passed, I would get little pieces here and there about what created “depth” in a character. But I never got anything concrete – something I could incorporate into my characters *right now.*

Once I started reading screenplays, though, that changed. When you encounter 20,000 characters a year, you begin to see patterns in the ones that are good whether you want to or not.

Over time, I piecemealed together a vague method for creating characters with depth. But just like anything in screenwriting, you focus on it for a while, then you get distracted by something else (“Ooh, different ways to create conflict in scenes!”). You become obsessed with that other thing. You sort of forget the things you figured out with character depth and don’t recover the information again until months later watching some late night movie on Netflix.

This happened to me recently when I went to Alien: Romulus. I liked what they were doing with the characters in the first act so, like any good screenwriting analyst, I paid attention to WHY I felt that way. I wanted to know the specific reasons why the characters were working for me.

It was in this analysis that I had one of those “ah-ha” moments in screenwriting.

In a heartbeat, I knew EXACTLY what was required to write a three-dimensional character. And I’m going to share it with you now.

But before I can explain the ah-ha moment, I must first explain how to write a two-dimensional character. A two-dimensional character consists of… you guessed it… two dimensions. One, what they say. And two, what they do. As long as you have a character saying and doing things, you’ve created a two-dimensional character.

You can actually go far with this. I might argue that, if you do this well, you could add another half-dimension (giving you 2 and a HALF dimensions). That’s because what a character DOES has a major influence on the reader.

Think about Civil War. The very act of those photographers traveling deep into war-torn America to do their job tells you something about them. That they’re strong. That they’re brave. Those are things that factor into how we judge a character’s depth. That’s why they say screenwriting is a show-don’t-tell medium. The most effective way to have us connect with the characters and root for the characters is through action.

Okay, that’s all well and good, Carson. But what about that elusive THIRD dimension? How do we get there?

What Alien Romulus taught me was that the secret to the third dimension is everything YOU CANNOT SEE about your character. It is…

THE PAST
THE FUTURE
THE WITHIN

With Rain, the two biggest things about her are her past (she lost her father) and the future (she’s desperate to get to a planet that has sunlight). Unfortunately, the character didn’t have much going on within, which is why she fell short of becoming a truly memorable character. But that’s, ironically, what completed the lesson for me. Cause I asked myself, “She’s got a past that makes me care. She’s got a future goal that makes me care. Why am I not head over heels about this character, like I was Ripley?” The reason was, she had a weak “within.” No real flaw.

So, let’s look at these three things we “cannot see” more deeply.

THE PAST

We’ll start with the past. The tricky thing about the past is that it’s backstory. And most screenwriting professors will tell you that backstory doesn’t matter. All that matters is what the reader can see. And they can only see the present. So focus on that.

That’s true. But your character lived an entire life. To pretend like that doesn’t affect how your character is acting in your movie is ridiculous. If your character has been in an abusive relationship for the past five years, then got out of it, and now your movie starts, it would be foolish not to write that character in a way where that abuse doesn’t affect their personality and the way they deal with others.

The tricky part with the past is giving the reader the relevant details about that past without stopping the story.

Luke Skywalker, for example, doesn’t wait for a silence and then say, “Hey everyone, by the way, I used to be a pilot. Did you know that?” Instead, he’s in an argument with Han Solo about the price of smuggling them off the planet and, when pressed, he lets Han know, “Yeah, I’m not such a bad pilot myself.” Because that information is given in the heat of the moment, we don’t notice it. We don’t label it as: SCREENWRITER JUST PROVIDED BACKSTORY.

That “invisible” delivery method is essential when informing the reader about the past.

THE FUTURE

Let’s move on to the future. Because this is the part of the third dimension that gets the least love. And I think it’s super important. Basically, the future is what your character wants out of life beyond this movie. It could be as simple as wanting to buy a home on the beach of Zihuatanejo, Mexico. It could be finding the love of your life. It could be a three-picture deal at Paramount (do they still give those out?).

