Out of curiosity, and because I like to know for sure about a script before I start condemning a film, I read Hot Tub Time Machine last night.
Actually that's not true. I tried to read Hot Tub Time Machine. I got to about page 55 before I gave up. The dialogue in the script was great and really well constructed, and the opening scene was delightful. Then it was downhill from there as I became increasingly infuriated with every page.
Here's the main problem I had with the version I read. You'd think if your story is called Hot Tub Time Machine, you would get to the hot tub time machine pretty quickly. I mean, it's the title, right, so it's the one thing we're all waiting for. Yet it was page 29 before anybody finally got in the hot tub.
A half hour. That's how much film you had to get through before you reached the inciting incident. What, you might ask, was so important that we had to wait that long before we got to the hot tub? I don't know. Dialogue. Character development. Certainly not plot.
I had to learn this lesson too not long ago. A helpful reader pointed out that the inciting incident in my story happened on page 18. I moved it up to page 12. Instantly my pacing picked up. Same thing this script. My inciting incident used to be on page 21. As soon as I bumped it to page 10, things picked up considerably.
In The Hangover, the guys wake up in their trashed hotel room on page 14. That means we have the rest of the movie to figure out what happened to Doug and why the dentist is missing a tooth, because that's what this story is about. Where's Doug? It's the adventure we're after, not the back story. Besides, you should be able to dish out back story in bits and pieces throughout the story, not all in long chunks of dialogue and exposition.
We as viewers need to know what our mission is. We need to know what we're waiting to happen, and we can't know that until we see the event that starts the ball rolling. The Crazies did a great job with that - we were probably four minutes in when the first crazy guy came wandering across a baseball field carrying a shotgun. Hell, the movie's called The Crazies. The previews showed a bunch of crazy people destroying shit. Why would I need to wait half an hour to see my first crazy person? Let's get that shit started as soon as possible.
If your movie is called Hot Tub Time Machine, you need to get some hot tub time machine action going somewhere within the first 15 minutes. Otherwise I'm just sitting around waiting for the story to begin.
