Last night I started trimming the new script. I don’t really think of this as a polish, just the last clean-up phase of the first draft. Still, I might need to make a couple of cutting choices that I usually put off until the real first polish. I want this thing to clear under 120, and while my years at the college newspaper make me VERY good at monkeying with overall length by condensing paragraphs and paraphrasing, it is a stretch to think I’ll be able to steal back eight pages in this manner. I’m going to have to carve out some content.
I already know two places I can go – I’ll have to write a short new scene that will replace a three-page sequence, and I can save a page at the end because I basically wrote two consecutive endings, and I need to pick the better one and just get out of the audience’s way. So with those two fixes and the more cosmetic stuff, I think I can get there.
The truth is, though, that I ought to go further than that. Comedies are almost always on the shorter side, so even squeezing my way to 119 still makes it look heavy. Under 110 would be stronger, but it’s too soon to make the category of decisions that will need to be made to get there, and I want to get feedback from friends first.
This makes two comedies in a row for me that have bumped up against traditional length limitations. I admit that, in both scripts, I put a lot of emphasis on incident. These are complicated plots – not necessarily farce in the classical sense, but definitely turning over actions at a high velocity, and with a larger-than-average cast of characters. Given the choice, I’d rather a script I write suffer from a saturation of ideas than a dearth – it’s why I put a lot of time into brainstorming and outlining. Cutting back, as much as I may carp about it, is ultimately easier than trying to pad something in a way that doesn’t leave it looking padded.
The next script I work on needs to exercise other muscles, though. Something atmospheric, with minimal characters, and 100 pages max, please!