I was temped to say Separation / Initiation / Return due to Maximus being separated from his family but returning to them in the final scene (in a way – more so in the film). But Maximus – in both the script and film – is never with his family (at least not when they are alive), so I’m not sure this structure type is applicable. I’m sure others will disagree, but I prefer Aristotle’s “Beginning / Middle / End.” Actually, I often think that story structure mimics evolution in that the protagonist [read species] is introduced in their natural environment living in some sort of equilibrium. Then an event occurs that disturbs that equilibrium/environment. The protagonist must then struggle to adapt and learn to survive the new environment with the biggest test of this metamorphosis coming at the end when they are forced to put what they have learnt/morphed into to action, then live or die. Either way, if the story is good, the reader/viewer should benefit from the tale. But I digress. Going back to Aristotle, I’d say that the first act finishes when Maximus falls unconscious outside the smoking ruins of his villa. What I found interesting was that there is usually (in Joseph Campbell’s structure) a refusal of the call before venturing into the second act (such as Luke Skywalker refusing to join Obi Wan until his aunt and uncle are killed), but we are well into the second act before Maximus agrees to conform to his new environment and become a gladiator. Where does the third act begin? I’m tempted to say when Commodus is begin painted gold and a hymn plays in the back ground mirroring the opening when we her the boy singing. But I maybe wrong about this. Talking about the first act, one of the first scenes is between Commodus and Lucilla in a wagon. Not exactly an explosive beginning for an action flick, and although the film takes a few minutes to get to the battlefield scene, at least you can see that something massive is going to kick off any moment, which it does! Although a bit off topic, I noticed in the script they attack a village. In the film two armies converge. I imagine they done this to make the Romans look less like cowardly butchers.

Bah. Copied the above from a Word document. Didn't know it would screw up the formatting! Sorry about that.

"What I found interesting was that there is usually (in Joseph Campbell’s structure) a refusal of the call before venturing into the second act (such as Luke Skywalker refusing to join Obi Wan until his aunt and uncle are killed), but we are well into the second act before Maximus agrees to conform to his new environment and become a gladiator." I think there's at least one Call before this. M delays in answering Marcus's call to become a transitory Emperor, and this (political and strategic) error gets his family killed, almost gets him killed, and kidnapped into slavery. What I noticed is this Ordeal comes earlier in the film than it usually does in most movies. M. is never quite as low as this again, even when he's in great danger - since at least in death he'll be reunited with his wife and son in the afterlife.

In terms of the action, I can't seem to narrow down the sequences from four parts to three. Act 1 - The Death of Maximus (p1-35) Intro to all characters -- Death of Caesar -- Hail the new Caesar -- Attempted Assassination of Maximus -- Maximus Escapes -- Death of his Family. Act 2 - From Slave to Gladiator (p 36-48) Saved by Bedouins -- Sold to Proximo -- Gladiator Training -- A Gladiator is born Act 3 - Maximus Reborn (p. 48-80) Lucilla and Senate try to save Rome -- The Emperor must die -- Maximus the Merciful -- "I am Maximus" -- Maximus must die -- Act 4 - The Fight for Rome - Maximus vs Commodus (p.80-120) Commodus' Revenge (fight with Tiger of Gaul) -- The rise of Maximus -- The battle of 'mercy': The last act of defiance -- Plot to kill Commodus discovered -- Final battle -- The return home. I am not familiar with these structures or what Campbell means by separation/initiation/return, but I think I can make them fit the script. Separation: In losing his family Maximus loses his past, his future and his will. It is not so much a separation per se as it is a schism between his person now and the person he has always been. He has nothing left to expect. Initiation: He has but one expection left: that of death. He regains a will to live in order to choose his manner of death--death in battle. He becomes the Gladiator. Return: Maximus returns when he realizes he can choose a much more meaningful death: an honourable one in the service of Marcus' dream of restoring Rome. He will defy the Emperor as well as the Romans' expectations by refusing to kill for no reason, hoping to destroy the very idea of a Gladiator, and all the decadence and baseness that goes with it.

