Inclusive Screenwriting for Film and Television

Jess King

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000584240
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Categoría: Film & Video

Breaking down the traditional structures of screenplays in an innovative and progressive way, while also investigating the ways in which screenplays have been traditionally told, this book interrogates how screenplays can be written to reflect the diverse life experiences of real people.

Author Jess King explores how existing paradigms of screenplays often exclude the very people watching films and TV today. Taking aspects such as characterization, screenplay structure, and world-building, King offers ways to ensure your screenplays are inclusive and allow for every person's story to be heard. In addition to examples ranging from Sorry to Bother You to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, four case studies on Killing Eve, Sense8, I May Destroy You, and Vida ground the theoretical work in practical application. The book highlights the ways in which screenplays can authentically represent and uplift the lived experiences of those so often left out of the narrative, such as the LGBTQIA+ community, women, and people of color. The book addresses a current demand for more inclusive and progressive representation in film and TV and equips screenwriters with the tools to ensure their screenplays tell authentic stories, offering innovative ways to reimagine current screenwriting practice towards radical equity and inclusion.

This is a timely and necessary book that brings the critical lenses of gender studies, queer theory, and critical race studies to bear on the practice of screenwriting, ideal for students of screenwriting, aspiring screenwriters, and industry professionals alike.

Part I Towards a Critique of Screenwriting

1Screenplay Manuals and the Homogenization of the Imagination

DOI: 10.4324/9781003170310-3

At the root of Hollywood’s representation crisis lies a failure of imagination. This failure is the result of over a century of severe constraints on who tells, sells, and green-lights screen stories. If imagination is, in part, the process whereby we “picture” or posit ideas, people, and worlds—in order to better understand our own—then considering the commonalities of who routinely writes, directs, stars in, and profits from the bulk of our culture’s vast creative output becomes important. To be more specific: when “most working writers emerge from the middle and upper middle classes; most are white; and the majority, most strikingly from the 1930s through the 1970s, have been men,”¹ it invites questions about the investments and particularities of their perspective and how those commitments impact the output of their imaginations. How, for instance, might we be curtailing the cultural imaginary when such a limited segment of the population defines how stories are told, what characters are centered, who is deemed a villain, who a sidekick, and who a hero? And yet, too often, calls for diversity of perspective get sidelined by critiques rooted in the mire of “identity politics”² where identity is relegated to the realm of the personal and shunned from public discussion. True diversity of thought, it is argued, comes through transcendent differences in ideas, not differences in lived experience, as if lived experience, along with one’s relationships to others, to history, and to place don’t impact how one responds to, theorizes about, or imagines the world. One of the central tenets of this book is that such claims are a ruse: ignorant at best, disingenuous at worst. Simply put, point of view matters. A person’s lived, material reality shapes their perceptions, perspectives, and imaginations in countless ways. When I argue that Hollywood suffers from a failure of imagination—in an industry that prides itself on superlative creativity, no less—I am not suggesting that there is no imagination, but rather that we’ve restricted the possibilities for storytelling by only allowing certain voices to speak on behalf of humanity. Confining storytelling in this way yields normative perspectives that determine not only who populates screen stories, but the rules governing them, which, in turn, impacts our understandings of one another and the world. When we limit the storytellers, we limit the stories, and when we limit the stories, we limit the possibilities for life. Thus, to begin the investigation into how screenwriting paradigms perpetuate normative values, in this chapter I explore how a white male perspective came to inform the creative logic and ethos underlying screenwriting norms.

When analyzing practices that encode meaning into a film, perspective is most commonly situated in relation to how the screenwriter develops the worldview of the protagonist. Though the screenwriter imbues the characters within the screenplay text with particular backstories, identities, and perspectives, the point of view, life history, and historical context of the screenwriter is rarely examined in terms of how it impacts the story they are writing or how their attachments, investments, and ideological commitments are conveyed via the characters, themes, and worlds they create. Even more rare is an analysis of the perspectives and bias contained within the screenwriting paradigms or the people who most often promote them. Instead, the rules of screenwriting—like most elements of craft and aesthetics—tend to be seen as universal and point-of-viewless.

The penchant for universalizing and naturalizing the rules is not unique to screenwriting. The belief that the laws governing a system exist outside of the specific context and people who created those laws forms the basis of entrenched structural systems that range from economics and philosophy, to medicine and law. Within the field of legal studies, for example, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work establishing intersectionality as a framework for looking at how multiple vectors of marginalization work in concert to oppress different people in multiple and particular ways is grounded in one of critical race theory’s central tenets: that institutions—despite claims to ultimate and universal authority—are not neutral. In fact, within legal analysis and practice, Crenshaw demonstrates that “what is understood as objective or neutral is often the embodiment of a white middle-class world view.”³ The consequences of this within the criminal justice system are as vast as they are damaging, as we see Black people and Latinos incarcerated at extremely high rates while their white counterparts often are exempt from the law altogether.⁴ When we unquestioningly accept that the rules are objective and neutral—whether legal, economic, creative, or otherwise—we unwittingly support dominance hierarchies by glossing over the particular consciousnesses, perspectives, and lived histories of those making the rules and the way that the rules are designed to protect the rule-makers. In essence, we deny the fact that one’s subjectivity is created within a particular context and is, in part, constructed through the very identities that notions of “objectivity” seek to conceal. As Crenshaw writes, people “view the world through a consciousness, constructed in part through race. The appearance of perspectivelessness is simply the illusion by which the dominant perspective is made to appear neutral, ordinary, and beyond question.”⁵ To expand on this claim through Crenshaw’s intersectional framework, we can say that our consciousness is constructed through not only race, but gender, class, age, ability, sexuality, citizenship, and more,⁶ and, in terms of consciousness-construction, this is just as true for those with dominant subject positions as for marginalized subjects. In effect, we elide the specificity of cis, white, able-bodied men under the rubric of the universal human, which erases the fact they, too, have particular consciousnesses, perspectives, and imaginations shaped by their identities, histories, and experiences. How, then, did screenwriting norms become universalized and entrenched, and what are the implications of obscuring the particularities of the men writing the rules?

