There’s something vaguely tacky about the practice (the registration is valid whether it’s indicated on the cover or not and everyone in the industry knows it), as well as a little adversarial (putting the registration number on your cover suggests you are expecting people to attempt to steal your script and you are warning them not to try, which is not the friendliest way to approach people who you want to take a liking to you and your material). However, professional screenwriters don’t put registration numbers on their covers. The front cover is free of WGA registration numbers and fake production company names Yes, it is important to protect your work and the best way to do that is to both copyright it and register it with the WGA (the copyright is the key piece of protection, and the WGA registration is a very helpful backup).If, however, a spec is one hundred-twenty pages or less, then I know the writer has paid attention to industry strictures, but (more importantly) has figured out how to focus, structure, edit, and pace his/her story so that it can play out in the proper amount of time. It also tells me that the script will more than likely be overwritten, unfocused, poorly structured, and/or poorly paced, as these are the usual causes of an overlong screenplay. If a script runs longer than one hundred-twenty pages, that tells me the writer doesn’t know the industry standards or, worse, thinks that he/she is an exception to them. Given that one page of screenplay usually takes about a minute to unfold on screen (heavy action usually takes a little more time to play out dialogue a little less), this means that a spec script should run somewhere between ninety and one hundred-twenty pages, with the industry’s current preferred average being one hundred-ten. Besides, as we all know, more often than not there’s nothing in the narrative content of these overlong films that warrant their excessive length - for most, the extreme running time usually hurts the story, especially the pacing, rather than helps it). The script is short – between 90 and 110 pages The average length of a feature film is between 100 and 120 minutes (yes, I know that a lot of modern movies run longer than two hours, but those films are usually the result of self-indulgent directors abusing their right to final cut and does not reflect a desire on the part of the industry at large to make longer movies – studios and theater owners still prefer pictures to be two hours or less so that they can screen them as many times a day as possible and so want screenplays sized accordingly.Here are those 12 elements–those 12 signs of a promising spec:
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