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Show HN: I have built a library of screenplays for movies and TV shows
- y42 4y agoI really like this and I adore the work you put into it, but as a couple of people already wrote you should beware of the water you are shipping here. E.g. this is a quote of a script that I picked randomly: "NO PORTION OF THIS SCRIPT MAY BE PERFORMED, PUBLISHED, REPRODUCED, EXHIBITED, SOLD OR DISTRIBUTED BY ANY MEANS, OR QUOTED OR PUBLISHED IN ANY MEDIUM, INCLUDING ON ANY WEBSITE, WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN CONSENT OF HOME BOX OFFICE" Nevertheless, fingers crossed. Nota Bene: And as a data guy, I'd would love to get the whole archive to parse it and do some text and sentiment analysis or something like that.
- Mandatum 4y agoPivot immediately to offering excepts, and then contact the publishers for resale rights when a request comes in.
- iamjasonlevin 4y agoEpic! What led to this?
- rks404 4y agoReally fascinating - thanks for this!
- etaioinshrdlu 4y agoI can't help but think this would be good training data for mapping text to long-form video. Even if it's too hard right now, don't underestimate our collective progress.
- Breza 4y agoGreat idea!
- noxon 4y agoHow is this legal?
- ekianjo 4y agoIt's not: > No portion of this script may be performed, or reproduced by any means, or quoted, or published in any medium without prior written consent of SONY PICTURES TELEVISION INC. * 10202 West Washington Boulevard * Culver City, CA 90232 Cease & Desist Notice coming in 3...2...1
- wanderingmind 4y agoJust can be used to refine training of GPT3 model /s
- jakzurr 4y agoI suppose all those subtitle sites aren't exactly legal either, but I don't see them going anywhere.
- ekianjo 4y agoSubtitles can be auto-generated. Screenplays, not really.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> Subtitles can be auto-generated. Is that legally any different from OCRing a copyrighted book? Or maybe running an audiobook through speech-to-text..
- VanTheBrand 4y agoWell OCRing books (for book search) was found to be fair use because “book search” and “books” are in different markets. So to the extent it is like book search that could be in its favor. Your other example (text to speech and audio books) is significantly less transformative as audio books and books are basically the same or very related markets. (For example they are both sold in the same specialty stores)
- raydiatian 4y agoAwhile back, Mark Z. Danielewski did some treatments of screenplays for House Of Leaves. You should look for them. They’re incomplete but man I’d love to see them crack into a full show.
- prvc 4y agoThat's interesting. Always wondered how those are sourced.
- cityzen 4y agoThis is amazing. Anyone that has written a script, what is the significance of words in all caps? Breaking Bad: Oh, by the way, he’s wearing a GAS MASK. That, and white jockey UNDERPANTS. Nothing else. The Dark Knight: A man in a CLOWN MASK holding a SMOKING SILENCED PISTOL ejects a shell casing. This is DOPEY. He turns to a second man, HAPPY, also in clown mask, who steps forward with a CABLE LAUNCHER, aims at a lower roof across the street and FIRES a cable across. Dopey secures the line to an I-beam line- CLAMP on- sends a KIT BAG out then steps OUT the window...
- soulofmischief 4y agoThese are all key characters or visual elements, often capitalized when introduced for the first time. Ultimately, convention is left up to the individual screenwriter, so you will find inconsistencies in application of capitalization.
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- detaro 4y agoHighlighting people/props the first time they appear and/or if they should be especially prominent, and key actions. E.g. notice how in the second example Dopey is only all-caps the first time, not when he is mentioned again 2 sentences later. And "FIRES" is highlighted, but "ejects", "turns to" are not.
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- defrost 4y agoHe walks past shelf upon which we see Chekhov's GUN . .
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- soulofmischief 4y agoOP, this is amazing. Will be using this heavily. What are your plans for the future?
- lumenwrites 4y agoThanks, I'm really happy you think this is useful! This is just a small hobby project I have done over a couple of weekends. I don't have huge plans for it, I just want to keep finding more screenplays and adding them to the library, to make it even more useful to people. Maybe I'll enable users submit their own screenplays and add them to the library (and create a new category for unproduced/spec scripts). Technically, they can do that already by sending me an email, but if there's interest I can make that process more convenient. Also, I'm thinking that maybe it could help me build a discord community of aspiring screenwriters, where we'd brainstorm ideas together and exchange feedback about our work. Like an online writer's room for exchanging ideas and advice. I have done that for my other hobby (writing adventures for roleplaying games like DnD), and it worked really well, it's very fun, and people love it: https://rpgadventures.io/writers-room https://rpgadventures.io/writers-room It would take a lot of time and energy to run, but it could be helpful and worth doing, so I might do that if there's some interest.
