The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development 3030822338, 9783030822330

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction
References
‘Behind the Scenes’ of Script Development
The Feedback Phenomenon: Dealing with Multiple Voices in the Development of Original Screenplays
Introduction
Prologue: The Story of a Story
Act I: The Concept of the “Screen Idea Work Group”
The Multi-voiced Feedback Setting
Act II: The Westerdals Project in Script Development Research
The Pilot, 2017/18: “Artistic Integrity and the External Voice”
Creative Tools
Challenges Triggered by External Feedback
Pilot Results
Act III: Examining the Feedback Phenomenon
“Feedback Science”: Toward a Model for Feedback Analysis
Feedback Science Training
References
Script Readers as Gatekeepers: Demystifying Processes of Script Coverage
Introduction
What a Top Sheet Looks like
Professional Roundtable
Who is Reading What and Why?
At What Stage is a Script When It Crosses the reader’s Desk?
The Art of Script Coverage
Writing the Logline
How Important Are Format, Presentation, Grammar, Spelling?
What Happens When a Positive Coverage Moves a Project Further into Development?
Screenplay Competitions
Is the Role of the Script Reader Markedly Different When Evaluating Work in a Competition?
The “gatekeeper” Question and the Power of a “pass”
Conclusion
References
A Creative Pilgrimage: Negotiating Authenticity, Creativity and Budget in the Medieval Web Series Tales of Bacon
Introduction
Starting Script Development—Planning the Journey
Choosing the Route
Making Our Own Writing Pilgrimage
Script Development into Production
Conclusion
References
Creating the Low-Budget Feature Film Script: Development as Emergence
Introduction
The Idea of Development
The Low-Budget Feature Pod process
Phase 1: Concept Development
Phase 2: Detailed Development
Conclusions
References
Script Development on Unscripted Television: Grand Designs and the Spectacle of the Reveal
Introduction
Unscripted Television
Grand Designs History and Context
Casting: The Beginning of Script Development
Production Team
Post-production
The Presenter: Kevin McCloud
Grand Designs: The Format
Part I, Act One—The Beginning
Part II and Part III, Act Two—The Middle
Part IV, Act Three—The End
Challenges
Conclusion
References
Saying What Must Not Be Said: Exploring Communication in the Script Development Process
Introduction
My Experience and a Note on Methodology
The Impact of Money
Culture and Language
Discipline
Second-Hand Information
Published Development Notes
Archives
Conclusion
References
Scripting the Experimental Documentary Film: Developing the “Script” for Not Reconciled
Introduction
Not Reconciled: The Premise
Not Reconciled Script: Pre-production
Not Reconciled: Production
Chance Encounters
Editing Script
Conclusion
References
Negotiating Television Authorship and Gendering Creative Identity: Vicki Madden as Australian Showrunner
Introduction: Women Showrunners in Post-Network Television
Vicki Madden Case Study: Negotiating Authorial Roles and Relationships in Australian Television
Creating Identity in the Creative Industries
Showrunner as Marker of Cultural Prestige
Conclusion: Layers of Women’s Identity in Script Development and Television Authorship
References
Constructing Criticism Without Crushing Confidence: Cultures of Feedback in Television Script Development
Introduction
Potential
Script Editors
UK Script Development Organisations
Notes
Praise
Corrective Culture
Conclusion
References
The Business of Script Development: Insights from Industry Practitioners
Introduction
The ‘Lived Experience’ of Script Development
Communication
Procedural Frustration
‘Digging Deep’
Conclusion
References
Script Development in Time and Place
Doctoring La Cacería, Las Niñas De Alto Hospicio: Issues in Cross-Cultural Script Consulting
Introduction
Research as It Evolves
Fictional and Non-Fictional Characters
Modulation—Action and Character
National Media Cultures and Audience
Working Across Differing Languages and Cultures
Local Stories in a Global Context
Conclusion
References
Script Development as a Collective Enterprise: The Writing of the Indigenous Feature Film Waru
Introduction
The Contextual Background
The Script Development Process
Script Development Based on Tikanga (The Customary System of Values)
Conclusion
References
Independent, Short and Controversial: The Script Development of San Sabba
Introduction
Negotiating Access and Finding the Story
The Process of Writing
Writing Through the Archives
Conclusion
References
How Angelica Became The Strange Case of Angelica: From the Idea to the Script to the Book to the Film
Introduction
Changes in the Screenplay Layout
Thematic Evolution
Character Development
Isaac
Angelica
Vine Workers
Conclusion
References
Scripting for the Masses: Notes on the Political Economy of Bollywood
Introduction: More Than a Metaphor
Political Economy of Scripting
Political Mainstream Cinema
The Epic as the Template
Personal Is Political
Remediating News
Pre-Censorship
Conclusion
References
The Relational Language of First Nations Cultural Sensibilities, Principles and Storytelling Ethics as an Intercultural Approach to Script Development
Introduction
Linking Living Heritage and History
Rights: Cultural, Moral and Intellectual Property
Authorial Voices of Living Culture
Photos and Trusting ‘What We’re Doing’
Building the Script from Real Life Events
Translating Culture: What the Script Had to Say
Wandering Spirit, Wandering Spirit
References
Writers’ Room and Showrunner: Discourses and Practices in the German Television Industry
Introduction
Production Contexts in the German Television Industry
Writers’ Room and Showrunner Practices in Individual Project Networks
Production Cultures: Broader Discourses
Conclusion
References
The ASEAN ROK SCREENPLAY LAB: Voices Across Asia—Stories About Rice
Introduction
Goals of the ASEAN ROK Screenplay Lab
Screenplay Lab Challenges
How the Workshop Was Conducted
The Screenplay Lab and Film Workshop Begin; National Arts Centre, Laguna, Philippines
Time and the Western Paradigm of Storytelling
Script Development with Production Input
Feedback Following Rehearsal Scenes
Input from Indigenous Production Professionals
Conclusion
References
Textual Manifestations of Collaborative Screen Idea and Story Development: A Danish Case Study
Introduction
Collaboration as Cultural Proclivity
Genre, Theme and Subject as Markers of Idea Development
Finding a Third Way: Story Development as an Open, Extended Discourse
The Creative and Structural Utility of a ‘Sound Universe’
Conclusion
References
Scottish Modernism Goes to New Hollywood: Tracing the Script Development of Alan Sharp’s Night Moves
Introduction
From an End of Wishing to Night Moves
The Kennedy Monologue
Conclusion
References
Alternative Approaches
Creating Kaleidoscopic Characters: Working with Performance to Develop Character Stories Prior to Screen Story
Introduction
Miranda July: Performance and Kaleidoscopic Characters
Mike Leigh: Devising Character and Character-Based Improvisation (CBI)
The Five Provocations: Developing Kaleidoscopic Characters and Spontaneous Performances
The Five Provocations Production Process: Strategies for Capturing Kaleidoscopic Characters
Strategy 1—Character Development Through Solo Improvisation
Strategy 2—Writing a Screenplay
Strategy 3—Concealed ‘Safe’ Scripts
Strategy 4—Principal Photography Filmed Chronologically
Strategy 5—Provocation
Strategy 6—Documenting the Character Responses
The Five Provocations: Casting the Actors
Conclusion
References
Lean Script Development in the Available Materials School of Filmmaking: This Is Dedicated to The One I Love
Introduction
Options Thinking in Lean Script Development
A Humble Suggestion to Freely Ignore: Developing The One I Love
Conclusion: Just-in-Time Script Development
References
Pedagogy-Led Practice and Practice-Led Pedagogy: A Feedback Loop of Teaching and Screenwriting
Introduction
Overview of the Course and Structural Plan of the Collaborative Project
The Screenplay in Development: Galway to Graceland
The Structure: Practice and Pedagogy
Stage 1: Weeks 1–3
Practice: Screenplay Development
Pedagogy: Generating Ideas and Introduction to Screenplay Conventions
Stage 2: Weeks 4–6
Practice: Screenplay Development
Pedagogy: Screenplay Analysis for Learning
Stage 3: Weeks 7–8
Practice: Rewriting and Revision
Pedagogy: Recapping and Screenplay Format
Stage 4: Weeks 9–13
Live Read and Workshopping—Rewriting
Conclusion
References
A Comparative Study of the Novel O Quatrilho and its Adapted Screenplays: Researching the Script Development Process
Introduction
Theoretical Framework
The Case Study of O Quatrilho
Comparative Study of the Novel and Screenplays
Interviews with José Clemente Pozenato and Antonio Calmon About the Script Development Process
Analysing the Collected Data
Conclusion
References
Scripting and the Multimodal Screenplay Within the Script Development Process
Introduction
Films Without Screenplays
Scripting
Digital Story Composing
Found Footage
Visual Literacy
Digital Story Composing: An Alternative Methodology for Script Development?
To Start …
Cataloguing
Non-linear Editing within Digital Story Composing
Conclusion
References
Don’t Eat My Baby: Collisions, Development and Indigenous Consultation in the Australian Family Feature Film Screenplay, Dingo
Collision No. 1: Evolution vs Creation
Collision No. 2: Documentary vs Drama
Final Collisions
Conclusion
References
The Application of an ‘Eternal Dance’ Methodology in the Development of an Original Screenplay
Introduction
Script Development as a Field
Creative Screenwriting Practice
The Importance of Models
The Advantages of a Dance Metaphor
The Eternal Dance Methodology as a Model
Other Codes and Conventions of the Methodology
The Information Captured
Provocation: A Question of Point of View
A Closer Look at Features of the Eternal Dance
Description of Findings and Discoveries
Reflection on Use of the Eternal Dance
Conclusion
References
A Collaborative Reflection Between Writer, Director and Actors: Table Read as Scriptwriting ‘Intervention’
References
Hitting the Road: Performing the Journey as a Development Strategy in Paris, Texas and Goodbye Pork Pie
Introduction
Context
Paris, Texas (1984)
A Vague Act Structure
‘Where Is the Script…’
Goodbye Pork Pie (1980)
The Road Trip
Cars, Borders and Guns
Character
Conclusion
References
Development Across the Intercultural Divide: Scripting Stories with ‘Other’ Groups
Introduction
Background
Who Should Be in a Story Room?
What Is Shared in a Group?
The Process of Forming Group
The Story Room Process and Making the Room Function
The First Meeting
The Second Meeting
Conclusion: Implications for Script Development
References
Unique Contexts of Script Development
Productive Interventions: Collaborative Script Development for Stories About Mental Health Issues and Suicide
Introduction
Writing Screen Stories About Mental Illness and Suicide
What Is Mindframe for Stage and Screen?
Industry Case Studies and Examples
Challenges Ahead
References
Place, Presence and Play: A Listening, Co-Active Approach to Story Development
Opening Image
From Play to Production
Potential Spaces
Documentary and Magic Realistic Approaches
Writing as Belonging to Settings and Spaces
Playing in Actual Places and Fictional Spaces
Rewriting and Script Development
Perception, Story Structure and Communication
Closing Image
Summary
Appendix
References
Crafting Immersive Experiences: A Case Study of the Development of Three Short Narrative Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) Projects
Introduction
Background
The Projects—An Overview
Problem #1: The Screen Idea on the Page
Problem #2: Development of the Audience’s Role
Conclusion
References
The Screenplay as a Means of Communication: The Case of Notorious
Introduction
Independent Film Production in Hollywood: David O. Selznick
Notorious (1946)
First Treatment
Second Treatment
Sold to RKO
Clifford Odets
Conclusion
References
Between Video Games and Television Shows, Towards Meta Script Development Practices?
Introduction
Script Development Against the Odds: The Challenge of Defiance
From Script Development ‘Mythology’ to a Mythology Coordinator
Script Development in the Hands of a Game Narrative Designer
Conclusion: the Emergence of New Roles and Models
References
Developing Texts for Animated Opera: A Unique Case Study
Introduction
The Case Study in Context
Language and Text in Opera
The Development of the Text in the Opera and the Project
Conclusion
References
From Comedy to Drama: The Curious Case Study of Queenpin
Introduction
Genealogy of the Screen Idea
A New Beginning
Challenges in the Writer’s Room
Writing on the Walls
The (Re)writing Process
Conclusion
References
‘You Never Know Who is in Control’: German Transmedia Content Development
Introduction
Terminology
Academic Perspectives on Defining Transmedia Storytelling: A New Form of Storytelling?
Industry Perspectives on Defining Transmedia Storytelling and Its Impact on Creating Transmedia Worlds
Creators’ Experiences of Creating Complex Transmedia Universes
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Transmedia Showrunner
Conclusion
References
Violet City: Script Development from Novel to Green Screen Fantasy Feature
Introduction
The Project
The Novel
Adapting the Novel
Synopsis
Considerations
Conflating and Condensing Using Transitions and Flashbacks
Post-Production
Is Editing Script Development?
Conclusion
References
Checking The Black List Twice: The Ambiguous Industry Role of Script Development Services
Introduction
Theorising the Consumer Screenwriting Industry
The Legitimisation of The Black List
The Cost of The Black List
The Black List as an Industry Tool
Conclusion
References
Correction to: Lean Script Development in the Available Materials School of Filmmaking: This Is Dedicated to The One I Love
Correction to: Chapter “Lean Script Development in the Available Materials School of Filmmaking: This Is Dedicated to The One I Love”: S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_23
Index

Citation preview

The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development Edited by Stayci Taylor · Craig Batty

The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development

Stayci Taylor · Craig Batty Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development

Editors Stayci Taylor RMIT University Melbourne, Australia

Craig Batty University of South Australia Adelaide, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-82233-0 ISBN 978-3-030-82234-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: malerapaso/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book would not be here without its contributors, who continued to get their ideas down and keep their spirits up through extremely trying times. Thank you for bringing your rich and diverse ideas to our readers. Thank you, too, to the team at Palgrave, especially for allowing us to produce another book on script development. To colleagues and friends at RMIT University and the University of South Australia, for moral and academic support. Stayci would like to thank Craig for consistently bringing the puns. Craig would like to thank Stayci for laughing at his jokes—and subsequently giving them an edit.

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Contents

Introduction Stayci Taylor and Craig Batty

1

‘Behind the Scenes’ of Script Development The Feedback Phenomenon: Dealing with Multiple Voices in the Development of Original Screenplays Siri Senje

9

Script Readers as Gatekeepers: Demystifying Processes of Script Coverage James Napoli

33

A Creative Pilgrimage: Negotiating Authenticity, Creativity and Budget in the Medieval Web Series Tales of Bacon Maxine Gee

47

Creating the Low-Budget Feature Film Script: Development as Emergence Simon Weaving

59

Script Development on Unscripted Television: Grand Designs and the Spectacle of the Reveal Lucy Brown

71

Saying What Must Not Be Said: Exploring Communication in the Script Development Process Wendy Bevan-Mogg

87

Scripting the Experimental Documentary Film: Developing the “Script” for Not Reconciled Jill Daniels

103

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CONTENTS

Negotiating Television Authorship and Gendering Creative Identity: Vicki Madden as Australian Showrunner Radha O’Meara and Cath Moore

121

Constructing Criticism Without Crushing Confidence: Cultures of Feedback in Television Script Development Marie Macneill

135

The Business of Script Development: Insights from Industry Practitioners Stayci Taylor and Craig Batty

147

Script Development in Time and Place Doctoring La Cacería, Las Niñas De Alto Hospicio: Issues in Cross-Cultural Script Consulting Jeff Rush

163

Script Development as a Collective Enterprise: The Writing of the Indigenous Feature Film Waru Christina Milligan

175

Independent, Short and Controversial: The Script Development of San Sabba Romana Turina

187

How Angelica Became The Strange Case of Angelica: From the Idea to the Script to the Book to the Film Rita Benis

201

Scripting for the Masses: Notes on the Political Economy of Bollywood Rakesh Sengupta

217

The Relational Language of First Nations Cultural Sensibilities, Principles and Storytelling Ethics as an Intercultural Approach to Script Development Sharon Huebner and Ezzard Flowers

229

Writers’ Room and Showrunner: Discourses and Practices in the German Television Industry Florian Krauß

251

The ASEAN ROK SCREENPLAY LAB: Voices Across Asia—Stories About Rice Gabrielle Kelly

267

Textual Manifestations of Collaborative Screen Idea and Story Development: A Danish Case Study Cath Moore

279

CONTENTS

Scottish Modernism Goes to New Hollywood: Tracing the Script Development of Alan Sharp’s Night Moves River Seager

ix

295

Alternative Approaches Creating Kaleidoscopic Characters: Working with Performance to Develop Character Stories Prior to Screen Story Angie Black and Anna Dzenis

309

Lean Script Development in the Available Materials School of Filmmaking: This Is Dedicated to The One I Love Andrew Kenneth Gay

327

Pedagogy-Led Practice and Practice-Led Pedagogy: A Feedback Loop of Teaching and Screenwriting Hannah Ianniello and Marco Ianniello

341

A Comparative Study of the Novel O Quatrilho and its Adapted Screenplays: Researching the Script Development Process Clarissa Mazon Miranda

359

Scripting and the Multimodal Screenplay Within the Script Development Process David Moore

375

Don’t Eat My Baby: Collisions, Development and Indigenous Consultation in the Australian Family Feature Film Screenplay, Dingo Rachel Landers

391

The Application of an ‘Eternal Dance’ Methodology in the Development of an Original Screenplay Rose Ferrell

407

A Collaborative Reflection Between Writer, Director and Actors: Table Read as Scriptwriting ‘Intervention’ Susan Cake

425

Hitting the Road: Performing the Journey as a Development Strategy in Paris, Texas and Goodbye Pork Pie Hester Joyce and Jade Jontef

437

Development Across the Intercultural Divide: Scripting Stories with ‘Other’ Groups Christopher Gist

451

x

CONTENTS

Unique Contexts of Script Development Productive Interventions: Collaborative Script Development for Stories About Mental Health Issues and Suicide Fincina Hopgood

469

Place, Presence and Play: A Listening, Co-Active Approach to Story Development Marianne Strand and Christina Svens

485

Crafting Immersive Experiences: A Case Study of the Development of Three Short Narrative Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) Projects Kath Dooley

503

The Screenplay as a Means of Communication: The Case of Notorious Claus Tieber

517

Between Video Games and Television Shows, Towards Meta Script Development Practices? Marida Di Crosta

531

Developing Texts for Animated Opera: A Unique Case Study Olga Kolokytha

545

From Comedy to Drama: The Curious Case Study of Queenpin Rafael Leal

557

‘You Never Know Who is in Control’: German Transmedia Content Development Sarah Renger

569

Violet City: Script Development from Novel to Green Screen Fantasy Feature Dave Jackson

585

Checking The Black List Twice: The Ambiguous Industry Role of Script Development Services Anthony Twarog

599

Correction to: Lean Script Development in the Available Materials School of Filmmaking: This Is Dedicated to The One I Love Andrew Kenneth Gay Index

C1

611

Notes on Contributors

Craig Batty is Dean of Research (Creative) at the University of South Australia. He is the author, co-author and editor of 15 books, including Writing for the Screen: Creative and Critical Approaches (2nd ed.) (2019), Screen Production Research: Creative Practice as a Mode of Enquiry (2018) and Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context (2014). He has also published book chapters and journal articles on the topics of screenwriting practice, screenwriting theory, creative practice research and doctoral supervision. Craig is also a screenwriter and script consultant, with experiences in short film, feature film, television and online drama. Rita Benis is a researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies (Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon). With a grant from FCT, she is currently finishing her doctorate on Manoel de Oliveira’s screenplays. She has a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature and teaches Screenwriting and History of Cinema. Rita is a member of the research project Cinema and the World, and she co-edited the electronic magazine Falso Movimento (also published, 2015). She has translated books and published articles/chapters on the relationship between image and writing. An award-winning screenwriter, she has worked in cinema since 2000 and has collaborated with Teresa Villaverde, Margarida Gil, Inês Oliveira, António Cunha Telles, Jorge Cramez, Vincent Gallo and Catherine Breillat. Wendy Bevan-Mogg is Programme Leader for the M.A. in Producing Film and Television at Bournemouth University. She began her career working for distributor Artificial Eye and sales agent Pathé International, before moving into production. She has worked as a script editor, producer, executive producer and line producer, with notable credits including Nick Whitfield’s Skeletons (winner of the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2010), Rufus Norris’ Broken (Critics’ Week, Cannes 2012) and Esther May Campbell’s Light Years (Critics’ Week,

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Venice Film Festival 2015). Before joining Bournemouth, she spent two years in the development team at Creative England and taught at Leeds Trinity University. Angie Black is a senior lecturer in Film & Television at VCA, University of Melbourne and a multiple-award winning filmmaker. Her debut feature film The Five Provocations (2018), premiered at The Melbourne Queer Film Festival, was likened to “a Luis Buñuel or David Lynch film” at the Adelaide Film Festival and distributed by Label Distribution. Black has directed more than ten short films, including award-winning short films Bowl Me Over (2001), winner best comedy St. Kilda Film Festival and distributed by Palace Films, and Birthday Girl (2008), winner audience award Women on Film Festival and selected for the Australian Women’s horror anthology Dark Whispers Vol. 1 (2019). She has a Ph.D. on performance approaches in film production and an M.A. in screenwriting. Her extensive body of film work utilises practice-led research to explore innovative approaches to filmmaking and actively promote on screen diversity. Lucy Brown is an associate professor and Head of Division for Film at London South Bank University. She is an authority in film and television with 20+ years’ experience as an educator and practitioner. She began her career at the British Film Institute before moving into production. She has filmed around the world for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Disney and Nickelodeon and has credits on multiple BAFTA and Royal Television Society programmes, including the acclaimed series Grand Designs (1999–). Lucy is a passionate advocate for equality, diversity and inclusion. She is Founder of Women in Screen and Chair of Trailblazing Women On and Off Screen and the Media Education Diversity Group for the National Association for Higher Education in the Moving Image (NAHEMI). She is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, winner of several Excellence in Education Awards and co-author of The TV Studio Production Handbook (Bloomsbury). Susan Cake teaches scriptwriting at Queensland University of Technology. Her doctoral research focused on reflective and creative writing processes to examine how writing narrative comedy performed creative resistance against the corporatisation of education. She has over 15 years’ experience teaching screen production in the vocational education and training (VET) sector and is a screen and media curriculum specialist. Susan has written screen and media curriculum for Australian and overseas education and training organisations and was the curriculum specialist for a $250,000 ABC-funded project to support TVET Journalism training in the South Pacific. Susan’s current research explores expanding conceptions of writing for “the screen”. Jill Daniels is a filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of East London. She has been making films since 1989 and has won many international awards, including Best Experimental Film for My Private Life II (2015) at Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2017. Her current practice focuses on

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xiii

memory, place and subjectivities in documentary film. She is the author of Memory, Place and Autobiography: Experiments in Documentary Filmmaking (2019) and co-editor of Truth, Dare or Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited (2013). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Media, Practice and Education. Not Reconciled (2009) was produced as part of her practice-led Ph.D. and is published in Screenworks (Vol. 3) [Online], available at: http://screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-3/not-reconciled. Marida Di Crosta is Associate Professor at LYON-3 University, where she teaches screenwriting and story design for digital media. The founder of a two-year Master’s Degree in Screenwriting for multiplatform content, she is the author of several publications on interactivity within narrative design and strategies. A former writer/producer, Di Crosta also worked on various interactive drama projects. Her research has progressively been focused on data-driven storytelling and the use of AI algorithms in scriptwriting. Kath Dooley is a filmmaker and academic in the Discipline of Theatre, Screen and Immersive Media at Curtin University, Western Australia. She is the author of Cinematic Virtual Reality—A Critical Study of 21st Century Approaches and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2021) and the coeditor of The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production (2019). Kath has written a number of short and feature-length screenplays, and has directed several award-winning short screen works. Her research interests include screen production methodology for traditional and immersive media, screenwriting and diversity in screen practice and education. Anna Dzenis is a Screen Studies lecturer and researcher who has taught at La Trobe University, Victorian College of the Arts and RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). She teaches screen literacy, screen criticism, world cinema, film history and theories of visuality. She is a scholar of photography and cinema and brings these two disciplines together in her teaching and research. She is the co-editor of the online journal Screening the Past, and has published essays in Senses of Cinema, Screening the Past, Lola, Real Time, Metro, The Conversation, 24 Frames: Australia and New Zealand, The Oxford Companion to Australian Film, Screen Hub and The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Films. Rose Ferrell is a screenwriting researcher and an independent screenwriter and filmmaker with three decades’ experience as a technician and writer in drama, documentary and commercial production. Her specialist research is on the screenwriter’s voice, particularly exploring the interrelationships between cultural inflection and voice in screenwriting creative practice. Her work has appeared in several publications, including in the Palgrave Handbook series (2019, and this present publication). Rose currently lives in regional Western Australia where she finds inspiration for madcap dramatic characters and offbeat adventure in that stunning frontier, the wild Australian west.

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Ezzard Flowers is a Wirlomin and Minang Noongar from the Great Southern region of Western Australia. He was born on the United Aborigines Mission Gnowangerup in 1958. In 2015, Ezzard was awarded the John Curtin Medal at Curtin University in Western Australia. This award acknowledged Ezzard’s contribution to the “Koorah Coolingah” (Children Long Time Ago) exhibition, a major arts project held in the regional town of Katanning in the Great Southern of Western Australia and which showcased a collection of Noongar drawings that had been discovered in the Herbert A. Meyer Collection at Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York. Ezzard is an ambassador for the Badgebup Aboriginal Corporation and cultural advisor to Greening Australia. He is also the Vice-Chair of the Wirlomin Stories and Language Project and an important contributor to the Dwoort Baal Kaat Songlines Project and the Songlines and Sustainability Project. Ezzard co-developed the script for No Longer a Wandering Spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers (2016) and is the short film’s narrator. Andrew Kenneth Gay is an Associate Professor of Digital Cinema at Southern Oregon University (USA), where he teaches storytelling, screenwriting, and short film production. He earned his MFA in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema from the University of Central Florida in 2010, and his teaching, scholarship and creative practice have focused on the intersection of story development and “lean” entrepreneurial principles. He has published peer-reviewed scholarship on screenwriting and script development, including “Start Me Up: Lean Screenwriting for American Entrepreneurial Cinema” in the Journal of Screenwriting (2014), an entry on German writer/director Ula Stöckl in Women Screenwriters: An International Guide (2015), and “The Cowboy, the Spaceman, and the Guru: Character and Convention in the Screenwriting of Toy Story” in Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature (2018). He also publishes the online open educational resource (OER) Screenplayology.com, which is used in college screenwriting classes across the globe. Maxine Gee is a senior lecturer in Screenwriting at Bournemouth University and Programme Leader for the B.A. in Scriptwriting for Film and Television. She has a Ph.D. by Creative Practice in Screenwriting from the University of York. In 2015, she was a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Summer Fellow, while in 2016 she became a Doctoral Fellow for the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York. As a creative practitioner, Maxine has written science fiction for film, theatre and prose and is the co-writer of Tales of Bacon, a medieval comedy web series. Maxine has published on science fiction screenwriting for BSFA FOCUS magazine, and on posthuman noir in Cinema: Journal of Film and Philosophy. Her short films Terminal (2018) and Standing Woman (2020) have screened internationally at a range of film festivals.

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Christopher Gist is a writer and screen content producer, previously Commissioning Editor for Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TV and TVNZ (New Zealand), and Head of Development for South Pacific Pictures. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in screenwriting at the University of South Australia, and a sessional Honours supervisor for the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Fincina Hopgood is Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of New England, Australia, with research expertise in Australian film and television, and portrayals of mental health and human rights on screen. A former editor of Senses of Cinema, Fincina’s work has been published in academic journals including Screen, Adaptation and Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, and edited collections Australian Screen in the 2000s, American-Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections and On The Island: Film, Television, Autism (forthcoming). Fincina is currently writing a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan Moving Images of Mental Illness on Australian Screens: The shift towards empathy. Sharon Huebner is a multi-disciplinary researcher in the complex spaces of relational collaborations, politics of agency, applied ethics and Indigenous principles, practices and governance. She received an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for a fellowship commencing 2022, and holds a Ph.D. from Monash University, Australia, 2016. Sharon is co-writer and director of No Longer a Wandering Spirit – Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers (2016). Hannah Ianniello is an academic and writer from Sydney. She has numerous academic and creative publications in international journals and was most recently the featured writer in the Honeyguide Literary Magazine (US). Hannah is an award-winning screenwriter and her academic research bridges literature, screenwriting and musicoliterary theory with a focus on the representation of jazz musicians and violence. Hannah holds a Ph.D. from Western Sydney University and a Masters of Creative Writing from The University of Sydney. She specialises in teaching screenwriting, creative writing and academic writing at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Marco Ianniello is Head of Film and Screen Production at The University of Notre Dame Australia. He is an award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter and his work was screened at festivals around the world and on Australian television. He is currently completing a screenwriting practice Ph.D. investigating the structuring of long-form screenplays and the nature of change in the television drama protagonist. Dave Jackson is a screenwriter, novelist, songwriter and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. His Ph.D. by creative practice was entitled Violet City: Personal & Cultural Mythologies in the Development of a Fantasy Novel. The novel, published by Mediadrome in 2017,

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became the basis for the screenplay for the micro-budget feature film of the same name. Violet City (2015) has been digitally distributed by Indie Rights through Amazon Prime, VUDU, iTunes and other digital platforms between 2016 and 2019. It is now available on YouTube. Prior to entering academia, Dave Jackson was singer/songwriter with various post-punk and alternative rock bands including, The Room, Benny Profane and Dead Cowboys. He still writes, records and performs with The Room in the Wood who released albums in 2018 and 2020. Jade Jontef is Honorary Associate in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Australia. She has over 10 years’ experience teaching across cinema studies, legal studies and the humanities and social sciences. Jade completed her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies in 2016. Her thesis Regulating Teenage Desire: Contemporary Teen Films and the Representation of Adolescent Sex, Sexuality and Pleasure examines the relationship between classification/ratings policy, representation and experiences of teenage sex and sexuality. Her research focuses on censorship, film classification and ratings systems and the regulation of sex on screen. Hester Joyce combines creative practice (with expertise in screenwriting, performance and screen biography) and research into screen cultures. She completed a Harry Ransom Fellowship at the University of Texas, Austin in 2015. She has served as co-editor of the Journal of Screenwriting and is co-author of New Zealand Film & Television: Institution, Industry & Cultural Change (2011). She has published articles and book chapters on screenwriting, screen aesthetics and New Zealand cinema. Hester is Adjunct Associate Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, at La Trobe University, Australia. Gabrielle Kelly is a screenwriter and producer of diverse content for the global marketplace. Her feature producing credits include Last Sunrise (2019), a Chinese sci-fi thriller; the Burmese Mudras Calling (2018); German-UK co-production All the Queen’s Men (2001); the Paramount family film D.A.R.Y.L. (1985) and the UK-French drama Beautiful in the Morning (2019). She is also the screenwriter and producer of the indie feature All Ages Night (2009) and of many screenplays set around the world. Her script development experience includes VP of Development for producer Robert Evans and Head of Development for Sidney Lumet’s New York-based company. Considered a global expert in Media/Screen Labs, Kelly has designed and run Screen Labs in Pakistan, England, Myanmar and Singapore, and was a Mentor in the first Sundance Screenwriting Lab in the Middle East. Olga Kolokytha is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication of the University of Vienna. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Institutions Studies awarded with Distinction, an M.A. in Arts Management and a B.A. in Musicology and Music Education. She has worked extensively as cultural projects manager and consultant around Europe. Her research interests include cultural

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and creative industries, cultural policy with emphasis on times of crises, cultural diplomacy and creative migration. She was one of the 35 representatives of the cultural sector invited by the European Commission at the Audience Development via Digital Means structured dialogue in Amsterdam and Brussels in 2015. In 2016 she received the Best Publication Award for the best published Ph.D. for the years 2013–2015 from the University of Music and the Performing Arts of Vienna and in 2018 she was among the key experts invited by the European Commission to the consultation on the future of the European Agenda for Culture. Florian Krauß is a substitute professor in Media Literacy at the Technische Universität Dresden and research fellow at the University of Siegen, Germany, leading the project “Quality Series” as Discourse and Practice (funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 2018–2022). Previously, Krauß was a lecturer in the Department of Media Studies in Siegen and a research associate at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Potsdam. In 2011, he completed his Ph.D. thesis on the diasporic reception of Bollywood films in Germany (Bollyworld Neukölln: MigrantInnen und Hindi-Filme in Deutschland [Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2012]). He is the co-founder and co-head of Netzwerk Drehbuchforschung, the German network for screenwriting research. Recent publications on media industry studies and screenwriting research include the anthology Teen TV (Springer VS, 2020) and articles in SERIES, International Journal of TV Serial Narratives; Journal of Popular Television; VIEW Journal of European Television History & Culture and others. Rachel Landers is a filmmaker with a Ph.D. in history. Her films have screened all over the world and won a number of prestigious awards including the Australian Documentary Prize and the Premiers History Multimedia Award. In 2011/2012 she received the NSW Premier’s History Fellowship and was appointed Head of Documentary at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. In 2015, she released the ABC/DVA/Screen Australia documentary Lest We Forget What? for the centenary of World War 1. She published her first non-fiction book Who Bombed the Hilton? with New South Books in 2016 which won the prestigious national Nib award for Excellence in Research in the Creation of a Literary Work. In 2018 she was appointed head of Media Arts and Production at UTS. She is currently working on a number of film projects and writing the monograph Hybrid Documentary and Beyond for Routledge. Rafael Leal is a screenwriter, executive producer and lecturer at the Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro. A Ph.D. candidate in Film at Fluminense Federal University (UFF) with a thesis about VR scripting, Rafael researches the screenwriting creative process from a practical transdisciplinary approach. He is a partner at Dedalo Productions, and his credits include A Dona da Banca (Queenpin, 2021) for CineBrasilTV and series such as As Canalhas

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(Bitches, 2015) for GNT, Jungle Pilot (2019) for NBC Universal, as well as the feature film Cedo Demais (Too Soon, 2021) for Fox. Marie Macneill is a senior lecturer at the School of Film and Television, Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK. She also writes, directs, script edits and works as a story consultant, across film, television and theatre. Katbottys (2018), for which she was the writer and producer, was nominated for the Short Form Award at the Celtic Media Festival 2019, and her play The Coastguard for which she was the writer and director was produced by Mundic Nation and garnered a 5-star review during a short tour in 2020. Later that year she was invited to be a part of Cornish Voices for the BBC Writers’ Room and is currently developing a drama series for television. Christina Milligan is a researcher-practitioner in screenwriting and screen production at Auckland University of Technology. She is an award-winning producer of feature and television dramas and documentaries, and much of her industry work reflects her indigenous heritage as a member of the Ng¯ati Porou tribe of the M¯aori people. She is completing a Ph.D. thesis on the work of the indigenous screen producer. Christina serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Screenwriting and is the government-appointed Chair of Te Puna Kairanga (The Premium Production Fund), a fund designed to support highend film and television production as part of the New Zealand government’s response to the effects of Covid-19 on the screen industry. Clarissa Mazon Miranda holds a Ph.D. in Letters at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (Brazil), conferred in 2018. Her Ph.D. thesis explores the intersemiotic translation of novels into movie scripts. She holds a Master’s in Midiatic Communication at the same institution (2012) and a Bachelor of Journalism by Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (2005). Clarissa has completed several short courses of screenwriting and works as a lecturer for Antonio Meneghetti Faculdade; as marketing and international affairs assistant for Fundação Antonio Meneghetti; as a journalist for the magazine Performance Líder, as the cultural manager for the Recanto Maestro Youth Orchestra and as a freelance screenwriter. Cath Moore is a filmmaker, author and educator. She completed her masters in screenwriting at the Australian Film Television and Radio school before attaining a Ph.D. on Danish screenwriting practices. With a focus on screen narrative development and Scandinavian cinema she has published with the Journal of Screenwriting and Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network. She was also a contributor to the books Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier (Edinburgh Press, 2018) and Script Development: Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Cath is currently a creative writing teaching associate at The University of Melbourne and lectures in the film and television department of the Victorian College of the Arts. Her debut novel Metal Fish Falling Snow won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s YA literary award.

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David Moore completed a Master’s in Film & TV Production and a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, before commencing his Ph.D. studies in 2019 on the topic of improvisation in screenwriting applied to found footage films. For the past 20 years David has worked as a lecturer of film, screenwriting, graphic design and creative industries in the Middle East, Vietnam and Australia. David has also written and directed 15 short films, participating in many International film festivals including Abu Dhabi, San Francisco, Calgary, Tabor, Montreal and the Commonwealth Film Festival in England. He has won several awards for writing and directing his short films and has also written several feature films and a book of short stories. Prior to becoming an educator and expat, he ran his own creative design agency in Sydney, Australia for 13 years. James Napoli has been providing story analysis to agents and independent producers in Hollywood for over twenty years. He teaches in National University’s MFA in Professional Screenwriting Program, is a best-selling humour author and the writer-director of two award winning short films. Radha O’Meara is a lecturer in screenwriting in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research combines practice in creative writing with critical research into screen cultures, screen industries and screen aesthetics. Radha’s recent research focuses on practices, values and formations of media authorship. She has published journal articles and book chapters on narrative and storytelling in soap operas, superheroes and cat videos. Sarah Renger studied German literature, education, film, television and media studies in Berlin, Mainz, Potsdam-Babelsberg and Los Angeles. In 2020, she received her doctorate from the University of Leicester, UK, with her dissertation “The Poetics of German Transmedia Storytelling and World-building”. She has been a lecturer at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Germany, since 2014. Since 2010 Sarah has been a writer and director for transmedia series and documentaries. She also works as a media educationist in schools. Jeff Rush is an associate professor of the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. He is the co-author of Alternative Scriptwriting, whose fifth edition was published in 2013. He has written extensively on screenwriting, literature, video games, narrative theory and philosophy of metaphor, including most recently the chapter, “Doubled Ethics and Narrative Progression in The Wire” for Ethics in Screenwriting: New Perspectives, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Film and Video, the Journal of Screenwriting and Games and Culture. He is currently finishing the paper “Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas that Question Their Own Authority” and a chapter “Contrapuntal Screenwriting: Embracing Paradox” for the Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies due out in 2022.

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River Seager is a Ph.D. student at the University of Dundee, where they have been awarded funding from the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities to pursue this work. Their thesis, “Knights in Tarnished Armor: Masculinity in the literature and screenplays of Alan Sharp” explores themes of gender throughout Sharp’s canon. Their research interests include screenwriting studies, Scottish Modernism, transmedial analysis and the interaction between Scottish and American creative industries. Rakesh Sengupta is a Ph.D. candidate in South Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His doctoral project on early screenwriting practices in Indian cinema is an interdisciplinary engagement with film history, media ethnography, print culture and critical theory. Rakesh’s research article in BioScope was awarded the Best Journal Article by Screenwriting Research Network and also received High Commendation for Screen’s Annette Kuhn Debut Essay Prize. His research and writing have also been published in Theory, Culture & Society, Literature/Film Quarterly, The Wire and Indian Cultural Forum. Siri Senje is a professor of dramatic writing, currently heading the Scriptwriting Program at Westerdals, Kristiania University College. She has written for theatre, film and television and practiced extensively as a stage director at Norwegian residential theatres. Siri has taught dramaturgy, screenwriting and acting at several higher education institutions in Norway for more than 20 years. In 2020 she was awarded the title “Educator of Merit” by a cross-institutional academic committee. She has also worked broadly as a script consultant, including three terms as “gatekeeper” at the Norwegian Film Institute and a residency as dramaturg at the Norwegian Centre for Playwriting in Oslo. Her current research interests are within the field of script development and creative processes/methods. Siri holds an MFA in stage directing from University of Minnesota and a practice-based Doctorate in screenwriting from the Norwegian Film School. Marianne Strand is a scriptwriter, filmmaker, project leader and coach, and she lives in Harads, Northern Sweden. She writes for film, television and radio and directs short films. Together with Charlotta Lennartsdotter she drives the platform Krumelur, a vehicle for producing and screening children’s films. After releasing the short film Snakereins (2017) they directed the Sami documentary series Before and now with Elli-Karin (2020) for SVT. Another of Marianne’s fields of interest is using film as a resource for existential health. In the project Restorative Film (2013–2017) she collaborated with film and health care researchers, investigating the impact of moving images of nature in various health care environments. Marianne is also the author of the novel The experimental animal (2011) and the artbook Unfilmatized (2016). Christina Svens is an associate professor in literature—drama, theatre, film and senior lecturer at the School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Stockholm. Her research uses intersectional/intercultural perspectives

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and takes interest in creative processes in artistic work and specifically how questions of equality are performed. Her thesis Direction with a Feminist Overtone (2002) is about the film and theatre director Suzanne Osten’s work at Stockholm City Theatre. In 2015 she published the grant winning The Stranger on the Stage about Swedish-Kurdish actor’s performance work in Sweden. Christina contributed to the artbook Unfilmatized (2016), as well as to Cross-Cultural Interviewing: Feminist experiences and reflections (2016), Performance, Feminism, and Affect in Neoliberal Times (2017) and Cultural meetings (2020). Stayci Taylor is a Senior Lecturer and Program Manager (2020–22) with the Master of Media at RMIT University. Her research (critical and creative works) on screenwriting, gender, comedy, web series, scriptwriting-as-research and nonfiction has appeared in Journal of Screenwriting, New Writing, TEXT, Celebrity Studies and Studies in Australasian Cinema among others. Her Ph.D. by project (screenplay) won an award for research excellence (2017). She is the co-editor of the books Script Development: Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives (2021), The Bloomsbury A-Z of Creative Writing Methods (2022) and TV Transformations and Female Transgression: From Prisoner Cell Block H to Wentworth (2022). Stayci brings to her research a background in writing for television in New Zealand and Australia. Her credits include a bi-lingual soap, a sketch comedy series and a primetime sitcom. Claus Tieber is the former Chair of the Screenwriting Research Network, and a lecturer at the University of Vienna. He is the principal investigator of several research projects, including his “Habilitation”, about the history of the American screenplay (Schreiben für Hollywood. Das Drehbuch im Studiosystem, 2008). Claus has also published on storytelling in silent cinema (Stummfilmdramaturgie. Erzählweisen des amerikanischen Feature Films 1917–1927 , 2011), Hindi cinema and film music. Romana Turina is Head of Subject (Screenwriting), and Senior Lecturer at the Arts University Bournemouth. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre, Film, and Television from the University of York, UK. She is currently working on the translation of cultural geographies, memory, history and archaeology in audience-friendly outputs. Examples of her research on film are the essay films Lunch with Family (2016), nominated for the UK’s Art and Humanities Research Council Awards, and San Sabba (2016), a finalist at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards. Anthony Twarog is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is writing a dissertation on the consumer screenwriting industry. He received a B.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from New York University and an M.A. in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California. After completing his M.A., he worked as a

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coordinator in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles before returning to academia. Simon Weaving is a senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he teaches screenwriting and media production in the School of Creative Industries. A writer and filmmaker, Weaving has written and directed several award-winning short films and the feature film The Competition (2012). He was Director of the Canberra International Film Festival from 2009–2012, and the founding Director of the Stronger Than Fiction Documentary Film Festival.

List of Figures

The Feedback Phenomenon: Dealing with Multiple Voices in the Development of Original Screenplays Fig. 1 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Overview, in retrospect, of the Westerdals project in Script Development Research The timeline of the Westerdals Project in Script Development Original impulses and their emotional charge The distance from the Original Impulse to the Screen Idea Feedback giver profile analysis Two types of feedback approach/method Types of feedback content Feedback types of which to be especially aware

11 18 20 21 27 27 28 29

Script Readers as Gatekeepers: Demystifying Processes of Script Coverage Fig. 1

Coverage Top Sheet © James Napoli

35

Script Development on Unscripted Television: Grand Designs and the Spectacle of the Reveal Fig. 1

Fig. 2 Fig. 3

The triangulation of factors working in synergy throughout the script development process in factual television: the production team, the presenter and the format What is unscripted television? University television production students’ word cloud, University of Greenwich (2018) Example of a factual television post-production script

73 73 78

Scripting the Experimental Documentary Film: Developing the “Script” for Not Reconciled Fig. 1

The ruined medieval town of Belchite

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xxiv Fig. 2 Fig. 3

LIST OF FIGURES

The Fire at Casas Rusas/Russian Houses The Girl in Red

112 113

The Relational Language of First Nations Cultural Sensibilities, Principles and Storytelling Ethics as an Intercultural Approach to Script Development Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Bessy in a screen capture from No Longer a Wandering Spirit —Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers, 2016 © Sharon Huebner Ezzard Flowers in a screen capture from No Longer a Wandering Spirit —Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers, 2016 © Sharon Huebner The late Russell Nelly (far left) and Bessy’s descendant families in a screen capture from No Longer a Wandering Spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers, 2016 © Sharon Huebner Bessy’s Bryant family (left to right), Regina Wilkinson, Betty Hood, Flo Hood, Phyllis Andy and Amy Hood in a screen capture from No Longer a Wandering Spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers, 2016 © Sharon Huebner

232 236

240

243

The Application of an ‘Eternal Dance’ Methodology in the Development of an Original Screenplay Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 6 Fig. 7

Fig. 8

‘All is “Doing”’: representation of the creative practice involved in developing a screen idea into a screenplay. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2020) Examples of dance notation. ‘La Dance’ (Feuillet, 1709) From Recueil de dances by Raoul-Auger Feuillet, 1709, https://www. loc.gov/item/14002126/ Examples of dance notation. ‘The Tango Square’ (Newman, 1914) From Dances of To-Day by Albert W. Newman, 1914, https://www.loc.gov/item/14009840/ Examples of dance notation. Pastoral (Isaac, 1713), From Mr. Issac’s new dance made for Her Majesty’s birthday by Mr. Isaac, https://www.loc.gov/item/98160741/ An example of the eternal dance methodology showing its most prominent features. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2019) (table). The codes and conventions of the eternal dance methodology. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2020) Sketch of the first ten pages of the feature film screenplay ‘Calico Dreams’ drawn as a ‘dramatic chain’ using the eternal dance methodology. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2019) Reproduction of dramatic chain from Fig. 7 in electronic form. The methodology was used here to interrogate character interactions and point of view. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2019)

409

412

412

413

414 415

417

418

LIST OF FIGURES

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Crafting Immersive Experiences: A Case Study of the Development of Three Short Narrative Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) Projects Fig. 1 Fig. 2

The colour-coded key to the screenplay for Checkpoint (2019) (Courtesy of Mel White) The opening page of the screenplay for Checkpoint (2019), Draft 1 (Courtesy of Mel White)

509 510

Violet City: Script Development from Novel to Green Screen Fantasy Feature Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Violet City (2016), courtesy of John Maxwell and Dave Jackson Opening shot (2016), courtesy of John Maxwell and Dave Jackson Lord Splaine and Lady Ezcargoza (2016), courtesy of John Maxwell and Dave Jackson Empusa over Violet City (2016) courtesy of John Maxwell and Dave Jackson

589 591 594 595

List of Tables

A Comparative Study of the Novel O Quatrilho and its Adapted Screenplays: Researching the Script Development Process Table 1 Table 2

Protocol for a comparative analysis of the novel and adapted screenplay Comparison between the novel O Quatrilho and the script adapted by Antonio Calmon showing the moment when the protagonists, Pierina and Massimo, are cited for the first time in each text

365

366

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Introduction Stayci Taylor and Craig Batty

When we put out the call for book chapters on the topic of script development in July 2017, little did we know that four years later we would be publishing the second of two books—one that, as you will have noticed, contains 40 chapters. This volume follows our first edited collection arising from this call, Script Development: Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives (2021). Back in 2016, when we started to drive a research agenda on the topic of script development—with colleagues Louise Sawtell and Bridget Conor, and subsequently also Philippa Burne, Glenda Hambly, Hester Joyce (see Chapter 29), Marilyn Leder, Noel Maloney, Radha O’Meara (see Chapter 8) and Mark Poole—we knew that there was a scholarly gap, and we were keen to address this gap through strategic collaboration and publishing. While a few publications explicitly interrogating the topic of script development had already emerged (see, for just one example, Taylor & Batty, 2016), the first official output from this formalised endeavour was a special issue of the Journal of Screenwriting in 2017, which began to lay the foundations for research in this area of screenwriting studies. Two books and over 60 chapters and journal

S. Taylor (B) RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Batty University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_1

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articles later, we can probably no longer say that script development is an ‘emerging area’. Reflecting on our initial call for book chapters, which generated so much interest that we produced two edited collections, it is interesting to see what we foregrounded as important and in need of scholarly attention. For example, we wrote in the call that ‘this collection is intended to explore singular instances of script development ‘in action’ across various countries and cultures’—and, indeed, this collection features contributors from around the world reflecting on their own experiences of participating in and researching script development, across geographical, historical, cultural and political contexts. We also flagged our interest ‘in both mainstream and niche practices across all forms of screen media [to] present a rich and diverse set of analyses of script development’ to help us understand ‘what it is, what it looks like, and how it is being approached in various personal, industrial and geographic contexts’. Thanks to the contributions of our authors, this goal has been achieved, with some distinctive and arguably world-first case studies and scholarship in the field. Looking at the two collections, the first, Script Development, is in many ways an extension of the special issue of the Journal of Screenwriting. While it has case studies and specific contexts (e.g. how Denmark and Australia compare in their discourses on script development; how two Ph.D. candidates innovated development practices to address their research needs; how notions of quality and betterment appear in script development discourse), it very much provides further theorisation about how we might understand the practices of script development—useful, we hope, in continuing to provide scholarly foundations for further work in the area. What this, The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, offers is a much more diverse, eclectic and ‘lived’ account of script development. Across the book’s 40 chapters, which take us inside the writers’ room, alongside the script editor, between development conversations, and outside the mainstream and into the experimental, we learn about policies, practices, collaborations, breakdowns, creative interventions, critical explanations and emotional responses to script development. With authors spanning upwards of 15 countries, and who have inhabited an array of roles—including writer, script editor, producer, script consultant and executive, this is a truly international perspective on how script development functions (or otherwise) across media and platforms. Topics range from script readers and script reporting to feedback and collaboration, to gender, diversity and ethical representation and to specific national and cultural contexts. Form, format and mediums of focus include (as we would expect) narrative film and television, but also web series, video games, cinematic virtual reality, documentary and factual programming, transmedia and animation. Among the chapters focussing on original scripts and screenplays are analyses of adaptation including case studies of a Brazilian novel, a Czech opera and an Australian YA novella. Many of our authors’ sites

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of analysis go beyond specific media and into such contexts as the classroom and script development services. Comprising four parts, our handbook guides readers through the many and varied processes of script development, from the perspectives of creators of original works to consultative roles and to international perspectives, alternative approaches and specific and contextual case studies. Chapters represent key challenges, roles and cultures of script development, adding new knowledge about, and insights into, this process. In Part, our contributors take us ‘behind the scenes’, exploring how script development is being enacted, and how it is experienced, by those for whom this process is part of their professional, pedagogical or research practice. The chapters in this section ask questions about, and provide examples from, creators and writers of original screenplays, as well as revealing insights from those in other script developmental roles—script doctors, consultants, funding agencies, showrunners and those teaching in screenwriting training facilities. The authors in this section contribute to reflections upon, and interrogations of, roles and responsibilities, navigating development and deploying interventions across modes, forms, budgets and audiences. In Part: Script Development in Time and Place, the chapters pull into sharp relief the historical, social, temporal and geographical specificities of developing screen stories, and challenge notions of ‘universal’ approaches to script development. Through case studies and interviews, the authors span decades, continents and applications to offer unique perspectives on a wide range of script development processes. Part explores Alternative Approaches, whereby scholars, teachers and practitioners offer a range of approaches to script development that may be considered outside of the mainstream or that challenge dominant practices. The range of chapters in this section includes both case studies and reflections, offering new methodologies, experiments, multi-modalities and perspectives on script development innovation. In the final section, Part, we explore some of the Unique Contexts of Script Development, discussing a range of novel challenges and specific contexts over various sites, roles and responsibilities of script development. Some of these chapters look at some of script development’s social factors, and through reflection, case study and interview explore a range of considerations, dynamics and challenges including issues of communication, notions of gate-keeping and quests for greater diversity of perspective. Others focus on specific sites of practice, uncovering unique insights into script development for children’s drama, transmedia narratives, green screen fantasy, the Hollywood studio system, animation and modal migrations. To look at this book now, five years after setting out on a programme of research to celebrate and encourage further scholarship on script development, encourages us to assess how far we have come and what is yet to be achieved. The chapters in this book tell their own story and that the term ‘script development’ warrants its own handbook also speaks for itself, even while some of

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the scholarship grapples with, or even contests, the definition (see Batty et al., 2018; Price, 2017). In this introduction, we go briefly to where all of this has landed in terms of questions, debates and research endeavours. We propose that in inviting scholars to home in on script development, we uncover aspects of screenwriting and screen production that might otherwise be overlooked, or covered more generally, in screen studies scholarship or even, arguably, in screenwriting practice/screen production research analyses. The areas of focus we raised with our colleagues in the article, ‘Script Development: Defining the Field’ (Batty et al., 2017) included questions we can use as a roadmap by which to further reflect. Some of those questions were along the lines ‘why’ and ‘where’ people look do develop scripts. Here and elsewhere over the past five years, researchers have used interviews, discourse analysis, ethnography and reflective practice to unpack motives for, and subsequent experiences of, commitment to script development. And while the chapters in the handbook detail many of the contexts in which script development happens (as summarised above), our contributors go further to provide in-depth analyses of ‘how’ scripts are developed. They do this by showing us the methods enacted ‘behind the scenes’ of mainstream film and television script development (including Bevan-Mogg, Krauß, Macneill, Moore, C., Taylor and Batty), sharing their own—or analysing other’s—innovative processes (including Black and Dzenis, Daniels, Gay, Gist, Huebner and Flowers, Ferrell, Milligan, Strand and Svens and Turina), building case studies of the script development behind historical and/or landmark screen works (Benis, Joyce and Jontef, Miranda, Seager and Tieber) or tracking the process of becoming ‘green lit’ (Leal). Our authors also provide granular studies on some of the roles, stages, impacts and institutions of script development such as the showrunner (O’Meara and Moore), the table read (Cake), script development services such as The Black List (Twarog) and the political economy of script development (Sengupta). Others (Ianniello and Ianniello, Kelly, Senje and Weaving) take us into dedicated sites of script development—labs, pods and screenwriting courses—to give us a perspective on how script development is practiced outside of the ‘factory line’ of mainstream screen production. We also blur the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction script development with an account of using documentary methods to develop an adapted screenplay (Landers), and an analysis of script development for factual programming using fictional frameworks (Brown). Other questions posed by the 2017 article—around the role of the script ‘expert’, the possibilities for script development in the academic context and the influence of format and media on the practice—are equally instructive in establishing how our authors have contributed new scholarship to the field. In this collection, for example, the role of the script ‘expert’ is interrogated in chapters based on interviews with writers, script editors and development executives, but also in others with more dedicated foci, such as the script reader as gatekeeper (Napoli) and the cross-cultural script consultant (Rush). When

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raising questions around media and format, we had suggested in our journal’s special issue that a comparative study of script development practices across media—film, television, animation, games, web series and so on— could illuminate similarities and differences. Four years on, most work still centres around more traditional film and television. Therefore, we are happy to include in the collection chapters focussed on (and troubling notions of) script development in ‘web series’ (Gee), cinematic virtual reality (Dooley), green screen (Jackson), video games (Di Crosta), transmedia content development (Renger), the multi-modal screenplay (Moore, D.) and animated opera (Kolokytha), while also acknowledging we have only crested the wave of multimedia possibilities. Further research might also bear in mind Steven Price’s (2017) thoughts about the intersection of script development scholarship and adaptation studies, specifically the potential of practitioner engagement to ‘re-energize that field [adaptation] just as it has with research into the screenplay’ (p. 328). While inside the collection are wide-ranging analyses of script development processes for adapted screenplays as previously highlighted, only two are from an ‘insider’s’ perspective, which might suggest a gap in practitioner-led analyses of adapted scripts and screenplays. Researchers drawing on the theoretical resources of sociology, cultural studies and critical policy perspectives have begun to develop an evidence based focus on asymmetrical ‘access’ to script development, and how broader structural and social inequalities impact upon script development practices and spaces. There is no doubt that there is scope, and need, for a lot more work here, particularly longitudinal studies of these contexts. This feels like a natural progression of the work undertaken to date, especially of the case studies offered in this book covering script development under considerations including Indigeneity and mental health (Hopgood, Huebner and Flowers and Milligan). Screenwriting in the academy is arguably an area in which Australia has already taken a lead, specifically looking at the screenwriting doctorate, in part because of the sheer number of research degree students enrolled in practice-based work (i.e., the creative Ph.D.). While this is a niche area of script development studies, Australia provides a case in point that many established writers and script development personnel are undertaking Ph.D.s, expanding their practice through research. Whether and to what extent this informs industry practice beyond the Ph.D. is still to be determined, but in the context of increasingly conservative industries less willing to take creative risks, university research spaces might well be becoming incubators for innovation in script development. While this Handbook looks more into industry than it does to the academy, it is important in such a collection to highlight the research from those who, at the time of writing, are Ph.D. candidates (Gist, Ianniello, M., Leal, Milligan, Moore, D., Seager, Sengupta and Twarog). The summaries of our authors’ research detailed in the paragraphs above are by no means exhaustive, as many of our authors’ chapters address some, or all, of the questions and categories by which we have framed our assessment

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of where script development research is now, and where it can go next. For those looking to undertake more scholarship in this area, further directions for the future are to establish deeper connections with industry to undertake research, and the formation of interdisciplinary teams working together on shared research endeavours. Where writing about script development was previously, for some, a splintering off or packaging up of other work, this handbook is a commitment to such research where script development is at the very centre. For this work to progress, what we suggest is a coming together of scholars and practitioners across disciplines and with industry partners. Here we are reminded of Price’s note that ‘collaborations between practitioners, historians and theoreticians are essential in furthering critical enquiry into script development’ (2017, p. 331). We look forward to such ‘developments’ in the field!

References Batty, C., & Taylor, S. (Eds.). (2021). Script development: Critical approaches, creative practices, international perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan. Batty, C., O’Meara, R., Taylor, S., Joyce, H., Burne, P., Maloney, N., Poole, M., & Tofler, M. (2018). Script development as wicked problem. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Price, S. (2017). Script development and academic research. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 319–333. Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: Perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 13(2), 204–217.

‘Behind the Scenes’ of Script Development

The Feedback Phenomenon: Dealing with Multiple Voices in the Development of Original Screenplays Siri Senje

Introduction This chapter focusses on creative feedback as a phenomenon and the possibility of creating more informed feedback environments, in the field of screenwriting and also in educational screenwriting programmes. In recent years, the number of professionals participating in mainstream script development has greatly increased and current development settings are characterized by virtual choruses of contributing voices. While individual “script-doctors” have been used in Hollywood since the 1930s (Bordino, 2017), processes in today’s development industry have been likened to “an intricate dance […] during which the various parties controlling the script present their ideas for how the screenplay should be modified” (Hansen & Herman, 2010, p. 121). The outcome can be a collaborative chaos through which screenwriters must navigate. Also, script development, especially in the film field, tends to stretch out in time, keeping projects in the limbo of uncertainty for years rather than months. As a result, professionals in the field refer, as a matter of course, to the concept of “development hell”. The term may appear flippant, but it also gives associations to agonized artists exposed to conflicting opinions and orders from “bad-guys” in the shape of self-serving development executives with disparate agendas. Within the framework of this chapter, then, I define “development hell” as the occurrence of a drawn-out writing process in which S. Senje (B) Kristiania University College, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_2

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• an unusually high number of new drafts is produced; • each draft is subjected to feedback notes from a diverse group of feedback givers; • the feedback steers the project in new directions which may change according to who has spoken last; • the new direction/s move the project away from the writer’s original intentions, but not necessarily closer to greenlighting for production. The chapter draws on a practice-led study carried out in the Screenwriting programme at Westerdals Institute of Film and Media, Kristiania University College, Norway. The project was initially named “Artistic Integrity and the External Voice”, and its research questions were as follows: • How could certain creative tools help screenwriters strengthen the core of their projects and navigate through the chorus of multiple external voices, without compromising the integrity of the projects? • How might the multi-voiced feedback setting of screenwriting be developed and/or improved? The “creative tools” were gathered from my previous research in script development (Senje, 2013, 2017). My hypothesis was that through defining the emotional core of their projects more firmly at the outset, screenwriters might be better able to maintain the integrity of their stories when confronted by diverse feedback content. The practice-led study spanned a period of two years, during which seven student writers were monitored in two consecutive cycles of project development (Fig. 1). Surprisingly, even the most professional of script consultants rarely have training as feedback givers, nor do they subscribe to any specific feedback methodology, apart from the unassailable goal of “improving” the script at hand (Batty & Taylor, 2021). The situation in education programmes is similar; much feedback given to students is based on craft, but intuition and personal taste are frequently allowed to reign. When several projects in my case study ran into development problems triggered by feedback, an inquiry into feedback content and form was carried out. The final section of this chapter offers an account of that feedback analysis project and the implementation of “feedback science training” in the screenwriting programme at Westerdals. The models and the training in feedback analysis led to surprising results, which I contend might provide a framework for further investigations into how the development setting itself can be developed.

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Fig. 1 Overview, in retrospect, of the Westerdals project in Script Development Research

Prologue: The Story of a Story Once upon a time, I made a steep descent into hell. I had an idea about writing a story in which, during a national crisis caused by climate change, a blond, welleducated Norwegian mother of three becomes a refugee. Due to this reversal of fortune, she goes to extremes to save her children. The “original impulse” (see below) for the project was that motherhood, as I had come to know it, was not all tender and Madonna-sweet, but could be a source of brutal strength and endurance. “This is a Mother Courage story,” I proclaimed in a string of passionate pitches. The project—now named “Days of Winter”—was funded by the prestigious Norwegian Film Institute (NFI) script development program. The seasoned gatekeeper praised my treatment for its originality, impact and emotional power. He then declared that “This is in essence a love story”. Not surprisingly, I was taken aback. But, cognizant of the fact that writers may not be aware of what we have written about until far later in the creative process, I conceded. Perhaps the esteemed gatekeeper was right? While admiring my Mother Courage story, he missed “a deeper portrait of the children´s father”. His challenge was repeated when a producer came on board and, later, a director. I figured these reputable professionals must be right, and behold; my story of a desperate, single mother fighting for her children had turned into story about a loving couple. For the subsequent three years, I had my first experience of “development hell”. After a dozen script versions, I was still unable to create that complex father figure and his story. The screenplay— disconnected from its original impulse—ended up in a drawer.

Years later, during a screenwriting workshop, another script consultant came to the rescue: “The father character is a distraction”, she pronounced, “This is a story about a mother and her children”. Her simple statement triggered a

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huge sense of relief, and an expeditious and inspired rewrite in which the father figure was killed in a catastrophic accident in the first act. It also generated my very first reflections on the crucial, but largely unexamined, role of feedback givers in screenwriting processes. My hunch was that here, buried within the paradox of my script consultants’ contrasting claims and desires, lay the essence of script development issues thousands of screenwriters and production teams have wrestled with. My curiosity about other screenwriters’ experiences with turbulent feedback processes was awakened. The first seed to the Westerdals Project in Script Development Research was sown.

Act I: The Concept of the “Screen Idea Work Group” A few years later, I started work on a practice-based doctoral project titled “Imagining for the Screen: The Original Screenplay as poiesis” at the National Norwegian film school. My themes were the genesis of the screenplay text and its possible status as an autonomous work of “poiesis” on the same level as a stage play. I was to deliver two original screenplays developed through contrasting methodologies and a critical reflection on the two processes (Senje, 2012a, 2012b). At this time, the emerging field of screenwriting research was expanding rapidly, and I discovered Ian Macdonald’s (2004) research within the poetics of the screenplay. In a later article, tellingly named “So it’s no wonder I’m neurotic—on the screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group”, Macdonald (2010) investigates established development practices in UK television drama and the writer’s precarious position within them. In discussing the collective setting of the mainstream script development field, Macdonald (2010, p. 45) coins the term, the Screen Idea Work Group: The Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG) is a flexibly constructed group organized around the development and production of a screen idea; a hypothetical grouping of those professional workers involved in conceptualizing and developing fictional narrative work for any particular moving image screen idea.

He goes on to describe the SIWG’s membership as a diverse group of professionals comprised of script readers, script editors, development executives, producers, directors and commissioning editors, all of whom are expected to write, read, comment on, contribute to and “otherwise shape or influence the screen idea” in conventional development processes (Macdonald, 2010, p. 50). While describing the SIWG phenomenon itself in neutral terms, Macdonald is clear about how screenwriters frequently find the collaborative setting both trying and complex. From the moment their main creative capital—the original screen idea—is exchanged for a contract, the writers in his interviews find themselves “at the mercy of anyone who has even junior executive status” (Macdonald, 2010, p. 46). Further, the absence of strategies and methods in the feedback practices investigated appear conspicuous, even if not directly addressed. In short, Macdonald’s account of the pitfalls, power

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structures and contradictions of the development field mirrored my recent experience precisely and strengthened my impulse to pursue further research in the area. Arguably, the multi-voiced and non-methodical nature of feedback given in the SIWG forms a fertile ground for the notorious phenomenon of “development hell” to occur. The script Days of Winter was already included in the deliverables for my practice-based doctorate, so I decided to retrace the steps of my unfortunate development experience and use my own screenwriting story as a case study to become part of the project’s critical reflection. What had actually happened? How could what seemed to everyone like an unusually strong screen idea go so dramatically astray? How could all these costly, in labour and in funds, hours have been spared? I went on to recount and analyze my experience with Days of Winter in the form of a narrative video essay, named “Sculpting for the Screen: A story of the making of a story” (Senje, 2012a). In that essay, the retracing of my steps led me to the following conclusion on the nature of the SIWG: A Screen Idea Work Group is a potentially creative, but highly informal and subjective context in which projects are subjected to a surprising degree of coincidence, contradiction and sheer luck. (Senje, 2012a)

After completing my practice-based doctorate in 2013, I was more certain than ever that script development practices in general, and the multi-voiced SIWG in particular, were areas in need of further analysis and reconsideration. Since the advent of Macdonald’s article in 2010 and my own video essay in 2012, the field of screenwriting research has greatly expanded. Much relevant work on script development has been published (Batty & Taylor, 2021; Batty et al., 2017; McAulay, 2014; Nash, 2014; Senje, 2017). Complex processes have been examined from a variety of angles, such as history, political structures, funding guidelines and alternative practice. Inquiries into development practices is now a central area within screenwriting research discourse. Further, it is widely known that screenplays and serial dramas are developed in a SIWG context and exposed to what I have called “multi-voiced feedback”. Through some 25 years as a dramaturg/script advisor, I have taken part in a few hundred development processes myself, contributing extensively on the feedback giver’s side of the table. However, apart from the complaints of screenwriters, who perceive SIWG practices as random, uninformed and even degrading, feedback methodology is rarely addressed in the field. In educational programmes, the idea of learning how to give, receive and analyze feedback in a productive manner—surely a central aspect of a screenwriter’s skillset—is seldom taught, let alone treated as a subject in its own right.

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The Multi-voiced Feedback Setting Is the SIWG and the multi-voiced development setting an ever-present hazard to professional screenwriters, then? Should we strive to get rid of the whole chaotic mess so that screenwriters or “poets of images” (Pelo, 2010, p. 113) at last can be left alone? In both Macdonald’s article and the tales of professional screenwriters (Hansen & Herman, 2010; McAulay, 2014), the working conditions of screenwriters within mainstream film and television appear both aggravating and unproductive. But as it turns out, writers—professional and aspiring—seldom desire solitude and silence while writing. We want and need our process test-audience, that is, competent readers to comment on our work as it progresses. Creative feedback also results in creative exchange, followed by fruitful rethinking and rewriting. At their best, feedback and creative dialogue represent sources of inspiration and central contributions to the multi-faceted practice of screenwriting. But why does the call for dialogue partners and external voices actually appear to be stronger and more pronounced in screenwriting than in other writing processes? In aiming to contribute to the field of script development, a constructive approach would be to attempt a response to that question by asking why and how the complex pluralistic feedback approach in screenwriting has evolved. While the ontology and history of the screenplay cannot be traced here, there are several aspects of writing for the screen that distinguish this creative practice from other writing processes. Below, I suggest four such inherent characteristics of screen fiction and its context. The list is by no means comprehensive; rather, it is meant to give some pointers as to why the script development field has expanded into the complex industry that it is today, an industry that includes a higher number of script development executives than actual screenwriters (Batty & Taylor, 2021; Hansen & Herman, 2010). 1. The performative aspect: The screenplay is an intermediate text, written first and foremost to be performed, not read. An intermediate or performative text is projected to become another “text” in another medium, namely the film or serial drama. 2. The multidimensional poetics of the screenplay text itself: Claudia Sternberg has given a precise description of the complex and multidimensional poetics of screenplay (Sternberg, 1997, pp. 63–220). 3. The collaborative nature of film and serial drama: The screenplay is conceived, developed and realized within a collaborative artistic field in which multiple professionals such as producers, directors, photographers, actors, designers and editors contribute to the performative and audio-visual result. 4. The double identity/function of the screenplay text: The screenplay has a double identity as a) an autonomous piece of creative writing, written to envision and evoke an audio-visual work and b) the most significant planning document for a complex and costly audio-visual production.

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On the first two points, I contend that in a performative, multidimensional text like the screenplay, it is to be expected that the writing process is more multi-faceted and arduous than in most text genres. For example, numerous rewrites are common (Hansen & Herman, 2010, pp. 301–325), and not in themselves a part of anything “hellish”. I have previously compared screenwriting processes to rehearsal processes in the theatre, in which runthroughs of the unfinished performance are repeated and attentively “read” by the director. After each such “reading” the director—as an inherent part of the building of a finished performance—gives notes to actors and other staff (Senje, 2017, p. 281), adjusting details. Further, writing for the screen does not mean just describing a storyline in action text and dialogue; it also demands that the writer’s words evoke a complete audio-visual work, often including screen directions so specific as to make the writer and director’s work appear to merge (Berg, 2011; Mamet, 1991; Sternberg, 1997). A contemporary screenplay is typically written in the same six dimensions that Aristotle laid out as the component parts of classical tragedy in his Poetics (Andersen, transl. 2008/Aristotle, ca 360 B.C.): mythos, ethos, dianoia, lexis, opsis and melopoeia correspond to what we would today call plot, character, thought (content/theme), dialogue, cinematography/visuals and music/sound design. The philosopher, whose principles of drama are still manifest in the field today, wisely wrote about the totality of the audio-visual work, not just the script, indicating that the two are inextricably connected. Hence, we are dealing with a complex type of textual work. Where the third point is concerned, the collaboration of a team of creative professionals is a given in any production of scripted drama, be it for the stage, the cinema or television. Unlike prose writers, the screenwriter produces words that will be transformed into visuals and human action by artists from allied professions. Directors, actors and cinematographers will inevitably add and interpret—and so they should—as part of their own artistic processes. The saying that a movie is “written” three times—by the screenwriter, by the director and by the editor—still holds. The writing of the story in three different languages should not mean altering its essential vision with each profession’s “rewrite”, but these intrinsic rewrites also heighten the need to guard and preserve the screen idea’s integrity underway. Further, to navigate such a complex chain of creative events, the screenwriter needs a robust screen idea, a well-tested story and—not least—strong collaborative and communicative skills. On the last point, the cost aspect of audio-visual production could, in an ideal world, have contributed to rationality and method-oriented approaches in feedback practices. After all, lengthy development processes cost money and high number of terminated projects discourages everyone. When the opposite so often appears to often be true, it might mean that development processes in the film-television field are powered irrationally, by a combination of fear of failure and dreams of success. While resorting to a multitude of feedback givers may give producers a sense of securing their investment, the practice has

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observable side effects: Not only has it been responsible for original screenplays turning into hybrids that primarily express the SIWG’s fragile consensus or “smallest common denominator”; it has also undoubtedly contributed to “development hell”, a phenomenon that has sent hundreds of strong screen ideas into the darkness of the drawer (Hansen & Herman, 2010; Hughes, 2012). In this context, inquiries into how Screen Idea Work Groups can be made to function more constructively appear highly relevant, not just for screenwriting practice but in the film field as a whole. Below, I outline how The Westerdals’ Project in Script Development Research evolved, from its focus on creative tools that could strengthen the integrity of their projects into a new and unforeseen study of the content and nature of feedback.

