Vice (2018) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
A savage political character study about power, secrecy, and the art of hiding in plain sight.
Vice follows Dick Cheney from hard-drinking Wyoming dropout to one of the most powerful vice presidents in American history. Adam McKay’s screenplay treats biography like an autopsy with jump cuts, moving from Cheney’s early failures and Lynne Cheney’s furious ultimatum to Washington backrooms, legal theories, corporate influence, 9/11, and the expansion of executive power. The script’s central idea is simple and terrifying: real power often belongs to the person nobody is watching.
For writers and film students, this screenplay is useful because it refuses the polite, museum-glass version of political biography. It uses narration, freeze frames, archival-style inserts, fake-outs, absurdist detours, direct address, and tonal whiplash to explain systems that are usually designed to bore people into surrender. Study how the script turns bureaucracy into drama, legal theory into stakes, and a quiet protagonist into a force field of consequence.
Ready to get to work? Check out the Study Notes just below. When you're ready, download the Vice screenplay.
Vice Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this screenplay
The Vice screenplay is useful to study because it makes hidden power visible. Dick Cheney is not written as a loud, theatrical climber. He watches, waits, learns the rules, finds the gaps, and then quietly turns those gaps into authority. The script tracks that evolution through a wild formal toolkit: narration, flashbacks, freeze frames, political explainers, comic interruptions, fake endings, and even a Shakespearean bedroom detour. Instead of pretending politics is cleanly dramatic, the script embraces the weirdness of influence itself: memos, legal opinions, appointments, committee rooms, cable news, family bargains, and the dull paperwork that can change millions of lives.
Craft Focus
- Form as argument: The screenplay’s style is not decorative chaos. Its interruptions, jokes, narrator explanations, and media fragments are part of the thesis: modern power is fragmented, hidden, branded, and often deliberately confusing.
- Character through appetite: Cheney’s wants are rarely emotional in the obvious sense. He wants access, leverage, silence, loyalty, legal cover, and institutional control. The script dramatizes ambition through what he chooses not to say.
- Explaining systems dramatically: Concepts like the unitary executive theory, lobbying, think tanks, media deregulation, and vice-presidential authority become scenes with stakes instead of civics-textbook sludge.
- Tonal whiplash with purpose: The script jumps from absurd comedy to war, grief, torture, family loyalty, and political horror. That instability keeps the audience alert and mirrors the moral dissonance of the story.
Questions for Writers
- How does the screenplay turn a reserved, hard-to-read protagonist into an active dramatic force?
- Where does narration clarify the story, and where does it deliberately challenge the audience’s comfort?
- How does Lynne Cheney function as both emotional partner and political catalyst?
- What makes the script’s fourth-wall breaks feel connected to the subject rather than random stylistic fireworks?
- How does the screenplay make bureaucratic decisions feel as consequential as battlefield action?
While reading, pay attention to how Vice turns absence into drama. Cheney’s power often comes from what is not public, not recorded, not clearly assigned, not easily explained, and not immediately understood. The screenplay keeps dragging those shadows into the light with jokes, diagrams, historical smash cuts, and narrative trapdoors. The craft lesson is wickedly useful: when your subject is opaque, the structure of the script can become the flashlight.
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Vice (2018)
The story of Dick Cheney, an unassuming bureaucratic Washington insider, who quietly wielded immense power as Vice President to George W. Bush, reshaping the country and the globe in ways that are still felt today.
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