Endings: The Good, the Bad, and the Insanely Great

so [Music] i can take you through it step by step explain why your story stinks but i won't insult your intelligence well all right first of all really which film you ever saw well my next one will be better hello i hated this movie hated hated hated hated hated this movie hated it hated every simpering stupid vacant audience assaulting moment of it so there's an old line from mark twain where he says that everybody complains about the weather but no one ever does anything about it and that's kind of how i feel about screenplays hey

everybody my name is michael arne i'm a screenwriter i wrote little miss sunshine and a couple of other movies and i put this video together because when i first started out trying to write screenplays i just didn't know what the hell i was doing and i kind of stumbled around in the dark for years and years and i just made every possible mistake you could make as a screenwriter so i want to make this video and just put as much as i know about storytelling into it and my hope is that if you love movies

and you're just starting out trying to write screenplays maybe some of these ideas will be helpful now i just want to say it quickly a disclaimer because i know that i'm going to get roasted alive by people who are saying oh he's trying to turn story into a formula and he's trying to say that stories can only be one thing and that's not what i'm saying i'm gonna say this three times which is i'm not saying this is the only way to tell stories i'm not saying this is the only way to tell stories i'm

not saying this is the only way to tell stories you can tell a story any way you want there's any kind of way of telling stories what i'm doing here with this video is i'm taking three movies star wars the graduate little miss sunshine and i'm just analyzing how they work i'm just trying to show what the narrative mechanics are going on underneath them so i'm describing how they work okay i'm not prescribing i'm not saying that stories have to be like this i'm only saying here's three films here's how they work so again the

disclaimer is i'm not saying that films have to work this way or stories have to work this way stories can work any way you want you can write any kind of ending you want this is just one specific kind of ending that i used in my own film little miss sunshine so just a quick backstory which is when i got to film school i want to be a screenwriter and i got a job reading screenplays and so i read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of screenplays and what i found was that a lot of them

could set up very well and usually your first act was sort of entertaining and sort of engaging and a lot of scripts could get to the second act and were still working but most of the time scripts tended to fail in the third act and i kind of saw over and over again i saw stories sort of just fall apart at the end either they felt sort of mechanical and predictable or a lot of times even if the ending worked there was this sort of so what factor you go like okay the hero got the

pretty girl and he got the bag of money but like so what who cares you know or the girl she got the handsome guy and she got the dream job so what and so i was trying to write screenplays and i was just obsessed with endings and going like why do these endings not work and i was trying to like figure out how to make endings really work so when i was just starting out i remember reading a book that said that in order to analyze a story what you had to do is you had

to break down the stakes in the story and it said there was two sets of stakes there was the external stakes what was going to be gained or lost in the outside world and then there was an internal set of stakes there was sort of an emotional set of stakes and so that was my guide for a long long time but i finally decided that there was one additional set of stakes that people weren't really paying attention to or people really weren't talking about which was a philosophical set of stakes in a story and kind

of at the same time i got obsessed with the ending of star wars like the ending of star wars is so crazy and weird and mysterious like luke is sitting there he's in his little x-wing fighter and he's trying to blow up the death star and sort of out of nowhere all of a sudden like obi-wan kenobi's voice sort of comes back and starts talking to him and he pushes aside his computer targeting screen it's this really weird thing like i remember going like why what is obi-wan doing there in luke's cockpit like when he's

trying to you know [ __ ] defeat the empire so i finally just sat down and i mapped out what was going on at the ending of star wars and it gave me all these ideas about sort of your external stakes your internal stakes and your philosophical stakes and that was very helpful to me in terms of writing out little miss sunshine and especially sort of engineering the ending of that movie and again i'm just going to say that i'm going to resist the notion that i'm just applying a one-size-fits-all formula to storytelling okay that's

not what i'm doing again stories can be anything you want all i'm really trying to do with this video is to give people a vocabulary to talk about stories and storytelling to give people tools they had the saying at pixar it's tools not rules you know this is not a set of rules this is not even a set of guidelines this is just again trying to put out a vocabulary in which people can think about talk about and and hopefully write out great stories so here's a lecture it's called endings the good the bad and

the insanely great the cliches that movies are all about the last 10 minutes but the argument that i'm going to make is really that movies are all about the climactic two minutes of the movie and that's because the climactic two minutes are the place where the meaning of your movie is revealed when you're talking about meaning you're talking about the values that are embedded in your story so when you're talking about values you're talking about guides to life how you live your life what you think is worth living for what you think is worth doing

what you think is not worth doing so in a weird way stories are really sort of guides to how you live your life if stories are about competing values then they're about competing visions of how you should really live your life and i think we've all had the experience of going to see a movie and just going like walking out of it walking out of the ending and go oh my god the ending was so great you know and you have this sense of euphoria and release and the sense of clarity and you feel like

you're looking at the world with new eyes and you actually think that you know when you walked in you thought life was pretty terrible but actually it seems that like right now it seems that life is actually pretty great so i think we all have our you know personal list of uh movies that we love especially the endings that we love the endings i really love are fellaini's eight and a half star wars also catch 22 the graduate and of course the bad news bears hey yankees you can take your apology out of your trophy

and shove it straight up your ass see we all know what a bad ending is right a bad ending is we've seen him a million times it's one that's positive but it's predictable you knew was gonna happen and it happened and a good ending is one that's positive but it's surprising you wanted something to happen but you weren't sure how it was going to happen but then boom it turned out and you're super happy you know that that it turned out as well as it did now for an insanely great ending i think the thing

is that you want it to be both surprising and positive but the most important thing is that you want your ending to be meaningful and i think that that's the thing that a lot of stories fall down on they don't have the ending be as meaningful as they could be this is the thing that's going to set your ending apart from every other ending out there is that it's not just going to be positive it's not just going to be surprising it's going to be super meaningful to your audience so the question is how do

you put meaning into your story how do you make your story meaningful to the people who are sitting there watching it so when you talk about meaning you're talking about the values that are embedded in your story and usually in a story you don't just have one set of values you have two sets of values you could call them values a or values b but the way i prefer to think of it is a lot of times you have a dominant set of values in your story these sort of pervasive ubiquitous values in your story

and then you have an underdog set of values which is sort of a scrappy band of misfits set of values and what you want to do is you want to have the dominant values of your story on the verge of defeating those underdog values you want a sudden reversal to happen and then have the underdog values prevail over the dominant values of your story and that sudden reversal is overturning the moral order of the universe that you've created in your story and that sudden reversal of values becomes the meaning of your story this is something

robert mckee says i don't agree with him on everything but he says something really smart which is the more meaning that you can put into your story the more emotional it will be and i really really believe that especially for the ending so the more meaningful emotion you can have there at the end of your story the more insanely great it's going to be okay so i'm going to talk about star wars and i want to show the final climactic two minutes what's important to remember is that when this movie came out you know we

look back on it now it's almost a 40 year old movie and it seems like it's very predictable like it seems almost quaint in certain ways but boy when this movie came out the ending worked so well people went berserk for this ending there was a contemporary reports at the time of they were saying like when han solo came in like bodies were flying through the theater at the premiere because people just went so crazy for this ending so however queen it may look to us now you have to admit that this is an ending

that worked it worked for the audiences at the time and i will argue i think it still works so here we go i'm going to play the climactic two minutes of star wars and then i'm going to go back sort of open up the hood dig down and see what the mechanics underneath the hood of this ending are so here's the climactic two minutes of star wars use the force luke let go the force is strong luke trust me [Music] what's wrong nothing i'm all right [Music] i lost your [Music] ignition [Music] i have you

now what look out [Music] [Music] great shot kid that was one in a million remember the force will be with you always okay so the question is how does it work what is going on at the ending of this movie and in order to figure out what's going on almost in any story you know a lot of times you get a screenplay and it's this sort of big salad it's this big spaghetti bowl of character and plot and incident and you're trying to figure out what's working in this story what's not working and i always

feel like the most important thing to do to go back to figure out how to make a story work is to ask the question what is at stake in a story so we all know what stakes are stakes are like what can be gained or lost and the important thing is it has to be a binary thing it has to be a pass fail thing it has to be black and white you're either going to gain something or you're going to lose something when you're talking about the stakes of a story so the main argument

