Script To Screen: “Young Frankenstein”
A classic scene from the 1974 comedy Young Frankenstein.
Setup: Dr. Frankenstein’s grandson, after years of living down the family reputation, inherits granddad’s castle and repeats the experiments. To reveal his grand experiment to the world, Young Frankenstein chooses a theater as a public venue.
Here is the scene from the movie:
From IMDb:
The original cut of the movie was almost twice as long as the final cut, and it was considered by all involved to be an abysmal failure. It was only after a marathon cutting session that they produced the final cut of the film, which both Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks considered to be far superior to the original product. At one point they noted that for every joke that worked, there were three that fell flat. So they went in and trimmed all the jokes that didn’t work.
Fortunately, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” stuck. Easy to see why, such a brilliant comedic moment.
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.
