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The Screenwriter in Cyberspace
By Charles Deemer

Mr. Deemer is an award-winning playwright, a screenwriter, an editor and writer. He teaches screenwriting at Portland State University, is the author of the book Screenwright: the Craft of Screenwriting, and is the webmaster of The Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page. For more information on Mr. Deemer and his work, please click here. This column is a guide to using the Internet to a writer's advantage in matters of craft and marketing.

Listen to Charles Deemer's RealAudio Screenwriting Tips

Column #23: My Dream Screenwriting Program

For all the progress made in screenwriting software, I am impressed more than ever with the original DOS-based version of Movie Master, which appeared over 15 years ago. I don't use that program any more but I did have the opportunity to go into it recently -- and everything a screenwriter wants is there. Well, almost.

There ARE some things I would like to see in a screenwriting program that, to my knowledge, no one is doing yet. Maybe they can't be done, I don't know. So this is my wish list for a Dream Screenwriting Program.

Compatibility

First, I'd like a program that doesn't make all my past scripts a hassle to deal with. Many full-powered programs today have "import" functions, with which you presumably can import scripts written in other programs, but none of these do a clean job in my experience. Some put elements in the wrong place, some eliminate character names -- none lets you press a key or click a mouse and, wah-lah!, find your screenplay cleanly formatted and in place in the new program.

Perhaps this kind of programming is very hard to do. I'm not a computer programmer, I don't know. But one of the obstacles to selling a new screenwriting program to any experienced writer is the question of prior scripts and what to do with them. Presently I find myself with scripts I wrote in Movie Master (DOS), ScriptThing, Scriptware and Hollywood Screenplay, and it's such a hassle to try and import any into another program that I have to keep all these programs around in case I have to access the scripts they were written in.

So please, someone, perfect the import function!

Remember DOS

When I start writing, I hate to have to use my mouse. In the old DOS programs, you couldn't use a mouse -- and programs like the old Movie Master perfected screenwriting on the fly. It seems like the more advanced screenwriting programs become, the more bells and whistles they add, the more I am seeing little windows pop up everywhere, requiring me to use my mouse and select something.

Some programs do a mouseless interface better than others -- but in my experience, almost all programs "progress" to more mouse use, not less, as they add these "improved" versions of their products, which often, of course, are really not improvements at all. I remember that at a certain point the "improvements" of Movie Master (DOS) were so irrelevant and disruptive that at the film company where I worked at the time, we were uninstalling new versions and reinstalling the older version all the time!

>Format is format is format -- let's just do it seamlessly, without using a mouse, and for my money the DOS programs did this better than the windows programs.

Reports That Mean Something

One reason to buy a full-powered screenwriting program is that it should do many useful things other than format a script. For example, all the topnotch programs (Hollywood Screenplay, ScriptThing, Scriptware, Final Draft and the recent Screenplay Studio) generate reports to help the writer analyze the script.

Well, once again, I have never seen a report more useful than the "Scene Breakdown" report in the original Movie Master (and duplicated in its resurrection, Hollywood Screenplay, and a couple other programs). This report lists scenes slugline by slugline, AND the characters in each, AND the number of lines each character speaks, AND the length of the scene -- all good data for looking at a story's pacing.

Many programs generate a Character Report. In some programs, this is a rendering of all the dialogue spoken by a specified character. For others, it means the percentage of lines (of total in the story) spoken by a specified character. Both of these are useful -- so why not generate both in all programs?

A few programs generate graphs but I've never seen such a graph that I can easily understand. I would love to see a graph that follows the arc of a major character. Maybe the horizontal axis could be pages in the screenplay and the vertical axis could be a double entry of number of action lines involving the character and number of dialogue lines.

Tips

A lot of programs offer screenwriting tips but the interface for them has followed the start-up formula of tips for windows programs in general. I'd like to see access to tips relevant to the part of the screenplay the writer is developing being made available at the time s/he is doing that. Perhaps a menu item with tips classified into categories. Act I, II and III tips, writing action tips, characterization tips, dialogue tips, and so on -- not randomly delivered at startup but available during the act of writing.

Cost

I would like to see the cost of almost all screenwriting programs come down to where students can afford them. Well under one hundred dollars. Maybe lite versions for a third of that. There are good buys on the market -- Hollywood Screenplay still strikes me as the best buy -- but surely we don't need to pay several hundred dollars for a screenwriting program any more.

"Your Cards and Letters..."

Now I anticipate that I'll be hearing from many companies who produce screenwriting software, telling me that they already do all the things I am asking for. I admit that I have tried out only one new version of a screenwriting program in about a year now. After all, once you have a program you are mostly happy with, why change it? Format is format is format. It's writing that's important.

But if I've missed some of the things that recent programs are doing -- particularly in a mouseless interface and in generating truly useful reports -- I'll be glad to find out. Sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks. Or so they say.

--Charles Deemer



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