that i'm going to make is that usually in a good story you don't just have one set of stakes usually to my eyes you have three sets of stakes in your story if you don't remember anything else from this video try to remember this that every good story should have three sets of stakes in it in terms of external stakes like we're all familiar with this your external sticks are usually something like life and survival or if you're trying to get the bag of money you're robbing the bank and trying to get the money sometimes

it's winning a contest uh sometimes it's achieving any kind of like sort of position or status any sort of achievable goal any sort of pass fail thing anything that's sort of out there in the outside world those are the external stakes of your story now for the internal stakes your story the emotional stakes of your story a lot of times it's romantic love you fall in love with someone you're hoping that they're going to reciprocate their love or a lot of times it's a parent child love you know in finding nemo for example you know

marlon loses the love of nemo and he's trying to win his child love and respect back sometimes in movies like it can be friendship you know a friendship can be can be gained or lost and that's what you put emotionally at stake and a lot of times it's self-respect i mean it's really interesting that uh for example in the first rocky film he's sort of out there training but he considers himself kind of a bum in the neighborhood he's training but he's smoking cigarettes and he doesn't really even respect himself and just the act he

doesn't win the championship right but he goes 15 rounds with apollo creed and in doing so he gains his own self-respect so the philosophical stakes are story a lot of times in movies what's at stake philosophically is you're privileging the values of community over the individual and you see this in films like casablanca or star wars where the hero chooses the values of community over the values of narrow self-interest conversely a lot of times in movies you are having for example in catch 2 or the graduate you're privileging the values of individualism over the stifling

conformity of the community and then for something like little miss sunshine i always saw just the philosophical stakes were do you live your life trying to be an ideal do you live your life trying to be like barbie you know to win a beauty contest or do you live your life trying to be yourself so three sets of stakes external internal and philosophical and what i'm going to argue is that most movies right have an external set of stakes every movie james bond you're trying to save the world or you're trying to rob a bank

you're trying to win the heavyweight championship of the world you're just trying to do something so almost every movie has an external set of stakes most movies have an internal set of stakes there's something emotional going on the place where a lot of films fall down or a lot of films get muddy or a lot of films become sub-optimal is in the philosophical stakes of the story a lot of stories are not as clear or articulate as they could be in terms of what the underlying set of values in their stories are and creating a

drama out of two competing value systems that are embedded in those stories okay so before we go any further i just want to take a giant step backwards and look at the big picture of storytelling so let's say you have a 100 minute movie and that translates into a 100 page screenplay and so we're all familiar with the general outlines of a story arc right so you start off your movie and you have your exposition and that's the moment in which you're establishing the stakes of your story you're establishing what's going to be gained or

lost but the important thing is you're establishing not just what's externally staking your story you're also establishing the internal stakes of your story the emotional stakes your story and you're also establishing what's philosophically at stake in your story what's going to be gained or lost philosophically and then as you move through the second act of your story you're going to add complications to your story you're going to put those stakes into jeopardy external internal and philosophical so then you get to a crisis where you're forcing the stakes your story you get your climax and then

you get to your resolution in which you're resolving the stakes your story external internal and philosophical all hopefully at the same time so i'm going to make the argument that there's actually an organic logic to storytelling there's an organic logic to narrative and it goes back to the vocabulary that we're all familiar with in terms of fairy tales you know once upon a time or lived happily ever after so with a typical fairy tale you know you begin your movie once upon a time and you get the who what where when of your story and

you also have what you're doing is you're saying and then every day you're establishing the daily routine of your hero plus usually you're introducing some kind of unresolved issue it's either an internal unresolved issue inside them or it's an external unresolved issue it's some problem that there is with the world so you're going once upon a time your hero's walking down the road of life it's a bright sunny day you know there's a few clouds on the horizon and then you go but then one day boom something comes along and it totally disrupts your hero's

life it turns your hero's life upside down and it changes their sense of who they are it changes their sense of what the world is like and it also changes their sense of the future and in the wake of that bolt from the blue your hero embarks upon a quest and usually what you're doing is that they have a long-range goal they're trying to achieve and then they have a short-term plan to achieve that goal so for example with dorothy you know she wants to get home to kansas and to get home to kansas she

got to go see the wizard to see the wizard she's got to follow the yellow brick roads so then you get to usually a moment in which suddenly without warning something happens you know that pulls the rug out from under your character and they have a setback at the middle of the story and they have to sort of take stock look inside themselves and figure out a new way forward and then there's always a moment in a story in a fairy tale where you go and then there was no going back you know you have

to enter the dragon's cave you have to slay the dragon or whatever but there's no going back you can't go back to safety anymore and then you have your climax where your hero either achieves his goal or fails to achieve his goal for example once upon a time there was a prince who lived in a castle in denmark and every day he mourned the untimely death of his father the king and the sudbury marriage of his mother the queen to his sleazy uncle the king's brother and then you say and then one day the ghost

of the dead king appeared to the prince and claimed he was murdered by his brother and demanded that the prince avenge his untimely death so your hero dealers and dithers and then you go then the hero embarked upon a quest and the hero's quest was to find out if his uncle was guilty by staging a play reenacting the murder and then if his uncle was guilty to avenge his father's death by killing his lazy uncle however suddenly without warning the prince having discovered his uncle was guilty accidentally kills the wrong guy and gets sent into

exile by his uncle and then the prince returns he gets challenged to a duel and there was no going back and then you have a climax where everybody gets killed so that's the story of hamlet right and you can say you know shakespeare is a hack and he was just following a formula but my argument would be that he was actually following the organic logic of a story that once upon a time that then one day you know the hero embarking upon a quest and so in script speak we talk about the once upon a

time moments there's a different word for them the once upon a time is the opening of your story the and then one day moment is the inciting incident of your story when you're hearing barks upon a quest that's the first act break of your story suddenly without warning that's the midpoint of your story and then there was no going back that's the second outbreak of your story and then of course ba-boom there's your climax at the end of your story and these moments of your story tend to correspond with a certain page number so for

example page one is your opening of course around page ten you have your inciting incident page 25 is your first act break 50 is your midpoint 75 your second act break and your climax of course comes 10 minutes from the end uh on page 90. and i would call these the tentpole moments of storytelling a lot of times people ask me to read their screenplays and i feel like if you can just tell me what these six moments are if you can tell me what the six ten pull moments of your story are i can

tell you whether or not you've got a good story or not so when i'm working on a story i like to think of these moments in visual terms so with the opening i always imagine it's sort of tanking up you're just getting as much emotional rocket fuel as you can right at the beginning of your story and then when the inciting incident comes along that's sort of lighting a fuse the status quo of your story is shattered and a fuse is lit you know that's heading towards that emotional rocket fuel you get to your first

act break and boom that's the blast off you have sort of maximum rooting interest in your story you want to see your hero sort of take off and and either externally or internally go on this quest and achieve a goal then in terms of the midpoint the image i always have in my head is that the rug is getting pulled up from under your hero you know he's headed towards his goal he's got his eye on it and suddenly whoa the uh the rug gets pulled out from under him and he's sort of like has

to pick himself up dust himself off and find a new way towards that goal well the second act break i know this is kind of complicated but the image i have in my head is that your your hero is headed towards his goal it seems like it's almost within his grasp and then suddenly a trap door opens and your hero falls down and suddenly he's in a canoe sort of headed down a river towards a waterfall and he is either going to like get to safety get to the edge of the river and save himself

or is going to go over the waterfall and get himself killed but you fall through a trapdoor and you get into a do or die all or nothing situation here's your story three acts usually on page one you're opening up on a world that's sort of in equilibrium you know there might be a few flaws in it there might be a few problems but basically the world is steady and equilibrium then you meet your hero and a lot of times your hero is flawed or the world itself is flawed but your hero has a stable

sense of himself he has a stable sense of what the world is and he has a fixed sense of what his future is going to be usually you want to have your hero have a very clear visual sense of what their future is going to be and then on page 10 but boom you have your bolt from the blue and your hero's future changes it changes a sense of himself it also changes his sense of the world a lot of times it's the worst possible thing for the hero like whatever is most valuable for the

