I got this question recently:
“I’ve decided that I want to track e-mailed scripts I send out with a faint numbered watermark. (This can be made in Movie Magic Screenwriter) Is this looked down on in the industry?”
I’m honestly not sure about this… my gut reaction is that it will look a little bit paranoid. The only scripts I’ve seen with this on them are major studio scripts. I think I saw a copy of Titanic with a number on the pages but I can’t remember ever seeing a spec screenplay with this on it, especially from a new writer.
I don’t know how it will look since I don’t use Movie Magic Screenwriter so it’s hard for me to say whether you should do it or not. If it’s very distracting I would most definitely NOT do it. But if it’s so faint that people may not even notice it, I guess why not? Can you watermark like 4 or 5 random pages throughout the script? That way people might not even notice but if you ever did find a copy of your script floating around you’d be able to figure out where it came from.
It really seems to me though that a watermark on a spec script is much to do about nothing. I mean, if people are circulating your script that’s a good thing for a new writer.