Script To Screen: “Election”

From the 1999 movie Election (screenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, based on a novel by Tom Perrotta).

Setup: Jim [Matthew Broderick] is in charge with counting votes for student council president.

INT. JIM'S CLASSROOM -- DAY

JIM counts out the last of the ballots, mouthing the numbers to
himself.

JIM (VO)
I was at the end of my count when it
happened. I'd come up with exactly the
same numbers as Larry: Tracy had won
the election by a single vote, 256 to
257. I was about to announce my tally
when...

JIM looks up and sees

TRACY in the window, her face exploding with joy. She FREEZES.

We move closer to Jim in SLOW-MOTION. What actually occurs in a
split-second is suspended in time

JIM (VO CONT'D)
The sight of Tracy at that moment
affected me in a way I can't fully
explain. Part of it was that she was
spying, but mostly it was her face.
Looking at her, you might think she was
a sweet, innocent teenage girl. But she
wasn't sweet. And she wasn't innocent.
She was selfish and cynical and
ambitious and thought nothing of
destroying the lives of others to get to
the top. who knew how high she would
climb in life, how many people would
suffer because of her? I had to stop her
now.

Tracy UNFREEZES and darts out of sight. JIM glances at Larry. Larry is
writing in a notebook.

JIM'S HAND

creeps up from his lap and onto the pile of TRACY VOTES. His fingers
nimbly count two ballots and pull them off the desk.

JIM coughs as beneath his desk he CRUMPLES THE BALLOTS into a ball and
drops them into the wastepaper basket.

JIM
Larry?

LARRY
(looking up)
Yeah?

JIM
I think we've got a problem.

Here is the scene from the movie:

http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=tUbeS

Questions to ask to analyze the scene:

* What elements in the movie scene are the same as the script?

* What elements in the movie scene are different than the script?

* Regarding the differences, put yourself in the mindset of the filmmakers and speculate: Why did they make the changes they did?

* How did the changes improve the scene?

* Alternatively are there elements in the script, not present in the movie, that are better than the final version of the scene?

* Note each camera shot in the movie version. Which of them does the script suggest via sluglines or scene description?

* How does the script convey a sense of the scene’s tone, feel, and pace through scene description and dialogue?

* What ‘magic’ exists in the movie that is not indicated in the words of the script? How do you suppose that magic emerged?

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

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

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