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Despite increasing efforts for ‘greener’ screen production practices and screen poetics, the nonhuman continues to be excluded in screen narratives that predominantly revolve around the human protagonist and anthropocentric world views. Arguing that inclusion is not a matter of representations on the screen but of letting others tell, this research explores diversity as more-than(-human) matter to ask how the utterances of more-than(-human) storytellers can be invited into story development and the writing of the screenplay text. By offering the screenplay page as the common ground that invites others into its storytelling, I draw from the ‘wandering’ of my creative practice to explore how different relational, experiential and textual markers provide the semiotic pathways that indicate or limit another's telling respectively. The result is a shift from representation, as a storytelling about, towards the narrative positionings of a storytelling together with in the form of polyphonic assemblage. Diversity emerges as a screenwriting beyond conceptions of voice, language and my screenwriting self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2023, as the release of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT became more widespread, concerns arose in the higher education sector regarding how students might use generative AI (gen-AI), not only for writing critical essays, but for producing creative works. Multiple gen-AI tools appeared specifically targeting the application to writing screenplays. This prompted the question: what are the ethical and pedagogical implications of integrating gen-AI within the context of teaching and learning screenwriting within the academy? The research design for this project applied a practice-based approach to script development, embedding critical reflection on the iterative process of engaging with gen-AI to write a short screenplay. The gen-AI was also prompted to self-critique the story it generated. The research identified ethical concerns regarding equitable access to technology, the potential for bias and theft of works used to train the AI. The study also found that engaging with gen-AI privileged analytical thinking over emotional engagement with the creative process. The findings suggest that creative confidence and an awareness of one’s own creative process are critical to effectively engage with gen-AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some Kind of Liberating Effect is a documentary dedicated to research freedom in the academic study of religion in Central and Eastern Europe. This essay examines the techniques used to develop a script and a screenplay. It will show how the documentary integrates screenwriting with the question of freedom of research in this academic field and region. First, the essay presents the raw footage filmed between 2022 and 2023, then the screenwriting techniques used for plotting a story. Finally, it discusses the shift from the history of the academic field to storytelling, particularly with regard to the frame story included in the film. In conclusion, it presents some remarks concerning the interdisciplinary and intersectoral approaches between religious studies and the film industry implemented in the documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of artificial intelligence in the creation of audiovisual scripts. The goal of the research was to analyze how AI can generate stories and characters, as well as create conflict situations within the script. Traditional screenwriting tools are replaced by generative AI models, which were used for script development in the practical part of the study. The results showed that AI is effective at creating the basic structure of a story and characters, but still requires human intervention when crafting more complex dialogues and emotional layers. This research contributes to the understanding of the potential and limitations of AI in the creative process of scriptwriting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As with many popular texts promising templates for successful storytelling, The Writer's Journey claims that a singular story structure applies to all voices and circumstances, therefore funnelling every character journey into a 'universal neutral'. This article offers queer temporality as a lens through which to unravel the 12 steps of Vogler's hero's journey, informed by queer theory's critiques of the 8 steps of the heteronormative life journey. It joins other studies critiquing the paradigm from other standpoints, including Indigenous screen storytelling, gaming and interactive narratives, and for development of characters disenfranchised by gender and/or circumstance. Others note the model's increasing irrelevance as writers uncover its limitations for creative processes of story development. This article homes in on how studies of queer temporalities – rejecting 'dominant temporal logics' and 'chrononormativity', replacing 'straight time' with 'queer time', can further destabilise the hero's journey's dominance in story development by exploring the breadth of practices in creative writing and screen production beyond the universalising models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of a Critical Race Feminista praxis-oriented methodological framework in development called FilmCrit, and a critical race method expanded into filmic form called Cinematic Critical Race Counterstorytelling. Critical Race Feminisita Praxis informs this work by drawing on a Critical Race Theory in Education framework and Chicana Feminist theories and epistemologies. In discussing two FilmCrit studies, a qualitative documentary study, No Somos Famosos (We Are Not Famous), and my dissertation study, From the Classroom to the Screen: Experiences of Women of Color MFA Film Students, I detail the theoretical, methodological, and analytical development, as well as the scholarly significance, of FilmCrit and (auto)biographical and composite Cinematic Critical Race Counterstorytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the role of screenwriters and dialogue writers within the more extensive filmmaking process of New Bollywood. Drawing on ethnographic data, I foreground the creative