Repair a Screenplay Import Before Using It as a Pitch Sample
Repair a Screenplay Import Before Using It as a Pitch Sample
An imported screenplay is fixed when its paragraphs behave as screenplay elements again and every word of the source is still there. It is not fixed because page one lines up.
That distinction decides how you spend the next hour. A file that "looks right" but has its character cues typed as dialogue will betray you the moment you edit a line, and the betrayal will happen in front of whoever is reading your sample. So the work is structural: get the paragraph boundaries right, assign each paragraph the element it actually is, then check that the words survived the trip.
Two things before the first step. Do all of this on a copy — never on your only file, and never on the authorized source itself. And understand what kind of guidance this is: the repair moves below come from Final Draft's published documentation, not from a run I performed for you. The routes differ by version, so the sequence you use is the one your installed version documents, and you should keep your own note of exactly what you did.
Set up a comparison you can trust
You need three things open before you touch anything: the source file, a new copy to repair in, and a written note of the destination application and version. Version matters because the vendor's import documentation is scoped that way. The knowledge base page on importing from another program applies to Final Draft 12 and 13, with separate instructions for Final Draft 11 and older; it distinguishes PDF import in the versions it names from the older text routes. The page on repairing a misformatted import describes the Elements dropdown and the Tools > Reformat command. Neither page is a promise about your file. One of them says the transfer is close to lossless; treat that as marketing, not as a result you can rely on. You are going to verify the outcome yourself.
Choose a representative passage, not the whole script. You want a stretch that contains a scene change, some action, a character cue, a parenthetical and a voice-over or otherwise labelled cue, and at least one long speech. That small set exercises the boundary and element failures you are most likely to meet, and it lets you compare the whole thing line by line instead of skimming two hundred pages and hoping.
One warning about page count. A different number of pages proves nothing on its own. Words can vanish and the page count can stay the same; words can all survive and the count can shift. Page count is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Compare text.
Here is a passage I invented for this article, from a fictional short script called The Long Way to the Ferry. It is two pages, and it is deliberately small so the repair stays visible.
INT. FERRY TERMINAL - NIGHT
Rain drums the corrugated roof. MARISOL stands at the ticket
window, holding a paper cup she stopped drinking from twenty
minutes ago.
DENNIS
(carefully)
The desk closes at eleven. After that, the room is just a room.
MARISOL
I know what time it is. I've been standing here since the nine
o'clock boat pulled out, watching the man in the yellow slicker
mop the same twelve feet of floor, and I keep telling myself that
if I walk back through those doors I'll have to explain why I came,
and I don't have an explanation. I have a paper cup and a bus
ticket that expires at midnight.
EXT. FERRY DOCK - CONTINUOUS
The rain has thinned. A radio on the dock plays to nobody.
RADIO (V.O.)
All small craft advisories remain in effect until morning.
That is eleven paragraphs: two scene headings, two action paragraphs, three character cues, one parenthetical and three dialogue paragraphs. Hold that number. It becomes a useful check.
Fix the boundaries first, because nothing else works until they are right
The same passage, after a bad conversion, arrives like this. The bracketed label is the element the import gave each paragraph.
INT. FERRY TERMINAL - NIGHT Rain drums the corrugated roof.— ActionMARISOL stands at the ticket window, holding a paper cup she stopped drinking from twenty minutes ago.— ActionDENNIS— Dialogue(carefully)— DialogueThe desk closes at eleven. After that, the room is just a room.— ActionMARISOL— ActionI know what time it is. I've been standing here since the nine o'clock boat pulled out, watching the man in the yellow slicker mop the same twelve feet of floor,— Dialogueand I keep telling myself that if I walk back through those doors I'll have to explain why I came, and I don't have an explanation.— DialogueI have a paper cup and a bus ticket that expires at midnight.— DialogueEXT. FERRY DOCK - CONTINUOUS— Scene HeadingThe rain has thinned. A radio on the dock plays to nobody.— ActionRADIO (V.O.) All small craft advisories remain in effect until morning.— Dialogue
Twelve paragraphs where the source has eleven. The extra one is the tell.
Look at paragraph 1. A slug line and the first sentence of an action paragraph have been welded into a single block, and the rest of that action sentence sits in paragraph 2. This is one case where you cannot lean on the automated tool, and paragraph 12 is another. The vendor's reformatting page notes that Reformat works through blocks and cannot split a block that contains more than one paragraph type. A block made of a scene heading plus action is exactly that; so is a character cue glued to its spoken line. Any mixed block has to be separated by hand before Reformat can do anything useful with it. Separate paragraph 1 by hand first — put your cursor after NIGHT, break the paragraph, and then join the freed fragment to paragraph 2 so the action sentence is whole again.
The speech in paragraphs 7 through 9 is the other direction. Three paragraphs that should be one, split by hard returns that the conversion invented. Join them. Join them exactly as they were, with single spaces at the seams, because you are repairing a file, not improving a sentence.
When a boundary is genuinely ambiguous — a line that could be the tail of one paragraph or the head of the next — decide it by looking at the source. Not by what a polished screenplay ought to look like. Your job is to reproduce the script that came in, not to guess at a better one.
Assign the element. Spacing is not a repair.
Now the assignments. Paragraph 3, the cue DENNIS, was typed as Dialogue. Paragraph 5, which is his actual line, was typed as Action. So the scene currently contains a line spoken by nobody, followed by a sentence lying on the floor.
