As a writer it was difficult for me to come to grips with the overarching importance of the first 15 pages of a spec script. You work so hard on your B story, reveals, character arcs, and ending. But basically if you don’t nail the first 15 all that work is for naught.No one will ever meet those secondary characters or watch those plotlines come together.

I was talking to an old friend recently, he is not interested in any of this, but he read my first script because he’s my friend. He complimented a scene I wrote. I said that was my best scene in that script, and it came on page 61. I told him I had since learned that page 61 can be fucking blank and most people wouldn’t notice.