If you want to truly know someone, ask them what their big dream is. What do they want out of life more than anything? That answer will tell you SO MUCH about a person. It’s no different with your characters. Figure out what they want beyond this movie, drop that information somewhere in your script, and you’re a third of the way there to creating that third dimension.

THE WITHIN

The final piece of the puzzle is the WITHIN. I call it the “within” because it can either be a flaw or a conflict. But it must be something going on WITHIN your character. It’s something we cannot physically see.

I’ll give you a great place to study the WITHIN. Reality TV. What reality TV does now is focus heavily on character flaws. If you pop in an episode of 90 Day Fiance, which has five couples, so 10 characters total, every single time they cut to one of those storylines, the show will start hitting on each of those characters’ fatal flaws.

For example, one character has trust issues. No matter what happens, they can’t trust their partner. Another has control issues. They have to control everything. Another has jealousy issues. Another has anxiety stemming from trauma. Another is stubborn. Another is blindly optimistic. Another is codependent. Another has zero self-confidence. Every episode is about those characters battling those specific issues.

Screenplays are no different. You figure out what your character’s inner weakness is – the thing holding them back from being whole, from being happy – and you repeatedly put them in situations where that weakness is tested. If their weakness is that they’re stubborn, you put them in a bunch of situations where they have the opportunity to compromise.  And, since it’s a movie, they will fail that test every single time until the end.

And that’s pretty much it.

Make those first two dimensions as good as you can make them. Make sure the things they say are entertaining. And make sure they’re active as heck (they’re DOING things).

Then, with that third dimension, give us the relevant things about their past. Tell us what they desire most in their future. And finally, identify that thing within them that’s unsettled. Their flaw. Their inner conflict. Whatever you want to call it. Then test it over and over again.

If you do all those things well, you will have a three-dimensional character.

:)

Genre: Biopic/Sports
Premise: Set in the early 2000s, superstar Ivory Coast soccer player, Didier, joins his flailing home-country team again, but finds that they’re divided by the political civil war brewing within their nation.
About: A fresh and green writer pens one of the top ten Black List scripts.
Writer: Jackson Kellard
Details: 115 pages

This is the highest-ranked screenplay from last year’s Black List that I haven’t reviewed yet, with 24 votes.

But it is also… a biopic.

I’m reminded of a line from my favorite movie whenever I read biopics: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

Should we hold out any hope that the script will be good?

I hold out more hope that the Big Mac I order from McDonald’s later is going to be piping hot.

The one chance this script has is if it constructs an amazing character. An amazing character trumps all. It is the boundless beating heart of every great storytelling experience. Didier? I do not know ye yet. But please, I beg of you. Be great.

It’s 2002 and 27 year old Didier Drogba, an Ivory Coast native, had decided to leave his superstar French team to come back to his hometown and play for the Ivory Coast.

But while his return is celebrated, it is a complicated time in the nation. The north and the south hate each other. And guess what? The Ivory Coast team is made up of players from both the north and the south. Which is probably why they suck so bad.

But Didier’s arrival allows them to start winning games. After several wins in a row, the unthinkable starts to become thinkable: a birth in the World Cup. But, to do so, they’ll need to beat both Ghana and Cameroon, powerhouses in the region.

As those games approach, Didier makes a plea to the country to stop fighting and start uniting. That plea places Didier in the middle of a political firestorm. The current president, Gbagbo, notices and sees that he can use Didier as a pawn.

You see, Gbagbo’s presidency thrives on division. He rules through fear and inspires the north to hate the south. So, when the Ivory Coast gets to the final deciding game with Cameroon to make the World Cup, he tells Didier that he has to lose so that the country remains divided, placing our hero in an impossible situation.

With Scene Showdown coming up, I want to talk about scenes today.

The problem with scene-writing in 2024 dates back to the 1980s, with the introduction of video editing hardware, and then more severely, the 1990s, with the introduction of digital editing software.

Before the invention of these two things, film was being physically cut by an editor. The reason that’s important is because you didn’t have an unlimited number of options when you physically cut into film. You had to think about what you wanted to cut and, because you didn’t have time to make a million cuts, the shots and scenes were longer.

Once video and, especially, digital editing came around, you no longer needed to worry about this. You could make 1000 cuts in a 3 minute piece of video/film within 30 minutes.

What that ended up doing is leading to much shorter shots and scenes. At first, this was a good thing. If you watch some of those 1970s movies, there would be unnecessarily long shots of people getting out of cars and walking up stairs. The audience didn’t need those things so it made sense to cut them out.

But then directors and editors started going too far. It wasn’t just the unnecessary heads and tails of shots that were being cut. It was the whole beginnings of scenes. Or the whole endings of scenes. This led to writers believing they only had to write the middles of scenes. Which is why you get scenes like this…

What is this scene??

It’s just information about a character. There is no conflict. There is no drama. There is no building of tension or releasing of tension. There is no suspense. Where is the craft in this scene?? What are we, the reader, supposed to be entertained by?

I don’t blame the writer for this.

Honestly, I don’t.

I blame the last 30 years of storytelling for making writers believe this is a proper scene to include in a script.

To be fair, I get that you can use scene-fragments to build larger sequences that can have all the things I listed above (tension, conflict, drama, suspense). The problem is when you overdo that. Cause if every scene is just a fragment, I guarantee you you’re going to lose the reader at some point.

Why not write longer scenes that have their own entertainment value, and use those longer scenes to STILL build compelling sequences? Then you get the best of both worlds. We’re entertained DURING the scene and THROUGHOUT the sequence.

But I honestly don’t think writers know how to write scenes anymore. Any scene they write that’s good is by accident. They stumble upon it and realize, “Oh, yeah, this is pretty good. I like this scene.” Instead of planning the script so that nearly every scene reads like that.

And today’s script is where you need that consistent scene-writing ability more than usual. Cause readers are already coming in expecting to be bored. They’re reading some serious biopic about African politics. But you can win them over if you give us entertaining scene after entertaining scene.

This is why I’m doing the Scene Showdown. Not just so you write a full scene with a beginning, middle, and end. So that you realize, “Oh, I should just approach every scene like this.”

Yeah, I get it. Sometimes you have to write a scene fragment to bridge two scenes together. But let that be the exception as opposed to the rule.

All right, so, what about the rest of the script?

I’m not going to lie. I spent the first 75 pages of this script debating whether to jump head first into a volcano. It was just so serrrriuossss. I wanted to be entertained and, instead, I felt like I was doing homework.

But the script picks up in its last 40-45 pages because the stakes are so high. This game they’re playing against Cameroon is not only to get them into the World Cup for the first time ever, but President Gbagbo is threatening to destroy Didier’s life if he wins, because he believes a win will unite the country and, subsequently, eliminate his power.

That’s a great place to put your character – in an unwinnable situation. Cause we truly have no idea what he’s going to do. How rare is that in a sports movie where we don’t know what’s going to happen in the final game? It’s pretty darn rare.

Also, any script can be saved if you get the hero and villain right. If we’re rooting for that hero to succeed and rooting for that villain to go down, that can be enough to do the job. Even if your script is steeped in 50 tons of seriousness, that alone can make us care. I wouldn’t call Didier a perfect hero. But I was rooting for him. I was more rooting against Gbagbo. That guy I definitely wanted to see go down.

So that tipped the scales into a ‘worth the read’ here. But I would still be surprised if anyone who wasn’t an Ivory Coast history buff made it through the whole thing. It’s still a biopic so it’s never going to win over the casual movie fan.

To win over the casual movie fan, you need to be a WANT TO SEE movie, not a SHOULD SEE movie.

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

What I learned: Complex socio-political period stories NEED CONTEXT. You can’t just hope to teach the reader everything through exposition. You need a title card at the opening. Tell us what’s happening. Explain this world to us. I spent the first 40 pages only vaguely understanding the conflict between the North and the South. I didn’t even know, at first, that the Ivory Coast team was struggling with North-South division within it. All of that could’ve been easily remedied with a quick title card explaining the basics! How do I know this? Because I am willing to bet my life savings that when this movie comes out, the powers that be will make sure there’s a title card.

