Script To Screen: “The Terminator”

The beginning of the 1984 film The Terminator, written by James Cameron & Gale Anne Hurd.

Setup: It’s late at night when…

The scripted version of the opening:

Here is the scene from the movie:

There are some incidental changes from screenplay to movie, but largely quite the same. Note: The original title was Terminator, not The Terminator.

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.

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