"Then I Woke Up"

I went online to see if I could find the screenplay for No Country for Old Men -- yeah, it's that good.

Unfortunately it's not for sale yet. However, IMDb has extensive quotes from the film, which are fairly accurate based on my memory of it from yesterday.

Most importantly, I wanted to look up Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's (Tommy Lee Jones) speech from the end, where his wife has asked him about his dreams. I also found the opening speech, which Ed Tom gives in voiceover as the film starts. The two speeches tease out quite a bit about the character, and the hell in which he finds himself at the end.

The opening voiceover:

I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. Nigger Hoskins over in Bastrop County knowed everbody's phone number off by heart. You can't help but compare yourself gainst the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how they would've operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the gas chamber at Huntsville here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killed a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about fifteen minutes. I don't know what to make of that. I surely don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job - not to be glorious. But I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. To go into something you don't understand you would have to be crazy or become part of it.

And the final speech, to his wife about his dreams from the night before, both of which feature his father, who was also a sheriff:

Okay. Two of 'em. Both had my father. It's peculiar. I'm older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he's the younger man. Anyway, first one I don't remember so well but it was about money and I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin' through the mountains of a night. Goin' through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin', hard ridin'. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and that he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead. And then I woke up.

I will be very surprised if they don't win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Best Original Screenplay, by the way, will almost certainly be Juno. If I have my way, anyway.