by Robert McKee
The death of Sledge’s daughter was “obligatory” in this sense: Suppose Horton Foote had written this scenario: The friendless alcoholic Sledge wakes up one morning with nothing to live for. He meets a woman, falls in love, likes her kid and wants to raise him, finds religion, and writes a new tune. FADE OUT. This isn’t story; it’s daydream. If the quest for meaning has brought about a profound inner change in Sledge, how is Foote to express this? Not through declarations of a change of heart. Self-explanatory dialogue convinces no one. It must be tested by an ultimate event, by pressure-filled character choice and action—the Obligatory (Crisis) Scene and Climax of the last act.
When I say that the audience “knows” an Obligatory Scene awaits, it doesn’t know in an objective, checklist sense. If this event is mishandled, the audience won’t exit thinking, “Lousy flick. No Obligatory Scene.” Rather, the audience knows intuitively when something is missing. A lifetime of story ritual has taught the audience to anticipate that the forces of antagonism provoked at the Inciting Incident will build to the limit of human experience, and that the telling cannot end until the protagonist is in some sense face to face with these forces at their most powerful. Linking a story’s Inciting Incident to its Crisis is an aspect of Foreshadowing, the arrangement of early events to prepare for later events. In fact, every choice you make—genre, setting, character, mood—foreshadows. With each line of dialogue or image of action you guide the audience to anticipate certain possibilities, so that when events arrive, they somehow satisfy the expectations you’ve created. The primary component of foreshadowing, however, is the projection of the Obligatory Scene (Crisis) into the audience’s imaginaton by the Inciting Incident.
LOCATING THE INCITING INCIDENT
Where to place the Inciting Incident in the overall story design? As a rule of thumb, the first major event of the Central Plot occurs within the first 25 percent of the telling. This is a useful guide, no matter what the medium. How long would you make a theatre audience sit in the dark before engaging the story in a play? Would you make a reader plow through the first hundred pages of a four-hundred-page novel before finding the Central Plot? How long before irredeemable boredom sets in? The standard for a two-hour feature film is to locate the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident somewhere within the first half-hour.
It could be the very first thing that happens. In the first thirty seconds of SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS Sullivan (Joel McCrea), a director of vapid but profitable films, defies studio bosses and sets out to make a film with social significance. Within the first two minutes of ON THE WATERFRONT Terry (Marlon Brando) unwittingly helps gangsters murder a friend.
Or much later. Twenty-seven minutes into TAXI DRIVER a teenage prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster), jumps into Travis Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) taxi. Her abusive pimp, Matthew (Harvey Keitel) yanks her back to the street, igniting Travis’s desire to rescue her. A half-hour into ROCKY an obscure club fighter. Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), agrees to fight Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) for the heavyweight championship of the world. When Sam plays “As Time Goes By” thirty-two minutes into CASABLANCA, Ilsa suddenly reappears in Rick’s life, launching one of the screen’s great love stories.
Or anywhere in between. However, if the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident arrives much later than fifteen minutes into the film, boredom becomes a risk. Therefore, while the audience waits for the main plot, a subplot may be needed to engage their interest.
In TAXI DRIVER, the subplot of Travis’s lunatic attempt at political assassination grips us. In ROCKY we’re held by the ghetto love story of the painfully shy Adrian (Talia Shire) and the equally troubled Rocky. In CHINATOWN Gittes is duped into investigating Hollis Mulwray for adultery, and this subplot fascinates us as he struggles to untangle himself from the ruse. CASABLANCA’s Act One hooks us with the Inciting Incidents of no fewer than five well-paced subplots.
But why make an audience sit through a subplot, waiting half an hour for the main plot to begin? ROCKY, for example, is in the Sports Genre. Why not start with two quick scenes: The heavyweight champion gives an obscure club fighter a shot at the title (setup), followed by Rocky choosing to take the fight (payoff). Why not open the film with its Central Plot?
Because if ROCKY’s Inciting Incident were the first event we saw, our reaction would have been a shrug and “So what?” Therefore, Stallone uses the first half-hour to delineate Rocky’s world and character with craft and economy, so that when Rocky agrees to the fight, the audience’s reaction is strong and complete: “Him? That loser?!” They sit in shock, dreading the blood-soaked, bone-crushing defeat that lies ahead.
Bring in the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident as soon as possible… but not until the moment is ripe.
An Inciting Incident must “hook” the audience, a deep and complete response. Their response must not only be emotional, but rational. This event must not only pull at audience’s feelings, but cause them to ask the Major Dramatic Question and imagine the Obligatory Scene. Therefore, the location of the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident is found in the answer to this question: How much does the audience need to know about the protagonist and his world to have a full response?
In some stories, nothing. If an Inciting Incident is archetypal in nature, it requires no setup and must occur immediately. The first sentence of Kafka’s Metamorphosis reads: “One day Gregor Samsa awoke to discover he had been changed into a large cockroach.” KRAMER VS. KRAMER: A wife walks out on her husband and leaves her child with him in the film’s first two minutes. It needs no preparation, for we immediately understand the terrible impact that would have on anybody’s life. JAWS: Shark eats swimmer, sheriff discovers body. These two scenes strike within the first seconds as we instantly grasp the horror.
