All screenplays on the simplyscripts.com and simplyscripts.net domain are copyrighted to their respective authors. All rights reserved. This screenplaymay not be used or reproduced for any purpose including educational purposes without the expressed written permission of the author.
Um, ok. Let's boil the "three act structure" down to what it is.
Beginning - Middle - End
All stories have a beginning, middle, and end. That's a fundamental characteristic of storytelling. If you are missing one of these three elements, you don't have a complete story. No matter how long or short your story is, it has a beginning, middle and end. This is the source of the "dreaded" three act structure.
So no matter what you write, it will have these pieces.
Now, as for the "Hollywood" three act structure... All that is is some guideline that stretches these three fundamental pieces into at least 90-120 minutes. It's a suggestion to help your audience remain interested. You're dealing with a group of people who have short attention spans. A lot of these people watch movies because they don't have the wherewithall to actually sit down and read a book. So if you haven't hooked them in 10 minutes, chances are they've already started looking for something shiny.
Do you need to adhere to page numbers? No. It's a really good idea for the act one break to fall around page 20, but that's about the only only to keep your short attention spanners happy.
Now, Phil proposed the question of "are any of those book writers produced?" To me, that doesn't really matter. Those who can't do, teach, right? But take the information they give and test it against the writers who ARE produced. Didn't Dreamscale complain that all the movies are boring because they follow the same structure?
Wait, wait, wait, wait... So in that complaint, he says that the structure touted in the books is used by professional writers who are being PAID to do what we're dreaming of doing. Another thread about camera directions complained that people were advising against doing what the pros are doing in their scripts, and now this thread is shouting AGAINST doing what the pros are doing in their scripts.
Weird. So do you want to follow the professionals or not? You want to put in camera directions but not follow the structure. You want to pick and choose the stuff that the pros are doing to make yourself happy.
Ok. That's fine.
Now, let's talk about the point of this board, labeled "Screenwriting Class." This is for people looking to learn something about screenwriting, whether that be format, structure, character, whatever. There have been some very insightful posts about all of these things and more, but recently, the posts have been saying "this whole practice is crap. I want to do it my own way."
My advice is to do it your own way. I mean, it's your story. Your script. No one is going to stop you. My only question is why are you posting threads to tell everyone that you're not going to listen to them?
What do I know? Well, I have read several books. I've seen probably 1,500 movies ranging from 1880 to the present from every genre. I've read hundreds of screenplays. I've written around sixty scripts including stage plays, musicals, screenplays, shorts, and teleplays. Of those, I've had a play, a musical, a short, and a screenplay produced. Of course, I produced and directed the short and screenplay. The teleplays were written for virtual series for someone else who liked my writing. I've finished my first novel recently in its entirety which should be available on Amazon in the next couple months. I am going to record some of the music I've written here pretty soon, and there's a band interested in me as either a bass or piano player. There. A quick bio for those who have no idea who I am.
If you have a question about writing, I'd be happy to answer whatever I know. If you're going to post a thread about how much the learning tools for writing suck, there are other boards for it.
Now, Phil proposed the question of "are any of those book writers produced?" To me, that doesn't really matter. Those who can't do, teach, right? But take the information they give and test it against the writers who ARE produced. Didn't Dreamscale complain that all the movies are boring because they follow the same structure?
I might be wrong, here, but no one really sets out to write a book on screenwriting. They set out to be the screenwriter. And, for whatever reason, they don't make it.
I might be wrong, here, but no one really sets out to write a book on screenwriting. They set out to be the screenwriter. And, for whatever reason, they don't make it.
I'd rather learn from those who made it.
The point of that paragraph was to say to look at what the books are saying and then see how it compares to what is produced in regards to structure. Barring the books, the rest of what you quoted pointed out that some people have no interest learning from those who made it either. Just seems kind of hypocritical to say you want to learn from those who made it, and then criticize what those who made it are doing.
It was OK. It read quite quickly. I think that it should give people a lot of hope though if that's the very best around.
