Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2023

The principal aim of this article is to explore how screenwriters can guide audience emotions with respect to the television anti-heroine and encourage their engagement. The model ‘piloting audience emotion for the television anti-heroine’ will be presented as a screenwriting tool to encourage audience engagement by sequencing specific emotional responses at key points in a pilot episode. This framework is the result of the author’s research that explored how audience engagement with a television anti-heroine can be encouraged and comprised of the development of a television show titled Angela. Discoveries made during practice were used to synthesize Aristotle’s understanding of pity, fear and catharsis with Murray Smith’s structure of sympathy. The model that arose is not an absolute approach, but regardless of its veracity, the conclusions drawn will at the very least promote scholarship concerning the creative development of an anti-heroine screenplay. Before the framework and the specific components comprising it are critically unpacked, the term emotion is first defined within the context of this article.

This article presents scholarship relating to work conducted in the Dennis Potter Archive, Dean Heritage Centre, Dean Museum Trust, England. It argues that the Dennis Potter Archive is a significant archive consisting of handwritten manuscripts and notebook drafts of virtually all of the work of famed writer Dennis Potter (1935–94), allowing us unique access to the engine room of his creativity. The article focuses on the ‘discovery’ of Potter works previously unknown and/or inaccessible, including completed drafts of unproduced television plays and unproduced film screenplays. It also sheds new light on the genesis of perhaps Potter’s most famous work, The Singing Detective (BBC TV 1986). It shows how this began as a ‘last’ television play, but that as it developed, Potter reached back to themes and preoccupations he first explored as a young man in an unpublished novel, written decades earlier. Marrying research in the archive with statements Potter gave about his work during his lifetime, the article uses accumulated Potter scholarship, together with manuscript critical analysis and dating, in order to piece together a clearer and fuller understanding of the working life of one of the most famous names in British television and film history.

Team-based learning (TBL) is a collaborative learning method that has been successfully adopted across a number of disciplines since its inception in the early 1970s. This article provides an exploration as to how it has been implemented and why it has not been adopted by arts-based disciplines on quite the same scale as those of scientific, medical, engineering and business-related subjects. The findings indicate that the time required to design a TBL course is a major hindrance to adoption. Other factors such as students’ reluctance to engage with the unfamiliar, unsuitable working spaces; the lack of guidance as to how to design the integral problem-solving exercises; an institutional culture not open to adopting new working practices and limited empirical evidence of the impact of TBL in arts and creative disciplines such as scriptwriting are all reasons given as to why TBL has not crossed wholesale into the study of arts-based subjects. Students are changing and it is therefore imperative that as educators we investigate and discover new ways to teach scriptwriting and arts-based subjects that meet the needs of the requirements of future generations.

Although a prominent characteristic of western cinematic narratives, the structure of psychological transformation known as the Character Arc remains ill-defined. Currently popular models based on value judgements demonstrate significant shortcomings, particularly the inability to account for the relativity of such judgements from one narrative context to the next. To rectify such issues, this article proposes a re-definition of the cinematic Character Arc using concepts obtained from Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s book, The Social Construction of Reality. This new definition reframes the Character Arc as a dialectic between the ‘subjective reality’ of the protagonist and the ‘objective reality’ of the primary sphere of diegetic action. Through environmental friction and the acquisition of new knowledge, a protagonist’s initially incongruent mental model undergoes a process of re-socialization, creating a more objective comprehension of the demands or necessities of the story world and its social phenomena. The drama of a Character Arc is frequently informed by a clash of multiple ‘realities’, producing various complexities in form.

Review of: En Cas De Malheur, De Simenon A Autant-Lara (1956-1958): Essai De Genetique Scenaristique, Alain Boillat (2020)

Geneva: Droz, 376 pp.,

ISBN 978-2-60006-046-2, p/bk, €18.90

Review of: The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Donna Rifkin (2020)

New York City: Other Press, 560 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-59051-721-5, h/bk, $21.00