Again some strong analysis. I'm a bit short of time just now, so let me drop in this thought. I look at the screenplay universe as comprised of two worlds: The External World (Plotline) which is the realm of action and dialogue, what we can see and hear, and the Internal World (Themeline), which is the realm of intention and subtext, what we can sense and interpret. Which means that at any given moment, while there is something happening in the External World -- actions, events -- there is also something happening (almost always) in the emotional subsurface. I think this plays out in a macro way as well. So whereas the Plotline may typically have three acts, the Themeline -- the domain of the emotional plot if you will -- is often comprised of four movements: Disunity, Deconstruction, Reconstruction, Unity. This is an articulation of metamorphosis we see in stories over and over and over again. Campbell called it 'transformation' and he said it was at the core of The Hero's Journey. To bring Jung into the discussion, he would probably suggest it is the entire point of the journey (in his psychological terms, we can call it individuation). I will get into this more tomorrow when we discuss characters, but as I suggested yesterday, Maximus in Act One has several aspects of Disunity. Once he is enslaved, I think it's interesting to look at his development as a character through the lens of Deconstruction: He is physically broken down, emotionally crushed by the death of his family, and as noted yesterday for 20+ pages, he doesn't even say one word. The warrior he was is no more. But then he finds new meaning in his use of violence: Revenge. Once he learns he can potentially intersect with Commodus if he succeeds as a gladiator, that serves as the Transition. And now his Reconstruction as a Gladiator-Warrior. And Unity? We have discussed this in some respects yesterday, but in killing Commodus and dying himself in achieving his goal (revenge), he is released from life to join his wife (and family) in the afterlife. So in the Plotline, we can view the story as three acts: Warrior, Gladiator, Revenge. But in the Themelin, we get a more specific view of his metamorphosis, clearly the second act divided into two halves as Maximus goes through a Deconstruction - Reconstruction arc.

Awesome breakdown of the scene structure @Lise. So I love and am learning lots from everyone's choices above. Continuing the thriller structure I launched from yesterday, I'll play from that perspective. As I understand it, thrillers often follow a four part (1, 2A, 2B, 3) breakdown: 1A Ordinary man trapped; 2A running away; Midpoint strength realized; 2B running toward; 3 vanquishing the enemy, saving polity and others' lives in the process. 1. By end of Act 1 (yes, condors!) our ordinary man is trapped; he's been pushed into a foreign world from which he must escape. [In Gladiator, end of Act 1 comes with the Emperor's death and Commodus's ascension to Emperor (Hail Caesar.) The Rome that Maximus fought for has disappeared and Maximus will shortly be enslaved, trapped in the foreign Gladiator world.] 2A. In the first half of the second act, our hero *runs from* the enemy [Maximus's run from the assassins, toward home, withdrawal into silence and attempts at self-preservation in the gladiatorial ring.] --Midpoint: Hero begins to realize his/her strength. In the film, I'd say this is at 1:08, the first time Maximus realizes that he has won the crowd and that as Gladiator he can win his freedom. His mission to rejoin his family begins to take shape. He can get to heaven by confronting his nemesis. As Maximus says to Proximo after the match and upon the news that they will go to Rome, "I will win the crowd. I will give them something they have never seen before." [Multiple meanings here--Maximus will give them someone who stands up to the corrupt Emperor. He will avenge his family. But possibly also he will give them someone who stands up for freedom and Rome. He will give them a martyr.] 2B. In the second half of the second act the *hero actively pursues the antagonists* (as opposed to 2A where hero runs from enemies.) Maximus fights heroically in the staged Battle for Carthage; calls himself Gladiator but announces his true identity to the Emperor; becomes a "man for the people"; Max reconnects with Lucilla; Juba tells Maximus that Max must kill his name before it kills him [Ridley Scott in DVD commentary points out that this could be seen as the beginning of the third act because now everything is out in the open.] 3. In Act 3 of thriller, ordinary man vanquishes his nemesis, saving the polity and lives of others in the process. Maximus fights Tigris, showdown between Commodus and Maximus the Merciful, crowd is with Maximus; Commodus plots; Maximus meets with Lucilla & Gracchus and the deal is forged according to the last wish of a dying man--Max will kill Commodus but the fate of Rome is up to Gracchus and the Senate. Lucilla and Commodus alliance solidified; Lucilla buys Max's freedom; the coup fails and Maximus is caught; mano a mano final battle; Maximus kills Commodus; Maximus dies; return to heaven; Lucilla reaffirms Rome. Juba buries Max's ancestors in soil & blood. "I will see you again. But not yet."

@DAF - Thanks for breaking down the four-part thriller. It fits in several ways, although I would argue that Act 2 begins with Max being taken as a slave. Please help me, since I'm very new to script analysis. Leaning on Syd Field's work, I would guess the following structure from reading the 2nd draft script: Inciting incident: Murder of Marcus. Plot Point 1: Maximus is taken captive by slave traders. Midpoint: Proximo tells Maximus they're headed for Rome. Plot Point 2: Commodus uncovers the conspiracy and kills the participants. Climax: Maximus and Commodus fight to the death. Resolution: Maximus kills Commodus and starts a new life with Julius. Rome's future is brighter. I just watched the first 46 minutes of the film, and the shooting script was SO much better than the 2nd draft. It should serve to give aspiring writers much hope, as an original draft need be nothing like the final story - and the change can often be for the better. I am learning much from this conversation. Thanks, Scott, for leading these sessions.

