The Toughest Scene I Wrote: Danny Strong (“Lee Daniels’ The Butler”)

Once again, Vulture does screenwriters a solid:

In this series, Vulture has been speaking to the screenwriters behind 2013′s most acclaimed movies about the scenes they found most difficult to crack. What pivotal sequences underwent the biggest transformations on their way from script to screen?

In this article, Danny Strong discusses the difficulty of writing the Ronald Reagan sections of the script “because Reagan’s record on civil rights was so bad, in that he basically dismantled or attacked every civil rights initiative put into place.”

It was really challenging, because it was the end of the movie and I just didn’t know how to address that in a way that was dramatically satisfying for our lead character. How is he going to respond to this? It’s kind of easy to figure out how Louis is going to respond to Reagan’s race policy: He can just protest it. But I had no idea how I was going to deal with Cecil’s response to Reagan’s extremely negative civil rights record.

For the rest of the article, go here.

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