In Hollywood today, everyone loves talking about how audiences have smartphones glued into their hands. Our big discourse is all about how the minute-to-minute attention span of the average modern filmgoer is a warzone in which our creative aspirations are pitted against every meme and TikTok video a user’s algorithm can throw at them. What if I told you that shrinking attention spans aren’t the reason people are so easily distracted in the movie theater? What if I told you that the problem is entirely with our development process, and with the writing in particular?

Who am I, to say such things? My name is Tennyson E. Stead, and I’m a screenwriter and script doctor with a background in classical theater and executive-level film development. My body of work encompasses well over 70 screenplays, and more than half of these were page-one rewrites ghostwritten on behalf of other writers because the scripts were broken on some fundamental level. Basically, I’m the guy who gets paid to fix your movie.

Nine times out of ten, believe it or not, I wind up building a pretty fantastic relationship with the writers whose visions I’m serving… but in this blog, I’m going to teach you how to keep me the hell away from your film’s development process.

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE IS A TOOL

Like all tools, dramatic structure was invented to solve a very specific problem. If this problem isn’t solved in our writing, then we’re not using dramatic structure correctly. The problem is:

There’s a humongous difference between an audience that’s watching a performance, and an audience that’s waiting for something to happen.

Most of the issues with Hollywood’s creative development process today are tied up in the fact that most of Hollywood’s writers came from literature and journalism. In literature, a reader who wants to know what happens next will keep turning pages. Keeping that interest alive in a reader is the key to reader engagement and most writers in Hollywood today assume that the same principles apply in film and television. Modern thinking suggests that cinema is inherently less engaging than literature, and that keeping the butts in the seats is the extent to which we can hold ourselves accountable for closing that gap.

No. Not actually.

WHAT PEOPLE WATCH

Great stories on the stage and screen are made from the efforts of our characters to achieve overwhelmingly challenging goals. Most writers think of a character’s situation as the thing that makes them relatable to an audience, but you don’t watch a situation. You see a situation. What you watch is the character’s effort to create the story they actually want to be in.

Writers traffic in catharsis, and catharsis is something that happens to a character. When we build a story around the things that are happening to a character, and how those events are changing the people wrapped up in them, the audience starts waiting to see what happens next. Our characters need to be driving their stories, rather than or stories driving our characters. Our characters are defined by how they pursue their goals, rather than by how they react to circumstance. Our characters need to be setting out to do something they have no fundamental business doing, because that’s what drives the arc. Not catharsis. Evolution, in the face of impossibility.

In the beginning, our characters marshall their resources and try to set themselves up for success. When they start engaging the real risks of their endeavor, and pushing through them, they’re going to overextend themselves. Let them do it. Your collapse before the denouement comes from the fact that your character is so overextended that when their efforts fold in on them, the implosion wipes out all their relationships, all their resources, and every chance of success. Let them sit there in the wreckage until they realize that they need to change themselves to move forward… and their efforts to complete that arc and find a new way of approaching their goal become the final act of your story.

What people miss about the three-act structure, and they miss it all the time, is that the three acts are a natural byproduct of a character’s unyielding efforts to try and achieve something that’s out of their reach. If a character is going to jump across a ravine, they get a running start. They jump as high and as far as they can. When it’s not enough, they fall… and then they climb up the other side. None of these act beats should be imposed by external forces. All of it is coming from the character’s efforts to achieve their goal, because the effort is what people watch.

ACTING IS NOT REACTING

When we build a story around the things that are happening to our characters, and when we define our characters through their reactions to those events, two things happen that are very detrimental to our performances. First, obviously, we’re letting the story drive the characters instead of letting the characters drive the story. Our audience stops watching the characters, and they start waiting to see what happens next.

Secondly, we’re setting our actors up for failure in their performances. When we write a reactive beat for a character, what we’re asking that actor to do in that moment is to present the emotion, and present the tone, that makes the thing they’re reacting to feel credible in some way. We’re asking the actor to sell the story, and you can’t sell something to a room full of people without coming off inauthentic.

Loads of people in Hollywood today will tell you that “selling” is an actor’s job, and that “acting is reacting.” Acting theory tells us differently. Actors perform actions, which for the purposes of dramatic structure means that a character should always be doing their very best to drive their goal and their arc into completion. That’s the action the actor performs.

Models perform reactions. Using emotion and tone to make an idea feel credible and meaningful? That’s what modeling is! When we write a reactive beat for a character, beneath the urgency and allure of all our best creative intentions, we’ve written an advertisement.

All those people out there telling us that acting is reacting, and that this or that actor “really sold it,” are coming from a marketing background. To a hammer, as they say, everything looks like a nail. Our job, as the screenwriter, is to know better.

When you’re sitting at the table read, and when it starts feeling like the actors are acting too much, look for reactive scenework. Chances are, the actors are only doing what the script is asking them to do.

THE BYSTANDER EFFECT

For those who don’t know, the Bystander Effect is a sociological approach to understanding mob mentality. When a crowd sees a person beating another person in the street, that crowd has a tendency to support the aggressor and to dehumanize the victim. As individuals, people are likely to have empathy. As a mob, we get ugly.

Audiences are crowds, and the relationship between an actor and an audience is very much an extension of the Bystander Effect. When we see someone doing something with a lot of intent and effort, we feel compelled to watch that person. If that person is doing something reprehensible or horrific, watching them makes us feel uncomfortable… so we rationalize the action. Maybe they have a good reason. We humanize them, for the sake of our own identities as decent people.

Conversely, a person to whom horrific things are happening isn’t someone we can watch. All we can do is wait to see what happens next, and that makes us feel uncomfortable too! Coping with that discomfort, often, means coming up with reasons why that victim might deserve what’s happening to them. To make ourselves feel better, a crowd will dehumanize a passive or reactive person.

Selling the humanity of a passive or reactive character never works. To make sure that every character reads as human, we need to make sure that every actor has a strong action to play. Conflict, then, is just the naturally escalating competition that happens when more than one character is trying to achieve different goals with the very same resources. Don’t try to create conflict by dumping traumatic events on your characters, or you’ll be feeding that actor to the mob.

Why is a serial killer so appealing on film? Simply put, they’re playing an action. Why are the female victims in serial killer movies always so annoying to watch? Scream queens are playing a reaction, and they come off dehumanized as a result. Most of the time, when we feel annoyed with an actor’s performance, it’s because we can’t watch them. It’s not the actor at all. It’s the script.

LEAVE THE SELLING TO THE SALESPEOPLE

Write in service to the actors, instead of asking the actors to serve the text. Don’t build stories around the circumstances your characters are in, and don’t let the plot go looking for your protagonist. Let your character create the plot for themselves, through their relentless efforts to accomplish something that’s impossibly beyond their reach.

Literature is an art of observation. By explaining what happened to our characters, and how it affected them, and what it means, we get to reveal something about human nature. Literature is observation, strung together on threads made of theme. In a movie theater, nobody wants our observations. Reductive as this may sound, they come to watch. They want to make their own observations. If we build the story around what we see and how we see it, we deny the audience their role in the performance.

Give your actors strong actions to perform, and let those actions define the story and the world on the screen. Let all your themes, all your emotional truths, and everything else that makes this story so important live in the subtext of the action itself. Before you hand an idea to a bunch of actors, turn it inside out. Don’t ask them to express your ideas to the audience. Just give them actions to perform that make your ideas implicit. Your audience will feel compelled to watch your actors… and to the astonishment of all your peers, the cell phones shall remain in the pockets of your patrons.

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