Screenwriting Studies

Chapter 2 investigates a series of technical practices that were mobilized in the early talkie decades to counter Bombay cinema’s dubious social reputation and reposition it as an efficient swadeshi industry, owned and managed by Indians. I look at the strategic deployment of science as the performative register for a concerted industrial project toward respectability. From the use of exhibitions as sites for the spectacular display of cinema-as-science to technical practices of continuity writing and double-unit shooting, I identify a range of strategies deployed by a young talkie industry to rationalize production and establish a national presence. I question the usefulness of comparisons with the Hollywood studio system in light of transnational influences from other film centers and local transindustrial work conventions.
Colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism come together in this chapter under the sign of science to shape the discursive and productive future of cinema in India. A technical history of cinema thus gestures to the ways in which film practitioners and publics found new horizons for defining the self and work through the infrastructural impulse of scientific-industrial transformations of the cine-ecology.

This book is intended for writers of feature motion pictures, and specifically for writers of original screenplays rather than adaptations from existing literary material.  The goal is for the writer to

• Sell his or her screenplay;
• Make the best deal for that screenplay;
• Get the film made; and
• Get his or her project back if the film does not go into production

This is not a “how to” book, since there is no one route to achieving these objectives.  Rather it is an introduction to important terms and concepts which the writer needs to know not only to meet his or her goals, but also to communicate and function in the motion picture industry.  Some of the terms and concepts are specific to the deal-making process.  Included are simple explanations of a few fundamental legal concepts.  Other terms extend into broader entertainment industry interests and concerns.

Although this book is aimed primarily at writers of original screenplays intended for production as feature motion pictures for initial release in theaters or on video-on-demand platforms, it also contains much information applicable to writers in general who have an interest in the entertainment industry, including novelists and authors of non-fiction books.  It should also prove useful to writers whose career goal is not to write original scripts, but rather to be employed doing adaptations of existing material such as novels, or doing rewrites of other writers’ screenplays.

Sorkin uses five different techniques which, taken together, constitute his unique style. Arising from his very early love of theatrical dialogue and screwball comedy, he sought to construct an appearance of reality in the workplace that challenged TV audiences as they'd never been challenged before, splicing comedy and drama in ways that still appear fresh and created a template for a golden age of TV writing.

A partir dos referenciais teóricos de Linda Williams (1991) e Mariana Baltar (2019), esboço neste artigo uma primeira tentativa de entrelaçar os estudos do excesso aos estudos de roteiro. Argumento que a estética fílmica não é algo que se dá, exclusivamente, no âmbito da realização, e que o roteiro pode antecipar o projeto estético do filme e também levar a uma experiência estética. Para isso, transponho dos domínios da mise-en-scène para o roteiro cinematográfico três categorias propostas por Mariana Baltar (2019), aqui denominadas “marcas estilísticas do excesso”: obviedade, antecipação e simbolização exacerbada.

Writing the script for a documentary film can be problematic. According to some documentary filmmakers, it is not possible at all, because one cannot know beforehand what is going to happen. On the other hand, some attempt to produce a written script is often required to obtain financing for a documentary project. This article deals with different work practices and forms of documentary script. It analyses two case studies: the writer’s own films A Man from the Congo River (2010) and Kusum (2000). The first is the story of an engineer who worked in colonial Congo at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is based on diaries and other historical material, and therefore it was possible to construct a very precise script for the film. Kusum is an observational documentary film following the healing of a young Indian girl. The script was produced prior to production, but during the shooting process many core elements changed, including the main character and storyline. The form and dramaturgy of documentary films are created in the filmmaking process and in dialogue between the film-maker and real people. A documentary script can be considered a hypothesis about the reality that the film-maker will encounter via the process of filmmaking. Instead of ‘a screen idea’ we could speak about ‘a documentary idea’.

