Script To Screen: “Erin Brockovich”

A compelling scene from the 2000 movie Erin Brockovich, written by Susannah Grant.

Setup: Erin [Julia Roberts], her boss Ed Masry [Albert Finney], and their legal team vs. PGE’s lawyers to discuss the corporation’s offer to settle a lawsuit.

     INT. MASRY & VITITOE, CONFERENCE ROOM - LATER

     Mario and Anna are sitting mutely in their seats beside Ed
     and Erin, firing blank looks across the table.

                               SANCHEZ
            Let's be honest, here.  Two million dollars
            is more money than these people have ever
            dreamed of.

     Erin has no patience for this today.

                               ERIN
            Oh, see, now that pisses me off.  First of
            all -- we got more'n a hundred plaintiffs.
            They may not be sophisticated, but they do
            know how to divide, and two million dollars
            isn't shit when it's split between them.

     Mario and Anna exchange a look.  This is getting interesting.

                               ED
            Erin --

     But there's no stopping her.

                               ERIN
            And second of all -- these people don't
            dream about being rich.  They dream about
            being able to watch their kids swim in a
            pool without worrying they'll have to have a
            hysterectomy at age 20, like Rosa Diaz -- a
            client of ours -- or have their spine
            deteriorate like Stan Bloom.  Another client
            of ours.  So before you come back here with
            another lame-ass offer, I want you to think
            real hard about what your spine is worth,
            Mr. Buda -- or what you'd expect someone to
            pay you for your uterus, Miss Sanchez --
            then you take out your calculator and
            multiply that number by a hundred.  Anything
            less than that is a waste of our time.

     And she gets up and storms out of the meeting.

Here is the scene in the movie:

One way to woo an actor to a part is to give them a great monologue, especially one in which they have the chance to vent some anger. Case in point: This scene from Erin Brockovich.

Note how Julia Roberts delivers the monologue almost word for word. That’s a sign of respect for the quality of the written word.

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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