Genre: True Story/Comedy/Drama
Premise: Based on the true story of James Hogue, a talented student and long-distance runner who was admitted to Princeton University under the false identity of “Alexi Indris-Santana”–an orphaned, self-educated, teenage ranch hand.
About: James Hogue is a real person and, if you google him, he’s had a pretty adventurous life. The writer, Ryan Hoang Williams, wrote 11 episodes on the highly-rated show, “The Lincon Lawyer.”
Writer: Ryan Hoang Williams
Details: 121 pages

You know what I realized the other day?

The system in place for getting movies made is a meat grinder.

That’s how you have to think about it. It’s got a million of those little grinding wheels that you have to push your script through to get to the other side – the side where someone makes the movie.

If your script isn’t tough enough, every single one of those pages is going to get ripped to shreds. That’s why you have to fortify every page with your best effort. Your best effort is like encasing those pages in a diamond sheen. They cannot be ground up.

Let’s find out if today’s script is tough enough.

It’s 1989. A 21 year old man named James Cooper Hogue from Texas, decides he wants to go to Princeton. But he knows he can’t get in with a boring life. So he invents one. He names himself Alexi Indris-Santana, says he lived in Switzerland with his mother for most of his youth. He has since come to the states where he is now a ranch hand in Texas. He is not like other students they have because he has had no formal schooling. His school is the School of Life. He is also a long-distance runner, which is the one thing about him that’s true.

Princeton eats it up and accepts him and James quickly finds himself on campus mixing it up with the cross-country team. James gets along with everyone just fine. He starts dating a philosphy teacher’s assistant named Erica. He starts going to parties with the Old Money students. He’s really only got one issue. A student named Todd.

Todd is suspicious of James’s origin story and looks for any opportunity to catch him fibbing. He finally decides to challenge James and invite his father figure from back on the ranch, Mr. Oswalt, to come to the school and meet everyone. Except there is no Mr. Oswalt. James made him up. So James runs over to a local theater group and hires an actor to play Mr. Oswalt in order to save his butt.

Despite the actor convincingly portraying his father figure, Todd is still convinced James is a fake. So one night, while drunk, he confronts James and tells him he knows his true identity. James freaks out and murders him then disposes of the body. Will he get away with the murder? Or will James finally be exposed for the gigantic murdering fraud that he is?

One of the screenwriting strategies out there when trying to come up with the next idea you’re going to write is to take a ripped-from-the-headlines story and write a story about a similar situation from the past.

Writers do this for a couple of reasons. One, they’re not competing with anyone else if they’re digging up an old version of a similar idea. And two, your script is more likely to be labeled as “clever” since you’re not telling some on-the-nose tale about the latest ripped-from-the-headlines story.

This is what we get today.

There were all those shenanigans recently about rich people illegally getting their kids into schools. Others were pretending to be minorities to get into elite schools. So this script explores that idea except back in the late 80s.

And…….. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about it.

There’s something that feels too small about the idea if I’m being honest. That’s a question every writer should be aware of when coming up with movie ideas: “Who cares?”

Would people actually care about your story?
Is it big enough?
Are the stakes high enough?
Why should we care about what’s happening?

The answers to those questions have to live up to outside scrutiny, not just your late-night flimsy personal wall of persuasion.  Why do I care if this guy gets caught? Let’s say he’s thrown out. Well, he was never supposed to be here anyway so… what has he really lost?

That was my big issue with Personal Best. I never thought it was that big of a deal if he got thrown out. This was back before the internet where, if you pulled a con and got exposed, you just moved on to the next con. There were no digital 1s and 0s immortalizing your crime for anyone curious enough to pop your name into a search bar.

