{"id":754262,"date":"2026-07-10T08:09:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T08:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/754262\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T08:09:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T08:09:13","slug":"screenwriting-101-how-to-write-a-feature-length-script-in-a-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/754262\/","title":{"rendered":"Screenwriting 101: How to Write a Feature Length Script in a Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

While at the 2026 Sundance Film<\/a> Festival for the premiere of \u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass<\/a>,\u201d co-writers David Wain and Ken Marino<\/a> revealed they wrote the first draft of the script in a week. While guests on this week\u2019s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast<\/a>, we asked the longtime collaborators to elaborate on their unique approach to starting the writing process.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe exercise is sourced out of the idea that, when you\u2019re shooting something, you get there at seven in the morning and you do a 12-plus hour day, and there\u2019s no wiggle room,\u201d said Wain, who also directed the film. \u201cYou\u2019re on the clock, people are getting paid, so we just thought to ourselves, \u2018Maybe writing could benefit from the same kind of rigor.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TORONTO,<\/a> \"Attention<\/a> <\/p>\n

Wain and Marino commit to showing up at 7:00 a.m., working uninterrupted on a first draft until 7:00 p.m., for seven consecutive days, when working on the first draft of their new film.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not only a good exercise, we\u2019re three for three in terms of getting it done,\u201d said Marino, explaining \u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass<\/a>\u201d was the third time he and Wain have done the seven-day exercise to write a screenplay \u2014 the previous two were for the other two feature films they\u2019d written together: \u201cThe Ten\u201d (2007) and \u201cWanderlust\u201d (2012).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal was simply to walk out after seven days with a first draft. Not a good first draft, just a first draft,\u201d said Marino. \u201c\u200aBut we start with no concept.\u201d<\/p>\n

The no concept part is particularly surprising. \u201cGail Daughtry\u201d is a pretty high concept film: Gail (Zoey Deutch) sets off to Los Angeles to seek out her celebrity sex pass (Jon Hamm) in a \u201cWizard of Oz\u201d-tinged journey in which Hamm\u2019s \u201cMad Men\u201d co-star John Slattery, playing a sad-sack version of himself, joins her quest. Wain and Marino insist they didn\u2019t have the basic idea on Day 1; nor did they reach out to Hamm and Slattery to gauge their interest until after the seven days.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing is we get together and [ask], \u2018So what could a movie be about?\u2019 And so it\u2019s fun, and by the end of day two, we have to have a complete outline, and then we just write,\u201d said Wain.<\/p>\n

\"Zoey\u2018Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass\u2019Sony Pictures Classics<\/p>\n

The co-writers estimated they average 20 pages a day, which they partially credited to avoiding the stop-and-start nature of a normal writing process. Explained Wain, \u201cThe ramp back up, once you\u2019ve stopped for even one or two days, is so much more than just picking up right where you left off when you went to sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a process that was born of necessity: Wain was living in New York, Marino in Los Angeles, and as both started having kids, finding time to write together in the same room became increasingly hard. It was a different, more adult life than the two collaborators\u2019 early days with The State \u2014 the comedy troupe they formed with their NYU classmates that went on to become a hit MTV show in the \u201990s and gave birth to Wain\u2019s beloved \u201cWet Hot American Summer\u201d \u2014 but nonetheless grounded in the same principles.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy forcing [writing], something comes out,\u201d said Wain. \u201cIt\u2019s actually a discipline we learned when we were doing sketch comedy with The State, where sometimes you just write something, even if you don\u2019t have a great idea, and something will come out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the seven-day first draft serves as a jump-start for the rewrite phase, which does stretch out over time and distance. \u201cAfter seven days, after we print it out and we hold it, we then take a couple of weeks away from it and come back, and we can spend sometimes years retooling it,\u201d said Marino.<\/p>\n

When they first did the exercise, Wain and Marino thought they had stumbled upon something novel, but over time have learned that a number of successful writers practice some variation of the same idea. Marino pointed to a recent video of \u201cWeapons\u201d writer\/director Zach Cregger explaining his own trick to getting past the hump of a first draft.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201c[Cregger] was talking about basically a version of what we do, which is not the time limit, but of not filtering, or not censoring yourself. He says, \u2018I\u2019m going to write the elf version,\u2019\u201d said Marino, describing how Cregger pretends he hired an elf to write the first screenplay draft. \u201cIt\u2019s an elf that you pay very little money to, and so you don\u2019t expect it to be good, and you write the scenes in the script as if an elf would write it, and the elf is not too bright, so it\u2019s not going to be a really good draft, but the elf is determined to finish the script. And then when it\u2019s done, you have the elf script that you\u2019re working off of, and then you make it better as the human.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sony Pictures Classics will release \u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass\u201d in theaters on Friday, July 10.<\/p>\n

To hear Wain and Marino\u2019s full interview, make sure you subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast<\/a> on\u00a0Apple<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>, or your favorite podcast platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of \u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":754263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[204287,88,2695,23575,205474,5450,205475],"class_list":["post-754262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-david-wain","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-filmmaker-toolkit-podcast","tag-gail-daughtry-and-the-celebrity-sex-pass","tag-interviews","tag-ken-marino"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/754263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}