The Screenplay: Software

Word processing for screenwriters

When I was in the business, the #1 software choice for writing screenplays was Final Draft http://www.finaldraft.com but there was also Movie Magic, and an unusual approach in Dramatica (both can be found at http://www.screenplay.com) which is an interactive application helping the screenwriter shape and build his tale. These programs are commercial and cost money, though they probably have trial versions available.

Recently Celtx http://www.celtx.com has achieved 1.0 version status, and is open source and free of charge.

There are also word-processing programs that have predefined screenplay modes. One I like very much is Scrivener http://www.literatureandlatte.com which is available only for OSX and the Macintosh platform. Scrivener is commercial and costs money, and does have a trial period.

I’m sure there are other programs designed for screenwriters as well, which will serve the purpose.

In addition to these choices, which handle all the formatting and page breaks for you, there is also the path of turning a general purpose word-processor into a screenwriting machine. Microsoft’s Word (available for MS-Windows OS and OSX, commercial and costing money) and OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org (which is open-source and free of charge), along with other word processing applications, can work with ‘styles’ or ‘style sheets’ which are paragraph styles whose characteristics you can alter and name. A ‘Scene_Heading’ or ‘slugline’ paragraph style can be defined that has the proper spacing and is ALL CAPS; when you hit Enter or Return at the end of a Scene_Heading it can make a ‘Description’ or ‘Action’ paragraph. A ‘Speaker’ paragraph can lead to a ‘Talk’ paragraph, which can then lead to another ‘Speaker’ paragraph.

If you Google for them, you’ll probably find that some fellow-screenwriters have posted templates for writing screenplays with Microsoft Word. Bear in mind that most MS-Word templates also open in OpenOffice.org as well.

For OpenOffice.org screenplay templates, here are a few links:
http://www.zoetrope.com/files/pri/168/scr2.odt
http://www.geocities.com/n2geoff/OO/oo.html
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/scr2

I haven’t tested any of these myself, as I made my own ’way back when.

It’s also possible for those of you who can handle coding HTML to create such a file for your screenplays, but such files wouldn’t print out to industry standards. If you’re only interested in writing a screenplay as a proto-draft for a tale you mean to end as a novel, though, formatting is less important to you.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, June 13, 2008)