A History of the Screenplay

286 Pages·2013·1.319 MB·English

by  Steven Price (auth.)

A History of the Screenplay
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A History of the Screenplay
Steven Price
SchoolofEnglish,BangorUniversity,UK
Palgrave
macmillan
©StevenPrice2013
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 PrehistoryoftheScreenplay 22
2 CopyrightLaw,TheatreandEarlyFilmWriting 36
3 OutlinesandScenarios,1904–17 52
4 TheContinuityScript,1912–29 76
5 TheSilentFilmScriptinEurope 99
6 TheComingofSound 120
7 TheHollywoodSoundScreenplayto1948 140
8 EuropeanScreenwriting,1948–60 163
9 Master-SceneScreenplaysandthe‘NewHollywood’ 182
10 TheContemporaryScreenplayandScreenwritingManual 200
11 ScreenwritingTodayandTomorrow 220
Conclusion:TheScreenplayasaModularText 235
Notes 239
Bibliography 260
Index 271
v
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the British Academy for an award under their Small
ResearchGrantscheme,whichincombinationwithBangorUniversity’s
sabbatical arrangements enabled me to conduct some of the primary
research and to write up the results. The book has its origins in a
few chapters originally proposed as part of a project that became The
Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
I am grateful to the anonymous readers of that proposal for recognis-
ingthatthematerialwouldbebetterorganisedastwoseparateprojects;
to Christabel Scaife, who acted as editor on the first of them; and to
Felicity Plester, whose infectious enthusiasm and commitment to this
areaofresearchhasbeenacontinuingsourceofencouragement.Ithas
latterly fallen to Chris Penfold actually to drag the thing out of me;
many thanks to both Felicity and Chris, and to Cherline Daniel, for
theirextremepatienceandunfailingcourtesy.
The biggest change in the field since I completed the first of the
projects has been in the flowering of the Screenwriting Research Net-
work (SRN). While conducting research for that book I was under the
impressionthatIwasalmostaloneinwritingaboutthisarea;itturnsout
that several other people were independently working on screenplays,
all of us under the same misconception. It has taken the growth of
the SRN to put these people in touch with one another. For that and
muchmore,I,likemanyothers,amindebtedtothetirelesseffortsofIan
Macdonald and Kirsi Rinne, and to those who have been instrumental
in organising the annual conferences I have been fortunate enough to
attend:KirsiatHelsinkiin2009,EvaNovrupRedvallatCopenhagenin
2010,RonaldGeertsandHugoVercauterenatBrusselsin2011andJ.J.
Murphy and Kelley Conway at Madison in 2013. Two further, related
developments have been the founding of the Journal of Screenwriting,
undertheeditorshipofJillNelmes,andtheestablishmentoftheLondon
ScreenwritingResearchSeminar,co-ordinatedbyAdamGanz.
Through these means I have encountered so many people whose
comments, advice and scholarship have been helpful that I could not
possibly name them all, but I must give warm thanks to Steven Maras,
J. J. Murphy and Paul Wells, while Margot Nash saved me from a
howler I was certain I hadn’t committed, but had. David Bordwell, Ian
vi
Acknowledgements vii
Macdonald, Jill Nelmes and Claus Tieber all generously gave me access
tosomeoftheirresearchfindings.OutsidetheconferencecircuitIhave
beengratefulforthediscussions,face-to-faceandbyemail,withJoanne
Lammers, Patrick Loughney, Tom Stempel and Selina Ukwuoma. What
hasemergedisakindofloose-knitresearchcommunityinwhichthereis
nopartyline,peoplefromaremarkablydiverserangeofspecialismsare
welcomed, and while disagreements may sometimes be pointed, they
arealwaysgood-humoured,generousandfreeoftheaggressivepursuit
ofself-interest.Whoknew?
What has not changed is the unfailing helpfulness and meticulous
scholarship of the staff at the many different libraries whose archives
Ihaveexplored.ImustespeciallythankBarbaraHallandJennyRomero
attheMargaretHerrickLibrary,AcademyofMotionPictureArtsandSci-
ences,LosAngeles;KarenPedersenandJoanneLammersattheWriters
GuildFoundationLibrary,LosAngeles;PatrickLoughneyattheLibrary
ofCongress,Washington,D.C.;andJonnyDaviesattheReubenLibrary,
British Film Institute, London. On a much earlier visit to the United
States I benefited greatly from the assistance of Ned Comstock at the
Doheny Library of the University of Southern California, and Charles
SilverattheMuseumofModernArtinNewYork.
Closertohome,Ilearnedagreatdealfrommydoctoralstudents,Ann
Igelström and Chris Pallant, and Chris’s post-doctoral work continues
to interact productively with my own interests. Julia Knaus’s intern-
ship at Bangor University in 2013 has been a godsend, and Michelle
Harrison has uncomplainingly tidied up several loose ends left behind
whenIembarkedonaperiodofresearchleave.IamgratefultoDomini
Stallingsforthecoverillustration,andtoRussellHallforassistancewith
