Lex Williford

Script Format Notes

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Shooting Script

Screenplay: Writing the Picture: Chapter 2 (16-37), Appendix A, Movie Template (408-409).

Spec Script

Screenwriting Format NotesLex Williford

Please follow closely all the formatting guidelines for spec (or reading) scripts in Screenplay: Writing the Picture (SWP).

Read and compare the differences between spec and shooting scripts in “Spec and Shooting Scripts.pdf.”

Under the title headings listed below, please follow my additional suggestions and guidelines.

The Complete Guide to Standard Script Formats: The Screenplay, by Judith Haag and Hillis Cole(optional).

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Shooting Script Spec Script

Spec and Shooting Scripts

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SWP, pp. 16-21A Few Additional Notes to the Text

Covers and Title Pages

Instead of blank cover page, use a title page (printed on white card stock) with three holes and two brass brads, one on top, the other in the bottom, no brad in the middle.

To format the basic page, refer to Appendix A for the Movie Template.

Leave a lot of white space in your script. No more than four lines of narration or dialogue.

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SWP, p. 21.FADE IN:

Is always the first thing to write, on the first page of your script, flush left;It appears only once in your script.

SCENE HEADERS (SLUG LINES)

Always follow this order:

EXT. (or INT.) PLACE -- ROOM -- TIMENotice how place size moves from larger to smaller as you read from left to right (cities institutions buildings rooms): INT. UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, EL PASO -- LIBERAL ARTS BUILDING -- ROOM 415 -- NOON

Notice that there’s a space between each item and two unspaced hyphens to show a dash (--). You may also use an em dash (—); please be consistent.

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SWP, p. 21, CONT’D.SCENE HEADERSMust always begin with exterior establishing shots when the script moves to new locations:

EXT. UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, EL PASO -- HUDSPETH HALL -- AFTERNOON (ESTABLISHING)

A student with a rainbow Mohawk rushes up the steps of a stucco building of Bhutan design, past dozens of El Paso and Juárez students, then inside.

INT. UTEP -- HUDSPETH HALL -- ROOM 415 -- AFTERNOON

The student, CANDELARIO ORTIZ, 18, runs into class, winded, glances at PROF. LEX WILLIFORD, 52, standing in front of the chalkboard with his arms folded.

CANDELARIO

(to Williford)

Dude, sorry I’m late.

Notice how even the somewhat static description of the exterior has some drama.

Never go directly from an external scene heading to an internal scene heading without at least a few action lines showing a quick, surprising description and some drama.

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SWP, p. 22.Narrative:

Should focus on small turns (or beats ) of dramatic action and quick strokes of surprising description, two or three surprising details to give us the sense of an entire place or gesture: a short new paragraph for each turn.

Should focus only on what we see and hear.

Should not include the words we see or we hear.WEAK:

We see JACOB ARVITZ, 48, head surgeon at Cedar Sinai, running to the ER. BETTER:

JACOB ARVITZ, 48, head surgeon at Cedar Sinai, scrambles to the ER.

Should not go over about four lines. (The same goes with dialogue.)

If you have long passages of narrative or static description, break these into short paragraphs, blend description with action and break up long passages of dialogue.

Long blocks of narrative are hard to read, the first sign of amateur scriptwriting.

Remember: we read novels across the page; we read scripts down the page, so please . . .

Leave a lot of white space.

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SWP, p. 22, CONT’D.Narrative:Should always be in present tense (verbs with -s not -ed endings).

Should always be direct, concise, easy to read and compelling, using vivid, surprising descriptions and strong active verbs.

Should not rely on “is” verbs:

Linking verbs (Subject + is verb + noun/adjective) which tend to tell and not show, using the writer’s value judgments rather than with real visual or aural descriptions:

WEAK:

JACOB ARVITZ, 48, is a doctor. He is head of surgery at a hospital. He is younger than he looks. He is an angry guy. He is frustrated with long hours of surgery and too many patients.

BETTER:

JACOB ARVITZ, 48, head surgeon at Cedar Sinai, rubs his gray beard stubble, then slaps a bloody scalpel CLATTERING onto the nurse’s tray.

Progressive verbs (Subject is verb + -ing):WEAK:

JACOB is running into the ER. BETTER:

JACOB runs into the ER.

Passive verbs (Subject + is verb + -ed verb + by object of the preposition):WEAK:

He is struck by a gurney and toppled to the floor.BETTER:

A gurney strikes him, almost toppling him to the floor.

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SWP, p. 23.Dialogue:According to poet John Ciardi “is poetry.”

Ciardi doesn’t mean that dialogue is flowery or overblown. It’s plain-spoken, the essence of elegant simplicity.

Dialogue has the precision of poetry: It says exactly what it means in the fewest possible words. No hemming or hawing, er, um, uh, duh . . .

