Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea

I. MacDonald, Ian W. Macdonald

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230392281
• eBook ISBN: 9780230392298
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A new, original investigation into how screenwriting works; the practices, creative 'poetics' and texts that serve the screen idea. Using a range of film, media and creative theories, it includes new case studies on the successful ITV soap Emmerdale, Hitchcock's first major screenwriter and David Lean's unfinished film, Nostromo.

1

Introduction

This book proposes a new way of understanding the process of screenwriting, suggesting answers to the questions of what should be studied and how, without relying on ‘how-to’ books and manuals. It refers to the process of screenwriting for film and television drama, but the principles discussed apply to all forms of moving image screen narrative.

The concept of poetics, or the study of ‘the finished work as a result of a process of construction’, as David Bordwell put it (2008, 12) is important in screenwriting, not least for the questions it raises. Screenwriting is clearly about the process of construction, but what the ‘finished’ work is, is open to question. Poetics, as the study of how people work as artists, may also become synonymous with codification, or how people ‘should’ work; as in the case of the observations made by Aristotle in his Poetics, and often quoted by screenwriting manuals as principles of practice. A system of poetics is also located in time and place, and, as a framework, it works to inform artists about their judgements within that particular industry and culture.

This book is not a set of rules, nor is it a ‘how-to’ manual. Neither is it a history exploring the origins of screenwriting (though I do refer to historical contexts and inter-medial connections). Instead I explore three facets of screenwriting – the practices, the texts and the discourse – and the notion of the ‘screen idea’ to re-conceptualize our understanding of what happens during the development of a film. The screen idea allows us to focus better on those facets which otherwise find themselves submerged within other studies and researches. This is a new explanation of the processes that constitute the conception and development of moving image screen narrative, and of how screenplays are produced. I have taken a deliberately broad approach to this topic, to counter its tendency to remain focused on particular issues; sometimes the casualty is depth, frustratingly, for which I apologize.

I have considered screenwriting throughout as the traditional practice of producing fictional narrative for film and television. This is not because there is little to be said about factual narrative, animation, narrative games media or other (digital, for example) narrative; far from it. There is also much to be said about non-traditional work, but space is inadequate for such a wide canvas, and the discussion will, I hope, be extended much further in time to come.

The use of UK examples in this book should not be seen as an insistence on taking a parochial view; the UK is simply a useful example of the real world. As a Western, well-resourced English-speaking country outside the US, it enjoys commercial advantages in working closely with the US industry. However, as a small industry with distinctive cultural differences, there are tensions. It shares in the Hollywood domination of the orthodoxies of screenwriting, but also finds reasons to resist it.

A screenwriting ‘poetics’?

David Bordwell’s central research question in film poetics is, ‘how are films made in order to elicit certain effects’ in the spectator? (2008, 54). This question appears to assume that those effects are fixed phenomena, always produced as a result of a particular construction on screen. This may seem overly deterministic.¹ Whether or not it is possible to identify such causes and effects in all cases, or indeed whether they are as fixed a phenomenon as this view seems to suggest, this statement refers to the analysis of the screenwork – the film.

On the other hand, an idea for the screen contains only beliefs about its effect. Even if an element is likely to be true, such as a loud and sudden noise creating a startling effect in the viewer, it is not perhaps the noise that is significant, but the fact that the screenwriter chooses this moment in the narrative as the appropriate moment to startle you, and to use a specific means to do so. Screenwriting is about considering a future film-text which will include what writers believe is effective, and what they believe is replicable, within their own understanding of film consumption and the particular circumstances of that production. The more significant questions in the study of screenwriting, as Kristin Thompson has noted,² are what film-makers thought they were doing, how they thought things should be made, why they thought it would be effective and in what way, in order to elicit a desired response. These are significant because the answers to these questions are the very basis of film-making. These answers may show up some very specific beliefs or some general and even vague ones, some fragments or a complete and coherent manifesto for production, but they are important in understanding not only what is on the page of the screenplay, but also what may (or may not) appear in the final film.

The ‘poetics of screenwriting’ is therefore not about establishing the rules of craft, but about studying the reasons why they are seen to be important. The poetics is not about how to write screenplays; but about understanding the actual practices of how they are written, and the institutions, individuals and beliefs that lie behind them.

A ‘poetics’ should not be confused with a screenwriting manual. Aristotle’s Poetics is about the intrinsic rationale behind the craft of Greek tragedy, but he ‘is unlikely to have assumed that reading the Poetics would make someone good at composing poetry’ (Heath 1996, xi). Similarly, Bordwell’s work on film narration and poetics is about empirical analysis of both film and related documentation (including screenplays) in order to understand the common stylistic features of past films. Like Aristotle, Bordwell makes no claim that this is how it should be; just that this is how it is (a powerful enough statement anyway).

A particular poetics of screenwriting exists only within a particular industrial and geo-cultural environment. It is the rationalization 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. The questions then are not about how we acquire a full understanding of those poetics in order to apply them to our personal screenwriting practice; but how the system works to create a particular kind of text, and how it has come to be that way.

A poetics of screenwriting is usually taken as essentialist; the basis for the explanation of how something works. A poetics, such as Aristotle’s, is taken as a statement of what is; it has authority and can point to material, empirical evidence for what it says – that these artefacts have been created, in general, in this way, using these principles and with these commonalities. An empirically researched and careful analysis of film production will inevitably produce a clear statement about how films have been constructed – in a particular place and time, and in ways seen as common across the sample – so the very identity of something like a screenplay is based on what is known, and what is already past.

However, screenwriters and those others involved in developing screen ideas naturally want to use a poetics as a guide for future work, as a set of notes on how to conceptualize and develop the idea for a screenwork. It is reasonable to think that a poetics of screenwriting for film or television is a good place to start, not least because the claim of a poetics is that the audience has also understood the screenwork in this way. Any departure from these ‘principles’, it is implied, runs the risk of losing the viewer. The power of a poetics is in the establishment of a status quo, a vehicle recognizable to the writer, the reader and the viewer, which is used to carry new content. For the screenwriter, a poetics is an aid to constructing that vehicle; wheels that do not need to be re-invented. The question then is (to complete this mechanistic metaphor) what kind of vehicle is this, and what can it do – or not do?³ Whether or not we should use a poetics in this way is a rather pointless question; those who create new work will certainly ask, ‘how have other such works been constructed before?’

But scholarship in screenwriting studies has come to recognize the limitations of studying only the ‘how’, especially when a body of popular literature then assumes that this is the correct way to do it in future. It is clearly important to also ask, ‘why has it been done this way?’; a question that raises yet more questions. What is also insufficient is a focus only on the written script; much more is shared than a paper document, however central. A screenwriting poetics becomes a full study of the totality of the process (instead of a statement of beliefs in an orthodox practice) when we consider fully what is shared – the screen idea.

‘How it works’ also depends on knowing what ‘it’ is, and even if we move away from the notion of establishing and studying a fixed text or ur-text, and towards ideas and theories of multiple versions, and of theories of collaboration and socialization, as Steven Price has noted (2010, 100), it’s not just about establishing a more complex text as a benchmark. We also need to relate any such textual analysis to an understanding of the conventions of screenwriting as they apply at that time and in that place; not just the orthodoxy, but the place of the orthodox within the more general doxa of practice.

A poetics of screenwriting cannot address only craft skills, nor can it attempt to isolate ‘general principles’. We need to consider general beliefs (as the discourse), individual beliefs (in informing their judgements and their actions), the institutions (which structure the work to be done) and the evidence of all this in the available texts. So, if the question is not about a ‘quest for the principles’, but a quest for what people believe are the principles and how they then use them, can we establish something of how this more complex process works, and why?

The screen idea

The ‘screen idea’ is a key concept in this book.⁴ It is a simple notion; a label for the singular project that people are working on, however they define it. It is the focus of the practice of screenwriting, whether mainstream or not. It is what you, as the writer, think you’re writing, but of course it does not exist except as an imaginary concept. It is a term which names what is being striven for, even while that goal cannot be seen or shared exactly. The goal of the concrete never arrives – as the screenwork develops, each draft script becomes one more fixed version of the screen idea. The final film – the screenwork – is another such version.

The screen idea has multiple possibilities, even if it is written down and specified in great detail by those developing it. It is usually described in writing, in standardized forms, but it need not be. It is usually shared and developed verbally by several people, according to appropriate norms and assumptions, but again it could be developed entirely by one person on their own. I have previously defined the screen idea as follows:

Any notion held by one or more people of a singular concept (however complex), which may have conventional shape or not, intended to become a screenwork, whether or not it is possible to describe it in written form or by other means.

This links the major approaches to screenwriting study; the practices, the individual and the text. The value of this term is that it allows reference to a singularity (such as a film), without specifying pre-conditions for the existence of that singularity. The only rules are those which have been set by the conditions of production, at that time and in that place. A new singularity exists when those who name it decide it is new – one screen idea is abandoned in favour of another. The ‘screen idea’ is a conceit, a way of talking about a potential screenwork, not a concrete screenwork.

The screen idea is invisible, but it is possible to focus on its appearance at different ‘moments’. Despite its intangibility, the behaviour of those around it – who share it, shape it, describe and discuss it – gives it some kind of visibility. Development of a screen idea usually occurs within pre-set parameters of norms, orthodoxies and institutions, and is subject to social and cultural conditions of production, including the exercise of individual power and of collaborative behaviour.

The screen idea exists in the minds of all those involved in its production (screenwriter, producer, director and others), though of course it can never be exactly the same idea and it will never be complete. It can, however, be discussed in terms common to the shared understandings of this group; and these may emanate from the beliefs, the practices and conventions of those producing the film, and from the habitus and dispositions of those who discuss it. The screen idea can be recorded, formally or informally, though it need not be; and, as film-making is a dynamic process, the screen idea undergoes change throughout this process. The screenplay is one record of the shared screen idea, re-drafted in stages as the collaboration proceeds, a location for, and partial description of that shared idea, representing a framework within which others will work. As a concept whose essence is impossible to describe in toto, the screen idea exists only as the focus, at a given moment, of a dynamic and collectivized thought process.

The view that a text is shared between writer and reader in this way is familiar in narrative theory. Wolfgang Iser described the literary work as existing somewhere between two poles: the artistic (created by the author) and the aesthetic (a realization accomplished by the reader). Significantly, Iser referred to ‘picturing’ the text, anticipation and retrospection, and the gaps in the text which allow the use of imagination (Iser 1974, 274–94). A text of the screen idea – a script – requires the participation of a reader in similar ways. Reader–response theory has included discussion of the governing of the reader’s response by the codes of a cultural community (Jonathan Culler) and membership of an interpretive community (Stanley Fish). In screenwriting, the immediate community of those involved in working on it interpret and contribute to its meaning and development.

The screen idea concept helps in screenwriting research, because it acts as a central imaginary which can be viewed from different perspectives, like a crystal with several facets. It does not need to be considered as a specific screen idea; just that it acts as the purpose of screenwriting activity. The crystal has been used previously in discussions on research methodology, as a metaphor, to support the view that some types of research may need insights into several aspects, but not to claim that this provides a definitive, unchanging and necessarily complete view. Laurel Richardson, talking of less-than-fixed ‘texts’ such as dance or performance, recognizes the value of this metaphor.

[The crystal, as central imaginary] provides us with a deepened, complex, thoroughly partial, understanding of the topic. Paradoxically, we know more and doubt what we know. Ingeniously, we know there is always more to know.

(Laurel Richardson 2000, 934)

This metaphor unifies, while allowing us to view facets separately. It reduces the danger of a disconnect between research methods. It encourages not only sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theoretical Approaches
• 3. The Orthodox Poetics of Screenwriting
• 4. The Real World, and Screenwriting as Work
• 5. The Screen Idea Work Group: Emmerdale
• 6. The Individual, Their Creativity and the Poetics
• 7. Hitchcock’s Forgotten Screenwriter: Eliot Stannard
• 8. God Is in the Details: The Text Object
• 9. The Poetics of the Screen Idea: Nostromo
• 10. Screenwriting Studies
• Appendices
• References
• Index