Script To Screen: “Bonnie and Clyde”

The ending sequence from the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde, written by David Newman & Robert Benton.

IMDB plot summary: A somewhat romanticized account of the career of the notoriously violent bank robbing couple and their gang.

In this scene, Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde (Warren Beatty) drive along the road, feeling pretty good about things. And then…

EXT. ROAD. DAY.BONNIE and CLYDE's car coming down the road. Camera sees
from CLYDE's P.O.V. MALCOLM standing in the road, waving
him down. The pickup truck, its back jacked up, is parked
beside him on a shoulder of the road.INT. CAR. DAY. BONNIE
What's wrong? CLYDE
I don't know.EXT. ROAD.CLYDE reaches the spot, pulls off the road and stops the car.
He gets out. Camera pulls back. CLYDE talks to the old
man, BONNIE stays in the car. Cut to a shut down the trench
of the law, tense.Suddenly, a truck loaded with chickens comes riding down the
road from the opposite direction. HAMER sees it from a long
way away and realizes that he cannot afford to let anything
pass between him and his quarry. He decides the time is now.
He leaps up from the trench and yells at CLYDE. HAMER
Barrow!The OLD MAN dives under his truck to hide. The shooting
starts.We see the chicken truck. Two men in the front seat. They
see ahead of them an incredible shooting match and, in
terror, they jam on the brakes and leap out of the truck.
They run as fast as they can into the meadow, away from the
trouble.The gun fight takes just seconds during which law fires
eight-seven shots at BONNIE and CLYDE, giving them absolutely
no chance. The sound is rapid, deafening.At no point in the gun fight do we see BONNIE and CLYDE in
motion. We see, instead, two still photographs cut into the
sequence: one of Clyde, half out of the car, taking careful
dead aim with his gun, just as he did in the teaching scene:
one of BONNIE, in terror, a pack of cigarettes in her hand
clutched tight, looking as fragile and beautiful as she can
be.The noise stops at once. Utter silence. It has been a
massacre. BONNIE and CLYDE never had a chance to return the
gunfire. We see the car, a complete shambles. We never see
BONNIE and CLYDE dead, though for a moment we discern their
bodies slumped in the car.The camera pulls above the car until it is on a level with
the opposite side of the road. Then, slowly, the six lawmen
stand up in the trench. On the faces of the five deputies,
horror and shock at what they have just done. HAMER,
however, registers no emotion. His face is a blank. He
lights a cigarette. Slowly, slowly, the five men begin to
edge closer to the car to see the result. Music, the wild
country breakdown music, begins on the sound track.Before they reach the car, the camera swings away from them,
past them, and zooms out and above into the meadow where the
two truck drivers are standing--tiny, distant figures.The truck drivers begin to walk toward the camera, coming
back to the road to see what happened. They get closer and
closer to the camera until they have reached a middle
distance and, as they continue to walk at us, it is--THE END

Here is the movie version of the scene:

Several significant changes from script to screen, the biggest one being this: “At no point in the gun fight do we see BONNIE and CLYDE in motion… We never see BONNIE and CLYDE dead, though for a moment we discern their bodies slumped in the car.”

The final version is a stunning alteration from the script because the ending of the movie is iconic, a full 36 seconds of the gangsters’ bodies being decimated by a fusillade of bullets. In fact, the last images of Bonnie and Clyde in the script are more reminiscent of another film about gangsters: The 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

With Bonnie and Clyde, the choice of the director made a huge difference in the way the movie was received, the violent conclusion key to the word of mouth that drove young people into theaters to see the end point of these anti-heroes. Frankly I wonder if that scene influenced the decision by screenwriter William Goldman not to show the two lead characters die on-screen in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Here is the last paragraph from Goldman’s script:

CLOSEUP - BUTCH AND SUNDANCETHE CAMERA FREEZES THEM. And as it does, a tremenounds
fusillade of shots is heard, then another, even louder,
and more and more shots, building its tempo and sound.
The shots continue to sound. Butch and Sundance remain
frozen.FINAL FADE OUTTHE END

The final image of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid freezes into something resembling a photograph… and the script for Bonnie and Clyde describes the characters never seen being shot, but instead an image of them as “still photographs”.

Very interesting. See what you can learn from comparing script to screen?

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

For more Script To Screen articles, go here.