There was also something quite convenient about the idea. The main character is pulling this giant con. He’s pretending to be this farmer. He’s from Switzerland. He faked his perfect SATs. But, oh, by the way, he also happens to be one of the best cross-country runners in the nation, which is a big reason why he’s accepted.

But I thought the whole point was that this was a con. It’s not really a con if the biggest reason you got accepted into the school was based on truth. It would’ve been better if he had made that up too and had to dance around it in order to keep his con going (i.e. shown up with a “sprained MCL” so he wasn’t able to run “full on” yet).

You see, the element that pulls the reader in is never the thing that’s easy for your character. It’s the thing that’s impossible for your character. In last year’s Willy Wonka, they don’t just hand him his chocolate store the second he arrives in town. There are three competitors determined to KILL HIM if need be to protect their market share and a hotel that enslaves him for the rest of his life. You’re genuinely wondering how Willy Wonka is going to succeed.

If we sense EVEN A LITTLE BIT that the writer is on the hero’s side, we tune out. That’s what bothered me so much about yesterday’s movie, Rebel Ridge. The writer allowed the main character to antagonize, humiliate, and even attack the local cops again and again. Yet the cops never killed him or threw him in prison. 100% that’s a writer padding his character with plot armor.

Despite this, I give props to today’s writer for understanding the low stakes of his story and introducing a plot point that never happened in real life – James kills Todd.

As I’ve told you a million times, if you’re unsure whether your script has high enough stakes… introduce a dead body. Even better, have your main character create the dead body! Which is exactly what James does when he kills Todd.

This is how powerful this plot device is: Before James killed someone, I was at a 3 out of 10 on the “interest” scale. Afterwards, I was 7 out of 10. Still not great. But all of a sudden I cared what happened next.

The problem was, the murder didn’t hit the story until page 80! So that’s 80 pages of 3 out of 10 compared to 40 pages of 7 out of 10. I would’ve at least made that plot point the midpoint shift. I don’t know why it comes so late in the story.

The thing that ultimately doomed the script though – and I give credit to the writer for acknowledging it – was that James didn’t just have to graduate school to complete the ruse, he has to carry this name and backstory with him for the rest of his life. It just seemed like a really dumb plan – not a lot of thought put into it.

The script has its moments. It’s not bad by any means. It’s just one of those scripts you read and nod your head every once in a while thinking, “That was a pretty good scene.” But the totality of the experience doesn’t move you so you’ll never recommend it to anyone else. And that’s what every script needs. It needs that RECOMMEND quality because, otherwise, not enough people are going to read it to push it through that meat grinder.

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

What I learned: A good show to compare this script to is Inventing Anna. In that real-life story, Anna Sorokin was conning people out of millions of dollars. And she was doing it to the upper-crust New York party scene. Those two high-level elements (conning millions and the elite NY party scene) made that feel larger than life. Not to mention, that person became infamous. This script only ever gets up to the line of being larger than life. It’s an old story. Nobody’s heard of this guy. Yeah he murders someone later on but, for most of the script, he’s got nothing to truly worry about. So the story experience was too casual.

C’mon Netflix.

You’ve had your streaming service for 17 years now and you STILL don’t know how to release a movie!

The only reason I knew Rebel Ridge came out on Netflix this weekend is because I saw a couple of you guys talking about it.

The strange thing is that they seem to know how to promote shows. Their good shows always do well. But I can’t remember a single true breakout Netflix movie. And that may not be because they don’t have one. It’s because they don’t know how to let anyone know they exist!

This comes down to Netflix arrogance. The second they dropped the first ten episodes of House of Cards and declared, “BOOM!” as if they’d finally proven string theory, they assumed that every industry-changing move they made was genius.

Not promoting movies was their next big idea and they’ve been so stubborn about proving they were right, they seventeen-fold-downed on the practice.

Who honestly thinks that a movie is going to do well if nobody knows about it!?

