Three-Act Structure

I first started writing screenplays back in the 1970s, sometimes with a collaborator and sometimes alone, and at first flew by the seat of my pants, intuitively guessing how screenplays should be structured. Working as an actor for many years, prior to producing and directing, made me more aware that the storyline and subject matter were critical to the interest of prospective readers, whether actors, producers, or financiers. For many years, I constantly read scripts and prepared for auditions, trying selfishly at first, to glean the essence of my particular character from the brief character description and additional clues layered into screenplays and teleplays by the respective screenwriters, and then to understand the character in the context of the story and the narrative. Actors, particularly those who study any form of Actor’s Studio method, have a keen sense of truth and flaws in storylines; plot devices and narrative logic began to stick out more and more apparently to me. I remember after the success of the movie Grease I was offered the young male leading role in impresario producer Alan Carr’s Can’t Stop the Music, and as much as I wanted to work in a feature film with theatrical distribution, I remember knowing at the time how utterly horrific the script was, and trusting my instincts, I passed on the offer. I was right, as Can’t Stop the Music was, according to Wikipedia, notorious for being the first winner of the Worst Picture Golden Raspberry Award, and was allegedly an inspiration for the creation of the Razzie Awards, which celebrate the worst in cinema.

As I started to attempt to branch out from acting, and embarked on writing stories and screenplays to pitch to studios, I began to understand that in the studio film world, the three-act-structure for a traditional screenplay, which dates back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, was something that every studio executive understood and adhered to. It is the language that almost all knowledgeable industry professionals and executives still speak today:

• Set up
• Confrontation
• Climax and resolution.

As I mentioned in Chapter 6, today, the requested running time by most distributors is ninety to ninety-six minutes, approximately thirty minutes per act. The old 120-page three-act model, with a thirty-page first act, a sixty-page second act, and a thirty-page third act, exists only for some art films and a few studio theatrical pictures.

Act Structure for Television Films

Since we are focusing more on independent films, rather than studio films, let’s take a look at a television example from a TV network, which mostly independent film companies develop and produce for: the SyFy channel. SyFy has historically developed many “premiere” movies per year, and their mandate has always been to capture the audience in the first teaser or prologue and throughout the first twenty minutes of the film, so all commercial elements of its films, which are almost entirely creature or disaster films, are front-loaded. All act breaks thereafter are ten minutes in length and need to end in some type of cliffhanger, again to get the audience back after the break. The eight-act structure of TV movies, presumably, was constructed purely to keep the audience from turning the channel.

The Syd Field Paradigm

In his book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, first published in 1979, Syd Field introduced his paradigm, and over-laid it onto the classic three-act structure. He articulated the notion of plot points, which he defined as “any incident, episode, or event, that hooks into the action and spins it around in another direction,” and he noticed that these plot points occurred in roughly the same place in many classic as well as contemporary films that were successful. He stated that “the plot point is a function of the main character” and “the purpose of the plot point is to move the story forward, toward the resolution” and that “it amps up the action and underscores the arc of the character.”

Field posed that the first plot point should occur at the end of act one and (in my words) is an unexpected dramatic event that has a profound effect on the main character and spins the action in a different direction. He placed the second plot point at the end of the second act, which is a powerful turnaround, setback, or reversal of fortune that propels the main character and the action toward the confrontation and resolution. He also cited what I call the second act doldrums, and to counteract the picture bogging down in a tediously long 120-page format, and a second act that was twice as long as acts one and two, he inserted the concept of a mid-point into the middle of the second act. The mid-point is a critical scene in the middle of the second act, where a revelation or turn of events can send the main character and or the story into a change of direction.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, I had written several scripts and many stories for screenplays, which I had pitched and not sold. I was implementing the three-act structure, which studios expected, and with what studio executives at the time called twists at the end of the first and second acts. Around this time, a friend of mine and I went to a weekend seminar with Syd Field, at which I also bought his book (signed by the author). I learned about his concept of plot points, which I called twists, and also his concept of a mid-point event, which I began to incorporate into the structural foundation of my scripts.

