“You’ve Got 10 Minutes”
10 minutes. That’s all you’ve got per this article:
This story is about why people can’t seem to pay attention for long periods of time anymore, especially our young people, and whether we should be worried about this fact.
It will take less than 10 minutes to read. Honest.
Why 10 minutes? Because any longer, and your attention will drift away, according to John Medina, author of “Brain Rules.”
“What happens at the 10-minute mark to cause such trouble? Nobody knows,” he says. “The brain seems to be making choices according to some stubborn timing pattern, undoubtedly influenced by both culture and gene.”
If you aren’t paying attention, you should be: This article was forwarded to me by D.C. Mar, a writer, script reader, and story analyst whose Q&A series got rave reviews from GITS readers when I ran it last year. Here was her comment in the email to me:
Passing on an article I thought interesting and reinforces the importance of the first ten page rule.
BTW, that was D.C.’s only comment, so when she means succinct, she means succinct! By “ten page rule,” D.C. means that as a reader, she gives a script 10 pages to hook her attention — and maybe that’s a result of shrinking attention spans? More from the article:
— Sound bites. In television news, they dropped from “more than half a minute in 1968 to about 10 seconds by 1988,” McPherson said. Now, they average about 7 seconds, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs.
— Movie trailers. For one of his classes, McPherson found on YouTube a trailer for the 1954 film “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
“The trailer is 2.5 minutes long,” McPherson points out. “Today in a theater, in that 2.5 minutes, you’ll see five trailers.”
— Movie scenes. “From 1930 to 1960, most films averaged two to four minutes per scene and many scenes ran four minutes or more,” according to film studies writer David Bordwell. “In films made after 1961, most scenes run between 1.5 and 3 minutes.” Scenes lasting less than a minute are no longer uncommon, he pointed out.
This last point is the most salient for screenwriters — and it’s something I’ve incorporated both in my teaching. I used to say the average length of a scene was 2 pages and a script 120 pages. Now I teach that the typical scene is 1 1/2-pages long and typical script tops out at 110 pages. I’ll let GITS script readers weigh in on the accuracy of those numbers.
Caveat: The length of scenes and a script can vary from genre to genre as noted here.
Now where I vary from the article is the implication that this trend is necessarily a bad thing. It’s rare I read someone’s script that I don’t feel like it couldn’t be tightened up and trimmed to its benefit. Since we’re writers, we liked to, you know… write. And often that translates into overwriting. This is especially true given the fact that movie audiences today know a lot more about story conventions than they used to. They simply don’t need as much exposition.
An example: Do yourself a favor and screen The Karate Kid. A movie produced in 1984, just a quarter century ago. Miyagi (Pat Morita) doesn’t even start teaching Daniel (Ralph Macchio) karate until after the 45 minute mark in the movie. When you watch it today — and it’s still a fine story — it just seems to take interminably long to get the story going. They’re remaking that movie and I guarantee you the karate training is beginning by the end of Act One and probably even earlier.
Another example: I just read Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman while watching the movie for an analysis for my screenwriting course at UNC. Granted the only draft I could find was clearly not a shooting script — there are some significant changes in storylines most notably the Kaufman — Amelia (love interest) subplot. But a vast majority of the script matches up to the movie — and there are whole scenes and dozens upon dozens of lines of dialogue that simply didn’t make it into the movie. Which shouldn’t be surprising: The draft of the script I read was 130 pages; the movie clocks in at a tidy 115 minutes (110 minutes w/o credits), or in other words 20 pages of material that ended up not being necessary to tell the story.
Another example: In The Dark Knight, arguably the single most important plot point in the movie — where Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) are being held hostage, resulting in Rachel’s death and Harvey’s face getting burned — the set-up to this sequence is not visualized. Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, who wrote the script, figured that audiences were smart enough to make that leap of imagination. 20 years ago, hell, perhaps even 10 years ago, movie studios would have insisted those scenes be in the movie — after all, “Show it, don’t say it” — but in The Dark Knight, the Nolans dispatched all of that business with a few lines from the Joker to Batman. Then it’s off to the races.
Which is to say that there is nothing wrong with taut, tight writing in a screenplay. It’s a good practice for writers and it matches up with how savvy viewers are nowadays.
Per the ten minute thing, the point D.C. wants to drive home is, we, as screenwriters, have a maximum of 10 minutes to hook a script reader into our stories. In fact, with 10 minutes, D.C. is actually cutting us some slack. Here’s what she had to say in her Q&A:
— As I start reading, the first page tells me a lot. Does the tone clearly signal what kind of movie I’m in for (genre)? Does the script have me hooked yet? Or am I confused? Indifferent? Bored? Or am I intrigued, excited, amused, unsettled and, in other words, emotionally engaged in some way?
— By page five, if something hasn’t hooked me yet, I’m scribbling peevish notes on the margins such as “what’s going on?” “what’s happening?” “too slow,” etc.
D.C.’s need to be entertained and pulled into a story begins on Page 1. By Page 5, if she isn’t hooked, she begins to feel like there’s something wrong with the script. At Page 10, you’re really cutting it close and better have her deeply involved in the story.
So when you type FADE IN, beware all ye who enter here! You’ve got 5, maybe 10 pages to grab a reader’s attention.
My advice? Write this note and pin it up where you write:
“You’ve got 10 minutes.”
BTW, if you’re interested in a script consult with D.C., here is her email address: