1001 Film Scenarios: Selections from a Proposed Chapbook
by Richard Kostelanetz
~ R.K.
- A fake medium persuades her boy friend to kidnap a young woman and imprison her in an obscure hideaway so that the medium can take public credit for correctly locating the young woman.
- A thoughtful gangster cultivates social-climbing, divorcing his wife to marry an heiress, for the sake of his ambitious daughter.
- A police laboratory scientist, assigned the task of finding the mayor's murderer, discovers that the most likely perpetrator is the mayor's best friend.
- After twenty-five years of marriage, a wife's infidelities finally alienate her once-devoted, long-suffering husband, who, his patience expired, begins to consider divorce.
- A suddenly successful pop singer hires gangsters to kill his sister before the singer himself disappears.
- The star salesman of fishing equipment, his colorful clothing reflecting his reputation, finds his reputation challenged perilously when he needs to enter a fishing contest.
- Decades ago, a naive hick inadvertently becomes a movie star.
- Disappointed with his honeymoon, a pet-food salesman begins a flirtation, almost a courtship really, of a wealthier woman.
- A famous writer marries his childhood sweetheart, who turns him into an alcoholic.
- Explorers in Africa persuade a deposed chief to help them locate a diamond mine near his former palace.
- When an insurance detective disappears in another country, a dozen of his colleagues are assigned to find him before he dies.
- A railroad attendant's sinus trouble is mistakenly diagnosed as terminal radiation sickness.
- A traveling circus performer, female, enchants a lonely minister who incurs his superiors' disapproval.
- Rustlers hiding for the night in a frontier town find themselves inadvertently at the center of an Indian attack.
- A young prison guard finds his attitudes changing before the impending fate of two equally young charges who are sentenced to be electrocuted.
- A renegade prince, studying economics in a foreign country, falls in love with a waitress whose understanding of his precarious circumstances is unfortunately limited.
- Soldiers holding a little island, having nothing better to do, construct from scrap a luxurious hotel for their postwar years.
- An intelligent dog successfully protects the absent-minded inventor of a universally destructive technology from predators eager to steal it.
- A retired horror-film star confronts and disarms a man terrorizing a large motion picture theater.
- An American officer in occupied lands falls in love with an enemy general's former mistress.
- A lonely middle-aged man tries to win back the ex-wife he accidentally encounters on a week-long warm-weather cruise.
- A nervous young advertising executive so neglects his wife, less by infidelity than through distraction, that she flirts promiscuously to make him jealous.
- The business designs of a manufacturer are hampered by his socially conscious--actually, social-climbing--wife.
- A young husband, infiltrated by evil spirits, is rescued by his wife, who repels all attackers.
- A shepherd family takes in a gangster on the lamb and makes him tend the sheep, to his gratitude and pleasure.
- A rich impetuous landowner, usually drunk, is repeatedly rescued from dangerous
situations by his loyal valet. - A high-school football team adopts an animal who can hind-kick a ball directly at a target one hundred yards away.
- A wandering tramp comes to care for a family of orphaned children, who give him a permanent home.
- A farmer's daughter marries her rich cousin before she discovers that he had poisoned his first wife.
- Six soldiers serving abroad, cursed by the high priest of a cobra cult, return home only to meet a mysterious woman who poisons only five of them; for when the sixth kills a cobra, the woman also dies.
- A millionaire vows to return and kill all of his relatives if he is buried alive, which he is.
- The son of a country parson loves the daughter of another country parson until they decide to move together to the nearest metropolis, which offends them to death.
- To the rescue of a small-town widowed newspaper publisher comes a stranger who is only passing through.
- Two cats are deliberately lost by a butler who fears they are designated to inherit his mistress's wealth; but thanks to assistance from other animals, they return home.
- A shop girl who claims to have found an abandoned baby is thought to be its mother until DNA-testing proves the infant was fathered by her boss with another clerk.
- A parolee joins his wife and daughter in a small town until local violence forces them to separate again.
- A free-spirited lawyer comes to regret letting his only daughter date an admiral.
- A stage-struck country girl tries to push her way into a national theatrical production that is incidentally rehearsing near her family farm.
- Returning home from a trip, a wife finds that her husband's place has been taken by his brother, a gangster who wants to launch a series of bank robberies from her home.
- The salesman who thinks he is terminally ill goes on a spending spree only to discover that the medical diagnosis is wrong and that he has accumulated crushingly excessive debts.
- Upon the death of her husband, a ruthless businessman much older than she, a middle-aged woman returns to her first love, a sweet-tempered poet.
- A husband thought to be dead returns as a "ghost" who frightens his wife's new boy friends.
- Jockeys fight with one another, both verbally and physically, over the chance to ride the best horse in the most famous race.
- A handsome rock singer runs away from an orgy in order to find some meaning in his life.
- A bankrupt Middle Eastern king orders all of his noblemen to woo wealthy widows.
- A retired fashion designer, still attractive though terminally ill, retires to her rural farmhouse to have a final fling with a local yokel.
- A young girl, new to a town, falls in unrequited love with her maiden aunt's faithful boy friend.
- Three letters, lost in the mail for a year, drastically alter the lives of their recipients when they are delivered.
- A boastful but insecure college girl has her first real sexual adventures.
- A farm girl, wanting to escape an undesirable suitor, loses his interest as well as his respect when she becomes a chorus girl in the big city.
- A policeman who closely resembles a well-known drug dealer captures him secretly before with minimal disguise infiltrating an international cartel.
- Smugglers, hiding on an ocean liner, fight with one another over the affections of a beautiful stowaway.
- An innocent researcher for one branch of the secret police finds memos marking him for death by assassins employed by another branch.
- Two haughty playboys are forced by circumstances to become tough soldiers.
- A mogul's long term gardener turns out to be the father of the girl about to marry the mogul's son.
- An eccentric widow is abducted by gangsters, whom she comes to like, if not
love. - A professional boxer and his manager join a prominent debutante's entourage as her fulltime bodyguards.
- The headmistress of a prominent girls' school is accused of lesbianism.
- A beggar realizes that the raggedy doll he found in a garbage can must have ulterior value when strangers offer him thousands of dollars for it.
- An American inheriting an African plantation successfully trains chimpanzees to harvest his crops.
- A wife, married only recently, learns about her husband's previous affairs, one each night for a whole year.
- While protecting her brother from kidnappers, a young girl inadvertently shoots a plainclotheswoman who fails to identify herself.
- A girl caught in a hurricane is rescued by a mysterious stranger who, his pet ocelot notwithstanding, turns out to be a champion fencer with whom she falls in love, the pet notwithstanding.
- Terminally ill, a man frames himself for an unsolved murder, so that the reward money can go to his lover.
- A socialite working as a photographer's assistant falls in love with a minor-league baseball player who, under another name, stands to inherit a famous fortune.
- A horny young teacher rents one room of his apartment to a homely young woman from the provinces and another to an experienced hyper-male seducer.
- The largest local newspaper hires a neglected professor to find evidence of prehistoric life in its readers' territory.
- A bank cashier seduces, marries, and murders rich women to support his otherwise indigent wife and handicapped son.
- An American spy crashes his plane into a potentate's palace at the same time that his girl friend, working as a reporter, arrives to do an interview.
- A dancehall dancer responds to an attempted rape with nightmares about herself committing murder.
- A failed playwright, who is nonetheless successful at writing pornography, purchases a new grandiose apartment that he thinks will fulfill all of his fantasies.
- A rich boy courts a lounge singer whose colleagues celebrate by giving a spectacular performance on his estate.
- Two actors, father and son, similar in general appearance, compete in casting calls for the same parts.
- A recently divorced housewife, stranded on a Caribbean island, falls in love with a mysterious American who turns out to be an emotionally despondent millionaire, much to the delectation of similarly situated female moviegoers.
- A graduate student inherits a haunted house that he and his classmates of both sexes try to occupy.
- The captain of an old sailing ship takes her on a final voyage around the world.
- A gangster has two sons, one of whom becomes a struggling hood, while the other succeeds as a lawyer with a different last name.
- A recently divorced man inadvertently meets on a transoceanic air flight a flirtatious young woman who asks him to hide her smuggled jewelry.
- Two war orphans and their pets, trapped in a flood, drift to safety on a raft.
- Academic archaeologists, falling down a mine shaft, find themselves in a world unlike any described in the accepted professional literature.
- A successful advertising man, whose attempted suicide has left him only injured, spends his convalescence reflecting upon an emotionally insufficient life.
- A female larcenist returns home to find all her stolen valuables gone; she cannot tell the police.