I remember a long time ago when Mike Judge came out with his movie, Idiocracy. Because of some weird issues within 20th Century Fox, they decided not to promote it. Believe it or not, they didn’t even have a poster for it at first! If you went to the theater and saw all the movie posters of the movies they were showing, all you saw for Idiocracy was a blank white poster with the title “Idiocracy” written in generic font.

It made me wonder what would happen if they didn’t promote the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel which, at the time, was one of the flashiest franchises going. Would people actually show up?

Of course SOME people would show up. But it’d probably be like 1/5 of what the audience would be if they had promoted it.

I just find it weird that Netflix allows so many of their movies to show up and die on their app. Nobody will know what Rebel Ridge is in a week.

The question is, should they?

Cause three of you in the comments section called it the best film of the year.

I read the script four years ago when Jeremy Saulnier was first going to make the movie with John Boyega before Boyega ran away from set and never came back. Even though I reviewed the script, the review no longer exists on the site. Why? I have no idea. It disappeared.

My question to the three people on the site who loved this movie is: ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MINDS???

All the issues that were on display in the script were in big bright Netflix lights here as well.

It’s no secret that I like a simple well-told story. I don’t like when stories get unnecessarily complex, when too many elements are thrown into the mix. I don’t like when plots jump around too much. The only time I like that stuff is when I’m in the hands of a true master and I can feel the confidence in the writer’s hands that he’s going to deliver.

Rebel Ridge does not move that way.

It’s a movie that never seems to know what it is.

Let me give you a quick breakdown of the plot so my analysis doesn’t confuse you.

Terry, who’s black, bikes into a racist southern town to bail out his cousin who’s being kept in a nearby jail. He’s got a stack of money on him to do so.

But he gets stopped by racist cops who not only give him a ticket for “evading pursuit” but they take all that bail money and tell him he can’t have it back. Terry’s mad so, later that day, he charges into the police station to make a complaint about the cops. An even bigger racist captain tells him to screw off.

He leaves and goes to talk to a female lawyer in town who’s kind of helpful. He goes back to the station again, then he leaves again, then he goes back AGAIN, then he leaves and comes back AGAIN, ties up all the cops, gets the money, and goes to bail out his cousin, only to, after getting the bail through, get arrested for tying up all the cops.

His cousin is killed in jail, possibly because these cops put a hit out on him. The captain then gives Terry a car and some money and tells him to leave town. But Terry is determined to even the score so he teams up with the lawyer to expose their corruption.

At one point they end up in a dungeon somewhere. It’s very confusing. Finally, there’s this shootout by the station and, for no clear reason that I’m aware of, the very same racist cop who stole his money at the beginning decides he’s going to team with Terry because it’s the “right the thing to do” or something. It’s apropos that it’s the first football Sunday of the year because, from there on, the movie stumbles to the finish line.

It was just. So. Sloppppyyyy.

I don’t like sloppiness in storytelling.

Why are we taking four separate trips to the police station in the first act when we could’ve gotten it done in one? Or at most two! Screenwriting is about efficiency. You don’t want to do anything more than you have to. And you definitely don’t want to repeat beats.

As I said in my script review, this movie could’ve been awesome if Terry held everyone hostage in the police station for the full movie. And a group of cops show up outside surrounding the place. You’ve got a great contained thriller if you do that. But all this back and forth and back and forth destroyed the story’s momentum.

Another thing that drove me nuts was that these cops were letting this dude have his way with them. This guy LITERALLY stole their guns and tied them up in their own station and the next scene is the captain giving him 10 grand and a new car and telling him to leave town!

WHY NOT JUST KILL HIM???

There’s literally NO REASON why they didn’t kill him other than that the writer saved him. That’s it. And that’s unforgivable to me. You can’t be your hero’s guardian angel. If your bad guys, who demonstrated they had zero morals right from the opening scene, don’t kill this guy after he breaks twenty laws in their town, including holding them hostage while he steals their money, that’s only because you’re saving him.

And if your response to that is, “They couldn’t kill him because it would’ve been too obvious and they don’t want trouble,” I’m not buying it because they just killed his cousin!

I cannot remember a screenplay that frustrated me as much as this one.

