Script To Screen: “Jacob’s Ladder”

A truly creepy scene from the 1990 movie Jacob’s Ladder, written by Bruce Joel Rubin.

Setup: Mourning his dead child, a haunted Vietnam vet attempts to discover his past while suffering from a severe case of disassociation. To do so, he must decipher reality and life from his own dreams, delusion, and perception of death.

Here is the movie version of the scene.

Two things:

• Much of what screenwriter Rubin indicates in scene description appears on film, but there are several images included in the movie not in the script. It’s a case of the screenwriting suggesting a mood, atmosphere and tone, and providing several examples of possible visuals, then the director working with his crew to come up with additional scary images.
• We are barely three decades away from when this script was written, but screenplay style has changed dramatically. For example, you would never see anything nowadays like the third paragraph which is 13 lines long. Today each of those camera ‘shots’ would be separated out into individual paragraphs.

Per this last point, a word of warning: While it’s great to read older scripts, do not look to them as guides to screenplay style. You must read scripts written in the last five years to provide stylistic touchstones for your own writing.

Here is a video analysis of the movie:

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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