Scriptwriting - Gallipoli from novel to film.
Gallipoli - the novel.
We're going, lads, he said. 'I know everyone of you will do your utmost. Good luck to you all, and God bless you.' He turned away and grasped the climbing peg.
Archy slowly took off his Kimberly Gift medal and hung it from one of the climbing pegs. As though in a dream he seemed to hear Uncle Jack's voice again, to see the pepper trees behind the house, the cockatoos in white clouds at sunset, to hear the thunder of rain on the corrugated iron roof. Pictures ran across his mind's eye, fast as summary lightning: Billy, Snakeskin. Zac. Stumpy and the camel. Mary Stanton. Frank learning to ride. The images flickered and ran together and he heard himself saying softly: 'What are your legs, boy? Springs. Steel springs. And what are they going to do, boy?' Tears rained from his eyes and pattered on the bloody dust of the trench floor. 'How fast can you run, boy?' fast as leopard! Then let's see you do it!'
The silver whistle shrilled.
Archy was over the parapet and among the dead. For a second it was breathlessly still: cordite smoke from the Turkish guns eddied among the bodies. Then the gunfire crashed around him. He ran as he had never run before, head high, rifle forgotten. He was alone, at the head of the field. 'How fast can you run, boy?' Like a leopard! He was still running with head high, his eyes half closed, when the nearest Maxim gun team clipped a fresh belt into their weapon, and Archy fell with a roaring in his ears. Lieutenant Gray, on the fire step, turned irritably as someone seized him by the arm.
'Dunnet!'
Frank sank to the floor of the trench, 'it's cancelled! General Gardner's Orders!' Then he screamed a long cry of anger and rage and was violently sick. Lieutenant Gray slowly holstered his revolver. He looked at the dead and the dying in the trench and the bloody debris in no-man's-land.
'My God,' he said. 'My God.' Something winked in the early sunlight.
Frank looked at it dully, uncomprehending. Then he recognized it, as it twirled on its watered silk ribbon, catching the sun. Archy's Kimberly Gift medal.
Carefully read the following passage from the novel Gallipoli, and turn it into film script.
