You Sure Have a Nice Midpoint — What’s Your Name?

Chapter Seven of my Indie-Film Journal A Virus Ate My Movie!

Sex at 60

This is truly one of my favorite parts. Whoops — not that you dirty bird. I mean the movie’s sex scene that happens around the middle of the film — aka page 60. Even though I didn’t have it in this film, for many years ‘sex at 60’ was a Hollywood standard. The place to put the first intimate scene.

Why?

Well for one thing, what do we know about sex? It changes EVERYTHING, right? So, with a standard screenplay of 100–120 pages, the sex at page 60 was apparently as good a time as any to flip the story and raise the stakes.

Sex at 60 is great for a rom-com, but the same plot point can be used for any genre. It’s called “party at midpoint.” It’s the place where, after the fun has run its course, at some point it’s gotta ‘arrive.’ It’s gotta lead to something. So we end up at a graduation or ball or gathering or office party of some kind before we can dive in to the second half of the film.

The classic 90’s action movie The Fugitive does it very slyly with the scene where Harrison Ford blends into the St. Patrick’s Day parade crowd in Chicago — it’s a party atmosphere — at least as close as we’re gonna get with a guy on the run for his life, and it ends so succinctly when he tosses his green plastic hat in a trash can and disappears into the crowd. And here we go into the second half of the film.