Margot Nash

ABSTRACT

This chapter explores ‘essence’ and ‘originality’ in screenwriting adaptation practice. It investigates the ‘translation’ of a source text into a new form, and argues for creativity and risk-taking in order to produce original work.
Case studies examine decisions made by screenwriters to move away from a source text and make the story their own. Greta Gerwig’s reframing of Little Women (2019) meant changing the structure and the ending. Kelly Reichard adapted three unconnected short stories into Certain Women (2016). Rainer Werner Fassbinder radically transformed Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955) into Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Tod Haynes was inspired by both films to create Far from Heaven (Haynes 2002), which referenced both films and paid homage to Sirk and Fassbinder.

Lottie Lyell was a much-loved silent film star in Australia. She was also a scenario writer, director, editor, producer, and art director. Quietly working alongside director Raymond Longford, she had a significant influence on the twenty-eight films they made together. Lyell starred in nearly all the films, but it is now generally accepted that she contributed a great deal more than was officially acknowledged at the time. This profile includes a detailed filmography including extant and non extant titles.

Part memoir and part meditation on memory, history and photography, ‘The Silences’ (Nash 2015)* is a 73 minute personal essay documentary. Drawing on family photographs, oral histories, my parents’ letters, documentary video footage I shot over a seven-year period and clips from my own body of work as a filmmaker, ‘The Silences’ investigates family secrets through an excavation of the repressed and hidden histories in my family, in particular the history of trauma and mental illness. In this article I reflect upon a discovery-driven, as opposed to a market-driven, creative development process and argue that it fostered a ‘brooding’ questioning space where old ideas were challenged and new ideas were nurtured. I explore ‘writing’ in the editing room with images as well as words, rather than setting out with a pre-ordained script. I share the discovery of an unconventional structure driven by theme, rather than chronology or structural paradigms and draw upon my research into literary, cinematic and psychoanalytic inquiry to build an essay film that ‘speaks’ in both pictures and words. I investigate the subversive power of the subjective and reveal how the gaps and silences in history were made visible when little or no documentary evidence existed.

* In 2016 'The Silences' received an Australian Writers Guild AWGIE Award for Documentary - Broadcast or Exhibition

Lottie Lyell was a much-loved silent movie star in the early days of cinema in Australia. She was also an accomplished scenario writer, director, film editor, and producer. Quietly working alongside director, Raymond Longford, she had a considerable influence on the twenty-eight films they made together. [1] Longford directed and Lyell starred in nearly all the films, but it is now generally accepted that she contributed a great deal more to all the films than was officially acknowledged at the time. [2] This article builds on the existing research on Lyell through a focus on her work as a scenario writer. It also makes a contribution to screenwriting research through a study of some of the original scenarios held in the archives. In her work on the Canadian silent screen star, scenario writer, director, and producer, Nell Shipman, Kay Armitage writes of the experience of original research in the archives and " the sense of the body of the subject as perceived through the sensorium of the researcher " : … every time Shipman typed a capital, the letter jumped up half a line, and when she came to the end of a sentence, she hit the period key with such force that it left a hole in the paper … That it is Shipman's body that we contact, rather than a simple fault in the machine, is proven when we read a letter written by Shipman's husband on the same typewriter. [3] My search for evidence of Lyell's contribution as a scenario writer has meant looking for this " sense of the body " on the original scenarios and this has inevitably involved a degree of speculation. Longford and Lyell Longford was a good deal older than Lyell, a friend of the family and a married man. They were both stage actors and in 1909 when Lyell was nineteen, her parents put her in Lottie Lyell: the silent work of an early Australian scenario writer

This article explores the concept of a shadow narrative lying under the surface of the main film narrative through a case study of the  film Lore (Shortland 2012). The film is based on the second story in Rachel Seiffert's book The Dark Room. It was adapted for the screen by British screenwriter Robin Mukherjee and Australian director and screenwriter Cate Shortland. I will search for the structure of this narrative through an analysis of key emotional scenes, moments or spectral traces when the unspo-ken desires of the protagonist, Lore, surface and take form, when subtext becomes text and nothing is ever the same again. Using film analyst Paul Gulino's argument that most narrative films consist of eight major sequences, each between eight and fifteen minutes, I will break the film into eight sequences and then identify one key emotional scene in each sequence. I will then analyse the eight key scenes and discuss the development of Lore's shadow or unspoken narrative of desire. Some of these key scenes re-imagine or extend narrative moments from the book, but most are new, created by the screenwriters in order to make visible the invisible transformation of character and to heighten themes introduced in the first story in the book and brought to a resolution in the third.

Set against a backdrop of the boom and bust of Australian silent film production, World War 1 and the first wave of feminism that provided role models for spirited young women, this chapter will explore the lives and scenario writing work of Lottie Lyell, the McDonagh sisters and to a lesser extent Agnes Gavin and Louise Lovely. Through a study of some of the surviving original scenarios, it will also examine the form the early
scenarios took before the talkies transformed writing for the screen into what we know today as the screenplay.

Set against a backdrop of the boom and bust of Australian silent film production, World War 1 and the first wave of feminism that provided role models for spirited young women, this chapter will explore the lives and scenario writing work of Lottie Lyell, the McDonagh sisters and to a lesser extent Agnes Gavin and Louise Lovely. Through a study of some of the surviving original scenarios, it will also examine the form the early scenarios took before the talkies transformed writing for the screen into what we know today as the screenplay.