Observations on the "Eighth Grade" Screenplay

(Elsie Fisher in Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade. Credit: A24)

I have a fascination with reading the screenplays of movies that I've already seen. Seeing the film put on paper gives me a new perspective on it. Often, the screenplay will note minor details that completely shift the way I perceive a scene. Sometimes, the screenplay is an entirely different experience from the finished film, and serves as something of a document of the journey that a film took from script to screen. Aspiring screenwriters often spend a considerable amount of time looking up "the greatest screenplays of all time" to read. While this undoubtedly has its benefits, the amount of guidance you can receive from reading the screenplay for a film you're familiar with or simply interested in seeing its inner workings will do a great deal for you.

This brings me to Eighth Grade. I first watched the film a few nights ago and was left speechless. It is by far the most realistic depiction of adolescence I have ever seen in fiction. I love Freaks and Geeks, but Eighth Grade makes that show look like Smallville. Comedian-turned-writer/director Bo Burnham does a brilliant job of conveying exactly what makes that stage of life so terrifying--the way that awkwardness can quickly sink into existential terror, the way the worst moments seem to last forever. As someone who was actually a junior high student around the time this film is set, I'll admit to watching a good chunk of it through my fingers. I was fascinated by the film, and wanted to see how these moments play out in the written word, disconnected from Burnham's beautiful visuals.

Thus, I tracked down (meaning found in a random Google Drive folder someone on Reddit posted) an early draft of the script, back when it still went by the working title The Coolest Girl in the World. Reading it, I feel, gave me a greater insight on the film's journey and about the process of filmmaking itself. Here are some thoughts I recorded while reading the screenplay. I hope you help, find them interesting, or are at least willing to acknowledge their existence

• There's an immediate difference from the final film right off the bat. The opening scene, for both, is Kayla recording one of her videos, the one about "being yourself." However, while the film shows the video and nothing else, the screenplay shows her struggles recording the video, flubbing lines and experiencing technical difficulties. The scene as it's shown in the screenplay does a good job of establishing the theme of the inherent falseness of online life, but given that the morning routine sequence comes immediately after and basically does the same thing, you can tell why it was changed.
• Burnham's understanding of 2017-era teen culture comes across as effortless on the screen, but from this draft you can tell he had to work his way there through research and consulting his young stars during filming. While Facebook is used by the characters throughout the script, in the final film the only reference to Facebook is a teen grumbling "no one uses Facebook anymore" to her mom. Kayla doesn't end her videos by saying "gucci!" The screenplay doesn't even have the kid who keeps referencing the "LeBron James" Vine, one of the most true-to-life parts of the film.
• The screenplay is edgier in some ways and toned down in some ways compared to the film. Obviously the movie was always going to have an R rating (no way around it, junior high is an R-rated experience), but the screenplay earns the rating in a different way compared to the finished film. The screenplay is a little more liberal with its F-bombs (compared to the movie's downright restrained five uses), but the scene of Kayla researching a sexual technique on YouTube and the "truth or dare" scene are both implied in the script, as opposed to the movie where they are shown in full and allowed to linger in stomach-churning ways.
• As much as I think the final film's version of the truth or dare scene is brilliant on just about every level, having the scene's events be implied in some ways makes it more effective. I'm not sure which one I prefer.
• The screenplay as a whole dials back some on the naturalism that defines the movie. The cuts in the screenplay feel a little more cinematic, whereas the film is deliberately a little un-cinematic in its editing. The screenplay sometimes feels like, well, a film about eighth grade. The film, on the other hand, feels like eighth grade.
• Similarly, the script features a bit more of a balance between comedy and drama. There are more jokes and sight gags (I, for one, was a big fan of Kayla's dad getting suckered into buying something from a mall kiosk). The final film, however, is very much a drama with moments of comedy. As much as I thought the jokes were good, I have to agree with Burnham that the film's tone fits much better with the story that he's trying to tell.
• The scene of Kayla watching the video letter she made to herself in sixth grade is placed earlier in the screenplay than in the film. I'm inclined to say I prefer that placement. It perfectly sets up the theme of the wish for simplicity in a complicated time, and I think provides some necessary emotional context for what happens in the rest of the story.
• The screenplay portrays Kayla as a clumsy member of the school's dance team rather than the orchestra. In this scene, Burnham writes that the eighth-grade boys in the audience holler at any move could be interpreted as vaguely sexual. This is painfully, painfully accurate.
• Unfortunately, the script doesn't feature the sex ed video saying "it's gonna be lit" or the principal dabbing, two scenes from the movie that very much gave me flashbacks to my own junior high days.

What reading this script taught me (other than that junior high is one of the most inhumane things we force our children to endure) is that a film is something that is constantly in motion, never entirely locked until the final edit. Even the final draft of the screenplay is only a starting point of its own. Knowing that, as someone who is currently working on writing a screenplay and thinking that it maybe has an actual chance somewhere along the line, it's an important thing to know.

"Gucci!"