I don’t think how you lay your script out matters nearly so much as people say it does. It drives me crazy to see all the people out there insisting you have to format your screenplay in such and such a way, on so and so paper, punched here and there, margins specified down to the last nth of a millimetre in all directions.
Unfortunately, when you are starting out you will come across a lot of people on the fringes of the industry who aren’t that high up or experienced and who therefore don’t know what they are looking for in a script.
They think that surface presentation is king – and they are the ones who will be reading your script initially, so it’s always worth making sure the script is as polished and error free as you can. Spell check, print it off and read it on paper, read it aloud to check it’s correct. That sort of thing matters.
But after that, look, it’s shape on the page really isn’t that big a deal. Obviously you want your thing to more or less look like a pro script – but when they are writing a spec script most pros I know would use the basic template layout in either Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter, which does it all for you.
If you can’t afford either of those, here’s a page that tells you everything you need to know till you get a gig, in which case the production company will give you their inhouse format http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scriptsmart/screenplay.pdf
Please, please believe me. No-one is ever going to see you are half an inch off on your margins and despise you forever, or think, hmm, they’ve used one hole binding and therefore this script is clearly rubbish. Seriously. It just doesn’t work like that.
Save your time, effort and pain, and direct it towards your writing. It’s the story, not the surface texture of the story, that REALLY counts.
And if you want to develop a great story that people are desperate to read, well, you could do a lot worse than downloading the Screenwriting Goldmine step by step guide to writing a great screenplay – and really taking just a few days to put it into practice.