Perhaps no film released last year contained more text than Spree, Eugene Kotlyarenko’s horror-satire about a driver whose insane night is broadcast online as a growing audience weighs in, Greek chorus style, through a series of internet comments, texts, and other written communication. In your own scripts, of course you can skip the whole moment where the character sees that a message is pending - Fennell is just ratcheting up the tension, for reasons that will become apparent when you see the movie. You can download the Promising Young Woman script PDF here, since Focus Features, the film’s distributor, made it available online for last year’s awards season. Here’s how she describes one character, Ryan, receiving a text:Īnd then Ryan actually receives the text:
(By the way: See Promising Young Woman! If you care at all about screenwriting, it’s a must-watch.)įennell handles the question of how to format a text message in her script very elegantly: She just writes it into the action. The texts we’re going to look at come at the end of the film, but we don’t think sharing them here will spoil anything if you don’t have the context of the rest of the movie. There aren’t a lot of text messages in Promising Young Woman, but texts are very important to the film.
Like all great screenwriters, Fennell keeps things as simple as possible. Why not start with the film that won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the latest Academy Awards? Promising Young Woman director-writer Emerald Fennell clearly knows what she’s doing.
Okay, turn off your text alerts, and let’s dive in. As Last Night in Soho and Oscar-nominated 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns recently told us, you want readers to forget they’re reading a screenplay and instead visualize your story on the screen. The best way to write something, as is always the case in screenwriting, is to make it as easy to read as possible. We’re going to lay out some examples here from films that handle texts artfully. But how you format text messages in a screenplay? Some of us even text more than we talk - so some films have just as much text messaging as they do dialogue.
If you’re writing a movie or TV script set in the present day, the moment will probably arise when your lead character sends or receives a dramatic text message.