Screenplay format, length, and what a competition will accept

How long should a feature screenplay be?

The published ranges cluster, and they differ at the edges. The Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting accepts feature scripts "no shorter than 80 pages and no longer than 125 pages."¹

Sundance Institute's Development Track sets a wider window with a stated preference inside it. Its FAQ names 90 to 120 pages as the industry standard, and accepts submissions between 75 and 130 pages where staff have not approved something else in advance.²

Those two ranges overlap between 90 and 120, which is where most feature scripts sit. A script at 138 pages is not disqualified everywhere, and it is disqualified in enough places to be worth counting.

Page count in a screenplay is a function of format rather than of word count, which is why reformatting a script can move it several pages in either direction without a word changing.

What is standard industry format, and does it matter?

It is a specific typeface at a specific size, with fixed margins and indents for scene headings, action, character cues, parentheticals, and dialogue. The Nicholl rules name the typeface directly, asking for scripts "in standard industry format (12 point Courier)," and note that non-standard formatting may negatively affect judging.¹

Sundance asks for standard screenplay format without prescribing the typeface. It requires a completed draft rather than a finished one, and describes the script it wants as a work in progress.²

The reason the conventions are strict is arithmetic rather than tradition. Readers estimate running time from page count, and that estimate only holds where every script uses the same margins. A script with narrow margins and a small typeface reads as shorter than it plays, and the discrepancy shows up in the first budget conversation.

Courier survives for the same reason. It is a monospaced face, so a line of dialogue occupies predictable space regardless of which letters are in it.

May my name appear on the script?

Not on a blind-read competition, and the Nicholl rules put the responsibility on the entrant. The rules state that the entrant is responsible for ensuring their name, address, phone number, or any other identifying information does not appear on the title page or any other page of the script.¹

Registration numbers are the exception. Library of Congress or Writers Guild registration numbers are permitted on a Nicholl entry.¹ A Writers Guild number refers to the West Registry, which describes itself as providing "a dated record of the writer's claim to authorship of literary material."³

Identifying information survives in places writers forget. A header on page one, a footer carried through from a template, the document's own file properties, and the file name itself have all disqualified entries that were anonymous everywhere a reader would look.

Does the script have to be in English?

For these two programs, yes, and the requirements differ in an interesting way. The Nicholl rules state that submitted scripts must have been written originally in English, and that translations by a third party, including translation software, will not be accepted.¹

Sundance takes the opposite approach to the same requirement. Its Development Track FAQ states that a script in another language has to be translated into English before submission.²

A writer working in both languages therefore has two different questions to answer, and the answer to one does not settle the other. Reading the specific program's rules is the only reliable route.

Neither rule is about the quality of the English. They are about provenance, and a script written in English by its author is what one of them asks for.

What does editing do to a screenplay?

It works on the text rather than the story. Character names spelled two ways, a location whose scene heading changes from INT. MARTA'S KITCHEN to INT. MARTHA'S KITCHEN, a character who is thirty-one in one scene and thirty-four in another, and a prop that appears before it is introduced are all consistency faults, and all of them are findable.

Format is the other half. Scene headings that follow one pattern for sixty pages and another after that are a mechanical problem with a mechanical fix. So are parentheticals used as action lines, inconsistent capitalization of a character cue, and a transition style that changes at the midpoint.

Spelling and punctuation inside dialogue need a lighter hand than elsewhere. Speech is written the way a character speaks, and a fragment in dialogue is usually deliberate, which is why those get queried rather than corrected.

What about the reader's copy?

A PDF, almost always, generated from the screenwriting software rather than exported through a word processor. Pagination shifts between programs, and a script that runs 119 pages in one can run 124 in another.

The version that goes out is worth checking as a PDF rather than in the editing file. Widowed dialogue, a scene heading stranded at the foot of a page, and a MORE and CONT'D pair that has come apart only appear once the file is paginated.

Title pages carry their own conventions, and they vary by market and by submission. Where a program publishes a title page requirement, that requirement outranks the general convention, and the Nicholl rule about identifying information is an example of a specific instruction overriding a habit.¹

Which software, and does it matter to an editor?

Final Draft is the common standard, and several other programs produce compliant output. What matters for editing is whether changes can be shown and reviewed, which is easier in some of these applications than in others.

Where the software makes tracked changes awkward, a workable arrangement is a marked PDF plus a list of consistency findings keyed to page and scene. The writer applies the changes in the script file, which keeps the pagination under one person's control.

Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence. An unproduced screenplay is held on the same terms as any other unpublished manuscript.

Version control matters more here than in most editing work, because pagination is part of what gets sent. One person holding the master file avoids a situation where two people are both correcting page 74 and neither has page 74.

Can an editor tell me whether the script is any good?

That is a different service from the one described here, and a different skill. Assessing structure, character, and whether a scene earns its place is development work, and it is done by readers and story editors rather than by copyeditors.

What editing supplies is narrower and still worth having before a script goes out. A reader working through a stack forms an impression in the first ten pages, and inconsistent names, drifting formatting, and typographical errors contribute to that impression without anybody deciding they should.

The published rules are the part of this that has definite answers. Page ranges, typefaces, and what may appear on a title page are printed, and a script can be checked against them before anyone reads a line of it.