One of the things that sucks about this is that the publishing rights for all of the original, non-ip based scripts and TV scripts are actually controlled by the writers and show creators. So it’s individual writers, not big corporations that you are actually distributing the work of without compensation.
You might say but this is fair use / you aren’t charging or profiting… it’s not fair use and I think actually you are profiting. Posting it to hacker news shows that you do profit if only though building your own notoriety and as for fair use, you can’t distribute a written work in its entirety and say it’s fair use simply because you say it’s for “educational purposes.” If that was true you could do this with any book (which you obviously can’t). The screenplay has its own copyright distinct from the movie and you are distributing the entire work. Also if you go to your local Barnes and Nobel you will see screenplays published and for sale if you need more proof this is not fair use. There is a marketplace that this act undermines.
I know you have a link for people to do takedowns, but you also know the name of all of the writers. You should be proactively reaching out and asking their permission. I bet you would be surprised how many would grant it!
I'm not sure that screenwriters or studios care to much about this kind of distribution on the web. Screenplays for Oscar-contending movies are usually distributed widely and freely prior to voting, including via widely-known, industry-friendly blogs, and I don't know that anyone has any problem with this (unlike copies of the actual films distributed to voting members of the Academy). The scripts listed here are often available at a variety of long-established sites on the Internet. Yes, some screenplays available in book form, usually with added value content, such as production or behind-the-scenes photographs, commentary and analysis, etc. Hard copies of screenplays have been sold at comic and pop-culture shops, though I'm not sure how these are distributed or who benefits from them (beyond the shop).
Screenwriters advise other screenwriters to read existing screenplays, and the best source for someone wanting to read a lot of screenplays is the Internet. As someone who is trying to learn about screenwriting, availability of produced screenplays is a critical resource...and I simply am not aware of screenwriters or filmmakers demanding these already-produced screenplays to be taken down.
Humans are mostly driven by feelings. Even their thoughts are driven by feelings. That's why there is such a broad support for copyright violations. "Oh wow, free stuff! This feels good! This is good!".
Access to our culture is good. Access to art is good. Accessing this material would not likely have any negative impact on the creation of new art and could very likely promote the creation of new art, so I'm not really seeing any problem with it from a purely practical standpoint. From an emotional standpoint, it really is cool to read an early draft of a show or movie I love. I'm glad somebody is willing to risk the copyright police to host this for everybody!
These are screenplays. Normally they would stay in a drawer forever and nobody would see them. That's what the writers expect. Now they have a new life, and maybe the writers have new opportunities too.
Those are screenplays for successful projects. Not some studio's slush pile. Those have value.
(A web site for script slush piles would be fun, and would raise few objections. There are a huge number of rejected scripts around LA. It used to be a joke to ask random people on Melrose Avenue "How's your screenplay coming?" About one in five had a screenplay. There's a minor minimum-wage industry in Hollywood writing two-page summaries of screenplays. They're called "one-pagers", but are usually two pages. An actress/model/waitress friend used to do that to make extra money. She'd receive a stack of scripts written by unknowns, and boil them down to two pages each. Someone at a higher pay grade would read the one-pagers. At the slush pile level, that's how much attention a script gets. Many wannabe scriptwriters would be glad to upload their script.)
The screenwriters union fought for and negotiated for the right to own the publishing for their screenplays. Many writers of notable films have been able to use these writes to publish their scripts in book form to supplement their personal income.
Are you sure those are the same? The book contains two screenplays, an amazon review says it's an early draft but the download doesn't suggest that.
Even if they were 100% identical I'd be willing to bet the kinds of fans that would treasure having the book would still want it on their shelf even if they had a digital copy available.
I’m sure I can find an example of one that’s exactly the same copy. Regardless the writer gets the exclusive right to publish all drafts as part of their union won separated rights. Also your point about treasured copies would apply equally to any book, movie, or music but I don’t think if someone posted their free top 40 mp3 download site on hacker news in 2022 it would have the same reaction. I get that you want this to be a “victimless crime” but… it’s not. Sorry that’s inconvenient for you.
In the same vein I would argue that authors need to pay for the hard work of this gentleman distributing their work. they are profiting from the publicity for free
What "value" is there in this publicity that the author hasn't already received? I have to imagine that it's exceedingly easy to find the screenwriter for a published script, and as such this additional publicity gets them little to no additional benefits.
The downside of having this published for free is that the author now has a more difficult time profiting from the sale of the script. This is the same for any author that profits from the sale of their writing. This conversation would have a much different tone if the site was publishing novels, wouldn't it?
There are two ways screenwriters can make money directly from their writing.
