Watching 12 Angry Men for the first time...

Pacing is great, personalities unfold quickly and naturally, good stuff

It’s an all time great movie, but the kid is guilty as frick

12 Angry Men was pretty “woke” for its time.

It wasn’t preachy or particularly in-your-face, but its message is unmistakable: the writers were deeply critical of a system in which an all-white, all-male jury could send a poor minority teenager to the electric chair for killing his abusive father—while prejudice, class assumptions, anger, and indifference influenced how the jurors viewed the evidence.

The original television play aired in 1954, the same year as the McCarthy hearings and Brown v. Board of Education. There are obvious 'socialist' undertones re: class imbalance, but the writers are clever in keeping it subversive. The film arrived in 1957, in the middle of an America divided on segregation and civil rights.

The film was a box office failure. Empty theatres opening night and pulled off screens a week later.

What makes the film especially interesting today is how the conversation has changed. Today some viewers might be angered by the film's lack of women or minorities represented on the jury.

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They were all stage actors at some point. It shows

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Sometimes it is just a treat to watch actors work their craft. Glenngary Glen Ross is a great example. Brilliant acting with a generally boring plot.

I’m messing around with writ g a script and the one bit of advice I’ve seen everywhere is don’t let your script tell directors and actors how to do their jobs.

Give them freedom to interpret the material. Your writing should inspire them to play it a certain way.

Also, that’s why dialogue in movies is so expositional. Spec scripts are written to have an extremely quick moving pace and quickest way to get things across is through dialogue. But then the shooting script version should tone down that expositional dialogue.