Script To Screen: “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”
From the 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, screenplay by Sidney Buchman, story by Lewis R. Foster.
From the 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, screenplay by Sidney Buchman, story by Lewis R. Foster.
A naive man [Jefferson Smith] is appointed to fill a vacancy in the US Senate. His plans promptly collide with political corruption, but he doesn’t back down.
Setup: Smith has been speaking for hour after hour, filibustering a bad Senate bill.
Here is the movie version:
There are some key visuals in the movie which are not in the script, but the dialogue is very much the same.
It’s said that Jimmy Stewart coated his throat with iodine to give him that raspy whisper. Another great performance by one of Hollywood’s premier actors.
Side note: To give some sense of how contemporary screenplays have evolved over the years, check out this paragraph of scene description from the script:
That’s the approach most scripts from 30s through 50s adopted: Long paragraphs of scene description. Nowadays, break up scene description into short paragraphs to make them more readable.
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.