This is the second volume of the History of Tv series, that goes from 2000 to today. It deals with both Italian and American Tv series (it has also a chapter on series in UK). It arrives to today: the explosion of Netflix, the Tv series in Amazon and Dinsy+, and the opening of Italian Tv series to the International market with series like Medici, My Brilliant Friend, and Leonardo

This paper proposes that dreams can be analyzed from a narrative perspective and that this approach produces a new appreciation of dreams. When we ask the dreamer narrative-like questions such as “How would you change the
story of the dream?” or “If they were making a movie of this dream, who would play you?” we take the dream work in a different direction than when we ask questions of the form “Does this dream remind you of something in your waking life?” Consideration of the formal narrative components of the dream report allows us to address issues and remedies that are not readily apparent in other approaches. In the case of the nightmare, imagining the dream as a story can prepare the dreamer to master the nightmare’s climax.
Within the logic of the nightmare, it enables the dreamer to identify or create sources of support and to see herself as someone who can solve the nightmare problem. It provides the dreamer with the means to eliminate the nightmare.

A dream report is rarely a complete story, and narrative can be used when we can conceptualize the dream as a fragment implying a narrative whole. The nightmare can be seen as a fragment which consistently halts at what would
be the climax of a plot. Correspondingly, there is a quasi-nightmare embedded in the plot of many novels and films; Stephen King’s horror story Carrie is taken as an example. Many of the analyses and techniques used in both
nightmare studies and in nightmare interventions already imply a narrative perspective. In particular, narrative offers an explanation for the success of the Imagery Rehearsal Technique (IRT) method of working with nightmares.
Narrative analysis can benefit dream work in three ways. First, narrative suggests a framework in which current approaches to nightmares can be understood; second, it offers a different way to consider dream reports; and
third, the extensive body of narrative theory as well as practical applications, such as screenwriting techniques, can be applied to dream work.

Night Bus is a creative exploration of relationship between the screenplay, affect and bodies. The short film script sees a re-imagining of contemporary, real life events to produce a dramatic narrative concerned with themes of public violence, individual intervention and responsibility. Following on from research into the affective dimensions of cinema, this has been written as a means to explore the conditions that encourage the production of bodily sensation at a conscious and unconscious level within the screenplay itself. I have sought an answer to the question of how the screenwriter’s description of material gives rise to a visceral response in the reader, which may also be reflected in a resulting film text. My screenwriting focuses on the
creative use of narrative content and the description of aesthetic dimensions such as colour, light, sound, movement, rhythm and texture to affect the reader.

This paper explores some interfaces between so-called 'polysystem' (PS) studies of adaptation and screenwriting studies. Part I explains first some general features of a PS study of adaptation. Part two explores three sets of questions connecting adaptation studies and screenwriting studies: the definition of the object of study, be it adaptation or screenwriting, the study of what is called ‘preliminary’ norms and its relevance for screenwriting studies, and the study of so-called ‘operational’ norms as a frame for studying screenwriting.

This paper discusses the teaching of screenwriting and storytelling in terms of art and craft. It argues that since Romanticism established itself in the 19th century as the dominant Western view on art and culture, it has driven a wedge between people’s notions of art and craft, promoting the former and demoting the latter. This rift has impeded the teaching of screenwriting and storytelling in general. Following this, art historians and sociologists of art have suggested developing a “third system of art,” one that reintegrates the artist and the artisan, the art and craft-based values. This essay develops the basic tenets of a “technical approach” to the teaching of screenwriting. This technical approach sits in-between a Romantically biased “free-wheeling” approach and a mechanistic, “rule-based” approach. It is argued that a technical approach to screenwriting or storytelling could help materialize such a “third system of art” and benefit the practice, teaching, and study of screenwriting and storytelling.

Crimes, investigations, questions, surprises and emotions. Let’s dive into this world with Raymond Reddington (James Spader) who will take us on a journey full of mystery and excitement. The Blacklist, is a typical American crime thriller network series of the 21st century, premiered on NBC on September 23 in 2013. In this paper, I will be analyzing the narrative structure of Joen Bokenkamp’s creation, its progression and evolution throughout the first season only. Narrative complexity, dominant types and styles has changed by the time, so this series does not present an exception of its generation. However it offers plenty of interesting points to talk about and a rich structure to analyze.

