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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

This is a really neat solution to a very constrained problem space. For those who don't know, Hollywood lives and breathes 12 point Courier. It is the standard font for screenplays. Producers won't even look at a script that is set in anything else because it implies the author doesn't know industry culture and norms.

Also, by having a standard font size and metrics, it means that the number of pages in a script directly corresponds to a certain quantity of text. That in turn roughly corresponds to a certain length in time. The guideline is about a page a minute. So people who work in film know that a 90 page screenplay will be about a 1 1/2 hour-long film.

So Courier Prime is trying to improve the readability of that font without touching any of the metrics that the industry relies on or alienating readers who might think anything "not Courier" means "not professional".

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Thanks for explaining this. I was having trouble to understand what was the concrete problem this font was trying to solve. That makes a lot of sense. Especially the standardization of text length to determine actual playtime.

didn't the very first paragraph fta make things sufficiently clear?

"Since the beginning, screenplays have been written in Courier. Its uniformity allows filmmakers to make handy comparisons and estimates, such as 1 page = 1 minute of screen time."

Yeah. I read that part, but I didn't know about the idiosyncrasies behind the use of the font, so it wasn't fully clear to me why was important in this industry to heavily rely on a particular font.

Also, read the HN guidelines. Comments like this degrade the quality of the discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It does, but it's easy to underestimate how important this is to the film industry.

As a non-seasoned complete outsider, I thought this part of the article was somehow being dryly facetious or sarcastic or something. Kinda good to have somebody to provide context, actually.

So there were no screenplays before 1956? (When the Courier typeface was created.)

I would think they were typed on manual typewriters (so the tradition of using Courier probably stems from those days).

I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Text/playtime varies a lot between a Tarantino movie and something like Mad Max: Fury Road. It seems like a pointless metric.

And while I like courier in general, I thought typography experts disliked it because it's not as readable as proportional fonts. I'd expect readability to be important for screenplays too.

Besides, stuff like word count is easy to automate.

So to me it seems that if the industry indeed insists on everything being in courier, that's more likely to be a traditionalist remnant from the typewriter era rather than a rational decision. But I admit I don't know this industry at all.

In addition to using a very standard font, screenplays have a lot of other very strict formatting guidelines involving use of things like particular whitespace rhythms.

It's the combination of the whole, including and especially the whitespace rhythms (which are still connected to font metrics, of course), that lead to the 1 page is approximately 1 minute guideline metric, because scene descriptions and actions have different whitespace from dialog.

Interestingly, compared to your expectation that a Tarantino screenplay would be more dense than the Fury Road screenplay, it is actually dialog that has a lot more whitespace overall in the screenplay format (they are subject to smaller inner columns) than scene descriptions/action descriptions (which use the full width of the page). Word count wise, action involves a lot more prose than dialog and many of the best action screenplays have more overall word count than a more dialog-heavy screenplay. (What I've seen of the Fury Road screenplay read like a novel, though as is pointed out elsewhere it is fascinating because it was written storyboard first, which is the exception rather than the rule.)

The screenplay format really is a fascinating thing to study. There are some great books out there on the screenplay format and how it came to be what it is today.

Any top recommendations for those books? Super intrigued to read more.

The big one that left a lasting impression for me at an early age was Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434. It does a very good job illustrating a lot of the technical mechanics of the format and the Hollywood guidelines and expectations that have built up around it (including the page per minute expectation, and even the expectations on page per act, which is another formula that Hollywood has), and some of why, using an example screenplay throughout.

(Just be forewarned it is not a great example screenplay in the usual fashion of such teaching examples because it is designed more towards the lesson plan than coherency/quality as a story of its own; and also arguably another example of that old weird maxim "those who can't, teach" given Lew Hunter's mostly TV Movie writer IMDB credits.)

> Besides, stuff like word count is easy to automate.

Supposing I hand you a 90 page book and ask you roughly how many words are in it. How are you going to answer that? People hand round paper screenplays, or bits of screenplays, all the time, especially on set. It's much more practical for lots of purposes. Abandoning the minute-per-page rule of thumb (or equally importantly pages-per-shooting-day targets) would create way more problems than it solves.

However, it's also true that if you receive a screenplay that's not in standard screenplay format, it's a very reliable indication that the writer doesn't know what they're doing. Not a perfect heuristic, but there are maybe hundreds of thousands of spec scripts in circulation of which a few dozen a year get picked up by studios. So they can afford to be picky.

Bonus trivia: As it happens Fury Road is a very rare case of a movie that was originally developed as a storyboard, and converted to screenplay format for production purposes. Apparently you can do that if you're George Miller.

> Supposing I hand you a 90 page book and ask you roughly how many words are in it. How are you going to answer that?

Get the digital version. We're talking about a computer font here, so the script exists in digital form.

> As it happens Fury Road is a very rare case of a movie that was originally developed as a storyboard, > and converted to screenplay format for production purposes. Apparently you can do that if you're > George Miller.

And it worked very well. It makes a lot of sense for a very visual movie.

> Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop.

Screenplays contain more than just lines.

Even so, using the number of words to describe events to estimate the time those events will take to play out, seems like asking for trouble.

And yet. It's a rough heuristic, good enough for its purpose.

>I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time.

Agreed. Here's a fun counterexample:

2001: A Space Oddyssey

Screenplay length: 65 pages

Run length: 161 minutes

A movie famous (infamous, even) for it's significant non-verbal presentation? That sounds like an exception proving the rule.

If hollywood producers are so famously picky, I wonder if they will reject a script with this font because it simply looks different.

I don't think you'll be able to explain to them that it is metrically identical, just like you can't explain to your garbage man that you are using a decomposable plastic bag, but they have the strict order to not accept plastic in your organic trash (if you live in the kind of place that separates trash like this).

It could be great after you get your screenplay accepted, if you want to have a nicer copy that matches line-by-line the courier version.

The thing with decomposable bags is that it's a bit more complicated. Take a look at the marketing issues section in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradable_bag

I think that that's the point of it being metrically identical.

You can work in Courier Prime any time you want, and then switch to Courier for submitting your screenplay without worrying about it changing the pagination.

So it can help out any time you are working on your screenplay or working on it with anyone you know won't care, both before and after submission.

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