On my last two days of 'Young and the Restless,' I had 120-something pages of dialogue. My last two days.
A 300pp novel can easily become a 200pp novel by printing with smaller type; a 100pp screenplay can potentially become a film of between 60-140 minutes in length; a 200pp stage play could be performed in anything from 30 minutes to four hours. For all these media, the script length is agnostic to the final work.
I find that most of my scripts have a lot more scenes than most films, so the average movie might have 100 scenes, my average script has 300 scenes.
Mini-series are my favorite medium to act in because it's the right amount of pages you shoot a day, it's the right amount of time that you're with a character, and they really advertise it a lot so that people get excited for this epic event.
I probably have more words to say in 'Mr. Robot' than I've had in my entire career put together.
The script for 'Thirteen' is tight, and not because of the now-famous six day writing spree, but more because it started out as 15 pages longer.
You have to have all these elements of a feature but with a third of the length. And also the development process - there are so many more steps in getting notes from the studio, getting notes from the network.
Well, usually, when you're doing a sitcom, you get a script and every word or for the most part, is written. So, you know, if it's a 30-minute sitcom, then it's a 35-page script or something like that.
Twenty-two pages is not a lot of space. Believe me. Having written a bazillion comics, I still find myself more often than nine pages into a script and realizing to my horror that I'm only about a quarter of the way through the story I wanted to tell, and the next thing you know, I'm making fresh coffee and tearing up the floorboards to rewrite.
I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that.
I write my scripts short and they develop on the set, which I have found a far better premise both economically and practically.
If a scene is longer than three pages, it better be for a good reason.
We used to get 27, 28 minutes to do a story in, and now they're lucky if they get 18 or 20 minutes. So I don't think they can really do a beginning, a middle, and an end anymore. There's an awful lot of one-line jokes; almost every line is a punchline. It's not the same, but there's still good comedy around.
Most shows are normally 40 or 50 pages.
What I look for these days is that I don't have long speeches, the characters gets to sit down a lot, I don't have to learn any foreign languages, and it doesn't shoot in Minneapolis in February. That's mainly what I look for.
