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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
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Tablets of Stone or DNA? TV series bibles
More LessAbstractThe term ‘bible’ is applied loosely to a document setting out the essential elements of a screen narrative, usually a TV series but also a film (especially if it is complex or part of a franchise) or digital medium. Advice from published manuals, and information from professional writers suggest its use, form, purpose and meaning is both vaguely applied and little understood. Investigation of around 40 such bibles, plus another 90 historic sales documents, mostly from the United Kingdom, suggests a series bible can be defined as: A document (or documents) which propose(s) a screen idea, in ways which identify it as a unique story-world or narrative context sufficient to host new stories yet to be written. The term bible covers at least six different types of document: (A) a writer’s framework; (B) a sales document; (C) a re-definition of the elements after purchase; (D) a development tool; (E) a ‘codification’ or archive of story ‘case-law’; and (F) a sales document for the finished screen-text. The elements included vary in each, but the core items are usually concept, place, character and storyline examples. A bible may not actually be a document; it can for example be a wall-chart during development stages (D), or even a human expert in the series’ story history (E) – a ‘walking bible’. The question of how we are to view it, whether as a statement of the DNA (or essence) of a narrative yet to be produced, or as Tablets of Stone whose information is regarded as sacred, depends on how the bible is being used at the time, i.e. whether the Screen Idea Work Group is looking forward to a new series, or backward to ensure new ideas fit the understood template.
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The screenplay/film relationship bifurcated: Reading Carl Mayer’s Sylvester (1924)
More LessAbstractThe article explores the question of whether screenplays can be defined and interpreted based solely on their functional relation to film. It argues that another aspect of the screenplay/film relationship is crucial for a more precise definition and reading of scripts, namely the textual simulation of film as a medium. This argument is first made on a theoretical basis and supported by an analogy with the relationship between drama and theatre. The second half of the article illustrates and expands the theoretical claims in a close reading of the silent film script Sylvester written by German screenwriter Carl Mayer and published in 1924. In particular, it is argued, Mayer’s acclaimed ‘expressionist’ writing style does not aim at performing any function in the potential film production, but rather reflects a certain view on the media-related specifics of film and the possibilities of their verbal representation.
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‘Real people’s lives rarely fall into a three-act structure’: Writing biographical drama for British television
More LessAbstractThis article combines primary material based on interviews with British screenwriters who have written prominent dramas based on real lives with biography theory and screenwriting praxis. It seeks to analyse some of the solutions screenwriters have found to the unique challenges of writing drama based on real lives, specifically by comparing it with the developing field of biography theory. These issues are analysed in the light of the recommendations of well-known screenwriting theorist/practitioners on the creation of character and its relationship with story. The article considers some of the specific challenges for British screenwriters in creating biographical drama, given the context of public service broadcasting and its associated pressure for accuracy and fairness.
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Screenwriting, adaptation and reincarnation: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s self-adapted screenplays
By Laura FryerAbstractReferring to the self-adapted screenplays of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, this article argues for a conceptualization of adaptation as a collaborative continuum. To do this I develop Kamilla Elliott’s ‘Incarnational Concept’ of adaptation and propose a reincarnational concept. Jhabvala adapted her novels The Householder ([1960] 2004) and Heat and Dust (1975) to screenplays as well as Three Continents (1987) and the short story ‘How I Became a Holy Mother’ (1976), although the latter two were unmade. Jhabvala’s self-adapted screenplays attempt to retain control of certain aspects of adaptation; however, her predominant approach is to encourage collaborative input from filmmakers and the rewriting of her stories. Therefore, these insights into Jhabvala’s open approach to self-adapting demonstrate screenwriting and adaptation as collaborative, continual processes befitting a model of reincarnation.
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Virtual sidekick: Second-person POV in narrative VR
By Mads LarsenAbstractToday’s virtual reality (VR) restricts the screenwriter with its technological shortcomings, and there is little agreement on how stories should be told in the new format. While its immersivity heightens the audience’s sense of presence, and perhaps accentuates empathy, it draws attention away from plot and information, favouring mood and emotion. While the narrative VR of the mid-2010s favoured first-person point-of-view (POV) protagonists, what we must consider is how, as technological advances grant audiences ever-greater agency, traditional storytelling collapses when said audiences can take autonomous action and affect the plot. A disembodied third-person POV, as in regular cinema, is also unlikely to satisfy audiences. This paper argues that second-person POV, where the viewer is the protagonist’s sidekick, is the device that will allow future VR audiences to fully immerse and interact without giving up our perennial pleasures of plot, character arc and leaning back while others do the work. In the 2020s, narrative VR’s economies of production are also likely, through an uberization of filmmaking, to dramatically change the industry and the role of the screenwriter.
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Writing-for-the-cut: What can screenwriters learn from film editors about storytelling?
By Greg LoftinAbstractThis article explores an approach to screenwriting using storytelling dynamics found in film editing. I call this ‘writing-for-the-cut’. This idea finds its roots in the lively theories and debates of early Soviet filmmakers such as Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein in the 1910s and 1920s. They viewed editing as a juxtapositional dynamic, one that invites the audience to ‘discover’ the story for themselves. From their Hegelian notion of juxtaposition to its more nuanced application today, I discuss three kinds of cinematic juxtaposition: suggestion, puzzle and kinesis. I then explore how these dynamics might be embedded in the screenplay.
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Decomposing scripts: Ethnography and writing about writing
More LessAbstractAs a field whose founding gesture has been to go behind and before the audio-visual text, screenwriting scholarship has become an exciting new frontier for ethnographic approaches to writing about writing. However, so far there has been very little attention paid to what doing an ethnography of script writing might actually entail. What challenges are specific to writing an ethnography on the practices of writing a script? What opportunities does working on script writing offer us as scholars seeking to establish a better understanding of both the narratological and discursive qualities of the practice of writing itself? Rather than retreat to a familiar understanding of ethnography as documentary observation, this article proposes that productive answers to these questions might be found in turning to more experimental approaches to writing ethnography. Understanding the script as a unique kind of writing that anticipates its own death as writing, this article suggests a new genre of ethnographic writing, one not simply appropriated from cultural anthropology, but expressed within the specificity and strictures of researching screenwriting. I call this genre of writing about writing in anticipation of death, a decomposition.
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Reviews
Authors: Warren Lewis, Claus Tieber, Jule Selbo and Rosanne WelchAbstractAdaptation Studies and Learning: New Frontiers, Laurence Raw and Tony Gurr (2013) Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 186 pp., ISBN-13: 9780810887930, p/bk, $63.98; ISBN-10: 0810887932
Der Drehbuchautor: USA – Deutschland. Ein historischer Vergleich, Juliane Scholz (2016) Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 412 pp., ISBN: 9783837633740, p/bk 34.99
Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling, Alexis Krasilovsky (2017) New York and London: Routledge, ISBN: 978-1138949188 380 pp., p/bk, $39.95
William Goldman: Five Screenplays with Essays, William Goldman (1997) Montclair, NJ: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 618 pp., ISBN-10: 1557833621, p/bk, $19.93; digital $15.99
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