Screenwriting

Creative Labor and Professional Practice

Bridget Conor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136169489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Rédaction de scénarios de films

Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice analyzes the histories, practices, identities and subjects which form and shape the daily working lives of screenwriters.

Author Bridget Conor considers the ways in which contemporary screenwriters navigate and make sense of the labor markets in which they are immersed.

Chapters explore areas including:

• Screenwriting histories and myths of the profession

• 
  
  

• Screenwriting as creative labor

• 
  
  

• Screenwriters' working lives

• 
  
  

• Screenwriting work and the how-to genre

• 
  
  

• Screenwriting work and inequalities

• 
  
  

Drawing on historical and critical perspectives of mainstream screenwriting in the USA and UK, as well as valuable interviews with working screenwriters, this book presents a highly original and multi-faceted study of screenwriting as creative labor and professional practice.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorandfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780203080771

1 Screenwriting histories and myths of the profession

Histories of mainstream screenwriting, usually centred on the development of the profession in Hollywood, offer a number of insights into an ongoing process of standardization and mythologization on the part of the screenwriting community and commentators within this community. Often these histories come from writers themselves, and writers based in Hollywood at different points in time have contributed to the self-mythologizing process in numerous ways, through novelizations about Hollywood, often with screenwriters as central characters: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941) for example. Particular origin stories and mythic narratives are repeated across the histories, and this process has served to solidify a particular self-perception on the part of the industrially oriented screenwriter. The crudest and most potent version of this, the degraded, deskilled, marginalized writer, is evoked repeatedly in particular on-screen portrayals of writers from Sunset Boulevard (1950) – in which a writer floats face-down in a swimming pool as the film begins – to Barton Fink (1991). A quote from the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker is used to illustrate this in one of the few contemporary discussions of screenwriting as history and practice:

The writers are part of the production of pictures rather than authors. A bon mot in the community is that ‘writers in Hollywood do not have works, but are workers’ … In Hollywood, the writer does not write to be read.

(Powdermaker 1950, 150–51, cited in Maras 2009: 52)

This first chapter will echo these self-mythologizing processes by ‘setting up’ some of the key foundational moments – from the early years of the scenario writer and into the golden era of Hollywood filmmaking in the studio system – which have fuelled a standard historical narrative. Chapter 1 illustrates the investment that screenwriters themselves have in these histories, histories that are circulated and re-circulated in discourse; for example, in screenwriting manuals and in interviews with screenwriters from particular eras.¹ Histories of screenwriting serve as conduits for self-theorizing processes and are invested in particular concepts – the standardization of screenwriting craft over time, the concomitant separation of craft from creativity, the brutalization and marginalization of writers, the necessary politicization and organization of screenwriters in order to tackle marginalization. These concepts are understood in the first half of this chapter as mechanisms of intelligibility for screenwriters. These mechanisms anchor screenwriting workers across a coherent, historical trajectory as their profession develops, enabling them to more deftly navigate the industrial dynamics of contemporary screen production. The chapter then moves from the early histories to a critical discussion of contemporary labor relations in Hollywood and the material and symbolic effects these changing relations have had on screenwriters as professional creatives. It compares and contrasts the US and UK labor markets for screenwriters, markets that need to be distinguished, but markets that are also intertwined. This first chapter asks: what are the patterns of continuity and change that have determined the professional parameters of screenwriting and how do they differ from place to place, industry to industry?

