Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry

James Fenwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000463200
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book makes the case for unproduction studies, the study of films left unmade, unseen, or unreleased, as a radical discipline with the potential to uncover a shadow history of the American film industry.

Exploring the archival methods that can be utilised in this endeavour, James Fenwick argues that a revisionist history is needed to understand the logic of the film industry, finding that it has long-been predicated on a system of unmade creativity in which finances, resources, and labour is invested into projects that production companies know will never be produced or have no intention of ever producing. Using the Production Code Administration (PCA) records, housed at the Margaret Herrick Library, as a case study, the book explores the material existence of the unmade and considers how archives and archival methods can be used to construct a shadow history that recovers the forgotten, marginalised, and overlooked figures in film history, providing explanations for structural forces that contributed to the unmade.

Given its unique use of the unmade as an analytic for film history, this book will be an essential read for scholars interested in film and media history, performance studies, film production, and creative practice, as well as to archivists and archival researchers.

1 Unproduction studies

DOI: 10.4324/9781003206118-1

Unproduction studies is a burgeoning new field of enquiry. New in the sense that it remains an amorphous collection of disparate case studies of unmade, unseen, and unreleased projects from across film and television history. There have been two dedicated edited collections on the subject—Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films (2008) and Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films (2020)—with a further collection on the potential of unfinished women’s films forthcoming (Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film). In addition, there have been several academic articles that have provided case studies of unmade or abandoned projects, most notably Peter Kunze’s ‘Herding Cats; or, the Possibilities of Unproduction Studies’ (2020), in which the term unproduction studies was coined.

A variety of terms have been used to describe the field—lost, unproduced, unproduction, unmade, unseen, indirected, shadow cinema, phantom cinema, post-humous cinema, etc.—indicating the fledging nature of the discipline. Kunze’s ‘unproduction studies’, a term devised in opposition to production studies, attempts to utilise the political economic framework of the latter in order to focus on below-the-line workers and to raise questions about ‘hegemony, power, agency and resistance’ within the film industries (Kunze 2020, 134). Production studies focuses on issues of labour, production, and authorial agency. Scholars like Miranda Banks et al. (2009) have focused their research on production cultures, hierarchies of labour, and the ‘lived realities’ of all those labourers involved in the production of film and television. It is an empirical field of enquiry, one based on observation, interviews, and archival sources and which focuses on constructing an understanding of the film and media industries from the bottom up, as opposed to industrially constructed accounts of corporations, companies, and institutions.

Kunze took the framework of production studies but questioned why it primarily focused on what was produced, asking, ‘must media be produced to be studied?’ (Kunze 2020, 131). He then applied the framework to a study of Steven Spielberg’s unmade adaptation of the Broadway show Cats (1981). But Kunze’s appropriation and inversion of production studies into unproduction studies did not necessarily define the object of study. Kunze relied on the idea of there being something available to produce and he initially relied on notions of success and failure: if something is not made, or produced, it is a failure, while something that is made or produced is a success. As he acknowledges in his case study of Cats, ‘This area of inquiry not only should include projects that never made it to fruition, but unsuccessful attempts at successfully produced projects’ (Kunze 2020, 129). I would agree. However, Kunze’s use of the term ‘successfully produced projects’ can be misleading. After all, Cats was eventually produced as a feature film, not by Steven Spielberg but by Tom Hooper in 2019. Yet, to call the latter film a success given the barrage of negative critical attention it received and the fact it performed disastrously at the box office raises questions as to whether the film was more of a failure than a success. What I am suggesting is a need to be cautious in the use of the term failure in unproduction studies when discussing projects that are unmade. Just because a project was never produced does not automatically classify it as a failure. However, it can be an instructive object in uncovering the production cultures of creativity in film industries around the world as well as the ways in which film industries are typically built on an infrastructure of unmade projects: an entire system of writers, both professional and amateur, churning out ideas, scripts, and scenarios that are never, and will never, be made. Unproduction studies is not so much about failure as it is about creativity and the creative process and the archival methods that can be used to study it.

Maybe it is necessary to take a step back and consider the wider process of human creativity and how the majority of ideas do not even fail because they never even reach the point of being considered for publication or release, but rather…just come to nothing. Think of how many people, whether amateurs or not, have considered writing a novel or a script, set off on their ambition, only for it to fizzle into nothing: they grew bored, tired, found it impossible to complete, or realised writing a novel or script is actually quite hard. Or they might complete the novel or film script but have no intention of showing it to the world: they have written it for their own creative pleasure or for their friends.

Of course, there are ‘amateurs’ who write film scripts with the aim of breaking into the industry. Think of the number of scriptwriting manuals that exist, teaching budding screenwriters and directors the principles of how to write a script that will ‘make it’. These manuals are nearly as old as the medium of film itself, with the earliest known manuals appearing in 1911 (Ralph Perkins Stoddard’s The Photo-Play: A Book of Valuable Information for Those Who Would Enter a Field of Unlimited Endeavour) and 1913 (William Lewis Gordon’s How To Write Moving Pictures Plays). These early manuals mitigated the expectations of the reader by making it clear that most screenplays would never be produced into a film. Take the opening statement to Gordon’s revised edition of his manual: ‘Neither do I wish to imply that by following these instructions ANYONE can become a successful photo playwright. This is not true. Everyone cannot succeed in any chosen profession’ (Gordon 1914, 5). This is an early admission of the realities of the industrial system of creativity for budding film screenwriters. It is also a definition of success based on becoming a professional screenwriter able to make a sustained living. The realities of screenwriting have barely changed in the last one hundred years. Estimates suggests that each year anywhere between 25,000 and 50,000 unsolicited original ‘spec scripts’ flow through the main Hollywood companies (Myers 2012). Of them, an average of eighty-three a year are bought by a production company or agent, and of them only a fraction will ever be produced, with most entering protracted ‘development hell’ (Myers 2012). This suggests that upwards of 99 percent of all scripts remain unmade. These are only estimates and the figures are likely to fluctuate greatly in any given year. Most of the scripts will not only remain unmade, but also remain unread. And there are many more scripts and creative ideas that will not even enter this creative flow that sustains Hollywood. Perhaps even more sad is the fact that most of these scripts and creative ideas will never even be made available to an archive for later scholarly discovery. The scripts and ideas will simply disappear as if they never existed in the first place.

There needs to be a clear understanding that the boundaries and delineations between creative success and creative failure are not easy to mark. Certainly, any film that is produced and released is a success on one level: it made it through the system of development, production, distribution, and exhibition, despite whether it then goes on to fail commercially or critically. For the unproduction studies scholar, what is of interest is those films that are not made, produced, or realised and why that is the case. Why are so many projects left unmade? The answer is not necessarily one of failure of individual projects and scripts. After all, given the abundance of scripts and creative ideas available versus the limited material resources available, it is inevitable that the majority of scripts and ideas will never be made. The large quantity of unmade projects is a reality of the film industries generally around the world rather than a reflection of ‘failure’. As Kunze has subsequently argued, ‘for this intriguing area of investigation to thrive, it must be liberal in its understanding of “failure” and sceptical of any perceived sharp distinction between unproduced and produced’ (Kunze 2020, 130). Unproduction studies is a field that studies the process of creativity and development as much as it does the process of failure when writers, producers, directors, agents, or studio executives do attempt to produce a project. The projects Kunze outlines in his research certainly fall into the category of failure in one way or another: attempts were made by producers to realise a project, money was raised, but the projects collapsed.

However, the unproduction studies scholar will, on their travels through the archives of the world, come across many ideas and scripts that were left unmade simply because that is the nature of human creativity and the logic of the film industries. As a scholarly field, what we are investigating suggests a creative effort of some kind, but not necessarily that any traditional creative material exists, i.e. a screenplay. What the unproduction scholar will not easily discover are those script ideas that were discussed over a telephone, over a lunch, or between friends: many ideas are developed and shaped verbally, with no written record available. Unproduction studies also confronts the challenge posed by archival research in which there is often no linear and complete history of the unmade, merely creative debris and fragments. The object of study is unmade, skeletal, damaged, often non-existent. It is not in a form in which it can be easily moved from being unproduced to produced. It exists in a form utterly different to the object of study of classical film history. There is no complete film text and, quite often, no complete screenplay ready to enter production.

Unproduction studies is about exploring a shadowy archival world where little makes sense within the framework of existing canonical film history. Brian Norman, in his investigation of an unproduced James Baldwin script about the life of Malcolm X, captures the essence of the awkwardness of the unmade. He describes the object of study as a ‘closet screenplay’ and wonders how exactly it can be understood: ‘The reading skills that literary studies offer this anomalous and necessarily politically charged bastard genre are limited given that there is no film, and therefore no film stills, to “read”’ (Norman 2005, 103). Simone Murray’s investigations into the adaptation industry utilises the term ‘phantom adaptations’ to describe those films based on the literary property that were ultimately left unmade. Murray focuses on the unmade film adaptation of the novel Eucalyptus (1998) and how the screenplay that resulted offers the potential to problematise the entire field of adaptation studies, while the archival remains can provide ‘fascinating insights into the functioning of the broader adaptation industry’ (Murray 2008, 6).

Other academics have tentatively touched upon the unmade, usually only via career surveys of individual directors or screenwriters and often with an uncertainty of what was really being studied or what the unmade was actually about. But these outputs, and others like them, have indicated the potential of unproduction studies, including the theoretical dimensions of the field and the methods and approaches that can be utilised. So just what is unproduction studies? What does it involve? And why should it be taken seriously as a scholarly discipline? What follows is an attempt to answer these three questions in a bid to begin thinking through the potentialities of unproduction studies.

So what is unproduction studies?

As stated above, unproduction studies primarily involves archival research of unmade, unseen, or unreleased film and television projects that are typically (though, not exclusively) housed in archival institutions around the world. For the purposes of this study, I will be focusing on film. The predominant object of study are those projects that never even made it out of development, ranging from artistic documents (scripts, treatments, outlines, ideas scrawled on scraps of paper, photographs, location research, costume designs, artwork, even test footage), business documents, budgets, correspondence, readers’ reports, studio ledgers, trade journal articles, and much more. An unmade project within the archive may not necessarily contain all of these items, as the case studies in this book make clear. Often an archive may make it apparent what unmade projects it contains via metadata in the archival catalogue. Other times, this is not the case, with material pertaining to the unmade distributed throughout other archival categories. So contingency is an inherent aspect in studying the unmade. One also needs to be mindful of the encounters with the unmade that resist archiving: the phone calls, the arguments, the discussions in corridors, and the thoughts in people’s minds. All that remains of these encounters are archival fragments or people’s (unreliable) memories, if that.

The unmade seems to be an integral part of how the media industries work. One reason for this is because of the nature of the creative process: ideas mutate and evolve, stories and scripts are developed and redeveloped, revised, and edited, to the point they become wholly new ideas and stories unrecognisable from the original idea. Draft one of a script will likely be very different to the final draft of the script. However, beyond this particular aspect of the creative process, there is clearly an expectation amongst producers and screenwriters that most projects will never be produced, particularly if they become stuck in ‘development hell’, a process in which a project (not necessarily even a screenplay, but maybe just a film title, a planned adaptation, or an elevator pitch) becomes trapped in a perpetual cycle of creation and revision for many years and usually leads to it eventually being abandoned, or even just left in a purgatory state.

In 2004, the then head of the UK Film Council’s Development Fund, Jenny Borgars, described creative development as ‘an agonisingly slow and frustrating process. “If you’re developing a new project from scratch, you’re fortunate if it takes two to three years, and it can take a lot longer”’ (McNab 2004, 4). Seventy-three percent of the companies or producers that had received project development financing from the UK Film Council ‘had failed to make a single film between them’ (McNab 2004, 4). While this percentage relates to a specific funding scheme in the British film industry and therefore may reflect wider bureaucratic processes contributing to development hell, anecdotal evidence suggests that the unmade is a much bigger problem across film industries around the world. Filmmaker John Boorman reflected on the process of development hell as he had experienced it, stating that

All film-makers spend time on aborted projects. […] it is because the big studios play the destructive game of developing dozens of projects with the intention of making only one in ten or one in twenty. At any one time in Hollywood 90 per cent of the writers and directors are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• About the author
• Preface
• 1 Unproduction studies
• 2 Hollywood and the Production Code Administration
• 3 The Margaret Herrick Library and the PCA records
• 4 Women
• 5 Sex
• 6 Politics
• 7 Crime
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix I: Unproduced files in the PCA records
• Index