Ten pages. That’s what I’ve been told time and time again is the point where someone being pitched a script will toss it in the trash if they don’t like it. Within the first ten pages, the reader has to be hooked. They have to be in for the long haul. Why? If they’re being pitched a script, they’ve probably been pitched a lot of scripts. They need to get through them. They don’t have time to read the entirety of every script. They don’t have time to read one hundred and twenty pages of something they might not like. If they don’t like the first twenty pages, they’ll assume the other hundred pages are more of the same and they’ll toss the script.
Another quick rule of script writing is that one page of script is approximately one minute of screentime. That means that a hundred and twenty page script would be about a two hour movie. Of course, that’s not always the case. Rewrites might make it longer. We’ve all seen blockbusters getting longer, to around the two and a half hour point. There could also be cuts made. No script is perfect, and things might be removed for the sake of character arcs or pacing. Or there could just be longer or shorter scripts. There’s no set rule for script length. People are just taught to try and go somewhere between ninety pages and one hundred and twenty pages.
This is all to say that the first ten pages of a script are critical to the success of the script. And those first ten minutes of the script can be assumed to be the first ten minutes of a movie. This is why so many movies kick off with an action scene or a death scene that can hook viewers in. These scenes might even be longer, depending on how invested the reader/viewer is by that point. Think back to 1996, when Scream was released. The main characters weren’t introduced until a good twenty minutes into the movie. The first twenty minutes were spent with Casey as she spoke on the phone with a mysterious person asking about scary movies. The hook came a few minutes into the conversation when lives were threatened. Audiences became invested. The scene played out. When the scene was over, the Sidney Prescott story began.
Now, almost as important as an opening scene is the opening of the actual story. The opening scene will likely tie into the story, though it might not involve the main character. Casey was killed by the same masked figure who stalked Sidney through the entirety of Scream, but Sidney and her story weren’t introduced until after Casey’s death. There needs to be a reason for the audience to keep watching or the reader to keep reading after the initial scene. They got hooked into the story. They need to stay invested. The main story needs to be as compelling as the opening hook, whether it’s through continuous action, an intriguing and twisty plot, or strong characters. Hopefully a combination of the three, with the action being interpreted however the movie needs it to be. And the story must progress through the three elements.
A movie that fumbled the continuation a little bit was Zombie Strippers. A highly skilled group of zombie-fighting soldiers were brought into a medical laboratory to contain an outbreak of a zombie virus. When one of the soldiers was bitten, he fled the scene and took shelter in a strip club. The star stripper, Kat (Jenna Jameson), was infected soon after the soldier turned. This zombie virus didn’t have quite the same effect on women, however. It allowed women to remain intelligent beings, with a hunger for flesh and enhanced physical abilities, rather than mindless hungry monsters. Kat used her newfound undead skills to become a better stripper. Club owner Ian (Robert Englund) capitalized on her new skill and kept her around for the extra cash.
Zombie Strippers started off with that opening scene punch that a script requires. It was an action-packed first ten or fifteen minutes of a movie. The zombie outbreak happened. The military squad arrived on the scene. They were filled in on the details of the zombie virus. There was a little bit of exposition. Then they went into a hall full of zombies and opened fire. It was some zombie-killing action to kickstart the movie and get people invested. There were some suspenseful (for this movie, at least) moments where the soldiers thought the zombies were killed before the zombies re-reanimated and started attacking again. It was a solid first chunk.
The transition into the real story didn’t work quite as well, though. During the re-reanimation, a soldier was bitten and fled to the safety of a strip club. You already knew that. I put that in the synopsis only two paragraphs ago. The strip club was the real story of the movie. The name could have tipped anyone off. Zombie Strippers. There were going to be some strippers who turned into zombies at some point. It would be a little while before that started.
As Zombie Strippers transitioned into the strip club portion of the movie, it introduced the stripper characters without really introducing them. It introduced the idea of characters without putting any depth into the characters. There was the star stripper, Kat. There was the stripper who was jealous of the star, Jeannie (Shamron Moore). Lillith (Roxy Saint) was goth. Sox (Penny Drake) was a redhead. Gaia (Whitney Anderson) was the dumb blonde. And then there was Jessy (Jennifer Holland), the Christian girl starting a career in stripping because she needed money to help her grandmother. They were all very basic character types that didn’t have any depth beyond those character types.
