HELP! I need a stronger opening!

How about if...

She is on her way home from work- calls her boyfriend to let him know she'll be there soon.

Did he pick up the groceries for dinner like she asked him to? Of course not.

Fine, she'll stop at the store and get it.

At the checkout, somehow she realizes her wallet is empty. Did deadbeat take her cash? Of course he did.

Luckily, she's been flirting with the clerk and the chemistry between them is palpable. He tells her to bring in the balance the next day (another chance for the to talk).

She heads on home.

Deadbeat finds the spilled bag of groceries outside their building.

Celia - I like your version. Why wouldn't it work as the opening scene of a film? It doesn't need to take very long. And the bedroom can establish all sorts of things about their characters and relationship (She's neat, he's a slob. She's professional; he's out of work.)

She tosses and turns on the edge of the bed. She gives up, gets dressed being careful not to wake him. In the bedroom and on her way out she picks up stuff and straightens as she goes - showing that without even thinking she does all the work. He wakes up the next morning, late because she always wakes him, pissed off because she always makes breakfast. What he does next depends on just how self-centered he is.

Just thoughts - obviously you know your characters and I don't, so the details may not jive.

But look at the beginning of Four Weddings and a Funeral. It starts with Hugh Grant in bed and the alarm goes off. Works just fine.

Do we see the kidnapping? If so, if I were writing it, I'd kick off with this. Show how boring and ordinary her life is when cops question the heck out of everyone and try to figure why this woman would be kidnapped.

-Derek

Finish the script, then worry about whether or not your opening scene works.

I think "establishing" is over-rated and kills most beginnings.

Information is valuable. Save it for a scene where it has impact.

Celia

Another possibility is writing a "grabber" -- something that sucks the audience in right away. Have the movie start out with a "bang," something so unexpected it "grabs" the audience. Have the main character get killed in some horrific way or have her do something totally uncharacteristic like killing someone herself -- then, have her wake up from a dream because her loser, slow-leak boyfriend is hogging the bed. Then she gets up, needs something form the store and so on. You can start the exposition on the characters there.

Just an idea that you might run with to put some "ummph" in the first few pages. Shouldn't add much to the page count.

R

I'm in favor of her killing the dead beat or the dead beat dying in some horrific way in the dream lol. For comic value if for nothing else.

BottomlessCup said:

I think "establishing" is over-rated and kills most beginnings.

Information is valuable. Save it for a scene where it has impact.

Click to expand...

I read through all the posts in this thread and didn't see the idea of an "establishing" shot mentioned, so your post here seems ... odd. Perhaps I missed it?

But in any case, establishing shots are common as apple pie in movies and in television dramas. And why? Because we have to keep our audience oriented (unless we choose, in a given instance, to not) and if we cut from someplace to an INT. somewhere else they'll be hard pressed to know where they are if we don't "establish" the location for them.

The only information an establishing shot should convey is where we are.

As for using an establishing shot in a beginning, or opening, I reckon that would depend on how important it is that the audience know exactly where we are (they are); if that's not a consideration, and often or even usually it isn't, no establishing shot would be necessary. But it isn't too difficult to imagine beginnings that would be well served by an establishing shot and in such cases I see nothing wrong at all with including one.

Keeping track of the audience's ability to know where it is (or to not know) is screenwriter's work, a consideration that's relevant to almost any new scene, to one extent or another. In many cases it is self-explanatory of course, but one dare not not think about it while writing.

If you have a sequence that occurs in Los Angeles or Seattle and then cut to the next sequence and it begins in an office in New York City, you may need to establish that fact before you write the INT., otherwise, that office could be in Atlanta or Cheyenne or El Paso, and the audience would never know the difference. They'd probably think they were still in Los Angeles or Seattle.

Celia Cyanide said:

My problem is that I can't find a good place for the film to begin. The woman's life is rather boring before she is kidnapped. However, I need to ESTABLISH 2 things 1) she lives with her dull deadbeat boyfriend and 2) she has a big crush on the young guy who works at the grocery store across the street. Both these things are very important to the story later on.

Click to expand...

(Caps are mine.)

I meant "establishing" in terms of first-act set up stuff. I'm not sure if that's a correct usage of the word, but I see it used that way a lot online, and I've use that way myself.

A lot of writers want to use the opening scenes to give uncharged information about the characters: to establish that she's a nice girl, to establish that he can jog fast, etc.

Too often, I think these scenes are essentially blank pages. Without any attachment to the story and characters, they're boring and flat. The writer spends a page and a half giving us one sentence worth of story.

IMO, if you can give us a whole scene's worth in one sentence, write a sentence not a scene.

BottomlessCup said:

(Caps are mine.)

