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AMADEUS, Best Adapted Screenplay, Milos Forman, Peter Shaffer, rewriting - September 02, 2020

Rewriting Success Story: AMADEUS

Rewriting a screenplay sucks. It’s painful. You know the story. It was compelling enough for you to write it in the first place. Why doesn’t everyone love it already? As a screenwriter toils through numerous drafts, it can feel like a Sisyphean task. Is all this rewriting really going to make the script better? The answer, nine times out of ten, is yes. To provide some hope, here is perhaps one of the biggest success stories to come out of rewriting: AMADEUS. Per The New York Times, which wrote an in-depth article on this subject in 1984, Peter Shaffer spent...

How Many Drafts Will You Write Before Your Script Gets Produced?

Rewriting is writing. Nothing reinforces this more than seeing how many drafts it takes to move a feature from first draft to produced film. For this example, we’re going to use a project written by one of our ScriptArsenal readers. This was a low budget film, which means that in this case, the amount of drafts is likely lower than what you might see in a higher budget film. In this case, the writer was hired and wrote several drafts, adapting a novel, for a production company. After three drafts, the production company took the script and partnered up with...

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