Act II: The Westerdals Project in Script Development Research In 2017, a few years after completing my doctoral work, I got the chance to design a brand-new screenwriting programme at Westerdals School of Arts, Communication and Technology (now Kristiania University College). Within the academy, I found an ideal context in which to study method, process and feedback in script development. The three-year Bachelor programme is built upon the idea that texts written for different genres of dramatic writing such as feature films, serial drama, stage text, animation and storytelling for games have a certain poetics in common, given that they all are written to be performed. Consequently, although screenwriting is most central in the curriculum, students at Westerdals are introduced to multiple formats during their course of study. The philosophy of the programme is to allow student writers to develop a personal voice, while providing them with tools to build a career in the broad field of dramatic writing in various genres and platforms. The programme proposes no particular dramaturgical method or screenwriting “guru”; instead, our students are exposed to a number of approaches and ways of working with dramatic texts. The students’ progression through the three-year programme is outlined below: • Year 1: First semester; classes in creativity, poetry and short stories, followed by classical dramaturgy, short film writing and technical aspects of filmmaking. Second semester; short films, writing for games, visual effects sequences, animation and adaptations. • Year 2: Third semester; serial drama. Fourth semester; theatre text and production. Throughout the second year, collaborative production processes with students from the school’s film-television programme, acting programme and programme in sound design progress. Bachelor project is initiated at the end of the fourth semester. • Year 3: Bachelor project development from ideas through to feature film scripts, serial drama concepts or stage plays.

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Our first class of screenwriting students got a taste of collective development processes in their second year, through their collaborations with directing, acting, producing, photography, sound design and editing students. The SIWG that naturally formed around each project often turned out to be every bit as multi-voiced, power-directed and filled with contradiction as the professional ones described by Macdonald and myself. Consequently, frustration levels among the second year’s screenwriting students were high. Teachers frequently had to mediate in bitter conflicts between writers, directors and producers. As I observed these processes, I began to ask whether it could be possible, within the more controllable academic environment, to prepare students for more informed collaboration and construct a different kind of SIWG, directed by method and powered by true creative exchange. From the first year on, in order to deepen their sense of practice our students were asked to write critical reflection texts on their own screenwriting work. In these texts, they described their projects’ origins, methods, creative choices and challenges. They were also required to employ certain creative tools based on my previous research (Senje, 2012a, 2012b‚ 2017). The first required step was to define what I called the “Original Impulse” for the project. This concept is a translation of screenwriter and researcher Ståle Stein Berg’s term “opphavleg stimulus” (Berg, 2009, p. 21). The idea of a defining root impulse for a screen work is by no means new. Ingmar Bergman refers to it as “a snowflake” from which a snowball gradually could be rolled, adding layers of snow (cited by Grenier, 1964). Adrian Martin describes it as a “germ, seed, nucleus, matrix, core” (Martin, 2014, p. 16). A well-known example of an Original Impulse is Paul Schrader’s description of how the core image of the film Taxi Driver came to him (cited in Hansen & Herman, 2010, p. 303): The metaphor of the taxi—this iron coffin floating through the city, with this person locked inside who seems to be surrounded by people, but is in fact desperately alone—I realized the taxicab was the metaphor for loneliness. I had a metaphor, I had a character, and then there was just the matter of creating the plot.

As our first students embarked on their final year and their first full-length project, I wished to test whether the concepts and tools applied in the critical reflections could play an active role in the early writing process as well. My hypothesis was that these would help the writers anchor the projects firmly at the outset. The aim was that more robust screen ideas be built, enabling the writers to receive and process multi-voiced feedback without losing track of their original intentions or their projects’ integrity. Thus, my plan for the very first Bachelor class was to simulate the multi-voiced setting of a professional SIWG environment. In addition to the staff script advisors they knew well by then, I would expose the student writers to feedback from multiple

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Fig. 2 The timeline of the Westerdals Project in Script Development

external feedback givers, through both workshops and individual feedback from external advisors. The revised timeline of the study is visualized in Fig. 2: Why would I risk exposing my inexperienced student writers to the hazards of “development hell”? Why not stick with the small feedback groups and the skilled teachers/advisors they knew and trusted? The idea was, of course, that the final project would serve as a training ground for receiving and processing feedback in the “real world”. Also, I sensed that our student writers needed to be confronted with alternatives to the feedback givers who had been their devoted teachers for two years. Sharing a writing period with someone is often an intimate process, leading a writer and script advisor into a close creative relationship in which values, personality and biography is exposed. The Achilles’ heel of such a creative collaboration is that, over time, the script advisor may gradually identify strongly with the writer and turn into “an internal voice” in the project. In spite of what might be an excellent creative exchange, the “outside-eye” component of the dialogue is weakened. Below I summarize and discuss the first phase of the Westerdals Project in Script Development Research, namely the pilot project, in which the development of four feature film scripts was monitored and evaluated.

The Pilot, 2017/18: “Artistic Integrity and the External Voice” The pilot was designed as a practice-led research project, in which I would follow four students through a year of script development, from start-up in May 2017 to delivery in May 2018. The four projects were all feature films.

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The four students and I, their teacher and script advisor, formed a “Creative Exchange Group”. I met with the writers frequently in the initial phase to learn about their intent and establish the use of the creative tools. The students, anonymized as Student 1–4 in the below summary, met with me regularly throughout their third school year. After handing in their final scripts in May 2018, they filled out a questionnaire about the process retrospectively. Toward the middle of the Fall semester, the class encountered an external feedback giver in a one-week workshop. Here, I listened in on the individual feedback sessions of my group without contributing myself. In the next phase, during the Winter/Spring semester, the students were free to choose their individual, external advisor from a pool of seasoned practitioners. The externals met with their student three times during a period of three months. In the four final weeks, staff advisors followed up the projects before final delivery. Our teaching staff continued to be contact persons and internal script advisors on the projects throughout the school year. This gave the writers someone to debrief with and refer back to after encountering the external feedback givers. It also opened up the dialogue to contradictory and diverse opinions.

Creative Tools The three development tools employed in the study were 1. Original Impulse 2. Screen Idea 3. Statement of Personal Motivation The concept of the “Original Impulse” was already well established through the work on critical reflection texts. For the concept of the “Screen Idea” we chose Macdonald’s definition: “A singular concept intended to become a screen work” (Macdonald, 2004, p. 5). The Screen Idea as a tool had not previously been introduced to the student group. Finally, for the third tool, the writers would give written short statements describing their “personal motivation”. What was their inner drive and why would they want to spend a year working on this particular story? Equipped with these three creative tools, the four writers were set to navigate through their the SIWG journeys. The pilot project timeline followed a traditional development model. Once the first phase of discussing and defining Original Impulses and Screen Ideas was complete, the writers started working out their stories’ timelines with structuring documents such as synopsis and treatment. In the next phase, they continued with a first draft and subsequently wrote further, revised drafts until final delivery. In other words, they followed what I have called “The Set Stage Chronology of Documents” (Senje, 2017, p. 271), progressing through the conventional stages of mainstream script development.

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By August 2017, the student writers in the first cycle had defined the Original Impulses for their projects as follows: Student number 1: An eight-year-old girl gets two monsters as best friends Student number 2: A nine-year-old girl starts living in a Charlie Chaplin costume Student number 3: A young woman flees through a forest when a grown man hits her with his car Student number 4: A dead body is discovered floating in the water on the day of a big and prestige-driven event

These four Original Impulses are all visually oriented; the writers could easily draw them as pictures. Also, they appeared to be charged with emotion. In our group discussions we now explored the emotional content of each image, in search of the projects’ emotional “chamber tone”. What was the appeal, in the deepest sense, of this particular image to the writer? Was there an “electric current” hidden in it that might underlie the story-to-be? In dialogue with the group, we defined the emotional timbre of each Original Impulse as shown in Fig. 3. At this point, each of the student writers had only a vague idea of what kind of story they wanted to write. Having established an emotional chamber tone, it was time to find out how the fleeting images could lead to specific

Fig. 3 Original impulses and their emotional charge

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Screen Ideas from which a story could spring. The writers now entered the next phase of development—that between the articulation of the Original Impulse and the definition of the Screen Idea—a phase I have often found to be the most precarious one in a development cycle. How to sculpt their emotionally charged images into story ideas that could inspire character development, trigger cinematic action and be stretched, through craft and imaginative labour, on a timeline of approximately 90 min? A good screen idea is hard to find; one that has the qualities mentioned above is even more uncommon. I sensed that it was important not to rush this phase of the process, and an arduous period of screen idea development followed. It is worth noting here that screenwriting teacher and author Philip Parker, who was the first to use the term “screen idea”, presents a different definition from that of Macdonald. According to Parker, a screen idea must include “A clear sense of the story, subject and theme and its dramatic potential in terms of genre, style and structure” (1998, p. 57). Clearly, he gives a more practical and detailed definition than Macdonald, prescribing a Screen Idea almost as concrete as a synopsis. In fact, many screenwriters would only be able to meet such specific requirements after a first draft is written. While I was well aware of Parker’s substantial definition, I perceived its requirements to be so detailed as to leave little room for discovery underway. Following an exploratory process that lasted almost four weeks, with much creative exchange and discussion within our group, the writers came up with the following screen ideas (Fig. 4). The screen ideas all appeared to have a strong connection with their Original Impulse. We discovered that they also had some common features, such as

Fig. 4 The distance from the Original Impulse to the Screen Idea

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a defined protagonist, an inciting incident and the seed for a personal struggle. These specific elements were not called for in the chosen definition of a screen idea. They are, of course, classical elements in screenwriting, which is not to say that they are always clearly articulated in development processes. In fact, the lack of such a defined screen idea, or vision, for the whole SIWG may be the most common reason why script development processes run into conflict or go astray. At this point, the four writers also activated the third tool, that is, they wrote down their statements of “Personal Motivation”, which were not yet shared within the group. Based on these screen ideas, the four writers now started developing their feature film screenplays. At the end of October, a one-week intensive workshop with an external script consultant was arranged. The first rough draft was due at the end of January. By early February, the students handed in their rough drafts or extended treatments and began their work with external script consultants, chosen from a list of experienced screenwriters. This phase in the development plan was meant to last for three months. After two months of working with external consultants, by early Spring 2018, it became clear that project number 1, 2 and 4 had run into serious development problems. By this I mean that the writers kept rewriting treatments and drafts without reaching a script version they believed in. All three felt deeply frustrated and insecure, all were losing their motivation to work on the projects they had passionately described a few months before. They each produced between 6 and 10 new treatments or drafts in about ten weeks. They all sensed that their project’s Original Impulse was lost. In all three cases, I registered that feedback given by an external advisor was a significant trigger to the development problems. How exactly did this happen? The framework of this chapter does not allow for a full run-through of the processes and the direct feedback given. However, in the section below, two pertinent examples of troublesome feedback are chosen from the three troubled projects and described.

Challenges Triggered by External Feedback Student number 1 wrote a family comedy-drama sprung from the Original Impulse of a small girl who has two imaginary monsters as her best friends. The impulse gave a strong sense of loneliness. In the story, the girl lives alone with her depressed and distraught mother, whom she struggles alone to take care of. Since the mother’s crisis stems from her being left by a partner, the precocious girl is convinced things will go awry when her mother finds new romance. Driven by jealousy and fear, she decides the man is a troll. Allied with her two imaginary monsters, she plots to break the couple apart. The girl and the monsters subject the poor man to a string of imaginative (and wildly funny) tricks and attacks. They finally succeed in ruining the love relationship. At that same moment, the girl discovers that the guy is caring and funny, not a troll after all. She regrets her actions and the two begin to make friends. Soon

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after, her mother regains her grip on reality, and is able to start nurturing her child. The daughter is no longer neglected and consequently has no need for magic monster friends. She has gained new insight and now accepts herself as a child, the person in the family who needs and deserves parenting and care the most. During a workshop, the writer received the following feedback comment from an external script advisor: “If the story ends by the couple getting back together, you are saying that a woman needs a man in order to be happy”. Should I make a qualified guess, I would say that this comment was made spontaneously, with no intentions on the part of the seasoned feedback giver to change the project’s direction. Still, that was exactly what happened. As a result of the comment, the writer now saw her mother/daughter story as hostile to women and was convinced that major changes were called for. In spite of much encouragement, she lost confidence in her story and abandoned what several experienced readers had perceived as an excellent project. Instead, she wrote a dozen drafts in search of a new story, while suffering serious doubts and anxiety about the whole project. Finally, she steered clear of the rocks by making the crisis-stricken parent a father trying to recover from the mother leaving him. The love story and the quirky incidents of the girl’s struggle to ruin her mother’s romance were eliminated, and the mother–father couple never got back together in the new story. The result was a decent, but different script. Clearly, it was based on the same original impulse as the first one, but the writer ended up telling a completely different story from the one originally intended. In the second example, student number 4 set out to write a burlesque comedy based on the idea of a dead body discovered in the water, right outside the party venue, on the day of a big, ostentatious family celebration. The main character was June, 52, an eccentric woman of big dreams but small means, who sets out to arrange a lavish confirmation party for her teenage son. Her ambition is to impress her hostile family, to defeat her reputation as a worthless bohemian and increase her son’s social standing in the process. June goes to great trouble to raise money, fix a luxurious seaside venue, hire a cook she can’t afford and persuade her snobbish, distant family to attend. As the guests arrive, she comes upon the sinister sight of a body—the corpse of her former lodger—bobbing in the waters in front of the seaside terrace where the champagne is to be served. Chaos arises as she, her two sons and her drunken ex-husband attempt to hide the corpse and keep the party going as if nothing has happened. Naturally, they fail at this mission. When all is revealed, June sheds her disguises, throws out her judgmental relatives and embraces her own, imperfect family. Through a classical character arc, she ends up rejecting false aspirations, regaining self-respect and restoring her relationship to her estranged children. For the writer, trouble began when an external advisor questioned the choice of protagonist: The mother ought not to be the main character, as

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she was “the kind of person who would never change”. Rather, the protagonist should be the eldest son—big brother of the teenager to be confirmed. The 28-year-old unemployed man was still living at home and clearly needed to liberate himself from his deranged, far less interesting, middle-aged mother. The result of this feedback was that student number 4 wrote several versions of her story with the eldest son as the driving force of the party which powered the comedy plot. The writer found it nearly impossible to connect this weak and dependent young character to a struggle to impress the world through a grandiose confirmation party. She produced a large number of new drafts and outlines, trying to find out how the grown man could hook onto a teenager’s party as a driving goal. As it turned out, she did not succeed in finding a story she could believe in. Three weeks before the deadline, she went back to her original set-up with the mother as protagonist. She reconnected with her Original Impulse and realized her protagonist needed to be the character who had the highest stakes in the party project that was the driving force in the comedy plot. The carnivalesque character of the mother had been the one her heart was with from the outset. In both examples, the student writers experienced a compact version of development hell, with a high number of drafts written, comments from diverse feedback givers steering the projects in new directions, and a drastic move away from the writer’s original intent. The first one ended up with a completely different story, the second finally recovered the one she had wanted to write. A new story of quality is not a negative final outcome, but both writers would surely have been better off and could have advanced further in the work on their delivered screenplays without the frustration, loss of confidence and circuitous routes taken. In both cases, the concept of the Original Impulse turned out to be truly significant in restoring the core of the stories.

Pilot Results A year after initiation, all four student writers had submitted full drafts of their first feature film screenplays and passed their B.A. exam. They had also filled in their post-project questionnaires. Here, all three writers who were struck by development hell all reported that the conscious anchoring of the project in an Original Impulse was highly useful; in fact, it was a major factor in getting their projects back on track after their lengthy development detours: For my part, the original impulse was an image and the emotion I felt spring from that image. Also, it was the mood and image that I think form the core of my story. As long as I retain that core, I can do whatever I wish with the plot, without changing the actual story content. The concept has been a good tool whenever I have gone lost in my own script. (Student number 1) The essential thing is that it gives me an emotional hook to hang my ideas on, something that can power my further exploration of my material […] It is

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more about a starting point for creative exploration than attempting to anchor my narrative in a specific theme, environment or other frameworks. (Student number 4)

The concept of the Screen Idea had been far less useful to the writers. This appeared to be due to the fact that our chosen definition was too broad to be useful in the context of a story development process. The open definition of “a singular concept intended to become a screen work” is probably more useful to screenwriting research than to actual writing practice. Thus, a challenge for further research might be to redefine a Screen Idea concept for the purpose of script development practice, more concrete than Macdonald’s, less prescriptive than Parker’s version. The third chosen tool, the statements of Personal Motivation, turned out to have no significance at all: By the time they finished, all four students had a new and different idea of why they had chosen their subjects. Apparently, they were not aware of their own motivational drive until the project was well behind them.

Act III: Examining the Feedback Phenomenon While the writing processes all had a satisfactory conclusion, the appearance of development problems in three out of four projects is substantial. Where had we gone wrong? Did we choose the right feedback givers? Did we bring in too many of them? After closer examination of students’ reports, I found that development trouble did not originate in the multi-voiced context itself. Nor did they mention or criticize the style or the personalities of the feedback givers. The cause seemed to be the actual content of certain feedback. In addition, the students’ loyalty to and respect for the feedback givers, who as noted were prominent practitioners, clearly came in the way of their sticking to their original intentions. Like myself in the encounters with a reputable consultant of the Norwegian Film Institute, they accepted the feedback giver’s opinion as “truth”. It is worth noting that the feedback givers in this study were all creative people themselves, that is, they were screenwriters. This was not necessarily a wrong choice. Rather, it confirmed the findings of my earlier work, the video essay, in which I conclude that the participants in SIWGs are: mostly creative people such as directors, dramaturgs and writers who are all trained and inclined to invest their personalities, emotions and heartfelt convictions into the work in question. However, this personal engagement is a double-edged sword, as it represents both a prerequisite for quality in creative work and a potential hazard to a screen project´s integrity. In examining the students reports of the feedback given, I found that the filters of the screen development field can be rational or highly personal, including biases based on ideology, gender and personal emotion. (Senje, 2012a, 2012b)

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The feedback in the two example cases was clearly influenced by personal ideology and preferences, of which these skilled and engaged feedback givers might have been unaware. In the first case, where the feedback giver indirectly pronounced the story unfriendly to women, a normative element was clearly present. In the second, personal taste and a classical development model based on required “character change” came into play. The second feedback giver found the neurotic son’s liberation process to be a deeper and more interesting character change than the eccentric middle-aged woman’s struggle to accept her true self and discover the falsity of her social ambitions. After the problem-ridden pilot, studying feedback styles and content in more detail appeared urgent. We were about to embark on the second cycle of the research project, with a new group of B.A. students to be monitored. Focus was on developing the creative tools and attempting an alternative development model, without the “Set Stage Chronology of Documents” previously mentioned. I clearly needed to rethink and expand the focus of my study: How could we avoid a repetition? Could our experienced feedback givers be coached and trained to give feedback that focussed on the projects’ Original Impulses and redefined Screen Ideas, feedback that was more aligned with the writers’ own intent? I considered arranging a feedback method seminar, as training the trainers seemed an obvious option, at least within an academic setting. However, in the field at large, feedback training of script consultants and development executives seemed less realistic. What if we, as a first step, could educate the feedback receivers instead? Could it be that an extended awareness of feedback methods—or the lack thereof—and content might affect the writers’ approach to receiving notes? I concluded that, within the next cycle, the most effective strategy would be an attempt to change the way feedback was received and analyzed by the writers. In the final section below, I describe the chosen approach to this task and my attempt to formulate a model for feedback analysis. I also outline a suggested taxonomy of feedback types that may increase awareness of the unpredictability, contradictions and other hazards of the multi-voiced feedback phenomenon. Simply making these prevailing aspects of the conventional script development scene recognizable and visible appears to be a significant tool for more productive script development, whether it takes place in educational programmes or the professional field.

“Feedback Science”: Toward a Model for Feedback Analysis My proposed feedback analysis model was divided into three areas, or steps: The Who, the How and the What. The first step was for the writer to establish the identity of the feedback giver (Fig. 5); the second to determine her approach, method and mode of communication (Fig. 6); the third to perform an analysis of the feedback content itself (Fig. 7), according to a taxonomy. In

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Fig. 5 Feedback giver profile analysis

Fig. 6 Two types of feedback approach/method

addition, I worked out a “red light list”, defining types of frequently occurring types of feedback content that writers need to be especially aware of (Fig. 8). As for the chosen methods of feedback, the internal and external feedback givers’ approaches were clearly divided into two main modes of communication, which I named as Inner- and Outer-directed.

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Fig. 7 Types of feedback content

Regarding content, one would expect expert script advisors to focus on dramaturgy, structure and various narrative conventions. Such feedback certainly occurred but appeared manageable and easily processed. Feedback that interpreted, questioned or challenged core idea, theme or characters was perceived as more problematic and invasive. My attempt to define various feedback content resulted in the taxonomy outlined in below. Finally, I developed a “red light list” of feedback types to be especially aware of. In this taxonomy, the types of feedback content that emerged in the process of developing Days of Winter, as well as in the writing processes of my students, are defined and included. The list, which is still a work-inprogress, is intended to serve as a tool for screenwriters to refer to before and after feedback sessions. It aims to enable writers to better select feedback that is relevant and useful and separate it from that which is grounded in subsidiary circumstances and motives—such as strong personal engagement on certain issues—that do not coincide with the project’s Original Impulse and Screen Idea. On this list, the most potentially damaging types of feedback appeared to be what I define as normative and the type based on personal emotion.

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Fig. 8 Feedback types of which to be especially aware

Feedback Science Training The feedback analysis model was communicated to the next group of students before they started working on their B.A. projects. This was done through a minicourse informally named “Feedback Science”, the aim of which was clearly defined as a countermeasure to prevent development troubles. The problems triggered by feedback in the pilot were also presented and analyzed, together with examples from my own experience as a writer and script consultant. The students were introduced to my feedback model, to feedback analysis and to the taxonomies. Thus, I hoped to prepare them to interpret, classify and select feedback from multiple voices. I made no attempts to influence the script consultants in the second cycle or the feedback itself. Several of the feedback givers chosen were the same as the year before. During script development in the second cycle, interesting results were achieved. After being trained in Feedback Science, students tended to sort out and shrug at the less relevant comments, rather than being distracted from their intentions and struck by despair. One student, whose original impulse had to do with violent child abuse, conceived a story about a grown-up man who returns home after thirty years of absence to confront his brutal father. When an external advisor proposed that his stories of abuse “could be all made up”, she reported: “Obviously, this comment was random feedback; he had not actually asked me about my Original Impulse and my project intentions”. Another student, in writing a horror-film about eating disorders, was persistently encouraged by feedback givers to turn it into a psychological thriller instead. He commented: “I knew it was normative, you know. They just did

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not approve of my creative goal, which was to write a truly experimental genre film”. In the second cycle, none of the writers experienced development hell. To generalize from this is, of course, premature, as only seven projects were analyzed so far. However, the results have also been presented to a group of professional screenwriters, who unanimously embraced the concept of feedback analysis as a useful tool for writers. Further, the results confirm the impressions I have gathered from two decades as a script advisor, including five years as gatekeeper at the Norwegian film institute: Screenwriters need to develop strategies for dealing with and benefitting from a rich chorus of external voices without compromising their projects. Feedback awareness training may well be one of them. The role of the script advisor and the creative feedback phenomenon are important aspects of screen idea development, worthy of more investigation than has so far been conducted. With further research in feedback and training on both sides, we may be a few significant steps closer to developing the unruly script development field. The result of such development, one might hope, would be more productive writing processes, more satisfied screenwriters and, ultimately, more interesting and original screenplays.

References Andersen, Ø. (trans.). (2008a). Aristoteles Poetikk, Bokklubben. Batty, C., & Taylor, S. (2021). Script development. Palgrave Macmillan. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Berg, S. S. (2009). Refleksjonar kring Forteljarstyrt Film (Reflections on narrativedirected film). Thesis, doctoral fellowship project. Den Norske Filmskolen, Høgskolen i Lillehammer (Lillehammer University College). Berg, S. S. (2011). Interview with Siri Senje as part of the project ‘Imagining for the screen – The original screenplay as poiesis’. Den Norske Filmskolen, Høgskolen i Lillehammer (Lillehammer University College). Bordino, A. W. (2017). Script doctoring and authorial control in Hollywood and independent American cinema. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 249–265. Grenier, C. (1964). Playboy interview: Ingmar Bergman, in Shargel, Rafael (2007): Ingmar Bergman: Interviews. Conversations with filmmakers series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Hansen, P., & Herman, P. R. (2010). Tales from the script: 50 Hollywood screenwriters share their stories. Harper Collins. Hughes, D. (2012). Tales from development hell: The greatest movies never made? Titan Books. Macdonald, I. W. (2004). The presentation of the screen idea in narrative filmmaking. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University. Macdonald, I. W. (2010). ... So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic – The screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 45–58. Mamet, D. (1991). On directing film. Penguin Books.

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Martin, A. (2014). Where do cinematic ideas come from? Journal of Screenwriting, 5(1), 9–26. McAulay, A. (2014). Based on a true story: Negotiating collaboration, compromise and authorship in the script development process. In C. Batty (Ed.), Screenwriters and screenwriting: Putting practice into context (pp. 189–206). Palgrave Macmillan. Nash, M. (2014). Developing the screenplay: Stepping into the unknown. In C. Batty (Ed.), Screenwriters and screenwriting: Putting practice into context (pp. 97–112). Palgrave Macmillan. Parker, P. (1998). The art and science of screenwriting. Intellect Books. Pelo, R. (2010). Tonino Guerra: The screenwriter as a narrative technician or as a poet of images? Authorship and method in the writer–director relationship. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 113–129. Senje, S. (2012a). Sculpting for the screen – A digital media essay. Thesis, artistic fellowship project. Den Norske Filmskolen, Høgskolen i Lillehammer (Lillehammer University College). https://vimeo.com/manage/51174725/general Senje, S. (2012b). Frosten og September. Vidarforlaget. Senje, S. (2013). Imagining for the screen – The original screenplay as poiesis’, thesis, doctoral fellowship project. Den Norske Filmskolen, Høgskolen i Lillehammer (Lillehammer University College). Senje, S. (2017). Formatting the imagination: A reflection on screenwriting as a creative practice. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 267–285. https://doi.org/10. 1386/jocs.8.3.267_1 Sternberg, C. (1997). Written for the Screen, the American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text. Stauffenburg.

Script Readers as Gatekeepers: Demystifying Processes of Script Coverage James Napoli

Introduction In the pivotal show business satire film Sunset Boulevard (1950), script reader Betty Schaefer is summoned to a studio executive’s office and asked for her opinion on a fictional screenplay entitled Bases Loaded. She trashes it, not realizing its author is in the room. This is an awkward fictional moment, to say the least, but it is unlikely to occur in modern Hollywood. Mostly because story analysts, or script readers, even if employed by a major studio, do not maintain offices on the lot as they did in Tinseltown’s heyday. Plus, Betty was informally relaying to her boss an opinion she would not be allowed to phrase in such a blunt way in her written appraisal of a screenplay. That written appraisal is called “coverage”, and scripts for movies and television shows are still “covered”, as they would have been in 1950, with 2-page synopses, followed by a page or so of comments assessing the viability of a script on a variety of levels, usually in the major categories of Premise, Storyline, Character and Dialogue. In the world of Betty Schaefer, and in the world of story analyst/readers in the present day, these write-ups, evaluating the suitability of a script for funding and production, must do the job without the harshness Betty lapsed into within a more informal setting. If a reader does not think highly of a screenplay, for example, that reader must carefully lay out the reasons why,

J. Napoli (B) National University, Los Angeles, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_3

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exhibiting a solid knowledge of the craft of writing and dispassionately indicating the areas of critique that fell short of delivering an effective screen story. As Taylor and Batty (2016) wrote about Lucy Scher’s guide to analyzing and developing film scripts (2011), script reports, or coverage, should not only analyze the work but also encourage the writer. This philosophy is particularly appropriate, then, when considering the above-mentioned areas of analysis and the concise nature of communicating key feedback to the writer or the writer’s representative. Indeed, most screenplays within an established system of film production are submitted by agents on behalf of their writer clients, and a hard-working writer (it is a tremendous achievement to complete any literary endeavour, a screenplay being no exception), at whatever level of mastery, is owed a cogent and fair-minded take on their work. In most cases, the story analyst’s criticism will be delivered in condensed form by the agent, with the reader’s comments rarely being handed over as a document for the writer to examine. More writing submissions are rejected than accepted, therefore when a coverage conveys overwhelmingly positive feedback, a representative can choose to share this with their client as a form of validation and motivation. Whatever the delivery system, what Sunset Boulevard’s fictional scenario informs us about the reality of the script reader/executive relationship is that it is a valid, established and respected one. The reader’s words are trusted and taken into account when a production entity decides to go forward (or not to go forward) from script to screen. Given that script development begins with the review of the writer’s work by a reader who delivers a condensed synopsis which is not the work itself, but rather the introductory basis upon which the work will be evaluated, is it reasonable to assert that script readers do, in fact, function as gatekeepers? The aforementioned condensation of the story and appraisal of filmic potential (its suitability to the visual medium) in a writer’s submission begins with a metaphorical gate in paper form: the top sheet (see Fig. 1). The top sheet may be the only thing that the executive making a decision about moving forward with a project ever has time to review.

What a Top Sheet Looks like Writers would do well to be aware that the opinion of their work is commonly reduced to a checkbox-grid with a rudimentary rating system—knowing this will help them implement an often-paraphrased maxim of the business of show: only submit your best work. Go Into the Story is the official blog of the Black List screenwriting service, which offers “would-be writers…a chance to get critical feedback”, and “gives moviemaking professionals a portal through which they can search out new—and well-reviewed—scripts” (Wagner, 2017). In it, screenwriter Scott Myers (2018) quotes an anonymous producer who once chided him for letting a less-than-superlative script go out into the world:

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Fig. 1 Coverage Top Sheet © James Napoli

Never send out a script before it’s ready. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever! You get one chance to create a perception in Hollywood. Sorta there, almost there, really close… that’s not good enough. If your script isn’t totally, completely, holy-sh*t-son-of-a-bit*h ready, don’t let anybody who is anybody in Hollywood come within a mile of it. Only go out with a script when you know it’s good.

Such advice begs the question of any writer: How do I know when a script is ready? A good deal of the areas of concern to a script reader detailed in this chapter may provide at least some of the foundational answer to that complicated question.

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An example of a coverage top sheet is illustrated in Fig. 1, entitled Story Report. Each informational category is in bold, with bracketed descriptions of the kinds of content each reader must supply. Grid categories referring to elements of screenwriting craft are selfexplanatory, with “Production Value” referring to the visually compelling nature of the story and whether or not its effectiveness as a visual product is conveyed by the material. A coverage cover page concludes with a final verdict on whether or not a script should be advanced along the development path. There are several levels of “Reader Recommendation” in this category. They are: PASS [Not enough in the script to merit pursuing.] This is sometimes reflective of a script that needs further revisions in order to tell a story effectively, but it may also be contingent on such external factors as the studio or production company’s brand (the genres of films they typically pursue) not being a good fit for the material, or an agent or producer already having a similar-themed project in their stable of projects. A script reader is also made aware of such factors and includes knowledge of these contingencies within their commentary. RESERVED CONSIDER [A few intriguing elements, perhaps should not be rejected out of hand.] A Reserved Consider can allow for a script to be passed further along the chain of development executives who see it for the first time and make a decision about whether or not they wish to engage further with the material. CONSIDER [Many worthwhile elements, definitely worthy of attention.] A solid narrative with a good showing in each grid category, but likely in need of further input from the development team. STRONG CONSIDER [Approaching true excellence, even more worthy of attention.] Here, a story analyst is more pointedly urging development executives to get first-hand the experience of immersing oneself in an above-average submission. A reader is communicating that the team may not want to let such quality fall through the cracks. RECOMMEND [An unqualified rave, worthy of immediate attention with an eye toward eventual production.] The level of trust cultivated between a reader and their development executives is fully on display with a Recommend. Here the reader is, in a sense, staking their reputation on the team taking the next step into attempting the realization of the page to the screen. Recommends are carefully considered and not handed down lightly.

Finally, all of the above categories also apply to the recommendation levels of the writer submitting the work. A script is indeed evaluated from the standpoint of whether or not it provides a blueprint for a potentially successful film project, but within this assessment is also a critique of the general level of expertise displayed by the scriptwriter. As such, a screenplay might not meet all

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the necessary criteria sought by a development executive, however it might well point toward a writer with a good deal of talent on display and therefore worthy of continued interest with an eye to cultivating a long-term relationship Therefore, the categories of screenplay evaluation listed on the top sheet’s grid also apply to the viability of the writer. On most occasions, recommendations as high or higher than “Consider” would also warrant that the writer be considered (more of the writer’s work requested for review, or, if the writer is unrepresented, possibly calling him or her in for a general meeting). Once we have absorbed the technical aspects of the format, intent and purpose of script coverage—and in continuing to pose the question about whether or not the individuals who supply said coverage are, indeed, industry gatekeepers—there remains the crucial component of the skill sets, and mindsets, of those in development who encounter and appraise a writer’s work on a regular, if not daily basis. By obtaining professional readers’ first-hand accounts of their experiences, preferences and practices we can gain a clearer, more informed picture of that crucial intersection between the completion of a creative work and its initial boots-on-the-ground exposure to the entertainment industry. To this end, a research study was conducted, engaging story analysts that represent a cross-section of reader responsibilities within their fields to share their insights regarding the craft, goals and influence of the service they provide.

Professional Roundtable There were four participants in these qualitative structured interviews. Each of the four participants daily comes into contact with submitted script material. Each of them provides a slightly different perspective on the processes of coverage described above. In aggregate they provide an insightful snapshot of the point of first contact for a writer’s work in the industry. Below are short biographies of each participant followed by excerpts from their interviews and analysis of how each might support or oppose the assertion that their roles fit the description of entertainment business gatekeepers. For the purposes of confidentiality (within a facet of the film industry that depends upon the confidential review of intellectual property), the study’s participants have been anonymized using initials. CC: Career story analyst and co-founder of a leading screenwriting consultancy and competition platform. JJ: Production and Development Executive. RP: Long-time story analyst for a Los Angeles-based television network. MW: Story analyst and script consultant.

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Who is Reading What and Why? Every producing entity (and every talent agency assessing their client’s viability for collaboration with these producing entities) is on the lookout for certain types of material. Whether it be an independent producer whose financing comes from a variety of international partners, a studio looking to duplicate some of the aspects of its popular genre material or a small production company owned by an actor looking to develop projects that would help solidify or expand that actor’s repertoire, the story analyst/script reader is often called upon to generate coverage that reflects the needs and sensibilities of his or her employer. As CC stated when asked about this aspect of the process, “Material has to be analyzed both in terms of general craft and market potential, but also— and crucially—in terms of how it is or is not a fit for a particular entity”. JJ emphasizes the responsibility of each reader for “doing their homework in finding out what productions the company has been involved with”. As such, the process of development is not a random one in which every producer is simply looking for a good script to finance. It is, importantly, linked to the visions, goals and unique personalities of each company. It is unlikely, for example, that even the most flawless graphic horror screenplay would find its way into the development process at a company that has built its reputation on family entertainment.

At What Stage is a Script When It Crosses the reader’s Desk? Development can occur at any stage of the script-to-screen process. Indeed, scriptwriters may be asked to make changes on each day of shooting once a film is in production. In the script development stage, the story analyst’s notes are conveyed to the writer with each new pass at a draft. A reader, then, may receive submissions that reflect a first finished draft that the writer feels is ready to be shown and then be consulted for input in all future drafts. Another script may have already generated quite a lot of interest independently, and the reader is simply asked for coverage while executives weigh their own commitment to the piece. “I get sent projects and get asked to consult on scripts and pilots at a variety of stages—everything from spec efforts from aspiring or emerging screenwriters to scripts that are partially or fully financed and/or partially or fully packaged with talent”, CC says. MW adds that a reader engaged by a production company or agency is receiving material that the writer or their representative considers polished enough to submit, sometimes for possible production, sometimes for consideration as being represented as a writer client within the agency. (Hence the designated evaluation categories for a screen story indeed also applying to the writers themselves.) RP agrees, and more fully outlines the variety of material that might cross his desk as a story analyst:

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If it’s a project a company is developing, I might see an early draft and then it will come back to me in other drafts as it’s rewritten. In this case, they’re not interested in whether I think it’s a good project or not, since they’ve already commissioned it. What they are seeking is input on the material’s flaws, or how one draft stacks up to the previous ones. If it’s a straight submission coming from an outside source, then it’s presumably something that production company or agent has vetted and they are confident it’s in pretty good shape. In that case, I’m just analyzing it in terms of whether this is something my employer should get involved in (or if it’s a writing sample, whether the writer is someone they’d be interested in hiring).

The Art of Script Coverage To those outside the entertainment industry and, to a certain extent those inside it, the process of writing script coverage is a mysterious one. On the surface, it may seem that the task of the reader is simple: to convey to an employer whether or not they enjoyed a script. Well-written coverage, the kind that creates a reputation for a reader and finds him or her requested by producers, development executives, agents and the organizers of competitions, demonstrates a mastery of a craft all its own. There are tell-tale signs of well-written coverage, including the crafting of a strong synopsis, the efficient display of targeted, insightful comments and an on-point logline (a one or two sentence description of the script’s most important story and character elements). JJ feels coverage is an art form. “It is challenging to capture a story in a small amount of page space. I feel that good coverage tells a story of the story”, she adds, including an emphasis on how a story analyst needs to think cinematically when creating a synopsis and have an awareness of the fact that coverage is shared within a company so that a critique will ideally include suggestions for alternative approaches to areas identified as weaknesses in the script. With a document that is indeed read by many different development personnel, criticism must always be constructive. MW offers up common phrasing in her experience which helps show a balanced and noncombative look at a script’s problem areas, such as “lacks necessary shading”, “pacing lags in Act Two” and “the script could use more of these impactful moments”. MW asserts that these are ways of wording criticism in plotting, characterization and dialogue that convey encouragement along with criticism. CC supplies another component to the architecture of coverage as an art form. While he feels that calling coverage an art form may be somewhat grandiose, he also acknowledges that, “Coverage and development acumen drive the entire industry … something that comes across as pared and focused but not truncated or butchered or anemic. And, even more impressively, [it] manages to do so while also fully replicating the emotional thrust of the piece of material as a whole … and whether or not it has general commercial and market potential”. RP calls coverage an art form, but one that has very defined parameters and rules. That script development is dependent on a

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level of shared understanding around these parameters and rules makes effective coverage an incredibly valuable component—if not, as CC suggests, the driving component—of the development process.

Writing the Logline A logline is, again, the one (occasionally two)-sentence description of the script’s story included on the coverage top sheet. These hyper-condensed versions of an entire, often very complex, story become a crucial tool of communication between the story analyst and the agent or production entity. It is distinct from an advertising tagline, which is a clever turn of phrase on a poster or trailer designed to induce curiosity about the story’s subject matter or make a statement/pose a question about universal life experience in order create a level of relatability for a prospective audience. By contrast, a logline must actually convey the events of the story to those who could be entrusted with amassing the machinery necessary to produce a film. It cannot deal in generalities or catch phrases; it must give as full a sense of the story as possible. CC calls loglines an underappreciated skill. They don’t just have to accurately synopsize and convey, they also have to have a little bit of marketing pizzazz. They have to capture content, genre, tone, main character, character arc, and key conflict all in one sentence. Good loglines are dangerously close to an art form. I don’t have a real method or go-to first step in crafting a logline. It’s just something I do instinctually and organically. I have a feeling this is true for most professional story analysts—if you’re good at assessing a piece of material, you’ll automatically have an instinct on how to craft an effective and accurate logline.

Within the realm of development, a well-crafted logline can thus become the first real point of interest for an executive, producer or agent. The story analyst who can bring out the proper sense of excitement, respect and even affection for a beautifully composed piece of cinematic writing is doing a service for the writer who created it.

How Important Are Format, Presentation, Grammar, Spelling? The physical nature—the basic look and layout of a script—are not identifiable aspects of steps within the development process. However, it behooves writers to understand that the first person within the industry to encounter their work will likely be a story analyst. While the statements from the interview subjects to follow flatly report that typographical or grammatical errors can never truly provide the rationale for passing on a script, there are areas of nuance regarding this topic that provide real-world cautionary advice for writers hoping to shepherd their works into development. First impressions

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can sometimes colour a reader’s feeling for the professionalism and credibility of the writer. CC states that he will never reject any work simply because typographical errors are present, but adds that it significantly distracts from the reading experience and calls into doubt the overall quality of the submitted material. “Great scripts are usually devoid of sloppy errors. They just go handin-hand”, he says. JJ is in agreement, pointing out that scripts with a large amount of grammatical or spelling errors are hard to overlook, and that a script would have to be extraordinary on all the other storytelling fronts in order to have copious errors forgiven. Too many errors can create an assumption that a writer is lazy, according to MW, and RP confirms that “a lot of errors is a really bad look for a screenplay for an unknown writer looking to break in. It just screams…that you don’t respect the industry enough to care … you’re hurting your odds”. The consensus about the potentially detrimental aspects of spelling and grammar errors among the interview subjects provides important context and a clear message for writers: Part of telling an effective tale on paper is presenting it cleanly and correctly.

What Happens When a Positive Coverage Moves a Project Further into Development? An established script reader will often be called upon to supply more detailed commentary, most often when their initial positive coverage helps move a script more deeply into being considered as a potential produced product. There are several different tiers of responsibility asked of a reader in these cases, including comparison coverage (analyzing changes made by a writer since implementing a previous round of reader feedback) and development notes (scene-by-scene, page-by-page, sometimes line-by-line appraisals of where each section of a script is succeeding and failing). Basic coverage, says JJ, is an overview of the viability of a given project and the reader’s assessment of the writer’s ability. Comparison coverage, she continues, “compares drafts of scripts and comments on whether changes have offered improvement or still need work”, while development notes are comprehensive notes shared between the writer and producer, or studio or network, invested in the project. CC elaborates on these distinctions, noting: Coverage is a diagnostic document that is meant to render a binding verdict. It’s a yes or no matrix. Coverage is meant to determine whether or not a piece of material has production potential and should be escalated up the hierarchical ladder at a studio, production company, distributor, agency, management company or sales outfit. Its purpose is to distill and to either confirm or dismiss. Comparison coverage and development notes are forward-thinking modes of story analysis that treat a piece of material as if it already has inherent quality and market potential and is on a path to a positive outcome.

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CC maintains that comparison coverage requires perhaps the highest level of focus and commitment to detail of the three modes, because the analyst is required to have an authoritative stance on at least two different versions of the same material, and be able to track and identify the changes and determine whether or not those changes are effective or not.

Screenplay Competitions Not only are they an avenue for undiscovered writers to gain some legitimacy in the form of prizes and possible meet-and-greets with Hollywood influencers, but script competitions also provide work for story analysts, whose skill in assessing work is needed as hundreds of screenplays flood the ever-growing list of competitions. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Fellowship is perhaps the most well-known of the contests offering the chance of exposure and recognition to unrepresented talent. Established by Gee Nicholl, widow of veteran television writer Don Nicholl, the Academy Nicholl Fellowship “…accepts original scripts from writers who’ve never earned more than $25,000 writing fiction for film or television…up to five finalists are selected…to write an original feature in the next year” (Barr, 2014). Producer Gale Ann Hurd commented in Entertainment Weekly, “There is no such thing in the industry as a sure bet, but this is a pretty good one” (Barr, 2014). RP agrees: “The contests are a very important gatekeeper for the industry. I don’t know any company with the resources and patience to sort through the thousands of submissions from unproven writers that contests receive, so getting to the quarterfinal or beyond rounds of a major contest at least gives beginning writers a way of separating themselves from the pack”. Ken Miyamoto (2017), writing in The Script Lab, names some of the other prominent competitions, and summarizes the evolution of the impact of these contests on the industry: Scriptapalooza, BlueCat, Final Draft’s Big Break, PAGE International Screenwriting Awards, Script Pipeline, Slamdance, and many others were born as the first decade of the 2000s brought forth the Internet, social media, and overall technological advances that allowed screenwriters to find contests and submit with ease…. Cash prizes got bigger and more and more contests were offering access to the industry, as well as in-depth feedback from professional readers. Studios began to enter into the mix, with Universal, Warner Brothers, Fox, and Disney offering their own in search of undiscovered talent.

Is the Role of the Script Reader Markedly Different When Evaluating Work in a Competition? Although the established entertainment industry paradigm can be said to be founded upon the discovery of new talent, as screenwriting competitions have

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gained in reputation and influence, that same paradigm provides the thrust of their importance to the development track. Indeed, they widen the field of potential undiscovered new talent, and are buffers between the general public (or aspiring screenwriters who’ve yet to find representation) and the established system. RP elaborates on this by observing, “Everyone is looking for good writers and good material, whether it’s a company or a contest”. CC co-founded a leading script consultancy organization and served as its competition’s director for its first five years. He has also provided story analysis for a wide variety of script competition platforms. He says the level of detail is, usually, not as high as is the case when writing coverage for a studio, production company, agency or management company. “Oftentimes a synopsis isn’t even required, and if it is, it’s more streamlined. Comments are more streamlined as well if they are just being used internally to judge a competition….It’s a total focus on craft execution and a premium emphasis on the voice of the writer, rather than commerce and market potential”. MW concurs, adding that competition coverage synopsis and comments are aimed only at the quality of the script as a separate entity, set apart from any considerations of eventual production. Script competitions, then, rank as a part of the development process, in that they provide the industry a first glimpse of projects that executives might not otherwise encounter through established agent and representative channels.

The “gatekeeper” Question and the Power of a “pass” An important component in the larger question of whether or not script readers are industry gatekeepers is contained in the concept of what it means when a submitted script receives an evaluation of “Pass”. Ascertaining the outcome of this eventuality for a writer not only sheds light on a significant hurdle that must be crossed with the development process, but also lets us see how the role of the story analyst can be a very decisive one at the script submission stage. MW says that in the majority of cases a “script is dead after receiving a pass from the reader”. CC agrees, saying a pass most often stops a script in its tracks, adding that this has held true across his experience as a reader for contests, producers or as an assistant or talent manager. RP brings up a distinction in this area when he mentions that certain projects come to him wherein high-level industry players have already put a script onto a fast-track and are seeking notes for further development. In those cases, says RP, the power of a “pass” may not be as detrimental to the future of the work. “Where a reader has the power to kill a script”, he adds, “is when it’s not coming from any kind of brand name”. Aside, then, from such considerations as RP cites above, there is a consensus among the professional story analysts that a pass can curtail the development of a project immediately. However, JJ asserts that, as someone who is also part of the development process, it can be important to have a personal knowledge

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of the material that is being covered by the reader. “I’ve…had readers offer a ‘consider’ to a script and thought the opposite, same goes for a ‘pass’ so it’s hard to bypass some sort of [personal] review of the material before completely deciding”. JJ’s response is a helpful one to contemplate, since it creates awareness of the importance of the relationship between a story analyst and a development executive and the give-and-take that can be fostered over time in such a professional sphere. At the same time, as we move toward answering the question about the script readers’ role as gatekeeper, we find that even with the above symbiotic relationship in play, the influence of readers does put them in a position of great influence in the larger arena of development. Indeed, JJ does feel that story analysts are ultimately gatekeepers, and clarifies her previous observation about the need for development executives’ due diligence: “While I end up doing my own reviewing of the material to make sure I am apprised of what was submitted, I do feel that readers are the front line to pushing a script up the ladder. Their coverage is a huge timesaver for executives to assess what level of attention to pay to a submission”. MW also adds definitively that a story analyst is a gatekeeper, saying the vast majority of scripts live or die based on the reader’s evaluation. CC states plainly that “Readers absolutely are gatekeepers. It’s a job that carries a tremendous amount of responsibility”. He also points out another thoughtful layer of the role of a strong and competent story analyst by stating: The danger of the “gatekeeper” term though—which at its core is accurate— is that bad readers start enjoying the power they think being a reader gives them…to be an arbiter of taste and quality…and it starts affecting their work. Good readers remain objective and cautiously optimistic and dedicated to the job for their entire career, across tens of thousands of scripts.

RP echoes this when he says: I know if I don’t like something from an unknown writer, small agency or fledgling production company, then it’s unlikely anyone above me will read it. The good news, though, is I don’t know any reader who doesn’t take that responsibility seriously. We really do care about getting the decisions right!

Conclusion While two of the interview subjects placed small caveats on the notion of industry story analysts as gatekeepers, a consensus was reached among them that the term “gatekeeper” is an accurate and appropriate one to apply to those professionals whose job it is to appraise a writer’s work in the common first step of the development process—the submission of a script to a producing entity or artist representative with the goal of receiving expert analysis on

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its storytelling effectiveness. In coming to understand the technical aspects of creating coverage and the many permutations involved in the reader’s job description, we can understand more fully how the story analyst is an indispensable—and influential—aspect of the process of script development.

References Barr, L. (2014). What is the Nicholl fellowship? Entertainment Weekly. Miyamoto, K. (2017). The history of Hollywood screenwriting competitions. Los Angeles: Script Lab. https://thescriptlab.com/blogs/7655-the-history-of-screenwri ting-contests/. Accessed 29 Dec 2020. Myers, S. (2018). The business of screenwriting: never send out a script before it’s ready. The Black List. https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/the-business-of-screen writing-never-send-out-a-script-before-its-ready-7e2d3839bea2. Accessed 29 Dec 2020. Sunset Boulevard. (1950). wr: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman Jr., dir: Billy Wilder, USA, 110 mins. Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: Perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing: THe International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 13(2), 204–217. Wagner, A. (2017). How Franklin Leonard created the Hollywood list everyone wants to be on. The Atlantic.

A Creative Pilgrimage: Negotiating Authenticity, Creativity and Budget in the Medieval Web Series Tales of Bacon Maxine Gee

Introduction Why hasn’t anyone written a medieval web series set in York, England? My co-writer Natalie Roe and I mused in a café one afternoon when the screen idea (Macdonald, 2013) for Tales of Bacon (Roe, 2016–2018) was born. The city and the surrounding area could provide plenty of free, period-accurate locations and its history, the starting point for many different tales. While the small independent filmmaking hub in York had produced, and continues to produce, a range of supernatural web series with notable examples being Zomblogaplyse (Bungard et al., 2008–2011) and I Am Tim (McKeller, 2010– 2017) at the point when Roe and I were planning Tales of Bacon, no historic web series had been created in the city. At that initial stage of the script development process, when ideas are uninhibited by practical concerns, we could envision a range of storylines for a medieval road trip comedy web series. Tales of Bacon developed from an interest in The Pardoner from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the relationship that Chaucer’s contemporaries had to religion and religious objects. In the first stages of script development, Roe and I decided on a pardoner as a lead character, whose artefacts were not quite as holy as they seemed and who fit into a trickster/conman archetype. As female writers we

M. Gee (B) Bournemouth University, Poole, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_4

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also wanted to explore the roles of women in the period and to unpick stereotypes of medieval women, especially around their literacy and agency, thus our other lead character Elfrida Deverwyck was born. Here were the fine ideals of creation without the bounds of budget, the glorious play that occurs at the early stages of a screen project (Aronson, 2010; Waldeback & Batty, 2012). However, our experiences of working on the aforementioned web series soon brought some clouds across that blue sky. To create an authentic story world involved more than locations and while we could research and develop storylines that were accurate, as well as approachable to non-medieval specialist audience, we knew we would have to write the scripts to fit the caprices of British weather, actor schedules and location availability. When creating for low- to no-budget—the overall budget for the series was around £3000 for six episodes—creative ideals and historic authenticity soon have to compromise with the practical concerns of money and logistics. Much like the medieval pilgrims, in script development the no-budget filmmaker must rethink their planned route, their travelling companions and be flexible to allow for unforeseen encounters and diversions as they travel towards their goal. In this chapter, I will explore the script development process that I and cowriter/director, Natalie Roe, undertook on Tales of Bacon. Through mapping our script development process onto elements of medieval pilgrimage, such as selecting and planning a route, consulting guides both textual and human and choosing travel companions, I will demonstrate how low-budget script development like a medieval pilgrimage is a constant negotiation between creativity, authenticity and budget. Each of these stages bring new challenges and shifts to the script development.

Starting Script Development---Planning the Journey Script Development, as a term, has been used in a fluid manner in academia and the industry covering multiple interpretations (Batty et al., 2017). Where development ends and the next stage of production begins is equally blurred, often depending on each project (Batty et al., 2017; Price, 2017). Script development on Tales of Bacon, I will demonstrate, continued well into our filming of the episodes, as the low-budget nature of production necessitated redrafts and narrative reshapes to fit our shifting production circumstances. Tales of Bacon is set in the 1380s. This was a turbulent time for England which included The Peasant’s Revolt, Lollardy, The Hundred Years War (1337–1453), it was forty years after The Black Death and the time that Chaucer may have collected stories for The Canterbury Tales. In this medieval period, there were also a plethora of pilgrimage routes that crossed Britain and the continent, including the longer and more dangerous paths to the Holy Lands into what is now the Middle East (Webb, 2002). Before deciding to embark on a pilgrimage a person would consult guides (Davidson & Gitlitz, 2008) as well as gathering information from ‘family, friendships and monastic

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networks’ (Webb, 2002, p. 49). I see comparisons with the route taken by myself and Roe as we embarked on this web series in the way that we consulted writing manuals, friends and our filmmaker networks. Pilgrimage in the medieval period could take a variety of forms, and while people did undertake longer journeys to Canterbury, like the characters in Chaucer’s tale, or to Rome, for many pilgrimages occurred on a smaller scale. There were many holy sites in Britain and Europe, some Christianised sites of pagan worship while others were spaces of local miracles (Webb, 2002). The choice of what pilgrimage to make was influenced by economics, both in the sense of how much capital a person had but also in how much time they could afford to be on the road. The choice in script development of what type of screenplay to write is similarly influenced by economics, how much capital an independent filmmaker can raise and how much time they are able to put into the project. Unlike writing a novel, writing the screenplay is a collaborative act (Macdonald, 2013; Maras, 2009); although one might argue that the editorial and publishing team make prose writing collaborative. The screenplay is the first step towards making a screen work be that a short film, feature, television series or web series, which act in this metaphor as the route of, and final goal within, the filmmaking pilgrimage. The reason that Roe and I were drawn to the format of the web series was due to the low-budget nature of the project. We wanted to write something which we could make ourselves, and this was to be Roe’s first larger project as a director. In deciding on a format, the web series, we settled on a style similar to the concept of a smaller local pilgrimage, both for ourselves in creating the material and for our content. The advent of affordable, digital cameras at the turn of the twentieth into twenty-first century, in conjunction with the internet and online spaces for video content changed the media making landscape. ‘The web […] radically democratised media and created tremendous opportunities for independent artists and performers’ (Drennan et al., 2018, p. 3). The web series emerged from this space and offered limitless possibilities for episode/series length. As web series are not broadcast in timetabled slots their length is not subject to the same limitations; creators of this new format embraced this idea with shows that were short and snappy to those which mirrored the scope and length of traditional broadcast television (Taylor, 2015; Williams, 2012). One could argue that shows created for streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu etc. are web series, indeed the IMDB pages for shows such as The Witcher (Schmidt Hissrich, 2019) or The Haunting of Hill House (Flanagan, 2018) contain tags for these series as web series. However, in this pilgrimage analogy these large budget productions are more akin to the prestigious pilgrimage sites, such as Rome or the Holy Land. Accessibility, key to grass roots filmmaking, or in the medieval period to the aspiring pilgrim, had a significant impact on our script development process. The emergence of the web series and the affordability of technology gave Roe and I a route map to turn our idea into a viable project for script development and production.

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Through pilgrimage, people of diverse economic backgrounds and genders were provided the opportunity to travel and experience life outside of their home environs (Amt, 2010; Webb, 2002). There are accounts of women making careers out of a life of pilgrimage such as Margery Kempe (Morrison, 2016) that demonstrate a more egalitarian approach to the travel, if under the auspices of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages. In similar ways to the advent of the web series, the concept of pilgrimage in the medieval period democratised travel and opened up new spaces for creativity. Many journals of pilgrimage were written and circulated (Davidson & Gitlitz, 2008) including those satirising the experience such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; musicians performed and wrote music to be performed on different routes (Webb, 2002); accommodation punctuated the routes and Pardoners found audiences for their holy wares. Pardoners and specifically The Pardoner from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were the inspiration for Tales of Bacon. Roe was drawn to the following description of The Pardoner’s wares. ‘His walet lay biforn him in his lappe, Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot… He seyde, he hadde a gobet of the seyl That sëynt Peter hadde, whan that he wente Up-on the see, til Iesu Crist him hente. He hadde a croys of latoun, ful of stones, And in a glas he hadde pigges bones.’ (Chaucer, 2007)

Chaucer lists the objects that the Pardoner carries in his introduction; pardons from Rome to sell to exonerate the buyer from their sins, this is where the job title comes from, as well as pieces of Mary’s veil, the sail of St Peter’s ship, a jewelled cross and a jar of pig bones. Later, Chaucer alludes to the less than holy nature of The Pardoner’s relics and the hypocrisy of religious trade in the period drew Roe to the character. The figure of a medieval conman, who sold bits of dead body as bits of saintly body, became our starting point and eventually the character of Thaddeus Bacon. This character became the starting point for our script development.

Choosing the Route In a similar manner to the medieval pilgrim, once we had decided on our format we consulted the guides; screenwriting manuals such as Screenplay by

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Syd Field (2005) and Story by Robert McKee (1999) as well as notes from the MFA I had undertaken at UC Riverside, Palm Desert between 2008 and 2010. In these sources we found tried and tested methods for structure, character, plotting and theme, which acted as a guide as we developed our series. Just as written guides became popular for a certain class of potential pilgrim in the Middle Ages, screenwriting manuals have become a first step for twentieth and twenty-first century prospective writers, and their spread is examined by screenwriting scholars such as Steven Maras (2009). Our use of these screenwriting manuals was driven by their popularity/ubiquity, not by their specificity to the creative pilgrimage we planned as these texts focus more on film than television. As we started our script development, like a pilgrim planning their route, we sought broad, well-known guides first before seeking out more specific texts such as William Rabkin’s Writing the Pilot (2011). I was aware of Rabkin’s book as he had taught at the UCR Palm Desert MFA, and while it is focussed on mainstream American television writing the principles could be adapted to the smaller project of the web series. As we moved from the initial concept stage of script development, in a similar manner to a pilgrim planning their route Roe and I were selective about which elements (our equivalent shrines, holy sites and inns) we might include. We settled on six or seven episodes, each with a length of 10 to 15 minutes, following examples of the web series we had watched and worked on. One of the first decisions we made in script development involved genre. Our initial inspiration text The Canterbury Tales is a satirical piece, and two screen texts that inspired us as we devised the series, Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (Callanan, 1988–1994) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Forstarter & White, 1975), were comedies. In both these examples the filmmakers use comedy to draw attention to the rough-around-the-edges aesthetic of their production, rather than trying to conceal it. Therefore, Roe and I decided to use comedy to navigate the fine line between practicality and authenticity. Comedy acts as an uber or umbrella genre (Selbo, 2015, p. 69) in which many subgenres exist. Tales of Bacon is a medieval road trip comedy, this was instrumental to understand during the script development process. We first created lists of humorous situations and unusual relics, such as milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary, then we mapped these elements onto the more serious spine of the plot which being a road trip focussed on literal and figurative journeys of self-discovery and companionship for our main characters, Elfrida and Thaddeus. These two aspects of our genre hybrid enabled balance between highs and lows in each episode. As Roe and I then created the scripts for each episode we used conventions of the genre hybrid to build an authentic story world (Selbo, 2010), following the practice of our inspiration screen texts. We know who we wanted to work with as our crew and thus we had their skills in mind as we wrote the scripts. This allowed us to make active choices to write scenarios that embraced the low-budget nature of the production design and enhance our theme of religious hypocrisy, such as the phallic-shaped noses passed off as relics in episode two.

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A negotiation between humour and authenticity drove our inclusion of a version of Chaucer and a direct reference to the Canterbury Tales. Roe and I wanted to incorporate Middle English into the dialogue within an episode, as well as reference the way many British teenagers first encounter the Middle Ages through reading Chaucer at school. In the cold open to episode four, Thaddeus and Elfrida are in a tavern with a stranger. Thaddeus, who is a natural storyteller, is telling The Pardoner’s Tale while the stranger scribbles notes. This character, who is revealed to be Chaucer, delivers all his dialogue in Middle English with subtitles, compared to the main cast who speak in a more contemporary style. His unusual dialogue forms the basis of the joke when both Thaddeus and Elfrida, like modern teenagers find his way of speaking a little impenetrable. We worked with a specialist during script development on devising dialogue which matched the rhythmic style of the Canterbury Tales to capture a compromise between authentic language and homage to our inspiration. Script development in low-budget productions can bleed into the shoot stage of the production process as explored by Stephen Price (2017). Our choice of genre took into account the later stages of the production. The limited budget that Tales of Bacon had meant that the shoot window for the series might span years. During that time, our cast may have to take other jobs resulting in Roe and I redrafting the screenplays to match the availability of our cast. When this happened with episode three, we could use our research and comedy to smooth over story logic. The actor playing Thaddeus Bacon, Adam Elms, was also performing in another stage play at the time we planned to shoot episode three in which he needed to have a full beard. Roe had shot scenes of the previous and following episodes at this point where Thaddeus did not have a beard. As Elms was being paid for his other role, he was not comfortable, nor able, to shave and regrow his beard around our episode three shoot. Therefore, Roe and I revisited the screenplay. Rather than try to ignore the beard we drew attention to it with a series of jokes. We created two versions of Thaddeus and Elfrida’s first scene in the episode to explain the beard; one focussed on Saint Uncumber, a female saint who grew a miraculous beard, the other around the biblical figure of Noah. The latter was selected for accessibility, here we compromised between a joke for a niche audience and one for a broader audience. Throughout the episode we had side characters comment on how the beard made Thaddeus look wise or holy and culminated this series of jokes with Elfrida concluding that bearded Thaddeus attracted too many strange people and it had to go. This is an example of how an early creative choice enabled problem solving further down the line. At the early development stages of a low-budget production one of our eyes was always focussed on the shoot and that influenced writing decisions. As Kathryn Millard examines, ‘In our digital world, the boundaries between the once discrete stages of writing, pre-production, production and postproduction are ever more blurred’ (2014, p. 8). Roe as both writer and director was conscious of what could be achieved. This worked in two ways, in the

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removal of elements we deemed impossible to realise and in the inclusion of elements based on assets we knew we could acquire. Thus, on the one hand, an episode idea that took place within a gaol, where our Pardoner was locked in with Watt Tylor, of peasant’s revolt fame, was removed as we moved from outlining to writing the drafts because we could not feasibly find locations on our budget. The episode set in a plague village, a reference to the Black Death which arrived in the country in 1340s, was drastically trimmed and an overly contrived flashback masquerading as a tale around a campfire in episode two was removed. On the other hand, however, having worked with a variety of film and theatre makers in York and the North East we had built a network of connections, especially around heritage that we could draw on. Therefore, aspects of our scripts were built around objects or animals that we knew we could access. In the second scene of the pilot, we wrote in a woman riding an ox who talks to the pardoner because we knew someone who would be willing to ride her ox on film. However, it is important to note this is an example of a moment where visual humour of the genre was prioritised over authenticity as oxen were not often rode in the period, as a medievalist viewer later pointed out. After consulting our script guidebooks and drafting treatments of the season arc, as well as scripts for each episode, we consulted, like pilgrims, friends and respected experts. All the episode scripts were critiqued by The York Screenwriters’ Guild and the pilot script was part of a table read at the Raindance Digital Creatives group. The feedback on the pilot was especially interesting as we realised we needed to further explain what a pardoner was, we as writers understood aspects of the story world but hadn’t conveyed them well to the audience, thus we further incorporated this into the beginning of episode two. It was also fascinating how the Raindance Digital Creatives focussed in on a well-known character cameo, Robin Hood, and advised us to use him more, perhaps even start the episode with him. While we didn’t take that feedback onboard, we did make Hood a recurring cameo as a touch point of the familiar in our story world. Taking part in group feedback sessions also created a space to attract local filmmakers to the project—to gather companions for the road. Just as local networks were invaluable to the medieval pilgrim in deciding on and planning a route, such local filmmaker networks enabled the project to move from early development to pre-production and further script development.

Making Our Own Writing Pilgrimage In script development it is sometimes necessary for the writer(s) to make a pilgrimage to locations. During the drafting stages, before we moved to writing the scripts, the story stagnated. Thaddeus Bacon, our pardoner, had an interesting backstory which built to the climax of the season. However, as a mainly comedic character he did not quite carry the narrative arc. In the pilot he rescues young noblewoman, Elfrida Deverwyck, from being burned

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as a witch by providing a pardon. They become travelling companions and head north to find her true love, Percy, who has been sent to a monastery on Lindisfarne in Northumbria. Finding ourselves facing writer’s block, Roe and I took a day trip to Lindisfarne for inspiration. Visiting locations can generate new associations and inspirations for the writer leading to a creative enlightenment. After walking around the holy island, Roe and I reached the conclusion that Tales of Bacon was Elfrida’s story and that with her as the protagonist there was a clearer narrative drive for the episodes. She had a more active presence in the story. In making this decision, Roe and I were reminded of one of the aspects of medieval life that we had wanted to explore in the series: the roles of women. We had selected noblewoman for Elfrida’s status because it afforded her capital and opportunity to travel. With Elfrida we also wanted to showcase how literate women of this period could be, as noblewomen may be expected to educate their children, they were themselves educated (Amt, 2010; Morrison, 2016). While Thaddeus exploits the ignorance and superstition of peasants and serfs, Elfrida acts as foil wanting to make knowledge accessible and educate. Elfrida became a mouthpiece to challenge stereotypes of medieval women as subservient and ignorant. In the pilot she discusses John Wycliffe’s ideals in translating the Latin Bible into the vernacular and challenging the wealth of the clergy, thus establishing her knowledge of current contentious affairs. In this period the followers of Wycliffe, many of whom were women, were persecuted. Records remain of the trails of such Lollard heretics as Hawisia Moone, who was forced to renounce her following of John Wycliffe (Amt, 2010, pp. 255–257). Through a ridiculous situation in the series, again drawing on humour, we were able to bring to the fore how fragmented religious beliefs were even before the Reformation. As Elfrida supports these views she becomes a counter to Thaddeus who profits from the practices John Wycliffe preached against. The trip to Lindisfarne allowed Roe and I to talk about the series in a different setting and made the development process run more smoothly. As location was instrumental to our vision for the series, we incorporated it further into our script development process. Roe and I included more local excursions to churches and sites that might be suitable for our ideas. Once we were able to secure locations, we revisited the scripts to adapt the scenes for the chosen spaces. The different stages of the production process blurred into each other and script development became part of an iterative cycle.

Script Development into Production Price (2017) explores how the term script development applies to a diverse series of processes each with differing end points, depending on project. While one might argue that once the project goes into production the script development stage is finished, I want to demonstrate a counter argument with Tales of Bacon that might be indicative of making low-budget web series.

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To create the web series we needed to crowdfund and so we embarked on a smaller pilgrimage to make the pilot. Through creating the pilot and the following crowd funding campaign the series shifted and further drafts were made of the screenplays of later episodes. Our development process for Tales of Bacon was iterative and each moment of shooting led to shifts in the screenplays. Selecting who to travel with on a pilgrimage, as with any journey, is an important act. Filmmaking, especially for a series like Tales of Bacon which took over two years to wrap, is a long journey and selecting crew and cast in this process is important. As soon as the lead actors, Gemma Shelton and Adam Elms, were cast, then they also formed part of the script development team. Just as travelling companions might alter the pilgrimage route to incorporate their own preferences for shrines, these actors helped shape the scripts. As part of a research and development process we held table reads of scripts, this proved vital for testing the humour and the pacing of scenes and that led naturally to changes in the writing. In casting for the pilot, Roe and I found it difficult to find two male actors to play Elfrida’s father and his nobleman friend with a very young son Elfrida is meant to marry. Here the nature of making the pilot with no budget resulted in a script change: Lord Burstwick became Lady Burstwick. This gender swap made Roe and I reconsider the gender of our characters across the series and recognise our unconscious biases in writing almost all the side characters as male. Therefore, in our redraft of episode two the character of our Scotsman became a Scotswoman and we fleshed out a rival pardoner into a widow with the independent means to be able to also ply her relics on pilgrimage routes. There was a similar gender switch to a character in episode three due to a casting problem, however, this created a better gender balance across the series as our final episodes set in a monastery were male focussed. The scale of what was achieved in the pilot, as well as the previously mentioned Ox there were some pyrotechnics in a burning torch, led to our revisiting scripts with a more ambitious eye. Where earlier practical thoughts had discounted or downscaled elements, the process of making the pilot, built the team confidence for the rest of the series.

Conclusion One goal of pilgrimage is enlightenment; in reaching the final stages of a screen production the filmmaker pilgrims can also reach a form of enlightenment. They may gain new understandings of their creative process, or better understand themselves and the themes that motivate them. Script development is a journey where the creatives aim to shape the screen idea; through drafts of outlines, treatments, scriptments, screenplays, this idea forms the route for the screen production. That idea shifts to account for the skills, ambition and budget of the crew, the travellers who undertake this filmmaking pilgrimage. With a low-budget web series, this journey is one of years that necessitates a

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rolling cast and crew and a flexible approach to script development that can incorporate changes throughout the production period. Our planned pilgrim route for Tales of Bacon had a clearly defined end point, a season arc which addressed the wants and needs of the lead characters; six major stops (episodes) on that route, although Roe and I created space for spontaneous detours that we knew might occur. Our chosen genre, road trip comedy, helped Roe and I narrow down our story and therefore be selective of the hallowed narrative sites we would visit, while also providing an environment to negotiate authenticity and budget. Without consulting prior knowledge from manuals and trusted experts, we could have lost our way; however, a considered development strategy prevented this. Travel companions shifted throughout the journey, although our common aim, the screen idea, kept us heading the same direction towards the completion of the series: the final point on the pilgrimage.

References Amt, E. (2010). Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe (2nd ed.). Routledge. Aronson, L. (2010). The 21st Century Screenplay. Allen & Unwin. Averill, M., Frank, D., Falvey, J., Flanagan, M., & Macy, T. (2018). The Haunting of Hill House [TV Series]. FlanaganFilm; Amblin Television; Paramount Television. Batty, C. (Ed.). (2014). Screenwriters and screenwriting: Putting practice into context. Palgrave Macmillan. Batty, C., Taylor, S., & Sawtell, L. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Bungard, H., Hipwell, T., & Watts, M. (Creators). (2008–2011). Zomblogalypse [Web series]. MilesTone Films. Callanan, R. (Producer). (1988–1994). Maid Marian and her Merry Men [TV Series]. BBC. Chaucer, G. (2007). Chaucer’s Works Vol. 4 The Canterbury Tales. In W. Skeat (Ed.), Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22120/22120-h/22120-h. htm (Original work published 1400). Last accessed 17 January 2021. Christian, A. J. (2020). Off the line: Expanding creativity in the production and distribution of web series. In S. Shimpach (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Global Television. Routledge. Daniel, S., Brown, J., Baginsk, ´ T., Sawko, J., Schmidt Hisrrich, L., & Sakharov, A. (2019–). The Witcher [TV series]. Sean Daniel Company; Stillking Films; Platige Image; One of Us; Cinesite; Netflix. Davidson, L. K., & Gitlitz, D. M. (2008). Pilgrimage narration as a genre. La Corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 36(2), 15–37. Drennan, M., Baranovsky, Y., & Baranovsky, V. (2018). Scriptwriting for web series: Writing for the digital age. Routledge. Field, S. (2005). Screenplay: The foundations of screenwriting revised edition. Delta. (Originally published 1984).