- soulofmischief 4y agoDigital writing rooms seem like a cool idea. If you make one, shoot me an email! I'm just about as aspiring as it gets, I try to spend time getting comfortable with tools like Fade In but have yet to produce anything meaningful.
- wackget 4y agoI just want to know why they're all written in the most horrible typewriter-style font. They're written on computers now, right? So why not use a font that's easier on the eyes?
- raydiatian 4y agoIt’s a thing. Screenplays started in old Hollywood, pre-Depression era, when typewriters had mono space courier font. It stuck.
- codazoda 4y agoI believe they use a font that works well for time. So each page covers approximately the same amount of screen time. Probably a bit of tradition there too.
- troymc 4y agoIf you look at the software designed specifically for script/screenwriting, it almost always produces scripts that look like that, even the very latest modern software. Examples are celtx and Final Draft. Why? Maybe convention, maybe superstition, maybe readability. Coders also like monospace fonts in their IDEs. In fact, the font I'm using to write this comment (on HN) uses a monospace font haha!
- ilaksh 4y agoCoders use monosoace fonts so things align.
- crazygringo 4y agoBecause the line spacing and margins and font pitch are specifically chosen so that 1 page = 1 minute. This is critical. It's also why dialog is written in a much narrower column than description. But also, the typewriter font is "without personality". It gives a neutral almost engineering feel so you can focus on the content without being swayed by the style of a typeface. I think it also conveys a sense of technical precision. Every comma, every dash matters. Screenwriting is incredibly precise. In comedy, the exact punctuation is as critical as the words. (BTW, multicam comedies like Friends are double-spaced and follow a different formatting and speed-per-page. The double-spacing is to allow for handwritten changes and notes.)
- umvi 4y agoHow does one get a copy of a screenplay in the first place?
- modinfo 4y agoI also wonder if the producers make the script available to anyone?
- Keyframe 4y agoOn any given production, a ton of people have to have access to the script. Outside of production, scripts are handed over for various purposes, including promos, archiving etc. And then there are business like The Black List which are primary source of not originally (studio) comissioned scripts. Form what I've seen, ONCE the material's out / production over, not many fucks are given if the script is out there as well. Now, is it legal? Who knows, depends where it came from probably. Heat would be on if it's a script in or before production, but it also varies.
- lumenwrites 4y agoI don't know how people get screenplays originally, I'm just searching and organizing ones that are freely available online already.
- ekianjo 4y agoThose are not final screenplays, apparently. They may be early versions before the final ones, judging from the first one for Breaking Bad
- crazygringo 4y agoDon't ever judge a pilot screenplay -- those circulate sometimes for many years before a show gets produced, and modified heavily before a show is picked up. On the other hand, episodes after the pilot would usually be shooting scripts. Obviously final episodes don't always match shooting scripts, but the difference is usually in making cuts or slight reorderings, not adding new material.
- shepherdjerred 4y agoScreenplays are different from scripts right? The screenplay an episode or movie is based off of may be significantly different from the script and the final product. Screenplays are the interface, scripts are the implementation.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoCountdown to a stable diffusion model trained on screenplay + video pairs.
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- svnpenn 4y agoDoesn't work on Firefox
- mentos 4y agoI've heard of famous writers re-writing their favorite authors works by hand and I've fantasized about having more time to do that with my favorite tv shows/movies. For me I'd probably start with "Community" and see if I can absorb/train my neural net to be an iota as clever.
- thedailymail 4y agoThe two authors I have heard of doing this are Joan Didion (who typed out entire Hemingway novels) and Hunter S Thompson (who did the same, using both Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald as models). I always wondered if they arrived at this seemingly not very efficiient method independently, or if there was some antecedent. Do you know of any others? https://earlybirdbooks.com/books-that-inspire-joan-didion https://earlybirdbooks.com/books-that-inspire-joan-didion https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/hunter-s-thompson-typed-out-the-great-gatsby-farewell-to-arms.html https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/hunter-s-thompson-typed-...
- drumhead 4y agoThe first thing I though when I saw this was "is it legal". The way rights holders protect their assets these days I can imagine it won't be too long before it's taken off line. A shame really its fun to read scripts.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoI see this getting the OLGA treatment too. Nice idea but won’t last long.
- totetsu 4y agoAny guide on how to read a screenplay? Something that explains the 3a 3b etc on the right
- BMc2020 4y agoI don't know, but I would think getting a screenplay to a good movie and reading along with it while watching it would be a start. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.
- crazygringo 4y agoNumbers on the right are production-specific, but you can generally figure out that it's some combination of page number, scene number, and act numbers -- often with new pages inserted without reordering later ones, so 3B sometimes might mean the page between 3 and 4. Asterisks on the right side indicate lines added/changed since the previous revision. Big blank spaces indicate where lines have been taken away. This complicated system is because pages are constantly being replaced/inserted and distributed as they're rewritten, without re-printing the entire script -- not just to save paper, but because people are writing personal notes/highlights/etc. on pages and you don't want to lose those.
