We’ve been talking about screenwriting long enough.  Let’s see how it’s done, and who better to show us than Diablo Cody, who won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Juno.  Here’s the opening paragraph of that script:

JUNO MacGUFF stands on a placid street in a nondescript subdivision, facing the curb.  It’s FALL.  Juno is sixteen years old, an artfully bedraggled burnout kid.  She winces and shields her eyes from the glare of the sun.  The object of her rapt attention is a battered living room set, abandoned curbside, by its former owners.  There is a fetid-looking leather recliner, a chrome-edged coffee table, and a tasteless latchhooked rug featuring a roaring tiger. 

JUNO V.O.

It started with a chair.

So, what do we know?  A key aspect of screenwriting is epistemology, which is a fancy way of saying ‘how do you know what you know?’.  And in screenwriting terms, that’s about presenting multi-sensory clues and cues in the written text that will be used by the director and others to construct the world of the film as seen by the audience.  The more thought goes into it upfront on the writer’s part, the richer experience the viewer has.

Well, for one thing, this opening sets out a world – that of the suburbs – and in one simple low-budget image presents something that stands out from that world.  Furniture is ‘meant’ to be inside, so seeing this acutely depicted range of interior items at the roadside is slightly unsettling.  All the furniture is from another time, perhaps within the memory of many of the people seeing the film, but notably from a world before that of Juno and her peers.  The roaring tiger is particularly intriguing: a wild animal captured in a cheesy rug, the owner probably thinking it expressed something of themselves. 

As for our heroine, Juno MacGuff is a wonderful name that trips off the tongue with ease, and suggests to me that the writer enjoys the sound of words – always a good thing.  She lives in the anonymous suburbs, but is far from anonymous herself.  No, she’s an ‘artfully bedraggled burnout kid’.  One of the things I like here is that there are no specific wardrobe suggestions: we’re looking deeper than that, into Juno’s character. 

‘Artfully bedraggled’ says Juno is conscious about the way she looks, as almost any teenager is.  But she’s making a choice not to run with the herd, and does so with her own sense of style.  That tells us a lot.  As for ‘burnout’, there are two routes to go down I suspect.  Juno is either burnt out by experience of school – a kid who’s smart and doesn’t fit in.  Or she’s emotionally burnt out by whatever family experiences she’s had so far, maybe including divorce and death by her age.  More than likely, the burnout comes from a combination of school and home.

Not bad for a first paragraph, huh?  Especially when it’s rounded off by a voiceover from the protagonist that serves as a hook to lead our attention into the substance of the film.  ‘It started with a chair’ is a fairly gnomic utterance, but it captures the attention, and that’s all we could possibly hope for so early on.