Early histories – defining screenwriting work and workers

The general perception gained from reading accounts of the development of screenwriting as a form of work in the pre-studio era – the era of the ‘scenario writer’ – is a time of a proliferation of opportunities for budding writers in which creative roles in the new industry of screen production were characterized by multiplicity and multivalency.² This era is viewed as one of freedom and creative ferment – scenario writers commanded prestige in this new creative field, often juggled a number of production roles, were prolific and rewarded for their originality and work ethic, and were well-treated and respected. Roy McCardell is widely cited as the first person hired for the specific job of writing for motion pictures. As the histories make clear, his career mirrors the careers of contemporary screenwriters, a rhetorical technique that establishes palpable links between past scenario writers and present screenwriters. McCardell had previously been a journalist and also wrote novels and plays. He was taken on by the Biograph Company on a salary of US$200 per week to write ‘stories’ and, very quickly, this led to a demand for scenario writers to write short scenarios for filming and then to the development of ‘story departments’ within each motion picture production company (Stempel 1988: 4). Scenario writers in the silent era also read and evaluated story material from outside sources (much like the contemporary work of script reading and assessment known as ‘coverage’) and early writers undertook multiple roles within the company they were contracted to. For example, Gene Gauntier, a prominent early woman writer, wrote, edited, acted, directed, made costumes, sets, and props and performed stunts. As Stempel puts it: ‘For her first scenarios Gauntier was paid US$20 per reel while the director was paid only US$10, an indication of the relative value the company placed on writers and directors’ (1988: 8). The figure of the early scenario writer offers a compelling central character in the origin story. Quotes and vignettes abound that serve to illustrate the freedom and playfulness scenarists enjoyed and exhibited. Gauntier wrote in the 1920s: ‘The woods were full of ideas … A poem, a picture, a short story, a scene from a current play, a headline in a newspaper. All was grist that came to my mill’ (quoted in Norman 2007: 26). This is a time in which there are a large number of women working as scenario writers. In fact, Mahar argues that women ‘originated the craft of screenwriting but also developed the “continuity” … ’ (2001: 72–73). It is worth noting, however, that there is a disagreement about the numbers of women writing early cinema. Whilst many studies often state, without attribution, that up to 50 percent of early screenwriters were women, Slide (2012) has recently challenged this figure, arguing that a realistic figure would more likely be between 20 and 25 percent. The openness and egalitarianism of the profession in its early days is still emphasized as evidence of intrinsic freedom and flexibility but this is a characteristic of the profession that does not last (see also Francke 1994).³

The historical record deploys facts and figures in support of the free-wheeling scenario writer, illustrating the rapid turnaround of the work; anecdotes emphasize the dashing-out of a deluge of short scenarios and the increased demand for such work. Most stories were bought, filmed and released within three months and the high turnover created a palpable demand for story material so, by the mid-1910s, the rates of pay for scenarios were steadily increasing (Hamilton 1990: 7). By the early 1910s, the mythic narrative is already preoccupied with the theme of the standardization of the form and the work of scenarists is characterized as pioneering forms of continuous storytelling on screen. Thus, the free-wheeling writing style was rapidly normalized to a single page for a one-reel film; very basic scenes were described and typed out. There was no written dialogue but written titles were inserted between the filmed scenes in post-production. The scenarios themselves form the framework and rudimentary structure for the subsequent ‘photoplay’ and for the eventual standardized screenplay.

Coupled with the increase in demand for stories was a rash of books published on how to write screen stories, the very early precursors to contemporary how-to screenwriting manuals. These included Eustace Hale Ball’s Cinema Plays: How to Write Them, How to Sell Them (1917), J. Arthur Nelson’s The Photo-Play: How to Write, How to Sell (1913) and Epes Winthrop Sargent’s The Technique of the Photoplay, which went through three editions from 1912 to 1920 (Stempel 1988: 14). As Chapter 4 will discuss in full, how-to discourse is central to the circulation and maintenance of standards and conventions of screenwriting labor and these early manuals illustrate that, again, this is not a recent phenomenon. This early publishing period is often referred to within the wider context of ‘scenario fever’, which, fed by encouragement of public submission of story ideas, facilitated ‘a gold rush mentality’ (Azlant 1980 cited in Maras 2009: 141) and a ‘mass publication of handbooks between 1912 and 1920’ (ibid.: 139). Maras (2009) argues that the first handbooks often made reference to the need to carve out a space for screenwriters, to draw borders around their craft and thus offer some protection from hostile directors, studio executives or other villains of the time. As with contemporary titles, Maras argues that many early how-to authors invoke a sense of insider knowledge and ‘the particularist impulse informing the handbook genre gives it a pedagogic quality, separating players from non-players in a broader game of industry, in which industrial knowledge belongs to a social minority’ (2009: 163). Like the histories more broadly, the early development of the how-to screenwriting genre serves as a platform for the construction and teaching of scenario writing and becomes a zone of intelligibility and normativity. Here, the codes and conventions of the form, the elements of visuality that writing for the screen required, were carved out and legitimated.

A consistent theme in this early period is the perceived fluidity of roles within the film production business and particular early figures exemplify this flexibility – a flexibility that arguably (and lamentably for many writers and commentators) recedes as the rigid divisions of labor in the studio era come into focus. Processes of rationalization and standardization exemplify the inexorable movement towards increased efficiency and continuity in screen production processes. For example, Thomas Ince, a prominent writer-director of this early period, is widely cited as developing the classical narrative style of American filmmaking by emphasizing continuity in his scenario writing and in the filming process (Stempel 1988: 41). He listed scenes to be shot together and created schedules for cast and crew that other prominent directors such as D. W. Griffith had not bothered with. For Staiger (1982), Ince’s continuity scripts were integral to the separation of the conception and production phases of filmmaking that exemplifies a Taylorist division of labor, and for Maras (2009) this is another theme that has shaped the particularist discourses of screenwriting. According to him, from the earliest moments in the history of screenwriting, the separation of conception and execution is a process used to differentiate screenwriting from other forms of dramatic/fictional writing. Ince’s scripts were precise in their detail, including instructions on costumes, shots and blocking of actors, and Ince reportedly rubber-stamped all his final scripts, ‘Produce exactly as written’ (Norman 2007: 44). C. Gardner Sullivan (reportedly the highest paid screenwriter of the silent era) worked frequently with Ince and their collaborative work is cited as producing some of the first scripts that specified elements of visual composition. Hamilton (1990: 11–12) highlights one in particular:

SCENE L: CLOSE-UP ON BAR IN WESTERN SALOON

A group of good Western types of the early period are drinking at the bar and talking idly-much good fellowship prevails and every man feels at ease with his neighbour-one of them glances off the picture and the smile fades from his face to be replaced by the strained look of worry-the others notice the change and follow his gaze-their faces reflect his own emotions-be sure to get over a good contrast between the easy good nature that had prevailed and the unnatural, strained silence that follows-as they look, cut.

Lesser-known or cited in mainstream histories is Ince’s chief scenario writer Bradley King, who began as a stenographer for a scenario editor in the 1910s (Holliday 1995: 45), learning ‘plot construction and continuity’ before working consistently with Ince in the 1920s. Crucially, Ince is also cited as ushering in a process that emphasized organization but sidelined creativity and artistic freedom. Norman writes: ‘Ince took assembly-line techniques, perfected by manufacturing giants like Henry Ford, and applied them to the movie industry’ (2007: 44). As the historian Karen Mahar (2001: 103) puts it, increasing efficiency and specialization also led to increased sex-typing and exclusion for women who had been able to ‘force an opening’ for themselves, as Bradley King described her own beginnings in the industry (see Holliday 1995: 45).⁴ A mythic, usually masculine figure such as Ince is deployed to illustrate the first signs of the degradation of the screenwriter’s creative process under the strictures of an industrial production system. As Staiger writes, the application of scientific management to screen production leads to a separation that ‘destroys an ideal of the whole person, both the creator and the producer of one’s ideas’ (1982: 96).

Mack Sennett, who produced comedies for the Keystone Company, is another villainous character looming large at this time, embodying the producer-driven desire to separate out the heads and hands of his screenwriter lackeys. He hired a team of ‘gag writers’ but the gags conceived to be filmed were never written down. Instead they were spoken to one another and then ‘pitched’ to Sennett. Norman writes that ‘Sennett nursed a perpetual mistrust of his writers … he built a tower on the lot with a glassed-in penthouse so he could glower down at his writers along with his other employees’ and that he had an ‘aversion to the written word’ (2007: 58). Again, this type of anecdote is presented as evidence of Sennett’s calculated strategy of degrading his writers’ craft and skills and maintaining a ‘collective anonymous output’ in order to control both story conception and production. For Norman, this illustrates an underlying antagonism between producers and writers, a theme that can be traced right through the histories of screenwriting in Hollywood. The enlightened but vulnerable figure of the screenwriter is pitted against the brutish, efficiency-obsessed producer determined to control the outputs of their writers and to deny those outputs the ‘creative’ label, by effectively severing the ties between hand and head. No matter how crude these early characterizations, the rhetorical effect is to make the screenwriter intelligible as a player in the promising early days of the screen production industry. They are what Caldwell (2008: 47) refers to as ‘genesis myths’. Screenwriters,...