Script To Screen: “High Fidelity”

The delightful 2000 comedy High Fidelity, screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack and Scott Rosenberg, novel by Nick Hornby.

Setup: Rob, a record store owner and compulsive list maker, recounts his top five breakups, including the one in progress.

INT. ROB'S APARTMENT - NIGHT STEREO Not a minisystem, not a matching set, but coveted
audiophile clutter of McIntosh and Nakamichi, each
component from a different era, bought piece by piece
in various nanoseconds of being flush. ROB (V.O.)
What came first? The music or the
misery? People worry about kids
playing with guns and watching violent
videos, we're scared that some sort
of culture of violence is taking
them over... RECORDS Big thin LPs. Fields of them. We move across them,
slowly... they seem to come to rest in an end of a
few books... but then the CD's start, and go on,
faster and faster, forever then the singles, then the
tapes... ROB (V.O.)
But nobody worries about kids
listening to thousands -- literally
thousands -- of songs about broken
hearts and rejection and pain and
misery and loss. It seems the records, tapes, and CD's will never end
until... we come to ROB -- always a hair out of
place, a face that grows on you. He sits in an
oversized beanbag chair and addresses us, the wall of
music behind him. ROB
Did I listen to pop music because I
was miserable, or was I miserable
because I listened to pop music? INT. APARTMENT - NIGHT Group of bags huddled next to the door. Not the go
on-vacation set, but the clothes-to-coffee-maker
moving out variety. Rob stares at them, his face
unreadable, his head gripped by a big pair Boudokan
headphones. We hear what he is hearing, something
foreboding and upbeat at the same time. LAURA, Rob's girlfriend, enters the room, and he
immediately pulls the headphones off. She clocks him
for a moment, catching him in what seems to be an old
and repeated moment of nonpresence. She begins to
heft the bags, Rob goes to her, a little tardy for
his big goodbye. Laura begins to cry a bit. LAURA
I don't really know what I'm doing. He smiles, and she doesn't. He adjusts. ROB
You don't have to go this second.
You can stay until whenever. LAURA
We've done the hard part now. I
might as well, you know... ROB
Well stay for tonight, then. Laura shakes her head, lifts the last small bag, and
backs out the door. A strap catches on a handle and
the two of them wrestle with it a bit, while trying
to keep the door open, until Laura awkwardly
disappears from view and the door shuts behind Rob.
He stays right there staring at the shut door for a
long moment, listening to the fading sound of Laura
and her dragging bags. STEREO Rob's left hand cranks the volume knob while his
right switches the CD changer to something loud and
adrenal. He addresses us again. ROB
My desert-island, all-time, top five
most memorable break-ups, in
chronological order are as follows:
Alison Ashworth, Penny Hardwick,
Jackie Allen, Charlie Nicholson,
Sarah Kendrew. INT. APARTMENT STAIRWELL Laura drags her bags, banging down the stairs -- INT. ROB'S APARTMENT Rob moves around the apartment, seeming to expand
physically, looking for change as he continues. ROB
Those were the ones that really hurt.
Can you see your name in that list,
Laura? Maybe you'd sneak into the
top ten, but there's no place for
you in the top five. Sorry. Those
places are reserved for the kind of
humiliations and heartbreaks that
you're just not capable of delivering. He adjusts the angle of the TV, stuffs a creepy
family portrait into a drawer. ROB
That probably sounds crueler than
it's meant to, but the fact is, we're
too old to take each other miserable.
Unhappiness used to mean something.
Now it's just a drag like a cold or
having no money. He moves through the living room to an open window
facing the street. Looking down two stories, he sees
Laura emerge from the building and drag her bags
toward her car across the street. ROB
If you really wanted to mess me up,
you should have got to me earlier.

Here is the scene from the movie:

See you in comments to discuss this scene in High Fidelity.

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 weekly series on GITS where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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