journal of screenwriting 1 1

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CONTENTS

Editorials

3–6 Jill Nelmes

7–10 Ian W. Macdonald

Articles

11– 25 After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era

Kathryn Millard27–43 ‘Everybody’s a Writer’ Theorizing

screenwriting as creative labour Bridget Conor45–58 ‘…So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic’

The Screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group

Ian W. Macdonald59–81 Teaching screenwriting in a time of

storytelling blindness: the meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish fi lm-making

Eva Novrup Redvall83–97 The protagonist’s dramatic goals,

wants and needs Patrick Cattrysse99–112 Cyber-Aristotle: towards a poetics for

interactive screenwriting Jasmina Kallay113–129 Tonino Guerra: the screenwriter as a

narrative technician or as a poet of images? Authorship and method in the writer–director relationship

Riikka Pelo

131–148 Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on If.... (1968)

Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard149–173 Screenwriting strategies in

Marguerite Duras’s script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960)

Rosamund Davies175–196 No room for the fun stuff: the

question of the screenplay in American indie cinema

J. J. Murphy

Research Resources

197–202 Unpublished scripts in BFI Special Collections: a few highlights

Nathalie Morris

Reviews

203–206 Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, Steven Maras (2009)

207–210 And the Best Screenplay Goes to…, Linda Seger (2008)

210–213 Authorship in Film Adaptation, Jack Boozer (ed.) (2008)

214–217 Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film, Torben Grodal (2009)

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ADVISORY BOARD

John Adams, University of BristolRobert Engels, California State UniversityAdam Ganz, Royal Holloway, University of LondonPhil Parker, Script Developer (ex-Head of Screenwriting at LCP)Chris Walker, De Montfort University

EDITORIAL BOARD

Sue Clayton, Royal Holloway, University of LondonKen Dancyger, New York UniversityJim Hill, De Montfort UniversitySteven Maras, University of SydneyKathryn Millard, Maquarie University, SydneyJJ Murphy, University of Wisconsin-MadisonSteven Price, Bangor UniversityIsabelle Reynauld, University of MontrealAndrew Spicer, University of West of England Kristin Thompson, University of Wisconsin-MadisonPaul Wells, University of Loughborough

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JOSC 1 (1) pp. 3–6 Intellect Limited 2010

Journal of ScreenwritingVolume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.3/2

EDITORIAL

JILL NELMESPrincipal Editor

The Journal of Screenwriting is a timely and much needed addition to the increasing number of published works on the subject of the screenplay. As Co-Editor Ian Macdonald points out below, it is sur-prising that there appears not to have been a journal on the subject of screenwriting previously, but as a result of this lack, a journal spe-cifically devoted to the study of screenwriting has now been launched which aims to communicate and encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas in a more immediate way. There have been few arenas which allowed for writing and discussion of the screenplay with an aca-demic focus; journals such as the Journal of Media Practice and Journal of British Cinema and Television (JBCTV) have championed the cause for further research by publishing articles and special issues on the study of screenwriting; Lina Khatib (2007: 106), editor of the Journal of Media Practice, has identified this as an ‘under-researched area’. John Cook and Andrew Spicer (2008: 213), in their introduction to a spe-cial issue on screenwriting in the JBCTV, pointed out that ‘discussion of screenwriting is a notable blind spot in both British cinema and television studies’. The number of academic books published on the subject is now happily increasing; Steven Maras’s recently published Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (2009) is one such exam-ple and an important contribution to the field, while Steven Price’s The Screenplay: Authorship, Ideology, Criticism is to be published later this year. The first Screenwriting Conference was held in Leeds last year and this year it will be in Helsinki, and on a much larger scale, as the number of papers to be presented has tripled; the associated

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Screenwriters Network has also burgeoned. All these factors suggest there is a healthy, vigorous and growing interest in the study of the subject at an international level.

Thus Intellect needed little convincing of the need for a journal which specifically studied the screenplay, responding to the proposal with great enthusiasm, and within a few months the first issue was being planned. In fact the conception and birth of the Journal has been remarkably straightforward. This could not have happened without the support of Ravi Butalia, Journals Manager, and the team at Intellect, especially Alanna Donaldson, who has dealt with the production stage so diligently. The tremendous support and good will provided by both academics and practitioners internationally has also been extremely heartening. This bodes well not only for the future of the Journal, but also for the subject of screenwriting as a discrete area.

The Editors are pleased to have such a knowledgeable Editorial and Advisory Board associated with the project, who have given their unequivocal support to the journal. We are very grateful for their positive input during the initial stages of development and while in the process of publishing the first issue. Our thanks also go to those who gave such thorough peer reviews and their valuable time so willingly.

The first issue of the Journal has greatly benefited from Ian Macdonald’s skills as Co-Editor; Ian has worked tirelessly and with great dedication, championing a system of referencing film and televi-sion which gives the writer equal placing alongside the director and is to be used for all relevant referencing in this journal – perhaps in future years this may become the accepted practice of referencing. Jule Selbo, as Reviews Editor, has dedicated herself to the task with supreme ease and efficiency.

There is still a wealth of unexplored material on the subject of screenwriting and if this cannot be described as a new subject area – there have, of course, been previous academic works on the screenplay such as Wolf Rilla’s The Writer and the Screen (1973), Kristin Thompson’s Storytelling in the New Hollywood (1999) and Sarah Kozloff’s Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000) – perhaps we can view screenwriting as a subject which has been recently rediscovered, not solely with regard to the sub-ject of film writing but also the writing of television and newer media forms such as interactive media.

The Journal aims to highlight the importance of the study of the screenplay, to encourage the development of this expanding area of research and to be a forum for debate on the subject. There are many aspects of screenwriting history, theory and practice still to be investigated: the Special Collections at the British Film Institute and the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, for instance, are both treasure troves of information, holding thousands of screenplays, often with many drafts and accompanying letters (see Nathalie Morris’s piece on the BFI National Library’s Special Collection in


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this issue). The development of new media forms such as compu-ter games and how they are written begs further research, as does the question of the relationship between screenwriting theory and practice. The Journal will be a vehicle for promoting fruitful ways of writing about and analysing the screenplay, from textual analysis to studies of the industry to discussion of practice and theory. We hope the international links will continue to develop and encourage further research and possibly collaborative work, while enhancing and developing academic scrutiny and scholarly activity via research networks.

This is an exciting time for the Journal and also for the study of screenwriting: there certainly seems to be an upsurge in publishing in the area and an acceptance that the screenplay has been a remarkably neglected area of study; it is the intention of this journal to at least partly redress this.

The first issue of the Journal has already attracted a varied and fas-cinating mix of articles, which give a sense of the depth and breadth of the subject, and we are now preparing for the second issue, with the third issue in mind! Each issue will be jointly edited by the Principal Editor, Jill Nelmes, and the Co-Editors in rotation. For this issue the Co-Editor is Ian Macdonald; the second issue will be co-edited by Jule Selbo and the third by Barry Langford. The Journal will be published twice yearly in the first instance and the Editors hope you will find this issue a stimulating and thought-provoking mix of articles. We also hope the Journal will inspire you to contribute as we are very much dependent on your research and passion for the subject in this fasci-nating and developing field.

REFERENCES Cook, John and Spicer, Andrew (2008), ‘Introduction’, Journal of British Cinema

and Television, 5: 2, November, pp. 213–22.Khatib, Lina (2007), ‘Editorial’, Journal of Media Practice, 8: 2, pp. 105–06.Kozloff, Sarah (2000), Overhearing Film Dialogue, Berkeley: University of

California Press.Maras, Steven (2009), Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, London:

Wallflower.Price, Steven (due 2009), The Screenplay: Authorship, Ideology, Criticism, London:

Palgrave.Rilla, Wolf (1973), The Writer and the Screen, London: W.H. Allen. Thompson, Kristin (1999), Storytelling in the New Hollywood, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSJill Nelmes is a senior lecturer in film at the University of East London and a screenwriter. She has studied screenwriting at the National Film and Television School and at UCLA, is the editor of Introduction to Film Studies and is currently working on a ‘how to’ manual about writing the independent


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screenplay and also researching a book on British screenwriters. She is par-ticularly interested in looking at the relationship between theory and practice in the screenplay and the collaborative nature of the film industry.

Contact: School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of East London, E16 2RD.Phone: +44 208 223 7483E-mail: [email protected]


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Journal of ScreenwritingVolume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.7/2

EDITORIAL

IAN W. MACDONALDCo-Editor

This seems to be the first peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to screenwriting in the world. Good grief! you say, are you sure? After more than a century of screenwriting? Well, not quite, I reply, though the lack of any reference to such a publication in researches so far is a strong indicator. I await a flurry of postcards from those who know better than I do…

Although in the 1980s there was an occasional series of papers published in Brussels under the title Cahiers du Scénario (still acces-sible at http://www.uee.be), collections of scholarly articles on screen-writing have usually turned up as occasional special numbers of film and media periodicals like Cinémas, Film History, the Journal of British Cinema and Television and Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture (see also Maras 2009: 187–88). The remarkable absence – until now – of a regu-lar scholarly journal is probably due to film academics frying bigger fish, focusing on New Waves, semiotics and male gazes, and only intermittently recognizing a need to consider the formation of the idea for a screenwork as something of interest.

An awkward and peripheral subject then, sidelined because of its problematic relationship to the apparently more concrete final ‘text’ of the film. Considered as rough sketches or the ‘blueprint’, or as incom-plete or transitional, who would not look at the screenplay in its various forms as somehow inferior? More recent scholars have, however, begun to think of screenwriting as a practice involving more than writing a screenplay; and of the process of conceptualizing the screenwork as something more than merely part of production, or just a written text.


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Screenwriting is now a broader academic subject than the industrial process of the same name, and its analysis involves approaches ranging from the sociological to the psychological. But the realization that there is more to the screen idea than scriptwriting has caused its own prob-lems for academics, scattering potential publishing outlets right across media and cultural studies.

Finally, there is now a small corner of the academic universe reserved for such work, and we all owe a debt of thanks in particular to Jill Nelmes and to Intellect for creating this space. Jill’s success in start-ing this journal has also coincided with a series of annual conferences, the first of which was held at the University of Leeds in September 2008 and which resulted in the setting up of the Screenwriting Research Network (join up at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk). The second conference takes place at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, in September 2009.

In this issue we present a few of the issues facing screenwriting scholars at the present time, some of which surfaced at our first Leeds conference. We look at the appropriateness of current industrial prac-tice, at theorizing labour practices, at understanding how they operate, and at how re-thinking screenwriting can change industrial thinking. We ask how mainstream screenwriting might deal with the challenges of terminological vagueness, and of interactive storytelling. The com-mon assumption that the director is auteur is challenged in three arti-cles which focus on the involvement of the writer in collaboration, and we discuss the methods adopted by those in the independent sector in the United States to get round the limitations of orthodox craft skills.

Kathryn Millard questions whether ‘Courier 12 point’ typescript (and by implication a range of other practices) is the ‘natural’ way of presenting a screen idea, or is due for a complete re-think. Bridget Conor presents her investigation into theorizing screenwriting as a creative labour process, and I suggest it is time to consider screenwrit-ing as the product of the Screen Idea Work Group, a common indus-trial grouping of key creative workers (and others). Eva Novrup Redvall provides a historical analysis that connects the Danish film industry’s adoption of new screenwriting practices with pioneering work around screenwriting at the National Film School of Denmark over the last 30 years. Patrick Cattrysse and Jasmina Kallay talk of mainstream indus-trial practice; Patrick on improving our understanding and use of key terms in script development, and Jasmina on assessing the merits (and difficulties) of using Aristotle’s Poetics as the basis for an interactive screenwriting poetics. Riikka Pelo, Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard and Rosamund Davies all present studies of how renowned film directors worked with their often less well-known screenwriters. Despite being revered as ‘the greatest Italian screenwriter’, Andrei Tarkovsky’s and Michelangelo Antonioni’s collaborator Tonino Guerra is still a ‘foot-note’ says Riikka Pelo. Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard carries forward the discussion begun by Charles Drazin in the Journal of British Cinema and Television (2008) on the collaboration between Lindsay Anderson


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and his screenwriter David Sherwin; and Rosamund Davies offers some insights into the way that the experienced and respected writer Marguerite Duras approached her first screenplay for Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959). J. J. Murphy starts with Gus van Sant’s observation that the screenplay does not leave a lot of room for ‘the fun stuff’, and explains how US independent film has negotiated its way around (or without) the script.

I hope it is clear from this range of contributions that our definition of screenwriting is a very wide one. It is not restricted to the written word, and is unconstrained by industrial demarcation. We are inter-ested, in fact, in redefining the research and study of screenwriting in ways suggested by our contributors and our readership over succeed-ing issues. We now have the opportunity for a regular and sustained debate around screenwriting, a focus point for scholars who until now have been somewhat isolated. It is a great opportunity for us to think seriously about this neglected area, and to do something about grounding and cultivating it.

It is with much appreciation of and grateful thanks to my colleagues Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo, to Alanna Donaldson and Ravi Butalia at Intellect, to our hard-working contributors, and to the anonymous peer reviewers without whom this process is impossible, that I admit to being delighted and proud to have had the opportunity to start the ball rolling, as Co-Editor of this first issue.

REFERENCESCahiers du Scénario (c.1985–89), 1–3, 6–15. Brussels: Université Européenne

d’Ecriture, http://www.uee.be. Accessed 25 June 2009.Cinémas (1999), 9: 2/3, Spring, Montreal, University of Montreal.Film History (1997), 9: 3. Sydney [?]: John Libbey.Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Wr: Marguerite Duras, Dir: Alain Resnais,

France/Japan, 91 mins.Drazin, Charles (2008), ‘If… before If…’, Journal of British Cinema and Television,

5: 2, November, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 318–34.Journal of British Cinema and Television (2008), 5: 2, November, Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press.Maras, Steven (2009), Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, London:

Wallflower.Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture (2006), 3: 2, October. Sydney: Macquarie

University, http://www.scan.net.au/scan/journal/. Accessed 26 June 2009.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSIan W. Macdonald is the research director of the Louis Le Prince Research Centre for Cinema, Photography and Television, in the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Leeds. His own research work has concentrated on aspects of screenwriting, a subject he has taught since 1993, both during and after his time as head of the Northern Film School at Leeds Metropolitan University (1992–2001). Most recently he has investigated the changing and establishing practices of early British screenwriters during

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the silent era. He is also Convenor of the Screenwriting Research Network, and encourages anyone interested in screenwriting research to log on to www.jiscmail.ac.uk and join up!

Contact: University of Leeds, LS2 9JT.Phone: +44 113 343 5816 (incl. voicemail)E-mail: [email protected]


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Journal of Screenwriting | Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.11/1


KATHRYN MILLARDMacquarie University

After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era

ABSTRACTThis article aims to contribute to contemporary debates about screenwriting as a process of developing the screen idea; about the ways in which for-matting conventions from an earlier era of cinema may restrict innovation in screenwriting; and about shifting practices of screenwriting in a digital era in which images and sound play a potentially more significant role. Additionally, it questions the use of terms such as ‘blueprint’ to describe the relationship between the screenplay and the proposed film that it repre-sents. The article draws on the author’s body of practice-led research as a writer and director of feature films and documentaries, as well as histories of screenwriting, film production, comics and the graphic arts.

INTRODUCTIONIn 2003, I directed a feature film Travelling Light (2003) which was loosely inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s visit to Australia to participate in Adelaide Writers’ Week in the 1960s. The script, which was in devel-opment for approximately six years, was funded draft by draft through the Australian Film Commission, the national film-funding agency

KEYWORDSscreenwritingscriptwritingscreen practice

researchdigital cinemaindependent filmscript development

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then responsible for script development. The project was conceived as a multi-stranded narrative with an ensemble of characters at pivotal moments in their lives, all connected via their relationship to televi-sion; in particular, to a fictional 1960s variety show Adelaide Tonight, hosted by the equally fictional Ray Sugars. The screenplay utilized motifs of light and electricity to be played out across the film’s image and soundtracks. As is so often the case, however, as the project pro-gressed down the financing route there came increased pressure for the screenplay to conform to a more classic, protagonist-driven, three-act structure. I, together with the script editor and producer, was advised by assessors and readers that we should complete the set-up more quickly, snip out those scenes about early television they deemed unnecessary, and focus more on a central character (thereby ensuring sufficient screen time to retain the prominent young Australian actress who was attached to the project). We were also encouraged to fill out the soundtrack with hit songs of the 1970s to ensure audience acces-sibility. These pressures did not come from the film distributors who were providing a distribution guarantee, but from the public broad-caster and government screen-funding agencies who would form a vital piece of the financing jigsaw if the script was to make it to the screen. Needless to say, my talk of independent cinema with its ambi-guity, internalized character conflict and visual motifs as structuring devices did not go down well.

Over the third, fourth and fifth drafts, the film was re-structured and pruned to fit a template more closely aligned to those promoted by the screenwriting manuals. In the process, temporal, stylistic and thematic complexity was significantly minimized. Finally I made enough changes to steer the film through the two state agencies, the Australian theatri-cal distributor, the Australian public broadcaster, the Australian pay-TV broadcaster and the European-based sales agent, who were all needed to secure the balance in federal film funding. The additional plot intro-duced at the last moment to provide the narrative closure demanded was undoubtedly the most ‘undercooked’ aspect of the script, introduc-ing a false note to the characterization of Lou, our beat poet/trickster character. Despite a number of nominations, awards and enthusias-tic responses, critical reactions to the film were sharply divided, and Travelling Light had difficulty finding its cinema audience in the nar-row time-span within which even specialized, limited release films are expected to perform.

While the claim is frequently made that Australian feature screen-plays are under-developed, I would argue the opposite. My experi-ence with Travelling Light, and my background as a script reader and assessor for various funding bodies, leads me to the conclusion that many scripts are over- rather than under-developed. The handful of screenplays and film projects chosen for development through gov-ernment programmes all too often lose momentum and energy as a consequence of this selection. A selection which almost invariably subjects them to drawn-out rounds of assessment, reports, required



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revisions and yet more revisions – all justified in the name of criti-cal rigour and industry imperatives. Along the way, screenwriters and their collaborators struggle to retain or re-inject into their screen ideas what social psychologist Abraham Maslow called in his diaries a qual-ity of ‘aliveness’ (Lowry 1982: 37); an attribute that Maslow consid-ered fundamental to works of art if they were to connect with their intended audiences.

Early in his career, Atom Egoyan observed that many script-devel-opment and film-funding mechanisms seem aimed at delaying the pro-duction of the film as long as possible in the belief that this was a good thing (Burnett 1988). In all the many and various deliberations about Travelling Light it was invariably words on a page that were discussed, dissected and analysed, rather than images, sounds, gestures, rhythm or the cinematic qualities of the script. Yet the work of many innova-tive screenwriters and film-makers has long favoured audio and visual expressivity over plot and narrative drive, and their approaches pro-vide a wealth of alternative scripting methodologies and structures for analysis. Scripts can be inspired by still photographs, visual art, sense memories, location pictures, video footage or popular songs. Acclaimed writers and film-makers, including Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, Tony Grisoni, Michael Winterbottom, Wong Kar Wai, Wim Wenders and Chantal Ackerman, have all developed methods of shifting between writing and production, working with both words and images. These writers and film-makers embrace cinematic scriptwriting. Some of the terms used to describe the resulting story designs include the road map, the open screenplay, the visual scenario and the ars combinataria screenplay (Millard 2006). As film-maker and screenwriting theorist J.J. Murphy suggests, ‘real innovation in screenwriting […] comes not from ignorance of narrative film conventions but from being able to see beyond their limitations’ (Murphy 2007: 266).

SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT AS A PROCESS, NOT AN END IN ITSELF Increasingly I find myself interested in screenwriting and development processes aimed at realizing films within specific production contexts and parameters, rather than free-floating script-development pro-grammes that can so easily become ends in themselves. As Australian playwright and dramaturge Noëlle Janaczewska notes in her blog entry ‘The Development Sceptic’, the most useful development of new playscripts is undertaken in contexts where the writer works with the company and collaborators who are committed to producing the play. Janaczewska is particularly wary of development programmes influ-enced by the development practices of film. She argues:

Film has a whole host of development initiatives, most of which seem to exist to (a) provide an income stream for assessors, script editors, program directors, administrators and others, presumably


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while they try to get their own projects up, (b) generate activity and create the illusion that your project/screenplay is progress-ing, and (c) to explain why things can’t or won’t happen.

(Janaczewska 2007)

Many development processes simply shape screenplays to pre-existing templates, so that the distinctiveness of works can be gradually eroded, assessment by assessment, draft by draft. As Ian Macdonald argues in his discussion of the ‘screen idea’ as the basis for the proposed screen-work, development processes such as those held by CILECT involve writers in workshops in which ‘the screen idea was being shaped, altered and drawn towards what the professionals thought of as right, based on internalized experience and expressed as craft or lore’ (Macdonald 2004b: 91).

Although the workshop Macdonald discusses was specifically aimed at screenwriters collaborating with directors and producers as part of their studies at film school, the methods used appear to be modelled on those used within the subsidized sectors of the film industry. That is, screenplays and projects are often selected on the basis of attributes such as originality and innovation, only to have these very qualities systematically minimized through the workshop-ping and script-development process. As Lewis Hyde suggests in his book about the archetypes of creativity, ‘works proceed according to their own logic […] Premature evaluation cuts off the flow’ (Hyde 2007: 187).

BEYOND THE BLUEPRINT The screenplay is often referred to as a ‘blueprint’ for the film to come, but perhaps it is time to reconsider this term? After all, blueprints derive their name from the cyanotype photographic process devel-oped by John Herschel in the 1840s (Ware 2008). Herschel coated paper with photosensitive compounds and then exposed it to strong light. In the process, areas of paper were converted to Prussian blue. The cyanotype, one of the tantalizing byways of early photography, did not find wide acceptance because many viewers were unable to accept the world rendered in shades of blue and white. The process, however, was widely used to reproduce architectural and engineering technical drawings until replaced by less expensive printing methods in the 1940s and 1950s and, more recently, by digital displays. Given the term ‘blueprint’ still carries with it this residue of technical draw-ing and specifications rather than fluidity and flux, it seems a less than ideal metaphor for the screenplay. The development of the screen idea inevitably involves collaboration, and therefore to concentrate solely on the screenplay as a source for the film-to-be seems unnecessarily restrictive.

Collaboration involves reading and re-reading, notes, discussion and redrafting, creating and recreating something that represents



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1. Cultural historian Thomas Hine uses the term ‘populuxe’ to describe a trend within architecture and design in the United States of America in approximately 1955–64: the design of everyday spaces and consumer goods aimed at a combination of populism and luxury. Hines suggests that ‘populuxe’ simultaneously looked back to the myths of the frontier whilst anticipating the coming space age. For more information about populuxe see Hine (1989).

a common understanding. The readers of the screenplay and other documents inevitably construct a version of the screen idea in their heads, which (unlike readers of novels) they then have to contribute to (Macdonald 2004b: 91). This process, too, has only intensified with the proliferation of digital technologies and the working methods they enable. In this era of digital cinema, previously discrete stages of pre-production, production and post-production tend to get collapsed into a single more fluid stage, in which images and sounds can be reworked to a much greater degree. Increasingly, elements of post-production and pre-production can be happening simultaneously. Surely then, more than ever, the screenplay needs to be a flexible doc-ument? Film editor Walter Murch observes that ‘digital technologies naturally tend to integrate with one another’ (Murch 1999). Perhaps in this environment it is more appropriate to consider the screenplay as an open text that sketches out possibilities and remains fluid through the film-making process?

COURIER AND THE SCREENPLAY‘The screenplay […] is the record of an idea for a screenwork, writ-ten in a highly stylized form. It is constrained by the rules of its form on the page, and is the subject of industrial norms and conventions’ (Macdonald 2004b: 81). When I began writing screenplays in the 1980s (assembling images and text with scissors, paste and colour Xeroxes to construct the treatment for my first production) I was astonished to discover the degree to which scriptwriting formats were rigidly pre-scribed. Even now, the Nicholl Fellowships Guidelines, sponsored by the US Academy of Motion Pictures, warn that you can create a nega-tive impression of your script through the following list of foibles and indiscretions: ‘Art on the script cover; Hard, slick Acco covers; Plastic spine binding; Commercial, College paper covers; Wimpy brads; Long “dangerous” brads; Cut “dangerous” brads’ (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 2008). Reading this list, a trip to the local stationery shop is beginning to sound surprisingly complex. The pit-falls awaiting the writer seeking professional acceptance and eventual production are many. The Nicholl Guidelines go on to advise against ‘a clipped or rubber-banded script on non-three hole paper, overly thick scripts, thin scripts, three-ring binding, color of card stock cover that inadvertently bugs a reader’ (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 2008, my emphasis).

The number one convention, however, is that the screenplay must be presented in Courier 12-point font. Similar advice can be found in screenwriting training manuals and submission guidelines around the world. Why must it? Is it because this font conveys a sense of timelessness, thanks to its association with the typewriter? Yet the Courier font was designed not in the early twentieth century along with the first mass-produced typewriters, but much later, in the 1950s Populuxe era.1 It rapidly became one of the most popular


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2. In typography, kerning refers to the process of adjusting the spaces between letters.

fonts around, with versions available for almost every typewriter on the market. One of the first advertisements for the ubiquitous Courier claimed ‘a letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier which radiates dignity, prestige and stability’ (Vanderbilt 2004).

Of course, this message is exactly what many screenwriting manu-als and funding guidelines have long been trying to drum into aspir-ing screenwriters. Present your scripts in the approved formatting, and you not only imbue your work with ‘dignity, prestige and sta-bility’, but announce your status as an insider in the film industry. In What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (Norman 2008: 190–96), Marc Norman reports that Preston Sturges was initially hired to write dialogue in 1930s Hollywood on the basis of his stage plays. Producer Jesse Lansky initially dismissed Sturges as an amateur when he offered to take Lansky’s idea straight from pitch to first draft (bypassing the conventional ten-page treatment common at the time). When, a month later, Sturges turned in a script, Lansky was forced to eat his words:

[It was] a complete screenplay of proper length, complete to every word of dialogue, the action of every scene blueprinted for the director, and including special instructions for the camera-man and all the departments […] I was astounded. It was the most perfect script I’d ever seen […] I wouldn’t let anyone touch a word of it.

(Norman 2008: 193)

There are several ways to read this but it is hard to go past the view that, in Lansky’s eyes, it was Sturges’s command of screenplay for-matting that accorded him the status of the true professional.

THE PERSONAL COMPUTER AND THE RISE AND FALL OF COURIER One of the main reasons that Courier was able to migrate successfully from the typewriter to the first personal computers in the 1980s was that it did not require much memory. This is because Courier is a fixed pitch font, in which every character has the same width, and therefore requires no kerning.2 Although perhaps even more important to note is that the packaging of Courier with the first PCs ensured that users would be able to replicate typewriter-looking documents, enabling a smooth transition to the new era of word processing and personal computing. By 2004, however, Slate writer Tom Vanderbilt reported that the US State Department was replacing Courier 12 as its official font-in-residence.

Courier 12, created in 1955 by IBM, is perhaps the most recog-nisable typeface of the twentieth century – a visual symbol of



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3. Noted in personal communication with Ian Macdonald, June 2009.

typewritten anonymity, the widespread dissemination of infor-mation (and a classification of documents), stark factuality, and streamlined efficiency.

(Vanderbilt 2004)

Exiled from bureaucracies, the film industry remains one of Courier’s last strongholds. But for how much longer?

Conventional wisdom in the film and television industries sug-gests that the screenplay is not only a creative document, but also one that encompasses production planning; providing information about locations, actors, sets, props, time of day and, most vital of all, timing. If the usual film formatting conventions are followed, then a page of screenplay equals one minute of screen time. I suspect, however, that the equation has never been as easily calculated as this convention might imply. Tom Pevsner, who started as second assistant director with Ealing Studios in the 1950s and completed his career in the 1990s as executive producer on the Bond films, says that the ‘rule’ of a page per minute has not always applied exactly; the duration of any section of the screenwork will depend on the director (Macdonald 2004a: 44–45). Pevsner mentions the example of the screenplay of One Two Three (Wilder and Diamond, c.1961) which was planned to increase in pace; it changed from a duration of about 50 seconds per page to about 20 seconds per page by the end. Macdonald notes that the unpublished script of One Two Three includes a message as a frontispiece which states ‘This piece must be played molto furioso – at a rapid-fire, breakneck tempo, suggested speed: 100 miles an hour – on the curves – 140 miles an hour on the straightaway’ (Macdonald, 2004a: 44n, original emphasis). This anecdote refers of course to standard film format, which is only one screen script format. There are other variations, particularly in TV where styles also differ between companies, and many (possibly most) of these TV formats do not conform to the ‘page-a-minute’ rule, always starting a new page with every new scene, however short.3 Different genres and styles of film-making, as well as indi-vidual director’s preferred patterns of coverage are likely to result in a much greater range of page to screen ratios than the idealized one minute of screen time per page of screenplay. Moreover, one cannot help but wonder if the enforcement of this equation does not nudge the screenplay towards a production and budgeting document, rather than a creative record of a screen idea – an idea in flux and transition, an idea on the way to becoming a film. Indeed, the insist-ence on a single method of writing and presenting a range of screen ideas across genres may primarily owe its existence to the need to efficiently process large numbers of speculatively written screen-plays. This may be a response to the growing number of screenplays (fuelled in part, at least, by the growing number of screenwriting manuals and workshops), rather than a response to the needs of the development process.


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4. In his ‘evolving systems’ theory of creativity Howard Gruber proposes that each creative practitioner is a complex, organized and knowing system. His phenomenological approach to studying creativity involves taking individuals’ self-reports as points

of departure and studying them within the historical, social and institutional frameworks within which they operate. For more information, see Gruber and Wallace (1989).

FLUIDITY: IMPROVISING THE SCREENPLAYCognitive psychologist David Perkins is noted as saying that ‘a lively interplay between the developing work and the mind of the artist’ is an important factor in crafting large writing projects (John-Steiner 1997: 128–29). Novelist Anthony Burgess, for example, describes the early stages of new work as follows: ‘I chart a little at first […] lists of names, rough synopses of chapters, and so on. But one doesn’t over-plan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing’. Similarly, Nelson Algren is quoted as referring to a book finding its own shape in the process of creation (John-Steiner 1997: 128–29). Wong Kar-Wai ‘typically allows his stories to evolve as he films them; he simply sketches an outline of the story, finds locations, and begins shooting’ (Bosley 2001: 24 in Geuens 2007: 413). As Wong puts it, he does not really know what he wants at the writing stage, thus ‘making the film is actually a way for me to find all the answers’ (Tizard 2002: 197 in Geuens 2007: 213).

The ‘evolving systems’ theory of creativity4 proposes that major innovations across the arts and sciences are usually the result of extended periods of focused work on multiple, overlapping projects. Gruber terms this the ‘network of enterprises’, arguing that such a way of working increases the likelihood of cross-fertilization across projects (Gruber and Wallace 1989: 11–13). Canadian film-maker Guy Maddin uses just such a process. He describes the genesis of his mockumentary Brand Upon The Brain (2006), explaining that he was approached by Seattle’s not-for-profit The Film Company. They were willing to fund a low-budget feature providing that it was based on an original idea. Or as Maddin explains, ‘you can’t use an old pre-existing script that’s got the producer’s breath all over the title page’ (Douglas 2007). He was asked to write something new within a month. Since Maddin’s films typically revisit his autobiography, it was a given that some such scenes would be included:

I didn’t have time to make up a lot of stuff, so I took some episodes from my childhood, one key sort of pivotal coming-together. I knew I didn’t have time to write dialogue, but I knew I had time to wing a film poem together […] especially if I started writing it later in the editing process, using title cards or narration.

(Douglas 2007)

In fact, his script never really existed as a traditionally presented and for-matted screenplay. Instead, Maddin and his collaborators worked from a story outline with lists of sets and props. He also describes gradu-ally introducing other elements into the mix. Fascinated by sound post-production he invited the film’s team of Foley artists to contribute to a live performance, and his narration was partly inspired by benshi, the film explainers of Japanese silent cinema. Maddin’s work presents one possible model for opening up the screenplay, due to his insistence on working with cinematic elements from early in the process.



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Maddin and Wong’s methodologies also have parallels with the improvisational processes of performers and musicians. Social psy-chologist and creativity theorist Keith Sawyer observes that improvisa-tional theatre groups that do ‘long form improvisation’ almost always prepare a loose structure in advance; ‘good jazz improvisers have years of experience […] they build a repertoire of phrases, overall forms, and memories of other musicians’ famous solos and recordings […] When improvising, they draw on this material’ (Sawyer 2007: 170). In other words, they draw on these phrases and forms, modifying and embel-lishing them to suit the demands of specific situations. Yet in the film and television industries it is usually only actors who are given the latitude to improvise. Research conducted in the IT industries also sug-gests that successful innovators build on limited structures: ‘the critical balance for innovation is at the edge of chaos; not too rigid to prevent emergent innovation, but not too loose to result in total chaos’ (Sawyer 2007: 169).

COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELSScreenwriter Jim Taylor (Election (1999) and Sideways (2004)) argues that screenplays could draw more on comics and the graphic novel in their formatting and layout. ‘I’m hoping to figure out a new way to make screenplays more expressive,’ he says (Kretchmer 2006). Taylor points to the work of comic artist Chris Ware as one of his own inspi-rations for experimenting with the look of screenplays, since in Ware’s comics text is often more prominent than pictures. Taylor’s own experiments in creating visual interest include using a number of fonts and letterforms. In a sample page from Sideways he delineated charac-ters with the use of different fonts and typefaces, formatting all of the Miles character’s lines in Comic Sans, and all of Jack’s in Chalkboard (Kretchmer 2006).

Paul Wells’s Scriptwriting (in a series on Basic Animation) focuses on the role of narrative forms and concepts, images, sounds and music in the development of screen ideas (Wells 2007). Wells’s wealth of beginning points for generating audio-visual narratives include iconic images, sounds, sense memories, emotions, concepts and re-narra-tions of established myths and fairy tales. Similarly, structuring devices and methods of analysis include storyboards, friezes and ladders which combine sketches and hand-drawn text and event analysis. Many of these methods are drawn from the working methods of a diverse range of writers and directors. While Scriptwriting is aimed at those begin-ning to write for animation, it is the openness of this approach that makes it a valuable source of ideas for screenwriters more generally. In Comics as Literature (2007) Rocco Versaci notes that comics of all kinds are increasingly being adapted into films. While mainstream superhero films have long drawn on comics, less well-known and edgy mate-rial has been successfully adapted into high profile films too; Versaci (2007: 11) cites Sin City (2005) and V for Vendetta (2005) as examples. His analysis of comics suggests, though, that the form has considerably


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more to offer cinema than simply a stockpile of stories ripe for adapta-tion. For him, they are a form of graphic language that operates within a unique poetics.

Comic narration blends and modifies features shared by other art forms – especially literature, painting, photography and film.

Like literature, comics contain written narrative and dialogue, and they employ devices such as characterisation, conflict and plot […] comics blend words and pictures […] Unlike film, the images in comics are ‘read’ more like paintings and photographs rather than ‘watched’ like movies.

(Versaci 2007: 13)

Versaci contends that reading the interplay between the written and the visual is complex, and that comics do not happen in the words or the pictures but ‘somewhere in between’, in a process that requires the active participation of the reader to fill in the details between the panels. It is this filling in the space between the words and the pictures, he suggests, that fosters an intimacy between creator and audience (Versaci 2007: 14, my emphasis). For me it is this dynamic mix of words and images, the fact that images as well as words (and the relationship between the two) take centre stage from the beginning, that makes comics and graphic novels one particularly apt model for the screenplay.

One artist/illustrator whose work I have found especially inspiring is John M. Muth. In his graphic novel M, Muth restaged Fritz Lang’s film (1931) about the investigation of a child murder with a neighbour-hood cast and a collection of borrowed costumes (Muth 2008). He then produced watercolours based on stills from these re-enactments. His blurred, defocused images of his characters help convey the sense of an everyman’s version of M. His graphic novel juxtaposes stills of dramatic action and evidence from the investigation – maps, memos, bars of haunting music and dialogue bubbles. Muth’s M suggests yet another possible pathway for the screenplay, perhaps with collected and assem-bled images for those of us who do not have his skills as a visual artist.

In her account of ‘breakthrough thinking’ across the arts and sci-ences, Notebooks of the Mind, cognitive psychologist Vera John-Steiner argues that images are a more nuanced form of representing ideas than words (John-Steiner 1997: 109). This is not to suggest, of course, that words such as the scene description within a screenplay cannot evoke images for readers. Indeed, in his discussion of the evolution of screen-play, Kevin Boon argues that the trend towards less technical informa-tion within screenplays, and a more distilled, literary style has been particularly pronounced over the last thirty years (Boon 2008). Boon describes this transition as cinema and television shaking off the influ-ences of staged theatre and developing its own distinct literary form. He regards Robert Towne’s influential screenplay for Chinatown (1974) as a significant marker in this evolution. For Boon, though, the object of screenplay analysis is always this written documentation rather than



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the processes and collaborations that are part of both the development of the screen idea and its transformation into the screen work. Perhaps this arises from the fact that in charting the transitions in the formatting of the screenplay over the last century and more, Boon is primarily con-cerned with making a case for the film script as a distinct literary form.

JUST ADD WORDS: FORMATS Since perhaps the early 1990s, the film industry’s standard software for screenwriting has been the Final Draft computer program, marketed with the slogan ‘Just add words’ (Final Draft 2009). While Final Draft’s main function is to assist writers in formatting screenplays to indus-try standards, it also contains an expert problem-solver based on Syd Field’s three-act structural paradigm. This generates reports and sugges-tions about how the screenplay could more closely fit Field’s paradigm. Other software programs such as Dramatica also include restrictive story paradigms (Dramatica 2009). Ironically, just as digital technologies and networked media are opening up new methods of sketching screen ideas and collaborating with others, much of the scriptwriting software may be serving to restrict the range of possible storytelling strategies on offer. Story templates from the likes of Syd Field, Christopher Vogler and Robert McKee have migrated across to digital platforms, along with Final Draft and its Courier font. On the other hand, some individuals and communities are developing shareware computer programs like Celtx, which allows writers to add ‘assets’ to conventional script layouts (Celtx 2009). These ‘assets’ can include video, stills, music and sound. Celtx also aims to build online communities who can respond to each other’s work. The potential source of innovation is when these features are seen as aids to screenwriting as well as pre-production and produc-tion. While programs like Celtx still have a long way to go in enabling a more fluid use of imagery, sounds and words in the development of screen works and ideas, they do perhaps point towards one new set of possibilities for the screenplay. Similarly, pre-visualization (‘pre-viz’) software such as Frameforge 3D (Frameforge 3D 2009) suggests new possibilities when used as a tool for generating writing and scenarios rather than as a director’s tool for the pre-production phase.

CROSS-PLATFORM WRITING

Want some screenwriting advice? Add drawings to your script. And then put your dialogue in bubbles. If recent studio acquisi-tions are any evidence, then the fastest way to get a movie deal these days may just be to turn your next Big Idea into a graphic novel.

(Fernandez 2008)

Thus wrote Jay Fernandez in The Hollywood Reporter. A new generation of screenwriters who have grown up in a networked world saturated


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with YouTube, TiVo, instant messaging, MP3s and cell phones as well as graphic novels are abandoning the idea of writing only for the mov-ies. Instead they are embracing a more elastic, cross-platform approach. According to some commentators, the era of the speculative script with its armies of gatekeepers may have passed. US-based manager/pro-ducer Paul Young, for example, encourages his comedy clients to film excerpts from their speculative scripts and post them online. He sees producers, studios and distributors looking beyond the printed page for material to film. Many people are now used to watching material online and do not expect it to have high production values, Young suggests (Fernandez 2008).

CONCLUSIONWe are all subject to what Susan Stewart calls the ‘self-periodisation of popular culture’, to the ways in which shifts in technologies and viewing platforms shape our experiences of viewing and watching (Straw 2002: 313). Courier, a product of the 1950s, could perhaps be regarded as the film industry equivalent of the Ploughman’s Lunch. If the Ploughman’s Lunch was a fake heritage item devised in the 1980s to bolster lunchtime trade in British pubs, then might we see Courier as a font maintained by a nostalgic film industry to keep itself aligned with the era of classic Hollywood?

Media theorists Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn challenge the assumption that new technologies displace older systems with decisive suddenness. ‘Media change is an accretive, gradual proc-ess, always a mix of tradition and innovation, in which emerging and established systems interact, shift and collude with each other’ (Jenkins and Thorburn 2003: x). So much of cinema did not begin with film, but migrated across from earlier art forms and entertain-ments. Consequently, cinema’s histories can be found in photog-raphy, painting, portraiture, music, the fairground, the peep show, picture palaces, vaudeville, theatre, the nickelodeon, magic shows, travelogues, the illustrated lecture, the public science experiment, the book, the typewriter and the architectural sketch. Digital cinema continues to transform, to adapt and reconfigure itself. So much of the current era, with its proliferation of digital technologies, returns us to the beginnings of cinema and creates spaces to investigate the paths that were not followed, the possibilities not explored; the branching lines and loops, or the byways of cinema as Guy Maddin describes them (Marlow 2007). Film theorist Robert Stam notes: ‘Pre-cinema and post-cinema have come to resemble each other. Then, as now, everything seems possible’ (Stam 2000: 318). I think the same is true for the screenplay. As Lawrence Lessig argues, the most interesting ways to write are increasingly with images and sounds in addition to text (Korman 2005). The processes of screen-writing and film-making have been separated since the early years of cinema when Thomas Harper Ince, Hollywood’s answer to Henry



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Ford, devised his industrial system of the continuity script as a basis for pre-planned productions (Staiger 1985: 191 in Geuens 2000: 83). Over ninety years later, the digital era offers the possibility of re-uniting screenplay and film production in an expanded notion of the screenplay.

REFERENCESAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (2008), A Few Notes on

Formatting, http://www.oscars.org/nicholl/format.html. Accessed 31 August 2008.

Boon, K. (2008), Script Culture and the American Screenplay, Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Bosley, R. (2001), ‘Infidelity in the Far East’, American Cinematographer, 82: 2, pp. 22–33.

Brand Upon the Brain (2006), Wr: Guy Maddin, Louis Negin, Dir: Guy Maddin, Canada, 95 mins.

Burnett, R. (1988), ‘Atom Egoyan: An Interview’, http://www2.cruzio.com/~ akreyche/aeai1.html. Accessed 24 May 2009.

Celtx (2009), http://celtx.com/overview.html. Accessed 24 May 2009.Douglas, E. (2007), ‘Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!’, interview with Guy

Maddin, http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=20244. Accessed 24 May 2009.

Dramatica (2009), http://www.dramatica/com. Accessed 8 June 2009.Election (1999), Wr: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor, Dir: Alexander Payne, USA,

103 mins.Fernandez, Jay A. Evolution of a Screenwriter, Hollywood Reporter, 24th July,

2008. http://vivicardoso.blogspot.com/2008/08/evolution-of-screenwriter.html Accessed 3rd August 2009.

Final Draft (2009), http://www.final draft.com. Accessed 8 June 2009.Frameforge 3D (2009), http://www.frameforge3d.com. Accessed 3rd August

2009.Geuens, J-P. (2000), Film Production Theory, New York: State University of

New York Press.—— (2007) ‘The Space of Production’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24:

5, pp. 411–20. Gruber, H. and Wallace, D. (eds) (1989), Creative People at Work: Twelve

Cognitive Case Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hine, T. (1989 [1986]), Populuxe, London: Bloomsbury.Hyde, L. (2007), The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World,

2nd edn., New York: Vintage. Janaczewska, N. (2007), ‘The Development Sceptic’, Outlier-NJ, 19 December,

http://outlier-nj.blogspot.com. Accessed 24 May 2009.Jenkins, H. and Thorburn, D. (eds) (2003), Rethinking Media Change: the

Aesthetics of Transition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.John-Steiner, V. (1997), Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Ketchner, Andrea (2006), Screenwriter Jim Taylor Talks Comics, http://www.tsl.

pomona.edu/index.php?article=1371. Accessed 3rd August 2009. Koman, R. (2005), ‘Remixing Culture: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig’,

O’Reilly Network, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2005/02/24/lessig. html. Accessed 24 May 2009.


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Lowry, R. J. (ed.) (1982), The Journals of Abraham Maslow, Lexington, MA: Lewis Publishing.

M (1931), Wr: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang, Dir: Fritz Lang, Germany, 117 mins.

Macdonald, Ian W. (2004a), ‘The presentation of the screen idea in narrative film-making’, Ph.D. thesis, Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University.

—— (2004b), ‘Disentangling the Screen Idea’, Journal of Media Practice, 5: 2, pp. 89–99.

Marlow, J. (2004) ‘The reconfiguration of film history: Guy Maddin’ GreenCine, 28 April, 2004 http://greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID+118. Accessed 3rd August 2009.

Millard, K. (2006), ‘Writing for the Screen: Beyond the Gospel of Story’, Scan, 3: 2, http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=77. Accessed 24 May 2009.

Montage (2009), http://www.marinersoftware.com. Accessed 8 June 2009. Murch, W. (1999) ‘A Digital Cinema of the Mind? Could be’, New York Times,

http://filmsound.org/murch/murch.htm. Accessed 24 May 2009.Murphy, J. J. (2007), Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent

Screenplays Work, New York: Continuum.Muth, J. (2008), M: A Graphic Novel Based on the Film by Fritz Lang, New York:

Abrams.Norman, M. (2008), What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting,

London: Aurum.Sawyer, Keith (2007), Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration ,

Cambridge, MA : Basic Books. Sideways (2004), Wr: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor, Dir: Alexander Payne,

USA, 126 mins.Sin City (2005), Wr: Frank Miller, Dir: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin

Tarantino, USA, 124 mins.Staiger, Janet (1985), Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts

in Balio, Tina (ed.), The American Film Industry, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Stam, R. (2000), Film Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.Straw, W. (2002), ‘Re-Inhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful’, in

E. Walz (ed.), Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on 15 Canadian Films, Amsterdam: Ropodi.

Tizard, L. (2002), Moviemakers’ Master Class, New York: Faber and Faber. Travelling Light (1993), Wr/Dir: Kathryn Millard, Australia, 84 mins.V for Vendetta (2005), Wr: Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski, Dir: James

McTeague, USA, 132 mins. Vanderbilt, T. (2004), ‘Courier Dispatched’, Slate, 20 February, http://www. slate.

com/id/2095809/. Accessed 24 May 2009.Versaci, Rocco (2007), This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature,

New York: Continuum.Wells, P. (2007), Scriptwriting, Singapore: Ava Publishing. Ware, M. (2008), ‘Alternative Photography’, http://www.mikeware.co.uk/

mikeware/John_Herschel.html. Accessed May 24 2009.Wilder, Billy and Diamond, H. A. L. (c.1961), One, Two, Three, [Based on a one-

act play by Ferenc Molnar]. [Munich?] [The Mirisch Company?] 179 pp., (unpublished screenplay, Thomas Pevsner collection, Leeds Metropolitan University).



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SUGGESTED CITATIONMillard, K. (2010), ‘After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era’, Journal

of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 11–25, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.11/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSKathryn Millard is a writer and film-maker and is Associate Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her credits as writer, producer and director include award-winning features, documentaries and essay films. Kathryn publishes on topics including screenwriting, screen history, colour, pho-tography, creativity and collaboration. She is currently carrying out further research on the increasingly blurred boundaries between screenwriting and pre-visualization software, and the creative possibilities that this represents for screenwriters. Her feature-length essay film about Chaplin imitators, The Boot Cake, was released in 2008.

Contact: Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 2109.E-mail: [email protected]


Transnational CinemasISSN 2040-3550 (2 issues | Volume 1, 2010)

Aims and Scope

Transnational Cinemas has emerged in response to a shift in global film cultures and how we understand them. Dynamic new industrial and textual practices are being established throughout the world and the academic community is responding. Our journal aims to break down traditional geographical divisions and welcomes submissions that reflect the changing nature of global filmmaking.

Call for Papers

Transnational Cinemas covers a vast and diverse range of film related subjects. It provides a new and exciting forum for disseminating research. The editors are seeking articles, interviews, visual essays, reports on film festivals and conferences. Articles should be up to 6,000 words in length and should be written in English, with all quotations translated.

Editors

JOSC 1.1_5_art_Millard_011-026.indd 26JOSC 1.1_5_art_Millard_011-026.indd 26 8/26/09 10:45:12 AM8/26/09 10:45:12 AM

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KEYWORDScritical sociologycreative labour screenwritingindustrializationmarginalizationcollaboration

BRIDGET CONORUniversity of London

‘Everybody’s a Writer’Theorizing screenwriting as creative labour

ABSTRACTThis paper offers a theoretical agenda for a labourist analysis of screen-writing, and critically evaluates the marginal status of screenwriting within film production systems. On the one hand, screenwriting offers an exemplary case study of creative work in post-modernized film production industries, work characterized by freelancing and multivalent working pat-terns, insecurity and hierarchization. Investigating screenwriting as creative labour also offers unique insights into an intensely industrial vocation; this requires a highly particular theorization of the contexts and conditions of writers’ working lives.

This paper draws on sociological analyses of creative production and utilizes a Foucauldian understanding of ‘technologies of the self’ as this concept has been applied in the analysis of creative labour. This approach enables a critical examination of particular aspects of screenwriting labour, including the rigidity of the industrial screenplay form and its pedagogi-cal frameworks, the standardized mechanisms of control over screenwriting labour (such as inequitable collaboration and practices of multiple author-ship), and the heady mix of both creative fulfilment and punishment which characterizes this form of work.

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INTRODUCTIONSyd Field’s (1994: 254) warning that ‘Everybody’s a Writer’ works as a rhetorical device in his ‘how-to’ manual to describe the widely held belief in Hollywood and beyond that many people aspire (but often fail) to make a living as a screenwriter. Concurrently, Field’s phrase warns that working screenwriters will constantly be offered advice, comment, criticism and suggestions for improvement from those they consult with, those who likely harbour dreams of success and acclaim in the seductive world of film production like everyone else. This paper presents a labourist analysis of screenwriting and one which works to critically evaluate the marginal status of screen-writing as a creative input within film production systems. On the one hand, screenwriting offers an exemplary case study of creative work in post-modernized film production industries, work charac-terized by freelancing and multivalent working patterns, insecurity and hierarchy. Investigating screenwriting as creative labour also offers unique insights into a vocation that is often shaped by col-lective organizing that bestows benefits and privileges not provided for ‘below-the-line’ film workers. For Kohn (2000: 303) screenwrit-ers now typically inhabit the familiar roles of new creative workers: ‘cosmopolitan, networked and networking, brazen, supremely self-confident’ but argues that this masks a ‘hollowness’ and ‘insecurity’ which is perpetuated by the continued peripheral status of screen-writing as a creative form.

I will argue in this article that the historical and continued margin-alization of screenwriting labour can best be understood and analysed by a) examining and critiquing standard theoretical paradigms for ‘creative labour’ practices, b) analysing how these standard paradigms can be applied to screenwriting labour, and c) examining the unique practices of screenwriting labour and the exceptional labour market in which screenwriters work. This actively challenges key aspects of established creative labour theory.

THEORIZING CREATIVE LABOUR AND SCREENWRITING LABOURFirstly, I will outline the theoretical framework in which I contend that ‘creative labour’ can best be critically examined. Developments and changes in the organization of production and the rise of supposedly new forms of work and working experiences in late capitalism have been analysed using a number of (sometimes conflicting) paradigms. These range from what I would term ‘liberal-democratic’ theories of the information society (following Banks 2007 and Brophy 2008) to post-Fordist readings of changes in production organization. Autonomist-Marxist perspectives have also been deployed to emphasize the hegemonic influence of ‘immaterial labour’ in post-Fordist economies and more critical sociological accounts have outlined the features of creative labour in ‘fiercely neo-liberal’ societies (McRobbie 2002b: 518).


‘Everybody’s a Writer’ Theorizing screenwriting as creative labour

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I. Immaterial labour is defined as ‘…the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (Lazzarato 1996: 133). Hardt and Negri argue that immaterial labour is now a qualitative hegemonic force within postmodern production systems.

2. Note that the autonomist-Marxists both question the adverse effects of postmodernization and post-Fordism for immaterial labourers and also suggest the emancipatory possibilities of immaterial labour, but do not offer a sustained critique and lack empirical evidence to back up their philosophical arguments. See Gill and Pratt (2008) for a recent and very useful discussion.

All have been employed in order to understand how the experiences of work have changed in recent decades and, particularly, how the work of artists and creatives is now constituted and experienced within the postmodernized cultural industries.

LABOURING IN LATE CAPITALISMShifts in production organization since the 1970s and the rise of new working subjectivities have been analysed in numerous ways. There is a vast array of accounts of these changes which are largely within a ‘liberal-democratic’ paradigm that celebrates them as progressive and humanitarian in the benefits they offer ‘post-modern’ workers (for example see Aglietta 1979; Bell 1973; Castells 1996, 1997, 1998; Lash and Urry 1987; Piore and Sabel 1984). This paradigm can also be seen at work in autonomist-Marxist accounts (see Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Virno 2003; Lazzarato 1996) of these changes in production, which focus on the nature of work in ‘informational’ societies. As Webster (2002) outlines, most theories of the ‘information society’ and the shifts to postmodernized production systems focus on a number of quantitative changes that, it is argued, have led to a qualitatively new society. On the one hand, technological developments since the 1970s and the rise in the pervasive use of information and communi-cation technologies (ICTs) have been a starting point for analysis; for others, economic changes, particularly the measured increase in the economic worth of ‘informational activities’ are paramount. Occupational changes are also foregrounded – from a preponder-ance of workers in primary and secondary occupational sectors to the rise in service sector (tertiary) and now ‘information-processing’ or ‘symbol-manipulation’ (quaternary sector) jobs (Hardt and Negri 2000: 292). Post-Fordist writers have produced parallel accounts of changes in various production sectors, from car manufacturing to film production, that emphasize shifts from mass production to small-batch production. Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) offer a typi-cal and influential reading of these changes, writing that the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial or information society can be termed the ‘postmodernization’ of production. Most importantly Hardt and Negri argue that postmodernization ‘marks a new mode of becoming human’ (2000: 289) and integral to this is the new and central role for immaterial labour in many areas of productive life.1

The rise in the centrality of immaterial labour is tied in with changes in production and work since the 1970s and modern management techniques, which, Lazzarato argues, have increasingly sought to co-opt the soul of the worker – to make the worker’s personality and subjectivity ‘susceptible to organisation and control’ (Lazzarato 1996: 134).

The conceptual problems with broadly ‘liberal-democratic’ theo-ries of changes in production organization and more specific the-ories of immaterial labour2 are their tendencies (both subtle and


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3. For example, de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford (2005) have emphasized the consequences of the now stark divisions of labour within postmodern or post-Fordist production systems – separating out high-tech research and development workers in Silicon Valley from young women in developing nations who assemble

microchips for example. New hierarchies within post-Fordist workforces often reinforce traditional

stratifications along gender, ethnic and socio-economic lines, issues which proponents of post-industrial or information societies and workers often neglect entirely.

4. Castells (1996, 1997, 1998) offers a more nuanced account of these changes, arguing for both transformation and continuity and is one of the most authoritative scholars on these various trends.

5. Braverman and labour process theorists have been criticized for their ‘neo-Luddism’, for romanticising forms of brutalizing industrial work and for embodying a ‘radical pessimism’ which leaves little room for the subjectivities of workers themselves (see Dyer-Witheford 2004). As Blair (2003) notes, the ‘missing subject’ within Braverman’s work has been a sticking point for many.

overt) to celebrate the ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ which post-Fordism, flexible specialization and other incantations of the ‘information society’ promise, thus often masking issues of increased exploita-tion, precariousness, marginalization and discrimination which new forms of immaterial work have also made visible.3 Whilst they have varying philosophical agendas, they also tend to lack empirical evi-dence for the trends they discuss, or they offer quantitative data on changes in occupational structures (Bell 1973 for example) but then make sweeping claims about changes to the nature of work and society whilst neglecting the continuities also visible between industrial and informational capitalism.4 In fact, such theories also raise further issues by using ambiguous concepts such as ‘immate-rial labour’ or ‘symbol-manipulation’ to crudely hierarchize labour in new and problematic ways (between skilled/creative and unskilled/non-creative jobs for example). Such theories, whilst providing important tools for understanding the disparate changes precipitated by declining manufacturing industries, rising employment in new types of ‘immaterial’ work, and the pervasive influence of informa-tion technology, offer a partial and distorted theoretical framework for understanding changes in labouring practices in late capitalism. Critical sociological frameworks that recognize these changes, but also foreground the marginalization of labour within ‘knowledge economies’, provide a sharper and more incisive theoretical frame-work. These accounts have some affiliation with the earlier seminal work of Braverman (1974) and labour process theorists who provide the most scathing critique of the degradation of work in advanced capitalism, emphasizing the spuriousness of claims made about labour ‘flexibility’ (for example Pollert 1988). However, Braverman is now dated and has also been extensively criticized and this signals that a more sophisticated approach is needed to questions of labour in postmodern production systems.5 I argue that critical sociology coupled with a neo-Foucauldian understanding of governmentality and ‘technologies of the self’, as they are mobilized within working selves, offers a more satisfying critical base.

CREATIVE LABOURThe theories outlined above have been mobilized to examine the par-ticular changes that are visible within creative occupations and the production of cultural goods. Certain cultural industries such as the Hollywood production system have been analysed as exhibiting a post-Fordist model in its changing organization (from mass production to independent and contract forms of film-making, see Christopherson & Storper 1986, 1989; Storper 1989, 1993) and the term ‘immaterial labour’ has been utilized in relation to creative occupations within new media production (such as game developers, see de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2005). Celebratory accounts of a new ‘creative class’ (for example Leadbeater 1999; Landry 2000; Florida 2004) have argued



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6. Ursell (2000) also provides an important account of self-enterprise in television production work as a powerful form of pleasure in creative work and thus also a technology of the self.

that the freelancers and independent creative workers have become more visible within the economic growth patterns of cities and nations. These workers are described as the vanguard of the workforce in ‘post-industrial’ societies, embodying the traits – entrepreneurialism, networked, multivalent, flexible – most valued in advanced, neo-liberal economies. These celebratory accounts have, in turn, been taken up by governments keen to invest in their ‘creative industries’ and ‘knowledge economies’ and hoping to reap both economic and cultural rewards. Thus discus-sions and analyses of creative labour are developing at a particularly interesting and rich intersection of a number of theoretical and policy-directed paradigms.

Critical sociological accounts of creative labour (such as Ryan 1991; McRobbie 1998, 2002a, 2002b, 2004; Ursell 2000; Blair 2001, 2003; Gill 2002, 2007; Ross 2003) provide an incisive basis for analysis when combined with a Foucauldian understanding of work and subjectiv-ity, and this mitigates against simplistic accounts of brutalized and exploited workers. As Hesmondhalgh writes in his assessment of theories of creative labour as they have developed in recent years, the work of McRobbie and Ross provide the most promising openings because, ‘they join theoretical sophistication with empirical sociologi-cal analysis of the specific discourses of creativity and self-realization in particular industries’ (2007: 67).

