Some notes on certain sections:

0:07 Writing process

In How to Write a Scene, I go into a lot more detail on “looping” and “scribble versions” of scenes.

0:49 How scripts have evolved

My hunch is that the modern era of writing action begins with James Cameron. Every screenwriter I know read and devoured his scripts for Terminator, Aliens and Point Break. We’re all probably channeling him a bit.

1:30 When I write

I really do try to do most of my work during “office hours.” But during crunch times — which has been a lot more, recently — I find myself going back to work after dinner, or setting the alarm for 5 a.m. to get stuff written before breakfast.

Writing is an inherently selfish act: you’re shutting the world out to live in a fantasy. You don’t really appreciate that until you have a family.

2:18 This could possibly suck

One of the main reasons we procrastinate is to give ourselves an excuse for why things might be terrible: “I know it’s not great, but I wrote it in three days.” Suck early and fix it.

3:30 Writer’s block

You know who gets writer’s block? Non-writers. They think it’s cool and romantic to struggle to make Art. They make sure everyone knows how torturous the process is, so when they finally squeeze something out, it won’t be judged on its merits but rather the emotional anguish involved in its creation.

Writers write. Hacks Posers whine about how hard it is.¹

4:09 Heavy lifting

The twenty minute timer actually works. Do twenty minutes of solid work, then give yourself ten minutes of freedom.

Ideally, you want finesse: a combination of strength and dexterity that uses a scene’s natural momentum to make everything look effortless. But sometimes, that’s not possible: there isn’t time, or there’s some major impediment. With enough craft, an experienced screenwriter can often muscle a scene that shouldn’t otherwise work.

4:35 You can always cut something

I’m obliquely referencing a meeting for Charlie’s Angels, during which the studio president ripped ten pages out of the script and told me to write around what was missing.

5:10 Most people aren’t screenwriters

If you want to work in film or television, you need to work on films and television shows. Screenwriting is mostly writing, but without experience in how stuff is actually made, you’ll never be very good at it.

1. “Hacks” was really the wrong term, because there are some very prolific hacks. There are also some genuinely talented writers who go through spells of low productivity. I find stories glamorizing their travails really tedious, however.

– Lewis

It’s not uncommon. I was on and off both Charlie’s Angels movies several times, and I can think of at least half a dozen other cases where the original writers came back in before (or during) production.

In order to understand why the original writers are sometimes rehired, you have to understand why they leave projects. Sometimes, it’s simple availability: at a crucial moment during development of the first Charlie’s Angels, I was shooting a series in Toronto, so someone else got the gig (a long string of someone elses, as it turned out). In other cases, a new element (director, producer, star) wants to take the script in a new direction, which generally means a new writer — often someone they’ve worked with before.

You’re not always fired, and it’s not always acrimonious. That’s important to understand. The screenwriter wants the movie made, and wants to maintain relationships with the filmmakers and the studio. So it behooves everyone to make sure the original writer is at least peripherally involved, even if he’s no longer the active writer on the project.

The original writer might get asked back for several reasons. The simplest is cost: she may be willing to do a lot of piece work essentially for free because it’s her movie. But more often there is something about the original writer’s voice or vision that remains important despite subsequent revisions, and the producers (or director, or stars) recognize this. So she comes back in to make the new stuff feel like her stuff, and let it read like one movie rather than a patchwork.

That’s an absurd oversimplification, of course.

One page of a battle sequence might run four minutes of screen time, while a page of dialogue banter might zip by in 30 seconds. No matter. The rule of thumb might as well be the rule of law: any script over 120 pages is automatically suspect. If you hand someone a 121-page script, the first note they will give you is, “It’s a little long.” In fact, some studios will refuse to take delivery of a script over 120 pages (and thus refuse to pay).

So you need to be under 120.¹

Which usually means you need to cut.

Before we look at how to do that, let’s address a few things you should never do when trying to cut pages, no matter how tempting.

• Don’t adjust line spacing. Final Draft lets you tighten the line spacing, squeezing an extra line or two per page. Don’t. Not only is it obvious, but it makes your script that much harder to read.

• Don’t tweak margins. With the exception of Widow Control (see below), you should never touch the default margins: an inch top, bottom and right, an inch-and-a-half on the left. ²

• Don’t mess with the font. Screenplays are 12-pt Courier. If you try a different size, or a different face, your reader will notice and become suspicious.

