screenplay | Matt Writes Words

Open With a Bang

There is a saying in screenwriting to “open with a bang.” I just wanted to write a bit about what this means to me as a writer and someone who has just had to read a bunch of scripts for a screenplay competition.

The first thing to note is that “open with a bang” should really be thought of as “open with a hook.” Make the audience curious. Draw them in. This can be done in a myriad of ways, so it’s great to see a writer be creative with it.

Opening with a bang does not necessarily mean that you should open with an action scene or something shocking. That’s fine, but there needs to be something interesting about it. Some of the scripts that I would read would start with an action scene that was not interesting because it read like an action set piece without context. Some character might die, but I wouldn’t care, because I don’t know any of the characters and I don’t know why they’re engaged in this piece of action. Opening with a bang does not necessarily mean to open loud.

Opening with a bang also does not have to mean opening fast. A deliberately paced opening is a great way to create a sense of mystery. It can be unusual, and that quality might be enough to suck an audience into the film’s spell. There are a few movies with long wordless openings, like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, THERE WILL BE BLOOD, and WALL-E, for example. These films don’t open with an in-your-face kind of bang, but employ different ways of sucking you in.

Each of those films also immediately state that the audience is in for an unusual experience, and is in the hands of a writer and/or director who is not afraid to make bold choices. Speaking for myself, that alone is enough to get me excited for what’s about to come, whereas a film that opens like any other film has me sitting there waiting for it to get interesting—and of course, sometimes, it never does.

Whatever “interesting” means to the writer, he or she needs to get to that immediately, because it needs to be interesting to the reader on page one. It may even be a gripping writing style that makes a reader become interested. Turn the reader on by the first page.

Another tip for screenwriters is that they need to learn how to write in a way that looks attractive on the page. It needs to be immediately clear that the screenplay will flow well. If it’s clunky, with big chunks of scene descriptions between the dialogue, it’s going to strike the reader as a challenge to wade through even before he or she starts reading. Big chunks of scene descriptions also signifies immediately to the reader that the screenwriter does not know how to edit; there is always a lot that can be cut from a chunky description. If a reader comes across a page with a lot of white space, and scene descriptions that are one or two lines long, then there is the immediate sense that this is a tight script that will read fast. That’s a good thing.

The clichéd opening of the main character waking up is a perfect example of how not to open the script. It’s very common for these scenes to be filled with dense descriptions of the character hitting “snooze” on the alarm clock, brushing their teeth, taking a shower, getting dressed, eating breakfast… It’s thoroughly un-mysterious, boring, and uninformative.

It’s worth imagining who is going to read this script. It’s probably going to be somebody who loves movies, but has had to suffer through reading many sub-par scripts, which is unavoidable for a script reader. With the opening, the writer should remind the reader why he or she loves movies.

In my opinion, the first two pages of a script are the most important part of the whole thing. Writers should show off their abilities here, in style and content. Win a reader over in the first two pages, and chances are that they will be prepared to love that script. If the opening does not wow or intrigue the reader, then the rest of the script has a lot to overcome. If the opening is terrible—bad writing, bland content—then the reader will most likely not give the rest of the script a chance.

So, writers, GRAB the attention of the reader. Open with a grab!

MARIE, Early-20s, Attractive But Doesn’t Know It

My eyes have shimmied through 140 scripts for the Austin Film Festival screenplay competition this year, and I have caught onto an undeniable fact: most screenwriters don’t know how to describe women.

Take any 5 descriptions of female characters from different screenplays, and you’ll most likely get something like this:

LISA, 30s, beautiful.
ASHLEY, late-20s, sexy and knows how to work it.
JOAN, 40s, well put together, attractive for her age.
KIMMY, 15, cute and spunky.
MARIE, early-20s, attractive but doesn’t know it.

The other wonderful quirk of screenplays is that you can assume that these are meant to be white women, because if they were black, they would be described as “African-American, attractive,” and if they were Hispanic, they’d be “a sexy, hot-tempered Latina.” Generally speaking, screenplays written for American audiences do not feature Asian people, with the exception of the old, wise Asian man, so I’m afraid I can’t tell you whether Asian women would be generally be described as “attractive,” or whether they’d be described as “cute,” but it’d probably be one of those two words (or… *shudder*… “exotic”).

Male characters are more likely to get a wider breadth of descriptions, though it’s still rare to find interesting or unique descriptions. Typical descriptions are: handsome; square-jawed; scrawny; a giant wall of muscles; scruffy; bearded; crazy-eyed; pot-bellied, and so on. There’s slightly more character to their character. There’s still the assumption that they’re supposed to be white if their ethnicity is not described.

For the screenplay competition, we are not given any information about the writer, so I can’t say for sure whether the scripts I read are written by men or women–though I can usually make a good guess based on the writing style and story content. I can say, however, that most professional screenwriters in America (according to the Writer’s Guild) are white dudes. I can definitely tell you that most directors in America are white dudes (something like 85%?).

I do think that that is a factor in why there’s not a lot of diversity in American film, but I also want to say that bad writing is something that crosses gender and ethnicity lines. A bland description is a bland description, and these bland descriptions are usually just a part of a generally bland screenplay. These writers are just writing the movies that they’ve seen before, and most of those movies that they’ve seen before are about attractive white people.

I zeroed in on character descriptions because I noticed that there was one word used over and over again to describe female characters: attractive. This word is so meaningless as a one-word descriptor in a screenplay that it’s worse than not having any description at all (no description would be perfectly fine, if instead we get a sense of her character from her actions and dialogue). It’s so meaningless that it doesn’t even serve to distinguish between female characters within the same screenplay, because you’ll have a scene where GINGER, 20s, nerdy but attractive, is talking to POLLY, 20s, punky but attractive, about what they’re going to do with the body of ROSE, 20s, dead but attractive.

The word “attractive” gives me nothing as a reader. What does that word conjure up for you? I’m not sure if it’s just me, but as I’ve been reading these scripts, I get the feeling that the word “attractive” is a signifier that this is a tall woman that we should care about, while “cute” is a short woman that we should care about, and “hot” is the woman that everybody wants to see naked, but we don’t really have to care about her. She’s the one who would die in a horror movie.

I also often come across descriptions that we wouldn’t be able to see on screen, such as: “This is HELEN, late 20s, scorching hot. She’s George’s half-sister and engaged to Marta’s wealthy father.” If this information is revealed through action and/or dialogue later in the script, then this description becomes redundant. If it’s not revealed through action and/or dialogue, then it’s information that the audience watching the film would not get. Sometimes the character is meant to be such a caricature that the audience should be able to get upon first glance exactly what this character’s deal is, but “George’s half-sister” or something like “Gregory’s fiance” is not the kind of information you get upon first glance of a character.

So, one of the many things that I’ve learned from reading these amateur scripts is to think more about how to describe characters. I’ll write a few posts from time to time about the things I’ve learned from reading screenplays, good and bad.

Matt Writes Words

Tag: screenplay

September 4, 2011

Open With a Bang

August 26, 2011

MARIE, Early-20s, Attractive But Doesn’t Know It

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