If you have this movie watching habit, you are completely ruining your experience of the film.

I'm not judging. I'm guilty of this myself. But it has to stop because when you do it you are robbing yourself of a key part of the onscreen story.

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It’s the end of a long day, and you and your partner have just finished debating what you should watch on Netflix.

You’ve settled on a movie. One of the new releases you didn’t see in theaters but have been meaning to get around to. You press Play.

Oh shit! You actually want to grab a snack.

So you head to the kitchen while you hear the signature DADUM in the background. Music starts, and you quickly gather your food and a drink before the action of the scene really kicks in.

Once the characters start talking, you snag your spot on the couch. But you didn’t miss much. You could hear most of the conversation from the kitchen, and you get the gist of what’s going on.

Photo by Arlinda on Unsplash

Or:

You are finally getting out of the house and going to meet some friends at the movie theater.

But you’re running late because at the last minute you decided you hate every piece of clothing that you own and your hair and all your makeup and you were fussing with your looks until you finally just gave up and went with what you had on originally.¹

But that’s okay.

There’s always like 20 minutes of previews anyway.

You get to the theater, grab your popcorn, and find your way to the proper row.

By the time you take your seats, the movie has started. But the character dialogue quickly explains everything and you get up to speed enough to understand the plot engine of the opening sequence.

Do you know what bad habit I am describing?

It’s not paying attention to the opening shot.

Photo by Laura Nyhuis on Unsplash

Hooking your audience from the first moment of your script is key.

The first moment sets the tone of the story to come. It lays out the theme. As a screenwriter, if you want to learn how to master the art of grabbing a reader’s attention, you need to pay attention to these things.

If you don’t, you’ll miss that beautiful, perfect foundation that sets the groundwork for the rest of the movie.²

You might have heard that agents, managers, or Showrunners will throw your script out if it doesn’t hook them in the first five pages. This isn’t necessarily true for everyone in the business, but it is true for many of them!

So you need to make sure your first five pages sing. That your first page is brilliant.

Why aren’t you paying close attention to and learning from the first moment of everything you watch?

That’s what was happening on the first pages.

That’s what got every reader of this script interested in the story until they finally were hooked into the bigger plot. Eventually, enough readers said “yes!” to this movie, and then it got made.

We can learn from the opening moment.

If you’re keeping up with your weekly script + movie watching analysis homework, you have probably noticed that many scripts and films have different openings.

When there is a discrepancy like this, study the changes! Why do you think the filmmaker pushed for something different? Does the script version work better? Or does the movie version have a stronger impact?

Believe me when I say that I, like you, have slacked off on occasion when it comes to paying attention during the first few seconds of a story.

I realized this habit needed to be stopped when I watched Barbie for the second time.

There’s even a whole IndieWire article on the creation of this opening shot!

If you’ve seen the Academy Award Winning³ Barbie film, you might remember that the opening shot is an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This sends a strong set of expectations for the movie that you just sat down to watch:

1. It’s going to talk about big human impulses that feel deeply ingrained into our core evolutionary identity.

2. It’s going to be smart, witty, and have high-brow commentary despite being about a “low brow” product.

3. It’s ambitious. We’re going big with Stanley Kubrick level cinema here (Helen Mirren as narrator also adds to its “classy” elevation.)

4. All of the above is ironic. This movie will be all of those things. But it promises to not take itself too seriously. They’re just dolls, after all. Or are they? 😉

Only I MISSED all of this because for a completely avoidable pregaming reason, I was late to the movie theater. So I was taking my seat as Margot Robbie was driving her car through Barbieland during a narrative overview of the rules of the world.

I still enjoyed the film. I got everything out of it that Greta Gerwig wanted me to.

But it was only during my rewatch a year later that I realized how much I had missed when I missed that opening shot.

Am I overthinking this? Most certainly. That’s why I get paid the big bucks⁴ on Substack to publish my insights.

But if you want to be a screenwriter, you should be overthinking these things too.

As a literary manager and consultant, I have read too many scripts that open up with a statement about the character we’re watching. Or by naming the setting. There’s nothing illegal about getting straight to the point like this (Though if you spend a paragraph describing all the furniture in the room first, I will know that you used to be a playwright. And if you describe the weather first I will know that you started out as a novelist. But I digress.)

Sometimes writers get so caught up in what they are trying to tell the reader right away that they forget you are allowed to put your director hat on.

Picture the black screen. The studio logo has just faded out.

What does your audience hear first?

Is it silence, like in the original Star Wars?

Is it gratingly sarcastic pop music, like in Promising Young Woman?

Is it the sound of a dying woman gasping her last breaths, like in Kill Bill?

Then what do we see first?

Is it a syringe injecting an egg yolk with a mysterious Substance.

Is it a smiling Anora as she dances to a sappy dance pop song under a blue light?

Is it a melancholic Jackie Brown riding the moving walkway in—

You get the idea.

Don’t neglect the opening moment in your script. Don’t overlook the opening moment when you watch movies and TV shows.

Prepare your snacks and drinks and get comfy on the couch before you hit play.

Get to the theater early, even if it means watching the annoying pre-preview ads.

Think critically about this opening moment. The filmmaker spent a lot of time on it.

What is it telling you?

1. Just me??

2. Okay, there’s a very real possibility that this opening isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s not worth the risk of skipping it just in case it is. And writers spend an inordinate amount of creative energy on the first few moments of their film (or TV pilot). It’s an important clue that tells you what they think will be important for the rest of the story.

3. Best Original Song counts!

4. lol