All of these dont’s could be summarized thusly: Don’t cheat. Because we really will notice, and we’ll begin reading your script with a bias against it.

There are two kinds of trims we’ll be making: actual cuts and perceived cuts. Actual cuts mean you’re taking stuff out, be it a few lines, scenes or sequences. Perceived cuts are craftier. You’re editing with with specific intention of making the pages break differently, thus pulling the end of the script up. Perceived cuts don’t really make the script shorter. They just make it seem shorter, like a fat man wearing stripes.

Fair warning: Many of these suggestions will seem borderline-OCD. But if you’ve spent months writing a script, why not spend one hour making it look and read better?

Cutting a page or two

At this length, perceived cuts will probably get you where you need to be. (That said, always look for bigger, actual cuts. Remember, 117 pages is even better than 120.)

Practice Widow Control. Widows are those little fragments, generally a word or two, which hog a line to themselves. You find them both in action and dialogue.

If you pull the right-hand margin of that dialogue block very, very slightly to the right, you can often make that last word jump up to the previous line. Done right, it’s invisible, and reads better.

I generally don’t try to kill widows in action lines unless I have to. The ragged whitespace helps break up the page. But it’s always worth checking whether two very short paragraphs could be joined together.³

Watch out for invisible orphans. Orphans are short lines that dangle by themselves at the top of page. You rarely see them these days, because by default, most screenwriting programs will force an extra line or two across the page break to avoid them.⁴

Here’s the downside: every time the program does this, your script just got a line or two longer. So anytime you see a short bit of action at the top of the page, see if there’s an alternate way to write it that can make it jump back to the previous page.

Nix the CUT TO:’s. Screenwriters have different philosophies when it comes to CUT TO. Some use it at the end of every scene. Some never use it at all. I split the difference, using it when I need to signal to the reader that we’re either moving to something completely new story-wise, or jumping ahead in time.

But when I’m looking to trim a page or two, I often find I can sacrifice a few CUT TO’s and TRANSITION TO’s. So weigh each one.

Cutting five to ten pages

At this level, you’re beyond the reach of perceived cuts. You’re going to have to take things out. Here are the places to look.

Remove unnecessary set-ups. When writing a first act, your instinct is to make sure that everything is really well set up. You have a scene to introduce your hero, another to introduce his mom, a third to establish that he’s nice to kittens. Start cutting. We need to know much less about your characters than you think. The faster we can get to story, the better.

Get out of scenes earlier. Look at every scene, and ask what the earliest point is you could cut to the next scene. You’ll likely find a lot of tails to trim.

Don’t let characters recap. Characters should never need to explain something that we as the audience already know. It’s a complete waste of time and space. So if it’s really important that Bob know what Sarah saw in the old mill — a scene we just watched — try to make that explanation happen off-screen.

For example, if a scene starts…

…we can safely surmise he’s gotten the necessary details.

Trim third-act bloat. As we cross page 100 in our scripts, that finish line become so appealing that we often race to be done. The writing suffers. Because it’s easier to explain something in three exchanges of dialogue than one, we don’t try to be efficient. So you need to look at that last section with the same critical eyes that read those first 20 pages 100 times, and bring it up to the same level. The end result will almost always be tighter, and shorter.

Cutting ten or more pages

Entire sequences are going to need to go away. This happens more than you’d think. For the first Charlie’s Angels, we had a meeting at 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in which the president of the studio yanked ten pages out of the middle of the script. There was nothing wrong with those scenes, but we couldn’t afford to shoot them. So I was given until Monday morning to make the movie work without them.

Be your own studio boss. Be savage. Always err on taking out too much, because you’ll likely have to write new material to address some of what’s been removed.

The most brutal example I can think of from my own experience was my never-sold (but often retitled) zombie western. I cut 75 pages out of the first draft — basically, everything that didn’t support the two key ideas of Zombie Western. By clear-cutting, I could make room for new set pieces that fit much better with the movie I was trying to make.

Once you start thinking big-picture, you realize it’s often easier to cut fifteen pages than five. You ask questions like, “What if there was no Incan pyramid, and we went straight to Morocco?” or “What if instead of seeing the argument, reconciliation and breakup, it was just a time cut?”

