The CTA happens ‘remarkably often’ around 10-12; not always.

T&L is essentially the journey of Thelma, not Louise. So Louise shooting Harlan is something that happens to Thelma; not something she does. Therefore, there is no committing for Thelma until she decides not to go back home, but to escape to Mexico with Louise.

In T&L, we don’t have a story until they decide to hit the road towards Mexico.

But the main reason why I would argue there is no CTA until the shooting, is that everything that has happened up to this point could have happened in Thelma’s life before. She has allowed men to steamroll over her, so there may well have been an attempted rape that she somehow got out of. This time things are different, and now Louise has shot Harlan, we KNOW a story MUST happen.

I hope this makes sense.

Thank you Romain. I find it really useful to distinguish between these steps of what people call the Inciting Incident and/or Call To Adventure.
Is this a distinction you came up with, or did you read it somewhere? Although I like the principle, I would probably use different terms depending on the framework I’m working in (Hero’s Journey or other).
Thank you for your contribution. Keen to read your response.

Follows a table with Journey/Shit Metaphors/Pixar slang

Inciting Incident———-“Piece of Shit”———————-Clouds on the horizon
Call To Adventure——–“Shit Happens”———————Hero hurt /Passion taken away
[Refusal of Adventure—“Not give a shit”/”Full of Shit”—–Hero makes the bad choice to refuse reality
Catalyst——————–“Shit hits the Fan”——————Bad Choice creates Crisis/Problem

Between CTA and Catalyst, you have the Refusal of Adventures or Refusal of the Loss (denial stage) where the Hero makes the bad choice to refuse reality.
The main thing is that the Catalyst event must, as much as possible, be a consequence of this choice

Examples :

JAWS
CTA: The shark kills the swimmer + Brody is told about over the phone(Brody should have been in the kill scene)
Denial : Beaches not closed
Catalyst : Boy killed for negligence

THE INCREDIBLES
Discreet I.I : Robert sent Buddy packing
CTA: Hero’s are illegals
Denial : Robert plays undercover do-gooder/hero at work and afterworks
Catalyst : Robert get busted in jewel store (+ then by his wife) and at job
Mirage offer is no catalyst because it happens after Robert ACCEPTS his new boring life (and would kill the story doing so)

GROUNDHOG DAY
CTA: Radio plays same song (we get it)
Denial : Bill walks through his first cloned day without a clue
Catalyst : Bill Murray character realises

STAR WARS

Bad I.I.: Princess Leia records message + droids got of the ship + droids get caught + droids get sold to luke’s uncle and finally…
Bad CTA: Luke sees the message and does nothing (should have rushed his way to Ben to get the end of the message, being sure he would have found a way to remove the security plug by the time he got there)
CTA that should’nt have existed : R2-D2 does Luke’s protagonist job and so Luke has lost one of his droids
Denial that shouldn’t have existed : has to retrieve it so he could lie to his uncle by not telling him
Denial again : don’t want to go get the girl with Obi wan
Bad Catalyst : Uncle and Aunt deep fried, Luke doesn’t have anything to do with it, doesn’t even care (ok except for the 5-step-of grief-in-one-shot looking in the suns dawn/set with Williams huge music)

THELMA & LOUISE
CTA: Harlan tries to rape Thelma
Catalyst : Louise shoots Harlan

KICK-ASS
CTA : Dave and Todd robbed
Denial : Dave overthinks himself into superhero stuff and get to beat up his robbers
Catalyst : get stabbed, run over and gains “superpowers”

I always also look at i.i. as that the audience will think ‘omg, how will this turn out/end’? In the case of Groundhog Day, going to Punxsutawney to cover Groundhog Day is Bill’s character’s ordinary, normal life. As an audience, I don’t think when he goes there to cover or even when he is doing his little report ‘omg, how will this turn out’, especially because it is made clear he does this every year. We as the audience don’t expect this year will be any different by the beginning of it, apart from the title that this will be probably about Groundhog Day, but titles can be misleading and we still don’t know what is going to happen.

I think this happens too late into the movie, at 34mins:
https://thestorydepartment.com/structure-jaws