How come you so brilliant?

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

I was never overly heavy with parantheticals, but going back over some stuff I see I had way more than I should -- and after reading that a lot of top actors take a black marker to all parantheticals in scripts they read, well, heck

Actors loathe parentheticals. I guess it's their equivalent to a screenwriter inserting directing lingo -- REVERSE CAMERA ANGLE, TILT UP, CLOSE UP, SMASH CUT TO -- for a director.

In the Paddy Chayefsky case, I think that piece of parenthetical direction would be three lines whichever way you cut it.

Either it's three lines in parentheses, or it's

Dialogue
------Empty line
One line of scene direction
------Empty line
Character name (cont'd)
Dialogue

So, in this case Chayefsky would have been using four lines through his use of SD, instead of just three in parentheticals.

On the other hand, SD is necessary to break up a page full of dialogue, and there is always the chance that could be inadvertently deleted. So I would probably have gone SD in that case.