Script To Screen: “Thelma & Louise”

One of the most memorable movie endings in the last quarter century: Thelma & Louise (1990), written by Callie Khouri.

Setup: On the run and being chased by seemingly every law enforcement agent in the southwest, then confronted by the Grand Canyon in front of them, what will Thelma and Louise do?

Here is the scripted version of the scene:

Here is the movie version of the scene:

Lots of differences between the two including no B.B. King song. What else can you spot?

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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