Script To Screen: “The Apartment”
A key revelation scene from my favorite movie, the 1960 The Apartment, written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. “Izzy” Diamond.
Plot Summary: A man tries to rise in his company by letting its executives use his apartment for trysts, but complications and a romance of his own ensue.
Here is the movie version of the scene:
If you want a master class in how to write a scene, look no further than this one. What’s the point of the scene? To reveal to Baxter that Fran is Sheldrake’s mistress. How to do that? Payoff the broken compact mirror which was set up previously.
But how to do that artfully? What about a reversal? Party scene. Baxter is feeling grand. Promotion, his own office, now he gets to make his play for his longtime love interest. Just preceding this scene, Sheldrake’s current secretary (and former lover) lets Fran know she (Fran) is just another in a long line of Sheldrake’s paramours. Hence her foul mood as she enters this scene. Since we saw the exchange with Fran and the secretary, and Baxter didn’t, we have the knowledge of why Fran is acting the way the she is, but not Baxter.
This allows for all sorts of irony: “You know Mr. Sheldrake,” Baxter asks. Oh, she most certainly does. Showing off Sheldrake’s Christmas card, rubbing salt in Fran’s wounds. And then the subtext:
- “This is a bad day for me.”
- “Too many girls here with seniority over me.”
- “Makes me look the way I feel.”
Ending with the bitter pill Baxter has to swallow, confirming with Sheldrake that his apartment is all set up for Sheldrake’s tryst… with none other than the woman Baxter just discovered is his boss’s mistress.
All great stuff. But the piece de resistance? The hat. Wilder and Diamond do this type of thing all the time, where they provide the characters what I call a BOB (Bit Of Business), something to do around which they can wrap the scene. So there’s this whole thing with Baxter messing around with his hat, of course symbolic of his recent success, meanwhile his life is unraveling… and he doesn’t even know it… until he makes the connection from the broken mirror.
Absolutely brilliant scene, a huge turning point in the story, and deftly done.
Which is why when you compare the script to the screen version, you see virtually no differences because Wilder and Diamond almost always cracked their scenes in the script phase.
God, I love The Apartment.
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 series on Go Into The Story where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.
For more Script To Screen articles, go here.
