I’d just wrapped up the end of act one with a longer sequence at a poker table where Barclay, my main character, need to leave as soon as possible, but not before he got some much needed money. Although it was just characters sitting around the table playing a game, I felt I had established the circumstances going on around the poker game to keep it exhilarating.
As you might expect, things go awry…
Barclay was then forced to get out of a tough predicament. While the sequence was long, part of what went into that length was setting up all of the threats that were waiting for him if he failed. Once things did, I had a brief sequence of narrow escapes that would take the audience to act two.
And once in act two, Barclay was going to find things weren’t going to be any easier for him.
The start of the second act revisited one of the locations already established in act one. Barclay isn’t a wanted man at this point, but he knows its only a matter of time before he is.
I infused this undertone into a conversation with a deputy that was already established earlier, one who I made a point kept up to date with all of the wanted posters coming across the wire. When Barclay meets the character again, they’ll hauling around a stack of new bounties that have been posted. The idea for the scene was that Barclay doesn’t know two things: 1) if one of those wanted posters is his, and 2) if it is, has this character seen it yet.
This made for an interesting setup for the scene because when I was writing the deputy’s dialogue, everything he said could be interpreted two ways. The first was that the deputy had seen Barclay among the wanted posters, and so things that he’s saying, like inviting him back to the Sheriff’s, was a way to arrest him without raising the alarms with Barclay. The second, was that he hadn’t seen Barclay in the wanted posters, and so everything he’s saying is just making conversation, and its Barclay’s paranoid state reading into every innocent statement and question as a trap.
I felt it was another great sequence that I had drafted. Once again, characters were simultaneously working toward their own goals, both of which complimented the scene. Barclay was trying to learn what news had spread from another town. The deputy was trying to keep the town safe, and might have been trying to arrest Barclay in order to do so.
The only problem was that this sequence last another 11 handwritten pages. This once again wouldn’t have been close to the actual number of pages of a screenplay, but I was concerned it was another extended sequence that was making the script run long.
While this was a bit of a concern, in paled in comparison to what happened next in the screenplay.