The Hollywood Standard: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style

I have to admit, that when I heard about The Hollywood Standard I wondered how it measured up with other screenplay formatting books. I had always taken issue with some of those books for not being as thorough or as "standard" as they should be. Being a producer with several credits to my name, and a published author ("I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development From The Inside Out") but also as a teacher and film consultant, I can tell you this is the one screenplay format book I will recommend to all my clients and students. In fact, I made it a required textbook in the Basic Screenwriting Fundamentals class I teach at Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. What I love about Chris Riley's book is how easy it is to understand and the great examples he gives. Especially how NOT to write Action versus how TO write Action. Invaluable. While there may be some differentiation for some writers who may not follow "The Hollywood Standard" 100%, it is definitely the "go to" guide that offers the real meat and potatoes of a format unlike any other a writer will have to learn. This book will be next to my computer and if you're serious about your screenwriting career, it should be next to yours. Rona Edwards Producer/Author "I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development From the Inside Out"

Our scriptwriting group uses this as a textbook. Excellent examples of formatting, style and how-to's. I'd also recommend for anyone interested in joining a production crew (shout-out to all those laid-off by the Big Three). Takes the mystery out of the industry by explaining WHY.

There are hundreds of screenwriting books on the shelves (some of them good), but even the best are 90% recycled material; endless prattling about character and plot points, as if the last 40 books never mentioned it. For all those hundreds of pages about narrative, there's very little technical information about how to convert that material into a rigid and admittedly unreadable format that is the screenplay. The advent of screenwriting software solves all those problems except the ones the books never talked about: proper formatting, which, Riley states quite reasonably, can put a good story in bad shape. He makes an important note before the book even begins: THE SOFTWARE ONLY DOES MARGINS. Neither it nor these books tell you how to type out elaborate, uncommon transitions and dialogue arrangements on the page: overlapping voices, phone-conversations, foreign langages, flashbacks and scenes-within-scenes (etc.)...but Hollywood Standard DOES. And unlike other writers of how-to books, he doesn't lacquer the page with self-important droning. He stays professional and direct, explaining the difficult in simple, concise, this-is-how-and-this-is-why fashion. You can read this book in an hour and STILL find yourself revisiting it again and again to double-check your work. Half of the book are examples of what can go wrong and how to fix it: everything from where to put hyphens in slug-lines to what words to underline and when to captialize and more. Your head is likey to start swimming from the overload of detail you receive about how to tweak things exactly the way they should, and from the realization of how much you didn't know: like how to omit scenes without changing the page count on a locked script, or how many lines should precede a page break, or when to alter you parentheticals. Granted, it was correctly mentioned that not EVERY SINGLE LITTLE DETAIL IN THE HISTORY OF SCREENWRITING FORMAT is addressed in this book, and there's no guarantee that refraining from underlining periods will get your script sold, but the information revealed in STANDARD will ensure that if your script DOES get rejected, it won't be for amateur mistakes. I can't recommend this highly enough.

I had not written a script of any kind since high school, nearly twenty years ago. I picked up this book and a copy of Final Draft, and wrote a screenplay that a former script editor referred to as the best script he had ever seen. While the program was very helpful in facilitating proper format, I could not have done it without the Hollywood Standard. Software will keep your margins in order, but it does not know how to write a script for you. This book gives you everything you need to know, in a reference book format that is easy to follow.

Thousands of fine scripts never get read because their format is wrong: in Hollywood, first impressions and amateur productions can kill an otherwise-solid presentation. That's why would-be script writers can't afford to live without Christopher Riley's The Hollywood Standard: The Complete & Authoritative Guide To Script Format And Style. Riley ran the script processing department at Warner Brothers and was the studio's script format guru, so he's got the credentials of authority to produce a winning guide covering everything from scene headings and pace control to managing POV shots and more. Quite simply, a 'must' reference for any up to the professional.