Script To Screen: “Bonnie and Clyde”

The ending sequence from the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde, written by David Newman & Robert Benton.

IMDb plot summary: A somewhat romanticized account of the career of the notoriously violent bank robbing couple and their gang.

In this scene, Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde (Warren Beatty) drive along the road, feeling pretty good about things. And then…

Here is the movie version of the scene:

Several significant changes from script to screen, the biggest one being this: “At no point in the gun fight do we see BONNIE and CLYDE in motion… We never see BONNIE and CLYDE dead, though for a moment we discern their bodies slumped in the car.”

The final version is a stunning alteration from the script because the ending of the movie is iconic, a full 36 seconds of the gangsters’ bodies being decimated by a fusillade of bullets. In fact, the last images of Bonnie and Clyde in the script are more reminiscent of another film about gangsters: The 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

With Bonnie and Clyde, the choice of the director made a huge difference in the way the movie was received, the violent conclusion key to the word of mouth that drove young people into theaters to see the end point of these anti-heroes. Frankly I wonder if that scene influenced the decision by screenwriter William Goldman not to show the two lead characters die on-screen in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Here is the last paragraph from Goldman’s script:

The final image of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid freezes into something resembling a photograph …

… and the script for Bonnie and Clyde describes the characters never seen being shot, but instead an image of them as “still photographs.”

Very interesting. See what you can learn from comparing script to screen?

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.

For more Script To Screen articles, go here.