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Act One

Every episode covering Act One.

"This screenplay is incredible at setting goals that the audience understands so clearly and so quickly and they’re all related to survival."

— Chas Fisher  |  DZ-2: Do the Screenplay Gurus score big at the Box Office?

KEY IDEAS

Balancing First Act Pacing and Exposition

"I think the two, I wouldn't even necessarily call them problems because I think they are part of the process. But I think the two main things that I find when I hit the end of my first drafts is getting a first act that balances pacing with information. That to me is kind of a hard problem."

— Stu Willis (01:31:32) · DZ-106: How do you know if you have enough story?

Setting Immediate, Understandable Stakes

"This screenplay is incredible at setting goals that the audience understands so clearly and so quickly and they're all related to survival."

— Chas Fisher (00:26:54) · DZ-2: Do the Screenplay Gurus score big at the Box Office?

DZ-44: Marvel - First Acts and Establishing Characters

How can your first act effectively establish your character journey?
AI✦Stu and Chas break down how three MCU origin films structure their first acts to establish character wounds and flaws, treating the opening sequence as a repeatable schema across the franchise.✦
⏱ 2h 7m
17 SEP 2017
Listen if your first act exposition feels clunky--the MCU has a schema for burying backstory inside character introductions.
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First Acts are hard. They have to set so much in motion, especially setting up characters. To help them understand how to write effective first acts better, Stu and Chas turn their analytical gaze to a franchise that has been refining and reiterating its first act “schema” for over a decade... THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE… →

DZ-95: Backmatter - Building and Maintenance

How do you maintain hope in the face of, er, screenwriting
AI✦Chas and Stu discuss the ostensible shortening of first acts as a contemporary structural trend worth examining.✦
⏱ 1h 16m
31 DEC 2022
Listen listen to hear why first acts keep shrinking--and whether yours should too
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Time for our annual backmatter episode, where we drop any ruse of any objectivity, and fully embrace our subjective opinions… →

DZ-24: Forging story rules in TV pilots

Are your story rules in your pilot strong enough to play out over the life of your show?
AI✦The episode focuses on how pilots establish the rules and world of a show, and Grant Nebel walks through the opening act of these seminal series to show what groundwork must be laid before the dramatic engine kicks in.✦
⏱ 2h 5m
4 AUG 2015
Listen if you wanna know great television pilots establish the dramatic, literary, and cinematic rules that sustain their entire run.
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Stu and Chas move away from the world of features and dive into the Pilot Episodes of some (New) Golden Age Television: THE SHIELD, THE WIRE, BREAKING BAD, and MAD MEN. And we sneak in some discussion about ANGEL, THE SOPRANOS and GAME OF THRONES… →

DZ-2: Do the Screenplay Gurus score big at the Box Office?

Do the biggest original films of 2013 follow more archetypal - or formulaic - structures?
AI✦The episode interrogates where Act One actually ends in both films, with particular attention to whether the threshold crossing is the tether in Gravity or Anna’s departure in Frozen, and what gets compressed into those opening sequences.✦
⏱ 1h 33m
17 MAR 2014
Listen if you need to know which guru frameworks actually deliver in Act Three.
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Part 2 of our Screenplay Gurus series takes the same lens from Part 1 — Vogler, Snyder and Hauge — and points it at the two highest-grossing original films of 2013: GRAVITY and FROZEN. No franchise, no sequel. Just the two films that audiences went to see in the biggest numbers that year, and the question of what their scripts actually look like when you run them against the guru formulas… →