The Oscars for best original and adapted screenplay were handed out against a backdrop of manual typewriters stacked row upon row, like museum specimens of an animal hunted to extinction in living memory. Of all branches of the trade, screenwriting remains most attached to that particular tool of creation and metaphor of creativity: after all, the two of them grew up together, and the movie business is nothing if not sentimental about such things.

Nowadays, nobody uses a typewriter to produce a screenplay[1], but it lives on in the work, as writers crack open their laptops and curse at Final Draft, a program best described not as a word processor but a typewriter emulator. It supplies everything the industry demands: 12-point Courier, CAPS and underlines, the primacy of the page, and above all, the frustration of turning words into a thing. Perhaps expecting it to adapt to modern operating systems and hardware is fundamentally misguided: instead, writers who want an authentic Final Draft experience should install SheepShaver and run the original version, setting in place the next logical step of a nested emulation that can keep them going for decades.

[1] Aside from Woody Allen, but, anyway.