Working on this action script has been an education. For one, I am realizing that you shouldn’t fear writing yourself into a ridiculous situation, because you can always write your way out of it with something even more ridiculous – and, in fact, people often pays their money for just such pleasures. On top of that, action sequences are, these days, never left solely to the writer; the director and many, many others will work to build it, so my concern is primarily specifying where the plot is when we enter, and where it will be when we leave, and just making sure the reader stays entertained.
It’s also – and I knew this was coming – a hell of a lesson in pacing. As I’ve written before, modern action scripts turn over story beats at a terrifying rate. And I wanted to see if I could evolve my style to work within those confines. I specifically plotted out my treatment to include a lot of twists and turns and action variety; but it meant a story with more beats than any I had written before.
The last treatment I wrote was for a horror movie – 22 beats intended to fill 95 pages. That script never got drafted, but that’s to do with whom I was pitching it to. Still, the story felt solid and each beat would have broken down to about 4.32 pages; a pace I felt very comfortable with.
The treatment for this action script has 45 beats to it. Now, “beats” are a very arbitrary and inexact term of measure. It’s sort of like paragraph breaks in writing; it goes more by when you feel a shift in direction, or location, or tone. Still, my aim was a 110-page draft, which would have required averaging 2.44 pages/beat. There’s evolving my style and there’s outright mutating it.
I’m near the home stretch now, and my latest calculation shows me at 3.02 pages/beat. Now that’s pretty great progress in this new direction for my work, but it still sets us up for a first draft of as long as 136 pages, far longer than I would want to turn in to any producer or buyer.
First drafts can always be trimmed – in fact, they pretty much always should be trimmed – and the director I’m working with will, I’m sure, have some good perspective to offer. In addition, I just finished working with producer on probably the most punishingly-extreme redline polish I’ve ever performed on a script of mine. I thought it was my tightest script, and by the time we were finished, it was 10 pages shorter without losing a bit of story. I would love to turn in a script below 120 pages; and I would love to do it without cheating. That will be a different skillset than what I’m developing now, but I think it can be done.
4.32 pages/beat to 3.02 pages/beat. I wonder how long beats were before Star Wars came along and permanently adreanalized all our movie brains?