Rage Against The Page

... that's the story I'm working on right now. I'd read much about Capra's beloved IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, but I hadn't seen it.  Before I remedied that, I grabbed a copy of the script (transcribed; if you have a scanned copy, please email me!) — written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, and Jo Swerling — and did a page breakdown. I work in four acts, being your traditional three-act structure split equally into quarters.  Feel free to lump my Act Two and Act Three into a single Act Two, if that's your model. The [F] indicates the protagonist's rising or falling fortune at the end of the scene.  Take note how the writers ping-pong George's fortunes during the first half of the story — fortune smiles upon him here and frowns on him there — then they carve out a precipitous, continuous drop in George's fortunes from around page 105 onward, until things finally bottom out at the Climax and his fortunes rapidly ascend during the ...

For a long time I held aloft, above all others, Michael Hauge's one-word answer to the question:  What makes a screenplay work? EMOTION . On the first page of  Writing Screenplays That Sell , Michael explains: People do not go to the movies so they can see the characters on the screen laugh, cry, get frightened, or get turned on.  They go to have those experiences themselves.The reason that movies hold such a fascination for us, the reason the art form has been engrossing and involving audiences for close to a century, is because it provides an opportunity to experience emotion. ... All filmmakers, therefore, have a single goal: to elicit emotion in an audience. That was then; this is now. Now, I understand there's something loftier.  Something more seminal.  It was there all along.  I just never bothered to follow the breadcrumbs all the way to the source. It's true: eliciting emotion in your audience makes a screenplay work. So, how do you c...