Script To Screen: “Rebel Without A Cause”
Perhaps the most memorable scene from the 1955 movie Rebel Without A Cause, screenplay by Stewart Stern, adaptation by Irving Shulman…
Perhaps the most memorable scene from the 1955 movie Rebel Without A Cause, screenplay by Stewart Stern, adaptation by Irving Shulman, story by Nicholas Ray
Setup: A game of “chicken” between two rivals, Jim and Buzz.
The script version of the scene:
Here is the movie version of the scene:
Note the small details of the script that end up in the movie, like Plato’s crossed fingers, but also some key differences. Can you spot those? Why do you think director Nicholas Ray cut the movie that way?
Also this: If you take away the actual camera shots — Long shot, Wide angle, Med. shot — you’d have a script that looks pretty similar to the style used in action scripts nowadays, each paragraph representing a camera shot.
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 articles, go here.