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This book is MUST HAVE for anyone who wants to be a professional script coordinator or staff writer, and for anyone who wants their scripts to look just like professional ones. Combine this with Ralph Singleton's Film Scheduling/Film Budgeting Workbook. I've worked in the hour-long TV business as writer's assistant, then staff writer, then producer, for almost 15 years, and I recommend this book to everyone I work with and all my students. It isn't really designed for, or necessary for, people who are just starting out, although I personally think it should be required reading for every aspiring writer, especially in TV, because understanding how a script is used as a blueprint for filming, such how the scene headers are used to create the shooting schedule, can really help new writers to understand how to create a script that is not only interesting but filmable. Script formatting and scheduling programs are great timesaving tools, but you should be telling the programs how to format your script, not the other way around. This book was written by professional studio typists, back before there were word processors, when every produced script was typed by people who did that as their full time job. It contains THE industry standard for how scripts should look -- which is sometimes not the default setting of those expensive script programs.
I've read a half dozen books on screenplays. and hasn't been updated.
Two newer books I would recommend instead would be CRAFTY SCREENWRITING by Alex Epstein (2002) and HOW NOT TO WRITE A SCREENPLAY by Denny Flinn (1999). I suspect that much of the formatting advice this book offers is now out of date, old fashioned to what professional script writers are doing this days.
I've just finished my first script. It was writen in 1983.
You'll get modern formatting information from these books PLUS a lot more useful advice about how to write well. I suppose it's okay, but not awesome.
Of those books, this one is likely one of the least helpful.
This book is useful (meaning I did not return it) however, it is not easy to read if you know nothing about scriptwriting to begin with. I bought this book thinking it would give me all the technical terms and definitions of a script. It does have some, however I found another book which is more what I was looking for.
It does not address the art writing or the literary aspects of how to construct a story suitable for making into a film. It should be understood that this book is an excellent resource for understanding the format component of writing a screenplay. If you've already got the story down and learning the proper format for your first screenplay is your task at hand, this is the book for you. The first time I looked at a screenplay script format, I thought I'd never be able to understand what went where and why. After a few days with "The Complete Guide to Standard Script Formats," I felt like an expert.
A minor example would be capitalising text to highlight sounds in a direction section. This is a book well worth having, so that you can format and structure your script to be as effective as possible, and to take care of the parts that script formatting applications such as Final Draft 6.0 or Screenwriter 2000 don't attend to. After downloading a few scripts from drew's scriptoroama, Basic Instinct, Fargo, Blade Runeer (the original Hampton Fancher version ), etc., I thought it would be a good idea to get familiar with what is recommended practice., since scripts tend to look pretty similar but with inconsistencies in some of the details.Cole and Haag give plenty of clear advice, coupled with why the block elements and the inner details of a script are formatted and timed as they are. The section dealing with the setting up of a word processor to make the work easier was somewhat garbled, but the part for typewriter set up looked to be okay.
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