2. The audience wants the Hero to exhibit a sense of humor.

Very near the opening of your screenplay, try to find a way to demonstrate that your Hero possesses a sense of humor.

This is a simple but important desire to satisfy. You don't need a gag writer.

Audiences respond positively to self-deprecating or ironic humor. When Angela Bennett is accused of not being a risk-taker, she counters that she does take risks: she doesn't always floss, and she tears the labels off her mattresses.

Try to make your Hero exhibit a sense of humor as soon as possible.

4. Moviegoers want the Hero to believe in (and act according to) the basic set of values that they believe in.

In Titanic Jack Dawson (Leonard DiCaprio) believes that a poor sincere artist should be true to his inner calling.

He believes in the value of life. He believes that true love should triumph over class barriers and financial considerations.

He believes in heroism to save a human life. These are all values that North American moviegoers believe in.

Dirty Harry believes that a cop should not follow regulations if it's a case of protecting the honest citizenry from the scum that infest the streets.

What are your Hero's values? Are those values shared by the majority of the audience? Take your best shot.

Audiences dislike base selfish desires like greed. They like admirable selfish desires like striving for achievement (to become a great opera star, or head of the company, or discoverer of Insulin).

They dislike base selfish desires like pure revenge. They like admirable selfish desires like wanting to redress an injustice that one has suffered.

They love admirable unselfish desires like wanting to redress an injustice others have suffered, so as to make the world a better place to live.

A hero with base selfish motives is exactly what you want if your screenplay is intended to be:

You can often create great tension and catharsis in an audience through heroes with base selfish motives. Three good examples from different eras: Macbeth, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Goodfellas, and My Best Friend’s Wedding

Cameron Diaz (Opposing Force), Dermot Mulroney (Bonding Character) and Julia Roberts (Hero with base, selfish motives) in Karaoke bar where Hero tries to humiliate Opponent in order to make Bonding Character fall out of love with her.

Robert de Niro (Bonding Character) and Billy Crystal (Hero) having a "discussion." This picture has some clever twists on the Hero/Bonding Character model. Many of the hilarious outcomes stem from the Hero's desire to escape from his Bonding Character. Then the plot escalates when the Hero finds himself battling his patient's enemies.

At first, there are meetings in offices, and chases around a hotel, but the obstacles escalate, until Sobel finds himself pinned down by a hail of lead in a waterfront shoot-out.

Is your Hero's struggle escalating to the utmost level consistent with the premise?

To build a really good story, you need to create a backstory that includes this Prior Power characteristic for the Opposing/Attacking Force.

Two genres of movies, at least, don't employ an antagonist or opponent in the typical sense.

The first of these two types is the Romantic Comedy.

In a Romantic Comedy the Opponent is the person whose love the hero needs to win.

Bonding Character/Opponent (Meg Ryan) gets ready to fake an orgasm in a restaurant, to prove to the Hero (Billy Crystal) that men never know when a woman is faking it.

In addition to the resistance of the desired loved one, if you are writing a romantic comedy, you need to create as many situational obstacles as possible.

In Sleepless in Seattle, the dominant situational obstacle is geography. The romantic couple is separated by a whole continent. Without this situational obstacle, you don't have a story, you have a cliché.

One of the favorite situational obstacles is mistaken identity. This device is one that could use a whole chapter in itself. Story tellers have been using it for centuries.

The Sandra Bullock vehicle, While You Were Sleeping, utilizes a unique twist on this situational obstacle.

Bullock has gotten herself into a situation in which she's innocently led the family of an injured commuter (played by Peter Gallagher) to believe she's his fiancé, when in fact he's only a passing acquaintance.

Gallagher is in a coma, and she starts falling in love with his brother. As long as she maintains her masquerade, neither can gain the love of the other. It's a comedy, so the struggle leads to hilarious results.

What about the opponent for your Romantic Comedy Hero? Is he or she as daunting as you can imagine?

