This week’s Scriptnotes episode is a rebroadcast of Episode 224, in which John and Craig discussed several scenes from Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash. They discuss the family dinner scene and Miles’ and Fletcher’s meeting in the Jazz bar towards the end. For both examples, they look at the scene as written and compare it to the final version. It is instructive to see the differences and how much was cut from script to screen.
Rather than rehash their discussion, I’m using the Script to Screen idea on a different story: the pilot for The Expanse.
I’m a late-comer to The Expanse. I didn’t start watching until the end of 2021. But once I started, I binged the first three seasons in two weeks.
Midway through my Expanse marathon, I read the pilot. It is a good script, but there are a few changes that make the filmed version much better.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
I’m going to discuss two specific plot elements, so consider this the spoiler alert.
Leaver and Left
In the script for the pilot, the writers have James Holden looking to… not so much break up as keep free of emotional entanglements with the woman he’s sleeping with, Ade. In the version they filmed, they make Ade be the one looking to keep Holden at arm’s length. Why does this change matter? And how does it make the filmed version better?
Shortly after Holden and Ade ‘break up’, pirates destroy their ship the Canterbury. Only Holden and a handful of the crew survive. Ade is killed. In the script version, it is less impactful when Ade dies because Holden has already moved on. He had already made it clear he’d moved on, and so her death is less emotional.
In the version as filmed, however, Holden wants to pursue Ade and win her back. Because Holden is still invested in the relationship with Ade, we the audience are invested in their relationship. We want them to patch things up and draw closer, so we feel the loss much more when the Canterbury is destroyed and Ade is killed.
This simple change doesn’t change anything structurally, or plot-wise, but it does change the character dynamics and the emotional impact on the audience.
Tracking It Down
Another change from the pilot to the filmed version involves the character of a police detective named Miller. In the pilot, Miller hunts for clues in the apartment of a missing woman. Half-way through the pilot, he discovers a data-node in the apartment. I’d watched the pilot first, so this event surprised me, because it didn’t happen for a few episodes in the show as filmed. I remember it bumping me in the read, as it happened too easily, as if he simply intuited it was there without any real basis to the discovery.
In the series as filmed, Miller doesn’t find the data-node until a later episode. And he has to piece together clues and track down the data-node. Because it was much harder for him to find the data-node, it felt like a victory once he finally discovered it. It made Miller feel more active, as he had to solve the puzzle, rather than having the solution fall into his lap.
In Closing
There’s a lot to be said for comparing the script version of a story with the screened version. In this instance, I watched the pilot first and read the script afterwards. But it’s also a good choice to read first and then see how closely the filmed version is afterwards.
My two takeaways from this brief look from script to screen of The Expanse is to make sure I think through the most impactful way of arranging the relationships between the characters. Does swapping who has power, or who is pulling away from the other, make for a more impactful scene? And it’s always going to be better to make a character work for their victories rather than have them simply fall into their lap. It makes the character feel like they have more agency, and makes us as the audience appreciate their victory more.