What is a Page One Rewrite? The ESSENTIALS of Rewriting a Script

A ‘page one rewrite’. It can be one of the most dreaded words a screenwriter can hear and something that most writers will hope to avoid. However, it’s inevitable that at some point in your writing career you will have to start a script from scratch.

It could be something about the structure that’s not working or something about the protagonist arc or well, everything. Either way, a page one rewrite will require you to keep the core ideas of your screenplay but potentially change everything about how those ideas are conveyed. It’s a scary prospect.

So let’s break it down. What exactly does doing a page one rewrite mean and how can you tackle it?

What is a Page One Rewrite?

So, you just typed “Fade Out” on a completed draft of your feature or TV pilot, and you are feeling a mix of pride, relief and just a little bit chuffed.

But is it production or even agent ready? Of course not, as most writers will know completing a draft is not the end of the process. It is not even the beginning of the end of the process. It is more the end of the beginning phase of project development. You are going to be doing plenty of drafting.

Drafts are part of life as a writer. More to the point you will be doing lots of revision, so get used to it. But once you finish your draft – and it is the best you can make of it – and you have registered it and even submitted it to an agent, then there is another form of revision required: rewriting.

“When a script’s central premise or characters are good but the script is otherwise unusable, a different writer or team of writers is contracted to do an entirely new draft, often referred to as a “page one rewrite”” – Wikipedia

Where drafting is considered more of an iterative process of refining action lines, transitions, and dialogue, rewriting is when you go back into a finished manuscript and modify parts of it like scenes, pacing or even the structure.

And a more extreme version of a rewrite is a page one rewrite. Here, that completed draft is stripped down to its conceptual foundation for a complete story rebuild. As the name indicates it is a “rewrite” from “page one” onwards.