Screenwriting

By Andrew Horton, Julian Hoxter, J. Madison Davis and 4 more

 Screenwriters often joke that “no one ever paid a dollar at a movie theater to watch a screenplay.” Yet the screenplay is where a movie begins, determining whether a production gets the “green light” from its financial backers and wins approval from its audience. This innovative volume gives readers a comprehensive portrait of the art and business of screenwriting, while showing how the role of the screenwriter has evolved over the years.

Reaching back to the early days of Hollywood, when moonlighting novelists, playwrights, and journalists were first hired to write scenarios and photoplays, Screenwriting illuminates the profound ways that screenwriters have contributed to the films we love. This book explores the social, political, and economic implications of the changing craft of American screenwriting from the silent screen through the classical Hollywood years, the rise of independent cinema, and on to the contemporary global multi-media marketplace. From The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) to Chinatown (1974), American Beauty (1999), and Lost in Translation (2003), each project began as writers with pen and ink, typewriters, or computers captured the hopes and dreams, the nightmares and concerns of the periods in which they were writing.

As the contributors take us behind the silver screen to chronicle the history of screenwriting, they spotlight a range of key screenplays that changed the game in Hollywood and beyond. With original essays from both distinguished film scholars and accomplished screenwriters, Screenwriting is sure to fascinate anyone with an interest in Hollywood, from movie buffs to industry professionals. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Aug 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813574356

Book preview

SCREENWRITING

BEHIND THE SILVER SCREEN

BEHIND THE SILVER SCREEN

When we take a larger view of a film’s life from development through exhibition, we find a variety of artists, technicians, and craftspeople in front of and behind the camera. Writers write. Actors, who are costumed and made-up, speak the words and perform the actions described in the script. Art directors and set designers develop the look of the film. The cinematographer decides upon a lighting scheme. Dialogue, sound effects, and music are recorded, mixed, and edited by sound engineers. The images, final sound mix, and special visual effects are assembled by editors to form a final cut. Moviemaking is the product of the efforts of these men and women, yet few film histories focus much on their labor.

Behind the Silver Screen calls attention to the work of filmmaking. When complete, the series will comprise ten volumes, one each on ten significant tasks in front of or behind the camera, on the set or in the postproduction studio. The goal is to examine closely the various collaborative aspects of film production, one at a time and one per volume, and then to offer a chronology that allows the editors and contributors to explore the changes in each of these endeavors during six eras in film history: the silent screen (1895–1927), classical Hollywood (1928–1946), postwar Hollywood (1947–1967), the Auteur Renaissance (1968–1980), the New Hollywood (1981–1999), and the Modern Entertainment Marketplace (2000–present). Behind the Silver Screen promises a look at who does what in the making of a movie; it promises a history of filmmaking, not just a history of films.

Jon Lewis, Series Editor

1. ACTING (Claudia Springer, ed.)

2. ANIMATION (Scott Curtis, ed.)

3. CINEMATOGRAPHY (Patrick Keating, ed.)

4. COSTUME, MAKEUP, AND HAIR (Adrienne McLean, ed.)

5. DIRECTING (Virginia Wright Wexman, ed.)

6. EDITING AND SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS (Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel, eds.)

7. PRODUCING (Jon Lewis, ed.)

8. SCREENWRITING (Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter, eds.)

9. ART DIRECTION AND PRODUCTION DESIGN (Lucy Fischer, ed.)

10. SOUND: DIALOGUE, MUSIC, AND EFFECTS (Kathryn Kalinak, ed.)

SCREENWRITING

Edited by Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter

New Brunswick, New Jersey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Screenwriting / edited by Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter.

Pages cm.—(Behind the silver screen series ; 8)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–6341–1 (hardback) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6340–4 (pbk.) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6342–8 (e-book)

1. Motion picture authorship—History. 2. Motion picture industry—United States—History. I. Horton, Andrew, 1944–editor of compilation. II. Hoxter, Julian

PN1996.S38 2014

808.2'3—dc23

2013042857

This collection copyright © 2014 by Rutgers, The State University

Individual chapters copyright © 2014 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Introduction    Julian Hoxter