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Goldstone J. (Executive producer), Forstarter, M., & White, M. (Producers). (1975). Monty Python and the Holy Grail [Film]. Python (Monty) Pictures; Michael White Productions; National Film Trustee Company. Macdonald, I. (2013). Screenwriting poetics and the screen idea. Palgrave Macmillan. Maras, S. (2009). Screenwriting: History. Theory and Practice. Mckee, R. (1999). Story: substance, structure, style and the principles of screenwriting. Methuen. McKeller, J. (Creator/director). (2010–2017). I Am Tim [Web series]. RedShirt Films. Millard, K. (2014). Writing in a digital era. Palgrave Macmillan. Morrison, S. S. (2016). A Medieval woman’s companion: Women’s lives in the middle ages. Oxbow Books. Price, S. (2017). Script development and academic research. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 319–333. Rabkin, W. (2011). Writing the Pilot. Moon & Sun & Whiskey Inc. Roe, N. (Creator/director). (2016–2018). Tales of Bacon [Web series]. Plotting Films. Selbo, J. (2010). The constructive use of film genre for the screenwriter: Mental space of film genre—First exploration. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(2), 273–289. Selbo, J. (2015). Film genre for the screenwriter. Routledge. Taylor, S. (2015). “It’s the Wild West out there”: can web series destabilise traditional notions of script development? Refereed proceedings of the annual Australasian Screen Production, Education and Research (ASPERA) conference. https://www.aspera.org.au/research/its-the-wild-west-out-there-can-web-ser ies-destabilise-traditional-notions-of-script-development/ Waldeback, Z., & Batty, C. (2012). The creative screenwriter: Exercises to expand your craft. London. Webb, D. (2002). Medieval European Pilgrimage c 700–1500. Palgrave Macmillan Limited. Williams, D. (2012). Web TV series: How to make and market them. Kamera Books.

Creating the Low-Budget Feature Film Script: Development as Emergence Simon Weaving

Introduction In 2011 I wrote and directed a short film called Waiting for Robbo, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012 and went on to win Best Film at the Canberra Short Film Festival that same year. Whilst the film was under ten minutes in length, my intention had always been that the short was a “proof of concept” for a feature film of the same name, involving the same basic plot and core characters. As I contemplated the task of developing a feature length screenplay after returning from Cannes, ScreenACT (my local screen agency, now called Screen Canberra) announced that it would run a development initiative for low-budget feature films. The programme, called the “Low-Budget Feature Pod” was advertised (EoR Media, 2012) as “a once in a lifetime opportunity to get your idea from the page to the big screen.” With a cost of $720 per person, the Pod involved three discrete phases: an initial workshop-based phase open to anyone who wanted to develop a concept; a development phase for the best ten concepts and a funding phase for the best single project to emerge from development. It is important to note here that I was both screenwriter and director of the work in question, and what attracted me to the initiative was that it was an industry-focused process aimed at maximising the chances of getting an idea onto the screen, rather than simply a way to help a screenwriter develop S. Weaving (B) University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

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a feature length screenplay. Running over a six-month period, the process required participants to involve stakeholders from finance, distribution and production, and develop a screenplay along with finance and distribution plans, budgets and marketing material, viewing the screenplay as only one of a set of inter-related artefacts necessary to help a filmmaking team get a feature film through the combined key activities of development, production and distribution. This chapter sets out the details of the development process and explores the interconnected nature of the screenplay, drawing on recent theoretical work about script development. I hope to provide useful insights for those academics examining the ways that creative ideas move from initial thoughts to realisation on the screen, and for practitioners in search of proven ways to scaffold their screenwriting work with supporting industry practices and tools, especially for projects with lower production budgets.

The Idea of Development In their comprehensive survey of the field of script development, Batty et al. (2017, p. 226) establish that script development is “complex, contested and contingent upon context.” Whilst they purposefully avoid offering a definition of script development, they articulate a number of common attributes of the activity: that script development is typically (but not always) a collaborative effort designed to help a screenwriter (or writing team) advance a screen idea to a stage where it will—as a screen work—attract investment (in the form of talent, finance and or distribution). At the heart of this sense of the development process is the movement from idea (however articulated) to formal document (typically a screenplay). Analyses of script development often conflate the more specific progression of the screen idea to screenplay (typically involving notes from external readers and stakeholders, writers’ rooms, readthroughs, rewrites and oneon-one consultation with script specialists) with broader industry ideas of development of a screen project, defined as “the work surrounding the initial screenwriting process, the raising of finance and the initial planning of production” (Finney, 1996, p. 2). Whilst script development can be seen as a subset of the development of a screen project as a whole, the boundaries between the two are often unclear. The screenplay, as “industrial blueprint” (Knudsen, 2016, p. 110) is regarded as the most formal articulation of what is to be produced on screen and will change (i.e. be “developed”) as finance plans and budgets change, as talent is secured, and as distribution plans emerge. In other words, the processes of script development and development generally are intertwined and difficult to disentangle, part of what makes the understanding of script development a “wicked problem” (Batty et al., 2018, p. 153). Reflecting this complexity is the range of definitions of script development, which vary from the highly generic “a gradual, time-bound process of improving a ‘screen idea’ (Macdonald, 2013), to the highly specific notion

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that it is the process of helping “filmmakers develop compelling and viable projects to a point at which they are ready to seek production funding” (British Film Institute, 2019). In the USA, script development is a legally defined industrial process, adopting conventions negotiated between production companies and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) over a century of industrial activity. Under these arrangements the activities of providing notes, making revisions and rewriting the first draft of the screenplay, for example, are strictly controlled practices, enforceable through arbitration (Writers Guild of America, 2019), In this context the screenwriter may be seen not as an isolated participant in development but rather “a vital player in the production process” (Banks, 2015, p. 3). The idea of writer as collaborative “player” is also emphasised by the WGA, despite the clarity that industrial agreements provide about the specific role and rights of the writer. The WGA (2019) suggests that: legally enforced creative rights on their own are unlikely to yield the richest and most rewarding creative experiences. The best experiences come from projects where all participants - writers, directors, actors, producers, executives and others - respect and welcome the participation of the others. When a finished theatrical motion picture or television program realizes its creative intent, that success is the fruit of collaboration.

For the purposes of this chapter, script development is seen as a process that cannot be separated from development of the screen idea more generally. I argue that as the screen idea is developed, a number of inter-related artefacts are produced by those participants of the development process, only one of which is the screenplay. Others include documents like the story synopsis, the treatment, pitch documents, the production budget and finance plans, some of which are created before or at the same time as the screenplay and others which are developed as the result of “breaking down” of a version of the script, which may then have to be changed, with consequential iterations. The complexity for writers and filmmakers lies in the need to make all these connected artefacts appear part of a unified, cohesive and consistent creative endeavour.

The Low-Budget Feature Pod process The overall approach of the Pod was to start with as many individual writers and filmmaking teams as possible, helping them to develop ideas through a semi-structured and competitive process with three distinct phases. From those who started the process (Phase 1: concept development), only ten ideas/projects/teams would be selected for “intense development” (phase 2), with the initial promise that one of those ten would then go forward for production funding with the screen investment fund (phase 3). Whilst “low budget” was not defined at the start of the process using specific budget parameters, it was announced that the screen investment fund involved in the

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initiative had $300,000 that would support a single feature film with a total cost of approximately $600,000. Phase 1: Concept Development The first phase of the Pod ran for approximately seven weeks from 6 July to 20 August. It started with a 3-day workshop that 50 people attended, facilitated by Stephen Cleary, an internationally recognised story developer, script consultant and development trainer. Day one of this workshop focused on the development of low-budget screen ideas. This involved working both in small groups and individually, supported by a series of presentations from Cleary. Using case studies including The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009)—a film developed with three characters and a single location for 90 per cent of the film—Cleary articulated a low-budget framework for establishing a screen idea. Participants were challenged to write and rewrite one sentence ideas with as few known locations as possible, and then rewrite the idea with only two actors, making sure it was set in the present day. Participants had to justify every location, every character and continually explain—in feedback sessions to the whole group— why each idea was better as a low-budget film. It became clear that the central challenge was to make a virtue of the conditions of low-budget filmmaking (such as variable performances, unsophisticated sound and real locations). The most significant insight to emerge from day one was that the very process of development must be different when working with low budgets: conventional approaches (i.e. processes that are linear, sequential and with separate stages) would not work. Participants were encouraged to think about developing ideas with, for example, actual locations, performance standards and production values already determined. Rather than the screenplay being used as the basis for production decision-making, production realities were determining what went into the script. Days two and three followed a more traditional script development process: taking the one sentence idea and developing it into one paragraph story and one-page plot synopses, along with an articulation of the unique selling point of the film, the conditions under which the film would be made, and an explanation of why the low-budget nature of the film was a positive feature. In other words, the workshop process was facilitating the development of a series of documents that could be used to promote, sell, raise finance for and produce the film. Cleary pointed out that the time constraints of the Pod meant that being able to write more than two drafts of a screenplay was highly unlikely. Instead, the screen idea would go through many iterations in much shorter documents. At the end of the first three-day workshop, participants were given two weeks to develop a set of documents to be submitted online before a second three-day workshop. These were:

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1. A one-page project description: “which gives an all-round introduction to the project, which mentions the story but does not centre on it and gives a good general idea of the kind of film you are talking about.” (Weaving. S. Workshop notes, July 2012) 2. A one-page story synopsis: focusing on the story and how it is to be told, rather than the specific details of the plot. It was recommended that the one page be broken down into eight paragraphs across three acts of the narrative (two for the beginning, four for the middle and two for the end), with possibly an introductory paragraph. 3. A one-page statement of intent: what this included was deliberately left vague, but at various points in the workshop it had become clear that the writer/filmmaker developing a low-budget feature must bring something of themselves to the project that would make it unique and distinctive. We were asked the question “What is the truth expressed by your film which will resonate with whoever watches it?” (Weaving. S. Workshop notes, July 2012). This “truth” was likely to be something personal, and the statement of intent was designed to get at this truth behind the film. 4. Any supporting visual materials: the visual look, style tone and feel of the project. As I already had a clear idea of the film being developed (based on the short film), creating this package of documents did not seem a complex task. In summary, Waiting for Robbo was pitched as “an existential heist movie that combines sharp dialogue, gallows humour, and unreliable subjective flashbacks to show how two robbers pass the time after a disastrous heist that possibly didn’t even happen” (Weaving. S. Workshop notes, July 2012). The story centred on two main characters and one location (Weaving. S. Workshop notes, July 2012): Older, philosophical Eric & not-too-bright but enthusiastic Col wait in their car on a deserted road for the other two members of the gang to arrive after a heist. To pass the time they go over the details of the robbery, annoy each other, and discuss the meaning of existence. As they replay the events of the dangerous heist, they start to realise the truth of the outrageous double crossings, accidents and betrayals that have happened – particularly involving the multiple switching of the bags containing their loot. They also come to understand that – whilst they have lost everything and can trust no one – waiting is essentially an act of hope.

The statement of intent was the most difficult document to write and I circled around several drafts. In the end I decided that my intention was linked to the success of the short film: it had performed well at festivals, the cast and crew wanted to make a feature version, and we had locations already scoped out. Most importantly the characters had worked on screen, and the actors playing them had trusted the screenwriting and had brought them to life in

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a way that resonated with audiences. I wrote: “This gives me confidence for the feature—especially as writing comedy is so hard” (Weaving. S. Workshop notes, July 2012). The second three-day workshop of Phase 1 took place on 27–29 July, with a focus on shaping and refining the material that would be formally submitted as an application for Phase 2. Writers working alone were strongly encouraged to involve a director and “a producer acceptable to the production investment fund” (Weaving. S. Workshop notes, July 2012). The workshop involved pitching the concept—as articulated in the key documents created so far— to a series of industry professionals including film sales agents (in attendance to acquire distribution rights for projects), experienced producers and film finance specialists, as well as receiving notes from a 40-min one-on-one session with Steven Cleary. In formal presentations to all participants, Cleary outlined a more detailed approach to story structure, using the narrative sections of Status Quo, World Disturbed, New World Rules, Performing, MIDPOINT, Hitting the Wall, Crisis, Catastrophe, Redemption and Resolution. It became clear that two things were important to get right to proceed to the next phase. Firstly, the idea needed to be clear, imaginative and fully embrace the low-budget philosophy. Secondly, and with equal significance—it would be critical to demonstrate the project involved a team that would make the film happen. Whilst there were few rules established for the process, participants were told that a project would not be selected for the top ten if one person held the roles of writer, director and producer. Cleary also made the point that the workshop had “a lot more projects than producers,” (Weaving. S. Workshop notes, July 2012), signalling the significance of attaching a producer. In between constant pitching and listening to feedback from industry professionals, I spent most of my time working on the documents that would be submitted as an application for Phase 2. These were similar to the documents created after the first workshop (project description, story synopsis and statement of intent) with the following modifications: 1. The one-page project description was to include specific paragraphs on: the thematic ideas of the film; how the film is to be made; the team attached to the project and any financial deals or investors involved. 2. The story synopsis was extended to three pages (from the original one). 3. The statement of intent was articulated more clearly: “describe your vision for the film, where it comes from in you—its inspiration, the reason you chose this subject matter and so on, and how the way this film will be made will express the vision you have for the story” (Weaving. S. Workshop notes, July 2012). The most significant, consistent feedback about Waiting for Robbo from the pitching sessions was recommendations to place much less emphasis on the

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philosophical aspect of the story and the theme of inaction/waiting/hope, and to water down the story’s link to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Whilst the one-page synopsis did include a shoot-out and a series of flashbacks that retold events from different points of view, the idea of “an existential heist movie” was not considered to be of great value in the market. Participants were given three weeks to submit their application for Phase 2, which was to be judged by an industry panel, including the sales agents and industry advisors who had been present at the second workshop. Participants were advised that the following criteria were to be used to rank applications: 1. Strength of idea/concept—20 points 2. Commerciality of idea—10 points 3. Feasibility at low budget—10 points 4. Quality of supporting materials—5 points 5. Professionalism of written presentation—5 points MAXIMUM SCORE—50 points

During the three weeks, I spent most of my time developing the next level of detail of the story and how it was to be told—creating the now threepage story synopsis. As I expanded the story idea from one page to three, I dealt with the challenge of making the story less about waiting. This was done by increasing action, mainly through flashbacks of farcical recollections of the double-crossing and botch-ups involved the heist. The phrase “existential heist movie” was dropped altogether and replaced with a tagline: “killing time is never easy.” As a result, the three-page synopsis had an energy and playful madness that was missing in the one-page synopsis. It also outlined the events of the heist and other characters in more detail. Besides the four gang members (Col, Eric, Robbo and Fatboy), we learn that the heist put them between a group of hairy, greasy bikies and a strange and violent branch of the Swedish mafia operating in rural Australia. Everyone, including the gang of four, is working to swindle everyone else and get their hands on the bag of money. In keeping with the low-budget ethos, much of the film was to be told as unreliable subjective memories, using rapid-cut flashback montages. I also met regularly with my Producer and we began to conceive the feature as a $500,000 project. Whilst we didn’t create a detailed budget at this time, this number—or what I imagined it would look like on screen—framed storytelling decision-making at all times during the development of the screen idea. It helped define story elements like the number of characters, the number and type of settings, key production design elements (mainly vehicles), and any complex staging. I was also conscious of imagining the impact that story decisions would have on the size and composition of the crew, the likely number of days required to shoot the film, technical requirements and the length of time key cast would be required.

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I submitted the documents required (project description; story synopsis and statement of intent), along with a three-page “look-book” containing images from the short film and reference movies, giving a clear idea of the characters and story world we were trying to create on screen. Ten days after the closing date—on 31 August—I received a phone call (followed by an email) saying that Waiting for Robbo had been selected in the top ten and would proceed to the next phase of development. The email (M. Penders, personal communication, 31 August 2012) stated that “the next roughly 3 months are going to be very busy—you will need to be dedicating a lot of time to your project”. Phase 2: Detailed Development The second phase of the Pod involved two sets of activities, broadly separated as screenplay development and commercial development, although these two were deeply interconnected. Teams were given two months—until 2 November—to develop a first draft of the screenplay along with notes on the next steps for script development, a draft budget and an application to the screen investment fund in the required format. The commercial activities were supported by workshops with an experienced line producer/producer and the Manager of the screen investment fund, along with access to a corporate lawyer. Screenplay development involved oneon-one sessions with Steven Cleary, conducted remotely, as he had returned to France where he lives. With the producer of Waiting for Robbo focused on raising finance, it was agreed to bring into our team an experienced line producer who would develop the production schedules and budgets and conclude discussions with the distributor we had attached to the project. This left me free to write the screenplay, with guidance from Cleary. Cleary’s first suggestion was to take the three-page synopsis and break it into sequences. I was asked to state, at the start of each sequence what the sequence question was, what the sequence twist was and how the sequence question was answered (yes/no) at the end of the sequence. I completed this quickly and emailed it prior to the first of six one-on-one feedback sessions. By way of example, the first sequence of the film involves Col and Eric waiting in their Holden Torana for the other two members of the heist to arrive. The sequence was called Waiting is what they usually do and had the question: “Will Robbo arrive?” to be answered with a No. The re-evaluation of the narrative in this way identified where the story lagged or meandered, and within six days of the first feedback session, I had written a second version of the sequence document with significant changes. All of these improved the pace, the sense of continuous, rising action, and ensured that there was something at stake for the audience all the way through the narrative. The story “feels punchier, more farcical and pacier,” I commented to Cleary in an email (personal communication 2012). Two of the main changes were to start the flashbacks of Col and Eric’s recollections

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of the heist earlier in the script, and to give Robbo, a highly charismatic and visceral character like Ben Kinsley’s Don Logan in Sexy Beast (2000), much more screen time. With a much tighter narrative structure the result of the sequencing process, the next step was to develop a plot outline, breaking each sequence into the scenes that would then be fleshed out in the first draft of the screenplay. This took five days, was discussed in a session with Cleary and then fine-tuned. Most of the notes at this point were not structural but about nuances of character. For example, it became clear that dialogue would be needed to help portray Eric—a big man to be played by John Wood, and outwardly the “enforcer” of the gang—as a character with a tender heart who had never wanted to end up in crime. After the second draft of the plot outline, I began writing the screenplay, sending a first draft to Cleary for notes on 29 September. Over the following two weeks, I had a series of long feedback sessions, working fulltime on rewriting, and had completed a fourth draft by 14 October. At this point Cleary felt that the screenplay was in good enough shape for the next phase of the process and commented that further rewrites might damage the energy of the piece. At the same time as developing the screenplay, I had been working with the line producer on the detailed production schedule, the budget and on casting key characters. We used the fourth draft of the screenplay to complete a script breakdown that enabled us to estimate shooting schedules and production costs, with the budget now estimated at $600,000. The major technical/financial complexity for the film would be the shoot-out, involving the closing off of a minor road, several vehicles, all the story’s characters, an armourer, special effects and make-up and the staging of the gun fight. I began to watch shoot-outs in other movies as part of the preparation, documenting how coverage was achieved and specific shots pulled off, and I used this learning when I wrote and re-wrote the shoot-out in the screenplay. As with the earlier round of development—I was constantly rewriting with low-budget production realities in mind and taking into account important suggestions and notes from the line producer with whom I developed a positive and collaborative working relationship. I was living on the South Coast of New South Wales at the time and found a perfect location to shoot much of the film: a deserted beach with a Council-owned dirt road for access. I imagined it would be here that Col and Eric would wait in their Torana, wandering onto the beach for parts of the action, with the shoot-out taking place on a section of the road that ran through a stunning tree-fern forest. I set up a meeting with the local Shire Council and they agreed to support the film, waiving all fees, and agreeing to help secure volunteers who might help with catering, transport and accommodation for actors. Having a clear idea of the precise location of the shoot made writing the scenes that would occur there much easier, and the Council’s generosity freed financial resources that could then be used to raise production values—especially for the shoot-out. I wanted

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as many extras and guns as we could afford to be present in the climactic show down. We also used the fourth draft of the script to secure a distributor and the actors who had played Col and Eric in the short film. After deciding to recast the two other main roles, we also sent the script to a number of leading Australian actors. The feedback was highly positive, and we were able to “attach” names to these roles in the funding application. On 2 November, we submitted the documents required, including the fifth draft of the screenplay, a letter confirming a deal with the distributor, and a fully detailed budget and finance plan. Costing $600,000, the producer had used the story synopses, casting arrangements and financial plan to raise $300,000 from private investors, with the remaining $300,000 to come from the screen investment fund. A week later we were invited, along with seven other teams (two had dropped out), to a “public presentation” of our feature film proposal. It was a ten-minute pitch, using images and key phrases taken from the suite of documents developed during the previous four months. On 23 November the Screen Investment Fund Committee met to consider its decision and at an open forum the following week, all the participants of the Low-Budget Feature Pod were invited to a meeting to hear the outcome. The Chair of the Committee announced that, rather than award the $300,000 to one project, they would split the finds across three projects. Waiting for Robbo was one of those three—and in a letter dated 14 December the fund agreed to provide us with $120,000 in finance. For the purposes of this chapter—with its focus on script development— that is a perfectly acceptable place to end the story: the screenplay had emerged as a result of a highly structured, collaborative and iterative process of development alongside a suite of other integrated production documents. The developed screenplay had “done its job”: allowing the filmmaking team to raise private equity, secure a distribution deal, lock in cast and attract government funding. What happened next with the broader development process is a too frequent tale of disappointment. It involved eighteen months of negotiating deals, juggling cast schedules, managing private investors, restructuring financial arrangements and the highly detailed planning of a 26-day shoot with a professional crew—all scheduled for May 2014. Two months before the start of pre-production, the Screen Investment Fund advised us that their offer was now withdrawn. All the other deals collapsed as a consequence, and the film remains “in development.”

Conclusions From my experience as a writer working through the Low-Budget Feature Pod scheme, I conclude that the process was well structured to support screenwriting as part of a unified approach to development. The six-month initiative found an appropriate balance between allowing the screenwriter time

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to develop materials and pushing for deadlines to be met. In addition, I felt that the process lived up to its promise that it was designed with a clear understanding of the commercial context of getting a screen idea into production. Support was given not just for script development, but for development of the bundle of documents required to attract other stakeholders to the project. Reflecting more deeply on the process, I now see that what I was developing was not just a screenplay, but a series of views of a future object (the film on screen), each from a very different perspective. As any one view became clearer, it would have to be reflected in all the other views. Synopses, budgets, production schedules, pitch documents and plot outlines were all different ways of trying to understand and build a single, complex, creative work. My role mostly felt less like a “writer” than a creator or developer of the screen idea, constantly advancing each view—sometimes incrementally, sometimes in a leap—whilst keeping all views harmonised. What was occurring was less a sense of improvement and enhancement, with the implication that there was something solid to work with from the start, than the idea that the effort of development was the building of a variety of ways of conceptualising an emerging work. This would ultimately be formally manifest for the screenwriter as the screenplay, with its industrially agreed conventions of form, and emergence becomes a useful way of viewing the development of both the screenplay and the film as a whole. Emergence as a theory (applied to creative design) suggests that “solutions are not obtained through direct modelling of the desired outcome, but they are formulated as an aggregate effect of distributed processes carried by a number of individual entities (agents) that interact with each other” (Alexiou, 2010, p. 77). Glãveanu (2014, p. 325) suggests that this “molecular” perspective is needed to better understand the dynamic totality of creative phenomena and cites, as an example of how emergence works, the way in which for screenwriters “the story and the characters, acting according to their own logic, move the project forward.” To this two-part dynamic we can add a number of other specifics (e.g. budgets, audience demands and production realities) all of which also shape the direction of the script through development. As a writer working through a process that was both script development and development more broadly, I was part of a complex system of distributed, yet connected stakeholders. The molecular level interactions between myself and others (or by just personally thinking from multiple perspectives) resulted in changes to the creative work as a whole. The low-budget philosophy of the process also enhanced this sense of complexity and connection, with the parts being developed at the same time as the whole emerged. What my experience in the Low-Budget Feature Pod ultimately showed me is that a finished film—as a completed artistic work—emerges as an object from the process of film development and is the complex outcome of the interaction of a number of constituent elements involved in the process, script development being only one of these. The objects involved in the process that creates this emergence include (but are not limited to) the screenplay, story

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synopses, pitch documents, budgets, finance and distribution plans, marketing materials, production design plans and casting proposals, all of which are dynamically interdependent and frequently modified as emergence plays out. Viewing script development as a subset of this process acknowledges the highly collaborative nature of successful screenwriting, and helps the screenwriter, and the writer-director in particular, identify the needs and demands of other stakeholders along with the creative limitations and opportunities that will almost certainly find their way into the finished work as the rubber of the screenplay hits the road of production reality.

References Alexiou, K. (2010). Coordination and emergence in design. CoDesign, 6(2), 75–97. Banks, M. (2015). The writers – A history of American screenwriters and their guild. Rutgers University Press. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Batty. C, O’Meara, R., Taylor, S., Joyce, H., Burne, P., Maloney, N., Poole, M., & Tofler, M. (2018). Script development as a ‘wicked problem’. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. British Film Institute. (2019). Development funding. Retrieved from https://www. bfi.org.uk/supporting-uk-film/production-development-funding/development-fun ding. 10 December 2019. EoR Media. (2012, May). Canberra Film Files e-newsletter. Retrieved from https:// www.enemiesofreality.com/archive.html. 10 December 2019. Finney, A. (1996). Developing feature films in Europe: A practical guide. Routledge Glãveanu, V. (2014). On units of analysis and creativity theory: Towards a “Molecular” perspective. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 45(3), 311–330. Knudsen, E. (2016). The total filmmaker: Thinking of screenwriting, directing and editing as one role. The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 13, 109–129. Macdonald, I. (2013). Screenwriting poetics and the screen idea. Palgrave Macmillan. Writers Guild of America. (2019). Creative rights for writers of theatrical and long-form television motion pictures. Retrieved from https://www.wga.org/contracts/knowyour-rights/creative-rights-for-writers#3. 10 December 2019.

Script Development on Unscripted Television: Grand Designs and the Spectacle of the Reveal Lucy Brown

Introduction This chapter will discuss the key ingredients involved in the script development process of factual television, from pre-production to post-production. The television industry can be understood as having two different worlds: fiction and non-fiction, or scripted and unscripted. Each world has separate commissioners, production teams and crew, and it is rare and difficult for those who start in one world to cross over to the other. Story and narrative processes for the fiction/scripted world have been written about extensively by both academics and practitioners (McKee, 1998; Taylor & Batty, 2016; Vogler, 2007) and there are numerous university screenwriting courses dedicated to studying their form. Similarly representing the non-fiction/unscripted world, documentary, is studied within the academy and its methods have been considered by documentarians and film theorists alike (De Jong et al., 2013; Glynne, 2011). Scholarship on script development tends to be overlooked but is beginning to emerge out of screenwriting studies and practice-based research (Batty, 2014; Bradley, 2014). However, theoretical analysis of unscripted or non-fiction television largely favours the study of audiences, representation, production culture and social context (Hill, 2005; Holmes & Jermyn, 2004; Skeggs & Woods, 2012). As a film and television educator/practitioner, students often ask me how to begin developing a script for television that is L. Brown (B) London South Bank University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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not part of the documentary or drama oeuvre. The craft of developing a script for this genre can seem a bit like a dark art, despite its prevalence on the small screen and on streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. In this chapter, I examine the key ingredients of the script development process on factual television that is formatted and repeatable. I focus on a case study of Grand Designs (1999–present), the long-running international primetime design/architecture series produced by Fremantle, which since its inception in the UK continues to be a rating success with a loyal fan base and is sold to over 100 territories with two local versions. The chapter will offer insider knowledge and shed light on the script development process within factual television. I will draw upon my professional practice as a producer and director with many years’ experience working on factual formats, including on Grand Designs between 2005 and 2010 and upon interviews with executive producer/showrunner Fiona Caldwell, who was director on the third series of Grand Designs in 2001, directing three projects and returned as series producer from 2004 to 2007 and executive producer 2011–2018; and Madeleine Hall, who also started as a director on Grand Designs in 2006 and then moved on to series production for five years. My aim is to provide insights into the principles governing the script development process of factual television through the lens of Grand Designs. According to J.T. Caldwell, my professional knowledge positions me as an “insider”, and the first-hand expertise this affords of production processes “pushes beyond the sometime rudimentary questions that scholars with little direct knowledge of film/television raise” (2009, p. 214). I will employ this semi-autoethnographic method to examine the skills required by the production team as well as the challenges and ask how new and traditional storytelling methods are employed on Grand Designs to keep the viewer hooked and sustain its status as one of the pre-eminent shows in this genre. I will suggest that the success of Grand Designs relates to a triangulation of factors working in synergy throughout the script development process: the production team, the presenter and the format (Fig. 1).

Unscripted Television Unscripted television, sometimes referred to as non-scripted or non-fiction television, is an umbrella term for anything that sits outside of drama or scripted comedy. It is made up of a number of sub-genres such as current affairs, news, lifestyle, talk shows, sport, game shows, panel shows, talent shows and live event television. It has been defined within the TV industry as programming “without actors” (ScreenSkills, 2018). Television studies scholars have a propensity to refer to unscripted TV as “reality television” and argue unscripted TV is difficult to define due to the hybridity of forms it takes. Even so, there is some agreement around it referring to programmes which claim to depict “real life” (Holmes & Jermyn, 2004, p. 2), combine fictional and documentary methods (Kavka, 2012, p. 7) and have a “highly

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Fig. 1 The triangulation of factors working in synergy throughout the script development process in factual television: the production team, the presenter and the format

Fig. 2 What is unscripted television? University television production students’ word cloud, University of Greenwich (2018)

visible presence of ordinary people in ‘unscripted’ situations” (Biressi & Nunn, 2005, p. 2). The paradoxical title “unscripted”, potentially confuses expectations in terms of script development, implying there is no script. The wide breadth of programmes that fall under this blanket term further adds a layer of misperception and I have detailed elsewhere, in relation to TV studio formats, the variety of strategies deployed across the factual genre (Brown & Duthie, 2019). Thus, it is not difficult to see why some students and audiences may assume there is no script in this genre and are perplexed by the scripting mechanics. Indeed, when I asked my first-year television production undergraduates at the university I was teaching “what is unscripted television?” there were a myriad of answers from the 35 student respondents as Fig. 2 illustrates.

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The results were garnered from an anonymous online poll I set up in class to get a sense of my students understanding of unscripted television and whilst this is a small sample it demonstrates the challenges students face in developing a script for a genre that is nebulous and perceived to be improvised and spontaneous. For the purpose of this chapter, I focus specifically on the location-based series Grand Designs which deploys documentary scripting techniques as director and series producer Madeleine Hall (2020) points out: Where some factual programmes are very much script led, (history programmes for example), Grand Designs, despite being presenter led, relies on observational filmmaking to tell its stories. Story comes first (in everything!), and how you tell it is what gives a programme its identity.

Grand Designs History and Context Grand Designs was first broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK on 29 April 1999 and features presenter Kevin McCloud following people building ambitious dream projects from original plan to finished home. It became one of Channel 4’s flagship series attracting millions of viewers and continues, 20 years on, to retain a loyal fan base and exceed audience slot averages (Tilley, 2019). There are more than 200 episodes and over 20 series with more currently in production and Grand Designs has sold to over 100 territories with local versions in Australia and New Zealand. The series is BAFTA-winning, and the Grand Designs brand has spawned a multitude of spin-off shows, as well as a magazine, books and a live event exhibition. It was created by producer Daisy Goodwin and John Silver and is produced by the global media entertainment empire Fremantle. Until that point the only property/design show on British television was Changing Rooms (1996–2004) which involved smallscale home makeovers. Conversely, Grand Designs only features projects that are challenging and remarkable. Channel 4 wanted to call the series Building Houses and Goodwin notoriously fought for the title Grand Designs to represent its aspirations. Certainly, it is often deemed by critics and audiences alike to be the king of the design/property genre, attracting significant upmarket viewers from an ABC1 demographic (Rogers, 2009) and spurred a surge in property formats such as Location, Location, Location (2000–present), Property Ladder (2001–2009) and Escape to the Country (2002–present).

Casting: The Beginning of Script Development In our interview Caldwell revealed “It is hard to define what makes a successful show but stories about ordinary people who do a lot of the work themselves and the audience see the physical work and watch them struggle as they make the building physically themselves are particularly memorable” (2017). As with similar factual programmes compelling characters are an essential part of Grand Designs. However, feisty contributors with “good banter with Kevin”

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(Caldwell, 2017) are not enough. The project or building, often referred to as the “build” by the production team becomes a character in the story and needs to literally grow and develop to sustain audience interest over the hour-long slot. The challenge for the production team is to find original building projects in ever more breath-taking plots or hazardous landscapes that also incorporate new technologies and construction or design ideas. The build needs to have exceptional features and a point of difference from other episodes so that it does not feel like a repeat. Many people renovate or build homes on a small scale but projects on Grand Designs need to stand out and importantly they need to be the contributor’s dream home which rules out property developers. The production team generally choose builds with more than one contributor (but there are exceptions to this rule if the project is substantial and the contributors engaging) as more than one contributor can help to advance the story and provide opportunities to uncover character desires and flaws. New stories are researched by assistant producers (APs). Stories tend to come from the solicit at the end of the programme that directs viewers to apply or via advertisements in the Grand Designs magazine. Shortlisted projects are recced and if promising, the AP produces a short taster and one-page pitch document covering characters, budget, schedule and highlighting unique architectural features, building methods or technologies. Television is hierarchical and procedural, and builds need to be approved by the SP, the executive producer (EP) and Kevin McCloud and if they support the project it goes to Channel 4 for final authorisation. It is a complex process, and these factors can be challenging and create barriers in the script development process. Quite often exciting projects are tracked for many years due to planning hold-ups before they can be filmed.

Production Team Grand Designs is organised around teams of directors and assistant producers (APs) who work closely together as a team. Each director/AP looks after a number of builds and is headed by a series producer (SP). The other members of the production team include a unit manager, production co-ordinator and runner. The unit manager approves crew and travel. The production coordinator makes the travel and accommodation arrangements and prepares the call sheet. As Gerard Millerson has written, “When you work in a cooperative team where each member appreciates the other person’s aims and problems, difficulties somehow seem to become minimal!” (1999, p. 12). APs provide logistic and editorial support for the director. The AP is main point of contact with all the key people involved from architects to contractors and contributors and compiles the research on building projects, referred to as “builds”, keeping presenter Kevin McCloud abreast of issues and tracking the build schedule. Specific script development duties include researching factual information and storylines concerning the build in discussion with the director. It is also the AP who takes responsibility for fact checking the final script.

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Because the builds are so long and often over run, the director and AP have a much longer period working on the show than what is typical in factual television production. Indeed, there are members of the team who have worked on the series for over fifteen years which is quite remarkable given the usual short-term contracts that are rife in the television industry. In my experience this adds a quality of calm and unity that is not always evident on other TV shows that have a shorter time frame to bring a show to air or are struggling to develop a series from scratch. Directors are responsible for creating the finished broadcast programme and ensuring it is compliant with broadcasting regulations. The director’s role is to produce a narrative film that charts the structural build of every house, together with the emotive human side to every contributor’s story. The director is responsible for directing the presenter, McCloud, the contributors and crew and self-shooting on process days if necessary. They plot central themes, storylines and narratives emerging from the build progress in conversation with the SP. They work with their AP in researching the principal structural and architectural story features so that they can deliver complete shooting scripts (Hall, 2020): The director is the first author of the script. Through viewings of the programme as it comes together, the script is discussed/revised by the series producer and the executive producer. This is a collaborative process. It then will have some revisions made to it, following viewings by the commissioning editor, who, depending on who they are, may make changes to the script. Finally, the script is given to the presenter, Kevin McCloud to do a pass. Kevin’s changes not only put it into his voice, but often bring out the more architectural stories of the builds.

The script development process begins as soon as the build has been greenlit by Channel 4. The scripting cannot be left until the end of the build. The shaping of the narrative begins before the first day of shooting. Regular contact with the contributors via the AP is vital to ensure no key events are missed, for example, the scaffolding or windows or first day of diggers on site. This knowledge needs to be shared with the director and McCloud who more than any presenter I have worked with is fundamental to the script development process. Potential themes are explored and after filming a few presenter days with McCloud, the director assembles Parts I, II and III. The SP and EP view the assembly to discuss story and structure. This process happens on a regular basis enabling the director to fine-tune Parts I–III before the Channel 4 commissioning editor views them. The long-serving production team have the depth of knowledge that is invaluable for avoiding errors and suggesting new ways to tell a familiar story. It is important that contributors are treated respectfully throughout the filming process and that each episode reflects events accurately rather than recreating them. The editorial team of director and AP need to ensure that the

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contributors have full confidence in them so that they will be honest about all aspects of the build and how it is affecting their lives. This trust will help with the planning of the script. The advantage of working on a well-established and generally well-regarded series such as Grand Designs is that people are usually happy to contribute to the show. Grand Designs is not a contentious or controversial programme and viewers understand the nature of the programme and the kind of contribution they are expected to make—whether it is a vox pop from a builder or project manager or an interview with an architect. As Caldwell says “They [Channel 4] haven’t encouraged an increase in jeopardy and Grand Designs never joined in with the vogue for high conflict television such as Wife Swap that undermined contributors” (2017).

Post-production Part of the script development process for the director involves viewing and logging material as soon as it is shot and working out what to shoot next to advance the storyline. This process helps the director to write the commentary or voice over (V/O) and create a full-edit script. This provides the blueprint of the build and the order of events. The AP and director keep a written log of conversations with the contributors that can be helpful to refer to, particularly when fact checking the script. When it comes to the post-production stage, the director works with an editor to cut the programme and typically supervises grades, onlines, mixes and voice over sessions with McCloud. During post-production the director is responsible for ensuring that the script is updated and includes all synchronized sound and commentary. The pacing needs to be precise so that the shots are the right length to fit the voice over and allows the pictures to breathe. Scripts should be dated so that the current version can always be identified for the SP, EP and commissioner to provide feedback. The AP must also include references where necessary to make for a smooth fact-checking process before delivery of the script to the channel for transmission. Final editorial control in the programme rests with the channel. Directors are asked to provide a log of any sound and musical tracks used in their episode at the end of the offline so that this can be submitted to the channel. The script excerpt in Fig. 3 shows a standard documentary layout with the page divided into two, picture and sound. The left-hand side is what the viewer sees, and the right side is what the viewer hears. The third smaller column is added in the post-production phase to note any sound and music.

The Presenter: Kevin McCloud Kevin McCloud has been at Grand Designs’ helm since the outset. As Caldwell (2017) reports:

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Fig. 3 Example of a factual television post-production script

Kevin is committed, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and authentic. People believe he is genuinely interested in the building projects. People see that. He is like a friend or observer rather than an expert, sticking his nose in and going in to sort people out. That was a fad on Channel 4 […] The presenters were condescending experts and Kevin isn’t seen like that.

McCloud is generally applauded by critics and fans for his knowledge, demeanour and passion and people watch because they enjoy hearing his opinions. The format calls upon McCloud to deliver well-known documentary filmmaking tropes that enable him to be positioned as the voice of authority. He delivers in vision pieces to camera (PTCs), straight to camera and provides a voice over to guide the viewer through the story. Caldwell says that McCloud “has grown as a presenter and is the secret of Grand Designs’ longevity” (2017): You can never change Kevin. It’s inconceivable. He has a strong authorial voice and an editorial role in the programme. People enjoy hearing what he has to say about architecture and making it accessible – that is very appealing.

McCloud’s involvement in each programme extends beyond him turning up for the allocated filming days. He is woven into the fabric of the narrative from the selection of new projects to suggesting sequences and interview questions and he also writes the final script. He is collaborative and works well with directors and the production team. His interview technique allows for a range

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of points of view and he recognizes the intricacies of a theme and is skilled at capturing contributors’ intimate feelings. The director, along with the AP, is responsible for briefing McCloud on the build’s progress, and how this is impacting on the contributors’ lives. McCloud is highly experienced and passionate about the design and building process. He studied the history of art and architecture at Cambridge and his involvement in the script development process enhances the script. The director and McCloud can discuss creative solutions to tell the same stories in a different way, avoiding static interviews and involving McCloud alongside the contributors in clever ways to move the story forward.

Grand Designs: The Format Grand Designs is formatted in such a way as to be repeatable and returnable. Each episode has a running time of approximately 47 min and can be broken down into four distinct parts, separated by a commercial break (unless watching on Netflix, which has started airing Grand Designs to American audiences). As Caldwell notes, “Grand Designs has changed very little over the years, only tinkering. It hasn’t fallen prey to different television fashions and Channel 4 hasn’t interfered editorially with it” (2017). Each of the parts follows familiar format points that viewers can identify, and the production team need to master. Every episode of Grand Designs involves a different building and a different person or family, but the fundamental structure remains the same. Building projects have built-in jeopardy and an element of the unknown because in theory anything can go wrong (costs spiralling out of control, battling extreme weather, missing materials, fall outs with builders, etc.). However, there is also a degree of certainty in that they, in most cases, start with a field or shell and end with a finished home. It is a shrewd premise because all builds follow specific stages from groundworks to scaffolding to first fix and second fix electrics which provides the narrative framework for the television makers in developing the script. But how does the inbuilt storytelling format mechanics of Grand Designs inform the script development process? In the way Caldwell (2017) talks about Grand Designs, the concept of the “hero’s journey” is evoked: It is a classic human story of people building their own home. They start with nothing and build their own dream through sheer will and determination and hard work. The contributors do what most of us only dream of – get a happy ending. It is a tale of triumph over adversity. It is something that many of us fantasise about doing and admire people who do it. The effort it takes. It taps into that fantasy of having a dream place.

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Grand Designs hooks the viewer by utilising a story arc that can be read as mimicking the “hero’s journey”, a mythical story structure whereby a character ventures out to get what they need, faces conflict and ultimately triumphs over adversity (Campbell, 1993). There is a clear three-act structure in every episode of Grand Designs with each part moving the story on. Christopher Vogler, script development executive, screenwriter and author of The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2007) was influenced by The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by mythology academic Joseph Campbell and applied his theory of “the hero’s journey” to screenwriting. Part I of Grand Designs is what Vogler (2007) refers to as the ordinary world which, on Grand Designs, typically translates to an empty plot of land. This is the beginning of the story where we meet our hero, otherwise known as the contributors who are about to embark on an adventure into the unknown or what Vogler coined the “call to action”, and on Grand Designs this is the process of building or renovating an ambitious project without any prior experience and is often framed in the script as bonkers or terrifying to create dramatic tension. Presenter Kevin McCloud visits the site at various stages and acts as mediator between the contributors and the audience, offering his opinions and asking the imagined questions of the audience at home. “He invites the viewer to act as judge and critic in contemplating what the build will be like and whether it will be to the viewer’s taste and style” (Caldwell, 2017). In this way what Vogler defines as “meeting with the mentor” could be understood as the moment the contributors meet McCloud who takes on the role of critical friend. The “hero’s journey” paradigm is more widely known as a framework to theorise fictional stories but applying this storytelling method to Grand Designs can help us to understand the script development process in factual television.

Part I, Act One---The Beginning Part I of Grand Designs begins with a 30-second pre-title tease, a point of intrigue, in which McCloud is in vision delivering a short piece to camera (PTC) straight to the lens. Unlike in television fiction, where breaking the fourth wall is relatively irregular and can be considered a bit radical, the PTC is a common tool in factual television programmes and is useful for opinion, moving the story on, building jeopardy or specifically in Grand Designs to explain an unusual design technique or building process. It draws the audience in by asking what is happening next and why it matters to the story. The director suggests ideas for PTCs for McCloud. These need to be succinct and rousing. The relationship between the director and presenter is pivotal in the script development process from pre-production through to post-production. The director’s job in developing the script is to work with McCloud to set up the drama in Part I that will unfold and pose questions about whether the contributors will be able to accomplish their dream against a backdrop of potential challenges, such as finite funds, nasty neighbours or a perilous plot.

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The director and production team need to build trust with the contributors in order to extract their back story and help the audience develop an emotional connection with them and learn their goals and what motivates them. We find out what they are building, why and what is at stake. In Part I there is always a computer-aided design (CAD) teasing the finished design with an architectural graphic of the finished project. The director works with the graphics artist to develop a CAD script and to establish the optimum direction through the CAD. This is an important part of the script development process. The choice of language and the novelty of the build has to entice the viewer to keep watching. The director and McCloud are aware of the need for the audience to share the contributor’s passion for the build. Vogler ascribes human emotion in storytelling as a vital tool to connect with the audience in that “you measure yourself: how am I doing? Is what I do better, or do I need to learn something from the behaviour of heroes from the story?” (Taylor & Batty, 2015).

Part II and Part III, Act Two---The Middle In Parts II and III, the middle or act two, the building is developing and McCloud visits at significant points to capture the build’s metamorphosis and to evaluate progress. The contributors in terms of the hero’s journey have “crossed the threshold” into a special world, that of the build (Vogler, 2007). It is in Parts II and III that the contributors face a series of ordeals that threaten to derail the build. We get closer to the contributors emotionally as they approach their toughest internal and external battles. This accounts for the longest part of the programme and in terms of the script development process is deemed to be an important time to formulate elements of surprise to tantilize the narrative for the benefit of the audience. It involves continual interrogation and depending on the project it may seem to the production team that everything is going wrong and the build will never finish or at times that things are going so well that there won’t be enough excitement in the script to engage the viewer. The director needs to evaluate the direction of the script regularly and stay on top of the story by constructing and focussing on two or three themes that will run through the episode, for example, money, style or materials. The themes hold all of the other components together and guide many of the choices the director makes in developing the script. Part III moves towards completion with second fix electrics and interior finishing ideas reviewed but it is imperative that the final project is not revealed so that the audience do not know if the building has delivered on its promises. This is a stage of self-discovery for the contributors whereby they learn new things about themselves and this propels them forward to the end and getting the build finished, the climax, the spectacle of the reveal.

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Part IV, Act Three---The End Part IV ties everything in the script together, answering the three or four questions raised in the earlier parts and in the final moments of each programme, the building reveals itself. As Caldwell (2017) explains: The most editorial thought goes into Part I and Part IV. Part IV involves thinking carefully about what to say and what Kevin says in final summing up. It is a very important seven or eight minutes, and it is this part where the audience ratings peak.

Part IV, or act three in Vogler’s hero’s journey, symbolises a return to normality for the contributors. They have emerged out of the intensity of the building phase and the unknown, returning to a place of safety. McCloud bookmarks Part IV with an opening and closing PTC: A marker of the importance of his authorial voice as a guide and overseer. “As the script is in the voice of Kevin McCloud, the presenter, it creates an intimacy with the audience. Kevin is the story’s witness, and so through the script, we are too” (Hall, 2020). This part then follows a formula with a tour of the finished home, if the build is complete, and McCloud sitting down with the contributors for the final time to delve deeper into their innermost feelings. Like the hero’s journey, the contributors come full circle. This part deconstructs that journey and allows the contributors to reflect on their journey and what they have learnt. Anticipation in the script is heightened to the final moments when the viewer finally sees the entire house. The spectacle of the reveal, the lynchpin of the episode and gratification for the audience. The beauty of the finished home is what Vogler refers to as the hero’s elixir but also in the context of Grand Designs, it is the viewer’s treasure, their reward for watching. The director and McCloud are conscious of the need to script a strong closing PTC that masterfully articulates the journey and the spectacle of the build poetically and with gusto. As Caldwell (2017) says: They were wide-eyed, innocent and naive at the beginning and are rewarded at the end. We see how far they have come and changed in the process. This is the time to take stock and provide insight into their lives. It is a timeless human journey. Their achievement and creativity are fulfilled with something tangible and concrete that embodies their toil.

The finished house is strong visually and is what might sometimes be referred to as the money shot, the most visually stunning sequence in the programme. The success or failure of the programme often hinges on these final moments as Caldwell states: “viewers are disappointed when they don’t get to see the finished product and can feel cheated if the final reveal is underwhelming” (2017). Backlashes can be played out on social media when viewers are unsatisfied by unfinished projects (Caldwell, 2017):

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Part of the enjoyment of the reveal is the viewer taking on the role of judge. The ending satisfies a curiosity about looking into what people do and judging the outcome. There is a pleasure at looking at what has been completed and measuring against our standards.

Grand Designs Revisited is there for that purpose. Filming on a revisit only takes place if enough has happened both physically to the build and emotionally to the contributors or heroes to continue the journey. This usually means that a revisit takes place a year or more after the original programme transmission so that the building has had time to embed into the landscape and the contributors have had a chance to, in Vogler’s terms, bring their knowledge and experience of living in their home to bear. Script development for a revisit can be considered a sequel and provides an opportunity to craft a new beginning and ending with the insider knowledge of the story outcome. The new part four needs to add tangible value to the original episode if it is to provide viewers with the ending that they crave: a finished build, showcased through stunning cinematography. More money is spent on Part IV to ensure it is aspirational and lives up to its moniker. Part IV or as the production team call it, “the finals”, are shot over two days. Specialist lighting, cameras, helicopters, jibs and equipment such as remote control helicams ensure high production values to capture the splendour of the finished building and “push the spectacle so it is an architectural treat” (Caldwell, 2017) for viewers. With regard to script development the director works with the camera team to plan McCloud’s route through the space thinking through shots required to meet the audiences’ thirst to see inside fantasy homes. The director needs to also consider how to capture general views (GVs), the filmed images of the build, in a meaningful and unique way so that these can be intercut with McCloud and the contributors’ final conversation and enrich the story.

Challenges “The biggest challenge of developing a script” says Hall (2020): is to create drama out of sometimes quite ordinary events - building is repetitive and made of small steps over a long period of time. It is important to be able to see which of these events are relevant to the story one is telling. Grand Designs does not simply document builds but creates a unique story to each of them. Being able to identify this story and tell it well, is down to the quality of the script writing.

The production team needs to find new ways to communicate design techniques and what it takes to build a house, and to get closer to the contributors by spending more time with them to enrich the story and explore what they do and what the build means to them. One way the team can do this is by embracing new technology to tell stories. The director can incorporate this by

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offering different points of view in the script development process, pushing the narrative in new directions, for instance, to differentiate projects, creating cinematic actuality and playing with pacing. Audience expectations for the small screen have changed with streaming services investing heavily in not only drama but factual and reality formats such as Amazing Interiors (2018) and Million Dollar Beach House (2020). Caldwell (2017) believes that “New technology creates new ways to reach high production values and innovate that were not possible in the past”. As she explains, “the production team can now shoot different angles and get more coverage by using the likes of go pros on a crane as a new way to show how a build is embedded in the landscape and the beauty of the context”. The challenge for producers of popular factual series, like Grand Designs is how to continue to keep viewers hooked and prevent them from becoming bored whilst sticking to the format. Many shows choose to rebrand with new presenters or different story elements. Another series I worked on, Property Ladder, went from featuring one development per episode to two and later during a housing market crash it rebranded as Property Snakes and Ladders (2009). The director may struggle to be original in a format. They need to find creative ways to add their personal storytelling flair by finding humour or bringing a new perspective to draw the viewer into the contributor’s life without moving away from the existing narrative conventions or losing the editorial integrity of the format. Directors need to get prior approval to make significant changes in structure from the channel and the series producer and executive producer. In this way the format is far from the free-flowing image many students appear to have in their mind for this genre (see Fig. 2). The programme does not require an auteur director per se, rather a team player who will work closely with the presenter and the other members of the production team and understand the principles of crafting the story so that it feels familiar yet different. In contrast, features and experimental documentaries can allow the director more freedom to create their own vision and play with narrative forms. On Grand Designs, as with other factual formats, there are immovable parts, and a visual style to adhere to (Hall, 2020): Although we create the stories by following the builds/lives of the contributors in an observational way, we rely on the script to drive and shape these stories. A lot of the filming of the builds is merely process and so the script makes sense of and creates a narrative out of this. It can set up jeopardy, excitement etc.

The director therefore cannot be complacent. Some builds can take up to four or five years to complete, when they are scheduled to complete in 12– 18 months. The director needs to have a detailed summary of the story from the outset and revise the script on a weekly basis and be primed to take it in new directions if necessary. The script development process involves a lot of planning and knowing precisely what one will film, how it fits into the script

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and the cause and effect of each sequence. The director does not do this alone. The production team and presenter play a vital part in the script development process and thus the longevity of its success.

Conclusion Factual formats like Grand Designs may seem straight forward and not scripted but as television executive Dom Bird states: “The important thing to remember is that a simple idea doesn’t mean simple to execute” (Brown & Duthie, 2019, p. 23). I have shown that three elements play a significant role in the longevity of a popular factual series, such as Grand Designs. Firstly, the production team is integral to the script development process. The script is not just the work of a single director. It goes through a process of continual revisions from pre-production through to delivery. The hierarchical nature of television production means that it is not the director who signs off on the final script but McCloud, the SP, EP and the channel. Secondly, the onscreen talent, presenter Kevin McCloud, is part of the show’s DNA and plays a central role in developing and writing the script, providing its distinctive voice and ensuring its status and permanence in the television landscape. Finally, to develop the script one needs to have a thorough understanding of the inner workings of the format, its possibilities and its limitations and what strategies to employ to make an emotional connection with the audience. Thus, the script development process involves collaborating and communicating with the other members of the production team and utilising their expertise.

References Amazing Interiors [Television series]. (2018). Netflix. Batty, C. (2014). Me and you and everyone we know: The centrality of character in understanding media texts. In J. Round & B. Thomas (Eds.), Real lives, celebrity stories: Narratives of ordinary and extraordinary people across media (pp. 35–56). Continuum. Biressi, A., & Nunn, H. (2005). Reality TV: Realism and revelation. Wallflower. Bradley, P. (2014). Scripting the real: Mike Leigh’s practice as antecedent to contemporary reality television texts The Only Way Is Essex and Made in Chelsea. In C. Batty (Ed.), Screenwriters and screenwriting (pp. 170–186). Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, L., & Duthie, L. (2019). The TV studio production handbook. Bloomsbury Academic. Caldwell. F. (2017). Executive Producer/Series Producer/Director with Lucy Brown in London. Interview. Caldwell, J. T. (2008). Production culture: Industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television. Duke University Press. Caldwell, J. T. (2009). “Both Sides of the Fence.” Blurred Distinctions in Scholarship and Production (a portfolio of interviews). In V. Mayer, M. Banks, & J. T. Caldwell (Eds.), Production Studies. Cultural Studies of Media Industries (pp. 214–230). Routledge.

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Campbell, J. (1949, 1993 rev Ed.). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Fontana Press. Changing Rooms [Television series]. (1996–2004). BBC. De Jong, W., Knudsen, E., & Rothwell, J. (2013). Creative documentary: Theory and practice. Routledge. Escape to the Country [Television series]. (2002–present). BBC. Glynne, A. (2011). Documentaries and how to make them. Kamera. Grand Designs [Television series]. (1999–present). Channel 4. Hall, M. (2020). Series Producer/Director with Lucy Brown. Online Interview. Hill, A. (2005). Reality TV: Audiences and popular factual television. Routledge. Holmes, S., & Jermyn, D. (2004). Understanding reality television. Routledge. Kavka, M. (2012). Reality TV . Edinburgh University Press. Location Location Location [Television series]. (2000–present). Channel 4. McKee, R. (1998). Story: Substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting. HarperCollins. Millerson, G. (1999). Television production (13th ed.). Focal Press. Million Dollar Beach House. (2020). USA, Netflix, 23–30 min, 6 episodes. Ofcom. (2019). The Ofcom Broadcasting Code. Retrieved September 1, 2020, from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/132073/ Broadcast-Code-Full.pdf. Property Ladder [Television series]. (2001–2009). Channel 4. Rogers, J. (2009). Viewers have grand designs on C4. Retrieved September 1, 2020, from https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/viewers-have-grand-designs-on-c4/ 1978203.article. Skeggs, B., & Wood, H. (2012). Reacting to reality television: Performance, audience and value. Routledge. ScreenSkills. (2018). Unscripted TV. ScreenSkills. Retrieved September 1, 2020, from https://www.screenskills.com/careers/job-profiles/unscripted-tv/. Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2015). Interrogating writing Practices: Perspectives from the screenwriting industry. Writing in Practice: The Journal of Creative Writing Research, Vol. 1. Retrieved September 1, 2020, from https://www.nawe.co.uk/ DB/current-wip-edition-2/articles/interrogating-writing-practices-perspectivesfrom-the-screenwriting-industry.html. Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: Perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing, 13(2), 204–217. Tilley, J. (2019). Ratings. Retrieved September 1, 2020, from https://www.broadc astnow.co.uk/ratings/prorogue-pulls-in-punters-for-news-at-ten/5142346.article. Vogler, C. (2007). The writer’s journey: Mythic structure for writers. (3rd Ed.). Michael Wiese Productions.

Saying What Must Not Be Said: Exploring Communication in the Script Development Process Wendy Bevan-Mogg

Introduction Script development can be a complex process. It relies on a series of formal and informal conversations between financiers, producers, writers and other key industry players. Ostensibly, the goal of these conversations is simply to create the best film1 possible. However, there are often other elements at work, with politics, finances, reputations and ego all playing their part in how a project is shaped. Dialogue during the development process is often multi-levelled, as participants navigate how best to deal with the personalities involved and hierarchies, motives and alliances are established. Script editors must often ‘translate’ notes to and from writers, producers protect important relationships and script development meetings rely as much on what is not said as what is. It is my experience that, at its heart, successful script development depends on effective communication between a number of parties who may have very different agendas. In this chapter, drawing from my own practice and that of others, I will identify some of the ways in which communication amongst the creative team might be affected during the development phase; and consider 1 For the purposes of this article I will use ‘film’ as a shorthand term for any project

that results from a finished screenplay. This may include film, TV drama, web series or other. W. Bevan-Mogg (B) University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_7

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why, though they may have a direct bearing on the direction in which a project is developed, these elements might be rarely acknowledged or recorded.

My Experience and a Note on Methodology From 2000 to 2015 I worked variously as a writer, script editor, development executive and producer within the UK film industry. My perspective comes from this experience, which includes working both as a writer and as a development executive and producer. I refer to commercial scripts throughout this piece. As well as taking examples directly from my own professional practice, I have included quotes taken from an (unpublished) online questionnaire of film industry development professionals that I conducted in the spring of 2019 for this chapter.2 I will also draw in elements of my practice-based research, in particular my work on the development of screenplays that have stories about science at their core. This in turn draws on Robin Nelson’s writing (2013) on practicebased research, which considers the use of professional practice as substantial evidence of insight. I shall also draw on the work of Catherine Z. Elgin (2017), whose work on the notion of ‘true enough’ is fundamental to my current research. Lastly, I will ask how far an analysis of commercial script development is possible within the academy, when such important elements of the process must be navigated but may remain largely undocumented.

The Impact of Money Access to development finance varies greatly between companies and individual creatives. Just as there is no universally set structure which dictates how every film should be produced, there are no industry-standard, defined parameters for how commercial script development should be conducted. While broadly speaking the process will be similar for each script, every project is its own entity, and will usually bring a unique group of individuals and companies to the table. Typically, it will be the producer who leads the development process, but the direction in which the producer leans may be influenced by factors other than creative vision. Indeed, in my experience it is naïve to suggest that creativity is the only driving force. As with many industries, finance in particular plays an important part. Whether the project is an independent, lowbudget feature or a multi-million-dollar studio film, we must follow the money if we wish to understand where the power lies in each stage of a project’s development.

2 Given the sensitive nature of some of the questions asked in my questionnaire, it should be noted that participants were given the opportunity to remain anonymous.

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Though a writer may enjoy relative autonomy when writing a first (often speculative) draft of a film,3 as soon as a script is optioned or commissioned, the balance of power quickly changes. Writers must now please their employer if they wish to be paid. Their employer, the producer, will also (most likely) have financiers whom they in turn must please. While more established producers may typically have their own development funds to pay for a writer’s work, many will not, and must apply for public development funds if team members are to be paid. In the UK at the time of writing, there are few sources of development funding to which a producer might turn.4 The process of applying for this funding is time consuming and only a small proportion of projects are granted development awards. The first gatekeeper, whose job it is to allocate funding to independent projects, is likely to be the development executive working for the funding body to whom the producer has applied. The development executive’s personal taste, ambition and opinion, together with the wider strategic aims of the funding body will all have an influence in deciding which projects will receive support. Just as a programmer’s tastes and interests inevitably shapes the direction of a film festival, so the make-up of even the most balanced of development teams will affect the choice of projects given public development funding. When a project receives development funding, a representative of the funding source will usually become part of the project team. In an Executive role, this representative will work to ensure that the project is developing along the lines that the funding body expects. This may include ensuring the incorporation of the Executive’s script notes and any other factors (including, for example, casting suggestions) that will give the project what the funding body sees as the best chance of the project becoming fully financed for production. Development funds are usually released in tranches, overseen by the Executive as key stages in the project’s development are met. Subsequent production funding might be provided by the same bodies (if not by the same staff members), so it is imperative for the project’s original team to keep the Executive ‘on side’ throughout the process. However, while it is usually possible for an experienced producer and equally experienced Executive to balance the needs of the project and the funding body, maintaining the relationship between project and funder is often difficult. When expectations differ and 3 Hughes (2012, p. 240) describes the act of writing on spec as: ‘without anyone actually, asking, much less paying.’. 4 At the time of writing, independent producers in the UK looking for public development funding may turn to Creative Scotland, Ffilm Cymru and the British Film Institute (BFI). Sample awards range: Between £3000 and £50,000 (Creative Scotland, 2019) and similar amounts for Ffilm Cymru, though awards over £50,000 are subject to board decision. The BFI (2019) does not give an amount but states that ‘you can request the full amount of costs needed at your current stage of development, but please note we are usually only able to support one or two stages initially (i.e. a draft and a set of revisions, or late stage costs)’. Ffilm Cymru (2019) reports: ‘We receive in excess of 100 applications for development funding and make an average of 12 development awards a year.’.

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visions of the final project diverge, the project’s development can be adversely affected. To illustrate this, I note in the below table some examples from various feature films projects on which I have worked. It is a purely subjective list in that it reflects only my own experience, but still I hope it provides some useful examples of how the balance of power within projects may at least be perceived to differ. Please note that I have kept these projects anonymous out of courtesy to the other team members involved.

Example 1

Team members at the stage of the development process remarked upon

Team member perceived by me to hold the most influence

Notes on the development process

Outcome

Producer, Writer/Director, Co-Producer, Script Editor, Development Executive (Public Funding Agency)

Development Executive

As soon as the development finance was received, the balance of power appeared to be with the Development Executive that represented the Film Agency. Without the approval of the Development Executive, the film could not be put forwards for production funding

The project was developed according to the wishes of the Development Executive, despite the fact that their creative opinion differed to the Producer. The development process deteriorated to the point that the Producer considered stepping away from the project in order to protect the funding and the Writer/Director, who was being pulled in two creative directions (continued)

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(continued) Team members at the stage of the development process remarked upon

Team member perceived by me to hold the most influence

Notes on the development process

Outcome

Example 2

Producer (privately financed), Writer/Director, Script Editor

Producer

The project was developed entirely according to the Producer’s vision. However, the project was never realised

Example 3

Producer, Writer/ Writer/Director via Director, Producer Development Executive (Public Funding Agency)

In this example, the film was entirely financed by the Producer. This meant that they called the shots entirely through the Development Process and was the Writer, Director and Script Editor’s clear employer. Even when the Writer, Director and Script Editor collectively disagreed creatively with the Producer, the Producer’s decision was final Here, the Writer/Director were in the driving seat throughout. This film was fully financed by a Public Funding Agency. The Producer’s preferred way of working was to give the Writer/ Director full creative control throughout the development process

The project developed entirely along the lines determined by the Writer /Director and Producer. The Development Executive had little input and the film delivered differed considerably from the original script

(continued)

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(continued)

Example 4

Team members at the stage of the development process remarked upon

Team member perceived by me to hold the most influence

Notes on the development process

Outcome

Producer, Writer/director, Development Executive (Broadcaster)

Development Executive

This project, from a writer/director, attracted its Producer because of its genre of light comedy. The team were invited to talk to a major UK broadcaster. The Development Executive representing the broadcaster was interested in working with the Writer/Director, liked the film but was interested to see if the project could be pushed into a darker space. The Writer/ Director agreed. The Producer did not like this new direction but was persuaded to try it by the promise of a financial relationship with the broadcaster which gave them the best chance at that time of getting the film made

The Writer/ Director created a new, very dark version of the project which the broadcaster decided that they did not like and would not fund. At this point, the Writer/ Director decided not to revert to the comedic version that had attracted the Producer in the first place. The Producer left the project, and the resultant script has not to this date been made

From this brief selection it is possible to see both how different the balance of power between projects may be, and how far the project’s financial structure can determine the direction of its development. However, the examples given above are not exclusive, and finance can influence the project’s development in many other ways. When, for example, ‘bankable’ writers are working on a project (such as an animation) where the credit ‘from the creators of…’ will be more powerful than a named director the power shifts in their favour; when

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the financier has a set agenda (such as to establish a particular relationship with a director), when the writer is best friends with the actor whose name alone can secure distribution for the project … all of these situations, and many more, will have a different gravitational effect on the power structure in the room. As well as acknowledging who is paying whom, we must also consider that the way in which team members are being paid can affect the power structure of a project team. In the world of UK independent filmmaking, writers and producers are less likely to be in salaried positions and more likely to be working either freelance and/or for a small company that is to a large extent dependent on the developing funding that has been secured. This can make these team members creatively as well as financially vulnerable—is it wise for them to reject a Development Executive’s note they may not like, and risk losing the next tranche of their funding? Those development executives with salaried roles depend far less on pleasing the creatives that they are working with. It should be noted also that for some projects, a catastrophe occurs when the salaried Development Executive leaves their position. It is widely accepted that projects on a Development Executive’s slate will be at least delayed (Kellison, 2009), most likely dropped when he or she leaves their post, and will rarely be championed by the incoming replacement, keen to make their own mark on the company’s creative slate. No matter what a project’s creative merit, many projects deemed good enough to receive initial public development funding may be abandoned when an Executive changes their job.

Culture and Language But even when teams are robust and pay is guaranteed, communication in development can still be fragile. As in any human interaction, care must be taken to accommodate personalities. Criticism of creative work, which can feel personal even if it is not intended to be, must be given alongside compliments. A certain level of tact and prioritisation is required if negative notes need to be given. As Karol Griffiths notes, ‘sometimes writers take notes very personally. If this happens, try to remind the writer that your comments are about the story and are NOT personal… proceed gently. An upset writer isn’t going to hear your points anyway, but an encouraged one will’ (Griffiths, 2015, p. 95). There are ways of managing the delivery of criticism. For example, when working as a development executive I would always prioritise my note-giving so that the most significant issues (such as major plot points or issues of tone) were dealt with first. Smaller notes (such as vocabulary or notes about a minor character) would be raised when the more difficult, heavy lifting has been completed, and some points may be left altogether to be dealt with by other members of the team (such as the director or actor, in the case of dialogue). As Griffiths notes, sometimes when a specific issue is left, it is often dealt with

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later without the script editor needing to draw specific attention to it (2015). The writer must not be overwhelmed, and battles must be chosen. What these battles are may depend on the writer’s personality and even circumstances on the day of the meeting. It is not that the script editor or producer is not ‘allowed’ to pass on a note, but rather that it is deemed unhelpful to do so. As one response to my questionnaire states: ‘I rarely feel they [the development notes] have been censured as such – often there is a telling and helpful reason why some notes are omitted and reshaped’. A level of tact (or obfuscation, depending on your view) may obscure the immediate point of the development notes. As Jack Epps writes, ‘In working with executives, you need to try and see the logic behind their notes. Always look for the ‘note behind the note’—the intent of the note’ (2016, p. 241). Given the level of tact required to do the job, it is notable that, at the time of writing, most of the top-level script editors in the UK are female. I draw a parallel here to the role of the continuity supervisor, who have also historically almost always been women. As Dr Melanie Williams (2014) and others have noted, they work in a job that is not associated with great amounts of prestige but is nonetheless instrumental in making often significant changes to a project, at the same level of responsibility (though not of pay) of other creative heads of department. It is out of the scope of this chapter to interrogate this further, but it is interesting to consider that these difficult, diplomatic roles are often done by women. As well as the need to spare feelings, the level of directness used when delivering development notes may also depend on the method of delivery. There is a difference, for example, in what can be said in writing, which is not faceto-face and can be poured over, what can be said on the phone in a brief meeting or what might be ventured after a leisurely and friendly lunch. Are the notes being delivered, or responded to, face-to-face or not? How sensitive are the personalities involved? Does everyone feel entitled to speak their minds freely—or do potentially revolutionary ideas remain unsaid for fear of offence or ridicule? Are some participants adding notes simply to be seen to be contributing? Even when criticism is raised, it should be noted that even within a team that communicates well, the manner in which this is done may also differ. For example, in discussing the difference between her experience of working in both English and German, Dramaturg and Professor Kerstin Stutterheim (personal communication 1.10.2019) notes: English speakers expect a less direct and more layered discussion then German authors, for example. Of course, it also depends on the character and selfconfidence of the respective authors, but in principle authors in the UK are more reserved and expect a very cautiously expressed discussion. I quickly experience a defence strategy, that it is an early version, not all worked out and the like.

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She notes a strong cultural difference in the way in which criticism is delivered: In Germany we are used to speaking our mind, and to be criticised, which is not per se a personal offence … Often, I have a very vital discussion with my authors in Germany, with a lot of laughter and also intense discussions. It is more about the work, not the person; here, often it is more about the person and how they feel … it is more about them as authors then the work.

Even turns of phrase can mean different things depending on the culture of the listener. ‘I’ll bear that in mind’ or ‘that’s an interesting idea’ can have opposite meanings depending on whether they are taken literally or within a British cultural subtext.5

Discipline There may be other differences in culture, or disciplinary need, to navigate within the development team. For example, my practice-based research on the development of my (unpublished) screenplay Voyagers highlights the how the differing priorities of consultants and the creative team they are working for can also influence a project’s development. While in the case of Voyagers, whose protagonist is a scientist working on the Voyager space mission, I refer to scientific consultants (with specific expertise on the Voyager missions) who might be employed to ensure the veracity of certain elements of the script. However, we might also consider the work of consultants working in other areas—for example, historical consultants on series such as The Crown (2016–present) or legal consultants working on a police procedural drama. Whatever the genre, in each case the consultant is brought into a scripting process in order that their expertise may help specialist elements of a project ring ‘true’.6 But just as a distributor may prioritise the fulfilment of expectations set by a film’s genre, or a sales agent may push for particular casting, so the consultant may have different expectations of how far a production team can or should stick to ‘the facts’, or how far a story structure can flex in order to present what the consultant deems to be a ‘correct’ sequence of events. 5 A recent YouGov report (Smith, 2019), perhaps intended to be humorous, in this instance reminds us of this nonetheless valid point. In particular, the phrase of ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ mentioned in the report, is something I refer to in lectures to writers and producers as a useful way to indicate that you are willing to listen to a note but without committing yourself to take action upon it. 6 I use that wording very carefully here, for the idea of truth in this context is complex. On the one hand, it can be argued that the fact that a script is necessarily a fiction means that no project can ever be true; but any drama can (especially if it is based on real events) to one extent or another purport to represent what are commonly held to be facts. One only needs to look at the critical furore regarding Netflix’s The Crown (2016–present) (Elbaum and Itasaka 2020) to observe how an audience might be (rightly or wrongly) supposed to take a drama as ‘fact’, and it is in this context that we might consider the role of the consultant in the development process.

