On Twist Endings

A good twist ending can make your audience forget just how thoroughly mediocre the preceding ninety minutes have been. We all remember that electric thrill of discovery when we first realized that Darth Vader was Luke's father, or that Bruce Willis was a ghost, or that Jaws was actually a shark.

As a writer, your ultimate goal should be to send your audience reeling and stumbling from the theater, so thunderstruck by your brilliance that they don't even realize they've wandered into the path of an oncoming semi. This means that whether you're writing a sleazy crime story about duplicitous bank robbers or a cheery animated fable about Unicorns doing Unicorny shit, your script must have a twist ending.

Coming up with a corker of an ending is the easy part. The problem is that audiences have become savvy to many of Hollywood's most reliable twists and turns. They know the villain isn't really dead, the boyfriend is actually the serial killer, and Vin Diesel isn't really allergic to shellfish. (Remember in the beginning of the movie, that part where Vin talked about going to acting school? Remember that part? He's actually an actor! C'mon, weren't you paying attention? Christ.)

So if you want to stay in the game, you'll need to invent some new twists for your script, and they must be so explosively explosive that their sheer kinetic force ruptures the scrotums of every adult male in the audience.

Here's a surefire way to come up with an unbeatable twist:

1. Write the first 89 pages of your script
2. Think of a twist

Many writers get tripped up at this second step by obsessing over trivial details, such as narrative consistency or internal logic. Don't become one of those sad, stupid souls. With enough lubrication, any nonsensical plot contrivance can be thrust deeply and repeatedly into your script's most delicate areas. If you believe in your twist, your audience will too. And even if they don't, you already have their nine bucks. So, really, who cares?

Here's a fun exercise (fun for us, not you). Below is a plot synopsis for a typical crime caper that we were almost hired to rewrite until the studio hated all of our ideas. Read the synopsis, then see if you can come up with three different twist endings for this story. Then compare your twists to the ones we came up with.

Ours are better, right? And that's why you'll never be a screenwriter.

SYNOPSIS: Rance MacGuffin is a down-on-his luck private dick who is hired by the mysterious and seductive Lola Danger to discover who killed her husband, Gregory Richwell III, a venture capitalist who parlayed his banana-importing operation into a lucrative line of banana-scented women's handbags.

Richwell disappeared on his private yacht without a trace, except for all the blood he left behind. Lola, the only other passenger on the yacht at the time, was occupied with a particularly nasty bout of the Caribbean squirts, and except for Richwell's frantic screams for help, she saw and heard nothing out of the ordinary.

As MacGuffin sinks deeper into the seedy cocktails-and-brie world of the Hamptons, his attraction to the dangerous Lola Danger grows. But MacGuffin is about to learn that the deadliest mystery of all is...love.

Now it's your turn, dear reader.

WHAT'S THE TWIST ENDING?

ENDING #1. The case is finally cracked when a case worker from Big Brothers, Big Sisters shows up to take Gregory Richwell III to the park to play on the swingset. The case worker explains the shocking truth: Richwell was actually developmentally-disabled! The fact that Lola Danger never realized that she was married to a retard can be easily explained away by the fact that she's a woman, and women don't notice stuff. With this new information in hand, MacGuffin easily deduces the sequence of events: first Richwell sliced his finger while trying to open a particularly stubborn can of Pringles--hence the blood they found--then tried to wash the blood away by jumping into the ocean. Because, see, he was retarded. In the final scene, MacGuffin and his new flame share a laugh over this improbable turn of events. Then MacGuffin and Lola do the nasty in the Jacuzzi.

ENDING #2. The case is finally cracked when Lola rips away her biomechanical faceplate. Then she explains the shocking truth: she's actually a pulsating, gelatinous lifeform encased in a cybernetic human shell! It turns out the creature is an interstellar anthropologist sent to observe and document life on earth. But the alien's cover was blown when a bottle of Mexican water caused its simulated bowels to temporarily shut down, and she was forced to kill her husband to protect her secret. In the final scene, MacGuffin sheds a tear over this improbable turn of events as he grinds the alien into paste under the heel of his boot. Then MacGuffin does the nasty with Lola's cybernetic shell in the Jacuzzi.

ENDING #3. The case is finally cracked when a cadre of trained chimps disrupt the climactic cocktails-and-brie party on page 82. Using a rudimentary form of sign language, the Chimp Leader explains the shocking truth: Richwell's line of fashionable women's handbags derive their distinctive odor not from bananas, but from squeezed monkey essence! It seems Richwell was killed in a desperate attempt to stop the cycle of ape-slavery. With this information out of the way, the noble chimp leads the humans to a factory filled with monkeys attached to horrible milking devices. Using the power of his newfound love--and a gun, which turns out to be more useful--MacGuffin rescues the captive simians. In the final scene, MacGuffin and his new friends share a banana over this improbable turn of events. Then MacGuffin does the nasty with Lola in the Jacuzzi while the monkeys watch.