I meant "establishing" in terms of first-act set up stuff. I'm not sure if that's a correct usage of the word, but I see it used that way a lot online, and I've use that way myself.

A lot of writers want to use the opening scenes to give uncharged information about the characters: to establish that she's a nice girl, to establish that he can jog fast, etc.

Too often, I think these scenes are essentially blank pages. Without any attachment to the story and characters, they're boring and flat. The writer spends a page and a half giving us one sentence worth of story.

IMO, if you can give us a whole scene's worth in one sentence, write a sentence not a scene.

Click to expand...

I agree and my earlier comment was ill-founded, although rightful within itself.

Movie people don't use the word "establish" in the way it is being used here. They use it more in the sense that I discussed, which is a very real consideration in features and dramatic television.

A screenwriter doesn't need to "establish" anything, they just need to get their story rolling. Audiences want to see the story and enjoy its movie, they don't want story elements to be "established" for them. Establishing story elements or some expositional things is something that occurs subliminally for the most part and need not be overt for overt's sake, although I can see the sense of it in this discussion. Which is to say, I can see the story logic Celia was grappling with. She's trying to make her opening have logic ("story sense") and be compact, and that's indeed a desirable goal, indeed a necessary attribute of an opening. Then again, you've got the whole movie to give it sense, too.

The way I see it, you need to have her kidnapped by page 3 (4 bottom of 4 at the latest).

That gives you some time to care about her.

A phone call to her hubby would be good and having it at the supermarket would kill two birds... A wink from the cashier or a little chit chat before she goes to work.

She gets there, goes to the bathroom and Boom.

I would only hint at the things you want to establish, otherwise you run the risk of the reader thinking he/she is being spoon fed.

Let the cops (as Derek said) bring the pieces of her life together for the reader.

Hope it helps.

Celia Cyanide said:

Yeah, that's the trouble I'm having. I thought about starting with a kidnapping. That would be interesting. But if you don't even know who she is, are you really going to be bothered that she was kidnapped? If she wakes up in a strange place, are you going to be surprised when you don't understand that it isn't her house?

SYW posting coming soon...

Click to expand...

Lots of movies begin with what appear to be confusing or hard to understand events which only become clear as things unfold and the movie proceeds apace. One thing about movies, or stories in general, is that you're cool as long as by the time "THE END" rolls around everything has been made clear and there are no remaining unresolved issues or unanswered questions.

I think an audience would have empathy for a kidnap victim even if they didn't know who she was or why she was kidnapped or where she ended up. The audience knows there's miles of film yet to come and it will probably make things clear, as it had better, so they'll forgive a lack of clarity for awhile, ten or fifteen minutes even.

In the opening sequence of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" we didn't know a thing about who Indiana Jones was or what he was doing that had him running from those Indians, leaping into his plane, and flying away to make good on his escape. It was only later that we learned what the heck had been going on in that opening, the "why" of it. There was no prologue to explain what Indy was up to or who he was or what his mission was. We just saw him run and danged near get killed in the process. He could have been a mining engineer looking for uranium for all we knew in the moment.

But it was a great opening because of its high energy, nip and tuck chase, close calls, bad looking spiders, and that death dealing rolling ball.

As long as things are made clear soon after, you're cool.

And this usually occurs throughout, with next scenes "explaining" preceding ones, following sequences making sense of preceding ones, until in the end we know everything we need to know to "get it."

Cheers!

I think the idea of an opening a film at a grocery store is a great idea,very original.

Celia, I really like your opener...
Close to yours...Hot july nite, boyfriend in bed...windows open, she walks over and stares out her window ...looking toward the grocery, uhmm maybe a flashback of her meeting with the grocery store guy the previous day, she'll reflect back







kimmi can't think with this tummy ache

Do you believe in writing the first major plot point, change of direction, at approx. thirty pages?
If so, where does the actual kidnapping fit in?

Um,

I have a totally different take.
It jumped in to my head about the fourth or fifth posting.

Why not tell the story backwards?

Start with her beating the living hell out of, or having sex with the kidnapper (which ever way your story goes) and then take us back through the steps that got her there.

Celia Cyanide said:

The actual kidnapping is on page 4, as of right now. Joe suggested I should move it up to page 3. One thing I was thinking of doing was having the story start in the grocery store. She and the store clerk are flirting a little bit, and then she mentions her boyfriend. Then, you see her go home and get into bed with her boyfriend and being really uncomfortable. That would speed up the beginning, but still give all the information I want the audience to have.
What do you think of that change?

Click to expand...

Joe is more experienced than I, but moving it from page four to page three is only a minute, not much difference. Either way you've opened with three or four minutes of exciting action and some character development. What do you do with the next 25 pages of act 1, and what propels the story into act 2?