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My current research considers the conflict between the desires of the consultant and the production team. While time precludes a full examination of these ideas here, I am in short interested in how Catherine Z. Elgin’s theory of ‘true enough’ (2017) can be used to enable a consultant to work with rather than against a creative team. By using what Elgin terms ‘felicitous falsehoods’, I argue that it is possible to convey complex ideas within a dramatic setting without abandoning either the team’s dramatic or the consultant’s epistemic goals—but only if these goals are discussed in detail before the script development is begun. It is no good if the ‘truth’ of the scientific procedure, or historical event, does not fit within/allow a frictionless progression of the dramatic structure of the fictional project, or is too complex for an audience that does not possess specialist knowledge to comprehend a vital plot point. Similarly, the writer cannot simply ignore certain aspects of scientific practice (or historical factuality, or legal practice) without their work potentially becoming dismissible by the audience as being too obviously ‘untrue’. The project cannot succeed if neither side will accept the needs of the other. Marked differences in how the role of the consultant is seen across the media industry suggests, however, that this important discussion may not always occur. To begin with, the role of the consultant is not always clearly defined. Are they there to guide, or to dictate? In The Science of Interstellar, physicist Kip Thorne (2014) describes how he worked out elements that became central plot points of Interstellar (Nolan, 2014), while a historical consultant I’ve worked with (but who out of courtesy should remain anonymous) complains that their advice regarding the use of particular guns in a historical drama were ignored, and that they appear in the film’s timeline several months before they would have been issued to troops in real life. For them, this was of huge importance; for the director and, one might guess the general audience, less so. Of course, each project will work differently, but the constant that I observe is a need for the development team, including the consultant, to have a shared goal or, as we might borrow from Elgin, a common thesis. Scientists and dramatists can (perhaps thanks to the Two Cultures debate) be unsure of each other, either prone to accepting tired stereotypes of distracted creative and boffin. Meeting only formally and without the time to build a rapport, there can be a hesitancy, with neither side knowing quite how to act. It’s worth noting that even in the literature there is a difference in how consultants are regarded, with David Kirby (2011) on the one hand holding the consultant in high esteem, suggesting that the consultant should be well paid, and Robert Grant (2013) suggesting that almost anyone with specialist knowledge will be happy to spend their time with a writer in exchange for a cup of coffee and the chance to be involved. Once again, here the work of the script editor can be vital, ‘translating’ notes between the writer and third parties. If these third parties include consultants, as mentioned above, or other links in the film value chain, it is important that the script editor can broker the notes in a language that all parties can

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understand. Does the consultant understand the basics of dramatic structure? Do the development team understand the consultant’s specialist vocabulary? Furthermore, have any members of the team other than the script editor been formally trained in dramaturgy—in film, television, theatre, radio or prose? Will team members understand the technical language of script development in the same way? It is not always the case in the UK that even a scriptwriter has had formal training in writing scripts, so it becomes important to ensure that even a very basic tool such as working vocabulary is understood by all.

Second-Hand Information When even team members with first-hand knowledge of a project may struggle to obtain a complete picture of how a project was developed, academics researching projects to which they do not have direct personal access face an even more difficult task. Second-hand information is necessarily curated and often polished. Published interviews, for example, work to appeal to general film fans as well as researchers, playing up to the promise of the ‘show’ in ‘show business’.7 For example, David Hughes’ books Tales from Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made (2012) and The Greatest Sci Fi Movies Never Made (2001) offer information about the development of various projects and all feature in depth interviews with the industry professionals involved. Names are dropped and the stories of these films are presumably written for dramatic emphasis, focussing not on subtle points of plotting or characterisation but on the wider world of project development—the packaging of cast, directors and distribution. The tone is of big personalities and revelatory detail. These books are an entertaining read. For the researcher who prefers not to rely on such interviews, development documents may also shed light on the project’s journey. Key documents such as treatments, outlines and various drafts as well as meeting notes may all contain clear signposts or subtle clues about how a script’s development is unfolding. However, when seeking access to these notes further levels of complexity become apparent. Who has the notes? To whom do they belong? The Script Editor, for example, will usually, be paid by the producer to create (and curate) script notes which are discussed amongst the team, but it would be very unusual for a contract to insist that the Editor’s working notebooks were owned by the producer. If this is the case, how can the scholar access this material, or even know it is there to be requested? Of course, the more organised Development Executive may insist on meeting notes being written up and circulated, so that a record can be kept 7 As well as concentrating on these more entertaining aspects, while finer script points are discussed, it is clear from Hughes’ interviews that these wider financial/strategic packaging decisions have huge impact upon the development of a script. While space precludes a detailed examination of the packaging side of script development within this article, his books provide a strong reminder of how far elements removed from the script can impact on how a project evolves.

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of what a writer has been required to do. But these records will usually be edited. In these cases, as a questionnaire respondent noted: ‘The notes often omit or reshape elements’. Another notes: ‘At times, what is said and noted in formal minutes are then revised or removed due to sensitivities on the part of the note giver, or expanded on from memory’. While some executives feel more secure in capturing a reliable record of a meeting, ‘because participants often disagree about the meaning/understanding of what was “said” (or not said) […] no record can capture the nuances and subtexts of a development relationship’.

Published Development Notes Even the published accounts of established development professionals may not be entirely reliable. Once again, the presentation of industry memoirs as entertainment has an impact, as could an author’s desire to present themselves to fellow industry professionals in a particular way. For example, in Christopher Vogler’s (1998, p. 271) account of a development meeting for The Lion King (Allers & Minkoff, 1994) he writes: It occurred to me that when Rafiki held up the baby lion to show the assembled animals, a beam of sunlight from the clouds could strike the cub, giving the divine stamp of approval to the specialness of this child and to Mufasa’s royal line. There was an almost audible crackle of energy in the room at that moment. The image came into several minds at once and I experienced the frisson, the shiver down the back that always tells me when an idea expresses the truth of the story.

Are we really to believe that Vogler’s audience were truly amazed by this apparently revelatory thought, or might some people in the room have considered this idea to have been a far more obvious suggestion? Vogler provides several similar instances in his book, but we only have his word regarding how many of the project’s story ideas were directly influenced by his Hero’s Journey writing structure—that it is ultimately his business to sell.8

Archives Specialist archives offer further opportunities for scholars to gain access to development material. However, development archives will necessarily have limited content. Just as space precludes too long a discussion of this problem here, so film libraries are also limited. When assessing materials in order to decide whether or not to retain them as part of a film library, the archivist might ask the following questions: 8

Vogler does receive one of the eight Additional Story Material credits on the film, after 17 other Story credits. It is not my intention to suggest that his input was not valuable; rather that it is considered in context.

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Does it fit our acquisition policy? Is it a significant acquisition for teaching, research or public display? Does it duplicate anything we already hold? Do we have space to hold the collection?

Dr. Phil Wickham, Curator of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and archives explains further (personal communication, 23.9.19): In some cases we may ask to choose just some elements within a collection and there might be a negotiation with a donor. Script materials would tend to one of the types of item we might favour most because of their research potential and their rarity as artefacts. We might take a number of versions of script if they were representing different stages of the process. They would tend to come from one person within the production – if offered from others we might take them if they were different (for example containing editor’s notes or continuity scripts, which is the case for our holdings on Bill Douglas’ Comrades for example). Space is always an issue but at the moment we would try and take anything we thought was significant unless it was an enormous content that we would have trouble accommodating.

In other words, an archive might take script drafts and other productionrelated material. But even if archives are offered full development notes for a project, how likely is it that scribbled, but crucial, notes from a development meeting be overlooked?

Conclusion The script development process can be shaped by ego, circumstance, and creative politics. As is common with many other human endeavours, the issue of finance is central, as are cultural differences, be they national or disciplinary, and the influence that each team member has on a project varies according to a multitude of hierarchies. Indeed, these complexities can be so varied that it may not always be possible to gather together all of the facts and unspoken influences which shape how a project is made. The methods of communication used within the process are blunt instruments, and meetings and discussions are rarely documented entirely truthfully, or comprehensively. ‘With permissions, enough time and the buy-in of all involved it’s possible [to develop a true picture of the development process] per-se’, writes one of my questionnaire correspondents, ‘however, it would be a very complicated and long process’. It would be easy to say that the process of development is not possible document with any certainty. However, just as historians employ analysis and interpretation when addressing primary material, it is possible to look out for some of the broader

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issues that might influence the trajectory of a script in its life before production. I hope that this chapter will provide some assistance in untangling the very human elements that make-up the creative process, and in doing so, encourage a more comprehensive understanding of a project’s development.

References BFI. (2019). Development funding guidance [online]. British Film Institute. https:// www.bfi.org.uk/supporting-uk-film/production-development-funding. Accessed 4 Oct 2019. Creative Scotland. (2019). Targeting funding guidance [online]. Creative Scotland. https://www.creativescotland.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/51479/FilmDevt-Prod-Guidance-Aug-2018.pdf. Accessed 4 Oct 2019. Elbaum, R., & Itasaka, K. (2020). Is ‘The Crown’ fact or fiction? For the British royal family, the answer matters. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ crown-fact-or-fiction-british-royal-family-answer-matters-n1249661. Accessed 18 Mar 2021. Elgin, C. Z. (2017). True enough. MIT Press. Epps, J. (2016). Screenwriting is rewriting: The art and craft of professional revision. Bloomsbury Academic. Ffilm Cymru Wales. (2019). Development Funding Guidelines [online]. Cardiff: Ffilm Cymru Wales. http://ffilmcymruwales.com/index.php/en/film-makers/dev elopment-support-for-film-makers. Accessed 4 Oct 2019. Grant, R. (2013). Writing the Science Fiction Film. Michael Wiese Productions Griffiths, K. (2015). The art of script editing: A practical guide. Kamera Books. Hughes, D. (2001). The greatest Sci Fi movies never made? Titan Hughes, D. (2012). Tales from development hell: The greatest movies never made? Titan Interstellar (2014) [Film]. Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers Pictures, Legendary Pictures, Syncopy, Linda Obst Productions; Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures. Nolan, C. (Director). Kirby, D. (2011). Lab coats in Hollywood: Science. MIT Press. Kellison, C. (2009). Producing for TV and new media: A real-world approach for producers. Focal Press. Nelson, R. (2013). Practice as research in the arts. Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, M. (2019). Half of Americans wouldn’t be able to tell that a Briton is calling them an idiot [online]. YouGov.co.uk. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/ articles-reports/2019/01/11/half-americans-wouldnt-be-able-tell-british-person? utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=british_subtext. Accessed 12 Jan 2020. The Crown. (2016–). [TV series]. Leftbank Pictures, Sony Pictures Television; Netflix Streaming Services. Byam Shaw, M., Caron, B., Daldry, S., Fox, R., Goss, A., Harries, A., Mackie, S., Martin, P., Morgan, P., Seghatchian T., Stebbing, A., Wolarsky, N. (Executive Producers). The Lion King. (1994) [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Feature Animation; Buena Vista Pictures. Allers, R., Minkoff R., (Directors). Thorne, K. (2014). The science of Interstellar. Norton. Vogler, C. (1998). The writer’s journey: Mythic structure for writers. Michael Wiese Productions

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Williams, M. (2014). Continuity Girl [online]. Women’s Film and Television History Network. https://womensfilmandtelevisionhistory.wordpress.com/2014/ 02/21/continuity-girl/. Accessed 3 Jan 2020.

Scripting the Experimental Documentary Film: Developing the “Script” for Not Reconciled Jill Daniels

Introduction In this chapter, I explore the development of the script for my short experimental documentary Not Reconciled (2009), which I wrote and produced as a practice as research project for my Ph.D.1 The film is experimental in its use of hybrid strategies; enactment through fictional characters who are represented through extensive voice-overs combined with interviews and observational footage of place and the routines of daily lives. It is located in Belchite, a medieval market town in Aragon, northern Spain, the site of a three-week battle in 1936 between Republican and Nationalist fighters in the Spanish Civil War. The town was left in ruins. Not Reconciled builds on my previous film practice, documentaries produced independently of the mainstream film industry and broadcast television. They are located in places where traumatic events such as war have occurred or are suffering the effects of economic globalisation. In developing scripts for my documentary films, I take into account that the articulation of the past takes place in the present, and thus I seek to recreate the past rather than attempt to recapture it. I do not aim to provide certainty, but to focus on extensive use of disconnected subjective voices in 1 The title is a reference and homage to the eponymous film by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet about history and memory in Germany after the Second World War.

J. Daniels (B) University of East London, London, UK

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_8

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a range of tenses, which may create clashes of temporalities between sound and image. I rely on chance and the flexibility to change course according to circumstances and I treat the script as a working document that I adapt and change throughout the process of making the film. As Dwight Swain highlights in his manual of scriptwriting: “If there is something that you need in your survival kit it is flexibility” (1976, p. 10). This is particularly the case in making a documentary where changes in circumstances cannot always be foreseen. I am conscious that the term documentary may imply that this is a fixed genre but as Ken Dancyger points out “a documentary can be personal, political, educational, or cinema verite” (2011, p. 106). Further, Alan Rosenthal notes that unlike most fiction screenplays many documentaries do not have anything resembling a full preproduction script or outline but are built on the editing table (1996, pp. 9–10). In developing scripts for documentary films, particularly where there is an element of experimentation with filmic form, the lack of a recognised screenwriting format such as may be found in the writing of a fiction screenplay with all of its certainties may sometimes appear problematic. However, I argue that where there is an intention to experiment with filmic techniques and strategies this lack may also be viewed as an opportunity. As Sergio Puccini (2015, p. 26) observes as long as there is a guide or plan to guide the development of the project during the preproduction stage there are no constraints on the form of the documentary script: The work of scriptwriting made in the preproduction of a [documentary] film, will delineate a basic structure that will be used as a guide to the filmmaker during the shooting, with the provision of sufficient plasticity to be altered within the production process, taking into account possible contingencies

In script development for experimental documentary films there may still be, as may be found in a fiction screenplay, an initial treatment, a synopsis and ideas for characters. Scripts may consist of a number of different texts, lists and notes or visual materials that come together to form a guiding plan for production, something we might still describe as the script. In my documentary films, I rarely have a fixed idea of what the film will be at the start of the process. I develop a script bearing in mind Jean-Luc Godard’s observation that the form of documentary films is often only found during their production. He observed that directors like Jean Rouch: “Don’t know exactly what they are going to do, and search for it. The film is the search. They know they are going to arrive somewhere–and they have the means to do it–but where exactly?” (1972, p. 180). Kilborn and Izod point out that spectators may expect documentary films to have an indexical link to the workings of the external socio-historical world before they are transposed into a representational form that can be understood by its audience. In other words, the production of a documentary is not simply an act of chronicling; it is just as much an act of transformation, changing the material in such a way as to

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change it from a direct record of actuality into a form which Kilborn and Izod refer to as “documentary discourse” (1997, p. 4). The aim of chronicling and transforming gives me a rationale for the early stage of developing ideas for my documentaries. Dancyger notes that a documentary, unlike a fiction film may evolve from an idea rather than from a script (1991, p. 63) and as Rosenthal observes, “you can’t have a film without a concept” (1996, p. 10). I begin my script development journey with an idea, that may be triggered by an event, a memory, a film, book or article, or a conversation. At this stage, I generally carry out research through the internet, books, journal articles and newspapers, and I visit libraries. The research develops into notes, lists and quotes that roughly resembles a treatment for the film. Dancyger notes the value of research for documentaries: “On many documentaries the challenging phase closest to writing is the research phase. Much of the interesting material, characters, and locations generate out of that research” (1991, p. 63). To further my research, I carry out field trips to specific locations to stimulate the development of ideas and to remove myself from the distractions of everyday life. My script development journey for my film, Not Reconciled began from a brief conversation with a friend about his visit to Gualchos, a mountain village near Motril in southern Spain; a village abandoned during the civil war when its inhabitants fled. My friend said he felt like he was in a place full of ghosts. His story resonated with me due to my personal experience of living in Spain many years ago; my interest in the civil war and the passionate debates in Spain around the lack of a truth and reconciliation process to deal with memories of the war. My intention was to make a film about remembering and forgetting the civil war, taking as my starting point the discussions around whether to excavate the thousands of unmarked mass graves from the civil war period and its violent aftermath. I noted in my diary that Gualchos could well be a fruitful location for a film. I always follow up these research activities by visiting the location where I might find tangible traces of historic events or meet eyewitnesses to supplement my research. Rosenthal notes that the documentary script “is a working document not a literary document. It is the basis from which plans can be made and action carried out” (1996, p. 11). My “script” for Not Reconciled consisted at this early stage of a magpie collection of research findings, preliminary reflections and ideas stored in a notebook and computer files (see Extract A). I set off to Gualchos armed with an embryonic idea and a notebook. This notebook stayed with me throughout the production of the film. Extract a: Notebook Find People Around Who Know About the Civil War and the Battle As it was before the civil war – photos – sounds of church bells, ploughing, birds, interior of bar. Where was the location of the village cemetery? Sounds (some from the location, some created later) Sounds of war – shooting – bombing, protagonists, start of villagers

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Names. Wheels – carts – water flowing – agricultural sounds – not mechanised – horses – sound of ploughing – digging Possible music – Ay Carmela; singing in the Figaro. Drums. Rocks knocking together –

Not Reconciled: The Premise My aim in visiting Gualchos was to explore how local inhabitants in the vicinity remembered the bitter conflict that often divided families and whose effects may linger to this day. I have a personal preoccupation with Spain and the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 because of my own intimate and familial connection with Spain. Since Not Reconciled was produced as part of my doctoral thesis I did not make applications for funding. I wanted full control of both the aesthetic decisions and the length of the film. Unfortunately, this trip was not a success. After a hair-raising drive into the mountains above Motril in southern Spain through dense fog into the mountains above Motril in southern Spain, I arrived at a small hamlet and a deserted bar. The bartender had never heard of Gualchos. No other living soul could be found in the vicinity. Back in Motril, I made enquiries about the whereabouts of Gualchos, but a village ruined in the civil war sparked no interest in the locals. After this failed trip I scoured the internet for larger villages or towns in Spain that were sites of battles in the civil war. I discovered Belchite, a medieval town in Aragon, Northwest Spain (see Fig. 1), the site of a three-week battle between Nationalists and Republicans in 1936, which resulted in the ruin of the entire town and the dispersal of most of the inhabitants. It had been left untouched since the war. It was still partially inhabited in 1954 when the last remaining inhabitant was relocated to a new eponymous village, next door to the ruins. Before the civil war, in this arid area of Spain, there was an extensive system of irrigation channels to support agriculture. They were destroyed during the war. After the Nationalist victory, the authorities abandoned the ruined town to the elements. They did not repair the irrigation channels and decided to build a new town of “model” housing a few meters away from the ruins. The lack of irrigation channels ended agriculture and thus destroyed livelihoods. Many inhabitants were plunged into poverty and a forced labour camp of Republican prisoners was established next to the ruined town to build a new town. Belchite was a promising location for my film; there were plenty of published first-hand accounts of the battle to stir my imagination. My aim at this point was to use the images of ruins to evoke the interruption of time and to its dislocation (Benjamin, 1940 [1973], p. 263), in order to examine the metaphorical nature of silence and absence in a place where history tells us that once there was the opposite, the chaos and roar of guns and bombs.

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Fig. 1 The ruined medieval town of Belchite

I wanted to create a documentary that acknowledges the inevitable limitations of bearing witness, to mediate a past that cannot be recuperated but must be reimagined through an elliptical cinematic strategy and exploration of subjectivities. The development of the premise for the script was taking shape but I needed more material to develop it further and that would involve knowing more about the town in the present through chance encounters and observations of daily lives. In documentary films it is virtually impossible to control every element of the film before it is shot. Unlike fiction, actuality can never be completely controlled in advance. Chance provides some of the most creative and meaningful inclusions in the finished film because they were not even imagined beforehand. They may shape and change the film in new ways and enrich the possibilities open to the filmmaker, particularly when a budget is small. In the script development of a documentary, it is important to remember that “New possibilities may be discovered while shooting. Strange characters may turn up and marvellous, unexpected events happen even in the best-planned film” (Rosenthal, 1996, p. 11). Chance and the flexibility to change course according to circumstances was an integral part of the plan for Not Reconciled. The inclusion of chance involves a script model, which as Kathryn Millard helpfully suggests, is one that “places the emphasis firmly on the creative process and the generation and development of new ideas rather than pre-determined templates” (2011, p. 155). In a documentary, it is often places or objects that give rise to ideas that lead to

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the path the writer will take. This was particularly relevant in Not Reconciled when I decided to treat Belchite’s ruined buildings as the central character of the film. Most of the smaller outlying buildings were just piles of rubble, but the churches were empty shells retaining traces of their former grandeur; many buildings in the central street retained their wrought-iron balconies, and traces remained of shop signs. Millard, explaining her writing method for her film on Charlie Chaplin, The Boot Cake (2008), said she gave her collaborators a 10,000-word essay, a four-minute trailer and what she describes as a “grab bag of Chaplin related relics that I had assembled over the term of the project’s incubation: a talcum powder holder in the form of Charlie Chaplin from Adipur in India, a flexible bamboo cane” (2011, p. 154), and other assorted Chaplin memorabilia garnered from her global travels. Some of the scenes in The Boot Cake were based around these objects. In words which many documentary filmmakers would recognise, she states: “we were finding our way step by step” (ibid). In Not Reconciled the most important item to me was the notebook which I carried everywhere. I wrote all my ideas, quotes from readings, lists, notes, and reminders of what I wanted to film in the notebook, from the premise through the pre-production and production process to the end of post-production. My use of a notebook was supplemented through the script development with stills, video footage and computer files consisting of research and transcripts of interviews and later a dialogue script for fictional characters. The dialogue script was the closest I came to the production of a conventional fiction screenplay. Reading many eye-witness accounts of fighters in the battle in Belchite I decided early on to include my surrogate, the character of a flâneuse and storyteller who is also the author of the film (see Extract B). Extract B: Notebook for Not Reconciled The idea of someone writing this story, piecing together these characters – describing the process of creating these characters – crossing out, building up the identity. And in between these attempts and misattempts are the conjured sounds of the town, peace, war, then peace and in the new village maybe no sound at all – silent parts - transpose the sounds of the new village to the old village, even the sounds of traffic

Not Reconciled Script: Pre-production In the development of the script for Not Reconciled, I carried out two preproduction visits to the location with a non-filmmaker friend. Two women with low-budget equipment seldom attract much attention. I took extensive photographs of the ruined town. Some found their way into the film during the editing. I observed the routines of everyday lives. The streets in the new town were generally empty but on Sundays, the locals went to church and

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to the bars. I discovered a social club for pensioners. I also found that the ruins were not entirely empty. Tourists came, wandering round and in the ruined buildings; men exercised their horses; children played, and traces of graffiti pointed to the presence of lovers. There was no hotel in Belchite so I became embedded in the daily life of the hotel in Lecera, a neighbouring village, getting to know the owners and the locals who ate in the hotel restaurant and drank in the bar. I sought out inhabitants of other neighbouring villages who may have witnessed the civil war. Jaime Cinca, the local historian specialised in the civil war and showed me the location of a mass grave of local inhabitants killed in the war and secretly buried. He was anxious to explain the history of a three-week battle that ended in a Republican victory and showed me the extensive trenches the opposing forces had dug in the mountains. After I had spent days roaming the desolate ruins, taking photographs, listening to the sounds of birds and ghostly music carried by the wind, I abandoned the idea of creating a semi-autobiographical flâneuse. I considered it to be an inappropriate trope since I had no connection to the town and would have had to write an account of why, and how I had wandered by chance or intention, into this remote area. For a while, I struggled with the script. However, I decided to create fictional characters of ghosts, buried in a mass grave under the ruins. They would be represented as combatants; prisoners, or former inhabitants; unseen but heard through voice-overs, telling the history of the town and giving their versions of the battle and squabbling. These characters would provide some character motivation and narrative conflict in what would otherwise, I felt, be a very static film. I drew on the published interviews and diaries of combatants in the civil war for dialogue and characterisation. I wrote a new list of varied types of characters as the basis for the ghosts (see Extract C). Extract C: Notebook for Not Reconciled Fictional Characters The Dictator The Farmer – I am dead – memories The American – I am dead and I died in glory – memories The Nationalist – I am dead – pride The male ghost who can’t let go - whose bones lie in an unmarked grave. He is watching. A woman he doesn’t know lies next to him – she talks about her memories of watching of not being reconciled – she describes – they are the guides. They want to find out who killed her.

Archive material from the battle was not available to me, but I found still photographs of the town and its inhabitants before the civil war and its subsequent destruction on the internet. I decided that my voice off-screen would

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be heard in the film through brief filmed conversations carried out directly to camera with local inhabitants, asking them the same questions about the war, whether they were witnesses to the battle (most were too young). I wrote lists of brief questions on memory and forgetting the civil war. The shooting script for the production of the film was beginning to take shape (see Extract D). Extract D: Shooting ‘script’ Ruined Belchite - Shots Underground shots at night, light moving, shadows. Camera: Tripod and handheld. Shots of remains of writing and tiles in the earth, anything that looks like the traces of humans. New Belchite - shots Shots in the old bar. Try to get different times, with different people, particularly old guys playing cards. Guy opening up the bar. Or closing - might be very late! Shots of new bar. Weekend when it’s busy. Where was the prison camp? Everyone but Jaime says it’s the Casas Rusas. Why doesn’t he agree? Film the camp if I find it. People to look for to interview: Guy who owns the bar. Aurelio Salavera in his memoir talks about how they shot 370 villagers one day including his father, 11 uncles and aunts, 3 pregnant women, what he calls the village idiot and Mariano Castillo the socialist mayor. Find their descendants? Julio Diaz had a father who served 18 years in the concentration camp building the new Belchite. He knows about the bars and who drinks in which bar. Interview questions (some of these will be vox pops chance encounters With Elderly People Who May Have Been Children During the Civil War). What is it like living with the past? Do people want to forget the past? What should be done with the ruins? Raze them? Did their grandparents fight in the war? How many people were in the prison camp and what nationalities were they? Did anyone try to speak to them? Did the people watch when they were working? Was there an order in the camp? A pecking order?

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Where were people buried when they died? Water. Was it true that the water was the reason they wouldn’t rebuild the town?

A central aim of the film was to explore whether present inhabitants in Belchite and Lecera, retained loyalties to former political allegiances. For years after the civil war ended, a labour camp outside the ruins imprisoned Republican fighters, including Russians, British, Americans and Serbs; trade unionists and civilian supporters of the Republicans. There was confusion among local inhabitants about the location of the concentration camp. I was told that disused farm buildings outside the town, known locally as Casas Rusas/Russian houses was used as the camp, but later it transpired that these buildings had been used to house the relatives of the political prisoners; it was common for relatives to live near a concentration camp in the Francoist period after the civil war, to bring food to the prisoners. In poverty-stricken post-civil war Spain, there was little to eat for the general population and virtually nothing for political prisoners. The new town was built around the camp. After the town was completed in 1954 the camp was razed. Since there was no longer a camp to film, I decided to film the relatives’ houses. According to historic accounts these relatives had to feed the concentration camp inmates and were housed in buildings with boarded up windows, probably used previously for animals, located near an old chapel, isolated from any human settlement. They evoked in me a strong sensation of unease. I discovered that there were two bars in the new town; one containing dark wooden floors and a stag’s head on the wall, frequented by poor and older workers, mainly men; and a modern bar with younger clientele. The bars and their clientele found their way into my shooting script. I decided that conversations with inhabitants, through chance encounters, would be conducted in the streets and these were also added to the shooting script. When it was time to go into production, I had a developed premise and shooting script. Enough to lay the foundations for the first shoot.

Not Reconciled: Production The filming of Not Reconciled consisted of two shoots, each lasting a week. The notebook, the stills from the research period, and the lists of things to film, as well as the way the interviews and observational footage would be framed and shot formed the shooting script. In the first shoot, I shot observational footage of daily lives and I carried out brief filmed interviews with inhabitants I found in the streets. The brief questions were expanded to highlight nuances of opinion between groups of people. The second shoot expanded this collection of footage. Both shoots were supplemented by many valuable chance encounters.

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Chance Encounters Several chance events occurred during both shoots which were fortuitous in overcoming some of the problems I was experiencing in the sense of stasis conveyed by extensive shots of ruined buildings. One evening at dusk, driving through the countryside I saw a huge plume of black smoke in the distance and decided to investigate. It turned out to be the farm buildings where the prisoner’s relatives had been housed. A heap of lorry tyres was ablaze. This fire became a key recurring image in the film, acting as a metaphor for violence, and even if I had imagined it would not have been scripted because I did not have the budget to create it myself (See Fig. 2). Another chance occurrence was an encounter with Pilar Paris Minga, a woman who was wandering around the ruins. Now in her nineties, she had lived in extreme poverty in the town throughout the civil war. She was very keen to act as my guide and I filmed her showing me various ruined buildings. However, I was unable to locate Pilar again to carry out more filming when I returned. I found her address in the telephone directory and visited her house, but nobody came to the door.

Fig. 2 The Fire at Casas Rusas/Russian Houses

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Fig. 3 The Girl in Red

One Sunday I was filming outside the church in the new town when a girl dressed in an old fashioned long red dress walked into frame, her back to the camera, she wound through the oppressive image of black-clad legs of old people in the foreground. It is unclear whether this girl is a child or a small woman. Reaching the opposite pavement she twisted her body to jump onto it and then walked out of the frame. This image made a strong impression on me; the contrast between men and women, their faces out of view, dressed in sombre black evoked in me a feeling of oppression, while the girl in the vivid red dress evoked joy and optimism (Fig. 3).

Editing Script The editing script consisted of a guiding structure for the first assembly of the film, followed by a rough cut. In editing Not Reconciled I did not create a single editing script. I created a wall of “post-it” notes detailing scenes and interviews from the footage itself. The ghosts’ dialogue was scripted as a separate script using a conventional fiction script format, albeit without slug lines, description or action. The dialogue was recorded and cut in as the editing progressed. There were many drafts of the dialogue script in Spanish and English, in collaboration with the actress who played Rosa, Judith Mora Toral. Rosenthal (1996, p. 13) observes that in a documentary: The editing script (visuals) may be the same as the shooting script or something radically different […] the rushes, not theory, must guide the film, and this material may necessitate many departures from the original script. Hence, the occasional necessity to formulate a special editing script.

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In Not Reconciled it was the rushes, together with the dialogue that guided the editing. As editing progressed, in order to give the film more depth and nuance I created further characters of ghosts based on published memoirs and interviews with fighters in the civil war. Their dialogue was added to the dialogue script. Extract F: Dialogue Script – Opening Sequence CARLOS (V/O) Let’s imagine the treasure we’re hunting is there for the taking. It’s somewhere close by, but too far to be seen. ROSA (V/O - calling faintly at first as though waking up) Here I am. I’m buried under a pile of earth somewhere, maybe this one. If you look out of the corner of your eye you might see me. I’m always here under the ground. It’s strange to hear my voice. But they say nobody likes the sound of their own voice. CARLOS (V/O - a bit cross to have been interrupted) Even stranger given how long we’ve been here. ROSA (V/O - a little defensive) Of course. A pause. CARLOS (V/O) Am I an actor outside the character playing a ghost? Or am I a ghost playing the actor who is playing a character? ROSA (V/O) Death’s addled your brain.

The creation of fictional characters through voices or enactments with scripted dialogue is not considered to be a conventional strategy in a documentary film by writers, such as Trisha Das. In her book How to Write a Documentary Script, she maintains that dialogue is not formally part of a documentary script. She acknowledges the existence of drama documentaries, where “this style mixes the techniques of drama and the factual elements of documentary” (2007, p. 8). However, she offers no advice on how to deal with dialogue in these films and she asserts that documentaries represent actuality, and when drama occurs it is integrated into the diegesis of the world of actuality rather than creating a binary relationship between fiction and actuality. This resistance to the notion of the inclusion of fictional enactment or

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re-enactment in documentary films lies in a perceived demand that documentary films should provide “evidence”, which is generally found in the conventions of mainstream documentary filmmaking whose aim is primarily to provide authentication of the mediation of historical events. Experimental films are often considered difficult to “read” in their use of unconventional filmic language and my choices of tropes and techniques—such as realism or fictionalised enactments—and the inclusion of stills, archive material, found footage or slow-motion that may be deployed in experimental documentary films may be varied. However, contrary to this view I aimed to create just such a binary relationship in Not Reconciled. This and the conscious search for chance events to film afforded me a flexibility that helped to open a window onto distinctive and original ways of mediating historical events, thus deepening knowledge of those events. The dialogue enabled me to provide the viewer with exposition as well as character motivation. (see extract G dialogue script). Extract G: Dialogue Script CARLOS (V/O) Let’s talk about the civil war; the fucking bastards on all sides. Their side and our side. And the Russians who were on their own Treacherous side. And the ruins. ROSA (V/O - sighs then perks up as she talks) OK. Then, the war. When it began, you have no idea how liberated I felt, drilling secretly in the fields with the others. Feeling like I was in a real army. Even my mother didn’t know. No one’s eyes on me, walking alone to the fields, feeling the sun on my bare arms. It was the best time of my very short life. ROSA (V/O) The fascists occupied our town almost straight away. We couldn’t take it back until the Americans came and the Republican army. Our lot came from the villages nearby to fight. They fought for a while then went home for lunch. That was how they thought a war was fought. Rosa giggles.

In the extract below, the dialogue for three characters of ghosts was written and then edited into the film over a five-minute take of a ruined church, while

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a few tourists wander around the bare earth that now forms the former square in front of the church. Extract H: Dialogue Script THE AMERICAN (V/O) I always tried to keep one pair of reserve socks. If I found a place where there was water then I’d take off my boots and socks and wash my feet. I wondered if my cigarettes would last till tomorrow and if my laces would hold out; or when my body split where exactly it would be. ROSA (V/O) I’m sick of these interruptions. AMERICAN (V/O) Sorry. ROSA (V/O) Stop repeating that! AMERICAN (V/O) Sorry..(faintly) So sorry…(fades out on) So sorry. CARLOS (V/O) Of course they shot the officers. What do you expect? The battle was won and we retook the town but the war was lost. They all left, the soldiers, the people, everybody. Later at the end of the war, the fascists retook the town. The people came back but by then the houses had fallen down over the bodies.

It was also in the editing that the importance of chance footage obtained during the filming became clear, offering a greater richness of visual and aural material than was conceived in the original script. During the editing, much of the observational footage in the new town I had shot in the first shoot was discarded, including a football match and interviews with younger inhabitants who had no interest in the past and the footage of an academic conference although I refer to it in a title at the end of the film. The footage of occupants in two contrasting bars is included. Images of the ruins are extensive. On occasion, the wind carried over very faint sounds that may have been singing

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and these ghostly sounds were edited into the film. Conversations with a few characters I encountered by chance were edited into the film during postproduction. None were used in their entirety and some were discarded. The extract below is from the post-production transcript of the completed film. It is a chance encounter I had with two elderly men waiting for a bus. Extract I: Vox-Pops QUESTION (V/O) What happened in the civil war? MAN There was a lot of jealousy. SECOND MAN There was a lot of jealousy. MAN Many people died. You had to pay 500 pesetas to hire a worker to work on the land. And if you couldn’t repay the money… SECOND MAN You were denounced. MAN They said you were a Red, or you were a fascist. SECOND MAN Have you seen Belchite, how it is? That was the war. MAN The fascists were bad but so were the Reds! When I was a boy I had to work all day for nothing. SECOND MAN The fascists didn’t kill anyone here. But the Reds killed people. Four or five. MAN Four or five innocents. QUESTION (V/O) Are you left or right? MAN I am nothing. QUESTION (V/O)

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Is that possible? MAN Nothing. We’re old. As long as they govern properly. SECOND MAN They govern very badly. The one who governed well is dead. MAN In the war we had communism here. And if hadn’t ended Spain would have been ruined. He was a friend of Franco. Not me! SECOND MAN He wasn’t a friend or an enemy. We won’t see anyone like him again. QUESTION (V/O) Was it better under Franco? SECOND MAN We won’t see anyone like Franco, no. MAN Franco did some good things and some bad things.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the different stages in the development of my script for Not Reconciled. The documentary script, with its multiplicity of interlinked texts and visual material and allowance for flexibility through accident and chance, forms a tightly enclosed symbiotic relationship with the final documentary film and can take many forms and formats. The creation of texts and visual material may be appropriate for the production of every idea and therefore it is not possible or necessary to offer a prescriptive script format. In order to scrutinise the documentary in all its forms, it adds value to gain access to the working methodology of the texts and visual material that form a rich relationship with finished films more will become available. The examples of the varied formats of documentary scripts including my own, point to the need to underline the importance of creativity and flexibility in finding an appropriate format for a documentary script that creates in the imagination of the reader, the creative possibilities for the finished film. In that sense, therefore, the documentary “script” exists only in fragments; or, one could say the “script” for Not Reconciled is the film itself.

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References Benjamin, W. (1973 [1955]). Theses on the philosophy of history. In H. Arendt (Ed.) Illuminations. Fontana Press. Dancyger, K. (1991). Broadcast writing: dramas, comedies, and documentaries. Focal Press. Dancyger, K. (2011). The flexibility of genre. In J. Nelmes (Ed.), Analysing the screenplay. Routledge. Das, T. (2007). How to write a documentary script. Public Service Broadcasting Trust. Godard, J-L (1972). Godard on Godard. T. Milne (Ed.) Secker & Warburg. Kilborn, R., & Izod, J. (1997). An introduction to television documentary: Confronting reality. Manchester University Press. Millard, K. (2011). The screenplay as prototype. In J. Nelmes (Ed.), Analysing the Screenplay. Routledge. Not Reconciled. (2009). Written and directed by Jill Daniels. UK. https://vimeo. com/28050084. Puccini, S. (2015). Guión de documentales: De la preproducción a la postproduction/documentary scripts: from preproduction to postproduction. La Marca Editora. Rosenthal, A. (1996). Writing, directing, and producing documentary films and videos. Southern Illinois University Press. Swain, D. (1976). Film scriptwriting, a practical manual. Hastings House Publishers. The Boot Cake. (2008). Written and directed by Kathryn Millard. Australia.

Negotiating Television Authorship and Gendering Creative Identity: Vicki Madden as Australian Showrunner Radha O’Meara and Cath Moore

Introduction: Women Showrunners in Post-Network Television This chapter examines the case study of Vicki Madden’s role as showrunner of Australian cable television drama The Kettering Incident to explore broader industrial conditions, forces and trends in script development and television authorship. Vicki Madden is identified as the key creative agent behind The Kettering Incident, an eight-part cable television drama that aired on Foxtel in Australia, Amazon Prime in the US and Channel 4 in the UK in 2016. Kettering is a sci-fi/murder mystery about a doctor in Tasmania’s gothic landscapes. Madden worked collaboratively with co-creator Vincent Sheehan and a handful of writers and directors, but positioned her authorship of the series self-consciously, by describing herself as showrunner. Showrunner is a title sometimes used by authors of television series in the US and the UK, which denotes industrial roles of executive producer and head writer and connotes strong leadership and creative control throughout the series. It has been very rare for Australian television creators to call themselves showrunner, so this chapter concentrates on the implications of Vicki Madden adopting the title and practice on The Kettering Incident (Foxtel, 2016). As self-titled showrunner on this series, we examine the rhetoric and practice of Vicki Madden and suggest this case study can serve to illuminate larger issues R. O’Meara (B) · C. Moore University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_9

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about gender and authorship within script development processes and, more broadly, spaces of media production. Despite the differences in the definitions, histories and practices of showrunning in the US and UK, in both contexts, the role is well-established and recognised as a position of power, which functions within and broadly reinforces racialised patriarchal social systems. As such, it is little surprise that showrunning, a position of notable industrial and social power, is heavily dominated by white men in both the US and UK. Television showrunners, writers and directors have been identified as creative leadership roles, which may help to shift male dominance among casts and crews more generally (Smith et al., 2014). Women showrunners—including all people who identify as women—in US and UK television industries are relatively rare, but there are some notable examples, such as Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, 2005–), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, 2016–2019) and Jane Campion (Top of the Lake, 2013–). Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber characterise contemporary television as “a new site of independent production for women, with amplified connotations of freedom and authorial control” (2019, p. 922). In this global context, Madden’s relatively unusual adoption of the showrunner role in Australia is significant for the way she self-consciously defines her authorial role. Authorship is a key filter through which viewers, critics and scholars access global television, as well as a highly contested discourse in the scholarly fields of screenwriting, film and television. Our concentration on a woman showrunner is a feminist move to interrogate the discourses, structures and possibilities present within script development processes and the television production industry. This chapter takes a production studies approach to creative labour discourses and practices. We interviewed selected television production personnel about their understanding and practices of showrunners and showrunning in Australia, as well as the industrial landscape in which they work. Key interviews for this study were conducted by the authors in Melbourne with: Vicki Madden, showrunner of Kettering, on 9 November 2018; Stephen Luby, film and television producer, on 3 December 2018; Julie Kalceff, web series writer/director, on 28 November 2018; and Tony Ayres, television producer and showrunner, on 29 January 2019. These interviews were conducted as part of a project approved by the Faculty of Arts Human Ethics Advisory Group at The University of Melbourne (Project Number 1853254.1). These interviews inform a multilayered understanding of script development and screen production work that focuses on the interrelated concepts of roles, identities and authorship. By mobilising and adapting an imported model of showrunning from the US and UK television industries, Madden has been able to redraw the terms of leadership and success in the Australian screen industry. Such active creation and management of one’s professional identity is perhaps an extension of the work women are always expected to perform, in order to make themselves and their achievements visible. As a creator, Madden performs this kind of identity work throughout phases of development, production and promotion, so that

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her own identity as a craftsperson is repeatedly rearticulated and connected with her show. What emerges from this analysis is a picture of how one screen professional negotiates her craft, her project and her professional identity—and how these intertwine.

Vicki Madden Case Study: Negotiating Authorial Roles and Relationships in Australian Television When Vicki Madden adopted the title of showrunner for Kettering, she had accumulated a wealth of experience in both the Australian and UK television industries. Madden is a white Australian, who began her television career working within the Australian production company Crawford’s as a trainee script editor on the serial television drama The Flying Doctors (1986–1993), eventually taking on the roles of script editor, writer and story producer. She garnered writing credits on numerous Australian television series, including crime dramas Water Rats (1996–2001), Sea Patrol (2007–2011) and Halifax f.p. (1994–2002). Madden’s specialisation in crime television led to her first key international career move, when she relocated to the UK to be mentored by Lynda La Plante, creator of Prime Suspect (1991–2006), which Sue Turnbull describes as a “canonical text” in the history of television crime dramas by and about women (2014). In 2003–2004, Madden worked as showrunner on long-running UK cop show The Bill (1984–2010). Since the series and the role was highly successful well before Madden joined The Bill, she could effectively assume an established position and work within a prevailing structure. In what was ostensibly “the biggest script department in the world” (Madden quoted in Bizzaca, 2016), Madden honed her craft as a showrunner and her keen appreciation for script development as a multidisciplinary craft. Upon her return to Australia, Madden quickly formed a partnership with film producer Vincent Sheehan. Madden initially drafted an idea for a smalltown crime drama with supernatural inflections as a feature film. She revised this into a television concept, at a time when pay-TV giant Foxtel was looking to invest in new Australian drama series. Madden wrote a pitch document specifically for Foxtel, who then commissioned the series. Kettering was produced independently by Vicki Madden’s Sweet Potato Films and Vincent Sheehan’s Sydney-based Porchlight Films, with development and production funding from Screen Australia, Screen Tasmania, Foxtel, BBC Worldwide and Britain’s Channel 4. In television production in Australia, Madden was one of the first to ever use the title showrunner. Madden asserts, “There hadn’t been a precedent for it in Australia” (Madden Interview, 2018). By invoking her experience in the role within the UK television industry, Madden was surely appealing to the standing of a more productive national industry, and one that looms large in the colonial cultural imaginary. Many Australian screenwriters look to the US and UK as prolific, creative and trend-setting industrial landscapes. Working

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in US and UK screen industries is often seen as a rite of passage or recognition for Australian practitioners. Ultimately, the Australian television industry’s predilection for international precedent can be used to justify both the hierarchy Madden seeks to overthrow and the new identity she seeks to craft. The superiority of industrial practice in sites of global power is a dominant logic, but this is wielded in uneven and sometimes contradictory ways. Appealing to the international precedent of the showrunner model may also appeal to financiers’ aspirations of cultural prestige, as the role is popularly associated with ‘High-End’ or ‘Quality Television’ (Nelson, 2007). From the initial meetings with Foxtel, Madden positioned herself as showrunner of Kettering, insisting on leading the writing team, but also working on set throughout the shoot, even in tough conditions in rural Tasmania. Madden describes her focus on story and script supervision within pre-production. I was writing and overseeing most of the scripts. Because Foxtel greenlit the project very quickly, I only had two scripts done so... we brought in a couple of writers, which can be difficult because they often bring in their own things, even though it’s one big story. (Madden Interview, 2018)

Madden’s role as showrunner was probably partly legitimised by her ownership of the key production company, which gave her some agency to establish and define roles, responsibilities and relationships on the production. It is likely that Foxtel, as a subscription cable television provider, was somewhat more flexible about roles than an Australian broadcast network might have been. In pioneering the role of showrunner in Australia, Madden aimed to be a multidisciplinary craftsperson focused on storytelling holistically: People are often surprised to hear it, but there’s a big difference between being a storyteller and being a writer. They’re two different disciplines, and not everyone’s good at both. There’s a lot of good writers around, they can create really good dialogue and characters, but they’re not necessarily good storytellers, which is a craft of its own and you really need to be able to spin a yarn, if you like. To be able to control and build that story, it’s a real world-building craft, that in itself is a big job and really my skill set sits there. (Madden Interview, 2018)

Madden conveys the importance of working across phases and sites of production to craft a cohesive story. Shifting between or negotiating authorial modes reiterates the collaborative mechanics of television production that function within gendered hierarchical structures. As a mediator between the creative and business realms of production, one of the challenges Madden faced was facilitating discussion with Foxtel executives about the show’s narrative during the shoot and subsequent edit phases. Madden articulates the necessity of working across business and creative realms in terms of the showrunner’s responsibilities to investors and audiences:

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Ultimately the buck stops with the creative person. For example when we were cutting the show together and Foxtel came and had a look at episode 2, and the director had missed out a few scenes and Foxtel said, ‘we want you to recut it, the whole front needs reworking because a few scenes were cut out,’ that’s my responsibility to fix it, and it was like pulling scenes from episodes 4 or 6 or 8 and reimagining how that episode could look and then having to look at the others and make sure they’re not suffering and being really creative on the spot. That’s where all my experience comes to the fore and if there were people who were putting their own input in, I would say, ‘you have to trust me with this, this is what I can do.’ Foxtel ended up looking at it and said, ‘Oh my god it’s perfect, thank you.’ So for me it’s satisfying as well, because you do get to the point where you think ‘I’m not going to be able to pull this off,’ but when you’ve got 15 million dollars invested, there’s no option. (Madden Interview, 2018)

Practitioners working under the showrunner banner deftly wield their autonomy to negotiate tensions and structures with the conventional culture/economy binary of screen development, which is subject to, “the economic powers and constraints, often organized around technological and political restraints” (Blakey, 2017, p. 325). Among processes of collaboration and negotiation, script development and screen production are peppered with moments of tension and adversarial conflicts; these roles and relationships are inherently gendered within our patriarchal society. The lines of engagement in television production can be informally drawn, but financiers, distributors and exhibitors often stake their claims of power and influence in the development and production process by providing “notes” to writers, producers and directors. Thus “note-taking” becomes a key site of tension in negotiating screen authorship (Caldwell, 2008, p. 219). For Madden, the process of “note-taking” on Kettering allowed authorial revision and an exploration of the boundaries of her own agency: It’s a very intimidating industry. You’ve got people who put money into it, producers who think they have a right have a say and they can come in and do notes, but you as the creator or showrunner, you have to have the confidence and ability to take in what they’re saying, but argue back…. it’s a very unmonitored space and that’s why men flourish, and you just have to fight a good fight. (Madden Interview, 2018)

The role of showrunner marries the creative and business realms of television production, so Madden’s adoption of it allowed her to assert her power and resist established structures in Australian television. Madden’s innovative role on Kettering implicitly destabilised conventional dynamics between creators and financiers. Madden’s adoption of the showrunner title represents a resistance to the industrial norms of the Australian screen production industry, where producers

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tend to wield power over directors and writers. When Madden describes her practice of showrunning, it is heavily anecdotal and situational. She seems cognizant of negotiating her own role through an ongoing process, referring to, but not being bound by, showrunning norms in the US and UK. I said to Vincent [Sheehan, producer] ‘I don’t want this to be a director-run show, because that’s just not the way things are moving. Overseas the writer is the creator. They’re the person who runs it… if you’re not strong and you don’t have that power, you lose control of the creative and then you’re the one who gets the blame when it doesn’t go right. So, I had to be very forceful and test myself. (Madden Interview, 2018)

Moreover, research by Lisa French and Screen Australia demonstrates that the Australian production sector is heavily dominated by men: men outnumber women at every level, and increasingly so at the upper echelons (French, 2014; Screen Australia, 2018). Australian television production is notably dominated by producers, who are most likely to be male, older, university educated and with over 15 years of experience in the industry (Cameron et al., 2010; Ryan et al., 2014). In negotiating new roles and hierarchies, Madden appeals to international examples in order to craft a new precedent. The fact that the role of television showrunner was not already in common usage in Australia allowed Madden to adopt and refashion the role for herself. Vicki Madden’s positioning of herself as showrunner is an interesting example of individual agency within rapidly transforming structures of the global media industry, which is marked by new patterns of distribution, heights of production and levels of cultural prestige, but also widely criticised for the routine marginalisation of women. Madden’s adoption of this new role intersects with each of these changes. Madden speaks to the cyclical temporality of social, cultural and industrial changes: There are huge changes happening in the way we tell stories; we are influenced a lot by what’s happening in the world with the #metoo movement and the voice of the female is rising at this point. It will change again; if you look at the ebb and flow of history, you see that women break through and then it gets overwritten, so it’s kind of finding the momentum. (Madden Interview, 2018)

Madden has evidently found momentum in the role, as she also held the title of showrunner on her subsequent television drama series, The Gloaming, released in 2020. Like Kettering, Gloaming was shot in Tasmania, focused on a professional woman protagonist and financed as an international coproduction including partners Disney ABC Studios International and local Australian SVOD Stan.

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Creating Identity in the Creative Industries Vicki Madden’s move to position herself as showrunner of Kettering demonstrates both explicit and implicit awareness of the importance of identitymaking in the screen industry. It constitutes an intervention into established local practices and offers a new model for how women can work in television production. It thus represents an exciting instance of self-determination, draws on global influences, and functions within a localised structure. Nevertheless, it opens potential for transformation in the constant negotiation of industrial roles and labour practices within creative industries, where cultivating and managing personal identity is increasingly self-conscious and important. Madden’s adoption of the title showrunner on Kettering can be understood as a political intervention into entrenched traditions and hierarchies that privilege white men. Research documenting the gender and racial biases of anglophone screen industries has been conducted by Conor et al. (2015), Lauzen (2018), Smith et al. (2014) and Kraeger and Fellows (2018). A recent study of the US television industry by Darnell Hunt found that 91% of showrunners are white and 86% of writers are male (2017). In addition, the overrepresentation of White people and men in the role of showrunner seems to produce further imbalances across other production roles, presumably through homophily, which Wing-FaiLeung, Rosalind Gill and Keith Randle have identified as particularly strong in screen industries (2015). A woman in the role of showrunner has the capacity to shape hiring decisions and hierarchies, potentially impacting a wider network of roles, practices and careers. Further, women in creative leadership roles may also lead to more womancentred stories and scripts being developed and produced. Smith, Choueiti and Pieper’s statistics demonstrate that where there are (relatively) more women in a television show’s senior creative team, this also translates to (relatively) greater representation of women on screen (2014). On Kettering, Madden hired and collaborated with many women in key roles, including writers Cate Shortland and Louise Fox (as well as cinematographer Ari Wegner, line producer Fiona McConaghy, and art director Emma Fletcher). Fashioning a professional self-identity is an increasingly important part of creative labour. In their defining work on creative labour, David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker suggest that careers in creative industries are especially prone to fragility, as contracts are often short and project-based, and hiring commonly relies on personal networks. Significantly, Hesmondhalgh and Baker argue that this fragility advantages those who can craft their own career narratives and identities (2010, pp. 145–147). In the reigning neoliberal regimes of the anglophone west, where the arts have been reconceptualised and revalued, creative industries are as much about creating professional identities as they are about creating art. This perspective situates Madden’s work as showrunner of Kettering as more routine and less radical. Adopting a title new in the national industry and explaining that role to the industry and the public has become part of everyday labour in the creative industries.

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Further, creating and managing one’s professional identity in the creative industries is especially important for women. Bridget Conor, Rosalind Gill and Stephanie Taylor argue that contemporary creative work depends particularly on self-presentation as a claim to professional status and identity, in ways that are commonly gendered (2015, p. 13). Indeed, Madden’s unusual adoption of the title and role of showrunner might be understood as simply a continuation of the work women are always expected to do managing their own visibility and recognition. Miranda Banks unpacks the gendered dimension of this identity work, suggesting that part of women’s labour in the screen industries is to constantly define and validate their own contributions: Gender plays into the collaborative nature of film and media production— not just in what is produced but in how. In subtle ways, much of the work women do in Hollywood is—both through language and through economics— treated as “women’s work.” Through agencies and organizations, women within the industry are trying to redefine their work as artistry and crafts worthy of professional respect—and commensurate pay. (2009, p. 95)

In a similar vein, Alison Butler and Patricia White have analysed the shifting positions of women in contemporary cultures and screen practices, arguing that the visibility of women on screen and in the screen industries is always meaningful (Butler, 2002; White, 2015). In particular, White emphasises, “the increasing importance and shifting valence of the public persona and image of the woman director” (2015, p. 4). Even as this kind of identity work has become more routinely expected and performed by women in the creative industries, Madden’s role on Kettering is pioneering. Madden’s visibility as a showrunner breaks the mould of authority and success in Australian television, which is so heavily dominated by white male producers. It seems that the constant negotiation of industrial roles and identities is currently converging with calls for greater racial and gender diversity behind the scenes and on our screens. Vicki Madden is part of a growing trend towards showrunning in Australian television production. There are now a handful of Australian television practitioners who call themselves showrunners, including Tony Ayers (showrunner of The Slap, 2011, and Nowhere Boys, 2013–2018, interviewed Ayers, 2019) and Louise Fox (writer of an episode of Kettering and showrunner of Glitch, 2015–). It is significant that these new showrunners of Australian television series tend to be people from groups traditionally marginalised within the screen industries—women and people of colour. The television series showrunner is perhaps especially appealing and useful to traditionally marginalised screen practitioners, as it affords them an opportunity to empower themselves from the beginning of the script development process, in order to write and produce a series and a self in new terms. This indicates a shift in how practitioners position their roles and how their work is valued in Australian script development and television production. While, as stated, showrunner is an emerging role within

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Australian television production, Madden’s experience demonstrates how it can be utilized as an agitating mechanism, drawing more women into the frame. Further, these fellow showrunners display alternative visions of creative leadership and success, which decentre industrial norms. This accords with Perkins and Schreiber’s description of current popular television feminisms, which they argue is a “struggle to become at once visible and resistant ” (2019, p. 921, emphases in original). Nevertheless, the role of showrunner is bound by limitations and imbued with biases. Vicki Madden is cognizant that the potential to transform identities and practices in the screen industry remains accessible to a privileged few. Showrunners tend to work extremely long hours, for months on end. The sheer volume of work involved in showrunning functions to gender the role. It means that many women, who perform the clear majority of unpaid parenting and caring labour in the anglophone west, are precluded from the role. Madden reflects: “I know that if I wanted to be a mother, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do what I do now. The hours are brutal and there’s no real monitoring… it’s a sink or swim industry” (Madden Interview, 2018). Madden’s insight relays a continuing tension between the authorial benefits of and flexibility attributed to the showrunner model, and the complex demands of the role and the industry. In conjunction with expressions of gender, for those who self-identity as a showrunner, personal circumstance and lived experience may also be important considerations as to whether the practice provides more benefits or challenges. However, the difficulties of managing creative work with caring responsibilities affirms the importance of establishing and maintaining an industrial culture flexible enough to sustain and support diverse experiences, backgrounds and identities.

Showrunner as Marker of Cultural Prestige Issues of identity and authorial branding are also increasingly important in the realms of distribution, promotion and reception. Authorship is a key filter through which viewers, critics and scholars access global television, as well as a highly contested discourse in film and television scholarship. Discourses of authorial value in anglophone television cultures have risen markedly since the 1990s, as part of the transformations that legitimated television shows as art and production work as cultural labour. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine locate the role of the showrunner in US television as a central site of discursively constructing a quasi-cinematic authorial figure—a figure who is, above all, conspicuous (2012, pp. 38–58). In the era of subscription and streaming television, Newman and Levine suggest that the showrunner functions as branding for audiences and product differentiation for shows: “The identification of more aesthetically distinguished programs with the artists credited with imagining and producing them validates some kinds of television, making these instances fit within traditional conceptions of art and distancing them from the reputation of TV rooted in the past and in less valued technologies,

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audiences, and genres” (2012, p. 40). This discourse of authorship as cultural prestige has been adopted readily by Australian fans of US and UK shows, but it has only been applied to Australian-produced television more recently. Madden’s use of the title showrunner may have been a strategic choice to discursively position herself and her product as prestigious within the commercial promotion of screen works. In interviews promoting Kettering , Madden described herself as showrunner and emphasised the integration of writing and production (Madden in Bizzaca, 2016; Madden at The Wheeler Centre, 2016). In the US and UK, the showrunner title is often understood as a marketing tactic (Caldwell, 2008, p. 199), providing a series with prestige. The extratextual promotion of a showrunner in this way industrially locates the role as a business model, as much as it is a form of creative labour. By adopting the role herself, Madden deployed authorship as a source of prestige, or what Trisha Dunleavy calls “cultural distinction” after the work of Pierre Bourdieu on how cultural value is socially constructed (Bourdieu, 1984; Dunleavy, 2018, pp. 79–82). In Australian culture, simply discussing the authorship of a television show accords it a certain level of cultural distinction. This supported Foxtel Australia’s promotional strategy to position Kettering as what Robin Nelson calls “high-end” television (2007), or what is known in the cable sector as “subscriber-bait” for the cable provider. The showrunner tag also functions to brand the show internationally as prestige television, at a moment of “Peak TV”, when the global marketplace is awash with unprecedented levels of production and cross-platform sites of exhibition. In this regard, the use of showrunner as a “premium signifier” arguably delivers a competitive distinction for broadcasters who employ the term as a marketing tool. Madden repeatedly emphasised the relevance of her personal experience growing up in Tasmania to the development of the Kettering story, both when she was seeking funding to get the project green-lit and when she was doing promotional interviews for the finished show (Madden in Bizzaca, 2016; The Wheeler Centre, 2016). Madden readily discussed her experience as a Tasmanian expatriate returning home to feelings of familiarity and estrangement, and she mapped this dislocation onto the biography and mood of Kettering protagonist Dr. Anna Macy (Madden Interview, 2018). The biographical similarities of author and protagonist are notable for their function in positioning Kettering as a product of personal authorship and therefore cultural value. This connection between authorial identity and text also serves to reinforce Madden’s identity as a leading creative labourer, fusing the personal and professional. Madden positioned Kettering as a “personal” narrative, engaging the cultural logic connecting authorial biography and artistic value. Caldwell affirms the multiplicity inherent within production cultures, where personal or biographical authorship sits alongside institutional practices of developing and positioning cultural products within the industry and the marketplace (2008, p. 201). Newman and Levine argue that positioning television as a means of personal expression is a key trope of television authorship, which

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contrasts with the medium’s common perception as impersonal and commercial (2012, pp. 48–50). Personal expression figures television production as less like manufacturing and more like creation, harnessing the Romantic and god-like connotations of that term to further elevate the work as both an individuated process and singularly unique product. By highlighting these associations between authorial identity and textual form, the feminism of Kettering reinforces Madden’s feminist leadership. Kettering centres on a woman protagonist, implicitly suggesting the importance of making women, their actions and perspectives not only visible but dramatically viable. Madden thus challenges the pervasiveness of a masculinized narrative, where male protagonists often take on the role of, “nongendered beings… representative of a kind of universal humanity” (Annette K. Olesen interviewed by Mette Hjort, 2010, p. 197). Ana Alacovska has argued that the crime genre is notably gendered: “Crime fiction has been traditionally considered an androcentric—masculine and conservative—genre featuring a male detective with a cerebral, analytical and inquisitive mind and his investigative work associated with masculine prerogatives involving logic/science/judgement/rationality/deduction” (2017, p. 385, emphasis in original). Madden uses a minimalist narrative form inspired by Nordic Noir to create resonance, but also to displace the conventional role of the male detective. As a medical doctor, Anna Macy appeals to logic and science in her attempt to understand local histories, but finds that these discourses may not provide adequate explanation. This demonstrates how women practitioners taking the lead in the script development process can transform traditionally masculinized genres such as crime and make visible the implicit feminist agendas within their own working practices. Inscrutable character psychology is a trope of Nordic Noir evident in Madden’s protagonist. The introspective, woman detective associated with Nordic Noir provides a clear alternative to the (mostly men) Australian screen protagonists, as does Kettering ’s protagonist, Dr. Anna Macy. Macy’s role as quasi-detective in Kettering is analogous to Madden’s role as showrunner of Kettering: a seemingly small shift in identity breaks outside established paradigms and offers a new model.

Conclusion: Layers of Women’s Identity in Script Development and Television Authorship Women working in the screen industries are constantly reframing their identities and practices. Analysing the utility and deployment of the showrunner title further illuminates collaborative practice and reflection, self-conscious authorship and creative innovation as strategies often employed by women practitioners to both negotiate and agitate gendered industrial conditions. In the phases of script development, production and promotion, Madden crafted her identity and the profile of her show by adopting the showrunner as an imported model and tailoring it to produce a new vision of leadership and success in the Australian context. Madden’s pioneering work as showrunner

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of Kettering created a tight association between her personal experiences, her professional profile and her show’s protagonist. This highlights the importance of identity in women’s creative labour, and the multiple levels of identity work that women must perform. Within a television landscape swiftly being reshaped by new technologies and practices of production, distribution, reception and consumption, this case study of Vicki Madden as showrunner in Australian television demonstrated the capacity for driving situated change. Like Madden’s adoption of a new role in a rapidly transforming television industry, feminist scholarship points to other women who have capitalised on an “unsettled marketplace” to “survive and succeed within the ever-expanding spaces beyond the major studios” (Lane, 2016, p. 72). No doubt there are still gendered barriers to success in contemporary screen industries, but Madden offers an example of how independent women can create new identities and new forms of visibility. Similarly, Linda Badley, Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber argue that the women of independent American filmmaking, “disrupt[s] and reframe[s] the dominant narratives and traditions of this sector” (2016, p. 3). The title of showrunner stakes a claim for authority, recognition and prestige in new terms, which destabilise the biased norms of the Australian television industry and its attendant script development processes. This case study of Vicki Madden reminds us how the labour of negotiating production roles overlaps with crafting a professional identity, and how important these tasks are for the success of women in creative industries.

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Cameron, A., Verhoeven, D., & Court, D. (2010). Above the bottom line: Understanding Australian screen content producers. Media International Australia, 136(1), 90–102. Conor, B., Gill, R., & Taylor, S. (2015). Gender and creative labour. The Sociological Review, 63(S1), 1–22. Dunleavy, T. (2018). Complex serial drama and multiplatform television. Routledge. Fleabag. (2016–2019). Television Series. Seasons 1–2. BBC Two/BBC One. French, L. (2014). Gender then, gender now; surveying women’s participation in Australian film and television industries. Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 28(2), 188–200. Glitch. (2015–). Television Series. Seasons 1–.ABC. Grey’s Anatomy. (2005–). Television Series. Seasons 1–. ABC. Halifax f.p. (1994–2002). Television Series. Seasons 1–6. Nine. Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2010). Creative labour: Media work in three cultural industries. Routledge. Hjort, M. (2010). Interview with Annette K. Olesen. In M. Hjort, E. Jørholt, & E. N. Redvall (Eds.), The Danish Directors 2: Dialogues on the New Danish Fiction Cinema (pp. 190–200). Intellect. Kalceff, J. (2018). Interview by Cath Moore. 28 November, Melbourne. Kraeger, A. & Follows, S. (2018). Gender Inequality and Screenwriters: A Study of the Impact of Gender on Equality of Opportunity for Screenwriters and Key Creatives in the UK Film and Television Industries. Report Commissioned by The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Agency, 23 May. https://stephenfollows.com/major-new-study-into-gender-inequality-amonguk-film-and-tv-writers/. Accessed 2 Feb 2018. Lane, C. (2016). Susan Seidelman’s contemporary films: The feminist art of selfreinvention in a changing technological landscape. In B. Linda, P. Claire, and S. Michele (Eds.), Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (pp. 70–86). Edinburgh University Press. Lauzen, M. M. (2018). Boxed in 2017–18: Women on screen and behind the scenes in television. A Report from the Centre for the Study of Women in Film and Television, San Diego State University, September. https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/research/. Accessed 2 Feb 2019. Leung, W.-F., Gill, R., & Randle, K. (2015). Getting in, getting on, getting out? Women as career scramblers in the UK Film and television industries. The Sociological Review, 63(S1), 50–65. Luby, S. (2018). Interview by Cath Moore. 3 December, Melbourne. Madden, V. (2018). Interview by Cath Moore. 9 November, Melbourne. Nelson, R. (2007). State of Play: Contemporary High-End TV Drama. Manchester University Press. Newman, M. Z., & Levine, E. (2012). Legitimating television: Media convergence and cultural status. Routledge. Perkins, C., & Schreiber, M. (2019). Independent women: From film to television. Feminist Media Studies, 19(7), 919–927. Prime Suspect. (1991–2006). Television Series. Seasons 1–7. ITV. Ryan, M. D., Goldsmith, B., Cunningham, S., & Verhoeven, D. (2014). The Australian screen producer in transition. In A. Spicer, A. McKenna, & C. Meir (Eds.), Beyond the bottom line: The producer in film and television studies (pp. 125– 142). Bloomsbury.

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Constructing Criticism Without Crushing Confidence: Cultures of Feedback in Television Script Development Marie Macneill

Introduction In the 2018 film Puzzle, the main character, Agnes (Kelly Macdonald), quizzes Robert (Irrfan Khan) about his obsession with completing jigsaw puzzles. AGNES: Why do you do these stupid puzzles? ROBERT: It’s a way to control the chaos. Life is messy. It doesn’t make any sense. Everything is random. When you complete a puzzle, everything makes a perfect picture.

Experienced writers find the jigsaw pieces that create the whole picture: the right place for the right piece, in a structure that provides the integrity to support the gift of their imagination, and to ignite the imagination of their audience. In short, they order the chaos. In their early writing years, storytellers, like any other craftsperson, need practice. Novice screenwriters can, all too often, put the wrong jigsaw piece in the wrong place. The plot shifts and the story founders. The narrative world is lost, quickly followed by the audience, because the comfort of ordering the chaos and rearranging the random has not been satisfactorily foreshadowed, signposted or resolved. The role of the screenwriting tutor, as

M. Macneill (B) Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_10

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a talent-nurturer, deliverer of theory, supporter, sounding-board and teller-ofexperience—not forgetting William Goldman’s famous quote that ‘Nobody knows anything’ (1991, p. 39)—is to guide students (as novice writers) towards a variety of tools and storytelling concepts: from the prosaic nature of industry-style formatting, to the overarching inner and outer journey of the protagonist, to identifying and working with their own creative process. Is there also something else at play here? Can a mentor guide a student towards the appropriate pieces of the puzzle without actually putting them into place? Can screenwriting tutors help fledgling writers take flight without being overly critical, or reducing their big idea to preordained beats or plot points? Can they teach them without telling them what to change or solving the story problem for them? To build on another adage, can screenwriting tutors, script editors and script consultants show rather than tell their students/writers how to improve? Is it possible to create a safe zone where a screenwriter’s confidence remains buoyant and where nurturing can gently guide them to find their own story’s path? This is a path John Yorke describes as ‘the journey into the woods to find the dark but life-giving secret within’ (2014, p. xviii). A writer needs to feel that it is their ‘secret’ that is being imparted—their voice telling the tale—and so it becomes important that their tutor, script editor or consultant is there to guide them along the path, not walk the steps for them. In this chapter, then, I reflect on my own experiences as a television writer and screenwriting tutor to understand some of the ways that feedback can be framed to enable productive, positive experiences of script development and screenwriting teaching.

Potential Will Storr claims that ‘We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains’ (2019, p. 3). This sounds plausible, especially when we read his next thought, that our storytelling ‘turns chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple hopeful tale, and at its centre it places its star—wonderful precious me—who it sets on a series of goals that become the plot of our lives’ (Storr, 2019, p. 3). His final flourish, ‘Story is what brain does’ (Storr, 2019, p. 3), creates an assumption that everyone, everywhere, can write, with a little guidance and encouragement, because all the tools we need are innate within us. It is possible to strengthen one’s screenwriting muscles and become a stronger and better writer, but only if the bar is not kicked from under a writer, or if their confidence is not crushed. It would be appropriate to think that no one does this wittingly, but sometimes the enthusiastic rush to get a project finalised, commissioned or finished in time for the hand-in deadline means that a rash of negative words can have a devastating effect. Not all scripts have potential and not all writers have a voice—initially. As Robin Mukherjee puts it, ‘Finding your own style, or voice, takes time. It will certainly take some writing. Bear in mind that it isn’t something to be

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contrived but discovered and, thereafter, refined’ (2014, p. 236) It is possible for writers to find a voice through practice, exercise and rehearsal and for scripts to change and grow. Nevertheless, it is something of a script-editing challenge to successfully understand a world created by a storyteller, find order and seek clarification without distressing the intention, characterisation, motif, theme, layers and puzzles crafted by its originator. Sometimes editors, producers or tutors do distress and do not fully realise the potential damage they may be causing or the creative paralysis that can ensue because, as Batty and Taylor note, ‘in script editing there is a fine line between offering encouragement and showing dissatisfaction with the work’ (2020, p. 131). In an attempt to please their mentor, the writer will try to move the pieces of the story puzzle around. The advice they have been given may be appropriate to the story, the plot and what drives the central character. Conversely, it may not. After all, Goldman’s belief is that ‘Nobody knows anything’.

Script Editors Naturally, there are many script editors who are simply brilliant at their job: intuitive, exacting, nurturing, great company and whose radar is able to pick up when plot is leading character rather than the other way around. Yvonne Grace (2014, p. 65), one such script editor, states: A good, expert, fantastic script editor will be able to give you script notes (some large, some small, some irritating, some illuminating) without you the writer, ever feeling exposed, or unsure, or feeling that your work is being ridiculed, overly criticised or downright changed too much.

Grace sounds like the kind of script editor we would all like to work with, and she has the added kudos of once writing me an excellent rejection letter telling me to keep going and to keep in touch. I will and I should. I asked a screenwriting undergraduate, ‘As a new creative what is the least helpful in terms of script editing and story feedback?’ He responded: New ideas being offered, and characters being developed in a way that doesn’t fit them or the story. Having too much input on the way a story could improve with specific events or details isn’t helpful when trying to develop the original story.

Perhaps this aligns with the kind of director who grabs actors by the hand and pulls them into position, while giving them a line reading.

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UK Script Development Organisations When starting out, a stepping-stone that can help beyond measure is a script development organisation. In my case, I came across TAPS (Television Arts Performance Showcase) in 1999, run by the indomitable Jill James: What we want is an assessment of the writer’s voice. Pure and simple. We need your subjective view of that writer’s talent. Not your positive or negative reaction to the subject matter but your view about whether this writer has the sheer skill to engage you in the world of his or her drama and take you on a journey you did not expect to be on. And, crucially, can write characters you can understand (not necessarily like) but with whom you can absolutely empathise. (1999)

James’ passion for new writers attracted industry professionals, who donated time and energy to read, select, nurture and showcase writers. A gala-style, filmed live performance gave writers an entrée into the industry. There was no magic formula beyond selecting writers who showed promise, then developing and exposing their work. The most instructive part for me was a script meeting and two days of rehearsals prior to the showcase with Baz Taylor. A stalwart director on My Family, Shine on Harvey Moon and The Bill, Taylor taught me so much in so little time, mostly because we were Doing it for Real1 and he was a generous genius, with a gift for comedy. Taylor enthusiastically encouraged me to make changes—‘Have had a few feeble attempts to play with some jokes. Maybe you’ve also had some second thoughts—just the more the merrier’ (2000)—which was a positive way of saying that we should make my sitcom a little bit funnier. Together we made small but effective dialogue tweaks, set-ups and pay-offs, all totally born out of character, it felt like he was complimenting my work rather than changing it. In this setting, I was treated like a writer rather than a hopeful and ergo—it was so. In the UK today, the equivalent of TAPS is BAFTA Rocliffe’s New Writing Competition, a platform for aspiring screenwriters to have their work showcased. Every year I encourage my soon-to-graduate students to send in drama or comedy scripts to their open-door competitions, as well as to the BBC Writersroom’s script competition windows. As a result of my TAPS exposure, I was given my first broadcast commission. I was recommended by someone I had invited to the showcase. He asked me to submit a speculative script to Harry Duffin, a story consultant at Cloud 9, an international, independent television production company. I got the job. The Tribe (1999–2003), a post-apocalyptic drama series, written in the UK and shot in New Zealand, had already run for three seasons when I joined the team. We worked collectively in a writers’ room to storyline a batch of episodes and then independently to hone a script. I was the only woman, and 1 Doing it for Real is a current Falmouth University (my employer) mantra which encourages students to study in industry-style situations.

