It's our differences that make us special

Ocean's Eleven by Steven Carpenter revisions by Ted Griffin

So, today I decided to try something I had read about, where you read the screenplay whilst you watch the movie.  Unfortunately, the only copy of Ocean's I could find was not the shooting script, but was (I'm guessing) an almost final draft.  What was interesting about this was the skeleton was all there, but the minor tweaks from dialogue to charcter and plot points made a huge difference on the screen.  Seeing the final version, I agreed with all the changes made.  A lot of them were just wittier dialogue, although many of my favorite moments do exist in the script.  The big change that I noticed was the end.  In the script Tess tells Danny that she doesn't want to be with him or Terry and then walks off leaving Danny with his crew, whereas on screen Danny gets arrested for parole violations (which had been foreshadowed throught the script and film) and Tess runs up and says "That's my husband".  That is one of the biggest emotional points in the film and it's not in this draft of the script.  My hope is that Ted Griffin saw the mentions of parole and then realzied that was a perfect ending.
At Screenwriting Expo John Cleese talked about how in Fish Called Wanda he couldn't figure out what to do with Michael Palin's character in the middle of the script (as he had nothign to do until the end), then he realized he should have him try and kill the witness but instead just kill her dogs (his character is huge animal lover).  This kind of thing was just somethign that was probably always there in the story and he just had to find it.

I'm going to try and do this kind of thing more often, with both shooting scripts and early drafts.

Ocean's Eleven  http://www.mypdfscripts.com/index.php?s=ocean's+11