Success story movies movie#

Ten percent of the way into your screenplay, your hero must be presented with an opportunity, which will create a new, visible desire, and will start the character on her journey. Gladiator: Maximus is offered a reward by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and he says he wants to go home. These setups pull us out of our own existence and into the captivating world the screenwriter has created.Įrin Brockovich: Erin forces Ed Masry to give her a job. Or think of Lowell Bergman’s mysterious, threatening pursuit of a story at the beginning of The Insider.

The opening 10% of your screenplay must draw the reader, and the audience, into the initial setting of the story, must reveal the everyday life your hero has been living, and must establish identification with your hero by making her sympathetic, threatened, likable, funny and/or powerful.Ĭast Away transports us into the world of a FedEx executive, shows him as likable and good at his job, and creates sympathy and worry when he must leave the woman he loves at Christmas to fly off in dangerous weather. Gladiator: Maximus, Rome’s most powerful, and most popular, general, leads his troops to victory in their final battle. As different as these two films are in style, genre, length and subject matter, both have made more than a hundred million dollars at the box office, both were among the most critically acclaimed films of 2000, and both employ the same basic plot structure.Įrin Brockovich: Erin is a broke, unemployed single mother who can’t find a job, gets hit by a car, and loses her lawsuit.

Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson. In the explanation that follows, I want to take two recent blockbusters through this entire structural process: Susannah Grant’s screenplay for Erin Brockovich and Gladiator, written by David H. (These percentages apply both to the running time of the film and the pages of your screenplay.) So what happens at the 25% point of a 90-minute comedy will be identical to what happens at the same percentage of a three-hour epic. Not only are these turning points always the same they always occupy the same positions in the story.

In a properly structured movie, the story consists of six basic stages, which are defined by five key turning points in the plot. And here’s the good news: whether you’re writing romantic comedies, suspense thrillers, historical dramas or big budget science fiction, all successful Hollywood movies follow the same basic structure.Įven if you are a novelist, speaker, marketer or attorney, understanding these turning points, and incorporating them into your stories, will strengthen your ability to enthrall your reader or audience. Plot structure simply determines the sequence of events that lead the hero toward this objective. Whether it’s Clarice Starling trying to stop Hannibal, Captain Miller Saving Private Ryan, or Billy Elliott trying to gain admission to a ballet school, all these protagonists confront overwhelming conflict in their pursuit of some visible goal.

Success story movies movie#

Though writing a successful Hollywood movie is certainly not easy, the stories for mainstream Hollywood films are all built on only three basic components: character, desire and conflict.įilm stories portray heroes who face seemingly insurmountable obstacles as they pursue compelling objectives.