hero that's the thing that gets taken away from them sort of in the inciting incident a lot of times you're adding an insult to injury moment in order to put in more emotional rocket fuel into your story and what you're doing in the exciting incident is you're creating a global problem in your story you're creating a problem that your hero has to solve and that's the problem that's going to get solved at the climax series story on page 90. so with a little sunshine for example you know on page 10 aunt cindy calls and you

know ba-boom olive has you know a place in a little miss sunshine contest [Music] you know and she's so excited and and she can't wait and that's tying into the climax of your story is you know the question is is she going to win the little miss sunshine contest or not so then in the wake of the inciting incident a lot of times your hero doesn't know what to do you know they're sort of casting around they're trying to figure out what to do and they find a course of action and they seize upon that

and then you get to your first act break you've lit the fuse it's connected with your emotional rocket fuel and you're taking off into your second act and so your second act you're creating a smaller goal you're creating a local goal you know that's going to lead to a solution to the global goal so for example a little miss sunshine olive wants to win the little miss sunshine pageant but first they've got to get to redondo beach in california or for example in star wars luke wants to save the rebellion but in order to do

that he's got to take r2d2 and deliver the plans inside r2 to princess leia's father on alderaan so ba-boom your second act begins with your hero having a goal and embarking on a quest and so your hero is going through the story and he gets to the midpoint and suddenly usually there's a setback or some kind of reversal or your story changes directions and a lot of time what you're doing is deepening the stakes of your story and you're revealing stuff that had previously been hidden in the story a lot of times what you're doing

also is you're having to force your character to look within and see a flaw inside themselves that they had been blind to uh before that time okay so here's your third act you get a page 75 and your hero is achieving their second act goal but sort of inadvertently forcing the stakes for your global goal and then what happens from your second act break to your climax usually it's just nothing but things going wrong for your hero you have external setbacks you have internal or emotional setbacks but you also have philosophical setbacks for your story

and a lot of times i call this the judas moment of betrayal which is your hero's closest ally the person that your hero feels like he can count on the most is the person that betrays them philosophically and chooses the dominant values of the story so that's again the sort of judas moment of the story we'll get into a few examples of that so then you get to page 89 and i like to call this moment the kamikaze moment of commitment because a lot of times your hero is headed into the sort of killer be

killed moment with their bad guy or whoever and the voice at that moment the voice of the mentor comes back to them and it's something that only the hero can hear and he's sort of whispering into the hero's ear and saying remember those underdog values that we talked about back in the first act you know live your life according to those values and so the hero chooses the underdog values usually against their own self-interest and you want everyone else in the movie to go oh my god what are you doing that's crazy and then you

get to a moment of despair in which it seems as though your hero has failed externally failed internally failed philosophically and if you stop the movie at that moment it seems like there's no positive outcome possible so then you get your decisive act and your decisive act is positive right it's surprising and it's meaningful and it's meaningful because and this is crucial the decisive act speaks to and is an embodiment of the underdog values of your story so your hero doesn't have to get up at the climax of your story and give a big speech

right that's just bad writing the underdog values are embedded in the decisive act itself and that's the thing that again is going to turbocharge the emotion at the end of your story and give your story an insanely great ending okay so how do all these ideas work in an actual movie right let's take a look at star wars so [Music] okay so star wars now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go through the movie and try and explain what's at stake externally what's at stake internally and what's at stake philosophically okay so

external stakes so you're introducing the external stakes of your story in the inciting instance story and you're introducing sort of the global problem that luke is going to have to try and solve at the climax of the story so here's the scene in star wars that introduces the external stakes of the story i have placed information vital to the survival of the rebellion into the memory systems of this r2 unit my father will know how to retrieve it you must see this droid safely delivered to him on alderaan so survival of the rebellion that's what's

externally at stake in star wars the rebellion is either going to prosper and survive or it's going to be wiped out completely now a lot of times what you do in your story when you're trying to introduce a philosophical state to your story is that you have the bad guy your antagonist come in and he sort of says to the hero kid let me tell you the way the world works and he lays out the dominant set of values for this whole universe and i like to call this the antagonist arya so here's the antagonist

aria of star wars that happens right at the end of act one it's peter cushing telling you how the world works in star wars the rebellion will continue to gain a support in the imperial senate will no longer be of any concern to us i have just received word that the emperor has dissolved the council permanently the last remnants of the old republic have been swept away how will the emperor maintain control that the bureaucracy the regional governors now have direct control over their territories fear will keep the local systems in line fear of this

battle station so fear peter cushing is saying we are going to rule through fear through coercion we're an empire and then you have the underdog values of the story and a lot of times what you're doing is just like you have the bad guy the antagonist come in and say here's the way i think the world works the hero also meets a mentor and the mentor is the one who speaks the underdog values of the story and the mentor will give a speech to say kid you know i know everybody else thinks this but really

things are like this so here is the mentor speech in star wars you must learn the ways of the force if you were to come with me to alderaan alderaan i'm not going to alderaan i'm going to get home it's late i'm important as it is i need your help luke she needs your help i'm getting too old for this sort of thing i can't get involved i've got work to do it's not that i like the empire i hate it but there's nothing i can do about it right now such a long way from

here that's your uncle talking so obi-wan is saying i need your help she needs your help he's saying that the way we should get along in the world is not through empires not through domination is not through fear but it's through democracy through cooperation through helping each other so we all get this right it's the empire versus republic it's fear versus the consent of the governed it's violence versus cooperation it's tyranny versus freedom it's basically good guys versus bad guys and that's all set up in the first act of the story now what you're also

doing is you're not just establishing what's philosophically at stake in the global world but you're also establishing what's philosophical at stake in the personal realm so here is a speech in star wars in which alec guinness playing obi-wan talks to luke about what the underdog values of the story are personally the force the force is what gives the jedi his power it's an energy field created by all living things it surrounds us and penetrates us it binds the galaxy together what obi-wan is saying here is that we are all connected to each other we're all

united you know the force is something that all unites us all so here's the philosophical attacks of star wars telling luke the way the world works through his eyes pokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side you don't believe in the force do you kid i've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other i've seen a lot of strange stuff but i've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful force controlling everything there's no mystical energy field controls my destiny it's all a lot of

simple tricks and nonsense so what han is saying here is there's no force there's no commonality we're not connected to each other we're all alone in this universe so in the drama of the philosophical stakes of your story you're setting up the dominant values at the beginning in act one with the antagonist arya in which he says to your hero like here's the way the world works and then what happens usually in act 3 is you have your hero's closest ally come to him and philosophically betray your hero again what i call the judas moment

of betrayal because the hero's ally is going to choose the dominant values of the universe and reject the underdog values of the universe and then for the underdog values you have your mentor give a speech in act one and say kid there's another way to see the world there's another way of living your life and then you get to act three and you'll have the mental return the mentor is going to come back and whisper in the ear of your hero and remind him of the underdog values that they talked about in the first act

of the story use the force luke let go [Music] what's wrong nothing i'm all right so what's philosophically at stake in star wars is this notion of are we connected to each other you know do we share this sort of universal kinship or are we all just disconnected and it's every man for himself and that bleeds out to a larger set of values right do we choose to live our lives according to the ideas the tenets of altruism and community and selflessness or do we pursue a path of sort of self-interest individualism and selfishness so

here's the philosophical stakes of star wars right on the global level it's about empire and dominance versus democracy and cooperation on a personal level it's sort of about greed and selfishness versus duty and altruism now let's go to the internal stakes of star wars what's emotionally at stake at star wars with star wars it was a little trickier and i had to go back and watch the film a couple times because i was thinking well is it a romance with princess leia but obviously that's not really going to be it and then i was also

thinking well maybe you know luke is trying to find a father figure in obi-wan maybe that's what he's searching for but then you know obi-wan gets killed sort of at the end of the second act and so i couldn't figure out sort of what the emotional stakes of star wars were and i had to go back and watch the movie a couple of times and i finally found a moment where i felt like it sort of like brought everything to a head so here is the scene in which you're setting up what's internally what's emotionally

at stake in star wars your only concern is to prepare those new droids for tomorrow in the morning i want them up there on the south ridge working on those condensers yes i think those new joys are going to work out fine in fact i uh also thinking about our agreement about me staying on another season and if these new droids do work out i want to transmit my application to the academy this year you mean the next semester before the harvest sure there's more than enough droids harvest is when i need you the most

