Not so much of a help request as a general commentary of script vs. treatment.

I'm writing something off an 18 page treatment I wrote for this story. It covers every scene and character and all that goes in it, but for the 18 pages, it runs chronologically, so I look at the treatment and write the scene. I've had sections of the script where instead of a large paragraph, I had four lines of text that turned into 5 pages and multiple scenes.

But that's not the funny part. I told you 18 pages, right? I'm on page 9, or right around halfway through...I'm on page 76 of the screenplay. It's those pesky two sentence descriptions becoming 5 page sequences. I fear I may go over 120 pages. Oh well, first drafts aren't perfect, and one of my subplots is becoming very inactive.

If anyone is wondering why I'm not reading much at the moment, this is why...

Don't worry George, I think it was Stephen King who said the second draft is the first draft minus ten percent. But I'm sure you already know that. ;)

Why don't you just pump it up, go for more epic, write a 180 or 200 page script than just chop it in half Kill Bill style. Put them on the board as vol 1 and vol 2.


I would love to do something like that  just for the oppurtunity to have a go at doing a cliffhanger. Cliff hangers are cool and would be fun to write.  

After your last effort I am very keen to read your next creation and two scripts would be all the more sweeter.

Don't worry about the page count.  When you start working on the second draft, you'll be cutting things out.


Phil

Teacher of mine (who was quite good) said that this is the "best problem" to have. I went to him with similar concerns. Not only will you be cutting out stuff on a rewrite, but it also makes for a tighter and more concise story. It'll force you to pull your elements together more. He was right.

By the way, your treatment sounds like an outline, as I understand it.

Quoted from I_Am_Remote Teacher of mine (who was quite good) said that this is the "best problem" to have. I went to him with similar concerns. Not only will you be cutting out stuff on a rewrite, but it also makes for a tighter and more concise story. It'll force you to pull your elements together more.

I agree. You'll have more material from which to choose when writing the second draft, and the best stuff will go in here. While a 140 page count isn't exactly something to be happy, I prefer this situation than ending up with a 60 page first draft (which will surely have to take some chainsaw sessions nonetheless).

My first draft of The Burnout was about 165 pages long.  After a couple of rewrites, it's about 120 pages and included a lot of things not in the original draft.  Goes to show what happens in the rewrites.

And to be completely contrary, today I finished the first draft of another feature length script.  It's only seventy-three pages long.  I have to add another 20-25 pages because someone wants to see it at the end of the month.


Phil

Quoted from dogglebe And to be completely contrary, today I finished the first draft of another feature length script.  It's only seventy-three pages long.  I have to add another 20-25 pages because someone wants to see it at the end of the month.

Had a similar problem with The Armor of Belial except that no one was waiting to see it. My first draft was 65 pages. A year later I wrote the middle, and it's funny how experience works. I got more comments from the beginning and end than I did the middle.

Yeah I know that, George I'm a victm of this your hard work! hehe! Move on, dude!

I work better under pressure.  Tonight, I'll start working on the rewrites after Hell's Kitchen.  I'm hoping the final draft will be about 100 pages.


Phil

It's not getting any better on this end. Remember page 9 of 18 being on page 76 of the script? I'm now on page 11...and page 100 of the script. I don't think it's getting any shorter... I'm definitely going to have to go through this thing later and find all the excess discussion and trim it. What's worse is I'd planned to go back through anyway and make sure the characters were unique, which is bound to add a page, since my first drafts generally run a little stale on character.

Unfortunately, I fixed my inactive subplot and made her a second love interest making a little triangle. That wasn't exactly planned.

I kind of have a question following the same discussion as the title.

If you have a treatment or outline that deatils the screenplay how long should it take to actually write the first draft.

A treatment gives you the direction to write the script, so rather than concerning yourself with what happens next, you're free to just write. As I'm writing on this one, I'm noticing problems that I didn't notice with the treatment, so I'm correcting them as I go along. When I know what's going on and have a scene by scene treatment to go by, I knock out 20-40 pages a day. If I'm writing from the hip and only have a general idea, it takes longer.

In a way it sounds as though you may be trying to compress two separate scripts into one.  Does all the material in the script serve the story you're looking to write?  Is there a chance you could make a second original script with the trimmings you take from this one?  Does every character and subplot serve the overall story?

I'm actually in an opposite situation.  I'm rewriting a script for a producer.  It was an original script I wrote; they asked me to change the setting to South America and now the rewrite is actually about twelve pages LONGER, yet there's nothing really extraneous.  I have no idea how that happened!

Well, it's a character based tale and all of the character plots interlock. I can only think of one plot that can be pulled out without a serious loss to the story, though it does serve some purposes to fill out a couple of the characters who have their own issues.

Quoted from George Willson I knock out 20-40 pages a day

Holy cow!

I had a pretty interesting meeting with a story consultant today. We were talking about stories in terms of video games, but a lot of what we discussed can also be applied to screenwriting.

In terms of story, we talked about the importance of deep plotting, detailed backstories, character histories, relationships etc and how much of that actually ends up in the final product. The key point of the discussion was allowing the audience to work things out for themselves by essentially joining the dots provided by the writer. It's a case of the reader creating a perception of the story that matches, or even trancends, the story the author intended. The trick is to provide just enough exposition for the audience to fill in the blanks without ever becoming confused.

He gave an example from a pen and paper role playing game where he was telling a story, describing a scene, and one of the players responded with certain story details that he'd never actually verbalized, yet he had written them down. The player had filled in the story himself without even realizing he'd done so.

Definitely some food for thought.

Perhaps you should look at your treatment and hack away at anything that is not "essential" to understanding the story you're telling. Anything that is implied elsewhere may not require its own scene. You may end up cutting some of your favorite scenes, but it'll be a helpful exercise in streamlining your story.

I've actually cut (read: never wrote) several scenes already that were understood, understood, or explained elsewhere. One thing that helped my train of thought was watching the deleted scenes with the commentary on for the most recent Zorro movie (whatever it was called). The cut scenes were okay, but what the director kept saying through each one of them was "we have all the information in this scene at this other point of the film so we cut it". When I thought about it, I found it to be very educational. Some scenes had a lot of work done of them before hey were cut, but it boiled down to "do we need it to tell the story?" Interesting.