Abstract

I Read the Movie

John Osborne indicated the difficulties of publishing film scripts in a letter giving Grove Press permission to publish his script for Tony Richardson's "Tom Jones." This is the problem to publish the script to publish a transcription of the film itself, or to combine both. None of the solutions is ideal because something is always missing. The script is to the film as the blueprint is to the building. Once the edifice is completed, the plans retain, at best, an academic interest. To publish and make widely available a script works against the idea of cinema, the entire point of which is to turn the idea into the moving image. The director started with words and made them flesh. The film-script editor must turn flesh back into words and yet, if possible, retain something of the living film. It is an impossible task, yet some of the results are interesting. There are, as indicated, three ways of publishing scripts. If the finished scenario exists, one may simply print it, as was done in that early. John Gassner collection of "Twenty Best Film Plays," an exact title in that the scripts read as plays not as films. If the film is different from the script, then one indicates all of these differences, as in the fine editions of "Children of Paradise" and "L'Avventura."