I’m at the Airport Marriott right now, waiting to shuttle back over and catch a flight to Chicago. I checked in early and shuttled over here because I prefer this lobby to the airport terminal.
Yesterday I woke up with 120 pages of an unfinished screenplay. I met a friend for breakfast, and then parked myself at the Central Library in front of a big window looking out onto the duck pond. And by noon I had written five pages, typed those transcendent words: “FADE OUT”, and had a draft of 125 pages.
However, since the day wasn’t over yet, I decided to put off circulating the draft in order to say if I could ratchet that page count back with a comb through the script. This took several horus in and around packing and prepping for the trip, but it was well worth it – and at 9pm I was able to circulate a “finished” first draft of 120 pages to the director and a couple of trusted readers. I like the symmetry of that.
120 is sort of a talismanic number in Hollywood. If your page count is above that people get as nervous as if you start saying “Candyman” into a mirror. It’s not as if it’s a guarantee your movie will end up bloated or bad at 121, it’s just that they start worrying about the worry it will trigger in others until it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. While every reader fancies that THEY will judge something purely on its merits, they always believe that the next reader in the chain wll just look at the page count and the cloud of negativity will doom the content.
I’m sitting in the 13th row of this airplane I’ll be boarding, so I obviously give less of a damn about such things; I just wanted to get the story on paper. However, I do want to make money, so I’m glad we’re at least at 120. 115 would be even better, since while 120 itself is not outright terrifying, its position at the upper limit of acceptable is at least partially-alarming by proximity. I know all this sounds ridiculously stupid, but so much of the game out here is about confidence.
I am confident we can wrench it down further. Even after my comb-through, first drafts tend to contain redundancies, over-describing, all sorts of things. And I went into a lot of detail with all the action sequences, something that will be less necessary on the page as the action-minded director and I start working them out.
So 115 may be in the future; or even less. But that’s a worry for another day, and so much smaller a worry than putting something on a blank page. Once again, that process is finished. I have written another script. And as I prepare to travel, visit loved ones in a loved city, I can move it off the top spot on my writing “To Do” list.
Of course I’ll be writing on my holiday. I’ll be eating and sleeping, won’t I?