Smart restructuring of events can often do the work for you. A project I’m just finishing has several occasions in which the action needs to slide forward several weeks, with characters’ relationships significantly changed. That’s hard to do with straight cutting — you expect to see all the pieces in the middle. But by focussing on something else for a scene or two — a different character in a different situation — I’m able to come back with time jumped and characters altered.

Look: It’s hard to cut a big chunk of your script, something that may have taken weeks to write. So don’t just hit “delete.” Cut and paste it into a new document, save it, and allow yourself the fiction of believing that in some future script, you’ll be able to use some of it. You won’t, but it will make it less painful.

1. But! But! you say. In the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), both Big Fish and Go are more than 120 pages. I’m not claiming that longer scripts aren’t shot. I’m saying that if you go over the 120 page line, you have to be doubly sure there’s no moment that feels padded, because the reader is going in with the subconscious goal of cutting something. Go is 126 pages, but it’s packed solid. Big Fish meanders, but those detours end up paying off in the conclusion.
2. Page numbers, scene numbers, “more” and “continued” are exceptions.
3. I try to keep paragraphs of action and scene description between two and six lines.
4. While I rag on the program, Final Draft is smart enough to break lines at the period, so sentences always stay intact. It’s a small thing, but it really helps the read. Other programs may do it now, too.

– Duane
Mount Pleasant

Duane is referring to this scene, near the end of the movie:

(Those last three are separate scene numbers, by the way.)

Here, the “Kleinhardt Gambit” refers to the way the angels sent Madison’s buyers to the wrong rooftop through elaborate misdirection. The telescope is apparently not a key part of the gambit, but rather just to piss off Madison.

The action is pretty standard for Charlie’s Angels (or Mission: Impossible), so it makes sense that a fallen angel would recognize how she was duped, and would have a term for it. The term itself is completely invented, a ridiculous neologism. And believe me, there wasn’t a lot of deep thought going into it. The first combination of syllables that seemed reasonable got typed.

Science fiction does this constantly. What’s a flux capacitor? How did Kirk prevail in the un-winnable Kobayashi Maru? What are midi-chlorians, and how can we pretend we never heard of them?

Don’t be afraid to invent terms you think would exist in your fictional world. Done just right, jargon helps ground characters in their setting, much the way medical-ese makes you think those pretty people on TV could actually be doctors.

And so I must ask someone wiser and infinitely more successful than I am: at what point do you pull the plug. You know, you’re getting notes that make no sense. You’re executing a project that is someone else’s “idea”…though you know full well this someone doesn’t realize that his idea is nothing yet…not until you deliver a script that will undoubtedly be everything he did not imagine (because he really hasn’t imagined anything at all).

When do you save yourself the embarrassment and heartache and suddenly become “unavailable due to a scheduling conflict.” Yes, sometimes the most unlikely projects fraught with problems go on to become successes. Apparently Casablanca didn’t have a script and was being written anew the night before each shooting day. But my experience also tells me that is the exception and that doing it “right” has a higher likelihood of turning out a creatively successful product. What’s John August’s tipping point? When does he leap? What are the danger signs that make John August say, “My employers are completely whacked and I’m catching the next bus out of here”?

– Skip
Vancouver

Often, the only power a screenwriter has is to walk away, and the decision whether to do it is almost never straightforward. But there are a few key points to consider:

1. Write movies, not scripts. Always recognize that the words scrolling up and down on your monitor are the means to an end, not the end itself. An unproduced screenplay is like blueprints for an unbuilt skyscraper — brilliance is irrelevant if it never gets made. So ask yourself: “Am I giving up because of a fundamental concern about the movie, or a concern about the script?” The former is valid, the latter isn’t.

2. Don’t do free repairs on sinking ships. The Writers Guild (or the Canadian equivalent) would like to remind you that you’re never supposed to do free rewrites, but the reality is that for a project you believe in, you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get it right. But if you’re questioning the producers’ commitment to the project, ask to get paid for that next batch of tiny tweaks. If they balk, it’s that much easier to walk.

3. Set some objectives and deadlines. Agree to do that next pass, but only if they’ll commit to taking it out to directors. Insist on having the follow up meeting this week, not a month from now. Don’t let it drag out.

