Script To Screen: “The Artist”
A cute scene that turns into a significant plot point from the 2011 silent movie The Artist, written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius.
A cute scene that turns into a significant plot point from the 2011 silent movie The Artist, written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius.
Plot Summary: A silent movie star meets a young dancer, but the arrival of talking pictures sends their careers in opposite directions.
Here is the scene from the script:
Here is the scene in the movie:
It’s interesting to note that the movie mimics silent film not only in what’s on screen, but also in one key respect with the script itself: Big blocks of scene description! For instance, here is a script excerpt for the 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery:
Contemporary screenplays put a premium on white space with paragraphs typically no more than 4–5 lines with some types of scripts, action genre in particular often having 1–2 line blocks of description.
That said, the script for The Artist does a great job conveying not only action, but also the mood of the characters within the piece.
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 on where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.
For more articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.