Screenplay Format Explained

Industry-standard screenplay format is a fixed set of margins and element types, set in 12 point Courier, designed so that one formatted page runs roughly one minute of screen time. Everything else follows from that.

That page-per-minute relationship is the reason the rules are strict. A producer looking at a 110 page script knows it is about a 110 minute film. A first AD counting eighths of a page knows how much work a day holds. Break the format and you break the estimate, which breaks the schedule and the budget.

So the conventions are not gatekeeping or tradition. They are a shared measuring system.

Why Courier, specifically

Courier is monospaced: every character occupies identical width. That is the whole reason. A monospaced font at a fixed size with fixed margins produces predictable page counts, and predictable page counts are the entire point.

Set a script in a proportional font and the page count stops meaning anything. Twelve point Courier, or a close variant like Courier Prime, is the standard.

The page setup

These numbers are the actual convention. You will rarely type them yourself, because any screenwriting tool applies them, but they are worth knowing so you can tell when something is wrong.

• Paper: US Letter (8.5 x 11 inches). Even outside the US, Letter remains standard for screenplays.
• Font: 12 point Courier.
• Top margin: 1 inch. Bottom: about 1 inch, with some tolerance.
• Left margin: 1.5 inches. The extra half inch is for the brads that bind a printed script.
• Right margin: 1 inch.
• Page numbers: top right, followed by a full stop. The first page is not numbered.
• Single spaced within elements, with a blank line between them.

The five element types

Almost everything in a screenplay is one of five things. Learn these and format stops being mysterious.

1. Scene heading (slugline)

The line that starts every scene. Always uppercase.

INT. KITCHEN - DAY

Three parts: whether we are inside or outside, where, and when. Left margin, full width. This element does an enormous amount of work downstream, so it gets its own post tomorrow.

2. Action

Present tense prose describing what we see and hear. Full width, left aligned, same margins as the slugline.

Sarah drops the mug. It shatters. She does not move.

Keep paragraphs short, three or four lines maximum. A wall of action text is the fastest way to make a reader skim, and a skimming reader misses the thing you needed them to see.

Two conventions inside action lines:

• A character's name is capitalised the first time they appear, and only the first time. SARAH enters, and thereafter she is Sarah.
• Important sounds are sometimes capitalised. A GUNSHOT, a CRASH. Use it rarely; a script where everything is capitalised has emphasised nothing.

Write only what the camera can record. "She remembers the summer her father left" is unfilmable. What does she do that shows it?

3. Character cue

The name of whoever is speaking, uppercase, indented to roughly 3.7 inches from the page edge.

                SARAH

Use the same name every time. If she is SARAH in scene one she is not SARAH CHEN in scene forty; the character is a database entry as much as a person, and the breakdown, the schedule and the cast list all depend on that consistency.

Extensions go in brackets after the name:

• (V.O.) voice over. The speaker is not physically in the scene: narration, a memory, a recorded voice.
• (O.S.) or (O.C.) off screen or off camera. The speaker is physically present but not in shot, for example calling from another room.
• (CONT'D) when the same character speaks again after an action line interrupts.

The V.O. versus O.S. distinction genuinely matters and is genuinely confused. If they are in the room, it is O.S. If they are not in the room at all, it is V.O.

4. Dialogue

What they say. Indented about 2.5 inches from the left edge, with a right margin roughly 2 to 2.5 inches in, giving a column a bit under 3.5 inches wide.

                SARAH
      You can't keep doing this.

That narrow column is deliberate: it makes dialogue length instantly visible. A speech that runs half a page looks like half a page.

5. Parenthetical

A short direction inside a speech, in brackets on its own line, indented between the character cue and the dialogue.

                SARAH
          (quietly)
      I know what you did.

Use sparingly. Parentheticals that describe emotion tell actors how to act, which is not the writer's job and which good actors ignore. They earn their place when the line's meaning would otherwise be genuinely ambiguous, or when they carry a small action: (not looking up).

Transitions

Right aligned, uppercase, followed by a colon.

CUT TO:

Modern practice is to use almost none. Every cut is a cut; writing CUT TO: between every scene adds pages and tells the reader nothing. Keep the ones that carry meaning, such as SMASH CUT TO: or MATCH CUT TO:, and let the rest be implied by the next slugline.

FADE IN: at the very start and FADE OUT. at the very end are still conventional, and largely optional.

Things that are not your job

A frequent beginner instinct is to write the film as though directing it on the page. Resist it.

• Camera directions. WE PUSH IN, ANGLE ON, CLOSE ON. In a spec script, near-zero. You direct attention through what you choose to describe, not by naming lenses. Describing only the trembling hand is a close-up without saying so.
• Editing instructions. Not yours either.
• Music cues. Naming specific tracks creates licensing expectations nobody agreed to.

The exception is a shooting script, which is a different document. Once a film is actually being made, scripts get scene numbers, sometimes camera notes, and revision colours. That is production, not writing.

Numbers, time and small details

• Scene numbers are not in a spec script. They are added when the script is locked for production, and thereafter they never change, because the whole breakdown and schedule reference them.
• Time of day in sluglines: keep to DAY and NIGHT wherever possible. DAWN, DUSK, MAGIC HOUR are real but expensive, and every one you write is a scheduling constraint you are creating.
• CONTINUOUS means the action runs unbroken from the previous scene.
• Numbers in dialogue are usually written out, because the actor reads it aloud: "twenty five", not "25".
• MONTAGE and INTERCUT have their own light conventions. Use them when they genuinely clarify, not to avoid deciding what a sequence is.

How long should it be?

• Feature: commonly 90 to 120 pages. Comedies tend shorter, drama longer.
• Short: whatever the story needs, but remember one page is one minute, and a 25 page short is a 25 minute short with all the placement problems that brings.
• Half hour TV: around 25 to 35 pages. Hour TV: around 45 to 65.

A script substantially outside these is not automatically wrong, but it will be read as a signal about experience before anyone reaches page two.

The reason all of this matters downstream

Format is not only about looking professional to a reader. The script is the source document for everything in the chain.

The breakdown reads your sluglines to know how many locations exist. The schedule groups scenes by INT/EXT and DAY/NIGHT. Page eighths, measured off correctly formatted pages, are how a day's work is estimated. Cast lists come from character cues.

Sloppy format is not a cosmetic problem. It is bad data entering a system that will make expensive decisions with it.

Next

Tomorrow, the single line that does the most work in the entire document, and the one most people write carelessly: the slugline.