Selling it to studios. (This website of already produced film scripts is not going to help with that)
And publishing and selling the script(This website and ones like it literally undercut that market and make it very difficult for any but the most successful writers to get any publishing money)
Not sure of the sources for this site but FYI; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars) has a screenplay library (they collect internationally and like to get different versions of them, from initial drafts to shooting scripts), there are also libraries that collect screenplays that are affiliated with other film or TV academies (and internationally) or film schools. Screenplays are also often given considerable distribution during awards season, even posted on special "for your consideration" websites that the film production companies setup each year.
This is brilliant and I've been looking for something like this for a LONG time, thank you!
Quick request: the experience would be even better if we could search for words/phrases within the screenplays of a particular episode/series/movie. Many times I randomly have a not-so-popular dialog in my head from a TV show or movie, and then find it incredibly difficult to find which particular scene it was from.
This is a great idea, I will add the full-text search feature.
Although it probably wouldn't work for your particular use case - TV shows rarely release the screenplays for all of their episodes, only a few select ones.
It's very interesting and useful for screenwriters looking to read screenplays to get better at their craft, but it's not enough to do a full-text search over a whole TV show.
This is amazing. Anyone that has written a script, what is the significance of words in all caps?
Breaking Bad:
Oh, by the way, he’s wearing a GAS MASK. That, and white jockey UNDERPANTS. Nothing else.
The Dark Knight:
A man in a CLOWN MASK holding a SMOKING SILENCED PISTOL ejects a shell casing. This is DOPEY. He turns to a second man, HAPPY, also in clown mask, who steps forward with a CABLE LAUNCHER, aims at a lower roof across the street and FIRES a cable across. Dopey secures the line to an I-beam line- CLAMP on- sends a KIT BAG out then steps OUT the window...
Highlighting people/props the first time they appear and/or if they should be especially prominent, and key actions.
E.g. notice how in the second example Dopey is only all-caps the first time, not when he is mentioned again 2 sentences later. And "FIRES" is highlighted, but "ejects", "turns to" are not.
These are all key characters or visual elements, often capitalized when introduced for the first time. Ultimately, convention is left up to the individual screenwriter, so you will find inconsistencies in application of capitalization.
I'm hoping I won't get into too much trouble, since:
- The intention of this library is to be a free educational resource for screenwriters, it's just a hobby project that I'm not making any money off of.
- I'm simply collecting and organizing the screenplays that are freely available online already (just with a nicer UI/UX, and with more convenient searching/sorting/filtering functionality).
- On the about page I have left an email people can use to submit a takedown request, if they want to remove their screenplay from the library.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm hoping this is enough to qualify for "fair use", or something like that.
> I'm simply collecting and organizing the screenplays that are freely available online already (just with a nicer UI/UX, and with more convenient searching/sorting/filtering functionality).
You're also redistributing them.
I have no idea if this is fair use or not, but redistributing might increase your risk. It'd be better if you could link to some other source.
Though I have no law expertise, this does not qualify for fair use. I do really like this though, as I haven't seen or heard of the majority of these and they're interesting to flip through.
Reproducing a copyrighted work in full as a part of publicly available collection is pretty clearly not, though, otherwise Pirate Bay would be 100% legit.
I like reading screenplays (and "regular" plays) because you have to imagine the "look and feel" of almost everything. It really exercises the visual imagination. If you have seen the movie, or play, you might remember much of it, but you'll have to make up a bunch of stuff too, or you might find your imagination going in some other direction -- but the story is still there, carrying you along.
Yes, I think it will soon be the largest library of the screenplays on the internet (if it isn't already), the idea is to find as many screenplays that are freely available online as possible, and add them to a library that is easy to search and to browse. And make it good looking, with nice UX.
I've heard of famous writers re-writing their favorite authors works by hand and I've fantasized about having more time to do that with my favorite tv shows/movies. For me I'd probably start with "Community" and see if I can absorb/train my neural net to be an iota as clever.
The two authors I have heard of doing this are Joan Didion (who typed out entire Hemingway novels) and Hunter S Thompson (who did the same, using both Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald as models). I always wondered if they arrived at this seemingly not very efficiient method independently, or if there was some antecedent. Do you know of any others?
I really like this and I adore the work you put into it, but as a couple of people already wrote you should beware of the water you are shipping here. E.g. this is a quote of a script that I picked randomly:
"NO PORTION OF THIS SCRIPT MAY BE PERFORMED, PUBLISHED,
REPRODUCED, EXHIBITED, SOLD OR DISTRIBUTED BY ANY MEANS, OR
QUOTED OR PUBLISHED IN ANY MEDIUM, INCLUDING ON ANY
WEBSITE, WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN CONSENT OF HOME BOX OFFICE"
Nevertheless, fingers crossed.
Nota Bene:
And as a data guy, I'd would love to get the whole archive to parse it and do some text and sentiment analysis or something like that.
On any given production, a ton of people have to have access to the script. Outside of production, scripts are handed over for various purposes, including promos, archiving etc. And then there are business like The Black List which are primary source of not originally (studio) comissioned scripts.
