Trimming Tricks of the Trade, Part 1: Lose the orphans
One way to cut pages while not messing with the integrity of the story.
Page count. A screenwriter must be cognizant of it. Even if you don’t subscribe to the theories of screenwriting gurus like Syd Field, who asserts that the typical Act I ending plot point falls between P. 25–27 and Act II ending plot point between P. 85–90, the fact is you will run up against those who do subscribe to this thinking — producers, agents, and studio execs who have all been schooled in the mysteries of screenplay paradigms. So if your end of Act I plot point is at P. 40, that is likely to be a subject at a notes meeting ala “Act one feels a little long.”
A screenwriter not only confronts page count per each plot point, but also and importantly with the script’s total page count. Although movies vary widely in terms of budget, one page of a script can translate into a production cost of several hundred thousand dollars. So if your comedy script logs in at 125 pages when a typical comedy movie times out nowadays at 90 minutes, multiply 35 pages times, let’s say, $100K and you get $3.5 million in additional expenditures. That monetary concern could prove to be the difference between a spec script sale and a pass.
Beyond that, there’s always that hugely important Hollywood threshold guardian — the script analyst. I doubt any script reader relishes the prospect of slogging through a 140+ page script.
Plus, you know it’s inevitable: someday you will write a long script. And you will need to cut it down to size.
A long script can be the result of structural issues, so that’s where you should look first: make sure every scene, every character, every subplot is necessary. If not, figure out ways to jettison them.
Next you review every line of dialogue and bit of business within each scene: if the dialogue or action is extraneous, unless it’s hugely entertaining, consider excising it.
Let’s say you’ve done both those things. And you’re still stuck with a 135 page script. You don’t want to hack out whole sides of dialogue, scenes or bits of business, not if they’re intrinsic and important to the script or add to its entertainment value.
That’s where you can look for a series of small edits and stylistic choices you can make which taken together can reduce your page count without messing with your script’s integrity.
So beginning today a four-part series: Trimming Tricks of the Trade.
#1: LOSE THE ORPHANS
By that, I mean scene description or dialogue which has a line comprised of 1–2 words. Here is an example:
The snow falls harder, it swirls soft, thick. The flakes are
larger.
The word “larger” is an orphan as that one word takes up one whole line of script space. So why not this simple change?
The snow falls harder, swirling soft, thick. Flakes larger.
There. Line saved.
Several scripts ago, during the edit process, I counted the number of 1–2 word orphans in one of my drafts: 98 in all. By editing them, I cut the script by nearly 2 pages (typical page has 52 lines).
In dialogue, the same thing pertains:
UMBRELLA MAN
It’s the rain. You should find an
umbrella.
(urgent)
Quickly.
Four lines of dialogue. You could save a line by writing this:
UMBRELLA MAN
It’s the rain. Find an umbrella.
(urgent)
Quickly.
Actually, you could save two lines by writing it this way:
UMBRELLA MAN
It’s the rain. You should find an umbrella.
Quickly!
By losing an orphan and the parenthetical, you take four lines down to two. And speaking of parentheticals, that’s the subject of tomorrow’s Trimming Tricks of the Trade.
Tomorrow another Trimming Trick of the Trade.
[Originally posted 11/24/2008].
