Hello my babies, hello my honeys, hello my huddled masses yearning to be free! Welcome to the February edition of I HAVE SOME NOTES, the newsletter where I synthesize all my feelings about the 30-odd scripts I read per month into one big note.

I don’t know about you, but in January, I had some trouble concentrating. First, the city I lived in for 18 years, and where all my closest friends still live, tried to burn down. Then we put an evil animatronic grapefruit in the White House as a goof, and he immediately started doing things like declaring the pride flag hate speech and saying all female statues need to have cleavage added. It’s been hard to concentrate, and it’s been hardER to concentrate on scripts that - how shall I say this - are longer than Roman Empire lasted.

This is going to be a spicy take, but I want to assure you that I know, there are exceptions to everything I am about to say, and if you are Christopher Nolan, or the Prince Who Was Promised, or some vast, soon-to-be discovered genius, you don’t need to trust me on a word of it. If you are not, however…

The Long and Winding Word

The average feature length screenplay runs 90-120 pages. There are many exceptions in both directions, but most of the time this is considered the sweet spot because the general rule of thumb is that one page equals one minute of screen-time, and features tend to run somewhere around one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours. There are, of course, perfectly good reasons for scripts to be longer than 120 pages. Heavy action and sci-fi films often land around 130-150, because it can take longer to describe dense, complex action sequences, and blockbuster action films tend to have these sequences every 10-20 pages. Ensemble films with more than two or three protagonists can also be longer, because it simply takes quite a while to pay off every arc you’ve established (MAGNOLIA, I am looking at you.) Biopics that cover a very long span of time, like Einstein’s entire life, can also be a bit longer (though we’ll talk about why that may not be the best approach in a future newsletter, though).

But let’s pretend you’re not writing DIE HARD ON A BRIDGE, MAGNOLIA or EINSTEIN THE HUMBLE PATENT CLERK: you are writing a straightforward comedy or drama - a coming-of-age story, family drama, or romance, and your page count is rounding third and heading toward 150. Why is this broadly considered a screenwriting no-no, and how can you address it?

Ain’t No Screenplay Short Enough

There are a few basic reasons why an extra-long script can hurt you when it comes time to hand it to other people. These reasons are, again, not universal, and do not apply if you’ve written A Masterpiece, At Which People Weep Upon Sight. If you have a sneaking suspicion you have not done that however, and you keep getting the note that it feels a bit long or slow, here’s a few possible reasons why:

-Readers are Busy

Most professional readers in Hollywood are reading dozens of scripts per week. Agency workers are paid a fixed amount, but they have bosses breathing down their necks, and a slush pile that never ends. Freelancers like me get paid per script. With both kinds of readers, time is an invaluable resource. A 90 page script means that I can read three a day, no problem, with nice little breaks in between each one. A 165 page script? Even if it’s riveting, it’s literally costing me money, because it cuts down on the amount of scripts I can read in a day. Now of course, the writer doesn’t know that, and I’d never ding a writer in coverage just for writing long. But ignoring the fact that another human has to read your script is at your peril as a screenwriter. The page count is often the first thing we see. If it says 98, we think, whew, at least even if it’s awful it’ll be a quick read. If it says 176, we think, alright hotshot, you better wow me if you’re asking for three hours of my time for the same price as Mr. 98 Pages. In essence, because you are dealing with busy, overworked humans, a long script can start the reading experience with one strike against you. And it’s a strike you almost never need to give up for free.

-It Hints You May Not Know The Genre

Your script isn’t just a story, it’s a calling card for your understanding of the craft and the industry. The same way that a script filled with formatting errors suggests you might not be a titan of the craft, a script that is vastly over the normal page count for the genre suggests that maybe you haven’t studied the medium you’re writing in. You’ve likely never seen a coming-of-age high school virginity-loss movie that’s three hours long. So if you write one that’s 182 pages, you either better have a very clear reason to do so, or you need to be prepared to get notes saying that it doesn’t seem to fit the genre conventions. While this isn’t a fatal problem, it can signal trouble ahead. When a reader for an agency or a studio is reading your script, they’re not only thinking about whether they like the story, but whether you seem like a professional. Their reputation can be at risk if they endorse you and you turn out not to be ready for the big leagues. While breaking conventions can be a bold move in a script, it does give you twice the tricks to pull off, and if you don’t do it with flying colors, it’s easy for front-gate readers to say no.

-Something Is Wrong With the Story

And here’s the big one. Movies are generally a two-hour medium. There are some three hour movies, and some one hour movies, but the vast majority of standard, three-act narrative features land in this range. If yours lands way over the mark, either you’re doing something rare and innovative, or the story is not as streamlined as it should be. Whether it’s because of the structure, wandering character development, or simply a lack of efficiency, this is the place where a long script can really kill you.

Enormous Warning Sign:

This does not mean a long script always has something wrong with it! But if it is long and you are getting notes like “too long,” “pacing seemed off,” “felt episodic,” a big pair of scissors might be your answer.

Textual Healing

So how do we go about cutting down a long script, if we keep getting a note (or have a bad feeling) that the first words out of anyone’s mouth will be “this is too long”? Like last month, I’m going to give you the quick and dirty fix, and the deeper dive into diagnosing the real problem behind the “too long” note.