it's only one season more this year we'll make enough on the harvest that i'll be able to hire some more hands and then you can go to the academy next year you must understand i need you here luke but it's a whole another year look it's only one more season yeah that's what she said when big's in tank left where are you going looks like i'm going cleaning those nowhere oh and he can't stay here forever most of his friends have gone it means so much to him i'll make it up to him next year

i promise luke's just not a farmer he has too much of his father in him that's what i'm afraid of [Music] you kind of expect him to start singing over the rainbow at that moment you know looking at those two suns but the argument i'm gonna make here is that what's emotionally at stake in star wars is luke's sense of being called to a greater destiny it's the call to greatness and this is something i think we can all relate to right because we've all felt that way right we've all felt like we're just like

a small town kid in a small town world and somewhere out there there's something bigger more exciting happening there's like a greater destiny out there and the drama of our lives is like are we going to be able to go out there and reach it are we going to be able to go out and fulfill it like are we even going to get a chance to go out there and see the world and have adventures and fulfill our full potential so just as you have an antagonist and a mentor in your external stakes you also

have an antagonist and a mentor in your internal set of stakes so the bad guy emotionally in star wars is actually uncle owen he's the guy who's looking at luke and saying hey don't get too big for bridges kid you're just a small town kid in a small town world your only job is to make sure those condensers are working tomorrow don't get any big dreams you're not that special and then the opposite of that is obi-wan and he's the guy the mentor who looks at you and says kid i see something special on you

i think you have the seeds of greatness inside you okay so three sets of steaks in star wars externally it's the survival of the rebellion internally it's luke's called the greatness and philosophically it's this question of do you live your life according to the values of selfishness or according to the values of altruism and in each set of states you have a bad guy right so externally it's darth vader who's trying to crush the rebellion internally it's uncle owen who's saying kid you're not that special and philosophically it's going to be han solo saying hey

it's smarter to be selfish and self-interested than to help anybody and what i'm going to do next is just talk about how each set of stakes has its own story arc to it it has its own inciting incident its own for stack break etc so here's the arc of the external stakes in star wars which is you begin on page one and on page 10 you have your inciting incident you're establishing that the survival of the rebellion is at stake on page 25 you're giving luke a goal which is to deliver the plans that are

inside r2d2 right to princess leia's father on alderaan now if you're a bad screenwriter that would be the second act for the rest of your story just watching luke try to get r2d2 to alderaan but lucas does something super super smart here in terms of storytelling which is he has a death star show up and just blow a balder on right so now you know that luke and obi-wan are heading towards a planet that doesn't exist anymore so that's a great little thing to happen at the beginning of your second act right your hero has

a plan they're heading towards that plan and then something comes along and disrupts that plan so you get to page 50 and you know they come out of hyperspace and oh my god alderaan's gone and there's a tractor beam and they get sucked into the death star so that's sort of this midpoint reversal of the story but then as soon as you get into the dust start right you have a new goal you go oh my god she's here she's here we've got to go rescue the princess so you're spending the third quarter of the

film going out finding the princess and rescuing her and then you get to the second act and you rescue the princess you escape from the death star and it seems like you've achieved your goals right you've taken r2d2 you don't go to alderaan but you find princess leia's father and you deliver the plans and so it seems as though you've achieved your second act goal however this is the genius thing so at the same time you're delivering the plans to the death star to princess leia's father and the rebels you're inadvertently revealing the location of

rebel's base and that's forcing the stakes to restore it right because now the death star is on its way now the death star is coming so now either the death star is going to survive or the rebels are going to survive but they both can't survive at the same time you get your climax you blow up the death star you save the rebellion and you have your ending now you have a similar arc in the internal story of star wars the emotional story it begins on page one and you already have luke planning to leave

the farm go off join the space academy so the inciting incident is actually when he sits down with his aunt and uncle and asks to go to space academy and he gets turned down and now his future has changed and he feels diminished somehow he feels like he's maybe not that special however just a few pages later right he meets obi-wan and obi-wan leaves and goes you must learn the ways of the fourth and obi-wan is saying like i believe in you kid i think you got something special inside you so when you get to

page 25 right the end of the first act uncle owen gets killed and now luke is free to leave home and pursue his greater destiny i want to come with you to alderaan there's nothing for me here now i want to learn the ways of the force and become a jedi like my father [Music] you get to your midpoint and obi-wan is training luke to use the force right and when luke is actually able to connect and use the force he dodges at that droid and obi-wan turns to him and says you've taken your first

step into a much larger world and what that's doing is affirming luke's sense that maybe he is special maybe he does have something inside him like maybe he is destined for greatness somehow so then on page 75 at the end of the second act you have this enormous setback in the emotional stakes of your story because obi-wan gets killed by darth vader and you suddenly think oh my god maybe uncle owen was right maybe obi-wan was just a crazy old man and then you get to your climax on page 90 and that's when obi-wan returns

and he whispers in luke's ear and he says remember trust your feelings use the force so luke is able to blow up the death star and obi-wan comes back and says remember the force will be with you always and that's the resolution of the emotional stakes of star wars so there's a similar arc in the philosophical stakes of the story you meet luke on page one and he's sort of sympathetic to the rebellion but he's not doing anything about it he's sitting around and he says it's not like i'd like the empire i hate it

but there's nothing i can do and uncle owen is the guy who's sort of stoking that at the same time he's saying your only job is to prepare those new droids for tomorrow morning the inciting incident then philosophically is meeting obi-wan and having obi-wan say i need your help she needs your help and obi-wan is introducing this new set of possibilities that you can live your life according to the values of altruism so on page 25 uncle owen dies and now luke sets off he says i'm committed to this underdog set of values i'm committed

to helping obi-wan and trying to help princess leia now you get to the midpoint and you meet han solo and he's the philosophical antagonist of the story he's the guy who says i don't believe in the force i don't believe in any sort of universal connection and he also says i take orders from one guy me so you're meeting a guy who doesn't believe in the values that obi-wan has been preaching to luke you meet a guy who's sort of disdainful of those values and saying listen kid that's not the way the world works at

all so now you get to page 75 and again you have this huge setback at the end of the second act obi-wan dies and then a few pages later han solo flees the rebel base and that's the judas moment of betrayal that's the moment in which your hero's closest ally sort of turns his back on the hero turns his back on the good values of the story the underdog values and chooses to embrace the dominant values of the story and then you have the climax of the story in which the mentor comes back and he

sort of whispers in the hero's ear and he says remember those good values that we talked about remember our sense of connectedness remember helping people like you've got to commit to those values and then you have a moment a few minutes later where han solo comes back right and he embraces the values of teamwork he embraces the values of duty and sacrifice and he shoots darth vader off luke's tail and it's a combination of those two things it's a combination of luke remembering what obi-wan said and han solo coming back embracing the values of altruism

that allows luke to finally shoot the bullseye and blow up the death star and then you have your ending where the good values have prevailed over the bad values the underdog values have prevailed over the dominant values democracy freedom connection altruism has all prevailed over empire violence and greed so i'm going to show you the second act break reversal of star wars it's one of the best second act break reversals of all time i think in the movies it's the moment in which your hero has achieved a second act goal but now he's inadvertently forcing

the stakes of the global goal here at it that's it we did it we did it help i think this is all your fault [Music] are there away they've just made the jump into hyperspace you're sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship i'm taking an awful risk vader this had better work so you got to pay 75 and you escape from the death star you know you take r2d2 you take the plans and you deliver it to the rebel base you know and it seems as though you've achieved your second act goal however

one page later you got to reveal that the location of the rebel base has inadvertently been revealed you know and that's this huge huge setback in the external stakes of the story and then one page later han solo sort of flees and says you know i'm sticking around here and that's a huge setback in the philosophical stakes of the story and then even a few pages before that you had obi-wan killed and that's the worst possible thing in terms of the internal stakes of the story so for the third act of your story you're going

from page 75 the second act break to page 90 and what ideally you want there is to have nothing going right for your hero you just want one thing after another going wrong in all three sets of stakes externally internally and philosophically so in star wars right you have obi-wan gets killed right that's a huge setback emotionally in the internal stakes you have the death star locate the rebel base that's a huge setback externally the external stakes and you have han solo abandoned luke which is this big big setback your judas moment of betrayal and

