You can find Day 1 of Prep here and Day 2 of Prep here.
When Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus sat down to write the gigantic two-part Avengers finale, they admitted they were overwhelmed by the task. Filling up a six hour screenplay is a daunting experience. So how did they overcome the fear?
They started writing down CHECKPOINTS – major moments in the script.
For example, the scene where Captain America fights himself. They figured out, “Okay, we’re going to have that happen around page X in the story.” Once they were able to lay these checkpoints down on a timeline, they no longer had to write from page 1 to page 300. They only had to write to Page 25, when Tony Stark, Dr. Strange, and Spider-Man fight Thanos’s goons in New York City. And then to page 40, when the Guardians of the Galaxy rescue Thor.
Checkpoints give you smaller chunks of screenplay to conquer. The more of them you have, the smaller those gaps of blank pages become. All of a sudden the screenplay you’re writing doesn’t seem so big and scary anymore.
That’s tomorrow’s goal. I want you to come up with five checkpoints in your script. And then Friday’s goal is going to be to come up with five more, for a total of ten. I’m going to make it easy for you by providing you with the four most common checkpoints.
The first is the inciting incident, which tends to happen somewhere between page 5-12. Depending on your script, it could come sooner or later. All the inciting incident is is the introduction of the major problem your hero faces in the movie. So if it’s Avengers, it’s that Thanos is trying to get the Infinity Stones so he can snap away half the universe. If it’s John Wick, it’s when they kill his dog. If it’s Ad Astra, it’s when Brad Pitt is told his dad is still alive and missing and they need Mr. Pitt to find him.
Not all inciting incidents fall perfectly into the “major problem” category. For example, Uncut Gems. I’m not entirely sure what the inciting incident there is. Maybe it’s when Kevin Garnett won’t give him back the gem right away? Or is it when Sandler initially receives the gem? Not sure. Parasite as well. No real problem enters our poor family’s existence in the first act because the infiltration of the rich family’s home was the poor family’s idea to begin with. I suppose you could say that the inciting incident is when the family friend comes to the son of the poor family and tells him about the tutoring job.
In these cases, think of the inciting incident as any plot moment that jumpstarts the story. So Adam Sandler receiving the gem in the mail jumpstarts Uncut Gems. The son being alerted to the tutoring job jumpstarts Parasite.
The second checkpoint is the end of the first act, which is when your character commits to the journey. After the inciting incident, there is often a “refusal of the call” or a “delay in action.” But, eventually, our hero decides to go on the journey because there wouldn’t be a movie if he didn’t. This occurs around page 25-27 in a 100-110 page screenplay.
You see this in just about every Pixar and Disney movie. Most recently, Onward. Ian and Barley head off in search of their father. Inception when they head into Robert Fischer’s mind. Every Mission Impossible movie when they actually go off on the mission. This is where your movie officially begins.
Of course, just like the inciting incident, this doesn’t fit perfectly into every movie, particularly ones where the hero doesn’t go on a journey. Sometimes your hero is stuck in a house, like Michelle in Cloverfield Lane. If your script is non-traditional, look for something that approximates a first act turn. In Cloverfield Lane, for example, I might classify the first act turn as the moment Michelle DECIDES she’s going to try and get out of here. That switch in her demeanor from reactive to active signifies a new energy in the story.
Next we have the midpoint shift. Or the midpoint escalation. The best midpoint shifts transform the story. Make it feel different from the first half of the movie. You do this so your movie doesn’t have the same energy and feel the entire way through. Remember that predictability eventually equals boredom. So you want to use your midpoint shift to change things up a bit. A good example would be the midpoint shift of The Invisible Man. That happens when Cecilia gets booted out of her friend’s house and decides to prove this man is after her instead of allowing him to do what he was doing through the first half of the movie, which was torture her.
Or Parasite. That film had one of the most daring midpoint shifts I’ve ever seen, when they introduce a secret basement floor where a third family is hiding.
Finally we have the LOWEST POINT, which will take place at the end of your second act (between the pages of 78 and 90). Lowest Points are easy to come up with because it’s always some connection to death. Either literally or symbolically. It could be our hero’s friend died. If the main hero is a chef, maybe his restaurant closes down for good (dies). To use Invisible Man again, Cecilia is in a nut house, she’s tired of fighting, so she slits her wrists. In Parasite, it’s when the poor family’s house is flooded, destroying everything (their house literally dies).
So there you have it. Four checkpoints to get you started.
How do you come up with six more? That’s up to you. It could be one of the first scenes you imagined when you came up with your idea. Like the hilarious scene when all the human characters meet the game versions of each other in Jumanji. Or the convenience store scene in The Hunt. It could be something visual, like the famous giant piano playing scene in Big.
It may be a plot twist that happens, like the reveal of the girl in JoJo Rabbit. Or the surprise death of one of your characters. It could be a major monologue from one of the characters (Jules’ Big Kahuna burger monologue scene in Pulp Fiction) or a killer dialogue scene (DeNiro and Pacino in Heat) showdown. If you can envision it, it can be a checkpoint.
Some final thoughts. It’s important that you do this because we’re going to be making a mini-outline over the weekend and the more of these you have, the easier it will be to construct your outline.
Also, if you can, try and balance your checkpoints out so that you have roughly the same amount in the second half as you have the first. It’s easier to come up with first-half checkpoints because that part of the story is clearer in your head at the moment. But one of the big challenges of finishing a screenplay is that back half of the second act. It’s the section of the script we know the least about before we write. So if you can throw a couple of solid checkpoints in there, you’re going to be ahead of the game.
Now get to it!
