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.

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.

JEFFERSON has gone wearily to the baskets. He seizes handfulls 
 of telegrams at random and glances at them. He sags in 
 despair, almost falling.

JEFFERSON
 (with effort)
 I guess this is just another lost 
 cause, Mr. Paine. All you people 
 don’t know about lost causes. Mr. 
 Paine does. He said once they were 
 the only causes worth fighting for, 
 and he fought for them once, for the 
 only reason that any man ever fights 
 for them. Because of just one plain, 
 simple rule, “Love thy neighbor,” 
 and in this world today, full of 
 hatred, a man who knows that one 
 rule has a great trust. You knew 
 that rule, Mr. Paine, and I loved 
 you for it, just as my father did. 
 And you know that you fight for the 
 lost causes harder than for any 
 others. Yes, you’d even die for them, 
 like a man we both know, Mr. Paine. 
 You think I’m licked. You all think 
 I’m licked. Well, I’m not licked and 
 I’m going to stay right here and 
 fight for this lost cause even if 
 this room gets filled with lies like 
 these, and the Taylors and all their 
 armies come marching into this place. 
 Somebody’ll listen to me — some —

The chamber whirls in front of Jeff’s eyes — and he pitches 
 forward to the floor. People get to their feet automatically 
 all over the house — and there is dead silence except for 
 SAUNDERS, who utters one shriek as she gets to her feet — 
 then stands unable to move.

Here is the movie version:

I’ll see you in comments for a discussion of this scene from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

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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