Quentin Tarantino (screenplay) FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1995) Final shooting script

Los Angeles: Acuña Boys, 1995. Vintage original film script, 109 pp. A photocopy of the script produced internally for the production. Unbound, with three punch holes. There are shadows around some punch holes, and some pages show blurriness in blank margins. Sold with an approximately 40 pp. press release about the film from distributor Dimension Films. Near fine.

Script and related materials come from Chris Scher, who worked in the film’s art department and is so credited on IMDb.

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) was one of the first significant Quentin Tarantino screenplays to be directed by someone other than Tarantino himself; in this case, Tarantino’s frequent collaborator, the Mexican-American filmmaker Robert Rodriguez.

Though remembered mainly as an over-the-top vampire/horror film, the movie is actually a genre hybrid, beginning as a crime/action thriller about two bank robber brothers on the lam (Seth and Rich, played respectively by George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino), and not introducing the supernatural vampire element until roughly two-thirds of the way through. Once the fugitive brothers arrive at a Mexican strip bar called the Titty Twister, accompanied by their hostages Reverend Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) and his two teenage children, Scott (Ernest Liu) and Kate (Juliette Lewis), the film becomes a classic closed ensemble melodrama in the manner of Assault on Precinct 13 or Night of the Living Dead, but saturated with Tarantino’s particular brand of ultra-violent dark comedy.

Because this is the movie’s final shooting script, the differences between what are read on the page and what we see on the screen are more noticeable in the way scenes are staged than in Tarantino’s distinctive dialogue. Some actors may add their own twist to a particular line. For example, the opening scene introduces us to Texas Ranger Earl McGraw, played by Michael Parks, a character who appears in numerous Rodriguez and Tarantino movies. In the script, McGraw announces to his friend, “I gotta piss”. In the movie, Parks as McGraw says, “Gotta drain my lizard”. An example of how things are changed in the staging: in the script, when Seth and Rich make their initial escape, Rich is shot through the shoulder; in the movie, Rich is shot through the hand, and he even holds up the hand to show a large round hole in the center of his palm. An example of something added during shooting: to the first shot that shows Seth and Rich speeding down the desert highway, the filmmakers add an elaborate optical effect, an X-ray cutaway view of the car’s backside revealing a female hostage bound and gagged inside the trunk.

As noted, the most radical thing about From Dusk Till Dawn‘s screenplay is the way it shifts genres roughly halfway through. The first half is pure neo-noir crime thriller, taking place in a world of highways, diners, liquor stores and motels. All this changes after the fugitives and their hostages crossover into Mexico and arrive at the Titty Twister, a location described in the screenplay as “the rudest, sleaziest, most crab-infested strip joint, honky tonk whorehouse in all of Mexico”. From that point forward, the story becomes a gore-saturated vampire action horror extravaganza told in the gleefully grotesque style of a 1950s EC horror comic.

Regardless, since this is a Quentin Tarantino screenplay, the story remains character-driven. In particular, we follow the character arcs of Reverend Fuller (Keitel), a minister who has lost his faith and has to find it again in order to protect his family from evil, the Reverend’s daughter Kate (Juliette Lewis), an innocent who has to find the strength within her to survive a night of agonizing horror, and finally, Seth (Clooney), a professional thief, not a murderer, who gradually reveals his own code of honor.

Ultimately, notwithstanding all the horror, this is a movie about basic values: professionalism, family and faith.

As in a number of Hollywood scripts by prestigious writers, the filmmakers intentionally chose to omit the last few pages (as the screenplay itself says at page 109, “THE LAST THREE PAGES ARE TO COME”.) That’s roughly five or six minutes of material, including Seth’s great exit line to Kate (she asks to accompany him to the hideout for outlaws that is his final destination, and he sends her back home with a wad of cash, saying “I may be a bastard, but I’m not a fucking bastard”.) This is followed by the movie’s big reveal, the final shot that pulls up and back to show that the vampire bar is, in fact, situated on top of a massive ancient Aztec pyramid.

From Dusk Till Dawn was an enormous box office success, earning more than three times its initial budget. It was the film that enabled George Clooney to make the transition from TV stardom into film stardom, and it jumpstarted the careers of several of its performers, notably Salma Hayek who played the role of “Santanico Pandemonium”. The movie spawned two direct-to-video follow-ups, a sequel From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999) and a prequel From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter (2000). Eventually there was even a TV series, produced and directed by Rodriquez, From Dusk till Dawn: The Series, which ran on the El Rey network from 2014 to 2016.