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.

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

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