In this study we develop an empirical model to explain failure rates of new television series. Specifically, we test the ability of three factors to predict the success of new dramatic series appearing on 31 cable networks over the last 10 years. Those factors are the originality of the story, the track record of its creator(s), and the cognitive complexity of its pilot episode script—all of which are known well in advance of a network’s decision to greenlight a new series. As predicted, we find that all three variables—both individually and in combination—strongly predict the success rate of new dramatic series in their first two seasons.

Everyone agrees that a key element of the creative process of a Film is the screenplay. Following an essay on the theory of screenwriting (Maras: 2009), questions concerning the debate on the nature and the goals of “Screenwriting” are encouraged thanks to the import of Frame Analysis approach from social sciences. Maras’ proposal, which we adopt here, is to identify a frame where to include all theoretical contributions participating to this debate, although of a different nature. Adopting this approach allows to take up the subject “screenplay” from a new perspective reflecting and including what analyses from what other approaches decreed on the subject. The usefulness of this theoretical frame can be verified in the investigations of the transitions between texts (for instance between a screenplay and a movie), and it’s ideal to host debates on the concept of “creative process”.

This study traces the last years of Ben Hecht's writing career, arguing his importance in postwar American literature. He produced ten novels, about 250 short stories, some twenty plays, more than seventy screenplays, and many radio and television scripts. Perversely, his legendary success as a Hollywood screenwriter only served to undermine his literary reputation, so that his prose remains overlooked to this day. But while Hecht's first book, Erik Dorn, published in 1921, was an alienation novel written some twenty years ahead of its time, his final cycle of nonfiction books anticipated the New Journalism of the 1960s. None better exemplified his blend of fiction and nonfiction than an unpublished biography of the Jewish gangster Mickey Cohen, the so-called king of Hollywood's Sunset Strip. Cohen personified the " tough Jew " for Hecht, and research on the biography became a confrontation with a myth that the author himself had constructed and disseminated to the American public. A Chicago crime reporter in his youth and inventor of the gangster movie, Hecht had become a militant propagandist for the Zionist cause back in the late 1940s. He had originally befriended Cohen when the two joined forces to raise money and smuggle weapons to the Jewish " terrorists and gangsters " of Palestine. The Cohen manuscript thus illuminates Hecht's significance as both a twentieth-century writer and a man who played a role in history.

Este trabalho pretende analisar como os roteiros dos filmes dos irmãos Coen se relacionam ou rompem com diferentes tradições do roteiro cinematográfico. Seja partindo do Cinema Narrativo clássico, marcado pela tradição arquetípica da "jornada do herói" e pela estrutura dramática em três atos; seja pela tradição de ruptura instaurada pelo chamado Cinema Moderno, marcada por tramas mais metafóricas, ambíguas, simbólicas, existenciais e sem causalidade necessária. Buscarei demonstrar como os irmãos Coen tendem a misturar e ao mesmo tempo subverter essas diversas tradições, numa operação de colagem e fragmentação pós-moderna que cria filmes “sistemas”, filmes tão centrados em sua própria artificialidade que enunciam, de forma alegórica e abstrata, discursos sobre o mundo.

Network Text Analysis (NTA) involves the creation of networks of words and/or concepts from linguistic data. Its key insight is that the position of words and concepts in a text network  provides vital clues to the central and underlying themes of the text as a whole. Recent research has used an inductive approach to the question of theme extraction. In this paper we take a deductive approach in that we first establish prior expectations as to the key themes to be found in the text. We then compare and contrast the results of our network analysis with the results of  literary and cultural analyses of the film Fight Club as reported in over four dozen other peer-reviewed publications. While our results are remarkably consistent with and complementary to results in those studies, our analysis permits something the others do not—an analytical framework for relating those underlying and central themes to one another.

Screenwriting 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 distinction, 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.

