Script To Screen: “All About Eve”

A scene from the 1950 movie All About Eve, written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and featuring one of the most famous lines of dialogue in movie history.

Plot Summary: An ingenue (Eve) insinuates herself in to the company of an established but aging stage actress (Margo) and her circle of theater friends.

Here is the scene in the script:

Here is the movie version of the scene:

First thing to note, the line “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night,” was named by the American Film Institute at the #9 most notable movie quote of all time. But it’s what happens after the line that ratchets up the plot, Eve connecting with Addison.

One thing interesting about scripts from this era is how close the actors stick to the dialogue as written. Few changes if any as is the case here. There’s a reason for that: During the first half-century during the evolution of movies, and especially during the 30s and 40s, many films were adaptations of stage play. Indeed, many screenwriters were playwrights. And in that world, the writer’s words were sacrosanct.

This attitude prevailed in Hollywood and it was only with the emergence of the director as auteur and the growth of method acting that we saw a screenplay coming to be perceived as a blueprint for production.

One of the 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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