The Quick Fix

The quick fix for length is not about content, it’s about copy. Rather than going in and analyzing your character journeys or stakes development, the fastest way to cut is to literally reduce words on the page. There’s a few tricks to try to cut length fast

-Killing Orphans

Take a look at this one page excerpt of a scene (that I wrote in five minutes, do not judge my writing by this, please):

This page is littered with what are known as “orphans,” (because screenwriters are a maudlin lot) which means prose or dialogue that hangs down onto a new line by a word or two. While it may seem small, over the course of the script, this can add pages and pages to the length. On average, when my writing partner and I do an “orphan pass,” to rephrase or rearrange these dangling lines, we lose 3-5 pages in length. In this example, simply rephrasing all the orphan lines saves you 1/4 of the page, without cutting into your content or intentions!

-Start Later, End Earlier

When you’re writing a first draft, it can often take a few lines into a scene to gain your bearings and figure out where you’re going with it. One of the easiest things you can do during rewrites is find those places where your openings are meandering or heavily introductory and chop them off. In our example scene, lopping off the first exchange between Mary and Jorge - where no real important information is exchanged - turns our original one-page scene into a half-pager. HUZZAH! Of course this won’t work for every scene, but you’ll be amazed by how the pacing picks up when you chop off the first few lines of a conversational scene.

-Three to Two

While this often not possible in long action sequences, another trick to try - especially if you are of the purple prose persuasion - is to make every prose description that is three lines or longer one line shorter. You can almost always find a way to condense your language to be more concise, and often the simple act of rewriting can make the line more elegant and cinematic.

Enormous Warning Sign #2:

While these are all tricky ways to cut length, there are a few things that have a 90% chance of causing more harm than help. I would highly recommend you never mess with the pre-set margins, because readers notice instantly. We look at scripts all day. If there’s suddenly one with 400 words per page, it’s going to stick out, and not in a good way. It is also not a great idea to condense your action prose by putting it in big, unbroken blocks to save on blank spaces between lines. These dense paragraphs are difficult to read and can quickly grow confusing, and are usually not worth the effort, in my experience.

The Deep Dive

Let’s say you’ve done all the technical fixes above and you are still getting the dreaded “too long” note. There are only two possibilities from this point on: either the script simply needs to be longer than average, or there’s something amiss with your plot, characters, or pacing. In this case, the length is a symptom of the problem, and it’s worth investigating further to figure out what’s causing it to run excessively long, or feel slow to read. Though there are dozens of reason why this could be happening, let me share a few that come up over and over again in my coverage:

-Too Much, Too Many

A good rule of thumb for keeping a script’s length in check is this: Simple world, complex characters. Complex world, simple characters. Sci-fi is a great place to look at for examples of this going right and wrong. THE FIFTH ELEMENT, for instance, has a complicated new world to introduce, with an ancient struggle against evil, complex politics, and multiple factions and villains. However, the character story is very basic: the leads are outlined with a few clear characteristics and a simple romantic arc.

Bruce Willis is a bitter, divorced guy with a bleak outlook. Leeloo is an powerful being with an innocent understanding of the world. She inspires him to try hard to do good again, until at the end, she’s disillusioned and needs him to use the hope he’s learned from her to save her and the galaxy. That’s it! A simple character story gives the story the time to do a lot of fantastic world-building. If you’ve got complex, background-heavy character stories to deliver, you simply aren’t going to have the time to build a complete universe in a feature format. This is also why so many sci-fi concepts work best as books, film trilogies and TV shows instead of stand-alone features. Notes that will often warn you that this is your problem tend to sound like “Felt underdeveloped,” or “one-dimensional.”

-Insufficient Outlining

Ooooh, this one stings. The upside of minimal outlining (or “pantsing” as some call it) is that you can get a first draft out quickly, getting right to the fun part. The downside is it often means that your first draft wanders before honing in on the real story and character arcs. There’s nothing wrong with being a pantser, but what you have to understand if you don’t outline, or only lightly do so, is that the time saved at the beginning is going to be paid back during rewrites. Scripts like this tend to have long first acts, before finally the writer has an epiphany about where the story is going and locks in. Again, no problem in a first draft - BIG PROBLEM in a draft you’re sending out. Unfortunately, if you haven’t captivated your reading audience by the end of your first act, the emotional payoffs at the end likely will not matter, because they’ll have checked out. If you are a light outliner and you keep being told your script is too long, or are getting the note “it took me a while to get into it,” take a look at your first act and see if you can refine the early meandering you were doing before you settled on a tone and direction.

-Foggy Themes

The other type of unpleasant long script I run into has the opposite problem. It often has a tight, clean story up to the midpoint, and then everything from then on feels a little bit lost. This is often the result of a lack of a cohesive theme - the thing that tells you why any of this is important. Theme is a tricky, ephemeral concept for screenwriters (we’ll do a whole issue on it at some point.) But the gist of the problem is that if you haven’t fully thought through why the story your telling is important to the characters and the audience, the script can feel unfocused. You will start losing momentum in the second half, as readers start to notice that nothing is really adding up to anything. If alongside the “too long” note, you’re also hearing “the payoffs didn’t hit,” it’s a very good clue that this might be your problem.