- totetsu 4y agoSo for Rick and Morty they might be referring to a similarly changing story board document.
- mehrzad 4y agoI've been looking for something like this because sometimes it's hard to verify movie and TV quotes unless they are already very famous.
- stevenwoo 4y agoIf all that is desired is the spoken text, most subtitle sites have fairly accurate copies of the official subtitles or even better than original subtitles for stuff that is very popular. For instance sometimes I see homophones for the correct words or abbreviated text versions for rapidly spoken speech even in the official subtitles for streaming shows. Websites like subscene.com and opensubtitles.org are pretty active.
- bscphil 4y agoPlus it's very common that the final line spoken in a film is not the line that was in the screenplay. Stuff changes, people ad lib.
- 6644467364 4y ago
- crazygringo 4y agoIt looks beautiful! I'm just curious -- besides the aesthetics and organization, how is it different from other screenplay sites? Is it trying to be more complete? Or just a nicer site? Also, are you trying to automatically scoop up new content, e.g. from the industry-standard: https://sites.google.com/site/tvwriting/ https://sites.google.com/site/tvwriting/ (It's basically the screenwriter's equivalent of Sci-Hub.)
- lumenwrites 4y agoThanks! Yes, I think it will soon be the largest library of the screenplays on the internet (if it isn't already), the idea is to find as many screenplays that are freely available online as possible, and add them to a library that is easy to search and to browse. And make it good looking, with nice UX.
- eigenhombre 4y agoA treasure trove, especially if it sticks around. I like reading screenplays (and "regular" plays) because you have to imagine the "look and feel" of almost everything. It really exercises the visual imagination. If you have seen the movie, or play, you might remember much of it, but you'll have to make up a bunch of stuff too, or you might find your imagination going in some other direction -- but the story is still there, carrying you along.
- Breza 4y agoUntil I saw this site, I had no idea how much detail was written in scripts.
- phillipseamore 4y agoNot sure of the sources for this site but FYI; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars) has a screenplay library (they collect internationally and like to get different versions of them, from initial drafts to shooting scripts), there are also libraries that collect screenplays that are affiliated with other film or TV academies (and internationally) or film schools. Screenplays are also often given considerable distribution during awards season, even posted on special "for your consideration" websites that the film production companies setup each year.
- CobrastanJorji 4y agoLooks awesome. Would you be willing to also make them available as text files for easier searching and building stuff?
- lumenwrites 4y agoThanks! I think this is a good idea, and I think it wouldn't be all that difficult to convert pdfs into text. At least some of them, since some are represented as text and some are just picture scans, which would be much more difficult to deal with. I will look into this!
- amir734jj 4y agoI am a movie enthusiast and I love it. Thank you.
- modinfo 4y agoI read the Joker screenplay, then I post it to DALL-E the initial scene and it really came out interesting! https://labs.openai.com/s/kJtpqV4wZBeNkPnNVVchJKoE https://labs.openai.com/s/kJtpqV4wZBeNkPnNVVchJKoE
- dizhn 4y agoscarf so thin it's not even visible..
- Flatcircle 4y agoThis is so good. Screenwriting is an amazing skill.
- lumenwrites 4y agoThanks, I hope it will be useful to people!
- sn0wtrooper 4y agoVery fast. Is the website static? Are you using a CDN?
- lumenwrites 4y agoThe website is built with Next.js and deployed on Vercel. It's so fast because Next and Vercel do a lot of smart optimizations with the code and the images. Also, because the screenplays are not stored in the database, just one large local json file, so the server doesn't have to make an extra request to the database.
- chatterhead 4y agoThis is awesome! Great job. Have you posted this to Reddit? https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/ They would love it!
- plibither8 4y agoThis is brilliant and I've been looking for something like this for a LONG time, thank you! Quick request: the experience would be even better if we could search for words/phrases within the screenplays of a particular episode/series/movie. Many times I randomly have a not-so-popular dialog in my head from a TV show or movie, and then find it incredibly difficult to find which particular scene it was from.
- lumenwrites 4y agoThank you, I'm glad you like this! This is a great idea, I will add the full-text search feature. Although it probably wouldn't work for your particular use case - TV shows rarely release the screenplays for all of their episodes, only a few select ones. It's very interesting and useful for screenwriters looking to read screenplays to get better at their craft, but it's not enough to do a full-text search over a whole TV show.
- techer 4y agoNot the same but subtitles are available of course… not sure if you’ve seen getyarn.io which isn’t comprehensive but is quite fun :)
- radiojasper 4y agoYeah this is not legal. It might be the top post here, but all works are copyrighted.
