Script To Screen: “Blue Velvet”

A scene from the 1986 movie Blue Velvet, written by David Lynch.

IMDb Plot Summary: The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of criminals who have kidnapped her child.

In this scene, Frank (Dennis Hopper) having discovered Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) spending time with Frank’s love interest Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), takes Jeffrey on a “joyride” with some of Frank’s thugs, Dorothy and a character known as Greasy Girl.

Here is the movie version of the scene:

The scene plays out pretty much as written with one major exception: The addition of the Roy Orbison song “In Dreams”. What is described in the script simply as this — “Frank takes a small square of blue velvet out of his pocket and begins feeling Jeffrey’s face with it” — has Frank echoing lines of dialogue from the song as it plays on the car tape player.

In dreams I walk with you. In dreams I talk to you.
In dreams you’re mine. All of the time we’re together
In dreams, In dreams.

It provides a level of homoeroticism that takes the scene from creepy… to really creepy. Combined with Greasy Girl shifting from the mood in the script — “watch in terror” — to her dancing on the car while Frank terrorizes Jeffrey, adding a darkly comic twist, what Lynch ends up with is a memorable scene.

Any Blue Velvet fans out there? Arguably Lynch’s best movie, I think it’s about time for another screening.

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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