Much work remains to be done to develop a historical-critical integrated knowledge of the show business of the twentieth century capable of considering cinema and stage as the two main fields of a single area of artistic creation. The Hollywood’s Golden Age is a very important moment in the history of the relationship between the forms of the stage and the ones of cinema. To enter into a critical analysis of this relationship in that historical period, it is very useful adopt the point of view of the screenwriting manuals. At the beginning of this paper, we will ask how the techniques of theatre playwriting have remained in the production practices of classical Hollywood cinema and if its professionals had awareness about it. I will show some common traits of playwriting and screenwriting, with a focus on an issue constantly debated in the circle of screenwriters: the usefulness and the validity of the three-act structure. Jumped again to the headlines in the Seventies, this structure was already known by the early writers of the silent film era because of a legacy of centuries of playwriting and literature.

«Nikos Kazantzakis’ Unshot Adaptations of Don Quixote and Decameron: Studies on images and sound during early talking cinema», Classica Cracoviensia, vol. 24 (2021), p. 81-102.
This article examines two of Nikos Kazantzakis’ unshot screenplays of the early 1930s: his adaptations of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Boccaccio’s Decameron, kept in typed manuscripts at the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum Foundation in Iraklion, Crete. The article analyses Kazantzakis’ Don Quixote and Decameron in the contexts of early talking cinema and his ideas of the image-language relationship. Written at a time when the artistic value of talking cinema was still debated, Kazantzakis’ adaptations demonstrate that he sought to express ideas with images rather than dialogue (Don Quixote) and use sound as a creative element (Decameron) in ways alluding to Eisenstein’s 1928-1929 writings, with which, as evidence suggests, the Greek author was familiar. Thus, Kazantzakis’ Don Quixote and Decameron show how a technological development in film history – the coming of sound – and the Soviet film theory influenced this author’s adaptation techniques, while also enhancing our understanding of his creative career as well as the worldwide resonance of Cervantes’ and Boccaccio’s literary milestones.

“. . . as well as being a good idea in itself, Pacchioni’s ‘perspective’ works rhetorically to make possible an extraordinary density. A short book covers a huge amount of Fellini’s work in a penetrating way. Strangely, it isolates themes, motifs, and meanings from the films themselves, in the sense of endowing figures with meaning, but without their aesthetic insertion into the artistic artefact. In other words, the book throws enormous light on the components of Fellini’s films. And there is nothing wrong with this, when you reflect on the extent to which each film is an assembly of fragments—that is the way Fellini works. But the assembly is really successful—and this is where the ‘collaborators’ stop, and ‘Fellini’ himself takes over completely. He welds their disparate contributions into a work that is unified and ‘beautiful’, as well as meaningful. By not dwelling on this (though he does talk about it), Pacchioni lets the ‘contributions’ stand out, each with their identity. It is the films themselves that incorporate, absorb, digest the components, and Pacchioni’s critical activity is to undigest and tease out the threads, so that each character on the stage (each writer) receives his own spotlight. The reader, in his memory, reassembles the now enriched components.” –– Excerpt from Christopher Wagstaff’s review (University of Reading) in The Modern Language Review
 11.3 (July 2016)

“We are not HBO, We are Television”: An Ethnographic Analysis of the Group Writing of the Series The First Republic

This article focuses on the efforts of the Czech public service television (Česká Televize, hereafter ČT) to compete with private companies for the primetime soap opera audience. The melodramatic historical crime drama The First Republic has been something of a turning point in post-Socialist ČT. It exemplifies a recent Czech tendency to coproduce programmes with independent partners, thus blurring the distinction between private and public interests. The series exemplifies a shift away from the longstanding Czech tradition of having one or two writers pen either six- or thirteen-part screenplays as one whole in favor of having a writing team collaborate on dozens of screenplays. The First Republic also illustrates the standardization of family entertainment as a ČT programming slot, as well as a greater effort to follow trends in American and, to some extent, European quality television. Through an ethnographic study of day-to-day production processes, this article sheds light on the social logic that drove this collaborative effort. More specifically, it focuses on the differing expectations and authorial subjectivities of the agents and institutions involved in the production of The First Republic. The initial conception of the series posited a complex, gritty historical drama, but this idea gave way to what many critics saw as a high-end soap. Shift s in power between ČT, its independent production partners (together with the series’ director), and head writer were symptoms of the changing position of public service television on the Czech market and ČT’s relationships with private producers. As the most successful programme of its kind, the series stands as a striking emblem of a post-socialist production culture in transition. Research for this article is based on Eva Pjajčíková’s experience as a writer intern on The First Republic, her nine-month participant observation of the writing team, and interviews both authors conducted with participants in the series.

