Script To Screen: “There’s Something About Mary”

One of the most memorable scenes from the 1998 comedy There’s Something About Mary, screenplay by Ed Decter & John J. Strauss and Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly, story by Ed Decter & John J. Strauss.

Setup: Ted is prepping to go out to dinner with Mary, but is feeling rather on edge and decides to take matters into his own hands…

Here is the script version of the scene:

The scene in the movie:

There is one huge difference between the script and the movie. What is it? And why do you think they made the change? What can we learn from this choice re our writing?

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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