Quote: Lazzard @ February 19 2010, 11:14 AM GMT
But life is never that simple.
Faced with two quite good scripts, they'll go for the one written by the person who's made an effort to find out how things are done.
They need someone they can work with, to develop things further.
They don't particularly want to nursemaid an amateur who doesn't know the first thing about the process.
But for those of you who like a chalenge, soldier on with the lined paper and magic marker.
Yes, given a scenario where a company receives two equally-funny scripts, one written in the perfect house format and the other in red crayon, (an exaggeration!) the properly-formatted one would be dealt with first. But the writer with the good-but-crappily-formatted script would also be contacted, if the producer wasn't a complete idiot.
All I'm saying is it's obviously good to know the right way of setting out your script, and Bill makes good points about it being a good idea to go and actually watch sitcoms being recorded - but really, most companies really don't care about formatting as long as it's clearly-written and resembles something like a script. A friend of mine has been writing TV for 15 years, he's had his own sketch show and sitcom broadcast, and his scripts are very basic-looking. Like he says, "It all gets re-typed anyway".
I just don't think it's something to get too hung-up about. I used to be very anal about submitting scripts in the traditional BBC format, wide left margin, double-spaced, etc. I don't anymore. I actually had one Indie producer call me and say "I think this Word document is corrupted, all the dialogue's squeezed over to the right". Mind you he was a moron. 
The serial number will time-out after it has been used on 10 dates, but more than one person can download on the same date.
