It’s sort of a companion piece to Kagemusha and Ran, having been written around the same time as the two epics.
I remember thinking it when I first read the screenplay, and the thought came to me again now that I leafed through it: they should just publish this as a book. Kurosawa’s translated screenplays tend to be really pleasant to read, almost novel-like. I’m not talking about the published reconstructed “screenplays” which are not much more than descriptions of the finished film, but the actual screenplays like this one or the Dreams screenplay that was made available last week. The Ran storyboard and screenplay book is also pretty good.
It looks like someone, perhaps related to Cinephilia & Beyond, has gone through the Akira Kurosawa Digital Archive‘s copy of Kurosawa’s unfilmed screenplay The Mask of the Black Death and print-screened it into a pdf file, which you can find and download here.
It’s sort of a companion piece to Kagemusha and Ran, having been written around the same time as the two epics.
I remember thinking it when I first read the screenplay, and the thought came to me again now that I leafed through it: they should just publish this as a book. Kurosawa’s translated screenplays tend to be really pleasant to read, almost novel-like. I’m not talking about the published reconstructed “screenplays” which are not much more than descriptions of the finished film, but the actual screenplays like this one or the Dreams screenplay that was made available last week. The Ran storyboard and screenplay book is also pretty good.