Script to Screen: “48 Hrs.”

The Black Russian scene, a break-out moment for Eddie Murphy.

Die Hard is perhaps the most paradigmatic example of an action movie, but for awhile when buddy movies were all the rage, everybody in Hollywood was looking to do a ‘similar but different’ version of this 1982 movie: 48 Hrs., written by Roger Spottiswoode by and Walter Hill & Larry Gross and Steven E. de Souza.

Setup: Reggie Hammond [Eddie Murphy] is a convict pulled out of prison for 48 hours by cop Jack Cates [Nick Nolte] to locate some bad guys and a missing briefcase full of cash. In this scene, Hammond and Cates enter a hillbilly bar with Hammond impersonating a cop.

Here is the scripted version of the scene:

Here is the movie version of the scene:

Some nice improvisation by Eddie Murphy. What other differences do you notice between script and screen?

Trivia: The bar scene in K-9 was an homage to 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 weekly series on Go Into The Story where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

For more Script To Screen articles, go here.