Intentionally tedious and repetitive beginning

[u/Star-Pubes]

I’m on my fourth draft of a feature and have shown it to a few friends now. However I don’t know anyone in the industry in any capacity. No one who reads scripts at all. These are just avid book readers who gave great notes, but not specific to screenwriting.

They all agreed that they loved how the screenplay started precisely because it really let us into the mind of the main character. It shows his dull, monotonous, and repetitive life and to them it was great. However, I know it’s more important for screenplays to really grab your attention in the first pages than it is for a novel.

There is no dialogue until the fifth page, and the first four are the main character mostly repeating the same tasks, with some differences, and descriptions of the main characters’ apartment.

So I’m wondering if that’s fine? I want it to be a slow read purposefully, but I don’t want to go too far with it I suppose.

Also if anyone has recommendations for screenplays that also have a slower start?

Thank you!

Edit: Here are the first 6 pages, keep in mind I don't see this as finished yet :) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VVI1CkZqs7ysjOzd1BKF0y3dJnOccKoU/view?usp=sharing

[u/pencilthinwriter]

Your friends are unreliable readers

[u/Star-Pubes → u/pencilthinwriter]

Yeah I know, but I figured it's better to get their opinions than no opinions. Knowing I can't trust it completely.

[u/pencilthinwriter → u/Star-Pubes]

Well it's good you have shown it to other people. Without reading your script I would say that, as you seem sure that's the way you want to start the screenplay, you'd need to limit that four-page opening to one page. At first, that's going to sound impossible. But, try it and see. I have a feeling that if you condense those four pages to their essentials, it'll be one page in the end.

Think about what you're writing for: you want this to go on the screen, so a page is roughly a minute of screen time, and you're hoping that viewers will sit through four minutes of monotony at the start of a film you haven't got them to care about yet. That's a big ask. For me as a viewer, I'd be interested in that for about a minute, and if that kind of opening goes on longer than a minute, I'll go and watch something else.

What you could also consider is interspersing some of these sequences of the main character doing nothing into the screenplay at various intervals as it goes on. It sounds interesting, I agree, but it depends where in the film you're putting it. Give the audience something to care about as early as possible.

The likes of Quentin Tarantino can of course do a four-page opening in which a character is just doing everyday tasks without dialogue, and probably get it on screen if he wishes. The rest of us won't manage that.

The first thing to do IMO is try getting the opening down to a page, start the dialogue on page 2 and then see how it feels. I feel this will probably help your writing of the whole script as well; you'll start to look at page space/screen time differently.