1. MACHINE TO SCREEN: THE EVOLUTION TOWARD STORY, 1895–1928    J. Madison Davis

2. CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD, 1928–1946    Mark Eaton

3. POSTWAR HOLLYWOOD, 1947–1967    Jon Lewis

4. THE AUTEUR RENAISSANCE, 1968–1980    Kevin Alexander Boon

5. THE NEW HOLLYWOOD, 1980–1999    Julian Hoxter

6. THE MODERN ENTERTAINMENT MARKETPLACE, 2000–PRESENT    Mark J. Charney

Academy Awards for Screenwriting

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

SCREENWRITING

INTRODUCTION

Julian Hoxter

There is an inevitable to-be-transcended-ness that circumscribes the work of the professional screenwriter. Cinematography, editing, sound, costume and production design, makeup, casting, and acting are manifested in movies as solidly as the medium itself can allow. In simple craft terms, we can see the final fruits of the designer’s or the cinematographer’s labors in and as images onscreen. Above them, directors claim authorial dominion—or have had it claimed for them—through the intersection of the other crafts as film style and directed performance. Of all the crafts that are involved in the production of motion pictures, however, screenwriting is defined the most clearly by the instability of its own product. It is unique both in being at once present in the product of every other craft, as inspiration, as guide, and even as direction, yet (with the exception of instances of visual text such as intertitles) also simultaneously absent from the screen. The very nature of this material absence defines screenwriting as, to some extent, having already been moved beyond.

Of course, audiences hear dialogue when it is present and we invest in characters as their onscreen actions and interactions unfold as drama. Indeed, it is easy to suggest that the traces of screenwriting and typically of its default text, the screenplay, may be discerned most clearly through the pleasures of structure and story. In this way the unseen work of the screenwriter must be evident in the finished film. However, there is always a necessary slippage between the two principal texts of moviemaking, one written and the other cinematic. As Steven Price writes in his pioneering study, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism, The screenplay is not so much a blueprint as an enabling document, necessary for the production but transformed by directors, actors, vagaries of the weather, and a multitude of other factors that occasion the rewrites that are the bane of the screenwriter’s craft.¹ In that slippage lies part of the challenge for scholars and students of screenwriting to locate their object of analysis.

For example, I am studying a shooting draft of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s screenplay for Let the Right One In (Låt den Rätta Komma In, 2008) in preparation for another writing project. Although the plotting of script and movie are almost identical, I was intrigued to find significant tonal differences in the screenplay when compared to the finished film. Lindqvist’s script, adapted from his own novel, places the central relationship between his young protagonist, Oskar, and the vampire, Eli, clearly on the track of love. The onscreen events occur much as they do in the script; however, the finished movie offers a much more ambivalent reading of the emotional track. The film’s story asks us to accept the distinct possibility that Eli is simply recruiting Oskar to be her next daywalking servant. This tonal shift between script and screen is both powerful and transformative, and it raises the question as to when and why, during the late stages of development and pre-production of the movie, the story(telling) changed.

To study screenwriting, then, is to engage with the problem of uncertain or even contested authorship from first principles. A professional screenwriter may be the initiating author of a screen story, but the inevitability of future collaboration and transformation are written into the very formatting of her screenplay. While recent interventions in screenwriting studies by Price and Steven Maras have moved our conceptualization of the screenplay beyond the outdated and simplistic model of a blueprint for construction, professional screenwriters still present their work in a form ready to be taken forward by others.²

Let the Right One In (2008). Slippage between script and screen. Screenplay by John Ajvide Lindvist.

Hollywood screenplays, whether initiated by writers as spec scripts looking for a sale or by studios and other production entities as in-house assignments for jobbing screenwriters, are typically developed documents. These socialized texts bear the fingerprints of any number of script readers, producers, executives, accountants, directors, and, frequently, other screenwriters.³ All have had input into the script and few get screenwriting credit under the rules for signatories to the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) Minimum Basic Agreement.⁴

A simple check of a movie’s writing credits, therefore, often offers a poor accounting of those who have had a significant involvement in the creative process that carries a story idea through writing and to the screen. Typically, studies and histories of screenwriting present accounts of the development of story in terms of genre, in the context of the zeitgeist of a given period, or through case studies of the careers of individual writers. This kind of history often accedes to a default authorship—a received logic of screenwriting auteurism—that stops with the name or names on the screenplay or the credit on screen.