So then why is the film getting such good reviews? I know the answer to this. It’s the ‘ace in your sleeve’ move that every screenwriter has at their disposal: If you give us a character we love who someone else is taking advantage of and you execute that character well, the readers and the viewers will become blind to any plot holes in the movie.

When we like someone – and particularly in a movie like this where we really want justice for Terry – we don’t see the cracks in the screenplay. We just don’t. And that’s the one thing Jeremy Saulnier got right. He got that main character right.

But, to me, the plotting was so egregious that I couldn’t overlook it. I mean that stupid lawyer plot was soooooo dumb. That little side journey we went on with her in the second act? I could barely contain my fury that she was in the movie.

This should’ve been a simple story about Terry getting that money back. 90 minutes in and out and it would’ve been great. Because, like I said, the character worked. Instead we get all this nonsense in the meantime. I strongly strongly discourage anyone from watching this film. Watch the first scene for Scene Showdown. But, after that, save yourself and go watch some football.

Okay, we can’t leave without talking about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice! A 110 million dollar box office bonanza built around Michael Keaton trying to either entertain or annoy us to death. I can’t decide which. I had no idea this franchise had this kind of box office power. The only way I can make sense of it was that the Netflix show Wednesday (which also starred Jenna Ortega and was directed by Tim Burton) was such a smash hit for them. And all those people came out to see a continuation of that team-up.

Good for everyone involved. 2024 has taught us over and over again how stingy the average moviegoer is. To make 110 million dollars off of something that has no superheroes, no spaceships, and no fast cars, is a gigantic accomplishment.

Next weekend I’m very excited because I’m going to see Speak No Evil. It looks awesome. As you know, I love it when a movie comes out that could’ve been a spec script. No special effects. All it has is people talking. Yet here it is, with a wide release. I can’t wait. I’m not going to look up any of the reviews or anything. I want to go in as naked as I can. Go watch it too so we can discuss it afterwards.

In the lead-up to this month’s “Scene Showdown,” the question must be asked: ‘What, exactly, is a scene?’

Before we break down what a scene is, here are the submission details for Scene Showdown. Literally EVERYBODY who reads this site should enter. Here’s what I need from you…

Title
Genre
Logline
Up to 50 words to prep the scene (up from 30)
A PDF of your scene (no minimum length, maximum is 5 pages long)
Send submission to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Deadline: 10pm Pacific Time, Thursday September 26th!

It’s funny because when I came up with the idea for Scene Showdown, I assumed it was self-explanatory. I thought that everybody knew what a scene was. But after all the questions that popped up in the comment section, I realized that a scene is not clear at all. So, let’s talk about what a scene is.

I started off by asking Chat GPT and I can’t say I’m a fan of his answer:

A scene is a distinct narrative unit where characters interact within a specific time and place to advance the story.

I then asked Miriam’s Dictionary for help and this is what they told me:

A division of an act presenting continuous action in one place.

I didn’t love that definition either so I googled a few other options:

A complete unit of storytelling, usually consisting of a sequence of events and dialogue taking place in a specific location and time.

A scene is a section where a character or characters engage in action or dialogue. You can think of a scene as a story with a beginning, middle, and an end.

Change (the writer of this article defines a scene as anything where a character expects one thing but something else happens)

Color me surprised that defining a scene is so difficult because, on a macro level, it seems obvious. Similar to how we inherently know what a paragraph is because we’ve read so many books, I figured we inherently knew what a scene was because we’ve watched so many movies.

But the more we get into the micro – nailing down the specifics of what makes a scene – the harder it becomes to define.

There are common threads in these definitions, however. Continuous time is one. A single location is another. There is action, dialogue, or both. Maybe the one thing that these definitions are missing is that there’s an actual point to the scenario. I like to think of it as a little story (which may align with the writer above who defines a scene as “change”).

With that in mind, our definition of a scene might look like this…

A storytelling unit where characters engage in action or dialogue within a single location during a continuous time frame.

