The Hook

In yesterday's Rouge Wave, my colleague PJ answered a question about hooks, catalysts and inciting incidents. I just wanted to add my two cents. First, we have to acknowledge that there are some terms that get bandied about in Hollywood and in screenwriting that are assigned different meanings. Some screenwriting books call the inciting incident the "catalyst" others call it the "call to adventure". Kids, it's the same thing: it's your page ten(ish) moment in which the world you've quickly, cinematically and compellingly set up, gets a stick in the eye. Uh oh, as PJ's mom astutely says. What's wrong? What will they do? The apple cart is upset.

In YUMA, Christian Bale's barn is burned down.
In JAWS it's on page one, actually, the night-swimmer gets chomped.
In JUNO, it's the positive pregnancy test.
In NORTH BY NORTHWEST it's Cary Grant's abduction when he's confused with the wrong guy
In RAIN MAN it's when Tom Cruise finds out his father died.
In THE SIXTH SENSE it's when Bruce Willis gets shot.
In JERRY MAGUIRE it's when Tom Cruise gets fired.
In PIRATE OF THE CARIBBEAN it's when the necklace hits the water.
In INDIANA JONES THE LAST CRUSADE it's when the archeologist says he's found the holy grail.

The hook, however, is related to the inciting incident but actually, is a stand alone term. I wrote something about the hook almost exactly one year ago on the RW and I am reprinting it here. I just don't think I can top the way I explained it before.

***

One of the first things an agent, manager or executive will ask of your material is “what’s the hook”? You may have wondered what the heck that is. The definition seems to vary by person but the upshot is that the hook is something about the script that is centrally very simple, very cool and very original. There are many different types of hooks but here are some likely suspects:

Character hook: James Bond, Shrek, Austin Powers, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Bonnie & Clyde, Psycho, Batman, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, Sexy Beast, Pulp Fiction, When Harry met Sally, Clueless. Think of this as the "you talkin' to me?" category. Movies that carry a character hook are movies in which the central character is so unique that movie-goers remember that particular character for a long time, quoting him or her, etc.

Plot hook: The 6th Sense, Identity, Gattica, Jaws, Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain, Saw, Speed, Terminator, The Island, Jurrasic Park, The Ring, Purple Rose of Cairo, 28 Days. Think of this as the "I see dead people" category. Movies that have a plot hook are movies that have a central plot or plot twist that we have literally not seen before; a giant shark terrorizes a town, two gay cowboys have a love affair, a bus that will explode if it goes under 60mph, a video tape that if you watch, you'll die 7 days later.

Cinematic and craft hooks: Memento, the Matrix, Crouching tiger, Jesus' Son, Trainspotting, Sexy Beast, Pulp Fiction, The Ring, The 5th Dimension. Think of this as the "bullet time" category. These are movies that have a really unique look or narrative methodology that we have not seen before. A stylized look, CG effects, super-saturated footage, jumps in time; but more than simply a look or a narrative style, the execution is intrinsic to telling the story. It's not frosting; it is a delivery system without which the story wouldn't be the same.

…You'll notice some titles appear under more than one category. True enough. If you can get your script to carry all three hooks? You are golden. But that's hard to do. That said, writers should strive to come up with a hook, that I can tell you. Because having a hook is golden, my friends, it will move your script from the bottom to the top of the stack, it will get you meetings and it might even get you sold.

Don’t despair if you don’t feel as if your current script has a hook. Don’t shoehorn absurd hooks into your coming-of-age drama by making the main character a Siamese twin – just to be different. Let the hook come to you in an organic way. But remember this: coming-of-age, romcom, horror, thriller, fantasy – whatever the genre is, seriously every story has already been told. So how can you set your script apart? By lending to it your unique voice and by looking for creative opportunities to make a familiar story paradigm different enough in its details to provide unique entertainment. Audiences crave that which they are familiar with – there are genre expectations without which your movie will not succeed. It’s not always the what – it’s the how.

As you work through your idea, ask yourself: when an agent, manager or executive asks you what the hook is – what will you say? If right at the moment, the answer is a fish-eye stare, that’s okay. What opportunities lie within your story to create a unique hook? You may have to cast about for awhile to find something that really works but the rewards for you and for your script can be huge; fish or cut bait, Wavers. Aspire to create a hook that will net you one big, drooling executive - and a WGA membership card.

If you enjoyed this post, follow me on Twitter or subscribe via RSS.

The Old Left Hook

By PJ McIlvaine

“Hi Julie, I noticed on your blog you mentioned requests for topics. I did a search and couldn't find anything of real great length on THE HOOK or CATALYIST moment in a script. I think it's obviously underrated and can break material before it’s even begun. " - Daniel

When Julie first asked me to write on this subject, I must admit, I had a brain fart. Staying up three nights straight to plot out a climax (on a script, people, get your minds out of the gutter) will do that to a person. As it turns out, Daniel is a pal of mine, so I e-mailed him to ask if what he meant was what I refer to as the INCITING INCIDENT, or as my good old mother exclaims while she’s watching her Lifetime movies, UH-OH!

