Save the Cat
"BREAK INTO TWO (25)
It happens on page 25. I have been in many arguments. Why not page 28? What's wrong with 30? Don't. Please.
In a 110 page screenplay, it happens no later than 25.
Page 25 is the place where I always go to first in a screenplay someone has handed me (we all have our reading quirks) to see 'what happens on 25.' I want to know 1) if anything happens and 2) if this screenwriter knows that something should happen. And I mean something big.
Because that's what is supposed to happen... on 25" (Blake Snyder 78-79).
Screenplay
"Throughout my many years of teaching, I've noticed that some people have a tendency to want to make a rule for everything. If there happens to be eighteen scenes in the first act of a screenplay or movie, they feel their first act must have eighteen scenes. I can't tell you how many times I've been awakened in the middle of the night by a hysterical writer on the phone saying, 'My pages are too long,' or 'Act I is thirty-five pages long,' or 'My Plot Point I happens on page nineteen'; then I hear labored breathing in my ear, followed by a plaintive cry: 'What do I do?'
I listen and always give them the same answer: 'So what!' So what if your first act is too long; so what if Plot Point I occurs on page 19. So what! You can't write a screenplay following numbers as you would a drugstore painting. It is the form of the screenplay that's important--beginning, middle, and end--not the numbers on the page. The paradigm is only a guide, not an absolute! Writing a screenplay that way doesn't work--trust your story to tell you what you need to know, what scenes you need to write, or what scenes not to write" (Syd Field 162).
"BREAK INTO TWO (25)
It happens on page 25. I have been in many arguments. Why not page 28? What's wrong with 30? Don't. Please.
In a 110 page screenplay, it happens no later than 25.
Page 25 is the place where I always go to first in a screenplay someone has handed me (we all have our reading quirks) to see 'what happens on 25.' I want to know 1) if anything happens and 2) if this screenwriter knows that something should happen. And I mean something big.
Because that's what is supposed to happen... on 25" (Blake Snyder 78-79).
Screenplay
"Throughout my many years of teaching, I've noticed that some people have a tendency to want to make a rule for everything. If there happens to be eighteen scenes in the first act of a screenplay or movie, they feel their first act must have eighteen scenes. I can't tell you how many times I've been awakened in the middle of the night by a hysterical writer on the phone saying, 'My pages are too long,' or 'Act I is thirty-five pages long,' or 'My Plot Point I happens on page nineteen'; then I hear labored breathing in my ear, followed by a plaintive cry: 'What do I do?'
I listen and always give them the same answer: 'So what!' So what if your first act is too long; so what if Plot Point I occurs on page 19. So what! You can't write a screenplay following numbers as you would a drugstore painting. It is the form of the screenplay that's important--beginning, middle, and end--not the numbers on the page. The paradigm is only a guide, not an absolute! Writing a screenplay that way doesn't work--trust your story to tell you what you need to know, what scenes you need to write, or what scenes not to write" (Syd Field 162).
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