A codified solution for a bona fide problem
Imagine you're a PA in the Golden Age of Hollywood. You're distributing scripts, anywhere from 25 pages to 70 pages each, to the 300+ person crew on the Paramount Lot. Your back hurts, your legs hurt, and you've got a papercut.
Just as soon as you're done, you get word from the writer's room: they're updating the joke on page 19. In any other industry, this would mean reprinting the entire script and redistributing it to everyone. Even then, the next day on set someone would inevitably insist they didn't get the newest version. To make things more efficient and save money on printing costs, studios developed a surprisingly simple and elegant solution: just print and distribute the updated page(s) on a different-colored piece of paper. The crew would collate it in manually, and new color provided a quick visual cue whether people had the most updated revision set.
The Colors
The basic colors of the color wheel are:
White (Production Draft)
Blue
Pink
Yellow
Green
Goldenrod
That is, the first draft of the script that gets distributed to the crew at large will be printed entirely on white paper and is called the Production Draft. The next set of revisions will be printed on blue paper and called Blue Pages (more on this below). Then pink, then green, etc. After goldenrod, the script cycles back to white and will be called 2nd White or Double White, depending on the studio.
Modern screenwriting software can mimic the backrgound color of the paper, but the paper available to the production office (who prints the scripts) may result in a smaller color wheel.
Some studios and pilots also expand the color wheel into the following colors that come after goldenrod: Buff
Salon
Cherry
Tan
Collated Scripts and Full Drafts
Scripts come in two flavors: collated scripts and full drafts. Collated scripts are the result of revision pages replacing the pages of a previously-published draft. a well-organized collated script should have the revision set that reflects that page's most recent update in the header, that way writers can leaf through a script and see which material needs updating (and likely hasn't shot yet). Full drafts are issued when more that 50% of a script's pages have rewrites in any single one revision. The reasoning is that it's too much work to manually replace that many pages at once. As rooms and sets go paperless, however, the tradition remains. Full drafts can be problematic for crew members, especially script supervisors and ADs, who take notes in their script. A full draft means they need to manually transfer the notes from already-shot-material to the new script which is time out of their day they don't need wasted. It's not unusual to issue a special revision set for these departments that's not a full draft, even if the official draft now used by production is a complete full draft.
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