the philosophical stakes of your story and then you have the rebel fighters take off and they all get killed by darth vader and then you have r2d2 get shot by darth vader and then you have the death star clearing the planet and you have the rebel base targeted and you have peter cushing saying commence primary ignition and then you have darth vader get onto luke's tail and he's chasing luke and he's chasing luke and he finally locks on luke and that's what i call the moment of despair because we've just seen darth vader kill everybody

else that he locked onto like that we've just seen darth vader you know one by one pick off all of luke's friends all of luke's allies and now darth vader's chasing luke he locks onto him and he says i have you now and that's an external failure right because luke's about to get killed and the rebel base is about to be destroyed it's an internal failure right because you're saying uncle owen was right like luke is going to die just like his father did he will have failed to achieve any kind of great destiny but

you also have a philosophical failure at this moment because at this moment it feels like han solo was right you know he was smart to just leave the rebel base and take off and be self-interested and not try to help anybody else out so it seems at this moment as though selfishness was smarter than altruism self-interest is smarter than loyalty tyranny is going to triumph over democracy greed is better than self-sacrifice violence is going to triumph over cooperation so you have a total failure luke has failed externally he failed internally he failed philosophically and at

this moment it seems like there's no positive outcome possible okay and this is really really important if you want to have a happy ending because you want your audience to feel as though your hero has earned their happy ending they need to have gone to the end of their ability and still fallen short and the more you can convince your audience that there's no way out the more that you can convince your audience that everything is lost the happier they're going to be when you're able to flip everything from failure to success and have a

positive outcome so how do you do that how do you get from total failure to total success it comes from the decisive act so the decisive act in star wars is han solo returns and he shoots darth vader and that's the thing that allows luke to shoot his bullseye and blow up the death star [Music] look out and what's crucial here again is that your decisive act is an enactment of the underdog values of the story here's what all comes together at the end you have your moment of despair darth vader locks onto luke says

i have you now and then ba-boom han solo returns shoots darth vader off luke's tail that's overturning the philosophical stakes of your story from negative to positive and because that happens luke is able to shoot a bullseye he blows up the death star you're overturning the external stakes your story from negative positive and because that happens obi-wan comes back and says remember the force will be with you always and you're overturning the internal emotional stakes of the story from negative positive it happens in 42 seconds and that is an insanely great ending so let's go

back and watch those last two minutes of star wars and we'll just play them through but you'll see how each of these moments play out from the kamikaze moment of commitment to the moment of despair and to the decisive act so here it is the two-minute climax of star wars use the force luke let go the force is strong luke trust me [Music] what's wrong nothing i'm all right [Music] ignition [Music] i have you now what look out [Music] you're all clear [Music] [Music] great shot kid that was one in a million remember the force

will be with you always okay so the general point here is that for an insanely great ending you don't have just one climax your story right you have three climaxes external internal and philosophical and you want them all to be logically connected in as close proximity to each other as possible and also in ascending order of importance ideally you want to go from total failure to total success in 45 seconds or less and this is like the hardest thing in the world to do in terms of storytelling but if you can convincingly pull it off

you got yourself an insanely great ending okay so now the graduate [Music] do [Music] there's three sets of stakes in the graduate external internal and philosophical so what's excellent at stake in the graduate it's not anything big like star wars it's not the fate of the galaxy or anything like that it's something very small very intimate very tied to the hero benjamin braddock and mike nichols sets it up in this early scene at the beginning of the movie hey what's the matter guess we're all downstairs ben waiting to see you dad can you explain them

that i have to be alone for one these are all our good friends ben most of them have known you since well practically since you were born what has it been i'm just worried [Music] well about what i guess about my future [Music] what about it i don't know i wanted to be [Music] to be what [Music] different so it's the future that's what's at stake ben has a future and he just wants it to be different so what are the internal stakes of the graduate what is emotionally at stake in the story now obviously

it's a love story he meets elaine robinson he falls in love and there's this great scene in the middle of the movie where he talks to elaine about how much he likes her so here is the scene that sets up what's emotionally at stake in the graduate elaine i like you i like you so much do you believe that do you yes you're the first you're the first thing for so long that i've liked the first person i could stand to be with my whole life such a waste it's just nothing so what's at stake

here is ben is falling in love with elaine but it's not just you know that she's pretty and have had a good time going out but that he feels connected to her like she's the first person that he can stand to talk to you know the first person that he can stand to be around and ben has been a guy like this has been his quest for the whole movie is to try to find somebody he can connect to and now he's finally found it he's finally found a lane and there's that connection made so

it's a love story but it's also a story about finding someone that you can talk to and somebody who understands you and this is the thing that ben has been searching for the whole movie so now we go to the philosophical stakes of the graduate and uh it's a little murkier than star wars it's not quite so black and white it's not just like you know good guys and bad guys you know it's a little murkier but to figure it out you know you go back and you figure out who's the antagonist of your story

and what's the antagonist aria like what's the moment in which your bad guy says to your hero like kid here's the way the world works so there's one person who comes along in the first five minutes of the graduate and explicitly talks to ben about what his future should be so here's the speech i think a lot of people would consider the antagonist aria of the graduates i just want to say one word to you just one word yes sir are you listening yes are you plastics exactly how do you mean there's a great future

in plastics think about it what do you think of that yes i will i've said that's a deal so plastics right there's a great future in it but i would argue that this is actually not the antagonist aria of the story because it's only one word and it doesn't really speak to the underlying values that are embedded in the story there's actually a scene a few minutes later on where someone sits down with ben and tells him how he should be living his life and i would say that's the real antagonist aria of the graduate

so just to set the scene mrs robinson has sort of asked ben to drive her home she's lured him into the house she lures him upstairs into her bedroom and then she comes in and drops all her clothes and she says ben i'm ready to have an affair with you i'm available to you anytime and oh my god all of a sudden mr robinson pulls in and ben has to quickly run downstairs and sit down there and pretend like he was looking after her and trying to protect her and just waiting for mr robinson to

come home and mr robinson comes in he pours himself a drink right and he sits down and he tells ben how ben should be living his life so here in all its glory is the antagonist aria of the graduate ben i think i think you ought to be taking it a little easier right now than you seem to be so a few wildos take things as they come [Music] have a good time with the girls and so forth don't get up i uh i was just telling uh ben here that he ought to sew a

few wild notes have a good time while he can you think that's sound advice yes i do i've got to go so there's a bad guy saying to your hero like go out have fun with the girls you know don't take things too seriously and you think to yourself well is that maybe that's what's at stake philosophically is that it's just like true love versus you know going out and having empty sex um but there's more to it obviously it's got to be a little bit more than that so there's another scene later in the

movie where ben and mrs robinson embark on this affair and they're going out and they're sneaking and they're going to a hotel room and having sex all the time and they never talk to each other like ben is trying to connect he's trying to connect and they never talk about anything so finally there's a scene in the movie in which he says no no i want to talk i want to have a conversation and so this is a scene that also has a clue as to what the philosophical stakes of the story are i don't

know anything about how you work this what do you say to when you leave the house at night nothing he's asleep always doesn't he wake up when you come home we have separate bedrooms oh i see so you know i mean i don't like to seem like i'm crying but i guess you don't sleep together or anything no we don't well how long has this been going on for god's sake let's try wait a minute why did you marry him see if you can guess well i can't think real hard benjamin i can't see why

you did unless you didn't have to marry him or anything did you don't tell elaine so what we learn in this scene is that mrs robinson didn't get married to mr robinson because she loved him right she only got married to him because she got pregnant and in the world at the time single moms were frowned upon and if you got pregnant you were expected to get married to the man you got pregnant to so you're saying philosophically it seems as though what's at stake here is this question of do you live your life according

to sort of true love or do you live your life according to social expectations but it's not just like social expectations right there's also this sense of sort of jadedness and cynicism and sort of shallowness and like using other people so you feel like you know maybe that's what's at stake is true love versus this horrible cynicism in the world and now the problem for ben is that he doesn't have a mentor he doesn't have obi-wan he doesn't have any sort of wise elder person who's going to come up and say like kid here's how

you got to do it like don't pay any attention to those other people here's a better way to live your life so ben's mentor this is my argument ben's mentor is actually his feelings his feelings are the thing that's sort of guiding him through life and it's going to come up into conflict with the dominant values of this world so the contest philosophically in this story is between ben and his feelings versus this whole dominant world and this whole universe of sort of cynicism and jadedness and shallowness and just people using other people but it