@chris: If you're new to script analysis, then (A) you have an instinct for it or (B) Syd Field has taught you well. Your take on the script's structure works for me. It takes me back to the WGA strike in 1988. Traipsing around the Fox lot, I struck up a conversation with a veteran writer who told me this: "To write a script, you gotta know four things: The beginning of the story, the end of Act One, the end of Act Two, and the ending of the story. If you know that, you can write a script. If you don't know that, you don't know dick." I have carried that insight with me all these years. In fact, in the Prep class I teach, the third writing assignment is Four Primary Plotline Points, precisely what that writer told me over two decades ago. They are the linchpins of a script's story structure.

@Scott. Would you say that, of the Four Primary Plotline Points, it's more important to know the end first? I think I read that somewhere once. Wondered if you'd agree.

@chris - Yes, I definitely think you could see Act 2 as beginning with Maximus's transition (on that cool gurney no less) from his villa in Spain to the slave market. I've often heard that the end of Act 1 should be a decision that the protag makes, not something that happens to them. So I chose Maximus's running/return to his family. But that and his entry to slavery are pretty closely linked. The key plot point that spins things in a new direction seems to me that Maximus finds his family dead. This, on top of Commodus's death, appears to be the key thing that changes Maximus's world and forces him to act in a new way. It's upon finding his wife hung that he give up his warrior *fight* and enters a new phase of submission or *running from.* This, not his actual capture, is the pivotal moment [in the screen version.] At any rate, we're definitely talking about the same set of scenes. I'd think one could also quibble with my placement of the end of Act 2. Personally, I see your scenario as much as I do Ridley Scott's. But he's the director so I went with him. Bottom line: I doubt there's an absolute right or wrong to these things (and certainly given revisions from script to screen etc it gets murky.) Rather, I took the purpose of the exercise to lie in the importance for us to try and think through the film's structure ourselves so that we start developing our own instincts on structure, instincts that will help us better fashion our own screenplays. I'm interested in thrillers, so I'm trying to map that way. I'm thinking it's ok that there's more than one answer. And the fact that we all come up with different things is partly why I love this exchange. Then again, it's also possible that I, to use Scott's phrase, "don't know dick." Either way, the discussion is very helpful for me. Thanks!

@Sean: I know there are writers, especially novelists, who charge into their stories without knowing the ending. And there have been famous cases in the movies where the ending was up in the air well into production ("Casablanca" a most notable one). And sometimes that can turn out well (as it did with "Casablanca"). But most professional screenwriters I know, either directly or through interviews, have to have their ending set before they start the page-writing part of the process. And in TV, I can virtually guarantee you that 100% of the writers on staff know the ending before they start to crank out the script. Why? Because the ending influences everything. You may well have read columns where Aspiring Writer says, "My ending doesn't work," and Screenwriting Guru says, "That means you have a problem with the beginning." That's almost always true. The ending is the culmination of what is at issue with the Protagonist at the beginning. That means both in terms of their conscious goal (want) and their unexpressed goal (need). So yes, the ending is incredibly important. It should be intimately involved with and connected to the beginning. Here's a good example: In "Star Wars: A New Hope," as soon as Luke Skywalker sees the hologram message from Princess Leia -- "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope" -- he is 'predestined' to be seated in that X-wing just about to pull the trigger on the bomb that will destroy the Death Star. That ending is implied, indeed instigated in the events of the beginning. Is the ending the most important plot point? They're all important. But unless you're a veteran writer who has written dozens of scripts and intuitively 'knows' story, I would never recommend a writer start a screenplay without knowing its ending.

@DAF: You make a really important point that bears repeating basically all the time. Stories are organic, living and breathing entities. So whenever we use designations like act breaks or plot points, while helpful from the standpoint of story development and analysis, they are - ultimately - artificial, even arbitrary. In other words, one person's Act One ending is another person's Act Two whatever. Here is a good example: I was teaching an online course and used the original "Pirates of the Caribbean" as the study script. The way I approached the content was with this character archetype lineup: Protagonist: Will Turner Nemesis: Barbossa Attractor: Elizabeth Mentor: Pirate lore Trickster: Jack Sparrow Will Turner goes through the most significant metamorphosis, moving from the Disunity of trying to be a normal, upstanding citizen when in fact he has pirate's blood coursing through his veins to the ending where he frees Jack Sparrow from hanging, and Elizabeth literally declares to her father, "No, he's a pirate," thus achieving unity. All very nicely wrapped up in my view. Then a student said they watched the DVD extras commentary by the film's screenwriters Elliott & Rossio who said that Elizabeth was the Protagonist. That leads to another subject entirely where you can use archetypes to 'switch Protagonists,' look at the story universe through each primary character's eyes as the Protagonist, a great way to dig into them. But you see my point: Finally these are all abstractions compared to the reality of the story itself. Now to balance that out, clearly we need designations like plot points, act breaks, archetypes and what not in order to wrangle our stories, and - as we're seeing in this series - analyze stories. But our ultimate goal is to create stories that live and breathe, where the reader or moviegoer gets so caught up in the characters and events, they -- ahem -- go into the story. BTW you're smart to be interested in thrillers. It's the #1 genre right now in Hollywood in terms of spec script acquisitions.