Yep, turns out we’re all on the same page, despite all the different catch phrases. Men are from Mars, Women are from Hagen Daaz.

Well, this is my take on the HOOK and/or CATALYST issue. It can be on the first page or the twentieth, the sooner the better most say, but whatever it is, it has to be there, and it better be a good one if you expect to keep the reader turning the page. Otherwise, you might as well pen a boring book report or a methodical grocery list. It has to propel the script, to launch it---the unmistakable, uh-oh moment where you know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

It can be as simple as a woman walking into a bar ( Casablanca ); a bunch of money grubbing tourists trying to outrace each other to find that great big W in the sky (It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World); or when a shallow advertising bon vivant is mistakenly kidnapped (North By Northwest).

When we first meet Rick, the affable bar owner with a shady past, he’s going about his business, meeting and greeting patrons and just generally minding his own P&Q’s. He’s a man without a country. There’s a war going on, the world is in turmoil, but you wouldn’t know it from Rick’s stone faced demeanor. And then, out of the proverbial blue, a woman enters Rick’s Place. We don’t know who she is, where she comes from. She could’ve fallen out of the sky for all we know. But when she walks in and she and Rick lock eyes, its fireworks, it’s an earthquake, it’s an erupting volcano, and all because this beautiful woman walked into a bar. She could’ve have strolled into any bar, any place…but no, she had to walk into Rick’s.

Speaking of earthquakes, what would you do if you were driving along on a lovely afternoon and you saw a speeding car careen off a mountain road? Being the Good Samaritan that I know you are, naturally, you’d stop the car, like a half dozen others, and go attend to Jimmy Durante, broken on the rocks, about to take his last breath, and then he gasps out some nonsensical story about buried money. Everyone stares at him and go yeah, right, and I’m King Henry VIII. He dies, the police arrive, and everyone goes back in their cars and drive away. Yet the old coot’s story tugs and nags and chews and then you realize that the other cars are going faster and faster and you wonder, hmmm, what the hell are they up to? Everyone stops and tries to come to an equitable division of this still to be found money, but it becomes painfully clear that Ethel Merman isn’t going to settle for beans. Jonathan Winters and Mickey Rooney slowly back toward their vehicles and within seconds, the madcap race, the chase, which is going to destroy half of Southern California, is on. Now what if Jimmy Durante’s car hadn’t veered off the road? And what if you hadn’t stopped? It makes me sick to my stomach just to think about it.
Now we’re in Manhattan, it’s a beautiful day on Madison Avenue, and advertising exec Roger O. Thornhill, carefree, insouciant, a confirmed rake after being divorced several times, is on his way to a liquid meeting at the Plaza Hotel. Instead of gin on the rocks, Thornhill is mistaken for a spy and kidnapped and what do you know, this vain and superficial lunk eventually winds up hanging by a nose on Mr. Rushmore and getting married for what appears to be the last time. I’m getting ahead of myself. Back at the Plaza, what if the case of mistaken identity had just been an innocent mishap that only resulted in Thornhill being late to join his mother at the opera house?

I tell you what you’d have...a not very exciting movie.

And yes, there are exceptions that we can quibble about until dinosaurs roam the earth again. For example, in one black and white classic, a case could be made that the hook was when the blonde bombshell hightailed it out of town with forty thousand dollars safely tucked inside her purse. I beg to differ. I say it’s when the blonde bombshell, cold, tired and hungry, turned off the highway and got out at the Bates Motel.

Mother never had it so good.

If you enjoyed this post, follow me on Twitter or subscribe via RSS.

Tackling the Logline

Rouge Waver Mike Scherer comments: The biggest bugg-a-boo I have is creating an effective logline. Very hard. Harder than writing the actual script.

Heeeelllllllp!

Mike, you aren't alone. Many writers find loglines very challenging. I've gotten pretty good at it not only from having to write them daily for clients (not my own work, so easier, but good training) but from having attended the Writer's Boot Camp where, for the first several weeks, there was a strong focus on pithy reductions. And by that I do not mean lemon curd.

A cornerstone of my take on screenwriting - doing it, teaching it and living it - is that a writer has to use both the micro and macro view of the material at all times. Zoom in. Zoom out. Picture a person working on a vast quilt - peering closely at the stitches in their hands, glancing over three squares to the left to see how the flow of the pattern is doing, and then standing up, stepping back and, hands on hips, looking at the whole quilt. That's what writers need to be doing all the time. Zoom in. Zoom out. Micro and macro.

For many writers, the logline is something to work on after the script is already written. Cardinal sin in my book. The logline should have been the compass rose all along. But I get ahead of myself. What commonly happens is that writers get way too enmeshed in the micro page-work and write a logline like this:

A civil war vet has a failing ranch and someone threatens to cut off the water and he doesn't know what to do and then they burn down his barn and he's really upset and then he gets a proposition, to help escort a dangerous criminal to the train station on time and they'll pay him $200 but on the very first night out the criminal kills someone and he realizes he's in pretty deep and then......

