Screenplay Structure - Part 1

A whopping ONE reader left a comment saying a discussion of Structure would be helpful (Thanks "T")... now most people would probably argue that one person is not enough to spark a long detailed discussion of screenplay craft... but in Shears' case, one person could be as much as 50% of my total readership... so who am I to resist those kind of overwhelming numbers. Vlad Guerrero would kill for a .500 batting average after all...

Screenplays, ALL screenplays, must be written in three acts. Are there exceptions to this rule? Yes, of course, but they are few and far between and in 99% of cases, if you can't fit your story into a three act screenplay, it's either a bad or fundamentally flawed idea, or the story would work better in some other format.., a novel or short story, for example. Truth is, you give me a movie you think occurs in more or less than three acts, and I'll bet you a can of crisco I can prove you wrong... (now if THAT doesn't generate a flood of e-mails, nothing will! :-)).

So what are these three acts... well before we get into that I'm going to steal an idea from the Libertas guys... before you start writing, you need to be able to encapsulate your idea into one sentence... what we Hollywood eggheads call a "logline." For instance, the logline for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK might read something like "An adventure-seeking Archaeologist must track down a potentially dangerous Biblical artifact before the Nazis can use it to conquer the world." That one-liner, as the Libertas guys point out, will tell you exactly how your story breaks down into three acts.

Act one is where you'll introduce your characters and let the audience know what problem he (or they) will be forced to solve. In Act Two, your hero will go about the process of actually tring to solve the problem you've presented him with. Act Two typically ends at a low point in the hero's story... a moment where all seems lost. And finally, in Act 3, the hero re-engages the problem, gets his second wind, and ultimately comes out the other side victorious... or at least having come full circle in some way. I say that because it's important to remember that every movie doesn't have to have a happy ending, but if the ending IS a downer, you are still responsible, as a writer, for giving your hero some kind of character arc that justifies the story you've just asked your audience to spend two hours watching. As a quick example, in AMERICAN BEAUTY, Kevin Spacey's character is killed at the end (bummer), but having gone through the experiences provided by that story leaves an indelible impression on the other characters which makes their lives better for having known and interacted with him (whoo-hoo!)... the ending is ultimately uplifting, even though our hero is gunned down in cold blood.

Act One generally runs anywhere from 20-35 pages, where one page equals one minute of screen time, depending on the genre. Action movies tend to be short on character development and usually come with a requirement to get right to the action or risk losing the audience... in other words, action movie audiences require a certain amount of cutting to the chase, and are willing to sacrifice deep character development for it. As a result, you'll generally see the first act of an action movie run on the short side, say 20 pages or so. Dramas like THE GODFATHER, APOCALYPSE NOW or THE KILLING FIELDS may run longer because so much more is required of the screenplay writer in setting up the story and the characters who will go through it, and where so much less of the story will need to be filled up by action sequences.

Let's look at a couple of First Act examples.

RADIERS OF THE LOST ARK - I start with RAIDERS for a couple of reasons... 1) it's flat-out one of the best movies ever made, and a textbook example of the three act structure, and 2) Spielberg and Lucas were trying to make a movie that was an homage to the classic serials they went to see at movie houses when they were kids, and as such, they added interstitial scenes which effectively break up the 3 acts for us. Back in the 40's and 50's, folks would spend all day at the movies, sometimes seeing two or three episodes in long-running serials where stories played out over months rather than hours, and audiences were expected to get up and move around, or go to the snack stand every now-and-then, and thus needed clear act breaks to tell them what was going on from one minute to the next.

Before we start, we must agree on what RAIDERS is about? To do that, let's go back to the logline I wrote earlier... "An adventure-seeking Archaeologist must track down a potentially dangerous Biblical artifact before the Nazis can use it to conquer the world." OK, so if that's our logline, what do we need to do in Act One? We need to introduce our main character Indiana Jones and the world he lives in, we need to tell the audience about this dangerous Biblical artifact, and we need to start Indy off on his journey to find it. That's it. Pretty simple right?

