The Great Escape: Annotated script pages by Steve McQueen
A WWII prison break, a novel, a passionate director, a number of good writers and actors - put it all together and you just might eventually have yourself a classic.
The odds of any movie ever getting made are always terrible. A thousand and one things can go wrong along the way and, most often, something somewhere doesn’t align. Timing, money, sensibilities - every film that actually does get made is - whether good or bad - a small miracle. Now then, when the stars do align, when everything does come together and the outcome is something like The Great Escape, well then that’s a major miracle - it’s movie magic!
Ever so often, annotated screenplays are sold at auction for sometimes ludicrous sums of money (to give just one example, the divine Audrey Hepburn’s annotated Breakfast at Tiffany’s script sold in 2017 at Christies for - wait for it - £632,750). For the fun of it, I occasionally search the world wild webs and sometimes I find auction houses highlighting a few sample pages - et voilà - there were twelve of pages from Steve McQueen’s personal shooting script of The Great Escape. Fascinating, just fascinating - his notes, his thoughts, his adjustments. If you’d like to peruse them right away, just scroll down.
Paul Brickhill had been a prisoner of war at the Stalag Luft III camp and turned his experience into a novel called, you guessed it, The Great Escape. From that book, published in 1950, it would take another thirteen years for the film of the same name to flicker across the world’s silver screens. Director John Sturges was long interested in Brickhill’s book, but studios passed on the idea for eight years because, apparently, it was too focused on British POWs, didn’t have any female stars and didn’t come with a Hollywood ending … all that changed with Sturges’ clout rose considerably with the release of the The Magnificent Seven in 1960.
James Clavell and W. R. Burnett wrote the script. Both were screenwriters and novelists and Clavell even had been a POW. He incorporated his personal experiences into his first novel, King Rat. In addition Walter Newman worked on the script. An odd twist: Newman had worked with Sturges before, on The Magnificent Seven, and for both The Magnificent Seven and for The Great Escape he apparently renounced screenwriting credits because of disagreements with Sturges and changes made to the script during shooting.
More script work was required when Steve McQueen complained that his part wasn’t big enough. He was particularly displeased that his character all but vanishes from the film for about thirty minutes in the middle of the film. McQueen demanded rewrites and walked out. Sturges seems to have considered writing McQueen’s character out of the story, but United Artists maintained that the star was essential for the film’s success. They offered to hire an additional writer to deal with the star’s demands. That seems to have done the trick because McQueen returned to the set.
Interested in more about the making of The Great Escape?
For those interested, here’s the complete script. And finally, without further ado, the script pages, personally annotated by Steve McQueen:
