Script To Screen: “Air Force One”

The movie version of this pivotal scene is much different than the script.

The climactic scene from the 1994 movie Air Force One written by Andrew Marlowe.

IMDb plot summary: Hijackers seize the plane carrying the President of the United States and his family, but he — an ex-soldier — works from hiding to defeat them.

Here’s a scripted version of the scene:

Here’s the movie version:

Lots of changes most notably in the movie, Marshall takes on a traitor in a brawling Final Struggle. They also save the reveal of that Bad Guy until this moment in the scene. Movie logic? Bring everything to a head and let the Protagonist take care of the enemy.

Any fans of Air Force One? Checked on Andrew Marlowe, the movie’s screenwriter. He went on to create the long-running TV series “Castle”. Done all right for himself.

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.