Reading these analyses has been very rewarding to me. Just to explore another dimension of structure, it looks to me as if the Hegel structural lens of Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis is at work here.. along with the dual internal arc and external plot development that you mention, Scott. I am not familiar with the details of all of the choices you offered in the article, but at the risk of being a goof, what about this? Thesis: Maximus' role and self image is that of a brave, successful warrior and military leader who obliterates enemy lives for the glory of his emperor. Even though he longs for the warm family life he left in Spain, Maximus is ready to stay in service to Marcus -- not as his successor as emperor but as his champion in the corrupt old emperor's twilight redemption. That is Marcus's dream of returning Rome to a republic. Knowing Commodus murdered his father for the crown, and will never return the government to the people, Maximus makes the fateful decision to refuse to serve the dissolute young caesar. By asserting his thesis viewpoint and allegiance, Maximus seals the "new world order" fate of himself and his beloved family. He continues to act like a brave, honorable general of the Roman Legion as he outwits his would-be assassins and rides their horses to reach his family to protect them. But he finds them brutally, unmercifully tortured and murdered by henchmen of the new caesar. Thus he sees the new world, where individual political enemies of caesar and their families are savaged or placed into slavery for the empire's pleasure and distraction. Anthesis: Maximus' life, fortunes, status inverts in this new world. He is a slave, alone and worth only what his owner- trainer can earn from his fights in armed combat or animal-baiting bouts and via the side bets that accompany these "entertainments" for the dissolute masses. Even so, broken and hopeless as vanquished people often are, he refuses to fight. His long "silence" is deafening. Then motivations that mean something to him kick in. Juba, his only friend, is chained to him and is about to be senselessly slaughtered for the amusement of a base crowd. This is too much. It is essentially the repeat of his innocent wife, son and servants being murdered by men who enjoyed their job too much. Only then does Maximus unleash his deathly skills as a warrior in the role of gladiator -- to protect and an innocent and good man. As a slave gladiator, he is beginning to experience a life lesson. That is, how men with unlimited power manipulate those beneath them, causing innocent men and women to become lion bait, or killing machines, or brainless "citizens" reveling at colosseum games while their leaders plunder their grain stores and their future. All are victims of the all-powerful puppeteers. When Proximus explains that Maximus could meet Commodus face-to-face if he is victorious in the Roman games, Maximus's need for revenge meets an emerging higher purpose of helping Marcus's deathbed dream of a republican Rome come true. In Rome, even as Maximus becomes involved in Lucilla's and the senate's political conspiracy against Commodus, it is his military-bred bravery and strategies in the blood ring that bring him to the attention of the crowd. In Act 2b, slave-gladiator Maximus has become the warrior he once was, but with a key difference. He is merciful. He has learned from the unfair murder of his wife and family, the meaningless killings of fellow slave gladiators and even the unaware dissolution of Roman citizens... who often wind up as cat bait without cause or warning. It is this new trait that draws the crowd's empathy and massive response. It is Maximus's refusal to murder defeated gladiators, coupled with the crowd's response to his merciful, fair, honorable treatment of those under his control that earns him the power to influence Commodus' emotions, decisions and actions. Synthesis: In both the second draft of the script and in the movie, Maximus melds the best of both of his life experiences to become an avenger of his family as well as a champion of the manipulated citizens of Rome. In the script, he escapes Rome, reclaims his badge of rank and actually leads his army again as its general. But this time he doesn't charge in to conquer helpless peoples for Caesar's glory. He defeats Caesar's partisan soldiers, kills Caesar in a lusty battle and then orders his second-in-command to support the return of power to the people. Only then does he ride off into the sunset with young Lucius. In the movie, Maximus's popularity with the citizenry draws Commodus out for a duel in the Colosseum. His victory over Maximus will, in his mind, re-cement his place as the people's great and unquestioned "father." To make sure, he wounds Maximus before the fight, and this proof of Commodus' treacherous character ensures that the match will end in both men's death. But the combined response of citizens, senate members, Lucilla and Lucius make it clear that Maximus's higher purpose has been achieved, as well as his vengeance. He is now free to go home to his family. Kind of the best of both worlds. Anyway, that's one way of looking at the overall structure.