Vintage Movie Scripts, Rare Books and Other Memorabilia

Vintage movie scripts constitute, as an overall category, one of the most fascinating parts of WalterFilm’s inventory.

MOVIE SCRIPTS

We only offer vintage original movie scripts. And, on occasion, we can provide multiple drafts of the same script, which can be wildly different. Movies may be in development for many years, with a variety of different writers and directors attached to them. As a result, one script can be very different in its content from another. We recently handled very divergent scripts from such science-fiction classics as ROBOCOP and TOTAL RECALL. If you are a script collector or curator, it is fascinating to compare the different approaches taken as you read the different drafts.

There are many different approaches to script collecting:

Some people prefer a final, revised draft—one as close as possible to the completed film.
Some are fascinated by earlier drafts.
Some take pleasure in searching out a variety of drafts of the same film.

There are scripts that are clean with nothing added while others might have highlighting—actors often highlight their lines or have handwritten notes or various last-minute changes to the dialogue. If a script belonged to someone in the costume department, you could see various manuscript notes about appropriate costumes.

A few years ago, we had a wonderful vintage original script for Quentin Tarantino’s PULP FICTION. It had belonged to a member of the production crew and contained all kinds of extras—a complete shooting schedule, an amazing list of all the southern California locations used and the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all cast and crew members.

Scripts can be collected because of the film itself. But there are numerous scripts whose greater interest lies in their being a literary adaptation. Many of the great names of Twentieth Century literature had films adapted from their works: Peal Buck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jim Thompson, to list just a few.

Scripts also exist that were actually written by important authors. Steinbeck, Chandler, Hammett, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Thompson, are all authors who, at one time or another, wrote screenplays. And those screenplays, all of them very scarce, are always prized when they appear. (Several years ago, there was a West Coast auction of an original screenplay for THE BIG SLEEP, which had Faulkner’s name on it as one of its authors, and it sold for about $100,000. If another one appears, it is unlikely to sell for anything less.)

PRESSBOOKS

Pressbooks first appearedin the 1910’s, the studios would create campaign books, each for a specific film, which were most often described as pressbooks (although, they were usually sent to prospective theater owners rather than to members of the media). These fascinating books, which often have beautifully illustrated covers, lengthy articles about the history of the film, and many images of the film’s posters. In the case of earlier films, often these images are all that has survived of the film’s poster designs.