Screenwriting 101 — Finishing The Damn Thing

It’s interesting that the two screenplays you’ve finished were for classes. Maybe what you need is a deadline. Before I was a screenwriter with dozens of unproduced screenplays I was a playwright with dozens of unproduced plays, plays that no one wanted to read but which I had to write anyway. Since I knew no one was interested in reading them, I had to create my own deadline or else I would never finish them. So I would set a completely arbitrary deadline, say, six weeks, from beginning to end, and I would write toward that deadline, and I would stick to it.

But maybe deadline is not your problem. If your screenplay gets tied up in insoluble knots at the top of Act III, it may be because you didn’t plot it out well enough ahead of time. This is where treatments come in handy. They take a lot less time to write and they reduce the stress of writing the actual screenplay. If you’ve plotted the whole thing out ahead of time, the screenplay should be a simple filling in of the blanks.

I see that you have “about 100 different little ideas for themes, or characters or scenes.” What about story? David Lynch once said that writing a screenplay is easy, you just jot down ideas for scenes on notecards, and when you have 70 of those, you’ve got a feature. Well, David Lynch is one of the most imaginative, creative artists of our time but in this regard he is full of shit. You need a solid story before you start writing your screenplay, otherwise you are wasting your time, your screenplay will become a tangled mess by the end of Act II, justwhen it should be turning into an unstoppable dramatic juggernaut.

In fact, maybe it’s the second-act break that you’re getting stuck on. By the end Act II, the entire “problem” of the screenplay should be in complete focus and honed to its irreducible point. By the end of Act II, the protagonist should know who he is, what’s going on and where he needs to go to get to the ending, and then Act III should be how he gets there (whether he arrives at his goal or not is a different matter). At the end of Act II, Dr. Kimble has identified the one-armed man. At the end of Act II, the killer Brad Pitt’s been chasing suddenly turns himself in to the police. At the end of Act II, Clarice has her final confrontation with Lecter and he gives her the clue she needs to solve the case. If you’re arriving at the end of Act II and your script is suddenly falling apart, you may be structuring your acts wrong.

If you know how your second act ends but you don’t know what happens afterward, think of what you want the ending to be and write that. I do this all the time; there will be big spot in the script where I don’t know what’s supposed to happen, and instead of giving up I just type a row of X’s and skip to the next place where I know what’s supposed to happen. Or else write what we in Hollywood call “the bad version,” just the dumbest, most cliched version of events you can think of. Then at least you’ve got something written down and you can finish the thing and then go back, read it as a complete thing instead of a broken idea, and set about fixing it.

One thing I know: all writing is re-writing. If you don’t like re-writing you should not write screenplays. Early on in my career I had the good fortune to have a conversation with Scott Frank.  I had just finished working on Curtain Call and he had just finished working on, I believe, Saving Private Ryan (I know, I know, he didn’t get a credit — this is the life we’ve chosen).  I was carping about how often the producer of Curtain Call had made me endlessly re-write scenes and all I wanted was to have the damn thing done, and Scott said “Gee, that’s weird, I have the exact opposite problem, my scripts are always going into production before I feel like I’m done with them, I’ll see the movie in the theater and think ‘Man, if they had only given me one more day with that scene, I could’ve really made it sing.'”  And he’s right — you have to enjoy the whole process and look forward to working on the script more.

Hope this helps.