Starting at the Ending: Drew Yanno on How to Write Third Acts
By Bill McIlvaine

One of the things that makes the Great American PitchFest unique is that our founder, Signe Olynyk, handpicks each of the speakers who appear each year, and personally attends all of their sessions, reads their books, and reviews their DVD's/Audio recordings before they are invited to attend. Drew Yanno provides consultation services for producers and writers including Will Smith and Overbrook Entertainment, and we are thrilled to add this exceptional writer to this year's lineup.

As author of 'THE THIRD ACT', Signe recently read his book and worked with him on a consultation of her most recent script. " 'The Third Act' is the single best book I've ever read on writing great endings. By focusing on your ending, you can't help but strengthen your first and second acts. Every writer absolutely needs this book!'

This year, Drew Yanno will travelling from Boston to teach a free class, and is also available for half hour, private consultations to all attendees. You can RSVP for Drew's free class, 'The Third Act' by emailing info@pitchfest.com or purchase a consultation with him at private consultations.

Think writing a great ending to a screenplay is easy? If it is, then why do so many screen endings seem unsatisfying, even in a finished film? After a bang-up opening act and a second act that raises the stakes accordingly, the third act has to deliver the goods. Screenwriter, teacher, and script consultant Drew Yanno (Banca’s Raviolis, No Safe Haven) explains how screenwriters can use proven techniques to the make sure this happens. At the Great American Pitchfest June 13 at the Marriott Burbank, Yanno will discuss his book The Third Act: Writing a Great Ending to Your Screenplay. The workshop will explore all the elements that go into making a great ending, including the crucial first act/third act connection. Included as well will be an examination of the types of endings that Hollywood loves, along with those that work best for particular genres.

We’ll start by my asking what drew you into screenwriting, as opposed to any other kind of writing. Do you have or harbor other writing ambitions?

I actually started out wanting to be a novelist. I have two unpublished novels that I wrote in my early 20s. But I always loved movies and thought that writing them would be fun. I found a writing partner, we entered a contest and came in second. Two scripts later, we made a big sale and that was an action script entitled No Safe Haven. After a slew of rewrites and ultimately no greenlight, my writing partner bowed out for family reasons.

I started my career as a lawyer. A lot of screenwriters used to be lawyers, believe it or not. Ron Bass [Rain Man, Waiting to Exhale, Entrapment], John Lee Hancock [The Alamo, A Perfect World]. A lot of writers on the staffs of the TV lawyer shows are former lawyers. For the most part, they’re happy lawyers because they’re former lawyers.

Currently, I teach screenwriting and film studies at Boston College. I also teach a class on film adaptation, where we look at the source materials and view the film, but it doesn’t involve any writing. We study Cool Hand Luke, based on a book by Donn Pearce, and Rear Window, which was a short story by Cornell Woolrich. It was also one heck of a treatment – over 70 pages long. We also study A Few Good Men, which is based on a play by Aaron Sorkin, and Stand By Me, the Stephen King novella (“The Body”), a favorite of mine. I also cover The Killers, based on a Hemingway short story. It’s been made into a film several times. It’s an interesting bit of source material because it’s really not much more than a first act. Less even. There’s so much story missing, in fact, that every film version has been forced to extrapolate.

What movies made you say, “I want to write that kind of thing”?

Moonstruck was one. Another one of my favorites was The Fabulous Baker Boys.

I always thought that was underrated.

It has great writing and dialogue by Steve Kloves, who also wrote The Wonder Boys. He has also written all the Harry Potter movies as well, I think. I’d also cite Midnight Run as an inspiration to want to write movies. I watch it every time it’s on TV. I love it.

Another deceptively great movie, especially as a screenplay. Everything works and hangs together.

What makes that one great is what makes any good screenplay great: It engages your emotions. Movies are all about entertaining audiences; everything revolves around that. Everyone strives for that. But striking a chord emotionally is what separates the great ones from the merely good.

My wife, who’s a produced screenwriter herself, knows how hard it is to make that second sale. After No Safe Haven, how hard has that been for you?

I know people who have made 10 sales and they say the 11th one is just as hard! It’s probably a little harder for me because I live in Boston. I chose not to live in Hollywood.

I’m always been fascinated by what fascinates other people. What could a movie called Banca’s Raviolis possibly be about?