The most penetrating accounts of creative labour to date (McRobbie, Ross, Ursell) have illuminated trends in late capitalist workplaces (towards increased individualization, self-reflexivity and uncertainty; see also Beck 1992, Du Gay 1996; Sennett 1998; Bauman 2001) whilst also offering prescient critiques of neo-liberal working cultures and claims to increased freedom and creativity in work. What these accounts do not neglect, unlike labour process theory and some sociological accounts, is the self in work. A Foucauldian perspective focuses on the ‘technologies of the self’ or ‘self-steering mechanisms’ (Foucault 1988) that creative workers embody and employ in order to conduct themselves in their work. Thus buzz-words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘flexibility’ within creative labour practices are ‘new languages and techniques to bind the worker into the productive life of society’ (Rose 1990: 60) and are also embod-ied and enacted by workers themselves. Angela McRobbie writes:

By handing over responsibility of the self to the individual, power is both devolved and accentuated. So it is with creativity/talent. Where the individual is most free to be chasing his or her dreams of self-expression, so also is postmodern power at its most effective.

(McRobbie 2002a: 109)6

I argue that the work of screenwriters not only exemplifies creative labour as it has been theorized by critical sociologists but also ena-bles an analysis of a unique set of self-actualizing practices, tech-nologies of the self and disciplinary techniques in film production work. Overall, a theoretical lens that combines critical sociology


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7. McRobbie (2002a and 2002b) also highlights the issue of the lack of diversity within creative workforces and the brutal working conditions that often disadvantage and marginalize particular social groups such as women and ethnic minorities, and this is an issue raised in much of the current creative labour research – Gill (2002, 2007), Ursell (2000) and de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford (2005) also identify lack of diversity as an inherent consequence of the conditions of new creative work. Within the screenwriting sector, this is also an acute concern. See the Film Council reports that have investigated these issues in the context of the UK screenwriting industry (UK Film Council 2006; 2007).

with Foucauldian concerns enables an investigation of the extremes of both self-fulfilment and pleasure in screenwriting work and also the vagaries of marginal labour conditions in the film production industry. I will now explore some of the specific discourses I see at work in contemporary screenwriting labour practices.

SCREENWRITING AS CREATIVE LABOURAngela McRobbie (1998, 2002a, 2002b, 2004) has been concerned with the development of the ‘new cultural economy’ in the UK, the develop-ment of the discourses of creative workers as ‘pioneers’ in their multiva-lent working lives and in their lived experiences of work in ‘speeded-up creative worlds’ (2002a). She identifies a number of features of ‘creative work’ which now make up the standard creative labour vocabulary and these can be analysed in relation to screenwriting labour – the freelance nature of much of the work in screen production, the insecurity of such work, the ‘portfolio careers’ which creatives must assemble in order to make a living and the constant networking and entrepreneurial skills required to make contacts in cultural industries in order to build and maintain a reputation and secure future work.

For example, McRobbie writes, ‘creative’ working practices are characteristic of ‘portfolio careers’ (2002a: 111) which are collated by individuals in order to offset the insecurity and capriciousness which is now built in to ‘flexible’ production systems such as film- or television-making. This then requires creative individuals to be intensely ‘self-promotional’, echoing the constant need to ‘work on oneself’ within a new enterprise culture that writers such as Du Gay (1996) and Rose (1999) articulate. For screenwriters, this has become an inherent feature of getting by and particularly moving up in their field – the skills required to network, take meetings and pitch ideas have become central to everyday screenwriting careers. McRobbie writes that the pleasure workers express in their work through these studies is a ‘critical and intransigent’ factor – despite chronic condi-tions of low remuneration, extremely long working hours and ‘volatile and unpredictable’ work patterns (2002a: 109).7

Another key feature of creative work for McRobbie is the uneven spread of rewards across labouring sectors, a theme echoed by Gill Ursell who observes:

Acclaim, reward, recognition characterise the top end of the television labour market and arguably, it is the attractiveness of such attributes which helps keep the bottom end entranced and enlisted. Truly, this is a technology of the self which turns on self-enterprise.

(Ursell 2000: 818)

This trend is certainly visible within Hollywood’s screenwriting labour force. Levels of remuneration vary considerably between the minimum



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8. The ‘Schedule of Minimums’ is broken up into yearly periods from 2008–2011 and these figures are for the first period effective 2/13/08 to 5/1/09. See Writers Guild of America (2008).

9. A number of factors are influential here including the commercial sensitivity of these top-end figures for production companies and studios as well as for the established writers. But also and even more slippery, the notorious Hollywood rumour mill which thrives on such speculative figures serves to inflate hype and prestige around particular projects during the development process. Arguably, this further veils the material conditions of the pay negotiations that are routinely conducted within the industry, distorting the perception both within and outside screenwriting labour networks about what screenplays and screenwriting work is ‘really worth’ and perpetuating such catch-all industrial axioms as ‘nobody knows anything’ (see Goldman 1996).

10. Because the focus of this theorization is industrial screenwriting labour, it is important to examine the Hollywood labour market as the industrial centre for film production and screenwriting work particularly. Certainly British writers work outside this centre but with British film production inextricably tied into Hollywood-centric networks of film-making, writers constantly engage with and function within

wages set by the US Writers Guilds for writing a treatment or first draft in comparison with the very high retainers which are paid to the few ‘sought-after ’ screenwriters at any particular point in time. Within the 2008 Writers Guild of America ‘Schedule of Minimums’, the delivery of an original screenplay, including treatment,8 ranges from US$58,477 to US$109, 783. Figures for the top end of the pay spectrum are more difficult to accurately document9 but widely cited examples in the last ten years include the fees paid to writer-directors such as M. Night Shyamalan, paid US$5 million for Unbreakable in 2000 (Anon 2009) and David Koepp, paid US$3.5 million for Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005) (Laporte 2004). Published interviews with screenwriters are also littered with references to the glamour, excitement, creative fulfilment and prestige possible within the industry as compelling reasons to pur-sue such work. Again, creative screenwriting labour like other crea-tive occupations offers simultaneous limitations and rewards, potential autonomy and creative freedom as well as exploitation and insecurity and these are not binary oppositions but are enmeshed within the eve-ryday working experiences of screenwriters.

Broadly, screenwriting labour must be separated out from the theorizations of other creative labour forms firstly because of the inherently industrial nature of the work – screenwriting is a histori-cal and contemporary industrial creative labour form which exemplifies idiosyncratic characteristics, enables distinctive working experiences and facilitates particular mechanisms of organization and control. For screenwriters, the inherent industrialization of their largely independ-ent, creative, pre-production or inception-oriented work means that they have always experienced their labour as highly intensive and personal; individualized and collaborative; competitive and hierar-chized; marginalized and elite – which then offers a rich mixture of both pleasures and pains (Caldwell uses the term ‘trade pain’, 2008: 221) which can only be understood by examining both the historical and contemporary industrial conditions within which screenwriting functions.

INDUSTRIAL FILM PRODUCTION AND SCREENWRITING LABOUR MARKETS In particular, the development and contemporary workings of the Hollywood labour market in which screenwriters now function10 provides key insights into the unique set of trends and conditions that mark out the distinctive case of film writers as creative workers. A brief examination of some of these trends and conditions in the industry’s ‘post-Fordist’ phase emphasizes not only this uniqueness (unionized creative workers are rare for example) but the clear paral-lels with other forms of creative work that encourage partialization for most workers – hierarchization, a dual labour market, entrenched insecurity, individualization and compulsory entrepreneurialism. Dichotomies that have now developed in the film production industries


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these networks. Many British writers belong to the US Writers Guilds (more so than the UK Writers Guild) and have US-based agents. See UK Film Council (2007) for one of the few studies of writers for British films which highlights these dynamics.

and the screenwriting labour market specifically, signal these issues – above vs. below-the-line, and entrepreneur property-holders vs. wage workers for example.

Scott (2005) provides an analysis of the increased hierarchiza-tion of the Hollywood labour market in the period since the 1950s, emphasizing the externalization of the employment relation and the shift to predominantly temporary and freelance work for film work-ers. Scott (2005) and Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell and Wang (2005) write that a key element of this profound change was codified within the new classification system which distinguished workers according to labour-market power and was then enshrined within the production budgets of the films themselves. So ‘above-the-line’ workers (such as stars, directors and writers) considered to be the key creative inputs for a film, have individually negotiated salaries, are guild represented and ‘are named explicitly as line item entries in any project budget’ (Scott 2005: 121). Miller et al. (2005: 119) note that these workers are subjectively viewed as ‘creative’ and ‘proactive’. In comparison, ‘below-the-line’ workers are the mass of ‘reactive’ or proletarian workers whose wages are determined by collective agreements or wage schedules.

Christopherson (1996) analyses the consequent shifts in the rela-tionships between workers and firms in Hollywood after the 1950s and argues that as the major studios divested themselves of once per-manent workforces and began subcontracting production, there were concomitant changes in labour organizations – mechanisms such as health and pension benefit schemes and certification of skill and experience came under threat and the unions were forced to adapt. Particular strategies in response to flexible specialization were a roster system to certify skills based on seniority and experience, health and pension systems independent of any one employer and a system of residuals payments for creative workers (Christopherson 1996: 103). Overall these changes made it possible to ‘maintain and reproduce a skilled and specialised labour force without long-term employment contracts’ (Christopherson 1996: 104).

Christopherson also provides insight into new hierarchies that emerged within the labour force at this time. She states:

The talent work force became more heterogeneous with respect to gender and (to a much lesser extent) race and access to work and property rights. For example, a split emerged between ‘writ-er-producers’ – with entrepreneurial skills and property rights in the film or tape product – and a vastly increased pool of writers with dramatically varying access to work. This heterogeneity is contained within the talent guilds leading to serious differences between segments of the workforce whose primary interest is access to work and those whose interests focus on property rights in the form of residuals payments.

(Christopherson 1996: 104).



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11. This is reflected by the large number of possible modes of screenwriting work now mobilized which link to variable pay rates, e.g. treatments, first and subsequent drafts, rewrites, polishes and so on.

12. In 2007–2008 the most recent strike action of the Writers Guilds in the United States highlighted residuals payments as a key area in which screenwriters continue to fight to maintain security and some control over their work. In eighteen of twenty-one strikes by above-the-line guilds since 1952, the issue of residuals was the major or at least a prominent issue (Paul and Kleingartner 1996: 172).

These new hierarchies are fundamentally important to the exceptional analysis of screenwriting labour – while on the one hand, their sta-tus as ‘above-the-line’, creative and ‘proactive’ workers bestows some prestige on the profession overall (and enables certain levels of job security and industrial power in the form of the Writers Guilds), signif-icant hierarchization is now a feature of the profession and this opens up new fault-lines and serves to stratify workers within the field.

Christopherson also identifies the new entrepreneurial culture that developed and contributed to new divisions of labour, as well as new opportunities for acquisition of skills and working alliances across the production sector. As she puts it:

The historical social division of labour between craft and tal-ent, manager and worker, was undermined and new divisions, such as those between entrepreneur-property holders and wage workers, were constructed. This transformation created new ten-sions between individual skills and collective identities.

(Christopherson 1996: 108)

Scott argues that Hollywood’s occupational structure can now be viewed as two overlapping pyramids, ‘one representing the manual, crafts and technical workers in the industry, the other – which has many more tiers in the upper ranges – representing the creative or talent workers’ (2005: 127). Scott also writes that the labour market is characterized by an intricate system of occupational categories (now codified within collective bargaining agreements) that illustrates the myriad divisions of labour both above- and below-the-line and which then often links directly to rates of pay, credits awarded to various roles undertaken on particular films and prestige and status within the industry.11 The creative pyramid of the labour system is characterized by chronic bloating at the base of the employment pyramid because, as Scott illustrates, there is a constant over-supply of ‘aspirants’ who are then slowly filtered through the system along various paths: into routine, relatively secure ‘day jobs’ such as television writing; out of the industry altogether; or up into the higher echelons, where reputa-tion, credits, asking prices and interpersonal networks all play signifi-cant roles in maintaining one’s status (Scott 2005: 128). Networking is also complemented, for Scott, by other ‘instruments of social coor-dination’ (2005: 130) such as the prevalence of intermediaries (talent agents, managers etc.). This also means that particular mechanisms of control become the pivots of prestige and security within the screen-writing labour market, such as the complex processes of residuals pay-ments and credit allocation.12

I argue that at one level there are two broad modes of industrial-ized screenwriting labour which can be identified and which broadly determine the amount of autonomy and authority individual writers have to control their own creative work and the uses to which that work is put. This fits within the ‘dual labour market’ picture outlined


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by creative labour theorists and can be articulated using Ryan’s theori-zation, in which he distinguishes two kinds of labour positions within industrial creative production systems: ‘contracted artists’ and ‘profes-sional creatives’ (Ryan 1991: 136). The former category is ‘personal-ised labour’ and represents, for Ryan, not labour-power but the roles of ‘petty capitalists’ who supply intermediate artistic goods to corpo-rations such as production companies. For screenwriting, this maps on to the labour market in which a small number of writer-producers or well-known, consecrated writers function, survive and flourish at the top end (Christopherson’s ‘entrepreneur property-holders’). They are generally able to secure ongoing and rewarding work, are well-remunerated, critically recognized and are more able to resist attempts to extensively rewrite or change their work. On the other hand, ‘pro-fessional creatives’ are ‘supporting artists in the project team [who] are employed on wages or salaries in permanent or casual positions’ (Ryan 1991: 138). This is rationalized work, supporting work, ‘vari-able capital to be put to work across continuous cycles of production’ (Ryan 1991: 139). Professional creative screenwriting labour represents the vast majority of screenwriting work undertaken in contemporary film production industries at the bloated bottom of the occupational pyramid. Within this category, the multiple modes of piecemeal screenwriting work come to the surface – treatment writing, drafting, rewriting, polishing and so on. Screenwriters working at this blunt end of the industry are concerned with security; they are constantly scrambling to secure future work, may lack autonomy and control and routinely face brutalizing and intense industrial conditions, the ‘serial corporate churn’ characterized by Caldwell (2008: 113).

THE PARTICULARITIES OF SCREENWRITING AS CREATIVE LABOURTo more forcefully carve out a theoretical agenda for a consideration of screenwriting as a creative labour however, I argue that screenwrit-ing labour must, to some extent, be separated out from the accounts of postmodernized production/Fordism-post-Fordism/creative indus-tries altogether. The standard vocabulary that supports and makes up these accounts must be broken down and new terms, dialectics and subjects be produced.

Screenwriting labour can be viewed within a creative work para-digm but can certainly not be considered to be a wholly new form of creative work unlike other occupations such as those in new media for example (see Gill 2002, 2007, and de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2005, for example). The history of Hollywood-centric screenwriting illustrates the historical development of industrialized writing and suggests that many of the rigidities which characterize the labour process and limit the autonomy of individual writers in a contempo-rary setting can be traced through the history of screenwriting (par-ticularly as it was standardized within the Hollywood studio system



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13. For example Thomas Ince is cited as ushering in a process of script development and film production which separated conception from execution. In evidence here is the first sign of the degradation of the screenwriter’s creative process under the strictures of an industrial production system. As Staiger writes, the application of scientific management to screen production leads to a separation which ‘…destroys an ideal of the whole person, both the creator and the producer of one’s ideas’ (1982: 96, my emphasis). Arguably this separation is applied vigorously to screenwriting in later years and is thus acutely felt by screenwriters themselves.

14. The strategies of a studio boss such as Irving Thalberg can be highlighted here – he developed the routine practice of hiring multiple writers and/or teams of writers for a single project without the others’ knowing; see Stempel (1988: 71) for an account of this and Norman (2007: 135), who refers to this by the insider term ‘following’.

15. This is the premise and focus of Becker’s sociological account of collaborative networks and collective production within ‘art worlds’: ‘Art worlds consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art’ (2008: 34).

16. This practice of ‘distanced collaboration’ is

and into other industrial film production contexts such as in the UK; see Stempel 1988, and Norman 2007 for historical accounts in the US). For example, the divisions of labour formalized in the Studio era of Hollywood production, which separated out conception from execution and offered a standardized screenplay model,13 can be highlighted, as well as the coordinated mechanisms of control that solidified routine practices such as multiple authorship in the film production system, eroding claims to individual creative authorship by screenwriters.14 Changes in the organization of the film produc-tion industry have certainly followed broader changes in production organization but, again, screenwriters cannot be analysed as exempli-fying new, flexible, post-Fordist labour practices.

Firstly, this is because screenwriters have always and continue to be inherently individualized and atomized in the experiences of their working lives – by nature of their work and its placement in the incep-tion stages of a film production, often before a ‘project-team’ has even been assembled. Simultaneously, writers are called into being within daily industrial working contexts as collaborative and therefore inher-ently partial – their work only becomes productive, useful and thus meaningful when it is subject to development, notes, and input from other film-makers. It is then produced in filmic form, leading to a con-stant and chaotic tension between individualized and collaborative modes of work.15 So, whilst some screenwriters may work in teams, most experience the writing itself as solitary, even if working within larger television writing teams or other agglomerations. Also, more commonly, they experience competition on numerous professional levels as well as both productive and punishing forms of collaboration during the writing process. Examples of this potent mix of solitude, competition and collaboration can be seen in the narratives recounted by screenwriters such as Mark Andrus (who co-wrote As Good As It Gets, 1997, with James L. Brooks without the two writers ever meet-ing; see Katz 2000).16 Ron Bass’s self-described ‘ordeal’ writing Rain Man (1988) is another telling example (Engel 2002: 55); his experience involved initial collaborative work with Stephen Spielberg, a firing with the arrival of a new director (Sydney Pollack) and the eventual re-hiring of Bass. Macdonald (2004: 204–5, citing Petrie 1996) also pro-vides a fascinating inventory of the collaboration between the Scottish actor and writer-director Peter Capaldi and Miramax in 1995–1996, which includes numerous approvals and disapprovals, suggested rewrites, delays and a threat to bring on a new writer.17

Additionally, the creative drive of screenwriting labour is and has historically been highly marginalized but this must be simultane-ously viewed alongside the organized (and thus securitized) and elite positionings of screenwriters. The liminal status of the screenwriter as an author/artist and the questionable status of the screenplay as lit-erature or art (visible in the rhetoric of auteur theory for example18) are important elements of broader arguments for crude marginaliza-tion and brutalization of screenwriting but these discussions cannot


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common – Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman’s work for Shakespeare in Love (1998) is another example recounted in Katz (2000).

17. For Macdonald, this example ‘…underlines Capaldi’s status as a supplicant’ (2004: 205).

18. This is a complex issue which I am not able to elaborate on here – it raises much broader philosophical issues about notions of authorship in film-making. See Stam (2000) and Corliss (1974) for relevant discussion.

19. See Stempel (1988) and Norman (2007)

for more in-depth accounts of the

progressive standardization and marginalization of screenwriting work in Hollywood’s Studio era. Collected interviews with screenwriters, for example Katz (2000) and Engel (2002), offer a good starting point for first-person accounts of contemporary screenwriting collaborations of both the productive/rewarding and destructive/disheartening kind. Note that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories but that screenwriters can and do frequently experience these highs and lows within a single project development experience. Again, the previously cited anecdotes from writers Ron Bass (Engel 2002) and Peter Capaldi (Macdonald 2004: 204–5) are indicative examples.

20. I offer here a number of ‘directions’ that I believe, through

be viewed in isolation. The long-term organization and unionization of the Hollywood-centric screen production industries also offers an important diversion from creative work as it is conceptualized by McRobbie and others and arguably mitigates against the worst vagaries and brutalities of the industry. It is also impossible to dis-miss the elite status of screenwriters here – they are ‘above-the-line’ workers, largely educated, often able to produce work in a number of literary fields and potentially able to command significant amounts of remuneration and ‘consecration’. An analysis of the processes and experiences of screenwriting labour indicate that a renewed and reinvigorated vocabulary for the theorization of screenwriting crea-tive labour is productive and essential here – one that foregrounds a number of terms: old and new; individualized and collaborative; atom-ized and partial; standardized; elite; entrepreneurial and disinvested. These terms should not be viewed as binaries or polarities but they complement, complexify and play off each other and serve to rein-vigorate creative labour theory itself.19

ANALYSING TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF WITHIN SCREENWRITING LABOURThe material and frequently brutal conditions of the screenwriting labour market have profound effects on how screenwriters them-selves function – their career trajectories, their creative and craft practices, their daily working lives and their self-perceptions are shaped by these specific dynamics of cultural production. The key question examined here is: what particular mechanisms of screen-writing labour and ‘technologies of the self’ are mobilized within screenwriting labour practices in order for writers to at least survive and perhaps prosper within this labour market and how do these both marginalize and empower screenwriters? Nikolas Rose empha-sizes this ‘double bind’, writing that modern power is exercised by both producing individual selves and constraining individuality (see Rimke 2000: 72). By way of conclusion, I offer a few preliminary thoughts on the areas in which disciplinary techniques and ‘tech-nologies of the self’ mobilized within screenwriting labour are visible and, using a reinvigorated theoretical framework, can be empirically investigated and analysed.20

In particular, certain features of the production of screenplays strike me as pivotal mechanisms in the dialectical process of the production and constraint of screenwriting labour in both historical and contem-porary terms. Firstly, the fairly rigid structure of mainstream screen-plays arguably acts as a set of coercive tools and sets standards and expectations within the industry. These rigidities are then perpetuated within ‘how-to’ screenwriting manuals, screenwriting courses and film and television commissioning and funding bodies.21 Secondly, the encouragement (usually by producers, studio bosses, agents and so on) of disinvestment in the screenwriters’ own work through concrete



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qualitative, empirical research, will mirror Hesmondhalgh’s ideal approach for creative labour research: ‘…theoretical sophistication...[and] empirical sociological analysis of the specific discourses of creativity and self-realisation in particular industries’ (2007: 67).

21. Ryan’s analysis terms this ‘formatting’ ‘loosely-connected parameters pointing to preferred outcomes’ (1991: 180), but which nonetheless exert a ‘coercive power’ over creative labouring such as screenwriting.

22. I use this term to connote particular routine practices and discourses, perpetuated within the film production industry over time and now invoked in ‘how-to’ screenwriting manuals and within production meetings that routinely place screenwriters in the position of (as Macdonald, 2004, terms it), supplicants. These practices demand and/or assume that screenwriters be ready and open to collaboration; open to ‘suggestions’ and changes from other creatives (particularly directors, producers and stars); to be ready and willing to make these changes and rewrite scenes or whole scripts or be summarily fired or otherwise forced off a project; and to be accustomed to ‘multiple authorship’ practices – working either simultaneously or serially with many writers on one project and then often fed into complex credit arbitration processes that encourage intense competition between

practices such as ‘inequitable collaboration’22 which dilutes the author-ity of the screenwriter as a primary creative input and therefore affects the ability of the screenwriter to maintain control of their own work. Also, the entrepreneurial mechanisms that require constant network-ing, pitching, negotiation and meeting-taking are all practices that can discourage screenwriters in their pursuit of secure and rewarding work or force them to ‘play the game’ (often to their detriment) within a corporate cultural production system. All these factors are experienced by screenwriters at the deepest levels of the self – ‘how-to’ screenwrit-ing manuals that encourage writers to put their hearts and souls into their writing then, on the following pages, remind writers to subject and adapt those screenwriting selves to the everyday vicissitudes and brutalities of the industry.

However, all this does not preclude the very real benefits that screenwriting labour provides and the creative and artistic, as well as economic, rewards which the work offers. As Caldwell writes in relation to the resilience of the film and television production indus-tries and workers, ‘reflexivity operates as a creative process involving human agency and critical competence at the local cultural level as much as a discursive process establishing power at the broader social level’ (2008: 33). Screenwriters are able to exercise creative autonomy and freedom not possible for many other film production workers; they can and do experience fruitful collaborations with fellow creatives and may be rewarded with both high remuneration and also critical rewards and recognition. It is this rich mix of individualization and col-laboration, constraint and reward, exploitation and autonomy within this work that an examination of screenwriting as creative labour can illuminate.

REFERENCESAglietta, M. (1979), A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, London:

NLB.Anon (2009), ‘M. Night. Shyamalan: Variety Profile’, Variety, http://www.

variety.com/profiles/people/main/35525/M+Night+Shyamalan.html?dataSet=1&query=m.+night+shyamalan. Accessed 21 March 2009.

As Good As It Gets (1997), Wr: M. Andrus and J. L. Brooks, Dir: J. L. Brooks, US, 139 mins.

Banks, M. (2007), The Politics of Cultural Work, Basingstoke: Palgrave.Bauman, Z. (2001), The Individualised Society, Cambridge: Polity.Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage.Becker, H. (2008), Art Worlds, Twenty Fifth Anniversary Edition, Berkley:

University of California Press.Bell, D. (1973), The Coming of the Post-industrial Society, New York: Basic Books.Blair, H. (2001), ‘“You’re Only as Good as Your Last Job”: The Labour Process

and Labour Market in the British Film Industry’, Work, Employment and Society, 15:1, pp. 149–169.

Blair, H. (2003), ‘Winning and Losing in Flexible Labour Markets: the Formation and Operation of Networks of Interdependence in the UK film industry’, Sociology, 37:4, pp. 677–694.


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writers. Screenwriting is an inherently collaborative form of creative work and these practices do differ within modes of writing and types of screen production work. However the term ‘collaboration’ is, I believe, often used to mask marginalizing practices that consistently work against writers and in favour of more ‘powerful’ or visible creative inputs.

Braverman, H. (1974), Labour and Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Brophy, E. (2008), ‘The Organisations of Immaterial Labour: Knowledge Worker Resistance in post-Fordism’, Ph.D. thesis, Kingston, Ontario: Queens University.

Caldwell, J. T. (2008), Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, Durham: Duke University Press.

Castells, M. (1996), The Rise of the Network Society, Malden, MA: Blackwell.Castells, M. (1997), The Power of Identity, Malden, MA: Blackwell.Castells, M. (1998), End of Millennium, Malden, MA: Blackwell.Christopherson, S. and Storper, M. (1986), ‘The City as Studio; The World

as Back Lot: The Impact of Vertical Integration on the Location of the Motion Picture Industry’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 4:3, pp. 305–320.

Christopherson, S. and Storper, M. (1989), ‘The Effects of Flexible Specialisation on Industrial Politics and the Labour Market: The Motion Picture Industry’, Industrial and Labour Relations Review, 42:3, pp. 331–347.

Christopherson, S. (1996), ‘Flexibility and Adaptation in Industrial Relations: The Exceptional case of the US Media Entertainment Industries’, in L. Gray and R. Seeber (eds), Under the Stars: Essays on Labour Relations in Arts and Entertainment, Ithaca and London: ILR Press, pp. 86–112.

Corliss, R. (1974), ‘The Hollywood Screenwriter’, in G. Mast and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fourth Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 541–550.

De Peuter, G. and Dyer-Witheford, N. (2005), ‘A Playful Multitude: Mobilising and Counter-mobilising Immaterial Game Labour’, Fibreculture, issue 5, http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5.html. Accessed 4 October 2007.

Du Gay, P. (1996), Consumption and Identity at Work, Cambridge: Polity.Du Gay, P. and Pryke, M. (eds), (2001), Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis

and Commercial Life, London: Sage.Engel, J. (2002), Oscar-winning Screenwriters on Screenwriting: The Award-

Winning Best in the Business Discuss their Craft, New York: Hyperion.Field, S. (1994), Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, Third Edition,

New York: Dell.Florida, R. (2004), The Rise of the Creative Class: and How its Transforming Work,

Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books.Foucault, M. (1988), ‘Technologies of the Self’, in L. Martin, H. Gutman and

P. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self, London: Tavistock, pp. 16–49.Gill, R. (2002), ‘Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-

based New Media Work in Europe’, Information, Communication and Society, 5:1, pp. 70–89.

Gill, R. (2007), Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat?, Amsterdam: Notebooks: Institute for Network Cultures.

Gill, R. and Pratt, A. (2008), ‘In the Social Factory?: Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work’, Theory, Culture and Society, 25: 7–8, pp. 1–30.

Goldman, W. (1996), Adventures in the Screentrade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting, London: Abacus.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000), Empire, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Penguin.



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Hesmondhalgh, D. (2007), ‘Creative Labour as a Basis of a Critique of Creative Industries Policy’, in G. Lovink and N. Rossiter (eds), My Creativity Reader: A Critique of Culture Industries, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 59–69.

Katz, S. B. (2000), Conversations with Screenwriters, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Kohn, N. (2000), ‘The Screenplay as Postmodern Literary Exemplar: Authorial Distraction, Disappearance, Dissolution’, Qualitative Inquiry, 6:4, pp. 489–510.

Landry, C. (2000), The Creative City, London: Earthscan Comedia.Laporte, N. (2004), ‘Inside Move: Best Koepp “Secret”’, Variety, 14 March, http://

www.variety.com/article/VR1117901643.html?categoryId=1228&cs= 1&query=david+koepp+%2B+panic+room. Accessed 21 March 2009.

Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1987), The End of Organised Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity.

Lazzarato, M. (1996), ‘Immaterial Labour’, in M. Hardt and P. Virno (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 133–147.

Leadbeater, C. (1999), Living on Thin Air: The New Economy, London: Viking.Macdonald, I. (2004), ‘The Presentation of the Screen Idea in Narrative Film-

Making’, Ph.D. Thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University.McRobbie, A. (1998), British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry?,

London: Routledge.McRobbie, A. (2002a), ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in

the new Cultural Economy?’, in P. Du Gay and M. Pryke (eds), (2001), Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life, London: Sage, pp. 97–114.

McRobbie, A. (2002b), ‘Clubs to Companies’, in J. Hartley (ed.), Creative Industries, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 375–390.

McRobbie, A. (2004), ‘Making a Living in London’s Small Scale Creative Sector’, in D. Power and A. Scott (eds), Culture Industries and The Production of Culture, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 130–144.

McRobbie, A. (2005), The Uses of Cultural Studies, London: Sage.Miller, T., Govil, N., McMurria, J., Maxwell, R. and Wang, T. (2005), Global

Hollywood 2, London: BFI Publishing.Norman, M. (2007), What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting,

New York: Harmony Books.Paul, A. and Kleingartner, A. (1996), ‘The Transformation of Industrial

Relations in the Motion Picture and Television Industries: Talent Sector’, in L. Gray and R. Seeber (eds), Under the Stars: Essays on Labour Relations in Arts and Entertainment, Ithaca and London: ILR Press, pp. 156–180.

Piore, M. and Sabel, C. (1984), The Second Industrial Divide, New York: Basic Books.

Pollert, A. (1988), ‘Dismantling Flexibility’, Capital and Class, No.34, pp. 42–75.

Rain Man (1988), Wr: R. Bass and B. Morrow, Dir: B. Levinson, US, 133 mins.Rimke, H. (2000), ‘Governing Citizens Through Self-Help Literature’, Cultural

Studies, 14:1, pp. 61–78.Rose, N. (1990), Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, London:

Routledge.Rose, N. (1999), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge

University Press: Cambridge.


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Ross, A. (2003), No Collar, the Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, New York: Basic Books.

Ryan, B. (1991), Making Capital from Culture: The Corporate Form of Capitalist Cultural Production, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Scott, A. J. (2005), On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Sennett, R. (1998), The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York and London: W.W. Norton.

Shakespeare in Love (1998), Wr: M. Norman and T. Stoppard, Dir: J. Madden, US/UK, 123 mins.

Staiger, J. (1982), ‘Dividing Labour for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the rise of the Studio System’, in G. Kindem (ed.), The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 94–103.

Stam, R. (2000), ‘Introduction’, in R. Stam and T. Miller (eds), Film and Theory: An Anthology, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 1–6.

Stempel, T. (1988), Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, New York: Continuum.

Storper, M. (1989), ‘The Transition to Flexible Specialisation in the US Film Industry: External Economies, the Division of Labour and the Crossing of Industrial Divides’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 13:2, pp. 273–305.

Storper, M. (1993), ‘Flexible Specialisation in Hollywood: A Response to Aksoy and Robins’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 17:4, pp. 479–484.

UK Film Council (2006), ‘Scoping Study into the Lack of Women Screenwriters in the UK’, commissioned from Institute for Employment Studies, http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/media/pdf/4/r/0415womenscreen_-_FINAL_09.06.06.pdf. Accessed 12 August 2008.

UK Film Council (2007), Writing British Films: Who Writes British Films and How They Are Recruited, prepared by S. Rogers, http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/media/pdf/5/r/RHUL_June_27_2007_-_Final_for_Cheltenham.pdf. Accessed 12 August 2008.

Unbreakable (2000), Wr/Dir: M. N. Shyamalan, US, 106 mins.Ursell, G. (2000), ‘Television Production: Issues of Exploitation, Commodification

and Subjectivity in UK Television Labour Markets’, Media, Culture and Society, 22:6, pp. 805–825.

Virno, P. (2003), A Grammar of the Multitude, London: Semiotext(e).Webster, F. (2002), Theories of the Information Society, New York: Routledge.Writers Guild of America (2008), Schedule of Minimums: Theatrical and Basic

Agreement, February 13, http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/ contracts/min2008.pdf. Accessed 21 March 2009.

Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005), Wr: D. Koepp and D. Kamps, Dir: J. Favreau, US, 113 mins.

SUGGESTED CITATIONConor, B. (2010), ‘‘Everybody’s a Writer’ Theorizing screenwriting as creative

labour’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 27–43, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.27/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSBridget Conor is a Ph.D. candidate in the media and communication stud-ies department of Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her disserta-tion is a critical analysis of screenwriting as creative labour in the British



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and North American film industries. She is also a lecturer in media and film theory in the UK. Previously, Bridget taught and studied in Auckland, New Zealand, her research focusing on the globalisation of the New Zealand film industry.

Contact: Goldsmiths College, 8 Lewisham Way, New Cross London, SE14 6NW.E-mail: [email protected]


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KEYWORDSScreen Idea Work

Group (SIWG)screenwriterinterviewsdoxabest practicecraft skillsproduction analysis

IAN W. MACDONALD University of Leeds

‘…So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic’ The Screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group

ABSTRACTThe Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG) is a flexibly constructed group organ-ized around the development and production of a screen idea; a hypotheti-cal grouping of those professional workers involved in conceptualizing and developing fictional narrative work for any particular moving image screen idea. In this article, I use the notion of the SIWG to draw together the views of key workers about how the process of screen idea development works – or doesn’t. My findings are based on a small ethnographic study I undertook in 2004, in which, through in-depth semi-structured interviews with seven SIWG workers, I attempted to understand how they came to occupy their role, how they felt their judgements were made and received, and how far the SIWG’s view of the screen idea accorded with the screenwriting doxa (characterized as how to do a ‘good’ piece of work). As detailed below, their answers were concerned with status, a sense of self-worth and respect, points of tension, power, control, collaboration and trust, and the nature of the doxa itself.

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1. For example, the UK professional journal Scriptwriter has included articles fairly regularly on what is wrong with the industry’s relationship with the screenwriter, such as in issues 6 (September 2002), 7 (November 2002), 8 (January 2003), 10 (May 2003), 15 (March 2004), 17 (July 2004), 21 (March 2005), 22 (May 2005)… etc.

2. See, for example, Bourdieu (1984; 1993; 1996).

3. The doxa is therefore the internalized practice of a set of norms based around a particular orthodoxy. The doxa also informs the habitus, and the feeling of ‘rightness’ that comes with the doxa will contribute to the (re-)composition of the habitus. This disposes the ‘agent’ to make judgements in the same or similar way in the future, in an almost circular fashion.

4. For more information on this study, see Macdonald (2004c), Chapter 7.

If you believe the stories, film and TV screenwriters are frequently struggling in an already tough freelance business.1 They are misunder-stood, unappreciated and ignored, and what creative power they have is neutralized before anything gets going. Their one bargaining chip – their creative idea – is exchanged for a contract, and from that point on they are at the mercy of anyone that has even junior executive status. One writer I talked to (on condition of anonymity) was bitter about the treatment he’d received from film and TV companies, who wanted his scripts but not his opinions once he had delivered his drafts:

[I] mostly have to deal with idiots [who] don’t know what I do, how difficult it is. The pay is ridiculous in the UK. Meetings can easily be cancelled… [there is a] courtesy problem. [I also have experience outside the UK] – but instead they want me to disappear. There’s a lot riding on it for me, so it’s not surprising that I’m neurotic and nervous.

(Writer ‘B’ 2003)

So what is the screenwriter’s role in relation to the development of the screen idea, and to the others involved in that process? I have argued previously (Macdonald 2004a) that the study of screenwriting as a practice can be approached using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habi-tus’, which he developed to describe how individuals form a system of dispositions within a culture and area of activity, and which then work to structure practice.2 Habitus provides the practice with its normative codes, which are (re-)internalized as ‘best practice’, craft skills and so on. Best practice becomes the doxa – the way we feel it is done best in the rules of the game – which is articulated as an orthodoxy or doc-trine via manuals and other ‘how-to’ books and articles.3

Secondly, I have argued that such practice congregates around a shared screen idea rather than focusing on a specific written text (Macdonald 2004b). Thirdly, I have also suggested the idea of a Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG) as a flexible and semi-formal work unit that congregates around the screen idea, and whose members contribute to its development (Macdonald 2004c; 2008). In this article I describe the notion of the SIWG, based on a small ethnographic study undertaken in 2004. In this I attempted, through in-depth semi-structured inter-views with seven SIWG workers, to understand how these workers viewed their creative involvement, and how they believed it worked in relation to each other and to their industrial context.4 The quote above comes from a screenwriter interviewed for this project.

The Screen Idea Work Group is a conceit; it is a researcher’s way of understanding how a process takes place around something that is non-existent (the screen idea). The concept is taken from the ‘flexible work group’ referred to by Helen Blair (2001, 2003), where she talked of a figuration – using Norbert Elias’ term – of networks of interde-pendence between freelance workers in a fairly closed industry. It is


‘...So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic’ …

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5. The well known and respected TV adaptor Andrew Davies offered an amusing and revealing example of his relationship with his director in his 1995 Royal TV Society Huw Wheldon Lecture (Davies 1995).

a flexibly constructed work group organized around the development and production of a screen idea; a hypothetical grouping of those pro-fessional workers (with, potentially, a few non-professionals) involved in conceptualizing and developing fictional narrative work for any particular moving image screen idea.

Of course one could argue that the kind of opinion contained in this quote from Screenwriter B above is not confined to writers, and that ridiculously low pay, short cuts around courtesy and a lack of interest in previous experience is what some other people also put up with in the film and TV industry. These kinds of comments are individual reactions to the way the film and TV industries are organ-ized, and also represent the common understanding in the business of ‘how it works’ (or the doxa). People know it’s a tough business, and there may even be a rough sense of pride in surviving it.

However, the negative and personal nature of such comments still characterize such problems as fixable at the individual level, or as issues for strategic action. There is little sense that they might be systemic, entrenched in the doxa itself. In other words, the assumption – whether generally negative or not – appears to be that better treatment for screenwriters lies in recognizing their authority as true originators of the screen idea, and therefore of their deeper, more fundamental understand-ing of it. Screenwriters deserve higher status and better treatment (the argument might go) because they know the idea better than others. But it stops short of demanding change to the system, of (for example) claiming an authority for the writer that might trump the director. In practice some of those writers who have developed a personal status that might be powerful enough to cross that demarcation line, shy away from claiming it.5 Others, like Dennis Potter, seek more power by becoming hyphenates (e.g. writer-producer, writer-director), which solves an individual prob-lem without changing what appears to characterize the writer’s role.

Some production studies, like Georgina Born’s 1997 study of news production in the BBC (Born, 2002) reveal, as David Hesmondhalgh says, what creative staff struggle with – real dilemmas and difficul-ties involved in making public service broadcasting (Hesmondhalgh 2006: 83). This emphasizes the inner dynamics of institutions while also suggesting ‘the continuing existence of spaces where relative inde-pendence can exist’ (Hesmondhalgh 2006: 84). I suggest that study-ing the conceptualization of fiction production for the moving image in terms of firstly the doxa, and secondly of the specific practices of the SIWG, can be useful in understanding the link between produc-tion practices and text. It could explain how ‘relatively independent’ working is encouraged, shaped, directed and channelled as well as constrained; and also how that process informs the development of the screen idea into something this group of workers recognizes as legiti-mate in their understanding of a moving image narrative. In this article I use the notion of the SIWG to draw together the views of key work-ers about how they perceive the process of screen idea development works – or doesn’t.


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6. For example, Todd Gitlin’s excellent analysis of the US networks in the 1980s (1985); or Feuer, Kerr and Vahimagi’s useful study of the MTM production company (1980). Roger Silverstone’s Framing Science (1985) is a good example of a factual production analysis. All these include useful information about early screen idea development, but the focus on individual cases makes it harder to draw general conclusions about common patterns of development.

7. For example, Parker (1998: 42–43), McKee (1999: 415) or Cattrysse (2003). See also Patrick Cattrysse’s article in this issue of the Journal of Screenwriting.

This kind of study is, I suggest, a form of production analysis which concentrates on the early conceptualization of the production. Production analysis can help in understanding why a screenwork is like it is, but such studies often concentrate on the later and practical ele-ments of production post- script development, and are usually descrip-tive of specific cases. This limits the generalizations that might be made.6 Individual biographies or production diaries are also helpful in under-standing the creative context, but again such approaches reinforce the sense of individual actions taken in the context of a specified role within a production – Hesmondhalgh’s space of ‘relative independence’. In relation to the study of screen idea development in general, however, two suggestions offer areas for further consideration. First, John Corner has suggested that the development of screen ideas from pre-production through to viewing the final film can be seen as a series of transfor-mations (Corner 2008: 125). The direction of these transformations is influenced by (or even determined by) decisions made in response to specific and significant elements – from TV network policy to ele-ments identifying a particular company style, to practical interventions in project development like changes in location, budget, schedule or even censorship rulings. In relation to these elements, the more overt judgements and decisions usually occur some way into the production process. However, less obvious is what informs decisions made in the early stages, when people are assessing and developing the perceived general worth of the screen idea. This occurs in the perhaps ‘purer’ air of script development rather than in pre-production proper, where realities intrude on creative suggestions.

Second, as Newcomb and Lotz have suggested (2002: 76), the emphasis on struggles and power relations in accounts of produc-tion sometimes obscures the collaborative nature of such work, which also obscures the nature of that collaboration and what underpins it. It may be easier to observe decisions made in response to the kinds of changes mentioned above, than it is to identify the quieter decisions made in agreement with others. But one assumption must surely be that screenwriters and their colleagues wish to reach amicable agree-ment about the screen idea and its meanings, and that such collabora-tion is an important factor in deciding the eventual screenwork.

Before looking more closely at the transformations, collaborations and conflicts within the SIWG, two observations on the conventional framework within which screenwriters are invited to work – the current doxa – are pertinent, as this is the basis for collaboration and communi-cation. Usually referred to as ‘craft skills’, the doxa is well documented in manuals and underpinned by courses for budding screenwriters, and by the UK’s training agency for screenwriting, Skillset, when approving such courses. The professional discourse of screenwriting has recently become more overt with a proliferation of works during the last fifteen years, marked by increasing discussion in the professional arena about specific aspects of orthodox practice such as terminological incon-sistency.7 Screenwriting manuals reinforce the status quo, while their



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8. To get a clearer sense of the extent of this ‘normalisation’, in 2003 I conducted a representative survey of concepts and terminology. I analysed twelve manuals (six British and six US), and cross-referenced the similarities. An analysis of terms and concepts produced a very close fit. For a full account of this see Macdonald (2004c), chapter 3.

9. The concept of elective interaction with others, in a hybrid activity between consumer and producer – ‘prosumers’ or ‘produsers’ – has been discussed recently, e.g. by Bruns (2008).

10. The importance of the screenplay as text is also implicit in academic studies such as Sternberg (1997). She also makes the point that it is an ‘unstable’ document open to various interpretations (Sternberg 1997: 1), effectively allowing its unreliability and partial nature. See also Pasolini ([1966] 1977).

proliferation offers the impression of difference in the field. However, there is little or no difference. The point is that they all offer a consistent normative framework representing a specific approach to storytelling on screen, even where there is some variation between what Philip Parker has called the ‘new structuralists’ (2000: 66) and those presenting ‘alter-natives’ such as Dancyger and Rush (2002).8 Secondly it is important to note this as a discourse which characterizes the process of screenwriting as individual, personal and oriented towards a goal that is qualitative and universal – that is, possessing merits independent of its industrial brief. It connects the industrial need of commercial film-making with the subjective mindset of an individual worker, and it makes a clear appeal to the screenwriter to put aside any questions, and immerse themselves in the process of writing. Debate within the doxa is usually restricted to ways of understanding the orthodoxy – the secrets of how it is done. This is seductive, as it offers systematic help to the struggling individual, and promises you can write any content as long as it is written ‘this’ way.

Of course screenwriting is only ‘individual’ for as long as it takes for the writer – working within the doxa – to complete the first draft (or even treatment). When this is produced, the screen idea is then developed through a social process amongst a ‘community of practitioners’, as Bill Nichols put it (1991: 14). However, this is not a democratic community as Nichols implies in his model (though there are democratic elements to it), and neither is it elective or self-nominating as Internet groups are.9 Drawn together for the purpose of developing the screen idea, the Screen Idea Work Group simply refers collectively to all those who have some direct connection with the development of the screen idea.

This notion of the SIWG allows us to consider the screen idea devel-opment process both in general terms and in terms of what is specific to that particular production. We can avoid being limited to discussion of activity linked to an individual role as currently demarcated, such as what the director commonly does or does not do. We might identify how judgements and decisions are made within the changing flux of power relations in this group, and in relation to screen idea and to the industrial field and the field of power. We might consider the habitus of the individ-uals, the extent of the constraints and possible spaces allowed for nego-tiation within the field of film and TV drama production, the imported status of those individuals, the social power they actually wield, and the actual negotiation processes involved in the working of that SIWG.

It is, I claim, easier to think of a group working in both formal and informal ways to shape this screen idea than it is to accept the com-monly described linear model of a succession of individuals crafting a script like some kind of object passing down a Fordist production line. I suggest it also helps to get away from focusing on the importance of the script itself; not as a document of record, because it is clearly the main written evidence of the screen idea, and the main document that people work with,10 but because the people around it are not working with the script alone. They work with their notion of the screen idea in the contexts of that document and of that particular group.


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The orthodox account of creating a screen idea is characterized as a process of script development that involves workers in different roles and having different status. It characterizes these roles as almost set in stone, even if an individual can hold several at once, such as a writer-producer – a hyphenate. The impression given is that a good development process is one in which everyone knows their place and contributes ideas that serve an ideally constructed screen idea. Even in the wider ‘Triangle’ model of producer/writer/director collaboration, there is an assumption of ‘passing the parcel’ as many times as is necessary in the expectation of progress.

Accounting for the creation and development of the screen idea using the SIWG model is less rigid and more wide-ranging. The SIWG is made up of all those people who have a direct relationship to that particular screen idea. We can sub-divide the group into two ver-sions – firstly the group as it exists and works before any concretization of production, and secondly the group as it works once practicalities like actual footage or availability of personnel and equipment inform or even drive decisions. This effectively means a slightly different character to the group before and after the start of principal photography.

Core members of the group before principal photography takes place are considered to be those who are required to write, read, comment on, contribute to or otherwise shape or influence the screen idea as a direct consequence of their role as currently defined. In conventional practice this would be the writer, the script reader, the script editor (a TV term) or development executive (a film term), the producer and/or the commissioning editor or department head, and the director. These are considered ‘core’ in that they will almost always be represented in a SIWG.

Others will also be involved and may be influential during this time. They might include the art director, the location scout, the actors, or any-one else with whom core members have a strong relationship. Executives may get involved, even financial backers who have no other involvement except to read the script and approve it (or not). They may give back notes and get credits as Executive Producers, for example. Membership of this hypothetical group could even extend to a friend in the bar who offers his own ending to the story, for consideration. The point is that membership of the group is flexible, and may extend to the unorthodox, non-professional or even fleeting, but every SIWG has the same purpose and goal – it serves and discusses a screen idea in order to agree, as far as possible, what should constitute the emerging screenwork.

If we use the notion of the SIWG to construct a small survey of opinions of key workers, we might clarify both what occurs during screen idea development, and how this process affects and is viewed by those involved. This could study either a specific group based around an actual screen idea, or could be used to draw more generalized con-clusions by targeting key workers who have worked on different screen ideas. As a small-scale exercise to test the practicality of this, I targeted seven workers representing the core roles involved in any mainstream SIWG (see Table 1). These were three writers, a producer, a director, a



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script reader (TV) and a development executive (film). They also repre-sented some key differences in gender, race, industry experience, and location within and outside London. I was trying to understand what went on in general, using specific but different experiences to build up a composite picture of conventional practice.

In semi-structured interviews lasting 60–90 minutes I asked inter-viewees questions designed to elicit how they got to occupy their role, how they felt their judgements were made and received, how far the SIWG’s view of the screen idea accorded with the screenwriting doxa, and what might have shaped, constrained or restrained the judge-ments of those involved. I asked them about screen idea development, the concept of ‘good’ screenwriting, the training of screenwriters and their sense of the audience. Their answers came back as being con-cerned with status, sense of self-worth and respect, points of ten-sion, power, control, collaboration and trust; as well as being about the nature of the ‘doxa’ (characterized as how to do a ‘good’ piece of work). The three writers, the director and script reader discussed their personal power in negative terms, with only the development exec and the producer appearing to be satisfied with their personal power and status. This seemed to be based on their direct experiences of treatment received, with all giving examples. The writers in particular talked of being ‘constantly rejected’ (Writer B 2003) and ‘being locked out of decisions’ (Writer A 2003) and of being led into directions they were not inclined to go down; ‘all the banging your head against a wall thinking yes, but this isn’t what I wanted to write’ (Writer F 2004).

The opposition of power and control versus collaboration and trust was a balance important to all interviewees, and this seems to go to the heart of the operation of a SIWG. Good experiences were those

Writers Others Total

White 3 3 6

Non-white 1 0 1

Male 2 2 4

Female 1 2 3

Film experience* 2 4 6

TV experience* 2 4 6

London location 2 3 5

Regional location 1 1 2

*NB: Some interviewees appear in both these categories. Source: author’s analysis of interviewee information, 2003/2004.

Table 1: Origin and background of seven selected script-ideaworkers.


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11. ‘Format’ here refers to shape, style, tone and genre of this series, not (necessarily or only) to script format.

in which the interviewee felt both empowered and trusted, as well as trusting the judgement of colleagues; and unsurprisingly these occurred with people of similar backgrounds and experience. Bad experiences were those where there was disagreement leading to a breakdown of trust, which seemed to happen when there was a change in person-nel or direction of the project for external reasons, together with a difference in cultural vision. It was a separation of views of the screen idea that seemed to lead to breakdowns in trust, the point where what might be an undercurrent of differences in opinion became less of a negotiation and more of a power struggle.

Cultural differences really came to a head in the [nth] series. Until then [the director] had been following the format11 laid down by other directors. Now there was a chance for him to re-con-ceive the whole project in his own [way]. He knew more about the American market… From being recognisably English in the old sense, it was given this very North American quality. The music [for example] … suddenly became very North American. Completely changed the tone.

(Writer A 2003)

Here the aesthetic judgements of the writers were successfully chal-lenged, mistakenly in Writer A’s opinion. This particular TV series was always a UK/North American co-production. While the concept of the series was stable, based on a UK audience and culture, the balance of power fell in favour of the judgements of a UK producer and writers. When market circumstances forced some form of change on the pro-duction team, the UK producer was not invited to join the new team. The concept of the series spin-off changed towards the ‘mid-Atlantic’ in the attempt to address the North American market more strongly, and in favour of the judgements of the North American producer and director, who demanded changes and rewrites to the scripts. In the opinion of Writer A, it lost its British television values; ‘we can never match the same kind of production values as some of those American series, yet we were trying – to me that was a mistake’ (Writer A 2003).

The redevelopment of this series shows a realignment of cultural vision after these market forces intervened, which resulted in a change of personnel and shift in control of the content, and a different set of judgements being made. To that extent it can be said that the writers’ dispositions were being challenged by others, and that their sense of what was good judgement was not (fully) working within the new power structure, whether or not the series succeeded in its market aims. It cannot be said, however, that the writers did not (then or eventually) adapt completely to a different market; only that, in this example of change, the stimulus of external forces on opposing dispo-sitions created a rift in views of the screen idea, and that one prevailed to create the form of the new series. The writers had to accept defeat. This example shows how a TV drama series can change radically as a



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result of a shift in the operation of the SIWG, even while retaining the original screenwriters writing the same kind of storylines.

What about film production? In another example, Writer B describes the personal dislike that he took to the people in the company that wanted to produce his treatment and first draft. After various con-tractual moves over some time, the same company acquired the script but not the writer, suggesting the feeling was mutual. According to the writer, the screen idea changed radically after his departure and it no longer ‘worked’ because the genre did not fit the different context. Here, judgements could not be made in common and disagreement was terminal, for the writer. In this example, Writer B was originally working with one producer with whom he agreed, but eventually another SIWG took over the screen idea and developed it differently.

These examples highlight differences, but shot through all the interviewees’ comments was the clear desire to find common ground on which to collaborate. This takes the Newcomb and Lotz observa-tion mentioned above a bit further, in that collaboration seems to be the desired way of working. It is when individual struggles for power and control become important, and when market and industrial pres-sures combine with individual habitus to bring about difference of opin-ion that can be acted upon, that trust breaks down and collaboration ceases. At that point the character and operation of that SIWG changes. The well-known term ‘development hell’ suggests (anecdotally at least) that difficulty and breakdowns are not uncommon. Such a conclusion implies that our conventional industrial model places the screenwriter in a difficult position personally; this is often damaging to the ego, and it’s tough to survive that.

If the Screen Idea Work Group is based on the desire for collabora-tion, the basis for that collaboration and communication is clearly the doxa. Conventional craft skills, and a shared vocabulary of technical terms were mentioned and used (although one interviewee did not believe the trend towards greater use of such terminology was add-ing value). There is a universal belief amongst these interviewees in the ‘admirable screenplay’, a piece of consecrated work whose quali-ties are difficult to define but which are clear ‘when you see it’. It is believed that this is achieved once a screen idea has been developed in accordance with the doxa, but which then somehow transcends the ordinary. The admirable screenplay appears to aim particularly at four specific goals associated with industrial practicability: realizability; an appropriate structure; a clear thesis, and some aspect of originality (or perhaps novelty). Good screenwriting, according to all the interview-ees except one writer, is something that connects subjectively with the reader. ‘Great screenwriting’ is something that transcends the frame-work of craft skills. These are orthodox views that do little to illumi-nate the process of screen idea development, except to show that their holders have absorbed professional screenwriting culture to a point where they rarely question their practice and accept it as the norm. What constitutes or leads to admired work can therefore only be


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divined from the previous work of professionals, including their repu-tation and their contribution to the discourses of taste. Development Executive G describes discussion of the screen idea commonly in rela-tion to previous screenworks; ‘which film are we going to use as our touchstone?’ (Development Executive G 2004). As Reader E suggests, it is important to know the field; ‘watch as much as possible what else has been made, old and new, good and bad, so that you can see what works and what doesn’t, and you can learn why people make the judgements that people make’ (Reader E 2004).

This is another invitation to join the illusio as Bourdieu terms it (1996: 228), the game of using and constructing the field, including acceptance of conventional notions of what works and what does not. The suggestion from interviewees’ responses is that the ‘admi-rable screenplay’ is something ‘new’ and emotionally engaging, a singularity that is usually described as original or from an original voice, and the provenance of which is assumed to be the genius of the writer. The description of how this transcendence occurs is vague, and acknowledges nothing of the cultural and normative context that might define ‘new’ in the first place. It is not surprising therefore that normative discourse in development always characterizes the produc-tion of something genuinely new as difficult.

So, in general how does this hypothetical SIWG appear to work? It is based around the conventional production hierarchy (led by the producer or executive producer), through which decisions are made or confirmed. This is affected by institutional factors, by professional status, by other forms of social status both inside and outside the field, and by power granted to individuals through the operation of both artistic and commercial capital in the marketplace. If the group were to meet, this would be the social framework in which the screen idea was initially discussed. However, there is also a second and level-ling factor in operation as development progresses, in its discourse of artistic practice and craft skills – it does allow for lower status mem-bers of the group to offer opinion on the screen idea, on almost equal terms. If the script reader, as a junior member, described various prob-lems with the script in articulate and perceptive ways, their influence on the idea is likely to increase. Anyone from teaboy upwards could suggest an improvement that might have a significant bearing on the final screenwork, even if this contribution is eventually uncredited or filtered through the intervention of others. This kind of contribution informs but does not threaten the decision-making process, control-led or directed by the powerful within the group.

This is authorship on two levels. The first level is intended as collab-orative within the official hierarchy and conventions, where individuals collaborate to present a coherent version of a screenwork according to accepted parameters and social status. In this there are contributions from official and acknowledged authors, demarcated, specialized, even informal but likely to be credited on the screenwork. Then there is the second, rather more anarchistic process in which ALL those individuals



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12. See Barthes’ S/Z (1974), and Macdonald (2004b, 2009).

involved negotiate a place for their ideas within the screen idea. They do collaborate but also compete to present and legitimize their version of the screen idea outside the framework of observable and conven-tional power relationships. Successful adoption of a contribution does not necessarily reflect the power structure, as all members of the group usually subscribe to some kind of consensus about the screen idea in question, and how it should operate. This means that any contribution to the screen idea is absorbed into the official hierarchy and conven-tional ways of working and – importantly – is (re-)directed towards the commonly understood goal of producing a particular (type of) screen-work. As Newcomb and Lotz suggested, in relation to the production structure of a US TV drama, ‘it would be wrong to suggest that unequal power relations always reflect fundamentally opposed perspectives, or that ‘winners’ exercise power in order to obliterate the ideas and contri-butions of “losers”’ (Newcomb and Lotz 2002: 76).

Working on the screen idea then, during the period of script devel-opment, is a complex process which acknowledges some contribu-tions but not others, where the power that comes with status is used in decision-making but where acceptance of ideas does not always relate to status, where judgements are made in relation to the doxa of screenwriting and its surrounding culture as well as in relation to direct market and institutional pressures and where, as Roland Barthes might put it, a writerly process is directed towards a readerly goal.12

The way the SIWG works requires an individual to submit their contributions to a process of review and decision-making in an arena fraught with social complexities, industrial and cultural conventions and individual habitus masquerading as ‘sound artistic judgement’. This makes the screenwriter immediately vulnerable, as noted at the start of this article – their status as the originator of the screen idea is initially high, until others have become familiar with it and begin contributing, but then the writer is in practice no different from any other contributor. Of course their official status as writer comes with a level of respect that demands diplomacy in how they are treated, and it is likely that their experience and familiarity with the project affords them a higher chance of making valuable contributions, but the conventional role of the screenwriter requires them to relinquish control of decision-making in the screen idea. On a personal level this is never going to be easy, especially in the freelance and pressurized film industry in the UK, because their dispensability reduces their lev-erage, to use Joseph Turow’s phrase (1997: 26).

