‘Asteroid City’: Read The Screenplay For Wes Anderson And Roman Coppola’s Latest Collaboration That Makes All Their Worlds A Stage
(L-R) Jason Schwartzman and Jake Ryan in ‘Asteroid City’ Focus Features / Courtesy Everett Collection
Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Asteroid City, Wes Anderson‘s latest film that had its world premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Anderson penned the script with his frequent collaborator Roman Coppola after the two previously teamed on the Anderson-directed The Darjeeling Limited, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch and Moonrise Kingdom, the latter of which scored the pair an Original Screenplay Oscar nom in 2023.
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The plot is set in 1955 and revolves around the American Southwest desert town of Asteroid City (population: 87), whose famed attraction is a giant meteor crater and observatory. The one-telephone-booth town is playing host to the military and astronomers honoring five Junior Stargazers with awards for their scientific inventions. It’s also the weekend celebrating Asteroid Day, commemorating September 27, 3007 BC, when that Arid Plains meteorite made impact.
It’s also the weekend an alien appears, after which the town goes into lockdown and the Army attempts to cover up the story. But the Junior Stargazers have a plan to get the word to the outside world anyway.
That’s the plot of the story, anyway, behind the real story, which is that Asteroid City is a play in preproduction in New York, with the lives of the actors playing out simultaneously to the action in the desert. Somehow in the middle of it all is the dissection of the big and the small, with reference points ranging from Sam Shepard and the Cold War to Elia Kazan and theater, and the American West.
Anderson regulars Jason Schwartzman (he plays a recently widowed, grieving father of three war photgrapher; Anderson said the part was written specifically for him to play), Scarlett Johansson, Jeffery Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Tony Revolori, Liev Schreiber, Adrien Brody and Bryan Cranston star along with Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Hong Chau, Maya Hawke, Rupert Friend and Stephen Park.
The pic hit U.S. theaters and June via Focus Features and has grossed $53.8 million at the global box office.
Click below to read the script:
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