Screenwriting

Andrew Horton, Julian Hoxter

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813574356
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenwriting

 Screenwriters often joke that “no one ever paid a dollar at a movie theater to watch a screenplay.” Yet the screenplay is where a movie begins, determining whether a production gets the “green light” from its financial backers and wins approval from its audience. This innovative volume gives readers a comprehensive portrait of the art and business of screenwriting, while showing how the role of the screenwriter has evolved over the years.Reaching back to the early days of Hollywood, when moonlighting novelists, playwrights, and journalists were first hired to write scenarios and photoplays, Screenwriting illuminates the profound ways that screenwriters have contributed to the films we love. This book explores the social, political, and economic implications of the changing craft of American screenwriting from the silent screen through the classical Hollywood years, the rise of independent cinema, and on to the contemporary global multi-media marketplace. From The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) to Chinatown (1974), American Beauty (1999), and Lost in Translation (2003), each project began as writers with pen and ink, typewriters, or computers captured the hopes and dreams, the nightmares and concerns of the periods in which they were writing.As the contributors take us behind the silver screen to chronicle the history of screenwriting, they spotlight a range of key screenplays that changed the game in Hollywood and beyond. With original essays from both distinguished film scholars and accomplished screenwriters, Screenwriting is sure to fascinate anyone with an interest in Hollywood, from movie buffs to industry professionals. 

1

MACHINE TO SCREEN: THE EVOLUTION TOWARD STORY, 1895–1928

J. Madison Davis

The screenplay is such an essential part of the moviemaking process today that it is hard to imagine a period in which it was unnecessary. Yet, at the very beginning of motion pictures, there was no necessity for many of the logistical elements so important in filmmaking today, and though the process from idea to movie may be in many ways inefficient compared to the manufacture of other products, each step in any process involving a new technology must be created and institutionalized. The ancestor of all screenplays was probably a note scribbled on the back of an envelope and not even recognized by its author as an invention. With the gradual improvement of motion picture technology and the discovery of the most popular—that is, “moneymaking”—forms of the medium, the filmmaker’s scribble evolved into what was called a scenario and then to what we now call a screenplay.

From Hardware to Software

Long before the motion picture camera, there was a desire to animate the inanimate. In 1868, a paleolithic bone disc from the Dordogne was found. The opposite sides of the disc display different images. When spun, it creates the illusion of motion. A standing doe lies down, then stands, again and again. Movement is also believed to have been simulated in paleolithic caves by overlaying images that were made successively visible by firelight.¹ The motion of firelight against drawings of multiple legs could also create the illusion of bison running.² In China in about A.D. 180 Ting Huan invented a lamp with moving parts that simulated motion. When it was reinvented in 1833 it was called a zoetrope. The quest for moving images led to an alphabet soup of devices. The abracadabra names promised magic while invoking the wonders of Victorian science: the phenakistoscope (1841), the kineograph or “flip book” (1868), the praxinoscope or phantasmascope (1877), the zoopraxiscope (1879), the électrotachyscope (1887), and several others. The moving images created by these devices, however, were based on a single, repetitive idea—a horse trotting, a gentleman bowing, a couple eternally repeating a sexual movement. These images could be interesting, amusing, possibly mesmerizing, but certainly unable to hold a viewer’s interest for long.

Combining innovations such as the reciprocating shutter and the continuous roll of celluloid ultimately led to the assembly of a camera capable of recording sustained moving images. In 1888, Thomas Edison filed notice with the patent office, describing a device that would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”³ William Dickson, an employee, was assigned to assemble the device, and in 1891 Edison filed patents for his Kinetograph (camera) and Kinetoscope (a peep-hole viewer). The Kinetoscope held about fifty feet of looped film, improving the duration of the images, and the device created a need for films. Even so, it took many Kinetoscopes to harvest the public’s money.

