A Boy's Life Blog Assignment

When I first looked at the massive amount of paper that was A Boy's Life, I thought it was going to take forever to read, but it really didn't. From the moment I started to read the script, I began to see the movie play out in my head. It is hard for me to determine whether or not I would have had the same experience not having seen the movie, because when I was reading the script I remembered the actual scenes from the film, the sounds of the characters voices, and the emotions I felt. It's amazing to me just how similar reading the script was to watching the movie. One thing did confuse me, however. At the beginning of the script, KEYS was used to describe the man with the large key ring, but later KEYS was used to identify him as a character. I understood who they were talking about, but I thought it was executed in a confusing manner. One thing is for certain: Reading the script made me really want to watch E.T.

Discussion Questions:

1-Judith Weston discusses two methods of script analysis: Anthony Hokins' method of reading the script "about two hundred times," and Meryl Streep's method of reading through the script one time and going with her intuition from there. Which method does anyone find more effective? Or is it a combination of the two?

2-One of the things that I found very interesting in the Judith Weston reading was her recommendation of coming up with three possible solutions to any script analysis problem, that way you can try them all out and see which one works. She also states that this enables greater creativity to be had by the director. Does anyone have any experience doing this? Does anyone have a method that they feel is more productive?

-Kyle Deason