[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: How does a screenwriter ruin the first 10 pages of their screenplay?
Mike Thompson, Screenwriter/Script Consultant: Well, more than ever it used to be you would get an act right, so your script would go out to the executives across town. Some executive would read it over lunch and by the end of act one, on page 25, they know whether they’re buying this script or not or advocating to their boss to buy the script or advocating to the studio to buy the script.
You’ve got 25 pages, luxurious! You can play out your whole concept, play out your character, your hero and then off on the hero’s journey they go. It’s a luxurious 25 pages.
What’s happened is with the advent of streaming, people don’t give a movie or TV show that much time. They’re sitting on their couch, they turn it on and they know within a few minutes if they’re watching this thing or not. Oftentimes it’s no, click out. The streamers are noting all of this. They know that they don’t have the luxury of 25 pages to have or 25 minutes to have their viewer try something out.
They apply that same standard to themselves. Well, you need to get me within the first 10 pages. Some people even advocate it’s down to like one to three at this point, but you have to capture their attention. You have to capture them with a concept and with something fresh, something that they haven’t seen before. You have to do it quickly.
Now the trick is you don’t want to completely blow out your beginning, middle and end. You don’t want to give away your ending. You want to be able, as writers and artists, you want to be able to slowly percolate these things and develop them and give them time. You have to be clever about how you do it and oftentimes what people do is they’ll use a flashback or they’ll use something that is a scene that’s going to be happening later and just give us a tidbit of it so that we feel and absorb the concept but now you’re going to start…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
About:
Mike Thompson is a veteran Hollywood writer/producer, perhaps best known for his feature films, Dragonfly, starring Academy Award-winner, Kevin Costner, and Love Happens, featuring Emmy-winner Jennifer Aniston. He also co-created and was a showrunner of the FOX television series, John Doe, starring Dominic Purcell, and co-wrote and produced the indie horror film, Choose, starring Academy Award-nominee, Bruce Dern. In the documentary realm, he executive produced the multi-award-winning feature, A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar, and appears as himself in the cult classic award-winner, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. In addition to his produced credits, he is uniquely distinguished for having written and sold dozens of high-profile spec scripts, pitches and teleplays to nearly every major Hollywood studio, including multiple seven-figure deals and at one point, the “highest-paying scripter deal ever” ~ Variety. He has collaborated on projects involving the likes of Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Johnny Depp, George Clooney, Will Smith, Edie Falco, Chris Pine, Michael Keaton, Richard Gere, Academy Award-winning director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump), and presently, blockbuster producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun: Maverick). Upon graduation from film school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Mike began his career at Paramount Pictures, where he worked as an assistant to Academy Award-winning producer, Scott Rudin (No Country for Old Men), and subsequently for legendary producer, Larry Gordon (Field of Dreams), who set up Mike’s very first spec script sale at Walt Disney Studios. Mike lives and works in the mountains outside of his hometown of Seattle, near the U.S. military’s decommissioned Nike “missile site” where, as a kid, he cut his teeth on his first camcorder short films, thus inspiring The Missile Site Blog.
CONNECT WITH MIKE THOMPSON
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