Your opening scene, and the four questions that fix it.

Every other scene in your script gets read in the light of something. The first one doesn't. It's the only scene read cold. It sets the tone, opens the question, shows the world, and puts a person in front of us. Which is a lot of weight for a scene written and revised least.

The opening in your draft is usually the first idea you had, sitting untouched while the rest of the script got smarter around it. By page ninety you know what the movie is. Page one doesn't. So go back and ask it four things.

What's the first image. Not the slug line, the picture. The Godfather opens on a face in near darkness saying I believe in America, then pulls back slowly to find Don Corleone listening. Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola wrote it, Coppola directed. That reveal is the whole film. A man believes in the country, the country failed him, so he came to this room instead. No exposition.

Where do we come in. Most openings start too early. You're establishing when you could be arriving. Sunset Boulevard comes in at the end, on a dead man in a pool narrating his own story, then walks you back to how he got there. Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D. M. Marshman Jr. wrote it, Wilder directed. Pick the latest possible moment, then cut one beat later than that.

What's the first thing anyone says. First lines tell the reader what kind of talk this script does and whether it trusts them. If your first line is a greeting or a name, you spent it on nothing.

And is this the right scene to be first. That's the hardest one, because sometimes the answer is no. Sunset Boulevard originally opened in a morgue, corpses comparing notes on how they died. The preview audience laughed. Wilder replaced the whole thing with the pool. He didn't fix that scene. He threw it out.

Your opening isn't sacred because it came first. It's the oldest thing in the file. Read your first scene as though somebody handed it to you and told you nothing.