Film/Television Studies

American Film Scripts  (AU login required)

This database provides full text access to 1,000+ film scripts from 1903 to 2006, with PDF versions as available. Includes the ability to search by writer, director, scene, race, nationality, age, subject, year of writing, and other elements. Note that the database is limited to American films.

If you want to locate film scripts in the library catalog, do a keyword search with the phrase "motion picture plays" - that is the subject heading most commonly used to identify a published script. If you are interested in browsing the Bender Library stacks for published scripts, visit the third floor and look under PN 1997 .A1 → PN 1997 .Z999. To browse TV scripts, look under PN 1992.77 .A1 → PN 1992.77 .Z999

The legality and integrity of the following sites have not been fully investigated by the editor and some of the the content is questionable. The user should use caution when citing from these websites. They provide free access to scripts from well-known films and TV shows.

Daily Script  A modest collection of film and TV scripts made available "to serve as a resource for writers and actors and those who simply enjoy reading movie scripts."

Drew's Script-O-Rama  "the place you know and love for free scripts and screenplays." It's the best known of the free script sites and has been around since 1995. So the copyright owners of these scripts don't seem to care to fight it.

Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb)  "The web's largest movie script resource!"

Scripts on Screen -  a search engine for scripts

Simply Scripts    "A database of hundreds of downloadable scripts, movie scripts, screenplays, and transcripts of current, classic and maybe a few soon-to-be-released movies, television, anime, unproduced and radio shows. "

TV Writing   A collection of TV scripts. "... here you can study scripts for existing shows, some of your old favourites, and many that never even made it to air. Figure out what makes an episode work, how to format that spec, why a pilot failed and how to write in four, five or six acts."