WRITING YOUR SCREENPLAY: THE END (AKA LAST PAGES)
As the first post in this series began on page one, it feels natural for us to conclude with a look at “THE END.”
SPOILER ALERT: Do a quick scroll through this post. If you haven’t seen some of the movies listed, please know we’ll be discussing their endings. If you don’t want to ruin it for yourself, watch the movie before diving in.
People like to talk about happy endings and how viewers crave and love happy endings. We’re here to say: If anybody gives you this adage as a note, you have the WGF Librarians’ encouragement to question them.
Querying ourselves about some of our favorite endings, a movie that seems to come up again and again is My Best Friend’s Wedding.
What is it about this particular ending?
If you’ve seen it, you know the film ends with the protagonist, Julianne, giving the maid of honor speech at her BFF Michael’s wedding… on every level, putting his happiness ahead of her own. For the duration of the film, she’s pursued marrying him, but in the end… he marries another person.
Julianne lets him go. She does the right thing, sure, but—as she points out—she loses. Doing the right thing is good, but it doesn’t really make Julianne happy.
Life and movies are often about loss. Loss of a partner, friend, or protector. Loss of innocence. Loss of time. Loss of success or victory. Loss of the thing you thought you needed in order to be happy.
We find ourselves like Julianne, sitting alone at a wedding that is not ours, having experienced a painful loss.
But then our phone starts to ring…
And there’s our other best friend, George, who points out….
“There may not be marriage. There may not be sex, but BY GOD…”
(CUE THE MUSIC.)
“…there’ll be dancing!”
Maybe when people say that viewers crave happy endings, they really mean that viewers crave SATISFYING endings.
When we go through the major exercise in loss that we call LIFE, we want to be reminded of George. We want to be reminded of the things we STILL HAVE. At their core, that’s what stories give to us. They point out what remains.
If you read the draft of My Best Friend’s Wedding that exists out there on the web, you’ll see on the page that the ending is more or less there, but it doesn’t possess quite the same magic that it does in the final film. The idea is there, but it hasn’t been totally realized yet.
That’s the sentiment we’d like to leave you with here at the end of this WRITING YOUR SCREENPLAY series.
A screenplay is a blueprint, a map, a guidebook — often with a destination in mind, but as you move along towards that destination, the feeling might evolve. At its most transcendent, writing is about that very evolution and learning. Embrace it!
Now let’s look at a few more scripts.
If you want to make the ending to your script even more satisfying, remember, great endings —
Are often about losing something, but gaining something more meaningful through the loss
Sometimes possess a little ambiguity
Are a pay-off to information planted very early and throughout the script
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