Search

In recent years, the increased take up of game engines in the context of emerging and traditional screen media production has fostered innovation across formats. Game engines present an opportunity to author immersive projects that draw upon the expertise of experience designers, game developers, screenwriters and other creative practitioners; however, questions arise as to the ways that individuals from different backgrounds might work together effectively on these projects given the varying 'poetics' of their fields. This term, used by Ian MacDonald in the context of screenwriting practice, refers to 'the rationalisation of a mode, or a paradigm, of practice; a collection of perceived norms that make sense together, for those involved in developing a screen idea, in that time and place' (2013, 3). This article explores the development of two screen works created using Unreal Engine, so as to outline the challenges for multidisciplinary teamwork in this area. This article will argue that the successful realisation of these projects called for the development of common ground around this new mode of practice, one fostered through a sharing of boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989), expertise and through listening to participant concerns. [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]

In the article, the author discusses the screenwriting practices of writers in their efforts to write about dead characters and bring life to them in films and the concept of 'narrative life.' Other topics include the discursive practices of writer and philosopher Michel Foucault, and the distinction between practices of habit and normative practices in writing.

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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to this interview presents Chloé Aïcha Boro, a Burkinabé journalist, writer, filmmaker and screenwriter. Although she started her career as a journalist for La voix du Sahel and Le Marabout in her native Burkina Faso, her love of literature inspired her to write novels and move on to screen writing and directing films. The introduction explores Le Loup d'or de Balolé. The interview focuses on her personal life and the making of her films, notably Farafin Ko and Le Loup d'or de Balolé. She explains the opportunities and challenges she faced during the production of her films, sharing her vision on documentary filmmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a range of draft scripts, correspondences, notes, trade and mainstream press reports, this essay examines the career of screenwriter Waldo Salt in the years surrounding the development and release of Midnight Cowboy (1969). While much literature has discussed Salt's communist affiliations and writing under a pseudonym for 1950s television, his 'rebirth' as one of Hollywood's most sought after screenwriters in the late 1960s and 1970s has received less detailed attention. Situating unproduced screenplays Don Quixote and The Artful Dodger as well as his acclaimed work on Midnight Cowboy within broader industrial, political and cultural developments of the period, I explore the ways in which Salt's writing and public persona responded to broader discourses then impacting upon screenwriters. In doing so, the essay reflects on key issues related to screenwriting during the late 1960s and 1970s 'Hollywood Renaissance', a period of film history still largely defined by a focus on a small group of 'superstar' auteur directors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his memoirs, screenwriter Charles Bennett reflects upon writing the British horror filmNight of the Demon(1957, Jacques Tourneur). He reveals his lack of fondness for the film’s executive producer, commenting ‘Hal Chester, if he walked up my driveway right now, I’d shoot him dead’. Chester rewrote elements of Bennett’s script to focus attention on the fire demon, and arranged additional filming after Tourneur had completed directing duties. This much ofNight of the Demon’s production history is well documented. However, drawing upon extensive research at BFI Special Collections and the BBFC, this article offers an alternative reading of the film. Focusing on creative process, I utilize draft screenplays, reader reports and letters to piece together how the original writer envisagedNight of the Demonand how various institutional pressures impacted upon the final script. Crucially, by examining the séance – the act two midpoint – I provide a revisionist account of the film, one that draws away from the now-standard discussion of whether Bennett and Tourneur knew the fire demon would be shown at the film’s beginning and end. Instead, this article is a consideration of the power of storytelling to generate fear. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An interview with French filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter Jacques Tati is presented. Tati shares how he came up with a film like "Play Time?" and explains why he believes dramatic composition is important when writing a script. He also offers his understanding of the evolution of film comedy. Tati offers his views on critics' reactions to the film "Play Time?" and reveals how he gets his ideas for gags. He also shares where a part of sadness in the film came from.

