The Business of Screenwriting: Act Two Blues

The weird synergy between the Protagonist’s challenges in the middle of their story… and that writer’s life.

It is January 17, 1994. My wife and I had gone to see Schindler’s List in Century City. Now back home in our 1,300 square foot fake English tudor house in what is charitably called “Beverly Hills adjacent,” we have a few glasses of wine to decompress. We process the movie until well after midnight, then make our way to bed, and fall asleep.

At 4:31 AM, all hell breaks loose.

My wife is a native Californian. At this point, I have lived in northern and southern California over 20 years of my life. So both of us are earthquake veterans.

At least we thought we were.

When the Northridge Earthquake hits, it is like nothing we have ever felt before.

I am roused from my slumber by its initial shaking and like any Californian, even in my semi-conscious state, I figure it’s just a little temblor. But it gets bigger and bigger, louder and louder.

Suddenly our house is shaking, rattling and rolling like Elvis Presley on crack.

“Get Will,” Rebecca shouts at me, her thoughts immediately turning to our then 3 year-old son.

I try to get out of bed, but am flung back by the shock waves. I manage to stagger out into the hallway, the closest flapping open, stuff flying everywhere. And the noise is so damn loud! Utter chaos.

I am thrown against the wall once… twice… banging the hell out of my shoulder.

Finally, I make it to Will’s room. He is standing in the corner of the crib, hands clamped onto its rails, and I can see his eyes wide open even in the darkness. Ironically a bunch of scripts I had been meaning to move from his now gyrating bookcase hurtle through the air, narrowly missing us.

I grab Will and we inch our way down the hall, through the living room, and eventually outside. And the ground is still shaking.

Telephone transformers explode, neighbors shriek, car alarms blare, chimneys topple. It’s an urban version of Apocalypse Now without the smell of napalm.

And then, it’s over.

Dozens of us huddle in the dark tending to various wounds, retrieving blankets for warmth, checking out the houses on the block, flashlights strobing from yard to yard.

Then the oddest thing: Because all of the electricity is out, L.A.’s ambient light is gone. And for once, we can look up in the city sky and see stars. Thousands of them. A surreal experience of beauty amidst the catastrophe.

As we sit tensing through every aftershock, I sit clutching Will in my lap. Everyone is abuzz, talking about earthquake weather, the Big One. But I know the real reason it happened.

I am in the middle of writing the second act of a screenplay. And almost without fail when I’m there in the process, something bizarre, even destructive takes place.

Look, I know you will think I’m crazy, but if you ponder it from a writer’s perspective, you will see how it is completely logical… in a completely illogical way.

What happens when we write a screenplay? In Act One, we establish the story universe, set up key plot elements and dynamics, and introduce all the primary characters, most importantly the Protagonist. Something occurs which causes the Protagonist to leave their Old World and enter the Extraordinary World of Adventure, otherwise known as Act Two.

We all know what typically transpires in a script’s second act: The Protagonist doesn’t know this place or these people, so they are a stranger in a strange land, immediately on the defensive. The rules they knew in Act One don’t apply here. What’s more they confront a series of obstacles, trials and tribulations. The key to good drama is conflict, right?

In other words, the Protagonist has to navigate a whole lot of really weird and difficult shit.

Apparently, I so identify with my stories’ Protagonists, time and time again when I’m writing their experiences in Act Two, the crazy business they get into manifests itself in my own life.

Don’t believe me?

Here is a brief list of things that have happened to me when I was writing the second act of a screenplay:

• While calmly sitting in my car at a red light at Sepulveda and Santa Monica Boulevard, I am rear-ended by an 80 year-old dude going 30 miles per hour, never once hitting the brakes, just — BAM! When I emerge from my crumpled car and stagger back to check on him, he squints up at me all slack-jawed and mutters, “What happened?” Result: A bad case of whiplash and the additional headaches of dealing with insurance companies, doctors, lawyers, etc.
• Someone breaks into our house and steals my laptop on which I have all sorts of private financial information, necessitating me having to contact all the banks involved to stop this card and that, reissue new ones, etc.
• Someone breaks into our garage office where among other items, they steal my wallet, meaning I have to contact all the banks again.
• The yard crew are mowing the front lawn when the lawnmower kicks up a rock and sends it hurtling into my car window and shattering it.
• I am out for a bike ride from Marina Del Ray to Torrance when I suddenly have to swerve out of the way of an unleashed sprinting dog, sending me sprawling on my side, resulting in months of physical therapy.
• The worst of all is the time I fall weirdly ill. High fever, no energy, body aches, painfully swollen lymph nodes. I shuttle back and forth from one specialist at UCLA to another. They think I have AIDS, then Hodgkins disease, then back to the AIDS diagnosis, despite me swearing to them in no uncertain terms mine would be the first airborne case of the condition in recorded history. Come to find out after a month of discomforting tests, failed drugs, and false calls, I have cat scratch disease. [Insert Ted Nugent jokes here]. It seems the little kitten we adopted, when it hooked a claw in my leg for like a half-second while playing in bed one night, infected me. There is no cure other than time. And so for three months, it’s like I am a zombie with mononucleosis.

A hailstorm which trashes both of our cars, raccoons who suddenly decide to start sneaking into our house through the cat door, exploding sewer pipes underneath the house, all of these — and more — when I have been writing Act Two.

I am not saying this will happen to you. Indeed, I hereby offer a virtual blessing for each of you to avoid this bizarre psycho-drama arrangement.

Then again, perhaps not. Maybe for some folks, such as myself, we have to be willing to experience in our own lives something akin to what our characters do in theirs, suffering for our art… or something like that.

In any event, be prepared. When you hit that plot point at the end of Act One and accompany your Protagonist as they venture into the New World…

Watch out. Drive carefully. Get more sleep. Lock your doors. Avoid ladders. Let your spouse do the cooking so you can stay away from sharp knives. Don’t adopt kittens. And say your prayers.

You may need it.

Because when your story’s Protagonist goes through their Act Two blues…

It may be your turn, too.

The Business of Screenwriting is a series of Go Into The Story posts based upon my experiences as a complete Hollywood outsider who sold a spec script for a lot of money, parlayed that into a screenwriting career during which time I’ve made some good choices, some okay decisions, and some really stupid ones. Hopefully you’ll be the wiser for what you learn here.

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