Write Brothers Movie Magic Screenwriter for PC, Mac (705868060066) Review

A long time ago, in a high school classroom not too far, far away, I promised myself that at some point in life after graduation - hopefully after going through college and becoming a bona fide journalist, I'd follow in the footsteps of Ben Hecht and Ernest Hemingway and write either the Great American Novel and maybe even some Academy Award-winning screenplays.

At the time I was seventeen years old and just getting started as a staff writer on the Entertainment beat of my high school newspaper.  I hadn't exactly chosen Newspaper Reporting and Page Editing as my sophomore year elective, but after a momentary inner panic attack ("Journalism? I'm not a reporter-type kind of guy! I'm a shy nerdy writer kind of guy!")  I took to the course like a duckling takes to water.

Still, because my teenager's enthusiasm for professional writing had been spurred by the fact that I knew movies start out - with very rare exception - as screenplays, I read several mass-market versions of screenplays, especially the four written by George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan for the Star Wars Trilogy and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  

Not only were these screenplays entertaining as reading material - they were all lavishly illustrated with either storyboards and/or other production art (posters, publicity and pre-production photos, and production paintings) - they were also pretty instructive because they had the basic elements of a screenplay (scenes, dialogue, action and transitions) for the reader to grasp the difference between prose style (such as that in novels and short stories) and screenplay style.

Form Follows Function

What I didn't know at the time is that when Ballantine Books (or most publishing companies, for that matter) release books that contain screenplays (The Art of Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, or The Illustrated Raiders of the Lost Ark Screenplay), they alter the screenplay format to the same style of presentation used in kids' reading textbooks or high school/college English Lit books, with each speaking part presented like this:

Luke: I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm here to rescue you.

Leia: You're who?

Of course, because I stayed on the print journalism track for quite a while and my one brush with TV production was limited to being the floor director for my high school's closed circuit TV "station" in 12th grade, I didn't get to see a script to any TV or theatrical movies done in proper screenplay format until I bought a copy of Stephen King's Silver Bullet, which is unique because it comes with the source novella, Cycle of the Werewolf in the same volume.

Still, this didn't affect me personally until the mid-1990s, when I had the chance to do some "script doctoring."  A friend of mine was working on a screenplay for a class project, and knowing that I was both (a) a good writer and (b) keen on wanting to write a screenplay, he asked me to revise a rough draft that needed some fine tuning.

I told him that I would but that I had never written a real screenplay in the proper format.

"Don't worry," he said as he handed me a copy of a book titled How to Write a Screenplay in 30 Days and a 3.5-in. floppy.   "This Word Perfect file isn't exactly set up professionally either, but just try to make your revisions match my draft's formatting and we'll be okay."

Formatting is Everything in Screenwriting

The "real screenplay format" is not, alas, easy to replicate on a typical word-processing program such as Microsoft Word 2007.  I assume that if you have the programming know-how and knowledge of the spacing and highly esoteric justification settings, it's possible that you can customize a template that allows you to write a professional-looking screenplay.

However, not many people have the skills or the patience to customize their own templates, so several software companies (including Final Draft and Write Brothers) have published programs that help wannabe screenwriters write professional-looking scripts which meet the standards of both the industry and the Writer's Guild of America.

Thus, when I helped my friend with his revisions, we had to make do with whatever formatting tricks we could do on WordPerfect (the software I had in 1997), knowing that his teachers weren't looking for professional-level formatting, just the rudimentary approximation they knew most people could achieve.

Movie Magic Screenwriter 6

Although I know the theory of screenplay writing well enough to still hope to write a script someday, until I purchased the Write Brothers' Movie Magic Screenwriter 6 screenwriting software, I figured that becoming the next Ben Hecht,  Paul Haggis, Lawrence Kasdan or David Koepp was only a writer's Walter Mitty-esque fugue.

Because screenplay formatting software is not cheap, I have to admit that much of the dawdling on my part was caused by my reluctance to invest in something along the lines of the Final Draft programs.  I'm cursed by an odd mixture of ambition and aversion to risk-taking; I sometimes want to do something BIG (like, say, write a movie script) but let worries about cost and what-ifs get in the way.

