Let’s get the cliché out of the way, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” In movies, that may not be true because people coming to your work may already know about the movie or TV series, but the first people to actually judge your work are reading it, not watching it. They may reject your script if you don’t engage them right away. In any case, if you have an insipid opening, it will be twice as hard to get someone to say yes because they’re already making decisions about your script in the context of a lame opening.

The Contract With The Audience

Years ago, I was in a theater watching who-knows-what and I noticed I couldn’t get comfortable. No, it wasn’t the guy behind me blowing popcorn breath on the back of my head, or the idiot trying to impress his date with his arcane knowledge of the history of the film – it was that I never felt like I was given what I needed to enjoy the movie. The filmmakers hadn’t set the film up properly and I was just unengaged and lost.

Afterwards, I came to the conclusion that there’s a process of getting stories rolling. And the most important part of that is the opening sequence. You may think it’s a cliche but that opening does so much you cannot really be without a strong presentation. And it’s only a cliché if you make it a cliché. It’s incumbent on you, as the writer, to elevate openings so they do what they’re supposed to do but in a different manner than the rest of the openings we’ve seen.

I identified the “Contract With The Audience” (Quantum Scriptwriting, Part I, Act I, Setup) as the items you need to accomplish to fully engage an audience, reader or viewer. Again, the opening sequence is perhaps the most important of that list. From a purely practical angle, it’s the handshake with the reader. Readers are typically writers and we are a harsh and sometimes petty group. We resent the reading even though as a reader it’s literally our job! In defense, we can also be impressed with a stunning opening. So cliché away at your own peril.

If you do the opening right, you establish a bond with the audience (the reader) that then will gain you a lot of goodwill throughout the script and make that script even more interesting.

Big Openings

Recently, a student wrote an eleven-page scene of mayhem that his character, a rock star, engendered. The character was nude from start and finish and flashed his frank and beans all over L.A. while being chased by various cops and offended citizenry. It was fantastic if a little over the top. Ultimately the opening pages were reduced in length but it still made a great opening introduction and showed the vision he had of that character’s world.

Look at other big openings: Raiders of the Lost Ark has an eight-minute insane opening sequence that starts the movie. Baby Driver has a really tense anticipatory opening that roars into crazy-ass drifting and driving once the bank robbers jump in. I love the moment when one of the robbers points to go and Baby, Ansel Elgort, zooms backwards. 

Casey (Drew Barrymore) in Scream. Photo courtesy of Dimension Films

Scream plays with genre and expectations as Drew Barrymore answers a phone call and flirts with the caller – until he reveals he’s been watching her and things start to get weird.  Of course, no one thinks they’re gonna kill a star like Drew Barrymore. And then they do.

These openings shout to the audience to pay attention and put that popcorn away – things are gonna get mental.

Reading these scripts would have been such a dream to any producer. Nothing is what it appears to be and everything that follows should be a pure joy to read.

Bond. James Bond

The big opening is nothing new. Movies from the dim days of film history have always shown the audiences the sizzle and the steak.

Perhaps no more faithful adherer to this are the James Bond films. In watching all twenty-five recently, I was shocked when one of them, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, did not open with a huge action set piece. No car chases, fights, bombs – and the only gun in the sequence is a disassembled rifle that Bond only uses to scope out something in the scene.

George Lazenby as James Bond. Photo courtesy of Eon Productions

Contrast this to the amazing openings in all the Daniel Craig Bond movies where frantic chase scenes on foot and in cars take place.

The next Bond should be interesting in that the producers lately seem determined to re-invent the master spy. Will they then do away with the great opening set pieces? No more Bond driving a motorcycle off a cliff and skydiving to a pilotless airplane? Doubtful. Bravura openings have become a franchise expectation and no matter what they do with character, the Bond films are action films and require an action opening.

Small, But Memorable

American Beauty is a challenging movie on many levels these days. You’re shown this by an opening that can be described as, well, if you haven’t seen it try it on. But the most memorable part of that opening is the main character’s contention that this (what he does in the shower) is the high point of his day. In mere moments we already know a lot about this sad sack of a man who will upend his life completely.

Get Shorty doesn’t open with a bang but has a quiet buildup to a moment with Chili Palmer (John Travolta) and Ray Barboni (Dennis Farina). Travolta translates the character perfectly. He’s calm, calculating, in charge of himself and the small things that happen lead to a moment that will have implications throughout.

Ted Danson’s recent turn as Charles Nieuwendyk in A Man on the Inside (show runner Mike Schur) has a very mundane opening, more like an extended montage, to show Charles’ sleepy world of retirement and widowhood. It’s done to contrast what he will be doing, but also to show that he’s living a boring, repetitive life at this point. I’m not sure how I would have approached this, but I can understand and embrace its efficacy. It also shows us how meticulous Charles is in his grooming and coffee making, using a scale to weigh exactly the right amount of beans. It’s a quiet opening that accomplishes a lot. By the way, this funny series is based on a documentary, shown on the screen, which makes it even more interesting.

Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson) in A Man On The Inside

Small openings are a challenge because you have to be working at a high level of skill to know how to hook your reader with a gentle brush as opposed to throwing a gallon of paint at the canvas.

The Hook

X-Files perfected the opening hook for series TV. Episodes showed deliberately mysterious events that were then investigated by Scully and Mulder. Taking his X-Files sensibilities with him, Vince Gilligan created many more memorable openings in Breaking Bad. 

For example, Season 3, Episode 1 had one of the best openings I’ve ever seen anywhere.

In a rural village many people are shown crawling in the dirt. A new car pulls up and expensive boots set down in the dirt. The boots have death’s heads on them. The men are dressed in $3,000 suits. They suddenly drop down and begin to crawl with the rest of the villagers. They are heading to a shrine to make an offering to give them luck against the man they’ve been hired to kill – Heisenberg (Bryan Cranston).

I’ve never seen a more compelling or original opening. And I could no more turn that episode off than turn down a bowl of Chunky Monkey. Gilligan had hooked me into watching it and I did. I guarantee if this had been a spec script whoever was reading it would have continued to turn pages.

Masterful.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in Mission Impossible 3. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Non-Linear Openings

Trickeration, as the sports pundits call it, is doing something unexpected. One of my favorite examples of the unexpected is the Mission Impossible III movie. It opens with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), tied up in a chair and being questioned. Across from him is his wife. If Ethan doesn’t tell Phillip Seymour Hoffman what he wants to know, they will kill his wife. He swears he doesn’t know and they shoot her. Shocking! Well, maybe not. But it is a grabber and you sit there thinking, did they really just kill her?

The purpose of opening this way is if you have a slowly developing story and you want to show the audience they need to stick around. If they’re killing main characters off in the opening then where is this crazy movie going?

Hoffman is involved in another non-linear movie, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead which keeps folding in on itself to tell the story of two brothers who will be robbing their parents’ jewelery store. The opening shows a married couple (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei) making passionate love – it piques your interest, and then falls back to display a suburban neighborhood and The Day of The Robbery. Hmmm. Intriguing. Gotta follow that.

Wicked opens with the Wicked Witch having been destroyed by Dorothy. Galinda (Ariana Grande) is asked about the nature of evil and she recounts the past history of the witch. It’s a brutal tale filled with rejection and prejudice and we can begin to understand how Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) went bad as the story rolls forward.