The first is how do you get a personal line into a fast action story? Because that personal line is what's going to make it pay off emotionally for the audience. It's very difficult to do because you're moving so fast that you really don't want to slow down and take that time. Another problem that you have to overcome, is how do you focus all the action in a single arena. Again, this is especially difficult in a film like "Outbreak" where you're covering epic action, it covers a huge amount of territory. A third big problem is how do you create enough plot? Although we have a lot of action in action stories, we often don't have very much plot.

What I'd like to do is use the seven steps of structure along with concepts like ghost, context and theme to see how the writers solved these problems and created a blockbuster script.

Ghost: The ghost is the event from the past that's haunting the hero in the present. When you're writing an action thriller you have a very unique situation where you have to have not one but two ghosts. You have to have a ghost for the action line and you have to have a ghost for the personal line.

The ghost for the action line in "Outbreak" is seen in the opening scene of the movie. This isn't very common, we don't usually see the ghost played out in the first scene, but we do here. In this particular case, the opening shows us the outbreak of a very deadly virus in some corner of Africa which has decimated most of the population. A couple of guys in funny suits show up and they claim that they're going to help out. In fact what they do is have the entire village bombed. They just totally wipe it out.

We find out a little bit later that another part of the ghost is the fact that the virus and the antibody that will stop the virus have been stored by the U.S. government for possible future biological warfare.

We also need to have a ghost on the personal line which we do have here. When we come into the story and first meet the hero he has just gone through a divorce with his wife. Even though, he's still in love with her.

Context: Also at the beginning of the story, we have the context which is the world of the story. With action stories we have a unique problem that we need to compress the action into a particular space where the story is going to take place. It's what I call a pressure cooker effect. The key rule to keep in mind here is in the greatest action stories, they always strive to jam the most opponents into a single arena. With "Outbreak" this is made even more difficult by the fact that the arena of this story is world wide. We go to Africa, we go to California, Boston... we're covering a huge amount of space. The solution the writer's come up with is a visual progression for the story. Just like we have character development and we have story development, in the best scripts we also have visual development. The technique that they use here is the whirlpool effect, whereby they begin wide and then tighten it down. The action speeds up as they focus it into a particular spot which is a small town in California.

Problem/Need: Also up front in the story we have the problem need and again we have that special difficulty with the action story which is how do you make a fast epic action story person. They're really contradictory. But that's what you have to do. The solution the writer's come up with is they simply take the time to give the hero both a personal problem and need and the action part of the story a problem. So, again we have two tracks. Very important that we have both.

A lot of writer's are mistaken. They think that if they're writing an action story, they have to write fast. Take the time up front to get that personal line established. Now the problem on the action level is that the hero is facing a virus that is very deadly and its spreading fast. That's essentially what has to be solved in the story.

We also have a personal problem for the hero. We see him when his life is in crisis, he's going through a divorce with a woman that he still loves.

The psychological need for this character is established up front when we see him with his ex-wife. He also has certain weaknesses. He's very overbearing, he has a very superior sense towards just about everybody that he comes up against and he has in effect driven his wife away. So if we were to describe his need which is positively what he must gain by the end of the story if he's going to change his life, his need is to learn to respect other people, and to treat them as equals.

The psychological need is typically the source of the moral need which refers to how the character reacts toward other people. His weakness on the moral level is that he's tyrannical. Not surprising for someone who's overbearing and superior. He pushes people around. So again, his positive need in the moral area is that he has to learn how to love. Even though he's going to go through this big action sequence, the real need is going to happen on the personal level with his wife.

Desire: Also fairly early in the story, we have the desire line. This is the particular goal that the hero has in the story. The single greatest advantage to an action story is that it gives you a single track desire line. You ride down this as fast as possible. It's a tremendous advantage because you have a super strong spine for your story. That is certainly the case in "Outbreak". There is a very strong desire line. We have the added advantage that it is a building desire line. Ideally we don't want to set a particular goal for the character and have that remain at the same level for the entire story. We want to keep the same single desire line but we want it to build in intensity and in stakes. What is at stake in the story.

The overall desire line for the character in this story is to find the agent of this disease and to create an antibody to stop it. That pretty much tracks all the way through. Because this virus is so deadly, we have a time element involved in that we've got to solve this problem real fast or not just this town is going to go but it will spread throughout the entire country.

