6 Things You Need To Know As A Screenwriter If You Want Your Scripts Made

"I remember a professional writer coming in to talk to us at university. I forget his name or what he wrote – see number 2 on this list – but I remember having seen his movie, thinking it was shit and therefore he must be a shit writer.

How wrong I was.

Fact is, until a writer is produced, there’s no way of truly understanding how screwed up filmmaking really is. That’s why lots of new writers point fingers at various productions they dislike, believing they somehow could have made them better. In theory, perhaps they could – but then it’s unlikely that production didn’t work through those issues anyway. Hence the notion of “Development Hell”.

So, if you want to be produced, there’s a few things you need to realise first … And yes, I’ve been through every single element on this list, countless times:

6. One minute a page? Well, that depends who’s making it/in it.  100 pages is a 100 minutes – right? WRONG. The “page a minute” thing you adhere to so strictly as a spec screenwriter is just a GUIDELINE. How long your produced work ends up will depend not only on what it is, but who is directing it, who is in it and even who is editing it. In other words, the process of collaboration will make its mark. Fancy. When thinking about this, I’m always reminded of a day I spent on a soap opera years ago … One of the writers said of one of the pivotal characters: “Always add on at least an extra 3 pages if he features in the scene, ‘cos that fucker motors through his lines”! 

5. Your great dialogue will get changed. I frequently say dialogue is the least of a script’s problems and that there’s too much of it anyway, but here’s ANOTHER reason dialogue is overvalued in the spec screenplay: it gets changed during production. That’s right, those fantastic lines you slave over can and WILL get chucked out by the director and/or actors. It may be for the better; it may be for the worse – it might even be by accident. But get used to it."

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