500 Days of Summer, Other Scripts, and How Long it Takes to Complete

filmnutlive August 2, 2011 2:57 Social Media Money and Taxes

A producer on real timelines, and why a project going quiet for years is normal rather than a bad sign.

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5 Things Actors Should Know About How Long a Film Takes to Get Made

Drawn from what is actually said on camera, so you can decide whether to spend the 2:57 watching it.

There is no rule for how long a script takes

500 Days of Summer was written fast, as something closer to a personal exercise, by people who did not expect anyone to want it. Other scripts take years. Speed is not a signal of quality in either direction.

Three years from read to made is fast

That is the producer's own benchmark for a project moving well. Measured against that, most of the silence an actor experiences after a promising meeting is the process working normally.

A year and a half is about the floor

Even with a studio ready to finance it from the moment it is read, a year to eighteen months is the quickest realistic path. Nothing you audition for is about to happen next month.

Sometimes the money arrives before the idea

One project had financing and distribution in place first, and the work was to go and execute an idea to fit them. It is not typical, but it is worth knowing that the order is not fixed.

Things stall because everyone has other things

One script sat six years, not because anybody lost faith but because every person attached had other work, and financing fell through more than once along the way. That is described as entirely typical.

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Full transcript (591 words)

hi i'm jeff schubert the host of film nut here with a clip from our last live broadcast how long does it take to get that great script because you talk about you know show up and be awesome how you committed you have to be to write a great script is it that first draft that you write in two to four weeks or you know there is no rule to that um you know i think that if i remember uh 500 days of summer it was written pretty quickly and and the guys didn't think anybody would be interested in it it was more a cathartic experience but you know i've worked on projects i did a family comedy a few years ago called the dennis the menace christmas it was a sequel to the dennis the menace uh movies and uh you know there was a script that went fast i mean it we developed it from an idea stage and uh warner brothers was involved in it this was one not typical but this one we had the money before before we had an idea and we had the money and we had the distribution and all we had to do was go out and execute the idea and that was great um but you know uh so developing a great script can can be as little as a few weeks or it can take a couple yeah you know it took a long time to get to the position where they were ready to go on it you know it was an idea and it was like two literally two years of you know checking in and and pushing that along but once they said yes we want to do this then we went out and and the writers wrote the script in two to three months and it happened to be good and then when the directors and producers get involved how much do you continue to that particular one it was tweaked you know every single project is tweaked as long as you can tweak it um bottom line you know but nothing unusual but you know generally you know if a film gets made within three years from the time i read it then i think it's fast and great um and even in the i think the fastest even films that have come to me from studios where they're going to finance them probably the fastest is a year to year and a half from the time i actually read it when we were making it um that's a good good answer but you know i read the secret lives of dork six years ago um some of it was because you're working on so many things you don't have time you know maybe if i had all day every day to devote to getting that movie made it would have been made in uh a year but the fact of the matter is i read it and then i had other things to do and i had partners on it and they had other things to do and you know and we all just kept working on it and pushing it along and there was a few financing scenarios that fell through along the way which is very typical and eventually it got made you can watch episode 506 with stephen wolfe at the stream dot tv film nuts live wednesday nights and on demand thursdays only on the stream dot tv