The Prologue

As discussed in Chapter 4, for the types of films that early in my producing career I was able to finance and produce, I have always traditionally used the prologue to introduce my main character, his or her franchise and/or expertise, or the former expertise of the main character whose conflicts or demons must be overcome in order to recapture the full scope of his or her ability. Clearly this is nothing new, but you’d be surprised how many scripts have been submitted to me over the years that were inexplicably poorly structured. Subsequently, the set-up was defined, as well as the antagonist, the agenda of the antagonist, and his or her conflict with the protagonist. Great set-ups also sometimes have twists that the audience doesn’t expect from central characters who are both protagonists. Two examples are in classic movies that are favorites of mine, and each has two significant central characters that must come together to defeat the antagonist: The Sting, which starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman, and Cat Ballou, which starred Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin. I’ve been asked why I don’t cite more contemporary films as references in this book and the answer is that contemporary references quickly become dated and forgotten, and classic film references should remain timeless for true students of film.

Early in The Sting, we establish the Redford character as a handsome, charming, beguiling young man who is an expert grifter (one who makes money from swindles and con games). He is faced with an opportunity to take on a notorious crime boss. He needs the help of a great con man, played by Paul Newman, who is in hiding from the FBI. However, our introduction to Newman is not what we expect. When Redford first enters Newman’s room, we hear snoring from an unseen source and find Newman has passed out so drunk that he has fallen behind the bed between the wall and the mattress. Newman’s character, in order to recapture his former ability as one of the greatest con men of all time, and to seize on the opportunity to pull off an elaborate con known as “the wire,” must reluctantly agree to rehabilitate for the sake of the con.

In the movie Cat Ballou, a wealthy developer in the old west covets the ranch of Jane Fonda’s character’s father and hires a gunslinger to threaten him. She seeks the help of legendary gun fighter, Kid Shelleen, played by the great Lee Marvin (who won an Oscar for this performance), to protect her father. However, when we’re introduced to Kid Shelleen he is so drunk and so shaky that his ability to be an effective gunslinger has dissipated to the point of being a laughingstock. There is a great turning point that I often refer to when talking to writers who are developing scripts for me that I call the Kid Shelleen moment. Marvin, as Kid Shelleen, pulls out an old trunk from under his bed that contains his clothing and gun belt from his former glory days and decides proactively to rehabilitate himself and face down the nefarious gunslinger.

Entrance and Exit of Major Characters

Many years ago, as an actor, I co-starred in the period piece Death Hunt with the iconic Charles Bronson and the legendary Lee Marvin. Lee Marvin constantly reminded me that the two most important scenes in an actor’s character’s screen life were the character’s entrance and the character’s exit. Marvin contended that the entrance should always make an indelible first impression on the audience and that the exit should make that character enduringly memorable to an audience. In Death Hunt, Lee Marvin played a crusty old Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman (RCMP), and I played a young Mountie who had just graduated from the RCMP academy, who was assigned to Marvin’s outpost in the remote northern Canadian wilderness. Although a Mountie would never have traveled on horseback in his red dress tunic, Marvin was insistent that I wear that emblematic red tunic so that I could be seen from a great distance as I was riding on horseback into the small town, receiving disdainful glances from the rugged trappers in their drab environment. This visual was an indelible first impression for the audience and also for Lee Marvin’s character, whom after years in the primitive wilderness, had a disdain for conventional order, bureaucracy, and dress codes. The red tunic, explained Marvin, was an iconic image that that every audience member, even younger ones who had seen Dudley Do-Right cartoons, would immediately recognize, and as a sharp contrast to all of the other bleak and de-saturated colors in the film, would add to the memorable and dramatic impact of my entrance. He was right.