tools, research and negotiations that prompt screenwriters to conceptualise and pitch character arcs that feature disability while positioning the writer as central to diversify film genres. By building on scholarship on production cultures, scripting and disability studies, I draw upon factors that navigate the writer's gaze from non-hereditary filmmaking networks to foreground disabilities in scripts and character arcs in efforts to strategise that they do not classify as reductive pathologisations and supercripping cultures. This article pays close attention to the conditions, identity politics, biases and situated vulnerabilities of writers that shape the assemblages of scripting disability rhetorics. The data from semi-structured interviews, with an explicit focus on three films and their script ideation and production pedagogies, illustrate these interlinkages and insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2000, Rick Altman, McGraw Jones and Sonia Tatroe presented the term mise en bande, or 'putting onto the soundtrack', as a framework to analyse the relationship between a film's sound and its accompanying image. This article proposes an additional term for the study of sound on-screen – 'son sur le scenario' – the consideration of writing sound through the pages of a screenplay. Using the script of writer/director Mark Jenkin's folk horror Enys Men (2023) as a case study, we consider cinematic sound through the perspective of its representation on the page, prior to its actualization through the subsequent processes of production, recording, design and postproduction. Under consideration is the manner that the written soundtrack can be used to articulate and evoke the complex temporal and spatial interrelationships with an imagined image at this stage of film development and its association with the visual realization of cinema's characters, locations and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains a case study of original creative historical screenwriting and its theoretical underpinnings. The creative writing component visualises the 'true' story of the Coolgardie Water Supply Scheme under construction in 1902 in Western Australia. It functions as an additional 'layer' to my previously published paper, 'A Process of Screenwriting: A Film Treatment for "The Engineer-in-Chief"', (Meneghello, Rethinking History, 2021). The theoretical component explores my own creative process of writing an artwork history as a filmic and poetic interpretation of history containing emotional subtextual meanings. I ask the question: How can archival richness and complexity be communicated in screenwriting beyond the restrictive form of the 'script'? The aim of the essay is to describe how pursuing creative historical research has led me into screenwriting innovation. I do this by synthesising screenwriting theory and practice to consider how the film treatment is an underestimated tool of script development. I draw on the field of artwork history, incorporating the metaphor and imagery of the 'archaeological gaze' and cardiovascular biomechanics to bridge the gap between creative historical writing and screenwriting innovation. Drawing on Indigenous Studies, I show how my innovation honours both the collaborative dimensions of filmmaking as well as the importance of including absent and diverse voices from the historical record. This interdisciplinary framework supports the argument I make for conceptualising the film treatment in the form of 'layers'. This new approach to screenwriting is particularly useful for researchers to test and experiment how facts can be translated using visual imagery and literary techniques into a cinematic rendering of a 'true story'. My creative research thus has implications for the fields of both artwork history and screenwriting by enhancing the traditional screenplay format, and also contributes to historiography through the generation of new insights into how form shapes content and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a climate of increasing social and political polarisation, there is much interest in dialogue and bridging differences. This article investigates the dramatisation of dialogic conflict resolution, examining how the psychological science of bridging differences can be utilised to create realistic and emotionally engaging narratives that highlight the transformative impact of dialogue on character development and relational dynamics. Relational conflicts have long been recognised as possible catalysts for character transformation, and complex narratives (Mittell, 2015) are particularly appropriate for a nuanced representation of characters' psychological experiences throughout the process. This study draws upon extensive psychological and communication research on bridging differences compiled by Shigeoka et al. (2020) and UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center (2021). It reorganises this research into a horizontal timeline of behaviours, highlighting their practical application during the conflict resolution process. It then makes a cognitive poetics analysis of how these behaviours may be observed in a case study of relational conflict from the complex television series This is Us (NBC, 2016-2022). By observing the impact these behaviours have on the transformation of characters, the study explores how credible dialogic relational conflicts can lead to verisimilar character transformation on screen. In addition, it considers how an artistic interpretation of the science of bridging differences can contribute to our understanding of dialogue in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how Céline Sciamma uses screenwriting to underpin her rigorous and uncompromising approach to independent filmmaking. She blends writing and mise en scène in the development stages to repeatedly subvert familiar generic conventions and calls into question what she calls the art of conflict through her distinctive gaze on relationships, femininity, sisterhood, coming of age and gender fluidity. Taking as starting point Sciamma's own analysis of her method of film development in preproduction, the article explores the centrality of screenwriting to her subjective and political approach to artistic creation. The second part of