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]

So many film critics, film scholars and film historians have taken the concept of author to built some of their proposals, like an interpretative politics or sophisticated textual approaches. The matter which underlies is the next one: the author in cinema, thought as a person or as a textual strategy, makes a film, and that film is finished work. This idea has become the touchstone for any approach to this topic: someone is a film author depending on the films that he makes. The goal is discover another way to review the concept of author in cinema: the filmmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to sketch out the landscape of screenwriting in mainstream French cinema in the post-war period (1945–1958). Taking the box office top twenty for each year as its corpus, this article will set out the situation of screenwriting in France in relation to the variety of genres and types of films favoured by audiences. By examining the way screenwriting is portrayed in the popular film press of the time (notably Cinémonde), the article also aims to recentre the debates away from the politique des auteurs which dominated the so-called cinéphile press of the time (Cahiers du cinéma,Positif,Artsetc.) and to consider what discourses dominate in a publication which does not have any particular axe to grind with the so-called ‘tradition of quality’. Thus, the article will also address one of the foundation myths of the New Wave; that is to say, that post-war French film was dominated by a literary cinema which was therefore also a cinema mired in convention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present article aims to address a current gap in our understanding of creativity in screenplay writing by focusing on the cognitive, conative, affective, and environmental factors that come into play at different stages in the creative process. It reports a study employing in-depth interviews with 22 recognized French screenplay writers. The findings reveal a series of distinct but interrelated stages in screenplay writing, starting, in general, from a long and enjoyable phase of impregnation, followed in some, but not all cases, by a formal phase of structuring (writing an outline and or treatment), and, finally, intense periods of writing and rewriting the script. These 3 stages, and, in particular, the multiple and concrete decisions to be taken within each one of them, support a vision of the creative process in this domain metaphorically conceptualized as crossing a maze. Creators prepare for this "journey," create "maps," and then enter the maze navigating through various true path segments and blind alleys. This maze is seldom traveled alone, the followed path is not linear, and there are several back-and-forth movements before reaching the "exit," which is represented by the "final" version of the script. These findings are discussed using central ideas from a number of theories, and ideas for future research are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the short-film Gilete Azul, by Miriam Chnaiderman, the authors intend to study the question of authorship in the contemporary context. Elements found in the artwork of Nazareth Pacheco, presented by the film, allow to understand that the authorship-function cannot be understood as something evident, i.e., the author is a sort of subject in the discourse, as an effect of the discourse. Therefore, it is proposed that the author is always "hanging by a thread": either because its presence is not guaranteed a priori, or because it is the effect of a signi! cant chain. [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]

In 1944 the Mexican writer José Revueltas began his adventure in Mexican cinema. Since then, and until 1960, Revueltas will appear as screenwriter in the credits of twenty-four Mexican movies, and in one more in 1975: the adaptation of his own novel El apando. Four screenplays by Revueltas were also published: La otra, Tierray libertad, Los albañiles, El apando. This article is a critical analysis of Revueltas' screenplay La otra. The study focuses on the narrative functioning of this screenplay as a filmic text and has the specific aim of reinserting La otra within the context of Revueltas' literary production. The presence of mirrors and reflection as central elements of representation of identity and the double; the prison as sign and representation of alienation; guilt (fratricide) and punishment; pity towards the guilty (female) character: all these elements demonstrate that the screenplay La otra is closely related to Revueltas' narrative universe and literary ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses American author William Faulkner as a screenwriter for Hollywood movies and how his participation in producing such works will affect the way critics and readers look at his novels and other works of fiction. The article notes that little has been written on Faulkner's work as a screenwriter even though many of his screenplays have been published. The author mentions that Faulkner's only motivation for writing screenplays was money and it is generally believed that he hated the motion picture industry.

With respect to their narrative construction, documentary films have received less attention on the part of analysts and scholars of texts and scripts. Fiction has reaped a variety of opinions, publications and suggestions which - in the form of script manuals - have exemplified and interpreted the world of audiovisual narration. Nevertheless, not all documentaries have enjoyed freedom in their dramatic construction. This study details and analyzes, in Javier Corcuera's documentary film La espalda del mundo (2000), the application of techniques used to create scripts with dramatic tension and the habitual structure of fictional works, without losing sight of the topic at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the craft of screen writers and script readers. It describes how a screen writer works toward developing a story from a creative idea and comments on the process of crafting this idea into a screen project. The author explores the role of the script reader in helping the writer develop the script into a viable motion picture project, and briefly reflects on the state of screen writing and movie making in Argentina.

For about 15 years, from c.1918, British screenwriters wrote scripts in a style which allowed them – indeed encouraged them – to express their screen idea in a comprehensive fashion, including specifying shots and instructing actors. Early examples of a writers draft and a shooting script suggest British practice used both at appropriate stages in production, but that the writer's role in silent films encouraged the development of the writer's draft style into a comprehensive document from which the director took instruction. This is different from current conventions. The assumption that the writer ‘picturised’ the film on the page, as well as structuring it dramatically, persisted until the 1930s, with what appears to be a low-level struggle for control of both the visual style of the film and (eventually) the main credit for that being won by the director. The script for The Bachelors Club (1921) was written by Eliot Stannard, who wrote for Hitchcock later in the 1920s. Although primary sources for British silent screenplays are very scarce, both a writer's draft and a shooting script exists for this film; and comparison of the two accords with the view that the writer presented a complete visual concept of the film from the initial script. The industrial practices of the time had not yet rationalised the growing dominance of the director into something more than the person who ‘realised’ what the writer had ‘picturised’, but this raises questions about how far we should study British silent films through the lens of the auteur theory. The conclusions reached here are tentative. While they are not just speculation, neither is there sufficient primary evidence yet to provide more than a very patchy picture about early screenwriting practice in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writer and taste-maker Elinor Glyn performed a kind of paradoxical labour to define her authorial signature well beyond that traditionally accorded screenwriters. Thus Glyn cultivated power outside the role of author through performance, supervision of production if not direction, commentary about Hollywood, and in some cases control aver casting or the moulding of the performances of others. But these other areas of authority themselves arise from the value of the Glyn narrative as something highly recognizable during the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflects on a gap in the teaching of scriptwriting. Inspiration behind the motion picture "Taking Apart"; Factors contributing to the perceived gap in learning how to write a script; Approach used to introduce undergraduate students to both drama and documentary script.

This essay discusses the basics of writing novels and screenplays. Essential parts of a story; Considerations before adopting a method in writing; Situations to avoid in scriptwriting.

This article focuses on the film industry in the U.S. Starting in 1947 the House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HUAC) pursued a series of official inquiries into the penetration of the film industry in Hollywood by the Communist Party of the U.S. In the course of these inquiries dozens of friendly Hollywood witnesses denounced hundreds of people as secret members of the Communist Party, while dozens of unfriendly witnesses refused to discuss their politics with the Committee. Those who were either publicly or privately denounced as members of the American Communist Party found it almost impossible at least for a decade to get employment in the motion-picture industry. The most famous victims of the resulting blacklist were the "Unfriendly Ten" or "Hollywood Ten," the original group of unfriendly witnesses, mostly screenwriters, who refused to give political information about themselves before HUAC in October 1947. As a result of the blacklist system some film careers were totally destroyed: for instance, that of Mickey Knox, a rising star of the late 1940s.