The possibility of a single machine serving a larger audience had several inventors ahead of Edison. Louis Lumière is often credited with the first workable projector. The cinématographe, as the Lumière brothers called it, was a lightweight combination camera, developer, and projector, and the Lumières were the first to present projected photographic motion picture images to an audience in March 1895, La Sortie des usines Lumière á Lyon (Workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyons). A month later, Woodville Latham and his sons unveiled their Eidoloscope projector. William Dickson had given advice to the Lathams and soon left Edison to help form what became the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. In September 1895, C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat demonstrated a projector called the Phantoscope, which Edison Manufacturing agreed to build and produce films for, on the condition it be advertised as a new Edison invention, the Vitascope, which was subsequently unveiled in 1896. Edison later premiered a device of his own, the Projectoscope. Other competitors also offered projection systems, like the Biograph and the Kineopticon.⁴ As with the coming of any popular technology, manufacturers rushed in to grab the profits, and patent fights dragged on for years. Within less than two years the peepshow boom was replaced by a projection boom and films were regularly included in vaudeville shows.

In the initial phase of motion pictures, the novelty that a photograph had become animated was thrilling, interesting in itself. This made it simple to be a filmmaker. Buy a camera and film anything: carriages in the Bois de Boulogne, ships docking, trains pulling into stations. Get the film developed and sell copies to entrepreneurs needing something to project. Among the surviving films from Edison in 1891 is William Dickson raising his straw hat. Another shows men in boxing gloves moving their fists, but not really boxing. In a third, an athlete swings his Indian clubs. It was all interesting, even breathtaking. There was no reason to plan or plot. None of them lasted a minute. Soon, however, such films became monotonous. The familiarity of the no-longer-magical mechanism shifted the viewer’s attention to the content, and the device, initially miraculous, earned a shrug. Moving pictures had to become more than just a mechanical novelty. Manufacturers had to evolve the device into a need, and the only way to do that was through its content. Eventually, the content—like recorded music or software—became a greater source of income than the hardware that employed it. And furthermore these films became comparatively cheaper to produce.

Filmmakers sought more unusual or exotic things to film. Surviving Kinetoscope films from 1894 show a man sneezing and an athlete exercising with a rod, but then they elevate to the dancer Carmencita, the legendary Annie Oakley, Sioux and Japanese dancers, an Arab knife juggler, and a policeman’s slapstick chase of an acrobatic Chinese laundryman. This last film records a vaudeville act and suggests the future Keystone Kops comedies. By 1894, instead of men waving boxing gloves pointlessly, each of six rounds of a boxing match between Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing is advertised in the Edison catalog at $22.50, the 2011 equivalent of about $560 per round. Foreshadowing today’s pay-per-view, it was clearly successful. Another six-round fight between “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and Peter Courtney was arranged later that year. Portending YouTube, $10.00 (about $250 in 2011 dollars) that year got you a film of “Professor Weldon’s boxing cats.” In the progression of available product, one can see the filmmakers gradually expanding the potential of the medium, both artistically and financially.

Content Replaces the Novelty of Moving Pictures

In 1896, at the request of the New York World, May Irwin and John Rice reproduced their comic kiss from the hit stage comedy The Widow Jones. Irwin was described by one adoring critic: “Elevation to stardom has not changed her in any respect. She is as round, as blond, as innocent looking . . . and as blue-eyed as ever.”⁵ The Edison catalog described the forty-seven-second film thus: “They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time.”⁶ The most popular film of 1896 for Edison, it was reviled in editorials and engendered the first controversy about movie content. The guardians of morality reacted, as they usually do to new media, with alarm. One appalled critic commented, “Neither participant is physically attractive and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to beat when only life size. Magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over is absolutely disgusting.”⁷ Implicit in the attack upon The Kiss is the idea that the motion picture might actually have the power to affect society. What had once been merely a fascination with a mechanical marvel had evolved into taking film content with the seriousness previously reserved for spoken, staged, or printed content.

Violent content was viewed as much less reprehensible. As the early film historian Charles Musser points out, executions were still considered a form of entertainment in turn-of-the-century America.⁸ In 1895, Alfred Clark, who replaced Dickson as head of Edison’s filmmaking, re-created the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. This mini-costume drama shows the nobles watching as the executioner brings down his axe on Mary’s neck. Mary’s head drops off and is lifted for display. The coordination of the cut that produces the special effect of Mary’s head toppling was a major technical advance in moviemaking. (The capability of film to shock is obviously a selling point; Edison offered the Execution of Czolgosz [President’s McKinley’s assassin] only months after the event.) The commercial appeal of the horror of a beheading is significant, whether or not the viewer had ever heard of Mary Stuart. Even something as brief as this vignette requires complicated arrangements: assembling the actors, costuming them, and gathering the props. The development of screenwriting accompanied the more elaborate making of films.