This small study (and my accompanying arguments) is merely a pointer to future work. I suggest it indicates the value of studying group practice as an SIWG, and it raises a few possible conclusions that need further investigation. Firstly it suggests that professional screenwriters are likely to believe in an orthodox way of doing things – even if it is approximate in their view – which doesn’t just inform their work – it forms their work. I suggest tha t thinking of their work in terms of the screen idea and the SIWG helps to recognize how this orthodox discourse


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underpins the, sometimes confusing, world of actual production. This is not to suggest that all such groups work in the same way, though one could argue that all have some sort of relationship to the doxa.

Second, by understanding the process as one of developing the screen idea, we can link production to conceptualization and to text through the study of the provenance of specific screenworks. This is not just in terms of trying to identify textual progress in screenplay drafts, or of attributing authorship, or of institutional pressures and internal power struggles, or of other drivers such as a public service broadcasting ethos, but also in the membership and activity of a par-ticular SIWG in the service of a particular screen idea.

This approach also re-places the study of the screenplay in its context. Instead of looking at it either as an inferior version of the screenwork, or as a literary work of art in its own right, it can be seen as a stylized expression of a screen idea at a particular moment. It is therefore neither separated from its purpose, nor unappreciated for its own beauties. It can be poetic, and appreciated as such – Carl Mayer’s Sunrise (1927) or Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1970), for exam-ple, are both sparing and expressive, even poetic and wonderful to read on the page. They work as literary pieces expressing the visual, read according to the conventions of the screenplay. But they also record what was thought to work at that moment, and in that sense they are as valid an expression of the screen idea as the later screenwork. The ‘progress’ of development may not (always) be a linear process.

Lastly the notion of the Screen Idea Work Group is not intended to replace the sense of individual authorship, despite the implication that collectively the SIWG is the true site of the emerging screen idea. Attribution of, or credit for, creative ideas is not the purpose of this way of studying screen idea development. It is instead intended as a way of understanding what actually happens when a moving image narrative is conceived, developed and produced. It is a way of seeing what conventions, attitudes, judgements and taste inform that particular screen idea; and how they interact to produce the work collectively regarded as – if not good – then satisfactory for the pur-poses of production.

REFERENCESBarthes, Roland (1974), S/Z, Oxford, Blackwell.Blair, Helen (2001), ‘“You’re Only as Good as Your Last Job”: the Labour

Process and Labour Market in the British Film Industry’, Work, employment and society, 15:1, pp. 149–169.

Blair, Helen (2003), ‘Winning and losing in flexible labour markets: the forma-tion and operation of networks of interdependence in the UK film indus-try’, Sociology, 37:4, pp. 677–694.

Born, Georgina (2002), ‘Reflexivity and ambivalence: culture, creativity and government in the BBC’, Cultural Values, 6:1/2, pp. 65–90.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984), Distinction. A social critique of the judgement of taste, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.



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Bourdieu, Pierre (1993), The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1996), The Rules of Art, Cambridge: Polity Press.Bruns, Axel (2008), Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: from production to

produsage, Oxford: Peter Lang.Cattrysse, Patrick (2003), ‘Training in Scriptwriting’, Scriptwriter, 9, March,

pp. 48–53.Cleary, Stephen (2002), Short Documents, unpublished course notes on docu-

ments used in development of the screen idea, London: Arista.Corner, John (2008), ‘On Documentary’, in Glen Creeber (ed.), The TV Genre

Book, Second Edition, London: British Film Institute/Palgrave, pp. 123–127.Creeber, Glen (ed.) (2008), The TV Genre Book, Second Edition, London: British

Film Institute/Palgrave.Dancyger, Ken and Rush, Jeff (2002), Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully

Breaking the Rules, Third Edition, Boston, MA: Focal Press.Davies, Andrew (1995), ‘Prima Donnas and Job Lots’, The Huw Wheldon

Memorial Lecture (for the Royal Television Society), London: British Universities Film and Video Council.

Egri, Lajos (1960), The Art of Dramatic Writing, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Feuer, Jane, Kerr, Paul and Vahimagi, Tise (eds) (1980), MTM : ‘quality televi-sion’, London: BFI.

Field, Syd (1994), Screenplay. The Foundations of Screenwriting from Concept to Finished Script, expanded edition, New York: Dell.

Frensham, Raymond (1996), Teach Yourself Screenwriting, London: Hodder Headline.

Friedmann, Julian (1995), How to make money Scriptwriting, London: Boxtree Press.

Gitlin, Todd (1985), Inside Primetime, NY: Pantheon.Grove, Elliot (2001), raindance writer’s lab: write + sell the hot screenplay,

London: Focal Press.Hauge, Michael (1992), Writing screenplays that sell, British Edition, London:

Elm Tree Books.Hesmondhalgh, David (ed.) (2006), Media Production, Maidenhead: Open

University Press.Jensen, Klaus Bruhn (ed.) (2002), A Handbook of Media and Communication

Research. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies, London: Routledge.Kubrick, Stanley (1970), Clockwork Orange, shooting script, 07/09/70, London,

Hollywood Scripts [distributor]. 107 pp.Macdonald, Ian W. (2004a), ‘Manuals are not enough: relating screenwriting

practice to theories’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1:2, pp. 260–274.Macdonald, Ian W. (2004b) ‘Disentangling the screen idea’, Journal of Media

Practice, 5:2, pp. 89–99.Macdonald, Ian W. (2004c), ‘The presentation of the screen idea in narrative film-

making’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University. Macdonald, Ian W. (2008), ‘“It’s not surprising I’m neurotic!” The screen idea

and the Screen Idea Work Group’, paper by invitation at Behind the scenes of cultural production, mediatization of culture seminar, 25–26 September 2008, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. A version of this paper was also delivered as a lecture at Shih-Hsin University, Taipei, 10 April 2009.

Macdonald, Ian W. (forthcoming 2009), ‘Behind the mask of the screenplay: the screen idea’, in Clive Myer (ed.) (forthcoming 2009), Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice, London: Wallflower Press.


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Mayer, Carl (1927), Sunrise. A Song of Two Humans. Photoplay. [Los Angeles, Fox Film Corporation] [DVD]. [London], Eureka Video, 2003 [distributor].

McKee, Robert (1999), Story. Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, London: Methuen.

Myer, Clive (ed.) (forthcoming 2009), Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice, London: Wallflower Press.

Newcomb, Horace and Lotz, Amanda (2002), ‘The production of media fiction’, Klaus Bruhn Jensen (ed.), A Handbook of Media and Communication Research. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies, London: Routledge, pp. 62–77.

Nichols, Bill (1991), Representing Reality: issues and concepts in documentary, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Parker, Philip (1998), The Art and Science of Screenwriting, Exeter: Intellect Books.

Parker, Philip (2000), ‘Reconstructing Narrative’, Journal of Media Practice, 1:2, pp. 66–74.

Pasolini, Pier Paulo ([1966] 1977), ‘The Scenario as a structure designed to become another structure’, Wide Angle, 2:1, pp. 40–47. (Originally publis-hed in Pasolini, Pier Paulo (1966), Uccellacci e Uccellini, Milan: Garzanti.)

Silverstone, Roger (1985), Framing Science: the making of a BBC documentary, London: British Film Institute.

Sternberg, Claudia (1997), Written for the Screen. The American motion-picture screenplay as text, Tuebingen: Stauffenberg Verlag.

Tobin, Rob (2000), How to write high structure, high concept movies, Santa Monica, CA: Xlibris Corporation.

Trottier, David (1998), The screenwriter’s bible. A complete guide to writing, for-matting and selling your script, Third edition, Los Angeles: Silman-James.

Turow, Joseph (1997), Media Systems in Society. Understanding Industries, Strategies and Power, second edition, New York: Longman.

SUGGESTED CITATIONMacdonald, I. W. (2010), ‘‘...So It’s not surprising I’m neurotic’ The Screenwriter

and the Screen Idea Work Group’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 45–58, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.45/1

Contact: University of Leeds, LS2 9JT.Phone: +44 113 343 5816 (incl. voicemail)E-mail: [email protected]



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KEYWORDSscreenwritingfilm schoolsDanish cinemacollaborationauthorship

EVA NOVRUP REDVALLFilm and Media Studies Section, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

Teaching screenwriting in a time of storytelling blindness: the meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish film-making

ABSTRACTThis article analyses how the approach to screenwriting in Danish cinema has undergone major changes from an auteur-oriented film culture in the 1960s with basically no professional screenwriters, to a ‘collaborative auteur’ industry where screenwriting is now a recognized craft and screenwriters are established professionals in the film industry. Focusing on the histori-cal development of the Screenwriting Department at the National Film School of Denmark, the article discusses how the educational emphasis on teaching screenwriting has had an impact on Danish cinema both by introducing a basic understanding of screenwriting models and tools

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for a new generation of Danish film-makers, and by developing a common awareness of the importance of screenwriting as well as successful collabora-tions in creative teams. The article highlights how, after widespread enthusi-asm over the emergence of successful screenwriters, there are currently debates about the dangers of professionalization as well as critical voices calling for a return to a more personal kind of auteur film-making. Finally, it is suggested that further investigation of the nature of close collaborations between direc-tors and screenwriters, now more prevalent in Denmark, can provide interest-ing material for new perspectives in discussions of authorship.

‘It was a time of storytelling blindness’ (Fredholm 2006: 18). This is how one Danish director described his time at the National Film School of Denmark (NFSD) soon after it was first established in 1966. In the years following the introduction of the auteur theory and the films of the New Wave, issues like story structure and dramaturgy were not on the curriculum. There was a widespread suspicion ofclassical ‘Hollywood’ principles, and screenwriting was not something that was taught during its first decade.

Some critical studies of the state of European cinema have argued that the ‘auteur culture’ of European film has marginalized screen-writers and led to a lack of focus on screenwriting and development (e.g. Finney 1994, 1996). In this article I analyse how the approach to screenwriting has changed dramatically in Danish film since the establishment of the NFSD. Focusing on the challenges which faced the Screenwriting Department from the mid 1970s, the article will highlight how the educational emphasis on screenwriting has had an impact on Danish cinema; not only by introducing a basic under-standing of screenwriting models and tools, but also by developing a shared language between professions and a common awareness of the importance of screenwriting as well as successful creative teams.

The approach to screenwriting in Denmark has undergone a major change from an auteur-oriented Danish film culture with basically no professional screenwriters to the ‘collaborative auteur’ industry of today where screenwriting is a recognized craft and an established profession, and screenwriters are considered important collaborators in the film-making process.

THE NATIONAL CONTEXTAs has been discussed by a number of scholars, Danish film has under-gone major changes since the mid-1990s. On a financial and structural as well as a textual level, the effects of globalization have influenced the small national Danish film industry (Bondebjerg and Hjort 2001; Schepelern 2001; Hjort 2005). An ambitious plan of action from the Danish Film Institute (DFI) helped boost film funding considerably in the late 1990s, while the new Film Act of 1997 and the reorganization of the DFI has changed the institutional framework (Mathieu 2006; Darmer, Mathieu et al. 2007). Major new industry players like Zentropa


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1. Not surprisingly, many film professionals with a focus on screenwriting are not happy with the auteur theory. After the publication of Sarris’s writings, the film critic Richard Corliss thus replied with a ‘Screenwriter’s Theory’ in Talking Pictures: Screenwriting in the American Cinema 1927–1973. The debate is still alive in recent books like David Kipen’s The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (2006).

and Nimbus Film have emerged (Darmer, Pedersen and Brorsen 2007), and the financing of the films has gone from a mainly national focus towards international co-production or co-financing (Brandstrup and Redvall 2005). On the textual level, Lars von Trier and the Dogma 95 Manifesto has had a great influence on the output of films and their international positioning (Hjort and MacKenzie 2003; Schepelern 2001), and a number of prestigious prizes as well as local box office hits have made audiences turn to Danish films, producing an impressive mar-ket share ranging from 24 to 33 per cent of the domestic box office in admissions since 2001 (Danish Film Institute 2002–2009).

However, one aspect of this blossoming time for Danish film that has not received much attention is how screenwriting has become a respected craft and profession during these years of success. Several directors have found inspiration and help in working with a screen-writer, and this article argues that a crucial reason for the emergence of the screenwriter as an important collaborator is the establishment of a full-time screenwriting department at the NFSD, and consequently an almost paradigmatic change in the status of storytelling techniques and dramaturgy. Focusing on the development of the NFSD Screenwriting Department, this article takes a historical approach using written Danish sources together with qualitative interviews, to show some of the effects of teaching basic storytelling tools combined with the deliberate inten-tion of creating collaborations between directors and screenwriters.

SCREENWRITING VS. THE AUTEUR TRADITIONScreenwriting as an independent profession has been under pres-sure in European cinema since the ideal of the auteur with a focus on the ‘caméra-stylo’ to express a personal vision was introduced in the 1950s (Truffaut 1954). American film has always had a stronger industrial tradition in screenwriting, even though the auteur theory has also been influential in American film. As argued by Tom Stempel (2000) in his history of American screenwriting, the general accept-ance of the theory had grave consequences for screenwriters follow-ing Andrew Sarris’s translation of the thoughts behind la politique des auteurs (Sarris 1962) and the publication of his ‘auteur bible’ The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–68 (1968). According to Stempel, one of the charges against the theory is that it created an inaccurate view of American film history and the role of screenwriters in it (Stempel 2000: 192).1

The auteur theory does not imply that a director is himself a screen-writer, necessarily. Many of the directors celebrated by the originators of the auteur theory worked in the American studio system, where they managed to give their films a personal signature in spite of changing terms of production or of different collaborators, some of these being screenwriters. However, the auteur theory has often been interpreted as a theory of the director as a writer-director, and, as noted by Steven Maras when discussing auteur theory in his recent book on the history,


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2. While the director was in focus, director/novelist teams like Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt/Klaus Rifbjerg and Bent Christensen/Leif Panduro thus emerged at the time as noted by Dan Nissen when writing on a new wave in Danish film in the 1960s (Nissen 2001: 206–07).

theory and practice of screenwriting, ‘few issues provoke as much emo-tion in screenwriting discourse’ (Maras 2009: 97).

Since the establishment of the DFI in 1972, in the institutional frame-work of Danish cinema directors have been given the main credit as initiators of films. As described in classical studies of the American film industry as well as studies of small national cinemas like the Danish one, the structure of Hollywood is of course dramatically different to a small, state-subsidized film industry (Bordwell et al. 1985; Hjort 2005). When it comes to screenplays, the American industry has a producer-driven film culture where studios and producers often buy the rights to finished screenplays and later get a director attached to the project (Taylor 1999; Wasko 2003), while modern Danish film culture has been based on the conception that a film springs from the idea and the vision of a director. As noted by former film consultant Vinca Wiedemann, Danish directors primarily want to work on films that they have initiated while screenplays initiated by writers are considered second rate (Wiedemann 2003).

In his analysis of the transition from a classical to a modern Danish film culture, Ib Bondebjerg has argued that from 1930 to 1960 Danish film was dominated by a studio system where a number of strong production companies worked with regular film teams and directors (Bondebjerg 2005: 56–57). Peter Schepelern has documented how only six writers wrote more than half of the 350 sound films produced in those same thirty years (Schepelern 1995a: 19). These writers were craftsmen who could deliver both original screenplays as well as adap-tations on a regular basis.

As Bondebjerg (2005) concludes, a lot of very different causes led to major changes in the film culture of both the United States and Europe around 1960. Among them, the French New Wave and mod-ernism in European film led to a focus on the individual artist, or a privileged position of the director in the production process. This shifted the power structure in the industry and films were considered less as factory products and more as individual works of art.

The Danish director Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt has described the New Wave as an inspiration to move from a view of film as being ‘just’ entertainment to a view of film as a medium where new realizations could be explored. He says,

We found that the old rules of the craft that we had slavishly been following were without meaning […] If the content was vital, then one just had to start telling the story and trust that a form would appear. The essence could grab an audience without the use of stiffened conventions.

(Bondebjerg 2005: 85)

This meant that there was no longer the same interest in efficient crafts-men producing formula films. If directors were looking for collaborating writers, they were more likely to collaborate with authors from the new realism in literature who had become interested in film, for example.2



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3. The National Film School is the only official institution for learning film-making in Denmark. It is a state school, financially supported by the Danish Ministry of Cultural Affairs. There are four study programmes available: film, TV, screenwriting and animation directing. The number of students is approximately 100, with six directors and six screenwriters being accepted every second year. All lines of study are four-year programmes, except for the two-year screenwriting course. On the website the School is presented as an art school ‘which means that the teaching aims at developing and supporting each student’s unique talent. At the same time it is important to us that our students learn the craft of film-making to ensure their future employment in the professional film and media industry’ (National Film School of Denmark 2009).

4. Filmfonden was established in 1964 to support Danish film of artistic and cultural quality with money from a levy on cinema tickets. When the number of tickets sold declined, the levy was repealed, and in 1972 the Danish Film Institute was established to administer state support for Danish film (Schepelern 1995b: 106).

5. Panstwowa Wyzsza Szkola Filmowa Telewizyjna i Teatralna (the Polish National Film School).

6. La Fémis (the French National Film School).

A FILM SCHOOL IN THE TIME OF THE AUTEURIt was in the middle of this revolt against traditions and conventions that the National Film School was founded in 1966 in Denmark, with I.C. Lauritzen as the head and Theodor Christensen as tutor.3 The first years were turbulent, since an industry previously based on apprentice-ship was suspicious of an art-oriented film school. The National Film School was also affected by the youthful rebellion of the era. In 1969, self-proclaimed ‘filmcommunards’ occupied the School, opposing ‘elitism’ and demanding that the technical equipment of the School be made available to ‘the people’ (Philipsen 2005: 39). Bent Christensen has described his time as head from 1970 to 1972 as marked by the anti-authoritarian actions of the period, and the reaction against all established systems (Christensen 1991: 30).

Jens Ravn took over as head from 1972 to 1974 and has expressed the thinking behind his structuring of ‘this difficult education between art and technicality’ as ‘leaving the problem to those who so desper-ately wanted to be talented film directors. Figure it out for yourselves. Here is a School with a lot on offer, so that you can build your own education’ (Ravn 1991: 35). Theodor Christensen had based his cur-riculum around long courses where the teaching between the differ-ent departments was synchronized to allow collaboration between specializations, but under Ravn the School organized shorter courses. One of the reasons for this was that at the time Filmfonden4 wanted courses as professional training for the industry.

When Jens Ravn left the School, Henning Camre (who was attached to the School as cinematography tutor) replaced him in 1975. He rein-stated the earlier synchronized courses, with each lasting several years. The intention was to foster collaborations between different professional specializations, and to give the students both a theoretical and practical knowledge of the entire film-making process. Screenwriting was a part of this. Henning Camre has formulated his ethos in this way:

The thought that film was made by the cooperation of basic ingredients: direction, image and sound was hardly revolution-ary, but [was] at that time new. The auteur-driven Schools in Lodz [PWSFTViT5] and Paris [FEMIS6] didn’t teach sound, for instance. That took place in a technical university that only dealt with sound as a technological phenomenon. The absence of a screenwriting education was striking – there was not an actual education in the work with screenplays, that was something the director – as auteur – was expected to already have mastered.

(Camre 2006: 24)

Shortly after becoming head, Henning Camre hired Mogens Rukov as screenwriting tutor. Together they established an independent screenwriting education that Camre remembers was met with both resistance and indulgence: ‘something as fundamental as dramaturgy


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and screenwriting didn’t exist at that time. And it was presumably the dominant opinion that teaching it wasn’t feasible’ (Camre in Wivel and Bro 1991: 11). Rukov agrees and believes that the teaching of screen-writing started at a very bad time, because it was a time of moving from subjectivity being the ‘law’ together with the idea that nobody could teach anybody anything, towards an acceptance of the possibil-ity of basic elements in screenwriting being something that could be learned (Rukov 1991: 39).

The director Gert Fredholm was a student in the first class of direc-tors graduating in 1968. He has described his time at the School as a time of ‘storytelling blindness’ (Fredholm 2006: 18). After Theodor Christensen had left the School, the more focused analysis of gen-res and structures disappeared, according to Fredholm, who com-plains about not having heard of Aristotle or basic dramaturgy at the School: ‘intuition can be a good thing, but it was not until much later when Mogens Rukov made his entry at the School that there started to come words and terms on a dawning film dramaturgy’ (Fredholm 2006: 18).

THE FRAIL BEGINNINGAt the end of the 1970s, in addition to the introduction of storytell-ing elements into the programmes for directors, shorter standalone courses on screenwriting were introduced, providing more profes-sional training for outsiders than the fully integrated courses at the School. Mogens Kløvedal was among the students of the first courses. He found them to be amazing at a time when writing (in his opinion) was regarded as art and thereby reserved for artists, meaning directors (Kløvedal 1991: 44). Kløvedal graduated from the first official screen-writing course in 1982 and has described the education as ‘heretic’, since one of the fundamental teachings was that writing to a great extent could not be taught. He believes that a lot can be learned and accentuates that one should not only focus on dramaturgy in this regard. A crucial part of teaching screenwriting is developing a shared mindset: ‘a way to read each others’ ideas, so that you can express yourself in a helping, concrete, and structural manner […] The Film School has been the midwife of a new way of exchanging knowledge’ (Kløvedal 1991: 44).

As Kløvedal emphasizes, teaching screenwriting is not only about presenting concrete models and tools that can guide the writing, but also about creating a shared language for communicating about stories. One of the thoughts behind the reinstatement of the longer ‘integrated’ courses was to secure the existence of long-term collabo-rations between specializations, while simultaneously giving all those specializations a shared basis of knowledge and a shared language through obligatory courses for all students.

Creating such collaborations has been a cornerstone policy of the School, but integrating screenwriting has turned out to be one of the



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major challenges. While it has been natural for directors to use a cin-ematographer, an editor and a sound engineer on their productions, screenwriters have not been an immediate choice as collaborators. Over the years, the School has attempted many strategies in trying to establish collaborations but, as exemplified by the problems of the first screenwriting students, it is hard to force directors into directing screenplays in which they have no faith.

When writing about Lars von Trier’s time at the NFSD in 1979–82, which was also when the first cohort of writers started on a longer screenwriting course, Peter Schepelern has described how there was trouble brewing when von Trier refused to direct a screenplay he was given during one of the few firm attempts to force the students to col-laborate. His categorical refusal could have been a cause of expulsion, but there were no negative consequences since Mogens Rukov – after having read the screenplay in question – argued that directors want-ing to direct that particular screenplay ought to be expelled instead (Schepelern 1997: 42–43).

The anecdote is amusing, but the fact is that establishing collab-orations with the students of the other departments, especially the directors, has been a genuine problem for the writing students. This is partly due to the conviction of many directorial students that ‘real’ directors are writer-directors with no need of assistance on the screen-play, and partly due to logistical problems in terms of coordinating the education of the different departments.

A SHARED LANGUAGEAt the time the first screenwriting students graduated in 1982, the screenwriting courses lived a parallel life of their own, separate from the rest of the School. However, around the same time there was beginning to be a new awareness in the industry that one might actually be able to learn something about telling stories. The present director of the drama department of the Danish public service TV station Danmarks Radio (DR), Ingolf Gabold, thinks that there was a minor revolution in the Danish film and TV world when the Swedish dramaturg Ola Olsson came to the NFSD in 1979. Olsson intro-duced ideas about story structure and terminology that, according to Gabold, created the possibility of a shared language between screen-writers, directors, production designers, cinematographers and the rest of the team.

Ola Olsson gave us a film and TV dramaturgy that let the stuffy air out of that room, which a lot of film and TV people had kept hermetically closed, believing that their creations could not be put in a formula or be discussed in a professional lan-guage beyond judgments of taste by their colleagues and the audience.

(Gabold 2006: 9)


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7. In the 1980s, the output of films was on average 12.4 films per year (Bondebjerg 1997: 15). As put by two film historians in 1985, Danish film at the time was very depressing, losing money and getting bad reviews (Schmidt and Nørrested 1985: 153). Between 2003 and 2008 the average Danish output of fiction features was 26 films per year, including 100 per cent Danish-financed films as well as major and minor co-productions (Danish Film Institute 2009: 8).

As a directing student at the School (graduating 1979) and afterwards a screenwriting student (graduating 1982), Rumle Hammerich experi-enced how Ola Olsson and the British screenwriter Neville Smith were great revelations in the field of screenwriting. Hammerich described it as a shocking experience to learn that stories have a certain structure like a beginning, a middle and an end since until then the students had been ‘floating around in a magical darkness regarding screenwrit-ing’ (Hammerich 2006: 97).

Peter Thorsboe, who graduated in 1984 and is now a successful writer of TV fiction together with his brother Stig, participated in one of the early short courses and later applied for the longer screenwriting course, which had classes laid out over the whole year so that one could attend part-time and still maintain paid employment. As Thorsboe states, there was no prestige in writing films at the time, and for most people screenwriting was something they would do over a summer break out-side their official careers in literature or journalism. Considering that the directors ‘of course wanted to write their own films’, Thorsboe was nev-ertheless impressed by the facilities that the School put at the disposal of the writing students (Thorsboe 2006: 144–45).

Although the early years of teaching screenwriting were not marked by fruitful collaborations, important first steps were made towards establishing a shared language, one of which was the obligatory dramaturgy class, attended by all other specializations as well as the screenwriting students. A central conclusion in Heidi Philipsen’s Ph.D. thesis on the NFSD is that most former students emphasize having acquired a shared language as one of the most valuable things learned at the School (Philipsen 2005: 352).

SCREENWRITING AS AN OFFICIAL DEPARTMENT OF ITS OWNAccording to Lars Kjeldgaard (graduated 1987), there were numer-ous problems with the screenwriting courses up through the 1980s (Kjeldgaard 2007). Indeed, one possibility was eliminating them all together, since they did not have much to do with the teachings at the rest of the School. However, it was decided to dramatically re-think the design of the courses before the decision was made to establish an independent department for screenwriting in 1988, based on an eight-een-month curriculum of full-time studies. Lars Kjeldgaard was hired as an assistant for Mogens Rukov and together with Henning Camre they decided to make a conscious effort to fight the strong focus on literature in Danish film, to which they attributed the depressing state of Danish films made in the 1980s.7

Until the establishment of the Screenwriting Department in 1988 there had been many novelists among the students in the writing courses, but now a deliberate attempt was made to attract new peo-ple from advertising agencies, artists or actors. The basic idea was to ‘teach people to surrender themselves to film’ instead of having a



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8. As it is satirically shown in De Unge År/The Early Years – Erik Nietzsche Part 1 (2007) – directed by Jacob Thuesen, from a screenplay by Lars von Trier that was inspired by his time at the School – a circular dramaturgy was on the NFSD agenda at the time of the earliest screenwriting students. Students of the first class of the Screenwriting Department in 1988 remember also being taught alternatives to classical, dramaturgical models but, as one graduate of the first intake has stated, the female students of the introductory course were primarily interested in circular dramaturgy which was considered to be more ‘round’ and ‘female’ while ‘all the others just thought that dramaturgy was a bourgeois Hollywood thing that impeded the free, artistic will’ (Scherfig 2006: 156).

literary approach to writing films (Kjeldgaard 2007). ‘Show, don’t tell’ became a mantra and, as a supplement to in-house lecture notes about directors ranging from Buñuel to Cassavetes, American screenwriting manuals like Syd Field’s Screenplay (1979) were introduced. Kjeldgaard calls the approach a continuation of ideas from the French New Wave and Italian neo-realism, but a fundamental principle was to identify with ‘great storytellers, no matter where they were’ (Kjeldgaard 2007). However, because of the introduction of terms like ‘acts’ and ‘gen-res’ some people in the film establishment, according to Kjeldgaard, felt that the teaching was too influenced by thoughts from Hollywood film-making.8

The Screenwriting Department launched in 1988 by letting 30 applicants participate in a four-week introductory course, before accepting 12 students on to the eighteen-month programme. Nikolaj Scherfig, screenwriter and later film consultant from 2003 to 2006, was among the first 12 students chosen. He found being introduced to basic and concrete thoughts about elemental storytelling concepts like plot, character, scenes and conflicts to be a great revelation, but he also states that the notion of a real director at the time was still that he wrote screenplays himself, or wrote them together with a famous novelist (Scherfig 2006: 158). In tongue-in-cheek fashion Scherfig has described how directors felt threatened by screenwriters, since they were convinced that they in fact wanted to become direc-tors; the idea of anybody actually wanting to be a screenwriter was too absurd (Scherfig 2006: 159). Scherfig managed to start working with the director Søren Fauli on his graduation film, and then later wrote films for the students of 1989–93; he himself started teaching at the Screenwriting Department in 1995. He is convinced that the graduating students of 1988–89 were the starting signal for something crucial in Danish film in the 1990s and onwards, because they devel-oped into a whole new professional grouping in Danish film, whose primary focus was on film story. Nowadays the members of this group are popular as collaborators with directors (Scherfig 2006: 162).

The so-called ‘golden year’ directing students of the class of 1993 have been highlighted as being the first to be interested in the screenwriters (Philipsen 2005). Director Thomas Vinterberg had the impression of the School having previously been dominated by the cin-ematographers, while he and his directing colleagues now had a new focus, that of putting the actors and the story around their characters at the centre of attention (Vinterberg and John 2006: 180). Producer Bo Ehrhardt who, together with Birgitte Hald, started the production company Nimbus Film as a base for a number of directors from this ‘golden’ year, believes that the collaborations between directors and screenwriters at the School did not seriously take off until their year (Philipsen 2005: 230).

The Dogma 95 Manifesto (von Trier and Vinterberg 1995) and Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov’s collaborative writing of Festen/The Celebration (1998) are among the events that, in the late 1990s,


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9. The Bodil award is the Danish film award given by Denmark’s National Association of Film Critics (Filmmedarbej-derforeningen). Established in 1948, it is one of the oldest awards in Europe. Mogens Rukov shared the Honorary Bodil with screenwriters Anders Thomas Jensen and Kim Fupz Aakeson.

started to make people outside the NFSD aware that something interesting was happening in the Screenwriting Department. Vinterberg remembers that as a student it was a great insight that there was inspiration to be found there with Lars Kjeldgaard and Mogens Rukov doing interesting research and coming up with con-cepts like ‘the natural story’ (Vinterberg and John 2006: 184). The concept of ‘the natural story’ can be described as – in its utter banal-ity – stating that the physical contexts, plots and rituals that make up every moment of every day are the basic building blocks of film drama (Wiedemann 2005: 24). According to Vinterberg, the concept worked very well with the desire of the directors to give the actors more room for creating living characters, and together with a hand-held camera this created the framework for telling stories that gave actors the opportunity to show what they were worth (Vinterberg and John 2006: 184).

This concept of the natural story has been influential in Danish film since its introduction at the School. The former film consultant Vinca Wiedemann highlights it as important for a change in how to approach writing stories and finds that by leading to films like The Celebration it raised the bar for Danish films in general and Danish screenwriting in particular (Wiedemann 2005: 24). Rukov’s impor-tance has been acknowledged in Danish film by an honorary Bodil award in 2003 and he has also become known abroad.9 When the script tutor Dick Ross in 2002 counted NFSD among the leading film schools in the world he credited Rukov for a lot of the School’s success (Ross 2002: 47).

The films made by the directors of the class of 1993 show an inter-est in writing stories in close collaboration with others. While still at the School, Vinterberg started working with the screenwriter Bo hr. Hansen (graduated 1991). Together they wrote his graduation film Sidste Omgang/Last Round (1993), the much-acclaimed short Drengen der Gik Baglæns/The Boy Who Walked Backwards (1994) and Vinterberg’s first feature De Største Helte/The Biggest Heroes (1996). Then Vinterberg turned to collaborating with his old teacher, Mogens Rukov, with The Celebration (1998), It’s All About Love (2003) and En Mand Kommer Hjem/A Man Comes Home (2007).

After having worked with screenwriter Ole Meldgaard (graduated 1991) on his graduation film, director Ole Christian Madsen worked with Lars. K. Andersen (graduated 1996) on Pizza King (1999), the TV series Edderkoppen (2000) and the recent box office hit Flammen og Citronen/Flame & Citron (2008). He also directed screenplays by Mogens Rukov (En Kærlighedshistorie/Kira’s Reason (2001)), Bo hr. Hansen (Nordkraft/Angels in Fast Motion (2005)), and Kim Fupz Aakeson (Prag/Prague (2006)). All screenplays have featured Ole Christian Madsen as co-writer.

Peter Flinth, another director from the same class of 1993, directed Nikolaj Scherfig’s screenplay for Ørnens Øje/Eye of the Eagle (1997) while Per Fly, after having directed the puppet film Prop og Berta/Prop and Berta (2000) from a screenplay by the author Bent Solhof and



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screenwriter Mikael Olsen (graduated 1987), became famous for his much acclaimed trilogy Bænken/The Bench (2000), Arven/The Inheritance (2003), and Drabet/Manslaughter (2005). All three films were developed in close collaboration with several writers and consultants, among them Rukov, Kjeldgaard and Kim Leona (graduated 1997).

MAKING THE SCREENWRITERS VISIBLEAfter a small class in 1994, where only four of just six student writers graduated, the NFSD decided to expand the number of screenwriting students considerably from 1996. Poul Nesgaard, who replaced Henning Camre as head in 1992, explained that this expansion was the result of an initiative from the Cultural Ministry to create more trainee oppor-tunities, and that this new funding – combined with money from the Nordic Council for studies in screenwriting as well as a prestigious sym-posium – showed a new interest in the screenplay (Vinterberg 1994).

The Screenwriting Department came to the attention of the national media when Rukov and Kjeldgaard arranged a symposium in 1995 entitled ‘To Move the Film: The Script’. A number of direc-tors and writers remember this symposium as a landmark event. Nikolaj Scherfig describes it as the first sign of public interest in screenwriters and screenwriting (Scherfig 2006: 163). The film critic Bo Green Jensen was at the symposium and began his long report from the event (with guests like Paul Schrader, Richard Price, David Newman, and Italian co-writer of neo-realist classics, Suso Cecchio d’Amico) by underlining the fact that it had never really been a secret that a good screenplay is the basis for a successful film. However, he continued, the importance of the screenplay had only been truly recognized in Denmark in the past ten years, but it was still hard to convince the funding bodies to invest money in giving screenwriters the peace to work on their screenplays for a substantial amount of time. (Bo Green Jensen 1995).

The blackboard with the notes from Paul Schrader’s lecture is today to be found behind glass and framed on the wall of the Screenwriting Department, and the symposium is accorded great importance by the current department tutor, Lars Detlefsen (graduated 1997). He views the symposium and especially Schrader’s visit as a turning point for the entire School, because it legitimized more craft-oriented work methods. He says:

People started taking writing seriously instead of just saying ‘art is free’. After his visit, people really started working after the rules of art and understanding that it is not something evil which Hollywood has come up with, but rather something that is true in the human nature in terms of communicating in a certain way. It is not about what you can tell. You decide that. It is about the way you tell it and that you can actually learn in a school.

(Redvall 2007: 34)


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While Ola Olsson began in the 1980s by drawing attention to a basic dramaturgy, the screenwriter of films like Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) helped to draw attention to American film and its screenwriting tradition in the 1990s.

THE DIFFICULTIES OF ESTABLISHING COLLABORATIONSIn the graduation handbook for the eleven students graduating in 1996 there is an excerpt from the talk given by Schrader that, together with a study trip to New York, was regarded as being among the highlights for the students that year. In an interview for the news-paper Information, two of the students described their satisfaction in graduating at a time when more attention was being directed towards the screenplay. As Dunja Gry Jensen states:

It is all about film-making as a collaboration. You have to respect each other’s skills and specialities whether you are an editor, a screenwriter, or a director. Some directors think that they have to be able to do it all and are ashamed if they don’t write the screenplay themselves. But why is that? A screen-writer’s job is precisely to be at the director’s disposal with his professional knowledge. And together one can then create a story that works.

(Michelsen 1996)

Collaboration is also present in their description of the education they received and of the nature of their work. One of Dunja Gry Jensen’s colleagues from the class of 1996 is Kim Fupz Aakeson. After having written Susanne Bier’s domestic box office hit Den Eneste Ene/The One and Only (1999) he went on to become one of the screenwriting stars that are known to the public together with Rasmus Heisterberg (gradu-ated 1999) and the self-taught star of the trade Anders Thomas Jensen. Aakeson has mostly praise for his time at the School, but he finds that a basic problem was that he never really got to see any screenplays made into films. One of the reasons for this was that the directors still did not want to work with the writers. Aakeson describes a programme where no formal collaboration was scheduled. There were a few ‘dating-meetings’ where the writers would present their ideas and the directors would turn them down, and for the writers this lack of seeing words become images was problematic (Aakeson 2007b).

Besides the frequently noted scepticism towards the writers and their craft on the part of the directors, the problem of coordination between the different departments is also mentioned. The full-time screenwriting programme started as an eighteen-month course but soon became – as it remains in 2009 – a two-year course, while the other specializations are based around four synchronized years where students collaborate across the courses on small assignments, mid-term projects and final films. This difference in length is repeatedly



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pointed out as an elementary obstacle in terms of establishing collab-orations. A team of directors and writers starts at the same time, but the writers graduate halfway through the education of the directors. A new team of writers then starts, but they have a hard time getting the attention of the ‘older’ directors.

Rasmus Heisterberg is among those who think that the screen-writing programme ought to be extended to four years. One reason is that it would increase the possibility of collaboration, and another is that it would show the necessary respect for the trade where the hardest thing, according to Heisterberg, is the rewriting and not the writing. There is no time, he says, to explore this enduring process in only two years (Heisterberg 2007). The idea of extending the pro-gramme to at least three years has been discussed on several occa-sions, but for a number of economic as well as practical reasons this has not happened. As explained by Lars Detlefsen, the education of screenwriters is expensive if one is to allocate the teaching capacity to take each writer and his or her writing seriously. Logistically, the idea of fostering collaborations with the directors is also challenged by accepting more writers than directors (Detlefsen 2007). However, as discussed in a panel on educating screenwriters in Denmark, at an annual industry seminar in June 2009 at the Danish Film Institute, the School is currently trying out new paths by initiating collaborations with directors outside of the School. It is also considering establishing a one-year Masters course in screenwriting, with a focus on writing feature films (Detlefsen 2009).

READINGS AS A USEFUL TOOLIn 1997, the year after Aakeson and his colleagues graduated, the NFSD tried introducing obligatory collaboration on shorter film exercises. Marianne Moritzen, now Head of Development in the Department of Production and Development at the DFI, was in charge of coordinating the curriculum at the School from 1993 to 1999. She remembers how there were many discussions about how to improve the relationship between directors and writers. One very concrete initiative was to help the writers make their texts come alive by introducing a new method (for Danish film) called ‘readings’. In simple terms readings are meetings where the screenplay is read aloud, often using actors in the different parts; though as an inter-nal work tool in the Screenwriting Department it can also help the words ‘come alive’ by just using writers.

As described by Moritzen, the use of readings grew out of a struc-ture that was not working. Since the directors would not work with them, the writers did not get the opportunity to work with actors and hear their texts spoken or acted. The School wanted to solve this prob-lem within a reasonable budget, and one solution was to start collabo-rating with the Theatre School by using their actors for readings. At the same time Moritzen and Poul Nesgaard applied for funding from


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the Actors Guild to finance readings with professional actors at fixed rates, so that it became possible at a reasonable cost to:

… get them around a table, give them a day to play with it and hear it, and make their text come alive by putting it in the mouth of an actor […] Suddenly people started to realize what that could give and then suddenly I think that the directors started listen-ing. What are the actors suddenly doing with the screenwriters?

(Moritzen 2007)

Thus, specific problems for the writers led to the introduction of a practical method that is now widely used in the industry. According to Lars Detlefsen, readings are still commonly used in the NFSD Screenwriting Department because they work both as a useful tool for the writer and also as a way of making the writer’s text come alive for others. Detlefsen believes that few people in the industry know how to read screenplays, and by making it possible to hear a screenplay read aloud professionally, readings make the text more attractive and nourish collaborations (Detlefsen 2007).

Besides being a tool for the writer, readings are thus an attempt to make screenplays more accessible to people who find it harder to sense a story on paper. Readings can be seen as yet another attempt to make the writers visible, and since the class of 2005 the Screenwriting Department has produced DVDs with readings of texts written by the graduating students.

FROM THE SHADOW TO THE SPOTLIGHTIn 2005, after the difficulties of establishing writing courses and col-laborations, Detlefsen and Rukov said that the screenwriting students were now so popular among the other students that they were almost over-burdened with dramaturgical assignments. Detlefsen and Rukov describe it as a move from being stuck in a corner to being suddenly placed in the spotlight (Philipsen 2005: 260).

The experiences of the students of the class of 2007 indicate that the directors are now more open to working together with the screen-writers, in spite of initial difficulties. As graduating screenwriter Maja Juul Larsen puts it, there are bound to be problems from the outset because of insecurity and fear on both parts. However, all directors voluntarily chose to use writers on their mid-term films (Iskov 2007).

The graduating students’ description of their time at the School gives the impression of a busy schedule with constant deadlines on both their own projects and projects by the directors. One exercise on the programme since 2003 is a project where they – in collabora-tion with the producer students – develop a long series for TV over the course of an academic term. Television writing is a popular choice for some students, and a number of students from recent years have got their first professional assignments writing popular TV series.



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Many directors regard this as a growing problem, since the relatively steady employment and attractive salaries currently available in the TV industry make it hard to convince the best screenwriters to stay in the less lucrative and less secure film industry (Redvall 2008a). In 2009 screenwriting as a craft and screenwriting for a specific audience is now more fully incorporated into the NFSD curriculum, and there no longer seems to be a problem talking about dramaturgy.

Both Danish critics and audiences seem to have appreciated an improved quality of screenplays in Danish films, and the success of tight screenwriting collaborations on films by such partners as Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen, Annette K. Olesen and Kim Fupz Aakeson or Per Fly and oth-ers. The result of this new emphasis on well-crafted dramaturgy in Danish film overall has also been noted abroad, as when film histo-rian David Bordwell wrote about ‘a strong sense of narrative desire’ in Danish film (Bordwell 2004). Three years later, writing about risk and renewal in Danish cinema, Bordwell commented on the ‘well-carpen-tered’ screenplays, and called Anders Thomas Jensen ‘one of the finest script craftsmen in world filmmaking today’ (Bordwell 2007: 17).

THE DANGERS OF PROFESSIONALIZATIONHowever, following the increased focus on craft, and general satis-faction with the professionalization of the writers, critical voices have now started to appear warning against the dangers of this develop-ment. As the film critic Morten Piil wrote on this new ‘canonization of the writers’ in 1999, it was fruitful to have a number of new writ-ers from the NFSD Screenwriting Department, but one has to beware ‘barren professionalism’ (Piil 1999). He states that the director needs a good screenplay, but only the art of the director can make a film into more than an indication of good intentions on paper. He says:

In the same way, no director automatically becomes less of an auteur by collaborating with a screenwriter. On the other hand, this can help him/her crystallize what is in the personality. Much more cannot with certainty be said about the collaboration of a director and a screenwriter in general.

(Piil 1999)

Piil is convinced that trained screenwriters are needed, but that it is naïve to believe that they are the ones who will improve the general quality of films.

Two years later in 2001, when journalist Bo Tao Michaëlis reviewed a new Danish book on screenwriting he referred ironically to a recent lecture, where he says he found himself moved by how much the film industry apparently owes ‘old Aristotle’, whom he describes almost as a living person teaching his Poetics at the Film School. He continued to point to the major difference in dramaturgical approaches in Danish


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film and theatre, noting that while Danish theatre has for a number of years tried to break out of this ancient Greek way of thought, many film people have fallen in love with this old model, with a touching and faithful passion (Michaëlis 2001). By 2001, classical dramaturgi-cal tools were now so established and commonly used that they, in the opinion of Michaëlis, cemented a certain conservatism that might work but which might also obscure more original approaches.

So, after some years of general enthusiasm for efficiently narrated films, a fear of dramaturgy as a straitjacket began to emerge; the sug-gestion that it makes it harder for different and more experimental films to see the light of day. If most people in the industry have learned the same things about the nature of stories, and now read screenplays using the same parameters for judging quality, it is hard to go against the stream. A dominant discourse then becomes hegemonic.

In 2005, when Lars von Trier sharply criticized the current state of Danish film he began another debate about screenwriting. Ten years after having attacked the predictability of dramaturgy for being ‘the golden calf around which we dance’ in the Dogma 95 Manifesto, he now criticized writers like Kim Fupz Aakeson and Anders Thomas Jensen for being so good at writing screenplays that are so clear in their structure and easy to read that it is damaging for films. Von Trier called for people to have a personal relation to the subjects treated, and for a discussion of the profession of screenwriting per se:

The problem is that a director who turns to a writer comes with an idea for something that has more or less of a heart. And one thing is certain: that when it has been through this very quick dramaturgical treatment there is no longer a heart. Then it is extremely superficial.

(von Trier in Schepelern 2005: 28)

The writers were accused of abusing reality by taking all sorts of topics off the shelf and – in an American fashion – treating them only at a superficial level.

COLLABORATIONS AND COMPLEMENTARY SKILLSAs implied by Lars von Trier in the above criticism, by 2005 screenwrit-ers were now an established professional group in Denmark and could be discussed as such, often in relation to their effect on the director as auteur or not. Film critic Morten Piil emphasized that a good screenplay is evidently not enough to create a good film (Piil 1999). The essential thing, he says, is how every person in the process of making the film has the right skills and the ability as well as the potential to make them work in the best way for the collaboration. The NFSD Screenwriting Department has played an important part in creating, in Denmark, industrial awareness of the importance of a good screenplay, as well as in establishing a professional cadre of writers with skills that directors can call on for inspiration and storytelling assistance.



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Despite his criticism of screenwriting as a separate specializa-tion noted above, Lars von Trier has continued to collaborate with screenwriters since then. Anders Thomas Jensen wrote the initial screenplay for the controversial thriller Antichrist (2009) based on von Trier’s original idea for the film, before von Trier then rewrote the first draft. Few people would claim that involving a screenwriter (as well as the several consultants that are mentioned in the cred-its) has made Antichrist any less of a film from the heart and mind of Lars von Trier; although it might of course have been expressed differently without the different collaborators attached. And, in con-trast to von Trier’s statements, successful directors like Susanne Bier, Per Fly and numerous other Danish directors have stated that they have found great help in exploring and expressing their personal vision for films, in collaboration with screenwriters who have com-plementary skills to theirs (Hjort et al., forthcoming 2010). Indeed, it is striking how appreciative many directors are of the emergence of accomplished screenwriters. Henrik Ruben Genz gives considerable credit to screenwriter Dunjy Gry Jensen for her work on his Karlovy Vary-winning film Frygtelig Lykkelig/Terribly Happy (2008), stating that it saved him from ‘three years of despair’ in helping him adapt Erling Jepsen’s novel.

She cut to the bone, and she only wanted to get to what I wanted to get to. That is what a good screenwriter does; digs out what you are looking for or helps find what you cannot see for yourself.

(Genz, in Redvall, forthcoming 2010)

Genz also pointed out in the same interview that he later ‘re-conquered’ the material, making it his own, but also that he believes he has a tendency to get too caught up with everything in a potential story to get anywhere with it directly. Genz’s opinions suggest that, far from making the material lose its heart, the screenwriter helps the material find its right form. However, while appreciating the work of screenwriters, Genz nevertheless also mentions the prevailing tendency to try to fit every-thing into the same story structure as one of the greatest challenges of Danish cinema today (Redvall, forthcoming 2010).

Concerned voices have argued recently that the artistic integrity of the director is threatened by the increased industrial status of the screen-writer, and after a number of years where the National Film School of Denmark has been credited as one of the major reasons behind the recent success of Danish film, the NFSD has also become the target of criticism (Monggaard 2007; Benner 2008). In a series of articles focusing on the state of Danish cinema in 2006/7, the School was charged with having become too oriented towards the industry rather than towards creating art. Lars Kjeldgaard stated that the storytelling theories of the Screenwriting Department have been devalued by being regarded as too general, rather than as aids to creating engaging stories. He would


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like to see a return to an auteur understanding of film production, both at the School and in the industry (Monggaard 2007: 53). This may seem reactionary, even retrograde, but as pointed out at the beginning of this article, auteurism does not necessarily mean the death of the screen-writer. On the other hand, I would argue that this could be an exciting time for a more modern sort of Danish auteur film-making, where the director is the personal driving force and decision-maker on a film, but who now also has increased opportunities to find accomplished writers with a broad understanding of film with whom to collaborate. As Genz has put it, it was ‘a gift’ to get a screenwriter to help him sort out how to approach the adaptation Terribly Happy (2008).

A COLLABORATIVE AUTEUR FILM INDUSTRY?The director still has the final cut in Danish film. However, besides the well-known auteur directors, Danish film now also has ‘author-auteurs’ to use the term coined by Richard Corliss when trying to drag extraordi-nary screenwriters out of their anonymity with his Screenwriter’s Theory (Corliss 1974). Based on her experiences at the Film School and as film consultant, in 2007 Vinca Wiedemann argued for the concept of a ‘col-laborative auteur theory’ that she found unique to Danish film. Projects are still initiated and driven by the director, but the director collaborates closely with all the people in the team who to a greater or lesser extent all have a storytelling function (Vilhelm 2007: 279).

As I have argued in previous articles on the work of director Annette K. Olesen and screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson in making their feature film Lille Soldat/Little Soldier (2008), this process can be a close and time-consuming collaboration all the way from an original idea until a final draft, with a number of other people invited to contribute their input for the screenplay along the way (Redvall 2008b; Redvall 2009). There was never any doubt about the director having the final call on decisions, but the finished film is very much the unique result of two people with complementary skills seeking a way to overcome some of their individual professional weaknesses, and so creating something that they could never have created by themselves.

It is not just practitioners who have challenged the ‘single auteur’ tendency. In Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry (1991), Duncan Petrie analysed British film production during the years 1987–88, concluding that expertise and creative input from collabo-rators is of great importance to all film-makers, even though critical focus on the auteur tends to obscure this. He rejected the strict term of ‘collective authorship’, but called for a greater understanding of the creative collaborations in film studies (Petrie 1991: 206). Recently more discussions about different forms of authorship have emerged with writings on multiple authorship (Gaut 1997), collaboration analysis (Carringer 2001) and collective authorship (Sellors 2007). Moreover, more scholars are taking an interest in how production analysis of the creative processes behind film production can contribute valuable



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insights into questions of authorship and intentionality, as well as in the analysis of film texts themselves (Grodal et al. 2005).

As I have attempted to show in this article, the National Film School of Denmark has for a number of years worked hard to cre-ate a common understanding for film production, and to teach stu-dents to collaborate. By 2009, largely as a result of the teachings at the NFSD and the influence their graduates have had on the Danish film industry, screenwriters now play a considerably more impor-tant role in the production process of Danish feature films than they did formerly. In addition, based on the various forms of fruitful col-laboration between directors and screenwriters in developing films together all the way from an original idea, one could argue that while the auteur notion is still at play in Danish cinema, it is now in the form of an extended, collaborative version that has invited screenwriters to take part in – and to take credit for – their creative contributions. The teachings at the NFSD have created an awareness of the need for, as well as the existence of, these skilled partners in crime. And one thing is certain. Discussions in Danish cinema today are more likely to be about the risk of being blinded by storytelling than about being blind to storytelling.

REFERENCESAakeson, K. F. (2007a), ‘Honey, I’m home’, in O. John (ed.), At lære kunsten,

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Film-makers on Film Schools, London: Faber and Faber.Bordwell, D. (2004), ‘A Strong Sense of Narrative Desire’, FILM, 34,

pp. 24–27.—— (2007), ‘Risk and Renewal in Danish Cinema’, FILM, 55, pp. 16–19.Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. and Thompson, K. (1985), The Classical Hollywood

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Camre, H. (2006), ‘Hvordan var det nu det var’, in O. John (ed.), At lære kuns-ten, Copenhagen: Aschehoug, pp. 21–25.

Carringer, R. L. (2001), ‘Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship’, in PMLA, 116: 2, pp. 370–79.

Christensen, B. (1991), ‘Da ungdomsoprøret toppede’, in A. Bro (ed.), Filmskolen: De første 25 år, Copenhagen: National Film School of Denmark, pp. 30–31.

Christensen, R. (2001), ‘Manusforfatterne: Film er noget man skriver’, Politiken, 27 April.

Corliss, R. (1972), The Hollywood Screenwriters, New York: Discus/Avon.—— (1974), Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema 1927–1973,

New York: Penguin Books.Danish Film Institute (2002–2009), Facts and Figures, Copenhagen: DFI.Darmer, P., Mathieu, C., Pedersen, J. S. and Strandvad, S. M. (2007),

‘Professionalisering i den danske filmindustri: Det Danske Filminstitut’, in J. O. Bærenholdt and J. Sundbo (eds), Oplevelsesøkonomi – Produktion, Forbrug, Kultur, Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur, pp. 209–29.

Darmer, P., Pedersen, J. S. and Brorsen, J. P. (2007), ‘Zentropa – i de gyldne palmers skær’, in J. A. Madsen (ed.), Organisationer i forandring, 5th edn., Copenhagen: Handelshøjskolens Forlag, pp. 149–97.

Den Eneste Ene/The One and Only (1999), Wr: Kim Fupz Aakeson, Dir: Susanne Bier, Denmark, 100 mins.

De Største Helte/The Biggest Heroes (1996), Wrs: Bo hr. Hansen and Thomas Vinterberg, Dir: Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 90 mins.

Detlefsen, L. (2007), research interview by Eva Novrup Redvall, 21 June.—— (2009), presentation in panel on the education of screenwriters at The

Fiction Day, 8 June, Copenhagen: Danish Film Institute.De Unge År/The Early Years – Erik Nietzsche Part 1 (2007), Wr: Lars von Trier

(as Erik Nietzsche), Dir: Jacob Thuesen, Denmark, 92 mins.Drabet/Manslaughter (2005), Wrs: Per Fly, Kim Leona, Mogens Rukov and

Dorte Høgh, Dir: Per Fly, Denmark, 104 mins.Drengen der Gik Baglæns/The Boy Who Walked Backwards (1994), Wrs: Bo hr. Hansen

and Thomas Vinterberg, Dir: Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 37 mins.Edderkoppen (2000), Wrs: Lars Kjeldgaard and Lars K. Andersen, Dir: Ole

Christian Madsen, Denmark, DR, tx. DR1 26/03/2000–30/04/2000, 58 mins × 6 eps.

En Kærlighedshistorie/Kira’s Reason (2001), Wrs: Ole Christian Madsen and Mogens Rukov, Dir: Ole Christian Madsen, Denmark, 93 mins.

En Mand Kommer Hjem/A Man Comes Home (2007), Wrs: Thomas Vinterberg, Mogens Rukov and Morten Kaufmann, Dir: Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 97 mins.

Festen/The Celebration (1998), Wrs: Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov, Dir: Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 106 mins.

Field, S. (1979), Screenplay, New York: Dell.Finney, A. (1994), The State of European Cinema, London: Cassell.—— (1996), Developing Feature Films in Europe, London: Routledge.Flammen & Citronen/Flame & Citron (2008), Wrs: Lars K. Andersen and Ole

Christian Madsen, Dir: Ole Christian Madsen, Denmark, 130 mins.Fredholm, G. (2006), ‘Erindringsmonolog om Theodor’, in O. John (ed.), At

lære kunsten, Copenhagen: Aschehoug, pp. 13–19.Frygtelig Lykkelig/Terribly Happy (2008), Wrs: Dunja Gry Jensen and Henrik

Ruben Genz based on novel by Erling Jepsen, Dir: Henrik Ruben Genz, Denmark, 104 mins.



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Gabold, I. (2006), ‘Forord’, in P. H. Hansen (ed.), Den dramaturgiske værktøjs-kasse, Copenhagen: Frydenlund, pp. 9–10.

Gaut, B. (1997), ‘Film Authorship and Collaboration’, in R. Allen and M. Smith (eds), Film Theory and Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Grodal, T., Larsen, B. and Laursen, I. T. (2005), Visual Authorship: Creativity and Intentionality in Media, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Hammerich, R. (2006), ‘Noget vigtigt man husker’, in O. John (ed.), At lære kunsten, Copenhagen: Aschehoug, pp. 91–99.

Heisterberg, R. (2007), research interview by Eva Novrup Redvall, 25 July.Hjort, M. (2005), Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Hjort, M., Jørholt, E. and Redvall, E. N. (eds) (forthcoming 2010), Danish

Directors 2, Bristol: Intellect Press.Hjort, M. and MacKenzie, S. (2003), Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95, London:

British Film Institute.Iskov, B. (2007), ‘Filmskoleafgang 2007/Manuskriptlinien’, FILM, 59, pp. 36–38.It’s All About Love (2003), Wrs: Mogens Rukov, Thomas Vinterberg, Dir:

Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 104 mins.Jensen, B. G. (1995), ‘Det gode manuskript’, Weekendavisen, 24 February.John, O. (ed.) (2006), At lære kunsten – 40 år med Filmskolen, Copenhagen:

Aschehoug.Kipen, D. (2006), The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film

History, New York: Melville House.Kjeldgaard, L. (2007), research interview by Eva Novrup Redvall, 13 September.Kløvedal, M. (1991), ‘Lusk’, in A. Bro (ed.), Filmskolen: De første 25 år,

Copenhagen: National Film School of Denmark, pp. 44–45.Lille Soldat/Little Soldier (2008), Wrs: Kim Fupz Aakeson, Dir: Annette K.

Olesen, Denmark, 102 mins.Mathieu, C. (2006), ‘Transforming the Danish Film Field via “Professionalization”,

Penetration and Integration’, Creativity and Innovation Management, 15: 3, pp. 242–49.

Maras, S. (2009), Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, London: Wallflower Press.

Michaëlis, B. T. (2001), ‘Filmfortælling: Aristoteles på filmskolen’, Politiken, 1 September.

Michelsen, L. (1996), ‘Billedglade fortællere’, Information, 3 February.Monggaard, C. (2007), ‘Verdens bedste filmskole?’, in EKKO, 38 (August),

pp. 52–54.Moritzen, M. (2007), research interview by Eva Novrup Redvall, 3 August.National Film School of Denmark (2009), ‘About the school’, http://www.

filmskolen.dk. Accessed 22 June 2009.Nissen, D. (2001), ‘Filmens moderne gennembrud’, in P. Schepelern (ed.),

100 års dansk film, Copenhagen: Rosinante, pp. 199–236.Nordkraft/Angels in Fast Motion (2005), Wrs: Ole Christian Madsen and Bo Hr.

Hansen based on a novel by Jakob Ejersbo, Dir: Ole Christian Madsen, Denmark, 120 mins.

