Nowhere Boy, Script versus Screen
So an early script of Nowhere Boy (31st March 2008) came my way, and the differences to the final screen version are virtually a text book lesson in good editing and rewriting. With some scripts of films you find yourself thinking, damn, I wish they'd kept this, or you even like an earlier version of a scene better, but wow, here it's basically all improvement.
The beginning is very different as Matt Greenhalgh (the scriptwriter) can't resist using Mimi's cinematic anecdote about John being born during a bombing attack on Liverpool which has been disproven since the 80s (when the first biographer actually went to the trouble to check whether there were any air raids on Liverpool on October 9th and found out no, there were only some much earlier that week). There's also a moment when Mimi, visiting Julia post-birth, holds the baby a little too long and is hesitant to give it back. I can see why this got chucked, and no, not for historical accuracy's sake. One of the charms of Nowhere Boy is that the story works whether or not you now the boy in it becomes one of the most famous musicians of the 20th century, but if you start with a birth scene, you signal "this is an important person being born there". Also "Mimi and Julia compete for John" is an obvious theme that doesn't need to be hammered in with an anvil via baby tug of war.
Next, we get a sequence of John-gets-in-trouble-at-school scenes (there's one left in the finished film, and one is enough, because again, point made, moving on), and several animation sequences of John's drawings and his Brigitte Bardot poster coming to life. My guess is Greenhalgh wrote these knowing the director of the film, Sam Taylor-Wood, was an artist and thought they'd appeal to her, and she took a look at the film's budget and said, thanks, but no, thanks. (Also you don't need them.) Once Julia appears on the scene, again, the trimmings in the finished version are for subtlety. Nowhere Boy has the interesting idea of Julia as sort of manic depressive (add here a whole slice of "are the famous Lennon mood swings actually John being bi-polar?" discussion), but in the finished film you see this indicated via a scene where she, after the first two exubarant visits of her son, pretends not to be at home the third time he shows up, sitting and smoking with a slash depressed expression. In the original script, we get Julia doing the Jekyll and Hyde thing of being cheerful one minute and ranting at a waiter in John-during-Lost-Weekend-fashion the next, and laywoman me thinks this is not how this particular disorder works. (And again, unsubtle as well.)
The emotional climax of the film is John finding out why he ended up being raised by Mimi. As filmed, this scene has John, Mimi and Julia all present. As scripted, we get first Mimi giving John the story monologuing at her house, then John goes back to Julia and nearly wrecks the place until she adds her bit of the story. At this point the script still tries to use both versions of the tale, btw, i.e. not simply the "making John choose between his parents in Blackpool" event but also Julia the younger (John's half sister)'s defense of her mother painted as giving her son away willingly by pointing out Mimi called the social services on her. This unfortunately leads to two very stagey scenes in which there is first exposition from Mimi, then exposition from Julia, whereas the rewritten version ending in the film chunks the social services bit but ends up with a far more dynamic scene by having three-ways-interaction between Mimi, Julia and John that says something not just about either's relationship to John but both their relationship with each other.
Also cut out: a pointless Stuart Sutcliffe cameo (there's one scene of John in art college, but if you don't know who Stu was in the Beatles saga, this brief exchange with a fellow student has no purpose in this story). Two subplots are all but vanished in the final version, or rather, reduced to hints resulting in subtlety and layers: one of them is about Mimi starting an affair with her lodger, Michael Fishwick. I was slightly torn about this excision but ultimately decided they did the right thing, because in the filmed version it's hinted at BUT the extremely unlikely pay-off of this subplot does not happen. To wit: in the original script, John actually finds out, after the big revelation scenes, no less (this shifts focus), and in a display of both historical untruth and psychological unlikelihood discusses it with Paul and George. More about this in a moment.