the article explores to what extent her screenwriting for other directors – especially her collaborations with Claude Barras, André Téchiné and Jacques Audiard – has reinforced her method or revealed new facets of her artistic and screenwriting signature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research mainly explores the connection between Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, with the filmmaker’s cinematic depiction of literature. Ron Howard as an adaptation director in the Hollywood industry is evaluated in the context of his auteurism and examined his approach of repudiating a substantial portion of the Catholic secrets which dodged the predicament of fidelity, a core of conventional Film Adaptation. Disregarding the controversy, fidelity is indeed a deliberate action overtly brought by the auteurist vision resulting from screenwriting. This article explores the modern implications of screenwriting on auteurist function, aiming at how Hollywood’s conception of the director’s auteurism in cinema works and the film’s artistic approaches from the novel to the screenplay. This study illustrates that the adaptation highlights the author’s and his work’s superiority yet emphasises the director’s technique as inevitable during the transposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Sergei Eisenstein's essay "The Form of the Script" (1929), focusing particularly on its publication and translation history. It reconstructs the missing parts and the logic of the essay based on its original Russian print and an early German translation. In so doing, the paper clarifies Eisenstein's position in the debates surrounding the various forms and formats of screenwriting. It additionally draws attention to the role of rhythm in Eisenstein's screenwriting theory and in his essayistic writing. Finally, this article offers a new translation of "The Form of the Script," which brings the essay as close as possible to its original publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines screenwriter Frances Marion's use of sound in scripts she wrote during the transitional period from silent to sound film. Engaging feminist historiography, screenwriting studies, and sound studies, I argue that Marion's expressive use of narrativized sound in both sound and silent scripts was remarkably innovative, yet underappreciated. Her skillful use of integrated sound helps account for her success in the early 1930s and aligns with the style of sound filmmaking that later came to dominate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of South America's most popular poets, Alfonsina Storni is primarily known for verses of love and passion. During her lifetime, Storni also wrote as a newspaper columnist under the pseudonym Tao Lao. Storni's association with film has primarily been discussed as part of her friendship with author and cinephile Horacio Quiroga but translations and analyses of Storni's film-poems, mainly composed in the last decade of her life, show that she was experimenting in a fusion of verse and cinema. Drawing on the proliferation of consumer products bringing film and photography into everyday life in Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s, Storni's film-poems blend word and image through the photochemical properties of the film medium and the spatial and temporal techniques of motion pictures. While Storni's biographers have classified some film-poems as falling within the reportage genre of the chronicle (crónica), these multimedia experiments work problems of subjectivity and objectivity intrinsic to the time-based approach of the chronicle through filmic technologies, while also interrogating constructs of gender and colonial power that were deeply embedded in the visual culture of South America in the 1920s and 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, fictional productions which use sign language have often begun with scripts that use the written version of a spoken language. This can be a challenge for deaf actors as they must translate the written word to a performed sign language text. Here, we explore script development in Small World, a television comedy which attempted to avoid this challenge by using improvisation to create their script. The creators framed this process as a response to what they saw as "inauthentic" sign language use on television, foregrounding the need to present "natural signing" on the screen. According to them, "natural signing" is not influenced by an English script but is varied language use that reflect a character's background, their settings, and the characters that they interact with. We describe how this authentic language use is derived primarily from improvisation and is in competition with other demands, which are textual (e.g., the need to ensure comedic value), studio-based (e.g., operating within the practical confines of the studio), or related to audience design (e.g., the need to ensure comprehensibility). We discuss how the creative team negotiated the tension between the quest for authentic language use and characteristics of the genre, medium, and audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reflections on screenwriting in Mexico constitute a tradition that has not been critically reviewed. This article recovers fundamental texts of Mexican writers and teachers in order to analyze their attempts to articulate this practice. The texts oscillate between the poetics, the essay and the didactic manual. A stimulating dialogue arises from interweaving their ideas about the nature of the screenplay, its narrative and dramatic dimensions, the specificity of this type of writing and the creative process. The review begins with El conocimiento cinematográfico y sus problemas (1965), written by José Revueltas and ends with the unpublished book by Beatriz Novaro, El roce de los lenguajes (2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation in ethics pedagogy has continued to evolve and incorporate other forms of storytelling aimed at improving student engagement and learning. The use of bioethics narratives in feature-length films, medical television shows, or short clips in the classroom has a well-established history. In parallel, screenplays present an opportunity for an active approach