To tease or not to tease, that is the question.
It’s finally here! I’m going to guide you through the process of writing a first act in the month of March. The goal will be to write 30 pages. You might be wondering why not 25 pages, which is the page count I usually promote for a first act. It’s because first acts are always bloated. You’ll be figuring a lot of stuff out in any first act which means you’re going to run long. And that’s a good thing. It’s way easier to cut pages than add pages. So don’t feel any restraint here. It’s okay if you write a big fat first act.
To start this process off, we’re going to talk about teasers.
Should you write one? Should you not write one?
A teaser is an exciting opening scene that is often dissociated from the linear narrative and which rarely contains your main character. The bank robbery scene in The Dark Knight is a teaser scene. The black man who gets taken in a suburban white neighborhood in Get Out is a teaser scene. A well-written teaser will immediately grab the reader, which is why a lot of writers write them.
Another reason writers turn to teasers is because their story isn’t set up in such a way that it opens with an exciting scene. A perfect example is Die Hard. Die Hard actually starts out with a boring first scene because the terrorists hadn’t started doing their terrorizing yet. So we get a scene of John McClane lazily flying into Los Angeles. Now you may say, “Well isn’t this proof, Carson, that you don’t need to open with a flashy scene? Die Hard became one of the best movies of all time.”
True, but this is where I remind you that DIE HARD WAS NOT A SPEC SCRIPT. It was an adaptation. It didn’t have to win any readers over. Your script WILL need to win readers over, which is why, if your script doesn’t organically start out with an entertaining scene, you should consider a teaser.
A teaser can basically be set anywhere. You can set it 300 years ago. You can set it 3000 miles away. You can use it to introduce your villain. You can grab a fun scene from later on in the script, a practice almost every screenwriter has used at some point in their career. They’ll fast-forward to one of the cool parts of the story, use it as their teaser, then cut to present day, where we stay until we revisit this moment later on. You’ll know you’ve seen this teaser when the following scene opens with a title card that says, “3 Days Earlier.”
Teasers were basically created for increasingly impatient audiences. Back in the 70s, moviegoers just wanted to sit down and relax. They didn’t give a sh#t if it took an hour to set up the film. But these days people are ready to move on if they get a mildly amusing text from their work buddy, Chuggs. So teasers have become a tool to combat boredom.
But teasers bring with them their own bag of problems. I often read teasers that don’t deserve the teaser title. A weak teaser I commonly run into is a woman driving her car down an empty wooded road at night (or a character in some dark secluded place where no one can hear you scream). She runs out of gas so she pulls over. She then thinks she sees someone up ahead. So she gets out of her car, walks forward, and asks if anyone is there. Then we see her eyes grow big as she sees something off-screen. Whatever the thing is, it attacks her. But before we can see the attack, the scene ends.
Not only is this a really boring predictable teaser I’ve seen a million times already. But it’s too short. It doesn’t give us any unique information. A teaser scene is almost like a mini-movie. It needs detail. It shouldn’t operate on generalities and cliches. The Hans Landa opening in Inglorious Basterds is a great teaser. Or the babysitter scene in Scream. These are full scenes – mini-movies if you will – that provide a very specific and entertaining story.
But therein lies the second issue when you write teasers – especially long teasers – which is that it f#cks up your page structure. There’s so much you have to set up in a screenplay. So if you write a long teaser scene, such as the one Tarantino wrote in Inglorious Basterds, that pushes your entire structure back 12 pages (the length of the scene). So instead of the inciting incident happening on page 12. It’s now happening on page 24.
I’ve seen many writers get confused by this. They’ll still try to hit their beats going off a traditional first act breakdown. So they’ll try and come up with an inciting incident immediately after their 12 page teaser is over, since page 12-15 is when your inciting incident is supposed to happen. Except how can you disrupt a character’s life (which is what the inciting incident does) if you haven’t even shown us that life yet?
This leads to writers talking themselves into things. They’ll say stuff like, “Well, that moment in the teaser did disrupt my hero’s life so that means it’s the inciting incident,” when that might not be the case.
As you can see, whether or not you start with a teaser is a big decision. There are repercussions to using them. Which is why I prefer that writers start with a scene that grabs the reader right away, *but is within the flow of the story.* It’s not an isolated teaser from another time or place. It introduces us to our hero. It shows them doing something interesting. A good example of this would be the opening scene for Don’t Look Up. We see our main character, played by Jennifer Lawrence, discover the comet that’s going to collide with earth.
You could’ve done this with Die Hard, by the way. You could’ve started with John McClane taking down a criminal back in New York. Then, the very next day, he has to head to Los Angeles. But therein lies the opening scene paradox. You are supposed to start your screenplay as late as possible. The later you start it, the quicker we get to the good stuff. If you start Die Hard back in New York with John McClane taking down a bad guy, you are not starting your story as late as possible.
To summarize, I prefer opening scenes that grab the reader, but are within the flow of the story. These scenes allow you to set up your character as well as the world they live in. So you’re getting more bang for your buck. However, if your story doesn’t allow this, consider a teaser. Because it is imperative that you grab the reader right away. And if a teaser is the only way to do that, then write a teaser. Remember that readers have formed their opinion of you as a writer, formed an opinion on the first scene you’ve written, and formed an opinion on if they think your script has any chance at all at being good, all within the first couple of pages. So if you lay out a dud scene right away, forget about it.
There was this movie that came out in 2000 called, “Mission to Mars” which was as awful as the title implies. All the reviews of that movie highlighted that they knew it was going to be a bad movie based on the first scene. That’s because the scene took place at a barbecue with a bunch of the movie’s astronauts. The writer’s pursuit was noble. He thought the party was a perfect way to get all the astronauts in one place and, therefore, quickly set them up. But because it resulted in a ten minute scene of characters lazily chatting with each other, the audience checked out before the real story could even begin. That is the danger of writing a weak opening scene.
Technically, you only have to write 1.5 pages today but I figure most writers are going to be writing full scenes. So just try to write one scene today. It’s okay if you get ahead of the class. You can use the extra time at the end of each week to go back and rewrite your scenes. Or you can charge ahead and try to write the first act as quickly as possible. With that said, you’ll be missing specific instructions from me about each section you’re entering so take that into account.
Pages to write until next post: 1.5
Next Post: Tomorrow (Wednesday, March 2)
P.S. Let me know in the comments if there is anything about the first act that you want me to cover over the next month!
