Reinventing the Typewriter: Surveying the History of Screenwriting Software
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Ever been working on your script in your screenwriting software of choice and ask yourself “How’d we get here? How did this software come to be?” Daniel Plagens, Humanitas’s Program Manager reviewed dozens of press articles, web sources, and archived materials, conducted original interviews, and wrote about what he learned.
Reinventing the typewriter:
Surveying the history of Screenwriting Software
by Daniel Plagens
The early novelists wrote by hand, using quill pens to write on parchment or vellum. The early screenwriters were lucky. Paper had been invented and the printing press, too, and with it, a little brother called “the typewriter.” It was on these, for the first seventy-odd years of Hollywood filmmaking, that the screenplays for early film classics would be written.
But by the 1980s and 1990s, screenwriters began to adopt computers as their writing tool of choice. This transition was slow. In 1984, the U.S. Census Bureau reported only eight percent of households owned a computer (compared to 92% in 2018). In the era of Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters, over half of adults who used a computer at home said that they were “still learning to use it.” They were also decidedly middle class, between 25 and 44 years old, had college educations, worked managerial, technical, or white-collar jobs, and reported over $25,000 a year in income—the rough equivalent of $71,263 in 2022.
Whether they were still learning how to turn a computer on or they already knew how to hack a mainframe, if a writer wanted to hammer out a screenplay on a newfangled Compaq Plus Portable, an IBM 5150, or something called an “Apple II,” their options were limited. There was no word processing software specifically for screenwriters at this time. That is, there was no floppy disk on the market that you could buy, stick into your computer system, and then have an easy-to-use platform that would let you write a screenplay and format it properly. Making sure character names were above their dialogue at 3.7 inches from the left side of the page, parentheticals (or wrylies) were 3.1 inches from the left, and dialogue was properly spaced from the right and left margins—users would have to do all this manually.
That was until Scriptor launched in January 1983 at $495 a unit, over $1,400 in today’s dollars. Even that, though, was not an all-in-one app the way we think of screenwriting software today. Writers would still write in WordStar or Microsoft Word, but they would add “tags” that Scriptor would read and interpret to format the text into a screenplay. Complicated? Perhaps. Did it save time? Yes. The alternative was hitting the spacebar until it popped off its hinges.
The program was developed by Chris Huntley and Stephen Greenfield, who met as film students at USC. The pair worked various odd jobs in film and television before forming their company, Screenplay Systems. Greenfield explained in a 2012 interview that they wanted writing tools and “we figured other writers would want those tools too. We also wanted to be in the film industry, meet people, and be connected in order to be filmmakers [ourselves]. But… the people we met didn’t have the power to greenlight a movie.”
While their networking efforts may not have paid off as originally intended, the pair found a profitable niche. As the computer proliferated through modern life, production companies and studios embraced it as well. To assist the logistical side of production, Huntley and Greenfield’s company developed additional tools, including Movie Magic Budgeting in 1985 and Movie Magic Scheduling/Breakdown in 1987. And though competitors to Scriptor did arise by the late 1980s (such as Warren Script Utilities, ScriptWare, ScriptThing, and Final Draft), Huntley and Greenfield’s status as pioneers remained undeniable and, in March 1995, they received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement. To date, they are the only developers of screenwriting software to receive an Oscar.
Three weeks after Huntley and Greenfield received their Technical Achievement Award at a ceremony hosted by Jamie Lee Curtis, ABC broadcast the 67th Academy Awards ceremony hosted by David Letterman. John Carman of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Hollywood's big event was wonderfully littered by technical errors, bad taste, low comedy and lower necklines.” Opinions differed at The San Francisco Examiner: “[Letterman] made something entertaining from what is traditionally the most boring three hours of TV this side of a test pattern” (apropos of nothing: the 46th Humanitas Prizes in September 2022 was a tight ninety minutes). The award for Best Adapted Screenplay was presented by Anthony Hopkins and led to a moment perfectly encapsulating the mixed feelings about the evening.