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my fellow writers were talented, erudite, friendly, blue and hard-working. My story consultants and script editors were also writers on the series and their notes were constructive and helpful. I flourished, became more confident and worked hard. I learnt how to write for younger actors, discovered how less is more, show don’t tell, and that reaction was just as important as action. There were six months of intensive writing followed by six months of calm while the show was shot and edited. Then we would go again. Praise was generous and critiques were only about the business of making the story better. My very first script notes were from writer David Richard-Fox in 2001 and ran like this: ‘Why nervous? This is great stuff. You’ve got a good sense of the characters coming through, nice touches of humour, and you’re playing the scenes off each other to good effect … It’s just right’. David went on to tell me what I needed to do to improve the script, but kindly. Eighteen months later we were writing Season Five and I was still on board. In 2002, Duffin wrote in one note: ‘This is your best first draft to date. The scenes are more focussed and generally less “domestic” in the wrong sort of way. Not many notes at all, but one or two biggish ones that need a bit of a rethink’. The email went onto give me the two biggish notes, and 11 little ones. Written on a Wednesday, it was signed off, ‘That’s it. Monday, please. Thanks, Harry’. This was perfect. Some praise, some help, a to-do list, a deadline and a thank you. There was nothing missing from this elegant critique.

Notes The sort of feedback described above is vital when working with writing students. There was definitely a criticism in Duffin notes, but it was couched in such a way that it came across as a positive. By putting in the word ‘generally’, it made me go back over what I had written and enabled me to rewrite the ‘wrong sort’ of domestic without losing face. At the time, I had a tendency to overwrite what was known as ‘toothbrush moments’, which Harry knew had the potential of halting the drama or slowing down the storytelling. This was masterful feedback. It was honest and it was kind. In 2000, I created an idea for an original, six-part television drama series and sent it to Taylor in the hope he might want to direct it. He did and very quickly we had an offer from a regional broadcaster and a network commission. I was assigned a script editor, a role whose abilities are summed up by Karol Griffiths: ‘A good script editor will simplify the process, helping the writer improve their script with minimal confusion or stress, and also, hopefully make it a gratifying experience’ (2015, p. 13). My script editor nodded support, smiled enthusiastically and gently unpacked muddled thoughts with light questions that enabled me to discover for myself the crass excuses for plot turns. It was a shared experience that buoyed me up rather than put me down. I have worked with a script development consultant since who only asked questions, such as, ‘And what is our character feeling now?’ She would

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simply lean back and allow me to freewheel, as I imagine a client might in a psychologist’s chair. I found the answers she had guided me towards, and we both felt satisfied with different jobs well done. The development process for my six-part series was beginning to take shape as I explored the various small documents (logline, synopsis, character breakdown, episode outlines) that made up the series bible with my script editor. The decision was made about where it would be filmed and I was taken around a number of locations. I adjusted the script and delivered the final draft for episode one. It was greeted with enthusiasm and signed off by the head of drama. Taylor and I were also busy with casting suggestions. The series was on its way. Then the head of drama was called away and replaced on the project by another producer. We had a meeting. In London. In a plush hotel. He introduced himself and then told me that he had 124 notes.’ I shrank. What did he mean? The script had been signed-off. What notes? He proceeded to take me through them. One after the other. Blow by blow. Bullet by bullet. Griffith states that “Note-giving is a delicate job and it is important that you do it with respect and care” (2015, p. 123). This was not a delicate job and somewhere on the Langham Hotel battlefield, I became confused and punch-drunk. I could no longer see my story and I felt like a failure, hurt by the bombardment of too much information, and upset that he delivered his thoughts in such a didactic and unsympathetic way. Griffiths tells us that script editors (and presumably producers) ‘will provide well-thought-through notes in a respectful, practical and attentive way, without involving their egos, keeping the writer and the story their top priority’ (2015, p. 13). Or, as Batty and Waldeback state, ‘an occasional problem is that producers are not adept enough at analysing scripts, and provide false or unhelpful solutions. It is thus the job of the writer to pick their way through the morass of comments and find the truth behind them’ (2019, p. 132). At the time I was not experienced enough to know this nor did I realise that ‘rather than follow the notes blindly, it is important to discern what they are really saying’. (2019, p. 104). In an attempt to be professional, and despite feeling upset, I agreed to address his concerns. My agent backed my decision to make the necessary changes, feeling that, as a writer fairly new to television, it would be in my best interest to be amenable, flexible and no prima donna. Screenwriting agent, Julian Friedmann wrote in 2004 (p. 5): I don’t actually agree with William Goldman’s dictum that ‘No one (sic) knows anything.’ Just knowing that you know nothing is evidence that you do know something. The trouble starts when someone is convinced that they know everything. Of course they cannot know everything so the goalposts are moved and the writer has to make changes to their treatment or (worse) to their script either because it really didn’t work, or because the reader thought that it didn’t work.

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The problem, I see with hindsight, was the producer’s approach. I had had a creative idea, that was potentially six hours of original television drama. Important people had enthused about that idea and commissioned it. It was an incredible opportunity. Then I met someone who had over a hundred notes on something that we believed to be working well. It knocked my confidence. I started to doubt my abilities. I began to tinker with the story beyond the notes. I changed adjectives, character names, verbs, settings, scenes, anything that I thought I could do to somehow address concerns. This fruitless rewriting was compounded by the loss of my script editor, who was moved upstairs to the role of producer on another project. At my next script meeting, with the note-giving producer and a new script editor, whom I had not even met, but who had read the rewrites, I found myself defending my work and being asked if I could beef up the dramatic situation of an important character to beyond what I considered to be the pale of her motivation. This experience was the antithesis of how Griffiths defines such consultations, whereby ‘A script editor will examine the script and provide an analytical overview of the work. This will identify any problem areas and assess where the script is working and where and why it is not; and they aim to help the writer get on, stay on track’ (2015, p. 13). On the contrary, my script was veering off track and in danger of straying into cliché and soap opera, and I was desperately trying to pull it back from the brink. It had been commissioned as a drama for network television and I wanted to stay true to my original concept. However, I was only the writer. Only the creator of the characters, and this producer was either trying to make a mark by bending my story into a different shape or trying to new-broom sweep me out of the development door. Furthermore, his script editor felt more like his hench-woman than my constructively critical friend. My six-part drama, idiomatically, fell off the map. I was paid for the work I had done but the series never got made. If I look at this scenario with more experienced eyes, I begin to understand what was at play here. And how I might have reacted differently if the concerns had been presented differently. Perhaps the producer genuinely wanted to make my script work but believed that the storylines were muddled and needed clarification. Perhaps the themes, central message, and character motivation were only clear to me and it lost something in its translation to the page. Perhaps it was not good enough and could have been better. Perhaps I was not good enough. At the time, I certainly felt that the latter was the case. Yet, The Tribe’s production company, Cloud 9, continued to commission me to write for television. By saying, ‘I have 124 notes for you’, it gave the producer the upper hand and upset the balance of power in what should have been a collaborative experience. I became nervous, defensive and confused. His opening sentence had completely crushed my confidence. And there’s the rub. Writers put themselves out there and say, ‘Look at me, look at what I have created,’ but there is another part of them that is afeared of criticism. If the producer had said

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instead, ‘Hello, welcome, I’ve read the script. The main character is thoughtprovoking, visceral, honest (please supply your own adjectives here) and I am wondering if we might tweak this a little by escalating the drama, perhaps by introducing a new problem in the middle? I often find the middle sags a bit, don’t you?’ Then I would have felt a part of the refit and perhaps we would have ended up with a better drama or even a drama that was broadcast.

Praise My producer seemed to lack empathy and the ability to praise. His negative comments almost stopped me writing altogether. As a lecturer, many years later and of many years standing, this lesson continues to constantly sit at my side. My priority over everything else is to try and find something positive to say to my writing students: something honest and supportive. In a one-to-one meeting I make my encouraging comment and then I wait for their eyes to light up. The moment when the message hits home. ‘Because how many of us do respond well to negativity and criticism? Don’t most of us just shrink inside and put that work to one side, unsure how on earth to fix it? We do respond to positivity, however’ (Dawson, 2020, p. 54). In my teaching, I try to tailor critique to match the current position of the writer. All writers move at different creative paces and there is no one-sizefits-all when you are trying to draw a story outline from memories, objects, observations, imaginations, thoughts and feelings, or simply from thin-air. When a script is not working, for whatever reason, as the encourager, you might need to draw from your own experiences. Give little hints and examples as to why a scenario might not be ringing true. At this junction try not to be tempted to tell them how to resolve the problem. Keep going with the hints and examples until you experience their ‘penny-drop’ moment. That clear sight and sound moment when you know they now know how to tell their story. You have helped them up on to their story springboard but now they need to dive in on their own. Which is how it should be. Always.

Corrective Culture When a group of undergraduate filmmakers, optioned a neat and breathtakingly simple three-minute script from a university script competition, every member of the student crew inadvertently assumed that that script would need to be fixed. Alas, it was not broken. It went into preproduction and much of the initial activities centred around note-giving. After some 14 rewrites and much wringing of hands, the undergraduate writer came to me. Having read the original draft but not being part of the ensuing process, I could clearly see that the story did not need all of this work and opinion and butchery. Indeed, perhaps it had culminated thus because the filmmakers felt that they must make comments rather than comments needing to be made. ‘There is a corrective culture of script development that regularly goes unchallenged,’ argues

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Taylor (2016, p. 3): ‘The notion of development in the case of screenplays is often synonymous with repair and that script development … is a process that leans heavily upon assumptions’. Taylor suggests that ‘assumptions are perhaps born of the marginalisation of the screenplay in wider discourses of filmmaking, as well as the assumptions inherent in the language of screenwriting practice’ (2016, p. 3). Certainly, on this occasion, assumptions had been made and everyone was a critic. I tried to be neutral as we discussed possible scenarios. The student decided that the best things to do, in this instance, was to take their name off the project. They were right: the production crew did not fully understand the original concept and the writer was exhausted and crushed by having to rewrite it so many times. The story had been well-written, and the first draft was infinitely better than the fourteenth. Furthermore, it had changed so radically that it was no longer the story that the crew had optioned in the first place. The filmmakers had created a great deal of paperwork but failed to provide a contract. The student writer left the project and yet another draft was written, this time by the director. I asked the student in 2019 what would have helped the most in terms of script editing and story feedback: Having someone who is understanding of the writing process and can give advice and guidance without trying to make the story their own. Story feedback focussing on the actual story rather than suggesting new ideas to be implemented on the story would also be helpful.

How does a screenwriting tutor or script editor nurture someone’s original story idea? How do they oversee fresh talent? How do they serve as ‘plotters’ rather than ‘pantsers’—those that write the story down first and those that write by the seat of their pants—and vice versa? How do they not crush creative endeavour? How do they guide their proteges towards the jigsaw pieces that reveal the full picture? How do they assess objectively and become that constructively critical friend? Perhaps the industry and academia have a little to learn around this still. In script editing there appears to be a quantum leap from showing novice writers the basics (such as how to format a screenplay) to telling them how they should write their story. The real script editing must surely lie somewhere in between. MA Film & Television student Katherine Press’s (2019) ideal expectations from a script editor were: To guide (rather than dictate) the way towards a more cohesive, polished version of the story I’m trying to tell. A sense of empathy is invaluable, as each writer will need a different approach at different times and on different projects. Someone who can free up, empower, reassure and motivate.

It is interesting to note that the relationship between a director or producer and the writer can often be at odds, even in projects that have made it to the screen and have won plaudits and awards. Such was the case in 1961

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when Janet Green wrote Victim for producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden. Green explains that changes suggested by Relph will not work because the logic of the story and the characters would neither be believable nor accurate … Green’s frustration with the development process increases with each draft … Even though Green is often upset and annoyed by Relph and Dearden’s comments, she is still very aware that they are a development team and the writer, producer and director have a common aim in mind – which is to produce the best possible film. (Cited in Nelmes, 2010, pp. 261–262)

More recently, and in television rather than film, Graham Mitchell, a writer of seven years standing on the BBC’s Silent Witness (1996–) told me in an interview in 2019: If it’s an authored piece it is generated by you as a format: something like Years and Years - that’s Russell Davies’, but something like Silent Witness, where each two-episode story is to some extent authored, all the writers come up with the material for those two episodes, but the actual overall ownership is not the writers’. You own your two bits, but the overall ownership belongs to the Exec Producer. If a writer’s piece differs significantly from the Exec Producer’s view, then he has seniority – that’s where the frustration comes from – they get to say yes or no. If the concept you come up with is severely damaged by the intervention of the senior person then you’re immediately into a repair situation before you’ve even begun the process, as you are constantly trying to rewrite it, and the process is, you’re constantly trying to repair an idea that was one thing and is now something else. It’s neither one thing nor the other. Sometimes, it’s better if an Executive Producer completely disagrees with a vision for something, to say let’s start again – We’re not going to agree on this. But because of my seniority on the programme and the length of time I’d been doing it, we got to a place where perhaps that decision would have been taken, but it was too late in the process to replace it with something else. So, we then end up with a muddle.

I asked Graham if he had ever been sacked or fired from a writing job. Yes, but it’s never dressed up as that. Sometimes I have to admit though, and this is interesting for younger writers, you need ego, you need to believe in your ideas to do this job. But too much ego and you shoot yourself in the foot, so, finding the right balance. I’ve been fired for being difficult and I’ve been fired for not being very good … I was fired once from my own show. That wasn’t great.

My experience of the TV series that never was, was the equivalent of being fired, and like Graham’s experience, it was not dressed up as that. Finally, I

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contacted Jane Johnson, a successful novelist, editor and 2019 joint-winner of the Alfie Awards, given to her by one of her stable of writers, George RR Martin (Game of Thrones ) for editing. I asked, ‘What are your expectations from an editor? What advice, help, inspiration, observation, comfort or support do you value most?’ She replied: Book editors are there to help the author maintain consistency, pacing, integrity of structure: not to impose their, or anyone’s else’s view on a text but to enable the writer to deliver the very best version of their own vision possible. I am the person who is supposed to hold their works in my head if they write in series – and each time they deliver a new volume I will reread the entire series in order to do just that. If any of them ever has a problem, I am there to listen and try to help solve it; I’m the one who softens blows and celebrates good news with them.

This all sounded so very different from my Langham Hotel experience and the experience of my undergraduate. Johnson also pointed out: ‘Writing as a novelist is a very personal and largely private exercise—which is why most of us choose this form of expression over the complex and often frustrating teamwork and consensus creativity of TV/film’.

Conclusion The full (and often unacknowledged) quotation from Goldman (1991, p. 39) is: ‘Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess— and, if you’re lucky, an educated one’. Perhaps the reality of the nurturing, feedback and the script-editing process is to show without telling, suggest without doing, and gently help your writer stick to their story path, without crushing their confidence. In her blog, Julie Bush (2016) compares jigsaw puzzles with screenwriting and how sometimes she likes to do both at the same time. ‘These two things are the same thing. This is a puzzle with layers and that is a puzzle with layers. Do not be afraid … screenwriting is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together where you have to design all the pieces’. Script editors, mentors and tutors can help new writers with the design but should always gently allow the student to try to find the best fit. A few attempts are part of the game and eventually, with encouragement, they will find where the pieces go to make up the full picture.

References Batty, C., & Waldeback, Z. (2019). Writing for the screen: Creative and critical approaches. Palgrave Macmillan. Batty, C., & Taylor, S. (2020). The role of the script editor, revised. In G. Harper & J. Kroll (Eds.), Creative writing: Drafting, revising and editing (pp. 123–138). Palgrave Macmillan.

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BBC Writersroom. (n.d.). https://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/. Accessed 15 Dec 2020. Bush, J. (2016). Jigsaw puzzles. https://medium.com/adventures-in-the-peen-trade/ jigsaw-puzzles-c555baf836ae. Accessed 15 Dec 2020. Dawson, J. (2020). ‘A spoonful of sugar.’ Mslexia 88. Mselxia Publications. Friedmann, J. (2004). ‘Learning to love development hell’. ScriptWriter Magazine, 15. Scriptease Ltd. Goldman, W. (1991). Adventures in the screen trade: A personal view of Hollywood and screenwriting. Macdonald & Co. Griffiths, K. (2015). The art of script editing a practical guide. Kamera Books. Grace, Y. (2014). Writing for television series serials & soaps. Kamera Books. James, J. (1999). TAPS Readers Guidelines [handout]. Johnson, J. (2019). Response to questionnaire from Macneill, M. Mitchell, G. (2019). Recorded interview with Macneill, M. Mukherjee, R. (2014). The art of screenplays a writer’s guide. Kamera Books. My Family. (2000–2011). cr: Fred Barron UK: BBC. Nelmes, J. (2010). Collaboration and control in the development of Janet Green’s screenplay Victim. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(2), 255–271. Press, K. (2019). Response to questionnaire from Macneill, M. Puzzle. (2018). wr: Polly Mann and Oren Moverman, dir: Marc Turtletaub, USA: Big Beach Films. Rocliffe. https://www.rocliffe.com. Accessed 15 Dec 2020. Shine on Harvey Moon. (1995–1982). cr: Maurice Gran and Laurence Marks UK: ITV. Silent Witness. (1996–). cr: Nigel McCrery UK: BBC. Storr, W. (2019). The Science of Storytelling. Harper Collins. Taylor, S. (2016). Ghostbusting in Screenwriting Practice: rewriting the corrective culture of script development. Refereed proceedings of the 20th Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP). http://www.aawp.org.au/ wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Taylor-1.pdf The Bill. (1984–2010). cr. Geoff McQueen. ITV. The Tribe. (1999–2003). crs: Harry Duffin and Raymond Thompson. UK: Channel 5 Television; Cloud 9. Yorke, J. (2014). Into the Woods: How stories work and why we tell them. Penguin.

The Business of Script Development: Insights from Industry Practitioners Stayci Taylor and Craig Batty

Introduction As the contributions to this collection reveal, there is a rich body of scholarship on script development that has emerged over the past five years, some of which is starting to be drawn together in other collections such as the Journal of Screenwriting ’s Script Development Special Issue (Batty et al., 2017) and Script Development: Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives (Batty & Taylor, 2021). Seen as a distinct area of screenwriting studies, script development scholarship has provided definitional and methodological foundations, theoretical explorations and critical insights, as well as case studies of specific screen projects and of particular roles within the screen industry. Often, the works that analyse industrial processes of script development have emerged from practitioner-scholars usefully examining their own practices or projects (including many in this volume). Other industry insights have made a wider survey of specific industry cultures, notably Bevan-Mogg (2021) (UK film industry), Davies (2021) (international co-productions), Dooley (2021) (cinematic virtual reality), Ellingsen and Taylor (2019) (Australian web series), and Hambly (2020, 2021) (Australian feature film screenwriters), Krauß (2021) (German television writers’ rooms), S. Taylor (B) RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Batty University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

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Maloney and Burne (2021) (Australian television script writers), Milligan (2021) (M¯aori filmmaking), Moore (2021) (Danish feature film), Napoli (2021) (US script coverage), Sengupta (2021) (political cinema in Bollywood) and Szczepanik (2021) (feature film development in the Czech Republic). This chapter builds on that body of work, responding to our own call to elevate the scholarship and discourse of script development in consideration of the ‘many and varied practices, understandings and imperatives, over just as many different media, cultures and contexts’ (Batty et al., 2017, p. 226). We agree that ‘we still miss in-depth studies of development as a production practice and culture embedded in concrete industrial and policy contexts’ (Szczepanik, 2021, pp. 52–53). Here, then, we draw on a collection of interviews with screenwriters and script development personnel to map the lived experiences of this aspect of the screenwriting and screen production ecosystem. Focussing on the ways in which people and processes operate, and how that results in how people feel about the work they are doing, we offer a snapshot of the ‘human dimension’ of participating in the business of script development. In this way, we subscribe to Bridget Conor’s belief in the value of ‘qualitative research strategies including interviews to foreground working lives and subjectivities’ (2014, p. 10) of those facing the practical realities of the industry. 14 interviews were conducted with industry professionals from Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US in 2017. These interviewees, who have been anonymised for reporting purposes (named as Participants 1–14), have worked in a variety of script development roles across these countries, including as screenwriter, script consultant, script editor, story editor and storyline writer. By tracking the practical realities of script development across a number of production cultures, we ask how those developing or being developed feel about its practices and processes. Our sections focus on common themes arising from a practice described by Ian Macdonald as ‘a multistranded activity in which shared conceptual values (e.g. of what a film is, or a TV soap) are articulated by individuals as the basis for a new piece of work’ (2021, p. 13). We turn to our interviewees’ industry insights to ask how these conceptual values are shared and articulated within the practical realities of the screen production industry, from which arises the topics ‘communication’, ‘procedural frustrations’ and ‘digging deep’. We then draw some conclusions about the script development business by those who undertake it, and speculate on some of the implications this might have for those working in script development in the future.

The ‘Lived Experience’ of Script Development When interviewing our participants, we were interested in a number of factors: how those immersed in script development processes believed these could be improved (Batty & Taylor, 2021); how their insights could expand the methods by which screenwriting is taught (Batty & Taylor, 2019); and the ‘human dimension’ of script development—the ways in which people and

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process operate, and how those in these roles feel about the work they do. If script development involves, as Participant 7 (an independent film producer) suggests, ‘the collaboration of the creative team with the primary writer […] whereby you build the viability of the project’ then it is useful to explore the details of who those team members are, how they ‘build viability’ and what how the process is experienced. To understand the ‘lived experience’ of script development, we asked our participants how they saw the responsibilities of their role. Some of those responses are worth recording here in their entirety to give a snapshot of the different imperatives experienced by those in the process: I have been the producer in most of the script development projects I’ve been involved with; therefore I’ve always had consideration of the budget when storylining in particular is in progress. I try hard not to let this affect the best story outcomes but need to be realistic as well—there’s no point staying silent when you know it just can’t happen. In this case, my input would provide opportunity for the team to be inventive about how the desired outcome may be achieved albeit in a different way. (P9) My role [as Senior Script Development Executive] is to carefully read the script (first pass for initial impressions and overview, then a second or third closer read), meet with my colleagues to get their feedback, then convey this to the writer in a way that protects the writer’s sensibilities, and keeps them enthusiastic about the next stage. I try not to point out something that’s not working without offering a creative suggestion in return, while making it clear that the final decision is totally up to the writer—it’s more in the spirit of keeping the conversation and process flowing, and not just being a handbrake. (P13) I see it as my role [as script editor] to represent the audience. To ensure clarity and coherence in terms of the world of the story and the story itself and in terms of the characters and their motivation. To anticipate the questions the audience will have and their response to what is being presented. It is not my role to offer solutions to problems in the script, but to point out what those problems are and to ask the right questions, so that the writer can come up with the right answers. (P1) [As a screenwriter, my role is] to write. And to generate ideas. To write multiple drafts of a script and all that that entails—character development, plot development, theme development, reflective work on process and to work out a process that’s effective, to be open to feedback, receptive to the input of others, meet deadlines, to be diligent and professional, and to deliver what has been agreed upon. Whatever the funding is for, that’s what I produce at the end of it, and to have some sufficient critical faculty so that I can gauge where we’re at, where the script is going, where it’s come from and to be able to articulate that. (P10)

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And, from Participant 11, an Australian freelance developer who has an ongoing career working for government funding agencies and high-profile production companies: Technically I’m not responsible for anything; nothing rests with me. I see my role [developer] as steering and supporting the writer to the best possible version of the story. Also, keeping an eye on the bigger picture, all the ‘noise’ the writer doesn’t need to hear. They can go granular, I’ll stay macro. I don’t need to be immersed in the world [of the story]—they do.

In navigating these sometimes aligned, and sometimes conflicting, responsibilities and agenda, our participants reported different experiences, productive and otherwise, from their work in script development. Themes emerged around communication, procedural frustrations, and ‘digging deep’.

Communication Given the volume and variety of written and verbal feedback given during script development, communication is one of the key factors in successful or unsuccessful practice. Participant 5 (a multi-credited, award-winning screenwriter), speaking of those involved in script development, puts it this way: ‘If they aren’t communicators they have no business in this business, which is all about communication after all’. As Wendy Bevan-Mogg (this volume) reminds us, ‘Dialogue during the development process is often multi-levelled, as participants navigate how best to deal with the personalities involved and hierarchies, motives and alliances are established’ (2021, p. 87). Participant 4, a television writer, storyliner, script editor and story developer, asserts ‘there needs to be respectful and open communication, and an ability to robustly discuss the ideas, the issues, and find solutions’. Participant 6 (who has worked in many professional script developmental roles ranging from production head to development funding assessor to script reader) reports, ‘The worst experiences I have had have been where the producer, script editor and execs have all had different visions of the film and this has led to the film falling apart’. From the other side of the table, Participant 14 (a working screenwriter with several projects in development) recalls one time when ‘we knew the communication had broken down, so we [the supporting writers] were caught between loyalty to the lead writer and the vision of the producer’ and also another when it became clear that, as a writer, they were surplus to requirements once the script was delivered: ‘It comes down to morals really. I felt disrespected and out of the loop’. As P13 notes, of television script development processes in particular, ‘Writers and TV execs need to have a better understanding of the realities and constraints of their respective worlds’. When it comes to communication, then, it is important to consider between whom the vital communication takes place. P5 reports that ‘bad’ experiences of script development ‘are not uncommon’ and recalls ‘I worked on one

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project in which the producer and executive producer were married. They would keep phoning me to completely change the underlying narrative of the series having ‘had a chat last night”’. P5 explains their ‘good’ experiences: ‘To the extent that I am central to it, I am happy. This is not an egoistic matter. it is important that the writer is invested in the material. Sometimes the writer is given a peripheral status in development, and this is usually to the detriment of the development’. If the writer is not central to script development, one might expect that the script itself is forefront in the process but, as P13 explains, this is so often not the case: Sadly, TV execs often don’t read scripts in a single sitting – they might read half on a flight, then the other half in their hotel room after 5 phone calls and 20 emails. So if the writer’s whole narrative turnaround relies on the subtleties of a single line or glance, then this has probably been missed, and the writer suddenly finds themselves hit with negative notes, and is resentful that their script hasn’t been read properly.

It is perhaps unsurprising that most of our interviewees discussed ‘communication’ in the context of giving and receiving notes—a process by which a development process can seemingly thrive or falter. P13 discusses the importance of communication in the vital note-giving process: As a freelance writer, I’ve been on the receiving end of poorly executed network notes many times, so it’s really important to me to not be guilty of this [in my current role as Senior Script Supervisor] – time-poor television execs tend to focus on the negatives and can be unintentionally blunt in their feedback (not to mention contradictory and downright confusing).

P10, on the receiving end of such notes, would agree: ‘The thing with feedback, it’s most helpful the more specific it is—so it’s unhelpful when it’s general, it’s not actionable. Just like a piece of general direction to an actor isn’t performable’. Participant 1 (whose television script development roles include Head of a Script Unit, as a script editor, Head of Comedy Development and producer of situation comedy) reports ‘I always tried to accentuate the positive (though not entirely eliminating the negative)—writers respond positively to praise, and a demoralised writer is not going to be capable of delivering what is required’. When it comes to both written and verbal communication in script development, it seems that participants from a breadth of standpoints all continue to seek the solutions by which clarity, respect and transparency can enhance each new process. Script development might have its ‘rules’ but that does not mean it should remain static. As new experiences occur, forms and styles of communication evolve (for better or for worse). Or, as P5 succinctly puts it, ‘Usually, a good experience leads to a good script’.

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Procedural Frustration Another recurring theme of the ‘lived experience’ of script development was having the process undermined by the machinations of entrenched systems or interventions. For our participants, such counterproductive measures reveal flaws in the production cultures underpinning script development; sometimes hardwired into the systems in which script development occurs, and sometimes situational, where those who know most about effective methods are outranked by those who have more power, but not more know-how, in the process. On systemic issues, Participant 3 (screenwriter, script editor and agency script consultant) points out: There are ideas involved about TV format, narrative structure, channel requirements, casting, compliance etc. […] governed by convention, tradition, assumption or regulation that can be changed or interpreted differently so in some ways the terms “facts” and “objectivity” are always for me relative terms within which subjectivity and or custom and practice are buried.

As an example, P3 reflects on a time when ‘it was a “fact” avowed by TV execs that female characters could not drive narrative in a TV series […] the first series that proved that “fact” wrong [was] Widows [1983–1985] written by Lynda La Plante’. Gender in script development is another significant factor, beyond the scope of this chapter but given excellent scholarly attention elsewhere—see, for just one timely example, O’Meara and Moore (2021) in this volume. Participant 8, a script editor who has worked in various other development roles including development officer and script reader, questions both the systems that dictate which projects get to be developed, and also the source of those decisions: ‘My experience has been that government agencies are not the right people to make decisions on which projects should be developed and which shouldn’t. These decisions should be in the hands of experienced producers’. P8 goes on to share the story of working as a script editor for a producer who, as part of an innovative funding scheme in Queensland, Australia, was lent a budget of $100,000 to select projects for development. Ultimately selecting eight writers from 80 applicants, and paying all involved including P8, the producer went on to see three of those eight projects go into production. This strike rate easily surpassed the statistics coming out of agencies at the time (as reported by P8, whereby only one in seven scripts in funded development would progress to a produced screen work). P9 (producer) reports that ‘without exception, my bad experiences within the script development process all have to do with the broadcaster’s input. Usually in regard to network commissioners who are unnecessarily heavy handed and in my opinion, keen to show the production company who’s boss, who wields the ultimate power’. P5 (writer) has experienced the same issues:

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‘A bad experience is usually characterised by ignorant or egotistical executives/editors/producers who insist on the implementation of bad notes’. Of the typically hierarchical structures of script development, P5 continues that ‘much also depends on the script-literacy of the people with whom one works’, going on to explain: ‘By script literacy I mean being able to read a script, having the imagination to see what is happening, having an ear for the subtext, being able to discern the deeper engineering of a story, and also having a broad range of reading and viewing experience’. This frequent lack of literacy can be in part understood in the context of the ‘strangeness’ of the screenplay. As Peter Bloore (2013, p. 17) reminds us: At the heart of screenplay development is the strange disjunction that the writer is creating a literary artefact, which is judged partially in literary terms (an evocative and spell-binding page-turner has a good chance of getting made) but is then a blueprint for a visual work of art. The dialogue will make it to the screen, but the prose style and dramatic description will not.

Entrenched, then, in processes of script development, are feedback loops enacted by those who may or may not be literate with the text object at the heart of the process. The demands on the writing are high, but the expectations on the reading (which, as P13 pointed out in the previous section, may be rushed and fragmented) are far less regimented, leading writers to simply hope for the best. Relatedly, P10 questions the validity of the ways in which feedback is typically filtered through to writers: What I find unnerving is the fact of the anonymous readers giving you the feedback—so has the Development Executive read the script, or just the feedback? […] Moreover, who has read it? And why should I trust them? Who’s been assigned? Someone sympatico with genre and/or subject matter? Is there matchmaking that happens at that end? Why don’t I see feedback directly? Why is it filtered through the Development Executive? What’s being lost in translation?

A counterpoint is provided by P1, who sees it as their role to broker feedback for the writer. They believe it is their ‘job to filter criticism from above and to ensure that the writer is only receiving notes from one source (i.e. the script editor, who will coordinate feedback from other people, which sometimes can be contradictory) and not having to respond to a variety of different “masters”’. P10 later explains that, for writers, it is not about resisting the input of these ‘invisible’ readers, but rather embracing a more transparent collaborative process: When you’re looking for collaborators you’re looking for gang/rock band/army with good handle on group think and yet bringing something unique to that vision—development people and readers, people judging the work, ARE collaborators, yet they’re often hidden from the screenwriter/s—why do they have so

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much sway? Why are there silent partners in collaboration? Because it is [should be] about getting in a room with people and firing ideas around.

For P4, the biggest procedural frustration is the lack of resources behind script development, a concern shared by many of our interviewees. As P4 expresses, speaking from the Australian context: both television and film scripts undergo insufficient development. This is due to shortage of money and the pressure of short timelines, and an undervaluing of the need for script development which, I believe, contributes to both of these. Hence, audiences find Australian TV and films unsatisfying in terms of depth and complexity, both of which are key areas addressed by script development.

As Steven Price has stated, ‘Personal testimonies of script development are replete with accounts of how the individual writer’s illusions are shattered by encounters with an industry that he or she has failed to understand’ (2017, p. 329). But what script development research is beginning to uncover is that participants in all roles of script development, including the individual writer, are all too aware of the industry, and the entrenched systems and conventions that are counter to productive processes. Less clear is how these processes remain static, and what stands in the way of those involved ‘feeding up’ this information to those with the power to make a change.

‘Digging Deep’ We begin this section with a candid recollection from P11: Early on I thought you had to divorce emotion from development, and thought it had to be “scientific”. But my mentors assured me to not strip my emotions from the process. Because as well as being a ‘work order’ for a bunch of departments, it’s [the script and resulting screenwork] still going to be an emotional experience for the audience.

Likewise, in trying to objectively uncover information about script development using qualitative methods it is important not to discount what is at the heart of the data, nestled within the anecdotes, which is that script development is about storytelling and is a creative process which requires participants to call upon all of their resources: memory, imagination, experience and, at times, painful recollections or revealing human insights. The role in script development of emotions, life journey and personal circumstances was highlighted through our interviews, over the breadth of roles and production contexts, as practitioners detailed their ‘lived experiences’ of the process. As P7 explains: Invariably any screenplay will require the writers to expose their own vulnerabilities. I encourage writers to mine their emotional experiences to heighten the

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work. It is not unusual in script workshops that I conduct, to dig deeply into the emotional and subjective experiences of every team member. This can form a greater bond for the team and in turn greater support for the writer.

P5 likewise values the ‘feelings’ aspect of script development: Emotions are hugely important in evaluating the quality of an emotional artefact (a story). Are we moved, gripped, enthralled by it? How people feel about a script at the development stage anticipates how an audience may feel eventually. This is not the same as subjective. All the people involved in the process should know the difference. It is an art, in the end, not a technical process, and people can get it wrong. But feeling the script is how we test it.

For P10, the emotional investment of script development is at odds with the abovementioned procedural limitations, pointing out that, ‘writers are driven by emotion and desire to create emotional experience – so it doesn’t make sense to insist that emotion doesn’t factor into it, by separating writers from those who judge the work and trying to curtail emotional connections. There’s a certain caginess about that stuff I find baffling’. P11 has sympathy for the plight of writers such as P10 and acknowledges: ‘I’m really aware that we’re asking writers to be objectively distanced from their own emotional work which is really hard; as a developer I have no ego invested, yet I’m asking all this from someone who does’. For P6, ‘it’s important to remember that most of the people who are involved in the process are not trained, relying instead on gut feeling’. P6 goes on to elaborate that ‘Writing is an incredibly revealing and emotional process, and criticising writing is a bit like having other people tell you whether or not they think your children are “any good”’. P13 similarly reports ‘there’s a lot of emotion in the process, in order to dig deep and capture the emotional truth of the story, so that it will resonate with an audience and be relatable. People often share aspects of their personal lives as part of the development process, and so there’s a degree of vulnerability and sensitivity’. Participant 12, whose ongoing roles include producing and heading development teams for television, suggests script development suffers when there is resistance to this part of the process: people are reluctant to dig into their own experience and expose themselves. Even if [doing that’s] not right and doesn’t work, it can trigger other stuff [...] It’s personally painful to examine at a deep level why people behave in a certain way. But that’s the only thing that makes anything authentic, your own personal and true responses to things. When people talk about ‘demographic’—we want it to appeal to women 25–44—it means nothing at all […] But if it’s about me and my personal experience, no matter how good or bad, then it’s real and relatable.

Such discussions inevitably come back to the importance of communication to this process, given the expectation on participants to share what might be

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otherwise painful, private or difficult experiences. Participant 2 (a writer and producer who has worked in TV and motion picture project development for multinational distributors) reflects on this inevitably subjective nature of the aspect of script development, explaining why it is important to ‘bring clarity to an elusive and personal process’: The players in the script development process, besides having their own career agendas at stake, approach ‘story’ about people and life from their own histories of experience. Thus, when discussing what action a character might take in a certain scene, the players can often argue about one choice over another not realising they are actually arguing about their own grievances in life.

In reviewing these responses, it becomes clear that acknowledging, and giving due consideration to, the very real ‘emotional’ aspect of script development, is an area worthy of further exploration, and one of the places script development research can go to next. While this can be challenging for interviewees, and potentially also for industry (e.g. having to reflect on its shortcomings), script development is such an important aspect of production—with more people involved than most people realise—that it deserves its own review process.

Conclusion Our interviewees have provided us with a range of insights into the screen business from those who undertake it. In this chapter we have discussed some of the practical realities of script development via the lived experiences of those developing or being developed, and their feelings about partaking in development practices. Interested in the ways in which people and processes operate, and how these practitioners feel about the work they are doing, we have themed these insights into the topics of communication, procedural frustrations and ‘digging deep’. While, on the face of it, these may appear to be obvious aspects of script development, they are so obvious that they can often get missed in research. Speculating on some of the implications this might have for those working in script development in the future, we can surmise from our interviews that the value of clear and considerate communication cannot be overstated. While this is hardly unique to the screen industry (as anyone who has ever filled a job application can attest), it is worth noting that those in the ‘business’ of script development are already in the ‘business’ of communicating, as the singular point of the enterprise is to communicate a story to an audience. However, as Bloore (2013, p. 129) points out, the conditions for good communication are already compromised, given: development teams are made up of different people with very different psychological types and roles, and with conflicting agendas and allegiances, working

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in an insecure and high-anxiety environment, where power and control are not static but shift within the team over time.

This in turn points to some of the procedural frustrations expressed by our participants, where unchanging systems and processes have been too long unchallenged, and are counter to the conditions by which writers and collaborators are asked to ‘dig deep’. However, some of our interviewees shared ways in which they are devising methods to bring fresh ideas into the business. P11 (freelance developer) offered: Sometimes [at the agency I worked for] we’d call teams in for a ‘creative meeting’, trying to redress the ‘faceless bureaucrat said no to me’ problem. We’d try to make it clear that all scripts have problems—if the script doesn’t have problems, why do you need development funding? New writers/teams would come in wary but leave excited by the notes and feedback. Some even made fundamental changes right there in the room.

And P13, who was a freelance writer before becoming a Senior Development Executive, sees an opportunity to bridge some gaps: I play a role in educating the broadcaster about the creative writing process— I’m like the “translator” between the writer and the network execs—often they don’t like a script, but can’t articulate why. In my experience, there can be a fair amount of ill-feeling from writers towards network execs, born from negative experiences in script development meetings. Project by project, I’m trying to turn this around. (emphasis added)

How the script development business can further ‘speak to itself’ is the direction we would like to take our research next. We have, in this short chapter, drawn some conclusions about the script development business by those who undertake it, and have supplied a snapshot of the ‘human dimension’ of participating in the business of script development. But where to next? How to share and, ideally, implement some of these findings with the industry itself? This represents the next stage of our work—and that of others, we hope—in order that the study of script development does not become just an academic exercise.

References Batty, C., & Taylor, S. (2019). Teaching screenwriting through script development: Looking beyond the screenplay. In C. Batty, M. Berry, K. Dooley, B. Frankham, and S. Kerrigan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of screen production (pp. 459–472). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Batty, C., & Taylor, S. (2021). Room for improvement: Discourses of quality and betterment in script development. In C. Batty & S. Taylor (Eds.), Script development: Critical approaches, creative practices, international perspectives (pp. 271–289). Palgrave Macmillan. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Bevan-Mogg, W. (2021). Saying what must not be said: Exploring communication in the script development process. In S. Taylor & C. Batty (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of script development (pp. 87–102). Palgrave Macmillan. Bloore, P. (2013). The screenplay business: Managing creativity and script development in the film industry. Routledge. Conor, B. (2014). Screenwriting: Creative labor and professional practice. Routledge. Davies, R. (2021). Nordic noir with an Icelandic twist: Establishing a shared space for collaboration within European coproduction. In C. Batty & S. Taylor (Eds.), Script development: Critical approaches, creative practices, international perspectives (pp. 113–127). Palgrave Macmillan. Dooley, K. (2021). Crafting immersive experiences: A case study of the development of three short narrative cinematic virtual reality (CVR) projects. In S. Taylor & C. Batty (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of script development (pp. 503–516). Palgrave Macmillan. Ellingsen, S., & Taylor, S. (2019). Writers, producers and creative entrepreneurship in web series development. In C. Batty, M. Berry, K. Dooley, B. Frankham, & S. Kerrigan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of screen production (pp. 181–191). Palgrave Macmillan. Hambly, G. (2020). Cultural influences in screenwriting: Australia vs hollywood. Journal of Screenwriting, 11(1), 45–61. Hambly, G. (2021). Cultural difference in script development: The Australian example. In C. Batty & S. Taylor (Eds.), Script development: Critical approaches, creative practices, international perspectives (pp. 69–82). Palgrave Macmillan. Krauß, F. (2021). Writers’ room and showrunner: discourses and practices in the German television industry. In S. Taylor & C. Batty (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of script development (pp. 251–266). Palgrave Macmillan. Macdonald, I. (2021). Originality and authorship in the development of the screen idea. In C. Batty & S. Taylor (Eds.), Script development: Critical approaches, creative practices, international perspectives (pp. 9–26). Palgrave Macmillan. Maloney, N., & Burne, P. (2021). So much drama, so little time: Writers’ rooms in Australian television drama production. In C. Batty & S. Taylor (Eds.), Script development: Critical approaches, creative practices, international perspectives (pp. 185–202). Palgrave Macmillan. Milligan, C. (2021). Script development as a collective enterprise: The writing of the indigenous feature film Waru. In S. Taylor & C. Batty (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of script development (pp. 175–186). Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, C. (2021). Textual manifestations of collaborative screen idea and story development: A Danish case study. In S. Taylor & C. Batty (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of script development (pp. 279–294). Palgrave Macmillan. Napoli, J. (2021). Script readers as gatekeepers: Demystifying processes of script coverage. In S. Taylor & C. Batty (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of script development (pp. 33–46). Palgrave Macmillan.

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O’Meara, R., & Moore, C. (2021). Negotiating television authorship and gendering creative identity: Vicki Madden as Australian showrunner. In S. Taylor & C. Batty (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of script development (pp. 121–134). Palgrave Macmillan. Price, S. (2017). Script development and academic research. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 319–333. Sengupta, R. (2021). Scripting for the masses: Notes on the political economy of bollywood. In S. Taylor & C. Batty (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of script development (pp. 217–228). Palgrave Macmillan. Szczepanik, P. (2021). Script development and the post-socialist producer: Towards a comparative approach to cultures of development. In C. Batty & S. Taylor (Eds.), Script development: Critical approaches, creative practices, international perspectives (pp. 51–67). Palgrave Macmillan. Widows. (1983–1985). Cr. Lynda La Plante. London, UK: Thames Television.

Script Development in Time and Place

Doctoring La Cacería, Las Niñas De Alto Hospicio: Issues in Cross-Cultural Script Consulting Jeff Rush

Introduction Drawing on the author’s experience as an American script consultant on the limited series, La Cacería, las niñas de Alto Hospicio (The Hunter, the Girls of Alto Hospicio, 2018) for the Mega television network in Chile, this chapter will focus on cross-cultural issues of docudrama script development including research beyond the consultant’s culture, fictional and non-fictional characters, story modulation, national media cultures and audience, and working across differing languages and cultures. It will also explore the expanded role of the television script consultant in a globalized media world. Assuming the most comprehensive definition of script development as the “process in which ideas, emotions and personalities combine with the practicalities, policies and movements of the industry to create, refine and tell a story in the best way possible and under the circumstances at the time” (Kerrigan & Craig, 2016), the chapter will concentrate on the “process” itself by which the consultant works across culture and language in a docudrama series in the context of a global streaming environment. La Cacería is drawn from real events that occurred within the memory of most of its national Chilean audience; the 1999–2001 serial killing of fourteen female victims in the impoverished town of Alto Hospicio in northern part of the country, the largest serial killing in that nation’s modern history. The story J. Rush (B) Temple University, Philadelphia, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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follows a fictional detective, Rojas, banished to Alto Hospicio from the capital, Santiago, for assaulting his superior officer who was having an affair with his wife. Although Rojas arrives in Alto Hospicio after a number of impoverished young women have disappeared, the local police force does not share their parents’ or his subsequent alarm, believing that they have run off and may have chosen to enter prostitution. The story is set against the national presidential election. The script development process ran from May to November 2017. As I did not read Spanish, all material was sent to me in English translation. I spent a week in Santiago, Chile, working intensively with the creative team, both considering the script for the Mega network audience and a more international one. Because of the availability of international, streaming distribution, television script consultants must now consider the potential for national productions to reach a world-wide audience. Working on a script drawn from real, recent national events, the consultant must take particular care to evaluate both how the story plays to the national audience who may still remember these events, as well as to an international audience who has no awareness of them. This chapter weaves these perspectives together, focusing ultimately on process of the script consultant working on a docudrama script across cultures and language in a global media environment.

Research as It Evolves When working on scripts based on real locations and events, most consultants begin with broad-based research. This initial research will necessarily be fluid, expected to evolve in the course of the project. However, its very generality brings value to the project because the consultant will develop a broad sense of how these locations and events may have been reported and remembered in the popular, national imagination. Since, as Alex W. Bordino puts it, one role of the consultant is to provide “another set of eyes that will sustain… [the writers’] original vision” (Bordino, 2017), the consultant’s general knowledge may provide a corrective to the more focused knowledge increasingly assumed by the writers, who have been concentrating on the background of this project over the extended period of script development. The cross-cultural consultant must understand the geography and the culture of the location at the time in which the story is set. In 1999, Alto Hospicio was an impoverished commune on the border of Iquique, a much larger, shipping town. An export hub for the copper mined in the Atacama Desert, Iquique had grown wealthier under the Pinchot military dictatorship which made it one of the largest duty-free commercial ports in South America. At the time of the serial, by contrast, Alto Hospicio, sandwiched between Iquique and the edge of the Atacama Desert where the victim’s bodies were deposited in abandoned mining shafts, was so small and insignificant that it had no police station of its own. Since characters move from Alto Hospicio to

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Iquique, the consultant encouraged the writers to specifically develop the relative cultures and economies of the two places, particularly for a non-Chilean audience (or even a national audience who did not know its topography). In the first episode, Rojas flies into Iquique, but rather than going to his hotel, insists on immediately being driven to a family in Alto Hospicio that had lost a child. In the original draft, this drive was consumed by Iquique’s assistant, Carrasco, briefing Rojas on the young women who had vanished. While conveying this back story was essential, the revised draft also detailed specific images that Rojas sees on his journey, designed to illuminate the contrast between the two towns so that both he and the viewer understand the conflict implicit in their juxtaposition. Beyond geography and economics, the consultant must understand the history behind the story. The representation of the past is always coloured by how it is to be used in the present1 so the next step in focusing the consultant’s research is to understand exactly how the creative team seeks to interpret the serial’s historic background. By the time the consultant is brought into the project, the writers and producers have likely developed a point of view on this and, in most cases, the script consultant must work within that.2 For the consultant to understand and respect exactly what the creative team’s perspective is requires an ongoing dialogue, particularly when the team is working on its own national history which it may take for granted. Frequently, it is useful for the consultant to explain back to the creative team what perspectives on the history seem to be coming through each developmental stage of the script. These perspectives may fully align with the creative team’s expectation, or might include problematic instances where the serial is internally inconsistent, do not represent the point of view of the creative team, or create a point of view which seems arbitrarily imposed on the story. In all of these cases, the consultant must be able to clearly explain these findings and demonstrate alternative solutions that will address the issues. For instance, the creative team brought a liberal historical perspective to the events of La Cacería, recognizing that even though the killer himself was ultimately revealed to come from a background similar to that of his victims, the 1 These differing colorations can be seen by looking at the work of two major scholars on the use of history. French historian Michel de Certeau sees history as a “laminated text” of interpretation and citation, of use and archived utterance, in which the “former is thus allowed to state what the latter is unknowingly signifying.” (de Certeau, 1988) or put in visual terms, “the convocation of raw data obeys the jurisdiction which is pronounced upon it in the historiographical staging” (de Certeau, 1988). By contrast, the American historian Hayden White sees coloration coming from the separation of event from meaning, arguing that the past event gains its particular present meaning from the historian’s choice of emplotment or narrative genre used to organize its representation. He settles on the genres of Romance, Tragedy, Comedy and Satire as proposed by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism, but suggests that beyond these, any choice of genre will serve to color history (White, 1973). 2 There are cases where the consultant may challenge these assumptions, but the invitation to do so must be explicit.

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social inequity between the copper-exporting port of Iquique and the poverty of Alto Hospicio played an important aspect in the story. To make this clear, they introduced Ponderosa, a nightclub for the Iquique elite, which recruited young women from Alto Hospicio as prostitutes. While advancing the team’s perspective, in the early drafts, Rojas obsession with Ponderosa did not fully dramatize what that institution meant to the arc of his character development. I will discuss how we addressed this in the section on action and character below. Finally, the preliminary research for a docudrama prepares the consultant for the inevitable negations on how far historic reality can be tweaked to serve the story without violating the deeper truth or at least the spirit of the events being represented. These can only be done judiciously when everyone involved knows and agrees upon the starting point, the original circumstances of what is subsequently being changed. One role of the cross-cultural consultant is to determine whether the script maintains that deeper sense of truth, particularly with stories that combine fictional and non-fictional characters.

Fictional and Non-Fictional Characters While set against the historical serial killings in Alto Hospicio and using several actual figures including the killer, most of the principal characters in La Cacería, las niñas de Alto Hospicio are fictional. One historical figure who is represented in the script was the father of a victim, a fisherman who sold his boat to gain the resources necessary to mobilize the other parents. Together, they found the belongings of their children in the desert which ultimately triggered the investigation. In the script, however, while he helps Rojas understand the culture of Alto Hospicio and provides contact with other victim’s families, this character plays a smaller role than he did in history; it is the fictional Rojas who both connects with the families and, in his official capacity, solves the case. From the time of the consultant’s involvement, this was a given of the project. While it can be argued that the concentration of both personal connection and official authority in the single character of Rojas changes the driver of the story from indigenous self-driven initiation to outside authority, the creative team decided it would be a more powerful creative solution. Using a fictional character who contains both perspectives personalizes the story’s tension, which is a technique for making a historical conflict more vital, while focusing on one dramatic center.3 To make this work, Rojas must be conceived so that he can respond to the victims’ families in a way that the other authorities cannot. The creative team took special care to build his backstory so the viewer would understand the 3

While dramatically powerful, combining contrasting perspectives has the disadvantage of personalizing history by reducing its complexity, embodying it in one character who experiences the totality of the conflict.

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reasons for his responsiveness, and to hint at it with flashbacks. The need for flashbacks was especially important, because although caring of others, Rojas is conceived as a self-protective, withdrawn character who conceals his own past, even from his son. Growing up as an isolated and impoverished orphan, he lived in foster households, called “Sename” in Chile. The consultant had to research the implications of the Sename, the Chilean agency which not only centralizes the protection and rights of children including adoption, but has had a long, sad history of violence and death within its homes. In fact, the flashbacks tell the viewer that Rojas felt so vulnerable and bullied as a young boy that the only way to survive was to learn to box, a motif used throughout the serial. This background gives Rojas a direct experience with the poverty, violence and identity loss he shares with the victims’ families in Alto Hospicio. However, this vulnerability is only one part of his character because he also possesses a strong personal sense of authority. The script reveals him to be a gifted policeman who can work the system, and is intellectually nimble enough to integrate what he learns from the community into his evolving understanding of the murders. Thus, the serial is not only hybrid in imagining fictional characters into real events, but in combining into one character the tension between a deep sympathy with the people of Alto Hospicio and the authority to do something about the serial murderer who is threatening them. Rojas is also a conflicted character as suggested by his aggressive hiding of his own past. It is through his conflict that the consultant first identified the international potential of the serial. Searching for the broader interest necessary for international distribution, consultants seek to identify a compelling character, frequently one with a secret. Such a character tends to evoke universal engagement through all viewers’ desire to see a secret revealed and resolved. The consultant may suggest a slight rebalancing of the script to emphasize this secret; however, this must be subtle because the best of internationally distributed media still maintains a national or regional flavour which is a major part of its appeal. Decreasing this flavour will risk making the miniseries bland and generic. Better yet, the secret can be made part of the texture so internationally targeted scripts can tie its revelation to the dramatic line of the character, and the nuances of the local story will reveal themselves through the character’s growth. Thus, the consultant suggested that the cultural specifics of Rojas’ backstory be brought to life for an international viewer by revealing them gradually as he overcomes his shame and begins to accept his past. The viewer is likely to be so interested in Rojas’ change that the script can reveal the cultural specifics of his background, without pausing or even confusing the viewer who chooses not to follow them. The story’s dramatic force will carry this cultural information. However, it is too much to expect a character as conflicted as Rojas to change on his own. The consultant worked with the creative team to help them use Rojas’ growing romantic relationship with Andrea, a social worker responsible for the welfare of several young victims, to help push him to this revelation. In the sixth episode, Rojas faces an emotional crisis. Having

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failed in his major line of investigation, been physically beaten to discourage his investigation, boxed in fury after leaving the hospital with those beating wounds not yet healed, and overcome by a fantasy that combines his memories of losing control in the Sename with all the violence he has confronted in Alto Hospicio, Rojas begins to open up to Andrea. She becomes the agent through which we understand Rojas’ backstory and the violence it represents. Later, visiting Santiago, she secretly fleshes out the details of his past without telling Rojas. When she ultimately tells him what she has done, he is able to overcome his anger about her violating his confidence, and accepts the relief her understanding brings him.

Modulation---Action and Character One of the consultant’s most ephemeral jobs is to examine script drafts for implicit ideas that are not yet fully developed. This is particularly true in crime serials because, while built around a series of hypothesizes that are then subsequently rejected, these stories do not always use their false leads to develop character. In La Cacería, several of the middle episodes turn on Rojas’ initial suspicion that the serial killer is connected to Ponderosa. Ponderosa as a clue is initially teased in a number of ways: one of the murdered young women had spent the previous night working at the club, there is a strong connection between the owner of the Ponderosa and the Chief of Police, as well as the rich elite and the politicians in Iquique who are suppressing the murder investigation. As discussed above, Ponderosa is also used to develop the broader theme of economic inequity that runs through the script. Yet Rojas’ fixation on Ponderosa in the early drafts was not developed sufficiently. So the consultant asked the creative team to explore further how they could use it to further the character of Rojas. This led to a discussion of the need for sufficient obstacles to develop Rojas’ character. There was an inherent trap of making this a story about a big-city detective exiled to a regional town, pinpointing a crime, successfully identifying a trail that no one else could see, and ultimately finding the killer. In such a story, Rojas would not only appear arrogant, but his lack of obstacles would not cause him to grow; he would remain a flat character whose only function would be to unearth the crime. And as discussed in the section above, this would put the weight of the story on the local circumstances of the crime itself rather than the more universal development of his character, diminishing the miniseries’ appeal in the international market. To develop the serial beyond the facts of the case, the consultant stressed the need to build Rojas’ through modulating his character, allowing him to make and learn from his mistakes. He needed a sufficient obstacle that would sharpen his character; Ponderosa became that obstacle. Not only does its flagrant wealth and its prostitution of Alto Hospicio women show the viewer sometimes about the corruption of this free port town, but Rojas’ singular focus on it dramatizes his initial arrogance as a big-city police officer.

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His obsession combines two elements of his character: his anger at the rich world he can never be comfortable within given his self-concealed past, and Ponderosa as an easy and logical solution to his problem of solving the case. Despite, or maybe because, everyone is warning him off, Rojas is determined that the killed is connected to Ponderosa. When he finally realized his mistake in episode six, he is exposed on both levels; not only must he confront his arrogance as a cop, but his denial of his personal past. Since failure reveals character, it can derail him or cause him to grow. In his case, it drives him to Andrea where he begins to open up. As Rojas begins to reevaluate his closed down life experience, he also begins to reconsider what he ignored as a detective because of his obsession with Ponderosa. Earlier, I said that Rojas was “intellectually nimble enough to integrate what he learns from the community with his evolving understanding of the murders”, but initially he can only do this intellectually, not emotionally. When he begins to open up personally, he starts responding emotionally to the local voices he could not previously hear, which leads him to understand that the killer comes from within the community itself.

National Media Cultures and Audience Mega, the television network that produced La Cacería, las niñas de Alto Hospicio, earns the largest broadcast ratings of any network in Chile. The serial was one of its first attempts to create a new audience for long-form shows, designed on the format of the American miniseries. Prior to this, Mega’s reputation had been built on the popularity of its telenovelas. Jade L. Miller defines telenovelas as “dramatic narratives, frequently imbued with humour, and even more consistently full of romantic liaisons, improbable storylines, and melodrama” (2010, p. 200). Telenovelas are similar to soap operas, except with a circumscribed run of often only one or two seasons, and involving a number of characters, usually set in a limited location. Unlike soap operas, “telenovelas are frequently success[ful] in prime-time timeslots on major networks” (Miller, 2010, p. 200). One of Mega’s most successful telenovelas was Perdona Nuestros Pecados (“Forgive Our Sins,” 2017–2018), a two-season show whose first season follows the arrival of a new parish priest to a fictitious Chilean town, Villa Ruisenor. Actually, the priest secretly seeks revenge against Quiroga, the richest man in the town, for previously insulting his sister and causing her suicide. This overarching story serves to structure a number of intimate sub-stories featuring heightened relationships, including Quiroga’s accidental shooting of his favorite daughter, who has fallen in love with the priest. The Mega production team sought to increase La Cacería’s audience by building on its viewership’s sensitivity to the dynamics of the telenovela, particularly on the importance of intimate character relationships, even in the context of a police procedural. One area where the consultant suggested this would work was in the treatment of Rojas’ thirteen-year-old son, Diego, who

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is sent to Alto Hospicio by his mother at the end of episode three. His major function in the script is to be threatened in episode six, causing the raging Rojas to send his son home, quit the police force and pursue the murderer on his own. In an early version, Diego, before being threatened, was largely imagined as a child, an obstacle who Rojas had to drag on his investigations. This made Rojas seem as if he were carelessly putting his young son in danger, belying his intended strengths as a father. The consultant suggested that the Diego character be given an emerging maturity so that he might begin to act on his own. For instance, this could be set up when, left alone playing a computer soccer game, he might instead search the internet for more adult content in which he had never previously been interested, hinting at an interest his father did not even realize he had. The writers developed this idea. Learning that the intended final victim, Ayleen, has trouble in her local Sename, Rojas invites her to stay with them, without thinking of the consequences. This brings Ayleen into close contact with Diego, which causes the boy to initially misjudge the situation. While the relationship ultimately settles into that of a brother and sister, Diego remains very protective of her. When Rojas, fearing for his son’s safety in Alto Hospicio, sends him back to Santiago, Diego turns on his father, accusing him of abandoning Ayleen. This deepens the story for Rojas who has been able to laugh off everyone else’s criticism, but not that of his son. Eventually Rojas comes to appreciate Diego’s growing maturity and takes pride in his concern for Ayleen.

Working Across Differing Languages and Cultures The consultant received synopses, treatments, character breakdowns, beat sheets and script drafts that were all translated to English. Translation provided no obstacle for the broader issues of story construction, episode breakdown and character build, but predictably, caused most issues in action description and dialogue. Paradoxically, however, these being casually translated from Spanish to English sharpened the consultant’s critical sensitivity to their function in the script. Without the smooth flow of well-written dialogue or action direction in his native language, it became easier for the consultant to see when the script sometimes failed to articulate subtext. For instance, in one scene, Ayleen, and Diego run to escape the police. Once safe, they relax and then Diego attempts to kiss Ayleen, who rebuffs him because she sees him as a brother. The action is written as continuous part of the same paragraph, suggesting the boy would naturally attempt to kiss this young woman to whom he is attracted. However, Diego is meant to be totally unexperienced, just leaving childhood and confused by his father inviting Ayleen to stay with them. His decision to kiss Ayleen is a big step for him and needs to be articulated by an additional beat after they escape the police. When a pause was added in the blocking, the flow from their escape to the kiss more clearly articulates Diego’s decision in making this move.

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The very roughly translated dialogue made it clear when its language contradicted its dramatic function. At one point, the young politician Martin, confronted with the urgency of the killings, says, “This is becoming a big problem and we want to end it as soon as possible. Hopefully, before the elections”. Martin is meant to be a hip politician, who has the surface behaviour of reformer. Even though underneath he is supposed to be focused entirely on the elections, he would most likely express his caring for the victims rather than to emphasize merely the politics of the situation. The consultant suggested that he stop himself in the middle of this dialogue and refashion his reaction. When Andrea declines Rojas’ invitation to return with him to Santiago, she says, “I still have dark-skinned ones to save here”, referring to the demographic mix of the impoverished children in Alto Hospicio. It was unclear whether the words “dark-skinned” or Andrea’s rather bald presumption of saving the children of Alto Hospice was a literal or a poor translation of the Spanish dialogue; however, recognizing what this dialogue might suggest about her character, the consultant suggested that this dialogue be replaced.

Local Stories in a Global Context There is little published academic research on how streaming television distribution has affected the form of national television stories, so we will look at journalistic sources before considering two related academic studies. Netflix’s model of internet distribution, which suggests how the other large internet television companies may be moving, has been the most journalistically documented. Netflix has “replaced demographics with what it calls ‘taste clusters,’ predicating programming decisions on immense amounts of data about true viewing habits, not estimated ones” (Adalian, 2018). It has identified close to two thousand of these; while only a few have actually been made public, the clusters focus more on idiosyncratic groupings of personal and genre tastes than the traditional demographic projection of viewer’s age, nationality or ethnicity. Netflix television bases its own productions, and presumably those they choose to distribute, on these clusters. As The Economist puts it, the company depends on “two things: a big, broad, frequently renewed range of programming; and an understanding of its consumers deep enough to serve up to each of them the morsels most likely to appeal” (“Netflix is moving television”, 2018). The “serving up” reminds the cross-cultural consultant interested in international distribution that Netflix did not start as a production or even a streaming distribution entity, but as a web company renting DVDs. It has always prided itself on an individualized online experience, interactively providing different home screens for different clusters of viewers. Netflix has “a saying: Your Netflix is not my Netflix” (Adalian, 2018). The company seeks to tie the specific national textures of a wide range of shows to different taste clusters, which feature differently (including with different art and text) on different user’s home pages. The national textures of individual works can

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be synchronized with transnational personal and genre tastes which transcend simple demographics. This combination of broader taste clusters and localized stories mirrors research on American network distribution of internationally produced television. For instance, in studying the American distribution of Ugly Betty, Miller notes that the precursor Columbian telenovela Betty la Fea “contains both universal themes and culturally translatable specifics” and that “the universal themes underlying the plot and the localizable specifics serve to support the argument that this formula can help explain the success of telenovelas” translating to an American television audience (Miller, 2010, pp. 213–214). While looking at streaming from a more managerial, Hollywood perspective, Hadida et al. (2021) argue that producing films for internet distribution requires separating the old Commitment model that focuses on the “Film-by-film approach” to the Convenience model of “Data analytics, search, recommender system” tied to something like Netflix’s clusters. The Convenience model stresses the “Tight coupling of distribution technology and content”, the distinct Netflix clusters served by the local specifics of the media to which they connect. Aware of this double purpose, contemporary cross-cultural script consultants seek to encourage the interplay between the national texture and transnational universal appeal. That interplay might be perceived slightly differently between national and international viewers (for instance, national viewers might seek out more of their specific cultural texture), but the goal of the script consultant is to help weave them together, so that the final story works for both audiences. This requires a conscious strategy with the creative team, first helping to build out the local story with particular attention to its immediate details, before thinking about a broader audience. The danger of the consultant working the other way around (from broader perspective to the details) would be to ask the writers to think about an imagined, broadly generic audience rather than the specifics of their own local experience and research. To encourage the specific, cross-cultural script consultants focus first on the particular details of the local story. For instance, in La Cacería, the killer used his own car not only as the place to kill his victims, but as a private taxi, a more common practice in provincial Chile than in the capital city Santiago (the miniseries is set before Uber). This explanation, made to Rojas, reinforces the poverty and joblessness of Alto Hospicio in contrast to extravagant wealth of Ponderosa, strengthening the underpinning of local differences that drive the story. If the script does not work on this smaller, detailed level, if the details do not advance the story, it is unlikely to compel an international audience. While consultants may choose not to discuss international issues early in the development process, they will be privately considering them, identifying what might be of broader interest. In this respect, cross-cultural consultants have one advantage over local ones; they will instinctively be aware of what outsiders must learn to understand the story and what is intuitively apparent. Once

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identified, the creative team can build out from the areas that initially required research, both explaining and making them more generally compelling in the script development process. As a result of these discussions, La Cacería, las niñas de Alto Hospicio has both achieved a wide audience for Mega in Chile and has been picked up for distribution in Latin America and Europe.

Conclusion Whatever the culture they are working within, script consultants must display great sensitivity to and respect for the creative team with whom they are collaborating. Good script consultants ally themselves closely with the creative team, respect the existing developmental process, and work collectively to push the script deeper than anyone expects it can go. Cross-cultural consultants have the additional responsibility of recognizing that, consciously or not, they carry their own cultural perspective. This is not something they can or wish to be free of; in fact, most cross-cultural consultants are hired precisely because of what they bring to the project. However, they must be responsible for it, and remain aware of who they are and what expectations they bring. This cultural difference may be of benefit if the consultant is working with a production team that hopes to gain international, internet distribution. Script consultants must first understand and respect the national story, recognizing that it is based on a culture and history that they have learned to appreciate. But subsequently, they can use their inherent difference, their sense of standing outside as consultant and as someone from another culture, to understand the script’s potential to reach a broader audience. National productions gain international distribution because they speak intimately about the world from which they come, while, at the same time, compel a wider audience. The script consultant has to consider both of these perspectives. However, the very power of these stories come from their representation of specific worlds, from the creative team’s own histories and cultures, something that no one else can replicate. The last thing any consultant would want is to inadvertently encourage the loss of this particular, intimate perspective, by making the scripts so broad that they could come from anywhere and anyone.

References Adalian, J. (2018, June 11). Inside the Binge factory. New York Magazine, 18–26 and 90–92. Bordino, A. W. (2017). Script doctoring and authorial control in Hollywood and independent American cinema. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 249–265. de Certeau, M. (1988). The writing of history (Vol. 94, T. Conley, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

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Hadida, A. L., Lampel, J., Walls, W. D., & Joshi, A. (2021). Hollywood studio filmmaking in the age of Netflix: A tale of two institutional logics. Journal of Cultural Economy, 213–238. Kerrigan, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Re-conceptualising screenwriting for the academy: The social, cultural and creative practice of developing a screenplay. New Writing, 13(1), 130–144. Miller, J. L. (2010). “Ugly Betty goes global: Global networks of localized content in the telenovela industry.” Global Media and Communication, 6(2), 198–217. Netflix is moving television beyond time-slots and national markets. (2018, June 30). The Economist. Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/06/ 30/netflix-is-moving-television-beyond-time-slots-and-national-markets White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe (Vol. 7). The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Script Development as a Collective Enterprise: The Writing of the Indigenous Feature Film Waru Christina Milligan

“The biggest thing you can hope for as a storyteller is to (promote) change … and then of course healing.” Briar Grace-Smith (2017)

Introduction The New Zealand feature Waru premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017. An anthology film, it tells the story of a little boy called Waru through the eyes of the women of his community. Waru has been killed by a caregiver before the film starts and the eight ten-minute stories which make up the feature look at the effect of his death on a number of women including his grandmothers, cousins, aunts, his teacher, and others from the M¯aori community to which he belongs. The film was released worldwide following its Toronto showing, receiving a range of mainly positive reviews with that of Mark Kermode (2018) in the Observer (UK) being among the most laudatory: ... the end result adds up to a surprisingly coherent whole. While so many anthology films seem scattershot or disjointed, Waru is perfectly suited to its kaleidoscopic form, taking strength from its multitude of perspectives. It’s a remarkable achievement—authentic, impassioned, unexpected—that stands as a testament to the radical power of cooperative film-making. C. Milligan (B) Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_13

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The film was written and directed by a group of nine M¯aori women, seven writer/directors and one writer/director team, and its cooperative development and production process is considered by all on the filmmaking team to be foundational to the achievement of the film (Akuhata-Brown, 2017). The script development process was informed by such M¯aori values as whanaungatanga (kinship), manaakitanga (generosity) and mana (spiritual power/authority) and was described by one filmmaker as “the optimal development process” (Wolfe, 2019). In telling the stories of a group of women on the morning of the child Waru’s tangi (funeral), the film brings into focus the community as a whole, reflecting a M¯aori way of being on-screen that emerges from a M¯aori way of working in development. This chapter looks at the origins of the film, how the team came together and the w¯ ananga 1 process through which the scripts for the film were written, to explore a script development process grounded in a non-Western world-view.

The Contextual Background In New Zealand, there is a deeply rooted, ongoing and shameful problem with child abuse. Filmmaker Briar Grace-Smith (Pringle, 2017) in an interview on Waru’s release commented: Every five weeks there’s a child killed in New Zealand … There’s lots of reasons … Stress, poverty, the growing gap between rich and poor. Apparently we have the highest rate of homelessness per capita in the world. People don’t understand that about our country, they think it’s all green and beautiful.

M¯aori children figure disproportionately in the statistics of child abuse, as M¯aori do in the figures for homelessness, poverty and family violence (Martin & Pritchard, 2010). For many M¯aori, the collective pain of this trauma is amplified by coverage in the mainstream press which contributes to the perception that M¯aori society as a whole is violent and dysfunctional, eliding both the child abuse in non-M¯aori households, and the majority of M¯aori who do not figure in any of these statistics. As Allen Meek (2013) notes, this framing invokes “the oldest, colonial stereotypes of the lazy, ignorant native or wild savage” (p. 32). From a M¯aori perspective, the persistence of this colonial view of New Zealand’s history has become very tiresome and contributes little value to the public discourse around how to address the country’s child abuse problems. Indigenous New Zealand producers Kerry Warkia and her husband Kiel McNaughton were well-established makers of M¯aori television drama when they decided to develop their first feature, a story about child abuse which 1 The concept of the w¯ ananga traditionally referred to the “house of learning” where esoteric tribal knowledge was passed on to the younger generation. The word is now more widely applied, for instance to mean “university”, “seminar”, “forum”, “wise person”, “sage”, and so on as well as retaining its traditional meaning.