- A casino manager, harassed by his ex-wife's lawyers for alimony payments, becomes the sole guardian of a six-year-old girl who may or may not be his daughter.
- A female gas station attendant tries to help two out-of-state burglars on the lam, in exchange for a promised cut of their loot and maybe some affection as well.
- Unsuccessfully prosecuted for treason, in part because of the intercession of celebrities, an attractive young man wins the hearts of not one but two of his advocates' daughters, creating his present dilemma.
- A demonically possessed doctor restores an ape to human life and then turns it (her) into a beautiful woman.
- At the end of an annual reunion of a wartime resistance group, the organizer-host announces that a dozen years before one of their group was a traitor.
- A lady detective ingeniously exposes a fake female spiritualist.
- Two earnest policemen devote their spare time to trying to rehabilitate the younger orphaned brother of a bank robber who was recently incarcerated.
- A divorcee survives a nervous breakdown by imagining how her past life might have been better.
- A playwright entices his secretary to enact several script ideas in which she is always a heroine while he sometimes the hero and at other times the villain.
- A village postman, transferred to the city against his wishes, finds urban life bewildering until he single-handedly captures a notoriously thief.
- An amnesiac awakes abroad to find that others think he has been involved in spying.
- A theatrical agent, with more than uncommon success as a Casanova, gets his comeuppance when he lusts after a new client whom he discovers is his daughter from a long-forgotten marriage.
- An office Christmas party comes to resemble an orgy.
- The clients of a small boarding school discover that their headmaster is a sadist and his staff is no more sympathetic.
- Four war veterans, returning home from unsuccessful campaigns, initiate incidents of random violence for which they are separately arrested.
- A family engages in elaborate debates over whether to emigrate, which they eventually decide not to do.
- The governess' daughter supports the musical studies of his mistress's ungrateful son.
- At the door of a mansion arrives a handsome woman, surprising its elderly occupants, claiming that she is widow of their dead son.
- A man escaping from an insane asylum eventually proves himself innocent of the crimes for which he was committed.
- Living alone with her fatherless boy, an artist unwilling to vote or pay taxes tries to enroll him in elementary school without bringing extra problems upon herself.
- A young man who lost his memory in war regains it a decade later, to make some startling perceptions unavailable to those who had continuous experience.
- A woman who marries a man who is never home fantasizes to no end.
- The young actress who hitchhikes to Hollywood not only finds a job and a small part but also discovers the father she had never seen before.
- A gambler and his granddaughter admit into their lives a miserly dwarf whose machinations make them miserable.
- Even the small son of a gangster suffers from his father's notoriety.
- Two dashing adventurers rescue the girl they love from the grasp of a villainous nobleman.
- Two manish lesbians living on an isolated farm are frightened by the arrival of a wandering seaman.
- A doctor accused of murdering a colleague goes underground, where he accidentally comes across a gang of drug dealers whose arrest he initiates without jeopardizing his own situation.
- A racecourse stable hand becomes involved with gamblers who think they have bribed him, only to discover that he has fingered them to the police.
- Becoming jealous of his employer's renewed interest in an old flame currently living abroad, a secretary deviously intercepts and rewrites his correspondence.
- A lady novelist, expecting to get enough material for a book when she visits
distant royalty, finds herself imprisoned without paper or pen, let alone a writing machine, in a cold castle. - Two gangsters out to kill each other are disarmed by a little girl and her winsome dog.
- An aspiring opera singer who loses his voice because of recurring disease, becomes a successful stand-up comedian.
- A recently released convict tries repeatedly to contact the daughter who never knew him.
- In a provincial town, an attractive young woman is simultaneously pursued by the mayor, the owner of the principal factory, a gangster, a farmer, and the illegitimate son of the priest, raising the question at the beginning of the film of which suitor might eventually win.
- Two impoverished lay-abouts ride across their country on expensive motorcycles.
- As the heir to the throne of an Asian country, a shy New Yorker is continually harassed by several sets of antagonistic agents and spies.
- A lonely heiress debates whether she should keep or fire the chauffeur who has fallen in love with her.
- For the sake of professional publicity, a male starlet confesses to a murder that he didn't commit, for which he expects the courts to find him innocent, if not crazy, all while his "performance" comes to the attention of prospective employers.
- The dogs of a city help save puppies that are being stolen for their sexy soft skins.
- When a new sales clerk sets her sights on the boss, relationships within the store are radically redefined.
