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    Lincoln: The Screenplay
    Lincoln: The Screenplay
    Lincoln: The Screenplay
    Ebook188 pages1 hour

    Lincoln: The Screenplay

    By Tony Kushner and Doris Kearns Goodwin

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    All forward thrust and hot-damn urgency A brilliant, brawling epic. Screenwriter Tony Kushner blows the dust off history by investing it with flesh, blood, and churning purpose. . . . A great American movie.” Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

    Lincoln is a rough and noble democratic masterpiece. And the genius of Lincoln, finally, lies in its vision of politics as a noble, sometimes clumsy dialectic of the exalted and the mundane And Mr. Kushner, whose love of passionate, exhaustive disputation is unmatched in the modern theater, fills nearly every scene with wonderful, maddening talk. Go see this movie.” A.O. Scott, New York Times

    A lyrical, ingeniously structured screenplay. Lincoln is one of the most authentic biographical dramas I’ve ever seen grand and immersive. It plugs us into the final months of Lincoln’s presidency with a purity that makes us feel transported as if by time machine.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly


    A decade-long collaboration between three-time Academy Award® winner Steven Spielberg and Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner, Lincoln is a revealing drama that focuses on the 16th President’s tumultuous final months in office. Having just won re-election in a country divided, Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of America, and generations, to come. Containing eight pages of color photos from the film and inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s critically acclaimed Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln is now a major motion picture by DreamWorks starring two-time Academy Award® winner Daniel Day-Lewis.

    Tony Kushner's plays include Angels in America, Parts One and Two; A Bright Room Called Day; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols's film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg's Munich. Kushner is the recipient of a Pultizer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, and two Oscar nominations, among other honors. In 2008 he was the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTheatre Communications Group
    Release dateFeb 5, 2013
    ISBN9781559367677
    Lincoln: The Screenplay
    Author

    Tony Kushner

    Tony Kushner is Professor in History and director of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton

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    Book preview

    Lincoln - Tony Kushner

    LINCOLN

    EXT. BATTLEFIELD, JENKINS’ FERRY, ARKANSAS—DAY

    Heavy gray skies hang over a flooded field, the water two feet deep. Cannons and carts, half-submerged and tilted, their wheels trapped in the mud below the surface, are still yoked to dead and dying horses and oxen.

    A terrible battle is taking place; two infantry companies, Negro Union soldiers and white Confederate soldiers, knee-deep in the water, staggering because of the mud beneath, fight each other hand-to-hand, with rifles, bayonets, pistols, knives and fists. There’s no discipline or strategy, nothing depersonalized: it’s mayhem and each side intensely hates the other. Both have resolved to take no prisoners.

    HAROLD GREEN (V.O.)

    Some of us was in the Second Kansas Colored. We fought the rebs at Jenkins’ Ferry last April, just after they’d killed every Negro soldier they captured at Poison Springs.

    EXT. PARADE GROUNDS ADJACENT TO THE WASHINGTON NAVY YARD, ANACOSTIA RIVER—NIGHT

    Rain and fog. Union Army companies are camped out across the grounds. Preparations are being made for the impending assault on the Confederate fortifications guarding the port of Wilmington, North Carolina.

    Two black soldiers stand before a bivouacked Negro unit: HAROLD GREEN, an infantryman in his late thirties, and IRA CLARK, a cavalryman in his early twenties. ABRAHAM LINCOLN sits on a bench facing Harold and Ira; his stovepipe hat is at his side.

    HAROLD GREEN

    So at Jenkins’ Ferry, we decided warn’t taking no reb prisoners. And we didn’t leave a one of ’em alive. The ones of us that didn’t die that day, we joined up with the 116th U.S. Colored, sir. From Camp Nelson, Kentucky.

    LINCOLN

    What’s your name, soldier?

    HAROLD GREEN

    Private Harold Green, sir.

    IRA CLARK

    I’m Corporal Ira Clark, sir. Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry. We’re waiting over there.

    He nods in the direction of his cavalry.

    IRA CLARK

    We’re leaving our horses behind, and shipping out with the 24th Infantry for the assault next week on Wilmington.

    LINCOLN

    (to Harold Green:)

    How long’ve you been a soldier?

    HAROLD GREEN

    Two year, sir.

    LINCOLN

    Second Kansas Colored Infantry, they fought bravely at Jenkins’ Ferry.

    Harold Green is a little startled at Clark’s bluntness.

    HAROLD GREEN

    Us 2nd Kansas boys, whenever we fight now we—

    IRA CLARK

    Another three dollars subtracted from our pay for our uniforms.

    HAROLD GREEN

    That was true, yessir, but that changed—

    IRA CLARK

    Equal pay now. Still no commissioned Negro officers.

    LINCOLN

    I am aware of it, Corporal Clark.

    IRA CLARK

    Yes, sir, that’s good you’re aware, sir. It’s only that—

    HAROLD GREEN

    (to Lincoln, trying to change the subject:)

    You think the Wilmington attack is gonna be—

    IRA CLARK

    Now that white people have accustomed themselves to seeing Negro men with guns, fighting on their behalf, and now that they can tolerate Negro soldiers getting the same pay—in a few years perhaps they can abide the idea of Negro lieutenants and captains. In fifty years, maybe a Negro colonel. In a hundred years—the vote.

    Green’s offended at the way Clark is talking to Lincoln.

    LINCOLN

    What’ll you do after the war, Corporal Clark?

    IRA CLARK

    Work, sir. Perhaps you’ll hire me.

    LINCOLN

    Perhaps I will.

    IRA CLARK

    But you should know, sir, that I get sick at the smell of bootblack and I can’t cut hair.

    Lincoln smiles.

    LINCOLN

    I’ve yet to find a man could cut mine so it’d make any difference.

    HAROLD GREEN

    You got springy hair for a white man.

    Lincoln laughs.

    LINCOLN

    Yes, I do. My last barber hanged himself.

    And the one before that. Left me his scissors in his

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