That’s a pretty expensive pad of paper
Reader Andrew sent a link to a company that sells specially-formatted paper for hand-writing scripts. Since I almost always write first drafts longhand, I’m theoretically the target audience for the product.
Buying one 80-page pad will cost you $22 with shipping, roughly five times more than the Ampad pads I use. But my pads merely have horizontal lines, whereas the Everybody’s Write pads have a special grid system for lining up various formatting elements. The non-reproducible blue lines disappear when you photocopy them — but then again, non-existent lines disappear just as well.
Do I think these pads are a waste of money? Kind of. But if they help some screenwriters write, I see no reason to mock them. If they were cheaper (vastly cheaper), I’d even consider trying them.
Articles
February 12th, 2007 at 9:18 am
80 pages seems a tad short, even for a rough draft. That, plus my handwriting stinks.
February 12th, 2007 at 9:29 am
I don’t see the point… the idea of scribbling ideas down is, well, to scribble. Formatted scribbling?! I don’t know.
February 12th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Nice! But it’s nothing I couldn’t make in in an afternoon.
February 12th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Seems easy enough to replicate on your own.
February 12th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Wow. What a great deal. And for you readers that have already ordered this, I have another great deal: I’ll sell you any of my half-used Bic pens for $15 a pen. Blue or black — your choice!
February 12th, 2007 at 10:23 am
What;s the point? Are you going to turn in a handwritten draft of a screenplay?
February 12th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Why not just print out one page with black vertical lines on it and place it behind your lined paper as you write?
February 12th, 2007 at 11:48 am
scam!
February 12th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Finally, the perfect place for me to practise my hand-written 12 pt courier.
I thought the day would never come.
Dave O.
February 12th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
You know, on further thought, and to be fair, someone could use these for scanners with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software.
(Still way overpriced.)
Dave O.
February 12th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
I suppose pads like this could come in handy if you are teaching the fundamentals of script formatting someplace where there are no computers and no typewriters. Places in Africa immediately come to mind.
Still, I’d absolutely love to have a pad like that — a whole stack of them actually. I kind of like this pale-blue grid for its own sake, so to speak. I use notebooks though, not pads, and the notebooks I favour are slim and perfectly square and actually meant for gradeschoolers. They’re incredibly versatile and one of the things I like about them is that they come lined in different ways (for arithmetic, for practicing longhand etc etc) as well as unlined.
I’m sure these screenwriting pads will become collectors items in the near future.
February 12th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Dude, That Lex guy is smucking fart. I didn’t even think of that. Good one.
February 12th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Lines that disappear. Cool.
Now, moving on.
Are you telling me that someone with enough visual sense to write a screenplay cannot have the ability to place direction/dialog/etc. without guidelines?
It’s called eyeballing.
I have to disagree with you John. These are mock-worthy.
February 12th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Longs Drugs sells a 50 sheet pad of quadrille (4 squares per inch)graph paper. The lines are non photo blue. 4 bucks or so. You can mark your own margins.
February 12th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Yeah that’s expensive paper. And probably pointless. But try buying brads in New Zealand. They just don’t exist here. Even our Writers Guild doesn’t stock them. And the shipping alone from the Writers Store in LA is $25 minimum. That’s US dollars – basically double it for our Pacific Pesos.
February 12th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
i use recycled paper – literally, with stuff on the other side. i know it’s gonna be a mess anyway, so why waste nice lined paper? (and i have a growing mountain of reams of expensive tissue-thin to bonded lined paper from loving and thoughtful family and friends.)
Sarah – no brads in New Zealand?! 38mm Celco Paper Binders (No. 646) can be bought from any decent Office Products Depot.
February 13th, 2007 at 1:45 am
I remember Quentin Tarantino wrote the first draft of Reservoir Dogs on graph paper using felt-tip pens (marker pens you call them?). His reasoning: “You can’t write art on a computer.”
February 13th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Reservoir Dogs is art?
February 13th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
That’s what he said.
February 13th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
There is absolutely no reason that you can’t create something like this in a word processor, print it out and go to a Kinko’s or something to run as many copies as you need. Granted, you don’t get the disappearing lines, but I’m guessing that they disappear because of the color, and not some time of special ink..
February 13th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Not trying to plug my site but I do have such a document in my download section. I started out writing by hand on legal pads but every once in a while, I am without a computer so I always have a clipboard of these sheets in my backpack.
They’ve saved me a few times when I had to fax fast changes from a fax machine on the road… LOL.
I made the document after reading the ad for this $21.99 pad in Creative Screenwriting… It just pissed me off so I created my own. Feel free to go grab it if you’re so inclined.
Unk
February 14th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Thanks, Unk.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Get a legal pad. Go to work and steal a pen. Better yet, if you can, steal the legal pad from work too. Go home and write your heart out for free. Borrow some time on a friends computer with a screen writing program already installed. Save your $22 for food!