Is very common to read/hear that the agencies and producers usually reads the first five pages of your script and if they're not hooked... to their always full waste basket.
This is a bit frustrating if you want to "build" a story, in particular a suspense one. In suspense, you can't reveal everything from the beginning. Suspense is built.
So, I use some tricks that I believe I'm not the only one doing them.
Take one of the bloodiest or more action-charged scenes of your script and put it on the start. It doesn't matter if it will be shown again 50 pages after. You must start with a big bang!
Then, some months ago, I was watching in some theaters movies like "Blood Diamond", "The Constant Gardener" and most recently, "Apocalypto."
What catch more my attention, even more than the films, was the response of the young audience to some "action" but dramatic moments of the films.
They were laughing! They didn't care if the scene was loaded with drama, if it was showing a genocide or else. Bang, bang, blood splitting, brains exploding: they laugh and enjoy.
So I did a trial: to write the first 5 pages of a script loaded from the beginning with that stuff. Even more, I decided that every minute the script must had no less than one kill, average 2 or 3 better. Car chases, subway trains crashing, even helicopters falling to the Hudson river... everything in five minutes.
The script is very politically loaded, is an action-political one, contemporary.
I showed the pages to a friend in the industry. His response: Gee man, this is promising!
So, hum, I'm going to finish the script, I have all the story line plotted, the characters defined.
But what about my ethics? Is that what I want to tell with my stories?
If optioned and produced, I think I'm going to drop by the theaters to check those young guys laughing because... they will be actually my guinea pigs in this film experiment.
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