I wish I could take credit for coming up with the title of this blog: “The film is the damaged version of the script.”
But to give credit where it’s due, that line was spoken by a student in Sydney, who was attending an intensive screenwriting workshop I conducted some years ago. Perhaps, at least, I can console myself with the fact that whatever the Hell I was talking about at the time was the prompt for her to come up with it.
I recall I was talking about the idea that the filmed result of one’s carefully structured screenplay – having been passed through the collective vision of a director, cast and crew, subjected to the vicissitudes of budgetary constraints and weather and location considerations, and THEN reshaped by an editor – may bear considerably less resemblance to the original words on paper than the writer might have hoped.
I think her version is more succinct.
