And I have had agents tell me that 117 is the magic number. Google, “How long is a good screenplay?” A straight-forward answer appears: 90 to 120 pages.
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I’ve spent my professional life writing screenplays, and now you know why I’ve always dreamed of writing a book. There is a long standing joke in Hollywood: No one sleeps their way to the top on a film set by fucking the writer. A screenwriter is a powerless position, and a screenplay that has never been filmed is, literally, nothing. The director cuts a scene to move the story along faster? Time for the Second Pink Revision and so on. Truth is, there is no “finally.” The actress doesn’t think her character would say that? Bring on the Second Blue Revision.
There is even a system for it, with hierarchical colored pages, signifying the amount of times a page has changed, from white (so rare, as it means: unrevised), to blue, then pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon, and finally, cherry. The screenplay, in fact, is meant to be endlessly revised, from casting to the final edit.
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If I were writing a screenplay I would have to resort to dialogue to betray my characters’ inner lascivious thoughts, their clandestine motivations, what should be their unspoken lust!Įven when you yourself are the director of your own script, which I have been several times, you must “fire the writer.” Because there comes a time when you are helming a movie that you have to forget the text, even rewrite it if it stands in your way. is a hard-boiled crime story with a bi-sexual love triangle, peppered with double-crosses, starring a disgruntled music professor, an unhappily married woman and a Mexican bartender who band together to steal a buried fortune. You can use simple parentheticals-(loading the gun)- but the rest is for the director and the actor to decide.ĩ9 Miles from L.A. Don’t direct the movie by suggesting how someone is sipping tea while loading bullets into a gun, in between each word. You learn to write only what people say, and what they do. You can’t write about what’s inside someone’s head because, well, you can’t see that.
Screenwriters are taught: “Do not write what you cannot see.”Īnd this is why, after a career of writing screenplays and directing films, I wrote a crime novel.Ī screenplay is a blue print, drawn with action and dialogue, something that exists in a slippery space, to inspire a director to film, to suggest actors fulfill characters, for a production designer to envision set dressings and costumes and hair designs that likely were not even on the page.