Almost any screenwriting book acknowledge, sometimes implicitly, that most concepts within its pages are borrowings from Aristotle’s Poetics. The essay shows how the relation between the centuries-old handbook and the most modern forms of media communication is grounded in the attitude film practice has to be taught and imparted. The essay also analyses how some Aristotelian notions (unity of drama, verisimilitude, the beginning-middle-end tripartition, catharsis) are vital to the screenwriter’s toolbox, while reflecting on how having deep knowledge of the Poetics helps with wondering about which are the stories, therefore the principles, most satisfactory to our need of meaning.

Screenwriter Charles Bennett was Hitchcock's mentor throughout the 1930's.  He created the "trademark scenario" utilized by the Master of Suspense, authoring seven films directed by Hitchcock.  But Hitchcock hid Bennett's influence, and film scholarship mistakenly disregarded Bennett in favor of either Hitchcock, as"auteur," or novelist John Buchan.  This two volume study penetrates through Hitchcock's obfuscations to reveal Bennett as the author of the technically Modern thriller, the staged hero's journey construction, and Hitchcock's trademark "wrong man" scenario.  It reveals the scope of Hitchcock's lies and deceit, and addresses many previously unanswered questions in Hitchcock studies.  Volume One "The Partnership" focuses on the partners' very productive but often dysfunctional relationship. Volume Two "Hero's Journey & Story Closeups" analyzes Bennett's constructions, characterizations, and the application of his thriller story elements.  Volume Two concludes by revealing Hitchcock's terror that his reliance on Bennett would be found out.  The set is accompanied by a foreword by Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan. 
For purchase see:  www.amazon.com/author/johncharlesbennett

This article investigates and proposes the concept of speculative writing, which is a disruptive sort of dramaturgy mediated by artificial intelligence. What are the kinds of events created by speculative writing? What might its history and genealogy be? What might the duration of an alphanumeric reenactment be? Guided by these questions, the article details its search for speculative writing in unfilmed script history as well as in premediation events. According to these concepts, this essay concludes that speculative writing will enact potential, abstract, and premediated events, which have never become material media.

The Hollywood Golden Age was a revolutionary moment in the history of cinema and is pivotal to understanding the historical passage of a peculiar new art form-screenwriting. This early film period, from the Tens to the Sixties, was determined by key interactions between the respective forms of cinema and stage. Together, these interactions form a wider screenwriting "discourse." There are reoccurring disputes in film scholarship over the paternity of the conventions and techniques of screenwriting. One solution is that techniques of theatre playwriting persisted extensively in the production practices of classical Hollywood cinema. Whether or not its professionals were aware of this is at the heart of this dispute. It is possible to identify the contribution of screenwriting manuals from Hollywood's Golden Age toward the standardization of screenwriting techniques. The article aims to examine in the screenwriting manuals of this period some statements by practitioners who document the normalization and codification of the narrative structures used in screenwriting over time-in particular, the three-act structure. The validity and origin of the three-act structure are constantly debated among screenwriters. While this formula was known to the early writers of the Silent Era due to its legacy throughout centuries of playwriting and literature, it reappeared in the Seventies in the guise of a new theory. This article attempts to fill in certain gaps in the history of the theorization of screenwriting practices by juxtaposing statements found in screenwriting manuals and the statements of scholars and educators of this field. Ultimately, narrative conventions belonging to the tradition of theatre, as well as technological exigencies were integral in shaping the cinema techniques in use today.