The temptation is to fix paragraph 3 by nudging it. Add spaces in front of DENNIS until it sits where a cue sits, add spaces under it, and the page starts to resemble a screenplay. Resist this, and notice why it fails. Those spaces become characters in the paragraph. Its element is still Dialogue — nothing downstream of the paragraph knows it is a cue. If the document reflows, the alignment you built out of spaces goes wherever the surrounding text goes, and the cue may land somewhere nothing else matches. And a reading copy exported from that file would carry the padding as content.
The words survived; the structure is a forgery. That is the whole argument for using the Elements dropdown instead: assign the paragraph the element it is, and let the application handle position, indentation and spacing. Do the same for the rest of the passage:
- Paragraph 3 → Character (
DENNIS) - Paragraph 4 → Parenthetical (
(carefully)) - Paragraph 5 → Dialogue
- Paragraph 6 → Character (
MARISOL) - Paragraphs 7–9 → one Dialogue paragraph
- Paragraph 12 → split into a Character paragraph (
RADIO (V.O.)) and a Dialogue paragraph for the line
Notice two things about the smaller elements while you are in there. The parenthetical (carefully) belongs inside the cue-and-speech unit — it directs the line that follows it. Leave it as its own dialogue paragraph and you have written a stage direction that nobody says. And the voice label (V.O.) belongs with the character cue, not with the spoken words. It tells the reader where the voice is coming from; it is not part of what the voice is saying. If it ends up glued to the line, split it out and put it back where it belongs.
Once a run of paragraphs is uniform, the documented Reformat command can work through that block and confirm the assignments. The order matters: manual separation first, because Reformat cannot split a mixed block for you. Do it the other way and you will spend a while watching the tool refuse to do the one thing you needed.
Count again when you are done. The repaired file should have eleven paragraphs, the same as the source. That number is a check on your boundaries, not proof that the wording is intact — for that you still have to read.
Put weight on the repair, then compare the export
A repaired file that only survives being looked at is not repaired. Test it in a disposable copy, so the real one stays clean.
Go to the long speech — now one paragraph — and make an ordinary edit. Type a few words into the middle of it, the way you would while revising. Then look at what happens below. The scene heading EXT. FERRY DOCK - CONTINUOUS should still be its own paragraph, standing where it belongs. The page boundary should fall wherever the new length puts it. What you are checking is behavior: does the document still know the difference between a speech and a slug line when the text changes underneath it? If the edit shoves the next scene into the middle of a paragraph, the boundary work is not finished. Undo the test words, or retype them away, and verify the restored line matches the source word for word.
Then export a fresh reading copy and compare it against the source. All of the demonstration text, not the first page. Every word of Marisol's speech. The parenthetical. The radio line. If a word fell out during conversion, the export is the cheapest place to catch it, and it is much cheaper to catch now than after you have sent the sample.
Two things to keep separate while you compare. First, a clean export does not prove the native file is structurally sound — a static reading copy can look correct while the underlying paragraphs are still wrong, which is why you edited the speech before exporting. Second, pagination will probably move, and that is allowed. Merging three paragraphs into one and splitting a glued cue changes how much text fits on a page. Record the new page anchors in your notes; if you need an old scene to start on an old page number, do not delete words to force it. Cutting material to protect a page break is a rewrite, and this is not a rewrite.
What "done" looks like
The file you want at the end of this is the native one: a screenplay where the scene heading is a scene heading, the cue is a cue, the parenthetical sits with the speech it directs, the long speech is a single paragraph that can be edited, and every word still belongs to the source. The reading copy is a by-product of that file, not a substitute for it.
Keep the repair small and complete. One passage, done properly and compared against the original, teaches you the whole procedure and leaves you with a demonstration you can trust. It also keeps the boundary clear: this work never touches what the characters say. If a sentence reads badly in the source, it will read badly in the repaired file too, and it should. Fixing it is a different job, and choosing which excerpt to send is a third one.
The test of a successful repair is unglamorous. Open the file, change a line, and watch the screenplay behave like a screenplay. Then read the words and find all of them still there.
Frequently asked questions
What makes an imported screenplay repaired?
It is repaired when its paragraphs behave as screenplay elements again and every word of the source is still present. Page one lining up is not the test. A file that looks right but has character cues typed as dialogue will fail as soon as you edit a line.
Why not fix a character cue by adding spaces?
Spaces become characters in the paragraph, while the element remains whatever it was. If the document reflows, the alignment built from spaces moves, and a reading copy may carry the padding as content. Use the Elements dropdown to assign the paragraph the element it actually is and let the application handle position and spacing.
What if the Reformat command will not fix a block?
Reformat works through blocks and cannot split a block that contains more than one paragraph type, such as a scene heading welded to action or a character cue glued to its spoken line. Separate those mixed blocks by hand first, then use Reformat on uniform runs.
How do I test that the repair is structural, not just visual?
In a disposable copy, edit the long speech and see whether the scene heading remains its own paragraph and the page boundary falls where the new length puts it. Then export a reading copy and compare all demonstration text against the source. A clean export alone does not prove the native file is structurally sound.
What should I do about changed pagination?
Pagination will probably move after joining and splitting paragraphs. Record the new page anchors in your notes. Do not delete words to force an old scene onto an old page number; cutting material to protect a page break is a rewrite, not a repair.