In 1999 my friend Jason Woods and I, inspired by the Adam West Batman TV series, wrote a screenplay for a short film called Batman: Riddler’s Ransom.
Traditional screenplay format has the handy property of representing approximately 1 minute of screen time per page. Unfamiliar with this standard, we wrote it in a homemade format that looked more like the script for a play — inline character names and dialog, numbered scenes instead of sluglines, action in parentheses or co-mingled with dialog, and line numbers for some reason.
The screenplay as originally formatted
Even in this condensed format, it was 17 pages long. I boldly estimated we could shoot it all in three, maybe four days.
We recruited our friends to be the cast and crew, and our mothers to sew the costumes. We assembled props and got approval to shoot after hours in key locations around Stillwater. Using Noteworthy Composer I composed and recorded a remix of the theme song, played on 2000-era midi instruments.
Unfortunately, due to equipment failures, logistical oversights, and teenage flakiness, we failed to shoot more than a few pages. I was heartbroken.
Recently I wondered how long our script would be in a standard screenplay format. This is something I had been curious about in the past, but had balked at the tedium of doing the conversion in something like Final Draft. A combination of the fountain plaintext format and the vim text editor made it possible to do it in an afternoon.
Our “movie” turned out to be twenty-five pages, about the length of a standard episode of the TV series. Reading it now, I’m surprised how well it holds up — I think we had a bead on the tone.
That said, no matter how well we had planned the production, our shot-on-hi8-video version would have inevitably fallen short of the version in my head. But I’m proud of what we accomplished, and I’m most proud of the script, which you can read below in its modern format.