Dialogue imitates the language and voice of oral speech—its informality, even its slang—but it isn’t oral speech at all.

Listen to the way people talk on a bus or in a mall or around the dinner table, and they ramble and go off on tangents; they usually talk around what they’re really trying to say. Your job is to imitate this speech simply, elegantly and in the fewest possible words.

Dialogue is never “on the nose.”

People rarely say exactly what they really feel: “I’m really upset about your coming home drunk at three a.m. last night.”

Characters, like real people, say what they mean by “telling it slant,” as Emily Dickenson suggests.

A scene with a husband and wife arguing over whether to set the oven at 350 or 400 degrees is really the continuation of an unresolved argument they had two weeks ago: The wife wants a child and the husband doesn’t.

Dialogue is the principal means of showing conflict, so . . .

Write dialogue that shows conflict.

Avoid writing chatty conversation: “Hi, I’m Fred Schlinkleflapper. Glad to meet you.”

Begin the dialogue of each scene at the moment conflict begins, as late in a scene as you can.

End the dialogue of each scene before the conflict is resolved, leaving a question in the viewers’ minds which propels them into the next scene.

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SWP, p. 23, CONT’D.Dialogue:Read your dialogue aloud and make it sound like natural speech:

WEAK: Darling, what do you think of my newly coiffed pompadour?

BETTER:

How you like my new haircut?

Don’t misspell words or overuse contractions to create a distinctive regional or ethnic dialect. Doing so makes your characters look silly or stupid, makes you look elitist (or, worse, racist) and makes your dialogue almost impossible to read. Instead, use sentence syntax by eliminating certain words:

WEAK:

I be gwine down ta de sto’.BETTER:

Think I’ll be taking the dogs to the Wal-Mart.

Don’t have your characters calling each other by name too often: Hey, Fred, how’s fishing?

Caught me a big-ass lunker, Billy Bob. Jesus in diapers, Fred, that sucker’s big as my boathouse.

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SWP, p. 23-24.Dialogue DON’Ts.DON’T write over four lines of dialogue. You can cheat a little by inserting action lines that show what a character does as she speaks. Too often beginning screenwriters have pages of dialogue without description or action: too much white space. It’s important to show what your characters are doing as they speak.DON’T write long speeches and monologues (even in lawyers’ summations at the end of courtroom dramas).

DON’T write obvious exposition through dialogue. Like a magician using misdirection, deliver small doses of exposition and background only in moments of heightened conflict. The moment the exposition through dialogue becomes obvious, we wake from the fictional dream, and we see the puppeteer and his strings:

CRYSTAL

Gee, Jimmy Joe, you remember the time we met? We was

in the Laundromat and you’d just thrown your buddy

Bubba in the dryer. You grinned and told me he was

a little wet behind the ears, and I knew you was

the boy for me.

If you’re writing in a standard word-processing program like Microsoft Word, DON’T format your dialogue as you write. If you use MOREs and CONT’Ds in early drafts, they’ll shift as you revise, and you’ll have to reformat them again countless times. When writing in Word, wait until you’ve finished a strong draft for workshop and then format your dialogue. If you write with Final Draft, it does most of the work for you.

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SWP, p. 25.Widows and Orphans:When you’ve finished a draft of your script for workshop, proofread closely for widows and orphans, stranded elements that appear at both the bottoms (widows) and tops (orphans) of your script pages. If you’re using Final Draft (www.finaldraft.com):

Use the Cole and Haag template, under File, New, then open “Screenplay (Cole and Haag).fdt. This template adheres to the industry standards for formatting and will save you countless hours of formatting manually. Final Draft automatically formats your script for you, leaving no widows or orphans.You may have to tweak your settings so that your script’s formatting is correct.

If you’re using other screenwriting software, I can’t guarantee that their formatting will be correct, so you may have to tweak their settings, too, and even make several manual changes. These programs include Movie Magic ($250 at www.write-bros.com), Celtx (a free download at www.celtx.com), Script Buddy (www.scriptbuddy.com) and so on.

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SWP, p. 25.Widows and Orphans:If you’re using Microsoft Word:

Begin with “Lex's Word Script Template.doc,” if you wish, but remember: this template, adapted from the template at Microsoft online is still a work in progress, and several students have had problems with it. At present, it’s the best I’ve got.

DON’T worry about widows and orphans while you’re drafting your script. Get it as close to right as you can and then, after you’ve proofread the draft for workshop or submission, proofread for widows and orphans insert the appropriate formatting elements [(MORE), (CONT’D)] as necessary.

If you try to format these elements while you’re drafting your script, remember: Every time you make a change in your script, everything on the page is shifted forward for the rest of your script, forcing you to have to change all these formatting elements again by hand. It’s a tedious chore that’s best left to the end of your revisions.As you’re formatting text in a standard word processing program such as Microsoft Word, all your formatting changes early in the document will affect the rest of the document, so be sure to proofread for widows and orphans carefully, beginning on page one and moving through the document, making your changes manually. If you make any other changes, remember: You may have to reformat the entire document again.