4. Write your own notes. Before the next revision, give them a set of written notes about what you want to do. Let that be the template. If they’re not on board, it’s clearly time to move on.

If it’s any consolation, the decision of when to cut one’s losses never gets easier. I had to walk away from both Charlie’s Angels movies when they completely went off the rails, only to come back later. More recently, I had to let Tarzan go, after more than a year of work.

In both cases, I felt profound frustration and disappointment, both in myself and the people who’d hired me. It wasn’t just the amount of wasted work, but the sense that I was abandoning my creations. The characters were real to me, and now wouldn’t get a chance to live. (This dilemma ultimately became one of the storylines in The Movie.)

The only upside I can offer is that once you leave a project, you remember how many other movies you want to write. Shutting one door opens others.

Screening a work-in-progress is just as nerve-wracking as it sounds. Going in, you know the film isn’t perfect. You’re projecting low-resolution video, with temp music, temp visual effects, and bad sound. But it’s a crucial step, because it’s impossible for filmmakers to see their movie with fresh eyes. You need an audience to laugh, gasp or murmur in confusion.

The thirty people who watched the cut were incredibly generous with their time and comments, not only staying afterwards to talk, but also filling out cards and emailing additional thoughts. They made the movie significantly better.

But as great as they were, the fact that they were friends and colleagues was a significant detriment. They had an emotional investment: they wanted to like it. They were also largely film-and-television people, hardly a representative cross-section of the movie-going public.

The obvious next step would be to put The Movie in front of a real recruited audience, i.e. strangers.

But I can’t.

The very same internet that makes this site possible makes a real test screening impossible. Or at the least, a very risky proposition.

Odds are, one or more of those recruited strangers would recognize my name, the producers, or the actors involved and decide it would be a really good idea to write in to Ain’t It Cool News or a site like it. Quite a scoop, after all, reviewing a movie where even the premise has been kept hush-hush.

Reviews of test screenings are frustrating for a big studio like Warner Bros., but they’re potentially ruinous for a little movie like ours. Keep in mind: We don’t have distribution yet. We’re hoping to sell the movie after a festival premiere. So if DrkLOrd79 trashes the movie, that sets a bad tone going in. Almost worse would be if DrkLOrd79 loved it and gushed on for pages. We’ve all experienced the disappointment that follows having our expectations set too high.

The friends and colleagues at last Monday’s screening were chosen for their insight and opinion. But more importantly, they were chosen for their discretion.

With one exception, every movie I’ve written has had a traditional recruited audience screening, with 200 or so demographically-mixed young filmgoers circling numbers with little golf pencils. After every screening, we learned important things which made the film better.

And after every screening, someone posted his thoughts on the Internet. It was annoying, but it was inevitable. For CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, I stayed up until 2 a.m. waiting for the first test screening review to show up. Sure enough, it came.

The one film which didn’t have a traditional test screening was CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE. It was fear of internet leaks that kept the studio from bringing in a recruited audience. And let me be clear about the cause and effect: Full Throttle was not untested because it was a bad movie.

Full Throttle was a bad movie because it was not tested.

The premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was the first time I saw Full Throttle with a full audience. As the lights went down, there was palpable enthusiasm, and some real residual love for the first movie. By the time the lights came back up, it was pretty clear we really should have done a test screening.

Part of me fears the same could happen with The Movie. Our fear of internet leaks may keep us from giving it the test it deserves. Lord knows, I don’t want the first time I see it with a real audience to be at Sundance or some other festival. So I’m trying to figure out some middle ground, an audience of trustworthy strangers.

As always, suggestions are welcome.

ONE PAGE OF A PROPERLY FORMATED SCRIPT = APPROX. A MINUTE OF SCREEN TIME.

I know one page of say a battle can last five minutes whereas one page of quick dialogue my last ten seconds if the actors talk fast… So my question is, is this rule true?

Has your 120 page script been a 2 hour movie or was it more like 90 minutes?

My main reason for asking this is I want to make my own low-budget movie. And the best tips I get say keep the script 90 pages or shorter. And to make it a play (dialogue heavy, one location).