Ørnens Øje/Eye of the Eagle (1997), Wr: Nikolaj Scherfig, Dir: Peter Flinth, Denmark, 91 mins.

Petrie, D. (1991), Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry, New York: St Martin’s Press.

Philipsen, H. (2005), ‘Dansk films nye bølge: afsæt og aftryk fra Den Danske Filmskole’, Ph.D. thesis, Odense: University of Southern Denmark.


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Piil, M. (1999), ‘Skriverkarlens kanonisering’, Information, 20 January.Pizza King (1999), Wrs: Ole Christian Madsen, Janus Nabil Bakrawi and Lars

K. Andersen, Dir: Ole Christian Madsen, Denmark, 103 mins.Prag/Prague (2006), Wrs: Kim Fupz Aakeson and Ole Christian Madsen, Dir:

Ole Christian Madsen, Denmark, 96 mins.Prop og Berta/Prop and Berta (2000), Wr: Mikael Olsen based on books by Bent

Solhof, Dir: Per Fly, Denmark, 73 mins.Raging Bull (1980), Wrs: Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, Dir: Martin

Scorsese, USA, 129 mins.Ravn, J. (1991), ‘Den åbne skole’, in A. Bro (ed.), Filmskolen: De første 25 år,

Copenhagen: National Film School of Denmark, pp. 34–35.Redvall, E. N. (2007), ‘Ingen elsker avisartikler’, FILM, 59 (September),

pp. 34–35.—— (2008a), ‘Ny skole for manuskriptskrivning’, Information, 6 October.—— (2008b), ‘Virkeligheden som råstof og modstand for fiktionen: Om brugen

af research, readings og improvisationer i udarbejdelsen af manuskriptet til Lille soldat’, Kosmorama, 242, pp. 145–60.

—— (2009), ‘Scriptwriting as a Creative, Collaborative Learning Process of Problem Finding and Problem Solving’, Mediekultur, 46, pp. 34–55.

—— (forthcoming 2010), ‘Henrik Ruben Genz’, in M. Hjort, E. Jørholt and E. N. Redvall (eds), Danish Directors 2, Bristol: Intellect Press.

Ross, D. (2002), ‘Dick Ross: Tutor’, in J. Boorman, F. MacDonald and W. Donohue (eds), Projections 12, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 39–53.

Rukov, M. (1991), ‘Om at lave skole’, in A. Bro (ed.), Filmskolen: De første 25 år, Copenhagen: National Film School of Denmark, pp. 38–41.

Sarris, A. (1962), ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, in Film Culture, 27 (Winter 1962–63). Reproduced in G. Mast, M. Cohen and L. Braudy (1992), Film Theory and Criticism, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 585–605.

Sarris, A. (1968), The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–68, New York: Dutton.

Schepelern, P. (1995a), ‘Mellem lyst og pligt: Filmkultur og filmkritik i Danmark’, Medie Kultur, 23 (February), pp. 5–25.

—— (ed.) (1995b), Filmleksikon, Copenhagen: Munksgaard/Rosinante.—— (1997), Lars von Triers elementer, Copenhagen: Munksgaard/Rosinante.—— (2001), ‘1990–2000 Internationalisering og dogme’, in P. Schepelern

(ed.), 100 års dansk film, Copenhagen: Rosinante, pp. 305–59.—— (2005), ‘Drillepinden’, EKKO, 28 (June/July), pp. 20–26.Scherfig, N. (2006), ‘Erindringer om skandaløse taler og andre anekdoter fra

senfirserne’, in O. John (ed.), At lære kunsten, Copenhagen: Aschehoug, pp. 153–63.

Schmidt, K. and Nørrested, C. (1985), ‘Har dansk film en fremtid? Dansk film i 80’erne – image og realiteter, problemer og løsninger’, in Sekvens 1985: Om Dansk Film, Department of Film Studies, University of Copenhagen, pp. 153–93.

Sellors, P. C. (2007), ‘Collective Authorship in Film’, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65: 3, pp. 263–71.

Sidste Omgang/Last Round (1993), Wr: Bo hr. Hansen, Dir: Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 34 mins.

Stempel, T. (2000), Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, New York: Syracuse University Press.

Taxi Driver (1976), Wr: Paul Schrader, Dir: Martin Scorsese, USA, 113 mins.



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Taylor, T. (1999), The Big Deal: Hollywood’s Million-Dollar Spec Script Market, New York: William Morrow.

Thorsboe, P. (2006), ‘Om at lære et håndværk’, in O. John (ed.), At lære kunsten, Copenhagen: Aschehoug, pp. 142–47.

Truffaut, François (1954), ‘Une certaine tendance du Cinéma Français’, in Cahiers du Cinéma, 31 (January), pp. 15–28.

Vilhelm, T. (2007), Filmbyen, Copenhagen: Ekstra Bladets Forlag.Vinterberg, S. (1994), ‘Haves: film og fjernsyn. Ønskes: gode historier’,

Politiken, 4 August.Vinterberg, T. and John, O. (2006), ‘Samtale’, in O. John (ed.), At lære kunsten,

Copenhagen: Aschehoug, pp. 177–87.von Trier, Lars and Vinterberg, T. (1995), The Dogme 95 Manifesto, reprinted

in R. Kelly (2000), The Name of this Book is Dogme 95, London: Faber and Faber.

Wasko, J. (2003), How Hollywood Works, London: Sage.Wiedemann, V. (2003), ‘Et manuskript uden instruktør er som en…’, Replikker,

4, pp. 20–21.—— (2005), ‘Immaculate Conception’, FILM, 41 (February), pp. 24–26.Wivel, A. and Bro, A. (1991), ‘Interview med Henning Camre’, in A. Bro (ed.),

Filmskolen: De første 25 år, Copenhagen: National Film School of Denmark, pp. 6–15.

SUGGESTED CITATIONRedvall, E. N. (2010), ‘Teaching screenwriting in a time of storytelling blindness:

the meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish film-making’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 59–81, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.59/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSEva Novrup Redvall is Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Section of the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. She has contributed to a number of anthologies on Danish and Nordic film, among them Transnational Cinema in a Global North (Wayne State University Press, 2005), and she is the co-editor of a new edition of Danish Directors – Dialogues on a Contemporary National Cinema together with Mette Hjort and Eva Jørholt (Intellect Press, forthcoming 2010). She is currently finishing a Ph.D. thesis on creative collaborations behind screen-writing practices in Danish feature film production. She has been film critic for the daily newspaper Information since 1999.

Contact: Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, Film and Media Studies Section, University of Copenhagen.Phone: +45 – 3532 9437E-mail: [email protected]


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KEYWORDScharacter designprotagonist dramatic goal want need empathy

PATRICK CATTRYSSEEmerson College European Center; Antwerp University; Université Libre Bruxelles

The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs

ABSTRACTScreenwriting manuals tell us that narratives should have a protagonist and that a protagonist should have an important dramatic goal to achieve. With respect to this goal, manuals often mention another common distinc-tion, that between a protagonist’s ‘want’ and ‘need’. Wants are generally understood as external and/or conscious dramatic goals, whereas needs are defined as internal and/or unconscious dramatic goals. This essay argues that these tools could be made more powerful if defined in a more precise way. Whereas wants refer to the goals of characters at the level of story, needs play at the level of the interaction between plot and real audience. This re-definition links the wants and needs debate with the much wider and far more complex study of audience involvement and its relationships with the value systems expressed in a narrative and those experienced by a viewer; a subject which stretches far beyond the limits of a single article.

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1. Few exceptions confirm the general rule; see Bordwell (1985:13ff.; 2006: 247–248), who does also consider the study of screenwriting manuals.

2. For more information, see http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2009.

3. For example the Catholic University of Louvain association, or the University of Antwerp Network connecting Belgian Universities with colleges.

4. I understand narrative studies in its broader post-1980s sense, that is as ‘post-classical’ (Herman 1997) or ‘contextual’ (Fludernik 2005: 44) narrative studies involving the input from a whole range of disciplines such as rhetorics, pragmatics, cognitive studies, psychology, cultural studies, etc.

INTRODUCTIONAlthough screenwriting manuals on the one hand and academic nar-rative studies on the other have both dealt with storytelling, they have managed to do so by largely ignoring each other for many decades.1 As a consequence, both practitioners and theoreticians have missed oppor-tunities to learn from each other. One can surmise several reasons for this situation. Screenwriting manuals serve a purpose that is very differ-ent from that of narrative studies. As a consequence, the terminology developed on both the practical and the theoretical side of storytelling is considerably different. From a practitioner’s point of view, academic jargon is often considered too sophisticated and not practical. From an academic’s point of view, the practitioner’s terminology is considered imprecise and confusing. However, bridging the gap between theore-ticians and practitioners would benefit both parties. Several initiatives may assist in achieving that goal, though needless to say there is still a long way to go. For example, the Bologna decision to restructure European higher education according to the bachelor-master (BA-MA) structure compels non-university tertiary education institutions (TEIs) to reinforce the academic component in their objectives.2 At the same time, it requires universities to consider more and new aspects of vocational training. Following the BA-MA Bologna indications, insti-tutional collaborations and networks have been set up between uni-versity and non-university TEIs.3 In the particular case of screenwriting it is worth mentioning the international conference on ‘Re-thinking the Screenplay’ held at the University of Leeds in September 2008, to be followed by another at the Helsinki University of Art and Design in September 2009, with a third being planned for 2010. These conferences and other initiatives could launch (or perhaps re-launch) a discipline called Screenwriting Studies, where both ‘traditional’ academic research and practice-oriented research could join forces. More concretely, this implies that know-how from practical writing classes can encounter academic narrative studies.4 Such a meeting represents a typical inter-disciplinary situation with all the complex problems and obstacles asso-ciated with a clash of different cultures: that is, different mentalities and attitudes, different intra-disciplinary points of view, differences between what is commonly known and what is not, different discourses or lan-guage use such as register and terminologies, etc. Consequently, aca-demics will have to find ways to communicate better with practitioners, and the latter will also have to make efforts to meet the former half-way. In order to bridge the gap between theory and practice, some sort of new ‘interlingua’ may have to be developed which is sophisticated enough to meet academic standards of precision, but not so sophisti-cated as to appear pedantic to the practice-oriented writer or trainer. Since a language never functions outside specific user contexts, some common ground will have to be developed in order for that ‘interlingua’ to be used socio-pragmatically and culturally in common (and therefore more efficient) ways by both practitioners and academics.



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5. This is also part of this ‘other’ practitioner’s culture. Trainers pass on knowledge and expertise in workshops such as the European programme ‘North by Northwest’ (which included tutors from University of Southern California) who ‘mention’ this in their workshops. Unlike the academic tradition, the oral tradition prevalent in such workshops does not have written references.

It is within this larger context that I venture a very modest con-tribution. It deals with one, rather widespread, terminological con-fusion in the normative discussion about protagonists, dramatic goals, and more specifically in the use of the terms wants and needs. Screenwriting manuals tell us that narratives should have a protago-nist and that a protagonist should have an important dramatic goal to achieve. Why this is so is not always clearly explained but one may assume that it is less difficult to interest audiences in someone rather than in something – hence the protagonist of the story – and that it is easier to interest audiences in someone who wants something than in someone who does not want anything; hence the dramatic goal. The types of problems or dramatic goals protagonists may run into have been widely discussed in screenwriting manuals. Dramatic goals can be concrete or abstract, external or internal, short term or long term, temporary or final, static or dynamic, simple or layered, conscious or unconscious, etc. With respect to this goal, screenwriting manuals often mention another common distinction, that between a protago-nist’s want and need. In what follows, I claim that these tools could be made more powerful if defined in a more precise way. At the same time, what follows puts into practice a shift towards the aforemen-tioned ‘interlingua’ between academic and practitioner, in the hope that the over-specialized academic and the imprecise practitioner may begin to find their common ground.

WANTS AND NEEDS: EXAMPLESAccording to oral tradition,5 the terms want and need originated with screenwriting guru Frank Daniel, but since then several other screen-writing commentators have applied the terms, adapting them some-times to their particular needs. Table 1 shows some examples taken from Trottier (1998: 24–28), Cowgill (1999: 45–46) and McIlrath (2004: 36). I add two more examples in order to support my argument.

The definitions of want and need given by the sources mentioned above reveal two recurring parameters: external vs. internal and con-scious vs. unconscious. One para meter does not necessarily exclude the other.

EXTERNAL WANT VS. INTERNAL NEEDSeveral critics use the concepts want and need to distinguish an exter-nal goal from an internal one. For example, in The Screenplay: A Blend of Film Form and Content, Margaret Mehring writes ‘a character can be driven to achieve one goal while being simultaneously compelled to seek a very different and conflicting goal. It is this warring between the external and internal goals that is the essence of great drama’ (Mehring 1990: 195). Mehring associates the want with an outer, physical struggle and the need with an inner, psychological one. This distinction is taken up by several other commentators such as Vogler (1992: 17), who distinguishes a protagonist’s external journey from his


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internal journey, or Lucey (1996: 51ff.) who refers to an A-storyline which deals with an external problem – winning a law suit, destroying the monster – and a B-storyline dealing with internal problems, usu-ally of a psychological nature, such as regaining self-esteem, acquiring independence or love, etc.

Finally, a similar distinction can be found more recently in Batty (2006: 12) who explicitly titles his article ‘Wants and Needs: Action and Emotion in Scripts’. Batty also associates the want with a literal,

Table 1: Protagonists’ wants and needs in Hollywood films.

Title Want Need

Gone with the wind (1939) Scarlet (Vivien Leigh) wants (among many other things) Ashley, who is married.

Scarlet needs Rhett Butler, who is not married.

Casablanca (1942) Rick (Humphrey Bogart) wants to forget about Paris and bury himself in Casablanca.

Rick needs to discover what hap-pened in Paris (in order to regain his proper self).

Some Like it Hot (1959) Joe (Tony Curtis) wants to cheat Sugar into a relationship.

Joe needs to love Sugar (‘tell her the truth’).

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) wants the custody of his son.

Kramer needs to become a good father.

Romancing the Stone (1984) Joan (Kathleen Turner) wants to find the stone.

Joan needs to find love.

Witness (1985) John Book (Harrison Ford) wants to catch the corrupt cops.

Book needs to relate more com-passion ate ly to others.

Moonstruck (1987) Loretta (Cher) wants to marry Johnny because he is a safe bet.

Loretta needs to marry Ronny whom she loves.

Twins (1988) Vincent Benedict (Danny De Vito) wants $5 million.

Vincent needs the love of a family.

Pretty Woman (1990) Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) wants to further his career.

Lewis needs to follow his heart.

The Devil’s Advocate (1997) Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) wants to continue his profes-sional career as a lawyer who never lost a case.

Kevin Lomax needs to seek moral justice and not prevent perverts and gangsters from escaping their rightful punishment.

Traffic (2000) Robert Wakefield wants to fight the drugs cartel on an interna-tional scale as a politico-judicial problem.

Robert Wakefield needs to fight the drugs problem on a family scale as a medical or a healthcare problem.

Analysis: the author



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physical journey and the need with an internal, emotional one (see also Batty 2007: 45).

CONSCIOUS WANT VS. UNCONSCIOUS NEEDA second group of screenwriting experts associate want and need with a conscious vs. uncon scious dramatic goal. This is believed to be how Frank Daniel originally understood the concepts. Others have picked up this definition, such as Robert McKee (1997) who uses want, need and goal interchangeably, but who indicates that a protagonist may have a conscious desire and a self-contradictory unconscious desire: ‘the most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these complex protag-onists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction’ (McKee 1997: 138). David Trottier indicates that if the central character has a conscious goal, beneath it may loom a great unconscious need:

The need has to do with self-image, or finding love, or living a better life – whatever the character needs to be truly happy or fulfilled. This yearning sometimes runs counter to the goal and sometimes supports or motivates it. The Crisis often brings the need into full consciousness.

(Trottier 1998: 24)

Finally, in a similar vein, Mark McIlrath (2004: 35) distinguishes between a want as a conscious objective and a need as an unconscious one. In agreement with Trottier, he argues that the need may become visible to the main character in the end. As a consequence, the need may become the explicit objective in Act 3 (see McIlrath 2006; 2007: 40).

SOME PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONSThe examples script-experts advance to illustrate their concept of need – finding love, fighting a low self-image – show how a need defined as an ‘internal goal’ may easily shift into (or be associated with) a need defined as an ‘unconscious goal’, even though an internal goal need not necessarily be unconscious. Physical actions are often associated with a conscious goal whereas character evolutions are frequently treated as evolving in an unconscious way. That is why some authors even combine both parameters to distinguish a want from a need. David Trottier connects the conscious want with what he calls the ‘Outside/Action Story’ and the unconscious need with the ‘Inside/Emotional Story’; ‘usually the need is blocked from within by a character flaw. This flaw serves as the inner opposition to the inner need. This char-acter flaw is obvious to the audience because we see the character hurting people, including himself’ (Trottier 1998: 25). In a similar way, Cowgill suggests that ‘the character’s need… refers to his unconscious motivation and comes from a depth of his psyche of which he is often


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ignorant’ (Cowgill 1999: 45), and that ‘what a character needs is often the psychological key to understanding his inner obstacles’ (Cowgill 1999: 47). Furthermore, irrespective of the parameters used to define the concepts of want and need, the examples mentioned above show two more common aspects of the want and need dilemma. Firstly, the development of a conflict between an inner and an outer or between a conscious and an unconscious goal can help to establish more psy-chological depth and to ‘dimen sionalize’ characters (Lucey 1996: 52) so as to avoid the narrative becoming too cartoon-like. Secondly, when a conflict is written in between the want and the need, it is shown to the audience that the more protagonists go for their want, the further away they drift from their need. Hence, applying the want vs. need terminology, a story with a happy ending is a story where the main character abandons his want in time to go for his need, whereas a trag-edy represents a narrative where the main character sticks to his want and thereby loses his need. A ‘Hollywood happy ending’ then is, as the joke goes, when the protagonist exchanges his want for his need in time and therefore ‘deserves’ to obtain his want in the end after all.

In spite of these common features, I would argue that the respec-tive parameters external vs. internal or conscious vs. unconscious are not accurate enough to describe the aforementioned examples of wants and needs in a precise way.

PROBLEMS WITH THE EXTERNAL VS. INTERNAL PARAMETER

To associate want and need with an external vs. internal goal or journey appears to be pro ble matic in more than one way. Firstly, a dramatic goal refers to an intention, an objective. One may therefore assume that all intentions are internal. That is why beginner screenwriters are often advised to watch out for intentional writing, and not to write intentions that readers of the script (e.g. director, actors) will not be able to see, hear or dramatize, e.g. ‘He wants to buy cigarettes’.

Furthermore, a closer look at the examples given as external vs. internal goals reveals that to verbalize dramatic goals in narratives is subject to interpretation. Sometimes the dramatic goal is very clear, concrete and visual; at other times it is not (and for the sake of my argument I discount those narratives which do not seem to present a dramatic goal). Consequently, the external vs. internal nature of the goal often depends less on the goal itself than on the interpretation or perception of the goal, that is, on the level of abstraction of its expres-sion. For example, if we consider The Devil’s Advocate (1997), we could say that Kevin Lomax’s want is to further his professional ego while his conflicting need is to develop his moral judgement. In this case, both want and need would be considered as internal. However, one could also say that his want is to win the case against the paedophile while his need is to abandon the defence of the client, in which case both want and need could be seen as external.



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Conflating external and internal ‘goal’ with external or internal ‘journey’ as some critics do (e.g. Mehring 1990, Lucey 1996, Batty 2007) may be even more confusing because the goal generally refers to the end point of the journey, while the journey (whether external or internal) refers to the process, i.e. the way(s) to reach that goal, or not, entirely or partially.

The distinction between an external and an internal journey of a character is, I suggest, a very useful one (and also a very old one). Whereas in ‘external journey’ the word ‘journey’ is used in a literal sense to indicate a real voyage or a series of events and actions, the ‘internal journey’ refers to a metaphorical journey indicating psycho-logical changes a character may or may not go through. In other words, the outer and inner ‘journey’ refer to the old distinction between plot (understood here as the course of events) and character design. Both plot and character represent the two inseparable sides of the same dramatic coin. Obviously, between the two, numerous relationships can and probably should develop.

If the distinction is clear between character change understood (in a metaphorical way) as an ‘inner journey’ and the external, literal journey, the concepts want and need – which seem to refer to goals rather than to journeys – may be confusing here. Also, to the extent that the concepts internal and external goals describe very well some differences such as the internal goal ‘to become a better father’ (e.g. Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979), and the external goal ‘to nuke a meteorite’ (e.g. Armageddon, 1998), the terms want and need may not be required at all.

PROBLEMS WITH THE CONSCIOUS VS. UNCONSCIOUS PARAMETERTo define want and need as the respectively conscious and unconscious dramatic goals of the main character is also problematic for more than one reason. Firstly, several critics (e.g. Trottier 1998, Cowgill 1999, McIlrath 2007) acknowledge that near the end, the unconscious need may become conscious. If both the want and the need are conscious, how does the conscious vs. unconscious parameter help to distinguish want and need in a precise way?

Secondly, in some examples the need not only becomes conscious towards the end of or in Act 3, but it is as conscious within the char-acter’s mind as the want, and from the very beginning. The Devil’s Advocate (1997) starts with country lawyer Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) who has never lost a case and who is defending a child rap-ist. When, in a not too subtle way, the suspect is shown masturbating in court while the D.A. is questioning his victim, Lomax is outraged and asks the judge for a short recess. He runs into the bathroom and confronts himself in front of the mirror. At that moment, Lomax expe-riences an inner conflict, made obvious to the audience through the cliché of having him looking at himself in the mirror: what shall he do? Follow his want or his need? Go left or right? Continue his list


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of wins in court and let this pervert go free or abandon his client and allow justice to run its due course? The stakes of the dilemma are raised because if Lomax abandons his client now, he will be barred from his profession as a lawyer. Both journeys, both choices, may be perceived and described as equally external or internal (as mentioned above) but, above all, in the mind of the protagonist they are both very conscious from the very beginning. In Some Like it Hot (1959) one may assume that Joe (Tony Curtis) is also very conscious of the fact that he should not lie to Sugar, that he should tell her the truth. However, when Daphne (Jack Lemmon) confronts him with his immoral behav-iour, Joe(sephine) replies that one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Thirdly, when looking at the examples mentioned in screenwrit-ing manuals it is not always clear how conscious or unconscious pro-tagonists are about their need. For example, is Scarlett (Gone with the Wind, 1939) conscious of the fact that she should marry Rhett Butler? Probably not. Is Rick (Casablanca, 1942) conscious of the fact that he should discover why Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) abandoned him in Paris? At first he is not, but as the narrative progresses, he is. In Traffic (2000) judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) wants to become President of the United States of America and in order to achieve that goal he accepts a high profile job to fight the international drugs cartel in Mexico. This represents his want. However, about thirty minutes into the movie, the audience discover that Wakefield’s daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is taking all kinds of hard drugs. When the audi-ence see how one night a boyfriend collapses after an overdose and she and a couple of her friends dump the boy on the street in front of a hospital, the audience realize that there is a conflict between what the main character Wakefield wants to do and what he needs to do. Wakefield wants to fight drugs on an international scale as a politico-judicial problem but he needs to tackle the drugs problem at a family level, i.e. in his own family, and this as a medical healthcare problem. At that moment, however, Wakefield is not so much unconscious of his need as entirely unaware of it; he does not experience any inner conflict. In fact, he is convinced that his daughter is doing as well at school as at home. It is only forty minutes later when Wakefield dis-covers his daughter taking drugs in the bathroom that the protagonist catches up with the level of knowledge of the audience and is con-fronted with the conflict previously shown to the audience; the con-flict between his want (to fight drugs on an international scale) and his need (to fight drugs on a family scale).

A fourth problem is that ‘knowing’ or ‘being conscious’ of a need that conflicts with a want offers no guarantee of continuous inner dra-matic conflict in the character. In Casablanca (1942), Rick realizes along the way that he should hear Ilsa out in order to learn what happened in Paris, and that inner struggle is dramatized through action (drinking) and dialogue. However, in Some Like it Hot, Joe knows that he should not lie to Sugar but he puts this knowledge aside without great difficulty



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6. Here I adhere to the common narrato-logical distinction, generally ignored in screenwriting manuals, between story (or fabula) understood as the diegetic content which through some act of narration is represented in a plot (or sjuzet) understood as the narrated story.

7. Obviously not all narratives present characters with inner conflicts between wants and needs. For example, in one-dimensional hero stories such as James Bond or Indiana Jones, the respective wants and needs coincide.

until the very end. In The Devil’s Advocate, Kevin Lomax ‘knows’ very well what he should do but after a few seconds he decides not to fol-low his need and to go for his want by defending the pervert. After that, the moments of inner conflict are rare even though he runs into an increasing opposition from his need. As the narrative progresses, Lomax’s relationship with his religious mother becomes troubled, his wife is raped, turns mad and kills herself, and finally Lomax has to commit suicide in order to prevent the antagonist – the Devil himself – from achieving his satanic goal. In Trottier’s (1998) terminology, the audience see how Lomax’s inner ‘flaw’ develops into a growing oppo-sition to his need. It is only at the end of the narrative, when it has been shown how the path of his want leads to total loss, that, at least temporarily, the protagonist chooses the path of his need.

Finally, if the need is, and remains, unconscious to the charac-ter (as in many gangster movies and crime stories), i.e. if characters find themselves in a dilemma of which one part remains unknown or unconscious to them, how can there be an inner conflict? The answer to that question is simple: there cannot. Still, intuitively screenwriting manuals recognize a conflict, but to the character that conflict is nei-ther internal vs. external, nor conscious vs. unconscious. It plays on an altogether different narrative level.

PROPOSAL FOR A RE-DEFINITION

Some critics already hint at a possible solution to the terminologi-cal problem. McKee, for example, remarks that while the protago-nist may be unaware of his subconscious need, the audience sense it (1997: 138). In a similar way, Trottier signals that whereas the need may be unconscious, blocked from within by a character flaw, this character flaw is obvious to the audience (1998: 25). The common feature that binds the examples mentioned above does not lie in the conscious or unconscious nature of the character’s want or need, or in the external or internal nature of it. As we have seen, the conflict is not always played at the level of the character, that is, at the story level. However, the conflict does always play at the level of interac-tion between plot and audience.6 The conflict (if there is one)7 plays between what a character wants to do and what they should do. While what the character should or should not do may (or may not) correspond to a more or less concrete idea within the character at the story level, what the character needs to do or should do is always meant to be clear in the hearts and minds of the audience. It is the audience who judge what a character should or should not do, and they do that (consciously or unconsciously) on the basis of another well-known ancient Greek concept called ‘doxa’ (from Plato) or ‘endoxa’ (from Aristotle). Doxa or endoxa refers to the dominant opinions, norms and values shared by a group of people in a spe-cific time-space context. Trottier’s ‘flaw’ (1998: 24) already hints at a moral aspect of the want-need dilemma. If the want deviates from


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the reigning endoxa, a moral conflict may arise between the want and the need. If all goes well – that is, if the audience empathize with the main character – this conflict may reinforce the ‘hope/fear’8 that the audience are experiencing vis-à-vis the protagonist.9 If the audience empathize with the main character, they hope that the protagonist is going to abandon their want and go for their need, but at the same time they fear that because of reasons such as an inner flaw, material profit, etc., the protagonist will choose their want and thereby lose their need.

If we consider the want-need dilemma as a conflict between the character and the audience rather than between the character and herself/himself, this shifts the central focus of the conflict from the story level to the level of interaction between the plot (as a narrated story) and the audience. At the story level all kinds of options remain open: the character may never learn about a conflict between their want and their need or may learn about it after the audience do, or they may be informed at the same time as the audience. The character may be more or less (un)conscious of an inner conflict, feel troubled by the conflict and act upon it or not. The inner conflict at story level may play immediately or start only later on.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS RE-DEFINITION

Does a re-definition of wants and needs solve all possible problems with respect to dramatic goals? Certainly not, because the concept of endoxa represents a rather slippery notion which is linked with another ghost-like idea, the audience. Whereas critics and journal-ists often like to pretend there are only two types of audiences – the mass audience and the cinephiles – it is now generally accepted that there exist many different types of audiences who should be con-sidered as complex, heterogeneous and ever-changing groups of individuals.

Con se quent ly their respective endoxas show not only common features but also important differences. One may assume therefore that public expectations about what a character should and should not do differ accordingly. In other words, redefining the concepts of want and need as suggested above links the discussion with the interesting but very complex and quite different problem of audience interpreta-tion and audience involvement.

Since Plato and Aristotle, scholars in sociology and cultural stud-ies have of course suggested several mechanisms to describe (en)doxas in more specific ways. The Greek concept has similarities with Bakhtin’s theory of ‘heteroglossia’ and Volosinov’s account of ‘mul-ti-accentuality’ (as in Fiske 1992: 298–299). It also recalls Stanley Fish’s ‘interpretive communities’ (Fish 1976), Pierre Bourdieu’s study of taste, ‘field’, ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1979) and Stuart Hall’s ‘preferred’, ‘negotiated’ and ‘oppositional’ readings (Hall 1980). What these and other so-called poststructuralist theories have

8. Another of Frank Daniel’s concepts (see Howard 2004: 52ff.)

9. For the sake of clarity I need to specify here that the concept of ‘audience’ refers to real, empirical audiences, not to imagined ‘implied readers’ or ‘narratees’ as is often the case in structuralist narrato logy.



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10. Malicious delight (trans. the author).

11. See for example Zillmann (1991), Smith (1995), Tan (1996), Grodal (1997), Coplan (2004), Keen (2006) and Keen (2007).

12. The concept is well known in struc tu-ralist narratology but generally ignored in the world of screenwriters and screen writing trainers. It refers to the person to whom the narrator is narrating/addressing. As the narrator is to be distinguished from the flesh and blood writer, so the narratee must also not be confused with the flesh and blood reader/viewer.

13. See Chatman (1978).

in common is the notion that texts do not have one fixed meaning and that different people may ‘read’ texts in different ways – ways that were not always intended by the writers. Among other fac-tors, people’s socio-cultural position for example co-determines the inter pre ta tion process in different ways (Fiske 1992: 292). In order to illustrate this, Fiske describes an interesting experiment about a group of homeless men who watched the movie Die Hard (1988) on a VCR in their church shelter (1992: 302). These men rarely watched television because it generally advocates values such as family life, work and leisure, which are irrelevant to them. Fiske describes how these men enthu siasti cally cheered when the villains destroyed a police armoured vehicle and killed a ‘good’ guy, but switched off the VCR before the end, when the hero and the police force restored law and order and reconfirmed the dominant ideology they so much despised.

Fiske’s anecdote and the aforementioned theories link the discus-sion of audience interpretation with that of audience involvement. Instead of rooting for the main character and its dramatic goal, Fiske’s viewers experienced what in German is called ‘Schadenfreude’;10 they hoped the protagonist would lose and they turned off the VCR when he started to win. This also suggests another line of research that is of interest to this study: the study of narrative empathy and other types of cognitive-emotional audience engagement with nar-rative fictions.11 The cognitive-emotional impact of a narrative plays at different levels. While reading or watching, readers-viewers con-sciously or unconsciously react to the ways a narrator behaves, the ways an agent acts at the level of story and the ways the narrator assigns features to the ‘narratee’.12 Narrators may behave in a sym-pathetic and agreeable way, but also in sexist, racist, unreliable, and other ways. These ways may or may not motivate the reader’s or viewer’s interest in the narrative. As explained above, ‘events’ and ‘existents’13 at the story level may refer to characters wanting things that are on a par with the reader’s or viewer’s hopes and fears, or not. And finally the use of any narrator, whether through telling or showing, not only creates a diegetic world, but also ‘creates’ an addressee or, in narratological terms, a narratee. The very act of nar-rating suggests features of a narratee. These features concern what a narratee does or does not know, likes or dislikes, feels or thinks, etc. For example, in the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1998) the narrating character, Stevens, addresses his narrative to a ‘you’ in the text, the narratee. When Stevens talks about butler-ing, he assumes the narratee knows certain things about the subject, and so does not explain these elements. Stevens also assumes other items may not be known to the narratee – hence he explains these things. The same goes for certain assumptions with respect to ‘nor-mal’ social, political, economical and cultural values or ideas that are ‘taken for granted’ by the narrator. When in Romeo is Bleeding (1993) the narrating character Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman) is enjoying the


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14. See for example Lavandier (2005: 43, 45), Iglesias (2005: 61ff.), Williams (2006: 93ff.), etc.

15. See for example Vogler (1992) and especially Vogler (2007), who concentrates on the story of a hero with a moral dramatic goal and a happy ending.

16. See for example Armer (1993: 5ff.), Iglesias (2005: 61ff.), Lavandier (2005: 44ff.).

sight through his binoculars of a man having sex with two women, he addresses the narratee in a direct way:

JACK GRIMALDI (V.O.)(Chuckles)

I bet you know what he was thinkin’, don’t ya? You’d have done just what he wound up doing, I’ll bet.

Some (actual) viewers of this scene may agree with his supposition and enjoy the view, others may not.

Even though not all narratives present narratees in such a con-spicuous way, the examples show that during the actual reading/viewing process a narratee may partly or entirely correspond with (or differ from) the actual reader/viewer on an individual as well as a socio-cultural and political level, in terms of moral and other values, opin-ions, beliefs, sensibilities, etc. In turn these differences and similarities may have an impact on different types of empathetic engagement. In this sense, cognitive narrative studies meet the aforementioned socio-logical and cultural studies approaches. As Ralf Schneider explains, ‘[the] kind of emotion [that] results from empathy and how intense it is in each case depends on the recipient’s attitude towards a character, which is (sic) turn influenced by his or her value system in general’ (Schneider 2005: 136).

Screenwriting manuals do not entirely ignore the problem. Several authors offer advice with respect to the so-called ‘un-sympathetic’ protago nist and how to increase the chances of obtaining audience empathy with that character and its goals.14 They suggest turning this main character into a hero and have him or her meet impossible challenges; or also assigning ‘positive’ features to the main character next to the negative ones, and to have other characters in the story admire the main character; or victimizing this ‘unsympathetic’ main character and making his or her antagonist(s) even ‘worse’ than (s)he is, etc. However, most screenwriting manuals focus on audience empathy with a protagonist and a dramatic goal that corresponds with what ‘the’ audience would like the main character to do.15 The re-definition of want and need offered above includes narratives that contain a character who goes after a goal the audience disagree with. Why audiences remain interested in watching characters who pursue something against the audience’s wishes is an interesting question. Why do audiences continue to watch Scarface (1983)? Or all those other crime stories and gangster movies for that matter? In order to experience criminal acts by proxy? Or to wait for that satisfying moment when the villain finally gets what (s)he deserves?16 The success of crime stories and gangster movies suggests that a gap between what a character wants and what an audience feel a character should want does not necessarily destroy viewer motivation. Fiske’s (1992: 302) anecdote about the homeless men watching Die Hard on a VCR shows



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at the same time that narratives with conflicting wants and needs hold some risks, including the risk that the value system of the character deviates so much from that of the viewer that the viewer abandons the narrative.

As suggested at the beginning of this section, these questions stretch far beyond the limits of a single article. They fit in the even larger debate about aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic experience. Audience empathy with one or more characters should be considered next to other possible viewer motivations for connecting or disconnect-ing with a narrative. Some viewers may continue watching because of the choice of actors or actresses, or vice versa. Others may continue watching because of the music, or the photography or because the movie was shot in their hometown. Since the point of view adopted here is that of the screenwriter, the scope should be limited to those motivations that fall into the working field of the screenwriter.

By way of conclusion, I turn back to the discussion about wants and needs. It should be clear to screenwriters that they may write conflicts between what a character wants and what she/he needs according to an audience. However, to the extent that there is not one homoge-neous audience, there is not one homogeneous need. What screen-writers intend does not always translate into what viewers interpret. One can doubt that the screenwriters of Die Hard intended to write a conflict between a want and a need with respect to their protagonist John McClane (Bruce Willis)? And who says that all viewers watching gangster movies experience a conflict between a want and a need? What should we think of the huge success of ultra-violent video and computer games where the dramatic goal of the player-protagonist consists in murdering as many people as possible as fast as possible?

The links between the value systems of a narrative and those of a viewer on the one hand, and empathetic viewer engagement on the other continue to fascinate scholars. Further research will have to come up with more convincing explanations. The next challenge will consist in turning those findings into workable writing tools.

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SUGGESTED CITATIONCattrysse, P. (2010), ‘The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs’,

Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 83–97, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.83/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSPatrick Cattrysse is Head of the Flanders Script Academy (FSA). He is a researcher and trainer in storytelling and screenwriting at different universities and film schools, among them the University of Antwerp, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Emerson College European Center, the FSA, and the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (San Antonio – Cuba). To receive current information on courses available at the FSA, please email [email protected] or visit www.vsa-fsa.org.

Contact: Raamlolaan3, B-3120 Tremelo, België.E-mail: [email protected].


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KEYWORDSinteractive

screenwritingpoeticsAristotlenarrative

architecturecyber-dramanew mediadigital media

JASMINA KALLAYNational Film School, IADT, Dublin

Cyber-Aristotle: towards a poetics for interactive screenwriting

ABSTRACTThrough analysing appropriations of Aristotelian dramatic theory within interactive digital narratives (Laurel 1991, Hiltunen 2002, Mateas and Stern 2005), this article assesses the merits of Aristotle’s Poetics in pro-viding a basis for an ‘interactive screenwriting poetics’. From the six com-ponents of tragedy (plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle) to mimesis and catharsis, these concepts are examined for their value in a new media context. The hierarchy of the components is challenged and new formal and material causative relations are explored, using the interactive drama Façade (Mateas and Stern, 2005) as an example. With new dra-matic configurations emerging (such as spatial plotting and narrative archi-tecture), the question posed is - to what degree can Aristotelian thought really aid the interactive screenwriting process? If this approach can not yield substantial results, what is the alternative?

INTRODUCTIONIrrespective of any new ideas and developments in screenwriting theory, Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 350 BC) remains the backbone of the

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1. A webseries is a term used for a fictional series that is broadcast online, with episodes termed ‘webisodes’, and of a much shorter duration than usual TV series episodes (the length varies and is not preordained, but usually ranges from 2 min to 10 min).

most influential guides to the craft of screenwriting. Whether as a foundation from which a screenwriting canon is expanded (e.g. in Syd Field’s 3-act structure, 1994 passim) or as a loose template for certain dramatic terms (e.g. in Robert McKee’s writing, 1999 pas-sim), Aristotle’s pronouncements on drama are absorbed by bud-ding screenwriters even when they are unaware of this theoretical lineage. In more overt referencing to Aristotle, we have Michael Tierno’s Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters (2002) and Ari Hiltunen’s Aristotle in Hollywood (2002). So, it is not a surprise that in the still nascent field of interactive screenwriting Aristotle has also emerged as a touchstone, with the result that there is a degree of projec-tion of the Aristotelian dramatic canon even when it is not wholly applicable.

It is the aim of this article to present a critical overview of the vari-ous incorporations of Aristotle’s work within interactive narrative for-mats, from Brenda Laurel’s groundbreaking model (1991) to Mateas and Stern’s re-imagining of the very same model (2005). Secondly, I will be evaluating their potential to serve as a universal ‘interactive poetics’, meaning – can they serve as a ‘how to’ template for inter-active screenwriters and generate satisfying interactive drama? In the process of this appraisal, I will identify aspects of the Poetics that have been neglected – mimesis and catharsis – which may yield use-ful additions to the work-in-progress towards a theoretical framework of interactive screenwriting. The importance of laying the theoretical groundwork in this area of screenwriting is crucial in order for the screenwriter to have a clear understanding of the dramatic techniques and creative processes involved in writing interactive narrative formats such as computer games, webseries1 or interactive film/drama.

Aristotle-derived screenwriting theory may seem like a natural starting point for this comparative exploration. However, the ideas in most of these screenwriting books are too diluted, recycled and mutated to be able to truly reflect the essentials of the Poetics, and may therefore be misleading. A case in point is Tierno’s above-cited book (2002), in which he proceeds to merge peripeteia (reversal of action) with metabasis (reversal of fortune) and mistakenly assumes that a tragic ending is a given in a tragedy (Tierno 2002: 75–82, 105–108). Tierno’s simplistic interpretation of catharsis as emotional purg-ing is more forgivable, as this has become a widely held reading of catharsis in most screenwriting manuals. However, his equating of epic film, in the context of The Lord of the Rings cinematic trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003), with epic poetry (Tierno 2002: 47–54) points to a superficial identification of a shared adjective in both categories, and does not take into account Aristotle’s differentiating point regarding epic poetry and drama: epic poetry does not contain opsis (special effects). Overall, Tierno’s central assertion that the best screenplays are driven by one action (action-idea) has translated into his whole approach to dissecting the Poetics; the idea of Aristotle being relevant to today’s screenwriters dominates his writing rather than the notion



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2. Although this debate is now losing steam, for the past ten years or so, the crux of it was that the ludologists (Gonzalo Frasca, Jesper Juul) defended the game-play as the main attraction in a game, and minimised the importance of the narrative, whereas the narratologists (Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan) defended the story as being key to attracting the gamer to a game and motivating the game-play. Irrespective of this debate, however, one undisputed development has been the emergence of more sophisticated narratives in games in recent years.

3. The terms for these six components can vary from translation to translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, however, here I am quoting the terms that Brenda Laurel uses. While ‘character’ is self-explanatory in dramatic terms, it’s important to note that the term action here refers to plot, and ‘thought’ can be likened to the idea or premise of a dramatic piece. Melody and spectacle are explained in greater detail within the article.

4. Aristotle’s Poetics define tragedy in section 4, ranking them in section 4.4 – ‘plot is the source...; character is second [etc.]’ (Aristotle [c.350BC] 1996: 12).

of a stringent analysis. The general picture, not the details, seems to be the guiding light of this work.

Alternatively, attempts by (non-interactive) screenwriting theorists to cover developments in the new media arena can be equally misguiding, as Hiltunen’s example demonstrates. In Aristotle in Hollywood (2002), Ari Hiltunen broadens his industry-perspective of the value of classical storytelling to include cyberspace. While he rightly recognises the inevitable media industry shift towards interactive forms of drama, when analysing specific examples, there is no attempt to provide a new, re-thought Poetics that could be adapted to the new digital media. Instead, Hiltunen presents a superficial reading of the narrative aspects of a game like Doom (1993) in order to prove his point regarding the universality of Aristotle’s dictum (Hiltunen 2002: 111–122). The book’s arguments are further weakened by the inclusion of Joseph Campbell’s mono-myth and Propp’s mathematical organisation of folk tale plots with-out linking them to Aristotle’s work in a coherent and meaningful way. There are two points that are significant, though. Firstly, in one chapter, Hiltunen steps away from drama to focus on sport and its mass appeal, and makes the claim that sporting encounters that feature some type of ongoing background story (such as one built around two teams’ long-running rivalry) provide greater pleasure for the reader/viewer (Hiltunen 2002: 39). Unfortunately, this focus on sport is not tied into the analysis of computer games and so does not explore the balance between the ludic (gaming) and the narrative aspects, which is one of the key unreconciled aspects of interactive narratives, especially in computer games.2 The second point relates to Hiltunen’s interpretation of what Aristotle means by ‘proper pleasure’ derived from drama, and Hiltunen distinguishes four dimensions that provide pleasure: emotional, moral, intellectual and symbolic (Hiltunen 2002: 47). It is to the intellectual dimension that I will be returning when discussing catharsis, because while Hiltunen recognises that catharsis can not be fully explained accord-ing to the Poetics, he does provide useful links between these four dimensions and catharsis.

THE ARISTOTELIAN DRAMATIC MODELBrenda Laurel’s influential Computers as Theater (1991) was one of the first academic works to recognise the potential uses of computer tech-nology in drama and creative work, as long as dramatists and artists rather than computer programmers engaged with the medium. More significantly, Laurel’s adaptation of Aristotle’s six components of drama (action, character, thought, language, melody, spectacle),3 while not without its problems, provides a stimulating basis for exploring Aristotle in cyber-drama (2003: 565). Laurel begins by establishing the causative links between the six components. The hierarchy Aristotle imposed is not accidental,4 and Laurel develops a model from this, governed by a two-way system of causation: material and formative. A useful


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metaphor that Mateas uses for this model takes the building of a house as its example, and likens the material cause to the building materials whereas the formal cause would be the architectural drawing of the house (2004: 23). Applying this to the dramatic context, action (i.e. plot) becomes the main formative cause, and determines the form (comedy, tragedy) that the story takes. The formative line of causation thus fol-lows Aristotle’s six components sequentially in a line from action at the top, down towards spectacle at the bottom. The material causa-tive chain builds in the opposite way, in ascending order; from bottom to top. The basic material out of which the story is told is contained within the spectacle (or the visual, the mise-en-scène). So, in order for the story to be told it needs characters, who in turn need diction to express their thoughts and the aural and visual elements provide the material means for the drama to unfold. If this is the model from which successful, satisfying drama is generated, the question Laurel was curi-ous to explore was whether this same model could prove as fruitful in generating interactive drama.

Assessing each individual drama component in an interactive context, Laurel concludes that action is now a collaborative process between the user and the computer; character is similarly split into the human and computer correlative; thought influences process in the computer system as well as shaping the drama, and language com-prises verbal and non-verbal signs, being any of the available means of communicating/interacting with the computer (2003: 565). Thus far, the causative links appear intact in the interactive sphere. However, it is at the level of melody and spectacle that Laurel modifies the terms more significantly to allow for a broader understanding of these con-cepts and in the process the causative clarity comes into question. In screenwriting terms, melody is understood to denote the aural, from speech to sound effects and spectacle is understood to be the visual dis-play, from mise-en-scène to special effects. Laurel herself accepts these definitions to be the norm (2003: 565). However, Laurel’s premise is based on the aforementioned model of categories, which are interde-pendent in both upward and downward directions. Therefore, Laurel asserts that if melody builds on the material of spectacle (as in what is seen), then non-diegetic sound can not be included, which does not make sense (even from a classical or non-interactive screenwriting point of view). Laurel then goes further and transforms melody into ‘pattern’, which now signifies any sensory pattern that is perceived. More problematically, spectacle is turned into ‘enactment’, exhibiting every sensory dimension, ‘visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile, and potentially all others’ (2003: 565). This widening of spectacle (which by Aristotle’s admission is the least significant of the six components of drama) to now mean enactment, is quite illogical. According to Laurel, enactment encompasses the way the action is represented, meaning that the modes of interaction now fall under this category. The way the gamer navigates the gameworld and physically controls his ava-tar is both kinesthetic and tactile. Yet this interaction surely overlaps



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5. AI–generated dialogue is commonplace in gaming software, whereby artificial intelligence programming is used to create the impression of real time, spontaneous dialogue. This kind of programming has its limitations, as it can not sustain itself for any long stretches of conversation without revealing its computerised origin.

6. A cutscene is the only cinematic element in a game, which is inserted as a filmed sequence within the game to either explain some backstory or provide motivation for the next stage of the game. The cutscene is there to be viewed, not interacted with; therefore its dialogue is pre-recorded and can not be interrupted by the gamer.

with action, the first category, which means the clear causative chain is broken. Following this line of thought, enactment would hold a higher place in the interactive hierarchy of dramatic building, meaning that Laurel’s point challenges the ordering of the components, which I will address within the re-imagining of Laurel’s model by Mateas and Stern (2005).

Having laid out Laurel’s computer-friendly reading of Aristotle in its theoretical isolation, the natural question is – how does one apply this? What are the steps from this model to writing a synopsis for a computer game or an episode of a webseries?

So far, Laurel’s theory has inspired Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern to create Façade (2005), an interactive drama that was specifically designed with non-gaming and non-technologically aware users in mind. Taking its narrative cue from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), Façade invites the player to a dinner with his/her ‘old’ friends Trip and Grace, whose marriage has hit a rough patch. Interactions with the couple throughout the night (ranging from the player’s typed sentences, Trip and Grace’s AI-generated5 dialogue and displays of affection such as kissing and hugging) will affect the future of their marriage. What makes Façade so innovative is its positioning between a game and a webseries in the interactive narrative range. The fact that the player enters the narrative universe and participates as a character makes it more game-like, as they have the kind of agency games afford, yet the genre, focussing on relationships, is closer to the webseries scape. In addition, the AI dialogue is far more sophisticated than common in-game dialogue (excepting dialogue in cutscene sequences).6

Mateas also summarized the experience of creating Façade and formulated his theoretical approach in A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games (2004). Laurel’s re-thinking of Aristotle’s model serves as the basis for Mateas’ preliminary poetics, with user agency providing a crucial new component.

The formal cause is now no longer just at the level of the writer’s envisioning of the plot and how that plan manifests itself down to the other components; the user’s choice of how to interact/play the story creates another layer of formal cause - ‘user intention’ - that then shapes the subsequent components. Equally, the material causes become ‘material for action’ in the user’s hands. To put it crudely, as an interactive screenwriter you are no longer just in charge of devis-ing the plot and creating the characters, you are also responsible for the user’s actions. This might sound like an impossible task; as if it were not challenging enough to write a compelling drama, how does one predict a player’s behaviour and choices? To answer this we must first address the meaning of agency in this context.

Mateas draws from Janet Murray’s definition of agency (Murray 1997), which she identifies as one of three dimensions of interactivity, along with immersion and transformation. According to Murray, agency is not to be mistaken for mere activity, such as the clicking


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of the mouse or navigating the computer game interface; it is instead about meaningful action. The gamer needs to feel their actions have real consequences at the story level and what they do has a real, tangible, visible impact in the game world. Otherwise, agency becomes an arbitrary dimension, something to tinker with, such as moving objects and communicating with non-playing characters (NPCs), but which ultimately has no deeper meaning. A case in point is the kind of agency instigated by webseries (e.g. Sofia’s Diary 2007); when performed from outside the story world (as an observer rather than participant) the act of agency is limiting and wears its illusory nature on its cuffs. For instance, when asked to choose which course of action the protagonist Sofia should take (e.g. go to a party or stay at home and study) the predictable answer (going to the party, as it is the only option that is likely to generate interesting drama) demonstrates the predetermined nature of the plotting and takes away the pleasure of influencing the story world.

Mateas distinguishes Murray’s approach as phenomenological – ‘describing what it feels like to participate in an interactive story’ (2004: 22, original emphasis) – as opposed to Aristotle’s structural approach, yet in order for an interactive poetics to be viable in a practical sense, it has to be able to integrate agency, immersion and transformation. Of the three interactivity elements identified by Murray, Mateas focuses on agency, translating Aristotle’s primacy of action into a primacy of agency. Mateas advises that for the user to be prompted to take action, ‘the interface must in some sense “cry out” for the action to be taken’ (2004: 24-25). The technique to deploy in creating this sort of an interacting lure is the creation of affordances or constraints. Because constraint has a negative connotation of limiting the player’s experience, Mateas settles for the term ‘affordance’. These affordances, which can be as simple as prompting the user to press a switch in a room, open a drawer, pick up a book or help an NPC, become the user’s material causes for the action, or the building material equivalents. The user’s under-standing of the form, i.e. what is expected of him within the game world, constitutes the user’s formal cause, which shapes the way he interacts with the environment. In Mateas’s words, ‘a player will experience agency when there is a balance between the material and formal constraints’ (2004: 25).

The addition of agency to the dramatic model is both necessary and clear, but what is questionable is the role assigned to material affordances. The setting and objects found within a game world, for instance, would appear to play a far more important role than that suggested by the relegated bottom category of enactment (the category they fit according to Laurel’s revamped spectacle).

In Game Design as Narrative Architecture (2004), Henry Jenkins rightly points out that in the interactive context of navigable spaces, spatial development supplants plot development as the main nar-rative trajectory, and storytellers now become ‘narrative architects’



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7. In the absence of a universally agreed term for viewers/users of interactive content (webseries, computer games, etc), ‘interactor’ at least denotes a more precise nature of the active participation with the content.

(2004: 121). This is a novel way of thinking for someone coming to this field from ‘traditional’ screenwriting, and offers a useful way of entering the mental processes of interactive screenwriting.

Jenkins’s concept of narrative architecture underlines the need to reassess the position of setting and objects in the enactment rank. Alert to this discrepancy, Tomaszewski and Binsted have critiqued both Laurel’s (1991) and Mateas and Stern’s (2005) models in their A Reconstructed Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Interactive Narrative (2006). They point out that objects ‘play an increasingly important aspect of computer-based interactive drama since they are often the means through which the player can affect the action’ and go so far to liken the game world’s objects ‘within the same narrative context as characters’ (Tomaszewski and Binsted 2006: 3–4). To accommo-date this difference in status, the authors place ‘setting’ alongside ‘character’ in their table, below ‘action’, after which they reinstate Aristotle’s notions of object, manner and medium, which replace the other categories of Laurel and Mateas’ models. However, the authors do not venture further from their discovery vis-à-vis the setting and its revised position within the model. They have come up with a valid new positioning for setting, recognising its significance in both plotting and character development in an interactive context, but the full implications of how all the other interrelationships within the model would now work are not explored.

The relevance of this model, given the modifications and variations that have been made, is perhaps in question. It is possible that a new model is needed, a question I will return to in the conclusion.

MIMESIS AND CATHARSISIn the above cited works on interactive screenwriting, it is Aristotle’s six components of drama that take centre stage, and yet what is notably absent from these writings is a consideration of Aristotle’s concepts of mimesis and catharsis, which could open up new perspectives on the process of interactive screenwriting.

Paul Ricoeur, throughout his extensive work on narrative, reminds us of the significance of the mimetic quality – mimesis, or imitation of action, he says, is ‘the very definition he (Aristotle) gives of the nar-rative’ (Wood 1991: 28). Following on from this claim and picking up on the active form of the verb employed (mimesis), David Carr asserts that ‘(n)arrative mimesis for Ricoeur is not reproduction but production, invention’ (Wood 1991: 170). In this productive context Ricoeur equates narrative with metaphor as sites of new creation; if metaphor is ‘the capacity of “seeing as”… the narrative activity of story-telling opens to us the realm of the “as if”’ (Wood 1991: 171). Transplanted to an interactive setting this interpretation of mimesis fits perfectly into the concept of an interactor’s7 behaviour. A gamer assumes an avatar identity and while negotiating the formal and material constraints, they are essentially behaving ‘as if’ they were the


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character. The formal constraint means that the situations the gamer encounters are preordained, which would place this on a reproduc-tion rather than production level. However, how the gamer positions himself vis-à-vis this situation is a production and an invention; it is something that is unique to each gamer and indeed in each replay. This is the transformative aspect of interactivity – the infinite variation that each interaction prompts, unique and never to be repeated.

The ‘as if’ concept also happens to be a currency in cogni-tive behavioural psychology, courtesy of George Kelly’s research into corrective behavioural exercises (Kelly 1991), inspired by Otto Vaihinger’s philosophy based on the same ‘as if’ credo. Kelly found that by encouraging patients to behave (in a structured and guided manner) ‘as if’ they were something other than their usual self, he could help them access new emotional states and unblock emotional and psychological problems. By prompting an ‘as if’ mode of behav-iour in an interactive context, it follows that a psycho-emotional response can be elicited, which becomes relevant when analysing the possibility of catharsis in interactive narratives.

Aristotle did not fully elucidate the meaning of catharsis, which con-tinues to cause a certain degree of contradictory interpretations. The common interpretation, which dominates screenwriting manuals, is that of purgation in the metaphoric sense, of the build-up of emotionscaused by the dramatic incidents (although this is a point that is refuted by Aristotelian scholars such as Golden (1992) and Belfiore (1992)). A less simplistic take on catharsis explains it as the culminationof the emotions of pity, hope and fear. Its function can be summed up as a psychotherapeutic release of pent-up negative emotions such as anger, frustration and stress, which then get released along with the emotions stirred up as a direct response to the drama. And while most components of drama have been satisfactorily identified within interactive narrative formats, catharsis appears resistant to interactive narrative, and is deemed to be inapplicable by such scholars as Janet Murray (1997).

In her landmark work on cyber-narratives, Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), Murray makes a sweeping statement on the future of digital narratives; ‘… in order for electronic narrative to mature, it must be able to encompass tragedy as well’ (Murray 1997: 175). Yet this seems an insurmountable obstacle, as tragedy necessitates catharsis, and Murray in the same breath bemoans the impossibility of catharsis ‘in a medium that resists closure’ (Murray 1997: 175). From this we can glean that Murray, too, subscribes to the ‘final purge’ version of catharsis, which would appear contradictory in a medium that invites continuous re-engagement with the same narrative (e.g. multiple replays). So, is catharsis impossible as a potential interactive screenwriting ingredient? Laurel takes up Murray’s third aspect of interactivity, transformation (in the sense of personal transformation, where the user is changed emotionally and/or psychologically as a result of interacting), as com-ing closest to embodying catharsis, but does not elaborate on this



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8. Jenkins explains micronarrative as ‘the localized incident’ in gaming, a small narrative unit (2004: 125).

connection to make a wider-reaching, stand-alone argument on catharsis (2003: 20).

Examining the material causes of catharsis – the emotions of pity, hope and fear – raises the question whether interactive narratives such as games, dramas like Façade or webseries are capable of triggering the same intensity of emotion that a feature screenwriter hopes to deliver with his script (and fears he may not be able to). However, according to Aki Järvinen, emotions are very much part of the gaming experience. In Understanding Video Games as Emotional Experiences (2009) he argues that there needs to be greater attention paid to the different emotional experiences involved in gaming, and calls for more psychology-oriented research in the field. Järvinen identifies a number of categories of emotional experiences: prospect-based emotions; fortunes-of-others emotions;attribution emotions; attraction emotions; well-being emotions; and a subcategory covering variables affecting intensity of emotions which spans any modalities not included in the main categories (2009: 90–92). This classification of emotions is an intriguing proposal; one that mer-its closer study. For the purposes of this enquiry, however, I suggest that ‘prospect-based emotions’ are of most relevance to the Aristotelian line of thought, as they deal with emotions triggered by events. This might be emotions linked with the achievement of a perceived goal, for example, and which run the gamut from hope, fear and satisfaction to shock, surprise and relief. This means that catharsis can not be anti-thetical to interactive narrative, given that there are emotions involved. While prospect-based emotions may not be comparable to the emotions felt during the viewing of a film, a certain kind of catharsis becomes achievable as a release of the prospect-based emotions occurs. Järvinen sounds a note of caution about the different responses that vary across different genres (2009: 90–92). He cites the example of the story-driven game where the key emotion is providing anticipation of the unknown outcome (e.g. Myst 1991) as opposed to a sports game where from the outset the desired outcome is known in complete detail (e.g. Football Manager 2005). This genre sensitivity could provide an illuminating path to reduce the, at times, overwhelming complexity of interactive screenwriting.

