As I’ve said, the most important minutes of any screenplay are the first fifteen and what I’d like to do now is talk about the structure of the first quarter hour of the screenplay, the first four scenes. SCENE ONE: BUTCH CASING THE BANK. Very short scene. A guy walks up to a bank that is very modern-looking and ugly and heavily barred. (The guy is Butch and he’s an outlaw, but we don’t know that yet.) He looks at the bank sourly, then talks with a guard. BUTCH What was the matter with the old bank this town used to have? It was beautiful. GUARD People kept robbing it. BUTCH (walking off)
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