all kind of comes together in this beautiful scene that they staged in the middle of the movie in which ben picks up a lane they go out on a date and what's great about it is on the first date ben in is enacting all those bad values in the universe he's enacting the dominant values she's being this sort of cynical jaded sleazy guy and he takes to the strip club and it's just awful you know and he's trying to live his life according to the dominant values of that universe and then finally he looks up

he sees her crying he feels terrible about it and they go and they have hamburgers and then they have this conversation and this is such a lesson for screenwriters which is if your hero is going to talk to his love interest and they're going to bond you really only get one scene and you have to get it exactly right it has to be a bullseye so here is the scene in which ben and elaine have gone out they've gotten hamburgers they're sitting in their car and they connect with each other not just emotionally but they

connect with each other sort of philosophically so here's a scene which is laying out what's philosophically at stake in the graduate i've had this feeling ever since i've graduated this kind of compulsion that i have to be rude all the time you know what i mean yes i do it's like i've been playing some kind of game but the rules don't make any sense to me they're being made up by all the wrong people no i mean no one makes them up they simply made themselves up so this is what i think is philosophically at

stake in the graduate is this question of how do you live your life do you live your life according to everyone's expectations according to sort of the rules of social conformity or do you trust your feelings do you do you live your life according to what's inside you what your feelings are and what's interesting about that is that rules are the provenance of the community we all have rules so that we can all get along within the community and feelings are all about the individual so in a weird way the graduate is the opposite of

star wars in terms of its value the graduate is saying your individual feelings are more important than the rules of the community your individual feelings are more important than sort of the stifling conformity of the san fernando valley back in the 60s okay so you have three sets of stakes in the graduate externally it's what's going to happen in ben's future and will it be different internally it's a sense of love with elaine robinson but it's mostly about this sense of connection he's finally found someone to connect with and can he sustain that connection and

then philosophically it's this question of do you live your life according rules and expectations or do you live your life according to your own feelings here's the page count for the graduate if it were hypothetically a 100 page screenplay if you begin at the beginning you meet benjamin braddock he's sort of lost he's alienated he's floating around in his pool he he doesn't like his parents he doesn't want to be them but he doesn't know sort of how to make his future different and then boom your inciting incident is mrs robinson like drops her clothes

and propositions him and says i'm available to you anytime i want to have an affair you know and then like hamlet ben sort of dithers and dithers he doesn't know what to do you know and then finally after the scuba diving scene he's like i can't take it anymore i can't take the isolation anymore i got to connect i got to try and connect with someone so he begins his affair with mrs robbins you kind of know it's not the thing that he should be doing but he calls her up they go to hotel room

and he begins the affair and now just like star wars benjamin has a goal in the second act but it's not an external goal it's not anything he's trying to achieve in the outside world ben is pursuing an internal goal he's trying to connect with somebody and then what happens is and this is brilliant of course is that as soon as your hero embarks on their second act quest you want to have a wrench come in and like you know blow their plans apart so in star wars you know alderaan gets blown up in the

graduate you have mrs robinson says to bain you cannot date elaine i have a daughter but you're not allowed to date her and ben goes fine i won't date her so on page 50 he has to go on this date with elaine and he's trying to act like a jerk and sort of keep her at arm's length and he can't do it and at the end of the night they've connected with each other so he here got what he wanted right he connected with somebody but it just wasn't in the way that he expected so

as soon as ben has connected with elaine right you have to throw a new complication into your story so mrs robinson figures out oh my god like ben is falling in love with elaine and she goes to elaine and she lies she says that ben raped her and she disconnects ben from elaine you know she sort of takes elaine away from ben and sends her off to berkeley so the rest of the second act is ben going up to berkeley sort of pursuing elaine robinson sort of following her around wooing her wooing her and he

finally finds out that you know mrs robinson told all these lies to elaine and he says no no that didn't happen that didn't happen and he's gradually wearing down her defenses and you get to the end of the second act and you get to the first kiss moment and boom you've got it like ben has connected with elaine so you get to the end of the second act and ben has actually achieved his goal he's been able to connect with somebody who understands him who gets him and he doesn't quite feel so alone in the

universe your hero has achieved his second act goal of connecting with somebody and then of course you have to turn it all over because it's the end of the second act and mr robinson shows up and he takes elaine away from ben and then the climax of the story of course is been going elaine elaine elaine and then you have your happy ending okay so here's the second act big reversal of the graduate and again it's the moment in which your hero has finally achieved his second act goal which in ben's case is just to

connect with another human being and then one page later suddenly a trapdoor opens underneath your hero and he falls into this all or nothing do or die situation so here it is the second act break reversal of the graduate good night are we getting married tomorrow no day after tomorrow i don't know maybe we are maybe we're not [Music] wow [Music] so [Music] do you want to uh you want to try and tell me why you did it mr robinson so there's a lot going on in this moment right because you've gone to the end

of the second act ben has sort of wooed elaine she came back she gave him this perfect kiss he went out to buy the ring you think everything is going great but there's a bunch of huge setbacks happening all at the same time before the scene happened there was an enormous like emotional setback internal setback because ben has found out that elaine is actually engaged to you know married carl the makeout king of the fraternity one page later after the kiss mr robinson shows up the very next scene and takes elaine away from ben and

says that's it you're never going to see her again we're hiding her you're never going to get the chance to connect to this person that you thought you had this such a strong connection with and so ben you know the next scene in the movie is he runs over the sorority where elaine is and he's trying to find her again you know and she's already gone but she's left behind the letter and this is a huge philosophical setback in the story and that's what i call the judas moment of betrayal because elaine says to ben

i love you but it would never work and again it's now your hero's closest ally elaine robinson is telling ben i love you you know my feelings are that i love you but it would never work because of the circumstances we have to follow social rules instead of following our feelings so again this is a huge philosophical setback here's the scene her roommate's coming down with a note for you dear benjamin please forgive me because i know what i'm doing is the best thing for you my father is so upset you've got to understand i

love you but it would never work out so now you're at the end of the second act and you're heading to the third act and ben the hero has just had these huge setbacks in all three sets of stakes and now you're heading towards the climax of your story and again what you want to have happen is you never want anything going right for your hero between page 75 and page 90 you just want one setback after another so the graduate the first thing ben does is he confronts mrs robinson and she says well the

wedding is already planned elaine is getting married and we won't tell you where it is sorry we won't be able to invite you to the wedding benjamin but the arrangements have been so rushed so you know he finally learns where the wedding is he drives like crazy to santa barbara he runs out of gas he runs like crazy down to the church he gets to the church the doors are locked you know he doesn't know what to do and he runs up those stairs and he comes up to the to the mezzanine he looks down

and he sees elaine kiss carl and you go oh my god they're married it's too late and that's your moment of despair so ben has failed externally right because elaine has married carl and he's now facing this empty future but he's also failed internally which is his love that he has for lane it's not being reciprocated anymore and it seems as though that connection that bond that he felt with uh with elaine has been lost but he's also this is important he's also failed philosophically because now it seems as though rules have triumphed over feelings

that jadedness and cynicism have triumphed over love that conformity is traumatizing over non-conformity and basically the whole big bad world has triumphed over benjamin braddock and ideally what you want is if you stop the movie at this moment and you just ask people in the audience who've never seen it before you go like well how is ben going to get out of this again the best thing that you want is for audiences to go i don't know that's it it's over he's screwed there's no way ben is going to get what he wants you know

you have to have your moment of despair seem like it's absolute done deal there's no positive outcome possible and then you have your decisive act and i'm just gonna play the last two minutes of the graduate and you can see how it all unfolds and then i'll go back and i'll break it down as to what's happening in every moment but here it is and if you haven't seen the movie before if you've never seen the graduate my god stop watching this lecture right now turn it off go watch the graduate and then come back

and now that you've come back and you've seen the graduate here is the two minute climax of the graduate [Music] [Music] oh jesus god no [Music] where's that guy what's he doing take care of him he's too late [Music] stop [Music] [Music] [Applause] crazy [Applause] it's too oh for me [Applause] [Applause] okay so there it is it's like one of the greatest endings of all time and uh if you break it down under the hood it works in a lot of the same ways that the climax of star wars works so you get to your

