SEPTEMBER 30 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 9
DAY 9: A MOVIE THAT YOU KNOW PRACTICALLY THE WHOLE SCRIPT OF
This is easy for me! I only seen the movie 66 times so far!
AND IT IS................
"THE GREEN MILE"
Screenplay by Frank Darabont
from the novel by Stephen King
First
Draft
11/4/97
"We each owe a death, there are no exceptions..."
A SONG BEGINS, distant as a faded memory on an old Victrola:
Once I built a railroad, made it run... Made it race against
time...Once I built a railroad, now it's done...Brother, can
you spare a dime...
Opening credit sequence
plays against footage of the Great Depression, images
haunting and sepia-toned, defining an era. The bread
lines...the soup kitchens...the dust bowl refugees heading
west with their possessions on their backs and no hope in
their eyes...the strutting gangster royalty flaunting their
bootleg riches...an entire generation of lost youth riding
the rials...the U.S. army troops raining truncheon blows on
the half-starved and forgotten veterans of World War One as
"Hooverville" is set afire in the very shadow of the nation's
capitol...
All these faces, all these lives, in a world not really so
very long ago...
EXT. FIELD - DAY(SLOW MOTION)
...where cattails sway in the sepia-toned heat. A small scrap
of fabric is snagged in the nettles, fluttering languidly...
COLOR BLEEDS SLOWLY IN as mosquitoes swarm and dragonflies
skitter, showing the fabric scrap to be pale yellow...
Suddenly, a MAN WITH A SHOTGUN comes crashing through the
cattails, wiping through frame and exiting...
...then ANOTHER MAN...and ANOTHER...armed with rifles,
plowing through the brush, exiting frame...
...and now comes KLAUS DETTERICK, a farmer one step above
shirt-tail poor, a double-barrel shotgun in the crook of his
arm. He pauses, horrified, seeing the scrap of cloth. He
pulls it loose, turns back, screaming something in anguish...
...and still more men come crashing into view, flooding by us
with dreamlike, slow-motion grace. ONE MAN is leading a team
of DOGS, trying to untangle the leads. DEPUTY ROB McGEE is
shouting for everybody to stay together...
...and under it all, we hear a sibilant, frightening whisper:
WHISPERING VOICE (V.O.)
You love your sister? You make any
noise, know what happens?
And off that horrible voice,
CUT TO:
INT. GEORGIA PINES NURSING HOME - MORNING(PRESENT DAY)
A CLOCK RADIO spews the morning weather report, abruptly
pulling us into the present with a prediction of rain. PAUL
EDGECOMB, late 70's/early 80's, wakes to another day...
I COULD GO ON..........