Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016

Empirical studies of the determinants of box office revenues have mostly focused on post-production factors – that is, ones known after the film has been completed and/or released. Relatively few studies have considered pre-production factors – that is, ones known before a decision has been made to green-light a film project. The current study directly addresses this gap in the literature. Specifically, we develop and test a relatively parsimonious, pre-production model to predict the opening weekend box office of 170 US-produced, English-language feature films released in the years 2010 and 2011. Chief among the pre-production factors we consider are those derived from the textual and content analysis of the screenplays of these films. The most important of these is determined through the application of network text analysis (NTA) – a method for rendering a text as a map or network of interconnected concepts. As predicted, we find that the size of the main component of a screenplay’s text network strongly predicts the completed film’s opening weekend box office.

This article addresses the widely accepted, yet fictive dichotomy between the categories of ‘genre’ and ‘art’ film. These paradigms are perpetuated throughout the global film-making system by Hollywood norms that encourage screenwriters for popular films to write for genre category, rather than to reflect complex human experience in stories of liminality and interstitiality. An alternative conceptual framework for filmic narrative architecture that addresses these concerns can be developed out of the epistemological paradigm of ‘realism’ put forward by Birger Langkjaer. This construct is both-and-neither ‘genre’ and ‘art’, and enables a more grounded view of film narrative as composed of complex plots, characters and subject-matter/themes. However, in order to conceive of alternatives in ways that are pragmatically sound, account must be taken of how the profit-motives of Hollywood perpetuate dominant discourses. Such scholarship should also acknowledge the complexity of anthropological constructions of liminality, as well as the nature of film narrative as semiotic communication rendered to active (rather than passive) audiences. Taking account of these considerations, effective paradigmatic re-phrasing of film screenwriting can be engaged to encourage a philosophy of embodied experience in film practices, thereby reclaiming the power of subjectivity and voice in filmic narrative.

This article outlines the emergence of screenwriters in Germany from 1910 until 1945. It focuses on the technological, cultural, social and political contexts and changing occupational environments that shaped screenwriting craft into an accepted media profession. German screenwriters were subsequently influenced by the ‘author film movement’ in the 1910s, and soon established a professional association to obtain professional status in 1919. Following the national socialist takeover in 1933, the political influence on German screenwriting became the main concern of their professional and creative practice. The article outlines the key events and patterns and how the occupation was shaped towards a creative profession, and describes the ways in which its professional history was influenced by institutional, political, cultural and industrial configurations.

This article explores three volumes published in Latin America in the 1990s under the banner ‘Gabriel García Márquez’s Scriptwriting Workshop’. These volumes compile transcripts of the workshops for Latin American screenwriters that the Nobel Laureate taught at the International Cinema and Television School in Santo Domingo de los Baños, Cuba, in the 1980s and 1990s. García Márquez’s scriptwriting workshops were practice-based and production-oriented, generating film and television scripts that were subsequently brought to the screen. Therefore, while these workshop texts were disseminated throughout Latin America as manuals for aspiring screenwriters, these collected transcripts also disclose processes of creative collaboration taking shape within localized industrial contexts. Drawing on contemporary research on screenwriting manuals, critical industrial practices and forms of corporate and situational authorship, this article explores García Márquez’s workshop as a window into the craft training of screenwriters and the development of forms of collective screenwriting emerging at the intersection of literary and cinema movements in Latin America.

Throughout history, people with intersex variations have been positioned somewhere between ‘prodigy literature and pornography, mythology and medical discourse’. Contemporary representations have changed in step with societal values, yet it could be argued there is still slippage towards sensationalism. This article explores the writing of fictional characters with intersex variations for television. It is posited that screenwriters must go beyond limiting, stereotypical representations, and write characters with intersex variations ‘as an everyday social type’. Scripts that develop characters and narrative arcs in league with the intersex community rupture stigma and pre-inscription, defy current medical interference and promote ethical debates.

Screenwriting in the Digital Era, Kathryn Millard (2014) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 256 pp., ISBN: 9781137319104, e-Book, $69.99; ISBN: 9780230343283, h/bk, $95.00; ISBN: 9781349344659, p/bk, $90.00

Teaching Adaptations, Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds) (2014) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 208 pp., ISBN: 9781137311122, h/bk, £55.00; ISBN: 9781137311153, p/bk, £18.90

Inside the Writers’ Room: Conversations with American TV Writers, Christina Kallas (2014) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 184 pp., ISBN: 9781137338105, p/bk, £16.99

Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First-Century Programming, Melissa Ames (ed.) (2012) Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 337 pp., ISBN: 9781617032936, h/bk, $60.00; ISBN: 9781628461732, p/bk, $30.00

The Psychology of Screenwriting, Jason Lee (2013) New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 208 pp., ISBN: 9781441104984, h/bk, £40.50; ISBN: 9781441128478, p/bk, £16.99

Writing the Horror Movie, Marc Blake and Sara Bailey (2013) London: Bloomsbury Academic, 272 pp., ISBN: 9781441196187, p/bk, £16.99