Films are often edited to be quite different from the shooting script, so it's not necessarily about the end product, it's more about intentions.
The minute-per-page rule is really for two purposes: first to judge the general intended length of the movie (90 min? 160 min?) and therefore budget when shopping it around, and second in order to plan out a shooting schedule -- e.g. if you plan on being able to shoot 3 pages per day to produce 3 minutes of final footage per day.
Screenwriters often actually adjust the length of their descriptions in order to make it one minute per page, since you can't change dialog, but you can add or tighten descriptive language. They'll literally sit with a stopwatch and visualize the shots and say the lines out loud, and then adjust if it's wrong.
But once it goes into editing, then everything flies out the window -- the director and editor figure out what works best with what they shot regardless of what was on the page. Whole scenes frequently get dropped, especially in TV.
> They'll literally sit with a stopwatch and visualize the shots and say the lines out loud, and then adjust if it's wrong.
Thank you for these insights. This behavior strikes me as strange since the final product diverges from input. However like many things, the customs and conventions take on a life of their own in industry.
For clarity, 1 page = 1 minute, does that mean how long to read the page or how long that page is on film? I get a little confused by the part about adding descriptions, not dialog. For instance, could they not just leave trailing white space?
1 minute on film. So it's how long it should take for the actors to read dialog, plus pauses and action shots and establishing shots and everything.
Trailing white space would achieve the same goal but I guess they're trying to be elegant about it. :) But also, if the content takes a minute but doesn't fill a page, it's a good sign that more description will be helpful for the director and cinematographer to know what to do.
Also it's not like every single page has to be exactly 60 seconds, but it should average out to that over a 3-4 page scene.
The minute-per-page rule is really for two purposes: first to judge the general intended length of the movie (90 min? 160 min?) and therefore budget when shopping it around, and second in order to plan out a shooting schedule -- e.g. if you plan on being able to shoot 3 pages per day to produce 3 minutes of final footage per day.
Screenwriters often actually adjust the length of their descriptions in order to make it one minute per page, since you can't change dialog, but you can add or tighten descriptive language. They'll literally sit with a stopwatch and visualize the shots and say the lines out loud, and then adjust if it's wrong.
But once it goes into editing, then everything flies out the window -- the director and editor figure out what works best with what they shot regardless of what was on the page. Whole scenes frequently get dropped, especially in TV.