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they planned for Kiel to direct. In the course of developing the story, both say they realized they needed to “give voice to those who needed a voice” (Warkia & McNaughton, 2018). The unheard voice was that of M¯aori women, the mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins and grandmothers of the abused children, and the producers made the decision that “the best way to tell this story was from a female M¯aori perspective and from multiple viewpoints” (Pringle, 2017). So Kiel stepped aside as director and the pair put out a call for M¯aori women screenwriters and directors to come together to create the project which was to become Waru. They received fifty applications (Pringle, 2017) and also approached several experienced writers directly. The final nine who developed the film brought a range of industry experience. Two had feature-producing credits, one featuredirecting credits and one feature screenwriting credits. The others had all gained their experience in short films, television or theatre. The scripts for the film—essentially eight ten-minute shorts each taking a different viewpoint but all set at the same moment in time, at 10 a.m. on the morning of Waru’s tangi—were developed over the course of five days spent at a w¯ ananga on an island off the coast of the city of Auckland. This chapter looks first at the process and then at the underlying principles of the w¯ ananga, in order to reveal the rewards of a script development practice in a culture unfamiliar to most filmmakers. The Script Development Process The filmmakers arrived on the island in varying degrees of preparedness. Some came with stories they wanted to tell or characters they wanted to explore, others with fragments or concepts or research material. Several brought stories from their own lives: for instance, one wrote the story of Waru’s teacher, drawing on her own family background with a mother who was “an early childhood teacher, a carer and a nurturer. She raised our family in an environment that celebrated and honoured children” (Croot, 2017). Others speak of their inspiration in more overtly political terms: “As a (documentary) maker of social issues, I have heard many stories of the most horrific … abuse. So writing (this character), for me, was an opportunity to give power and strength to the survivors” (Croot, 2017). Another found her story in the women who run the community’s kitchens: “They’re kind of our unsung heroes … I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the kitchens and I’m quite a background kind of person, so for me it was an accessible entry into quite a heavy story …” (Hendrikse, 2017). The producers set a series of what appear to be quite arbitrary rules around the storytelling: each story had to be captured in a single, one-shot take; each story would take place at the same time, 10 a.m.; and each filmmaker had only one day of shooting. More understandably, each film was required to tell the story of a wahine M¯ aori (M¯aori woman) directly connected to the child who had died. The ten-minute, single-shot idea emerged from producer Kiel

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McNaughton’s previous experience, as he had already made a similarly technical short film (Wolfe, 2019). For some, this was an exciting provocation, generating a very cinematic approach to the story creation or recalling von Trier’s Five Obstructions in challenging filmmakers to expand their creative approach (Croot, 2017; Wolfe, 2019). Others saw the rules in a more pragmatic light, with one viewing the rules merely as “fiscally based. The creativity derived from each director’s approach is a response to a limited budget” (Croot, 2017). Yet another saw the challenge as no more than she had experienced for years as a writer in theatre (Stewart, 2019). All speak in varying publicity and research interviews of taking the rules on-board quickly in order to move forward with developing their stories, with one commenting: “I was surprised that as we went along, more and more I saw it becoming a strength” (Wolfe, 2019). Far more of a challenge for all the filmmakers was the kaupapa which, in this context, means both the purpose of the work as well as the subject of the film, for in M¯aori terms with this film they are inextricably linked. Producer Kerry Warkia says the project was “born out of heartache, love and passion to protect our children. It was created with a desire to challenge perceptions and to start conversations” (Croot, 2017). The kaupapa was thus a call to each of the filmmakers to confront what for some of them was personal pain and for all of them was a desire to bring about change in a community. Reactions ranged from fear to excitement but the key to accepting the challenge was the collective nature of the work. Much of the first day on the island was spent talking together, which required establishing a space where all could express themselves freely. There were karakia (prayers) to open and close each day and everyone ate together, which are basic protocols of M¯aori gatherings. There was a very high level of trust in the room so that all could discuss their own personal attachments to the stories they were telling. All the filmmakers had direct or indirect knowledge of family violence and the extensive sharing on the first day, before anyone began to discuss their actual story ideas, enabled some of the complex emotions surrounding the subject to be aired and confronted: … to have to sit there and actually talk about (the fact that) our communities kill their children … you know you can read that as a statistic in the paper, but to actually look at each other and acknowledge that it’s happened … these are children who have died and to talk about how they were killed and the reasons they were killed is really traumatic. (Wolfe, 2019)

The subject itself was one of contention when the producers first put out their call for filmmakers. As one filmmaker not involved in the project noted: “In my mind too many negative stories had already been written about M¯aori and I could not reconcile with being yet another writer to tell a story about how useless my people are” (Akuhata-Brown, 2017). Some of the filmmakers solved this by telling the stories of the strong: the teacher; the boss in the

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kitchen; the journalist; the sisters who set out to rescue some children from a bad situation. Others explored the lives of those caught up in poverty or self-harm: the woman with no money to fix the car to get the kids to school; the new mother with alcohol issues trying to be a good person around her baby. One story in particular divided the women in their response towards its inclusion, the story of Mere, a teenager who confronts her own abuser, as filmmaker Paula Whetu Jones (Hendrikse, 2017) discussed at the time: When I put my story forward, the other women weren’t wanting to vilify men, they felt that maybe I was going a little too far … But I pointed out he’s the only man in the whole film that actually has done something bad. We don’t ever reveal who did kill Waru. I pointed out that … we’re okay with pointing the finger at ourselves and taking that responsibility on. We wear that. We don’t want to put our M¯aori men under the spotlight, so we wear the guilt and the shame …

Part of the reluctance came from anger at a common trope around child murder in New Zealand: that the people who commit these crimes are all monsters. This sense was behind the collective decision never to identify Waru’s killer in the film as the filmmakers saw that as long as the killers are viewed as monsters, they are not part of society “and therefore not something we have to fix” (Wolfe, 2019). The filmmakers did not discuss their individual stories on the first day of the w¯ ananga. However on the second day, the producers confronted them with the demand that they pitch their stories immediately, and almost all of the stories pitched were the stories that were in the final film. For one experienced filmmaker in the room, the positive reception and speed with which the pitching and discussion developed, was exhilarating: So this idea of being the lone writer where you might be sitting in your kitchen and … having an idea and then you have a fight with yourself and throw the fucking idea out the window and it doesn’t happen. Or you pitch it to somebody and they go ‘Nah, we don’t like it’. And it gets turned down … and it never happens. We were in this really sort of unusual environment where your idea is picked up and nurtured from the very very first, so it moves forward … (Wolfe, 2019)

The speed was maintained as the writers split up to write their individual first drafts and then reconstituted as a group to read their drafts aloud and receive communal feedback, before continuing their individual development process. As work progressed, experienced actors were brought to the island to work with the writers in improvising situations, which for some contributed strongly to the final dialogue in their scripts. Asked about their role in the process, the producers saw a key responsibility as maintaining what they called a “safe space” because some of the filmmakers were not very experienced and some were writing from instinct informed by

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their own lives, so a secure, trusting environment was paramount (Warkia & McNaughton, 2018). The decision to isolate the writers on an island and run the w¯ ananga over a short period was designed to “create momentum” and they describe their own work in the development process as “listening to understand what is going on, not listening to get an answer” so that they felt able to offer solutions when problems arose (Warkia & McNaughton, 2018). With an estimated budget of NZ$ 215,000 (US$ 141,000), one can surmise however that a short development process was mandated at least partly for budgetary reasons. The last act at the end of the w¯ ananga was a pitch the filmmakers made collectively to establish what order the stories should play in, though the shape of the anthology continued to evolve and was ultimately decided after the films had been shot and individually edited. A final important element of the screenplay fell into place during shooting and editing: the voice of Waru. The finished film opens with Waru in voiceover saying: “When I died I saw the whole world” (Waru, 2017). Writer Josephine Te Whiu Stewart worried that she and director Awanui Simich-Pene were not incorporating the event of the tangi enough in their story of two sisters arguing as they drive on a mission to rescue some children from a bad home situation. Waru’s line came to her as she wrote late one night and ultimately the boy’s voice chants throughout the sisters’ rescue mission, which became the last story in the film (Stewart, 2019). The use of the line not just in the final story but also to open the film was an inspiring decision which in effect transforms the little boy’s absence into a presence that flies through the whole film. As filmmaker Katie Wolfe put it: “The camera then becomes Waru” (Wolfe, 2019). Script Development Based on Tikanga (The Customary System of Values) The decision to approach the script development process through holding a w¯ ananga is not surprising given that the filmmakers are M¯aori.2 However, it is unusual in feature film script development in New Zealand generally as most films, including those made by M¯aori, follow a conventional development model with the screenwriter working much of the time in isolation, as reflected in Katie Wolfe’s comments above on the difficulty of the conventional process. What emerged as of the highest importance for the filmmakers through the w¯ ananga process was the support they all felt from working collectively. This enabled the newer filmmakers to overcome their fears, while for the experienced practitioners, the support was invaluable in scaffolding them as they developed or expanded new creative muscles. Older group members discuss with pride the emergence of one of the younger filmmakers as a natural leader—a reversal of the more usual tuakana-teina relationship, where the older (tuakana) mentors the younger (teina)—and point to this 2 The one exception on the team is producer Kerry Warkia who is of Papua New Guinean and Scottish descent.

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as providing an opportunity for them to take a step back and focus on their own work, rather than feeling the obligation to lead. For those who also had a theatre background, the collaborative creative process was one they were familiar with, and for all of them as M¯aori women, working collectively was not new. Several spoke of the kaupapa requiring more courage than they would have been able to muster as an individual, with most referencing the fact that they are mothers themselves and the subject of child murder within their own community therefore cutting very close to the bone for them. In her article “Indigenous Storytelling: Deconstructing the Archetypes”, Aboriginal filmmaker Pauline Clague (2019) writes of the fundamental differences in the way Indigenous filmmakers see the world and share it with their audiences. She points to the strength and resilience that exists in Indigenous communities but is rarely portrayed or even perceived by non-Indigenous storytellers. When the “imagined common life” that films allude to (Masel & Taylor, 2011) is being imagined by the ill-informed or the uninformed, it is not just characters or events that may be misconstrued: missing from most mainstream representations of Indigenous are the social and spiritual bindings that underpin Indigenous society. In M¯aori terms these concepts include whanaungatanga (kinship, a sense of belonging), manaakitanga (generosity), aroha (love, concern for others), kanohi kitea (physical presence) and mana (spiritual authority), all concepts which were intrinsic to the development process of Waru as discussed and analysed by the filmmakers in interviews. The first four concepts—whanaungatanga, manaakitanga, aroha and kanohi kitea—are reflected consistently in the filmmakers’ discussions of the development process: their kinship with one another as M¯aori, the generosity with which they fed into one another’s story development process, the deep sense of love and concern for those whom their characters represented, and their physical togetherness for much of the w¯ ananga, all emerge from te ao M¯ aori (the M¯aori way of being or world-view). Additionally, they felt a responsibility to honour the lives of M¯aori women who are “terribly, terribly under-represented in the canon of New Zealand cinema” (Radio New Zealand, 2017). As one of the filmmakers put it, the film industry in New Zealand “has been good for male filmmakers and horrific for w¯ ahine (women). It’s one thing to be a man of colour but to be a woman of colour is a whole other set of challenges” (Akuhata-Brown, 2017). This level of underrepresentation is placed in stark relief by the knowledge that Waru is the first feature film made for cinema with a M¯aori woman directing since Merata Mita’s ground-breaking Mauri, released in 1988, a gap of almost thirty years. Mita (1942–2010) is a figure of great mana (spiritual authority) in the Indigenous film world3 and filmmaker Katie Wolfe (2019) discussed her influence during Waru’s script development process: 3

In 2016, the Sundance Institute established an annual fellowship for Indigenous filmmakers to honour Mita’s memory. In 2019, it was awarded to two of the Waru writer/directors, Briar Grace-Smith and Ainsley Gardiner.

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A lot of us knew Merata very well … So we were very mindful of her presence in the work … She was always in our ears. We could hear her, you know? And when we got stuck (we asked) what would Merata do? No two ways about that … she was very, very close to us in the making of this film.

Mana is a word that has moved into the New Zealand English language. In M¯aori terms, it is a spiritual gift or “authority delegated by the gods” (Marsden, 2003, p. 4). It can be inherited or accrued and it can be damaged if not respected. In English, it has come to mean secular authority or prestige or perhaps reputation. Among the Waru filmmakers, naturally, the spiritual element is intrinsic to their use of the word. Renae Maihi’s story is a story of mana and is the central pillar of the film’s structure. She tells the story of Ranui, the child’s paternal grandmother, who comes to take his body from the maternal family in the middle of the tangi. As is appropriate for such a subject, Maihi’s is the one story told completely in te reo (the M¯aori language) and her discussion of her motives reflects her deep embodiment of M¯aori values: When I learned that the story needed to be based around the death of a child through family violence, my initial instinct was absolute: somebody needed to come for him at his tangi to ensure that, despite this tragedy, our little one’s mana was not forgotten and our duty of care to his wairua (spirit) into the afterlife was not ignored. (Croot, 2017)

Maihi places this story in the wider context of the film as a whole: I wanted to reflect within my story the impact that the loss of our culture has had on our people and the importance that the restoration of it and (of) our mana will have on healing us as a country. (Croot, 2017)

All the filmmakers discuss this desire to heal as being fundamental to the kaupapa. Each in their individual way reflects Maihi’s statement of the imperative not just for M¯aori but for New Zealand society as a whole to confront the root causes of family violence and child murder. Equally the terms “heal” or “healing” can be applied to the work they have done in raising the visibility of M¯aori women as filmmakers and writing solid and challenging lead roles for underused M¯aori women actors, righting the wrong that Cherokee filmmaker Heather Rae refers to as “erasure by narrative” (2019) and fulfilling Merata Mita’s call to “reclaim our image” (1996). Mita’s paper “The Soul and the Image” (1996) discusses the challenges she encountered making her own feature documentaries and drama, and echoes the complications M¯aori filmmaker Barry Barclay explored in his book Our Own Image (2015 [1990]), in which he analysed the limitations of conventional First World filmmaking processes when applied to the making of films set in the M¯aori community telling M¯aori stories. Both were writing as pioneers in a time when there was, as Mita (1996) notes, hardly enough screenwork authored by M¯aori filmmakers to constitute what could be called a body of

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work. She dissects the bureaucracy and inflexibility of the mainstream development and production funding processes then extant, and her perceptive commentary, like Barclay’s writings, reflects some of the pain and struggle that pioneer M¯aori filmmakers of that era, which is barely a generation past, endured. Barclay’s philosophical approach to solving the problems that beset him led to his developing a theory of Indigenous filmmaking which he called Fourth Cinema (differentiating it from Third Cinema, while recognizing a common bond in the aim of decolonization). He used the illuminating metaphor of “the camera on the ship” (that of the arriving colonizer) versus “the camera on the shore” (the Indigenous camera) to illustrate the yawning gap between the cinema of the modern nation-state and that of Indigenous people. Barclay believed that the cinema of First Nations was fundamentally different from that of other cultures because the Indigenous camera serves a different world-view. I have discussed elsewhere Barclay’s enduring contribution to the theorizing of M¯aori cinema in his conception of the marae (communal meeting place) as central to the processes of filmmaking (Milligan, 2015). Applying the protocols of the marae to the work of filmmaking preserves the cultural integrity of the filmmaker, and as illustrated above, it was these protocols or concepts which animated the script development of Waru and which are foundational to the strength of the finished film. The appellation “Fourth Cinema” makes the point that Indigenous cinema, while it is built on acquired aesthetic and industrial foundations, is nevertheless sui generis, and it is this quality which informs the rise of Indigenous filmmaking around the world in the present day (iN-Rapport, 2018; Mitchell, 2018). Stephen Cleary, writing about the unconventional script development of the Aboriginal film Sweet Country (2017), asks. How many people who cannot, or don’t want to, write in a way ‘the industry’ expects, get to tell their stories? Get to have their stories even considered? How often does ‘the industry’ take the risk of going out on a limb … to find startling stories that break open the world in a new way for audiences?

Indigenous film, it can be argued, “breaks open the world in a new way”, taking non-Indigenous audiences by surprise as the Observer critique (above) notes, by being “authentic, impassioned, unexpected”. It achieves this by being grounded in a different world-view and then brought into being through a process which enables the writers (and directors once in production) to work in ways true to that world-view.

Conclusion Steven Maras’ (2017) argues for more critical attention to the dangers of universalism and its attendant obscuring of “the way different cultures explore different story worlds” (p. 177). I have sought here to unfold and examine a script development process that is very unusual by Western cinema standards and not common in the Westernized film industry that pertains in New

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Zealand, but which is utterly rooted in the lives and world-view of the writers of Waru. It reveals the voice of the Indigenous storyteller as one informed above all by a fundamental sense of responsibility, responsibility to the people represented and to the people who often have no voice. Unsurprisingly, this mirrors Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s comment in discussing his own feeling of obligation as a filmmaker: “It’s an obligation to those kids who had no voice … They need a voice and that was my job at that point” (cited in Maras, 2016, p. 62). What is heartening to M¯aori and other Indigenous filmmakers is that a similar collective development path has since been followed in the making of the feature films Vai (2019) by a community of Pacific Island filmmakers, and We Are Still Here (2022), a New Zealand-Australian coproduction between M¯aori and Aboriginal filmmakers. Additionally, two of the Waru filmmakers, Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith, have subsequently co-developed and co-directed the feature Cousins (2021). Commenting on what is needed to strengthen and expand the M¯aori film industry, Ainsley Gardiner says: “Collective development, collective producing. We are stronger when we are together” (Akuhata-Brown, 2017). Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the screenwriters of Waru who gave their time to be personally interviewed for this research: Paula Whetu Jones, Josephine Te Whiu Stewart and Katie Wolfe.

References Akuhata-Brown, K. (2017, October 10). The Spinoff. http://www.thespinoff. co.nz; https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/11-10-2017/the-women-of-waru-we-getshit-done/. Accessed on 8 September 2019. Barclay, B. (2015 [1990]). Our own image. University of Minnesota Press. Clague, P. (2019, June 1). Indigenous storytelling: Deconstructing the archetypes. Artlink. https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4758/indigenous-storytelling-dec onstructing-the-archety/. Accessed on 12 December 2019. Cleary, S. (2017, September 10). Let me tell you a story. Tonight, SWEET COUNTRY directed by Warwick Thornton and written by Steven McGregor and David Trantor, won the Jury prize at the Venice International Film Festival. Facebook. www.facebook.com Cousins. (2021). Wrs: Briar Grace-Smith, Patricia Grace. Dirs: Ainsley Gardiner, Briar Grace-Smith, New Zealand, 90 mins. Croot, J. (2017, October 22). Stuff. www.stuff.co.nz. https://www.stuff.co.nz/ent ertainment/film/98027844. Accessed on 12 December 2019. Grace-Smith, B. (2017). Interview. Extras on Waru DVD. New Zealand: Vendetta Films. Hendrikse, I. (2017, October 18). Metro magazine. www.metromag.co.nz. https:// metromag.co.nz/arts-film-tv/waru-the-new-zealand-film-you-need-to-see. Accessed on 8 September 2019.

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iN-Rapport_Jan2018_SA_05_indd.pdf. (2018). https://gallery.mailchimp.com/4f5 049d7811bd16c144f671c2/files/9959814d-2117-4c79-ad8d-dda43d3aaebd/iN_ Rapport_Jan2018_SA_06.pdf. Accessed on 10 September 2019. Jones, P. W. Personal interview, 4 July 2019. Kermode, M. (2018, November 11). The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2018/nov/11/waru-review-maori-drama-mark-kermode Maras, S. (2016). (Ed.). Ethics in screenwriting: New perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan. Maras, S. (2017). Towards a critique of universalism in screenwriting criticism. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.8.2.177_1 Marsden, R. M. (2003). The woven universe: Selected writings of Rev. M¯ aori Marsden. (Te, A. C. Royal, Ed.). The Estate of Rev. M¯aori Marsden. Martin, J., & Pritchard, R. (2010). Learning from tragedy: Homicide within families in New Zealand 2002–2006. Ministry of Social Development Te Manat¯u Whakahiato Ora. https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/ research/learning-from-tragedy/index.html Masel, B., & Taylor, C. (2011). Unscripted: The true life of screenplays. Lumina AFTRS, 7 , 118–124. https://www.aftrs.edu.au. Accessed on 10 September 2019. Mauri. (1998). Wr/Dir: Merata Mita, New Zealand, 101 mins. Meek, A. (2013). Postcolonial trauma: Child abuse, genocide, and journalism in New Zealand. In B. Hokowhitu & V. Devadas (Eds.), The Fourth Eye: M¯ aori media in Aotearoa/New Zealand (pp. 25–41). University of Minnesota Press. Milligan, C. (2015). Sites of exuberance: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema, ten years on. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 11(3). https://doi.org/ 10.1386/macp11.3.347_1 Mita, M. (1996). The soul and the image. In J. Dennis & J. Bieringa (Eds.), Film in Aotearoa New Zealand (2nd ed., pp. 36–54). Victoria University Press. Mitchell, W. (2018, March 30). Screen Daily. https://www.screendaily.com/features/ whats-driving-the-new-wave-of-indigenous-filmmaking/5127820.article. Accessed on 10 September 2019. Pringle, G. (2017, September 15). Stack. https://stack.com.au/film-tv/film-tv-interv iew/important-new-kiwi-film-waru-premieres-at-tiff/ Radio New Zealand. (2017, July 26). Radio New Zealand. https://www.rnz.co.nz/ national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/201852433/waru-eight-wahine-bearwitness-to-child-abuse. Accessed on 8 September 2019. Rae, H. (2019, June 18). Sundance Collab. https://collab.sundance.org/catalog/Cha nging-the-Cultural-Narrative-with-Heather-Rae. Accessed on 12 December 2019. Stewart, J. Te W. Personal interview, 10 July 2019. Vai. (2019). Wrs/Dirs: Becs Arahanga, Amberley Jo Aumua, Matasila Freshwater, Dianna Fuemana, Miria George, Ofa Guttenbeil, Marina Alofagia McCartney, Nicole Whippy, Sharon Whippy, New Zealand, 90 mins. Warkia, K., & McNaughton, K. (2018, March). Native minds. Presentation given at M¯aoriland Film Festival, Otaki, NZ. Waru. (2017). Wrs/Dirs: Ainsley Gardiner, Casey Kaa, Renae Maihi, Briar GraceSmith, Paula Whetu Jones, Chelsea Cohen, Katie Wolfe. Wr: Josephine Te Whiu Stewart. Dir: Awanui Simich-Pene, New Zealand, 86 mins. We Are Still Here. (2022). Wr/Dirs: Danielle MacLean, Dena Curtis, Renae Maihi, Tracey Rigney, Tim Worrall & Richard Curtis. Wrs: Miki Magasiva, Samuel Paynter, Tiraroa Reweti. Dirs: Beck Cole, Chantelle Burgoyne Mario Gaoa, 80 mins. Wolfe, K. Personal interview, 16 December 2019.

Independent, Short and Controversial: The Script Development of San Sabba Romana Turina

Introduction Script development for the short essay film San Sabba (Turina, 2016) both drew on and suffered from the historical and political situation and cultural environment embedded in the city where the story took place, Trieste. Located on the Mediterranean, before being annexed by Italy after the end of the First World War, the Imperial Free City of Trieste was a multi-ethnic Austrian port (1382–1918) only briefly conquered by Napoleon (1809–1813). In the city, cultural and social affiliations varied, but were dominated by the three major ethnic groups: Austrian, Italian and Slovenian. However, between 1918 and 1943 the Fascist regime forcefully Italianised, exiled or imprisoned the indigenous Slav population of the area (Ebner, 2011, pp. 189–191, 260–261). The cumulative effect of the policies that backed up Italian anti-Slavism from the 1920s and until the 1950s, including the years between 1943 and 1945 when the city was annexed to the Greater Germany, is embodied in one building, the Risiera di San Sabba. On site, thousands of freedom fighters were tortured, killed and others were chosen to be exploited as human shields during antipartisan operations (Kalc, 2005; Purini, 2010). Today, the site is a museum dedicated to the remembrance of the Holocaust, as San Sabba was also a concentration camp for the gathering, exploitation and killing of the Jews— historical research estimates the number of the Jewish people killed on site R. Turina (B) Arts University Bournemouth, Poole, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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at about one thousand (Verginella, 2008). In 1954, Italy regained the city and Trieste found itself on the Iron Curtain dividing capitalist and communist Europe. In 1965, the plans to make the Risiera di San Sabba a National Museum were made public, following the European opening of memorials at Buchenwald (1958), Sachsenhausen (1961), Dachau (1965). However, in 1966, much of the buildings at San Sabba were destroyed by a fire, and the reduced, refurbished and sanitised museum commemorating the Holocaust opened in 1975. The returning question of silenced truths concerning the purpose and operations launched from the Risiera di San Sabba, encapsulates the tension between established historical narratives and a past that if acknowledged would challenge them (Turina, 2016). This silence prompted my commitment to writing a film able to expose this case of historical amnesia, which was initially envisaged as a documentary commenting on a sentence uttered in 1970, in Düsseldorf, by Franz P. Stangl, SS Commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka: ‘As I entered the office, Globoˇcnik said: you are transferred immediately to Trieste for anti-partisan combat’ (Sereny, 1995, p. 249). This chapter will examine the development of the screenplay, starting from the initial research of documents in several archives and the oral testimony of survivors, to the setbacks and re-writing of the script to adjust it to a rapidly evolving situation, and the creative decisions imposed by the writing process— specifically the use of animation and still photography—as a counter-narrative to the one offered by the tour guides at the Museum of the Risiera di San Sabba.

Negotiating Access and Finding the Story In developing a story for a documentary, usually the subject is known, and the struggle is in building the most effective narrative structure to present this subject-led story to the audience. In the case of San Sabba, the material I uncovered revealed new layers of meaning and kept pushing forward the story I believe that I found. Meaning emerged during the process of writing, as the structure of the script continued to be unsatisfactory, allowing for the rise of narrative ‘hotspots’ that pushed the development of the script in new directions. In 2010, while visiting the museum of the Risiera di San Sabba, I had my first encounter with Marino Palcich, a valuable witness of the activities and routines established on site when San Sabba was an Axis concentration camp (1943 and 1945). Between 2010 and 2012 he used to visit the site every Sunday and tell his story to the visitors, competing for the attention of people with the local tour guides. This behaviour, indicating a discrepancy between the narrative in display at the museum and the experience of the survivor, had attracted the attention of the employed personnel, who tolerated Marino out of respect for his old age and difficult life history. I had identified the cause of Marino’s behaviour in the biased informative exhibition presented on site; the

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most evident example of the historical discourse shaping the narrative of the city, in that the exhibition underplayed the use of the camp as a base for antipartisan combat between 1943 and 1945 and mirrored the historical discourse found in the Nazis camps of central and eastern Europe. During my repeated visits to the site, I had the chance to investigate what the place meant both for the people working in it, and the people visiting it. Initially, I considered these people as potential characters, and their narrative as possible storylines to interlace. Different nationalities, religious affiliation and ages would bring to light different nuances of a harrowing history, but the viability of a documentary that narrated multiple kinds of relationship with the Risiera di San Sabba became a reality only when Marino agreed to work with me on the script, as he was a witness challenging the reductive translation of the site’s history. I hoped to bring Marino’s memory back to life with the use of the archival documents I would find and develop a script in which he could debate different version of the camp’s history with the ‘establishment’. Palcich had been interned in the Risiera for five months in 1944 with other Kinderbanditen (children-bandits), youngsters helping the anti-fascists. During that period, he was employed both as slave labour in the camp and as a human shield during the Axis missions against the partisans (Maranzana, 2004). His experience was of a camp that was used as a transit for the Jewish people sent to the camps in the East, and a detention, torture and killing site for anti-fascists, partisans and their families. Offering a view on the camp from the inside, Marino initially agreed to being interviewed on camera in the Risiera and to engaging in a debate with the people working in the Museum of the Risiera di San Sabba on the high number of Slavs who had died there as political prisoners (anti-fascists) or hostages, in retaliation for aiding freedom fighters, most of whom at the time were linked to Slav freedom fighter’s organisations. I hoped this exchange would reveal how the privileging of certain accounts of history entailed the silencing of other perspectives, which are not represented in any Italian media. In that case, I would be able to develop the script towards an essay film that drew from original archival footage, specifically material I found in the Instituto Luce Cinecittà on the opening of the museum of the Risiera di San Sabba. Furthermore, the absence of an Italian film on the Risiera di San Sabba added to the appeal of constructing a documentary able to tell Marino’s story, and to comment on the proximity of this camp to civilian life, which would continue undisturbed outside the walls of what was known between 1943 and 1945 like the ‘German barracks’, or one of the many ‘Police Depot’ in Trieste.1 The development of this script proved difficult and required changes in structure and story at multiple stages. When Marino entered the archive with me, my relationship to screenwriting for this film changed. The recuperative naming at stake in the observation of photographs made me toy with the idea of including images of unknown people and massacres in the documentary. 1

Interview with Marino Palcich, January 2013. Author’s archive.

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Marino objected to the idea, and I found his position controversial because in the case of the silenced history of the indigenous Slavs in Italy, it equated to the iteration of silence on what had happened. Simultaneously, however, Marino’s recognition of some people in the photos, and objection to their use as a source of spectacle in film, confirmed how the horrific dehumanisation the images pronounce should not be softened by any narrative device—as voiceover or music. This sudden vicarious vicinity to the victim forced me to see how the photo made for an obscene portrayal (Liss, 1998, pp. 5–6), as they were the result of crimes to which those victims who had become real people to me only through the words of Marino were subjected. Their use in the film would have iterated the view of those people as corpses and continue to define them as mute objects of our gaze, not as people. It is in this context that Lanzmann’s work became a point of reference for the narration of genocide within a script, as the debate on the use of photos generated questions about notions of realism, and when Marino suggested watching Ostatni Etap/The Last Stage (Wanda Jakubowska, 1948), as the only film that portrayed the fear he felt in the camp, I was confronted with a notion of realism driven by the personal experience suffered by the filmmaker, who witnessed the narrated events, which I could not offer. I could have based the entire script on Marino’s version of the events, but issues of agency brought to light the risk of portraying Marino’s testimony as the archetypal experience in the Risiera di San Sabba. This was problematic on multiple levels. First, it would give to the documentary the impression of bridging the epistemological gap between the witness and the audience about the past, as if by watching this one film we could enter all the truth about San Sabba. Second, due to Marino’s biographical authority, it could ossify the depiction of characters, place and relationships. I wanted to do more than that, but I was not sure about the story I wanted to tell. A more urgent matter, however, took my attention away from the abovementioned debated issues. While working with Marino on possible sequences that would introduce the events through interviews, as in Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985), I was suddenly refused permission to film in the camp and no explanation was offered. While forced to abandon my original project, Marino continued to fascinate me. Consequently, this stage of development concluded with the production of a short fiction that explores the relationship with the past the postmemory generation (Hirsch, 2012) might have, Behind the Book (Turina, 2015). The development of the screenplay for this 11-min film happened over a weekend. The script was re-written five times and went from a confrontation between a tour guide and Marino in the Risiera, to a meeting in a TV studio where Edda, a descendant of a camp guard, meets Marino and understands she has been given a sugar-coated version of the past by her grandfather. The screenplay drew from the experiences of a few descendants of inmates and guards that I met over the preceding years, who conveyed their surprise in finding unimaginable versions of their siblings’ experiences in archival documents they had never seen before—documents that told a

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different story to the one they grew up knowing as an irrefutable past. In the script, the invisibility of Marino’s story elicited my memory of half-confessed archival finds by people I met, and they merged in a story arc that served to put in front of the audience a vicarious meeting that indeed could have happened. The understanding gained in the development and production of Behind the Book made me realise that the story’s structure I had chosen did not serve the subject matter. The story had revealed the presence of a gap, a silenced experience happened in the past that had influenced the depicted characters, Marino and Edda. The film, however, had neither offered the space for the exploration of Marino’s experience, as a survivor of a deleted world, nor Edda’s experience, as a descendant confronted with a past she had no knowledge of. In this, Behind the Book indicated the possibility of a relationship of discovery between Marino and Edda that could be developed into a script for a feature film. Most importantly, however, it revealed the moment in time I needed to explore more, if I wanted to talk about silenced history, collective memory and postmemory in Trieste: the crossing of the threshold that divides a life of certainties based on a certain past from a life of wondering about the trajectory our lives could have taken if we knew the truth about the past, or an unknown event had not disrupted a continuity within a community. Therefore, the script development of the fiction Behind the Book (2015) constituted my point of entrance into possible ways of developing a new story contemplating the generational structure of memory and how it continues to inflect who we are. The idea for a script based on unseen documents, illustrating the harrowing topic without entering the camp continued to simmer in my mind, but when I presented the idea to Palcich he decided to withdraw from the project, as in his opinion there was no point to it if we were not allowed to film in the Risiera. Hence, through the second stage of development of the project for San Sabba (2016), I decided to include aspects of historical and geographical information into the screenplay, and to investigate the relationship between history, trauma, memory and postmemory in Trieste. I approached this second stage of development by drawing from some sequences filmed in Trieste, which recorded my reactions to the finding of documents and photos concerning the silenced history of the Slavs. The finding unearthed a problem of discrepancy, which would become the theme of the script and would reveal historical events that had been silenced. The task was difficult, especially because of the confusion created by the indiscriminate use of images of killing by the Italian media advocating the ferocity of the Slavs during the past decades, and the firm association of San Sabba to the established narratives of the Holocaust. It compelled me to be particularly precise about the content, sources and context of the material I decided to use to develop the script, as photos and archival sources are far from being a window into the past, and they often do not hold a fixed meaning.

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Thus, I had to define the indexicality of the archival material I continued to discover against the grain of the Italian traditional reading of San Sabba. The process, and matters of clarity, led to the construction of two story arcs, one collective and one personal, that I would merge only at the end of the script: a historical counter-narrative supported by images of long-buried documents and photos, and the narration of my own experience of discovery. I would allow my presence in the film to become a character in the script, and explore how my actions and reactions were able to inject subtext in the scenes, or link the two story arcs in a reflective dialogue about the most harrowing issues I encountered. To enhance the importance of my own take on the event, I wrote parts of a screenplay for an animation that would be inserted into the film. This process turned my attention back towards the construction of history as a narrative within the Municipal Museum of the Risiera di San Sabba. It revealed interesting connections and practices by which the making of history emerged as a cultural practice (Munslow, 2006, p. 17) informing concepts of heritage. The site drew my attention once when I had met Marino, now I wanted to go back and look at its rebranding by the subsequent political powers ruling the city of Trieste, as the place began its life as an Austrian rice mill before becoming an Italian police garrison, a Nazi/Axis police detention centre and concentration-extermination camp, an Anglo-American refugee camp and finally an Italian museum commemorating the Holocaust. To me, however, the significance of the site resided in its symbolic meaning as the embodiment of a structural discourse of historical amnesia. The research was completed, and I went back to the drawing board to review the creative decisions I had undertaken to date and reconsider the structure the script needed to fully represent the extent of the research, as well as address the questions that had emerged by that point. Several narrative modes could be implemented, but so far none had offered a clear answer to what I had in mind. Did I really find the story? Was it an issue of structure?

The Process of Writing To draw as much information as I could from the archive and translate this information into a screenplay for a documentary, I established three investigative trajectories that determined the structure of the script. First, I determined how the archival material demonstrated that the Risiera di San Sabba was primarily an anti-partisan combat depot and secondarily a site where the Jewish population of the area, and the Balkans, would transit in their journey to other extermination camps. Second, I worked on the elements that would permit me to show the dissonance between the characteristics of the historical events and the perception of them created by the stories I heard as a child. And third, I explored the visual narrative techniques able to express the gap between the first and the second trajectory to explore how we envisage who/what people were in the past. As a result, the idea of writing a classic screenplay, even if

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conforming with the open questions of the documentary form, started to look unlikely. This resulted in a practice that solved narrative problems through the act of writing and creating moving images, simultaneously. To translate the history of the Risiera di San Sabba, I started on the recuperation of the faces and the names of the victims. I compared them with the people who managed the Risiera between 1943 and 1945, who in 1943 left behind the extermination camps in Poland (Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor) and moved to the north-eastern part of Italy annexed to the Greater Germany (Sereny, 1995). My last visit to the Museum of the Risiera di San Sabba, in 2016, had revealed the extent to which the new exhibition continued to affiliate the site to the Holocaust narrative, which is supported by extracts from the film Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985) and the display of the iconic inmate’s uniform the media associate with the wider concentration camp experience in Europe, even if in the Risiera the prisoners did not wear uniforms or were tattooed. Looking into Lanzmann’s work, there is no mention of the Risiera di San Sabba; however, when we see his interview with Franz Süchomel, SS in Treblinka, his attempt to interview Josef Oberhauser, SS officer in Belzec, and his debates with several other interviewees on the Holocaust, they often speak about SS that were all working in the Risiera during the last two years of the Second World War. Unfortunately, I was not able to access Lanzamann’s filmed interviews at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, as they became available on site only from July 2016, but they could retain information on the Risiera that were of not relevance to Lanzmann’s project. The study of Shoah led me to an analysis of the concentrationary cinema, as Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (2014) define their work on Night and Fog (Resnais, 1956). Concentrationary is here the key term, as indicating the system of camps where starvation and violence ‘eroded brain functions, organs and hearing and worse: the starving organism consumes its own organs to maintain life to the bitter end’ (Pollock & Silverman, 2014, p. 27). This systematic erosion of human life that resulted in the creation of living corpses named in Nazi slang Muselmänner is a reality that did not completely apply to the Risiera di San Sabba camp (Yad Vashem, Resource Center).2 Thus, from the very beginning I was determined to debate the validity of the exhibition in the Risiera di San Sabba, in that it drew on the Holocaust narrative and focused predominantly on the narration of the camp’s function in gathering and deporting the Jewish population. A decision this, that guaranteed the exclusion from public memory of the Italian contribution to this mission, as the responsibility was given to the German invader, and muted any debate on the site’s most important purpose, anti-partisan combat, as the alignment of the camp to the Holocaust narrative determined the narrative. This was a key point that needed to emerge from the script, as the exhibition in the 2 Muselmänner (Muslims) were called the inmates that showed severe physical weakness and rested in a position similar to the Muslims during prayers.

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museum mentioned the Italian policy of persecution, exile and capital punishment against the indigenous Slavs rebelling against Fascism, but the historical narrative minimised the event and avoided any reference to the impact of the anti-partisan combat in the daily routine of the Risiera. Hence, the use of extracts from Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985) on the site constituted yet another narrative technique used to legitimise a mediation of history that intended to focus on one historical reading; one that silenced the details that would not fit within this Holocaust narrative embraced by commemorative site. Additionally, the script had to make clear how the exhibition gave relevance to the building of the museum, which defaced the aspect of the camp, and supported it as an act of artistic intervention of the architect Romano Boico (1901– 1985) following the example of the Memorial to Mauthausen-Gusen I (1967) (Bonfanti & Porta, 1973). This process of discovery, comparison, thinking and feeling the difficulties I encountered added to the impossibility to write nowhere else but in the editing room. To the hours of footage that I had filmed in Trieste through the years of research, I started adding images documenting the violence inflicted on the political prisoners, partisans and hostages interned in the Risiera as collected by Albin Bubniˇc (1915–1978), a journalist working for the Slovenian newspaper Primorski Dnevnik, who was interned in Mauthausen and after the liberation gathered information on the Rižarna (Risiera di San Sabba). This writing through editing, permitted me to test the capacity of the archival material to tell the story of the Risiera, while I considered the relationship between the anti-partisan activity exercised before and after the arrival of the Germans in 1943. The research I had conducted offered me a canvas of references, and the short film forms the parameter within which I wanted to translate the complexity I encountered. To explore the film form as a medium for the translation of silenced history, I started to experiment with a braided narrative and realised that a personal link to the site would have added both subtext and a ‘way in’ for the audience. Reminiscent of the stories my mother used to tell me about the Rišarna when I was a child, I obtained her permission to write my mother into the film as a character. In 1955, my mother lodged in the concentration camp of the Risiera di San Sabba, which the Anglo-American had opened as a Refugee Camp for people emigrating from Yugoslavia. She had rarely mentioned the detail before, used as she was to narrate the stories of the freedom fighters her family helped. In listening to her re-elaboration of the experience, and how she had tried to pass on the experience of her family to me, I understood the impact of those stories in my understanding of the site. This generated a process of reflection on the connection between her story, my reading of the past and my desire to reveal the lack of representation and memorialisation encountered on site at the museum. To translate the warmth and softness of her narration, I envisioned the presence of a little girl in the script, who expresses the personal impact I had perceived before I learned any history, present as it was in the emotional toll

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the people I grew up among had been paying during their entire lives. Hence, if the sequences supporting the historical discourse would have established the legitimacy of the events I narrated, due to the exhibition of artefacts (documents and photos), postmemory would have emerged through the process of taking history apart, of opening it and implementing narrative techniques able to generate questions on cognitive processes, meaning and survival mechanisms. Meanwhile, news of a monument erected in Trieste (September 2016) reached me. In the Park of Remembrance, a new plaque announced that the liberation of Trieste happened at the hands of the Anglo-American forces (12 June 1945). The severity of this action, which cancelled the memory of the liberation of Trieste by the Yugoslav troops (1 May 1945), compelled me to display more archival material in San Sabba. The problem lay in the necessity to establish silenced history not only as a relevant memory event but to reinsert the silenced events into public knowledge. In this case, the narration of the Risiera’s original purpose not only was necessary but would constitute an act of resistance to an ongoing process of erosion of the indigenous Slavs’ history in Trieste. Thus, I went back to the archive to find the documents that would establish unequivocally the original purpose of the site. The function of the Museum of the Risiera is particularly important, as in Italy the “Italian concentration camp system” (Collotti, 2001, p. 227), a galaxy of 49 camps that covered each region and different purposes including the deportation of Slavs, is not memorialised. To find documents related to the camp, and the German mission in Trieste, I spent time exploring the archives of the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, the Imperial War Museum, the British National Archives and the British Library. This resulted in the recovery of unexpected documents: early official publications of the United Nations, which displayed highly confidential documents and established the case of an Italian genocidal ˇ program against the Slovenes and the Croats (Cermelj, 1936/1945; INPE, 1954; RYGID, 1945; Škerl, 1945; YIO, 1945). The documents testify to the logic of imperialism and overlapping violence (racial, cultural and political) that was established in Trieste, an annexed territory from 1918, which continued with the German invasion and annexation to the Greater Germany in 1943.

Writing Through the Archives With the documents found in Berlin, I created the third act of the film San Sabba (2016), where I trace how the staff of the Risiera started their careers with operation T4 in Germany, continued with Aktion Reinhardt (Operation Reinhardt) in Poland, and concluded in Trieste (Aktion R1), where the Germans helped the Italians in what was considered a perilous theatre of war because of the anti-partisan combat against the Slavs (1943–1945).3 This 3 Aktion T4 was promoted by Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti. It implemented the forced euthanasia of selected layers of German population. Aktion Reinhardt implemented

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information was also corroborated by relevant references to Odilo Globoˇcnik, Higher SS and Police Leader in Trieste between 1943 and 1945, in an interview recorded by Gitta Sereny with Franz Stangl (1970), commandant of Treblinka. Following the uprising of Treblinka (2 August 1943) Stangl was transferred to Trieste (Sereny, 1995, p. 249) where he assisted Globoˇcnik in the organisation of the campaign against the partisans and the exploitation and transfer of the local Jews (ibid., p. 261). The crude depiction of persecution found in the documents and images collected in the United Nations Archive was vitally important, as this understanding amounted to the acquiescence in the suffering inflicted in the Risiera di San Sabba and became a key element I wished to foreground in the film. This breakthrough also added to the debate on how the Holocaust narrative aided the current exhibition in minimising the significance of the camp for the anti-partisan combat. Thus, once more ignoring or excluding the experience of the Slavs in Trieste, as most of the anti-fascist partisans were of Slav ethnicity. Also, it added to the understanding of how the Italian government continues to support a systematic attempt to expunge this history from the historical accounts. The discovery of new material subjected the project to a substantial revision, in that I added the German point of view on the Risiera di San Sabba. The material made the discourse stronger, as the narrative is now able to demonstrate how the anti-partisan missions led by the Italo-German troops only intensified policies already in place during the fascist era. This timeline is the fabric against which the more than 300 testimonies offered during the Risiera di San Sabba trial (1976) find the historical background to make sense. In this context, the insertion of my relationship to the site aided my attempt to cover the entire spectrum of what postmemory might relate to in this case: the still images of the animation testifying to the naïve storytelling of children, the revelation of the documents and photos of the victims held in the archives. The footage records the new exhibition failing to indicate the site’s purpose in the anti-partisans’ Italo-German combat, the German documents offer an overview of the Axis mission. Finally, the whole third act reiterates the exclusion from the Italian public memorials of any link to the Italian policies against the indigenous Slavs.

Conclusion The process of researching, developing and writing San Sabba transformed the project from a documentary to an essayistic personal film, engineered to produce curiosity, hold the audience interested, and ultimately reveal a silenced set of events. It was a process of script development that saw the testing of ‘classic’ screenwriting processes: the development of characters, a story arc, a program of mass murder of Jews, Poles and other Slavs in Poland (in the camps of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, among others).

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the testing of possible plot and sequences, the exploration of the theme of betrayal, which I only discovered during the writing of the fiction Behind the Book, and that continued to be central in developing each script. This took over the entire project in the editing room when screenwriting was applied to the editing process, and sequences filmed ad hoc were added, creating a film that explores a case of ‘historical betrayal’ at a commemorative site. In terms of the result of this process, on the one hand San Sabba presents the archival material in its indexical characteristics; as presumed snapshots of reality that are reduced to traces left behind by complex political, social and cultural processes alien to the present, and therefore mute and open to interpretation. On the other hand, the images translating personal experiences aim to convey the warm immediacy of life and the innocence of childhood memory. As highlighted above, I wrote parts of a screenplay for an animation that would be inserted in the film. The stories I wanted to represent with the animation reflected the memory of an educational device, storytelling, which introduced me to a very specific slice of history—one considered an unthinkable topic of discussion when children were present: the cruelty of Fascism and the anti-fascist struggle in the annexed territory to Italy between 1918 and 1945. I hoped the archival material and the animated sequence would clash in their stark differences and open a space for reflection for the audience. In the case of San Sabba, however, the animation offered an overly abstract and sweet rendering of the past and did not allow for the archival and live-action sequences to hold the attention of the audience there where it was needed the most, the debate of the archival material demonstrating that the primary purpose of the camp was anti-partisan combat. The discovery of a current desire to silenced history, which was partially perceived as diminished, sobered the process of development and production, making the film a more political piece. As a result, some frames of the animation were edited in sequences that link the historical narrative to processes of personal reflection on how history entered my life, but there was no animated sequence. The intention was to indicate the gap between the indexicality of the archival material, whose truth is evasive and un-filmable, and the childish colours of my reckoning with that past, which presuppose each other and here constitutes the fabric of postmemory—which is not memorialised in any museum in Trieste. As visible, some images from the animation evoke the tropes of the Holocaust narrative, for example in the characterisation of a child’s coat that presents yellow stars as buttons and the image of the child once freed from the camp. This resemblance comments on the influence of cinema, which had educated me on the look of the Second World War. Also, it indicates my difficulty in representing these victims, who hold no place in the Italian collective memory as they have been withheld from media attention in Italy. Thus, the final version of the script (and film) invites the audience to ponder on how the camp hosts the memories of people that experienced it as a concentration camp, a torture and killing centre, a refugee camp and a museum,

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but also how today the site is nothing more than an anonymous building among supermarkets. Postmemory in this case enters the film as an unresolved knot of questions, which expose the historical discourse in action at the Museum of the Risiera di San Sabba where the purpose of the building is simplified, concealed behind the vast network of references offered by the Holocaust narrative that dominates our Western understanding of evil in the twentieth century. Symbolic of the stories that enter our psyche in childhood, the opening image of the film is repeated in the end. Water, a river, the neutral beauty of a forest is what the film returns to, as postmemory can never do anything else but vicariously try to understand the stream of experiences of the ancestors and reflect our relationship to them in the present. And it is in the dialogue between a repressive tradition and the documents left behind by the indigenous Slav population of Trieste, that I understood how the mediation of silenced history is directly affected by the presence of sufficient archival material establishing its legitimacy as an event in the historical continuum of a nation, especially when no living witness is available. To better understand this project, please watch the films following one of these links: Behind the Book https://vimeo.com/141881380 San Sabba https://vimeo.com/188841154 http://film-directory.britishcouncil.org/san-sabba The oscillation between the different material that entered the film, which was inserted in the writing of the film in the editing room, permitted me to highlight the historical and cultural aspects of my own life and heritage against the cultural whole that in Trieste is not at all ‘whole’. Learning about script development, San Sabba expresses in itself the difficulties encountered by the filmmaker in illustrating the multiple layers of history within the screenplay, as history is more a process than a fixed fact. The scripts and then the cycle of feedback and creative surge that organised the script-film in the editing room, tried to narrate a journey of discovery of the silenced past within the given facts of an ossified tradition. This translation of silenced history into a script, with the final film a manifestation of a screenwriting process that spilled into the editing room, positions this experience as a learning process in script development. It also questions the form and the structure of classic screenwriting: as San Sabba was born as a documentary, it gave birth to a script for a short fiction, and then it mutated into a story that occurred in the making of an essay film. I hope the film’s value resides in the ability to position itself outside the polarity of the political debate in Trieste, where the Italian and the Slav positions retain an antagonistic quality, in that nationality in my work is perceived as an enriching core of cultural qualities removed from the implications associated with the idea of nationalism. This resonates with

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Slavoj Žižek’s concept of parallax view (2006) and is found in the meaning of the word meja (border) in Slovenian, as the territory in the middle that accommodates diversity—and encapsulates the multidimensionality of Trieste’s history, collective memories and postmemory.

References Bonfanti, E., & Porta, M. (1973). Città museo e Architettura Gruppo BBPR. Milano: Vallecchi. ˇ Cermelj, L. (1936/1945). Life and death struggle of a national minority (The Jugoslavs in Italy). Tiskarna Ljudske Pravice, Collotti, E. (2001). I Campi di Concentramento in Italia. Franco Angeli. Ebner, M. R. (2011). Ordinary violence in Mussolini’s Italy. Cambridge University Press. Hirsch, M. (2012). The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the holocaust. Columbia University Press. Institute for International Politics and Economics. (1954). Italian genocide policy against the Slovenes and the Croats—A selection of documents. UN Archive. Italian crimes in Yugoslavia. UN Archives. Jakubowska, W. (1948). The last stage. P. P. Film Polski/ Times Film Corporation. Warsaw. Kalc, A. (2005). Ai confini orientali della civiltà Italiana tra le due guerre mondiali. In Rojc, T. (Ed.), Trst—umetnost in glasba ob meji v dvajsetih in tridesetih letih XX Stoletja (pp. 57–76). Glasbena Matica. Lanzmann, C. (1985). Shoah. New Yorker Films. Liss, A. (1998). Trespassing through shadows—Memory, photography & the holocaust. University of Minnesota Press. Maranzana, M. (2004, December 5). Schiavi di Hitler, 60 anni dopo. Il Piccolo. (p. 9). Munslow, A. (2006). Deconstructing history. Routledge. Pollock, G., & Silverman, M. (2014). Concentrationary cinema—Aesthetics as political resistance in Alain Resnais’s night and fog. Berghahn. Purini, P. (2010). Metamorfosi etniche. I cambiamenti di popolazione a Trieste, Gorizia, Fiume e in Istria, 1914–1975. Kappa Vu. Resnais, A. (1956). Night and fog. Anatole Dauman; Argos Films. Paris. Royal Yugoslav Government Information Department. (1945). Summary of first six reports of the state commission for the investigation of the crimes of the invaders and their assistants. UN Archives. Sereny, G. (1995). Into that darkness: From mercy killing to mass murder. Random House. Škerl, F. (1945). The struggle of the Slovenes in the littoral for the people’s authority. Ljubljana University Press. Turina, R. (2015). Behind the book. Printed Press Productions. Turina, R. (2016). San Sabba. Printed Press Productions. http://film-directory.britis hcouncil.org/san-sabba. Verginella, M. (2008). Il Confine degli Altri: La questione giuliana e la memoria slovena. Donzelli Editore. Žižek, S. (2006). The parallax view. MIT Press.

How Angelica Became The Strange Case of Angelica: From the Idea to the Script to the Book to the Film Rita Benis

Introduction Starting in the silent film epoch with Douro, Faina Fluvial/Labor on the Douro (1931) and moving to the digital format at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Manoel de Oliveira’s career crossed different periods of Portuguese history, including António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship (1933–1974), during which many of Oliveira’s screenplay projects did not progress to production due to the tight censorship (see Benis, 2017). Angelica was one of those projects Oliveira “was not allowed to make” (Oliveira, 1998, p. 5). Angelica’s screenplay tells the story of Isaac, a young photographer who is commissioned to photograph a recently deceased young woman—the Angelica of the title—who later visits him in his dreams and becomes his fatal obsession. The screenplay has four main versions, corresponding to the years 1950/1954, 1988, 1998 and 2010. According to Oliveira, “Angelica was thought in 1950, written in haste in 1952 and fully developed in 1954” (Grugeau & Loiselle, 1998/1999, p. 28). In 1954 Oliveira submitted the screenplay for financial support to the censorship secretariat,1 but “time passed and they did not give 1 During Salazar’s regime, the Secretariado Nacional de Informação (SNI)/National

Secretary for Information—the censorship body in charge of evaluating all cultural activities—decided which film projects would be authorized to film and which would not. R. Benis (B) University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

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me any answer. Years passed without telling me anything”2 (Baecque & Parsi, 1999, p. 143). The absence of reply is explained by the screenwriter-director: The plot of Angelica is based upon two intertwining themes: the first has to do with death, depicted by the sudden death of a young bride, Angelica, the victim of an extra-uterine pregnancy which the doctors failed to diagnose in time. The second theme is war, depicted through the character Isaac, a Jew, fleeing Nazi persecution. […] A story of this kind had nothing to recommend itself to the regime, nor was it suitable for distracting people from more political matters […] I waited patiently until 1955, when I came to realize the silence was nothing but a stratagem to keep me quiet. (1998, p. 6)

This chapter tracks the development of Angelica, unveiling the subtle variations detected throughout the screenplay’s progress, emphasizing how the project succeeds in developing from its very initial idea (in 1950) to its shooting script/film form (in 2010). Aligned with the field of “genetic criticism”,3 this analysis of Angelica’s screenplay development not only focuses on its multiple social, political, financial determinations, but also adapts a “genetic” approach, trying, as Adrian Martin has expressed, “to understand and grasp how the essential core of a work—the embryonic idea that is encoded into its cinematic DNA—does (or does not) survive its multiple, material elaborations at all levels” (2014, p. 16). While “genetic criticism” does not focus on specific states of the screenplay, but rather on the process by which the text4 becomes the screenplay, it can be argued that everything that could reveal insights into the screenplay development have relevance: from diaries to letters and notes, to testimonies and interviews given by the author, or even the historical documents, such as censorship files or other institutional statistical records that give an account of the context the screenplay was developed. Such an approach is relevant to this analysis since Angelica’s script development crosses a series of historical and biographical circumstances 2 In the Portuguese National Archive (Torre do Tombo), the original screenplay for Angelica can be found in a file submitted on the 11th of January 1954. As Oliveira mentioned, no reply was given to his application: the usual stamp notification with the SNI’s response date is left in blank. 3 With more than 30 years of existence, “genetic criticism” field of study focus on the interpretation of a work in the light of its preparatory documents. “Genetic criticism” in cinema has been investigated by scholars and critics such as François Thomas (2016), Pierre-Marc De Biasi (2000), Bill Krohn (2003), Carole Le Berre (2004), Jordan Mintzer (2011), Ian W. Macdonald (2013) or Adrian Martin (2014). 4 It might be pertinent to recall here the concept of “Text” by Roland Barthes, according to whom the existence of the “Text” rests in the language itself, in the movement of its speech (in contrast to the written work, whose phenomenological existence occupies a space). The written work is definitive and concrete, while “Text” is the meaning that a reader takes from the work, thus not being definitive: “the nature of the Text is, therefore, entirely symbolic, functioning, like language, in a decentralized manner and without closure” (Barthes, 1977, p. 170).

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(over almost 60 decades) that leave an indelible impression on the screenplay itself, as we will verify.

Changes in the Screenplay Layout We will start with the “surface”—the screenplay layout changes—and then move to other deeper transformations—the mutations in the contents of the screenplay (namely, character and theme development). In the first version of Angelica’s screenplay (1954) we discover a page layout that offers a rare horizontal exposition5 découpage.6 At that time, Oliveira was likely testing the screenplay page horizontal format. His innovative spirit always kept him experimenting with different solutions and screenwriting styles, looking for better ways to expose his cinematic ideas. Almost every one of his screenplays explores some level of formal novelty, as if he were constantly searching for the best way to translate a moving image into a writing format. The 1954 screenplay version uses a two-column arrangement, which, as noted by Ian Macdonald, “is claimed to have been the French convention for cutting continuities since the 1930s” (2013, p. 170). No doubt the French model was by then the major influence in Portuguese cinema (see Benis, 2020). Another relatively common aspect at the time is that the découpage was divided in the number of shots (303 shots) and not into the number of scenes (as is the contemporary industry standard). In 1988, the Portuguese Cinematheque, celebrating Oliveira’s eightieth birthday, published a book—Alguns Projectos não Realizados e Outros Textos/Some Unfilmed Projects and Other Texts—with some of the projects Oliveira was unable to film, including Angelica. This second version of Angelica’s screenplay already presents a vertical layout (with a single column arrangement). Still, the screenplay appears constrained by the book format in which it is published, affecting the screenplay layout style. Specifically, each page of the book is divided in two columns, with each column corresponding to a script page.7 The most remarkable novelty in this new version is the indication of the expected time for each shot: the minutes inscribed in the scene heading.8 With this entry, Oliveira offers an extra element that helps to understand the duration the writer-director idealized for each scene.9 Other than 5 The horizontal format was just experimented by Oliveira this once, without following it up. Although rare, other horizontal screenplay layouts (from other authors) were found in the Portuguese National Archive (Torre de Tombo). 6

Découpage (French word): division of the script into sequences and shots.

7

Probably to reduce the number of pages in the volume, the 1988 publication presents this strange layout: each book page is divided in two columns with each column corresponding to a script page. 8 More precisely, in the shot heading, since the scenes are divided in shots (and the minutes are indicated in the shot heading ). 9 It is important to signal that the intended reader for this 1988 volume was not, in the first place, a film fund jury or the producer or any of the future film crew, but a wider

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that, the 1988 published screenplay has only a few other changes from its first version (1954). Some new scenes are introduced, and others are reordered, without having a major impact on the story. Small corrections occur such as taking out adjectives, like replacing “the indecorous boogie-woogie” (Oliveira, 1954, p. 13) for “the boogie-woogie” (Oliveira, 1988, p. 20). Although seemingly insignificant, these small corrections reveal a script development in process. The eliminated adjective "indecorous" signals an era (which helped to characterize the main character): the boogie-woogie was viewed with some kind of distrust by the social morals of the 1940/1950s. Only the young heard such scandalous music (as the main character, whose misfit profile would be underlined this way). In the 1988 script version the adjective “indecorous” is eliminated since the boogie-woogie no longer had a scandalous resonance (it ceased to characterize Isaac). Oliveira found another way to underline the character’s misfit profile: Isaac, instead, hears music out loud (which, given his circumstances—living in a boarding house, with other guests—also signalizes his unsuitability). Minor details as these give us an opportunity to discover not only about historical/social/moral mindsets, but it also bears witness of the screenwriter-director involvement with his project, revealing his strategies on creating alternative descriptions when characterizing a character. Ten years after, in 1998, a new version of Angelica’s screenplay is published, this time by a French publisher: Dis-Voir. The book is exclusively dedicated to the film’s project (being edited both in French and in English). This new version has a layout closer to a standard screenplay (with each page corresponding to a script page). The main novelty in its presentation is the inclusion of a significant number of photos of the possible sets (most of which later became the actual sets on the movie filmed in 2010). Mathias Lavin pertinently highlights how impressive are “the troubling similarities” (2013, p. 20) between the photos/descriptions in the screenplay and the final sets in the film: “Such proximity between the idea and its concretization bears witness to the personal investment of its creator” (2013, p. 20). We know that several writers-directors place emphases on writing strategies which can mix word and image (beyond written text). Kathryn Millard has developed work on this subject (see Millard, 2006, 2011, 2014), suggesting that writers-directors by enriching their screenplays with the cinematic qualities of images and locations, consciously or unconsciously, get more involved to the coming film. As such, Oliveira, by committing himself to further research into settings and locations (adding photographs to the screenplay), could be finding a way “to keep the

group of readers: academics, artists, curious. As João Bénard da Costa mentioned (in its introduction), the book was constituted to be “a fundamental approach to the study of the work of Manuel de Oliveira, to his better understanding” (in Oliveira, 1988, p. 8). Oliveira was eighty years old by then and the publication was also celebrating that fact, functioning as a memoir, a testimony of a life dedicated to cinema.

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project imaginatively alive” (Millard, 2006, p. 7).10 Indeed, Oliveira would later confess that “I kept on thinking about doing this movie for many years” (Oliveira & Costa, 2008, p. 59). As time went by, the screenwriter-director kept on developing the screenplay, as if waiting for the opportunity to film: “I modified it a lot, I went on changing it” (Oliveira & Costa, 2008, p. 59). When the opportunity finally arrived (with the producer challenging him in 2007), the revisions immediately multiplied. A total of at least 15 revisions were made between the autumn of 2007 and the spring of 2010, according to Oliveira (2010, p. 50). In the summer of 2010, the final version of the screenplay—with the new title O Estranho Caso de Angélica/The Strange Case of Angelica—was finally filmed by Oliveira.11 The script development of Angelica was unusual, especially given the fact that two of its main versions (1988 and 1998) were published and available to the general public as a standalone artefact, while still part of a larger work-in-progress script development. By publishing his “prototype” screenplay, Oliveira opened a possibility: “it was through this book [1998s French publication] that the producer François d’Artemare became aware of the project and encouraged me to return to Angelica” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 50). We can here wonder, as Millard has questioned (2011, p. 153), to whom are the published screenplays prototype addressed? Team members? Students? Academics? Producers? Screenwriters? Either way, one thing is certain: the published versions of Angelica’s screenplay undoubtedly became part of a work-in-progress in constant transformation.12

Thematic Evolution Looking carefully through the course of the approximately sixty years of screenplay development (1950/1954, 2010), we will try to perceive how the film theme envisioned by Oliveira evolved. Angelica’s original screenplay (1954) already evokes some of the recurring themes in Oliveira’s subsequent cinema, namely the aesthetic romanticism sought by the nineteenth century Portuguese novelist Camilo Castelo Branco, one of the most fertile influences in Oliveira’s cinematic imagery. Adding to that, the writer-director would 10 We can even say that this commitment is already visible in the first publication of the script, in 1988. For instance, when he establishes a precise minutage (time duration) for each scene. 11 After the film’s opening, the screenplay was published once more in a bilingual edition (Portuguese and French), organized by António Preto, in L’Avant Scène Cinéma 58, March 2011. A translation of the original shooting script (2010), slightly adapted by integrating all of the dialogue variations introduced in the film. 12 There are other examples of writers-directors that have published unfilmed screenplays—like Michelangelo Antonioni book: I film nel cassette [The films in the drawer].1995. Rome: Marsilio Editori (also published when he was 83 years old)—but few have achieved the feat of ending up filming an unfilmed project already published. Oliveira’s example is even more unique given the fact that he was 102 years of age when he finally filmed Angelica.

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develop (in many of his films) a common conception of “passion”: as a condition impossible to fulfil or satisfy, in which death represents the role of the definitive promise in the fulfilment of such love. In Oliveira’s words, “You can say that death was born with love. If you can’t be born without love, it is love that gives death. The marriage between love and death, in the romantic tradition, goes way back in time” (Baecque & Parsi, 1999, p. 112). This extreme bond stimulated Oliveira’s artistic imagination, for him: “Death is the ultimate abyss of love” (Baecque & Parsi, 1999, p. 166). In 1950, Oliveira found an idea for a film (addressing such theme), through a striking personal experience. In order to build an understanding of the origin of Angelica’s lengthy and complex script development, it is useful to read the full account of the incident that triggered the film: The idea itself stems from a sadly true story. My wife, Maria Isabel, was a close friend of her cousin, Maria Antónia […] we received a phone call from the Casas Novas Country House, informing us that Maria Antónia was feeling ill […] We had scarcely arrived at the driveway when one of her sisters […] came up to us and before we even had time to get out of the car, gave us the sad news. […] She asked me to take a photograph, saying the dead woman was very beautiful and that her mother would like a picture to remember her by […] My camera was a pre-war Leica, which had to be focused by looking through a split-image viewfinder which produced a double image, the second slightly more tenuous than the first. The two images split all the more the camera was out of focus, superimposing on one another when it was in focus. The exercise of focusing with precision on the dead woman gave me the impression of actually seeing the soul leaving the body. And it was that, in fact, which stimulated my imagination. Little by little, the idea took on substance and shape. (Oliveira, 1998, pp. 11, 12)

Besides this love/death thematic, in the different screenplay versions of Angelica we can also find another structural, subterraneous, timeless theme that emerges continuously, which shapes the matrix of the film: the idea of agonia,13 as described by Oliveira in his introduction to Angelica’s 1998 screenplay publication14 : Passing from the temporal to the timeless—as is the case in Angelica—the idea of mortal agony (agonia) springs to my mind, ultimately the great struggle for survival, the heavy weight imposed by the human condition and the laws of nature. Mortal agony which, in the social realm, often deludes those who 13 From the Greek word ag¯ ´ combat, struggle, fight and conflict. It can be on (’Aγων): applied to a dramatic context (a conflict between two characters, protagonist/antagonist, as in ancient Greek drama), to an athletic competition, or to a more spiritual realm (a struggle in the soul). 14 We are able to realize how deep this theme obsessed Manoel de Oliveira through the secondary documents related to Angelica’ script development: interviews, notes of intent, letters to the producer (see Baecque & Parsi, 1999; Oliveira, 2010; Oliveira & Costa, 2008; Preto, 2011).

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hold power, as opposed to the far greater number who are subjected to it and, marked by misfortune, sometimes bear the pain of such acute suffering that it actually reaches the point of sublimation. Angelica is the flight in quest for this sublime, outside our disparate and enslaved civilization. (pp. 10, 11)

The idea of agonia emerges in Oliveira’s discourse over the time in his interviews. He describes it as “fight against death” (Oliveira & Costa, 2008, p. 75). A fight imbued with spiritual meaning, which “starts when you are born. A constant and permanent struggle. The word agonia came to us from the Greeks. It is applied to a fight, to the athletes. Since we are born death is nearby, not letting the slightest occasion” (Baecque & Parsi, 1999, p. 41). This “fight against death” returns as a thematic layer in a regime of variations— through Angelica’ four screenplay versions (2010), ensuring and deepening both the profile of some characters (Isaac, the vintners), but as well the continuity on which the film is structured. Its most visible expression are the routine gestures of some characters, present in scene repetitions: the physical effort of the digging vintners’ activity; Isaac constant return to the fields, to his struggle to capture an image. Such scenes become more vivid and refined in the last screenplay. An example can be found at the end of the shooting script (2010): Oliveira adds there (in relation to the previous screenplays versions) a sound motif that should run over the credits (the song of the diggers while working in the field), referring to the agonic struggle: “Here you will begin eventually to hear the singing and the chorus of diggers in OFF” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 48). Parallel to this motto (embedded in and overlapping with it) are other more temporal themes (“death” and “war”), which also undertake some changes as the screenplay evolves. While the “death” theme is kept and improved mostly through the understanding of Angelica’s corpse/ghost character, the allusions to World War II are eliminated from the last version shooting script (2010). Oliveira felt the need to adapt. Still, as he remarked (in a letter to his producer): “All the political side is taken out (but the Jews’ persecution towards Isaac will be perceived, I strongly believe)” (2010, p. 50). Script development is always affected by time and history aspects. The fact Angelica was first developed during Salazar dictatorship (1933–1974) was impactful. By then, themes or subjects that could be considered outside the regime’s moral code did not have a chance within the institutional support of the National Film Fund (see Benis, 2017). Oliveira’s story “certainly came off [to the regime] as being nihilistic […] to be void of any patriot spirit and even to be a veiled denunciation of a totalitarian government” (Oliveira, 1998, p. 6). For such, the writer-director had to wait (nearly 60 years) for a more favourable time to his screenplay sensible topics. During Estado Novo censorship, the unfavourable political and financial circumstances (no film fund support) pushed Oliveira to the countryside, where he dedicated himself to

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agriculture for a period of almost 40 years.15 These years of contact with nature became fundamental for him to mature his personal understanding of cinema, and to strengthen his vision on subjects such as life/death, man/earth or mortal agony (fundamental themes in Angelica): So, I went back to earth. It is another rhythm. There is a time for everything, a time for the harvest. It is nature that rules. We are subject to weather conditions and there is a constant contact with working men. We have, then, a very particular feeling about the movement of natural things, which is not found in the industry. A job that is done in the spring cannot be done in the fall or winter. There is a time for each job, while industry always runs the same way. This period helped me to learn more about cinema. (Baecque & Parsi, 1999, p. 146)

Angelica is also a critique to the taint exploitation of man by man, as well as a critique to the mechanization that came to suppress the spiritual dimension of physical work. In the 1999 book-interview, by Antoine de Baecque and Jacques Parsi, Oliveira shares his view, remarking on how we kept the superficial parts part of our rituals, leaving what is most important behind: “We live through certain rituals. It is the rituals that make life. […] like the agricultural gestures, that have a higher meaning. […] The original meaning [of rituals] has been lost and only the superficial folklore remains. We lost a lot” (1999, pp. 41–44). Oliveira goes on to emphasize: [Wisdom] is based on the spirit of an experience lived through the centuries. It is not a philosophical abstraction. It is transmitted from generation to generation, thanks to true, authentic knowledge, rooted in life. Western civilization […] thinks it is on an extraordinary path of progress, and is marching towards the abyss. […] We must never forget that man, in spite of all the mechanical facilities that he offers himself, is inexorably linked to nature. (1999, p. 129)

Ironically, if the political pressure made Oliveira’s film career to slow down, urging him to move to the countryside, the filmmaker rural experience gave him the unique opportunity to keep a closer contact with nature and its rhythms, thus strengthening his vision of the film, enabling Angelica theme development to mature.

15

Manoel de Oliveira, for decades, lived from the revenues of a family farm in Douro. His cinematographic activity has become quite intermittent during this period, with only two feature films shot in a period of nearly forty years.

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Character Development We will now consider the impact the characters’ portrayal had on the script development process. Isaac Starting with the protagonist, in all of the first three screenplay versions of Angelica (1954, 1988, 1998) Isaac is depicted as sympathetic in the eyes of the other characters, who express solidarity towards his victim/refugee status (a World War II Jewish fugitive). No one seems to be uneasy with or against Isaac. We can verify this especially in the first screenplay (1954) when the memories of World War II were still present. For instance, in the dialogue with Angelica’s sister, identified as a “woman” in the first three screenplay versions (and later as a “nun”, in the final shooting script), when Isaac identifies himself as a Jew (through his name: Isaac), she expresses compassion: “The woman gives a kindly smile. They enter” (Oliveira, 1988, p. 23). Also, one of the boarding house’s residents remarks (suggesting the horrors of World War II): “– Oh, no! Such a proper man as he! …perhaps tormented by a great nightmare” (Oliveira, 1954, p. 80). Later, in the final shooting script (2010), these manifestations of solidarity and regret are cut off from the text and the portrait of Isaac suffers a metamorphosis. The perception of the persecution is maintained (as Oliveira noticed), but the Jewish figure as a fugitive/victim/refugee is replaced by the theme of the wondering Jew.16 It becomes evident (in the shooting script version) that most of the other characters now repudiate the strangeness of Isaac. As the maid in Angelica’s house, who regards him with distrust, in a hostile, unwelcoming way: “The maid closes the door [to Isaac] with contempt” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 20). At the boarding house, no one is interested in the same things as Isaac, finding discomfort or displeasure in his presence: “—That gentleman is strange. […]—A lot. We all think the same” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 31). Even Dona Justina, the maternal owner of the boarding house, has her doubts about Isaac: “—This gentleman came by one day, suddenly, out of nowhere …but he did not seem to be a bad person…” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 34). Isaac himself contributes to this exclusion since he does not participate in the conversations at the breakfast table, preferably taking his coffee on foot, slightly apart from the others (seated at the table). Complementarily, the way Isaac relates and reacts to Christian environments/places is also of importance. For instance, on the shooting script (2010) there is a scene (that did not exist in the previous drafts) where Isaac approaches the private chapel in Angelica’s house, but stops at the door, 16 The legend concerns a Jew who taunted on the way to the crucifixion, then cursed to walk the Earth until the second coming of Christ. Among the many names attributed to this figure (Ahasver, Mathatias, Buttadeus, Juan, etc.) is the name Isaac (Isaac Laquedem). Another denomination for this figure is “the one that waits for God” or the “Eternal Jew”.

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restrained from stepping inside. Although he takes off his hat in a sign of respect (as if he had the intention of entering), something seems to hold him outside, as if he didn’t feel allowed to enter the holy Christian space. He stands there “in front of the chapel door, in a silent waiting time” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 19). At that moment, his inner voice repeats a poem from the book God’s Crossroads/As Encruzilhadas de Deus (1935), by José Régio, as if meditating in the meaning of such words: Isaac OFF:

ISAAC OFF. Time! Stop! And you, creations of the past Roaming by unreal and celestial paths Angels! Open for me the gates… (…) …of heaven, For in my night is day… and I Have God Within.

