Eternal Sunshine (2004, Charlie Kaufman)

After reading the draft of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for class, a tremendously sad thought came to mind: was the success of the movie an accident?

By "success" I refer to my own thoughts about the film. Eternal Sunshine may be my favorite movie and I am not one to make lists or cite favorites. But there have been few movies to stimulate my thoughts about life as this one has done before and continues to do upon further viewings. This is a movie that was a fantastic, absorbing story and it makes me think about ideas and concepts it investigates, like consciousness and memory.

Every element of the movie is perfect - acting, shot choice, editing, music, lighting, writing, special effects. Nothing pulls me out - every aspect of the movie makes me forget I'm watching a movie.

But then I look at the script. Granted - and this is a humongous granted - this is not the shooting draft and the amount of unusual typos tells me that this may even be the first draft. But it makes me wonder: how much did Charlie Kaufman figure out in the script, how much did director Michel Gondry figure out on set and in the editing room, and how much just came out by complete accident and/or improvisation?

In other words, can something as incredibly beautiful as Eternal Sunshine be penned, as completely as possible, on the page? Sure, the director will find little bits, small emotional beats or line changes, that the writer never thought of and perhaps he or she will discover that in creating a certain rhythm in the editing a part of the story comes more easily to life.

But I look at the ES script and I see that many parts of the dialogue were excised, modified, or moved around. Many scenes were altered and moved around. And some entire sections - like the future-Clementine sequences - were entirely cut from the final movie. Large parts of the beauty of the film are in the script, but significant portions of the film diverge from the script.

So, when one looks at masterpieces of cinema, how many ever existed on the page as we view them?