On Scripts

Salon is not only still publishing, they’re publishing the shooting script of the Ronald Reagan TV movie that the conservative closet cases wanted to see on Showtime (the Queer as Folk Network). It’s an 8Mb pdf. Of a TV Movie. Starring James Brolin. About Ronald Reagan. You’ve been warned.
[For an invigorating Reagan text, try Joan Didion’s prescient 1997 review of DiNesh D’Souza’s Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader. It costs money, but it’s worth it.
For the definitive Reagan movie, buy or rent David O. Russell’s Flirting With Disaster, in which Reagan has two cameos: on the wall of Mel Coplin’s first adoptive “mom,” and on the tabs of acid of his real parents.]
In today’s Movie Issue of the NYT Mag, Lynn Hirschberg convenes a “roundtable” with two screenwriters, Brian Helgeland and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, the Silver Surfer convo airdropped into the middle of Crimson Tide) “share some wisdom about the screenwriting life.”
1) We always knew Tarantino’s too much of a loudmoth to pull off the Terence Malick thing. 2) How many participants actually constitute a roundtable? I want to know who couldn’t manage to stumble over to the Regent and run up the Times‘s bar tab. 3) Reason enough to read it in print: the Favorite Screenplays Speed Round, which runs along the bottom of the piece. I may have my data entry lackeys in Madagascar transcribe it for your illicit online pleasure.
Tarantino scripts online:
Kill Bill
Jackie Brown (pdf)
Pulp Fiction
Natural Born Killers early draft
Brian Helgeland scripts online:
Blood Work draft (pdf)
LA Confidential draft
The Postman early production draft (pdf) [heads up: think Kevin Costner, not Pablo Neruda]
Assassins draft, with the Wachowskis
The script’s not online, but a A Knight’s Tale is out on DVD. [Have a hard time keeping the similarly comical anachronism of A Knight’s Tale (“An InStyle Editor in King Arthur’s Court” starring Heath Ledger) and First Knight (“Ralph Lauren Camelot Collection” starring Richard Gere) straight? No problem. Amazon’s selling them together. Supplies are supposedly limited.
Think you can do better? Well, get Final Draft and start writing, script monkey.
[links via Daily Script and Screenplays For You]