For those less versed in the filmography of Wes Anderson, his first feature came in two iterations: the 1996 feature and the 1993 short film. In this article, I’ll compare and contrast the opening scenes of both of them to hopefully shed some light on what they do as well as what Wes and Owen did from a writing standpoint when jumping from short to feature.
Why would you wanna know anything about Bottle Rocket?
Well, if you’re someone looking to evolve a short script to a feature, for instance, if you were looking to expand your Killer Shorts entry into a feature script, you could do a lot worse than trying to learn some things from Bottle Rocket.
In the next section, I’ll summarize both the opening of the feature and the short. If you already know all about it — skip it. Just know I’ll be discussing the story from the very beginning until after Dignen and Anthony’s lunch at the drugstore.
After that, I’ll break down some key differences between the two mediums.
Summary
In case you’ve not seen either the short or the movie, they center on two best friends — Dignen and Anthony — that dream of leading a life full of crime and adventure. Dignen is the idiot mastermind of the team (played by Owen Wilson), and Anthony is the sensitive #2 (played by Luke Wilson)
The beginning of the feature sees Anthony willingly checking himself out of a mental hospital in the Arizona desert. The twist is that Dignen — unaware that Anthony checked himself in and could leave when he wanted to— came up with a plan to break him out. Anthony plays along with Dignen’s plan because he doesn’t want to disappoint his friend.
From there, they ride the bus back home. On the trip, Dignen lays out the seventy-five year plan that he hopes Anthony and him will follow. Anthony is less than enthused.
After the bus ride, about two minutes in, it’s finally crime time. Interestingly enough, this is where the short picks up. In both the short and the feature: they proceed to rob what we learn is Anthony’s house, have a post-job lunch at a restaurant, get into an argument playing pinball, and then resolve their differences as they walk home.
The Takeaway
One of my favorite aspects of the beginning of the feature is how it so clearly starts the story. Right away, we understand that this is going to be a story defined by the ridiculous notions of Dignen and the more grounded Anthony.
It’s a great conflict and dynamic that runs the course of the entire movie, and the fact that it begins right away makes it clear what to expect.
But this is not something present in the short. The beginning of the short features a moment exactly replicated in the film, save for the conversation topic.
In the short, as Dignen and Anthony hop a fence and stride towards the house, they talk about a random episode of Starsky and Hutch. While the moment entertains, Wes and Owen replaced it with a much stronger moment in the feature.
In the feature, Anderson and Owen switch the dialogue in the scene to focus on Dignen’s fitness plan he wants to put the two of them on. It’s a moment much more grounded in what Dignen wants out of life. And also mentioned in the conversation is how Anthony ran 10 miles every night while he was at therapy. Something Dignen wishes he could have done.
In the feature, the scene pulls us closer to these two characters and the intricacies of their relationship. In the short, it’s a bit of a wasted moment. I can’t know for sure, but I imagine that Wes and Owen had no real interest in putting Dignen and Anthony into a larger story when they wrote the short.
There’s no inclusion of Dignen’s obsession with Mr. Henry, there’s no seventy-five year plan, and there’s no indication of Anthony’s mental health issues.
These things are vital aspects of what construct the larger story of Bottle Rocket, the story that takes up about 90 minutes of screen time. But the short is not 90 minutes. It’s thirteen.
Conclusion
When coming up with an idea, it can be damn near impossible to keep it contained. As the new idea rattles around in your brain, setting off synapses or whatever the hell else ideas do in the brain, everything can look appetizing.
Characters, and relationships, and genre elements take on so many different facets, but when writing a short, it can be best to keep things limited — like in Bottle Rocket.
If Wes and Owen had included Mr. Henry, and the romance with Inez (a character from later in the movie), and Anthony’s mental health issues, and Future man (a character from later in the movie), the short would have been overstuffed.
All the individual pieces are wonderful, but the short would have suffered for it.
It can be nearly impossible to trust that a pared-down version of an idea can stand on its own. Especially one that doesn’t even contain a quarter of all the great stuff that you’ve thought up in your head, but that’s where the difficulty of writing shorts comes from, I suppose.
If you understand the core of the story and the experience you want to get across to the reader and the audience, you can write a short version of your idea. It can be tempting to put all the crazy/scary/funny things floating around in the grey matter into the story, but you shouldn’t feel the pressure to do that.
It’ll take a lot of trust and self-confidence in yourself, something that can be hard to drum up for a writer of any skill level, but it’ll pay off.