Hereditary: The Power of the First & Last Image

This week we’ll be talking about Hereditary written and directed by Ari Aster.

I want to start by talking about the first image of this film. So, if you're worried about spoilers, we will get to some spoilers later, but you can listen to the beginning of this podcast without concern.

The first image of Hereditary is the most important image of Hereditary.

That's because the first image of any screenplay is the most important image of the film.

It’s the most important image of your film creatively. It’s the most important image of your film structurally and it’s the most important image of your film commercially. So, it’s actually the most important image on three different levels.

I want to talk about how the first image functions on each of these levels. We’re going to start on the most external and then we’re going to work down to the most connected.

Externally, as a commercial device, the first image is the most important image of your film because the first image is the only image that everybody is actually going to read.

When your producer or agent or manager flips the script of the first page and takes a look, it’s actually that line that makes them decide, “You know what, I’m going to send this one out for coverage,” or, “Maybe I’ll read this myself.”

Similarly, if you think about the math of being a coverage reader, you as a consumer are likely going to pay about $150 for coverage, but they’re actually getting paid $50 a script. And, if you think of what it would take you to write a logline, a commentary, and a summary of a film, you’ll realize that if they were actually carefully reading each film, and carefully writing summaries, log lines and commentaries, that they would be working for about 32 cents an hour.

So that’s not possible. You can’t eat from that. Which means that coverage readers need to choose which scripts they’re going to fully read and which scripts they’re going to skim. And that’s true for festival readers and readers who read for production companies. They actually can’t afford to read every single script carefully.

And even if the economic reason for skimming didn’t exist, there’s an emotional reason that’s even more powerful, which is that almost everything they read is bad.

If you’re a coverage reader and you read a thousand screenplays and one of them is producible, you had a pretty good year.

Most of the scripts they’re reading—and I’m not talking about scripts by student writers or beginning writers or amateur writers, I’m talking about scripts by professional writers with agents—most of what they read isn't just bad, it’s actually un-producible.

Many of these professional writers are just slamming out ideas, playing within a formula, trying to get something to throw against the wall to see if it sticks, rather than doing the real work of carefully mining their subconscious for the real story they want to tell.

The downside of that is that there’s a lot of bad stuff that you’ve got to cut through in order to get your script noticed.

The good thing about that is that if you start to learn some of the things we talk about here, and you start to do this real work, your script really will stand out from the pack.

And that starts with the very first image.

If you’ve got a great first image in your screenplay, it will actually change the whole perspective of the person reading.

It will stop them from saying, “Oh... another bad script, okay let’s see if I can get through this,” and it will start them saying, “Oh wow! This is actually kind of cool!”

Because the secret of every coverage reader is that even though they dread reading another bad script, they’re desperately hoping to find that diamond in the rough.

So that first image is your place commercially to say, “You know what, pay attention. This one is going to be cool.”

I actually learned this lesson doing Off-Off Broadway theatre.