to ethical engagement. We argue that screenplays and screenwriting provide a rich supplement to current medical ethics teaching and serve as a strong form of reflective learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the 2018 Writers Guild of Great Britain report 'Gender Inequality and Screenwriters', and original interviews with female screenwriters, to assess how the experience of genre plays out in the UK television industry. The report focuses on the experience of women, as a single category, but we aim to reveal a more intersectional understanding of their experiences. Our aim is to better understand the ways in which women are, according to the report, consistently 'pigeonholed by genre and are unable to move from continuing drama or children's programming to prime-time drama, comedy or light-entertainment'. Considering the cultural value of genre in relation to screenwriting labour and career progression, we analyse how genre shapes career trajectory, arguing that social mobility for female screenwriters is inherently different and unequal to that of their male counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of a film treatment is to convince the reader of a cinematic story and the potential for the film to reach a broad audience. The treatment is a prose summary of the story as it plays out, in a compressed form, and is a process of screenwriting. It ensures the story is coherent and its meaning is made clear by conveying a sense of screenwriting conventions. Specifically, for the genre of historical drama, the poetics of a film treatment will encapsulate a blend of verifiable facts and creative solutions that contribute to the understanding of the past. Screenwriters, by way of empathetic and informed speculation, bridge the gap between epistemology and imagination to capture the hearts and minds of the audience. In 1902, a brilliant engineer's emotions are at breaking point in the final days of his life as he struggles to defend himself against false allegations of corruption and incompetence levelled at him by parliament and the press. This is the 'true' story of the Coolgardie Water Supply Scheme, in Western Australia, encompassing the longest water pipeline in the world, but events conspire against the Engineer-in-Chief, Mr C.Y. O'Connor, leading to his tragic death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the October Revolution and the Civil War, funerals became a distinct element of daily Soviet life. As a response to the traumatic moral situations, the filming of funerals fulfilled a documentary and didactic function as it formalized changes that were occurring within society, demonstrated appropriate ways to mourn, and performed a commemorative function. This article contributes to the ongoing study of Sergei Tretiakov's oeuvre by focusing on representations of funeral rights in his Georgian screenplays and films: Eliso (1928), Slepaia (1930), Sol' Svanetii (1930), and Khabarda (1931). It argues that the cinematic representations of funerals in Tretiakov's Georgian screenplays reflect several competing paradigms at work: the funeral rebellion in Eliso, the private funeral in Slepaia, the ethnographic funeral in Sol' Svanetii, and the political funeral in Khabarda. Within each of these scenes, the viewers' emotions are being rerouted and manipulated to align with the film's ideological message. This article further casts a light on a time when manipulating viewers' emotions was at its formative stages, while the contradictions between facts and emotions were being negotiated in LEF's cine-theory and on screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous corpus-based studies, which have mostly focused on a particular film or series, have identified various key characteristics of telecinematic language. However, a restriction on those results applies as regards the stability of findings across time and across individual productions. To address this gap, and following calls for more nuanced perspectives on telecinematic language as a whole, this study re-assesses a number of claims pertaining to lexical and lexicogrammatical aspects through a diachronic lens. To this end, it uses the Northern American sections of the new Movie and TV Corpora, multi-million word corpora compiled from subtitles of a wide range of film and series genres in the English-speaking world from the 20th and 21st century. Overall, the diachronic view of the data is suggestive of a highly complex nature of telecinematic language, with levels of emotionality and informality increasing over time for most items tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I present and analyze the many examples of how BoJack Horseman makes its screenplay visible. By drawing the viewers attention to the details of how an animated series is crafted, the creators deconstruct classical Hollywood screenwriting techniques in order to show how stories manipulate our minds. With subversive and ironic reflections on the mechanisms of fiction, BoJack Horseman brings socially important contemporary issues to the table of animation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about how Foucault's archaeology of the modern episteme, emerging from early 19th-century Europe, was curiously divorced from its context of colonialism. Media archaeology, as Foucault's legacy, has also remained rather geopolitically insular and race agnostic in its epistemological reverse engineering of media modernity. Using screenwriting history as a case study, this article demonstrates how bringing decolonial thinking and media archaeology together can challenge linear narratives of modernity/coloniality in media history. The article connects two seemingly disparate histories of archival absence and human obsolescence to reveal the construction of an elusive screenwriting modernity that has historically obscured parallel scripting practices and pre-existing scribal traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how screenwriters can discover and inject their voice into their screenplay, as a method for achieving originality. It should be noted that the study is exclusively concerned with screenwriters scripting for the commercial market. The definition formed on originality reflects this industrial position. Originality, therefore, is defined as a screenwriter successfully synthesising storytelling principles with their own voice to render something new. However, what precisely comprises voice is nebulous. To resolve this, the article will first need to critically explore writer's voice to frame a precise definition. Once this has been accomplished, a new conceptual framework, Cracks of Culture, is presented as a formula to guide screenwriters to discover and inject their own voice. The concept is underpinned by leading philosopher and neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio's [2018. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. New York: Vintage Books] notion that, culture expresses all categories, which gives rise to the social order and structure of a society. Finally, the article demonstrates how screenwriters can authentically voice a character of an opposite gender. This method is then presented as a possible tool for writers wishing to voice other social groups, inciting the author to call upon further research to explore this hypothesis further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the Outside (On the Outside. 2019. Film. Directed by Paul Gray. UK: Good Well Films), is a 42 minute film that is the outcome of a participatory film project involving women serving sentences in HM Prison Polmont, Scotland. Scripts were developed that communicated the women's stories using their exact spoken words and individual narratives were recounted by actors, giving introspective accounts of the women's lives, while challenging preconceived notions of the label 'prisoner.' Representations of the criminal justice system are a highly visible presence on current mainstream platforms. Delineations between fiction and non-fiction narrative are increasingly exercised by film-makers to affect audience expectations, in particular when exploring dramatisations of 'true life' crimes. On the Outside is a project led by Paul Gray, whose practice led research explores the dynamics of such delineations through collaboration with the participants, in their roles as authors of their own narratives. This paper recounts the processes involved in realising the project, which will be discussed in relation to verbatim practices, as well as the underlying methodology used to action participatory video techniques. The aim was to facilitate a production process that best suited the specific voices of those involved, by recognising the significance of anonymity in storytelling, when collaborating with vulnerable individuals and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last two years have seen the publication of two books in the genre of how-to fiction writing manuals that use science both as a selling point and as a genuine analytical paradigm. The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr and The Science of Screenwriting by Paul Joseph Gulino and Connie Shears use insights from the cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, while retaining their practical, how-to character. This review article goes through some of the main clusters of advice shared by the two books, dealing with information processing, attention allocation, the implications of human sociality for fiction, and story structure, while fitting their takes on these issues within the fields of biocultural criticism and cultural evolution. Despite containing occasional flaws and confusions about theory common in pioneering works, these books could be harbingers of change for the genre and an important step in the bottom-up infusion of biocultural theory into literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a self-directed, transformative, learning journey triggered by the writer-researcher's experiences of change management which led to widespread redundancies within the vocational education sector in Queensland, Australia. The creative-practice led research focussed on writing narrative comedy screenplays, titled Fighting Fit. Critical reflection was embedded in the research methodology. Reflective writing was documented in a reflection journal and triangulated against external feedback to improve screenplay drafts. Critical feedback on scripts provoked a cycle of inquiry into the lived experiences which inspired the screenplays and highlighted concerns about diminished professional agency and alienation in the workplace. These concerns were then reframed within a humorous perspective by parodying discourses surrounding organisational change management. In doing so, the creative practice-led research enabled the writer-researcher to examine her professional disquiet in response to workplace changes, crystallise values in conflict with neoliberal approaches to education and performed a kind of creative resistance to the corporatisation of vocational education. Moreover, critical reflection embedded in creative writing processes shifted the writer-researcher's perspective towards an increased sense of agency and openness to change; arguably, a desirable outcome for practitioners operating within increasingly precarious employment situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Transcultural remakes in television present added challenges for screenwriters. • Screenwriting research should combine theoretical and craft-oriented approaches. • According to Aristotle's Poetics , the mythos provides 'diegetic cohesion' to a story. • Transcultural adaptation in TV series must permeate through all narrative layers. Abstract Over the past decade, remakes of foreign television series have become increasingly popular all over the world. This phenomenon has had an effect not only on industry procedures, but also on the screenwriters' approach to the source material. In fact, remaking a foreign television series implies a significant challenge for screenwriters, who have to adapt a story within a new cultural setting. This research aims to explore this specific form of adaptation in television from the perspective of screenwriting theory. In order to do so, the methodology devised in this study is based on five narrative components or categories which are essential to the screenwriting process: concept, premise, genre, characters and setting. To examine the way in which these elements are adapted, this paper presents