So how did this work out in practice... well, right off the bat they tell us with a graphic that the movie is set in 1938. We watch as a group of men make their way through an impenetrable jungle. We see Indy find a poisoned dart and we learn from his compadres that the bad guys are, at most, 3 days away. We see one of his team attempt a double cross and we watch Indy disarm a gunman with a whip. Later, Indy disarms several deadly and ingenious booby traps using an extensive knowledge of archaeology. We then meet his arch-enemy, Beloq, a proper Frenchman who, rather than getting involved in the wet work himself, prefers to show up in a white suit after Indy has done all the hard work, and steal it for himself at the last minute. We watch as Indy teaches a class, badly, and see his female students swoon over him. It's at this point that his old friend Marcus Brody shows up with the news that Army Intelligence is looking for him. In the next scene, the Army guys ask for help finding something called the headpiece to the staff of Ra, which Indy interprets to mean that the Nazis are on the verge of finding the Ark of the Covenant... Marcus then explains that accortding to legend, the Army which carries the Ark before it is invincible. Shortly thereafter, Indy begins his journey by boarding a plane for Cairo...

Now, observant viewers would have already discerned that this is the end of the First Act... but even if we hadn't done it on our own, Spielberg did us a favor by putting in a musical interlude... A flying plane is super-imposed over a map of the world which shows us Indy's forward progress. Simple, no?

JAWS is much less simple, but still doable. Again, let's start at the beginning. We need a logline... how about, "A former New York City cop has his little slice of paradise shattered when a ravenous Great White Shark begins hunting off the coast of the small island where he has been hired as Chief of Police." Given this one-liner, in the First Act, we would expect the writer to introduce us to Chief Brody, tell us where he's from and why he's in Amity now, introduce us to the danger of the shark, and ultimately, to start Brody on his journey to kill it.

The problem with JAWS is that the end of Act One is much less cut-and-dried than it is in RAIDERS. We could debate where Act One ends for hours and never come to a consensus, and the reality is that we'd all be right. The details of where EXACTLY an act ends aren't so important as long as you quickly and efficiently move through the introduction of your characters and get them started on their journey to solve them... and that you don't spend 65 pages doing it.

However, just for fun, I going to tell you that I think the First Act ends when Quint screeches his fingernails down the chalkboard and offers the citizens of Amity a choice... "ante up, or be on welfare the whole winter." At that point, we've met our hero, we know the problem he faces, and between the Mayor and Quint, he's been presented with two very clear and distinct options for moving forward with a plan to deal with the shark.

That said, I would find it perfectly acceptable if you were to say to me, "no Shears, I think the First Act officially ends when they check the belly of the Tiger Shark, find no boy in it, and Hooper says 'You got a bigger problem than that Martin, you still got a hell of a fish out there, with a mouth about THIS big'."

I would even accept the view that the First Act truly ends when the shark kills the man in the Pond and the Mayor finally writes Quint the ten thousand dollar check that send the three men out on their final shark hunt.

I'd argue like hell that you're wrong, but I'd accept it. I think, by then, you're getting way late in the story for us to still be in Act One. In my opinion, by this point in the story, Marcus has already begun his journey to eliminate the threat posed by the shark. He's put shark watchers on the beach, he has Helicopters in the air, gun boats in the water, and he's forbidden his son from taking his sailboat out on the ocean. Just because his first efforts at neutralizing the shark are unsuccessful, I'd still argue that his jouney has begun.

For more practice, here's a few more movies that I have very definite opinions on as to where the First Act ends. Take a minute and see if you can figure it out for yourself. I'll post my answers at a later date.

STAR TREK 2: THE WRATH OF KAHN
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
DIE HARD

In the meantime, happy writing, and I'll see you back here for a discussion of Act 2 in the near future.