Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Three-Act Structure

At the foot of the greasy pole that is the Hollywood power structure toil the D-boys and the D-girls. The “D” stands for Development and what these minions do is provide “coverage,” in other words write reports on the hundreds of filmscripts that are submitted routinely day in day out to the studios and independent film companies in the hope that someone somewhere will like them.

Almost without exception this script analysis utilizes the concept of three-act structure to construe the merits and demerits of the screenplay in question. “… the conclusion of act one is weak and does not prefigure the emotional highs in act two …”; “… acts one and two work well but there are real problems of pacing in act three …” and so on. There are other buzz- or nonce-words that figure in Hollywood script analysis—“character arcs,” “backstory,” “beats,” “gracenotes,” “pushing the envelope,” etc. — but none — none — has such a pernicious hold as three-act structure.

Now this notion may be a handy device for writing coverage (by and large American filmscripts do not number scenes), but the use of three acts has become widespread in the teaching of screenplay writing and, inevitably, in the writing of screenplays also, and there its use is far less felicitous. No one ever determined that a screenplay should have three acts — why not five? why not two? — and there is no reason on earth why the 120-page screenplay, and therefore the ninety-minute to two-hour film, should have these segments imposed on it. The fact of the matter is that film is a narrative art form, a particularly straightforward narrative art form too, compared to the novel, and the rhythms and cadences of that narrative, its rise and fall, its crises and denouements should be determined, not by some arbitrary matrix, but by the demands of the story (how compelling is it, how entertaining, how suspenseful, etc.) and the characters it is dealing with (how real are they, how sympathetic, how dramatically effective, etc.). Any shape, any structure will do if it works narratively. There is no predetermined mould into which a story should be poured: its justification is provided solely by its success. If there is one area of a film where a strong sense of form may be relevant then that is its ending, but that is because it is the end of that particular story, and not of act three.

1996