It's just the old abduction story with a bit of undeveloped Satanist action it. There's nothing new in there or anything particularly moving or powerful.
Finished it too. It hit all its genre beats which was why it didn't feel very different. The thing that made it stood out was the fact that one of the main characters(or protagonist) is sort of a hmmm... how do I describe him... he's not a very populist kind of man. Probably a kkk person... He hunts animals and he tortures someone he thinks is harming his baby daughter. That's the difference and that's what actors want to act. An emphatic character who you can equally dislike.
The reading was fast and the first half was very well written. Absolutely no holes exists in it.
He used alot of "we"s in the beginning of the script and he's a total newbie so what we should take from that is that we shouldn't be so pedantic( rules wise) if we have a decent story.
I hear that management companies are more open to new writers than agencies. You can find emails addresses online if you look hard enough. There's a good site that lists quite a few names and email addresses of reps:
If you get a bounce, try different email structures: firstinitiallastname@... firstnamelastinitial@... firstname@... lastname@... firstname.lastinitial@... ... etc
You will usually find one that works.
I subscribe to HCD and IMDBPro to do my research on "who's who". I think it's important to get to know the names, credentials, and reputation of the reps working around town. Cross referencing rep names with the ones in the black list helps. You tend to develop an idea of what types of scripts certain reps lean towards.
The Done Deal forum is a great place to get other people's experiences working with the reps you wish to target, and provides updates on upcoming reps and which company reps currently work at as many tend to move around a lot.
I've received about 8 read requests from mid to top-level management companies a couple of months back -- including the same one that repped The Prisoners script. It's good to know that cold querying still works.
Awesome! I've saved the html page to my harddrive. Karma means you'll get your script(s) sold very soon being so helpful and all...
Are you guys actually saying that anyone you know has had any success at all with this list? I've seen this thing for years, and the guy who runs it is a whacko. He's always talking about his book, Ginny Good, or whatever it's called. I've seen numerous people complain about the list and ask politely to be taken off of it.
I just assumed it was all bogus. Let me know. Thanks.
Are you guys actually saying that anyone you know has had any success at all with this list? I've seen this thing for years, and the guy who runs it is a whacko. He's always talking about his book, Ginny Good, or whatever it's called. I've seen numerous people complain about the list and ask politely to be taken off of it.
I just assumed it was all bogus. Let me know. Thanks.
A while back, I was on Radio 4's Film Programme the same day as Simon Pegg. We were asked what we thought of screenwriting manuals. I dismissed them as get-rich-quick compendiums of cliche. Pegg said he thought they were really useful. Our films opened that weekend. His vacuumed up money. Mine tanked. It may well be, I thought, that I've been missing something. I decided to watch all my favourite movies again, notebook in hand, to figure out what made them work. Here are some of my observations. This is not a description of how I write. It's more how I wish I'd written. A map of the rocks on which I perished.
1. Write a play instead Are you sure you need to write a screenplay? Almost any movie takes years. I've just done a TV film for the BBC that has taken 20 years to go from idea to execution. If you've got a great story, it might be worth writing it as a play first, or a book. To get a movie into the world, someone needs to love it enough to spend millions of pounds on it - and years of their life. A play costs a few thousand and takes a couple of months. Plus it makes you a playwright, which is way upmarket from a screenwriter. And if it's successful, people will want to make the movie.
2. Do the title first Seems obvious, but you'd be amazed. A great title can make a big difference. The musical Oklahoma, as it was initially called, famously flopped in the provinces, but became a massive hit after they added the exclamation mark. Orson Welles said Paper Moon was such a great title they wouldn't need to make the movie, just release the title. If you want a good title, you need it before you start, when you're pumped up with hope. If you look for it afterwards, you end up thinking like a headline-writer. If Victor Hugo had waited until he'd finished Notre-Dame de Paris, he would have ended up calling it I've Got a Hunch.
