Today is Day 14 of the "14 Days of Screenplays, Version 3.0" challenge and the featured screenplay is for the movie The Wild Bunch (1969) You can download the script from myPDFscripts.com here.Background: The movie was nominated for 2 Academy Awards including Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Material Not Previously Published or Produced, the screenplay co-written by Sam Peckinpah and Walon Green, based on a story by Walon Green and Roy N. Sickner. It currently has an 8.2 rating on IMDB.com and is ranked #180 out of the site's top 250 favorite films.
Here's a treat: A lengthy audio interview with writer-director Sam Peckinpah. Here is Part 1 (73 minutes) and Part 2 (80 minutes). The interviewer is Tony Macklin. The interview took place in 1976.
I want to give time for people to weigh in about the script, those who have read it for the challenge as well as anyone else who has read the script in the past. I'll update this post with my thoughts on the script later.
What did you think of The Wild Bunch?
For links to all 14 scripts in the challenge, go here.
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2 comments:
This shoot 'em up, both guns blazing script was a fun read. One word and I phrase stands out to me:
Grabass
"... you two bit rednecked peckerwood."
Guns, whiskey, and sandwiching women -- what more you ask for in a movie?! If you're a testosterone laiden, boisterous "man's man" this is you're moive, BUT if you're a female concerned with the progress being made in the femine revolution, maybe not: grabass!!
I really liked the bitersweet ending where Deke Thorton joins Sykes for a new gang. Bad guy switches sides at the end; worked for me.
I read somewhere this movie really influenced Quinten Tarantino. "Wild Bunch" = "Reservoir Dogs" 24 years later... maybe.
- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA
There is a myth of the classic Western to which people like to compare movies such as "The Wild Bunch" or "Unforgiven." In this model, morality is a very simple dualism -- good guys and bad guys -- and these movies are a re-invention of the genre. In reality, the simplistic form of the genre hasn't been around in its pure form at least as far back as the 50s -- the Anthony Mann Westerns and "The Searchers" come to mind. But, whether it's groundbreaking or not, "The Wild Bunch" certainly belongs in the group of iconoclastic Westerns that explored those shades of gray with great success.
To whom do we owe our loyalty? To friends, family, comrades, fellow citizens, business partners, governments, corporations? Pike and Thornton, two weathered cowboys, don't seem to know any better than the rest of us. Their world is changing. Corporations pit convicts against each other for money and the promise of freedom. Generals rape and pillage the very townspeople their supposed to protect. Machine-guns are replacing the trusty six-shooter. Automobiles will soon make the horse obsolete.
Pike doesn't seem too concerned with all of that. He's out to keep his own hide intact -- and maybe yours if you've earned a place in his crew. A man's word matters, but all else is expendable: the kid holed-up at the bank while the Bunch escapes, the entire town of people caught in the crossfire, his former friend Thornton now that he's on the wrong side, and anyone who can't abide by the rules of the score. In that last category is thrown Angel -- the hot-headed member of the Bunch who can't stand to watch his people torn apart by the barbaric Mapache and decides to join the noble fight. Fine, says Pike, it comes out of your share.
The entire story is a nihilistic rampage of selfishness, inhumanity, and gorgeous violence. Except it's not. It's all heading for one single moment, when Pike and the Bunch know exactly what they need to do. They've just maneuvered the perfect score of weapons into a boatload of gold, and they're ready to ride off free and clear. But, they won't. They can't.
I've seen the movie many times. And, I still wait in giddy anticipation for the moment when Pike says the words that unleash the ecstasy of that revelation. To give up the easy way out and do something right. To save Angel and maybe a bit of their humanity. To go out in the only way that mattered to these selfish bastards in the first place -- together, as a team of fighting men. And, imagine my surprise, when at the bottom of p. 119, Pike says: "Let's get Angel..." A simple enough explanation, but in the world of classic movies, even that's too much. The geniuses who got it on film gave us us the most economical line of dialogue ever written. A perfect release of everything the Bunch and the audience knows is true. Angle can't die like a dog. Pike says: "Let's go." And, the orgy of brotherly love and violence commences.
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