8 CLOSE - CHRISSIE 8
Her expression freezes. The water-lump is racing for her. It bolts her upright, out of the water to her hips, then slams her hard, whipping her in an upward arc of eight feet before she is jerked down to her open mouth. Another jolt to her floating hair. One hand claws the air, fingers trying to breathe, then it, too, is sucked below in a final and terrible jerking motion. HOLD on the churning froth of a baby whirl- pool until we are sure it is over
9 ANGLE - CASSIDY 9
in his undershorts, laughing, turning in slow stoned circles, a prisoner in his orange windbreaker that seems to have him in a full Nelson. He stumbles to his knees.
As we read this today, we do so with the knowledge of the story and characters. However remember, when this story was first presented the reader and the audience did not have the familiar knowledge of JAWS and were spellbound by its story and characters. Stephen Spielberg took the basic idea that was included in the screenplay and the elaborated upon it – gave it tension and a sense of irony. However, the bottom line, is this opening compels us (even today) to want to know more, want to see more and ultimately find out what happens in the end. Think about the opening first ten pages of your script as if it were a movie trailer – a compacted version of what is to come.
If you are wondering how to do this?
Think about starting your script as if it were a movie trailer.
27
LET’S GO TO THE MOVIES
The First Ten Pages
OKAY, SO WHY would I want to frontload my screenplay with all the important elements of my story in the first ten pages?
If I do that, what will there be left to tell?
And why would I want to make my wonderful screenplay into a movie trailer?
Good questions and the answer for them all is the same.
So that you hook the person reading your script and you make them want (have to) read the rest of through to the end.
Let me ask you this… what is the purpose of a movie trailer?
(Audience member: “To get you to go see the movie.”)
Right and if you think about it. They are asking you to see the movie not immediately but sometime in the near future. How do they do that?
They make you a promise through the two to three minutes they have your attention.
If you see this movie it will be
A nail-biting thriller
A horror film that will frighten you
A love story that will make you cry
And they go one step further
They take what is unknown (you haven’t seen it) and connect it to what is known that you are familiar with. We are familiar with stars, directors or Sequels (a continuation of a storyline and characters we already know).
A love story starring Brad Pitt – you may not know the story but you know Brad Pitt
A movie from Woody Allen – you may not know the story but you are familiar with Woody Allen’s work.
The Expendables 1, 2 or 3 – does it really matter what the story is? You are familiar with all of the stars in the film and you know it will be an action picture.
So a movie trailer is a market tool used to connect an audience to a particular film at some future time.
Trailers pull us in with specific sounds and music to set the mood. Hard cutting so that they show us bits and pieces here and there but never truly reveal the entire plot. In short trailers tease us… into wanting more. Wanting more…
Everybody wants more of what they like. This makes me think of one of the greatest showman that ever lived Florenz Ziegfeld – who is best known for his Ziegfeld Follies. Now remember, Ziegfeld produced at the turn of the century in America – this was a time when there was a great formality in the way people behaved and dressed. But Ziegfeld was a master at knowing what the people wanted. So he came up with an idea to feature a half naked muscle man named Eugen Sandow to pose in a G-string on the stage. He was as naked as you could get without getting arrested. Of course women of the day, flocked to see THE GREAT SANDOW and some of them were even allowed to come up on the stage and squeeze his muscles – after which they promptly fainted. Ziegfeld knew how to pull an audience in and make them stay. He knew that no mater what he did, sex would sell to audiences at that time. So that’s what he did.
Now back to our screenplays. In our first ten pages we want to do pretty much the same thing. Introduce some compelling aspects of your character and story – but never give it all away. Remember the GREAT SANDOW – just give them enough to hook them and want more. Once you have them there – they will stay until the end. Also, think about JAWS – we never see the shark. We knows something is down beneath the water but we really don’t know what. If we want to find out, we have to stay with the story and characters.
You I can’t help but think of the opening sequence of the feature film The Godfather (1972) which opens with the haunting melody of the Nino Rota Theme and then is followed with the close up on Bonesera the undertaker asking for the Godfather’s help and more specifically “justice.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIBpHO1gZgQ
Here is the opening scene written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola in script form.
INT DAY: DON’S OFFICE (SUMMER 1945)
The PARAMOUNT Logo is presented austerely over a black background. There is a moment’s hesitation, and then the simple words in white lettering:
THE GODFATHER
While this remains, we hear: “I believe in America.” Suddenly we are watching in CLOSE VIEW, AMERIGO BONASERA, a man of sixty, dressed in a black suit, on the verge of great emotion.
