Script To Screen: “Batman”

The Final Struggle in the 1989 movie Batman.

Plot Summary: The Dark Knight of Gotham City begins his war on crime with his first major enemy being the clownishly homicidal Joker.

The script version of the scene:

The scene from the movie:

Lots of differences especially in dialogue suggesting there was a great deal of improvisation going on. Which ones are the most significant changes?

By the way, one of the few hard copy scripts I’ve saved is the very first version of this project written by Sam Hamm which you can read here.

Any of you prefer this version of Batman to The Dark Knight? If so, I’d love to hear why.

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.

Comment Archive

For more articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.