But firstly a more specific rendition of interactive catharsis is needed. In addition to Järvinen’s proposals, Jenkins’s theory of narrative architecture provides a useful concept of the micronarrative8 as the segment that deserves most attention within the interactive narrative format, whether that is a game level or a webseries episode (2004: 125). With the absence of a cohesive, time-limited overarching storyline in many interactive narratives, the closest to structured narrative (including closure) to which an interactive format comes to is within the micronarrative. So within a micronarrative ‘mini-cathartic moments’ can be found, as releases of the prospect-based emotions when a mini-goal has been achieved and obstacles overcome. Taking the genre distinction as shaping the type of emotional experience (which can be read as a formal cause), we could also study individual


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gaming/webseries/interactive film examples in order to ascertain the difference in the emotions and the difference in the cathartic moments (which might be termed cathartic variations). This is not unlike traditional genre distinctions in film and TV drama (e.g. the emotions and catharsis in a political thriller differ from those in a romance), and genre studies may well assist in the study of the still developing digital media field, where the question of genre is very much a moot point.

Emotions are not the only potential key to unlocking the cathartic equivalent in interactive narratives. In Aristotle in Hollywood, Hiltunen identifies ‘the intellectual’ as one of the four dimensions of the ‘proper pleasure’ derived from drama (Hiltunen 2002: 47). The intellectual in this interpretation does not refer to ‘high-brow’ cerebral content, but rather to our ability to cognitively process language and enactment in order to understand the drama. From this cognitive ability Hiltunen stretches the point to cover the pleasure derived from deciphering the mystery of the story, or the intellectual ‘puzzle’. This hypothesis taps into the work of Leon Golden, whom Elizabeth Belfiore recognises as the ‘single most influential living authority on Aristotle’ (Belfiore 1992: 1). She credits Golden for spreading the idea of the cognitive/intel-lectual source of catharsis; ‘he argues… that katharsis is “that moment of insight which arises out of the audience’s climactic intellectual, emotional and spiritual enlightenment”’ (Belfiore 1992: 1). Given the ludic component of games, where mystery and puzzle solving are often more important than the storyline, the idea of the intellectual pleasure of solving the puzzle-story as the act that unlocks catharsis is appealing and deserves consideration in future analyses. However, Golden’s assessment does not distinguish the cognitive from the emotional and Belfiore is quick to fill this theoretical imprecision by suggesting that the two are, in fact, inseparable, although she con-cedes that there is room for more rigorous theoretical work, and calls for a closer reading of Aristotle’s psychological works for clues to this unresolved issue (Belfiore 1992: 3). This echoes Järvinen’s call for psychology-based studies of gaming (2009: 85).

To sum up, it transpires from the above that experiencing catharsis in an interactive setting is viable; it may be that it needs to be under-stood in a less literal manner or rather in a new, expanded meaning.

CONCLUSION: ABANDON ARISTOTLE?In the progressive refinements of the Aristotelian model referred to above, the components continue to be displayed in a linear, cause-and-effect chain, which perhaps shows a reluctance to abandon this pre-digital way of thinking. What if the spectacle/enactment rela-tionship with the other components is not the only one that needs re-examining? If spectacle/enactment can be seen in the same category as character (as Tomaszewski and Binsted argue), then enactment’s relationship to all the other components changes automatically. The same logic can be successfully applied to pattern. If we look at



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cyberspace and its networked, multiple connectivity, or the rhizome model (i.e. a model with multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points, much like the root system in nature, where the concept is taken from) - which is frequently cited in digital domains as a typical example of non-hierarchical interconnectivity - then perhaps this is our cue for a re-thinking of the Aristotelian model. What if we looked at the six components of tragedy without any hierarchical conditions attached?

If we look at Laurel’s (1991) and Mateas’ (2005) models without the restrictive ascending and descending hierarchy of one-directional material and formal causes, we may discover which interconnections can be made outside of the up-down model. I accept that the likelihood is that not all of the elements will turn out to be formally or materi-ally linked to each other, but this ‘networked’ model would contribute to a more radical re-thinking of how to engage with Aristotle in an interactive narrative mode. However, it would be a stretch to claim that this networked model could provide the necessary foundation for an ‘interactive poetics’. The altered perspective of a network intercon-nectivity could well spark off some new ideas, but it would be unlikely to yield a comprehensive model for interactive screenwriting.

What appears to be by far the most common trait running through all the different approaches to Aristotle analysed here is the degree of modification employed within each aspect of the Poetics. Rather than showing us an updated re-imagining of dramatic concepts, what emerges, in fact, is a set of new dramatic configurations. And the more these new configurations (e.g. enactment, spatial plotting, setting as affordance, setting as narrative architecture, micronarrative) are explored, the clearer it becomes that they bear little resemblance to the Aristotelian categories to which they are attempting to cor-relate. While it is not my aim to minimise the worth of the theories discussed above, because they provide interesting insights into inter-active drama, it does appear that Aristotle’s model, as the basis for an interactive screenwriting poetics, is a problematic one. What this comparative study demonstrates is a tendency for commentators to start off with a familiar, fixed theoretical point in order to explore the unknown; but then the process begins to resemble an explorer’s chart-ing of new territory with a faulty compass. For a while the possession of the (faulty) compass provides some comfort but eventually new bearings and patterns manifest and there’s no longer the need to hold on to the functionless and archaic navigational aid. Let Aristotle be a valuable setting-off point, but there should be more caution before embracing him as an actual foundation for interactive screenwriting.

Mateas may have progressed along such lines, starting with Laurel’s re-conception of Aristotelian drama, but one of the most significant findings he makes regarding material affordances has little to do with Aristotle, and everything to do with the unique traits of interactive narrative theory, such as agency and spatial navigation. Rather than being concerned about where spatial affordances fit within the dramatic


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hierarchy (such as whether it is alongside character, or at the top of the table) in a forced attempt to mirror the Poetics model, we should accept that Aristotelian thinking may only illuminate minor aspects of interactive drama, and can not lead us to a self-contained interac-tive poetics. Instead, we need to start with the theoretical concepts of digital media and recognise the significant distinctions between the different interactive narrative formats.

For instance, the idea of narrative architecture or spatial plotting is a novel one for someone coming from classical screenwriting, where the focus on setting and objects is minimal by comparison (unless they have particular bearing on plot/character). Yet, revealing that the importance of an object may supersede the importance of character means little as a stand-alone statement, and as shown in the context of a networked structure, hierarchy ceases to be meaningful in the cyber-world. What is more exciting is the inverse relationship between dram-atizing a situation and tagging it to an object. To clarify: an interactive screenwriter surveys the interactive dramatic space as full of dramatic triggers. Nearly every object or NPC will have a dramatic function. So the writer plans the dramatic beats, then searches for the object that corresponds the best to that scenario to set the interaction off. In Façade, it could be something as banal as a wedding photo or answer-ing machine that initiates a plausible domestic rupture. Neither plot nor character can be revealed until the user interacts with the space. Then, when most of the desired dramatic situations have been spa-tially assigned, there is the issue of prioritising the revelations. Apart from programming, which can cleverly disable certain triggers until a specific development/discovery has been made, what plays a key role in the interactive screenwriting process is psychological awareness of how a user is likely to interact, and presenting the setting in such a way as to accentuate the affordances, so that the interaction is natural and organic to the story world rather than force-fitted to the writer’s conceived idea of the plot. Cognitive behavioural psychology is a use-ful tool in this respect, as well as knowing the genre expectations. At this stage of interactive story planning the Poetics approach feels like a distant echo.

This overview of the key writings connecting Aristotle’s Poetics with interactive drama models will hopefully serve to stimulate fur-ther research, because it seems undeniable that some form of an interactive poetics is the next step in the normatization of interactive narratives. The desire to experience stories has not changed with new media; only the mode of receiving them has. And even neophytes who may be suspicious of the genuine narrative possibilities in inter-active formats may need to retrain, as the transmedia phenomenon is already establishing itself as the industry norm. Classically trained screenwriters are likely to need to adapt to the cross-platform fre-netic traffic: studios are using interactive viral marketing to promote films (e.g. The Dark Knight 2008); TV series are expanding their sto-rylines and character activity to inhabit an online interactive presence



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(e.g. Lost 2004-present and Spooks 2002-2009); film and TV narratives are taking their inspiration from the gaming world (e.g. Lost 2004-present, Run Lola Run 1998); there are films-to-games and games-to-films adaptations (e.g. The Godfather 1972, Max Payne 2008,) and there are webseries turning into TV series (In the Motherhood 2007). As interactivity permeates mass media, we need an in-depth and coherent grasp of all its facets to equip a new generation of screen-writers to move us and entertain us.

REFERENCESAristotle ([c.350BC] 1996), Poetics. Translated with an introduction and notes by

Malcolm Heath. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books.Belfiore, Elizabeth (1992), ‘Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis’, Bryn

Mawr Classical Review 4: 1 http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-v4n01-belfiore-aristotle. Accessed 5 January 2009.

The Dark Knight (2008), Wr: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, Dir: Christopher Nolan. USA/UK, 152 mins.

Doom (1993-), PC/Xbox, Designers: John Romero, Sandy Petersen and Tom Hall, id Software.

Field, Syd (1994), Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, New York: Dell Trade Paperback.

Football Manager (2005-), PC/Xbox, Designer: Kevin Toms, Sports Interactive.The Godfather (1972), Wr: Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, Dir: Francis Ford

Coppola. USA, 175 mins.Halliwell, Stephen (1987), The Poetics of Aristotle, London: University of North

Carolina Press.Hiltunen, Ari (2002), Aristotle in Hollywood: The Anatomy of Successful

Storytelling, Bristol: Intellect Books.In the Motherhood (2007), Cr: Alexandra Rushfield, Jennifer Konner; Mindshare

for Science + Fiction; cca 6 mins x eps. Webseries.Järvinen, A. (2009), ‘Understanding Video Games as Emotional Experiences’,

in Perron, B. & Wolf, M.J.P. (eds), The Video Game Theory Reader 2, New York: Routledge, pp. 85–108.

Jenkins, H. (2004), ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture’, in Wardrip-Fruin, N. & Harrigan, P. (eds), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 118–130.

Kelly, George A. (1991), The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume One; A Theory of personality, London: Routledge.

Laurel, Brenda (1991), Computers as Theater, Reading MA: Addison-WesleyLaurel, Brenda (2003), ‘The Six Elements and the Causal Relations Among

Them’, in Wardrip-Fruin, N. & Montfort N. (eds), The New Media Reader, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, pp. 563–571.

Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Wrs: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Dir: Peter Jackson. USA/New Zealand/Germany, 179 mins.

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), Wrs: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, Peter Jackson, Dir: Peter Jackson. USA/New Zealand, 178 mins.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003), Wrs: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Dir: Peter Jackson. Germany/New Zealand/USA, 201 mins.

Lost (2004-present), Cr: J.J. Abrams, ABC; 42 mins x eps.


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Mateas, Michael (2004), ‘A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games’, in Wardrip-Fruin, N. & Harrigan, P. (eds), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 19–33.

Mateas, Michael and Stern, Andreas (2005), Façade, www.interactivestory.net. Accessed 15 June 2007.

Max Payne (2008), Wr: Beau Thorne, Sam Lake, Dir: John Moore. USA,100 mins.

McKee, Robert (1999), Story, London: Methuen.Murray, Janet H. (1997), Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in

Cyberspace, New York: The Free Press.Myst (1991), PC, Designers: Robyn and Rand Miller, Cyan Worlds.Run Lola Run (1998), Wr/Dir: Tom Tykwer. Germany, 81 mins.Sofia’s Diary (2007), Cr: Nuno Bernardo, Bebo; cca 3 mins x eps. Webseries.Spooks (2002-) Cr: David Wolstencroft; UK, Kudos for BBC; 50 mins x eps.Tierno, Michael (2002), Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets

from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization, New York: Hyperion.Tomaszewski, Zach and Binsted, Kim (2006), A Reconstructed Neo-Aristotelian

Theory of Interactive Narrative, http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax/pubs/2006-TomaszewskiBinsted-Drama.pdf. Accessed 22 February 2009.

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Harrigan, Pat (ed.) (2004), First Person, New Media as Story, Performance and Game, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Wood, David (1991), On Paul Ricoeur, Narrative and Interpretation, London: Routledge.

SUGGESTED CITATIONKallay, J (2010), ‘Cyber-Aristotle: towards a poetics for interactive screenwriting’,


CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSJasmina Kallay is a Lecturer at the National Film School (IADT), Dublin, and is in the final stages of completing her PhD in Interactive Screenwriting at UCD. Jasmina regularly contributes to film and digital media publications and confer-ences. Apart from her academic output, Jasmina also works as a freelance script consultant and editor for a number of broadcasting and production companies in Ireland and the UK.

Contact: National Film School, IADT, Dublin.E-mail: [email protected]


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KEYWORDSTonino GuerraMichelangelo

AntonioniAndrei Tarkovskyscreenwritingauthorshipwriter-director-

relationship

RIIKKA PELOUniversity of Art and Design, Helsinki

Tonino Guerra: the screenwriter as a narrative technician or as a poet of images? Authorship and method in the writer–director relationship

ABSTRACTThe article focuses on the ‘invisible role’ of the screenwriter and makes observations about the screenwriter’s part in the process of writing a screen-play together with a director. By studying the two examples of the collabo-ration between the screenwriter and poet Tonino Guerra with the directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky, the intention is to follow the ways in which authorship is both constituted and shared in such a liai-son. I observe how the craft of the screenwriter is understood in relation to the different aspects of his task. By focusing on the case study around

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the writing of the film Nostalghia/Nostalgia (1983), I also consider how responsibility in developing these aspects is shared between screenwriter and director during different phases of a screenwriting process: in gathering ideas, sketching, building the story structure, writing drafts, rewriting and completing the final draft.

1. TRACING THE SCREENWRITERIn Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Il Deserto Rosso/The Red Desert (1964) a little boy surprises his mother, Giuliana, as he argues that one plus one equals one. The son proves his statement by showing how a drop of blue liquid dissolves into another, making them one great drop together. A similar event takes place in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia/Nostalgia (1983) when the main characters, the Russian composer Gorchakov and Domenico, the village madman, have a long discussion in Domenico’s house while listening to Beethoven. In cajoling Gorchakov into sharing his own radical intentions, Domenico demonstrates how two drops of olive oil form one bigger drop, not two. The calculation, 1+1 = 1 is even written on Domenico’s wall as a manifesto.

The actions of the child in The Red Desert and the madman in Nostalgia could be significant points of departure for interpreting the visual poetics of both films and the original world-views of the directors, as metaphors for an inseparable union of different abstract matters such as human intentions or dimensions of time. The mathematical calculation on Domenico’s wall could also be seen as Tarkovsky’s tribute to Antonioni, as there was great artistic appreciation shared between the Italian and Russian auteurs (Tarkovsky 1989: 145). However, the crucial thing con-necting Tarkovsky’s late masterpiece to Antonioni’s early one is not just the cinematic brotherhood of the directors, or the fact that Tarkovsky’s film was both shot and produced in Italy. A more significant common denominator is the screenwriter Tonino Guerra, an Italian poet who wrote the screenplay for both films together with each director.

Could the philosophical calculation also be seen as Guerra’s own signature in the texture of these two films? On the basis of this, would it also be possible to go on retracing the handwriting of the screenwriter in the shadows of the directors’ more visible approach? This question, however, is a challenging one to contextualize, since the screenwriter’s work has very rarely been acknowledged as an independent craft worthy of studying by itself – not to mention the authorship of the screenwriter. Research into film seldom considers the contribution of a screenwriter, and even more rarely when discussing the works of such masters of cinematic language as Antonioni or Tarkovsky, or other famous auteurs such as Federico Fellini or Francois Truffaut. Neglecting such questions as those of theme, poetics or style emerging from the contribution of a screenwriter and focusing instead on those arising from the director’s oeuvre derives partly from the myth of the writer-director, the concept of an auteur director who writes as well as directs his own screenplays. This myth was created along with the rise of the French New Wave,


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presented in film journals such as Les Cahiers du Cinéma and in the writ-ings of Alexander Astruc (Astruc 1968 [1948]: 17–23).

The auteur philosophy emphasized the director’s creative domi-nance of all the phases of cinematic creation. It also questioned the importance of text, the screenplay, as an origin or an inherent part of a film. Jean-Luc Godard’s pronouncements on getting rid of the script may have had a great impact on the neglect of the screenwriter, even though he later admitted that he too had written manuscripts like all the others (Godard 1984: 229–30). As a result of the auteur philosophy, the screenwriter became an ‘invisible ghost’, hiding but still nonetheless working in the shadows of film production.

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s artistic work the ideals of auteur philosophy were strongly present. Although Tarkovsky held poets and novelists in high esteem, he did not value screenwriting very much, not even as a profession in itself. The screenplay was not to be compared to litera-ture either; it was a creative laboratory, in itself fated to die in the film. For him the director was the poet, the composer, the author.

However, as with Tarkovsky, the text did continue to serve as the basis for fiction film in the era of the New Wave. Yet there were also variations in how the labour of writing was divided or shared. Only a few directors, like Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini, ful-filled the double-duty position of writer-director and wrote their own screenplays. Godard often based his screenplays on other texts, nov-els and short stories, and especially later on in his career he worked extensively with screenwriters. Many auteur directors like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francois Truffaut wrote with a partner or team. In the tradition of European film-making, from the era of Italian neo-realism in the 1940s and 1950s to the French New Wave in the 1960s and later, the names of several screenwriters come up alongside famous directors. The Italian writer Suso Cecchi d’Amico began her career in the 1940s and went on to work with Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti. In France, the writer Jean-Claude Carrière worked with Jacques Tati and Luis Buñuel; Jean Gruault worked with auteurs such as Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette; and Gérard Brách wrote many of Roman Polanski’s films. Novelist Marguerite Duras created screenplays for and with Alain Resnais while directing her own films; and in the USSR, Aleksandr Misharin collaborated with Tarkovsky for over twenty years, starting with the film Zerkalo/The Mirror (1974).

One of the most recognized of these often-unacknowledged European screenwriters is Tonino Guerra. His contribution as a writer varied significantly depending on the film production he was involved in. Very often he co-wrote with the director, as was the case with the screenplays for Antonioni’s The Red Desert (1964) and Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983). In spite of his remarkable contribution to film, in most of his cinematographic work Guerra was characterized as an inventor of stories or as a technician of narrative structures but rarely as a screenwriter in the sense of an author (Pellizzari 2004: 228).


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1. A tetralogy is ‘any set of four related dramas’ (OED, 1968). Contemporary critics pointed to the similarities of these three from the 1960s. Il Deserto Rosso/The Red Desert (1983) was later seen by others such as Seymour Chatman as similar in theme, plot structure and character type (Chatman 1985: 51).

In this article my aim is to focus on the invisible role of the screen-writer and to make observations on the screenwriter’s role in the proc-ess of writing a screenplay together with a director. By studying the two examples of Tonino Guerra’s collaboration as a writer – the life-long collaboration with Antonioni and the one-off collaboration with Tarkovsky – my intention is to follow the ways in which authorship is both constituted and shared in such liaisons. I observe how the craft of the screenwriter is understood in relation to the different aspects of his task, here especially in creating the theme and the idea, the narra-tive structure and the cinematic image for a screenplay. I compare how these issues are defined by the directors and by the writers themselves. By focusing on the case study around the writing of the film Nostalgia, I also consider how responsibility in developing these aspects is shared between screenwriter and director during different phases of a screen-writing process: in gathering ideas, sketching, building the story struc-ture, writing drafts, rewriting and completing the final draft.

Theoretical discussion on the status of the screenplay as an inde-pendent work in its own right, as compared to a complete film or to a play or a literary work (e.g. a novel) will be left aside here, although it would also be a significant topic in any consideration of the screen-writer’s authorship. Instead the emphasis is here on the practice-oriented perspective of the artists and in the processes and methods of creating a screenplay.

With this study, my aim is also to give an optional view to tradi-tional research on the screenwriter’s work, which typically explores the subject from the perspective of American industrial film production. In that context the respective roles of the writer and director are gener-ally seen as separate entities with independent responsibilities in the production line, the writer being in charge of the storyline, the dramatic structure and the dialogue, whereas the visual imagery of the film is entirely the director’s responsibility (see, for example, Stempel 2000; Norman 2007). In studying the work of Tonino Guerra my question is whether these different elements of the narrative whole can be seen as separate entities or responsibilities defining the writer’s task, or does the example of his work suggest another way of looking at the writer–director relationship?

Very little has been documented of the professional relationship between Guerra and Antonioni, even though Guerra is credited as writer of the screenplay for most of Antonioni’s films. I shall mainly follow Lorenzo Pellizzari’s short monograph on Guerra’s work, in which he also tries to define Guerra’s personal poetic and narra-tive style, recognizable in many Italian films (Pellizzari 2004: 40–109, 218–40). In addition, I will pay attention to several scattered notions on the nature of Guerra and Antonioni’s relationship as presented in different interviews and screenplay introductions from the early 1960s, when the first three of Antonioni’s so-called ‘Great Tetralogy’,1 the films L’Avventura/The Adventure (1960), La Notte/Night (1961) and L’Eclisse/Eclipse (1962) were produced.



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The professional relationship between Guerra and Tarkovsky, on the other hand, is more accessible for study. For example, Tarkovsky’s published diaries, Time within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986 (1994), describe the working process on Nostalgia’s screenplay in great detail. It also reveals the intimate story of a friendship between two artists who appreciate and trust each other’s work. As the director’s diaries are one of the very rare available sources on Guerra’s actual work, the process is still documented largely from the perspective of the director only and, if not leaving the writer in the shadows, it does not really allow Guerra to present his authentic voice. Another valuable source for deciphering the screenwriter’s contribution is the documentary film Tempo di viaggio/Voyage in Time (1983), a visual diary of writing Nostalgia directed by Guerra and Tarkovsky together. That source does not offer Guerra’s pure point of view either, but it does give a more equal presentation of their cooperation as it involves many of their discussions around the creation of the screenplay.

2. TONINO GUERRA – THE INVISIBLE THREAD OF ITALIAN CINEMA

Tonino Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna, Italy in 1920. He had debuted as a poet before starting his career as a screenwriter and is still one of the most acclaimed living poets in Italy. His first screenplay was for Giuseppe de Santis’s Uomini e lupi/Men and Wolves (1956), but it was the three films he wrote at the beginning of the 1960s together with Michelangelo Antonioni and a team of other writers, The Adventure, Night and Eclipse, that helped establish a formidable reputation as a screenwriter. At the same time, these films made him a kind of ‘brand’ connected to Antonioni (Pellizzari 2004: 224–26).

Despite his collaboration with Antonioni, however, Guerra worked with many different directors in Italy and internationally; from Francesco Rosi and the Taviani brothers to Andy Warhol and Theo Angelopoulos. Later in his career he has often been recruited as a screenwriter especially to give his name and touch, his poetic signature, to a film production (Machiavelli 2004: 243). As a result, he has more than one hundred films credited to his name and has gained three Oscar nominations: for the screenplays for Casanova ‘70 (1965), Blow-up (1966) and Amarcord (1973).

Guerra’s role as writer appears to differ according to the director in question. For example, the auteur Greek director Theo Angelopoulos compared Guerra (who was his co-writer) to a devil’s advocate or to a psychoanalyst who challenges a director’s subjective approach and vision, and supports him in finding it (Angelopoulos 2001: 140–45). Conversely, in writing the screenplay for Amarcord Guerra shared a deeply personal autobiographical approach with the director Federico Fellini, who had spent his childhood in the same Apennine village as Guerra. Guerra also stated later, referring to the screenplay for Amarcord, that he did not know or remember whether there were more of his or of Fellini’s memories in the film (Burke 2002: 157).


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2. The term ‘cinema of alienation’ was first used in Italian film reviews of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, which dealt with individual experiences of alienation caused by modern industralization and technology. Later in Italy it also came to mean other post-neo-realist cinema influenced by Antonioni’s films (Pellizzari 2004: 220–28).

3. ‘Commedia all’Italiana’ refers to another approach in Italian post-neo-realist cinema presenting the subject of social malaise and contradictions of culture in the rapid transformation of Italian society, through comedy but with a cynical sense of humour. For example, films by Mario Monicelli represent the classic example of the genre, closely linked to the old commedia dell’arte (Bondanella 2001: 145).

4. In his book Story, Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee presents three variations of the plot, one of them being a mini-plot. Contrary to an archplot, which has an active protagonist and is dominant in Hollywood films, a mini-plot is often based on the internal conflicts of a passive protagonist and tends to have an open ending. McKee refers to Antonioni’s works as examples of a mini-plot (McKee 1997: 45).

In spite of his large filmography, Guerra has been treated as a footnote to European film history – if even that. Yet The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies in turn acknowledges him as the greatest Italian screenwriter, ‘playing an essential role in shaping Italian cin-ema’ (Marrone and Puppa 2006: 905–06). Leonardo Pellizzari, the writer of a monograph on Guerra, brings up the same argument and defines him as an invisible thread tying together the different nar-rative approaches in Italian cinema. Guerra did contribute widely to Italian cinema, from creating the post-neo-realistic ‘cinema of alien-ation’2 to developing the commedia all’Italiana.3 Pellizzari also claims that Guerra deserves the status of an original author, the creator and developer of cinematic storytelling, in stead of being defined as a mere technician working on the narrative inventions of the great auteurs (Pellizzari 2004: 218–21).

From the 1960s, in film reviews and cinema studies Guerra was already recognized as a writer with his own approach and bracketed together with Antonioni as one of the creators of the ‘cinema of alien-ation’. In particular Guerra has been credited with introducing the ‘irrational component’ to new Italian film (Pellizzari 2004: 224–25). The Red Desert powerfully exemplifies both these tendencies in the story of Giuliana, the neurotic Ravenna housewife suffering the trauma of attempted suicide, who is agonized by modern industrial life and her own paralysed marital life.

Both Guerra and Antonioni were also held equally responsible for the disintegration of cinematic narrative typical of the films of the Great Tetralogy, soon to be widely imitated in Italian and European cinema (Pellizzari 2004: 224–25). Though in most later research mini-malist and open-ended narrative structures with causal disturbances are often categorized as representing the inheritance of Antonioni’s 1960s approach (e.g. Chatman 1985: 73–82), Italian scholars Niccolo Machiavelli and Pellizzari are also willing to credit Guerra with having invented this whole new narrative style (Machiavelli 2004: 243).

Guerra himself has asserted that his signature as a writer in a film can be traced from its sense of poetry, be it poetic images or qualities of the structure. ‘In everything I make, all I am doing is diluting a little poetry. I think I’ve always given a bit of poetry to all the directors I have worked with,’ he has stated, in retrospect (Machiavelli 2004: 241). But how did this ‘diluting’ happen? How did Guerra work with the direc-tors and by what means was he able to bring his personal approach to the work of auteurs like Antonioni and Tarkovsky?

3. THE GREAT TETRALOGY: FROM WORDS TO IMAGES

The starting point for Antonioni and Guerra’s collaboration (which lasted for over fifty years) was The Adventure, the well-known mini-plot4 film which they co-wrote with Elio Bartolini in 1959. This film also marked a turnaround in Antonioni’s style, when his earlier neo-realism and social exploration gave way to a more reticent narrative



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revealing the fragile inner landscape of the modern neurotic psyche. The Red Desert (1964) was another turning point in Antonioni’s career as it was his first film in colour. The way he used colour as a poetically expres-sive element in the film made him one of the inventors of cinematic col-our according to Seymour Chatman (Chatman and Duncan 2004: 91).

In Antonioni’s oeuvre the visual images, colour, setting or land-scape dominate. In his films ‘words are only a comment, a background to the image’, as Guerra put it early on in his career, and he describes how, in the process of realizing a screenplay Antonioni ‘wants to destroy in the word what it retains of literary suggestion in order to give it value as cinematographic suggestion’ (Rohdie 1990: 76). Guerra has also presented his own intention as a poet and a screenwriter as primarily to create images: ‘everything I write [...] is full of images. My writing is in its essence of images. And my poems always contained cinema even before I worked in it’ (Machiavelli 2004: 241).

Nevertheless, as translating words to cinematographic images is actively pursued by Antonioni as well as Guerra, the significance of words, via the screenplay, is not denied in the process of creating a story. Guerra explains how in their collaborative work,

In the first sketches for the screenplay everything is entrusted to words. We rework things, change lengthy dialogue and along the way get ourselves accustomed to the way a particular character speaks. Then very slowly the words fall away and gestures begin to take their place, movements of the character [...] visual marks on which the story of the film more and more begins to rest.

(Rohdie 1990: 76)

Guerra’s description obviously underlines the essentially shared, col-laborative nature of creating a screenplay: ‘we rework’, ‘we get accus-tomed to’ the characters’ speech, and so forth. On the other hand, it also presents the dominance of the director’s cinematographic intention in the process as a whole. The director with his hunger for cinematic images is the driving force, the leader of the process; the screenwriters are his humble servants with only their inadequate let-ters, their secondary words at their disposal.

Although the young Guerra himself refers to the function of words in creating a story for a film as secondary (as generally emphasized in the auteur philosophy), he still underlines the necessity of this liter-ary exploration, done in the medium of words before translating them into images. Guerra’s characterization of screenwriting, then, could be outlined as follows: without the literary exploration of the world and the characters of the story, the cinematic images and the relationship between them would not be deciphered with the accuracy with which they are subsequently revealed. Without the writer’s literary work the meaning and the significance of images could not be developed either, even if words eventually fall away and give way to images, let-ting them exist in their own right.


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However, counter to the New Wave film philosophy, which strives to create the independent language of cinema by rejecting its textual and theatrical base in dramatic scenarios, Guerra’s description reveals that in practice fictional film is not as much of an immediate image-based medium as, for example, painting. Essentially it needs another medium, the text, to be what it is, even if the medium of film appears to reject such text.

If translating words into images is the prime intention of the director in the process of making a film, what, then, is the intention of the writer? Is it more related to developing the characters’ psychology and the whole fictional world as the basis, the ground from which visual imagery can arise? Or is it, rather, in creating a structure for the story, the arrangement of the scenes and events and the flow of images? Or is his or her main task simply to put the director’s vision into words, like a secretary, denied of all intention, creativity and authorship? This was perhaps the worst definition of a screenwriter during the New Wave period – and perhaps quite close to Antonioni’s own attitude towards his writers.

Antonioni, for his part, mentions Guerra in a preface to his 1960s screenplays, crediting him and his other co-writers in a patronizing way as being ‘useful and functional assistants in the construction of narrative’, and Guerra especially as ‘a perfect technician of the nar-rative’ (Antonioni 1963: x). Later Antonioni even invented a precise term to describe the narrative skill of Guerra, ‘technically sweet’; a phrase originally applied to the inventor of the atom bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, but here meaning the ability to make the story stand on its own feet by creating the right structure for it (Antonioni 2007: 28–32; Pellizzari 2004: 233). When talking about working with other directors, the young Guerra himself also denied his own authorship, admitting that his role and expertise often lay in the technical arrangement of a story – ‘I must say that I mostly collaborated on the structure of the narrative. I made an effort to contribute to the structure, a very important element of the film, but the rest is less interesting to me’ (Pellizzari 2004: 230).

Both of these definitions describe the screenwriter more as a dram-aturge or an editor, a technically oriented outsider who can arrange a sensible order for any project with his dramatic skill. As a result, the director is considered the real author of the screenplay, the one who has dreamed up or invented the original fictional world, its themes and characters. But in spite of the opinions presented above, is the structure to be seen only as something separate and technical, a sec-ondary arrangement not organically tied with the thematic or visual contents of the story as well?

Even Pellizzari argues that Guerra’s originality as a storyteller lies in his structural approach and talent (Pellizzari 2004: 224–33). But this skill is revealed most strongly in the narrative strategies, presenting the ways in which the insecure nature of reality is experienced and reinvented through the narrative construction of a film. These issues are strongly present in Antonioni’s Great Tetralogy; in playing with



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fiction and truth, appearance and substance, truth and lies appear as part of its themes so they also motivate the narrative structures, creating a new kind of, perhaps irrational, causality. Pellizzari (2004) points out that certain of Guerra’s qualities also specifically intensi-fied Antonioni’s narrative style present in the Great Tetralogy. He sees Guerra’s contribution as being especially in the way the films move from the conventional dramatic line of presentation to a more seg-mentally and structurally oriented – yet playful and open – way of constructing a story (Pellizzari 2004: 225).

In a later comment, the older Guerra considers the dramaturgical structure of a film in a more intuitive and artistic way: ‘the structure is something musical. It is like an electrocardiogram that appears to me at a certain point and allows me, so to say, to feel whether the story has its own rhythm, homogeneity and sonority’ (Machiavelli 2004: 248). The sensitive metaphor with which he speaks of the structure as the heart of the story itself suggests a concept of screenwriting similar to a composer working with his vocal or instrumental material, or to that of a poet absorbed in the materiality of his medium, and not as a tech-nician only working out a vision of the great artist.

Even though Guerra and Antonioni’s professional relationship was at the time defined in hierarchical terms of master and assistant, at least in public, questions still arise about the division of their tasks. Namely, is a screenwriter only ever able to work on the structure without at the same time intervening or developing the images – the visual, organic and moving material of the film? Are they not both, the image and the narrative structure, dependent on each other as well as the essential part of the screen idea as both sides of the coin, growing and develop-ing out of each other’s structure, itself a more organic problem of com-position than simply the order of the scenes? By looking at Guerra’s collaborative work with Tarkovsky on the screenplay of Nostalgia as a case study, would it be it possible to decipher a different, more organic and perhaps equal way of dividing and sharing the work of creating cinematic narrative?

4. THE JOURNEY TOWARDS NOSTALGIAFor Andrei Tarkovsky too, the notion of the auteur was imperative. In his case the auteur philosophy did not mean merely controlling all aspects of production, starting from the screenplay, but keeping hold of the central idea, ‘the concept around which the future film would be woven’ (Synesssios 1999: xv). As pointed out by Natasha Synessios in her introduction to Tarkovsky’s Collected Screenplays, his task was ‘to transform this idea into cinema, keeping it as pure and as close to the original impulse as possible’ (Synessios 1999: xv). Like the New Wave directors, Tarkovsky also believed in the immediacy of the cinematic image as; ‘the supreme embodiment of the absolute and the boundless, surpassing the senseless word’ (Synessios 1999: xv). The screenplay, the scenario, was just a point of departure for the future film, a first step in


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5. Most references to Tarkovsky’s diary are taken from the Finnish edition (1989). English translation is by the author.

the externaliation of images born in the stillness of the director’s inner self (Synessios 1999: xv).

Synessios notes that, like many earlier auteurs, Tarkovsky often worked with co-writers, even with novelists such as the Russian science-fiction writers the Strugatski brothers, but involved himself heavily in the process as the main author of the screenplay. In a collab-oration of this sort he usually discussed the work with his writers inten-sively, after which they would put themes, dialogues and scenes into writing. Usually he read the results, discussed it with them and asked them to revise and edit it, progressing in a piecemeal fashion. Even though he did part of the rewriting himself, it was usually the writer who made the changes and solved the problems, until Tarkovsky felt it was his own script. As a true auteur, he maintained control all the way through the screenwriting process and always had the final word (Synessios 1999: xvi–xix).

However, in his collaboration with Guerra on the film Nostalgia (1983), Tarkovsky’s auteurist attitude does not appear as strong and hierarchical as, for instance, in his other collaborations. On the con-trary, the professional relationship seems to be based on the possibil-ity of opening up a creative writing space for two authors with their original ideas and poetic and visual imagination. The fact that Guerra was a poet was also one reason why Tarkovsky (himself the son of a poet) ended up working with him, something which can be deduced from a quote from Goethe in Tarkovsky’s diary,5 written while he was working intensively with Guerra; ‘the one who wants to understand the poet must go to the poet’ (Tarkovsky 1989: 183).

Nostalgia is a film about the contradictory emotional life of a Russian intellectual abroad, and of his meeting with an Italian mad-man who has locked his family in their home for seven years because of his fear of the impending end of the world. As the film deals with the director Andrei Tarkovsky’s personal ‘state of suffering far away from my home country’ (as Pellizarri quotes from Tarkovsky’s state-ment to the film’s Italian investors), it also explores ‘the nostalgia for a world without borderlines, a world that each of us so often imagines existing or that could exist’, as Guerra crystallizes his own intention for writing the film (Pellizzari 2004: 238). The hero of the story, the poet Andrei Gorchakov, states this same longing in one of his lines too, including both sides in his character: Tarkovsky’s subjectivity on the one hand and the poet Guerra’s humanism on the other.

While considering Guerra’s contribution to Nostalgia to be author-ship in its own right, Lorenzo Pellizzari posits that the film works on two separate levels revealing the personal thematic intention of both authors. There is Tarkovsky’s self-absorbed level of inner torment and a more confident level of discovering the reality, mastered by Guerra. He suggests that the film’s visionary and hallucinatory aspects could be ascribed to Tarkovsky, and that the humanity found in all its quo-tidian matters is Guerra’s (Pellizzari 2004: 238). Following Pellizzari’s



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division, it is certainly possible to analyse Guerra’s personal artistic style and contribution in the texture of the final film of Nostalgia in a detailed way, and to identify his hand in the characters, the dialogue, its structure and images. But would this reveal more about the nature of authorship in the practice of screenwriting itself? What is inter-esting here is not the final work or its interpretations but the proc-ess of writing itself, and of discovering how the creation and actual work was shared between these authors. Moreover, whose intentions dominated and drove the creative process forward? And what role did Guerra occupy, as writer, which enabled him to pursue his intentions through the collaborative process?

Interestingly, the initial idea for the film Nostalgia did not come from Tarkovsky himself but from Guerra, who visited him for the first time in Moscow in January 1976. His intention was to invite Tarkovsky to direct a film in Italy with the support of the Italian national broadcasting company RAI. The project was named imme-diately; Journey through Italy, a story of a Russian man in a foreign country (Synessios 1999: 465–66).

When Guerra went to Moscow for the second time at the end of 1978, the real creative collaboration of the two started. Initial images and scattered fragments that emerged during their discussions were immediately captured in Tarkovsky’s notebook: ‘a story of cultivat-ing a flower bed which changes into being ugly’, a black brook, a quarrel in a house, a wife with tears in her eyes as though someone dear to her had died (but after all it was just about the dishes), rain, water on the terrace (Tarkovsky 1989: 191–96). But it was not until April 1979 that Tarkovsky was finally able to travel to Italy for a short trip, during which Guerra guided him around the Italian country-side. The new founding idea for the film – the story of a man who has locked up his family for several years to save them from the end of the world – was, however, invented together during the pair’s telephone discussions after Tarkovsky’s trip. A sketch of this story, developed together, was written by Tarkovsky in Moscow. They now called it ‘Il Fine del Mondo’, the End of the World story.

This original version included many of the significant elements that ended up in the final film: the main characters, the protagonist Gorchakov, the translator Eugenia and the madman Domenico, as well as Tarkovsky’s autobiographical moment of a family watching the moon rising, which starts and ends the final film as well as lending structure and motivating the flow of the images throughout. As such, the image of a nostalgic moment of a family reunion preserving the personal emotions of the director could be interpreted as the origi-nal idea of the auteur, the emotionally strong core image born in the depths of the auteur’s mind. But yet, was that also the primary idea on which the whole film was to be built and developed? On the contrary, as documents from the working process, the two diaries (Guerra & Tarkovsky 1983; Tarkovsky 1989) show much more was to come; other foundational ideas were needed and examined before the final narrative


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could be constructed – even though the original image had been fixed and set in its correct place in the narrative structure of the film.

A key issue was to find a motive for the hero’s travels. On Tarkovsky’s return to Rome in July 1979 – having by then found a new name for the film, Nostalgia – he and Guerra left immediately for a journey through Italy, seeking inspiration. They did not so much seek the hero’s motives in a dramatic sense but in a poetic and symbolic one, as Tarkovsky emphasized in his diary. Test shootings and a visual diary, later cut together as the film Voyage in Time (1983), also fed the writing process; fragmentary ideas inspired by the landscape and Giotto’s paintings, and sketches for important scenes that would occur later, were all registered in Tarkovsky’s notebook. He also writes of how they would constantly ‘invent a lot together’ (Tarkovsky 1989: 213–18).

Both sources, Tarkovsky’s written diary (1989) as well as their visual one Voyage in Time (1983), reveal how the dramatic motives of the hero seemed almost something to be avoided by both collaborators for a long time. They knew only some absurd details, about such things as Gorchakov’s hands and his wet feet, as well as of his interest in architecture. They wanted him to encounter the characters from the ‘End of the World’ story outline, but there was as yet no motive for Domenico’s death. Throughout this process of development the agony of the auteur as well as the hesitation of the dramatist continued, as they felt they did not have a basic idea. The overall concept of the film was missing. The inability to be alone in the beauty of Italy was not yet an idea. They had to search for more ideas (Guerra & Tarkovsky 1983; Tarkovsky, 1989: 219).

In studying these discussions it also becomes obvious how their roles of auteur and dramatist, visual thinker and storyteller, vision-ary and devil’s advocate were not something essentially defined and unchanging but roles that shifted between the two co-authors. And yet neither of them was ready to compromise their ideas or their work. They ‘demanded a lot’ from each other and from themselves, as Guerra states in the documentary film (1983). What Voyage in Time shows very clearly is how both of them were becoming the driving creative forces in propelling the work forward. For the intention to create a poetic film about a Russian meeting an Italian was becoming a very intense issue for both of them – full of personal intentions. As a result, the idea of only the director having dominance and control over the key personal idea and developing it in his own artistic direc-tion dissolved into a shared process of invention and creation.

After their Italian travels the new version of the screenplay was reworked separately by the two of them in Michelangelo Antonioni’s house in Sardinia. This was a literary document, a novella-like script in the Russian way (Synessios 1999: xiv). In diary entries from this period (Tarkovsky 1989: 219–21), the shared nature of the labour of writing becomes clear too; first Tarkovsky wrote the scenes they had discussed together, then Guerra translated and rewrote them and finally Lora, Guerra’s wife, translated them back into Russian for Tarkovsky. ‘I will



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6. Noted from Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com, accessed 2 July 2009.

definitely edit the final version myself,’ Tarkovsky now stated in his notebook, revealing that he truly wanted to retain ultimate control as a true auteur.

The structure of the story in this version followed the course of Gorchakov’s journeys – as their own journeying experience together would have silently slipped into its constitution. When this version of the manuscript was ready, Tarkovsky and Guerra resumed their travels and found a place where the story and the whole film was to be located, the medieval spa village of Bagno-Vignoni. The original journeying structure of the story was now broken altogether and the material restructured. As the film of their visual diary, Voyage in Time (1983), reveals, they decided to focus on Gorchakov’s meeting with the madman, Domenico, which now took place at the end of Gorchakov’s journey. By the end of August 1979 a draft written by Tarkovsky on the basis of their discussions was ready, and he then went back to filming another project. Guerra continued writing the draft for one more week, after which the version was sent to Italian and Soviet film funders (Tarkovsky 1989: 222–34).

The following spring Tarkovsky returned to Rome, where they started to rewrite the script again. However, now the Italian inves-tors demanded that the budget be slashed as well as the screenplay’s length. Tarkovsky and Guerra were forced to start the story again with only a few core elements, most of them already in the original first version of the screenplay: ‘1. Madman and the horses. 2. Madonna del Parto sequence. 3. Bagno-Vigno sequence with illness, dream and the bicycle. 4. Beginning in the Hotel Palma.’ The director’s autobio-graphical memory scene of the family bathed in moonlight, as part of the hero’s own nostalgic memories, was now to be the end of the whole story (Tarkovsky 1989: 281–83).

From now on, Tarkovsky’s notes emphasize the aesthetics and the cinematography of the future film. Judging by the diary, it now seems that he was not working with the actual screenplay anymore, whereas Guerra was at the time doing the heavy work of writing the script as well as working with the overall shape and structure of the story. This he continued doing until the final version of the screenplay was com-pleted at the end of May 1980. At the same time Tarkovsky’s Stalker won a special prize from the Ecumenical jury in Cannes,6 which was enough to attract a producer and enough money to realize the film (Tarkovsky 1989: 284–96).

Just over a year later, in July 1981, the contract with the Soviet and Italian producers and investors was finally made and filming com-menced the following October. Tarkovsky wrote the shooting script by himself, with notes regarding locations, scenes, parentheses, types of shot and with the actual dialogue. This was the Soviet way, and it also explains the major differences between the published screenplay version (Tarkovsky 1999: 471–503) and the film itself. Guerra went on working with another auteur – Fellini – on his new film E la Nave Va/And the Ship Sails On (1983). In August 1981, on the last pages of his


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diary, Tarkovsky tries to recall the screenplay of Nostalgia again. He remembers just three things, core images arisen and created from the depths of two poetic minds through an intensely shared, intentional but, more importantly, the equal process of writing: ‘1. Madonna del Parto. 2. Lobby of the hotel. 3. Room without window. A dream.’ (Tarkovsky 1989: 340).

5. THE WRITER’S METHOD

In considering Guerra’s personal work on the basis of Tarkovsky’s dia-ries and the film Voyage in Time (1983), many questions arise and many are left unanswered. For example, does all that material reveal anything about the ways of writing that were typical to him? How did he make his own creative work possible with auteurs like Antonioni and Tarkovsky? What was the method of writing and creativity specific to Guerra in the challenging conditions in which he worked? And how were the image and the word, the narrative and the structure, all considered in relation to each other and dealt with in the practice of his work?

The director’s diary, as such, is not the place to find detailed answers concerning Guerra’s own work. Instead, in an interview conducted by Guerra for an Italian film magazine during their period of collaboration Guerra asks Tarkovsky to describe his visions in detail (Guerra 1979: 166–70), and this may give a clue to his personal method: ‘Would you be willing to tell me the end of the film, shot by shot, as if I were a blind man?’ he asks (Guerra 1979: 169). In Voyage in Time too, Guerra keeps on asking detailed questions, demanding descriptions, digging deeper into the images that arose, along with Tarkovsky’s and his own impressions during the journey. This method brings to mind the defi-nition by Greek director Angelopoulos mentioned above, of Guerra as the psychoanalyst or the confessor to his own story. If the screenwriter is seen as such a confessor and a mediator to another person’s hid-den vision, one of the most important skills for him would then be to know professionally, like an analyst, how to relieve and challenge the buried, unconscious images of another person. If we assume that this was his method with Tarkovsky too, all the exploration here shows, however, that Guerra, in the guise of ‘devil’s advocate’, also needed to expose himself personally and culturally for the sake of the characters and the fictional world of the film, and not just to remain the passive recipient of another man’s visions.

For Nostalgia the ‘analytic process’ of gathering and sketching mate-rial happened at first primarily over the telephone between Italy and Soviet Russia. Later it was replaced by personal travel, which now appears as a methodical journey, an exploration of the themes and materials of the film as well. Travelling also gave Guerra another stance to be adopted in his role as a co-writer. He was the guide, as Virgil was to Dante, the one who knew where they were going and where they wanted to go and should go. He was giving space for Tarkovsky’s own ideas and images, as affected by Italy, to rise into the process at their



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own pace. Thus he seemed to be the driving force of the project during this time, propelling both of them forwards like a quasi-producer.

In addition to the roles of the analyst and the guide, there is yet one side of Guerra’s expertise as a screenwriter fully at work in the writing of Nostalgia, as it was in the screenplays of Antonioni too; his work with structure and cinematic images in the medium of words. Some of the elemental images of the film arose as expressions of Tarkovsky’s inner self, from sketches written in his diary many years before. To make a complete narrative stand on its feet, a wider and more sig-nificantly defined flow of ideas, themes and images was needed. Most importantly, it required the poetic, dramatic and narrative skills of a professional, Antonioni’s ‘technical sweetness’ mentioned above, for the dynamic relationship of the story to be constructed.

What counts in the task of the screenwriter the most is what to make out of all the material brought up by these or any other methods and, most importantly, how to build them into meaningful constella-tions, structural and syntactic units and a moving image narrative, into a ‘language’ of cinema, without shattering the often very abstract and fragile core ideas and the mystery involved in their creation.

To conclude, the authorship here should be considered not in terms of a personal signature, but more according to the mathematics of the child and the madman as they appear in Guerra’s oeuvre; as one plus one equals one, so Guerra and Tarkovsky’s work constitutes a whole in which one is inseparable from the other. Even though Tarkovsky can be seen as the ‘auteur of auteurs’, he nonetheless allowed Guerra to be a poet in the practice of screenwriting. Thus he makes Guerra a creator, not just serving Tarkovsky, but rather conceiving the story and the visual and poetic world of the film. Furthermore, what their liaison suggests is that, at its best, collaborative screenwriting – the shared authorship between a writer and a director on a screenplay – can be an organic and intimate thinking process shared between two creative minds, arising from the specificity of the film’s visual vocabulary, and its conditions and possibilities.

REFERENCESAmarcord (1973), Wrs: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Dir: Federico Fellini,

Italy, 127 min.Angelopoulos, Theodo-ros and Fainaru, Dan (2001), Angelopoulos Theo:

Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Antonioni, Michelangelo (1963), Screenplays of Antonioni, New York: Orion

Press.—— (2007), ‘Mitä olen halunnut sanoa’, Filmihullu, 6, pp. 28–32.Astruc, Alexandre (1968 [1948]), ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La

Camera-Stylo’, in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, pp. 17–23. (Orig.‘Du stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au stylo’, in L’Écran Française, March 1948).

Bondanella, Peter E. (2001), Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, London: Continuum.


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Blow-up (1966), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Julio Cortázar, Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/UK, 111 min.

Burke, Frank (2002), Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Casanova ‘70 (1965), Wrs: Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Tonino Guerra, Agenore Incrocci, Mario Monicelli et. al., Dir: Mario Monicelli, Italy, 113 min.

Chatman, Seymour (1985), Antonioni, Or the Surface of the World, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chatman, Seymour and Duncan, Paul (eds) (2004), Michelangelo Antonioni: The Investigation, Köln: Taschen.

Godard, Jean-Luc (1984), Elokuva Godardin mukaan (ed. Sakari Toiviainen), Helsinki: Love-kirjat.

Guerra, Tonino (1979), ‘Tarkovsky at the Mirror’, Panorama, 676: 3, http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Tarkovsky_Guerra-1979.html. Accessed 25 May 2009.

Il Deserto Rosso/The Red Desert (1964), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Dr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 120 min.

La Notte/Night (1961), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra, Dir: Michelangelo Antionioni, Italy, 122 min.

L’Avventura/The Adventure (1960), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini, Dr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 145 min.

L’Eclisse/Eclipse (1962), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini, Ottiero Ottieri, Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 118 min.

McKee, Robert (1997), Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, New York: Regan Books.

Machiavelli, Niccolo (2004), ‘Il pericoloso filo rosso delle cose Tonino Guerra e l(ad)oggi’, in Giacomo Martini (ed.), Tonino Guerra, Modena: Regione Emilia-Romagna, pp. 242–60.

Marrone, Gaetana and Puppa, Paolo (2006), Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, Raton: CRC Press.

Nostalghia/Nostalgia (1983), Wrs: Tonino Guerra, Andrei Tarkovsky, Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky, Italy/Soviet Union, 125 min.

Norman, Mark (2007), What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting, New York: Random House.

Pellizzari, Lorenzo (2004), ‘Un filo rosso per il cinema italiano’, in Giacomo Martini (ed.), Tonino Guerra, Modena: Regione Emilia-Romagna, pp. 218–40.

Rohdie, Sam (1990), Antonioni, London: British Film Institute.Stempel, Tom (2000), Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American

Film, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Synessios, Natasha (1999), ‘Introduction’, in Andrei Tarkovsky, Collected

Screenplays (trans. and eds William Powell and Natasha Synessios), London: Faber and Faber.

Tarkovski, Andrei (1989), Martyrologia (kotimaassa): päiväkirjat 1970–1981 (ed. Larisa Tarkovskaja, trans. Kari Klemelä), Helsinki: Mabuse.

—— (1994), Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986 (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair), London: Faber and Faber.

—— (1999), Collected Screenplays (trans. and eds William Powell and Natasha Synessios), London: Faber and Faber.

Tempo di viaggio/Voyage in Time (1983), Wrs: Tonino Guerra, Andrei Tarkovsky, Dirs: Tonino Guerra, Andrei Tarkovsky, Italy, 62 min.



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Uomini e lupi/Men and Wolves (1956), Wrs: Giuseppe de Santis, Tonino Guerra, Ivo Petrilli, Elio Petri, Tullio Pinelli, Cesare Zavattini, Dir: Giuseppe de Santis, Italy, 94 min.

Zerkalo/The Mirror (1974), Wrs: Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Misharin, Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 106 min.

SUGGESTED CITATIONPelo, R. (2010), ‘Tonino Guerra: the screenwriter as a narrative technician or as a

poet of images? Authorship and method in the writer–director relationship’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 113–129, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.113/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSRiikka Pelo is a Finnish novelist and a screenwriter currently working on her Ph.D. by practice in screenwriting in the University of Art and Design, Helsinki. Her novel, The Heaven-Bearer, will be published in English by The Twisted Spoon Press (Czech Republic/USA) in 2010.

Contact: University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland.E-mail: [email protected]


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KEYWORDSauthorshipcollaborationDavid SherwinLindsay Andersonsequence 5script to screen

transitionprocess of

equivalenceFrançois Truffaut‘une certaine

tendance du cinéma français’

ISABELLE GOURDIN-SANGOUARD University of Stirling

Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson andDavid Sherwin’s collaboration on If.... (1968)

ABSTRACTThis article draws upon the research currently undertaken for my doctoral thesis and is meant to act as a complementary study of Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s partnership on If…. (1968), following Charles Drazin’s 2008 article for the Journal of British Cinema and Television, ‘If… before If…’. Charles Drazin (2008: 318) highlights the idea of a ‘creative dynamic’ underlying the working partnership between Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin on If…., as well as in the subsequent projects they developed together. The following article aims to uncover the nature of the creative dynamic suggested by Drazin’s article by looking at both the personal and the artistic dimensions that the working relationship assumed. The aim is to highlight the distinctiveness of their collaboration in the cin-ema; the article will show that in the course of this collaborative work they realized their artistic potential through an exchange of expertise, and that

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1. The title for the film is If…., with four ellipsis dots, not three. See Lindsay Anderson (2004a, 2004b) and Mark Sinker (2004: 14).

their collaboration helped to bring about an alternative approach to the con-ventional opposition between screenwriter and director, especially when it comes to claiming authorship over a film.

INTRODUCTIONThe following article explores the nature of the working relationship between the film director Lindsay Anderson and the screenwriter David Sherwin during the screenwriting and production phases of the feature film If.... (1968).1 The objective is to highlight the distinctive nature of their director-screenwriter partnership by unravelling the existence of a dynamic that their respective artistic potentials made possible. The

Figure 1: Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin during the shooting of If.... (1968). Courtesy: Lindsay Anderson Archive, University of Stirling.


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background to the article originates from my own Ph.D. research which focuses upon the cinema authorship of Lindsay Anderson; it also aims to offer a complementary reading of Charles Drazin’s own insight into what he regards as ‘one of the British cinema’s most significant writer-director partnerships’ (2008: 318). The article will further relate the dynamic underpinning of Anderson and Sherwin’s work on If.... to Anderson’s own view of the film-making process.

During his days as the editor of the cinema journal Sequence, Lindsay Anderson argued for the need to acknowledge the proc-ess of film-making as the ‘[…] almost miraculous fusion of many and various creative elements’ (Anderson 1948: 199). This proved a clear departure from the approach that his French counterparts in the Cahiers du Cinéma were to privilege, from the mid-1950s, and which for him denied the true nature of film-making; ‘a basic weakness in most French writing on the cinema… seems to be this extraordinary unawareness of the fact that films have to be written before they can be directed’ (Anderson 1955: 255). For Anderson, the French journal’s reviewing practice of American cinema overlooked the reality of the studio system, one in which the director has little latitude in terms of creative input, as scenarios are often imposed upon them by pro-ducers. However, Anderson’s systematic review of the artistic role which each – screenwriter, director, producer – assumes within the film-making process illustrates his belief in the existence of a crea-tive exchange and thereby reasserts his particular brand of author-ship; ‘analytical criticism, discussion of [the] filmmaker’s personality, is impossible if a good half of the constituent elements of each film is simply ignored’ (Anderson 1955: 255).

The following article will place this claim in the context of Anderson’s first feature film involving an original script as well as a close working partnership before, during and after filming.

THE BACKGROUND TO ANDERSON AND SHERWIN’S FIRST COLLABORATION The story of the collaboration between Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin is one that deserves more than a mere acknowledgement within the history of British cinema, as it spans a nearly thirty-year period. The two men were formally introduced at a London Soho pub, the ‘Pillars of Hercules’, in July 1966: Seth Holt, a director and pro-ducer as well as a personal friend of Lindsay Anderson, had arranged a meeting with the intention of convincing Anderson to direct an original script written by two young aspiring screenwriters, with Holt as producer (2004b: 108). Crusaders was the brainchild of two school friends, David Sherwin and John Howlett, who had set out to fic-tionalize their days at Tonbridge School in Kent. By the time Lindsay Anderson met the two friends, their hopes to ever see the script real-ized onscreen were running low. Their story – a chronicle of the strug-gle for power and the resulting revolt against the daily abuses taking



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2. See David Sherwin’s 5

May 1960 entry: ‘the only experience we’ve got is that Nazi camp – Tonbridge – our schooldays!’ /[John Howlett] ‘it’s never been done. Not the real truth. The torture! The keen types!’ (Sherwin 1997: 2).

3. See Lindsay Anderson: ‘They had been working on the draft for some years, and in various drafts had submitted it to such people as Nicholas Ray… and the British producer Ian Dalrymple (who had told them they both deserved to be beaten)’ (Anderson 2004b: 108). Also David Sherwin noted on 21 May 1960 ‘[Lord Brabourne] is straightforward. Crusaders is the most evil and perverted script he’s ever read’ (Sherwin 1997: 4).

4. See also Penelope Houston: ‘France probably has a rather higher share of enlightened investors than Britain or America, men prepared to take risks on a creative rather than a commercial reputation’ (Houston 1963: 87). Also, ‘looking across the Channel … France and Italy have their defiantly young directors, as unafraid of making mistakes as they are of making pictures; and Britain’s cinema by contrast looks scared of cutting loose, of appearing immature or juvenile’ (Houston 1963: 113).

place within the confines of a fictional English public school2 – had, in Sherwin’s words, generally been met with moral outrage and outright condemnation.3 David Sherwin’s published diaries (1997) and more recently Charles Drazin’s account of If....’s genesis (Drazin 2008: 321–324), highlight the connections between the adverse feelings which the original script generated and the context in which it was presented to potential producers. Drazin’s article in particular outlines what he perceived to be the lack of artistic vision and ambition that charac-terized the British cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s (Drazin 2008). Quoting his own interview with Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Drazin contrasts the inertia afflicting the British cinema scene with the then blooming French New Wave that was, in his opinion, taking the medium into uncharted territories of new-found cinematic creativ-ity with films such as François Truffaut’s Les Quatre-Cents Coups/400 Blows or Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle/Breathless – both 1959 (Drazin 2008: 326).4

By the time the script – still entitled Crusaders – reached Lindsay Anderson in 1966, two film directors are cited as having expressed an interest in the story (Sherwin 1997: 3–10, Anderson 2004b: 108). In both cases, however, they decided against directing it themselves; Nicholas Ray, the director of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) whom David Sherwin and John Howlett greatly admired, turned down the project on the grounds of his American heritage, which he believed disqualified him for the task. Similarly, the second director to react positively to the script, Seth Holt, also felt that his lack of a first-hand experience of the

Figure 2: Lindsay Anderson and Malcolm McDowell on the set of If.... (1968). Courtesy: Lindsay Anderson Archive, University of Stirling.