a comparative analysis of two television series: Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–2007) and one of its transcultural remakes, the Spanish La Chica de Ayer (Antena 3, 2009). The results of this analysis illustrate that, when adapting scripted television formats, the cultural traits must permeate through the deeper layers of the narrative, impregnating the story as well. At the same time, the retelling of the story must be cohesive according to changes made in terms of concept, premise, genre, characters and setting, including the correlation among these five categories. In La Chica de Ayer , the changes made were necessary, but their execution was not inherently cohesive, and therefore had narrative consequences that ultimately undermined the consistency of the new story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the analysis of the television series narrative in Spain, this article looks into the nature of scripts. Even though screenwriting is just a link in the chain of tasks and processes resulting in a TV show as a final product, the text proposes to understand the TV series script as a product in itself. From this perspective, TV fiction screenwriting appears as an activity resulting in an autonomous product that works as a commodity in itself regardless of its translation to the screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a close look at an element that permeates the screenwriting process from initial idea to finished film, and suggests that at the beginning of the creative process there is a core or budding idea that takes gradual shape as the screenplay develops into the screen version. This element is neither detectable nor does it give the work unity at the beginning of the writing process, but results from such process. As the story develops, the authors (screenwriter, director, producer) negotiate about that intangible "something" they do not wish to lose. Alter a theoretical overview of Arislollc's notion of the poetic myth understood as the soul of the story and mimesis of action (,Poetics, 1450a 9,16-18,22,32-35, et. al.) and Ian W. Macdonald's notion of screen idea (2013) seen as the goal at which a screen project aims, this essay presents a case study of the Latin-American film No (Chile, 2012), written by Pedro Peirano, produced by Juan de Dios Larrain and directed by Pablo Larrain. The methodology combines narratological and thematic tools. As a result, the study shows how the screen idea can be tracked down by observing the transformation arc of some of the characters in the plot, and explains why the plot undergoes modifications throughout the different stages in the development of the film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown how the practice of screenwriting has always been affected by technological shifts. These moments in history both mirror the current state of digital screen production and provide a rationale for debating the twenty-first-century changes in screenwriting practices. The origin of the screenplay form is linked to the evolution of the cinema apparatus and though many sectors of cinema have benefited from a migration into the digital realm, the field of screenwriting practice has been slow to follow. In Screenwriting in a Digital Era (2014), Kathryn Millard draws parallels between the screenplay and other forms of visual storytelling and describes screenwriting as a multimodal craft. Changing production practices combined with recent shifts in independent film production demonstrated how screenwriters incorporate new and unconventional methods of communicating what Ian W. MacDonald refers to as the 'screen idea' into their work. Kickstarter fundraising campaigns, as one example, is one such method of communicating the screen idea through multi modal methods. An analysis of these campaigns reveals a surprising lack of attention given to the screenplay, instead relying on social media blurbs, visual pitch trailers, conceptual artwork and a multitude of other media. This paper will present a case study based on a short film, Still Life (Mac Coille, 2014), that used a crowdfunding campaign in its production, which included a combination of the screenplay and visual aids, such as conceptual artwork and a pitch trailer. The thesis of this article will be further bolstered by other examples that support the hypothesis that future screenwriting practices will include these new technologies and methods as a mainstay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a study of the animated short films that won the Academy Award from 2011 to 2015, specifically focusing on how their protagonists move the story forward. The main characters in these five case studies are presented in a monotonous routine. This analysis has found that their lonely life is disrupted by an event out of the ordinary, which sets the story in motion. Along with this, the article illustrates that short films tend to develop a single plot and a single action with a single climax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the films of Jacques Audiard from the perspective of the screenwriting process. It evaluates his work as a screenwriter, and the ways in which the development process of his screenplays can inform his cinema and distinctive style. Audiard always writes with collaborators and views the filmmaking process as a team effort. Beyond establishing his own personal signature renewal of the European thriller through complex narratives, Audiard has developed a filmmaking method in which the so-called writing stage seems to extend far beyond pre-production, to influence the shooting, and finally shape the editing process completed in post-production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The funds allocated to developing screenplays currently constitute on average 2 to 3% of the overall budget of a film in France. Producers are more than ever dependent on presenting attractive draft screenplays to find their financial partners. As a result, screenwriters undoubtedly are active economic partners of production planning, but they do not seem to receive much professional recognition for this vital role. Moreover, their earnings often fail to reflect the amount of work produced and do not reward adequately the risks