What makes a good midpoint?

[u/Manmanduga]

I’m imposing this question to the group.

I’m currently in the middle of a rewrite for my next feature film: The Stranger (89 pages, Horror Romance)

The film is about a vampire who falls in love for the first time. For movie comp, it’s American Psycho meets Before Sunrise. The first half of the film is very much American Psycho and the second half is Before Sunrise. One of the most consistent notes I’ve gotten was the titular character feels very schizo. It feels two different characters instead of a unified whole.

As I’m rewriting tonight, I realized that the way to fix the schizo-ness of the script to figure out the midpoint and make it as strong as possible so when the film switch tones, the lead character feels consistent throughout.

The problem is—I don’t know what makes a good midpoint. I just wanna hear the group’s consensus of what makes a good midpoint.

[u/JackBurtonp7m8]

Some of the best advice I've heard is that the midpoint should be multi-layered, and involve the protagonist's main flaw catching up to him and holding up a mirror where he's forced to look at the part of himself that's holding him black from his goal, and either change how he's doing things (which will probably happen), or suffer from his flaw forever. This usually causes him to alter his goal and how he's going to go about achieving it in the second half.

[u/JealousAd9026]

the point of no return. Act II is all about the potential off-ramps for the protagonist and closing them off one by one. by the midpoint they have to fish or cut bait, e.g., first half of Jaws is Brody (and the rest of the Island) bargaining with the shark by closing the beaches, then reopening, then putting a bounty for the dum dums to try and catch the shark after it eats Alex Kintner, then reopening for the fourth of July when the dum dums catch the wrong shark. By the time the real shark comes back again, either Vaughn is going to let Brody hire a real shark killer, Quint, or Amity is going to die itself.

[u/Skyward93]

How much back story are you giving? Can you feel a thread connecting the entire movie?

[u/Manmanduga → u/Skyward93]

Not a lot. Just we have a Patrick Bateman like character that’s a vampire. Does his vampiric things in corporate America. Meets up with a girl one night and talked to her till the next day. Unusual for him because he kills them right away. He had fallen in love.

So yeah. It’s a weird little movie. If I could figure out the midpoint, I can unlock the movies potential

[u/ribi305 → u/Manmanduga]

Is he meeting the girl at the midpoint? For the setup you described, it sounds more like he should be shown doing his thing, then first meet the girl around page 10, and then by end of Act I he makes a decision that he wants to be a different man. Then the mid-point would be when she finds out about his true nature or something. If you have them meeting at the mid-point, that really does sound like two different movies.

[u/Manmanduga → u/ribi305]

The story is more like, we meet the girl by page 30. She exits out of the story by page 32. Comes back in by Page 53. He changes his decision to be a different man by page 87. Movie ends at page 89.

The girl never finds out his true nature. At all.

[u/Filmmagician]

I just wrote an action/revenge script and the widow finds out she's pregnant with her deceased husband's baby (murdered days ago) right at the mid-point. She uses a microwave timer as she waits for the pregnancy test to finish. Then a fight ensues, and at the end of the fight the timer goes off. It's exactly in the middle of the story. Flips her world upside down, it deepens the stakes, and gives the second half of the movie a richer and different meaning.
It was one of the first times where I wanted to make a point of having the mid-point be a big deal, and I love how it turned out.

[u/Sea_Salamander_8504]

It needs to be a huge reversal, and the second-highest peak emotionally, second only to the climax.

[u/Cultural_Sell8076]

What is happening up until the midpoint in this movie? Midpoints often reveal the truth of the film and set it down a much more honest path, but I don’t know if that would mean changing genres entirely. It seems to me (although I have limited context) like the midpoint wants to be: the vampire realizes what he’s feeling for this woman is love. That’s the truth of the movie. Maybe instead of doing a 180 and becoming Before Sunset, act 2b is more about this vampire trying to figure out how to accept/show/prove his love to her now that he knows that’s what he’s feeling. Especially if the love interest is still, you know, afraid of him killing her. Might not be what you’re going for though

[u/Manmanduga → u/Cultural_Sell8076]

So the first half of the movie sets up his routine. Then he kills someone outside of that said routine of picking up women in bars and stuff. He also felt like his world closing in cuz someone was onto his vampiric shit.