The other all but vanished subplot from the original script is Matt Greehalgh going overboard with the oedipal dimension of the John and Julia relationship by doubling it via having Julia give Paul (once he enters the narration) the same half flirtatious, half maternal treatment and John being ravingly jealous about it, to the point where he wants to sack Paul from the band and is only dissuaded from it by Pete Shotton who in a display of foresight beloved by bad biopics points out to John that only with Paul will the band go somewhere. (Am I ever glad this scene didn't make the cut. Again, combination of historical untruth and psychological unlikelihood. Real!Pete was devastated to be replaced in the best friend stakes by Paul, never was that keen on the Quarrymen - or, for that matter, later the Beatles - and generally displayed a "whatever makes John happy" approach rather than "what's good for the band" (which he had left at that point.) At a guess, one reason why this subplot got excised is that it paints Julia in far too questionable a light. In the film, she doesn't come across as aware as to what she's doing to John. But it's one thing to behave that way with your son and another to do so with an unrelated 15 years old, to the point of Julia joking "if I were a few years younger..." and Jealous!John yelling "what, you'd shag him?" By contrast, in Nowhere Boy as filmed we do get a scene where Paul plays an Elvis song for Julia who feels sorry for him on account of the dead mother, with John watching and ultimately lashing out at Julia - "she died of cancer; what's your excuse?" - but it comes across as being motivated as much by John's increasing questioning of why he came to live with his aunt and realisation he can hurt people verbally and the power this gives him over Julia as by any feeling of competitiveness, plus Julia does nothing inappropriate there at all.
(Sidenote: Paul does come across as having had a crush on Julia when he talks about her, but not a single contemporary witness, let alone John even post- Primal Scream therapy, ever suggested Julia ever was out of bounds with any of John's friends. But again, leaving aside historical accuracy, the problem with the script here is that this in addition to Julia's earlier Jekyll and Hyde behaviour paints her so unstable that the later revelation Mimi called the social services asks for a "well, who wouldn't?" question. Which is not what the script is going for since it ends up even, after the reconciliation scene, letting Mimi suggest John could live with Julia now.)
The dialogue in general went through an overhaul in terms of "how do teenagers talk like?" Case in point, a gag-plus-character point passage in the scene at the porch of Mimi's house where John asks Paul, in both original script and final filmed version, "why are you so good at all this? I mean, you don't seem like a rock'n roll kind of guy?" Then we get a textbook illustration of stilted speech paraphrasing what biographers speculate versus something you can actually imagine a 15 years old saying.
Original script:
Paul: I'm not a hooligan if that's what you mean.
Filmed version:
Paul: What, because I don't go about smashing things, acting like a dick?
John in both versions gives him a well, yeah type, point taken type of look.
Original script:
Paul: I get it... Rock'n Roll. It's the only thing real to me at the moment.
Filmed version:
Paul: It's the music, man. Just - the music.
Another case of "wow, did the final film improve on that" though actually the film version is still not really convincing me on one particular point to me is the aftermath of the big childhood trauma revelation scene, a scene which in both cases has the purpose of moving John to deciding he forgives Julia and Mimi. In the original script, this comes in the extremely unlikely form of John confiding about both the Blackpool incident and the Mimi/Her Lodger liason (with George helpfully pointing out that the lodger, Michael, is only eight years older than John) to Paul and George. Since it seems to be screen!Paul's lot that if he's portrayed positively instead of negatively in a Beatles-related film, he has to act as John's therapist, he gets to give the following sage advice:
Paul: They both love you, right? Julia and Mimi?
John: In their own twisted ways.
Paul: But it's still love?
John: 'Suppose so.
Paul: Then just take it. And move on. They are who they are. Sort out your own life, not theirs. They'll never be the people you want them to be. Most people aren't.
My inner beta cries out in pain and says, Matt, this is not what they meant with teenage bonding over mother issues, and also, I don't care how much together you think Paul McCartney was at 16 (it's a year after he met John), this even beats Pete's "you've got to keep him for the band" in terms of historical unlikelihood. "They'll never be the people you want them to be"? Which 16 years old in the 50s talks like that?