taken, including the possibility that production could stop after the screenplay is written. This article investigates the place of screenplay development within the economics of French cinema. Using recently published official reports and interviews, the author identifies different types of screenwriters – freestanding screenwriters, writing teams and screenwriters co-writing with the director – and addresses their working conditions. She surveys some of the contract modalities for the remuneration of professional screenwriters. Finally, she reviews the proposals made by different professional bodies to improve the remuneration of screenwriters and reform the financing of screenwriting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gene Gauntier's career as an actor, screenwriter, and producer offers an important case study within American film's transitional era, as the creative opportunities and collaborative character of stock-company productions gradually gave way to the centralized spaces and practices of studio-era Hollywood. Gauntier progressed within less than a decade from inexperienced stage actress to leading lady and screenwriter at Kalem and then became an independent producer and studio owner. Her status and significance within the American film industry was then rapidly eclipsed by the consolidation of production and distribution structures and a more narrowly defined and highly gendered discourse of stardom. Making detailed use of her evolving construction in the contemporary trade press and her memoirs, this article traces Gauntier's rise and demise within the shifting industrial discourses and practices of this period and brings to light information concerning her exit from the industry and her life afterward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the concept of “meaning” developed by Juan José García- Noblejas in 1982, which is presented as an enlightening and useful tool for the screenwriting and film reception process. The essay explores the concepts of “theme” (Flinn, 1999:167-168); “dramatic question” (Selbo, 2007: 201-209); and “meaning” (Russin, 2012: 38-42) as they appear in screenwriting manuals from an academic point of view. Considering the perspectives of narratology, semiotics and Aristotelic Poetics the article relates the concept of “meaning” with the unifying principle of the story and the aspects of the human experience the story shows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Billy Wilder’sSunset Boulevard(1950) is a striking example of how a major feature film makes use of allegorical personifications. Wilder incorporates three filmic characters to represent Image, Word, and Motion as the metacinematic cornerstones of film after the advent of talkies. On the surface, the film deals with the major paradigmatic change in the media landscape that took place in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the introduction of sound. However, on a more coded and subliminal level, Wilder thematizes a similar landslide of media change that was taking place at the time of the release ofSunset Boulevardwith the advent of television. Making recourse to older media constituents, such as writing, sound, and movement, is a leitmotif in moments of media changes in general. For example, in the 1890s emerging film evoked older media, such as literature, photography, painting, sculpture, or tableaux vivants, in order to conceptualize the new medium and self-reflexively fashion its own media theory. Subsequent changes within the medium of film followed this very logic by reprojecting and grounding these ruptures through evocations of previous media shifts. This article examines how Wilder allegorically discusses the advent of television under the guise of a debate about the transition from silent movies to talkies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The secret wish of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman to become a writer is evident in at least two ways: (1) his repeated emphatic claims that he did not; (2) his way of sneaking in writing into his films. This article focuses on the latter. Seemingly unrevised and preliminary, textual information takes the shape of letters and notes written and/or read by the characters. When literary passages seemingly do occur (as in, for example,Persona), the quoted text in question is faked. If textual messages are emphasized in Bergman, it is less as literature than as the act of writing, a physical matter of paper, pen, or typewriter. This article investigates Bergman’s writing less in the auteur sense of him writing his own scripts, than in how writing permeates his work to the point where his films could be considered as productive detours. By looking at fictitious acts of writing in his films as well as the author’s own, peculiarly self-reflexive, writing habits insofar they are discernible in the Ingmar Bergman Archives, this article overturns the traditional notion of the screenplay as a kind of half-measure or necessary evil vis-à-vis the film. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Screenwriters are a vital part of the production of cultural products in the Canadian screen industry, but little has been written about how they perceive the environment in which they practice their craft. Situating our methodology within the general production culture framework, particularly in regards to industrial reflexivity, we present an analysis of 50 in-depth interviews with English-language Canadian screenwriters. As our subjects reflect on their experiences, a portrait emerges of the factors affecting the screenwriter's role in the production of screen culture in English-speaking Canada. Their stories reveal a complex plot: one in which screenwriters, much like the characters they create, manoeuver through a landscape with its own boundaries, pitfalls, rewards, and consequences in their quest to attract elusive homegrown audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a gendered reading of the screenwriter as creative worker in the context of the unequal socio-economy of screenwriting work. A number of ideal subject positions for the screenwriter are evoked in screenwriting manuals, pedagogies and representations of writers themselves, in particular, the 'egotist', the 