The Screenplay Title Page: What Goes On It (and What Doesn't)

The title page is the single easiest page of your screenplay to get right, and somehow it's where a startling number of scripts announce their amateurism before page one. The good news: correct screenplay title page format is a solved problem with almost no room for creativity — which, once you embrace it, is liberating. Here is exactly what goes on a script title page, where it goes, and the handful of things that should never appear there.

The Standard Screenplay Title Page Format

Everything is centered horizontally except the contact block. Same font as the script — Courier, 12 point. It looks like this:

                        THE LONG WAY HOME


                          Written by

                         Jordan Reyes




Based on the short story
"Homecoming" by Alice Whitfield          (only if applicable)




                                        Jordan Reyes
                                        jordan.reyes@email.com
                                        (310) 555-0142

The pieces, top to bottom:

• Title, centered, roughly a third of the way down the page (about line 22 in Courier terms). All caps is conventional; underlining is old-fashioned but harmless. No quotation marks, no giant display fonts, no logo.
• "Written by" (or "by"), centered, a couple of blank lines below the title.
• Your name, centered, below that. Writing teams joined by "&" (ampersand means you wrote it together; "and" means separate writers at different stages — a real WGA distinction worth respecting even pre-WGA).
• Source credit, if it's an adaptation: "Based on the novel by..." centered under the byline. Only if genuinely applicable — and if you're adapting something you don't hold rights to, that's a conversation bigger than formatting; see adapting a book into a screenplay.
• Contact information, bottom right (bottom left is also accepted): name, email, phone. If you have representation, it's your rep's contact info instead of yours.

That's the entire page. If your title page contains only those elements in that arrangement, you're done, and no reader anywhere will pause on it — which is precisely the goal.

Contact Info: The Only Part That Varies

The contact block is the one region with judgment calls.

No representation: your own email and phone. A professional-sounding email address matters more than writers think; a reader who has to type "xXfilmwarrior420Xx" into a reply takes you a notch less seriously, fairly or not.

With representation: the manager's or agent's name, company, and contact info replaces yours. That's part of what reps are for.

Entering contests: many competitions require blind submissions — no name, no contact info anywhere. Read each contest's rules and strip the page accordingly. Keeping a clean, contact-free copy of the title page around saves you the last-minute scramble; it's one of the small logistics covered in are screenwriting contests worth it.

Draft Dates and Registration Notices

Two elements sometimes appear in the bottom corner opposite the contact info, and both deserve caution.

Draft dates. In production, scripts carry dates and revision colors because tracking versions is operationally necessary. On a spec, a date mostly does one thing: lets a reader calculate how long the script has been circulating. "Third Draft — March 2024" tells a reader in 2026 that this script has been making the rounds for two years without selling. There's no upside. Leave dates and draft numbers off specs entirely; track your versions privately in your own files (this is exactly what revision history in modern screenwriting software is for — version tracking that lives with the project instead of on the page).

WGA registration and copyright notices. Registering your script with the WGA registry or the U.S. Copyright Office is a fine, cheap precaution. Advertising it on the title page is another matter. "WGAw Registration #1234567" or a © line signals — to the kind of reader who sorts scripts into piles — a writer worried about theft, which reads as inexperience, because working writers know outright script theft is rare and the registration protects you whether or not it's printed. If you register (and you may as well), keep the number in your records, not on the page. Some writers include a discreet registration line anyway; it won't get you rejected, but it buys you nothing and costs a little polish.

What Screams Amateur

The negative checklist, assembled from the collective sighs of every reader who's done coverage:

• Artwork, photos, or "poster" designs. Nothing marks a script faster. The title page is typography only.
• Fancy fonts or colors. Courier 12, black, like the rest of the script.
• Taglines. "In space, no one can hear you scream" was written by marketing, not on the spec's title page. Your logline belongs in your query email, not here — see what is a logline.
• Genre labels, episode grids, cast wishlists. "A four-quadrant sci-fi tentpole" or "For consideration: Margot Robbie" — no.
• "All rights reserved," legal warnings, or threats of litigation. The paranoid title page is a subgenre readers trade stories about.
• Draft numbers like "Final Draft" or "Draft 14." "Final" is a jinx and a lie; "Draft 14" is oversharing.
• A second title page or a quote epigraph page. A literary epigraph occasionally appears on a page after the title in produced scripts; on a spec it's a page of throat-clearing before your story starts. Your first page has a job to do — get to it.

Why Boring Is the Strategy

There's a deeper logic here worth internalizing, because it applies past the title page. A spec script is a professional document entering a workflow: readers process stacks of them, and every deviation from standard is friction — and friction gets attributed to the writing. The title page is your first and cheapest chance to signal "this will be a professional read." You cannot win the sale on the title page, but you can lose a sliver of goodwill on it, so the optimal move is perfect invisibility.

Most screenwriting apps generate the title page for you from a few fields, which removes even the margin-fiddling. Fill in title, byline, contact, and let the software place them. Then forget the title page exists — the pages that decide your script's fate are the ones after it, starting with a first page strong enough to survive the cold open test. Spend your obsession there.