Pat Higgins and Jinx Media

When I run Write a Movie in 30 Days, which is my travelling screenwriting seminar/workshop, I encourage writers to break their fledgling ideas down into 40 ‘Bits of Business’. I hesitate to use the word ‘scenes’ since people tend to take that very literally, and a bit of business might be three or four very short scenes or just a single one. The bit of business is a beat. A clear moment in the narrative.

I’ve always been fascinated by the first bit of business in any given script. Blake Snyder refers to this moment as the ‘opening image’.

I call it The Promise.

The very first thing that you present your audience with is exactly that; a promise about what the film is going to be. It’s a reassurance that their expectations of genre and tone will be met, and plants ideas about the turns of the narrative ahead.

A few of my favourite promises sit below:

BACK TO THE FUTURE: Ok, so we start off with endless ticking clocks just to slam home that this is a movie about time but then here’s my favourite bit: Marty is going to be late for school because Doc has set all the clocks incorrectly. This is a time-travel movie about fixing problems caused by mistakes in time that actually starts, on a much more mundane level, with a character trying to fix a problem caused by a mistake in time. This is what you call seriously embedding the theme, folks.

BLADE RUNNER: Man, that shot of the eye. Is there anything more simultaneously human and inhuman than the human eye? It looks NOTHING like the rest of the human body. It’s weirdly intimate, and looks almost manufactured (all those threads around the pupil? I have no idea what they’re called but they look like a pulley system). And the eye is plot-relevant in the world of Blade Runner: it’s the only way of telling human from replicant. So we have a human/inhuman central image that has a bearing on the plot and then reflected in that we have imagery that sets up the environment (urban futuristic), the genre (science fiction) and even the tone and content (those sudden plumes of fire suggest the violence to come, surely?). There’s so much being promised here, and the film delivers on all of it.

MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN: Our pre-credits promise, showing the three wise men turning up in the wrong stable and mistaking the infant Brian for Christ, sets up just about everything that the movie will concern itself with. The whole ‘mistaken messiah identity’ thing will drive the whole latter part of the film and here it’s presented in perfect miniature, even going so far as to have the previously worshipped Brian being completely abandoned to violence shortly afterwards. The tone, the style of human and the narrative itself are all very clearly signposted. After watching this promise, there’s no chance that you could argue that you had no idea what you were letting yourself in for.

One of the reasons that so many horror movies start with flashforwards or flashbacks (either a glimpse into something that happens later in the narrative or, more usually, a look at a previous incident involving our main antagonist) is so a promise can be made effectively (YES! You’re in the right movie! There WILL be bloodshed coming along later!) whilst keeping the narrative powder dry to allow some character development in the first act proper before delivering on those genre expectations.

The promise in SCREAM is another beautiful ‘whole movie in a nutshell’ set-up (Yes, you’ll see horror tropes! Yes, you’ll see discussion of those horror tropes! Yes, what you’re about to see will fit within those genre expectations whilst commenting on them and subverting them!) and the promises for each successive sequel are fascinating riffs upon those expectations.

The most obvious promise I ever wrote was for KILLERKILLER, which started with a classic slasher set-up (babysitter all alone in the house, takes impromptu shower for no particular reason whilst masked maniac lurks in the background) and then subverted it (babysitter produces two massive knives and slices maniac to pieces). It established exactly what we were going to do with the movie (serial killers get picked off by a mysterious unkillable woman who looks like a typical slasher film victim) but possibly did it a bit too effectively; I’m not sure that any of the various set-ups that followed built significantly upon that opening. When the disc skipped in a festival screening of the movie, missing out much of that cold open and going straight into the credits, I felt a blind rush of panic (“But that’s the best bit!”) which left me worrying that I’d miscalculated. After all, the opening few minutes should never be the best bit. Maybe that particular promise had been so keen to deliver that I’d left nothing back for the main feature.

POWERTOOL CHEERLEADERS VS THE BOYBAND OF THE SCREECHING DEAD takes its promise seriously, too. We open with a song (yes, this is a musical) in which our lead Emily directly addresses the audience (yes, we play with meta stuff) and pretty much lists various things that are going to happen (“there will be spinning blades and spinning babes, try not to lose your head…”) whilst acknowledging that some audience members will nope out as soon as they realise it’s a musical (“Will you watch five, turn and flee?”). In the script she gets doused in blood during the number, but we ended up shooting it dry for various tech and organisational reasons.

So the promise needs to establish tone, genre and narrative and it needs to do it quickly. More so than ever in this streaming age, where a miscalculated promise will lead to an audience clicking something else, we need to construct our promises carefully.

And keep them.