104. Keep your story focused!

Can you write down what your movie is about in one or two sentences? Does every single scene in the film help answer that question? Can you write down what each scene is about in one sentence? If it isn’t funny (if the people are laughing, they don’t care if the story is moving forward) or doesn't answer that one particular question in some way, seriously consider removing the scene from your script.

However you begin your story, whatever your story is about, you have to keep your eye on the ball. Half-way through the script, three-quarters of the way through the script, your story still needs to be about the same thing it was when you started. The story can grow and change, get larger and more intense, but it has to be the same story you promised to deliver at the beginning. The reader gets irritated when the rug is jerked out from under her. Don't start out with a romantic comedy, and suddenly turn it into a horror film.

I didn’t much like Something Wild... It started off like a little cheating-on-the-wife comedy... and ended up with the hero being terrorized by a psychotic killer. It was a tonal shift that the story was never able to recover from... They changed horses in the middle of the stream and lost me in the process. But then again, it did get made!

A shift in tone is a mistake. At least most of the time.

I'll get argument on this, but I hated the Russian film Burnt by the Sun. It started off as this lovely, gentle, family Sunday-in-the-country movie. Everything was in dappled sunlight, the girls were in their summer dresses, and everyone is outside eating great food and it's all sweetness and light and then all of a sudden the secret police come, haul dad away and blammo!, he's in the gulag. I bought a ticket for one kind of movie and then all of a sudden I was in another, completely different movie.

To Kill A Mockingbird is about one thing. Every single scene in the movie, or damn near, is about how Atticus loves his children. The last line in the movie tells us one last time: “He would be in Jem's room all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

Ordinary People is about one thing. Every single scene in some way answers the question, “Is Conrad going to try to kill himself again?” That is the only thing the movie is about. 

Imagine a clothes line with sheets of paper clothes-pinned to it. Each sheet of paper is a scene in your movie. If each scene in the movie is not about the one, single main thought which addresses the theme of the story, then if falls off the clothes line. Since every scene in Ordinary People addresses our fear of Conrad committing suicide, every scene addresses what the story is really about.