Moviemaking today is a different beast than it was 20 years ago. Storytelling has changed. None of this is news. Screenwriters everywhere (yours truly, included) write and rewrite in an attempt to grasp what “makes a movie”. This concept is clear as mud to some and completely inherent to others. However, it seems like this shift took place around the turn of the century and the problem is only going to get worse.
Take this scene for example. A man walks into a dark house. He calls out. No answer. The hardwood floor creaks as he walks across the floor. At this point the audience plays all the potential scenarios in their head. They’ve literally seen this one hundred times. THUD! A figure in dark clothes knocks him unconscious. SURPRISE! His wife planned a Birthday party for him. One step further, SURPRISE then THUD. He has a heart attack. We’ve seen it all. Audiences are so in tune to visual storytelling that by the time they’re fifteen minutes into the film, they’re already sizing up the ending. They recognize the archetypes. They see the set ups and are conditioned for the pay-offs. Much of screenwriting focuses on keeping away from cliché choices. I’m sure that as you read my “guy in a dark house” setup many of you were writing in your head how you’d do it differently. That’s good writing and we should fight cliché. However, the problem I see it is with Cliché with a capital “C”.
Individual choices are relatively easy to navigate away from cliché. The larger issue is Cliché in our main plot. I think Romantic Comedies should go away. There’s really only one ending in a Romantic Comedy… they end up together. The only variation is how far apart your characters begin and the journey that brings them together. The problem is, even if you put them on different planets, we know they will end up together. Rom Com writers continue to look for fresh ways of telling the same story, but it’s the same story. While this genre is possibly the most closed, the same holds for other genres as well.
In a crime story, the bad gets caught, or he gets away. This is an oversimplification but the point holds true. We’ve seen just about every variation. We’ve sat through the Act 1 setup, watched the story develop through Act 2 until things look their darkest and cheered our hero to victory in the third act, or commiserated as they failed, tragically.
This brings us to 20th Century vs. 21st Century films. Many writers, knowingly or unknowingly have uncovered a trick that plays with Cliché and keeps the audience invested. There are many theories and methods out there on how to structure your story. Without setting one as the way to go, or another as crap, I’d like to propose an addendum to how you write. It’s meant to work with whatever else you use in your writing process. Since, as writers we like to name things, I’ll call it the Two Movie Method .
With the last three or four screenplays I’ve written, the first half of the script rocks. They’re not perfect, but they work on many levels and the story is there. However, coming out of the back nine, the story loses steam. It became clear to me that, outside the opening and ending of your film, the most important beat in a film is the… midpoint. Your story needs to take a dramatic turn that is new, fresh and makes the second half
of your film a different movie. Others have written about this moment in their tomes on craft, but I’m not sure it’s ever been adequately expressed.
As much as we all love movies, and damn I love me the movies, television is our society’s primary source of visual stories. Television does things movies can’t (although with franchises and sequels, they’re trying). Each week we tune in to the adventures of our favorite characters. There’s very little setup needed because we already know the players. A film (think original story) has to set up the characters and setting… the world. By the midpoint, roughly an hour long television program in, we know where it’s going. That’s why we need a second episode to spin our heads out of cliché mode and disorient us just enough to turn off our brains and enjoy the ride.
The structure of this method then looks like this. We have Act 1 and Act 2 of our first story leading to the midpoint. Instead of resolution, our midpoint careens the story in an entirely new direction. This is essentially a new movie. However, because we already got our character set up in the first movie, we go straight to Act 2 of the second story followed by Act 3 which is the resolution of both stories.
This is our task as screen writers. Create a compelling what if? This presumably is resolved at the end of the film, but instead gets answered at the midpoint and the answer to the what if kicks us off in a new more urgent direction for the second half of the film. In our third act we find out how our what if and our second half plot are related in the film’s final climax. And, of course, all of this needs to be accomplished without the use of cliché or Cliché. It’s a daunting task, but not insurmountable.
