“Unveiling the Truth: Is Your Script’s Page Count the Secret to Hollywood’s Heart—or Just a Myth?”
The General Guideline of Screenplay Page Count
These are generalities—but Hollywood lives by them, so you need to as well if you want to work and play in the pro-screenwriting sandbox.
One Script Page Equals One Minute of Screentime
This is an age-old Hollywood barometer, and there’s some weight to it.
Sure, it varies:
- Dialogue Density: Dialogue takes time to deliver, so dialogue-heavy pages can actually run longer than one minute per page.
- Action Sequences: Sometimes scene description takes up a lot of space for action sequences and sometimes a single line of description for an action sequence can take up multiple minutes.
- Post-Production Editing: Editing can lengthen or shorten a page.
- Cinematic Techniques: Slow-motion, montages, and other filming techniques can alter a single page’s actual runtime.
Believe it or not, one page typically translates to one minute. A 90-page script is perfect for an hour-and-a-half movie—although you usually want to add another 10 pages because of the reasons mentioned above, regarding screen minutes being longer than the page.
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