As I dig deeper into the screenwriting game, I read more and more scripts before they eventually become films or TV shows. Sure, that sentence may sound smug, and it is smug, and it allows me many opportunities to smugly twirl a glass of wine in front of you and inform you, smugly, that “I actually read the script for that, and it was way different.” But alas, this actually leads to more disappointment than not because you fall in love with a script, it makes it onto the screen, and the movie doesn’t live up to your expectations. If you’re an aspiring filmmaker such as myself, you’re then left to wonder about the movie that could’ve been, which makes the whole experience even worse.

There’s a lesson script-to-screen adaptations teach you over and over again: There are a million ways to take a great script and turn it into a bad movie. Maybe the director/producer/coked up studio middleman butchered the story beyond the point of saving. Maybe they left the story intact, but the visual elements of the movie don’t work. Maybe it’s the acting or the editing or any number of intangible factors. However, one of the more common mistakes I’ve seen is a misunderstanding of the tone of the screenplay. The story a script tells feels a certain way, and its adaptation doesn’t jive with that feeling and may even directly contradict it.

And it’s here where we run into a bit of a flaw in the premise of this article: It’s entirely possible for you to have read any of the scripts I’m talking about and seen something completely different in your head. Maybe you like these movies and don’t have any qualms about the way they were adapted. (It’s almost like art is, I don’t know, subjective or something.) That said, even if you don’t agree with how I see the script or my opinions on their respective adaptations, even hypothetical differences are worth considering. One day, you may write a script, and someone may adapt it. If they fuck it up, it would be good to understand why, wouldn’t it?

So let’s take a look at three movies: Draft Day, The Equalizer, and Saving Mr. Banks. I read the scripts for these movies before they came out, and I loved all three of them. Then I watched them as movies and they were underwhelming or flat out bad. Each had flaws that had nothing to do with tone, but I argue that all of them would be better if they stuck more to the feel of the original script. Every once in a while, I’ll bring up an element of the story or a detail that was changed, but we’re really focusing on how it feels here. How did it feel reading it, and how the movie failed to capture that feeling. You know, those things that only I felt personally and maybe this article wasn’t worth writing. (*Clears throat*)

Draft Day

Draft Day, written by Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman, is about Sonny Weaver Jr., a fictional general manager of an NFL team. In the script, it’s the Buffalo Bills. In the movie, it’s the Cleveland Browns. Sonny is not in good standing with the city of Buffalo, what with the whole, “A few years ago, he fired the beloved head coach of the Bills, his own father Sonny Weaver Sr., who died a week ago, and the team’s been shit ever since and now there's rumors that the Bills are moving to LA” thing. On top of all that, it’s draft day, the most stressful day for GMs of the year. It’s a chance to make or break his team with an injection of new blood. Sonny wants to draft a linebacker. Everybody else, be it fans or coaches or his own mother, thinks Sonny should pick someone else. Maybe a new running back or even a new star quarterback.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a way to make everyone happy. As chaos consumes Sonny’s life, be it in the form of the million or so phone calls he gets from players and managers, or the angry masses fighting for Sonny’s time, or the whims of his eccentric mother, or people losing more and more faith in him, we watch him scheme and plot a series of risky trade moves that will secure the future of the Bills for the foreseeable future.

How it Read:

I’m quite fond of all three of the scripts in this article, but this is the one I loved the most. There’s much to appreciate in Draft Day. It’s characters are well-developed in a way that seems effortless. It tells a complex series of events in very clear and concise story beats that never lose you in the process. It even managed to make me care about a subject matter I personally couldn’t give less of a shit about: Professional football.

But the real thing the Draft Day script has going for it is pace. This is a story where huge decisions that impact thousands of people have to be made in an incredibly short period of time. There’s a sense of dread that hovers over every scene in this script, and it not only adds a sense of urgency, but also informs how these characters interact with each other and behave. In fact, reading the script for Draft Day reminded me a lot of In the Loop or an episode of The Thick of It. Consider this lovely interaction Sonny has on page twelve with a random woman he meets at a gas station:

Draft Day is an angry script. It’s not always about people yelling at each other or deal making, but that’s when it’s at its best. It’s not just angry, but also exhausting. Everyone needs Sonny’s time. Everyone is constantly demanding something from him, and when he can’t deliver or refuses to, he gets an earful. Every decision Sonny makes gets him closer to his goal, but also makes people even more enraged with him then they already are. Each story beat adds a little more pressure, and it never gets easier.

