Script To Screen: “Airplane”

Script To Screen: “Airplane!”

A memorable scene from the 1981 comedy featuring the actress who played June Cleaver on Leave It To Beaver, screenplay by Jim Abrahams & David Zucker & Jerry Zucker.

IMDb plot summary: A man afraid to fly must ensure that a plane lands safely after the pilots become sick.

Here is the scripted version of “I can speak jive” scene.

INT. PASSENGER CABIN - NIGHT

A Black Dude is holding his stomach in pain.

BLACK DUDE
Oooooooh.
Randy approaches.

RANDY
Can I get something for you?

BLACK DUDE
Cain fo' gwine sho fi cun for.

RANDY
I'm sorry. I don't understand.
MRS. SCHIFF, a middle-aged woman, is seated behind the
Black Dudes.

MRS. SCHIFF
Oh, stewardess, I can speak jive. He said
he's in great pain and wants to know if
you can help him.

RANDY
Tell him to relax and I'll be back as
quickly as I can with some medicine.
Randy exits.

MRS. SCHIFF
Shi gwine man chitlun down for mo sho.

BLACK DUDE
(indignantly)
Shi man I ain neba mo fo gwine ain.
They engage in an argument in jive talk, with Mrs. Schiff
getting the best of it. She swaggers off in typical black
dude fashion.

Here is the movie version of the scene:

The filmmakers must have known they had a good thing going with the actress Barbara Billingsley (Jive Lady), Norman Alexander Gibbs (First Jive Dude), and Al White (Second Jive Dude) because they added several lines of back and forth between them, certainly improvised.

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 GITS where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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