(Oliveira, 2010, p. 19) Isaac’s dialogue with Angelica’s sister (the nun) are also significant. For instance, she reacts scandalized when hears his name and introduces herself as Maria das Dores, a “name by which she defines herself above all as Catholic”17 (Bourgois, 2013, p. 38): Nun (in a muted tone): Isaac (willingly): Nun (surprised): Isaac: Nun (affirmative):

NUN: —Mr. photographer, what is your name? ISAAC: —Isaac. NUN: — Isaac!!!... ISAAC: —Yes, Isaac, dear sister. NUN —My name is Maria das Dores. I am the sister of the deceased Angelica and a devout Christian.

(Oliveira, 2010, p. 8) Another symbolic gesture (that is not depicted in any of the previous versions of Angelica’s screenplay) comes in the final scene of the shooting script (2010) when Dona Justina “puts the crucifix with her right hand on top of the chest of Isaac’s dead corpse” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 48). Throughout all the different screenplays Isaac seems to be kept from the Christian faith, anguished for not being able to understand it, haunted by metaphysical questions. However, at 17

“Maria das Dores” is a Portuguese/Spanish name whose direct translation can be read: Mary of Sorrows (a name that refers directly to the Christian figure: the Virgin of Sorrows/ Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows/ Mater Dolorosa).

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the end of the story, nevertheless, the spirit of Isaac flies away in the arms of Angelica (suggesting some type of afterlife survival, the overcoming of his condemnation). Oliveira was very aware of this enigmatic reversal. He deliberately chooses to save Isaac, opting to put an end to his condemnation. In his words: There is nevertheless a great compromise that I had to make: when Isaac dies, his spirit persists. This end is the most compromising part of the film […] In this film the fact that Isaac survives through his spirit is a choice I made, a subtle and delicate but assumed choice […] this is the enigmatic aspect of the film. (Preto, 2011, pp. 6–9)

We also signal a difference between the first three versions of the screenplay and the shooting script. The passionate drive (the trigger idea that first stimulated Oliveira’s imagination), although never entirely disappearing from the film, seems to be replaced by another stronger and mysterious drive that pushes Isaac towards his own death (towards Angelica): “the deep-down desire for liberation which surfaces in certain individuals, less because of, than in reaction to, an extreme situation in their lives—as is the case, at root, in this script” (Oliveira, 1998, p. 11). As Oliveira remarks: “The spirit arrives and saves Isaac from the situation of anguish in which he lived” (Valente, 2011, p. 26). At the root, in the first three screenplay versions (1954, 1988, 1998), the World War II theme was still present and Isaac’s desire for liberation appears to be related to his extreme situation as a fugitive: because of the nightmare he is immersed in, Isaac turns to Angelica. Later, in the last screenplay version (2010), Isaac’s desire for liberation is no longer so attached to his fugitive condition, it becomes more a reaction to yet another extreme situation. He seems to be the only character apparently capable of identifying the imminent extinction of a human fundamental bond, the disappearing of a sacred ritual between man and Earth: the forthcoming replacement of the vineyard diggers by agricultural machinery. Angelica Angelica’s ghost character endures a number of subtle changes throughout the development of the screenplay. The relationship between Angelica’s ghost and the vineyard workers represents one of the most important dynamics in the last screenplay/film: a mysterious mirroring relationship. The contrast between the documental (the sequences where Isaac photographs the workers in the Douro vineyard hills) and the fantastic pieces (Angelica’s ghost episodes, Isaac’s dreams scenes) seem to highlight a mysterious affinity. As if the sight of the dead alive (Angelica) would reflect the sight of the living-dead (diggers). Such affinity is not directly expressed in the screenplay text but can be sensed or perceived (by the reader) as an allegoric configuration. As Jean-Philippe Tessé identifies:

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The episode of the diggers: it’s not just side by side with the story of Angelica, it is its hidden heart […] like an intuition […] there are too many asides not to suspect that an enigma is developing in front of our eyes, that something is hidden in this film, which, in the end, shortly passes by the obsession of Isaac with Angelica. (2011, p. 78)

In the shooting script’s front page, under the (new) title The Strange Case of Angelica (2010), comes an enigmatic subtitle in brackets: (Allegory). We feel that such reference is there precisely to remind us not to be misled by the literal sense of the apparition [Angelica], but rather to follow its mystery, the allegorical chain18 lodge in the relation Angelica/Vine workers, which is can be percept through the interconnection/succession of the two motives along the screenplay (and film). As Oliveira once described, for him: “The fantastic is the shadow of reality” (Baecque & Parsi, 1999, p. 58). In the film, the intimate shiver that assails us when we see the apparition of Angelica mirrors something that goes beyond the vision: the eminent disappearance of the vine workers and their gestures, an ancestral relationship between man and earth, an alliance as old as man himself. The entire evolution of Angelica’s screenplay is crossed by this strong dynamic established between the ghost of Angelica and the (visible) spectres of the diggers, but the 2010 version depicts it all in a more intense manner. There is a constant crisscrossing in the screenplay between the two motifs: “Isaac is looking at the photo of the vine digger, and from behind, on the balcony, the ghost of Angelica appears, in black and white.” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 33). The more Isaac is aware of the fading figures of the vine diggers, the more Angelica becomes real to him. Isaac even comments: “—Why now this enchantment that cancels all the anxieties that haunt me! … Or is it my madness?!” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 23). The rope that holds Isaac’s photographic work depicts this cruel relation: the photographs of Angelica’s corpse mix with the photos of the digger’s grimaces, reflecting the mysterious bond that so desperately haunts Isaac. For Isaac it is as if the order of the world came out of its tracks: the living atmosphere of a human ritual—present in the songs of the vine workers, in their living vocabulary, their rituals—is being swallowed by machines and scientific abstractions (the conversations between the engineers at the boarding house breakfast table).19 Isaac seems to be the only character aware of a change: the perishing of a world of metaphors and sacred gestures, implicit in agricultural physical hard work. As such, Isaac, in the evidence of a catastrophe (the imminent loss of such a bond with Mother Nature), turns in despair to another mother: Death. Angelica then appears as this other Mater, who comes to his aid: A “Mythical 18

Cyril Béghin refers, precisely, that the constant alternation of sequences (Angelica/diggers) “shows a contrast of actions or situations without any causal relationship or temporal simultaneity, but whose approach calls for a comparison, producing an abstract sense, in the way of an allegory” (2013, p. 15). 19 Which, once more, only appear in the last version (2010). In the three previous versions the characters gathered at the breakfast table discuss other subjects.

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Death/Represented by a woman/Wrapped in fine transparent white tulle”20 (Oliveira, 2008). The character of Angelica ghost, besides being developed according to its original profile (the “abyss of love” theme) becomes, in the shooting script version, an incarnation of a “Mythical Death”, a much more complex apparition, related with the “liberation drive” that comes to define Isaac/Angelica relationship in the end. Vine Workers Returning once more to the “mortal agony” theme—as a fight against death that unites humanity in all kind of rituals—we find that this subject is ultimately reflected in the vine workers’ characterization. In Angelica’s first three screenplay drafts, Oliveira establishes a contrast between the natural, spiritual, agonic movement of our collective human fight against death and another type of struggle, which is our individual animal instinct for survival: “Parallel to the fight against death […], people are animated by a very deep instinct, of selfdefense, that can turn into aggression […] people are persecuted by a certain animal instinct. It’s complicated” (Oliveira & Costa, 2008, p. 75). These two different driving forces ruled the first three versions of Angelica’ s screenplay: the animal instinct—so strongly marked in the vine workers’ first drafts characterization—interferes with the sacred side of the human fight, squandering its spiritual charge. Isaac’s unsuccessful efforts to retain (photograph) a memory of a vanishing world (the sacred gestures that bond humans and Earth in a direct expression of faith) is constantly interrupted by the aggressiveness of the workers: “A digger screams with bulging eyes, contracting the face with a wide-open mouth, showing his teeth as a wild beast” (1988, p. 48). “A worker straightens up and lets out an animal-like cry with bestiality […] others howl” (1998, pp. 48, 49). Later, in the final shooting script/film (2010), the animalistic attitudes of the vine workers (gestures described with animal connotations) fade away. Here, the sacred agonic effort of the vine workers group is also corrupted, but differently (the force that corrupts the diggers suffers a metamorphosis): the vine diggers are now persecuted and corrupted by another thing (other than the animal instinct), which, according to Oliveira, corresponds to: “The violence of the individual, of the person” (Preto, 2011, p. 6). A violence that arises as the result of a fight from within, implicit in the human condition. A choice that transforms humans not into beasts but into spectral, lifeless, evil 20 These lines, which reproduce a close characterization of Angélica, are curiously taken from a poem Oliveira once dedicated to the novelist Camilo Castelo. It is not trivial to remember here the affinity with Camilo. Indeed, in Angélica project, Camilo’ influence is constantly being detected. Sometimes in a more evident manner—one of the books in Isaac’s room is a novel from Camilo Castelo Branco –, in other occasions, Camilo is quoted in a more indirect, subtle, mode, like in the mythological characterization of Angelica. Once again, these complex inter-textual crossings are matters which provide, as Adrian Martin recalls, “another instance of the kind of hidden, archeological depth or volume that a film-maker draws upon in shaping his work” (2014, p. 19).

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figures like hangmen, zombies: “The photo presents a digger with a hangman expression” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 33). “The violence of life” (Preto, 2011, p. 6) that once (in the firsts three screenplays) reduced man to beast, becomes then (on the final shooting script) a violence “of the individual”, a violence from within that springs from a more transcendental realm. This is a violence that enslaves us, that makes us enslave one another, leading to a human uprooting. The vine workers characters descriptions, on the 2010 screenplay version, are ones of workers as cursed souls (rather than beasts), with gestures closer to ones of gravediggers (rather than agricultural workers). In Isaac’s dreams descriptions, the diggers haunt him, tormenting his sleep with the sound of their grotesque blows and screams: “There are groans or muffled screams in the OFF like those of the diggers… which come from Isaac OFF himself” (Oliveira, 2010, p. 21). It is as if, through such nightmare visitations, the diggers were trying to reach and punish Isaac for being aware of the progressive emptiness of their gestures, their obscenity (obscene: out of scene), the out of the living world in which they fell.

Conclusion The choices each artist makes are part of the mystery of creation. In Angelica, Oliveira, while sombre and critical in his portrait (on our relationship with Nature), still, at the end of the story, he depicts Isaac’s spirit flying away in the arms of Angelica. Moreover, as noted previously, at the end of the shooting script (and only in this version), it is mentioned that the song of the diggers (sang while working in the fields) should run over the credits: the old melopoeia song of the workers escapes through at the end of the story, as if the sacred bond between humans and Earth, the living rule that connects them, remained somehow/somewhere alive, bringing a sign of hope for Isaac’s afterlife. To Oliveira, “the essential [in Angelica] is Isaac’s destiny” (Preto, 2011, p. 6). For such, Isaac’s melancholic regard, when facing the workers and their gestures (aware of their forthcoming disappearance) and his effort to photograph every single one of them (his attempt to save their gestures through an image), becomes Isaac’s true hypothesis of redemption: his longing may be the milestone that sets his spirit free: the consciousness of a remote affinity, the recognition of a bond, the expectation that we are part of something else, bigger, that connects us with Mother Nature. Along the reading of the different screenplay versions, it is fascinating to plunge into Oliveira’s intimate space of writing. It is an opportunity to follow his creative struggle; his search to make a cinematic idea visible, perceptible, as a written text. Oliveira’ process reminds us of the importance of rhythms, and the technique of playing with tensions (such as those between the ghost of Angelica and the diggers. Angelica’ s case study highlights the benefits of studying the embedded genetics aspects of screenwriting. For instance, taking

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into account the places, like the Douro vines landscape and its bucolic atmosphere, a space–time guided by the cycles of the earth, so familiar to Oliveira; considering the people who had an impact in Oliveira’s life and inspired the story, like the Douro vine workers, whom Oliveira observed for so long; or the trauma brought by the death of his wife’s cousin; or even the imagery of the artists who most influenced him (such as Camilo Castelo Branco, José Régio or Agustina Bessa-Luís); the political circumstances, like the consequences the Portuguese censorship had on the project, almost voting it to oblivion; and also the mere chances, like the meeting with producer François D’Artmare, who finally challenged Oliveira to do the film in 2010. Each aspect that affected Oliveira’s creative process helped to shape Angelica’s screenplay, determining the way its text developed towards the film.

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Oliveira, M. (1988). Angélica. Alguns Projetos não Realizados e Outros Textos (pp. 17– 53). Lisbon: Cinemateca Portuguesa—Museu do Cinema. Oliveira, M. (1998). Angelica. Dis-Voir. Oliveira, M. (2010). O Estranho Caso de Angélica—Alegoria—Argumento, Planificação e Diálogos. Oliveira, M., & Costa J. B. (2008). Manoel de Oliveira—Cem Anos. Lisbon: Cinemateca Portuguesa—Museu do Cinema. Preto, A. (2011, Mars). La métaphysique des anges: Entretien avec Manoel de Oliveira. L’Avant Scène Cinéma, 581, pp. 4–11. Régio, J. (1935). As Encruzilhadas de Deus. Coimbra: Presença. Tessé, J. P. (2011, Mars). Une nouvelle Joconde. Cahiers du Cinéma, 665, pp. 78–80. Thomas, F. (2016). Alain Resnais, les coulisses de la création-Entretiens avec ses proches collaborateurs. Armand Colin. Valente, F. (2011, April 29). O cinema é o espelho da vida, não temos outro: Entrevista com Manoel de Oliveira. Público—Ípsilon, p. 26.

Scripting for the Masses: Notes on the Political Economy of Bollywood Rakesh Sengupta

Introduction: More Than a Metaphor This chapter aims to discuss the politico-economic conditions and implications of script development in Bollywood, with an ethnographic focus on Prakash Jha and Anjum Rajabali’s collaborations during 2010–2013. Despite being the largest producer of films worldwide, Bollywood has historically not enjoyed a reputation for developing full-fledged scripts in pre-production stages. The film industry’s historical over-reliance on bankable stars, on-set improvisation, discontinuous narratives with extravagant song and dance sequences, plagiarist practices and informal financing frequently contributed to the stereotype that Hindi films were mostly made without any scripts. However, over the recent decades, processes of economic liberalisation in Bollywood has changed that perception significantly. The emergence of multiplex cinema in the new millennium and the more recent advent of digital streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon have refashioned script development as an indispensable process of making films. As a result, scripting as a practice as well as discourse (Maras, 2009) has gained wider currency in India in recent years. In fact, “scripting” has often been taken out of film production contexts and deployed as a political metaphor to reveal the concocted nature of certain media events. Put simply, when an event is suggested to have been scripted, it has allegedly been meticulously pre-planned and executed as if it were real. R. Sengupta (B) University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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In 2019, the metaphor of scripting surfaced more than once in the South Asian political landscape. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who doesn’t speak in press conferences, was accused of giving pre-scripted interviews with journalists of his choice before the general elections. In one particular instance, he was unwittingly caught on camera with an interview script in his hand. (“The Camera Frame,” 2019) Across the border, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of Pakistan People’s Party and an important opposition leader, referred to the “fascist” nature of the screenplay to express his strong views on how the current dispensation demanded absolute adherence to a rigid political doctrine (“Are You Declared a Traitor,” 2019). The role of media capture in the rise of majoritarian governments across the world today is undisputed. Critics of such populist governments have pointed out how political events are often planned media events, from hashtag activism to fake news circulation. Metaphorical extensions of the practice of scripting, such as the two mentioned above, are intimately tied with the organised nature of political events. For our sociological interest, scripting as a political metaphor finds its basis not only in the moral imaginary of cinema as a medium of artificial realism but also the increased understanding of the script as a logistical document used for the planning and execution of a film’s production. While the political metaphor might be of interest to media scholars generally, the use of this metaphor ought to alert screenwriting scholars to the political economy of pre-production. In other words, how do mainstream screenwriters engage with the ideological and economic constraints of their creative industries? So, moving beyond the political metaphor and returning to screenwriting studies, this chapter shall broadly engage with the question of how the political economy informs the script development of mainstream films. Drawing on my personal communication with Mumbai-based film professionals, I focus on the script development of four films made during 2010–2013. These were the years immediately before the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing Hindu nationalist party under the leadership of Narendra Modi, came to power in 2014. Since then hundreds of Indian writers, theatre practitioners, filmmakers have openly opposed the cultural policies of the government, even issuing collective statements against the increased suffocation of debate and dissent in the public sphere. My objective is to investigate how specific political circumstances shape the creative and commercial practice of script development in Bollywood in complex ways, which may offer comparative potential for the study of script development in other mainstream creative industries across the world.

Political Economy of Scripting Taylor and Batty (2016) have demonstrated the ambiguity around definitions of script development in screen industries, wherein the term may imply anything from developing a script to a script in the process of development.

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Drawing on this broad spectrum of definitions that constitute a complex (and largely invisible) process, this chapter studies the political and economic conditions of script development for mass audiences. Wasko (2008) has argued that the political economy of cinema refers to how films are made within particular economic arrangements that entail a range of political and ideological concerns. As a corollary, the political economy of script development would refer to how commercial film scripts are developed in different ideological contexts. As a film industry that cuts across a wide range of social, linguistic and regional divides, Bollywood usually boasts a mass national audience. Often enshrined by multi-million-dollar budgets, these films with high production costs are expected to do well commercially in distribution territories all across the country and even overseas. The high financial stake of Bollywood films is further compounded by a moral obligation to not offend any religious, social or political group, especially those that wield the power to restrict a film’s distribution or screening. Under such circumstances, screenwriters and filmmakers have to be additionally cautious about the content they can afford to create in volatile political economies of mass consumption. Scholarship on media and public culture in South Asia has largely focused on visual practices, an obsession referred to as a “theoretical trap” of the image (Punathambekar & Mohan, 2017, p. 4613). Discussions of Hindi cinema as a form of public address (Vasudevan, 2011) have largely ignored how political content is incorporated into the popular idiom behind and before the film text. The eventual act of spectatorship takes precedence with an emphasis on active contestation or passive interpellation, vis-à-vis the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry, often precluding discussions of subjectivity and agency of media producers themselves (Ganti, 2014). The primary objective of screenwriting studies has been to isolate the writing process of a film as a significant media practice, which accommodates rich ethnographic perspectives on script development across film industries (McNamara, 2018). Using interviews of two prominent Bollywood creators, Prakash Jha and Anjum Rajabali, this chapter aims to initiate a discussion on the political economy of scripting mainstream cinema. Unlike the Indian elections in 2019, the general election of 2014 was preceded by a surge in anti-establishment sentiments which was reflected as much in popular cinema as the people’s mandate. The vantage point of the present takes me back to this wave of mainstream political cinema where the screenwriter-director duo of Anjum Rajabali and Prakash Jha tried to redefine the limits of the popular by holding an allegorical mirror up to dynastic politics in India (Raajneeti in 2010) and the anti-corruption movement against the previous government in power (Satyagraha in 2013), as well as addressing issues of caste-based discrimination (Aarakshan in 2011) and Maoist insurgencies in tribal parts of India (Chakravyuh in 2012). My personal correspondence with Prakash Jha and Anjum Rajabali has created an archive of interview material not available in the public domain, allowing me to investigate how an ideological wave of mainstream cinema was conceived within a different political economy not too long ago.

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Political Mainstream Cinema “It is impossible to write similar films in this political climate,” lamented screenwriter Anjum Rajabali when I asked him why he had discontinued his collaboration with director Prakash Jha after 2013.1 Jha sounded even more despondent. Referring to the rise in majoritarian governments across the globe, he lamented, “There is no real democracy in the world at this point”.2 A few months later, the Hindu nationalist party BJP, under Narendra Modi, came back to power with an even bigger majority than they had achieved in 2014. Debates on cine-politics are as old as cinema itself, going as far back as the controversial The Birth of a Nation (1915) or the celebrated Battleship Potemkin (1925). Today there is a wider acknowledgement of how filmic narratives can mobilise audiences politically, making them aware of human rights violations in distant lands or even advocating status quo under more immediate oppressive regimes. In this context, Walter Benjamin’s (1969) discussion of cinema as a mode of mechanical reproduction remains relevant. Democratised mass consumption, for Benjamin, blurred all distinctions between art and politics. He was one of the earliest intellectuals to envision the democratic, emancipatory potential of cinema that would politicise art in a response to the fascist aestheticisation of politics, while also recognising that the medium alone cannot ensure the politicisation of art. Arguably, cinema as a medium has historically given in to both impulses. The question of content, vis-à-vis script development, becomes central here. Indian popular cinema has long been the site of ideological contestations and conflicts (Prasad, 1998; Vasudevan, 2011), and some historical attention has been paid to pre-production practices in the 1940s and 1950s. Baskaran (1996) has discussed how the vocation of dialogue writing in Tamil cinema allowed writers from the Dravidian movement to continue voicing their dissent against the establishment. Gopal (2005) too has explored the possibility of articulating radical sensibilities in Indian popular cinema through an analysis of the aesthetic and affective force of K.A. Abbas’ anti-colonial film stories. The role of marginal perspectives and progressive politics in shaping mainstream narratives, however, remains uncertain in the ethical vacuum of neoliberal Bollywood. I would argue that the idea of democratisation itself needs to be problematised for a more nuanced understanding of what is at stake politically when scripts are written for popular screen consumption. While all cinematic expressions are arguably political, I am referring here to the fictional treatment of contemporary political events for a mass audience as mainstream political cinema. 1 Rajabali, A. (2019, January 2). Personal interview. All subsequent quotations from Rajabali in this chapter are taken from this conversation. 2 Jha, P. (2019, January 4). Personal interview. All subsequent quotations from Jha in this chapter are taken from this conversation.

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My two interviewees, Prakash Jha and Anjum Rajabali, represent two different yet complementary approaches towards mainstream political cinema in Bollywood. During my interview, Jha came across as more pragmatic with a managerial coolness to how he approached mainstream political filmmaking. He claimed that he has been trying to create a new cinematic “vyakaran” (grammar) for the kind of political cinema he wishes to make for mainstream audiences: I try to weave my stories around social issues, and I try to say it in a language that people are satisfied that they have seen a commercial film . . . It is a constant effort to make it believable, real and yet palatable for the mass audience. . . Completely pure cinema is easy to make, completely commercial cinema is easy to make. Making a Gangajaal or a Mrityudand and making it a hit, this is what my constant struggle has been . . . The dialogues, the imagination, the scale, everything had to be increased.

Anjum Rajabali seemed more passionate in describing the “political” screenplays he had co-written with Jha. Apparently there was little room for commercial compromises in their collaborative scripting work: Our approach in terms of script to screen was idealistic . . . It was purist . . . It is how it is . . . Even in terms of songs, they were decided in the script. Not like, because we have got Saif, let’s give him a song like this. No, never. Or because there is Bachchan, let’s give him some bhaari (heavy) dialogue. It’s all about the character. In that sense, it was a very purist project.

From the perspective of script development, Jha and Rajabali’s approaches to script development reveal how collaboration is always a dialogical process of creative differences and pragmatic negotiations. In the following sections, several accounts of their collaborative work will provide rich insights into a wide range of creative, cultural and industrial strategies that allowed them to broach controversial subjects through a mass medium.

The Epic as the Template The Mahabharata is an ancient Indian epic generally believed to have been composed in the fourth-century BCE or earlier. Containing more than 100,000 verses, it is the longest epic in the world (roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together). The narrative kernel revolves around two branches of a family—the Pandavas and Kauravas—who battle each other in the Kurukshetra War for the kingdom of Hastinapur. A number of subplots and spiritual discourses such as the Bhagavad Gita are also interwoven into the main narrative, which imbue the text with great religious and philosophical significance for people of the Indian subcontinent.

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During the interview, Jha referred to Rajneeti (2010) as “the Mahabharata placed in a modern kind of a time.” Rajneeti translated literally means politics. The story draws parallels to the epic where shades of Karna (Sooraj Kumar played by Ajay Devgan), Krishna (Brij Gopal played by Nana Patekar), Arjuna (Samar Pratap by Ranbir Kapoor), Bhima (Prithviraj Pratap played by Arjun Rampal), Duryodhana (Veerendra Pratap played by Manoj Bajpai), and Draupadi (Indu Sakseria/Pratap played by Katrina Kaif) are mapped on to the screenplay’s characters. These characterisations also camouflaged a number of political references. As Jha confirmed, “Sections were taken from everybody. Whether it was Devegowda family or the Samajwadi party or Congress Party.” The mythical scale of the film was achieved by retrofitting contemporary electoral politics in the narrative patterns of the epic. The mythological template also became a tool for bypassing censorship. Rajabali narrated how Prakash had visited him with a story of just “a conflict between two parties vying for power in the cow belt.” He worked on the story, developing the character of Arjuna, the “conscientious objector”. Jha claimed that Rajneeti’s story about dynasty politics was a universal one despite some implicit references to real politicians. The diegetic parallels with the Mahabharata increased its universality since the epic was not only a repository of deep intertextuality but also, as Jha argued, a social text that outlined the filial networks of political power: It’s world over. When somebody establishes a political set up, it becomes a family profession. Now if you see the Mahabharata, what was the struggle about? About the land. You see The Godfather. I feel The Godfather is hugely influenced from the Mahabharata. And so are several political families here. Whether it is the families in Uttar Pradesh or Delhi. Now you see that BJP is the first political party where at the top level you don’t see a family structure but at various other levels you see it.

Personal Is Political The structuring of a screenplay’s narrative as the trajectory of a single protagonist’s objectives and desires is often assumed to be a staple of Hollywood screenwriting. In Bollywood as well, the star system contributes largely to the construction of narratives of individual journeys, albeit interrupted or facilitated by extra-diegetic conventions such as songs, dances and comic situations. A range of seminal film theories about filmic gaze vis-à-vis fantasy and pleasure (Mulvey, 1975) as well as cinematic spectatorship vis-à-vis community and citizenship (Vasudevan, 2011) problematise the single protagonist as the anchor of mass consumed narratives. As a result, the use of a single protagonist for audience engagement is often the subject of critique by film scholars due to its interpellative powers of subject formation.

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Rajabali disagreed with this scholarly criticism. He defined politics “as a history of struggle and not one of leadership” and argued that his characters were always informed by their social context before any specific ideology. He went on to explain that the dichotomy between social plot and individual character was a false one for him. “Politics is where larger choices, larger forces are influencing your personal choices. That is political for me.” The relationship between plot and character was therefore a dialectical one for him, and the protagonist a microcosmic embodiment of society. Additionally, the use of a single protagonist was a more commercially viable strategy because of its ability to generate audience empathy: The power of narrative cinema lies in the fact that if you’re able to create an empathisable character, you can carry the audience into any theme, any ideology, any kind of plot, any kind of territory.

When I asked Rajabali about the script idea of Rajneeti, he narrated how Jha wanted to make a film on “electoral politics in the Hindi heartland.” Rajabali was immediately interested because Jha had just fought an election in Bihar. Jha, on the other hand, mentioned that his participation in electoral politics had very little to do with the script: I had that experience from before. We are Biharis and we are part of the social system. We are constantly in touch with ground realities . . . The Rajneeti script was written before I entered politics.

Rejecting any autobiographical associations, Jha went on to discuss how his characters had to be created through “personal dynamics which have political and economic repercussions.” What interested him the most were the “aspirations” of his characters under any socio-economic system and how they might negotiate with changes in the system. Jha and Rajabali’s screenwriting processes largely seemed to complement each other. Jha looked outward at the world to examine the social, while Rajabali created characters through psychological interiority. However, on the contentious issue of how to weave a narrative around Maoist insurgencies in Chakravyuh, Rajabali seemed to have had a creative conflict with Jha, which was eventually resolved by making it a personalised story in a politicised context: I wrote my draft (of Chakravyuh) and gave it to him, and Prakash told me that it’s like a justification for the Maoist programme. I said it’s not because you are taking a certain antipathic view which is why you are seeing it as that. It’s an understanding, a very empathetic understanding. I’m not taking positions here. I am talking about individuals and their psychology, and they are locked in conflict. I am also talking about the reality of justice, oppression and inequality.

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Remediating News When asked about how political content could be made entertaining, Jha reminded me that the political was already a part of our daily entertainment. Mainstream news channels kept television viewers on the edge for hours with a range of offerings, from breaking news to heated political debates. Popular cinema, for Jha, remediated the same sensationalism. Using an example from a recently written script lying on the table in front of him, he spoke at length about the rise of citizen journalism and time criticality of media. He stated, almost philosophically: “Media has become an integral part of our life. Media is always intervening in our lives.” Aarakshan and Satyagraha were both based on contemporary and mediatised political events. Aarakshan was conceived in the backdrop of an affirmative action policy of the UPA II government where the reservation of OBCs (Other Backward Castes) was increased in the education and job sector. Rajabali had sensed the polarising potential of the situation: “This issue is going to divide India into two parts. It is really going to be India versus India.” Likewise, Satygraha’s idea was conceived against the backdrop of the India Against Corruption movement of 2011–2012 where a number of public figures had taken to the streets to mobilise the masses in support of greater public accountability. Rajabali was critical about this development: Any reformist movement which is apolitical, touting it as an advantage, and I mean non-ideologically driven, tends to turn narcissistic, and therefore you have leaders coming out who are actually autocrats . . . If I were asked to write a script on it, I would write about how a movement begins with a certain kind of promise, anarchy and then eventually ends in tragedy.

Unlike Rajneeti, he had clear political parallels in mind in this contemporary allegory. However, the film suffered a one-year delay due to the unavailability of a star actor. This delay, Rajabali recalled, changed the script completely. A screenplay about the hypocrisy of sensationalised mass protests turned into a celebration of the same protests. Taylor and Batty (2016) have discussed stages of script development as “different time frames of development,” which in this context helps us understand how specific shifts in the political landscape over a period of time can introduce substantial changes in a screenplay being developed during the same time frame. According to Rajabali, the content in news media dictated the ideological change in Satyagraha’s narrative: If we had started making Satyagraha in 2012 itself, we would have released it in 2012, but it went to 2013. So, December 16, 2012, the gang rape took place. The Nirbhaya incident. And there were massive protests. People’s movements began emerging. Candlelight marches. Because the issue was so emotional and horrible, that people couldn’t but support these movements. And Prakash changed the whole ideology of the story. Because from the film being critical

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of these reform movements, he said no . . . He rewrote few sequences in the story and narrated it to me . . . He said that one has to be supportive of these movements . . . Satyagraha eventually changed because of the outside trend.

Pre-Censorship Pre-censorship3

is inextricably a part of the cinematic grammar of postcolonial Bollywood. To understand this better, we only have to look at the complex relationship between filmmakers and film censors in India. Mazzarella (2013) and Ganti (2012) have given us ethnographic accounts of how certain Hindi filmmakers are against censorship while some are very much in favour of it. Film censorship laws in India are largely a legacy of the colonial censorship machinery which ensured the complete suppression of any sentiments of anticolonialism and suggestions of independence during the late colonial period. As a result, filmmakers often resorted to mythological, devotional and historical films with furtive anti-colonial references that would otherwise be lost on British censors. Pre-censorship inadvertently became a subliminal process of script development. After Independence, the continuation of colonial censorship laws in postcolonial India was largely legitimised through the idea that unchecked entertainment could prove detrimental for the uneducated masses of a developing nation. Film scholars, such as Vasudevan (2001), have also argued that spectatorship in Indian film cultures is more of a communal experience than an individuated one. A Bollywood script is therefore always already a document of pre-censorship, a conscious or unconscious practice which cannot be completely delinked from the craft of developing a ‘screen idea’ (MacDonald, 2013). With reference to Rajneeti and Satyagraha, Jha specifically complained about how difficult it was to make any indirect references to real politicians and political parties, let alone any direct ones. Rajabali also referred to an incident where the Indian National Congress (INC) had forced them to remove an unintended reference to Sonia Gandhi, the party president, wherein a character in the original screenplay was referred to as a widow. He was, however, quick to add, “That’s the extent to which Congress could have changed it. BJP would have asked for the character to not be shown as a widow altogether!” Jha also admitted that times had changed drastically as the censors under the present government were conveniently permitting the screening of political hagiographies, especially before the general elections. He condemned the film censors for their hypocrisy, taking digs at The Accidental Prime Minister (a biographical drama film that showed Manmohan Singh, the former Prime Minister of India, in a poor light) and PM Narendra Modi (a hagiographic biopic of the incumbent Prime Minister of India):

3 The term ‘pre-censorship’ has also been recently used by the well-known Bollywood filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt. (“Artistes Today,” 2019).

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Showing reality is always a challenge. You have to constantly negotiate. You can’t show a flag, you can’t use a party’s name, no personal references. But now The Accidental Prime Minister is coming out. I am amazed! It is now convenient for the ruling party . . . How are they able to do this and how will they release this picture? Today Modi’s biopic was announced. Vivek Oberoi will play Narendra Modi!

Chakravyuh’s example was also enlightening. Rajabali had written the story in 1995 when he was “very disturbed with the endemic violence of the Naxalite movement,” which had become “a self-generative kind of thing.” He recounted how he had heard accounts of a police informer hacked to death by Naxalite militants. While writing the script, Rajabali developed the story around the character of an informer, exploring themes of intelligence, fear and loyalty. However, the film could only be made in 2012. By then, the story was no longer as controversial as it would have been in the heyday of Naxalite violence. Censorship was easier to avoid. Jha confirmed that the “film was mature, and it was the right time to talk about that society.” With reference to Chakravyuh, he revealed how good screenwriters knew how to “camouflage bare reality” and develop a story around characters with whom the audience would get “emotionally attached.” Camouflaging was therefore a conscious script development strategy to evade censorship and introduce audiences to otherwise controversial subjects. Jha also pointed out how a fictional evil conglomerate in Chakravyuh was cleverly named “Mahanta,” instead of its real-life counterpart Vedanta, which was notorious for displacing indigenous populations for industrial land grab. Finally, I asked both of them about why they had refrained from making mainstream political films after 2013. Was it self-censorship? Rajabali’s response highlighted how the political economy had changed too rapidly: Today, post 2013 would I still have a response like that and would I want to make a script with a political approach? Yes, of course. But right now it’s not viable. Nobody is looking at it, you see. And people are scared. Today they would be hawkeyed with a magnifying glass.

Jha echoed similar concerns citing the lack of a thinking audience. With increased pre-censorship in a political economy where audiences had largely become uncritical and intolerant, developing similar scripts with non-partisan content had become unfeasible: It has always been difficult . . . But today no one is thinking. The Government cannot think. The time is such . . . Those people who are thinking in a civilised manner, the academics and the thinking public are in the minority.

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Conclusion Jha and Rajabali’s disclosures bring us to the irony that the same political party, that had once hijacked creative uprisings and piggybacked on mainstream narratives of social unrest to come to power, was now actively suppressing dissent. Mass consumption of mainstream political films, as discussed at the outset, does not necessarily produce a democratic event or act. The idea of democracy in political philosophy calls to mind both its advocate and adversary—be it the revolutionary impulses of the multitude and unchecked global influence of the Empire (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 2004), spaces of dissensus and consensus (Rancière, 2010), or the creative forces of politicisation and aestheticisation (Benjamin, 1969). To what extent then is scripting for mass audiences a reflection of the above forces and fears, especially in the largest democracies of the world? Under different regimes, the political economy, in varying degrees, can permit as well as prohibit the script development of certain kinds of films. In this chapter, a close engagement with creators of such mainstream political narratives has allowed me to initiate a discussion on the political economy of script development, wherein it functions both as a tool of film financing in neoliberal economies and power negotiation in postcolonial societies. Mass consumption, and all corresponding creative practices, remain democracy’s double-edged sword.

References ‘Are you declared a traitor if you don’t follow a script?’: Bilawal lashes out at ‘fascist trolls’. (2019, March 22). Retrieved from https://www.dawn.com/news/1471219. Artistes today resorting to pre-censorship: Bhatt. (2019, March 19). Retrieved from https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/artistes-today-resorting-to-pre-censor ship-bhatt/article26582230.ece. Baskaran, S. T. (1996). Era of the Dialoguewriter and the Cinema of Dissent. The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema (pp. 28–37). Tranquebar Press. Benjamin, W. (1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217–251). Schocken. Ganti, T. (2012). Producing bollywood: Inside the contemporary Hindi film industry. Duke University Press. Ganti, T. (2014). The value of ethnography. Media Industries, 1(1), n.p. Gopal, P. (2005). Straight talk or spicy masala? Citizenship, humanism and affect in the cinematic work of K. A. Abbas. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (pp. 123–145). Routledge. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Harvard University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. Penguin Books. Jha, P. (Producer & Director). (2010). Rajneeti [Motion picture]. India: Prakash Jha Productions. Jha, P. (Producer & Director). (2011). Aarakshan [Motion picture]. India: Prakash Jha Productions.

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Jha, P. (Producer & Director). (2012). Chakravyuh [Motion picture]. India: Prakash Jha Productions. Jha, P. (Producer & Director). (2013). Satyagraha [Motion picture]. India: Prakash Jha Productions. Macdonald, I. W. (2013). Screenwriting poetics and the screen idea. Palgrave Macmillan. Maras, S. (2009). Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. Wallflower Press. Mazzarella, W. (2013). Censorium: Cinema and the open edge of mass publicity. Orient Blackswan. McNamara, J. (2018). Decomposing scripts: Ethnography and writing about writing. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(1), 103–116. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. Prasad, M. M. (1998). Ideology of the Hindi film. Oxford University Press. Punathambekar, A., & Mohan, S. (2017). A Sound bridge: Listening for the political in a digital age. International Journal of Communication, 11, 4610–4629. Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics (S. Corcoran, Ed. & Trans.). Continuum Books. Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: Perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing, 13(2), 204–217. The camera frame, long an ally, finally betrays Narendra Modi. (2019, May 14). Retrieved from https://thewire.in/politics/narendra-modi-scripted-interviewcamera. Vasudevan, R. (2001). An imperfect public: Cinema and citizenship in the ‘third world’. In Sarai reader 2001: The public domain (pp. 57–67). Retrieved from https://sarai.net/sarai-reader-01-public-domain/. Vasudevan, R. (2011). The melodramatic public: Film form and spectatorship in Indian cinema. Palgrave Macmillan. Wasko, J. (2008). The political economy of film. In T. Miller & R. Stam (Eds.), A companion to film theory (pp. 221–233). Blackwell Publishing.

The Relational Language of First Nations Cultural Sensibilities, Principles and Storytelling Ethics as an Intercultural Approach to Script Development Sharon Huebner and Ezzard Flowers

Introduction No Longer a Wandering Spirit —Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers (2016) communicates First Nations principles and conceptions of belonging and identity in the twenty-first century (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1dAyn pp9R4&t=233s). The short film depicts the unifying story of two Aboriginal family groups from distinct geographic regions of Australia—WirlominMinang families from The Great Southern of Western Australia and GunaiKurnai families from East Gippsland in Victoria, who awakened a cultural place of remembrance and legacy for their shared ancestor, Elizabeth (Bessy) Flowers (c. 1849–1895). Engaging with what had previously been silent, the families speak back to Bessy’s past, and with specialist cultural knowledge interpret for an audience through scripted story, the multi-dimensional truths of knowledge, language, kinship, memory and conceptual understandings of non-linear time, ethics and morals. This collective experience of heritage reclamation responsible for restoring identity, dignity and emotional strength, involved members of the Flowers and Bryant families. The Flowers’ family belong to the Great Southern and maintain a physical and spiritual relationship to their ancestral country in Western Australia. The Bryant’s are connected to East Gippsland, and they are the direct descendants of Bessy’s eldest daughter, Magdalene (c. 1869–1925), who S. Huebner (B) · E. Flowers Australian National University, Canberra, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_17

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was born on the Ramahyuck Aboriginal mission in Victoria. Centrepiece to the Bryant’s family history is Bessy’s historical movement away from her southwest Minang homeland in 1867 (Huebner & Flowers, 2016). The underlying principle of Huebner’s collaboration with these family groups (2009–2016 and continuing) has been respectful recognition for heritage custodianship and storyteller rights (Huebner, 2015). Huebner acknowledges the contributions made by Elder and senior members representing both family groups. As spokesperson for the Flowers family, Ezzard (co-author) ensures that cultural integrity herein is of upmost importance. Any personal reflections shared by Huebner reflect the authenticity of a longstanding collaboration, by which cultural revisions to dynamic ancestral pasts were created and documented. Approaches to script development that are respectful and flexible to First Nations principles, values and practices are paramount. Particularly writing that relates to real-life events, adaptations of personal and family imaginings and story, and re-inventive intercultural collaborations (Rutherford, 2013). For historical, political and cultural reasons, personal and family cultural requirements must be a considered priority, as was the case with the script development for No Longer a Wandering Spirit —Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers. Appropriately in this chapter, Huebner and Flowers examine the intercultural dynamics of co-developing a script with the descendant Bryant families and Flowers’ kin of Bessy. Discussed is the inclusion of cultural perspectives that give voice to the past in relation to contemporary realities. Also considered are the implications of understanding the ethical momentum of moving on-country conversations from spaces of relational knowledge, and to the written page. Taken into account is Charles and Elsa Chauvel’s script development of Jedda (1955), Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr’s Ten Canoes (2006) and Christine Olsen’s film adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence for Phillip Noyce’s film Rabbit Proof Fence (2002). These feature films provide audience interaction with First Nations storytelling traditions, as well as an entry point to the ethical considerations that are inherent to issues of knowledge custodianship and rights of authorship. They also create an opportunity to engage with script development and ethics as determined by First Nations filmmakers, such as Warwick Thornton and Darlene Johnson. The jointly created story of Bessy that was used for developing the film’s script, provides insight to the multi-layered complexities of cultural authorial responsibility, while at the same time creating visibility for interconnected descendant family and kin decisions: how they chose to remember their ancestor, and to keep memories of her safe, animated and cohesive within everyday family and community social lives. Importantly, this chapter is about recorded oral history transcript and on-country conversations that contribute invaluable meaning to significant issues and discussions involving cultural and intercultural dynamics of relational research collaborations, exchange and ethical dialogue. Working together in authentic ways in research and the

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subsequent writing, recognises and respects the diverse expression of cultural identities, particularly in relationship to kinship networks, dynamic interrelationships between human and non-human worlds, and the social and ecological connectivity to ancestral homelands. As such, the script development phase responded to the authorial voices of the Flowers and Bryant family collaborators. It promoted and supported First Nations principles and respectful inclusion‚ as demonstrated through the review of a relational collaboration that creatively and culturally centred a familial approach to storytelling. It was this self-determined storytelling that became the conduit for sharing with a wider audience the social and emotional complexity of negotiating the multiple threads key to mediating grounded cultural imaginary and cultural identity. Importantly, outlined are the realisations and understandings about why ancestral connections are, and will always be, relevant to the contemporaneous lives of descendants and kin, and critical for sustaining into the future, First Nations storylines and songlines.

Linking Living Heritage and History Bessy Flowers was sent away from her Minang homeland in 1867, never to return. She was one of five Aboriginal women who moved from the Annesfield Native Institution in Albany, Western Australia, to the Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission, in eastern Victoria. Destined to marry Koori men from Ramahyuck, as a result of inter-missionary negotiations, the histories of Norah White, Rhoda Toby, Emily Peters, and sisters, Ada and Bessy Flowers were captured within the experience of colonial settlement and principally recorded in the subjective correspondence of evangelistic missionaries, government authorities, personal letters and the portraiture studies of nineteenth-century photographers. The history pertinent to these women and their descendant families has been reproduced in the key works of Australian historians such as the writings of Phillip Pepper and Tess de Araugo (1985), Neville Green (1989), Bain Attwood (1996) and Joanna Cruickshank (2008). For more than 150 years, Australian archives have held responsibility for all records pertaining to Bessy’s past. This includes collections of historical photographs, some of which are in Perth at the Royal Western Australian Historical Society and also the J.S. Battye Library of West Australian History. Photographs of Bessy were instrumental to Huebner’s engagement with the Flowers and Bryant families. They helped Huebner to initiate the research collaboration, particularly with relevance to activating cultural perspectives that became responsible for moving an ancestral history into the present, and onto the page as part of developmental writing. The early 1860s photographs of Bessy taken by English settler, Alfred Hawes Stone, provided evidence of Bessy’s reality during colonial times. They also acted as a portal for Bessy’s Flowers and Bryant families to explore the past in ways that allowed them to express perceptions of self and others on cultural terms, while taking into account a strong desire for sovereign futures (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1 Bessy in a screen capture from No Longer a Wandering Spirit —Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers, 2016 © Sharon Huebner

In 2011, and a five-year lead period to the script development phase, the Bryant families with a continuing connection to the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Trust—Bung Yarnda and the country of their ancestors, involved themselves in reviving Bessy’s lost history and creating new memories with members of the Flowers family connected to the United Aborigines Mission Gnowangerup. The families’ reclamation of ancestral memory and the restoration of kinship networks created a series of emotional and socially engaging experiences throughout places and spaces on-country. Childhood remembrance became a place from which the domestic and geographic sites specific to Bessy’s past, such as Albany’s St Johns Church and the heritage-listed ‘Annesfield’ residence on Serpentine Drive, could be negotiated and understood on cultural terms, as well as being inclusive of the contemporary politics of First Nations recognition. This configuration of social and cultural reckoning was instrumental during the script development phase, when tasked with identifying the multi-layered aspects of the story to be shared. Many of the experiences documented were implicit to self-narratives generated by thematic recollections spanning mission living; the interactivity between family networks; embodied and imagined associations with ancestors; and the visceral communication of temporal memory activation and reclamation. The creative emphasis was on building within the script a narrative involving the physical journey to recover the memory of an ancestor, but also the emotional and deeper meanings of enacting and reconfiguring practices of identity and belonging. For example, Bessy’s great-granddaughters were able to consolidate events of their ancestor’s past in relationship to their own stories of identity intrinsically linked to the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Mission and surrounding Gippsland homelands. This was also the case for Bessy’s senior

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Noongar kin, who despite being born and raised under missionary and government control and authority, maintained kinship connections to their ancestral country in Western Australia’s southwest, The Great Southern. As communicated during conversations and oral histories recorded on country, these cultural energies of belonging and identity were integral to developing a script for the production of the short film. The script development required adherence to respectful and culturally appropriate engagement with storytelling practices. Using respectful and ethical storytelling approaches, the objective of our collaboration meant innovating culturally appropriate ways in which to articulate family meanings granted to remembering ancestors and keeping memories of ancestors safe, animated and cohesive within a framework of everyday social lives. This way of working together served as a method for politically and socially re-positioning the custodianship and ownership of cultural histories from the archives, and to the authorial voice of Wirlomin-Minang and Gunai-Kurnai Elders, senior knowledge holders and their families, respectively representing the Flowers and Bryant families.

Rights: Cultural, Moral and Intellectual Property Cultural and moral rights in film aim to achieve genuine representation of First Nations people and their cultures, as part of contemporary filmmaking processes and public showcase. Protocols and guidelines currently exist, to guide intercultural filmmaking and screen-based practices that work with First Nations images, language, knowledge, dance, song and stories (Bostock, 1997, 2018; Janke, 2003, 2009; Johnson, 2001). Intercultural collaborations based on cultural integrity and respectful engagement play a crucial role in developing for the screen genuine and truthful representations of story, histories and identities. First Nations lawyer, Terri Janke (2003) outlines in protocols for filmmakers working with First Nations communities, that authenticity culturally perceived and understood is about recognising the humanness of Aboriginal cultural heritage, inclusive of songs, languages, traditional knowledge, networks of family, imagery, artwork and stories that are true to individual, family and community experiences and practices of remembrance passed from generation to generation. The protocols reinforce that, authenticity regarded on these terms, requires that the ‘appropriate context is given to the cultural material’ (Janke, 2003, p. 10). In discussion with Anne Rutherford, the artistic and social dimensions of intercultural collaboration, is distinguished through a cultural lens by Koori filmmaker, Darlene Johnson of the east-coast Dunghutti people of New South Wales (Rutherford, 2004, p. 56): There are people who regardless of their ethnicity or culture have spent time with Aboriginal people, have lived with them, worked with them, and who actually understand an Aboriginal aesthetic, or storytelling or point of view. It’s not

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so much who you are, but that intercultural experience … that knowledge base. I find that it is an obstacle, not having a knowledge or awareness about a sensibility that is so in antithesis to your own, and why the conventional process may not be appropriate. […] Surely by being familiar with the way it works, codes of behaviour, attitudes, cultural beliefs, it would inform the filmmaking approach much better. […] Rather than me having to go into my collaborators’ headspace and translate what they are doing, I wish that would come the other way, that a white person would know this stuff from a cultural framework position, or from an instinctual one, and could translate my perspective.

The cultural meanings arising from the reclaimed history of Bessy Flowers help to redefine inter-community relationships between descendant Bryant families and Flowers’ kin, as well as deepen the capacity for intercultural knowledge and dialogue. Playing a large role, the cultural authorial voice represented in the script, builds upon positive and resilient activations and activisms of living family and relatives. It’s a voice that also provides specific cultural contexts for exploring and understanding the complex particularities of identity, as well as the specificities of heritage to identity that are of value to current and future generations. As defined by Janke (2009, p. 11): Heritage comprises all objects, sites and knowledge, the nature or use of which has been transmitted or continues to be transmitted from generation to generation, and which is regarded as pertaining to a particular Indigenous group or its territory. Indigenous peoples’ heritage is a living heritage and includes objects, knowledge, stories and images, created now and in the future, based on that heritage.

The script, created from oral history transcripts, on-country interactions and knowledge exchange, was a collaboration that extended the experience of heritage return and revival from that of local family interactivity, and to audiences representing the broader community. The script development process was true to its task of making palpable and significant the cross-cultural action of building trusted relationships and communications, which acknowledged and respected the social and cultural language of heritage recognition, and mutuality of respect. Respecting the political and cultural activities of reclaiming and understanding ancestral pasts was most evident in the many questions of heritage that the families investigated during the practice of physical, and emotional repatriation, two of which were: who was Bessy, and what happened to her? These questions and concerns innovated a new territory in which script development could be taken. This included collaborative efforts with a focus on ensuring that the authorial voice was expressed as knowledge significant to living heritage, and in keeping with a cultural worldview.

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Authorial Voices of Living Culture On the written page, the opening scene of No Longer a Wandering Spirit — Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers, is that of Noongar words: Kia Kia, Noogiting Wirren, Minang Yorga, Minang Boodja

The introduction in language respectfully acknowledges Bessy Flowers, a Minang ancestor from the southwest of Western Australia and lands northwards to the Stirling Range. The words recognise a continuing Minang connection to, and affinity with, ancestors, culture and heritage. They communicate to the listener unshakable and deep-rooted living knowledge generated by kinship networks, dynamic cultural binds to ancestral lands and social interrelationships between human and non-human worlds. During production, the handwritten words are moved across the screen, and appear in sync with the voice-over. The script development successfully achieved an intended goal, which was to emphasise widely spread cultural connections and networks of family, as well as individual and family cultural responsibility to the southwest region of Western Australia and its multi-generational custodians. Anticipating a diverse audience, an English translation follows within the script, the language words being spoken: We acknowledge the sleeping spirit, the Minang woman from Minang country

The script’s narrator was Ezzard Flowers. During the script development process both Flowers’ and Huebner were careful to replicate the rhythm and tone of Flowers’ everyday storytelling voice. This approach held central Flower’s intimate knowledge of knowing who he was and where he came from, on cultural terms (Fig. 2). Flowers is a Wirlomin-Minang Noongar from the Great Southern of Western Australia. He was born on the United Aborigines Mission Gnowangerup in 1958. Gnowangerup is about 120 kms north of Albany, which is situated on the south coast and its wider region is known as The Great Southern. Gnowangerup is in the middle of wheatbelt and farming country, in a region that is known as the Central Great Southern. Flowers is connected to both Minang and Wirlomin tribal groups from this region. Minang covers the Albany region, which is the Great Southern and Wirlomin, the Central Great Southern. Wirlomin is a clan in the Goreng group in the Gnowangerup area. There are 14 different tribal groups in Noongar country that represent the Noongar Nation. Wirlomin is just one of them and Minang another. Flowers’ connection to Bessy is through his grandfather Clifford Flowers. Flowers also identifies as a survivor of the Stolen Generations. It is this layered cultural identity that he draws upon when seeking a connection to his ancestor such as through the traces of her historical past.

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Fig. 2 Ezzard Flowers in a screen capture from No Longer a Wandering Spirit — Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers, 2016 © Sharon Huebner

When Flowers was ten-years of age he moved away from family after the death of his father and into the benevolent care of the Baptist Marribank Mission near the regional township of Katanning, followed by the Methodist Overseas Mission, known as Mogumbar. Of this experience Flowers says that: […] A lot of people say, ‘Stolen? You wasn’t stolen.’ […] in my case, what was taken from me, without my permission, or even my mother’s permission was not only my family structure and connection to country, but my identity, culture and also my language and customs, which I had to learn all over again to reconnect to who I am. (Flowers, pers. comm., 2011)

Flowers identifies with his ancestor through the generation-to-generation experience of being dislocated from family and community kin. He recognises this relationship in context to cultural and spiritual connections to country, particularly paying attention to the fact that his ancestor never returned home. The script began with a narration returning Flowers to his childhood history, and therefore an intimate and emotional understanding of Bessy’s movement from Minang country and to the Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission on Gunai-Kurnai country in eastern Victoria. Flowers’ reflexivity generated throughout the script a receptivity for lost time and history. As he determined within the co-developed script, there were some details that the colonial records neglected to reveal to a reader, such as the time of day or night, or the weather conditions that were seemingly influential to his ancestor’s ocean voyage when leaving Albany during the Winter of 1867: She was a strong spirited woman.

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I think her spirit was wandering and yearning for country. That’s what my spirit was doing. Even though I’d been away from home for a long time, my heart and spirit was still connected to ‘Gnowangerup’, the Native Mission Settlement here in the Great Southern of Western Australia—where I grew up as a kid, before I was taken away. Bessy Flowers is my ancestor. She was born in Albany in the mid 1800s, about 1849, a Minang girl brought up in the Annesfield Native Institution by a missionary from England, Anne Camfield. Only 18 years old, Bessy was sent away from ‘Annesfield’ with four other young Noongar women. It was June 1867—a winter journey from King George’s Sound across the eastward seas to the ‘Ramahyuck’ Moravian mission, on Lake Wellington. It wasn’t mentioned in the records if it was daytime or night-time, or if the waters were choppy, big swells, or calm...

Throughout the script development process, Flowers’ narration makes a reference point for the images produced for the screen. Creatively, Flowers’ authorial voice instructed how the images would be seen and interpreted by the audience, especially in context to the meanings and messages that Flowers self-defined. The intended meanings included truth telling, particularly about the emotional and physical energy required to culturally reach out in the direction of silent and perhaps even lost ancestor memories. The script defines how Flowers engaged with both real and imagined pasts and engages with the tools that Flowers drew upon to build points of contact between a temporal history, and the deepened emotional ancestor understandings that came into being through acts of cultural heritage reclamation and memory restitution. Flowers’ storytelling replicated within the script, and a mirror of his natural speaking voice, insisted that an audience respect his authenticity as a Wirlomin and Minang Noongar. Flowers’ voice of authority, shared in a considered and humble voice respecting ancestral spirits, life and death, asked that any future audience listen to what he was sharing and accordingly engage with this knowledge, heartfully and without preconceptions of histories, not their own. Flowers’ authority to be the narrator came from his position within his family as the spokesperson for any cultural matters relating to the larger Flowers family. This position of cultural responsibility informed the use of transcripts that had been made by Huebner from oral history recordings, produced throughout the years of the collaboration. The script development process drew upon these shared stories, as well as other recordings that captured cultural improvisations of awakening silent memories on-country and sites significant to mapping the path of an ancestral history. Specifically, the script recorded and promoted a family history that was not part of the historical record and Flowers’ narration became the directing force for telling a significant Flowers and Bryant story, which reclaimed and made

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anew memories of their ancestor involving descriptive and evocative terms, such as cultural integrity, pride and dignity.

Photos and Trusting ‘What We’re Doing’ As part of Huebner’s preliminary consultation, historical photographs were returned to families. The photographs helped to establish a sense of trust and were a lead-way to conversations that explored Wirlomin-Minang and GunaiKurnai pasts, in relationship to the present. The photographs were also used to provide a significant reference point for locating within family story, a cultural position for Bessy. The photos represented events in Bessy’s life that could be re-interpreted and re-invented through onsite performances that worked to interweave both memory and the imagined within story. Effectually, photographs also instilled confidence and acceptance within the complex dynamics of cultural and inter-cultural social exchange and collaboration by supporting the recognition of kinship interconnectedness and also the pragmatic effort of achieving things together. Describing the making of Ten Canoes (2006) with the Ramingining community in eastern Arnhem Land and the use of the Donald Thomson collection, filmmaker Rolf de Heer reflected on such a process to Louise Hamby (2007, p. 131) in a recorded interview that: […] In many cases it was simply not that the photographs had anything to do with the story but that you furthered the story in a situation such as depicted by the photographs. That gave them all [community] a very clear idea of what we were doing to do and a sense of trust in it.

The Donald Thomson collection consists of more than 2500 ethnographic photographs (currently held at Museum Victoria) that were taken by Thomson during Arnhem Land fieldwork in the years 1935–1937 and 1942–1943. The photograph of most interest to actor David Gulpilil and the Ramingining community was an image of their old people goose hunting in the Arafura Swamp with the use of ten canoes. The film, Ten Canoes was a story born from photographs returned to a community in years prior to Rolf de Heer’s research and script development. The 1930s and 1940s photographs depicted events from the past, but also symbolised the ways in which photographs potentially represented continuing networks of kin. Some of these photos have made their way back to Ramingining, and there they’re considered with a lot more than curiosity. They’ve been consumed by the culture, become part of it […] The web of kinship is complex; everyone is related to someone in the photographs, and everyone takes pride in them. They are their continuity, their history. (Hamby, 2007, p. 134)

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Heritage and the continuity of strong kinship connections were all significant to the performances of identity that moved Bessy from a photograph and into the consciousness of her Bryant descendant families and Flowers kin. In the case of the research phase, historical representations of Bessy led Flowers into explorations of the former Annesfield Native Institution, their ancestor’s historical home run by colonial settlers, Anne and Henry Camfield. The photographs prompted Flowers to think about personal life experiences that were instrumental to forming his identity as a Wirlomin and Minang Noongar. Within remanent spaces of Annesfield’s historic domestic interior, Flowers improvised connections that sought to bridge gaps between past and present histories, that of his own and that of Bessy. Inside Annesfield, Flowers reflected upon Stolen Generations stories that had been shared over the decades from other parts of Western Australia, and which were pertinent to his own story of removal and dislocation. Flowers’ (pers. comm, 2011) sharing that: When that Rabbit Proof Fence movie came out […] to actually see those girls, runaway and head back home, tears just started falling down my face, big crocodile tears. Because they did what I couldn’t do, and I had plenty of easy opportunities.

For Flowers, and in later years also Bessy Bryant’s great-granddaughters, the temporal experience of performing within spaces relevant to their ancestor’s history was not about re-creating what happened in the past as depicted in the photos, but rather using the photos as portals for telling a unifying story that reconciled past hurts with stories that were important for rebuilding emotional and spiritual resilience. Fittingly, Flowers’ methods for remembering and telling a story of identity became crucial to the process of developing the script, as expressed in this extract: Inside ‘Annesfield’ I could sense my ancestor’s past, through my own mission story. I thought about her as a child in this place—a native institution, and her life at ‘Ramahyuck’ with the other Noongar woman. It made me think about my own identity. Being a mission kid, we were never shown affection by the missionaries, given a hug or a cuddle. They never prepared us for life outside the mission. It was rough. I was born on a mission, sent to another mission, then another one. All my life I had no say, I just had to move on when the welfare said. This was much the same of old girl, Bessy.

Involving Flowers in the script development allowed him to lay cultural claim to Bessy’s significant ancestral history. Through an authorial voice, asserted was his role as the custodian of Flowers’ knowledge and the keeper of his own story. Flowers was also a cultural anchor point for Bessy’s spiritual return to her resting place in ‘Bulla Miel’ or its European name, Bluff Knoll.

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Building the Script from Real Life Events In 2013, five Elder Bryant women travelled for the first time to Albany, the homeland country of their ancestor, Bessy. In Albany they were culturally welcomed home by long-standing family custodians of Minang ancestral lands and also senior members of the Flowers family and other local custodians of this country. Once again Noongar language words were used to acknowledge kin and country, and in terms of the script, an important link connecting people to country (Fig. 3): Kia Minang Boodja, Kia Kia Minang Boodja, Wirrin Mia. [I used] Noongar words to welcome Bessy’s Koori descendants home to Minang country, home to their great-grandmother’s country. The smoking protected their spirits. It gave them a passage through and into Minang country. And, the beach sand and ochre—For us Noongar’s our land is our heart, it’s how we connect with our ancestors.

The Flowers and Bryant families spent several days together experiencing the places representing Bessy’s story. They went inside the St. Johns Church where she was known for playing the harmonium and into the spaces of the heritage-listed residence on Serpentine Drive, which had been Bessy’s ‘Annesfield’ home. The audio and digital videos recorded with family permission, captured the expressive and improvised performances of heartfelt and honest emotion, as well as their truthful responses to the experience of being inside the social and political history of their ancestor. Photographs and recorded conversations also documented the family gatherings as they moved from place

Fig. 3 The late Russell Nelly (far left) and Bessy’s descendant families in a screen capture from No Longer a Wandering Spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers, 2016 © Sharon Huebner

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to place throughout the township of Albany, and further north into the rugged landscape of the Stirling Range. Flowers was genuine and honest about what he didn’t know about his ancestor’s past, and this was evident in the oral history recordings that Huebner made of Flowers’ story throughout their collaboration. In these recordings, imagining the past on cultural terms was often the creative device for establishing a meaningful pathway of connection between Flowers, his ancestor Bessy, and to the Bryant families. Translating to script First Nations knowledge and story in collaboration with Elder storytellers, significantly contrasts the development of scripts such as that of Charles Chauvel’s Australian feature film, Jedda (1955). Both Charles and Elsa Chauvel created a script that joined two true stories pertinent to Aboriginal Northern Australia. The script tells the story of an Aboriginal girl raised by a non-Aboriginal station owner’s wife, after the death of her own infant (Fox, 2009, p. 77). As Charles and Elsa’s daughter, Susanne, recounted: It [the script] was woven from two real-life stories and penned around our campfires near the Mainoru River in Arnhem Land. The first story was about a young Aboriginal girl who had re-joined her tribe after being brought up from early childhood by a white family. The second story was the dramatic tale of Nemarluk, an Aboriginal man wanted by the police for murder. (Carlsson Chauvel, 2005, p. 53)

Though the film was constructed from ‘roaming with a purpose’ and listening to the stories of First Nations and non-First Nations people, the script privileged a showcase of photogenic and impressive ‘outback’ landscapes, rather than authentic perspectives of First Nations storytellers, who were living at this time during the assimilation period and experiencing the effects of racially inspired and orchestrated government policy and acts. Writing the script from oral history and event-based recordings allowed us to explore repetition within Ezzard’s re-creation of his ancestor’s story. From this repetition we were also able to re-arrange the order of his narration, which in an everyday story often melded past and present memories together in ways only coherent to the storyteller. Taking parts from his recordings that were perhaps said at different time, was achieved without diluting the meaning of his story. For a listener, the story is clear and succinct and still follows Ezzard’s rhythm and syntax of recollection and storytelling. The script maintains and respects cultural knowledge by keeping strong Ezzard’s tone and inflections of his everyday speaking voice. The authenticity of Ezzard’s story of identity and family reunification taps into a human story of dislocation from family, fracturing of family memories and reclamation of personal and cultural histories and stories. It’s a process of memory recovery whereby cultural differences, but also mutuality of shared beliefs and values, are given validity through one’s own story and interpretation of historical and contemporary lived realities.

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Working with David Gulpilil on Australian films such as The Tracker (de Heer, 2002) and Ten Canoes (de Heer & Djigirr, 2006), Rolf de Heer (quoted in Mike Walsh, 2006, p. 16) observes cultural difference and intercultural storytelling with the Ramingining community in eastern Arnhem Land, Northern Australia, that: The local community had a strong sense that we were the means by which they were telling their story. It wasn’t me [the co-director] telling my story, but rather being the mechanism, the mouthpiece, to allow them to tell their story. It’s a very different way of working.

Similarly, for Phillip Noyce’s Australian feature film Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), Christine Olsen engaged descendant families from Jigalong and community traditional owners, the Martu peoples, in the development of her script adapted from Doris Pilkington Gariamara’s book about her mother’s story (Pilkington & Garimara, 1996). Jigalong is a community in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, around 1250 kms northeast of Perth and 520 kms southeast of Port Hedland on the western edge of the Little Sandy Desert. Olsen made several trips to the Jigalong community in an effort to configure the story’s emotion and to negotiate issues of cultural authenticity (Olsen & Pilkington, 2002, p. viii): Doris had taken me to Jigalong several times to meet Dolly and Daisy; the two girls who’d made it back home. They were now 85 and 79. Jigalong is a remote desert community, difficult to get to, cut off from the world during the ‘wet’. Doris and I would make the long journey from Perth, stay a few days and then leave. But I knew I had to spend a long time just being there. Then Doris told me she was going to Jigalong for a funeral. I said, ‘Can I come too?” We went and stayed with Molly for three weeks. And that was what nailed it for me.

As Olsen also explained in an interview with Hunter Cordaiy in 2002 (16): I’m very proud of the way that we handled the Indigenous issues in the film and consulted with the Jigalong people. We were very careful to take notice of their concerns, and their major concern was who would be playing Mardu [Martu] people on screen.

As the script developer of Ten Canoes, Rolf de Heer (cited in Hamby, 2007, p. 145) was also motivated by this same impetus to uphold Aboriginal values of belonging and identity: What I wanted from the film was for the mob to achieve what they said to me they wanted … a ‘movie’, as they understood it, to have their culture recognised (= valued) by the world, but one which they could also show to their kids and say, this is where you/we come from.

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Understanding processes of cultural authority that are often defined as cultural protocols or guidelines is of significant consequence to script development practices. This is the case because ethics and cultural protocols are not merely instructive words on paper but are weighted by the activities of mutual respect and social reciprocity. Seeking cultural permission and ascertaining cultural authority from individuals, families and communities, is not necessarily the act of making contact with descendant families and kin in the hope of a ‘yes’ to work with their cultural material required to engage with their histories. It’s about a more meaningful dialogue, which has impact on how collaborations are initialised and the ways in which research and script writing is moved forward for the benefit of First Nations people and multiple generations of their communities.

Translating Culture: What the Script Had to Say Revitalising what had been lost to memory materialised within experiences that by their social and political nature strengthened Wirlomin-Minang and Gunai-Kurnai histories. The cultural significance of these individual and family experiences influenced the conceptual development of the script and the film’s aesthetic approach. In the film, moved across the screen sequentially are black and white still photographs from historical archives, combined with coloured photographs that were collected contemporaneously as part of the family events and rendered monochrome for creative impact. The visual texture of historical and contemporary imagery as a singular visual palette blurs the usual boundaries, which in context to a western world, delineates human pasts as being separate from the present (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 Bessy’s Bryant family (left to right), Regina Wilkinson, Betty Hood, Flo Hood, Phyllis Andy and Amy Hood in a screen capture from No Longer a Wandering Spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers, 2016 © Sharon Huebner

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Painterly splashes of grey or red throughout the story narrated by Flowers provide context and insight to historical events. They also amplify responses by the Flowers’ and Bryant families such as grief and shame, and during the reunion of family and return of Bessy’s spirit to ancestral country, courage, love and determination. The film, produced from the co-authored script, premiered in 2016 at the State Library of Victoria, in central Melbourne. The film was true to the script, which represented the story of Bessy Flowers in context to her Flowers and Bryant families, both past and present. Following cultural methods for developing the script, the film screening also replicated and centralised family relatedness, kinship and the emotional and cultural capacity for these families to deal with the lost memories of their ancestors on their own terms (Refer to recordings: Part I: https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/asset/video/ 3788 and Part II: https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/asset/video/3830). Wurundjeri Elder and community spokesperson, Bill Nicholson opened the event with a traditional welcome to country in Woi-wurrung language in conjunction with a plain-English translation. He explained the significance of language revival for Wurundjeri peoples in context to the continuing practice of cultural law. The significant performance of welcoming people to country was one way for Wurundjeri people to speak back to the colonial legacy of oppression conceptualised by colonial authorities and settlers as Terra Nullis— land belonging to no one. He said to the audience who were diverse in cultural backgrounds, heritage, gender and age: ‘The law of this land, even though the Europeans ignored it, it still exists, and it says—you must respect this land, its people and its culture’ (Part 1: https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/asset/video/ 3788). The Wurundjeri Djirri Djirri dancers performed a cleansing of the land and re-invigorated the space with an acknowledgment of ancestors, country and the living. The dances evoked stories respecting sky, river, creator spirits and creation story. The entry point for an intercultural audience experience of a First Nations story was facilitated through dance, language and ceremony that respectfully responded to the country in which Wurundjeri ancestors were born and the country where Wurundjeri old people were buried. On stage after the film’s screening, Flowers spoke to the challenges he confronted within his life as a Stolen Generations Survivor and those navigated with his fellow Bryant kin throughout the reclamation of their ancestor’s memory and legacy. While Flowers spoke, two children fostered by Flowers and his late wife Lynthia, spontaneously danced upon the stage wanting to be part of the storytelling action. The film was shown and people from all walks of life participated in an event, which was about listening to Flowers tell his story, while also engaging with the Elder Bryant women who had walked up on the theatre’s stage and the place from where they answered questions presented to them from the audience. From Flowers’ perspective, the process of valuing and respecting the cultural complexities of knowing who you are and where you come from was intrinsic to the kinship relationships created over time, and which generated for

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an intercultural audience a shared story of reclamation, belonging and survival. As Flowers described to the audience at the film’s premiere, the movement of a story from country and to the pages of a script, relied in the first instance upon experiencing the heart of country and its interrelationships between ancestors, family and kin: We [also] had a welcome to country for my Aunty’s [the Bryant’s] when they came over to WA [Western Australia]. We acknowledged their presence through ceremony, through smoking and through sand and ochre. [And], we also acknowledged the spiritual presence of Bessy Flowers that day when we [Flowers and Bryant families] actually sat down and embraced one and other, in Albany, and prior to going out on site to country to explain the significance of the surroundings of Minang country. [And] as mentioned and seen in the film, we talk about Bluff Knoll, or Bulla Miel —place of many eyes. It’s a place that we long and yearn for when we leave country, because the first site that we see when we come back home is those mountain ranges. [And] as mentioned in the film, I was taken away for a period of time. But I had the opportunity of reconnecting to my country, to my spirituality, to my totems, to my people and to my place of belonging. [And] when we took Aunty Phyllis, Aunty Regina, Aunty Flo, Aunty Amy and Aunty Betty up the mountain [Bulla Miel] that was my intention; to connect them to old girl’s country. Not only physically, but spiritually and emotionally. Where we could sit, reflect and acknowledge and understand why land is so important to us. We could document thousands of stories—good, bad. But unless it’s got that family connection that brings [forward] the emotion, the spirituality, the love and the warmth, to a piece of paper, and make it live and breathe life […] that’s what this story does— No longer a wandering spirit. (Part II: https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/asset/video/ 3830)

Wandering Spirit, Wandering Spirit The cultural interactivity between past and present for Bessy’s descendant families and Flowers kin was to coalesce childhood mission memories and adult identity in-and-of cultural knowledge and worlds of imagination. By respecting the validity of oral and written traditions, and the ability of each to inform the other when defining the contemporary language of identity, the script development practice for No Longer a Wandering Spirit —Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers represents an ethical writing partnership based on mutual trust and respect, while importantly also recognising the rights of First Nations people to assert ownership of heritage materials and living culture. As Flowers’ communicated during script development, when talking about connecting for the first time with the Bryant families, and then entering individually and collectively into the past of their ancestor, ‘It’s an emotional story, and [it] captures all those feelings and emotions about what happened in the past, and where we’re going, and what’s going to be the outcome, our future’ (Flowers, pers. comm, 2012).

