Scene Description Spotlight: “Raging Bull”
Sports movie are tough to write for many reasons. Here’s one of them: How to describe athletic action without being too specific and…
Sports movie are tough to write for many reasons. Here’s one of them: How to describe athletic action without being too specific and ‘stagey’ or too generic and inauthentic. A screenplay that does a great job on this front is Raging Bull (1980). Adapted by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin from a book by Jake LaMotta with Joseph Carter & Peter Savage, there are well over a dozen boxing matches featured in the movie. How to handle all that action?
Early on, the script establishes a spirited but graphic approach to scene description as here in the story’s first fight:
Strong descriptors to convey the action and mood: charges, jabbing, punching, corners, unleashes, wild alley-fighting attack, ferocious punch, staggers, falls. If you read just those words, you get a sense of what’s happening in the scene.
In a later scene, the script balances the action in and out of the ring:
A lot of great imagery, but if you’ve got a killer visual up your sleeve, save it for the end of the scene: As he does, JAKE spits his mouthpiece in disgust at FOX and struts back to his corner. What a fantastic and symbolic gesture to sum up the tawdry business of the fixed fight.
The use of TIME CUT as a transition brings up another issue that always arises in sports movies: It’s impossible to visualize an entire game, fight, match, etc, so how to handle the inevitable time ellipses? Check out how the screenwriters handle the 3rd fight between LaMotta and Sugar Ray Robinson.
A primary slugline establishes the location and start of the scene, then underneath that — THE FOURTH ROUND, THE SEVENTH ROUND, TIME CUT. These are not secondary slugs, but rather literally what could be called ‘time frames,’ indicating a jump in time within the context of the scene and its primary location. The way I would have typically approached it would be to frame it this way.
But I think I prefer the approach that Schrader and Martin used.
Here is a taste of what director Martin Scorcese did with the script.
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