Wanted: Scene-By-Scene Movie Script Breakdowns

Scott Myers

07 Apr 2016 • 2 min read

A great way to analyze screenplay structure is by studying a script’s scene-by-scene breakdown. Over the last 15 months, Go Into The Story followers have been contributing breakdowns of contemporary movie screenplays to an ongoing script analysis series. Here are links to those posts which include downloadable PDFs of each breakdown.

Beasts of No Nation

Beginners

Belle

Birdman: Or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Boyhood

Celeste & Jesse Forever

Dallas Buyers Club

End of the Tour, The

Grand Budapest Hotel, The

Gravity [102 page draft]

Gravity [68 page shooting script]

Hanna

Imitation Game, The

Monsters University

Social Network, The

Still Alice

Trainwreck

Whiplash

Wolf of Wall Street, The

We’ve been working with the 150+ movie scripts which we host here because these are screenplays studios and production companies have released to the public as part of their annual For Your Consideration awards campaigns.

But what about movie scripts floating around out there not on our site? What if someone wanted to do a scene-by-scene breakdown of, let’s say, Michael Clayton by Tony Gilroy, a fantastic screenplay absolutely worthy of deep structural analysis?

That’s exactly what Connor M. O’Brien volunteered to do. And I said, ‘yes’. Which got me thinking: Why not invite GITS readers to do scene-by-scene breakdowns on any movie script of note of their choosing?

Let me add, doing a scene-by-scene breakdown is a great learning experience. When I first entered the business and was desperately trying to jump-start my understanding of the craft, I probably did 50 breakdowns so I could study the structure of each script. I’ve got stacks of notebooks filled with my chicken scratch breaking down hundreds more. If I had 36 hours in a day, I’d likely be transcribing those into word files to add to this collective effort.

So I toss that out to the Go Into The Story community. If there’s a favorite movie script you have obtained and you feel like contributing to this effort to amass as many scene-by-scene breakdowns as we can, I would be happy to post it here on the blog with attribution to you along with requisite laud and honor, then add to our archives.

If you’re so moved to act, please head to comments and let me know which movie script you’d like to take on.

Thanks in advance to any and all who have or will participate in this project.

Onward!

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