Anyway, thankfully, fate, the rewrite process, Sam Taylor-Wood or all of the above intervened, and now in the film instead we have a scene where John follows Mimi to Uncle George's grave, they talk a bit about dead Uncle George (which btw fulfills the important purpose of pay off to their respective reactions to George dying at the start of the film) and then he says he can't hate Julia because "if you love someone, I mean really love, you don't spend your life hating them as well, do you?" (With the not so subtext Mimi should make up with Julia as as well.) Now as I said, this is in the finished film actually a line that I have mixed feelings about (can't quite decide whether we're going for historical irony here, given John's relationships with, oh, just about everyone he ever loved, Sean excepted), and it's still a bit sledgehammery, but it's infinitely preferable to the original script version.
And after nitpicking on poor Matt G. who after all revised this script muchly as well, let me add a few non-critical observations. I remember Sam Taylor-Woods in the audio commentary saying they didn't get the rights for the Del Viking's Come Go With Me (aka the song John is singing and changing the lyrics for when Paul first sees him, so the film changes this to Maggie Mae), so it's nice to read the script version describing Paul's reaction to John's improvised lyrics. I also get a kick out of the script description ("Paul is studying John like a trainspotter"). The dialogue there is exactly as filmed, and it's perfect. And the excised scene where Pete Shotton hands over the invitation to join the Quarryman cracks me up because it illustrates the "playing hard to get" bit very well:
Paul: John asked you to ask me?
Pete: Well, he put the word out. First person to see you - ask. So here I am.
Paul thinks. And thinks.
Pete: Y'sure?
Pete: Yeah. We all want you in.
Paul (like it's a bind): Oh, alright then.
Pete: Cool! Really cool. Nigel's booked us a couple of gigs at the end of the month.
Paul: Can't do it.
Pete? No.
Paul: I'm at scout camp.
Pete: You're still in the scouts?
Paul: It's called 'Scout' camp.
Pete nods. Paul cycles off.
Pete (after him): So we'll see you when you get back from scout camp, yeah?
Paul just lifts a thumb into the air as he disappears.
It's the thumbs up gesture which reduced me to helpless giggles when I read it. (If you've ever seen footage of Paul through the decades...) But much as that scene is enjoyable, I can see why it was cut as well - not that it's bad but it's superflous; the next scene (in film and script, with Paul showing up at Mimi's) makes it clear he has joined anyway, and the focus of the film is on the Julia-John-Mimi triangle.
In conclusion: that early script has undeniable potential but was in dire need of a beta-reader editor. Thank the fannish Gods that it got one.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/668622.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
The beginning is very different as Matt Greenhalgh (the scriptwriter) can't resist using Mimi's cinematic anecdote about John being born during a bombing attack on Liverpool which has been disproven since the 80s (when the first biographer actually went to the trouble to check whether there were any air raids on Liverpool on October 9th and found out no, there were only some much earlier that week). There's also a moment when Mimi, visiting Julia post-birth, holds the baby a little too long and is hesitant to give it back. I can see why this got chucked, and no, not for historical accuracy's sake. One of the charms of Nowhere Boy is that the story works whether or not you now the boy in it becomes one of the most famous musicians of the 20th century, but if you start with a birth scene, you signal "this is an important person being born there". Also "Mimi and Julia compete for John" is an obvious theme that doesn't need to be hammered in with an anvil via baby tug of war.
Next, we get a sequence of John-gets-in-trouble-at-school scenes (there's one left in the finished film, and one is enough, because again, point made, moving on), and several animation sequences of John's drawings and his Brigitte Bardot poster coming to life. My guess is Greenhalgh wrote these knowing the director of the film, Sam Taylor-Wood, was an artist and thought they'd appeal to her, and she took a look at the film's budget and said, thanks, but no, thanks. (Also you don't need them.) Once Julia appears on the scene, again, the trimmings in the finished version are for subtlety. Nowhere Boy has the interesting idea of Julia as sort of manic depressive (add here a whole slice of "are the famous Lennon mood swings actually John being bi-polar?" discussion), but in the finished film you see this indicated via a scene where she, after the first two exubarant visits of her son, pretends not to be at home the third time he shows up, sitting and smoking with a slash depressed expression. In the original script, we get Julia doing the Jekyll and Hyde thing of being cheerful one minute and ranting at a waiter in John-during-Lost-Weekend-fashion the next, and laywoman me thinks this is not how this particular disorder works. (And again, unsubtle as well.)