Examples follow:

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SWP, p. 25.Parentheticals (wryly’s):RULE NUMBER 1: DON’T use parentheticals unless you absolutely have to.

The best scriptwriters rarely use them. Beginning screenwriters use them for almost everything. Parentheticals are the first thing directors and actors mark out of scripts: they don’t want you to tell them how to direct or act.

DON’T use parentheticals instead of action lines:

CRYSTAL

(lighting a Lucky Strike and caressing

Jim Bob’s shiny bald pate)

Love you, Jim Bob.

DON’T use parentheticals for obvious emotions, especially adverbs which don’t really describe anything but your value judgment:

CRYSTAL

(angrily)

Shut up, Jim Bob!

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SWP, p. 25.I can think of only a few instances when you might need parentheticals:

When your dialogue suggests the opposite emotions you intend:

CRYSTAL

(tenderly)

Shut up, Jim Bob.

When you have more than two characters in a scene and you need to clarify who’s speaking to whom:

CRYSTAL

(to Darlene)

You keep away from Jim Bob, you hear me?

When you need to clarify the language a character is speaking in:

Odette

(to Crystal, in Spanish)

But I’m carrying Jaime’s baby!

Follow the guidelines for dialogue in Chapters 2 and 13 carefully.

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SWP, p. 26, 30-32.Because it’s the industry standard for marketing scripts, we are writing only in spec (or reading) script format in this class. For this reason, DON’T use the following:Camera Directions.Scene numbers.CUT TO: (Every scene is a cut to another scene.)DISSOLVE TO: (Let the director decide.)CONTINUED: at the tops or bottoms of pages.But, to avoid widows and orphans, DO use (MORE) and (CONT’D) to show dialogue that splits across page breaks.

You may have to change Final Draft settings to meet these standards.Be sure to use the Cole and Haag template for Final Draft, the industry standard for feature-length films.

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SWP, p. 32-33.MONTAGE/SERIES OF SHOTSContemporary film scripts are more likely to use the words SERIES OF SHOTS than MONTAGE. I recommend using SERIES OF SHOTS.

As with parentheticals, use MONTAGE sparingly, no more than once or twice in a script--or not at all.

Beginning scriptwriters tend to rely too much on the MONTAGE as a means of advancing story, but it’s basically a short-cut for the hard work of writing brief dramatic scenes.

A revolutionary technique in 1914 when Russian Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein first used it in his film The Battleship Potempkin, MONTAGE has since become a Hollywood cliché, used more for comic effect than for most serious films: The falling-in-love montage, ending with two lovers running toward each other across a field of sunflowers, for example, is probably only going to get laughs.

Always number MONTAGES and SERIES OF SHOTS and keep them short. (The example in SWP, 33-34, is much longer than many expert scriptwriters would suggest.)

Never use dialogue in MONTAGES or SERIES OF SHOTS.

Never use MONTAGES or SERIES OF SHOTS when you can write a series of brief dramatic scenes instead.

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SWP, p. 33-34.Flashbacks:

Avoid using too many flashbacks.They can slow your script down and awaken the reader/viewer from the fictional dream.If you can write your story without flashbacks, do it. If you want to experiment with structure and time to avoid a cliché linear structure, remember that experimentation has become a cliché, too, especially when it confuses a reader/viewer unnecessarily. There are many fine films that play around with structure--Pulp Fiction, Babel, Amorres Perros, Memento--so watch such films and read the scripts to learn how to make time shifts work.Flashbacks can get cheesy fast: The Vietnam vet relives a Napalmed village burning, then wakes in a sweat. Dorothy wakes and realizes Oz was only a dream.

Flashbacks work best when they’re tied to images that provoke your protagonist’s memory: Vivid, surprising and original images in the present action evoke the past.If you’re going to use flashbacks a lot, begin using them in the first few pages so that the reader/viewer knows the “rules” of your script.Follow the format for showing shifts from flashbacks to the present action closely on page 33. (But forget the DISSOLVE TO and the CUT TO.)

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SWP, p.34.Telephone Calls:

Are essentially undramatic, but if you have to use them, you have three choices:1. When we hear only what the telephone caller shown in the

scene is saying,2. When we hear what the caller in the scene is saying and what

the other character is saying off screen, 3. When we see and hear both callers in different locations.

These all have considerable subtle differences, so think carefully about which you’ll use as you write your scenes and follow the guidelines carefully.

When in doubt, don’t use telephone calls. Just get two characters into the same room and have them speak to each other face to face, preferably in conflict.

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SWP, p. 27.FADE OUT

Is always the last thing you write (not The End), on the last page of your script, flush right ;It appears only once in your script, like this:

FADE OUT.

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