In an insightful video essay regarding the economy of storytelling, filmmaker Michael Tucker of Lessons from the Screenplay takes a look at the first ten pages of the script for the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada and shows how it translated on-screen. He explains how these few pages were able to comprehensively set the overarching premise for the entire film.
On page one we met our protagonist and through comparison, learned that this is a story about people who care about fashion and people who don’t. By the end of page four we knew the dramatic question had received all the necessary exposition and understood mistakes. And by page nine we had met important supporting characters and through their reactions learned the power of the antagonist, providing the proper build up to the first of many battles our hero will face.
