First ten pages - High concept comedy

So what do you do when you’re writing a High Concept Comedy script that requires you to lay a little pipe before getting to the hook? Let’s say you’ve got a brilliant hook like “teenager goes back in time and has to get his parents to fall in love” but there’s just no way you’re going to be able to set that up in ten pages. How do you get fickle readers to keep reading?

Remember: Tone. Genre. Craft.

Look at Back to the Future. Remember the first image in that film? It’s a ticking clock. From the first line of the screenplay, we’re aware of time as an element. Even before Marty enters Dock’s workshop, the camera has panned across the room. It passes a few expository newspapers, all while showing off Doc Brown’s Rube Goldberg-like device for getting canned dog food. That tells us something about Doc. Then Marty enters and through his phone conversation with Doc, we get a decent sense of their dynamic. This is important because they don’t really interact again until about 15 minutes into the film, when Doc makes his first on-screen appearance.

There are plenty of things to learn from Back to the Future, but with a film like this, the important thing is to set up the dominos that will eventually be knocked down. For this film in particular, that includes details like Principal Strickland mentioning Marty’s father was a “slacker.” He also says, “No McFly has ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley.” To that, Marty says “Well history is gonna change.”(THEME ALERT.)

Every subsequent scene contains details that are important. Marty’s band fails a tryout, and then he wavers about sending his demo in. Even with his girlfriend’s encouragement, he’s scared to take a chance. (CHARACTER TRAIT ALERT.)  As the two kiss in front of the Clock Tower, a woman comes over to solicit donations for the Clock Tower, which was struck by lightning 30 years ago (EXPOSITION ALERT.) Marty goes home to find his father being bullied by Biff…. (IMPORTANT SUBPLOT ALERT) and amid other details, his mother tells the story of how she and Marty’s dad first fell in love. (PAY ATTENTION – IMPORTANT BACKSTORY.)

There’s a lot of exposition there, but there are just enough hints of the script’s themes that most readers would probably have faith that this is all leading somewhere. We’ve got a teenager, a crazy inventor, lots of references to time and history, and Marty’s entire world established in about ten minutes, give or take. If you were to show those pages to someone with no prior knowledge of the film, it wouldn’t be a surprise if most of them guessed that Marty would somehow end up back in time and witness a few of the past events he’s been told about.

Most of the time in high concept comedy, your lead character HAS to jump off the page in the first few scenes. The character – not the plot – is really what carries the film. The hook is just a means to explore that character.

Liar Liar – a lawyer who lies as easily as most people breathe is forced to tell the truth for an entire day.

Bruce Almighty – An egotistical news reporter is given all of God’s powers and learns ultimate power isn’t as easy as it seems.

Groundhog Day – A jaded and selfish weatherman is trapped in a loop that forces him to live out the same day over and over again.

If you change the defining traits of those lead characters, the entire theme and story changes, even if the situation they are trapped in remains the same.

 So in high concept comedy, I’d say you can never forget this rule: Define your characters early and often

First ten pages - Horror

As I’ve said before, your first ten pages are critical. Agents, managers, readers and producers will often use the first ten pages to gauge how strong you are as a writer. If the first ten pages suck, you probably suck. Ten pages is more than enough space to convey tone, genre, themes and give the characters a good introduction.

I read a lot of bad horror scripts that start off the same – a disposable kill of a barely related supporting character. This makes a little bit of sense. In a horror film, you should establish the threat that’s out there. We need to know there’s a “shark in the water,” as it were.

But there’s more to a good horror opening than just killing a big-breasted babe in her underwear. Bad scripts start off with a throwaway kill, then introduce a new cast of characters and spend the next 25 pages just killing time until the act break. Worse, most of the time, the lead characters are so annoying I start rooting for the killer.

A good horror script doesn’t just kill a character in the first five or ten pages, it teases why this horror/thriller is different from all the others out there. Scream is brilliant because the opening establishes a unique M.O. for the killer – he calls up his victims on the phone and taunts them with movie trivia. Even before the Drew Barrymore character is killed, you know you’re reading something different.

