Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2020

Following previous works by Patrick C. Loughney, Isabelle Raynauld, Steven Maras, Ian Macdonald, Alain Carou and Steven Price on screenwriting’s historical development in national frameworks, this article proposes to examine Portuguese screenwriting historical culture in relation to its major external influences: French, Italian and American cinema. If it is true that American mainstream cinema and its screenwriting models are now hegemonic and increasingly present in Portuguese film culture, it is also true that Portugal had (and continues to have) a strong ‘author-oriented’ film tradition, focused on artistic processes, clearly present in its screenwriting culture. Such characteristics developed first under the influence of French and Italian silent cinema, through the contribution of foreign film directors who worked in Portugal and established schools there. Also important were the cinematographic experiences (film and writing) made by modernist poets during the silent film period. Finally, the powerful influence of the French Politique des Auteurs (1950s) also helped to configure Portuguese screenwriting culture. To contextualize the Portuguese experience specifically, I explore the origins of screenwriting practice and discourse in Portugal, addressing the many political, historical and financial aspects that impacted the Portuguese perception of screenwriting craft from an early stage.

The Hollywood paradigm of screenwriting is claimed to be the universal approach to storytelling. The paradigm is said to be ‘in our DNA’ and override cultural difference. It is declared the most popular cinema narrative form with audiences internationally. These claims of universal application and appeal are challenged in this article via a case study of Australian feature films and their appeal to Australian audiences. Interviews with industry practitioners establish the dominance of the Hollywood paradigm at the government screen agencies and in industry discourse, but its weak uptake by some of Australia’s most successful screenwriters. A link between national mythology, national narratives and a distinctly Australian idiom in screenwriting is investigated. A contrast is drawn with the influence of American national mythology in shaping the Hollywood paradigm.

This article investigates the writing of the Female Gothic as extended metaphor in the Complex TV series Big Little Lies (2017). It builds on my earlier work, ‘Theme and complex narrative structure in HBO’s Big Little Lies 2017’ (2019), wherein I applied Porter et al.’s (2002) structuralist narrative tool, the ‘Scene Function Model’, to investigate the way narrative and theme is progressed in complex interweaving stories via the writing of core or ‘kernel’ narrative scenes. Herein, I further investigate storytelling in series TV by proposing the ‘satellite’ narrative scene as a means by which the screenwriter may conceptualize and deploy metaphor to create viewer engagement. First, I consider David E. Kelley’s series screenplay, Big Little Lies, as a blueprint for HBO’s televised series. Specifically, I apply theories of Complex TV, Gothic Television and Domestic Noir to consider how Kelley deploys the Female Gothic as extended metaphor to inform formal narrative elements including the pre-titles sequences and flashbacks repeated across episodes.

The migration metaphor has been widely used in connection with media adaptions, but the metaphor has remained an abstract figure of speech. Yet, to understand characters as migrants who go through journeys of acculturation when they are adapted for the screen may enhance understanding of both the characters’ potential and problems that may arise during the development process. This article proposes that the development of characters and their processes – as fictional beings – can be understood through the use of models that describe real migrants’ adaptation processes. Using Christopher Hampton’s screenplay drafts for the film Atonement (2001), it outlines how such migratory journeys go hand in hand with screenwriters’ problem-solving processes. The article thus develops the idea that migrating characters, in their capacity as fictional beings and the thematic issues that they represent, both adapt to and appropriate their new media environments; simultaneously, they are appropriated by new creative forces and by the conventions of those new media environments, who in turn must adapt to the characters in this process of bi-directional acculturation.

This article examines how screenwriting adaptations of written material speak of levels of truth-telling within various autobiographical texts. These include literary adaptations by Marguerite Duras: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and The North China Lover (1992), and the autobiographical filmmaking of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon (1946) and The Very Eye of Night (1958). I argue that descriptions of tactile sensation necessarily remain codified in screenplays, their connotations left hanging even when the filmmaking process often falls short of depicting final truth. What remains is an unresolved problematic perception standing in for an experience. Our own experience of cinema can invariably be one wherein neither words nor images appear, or reappear, as to how they felt for the screenwriter. Is this a wholly negative situation, or merely the continuation of mediation, remediation and the contingent transposition of one medium into another? Drawing on examples from the screenwriting and/or filmmaking of Duras and Deren, I discuss why the screenwriter always writes in personal terms (because the personal is inescapable), and that this is a personal experience of imagination through the writing. Moreover, I test the idea that screenwriting only emerges in a form that we can recognize as truth, through its depictions of tactility and its representations of sensation.

Review of: Writing Hollywood: The Work and Professional Culture of Television Writers, Patricia F. Phalen (2018)

New York: Routledge, 110 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-13822-982-2, p/bk, $42.95

Review of: Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, Jane M. Gaines (2018)

Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 203 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-25208-343-3, p/bk, $29.95

Review of: Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling, Alexis Krasilovsky (2018)

New York: Focal Press, 259 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-13894-918-8, p/bk, £32.99