- edgineer 4y agoReminder, unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted works is sometimes legal, e.g. fair use.
- kadoban 4y agoThis seems to my non-lawyer eyes like it doesn't have a strong fair-use defense, but I'm not that confident at all. For anyone curious, these are the factors considered for that: https://support.google.com/legal/answer/4558992?hl=en https://support.google.com/legal/answer/4558992?hl=en
- taneq 4y agoReproducing a copyrighted work in full as a part of publicly available collection is pretty clearly not, though, otherwise Pirate Bay would be 100% legit.
- imgabe 4y agoFair use is a defense. After you get sued, you can argue fair use in court. It does not stop you from getting sued.
- Breza 4y agoRemoving content quickly after being asked is a good way to avoid a lawsuit.
- lumenwrites 4y agoI'm hoping I won't get into too much trouble, since: - The intention of this library is to be a free educational resource for screenwriters, it's just a hobby project that I'm not making any money off of. - I'm simply collecting and organizing the screenplays that are freely available online already (just with a nicer UI/UX, and with more convenient searching/sorting/filtering functionality). - On the about page I have left an email people can use to submit a takedown request, if they want to remove their screenplay from the library. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm hoping this is enough to qualify for "fair use", or something like that.
- VanTheBrand 4y agoOne of the things that sucks about this is that the publishing rights for all of the original, non-ip based scripts and TV scripts are actually controlled by the writers and show creators. So it’s individual writers, not big corporations that you are actually distributing the work of without compensation. You might say but this is fair use / you aren’t charging or profiting… it’s not fair use and I think actually you are profiting. Posting it to hacker news shows that you do profit if only though building your own notoriety and as for fair use, you can’t distribute a written work in its entirety and say it’s fair use simply because you say it’s for “educational purposes.” If that was true you could do this with any book (which you obviously can’t). The screenplay has its own copyright distinct from the movie and you are distributing the entire work. Also if you go to your local Barnes and Nobel you will see screenplays published and for sale if you need more proof this is not fair use. There is a marketplace that this act undermines. I know you have a link for people to do takedowns, but you also know the name of all of the writers. You should be proactively reaching out and asking their permission. I bet you would be surprised how many would grant it!
- slim 4y agoIn the same vein I would argue that authors need to pay for the hard work of this gentleman distributing their work. they are profiting from the publicity for free
- VanTheBrand 4y agoThere are two ways screenwriters can make money directly from their writing. Selling it to studios. (This website of already produced film scripts is not going to help with that) And publishing and selling the script(This website and ones like it literally undercut that market and make it very difficult for any but the most successful writers to get any publishing money) No thanks on the free “publicity”
- antasvara 4y agoWhat "value" is there in this publicity that the author hasn't already received? I have to imagine that it's exceedingly easy to find the screenwriter for a published script, and as such this additional publicity gets them little to no additional benefits. The downside of having this published for free is that the author now has a more difficult time profiting from the sale of the script. This is the same for any author that profits from the sale of their writing. This conversation would have a much different tone if the site was publishing novels, wouldn't it?
- Rodeoclash 4y agoWhy not take what Genius did for lyrics and apply it to scripts? Allow users to annotate it.
- spdustin 4y agoI read the first few dozen pages of the “Contact” screenplay, and that’s definitely an early draft. It’s nothing like the opening of the real film.
- hknmtt 4y agogreat addition to imsdb.com
- gurjeet 4y agoSee also: http://www.script-o-rama.com/ http://www.script-o-rama.com/
- Rant423 4y agoFor LOST, there are more available: https://archive.org/details/lost.the.script.collection https://archive.org/details/lost.the.script.collection
- PenguinRevolver 4y agoGetting error "402: PAYMENT_REQUIRED" when trying to access your site.
- lumenwrites 4y agoOh, thanks a lot for letting me know! The website got to the front page of HN, and I ran out of my free tier limits on Vercel, had to upgrade to the pro account. Already fixed.
- Rant423 4y agoYou have some minor errors: * Mulholland Dr. comes up twice (and different files) * Same for The Fellowship of the Ring (but the file seems the same) * Again for Se7en * In general, most of the movie with a ":" in their title are duplicated ("2001: A Space Odyssey", "Kill Bill: Vol.1", "Star Wars: The Force Awakens") Also, kudos for having some screenplays I've never found around
- ceoatpiedpiper 4y agoI love the UI - it is simple and beautiful . Can you please let me know how did you build it ? What is the tech stack to build an application like this ?
- lumenwrites 4y agoThanks! It is built with Next.js and hosted on Vercel. That's all there is to it, there's no database, just a big json file that contains all the courses.