Attention, Hollywood: 4 Tips On Writing The Opening Scenes Of Your Action Screenplay

Why It Matters

If your goal is to land an agent, pique the interest of a producer, or cause an actor to proclaim, "I have to play this role", you have no choice but to come out with guns blazing from Page One.

Agents, producers, actors, contest script readers -- or whomever you are lucky enough to get your script in front of -- will give you ten minutes of their time. In fact, I firmly believe they'll give you five. If you don't hook your reader in 10 pages or less, expect your 100 page masterpiece to be tossed in the trash. I would know. I've done it. Generally, if the script hasn't hooked me in the first ten pages, I'm going to speed read the rest, write up the coverage, and pick up the next script off the pile. A bad first impression sets a bias for how your reader judges the rest of your script -- and if you wrote poorly in the beginning, odds are the rest won't be much better.

Getting interest in your story is a crap shoot most of the time. Here are 4 crucial tips to improve your odds.

1. Draw Your Reader In Immediately

In today's insta-matic social media culture, our attention span for entertainment material has shrunk from hours to minutes, and possibly seconds. It makes sense -- we have access to millions of videos from our laptops, tablets, and phones -- so we judge immediately whether something is worth viewing, and if it isn't, we move on.

I believe this has begun to infect movie culture as well.

This is why.......

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