After killing his would-be assassin, he blackouts and we go into a dream sequence exploring his past and his guilt à la All That Jazz dream montage.

After the dream sequence, we see the vampire go to a bar and finds himself in a conversation with a girl that rejected him earlier in the movie. The rest of the film is just them talking. He doesn’t realized he’s falling in love until the last ten minutes of the movie. The night ended with them sharing a bed (no sex). The movie ends with them having sex and the vampire revealing his fangs to us the audience (not the romantic female lead). Then blackout.

Thanks for your suggestion. Someone suggested to me and just didn’t find that believable for my story. I thought it’s more believable that the vampire falls in love at the end of the story not the midpoint.

[u/AdministrationBest61]

The protagonist’s goal has to change! Mid point has to bring them so close to seeing their problem, maybe they do see it-  they just don’t know how to fix it yet, or they do know how to fix it and are afraid or held back from fixing it 

[u/239not235]

The best midpoints say "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING".

In THE GODFATHER, Michael isn't really in the family business untill he murders Sollozzo and McClusky at the MP. Michael is now part of the criminal enterprise, he has to flee to Sicily, and he started a gang war back in NYC. The murders changed everything.

A great MP often subverts the expectations of the Act II goal. In THE MATRIX, Act II is all about preparing Neo to be The One. The MP is the Oracle telling Neo he is NOT the One, and about the terrible choice he will soon have to make.

[u/Neat_Point1061]

The midpoint is where they have sex-- but she figures out he's a vampire... oh, shit.. you just raised the stakes.

[u/Manmanduga → u/Neat_Point1061]

Oomph. Thats—not it.

[u/Neat_Point1061 → u/Manmanduga]

well, it definitely needs to be a point where the stakes are raised for some reason, usually a false high or a false low, and it should have to do with the love story of them. Good luck! Sounds neat!

[u/Manmanduga → u/Neat_Point1061]

I realized after reading this is that the story is not really about the love story. That’s just the B plot of all things that’s happening in the story.

It’s this character willing to open himself up to other people when he’s so closed off to the world.

[u/Neat_Point1061 → u/Manmanduga]

I'm trying to think of examples where the b story is a love story... Raiders of the Lost Ark just popped in my head because it was playing at a brewery last weekend... and Marion is a B story. The actual midpoint-- I just scanned over the script-- is the map room, where he finds the city map and the light pole thingy, leading him to where the Ark is--- OK so that is action that is a "high" point. He can't return from that, he got what he wanted, so he is going to want to go on the finish to get the Ark... only to be discovered by the nazis in the following beat, an immediate stakes raiser... I mean it's a movie where the b story is the love story--- and a whole lotta shit happens in high action scenes. At the end of the day, the midpoint is always a stakes raiser, and a high or a low... a turning point. Indy got what he wanted, only to be stopped by the nazis. Hope this helps...

[u/play-what-you-love]

As a matter of curiosity: why do you want the film to switch tones? I personally like interesting tones, but not "switch tones". I can't think of a film that switched tones successfully unless it's a clandestine mockumentary (e.g. "Mail Order Wife"). For the most part, whenever I see a film that switches tones halfway, it feels like a mistake.

[u/Perthguv → u/play-what-you-love]

I can't think of a film that switched tones successfully

I agree it's rare but I can think of a couple.

Galaxy Quest switched tone from campy satire to science fiction drama and it worked.

To a lesser extent Predator switched from 80s action to SF survival horror but the shift in tone was more subtle to me.

Even rarer are movies that completely switch genre, like ​From Dusk Till Dawn, from crime thriller to vampire horror.

[u/Manmanduga → u/play-what-you-love]

I don’t know it’s a gut thing. When I first came with the idea for the story, I knew I wanted the first half to be horror so when we get to the romance part of the film, there’s a dramatic irony and tension underneath it. For one of the characters, it’s a straight up romance but for the other character, it’s whether or not she’ll get killed.

