Script To Screen: “The Searchers”
From the 1956 movie The Searchers, screenplay by Frank S. Nugent, novel by Allan Le May.
From the 1956 movie The Searchers, screenplay by Frank S. Nugent, novel by Allan Le May.
Summary: As a Civil War veteran spends years searching for a young niece captured by Indians, his motivation becomes increasingly questionable.
Here is the scene that sets the plot into motion:
Here is the movie version of the scene:
From time to time, I like to post excerpts from old scripts to drive home a point: Screenplay style and format is a malleable thing, a constant state of evolution.
Six decades ago when this script was written, it was standard practice to include specific camera shots and write scene description in continuous blocks of action in a single long paragraph. Nowadays we do neither.
And yet, this script is full of great visual writing: “Breathing hard himself, his face ashen in the moonlight… his face is alive with hope… Little tongues of fire are licking the edges of the uprights… The red glow of the burning is on the faces of the men as they dismount… what he sees makes the big shoulders droop, the huge frame slump.”
Format and style may change. The need to write visually never does.
Compare the script to the movie version to see how they compare. Mostly the same, a few subtle, but key changes.
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.