Script To Screen: “Unforgiven”

From the 1992 movie Unforgiven, written by David Webb Peoples, the movie’s Final Struggle sequence.

Setup: Retired gunslinger William Munny takes on one last job… and this is the finale.

Feels like the transcript of someone telling the story orally. And how about some of the descriptors:

There is a general whoop and hubbub…a sudden silence that has swept the bar like a brushfire…Skinny stares pop-eyed from behind the bar…and his eyes show how he feels about it…

A real ‘folksy’ feel in the language. To really drive home the narrative voice.

…but this is it, what all those Easteners dreamed about, the showdown in the saloon.“

Those Easterners” — as compared to the narrator who is not from the East. All of that adds to the compelling nature of the story.

Each line in the shoot-out suggesting a camera shot, you can just see the action right there on the page.

Here is the scene from the movie:

I’ll see you in comments for a discussion of this terrific scene from Unforgiven.

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 weekly series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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