'masochist' and the 'supplicant'. These subjects are masculine in orientation although rarely acknowledged in gendered terms. The article draws on findings froma three-year study of British screenwriters but for the purposes of this volume, focuses on on-screen portrayals of screenwriting work. In particular, the analysis looks at the film Adaptation (2002) and the ways in which the film and its characters embody these subject positions. Not only are these ideal types circulated and recirculated in discourse about screenwriting as creative work but they are constitutive of screenwriting as a profession and a representative sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Goldman is a North American novelist and screenwriter with more than fifty years in his professional career. This article aims to identify Goldman's personal writing traits by focusing on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, which can be considered the most comprehensive and complete of all his screenplays. Apart from their differences, both scripts reveal the influence of the adventure narrative on William Goldman's work and reflect the writer's interest in ironically revising some of the conventions of film genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leo Rosencrans, an Ohio native who came to Hollywood for four months in 1916–17 to pursue a career in filmmaking, left behind a record of his experiences in a series of letters that he wrote during his time in California. Inspired by the achievements of directors like D. W. Griffith and stories of fame promulgated by fan magazines, Leo sought employment as an extra. He proved largely unsuccessful and left Hollywood bitter and disillusioned. His letters provide a fascinating glimpse into the life of an extra, an existence framed by gender and class dynamics, labor struggles, and studio politics. As an addendum, this essay also reprints and examines one of these letters sent home to his family in Ohio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wrinkles, directed by Ignacio Ferreras, is one of the last 2D animation features "made in Spain" that lets us enjoy the adult audience a hard and real, though magical, story. Wrinkles is not one of those movies that leave you indifferent. It makes you think, it makes understand, it makes feel, it makes live, even when the main subject of the movie is just the opposite. Wrinkles, born as a comic book from the hands of Paco Roca, got the Spanish National Comic Award. With the images of the film, with its feelings on the surface, with large doses of implicit kindness and a gallery of characters who tell a story about friendship, loneliness, but also about the will to live, in short time it has enamored us and continues to captivating us. And as viewers we feel the need to see more real movies like this one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the notion of good and bad characters in a fictional world. The study is done from a humanistic perspective and considers the poetic proposal of Juan José García-Noblejas (1982) and Paul Ricoeur (1987). The paper suggests that a character is good as long as it serves the world of fiction in which it is, whereas the world of fiction is good - in the sense of complete - insofar as it is able to "do justice" to the part of human life it represents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses P. Ricoeur's studies on the Poetics, and his notion of "refiguration" as developed in the work of Juan José García-Noblejas, under the scope of the Aristotelian doctrine. It suggests that the "first writing" of a screenplay focuses on the structure of the plot and the characters, dialogue and actions. The "re-writing" deals with these same elements; but above all, discovers the deep poetic structure that holds together the story. From that point on, the writer is able to return to the plot and refine it. This back and forth movement ends up in coherence and unity of the story, and so illuminates the writer's personal exploration on the meaning of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bhutan until the last decade drastically restricted its contact with the outside world, and recent media interest has focussed only on Bhutan's late reception of global satellite TV and the Internet. To date there has been no scholarly account of its indigenous DV film industry; one that has produced nearly a hundred featurelength films, none of which have yet been screened outside Bhutan. The author of this report has had unique access to the country and, as a screenwriter and director herself, has by working in collaboration with Bhutanese colleagues gained added insights into the creative and practical dilemmas faced by film-makers there. She also highlights areas of concern to film theorists with regard to questions of spectatorship, as well as narrative strategies around the notion of the dream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala uses irony in a good number of her novels and screenplays to evaluate, as a theme, the adulteration of art. Specifically, she turns to three different patterns of irony to articulate it. Each of these patterns is distinguished by the matter that it censures: the merchandizing of art, the idolatry which art may raise, and the corruption of art by the culture of entertainment. But all of these have elements in common. Jhabvala composes the patterns by establishing paradigmatic models of relationships between characters, which are also caricatured in various degrees. In order to understand how these structures are shaped and how they articulate the issue of art, I will develop and illustrate each of them in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relative lack of success for British films in the marketplace is often cited as being rooted in the lack of quality screenplays. As the primary strategic body for film in Britain, the UK Film Council subscribes to this broad analysis and has identified training as one of the key strategies for overcoming this weakness. In this article, I question this assumption and examine to what extent the decision- makers, and the processes of decision-making, themselves are a problem in the development of talent and quality British films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]