Unlike teleplays, which do contain explicit act breaks, feature-length screenplays exhibit no obvious act structure. “A two hour feature film shown in a movie theatre is a continuous action,” argues James Bonnet. Here we will critique certain classical views and examine alternative views of script structure. In the previous section, we explored classical structure rules for Hollywood screenwriting.
But whatever the causes, even a cursory survey of films from the last decade and a half reveals that many tell their stories in some non-classical way.” - Charles Ramirez Berg 2 In the U.S., the rise of independent film and the need for product differentiation are surely important factors. Outside of the world of film, many possible contributory factors might have helped shape this surging trend in unconventional narration: the fragmenting ‘postmodern condition’ and its revolt against master narratives the ubiquity of shorter narrative media forms such as music videos video games, which stress multiple kinds of interactive narrativity, require various sorts of player strategies including role playing and team building, and repeatedly take players back to the same situations the branched experience of surfing the net and hypertext linking that allows users to create a personalized sequence of disparate types of artifacts that might include text, image, video, and sound. Nothing is more central to the manuals than their structural approach to screenplays, in particular, the importance of the three-act paradigm.” - J.J.