3. Read it to people It's easy to fool yourself on the page. Tell people your story and watch them. Is there a bit where they check their watch? Are there bits you unexpectedly feel you want to skip? Do they guess the ending? Get it worked up into a good anecdote. This also means that if you bump into The Money at a film festival, you can pitch the story right there. The same applies after you've written the script. Danny Boyle, director of 28 Days Later, makes you read your script out loud to him. It's horrible. It leaves you nowhere to hide. But it saves weeks of second-guessing.
4. Forget the three-act structure All the manuals insist on a three-act structure. I think this is a useless model. It's static. All it really means is that your screenplay should have a beginning, middle and end. When you're shaping things, it's more useful to think about suspense. Suspense is the hidden energy that holds a story together. It connects two points and sends a charge between them. But it doesn't have to be all action. Emotions create their own suspense. In American Splendor, the film about comic-book creator Harvey Pekar, you hope till it hurts that his relationship will work out. Secrets are good at generating tension, too. In A Knight's Tale, you fret all the way through that someone will discover that William is not really Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein.
A delicate art. If a setup is too obvious, it can announce a payoff. I remember watching Se7en in a multiplex. When Morgan Freeman said he was going to retire in a few days, someone shouted: "Gonna die!" (For once, it wasn't true.) On the other hand, if the setup doesn't signal something, it doesn't generate any suspense. The trick is to create an expectation but fulfil it in a completely unexpected way. I'm going to give the Oscar for this to Geoffrey Chaucer for The Pardoner's Tale, where they go looking for Death but find a pile of money instead. And the twist is ... they scheme over it and kill each other. 6. Don't write excuse notes Sympathy is like crack cocaine to industry execs. I've had at least one wonderful screenplay of mine maimed by a sympathy-skank. Yes, of course the audience have to relate to your characters, but they don't need to approve of them. If characters are going to do something bad, Hollywood wants you to build in an excuse note. If you look at Thelma and Louise, you'll see it's really just one long excuse note with 20 minutes of fun at the end. The US cop show The Wire, on the other hand, gives you characters you couldn't possibly approve of, or even like. Then, when it needs to, it gives you another glimpse of them. In one heart-scalding scene, a nasty, hard-nosed young drug-dealer from the projects finds himself in a park and says: "Is this still in Baltimore?"
7. Avoid the German funk trap People have a tendency to set up the characters and then have the stories happen to them. I think it comes from TV, where you want the characters to survive the story unchanged, so they can have another adventure next week. It's like in detective fiction, where "characterisation" means the detective is really into 1970s German funk. And "complex characterisation" means his wife is leaving him because she doesn't understand his love of 1970s German funk. In a film, you should let the story reveal the character. What happens to Juno - getting pregnant - could happen to any teenage girl. It's how she reacts that leads you to conclude she's charming (or sickening, depending on your point of view). Do it the other way around and it's like when someone introduces you to one of their friends and says: "I know you're going to like each other." It just makes you think: "I have to go now."
8. Do a favourite bit No one leaves the cinema saying: I loved that character arc. They come out saying: I loved the swordfight, or the bit with the bloated cow, or whatever. The manuals emphasise the flow of a narrative, but it's better to think of a film as a suite of sequences. That's where the pleasure is. I'm working on an animated feature at the moment. Traditionally, these films had no script at all. Teams built up a series of set-pieces and sequences around the story and characters. This is a great way to think. If you look at the first Godfather film, it's really an accumulation of anecdotes held together by the moral decline of Michael. Kes also works like this: the football match, the taming of the hawk, the careers officer and so on. Try breaking your script down into a series of chapters and giving them headings. If you want to see this not quite working, look at the Mission: Impossible films. Terrific action sequences marooned in quagmires of soggy exposition.
9. Cast it in your head Characters tend to be blurry in screenplays, partly because, if you over-define things, you limit the number of actors you can cast from. But just because you can't describe their eyebrows shouldn't stop you understanding thoroughly what makes them tick. When Sam Peckinpah was rewriting scripts, he used to cross out all the characters' names and replace them with the names of people he knew, so he could get a fix on them. Sometimes an arresting stage direction works wonders. The example writers always quote is Guy de Maupassant's line: "He was an elderly gentleman with ginger whiskers who always somehow made sure he was first through the door."
