Screenwriter’s Breakdown: Spider-Man No Way Home
The fall that brought us to tears
Early Career Screenwriters dream of the moment displayed in the short preview of the Spider-Man: No Way Home script shown above.
That moment when the audience is brought to the edge of their seats… When there’s nothing but uncertainty in the air as we wait for the director’s eye to reveal the fate of the character that’s been put into quite the predicament by the screenwriter.
The moment above being the one where Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man, or Webb-Verse Peter, catches MJ who has fallen from the scaffolding in much the same way that his love interest, Gwen Stacey, fell in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Unfortunately, in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Gwen Stacey did not survive her fall which was quite traumatic and sad for the audience and Webb-Verse Peter. BUT, lo and behold, MJ is saved by a tearful Webb-Verse Peter who utters a simple “Are you okay?” with a look that makes all true fans of the films tear up!
As an early career screenwriter, I cannot imagine what it will feel like when an audience has such a visceral and real reaction to a scene that I’ve written based on characters that I’ve developed (or that have been developed prior to me like those mentioned here).
Many people forget or simply don’t know that, before it makes to the screen within your home or the screen at a movie theater, someone sat down in front of screenwriting software to write it!
Earlycareerscreenwriters
While a big part of being a screenwriter is writing, an even bigger part to all of it is researching! That means: doing background work on the cities and time periods that you’re writing about; it means researching personality types for biting characters (and even nice ones); and it means reading script after script from those who made it through pre-production and post-production edits (not that there are edits post-production).
The interesting parts of this script are that the action lines vary in size and in description but the reader is still completely able to obtain the message! As screenwriters, we hear so many different directions when it comes to action lines — “don’t make them too long”, “don’t make them too short”, “they shouldn’t be more than two lines”, and so on! We get so much contradictory information when the reality about them is: it’s largely going to depend on what the script requires!
Early screenwriters struggle with just sitting down and writing because we try to consistently work within the lines and bounds created by the screenwriting Gods who tell us what works and what doesn’t before we even have a final product.
As an early career screenwriter myself, the best advice we can get and give is usually going to be: just write.
There will always be a reason to hold off on writing — edits, research, a quiet writing nook, writer’s block, etc. — so it’s our job to remember our jobs! TO WRITE is our job! We will never make it to our moment like the one written above if we never write. We’ll never see the teaser or the trailer that we wrote to go alongside our scripts played out by the perfect actors/actresses unless we write. And, we’ll never see our names rolling with the end credits next to “written by” unless we write.
So, while I am very away that being an early career screenwriter is difficult and trying, I also know that if it’s something that you love to do then it’s worth it whether you have the big audience moment or not.
Keep writing, screenwriters!
Best,
Bree (@brianna_jay) 🧡