Because a scene in a script doesn't start or stop neatly at the top or bottom of a page. It often spills over onto another page so in order to accurately measure how much space a scene occupies you divide a page into 8ths. So a scene that starts at the top of page 1 and only goes to the very top of page 2 is NOT 2 pages long, it's 1 1/8 pages long.
And your next question is: WHY is a page count important? Because the length of a production is based on the number of pages you can shoot in a day. That depends on a lot of factors (type of production, experience, location) but basically when you do your budget you know that each day of shooting is costing you X ? where X=actors, crew, equipment, food and location fees for a typical day. So you divide your production budget by X and that give you the number of days you can afford to shoot. And THEN you look at your page count and that tells you how many pages you have to shoot every day or else run out of time or go over budget.
Say your production budget is $100,000 and you have a 90 page script. Each day of shooting costs you $5,000, so you have 20 days to shoot your movie. 90 pages in 20 days is 4.5 pages per day (which is a LOT btw). So then your task is to fit together all the different-sized scenes like a jigsaw puzzle, combining short ones to equal out to a full 4.5 page day or splitting long scenes accordingly. Of course, some types of scenes take longer to shoot than others but these are the general rules that allow you to start budgeting your time.
HTH, JK
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