American Film Scripts

weblog | feed

NOW COMPLETE! - read more

American Film Scripts makes available, for the first time, accurate and authorized versions of copyrighted screenplays. Most of the scripts have never been published before, and nowhere else are they available online. Alexander Street Press has developed the collection through arrangements with Warner Bros., Sony, RKO, MGM, and other major film studios; rights holders such as Faber & Faber, Newmarket Press, Penguin Putnam, and Vintage Anchor; and the writers themselves, including Paul Schrader, Lawrence Kasdan, Gus Van Sant, Neil LaBute, Oliver Stone, and many others.

Script formatting is in the conventional screenplay format wherever it exists in the original—the preferred format for scholars who teach screenwriting and for many historians. For the occasional writer who did not conform to the accepted conventions (Gus Van Sant, for example), we stay true to the original. Users also will now see longer sections of each script for viewing and printing, links from search results directly to a specific scene, and other enhancements. Most exciting, you’ll now find PDF versions of hundreds of screenplays. Imagine bringing images of every page of hundreds of scripts into your library and teaching programs!

HOW WILL YOU USE IT?

American Film Scripts contains 1,000 film scripts—more than 100,000 scenes of human experience—opening an exploration of American culture through the decades. This highly structured archive offers a bibliographic and biographical database of directors and writers, along with the full text of the movies themselves. Extending back to the earliest silent films and progressing to the present, the collection presents the medium’s reflection of American attitudes and life. Students, instructors, and researchers use American Film Scripts for studying popular culture, diversity and gender issues, language and linguistics, writing, American history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and other disciplines.

Alexander Street’s Semantic Indexing™ enables a kind of research never before possible, revealing information that has been locked away within the scripts until now. With the ability to search by character, scene, race, nationality, age, subject, year of writing, and other elements, users can explore questions such as:

o Show me scenes of domestic violence involving characters of various ethnic groups.
o Give me wartime scenes in which children are characters.
o Over time, how are women depicted in the workplace?
o Explore examples of interracial dating.
o Show me all films about World War II.
o Show me all scenes having to do with baseball.

THE VALUE OF THE WRITTEN SCRIPT

We watch, discuss, and analyze movies—but rarely can we read the scripts. That’s because while some well known film scripts have appeared in print, most have not been published in any format. The scholar’s struggle to locate original scripts involves complicated permissions and negotiations, and holders of the scripts are often reluctant to lend rare and unique documents. American Film Scripts at last gives access and provides a tool for seeing films in a new way. Film scholars can compare the writer’s vision with the producer’s and director’s interpretations. Students of writing, drama, and literature can study the structure of scripts, character development, plot points, and scenes. When there are multiple versions of a script over time, users can see how derivative scripts are developed—there are three versions of A Star is Born and two versions of Lolita, for example.

CONTENT

Contact us for the complete list of scripts, or simply take a free trial and explore. These are just a few of the titles licensed for the collection: From Here to Eternity, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Lady from Shanghai, The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, Ben Hur, Casablanca, American Gigolo, Raging Bull, The China Syndrome, The Maltese Falcon, The Gold Rush, Unforgiven, Blade Runner, State and Main, Hotel Rwanda, Span’glish, Gods and Monsters, Ararat, Black Hawk Down, Body Heat, Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot, His Girl Friday, The Last Temptation of Christ, Sunset Boulevard, Bringing Up Baby, It Happened One Night, Urban Cowboy, Broadcast News, To Sir With Love, Witness, In the Line of Fire, The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, Out of the Past, The African Queen, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Predator, Trading Places, JFK, Platoon, Boogie Nights, The Big Chill, Night of the Hunter, The Searchers, The Spanish Prisoner, Twelve Monkeys, Rebel Without a Cause, The Hustler, North by Northwest, Mean Streets, Nashville, My Own Private Idaho, King Kong, Suspicion, Swing Time, The Magnificent Ambersons, Fury, The Sting…

PUBLICATION DETAILS

American Film Scripts is available on the Web, either through one-time purchase of perpetual rights or through annual subscription. The collection contains 1,000 scripts, re-keyed and indexed, along with a PDF version whenever available. Contact sales@alexanderstreet.com or your sales representative for more information.