The emotional climax of the film is John finding out why he ended up being raised by Mimi. As filmed, this scene has John, Mimi and Julia all present. As scripted, we get first Mimi giving John the story monologuing at her house, then John goes back to Julia and nearly wrecks the place until she adds her bit of the story. At this point the script still tries to use both versions of the tale, btw, i.e. not simply the "making John choose between his parents in Blackpool" event but also Julia the younger (John's half sister)'s defense of her mother painted as giving her son away willingly by pointing out Mimi called the social services on her. This unfortunately leads to two very stagey scenes in which there is first exposition from Mimi, then exposition from Julia, whereas the rewritten version ending in the film chunks the social services bit but ends up with a far more dynamic scene by having three-ways-interaction between Mimi, Julia and John that says something not just about either's relationship to John but both their relationship with each other.
Also cut out: a pointless Stuart Sutcliffe cameo (there's one scene of John in art college, but if you don't know who Stu was in the Beatles saga, this brief exchange with a fellow student has no purpose in this story). Two subplots are all but vanished in the final version, or rather, reduced to hints resulting in subtlety and layers: one of them is about Mimi starting an affair with her lodger, Michael Fishwick. I was slightly torn about this excision but ultimately decided they did the right thing, because in the filmed version it's hinted at BUT the extremely unlikely pay-off of this subplot does not happen. To wit: in the original script, John actually finds out, after the big revelation scenes, no less (this shifts focus), and in a display of both historical untruth and psychological unlikelihood discusses it with Paul and George. More about this in a moment.
The other all but vanished subplot from the original script is Matt Greehalgh going overboard with the oedipal dimension of the John and Julia relationship by doubling it via having Julia give Paul (once he enters the narration) the same half flirtatious, half maternal treatment and John being ravingly jealous about it, to the point where he wants to sack Paul from the band and is only dissuaded from it by Pete Shotton who in a display of foresight beloved by bad biopics points out to John that only with Paul will the band go somewhere. (Am I ever glad this scene didn't make the cut. Again, combination of historical untruth and psychological unlikelihood. Real!Pete was devastated to be replaced in the best friend stakes by Paul, never was that keen on the Quarrymen - or, for that matter, later the Beatles - and generally displayed a "whatever makes John happy" approach rather than "what's good for the band" (which he had left at that point.) At a guess, one reason why this subplot got excised is that it paints Julia in far too questionable a light. In the film, she doesn't come across as aware as to what she's doing to John. But it's one thing to behave that way with your son and another to do so with an unrelated 15 years old, to the point of Julia joking "if I were a few years younger..." and Jealous!John yelling "what, you'd shag him?" By contrast, in Nowhere Boy as filmed we do get a scene where Paul plays an Elvis song for Julia who feels sorry for him on account of the dead mother, with John watching and ultimately lashing out at Julia - "she died of cancer; what's your excuse?" - but it comes across as being motivated as much by John's increasing questioning of why he came to live with his aunt and realisation he can hurt people verbally and the power this gives him over Julia as by any feeling of competitiveness, plus Julia does nothing inappropriate there at all.
(Sidenote: Paul does come across as having had a crush on Julia when he talks about her, but not a single contemporary witness, let alone John even post- Primal Scream therapy, ever suggested Julia ever was out of bounds with any of John's friends. But again, leaving aside historical accuracy, the problem with the script here is that this in addition to Julia's earlier Jekyll and Hyde behaviour paints her so unstable that the later revelation Mimi called the social services asks for a "well, who wouldn't?" question. Which is not what the script is going for since it ends up even, after the reconciliation scene, letting Mimi suggest John could live with Julia now.)
The dialogue in general went through an overhaul in terms of "how do teenagers talk like?" Case in point, a gag-plus-character point passage in the scene at the porch of Mimi's house where John asks Paul, in both original script and final filmed version, "why are you so good at all this? I mean, you don't seem like a rock'n roll kind of guy?" Then we get a textbook illustration of stilted speech paraphrasing what biographers speculate versus something you can actually imagine a 15 years old saying.
Original script:
Paul: I'm not a hooligan if that's what you mean.