Please kill me now. Just. Kill me.

How about the freaking upshot already??

A desperate man with a failing ranch gets in too deep when he accepts $200 to escort a murderous outlaw with a devoted gang to the train station on time to stand trial.

Ohhhhhh now we've boiled YUMA down to it's most entertaining essence. Few details embellish this logline, just the upshot.

And that's what readers are asked to do when they write loglines: UPSHOT PLEASE.

But a logline you are writing needs to be a little sexier than the upshot only. Not longer, just sexier. Here's the logline a reader would mostly likely jot out for YUMA:

A failing rancher escorts a dangerous criminal to the train station.

Upshot and upshot only. But the one I used as an example earlier is closer to what you the writer would write as you represent your script when submitting.

A desperate man with a failing ranch gets in too deep when he accepts $200 to escort a murderous outlaw with a devoted gang to the train station on time to stand trial.

So let's look at that logline again. Is the genre clear - yeah, rancher, outlaw, got it. Who is the antagonist? Murderous outlaw, devoted gang, got it. Ticking clock? Train station on time. Main character and flaw? Desperate man with failing ranch. Crux of the conflict? Accepts $200 to escort murderous outlaw.

So like a dragonfly in the garden, we flew over the meadow of the script and alighted only on the key moments, the brightest flowers, the UPSHOT.

In my opinion, many writers struggle with their logline for two reasons - they don't practice doing it enough (exercise to follow) and they are writing the logline AFTER they wrote the script and, the biggest, worst culprit of all - the script they are trying to logline is too dense, confusing and meandering to really have a big upshot. And that is the worst thing of all.

I recommend working on a logline (or premise, actually, in this usage, I'll 'splain momentarily) before you outline your script. Then continue to amend the logline or outline as needed. You really shouldn't write your logline AFTER the script is done. Again, the logline should have been your compass rose all along.

It's kinda like a pyramid:

Logline
Premise
Outline
Script

So yeah, it's pretty damn tough to write a logline when boiling down the essence of the script has never entered your mind until page 86.

The difference between a premise and a logline is this: A premise is simply a longer version of the logline, maybe a paragraph, that is for YOUR use, YOU the writer, as you work on your outline. The premise can and will change often as you are shaping your story. And yes, there's room for spontaneity, if you change something on your pages post outline, yes, tweak the premise and loglines to reflect that change.

So what are the components of a good logline, whether you are being a Rouge Wave ROCK STAR and writing the log and premise before writing the script or being a goofball and attempting to write them to describe a script you've already written?

A good logline should include:

The main character and his or her flaw-weakness-downfall
(Desperate man, failing ranch)

The antagonist and his or her general m.o.
(Dangerous outlaw, devoted gang, trial a no-go)

Set up
(Failing ranch, wounded pride, needs $$$ for winter)

Complication/Crux of the conflict
Gets in too deep
train on time
devoted gang

So here is a fun exercise to practice writing loglines. This is something we used to do at the Writer's Boot Camp, I forget what they called the exercise.

By the way, these can be and are, obviously, silly, guys, but this exercise has real value because you might just find a good story doing a silly exercise, but you also will be building and toning the muscles of cobbling a story together from the macro view.

Make a list of main characters and flaws/problems:

Desperate rancher
Broke, alcoholic divorcee
Greedy, lying store manager
Self-centered, washed up rock star

Now make a list of antagonists:

Cruel and shrewd divorce lawyer
Dangerous outlaw
Demonic spirit
Mentally unstable fan

Now a list of ticking clocks:

Crossing the state line before the wedding
Making it to Burning Man on time for the concert
Making it to the train on time to stand trial
Sealing the crack in the time-space continuum before Satan finds out

Now a list of set ups:

Gets drunk and sleeps with her soon-to-be brother-in law
Is too high to show up for an audition and gets kicked out of the band
Can't make payments on the ranch, water gets cut off
Escapes from hell after throwing a demonic party and rupturing the time/space continuum

And a list of the crux of conflict:

Okay, I've officially run out of steam over my coffee here - you guys can take over from here. But are you getting the point? Like those flip books when we were kids, where your animal could have the head of an ostrich and the body of a bear and the feet of an alligator? Mix and match. Mess around with jotting down these loglines components and then taking the components and writing a logline. Just do it - have fun.

In fact - the Rouge Waver who can come up with the pithiest, most entertaining, I might actually see that movie logline, using the components above wins a lifetime supply of cupcakes. Any takers?

And Mike, if you still have questions, send them to me and we'll do loglines part II, III and IV if we have to. But the upshot is this: it ain't easy, so don't beat yourself up. It takes practice and lots of it.

If you enjoyed this post, follow me on Twitter or subscribe via RSS.