The Status of Screenplay Authors and Value the Surface Presentation on Film - Essay Example

?The Screenplay, Imagism and Modern Aesthetics The article by Boon on “The Screenplay, Imagism and Modern Aesthetics is a robust defence of the screenplay as a form of literature which has, until now, been “ignored and abandoned”2 by critics and scholars. Boon cites the main reason for this neglect as the genre’s interstitial nature, which simply means that it stands in between genres, and indeed also in between the author and the finished product, which is the film or television program. It is simply a fact of life that the public tend to view films and television programs in their finished state, complete with the contributions of actors and directors, and unless this finished product is a re-working of a famous novel or theatre piece, the writer of the screenplay tends not to be noticed. Screenplays are rarely read outside the confines of the film world and academe, and they have been very little studied. Boon says this means that we should take care before we judge the genre because the facts are simply not adequately researched. The origins of screenplays are traced back to the early years of the twentieth century when cinema was just taking off. Prevailing ideas in the arts like imagism and an emerging modernism are suggested as the most suitable foundations for studying screenplays. Poetic works are cited as comparable to screenplays because they use “concrete images in a direct style that compacts the information into a tight rhetorical presentation.”3 Two further principles of imagism are suggested as belonging also to the screenplay, namely “1) the establishment of new rhythms and 2) a focus on common speech. 4 Because screenplays must be performable, they must remain very close to experience, and Boon sees their narrative rhythm, and also the realism of the dialogue, matching modern fiction and poetics. On the format and layout of screenplays, Boon notes the rigid requirement for speaker name, colon, and spoken text in a screenplay, and argues that in novels and poems a similar approach is taken, usually but not always using quotation marks, and sometimes being omitted when the context makes it clear who is speaking. Boon notes these significantly different graphical methodologies, but somewhat perversely stresses what the two have in common: “Despite these differences, practical necessity guides the marking of dialogue in both modern prose and in the screenplay.”5 In one area Boon concedes that screenplays and novels or poems are different and that is in the impossibility of directly presenting introspection and psychological machinations in a screenplay. The use of symbolism, or of a rather intrusive narrative voiceover are the only techniques that allow the screenplay author to cover this important dimension. Boon finishes the article with a repetition of his main thesis: “Like any other more widely acknowledged literary forms (fiction, poetry, essay, drama), the screenplay is, in the final assessment, a creative literary form, and subject to the same historical and theoretical influences as any other creative writing.”6 There are some serious points in this article about the differences between a written text such as a screenplay and a motion picture which exists in film or nowadays also DVD form. It is certainly true that of all the participants in the making of a film the creator of the screenplay is often the least visible. Actors are used in all the publicity ventures, and the director usually takes part in interviews and is cited with the film title in all the catalogues. Authors of screenplays receive a mention the credits, and appear to receive prizes in their own special Oscar category, but beyond that, they mostly do not attain much public notice or fame. In another more lengthy work on the subject of screenplays, Boon reveals his own particular bias: “The lack of critical attention paid to screenplays has not been lost on screenwriters, many of whom expected screenwriters to achieve more status than they actually have.” 7 The problem that he debates is not so much one of the importance of screenplays in the making of films, but of the status of writers, and all that goes with that. A factor which may contribute to the invisibility of the screenplay in American literary culture is the way that American film making traditions have evolved: “Back in the 1970s this was noted as a difference between American and European filmmaking: “Most foreign art films are conceived by the director, who is the main or sole author of the script, whereas American movies are apt to be a team effort and to be directed by someone other than the author.”8 An example of this can be seen in the famous Italian screenplay author and director Michelangelo Antonioni. He was the creator of the original screenplay and then when he made the actual film, he worked further on the text of the screenplay. He explains, for example, how he changed certain details of the way that the characters move around the set, and he cut three lines of dialogue as well, when he was actually in the process of filming: “Why did I change it? Why, because when the scene was composed we had no idea what Piero’s house would have been like, so that the screenplay was of value to me only as a psychological note. And even then, only to a certain point… the changes were suggested to me by the actual circumstances at time of shooting.”9 This insight into the way that the filming influences the screenplay, just as the screenplay influences the film, raises questions about just what the screenplay is, in the eyes of the director and in the eyes of the writer. It is clear that the director uses a screenplay as a basis, but feels free to a greater or lesser extent to adapt and change what the screenplay contains. The use of improvisation is a technique which allows director and actors also to depart from the basis that the screenplay provides. In this respect films are not like plays, and there is a problem with making definitive statements about the actual written text of a film. Is it the original screenplay? Or is it the words and stage directions actually used in the final cut of the film? Although there are structural and even graphical similarities between a play and a screen play, they function quite differently in the marketplace for books and readers. Plays can can be bought and read by readers and they are designed to be used again and again by producers and to be re-enacted many times and new ways: “Whereas plays can work hermeneutically in a circle of birth and rebirth, screenplays, post-event, will always figure as a referent to another kind of text entirely.”10 William Horne argues that screenplays deserve to be examined both as independent constructs and as part of the process of filming: “There will be no substantial study of the script, until and unless it is afforded its own aesthetic existence – not merely as a set of interim production notes or as a substitute film – but as a separate work intended for the cinema.” 11 There is a sense in which this is true, especially for academics and those who want to study the way that a film is put together. In some ways, however, this destroys the unique attributes of a film as it exists in its final stage. Studying only the written screenplay, without the moving image, and all the creative contributions of director and actors is like studying a dead body. The bones and flesh are all there, but there is no life to it, and the emotional content, in particular is completely absent. It is for this reason that the article by Boon misses the point somewhat. Cinema has brought the world some entirely new ways of narrating human interest stories. It is precisely the strength of the medium that no one person claims the glory of originating a film. If screenplays were to be studied on their own, without the film text, this would be an arid and pointless exercise. It is hard to imagine the ordinary public buying a screenplay to read it for pleasure. The truth of the matter is that cinema lives or dies on the quality of the finished product. This explains also why some of the re-makes of classic films turn out to be flops at the box office, and others turn out to be successes. The public will judge the finished product, and after the expense and trouble of producing a great film, the screenplay will receive its due portion of the praise. In conclusion, then, there is some merit in academics and students studying screenplays but there is neither a good reason for publishing screenplays in large volumes, nor a market for them. The only reason given by Boon is that this would enhance the status of screenplay authors, but sadly the world is not fair, and it will always value the surface presentation on film rather than the basic work that is done behind the scenes. Screenplay authors should be honoured to work with a talented team and should be satisfied with their share of the glory that rightly belongs to the whole collection of people who made the final film what it finally is. References Antonioni, Michelangelo. Screenplays. New York: Praeger, 1963. Boon, Kevin Alexander. “The Screenplay, Imagism, and Modern Aesthetics.” Literature/Film Quarterly 36 (4) (2008a), pp. 259-271. Boon, Kevin Alexander. Script Culture and the American Screenplay. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Horne, William. “See Shooting Script: Reflections on the Ontology of the Screenplay.” Literature/Film Quarterly 20 (1), (1992), pp. 48-54 Morsberger, Robert and Morsberger Katharine. “Screenplays as Literature: Bibliography and Criticism.” Literature/Film Quarterly 3 (1) (1975), pp. 45ff. O’Thomas, Mark. “Analysing the screenplay: A comparative approach,” in Jill Nelmes, (ed.) Analysing the Screenplay. New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 237-262. Read More