moment of despair right ben is there at the window he's looking down and elaine is married carl and you go oh my god it seems like there's no good outcome possible and then you have again the kamikaze moment of commitment which is your mentor's voice coming back and speaking you know inside the head of the hero and going like remember remember remember what we talked about in the first act so of course ben's mentor is his feelings you see him struggling in this moment where he's looking down and he's struggling like do i follow the

rules i mean this is a moment of maximum social conformity do i follow the rules and just not say anything or do i let my feelings out and so his kamikaze moment of commitment is that he decides he's going to follow his feelings he's not going to follow the rules he's not going to follow anyone's expectations he's just going to trust his feelings just like luke does he's going to trust his feelings and he raises his hands up and he starts pounding on the window right and he starts calling out elaine elaine elaine and it's

such a great kamikaze moment to come in because the first time you see this movie right you go oh my god what are you doing you're making everything worse you know like you just feel like oh you're digging your hole deeper you're fooling the audience into thinking that your hero is doing the wrong thing but because he did that right because he listened to his feelings that's the thing that turns elaine around and then you have mrs robinson restate the dominant values of the universe by saying take care of him he's too late he's too

late right which means that rules are going to triumph over feelings that conformity is going to triumph over true love and at that moment you just want to go well that's it according to the rules of this world even if he's up there banging on the window it's too late like elaine has already gotten married and then the decisive act is sort of the han solo moment like elaine comes in and she just yells out and that's the moment in which she flips over right she is going to live her life according to her feelings

right and not according to everyone's expectations so the moment that elaine says ben right you're overturning the internal stakes of the story the emotional stakes of the story because you're saying oh my god that connection that they had that bond they felt it's still there it's still powerful like they're willing to like make fools of themselves in public because they feel that strongly and then because she calls out ben you know you have mrs robinson go over there and say to her [Applause] it's too late and elaine says not for me and that's overturning the

philosophical stakes of the story because what elaine is saying to mrs robinson at this moment is like you lived your life according to everyone's expectations and that's how you chose to live your life but not for me like even if i married carl even if we're in the church and everybody's standing there watching us like i am not going to let everyone's expectations dictate my life i'm going to listen to my feelings and that's going to be my guide to life and now because you've overturned the philosophical stakes your story bene you know fight and

push and shove and go through the glass doors and they get away and you're overturning the external strikes of your story so elaine says ben you're overturning the internal stakes of your story it's too late not for me you're overturning the philosophical stakes of your story and then bending only an escape you overturn the external stakes your story it happens in 42 seconds and that is an insanely great ending [Music] okay so now we get a little sunshine which is embarrassing because that script is just nowhere near as great as star wars or the graduate

but at least it shows how i was able to take lessons from those scripts and apply them to a screenplay of my own and i'm sorry but i'm going to add one last disclaimer because again i just know i'm going to get roasted alive by people who are going to say that i'm trying to turn storytelling into a paint by numbers exercise which is not what i'm trying to do like all these storytelling ideas don't apply to the most important part of storytelling which is just coming up with a great idea and with great characters

and getting a first draft down on paper so you can't use these story ideas to plot forward okay they only work in retrospect when you've already had that great moment of inspiration you've laid down that first draft and now you're just trying to find a way to turn it into the best version of itself okay it's like when all else fails you read the directions right so end of disclaimer let's look at little miss sunshine stakes a little sunshine are pretty easy to figure out they're all set up in this following scene there's no sense

in entering a contest if you don't think you're gonna win so do you think you can win little miss sunshine richard are you gonna win yes going to california so there it is it's pretty simple what's externally at stake in little miss sunshine is whether olive hoover is going to win the little sunshine contest when i was writing the script i thought you know what i was going to try to do was to have the smallest possible set of external stakes but then have the emotional stakes and especially the philosophical stakes be as big as

possible so it was a deliberate choice on my part for a comedy to have the external stakes be as small as possible now in terms of the internal emotional stakes it's also pretty simple here's the scene in which we're establishing in the first act what's emotionally at stake in little miss sunshine you know actually there is a message from cindy on the machine something about little missus sunshine sunshine what little sunshine yeah what cindy remember when olive was here last month she was runner up in the regional little miss sunshine well they just called right

now and said the girl who won had to forfeit her crown i don't know why something about diet pills but anyway now she has a place in the state contest in redondo [Music] so i didn't even realize like what a crucial scene that was until after i wrote the script and even after i sort of saw the movie i realized like just like that moment of olive like getting the news and reacting in such a such a like euphoric way right in such an emotional way that was the thing that allowed people to jump on

board with the movie so you're establishing right at the beginning what's emotionally at stake in this movie is olive's hopes and dreams she wants to become a beauty queen but it's not just about hopes and dreams right because what you want is sort of in the middle of your story you always try to sort of deepen the stakes your story reveals something that that your audience hadn't suspected so there's a scene in the middle of the movie that adds to the emotional stakes of the movie uh so here it is it's olive and grandpa in

the motel room setting up the internal emotional stakes of the story grandpa yeah am i pretty olive you are the most beautiful girl in the whole world no you're just saying that no i'm not i'm madly in love with you and it's not because your brains are your personality it's because you're beautiful inside and out grandpa what i don't want to be a loser you're not a loser where'd you get the idea you're a loser because dad hates losers so suddenly you're revealing that it's not just about sort of olive achieving or hopes and dreams

it's also the story of this little girl who's trying to connect to her dad you know she she's reaching out to her dad and she feels like the only way that she can do it is to be a winner because richard is obsessed with winning so now what you're putting at stake is not just like is she going to achieve her hopes and dreams but it's also her feel of failure and her fear of letting her father down and so it's that bond between the child and the parent that bond between richard and and olive

that's now being threatened and put at stake and now we get to the philosophical stakes of the story once again you just have your bad guy show up give his antagonist arya and he's saying to the audience and to the characters like this is the way the world works so here is the antagonist aria for little miss sunshine there are two kinds of people in this world winners and losers inside each and every one of you at the very core of your being he's a winner waiting to be awakened and unleashed upon the world so

it's richard right richard is the philosophical antagonist of little miss sunshine because he's sort of the the embodiment the apotheosis of the dominant values of this universe he sees the whole world in terms of sort of winners versus losers and his whole way of looking at the world is based on sort of status and rank and hierarchy and basically the approval of others like you're trying to be a winner and you're trying to at all costs avoid being a loser and what's important is that these are the dominant values of this whole universe it's not

just richer richards is the most sort of like virulent embodiment of these values but everybody else in this in this universe kind of shares the same sort of like i want to be number one i want to be a winner kind of value so you have richard you know he's a motivational speaker he wants to be a success he wants to be a winner but you also have sort of you know frank who's sort of the highbrow version of richard he wants to be the number one proof scholar in the us larry sugarman is perhaps

the second most highly regarded proof scholar in the us number one that would be me rich and you also have duane who wants to be a fighter pilot like who has this idea of just sort of you know joining the navy and sort of like transcending his whole family and i would call these sort of like the values of public life you know the values of sort of um the marketplace where you're trying to you know sort of impress other people you know and avoid being seen as a loser and so just as you have

an antagonist in the philosophical realm in little sunshine you also have a mentor you sort of have an obi-wan kenobi and he's the guy who's going to sit down with your with your hero and go like don't listen to all those other people like here are the real values that are important in life so here is the philosophical mentor of little miss sunshine i don't want to be a loser i'm not a loser where'd you get the idea you're a loser because dad hates losers back up a minute you know what a loser is a

real loser is somebody that's so afraid of not winning they don't even try now you're trying right yeah we need you not to lose it we're gonna have fun tomorrow right we can tell them all to go to hell good night i love you so it's grandpa right grandpa is the obi-wan kenobi of this movie he's the mentor for olive and he's the one who says like you know we're gonna have fun tomorrow like we can tell them all to go to hell like it doesn't matter what other people think it doesn't matter if we're

going to lose and so grandpa you know for him life is not about winning the approval of others it's just about having fun having pleasure sort of freedom and autonomy it's about letting yourself be defined by yourself and not being defined by others and i would call those sort of the values of private life you know it's sort of the the values of friendship the values of romance the values of creativity the values of the spirit like the things that other people can't see you know those are the values that that the grandpa sort of

