On the overlook of a dark, looming castle, scarred by war, two friends and lords look out through the mists. They are about to be sundered, by curses, by ambition, by madness, and by the razor-sharp edge of Toshiro Mifune’s katana. But how much mist is the right amount of mist?
That scene from Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 film “Throne of Blood” could not be more distinct (one hopes) from the California International Antiquarian Book Fair taking place February 27 to March 1. But an item that rare bookseller Peter Harrington brings to the fair holds the answers to the amount of mist, the size and shape of the castle, and much of the cursed landscape in the Kurosawa adaptation of The Scottish Play.
It’s a shooting script, with handwritten annotations by an anonymous member of the film’s crew, concerned with set design and atmosphere. While the original owner of the script is a mystery — the item came to the rare book dealer from another seller specializing in film scripts — it does hold a lot of information about the making of “Throne of Blood.”
“It’s annotated throughout in pencil with these little drawings of how the scenes are supposed to be laid out or shot, which is really interesting because ‘Throne of Blood’ in particular has this atmosphere that’s built throughout the film,” Joseph Bills, Peter Harrington bookseller and cataloger, told IndieWire. “You can see in the notes next to the little diagrams of the shots that ‘this should be from a particularly foggy day’ or ‘this needs to be a bit rainy’ or ‘you should just about be able to see the castle in the distance.’”
The rare booksellers also have a shooting script for “Ran,” Kurosawa’s jidaigeki take on “King Lear,” but that script is less mysterious. It belonged to Hidehiro Igarashi, one of the assistant cameramen on the shoot. The notes in the margins of that shooting script are full of lens focal lengths, camera angles, and distances that were key to the compositions of shots.
“That one is much more solid in terms of who it’s from, and you can see it’s very much about how you’re going to film the piece. The ‘Throne of Blood’ one is more vague, but it seems to be about how you’re going to design the area that [each shot] is particularly in, which is still important. I think it’s particularly important for ‘Throne of Blood,’” Bills said.
Bills would know. He was the person who had to screen-match the notes in the “Throne of Blood” script margins to sequences in the film itself in order to help verify its authenticity. “Sometimes that takes a little bit of effort because you’re seeing ‘Scene 75’ and you’re like, well, which one is Scene 75? You’ve got to look at the text and then be like, ‘OK, I think I get it’ and then try to work out what minute it occurs and match that,” Bill said.
But once you do, the shooting script provides an illuminating bridge into the filmmakers’ intentions and the final result on the screen. “It’s a really cool thing, and I think it’s quite fun,” Bills said. “One of the great things about working in a rare book dealership is you do see all kinds of different things.”
Seeing it does come at a cost, though. The “Throne of Blood” script has a £70,000 (roughly $95,000) price tag. That comes partly from the rarity of items like this ever crossing the market. This “Throne of Blood” script is the third Kurosawa that’s passed through Peter Harrington — they also currently have the “Ran” script and have sold a “Kagemusha” script in the past, and some Studio Ghibli animation cels as well. But Bills said there aren’t enough data points to price something like this.
“It’s a mixture of science and art,” Bills said. “We compared it to other annotated film scripts, other Kurosawa works that may have gone up in auctions or previous sales from other dealers. And also sometimes it’s a bit of instinct.”
