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Re:Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better by WorldMaker on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @11:55AM (#18807601)
In addition to using a very standard font, screenplays have a lot of other very strict formatting guidelines involving use of things like particular whitespace rhythms.

It's the combination of the whole, including and especially the whitespace rhythms (which are still connected to font metrics, of course), that lead to the 1 page is approximately 1 minute guideline metric, because scene descriptions and actions have different whitespace from dialog.

Interestingly, compared to your expectation that a Tarantino screenplay would be more dense than the Fury Road screenplay, it is actually dialog that has a lot more whitespace overall in the screenplay format (they are subject to smaller inner columns) than scene descriptions/action descriptions (which use the full width of the page). Word count wise, action involves a lot more prose than dialog and many of the best action screenplays have more overall word count than a more dialog-heavy screenplay. (What I've seen of the Fury Road screenplay read like a novel, though as is pointed out elsewhere it is fascinating because it was written storyboard first, which is the exception rather than the rule.)

The screenplay format really is a fascinating thing to study. There are some great books out there on the screenplay format and how it came to be what it is today.

Re:Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better by bjcy on Friday January 04, 2019 @10:23AM (#18824591)
Any top recommendations for those books? Super intrigued to read more.
Re:Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better by WorldMaker on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:13PM (#18825670)
The big one that left a lasting impression for me at an early age was Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434. It does a very good job illustrating a lot of the technical mechanics of the format and the Hollywood guidelines and expectations that have built up around it (including the page per minute expectation, and even the expectations on page per act, which is another formula that Hollywood has), and some of why, using an example screenplay throughout.

(Just be forewarned it is not a great example screenplay in the usual fashion of such teaching examples because it is designed more towards the lesson plan than coherency/quality as a story of its own; and also arguably another example of that old weird maxim "those who can't, teach" given Lew Hunter's mostly TV Movie writer IMDB credits.)