The Making Of Reflection Paper 

For my first Top 100 Movie Review I decided to watch ‘A Few Good Men’ written by Aaron Sorkin. I wanted to learn more about the behind the scenes of this movie so I chose to watch a making of featurette on it. The most interesting thing that I learned from this was that ‘A Few Good Men’ started off as a broadway play. The biggest struggle that Sorkin had to overcome was turning the play that he had written into a screenplay. This was a tough task for him because he had grown up watching and reading plays and didn’t know much about movies, let alone know how to write one; he had never written or read a screenplay before writing his own. To overcome this, he went to a bookstore and bought a screenplay book, which he took home and learned the rules and how to correctly punctuate and format. Another hardship that the crew overcame was how to make the movie interesting by adding movement because it was originally written as a play. One example of this is the scene where Tom Cruise is driving his car down the street and he pulls over on the side of the road and gets out to by a copy of sports illustrated, then gets back in his car and drives away. This also happens when Cruise and Kevin Bacon are talking for the first time and they do it walking down the hallway and picking up a donut rather than just sitting in the office. These scenes weren’t necessarily crucial to the progression of the plot, however they both added in some action to keep the audience engaged. The only scene in the whole film that couldn’t be done on stage was when Cruise goes into Santiago’s closet and looks at his clothes. Other than this scene however, most scenes in the film are near direct transfers to what they were in the play. I would love to work on a film set based off of what I’ve learned so far in this class. The job that I would want most is the director of photography because I would get to learn so much about camera movement on a movie set and how to get every angle right.