The nice thing that they do is they take the single track and build it in intensity. The first goal that the hero has before he even finds out that we've got this deadly virus that hits the US, is he wants to alert the authorities in the US about a possible danger. The danger that this virus may spread from Africa to the US At this point he doesn't realize that it already has spread. Once he finds out that it's spread then he kicks into his main desire line which is to find out what's carrying this thing. Catch it, try to create an antibody to kill it. But then we kick the desire line up to a third level as we move to the end of the story and that's to stop the bombing of this town. It could be argued that this element of stopping the bombing is not actually just building the main desire line, it's really a whole new desire line. That's why a lot of people have had a sense that this is really two movies that have been stuck together. I believe though, that they did a pretty good job of weaving that final desire line into the main line. So it works pretty well.

Opponent: Once we have a character with a goal, we then have to run up against an opposition. The opposition is very tricky in this script. The first opponent in this story is the disease. It's a very deadly virus. This movie has the best sequence perhaps that I've ever seen of tracking death. The intensity, the verosity that death can move because we have this great sequence where we have this sick guy on the plane and then it gets his girlfriend and then it gets the lab technician and then the lab technician sneezes in the movie theater and it gets everybody in the movie theater. It's a great sequence.

This virus provides us with a hell of an opposition because it is as deadly as anything can possibly be. But we run into a big problem. How do you create an ongoing and a building opposition when your opponent is a virus. You can't do it. The point here is that you never want to make a disease or an addiction your main opponent. You can't have a dramatic fight against an invisible bug. It's going to do whatever it's going to do, but you can't make public that fight. So you have to have a personal opposition.

So, the main opponent doesn't remain the virus, it is General McClintock. Let's look at this opponent for a minute. This guy is clearly a villain. In this movie we're not going to see any subtlety of opposition between hero and main opponent. They're not going to have a lot of moral fighting about whatever they might fight about. That's not what this opponent is all about. He is there to provide as heavy an opposition as we can get for our hero. This guy does have two really great advantages. One is that he provides the source for the conspiracy, where most of the plot comes from. Without him, we really have no plot. Once we hit those virus beats, we're going to run out of plot. The other great advantage he gives us is that he escalates the story up to the battle. We can't get to that battle without him.

There's a second opponent besides McClintock and he's an opponent ally. This is General Billy Ford. As an opponent ally, he is somebody who appears to be a friend to the hero but is actually an enemy. General Ford is an in-between character in this sense. He acts fundamentally as an opponent but he also acts as a friend, especially at the end of the story. Like McClintock, he is crucial for plot because like any opponent ally, he is hidden. The true nature of his opposition is hidden. He much more than McClintock provides moral argument with our hero.

Plan: Once we have a goal and we go up against an opponent the next step is to come up with a plan. The fact that this is an action thriller gives us a big advantage. If it was just an action story, all we would be doing is having fights, beating on one another. But the fact that we have a thriller involved here means that we're also doing investigation. The great advantage of investigation is that it gives you a detailed, single line plan that will allow you to track the entire middle of your script. That's exactly what the plan does here. It's very precise, and this main character because he is a professional at what he does, gives a number of different orders, takes a number of different steps to solve the problem and so on. For example, he initially asks his ex-wife Robbie to issue a warning, he tells the Sargeant to change his flight so he can go see her, he tells Major Salt to study the bloody bags with the E 1101 labels on them, he has the employees of the animal lab tested, he steals the helicopter to find the monkey and so on and so forth. All are very detailed steps that allow us to track a single line at top speed in the middle of the story.

So, let's look at the middle. As most of you know, the middle is where most scripts fail. And here again, we have a special problem, which is that problem of how do we increase plot in a fast action story. Action can mean the death of your plot. Because while action may be interesting for a little while, action stops the plot until we find out the outcome of the action. This is why most action stories are pretty dull. They have very little plot. The more big action set pieces we have, the less plot we have and so all we see is really a lot of movement, but not a lot of story turns.

Outbreak on the other hand has a tremendous plot and I believe probably its greatest strength, is that it is able to tie in a terrific amount of plot and still have the action move at a hundred miles an hour. This is very difficult to do. Most action scripts don't do it.

Plot comes from hidden information and sudden reveals. Which leads to a very important point. If you want a lot of plot, you have to have a very active but hidden opponent. That's exactly what we get in this script provided by the virus, and provided by McClintock. In fact, if you were to break this script down, you would find that there are, depending on how you determine reveals, you would find fourteen to sixteen revelations in this script. That is a tremendous amount of reveals giving us a tremendous amount of plot. Notice parenthetically, that is far advanced from the simple two to three plot points that you hear about in most screenwriting books. If you're only coming up with two or three plot points, you're not even going to be close.

Let look at some examples of the reveals. First of all, in terms of audience revelations, reveals that the audience gets, but the hero doesn't. Jimbo sneaks the monkey out of the facility. The monkey scratches Rudy. Jimbo is sick on the plane, Jimbo kisses his girlfriend. The Dr. who tests the blood has a shatter on him. The Dr. sneezes in the theater., McClintock considers blowing up the town, the monkey shows up at the windowsill of the child. These are all audience reveals. All are plot turns.