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English public school system proved too much of an obstacle for him to produce a film that would do justice to the script (Anderson 2004b: 108). Both David Sherwin’s diaries (1997) and Lindsay Anderson’s own recollection (2004b: 108) privilege the personal dimension in the decision-making process of these directors, while the industrial context might just as equally have accounted for Nicholas Ray’s and Seth Holt’s unwillingness to see the project through. Sherwin’s entry, detailing his first meeting with the American director, is illustrative of the tone which characterizes the screenwriter’s records for the gen-esis of the film; a tendency to turn the context in which film-making practice was operating in Britain at the time into a critique of his own personal struggle over artistic creation:

[Nicholas] Ray stares quizzically at me… ‘Well, why don’t they want to make your…’ – a long Ray pause – ‘film’? I explain Lord Brabourne’s reaction. ‘It’s England’. Ray tells me he is too American to make the film himself, but I have a great future in Hollywood. God, I think, I’m almost there.

(Sherwin 1997: 8)

Within the context of this article the quote also allegorises the connection between the personal and the artistic sides of Lindsay Anderson’s and David Sherwin’s lives. Their respective frustration at a system which was only just opening up to more socially rel-evant and challenging themes for screen adaptation is but another

Figure 3: Anderson and Sherwin consult their scripts, while shooting If.... (1968). Courtesy: Lindsay Anderson Archive, University of Stirling.



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5. See Robert Murphy (1992: 102–14), and in particular; ‘Complaints about Rank and ABC’s domination of the industry led Edward Heath… to refer the “Supply of Films to the British Cinema” to the Monopolies Commission. Their report, finally delivered in October 1966, proved to be a clear and incisive indictment of the monopoly influence exerted by the two big corporations’ (Murphy 1997: 106–107).

6. See also Roger Manvell (1966: 116–133).

7. Lindsay Anderson commented ‘we were not writing on commission, had no ‘development deal’, and so felt beholden to nobody, and quite unaffected by any prejudices except our own. In this way If…. was well and truly in the tradition of “Free Cinema”’ (2004b: 110).

8. David Sherwin: ‘With this mutual flash of understanding my and Lindsay’s destinies change…’ (Sherwin 1997: 11).

9. David Sherwin recalls in one of his diary entries how the title for the film came about (Sherwin 1997: 18). Lindsay Anderson was using his old school – Cheltenham College – as one of the shooting locations. As Anderson feared the reaction of the headmaster, should he read the actual Crusaders script, a fake script was sent instead. The title for this fake, from Rudyard Kipling’s poem If, was suggested by Albert Finney’s secretary, Daphne Hunter, and Sherwin decided to keep it afterwards for

manifestation of the duality which was to inform their working partnership. Robert Murphy (1992) provides a useful account of the structural and economic changes that were affecting the British cin-ema industry in the course of the 1960s. If the Rank Organization and Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) had a de facto monopoly on the British cinematic production and distribution until as late as the mid-1960s,5 cracks in the system had started to emerge in the early 1960s with a string of unexpected critical and public successes achieved by independent productions.6 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), for instance, which Seth Holt had edited, managed to overcome the hurdles of a hos-tile film trade, gaining critical and public acclaim which further enabled Tony Richardson’s newly created Woodfall film company to achieve financial viability (Murphy 1992: 21). Of note, Albert Finney, the lead in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was to become the producer of If…. with his own film and theatre com-pany, Memorial, taking the project on board in June 1967 (Sherwin 1997: 18). Lindsay Anderson had himself been given the chance to direct his first feature film at the suggestion of Karel Reisz, who acted as a producer on This Sporting Life (1963). It could be argued that Lindsay Anderson merely continued with David Sherwin the tradition of artistic exchange, started in the wake of the Free Cinema initiative, whereby respective areas of expertise were both used and promoted with the objective of furthering a common vision for the cinema.7 In this respect David Sherwin describes the conditions which led him to work with Lindsay Anderson as a personal and artistic epiphany (Sherwin 1997: 11). Charles Drazin (2008) also stresses this sense of artistic recognition – ‘a mutual flash of understanding’8 – which was to herald a lifelong intellec-tual, artistic and emotionally-charged collaboration of which If.... (1968) captures the essence.

FROM CRUSADERS TO IF…. :9 UNRAVELLING THE DYNAMIC OF A WORKING PARTNERSHIPIf this ‘stroke of divine providence’ (Drazin 2008: 329) translated into an opportunity for the script to become a film, it also led Sherwin to a profound reassessment of his professional skills in view of Anderson’s outright dissatisfaction10 with the draft submitted to him. As Drazin’s interview with Sherwin indicates, a self-confessed teacher/student working relationship soon asserted itself (Drazin 2008). It appears that the young screenwriter accepted the terms of their working partner-ship as a necessary and even integral part of a tacit learning curve. Lindsay Anderson’s own view of the early stages of their collaboration certainly suggests that his intervention brought about a complete re-appraisal of the existing draft: ’David Sherwin and I took Crusaders to pieces, invented new characters, new incidents and a new structure’ (Anderson 2004b: 109).



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the film itself. Mark Sinker highlights the fact that Lindsay Anderson leaves room for doubt as to whom – himself or Sherwin – Daphne Hunter suggested the use of the poem title (Sinker 2004: 18). See also Anderson (2004b: 110).

10. ‘After reading it, though, I found myself disappointed. It was certainly appealing in an anarchic, even poetic way, but I felt there was a naivety about it, which… made me feel that it could only be directed by the authors themselves’ (Anderson 2004b: 108).

11. Charles Drazin: ‘Anderson […] possessed a formidable sense of structure and the analytical ability to push a dramatic situation to its logical conclusion’ (Drazin 2008: 331).

12. Anderson spent three months in Warsaw between October and December 1966 to direct a Polish production of John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, with Tadeusz Lomnicki in the leading role. While in Poland, on the suggestion of the director of the Documentary Studio, Anderson also filmed a documentary about the Warsaw Dramatic Academy, which he called Raz, Dwa,Trzy/The Singing Lesson.

This idea of a new departure for the script finds further confir-mation in Anderson’s mention of the subsequent decisions by John Howlett and Seth Holt to withdraw from the project entirely (2004b: 109–10, 113). An interesting pattern then develops between the two men, as suggested in the Drazin article (2008: 331), from this initial hierarchical structure in their approach to their craft; the screenwriter locates his own strength in his capacity for imagination, but also pro-fesses a need for containment which he believed the director’s pro-claimed synthetic and analytical skills provided.11 Lindsay Anderson also appears to accept his role as the more experienced practitioner. The letter which he wrote to Sherwin from Poland in November 196612 illustrates the point fully:

You have (excuse me writing like a school report) a fecundity of imagination, but it seems to operate rather without organic sense, like a series of prose poems: or jottings for a script. Sometimes a whole idea is valuable, sometimes a couple of lines, sometimes nothing.

(Anderson 2004a: 171)

Not surprisingly, David Sherwin’s entries recording the redrafting process betray a high degree of emotional turmoil. Between July 1966 and June 1967 Sherwin’s mood seems to oscillate between extremes of exultation and depression. In his published diaries, two entries, one for December 1966 immediately followed by one for Spring 1967, are an indication of the emotional strain experienced by the screenwriter:

December 1966: I get so carried away by this letter that I produce a script which is complete rubbish.

Christmas Eve 1966: Lindsay tells me the script is awful. I have failed. ‘Go away and write simply. Remember Georg Buechner,’ he says.

Spring 1967: [...] finish the new draft in April. In trepidation I post it off to Lindsay. He rings me at the crack of dawn to say it’s brilliant.

(Sherwin 1997: 15)

What is noteworthy, however, is the positive light which both Sherwin and his editor on those same diaries, Charles Drazin, cast upon the same period. Drazin regards their collaboration as an ‘organic relation-ship of two equal collaborators’ (Drazin 2008: 331). Sherwin similarly adopts the view that their working relationship produced a ‘creative dynamic’, which he defines as a process akin to a ‘Thesis’, ‘Antithesis’, ‘Synthesis’ approach (Drazin 2008: 331). In so arguing, however, Sherwin also opens up the possibility of a more negative approach to their collaboration. If no feeling of resentment permeates the narrative



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13. Lindsay Anderson: ‘David Sherwin arrives early morning – well 10.00: but I am not up… the idea of getting down to discussing Crusaders, rewrites, etc. is really alarming and distasteful’ (Anderson 2004a: 177).

of his published diaries – merely the sense of an emotionally-driven creative spirit in need of critical support – the recent interview which he granted Charles Drazin (2008) appears to undermine, ever so slightly, this view of their collaboration. For instance, Sherwin recalls his attempts to regain control over the drafting process and his subse-quent strategy of privileging afternoons for their working sessions – in all likelihood due to Lindsay Anderson’s self-proclaimed aversion to working in the morning:13

[Sherwin set out to learn] how to trigger Anderson’s sub-conscious: ‘The best thing I found – it was no good in the morn-ings, but in the afternoon he quite liked whisky – I would give him half a glass of whisky every half an hour until by the end of the evening [Anderson] was firing with creative thoughts’.

(Drazin 2008: 332)

It is tempting to argue that the only way for this young screenwriter to ever see his script transposed onto the screen was to agree to a tacit denial of his artistic impulses. David Sherwin betrays an apparent desire to redress the balance: ‘Anderson was a containing influence for a highly inventive mind… Sherwin recalled the warning that the director would often issue during their work together: ‘David, bread as well as jam. And you’re too much jam’ (in Drazin 2008: 331).

In these circumstances the dual dimension underpinning the col-laborators’ working dynamic would point to the precarious position in which a screenwriter finds himself, whenever allowing the direc-tor to become involved in the drafting process. Instead of the fruitful collaboration which Sherwin appears keen to emphasize, a struggle for creative dominance (for which Anderson’s and Sherwin’s respec-tive set of artistic skills would provide a metaphor) asserts itself. An entry in Sherwin’s diaries, from around the same time as Anderson’s remarks quoted above, encapsulates this idea of a contrary pull, and is to the detriment of the screenwriter. On 15 May 1967 Anderson pronounces the draft to be complete. Sherwin says, ‘Our draft of Crusaders is finished. Lindsay is pleased…’. However, the following morning Sherwin finds himself in a state of panic: ‘The script is rub-bish’ (Sherwin 1997: 17). What is interesting about Sherwin’s out-burst is that it seems to act as a question mark over his claim of the authorship of the script. In this regard, his published diaries do not make any mention of the redrafting that subsequently took place at Lindsay Anderson’s flat in London, but an account of this is found in Anderson’s diaries (2004a: 177–80).

Charles Drazin (2008) contributes his own approach to the issue of who could rightfully claim the authorship of the final script in assimilating script and filmed version. Instead of establishing a clear divide between the author of the written script and the director of the film, Drazin reinforces the idea of a common artistic goal which would have been attained through a collaborative effort throughout.



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14. ‘I stare at the story in Variety, not quite believing that it is true: SHERWIN WINS BRITISH WRITERS’ GUILD AWARD’ (Sherwin 1997: 26).

He declares, for instance, ‘the film was an example of the key crea-tors in effect pooling their authorship through shared values. If.... was neither Anderson’s film nor Sherwin’s film; it was their film’ (Drazin 2008: 333, original emphasis).

This compromise position, which Drazin seems to privilege, finds its manifestation in the tone of the interviews at the time of the film’s release and the subsequent publication of the script in 1969. In an interview for The Observer in December 1968, Lindsay Anderson clearly attributes all decisions in terms of narrative and style to both Sherwin and himself (Anderson 1968: 114). Similarly, in the ‘Notes for a Preface’ to the published script of If…., the director discusses the background to the storyline as well as any decision pertaining to style or any meaning to be inferred from their working partnership (Anderson 1969: 120–3). Furthermore, given that Anderson’s sub-sequent two feature films as well as an unrealized sequel to If…. were scripted by David Sherwin as well, the picture of a particularly productive and mutually beneficial partnership would appear most convincing. David Sherwin does not seem intent on directly claim-ing the authorship of the script for himself. In his published dia-ries he refers to ‘our script’, or talks about his ‘contribution to If….’ (Sherwin 1997: 17, 23). The closest he comes to proclaiming the script as his own creation is his mention of the British Writers’ Guild Award, which he won for the 1968 Best British Original Screenplay (Sherwin 1997: 26).14

It follows that Charles Drazin’s article (2008) convincingly high-lights the emotional dimension underlying Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on the drafting process by offer-ing a detailed insight into their working pattern and writing rituals. However, the question of assigning the final authorship of the script remains open as Drazin grants each partner’s input equal importance. Within the present context this proves useful as it provides a starting point from which to investigate conventional notions of authorship in a cinematic context.

FILMING IF.... : A PROCESS OF EQUIVALENCEDavid Sherwin contributes the following diary entry the day before the filming is due to start:

The night before shooting starts at Cheltenham College. Lindsay calls me round to his flat in Greencroft Gardens. He admits to me point-blank that he’s terrified. Lost. He doesn’t even know where he’s going to put the camera. We drink a whisky and lis-ten to The Beach Boys one last time before the battle begins.

(Sherwin 1997: 21)

This entry is significant in two ways: first, it establishes the emo-tional bond which is an intrinsic component of their collaboration



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15. Entries in April and May 1967 note: ‘We settle into a routine… Lindsay insists on twowalks a day… then along the stony beach and into – JOY! – a wonderful seaside pub called the “Broadmark”. Here in the public bar we play the jukebox and listen to the Beach Boys. IfI’ve been a good writer, Lindsay allows me a second glass of barley wine’ (Sherwin 1997: 16).

on the film. Second, it hints at their ability to transcend the usual boundaries between each other’s assumed areas of expertise. This would in turn suggest the existence of an interchangeable dynamic between the two – a dynamic which lies at the heart of their artistic drive. Sherwin here writes himself into the role of dominant part-ner, referring to Anderson by his first name and further recounting their meeting that night by simply using the third person pronoun, and thereby asserting his control over the situation. Of note, Mark Sinker (2004: 62–3) regards the sequence in which the three main protagonists in If…. are whipped as evidence of an underlying S&M motif, for which the public school’s etiquette works as an allegory. He further argues that this reading would account for Mick Travis’s subsequent rebellion as in S&M practice “[…] the bottom is run-ning [the] scene” (Sinker 2004: 63). With regard to the present argu-ment highlighting the degree of emotional dependency displayed in turn by both Anderson and Sherwin, it is tempting to regard the sequence in the film as a fictional re-creation of their own artistic process; in other words, the apparent teacher/student relation that had established itself during the drafting process is indicative of a pre-established hierarchy necessary to the production of the story but by no means impervious to change and/or challenge.

Here, the recourse to a drink and some music mentioned by Sherwin functions as a much-needed reprieve from having to face the consequences of their artistic endeavour. A ritual has established itself between the two partners; whoever happens to find himself exposed to outside scrutiny can rely upon the emotional comfort and temporary leadership granted by the other. Both Anderson’s and Sherwin’s diaries support this view by providing examples of the same pattern repeating itself on numerous occasions. In the case of If….’s pre-production and filming stages, David Sherwin’s diary entries, referring to his stay at Lindsay Anderson’s family cottage, mirror the account of Anderson’s breakdown on the eve of shoot-ing.15 Similarly, Anderson documents his location-scouting trip to Charterhouse, at the end of which he reports Sherwin experiencing his own anxiety attack:

As we left, David announced himself as feeling quite ill and intimidated by the whole experience… we recovered a bit with teas and a Kit-Kat and records on the juke box in a chara caff on the road home…

(Anderson 2004a: 185)

The working pattern between the two men also provides an illustration of the human dimension underpinning the coming-into-existence of the script. It further lends legitimacy to Anderson’s vision of the film-making process as a fusion of many and various creative elements; the script becomes an intrinsic part of the production of the film. Neither a compilation of filming guidelines for the director, nor the transposition



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16. ’I work practically without a shooting script; all I prepare is the dialogue […] You can’t put the best moments of a film down in a script’ (Truffaut in Manvell 1966: 69).

17. See for instance Louis Marcorelles: ‘The credits of A Bout de Souffle list François Truffaut as screenwriter and Claude Chabrol as “artistic supervisor”; but this was done for the benefit of the technicians’ union and, in fact… Truffaut’s contribution was the discovery of a news snippet which became the starting point of the plot. A Bout de Souffle is therefore a genuine film d’auteur – more so than either Les Quatre-Cents Coups or Hiroshima, Mon Amour, to which the screenwriters made powerful contributions’ (Marcorelles 1960: 84).

of a novel, the script is the product of a creative dynamic which, in turn, makes the film possible.

Two episodes further illustrate the relevance of the dynamic that underpins Anderson and Sherwin’s partnership. The first involves the writing stage: the second, the passage from script to screen. In 1994 Lindsay Anderson recalled a key instance of a scene ‘which seem[ed] entirely right within the film but which [was] not in the original script’ at the start of filming (2004b: 117). The scene in ques-tion occurs straight after the sequence during which the three main protagonists and friends – Mick, Johnny and Wallace – go through the ritualistic flogging by the school’s prefects. Anderson reports that he did not think that the scene ‘worked’ as scripted, so instead he relied upon his intuition and devised an entirely new scene. For the director the new scene, showing Mick shooting darts at a col-lage of newspaper cuttings, ‘solved the transition after the beating’ (Anderson 2004b: 117).

The background to the filming of this unscripted scene reinforces Lindsay Anderson’s distinctive championing of the existence of crea-tive elements at the heart of the film-making process. Anderson’s account, justifying the suppression of one scene and its substitu-tion by another conceived by the director himself, initially seems to echo François Truffaut’s own directorial practice on Les Quatre-Cents Coups/ 400 Blows (1959), a film which has often been cited along-side Anderson’s If.... for their common homage to Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite/Zero for Conduct (1933). Roger Manvell quotes Truffaut as advocating a directorial practice liberated from the constraints of a written script and thereby opening up fully the cinematic potential of a film (Manvell 1966: 69).16 While the French New Wave representa-tives are keen to suggest that a gradual dismissal of the screenwriter’s input ought to operate when moving from the page to the screen,17 the collage scene constitutes another manifestation of the dynamic underlying Anderson and Sherwin’s collaboration; this visual token illustrates the process of equivalence that supersedes any traditional definition of authorship. Lindsay Anderson provides an illustration of this process of equivalence such as it applies to the two men’s work-ing pattern and, in this instance, to the collage scene:

[A]s the script developed we were consciously determined not to appear to be reflecting, in journalistic style, upon the revolution-ary student action in France or in America. That was one reason why […] we eliminated all the fashionable iconography of revolt from the walls of the boys’ studies.

(Anderson 2004b: 109)

Anderson’s comment highlights the extent to which the development of the script and its transposition to the screen function interdepend-ently from each other. The decision to take out a scripted scene from the film does not constitute a challenge to the validity of the screenwriter’s



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18. ‘It is only when you make [the film], you write it, you film it, you edit it that all the creative process sets in, and that you reach a conclusion which is the film per se’ (Anderson 1969, trans. the author).

19. The notebooks themselves are held in the Lindsay Anderson Collections, Stirling University.

work. Instead, the main protagonist ‘firing darts into the collages broaden[s] the impact’ intended by the film (Anderson 2004b: 118), and reaffirms the collaborative dimension of the pair’s work because, as Sherwin explains, ‘we worked through the night, arranging the pictures in different patterns on the floor, until finally we have highly charged collages for our heroes’ (Sherwin 1997: 23).

This mention in Sherwin’s diaries of the collage scene assumes further significance when seen in parallel with an incident that took place barely a month beforehand. David Sherwin was present for the shooting of the sequence showing the three friends carrying out their punishment for killing the chaplain. Just as the camera was supposed to start rolling, Lindsay Anderson started reproaching Sherwin for not having written one single line of dialogue between the protagonists from that place in the story until the very end of the film. At that point Anderson appears to forego all claim of author-ship over the script and instead castigates his screenwriter for his alleged laziness. Sherwin’s rebuke – ‘It’s called poetry, Lindsay – the poetry of cinema’ (Sherwin 1997: 23) – undermines the tradi-tional notion of authorship being limited to particular stages of the film-making process. A more fluid definition takes precedence: one which acknowledges the area of expertise of each person involved in the film-making process, while at the same time emphasizing the existence of a continuous exchange inherent to that same process. Sherwin’s active contribution to the preparation for the scene, which had come into existence as a result of directorial involvement, puts forward the interdependence of both. This dynamic sheds a new light upon the claim of the authorship over the script, which involves a process of equivalence.

There is no journal or shooting diary of the film itself; as far as we know, Lindsay Anderson did not keep a record of his day-to-day experience of shooting If….. Anderson did, though, give a sig-nificant number of interviews at the time of If….’s release in 1968, as well as on the occasion of the film’s presentation at the 1969 Cannes International Film Festival. These interviews suggest that Anderson, the director, goes beyond the normal and expected practice of mar-keting a film: it brings out Anderson’s view of his function as a direc-tor or, in other words, how this function translated into the practice of film-making. For instance, in a 1969 interview to a French cinema journal, Jeune Cinéma, Anderson defines his role as film director as an integral part of the creative process underpinning film-making, as opposed to being the film’s sole or main originator: ‘c’est quand on le fait, qu’on l’écrit, qu’on le tourne, qu’on fait le montage que s’opère tout le processus créateur et au bout on arrive à une conclusion qui est le film’ (Anderson 1969: 9).18

Anderson’s published diaries provide another example of his view; the editor, Paul Sutton, notes the presence in Anderson’s notebooks of a mock interview featuring both the questions and the answers (2004a: 193).19 One of the mock questions outlines the relevance of the



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film to the trends and concerns of 1960s’ youth. Lindsay Anderson’s corresponding answer is consistent with the interviews the director gave at the time of the film’s release in which he would emphasize the film’s claim to thematic and stylistic universality. In other words, both the storyline and the adopted filming style would illustrate the princi-ple of Dr Johnson’s ‘grandeur of generality’ (Anderson 1968: 113); the core example, which underpins the director’s argument here, involves a systematic reference – with varying degrees of openness – to the col-lage artwork episode. Anderson’s consistent use of the personal pro-noun ‘we’ to explain the rationale behind the selection process of each photograph and/or any item relating to the students’ possessions and surroundings, implies a direct correlation between the written inten-tion present in the script and its visual realization onscreen. In other words, a scene became a reality as the result of a process whereby the role of the director and that of the screenwriter assume a function of equivalence. This function of equivalence happens when the directo-rial decision originates an unscripted scene, but which only becomes ‘filmable’ through the intervention of the screenwriter, who acts both intellectually as cognisant of the script and literally by taking over the role of the art department.

Another example of this notion of correspondence between script and screen or, in other words, between the screenwriter’s wording and the director’s visualization in the case of Anderson and Sherwin’s collaboration, involves the so-called episode of the ‘Chaplain-in-the-Drawer’. We learn about the genesis of this oft-commented-upon scene in David Sherwin’s diaries. During the working holiday in April and May 1967 at Lindsay Anderson’s family cottage, Sherwin reports the circumstances that saw the birth of one of the key scenes in If….:

It happens like this. I am lying on the floor with a pad and Lindsay is walking around the large wardrobe. We are running through the scene where the Crusaders are being ‘punished’ by the Headmaster for ‘murdering’ the Chaplain. And I blurt out: ‘Cut from the screaming Chaplain… to the Headmaster… Now, Lindsay, at this moment the Headmaster slides open the large chest of drawers and there is the Chaplain! He sits up and the Crusaders each shake his hand one by one. Then the Chaplain lies down and the Headmaster shuts the drawer…

(Sherwin 1997: 17)

For anyone who has seen the film, the correspondence between script and screen is striking. In terms of the dynamics operating between the screenwriter’s and the director’s respective practice, it provides an example of this idea of equivalence that constitutes a key feature of their partnership. It also brings further confirmation that Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s working collabora-tion on If…. challenges the traditional notions of authorship within



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20. Reprinted in Lindsay Anderson (2004b: 194–199).

the film-making process; through the director’s and screenwriter’s open acknowledgment and sustained exchange with the constitu-tive stages of the film-making process, a more fluid understanding as to who is making/writing/ creating the film becomes possi-ble. When Anderson, as a director, defends his choice of literally ‘putting the Chaplain in the Drawer’ (Anderson 2004b: 118), he provides evidence of the dialectic which he places at the heart of his artistic practice; ‘I used to throw myself against reality out of which I can create something – but to create that reality is very hard for me. I only seem able to work through some kind of dialec-tic’ (Anderson 2004a: 174).

CONCLUSION: CREATING AUTHORSHIP?In 1976 Gore Vidal launched his own attack on the auteur theory by dismissing the centrality of the director’s role within the film-making process. He contends that the director is ‘expendable’ as ‘there are thousands of movie technicians who can do what a director is sup-posed to do… they actually do his work behind the camera and in the cutter’s room’ (Vidal 1976: 148). He argued instead for the pri-macy of the screenwriter’s role, going as far as proclaiming that ‘there is no film without a written script’ (Vidal 1976: 148). As mentioned previously, in an article for Sequence,20 Lindsay Anderson promoted an all-encompassing view of the film-making process, whereby each constitutive phase was granted its full relevance and significance – ‘to form something new, something individual, a whole greater than its parts’ (Anderson 1948: 199). His article provides an overview of the constitutive stages of a film, assessing the contribution of each and attempting to set up a possible hierarchy to determine their relation to one another within the film-making process. His view of the screen-writer’s role is particularly insightful as it reaffirms the centrality of the script while maintaining the idea of an integrated process. Anderson believes that any weaknesses in the script will damage the film, no matter how skilled the director might be; but conversely, the script does not exist in its own right as a novel or a play might. In other words, the quality of a film – aesthetically or thematically – stems from the skilful negotiation between the written and the visual, ‘for it is under the director’s guidance that the film is created, transformed from the inadequately expressed idea of the script to a living sequence of sound and images’ (Anderson 1948: 198).

Anderson’s use of the term ‘inadequate’, to qualify the writ-ten word before its transcription onto the screen, recalls François Truffaut’s attack upon the French Tradition de Qualité which he attributed to screenwriter-director partnerships such as the one embodied by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (Truffaut 1954: 224–36). In his influential 1954 essay in Cahiers du Cinéma, ‘Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français’, Truffaut denounced the practice known as the process of equivalence or ‘invention without betrayal’



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21. See David Gerstner and Janet Staiger (2003: 3–25) and Virginia Wright-Wexman (2003: 1–18)

for instance, for recent overviews of the debate

surrounding the issue of authorship in film.

(Truffaut 1954: 226). This refers to transformation between media, whereby in screen adaptations of pre-existing novels or plays, some scenes would be deemed un-filmable. Truffaut believed instead in the potential for an ‘auteur’s cinema’ (Truffaut 1954: 234), that is, a practice of film-making which would acknowledge the true potential of the medium. Using Robert Bresson’s bold inclusion of a supposedly un-filmable scene in his adaptation of le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne/Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Truffaut advo-cates the need for transcending the boundaries which ‘scenarists, directors and litérateurs’ have imposed upon film-making (Truffaut 1954: 234). Within our present context, it proves tempting to shed a new light upon a seminal text that is commonly regarded as the manifesto of the Politique des Auteurs, which was to champion the centrality of the director’s role in the film-making process and the study of film.21 It is worth noting that, in that same article, Truffaut resorts to screenwriting practice to illustrate the short-comings of the ‘scenarists and metteurs-en-scène of the “Tradition of Quality”’; he argues that (screen)writing comedy is the ulti-mate test for identifying the true men of the cinema (1954: 234). In other words, Truffaut might also have intuited the interdepend-ence of screenwriting and film directing but subsequently failed to investigate the connection any further, as his later contributions to Cahiers du Cinéma tend to suggest. Lindsay Anderson’s vision for the role of the director in the film-making process would here provide the missing connection by highlighting the centrality of the latter’s role while simultaneously arguing for the need of a creative trigger. In other words, Truffaut’s reference to the writing of com-edy as a way of testing the cinematic potential of ‘true men of the cinema’, would echo Anderson’s view of the ‘form versus content’ debate in the cinema. For Anderson contrary to what is happening ‘in the other arts [that display many] facets of the same personality, in the cinema we have a varying number of artists – each perhaps with a slightly different conception of the work they are combining to create (Anderson 1948: 198). In that same article for Sequence, Anderson further argues in favour of regarding the director’s role as essential, making possible the ‘fusion’ of the creative elements in the film. He also simultaneously proclaims the director’s reliance and dependence upon the other members of the filming crew – ‘he cannot stand alone’ (Anderson 1948: 199). This is a view which Lindsay Anderson reaffirmed throughout his career as a film critic (e.g. 1955: 255–256; 262; 271–276), and which his working collabo-ration with David Sherwin on If…. exemplified. In ‘Notes For A Preface’ (Anderson 2004b: 120), Anderson acknowledges the auto-biographical undertones that pervade the film, but urges audience and critics alike to look at it in more general terms. The way in which the personal (both Anderson and Sherwin attended a public school) and the artistic intersect in If…., parallels the way in which the context of the late 1960s that surrounded the film’s release – that



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22. See Lindsay Anderson (2004b: 118).

of ‘youthful dissidence and revolt’ (Anderson 2004b: 108) – inter-sected with the film’s script. It provides the metaphor for their working dynamic just as the parallels between lived experience and social context fed into the film – at the pre-production, pro-duction and exhibition stages. In that sense, their collaboration on If…. transcends the conventional boundaries of authorship within the film-making process. The intrusion into each other’s area of expertise does not signify a denial of authorship; instead, it signals a constant interchange of creative practice. Just as film functions as a metaphor for society but not merely as a reflection upon cur-rent events,22 Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration illustrates the possibility in film of:

…a complex series of relationships, susceptible to so many changes of emphasis… But one constant truth emerges – that the evolution of a whole and consistent film demands a rare, almost miraculous fusion of many and various creative elements.

(Anderson 1948: 199)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe author gratefully acknowledges Professor John Izod’s input at the drafting stage as well as Karl Magee’s and Kathryn Mackenzie’s assistance with the archival material.

REFERENCES A Bout de Souffle/Breathless (1959), Wr: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard,

Dir: Jean-Luc Godard, France, 86 mins.Anderson, Lindsay (1948), ‘Creative Elements’, Sequence 5, Autumn, in P.

Ryan, (ed.) (2004), Never Apologise: The Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 194–199.

Anderson, Lindsay (1955), ‘Positif and Cahiers du Cinéma’, Sight and Sound, January–March, in P. Ryan, (ed.) (2004), Never Apologise: The Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 255–256.

Anderson, Lindsay (1968), ‘School to Screen’, The Observer, December, in P. Ryan, (ed.) (2004), Never Apologise: The Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 112–115.

Anderson, Lindsay (1969), ‘Lindsay Anderson; en 69 comme en 57: contesta-taire’, Jeune Cinéma, Revue Mensuelle de la Fédération Jean Vigo des Ciné-Clubs de Jeunes et des Cercles de Culture par le Film, 39: 1–10.

Anderson, Lindsay (2004a), The Diaries, Paul Sutton (ed.), London: Methuen.

Anderson, Lindsay (2004b), ‘Unpublished Material’ in Never Apologise: The Collected Writings, P. Ryan (ed.), London: Plexus.

Drazin, Charles (2008), ‘If…. Before If….’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 5:2.

Gerstner, David A. and Staiger, Janet (2003), Authorship and Film, New York, NY; London: Routledge.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Wr: Marguerite Duras, Dir: Alain Resnais, France, 91 mins.



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Houston, Penelope (1963), The Contemporary Cinema, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.

If…. (1968), Wr: David Sherwin, Dir: Lindsay Anderson, UK, 111 mins.Journal d’Un Curé de Campagne/Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Wr: Georges

Bernanos and Robert Bresson, Dir: Robert Bresson, France, 111 mins.Les Quatre-Cents Coups/400 Blows (1959), Wr: Marcel Moussy and François

Truffaut, Dir: François Truffaut, France, 95 mins.Manvell, Roger (1966), New Cinema in Europe, London: Studio Vista.Marcorelles, Louis (1960), ‘Views of the New Wave’, (trans. Richard Roud),

Sight & Sound, 29:2, pp. 84–85.Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI.Raz, Dwa, Trzy/The Singing Lesson (1967), Wr/Dir: Lindsay Anderson, Poland,

20 mins.Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Wr Stewart Stern and Irving Shulman, Dir:

Nicholas Ray, US, 106 mins.Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Wr: Alan Sillitoe, Dir: Karel Reisz,

UK, 85 mins.Sherwin, David (1997), Going Mad in Hollywood, and Life with Lindsay Anderson,

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.Sinker, Mark (2004), If…., London: BFI.This Sporting Life (1963), Wr: David Storey, Dir: Lindsay Anderson, UK,

134 mins.Truffaut, François (1954), ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, transla-

ted from the French, ‘Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 31(Janvier), pp. 15–28, in Bill Nichols (ed.) (1976), Movies and Methods, Volume I, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 224–237.

Vidal, Gore (1976), ‘Who Makes the Movies?’, New York Review of Books, pp. 35–39, November 25, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) (2008), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 148–157.

Wright-Wexman, Virginia (2003), Film and Authorship, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Zéro de Conduite: Jeunes Diables au College/Zero for Conduct (1933), Wr/Dir: Jean Vigo, France, 41 mins.

SUGGESTED CITATIONGourdin-Sangouard, I (2010), ‘Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson and

David Sherwin’s collaboration on If.... (1968)’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 131–148, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.131/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSIsabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, M. Phil, is a doctoral candidate at Stirling University and part of the AHRC-funded project ‘The Cinema Authorship of Lindsay Anderson’. She has contributed a number of conference papers and articles to the project – one of which ‘Music/Industry/Politics: Alan Price’s roles in O Lucky Man!’ will be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, as part of a study of Culture and Society in 1970s Britain. She taught film, media and French language and culture, as a lecturer at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen (2004/7) and as a teaching assistant at the University of



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Aberdeen (2000/6). Her research interests also include the area of media and education, with presentations and a workshop at IAMCR 2006 and ECREA (2007 European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School).

‘The Cinema Authorship of Lindsay Anderson’ is an AHRC-funded project at the University of Stirling. The Principal Investigator is Professor John Izod, with Karl Magee as Senior Archivist and Co-investigator, Kathryn Mackenzie as Archivist and Research Assistant, and Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard.

Contact: The University of Stirling, Dept of Film, Media & Journalism, Office J13, Pathfoot Building, FK9 4LA.Tel: +44 (0)1786 466227E-mail: [email protected]


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KEYWORDSscreenwritingMarguerite DurasHiroshima,

Mon Amourscriptmemorynarrative

ROSAMUND DAVIESUniversity of Greenwich

Screenwriting strategies in Marguerite Duras’s script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960)

ABSTRACTThe published ‘scénario et dialogues’ (Duras 1960) (Figure 1) of the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) feature precise technical specifications of sound and image and more novelistic passages, all of which create an emotional resonance that has been left to the director to translate into images. This article explores Marguerite Duras’s text as a particular example of how the written component of the screen idea (Macdonald 2004a) might function on the page and as part of a dialogue with the director. It also examines the way that the script’s concern with problematizing and drawing attention to the process of rep-resentation makes it a palpable and controlling presence in the resulting film.

INTRODUCTIONHiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) was a collaboration between the writer Marguerite Duras, as script writer, and Alan Resnais, as director.A co-production between France and Japan, the original aim of the

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Figure 1: Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour published by Gallimard (1960).

film was to address the subject of the nuclear bomb and the tragedy of Hiroshima. Duras and Resnais approached this from an unusual angle, centring the narrative on a fictional present day love affair between a Frenchwoman and a Japanese man, set in Hiroshima, rather than undertaking a documentary examination of the facts. Subsequent critical analysis of the film has most often focused on the way that,

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by taking this approach, the film problematizes memory, history and indeed representation itself. An early analysis by Pingaud, reprinted from an original paper given in 1960 (Pingaud [1960] 2002), is typical in this respect. Pingaud states that the central character of the film is in fact time, rather than the human beings who live through it, and that the film presents memory paradoxically as a process of forget-ting (l’oubli), a state which is portrayed in the film as ‘the hopeless, wretched condition of life itself’ ([1960] 2002: 72).1 Pingaud points out that both the bombing of Hiroshima and the other central narrative of the film, which concerns a young Frenchwoman’s love affair with a German soldier and its aftermath, are presented as ‘images d’oubli’ ([1960] 2002: 70). Here he underlines the fact that these events are not so much memories for the characters as gaps in their memory. The film repeatedly emphasizes the fact that the bombing of Hiroshima, at which neither of the characters was present, can only be experienced by them second-hand: through the physical remnants of buildings and other artefacts that survived the blast, through the documen-tary footage of survivors, and through monuments and reconstruc-tions. Conversely, the Frenchwoman’s direct experience during World War II is buried so deep in her memory that, at the beginning of the film, she cannot properly access or articulate it. Rather it interrupts the film narrative as an unexplained visual flashback and through an aural motif; the name of the town ‘Nevers’ where she lived, which is repeated and lingered on as a word many times by the characters before its narrative significance is revealed.

More recently Gronhovd and VanderWolk write that in Hiroshima, Mon Amour the cinematic form lends itself to the portrayal of memory as ‘an agent of disjunction’ (1992: 125), which can open up ontological investigation, but cannot answer epistemological questions, because ‘there exists in Hiroshima no ontological grounding from which epis-temological questions can take shape’ (1992: 121).

What is being underlined in these readings is the fact that the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, in its insistence on the inseparability of memory from forgetting, sets out in a certain respect to represent the unrepresentable. This interpretation echoes the words of Duras in her synopsis for the film, in which she states that it is ‘impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impos-sibility of talking about Hiroshima’2 (Duras 1966: 10).3 Her script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour then takes on the paradoxical project of say-ing the unsayable.

Pingaud ([1960] 2002: 74) also highlights the way that the Frenchwoman’s story unfolds in the film in a form that is similar to that of a psychoanalytical cure. Her visit to Hiroshima acts as a cat-alyst for involuntary memories from her past in France. These start to interrupt and disrupt the present day narrative, until her Japanese lover takes the role of the psychoanalyst and helps her to finally tell in full the story of her love affair with a German soldier in occupied France. This aspect has also been picked up by more recent theorists,

1. My translation. All translations from the French, other than of the script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour, are my own. The original French is ‘la condition désespérée, désolante, de la vie même’.

2. Throughout this article, I refer both to the original French script by Duras (1960), and to the 1966 translation by Richard Seaver. When a quote from the script is given in English it is taken from Seaver’s translation, unless otherwise indicated. Any original French text (from Duras or other quoted French sources) is given in the footnotes, unless my comments refer directly to the original French, in which case French and English translation are quoted together within the article.

3. ‘Impossible de parler de HIROSHIMA. Tout ce qu’on peut faire c’est de parler de l’impossibilité de parler de HIROSHIMA’ (Duras 1960: 2).


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4. The published text for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Duras, 1960) is subtitled ‘scénario et dialogues’. This is in line with the standard credit accorded to the writer on French films, for which the translation in English would most typically be ‘screenplay’, as indeed would be the translation for ‘scénario’ alone. This absence of perfectly matching terms in French and English is further complicated by the fact that Duras’s script does not conform to the standard industry formats of the American and UK film industries of the period. Given these various slippages between terms, I have opted to use the word ‘script’ (which has a looser application than ‘screenplay’) to refer to the main script that is included alongside ‘synopsis’ and ‘appendices’ in the published volume.

who have expanded more fully on the film as an example of trauma narrative. Caruth (whose understanding of trauma resonates with Pingaud’s analysis of memory/forgetting within the film) writes that ‘the enigmatic language of untold stories – of experiences not yet completely grasped – that resonates, throughout the film’ is in fact ‘a new mode of seeing and of listening – a seeing and a listening from the site of trauma’ (Caruth 1996: 56).

My own research has been undertaken in the light of these existing readings of the film, which I take as a starting point for my own work. This article examines the script and associated documents written by Duras, presenting a close analysis of the way that the written text develops the themes and produces the effects commented on above.4

THE PRODUCTION CONTEXT AND PUBLISHED DOCUMENTSMy examination of the written text in relation to the completed film work also raises some questions about the nature of the collaboration between Duras as writer and Resnais as director and it will probably be helpful at this point to establish the context of this collaboration, of which there were three main stages. The first stage, completed in the spring of 1958, before Resnais went to Japan to shoot the scenes set in Tokyo, resulted in the writing of an initial scenario as well as character profiles and other supporting documents. The second stage consisted of a concentrated period, in July and August of 1958, in which Duras and Resnais worked in parallel: Duras writing scenes for the Tokyo shoot and sending them to Resnais for him to commit to celluloid a short while later. According to Adler ([1998] 2000: 221), this intense process was a two-way exchange, which also encompassed dialogue rewrites. The third stage was completed after the main shoot in Japan was finished, but prior to the shooting of the scenes set in Nevers, France in December 1958. Duras wrote additional notes relating to these scenes, which were collected in the published version of the script as a series of appendices to the main script. According to Duras (1960: 107) Resnais asked her to provide this material not as a script but in the form of ‘commentaries’, as if she was responding to a view-ing of scenes that had already been filmed.

In addition to the main script and the appendices, the published edition of the ‘scénario et dialogues’ for Hiroshima, Mon Amour also includes a synopsis, with which the volume begins. Before going on to a more detailed analysis, I will first give an overview of the character-istic features of each of these documents.

THE SYNOPSISThe synopsis both summarizes the film’s narrative and themes and specifies in some detail how the film should be interpreted. Having stated the impossibility of speaking of the bombing of Hiroshima, it goes on to identify one of the film’s major aims as being to ‘to have



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5. ‘en finir avec la description de l’horreur par l’horreur’ (Duras 1960: 3).

6. Here Seaver is picking up on Duras’s stated intention that the love affair between the Frenchwoman and the Japanese becomes indistinguishable from the story of Hiroshima. A slightly more literal translation of the original French might be ‘it is as if the atrocity of a woman’s head being shorn in Nevers and the atrocity of Hiroshima were EXACTLY the same’. However, this would not give the connotations of dialogue and interaction that are suggested by the French verb ‘se répondre’, which can mean both ‘to answer each other’ and ‘to match’ or ‘harmonize’.

7. ‘le monstre dévorateur fait peur, il est comme tenu à distance et dépossédé de ses pouvoirs au profit du texte...’

8. My translation. This opening line is omitted from the 1966 translation. Here Duras refers to the iconic photograph of the mushroom cloud produced by the 1954 atom bomb test that was carried out by the American military on Bikini Island in the Pacific Ocean. The image is clearly meant to stand for the earlier bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

done with the description of horror by horror’5 (Duras 1966: 10). Duras puts forward the proposition that, instead of simply attempting to represent the horror of Hiroshima head on, it would be much more powerful to tell a love story in which the characters’ stories become so entangled with the story of Hiroshima that it would be impossible to distinguish one from the other. Through this process, the experi-ence of Hiroshima will in a sense be relived, rather than simply rep-resented. Adler seems to provide some background on this, when she states that the departure point for Resnais and Duras, in developing the story for Hiroshima, Mon Amour, was to ask ‘Have our lives been changed by the horror of the dropping of the bomb?’ (Adler [1998] 2000: 219). Throughout the synopsis, Duras explicitly makes equiva-lent the horror experienced by the Frenchwoman, branded a collab-orator in post-occupation France, and the horror of Hiroshima. She ends the synopsis by stating that the lovers exist for each other only through the names of the places that they come from – Nevers, France and Hiroshima. Her final comment is that ‘C’est, comme si le désas-tre d’une femme tondue à NEVERS et le désastre de HIROSHIMA se répondaient EXACTEMENT. Elle lui dira: “Hiroshima, c’est ton nom” ’(Duras 1960: 10). (This is not translated literally in the English trans-lation by Richard Seaver, but interpreted as follows, ‘It is as though, through them, all of Hiroshima was in love with all of Nevers.6 She says to him: “Hiroshima, that’s your name”’) (Duras 1966: 15).

THE SCRIPTDetailed explication of the intending meaning or effect of the film also features in the script itself. Hiroshima, Mon Amour was the first film script that Duras wrote and, as Borgomano (1985) has written, it represents perhaps her unfamiliarity with and suspicion of the form. Borgomano’s view is that Duras attempts, through the use of detailed descriptions and stage directions, to anchor control of the film in the written text: ‘it is as though the scary, all-devouring monster [i.e. the cinema] is kept at arm’s length and deprived of its powers, which are given instead to the text...’ (1985: 39).7 Thus, for the opening sequence of the film, Duras writes a very detailed description, in which she specifies the opening image to be that of the ‘infamous “mushroom” of BIKINI’ (Duras 1960: 15),8 followed by a second image of two torsos in an embrace, framed so as to cut the bodies off at the neck and hips and ‘as if drenched with ashes, rain, dew or sweat (whichever is preferred)’ (Duras 1966: 17). Duras then goes on to specify that the main thing is that this image should ‘produce a violent, conflicting feeling of freshness and desire’ (1966: 17).

If Duras was seeking here to anchor control of the film in the written text, as Borgomano suggests, then the attempt was arguably not successful, as the specific image of the mushroom cloud was omitted from the film itself. But in fact her directions also contain a degree of ambiguity and openness to interpretation. It is not clear whether the phrase ‘whichever is preferred’ (‘comme on veut’) refers


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to the interpretation that the audience might have, or to the directo-rial interpretation that Resnais might make. Resnais in fact appears to have preferred to give himself, and the audience, all the choices on offer, rather than settle for one. In the film itself he cuts together four different identically framed shots, one after the other, which feature in turn ash, rain, dew and sweat, in the order listed by Duras (Figure 2a, b, c, d).9

It is possible moreover to interpret the development of the screen idea from page to screen other than as a struggle for control between writer and director. In her introduction to the published script, Duras comments that the script was the product of almost daily discussions with Resnais.10 This must have affected the precision with which she describes and gives directions for certain scenes in the script, since they were the culmination of these discussions. It seems likely that what Duras is offering in these passages is a further articulation on the page of ideas that had already taken shape in discussion. These ideas, taken one step further in their articulation on the page, were further developed by Resnais in the shooting and editing of the final screen work.

Duras’s style of writing within the main script and associated docu-ments must thus equally be a result of the fact that this is not a specu-lative script, obliged to leave plenty of room for an, as yet, unknown director to occupy. Rather, it constitutes a very specific and individual collaboration and dialogue with the film’s director Alan Resnais.

THE APPENDICESThe particular nature of the close collaboration between writer and director is suggested not only by the level of detail and prescription, but also by the stylistic aspect of the work. In the appendices in particu-lar, Duras provides passages of text that variously suggest or prescribe an emotional resonance, for which it is left entirely to the director to find a visual expression. In the synopsis and script these passages tend towards a rather bald prescription of effects, as with the opening statement about the importance of provoking desire in the viewer. However in the appendices, written for the final shoot in Nevers, the style often becomes novelistic, and suggestive rather than prescriptive. Thus the appendices begin with the following passage on the subject of the death of the German soldier:

Il sont tous les deux, à égalité en proie à cet événement: sa mort à lui.Il n’y a aucune colère ni chez l’un ni chez l’autre. Il n’y a que le regret mortel de leur amour. Même douleur. Même sang. Mêmes larmes.L’absurdité de la guerre, mise à nue, plane sur leurs corps indistincts.On pourrait la croire morte tellement elle se meurt de sa mort à lui.

(Duras 1960: 108)

9. Later on in the film, as Duras notes in the text, Resnais creates a similar plurality of interpretations whenhe responds to a choice of alternative lines of dialogue offered by Duras by including all of them, one after the other (Duras 1960: 64).

10. Also mentioned by Duras as a participant in these discussions is Gerard Jarlot, who is credited as literary advisor on the film. Jarlot, who was Duras’s lover during this period, was subsequently co-writer with Duras on the script for Une Aussi Longue Absence/A Long Absence (1966 [1961]) and the film adaptation of Moderato Cantabile/Seven Days...Seven Nights (1960).



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Figure 2a: Ash. Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais © 1959 Argos Films.

Figure 2b: Rain. Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais © 1959 Argos Films.


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Figure 2c: Dew. Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais © 1959 Argos Films.

Figure 2d: Sweat. Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais © 1959 Argos Films.



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Seaver’s translation renders this passage as follows:

Both of them, equally, are possessed by this event: his death. Neither of them is angry. They are only inconsolably sorry about their love.The same pain. Same blood. Same tears. The absurdity of war, laid bare, hovers over their blurred bodies. One might believe her dead, so completely has his death drained all life from her.

(Duras 1966: 83)

The translation is not able to render the full effect of Duras’s original text. It loses the rhythms, cadences and alliterations of the original lines and the particular emphasis created by the reinforcement of the possessive in ‘sa mort à lui’, for which there is no obvious English equivalent. However it does make clear the level of abstraction and description of inner emotions that Duras brings to the passage, for which there is no obvious visual translation.

The three parts of the ‘scénario et dialogues’: the synopsis, the script and the appendices, thus provide three different examples of how the written component of what Macdonald has termed the screen idea (Macdonald 2004a) might function both on the page and as part of a dialogue with the director. While the three elements of the published text would seem to relate to the three different stages in Duras’s and Resnais’s collaboration outlined above, they cannot be precisely equated without a far more extensive examination of the original sources. Duras states in the introduction to the script, for example, that she has kept in it ‘much of what was left out of the film’11(Duras 1960: 11). So the script is not a transcript of the film, it is very much an original work by Duras, as exemplified by her stage directions. At the same time, it has evidently undergone further revision prior to publication.

A reading of the three documents does however appear to offer some clues on the nature of the collaboration between writer and director on Hiroshima, Mon Amour and can perhaps raise some more general questions about the relationship between writer and director in the development of the screen idea, as I will now go on to explore.

THE FILM AND THE SCRIPTIn Script Culture and the American Screenplay, in which Kevin Boon sets out to elucidate and give a higher profile to the script as an element of the screenwork, Boon suggests that one of the reasons for the rela-tive lack of profile that a script has, compared to the completed film, is that the film, in visually making present what in the script must be supplied by the reader’s imagination, overshadows and seems to make the original script redundant (2008: 29). Furthermore, Boon goes on to point out, the high value placed on the material immediacy and presence of the image by influential critics and practitioners such

11. My translation. This passage was left out of the 1966 English translation: ‘un certain nombre de choses abandonées du film’.


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as Truffaut (1954) and Bazin (1957, 1967) has led, in part, to a corre-sponding devaluing of the script’s contribution to cinematic discourse (2008: 31).

What is striking in the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, however, as introduced in the discussion above, is the extent to which the image refuses to offer a viewing experience of plenitude and immediacy. The same lack, the same gap between representation and meaning that, as Boon points out, must be filled in by the reader’s interpreta-tion of the pages of the script, is, in this case, maintained in the cel-luloid frames of the film. As Willis explains (1987: 35), this is clearly apparent in the opening sequence, where the viewer is presented with the disorienting shot of two torsos locked in an embrace. The depicted activity is ambiguous – the bodies might either be in the throes of death or of lovemaking. Willis comments that the desire (speci-fied by Duras in the script) that the image provokes, is in fact the desire to see, to ‘obtain mastery of the image through its identifi-cation of a representable object’ (1987: 35). However, the framing and staging of the image frustrates this desire at the same time as it provokes it.

Furthermore, the accompanying soundtrack seems to specifi-cally deny the possibility of any such mastery. The opening speech of the film, which plays out over the above mentioned image, is delivered, as Duras specifies in the script, by ‘a man’s voice, flat and calm, as if reciting’12 (Duras 1966: 17), who announces ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing’13 (1966: 17). An off-screen conversation then continues, as a woman’s voice (‘Elle/She’) enters into a dialogue with the man’s (‘Lui/He’), in which she reports on various places and artefacts she has seen which relate to the atom bomb at Hiroshima, while the man’s voice continues to deny that she has seen anything. As the conversation continues, documen-tary and dramatic reconstruction footage of scenes of Hiroshima are intercut with the opening image.

As Duras specifies in the script, this dialogue is recited as a kind of duet by the actors, rather than spoken as a conversation. It instigates a trancelike, incantatory mood. It also offers some practical clues as to how to interpret the opening image, suggesting to the reader of the script and viewer of the film that the image of the torsos must some-how relate to what happened at Hiroshima. As the opening sequence continues, it is equally through the off-screen dialogue that a sense of the story begins to unfold. The woman continues to insist that she has seen everything at Hiroshima: the exhibits documenting the bomb in the museum; the news footage of the injured; and the devastated town. Meanwhile the man’s voice equally forcefully insists that she has seen nothing and knows nothing of Hiroshima. This conversation is overtly scripted, in the sense that it is not naturalistic language, but operates through the cadences and rhythms of poetry. The woman’s first line echoes the structure and rhythm of the man’s but substitutes ‘rien’ (nothing) with ‘tout’ (everything) in a combination of repetition

12. ‘une voix d’homme, mate et calme, récitative’ (Duras 1960: 16).

13. ‘tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien.’ (Duras 1960: 16).



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and opposition that is characteristic of much of this opening section of dialogue:

HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing...

SHE: I saw everything. Everything.(Duras 1966: 17, original emphasis)

Lui: Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien…

Elle: J’ai tout vu. Tout.(Duras 1960: 16)

However, even as the woman insists that she has seen everything, she seems also to concur with the man that what she has seen can-not possibly represent what really happened. She describes how the photographs and the reconstructions at the museum are there ‘for want of anything else’,14 and states that her conviction that she will never forget what she has seen at Hiroshima is an illusion (Duras 1960: 18).

The use of dialogue in this opening section and throughout the script suggests that, although it is ‘impossible to talk about Hiroshima’, para-doxically ‘the impossibility of speech generates an obsessional effort to speak...’ (Willis 1987: 35). The characters address their subjects (of the horror of the atom bomb at Hiroshima, and later of the woman’s expe-rience of first love and loss in the French town of Nevers) again and again in a circular way. The rhythms of repetition and redundancy in the dialogue dramatize the simultaneous necessity, urgency and impossibil-ity of narrating these experiences, of telling these stories. Furthermore, ‘Elle’s’ narration in voiceover and its contradiction by ‘Lui’ puts the emphasis on imagination and interpretation as crucial elements in the acts of looking, knowing and remembering. The role of testimony in creating history (which in French is the same word as it is for story, ‘his-toire’) is established as a central concern of the script.

DURAS’S WRITTEN TEXT: DIALOGUE, IMAGE AND NARRATIVE STRUCTUREThe importance given to the dialogue, and its performative and poetic qualities, thus establishes it from the outset as a structuring and mate-rial presence in the film. This has the effect of explicitly highlighting rather than hiding the existence of the script, since dialogue is the ele-ment of the screenplay that is the uncontested domain of the writer. Dialogue is also a privileged element of Duras’s novels, and accord-ing to Adler ([1998] 2000) it was in fact an initial dialogue written by Duras that convinced Resnais she was the right person to undertake the script for his film. Some of the most memorable aspects of the film are the particular qualities of the actor’s voices as they speak the lines, and the rhythmic patterns of repetition and opposition within the dia-logue, through which some of the film’s central themes are developed. As mentioned above, these effects are not created purely by the actors’ performance but are embedded in the script, which also gives precise instructions as to how the lines should be spoken. The place names

14. My translation : ‘faute d’autre chose’. Seaver has ‘for want of something else’ (Duras 1966: 18).


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‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Nevers’ take on a significance in the script through their constant repetition, and through the lingering emphasis that is put on them by ‘Elle’ and ‘Lui’ who – the script goes on to reveal – are two lovers; a Frenchwoman and a Japanese man, who have just met in Hiroshima. Having taken a shower with her lover, ‘Elle’ says to him ‘To-meet-in-Hiroshima. It doesn’t happen every day’15 (Duras 1966: 32). The syllables ‘to-meet-in-Hiroshima’ appear to form a newly coined word, signifying a unique experience. Duras specifies in the script that the words are spoken ‘slowly, as though savouring the words’16 (1966: 32). Similarly, when ‘Lui’ repeats the name of the town Nevers, where ‘Elle’ grew up, he lingers over the word. Afterwards she tells him that ‘In Nevers I was younger than I’ve ever been’17 (1966: 36) and he echoes her words, ‘Young-in-Ne-vers’: again dwelling on the rhythm and intonation, so that it is the sound and not the meaning of the words that is emphasized. Thus Duras introduces a level of mate-riality into the dialogue, which rivals that of the image. It takes on many of the characteristics of music and starts to signify at a level that is sensory, rather than semantic.

However, despite the importance of the dialogue to the themes, tone and style of the film, it is not only through dialogue that Duras’s script dramatizes its subject. Duras also employs other tools available to the screenwriter, such as narrative structure, action and description. The opening section of the script, which functions as a kind of overture or prologue introducing the central themes and figures of the film, is as specific about the images as it is about the dialogue, orchestrating a very precise juxtaposition of the two. For example, an ironic counter-point is set up between a paraphrasing of Hersey’s (1946) journalistic account of wildflowers springing up in the ashes of Hiroshima, spo-ken by ‘Elle’, and images of children injured in the blast, with which it is juxtaposed (Duras 1960: 21). Then, when ‘Elle’ talks about how she had the illusion that she would never forget Hiroshima, just as in love one has the illusion that one can never forget, Duras specifies that the accompanying image will be that of an eye being removed by surgical tongs (1960: 22). The image of the physical removal of the organ of sight thus frames, with some violence, the dialogue’s evocation of love as an image of blindness.

The internal oppositions that Duras creates within both image and dialogue and the repeated counterpoint she engineers between the two, leave the reader in no doubt that representation itself is being called into question. It is clear that the specified fragments of docu-mentary and dramatic reconstruction that Duras refers to are not meant to represent straightforwardly what happened at Hiroshima. In fact they are there precisely to enact the impossibility of making present the reality of the experience. According to Pingaud, docu-mentary is the most fragile form of memory, because it functions as a substitute for direct, first person experience, showing us ‘places that we can see, but which we have not seen. It is a derivative kind of vision...’18 (Pingaud [1960] 2002: 71).

15. ‘Se-connaître-à-Hiroshima. C’est pas tous les jours’ (Duras 1960: 36).

16. ‘lentement, avec une sorte de “délectation des mots” (Duras 1960: 36).

17. ‘c’est à Nevers que j’ai été la plus jeune de toute ma vie’ (Duras 1960: 42).

