one-hour TV show, you should finish in two weeks. Less, since these scripts should run between 50 and 60 pages, depending on their content. A two-hour MOW takes me three weeks since these end up anywhere from 105 to 110 pages in length. A script for a feature, using this measurement, should take no more than four weeks, at the max. But here, in consideration of the fact that you can elevate the quality of dialogue and the visualization of the scenes themselves, their staging, their mood, their texture, given the fact that a director is going to have more money and can spend more time in shooting a feature than a TV chunk of sausage, I cut down my page count per day to three pages rather than maintain the five-page-a-day pace. I round this out at 20 pages a week and allow myself between six and eight weeks for the first draft. If a writer takes more time than that he is bullshitting you. Of course, if you want to calculate working time from sitting down without the faintest idea of what you intend to write — until you finish whatever that thing may be — you could spend a lifetime and produce nothing.”
“What is this mystique when people say, ‘I spent all year working on a script?,’” he added to interviewer Bill Collins. “I say they spent all year at the beach, goofing off, avoiding the responsibility of trying to solve their scene. They didn’t sit down, as a producer or director must, and work at the film. My ‘inspiration’ comes by sitting there. If I don’t write anything that day, the next day I have to write ten pages. Another thing I find, if I’m really blocked, when I go to bed at night, I will feed it into my head before I go to bed and do a thirty-minute self-hypnosis in the dark, and it has never yet failed me. I don’t do it too often; I’m afraid of using it up. You wake up the next morning and wonder what the problem was. You don’t die when you sleep, so why not let your brain work?” [304]
“I feel that the screenwriter must isolate himself from the established ignorance of the people he’s writing for — the producer, the director, the actors (with some exceptions), the studio executives — and write for himself, that he must invest his script with a visionary energy which not only describes a particular scene but communicates his own unique and utterly subjective apprehension of what the scene feels like to him at that moment. I don’t believe one can do that by simply having your coffee, rubbing your eyes and sitting down at some machine and writing your scene off the top of your head. Hence, my belief in an almost mythic or spiritual hype before starting work each day.
“What I am saying here is that, once you’ve done all your spade work — got your locations in mind, have dressed the sets, selected the wardrobe, decided on the weather, cast your characters and know more about them than the average guy ever knows about his wife — at that point, if you take more than two or three months to write a script, I don’t ever wanta have lunch with that writer. Too fucking depressing to consider.
“Let me sum it up by saying that it shouldn’t take the writer any longer to write his script than it takes the director to shoot it or the actors to get it right.”
Stirling Silliphant “got it right” more often than not, and more often than most. He was both a craftsman and a businessman, someone who just did the damn job, sometimes because he wanted to, and sometimes because he had to, but he did it. When the source was inspired — when he found a way to make it touch his own life, as with Route 66 or Charly or In the Heat of the Night or The Grass Harp or The New Centurions or The Silent Flute — the results were personal, revealing, and moving. Even with pictures that turned out to be worth less than the paper they were typed on, he found ways to invest himself in the characters and tried to engage the audience to do the same.
Not all screenwriters’ lives
“What is this mystique when people say, ‘I spent all year working on a script?,’” he added to interviewer Bill Collins. “I say they spent all year at the beach, goofing off, avoiding the responsibility of trying to solve their scene. They didn’t sit down, as a producer or director must, and work at the film. My ‘inspiration’ comes by sitting there. If I don’t write anything that day, the next day I have to write ten pages. Another thing I find, if I’m really blocked, when I go to bed at night, I will feed it into my head before I go to bed and do a thirty-minute self-hypnosis in the dark, and it has never yet failed me. I don’t do it too often; I’m afraid of using it up. You wake up the next morning and wonder what the problem was. You don’t die when you sleep, so why not let your brain work?” [304]
“I feel that the screenwriter must isolate himself from the established ignorance of the people he’s writing for — the producer, the director, the actors (with some exceptions), the studio executives — and write for himself, that he must invest his script with a visionary energy which not only describes a particular scene but communicates his own unique and utterly subjective apprehension of what the scene feels like to him at that moment. I don’t believe one can do that by simply having your coffee, rubbing your eyes and sitting down at some machine and writing your scene off the top of your head. Hence, my belief in an almost mythic or spiritual hype before starting work each day.
“What I am saying here is that, once you’ve done all your spade work — got your locations in mind, have dressed the sets, selected the wardrobe, decided on the weather, cast your characters and know more about them than the average guy ever knows about his wife — at that point, if you take more than two or three months to write a script, I don’t ever wanta have lunch with that writer. Too fucking depressing to consider.
“Let me sum it up by saying that it shouldn’t take the writer any longer to write his script than it takes the director to shoot it or the actors to get it right.”
Stirling Silliphant “got it right” more often than not, and more often than most. He was both a craftsman and a businessman, someone who just did the damn job, sometimes because he wanted to, and sometimes because he had to, but he did it. When the source was inspired — when he found a way to make it touch his own life, as with Route 66 or Charly or In the Heat of the Night or The Grass Harp or The New Centurions or The Silent Flute — the results were personal, revealing, and moving. Even with pictures that turned out to be worth less than the paper they were typed on, he found ways to invest himself in the characters and tried to engage the audience to do the same.
Not all screenwriters’ lives
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