However, from my short film experience and being an editor, I saw a 90 page script of a friend be only 55 minutes when edited. And I know Kevin Smith’s CLERKS was 164 page script, but is only a 90 min movie because of the dialogue.

So, how can I find an accurate length of the movie before I shoot it. Or should I have a 130-page script if I want to make my own feature? How do the big boys figure out if there’s enough actual screen time on the pages?

– Matthew Kaplan
New York City

Your instinct is right: the one-page-per-minute rule of thumb doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. True, most screenplays are about 120 pages, and true, most movies are around two hours. But the conversion rate between paper and celluloid is rarely one-to-one .

That’s why when a movie is in pre-production, one of the script supervisor’s first jobs is to time the script. She or he reads through the screenplay with a stopwatch, estimating how long each scene will play, then adds up the total running time. Generally, they go through the whole script twice, averaging the times.

How accurate is the script timing? Well, that depends on how well the script supervisor has factored in the director’s style. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain featured long, contemplative shots of the heroes herding sheep, which another director might have dropped altogether. But generally, the script timing is in the right ballpark.

Although a script supervisor has more experience, you can time a script yourself. My advice would be to read the dialogue aloud, while trying to pad for non-spoken moments. It’s easier with some scripts than others.

As far as my own films:

Go was 126 pages, but came out at 103 minutes — without any major scenes left out. It wasn’t play-like, but the pacing was quick.

Big Fish was 124 pages, and 125 minutes long. To my recollection, only one significant scene was omitted, so the page-per-minute rule came close.

Both Charlie’s Angels movies went through so many drafts during production that an accurate page-count is impossible. But the first drafts were around 120 pages. The original film was 98 minutes; the sequel was 106. The pacing was obviously quick.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: 128 pages, 115 minutes.

Corpse Bride: 73 pages, 76 minutes.

In the beginning of the movie you show a scene that something is happening in Northern Mongolia and the people in the movie were speaking in Chinese. If you know a little bit about the country you would’ve known that Mongolia has its own, unique language, Mongolian. If you wanted to use Chinese people with their language you should’ve called that place Northern China.

I’m pretty sure that you’re a young and talented writer, but if you don’t know much about other cultures then don’t use them. I’m glad I didn’t pay to see your movie.

– Toshka

The sequence you’re talking about was written in English, with Russian subtitles, because the bad guys were supposed to be Russo-Mongolian. However, when it came time to shoot the sequence, they ended up casting Chinese actors. From a production standpoint, this makes sense: the martial arts team for the movie was largely Chinese, and these are the people who would end up doing the fight sequence anyway.

This is an example of why it’s frustrating being a screenwriter. You get blamed for a lot of things that are completely out of your control: plot holes that arise from editing, crappy dialogue improvised on the set, and supposedly Mongolian actors speaking Chinese.

I’m sorry, Toshka, that the five or six lines spoken in Chinese during the sequence offended you, but I think you’re expecting way too much cultural accuracy from a movie which ignores gravity, plausibility and narrative logic with alarming consistency.

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle isn’t my favorite movie either, but I can easily think of five better reasons to be frustrated by it:

1. Too many villains. (Four, if you’re counting.)
2. The wrong kind of sexy. Flirtatious, meet slutty. Oh, you’ve met.
3. The whole ring McGuffin. Where’s Frodo Baggins when you need him?
4. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s — huh? Demi Moore can fly?!
5. Bernie Mac? Funny! I just wish I could understand what he’s saying.

I was complicit in at least three of these faults (#1, #3, and #4, begrudgingly), so I’ll gladly accept my share of the blame. But as for the Mongolian problem, nope. Can’t help you there.

– Joseph
Uppsala, Sweden

Make friends with the slugline. That’s a single line, all in caps, which tells the reader that you’re focusing on something new. Here’s an example from CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE:

(Note: If the following text has bullet points, you need to clear your cache. On the Mac, hold down the command key while you press the Reload button on the toolbar.)

Sometimes, even those single sluglines can be too much, so you might consider embedding them into paragraphs.

Also from Full Throttle:

However you choose to do it, remember that you’re writing for the reader, not the director. You want to create the action sequence that feels most exciting on the page, even if the sequence of events isn’t exactly how you ultimately think a director will stage it.

–Barney

You can find the answer here.