Screenwriting 101: Nancy Meyers

“My first draft was exactly 250 pages. I didn’t have brads deep enough, long enough to get through the script. It took me about eight or nine drafts [to edit]. Just keep going, I think from the first draft to the second, I cut about seventy pages. It’s just like making the movie. I’m now editing it, and I thought, ‘How am I going to get two hours and forty-five minutes down to two hours?’ It was the same king of thing again. How do you do it? You just start tearing away at it, and you can’t do it all at once. It’s impossible to see what it is at first. You just keep taking away and taking away, and it begins to shape up. Story, you know — you just keep following the story.”

 — Nancy Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give)

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