“Scholars have long argued about whether the plays of William Shakespeare were written by others,” he read from a teleprompter. “They’ve also debated whether it is more difficult to write an original screenplay or to adapt one from other work—whatever.”
“Wow,” he added quickly, unamused.
As the writers of that joke no doubt cringed (and one can’t help but wonder if a punchline was still yet to come), Hopkins proceeded to present the award to Eric Roth for his work on Forrest Gump. Roth reported in a 2020 appearance on the Pardon My Take podcast that he wrote the screenplay for the seminal film on a typewriter. Today, though, Roth writes using an MS-DOS program called Movie Master, which can hold up to 40 pages before it runs out of memory. This is fine by Roth; each file serves as a single act.
“I work on an old computer program that’s not in existence anymore,” he says in a short video produced by the Academy. “It’s half superstition and half fear of change.”
Roth is only half-kidding when he says the program no longer exists. Web searches return very little on the software, and pertinent information can only be gleaned by looking at a frame of the Academy’s video where Roth boots up the MS-DOS emulator he runs on his computer to use the now 35-year-old software and the program’s start-up screen is prominently displayed. The software was developed by Adam Greissman, Ann Tuck, and Nick Southwell for the Comprehensive Video Supply Corporation, a company then based out of Northvale, New Jersey but has since gone inactive. Direct contact information for them was not immediately available, and it was difficult to find much on the company until I got in touch with Paul Distefano.
Distefano joined Comprehensive Video Supply in 1986. The company, he explained, manufactured and distributed various pieces of video production equipment to broadcasters and professional videographers across the country. He started as a regional sales manager charged with covering New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Eastern Canadian provinces, and he was eventually promoted to sales development manager, overseeing several other salesmen.
“If we didn’t sell it, we could find it,” he told me over the phone.
He described the company’s sales catalog as a “bible of the industry” and sent me scans of the copies he had kept over the years. The 1984-1985 edit advertised “The Associate Producer,” a production budget and scheduling program for the Apple II (priced at $499) and MS-DOS and CP/M based computers (priced at $549). A demo disk could be purchased for $10. That year’s catalog also advertised Edit Lister to assist videotape editors, and another nascent piece of scriptwriting software called Powerscript. New products in the 1992 catalog included PC-2, which generated digital chyrons over video, and FONTS-PLUS, an add-on circuit board that made available to editors fonts like Bauhaus, Brush, Rockwell, and Garamond.
That year’s catalog also advertised Movie Master. It was described as “a screenwriter’s dream come true” and “a powerful word processor that handles tedious screenplay formatting automatically. It is flexible too, so you can set your own margins, insert B-pages and B-scenes and customize the program using the special command feature… Don’t waste hours formatting! Let MOVIE MASTER do it all for you at a price that gets rave reviews.”
That price: $399. Or $349 if you didn’t think you needed the built-in spell checker.
Paul did me one other favor: he told me he still knew Adam Griessman and put me in touch with him.
The Minds Behind Movie Master
Griessman seemed surprised when I told him Eric Roth still used his product to this day. He was now the chief technology officer of Pearl Capital Business Funding, a small business financier, a far cry from his earlier days.
“Movie Master came from a kind of unusual place,” he told me. “I went to NYU in ‘79 and my mother’s intention was that I’d be a doctor, and I really wasn’t sure about that.”
Influenced by friends and roommates like future media producer Walter Gottlieb, Greissman switched from a pre-med track to the film program in his sophomore year. His grand start out of film school, as he puts it, was “was doing nothing.” He had learned to type in the seventh grade, and with a typing speed approaching one hundred words a minute, he found a data entry job where he’d be given a stack of index cards and postcards and enter data from them into a computer terminal. His wage was around three dollars an hour.
It was from this job that he developed an interest in computers, computer programming, and typesetting. He learned the basics on a Timex Sinclair and was hired by an advertising company on Wall Street to work on ads for stock issues and bond redemptions.
