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I had great hopes for Montage when it was first released, as, prior to this, the only options you had for screenwriting on a Mac were badly-ported, rarely-updated, and bug-prone Windows apps. I did have reservations though. Final Draft, pretty much the industry standard screenplay software out there, had already gone through years of development and professional feedback, while new kid on the block, Montage, from Mariner Software, was a first app in this category from a company that previously made its name with journaling and spreadsheet programs.

Call me stuck up, but I was pretty sure a bunch of programmer nerds couldn’t begin to fathom what was required of a full-featured screenwriting application, but after years of buggy performance from Final Draft, I was more than willing to give it a try.

So I ran Montage for the full trial period, writing a real, actual screenplay, and you know what? I was actually glad when the trial period ran out.

I think, as software, Montage is a very well put-together package; very few bugs, little or no crashes and no lost data. That’s something that can’t be said for Final Draft, even after many years and many versions on OS X. But as a screenwriting program, it really fails miserably.

First and foremost, what you end up with is not technically a screenplay. Screenplay formatting is a very strict, standardized thing. While Montage hits the major surface points, like getting the character names and dialogue centered properly on the page, the line heights are a little screwy and inconsistent, especially between scenes, and things that you take for granted with Final Draft, like “mores” and “continueds” for scenes and dialogue are just ignored by Montage. So, in the case of dialogue that spills onto the next page, you have to manually insert before the split, then CONT’D on the next page. But, if you then add a scene or a line at a later point, earlier in the script, you’re going to have to go through and find your and CONT’D and fix it again (and probably add more).

Final Draft does all of this automatically. With Montage, you may as well be using Microsoft Word. Maybe I’m missing a setting or something, that’s all I can figure because it’s something pretty basic, but if I have to hunt to find it, then it’s not really worth hunting for (I’ve already been through pretty much every menu option).

It should be mentioned that Montage includes a whole lot of features that you’re supposed to find useful in writing your screenplay, such as Scene Index Cards, Outline Mode, Character and Location databases, a Research section, Synopsis, Query, etc. I honestly don’t know any writers who use any of these integrated tools even in Final Draft (Final Draft also has index card mode, among other things). It’s almost like the designers on Montage consulted for a couple of hours with a friend who sometimes writes or with someone who’s taking a night course in writing because none of it is really professionally implemented. It’s nice feature-gloss, but none of it’s useful, nor is it implemented well. I tried using the Index Cards feature to organize some of my scenes and I ended up with a complete mess with 10-20 hard spaces between some scenes and other scenes clumped together in groups of 3 and 4.

I really wanted this software to work. The only real pleasure I got using Montage was knowing that I was using a native OS X application, but that feeling only goes so far. If you know you’ve got to spend hours tweaking the format before you click “print”, getting to “The End” isn’t quite as satisfying as it is with Final Draft despite its own constant, nagging problems.

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