- In a dark movie theater on a sultry afternoon, a seducer enjoys kissing only the wrong "girls."
- A photographer and his fashion model, stranded in the jungle, become reluctantly involved in an elephant hunt.
- After thirty years away, a man and a woman separately return to the island where they spent their childhoods and, we learn, got married.
- A volatile nurse marries her relentless boss while remaining passionately in love with an engineer whom she kills when their passion threatens to disrupt her marriage.
- In a small town a man is convicted for the murder of his grandson who, everyone knows, was actually killed by a wild pig.
- While the warden is away, two dozen convicts take over a maximum security prison from which they cannot physically escape.
- A businessman is mistaken for a spy apparently because he knows much too much.
- Drink and drugs contribute to the decline and death of a famous rock singer, who is here male, even though the role seemed modeled on the life of a woman.
- A private defective uncovers a perennial widow's last dead husband.
- When a top spy defects to a traditional enemy, no one among his captors can understand the significance of his purported inside information.
- A shy young man discovers he stands to inherit several million dollars if he can get himself legally married before the end of the afternoon.
- Having made a heavy bet, a sexually shy football fan wins a night with a prostitute.
- A rich, ineffectual young heir is gradually debased and robbed by his valet and maid.
- An unlicensed "doctor" is the only outsider who can persuade a primitive tribe to move before their land is flooded.
- Show business moguls try to mold a mailroom clerk to replace a deceased superstar.
- An attractive college girl is employed to make sure that an easily distracted novelist focuses upon finishing his next book.
- A prominent government official is debased by his infatuation with a burlesque dancer.
- A party girl agrees to go through a fake marriage with an older man she hasn't met before, only to discover at the nuptial ceremony that the vows she takes must be real.
- Robbed of a single valuable jewel, a diamond merchant inadvertently finds himself in the middle of international intrigue.
- An urban juvenile delinquent tries to redeem himself by working as a farm hand.
- A homeless bum, reformed by lady missionaries, becomes a policeman who tames the local bully who has been harassing the mission.
- The father persistently gambles away the money earned by his daughter as a child actress.
- A young mobster and his reputedly respectable brother both pursue the same girl.
- When the manservant of a notorious millionaire dies, the boss sends his own obituary under his servant's name and then, his fortune intact, assumes his employee's identity.
- A princess falls in love with a commoner whose parents have already arranged for him to marry someone else.
- By setting up a gang of crooks for capture, a stable hand is rewarded with a prize race horse.
- An outlaw is wed at gunpoint to a woman who, when he emerges from prison twenty years later, presents him with an adult daughter.
- On arriving in hell, an elderly playboy confesses to sins that, given general changes in morals, seem so trivial that he is reassiged to heaven.
- At her father's wedding, a young woman meets a mysterious guest whom, her efforts notwithstanding, she never gets to understand better.
- A widow traveling in a foreign country meets a man whom she suspects is the first husband she believed died long ago.
- Two inspired comedians improvise their own plot when a producer tells them it is impossible to make a movie without a story.
- A homeless man, invited to spend the night in a rundown house, becomes peculiarly involved with the four neurotic, bachelor brothers living there.
- Several couples independently discover that none of them was ever legally married.
- A businessman who takes up singing in his spare time learns he has a voice good enough to make him an opera star.
- Political revolutionaries, cornered as criminals, take over the royal palace and threaten to blow it up unless given free passage to a country friendly to them.
- A traveler in Switzerland falls in love with a shop girl and enters a skiing contest, winning both.
- Two aspiring actors, recently married, fantasize in bed together about movies in which they might co-star.
- An aging horseback-riding sheriff and his young protege, who is also his son-in-law, collaborate on the former's daughter and the latter's wife's final arrest.
- An employment agency sends a young woman to an interview in which she is drugged and given a new identity.
- A man and woman who marry for the sake of legal convenience in a foreign country find that, once home, they have no wish to annul.
- In a documentary-type story, government agents break up a gang of counterfeiters.
- A group of recently defrocked priests and nuns discuss their sexual fantasies without touching one another.
- A noblewoman sacrifices her marriage when she loves a handsome but cowardly young officer, who is legally obliged to someone else.
- A nameless man is accused of a crime without being informed what it is.
- To deflect his teenager daughter's growing interest in boys, a single father takes her on a motorcycle trip around the world.
- A young man claims custody of his illegitimate child against the wishes of his girl friend who insists that the baby be put up for adoption.
