Waiters, personal trainers and, more significantly, thousands of people whose scripts actually get produced owe a lot to the Write Brothers.
Celebrating its 30th anniversary recently, the Burbank, Calif., software publisher created Scriptor, the first word processor specifically designed to format screenplays.
Scriptor transformed that highly technical writing from an agonizing manual typing process to a few-click process.
"You had this 120-page document, and if you made changes, you'd end up retyping or, literally, cutting and pasting," explained Stephen Greenfield, who founded Write Brothers in 1982 with his USC film school buddy Chris Huntley.
"So word processing was a natural for screenwriters. But systems back then couldn't deal with all of the peculiarities of screenplay format: the weird page breaks, the odd margins, specialized formatting and numbering."
Scriptor did all of that maddening busywork, caught on, inspired imitators and in 1994 earned Greenfield and Huntley the first Academy Technical Achievement Award for an all-software engineering feat.
By then, the company had branched out into movie budgeting and scheduling programs. Then it licensed superior technology to replace the iconic Scriptor with the Movie Magic Screenwriter system "ironically, just after we got the award," according to Huntley.
Now fully owned by Write Brothers and in its sixth edition, Movie Magic Screenwriter, like the competing Final Draft, has passionate advocates among top Hollywood scribes. MMS users include Paul Haggis ("Crash," "Casino Royale") and David Koepp ("Jurassic Park," "Spider-Man," the upcoming "Men in Black III").