Scenes

Unfortunately, writers often create scenes to fill screen time that are meaningless to the evolution of the story or plot, are redundant, and/or they lack new information that gives the scene purpose either for the audience, the central character, or both. A general rule of thumb that I’ve always tried to adhere to is that scenes should run no longer than three to four pages for several reasons. Audiences, particularly in today’s fast food mentality with limited attention spans, generally lose interest quickly and need new stimuli or information. A practical production reason is scheduling, particularly in independent films, where sometimes eight to ten pages are shot in one day, and manageable scene length makes them practicable in terms of coverage (different camera angles of the same scene, which give the director multiple editorial choices when assembling the scene) for the director and cinematographer, and manageable in terms of scheduling for the line producer and director.

Longer scenes are generally broken up by a director who will often have actors exit a room or locale and enter a new locale to continue the scene just to make things more visually fresh and stimulating for an audience. As with everything in life, and everything we’re discussing in this book, there are always anomalies. A classic case in point where length of scene was totally irrelevant because it was so electrifying and compelling is the opening scene of Inglorious Basterds, where Christoph Waltz as a Nazi SS officer interrogates a man suspected of harboring a family of Jews. This scene was exceedingly long but still able to capture and hold the attention of the audience with amazing sustained dramatic tension, fabulous performances, and an internal pace of the scene that keeps the audience riveted.

Word of Mouth Scenes

Almost all successful films, based on successful scripts, contain what I call a word of mouth scene, which is a scene that is either so outrageous, exhilarating, or emotionally affecting that audiences and the press talk about it and tell their friends that they “have to see it.”

The word of mouth scene in Cat Ballou was a sequence where not only was Lee Marvin drunk but his horse was drunk. This fabulous stunt horse was cross legged, leaning against the side of a building with Lee Marvin equally drunk leaning over, inebriated in the saddle. All audiences and the press talked about was the drunken horse.

In the movie Bridesmaids, the word of mouth scene clearly was when the bridesmaids all ate the tainted food and went to try on wedding dresses resulting in a series of hilarious scatological faux pas and Maya Rudolph stopping in the middle of the street to relieve herself while wearing a bridesmaid’s dress.

In the movie Ghost with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, the word of mouth scene was him appearing in ghostly apparition behind her as she sculpted on a clay wheel with the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” playing over the scene. It was sexy, romantic, emotional, poignant, sentimental, and highlighted by fantastic music.

In Gone with the Wind, the word of mouth scene was Clark Gable as Rhett Butler telling Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara, “Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” This was not only a word of mouth scene because the character of Rhett Butler has evolved to the point that he no longer succumbs to the wiles and mercurial whims of Scarlett O’Hara, but also the use of the word “damn” on screen was scandalous in its day.

In the film Star Wars the word of mouth scene was when Darth Vader tells Luke Skywalker, “I am your father.”

In the movie Chinatown, the word of mouth scene is Faye Dunaway’s character’s revelation to Jack Nicholson’s character that the young girl she is being questioned about is both her sister and her daughter, revealing that she was raped by her father, played by John Houston.

On television these days, such as in the mega-budgeted SHOWTIME, Starz, and HBO limited series, it is the unexpected demise of key core characters, which in years past would always survive because they were critical to the perceived satisfaction of audiences but which are now routinely killed off in unexpected and dramatic ways, irrespective of their seeming critical importance to the series and its ongoing storyline. This unorthodoxy creates seasonal strings of word of mouth scenes as favorite characters from Downton Abbey to Game of Thrones are murdered or meet an untimely demise in an accident.

Word of mouth scenes can be humorous, devastating, poignant, revela-tory, or they can be simply physical and visual. I prefer to leave it to the responsibility of the writer to create something that is eternally impactful from a creative writing standpoint rather than a word of mouth scene emanating from an actress exposing her breasts, as with Hallie Barrie in Swordfish or Amanda Peet in a film I executive-produced and financed, The Whole Nine Yards. (The shot of Peet’s breasts potentially cost the film $10 million in lost box office revenue because it moved the picture from a PG-13 rating to an R rating, thus restricting a large faction of the audience that may have otherwise seen the movie.)

