Why is Highland called Highland, anyway?
Unlike most screenwriting apps, Highland isn't named after a term from a screenwriting glossary.
I love talking with other screenwriters about Highland, our company's terrific screenwriting app.
Whether it’s online or in person after a Scriptnotes show, writers will tell me about their favorite Highland features, or why they switched from Final Draft. (Or another screenwriting app, but usually it’s Final Draft, and the story generally involves some horrific crash or frustrating upgrade issue that sent them searching for a better screenwriting app made by an actual screenwriter.)
Highland users tend to be Highland evangelists, so they’ll often brag about how many new users they’ve brought into the fold. We love benevolent bounty hunters.
Then at some point in the conversation, these screenwriters I’m talking with – Highland experts, mind you, who have used the app for years – may ask, in a lowered voice, somewhat embarrassed, “But why is it called Highland, anyway?”
It’s a fair question!
Choosing names is hard
All screenwriters know how much titles and character names matter. I’ve spent hours, days, weeks agonizing over them. I have several unwritten movie ideas that stalled out in part because I couldn’t decide what to call them.
It’s the same with apps. An idea doesn’t feel real until it has a name.
Most of the other screenwriting apps sound deliberately screenwriter-y. Final Draft. Fade In. Hell, even the how-is-this-still-being-sold Movie Magic Screenwriter. These names are built around terms you’d find in the glossary of a How to Write a Screenplay for Beginners book.
In fact, we started plans for Highland under the working title “Page One.” It’s a decent name, but carries a whiff of beginner to me. There’s also that sense of restarting after a failure, as in, “It’s a page one rewrite.”
So where did we get the name Highland?
Highland didn’t come from a thesaurus, but rather a map. It’s one of a trio of projects we named after streets in Hollywood.
Take Fountain
In 2008, I enlisted coder Nima Yousefi to create a plug-in for my blog to make it easy to embed small snippets of a script. We called it Scrippets, because sometimes the obvious name is best.
The idea behind Scrippets is that you write in plain text, then the plugin converts it into something resembling a screenplay, with proper indentation for character names and dialogue. The inspiration was John Gruber’s Markdown, which was becoming widely popular online.
Once we had Scrippets working, I wondered if we could extend this syntax to writing actual screenplays in plain text. Nima quickly worked up a prototype. All that was left was to pick a name for this new Markdown-for-scripts format.
My assistant Matt Byrne had a new pitch. From my email on May 17, 2011:
I thought about it for hours, starting right after our conversation. Many of these choices are great, but what stuck with me most was a suggestion of Matt’s, vamping off our idea of streets in Hollywood:
Fountain
Example: file.fountain or file.fntn
Bette Davis’ famous (and possibly apocryphal) advice to Hollywood newcomers: “Take Fountain.” It’s the secret thoroughfare, and everything branches off from it. And that feels like a good metaphor for what we’re doing. We’re not making an app or a product, we’re making a path.
What also appeals to me about Fountain is how it sounds in conversation. “You can open a Fountain file in any text editor. In fact, every text editor is a Fountain editor.”
It’s fun to write promo copy for Fountain. “Fountain keeps your files eternally young.” “Fountain can get you there faster.”
It’s also fun to imagine a lot of the tools for using/manipulating Fountain files being named after streets that connect to Fountain. A batch converter named Bronson. A file comparison tool named Selma.
We weren’t the only developers thinking about a plain text syntax for screenwriting. We ended up combining forces with a similar project called Screenplay Markdown (SPMD) and launching Fountain as an open-source specification in February 2012. It’s now the basis for Highland and many other modern screenwriting apps.
Roaming the Streets of Hollywood
As mentioned in my 2011 email, I was very excited by the idea of naming things after other streets in Hollywood, in particular the ones that connected to Fountain.
Bronson Avenue lent its name to Bronson Watermarker PDF, our app for creating personalized PDFs as a batch. It’s used daily by productions in Hollywood and around the world.
Selma has been an internal codename for several projects. In 2013, we nearly shipped a Wordle-like iOS game named Vine, but then came a short-form social video service with the same title. Vine is a good name!
But Highland is even better.
Highland is our flagship app, which makes sense given Highland Avenue’s importance in Hollywood. It’s the major north-south route, and the only divided avenue, taking you past the Chinese Theater and the Hollywood Bowl.
If you’re a screenwriter headed to a meeting at Universal, Warners, or Disney, you’re likely taking Highland to get there.
To be honest, the literal intersection of Highland and Fountain isn’t much to look at.
But it’s still a nice metaphor. And maybe one day we’ll build a proper office there.
Why Highland Matters for Screenwriters
Both Highland (the street) and Highland (the app) help screenwriters get where they’re going quickly, and in one piece.
Whether you’re penning your first script or fine-tuning your tenth, Highland simplifies the process, so you can focus on what matters: telling your story. That’s why longtime Highland users will stop to tell me their stories, extolling their favorite features, from the navigator to the writing sprints. And when they ask about the name, I explain the part about LA streets.
I get two common responses:
WRITER WHO LIVES IN LA
Of course! That makes sense. Duh!
or
WRITER WHO LIVES ELSEWHERE
Oh, okay! I guess.
If you haven’t already joined these writers in exploring its wonders, check out Highland today and see why so many screenwriters consider Highland essential.
Even if they don’t know why it’s called that.
