Get Read.
Stay Out of the Rejection Pile.
Production companies receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of screenplay submissions per week. It's impossible to read all of them, so companies will initially judge a screenplay by quickly flipping through the pages and looking at the format. It's referred to as "fanning" in the industry. If the format is no good, the screenplay gets tossed and the reader moves on.
Proper format is the easiest part of writing a screenplay, and if you didn't get that right, you probably didn't get the rest right either—at least according to the reader! So it lands in the trash with most of other screenplays the reader is working through.
Bad format is the most common mistake made by new screenwriters. Until now, budding screenwriters had to sift through books with dozens of pages of "creative writing" just to figure out simple things like screenplay page margins or what things need to be capitalized. Talk about hindering creative flow when you're in the middle of writing and need to figure out how to format something!
That's where the all new Screenplay Format Guide comes in—it saves time by making it quick and easy to find screenplay format rules. In case that wasn't enough, we made the inside of the guide a two-page spread showing sample screenplay pages with "bubbles" pointing to all of the rules in actual use.
The guide is comprehensive—it lists the rules, explains them, advises when its okay to "stray" and when it's not, and shows them in real use on the included screenplay example. Dialog, scene headings, action, and the rest of the elements that make up a screenplay are fully explained and demonstrated.
The guide is complete—it takes you from the blank page all the way to how to assemble and bind together your screenplay pages, title page, cover, etc. It tells you how to format your title page, and first and last pages.
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