Meanwhile, in France, parallel developments were hurtling forward. Georges Méliès claimed he independently discovered Clark’s technique when his camera jammed momentarily and the developed film revealed men changing into women and an omnibus into a hearse.⁹ Méliès’s playful imagination grasped the potential. Initially his films are mostly amusing tricks, although he also sold actualités, slices of life, like the Lumières and Edison. Méliès’s tricks, however, soon became more than tricks. As early as 1896, he created mini-dramas, as when a man fights with a giant insect in his hotel room, or his Christmas treat for that year, La Manoir du diable, which features a bat turning into Mephistopheles, who conjures creatures out of smoke and then does battle with two intruders, one of whom defeats him with a cross. In about three minutes, Méliès created the stock horror movie plot, with a beginning, middle, and end. What’s important to the development of the screenplay is that Méliès might have improvised all this with the costumes and sets available at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, which he had bought in 1888. However, his special effects had to be meticulously planned, stopping the camera, repositioning actors, and making sure that everything was in the same location and everyone holding the same pose. Méliès might well have kept all this in his head, but very little more complication was needed before it was necessary to create an initial schema of the film. In a rudimentary way filmmakers were inventing what would become a crucial step in the process of creating movies; they were inventing the screenplay.

A lot of ink has been spent trying to sort out who first invented the processes of making feature films, and we cannot know who first sketched out what producers would soon call a scenario. There isn’t even consistency in what constituted a scenario nor the terms “continuity script” or just “script,” all of which were often interchangeable. Sometimes a scenario is simply a one-paragraph summary of the film, something akin to what we call a “treatment” or even a “pitch,” but as films lengthened, the brevity became inadequate for efficient production. The longer narrative forms to evolve from brief moving pictures had been foreseen by several early pioneers as a dream of the medium’s potential. As William Dickson stated in 1894, “Preparation have long been on foot to extend the number of actors and to increase the stage facilities with a view to the presentation of an entire play, set in its appropriate frame. . . . No scene, however animated and extensive, but will eventually be within reproductive power.”¹⁰

Two comic films released in early 1900 by Edison advanced the shift toward story. In Why Jones Discharged His Clerks, two clerks are playing cards. Jones, the boss, startles them, so they pretend to work, and Jones sits behind a screen reading the newspaper. A lady (using the term loosely) enters the office and is escorted to Jones. Behind the screen, Jones and she begin making woo. The clerks, in attempting to peek at this, knock the screen down on Jones, who furiously throws them out of the office. In Why Mrs. Jones Got a Divorce, a busy cook urges a boy to leave the kitchen. Mr. Jones comes home from a trip, greets the cook affectionately, and she embraces him, leaving flour handprints on his back. The boy, meanwhile, crosses the kitchen and presumably alerts Mrs. Jones, who marches into the kitchen. Jones denies a relationship with the cook, but Mrs. Jones sees the handprints. He falls on his knees to plead his case, but Mrs. Jones dumps a bowl of flour on his head and throws out both him and the cook. The Jones films are a little more than a minute long, shorter than most television skits. However, each has a rudimentary plot with a beginning, middle, and an end. Each has rudimentary characterization. The choreography of characters on the screen is complex as they negotiate the tables, doors, and screen in the first film, and the kitchen table, doors, and each other in the second.

In the next year, Edison followed up with similar humorous films of “Uncle Josh” (played by Charles Manley). In 1902, there is even Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, in which he mistakes a kissing scene for reality and tries to stop it. The movies, barely a decade old, are already self-referencing, counting on the audience’s knowledge of previous films. It is clear that, as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth, the content of film became more complex and projectors extended the time limits imposed by the Kinetoscope loop. Yet the nature of that future content was momentarily uncertain. For a couple of years, filmmakers had ground out mostly the same sorts of films, gag pieces and actualités or re-creations. After making nearly 1,500 films, Louis Lumière lost interest and famously made one of history’s worst predictions: “The cinema is an invention without a ...