Now, for those of you already getting wound up about the restrictions of that definition, calm down. This is a BASELINE definition to work with. It’s not the law.

If, for example, you write a scene where a married couple is fighting and they take the fight from their kitchen to their backyard, then to their car as they drive to work, that has three location changes but it’s still considered to be one scene because it’s continuous.

I think where writers get the most confused is with the time continuation thing. Because sometimes you’ll write three “scenes” that have time breaks between them, but they’re all so intricately woven together, you could make the argument that they’re one scene.

For example, let’s look at Kinds of Kindness, which I reviewed yesterday.

One of the scenes, from the middle story in Kinds of Kindness, has Robert, who’s mentally deteriorating rapidly in his marriage, coming to his wife, Rita, and asking her to chop off her finger, cook it, and include it in his dinner. This is, I guess, technically, one scene.

Right after that, we show Rita wrestling with whether to oblige her husband. She eventually decides to do what he says so she chops off and cooks her own finger. Again, this could be considered its own scene.

Finally, we have Rita serving Robert his dinner, with her finger, and him being confused as to why she would do this (remember, he’s going insane). That’s its own scene as well, you could say. But, really, all three of these moments, when combined together, make up about 5 minutes of screen time, and could, conceivably be pitched as one scene, even though there are time breaks between them.

Now some of you may say, “No, Carson. That’s a sequence (a “sequence” being a series of scenes).” And I wouldn’t say you’re wrong. But I think this speaks to why the question of “What is a scene” has perplexed so many of us. There is a greyness to the definition.

But what I hope this does for you, in regards to the showdown, is help you relax a little. As you can see, there’s some flexibility regarding what makes a scene.

I don’t want to stifle anybody’s creativity because some of the best writing I receive is from writers who have their own creative ideas and don’t try and retroactively engineer stories to my liking.  BUT if I were you entering the showdown, I would be thinking in terms of a short story that fits within the constraints of our scene definition. Something that could, if not completely live on its own, is entertaining enough that we’d enjoy it without context. Get that clear beginning (setup), middle (conflict), and end (resolution), in there.

If you want to get more specific, use GSU. Have a character who wants something (goal), will gain much if he succeeds or lose much if he fails (stakes), and has a limited amount of time (urgency).

Some recent examples of mini-story scenes that have clear beginnings, middles, and ends, would be the scene in Furiosa when Dementus enters the Citadel and tries to convince the ruler, Immortan Joe, to hand the city over to him.

In The Killer, the Killer gets a taxi/uber ride with a specific cab driver and demands information on the person the driver gave a ride to three days ago who went to kill his wife. Simple beg, mid, end. Simple GSU.

In Parasite, the family who invades the home is surprised when the real family, who is supposed to be gone, comes back unexpectedly. They all must hide within the house and not be seen until the family goes to sleep and they can sneak away.

In Emily the Criminal, a good scene is when Emily is tasked with stealing her first car. She has to go into a dealership and buy the car with a fake credit card from the salesman. But she’s told that 8 minutes from the moment he swipes the card, she has to be out of there, or else the card company will call the salesman and tell him it’s a fake.

As you can see, all of these scenes feel important. They’re not just casual things going on between people. There are stakes involved. The moments are larger than life. That’s where you want your head when submitting for the Scene Showdown.

I hope that clears a lot of things up. But I noticed there were other questions in Tuesday’s post so let me answer the relevant ones here…

Does it have to be the first scene of your script? – No.

Can it come from a screenplay that hasn’t been written yet? – Yes

50 words to prep the scene – What I mean by this is, if the scene comes deep in your script, you can provide some context as to who the characters are and what was going on before the scene. This is not mandatory.

Logline and Title – As best you can, create a logline and title for the scene (not the script). I know it’s hard and you don’t have to be too specific (you can be mysterious if you want, i.e., “A young woman wakes up to find her dead child alive and well in her arms”).

Winner – Winner gets a deep dive review of the scene on the site and a collective kick in the behind to write the full script!