18. ‘les lieux tels que nous pourrions les voir, mais tels que nous ne les avons pas vus. C’est en quelque sorte une vision dérivée…’



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This opening sequence of the script thus employs a careful juxta-position of voiceover dialogue and description of images, in order to problematize representation and the power of the documentary image to document or represent reality in any direct, unmediated or complete way. It also underlines the intense investment of the central charac-ters in this problem of memory and representation, both through the stylistic devices it employs and through an explicit statement of the theme, as when ‘Elle’ says ‘Like you, I too have tried with all my might not to forget. Like you, I forgot’ 19 (Duras 1966: 23). The wider question of history as a collective rather than an individual concern is also introduced when Elle says, of the events that have taken place at Hiroshima, ‘Listen to me. I know something else. It will begin all over again’20 (Duras 1966: 24). This suggests that, despite the monuments and the peace films, the lessons of Hiroshima too will ultimately be forgotten, and so repeated.

As well as providing a powerful and original example of the way that a particular tone and mood can be established through the juxtaposition of dialogue and image and through a particu-lar approach to the dialogue, this opening sequence of the script also provides quite detailed exposition concerning the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath. Duras integrates into the voiceover precise data on the number of dead and injured, on the tempera-ture reached by the blast and information about the effects of the radioactive fallout. However the stylistic effects discussed above – the incantatory nature of the dialogue, and the fragmentary structure in which the events are not recounted in order and in which image functions in counterpoint with dialogue rather than in parallel – work to obscure the extent of the information imparted. The reader has a sense of a narrative that doesn’t quite make sense, that has gaps and cannot fully be grasped. Thus Duras manages to impart background information that needs to be known while simultane-ously establishing a mood of not knowing: this produces the sense of the impossibility of speaking of Hiroshima that she states in the synopsis.

After the opening sequence, the visual treatment moves to a more conventional mise-en-scène in which action and dialogue are integrated within the bodies of the two main characters as part of a dramatized scene. There is not the same carefully contrived coun-terpoint between word and image that characterizes the opening sequence. However, Duras uses other strategies to disrupt the coherence and logic of the visual narrative. Oppositions and para-doxes continue to operate at the level of the dialogue; for exam-ple when ‘Elle’ says of herself that she lies and she tells the truth (Duras 1960: 41), or that Nevers ‘is the city in the world... I dream about most often at night. And at the same time it’s the thing I think about the least.’21 (Duras 1966: 36). Meanwhile, at the level of the image, Duras starts to introduce the disruptive presence of flashbacks. The first and most notorious of these is when the

19. ‘comme toi, moi aussi j’ai essayé de lutter de toutes mes forces contre l’oubli. Comme toi j’ai oublié’ (Duras 1960: 24).

20. ‘écoute-moi. Je sais encore. Ça recommençera.’ (Duras 1960: 25).

21. ‘C’est la ville du monde... à laquelle, la nuit, je rêve le plus. En même temps que c’est la chose du monde à laquelle je pense le moins’ (Duras 1960: 43).


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Frenchwoman is looking at the hands of the Japanese man asleep on the bed and suddenly sees in his place a different body, ‘the body of a young man, lying in the same position but in a posture of death’22 (1966: 30). This sudden, as yet unexplained, interrup-tion of the woman’s early life in Nevers is a foretaste of how the story of Nevers will later disturb and briefly invade the present day Hiroshima narrative.

Until this point in the script is reached, when the story of Nevers will take over the narrative, the love story between the Frenchwoman and the Japanese man is scripted by Duras in such a way as to sub-ject it to continuous interruptions and barriers. After the first scene in the hotel bedroom, a scene follows in which they have to shout at each other over noisy traffic outside the hotel. Following this, when he tracks her down to the set of the documentary film in which she plays the part of a nurse, their conversation is interrupted repeatedly by crew and cast who push past them as they participate in a peace parade that is being shot as part of the documentary film. Thus, as the lovers are physically interrupted by the action, their story is disrupted by the intrusion of another narrative – that of the documentary that is being filmed: a mise en abyme23 which further undermines the film’s central narrative.

Further confusion and obscuring techniques are introduced later on in the script, through a destabilising of subject positions. When the Frenchwoman finally recounts the story of Nevers to the Japanese man, he starts to speak to her from the subject position of her dead German lover. Then later, back in her hotel room, ‘Elle’ first talks to herself, referring to herself in the third person, saying ‘in Nevers she had a German love when she was young’24 (Duras 1966: 72), then addresses her own reflection in the mirror as if she is speaking to her former lover (Figure 3). Thus, through action and dialogue the experiences of ‘Elle’ and ‘Lui’ are continually linked, compared and contrasted; but the role that each plays in the oth-er’s story and the role that each story has in the other’s experience keeps changing. The relations between them are close but never stable.

These same shifting relations characterize the overall narrative structure of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which works simultaneously towards a final linking of the Frenchwoman and the Japanese man through their mutual traumatic experiences of the war, and of their final separation as the Frenchwoman returns to France. It is also revealed that the bombing of Hiroshima, which propelled the Japanese man into trauma, occurred just at the moment that the Frenchwoman left the trauma of Nevers behind. Furthermore, on a national level, Hiroshima marked the beginning of a story of suffering and horror for the Japanese, just as it marked an end to it for the French. This para-doxical resolution at the level of plot is consistent with the oppositions and contrapuntal relationships that structure the development of both character and theme.

22. ‘il apparaît brutalement à la place du Japonais, le corps d’un jeune homme, mais mortuaire’ (Duras 1960: 33–34).

23. This term, from literary theory, refers to the practice of putting a frame within a frame, i.e. an image within an image, a story within a story etc.

24. ‘Elle a eu à Nevers un amour de jeunesse allemand’ (Duras 1960: 90).



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HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR AS HYSTERICAL NARRATIVEAs Caruth (1996) and Willis (1987) point out, the structure of Hiroshima, Mon Amour functions in a similar way to the structures of trauma and of hysteria. Victims of trauma, whether the survivors of the atom bomb at Hiroshima or the Frenchwoman in the film who sees her lover die in her arms, find themselves unable to move on from the traumatic experience, partly because they are unable to comprehend it. The actual moment of the bombing of Hiroshima was an event that would be impossible for anyone to experience directly and in full. Eyewitness accounts testify to being blinded, to coming to consciousness some time later. Similarly the Frenchwoman relates how, despite the fact that she remained locked in an embrace with her lover until and after he had died of a gun-shot wound, she was unable to identify the exact moment at which he passed from life into death. This inability to pin-point the exact moment at which the experience took place – along with the enormity, and the impossibility of actually surviving, of living past the horror of such an event – traps the traumatized subject in a cycle of repetition as he or she seeks to finally access and make sense of what remains essentially a missed experience.

Figure 3: ‘Elle’ addresses her own reflection in the mirror. Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais © 1959 Argos Films.


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As previously noted, repetition is a central structuring principle of Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Furthermore, as Willis points out, the film struc-tures the experience of trauma through a hysterical aesthetic, which Willis defines as ‘a disturbance of narration... a failure of translation from image and fantasy to discourse’ (1987: 35). The structure of hysteria oper-ates in a similar way to that of trauma, in that it represents a failure to bring into consciousness, to access one’s own experience, which remains at the level of the unconscious. The hysteric thus enacts through bodily symptoms what he or she is unable to narrate through language. Indeed hysterical symptoms can be expressions of traumatic experience.

The development of feminist theory and criticism in the 1970s saw a development of the concept of hysteria as a specifically female discourse. An influential overview of this strand of feminist thought is given by Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady (1987). Showalter pinpoints the way that feminist readings of Freud’s case studies of female hysterics defined their behaviour as ‘signifying through the body... the protest that social condi-tions made unspeakable...’ (Showalter 1987: 157). Showalter also points out the way that this discourse was adopted by some feminists, such as Hélène Cixous, as a particular female aesthetic that could be employed as a creative tool, ‘a kind of female language that opposes the rigid struc-tures of male discourse and thought’ (Showalter 1987: 160). Subsequent readings of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, such as that of Willis (1987), have drawn on this idea of a hysterical aesthetic in their analysis of the film. Although Duras’s script predates this development in feminist theory and could not be seen as intentionally adopting the kind of female discourse it identifies, Duras’s creative strategies for saying the unsayable position her script in similar territory. So too does the orchestration of the telling of the story of Nevers into a kind of psychoanalytical talking cure facilitated by the Japanese man, which results in a climactic moment in which the Frenchwoman appears to lose control of herself and her Japanese lover/analyst slaps her back into consciousness and rationality.

The hysterical aesthetic can be seen at work in the script in the way that the story of Hiroshima and the story of the Frenchwoman’s love affair with the German soldier are related in fragments, through contradictory juxtapositions, which fail to cohere into a single com-prehensible unity. Through both dialogue and image, the script cir-cles repeatedly around what happened at Nevers in the same way as it does with the events at Hiroshima; it highlights their importance, while at the same time suggesting that what actually happened can-not be spoken or represented directly.

As Gronhovd and VanderWolk (1992: 135) and Caruth (1996: 52) have pointed out, the script suggests in fact that true remembering may only be possible at the level of the body – through the hysteri-cal symptom or the incorporation of the lost object into the self. The involuntary memory of the flashback, the woman’s assertion that she could not tell the difference between her dying lover’s body and her own, and the shifts in subject positions that occur within the triangle of ‘Elle’ ‘Lui’ and the German lover all enact this type of physical



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memory. So too does the material quality of the dialogue; the sen-sory repetition of names, and perhaps most strikingly, the apparent collapse of identity at the end of the film where ‘Elle’ asserts that Hiroshima is indeed his name and ‘Lui’ replies that hers is Nevers. The very physical presence that characterizes the dialogue becomes in the end just as much a signifier of absence. The characters, who seem to seek in the material qualities of the words ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Nevers’ a meaning and a reality that could make these place names somehow embody their experience, appear in this final scene to be replaced themselves by the words that hold them in thrall. The repetitive structures of the narrative suggest just as forcefully that this kind of physical, unarticulated memory traps the subject in an endless cycle of repetition, as they continue to try to access and finally live the missed event.

The cure for trauma and hysteria that is offered by Freudian psy-choanalysis is that of the talking cure, of narrative. The psychoana-lyst helps the hysterical or traumatized patient to access their issues through language, and to tell the story of what happened to them, establishing a logical chain of cause and effect. Once the experience is brought into consciousness in this way, it loses its emotional invest-ment and the symptoms disappear. However, in Hiroshima, Mon Amour this would-be cure – the creation of a logical narrative – is also problematized, precisely because of the loss of emotional investment that it entails. The official version of the story of Hiroshima is pre-sented from the outset as a narrative to be questioned and dismantled, while the Frenchwoman experiences her ‘cure’ as a betrayal of her lover, and as an experience of loss. Addressing her lover through her own reflection in the mirror she laments that he was not quite dead, until she told his story:

You were not yet quite dead.

I told our story.

I was unfaithful to you tonight with this stranger.

I told our story.

It was, you see, a story that could be told.

(Duras 1966: 72)

Tu n’étais pas tout à fait mort.

J’ai raconté notre histoire.

Je t’ai trompé ce soir avec cet inconnu.

J’ai raconté notre histoire.

Elle était, vois-tu racontable

... Regarde moi comme je t’oublie’

(Duras 1960: 90)

The dialogue, such a powerful carrier of meaning throughout the film and so central to its tone and feel, here calls into question its own validity as testimony. It is the telling of the story, rather than the new romantic liaison, that emerges here as the betrayal, as if telling his story is what has finally killed him. The ability to articulate her memory in


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words paradoxically means that the woman is beginning to be able to forget her love.

In the script of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, dialogue, image, action and narrative structure thus all work to elaborate the central concern that once the trauma of memory is ‘cured’, and is articulated in lan-guage or image, it is in some profound way lost or betrayed. As soon as the memory becomes part of ‘the sight and understanding of a larger history’ (Caruth 1996: 31) the reality of the lived experience is denied – whether represented by a textual narrative, a visual record-ing, or an object. In each case the real, which cannot be directly rep-resented, is replaced with a screen (Willis 1987) that can only stand in for it. Thus remembering is always a kind of forgetting. This is the central paradox around which all the other paradoxical and opposi-tional relations in the script are structured.

DURAS’S WRITTEN TEXT: TONE AND STYLEBesides dialogue, image and narrative structure, description and stage directions are other crucial elements of the script, employed by Duras to give a sense on the page of what the tone and style of the film should be on screen.

According to Adler, Resnais was particularly interested in Duras as a writer because he ‘saw Duras as an author who had tone’ (Adler [1998] 2000: 219) and this is certainly a notable feature of her script. Duras makes precise use of adverbs and adjectives to suggest a visual or dramatic treatment. Immediately after the opening image of the film, the action moves to a hospital, in which (Duras specifies) the woman who speaks on the soundtrack will not appear on screen. Only the hospital, with its corridors, its stairs and its patients will be shown, ‘dans le dédain suprême de la caméra’ (Duras 1960: 17) (‘the camera coldly objective’ according to Seaver’s translation) (Duras 1966: 18). Both in the use of the word ‘dédain’ (‘disdain’) and in her grouping together of architectural features and human subjects in an undiffer-entiated list, Duras’s text makes clear the extent to which the image is intended to have the effect of objectifying and distancing what it shows. Later, at the end of the opening section of the script, Duras specifies that, having remained off screen up until that moment, the woman’s face should appear ‘très brutalement’ in the frame. In French, the word ‘brutalement’ has the meaning of both ‘suddenly’ and ‘bru-tally’ and Duras exploits this latter connotation by countering it with its opposite later on in the sentence, where she describes the woman as ‘tender’; ‘très brutalement, le visage de la femme apparaît très ten-dre, tendu vers le visage de l’homme’ (Duras 1960: 27). (Seaver trans-lates this as ‘with exaggerated suddenness the woman’s face appears, filled with tenderness, turned towards the man’s’) (Duras 1966: 25). In these ways, as in every aspect of the script, Duras employs the use of opposition and paradox to elicit a complex and conflicted interpreta-tion from the reader.



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Duras’s stage directions also frequently specify the effect that an image should produce without giving an indication of how this might be achieved visually, as when she states that the opening image should provoke mixed emotions including desire. This is an approach that is particularly apparent in the appendices which, writ-ten at Resnais’s request as ‘commentaries’, are much more novelistic in style and tone. They take much further the approach that Duras also takes in the main script of suggesting an emotional resonance for a scene, rather than a precise visual treatment. One such example is when Duras writes ‘late one afternoon a German soldier crosses a square somewhere in the provinces of France. Even war is boring’25 (Duras 1966 : 84). It is notable that the sense of an apparent every-dayness, striking in its very banality (even war has become just part of the daily routine), that is communicated by the narrative voice of Duras’s text, is also conveyed visually by the scene that Resnais shoots (Figure 4). This more novelistic narrative voice marks Duras’s text out most obviously from mainstream screenplay conventions. It is perhaps this aspect (and the way that the final screenwork inter-prets it) that reflects most clearly the particular context of close and

Figure 4: ‘Late one afternoon a German soldier crosses a square somewhere in the provinces of France.’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais © 1959 Argos Films.

25. ‘quelque part en France, vers la fin de l’après-midi, un certain jour, un soldat allemand traverse une place de province. Même la guerre est quotidienne’ (Duras 1960: 109). ‘quotidien/nne’ commonly means ‘daily’: as in ‘daily life’. Seaver translates it here, as ‘boring’, but it could equally be ‘everyday’, ‘routine’ etc.


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intense collaboration in which the script was written and the film shot and edited.

THE SCREEN IDEA – THE COLLABORATION BETWEEN DURAS AND RESNAISHiroshima, Mon Amour was a creative departure for both Duras and Resnais. Duras was well known primarily as a novelist, and this was her first film script, while Resnais’s career up until then had been as a documentary maker. This might in part explain the extent and depth of their collaboration, in which the relative inexperience of each might perhaps have made both particularly open to the skills and knowledge brought by the other to the development of the screen idea.

Resnais’s directorial interpretation of the tone of Duras’s writing is evident in scenes such as the early hospital sequence, mentioned above, when Duras’s evocation of ‘le dédain suprême de la caméra’ (Duras 1960: 17) finds a visual equivalent in the tracking shots through the hos-pital corridors, which create visually the sense of haughty detachment that Duras’s words suggest (Figure 5). Furthermore, during the Tokyo

Figure 5: A tracking shot through the hospital corridors. Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais © 1959 Argos Films.



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shoot, Resnais apparently requested audio recordings of Duras reading the dialogue, so that he could reproduce, in the visual sequences and with the actors, the same rhythms produced by Duras’s voice (Adler [1998] 2000: 219).

However, when Duras specifies in the script that the opening image must provoke desire, or when, in the appendices, she highlights the banality of war, or states that the garden from which the German soldier was shot was as good for the purpose as any other garden and was chosen entirely randomly, more of a leap of imagination would seem to be required by the director if he is to attempt to realize this on screen. Indeed the garden that Resnais chooses for this point in the story is in fact quite distinctive, featuring an ornate, wrought iron viewing-platform, shot from below. Contrary to the specification in the script, this image in the film is not unremarkable and ordinary but striking, even before its significance in the story is revealed.

Since Duras’s voice as a writer was such an important aspect for Resnais during the main shoot, it is interesting to note how his approach seems to have developed for the second shoot in France. For this final stage in the collaboration, Resnais appears to have modified and developed his way of working and to have gone further in his use of Duras’s text as a starting point, as a source of ideas and motifs and as a back story, rather than as a script in any conventional sense.

The relationship between Duras’s text and the scenes of Nevers that exist in the film is thus more complex than that which exists between the script and the rest of the film. This complexity is partly because the story of Nevers actually exists in three different written versions; the scenes that are included in the original script, Duras’s later ‘commen-taries’ on each individual scene, and finally a monologue (also in the appendices) which is written in the voice of the Frenchwoman. Here the woman recounts her story in chronological order (the only time the story is told chronologically). None of these three versions per-fectly coincide. Each includes scenes and information that are absent from the others. The story is different each time in its telling. Resnais’s filmed version then supplies a fourth version, which takes from each of the other three and adds further elements, while leaving much out. Sometimes he films a scene that reproduces exactly what Duras describes, as when in the main script she describes the Frenchwoman in her bedroom, after the death of her lover, lying on her bed, ‘one leg raised, filled with desire’26 (Duras 1966: 58). Sometimes he finds a visual equivalent for a tone or a perspective that Duras suggests ver-bally, as with the ‘everyday’ scene of the German soldier. Sometimes he takes a motif – such as the young Frenchwoman’s Sunday bicycle trips, which Duras describes in the monologue in the appendices – and turns it into an extended visual sequence. This sequence brings out the closeness of the countryside, which Duras specifies elsewhere in the commentaries, when describing the town of Nevers, ‘the wheat is at its gates. The forest is at its windows. At night owls come into the gardens, and you have to struggle to keep from being afraid’ 27 (Duras

26. ‘la jambe relevée, dans le désir’ (Duras 1960: 73).

27. ‘Le blé est à ses portes. La forêt est à ses fenêtres. La nuit, des chouettes en arrivent jusque dans les jardins’ (Duras 1960: 112).


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1966: 86). The sequence also seems to express the ‘utter happiness’28 that Duras ascribes in her commentaries to the encounters between the Frenchwoman and her German lover.

The story of Nevers, which lies at the heart of the film and which constitutes the revelation towards which the trajectory of the plot leads, is thus given both greater depth and greater ambiguity through its repeated rewriting by Duras and its visual re-imagination through Resnais’s direction; this represents, it would seem, an extensive and intensive process of collaboration.

Such a relationship between written and cinematic text suggests a particular kind of interpretative work on the part of the director. In the same way that, when adapting a literary work, a screenwriter needs to think carefully about how to adapt the particular quality given to a novel or short story by its narrative voice, part of Resnais’s task as a director was to find visual equivalents for Duras’s particular literary tone.

The combined elements of synopsis, script and appendices for Hiroshima, Mon Amour therefore embody different approaches to the development of the screen idea through the writer’s written text and the director’s realization of the screen work. In certain sections Duras’s text furnishes a very exact description of what image will appear on screen, what dialogue and even what music will be on the soundtrack. Yet in other sections her text invites extensive translation and adaptation by the director, rather than facilitating a straightforward transferral from page to screen. Duras’s approach to the script thus provides an inter-esting example of the extent to which the screenwriter’s ability to use words to create a world of thematic depth and emotional resonance is as important to the film as her ability to write dialogue, create convinc-ing characters or provide a story structure. It also provides an interesting case study in the way that a writer develops the screen idea and opens up a dialogue with the director (and potentially other collaborators).

THE SCREEN IDEA: A QUESTION OF COLLABORATION?This examination of the written text for Hiroshima, Mon Amour and its relationship to the completed screenwork, thus offers some clues as to the nature of the collaboration between Duras and Resnais. More research into the particular production context in which the film was produced might perhaps provide insights into their particular collabora-tion, further to those already suggested in the published text. The dis-cussion also raises some questions as to the nature of the collaboration between writer, director and other potential collaborators that could productively be researched in relation to screenwriting in general.

One question raised concerns the screenwriter’s role in the creation of tone and style and the techniques he or she might use. Just as dia-logue is the aspect of any script that remains the most noticeable in the completed film, the style and tone of the script is the one that becomes the most invisible. Style and tone are indeed crucial elements of the director’s work in a film, and readings of films tend to focus on the style

28. My translation: ‘irrepressible bonheur’ (Duras 1960: 109).



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and tone of the screenwork rather than the screenplay. However, style and tone are still vital elements in any script that needs to convince and inspire co-collaborators. Further research could be undertaken to explore different approaches taken to style and tone within film scripts and other documents relating to the screen idea.

As Ian Macdonald (2007) and Kevin Boon (2008) have pointed out, the extent to which these elements are manifested in scripts, and the form that they take, vary according to production and geographi-cal context and time period. According to Macdonald for example, in the British film industry up until the 1930s, a script would typically take the form of a ‘comprehensive document’ that specified shots and instructed actors (Macdonald 2007: 115); in contrast, says Boon, the American ‘spec script’ has, from the 1970s onwards, developed increasingly literary features. He points out that contemporary spec scripts tend to suggest, rather than explicitly state shots and other technical directions, which are seen as the domain of the director (Boon 2008: 17). They focus instead on a fluent and engaging telling of the story.

In Boon’s opinion, these developments relate partly to the develop-ment of the form and writers’ increasing ability ‘to shape visual imagery for readers’ (2008: 17). This latter point is debatable, but contemporary scripts in the US and UK certainly reflect the contemporary production context in which a spec script will be read by many people: such as script readers, financers, and other influential agents. These readers are not film technicians and might respond more positively to the kind of literary features cited by Boon, than to a technical document.

At the same time, other features that might equally be termed ‘literary’, such as the kind of innovations in form that Duras, an established novelist but first-time screenwriter, effectively invented for herself, would be rare in the kind of Hollywood spec script described by Boon. Rare too, though not unheard of, would be the attempt to deal with a large-scale political issue. How much then are content and form inseparable as a package? Are mainstream indus-try screenplay conventions primarily suited to standard film genres? Do attempts to engage in different kinds of storytelling necessitate different formal approaches in screenwriting, as might often be the case with the novel or the stage play? To what extent also do these questions turn on the screenwriter’s habitual status as co-author of the screen idea, rather than single author, as with a novelist or a playwright?

The question of who is the intended reader (whether actual or implied) of the screenplay, also becomes a significant question. A screenplay (or other screen idea documents) has a relationship with its readership, and this can refer to a range of people, or indeed be more individually addressed. In each case the assumptions and expec-tations brought by the reader to the text may vary substantially.

Considerations of the macro-production context of industry structures and cultural conventions also lead to a consideration of


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the micro-production context. The combined documents written for Hiroshima, Mon Amour provide an interesting example of how the ‘materiality’ of the script can provide richness and depth as source material for a director, beyond the obvious structural and more imme-diately translatable elements of dialogue, plot, character and theme. But could such an approach work without the kind of close collabo-ration between writer and director that appears to have taken place between Duras and Resnais?

Such questions perhaps provide some starting points for further research into the range of contexts in which the screenwriter and the screenplay contribute to the development of the screen idea.

REFERENCES Adler, L. ([1998] 2000), Marguerite Duras: a life, (trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen),

London: Gollancz.Une Aussi Longue Absence/A Long Absence (1960), Wrs: Marguerite Duras,

Gerard Jarlot, Dir: Henri Colpi, France/Italy, 85 mins.Baker, G. (1999),‘The Predication of Violence, The Violence of Predication:

Reconstructing Hiroshima with Duras and Resnais’, Dialectical Anthropology, 24, pp. 387–406.

Bazin, André (1957), ‘De la politique des auteurs’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 70 (April 1957), pp. 2–11.

Bazin, André (1967), What is Cinema? Berkeley: University of California.Boon, K, A. (2008), Script Culture and The American Screenplay, Detroit: Wayne

State University Press. Borgomano, M. (1985), L’écriture filmique de Marguerite Duras, Paris: Albatros.Caruth, C. (1996), Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History,

Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Craig, S. (2005), ‘Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima: Desire, Spectatorship and the

Vaporized Subject in Hiroshima, Mon Amour’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 22:1, pp. 25–35.

Duras, M. (1960), Hiroshima, Mon Amour scénario et dialogues, Paris: Gallimard. Duras, M. Jarlot, G. and Colpi, H. (1961), Une Aussi Longue Absence scénario et

dialogues, Paris: Gallimard.Duras, M. (1966), Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Une Aussi Longue Absence, (trans.

Richard Seaver and Barbara Wright), London: Calder and Boyars. Gronhovd, A-M and VanderWolk, W. (1992), ‘Memory as Ontological

Disruption: Hiroshima Mon Amour as a Postmodern Work’, in Cranston, M (ed.), In language and in love Marguerite Duras: the unspeakable: essays for Marguerite Duras, Potomac, Md. : Scripta Humanistica.

Hersey, J. (1946), Hiroshima, [An account of events following the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, 6 August 1945], New York: Harmondsworth.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Wr: Marguerite Duras, Dir: Alain Resnais, France/Japan, 91 mins.

Macdonald, I. (2004a), ‘Disentangling the screen idea’, Journal of Media Practice, 5:2, pp. 89–96.

Macdonald, I. (2004b), ‘Manuals are not Enough: Relating Screenwriting Practice to Theories’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1:2, pp. 260–274.

Macdonald, I. (2007), ‘The struggle for the silents: The British screenwriter from 1910 to 1930’, Journal of Media Practice 8:2, pp. 115–128.



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Moderato Cantabile/ Seven Days… Seven Nights, (1960), Wrs: Marguerite Duras and Gerard Jarlot, Dir: Peter Brook, France/Italy, 95 mins.

Pingaud, B. [1960] (2002), ‘À propos d’Hiroshima mon amour’, in Goudet, S. (ed.), Positif: Alain Resnais anthologie, Paris: Gallimard.

Showalter, E. (1987), The Female Malady, London: Virago.Truffaut, François (1954), ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma français’, Cahiers

du Cinéma, 31 (January 1954), pp. 15–29.Willis, S. (1987), Marguerite Duras: writing on the body, Urbana: University of

Illinois Press.

SUGGESTED CITATIONDavies, R. (2010), ‘Screenwriting strategies in Marguerite Duras’s script for

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960)’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 149–173, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.149/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSRosamund Davies has a background of professional practice in the film and television industries. As script and story editor for Film London, she oversaw the development and production of over fifty short feature films. Her special-ist area of practice is screen narrative and, as senior lecturer in media writing and creative industries, she lectures in screenwriting and visual narrative at the University of Greenwich. Rosamund’s research interests include screen-writing practices and methods and cross art-form practice in the context of media convergence. Her recent visual media work explores the intersection between narrative and archive as cultural forms. Rosamund has published in academic journals and worked with independent production companies, writ-ers and producers.

Contact: School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Greenwich, Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, London, SE10 9LS.E-mail: [email protected].


Studies in Eastern European CinemaISSN 2040-350X (2 issues | Volume 1, 2010)

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KEYWORDSindependent

cinemascreenwritingscreenplaysimprovisationpsychodramavisual storytelling

J. J. MURPHYUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison

No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay in American indie cinema

ABSTRACTOne of the most interesting trends in recent independent cinema has been for film-makers to avoid using traditional screenplays in making their films. Not only have emerging film-makers associated with the so-called ‘mum-blecore’ movement, such as Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz and Ronald Bronstein, veered away from depending on conventionally written screenplays, but other critically acclaimed films, including The Pool (Smith, 2008) and Ballast (Hammer, 2008), have as well. Indeed, some of the most notable American indie film-makers – Gus Van Sant, David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch – have employed alternative strategies to the screenplay in such recent films as Elephant (2003), Inland Empire (2006), and The Limits of Control (2009). What is behind these developments and why has the conventional screen-play been under attack? What are the aesthetic benefits of choosing not to rely on a traditional script? Is this a completely new phenomenon or has the industrial screenplay always been an obstacle? I explore these issues by look-ing at three major strategies that indie film-makers have used in place of the

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1. Mumblecore is a term coined by Andrew Bujalski’s sound mixer, Eric Masunaga, during the 2005 SXSW Film Festival to refer to a series of naturalistic films made on micro-budgets by a group of younger film-makers inspired by John Cassavetes. The word alluded to the garbled sound quality of some of the films. Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha (2005) is generally recognized to be the first mumblecore film. See Van Couvering (2007).

2. My focus on American independent cinema stems from a need to limit the parameters of the discussion. American indie cinema is not simply a matter of budget. In order to obtain financing or to compete successfully in the US marketplace, indie films must walk a fine line between novelty and convention, yet still manage to differentiate themselves from Hollywood. The financing of international art cinema represents a very different situation. See Murphy (2007). For a treatment of alternative screenwriting issues related to international art cinema, see Millard (2006).

traditional screenplay: improvisation, psychodrama and visual storytelling. Finally, I argue that for current independent film-makers in the United States of America these methods provide an appropriate model for a practice that is attempting to create a truly viable alternative to Hollywood cinema.

One of the most interesting trends in recent independent cinema has been for film-makers to avoid using traditional screenplays in making their films. Not only have emerging film-makers associated with the so-called ‘mumblecore’ movement,1 such as Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz and Ronald Bronstein, veered away from depending on conventionally written screenplays, but other critically acclaimed films, including The Pool (2008) and Ballast (2008), have as well. Indeed, some of the most notable American indie film-makers – Gus Van Sant, David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch – have employed alternative strategies to the screenplay in such recent films as Elephant (2003), Inland Empire (2006) and The Limits of Control (2009).2 What is behind these developments and why has the conventional screenplay been under attack? What are the aes-thetic benefits of choosing not to rely on a traditional script? Is this a completely new phenomenon or has the industrial screenplay always been an obstacle? I intend to explore these issues by looking at three major strategies that American indie film-makers have used in place of the traditional screenplay: improvisation, psychodrama and visual storytelling. These three strategies may appear in isolation or in vari-ous combinations in the work of independent film-makers – both past and present. For some film-makers like Andy Warhol the categories themselves are fluid and cannot be separated from each other either in theory or practice. Finally, I argue that for current independent film-makers in the United States of America these methods provide an appropriate model for a practice that is attempting to create a truly viable alternative to Hollywood cinema.

In his chapter on writing in Film Production Theory, Jean-Pierre Geuens shows that following the introduction of sound, the industrial model of the dialogue-driven script became the standard convention (Geuens 2000: 81–109). There proved to be a number of obvious ben-efits to this industrial model as a kind of blueprint for a film produc-tion. It provides a basis for the strict division of labour required by the Hollywood industry. Given the huge financial risks that a feature film entails, the conventional screenplay allows studio executives, produc-ers and financial backers to have a clear sense of the film they are mak-ing. It enables actors to know precisely what lines they will rehearse and deliver, production managers to know what locations have to be found and what type of equipment will need to be rented, the ward-robe department to secure the required costumes, and the continuity person to be aware of what exactly will occur in each scene.

As Geuens points out, there are also a number of drawbacks to this approach. By emphasizing dialogue over action, written dialogue has become privileged over visual storytelling and improvisation. This model has been reinforced by various manual writers who now treat


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this as the norm. Richard Walter, for instance, ridicules the ‘weary cliché that film is a visual medium’ by insisting that ‘still, there is no getting around the fact that a good movie script is mainly talk’. He goes on to add, ‘but the fact remains: open a modern screenplay and you’re looking mainly at dialogue’ (Walter 1988: 83). For Walter, description in a screenplay has become ‘all that black stuff’, which he refers to as ‘random smatterings of ink grouped into bulky rectangular blocks separating the dialogue’ (Walter 1988: 83–84). Walter contends that producers and agents only read the dialogue and skip over the description or action when reading a screenplay. In turn, the written dialogue on a page has also had a huge impact on the performance of actors because it does not allow them to deviate from the script or to utilize improvisatory skills, a technique which I will touch on later.

In their efforts to develop an alternative cinema in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, American independent film-makers were keenly aware of these problems. The screenplay, in fact, has been a source of contention since the very beginning of modern American independent cinema, as evidenced by the influential writings of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas, the controversy surrounding the two differ-ent versions of John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1958, 1959), and Andy Warhol’s subversion of the very idea of the script in films he made during the 1960s.

Maya Deren insisted in her lectures ‘that the trouble with most films is that they are “written”, whereas cinematic thinking is another process altogether’ (Deren 1965: 33). In an article, entitled ‘Planning by Eye: Notes on “Individual” and “Industrial” Film’, she offers a visual alternative to the conventional written script; ‘every effective-ness that my films have, I owe to the fact that they were planned by eye: that I drew out what I wanted to see on the screen as the final product, and that I discarded any idea which I could not see or draw’ (Deren 1965: 34). Deren uses the concept ‘feeling lonely’ as an exam-ple, arguing that ‘aloneness’ is a ‘visual condition’;

Instead of showing bad and unconvincing grimaces, one might show, for example, a long-shot of a figure, isolated in an empty area. And this aloneness might even be strengthened if some action, such as people passing or children playing, were happen-ing at one edge of the frame, with no active relationship between the isolated individual and the other activity. One might even suggest this activity by shadows which come near the isolated individual. The possibilities are many, but note that they are all visual in nature, and that they are all more accessible to the amateur film-maker than those which would rely on speech(a monologue), titles, or acting.

(Deren 1965: 34)

Deren uses the word ‘amateur’ here to suggest a film-maker who cre-ates out of love as opposed to commerce.


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Jonas Mekas, the editor of Film Culture magazine and film critic for the alternative weekly the Village Voice, was also highly critical of the traditional script. He placed the blame squarely on the screenwriters, even going so far as to suggest that they should be shot for keeping cin-ema so conventional (Mekas 1959). Mekas had been an ardent cham-pion of the improvised and unscripted version of John Cassavetes’s first feature Shadows, even giving it Film Culture’s First Independent Film Award. Mekas felt betrayed after Cassavetes decided to go back and re-shoot a second version of the film using a script. All the quali-ties that Mekas had so admired in the first version – improvisation, spontaneity and inspiration – he found lacking in the new version, which he felt was no different from a Hollywood film.

Mekas would subsequently develop the notion of what he termed ‘plotless cinema’. For Mekas, La Règle du jeu/Rules of the Game (1939) rep-resents ‘the masterpiece of the personal, “plotless” cinema’. He writes:

Renoir’s people look like people, act like people, and are con-fused like people, vague and unclear. They are moved not by the plot, not by theatrical dramatic climaxes, but by something that one could even call the stream of life itself, by their own irration-ality, their sporadic, unpredictable behavior.

(Mekas 1961)

Mekas’s writings influenced a number of independent film-makers, perhaps none more so than Ron Rice.

Ron Rice made one of the early independent examples of plotless cinema, The Flower Thief (1960), a film that played for an extended commercial run and received a positive review in the New York Times. Strongly influenced by the spontaneity of beat poetry and Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (1959) – a film for which Jack Kerouac improvised the narration – Rice and the poet and under-ground actor Taylor Mead combined to make a feature film without the benefit of a written script. Rice was more interested in ‘doing’ than in ‘pre-planning’. He dedicated The Flower Thief to the ‘Wild Man’ – the person in early Hollywood cinema who dreamed up something when all else failed.

Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) is another early plotless narra-tive that brilliantly employs visual storytelling. Recently restored and finally given a belated theatrical release after languishing in obscurity for nearly fifty years, The Exiles involves a collaboration between the film-maker and performers and presents a slice-of-life portrait of a group of displaced American Indians living in urban Los Angeles over the course of a twelve-hour period. Although the credits indicate that the film was written, produced and directed by Mackenzie, ‘there was never any script’ according to John Morrill, one of the three cinema-tographers listed on the film (Lim 2008).

In the 1960s, Andy Warhol often deliberately subverted the scripts or treatments of his collaborators, Ronald Tavel and Paul Morrissey.



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Warhol preferred the moments when the scripts would break down and the performers would fall out of roles and become themselves. In order to do this he often employed a kind of ‘psychodrama’. In Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney uses the term ‘trance film’ or ‘psycho-drama’ to describe films that represent intense interior states of mind enacted in symbolic form, such as Deren and Hammid’s 1943 classic Meshes of the Afternoon (Sitney 1974).

Psychodrama also refers to a form of psychotherapy developed by Jacob L. Moreno, who emigrated from Vienna to the United States in 1925 and created the first Theater of Psychodrama in Beacon, New York in 1936. During World War II, Moreno started the New York Theater of Psychodrama, which he later renamed the Moreno Institute in 1951. Moreno’s psychodrama became very influential during the 1960s when his therapy sessions attracted the attention of actors and directors asso-ciated with professional theatre and were even broadcast on television.

Although Moreno’s definition of psychodrama was broad and shifted over time, psychodrama involves the patient’s spontaneous improvisation of a particular critical life situation within a clinical the-atrical setting. According to Peter Felix Kellermann:

A number of scenes are enacted, depicting, for example, memo-ries of specific happenings in the past, unfinished situations, inner dramas, fantasies, dreams, preparations for future risk-taking situ-ations, or unrehearsed expressions of mental states in the here and now. These scenes either approximate real-life situations or are externalizations of inner mental processes.

(Kellermann 1992: 20)

The esteemed theatre critic Eric Bentley offers a description of a typical ‘open stage’ session in the 1960s:

A patient, here called a protagonist, presents himself for a psy-chodramatic performance. A director-psychiatrist talks with him briefly, to find out what he sees as his problem, and what scenes from his life might be enacted. A scene being chosen, the roles of others taking part in it are played either by trained assistants or by anyone else present who might volunteer. What and how they are to play is briefly explained to them by the protagonist and director.

(Bentley 1987: 322–23)

Bentley makes clear that success in a psychodrama very much depends on the degree of spontaneity and self-illumination achieved by the patient in the process of active role-playing. The protagonist often experiences an intense emotional experience that leads to a deep personal insight and often builds to some type of a dramatic climax. According to Bentley, at this point, ‘The director now ends the play-acting and asks the audience to share common experience with the protagonist’ (Bentley 1987: 323).


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I employ the word ‘psychodrama’ in a different sense from either Sitney or Moreno. For lack of a better term, I am using ‘psychodrama’ here to refer to those peak moments of dramatic interaction, where the artifice of the performance or situation suddenly breaks down, and the performer as well as the audience experiences a heightened sense of reality. The films of John Cassavetes often contain such moments. In Shadows (1959) the lovemaking scene between Lelia and Tony can serve as an example.

The scene, which was actually scripted, involves what Ray Carney has referred to as a number of radical ‘tonal’ shifts (Carney 2001: 48). Although the audience expects that Lelia and Tony’s tryst will develop into a romantic plotline, Lelia has an unanticipated negative response to the lovemaking. We learn, for instance, that this was her first sexual encounter and, to our surprise, she tells him, ‘I didn’t know it could be so awful.’ Rather than feeling a sense of elation, Lelia has become unmoored, causing her to vacillate in her reactions to Tony. When he assures her that it is going to be much easier next time, Lelia replies, ‘There isn’t going to be a next time.’ After Tony raises the issue of her disappointment with him, Lelia talks about feeling frightened and wanting to cry, but then responds, ‘If you love a man, you shouldn’t be so frightened.’ Lelia asks, ‘What happens now? ... I mean, do I stay with you?’ She questions whether they are now going to live together –in other words, whether their lovemaking implies a commitment to each other. Tony responds somewhat insincerely, ‘You want to?’ But sensing his true feelings, Lelia answers, ‘No, I want to go home.’

What has been occurring in this scene is a kind of emotional flip-flop that reflects Lelia’s inner turmoil following her impulsive deci-sion to have sex with Tony, a person she hardly knows and someone who has already indicated that he is ‘not a nice person’. As the cam-era focuses on her, Lelia discusses her initial expectations, but real-izes that they are merely ‘two strangers’. She concludes, ‘It’s over. I know that much about life.’ After Tony attempts to placate Lelia and tells her that he loves her, Lelia appears to have a psychic break-down. Lelia tells him, ‘Please don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me. I want to go home. I want to get dressed now. Please leave me alone.’ As Tony tries to comfort her, she once again insists, ‘I want to go home.’

The scene has shifted from being scripted to something that seems unstaged rather than acted. Carney also suggests that the scene reflects the dynamic of Lelia and Tony’s relationship in real life. He writes:

Cassavetes once again drew on his actors’ real feelings and per-sonalities to lend authority to their line deliveries: Tony and Lelia had actually had a difficult romantic relationship that had not worked out well. There was still a residue of mixed feelings about their relationship when the scene was shot that undoubt-edly added to its authenticity.

(Carney 1995: 238)



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There are other instances of psychodramatic situations in American independent films of the 1960s, including Jonas Mekas’s docu-mentary-like production of The Living Theater’s The Brig (1964), the films of Norman Mailer and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968). In the latter film, William Greaves plays the role of an inept director shooting a feature film in an attempt to provoke open rebellion among his cast and crew members. The connection to psychodrama and Moreno is direct in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One because Greaves employed a Moreno-trained psycho-dramatist, Marcia Karp, to work with the actors on set (MacDonald 1998: 53).

No film-maker used the technique of psychodrama more consist-ently than Andy Warhol, especially once he turned to making films with synchronous sound. Warhol was interested in continuously recording events because he felt the most interesting things would happen the moment the camera was turned off. Warhol intuitively understood that the camera and the passage of time had the inher-ent potential to transform the profilmic event. Once he began to work with the playwright Ronald Tavel and to make narrative films, the employment of psychodrama became a standard technique for creat-ing combustible dramatic situations.

Warhol conceived of narrative as a series of situations in which his non-actor performers would engage in improvised role-playing in contrast to a carefully constructed plot. Many of Warhol’s films contain scenes that develop into psychodrama. The most famous example is Ondine’s freak-out in The Chelsea Girls (1966) where he slaps Ronna Page in the face and throws an extended tantrum. Other examples include the off-screen taunting of Edie Sedgwick by her former boyfriend, Chuck Wein, in Beauty # 2 (1965) and the decision to cast Valerie Solanas in I, a Man (1967) in a scene where Tom Baker attempts to coerce Solanas, an avid man-hater and future assassin, to let him into her apartment. The same scene is actually restaged in Mary Harron’s biopic, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), but the scene lacks the dramatic tension of the original despite the fact that Solanas is played by Lili Taylor, a highly gifted actress.

There are entire Warhol films, such as Henry Geldzahler (1964), that appear to be staged as direct psychodramatic encounters. Two early scripted films by Ronald Tavel also take this form by placing the per-formers in screen tests that bear a striking resemblance to actual psy-chotherapy sessions, namely Screen Test # 1 (1965) and Screen Test # 2 (1965). Tavel describes the genesis of Screen Test # 1, the uptight por-trait of Philip Fagan, who, at the time, was actually Warhol’s asexual live-in lover. According to Tavel, Warhol gave him explicit instructions for writing the script for the film:

And go home and devise an inquisition, basically. Sit and ask him questions which will make him perform in some way before the


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camera [...] And the questions should be in such a way that they will elicit, you know, things from his face because that’s what I’m more interested in rather than in what he says in response.

(Smith 1986: 481)

In other words, Warhol specifically asks Tavel to manipulate Fagan in order to extract certain emotional responses that will create a more authentic drama, thus blurring the distinction between Fagan’s actual life and the filmed screen test.

Tavel’s own approach was to think of the scripts he wrote for Warhol more as scenarios. He explains:

They provide a field in which whatever happens will develop its own meaning rather than have the author’s imposed meaning. The quality of my work can be judged by how well it provided for things to happen; I didn’t impose my personal vision. This way of working was part of what Andy was doing.

(Krasowska 2002: 43)

Tavel points out an underlying principle of working in this type of way:

But if you want to capture spontaneity, improvisation, the acci-dent, and so forth, you must set up an environment in which the spontaneous, the accidental, the improvisational, the unexpected, will take place. That takes planning. If you just turn the camera on people without saying anything else, they just tighten up.

(James 1995: 49)

After filming Tavel’s scenarios, which he often subverted in various ways, Warhol more or less abandoned the concept of using written scripts. He developed the notion of the ‘superstar’ as a way of shifting the burden from the written page to the performer. Warhol told an interviewer:

But, mainly, the stars improvise their own dialogue. Somehow, we attract people who can turn themselves on in front of the camera. In this sense, they’re really superstars. It’s much harder, you know, to be your own script than to memorize someone else’s. Anyhow, scripts bore me. It’s much more exciting not to know what’s going to happen...

(Kent 1970: 167, original emphasis)

There are numerous examples of subsequent independent film-makers who have reacted against the industrial screenplay, especially when working on smaller budgets outside the system. Jim Jarmusch wrote a treatment rather than a screenplay for Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Richard Linklater also used a short treatment of scenes, and then cre-ated the script post-facto for Slacker (1991). Matthew Barney simply



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had locations and images and some visual storyboards when he began filming Cremaster 2 (1999). The Waldo Salt Award for Screenwriting at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival went to co-screenwriters Nicholas Jasenovec and Charlyne Yi for their narrative film about romantic love, entitled Paper Heart (2009), starring Yi and directed by Jasenovec. In accepting the screenwriting award, Jasenovec remarked, ‘This is a weird prize to give this film because there were about five written pages’ (Hernandez and Knegt 2009).

The genesis for Chris Smith’s The Pool (2007) (Figure 1) was a seven-page short story by Randy Russell originally set in Iowa. Smith distilled the central idea – one person’s obsession with another’s swimming pool – and transposed it to India. The film-maker led a small crew to the ex-Portuguese city of Panaji, or Panjim as it is trans-lated in the film. Over the course of five months and 65 shooting days he shot The Pool, which won a Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

As Ronald Tavel insisted, all films, out of necessity, need to involve some sort of planning – The Pool did have some form of a script – but the process of making the film was much more open-ended. Smith, like David Lynch with Inland Empire (2006) and Jim Jarmusch with The Limits of Control (2009), began filming without actually having a final screenplay. Instead, he had a rough treatment that consisted of approxi-mately 22 pages. While many scenes were scripted later, they evolved and changed during the process of making the film. Once the actors were cast – Jhangir Badshah was recruited as one of the two leads while working at a restaurant the crew frequented – Smith incorporated the

Figure 1: The Pool (2008). Courtesy: Bluemark Productions.


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actors’ own life experiences as part of their characterizations. Smith, who acted as his own 35mm cinematographer, would shoot a scene and his editor Barry Poltermann would assemble a rough cut on the fly. They would view it and then proceed from there. In a sense, Smith found the ‘story’ in the course of shooting it, which could be described as a documentary approach applied to narrative film-making.

Chris Smith constructs The Pool as a series of vivid snapshots of the characters and the place they inhabit. Some scenes are short vignettes, containing only a few lines of dialogue. Smith is as much concerned with the visual details – the rhythms of 18-year-old Venkatesh’s daily life – as with character. Or maybe it is that the endless repetition of daily chores as a hotel worker defines his existence. We see Venkatesh making up beds, buying bread at the bakery, washing dishes in the kitchen, scrubbing marbled floors and toilets, dealing with the laundry and opening and closing the heavy metal gate of the hotel each day.

Venkatesh Chavan and Jhangir Badshah give outstanding perform-ances for being non-professional actors. Both play their parts with a combination of concentration and distraction, which adds to the natu-ralism. Their bodily gestures convey their characters as much as the words they say. When Nana, the wealthy businessman who owns the swimming pool, again brings up the proposal of Venkatesh accom-panying him to Mumbai, Chavan taps his arm with his finger as a kind of nervous tic. And there is something about 11-year-old Jhangir Badshah’s upright gait and the energetic way he swings his arms as he walks next to Venkatesh that suggests his fierce determination and survivor instincts.

Lance Hammer’s first feature Ballast (2008), set in the Mississippi Delta, generated a great deal of critical attention when it screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and Hammer wound up winning the Best Director Award. After immersing himself in the setting for the film and doing extensive interviews with local residents, Hammer abandoned his initial screenplay because he felt it was ‘too overt’ or ‘untruthful’. He eventually wrote a new version, which was based on a series of photo-graphs and very extensive notes, over the course of two years. Hammer then cast African Americans who lived there to play the parts rather than professional actors. He explains:

In a Bressonian fashion, I was interested in the physical charac-teristics of people, and physical comportment, the way a body moves in space, the way emotions animate the physical vessel you carry around on earth. You can tell the temperament of a person almost right away.

(Koehler 2008: 12)

Hammer did three months of scene-by-scene rehearsals on loca-tion. He would videotape the rehearsals, and what transpired in them would be transcribed into a ‘running draft’. The non-professional per-formers were never given the screenplay in order to memorize lines,



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although they sometimes were shown a scripted scene in order to grasp the basic idea of it. Hammer, who also cites Mike Leigh as a major influence, contends:

Because they [the actors] already had a general understanding of what was going on outside the scene at hand, but a foggy understanding of the scene itself, it would force them to respond as themselves. That was fun: it yielded many wonderful, realistic moments.

(Koehler 2008: 11)

Gus Van Sant de-emphasized the primacy of the screenplay in the last four films he made prior to his scripted biopic Milk (2008), i.e. Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005) and Paranoid Park (2007). Van Sant, who wound up using an outline for Elephant, suggests one limitation of using a traditional screenplay. In interpret-ing a written screenplay, he insists that ‘there’s not a lot of room for extra stuff – the fun stuff – that’s outside the screenplay. So when I got rid of the screenplay, I found that there was only the fun stuff’ (Somogyi 2003: 28, original emphasis). This ‘fun stuff’ includes being able to improvise scenes with the actors and to approach the film in more strictly visual and formal terms. This includes several extended tracking shots, such as the dazzling one lasting over six minutes that follows Brittany, Jordan and Nicole as they stroll down the hallway into the cafeteria and walk along the food line. The camera veers off into the kitchen, then picks the three up as they find a free table and see John outside with a dog, eat lunch, head back out, and then dis-appear into the women’s bathroom. In another, the camera follows Nathan in his red hooded sweatshirt as he moves through the school corridors – the lifeguard symbol on his back suggesting the moving target in a video game. A final striking example is the scene where Eric turns up as the camera tracks around Alex’s basement room and he plays Beethoven on the piano (Murphy 2007: 162–79).

Van Sant used somewhat similar approaches in Gerry (2002), the film that preceded Elephant (2003), as well as the one that followed, Last Days (2005). Even in his recent adaptation of Blake Nelson’s teen novel into the film version of Paranoid Park, Van Sant explains:

I wrote it quickly, in two days. I outlined the parts I wanted, wrote it out script style, transposing in some ways, not even rewriting. I would take the descriptions and make those scene headings, and then I would take the dialogue and make it dialogue. It was almost like Xeroxing the story. Then I shifted it around and got rid of some of the parts.

(Nelson 2008: 15)

The result was a 30-page screenplay that Van Sant transformed into a 78-minute film by altering the temporal chronology of events and


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adding long visual sequences of skateboarding, a time-lapse of the bridge at the film’s opening, and extended takes of the young pro-tagonist, Alex, walking down high school corridors. In the film’s most spectacular visual sequence, Van Sant changes camera speed and exposure as Alex showers – we see his lowered face as water spills over his hair – in an attempt to wash away the accidental crime he’s committed while hitching a ride on a train.

Jim Jarmusch had only a 25-page story, a number of well-known actors and a variety of Spanish locations in mind when he began shoot-ing The Limits of Control (2009). His original short story did not contain any dialogue, which was written the night before scenes were shot. In an interview in Artforum, Jarmusch indicates: ‘the twenty-five pages didn’t really have any dialogue, but they were a map of the story. It was very, very minimally written on purpose. I even tried to make the language very minimal, not very descriptive at all’ (Taubin 2009: 201). The film follows a professional hit man (Isaach De Bankolé, Figure 2) through a series of episodic incidents with enigmatic characters. In his various encounters, the protagonist, identified in the credits as Lone Man, orders two espressos in separate cups, the other characters all comment on the fact that he does not speak Spanish, they exchange different coloured match boxes that contain diamonds and a folded piece of paper with coded numbers, and clues to his next meeting are provided. One of the characters, an attractive young woman, turns up naked, but Lone Man refuses to have sex with her while he is on assignment. Another slips him an old black guitar. A flamenco dancer at a club passionately sings dialogue from the first scene at the air-port. Yet the exact nature of Lone Man’s mission remains a mystery

Figure 2: The Limits of Control (2009). Courtesy: Focus Features.



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throughout the film until he eventually confronts his target in a heav-ily guarded bunker at the end.

Jarmusch told an interviewer: ‘I always wanted to make an action film with no action, or a film with suspense but no drama’ (Lim 2009: 13). In The Limits of Control, Jarmusch appears to be less interested in creat-ing a conventional dramatic plot than in using repetition and variation to structure a film that is built around a number of cinematic, liter-ary and philosophical references, while at the same time playing with expectations of genre. He shifts the focus to more formal concerns – atmosphere, colour and the resonances of particular places – as Lone Man moves from an airport lounge, to Madrid and then travels by train to Seville and beyond. Jarmusch wanted the film to embody an existential, moment-by-moment apprehension of the world, which is how he positions both Lone Man and the viewer. This is also reflected in the more intuitive way he constructed the film during production. Jarmusch indicates that shots were deliberately not pre-planned, but were devised on location in collaboration with his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. In discussing the freedom and spontaneity of this method of working, Jarmusch comments:

It’s more of a dream-logic thing. There is a lot about the uncon-scious for me even in the way we made the film, which was being open to things happening and not always being sure exactly what the next move was or where the next camera placement would be.

(Taubin 2009: 203)

David Lynch went back to guerrilla film-making (and no final screen-play) in his digital film Inland Empire (2006), his film-within-a-film nightmare of an actress, Nikki Grace, who finds herself getting con-fused between her personal life and the role she’s playing in a fic-tional film called On High in Blue Tomorrows (Figure 3). The genesis for the project resulted from the surprise visit of actress Laura Dern, who became Lynch’s new neighbour. She expressed a desire to work together again, prompting Lynch to shoot a 14-page monologue that he wrote specifically for her. Lynch began filming other scenes without a clear idea of how they ultimately related to each other, so that the performers only had a sense of individual scenes. Nothing, however, was improvised. In this instance, Lynch admits that digital technol-ogy had a profound effect on his more intuitive method of working, including being able to have a smaller crew, to shoot longer takes and to operate the camera, which allows for a greater intimacy. He explains: ‘Now you’re right in there, and you’re feeling it and seeing it and you can do things, subtle, little things, that come out of what you’re witnessing’ (Rowin 2006).

It is not surprising that digital technology would have an impact on recent independent features, primarily because it reduces the cost of filming. This would seem to allow film-makers the luxury of greater experimentation, as evidenced by David Lynch’s piecemeal method of


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3. I do not mean to suggest that Hollywood never uses the technique of improvisation. Hollywood films in general, however, are not generated solely through improvisatory practice. When employed, it usually involves isolated moments within a highly-controlled structure.

shooting Inland Empire. Digital technology is also having an effect on performance. Sean Baker’s The Prince of Broadway (2008) (one of his two films that were nominated for the 2009 Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award) tells the story of a West African immigrant street peddler in New York City who unexpectedly has a baby thrust upon him by a disgruntled Latina ex-lover. The micro-budget film, shot in a documentary style by Baker, utilizes non-professional actors. A final credit indicates that the ‘characters’ dialogue was realized through improvisation and a collaborative process with all actors’.3

A number of Cassavetes-inspired younger film-makers dubbed ‘mumblecore’ use either improvisation or structured improvisation in films that feature mostly their friends and focus mainly on the relation-ships of twentysomethings. These film-makers include Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, the Duplass brothers, Ronald Bronstein and Aaron Katz. The plot of Aaron Katz’s Quiet City (2007) is remarkably simple. Jamie (Erin Fisher) arrives in Brooklyn to meet a friend, Samantha, who, due to problems with her cell phone, ends up leaving her stranded. Jamie runs into Charlie (Cris Lankenau) in the subway station, asks for directions to a diner, and the two end up spending the next 24 hours together. Although originally scripted, there is not really much of a plot in the conventional sense. Instead we experience a series of episodic narrative incidents. The two of them break into Samantha’s apartment, have a foot race in the park, visit a friend to retrieve Charlie’s hat, and later go to an art opening and after-party. Katz allowed his two lead actors the freedom to improvise or interpret each scene in their own words, even giving them co-screenwriting credit on the film.

Figure 3: Inland Empire (2006). Courtesy: Asymmetrical Productions.



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Ronald Bronstein’s debut feature Frownland (2008) is easily the most idiosyncratic of the recent spate of mumblecore films. Bronstein’s film is a character study of a dysfunctional, mentally challenged young man named Keith Sontag (played by first-time actor Dore Mann, Figure 4) who just happens to resemble David Berkowitz, the notorious Son of Sam. Keith is more or less harmless, but with his overly baggy clothes, grimacing facial tics and obsessive-compulsive gestures, he seems to be a walking time bomb. Bronstein originally wrote a script for the film – an experience he calls ‘a pinheaded endeavor’ – but because Frownland, like Katz’s Quiet City (2007), is more character-based rather than plot-ted, things changed once he cast the actors. Bronstein comments:

In general, I’m pretty disenchanted with the standard indus-try approach to screenwriting. I mean, I do find it helpful in terms of mapping out a structure and overarching themes and stuff, but the act of sitting alone in your room and trying to nail on the page the sort of ineffable dimensionality of human inflection just seems so completely backwards to me. ‘Cause as soon as you try and pass that set text through an actor’s mouth, ugh, it’s like knocking a square peg through a round hole. All the immediacy and emotionality gets lost. Like a dubbed voice. Maybe this approach can work if you’re making something grounded in heavy plotting, where the characters and the dia-logue exist chiefly to move the narrative from A to B. But I want to work in the reverse. I want the progression of the story to form organically out of the characters themselves.

(Lowery 2007)

Figure 4: Frownland (2008). Courtesy: Frownland, Inc.


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Shot on 16mm film rather than on digital video, Frownland has the overall feel and texture of an underground comic – dark and extremely hellish. Once Bronstein cast the actors, he worked with them over a six-month period to develop their characters through a process that approximates psychodrama (Kipp 2008).