10. Learn to love rewrites In Sunset Boulevard, the screenwriter says: "Maybe you saw my last movie. It was about Okies in the dustbowl. Of course, by the time it went out, it was all set on a submarine boat." Screenwriters famously kvetch about the rewrite. I don't get this. One of the glories of being a writer is that you get so many chances to get it right. Ask Norwegian footballer John Arne Riise how he would feel if he was allowed to say: "You know that last header, where I knocked it into my own goal? That didn't really work for me. I'm going to take it out. I've decided that match would be better with a happy ending." The trick is to stay in the loop and use the process to make your script better.
11. Don't wait for inspiration I think people see inspiration as the ignition that starts the process. In fact, real moments of inspiration often come at the last minute, when you've sweated and fretted your way through a couple of drafts. Suddenly, you start to see fresh connections, new ways of doing things. That's when you feel like you're flying. The real pleasure of any script is the detail. And a lot gets lost in the process. Put it back in at the last minute.
12. Celebrate your invisibility Ben Hecht famously said it would be easier to get famous by riding a tricycle than by writing screenplays. This is a good thing! When you go to a film festival, you'll see directors and actors besieged by the press and having to trot out the same old stories over and over, while you get to sun yourself. Remember: invisibility is a superpower.
13. Read, read, read, read, read Read other screenplays. Read wordplayer.com, which is full of discussion, advice and heartbreak. But above all, read Karoo, a novel by the late, great screenwriter Steve Tesich, who did The World According to Garp. It tells you everything you wanted to know - and a lot that you didn't.
Are you guys actually saying that anyone you know has had any success at all with this list? I've seen this thing for years, and the guy who runs it is a whacko. He's always talking about his book, Ginny Good, or whatever it's called. I've seen numerous people complain about the list and ask politely to be taken off of it.
I just assumed it was all bogus. Let me know. Thanks.
I have no idea about the owner of the site. But the site was a starting point for me when compiling my email list.
But I'm not too sure how up-to-date the list is. Reps move around all the time. Plus they change their email structure occassionally. I'd imagine that people want to be taken off the list because they're getting too much query spam.
I do my research and subscribe to other resource sites, so I can verify the ligitimacy of lot of the email structures.
Personally, I think randomly spamming people from the list is a waste of your time and theirs. I do my research beforehand so I know about the companies and can decide which to query. It's about knowing how to play the query game properly.
Oh yeah, and you'll probably need a solid query letter.
Awesome! I've saved the html page to my harddrive. Karma means you'll get your script(s) sold very soon being so helpful and all...
That's the kind of karma I would really like!
There're actually several pages just for literary agencies alone. You'll probably want to click through each one and save them. Some of the management companies are also under the "Movie Production Companies" section. I'd use the Search function.
There're actually several pages just for literary agencies alone. You'll probably want to click through each one and save them. Some of the management companies are also under the "Movie Production Companies" section. I'd use the Search function.
The point of that paragraph was to say to look at what the books are saying and then see how it compares to what is produced in regards to structure. Barring the books, the rest of what you quoted pointed out that some people have no interest learning from those who made it either. Just seems kind of hypocritical to say you want to learn from those who made it, and then criticize what those who made it are doing.
Whether I criticize someone or not, I still think I could learn more from those who have been produced as opposed to those who haven't.
I think we can all learn from everyone, whether they're produced, not produced, or a brand new "writer" with an opinion. Any feedback is good feedback, and you just never know what different angle someone new can find.
But we're not talking about feedback. We're talking about someone telling us how to write a screenplay when he hasn't been produced, himself. This isn't the same as what goes on here, with everyone helping each other. This is an unproduced writer selling us a book on how to get produced.
BTW, everyone should get a copy of William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. Good book.
Pages: 
Author
That's not how you Structure a script!
Logged
which gives tips on query letters, info on literary agents, publishers, production companies and theartres on a yearly basis. 
Locked Board