Screenplay Format: The Complete Guide
Screenplay format is the most rigidly standardised writing format in the world. The font, the margins, the capitalisation, the spacing between elements — all of it is fixed by decades of industry convention, and getting it wrong is the single fastest way to mark a script as amateur. The good news: the rules are finite, learnable in an afternoon, and largely automated by any decent tool. This guide covers all of them.
What Screenplay Format Is
A screenplay is not prose. It's a technical document that tells everyone on a production — director, actors, cinematographer, editor, line producer — what happens on screen and how long it will take. The format exists for two reasons: readability (a reader can skim a correctly-formatted script fast) and timing (one correctly-formatted page runs roughly one minute of screen time). Break the format and you break both.
“Screenplay format,” “script format,” “movie script format,” and “film script format” all describe the same thing for feature films. Television scripts add a few wrinkles (act breaks, sometimes double-spacing for multi-cam), but the core elements below are universal.
Page Setup at a Glance
Font: 12-point Courier (or a Courier equivalent like Courier Prime). Non-negotiable.
Page size: US Letter, 8.5″ × 11″.
Left margin: 1.5″ (the extra half-inch is for binding).
Right margin: 1″.
Top & bottom margins: 1″.
Page numbers: top-right, followed by a period — 12.
Length: ~90–120 pages for a feature; ~1 page per minute.
The Standard Elements
A feature screenplay is built from a small fixed set of element types. Each has its own margin and capitalisation rules:
- Scene heading (slugline) — ALL CAPS, flush left. INT./EXT. LOCATION — TIME.
- Action — sentence case, flush left, full width. Present tense, only what's seen and heard.
- Character cue — ALL CAPS, indented ~3.7″, sits directly above the dialogue.
- Dialogue — sentence case, indented ~2.5″ from each side.
- Parenthetical — lowercase, in parentheses, between cue and dialogue. Use sparingly.
- Transition — ALL CAPS, flush right. CUT TO:, FADE OUT.
For the full per-element spec — exact indents, character counts per line, and edge cases like character extensions (V.O.) and (CONT’D) — see the Screenplay Format Template.
A Formatted Page
Here's what every element looks like together. Notice the capitalisation, the indentation that pulls dialogue toward the centre, and the transition pinned to the right margin.
Spacing Rules
- Scene heading: one blank line before, one after.
- Action paragraphs: one blank line between them.
- Character cue → dialogue: no blank line — they sit together.
- Dialogue → next character cue: one blank line.
- Transition: one blank line before.
When dialogue is split by a page break, the bottom of the page gets (MORE) and the top of the next gets CHARACTER (CONT’D). A good tool inserts these automatically — you should never type them yourself.
Why Format Matters
Readers — agents, contest judges, development execs — read hundreds of scripts. A misformatted one signals “beginner” before they've read a word of the story, and many stop reading there. Correct format buys you the benefit of the doubt: it says you've done the homework and your story deserves attention. It costs nothing to get right, so there's no excuse not to.
Go Deeper
- Screenplay Format Template — the full spec, a copy-paste template, and title-page rules.
- Movie Script Format — how feature film and TV formatting differ, with examples.
- Screenplay Format Example — a full annotated page showing every element in context.
Want the format applied for you automatically? Ensemble detects every element as you type and exports a PDF that matches the industry spec down to the margin — free, in your browser.
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