Dore Mann’s performance as Keith is absolutely crucial to the suc-cess of Frownland. There is one scene in the film where Keith becomes extremely agitated at his so-called friend, Sandy, causing Mann’s dia-logue to become an explosion of incoherent sentence fragments and utterances. While watching the scene, one cannot help but wonder how something like that could possibly have been written. It was not exactly, but Bronstein describes how he was able to achieve the effect:

Yeah, he’s a complete maniac in it. The rehearsals for that par-ticular scene involved making him prepare enough dialogue for like 10 scenes, then loading him up with a disgusting amount of caffeine, spinning him around, making him sprint down the block until he was dizzy and hyperventilating, and then sort of letting him go so that he was totally incapable of relaying this prepared information linearly or coherently. What came out was this berserk jumble of disparate sentiments that rendered him absolutely senseless.

(Lowery 2007)

Bronstein’s technique worked because there is something very genu-ine and unnerving about his portrait of an inveterate loser.

For larger-budget productions, most independent film-makers do not command enough respect within the industry that they can obtain financing without a screenplay. Even after the success of Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Jim Jarmusch was told by representatives of distribu-tion companies and potential financial backers that the 59-page treat-ment he had written for his next project, Down By Law (1986), was not really a feature-length film (Shapiro 1986). Despite the fact that Poison (1991) won the top prize at the Sundance Film Festival, pro-ducer Christine Vachon still struggled for a number of years to obtain financing for Todd Haynes’s next effort, Safe (1995), even though it had a very detailed script and an upcoming star, Julianne Moore, already attached to the project. One independent film-maker who appears to have such flexibility is Gus Van Sant, who tried to get out of making Elephant (2003) for Home Box Office (HBO) because he did not have a viable screenplay. Much to Van Sant’s chagrin, HBO nev-ertheless decided to go forward with the project. Jim Jarmusch, whose reputation – much like Gus Van Sant’s – has been established over a long and successful career, was able to obtain financing for The Limits of Control (2009) from Focus Features with only a 25-page story and a cast of actors. But this turns out to be the exception rather than the rule, even for major indie auteurs.



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One of the downsides of the dialogue-driven script, as the prevailing industrial norm, concerns the fact that the conventional screenplay has become an autonomous entity unto itself – something that is used primarily as a standard marketing device to attract pro-ducers, financiers and even major actors to a project. Or as Geuens argues, ‘the fundamental concern of writers is for the script to catch the interest of agents, readers, and producers during the pitch session’ (Geuens 2000: 88). The Catalan director José Luis Guerín, whose struc-tural narrative feature En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia (2007) contains almost no dialogue, calls the system ‘perverted’. He told an interviewer:

Now, in a sense, the screenplay is the thing that controls the capital that a film can attract. It is what the producer uses to find money for his films; it’s his primary tool. So you need to ask yourself when you sit down to write a screenplay: do I want to write something that is going to serve as a proper working tool during filming or do I want to write something that will seduce investors, producers and various committees. Because of this traumatic divide that exists even before the actual film is born, a lot of films are chained like slaves to the words on paper.

(van Hoeij 2007)

Guerín goes on to suggest: ‘For me, the screenplay is not the desti-nation, but the point of departure. It is like a pretext I use to get the material, human and financial means to start shooting, when I can start inventing the film’ (van Hoeij 2007). He sees the actual making of the film as a process of discovery rather than one of translation. As I have tried to suggest, this is also how many American independ-ent film-makers approach their projects when they resort to strategies such as improvisation, psychodrama and visual storytelling.

I am not trying to suggest that many of the alternative strategies I have been describing here would be appropriate for some heavily plotted films, e.g. The Dark Knight (2008). Such films no doubt bene-fit from being tightly scripted. When Gus Van Sant made Milk (2008) for Focus Features on a budget of $20 million, he returned to a tra-ditional screenplay by Dustin Lance Black and star actors such as Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch and Diego Luna. Had Van Sant adopted some of the same tactics he used in his previ-ous four films – no script, improvisation and extensive visual story-telling – he might have wound up with the same type of rebellion among his crew members that William Greaves deliberately incited in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968). Nor, given the size of the budget, might Focus Features have been willing to take the finan-cial risk in the first place. More process-oriented approaches such as were used by Chris Smith in The Pool (2008) and Lance Hammer in Ballast (2008), or more intuitive ones such as those taken by David Lynch in Inland Empire (2006) and Jim Jarmusch in The Limits of


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Control (2009), are more time-consuming as well as less efficient, which is why they are not necessarily appropriate for big studio films. In addition, the overall architectural structure has to be found in the course of making the film, or in the editing room, because it actually is not fully known in advance, which is one of the obvious benefits of a fully realized screenplay.

Improvisation seems to work better with lower-budget films involv-ing non-professional actors. This appears to be the case with many of the examples cited, such as The Pool (2008), Elephant (2003), The Prince of Broadway (2008), Quiet City (2007) and Frownland (2008). Many of these films tend to be character-based rather than plot-driven. In striv-ing to differentiate their works from mainstream films, independent film-makers often employ realism or naturalism as a foil to the staged contrivance of Hollywood. Dramatic arcs are often flattened causing the films to be more episodic in nature. Yet there are a number of advantages to employing such strategies. Improvisation often can lead to deeper complexity of characterization. As the film-makers have commented, they are interested in creating something that feels more authentic or genuine. They are more attracted to stories that depict ordinary rather than heroic characters, involving smaller epiphanies rather than heavy drama. Like Cassavetes, they are attempting to col-lapse the gap between actor and role, thus making us less aware of the artifice of the performance. In a sense, many independent film-makers these days are working at the intersection between documentary and narrative, probably because digital culture has blurred the distinction between mediated experience and our own lives even further.

While it obviously depends on issues of budget and financing, in an age of digital technology when films can be made more quickly and cheaply, the ‘proper working tool during filming’ could, of course, be a screenplay, but the alternative possibilities are no doubt endless. These could include other creative forms such as sketches, notes, outlines, treatments, storyboards, diagrams, photographs, or even a short story. Kelly Reichardt’s career has been reignited through her recent collabo-ration with writer Jon Raymond on her last two films, Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008). Raymond’s short stories have provided her with strong characterization. In a recent interview in Filmmaker, Reichardt suggests what amounts to a reversal of the normal process of adapta-tion. In discussing her new project, she told screenwriter Larry Gross: ‘Yes, we have a script and Jon is now working on a short story of the script. I’ll make a shooting script from the story. I like working from a short story. There’s more detail and the form just allows for the charac-ters to have more of an interior’ (Gross 2008: 126).

Maya Deren understood early on that industrial procedures have become standardized ‘to insure a certain type of product’ (Deren 1965: 35). She cautions film-makers:

For it also follows that if one attempts to emulate commercial production procedures, one will come out with a commercial



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product as surely as it will always be a Ford and not suddenly an Austin which emerges on the belt of the Ford factory.

(Deren 1965: 35)

In industrial practice and the world of screenwriting manuals, the screenplay has become fixed and rule-bound, when in actuality the whole notion of what constitutes a screenplay should be fluid and adaptable to the aesthetic needs of a particular project. Largely because they have always expressed ambivalence towards industrial conventions, independent film-makers owe no allegiance to the writ-ten page. Their unique position outside the mainstream industry gives them the freedom to explore all of the available creative tools at their disposal. The sheer fun of a more open-ended approach is that indie film-makers actually have the ability to produce the equivalent of a shiny new Austin when everyone else is expecting just another Ford to roll off the cinematic assembly line.

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Carney, R. (2001), Shadows, London: BFI Publishing.Cremaster 2 (1999), Wr/Dir: Matthew Barney, USA, 79 mins.Deren, M. (1965), ‘Planning by eye: Notes on “individual” and “industrial”

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Spain, 84 mins.Frownland (2008), Wr/Dir: Ronald Bronstein, USA, 106 mins.Funny Ha Ha (2005), Wr/Dir: Andrew Bujalski, USA, 89 mins.Gerry (2002), Wrs: Casey Affleck, Matt Damon and Gus Van Sant, Dir: Gus

Van Sant, USA, 103 mins.Geuens, J. (2000), Film Production Theory, Albany: State University of

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parable for contemporary America in the story of a woman and her dog’, Filmmaker, 17: 1 (Fall), pp. 60–64, 125–27.

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James, D. (1995), ‘The Warhol screenplays: an interview with Ronald Tavel’, Persistence of Vision, 11, pp. 45–64.

Kellermann, P. (1992), Focus on Psychodrama: The Therapeutic Aspects of Psychodrama, London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

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Koehler, R. (2008), ‘Listening to silence: an interview with Lance Hammer’, Cineaste, 34: 1 (Winter), pp. 8–13.

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—— (1961), ‘Renoir and plotless cinema’, Village Voice, 26 January. Reprinted in J. Mekas (1972), Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971, New York: Collier, pp. 23–24.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Dirs: Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, USA, 14 mins.

Milk (2008), Wr: Dustin Lance Black, Dir: Gus Van Sant, USA, 128 mins.Millard, K. (2006), ‘Writing for the screen: beyond the gospel of story’, Scan:

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Nelson, B. (2008), ‘Back in Portland, the latest outsider has a skateboard’, New York Times, 2 March, pp. 15, 18.

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Quiet City (2007), Wrs: Erin Fisher, Aaron Katz and Cris Lankenau, Dir: Aaron Katz, USA, 78 mins.

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an improvisation (second version), Dir: John Cassavetes, USA, 81 mins.Shapiro, J. (1986), ‘Stranger Than Paradise’, Village Voice, 16 September.

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Press.Somogyi, J. (2003), ‘Flying blind’, Screenwriter Magazine, 12: 4, pp. 24–29, 36, 39.Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Wr/Dir: Jim Jarmusch, USA/West Germany,

89 mins.Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), Dir: William Greaves, USA, 75 mins.Taubin, A. (2009), ‘Breaking the codes: Jim Jarmusch in conversation with

Amy Taubin’, Artforum, 47: 9 (May), pp. 196–203.The Brig (1964), Wr: Kenneth H. Brown, Dir: Jonas Mekas, USA, 68 mins.The Chelsea Girls (1966), Wr: Ronald Tavel (two segments), Dir: Andy Warhol,

USA, 210 mins.The Dark Knight (2008), Wrs: Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, Dir:

Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 152 mins.The Exiles (1961), Wr/Dir: Kent Mackenzie, USA, 72 mins.The Flower Thief (1960), Dir: Ron Rice, USA, 75 mins.The Limits of Control (2009), Wr/Dir: Jim Jarmusch, Spain/USA/Japan,

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SUGGESTED CITATIONMurphy, J. J. (2010), ‘No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay

in American indie cinema’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 175–196, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.175/1


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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSJ. J. Murphy is a film-maker. He has written articles that have appeared in Film Quarterly, Film Culture, Millennium Film Journal, Field of Vision and Film Studies: An International Review. He is the author of Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work (Continuum, 2007). He teaches film production, screenwriting and cinema studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

Contact: Department of Communication Arts, 6035 Vilas Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 821 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, USA.Phone: (608) 238-3378E-mail: [email protected]


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Journal of Screenwriting | Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Miscellaneous. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.197/7


RESEARCH RESOURCES

NATHALIE MORRISBritish Film Institute

Unpublished scripts in BFI Special Collections: a few highlights

An article in the Journal of Screenwriting does not really require a preface outlining the importance or intrinsic interest of unpublished script materials. As Ian Macdonald has argued in a screenwriting-themed recent issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television, ‘reading a screenplay should not be seen as being of secondary impor-tance in understanding a film; it is of primary importance in under-standing what the film-makers were trying to achieve’ (Macdonald 2008: 223). The welcome establishment of the Journal of Screenwriting fully demonstrates that as a creative practice, and as an object of his-torical study, the screenplay is finally receiving a dedicated forum for extensive, varied and ongoing critical attention and debate. It is perhaps worth mentioning here that in the 1950s, when the Library at the British Film Institute (BFI) began to seriously acquire behind-the-scenes documentation relating to film and television production, one of its first major acquisitions, the script library from Ealing Film Studios, was rescued from a rubbish skip after the studios had been

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1. BFI Special Collections’ script holdings areclassified into twogroups: our sequence of individual unpublished scripts (c.25,000) and scripts that are part of other Special Collections (i.e. treatments and different script versions which make up part of ‘named’ collections, for example, the papers of David Lean, Joseph Losey, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger). The latter number approximately 5000.

sold. Things have improved somewhat in the intervening years, in part due to the efforts of the BFI National Library and Archive, and there is now a much greater sense of the value of preserving documents of this kind. Our Special Collections’ script holdings have grown to approximately 30,000, a figure which excludes the large number of published scripts that are held separately within the BFI National Library’s book collection.1 This short article is therefore by no means a comprehensive overview. It seeks merely to highlight a few interest-ing examples from the collection, giving a sense of the diverse range of script types we hold and indicating some of the ways in which they can provide insight into the creative and industrial processes of film- and television-making.

The BFI’s unpublished script collection is continually growing. The collection is particularly strong in the area of British and American cinema and ranges from silent film scenarios to shooting and post-production scripts for the latest cinema releases. There is also a substantial and steadily developing collection of television scripts. This includes complete drama series as well as samples from long-running soaps such as Coronation Street (we hold a camera script for the first ever episode, transmitted in December 1960). We are always looking to fill gaps in our holdings and are especially interested in adding to our collection of silent scenarios, and in receiving script donations from contemporary practitioners.

Where possible, we aim to collect a range of script types, dem-onstrating the full range of the writing and production process, from early treatments and draft screenplays through to shooting scripts, cutting continuities and post-production scripts. We hold, for instance, a full range of script types for Chariots of Fire (1982) beginning with Colin Welland’s early handwritten treatment for Runners (the original working title), through its various draft stages up to post-production scripts. There are also collections of scripts (often supplemented by correspondence and other papers) relating to screenwriters includ-ing Lajos Biro, T.E.B. Clarke, David Climie, Beverley Cross, Jeffrey Dell, Janet Green, Trevor Griffiths, Julia Jones, Angus MacPhail, Troy Kennedy Martin, Bill Naughton, Eric Paice, Emeric Pressburger and Eliot Stannard.

ANNOTATED SCRIPTSScripts come to BFI Special Collections from many different sources including screenwriters, directors, producers, actors and other mem-bers of the production team such as continuity supervisors, editors and costume designers. As working documents, many of these are annotated or personalized in some way. The collection includes bound copies of actor Dirk Bogarde’s scripts, for instance. Titles represented include several of the Doctor series (from Doctor in the House (1954)), Victim (1961), The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). These generally have Bogarde’s lines highlighted, some are signed,



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2. Vidor died during shooting and was replaced by George Cukor.

and many are full of notes, doodles, addresses and telephone num-bers. The script for Victim gives an important insight into Bogarde’s working methods. This was an important film for the actor and gave him the opportunity to break away from his matinee-idol image. One of the first British films to deal explicitly with homosexuality, Victim charts the attempts by barrister Melville Farr (Bogarde) to break a ring of blackmailers. Homosexuality was an imprisonable offence in the United Kingdom until 1967, so in the early 1960s it was a brave and challenging role for Bogarde and marked the beginning of a more serious phase in his career. The inside front cover of his script features a hand-drawn line graph, charting his character’s emotional trajectory across the film. This is cross-referenced with scene num-bers, enabling Bogarde to work out how best to pitch his performance when shooting scenes out of sequence. This seriousness of purpose stands in great contrast to his script for Song Without End (1960), an American biopic of the composer Franz Liszt made around the same time as Victim. Despite his initial enthusiasm for the role, Bogarde hated the script and clashed with the original director King Vidor.2 Consequently, Bogarde’s script conveys something of his frustration; it is full of elaborate doodles and scribbles, suggesting that the actor was not fully committed to his part.

The collection also contains innumerable examples of annotated working scripts from directors including David Lean, Michael Powell, Carol Reed and Joseph Losey. Some of these reveal the various stages that draft screenplays went through, with alterations to plot, character and/or dialogue. Others are annotated shooting scripts with details of camera angles and shot composition. Within the papers deposited by Joseph Losey, for instance, there are large quantities of screenplays and shooting scripts in which the film-maker works out details of dialogue and characterization, mise-en-scène, shot con-struction and editing. This is not to undermine the contribution of his collaborators. Indeed, these scripts (especially viewed in con-junction with correspondence and production files) frequently illus-trate the productiveness of Losey’s working relationships, and the value he placed on those he worked with. His collaborations with playwright Harold Pinter are well represented for example, and the various drafts of The Servant illuminate the development of the film as it was passed back and forth between writer and director. Losey’s annotations in the early versions show his nuanced understanding of the British class system and, more practically, his concern that the film should not contain any references that might be too obscure for the all-important American audience (a reference to a boating holi-day on the Norfolk Broads was cut, for example). If read as a creative dialogue between the two men, the scripts show a lively exchange of ideas with each challenging the other, spurring themselves on to a satisfactory final product.

Scripts donated by those working in other capacities can be equally precious and illuminating. Ann Skinner was responsible for continuity


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on a number of significant British or British-made features in the 1960s and 1970s including Darling (1965), Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and Star Wars (1977). Her scripts clearly demonstrate the extent to which the shooting script becomes an on-set bible, while revealing the extensive responsibilities of the continuity or script supervisor. Heavily annotated, Skinner’s scripts note shot duration, the action that occurs within each shot, the position of the main actors, slate numbers and line changes. Furthermore, many of Skinner’s scripts are supplemented with quanti-ties of Polaroid photographs used for reference. These record informa-tion such as scene set-ups and details of the films’ mise-en-scène, and there are numerous snapshots of actors unselfconsciously modelling their costumes. Each script therefore offers a completely unique and little-seen insight into the film in question.

SILENT SCENARIOSBFI Special Collections includes examples of ‘photoplays’, screenplays from the silent era (to around 1930), which on the surface may look quite different to modern-day scripts and which give some sense of how cinema as an industry and art form developed, during a highly formative period. Some of the earliest examples in our collections include screenplays by Eliot Stannard, a top British screenwriter of the silent era who worked with directors including Alfred Hitchcock and Maurice Elvey, and William J. Elliott, another prolific screen-writer of the period who is yet to receive detailed critical attention. There are also many screenplays by female scenarists including Alma Reville, Lydia Hayward and Mary Murillo, who represent another as yet under-researched area.3 Many of these silent scenarios offer a great deal of direction (explicit details of shot type and duration, action to take place within each shot, suggestions for visual refer-ence points) and are arranged in different ways, with a single scene or shot to a page or unusual page dimensions. Elliott’s scenario for The Darkest Hour (c.1913), for instance, is a bijou landscape-formatted document, while Alma Reville and Garnett Weston’s scenario for A Romance of Seville (1929) specifies elaborate camera movements and sets out explicit instructions for how shots should be edited together.

NON-STANDARD SCRIPTSSpecial Collections also includes examples of screenplays and scripts that defy standard expectations of what a script looks like. As perhaps to be expected, many of those that form part of the Derek Jarman Collection are in themselves beautiful objects that could be classified as works of art. The majority are in notebooks or albums, with decorated covers and objects such as feathers and mirrors stuck in. There are handwritten treatments, cut-and-paste scripts made up of manuscript and typescript sequences, scripts with passages from other texts pasted in (as with The

3. The Women’s Film History project (UK and Ireland network), the British Silent Cinema Festival and the Women and Silent British Cinema website (at http://womenandsilentbritishcinema.wordpress.com/) are all currently encouraging and supporting research in this field.



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Tempest (1979)), and scripts full of designs and storyboards by Jarman and his collaborator Christopher Hobbs.

UNREALIZED PROJECTSOf course, due to financial and creative problems, a director’s loss of interest etc., many more films are planned than are actually made. The archive contains myriad examples of scripts for unrealized projects. These are sometimes reasonably well developed as an idea and are supplemented by additional production materials such as cast lists, storyboards, production designs and location ideas. To give a single example, one such project is David Lean’s planned adapta-tion of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. The director’s attempts to bring Conrad’s South American tale of corruption to the screen began in 1976 and went on for five years. During this time Lean worked with writers Christopher Hampton, Robert Bolt and Maggie Unsworth on numerous drafts. Problems with financing, dissatisfaction with the script itself and ultimately Lean’s ill-health (he died in 1991 just six weeks before the film was scheduled to go into production) meant that the film was abandoned. It therefore now exists only on paper – in production paperwork, storyboards and scripts.4

CONCLUSIONBFI Special Collections holds a wide range of treatments, screen-plays and scripts that are available to researchers via the BFI National Library. They can be instructive documents for students and practitioners, and as research materials can shed light on the historical development of the screenwriting process; the career tra-jectory, working processes and creative struggles of individuals; the changing concerns and demands of censorship; and the economic imperatives of the film and television industries. There is not yet an online catalogue of our unpublished script holdings, but further information about the collections and how to access them can be found on the BFI Special Collections web pages: http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/library/collections/special/.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSGrateful thanks to Carolyne Bevan, Special Collections Archivist.

REFERENCESAccident (1967), Wr: Harold Pinter, Dir: Joseph Losey, UK, 107 mins.Chariots of Fire (1981), Wr: Colin Welland, Dir: Hugh Hudson, UK, 123 mins.Coronation Street (1960–), tx 9 December 1960, Wr: Tony Warren, Dir: Derek

Bennett, UK, c.30 mins.Darling (1965), Wr: Frederic Raphael, Dir: John Schlesinger, UK, 127 mins.Doctor in the House (1954), Wr: Nicholas Phipps, Ronald Wilkinson, Dir: Ralph

Thomas, UK, 91 mins.

4. For more details see http://www.bfi.org.uk/lean/.


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Elliott, William J. (c.1913), The Darkest Hour, unpublished scenario, 8 pp. typescript.

Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), Wr: Frederic Raphael, Dir: John Schlesinger, UK/USA, 168 mins.

Macdonald, Ian W. (2008), ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story: The “Well-Made Screenplay” in 1920’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 5: 2, pp. 223–41.

Nostromo (unrealized), Wrs: Christopher Hampton, Robert Bolt, Maggie Unsworth, Dir: David Lean, UK.

Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Wr: Len Deighton, Dir: Richard Attenborough, UK/USA, 144 mins.

A Romance of Seville (1929), Wrs: Alma Reville, Garnett Weston. Dir: Norman Walker, UK, 62 mins.

The Servant (1963), Wr: Harold Pinter, Dir: Joseph Losey, UK, 115 mins.Song Without End (1960), Wr: Oscar Millard, Dir: King Vidor, George Cukor,

USA, 142 mins.Star Wars (1977), Wr/Dir: George Lucas, USA, 121 mins.Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), Wr: Penelope Gilliant, David Sherwin, Dir: John

Schlesinger, UK/USA, 110 mins.The Tempest, (1979), Wr/Dir: Derek Jarman, UK, 95 mins.Victim (1961), Wr: Janet Green, John McCormick, Dir: Basil Dearden, UK, 100

mins.

SUGGESTED CITATIONMorris, N. (2010), ‘Unpublished scripts in BFI Special Collections: a few highlights’,


CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSNathalie Morris is the BFI’s Curator of Special Collections. She has recently completed a Ph.D. on the Stoll Film Company and British Cinema (1918–28), and has published on various aspects of British cinema including women’s pic-tures of the 1920s and silent Sherlock Holmes adaptations. She is a member of the Women’s Film History project and is co-creator of the website Women and Silent British Cinema (http://womenandsilentbritishcinema.wordpress.com/).

Contact: Special Collections, BFI, 21 Stephen Street, London, W1T 1LN.E-mail: [email protected]


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REVIEWS

Journal of Screenwriting | Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.203/4


REVIEWS

SCREENWRITING: HISTORY, THEORY AND PRACTICE, STEVEN MARAS (2009)London: Wallflower Press, £16.99 (paperback), x + 227 pp., ISBN 978–1–905674–81–7

Reviewed by Adam Ganz, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Steven Maras’s Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice is a signif-icant and necessary book. Given the growth of screenwriting as an academic discipline, Maras’s book is a timely attempt to trace its his-tory and develop a clear analysis of what exactly is meant by writing for the screen. This is not a ‘how-to’ book to add to the hundreds that fill reading lists on screenwriting courses and bookshelves of screen-writers, would-be and actual. It is far more (and far more significantly) a ‘what-is’ book, which should prove a seminal text for the study of screenwriting.

Maras tackles an issue that our comparatively young and forlorn branch of film studies has been reluctant to address. A general con-sensus seems to have developed amongst those of us involved in the disciplines of writing, teaching or studying the screenplay; that we work in an important and much neglected area in the making of cin-ema, and that in foregrounding the screenplay we can give a differ-ent emphasis to the question of how films come into being. National film-policy bodies have contended that the problems and weaknesses of national cinemas are best addressed by improving the quality of the screenplay. In the United Kingdom in 2006, for example, Skillset

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and the UK Film Council invested £675,000 in screenwriting training (Rolfe et al. 2007: 4). This much is, apparently, common ground. But when that apparent consensus is scrutinized we rapidly realize how fragile and insubstantial is the claim. We can, perhaps, agree that the subject of the screenplay is both neglected and necessary, but we are very far from agreement about what a screenplay is, let alone how it should be studied and practised.

Is screenwriting a form of writing, like other forms of dramatic writing? And if so what, if any, is the writer’s relationship with oth-ers involved in making the film? How does the notion of the screen-play as text relate to the subsequent film made from that text (if there is one)? What is the status of unproduced screenplays, and can we develop an aesthetics or poetics of the screenplay, separate from other branches of film?

The ten chapters of Maras’s book look at screenwriting as both practice and discourse. In it, Maras considers the early use of scripts as production plans and designs for narrative in both early Hollywood and Soviet cinema. He examines the development of screenplays as literature, and the conflict between the Eminent Authors imported by Sam Goldwyn to supply product (and what P.G. Wodehouse called ‘a touch of class and whatnot’), and the established skilled scenario writ-ers who were expected to transfer their words into ‘screenable stories’. He describes the gradual professionalization of the screenwriter and looks at writings about the screenplay from early books on technique to the writings of those screenwriters (notably Dudley Nichols) who reflected on what was already recognized in the 1920s as the paradox of ‘writing a picture’ (p. 150, original emphasis).

Maras puts this historical analysis into the context of debates – about texts and auteur theory – and looks at the history of the rules of screenwriting as described to would-be screenwriters. Finally he considers alternative models of writing for the screen, which do not rely on the separation between production and execution, especially those enabled by new technology, including pre-visualization, as well as editing and shooting simultaneously.

Maras proposes for this accumulation of information the term ‘accretion’, which, he contends, positions the screenplay as something that is necessarily changing on its journey to the eyes and ears of the audience. Writer-director Richard Kwietniowski seems to concur with this position, pointing out at a May 2009 conference on the screenplay at the London Film School that the original script is ‘interpreted, per-formed, staged, recorded, fragmented and reassembled’. One might assume, then, that amongst the indicators of a successful screenplay are openness and resilience.

Maras also discusses other notions of writing which prefigure a finished film: the alternative approaches to scripting that include the improvisational techniques of Mike Leigh, ‘the scriptment’ or hybrid half-script half-treatment (used for example by James Cameron for Terminator (1984), and perhaps the more natural medium for


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the writer-director), and other ways of scripting a film which don’t necessarily involve the 120-page document typed in 12-point Courier beloved of the screenplay purists.

Maras has commenced the long overdue task of looking at screen-writing as a form of notation for what he quotes Ingmar Bergman as calling ‘the inner structure of a film’ (p. 125). In so doing he opens a very necessary debate about what a screenplay is for. He separates the various roles a screenplay has been historically expected to fulfil: the same piece of writing may be expected to serve as a guide for the industrial process of film-making; a legal document inventor-izing the elements of the story that various parties have contracted to produce; a way to market the yet-to-be-made film to the readers; a document to attract producers and talent who will be needed to commit to it; and finally a description of the means of producing a set of emotions, ideas and images to be later experienced by an audience.

Maras’s work brings to mind the words of Stanley Kubrick; ‘a film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later’ (Kagan 1989: 231). It is perhaps this ability to compress so many different purposes into one text that best epitomizes the ‘craft’ of screenwriting. Terry Rossio, co-author of Shrek (2001) and Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) writes in his wordplayer.com column;

People tend to think of screenplays the way they think of novels. In truth writing a script is much more like writing poetry. The form and structure are paramount, and the goal is to convey as much information as possible in as compact a form as possible. Not only does every word count, every syllable counts.

(Rossio 1997)

There are areas to which I feel Maras could have profitably paid more attention, specifically the special case of the writer-director, and the relationship between editing and writing in the making of collabo-rative narratives. I’d have liked more on improvisation and the role of actors in bringing the screenplay into being. There is little about pitching, and this could have opened a discussion of film as a process, which, as Paul Schrader has observed in a recent Guardian interview ‘is closer to the oral tradition than it is to literature’ (Schrader 2009: 5). But these are not serious flaws. The remarkable and insightful research that Maras has done into the history, theory and practice of this branch of cinema is necessary to take the study of the screenplay beyond anecdote and lay the foundations of a rigorous academic dis-cipline. What Maras recognizes is that these interchanges are funda-mentally about power; screenplays are implicit battles for control over the working process and thus, in every sense, the ownership of the finished piece.


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It is this separation of the screenwriter from the process of film-making that Maras suggests needs to be reconceived. He stresses that we need to think about which practices from the past still haunt the way we think about and discuss the screenplay. In every screenplay two contradictory impulses are woven together – an implicit assertion of what the film will be, and an invitation to collaborate. Each film story is challenged to a greater or lesser degree by every collaborator it meets on its journey towards the screen. But it is in that dynamic struggle of telling and retelling that screenplays, in the process of becoming something different, achieve themselves.

In at last valuing the contributions of screenwriters to the mak-ing of cinema, we should not concentrate on writing as a narrowly conceived and isolated practice. Let us, as Maras proposes, adopt a pluralistic approach to the medium, which places the screenwriter as a key collaborator in a copious and variegated cinema.

REFERENCESKagan, Norman (1989), The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, New York: Continuum

Books.Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Wrs: Ted Elliott,

Terry Rossio, Dir: Gore Verbinski, USA, 143 mins.Rolfe, David, El-Husseini, Farid, Edwards, Adrian, Tucker, Tanja, Shaikh,

Zak and Graham, David (2007), A Study of Feature Film Development and Screenwriter and Development Training in the UK. A Final Report for the UK Film Council and Skillset 26.09.07. Taunton, Somerset: Attentional Ltd. http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/media/pdf/f/f/Development_and_training_final_report_07.11.07.pdf. Accessed 10 July 2009.

Rossio, Terry (1997), Points for Style, http://wordplayer.com/columns/wp23.Points.for.Style.html. Accessed 22 May 2009.

Schrader, Paul (2009), ‘Have videogames and reality TV given us “narrative exhaustion”?’, The Guardian, 19 June 2009, p. 5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jun/19/paul-schrader-reality-tv-big-brother. Accessed 13 July 2009.

Shrek (2001), Wrs: Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman, Roger S.H. Schulman, Dirs: Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson, USA, 90 mins.

Terminator (1984), Wrs: Gale Ann Hurd, James Cameron, Dir: James Cameron, USA, 107 mins.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSAdam Ganz was educated at Cambridge University, Bristol University and the National Film and TV School. He is a Lecturer in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. He writes for film, television and radio, and has worked as a script consultant for a number of companies including the BBC, Complicité and Working Title.

Contact: Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX.E-mail: [email protected]


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AND THE BEST SCREENPLAY GOES TO…, LINDA SEGER (2008)Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, £15.99 (paperback), 284 pp., ISBN 978–1932907384

Reviewed by Tim Maloney, California State University, Fullerton.

The inherent danger proposed by Dr Seger’s titular premise is that something – anything – can be learned from Oscar-winning screen-plays. It presupposes that you agree with her choices; that the three screenplays dissected therein – Sideways (2004), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Crash (2004) – are, in fact, ‘good’ films, and that they con-tain secrets worth sharing. The concomitant supposition is that win-ning an Oscar is a foolproof and generally agreed method of measuring the value of a screenplay.

These are, however, minor qualms which can most assuredly be ignored once the spine of this volume is cracked. Linda Seger has always distinguished herself amongst the would-be screenwriting gurus simply because her analysis is fairly flexible. There is no one-size-fits-all formula in her world, and plenty of screenplays that she finds worthwhile and even superior may or may not subscribe to her idea of structure. Seger seems to approach every new book with the same methodology as the first; analyse screenplays and determine what structures they have in common. This is in stark contrast to her contemporaries, many of whom have already determined the com-mon structure from their first book, and spend the rest of their careers applying that same structure to whatever comes along.

Seger’s introduction to this book makes her plan quite clear. Her interest in this troika of scripts seems to be that each of them was ‘successful’ both artistically and financially. Are there common traits in such screenplays to be discovered? Seger finds a series of qualities they share: stories about ‘the human condition’ that emphasize deep character, unusual situations, and which ultimately end in transforma-tion and/or redemption. It’s a threadbare justification – a great number of screenplays qualify and may have been included as well.

Suggesting that merely reading scripts will inform someone pre-cisely what positioned those scripts to win an Oscar is also terribly naïve about the processes that go into the Academy Awards. Surely reasonable adults must agree that an Oscar-winning screenplay is not chosen solely for its artistic merit or its inherent literary or storytell-ing qualities. The winning script may, indeed, have artistic and literary excellence, but it is hardly the entire qualification for success.

What we have left, then, is a very clever author able to read the structure of these three screenplays and extract a list of common observations; which is, by the way, the far more interesting part for those without stars in their eyes. Seger’s method of analysing dra-matic structure is keen and surprising on its own. If one can, by virtue


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of reading the book, glean something of her process of analysis, and be able to apply it to films that do suit one’s fancy, then this book is a powerful weapon indeed.

Though Seger, like all writers writing about writing, is at times pre-scriptive, she never loses her perspective. Each screenplay is given a similar treatment: there is an enumeration of the structures in each film, followed by an interview with the writer(s), followed by a list of ‘story beats’ in the film, for easy reference in case you do not remem-ber the movie with remarkable clarity. For those who have not seen the films this is not only helpful, but serves as a handy reference for the other sections. Regardless of whether or not one has seen the film, one can still learn from what Seger has uncovered, and can see how it works against the outline of the script.

The underlying, unspoken premise of Seger’s book seems to be that often the Oscar-winning screenplay, though it may be conven-tional in many aspects, does something unconventional and unusual. It is probably the presentation of that unusual material that brought it attention in the first place. All three of Seger’s picks for this book have that in common – combining fairly conventional storytelling methods with very specific points of view.

For Sideways, the ‘unusual’ material is the world of wine tasting, which is married to a fairly well-known road movie structure. Once the writers developed that concept, however, there was still the matter of the story. Seger is quite thorough in her discussion of how char-acters are developed, how to plan their interaction and the function of dialogue in revealing character or story. The interview with the novelist gives us even more meta-detail about how his material was adapted from unpublished novel to screen. Since producers are some-times involved in Seger’s interviews, there is also information about how scripts are adapted for shooting, and how difficult scenes were eventually realized.

The intertextual nature of Shakespeare in Love allows Seger to get at more complicated ideas about screenwriting. She spends no time with elementary concepts, either reasoning that her audience already knows about them or – if they are not writers themselves – certainly do not want to spend any pages on defining the term or the func-tion of the ‘protagonist’. Thus, she leaps in and takes on the much more intense aspects of Shakespeare in Love including the way the script plays with Shakespeare’s real life and his actual works; as well as interviews with the various screenwriters, examining their contri-butions. Most interesting is her analysis of how the screenplay can be telling a genuine, straightforward story while incorporating irony and a sense of playfulness with the audience. This is beyond figuring out what happens in the third act; it has to do with storytelling style.

Whereas with Sideways there were key concerns about how the characters interact, Seger jumps into Shakespeare in Love discussing completely different things, as though the two do not have anything in common. This is refreshing – Seger is celebrating the differences in


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screenplays and how they do not conform to a model, rather than the much more common inverted process. The Shakespeare in Love chap-ters also offer us an insight into the rewrite process (apparently a fairly radical redo by Tom Stoppard), subplotting and, perhaps most valu-able, balancing the intertextual jokes and flourishes of style against a solid and engaging love story.

Finally, Seger’s views on Crash are downright illuminating. What could quite reasonably be described as a mess of a script (I am not just editorializing here; the writers are quoted saying as much in the interview section), Seger is able to untangle what is working in ways the writers aren’t even able (or willing) to describe. And what a chal-lenge for Seger! Dramatists since Aristotle have cautioned the writer against the ‘message’ piece, the overly shrill work about a political topic that more often than not degenerates into a sermon. Crash, with its stated theme of ‘racism’, seems poised to run headlong into the ancients’ warnings. Once again, regardless of your personal opinion on Crash – or, for that matter, your attitude towards the ancient prohibi-tions – Seger does an admirable job of detailing how controversial and thematic material is woven into the script.

Because Crash is the least structured screenplay compared to the others, Seger spends a bit more time here showing how the organiza-tion of events in the film is a valid sequence for drama. It also reveals Seger’s own conception of story structure most clearly. Thankfully, she does not attempt to cram Crash into her own model of storytelling, but rather shows how simple, Aristotelian dramatic units (set-up, cat-alyst, complication, conflict, resolution) can be applied liberally and in quantity when dealing with multi-person stories. So long as an overall dramatic arc – and one of audience tension, not necessarily character –is observed, then the results will qualify as fulfilling drama. This sug-gests a freeing, anything-goes attitude that can open up screenwriting for those who feel constrained by formula.

Seger has written eight books thus far on the analysis of screen-plays, and fans of her previous work will not be disappointed by this new volume. Others will undoubtedly appreciate her analysis and insights, even if the suggested titles are not immediate favourites. It might be a worthwhile experiment to contract Dr Seger to view and analyse thoroughly despicable films with the sole purpose of seeing what results. The likeliest outcome is that when the dust subsides, she’ll have extracted all that could be learned from them, and that this material will also be valuable, regardless of provenance.

REFERENCESCrash (2004), Wrs: Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco, Dir: Paul Haggis, USA,

113 mins.Shakespeare in Love (1998), Wrs: Marc Norman, Tom Stoppard, Dir: John

Madden, USA, 123 mins.Sideways (2004), Wrs: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor, based on novel by Rex Pickett,

Dir: Alexander Payne, USA, 127 mins.


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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSTim Maloney, a graduate of the MFA Film program at the University of Southern California, is Associate Professor in the Radio-TV-Film Department at California State University, Fullerton.

Contact:E-mail: [email protected]

AUTHORSHIP IN FILM ADAPTATION, JACK BOOZER (ED.) (2008)Austin: University of Texas Press, £20.99 (paperback), 342 pp., ISBN 978–0292718535

Reviewed by Lawrence Raw

Focusing on the question of authorship in adaptation has become easier nowadays; we can use published screenplays or take advantage of the scripts published as extras on a film’s DVD release, as well as make use of online resources such as the Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb), or Simply Scripts, both of which contain extensive collections of draft scripts from (mostly US) films of the past and present. Close study of such resources demonstrates that the process of translating a text to the screen involves a complex process of negotiation between competing interest groups – screenwriters, actors, directors and producers. This is clearly evident in Jack Boozer’s collection Authorship in Film Adaptation. In an introductory essay, Boozer asserts that the screenwriter’s contribu-tion to film adaptation has hitherto been largely unrecognized. This is especially true during the studio period in Hollywood, where the moguls’ and the stars’ interests frequently took precedence. Screenwriters were little more than artisans, cooped up in their cramped offices and required under the terms of their contracts to produce a certain number of words each day. Even in recent years the screenwriter’s opportunities for crea-tive expression have been restricted by commercial factors, as most stu-dios opt to take ‘the conservative strategy [of film production] to increase the number of sequels and rewrites’, or to ‘look particularly to adapted screenplays and films that may have strong potential for sequels (called “tent-pole” projects)’ (p. 18). Boozer argues that the screenwriter’s sta-tus within a film has been questioned by poststructuralist theory, which focuses on ‘the total reassure of the individual creative voice’ (p. 21). The purpose of Boozer’s collection of essays is to reverse this trend by show-ing how adapted screenplays evolve through a complex relationship between individual and institutional forces, with the screenplay func-tioning as a site of ‘personal and cultural struggle and perhaps revela-tion’ (p. 24).


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This sense of struggle is especially evident in the first two contribu-tions. Albert J. Lavalley’s meticulously researched analysis of Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945) shows how producer Jerry Wald commis-sioned at least eight treatments and screenplays from writers (includ-ing William Faulkner) until he was satisfied with the finished product. Ranald MacDougall was eventually credited as the sole author; but this was only because Catherine Turney – who was largely respon-sible for creating the film’s original structure – asked for her name to be removed on the grounds that she did not want to be ‘second banana, so to speak’. Thomas Leitch suggests that Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation of treating all of his screenwriters as ‘second bananas’ in a conscious effort to forge his public image as an auteur was nothing more than a public relations exercise; ‘Hitchcock remains throughout his career a collaborator rather than a solitary author’ (p. 80). Leitch reminds us of the contribution made to Hitchcock’s films by writers such as Angus McPhail, John Michael Hayes and Evan Hunter, as well as his wife Alma Reville, the partner ‘whose approval was indispensa-ble to him [Hitchcock]’ (p. 80). Boozer’s essay on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) makes a similar point. He quotes screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who complained at one point that the great auteur/direc-tor did not ‘want to make anything with anyone’ (p. 89). However, Boozer points out that the final script would not have been created without the two men’s collaboration with one another.

Part II, ‘Screenplay Adapted and Directed By’, focuses on the work of writer/directors Carl Franklin (Devil In a Blue Dress (1995)) and Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter (1997)). While both contribu-tions offer detailed analyses of the alterations made to the original literary sources, they do not acknowledge the contribution made to the finished films by other creative personnel. Boozer, in the book’s introduction, alludes to the star power of Denzel Washington in the re-thinking of the characterization of the detective Easy Rawlins. Following this, it may have been of interest in the examination of The Sweet Hereafter to explore the decision to cast a British actor (Ian Holm) as the Canadian lawyer Mitchell Stephens. Did Egoyan hope to exploit Holm’s prestige as a classical Shakespearean actor? The same criticism can also be levelled at R. Barton Palmer’s analysis of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), which leaves some fascinating questions unanswered: how did Karel Reisz, once a champion of the Free Cinema movement and a pioneer of British neo-realist cinema in the early 1960s, work with screenwriter Harold Pinter, whose work for both stage and screen often rejects realism altogether? How did their script evolve? A comparison between the finished work – as used in the film – and the first draft script (now accessible in the British Film Institute National Library, London) might have provided some inter-esting answers.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau’s discussion of the two versions of Lolita (1962, 1997) focuses on how the scripts evolved in accordance with prevailing conditions of censorship. Calder Willingham’s first version


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of the 1962 screenplay (directed by Stanley Kubrick) had Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and Lolita (Sue Lyon) marrying in the end; this did not appeal to anyone, so Kubrick agreed to change Lolita from pre-teen to teenager. By 1997 when director Adrian Lyne took on the project, the conditions of censorship had been sufficiently relaxed to permit a more sexually explicit interpretation of the novel. Nonetheless, Lyne and screenwriter Stephen Schiff worked on the material to emphasize sentiment rather than satire, in the hope of rendering the novel more palatable to mass audiences. Such efforts proved in vain; the film’s release was delayed by two years, as pressure groups such as the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families proclaimed that the film would ‘increase child molestation and have a harmful effect on healthy men’ (p. 205). Mark Gallagher shows how Stephen Gaghan’s script for Traffic (2000) – based on a television pro-gramme originally broadcast on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom – consciously Americanized the material to suit the requirements of the producers, the director (Steven Soderbergh) and Gaghan himself, a recovered narcotics abuser; ‘Gaghan’s subjective interest in the avow-edly tortured lives of affluent adolescents contributes to Traffic’s areas of emphasis, as does his experience scripting characters involved in law and law enforcement’ (p. 231).

The book’s final section returns to the question of the screenplay as a site of ‘personal and cultural struggle’. Evidently the adaptation (2000) of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity evolved out of a series of discussions between credited writers D.V. DeVincentis and Steve Pink, star John Cusack and director Stephen Frears. As with Traffic, the basic point of discussion focused on how to re-situate the novel from London to Chicago (in the hope of broadening its potential appeal to filmgoers). While Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) credits Helen Fielding, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis as co-writers, Shelley Cobb argues that Colin Firth and Hugh Grant’s presence in the cast had a signifi-cant influence on the finished product. Cobb believes that many sin-gle women found the adaptation ‘authentic’, as they identified with the central character – even though the book had been fundamentally altered (p. 299).

As with most anthologies, some of the contributions to Authorship in Film Adaptation are more interesting than others. I’d have wel-comed fewer formal analyses and a greater focus on historical and social contexts, focusing in particular on how screenplays evolve over time. In this reviewer’s opinion, it’s time to move away from the familiar binary opposition between source and adapted text, and recognize instead how a screenplay is perpetually subject to revision by screenwriters, producers and directors. A good example of this might be Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), which began as a draft by Hampton Fancher based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and was eventually rewritten by screenwriter David Webb Peoples in collaboration with Scott. The text remains unstable – as shown, for instance, in the five-disc DVD release (2007),


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which contains at least four versions of the script (the original 1982 release, the so-called ‘Workprint’ shown to preview audiences prior to the film’s American premiere, the 1992 ‘Director’s Cut’ and the 2007 ‘Final Cut’). To help readers appreciate just how complex the proc-ess of adapting a text to the screen actually is, perhaps Boozer could have solicited contributions from practising screenwriters rather than full-time academics. Nonetheless Authorship in Film Adaptation is a groundbreaking anthology that places the screenplay at the forefront of the adaptation studies agenda. I have no doubt that it will stimulate further research.

REFERENCESBlade Runner Five-Disc Complete Collector’s Edition ([1982] 2007), Wrs: Hampton

Fancher, David Webb Peoples, Dir: Ridley Scott, Los Angeles: Warner Bros. Entertainment and the Blade Runner Partnership. DVD.

Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Wrs: Helen Fielding, Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis, Dir: Sharon Maguire, UK/France, 97 mins.

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Wr/Dir: Carl Franklin, USA, 102 mins.Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Wrs: Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael, Dir: Stanley

Kubrick, UK/USA, 159 mins.The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Wr: Harold Pinter, Dir: Karel Reisz,

UK, 124 mins.High Fidelity (2000), Wrs: D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack, Scott

Rosenberg, Dir: Stephen Frears, UK/USA, 113 mins.Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb), http://www.imsdb.com. Accessed

9 July 2009.Lolita (1962), Wrs: Stanley Kubrick, Vladimir Nabokov, Dir: Stanley Kubrick,

UK, 152 mins.Lolita (1997), Wr: Steven Schiff, Dir: Adrian Lyne, USA/France, 137 mins.Mildred Pierce (1945), Wrs: Ranald MacDougall, [Catherine Turney], Dir:

Michael Curtiz, USA, 111 mins.Simply Scripts, http://www.simplyscripts.com. Accessed 9 July 2009.The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Wr/Dir: Atom Egoyan, Canada, 112 mins.Traffic (2000), Wr: Stephen Gaghan, Dir: Steven Soderbergh, Germany/USA,

147 mins.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Laurence Raw is Professor of English at Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey. His recent books include Adapting Henry James to the Screen (2006) and the companion volume Adapting Nathaniel Hawthorne to the Screen (2008).



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EMBODIED VISIONS: EVOLUTION, EMOTION, CULTURE AND FILM, TORBEN GRODAL (2009) New York: Oxford University Press, £19.99 (paperback), 299 pp., ISBN 978–0–19–537132–1

Reviewed by Jule Selbo, California State University, Fullerton.

‘… to show how inspiration from the natural sciences is able to fertilize the study of culture and film studies’

(Grodal 2009: 271)

Those interested in the analysis of the screenwriting process have an opportunity in reading Torben Grodal’s Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film to examine the craft of screenwriting in an accessible and innovative fashion – through a science-based examina-tion of the audience’s response to story, genre and thematic choices.

Grodal’s area is film analysis and although the book is not specifi-cally aimed at the screenwriter (his target, in fact, seems very wide – film-makers, creators of video games, film and video-game analysts; as well as cognitive theorists and perhaps even anthropologists), his approach is applicable to those in the screenwriting field as a sup-port to more traditional examinations of film story. This latest work expands on Grodal’s Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (1997), a book that explores developments in neuroscience and cognitive science in relation to narrative theory and film theory. The breakdown of his PECMA model (perception, emotion, cognition and motor action; experienced in the processing of information through the phenomenon of film) strives to explore the audience’s preferences in genre and story by keeping in mind accepted theories of evolution – not just physical but mental. Grodal’s view is that audience responses may be predicted by understanding predilections that have been bio-culturally embedded over a multi-tude of generations (pp. 5–6). Using research in a variety of sciences, Grodal makes his case; each person is not self-created, there is a DNA heritage specific to the evolution of physicality as well as to emo-tions and even a deeply embedded heritage of thought. This theory, though seemingly out of the normal purview of the screenwriter, may serve as fertile territory because of its focus on the understanding of the audience – which, in most cases, is of supreme importance to the screenwriter and/or film-maker (be it the producer deciding whether or not to slate the screenplay for production, the director construct-ing a visual interpretation of the screenplay for the audience, or other film practitioners desirous of affecting the audience).

Grodal’s references are diverse and include cognitive scientists, philosophers, zoologists, biologists, film-makers as well as film aca-demics. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, ‘Film, Culture and Evolution’, Grodal presents the theory that genres and themes, when


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in line with story elements based on deeply rooted human conditions, hold a special resonance with the audience and that ‘emotional dispositions to which they appeal are [cross-culturally] innate’ (p. 27). For example, Grodal asserts that the popularity of the hunter-versus-hunted scenario in action, crime and horror genres can be traced to early man’s need to battle beastly predators as well as human enemies for survival. He supports the theory that the ‘fight or flight’ impulse is not being learned in the real time of one human lifetime, but it is an impulse embedded in human nature due to oft-repeated experiences of previous generations. Thus, he points out, stories utilizing plots in this domain quickly create empathetic understanding with an audi-ence. Grodal uses research in brain chemistry to examine why film stories exploring physical and emotional security appeal to children, pointing out that attachment ‘is linked to two estrogen derivatives: oxytocin, which influences the bonding of mothers and babies, and vasopressin, which influences male parenting behavior…’ (p. 27).

Chapter 3, ‘Love and Desire in the Cinema’, examines the evolu-tionary reasons for emotions such as love (a dominant or supporting element in many screenplays) and the human need for it – whether it be for survival, for procreation, for status, or for self-esteem – and how this desire forces action and conflict. Grodal pits the female’s desire for bonding – and her use of negotiation to achieve that end – against the male’s acceptance of anonymous (or at least non-bonding) sexual relations, thus pointing out the immediate discord that fuels much of the romance genre. Grodal cites Linda Williams’s work on pornogra-phy through an assessment of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), focusing on the conflict caused by the male character’s attraction to ‘non-closed’ relations and the female’s desire for relations offering closure. Grodal also considers the make up of the femme fatale, the aberrant female comfortable with the predominantly male desire of ‘non-closed’ relationships – a woman who ‘uses sexuality to achieve non-sexual ends’ (p. 73). Grodal’s sources, some pointing to research in human biology and others to anthropological insights, have rele-vance to the screenwriter’s task of constructing strong and relatable characters that resonate with an audience.

In subsequent chapters, Grodal touches on other genres such as melodrama, supernatural/fantasy and horror, citing the biological and psychological predispositions of the audience that contribute to each genre’s popularity with particular filmgoers. A screenwriter may ask for a deeper exploration into each film genre from Grodal, but as most creative souls crave inspiration rather than instruction, the depth cer-tainly provokes stimulation and challenge.

In Part II, ‘Narrative, Visual Aestheticism, Brain and the PECMA Flow’, Grodal provides a chart and explanation of his PECMA model, a flow system which is ‘… important for understanding the relation between the innate and the culturally acquired aspects’ of the film experience (p. 152). He makes the distinctions between audience responses in the experiencing of literature, film and drama as well as


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video games; for Grodal, the latter ‘represent a new form of storytelling that integrates high-order goals with low-level muscle-and-attention-training stories in a medium that allows for the mass production of such experiences’ (p. 172). Grodal differentiates between realist fic-tion (films with a beginning, middle and end that embrace final and emotional consequences for its characters) and the ‘playful’ cognition of video games – playful because of their sense of never-ending and often repetitive narratives. Grodal cites a few experiments of open-ended storytelling in feature films but sees that the ‘options’ remain the various visions of the film-maker, not the spectator or – as in video games – the player.

Chapter 7, ‘Stories for Eyes, Ears and Muscles’ advises on the basic need for the writer/film-maker to identify and focus on the charac-ter’s ‘high-order’ goals due to the audience’s innate desire to navigate through a story in a mostly logical and understandable way; a desire that holds true in film narrative as well as in storytelling in video games (p. 160). Grodal references films such as Paris, Texas (1984, adapted by Sam Shepard and directed by Wim Wenders), Mulholland Drive (2001, written and directed by David Lynch), and films written by Andrei Tarkovsky and others whose screenplays do not follow the logical ‘high-order goals’ template and create a ‘cognitive dissonance’, thus appealing to a unique (and smaller) segment of the film-going audience.

In Chapter 9, ‘Art Film, The Transient Body and the Permanent Soul’, Grodal examines differences in films aimed at the high-art audi-ence and films aimed at the mass audience; high-art films being more comfortable in transient storytelling, while mass-audience films (in most cases) featuring subjective storytelling and a permanent conclu-sion (p. 205). Grodal is not making a value judgment here – he simply makes the distinction (one that seems fairly obvious but may instigate creative sparks in the screenwriter tackling a story dilemma) between an audience willing and wired to ‘connect the dots’ and an audience more comfortable in a passive role.

There seems to be a plethora of thoughts, theories and possibilities in Grodal’s dense work – however, the screenwriter scrolling through its pages may find inspiration (or a sense of confirmation or even interesting points of argument) within his evolutionary theory of film story. Those creatives open to the study of the human condition as well as human conditioning will find much to peruse regarding the appeal of certain genres and stories to an audience interested in film and related media.

REFERENCESEyes Wide Shut (1999), Wrs: Frederic Raphael, Stanley Kubrick, Dir: Stanley

Kubrick, USA/UK, 159 mins.Grodal, Torben (1997), Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings,

and Cognition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.


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—— (2009), Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film, New York: Oxford University Press.

Mulholland Drive (2001), Wr/Dir: David Lynch, France/USA, 146 mins. Paris, Texas (1984), Wrs: Wim Wenders, Sam Shepard, Dir: Wim Wenders,

West Germany/France/UK, 148 mins.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSJule Selbo is Associate Professor of Screenwriting in the Radio-TV-Film Department at California State University, Fullerton. Her recent books include Screenplay: Idea to Successful Script (2007) and the companion volume The Rewrite: First Draft to Marketplace (2008). Professional writing credits include feature films and television series.



JOSC NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS 2010

GENERALArticles submitted to JOSC should be original and not under consideration by any other publication. Articles should be sent by email as Word documents.

LANGUAGEThe journal uses standard British English. The editors reserve the right to alter usage to these ends. Please note there is a preference for ‘ize’ endings rather than ‘ise’.

LENGTH OF ARTICLESArticles should be 4000–8000 words long and must not exceed 8000 words (including notes and references, but excluding the author biography, keywords and abstract).

METADATAAny article submitted should include the following metadata on a separate page:• An abstract of 150–200 words, providing a summary of

the key points in the article. • Up to six keywords, one per line, in lower case (for

indexing and abstract purposes).• A short biography to be included in the journal issue.• Your name, institution or affiliation, and contact details.

Please include phone number, and e-mail address, but indicate if you do not want this to be published.

NOTESNotes should be kept to a minimum and be as brief and to the point as possible. Use Word’s note-making facility, ensuring your notes are endnotes, not footnotes. The note call must be in superscripted Arabic (1, 2, 3).

PERMISSIONSIt is the responsibility of the author to obtain written permis-sion for a quotation from unpublished material, or for all quotations of more that 250 words in one extract or more that 500 words in total from any work still in copyright, and for the reprinting of illustrations or tables from unpublished or copyright material.

PHOTOS AND ILLUSTRATIONSThe journal welcomes illustrations and images. It is the author’s responsibility to supply images and ensure they are copyright cleared. Images should be supplied independently of the article and be scanned at minimum of 300 dpi resolution. Images sent as e-mail attachments should be in greyscale. Images should be accompanied by a suitable caption. The fol-lowing is the agreed style for captions: Figure 1: Caption here.

PRESENTATION• The title of your article should be in bold.• Please submit the article double-spaced in Times New

Roman 12 point, the same for references and endnotes.• The text should have at least 2.5cm margins for annota-

tion by the editorial team.

QUOTATIONS• Quotations should be within single inverted commas.

Material quoted within a cited text should be in double inverted commas.

• If quotations are of more than forty words they should be separated from the main body of the text and indented.

REFEREESThe Journal of Screenwriting is a refereed journal. Strict ano-nymity is accorded to both authors and referees. Referees are

chosen for their expertise within the subject area, are asked to comment on specialist content, comprehensibility and relevant contexts. A summary of the referees comments will be pro-vided, whether or not the article is accepted for publication.

REFERENCES• The Harvard system is used for bibliographical

references. All quotations should be followed by the name of the author, the date of publication and page number, e.g. (Price 2009: 2)

• References refer the reader to the bibliography at the end of the article, this should be headed ‘References’ and listed alphabetically.

Examples of the most usual cases are given below: • Books – Seger, L. (2003), Advanced Screenwriting, Beverly Hills: Silman-James Press. Spicer, A. (2007), ‘The author as author: restoring the screenwriter to British film history’, in J. Chapman, M. Glancy and S. Harper (eds), The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, Basingstoke: Palgrave/ Macmillan, pp. 89–103. • Journals – Fawell, J. (1989), ‘The musicality of the film script’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 20: 1, pp. 48–54.

REFERENCING FILM AND TELEVISION PRODUCTIONSIn JOSC, there is a significant political difficulty for us in privileging the director (or indeed anyone) as a single author of a film or television production, so these listing have to be by title, to be fair. We suggest the writer and director should be named (or the creator of a TV series, if appropriate), in that order.For clarity, we are adopting the following style for film and TV productions:In the text:• Film title:

Original title/translation (year of 1st release)e.g. Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul (1973)

• TV series title:Original title/translation (originating broadcaster, year of 1st transmission to last tx. if known)e.g. Spooks (BBC, 2002–); The Wednesday Play (BBC 1964–70)

• TV title episode:Original title/translation (originating broadcaster, year of 1st transmission)e.g. Middlemarch #1 (BBC, 1994)

• TV single drama:Original title/translation (originating broadcaster, year of 1st transmission)e.g. Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966)

In the References:• Film title:

Original title/translation (year of 1st release), Wr:, Dir:, Country, duration.e.g. Soft Top, Hard Shoulder (1992), Wr: Peter Capaldi, Dir: Stefan Schwartz, UK, 93 mins.

• TV series title:Original title/translation (year of 1st tx. to year of last tx.) Cr. (or lead Wr.); Country, production company for originat-ing broadcaster; tx. information ( where known and appropriate to the reference in the text), duration of ep. X number of episodes (if known).e.g. Spooks (2002–), Cr: David Wolstencroft; UK, Kudos for

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