Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2011

The journal is now approaching its third year of existence and attracting an impressive mix of articles, yet there are still many aspects of this fascinating subject still to be explored. This issue, focused on the history of the screenplay, is especially timely because of the government cutbacks in the United Kingdom, which give serious cause for concern regarding the effect they will have on the arts and humanities, higher education and the national libraries. These cutbacks are posing a particular problem at the British Film Institute (BFI), which houses the national library for film and TV, where not only the library is under threat of removal to a smaller base, with restricted facilities, it is also proposed that the research archive and viewing facilities will move from Central London to Berkhamsted, with likely staff redundancies.

This issue of the Journal of Screenwriting has primarily a historical focus, coincidentally at the same time as valuable collections of historical documentation are under threat from the world economic downturn. In her editorial, Jill Nelmes has eloquently expressed the concern that many academics in the United Kingdom feel about the threats to screen studies material, in particular the threats to the well-being of the British Film Institute (BFI).

The systematic collection and preservation of film and TV scripts at a national level has never been implemented in the United Kingdom. While the British Film Institute National Library (BFI) has a respectable collection of around 25,000 scripts, this has been built up from donations over the 75 years of the BFI’s existence. The silent film period, to 1930, is particularly affected by this lack of national care; the BFI has less than 100 British scripts from this period. Researchers from the University of Leeds spent several months in 2007 and 2008 seeking and collating information from around the world, with grant-aid support from the British Academy. The intention was to find out if any British silent film scripts had found a home in both British and foreign institutional collections, or elsewhere. The results were in general as expected – no major new collections were unearthed – but in part surprising. As a result of this a database has been compiled. Why should we search for scripts? It is now being realized that screenplay and other documentation hold information about the provenance and development of the screen idea that a film cannot provide. For some, the script may be a useful substitute for a lost film, but more importantly understanding how the film was envisaged before principal photography can reveal much about the industrial assumptions associated with film production in general, and about that screen idea in particular.

In 1912, with demand for story material increasing in a growing market, writing was becoming ever more essential to commercial film production in the United States. With several important legal developments that year, however, the marketplace for story material would begin to collapse as amateur screenwriters failed to gain the same legal protections as those producing finished films, rendering their creative material entirely susceptible to piracy from above. Despite several initiatives by advocates for non-professional writers and a few members of Congress, screenwriters would not receive legal protection for unpublished material until 1978. Throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, then, but dating back to the origins of copyright protection for finished commercial films, US copyright law encouraged Hollywood to produce story material in a closed, intellectually isolated and commercially protected shop, more closely resembling an enigmatic ‘culture industry’ than a ‘people’s art form’. This article examines a convergence of state institutions, private enterprise and commercial trade press that helped to radically re-define the creative processes underwriting film production and the system of compensation for creative material that would delimit relations of production at the beginnings of the American film industry.

This article builds on the earlier work of Patrick Loughney in discussing a series of texts written by Frank J. Marion and Wallace McCutcheon, and registered by American Mutoscope & Biograph (AM&B) at the Library of Congress in 1904–05. It assesses the arguments for regarding these as the earliest surviving texts that were written specifically in order to be filmed. Significant historical contexts include copyright disputes between the studios, developments in narrative film since 1902, and the problematic classification system at the Library of Congress that prompted AM&B to register a sequence of films as both ‘photographs’ and ‘dramatic compositions’. A comparison of the scenarios to the films provides evidence that they were written prior to filming. The formal arrangement of the scenarios is almost indistinguishable from that for contemporary playscripts, which may have been due to a deliberate attempt to facilitate their registration as ‘dramatic compositions’.

In this article I discuss the evolution of the screenplay from play to film of Escape (1930) through a detailed examination of the archive correspondence between its producer Basil Dean and the original writer of the play, John Galsworthy. My aim is to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between stage and screen practices at this time, one that goes beyond histories that have understood the adaptation of stage material to have been a burden from which British cinema had to escape, in order to create its own distinctive identity. I argue that the relationship between the two practices was affected by the coming of sound, and the cultural anxiety and debates around the film industry and national identity formations that it engendered. I then examine Basil Dean’s thoughts about the adapted screenplay, in particular his ideas around the retention of the original author’s dialogue, and his practical response to the issues in terms of his collaboration with Galsworthy in the writing of the screenplay of Escape, one of the first talkies made in the United Kingdom.

