I hit 88 pages the other night, which means that at my next writing session I should cross 90 – and that’s a benchmark I prize. Since the rule is that one page approximately equals one minute of screen time when it’s all averaged out, 90 is about the minimum length at which a screenplay can be taken seriously as a feature. I’ve seen less – hell, I’ve written less – the first draft of Snowblind was 82 pages and I do believe margin cheating was involved – but 90 is really the no-arguments edge of the strike zone. Hit too close to 120 – or, God forbid, beyond – and the professional reader who flips to the last page for the number before he starts reading will hate even starting your script. I know the sound of that sigh – I’ve made it.
So, for practical, reader-friendly spec writing, 90-115 is the range. Comedies, thrillers, and horror movies traditionally run on the shorter end of that scale since they are meant to be more energetic than hefty dramas or romances. As I’ve said before, I targeted 105 for this one but am bound to overshoot that – but that’s what happens in first drafts and I don’t fear the cut-down that will undoubtedly follow.
When I cross 90, basically at any point I could make a bomb go off, have someone say “Good night, sweet Prince!“, write “FADE OUT” and BINGO – I’ve written a feature screenplay. There’s a sense of power in that, because it’s like the labor part of it is accomplished triumphantly, now it’s just about writing the pages the story needs to be the best first draft of itself it can be.
I read an essay by Francis Ford Coppola today where he underlines the oddity that people write screenplays on spec at all. A screenplay is, after all, in great measure a technical document, filled with jargon, whose purpose is to tell the lighting department what to put on the truck each day. And to spend so much time creating that document without writing a good STORY first is startlingly premature.
This falls under the pick-your-poison heading – outline, treatment, prose summary, what have you – but what he’s advocating is that you get the creative elements right before you start swimming in the jargon. Because it’s so very easy to get all that stuff right and fool yourself into thinking that because of it you’ve written a good script.
Since Hollywood is relying more and more on stories from other media on which to base their movies, and there’s little market left for spec, this is not such a terrible thing to keep in mind. The last short story I wrote, as it happens, had been living in my brain for many months – as a short film idea. And if I ever do film it, I think having written it down like this first is going to make it better.