How Scriptation Broke Hollywood’s Addiction to Paper
"You could be saving reams and reams and reams of paper by going paperless on a production," says director and Scriptation user Jennifer Phang.
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Call him the anti-paperboy.
Steve Vitolo first came from Boston to Los Angeles as another writer with a dream, starting as an assistant when he began to notice a disturbing trend on set. “On this one show, we kept printing a revised script every single night for 100-plus people, 50 pages. So every single night, it was literally 5,000 sheets of paper that would then be obsolete by the next day,” he recalls, as he was tasked with the script delivery.
That was more than a decade ago now, with each new line of dialogue or director’s note resulting in massive paper waste — and others around him also waking up to the problem, without much of a solution. Which led Vitolo, who would go on to write for shows including Black-ish and Hot in Cleveland, to ask, “Why are we writing scripts digitally and then printing it on paper? Who uses paper now? We’re all using computers.”
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And so Vitolo — already with a love of tech and background working on websites — co-created Scriptation (and now serves as its founder and CEO). The software allows actors, directors, writers and crews to take notes and mark up their scripts digitally while easily migrating those annotations over to revised versions. The app also enables people to add photos, voice memos and various other personalized features to their documents — appealing even to those who aren’t necessarily making a choice to be sustainable but are drawn in by the ease. It’s always been that two-pronged approach, looking to solve both productivity and environmental problems and reach beyond just the eco-conscious community.
The company launched in 2016 and gained traction during the COVID shutdown, when people had a moment to learn a new technology. It took time, trying to convert an entire industry one by one — in what Vitolo describes as “this ground-up thing” — but word slowly spread, and today it has 25,000 active monthly users across more than 50 countries.
From April 2023 to this April, Scriptation users have eliminated more than 120 million sheets of paper from production sets worldwide, according to Vitolo; last year’s total of 48 million sheets alone equates to more than 5,700 trees preserved, more than 5 million gallons of water conserved and 3.3 million pounds of CO2 emissions avoided. On a personal level, each Earth Month, beginning in 2024, Scriptation has sent users a Green Impact Report (à la Spotify Wrapped) to estimate their own personal water, waste and carbon savings.
And new innovations are coming, as this spring Scriptation launches Playback, a feature that lets users listen to scripts read aloud in customizable voices (via AI). It comes at the request of executives who want to review scripts during their commute and saves them from reading on paper at home.
Word-of-mouth and listening to industry feedback has been key to Scriptation’s Hollywood success, with Michael B. Jordan, Kathy Bates and the teams behind Hacks, Dexter and Saturday Night Live as effusive supporters.
Hacks co-creator Lucia Aniello — who along with fellow showrunners Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky has had a longtime commitment to sustainability on the show — says she learned about Scriptation through her assistant director and was drawn in both by the program’s organizational benefits and the fact that “I have always felt there was too much paper waste” on sets. “There will always be something lovely about having a physical script in your hand, but with the endless revisions needed, it just feels irresponsible to print them out for every iteration,” she adds. “Let’s save the trees for the first and last drafts, in my opinion!”
Jennifer Phang, a director and member of the DGA’s Sustainable Future Committee, became aware of the software from a VFX supervisor on one of her sets and was impressed by the way “everyone was walking around with their iPads making notes; they looked so cool, everything was so clean and kept-together.” Though she acknowledges the additional step of having to make sure the iPad is charged every day, Phang has been using it on her projects — which include episodes of The Boys and The Flight Attendant — for years and adds, “If you see all the paper dis