Week 9 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge
Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Every Thursday, for the first six months of 2024, Scriptshadow is guiding you through the process of writing a screenplay. In June, you’ll be able to enter this screenplay in the Mega Screenplay Showdown. The best 10 loglines, then the first ten pages of the top five of those loglines, will be in play as they compete for the top prize.
Why is this such a great challenge? Because IT’S SO DARN EASY! What other screenwriting teacher out there asks for just 45 minutes a day? 45 minutes a day! And, at the end of this, you have a finished screenplay! Pretty sure there’s not a better deal on the internet.
But this week things get tough because page 45 is a deep crack in the screenplay’s crust. It is the official end of the “fun and games” section and the beginning of what, I call, “the real screenplay.” There is a rope bridge that takes you to the other side, aka the rest of the script. But it is so run-down that, any wrong move and you could plunge into the endless abyss between the two sides.
To understand this, you have to understand that the second act is an act that separates the professional screenwriter from the aspiring screenwriter. The professional screenwriter understands why the second act is there and what needs to be done during it. Whereas the aspiring screenwriter fakes the second act. They don’t understand what the directive is or how to navigate it. So they write a bunch of scenes that vaguely push the story, grasping at straws all the way until they get to the climax.
The reason screenplays fall apart here as opposed to immediately in the second act is because the “fun and games” section (first 12-15 pages of the second act that we discussed last week) provides them a grace period. The audience is so excited to be off on the adventure that they’re easily entertained. It’s hard to show up in Oz and not marvel at all of the wackiness surrounding us.
But once that excitement wears off, you actually have to entertain us. To do so, you have to understand what the second act is. The best way I’ve been able to define it is: It’s the “Conflict Act.” This is the act where your hero starts pursuing their goal (kill Thanos, find the Ark, build the atomic bomb, start a chocolate store, get through therapy a la Good Will Hunting) and encounters a lot of obstacles along the way.
You create obstacles not just for conflict but because you want your hero’s journey to be difficult. Nobody’s interested in an easy journey. They want it to be hard. When it’s hard, it creates drama. And it’s the drama that pulls us in. The second Willy Wonka shows up in Paris and announces he wants to buy a chocolate shop, the other three chocolatiers immediately conspire against him. They will provide a series of obstacles that Willy must overcome, starting with buying off the local police chief and telling him to arrest Willy at every turn.
That’s the general idea of what you want to do. But it doesn’t give us a blueprint we can follow this week. In order to do that, I need to tell you about the Sequence Approach. The idea with the Sequence Approach is that a movie has 3 acts and, within those acts, a series of sequences. In the first act, there are two sequences, about 12-15 pages long each. In the second act, there are four sequences, 12-15 pages long. And in the third act, there are two sequences, 12-15 pages long. That’s 8 sequences in total.
Because we’re on pages 40-50 this week, we’ve already written our first three sequences. We are now on the fourth sequence. All a sequence is, is its own little mini-movie. The reason the approach is valuable is because it takes the giant chasm of space known as the second act and it turns it into smaller, more manageable, chunks of real estate that provide a clear start and end point.
All you have to do in a sequence is create a little “mini-movie” that has its own beginning, middle, and end, that lasts around 12-15 pages.
This is something I worked extensively with Elad on in the tennis loop script we worked on, “Court 17,” which made the Black List last year (the script follows a character who gets stuck in a loop playing the same U.S. Open first round match over and over again getting destroyed by a much better player – he thinks that the only way to get out of the loop is to win the match).
Before we had sequences on that script, we were lost. A loop movie is particularly susceptible to structural issues because you’re writing the same day over and over again. How do you make each scene feel different if you’re stuck on the same court in the same match all the time?
You make it different with sequences! We broke the script down into eight sequences. Sequence 1 is the character’s day before the loop, going into and losing the match. Sequence 2 was the first day in the loop, the confusion and fear that went along with what had happened to him. Sequence 3 had him start to formulate a plan to get out of the loop by using the repetition of the match and a series of different strategies to beat his opponent. After endless failed attempts at winning, Sequence 4 had him giving up and, instead, focusing on winning his estranged wife back (who lived in the city). Sequence 5, he placed his focus on his opponent – studying him and meeting with him in an attempt to learn what made him tick in order to gain an edge in the match. And so on and so forth.
Once you have a sequence, you have a game plan. And, as long as you’re writing via the tenets of good storytelling, you’ll be in good shape: At the beginning of each sequence, give your character a goal. Have them go after that goal. Have them encounter obstacles that they must overcome. And, because it’s early in the movie, have them fail, fail, fail, and fail again. Of course they’ll have little victories along the way. But failure should dominate the second act.
I had never put as much emphasis on the sequence approach as I did in the writing of Court 17 and I learned something in the process. A sequence doesn’t have to be self-contained. In other words, if you have a subplot with Character Y that doesn’t perfectly fit the theme of the sequence, you can still include a scene with that character. Just as you can cut to other subplots with other characters during a sequence. As long as the majority of the sequence is your hero pushing towards the goal of that sequence, the sequence will work.
But if you’re just using your second act to randomly jump from this scene to that thread to that subplot back to this scene and you don’t have a plan for it all, that’s when second acts get messy. That’s when it starts to feel like the writer doesn’t know what they’re doing. And it’s not even that we, the reader, will think, “This writer clearly doesn’t know what they’re doing.” But we will think, “I’m bored.” That’s all it takes for a reader to give up on you. “I’m bored.” The Sequence Approach is the best approach I’ve found for preventing boredom in the second act.
If you’re confused about page starting points for the Sequence Approach, here’s what they look like…
100 page script
1-12 First Sequence
13-25 – Second Sequence
26-38 – Third Sequence
39-50 – Fourth Sequence <— you are here
51-62 – Fifth Sequence
63-75 – Sixth Sequence
76-88 – Seventh Sequence
89-100 – Eighth Sequence
110 page script
1-13 First Sequence
14-27 – Second Sequence
28-42 – Third Sequence
43-55 – Fourth Sequence <— you are here
56-70 – Fifth Sequence
71-84 – Sixth Sequence
85-98- Seventh Sequence
99-110 – Eighth Sequence
120 page script
1-15 First Sequence
16-30 – Second Sequence
31-45 – Third Sequence
46-60 – Fourth Sequence <— you are here
61-75 – Fifth Sequence
76-90 – Sixth Sequence
91-105- Seventh Sequence
106-120 – Eighth Sequence
Your assignment this week…
Friday = write 1 scene (last scene in the fun-and-games section)
Saturday = write 1 scene (Construct a sequence for this section)
Sunday = write 1 scene (moving towards the sequence goal)
Monday = write 1 scene (moving towards the sequence goal)
Tuesday = write 1 scene (possibly a subplot scene)
Wednesday = go back and correct any issues with your five scenes
Thursday = go back and correct any issues with your five scenes
