|
This week's answer:
Page
Counting: It's A Dirty Business But Somebody Doesn't
Have To Do It
Mark, I appreciate you contacting me. You may get
different answers to your question from various sources.
Here's what I have found: All those page numbers
could work, but it's usually best to have a little more
than a little less. 90 pages is very tight. It
can be done, but if the director or producer (or caterer
who has an in with him) wants to slice (good word for
the genre) off some scenes, you could be scrambling at
three in the morning, trying to come up with some more
material. 110 might be a tad long, but it's very
hard to say, being that each page may be "differently
dense" in terms of words-on-page, varying according
to the amount of dialogue versus description. (In
this corner, we have Dangerous Dialogue, and, in the other
corner, Deadly Description!)
If it's a fast-paced teen horror, you could shoot for
100. But if you hit 110, so be it. A story
editor once told me to not worry about the number of
pages. I have found that it can become an obsession
that takes the writer out of his creative story stream (I
just made that phrase up and may trademark it and hundreds
of other script consultants -- and there are that many and
more -- can use it and pay me royalties so I don't have to
worry about how many pages my next screenplay is).
Oh. But, be careful that you don't go past 110.
I recently finished a teen supernatural horror (although I
think there is some slashing in it, I decided not to call
it a "teen supernatural slasher horror"
because it has to many "s"'s, and
nobody would know what it was, anyway) and I believe
it is over 110 pages (but, then again, Final Draft might
disagree with Movie Magic Screenwriter regarding that
observation. In the first corner we have Fantastic
Final Draft and in the...). Now that you've written
me and brought up the subject, I find myself reluctant to
check.
There could be a scary caterer waiting on the other
side.
|
