Raising Arizona Books

The best movie EVER! The straight script, I had hoped to stumble onto some dialogue that wound up on the cutting room floor but to no avail. Being interested in screenplay writing I was curious how the Coen's conveyed all of the sight humor into their screen play. If your looking for screen play examples (the how to write a screenplay books are worthless) this has been very helpful to me. Too bad their aren't any story boards to go with it.

This screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen reminded me of how much I liked the film shot from it. Perennial criminal Hi returns to prison again and again for robbing convenience stores but Edwinna, the police officer who takes his mug shots, softens his heart. He decides to make a new life of it by marrying her. They buy a trailer in Arizona, set up housekeeping, and try the next logical step: to start a family. Edwinna, though, learns that she cannot conceive and that's where the screenplay takes a typical Coen brother leap into absurdity. Ed and Hi decide to become parents by kidnapping one of a set of quintuplets since "it was unfair that some have so many while others should have so few." What ensures is pure madcap, inventive, hilarious comedy with a hint of the bittersweet.

The screenplay evokes the film with such clarity and excellent visual storytelling that you'll feel as though you're watching it. While Holly Hunter and Nicholas Cage, who played Ed and Hi, excel at portraying quirky characters, this script makes it clear that they had a fantastic script to work with and were not the sole reasons for its success. This paperback contains a few black-and-white still shots of the film (certainly not worth buying the screenplay for), the full credits for the film, and a short interview/exchange between the Coen brothers and the filmmakers for Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, a movie that was released during the same season.

This is a well-researched look at Hollywood's never-ending fascination with moonshine, country bumpkins, and what goes on up there in the hills beyond Beverly. In the early 1920s as more people moved to the cities, Hollywood found it could make money telling audiences about the places they'd left behind. Lurid tales of sex and debauchery, such as 1950's "Tobacco Road," undercut the good-hearted goofiness of the Ma and Pa Kettle series of the 1940s. By the 1990s, the Coen brothers' "Raising Arizona" was a hit on the strength of Nicolas Cage's ironic portrayal of a lovable yokel (an updated edition of this book would have to include the current TV show "My Name Is Earl," proving this archetype isn't dead by a long shot).

Williamson covers a lot of ground here, from "The Andy Griffith Show" to John Boorman's "Deliverance," and his conclusions are fairly broad ones. His best writing narrows focus on a specific film or theme: the on-location making of the log-cabin potboiler "Stark Love" (1926) is wildly detailed, with newspaper reporting and interviews with local extras who made appearances in the film as members of an "authentic" mountain family. Lots of movie stills, contemporary cartoons, and detailed captions accompany the text. At times the book reads like a college course -- Williamson is a professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and acknowledges the input of several students -- but for film buffs and general readers, "Hillbillyland" is an entertaining look at how the film industry exploits one facet of American culture.