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.
"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."
Also, read the HN guidelines. Comments like this degrade the quality of the discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
Screenplays contain more than just lines.
Agreed. Here's a fun counterexample:
2001: A Space Oddyssey
Screenplay length: 65 pages
Run length: 161 minutes
:)