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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

The Hollywood screenplay format is one of the most grotesque offences against typography and design that I have ever encountered, but the upside is that the uniformity makes sure that every screenplay is evaluated on its content and not on its print design.

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The format for production screenplays evolved according to the needs of the people needing the physical pages on set, e.g. dialogue has a lot of whitespace so that director and actors can keep notes there. Also, scene headings need to convey a lot of information in one line: on which set the scene in shot, whether it exists as a continuation of the previous scene, whether it's shot on location, and what lighting equipment will be needed.

It's a storytelling format that also needs to function as a reference document. It's very efficient for its requirements.

There's also the idea that one page = one minute of screen-time, but this is a bit of a red herring. Rather it's that overall a 100-page screenplay, if it contains a conventional balance of action and dialogue, with conventional length of scenes, shot at a conventional pacing, will likely result in a 100-minute film once edited. ALL IS LOST is 32 pages and 105 min film, THE SOCIAL NETWORK is 164 pages, 120 min film.

There's a reason for it: it's designed so that a page of text translates to more or less one minute of screen time, so you can get a reliable estimate of how long the movie will run by looking at the page count.

(Source: I took a screenwriting class when I was living in LA. If you live in LA long enough and you don't write a screenplay they kick you out.)

(Here is the screenplay I wrote, in case anyone is interested: http://flownet.com/ron/control.pdf)

Interesting to compare with source code which also generally use monospace and indentation but otherwise no fancy typography.

This is exactly what I thought of too.

If you think about it, the screenplay is a form of source code (or at least a form of specification), similar to a printed musical score.

From what I've heard, the exact opposite is true: if you don't have the proper formatting, your screenplay is evaluated exclusively based on the (improper) print design since nobody will actually read it.

Screenplays are working documents that multiple teams of people from different disciplines work from. Form should always follow function, and the screenplay format does just that. It's got nothing to do with "evaluating" the "content".

Pretty weird that is has to be monospaced. I guess that enforces constant "density"?

It's mainly an artefact of typewriters that people are already used to and don't want to change since it's worked well for a century already.

Also, it's a bit easier to read in a hurry. Films and TV are almost invariably shot out of sequence for logistical reasons so actors and production crew are constantly consulting copies of the script under less than ideal reading conditions.

What would you change to make screenplays better from a design perspective?

Not parent: As both a designer and filmmaker I would change nothing. Important part of the screenplays format is IMO that the various departments have enough space to annotate their stuff at the sides. The current format is good at this.

A proportionally spaced typeface and the use of bold instead of ALL CAPS.

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