But because I have been thinking of adapting a short story I wrote 11 years ago into a screeplay just as a training exercise (for the time being), I recently decided to purchase a copy of Movie Magic Screenwriter 6, which normally costs $230 but was on sale at Amazon for $159.00.

Basic Features:

Movie Magic Screenwriter 6, which was published in 2008 by Write Brothers, is a multi-platform program which works on both Apple Mac and Windows-based PCs which use Windows Vista, Windows XP or Windows 2000 operating systems.  It comes in one CD-ROM disk and requires 60 MB of hard drive space (25 MB in Macs), as well as (for Windows users) a video card with 8 MB or greater to allow Screenwriter to work well in Full Page View.

Below are some of Screenwriter's 6 basic features:

Full-featured word processor designed specifically for script writing

Collaborate with a writing partner over the internet using i-Partner or send PDF files to agents, editors, or producers

Have your computer read your story aloud to get a sense of how it sounds

 Import your script or novel from MS Word and other programs

A Preferred File Format of the Writer's Guild of America West

Now, although Write Brothers (which has been publishing specialized writing software since 1982) calls this "Movie Magic Screenwriter 6" and the default template is the Screenplay Format, this handy program is actually designed to allow writers to write different types of stories, including but not limited to the following:

Novels

Teleplays (including sitcoms)

Comic book scripts

Stage plays

Thus far (I've only had this software for a few days and have just done the 10-minute tutorial), I've only tried out the Screenplay Format, but I can tell that when I start adapting Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken, I will be able to concentrate on the creative part of doing the screenplay rather than on the heretofore vexing issues of getting the formatting done correctly.

For instance, once you begin your first draft of a screenplay by typing the words Fade in or its shortcut command (hitting ENTER once by itself), all you need to do (after taking the tutorial once or twice) is refer to the manual until you have the pattern of keyboard commands (usually a combination of TAB, ENTER and one-letter "hot keys" for character names, screenplay elements, dialogue and transitions) down pat.

First Impressions:

Because I'm not the fastest of typists and I had to be putting on and taking off my eyeglasses to switch my gaze from my monitor to the manual and back to the monitor again, the "10 Minute Tutorial" actually took me over 20.   But as long as I focused on what I was doing, most of what was supposed to occur according to the manual did indeed occur on my computer screen.  Scene Headings were created. Location text was input. Character names and Action paragraphs were written, as were Dialogue elements and Transitions along the lines of CONTINUOUS, CUT TO and FADE OUT.  (This last Transition, for some reason, was hard to do; I had to hit the right combination of keys several times before the words appeared on the sample script I was told to write.)

The Movie Magic Screenwriter 6 program is not one of those programs geared for basic screenplay formatting only.  It has a lot of templates and features that are geared for professional writers, especially those who want to write production-ready screenplays.  These include:

 8 Instructional templates (including stageplay, screenplay, sitcom structure, and classic film structure).

 10 industry-standard Blank templates to help you format your screenplay, TV show, stage play, radio play, radio show, or even a comic book.

12 Sample files from the pros including 2 new sample files (comic story arc & radio play) and 2 updated sample files (screenplay and stage play).

 Over 86 TV templates including your classic favorites and 25 brand new ones.

Fully editable Index Card view so you can jot down story notes and ideas for your screenplay.  - from the Write Brothers website

Movie Magic Screenwriter 6  also has very handy tools, such as a thesaurus, real-time spell checking, formatting error correction, a name bank, easy-to-use menus, security options such as watermarks and password protection, outlining options and the ability to compare two documents at the same time.  It even has real-time scene renumbering (if a draft needs to be revised, as is very often the case) and revision tracking.

My Viewpoint:

Because Write Brothers' Movie Magic Screenwriter 6 isn't exactly cheap at $250 (I only bought it because it was on sale for $159.00 at Amazon a few weeks ago), I realize that many struggling writers will want to hold off until the economy improves or the price comes down a bit. 

Nevertheless, because formatting, editing, rewriting, fine-tuning and outlining big literary projects such as a screenplay or a novel are crucial if you want to have your script or stories read by an agent, producer or publisher, this software is a good investment.  It's easy to install, learn and use, it has tons of formats and editing tools to help you be more creative, and in case it helps you generate income from a sold script or story, you can write off the cost as a legitimate business expense in your 2009 tax return.