Script To Screen: “Ghostbusters”

The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man scene.

From the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, written by Dan Aykroyd & Harold Ramis, the Final Struggle.

Setup: Gozer commands the three Ghostbusters to choose their form of destruction and despite trying to keep their minds blank, Stantz has a brain fart, resulting in this:

Here is the scene from the movie:

Clearly, a lot of ad libbing in the scene including Venkman’s line: “Nobody steps on a church in my town!”

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 posts, go here.