By now, you’ve probably heard the supposed mandate from streamers, specifically Netflix, that filmmakers and writers need to continually keep the audience engaged by repeating plot points and reexplaining the story frequently. At least according to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. (For what it’s worth, Netflix execs later refuted those claims and said there was “no such principle” in play during their development process.)
But it’s true, to some degree, that attention spans are shrinking, and people commonly multitask while watching TV or films at home. Or sometimes even, God forbid, in the theaters. (Put your phones away!)
I know I’ve been in the audience at some screenings when you can actually feel when people are engaged and when they check out. How can we, as writers, try to ensure that you have the audience as hooked as possible? Writer Ron Mita has some advice for us today, via Film Courage.
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His Five-Minute Rule
Mita wrote movies like S.W.A.T., Robots, and 24 Hours to Live. Working across a few genres, he’s found one rule that helps him keep focus as a writer.
His rule is to ensure the story progresses at least every few minutes, which would be roughly five pages.
“I feel that your story needs to move forward every five minutes. It needs to progress with new information. It could be very subtle information, or it could be big news, but the story needs to progress."
This doesn’t mean you need a big twist every page or anything. Just look at your pages and consider whether characters have accomplished anything or the plot has significantly changed in about that time frame. Did a character learn something new? Did they face an obstacle? What was the outcome of facing that obstacle? Do they have to pivot to try something new? Those are all things that advance the plot.
Withholding vs. Stalling
Again, using this rule doesn’t mean you’re spoon-feeding the audience every five minutes (which is how many interpreted that supposed Netflix mandate). You don’t need to tell the audience everything or rehash the plot points. If you’re writing a mystery, for example, you’d want to do the exact opposite.
Mita says, "I have no problem withholding. I still think you can move the story forward with new information. You don't have to give out every detail.”
He adds that he doesn’t want the audience to know more than the characters do. An audience member can’t know what’s behind every door, or whether every gun is loaded, in a story.
Withholding those details involves teasing the audience. You can hint at what’s behind the door. The audience might think they understand or know something, and then you use a reversal to pull the rug out from under them.
Stalling usually happens in long dialogue scenes. Some writers will use conversation to pad pages. They can move well and even be fun, but as a story unit, they might not do much. Be aware of those scenes, and cut your dialogue down if you need to. Be a ruthless editor. (Also know that long dialogue scenes are daunting on shoot days.)
You should ask yourself one question at the end of every scene: Are things different for the character than they were when the scene started? Do they have new information, or have they been sent in a new direction? If nothing has changed for the character, the scene needs to be rewritten.
'A Quiet Place' Credit: Paramount Pictures
Long Isn’t Slow, and Short Isn’t Fast
There is plenty of discourse within the writing community about how long your feature screenplay “should” be. Film school will tell you that in three-act structure, you give about 30 pages to each act and end up somewhere around 90 pages. Some in the entertainment industry will tell you that you should never send out anything shorter than 100 pages.
Mita says, "If you start to come in under 95, I'm a little nervous that your story is moving way too fast, and probably you're flying through the second act. The second act is the hardest act."
So, what’s the right answer?
Whatever it is will be totally dependent on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re doing a self-funded indie feature, no one can tell you that you have to have a 100-page script. If you’re working with less dialogue, you might have an extremely short script (as was the case with A Quiet Place or All Is Lost).
On the other end, many scripts across eras are super long, and the movies are long too. (The Odyssey, anyone?) Scripts can balloon to 200 pages. But they might not feel that long, or move slowly, if they’re well-written.
Do look at your second act. Do think about structure. But maybe don’t worry so much about reaching an arbitrary page count just to satisfy an imaginary reader. Just make sure to tell the best version of the story you want to tell.
What to Avoid as You Revise
Mita is open about how his pitch for S.W.A.T. was not the movie that was eventually made. He wanted a movie that turned on the Act One break, at which point LA becomes a war zone. The studio moved that turn to the midpoint.
"It's my movie, but it's not the way I plotted it out. It's not the way we designed it. We said this film should be go, go, go, from 30 minutes on."
It might be easy to understand why the studio would ask for that move, because a midpoint like that does reframe the rest of the narrative in a way midpoint reversals often do. But it does make for a much different film.
Mita advises watching out in the rewrite and development process for notes that shuffle story beats around without really understanding why. You need to have solid plant and payoff. When you take notes on a draft of your own and do rewrites, you need to reread the whole thing. You don’t want to break threads and leave plot holes gaping.