BONASERA
America has made my fortune.
As he speaks, THE VIEW imperceptibly begins to loosen.
BONASERA
I raised my daughter in the American fashion; I gave her freedom, but taught her never to dishonor her family. She found a boy friend, not an Italian. She went to the movies with him, stayed out late. Two months ago he took her for a drive, with another boy friend. They made her drink whiskey and then they tried to take advantage of her. She resisted; she kept her honor. So they beat her like an animal. When I went to the hospital her nose was broken, her jaw was shattered and held together by wire, and she could not even weep because of the pain.
He can barely speak; he is weeping now.
BONASERA
I went to the Police like a good American. These two boys were arrested and brought to trial. The judge sentenced them to three years in prison, and suspended the sentence. Suspended sentence! They went free that very day. I stood in the courtroom like a fool, and those bastards, they smiled at me. Then I said to my wife, for Justice, we must go to The Godfather.
By now, THE VIEW is full, and we see Don Corleone’s office in his home.
The blinds are closed, and so the room is dark, and with patterned shadows. We are watching BONASERA over the shoulder of DON CORLEONE. TOM HAGEN sits near a small table, examining some paperwork, and SONNY CORLEONE stands impatiently by the window nearest his father, sipping from a glass of wine. We can HEAR music, and the laughter and voices of many people outside.
DON CORLEONE
Bonasera, we know each other for years, but this is the first time you come to me for help. I don’t remember the last time you invited me to your house for coffee...even though our wives are friends.
BONASERA
What do you want of me? I’ll give you anything you want, but do what I ask!
DON CORLEONE
And what is that Bonasera?
BONASERA whispers into the DON’s ear.
DON CORLEONE
No. You ask for too much.
BONASERA
I ask for Justice.
DON CORLEONE
The Court gave you justice.
BONASERA
An eye for an eye!
DON CORLEONE
But your daughter is still alive.
BONASERA
Then make them suffer as she suffers. How much shall
I pay you.
Both HAGEN and SONNY react.
DON CORLEONE
You never think to protect yourself with real friends. You think it’s enough to be an American. All right, the Police protect you, there are Courts of Law, so you don’t need a friend like me. But now you come to me and say Don Corleone, you must give me justice. And you don’t ask in respect or friendship. And you don’t think to call me Godfather; instead you come to my house on the day my daughter is to be married and you ask me to do murder...for money.
BONASERA
America has been good to me...
DON CORLEONE
Then take the justice from the judge, the bitter with the sweet, Bonasera. But if you come to me with your friendship, your loyalty, then your enemies become my enemies, and then, believe me, they would fear you...
Slowly, Bonasera bows his head and murmurs.
BONASERA
Be my friend.
DON CORLEONE
Good. From me you’ll get Justice.
BONASERA
Godfather.
DON CORLEONE
Some day, and that day may never come, I would like to call upon you to do me a service in return.
Here in this one scene we are provided with a glimpse of what is to come. The scene is compelling because we are only seeing bits and pieces and want to know more – we have to know what is going to happen next.
28
INSTANT GRATIFICATION
The First Ten Pages
TELEVISION HAS CHANGED us irrevocably and we have come to expect everything we experience to happen immediately. We are not interested as much any more in the process but are more focused upon the result. We have connected instant gratification to pleasure.
Just give it to me now. I don’t want to wait. We we are not fulfilled we become stressed out, unhappy and tense. To make matters worse, we fuel our instant gratification with the help of the latest technological device. Our IPhone, Blackberry, Ipad and Cloud give us everything we need at a moment’s notice. If it takes to long, we pass on it. Think of the prologue for the Shakespeare tragedy ROMEO AND JULIET. The prologue like a movie trailer, kind of sets the audience up for what is about to happen on the stage.
PROLOGUE
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
Now take that prologue today and try to put it in front of a feature film and audiences will say the following:
Get to it!
Can you show it to me instead?
Is the rest of this play going to be like this with long speeches?
Audiences will say “Okay, great… I’m outta here!”
(Audience laughter)
They would leave the theatre because the would say, that the prologue pretty much tells them what is going to happen and now that they know that why should they stay to see it.
You see what I am saying is that the audience doesn’t care much about the process and the use of language – they are more concerned with the result and the ending. So you have to provide them with a pivotal moment but you don’t show them how it turns out.
That’s what we see in JAWS or THE GODFATHER.