Filmed version:
Paul: What, because I don't go about smashing things, acting like a dick?
John in both versions gives him a well, yeah type, point taken type of look.
Original script:
Paul: I get it... Rock'n Roll. It's the only thing real to me at the moment.
Filmed version:
Paul: It's the music, man. Just - the music.
Another case of "wow, did the final film improve on that" though actually the film version is still not really convincing me on one particular point to me is the aftermath of the big childhood trauma revelation scene, a scene which in both cases has the purpose of moving John to deciding he forgives Julia and Mimi. In the original script, this comes in the extremely unlikely form of John confiding about both the Blackpool incident and the Mimi/Her Lodger liason (with George helpfully pointing out that the lodger, Michael, is only eight years older than John) to Paul and George. Since it seems to be screen!Paul's lot that if he's portrayed positively instead of negatively in a Beatles-related film, he has to act as John's therapist, he gets to give the following sage advice:
Paul: They both love you, right? Julia and Mimi?
John: In their own twisted ways.
Paul: But it's still love?
John: 'Suppose so.
Paul: Then just take it. And move on. They are who they are. Sort out your own life, not theirs. They'll never be the people you want them to be. Most people aren't.
My inner beta cries out in pain and says, Matt, this is not what they meant with teenage bonding over mother issues, and also, I don't care how much together you think Paul McCartney was at 16 (it's a year after he met John), this even beats Pete's "you've got to keep him for the band" in terms of historical unlikelihood. "They'll never be the people you want them to be"? Which 16 years old in the 50s talks like that?
Anyway, thankfully, fate, the rewrite process, Sam Taylor-Wood or all of the above intervened, and now in the film instead we have a scene where John follows Mimi to Uncle George's grave, they talk a bit about dead Uncle George (which btw fulfills the important purpose of pay off to their respective reactions to George dying at the start of the film) and then he says he can't hate Julia because "if you love someone, I mean really love, you don't spend your life hating them as well, do you?" (With the not so subtext Mimi should make up with Julia as as well.) Now as I said, this is in the finished film actually a line that I have mixed feelings about (can't quite decide whether we're going for historical irony here, given John's relationships with, oh, just about everyone he ever loved, Sean excepted), and it's still a bit sledgehammery, but it's infinitely preferable to the original script version.
And after nitpicking on poor Matt G. who after all revised this script muchly as well, let me add a few non-critical observations. I remember Sam Taylor-Woods in the audio commentary saying they didn't get the rights for the Del Viking's Come Go With Me (aka the song John is singing and changing the lyrics for when Paul first sees him, so the film changes this to Maggie Mae), so it's nice to read the script version describing Paul's reaction to John's improvised lyrics. I also get a kick out of the script description ("Paul is studying John like a trainspotter"). The dialogue there is exactly as filmed, and it's perfect. And the excised scene where Pete Shotton hands over the invitation to join the Quarryman cracks me up because it illustrates the "playing hard to get" bit very well:
Paul: John asked you to ask me?
Pete: Well, he put the word out. First person to see you - ask. So here I am.
Paul thinks. And thinks.
Pete: Y'sure?
Pete: Yeah. We all want you in.
Paul (like it's a bind): Oh, alright then.
Pete: Cool! Really cool. Nigel's booked us a couple of gigs at the end of the month.
Paul: Can't do it.
Pete? No.
Paul: I'm at scout camp.
Pete: You're still in the scouts?
Paul: It's called 'Scout' camp.
Pete nods. Paul cycles off.
Pete (after him): So we'll see you when you get back from scout camp, yeah?
Paul just lifts a thumb into the air as he disappears.
It's the thumbs up gesture which reduced me to helpless giggles when I read it. (If you've ever seen footage of Paul through the decades...) But much as that scene is enjoyable, I can see why it was cut as well - not that it's bad but it's superflous; the next scene (in film and script, with Paul showing up at Mimi's) makes it clear he has joined anyway, and the focus of the film is on the Julia-John-Mimi triangle.
In conclusion: that early script has undeniable potential but was in dire need of a beta-reader editor. Thank the fannish Gods that it got one.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/668622.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.