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Outbreak Meets Truby's Blockbuster If you thought Outbreak was a rip-snorting action ride, join the club. What you may not know is that it was written with the help of our very own Blockbuster software. Co-writer Laurence Dworet (along with partner Robert Roy Pool) is a huge fan of Truby's Blockbuster and used it to solve a few of the story challenges that this idea posed. Challenge #1: How do you manage an epic scope with a lot of characters? This is a movie that, by necessity, must have a "cast of thousands." The first job of the writers is to distinguish between all the characters, and do so at the breakneck speed required of the action thriller. To do this, Dworet relied heavily on the "Cast" and "Structure" sections of Blockbuster. Says Dworet, "Blockbuster allowed me to distinguish the characters, keep my desire lines separate, so I could individualize them much more." Challenge #2: How do you give a fast, epic action story personal stakes? Action stories are about the mechanics of moving fast and accomplishing superhuman tasks. The best action stories use techniques to create characters who can make the big stakes personal. This is where Blockbuster's structuring tools were so useful. Laurence and Robert took the time up front to outline not only the hero's problem - the spreading virus - but his psychological and moral need as well. Unless you set up a personal line that matches and is solved by the action line, and vice versa, your fast action will not pay off emotionally. The writers placed the hero's personal life in crisis: he is going through a divorce from a woman he still loves. The ghost, need, and desire for the hero are all well-defined up front. Even though they are not given much time once the movie takes off, they pay big dividends as the couple is brought back together. Challenge #3: How do you compress action that covers an epic scope? The advantages of epic - its vast canvas and huge stakes - are often what kills the story. The greatest action stories always strive to jam the most opponents into a single arena. But how do you get a single arena when you have a virus that travels from Africa to California to Boston and infects people at great speeds? What the writers did was plot the visual progression of the story just as they tracked the character and story development. Blockbuster's visual tools helped them figure out a kind of whirlpool effect where the scope of the story begins extremely wide and then inexorably tightens and speeds up as the action focuses on a single small town. Challenge #4: How do you create an ongoing opposition when the real killer is a virus? In the Great Screenwriting audio tapes, I teach that you never want to make a disease or an addiction your main opponent. Why? Because you can't have a dramatic fight against an invisible bug. Not that the bug in Outbreak doesn't provide some great scenes. The sequence where the virus is spread - from the sick man on the plane to his girlfriend to the lab technician to the people in the movie theater - is terrific. But ultimately, the opposition must take on a human form. For opposition the writers use both the opponent-ally (General Ford) and the main opponent (General McClintock) found in both Character and the 22 Steps screens. Though McClintock is clearly a villain, he effectively provides the source of the conspiracy (and thus much of the plot) and escalates the story to the battle. Challenge #5: How do you increase a plot in a fast action story? During an action scene the plot often stops until we learn the outcome of the action. This is why most action stories have little or no plot. Perhaps the most amazing thing to me about the Outbreak script is that the writers were able to pack in tremendous plot while moving the action at a hundred miles an hour. Plot comes from hidden information and sudden revelations. Two of the most powerful features of Blockbuster are the 22 Building Blocks and the Revelations screens. These tools help writers figure out what information to hide and when to let it out to the hero and the audience. A survey of the revelations in Outbreak will show, not two or three (as in a typical, slow-paced 3-act structure script), but ten to twelve. Challenge #6: How do you keep each scene driving forward while explaining all the personal and scientific information? In an action thriller, speed and danger are the first requirements. But again, speed without personal stakes doesn't pay. The problem is made worse when you have to explain complicated scientific information to a layman audience. In Outbreak the writers had to lay in the character arcs of the hero and his wife, as well as explain infectious disease, mutation, antibodies and much more. Still they made the scenes move. Dworet says, "I use Blockbuster to track the desire lines in the scenes, knowing what the actor's objective is. And as I go from draft to draft, the one thing I fall back on is having the program, without having to look for files and changes. For each scene I put in the simplest desire line objectives, what's really going on in the subtext of the scene, in one place. Later I'll go to that scene and I will have a complete emotional track of where I was when I wrote it. It's such a great organizational tool." We couldn't agree more. And congratulations, Laurence, on solving the story challenges and creating one of the smash hits of the year.
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