The Writers Guild Of America just came out with their list of the top 101 movie screenplays of all time.
Before you click on the following
link,
play fair and try to
guess the top five of their list.
Don’t read any other posts in this thread first.
Just hit reply and post your guesses for the
top five best movie screenplays of all time,
Then click on the link above to see how you did.
and then come back and click on the link to see how well you did.
Sorry about the double posting of my last sentence…but it gives you a little more space to guess.
BTW…I only guessed what was number one and missed the other four.
Godfather
Taxi Driver
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
Ernest Goes to Camp
How’d I do?
I’ll probably miss them all, but here goes…
The Godfather
Pulp Fiction
Casablanca
Gone With The Wind
Citizen Kane
I did better than I thought 
My first thought was Terence Malick’s Badlands, it must have been 102.
Now that I look at the list, why didn’t they leave out 85 and 87 and stick American in the title. Surely they are not suggesting that they considered non-American screenplays and could only find 2 worthy of inclusion.
OK, I’ll play.
In no particular order:
Schindler’s List
Casablanca
Marty
Ordinary People
Love, Actually
Betcha I didn’t even get one.
At least I got three somewhere on the list. Honest, I was going to say On the Waterfront, but since I was just in the best Score thread, I was thinking of that as one of the worst. I was also thinking “No way Eternal Sunshine will make that list.”
I would guess:
The Godfather
The Godfather, Part II
Casablanca
Chinatown
Pulp Fiction
Hey, I got three! Those were fairly predictable, though.
Porky’s
Dude, Where’s My Car?
Heaven’s Gate
Ishtar
Killer Tomatoes from Outer Space
I forgot to check the list. How’d I do?
In no order,
Chinatown
Pulp Fiction
One Flew over the Cuckoos nest
Casablanca
Godfather
No Marx Brothers movies? Did the WGA think that Groucho and Chico made up their lines as they went along?
Billy Wilder appears to come out as most appreciated: three of the top fifteen, four of the top twenty-six. Woody Allen also has four, but much lower overall.
Several people have three films on the list, including Francis Ford Coppola, William Goldman, John Huston, and Charlie Kaufman. IOW, six people are responsible for 20% of the greatest screenplays in history. (OK, with co-writers). How different would the history of film been without them?
Hey, somebody has to mention the writers in a thread about screenplays!
And I agree that the lack of non-American screenplays is silly. Even if you limit the scripts to English-language (fair, since it’s so hard to evaluate them in other languages) the whole British film industry is ridiculously underrepresented.
Citizen Kane
All About Eve
The Third Man
Chinatown
His Girl Friday
Pretty close to what you’d find on lists of best movies of all time, but I tried to think of things with particularly memorable and/or witty screenplays.
D’oh! How could I have forgotten Casablanca? I originally had The Godfather on there, but then I decided that His Girl Friday really was better (and I still think so, from a strictly screenwriting viewpoint). But otherwise I did pretty well…
Or put in the word “english-language” - weren’t some on the list (e.g. Lawrence of Arabia) considered british movies? But it’s very true that the people of the WGA seem to have never heard of movies made outside Hollywood. Their press release says only
The Godfather
The Godfather II
Pulp Fiction
Fargo
Gone With the Wind
If this is limited to US-made movies:
My two best guesses:
The Godfather
Citizen Cane
The rest, I’m not so sure about. It’s such a big field. I’ll guess:
Chinatown,
GoodFellas,
The Usual Suspects
er, Citizen Kane.
Can’t believe I spelled it with a ‘C’.