Bob S. answered • 07/15/23
Award winning film and TV Writer will guide your screenwriting
If you just wrote a feature length movie screenplay (which would be 90-120 pages long), and your first act is, say, 40 pages long, you're probably in trouble. Why? Over the past 90 years, at least since the advent of sound movies if not before, a basic three- or four-act structure has emerged for movies. We've seen at least hundreds, probably thousands of them, whether in a theater or on TV. That structure has been embedded on our unconscious. It has even more-so been embedded on the unconscious of all those people who write movies today. So whether they know or believe this or not, they tend to write movies that follow that same form. And one of the most consistent things we all unconsciously know is: the first act is 30 minutes long. (Watch some movies with a timer going and you'll see this for yourself.)
In scripts, although it's not exact and varies from genre to genre and writer to writer, 30 minutes translates into 30 pages. While Aaron Sorkin, or another famous screenwriter, can afford to break that rule, you can't. Not until you're equally famous.
Why? Because the people who read scripts for a living have read hundreds, perhaps thousands of movie scripts, and they too are unconsciously aware that each first act has been 30 pages. So if you deliver a script that doesn't have a turning point right about page 30, they are going to feel -- even if they aren't conscious of why -- that something is wrong, that the story is dragging. And they are likely to report the script is "a pass" and move on to the next one in their digital "pile" of scripts to read.
So tighten that first act and make the turning point really hit us between the eyes, and do so by page 30.
