Script To Screen: “10 Things I Hate About You”

Kat reads a poem she wrote… a poem with a LOT of subtext!

From the 1999 movie 10 Things I Hate About You, written by Karen McCullah & Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, based on a play by William Shakespeare.

Setup: A new kid must find a guy to date the meanest girl in school, the older sister of the girl he has a crush on, who cannot date until her older sister does.

Here is the scene from the movie:

There are few notable differences. Can you catch them? But overall, that dialogue is straight-to-screen, suggesting everybody knew the writers had nailed this scene.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a series on GITS where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

For more Script To Screen articles, go here.