An early scene in the 1985 western Silverado, written by Lawrence Kasdan and Mark Kasdan.
Setup: Emmett (Scott Glenn) and Paden (Kevin Kline), who have both been done wrong (Paden’s horse and belongings stolen), enter town together.
The script version of the scene:
The scene in the movie:
There is one cut from the script. After this nifty line of scene description — Paden holds a broken-down memory of a gun as though it were a cow chip — the movie cuts the final exchange between Paden and the clerk. Why? You don’t need it. Those three lines of dialogue are extraneous. Cut to the action, that’s what the scene is building toward.
Is it essential? That’s the first question to ask about any line of scene description, any line of dialogue, any scene.
I’ll see you in comments for a discussion of this fun scene from Silverado.
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 Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.
For more Script To Screen articles, go here.
Script To Screen: “Silverado” was originally published in Go Into The Story on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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Author: Scott Myers
