Call him the anti-paperboy.

Steve Vitolo first came from Boston to Los Angeles as another writer with a dream, starting as an assistant when he began to notice a disturbing trend on set. “On this one show, we kept printing a revised script every single night for 100-plus people, 50 pages. So every single night, it was literally 5,000 sheets of paper that would then be obsolete by the next day,” he recalls, as he was tasked with the script delivery.

That was more than a decade ago now, with each new line of dialogue or director’s note resulting in massive paper waste — and others around him also waking up to the problem, without much of a solution. Which led Vitolo, who would go on to write for shows including Black-ish and Hot in Cleveland, to ask, “Why are we writing scripts digitally and then printing it on paper? Who uses paper now? We’re all using computers.”

And so Vitolo — already with a love of tech and background working on websites — co-created Scriptation (and now serves as its founder and CEO). The software allows actors, directors, writers and crews to take notes and mark up their scripts digitally while easily migrating those annotations over to revised versions. The app also enables people to add photos, voice memos and various other personalized features to their documents — appealing even to those who aren’t necessarily making a choice to be sustainable but are drawn in by the ease. It’s always been that two-pronged approach, looking to solve both productivity and environmental problems and reach beyond just the eco-conscious community.

The company launched in 2016 and gained traction during the COVID shutdown, when people had a moment to learn a new technology. It took time, trying to convert an entire industry one by one — in what Vitolo describes as “this ground-up thing” — but word slowly spread, and today it has 25,000 active monthly users across more than 50 countries.

From April 2023 to this April, Scriptation users have eliminated more than 120 million sheets of paper from production sets worldwide, according to Vitolo; last year’s total of 48 million sheets alone equates to more than 5,700 trees preserved, more than 5 million gallons of water conserved and 3.3 million pounds of CO2 emissions avoided. On a personal level, each Earth Month, beginning in 2024, Scriptation has sent users a Green Impact Report (à la Spotify Wrapped) to estimate their own personal water, waste and carbon savings.

And new innovations are coming, as this spring Scriptation launches Playback, a feature that lets users listen to scripts read aloud in customizable voices (via AI). It comes at the request of executives who want to review scripts during their commute and saves them from reading on paper at home.

Word-of-mouth and listening to industry feedback has been key to Scriptation’s Hollywood success, with Michael B. Jordan, Kathy Bates and the teams behind Hacks, Dexter and Saturday Night Live as effusive supporters.

Hacks co-creator Lucia Aniello — who along with fellow showrunners Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky has had a longtime commitment to sustainability on the show — says she learned about Scriptation through her assistant director and was drawn in both by the program’s organizational benefits and the fact that “I have always felt there was too much paper waste” on sets. “There will always be something lovely about having a physical script in your hand, but with the endless revisions needed, it just feels irresponsible to print them out for every iteration,” she adds. “Let’s save the trees for the first and last drafts, in my opinion!”

Jennifer Phang, a director and member of the DGA’s Sustainable Future Committee, became aware of the software from a VFX supervisor on one of her sets and was impressed by the way “everyone was walking around with their iPads making notes; they looked so cool, everything was so clean and kept-together.” Though she acknowledges the additional step of having to make sure the iPad is charged every day, Phang has been using it on her projects — which include episodes of The Boys and The Flight Attendant — for years and adds, “If you see all the paper distributed in any given production office, it can be a lot. You could be saving reams and reams and reams of paper by going paperless on a production.”

Scriptation also has spread its gospel though the Hollywood guilds and various other industry organizations, putting on educational webinars and giving on-set presentations. Last year, the company launched a Brand Ambassador Program with 40 entertainment professionals and partnered with Green Rider, a U.K.-based movement pushing for sustainability on sets.

The Green Rider campaign was co-founded by actor-writer Danusia Samal (The Great) and is an agreement — largely focused around travel, energy, waste (where Scriptation comes into play), food and storytelling — “that’s sent to production when the job is offered or as part of the deal process,” Samal explains. It’s not an official contract but more of an approach of using talents’ leverage to make sustainable changes on set. Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bella Ramsey and House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy are among the stars who have signed on, and the Green Rider is eying an expansion to the U.S. soon after discovering a way to more solidly lock in sustainable commitments.

Despite the improvement over the past decade, though, it’s been a challenge to fully rid Hollywood of paper.

“Anyone outside of [the industry] will be like, ‘Why are we still using paper scripts?’ But it is pretty common, and that is honestly our biggest competitor — paper,” Vitolo says. “It’s the way it’s been done, and the industry is a little slow to evolve. We’re [visiting] kids shows, and the kids have paper scripts; it’s like, ‘But they’re the ones on their phones all day!’ ”

In 2022, Scriptation launched a pledge — with several major stars and directors on board — to get Hollywood paperless by 2030, and its founder is confident the industry can get there, though he sees some still using paper scripts “as a crutch” and resisting the push to learn a new technology.

“If people are set in their ways and their workflows, you don’t want to say, ‘You have to do this,’ because that’s also bad. It’s like, ‘Here are all the reasons why you should do this,” and you just have to make them feel like that is the obvious choice,” Vitolo says of his approach. “It’s still a battle trying to get people away from their scripts that they hold on to dearly. But we’re working on it — and I’m not against shaming them.”