Jump_Cut:
On Screenwriting

Editor's Note: Authorlink welcomes Los Angeles screenwriter and teacher Neil Flowers and his monthly column on the subject of writing for film and television. Neil's columns appears on the first of every month.

Max: Why didn’t you just kill me and get another cab driver?

Vincent: Cause you’re good. We’re in this together. Fates intertwined. Cosmic coincidence.

- Collateral (Stuart Beatiie, author)

"This three-act structure was subsequently adapted to the new theatre. . ."
—Flowers

This column marks the one-year anniversary of “Jump_Cut.”

In case you have just joined us, this seems like an appropriate time to look back and to sum up where we have come from and where we are headed.

We started by taking a look at the history of dramatic narrative in Western culture, beginning with the great Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We saw how Aristotle in his work, Poetics, the world’s first critical examination of drama, noted that the structure of Greek plays could be divided into a beginning, a middle, and an end.

This three-act structure was subsequently adapted to the new theatre that grew up in Western culture during and after the Renaissance, and was ultimately appropriated in the twentieth-century by that new-fangled technology, the movies. Right.

By examining Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and a number of feature films, such as Jim Carrey’s The Mask, Far From Heaven, and especially High Noon and Collateral, we investigated how this three-act structure is employed in various genres from slapstick comedy to Westerns to thrillers,

We have looked closely at acts one and two, including the “turn” from act I to act II and how that turn always entails a reversal in the emotional life of the protagonist.

Next we closely examined act two of High Noon and noted how it consists of a number of “interviews,” so to speak, between the hero, Will Kane (Gary Cooper) and the various townspeople he expects will help in the fight against the antagonist, Frank Miller and his gang. Everyone in Hadleyville has a reason to deny Kane, and so the tension ratchets up and up. Who will help him face these really bad guys?. Even his wife, Amy (Grace Kelly) and his ex-lover, Helen (Katy Jurado), both of whom who still love Will, nonetheless abandon him.. Finally, at the end of the second act, Kane is left to his fate alone.

In act two of Collateral, the reluctant protagonist, Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) lives a life of stasis and self-delusion, and has been doing so for 12 years. Only when he meets Vincent (Tom Cruise), a vicious hit man, is Vincent finally jolted out of his lethargy and self-deception.

The second act of Collateral is structured around a series of four external events: The murders of four of the five witnesses that Vincent is contracted to kill. The interior events--that is, the building change in Max’s consciousness--depends upon these events.

The first two murders.