The search for definitive authorship of the socialized text is probably a doomed undertaking both in pragmatic and scholarly terms. Besides, the industrial conclusion is frequently litigated to an abstraction by the arcane credit rules of the WGA. On the other hand, it is in the investigation of development that we access most directly and in any given period the workings of the Hollywood mind. Tracking the development process of a screen story through archives and anecdotal interviews offers another set of challenges for the historian, however.

Much of the difficulty of writing the history of screenwriting lies in gaining access to the appropriate primary sources. Developmental (and even final) screenplay drafts are disposable artifacts. They may not be kept and are rarely offered by studios, much less by writers, for study either for contractual reasons or due to the formative nature of the documents. After all, few writers relish the prospect of having their rough work pored over and evaluated in public. For practical and commercial reasons, published screenplays (happily more abundant in recent years, with excellent new series such as the Newmarket Shooting Scripts) also mirror the movie on release as far as possible. Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers, Scott MacDonald’s important volume, deserves special acknowledgment here for reminding us that visual text has had an important if changing role in commercial and independent cinema and for bringing unconventional and avant-garde works to a wider readership.⁵

With the exception of certain collections of individual filmmakers’ papers, the same tendency toward the preservation only of shooting scripts limits the utility of many archives. In my own research, for example, I make as much use as I can of the screenplay collection at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California. The Herrick archive is in one sense quite comprehensive. It has been acquiring material since the 1930s and by now contains example scripts or screenplays of over 11,000 produced films. For a scholar of screenwriting this presents a treasure trove of material for historical and textual analysis, and yet most of the screenplays archived at the Herrick are late drafts or shooting scripts, formatted and prepared for production. However useful these documents are in their own right, they conceal much of the development process that predated them.

Hence, in part, the problem of textual instability from a scholarly perspective. It is often hard even to define the end of the writing process. In the current tent-pole era of big-budget studio production, for example, it is common for story development to be handed off back and forth between screenwriter, director, and effects house and for the responsibility for the final dramatization of spectacular sequences to be as much the province of the storyboard artists and effects teams as of the screenwriter(s). Justin Denton, the previsualization supervisor for Halon Entertainment, recalls working with director Peter Berg during preparations for Battleship (2012, scr. Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber): The script was not complete when we started working with Pete . . . he walked me through scenes. I took notes and then we started animating in Maya.⁶

Here we owe a debt to Steven Maras’s notion of scripting, a term he uses to broaden definitions of screenwriting into the alternative and experimental arenas and to rethink the demarcation between creation and interpretation, writing and performance, and the boundaries between what is a matter of style and what is a matter of screenwriting.⁷ Scripting offers a useful corrective to the assumed hegemony of the screenplay as the definitive marker of screenwriting and a reminder that we also need to look beyond the page in our attempts to understand the movie-writing process.

Previous attempts to write the history of screenwriting have avoided asking many of the hard questions implicit in the above. In their different styles, both Tom Stempel’s useful study Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film and Marc Norman’s entertaining journalistic overview What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting view history in large part through what Maras calls the practitioner, story and structure, and business frames.⁸ He writes: The practitioner frame tends to be about advice, experience and the so-called ‘creative process.’ The story and structure frame is primarily concerned with dramatic principles and storytelling problems. The business frame focuses on deals and pitching a project.⁹

Although these frames offer only a partial account, they can be a useful starting point when carried forward with rigor. Importantly, however, Maras argues for a fourth, organizing frame, that of discourse: Because the practice and discourse of screenwriting is interwoven, the history of screenwriting is inseparable from a history of discourses that surround and constitute screen-writing. Approaching screenwriting as a way of speaking about texts, [we find that] writing and production allow us to question received understandings of what screenwriting should or could be.¹⁰

In this way, the frame of discourse allows the historian to examine and contextualize the accepted texts, vocabularies, and institutional and craft practices of screenwriting as constructions. For example, Janet Staiger argues that there is an important link between economic practices and aesthetic developments in early screenwriting.¹¹ The standardization of the photoplay script in the first years of the last century was motivated by budgetary considerations as well as a need for quality control more than by the needs of drama. These in turn motivate the advice being sold to aspirants in early screenwriting manuals. Similarly, I suggest in my chapter in this book that there is a clear although initially unofficial link between changes to the economic and institutional model of screenplay acquisition (freelancing) and developments in the format and style of the screenplay (the new spec format) that is increasingly visible in scripts since the 1980s. Over time, this connection becomes institutionalized within Hollywood, commodified and resold to aspirant screenwriters as part of the marketable narrative of breaking in.

