Last week we talked about beating down your protagonist–manipulation of audience emotion through them connecting to your characters. One sure way for them to connect is to have them identify with the character, and then mercilessly, relentlessly, beat them down. Many movies have done this in many ways. I showed some examples last week that […]
Dues. Gotta pay your dues to sing the blues. The lead character must pay dues. Is that true? Sympathy = Punishing Your Protagonist. Wondering how true is the truism. It’s common for movies to beat down the protagonist. It’s not done randomly. The filmmakers want us, the audience, to react to the beat down. We’re […]
Dorothy Parker founded the “hate writing, love having written” school. One of her beefs was rewriting. As every one of us knows, you can stare at a problem scene for hours and just be stuck. You know the damn script better than anyone but it doesn’t help get you to any sort of solution. You […]
This will be the first in a series of rule breakers. I love a good hell raiser and I’ll attempt to highlight a few here. By doing so I’ll likely be contradicting a ton of rules that I’ve thrown at you before. Not to try to be an asshole, but the only absolute in screenwriting […]
Here’s Part Two of famous movies with serious character arcs. I point these out not to say that the characters in each of your scripts HAVE to make such journeys, only that you should define the journey. Where does the character arc begin (Point A/ORDER), where does it change (Point P/CHAOS), and where does it […]