Form what I've seen, ONCE the material's out / production over, not many fucks are given if the script is out there as well. Now, is it legal? Who knows, depends where it came from probably. Heat would be on if it's a script in or before production, but it also varies.
Oh, thanks a lot for letting me know! The website got to the front page of HN, and I ran out of my free tier limits on Vercel, had to upgrade to the pro account.
I can't help but think this would be good training data for mapping text to long-form video. Even if it's too hard right now, don't underestimate our collective progress.
It's not technically, but movie and TV pilot screenplays circulate a lot before they get produced, because the creators want people to read them in order to fund/produce them. They're often rather different from the final shooting script.
On the other hand, scripts for TV episodes after the first generally have to be "leaked", which doesn't happen very often. But again, once it's out on the internet, the cat's out of the bag.
So production companies try to prevent scripts getting leaked, but don't really go after anyone once they're already out.
Plus acting studios use all of these in classrooms for training actors. So even if you did get the episodes "taken down" from websites, they're still circulating in classrooms in NYC and LA.
Of course, if you leak a non-pilot episode before the episode airs... let's just say don't ever expect to work in Hollywood ever again. ;)
> No portion of this script may be performed, or reproduced by any
means, or quoted, or published in any medium without prior written
consent of SONY PICTURES TELEVISION INC. * 10202 West Washington
Boulevard * Culver City, CA 90232
Subtitle files are arguably transformative and have a more benign character and purpose. They would have a significantly better fair use argument vs this. The purpose tends to either be to help the disabled or to assist non-native speakers in understanding the spoken dialogue track of the film. They also don’t directly compete with the underlying piece of copyrighted material (the screenplay) in the same market (publishing). A subtitle site could still easily end up on the losing end of a copyright suit but my point is this is far from an apples to apples comparison just because they both deal with text and audio/visual media.
Well OCRing books (for book search) was found to be fair use because “book search” and “books” are in different markets. So to the extent it is like book search that could be in its favor.
Your other example (text to speech and audio books) is significantly less transformative as audio books and books are basically the same or very related markets. (For example they are both sold in the same specialty stores)
It's probably posted without permission, but I don't think there's a strong incentive for rights holders to pursue copyright enforcement.
Screenplays are often meant for circulation, albeit in smaller circles within Hollywood and film industry personnel (producer and director mainly). The money is recouped when the finished film screens.
Of course, you can always buy the screenplay for personal reading to support their creators. It's often on Amazon. I used to read some at my library.
I love the UI - it is simple and beautiful . Can you please let me know how did you build it ? What is the tech stack to build an application like this ?
Don't ever judge a pilot screenplay -- those circulate sometimes for many years before a show gets produced, and modified heavily before a show is picked up.
On the other hand, episodes after the pilot would usually be shooting scripts.
Obviously final episodes don't always match shooting scripts, but the difference is usually in making cuts or slight reorderings, not adding new material.
Screenplays are different from scripts right? The screenplay an episode or movie is based off of may be significantly different from the script and the final product.
Screenplays are the interface, scripts are the implementation.
Thanks, I'm really happy you think this is useful!
This is just a small hobby project I have done over a couple of weekends. I don't have huge plans for it, I just want to keep finding more screenplays and adding them to the library, to make it even more useful to people.
Maybe I'll enable users submit their own screenplays and add them to the library (and create a new category for unproduced/spec scripts). Technically, they can do that already by sending me an email, but if there's interest I can make that process more convenient.
Also, I'm thinking that maybe it could help me build a discord community of aspiring screenwriters, where we'd brainstorm ideas together and exchange feedback about our work. Like an online writer's room for exchanging ideas and advice.
I have done that for my other hobby (writing adventures for roleplaying games like DnD), and it worked really well, it's very fun, and people love it:
Digital writing rooms seem like a cool idea. If you make one, shoot me an email! I'm just about as aspiring as it gets, I try to spend time getting comfortable with tools like Fade In but have yet to produce anything meaningful.
Awhile back, Mark Z. Danielewski did some treatments of screenplays for House Of Leaves. You should look for them. They’re incomplete but man I’d love to see them crack into a full show.
If all that is desired is the spoken text, most subtitle sites have fairly accurate copies of the official subtitles or even better than original subtitles for stuff that is very popular. For instance sometimes I see homophones for the correct words or abbreviated text versions for rapidly spoken speech even in the official subtitles for streaming shows. Websites like subscene.com and opensubtitles.org are pretty active.
The website is built with Next.js and deployed on Vercel.
It's so fast because Next and Vercel do a lot of smart optimizations with the code and the images.
Also, because the screenplays are not stored in the database, just one large local json file, so the server doesn't have to make an extra request to the database.
I think this is a good idea, and I think it wouldn't be all that difficult to convert pdfs into text. At least some of them, since some are represented as text and some are just picture scans, which would be much more difficult to deal with.
Numbers on the right are production-specific, but you can generally figure out that it's some combination of page number, scene number, and act numbers -- often with new pages inserted without reordering later ones, so 3B sometimes might mean the page between 3 and 4.
Asterisks on the right side indicate lines added/changed since the previous revision. Big blank spaces indicate where lines have been taken away.
This complicated system is because pages are constantly being replaced/inserted and distributed as they're rewritten, without re-printing the entire script -- not just to save paper, but because people are writing personal notes/highlights/etc. on pages and you don't want to lose those.
The first thing I though when I saw this was "is it legal". The way rights holders protect their assets these days I can imagine it won't be too long before it's taken off line. A shame really its fun to read scripts.
I just want to know why they're all written in the most horrible typewriter-style font. They're written on computers now, right? So why not use a font that's easier on the eyes?
Because the line spacing and margins and font pitch are specifically chosen so that 1 page = 1 minute. This is critical. It's also why dialog is written in a much narrower column than description.
But also, the typewriter font is "without personality". It gives a neutral almost engineering feel so you can focus on the content without being swayed by the style of a typeface.
I think it also conveys a sense of technical precision. Every comma, every dash matters. Screenwriting is incredibly precise. In comedy, the exact punctuation is as critical as the words.
(BTW, multicam comedies like Friends are double-spaced and follow a different formatting and speed-per-page. The double-spacing is to allow for handwritten changes and notes.)
Films are often edited to be quite different from the shooting script, so it's not necessarily about the end product, it's more about intentions.
The minute-per-page rule is really for two purposes: first to judge the general intended length of the movie (90 min? 160 min?) and therefore budget when shopping it around, and second in order to plan out a shooting schedule -- e.g. if you plan on being able to shoot 3 pages per day to produce 3 minutes of final footage per day.
Screenwriters often actually adjust the length of their descriptions in order to make it one minute per page, since you can't change dialog, but you can add or tighten descriptive language. They'll literally sit with a stopwatch and visualize the shots and say the lines out loud, and then adjust if it's wrong.
But once it goes into editing, then everything flies out the window -- the director and editor figure out what works best with what they shot regardless of what was on the page. Whole scenes frequently get dropped, especially in TV.
> They'll literally sit with a stopwatch and visualize the shots and say the lines out loud, and then adjust if it's wrong.
Thank you for these insights. This behavior strikes me as strange since the final product diverges from input. However like many things, the customs and conventions take on a life of their own in industry.
For clarity, 1 page = 1 minute, does that mean how long to read the page or how long that page is on film? I get a little confused by the part about adding descriptions, not dialog. For instance, could they not just leave trailing white space?
1 minute on film. So it's how long it should take for the actors to read dialog, plus pauses and action shots and establishing shots and everything.
Trailing white space would achieve the same goal but I guess they're trying to be elegant about it. :) But also, if the content takes a minute but doesn't fill a page, it's a good sign that more description will be helpful for the director and cinematographer to know what to do.
Also it's not like every single page has to be exactly 60 seconds, but it should average out to that over a 3-4 page scene.
If you look at the software designed specifically for script/screenwriting, it almost always produces scripts that look like that, even the very latest modern software. Examples are celtx and Final Draft.
Why? Maybe convention, maybe superstition, maybe readability. Coders also like monospace fonts in their IDEs. In fact, the font I'm using to write this comment (on HN) uses a monospace font haha!
The film/television industry is very conservative in some ways. Productions methods have stayed the same for nearly a century, often for very practical reasons. 12-point or 10-pitch Courier, the basic typewriter font, along with certain formatting rules, was found to produce a page of screenplay that equaled about a minute of screen time. Nothing has happened over the past 100 years to change that, so no one wants (or needs) to mess with an industry standard, which in this case might as well be a universal language understood by actors, producers, directors, etc. at least in the English-speaking entertainment industry. Thanks for the formatting, including the font used, everyone reading the script has the same idea about running time, scene lengths, character names, etc.
You might say but this is fair use / you aren’t charging or profiting… it’s not fair use and I think actually you are profiting. Posting it to hacker news shows that you do profit if only though building your own notoriety and as for fair use, you can’t distribute a written work in its entirety and say it’s fair use simply because you say it’s for “educational purposes.” If that was true you could do this with any book (which you obviously can’t). The screenplay has its own copyright distinct from the movie and you are distributing the entire work. Also if you go to your local Barnes and Nobel you will see screenplays published and for sale if you need more proof this is not fair use. There is a marketplace that this act undermines.
I know you have a link for people to do takedowns, but you also know the name of all of the writers. You should be proactively reaching out and asking their permission. I bet you would be surprised how many would grant it!