The contributions to this current volume engage with some or all of these four explanatory frames to varying degrees. In the first chapter, covering the period from 1895 to 1928, J. Madison Davis tracks the development of screenwriting from its beginnings as an afterthought to the attraction of the moving image into a professional craft within an expanded industry. His account explores the influence of established writers who moved to motion pictures from other media (notably theater and print journalism) first as scenario writers and later, when the text of the motion picture story was expanding from scene list toward script, as photoplaywrights.

Davis usefully chronicles the working relationships these early writers had with the emerging institutions of motion picture production and also public attitudes to movie writing as a newly glamorous career. It is sobering to be reminded that the salaries some scenario writers were already receiving in the early years of motion pictures did much to establish the fantasy of a gold rush for aspiring writers almost a century before Joe Eszterhas’s bloated paychecks in the spec boom of the late 1980s.

Davis goes on to offer a series of biographical vignettes of photoplay and screenwriters, including a number of women from a period in which their influence waned as the movie business expanded. These include Frances Marion, who wrote The Son of the Sheik (1926), and Frederica Sagor Maas, uncredited screenwriter on Flesh and the Devil (1927). Toward the end of the period, Davis writes, such women were gradually . . . being replaced—not so much as a policy, but as an indication that the movie business was now a serious business, and should, in the thinking of the time, therefore, be male. In order to establish the emerging professionalism of the craft, he also provides accounts of the first para-industrial manuals and guides for aspirant screenwriters by the likes of Roy McCardell.¹² In so doing, Davis reminds us that the history of the commodification of aspiration in American screenwriting is almost as long as the history of motion pictures.

Mark Eaton begins his account of the period of classical Hollywood, from 1928 to 1946, by discussing the upheaval to screenwriting caused by the coming of sound. Dialogue replaced intertitles and writers were suddenly required to come up with entertaining, funny, or intelligent speech for actors to perform. Sound brought its own false dawn for screenwriters who assumed, naïvely, that their stock would rise in Hollywood alongside their skills in dialogue writing. Importantly, Eaton also notes emerging tendencies in this period toward multiple authorship in the scripting process and standardization in the format of the screenplay, as well as important steps toward establishing the hegemony of what would later be called the three-act structure of movie storytelling.

Eaton suggests that the coming of sound and thus dialogue transformed genre writing and especially opened new opportunities for comedy. The little industry selling advice to screenwriters continued to make its mark in the period, with a new focus on deepening character development for the new talking pictures as outspoken characters became more verbally, psychologically, and socially complex.¹³

He goes on to offer an important partial corrective to the assumption that Hollywood was simply where writers from culturally respectable media went to sell out. Through a series of well-chosen examples, Eaton reminds us that the movie industry sustained a generation of writers, Nathanael West, Clifford Odets, and Nunnally Johnson among them, through the period of the Great Depression and beyond. Besides, as Eaton writes: Faced with a choice between becoming fettered to the studios or finding something else to do for a living, many writers were willing to make that Faustian bargain.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940). The road ahead, with HUAC as yet unseen in the future. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, John Steinbeck

In the third chapter, Jon Lewis’s analysis of the craft between 1947 and 1967 chronicles the end of what had been a period of relative freedom and prosperity for screenwriters, despite the puritanical dictums of the Production Code. This was the period in which the Paramount Decision of 1948 had begun to transform the institutions of Hollywood and their relationships with the crafts. The resulting changes to the script development paradigm turned screenwriters into freelancers, gradually investing more power in their agents. Lewis writes that in this transitional period, screenwriters were now no longer studio employees on the clock; they became independent contractors. At the same time, in the postwar years, the rise of television began to lure movie audiences away from cinemas and back home. The emerging medium offered new opportunities for some screenwriters just as they were becoming scarcer in the movies.

The Red Scare and the blacklist peeled away or cowed many progressive voices in Hollywood, however. Here, Lewis foregrounds the powerful racist and, in particular, antisemitic drivers of the congressional investigations of Hollywood writers and filmmakers at this time. He demonstrates how the progressive messages of Gentleman’s Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947) and Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947) provide an important counterpoint to the pernicious influence of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the years immediately following their release: It is only in the committee’s reaction to these films Lewis writes, that we can appreciate the implicit and explicit connection between industry regulation in the postwar era and larger efforts to rid Hollywood of its Jews, especially its Jewish screenwriters.