- Villagers living at the end of a single-track railway line so resent the government terminating their service that, guns drawn, they take over the track and run the train themselves.
- A fur coat thrown out the window lands on a policewoman who takes it to the station house.
- A young inventor constructs a machine enabling him to travel into the future, where he has (or imagines) strange adventures.
- An attractive woman continues to love a philanderer who doesn't love her now and probably will never will.
- Answering a "personals" ad, a salesclerk meets her boss whom she has known from afar and come to detest.
- A criminal tries to blackmail his former wife who murders him in return.
- Two small-town sisters, arriving in the city to pursue careers in office work, take an apartment in the red-light district.
- Oil prospectors disrupt the routines of shrimp fishermen, with violent results.
- A stock-car racer prone to blacking out behind a wheel falls for a woman whose designs include their spending their old age together.
- Outlaws hold several stagecoach passengers hostage while they wait to rob a train they think is carrying gold.
- An aspiring starlet survives a succession of flops by marrying the producer.
- A diabolical doctor bent on destroying mankind unleashes a stolen laboratory virus against an unsuspecting populace.
- After the enemy is vanquished from the city, a general is assigned the task of building a new hotel not only to house the top brass and but to hide their military secrets.
- At the end of the war, a once-prominent intellectual reflects upon his compromised behavior in morally difficult situations.
- A politically wayward civil servant is tortured and dehumanized, even in a period of peace, into writing a confession that lands him permanently in jail.
- An investigative reporter discovers that the most prominent liberal politician in a small country has a house full of slaves.
- A wealthy man who fears for his life is implicated in a murder from which he must spend a fortune defending himself.
- A young soldier about to go to war meets, woos, and weds a girl all within forty-eight hours.
- A college student impersonates his best friend's maiden aunt.
- Competing heirs hire detectives to investigate the murder of a millionaire whose body is found in a locked vault.
- An aspiring filmmaker inadvertently films brutality among his actors.
- A small, slight man, terrorized by a bunch of young punks, successfully sets up traps in which they fall and get stuck.
- Two unusually attractive young people encounter all the problems of newly weds, except temptations of infidelity.
- Four kids exploring a cave in the middle of a city park suddenly find themselves in prehistoric times.
- A hack writer becomes involved in the murder of a gossip columnist whose job he is surprisingly chosen to assume.
- Crooks taking revenge upon the various countries imprisoning them plan to flood the world with counterfeit currencies.
- A philanderer strangling his maid tries to implicate his brother and then his sister in the crime.
- A woman who emigrates to the city with several sons is puzzled by the different fates befalling them.
- Each of three wives receives a letter from a mutual friend claiming that another woman, known to them all, will be stealing her husband.
- An opportunistic novelist marrying the boss's daughter finds true unhappiness and creative sterility.
- A long-retired scientist terrorizes his rural community with his rocket experiments.
- Two young people from different countries, speaking different languages, slowly discover that their neuroses complement one another.
- An Egyptian fanatic restores to life a mummy who is sent into the world of prostitution.
- In this satire of the art and madness of making movies, the director tells his crew first of his ambitions and then of his compromises.
- A noted critic of claims for the supernatural is visited by the ghost of his recently deceased daughter.
- A prominent television newscaster gets both his wife and his mistress pregnant simultaneously.
- A spinster protects a young man clearly guilty of murder in order to seduce him.
- The immigration officer recognizes the young man speaking a strange language as the son she abandoned a generation ago in another country.
- A young girl thinks she turns into a monster at night; this may or may not be true.
- A quartet of free-fall parachutists cause turmoil when they arrive in a small mid-west town on the 4th of July.
- When the psychiatrist's wife is caught with her lover, his life collapses, both economically and emotionally.
- An escaped convict takes his four hostages to a ghost town that has been cleared for testing atomic bombs.
- A prominent businessman is suspected of murdering his wife's rich brother.
- When a hard-working lady novelist discourages men by claiming she is legally married to someone who has disappeared, a particularly determined suitor claims to be her long-lost husband.
- A metropolitan social dance instructor has a tempestuous affair with a provincial lawyer who claims he's on the verge of a divorce.
- A creature from outer space observes his first earthling, female, and, though mute, apparently falls in love.
- Neighborhood street gangs encounter difficulties operating on the other side of town.
- A woman contemplating divorce recalls courtship, marriage, and the death of her two children.
