Eleven pages a week

In one of my Hollywood books I read that writers in the studio system were expected to write eleven pages a week.

Eleven pages, seems very reasonable. Especially if we are talking script pages which have a lot of white on them.

Now you may have to write thirty-three pages to produce eleven good ones, but still.

I went looking for where I found this information but I couldn’t locate it in Schatz, Genius of the System, or Friedfrich, City of Nets, or Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, or Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, or Pirie, Anatomy of the Movies, or Rosen, Hollywood, or Dardis, Some Time in the Sun, or Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory or even Solomon, William Faulkner The Screenwriter. Not to say it’s in one of those, I just couldn’t retrieve it.

Using a Google Books search I did find reference to an eleven pages expectation:

That’s in Mark Wheeler, Hollywood: Politics and Society, which I’ve never read.

Cool cover!

If you reliably produce eleven pages a week your odds at some success are high.

Eleven pages a week will be my goal when I return from vacation at the end of August.

(that Faulkner typing pic seems to be from Time-Life Getty Images, found it on Reddit).