The trick is that since the character introduced in the first scene is also usually dead by the end of that sequence, the audience needs a reason to stick around. That’s why you have to make your antagonist and his methods distinctive. In the case of a sequel, it helps to have a really inventive kill. Scream 2 doesn’t get lazy there either. While an audience watches a “Stab” movie, based on the events of the first Scream, Jada Pinkett Smith is killed in the audience and then bleeds to death standing in front of the screen. That’s a powerful image.

Tone. Genre. Craft. You don’t even need your lead characters to display those three elements. (But it doesn’t hurt.)

So if your story is about Bigfoots killing people out in the woods, make sure your opening is memorable. Don’t just have a generic kill, and don’t think that hyper-violence is the only way to get an audience’s attention. Show me the monster, and then show me why I should care what it does.

12-Step Screenwriting: Week 3 - Inciting Incident

It's time for another episode of the Bitter Script Reader YouTube series!

This is the third chapter of a 12-part series designed to guide and motivate a writer to complete a screenplay within three months.  Recognizing that I had an opportunity to reach a new audience via YouTube, I decided to start with the basics.

This week's video covers the most important elements to have in your first ten pages, leading up to the inciting incident.



As you can see, this is back-to-basics information, but hopefully some of you will take up the challenge of completing a screenplay alongside the weekly lessons in this series.  I've done my best to minimize the jargon here.  So while at some point we'll be talking things like Act Breaks and Climaxes, but I won't ask you to commit things like "Fun & Games" to memory.


As always, it really helps me out to see some engagement with these videos, so please click through to the YouTube page, Subscribe and leave a few comments there.  Feel free to embed these on your blogs, and if you find the tips useful, tweet about them or put the videos on your Facebook page.

I hope that in three months time, a lot of you will be reporting back with completed screenplays.

21 Jump Street - a lesson in economical story set-up

I've talked before about how important the first ten pages of a script are.  One of the biggest issues I seen in amateur writing is writers taking too long to get their story in motion.  A bad writer thinks he needs 30 pages to set up his premise; a good writer can explain a lot in a third of that time.

I saw 21 Jump Street this weekend, and was impressed at how much the writers packed into the first ten minutes or so.  These are the plot-points that the script blows through:

- Jonah Hill was an awkward dork in high school.  Girls didn't like him (we see one hot girl rather cruely reject him) and Channing Tatum's popular jock character often teased him.
- Tatum's character couldn't go to prom because of bad grades, leaving him as humiliated as he made Hill feel.
- After graduation, the two re-encounter each other at the police academy.  It turns out, Hill is an ace at the academic stuff while Tatum is equally gifted at the physical challenges.  The two become friends and help each other through it.
- The two are assigned to bike patrol in the park.
- After botching a drug bust, the two are reassigned to an undercover unit at 21 Jump Street.

All of that only takes about a minute of time to set up in the trailer, and to be honest, in the movie, it feels like there's not much else added into those scenes.  I could easily imagine the hack writer version of this idea dragging its feet and not arriving at the church on Jump Street until p. 25.




Hack Writer would have insisted on a full 10-minute prologue in the school, driving home the point again and again that Jonah's a nerdy outcast and that Channing's big man on campus.  Here the point is made quickly - Jonah tries to ask out a girl way out his league, she crushes him, and Channing taunts him.  We don't need three scenes of bullying, we don't need to see Channing treated as the star athlete who has girls practically throwing their panties at him.  Their characters are such understandable archetypes that the script need only suggest these aspects of their characters and let us fill in the blanks.

Ditto for the police academy scenes.  The dynamic there really is established as fast as it is in the trailer.  We don't need a whole classroom scene to show off Jonah's smarts - just have him get back an A+ grade.  Similarly, two shots of Jonah being taken down by Channing in a wrestling match easily establishes the dichotomy.  From there, all it takes is a montage of them helping each other and we're off an running.

Why is it okay to do this ADD version?  Because as important as the set-up is, it's not the point of the story.  The story is about two guys who go back to high school while undercover and find that all the rules have changed.  It's about how it affects their friendship.  It would mess with the pacing to establish them as enemies, spend a whole act making them friends, then spend most of the movie with them breaking up only to make up at the end.  We just need a hint of how they became friends so we can take it as a given, and then enjoy how the rest of the story challenges that.

So when setting up your story, trust the audience to fill in the blanks.  Brevity reigns when getting to the main hook of your story.