Structure: each page = 1 minute (screenwriting)

That's more of a rule of thumb if you have a screenplay. It doesn't really describe a novel at all.

Yea, a minute is a long time to listen to people talk in a movie. What are the characters doing during this speech? Perhaps there is some action you can sprinkle in there. Or look at each line and be sure that it absolutely needs to be there.

DERP

1 page = 1 minute is a rule of thumb, an aggregate timing estimate. Mainly action will be more than 1 minute per page. Mainly dialog will be less than 1 minute per page. A monologue will take longer per page than back and forth banter. A 90 page screenplay represents about 90 minutes of screen time. A 120 page screenplay is about 120 minutes. It's not absolutely accurate at the individual page level. It also varies a bit with genre.

It only works if the screenplay is formatted to industry standards. That's a big reason why those standards are what they are and why they are so exacting.

GeorgiaScreenwriter said:

I've read that the "one page = one minute of movie" is a golden rule. If so, I'm not making this work and at best I'm making this more difficult than it should be.

I have a minute of dialogue that takes up more than one page. So add more action interspersed with the dialogue?


Thanks,
Angela
Atlanta

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Look, this whole "minute a page" thing is designed for scheduling purposes because when you schedule a shoot, it's blocked out in X number of pages and a half or pages and a quarter or what have you.

In order to do that, they employ this rough rule of so many minutes a page. But obviously, everyone knows that it's just a rough rule.

If a page includes a major fight scene, that could go on for several minutes.

If it consists of a several very terse exchanges of dialogue, it could last for twenty seconds.

In that case, they're going to adjust the schedule accordingly - presuming it ever gets that far.

That's not your business. Your business is to write a properly formatted screenplay that is the proper length (no more than 110 pages) that everybody in the world will want to buy.

Don't worry about minutes per page.

Proper format. 110 pages.

That's all that the people who will be buying your script will care about.

Between that point -- the buying or optioning of the script, and the production, many things will happen, involving the timing of the script, and it's budgeting, breakdown, rewriting, adjusting, etc. -- most of it probably not involving you.

NMS

What everyone else said.

A 120 page script will usually equal about 120 minutes. Some pages might take much more than a minute, some pages might take much less. It's an average thing.

Michael_T said:

Yea, a minute is a long time to listen to people talk in a movie.

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90 minutes straight is a long time to listen to people talk in a movie. But there are many effective scenes in many well-written movies where people are talking for 1 or 2 or 3 minutes non-stop. It's all depends on how the movie is written and balanced.