The Contract You Make on Page One

For a screenwriter, the opening ten pages are like a contract. By the time a reader reaches page ten, they have formed expectations about the story’s tone, genre, emotional weight, and the kind of attention the script will demand. Those expectations may be generous or skeptical, patient or guarded, but they are already in place. The rest of the screenplay will either fulfill that promise, complicate it, or quietly break it.

This is why the opening pages carry so much pressure, and why many scripts fail before the story has truly begun. The issue is rarely a lack of ideas. More often, the problem is that the writer has not yet decided what kind of experience they are offering.

The promise of the opening pages is not the premise. It is not the logline, and it is not the plot. It lives in smaller, more elusive choices. What kind of attention does this story require? Are we meant to lean forward, relax into the atmosphere, laugh, feel uneasy, feel complicit? Are we inside a character’s volatility, or watching them from a measured distance? These signals appear immediately, whether the writer intends them or not.

Many writers worry that if the opening is too defined, the script will feel predictable. In practice, the opposite is usually true. A clear opening creates room for surprise later because the audience knows how to read what they are seeing. When readers cannot tell what kind of movie they are in, they default to caution.

The opening ten pages should already be doing the same work the film will do at scale. If the story is about moral compromise, the opening should stage a small version of that dilemma. If the film is driven by a slow, accumulating dread, the opening should move at that pace rather than rushing toward an inciting incident. If the story hinges on character behavior under pressure, the opening should put pressure on someone immediately, even if the stakes are modest.

One of the most common missteps is writing an opening that feels like a placeholder. Writers often treat the first ten pages as necessary setup rather than storytelling in its own right. They explain context, introduce backstory, or wait for the “real” movie to begin. 

A strong opening demonstrates its priorities. It trusts the reader to infer tone and significance through action, rhythm, and choice. This does not mean withholding information for the sake of mystery. It means understanding that meaning is cumulative. What matters is not how much we know, but how we are being trained to watch.

Writers are often too close to their intentions to see them clearly. You know what the story will become. You know where the emotional weight will land in the second act or the final sequence. A reader does not. They experience the script linearly, with no assurances. Their confusion, impatience, or excitement is not a judgment of the idea. It is information about how the opening is functioning on the page.

A professional script reader can tell you what kind of movie they believe they are reading by page ten. They can identify mismatches between tone and action, between pacing and subject matter, between what the script seems to promise and what it later delivers. This feedback is difficult to generate on your own, especially when you are invested in protecting the work.

When writers revise with this lens, the opening often becomes leaner and more confident. Scenes that exist only to orient the audience are either reshaped to carry drama or removed. Early moments that felt minor are clarified because their thematic weight becomes visible. The script stops apologizing for itself.

The opening ten pages do not need to reveal everything. They need to be honest. Honest about tone. Honest about rhythm. Honest about the kind of engagement being asked for. When that honesty is present, readers are far more willing to follow the script wherever it goes. The promise of the opening is all about building trust. The writer is saying: this is how I will tell this story, and this is why it is worth your attention. When that promise is clear, the script stands on firmer ground from the very first page.