In the wake of a recent essay on the theory of screenwriting (S. Maras, Screenwriting. History, Theory and Practice. London-New York: Wallflower Press, 2009), questions concerning the debate on the nature, the regulations and the goals of “Screenwriting” and the dialogue between narratology and other fields of Film Studies are encouraged thanks to the import of Frame Analysis approach from social sciences. Steven Maras’ proposal, which we have adopted here, is to define the debate set in motion by the discourse on the screenplay as peculiar to the screenplay itself, and therefore, to identify a frame where to include all theoretical contribu- tions participating to this debate, although of a different nature and origin. Adopting this approach and defi- ning the discourse frame does not solve the problem on the nature of the screenplay but it allows to take up the subject from a new perspective reflecting and including what analyses from what other approaches decreed on the subject. Moreover it allows a great freedom in combining different subjects to analyze and define objects such as the screenplay of an audio-visual product, which nature is elusive and problematic, dignifying, for instance, an often underestimated branch of narratology applied to arts such as manuals (a discipline of great historical interest and a full-blown container of cinema theories). The usefulness of this theoretical frame can be verified in the investigations that do not just analyze texts but try to focus on the blurred landscapes existing between them, and it’s ideal to host debates on “authorship” and on the concept of “creative process”. For instance it becomes relevant in adaptation theories and every time there is an ongoing negotiation between cinema and other media.

Nell'analisi di una struttura narrativa di un film, non sempre è saggio adottare un unico paradigma e trascurare le altre possibilità. Difatti è molto probabile, soprattutto nel cinema contemporaneo, che la struttura risponda a più paradigmi o, perfino, riveli alcuni tratti di uno piuttosto che di un altro.

The auteur theory has been a moot point for several years, and among others it has been criticized for a thigh focus on directors and finished films. A similar tendency has been tracked in the Danish research, where the film research mainly notices directors and finished films. Therefore, Danish research has not yet discovered another type of auteurs: the screenwriters. With this thesis, I make a critical reflection on the auteur theory and auteur method based on the research question: How does the style of writing of the Danish screenwriter Tobias Lindholm chal-tinuation hereof I reflect on how Lindholm, as a writer, illustrate that the auteur theory needs alteration. I have answered the research question through an interdisciplinary study of the scripts The Hijacking (2011) and The Hunt (2012). In this, I highlighted seven so-of writing. I examined this through a text analysis that was-and the reading of the film by modern man. The text analysis was further supplemented by relevant terms and theories, for instance George Lakoff and Mark Johnsons theory of metaphors, Peter Harms Larsens description of types of scenes and author Robert McKee and screenwriter Linda Aronsons construction of style of writing in screenplays. Then I could make an auteur analysis of Lindholm, whereby it was possible to emphasize strengths and weaknesses of the auteur theory and respond to the research question. From the above, I could conclude that Lindholm can be termed a so-is a screenwriter with several similarities with the auteur-tions. His two scripts contain literary tools, extent and compression of speed through which his personal signature is expressed. This also supports the dramaturgy of The Hijacking and The Hunt scripts the relationship between the director and screenwriter through his literary and dramaturgical compe-auteur. With his writing of style, Lindholm demonstrates that not only the director has the vision for the finished film As can a screenwriter.

The role of a screenwriter in an adaptation is not just to condense and capture the essence of the novel; s/he writes for many readers. The role of the cinematographer is not just to frame the image and get the exposure right; s/he visualises the internal. The role of a director is not just to captain the ship and guide the crew to create her/his vision; s/he collaborates and listens. Each plays a similar role in the making of a film, to translate and interpret the words of one medium, the novel and/or screenplay, into the cinematic language of another, screenwriting and/or the moving image. Each step along the adaptation of novel to screen informs and influences the next stage. Lawrence Venuti, in his paper, Adaptation, Translation, Critique, proposes that the 'interpretant' is a 'third term' in what he sees as the 'competing discourses of fidelity and intertextuality' in adaptation theory (Venuti 2007, 31). Using his critical framework, this paper dives into the film production process to find evidence of the influence of each stage of production on the next. The paper analyses the process of a screenwriter/director and her/his cinematographer as they adapt a novel to the screen, acknowledging how each is an 'interpretant' contributing, collaborating, and influencing the next phase of production.