Call Number:

F0721

Repository:

University of Delaware Library Special Collections

Extent:

1 item (150 pages)

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

MSS 0099, F0721, Mamet, David, The untouchables : screenplay, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.

Date:

1986 february (inclusive)

Creator:

Mamet, David

Form:

Screenplays

Abstract:

Original screenplay by David Mamet of The Untouchables, 125 pages plus 25 rewrite pages. Mamet's holograph additions, deletions, and corrections are evident throughout as he advances the storyline to an interim stage that would be reworked further into the film form.

Original screenplay by David Mamet of

The Untouchables, 125 pages plus 25 rewrite pages. Mamet's holograph additions, deletions, and corrections are evident throughout as he advances the storyline to an interim stage that would be reworked further into the film form.

The title page is signed by Mamet, dated "February 1986" in his hand, and has also written out in full what has become a famous quotation from the film, "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun -- he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue -- that's the Chicago way."

Major changes made include the naming of Al Capone's chief killer as the real-life Frank Nitti. In the typed draft, he is referred to only as the man wearing a bowtie. In this draft, the police sharpshooter is of Polish descent. In the movie, he is an Italian. The screenplay has the gunned-down Malone dying not in his apartment but in a Chicago hospital. Finally, the climactic scence in which Elliot Ness seizes Capone's bookkeeper takes place in this draft on a moving train. The movie, of course, plays out this crucial event in the Chicago train station and features the celebrated cinematic homage to Eisenstein's

The Battleship Potemkin -- an abandoned baby in his carriage rolls slowly down a steep marble staircase to apparent doom while a shootout is taking place between Ness and Capone's men, who are holding the bookkeeper hostage. The last page bears Mamet's handwritten epigraph, "Do it the Chicago way." Housed in a specially designed cloth clamshell box and matching chemise.