The makers of Movie Magic Screenwriter were kind enough to give me a review copy of their latest version, so I've been working in Screenwriter on some of my new projects to familiarize myself with it.
When I wrote CRAFTY SCREENWRITING, I did not like Screenwriter at all. It was a clunky port of a Windows program onto the Mac platform. I found that where Final Draft was intuitive -- it worked about the way I thought it should work -- Screenwriter was a classic Windows program. It had good capabilities, but you had to learn an arbitrary series of commands to get them going.
So I've been a Final Draft guy all along. I've bought (or got a review copy) of each version as they came along. (I liked Final Draft 8.)
But I've been hearing a lot about Screenwriter.
Screenwriter has always had one killer app. Movie Magic makes the budgeting software everyone I know uses (Movie Magic Budgeting) and some terrific movie scheduling software (Movie Magic Scheduling). The three programs are built to hook into each other. So you can save your cast list from Screenwriter and upload it into Scheduling, and you automatically know which scenes which characters appear in, and how many pages they are. This saves a lot of work for the production manager. When you're in production on a TV show, that's a big deal. Production managers would much rather you work in Screenwriter.
Somewhere in the intervening years, Screenwriter went through a heavy redesign on the Mac. It was always a fairly powerful program. It is now much more intuitive and much less cranky.
Its Import feature is much, much better than it used to be. It used to be quite a chore to port a Final Draft script over to Screenwriter. Now you can save from Final Draft to RTF, and into Screenwriter, and you will have very, very little cleanup to do. Even a port from properly formatted text goes smoothly -- which means you can effectively import a PDF into Screenwriter just by saving the PDF as text.
One thing I like a lot about Screenwriter is that it keeps your scene outline in a sidebar, so you can easily see how your scenes flow -- and change the scene order -- while looking at the pages. Final Draft has its Scene Navigator mode, but you can't look at the script at the same time. In fact, on Screenwriter, you can look at any level of outline, from Act to Scene to Beat, while also looking at your text.
Screenwriter still isn't 100% intuitive. It has its ways. For example, rather than hitting "tab" to go from a character name to a parenthetical, you hit "return" to go to dialog and then parenthesis to change the dialog to a parenthetical. If you want to actually put a parenthesis in dialog, then you have to go hunting for your manual to discover that you need to type "control-open-paren" to get a parenthesis in dialog. To uppercase something is control-U. (Screenwriter loves to use the "control" key, a sign of a Windows port.) None of this is a big deal, you just have to learn it.
MMSW comes with all sorts of features set to "on" that you have to turn off. For example, if you type a period, it adds two spaces automatically. I don't like two spaces after a period (see my post One Space or Two), but even if I did, I don't want them added automatically, because I automatically add my own spaces.
It has a minor flaw that, in index card form, you can't see more than 12 cards at a time. In Final Draft, you can view as many cards across as you like, so if you're willing to put up with small cards (or have a big screen) you can view half the script at once.
It is annoying that you can't OMIT a scene unless you lock pages. MMSW assumes that I would never want to do that. But sometimes I like to cut a scene but keep it available, because I'm not sure I really want to cut it. Sometimes I want to remind a producer or director that I've cut a scene, even though we're in development and long before the point where I'd be locking pages. In Final Draft, I can just OMIT the scene, and I can even revise the omitted header, so it can read:
Another minor flaw is that some of the shortcuts get in the way. For example, I like to open up white space on my screen when I'm working on a scene. However if I type "return" twice, Screenwriter assumes that I want a slugline -- because a screenplay should never have two blank lines in a row. I find that irritating. If I wanted a slugline, I'm fully capable of typing "INT." myself.
If you want to write (V.O.) after a character name, it's super-easy: just type "(v" after the name. But if you want to write (V.O. PRELAP), which is something I sometimes like to type, when I'm pre-lapping dialog from the next scene, it's vastly irritating. I have to type "(" after the name, then click on a dropdown list to allow me to "add as text," then type "V.O. prelap."
And apparently you have to do this every time -- there doesn't seem to be an easy way to add V.O. PRELAP to a list.
You can easily change definitions of the standard screenplay elements -- dialogue, character, transition, etc. But what if you want to define a new one? For example, I sometimes define a "song" element that looks like dialog, but has longer lines, and arbitrary line breaks. Or when I'm working on a bilingual script, and want a "subtitle" element to follow the dialog -- I don't see how I can do that in Screenwriter. But I can in Final Draft.
I can format dual dialog and see it onscreen in Final Draft; in MMSW, dual dialog only views properly once previewed or printed.
All this adds up to a little occasional frustration. I actually got my review copy a couple of months ago. I've been playing with it since then because I wanted to take the time to get up to speed. As a Final Draft veteran, it took me almost no time to learn how to do 95% of what I needed. But after over a month, there are still these little doodads that get in the way. It's possible that I could eventually figure out how to fix some of these issues if I spend enough time with the program. But why should I have to, when I can do them all easily in Final Draft? Production managers aren't the people I have to please, producers and directors are. And they read my scripts in PDF anyway.
My feeling is that Final Draft was built on top of a word processor. It assumes you know what you want to do, and will let you do what you want. If that causes formatting errors, that's your lookout. I feel like Screenwriter is built on something other than a word processor -- perhaps a database program of some kind. So if what you are trying to do does not fit Screenwriter's ideas of what a screenplay has to look like, tough luck.
Screenwriter seems ideal for someone who does not type very fast, for whom saving a few keystrokes is more important than being able to freely compose. Since I type slightly faster than I can think, I don't want to save keystrokes, I want to save brain cycles.
Incidentally, neither Screenwriter nor Final Draft, so far as I can tell, can put two pages up on the screen. That's frustrating. I have a beautiful 22" Dell monitor looming over my 15% Macbook Pro screen, so I have a fair amount of real estate. I'd really like to be able to see two pages at once. With so many nifty features packed into this program, is viewing two pages too much to ask?
All in all, Screenwriter is a good program. I give it a solid B+. It's something you probably want to know how to use. Your production manager will thank you for using it. From the survey I did of my own readers, it seems to be the preferred program among professional screenwriters.
But after a month, I am still trying to iron out issues. I will almost certainly finish the screenplay I'm writing in Screenwriter. But I think I might go back to Final Draft when I start my new one. And that is ultimately the only real recommendation I can give.
UPDATE: Note also DMc's terrible experiences with FD's customer service, linked in his comment below. I should also mention that FD uses a bad system of authentification where anything you do to your computer -- e.g. updating the OS -- can wipe out your authorization, requiring a call to customer service. (However, they cheerfully restore installs once you do call them.) Screenwriter uses a smarter system where if you lose your computer you can simply go to the website, delete the old authorization on the old/dead/lost computer, and transfer the authorization to a new computer.
Because I do prefer Final Draft, here's a link to buy it:
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