Yeah, rewriting can be tricky. There have been a couple of occasions where I just simply start over, bringing a few scenes from the old script that I feel works. I do this a lot with the beginning.

At least tell me you’re saving that first draft somewhere, the giant lengthy monster in all its glory. never know when you might need the damn thing.

I’m feeling the same way, really. I spewed out thirty six pages of I don’t even know what for my senior thesis. Funny thing is, mine’s growing instead of shrinking and that’s OK, but I’m still finding weird things in it. It grows like a tumor, spontaneously developing, and the other issue is, the more I edit, the more I discover and find out and the more I realize that certain points were wrong (it isn’t chaos; there is order to be found in chaos; the house isn’t meaningless, there is meaning at the end of all labyrinths and purpose to all monsters)

But text, you see, is a labyrinth. This, too, is a labyrinth. There are many choices, many roads and the thing is, you’ve made the most important choice already: to embark on the journey. There’s no turning back now.

… dear god I need to stop doing this, I sound like Johnny Truant. Can’t wait till this is over and I can be sane again.

Hey don’t knock rewrites. Sometimes rewriting could be the best thing that happened to a scene or act or (in my case) an entire script.
You never know, you could write something that makes Shakespeare look like a pretentious jerk.
Though for the politician sort of feel, have Veovis say, “Friends, D’ni men- Lend me your ears!”
Guaranteed to win an Oscar!

Ya know, after you get the script down to “size” you should take your original insanely long one and turn into a book or something. Then release it a few months after the movie or something. Just an idea to make you happy!

Just think of it this way, at least your not looking for content to write about!

I would honestly love to watch a movie that is 3.5 hours long, so in script terms that would be like 210 pages give or take…Now I have to dig out my collection of Myst books to reeducate myself….

Also, Adrian, I think there’s an open bold tag somewhere, because the posts below this one suddenly got misformatted.

… oh dear, I seem to be in a rambling mood. Bear with me.

I find that the process of editing things down is one of distillation. It’s not a matter so much of cutting as trying to say what needs to be said as elegantly and quickly as possible. I do a little amateur comic writing on the side, and I often find that so much more can be said with panel layout, with lighting and angle, with a gesture, an expression, a movement, than can be said in simple words.

Distill. Try to capture essences. I hold still that it can be done.

Adrian… I really feel your pain. I understand exactly what you’re saying, and how painful it must be to have to cut out and rework such an awesome scene - sounds like it would explain one of my main problems with Ti’ana.

Hang in there… if it’s any consolation you have thousands of fans around the world eagerly awaiting every word and being fully supportive, if often silent.

Sometimes it can help to get someone else to kill your darlings for you. Hire an literary butcher.
Don’t give up hope though. Eventually it will be cut down to size, and maybe you’ll grow to like the shape of it.

Don’t get unhappy about those thing. A book is a book and a movie is a movie. In a book you get the reader to use it’s imagination, so you need lot’s of words. In a movie, you get the viewer to watch the books events with their own eyes. It takes less imagination for it, and of so- less words. Don’t worry about it. The viewers look for a good movie, not a good book. Something which will bring them what the book brings, in less words. If you are indeed movie makers as you state you are, you can do that for sure. Making good movies is your job. And when it comes to fans who are making a movie, the movie can’t get better. So remember: be a movie maker,who makes reasonable sized movies, but also be a fan who knows what’s good in a book and what is REALLY REALLY needed.

Well, that was random…

Overwriting then cutting down is definitely the right way to go. As much of a pain in the butt it is, you couldn’t get anything good out of a constrained first draft. Just keep muddling through.

[…long repetitive advice filled with encouragement and exhortations to continue and to do various impossible things and magically turn the script into a metaphorical flea that still presents vividly the great story - which, of course, you can do, because, despite your proclamation of innocence, you are brilliant like that - and then rambles on with various anecdotes and random syllables all jumbled together incoherently, but in an encouraging fashion…]
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Or you could just cut down the speech for the script, but keep the old version to show the actor who will play Ae’garis

The obvious reason that you can’t have a super long script is obvious because no studio would put so much into it. But have you talked to/considered any studios. It may be beneficial, and they could see where you were going with it.

As far as Myst fans, we will love whatever you make, so there is not huge pressure on this front.

“was done on the recommendation of many people in my life. Patrick, Patrick, Patrick, Jason, Sandy, Dylan, Patrick. It was perfectly good advice. They were right, but I hate them all right now. Intensely and completely.”
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Anyway, I agree that Ae’Gaeris needs to be just a little bigh long winded… I mean, that’s who he is! the beurocrat (did I spell that right?) that is able to convince a woman wearing white gloves to eat a ketchup popsicle! (TOMMY BOY REFERENCE!!!) It’s the kind of evil everyone can appreciate. I’d suggest leaving the first little speech there, then shortening all the others. Of course… this is coming from someone with no experience with scripts.

I wish I had your problem; writing assignments in school was like pulling teeth for me, trying to find the right words, just to put SOMETHING on that blank paper.

I think you’re brilliant, personally

It sounds painful to maim a beautiful thing like the script. Maybe if there was enough interest a screenplay-type book could be released with all the extra material (if it’s been saved). It would make a great movie companion, and it would be an interesting read.