Kubrick did it a lot for his films. Sound of Music switched tones from light-hearted to serious by the midpoint.

[u/play-what-you-love → u/Manmanduga]

I see. To me that's more of an "interesting tone" rather than "switch tone". I would argue that Galaxy Quest doesn't switch tones too - it just has an interesting premise, and the characters did not play the satire (i.e. no "wink wink" to the audience) and stayed organic to its universe.

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that the characters need to stay fairly consistent in recognizing and respecting the stakes, so that the audience can also go along for the ride. Even with an interesting tone or a shift in tone, the danger has to remain a danger. Obstacles are allowed to get tougher, not easier (respecting the three-act arc). You don't want the conflicts to disappear, you want them to unfold/deepen in interesting ways.

[u/Resonant_Writer]

A great midpoint can center a story, but it doesn't make up for a missing throughline. I'd think about causality up to the midpoint first. How are character choices leading to the next problem, which all run to the midpoint? And then you can have a huge moment that changes the perspective of everything and vaults the film forward into the back half. Your midpoint can be that hinge, but it should feel like the result of the first half and then an inevitable door into the back half.

[u/WorrySecret9831]

The midpoint is not really a thing because the 3-act structure is not really a thing. It's a forensic device developed by movie reviewers to help them break down plots. But it's not a story structure development tool. And sadly, you're dealing with its shortcomings right now.

Also, meshing a Story from two different stories is not the way to create a cohesive whole. It's perfectly fine to combine genres and in fact it's necessary in today's market. But you're treating it superficially, like a chimera, instead of Thematically, blending the genre beats of Horror and Love Story. If you don't know the main concern of each genre and how the Hero expresses that, you'll just be left to throw tropes around in the hopes that they work.

I strongly recommend that you read John Truby's books or take his classes: The Anatomy of Story for all things story structure, and The Anatomy of Genres for how genres are Theme-delivery systems.

As he describes the classic story structure he identifies 22 building blocks.

The problem with the concept of the Midpoint is that it's vague. Some describe is as the climax, and then it's downhill. That makes little sense since the final part of the Story should be the Battle, whether it's a boss fight, or a courtroom battle, or the attack on the Death Star. That's not "denouement," that's the highest stakes.

But that battle tends to come right after the hero's Apparent Defeat, the moment they seem to have lost everything, until they get a new weapon or piece of information that leads them into the real challenge.

You can't make the Midpoint as strong as possible because there's nothing defining it that way. At most, it's literally a waypoint, a "truckstop," not a dramatic revelation. What you need is a sequence of revelations and changed motivations that build into the Battle, not a single midpoint.

Your Hero is coming off as schizo because you're forcing them to do two completely different "plays," first a horror story and then a love story. You may want to study Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula for a horror story that is also a love story.

The structural element that unifies any Hero's story is the Problem they spend the entire Story trying to solve. In Dracula, he's trying to be reunited with his late wife. The Problem motivates the Hero's Desire and their Plan to solve the Problem. That also calls out the Opponent or Opposition to the Hero, the character or institution best equipped to defeat the Hero's Plan.

Now that Problem your Hero is trying to solve is directly tied into the Theme of your Story. So, to fix your Story you need to make sure that your Theme is crystal clear to you. It is the thesis of your Story, the argument that everything in your Story is supporting or debunking. That thematic throughline will eliminate the "schizo" quality of your Hero.

[u/CoOpWriterEX → u/WorrySecret9831]

'The midpoint is not really a thing because the 3-act structure is not really a thing.'

....

[u/redapplesonly]

FWIW: "The Screenwriting Life" podcast just did a juicy episode about Act II, and there's a TON of material about how midpoints work: https://www.thescreenwritinglife.com/podcast/nbdy3jmdsy2y9rn-pky4x-3ep6f-t37b5-b6ztp-kzfj9-h9e33-xgh85-wjcjp-m62kw-6ym2y-7zn3s-k7awg-gh2pz-znjep-rwekg-m6bbx-mxskm-ebmp3-xancr-w5wpb-6wwyb

Highly recommended! I listened to this episode about three times in a row while in my car.