Script to Screen: “(500) Days of Summer”

Tom’s best day ever plays out as a music video accompanied by Hall & Oates.

When an original screenplay starts out like this, the first three pages after the title page:

You know straightaway you’re reading a comedy. Screenwriters Neustadter and Weber stated they decided with this script to take “every chance we could” to make the story interesting. They do including this great scene where reality becomes hyper-reality.

The story’s Protagonist Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has been pining away for Summer (Zoeey Deschanel) for precisely 31 days. Then this happens:

Compare to the scene in the movie:

You’ll note that the scene as shot is similar but different to the scripted version. No Paul Newman. No Ronald McDonald. No Hall and Oates (though evidently, they came really close to getting the musicians to agree to perform on camera). No “Billie Jean” sidewalk. But that’s not important. What is is that Neustadter & Weber conveyed the tone of the scene, the basic arc of the scene, and provided the director with ideas for the scene.

Often budget and production constraints make certain scene elements impossible to shoot, so a writer has to learn to live with that, but I’ll bet Neustadter and Weber were happy they got the animated bird in the scene!

Here’s a scene which didn’t make it into the movie: Tom’s worst morning ever.

Great scene, great script, great movie.

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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 Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

For more Script To Screen articles, go here.