Greenaway’s published screenplays – screenplays produced and consumed as discrete material objects – function both as fluid, hybrid texts and as material books that stand ambivalently and therefore suggestively and productively poised between print and film technologies. Ranging from the early scripts published by Faber and Faber in the mid-to-late 1980s to the later and still-ongoing series of scripts produced by the French publisher Dis Voir, Greenaway’s published screenplays are fascinating examples of print film texts that produce and demand unique ways of reading and looking. By addressing these books as visual and material objects, distinct from the films, we might evince and extract from the pages of these published screenplays entirely new texts with a plurality of narrative possibilities, in which juxtapositions and relationships amongst different cultural discourses can give rise to innovative visual and verbal structures. Such an approach to Greenaway’s published film scripts as material events might contribute a curious but compelling chapter to the history of the ontology of the screenplay, affording the published script a visibility it often otherwise lacks.

This article centres on a drama-documentary developed by the author, an experienced screenwriter, producer and academic. The project in question was a major featurelength film for the BBC about the first suicide attack carried out by UK citizens. Aside from the significant difficulties posed by the subject matter, the mixed-genre nature of the film made its development problematic, falling between two distinct and contrasting traditions of programme-making. This case study locates the project in the context of a rising fashion for dramadoc within the BBC post 2000, identifies unforeseen difficulties with screenwriting that arose with the use of the form, and illustrates how those difficulties became amplified in this particular production. The analysis deals with the status of the screenwriter in a process where the script is no longer sovereign, raising questions of authorship, division of labour and collaborative exchange. It contributes to the ongoing debate between documentary values of sobriety and objectivity as opposed to dramatic ones of inner truth and emotional understanding, and makes the case for an ‘accumulation of voices’ as a justifiable representation of reality in contrast to a linear expository narrative. Finally, it commends further study of mixed genre drama/ documentary as a way of reappraising orthodox screenwriting theory, offering as it does production methodologies that frequently dispense with the formal screenplay.

This article analyses two drafts of Paul Laverty’s screenplay The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2004b, 2005), pointing out that the changes from the first draft to the second draft focus on a single protagonist and emphasize the narrative drive, prioritizing these over informational detail and scenes which do not have a clear narrative function. In this study, I argue, re-writing acts as a refining and filtering process, in which only the essential parts of the story are retained while the model of ‘cause’ then ‘effect’ is applied to ensure the linearity of the action.

An edited extract from a keynote address at the third Screenwriting Research Network conference, ‘Screenwriting Research: History, Theory and Practice’, at the University of Copenhagen in 2010,1 this piece focuses on what I have termed the ‘object problem’ in screenwriting research. I pay specific attention to how we might address the object problem by thinking about different attitudes and trajectories in screenwriting research.

A HEADY MIX OF THEORY AND PRACTICE – AS OBSERVED BY A NEW RESEARCHER Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, The Third Screenwriting Research Network Conference, University of Copenhagen, 9–11 September 2010

CREATIVE SCREENWRITING: UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONAL STRUCTURE, CHRISTINA KALLAS (TRANS. JOHN HOWARD) (2010) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 224 pp., ISBN 978-0230221413, Paperback, £16.99; ISBN 978-0230221406, Hardback, £50.00 WRITING FOR THE SCREEN: CREATIVE AND CRITICAL APPROACHES, CRAIG BATTY AND ZARA WALDEBACK (2008) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 224 pp. ISBN 978-0230550759, Paperback, £14.99 ANALYSING THE SCREENPLAY, JILL NELMES (ED.) (2011) Oxford and New York: Routledge, 288 pp. ISBN 978-0415556347, paperback, £22.99 BEYOND AUTEURISM: NEW DIRECTIONS IN AUTHORIAL FILM PRACTICES IN FRANCE, ITALY AND SPAIN SINCE THE 1980s Rosanna Maule (2008), Bristol: Intellect, 294 pp., ISBN 978-1841502045, Hardback, £41.50