138 CHAPTER 4 ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE
Script to screenIn Pulp Fiction(1994), the mob hit man Vinnie (John Travolta) has inadvertently caused his bosses’
mistress Mia (Uma Thurman) to overdose on pure heroin. Desperate to revive her, he drags her seemingly lifeless body to the
drug dealer Lance (Eric Stoltz) who sold him the drugs in the first place. In this scene, Vince attempts to revive Mia with a shot
of adrenaline injected directly into her heart. The stakes are high: if she dies, he dies. Writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s
screenplay provides more than plot and dialogue. Screenwriters use the script format to isolate and order images and actions
on the page to suggest shot-by-shot cinematic storytelling. A long line of creative collaborators——from director to designers to
cinematographer to actors to editors——build upon the narrative foundation supplied by the original screenplay. As we can see
from this example, the moment-by-moment presentation has evolved and expanded somewhat along the journey from written
word to edited images, but the essential narrative impulse remains intact.
The shots are presented in sequence as they appear in the completed film; the notations below[1, 5, 6, 4, 7, 3, 8, 9, 10]
indicate the portion of the original script depicted in each shot.
VINCENT
Count to three.
Lance, on his knees right beside Vincent, does not know what
to expect.LANCE
One ...Needle raised ready to strike.RED DOT on Mia’s body.LANCE (OS)
... two ...Jody’s face is alive with anticipation.NEEDLE in the air, posed like a rattler ready to strike.LANCE (OS)
... three!The needle leaves frame, THRUSTING down hard.Vincent brings the needle down hard, STABBING Mia in the
chest.
Mia’s head is JOLTED from the impact. [10][9][8][7][4][6][1][5][3]The excerpt above was abridged from the book PULP FICTION by Quentin Tarantino. Copyright © 1994 by Quentin Tarantino.
Reprinted by permission of Miramax Books. All rights reserved.