Final Draft: Want to Write a Screenplay?

Writing a movie is easy. Or to be more precise, getting your screenplay into the proper format for agents and producers is easy; that blockbuster idea is a bit more difficult.

There are books, seminars and on-line training sessions ad-naseum teaching you how to mine your brain to find the kernel of a hit movie idea, and how to turn that kernel into a full blown script. They'll even tell you exactly how to put that script onto paper with the proper spacing, tabs and capitalization. But actually formatting a word processing program to follow those guidelines is worse than sitting through Ishtar with your grandmother.

And make no mistake that format is absolutely critical. Anyone submitting a script that's improperly formatted should just throw it into the trash themselves and save the shipping cost because that's where it will end up anyway. Improper formatting is the mark of an amateur, and of someone who doesn't care enough about the movie industry to follow their rules. You may have written the next Lord of The Rings, but if it's not in the right format, you're headed for Mount Doom.

So what do to? How to get that Oscar-winning dialogue and those lavish scenes onto the page? Just like the rest of Hollywood, technology has changed the landscape.

Cut To: Final Draft.

Final Draft is (by most estimates) the number-one screenwriting software for sales and industry permeation. It has many industry endorsements including screenwriters who have penned some of the biggest movies in the past decade. Its beauty lies in the simplicity of use which masks a robust word processing program and deep set of tools.

Final Draft is already set with the proper screenplay format so you, the writer, can concentrate on what you do best; write. Anyone in Hollywood will tell you that story is the thing when it comes to movies, and Final Draft allows you to concentrate on just that. You spend your time concerned with whether your protagonist should pull out his grenade and risk his death to save the girl, instead of counting tab spaces. It aligns spaces and capitalizes each element of the script exactly as it should be.

And since story is the thing, it will even help you refine and shape your fledgling ideas. Hidden beneath the easy-to-use interface is a toolbox containing advice from industry experts, script templates, virtual note cards that you can drag and drop to easily move scenes anywhere in the timeline.

Need to type a submission letter or treatment instead of a script? Final Draft will do those too. It even has examples of produced scripts you can follow.

And lest you think Final Draft is just for screenwriters, it's also a full-fledged teleplay and stage play writing program. These two formats are vastly different from movie scripts and Final Draft knows just how they should look.

Flexibility, of course is a bankable commodity in Hollywood and Final Draft delivers there as well. If you want to step outside of the formatting rules for a legitimate reason, Final Draft allows you to do that by manually changing the format settings anywhere, anytime.

There are other programs you can buy that will format your text into movie format, but Final Draft is the easiest, all-inclusive package on the market. It allows you to focus on your story from Fade In to Fade Out, while it toils behind the scenes for you.

But it won't write your Academy Award acceptance speech.