The Industry Spec

Font: 12-point Courier (or a Courier-equivalent like Courier Prime).
Page size: US Letter (8.5″ × 11″).
Left margin: 1.5″.
Right margin: 1″.
Top margin: 1″.
Bottom margin: 1″.
Line spacing: single-spaced within elements, blank line between.
Page count: roughly one page per minute of screen time.

The 1.5″ left margin accounts for hole-punching and binding — a holdover from physical script distribution that has stuck around because everyone's tools assume it. Use it.

The Six Elements

A screenplay is built from six element types. Each has its own placement and capitalisation rules.

1. Scene Heading (Slugline) — ALL CAPS, flush left. Format: INT./EXT. LOCATION — TIME. Example: INT. KITCHEN — NIGHT.

2. Action (Stage Direction) — Sentence case, flush left, full page width. Describes what we see and hear. Present tense, no inner thoughts.

3. Character — ALL CAPS, indented roughly 3.7″ from the left edge. Appears immediately before that character's dialogue.

4. Dialogue — Sentence case, indented roughly 2.5″ from the left, with a right margin around 2.5″ from the right. Centered visually under the character name.

5. Parenthetical — lowercase, in parentheses, indented between character and dialogue. Use sparingly — only when the line reading is genuinely ambiguous or counter-intuitive.

6. Transition — ALL CAPS, flush right. Examples: CUT TO:, FADE OUT., SMASH CUT TO:. Modern feature scripts use transitions sparingly — often just FADE IN at the start and FADE OUT at the end.

A Worked Example

Here's a properly-formatted scene that uses every element type. Copy it, paste it into any screenwriting tool, and you'll see the formatting fall into place automatically.

Notice: scene heading in caps with location and time; action in sentence case describing only what is seen and heard; character names in caps above dialogue; parenthetical in lowercase; transition in caps, flush right.

Title Page

A standard title page is centered vertically and horizontally, with the title in ALL CAPS, "Written by" on a line of its own, then the writer's name. Contact info (email, phone, agent if you have one) goes in the bottom-left corner.

Don't include a draft date, copyright notice, or WGA registration number unless you specifically need to — modern industry readers find them noisy.

Page Numbering & Headers

Page numbers go in the top-right corner, followed by a period: 12. The title page is not numbered. The first page of the screenplay (with FADE IN) is also typically not numbered.

For production drafts, headers can also include revision-mark colors (Blue, Pink, Yellow, Green, etc.) on a per-page basis to track which pages changed in which revision pass. This matters in production, not before.

Just Use a Tool

Getting all of this right by hand — in Word, Google Docs, or any general-purpose editor — is painful and error-prone. Modern screenwriting tools enforce the format automatically. If you don't already have one, see our Best Free Screenwriting Software roundup.

Ensemble (the tool whose docs you're reading) handles all of the above automatically: type a scene heading like "INT. KITCHEN" and it's recognised; press tab to switch element types; PDF export produces output that matches the industry spec down to the margin.