What about the Situational Obstacle? Is it as potent as the two above?

The second of the two genres that don't employ an antagonist or opponent in the typical sense is the Person-in-Peril.

In this genre, as in the Romantic Comedy, the Bonding Character is also the Opposing /Attacking Force, whose sole mission is to gain total control over, and ultimately destroy, the Hero.

Simplified, what you have is essentially a two-hander, in which the Bonding Character relentlessly pursues the Hero, who tries throughout most of the movie to escape.

Near the end, however, the Hero turns on the Villain and carries out a plan to destroy him, her, or it.

Typical examples of this genre are Alien, Marathon Man, The Net, and Sleeping With the Enemy.

What's at stake in your Hero's struggle? Will your audience believe in its importance? Is it life or death? Is it the integrity of the community? Is it winning the only woman (or man) for the hero, as in a love story? Is it saving the nation, or the world, from disaster? Is it righting a monstrous injustice?

Some examples:

In The Net, Angela Bennet fights not only for her own life, but the safety and freedom of the nation, which is in danger of being controlled and manipulated by the megalomaniac computer baron.

In all of the Batman movies, Bruce Wayne fights for the safety of his community and its right to enjoy freedom from crime.

Melanie Griffith, as Tess in Working Girl struggles to rise from the secretarial pool to become an executive, and to win a life-partner worthy of her aspirations.

But she doesn't just struggle for her own selfish benefit, she represents the dreams of other women like her, and she' s also a champion of humanity and respect in the corporate workplace.

In Minority Report, John Anderton battles to uncover gross corruption in law enforcement, and subsequently to liberate certain special humans (the "pre-cogs") who are kept in a state of drug-induced coma to serve the purposes of the pre-crime unit.

Scratch any successful movie and you'll find high stakes for the Hero hidden just below the surface.

Bonding Character Hannibal Lecter(Anthony Hopkins) and Hero Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) in Silence of the Lambs. Visiting the notorious serial killer is scary, but not as scary as the tasks Agent Starling will face if she wants to catch the killer she's after.

John Book (Harrison Ford), the hero of Witness faces three lethal armed killers who invade the Lapp farm. Book, although a trained police officer, has no weapons. The audience is on tenterhooks through the whole final sequence. They believe he can overcome the villains, but they have no idea how he will do it.

In the final sequence of The Terminator, James Cameron's breakthrough movie, the hero, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) faces the robotic relentless killing machine all alone. Her worst nightmare has become a reality. What is your Hero's deepest fear? Use it.

The quintessential example of a writer manipulating this audience desire occurs in William Goldman's Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. The heroes find themselves trapped at the edge of a cliff, with the posse closing in. Instead of surrendering, they jump off the cliff into the river below and get away.

How many of these types of moments can you set up for your hero?

At the end of Working Girl, Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) wins her dream job and finds herself in the corner office. What's the prize for your Hero?

In the final battle in Star Wars, it could be argued that Luke Skywalker "gets lucky" when he destroys the death star. In fact audiences readily accepted his good luck, because they had shared his hours of preparation with Obi Wan Kenobi.

You need to create good reasons why your Hero cannot quit. In Robert Towne's superb detective story Chinatown, Jake (Jack Nicholson) cannot quit because he has a score to settle with the villain, and because he's fallen in love with Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), whose husband was murdered.

It wants to be surprised. So don't let your Hero do what the audience expects her to do. Write against the expectations of the audience, or have the expectation fulfilled but in a totally unexpected way.

Try to imagine all the ways in which you can satisfy the audience's desires and avoid (or manipulate) the audience's dislikes at every moment of your movie.

Try to put in as many audience-satisfying moments as possible. Put them in on top of each other if you can.

As you write, plan how you can satisfy your audience in some way on every page. Of course all those other elements--plot, theme, dialog, cast of characters, and structure--are important, but the most important task for you is to give the audience what they came to the theater for--satisfaction.