Sunday, February 20, 2011

The Incredible Shrinking Screenplay

Believe it or not, Any Color You Want has lost 47 pages since the last post without exercise, exorcise, diet or extreme surgical procedure. At 98 pages (approximately 1 hour 40 minutes of screen time), it's ready for the beach. Once I focused on some basic questions (is this scene/character/storyline really important to the major dramatic question? REALLY?) it became clear what could stay and what had to go.

Often I didn't cut characters; I just reassigned bits of dialogue between minor characters to major characters. By keeping my cast small I simultaneously kept conflict up whereas with a large cast conflict dissipated making for a longer and slower read. Now it's a quicker and edgier.

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