Suppose Peter Benchley had opened JAWS with scenes of the sheriff quitting his job with the New York City police and moving out to Amity Island, looking forward to a peaceful life as a law officer in this resort town. We meet his family. We meet the town council and mayor. Early summer brings the tourists. Happy times. Then a shark eats somebody. And suppose Spielberg had been foolish enough to shoot all of this exposition, would we have seen it? No. Editor Verna Fields would have dumped it on the cutting room floor, explaining that all the audience needs to know about the sheriff, his family, the mayor, city council, and tourists will be nicely dramatized in the town’s reaction to the attack… but JAWS starts with the shark.
As soon as possible, but not until the moment is ripe… Every story world and cast are different, therefore, every Inciting Incident is a different event located at a different point. If it arrives too soon, the audience may be confused. If it arrives too late, the audience may be bored. The instant the audience has a sufficient understanding of character and world to react fully, execute your Inciting Incident. Not a scene earlier, or a scene later. The exact moment is found as much by feeling as by analysis.
If we writers have a common fault in design and placement of the Inciting Incident, it’s that we habitually delay the Central Plot while we pack our opening sequences with exposition. We consistently underestimate knowledge and life experience of the audience, laying out our characters and world with tedious details the filmgoer has already filled in with common sense.
Ingmar Bergman is one of the cinema’s best directors because he is, in my opinion, the cinema’s finest screenwriter. And the one quality that stands above all the others in Bergman’s writing is his extreme economy—how little he tells us about anything. In his THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, for example, all we ever learn about his four characters is that the father is a widowed, best-selling novelist, his son-in-law a doctor, his son a student, and his daughter a schizophrenic, suffering from the same illness that killed her mother. She’s been released from a mental hospital to join her family for a few days by the sea, and that act alone upsets the balance of forces in all their lives, propelling a powerful drama from the first moments.
No book-signing scenes to help us understand
that the father is a commercial but not critical success. No scenes in an operating room to demonstrate the doctor’s profession. No boarding school scenes to explain how much the son needs his father. No electric shock treatment sessions to explain the daughter’s anguish. Bergman knows that his urbane audience quickly grasps the implications behind best-seller, doctor, boarding school, and mental hospital… and that less is always more.
THE QUALITY OF THE INCITING INCIDENT
A favorite joke among film distributors goes like this: A typical European film opens with golden, sunlit clouds. Cut to even more splendid, bouffant clouds. Cut again to yet more magnificent, rubescent clouds. A Hollywood film opens with golden, billowing clouds. In the second shot a 747 jumbo jet comes out of the clouds. In the third, it explodes.
What quality of event need an Inciting Incident be?
ORDINARY PEOPLE carries a Central Plot and subplot that are often mistaken for each other because of their unconventional design. Conrad (Timothy Hutton) is the protagonist of the film’s subplot with an Inciting Incident that takes the life of his older brother during a storm at sea. Conrad survives but is guilt-ridden and suicidal. The brother’s death is in the Backstory and is dramatized in flashback at the Crisis/Climax of the subplot when Conrad relives the boating accident and chooses to live.
The Central Plot is driven by Conrad’s father, Calvin (Donald Sutherland). Although seemingly passive, he is by definition the protagonist: the empathetic character with the will and capacity to pursue desire to the end of the line. Throughout the film, Calvin is on a quest for the cruel secret that haunts his family and makes reconciliation between his son and wife impossible. After a painful struggle, he finds it: His wife hates Conrad, not since the death of her older son, but since Conrad’s birth.
At the Crisis Calvin confronts his wife, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) with the truth: She’s an obsessively orderly woman who wanted only one child. When her second son came along, she resented his craving for love when she could love only her first-born. She’s always hated Conrad, and he’s always felt it. This is why he’s been suicidal over his brother’s death. Calvin then forces the Climax: She must learn to love Conrad or leave. Beth goes to a closet, packs a suitcase, and heads out the door. She cannot face her inability to love her son.
This Climax answers the Major Dramatic Question: Will the family solve its problems within itself or be torn apart? Working backward from it, we seek the Inciting Incident, the event that has upset the balance of Calvin’s life and sent him on his quest.
The film opens with Conrad coming home from a psychiatric hospital, presumably cured of his suicidal neurosis. Calvin feels that the family has survived its loss and balance has been restored. The next morning Conrad, in a grim mood, sits opposite his father at the breakfast table. Beth puts a plate of French toast under her son’s face. He refuses to eat. She snatches the plate away, marches to the sink, and scrapes his breakfast down a garbage disposal, muttering: “You can’t keep French toast.”
Director Robert Redford’s camera cuts to the father as the man’s life crashes. Calvin instantly senses that the hatred is back with a vengeance. Behind it hides something fearful. This chilling event grips the audience with dread as it reacts, thinking: “Look what she did to her child! He’s just home from the hospital and she’s doing this number on him.”