This paper takes the concept of the screen idea (as outlined by Philip Parker 1998) and uses it to mean 'any notion of a potential screenwork held by one or more people, whether or not it is possible to describe it on paper or by other means', and whether or not that notion has a conventional shape. This concept leads towards a clearer understanding of the process of screenwriting, which in turn helps consideration of what is being evaluated when looking at the products of that practice. The screen idea is the essence of the future screenwork that is discussed and negotiated by those involved in reading and developing the screenplay and associated documents; it is shared, clarified and changed through a collective process. This concept of the screen idea is developed with reference to the work of Roland Barthes in order to clarify the influence of norms and assumptions used during that process that may otherwise be hidden or unacknowledged. The process of script development has been explored in the CILECT conference 'Triangle 2' (Ross 2001), and this article takes two of these projects to examine how the screen idea is 'rewritten' by the collective process. In these examples it is not possible to attribute single authorship in the face of this dynamic and complex process of creating meaning. The underlying normative drive for a readerly text is made according to assumed, though often unacknowledged and unquestioned criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scenario! was a week-long event focusing on the contrasting and complementary attitudes and practices to screenwriting in the United Kingdom and France. It combined a five-day workshop for a selected group of professional screenwriters followed by a weekend of public screenings and panel discussions. The event was organized by Brian Dunnigan and Ben Gibson from the London Film School and Vincent Mellili from the Institute Francais in association with the CEEA (Conservatoire Europeen d'Ecriture Audiovisuel) in Paris. Scenario! was supported by the UK Film Council, the SACD (Societe des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques) and media partner Screen International. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective To determine whether the link between high success and longevity extends to academy award winning screenwriters. Design Retrospective cohort analysis. Participants All screenwriters ever nominated for an academy award. Main outcome measures Life expectancy and all cause mortality. Results A total of 850 writers were nominated; the median duration of follow up from birth was 68 years; and 428 writers died. On average, winners were more successful than nominees, as indicated by a 14% longer career (27.7 v 24.2, P = 0.004), 34% more total films (23.2 v 17.3, P < 0.001), 58% more four star films (4.8 v 3.1, P < 0.001), and (62% more nominations (2.1 v 1.3, P < 0.001). However, life expectancy was 3.6 years shorter for winners than for nominees (74.1 v 77.7 years, P = 0.004), equivalent to a 37% relative increase in death rates (95% confidence interval 10 to 70). After adjustment for year of birth, sex, and other factors, a 35% relative increase in death rates was found (7% to 70%). Additional wins were associated with a 22% relative increase in death rates (3% to 44%). Additional nominations and additional other films in a career otherwise caused no significant increase in death rates. Conclusion The link between occupational achievement and longevity is reversed in screenwriters who win academy awards. Doubt is cast on simple biological theories for the survival gradients found for other members of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the manipulation of time in Harold Pinter's screenplays, particularly, in the film Betrayal. As long ago as 1971 Pinter acknowledged having a keen interest in the uses of the past. Pinter time is not based on the linear concept of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Thus the viewers of Betrayal must adjust to disorienting temporal shifts. His metaphysic of time may well be an example of the affinity between art and science that Leonard Shlain advocates in Art and Physics. Like many writers of the modernist tradition Pinter subordinates the chronological to the psychological. It is well established that Pinter's memory is not chronologically bound. Pinter's imagistic memory was the impetus for the opening scene of the stage production and the second scene of the film. Betrayal is one of the works cited to illustrate how Pinter's involvement with film and television as early as the sixties cued him to the facility with which the camera can deal with memory and time shifts. The dialogue-less opening scene is an imaginative use of Pinter's trademark device of silence, and the party's over setting completes a past-present cycle. Whatever its scientific validity, the reverse chronology of Betrayal lends itself to two functions--one therapeutic and the other philosophical. The reverse narration may be an example of a therapeutic process since it was the first play Pinter wrote after the breakup of his marriage. Another function of Betrayal's chronology is to pose a riddle about the etiology of infidelity.

Deals with screenwriting and screenwriters in Australia. Place for people who have been damaged by what life has to offer; Manipulation of emotion in every scene; Screenwriters' knowledge of films; Absence of dynamism in the industry; Skills required for a screenwriter to survive in Australia; Need for distributors to be made aware of digital works.

Presents a postmodern perspective on the practice of writing for the screen or television. Disappearance of authors in the process of writing for the screen; Involvement of the director, producer, crew members, other writers and actors in the creation of a screenplay.

This article concentrates on a particular group of film professionals of classic French cinema. Taking the broader view though, the French cinema industry as a whole employed many women, chiefly in low-grade positions. Like other developing industries of the 1920s and 1930s, it drew on the semi-skilled process worker, in this case for developing and printing. A statistical report on workers in the French film industry in 1936 showed that processors far outnumbered any other category, and that the great majority of these were women. There were a tiny minority of women screenwriters, musical score writers and costume designers in the 1920s and 1930s, but the only production professions where the number of women was significant were those of continuity and film editing.

The article looks into the concept of genre in motion pictures and how this kind of filmic text is adapting to the current imaginative landscape. It cites the views of Roland Barthes claiming that many of the generically fragmented motion pictures of the current time call for the involvement of viewers to complete the formulation of meaning occurring between the producers of the message, the film itself and its audience. Moreover, it finds several generic conventions and patterns that oppose each other rather than blend in the films being evaluated.

This article profiles the late film writer George Froeschel who died in 1979. When Froeschel arrived in the U.S. motion picture industry, he was already an experienced writer, having been in the international entertainment industry before. Froeschel worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during World War II, leading him to co-write scripts for 6 war films namely, "The Mortal Storm," "Waterloo Bridge," "Mrs. Miniver," "Random Harvest," "The white Cliffs of Dover," and "Me and the Colonel," all produced by Sidney Franklin. His contribution to U.S. films was considerable. His talent for constructing a narrative came at a time when the U.S. film transitioned its emphasis from the visual to the narrative.