Film Courage: Why do you use four-act story structure instead of three-act story structure?
Jeffrey Alan Schechter, Author/Screenwriter/Founder of Writers Room Pro:
Because I’m Jewish. Okay, so the four sons, the four cups of wine, the four acts? Every
Passover we sit at the table and we drink another cup of wine to each one of the acts. I’m kidding!
Stop it, it's a joke. Okay, but I wasn't kidding. I am Jewish.
I found it to be an easier way of just thinking it makes things balanced. Three acts
on a typical three-act structure, it's act two is twice as long as act
one and act three so why not just call it four acts already? You can have act one, act two,
an act two b and then act three. I used to think in the early days when I was working on the system
(I think that's how I was calling it then) that just felt confusing so I just went with act one,
two, three and four. It's a four-act structure but it's all the same, it's all three-act structure. I
forget who, could be [John] Truby there's a six-act structure, [Syd] Field’s three acts,
we're all talking about the same stuff. It's really just here's your pie. You're
going to slice it into eighths or sixteenths or whatever. Then other pieces of my understanding
of story structure played nicely with the four acts so the the four archetypes things like
that so it just felt like four acts made things kind of brought a nice order to the universe.
Film Courage: Did anybody fight you on it?
Jeff: They fight people like me all the time.
Film Courage: But in terms of didn't they say “That can't be done, it's always this,”
and you said sure why not why it's 2a, 2b.
Jeff: It's like every conversation I have that is always
just silly. It happens now where like I'll talk to people who are working on on like tv shows like
even even like a like an episode of television where it's it's every story's got a beginning,
a middle and an end. At the very least you can subscribe to a three-act structure for your
tv show but people say well but we don't have commercials so therefore it's one act I'm going
okay if whatever floats you about it all comes out the same anyway see I’d like to think that
that the my understanding of story structure is not proscriptive it's descriptive so I just choose
to describe a well-told story like this somebody else could choose to describe a well-told story
using different terms and different terminology everybody does you know Blake Snyder had
his way of looking at a [John] Truby, [Robert] McKee we're all talking about the same stuff
it's not like it's not like if you looked at Star Wars or Avengers: Endgame it's like the movies
become different depending on how you describe the structure of it all so so to me it's just
it's kind of a semantic sort of argument just for my purposes it just it makes things very orderly
when you look at it in terms of sort of the flow of the of a story you can divide it into quarters
what are plot points and why are they important so plot points are
discrete in my understanding right discrete chunks of information that add
to the overall knowledge of the story so so for example if we had a
let's say we I'm making I make up a fictional movie okay and it's like we come up it's
the camera pans through a Manhattan living room in at right after sunrise it's been happening because
you can see the empire state building out the window and it ends up on and you see like there's
a music stand that as the camera's moving through this apartment so okay somebody's into music and
then there's an artist's easel so they're into music and also art and then the camera ends up
in this bedroom and the alarms go off there are two people in bed and each has their own alarm set
for the exact same time right and two hands reach out and shut off the alarms and the guy gets out
of bed on his side and the woman gets out of bed on her side and they go into their bathroom and
then the camera's finally just either cuts or one continuous movement however you want to direct it
but we see that they're brushing their teeth at two separate sinks and they're really talking to
each other brushing their teeth at two separate sinks and then they go have breakfast together
he's reading his newspaper she's reading her newspaper still not really talking
she gets up to go to work and they have a little kiss it even doesn't seem bad it just seems like
it's a kiss goodbye she goes off to work and is having coffee at some Starbucks and she looks
over and there's this couple clearly in love okay and she looks at them as they're hugging and they
kiss and she just bursts out crying right and there's a old woman next to her and she
goes what's the jerk's name sweetheart and she goes ben right so how many plot points was that
it's a true it's a trick question you say well it's Manhattan it's the the artist easel it's the
it's the music stand we saw them in bed and it's it's one plot point there's this guy
and a girl and their relationship sucks that's it everything else about that is necessary to
lay some pipe for the story who's somebody's into art somebody's into music they're living together
there's no communication going on but it's all about they Julie and Ben let's say her name
is Julie and Ben have a lousy relationship and it's killing her right so that says plot points
don't have to be, it's like there's beats there's scenes then there's plot points so
to me a plot point is you think of like a like a pearl necklace and plot point is another pearl
on that necklace and it's it's not meant to be and some plot points could be as just one
one beat but this plot point I described was basically I don't know 14 beats something
like that it's probably 14 beats if you I was writing it as a script it's probably seven scenes
like the the apartment in the morning and the breakfast and the like everything would have its
own slug line interior Julie and Ben's apartment bathroom interior Julie and Ben's apartment
kitchen or montage but each but when you shoot it the montages get broken down into so it's probably
seven scenes in terms of like strict movie making how many plot points won right so so that became
that's a big part of my understanding of story is how many plot points does it take to tell
a complete and ample story as our friend Aristotle might say and to me the magic number turned into
44. there's that four again right turned into 44 yeah right and the whole getting up to 44 was
kind of a weird sort of exploration anyway and it doesn't have to be 44 43 47 but if you tell
me your typical two hour movie is 85 plot points it'll be like I politely disagree it's too much or
you're thinking about beats maybe not plot points and also just just for clarity sake again it's
just descriptive right it's maybe this is the part where I'm actually getting proscriptive because
I believe very firmly and there's the the film that gets sold and the film that gets made so
I am obsessed with the film that gets sold because that's the one that you write and
you try to get people to fork over money for it but that's the one you have control over
that's like yours as a writer and that's the one that that you can really influence once you
sell it like if we go back to the Stanley's cup story I had no control once once I sold it
no control over the direction of the of the story and how would it get rewritten and who's going to
be in it and what's the director's take on it so it's like so I'm i'm really occupied myself with
the writing a script that could get sold and for that you want to tell a story in a way that the
person who will buy it can understand it and that story can kind of get into their heart and soul so
to me 44 plot points turned into that's a very manageable story and following a kind of a
a guideline of what does a well told story look like just felt to me like that
that enhances your chances of selling something because you're telling you're telling a story in a
way that people are kind of programmed to hear the story which is not to say that people shouldn't
do crazy ambitious stuff and just so everything everywhere all at once is crazy ambitious doing
really well I haven't examined it to see but I can almost guarantee you even with all that's going on
that it that it is hitting it's it's it's hitting the plot points in in the right order and in the
right places it just does it with crazy wild imagination right so so for me it's not like
every it's not like every good movie or every every popular movie has to follow this system
but or every movie written or every movie ever made follows this exact system it doesn't right
but every movie that that really kind of sinks in and gets to people pretty much
whether it's intentionally or not is following something very similar to what I prescribed.