It’s a buddy comedy, set in the Italian neighborhood known as the North End in Boston. It was written for a local screenwriting competition; it had to be set in Massachusetts under the rules. Basically, it’s about two buddies who are dissatisfied with their corporate careers and purchase a ravioli factory on a whim and are saved from financial ruin when the upstairs neighbor, an elderly Italian woman, lends them her family’s ravioli recipe. It has a real Moonstruck feel to it. That script is what got us noticed in Hollywood.

In your class at The Great American Pitchfest, you will be talking about your book, The Third Act. Can you give us an overview of what your talk will cover, without giving away too much?

In the course of teaching at BC, I came across a structure that writers can use to create that satisfying ending and that is what I will talk about. Satisfying is not the same as happy. There is this mistaken idea that Hollywood likes happy endings. An ending is successful if it logically concludes and yet, at the same time, we need to be surprised. Aristotle, who wrote “The Poetics” about how drama should be constructed, said that the ending should be both inevitable and unexpected. That’s no easy task.

In your book you invoke Casablanca, which to film buffs is famous for the anecdote that Ingrid Bergman asked the screenwriters who she was supposed to go off with at the end, Rick Blaine or Victor Laszlo, and they told her, “We’ll tell you tomorrow when we write it.” Since it comes down to us as feeling so perfect, it’s hard to believe it was a last-minute decision. What does that tell you about how these endings come about and why some seem so satisfying and others don’t?

They’re all different, whether the writer creates it in their study at home or the film makers come up with it on set. To help the writer do so in way that will appeal to Hollywood buyers, I break down the third act into structural elements, but it’s not formulaic. Endings are all different and if you take, for instance, Saving Private Ryan, it’s got a totally different feel from Good Will Hunting, but they both share the same structure in the third act.

I have found very often in consulting, even with produced screenwriters, that they set up something in the first act and forget all about it in the third act. They get away from what they started out with – and they know they did but can’t figure out how to get back to it.

In the book I devote a lot of time to the endings Rocky, Rain Man, Good Will Hunting, Saving Private Ryan, Casablanca, Million Dollar Baby, Se7en, Lost in Translation, and Gladiator. But it’s not just about the last five minutes, but the whole last quarter of the movie. At the same time, the third act is reliant on both the first and second acts. A good script is organic. Everything is connected. There are structural elements you need before you ever get to the third act or the ending in order to make the ending as compelling and satisfying as possible. My feeling is that you set up the story in the first-act with what the main character wants and is struggling with. Essentially, you ask a question that the audience wants an answer to. Then major obstacles occur in the second act that stand in the way of what the character wants.

Screenwriting gurus and screenwriters often say it’s the second act, or the middle, that’s really hard because you have to find a way to sustain a story that got off to a rousing start and you as the writer were excited about, and the third act is the ending, which as a screenwriter is also an exciting part to do because you’ve usually had it in your mind already how you wanted it to end. How do you view these two elements of screenwriting?

The second act is different than the third because it doesn’t resolve anything. It exists to present obstacles that stand in the main character’s path to getting what they want. In Cast Away, the main character [Tom Hanks] faces obstacles that anybody else can overcome rather easily, but they are nearly insurmountable for him because he’s shipwrecked alone on an island. In Good Will Hunting, the main character [Matt Damon] wants to remain in South Boston with his buds and not change his simple life. Then, in the second act, Skyler, the math professor and the therapist all force him to face all the things in his past that have kept him from exploring or using his genius.

If a filmgoer says he or she didn’t like the ending, leaving out that powers above the director may have forced a different ending, how does that reflect on the third act? What have you learned by studying this aspect of the screenwriting process?

It’s my own experience that if I don’t like the ending, I don’t like the film. And I think that true of most movie-goers. I’ve never heard anyone say, “The film was really good, but I didn’t like the ending at all.” If the ending doesn’t work, it’s a waste.

I teach my students to write an ending that’s so good nobody will want to touch it. Write it so it’s satisfying on the page. Write the ending that’s so powerful that it can’t be changed.

DREW YANNO has been writing for film since 1993 and has been a member of the WGA since 1995. In addition to writing, Drew teaches screenwriting in the Film Department at Boston College. He also works as a script consultant and has served as an adviser on a number of films. Prior to becoming a screenwriter, Drew was a practicing attorney and taught law in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Drew’s book The Third Act: Writing a Great Ending to Your Screenplay is available on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. To learn more, visit www.drewyanno.com.

BILL McILVAINE is a freelance writer and editor with over 25 years in the business. After starting out in the field of entertainment and rock music, he switched to writing and editing for high technology magazines. After his last publisher withered and died, he went back to his first love, movies and books (with a little teaching on the side). He has several screenplays completed or in progress.