Screenplay Five: The Sixth Sense

The Sixth Sense (1999)
M. Night Shyamalan
Click for screenplay.
"De profundis clamo ad te domine." ("Out of the depths I cry to you, lord." - Mass for the dead)

I can't believe that I feel like I have to do this, but

BEWARE: SPOILERS.

I imagine that by now, everyone on the planet is familiar with the twist in The Sixth Sense, but I am not holding back at all below the cut. So... be warned.

Screenplay Four: Annie Hall

Annie Hall (1977)

Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Click for screenplay.
"That movie makes me feel guilty."
"Yeah, 'cause it's supposed to."




Alright, so my last post covered the screenplay of a movie with which I am very familiar. It went alright, I suppose... but this time, I chose something new. I am not familiar with Woody Allen's body of work but I do know that he is a quirky little dude, so this is gonna be a wild adventure. Ready?

Screenplay Three: Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Michael Arndt
Click for screenplay.
"You know what...? Fuck beauty contests. It's like life is one fucking beauty contest after another these days. School, then college, then work. Fuck it... you do what you love, and fuck the rest."



I'm going to start this by defending myself...

I have seen Little Miss Sunshine a lot. My dad introduced it to me (no surprises there) during one of our family movie nights. (This is a good time to inform you, by the way, that I am one of those people who will watch their favorite movies/TV shows ad nauseum.)

My point? I know the movie very well. I'm quite familiar with each scene, the soundtrack, and the plot, as well as each of the characters.

I think that reading the screenplay of a movie I know very well is a valuable exercise because it strips away other aspects of the film--specific actors and their deliveries, the cinematography, all of that stuff--and makes me look at the story itself. Do I like the movie for the complete package, or for the story and its armature alone, or something else? It's A Wonderful Life, I discovered, has a brilliant story that I regard highly but it is packaged within a movie that I would not place in my top ten list (which I haven't ever created, but I know IAWL would not be in it). After having read the Little Miss Sunshine screenplay, I hope to explain my feelings towards it through that same lense. 

My regular source for screenplays, IMSDb, has not posted the Little Miss Sunshine script at the time of writing. I found an online version of the script that (because I know the movie so well) is NOT the post-production version of the script, i.e., not just a transcribed version of the film. The date on the screenplay I read is 2003, three years before the movie even came out.

So, if you're reading this review and you've seen the movie, you may (like me) notice some variation in the dialogue/scenery as well as some scenes that didn't make it into the film. 

Since this blog is all about the screenplay and not about the film, I am dealing with the script I read and not the movie. The biggest difference you need to know is that this script places the family in Maryland with the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant taking place in Boca Raton, Florida. (For those of you who haven't seen the movie, the movie places the family in Albuquerque, New Mexico with the pageant taking place in Redondo Beach, California.)

Working Out the Kinks

Alright, so as you can tell this project is lacking any strict set of guidelines, so luckily for me, I get to make it up as I go.

The last two screenplays I read, Casablanca and It's A Wonderful Life, were recommended to me by Emma so we could read a couple together and bounce ideas off of each other. I like this a lot. However, this will not always be the case--as for example, Screenplay Three. Something that Brian McDonald said in Invisible Ink was that if you want to write, you should examine "classic" or "popular" stories, and you should also examine your favorite stories to understand why they resonate with you the way they do.

I plan on doing a little bit of both here. I wasn't too familiar with either Casablanca or It's A Wonderful Life before reading them. Now I'm going to try to read a screenplay of a movie I like a lot, to see why it works for me.

Sound good?

Glad to hear you're on board! Look for Screenplay Three in the next couple days.

Screenplay Two: It's A Wonderful Life

It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, Jo Swerling
"What is it you want, Mary...? You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down... you could swallow it and it'd all dissolve, see? And the moonbeams'd shoot out of your fingers and your toes, and the ends of your hair."



When I saw this movie as a child with my parents, I'm sure I thought it was alright, but boy, have times changed. I read this screenplay and pretty much fell in love with it. I empathize with George at so many different points in the story and I truly think the ultimate message is worth keeping in mind.

Screenplay Two...?

I just finished reading Screenplay Two (no spoilers here, you'll have to come back later to see what it is!). Thought I should let all four of the people who are reading this know that, because it was a truly BEAUTIFUL screenplay that really got to me, I want to give it the time and dedication it deserves... which I can't do tonight.

I'll be back. Goodness, what a script.

Screenplay One: Casablanca

Emma shared the next few screenplays on her list with me. I kinda latched on to her and read Casablanca last night/this morning, jotting down my thoughts and impressions while reading. I hope to put them in some sort of coherent order below.


Casablanca (1942)
Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch
"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

Hello, world!

Hi there.

My friend Emma is doing this neat project where she reads a screenplay and then blogs about it.

Also, I'm not a very creative person.

So I'm doing a neat project where I read a screenplay and then blog about it!

A lot of our screenplays might overlap so that Emma and I can discuss them together, but we're not reading them together or writing them together, so our posts will still be original and reflect our personal opinions/reactions.

Here goes!




------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------EDIT: I should probably tell you my background with screenplays:

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Just so you know exactly how much experience I don't have with screenplays in an academic/professional setting. I have read Brian McDonald's Invisible Ink, and I took a course called "Introduction to Film Analysis and Visual Culture". 

So yeah, this is me dipping my toe into the seemingly placid but actually broiling lake of Screenplays.