“We’d have a team of thirty people going around the clock for four days, and they would produce basically six pages of the New York Daily News… and I wrote software to automate that and cut the time in half,” he explained. “I did that on a RadioShack TRS Model 100, which was like the first real laptop. I was also still writing my own scripts, trying to break in. I ended up writing my own script formatter that was similar in concept to Scriptor.”
He used this self-developed formatter to develop TV pilots and feature-length screenplays. He also used it to help his friends, including writer and actor John Ford Noonan, helping him with the play Talking Things over the Chekhov. “He would dictate to me and I would type in real time into my word processor, my formatter. And then we printed out his pages. So that’s how I got into computer science.”
After leaving his typesetting job to do consulting work on Wall Street, Greissman linked up with Comprehensive Video Supply around 1985, who by then were looking for a computer programmer who could help develop lines of software for the film and television business. The first product that he and the company’s team of programmers released was Tape Master, which was a video tape library system. He also worked with Nick Southwell, who was an expert in the C programming language. They were also joined by Ann Tuck, a childhood friend of Greissman’s who was instrumental in adding code to Movie Master which allowed it to access more memory. This improvement meant users, if they had the right hardware, could keep a script in one file as opposed to having to link multiple files together.
Greissman and Southwell worked together on the nuts and bolts of Movie Master as a word processor. Greissman explained:
The paragraphs and features that make up the script each have their own little data structure. And so in memory, it's a linked list of data structures where you've got scene headings, character name, dialogue, parenthetical statement, more dialogue. You know, it's a type of link list, and we had to basically create our model for editing. Basic word processing. Management of the paste buffer was really super difficult because you could put your cursor anywhere. So if you put your cursor in the middle of a scene header and the other part of the cursor was on a character name or in the middle of dialogue, you had to decide what the next move meant. Like when somebody hits copy or cut or paste, exactly. How do you interpret that?
“It was a tough program to write because there were very few benchmarks about how to do it,” Greissman said. “I looked at text editors, which I used all the time.”
Greissman and the company looked at Perfect Writer, Microsoft Word, Word Star, and Scriptor as influences. Greissman’s goal was to keep things simple and fast. He created a system so that character names could autofill after the first one to two letters were typed in. He liked the idea of pull-down menus where the first letter of a macro did “what you thought it would do.”
“There wasn’t a lot to memorize in Movie Master,” he said. “There were actually very, very few things you needed to memorize so you could really just start using the program and kind of figure it out. I think it demonstrated itself over time.”
The program proved popular for many years. Greissman estimates they sold over 10,000 units—“saturating the market,” as he put it—and recalls seeing help wanted ads in Hollywood Reporter and Variety where knowledge of Movie Master was a hiring requirement. He visited the sets of Days of Thunder and Hunt for Red October to help their writers and production teams acclimate to Movie Master.
But technological changes were in the offing. Windows computers were advancing and slowly but surely displacing computers with MS-DOS operating systems, which Movie Master was designed to run on. Greissman visited the Boston SIGGRAPH Convention in the mid-to-late 1980s to learn more, to see if he could create a Movie Master for Windows instead of MS-DOS.
By 1990, Greissman decided not to pursue developing Movie Master for another operating system change and he left the film and television business altogether by 1992. He pivoted to financial technology, doing work for Citigroup, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and other commercial finance companies before becoming the CTO at Pearl Capital.
“The reason was there just wasn't enough business to keep me in the business.”
Greissman couldn’t recall the price point of Movie Master so, for the sake of conversation, estimated it was $100. “Ten thousand times one hundred is one million. But spread out over how many years? It's not really a business. You need a broad market.”
That broad market would later be found by Final Draft and the Write Brothers, Greissman acknowledges. “Those programs really took over and they found a market in selling to universities and students. They found the broad, non-professional market.”
Big Business
Fast forward to 1999. Americans began to hear about something called “Y2K” that might end civilization as they knew it. The dot-com bubble continued to grow and no one considered that it might one day pop. The Sixth Sense was a phenomenon and people were camping out to be the first to see Star Wars: Episode I.
In the midst of all this, the screenwriting software business evolved to the point of consolidation and acquisition. Various products, like Movie Master, began to disappear from the marketplace until there were two main competitors jockeying for position as the industry standard: Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter.
The latter was, at least partially, another product from Chris Huntley and Stephen Greenfield. They’d rebranded from Screenplay Systems to Write Brothers, Inc. and, by their own admission, recognized that Scriptor was becoming obsolete. Why use their converter when you could use software that was an all-in-one package? The pair bought the rights to ScriptThing, a Windows program originally developed by Ken Schafer, and retooled it, releasing the resulting combination as Movie Magic Screenwriter. The program was well received, winning a Macworld Editors’ Choice Award in 2000.
Final Draft was founded in 1991. Like Huntley and Greenfield’s Scriptor, it was the brainchild of writing partners Ben Cahan and Marc Madnick. Madnick was a production accountant while Cahan was a developer of production scheduling and budgeting software for BC Software. LA Weekly reports that they went into business together in the late 1980s because Cahan felt he could improve on the tools already on the market. In the same article, Madnick compares their relationship to another pair of tech entrepreneurs: “He was the Steve Wozniak to my Steve Jobs. I was business and sales and he was engineering.”
Coincidentally, in the company’s salad days, Final Draft was a Mac-only product. Cahan and Madnick would refer inquiring customers with PCs to Scriptware. Scriptware was PC-only screenwriting software from a company that, in turn, would refer inquiring customers with Macs to Final Draft. But in 1995, Final Draft released a version for PCs, making it an early example of a screenwriting program that worked on both types of computer. Scriptware ceased updating its product in 2000, but its website—in all its early aughts glory—remains live.
Around 2003, Madnick bought out Cahan and moved the company to Calabasas. By this point, screenwriting software had fully penetrated the Hollywood screenwriting apparatus. But software sometimes fails. Glitches occur. Files disappear. Tech support is needed, especially if your clientele includes the high profile. Lynn Hacking, vice president of marketing, acted as the tech support representative for the likes of “Oliver Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Marlon Brando, who call him when they have problems with their screenwriting software,” per a January 9, 2000 New York Times report. Hacking’s LinkedIn profile, in which he describes himself as the “forward-facing liaison between filmmaker and solutions engineer,” notes that he “procured most of the A-List testimonials in use for marketing campaigns, including Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Michael Bay, James Cameron, Sofia Coppola, John Cusack, Wes Craven, Richard Donner, Carrie Fisher, [and] Edward Norton, to name a few.”
The same Times piece notes the arrival of a new type of software marketed to aspiring screenwriters. These were pre-writing programs, applications designed to help writers plan and outline before drafting full scripts. There was the $277 “Write a Blockbuster,” which included a “built-in story coach; a premise developer; ‘22 Steps Toward Weaving a Surprising, Interesting Plot’; a dialogue coach and 16 examples from hit movies to ‘build the script the studios want.’” FirstAid for Writers cost $199.95 and contained “five full modules with more than 60 subject settings” and an “intervention module” that “helps in writing erotic scenes.”
Write Brothers, Inc. released their own prewriting software still available today. Largely Greenfield’s brainchild, it is called Dramatica, and it is extremely complex. Per the Times, it involves a 250-question test, the answers of which are then run through a “story engine” that can help structure plot and make suggestions about characters and their motivations, subconsciousness, and themes. The software also involves a idiosyncratic, sometimes mechanical and at other times Jungian lexicon—“Influence Character,” “Story Mind,” “Relationship Story Benchmark”—specific to Greenfield, Huntley, and co-creator Melanie Anne Phillips’s own theory on story.
A story, they argue, “is a model of the mind's problem-solving process.” The Times quotes Robert McKee—who is well known for his own “Story Seminars,” writing the book On Story, and as the subject of parody in the 2002 film Adaptation—as being deeply critical of the theory and its complexity. For his part, Greenfield wrote a letter to the editor in which he pointed out that there was also a quick 34-question version of the introductory test and argued that “no one book, teacher, seminar—or software—has ‘all the answers.’ Writers will do well to experiment with several approaches, picking and choosing what works best for them.”
These prewriting tools were emerging alongside an expanding market of screenwriting consultants, workshops, contests, and classes—with varying degrees of credibility and utility— that catered to aspiring writers as the spec sale market increased in monetary value and public visibility. The spec market boomed in the 1990s, peaking mid-decade with 173 spec sales in 1995. These tools also piggybacked off a variety of texts that by 2000 had influenced the Hollywood mindset. As observed in Daniel Bernardi and Julian Hoxter’s scholarly 2017 book Off the Page: Screenwriting in the Era of Media Convergence, Syd Field’s 1979 manual The Screenplay popularized the three-act structure and Christopher Vogler’s The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers simplified into development shorthand the writings of Joseph Campbell, whose book The Hero with a Thousand Faces influenced dozens of Hollywood films.
Hoxter and Bernardi also note that the rise of screenwriting-specific word processors, how-to-books, consultancies, the proliferation of the number of spec scripts floating through the Hollywood ether, and changing corporate infrastructures coincided with a shift in what was considered acceptable writing style.
The “status quo ante in the period of typewriters and analog effects,” they write, “was for shooting scripts to describe practical action in detail and in blocks of text.” But in 1998, Creative Screenwriting magazine was reporting on a “sparer screenplay style with ‘a look and flow conducive to… a pared down read.’” Writers were being advised by agents, producers, and others to write with simplified style to make reading a quicker experience as reading loads demanded of the so-called “gatekeepers” continued to increase. Meanwhile, software programs like Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter, Hoxter and Bernardi argue, “helped to embed default developing orthodoxies of screenplay format for the new generations of writers.” Out went the blocks of text, in went the white space.
Retina Displays and Disruption
While they dabbled in the screenwriting guru game, Greenfield and Huntley’s Write Brothers, Inc. did not give up on developing word processors. The company released the last full numbered release of Movie Magic Screenwriter—its sixth—in September 2007 and continues to provide updates and support for the software. This version included several ancillary features that were borrowed from pre-writing software, chief among them a dedicated notes section and outline panel. Final Draft competed with the eighth iteration of its software which it called—shockingly enough—Final Draft 8. It included a similar feature set to Movie Magic Screenwriter 6 and a similar price: $250.
But there was a surprisingly large problem on the horizon neither company expected, and one that was difficult for general audiences to fully appreciate. This was the advent of Apple’s Retina Display. What is a Retina Display? It’s a brand name. What does the brand name actually mean? In the words of Macworld: “Retina is an Apple marketing term for which there’s no concrete definition.”
It’s best to think of it like this: A Retina Display is a special type of screen that is used on MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, and iMacs and has a higher pixel density than was previously standard. The upshot for screenwriters and developers at Final Draft and Write Brothers, Inc. was that, for a variety of technical reasons, text in their software now appeared on these screens as fuzzy and uncomfortable to read.
Fixing this was “a long, painful process,” Greenfield describes in an undated blog post, “one that has involved Apple working closely with us to help overcome complex engineering issues… and it’s taken over three years because Screenwriter and Dramatica are MASSIVE applications with hundreds of features.” The result has been many quiet updates over many quiet years.
In 2014, Final Draft began supporting the Retina Display with the release of Final Draft 9. To upgrade from Final Draft 8 cost $79, and there was a sense among some in the broader screenwriting community that this new version did not do enough to improve upon its predecessor to justify the cost. Slashfilm noted in their review that “there are no groundbreaking features that adapt to the online world. No cloud features, no useful online collaboration, no syncing with your mobile device.” An angry Reddit thread called “Final Draft 9 – basically FD 8.1, not even worth it” summed up the feelings of the screenwriting internet of the time. Notable screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin voiced their criticism on the January 17, 2014 episode of their podcast, Scriptnotes.
While August, who by this time co-developed his own screenwriting app, Highland, provided even-handed compliments, the consensus amongst the two was that, in August’s words, “it feels very much like the existing Final Draft 8. Like really very much like it, just with some new sort of cleaned up graphics.”
Mazin was less muted. “A lot of these features should have just been released incrementally as free updates on top of eight,” he argued. “There is nothing here that justifies a brand new release and to charge whatever they charge.”
After continuing to critique the high price point, Mazin continued, “And I think that frankly Final Draft is—they are perilously close to being disrupted, as the Silicon Valley term goes, because nobody cares about this Final Draft crap anymore. We’re in the age of PDF for transmission and they’re going to go bye-bye.”
This reception resulted in unintended consequences. Final Draft customer service reps received aggressive emails and calls from angry users, prompting August and Mazin to invite Final Draft representatives on the show and to suggest aspiring screenwriters not, as Mazin put it, “treat fellow human beings (many of whom are just working an hourly gig) poorly because you don’t like the company or product.”
“The One With the Guys from Final Draft” aired less than a month later; August and Mazin were joined by Marc Madnick and Joe Jarvis to discuss the release of Final Draft 9. The four cover an immense amount of ground, ranging from the difficulties of software development to prices to tech support. Among other things, Jarvis, then product manager, explained their slow turnaround time as due to “a lot of legacy code… unfortunately because we’ve been around so long it’s harder to pivot quickly because right now I’m talking all day long with our chief architect about these particular libraries that if we want to pursue opportunity A, or opportunity B, or put it on the surface, or make it Unicode for other languages, there are some legacy libraries that are going to have to get removed.” Madnick, meanwhile, argued that the price point was necessitated to adequately pay the company’s forty employees. August and Mazin offered firm pushback. The conversation was decidedly tense, but did not end entirely acrimoniously:
Marc: And please feel free to keep criticizing us. It makes us better.
Craig: [laughs] Fantastic.
John: Thank you guys so much.
Joe: Something tells me they will. [laughs]
John: Yeah, probably.
Marc: As always, John, good to see you.
Craig: Thank you guys, that was great.
In 2016, the company’s 25th anniversary, Marc Madnick sold Final Draft, Inc. to Cast & Crew, a company that was largely known as a payroll and human resources provider up until that point. Since then, Cast & Crew’s new subsidiary released Final Draft 10, which added collaboration features to allow writing to work remotely in real time with their partners, and Final Draft 11 and Final Draft 12, which both introduced more sophisticated prewriting tools and improved change-tracking features.
Still, in the mid-2010s, negative public sentiment for Final Draft and Movie Magic’s low profile led screenwriters to search for alternative software to help them write their features and pilots outside of what I’ll call “the big two.” One option was the now defunct Adobe Story, but many of the other programs that emerged in the broad screenwriting subculture were made by small developers, often with only a handful of employees.
One example is Celtx, which was based on the open-source Firefox browser. From its inception in the mid-aughts to 2011, it was a free and open-source piece of desktop software. Development stopped in 2011, and the open-source component was officially discontinued in 2017. Developed by Greyfirst, a Newfoundland and Labrador-based Canadian company, its main offering today is a web service that, as The Globe and Mail describes it, is “more akin to Google Apps.” For a monthly subscription fee, users receive access to a standard screenwriting word processor and tools for pre-writing, storyboarding, production scheduling and coordination, and community collaboration.
Fade In was another alternative that picked up steam at this period. Initially priced at $50 (now $79.95), the software designed by Kent Tessman received glowing reviews in the New York Times, Macworld, and PCWorld, and endorsements from screenwriters like Mazin, Rian Johnson, Kelly Marcel, and video game developer Ken Levine of Bioshock renown. Aside from its features list, a key push in Tessman’s marketing of Fade In has been to establish that its price point is lower than Final Draft’s. As it says on the purchasing page of the Fade In website: “For just a fraction of what it costs to buy a new copy of Final Draft, you’ll get a software package that does everything Final Draft does and more. Not only that, but it’s less than the cost of a single Final Draft update—and updates to Fade In are free.”
Writing in the Cloud
A third and especially unique alternative also arrived on the scene. This was the cloud-based WriterDuet. When it first launched in 2013, it was to Final Draft as Google Docs is to Microsoft Word, allowing a user to write a script simultaneously with a collaborator. WriterDuet’s users also wrote in the cloud; scripts were saved on a WriterDuet server and could be backed up on Google Drive, Dropbox, and a user’s individual hard drive. It was designed by the Austin, Texas-based Guy Goldstein, a computer engineer by trade and an aspiring screenwriter by calling.
“I had written with Celtx and Final Draft. At that point I didn't actually have as many problems with them as I think other people might’ve complained about at the time,” an energetic Goldstein explained on a call me earlier this year. “I knew that the missing opportunity in the market was the collaborative aspect, which I thought was really important.”
While building the code behind WriterDuet, which tracked a writer and their collaborators’ changes and saved keystrokes instantly, Goldstein had an overriding philosophy. His focus was on “just trying to make it feel like you weren't doing work, you were just creating. That was my goal and I think that other screenwriting software certainly has that goal as well.”
Producing a word processor is not, he explained to me, always an easy process. Different operating systems—Mac OS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android, and so on—behave differently. For example, Google’s keyboard reacts to inputs in a way that a Samsung Galaxy’s keyboard does not, such as keeping pagination consistent across different devices. Importing and exporting different file types so users could start a project in, say, Final Draft, then switch to WriterDuet, and then switch back again is also an important consideration.
Once WriterDuet was ready for market, Goldstein found a fanbase on the content aggregation website Reddit. Or, more specifically, the screenwriting subreddit (for the uninitiated, a subreddit is the section of the website devoted to specific interest).
“Certainly it was pretty small in 2013, but it grew so much,” he explained. “I was a member [of the screenwriting subreddit] and I was just hanging out. I don’t think you can do that right now. I’ve sort of seen [other companies] trying to do what we did. It doesn’t work anymore. And it’s because different communities just have different organic vibes, and I think the key to good marketing in this style is to just be there. To just be part of it. And if it turns into something big—cool. If it doesn’t, you weren’t there for that anyway, right?”
WriterDuet was not the first screenwriting tool to be based online and “in the cloud.” One of its predecessors was Zhura, which was founded in late 2007, and another was Scripped, which was founded shortly after in January 2008. The two subsequently merged in 2010 with Scripped.com remaining the flagship property. In 2015, however, Scripped was forced offline. A series of serious technical failures in both their primary and backup servers resulted in all user content being lost.
“As you may be aware, Scripped.com has been dealing with mounting technical problems and outdated technology. We have been planning to shut down for some time, but we had envisioned a much more graceful transition than what has occurred,” the company wrote in a statement. “The unthinkable has happened and all recent script content has been lost. We sincerely apologize for this. If you did not download a backup copy of your screenplay, then we regret to inform you that it no longer exists.”
I mentioned this story to Goldstein and asked him what he would say to a writer hesitant to use a cloud-based service like his.
“The cloud is pretty good at this point,” he said. “It’s kind of awkward to say this—I’m not trying to bash anyone else and certainly not trying to play more perfect at this. You have to know how people are developing [platforms] to a certain degree and know who they are and what they’re doing.”
He pivoted to his own work on WriterDuet. “Doing backups is huge on our end and is a huge amount of extra work. It’s extra money. It’s all these things that never matter until it does… but when something goes horribly wrong, we want to have that as a fallback. And you want to know that we’re doing that.”
He stressed how important this was to him earlier in our conversation. Describing his platform, he said, “We have cloud backups [for scripts]. It used to be one of our paid features that you could have separate cloud backups, but I’m like, no. This should be free. People deserve to have copies of their work everywhere. So we enable Dropbox, Google Drive backup options automatically. You can have it emailed to you. You can have a download to your computer automatically.”
“You should have a saying,” he said, “‘if you don’t have it in three different places, you don’t have it at all.’”
The Present
While the screenwriting software world has certainly evolved over the course of forty years, it is still a relatively niche market, and there is scant research to indicate how popular each piece of screenwriting software is amongst emerging writers. Arguably the best data available comes by way of Stephen Follows, a screenwriter and data researcher whose work has been featured in a variety of publications, including Forbes, The Guardian, and entertainment trade magazines.