Then there's all the reveals that happen to our hero. Anything that happens to our hero is even more powerful. We have a great revelation where Sam the hero sees the air grate in the hospital and he realizes for the first time that the disease is airborne. This is a great camera reveal as it travels through the air grate into another room and this gives us incredible insight that they're in big trouble. He has a reveal that the disease has two strains, that the animal is carrying both of them. He has a reveal that the monkey that was treated with E 1101, is O.K., which means that the government had the vaccine all along, this is a big reveal. He also realizes when they're going to blow up the town. All of these give tremendous amount of texture and story momentum to the middle of this script. It doesn't slow down.

Battle: In Outbreak, the writers were having a problem with how do you have a big final battle, when your first and biggest opponent is a virus. You either die or you don't. If you find the antidote, the story is over. Where is the battle. Their solution, was to come up with this human opponent who is planning to bomb the town. And they add another nice personal element in that the hero's ex-wife who he's still in love with is in this town. So now he's got to stop it. The battle consists playing chicken with the helicopter and the bomber. Which of course is man against man. This is a very big battle with the whole town at stake. There is a little problem with believability here, as often happens in action stories. There's really not much believability in the battle. First of all, the hero could have stopped the bombing when he first shows up at the T.V. station -- just make the situation public. That's the last the government is going to be doing that. But of course, he can't do that cause that will eliminate the final battle. So he doesn't actually say it then.

The other unbelievability here, is the fact that these pilots disobey an order from a general. A pretty high ranking general at that. This is just not going to happen. But ultimately, it doesn't matter whether its believable or not, because emotionally it works and by the time you get to the battle, everything is moving so fast, nobody seems to notice, or if they do notice nobody cares. Or if they do care, they didn't like this movie in the first place.

Self-Revelation: And finally we get to the self-revelation. The moment when the hero learns something very important about himself and makes some kind of change. Is there a self revelation for this main character? Remember the key rule about a self revelation. It's got to be new information that the hero has about himself and it's got to be how he has been wrong up until this point. The fact that he's willing to sacrifice himself to stop this bomber from dropping this bomb, seems to me behavior that he would have done in the very first frame just as much as he would have done it in the last frame, so it's not new behavior. The fact that he takes his helmet off and let's his wife touch his face is a very powerful moment but I'm not sure that's a self revelation. In other words, this guy already knows that he loves his ex-wife. We've known that from the very beginning. We have a sense that he now knows how to love her in the right way. Somehow, their relationship is going to be very different from now on. What we don't see is how that happened. Other than the fact that when you go through something this intense, maybe it can change you in such a way that behavior that you've been doing for ten years in your marriage is somehow going to be different the next ten years. It's a very positive moment. But I don't think there is much of a self revelation there.

There's one other problem with a self-revelation and that is that his stubbornness and overbearing drive which have been his supposed psychological weaknesses up front, are part of what helps him solve the problem. So you can't very well have him say "gee, I've got to stop being so overbearing." He just about saves the United States of America because of his overbearing and stubborn behavior.

What I think is a more serious problem, is the fact that the writers were unable to get across their thematic revelation here. In talking with Laurence Dworet, he made this point very clearly himself, the larger lesson that the writer's wanted to get across was an ecological one. They wanted to get across that this kind of thing is going to be much more likely to happen now that we're destroying the rain forests. First of all because these viruses used to be in closed habitats. As soon as you start wiping out rain forests, they're no longer closed off any more. The other point they wanted to make is that when you wipe out various species in the rain forests you're ability to come up with antidotes to stop these viruses is diminished as well. This thematic point was lost in the requirement that they have a big ending. This is not uncommon.

We end of course with the final structure step, the new equilibrium, where everything is back to normal but the hero is at a higher or lower level by having gone through this experience. Obviously the hero is at a higher level from going through this. In fact, all of America is at a higher level. The hero's ex-wife is now O.K., the outbreak has been stopped and it seems likely that they will reunite.

As far as focusing in on the strengths of this script. I think the three main strengths that you find useful in trying to see how a blockbuster is written. The first is that they take the time to establish a personal track between the husband and the wife. This line holds steady throughout the story and it grounds the movie which goes all over the place, it deals with a lot of scientific stuff. It deals with a lot of unbelievable actions, taking us jumping on ships, etc. And it just gives a real solid, personal connection in a story that really needs it.

The second real strength that you see here is the sequencing of the opposition. We talked about how they came in real strong with the virus and then kick it to the personal level with McClintock and the opponent ally, both of whom because they act so much under the surface, give us a tremendous amount of plot.