Subsequently, a bleaker and more paranoid zeitgeist also pushed postwar cinematic storytelling into darker corners in the years after the Black Dahlia murder case revealed the skull beneath the skin of the Hollywood dream. In this context, Lewis offers case studies of In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950) and Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950). Both films position the troubled screenwriter in search of a moral and creative center, both in Hollywood and postwar America. However, he argues that in the hands of writers of the caliber of Abraham Polonsky (before he, too, was blacklisted), the crime film in the 1950s could also be worked as progressive political allegory. Lewis ends his chapter, most appropriately, on a note of ambivalence as he hands off the problematic historical record of postwar screenwriting, in which the accomplishments of HUAC turncoats such as the director Elia Kazan and the writer Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront [1954] and A Face in the Crowd [1957]) exist only at the expense of the careers of their more honorable peers.

From the late 1960s through the 1970s, a period that is often referred to as the New Hollywood, American movie storytelling began once again to explore themes that had been impossible in the days of HUAC and the blacklist. In the fourth chapter, Kevin Alexander Boon argues that the French New Wave was the single most significant influence on the form and content of American screenwriting during this creative renaissance. At the same time, however, the role and craft of the professional screenwriter (as distinct from the writer-director) was marginalized even further in critical discourse by the reification of the director as the supreme creative force in movie production. This position was espoused by the intellectual wing of that same French import, auteurist film criticism, and its traces are still evident in the culture—even down to the citation format for movies in this current volume.

After the end of the production code in 1968, Boon argues that the moral compass of a screenplay shifted back into the hands of the screenwriter. As exemplar of the resulting liberalization, he offers a case study of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), a film that also signals something of a shift in the new independent and countercultural films of the late sixties away from traditional screenplay form. The plan-of-action script for Easy Rider was similar to what would now be called a scriptment, being more of a conglomeration of ideas and philosophies informing the production than it was a traditional script. While this approach was hardly typical, even in independent filmmaking, the lack of adherence to established formal orthodoxies does mark a tendency in American independent screenwriting that would continue into the micro-budget and mumblecore scripting of the last decade.

Boon goes on to chronicle the stories that began to push the boundaries of permissiveness in their representation of sex, violence, and decency in the period. Taking examples both from filmmakers emerging into the mainstream as well as from its exploitation and countercultural alternatives, he demonstrates that, while the underlying structure of movie storytelling was broadly consistent with past decades, its representational and thematic concerns were speaking much more clearly to the times. Cleverly, he also integrates here the influential film criticism of Pauline Kael as something of a transformative barometer of shifting public attitudes at the time.

In the fifth chapter, I offer a series of conceptual frameworks for understanding the development of screenwriting in the 1980s and 1990s. This was the period in which the strategic and creative priorities of Hollywood institutions shifted due to corporate mergers and buyouts. Simultaneously, the studios’ control of the movie development process was challenged by the burgeoning power of the biggest talent agencies such as CAA and ICM. Independent production had a brief new dawn, beginning in the Miramax-Sundance era, while at the end of the period the working practices of many screenwriters were adapting to a new timetable of collaboration as part of the move into the production practices and accelerated development schedules of contemporary digital production.

At the same time, screenwriters were fighting for a toehold in the new economics of the video (and subsequently digital) era. On the one hand, the late 1980s and early 1990s gave writers a brief glimpse of fame and fortune during the spec boom. The studios, however, got burned and soon retrenched, and the million-dollar script sales dried up. In the end, despite two WGA strikes in the 1980s, the position of the screenwriter in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood was much as it had always been.

Rather than offering a straightforward narrative of writers and movies (in Maras’s terms, the story and structure frame), the chapter provides linked perspectives by working between the practitioner frame, the business frame, and what we might call the technology frame.¹⁴ In so doing it provides accounts of the freelance development paradigm as it operated in the period and of its commodification and even circumscription by the increasingly influential journalists and screenwriting teachers selling their keys to the code of Hollywood success. The transformation of the technologies of screenwriting, as writers adopted first the