And all this weighs on Sonny, the beating heart of the script. This is a man who has an entire city constantly telling him how stupid he is. This is a man whose incredibly stressful job requires him to not only think twenty steps ahead at all times, but also to put up with loudmouths and morons who don’t know better. This is a man who just lost his father, but doesn’t have time to grieve or process his own emotional well-being. As a result, he’s stressed out, cross, and done with everybody’s bullshit. He keeps it together when he has to, but we get the feeling that he could explode at any moment.

What we have here is a script with the break neck speed of an Aaron Sorkin project, plus the anger and grit of In the Loop. How do you mess that up?

How the Movie Messed it Up:

You get rid of the pace and the anger of course!

Remember that scene in the gas station? In the script, he pulls into the station, the woman threatens him, we learn about the public hostility towards Sonny, and it’s over. In the movie, he pulls into the gas station, has an inspirational chat over the phone with another player that’s essentially a dumbed down version of an earlier scene in the script, he sees “Fire Sonny” written in the window of a dirty car, then he leaves. (Wasn't able to find the scene online. Sorry.)

It is literally the exact opposite of the scene in the script. Gone is the menace. Gone is the tension. Gone is the woman. (They filmed the scene, but they replaced “fuck” with “screw,” and then removed it from the final cut of the movie. You can find it online.) All that’s left in the end is a corny scene with a wooden expositional conversation that barely communicates anything we need to know, or at the very least, nothing particularly interesting.

That’s what Reitman or whoever did with every scene in the movie. They took an angry script about stress and the constant onslaught of problems, and turned it into a toothless feel good-y drama about an unremarkable guy going through the motions of his job.

Every decision this movie makes cuts the script off at the knees. Some problems are more egregious than others, but the element that suffers the most is the pacing. For example, the movies keeps the constant barrage of phone calls, but they clearly weren’t filmed together, and each call is showed as a split screen. Thus the timing feels off, everyone reacts to each other either too late or too early, and you become too aware of the fact that you’re watching a movie. Even when they’re cut properly, they feel slower than they should be.

The same is true for just about every conversation in the movie. Each argument in the script feels urgent because everyone is trying their damnedest to get their point in as quickly as possible because there’s shit to do. Time isn’t easy to come by on draft day, so everyone needs to act and talk fast. The conversations in the movie feel off because they’re slow, and they don’t match the urgency of the approaching draft or the story the movie is trying to tell. Denis Leary does what he can, but that’s about it.

The element of the movie that bothers me the most, however, is what it decided to do with Sonny. In the script, Sonny was active and constantly on his feet, putting out fires or yelling at people on the phone or trying to keep his head above water. In the movie, Costner and Reitman reimagine Sonny as, essentially, Eeyore. A sad eyed sad sack. Rather than have Sonny confront his problems with any sense of urgency, Reitman and Costner decided that all Sonny need do is make standard issue Kevin Costner sad face and deliver his lines in a Droopy Dog-esque drone that turns a once great character into a boring one.

A boring protagonist leads to a boring movie, and a boring movie can feed into a boring protagonist. We can have some sort of “chicken or the egg” style argument over what comes first, but the movie version of Draft Day is boring and I’ve grown bored of writing about it.

The Equalizer

Robert McCall is a nice unimposing middle-aged man who works at Home Depot. His days start early. He goes to work, he helps his friend lose weight so he can get a promotion as a security guard, and he clocks out. We learn little about him. He goes to a diner at night to read books, where he befriends a local prostitute named Teri. He explains to her that he’s honoring his late wife by going through her reading list. He sees something in Teri. A spark. One night, she’s beaten within an inch of her life by Slavi, her Russian mobster pimp. Robert meets the Russians in their office and tries to buy her freedom, but they laugh in his face. Slavi makes his intentions clear: One day, he will kill her. Whether he beats her to death or never grants Teri her freedom, she will die, and it will be Slavi's fault. And with that, McCall locks the door and murders everyone in the room in under a minute.

This sets off a chain of events that sucks McCall into further conflict with the Russian mob. After all, you don’t take out an entire group of mobsters in one swoop without some blowback. As the bodycount rises, we learn more about McCall’s past, what makes him tick, and the full extent to his abilities.

How it Read:

There’s much you can fault The Equalizer script on if that’s your inclination. You could say that McCall never really has any serious obstacles. You could say that McCall doesn’t have an arc. You could say any number of things. However, if this script gets you on its wavelength, you won’t care about any of them because this is a script that understands what you want to watch and gives it to you. McCall is an instantly likable and sympathetic character, as is Teri, while the Russian mobsters are instantly detestable. You want bad things to happen to them, and writer Richard Wenk more than delivers.

Much like Draft Day, it also has impeccable pacing. But whereas Draft Day’s pace is born out of the story’s natural sense of time and duration, The Equalizer earns it’s pace with sparseness and economic writing that dictates how it should feel. Much like McCall himself, the script doesn’t tell you much. It picks its words very carefully. It doesn’t describe a whole lot, but it still effectively communicates volumes of information.

Let’s take a look at the scene where McCall dispatches the Russians:

Simple, elegant, and brutal. Up until this point, we haven’t seen McCall in action. We’ve only spent time with civilian McCall. In that sense, he’s a simple man who helps others when he can and does no harm. “Progress, not perfection,” he tells his friend at work. You don’t need flash or pizzaz. You have a goal. Make a decision. Stick to it. Work slowly and diligently, keep it simple, and know that it’s not going to happen overnight.

We can see the same philosophy reflected in how Wenk writes McCall, the unstoppable killing machine. He’s decisive. These men have to die, or they’ll kill Teri. The goal is now clear, and his methods are divorced from emotion or feeling. It’s a means to an end. No glory. No fanfare. It doesn’t have to be pretty. You don’t have to look like you’re in a movie. Decide how to kill the men as quickly and efficiently as possible, then do it.

This attitude permeates throughout the entire script, and The Equalizer reads like an ultra stripped-down testament to efficiency over the eloquent choreography of The Matrix. In fact, purely on paper, I would argue that The Equalizer is a more effective deconstruction of modern action movies than John Wick. John Wick, the man, is portrayed as something of a mythical being, and the world he lives in doesn’t operate by the same rules as our own. He’s motivated by emotion. A wrong was done to him, and now he’ll right it. Robert McCall lives in our world. Hell, he may even be your local Home Depot guy! McCall has the same emotional drive as Wick, but I would argue that he's driven more by a sense of justice and duty. Those who won’t kill will be subject to those who will, and Robert McCall will, you know... equalize that. He knows he has the ability to help people, and that's what he'll do.

You know when John Wick is hunting you. You’ll never see Robert McCall coming until it’s too late, even if you’re looking him right in the face.

How the Movie Messed it Up:

Here’s the movie version of the Russian takedown scene. (Squeamish beware):

Up until now, the movie’s characterization of McCall has kept in line with the script. However, it’s here where the movie starts to diverge. Take the locking of the door. In the script, McCall doesn’t hesitate. It’s played up as a defining moment. He’s already made the decision to lock it before he even stepped over to the door. In the movie, it’s a debate. He opens and closes the door, contemplating what to do. It undercuts the character because it shows him as indecisive, and it betrays what we know about this man so far.

Not only is he less decisive, but he’s also less efficient in his movements. Take the goon he kills with the corkscrew. Notice how McCall is reacting to the goon, and not the other way around. Instead of attacking directly, he allows the goon to make a move. McCall chooses to put himself on defense, whereas the script version of McCall doesn’t even give his targets the opportunity to think about attacking him, let alone actually do it. On top of this, the movie version of McCall makes a little show of counting down to the man before he kills him. Cool? Maybe. But it’s also inefficient. Not the McCall style.

In fact, it’s really the filmmaking in general that hobbles this scene. We’re leaning more into my personal tastes here (we have the whole article, but… leave me alone), but when I hear the music playing in the background during the fight, or see the overly showy way it’s all filmed, or how it cuts all over the place as fast as possible, it strikes me as off. If McCall is a man of ruthless proficiency, shouldn’t that be reflected in the way the scene is filmed? Remember what the script says when we’re in McCall’s head: “Parts of the room fade away. The unimportant parts to McCall… Leaving only what’s necessary to him.”

The difference is that the writing doesn’t glorify McCall’s actions. (Or at least I don’t think it does.) It shows them to you as calculated and brutal as possible. When I look at how this scene is filmed, I think I’m looking at someone who’s going out of their way to make the violence look “cool.” It’s filmed like every other action scene that takes the professional wrestling approach of “This guy is awesome, and this guy sucks, and I want the awesome guy to kick his ass.” Normally, I’m all on board with that, but the movie sacrifices the element that made it special for the sake of a more standard approach we’ve seen a million times before.

The whole movie follows the same tune. It takes an interesting script about doing a lot with a little, and steers it towards the middle of the road. I don’t think The Equalizer is a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly good or interesting one either, and I feel like it could’ve been. There’s a universe out there where The Equalizer out John Wick'd John Wick, but we don’t live in that universe, and that makes me sad.

(I like John Wick, by the way. I don't love it the extent a lot of people do, but I think it's a great movie. I just want to be clear about that.)

Saving Mr. Banks

P.L. Travers, writer of the beloved Mary Poppins books, is running low on money. She’s been able to live comfortably off the Poppins proceeds for twenty years, but the well is running dry, and she needs to make a move. Walt Disney’s been trying to get the rights to her books for a long time, but she’s always refused. Now she doesn’t have a choice. She hops on a plane to California and strikes a deal with Disney: She’ll hand over the rights, but she gets script approval. We then follow her as she proceeds to make the adaptation process as difficult as humanly possible.

Though Travers is mean, extraordinarily difficult to work with, and ludicrously demanding, her behavior comes from a very personal place, as we learn from flashbacks to her childhood. In these flashbacks, we watch Travers as a little girl with her father, an alcoholic trying to keep his family fed. As we go deeper into Travers’s childhood, we understand what made her the way she is, and why she has such a hard time letting Mary Poppins go.

How it Read:

Biopics are tricky. It may seem like a simple enough formula: Pick a famous person, go through that person’s life story, put emphasis on the big thing they did, pony up the money for an Oscar campaign, and call it a day. It’s because this attitude exists that most biopics, let alone biopic scripts, fall flat.

I think biopics have to do two other things besides picking a random person who did something big and important. Biopic subjects have to be interesting people to watch. They have to respond to the world in a way that maybe you or I wouldn’t. Mark Zuckerberg is emotionally closed off and hostile. Erin Brockovich is a straight shooter unafraid to speak her mind, even if it costs her. Jake LaMotta is self-destructive, violent, and plagued by sexual jealousy.

The other thing they have to do, as we’ve discussed before, is actually tell a story. Remember: A sequence of events in chronological order is not a story. "Somebody was born, they did something important, then they died" is not a story. They gotta do all that Joseph Campbell shit. Arcs or whatever.

P.L. Travers, or at the version of P.L. written by Kelly Marcel in the Saving Mr. Banks script, is a great biopic character. She’s tightly wound, rude to just about everyone she meets, and you’d never believe that she’s the one who created the property that became the Mary Poppins movie. But at least to me, she still comes off as relatable. Early on, we see brief glimpses into what makes her tick, but a lot of the time, she’s merely saying what people are thinking. Case in point: As she’s boarding the plane to Los Angeles, she’s having trouble stowing away her bag. A woman with a baby volunteers to move her bag, to which Travers responds, “Will the child be a nuisance? It’s an eleven hour flight.”

Other than those kinds of character eccentricities, Saving Mr Banks reads like a down to Earth biopic with an actual good story to boot. It’s a little feel-goody here and there, but it does a fantastic job capturing the emotional connection artists have with their work and it grounds itself by looking into Travers’s past. I’m usually weary of flashbacks, but Saving Mr. Banks makes them vital. Without them, Travers would be too cartoonish and the story may be too fluffy. This is, after all, a story where Walt Disney himself is a character.

How the Movie Messed it Up:

Of the movies we’re talking about in this article, Saving Mr. Banks, at least in terms of structure and content, is probably the most loyal to the script. (I say “probably" because I didn’t have time to mine through both with a fine toothed comb. I’ve got stuff to do.) Most of the scenes stay the same, and any changes are minimal or not easily noticed.

But to me, it all just felt wrong.

Early on in the script, after Travers has landed in LA, she’s driven to her hotel room. Her driver was too happy, the porter was trying too hard to be helpful, and she’s already in a bad mood from her flight, on top of her naturally miserable disposition. So obviously, she’s disturbed to enter her hotel room to find it filled to the rafters with candy, balloons, stuffed animals of Disney characters, and the biggest Micky Mouse doll on the face of the Earth. We get a flashback, then Travers unpacks and proceeds to stuff all of the Disney shit into the closet.

Context: The script refers to older P.L. Travers as "Pamela" and childhood Travers as "Ginty." (The story explains why.) She has a thing with pears that I'd explain, but that would be too spoiler-y. Shout out to all the pear. Also, apologies fo… — Context: The script refers to older P.L. Travers as "Pamela" and childhood Travers as "Ginty." (The story explains why.) She has a thing with pears that I'd explain, but that would be too spoiler-y. Shout out to all the pear. Also, apologies for the gray line. These are snapshots from PDF documents, and normally I'd try some magic to get rid of it, but I have to go fix the chain in my toilet.

The movie version of this scene is more or less intact. She shoves all the stuff in the closet first, then unpacks, but other than that the story beats remain intact. The differences, however, are subtle. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any video of the scene online, but in the movie version, she’s constantly muttering “This won’t do” or “No no no” to herself while jazzy “happening” music plays in the background and Travers’s movements are cartoonishly stiff. (Note that she’s muttering to herself in the script as well, but not nearly to the same extent.)

Don’t get me wrong: Saving Mr. Banks doesn’t read as a super dark character study, but it also didn’t read this broad either. Travers is a funny character, but the script does a great job not playing it up. Ultimately, the movie version of Saving Mr. Banks leans too far into the comedy and the lightheartedness, and as a result, a grounded biopic becomes too hammy for its own good. Disney is the only studio with a recognizable brand, meaning that generally speaking, when you go see a Disney movie you know what you’re going to get. It’s understandable why Saving Mr. Banks feels the need to chase that brand, but this isn’t an article about good marketing, damnit! This is an article about how tone can make or break a movie, and the film version of Saving Mr. Banks feels too warm and fuzzy.

One of my favorite elements of this script is her father. You read “alcoholic father” and you assume the worst, but her father is the most loving man she’s ever had in her life. He’s charming, friendly, and funny. He just can’t stop drinking. He feels like an actual human being, well-intentioned but seriously flawed in ways that affect his children, and Marcel does a beautiful job writing him. In the movie, he’s played up too much. He seems like he’s aware of the fact that he’s being the charming character in a feel-good movie, and it betrays the humanity Marcel injected into him in the script.

This one bothers me a lot because this is the exact kind of thing Travers was trying to stop in the film adaptation of Mary Poppins. Travers has a very tangible emotional connection to her books. They mean something specific to her, and this hyperactive man-child wants to take them and add cheesy songs and animated penguins. Of course she'll fight it, as would any sensible person. My connection to the Saving Mr. Banks script isn’t as serious or meaningful as Travers’s connection to her art, but it’s still a script I had a great deal of affection for, and I feel Travers's pain. Saving Mr. Banks isn't a bad movie, but it's not what I felt like it could've or should've been, and it bums me out.

Saving Mr. Banks is, in the end, a hammy adaptation of an emotional text about a woman fighting to prevent a hammy adaptation of her emotional text. Go figure.