Writing a script in 10 days?

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  • #46
    Re: Writing a script in 10 days?

    If you are a writer on spec trying to break in then the camera crew packing up and moving to other locations is not your concern. Nor should you consider it as story breaks or scene breaks.

    Scenes play out defined beats. When those beats play out, the scene is over. Sometimes those beats carry on through multiple scene locations.

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    • #47
      Re: Writing a script in 10 days?

      I have written 1/2 hour comedy sketches in 2 days. TV dead lines are supposed to be a week. Especially for soaps like (UK) Emerald, coronation street and east enders.

      I like the idea of Butch Cassidy written on a week end. A brilliant film.

      I suppose the more solid the characters you create the easier it is to type the dialogue. You sort of instinctively know what they are going to say in a situation.

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      • #48
        Re: Writing a script in 10 days?

        By that same token, you should never mistaken "good writing" with "compelling writing". What makes a script engaging isn't necessarily related to craft which is what seems to lead to a lot of the Sharknado bashing.

        The writer Thunder Levin gave some insight into this during his interview with Film Courage (you can find the full video on YouTube).

        The Asylum has a very specific slate of films they make. As tempting as it is to just assume the writing is garbage, I'd argue that it takes a smart writer to write something like Sharknado. It was and still is SyFy's biggest attraction (Global Swarming, anyone?) so they're obviously doing something right even if by relative terms others would disagree. At the end of the day, a movie (and script) either grabs the audience or it doesn't. And in the case of Sharknado, it clearly does.

        Originally posted by nmstevens View Post
        You can write a good script in ten days. You can also write a truly terrible script in ten years.

        You should never mistake the process for the result.

        Asylum scripts are bad because they're looking for a certain kind of product. It would be a mistake to think that the reason that those movies are the way they are is simply because they don't have the time to perfect their scripts. Gee, if only they'd just gotten better writers and spent more time developing them, and hired better actors, those Asylum movies would be so much better.

        No, they develop the scripts the way they want them to be and hire the actors they want and produce movies that are just the way they want them to be.

        One movie might be a mistake. Fifty movies is a formula. And it's proven to be a very successful formula.

        I used to write screenplays in around ten days. I did it by writing ten pages a day. When I was working for very low budget companies, I used to write screenplays in four to five days. I did it by writing fifteen to twenty pages a day.

        This didn't include the time that it took to write the treatment, which was usually two to three days.

        The ability to do this comes out of working television, where you have to be able to write this fast because you write to deadlines. Very often, the teleplay that you'd be writing this week had to be re-written next week and would be going into pre-production the week after and would be on stage the week after that.

        So there's no time for crapping around. If a writer messes up or didn't deliver on time, somebody had to pick up the ball super quick and do a page one rewrite in a day and there wasn't any room for error because sometimes what you were writing had already been cast and they were going to start shooting in two days.

        So that's the kind of skill set that a writer develops that allows him to turn out twenty pages a day.

        And by the way, the fastest I've ever written a screenplay was two days.

        And that script sold and was produced -- not a particularly good final result, but that was because (in my humble opinion) the script was substantially rewritten by the producers.

        NMS

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