Notes on Disclosure Day, by Bill Johnson

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Notes on Disclosure Day
A fundamental principle for a popular Hollywood film is that it asks the audience to care, typically about a main character.

Disclosure Day starts by introducing us to a young man involved in tech who has stolen some data storage devices from a powerful organization.

He manages to escape with a young woman.

We’re given no reason to care.

She had studied to be a nun, but that feels more like a plot device when she discovers what the young man is trying to reveal to the world.

When we meet Emily Blount’s character, she's the live wire that runs through the film. She wants to be more than a local weather girl in a backwater TV market.

I call this a dramatic truth.

We meet her, we learn her dramatic truth.

I’ve been posting about this since I put up a website in 1995. My writing disclosure day, so to speak.

This explains the mixed reviews for Disclosure Day.

We eventually learn a dramatic truth for the young man, and even deeper into the film, the ‘Bad’ guy.

For anyone who’d like to learn more about how to express a dramatic truth in a novel, read the opening paragraph of Funeral for Horse, by Catherine Ryan Hyde. You can read the opening page on Amazon kindle version of the book. Or if you really want to understand how to create a dramatic truth, read the rest of the novel.

I do capsule reviews of movies that explore how a movie satisfied or failed to satisfy an audience at https://www.storyispromise.com/quikcuts.html

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