Script To Screen: “Jackie Brown”

A scene from the 1997 movie Jackie Brown, written by Quentin Tarantino, based on an Elmore Leonard novel.

IMDb plot summary: The middle age stewardess Jackie Brown smuggles money from Mexico to Los Angeles for the arms dealer Ordell Robbie. When she gets caught by the agents Ray Nicolette and Mark Dargus with ten thousand dollars and cocaine in her purse, they propose a deal to her to help them to arrest Ordell in exchange of her freedom. Meanwhile Ordell asks the fifty-six year-old Max Cherry, who runs a bail bond business, to release Jackie Brown with the intention of eliminating her. Jackie suspects of Ordell’s intention and plots a complicate confidence game with Max to steal half a million dollar from Ordell.

Here Jackie gets the jump on Ordell.

Here is the movie version of the scene:

It’s great to see what Pam Grier and Samuel L. Jackson do with Tarantino’s dialogue. One thing: Grier adds a few choice MF-bombs to underscore how damn serious she is.

One of the 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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