Where are screenplays located?

Two main locations in the library house substantial collections of screenplays. One location is the eighth floor, where we house those screenplays that have been published commercially. These titles can be checked out.

The other location is The Fales Library, located on the 3rd floor of Bobst. These titles are part of a much larger gift collection given to the library that includes not only original unpublished screenplays, but also teleplays, musical theater scripts and play scripts. These titles may not be checked out. Due to copyright restrictions they may not be photocopied.

How do I find published screenplays?

Locating screenplays housed in our stacks can be a little tricky. If you are looking for a specific title, then a simple title search in BobCat will tell you if we own it.

For example:

T=My Own Private Idaho

will result in a citation for a copy of the screenplay assigned the call number PS3572.A42268 E92 1993. Another search you could perform is an author search, if you know the author of a screenplay for which you are searching.

For example:

Author=Allen, Woody

will result in a list of the screenplays, as well as plays and books, written by Woody Allen.

Two searches that will yield a majority of screenplays are a LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Heading) search for Motion Picture Plays and a keyword search for Screenplays.

For example:

Subject Heading (LCSH)=Motion Picture Plays

which will retrieve about 300 BobCat records for circulating screenplays.

Or:

All Keywords =screenplays

which will retrieve all BobCat records with the words screenplay or screenplays somewhere in the record. Since many titles of screenplays include that word, many of our titles will be retrieved.

Should you wish to browse the stacks the call number for most but not all of the circulating screenplays begins with PN1997, and they are located on the 8th floor.

How do I find original screenplays?

Those original screenplays housed in the Fales Library can be located in BobCat the same way you would locate a published screenplay. If you know the title of the film or the author, either of those searches will tell you if we own the screenplay. You can, however, retrieve a list of ALL the original screenplays in this special collection. Each has been assigned a genre/form term which is searchable in BobCat.

The search you would perform is:

Genre Heading=screenplays

which will result in a list of the over 500 screenplays. About 270 of these are located in Fales and the rest are located in the American Film Scripts Online database.

Are there any screenplays online?

The database American Film Scripts Online contains 497 scripts by 605 writers together with detailed, fielded information on the scenes, characters and people related to the scripts. You can access this database from the libraries main page and clicking on "articles via databases" and selecting it from the drop down menu.
http://library.nyu.edu/collections/find_articles_title.html