As I said in my last post, there were unfortunately more negatives than positives in the second consultation I had for my script of Dig Down.
A second major negative that the judge focused on was the length of the screenplay. They reiterated several times that the length needed to be trimmed to 90 pages. This differed from what I’d been told in the first consultation, that if the script was good (which they felt it was) that the length wouldn’t matter, and so this became a negative for me on two levels.
The first, and deeper negative for my screenwriting, was that I now had conflicting pieces of advice. My goal for entering these screenplay contests was to get advice on what could be done to improve the quality of the story, and to ideally get it to industry standards. My expectation was that while some of the notes would vary, that there would be a general consensus on the main areas that needed improvement, providing me with a clear target of what needed to be addressed.
This conflicting advice was essentially a worse case scenario. If both judges, or most judges, honed in on the same aspects of the script that they felt needed to be changed, I would feel confident that addressing this would improve the script. But with two judges providing this level of feedback giving me two opposing viewpoints, I was now stuck with a decision – which one do I follow?
The one who was positive about my script said a long length would be okay if the script was good, but was this necessarily right? I could easily fall into a bias of following their direction just because they gave me a favorable score. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I should disregard the other judge, who while they listed more examples of negatives they found with the script, might actually be dispensing better advice because they’re pointing out all the areas where my adaptation was falling short.
In addition to this critical decision being posed to me, there was also the negative about the logistics to trimming down the screenplay. I had agreed that adding extra pages after the first script consultation didn’t feel quite right to me, that over 100 pages felt okay with how much I had packed into the story, but longer than that started to feel like the pacing was off. The judge for this second page believed that 100 pages was too long, and the way they kept reiterating that it needed to be trimmed to 90 pages left me believing anything over that was unacceptable.
This was probably an extreme opinion of this part of the call, but its just to give you context of how much this was stressed.
The problem I had with this was the same I had when I was first looking for an editor for my manuscript of Dig Down. One of the editors that reviewed my work complimented me on my writing, but said I needed to bolster my word count because the length was too small for a novel, which it was. The problem I had with doing that was that essentially doubling the length would devastate the pacing of the story, which is why Dig Down is a novella, essentially around half the word count of a typical book.
This was the flip side of that coin. The judge was asking me to trim close to a third of the screenplay. And while as we were going through it together there were definitely things that could more efficiently tell the story in this medium, and things that could also be cut, I felt that trimming this much of it would make the story as a whole feel rushed. There’d be no chance to sit and breath after tense sequences of Rob fleeing for his life, while at the same time absorbing the complexity of his relationship with Preston that had become so strained over the years.
I feel like too many movies today just rush through a lot of their plot points, just telling the audience how they should be feeling at different points in the story, rather than let them experience these moments and let them reach these feelings themselves. I didn’t really like the idea of my screenplay contributing to this. So while I agreed that there was definitely ways to trim pages from the screenplay, I felt that cutting so much was essentially changing key aspects of the story.
I’ll go over the last main criticism brought up in the consultation, next time.
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