Script To Screen: “Double Indemnity”

A key scene from the classic 1944 thriller Double Indemnity, screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, novel by James M. Cain.

Setup: An insurance rep [Neff] lets himself be talked into a murder/insurance fraud scheme by his lover [Phyllis] that arouses the suspicions of an insurance investigator [Keyes].

Notice the different approach to screenplay format. I rather like it. Essentially all it does is put the character name at the left action margin instead of in the center of the page. That could lead to a reduced page count since the character name is on the same line as the dialogue, not on its own separate line. Since character names are used hundreds of times in a typical screenplay, that could amount to 5 less pages or more per script.

Here is the movie version of the scene:

Notice something unusual about the door? How it opens out, instead of in? Billy Wilder had the production team do that as a way of allowing Neff to hide Phyllis from Keyes.

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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