Novelist Judith Guest and screenwriter Alvin Sargent gave Calvin a quiet characterization, a man who won’t leap up from the table and try to bully wife and son into reconciliation. His first thought is to give them time and loving encouragements, such as the family photo scene. When he learns of Conrad’s troubles at school, he hires a psychiatrist for him. He talks gently with his wife, hoping to understand.
Because Calvin is a hesitant, compassionate man, Sargent had to build the dynamic of the film’s progressions around the subplot. Conrad’s struggle with suicide is far more active than Calvin’s subtle quest. So Sargent foregrounded the boy’s subplot, giving it inordinate emphasis and screentime, while carefully increasing the momentum of the Central Plot in the background. By the time the subplot ends in the psychiatrist’s office, Calvin is ready to bring the Central Plot to its devastating end. The point, however, is that the Inciting Incident of ORDINARY PEOPLE is triggered by a woman scraping French toast down a garbage disposal.
Henry James wrote brilliantly about story art in the prefaces to his novels, and once asked: “What, after all, is an event?” An event, he said, could be as little as a woman putting her hand on the table and looking at you “that certain way.” In the right context, just a gesture and a look could mean, “I’ll never see you again,” or “I’ll love you forever”—a life broken or made.
The quality of the Inciting Incident (for that matter, any event) must be germane to the world, characters, and genre surrounding it. Once it is conceived, the writer must concentrate on its function. Does the Inciting Incident radically upset the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life? Does it arouse in the protagonist the desire to restore balance? Does it inspire in him the conscious desire for that object, material or immaterial, he feels would restore the balance? In a complex protagonist, does it also bring to life an unconscious desire that contradicts his conscious need? Does it launch the protagonist on a quest for his desire? Does it raise the Major Dramatic Question in the mind of the audience? Does it project an image of the Obligatory Scene? If it does all this, then it can be as little as a woman putting her hand on the table, looking at you “that certain way.”
CREATING THE INCITING INCIDENT
The Climax of the last act is far and away the most difficult scene to create: It’s the soul of the telling. If it doesn’t work, the story doesn’t work. But the second most difficult scene to write is the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident. We rewrite this scene more than any other. So here are some questions to ask that should help bring it to mind.
What is the worst possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could that turn out to be the best possible thing that could happen to him?
KRAMER VS. KRAMER. The worst: Disaster strikes the workaholic Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) when his wife walks out on him and her child. The best: This turns out to be the shock he needed to fulfill his unconscious desire to be a loving human being.
AN UNMARRIED WOMAN. The worst: When her husband says he’s leaving her for another woman, Erica (Jill Clayburgh) retches. The best: His exit turns out to be the freeing experience that allows this male-dependent woman to fulfill her unconscious desire for independence and self-possession.
Or: What’s the best possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could it become the worst possible thing?
DEATH IN VENICE. Von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) has lost his wife and children to a plague. Since then he’s buried himself in his work to the point of physical and mental collapse. His doctor sends him to the Venice spa to recuperate. The best: There he falls madly, helplessly in love… but with a boy. His passion for the impossibly beautiful youth, and the impossibility of it, leads to despair. The worst: When a new plague invades Venice and the child’s mother hurries her son away, Von Aschenbach lingers to wait for death and escape from his misery.
THE GODFATHER, PART II. The best: After Michael (Al Pacino) is made Don of the Corleone crime family, he decides to take his family into the legitimate world. The worst: His ruthless enforcement of the mafia code of loyalty ends in the assassination of his closest associates, estrangement from his wife and children, and the murder of his brother, leaving him a hollowed-out, desolate man.
A story may turn more than one cycle of this pattern. What is the best? How could that become the worst? How could that reverse yet again into the protagonist’s salvation? Or: What is the worst? How could that become the best? How could that lead the protagonist to damnation? We stretch toward the “bests” and “worsts” because story—when it is art—is not about the middle ground of human experience.
The impact of the Inciting Incident cre
ates our opportunity to reach the limits of life. It’s a kind of explosion. In Action genres it may be in fact an explosion: in other films, as muted as a smile. No matter how subtle or direct, it must upset the status quo of the protagonist and jolt his life from its existing pattern, so that chaos invades the character’s universe. Out of this upheaval, you must find, at Climax, a resolution, for better or worse, that rearranges this universe into a new order.
9
ACT DESIGN
PROGRESSIVE COMPLICATIONS
The second element of the five-part design is Progressive Complications: that great sweeping body of story that spans from Inciting Incident to Crisis/Climax of the final act. To complicate means to make life difficult for characters. To complicate progressively means to generate more and more conflict as they face greater and greater forces of antagonism, creating a succession of events that passes points of no return.
Points of No Return
The Inciting Incident launches the protagonist on a quest for a conscious or unconscious Object of Desire to restore life’s balance. To begin the pursuit of his desire, he takes a minimum, conservative action to provoke a positive response from his reality. But the effect of his action is to arouse forces of antagonism from inner, personal, or social/environmental Levels of Conflict that block his desire, cracking open the Gap between expectation and result.
When the Gap opens, the audience realizes that this is a point of no return. Minimal efforts won’t work. The character can’t restore the balance of life by taking lesser actions. Henceforth, all action like the character’s first effort, actions of minor quality and magnitude, must be eliminated from the story.