Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park, written by Michael Crichton, is a scientific thriller about the dangers of tampering with genetics. The plot centered around a group of scientists who are brought to a real-life dinosaur park, and the ensuing break down of the park systems, placing the characters into some dangerous situations.

About the Movie

Jurassic Park, the movie, was directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Michael Crichton and David Koepp. It was the highest grossing movie of all time, with more than $900 million dollars earned. It won three Academy Awards, including Best Special Effects, Best Sound, and Best Sound Effects Editing. The movie also beat entertainment records for the highest gross in one weekend, and opening weekend gross. The "show-stoppers" of the movie were the computer animated dinosaurs, which captured the imagination of everyone who saw the movie.
Spielberg was never really pleased with the results on Jurassic Park. In a Premier Magazine interview he stated that "JP had no real villains...I don't think you ever felt the terror very deeply, because of the Hollywood veneer". A fan of Speilberg's sent a letter that pleaded for "[no more] long, boring parts at the beginning that have nothing to do with the island [in JP2]".

Early Script

An early script is available here. A few comments about this script: This is really the "2nd draft" of the script, re-written by Malia Scotch Marmo. Michael Crichton wrote the first draft of the script--neither he nor Spielberg was thrilled with it, so they decided to get someone to polish it up. Scotch Marmo was brought in and revised it, producing the script above. Reading through it, notice the lack of the character of Maclolm, and the inclusion of many scenes that never made it into production. One scene of particular interest is when Lex rides a baby Triceratops--this scene was slated to be filmed, and Stan Winston had an entire crew working on a fully articulated model of the dinosaur. At the last minute, the scene was cut from the screenplay. When this script was delivered to Spielberg early in 1992, he simply said: "I've read it twice, and I think it's a miss". After this script, David Koepp was hired and basically started the script again from scratch.