So what I want to explore with you this morning is how you can take your novel or screenplay and find that pivotal moment of no return within the first ten pages of your script. A pivotal moment that will make your reader not want to put the script down. If that is the case, it won’t matter if you have a pitch session or not. They will want to read your work until the ending. They will have no choice but to do so.
We want to create that hook in the first ten pages so they can’t put it down. Not everyone will care or want to know about your story.
Yesterday, we talked about a writer who pitched a story idea (his only story idea) about the Russians landing on the moon first.
Producer: What have you got?
Writer: The Russians
Producer: What about the Russians?
Writer: They landed on the moon first.
Producer: Okay.
Writer: …and nobody knows about it!
(Brief silence)
Producer: Who cares … what else have you got?
(Audience laughter)
That was it. The pitch was over and the writer left the room broken hearted. But what we can learn from this is that not everyone is going to love what you write. But if you write a compelling first ten pages with interesting characters and plot – you stand a chance to find someone.
What key elements of character and story must you have then in these first ten pages?
You have to provide them with character as in the example of the GODFATHER.
How many of you have gone to a film and we are all an audience. In the first ten minutes you don’t have a clue as what is going on in the movie? Think about how you felt during those ten minutes – and you may have thought about leaving the movie. But then you think that you have paid for it so you stick it out. Now a reader, doesn’t have that problem. If your script bores them, they just read it a lot faster or they skim and then write their report.
Sometimes even the trailers do not connect to our interests. We sit in the movie theatre and say to ourselves. “That one looks good.” Then the next one comes one and we think “No way, Jose!”
(Audience laughter)
Or… I’ll wait for HBO. That means I won’t even stream it on pay per view for $5.99… I’ll wait for it to come out on something I already pay for.
(Audience laughter)
(Audience member raises their hand)
Yes?
(Audience member: “What do you think of the film opening for Inglorious Bastards (2009)? What do you think about the first ten minutes?”
http://vimeo.com/67348832
Yes, I think this particular opening is exactly what I am talking about. This opening on its face value is a very simple meeting between a Nazi officer and a farmer but under its surface is filled with tension and terror. It doesn’t hit you right over the head but the tension builds continually until the SS officer kills them all. Well, all except one.
With out that tension and immediacy we are doomed to disconnect. Our mind will take us somewhere else as it wanders away. We think of food (that’s what I do), what we will do later that day, things we have to do the next day -- all of it. From time to time we might reconnect to the characters and story but as time goes on even that becomes harder to do. We are all part of the instant gratification crowd. Just think about the last time your Internet connection was slow. As that small line moved across the computer screen indicating how much time was left, you felt like your brain was going to explode.
“I can’t believe this! It’s taking two minutes to download this file! Two minutes!” We become obsessed with the speed of it all and forget that we may be connecting to another machine on the other side of the world!
(Audience laughter)
…and although only a few of you sitting here today will admit that you go into one movie at a multiplex – get board, leave and go into another movie in the same theatre.
(Audience laughter)
We all do it. We as writers have to get to it sooner and make it more compelling than ever before. We do it for our audience and readers but we also do it for oursel
ves. This conference here today is not one for Dentists – we are not talking about teeth or dental hygiene… we are talking about writing. But here’s the rub.
You don’t need a degree like a dentist to call yourself a writer. Whether or not they are really a writer is not the point. The point is that they all call themselves a writer. Hollywood, is filled with bank tellers, former hairdressers and maybe even a few dentists that call themselves writers. They all have a screenplay or a book and a story that they want to tell. If they don’t have that, they have an idea… and Hollywood is filled with people that want to tell their story. In all fairness to the producers and readers, there are a lot of people trying to peddle screenplays in Hollywood. So if they act a little standoffish, please understand that’s why they feel this way. Think of this about 30,000 – 50,000 scripts are registered with the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) each year. Then there are new writers who don’t bother to register their work with the WGA that brings the numbers closer to 100,000. Out of that number only a handful – maybe fifty are ever moved into development. Now wait, I don’t want you all to get up and leave thinking if all that I am saying is true, then why bother.
However, with all of those numbers, I am telling you that you can enhance your chances to be one of those few screenplays that are put into development by making your work more inevitable. What does inevitable mean? Oxford dictionary defines it as “Certain to happen.”
You can make your script inevitable by creating interest, connection and loyalty to your idea. I am talking about loyalty beyond reason. Have you ever heard someone say… “I just love that movie… I loved it so much I want to see it again!” When someone loves something that is loyalty beyond reason. How do they get to love? They have a connection to the idea that goes beyond the ordinary, which connects, to them in an intellectual, emotional, physical or spiritual way.
Book to Screen Page 13
