Script To Screen: “Election”

A critical plot point in this fantastic comedy.

From the 1999 movie Election, screenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, novel by Tom Perrotta.

Setup: High school teacher Jim McCalister, caught up in a test of wills with student Tracy Flick, has a choice to make about Flick’s potential election.

Here is the scene in the script

The scene from the movie:

Note: Tom Perrotta has enormous range as a novelist because he not only wrote Election, he also wrote The Leftovers.

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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