Cheating Margins

Sneaky edits lower page counts

Showrunners have the weirdest obsessions: condensing revisions, avoiding their families, and keeping scripts as short as humanly possible. That means it's essential for a script coordinator to learn how to reduce the page count in a script - and to do so, that means cheating margins.

Cheating Margins Explained

You remember coin pusher arcade games, right? A terrarium filled with quarters contains moving platforms that threaten to push the coins over the edge. You feed the machine with the hope that every additional quarter dislodges others that, ultimately, cascade into the collection bucket below.

You're operating under the same principle here: cheating margins (also called cheating pages) attempts to fit a little more text on each page with the hope that these small changes might snowball into an entire element (or multiple) getting pulled up to the previous page.

To do this, a script coordinator or writer will expand the margins of one element, usually a piece of dialogue, to lessen the number of vertical lines that element requires.

This is accomplished by a unique feature to screenplays (unlike other text documents like Word files): each paragraph has its own formatting data. That means a single paragraph can be significantly squished or (in our case) secretly widened without affecting the other paragraphs of the same element type.

Show Me the Ruler!

For some inexplicable reason, Final Draft has opted to show a default view that includes several story breaking elements, but avoids showing an actually helpful tool: the ruler. To activate it, head to the top menu bar and hit View > Show Ruler. While you're here, go ahead and deactivate those story elements with View > Hide Outline Editor.

The Name of the Game is Subtlety

With your ruler now in view, you want to identify the tool that allows you to adjust the right margin. It's a small gray arrow in the ruler:

Dragging that will adjust the right margin for that exact element only. But abusing the right margin is glaringly apparent. In the below example, you can see Sasha's dialog extending far into the right. If revisions were turned on, it might even overlap with the revision mark.

Therefore, trying to cheat a margin needs to be subtle. There's no hard and fast rule for the number of ticks over you can go, but generally anything over 6 is dangerous territory.

In a situation like this:

Adjusting the right margin by three ticks in that last dialogue gives us:

When To Cheat

The only real purpose to cheating margins is to lower page a script's page count. But it's only effective in parts of the script that are vulnerable.

In Large Blocks of Text

Returning to the coin pusher analogy: the more coins there are, then more have the opportunity to fall. Similarly, the more words a single block of dialog has, the more words can potentially be moved up by changing the right margin.

When Words Dangle

Any time a single word or pair of words dangle on their own line, there's an opportunity to cheat.

Before an Act Break

Since an Act Break always includes a page break, you want to use the space before the break as efficiently as possible. Finding a way to move/remove all the material from the page preceding an Act Break means that page break can occur earlier, eliminating an entire page from your overall script.

When Not To Cheat

As much fun as you can have cheating your page counts, you should never cheat pages once you lock pages. Locking pages is a crucial step in the production process that allows production to quickly and efficiently add in revisions.

Additionally, cheating margins changes the amount of material on the page without adding a revision mark. Even if cheating margins allowed a script coordinator to condense material that occurred on pages 33 and 33A, Final Draft won't interpret this as a revision.

If you've ever had a writer turn off locked pages because they didn't like "all the white space" that was showing up in their revision, then you know what it's like to have someone interfere with the technical specifications of a script where they don't belong.

Tools to Avoid

Final Draft has other baked in tools that showrunners try to use to beat page counts all the time. And they never work. These include changing the font (stick to Courier Final Draft, please), changing the Format > Leading to Very Tight (an excellent way to trigger ocular migraines in your execs), and adjusting the margins for the entire script.

Doing any of these will result in more problems than you can fathom, so just take the honorable route and cheat.