I would absolutely buy a copy of the full, unabridged script. I’m not saying unedited; a script with grammatical/spelling errors that may or may not exist throughout wouldn’t be a good thing to sell, but whatever you had before you realized you had to cut half the script out

Everyone seems to be concerned that the original draft no longer exists. Of course I’ve saved it, Sillies I would be an idiot not to. /runs to his trash can to dig out the scraps…

Regardless of what the final script looks like, I think it would be cool if you released the original script at some point–from all the posts lately, it sounds like a lot of the really neat scenes might not make it.

Just try to leave all the important scenes in, but reduced, please

PS - Look out for ghosties tonight

I’m going to say this again: Go find Clint Eastwood and he’ll explain how to transform pages of needlessly verbose text into a single sentence (or less), one shot, and some body language with even greater meaning behind it. And he’ll explain it to you in three sentences or less.

Adrian,
I wish you luck with this… here is a small recommendation. Put yourself into the character of A’Gaeris, facing the same sort of challenge: “How can I address all of my points to this crowd without them getting bored and leaving before I’m half finished?” In other words… if A’Gaeris were made self-conscious of his own tendency towards overwrought speech, how would he shorten his talk and retain the same punch?

Try adding texture to the visuals in the scene. It takes too long to “say” everything so find a way to express the information with objects in the character’s environment. If you can express the character’s personality by the things he surrounds himself with it increases the texture of the scene and is fun for the audience when they recognize the iconic meaning of background objects.

I won’t let this movie happen.

My theory is that sometimes, in certain ways, Adrian can be long-winded — and the fact that he’s polled much from his darker underside to populate the soul of Veovis and A’Gaeris has conformed them into being a bit chatty as well. Adrian communicates with a razor-wit, a stellar grasp of vocabulary and injects immeasurable detail (seemingly) in order to be undeniably clear in what thoughts he holds. We all do it from time to time - I do it often, but with less success. (I just repeat the same thing, sometimes with minor tweaks to the wording until you get it). Adrian will learn through this process to be more confident in communicating his message with fewer words and weakened breath. For the time being, we can translate the initiating post for this thread as : I am brilliant and the script is good. I will figure it out.

I agree with Godot (and not just because he’s an awesome character in Phoenix Wright). Adding dramatic music or grand backgrounds can do wonders to an otherwise plain speech.

It’s not just the speeches or dialogue that are the struggle here. I’ve had to cut down my descriptions quite a lot in order to lower page count. Those descriptions are where those objects would be mentioned. The real trouble is the sheer amount of story that needs to be told. Even with cutting most of the minor subplots and killing plot points that have no real bearing on the ultimate story of “Girl stumbles on D’ni, D’ni freaks out, Girl is forced to stay, Some puritans hate this fact, Girl and Guy fall in love, Girl and Guy have kid, Puritans loose it and kill everyone”, the script is just massive. It doesn’t seem like a lot when you sum it up like I have above, but each of these movements requires many scenes to adequately portray the character motivations and story requirements.

How in the world can length be calculated by number of pages when a completely visual scene that takes 2 seconds to see could require 3 pages to explain?

Don’t sacrifice the development of a character for length. It can change what would have been a complex and engaging character into merely a placeholder from which plot points to spring, as needed.

Can’t be THAT bad. You’ll do it, I’m sure.

Sarda, I have plenty of examples of this in the script right now. There are certain action sequences that have no dialogue and take over a page to describe, but will probably only require thirty seconds of screen time. The way this “one page per minute” thing works is that, while those kinds of sequences exist, there are also other dialogue heavy scenes that take up a lot of page-room, but will not take nearly as long to deliver in performance. So, a three page dialogue scene could possibly only be a one and a half minute scene on screen. When you pair these two types of situations together multiple times in a screenplay, they tend to balance each other out. The format screenplays are written in is designed to facilitate that. So, that’s it. It’s all about how it averages out.
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That being said, I’ve found that my writing tends to be much closer to two pages for one minute of screen time. No matter, though. Regardless of what the actual run-time would be with my writing, the formula is trusted and is what will be used to judge the “produce-ability” of the script. Also, I don’t know if my experience applies anymore when it comes to this script because I’ve really changed my style in order to cut down on length.

SKW, I think of Godot as an iconic “non-character.” Everything will be great when Godot arrives but he never does. Godot is a figment of the imagination, he is the personification of hope.

Adrian, maybe you can break the story up into a trilogy. If the first movie is a box office success the studio will let you make the next one. I am thinking of trilogies like the Borne series, Underworld and the Matrix, I’m sure you could think of others.

We’ve had hopes of a trilogy since the beginning. There are three books, so…
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Unfortunately, this film seems to be long enough to be two films in itself.
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I’m waiting for Godot myself right now…

I don’t post on here a whole lot but i’m on almost every single day, and I thought I’d get on and just show my support. I understand how laborious and difficult it must be to adapt a screenplay from a novel such as BoT, and Adrian I don’t envy you your task. The Myst books are among my favorites and I trust them in your capable and brilliant hands =)