I found the script for the pilot. (The one script I have found from the show for free! It's hosted on what used to be Cannell's personal website and is now maintained in his memory.) Dated November 6, 1980. According to it, Bill is dazed from stopping the steering wheel with his face. It's an entertaining script to read; I always appreciate stage directions like "He slows his gait as he approaches David Knight, the vice principal who is about thirty-five and an asshole." It is also the kind of script which matches the final production almost beat for beat and line by line diverges significantly. Overall it looks like a matter of the language coming into focus—tightening up conversations, characters sharpening into themselves, rhythms people actually use when they speak—and some lines are unaltered page to screen, but some have undergone minor to massive revision and guess which category most of Bill's dialogue falls into? "That's my best pistola" and "We'll figure it out now, butterfingers" are both TV-only, for example. The high school bathroom scene is funnier and weirder generally in the finished show than it is in the shooting script: it's more efficient with its information, which means there's more room for expanding relatively standard-issue lines like "What I have that you don't have, Mr. Hinkley, is a dead partner . . . and that is not a small point" into the instantly recognizable "Well, what I got here, what you don't got, Mr. Hinkley, is a dead partner. If you will recall, somebody shot him full of holes, which is a definite no-no in my book—that's the same one I mentioned a moment ago, the one I go by?" (Also, emerging from a stall blowing one's nose on toilet paper is an extra-unprepossessing entrance.) Bill facing torture by Christian skinheads in the script sneers, "You ain't getting anything from me. Take your best shot." Bill facing torture by Christian skinheads in the show sneers, "Go ahead, take your best shot. I been here with better switch-hitters than you," and seconds after Ralph's Kool-Aid Man impression is doing that machine-gun babble that in hindsight I believe I recognize as Bill's characteristic adrenaline reaction, "I knew it, I knew it, I knew you'd be there! I never been so scared in my life. These guys are really bananas. One of them's got a key," none of which is in the script. And knowing how much Robert Culp took the character of Bill Maxwell to heart, I'm not willing to bet against his hand in any of these changes, even as far back as the pilot. So, in other words, I still got nothing. But according to the script clearly varied as production went along.
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I found the script for the pilot. (The one script I have found from the show for free! It's hosted on what used to be Cannell's personal website and is now maintained in his memory.) Dated November 6, 1980. According to it, Bill is dazed from stopping the steering wheel with his face. It's an entertaining script to read; I always appreciate stage directions like "He slows his gait as he approaches David Knight, the vice principal who is about thirty-five and an asshole." It is also the kind of script which matches the final production almost beat for beat and line by line diverges significantly. Overall it looks like a matter of the language coming into focus—tightening up conversations, characters sharpening into themselves, rhythms people actually use when they speak—and some lines are unaltered page to screen, but some have undergone minor to massive revision and guess which category most of Bill's dialogue falls into? "That's my best pistola" and "We'll figure it out now, butterfingers" are both TV-only, for example. The high school bathroom scene is funnier and weirder generally in the finished show than it is in the shooting script: it's more efficient with its information, which means there's more room for expanding relatively standard-issue lines like "What I have that you don't have, Mr. Hinkley, is a dead partner . . . and that is not a small point" into the instantly recognizable "Well, what I got here, what you don't got, Mr. Hinkley, is a dead partner. If you will recall, somebody shot him full of holes, which is a definite no-no in my book—that's the same one I mentioned a moment ago, the one I go by?" (Also, emerging from a stall blowing one's nose on toilet paper is an extra-unprepossessing entrance.) Bill facing torture by Christian skinheads in the script sneers, "You ain't getting anything from me. Take your best shot." Bill facing torture by Christian skinheads in the show sneers, "Go ahead, take your best shot. I been here with better switch-hitters than you," and seconds after Ralph's Kool-Aid Man impression is doing that machine-gun babble that in hindsight I believe I recognize as Bill's characteristic adrenaline reaction, "I knew it, I knew it, I knew you'd be there! I never been so scared in my life. These guys are really bananas. One of them's got a key," none of which is in the script. And knowing how much Robert Culp took the character of Bill Maxwell to heart, I'm not willing to bet against his hand in any of these changes, even as far back as the pilot. So, in other words, I still got nothing. But according to the script clearly varied as production went along.