In March 2019, he published the results of research in which he reviewed a dataset of 12,309 feature screenplays submitted to Screencraft in 2016, 2017, or 2018 and a survey of 2,128 screenwriters. Using the metadata that accompanies PDF files, it is usually possible to determine which program was used by the writer to create the script. Follows and his compatriots determined that 59% of the scripts in their dataset were created in Final Draft. Follows goes on to write that “Celtx was second at 12%, followed by Movie Magic Screenwriter (8%), WriterDuet (7%) and Fade In (4%). 9% of scripts were written in programs not intended for screenplay creation, such as Word, Pages and, yes, even NotePad.”
How these tools will evolve going forward remains to be seen. Without major changes in operating systems such as those in the early 1990s forcing developers to rebuild from the ground up, there is a push for various useful ancillary features. Goldstein and WriterDuet, for example, launched a feature in 2022 called ReadThrough which, among other things, allows users to leave feedback, to read scripts resized to their mobile device’s screen size, and listen to their scripts with computer-generated voices cast for each character.
Final Draft has implemented an inclusivity analysis feature which, per a page on the company’s website, allows writers “to assign custom properties to any character—race, gender, religion, physical characteristic, political viewpoint, favorite ice cream—any attributes and combinations of attributes you want to create and track—and then filter and display those properties in a series of charts.” The New York Times notes the update came in collaboration with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. John August’s Highland program instituted a similar feature one year earlier.
Why This History Matters
I started writing and researching this piece thinking it would be a brief overview of the lineage of screenwriting software. It felt like an interesting subject to explore for the Humanitas blog. The invention of the movie camera and the history of film technology is extremely well documented by a wide variety of sources. It has gotten to the point that Eadweard Muybridge and The Horse in Motion feels like the stuff of urban legend. By comparison, though, academic texts only lightly touch on tools used by screenwriters, if at all.
What I found after reviewing various sources and speaking with Paul, Adam, and Guy, wasn’t the story of a linear progression of personal computing developments but a microcosm of America’s computer tech industry.
It’s a story in three acts. In act one, a handful of garage pioneers build nascent businesses. In act two, those businesses achieve great success and the field enters a period of market oligarchization that climaxes, in act three, with a series of smaller enterprises emerging to compete with the entrenched firms.
The other thing I found was a recurring theme about the people who work at and for these companies. They are aspiring writers and film and TV lovers themselves who combine their knowledge of screenwriting and technology to create valuable tools that could not be envisioned by someone without that cross section of interests.
And all of this matters because the tools you use to write matter. Aside from a certain peace of mind coming from the knowledge that the faces behind the blinking cursor share your interest in and love of storytelling, knowing the history of these products and the engineers and entrepreneurs behind them is important because there is a strong argument to be made that technology affects our output as writers. In their book, Hoxter and Bernardi touch on the changes in what was recommended as “good” writing styles – more white space, fewer blocks of text – coincides with the introduction of computers and screenwriting software. Correlation does not equal causation, but there is at least one study indicating audiences read differently when reviewing material on paper versus on screens, so it stands to reason it may alter how we write as well.
As Humanitas's Program Manager, Daniel Plagens oversees the Humanitas Prizes, New Voices Fellowship, and College Screenwriting Awards programs while also handling day-to-day administrative matters. He came to Humanitas after working for several years in the unscripted television and documentary worlds and a stint as a writers' and production assistant on the YouTube Red series Paranormal Action Squad. An aspiring comedy writer himself, Daniel graduated from the University of Michigan's Film, Television, and Media program, where he was admitted to its selective screenwriting sub-concentration and won the Leonard and Eileen Newman Prize in Dramatic Writing. In 2020, he was named to the University of Michigan Entertainment Coalition’s Blue List, a compilation of the university’s top up-and-coming screenwriting alumni, and his work has since placed in writing competitions including those organized by the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards and the Austin Film Festival.