As I mentioned in my last post, as I was writing the first draft of my new Western screenplay, I was starting to get concerned about the length of some of the sequences. After the second script consultation I’d had for my screenplay of Dig Down, I’d come away with the advice to target about 90 pages. As a page of script roughly equated to one minute of screen time, I was essentially targeting about a 90 minute movie.
Although I had written several screenplays at this point, none of them had been optioned, so I would still be considered a first time screenwriter. That being the case, it made sense to keep the script to about this length, as anyone looking to option the script to turn it into a movie would be taking a chance on me, so reducing that risk as much as possible by keeping the story – and by extension how much would need to be filmed – within normal limits would make it easier for them to take that chance on me.
The opening sequence felt an appropriate length and pace, mixing in some hints about characters, building up tension and then an explosive opening. The first two sequences of act one introduced new characters and having them already working toward their own goals, so that these scenes didn’t just feel like exposition dumps for the audience.
But…
I still hadn’t even gotten to the inciting incident that the main character would be forced to react to for the rest of the story. And there were still some other villains, including the main antagonist, that needed to be introduced.
So while I felt these scenes were going well, I also felt I was at risk of lagging behind the pace already. 90 pages wasn’t a hard cap. I felt if I went over it by a few pages, potential buyers of the script wouldn’t toss the screenplay into the discard pile because they reached ninety pages and saw there were still two to five pages left to read. But if I was going to exceed 90 pages, I felt it could only reasonably exceed it by those two to five pages, and that every page it went over that was running the risk of not being considered at all.
The pages were also a little difficult to judge because as I had stated in an earlier post, as I was putting together this first draft, I wasn’t writing it in screenplay format, I was writing actions and dialogue on one half of the page, and notes on the importance – or at the very least why these were included – in the screenplay. The notebook I was handwriting these in had fewer lines than would be on the page of a screenplay, and I was always skipping a line before writing the next action or dialogue. Even with that being the case though, these sequences were averaging over 10 pages, with the sequences in Act One averaging over 15.
I needed to start trimming these down where I could.
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