Writing Act III: Essential Elements & Useful Tricks
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Writing Act III: Essential Elements & Useful Tricks
This week’s post runs through the elements of Act III, with links to expanded breakdowns of those elements!
THE THREE-PART ACT THREE:
Act III is very often divided into two major sequences, and a third, shorter, but important sequence or scene:
1. Getting there (STORMING THE CASTLE)
2. The FINAL BATTLE itself
3. The RESOLUTION and NEW WAY OF LIFE
But you don’t want to drag it out! Keep in mind:
The essence of a third act is the final showdown between protagonist and antagonist.
And the act should move quickly to that Final Battle. By the end of the second act, pretty much everything has been set up that we need to know — particularly who the antagonist is, which sometimes we haven’t known, or have been wrong about, until it’s revealed at the second act climax.
There is often a new, FINAL PLAN that the hero/ine makes that takes into account the new information and revelations. As always with a plan, it’s good to spell it out.
We very often have gotten a sobering or terrifying glimpse of the TRUE NATURE OF THE ANTAGONIST — a great example of that kind of “Nature of the Antagonist” scene is in **Chinatown, in that “My sister, my daughter” scene in which Jake is slapping Evelyn and he learns the truth about her abusive father. (Obviously, it says a lot about Jake, too.)
STORMING THE CASTLE
There’s a locational aspect to the third act: the Final Battle will often take place in a completely different setting than the rest of the film or novel. In fact, half of the third act can be, and often is, just getting to the site of the final showdown.
One of the most archetypal examples of this in movie history is the Storming the Castle scene in *The Wizard of Oz, where, led by an escaped Toto, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion scale the cliff, scope out the vast armies of the witch (“Yo Ee O”), and tussle with three stragglers to steal their uniforms and march in through the drawbridge of the castle with the rest of the army (an example of a PLAN BY ALLIES).
The Princess Bride also has a literal Storming the Castle scene, with the Billy Crystal and Carol Kane characters waving our team off shouting, “Have fun storming the castle!”
Read more on STORMING THE CASTLE here.
A sequence like this, and the similar ones in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, can have a lot of the elements we discussed about the first half of the story: a PLAN, ASSEMBLING THE TEAM, ASSEMBLING TOOLS AND DISGUISES, TRAINING OR REHEARSAL - but this time in brief.
And of course speed is often a factor — there’s maybe a TICKING CLOCK, so our hero/ine has to race to get there in time to —save the innocent victim from the killer, save their kidnapped child from the kidnapper, stop the loved one from getting on that plane to Bermuda….
NO. DO NOT WRITE THAT LAST ONE.
Most clichéd film ending ever. This is in fact the most despised romantic comedy cliché on just about every “Romantic Comedy Clichés” website out there.
But when you think about it, the first two examples are equally clichéd. Sometimes there’s a fine line between clichéd and archetypal. You have to find how to elevate —or deepen — the clichéd to something archetypal.
I think that understanding the concept of the antagonist’s CASTLE helps a lot.
Putting the final showdown on the villain’s turf means the villain has home-court advantage. The hero/ine has the extra burden of being a fish out of water in unfamiliar territory (mixing a metaphor to make it painfully clear).
TEAM BATTLE
In most stories, there is a Team Battle Setpiece before the Final Battle.
The TEAM BATTLE is generally a big, noisy SETPIECE scene.
The allies get to shine in this one. Their strengths and weaknesses are tested, PLANTS are paid off, and allies who have been at each other’s throats for the whole story suddenly reconcile and work together. We also often get the DEFEAT OF SECONDARY OPPONENTS. If we’ve come to hate a secondary opponent, we need to see them get their comeuppance in a satisfying way — think of Fanny and Lucy Steele cat-fighting in Sense and Sensibility; and Belloq, General Strasser, and Major Toht’s faces melting in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
FINAL BATTLE
And then, almost always, the Hero/ine must go in to the FINAL BATTLE to face the antagonist alone, mano a mano.
So f this is the pattern we see over and over again: New Plan, Storming the Castle, Team Battle, Final Battle— how can we possibly make it fresh?
Well, of course — look at books and films to see how your favorite storytellers do it.
—Silence of the Lambs is a perfect example of elevating the cliché into archetype. The climax takes place in the basement, as it also does in Psycho and Nightmare on Elm Street. In horror movies the Castle is often a basement, and this basement setting is no accident: therapists talk about “basement issues” —which are your worst fears and traumas from childhood — the stuff no one wants to look at, but which we have to look at, and clean out, to be whole.
But Thomas Harris, in the book, and the filmmakers, bringing it to life in the movie, create a basement that is so rich in horrific and revelatory and mythic (really fairy tale) imagery, that we never feel that we’ve seen that scene before. In fact I see new resonances in the set design every time I watch that film… like Mr. Gumb (Buffalo Bill) having a wall of his own news clippings just exactly like the same clippings on the wall in Crawford’s office. That’s a technique that Harris uses that can elevate the clichéd to the archetypal: layering meaning.
But even more than that: Gumb’s basement is Clarice’s GREATEST NIGHTMARE come to life. Lecter has exposed her deepest trauma, losing the lamb she tried to save from spring slaughter—and now she’s back in that childhood crisis, trying to save Catherine’s life (if you’ll notice, even the visual of Catherine clinging to Mr. Gumb’s fluffy white dog looks very much like a little girl holding a lamb…).
Full Act III breakdown of Silence of the Lambs
— Nightmare on Elm Street takes the clichéd, spooky basement scene of a million other horror movies and gives it a whole new level, literally: the heroine is dreaming that she is following a suspicious sound down into the basement, and then there’s a door that leads to another basement, under the basement. And if you think bad things happen in the basement… what’s going to happen in a sub-basement?
— Comedy characters have a different kind of GREATEST NIGHTMARE. Suppose you’re writing a farce. I would never dare, myself, but if I did, I would go straight to Fawlty Towers to figure out how to do it (and if you haven’t seen this brilliant John Cleese TV series, I envy you the treat you’re in for). Every story in this series shows the quintessentially British Basil Fawlty go from rigid control to total breakdown of order in the side-splitting climax. It is the vast chasm between Basil’s idea of what his life should be and the chaotic reality that he creates for himself over and over again that will have you screaming with laughter.
Another very technical lesson to take from Fawlty Towers —and from any screwball comedy or farce — is how comedies use speed in climax. Just as in other forms of climax, the action speeds up in the end to create that exhilaration of being out of control — which is the sensation I most love about a great comedy.
— In a romance, the Final Battle is often the Hero/ine finally overcoming their internal blocks and making a DECLARATION or PROPOSAL to the loved one.
And I’ve noticed that a lot of romances do the declaration in a one-two punch, two separate scenes: the recalcitrant lover makes their declaration, even does some groveling, apparently to no avail, and only in a later, final scene does the loved one show up with a declaration of their own.
(NOTE: I’m trying to get so much in this post that I ran over the length limit! Read the full post on the website, and I’ll also be able to add more links to expanded posts. Have a great weekend!)
Alex
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All material is from Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, © Alexandra Sokoloff
You can find Act by Act, Sequence by Sequence, scene by scene story breakdowns of Chinatown, Romancing the Stone, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Wizard of Oz and more in Stealing Hollywood -
And full breakdowns of Romancing the Stone, Notting Hill, Groundhog Day and more in Writing Love.
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