Screenplay


Does anyone know if the original script to this film is available anywhere?
Thanks!

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http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/holmes.pdf

I don't know if that's the whole thing though, as in all the scenes are present.

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It isn't. It's basically just the released version of the film in script format (there is, however, a little bit of extra material in the script, taken from the "Curious Case of the Upside Down Room" sequence, dealing with Holmes' cocaine addiction).

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A complete draft of the script is on the laserdisc version of the film. I don't know if it was included on the DVD release.

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I seem to remember having had and read in the 1970s a copy of the book on the basis of which the movie was made. I am almost sure it was not written by Conan Doyle but by ?. It may also have been written/published after the movie was released. The copy was (that I am sure of) in French (I hope I am not being presumptous) and I think it was published as a Livre de Poche, as all the other 'real' Sherlock Holmes I read at that time.

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By pure coincidence I have just read Jonathan Coe's (brilliant) short story 'Diary of an obsession' which appeared to be about 'The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes'. The original story was written as a pastiche of the Conan Doyle style by Michael and Mollie Hardwick. Coe's short story is to be found in '9th & 13th' published by Penguin Books in 2005 and had originally been published in French around 1998 in the 'Cahiers du cinema'.

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Your details are a bit jumbled. Coe released a collection of personal essays and reminiscences, including one related to the film; this collection is titled 9th & 13th (2005), and "Diary of an Obsession" may be the title of the one about the film (it humorously recounts his recurring experiences of the film from childhood to adulthood). Michael and Mollie Hardwick wrote a novelization of Wilder and Diamond's original 165 minute screenplay, published 1971. Preceding the film was a short volume of essays about Holmes collected by Vincent Starrett, sharing the same title as the film, published in 1933. So I'm not sure what you mean by "the original story written as a pastiche": the works by Starrett and Coe are not fiction, and the book by the Hardwicks was based on the film's screenplay.

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