(And now you know why they call them “pitches.”) Most screenwriters are the ones on the other side, with the pitchforks. The fact is, most screenwriters aren’t the ones inside the Hollywood gates. the substance of many conversations and arguments about which screenwriting platform is the best (whether that conversation is in forums, or on Reddit, or in snarky blog comments) seems to always come back to someone asking the same question: Should I use Movie Magic Screenwriter or Final Draft?īut what I’ve never seen, in all my internet travels hither and yon, is a detailed assessment of these two software suites, pitted against each other, using criteria and metrics that go beyond the “feature-bloat” features that each seem to suffer from, and go straight to the heart of what matters most: How usable are these two programs to screenwriters in a real-world situation? (Whether that real world situation is multi-million-dollar film production or Jerry from Iowa and Jill from Washington writing the spec scripts that are going to save Hollywood.)

And the two most dominant in the last decade or so? You guessed it: Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft.īut as I write this article, I find it a bit odd that while marketplace is fairly replete with a score of alternatives as of the last half decade or so - Fade In, Slugline, Adobe Story, CeltX, Highland, Scrivener, etc. Why is that? Because there have only been a small handful of screenwriting programs available. But I’ve only used a small handful of screenwriting programs. Since then, I’ve written, co-written, or worked on hundreds of feature screenplays. I hit RETURN, just like I’d done a billion times before when writing in Microsoft Word and other word processors. In short, with all due praise to John Hodgman, I was a “PC.”Ī different kind of “PC,” Production Coordinator Joey Geiger laughed at me because I didn’t instinctively know to hit TAB to get from the scene heading to start typing the action text below. It was on a “Macintosh” because I didn’t call them “Macs” back then. At Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Studios in 1997, I opened a script file using Final Draft for the first time.

Final draft 7 reviews