Abstract: The article explores the means of literary expressiveness used in the literary screenplays of film screenwriters of the 1990s. The literary screenplay, characterized by the extensive use of literary devices, became an educational and production standard of Soviet cinema from the 1930s. All elements of this form are subservient to the goal of subsequent screen embodiment and are directly related to the issues of the future film. In the 1990s, the transition from the state-controlled Soviet film production system to the producer model led to a shift towards the American screenplay, whose dry and concise language was radically opposed to the stylistic uniqueness of the literary screenplay. Some of the last debutants among the graduates of VGIK, who received their education in accordance with the Soviet model of teaching film dramaturgy (P. Lutsyk and A. Samoryadov, R. Litvinova, A. Balabanov), develop in their screenplays a complex set of techniques aimed at reflecting their contemporary issues through the formation of the film's chronotope, speech characteristics of the hero and their image using literary means – syntax, through which the spatial-temporal unity of the screenplay is organized, replicas, the score of the role, and the logic of editing and camera work (scale, angle, point of shooting) are created. These structural elements are inseparable from screenplay as a type of text. The author comes to the conclusion that the development of methods for their presentation in the screenplay text by the authors of the 1990s significantly influences the subsequent development of Russian screenwriting.