thefinaldesign;mythankstoDominimoregenerally,andtoJoeyand
Abigail,arebeyondwords.
SomeofthematerialinChapter1considerablyexpandsonarguments
I previously presented in ‘The First Screenplays? American Mutoscope
and Biograph Scenarios Revisited’, Journal of Screenwriting 2.2 (2011);
conversely,thesectionontheAM&BscenariosinChapter2isconsider-
ablycondensedfromthesamearticle.
Introduction
Among the ‘Thirteen Film Scores’ that Yoko Ono created in 1968 is
‘FilmNo.4’,entitled‘Bottoms’.Hereistheremainderofthetext:‘String
bottomstogetherinplaceofsignaturesforpetitionforpeace.’1
Isthisascreenplay?Fromoneperspectivethequestionisquitepoint-
less:thetextfulfilswhateverfunctionOnointendedittohave,whether
that be for herself or for anyone else to develop into a film; it is, per-
haps,apieceofconceptualart,oranopeninvitation,likeher‘SixFilm
Scripts’of1964,which‘wereprintedandmadeavailabletowhoeverwas
interestedatthetimeorthereafterinmakingtheirownversionsofthe
films,sincethesefilms,bytheirnature,becamearealityonlywhenthey
wererepeatedandrealisedbyotherfilm-makers’.2
The question does matter, however, if we are interested in the his-
tory of the screenplay, because the Ono texts show that quite literally
anything could, in theory, function as a scenario. The word ‘sce-
nario’, which is one of the terms used before the coinage of our word
‘screenplay’(andallsuchtermsareproblematic),capturesverywellthe
senseofapre-productionideaforafilm;andunlessthisideaisposited
within an industrial context, or at least one that requires a division
of labour, that idea can be retained in any textual form whatsoever,
or indeed just in the film-maker’s head. In the earliest days of cinema
many,perhapsmost,filmswouldhavebeenmadewithoutwrittenplan-
ning, while digital technology today means that distinctions between
writing,shootingandpost-productionstagesarebecomingincreasingly
unclear. Arguably, both print culture and industrial-scale film-making,
both of which would seem to be necessary for screenplays to exist, are
in terminal decline, and today this opens up possibilities for radically
newideasofwhatascreenplaycouldbe.
1
2 AHistoryoftheScreenplay
Conversely,today’spublishedscreenplaysandscreenwritingmanuals
poseadifferentproblem:seenintheirlight,ahistoryofthescreenplay
would not be a piecemeal catalogue of innumerable different kinds of
material, but instead would be quite brain-numbingly repetitive. The
form appears remarkably consistent, even in terms of length, with the
typicalscriptbeingaround120pageslong,withthoseforcertaingenres
suchaslightcomedyand,inparticular,children’sfilmsbeingsomewhat
shorter—perhaps 85 to 90 pages. This is usually held to result from a
rule of thumb whereby one page equals one minute of screen time, a
convention that itself derives from industrial requirements: the length
ofthescriptenablesaninitialestimatetobemadeofthelengthofthe
proposed film. For similar reasons, the contemporary screenplay has a
striking regularity of format in such matters as scene headings (‘slug
lines’)andthelineationofthedifferentelementsofthetext,including
thepresentationofdialogueandprosedescriptionsoftheaction.
Onthesecounts,‘Bottoms’isout,andwemightsuggestthattheterms
Ono uses—‘score’ and ‘script’—are quite precise and apposite. Digging
a little deeper, we might discover that the word ‘screenplay’ does not
appear as a compound noun until the 1930s, a decade that also saw
the now familiar screenplay format emerging, in embryonic form at
least, following the introduction of sound. Yet neither the word nor
the form materialised out of thin air. The two-word term ‘screen play’
has a longer history, stretching back at least to 1916, when it referred
tothefilmratherthanthescript,forwhichotherterms—‘scenario’and
thejust-emerging‘continuity’—wereinuse.3Inturn,thesehadreplaced
the rough outlines of action that formed the only written planning of
many films prior to the introduction of the industrialised Hollywood
studiosystemin1913.Ono’stextisnota‘screenplay’,butithasmuch
incommonwiththeseearliestformsofscreenwritinginfunctioningas
asimplepromptorinvitationtothefilm-maker.
A history of the screenplay, then, needs to explore several intercon-
nected texts and practices. It should be attentive to the relationship
between the written documents and their functions, distinguishing
betweenscreenplaysandscreenwriting,thelatterofwhichmayencom-
pass both the composition of the texts themselves and other kinds of
cinematic ‘writing’ such as filming or editing. It also needs to exam-
ine the historical development of the screenplay as a particular kind
of script, its emergence from other kinds of cinematic pre-text such
as the scenario and the continuity, and the often confused relation-
ships between these various kinds of text and the terminologies used
todefinethem.