Memorable Lines

Sometimes by the design of good writing, sometimes by accident, sometimes simply by fortuitous timing, and sometimes due to an actor’s improvisation, a line in a film may resonate with an audience and become enduringly iconic. As a society, we quote film lines, both in context and out of context, and so many have become part of our cultural vernacular. Here are some examples of some of my favorite classic film lines that evolved from key moments in movies and often within word of mouth scenes:

• Jerry Maguire actually had several: When Renée Zellweger says, “You had me at hello”; when Cuba Gooding Junior says, “Show me the money!”; when Tom Cruise says, “Help me help you”; and also when he says, “You complete me.”
• The Terminator, when Arnold Schwarzenegger says, “I’ll be back.”
• The Wizard of Oz, when Judy Garland says, “There’s no place like home” and “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
• The Godfather, when Don Corleone says, “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
• Mean Streets, when Robert De Niro says, “You talking to me?”
• When Harry Met Sally, when Estelle Reiner says, “I’ll have what she’s having!”
• Apocalypse Now, when Robert Duvall says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
• Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, when Darth Vader says, “I am your father.”
• A Few Good Men, when Jack Nicholson says, “You can’t handle the truth.”
• On the Waterfront, when Marlon Brando says, “I could’ve been a contender.”
• Sudden Impact, when Clint Eastwood says, “Go ahead, make my day.”
• Silence of the Lambs, when Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter says, “I’m having an old friend for dinner.”
• Love Story, when Ally McGraw says, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
• The Sixth Sense, when Haley Joel Osment says, “I see dead people.”
• A League of Their Own, when Tom Hanks says, “There’s no crying in baseball!”
• Apollo 13, when Tom Hanks says, “Houston, we have a problem.”
• The Shining, when Jack Nicholson says, “Here’s Johnny!”
• Forrest Gump, which had so many memorable one-liners: when Tom Hanks says, “Life is like a box of chocolates,” “Mama says, stupid is as stupid does,” and when Robin Wright says, “Run, Forrest, run!”
• Cool Hand Luke, when Strother Martin says, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
• Dirty Harry, when Clint Eastwood says, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

Plant and Pay-Off

In structuring a word of mouth scene, the event of the scene and how the event is revealed is critical. The event needs to evolve organically or it will feel contrived and manufactured. The event should be planted earlier in the screenplay at least once so there is the aha moment as the audience has the self-satisfaction of piecing together from the previous clues, which helps to embellish the impact of the event and helps to create that memorable word of mouth scene.

Exposition

Exposition is essentially the explanation of something, which in a screenplay could be the backstory of the plot, the backstory of a character, or the thoughts, feelings, and/or expertise of a character, and it can be accomplished in a number of ways. Bad exposition is dialogue where actors are forced to explain the plot, their motives, the backstory of their character or another character, who they are, what they do, and/or why. Soap operas essentially rely heavily on (usually bad) exposition, not only because of the limits of interior taped shows, but to fill broadcast time of thirty to sixty minutes each day. Consequently in today’s castings for soap operas, many British and Australian actors are hired, since excessive dialogue and bad exposition seemingly sounds better and are less cheesy with an accent.

The old adage has always been “see it or say it.” Seeing a character do something in a film is often stronger than words. Definitive action or reaction immediately defines the strengths, weakness, ability, or inability of a character in a given circumstance. If we’ve seen a character in action accomplish or fail at something, it’s rarely necessary to essentially repeat the same beat by duplicatively saying it verbally. Often it’s the space between the lines that gives the most depth and breadth to a character. By this I mean it’s often what a character doesn’t say rather than what they do say that can be the most pithy and impactful and certainly contemplative for an audience. If one character says to another, “I love you” or “I’m going to kill you,” the audience is waiting to see how the other character is going to respond. A non-verbal response or an emotional reaction, even if it’s an enigmatic one, can sometimes be more interesting and compelling to an audience as it keeps them guessing about what’s going to happen next, rather than belaboring something with exposition.