Script To Screen: “The Third Man”

Occasionally, I like to feature excerpts from screenplays from eras gone by. First, I happen to love all movies, including old ones. Second, it’s interesting to compare how screenplay style has changed over the years.

Today, we take a look at a scene from the 1949 movie The Third Man, screen play by Graham Greene.

Logline: Pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, black-market opportunist Harry Lime.

This is the end scene, one of the most memorable in cinema history.

Here is the script version of the scene:

Here is the movie version of the scene:

Love that last LONG SHOT: “She passes Martins without a glance.” Picture worth a thousand words.

If you compare this script excerpt to screenplays of today, particularly spec scripts (or selling scripts), one huge difference: No camera shots in contemporary screenplays. A writer-director script may include camera shots. A production draft as well. But the trend over the last three decades or so has been very definitely been away from including camera jargon and directing lingo in a spec script. Two reasons why:

• A director doesn’t want to be told by the screenwriter how to do their job in terms of cinematography.
• This trend has actually freed up screenwriters to transform selling scripts into a more literary form of narrative.

Besides, we can use paragraphs of scene description to suggest individual camera shots.

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.

John Geraci has an excellent post here analyzing The Third Man.

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