The Development and Allure of the Screenwriting Manual

One way that the white male perspective came to inform the standard screenwriting norms that are widely accepted by professional screenwriters, networks, studio executives, screenwriting degree programs, and the WGA is through how-to manuals. Peddling universal and “perspectiveless” principles of “good” storytelling, how-to guides and advice for screenwriters in trade magazines have been an essential part of Hollywood screenwriting practices since the early days of film. Widely circulated and containing advice about how to write a script that sells, the original screenwriting manuals were largely—though not entirely—written by white men, which reflects the dominant demographic of screenwriters throughout Hollywood history. Like so many of Hollywood’s creative practices, screenplay manuals straddle the line between the goals of the artist, with their concerns about craft, and the goals of business, with their concerns for efficiency and profit. In terms of craft, early guides like How to Write Moving Picture Plays, by William Lewis Gordon (1913) and How to Write Photoplays, by John Emerson and Anita Loos (1920) were often based on similar guides on playwriting. As screenwriting studies scholar Steven Maras writes on early how-to guides,

[t]he handbook writers of the day thus found themselves drawing—with differing degrees of success and rigour—on classical notions of drama and rearticulating them in the context of the motion picture for an audience that may never have encountered them before.⁷

Though the focus on craft in the original manuals arose, in part, to help aspiring screenwriters understand a developing and changing medium, they also “serve[d] as a platform for the construction and teaching of scenario writing and [became] a zone of intelligibility and normativity.”⁸ While early films were short enough that scripts consisted of simple lists of scenarios, norming the screenplay became necessary as films grew from one-reel to multi-reel productions. Increases in film length led to increases in story complexity, which led to narrative and budgetary concerns as shooting days increased and production expanded. As film historian and theoretician Janet Staiger writes,

with longer films, production times lengthened into weeks rather than days and the number of scenes multiplied per reel. The necessity to maintain continuity, verisimilitude, and narrative dominance and clarity for the five- and six-reel film while keeping down costs and production time intensified the need for a more detailed script.⁹

This resulted in a kind of efficiency-model of screenwriting that favored specific formatting and structural requirements. In terms of formatting, precise rules formed about margins, spacing, font type, and size, as well as the way character names, sound effects, and slug lines are formatted. Courier 12, for example, became the only permissible font for a screenplay because—as a fixed-pitch font¹⁰—one page of text translates roughly into one minute of film, which makes things like scheduling and budgeting more manageable. Alongside formatting, rules about narrative economy and clarity developed in ways that made every scene count, essentially eliminating narrative excess as a cost-saving measure. While the history of screenwriting and its relationship with the screenplay manual is far more complex,¹¹ what is essential for the purposes of this study is to understand that the role of screenwriting manuals has been to codify and standardize screenwriting practices while promising access to a system whose gatekeepers are “interested in ‘full profit maximization.’ ”¹²

Hollywood’s capitalist inclinations are no secret. In fact, they are often a point of pride. Such self-mythologizing about the studio system’s capitalist prowess, however, can obscure some of the underlying mechanisms that connect the profit motive with creative practices and how the desire for a “hit” movie or television series creates an environment that seeks to replicate and build upon prior successes, with success being narrowly defined as profitable and, secondarily, award-winning. Thus, to more fully understand the development and codification of standard screenwriting paradigms, an investigation of what media scholar John Caldwell calls Hollywood’s “critical industrial practices” is in order. This approach acknowledges two essential points that will be fruitful in this inquiry: 1) as a cultural industry, Hollywood theorizes about itself, employing “interpretive schemes” about the work that it does, which makes it an incredibly self-reflexive industry, and 2) this self-reflexivity occurs in all aspects of production from the technical to “professional interactions” and includes, but is not limited to, “general framing paradigms that writers and producers use to conceptualize and develop screen content for film and television”¹³ Caldwell’s work asks those seeking to understand how studio practices produce culture to look more closely at “the culture of film/video production.”¹⁴ By way of example, genres developed through a system of trial and error in what Rick Altman calls the “Producer’s Game,” wherein producers and studio heads break down financially lucrative films into their component “successful” elements, study those elements, and then reproduce them in different arrangements in new films, all with the goal of replicating financial success. For Altman, this approach to filmmaking puts “studio personnel in the place of the critic,”¹⁵ a highly analytical and theoretical mode that constra...