Nothing Is Ever Easy

After the inspiration struck for writing a screenplay, I did quite a bit of reasearch on the subject.   There are quite a few books written on this, numerous websites, and several software programs. 

I used a program called Contour for structuring the screenplay.  This allows the writer to write an outline of the sequence of events and act breaks for the story.  It uses several popular, recent movies as examples to help in laying out the story. 

Then I used a program cleverly called Screenwriter to format the dialogue in accordance with the accepted practice for font, size, and layout. 

A weird thing is that the accepted practice for binding a hard copy printout of the screenplay is TWO (not three) BRASS tacks holding the pages together (unwieldy and awkward); and the cover sheet MUST be pale blue with NO photos, clip art or anything else except the title of the screenplay, its author(s) - CENTERED on the blue paper - with the contact information in the LOWER RIGHT CORNER.  In COURIER 10 pt.  Anything else, I've read, is grounds for instant round-filing of your submission.  Weird.

There are several books I read about screenplay submissions, but the one I would most recommend is called Save the Cat.  The author's name escapes me at the moment.  His book discusses the formatting that Countour provides.  Also several examples, and, if you're interested, homework questions at the end of each chapter.

So, screenplay carefully written and re-written, and re-re-written, I mounted a writing campaign to find (a) an agent; or (b) a production company that would even take the damn time to open my pitch letter.

Nothing is ever easy.