Reading Movies

My library includes a small selection of published screenplays--too small, in my opinion. I have The French Lieutenant's Woman, L. A. Confidential, three Quentin Tarantino screenplays, sex, lies, and videotape, and several others. I also have a few oddities including the screenplay for the obscure 1972 television movie, Between Time and Timbuktu, based on a compilation of Vonnegut material (worth having if only for the vintage Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding skits) and a production copy of the original Blade Runner script that a friend smuggled out of Hollywood several decades ago.

Other than that, I don't have nearly the selection I'd like. For one thing, the scripts for most movies never make it into print. Those that do, often include pages of movie stills which generally contributes to unreasonable price tags. Years ago one could occasionally track down rare screenplays in small specialty bookstores--I used to drive into San Francisco just to browse the collection at a great little shop called Drama Books.

All of this has changed with the growth of the internet. Now one can easily find dozens of web sites with downloadable text, Word, and PDF versions of hundreds of screenplays. And best of all is the price tag: you can find the screenplay for almost any movie you can think of available for free download.

After browsing through many of these sites, I recommend one in particular: the Movie Scripts and Screenplays web site not only includes direct links to hundreds of screenplays, but it also has a handy search engine and a well organized link section that linked back to each of the other sites I had already bookmarked.

What began as a search for a specific screenplay I was curious about soon turned into a shopping spree. Before I realized how greedy I had become for free copies of terrific writing by Robert Towne, Harold Pinter, William Goldman, Peter Shaffer, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian Helgeland, Tom Stoppard, M. Night Shyamalan, Joel & Ethan Coen, Cameron Crowe, Anthony Minghella, and myriad others I had downloaded and organized over three dozen screenplays--all for free.

The first dozen titles alone are all five star movies and scripts I've always coveted (which probably explains why it turns out I already owned copies of three of them). Nevertheless, here are the first dozen screenplays I downloaded.

      Amadeus
      Blade Runner
      Chinatown
      A Clockwork Orange

      The Godfather
      Good Will Hunting
      Jaws
      L.A. Confidential

      One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
      Shakespeare in Love
      The Silence of the Lambs
      The Sixth Sense

I have to admit that what you get online for free is not always the highest quality. In several cases I could only find copies of dialog transcripts. In other cases, I only found early drafts that weren't as close as I desired to the final shooting script. If you're willing to pay, you might try The Script Shack; each script is listed for an average of $15 (but I can't vouch for the quality).

But I'm content to still browse and download. Before long I'll have a CD with a hundred favorite movie scripts for my library. Or I'll dump them onto an SD Card or memory stick so I can always have a movie to read while I'm out and about. And if I really get insane I'll invest in a ream of paper, some extra ink cartridges, and Kinko binders and I'll fill a shelf at home with some bound copies of favorite scripts--finally filling one gap in my library that's bothered me over the years.