Scene Description Spotlight: “Some Like It Hot”
Many older screenplays from the 40s and 50s are written in a style that makes them hard to read — loaded with directing notes, lots of…
Many older screenplays from the 40s and 50s are written in a style that makes them hard to read — loaded with directing notes, lots of parentheticals, and big blocks of scene description. However, scripts by Billy wilder & I.A.L. “Izzy” Diamond read like they were written pretty much to our contemporary standards.
A great example of this is Some Like It Hot (1959). Pay particular attention to the scene description in this scene: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, unfortunately witnessed by the story’s Protagonists Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon):
For the most part, Wilder and Diamond used each paragraph to signify a camera shot. That’s a clean way to handle “directing” the action through scene description and it is a screenwriting style prevalent in contemporary screenplays.
Here’s the movie version of the scene:
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