The Page-a-Minute Rule

In Hollywood, one page of a screenplay is approximately equal to one minute of screen time of a finished film. This is why screenplays are formatted the way they are, with dialogue indented the way it is.

Most screenwriters learn this page-a-minute rule fairly early on. Often, novelists will overwrite and spend pages describing what should only be a paragraph or so in a screenplay. It gets beat into their heads through repetition that they must tighten up their writing.

So what happens when they get it too tight?

Keep in mind that screenplays are evaluated for production. There are costs associated with putting a screenplay into production. A lot of that cost depends on figuring out how long the movie will run -- something that should be as easy as reading the page number on the last page.

If your writing is too tight and you're putting two minutes worth of action onto the page, it will throw the projections way off. Write too tightly and your 90 page screenplay could end up translating to 150 minutes on screen -- two and a half hours, nearly double what was expected. Of course, good producers are going to spot this right away, before a dime is spent. Odds are, they'll pass on the script because they don't want to deal with figuring out how long it's actually going to be.

Do yourself a favor. As you're writing, imagine the scene in your mind and try to figure out how long it will play on screen. If it's fifteen seconds, then don't use more than a quarter of the page, but don't write the whole thing out in a single terse sentence, either.  Give your story room to breathe. Respect the page-a-minute rule both ways.

-The Illiterate Writer