That lack of depth wasn’t exactly what made the transition into the strip club fall flat. Other movies have had very basic characters that worked well, mostly when commenting on how basic the characters are. Movies like Cabin in the Woods and The Final Girls played into how simple the characters were. They commented on the lack of depth. Zombie Strippers didn’t do that. It played the characters straight. It meant there wasn’t much that could be introduced about them. It simply led to stripping scene after stripping scene after stripping scene introducing stripper after stripper after stripper. And none of the strippers were interesting. From a character standpoint. If you want to see stripping, you’ll get what you want.
Zombie Strippers picked up a little bit once Kat was bitten by the zombie. It brought some horror commentary into the movie. Ian, the guy running the strip club, put people’s lives in danger to make more money. It was a commentary on the state of capitalism, especially in America. The rich want to be richer and they don’t care who gets hurt in the process. The strippers who were turned into zombies were more skilled than they ever were before. Guys came from all over to see them because the strippers put on the best performances the guys had ever seen. Ian didn’t care if the strippers ate or turned a few of the guys. He was willing to lock the zombie guys up in the basement and keep the strippers stripping. He wanted the money they were making.
That’s capitalism in a nutshell. People suffer for the bottom dollar. Sweatshop workers work for the bare minimum in cramped workspaces so consumers will pay exorbitant amounts for an item that will maximize profit for one CEO. Warehouse workers don’t get bathroom breaks because they must pick as many items as possible in a day so consumers get their products as soon as possible. Garbage and other pollutants are released into the environment because of manufacturing processes and fancy packaging. And world-wide transportation, of course. The person on top doesn’t care about the safety of the people working or the safety of the people consuming. All they care about is the money coming in. Zombie Strippers showed a strip club owner sacrificing safety for some money. It was a capitalism commentary through and through.
Zombie Strippers didn’t hit that thematic thread soon enough in the runtime, however. It could have been easy for people to tune out well before that thread made itself known. The problems came down to the structure of the script. That transitional period between that opening hook and the driving force of the story must be enough to keep an audience invested in what will happen. The hook gets them interested. The transition keeps them interested so that they’ll want to go on an adventure. Introducing simplistic characters without anything to say through stripping scenes for a good fifteen minutes was not interesting. The characters and commentary about the characters weren’t interesting enough to drive the story forward. That was the dead space that nobody wants in a movie.
The first ten pages of a script, and the first ten minutes of a movie, are the most critical in getting an audience. If they aren’t hooked into the story in those first ten minutes, they won’t be hooked into the story at all. They won’t even give it a chance. But the pages and minutes that follow those first ten are equally as important. It’s great to get people hooked into a story, but if there’s nothing to keep them invested after the hook, there’s nothing in the story at all. There needs to be an interesting plot, deep characters, or interesting commentary through the entire script to keep the audience. When none of those are present, for any amount of time, there is a problem.
There shouldn’t be much of a problem with these notes:
- Brad Milne popped up in Zombie Strippers. He was also in Iron Eagle IV (week 90).
- Zombie Strippers saw the return of David McClellan to Sunday “Bad” Movies, following a previous appearance in Budz House (week 198).
- Jim Lampley appeared in both Zombie Strippers and Balls of Fury (week 349).
- Finally, one of the most recognizable faces in Zombie Strippers was Robert Englund. He was also one of the most recognizable faces in Wishmaster (week 410).
- Have you seen Zombie Strippers? What did you think? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
- I’m always checking Twitter and the comments for suggestions about what I should be checking out. If you see something bad that you think would fit with Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know.
- Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram, with more fun Sunday “Bad” Movies things.
- It’s time for the final bit of every post, a look forward. I’ll be revisiting a filmmaker who I saw one movie from, way back when. That movie was Nightmare Asylum (week 134). This time, I’ll be checking out Prehistoric Bimbos in Armageddon City. I hope you’ll join me next week for that one. See you then.
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