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03/31/2006: One Wild Party


All right. Time to get all practical again. You're moving along through your outline, turning your little summaries of scenes into actual scenes. Here's what part of your outline might look like (for a hypothetical show):

INT. LIVING ROOM – NIGHT
The big party. Lots of guests, fancy decorations. Helene is playing hostess, but her husband Ralph is undermining her efforts by telling everyone the food is tainted. He sparks a panic that has the party in an uproar. Helene confronts Ralph about his lies, adding to the confusion. During the commotion, Jeremy corners Alice and tells her about his affair with Helene. Alice runs off crying into the arms of the caterer. Now in a towering rage, Ralph fires the caterer.

INT. HIGH SCHOOL GYM – NIGHT
Teddy and Sherman meet to talk about their plan to ruin the prom.


It all looks peachy, so you start writing. And you discover that the big living room party scene, which looked like so much fun in outline form, is clocking in at about 12 pages, or 14, or 17, dear god... It feels endless and is clearly far too long. You should've realized this was going to be a problem when you wrote the outline, but you had no idea that it was going to expand to this degree.

By the way, this phenomenon, the expanding scene, happens all the time. Even on shows where a half-dozen people have read the outline and signed off on it, the writer will often find themselves looking at a scene that simply will not end, and has too many load-bearing walls in it to just cut it all way back.

Don't panic. There's an easy solution. You're probably ahead of me on this, huh? Nest the gymnasium scene inside the living room scene. In fact, you might be able to cut back and forth between the two scenes several times -- this is intercutting. It's like stepping away from the party for some fresh air a couple times.

Now all you have to do is pick the moments of transition between the scenes. This is crucial. It can't be obvious that you're just cutting away from the party because you're afraid everyone is bored to tears by how long it is. You have to pick a significant moment, just as if this was now the end of a scene. Because, all of a sudden, it is. And it would be even better if you picked a moment that resonates with the moment of the scene you're cutting into. For example, if you cut away from the party as Ralph leans in to whisper to a guest that "Helene left the pork out all night." then you can start the Teddy/Sherman scene with Teddy saying something like "The best night ever! That's what this is gonna be!"

Then, of course, you have to find the right moment to cut back into the party to continue the scene. Maybe you go from Sherman saying "If we really can find that many live turkeys, this place is gonna be chaos!" back to the party where the guests are in turmoil. Finding these moments shouldn't seem like a chore. This is a big opportunity for you to be clever, to add humor and pace to your script. One of my favorite things is to take a moment that isn't a joke, and make it a joke via a funny transition.

When scenes are cut together like this, I generally assume that time has elapsed while the chunk of the other scene has been played out. I mean that when we return to the party scene, some time will have passed. I notice that some shows, especially soap operas, don't seem to play it this way, instead returning to the exact moment that you cut away. I don't recommend it. It will feel soapy. But, as in almost all else, you should consult your example produced scripts for guidance.

A huge benefit of the "elapsed time" version of this, of course, is that during the time we are in the gymnasium, you can imply that events escalated at the party, without having to show every little step. You can also eliminate having characters tell each other things that the audience already knows. You cut back into the party scene to see Alice's reaction to the news about Jeremy's affair without having to listen to him say a bunch of stuff the audience knows. Everything gets tighter, sharper, better.

What started out as a problem zone might actually turn into your favorite part of your spec. And the next time you write an outline, you will find yourself looking for these opportunities in advance.

Lunch: salad to which I added more canned garbanzo beans than they ever give you in a restaurant. Satisfying