is all about so you're setting up this universe in which sort of the dominant values of the universe you know are the values of the public self you know you live for others you live for status the underdog values of this universe are sort of the values of private life you know that you're going to just you know live for yourself you don't care what anyone else thinks and this is kind of the reason why i wrote the whole movie which is if you'll allow me to get up on my soapbox for a second i

feel like we all live kind of two lives we sort of have two selves we have our public self which is all about sort of like wealth and position and status is all the stuff that's visible it's all the stuff that everybody else can see and judge you on but we also have private lives we also have stuff that's hidden from the rest of the world it's visible only to a few people like only to a few loved ones and that's you know your private life and i just feel like we're at a point where

the values of public life sort of the values of the marketplace the values of judging people as to being winners and losers is starting to seep in to the realm of private life and especially into the realm of childhood and i just think that's terrible i think that children need to be protected from those values that childhood should just be about childhood and what's important about these two sets of values is the public values of wealth position status fame success you know just being an adult those are things that are not in your control and

the stuff in private life love friendship creativity those are things that are within your control and as the stoics say if your happiness is dependent on things you can't control you're never going to be happy so little miss sunshine was written to sort of stick up for the values of private life okay so lecture over i'm getting off my soapbox so a little sunshine the page count uh we start even before the movie begins we've established that frank has failed he's had this sort of failed love affair you start on page one you meet olive

and she's practicing to be in a beauty pageant but nothing's happening yet you're inciting incident all from the blue changes your hero's life changes their sense of the future aunt cindy calls says you've got a place in a little bit sunshine pageant right so like hamlet the k the family sort of dithers and deserves and is trying to figure out what they're going to do and what they realize they've all got to go to redondo beach so your first at break they set off they all get in the vw bush they take off they're driving

to redondo beach so you get into your second act and of course things start going wrong you know sort of on page 37 richard's book deal falls through on page 50 at the midpoint grandpa dies you get to page 62 and dwayne like realizes he's colorblind realizes he's never gonna be a pilot realizes his dream is all over and boom page 75 you get to the end of the second act and they arrive at redondo beach so you arrive at donna beach and your heroes have achieved their second act goal right but now you're forcing

the stakes of your global goal because olive is now either going to win the little miss sunshine pageant like she promised richard or she's going to lose the pageant but there's no going back it's all or nothing do or die kill or be killed and then you have your judas moment of betrayal right you have the person who's closest to your hero go and stab them in the back philosophically and that's dwayne dwayne is olive's closest ally he's the person who's sort of the closest with her and he looks around and he sees what's going

on he says this place is [ __ ] and he goes back and he talks to cheryl and he says like i don't want her to go on mom like she's not a beauty queen and olive overhears us hey how are you feeling better where's olive here what's up mom i don't want all of doing this oh my god around how this place is [ __ ] right look i don't want these people judging i'll [ __ ] them listen it is too late no it's not too late you're the mom and you're supposed to

protect her everyone is gonna laugh at her mom please don't let her do this olive hoover two minutes look she's not a beauty queen she's just not and so when dwayne goes backstage right he's seeing the world through richard's eyes he's saying in this life there's winners and losers and olive is not going to win so i don't even want her to go on so the third act you want nothing but setbacks happening so you know with a little bit of sunshine there's the setbacks happening all the way through the movie so frank has failed

you know larry sugarman gets the guy richard fails stan grossman rebuffs him you know grandpa dies your philosophical mentor is gone dwayne fails they arrive at redondo beach then you get to the swimsuit show and you're just establishing visually that olive is just kind of out of her league and she doesn't fit in with everybody else and then you get to the talent competition and you show like oh my god all the other girls have these great crazy kind of routines and then you have richard go backstage and he says like i don't want to

go on and you have dwayne go backstage and say she's not a beauty queen mom and you get to your kamikaze moment of commitment where cheryl sits down with olive right and she says for olive like we've come all this way like we're proud of you but you don't have to do this if you don't want to so it's up to you like you can either go on and dance or you can sit this one out it's all up to you and this is your kamikaze moment of commitment right because this is the moment where

your hero is sitting there and they have to make a choice they have to decide what they're going to do and there's two sets of values and olive at this point has heard there's no way she's going to win and if she were living her life according to richard's values there's no sense in any confidence if you can't win she wouldn't go on but there's something else like she's got the voice of her mentor she's got grandpa right who comes back and says like we'll tell them all to go to hell we're gonna have fun

tomorrow. so listening to the voice of the mentor again olive stands up and she walks down and she's going to go on and again what you want in a good sort of kamikaze moment of commitment you want your audience going no no no don't do it like you want your audience freaking out and going like stop stop don't do that so then olive walks out on stage and she's just like standing there right she's got a funny costume on and at this moment you want it to seem like olive is doomed like she's gonna lose

and be humiliated and it's just gonna be like the worst thing ever and there's no positive outcome possible so let's just play the climactic two minutes and then we'll go back and we'll see how it works under the hood so here it is the two minute climax of little miss sunshine okay um i'd like to dedicate this to my grandpa who showed me these moves oh that is so sweet is he here where's your grandpa right now in the trunk of our car okay well take it away olive [Music] she's a very kicky girl the

kind you don't think [Music] favorite when i make my move to her room it's the right time she's never hiding please i don't know that girl is pretty wild now you [Music] she's all right she's all right [Music] everybody [Music] what is your daughter doing [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so here's how it breaks down olive walks out on stage and you get the joke about the trunk of the car and then the mc leaves and olive is left alone on stage and this is your moment of total failure right because it seems like olive is

doomed like she's doomed to external failure she's not going to win a little miss sunshine contest and then there's an internal failure too because not only is olive gonna sort of like lose the contest and be humiliated but she's also gonna sort of hurt that relationship with her dad and there's just gonna be this overall like sense of family shame amongst the hoover family because they're all such a horrible bunch of losers and now you also have a philosophical failure right because you're saying winning is more important than fun public image is more important than

your private self competition is more important than just pleasure and then you have your decisive act so the music starts and all starts dancing and the decisive act is she tears her pants off which means she's going to fail externally right because she's not going to win the little miss sunshine contest but at the very same instant she's succeeding philosophically because she's enacting and affirming the values that grandpa taught her back in the motel right we're gonna have fun tomorrow and we're gonna tell them all to go to hell and the last set of stakes

is emotional right because you still have that relationship between olive and richard at stake and at first richard's uncomfortable right he's embarrassed but as he watches the audience heckle olive and then they get up and they start to walk out richard converts to the underdog valleys of the story and he stands up and he starts supporting olive so all of terrorists her pants off she fails to overturn the external stakes of the story but at the very same instant she's affirming grandpa's values and that's overturning the philosophical stakes of the story and then richard stands

up and starts supporting olive and that's overturning the emotional stakes of the story it happens in 45 seconds and that i hope is an insanely great ending okay so in summary your insanely great ending is you have your second act break reversal you've solved your second act goal but you're creating a crisis in your global goal you have an act three drive one setback after another down to a moment of despair you have your kamikaze moment of commitment in which your hero is acting on the mentor's values you have this moment of despair in which

it seems as though you've been defeated internally externally and philosophically and there's no positive outcome possible and then you have your decisive act that turns everything around and what's crucial here the most important thing is that your decisive act is meaningful in that it's an enactment of the underdog values of the story and because your hero trusts the mentor because he trusts the underdog values of the story that allows for a rabid reversal of stakes in the story and you're overturning the moral order of the universe that you've created and what's interesting about these movies

is that all the heroes luke ben and olive are all innocent heroes which means they're not flawed so the conflict in this story comes from the universe that they exist and they live in a flawed universe they are not flawed characters in a flawed universe which means that luke ben and oliver are all the redeemers of that universe so in a nutshell you create a flawed universe you overturn the moral order of that universe from negative to positive in 45 seconds or less and that is an insanely great ending so that's pretty much everything i

know about how to write a story with an insanely great ending and remember i'm not saying that this is the only way to tell a story okay a story can be anything like you can write a story any way you want i'm just hoping that if you love movies and you're just starting out trying to write your own screenplay maybe some of these ideas will be helpful so good luck and happy writing [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] you