- A middle-aged man, much devoted to his parents who depend upon him, meets through a dating service an attractive young man who, to his surprise, wants to marry him.
- In this science fiction, chemicals sneaked into the water supply cause the impotence of all men except the one who has the first artificial penis and thus gets all the girls.
- An earnest nurse looks after her mentally deficient brother--a giant who scares everyone except his sister.
- A secretary arrested for her boss' murder successfully raises the question of whether, since no body has been found, he is really dead.
- Living on an isolated farm, a teenage girl imprisons her adulterous father to no one else's concern.
- A second husband is driven crazy by a talking parrot whom he comes to believe is the reincarnation of his predecessor.
- An incompetent counter-intelligence agent chases an even more incompetent spy.
- A glamorous, politically enlightened actress forsakes the attentions of a nobleman for those of a labor leader.
- A network news commentator who says what he actually thinks increases his audience while temporarily alienating his bosses.
- From the city comes a do-gooder who helps small farmers put up barbed wire fences to protect their crops from the herds of cattle owned by the county baron.
- A debutante bets her father that she can live alone in the city for a fraction of her allowance.
- A car thief and the daughter of an intended victim team up to become feared and ruthless bank robbers.
- After a small plane crashes into a mountain, several survivors regard their situation in different ways.
- An assertive manufacturer inevitably causes dissension among his dozen children.
- After a newspaper tycoon dies, a reporter interviews his friends in a vain effort to discover the meaning of the tycoon's last words.
- Wishing to gain an inheritance, an under-financed debutante marries a millionaire about to be executed, only to discover he is reprieved.
- Four intelligence agents try to remain inconspicuous as they follow two young women from their homes to their high school and through other mundane activities typical of teenagers.
- In a cheaply made film a handsome young woman explored all the rooms and nooks of a sprawling manor house.
- A sky-diver leaps out of a plane tumbling through the air until his parachute opens, gently taking him and his camera to earth.
- The camera becomes anthropomorphic, representing a person who never appears on screen as he goes through his daily activities of getting up in the morning, eating breakfast at home, brushing his teeth, going to work, taking lunch at his desk, talking to colleagues, returning home, cooking dinner, and visiting his girl friend.
- Behind a fence with no visible entrance or locks anarchists construct a house only at night, away from noisy building inspectors.
- A boy and a girl, both teenagers, spend days and nights on the streets of a big city, rarely talking to each other during their wanderings.
- As the seven crooks speak a variety of languages, much of the film is consumed with translating their burglary plans, as well as correcting one another's misunderstandings.
- Surreptitiously kidnapping the wife and child of his enemy and then moving them to a town one hundred miles away, the protagonist thinks his act secure until his enemy unwittingly tries to relocate in the protagonist's hometown.
- The protagonist murders the pawnbroker who had all his worldly possessions that are then locked up until the murdered man's estate is resolved.
- Released from incarceration for murdering his wife, he becomes an actor who every night plays a role where a man murders his wife.
- Coming to a town overrun with vermin, the newcomer exterminates them, earning not rewards from his neighbors but their disdain, until the vermin return.
- Faking his death, he filmed his funeral in an audacious documentary.
- Coming across her husband in bed with another woman, she brandishes a gun that holds them both at bay, until the feature-length film ends with their conflict unresolved.
- Finding armed burglars in his house, the comedian experienced at difficult performance entertains them with jokes and alcohol until they pass out on the living room floor, lying much like garbage bags waiting to be picked up.
- To a young man aspiring to chastity appear a succession of temptations, each more appealing than its predecessor, until he finally succumbs.
Editor's Note
R.K. generously allowed SCRIPTjr.nl to publish "any number" of these scenarios "in any order." As such, the editors took the liberty of publishing selections from the chapbook as an ordered list, not so much to apply an order to the scenarios but rather as an homage to the script forms of the early 1900s. See, for example, Georges Méliès' scenario Le voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
Versions of this scenario can be found in various places, for example, online: Tim Dirks, "Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip To The Moon) (1902)" (filmsite, n.d. http://www.filmsite.org/voya.html [1 January 2010]), and, in print: Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (Harcourt Brace, 1939), 27-28 and Kevin Alexander Boon, Script Culture and the American Screenplay (Wayne State UP, 2008), 5.
The original French version of Méliès' scenario can be found reprinted in the November 1984 issue of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris).