Screenwriting in a Digital Era

Kathryn Millard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137319104
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Screenwriting in a Digital Era examines the practices of writing for the screen from early Hollywood to the new realism. Looking back to prehistories of the form, Kathryn Millard links screenwriting to visual and oral storytelling around the globe, and explores new methods of collaboration and authorship in the digital environment.

1

The Picture Storytellers: From Pad to iPad

The history of screenwriting needs to be tackled afresh in our digital era. A media archaeological approach seeks to find the new in the old, sifting through the evidence and making connections between previously disparate fields. Fractures, or moments of change, are thus especially significant.¹ It is in this spirit that I have approached sketching an expanded history of screenwriting. Digital technologies and frames of mind have fundamentally shifted what we mean by writing. We now write with images, sounds and gestures, as well as text. In addition, the digitisation of books, records, images and sounds allows us more ready access to a wealth of information and ideas. Back through the centuries and in far-flung places around the globe. In our time of flux and change, my aim is to begin to reconnect screenwriting to a long and rich tradition of picture storytelling. Practices of writing with pictures that stretch back to ancient India, China and the Middle East. According to Phillip Pullman, ‘Like jazz, storytelling is an art of performance, and writing is performance, too.’²

My quest to understand more about digital screenwriting began, paradoxically, with a journey in search of the reincarnations of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. How had this distinctive screen figure been adapted in different cultures? My search led me to Europe, the United States, Japan, China, South America and finally, India. It led me from the Chaplin fever of the years of the First World War to a small town in the Kutch Desert. In Adipur, in a remote and dusty corner of north-west India, the local Charlie Circle throw a birthday party each year to honour their guru. I wrote and directed an essay film called The Boot Cake (2008)³ about being invited to bring the birthday cake to this party. Later, I realised that I had not travelled far enough. There was much more to discover about why people in cities and small towns around the globe were so receptive – not only to Chaplin’s Tramp – but to silent cinema. There was much more to discover, too, about screenwriting (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Boot Cake, 2008, Charlie Productions

Mohammed Charlie

Noor Mohammed Memon is often named as the first comic star of Hindi cinema. He grew up in a village but soon dropped out of school to take a job mending umbrellas. To the despair of his father, Mohammed fell in love with the movies and decided to become an actor. Enthralled by Chaplin’s Tramp, Mohammed copied his hero’s mannerisms and costume right down to his trademark moustache. Making his way to Bombay, he changed his name to Mohammed Charlie and forged a career in Hindi musicals.

Visiting India’s National Film Archive at Pune in 2005, I threaded a reel of brittle celluloid on to a Steinbeck editing bench. I settled in to watch Sanjog (1943),⁴ one of Mohammed Charlie’s early film comedies. The film depicted Mohammed Charlie as an Indian version of the Tramp. A middle-class family welcomes him into their home. They believe he is a wealthy man interested in marrying their daughter. Mistaken identity leads to one comic mishap after another. Mohammed Charlie’s performance is particularly expressive. It owes as much to the Hindi musical as Hollywood. In one scene, safely out of the earshot of his potential in-laws, Mohammed Charlie bursts into song. What is he to do? He gazes up at the heavens and wrings his hands. Pigeons on a railing form a kind of poor man’s chorus, nodding their heads in time to the music. Eventually, the Tramp is sprung. Denounced as an intruder by the middle-class family, he is turfed out – and into the gutter.

In this film, Mohammed Charlie riffed on Chaplin’s The Idle Class (1921),⁵ embellishing the story with his own observations of 1940s Bombay society. He drew on India’s distinctive performance styles, fluidly shifting between drama, dance and song. Amongst the comedian’s influences, too, was a long line of awaara or drifter characters in Indian drama and literature. Looking even further back, as we shall see, the picture showmen of India who can be traced to the sixth century B.C.⁶ Like them, Mohammed Charlie improvised from a situation and a sequence of images. In the process, he adapted a well-known story to local conditions.

In Hindi cinema, story does not necessarily occupy a central position. Rather, song and dance sequences, dialogue, fights and romance all have a part to play. Many scripts give a nod to myths and legends. Writers and filmmakers in India have often successfully incorporated elements from other cinematic traditions into their own freewheeling narratives.⁷ Such elements are not always subsumed to the needs of a single overarching story. Instead, balancing different emotions and elements in the mix is considered part of a writer’s skill.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that screenplay guru Syd Field’s visit to Mumbai in 2007 to spread the good news on story and three-act structure was not uniformly well received. Field presented a cut down version of his seminar to an invited audience at the Taj Hotel. It included a number of India’s leading directors and filmmakers. The trouble with Bollywood was all those songs and dance sequences which kept getting in the way of the story, said Field. ‘What I see here is that . . . in the middle of something intense that is going on we break into a song and dance which is wonderful and I love it but it does nothing to further the story at all,’ he said.⁸ Not everyone returned after the lunch break. Had the visiting American even watched any Indian cinema, asked some of the industry representatives? Did he know that Indian filmmakers produced movies for huge local audiences – as well as the Indian diaspora around the globe?

Charles Dickens is sometimes referred to as the ‘father of screenwriting’. (In part, due to the wealth of adaptations that his novels inspired in early cinema and the fact that he generated many of his stories as serials.) Charlie Chaplin, who mostly improvised his films (at least, until the coming of sound), could equally be described as one of the founders of screenwriting. While he committed rough versions of his stories to paper, Chaplin wrote on film. Until he made The Great Dictator (1940),⁹ Chaplin worked from story outlines, which were often dictated to a typist. Throughout the production and editing of his films, Chaplin elaborated and embellished on these sketches and ideas. It was not uncommon for him to film individual takes hundreds of times. As the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky observed, Chaplin’s scripts were written in the process of shooting films. ‘Chaplin’s gestures and films are conceived not in the word, nor in the drawing, but in the flashing of black and white shadows.’¹⁰ The cinematic sequences for which the performer and director is best known, such as the dancing bread rolls in The Gold Rush (1925),¹¹ were generated through extended improvisations on set.

Oral traditions

These two Charlies – Mohammed Charlie and Charlie Chaplin – riffed on the performance and storytelling traditions of Europe and India, respectively. They were both migrants who adapted their stories and performances to meet the needs of the United States’ and India’s fledgling film industries. Paul Schrader described screenwriting as a part of an oral tradition. Screenplays belong to a storytelling tradition rather than literature. Tracing this lineage, Adam Ganz proposed oral storytelling, and in particular the ballad, as a useful model for screenwriters:

Oral storytelling not only stretches back much further than a European dramatic literary tradition but it is more improvisatory, adaptable and collaborative as opposed to the model of the screenplay-as-a-text, envisaged as separate from the film which arises from it.¹²

Ultimately, audiences are affected by what they see and what is vivid. It is not especially important whether that vividness is achieved through reenacted drama or narrated drama.¹³ The visual component of oral storytelling relies upon the audience to fill in the gaps and reconstruct images for themselves.

Screenwriting, I would like to suggest, is a form of writing with images. The proliferation of screens and digital composing practices has made improvisation, adaptation and the hybridisation of art forms and genres even more central to writing. The origins of screenwriting, as we shall discover, can be traced back nearly 3,000 years to the picture storytellers and reciters. Those performers’ stories of everyday life, war, news and reportage, strange and wondrous tales share many preoccupations with contemporary screen stories.

Although often reduced to a set of rules, screenwriting is a living art constantly in transition. After all, stories serve the needs of individuals and particular communities. As sociologist Arthur Frank says, stories give our lives shape and meaning. The role of stories is to ‘give form – temporal and spatial orientation, coherence, meaning and especially boundaries – to lives that inherently lack form’.¹⁴ Stories are not sets of rules. We live with stories, adapting them as we go. Stories bring people together – and keep them apart. A renewed engagement with screen stories devised with and for particular communities is, I believe, one of the defining characteristics of digital cinema. But let me piece together some of the evidence for an expanded notion of writing for the screen.

It begins with a pilgrimage. This particular pilgrimage was undertaken by Victor Mair, a scholar of Chinese language and literature. Mair’s story takes us from the sixth century to the present. It takes us from China to Japan, India, the Middle East, Europe and beyond in search of storytellers who used pictures to breathe life into stories. They include picture reciters, shadow playwrights, slide-projection showmen and the writers, performers and directors of early cinema. As Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye’.¹⁵ In my view, some of the seeds of contemporary digital screenwriting are contained within the many modes of storytelling with pictures that Mair uncovered from the past.

Transformation texts

In the 1950s, Victor Mair set out to trace the evolution of picture recitation in China. Popular stories known as pien-wen (or transformation texts) date back to the Tang period (618–907). They were the first vernacular narratives in Chinese literature. Many of the picture storytellers referred to a specific place on their paintings and narrated the events depicted. They said: ‘please look at the place where this event occurred and how it goes’.¹⁶ An approach that bears striking similarities to those used today by Court 13, the filmmaking collective responsible for the critical hit Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012).¹⁷ But more on that later.

As a popular art, picture storytelling was underrepresented in the Chinese historical records. In the early twentieth century, scholars who discovered a number of pien-wen manuscripts believed they were notes used by Buddhist monks for lectures and sermons. More recent research, though, showed them to be the prompts used by lay storytellers who travelled from village to village. The manuscripts developed from an oral version of storytelling with pictures called chaun-pien. It drew on both religious and secular tales. Artists painted scenes from the stories to be told on paper, silk or wall-paintings which were then used during performances. The term chaun-pien literally meant transformation. In part, this referred to the powers of the Buddhist figures that were often represented in the stories. Less literally, though, a transformation occurred when the picture reciters brought their stories to life through their performances and the use of images.

In one form of such storytelling that Mair found in the Qing period (1644–1912), picture reciters collected strange tales and created pictures to accompany them. Just as now, war stories were particularly popular. Picture reciters made their way up and down streets, calling out stories and carrying bundles of pictures for residents to buy. This form of storytelling was similar to that practiced by the bankel-sang, or benchsingers in Germany at around the same time.¹⁸ Deciding to look further afield, Mair discovered that picture storytelling was not confined to China but also existed in Japan, Iran, Tibet, Turkey, Italy, Germany and other countries. Mair eventually traced the Chinese form of performing with pictures and scrolls back to sixth century B.C. in India. Picture storytelling had gradually spread west from India to Persia and China and north into Europe.¹⁹

Pao-chuan

On a research trip to Kansu in north-west China in the mid-1980s, Mair discovered, too, that a more recent version of picture storytelling survived there. Prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, when pao-chuan went underground due to its connections to Buddhism, picture recitation performances were popular during fairs and festivals. The storytellers were often itinerants who travelled from village to village and performed in exchange for food and gifts. Rolling out painted cloths, they pointed to the pictures as they told stories. The multiple versions of...