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.
> 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
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)
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
115 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] thread> 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
Cease & Desist Notice coming in 3...2...1
Is that legally any different from OCRing a copyrighted book? Or maybe running an audiobook through speech-to-text..
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)
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.
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. ;)
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...
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.
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:
https://rpgadventures.io/writers-room
It would take a lot of time and energy to run, but it could be helpful and worth doing, so I might do that if there's some interest.
Probably a bit of tradition there too.
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!
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.)
That is quite interesting. Presumably one could check runtime of films in this dataset and see how precise this is.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 the interface, scripts are the implementation.
https://earlybirdbooks.com/books-that-inspire-joan-didion
https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/hunter-s-thompson-typed-...
And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.
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.
I'm just curious -- besides the aesthetics and organization, how is it different from other screenplay sites?
Is it trying to be more complete? Or just a nicer site?
Also, are you trying to automatically scoop up new content, e.g. from the industry-standard:
https://sites.google.com/site/tvwriting/
(It's basically the screenwriter's equivalent of Sci-Hub.)
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 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.
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.
I will look into this!
https://labs.openai.com/s/kJtpqV4wZBeNkPnNVVchJKoE