Script Choices
Yesterday morning over breakfast I mentioned to Carl that Mike Cassutt and I are making terrific progress on our spec feature SHOOT THE MOON, but I added that we need to cut it down so we hit the big end of act two moment at around page 60. He asked how long the script would be and I said we were aiming for around 110 pages. He then asked why we were going so short given the fact that many movies are running two and a half hours now. (And when it’s Spiderman 3 or Transformers it can seem like nine years.)
Anyway, that made me start to think about the choice between going to 120 or 123 pages and putting in every bit of Cool Shit you can think of, and keeping it taut and punchy. I ultimately decided that I would go for shorter and tighter and here’s my reasoning. It will give a studio suit something to mess with. In the immortal words of George R.R. Martin “they all want to piss in the soup to make it taste better”. If we haven’t played every possible beat then the exec can say, “I’d like to see a scene where _this_ happens and the writer can say, “What a good idea. I’ll add it right away.”
Of course this may not work at all because you might end up with the guy who thinks you are too stupid to have seen the possible Cool Shit scenes and rejects you and the script. But hey, as writers what we do is gambling, and Hollywood is the biggest crap shoot of them all.