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Significantly, throughout the phases of research and script writing, Flowers asserted powerful and dynamic family practices of reclamation, while also providing unique insight to personal ethics and cultural production. Drawing from a critical interest in First Nations filmmaker, Warwick Thornton, Steven Maras (Maras, 2016) says of First Nations approaches to ethics, style and story that ‘we do not often hear’ or experience directly, First Nations ‘personal relationships to ethics’ (Maras, p. 56). Interviewed about script writing and ethics, Thornton celebrates the ways in which his creative process constitutes filmmaking craftmanship, innovation, as well as cultural sensibility and integrity. Thornton’s approach to script development is the repetition of key elements, those being minimal dialogue that is brought to life through strong imagery, words, physical places and spiritual connections and understandings of these places (Maras, 2016, p. 58). For Thornton, all of the constituting elements define traditional approaches to storytelling that are mediated by the cultural sovereignty of his identity, and a First Nations need to keep culture moving, flexible and ever-changing (Maras, 2016, p. 59). Flowers’ tangible understanding of cultural sovereignty appears throughout the script in the form of thoughtful and energetic storytelling. Flowers shared a real story that was carefully constructed through extended reflections. Ethical approaches to script development are therefore best considered by engaging proactively with Flowers’ process of restoring distant ancestral memories, and as part of relational encounters and knowledge exchanges that Flowers insisted upon in order to make a story of truthful change for the Flowers’ family, and for Bessy’s descendants, the Bryant families. No Longer a Wandering Spirit —Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers began with Flowers’ poem, ‘Wandering Spirit’. Written sometime in the 2000s and before Huebner and Flowers’ first meeting, the poem became a meaningful place from which to explore the truths, morals and ethics of Bessy’s past as negotiated through a cultural voice, and as part of unifying and real-life experiences involving Wirlomin-Minang and Gunai-Kurnai Elders, senior knowledge holders and their families. The poem offers information about what has now become a larger story. It effectively opens up Flowers’ personal, spiritual and moral experience of reconciling the imaginary with the real, experiential understanding with knowledge, and identity with living culture. The poem speaks to Flowers’ search in life for a sense of belonging held within the strength of community cultural survival and legacy. The conclusion of the co-created script (as in the short film) enables a circling back to community life, and to truth telling through story that presents answers when possible, or questions to be answered at another time: Wandering Spirit, Wandering Spirit Where oh where can you be I need you back inside of me To help me through my destiny I’m lost, confused, and all alone

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They have moved me far from home My culture, confidence and self-esteem Is lost and destroyed, so it seems Wandering Spirit, Wandering Spirit I’ve been searching far and wide I just cannot hide it any longer I need you back inside of me For only you will make me stronger My journey almost destroyed me Their policies, ignorance and pride The way they talked, the way they lied They way I’ve seen how my people cried Wandering Spirit, Wandering Spirit Values and beliefs bring healing Culture and kinship embraces Empowerment Respect, Recognition creates Understanding But, with you in all of this, you have Given me DIGNTITY, for now I have DESTINY

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the Wirlomin-Minang Noongar families from the Great Southern of Western Australia and the Gunai-Kurnai Koori families from Gippsland, Victoria, with a connection to Minang Noongar, Bessy Flowers. They also acknowledge Elders, senior knowledge holders and their families representing other Noongar and Koori family groups who have contributed to the script development of No Longer a Wandering Spirit —Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers (2016). Thank you to the City of Melbourne Arts Grants Program, State Library Victoria Creative Fellowship Program, University of Melbourne Archives Hugh Williamson Fellowship Program, Creative Victoria and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra, Australia. Thank you to the film production team, Justin Kui, Kenny Thian and Joshua Biondi. Dedication In memory of Russell Nelly, Betty Hood, Melva Flowers, Donald and Dolores Flowers, Sedeena Flowers and Lynthia Flowers.

References Attwood, B. (1996). In the name of all my coloured brethren and sisters: A biography of Bessy Cameron. Hecate, 12(1 & 2), 9–53. Bostock, L. (1997). The greater perspective: Protocols and guidelines for the production of film and television on aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. SBS, Australia. Retrieved from https://www.sbs.com.au/aboutus/the-greater-per spective-indigenous-protocols (last visited November 14, 2020).

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Bostock, L. (2018). The Greater perspective: Protocols and guidelines for the production of film and television on aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, supplementary guidelines. SBS, Australia. Retrieved from https://www.sbs.com.au/ aboutus/the-greater-perspective-indigenous-protocols (last visited November 20, 2020). Chauvel, C. (1955). Jedda. Australia. Carlsson Chauvel, S. (2005). Jedda: New life for a fifties classic [online]. Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, 144, 50–53. Cordaiy, H. (2002, April–May 16). Making a rabbit proof fence. Hunter Cordaiy talks to Christine Olsen. RealTime Issue 48. Retrieved from http://www.realtimea rts.net/article/issue48/6347 (last visited 14 November 2020). Cruickshank, J. (2008). ‘To exercise a beneficial influence over a man’: Marriage, gender and the native institutions in early colonial Australia. In A. Barry (Ed.), Evangelists of empire?: missionaries in colonial history (pp. 115–124). eScholarship Research Centre in collaboration with the School of Historical Studies. De Heer, R. (2002). The Tracker. Adelaide: Vertigo Productions. De Heer, R., & Djiggir, P. (2006). Ten Canoes. Adelaide: Vertigo Productions. Flowers, E. (2011, December 1). Personal conversation with S. Huebner, Albany, Western Australia. Flowers, E. (2012, October 23). Personal conversation with S. Huebner, Melbourne, Victoria. Fox, K. (2009). Rosalie Kunoth Months and the making of Jedda, Aboriginal History, 33, 77–96. Griffin Press. Green, N. (1989). Aborigines of the Albany Region 1821–1898: The bicentennial dictionary of Western Australia Volume VI . The University of Western Australia Press. Hamby, L. (2007). Thomson times and Ten Canoes (de Heer and Dijiggir, 2006). Studies in Australasian Cinema, 1(2), 127–146. https://doi.org/10.1386/sac.1.2. 127_1 Huebner, S. (2015). Nidjuuk, Niih, Kaatitjin—Look, listen, learn: Noongar and Koories interpreting the silences of a colonial archive. Unpublished thesis, Monash University Library, Melbourne. Huebner, S., & Flowers, E. (2016). “It’s a resting place, where our spirits go”: Bringing back lost ancestor memories to Western Australia’s Great Southern— Noongar boodja’. Journal of Arts & Communities, 8(1&2), 75–92. https://doi. org/10.1386/jaac.8.1-2.75_1 Huebner, S. (2016, December 1). No longer a wandering spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1dAynpp9R4 Huebner, S. (2016, December 1). No longer a wandering spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy flowers. State Library Victoria Part One. Retrieved from https://www.slv.vic.gov. au/asset/video/3788 (last visited 30 November 2020). Huebner, S. (2016, December 1). No longer a wandering spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy flowers. State Library Victoria Part Two. Retrieved from https://www.slv.vic.gov. au/asset/video/38308 (last visited 30 November 2020). Janke, T. (2003). Issues paper: Towards a protocol for filmmakers working with indigenous content and indigenous communities. Australian Film Commission. Retrieved from https://www.wipo.int/tk/en/databases/creative_heritage/policy/ link0008.html (last visited October 29, 2020).

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Janke, T. (2009). Pathways and protocols: A filmmaker’s guide to working with Indigenous people, culture and concepts. Screen Australia. Retrieved from https:// www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/16e5ade3-bbca-4db2-a433-94bcd4c45434/ Pathways-and-Protocols (last visited 23 November 2020). Johnson, D. (2001). Indigenous protocol for SBS Independent. Retrieved from https://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/tk/en/databases/creative_heritage/ docs/aus_film.pdf (last visited November 20, 2020). Maras, S. (2016). Ethics, style and story in indigenous screenwriting: Warwick Thornton in interview. In S. Maras (Ed.), Ethics in screenwriting (pp. 55–76). https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54493-3_3 Noyce, P., Olsen, C., & Winter, J. (2002). Rabbit-proof fence. Sydney, New South Wales: Australian Film Finance Corp and Burbank, CA: Miramax Films. Olsen, C., & Pilkington, D. (2002). Rabbit-proof fence: The screenplay. Strawberry Hills: Currency Press. Pepper, P., de Araugo T. (1985). What did happen to the Aborigines of Victoria?: The Kurnai of Gippsland. Hyland House. Pilkington, D., & Garimara, N. (1996). Follow the rabbit-proof fence. University of Queensland Press. Rutherford, A. (2004). Negotiating indigenous documentary, storytelling, audience and cultural sensibility, Anne Rutherford interviews Darlene Johnson. Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, 139, 56–61. Retrieved from https://search.inf ormit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=833103870863018;res=IELAPA (last visited 23 November 2020). Rutherford, A. (2013). Ten Canoes as “inter-cultural membrane.” Studies in Australasian Cinema, 7 (2&3), 137–151. https://doi.org/10.1386/sac.7.2-3. 137_1 Walsh, M. (2006). Ten Canoes: Mike Walsh interviews director Rolf de Heer and reviews his new movie Ten Canoes. Metro, 149, 10–17.

Writers’ Room and Showrunner: Discourses and Practices in the German Television Industry Florian Krauß

Introduction For some years now, practitioners in the German television industry have approached and negotiated the use of the showrunner and the writers’ room in their productions. This chapter analyses the linked industry discourse and practices. In the US context, at least, the showrunner seems to be the crucial creator of contemporary TV/SVOD series. This industry term, in wide use since the 1990s, refers to the head writer who usually leads, recruits for and manages the writers’ room (see Mann, 2009). Very often, the person in the showrunner role is also the series creator, from whom the idea and thereby the basis for the collaborative plot development originates (see Del Valle, 2008, p. 403). Within the writing team, showrunners also can take on dramaturgical tasks, such as dividing and coordinating episodes and acts. In addition, they operate beyond the script development phase in order to ensure the narrative and aesthetic unity of the programme (see Mittell, 2015, p. 88; Redvall, 2013a, p. 155). In this sense, showrunners unite business and creativity in the production and development process (see Newman & Levine, 2012, p. 40). In the German and European industries, however, traditionally the scriptwriter is detached from the actual production and overshadowed by the director (Kasten, 1994; Kasten & Plattner, 1994; Szczepanik, 2013). This tendency continues today in the German television fiction industry, as will be discussed F. Krauß (B) University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

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in more detail. Nevertheless, in Germany as in other European markets (see, for example, Redvall, 2013b, pp. 131–158; Szczepanik & Pjajˇcíková, 2016), the ideas of the showrunner and the writers’ room have been gaining more ground in recent years. The increasing presence of both production models is linked to the recent, mostly US-centred—and thus one-sided—discourse on so-called quality TV in German-language media studies (e.g., Weber, 2019, pp. 240–242), in the feature pages of newspapers (Koepsel, 2015) and in the television industry (Krauß, 2018). Similar to well-known English-language scholarship (e.g. McCabe & Akass, 2007; Mittell, 2015; Thompson, 1996), in the German debates, ‘quality TV’ is often regarded as more literary and author-centred. The showrunner is seen as ‘a protector, guarantor and organiser of quality’ (McCabe & Akass, 2007, p. 9) and as the ‘crucial artist’ (see, for example, Dreher, 2010). Such a view tends to reproduce the romanticised image of the ‘auteur.’ Television studies, by contrast, typically highlight the institutional and collaborative aspects of this medium as well as its production and consumption. This chapter keeps these collaborative traits in mind by approaching the idea of the ‘showrunner’ as very closely linked to the writers’ room and to other members of the production team. The following analyses the showrunner and the writers’ room as industry discourse and practices. How do television professionals in Germany, especially writers, producers and broadcast commissioning editors, negotiate and practice the showrunner and the writers’ room? I propose that both production modes can be used to discuss broader transformations of the current television fiction industry in Germany. In recent years, the number of broadcasters and platforms commissioning for fictional television series in Germany, especially those featuring ongoing storylines, has grown (see, for example, Krauß, 2020a). As in other national markets, SVOD providers based in the US and pay TV channels, integrated into transnational media groups, have started to invest in local series. Established broadcasters are increasingly and extensively posting series online. Given these changed distribution patterns, other content and production methods are called for. Showrunners and writers’ rooms are surely not the answer to all possible challenges and problems, as some practitioners have critically reflected. For example, Hauke Bartel (2018), one of the two heads of fiction for the commercial RTL Group, stated: ‘I don’t want to open up this eternal discussion about showrunners and writers’ rooms. I don’t think it’s that simple’.1 Therefore, this chapter also considers broader, interlinked negotiations and fundamental characteristics of the television fiction industry in Germany.

1

In German: ‘Ja, ich will jetzt nicht diese ewige Diskussion um Showrunner und Writers’ Rooms aufmachen. So einfach ist das glaube ich nicht.’ At the time of the interview, Bartel was head of fiction for the broadcaster Vox, which belongs to the RTL Group.

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The chapter is based on 19 interviews conducted with writers, producers and commissioning editors before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has changed collaborative industry practices yet again. All the above-listed roles belong to what Ian Macdonald (2010) has called the ‘screen idea work group’ due to their contribution to conceptualising and developing scripts. The interviewees served as ‘exclusive informants’ (Bruun, 2016, p. 131) for my production study on the German television industry.2 The use of this method in my project acknowledges that I obtained only certain information or captured a ‘narrated reality’ rather than a ‘lived’ one (Kalthoff, 2011, p. 153). Still, the expert interview, often discussed and practised in media industry studies (see, for example, Bennett, 2016, p. 126; Bruun, 2016), is seen as productive: it enables researchers to dig deeper and to have greater exchange with the interviewees. Transcribed, systematically conceptualised and compared in different steps (see, for example, Meuser & Nagel, 1991), the interview is a comparatively transparent and well-proven method. The interviews with production members of several recent ‘quality TV’ projects from Germany were complemented by participant observations at multiday industry workshops on series production. This process guaranteed that the analysed discourse was not first constructed in the interviews.3 The chapter first looks at the showrunner and the writers’ room against the background of different production contexts, which became apparent in my research. Where can approaches using one or both production modes be found, and where are divergent production modes dominant? Secondly, the chapter concretises practices around the showrunner and the writers’ room in individual cases. Thirdly, it discusses production cultures that become visible in these project networks and are related to hierarchies in the script development.

Production Contexts in the German Television Industry Despite the focus on ‘quality TV’ series in my production study on the German television industry, the interviews and observations at the industry workshops encompassed a wide variety of production contexts. According to several interviewees (e.g. Eschke, 2015a; Leibfried, 2016; Kosack, 2019; Kromschröder, 2018), the writers’ room, in the narrower and literal sense of writers working together for almost the entirety of the script development and in one location (Gößler & Weiß, 2014, p. 31; Phalen & Osellame, 2012, p. 8), is something that previously only, or at least primarily, existed in the production of daily 2

The interviews discussed in this chapter were conducted between 2015 and 2019 as part of the research for the project ‘Quality Series’ as Discourse and Practice. The project is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, 2018–2021). 3

The industry workshops by Erich Pommer Institute in Berlin and Potsdam were ‘Winterclass—Serial Writing and Producing’ and ‘European TV Drama Series Lab’; participant observations from 2015 to 2019.

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soap operas (such as the long-running Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten, 1992– ). Since the 1990s, daily soap operas have used collective writing as part of an intense division of labour strongly motivated by time efficiency. So-called story editors, who are mostly employed on a permanent basis due to their continuous work (Knöhr, 2018, p. 34), develop the storylines together. These elaborate treatments serve as the basis for the dialogue writers, who mostly act more individually as freelancers outside the development office (Kirsch, 2001, pp. 48–49). In this development process, which several practitioners (e.g. Eschke, 2015a; Kromschröder, 2018; Leibfried, 2016) categorised as ‘industrial,’ we also find steps towards the showrunner: the producer is not only responsible for keeping the budget but also ensures the creative continuity of the episodes as a kind of ‘over-director’ (Über-Regisseur), as Gunther Kirsch puts it in his production study on daily soaps (2001, p. 46). Beside these ‘industrial series,’ Joachim Kosack (2019), managing director of the influential UFA production company,4 named further important television series production contexts in Germany. The ‘weekly,’ consisting of 26 or 50 episodes a year (see, for example, the medical drama In aller Freundschaft, 1998–), is to some extent similar to the daily soap opera. Again, a large portion of the team, including the writers and supervising producers, work exclusively on one project (Kosack, 2019; Kosack & Thielen, 2015; see also Krauß, 2019, p. 70). However, in the ‘weekly’ realm, episodic procedurals dominate, with some interviewees suggesting that thereby individual writers usually take responsibility for single episodes, mainly independently from each other (Eschke, 2015a; Gleim, 2016). In general, until recently, such single-episodic writing has been the common writing practice in German series outside the daily soap. The situation is similar with the ‘local series,’ which Kosack (2019) cited as another important segment: one defined by a lower number of episodes, a focus on national broadcasting slots, several seasons and a regularity in production and linear distribution. Finally, according to Kosack, there is also the ‘high-end series,’ which usually has a large budget, long preparation time and generally an extended dramatic structure instead of an episodic one. Following in the tradition of the multipart ‘event film’ (Cooke, 2016), which very often is historical in content, such as Generation War (Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, 2013), this ‘high-end’ type consists of relatively few episodes and may originate from only one writer. Particularly in this key ‘high-end’ segment, Kosack noted tendencies towards the showrunner. Kosack’s list of German television series contexts is clearly shaped by the structure and the productions of the UFA production company he represents. Other forms of fictional television, serial television and border areas, such as ‘scripted reality’ television (Klug, 2016) and hybrids of TV films and 4 The UFA includes some of the most important TV production companies in Germany and now consists of four units: UFA Serial Drama, UFA Fiction, UFA Show and Factual and UFA Lab. The UFA GmbH is a subsidiary of RTL Group’s production division, Fremantle.

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series (see Göbel-Stolz, 2016; see for example Tatort, 1970–), have been mostly ignored. Nevertheless, the distinctions he draw may point to central production contexts that differ, among other things, in their practising of the showrunner role and the writers’ room. According to this ranking, a showrunner at a higher level within the team characterises, above all, a mini ‘high-end’ series with an ‘event’ character, whereas collaborative writer teams, on the other hand, determine the more ‘industrial’ daily soap opera production (Kosack and Thielen, 2015). However, various other practitioners (e.g., Behnke, 2018a; Eschke, 2015a; Hess, 2019; Winger, 2017) also labelled less frequent, temporary and less systematised meetings of writers for series with significantly fewer episodes as writers’ room. For instance Jörg Winger (2017), producer and writer of Deutschland 83/86/89 (2015/2018/2020), even described a few meetings with writers for the long-running local crime procedural SOKO Leipzig (2001–) as the ‘lightest form of the writers’ room’.5 Not only the specific context of the German television fiction industry but also the individual projects affect how and to what extent the showrunner role and writers’ room are practised. Project-specific differences exist all the more, because the project network is the predominant organisational form in television series production in Germany. Again and again, the discourse on the showrunner and the writers’ room touched on the collaborative cooperation that occurs in the project network.

Writers’ Room and Showrunner Practices in Individual Project Networks Since the late 1980s, television series in Germany have generally been commissioned from production houses rather than produced in-house by the broadcaster. Hence, temporary, project-related business relationships and interactions usually extend across different companies, as has been demonstrated in a sociological study by Arnold Windeler et al. (2001). The cooperation between producer, writer, director, artistic and technical media service providers and the entity which these production sociologists still call the broadcaster (Sender) therefore varies from project to project. With regard to the showrunner and the writers’ room, we may specify the network-like arrangement and ask: Which roles belong to the individual writers’ room and to what extent? Do commissioning editors, representing the programme provider, directors or other actors, also form an integral part of it? How do the members cooperate? Is there a showrunner among them? In the observed industry workshops and in the interviews (e.g., Behnke, 2018a; Gößler, 2017; Hess, 2019; Leibfried, 2016), no general practice emerged. Thus, in the German television industry, no specific approach to the showrunner and the writers’ room comes into view, in contrast to the smaller 5

In German: ‘die leichteste Form des Writers’ Room’.

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Danish market and its public-service drama, as analysed by Eva Novrup Redvall (2013b). Because of the heterogeneity in the German context, it becomes clear that agency in writing and producing is to be found not just in a clearly identifiable and correspondingly titled ‘showrunner.’ The writers’ room exists only in a rudimentary form: over short periods of time, mostly without a common physical working space and adapted to more common and established practices of script development. For instance, the traditionally powerful director can be involved in the collaborative writing process. Close links between the director and the writer come to light in different project networks, for example, in the ambitious public-service political drama Die Stadt und die Macht (2016), where the director and writer are siblings, and in Dark (2017–2020), the first German-language Netflix production, where the central director is also the co-creator of the series and the partner of the head writer. An orientation to contemporary teen television in the convergent media environment became visible when social media experts partly contributed to the writers’ room as well, as in the case of DRUCK (2018–), the German adaptation of the Norwegian transmedia youth drama SKAM (2015–2017) (see Krauß, 2020c; Scharpen, 2019). Commissioning editors, often described as very influential actors in the script development hierarchy (e.g., Eschke, 2015a; Hess, 2019; see also Krauß, 2020a), can sometimes sit in on the writers’ room as well. For the 24-part Christmas series Beutolomäus und der wahre Weihnachtsmann (2017), made for public-service children’s broadcaster KiKA by ARD and ZDF, the editor even regularly participated in multiple meetings of the collaborative story development process, to be able to give direct feedback and shorten the process (Gößler & Schulte, 2017). A role related to the commissioning editor is played by the dramaturge, sometimes also called the development producer, who is involved in several writers’ room approaches. In the Beutolomäus project in particular, Timo Gößler (2017) acted both in this capacity and as a more general writers’ room consultant responsible for integrating this development method into the public-service processes of KiKA (Gößler & Schulte, 2017). Above all, Gößler (2017) suggested the use of the beat system, a specification regarding the smallest units of action (beats ), which he accentuated in the interview: ‘[T]he beat system [can] give you a kind of dramaturgical blueprint, which in a writers’ room […] leads you to simply work more effectively, because everyone knows: OK, dramaturgically they always have a kind of density, […] of rhythm, […] of narrative speed’ (see also Phalen & Osellame, 2012, p. 8).6 However, the other interviewed and observed practitioners (e.g., Hackfort et al., 2018) seemed to not have worked systematically with the corresponding structural 6 In German: ‘[D]as Beat-System [kann] dir eine Art dramaturgischen Bauplan vorgeben, der in einem Writers’ Room […] dazu führt, dass man einfach effektiver arbeitet, weil jeder quasi weiß: Okay, dramaturgisch haben die immer so ‘ne Art von Dichte […], von Rhythmik […], von Erzählgeschwindigkeit’.

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specifications of beats. Sometimes, they even expressed reservations about too much ‘technique’ (Hess, 2019).7 Once again, it becomes clear that the writers’ room is often used only in rudimentary and barely systematised form. In many cases in the German context, the writers’ room is a tried and tested aid, but not a central element in the process of scriptwriting. For Die Stadt und die Macht, for example, this collaborative development is said to have been practised only for a short period of two and a half weeks, primarily due to time delays resulting from the departure of the first head writer (Eschke, 2015b; Rauhaus, 2016). According to the show’s development producer Gunther Eschke (2015a), the temporary ‘writers’ room’ consisted of himself, the producer Sibylle Stellbrink, the new head writer Christoph Fromm and partly Fromm’s co-writer Martin Behnke, but no longer Martin Rauhaus, the creator responsible for the original idea (see also Eschke, 2015b).8 Eschke and the producer were there above all because, after the original writer’s departure, they knew the concept best and, since they were permanently employed by the production company, did not lead to additional costs (Eschke, 2015b). As this example shows, the compositions of writer collectives strongly depend on economic factors. Eschke and his producer colleague are not mentioned as writers in the credits, even though they apparently co-developed the content of the script. In this sense, they may have performed ‘invisible labour’ (Mayer, 2011, p. 27), a topic that caused significant discussion among the professional participants of the observed industry workshop (Eschke, 2015b; Winterclass, 2015). This lack of inclusion in the credits indicates that a clear form for collaborative authorship has not yet been found. At least in recent individual projects such as Bad Banks (2018–) and Skylines (2019), there is a tendency to explicitly include writers’ rooms and showrunners in the credits. While staff credits are useful to a certain extent, such data, of course, results from negotiations and contracts. Consequently, the credits provide only partial information on actual project networks. In the case of Die Stadt und die Macht, the terms ‘showrunner’ and ‘writers’ room’ seemed to fit only to a limited extent anyway. More clearly than Eschke, the writer Martin Behnke (2018a) denied that the project had a writers’ room. According to his explanation, tendencies towards the showrunner can only be detected with regard to the head writer Christoph Fromm: he wrote drafts for each episode and set the story arcs and the characters to a large extent (Behnke, 2018b). Collaborative development work shaped this project rather than the involvement of different actors from its commissioner ARD (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten/Das Erste). This traditional public-service network consists of nine different local broadcasters, of which NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Northern German Broadcasting) and WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, West 7

In German: ‘Technik’.

8

In the final credits, Rauhaus is listed under ‘according to the idea of’.

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German Broadcasting) were responsible for Die Stadt und die Macht. These federal structures, which many practitioners (e.g., Eschke, 2015a; Leibfried, 2016; Stuckmann, 2016) described as a challenge for script development, may stand in the way of a more comprehensive adaptation to the showrunner model in the German context. In other projects, tendencies towards the showrunner in the sense of ‘the writer and executive producer’ (Del Valle, 2008, p. 403) are more pronounced, albeit also still emerging. Very seldom is a person responsible for both writing and producing. Gabriela Sperl (2018), who has been active in both areas in the television industry for many years, is a rare example. She further pointed to former ‘showrunner personalities’ in (West) German television history. An adaptation of the showrunner can also be discussed regarding Deutschland 83/86/89, since the creators (and married couple) Anna and Jörg Winger bundled the competency areas of writing and producing (Winger, 2017). Until this historical miniseries, Jörg Winger primarily worked as a producer of numerous episodes of the constantly produced crime procedural SOKO Leipzig, whereas Anna Winger has experience in novel writing and journalism. In other project networks, writers are at least temporarily integrated in areas beyond script development by, for example, having a say in the casting or gaining access to the dailies (the raw, unedited footage shot during the making of a series) (Hess, 2019). Such involvement, however, is not self-evident and exists in a precarious state, since writers have to defend such rights time and again (Hackfort et al., 2018). Several series’ projects display emerging approaches to the writers’ room and the showrunner, in the sense that a head writer—and in exceptional cases a duo comprising a writer-director or a writer-producer— cooperates with several writers on the basis of an already clearly outlined concept. For Dark, for example, prewritten outlines with many gaps are said to have formed the foundation of the collaborative story development, which in this case actually took place four days a week in a physical space for some time (Behnke, 2018a; Friese, 2019). Martin Behnke (2018a) (involved not only in Die Stadt und die Macht but also in this show) described the beginning of the collective writing in more detail: ‘There are four families at the core of this series. […] Everyone took a family and wrote the biographies of these characters.’9 Later, the writers worked out individual episodes, which were then finalised by the head writer and creator Jantje Friese (2019). Such a process similarly shapes other approaches to the writers’ room in the German television industry. Wellknown writer and creative producer Annette Hess (2019), who at the time of the interview was working with several young writers on Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo (We Children from Bahnhof Zoo, 2021), the series version of the well-known 1980s youth drama Christiane F. (Christiane F.—Wir Kinder vom

9 In German: ‘[E]s gibt ja vier Familien im Kern dieser Serie, sozusagen hat jeder eine Familie genommen und die Biografien dieser Figuren geschrieben’.

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Bahnhof Zoo, 1981) for Amazon Prime Video and the Constantin production company, indicated an exchange on corresponding practices: before she initiated her rudimentary ‘writers’ room,’ which consisted only of several twoday sessions, Hess consulted colleague Anna Winger about her corresponding experience at Deutschland 83 (see also Krauß, 2020b). Like for the development of Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, often young, relatively inexperienced writers are involved in approaches to the writers’ room. Emerging writers may be more open to collaborative story development and lead to ‘fresh ideas’ (Eschke, 2015a),10 and they are also much cheaper (ibid.; see also Caldwell, 2009, p. 227). Given the early stage of their careers, a hierarchy in favour of the more experienced head writer might be guaranteed. Behnke (2018a), for instance, called himself a ‘staff writer’.11 Thus, he made recourse to the formal ranking within the writers’ room used in the US television industry: the showrunner is at the top, the staff writer at the bottom (Phalen & Osellame, 2012, p. 6). The degree of the writers’ individual experience and the organisation of the writers’ room are linked to the question of whether the showrunner (or the related actor) will write the final draft, as was the case for Dark and Deutschland 83/86. According to Patricia Phalen and Julia Osellame (2012, p. 8), this is a conceivable but not optimal scenario, because ideally the showrunner would be able to delegate the finalising of some scripts to other writers as well. The questions of agency and of individuality versus cooperation, which are indicated here, are linked to broader negotiations of production cultures.

Production Cultures: Broader Discourses The tension generally characteristic for production cultures, namely ‘between individual’s agency and the social conditions within which agency is embedded’ (Banks et al., 2016, p. x), is particularly relevant and complex in the discussed production methods. The writers’ room and the showrunner guiding it is supposed to maintain both a creative freedom (e.g., Borries, 2019), and thus a certain independence from social conditions, as well as a strong, productive collaboration. The interviewed and observed practitioners (e.g., Eschke, 2015a; Gleim, 2016; Hackfort et al., 2018) repeatedly contrasted the polyphonic writers’ room with the individual writing of single episodes and TV films, which they regarded as typical for the traditional German television industry. The linked production culture is reflected in the still predominant remuneration scale: except for story editors of daily or weekly soap production, writers are usually paid per script. This payment model is related to the repeatedly diagnosed tendency towards the ‘single piece’ (e.g. Winger, 2017). In German television fiction, single films and hybrids of them and series as well as procedurals 10

In German: ‘frische Ideen’.

11

In German: ‘Ich bin ja quasi ein Staff Writer’.

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still play a central role (e.g., ibid.; Gleim, 2016). Consistency in characters, from episode to episode and over the years, which the writers’ room and the showrunner are supposed to guarantee, is less relevant for such programmes. However, in the turn to ‘quality TV’ serials with ongoing dramatic continuity and a stronger focus on the characters, individual writing practices might be a hindrance. According to former commissioning editor Bernhard Gleim (2016), many writers accustomed to the single piece and the self-contained, episodic structure do not approach characters very bravely, as they become afraid that ‘[n]ow I’m changing the character too much and it goes in a direction that [...] the person who writes the next episode can’t [use] again’.12 The practices and production cultures opposed to the writers’ room and the showrunner are linked to alternative arrangements and hierarchies in production and project networks. Being associated with the single film, the director is often of great importance (Winger, 2017). Many practitioners, and not only writers (e.g., ibid.; Hackfort et al., 2018; Hess, 2019; Zöllner, 2018), took a critical view of the director-centred attitude, claiming that the person in this role often pays insufficient attention to the ‘foundation’ laid by the script. The diagnosed hegemony of the director was seen as problematic especially with regard to the series. Television is a ‘writer-producer medium’ and not a ‘directors’ medium,’ argued writer-producer Winger (2017), pointing towards a tendency known from scholarship regarding television series production in other countries (see, for example, Caldwell, 2008, 16f.; Mittell, 2015, p. 88; Newcomb & Alley, 1983; Redvall, 2013a, p. 155). Serials with several episodes, which are usually directed by different people, require production cultures other than the ‘single piece’ that arises out of the ‘television film tradition’ (Winger, 2017).13 However, the increasing serial production in Germany is not necessarily leading to a loss of power for the director. On the one hand, writers of the widely discussed initiative Kontrakt’18 (see Gangloff, 2018; Zahn, 2018) have demanded the right to have a say in the selection of the director of the productions they work on; but on the other hand, several recent ‘quality TV’ projects have tied in with the model of the ‘auteur film.’ The clearest example of this latter tendency is probably Babylon Berlin (2017–), the most expensive series production from Germany to date. That series’ three directors are also responsible for the script and, according to one of them, Achim von Borries (2019), together form a ‘writers’ room.’ In their discourse on showrunners and writers’ rooms, many practitioners reflected critically upon another actor: the commissioning editor (see Krauß, 2020a). In public-service and commercial (ad-funded) television, the editorial system would first have to change in order to establish the showrunner, development producer Eschke (2015a) asserted: ‘Because the [showrunner] of 12 In German: ‘Jetzt verändere ich den Charakter zu sehr und der geht dann in eine Richtung, die […] derjenige, der die nächste Folge schreibt, wiederum gar [nicht] gebrauchen kann’. 13

In German: ‘Fernsehfilmtradition’.

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course […] has more creative power and also as an executive more power than an editor, otherwise it makes no sense’.14 Eschke (2015a) and others (e.g. Behnke, 2018a; Leibfried, 2016) also criticised the large number of editors in individual project networks and the associated bureaucratisation of particularly public-service media. A polyphony in the development process, unlike in the writers’ room, is usually evaluated negatively and seen as an obstacle to the one vision. Various practitioners (e.g., Behnke, 2018a; Leibfried, 2016; Winger, 2017) referred at least indirectly to the idea of ‘one vision’ (Redvall, 2013b, pp. 109–112), by highlighting the ‘one voice’ or ‘common spirit’ in the script development process or problematising the lack of an ‘idea hierarchy’ (Stuckmann, 2016).15 They often suggested that ‘different visions’16 (Eschke, 2015a) are reflected at the textual level of the television series. According to the observed industry workshops, the showrunner as ‘guardian of the vision’ (Gößler & Schulte, 2017; see also Mittell, 2015, p. 90) is regarded as an antidote to textual deficits. But the director Rumle Hammerich (2016) from the Danish public-service broadcaster DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) spoke in his talk at the European TV Drama Series Lab against the sole supremacy of the showrunner and a strict adaptation of the corresponding US model to the European context. Instead, he suggested a less hierarchical ‘shared vision’ and a ‘triangle’ of writer, director and producer would be most appropriate for the European television industries. Negotiations regarding the individual actors and their power in the project and production networks touch on several economic issues. In addition to the diagnosis that the power lies largely with the broadcaster, there is the observation that a lack of financing prevents the writers’ room model from being more widely practised (Blumenberg & Kienle, 2018; Gößler & Schulte, 2017; Winger, 2019). More generally, several writers and producers (e.g., Hackfort et al., 2018; Hess, 2019; Winger, 2017) complained that a smaller portion of the budget goes into the script development compared to other television markets. In their view, the early concept phase in particular (Eschke, 2015a; Sperl, 2018), as well as research and writers’ expanded activities such as giving feedback during shooting (Hackfort et al., 2018), are currently insufficiently funded. From writers’ financial perspective, it has been very risky and thereby not very attractive to introduce new series ideas. For writers, very often individual work on an existing format has been much more lucrative and especially secure (Eschke, 2015a; Gleim, 2016; Hackfort et al., 2018). Efforts to produce ‘quality TV’ and to find other, often more costly, ways to develop such series may lead to less production in the longer term. Gebhard Henke (2018), the former programme manager of public-service WDR who 14 In German: ‘Weil der [Showrunner] hat natürlich […] mehr kreative Macht und auch als Executive mehr Macht als ein Redakteur, sonst macht es keinen Sinn’. 15

In German: ‘Ideenhierarchie’.

16

In German: ‘verschiedene Visionen’.

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was also involved in both Die Stadt und die Macht and the first season of Babylon Berlin, predicted the redistribution of budgets in connection with ‘quality TV’ series at the expense of TV films. Tendencies towards serialisation and ‘eventisation,’ which he identified, may lead to the need for other production models. In this respect, the showrunner and the writers’ room are closely linked to more general transformations of the German television fiction industry.

Conclusion Besides increased serialisation, transmedia narration and distribution in a convergent media environment may be a decisive factor for practitioners in the German television industry to approach the use of the showrunner and the writers’ room. Arguably, it is particularly series circulating across different platforms that need both collaborative writing and central coordination of the transmedia storytelling (see Krauß, 2020c). However, the analysed practitioners discussed the showrunner and the writers’ room more against the backdrop of ‘quality TV’ drama than of transmedia expansions. In spite of the intensive discourse, television professionals in Germany have been practising either production model to a limited extent. Usually, these practices take place within the framework of existing, historically established production structures, according to which the director and the commissioning editor play important roles. Local showrunner and writers’ room adaptations must integrate those actors, we can conclude. At the same time, the practices and discourses on the writers’ room and the showrunner are linked to the hope that writers will act less invisibly and precariously in the future and will be able to control ‘their’ products more strongly through formalisations and changes in the development process. Indeed, there are some signs that (at least some established) writers are gaining in importance in the transforming German television landscape, due to new and more broadcasters and platforms and their battle for content and talent. But authorcentred approaches cannot be seen as the answer to all possible structural problems, narrative deficits or changes in German television fiction. Sometimes, in the industry discourse on the showrunner and the writers’ room, the practitioners tended to refer back to the concept of the auteur and to idealise the supposed desirable production conditions of US ‘quality TV.’ When looking at well-known writers and possible steps towards showrunners, we must not forget the collaborative characteristics of the script development for television series and the various actors involved in project networks or ‘screen idea work groups’ (Macdonald, 2010). In addition to the individuality of each project network, the study of writers’ rooms and showrunners in the German context must keep in mind the

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quantity and heterogeneity of German television fiction. TV films and ‘breadand-butter series’17 (Gleim, 2016) with self-contained episodes are still, to date, for many practitioners and their production cultures more formative than a few ‘quality’ or ‘high-end’ projects. Large parts of especially fictional programmes in the public-service industry are still shaped by the tendency for the ‘single piece’, through strongly autonomous procedurals and TV films. In such areas, showrunner and writers’ room approaches may not be required in the same way. Last but not least, it is due to limited economic resources and their allocation that the writers’ room led by a showrunner is practised in Germany in only a rudimentary way. Funding This article is an outcome of the research project ‘Quality Series’ as Discourse and Practice: Self-theorizing in the German TV Series Industry that is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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German market: Case study Die Stadt und die Macht). Potsdam: Industry Talk. Winterclass Serial Writing and Producing. Friese, J. (2019, March 1). Interview by the author. Gleim, B. (2016, July 1). Interview by the author Gößler, T. (2017, September 26). Interview by the author. Gößler, T., & Schulte, C. (2017, November 11). Writers’ Room light?! Deutsche Adaption des Konzepts und dessen Konsequenzen im Herstellungsprozess/Case study (writers’ room light?! German adaptations of the concept and consequences in the production process/case study). Potsdam: Industry Talk. Winterclass Serial Writing and Producing. Hackfort, H., Konrad, B., & Kropf, R. (2018, February 14). Interview by the author. Hammerich, R. (2016, May 6). European adaptations of the US collaborative model. Berlin: Industry Talk. European TV Drama Series Lab, Berlin. Henke, G. (2018, March 8). Interview by the author. Hess, A. (2019, March 7). Interview by the author. Kosack, J. (2019, January 29). Interview by the author. Kosack, J., & Thielen, B. (2015, November 19). Serien-producing in Deutschland: Status Quo und Tendenzen (Series production in Germany: Status quo and tendencies). Potsdam: Industry Talk. Winterclass Serial Writing and Producing. Kromschröder, J. (2018, February 2). Interview by the author. Leibfried, U. (2016, June 16). Interview by the author. Rauhaus, M. (2016, June 16). Interview by the author. Scharpen, L. (2019, June 20). Interview by author. Sperl, G. (2018, November 22). Interview by the author. Stuckmann, S. (2016, May 13). Interview by the author. Winger, J. (2017, May 15). Interview by the author. Winger, J. (2019, November 14). High End Drama in Deutschland produzieren—von DEUTSCHLAND 83/86/89 zu HACKERVILLE (Producing high-end drama in Germany—From Deutschland 83/86/89 to Hackerville). Potsdam: Winterclass Serial Writing and Producing. Zöllner, M. (2018, October 26). Interview by the author.

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The ASEAN ROK SCREENPLAY LAB: Voices Across Asia—Stories About Rice Gabrielle Kelly

Introduction In 2009, just as many filmmakers in Asia were starting to assert their own voices, I joined a team of filmmakers in order to develop 10 short fiction films written by writers from ASEAN (The Association of South East Asian Nations), a 10-nation group and the central union for cooperation in the Asia–Pacific. The Screenplay Lab was part of a filmmaking workshop funded by ASEAN and ROK (Republic of Korea) led by Philippine writer/director/producer and film scholar, Nick Deocampo, with additional input from German cinematographer Christoph Janetzko and local production experts. The goal was to support ASEAN screenwriters to develop 10-min short film screenplays with the theme of rice, which would serve to promote filmmakers from ASEAN worldwide. I was invited to collaborate through the U.S. Fulbright Program, which aims to improve intercultural relations and competence between the U.S and other countries, through the exchange of U.S scholars/practitioners and their expertise. In this chapter I will examine how development of these screenplays raise questions about the challenges of using the Western approach to script development based around Aristotle’s thinking; attitudes towards time, conflict and acceptance in East and West as they play out in creating drama and tension in screenplays; the directing workshop and mentoring relationships G. Kelly (B) AFI Conservatory, Los Angeles, USA

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between screenwriters and other indigenous professionals and how the closed and focussed nature of the Screenplay Lab enhanced interaction between participants.

Goals of the ASEAN ROK Screenplay Lab As the central union for political, economic and cultural cooperation, ASEAN ROK funded and managed the Screenplay Lab through its Philippine partners. In a unique format, the Lab aimed to develop short film scripts to be directed by the screenwriters themselves and the finished films would then be edited into an omnibus feature-length film, to premiere the following year in a major Asian or world festival. Therefore the screenwriters selected had to develop production-ready scripts with a common theme of rice and work collaboratively with production departments. The Screenplay Lab thus allowed an examination of how a largely Western experience of script development would work in this singular instance of screenplay development “in action” across various cultures and countries.

Screenplay Lab Challenges Despite the success and dominance of the Hollywood-driven script development model (Batty et al., 2017), the precepts of Western screenplay development are not always a natural fit for other cultures. Although the Hollywood formula, based on Aristotle’s storytelling model of pity, fear and catharsis from two-and-a-half thousand years ago, is generally held up as the model for screen stories, other forms of storytelling (Khatib, 2012) pre-dated it in Asia and elsewhere. Therefore it was not clear that the tenets of screenplay education in the West, (Maras, 2016‚ 2017) would necessarily resonate with Asian filmmakers. Like Europe, Asia is not a homogeneous culture. There are significant, political, cultural and economic differences among Asian countries and as we developed the Lab participants’ stories one topic quickly emerged generating exchanges around the differences between each country: how much should their scripts be like Western, particularly American, scripts? Here Yoshinaga’s (2019) work on “the colonial screenplay” resonated as some participants leaned towards stories they felt would be more accessible to a Western audience. The question arose for them of how to use the accessibility of a Western story structure for a global audience more used to that style, yet still show what was unique and rich about their own culture. None had much experience of script development, though those from wealthier countries like South Korea and Singapore had greater access to screenwriting training, while others may have only attended the few local film festivals that offered occasional screenwriting workshops. This made the Screenplay Lab all the more challenging, but necessary, for ASEAN’s goals of training and promoting their filmmaking community.

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Rice was chosen as a unifying theme for this Screenplay Lab because in Asia it is central to life in every way. This requirement was demanding initially, but ultimately brought the scripts together into a cohesive whole and also helped give shape and focus to their original stories. More importantly, a central tenet of Western screenplay development is that “conflict equals drama” which forced a closer look at how conflict and time are experienced in a Buddhist worldview, the philosophy of many of the ASEAN countries. To write a screenplay that they would also direct, meant addressing production needs, especially the budget, into screenplay development. Additionally, this Lab was conducted in a remote setting in a specific and short amount of time. Experience in film and English language levels varied widely in the group, and the most useful teaching tool turned out to be an almost silent Icelandic short film, The Last Farm (2004), which obviated the need for a shared language and usefully underscored the importance of visual storytelling. How the Workshop Was Conducted Since this was not a lab for beginners, screenwriters were selected who had some experience in media, who had a good story idea and who could also direct or learn to direct. The organizers reached out to film programs, festivals, and other hubs of film education and practice to advertise the program. Applicants submitted resumes, story ideas and letters of recommendation, and since there are few film schools in this region, applicants came from a wide variety of backgrounds and experience levels. Apart from the two Philippine entrants, participants arrived in Manila, Philippines, from South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos PDR, Indonesia and Myanmar. Each country was represented by a writer/director and cinematographer and on arrival, all applicants were briefed about the goals of the project, expected outputs and details of the cultural support offered by the program. Screenwriters had been asked to prepare a storyline, character biographies, key incident, and step outline to pitch to the group. Screenplays would be written as quickly as possible in order to progress to production classes where script development would continue. We also needed to build working relationships between the writers/directors and cinematographers, and the group as a whole, since they did not know each other upon arrival. Our first discussion, which I led, was about what makes a good story, one that compels the reader to ask, “what happens next?” A “good” story in this case was a story that worked in the context of the script development specifics for this particular Screenplay Lab and its goal to reach a global audience via film festivals. In addition, the nine scripts also needed to work as an omnibus. This discussion was followed by Deocampo’s presentation on film structure using clips from 2001 Space Odyssey (1968) and Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan (1899). After showing how cuts between shots and camera movements are used to organize action and tell a story, he asked the screenwriters to re-tell the first scene of their story in terms of shots. This session

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then concluded with a discussion on how the nine individual stories could be woven together into a feature with rice as its theme and how to create a flow to the composite story. A consultant from the International Rice Research Institute then gave the storytellers a brief history of rice cultivation, and explained how this food staple affects all the ASEAN countries socially, culturally and economically. A key focus was that modernization, by improving the science of traditional rice cultivation, should support, not threaten, the livelihood of rice farmers. Marrying all these factors—cultural, educational and political—through the theme of rice would be an unique challenge of the script development process. Short films most often serve as “calling cards” for writers/directors to showcase what is unique about that filmmaker’s voice. However, as part of the ASEAN Screenplay Lab parameters, their stories needed to be about rice, to adhere to a certain budget and to showcase ASEAN, which meant all screenwriters had to follow a similar mandate, yet find orginal stories to tell. The cinematographers were invited to give their input at this early stage, whereas such conversations usually take place once a script has been completed. Their notes, plus the production parameters, served to focus story development on what was realistic.

The Screenplay Lab and Film Workshop Begin; National Arts Centre, Laguna, Philippines Most screenplay labs are modelled on the very first Sundance Lab, held in 1981 and founded by actor and activist, Robert Redford so that filmmakers could tell their own stories outside the confines of the Hollywood studio system. Redford wanted participants to spend time together away from everyday concerns which allowed a concentrated focus on story and on the group workshop process. For our Lab, the screenwriters and additional professionals travelled from Manila to the small campus of the National Arts Center in distant Laguna, where the intensive script process in this isolated setting moved very fast. One of the advantages of an immersive environment was that talking and writing were continuous over food, music and watching films. Any deference to us “experts” fell away allowing a fuller and freer exploration of story issues. Important differences in experience and resources between the different countries turned out to be less of a division than we anticipated. Overall, the confidence level of the screenwriters increased as these conversations and our development process unfolded. Script development in the West is a time-intensive and often rigorous process usually over a long period of time. In this Screenplay Lab the shorter time frame of several weeks forced us to focus on the crucial dictum of visual storytelling, “show” rather than “tell,” in a unique way. Every afternoon we broke for “merienda,” a type of Philippino afternoon snack time. It was there that certain scenes were acted out informally, showing the writers where

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dialogue was too long, not realistic, or failed to convey the intended emotion. This helped later when they acted out a scene for the group to review. Time pressure to complete the screenplay with specific production needs meant story issues were often resolved at an accelerated pace, and feedback from the participants went from tentative to targeted as production experts visited our group and weighed in on their areas of expertise. As we worked, production concerns worked parallel to script development, generally to the benefit of both. Since the screenwriters were also going to direct, and on a modest budget, it was therefore imperative as the script developed, to focus on practical considerations such as the number of shooting days, budget and available crew in each country. In that sense, they were writing to those considerations, and for those who had never directed, it became more important to focus on telling a strong story that did not involve too many locations, effects or actors. Also, considering the 10-min time frame, they needed to think about myriad factors; the number of characters that would work best, permits for child actors, locations, any animals or FX, and the very specific cultural aspects of each country. They also needed to answer basic story questions such as “Who is the protagonist; what do they want; who is the antagonist; what stops them; where is the location; and, most importantly, what is the story about?” Answering these questions was a complex exercise for the screenwriters. Some had never directed, and as they interfaced with production personnel, and especially their cinematographers, they were learning to integrate their roles as writer and director. I had chosen a selection of short films from ASEAN and other countries to use as examples in the screenplay development process, and had included the Icelandic, Oscar-nominated, short film, The Last Farm (2004), by Runar Runarsson, because it was about a farmer in an isolated rural setting, a background many of the writers could relate to, and the story is told visually with little dialogue. As we broke down Runarsson’s film into “beats,” highlighting the concept of “set-up and pay-off,” the writers noted how these “beats” or actions worked to give the simple story so much tension and surprise. It turned out to be an important touchstone for the group, and we watched it several times, stopping at specific frames to ask the group to imagine where the story was going. This exercise really helped structure the screenplays and seeing how the stoic farmer coped in an entirely unexpected way with his wife’s death, resonated with an acceptance of fate that was familiar to them. Because not everyone spoke English well and each participant spoke a different language, this almost silent short film proved to be the best tool to demonstrate many screenwriting lessons by “showing” not “telling.” With dialogue at a minimum, the powerful visual storytelling was accessible to all in the group. After writing out the “beats” in their story, and character breakdowns, they next answered “Ten Basic Story Questions” from a worksheet I created. These were then used to create a “beat sheet,” or step outline, where each “beat” is a sentence summing up the scene in order to see the flow of the story and if the protagonist is driving the action.

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Time and the Western Paradigm of Storytelling Paris, Je T’aime (Paris, I Love You, 2006) is an omnibus of 12 short stories directed by 12 different directors, each interpreting Paris in their own way. It illustrates how a theme can be carried through each short film and how time is interpreted in each story. By using their beat sheet and list of characters, we discussed how time can work to strengthen visual storytelling by compressing action. My worksheet “Time in Your Story,” helped them break down and analyse the timeline of their stories many of which were spread over different time periods, or over a long period of time and these stories had far more exposition than action. We looked at the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with its often hypnotically slow pace matching the tropical heat, which has been vividly described as the “primitive gazing” of “sensational inaction cinema” (Khatib, 2012). Weerasethakul’s vision of the torpid tropical heat hints at the timelessness found in so many stories set in Buddhist cultures, where time seems to function more as a continuum. As one of the screenwriters noted, their Buddhist worldview could serve as an antidote to a Western sense of drama, which often compresses the timeline to increase drama and tension. We also noted how the close-up shots in many Western films contrasted with the master shots of a small, faraway figure set in an impersonal landscape in Weerasethakul’s work, suggesting that there is perhaps less concern with individual destiny and more with the fate of the group and community. By looking at films from various countries, the social, cultural and creative practices of developing a screenplay become more evident (Kerrigan & Batty, 2016). At this point, it also became clear that scenes of conflict in their stories most often generated acceptance rather than provoked action on the part of the characters. The idea that “conflict equals drama” is a staple of screenwriting practice in the West, but not always so for indigenous screenwriters, was certainly proved true for these writers. It was challenging to discuss how conflict and drama work synergistically until we returned again to look at The Last Farm. What seems at first, to be the protagonist’s very Buddhist acceptance of his wife’s death, proves to be more of a dramatic and suspenseful misdirection in the story. The compressed visual language moved the story very quickly and in a surprising direction combining both “show don’t tell” and “set up and payoff.” Later when the Laotian screenwriter directed a similar scene, it was clear that an improvised line of dialogue, which respected an acceptance of destiny and fate, also made for a better story. It was both true to his culture and revealed how Western screenwriting practice could work without undermining cultural truth.

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Script Development with Production Input The screenwriters then resumed working on their step outlines, getting feedback and critiques from the group. At first, this feedback was mostly polite and general as this was also the first time many of the writers had ever given and received notes on their writing. The same can be seen in Western script development, especially with less experienced writers, but here there was the additional factor of “face” in Eastern cultures, a concept revolving around a desire to be well thought of by others (Ting-Toomey, 1998). Their initial vocabulary for feedback was about “liking” or “not liking” until the addition of a handout of basic screenplay terminology helped the critiques to grow more focussed by providing another “language” to deliver more rigorous critiques of their fellow writers’ work. Now they were ready to move onto the integration of directing and production realities into the script development process. Given the fact many had not directed before meant this next stage of script development was shaped primarily by the budget, which created some inventive solutions to story issues. As production now gave context to the stories being developed, it was always a return to the script and how it could address the production parameters. The directing sessions with Deocampo, an accomplished writer/director renowned for telling stories of his own Phillippine culture that also travelled globally, worked in a very engaging and tactile way. He used a large sheet of paper for each project and hung it on the wall like a banner. After breaking down the concept of “Organizing Action,” where a character plus their action equals the story, he used a simple exercise asking the writers to direct the following actions: “Standing Up From a Chair; Accidentally Dropping a Pen; Picking Up the Pen; Putting the Pen Onto the Chair; Walking to the Front of the Class.” All this was to illustrate an awareness of “action” rather than mere description or exposition. Following this, the screenwriters analysed their stories to isolate the actions that could be directed and discard exposition that did not move the story forward. The writers then wrote their “actions” on strips of paper, which they affixed to the banners. We could then all gather around the visual map for each project and see the progress of the “actions.” The process also allowed the participants to learn how shots are organized into a scene. Different teams were chosen who identified which “steps” of their step outlines were shots and which were scenes. Next, they wrote a one-script page for the scene where the antagonist meets the protagonist for the first time and developed this into a storyboard of no more than 10 shots. Finally, referring to their scripts and storyboards, each team then found a location nearby to shoot one scene, develop their shot lists and cast the roles among fellow Lab participants and workshop coordinators. Deocampo and I selected a rehearsal scene for each project that would be shot the next day. Each writer (and now director) was assisted by participants from two other countries and by now, a working “language,” both professional and personal, had developed among the group. When the written scenes

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were acted out, it was easier to describe the intent of a scene; however, if the scene did not work, problems were immediately apparent. The reverse was also sometimes true, as in a scene mentioned earlier, the Laotian project, where the protagonist seemed to lack the emotional conflict the situation would suggest. The scene was about a son who finds his father dying in a rice field, having been bitten by a snake. The writer had earlier, in development, struggled to inject more “drama” into the scene in which the son quietly holds his father’s hand instead of rushing to get help. An improvised and important line of dialogue emerged when the son says: “This is his time to leave,” as he prays over his dying father. Acceptance of death as a karmic event did not mean grief was absent and, in fact, with the most minimal acting (since participants without any acting training doubled up as actors), the emotional power of the scene was enhanced. Here the character reacted according to cultural norms, and any concern about a lack of “drama” was allayed by the line of dialogue that both served the truth of the character and showed acceptance of his fate. At this point, the script development process was entirely in service of directing scenes where rehearsing acting, and improvising helped dispel any confusion.

Feedback Following Rehearsal Scenes When the rehearsal scenes were screened for the entire group, the cumulative effect of workshopping scenes throughout much of the script development process was evident in responses that were more specific about the stories. Narrative beats and dramatic beats were discussed shot-by-shot, using Nick Deocampo’s award-winning short film Isaak (1993) as an example. The participants then chose a different scene from their step outlines to direct “beat” by “beat.” For every shot chosen, they had to describe the narrative and dramatic beats and shot size (wide, full, establishing, master, long, medium or close up) and why they had made that choice. Here the narrative beats, which had been intensively worked in the script development process, were translated into dramatic beats or visual images that most effectively told the story. To end this part of the process, each writer/director met to discuss the rice narrative and central rice image of each story; for example, Malaysia’s rice narrative was “Rice and Culture” and the central rice image was the Kolam (Rice Painting), a beautiful image made from coloured grains of rice. A field trip in the surrounding Los Banos countryside enabled them to find and photograph the central rice image that would encapsulate their story and be used as the poster for their short film.

Input from Indigenous Production Professionals Introducing local film professionals, specifically indie director, production manager, editor and producer to talk about their professions, was central to the philosophy of the Screenplay Lab. This was both to acknowledge their expertise and also to connect them as needed mentors to the Lab participants.

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Discussion focussed on how the transition from writer to director and the shoots and subsequent critiques had affected the original step outlines. The experience of rewriting had a different resonance when the story had to bear the weight of multiple demands, and was under a more pressured timeline. Simultaneously absorbing new technical skills in order to direct while rewriting was also steep learning curve. Next, using their completed 10-page scripts the writers/directors “cut and pasted” scenes and storyboards onto new banners of paper hung on the wall. The cinematographers then joined to discuss the equipment and budget requirements of every shot and annotate them scene by scene. This hands-on exercise really worked well, with each group spending hours critiquing and discussing how the stories had changed and for what reasons. Deocampo’s hands-on story “banners” were useful in another way. Because not everyone could afford Final Draft software, they provided uniformity to the screenplays so that the pages could be used to break down the script for budget purposes. Having access to the local professionals as mentors made the transition to production easier and provided an example of successful indigenous filmmakers which was inspiring to the screenwriters, now moving to direct.

Conclusion As one of the earliest screenplay labs held in Asia, the 2009 ASEAN ROK Screenplay Lab like the Sundance Screenwriting Labs provided support for marginalized voices (White, 2013). For the ASEAN writers, script development was an exploration as to how Western screenplay practices diverged from Asian aesthetic, cultural and religious realities and what part of Western practices could strengthen their stories. The concept of time was one such instance which afforded the writers a new look at their own culture. The way production input early on shaped their stories helped greatly in production as did the overall theme of rice, which drew together countries and cultures despite their differences. Writing while preparing to direct had a major impact on the development of their stories which improved greatly after the directing workshop showed how to use visual language and avoid exposition. Finally, the relationships created in this immersive setting formed a support system and inspiration by example from the indigenous professionals that assisted in successful production of their screenplays. All participants went on to work in the media world in some way, whether as executives in charge of film initiatives or, in the case of Robbie Ertanto (Indonesia), Pang Fui Lum (Malyasia) and Weijie Lai (Singapore), among others, as writers and writers/directors of award-winning feature and TV films and series. As one of the first screenplay-focussed labs in Asia, this Lab helped initiate further script development labs and workshops, expand filmmaking and increase demand for films from this region. The evolution and development of subsequent screenplay labs in the region has meant ASEAN voices are now prominent in many of the major co-production screenplay labs and

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film festivals around the world. Relaunched in 2012, the ASEAN ROK RICE LAB has evolved into the successful FLY Lab where young filmmakers from ASEAN and Korea make two short films together. More recently, it functions as a screenplay lab where the creators of 11 selected feature-length fiction film projects in development from 10 ASEAN member nations and the Republic of Korea are given an opportunity to strengthen their competitiveness and to heighten the potential of developing their projects into films. SEAFIC (Southeast Asian Fiction Film Lab), another groundbreaking script development venture, invites filmmakers to work with a script consultant and international experts through sessions held in various Asian countries. It provides eight months of development under the guidance of dedicated script advisers. With a strong Asian focus and primarily ASEAN mentors and instructors, these screenplay labs have moved closer to co-production projects with major world festivals. As script development has grown and evolved in the region, there are many more indigenous filmmakers who have experience of Western screenwriting practice, while remaining true to their cultural roots. Collaborations tend to rely more on the indie filmmaking model, rather than Hollywood films. As script development and screenwriting practice in ASEAN and beyond have become more common and more connected to global perspectives, there is today an increase in focus on local stories with global appeal. Script development is at the forefront of building sustainable media industries worldwide and the streaming models of distribution, especially in Asia, will accelerate this process. More than a decade since the ASEAN ROK Lab, screenplay labs in this region are now mostly led by indigenous filmmakers who play a key part in supporting screeenwriters to develop their own voice and stories. These indigenous voices are also connected to Western screenwriting practices through the global reach of their works primarily with European festivals and labs which themselves continue to be influenced by Western templates. Script development across cultures thus becomes all the more important in our global market and, looking back, this screenplay development Lab succeeded not only in an examination of Western practices, but in how they could be reshaped by the indigenous voices of the nine storytellers from ASEAN ROK to stay true and expand their own culture and aesthetic.

References 2001 Space Odyssey (1968), wr: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, dir: Stanley Kubrick, USA, 149 mins. Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan (1899), dir: James H. White, USA, 1 min. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. https://doi.org/10.1386/jocs. 8.3.225_1 Isaak (1993), wr/dir: Nick Deocampo, Phillipines, 9 min.

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Kerrigan, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Re-conceptualizing screenwriting for the academy: The social, cultural and creative practice of developing a screenplay. New Writing: THe International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 13(1), 130–143. Khatib, L. (2012). ‘National’ forms of storytelling: Aristotle did not make it to India: Narrative modes in Hindi cinema and Matthew P. Ferrari: Refusing to conform: Forms of non-narration: Primitive gazing; Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s sensational inaction cinema. In L. Khatib (Ed.), Storytelling in World cinema (1)‚ 13–23. Wallflower Press. Maras S. (2016). Ethics, style and story in indigenous screenwriting: Warwick Thornton in interview. In S. Maras (Ed.), Ethics in screenwriting. Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-544 93-3_3 Maras, S. (2017). Towards a critique of universalism in screenwriting criticism. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(2), 177–196.https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.8.2.177_1 Paris, Je T’aime (2006), wr: Tristan Carné & 26 others, dir: Olivier Assayas and 18 others, France, 120 mins. The Last Farm (2004), wr: Rúnar Rúnarsson, dir: Rúnar Rúnarsson, Iceland, 17 mins. Ting-Toomey, S. (1998). Intercultural conflict styles: A face recognition theory. In Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (Eds.), Theories in intercultural communication (pp. 213–238). Sage. White, P. (2013). Age appropriate? Sundance’s women filmmakers come next. Film Quarterly, 67 (2), 80–84. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.80 Yoshinaga, I. (2019). Disney’s Moana, the colonial screenplay, and indigenous labor extraction in hollywood fantasy films. Narrative Culture, 6(2), 188–215. Retrieved December 6, 2020, from https://doi.org/10.13110/narrcult.6.2.0188

Textual Manifestations of Collaborative Screen Idea and Story Development: A Danish Case Study Cath Moore

Introduction Over the last half-decade Denmark has shed a number of cinematic skins. Certainly, the shifts within film industry policy have positioned Danish cinema as an instrumental player in a global economy (Bondebjerg, 2016, p. 25), largely realised through the pivotal mid 1990s industrial overhaul under which the New Danish Cinema movement emerged. While national cinema has been used as a critical construct through which to identify ‘formal, thematic and cultural commonalities within their defined boundaries’ (Van der Heide, 1995, p. 213), story development features less frequently as a means to understand national cinema preferences or predilections. This chapter considers how the craft of screenwriting (encompassing script and story development) facilitates wider discussions about the nature and capacities of small yet globalised film nations. Viewed as a theoretical term engaging a singular concept (Macdonald, 2004, p. 90), the screen idea can also be examined as part of the collective whole, where story development is viewed as a series of distinct yet interwoven exchanges. Further, in the transnational space of relations and flows (Goldsmith et al., 2012), Danish development strategies often function in parallel rather than direct competition with Hollywood. This is notable within the dynamics of creative working groups and the narrative preferences such

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collaborations produce. Supportive engagement between Danish film practitioners seems logical within a small country of roughly five million people whose national language is only utilised or understood by regional neighbours such as Sweden and Norway. One may also argue that Dogme 95,1 a manifesto supporting ‘conditions that enable citizens from small nations to participate, or continue to participate, in the game of cinematic cultural production’ (Hjort, 2005, p. 39), demonstrates a self-regulating film industry where informal exchanges and critique promote industrial inclusivity. Utilising a case study methodology, this chapter explores the flexible arrangement of relationships and creative processes involved in the story development phase of En du elsker/Someone You Love (2014), a feature film co-written by one of Denmark’s most successful screenwriters, Kim Fupz Aakeson, with the equally lauded director, Pernille Fisher Christensen. I explore their writer/director interplay, focusing on how cultural sensibilities and industrial processes impact creative mobility and idea generation during the story development phase and how these are subsequently evoked within the screenplay as research text. Incorporating transcripts from practitioner interviews I conducted for the research, this chapter situates the filmmaker as a creative agent whose self-understanding is inextricably linked to the discourse on story and script development.

Collaboration as Cultural Proclivity More contemporary research trajectories into writer/director dynamics express a shifting understanding about screenwriting as a composite of varying processes (Maras, 2011, p. 275) that often involve problem finding and problem solving (Redvall, 2010, p. 52) as a key development strategy. The parameters of any writer/director methodology are influenced—formally or otherwise—by the principles that underpin national screen industries such as the value attributed cultural heritage, historical perspectives and ideological imaginings reflected in nationalised identities. Accordingly, the prevalence of these story partnerships in Denmark, certainly with regard to feature film production, demonstrates collaboration as a highly regarded creative arrangement that remains active within a wider industrial pluralism of filmmaking traditions and tendencies (Bondebjerg, 2005, p. 138). Looking further afield, the nation has produced a number of writer/director partnerships sharing either a story or writer credit such as Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen Efter brylluppet/After the Wedding (2006), Hævnen/In a Better World (2010), Den skaldede frisør/Love is all You Need (2012), En chance til/A second Chance (2014) Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg Man som hatar Kvinnor/The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), 1

A constraint-based manifesto, the movement was established in 1995 embracing traditional values of natural storytelling such as character and a focus on acting technique without the artifice of technology or special effects.

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En kongelig affaere/A Royal Affair (2012), and Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm (Submarino/Submarino [2010], Jagten/The Hunt [2013]), Kollektivet/The Commune (2016), Druk/Another Round (2020). The work of Aakeson is of particular importance because of his willingness to collaborate with numerous creative partners, especially female directors such as Christensen [En Familie/A Family (2010), En du elsker/Someone you Love (2014)], and Annette K Olesen [En Familie/A Family (2010), En du elsker/Someone you Love (2014)], and Annette K Olesen [Minor Mishaps (2002), In Your Hands (2004), 1: 1 (2006) and Lille Soldat (2008)].2 The co-writer/director dynamic between Aakeson and Christensen is an instructive example of how collectivist values can exist within the (arguably tempered) hierarchical framework of Danish film production; a system that allows directorial authority over the text and its ultimate transcendence onto the screen, through a co-operative story development alliance between the screenwriter and co-writer/director. Through narrative analysis of the screenplay, the following section examines how these story collaborators employ the subject of family and diegetic music as meaning-making systems. This focus on story development enables a broader understanding of the creative mechanisms that underpin screenwriting as both a culturally specific practice and universally recognised creative labour.

Genre, Theme and Subject as Markers of Idea Development This section provides a case study analysis of Aakeson and Christensen’s feature film project En du elsker/Someone You Love (2014), highlighting story and script development as disctinct yet interwoven processes where shifting dynamics between the writer and director provide a creatively synergistic space. It is first useful to provide a paragraph synopsis of the screen story: En du elsker/Someone You Love (2014) story synopsis: World-famous singer-songwriter Thomas Jacob is based in LA. He is a very successful man who has burned a lot of bridges. He lives and breathes music and very little else. When Thomas travels back to Denmark to record a new album with his regular producer Molly Moe, his grown-up daughter Julie shows up with his 11-year-old Grandson Noa, whom Thomas has never met. Soon—and much against his will—Thomas is forced to take care of Noa. Against all odds the two of them slowly begin to connect through music. Then disaster strikes forcing Thomas to realize that he now has to make a choice that will change his life forever.3 2

This chapter builds upon Redvall’s (2009) illuminating case study on the unfolding scriptwriting process on Lille Soldat (2008), an instructive analysis of ‘integrative collaboration’ where both writer and director collectively navigate a transactional problem finding and problem solving methodology throughout the scriptwriting process. 3 Synopsis written by Sisse Graum Jorgensen. Website. Available at: http://www.imdb. com/title/tt2659512/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl (12th October 2020).

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As a creative space, story development can be understood as a culturally informed arrangement of logics and practitioner preferences. This chapter does acknowledge slippage in the industrial application of idea and story, sometimes employed as interchangeable terms. Alternatively, where the screenplay is viewed as a textual realisation of a development phase, this might incorporate both idea and story as distinct processes. While the timeline of development places one after the other, this chapter locates development as an ongoing interplay between an initial idea or conceptual premise, and an evolving narrative that eventually holds weight as a definitive screen story. The initial screen idea for En du elsker/Someone You Love (2014)—a woman who has given up a child—already contains what might be referenced as ‘story’ possibilities. As such, this singular concept can also be examined in relation to considerations of craft such as genre, theme and subject. Shifting away from the expressive constraints of naturalism most commonly associated with Scandinavian cinema, the story underpinning En du elsker/Someone You Love (2014) subscribes more clearly to contemporary notions of melodrama in regard to the conspicuous emotionality that sustains inter-personal conflict. From director to composer, film genre as a mode of cinematic expression is often used to explore the artistic choices made by practitioners and how closely formalised frameworks have been adhered to, modified or rejected (see Peirse, 2020; Scheurer, 2008). While drawing on schematic, specific and general knowledge about film genre can assist the screenwriter in constructing story (Selbo, 2014, p. 317), these systems can alternatively be employed or extended as a research tool to de-construct screen texts and development processes. The Aakeson/Christensen case study narrative incorporates and deflects a number of different genre interpretations. Despite a focus on the family unit and dynamics within, one could not for example view their approach as a contemporary iteration of the post WW2 melodrama, which investigated social change alongside the shifting roles and identities of women. Nor does it provide a feminist commentary on ‘white female sufferings and frustrations within the patriarchal codes of the middleclass family in the West’ (Kaplan, 2001, p. 201). Their storyworld does however reiterate family as ‘a trans-class institution that reproduces individuals as both class and sexed subjects’ (Kleinhans in Mercer & Shingler, 2004, p. 25). Aakeson and Christensen have engaged with melodrama through acute emotional apprehension; fractured relationships embody the chaos and crisis embedded within the fabric of the storyworld. It is clear to see how narrative possibilities may evolve from the initial idea by establishing a genre framework. What Christensen’s reflections below highlight is how a dramatic conflict emerged once multiple iterations of family dynamics had been considered. In the beginning when we started throwing up ideas it was about a woman who had given away a child… then I think we couldn’t get any further with that idea and we did another film, A Family. Then it became a story about a boy who

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had grown up in a family with quite poor parents and then this guy shows up who is actually the father of the child and what happens with the family. Sometimes the conflict that would be possible in the set up, it just doesn’t work. Then you have to take something else and transport it into the story, and there is always a danger in that. What I’m looking for always is the natural conflict in the set up. So you are looking for environments, relationships, places where it just comes organically. And then we thought OK what if the story is not about the child but the grandchild. Then there would be a conflict because you have to take care of a child, but you don’t have to take care of a grown-up child. This is actually how the whole set up was formed, and you know, for a lot of stories it takes a lot of travelling around until you find, ‘this is it’.

En du elsker/Someone you Love (2014) presents family as a universally accessible gateway into the storyworld with a complex deconstruction of parent/child relationships. The screenplay is an interrogation and reparation of the dislocated self as a ‘cinematic subconscious that orchestrates the audience’s experience of the story through character desire’ (Waldeback & Batty, 2012, p. 90), namely through protagonist Thomas. A complex man, he is burdened with responsibility for his young estranged grandchild Noa. Thomas has been shepherded through his life by women: his manager, the housemaid and his producer. To a certain extent this trio of female caretakers infantilise Thomas and provide a sharp contrast to the figure of virility he presents as a musician on stage. This duality is part of Aakeson and Christensen’s dramatic coding where characters shift between childhood and adulthood as they negotiate traumatic circumstances and realign the past with the present. Thomas’ lack of self-awareness and his return to Denmark also provides the narrative with an inwardly drawn gaze, one that reflects Thomas’ unreconciled familial conflict and the insularity of a musician preoccupied with the creative process. This provided their subsequent screenplay with its deep structure (Waldeback & Batty, 2012, p. 91), reiterating the core principles at play, such as family will save you from yourself or family will ruin and redeem in equal measure. It is not only the thematic landscape that Aakeson and Christensen considered during early idea development, but also how the geographical surroundings may generate new possibilities. The original storyworld for En du elsker/Someone you Love (2014) was set in Copenhagen during the summer, with protagonist Thomas renting a villa by the sea. The ocean would have potentially become a source of inspiration for plotting (Aakeson, 2015), however, financing for the film required the regional location of Fyn—in the southern part of the island—with no villas or similar beachside locations. Christensen’s production window also meant that the film could not be shot in summer. Accordingly, the story setting shifted to a rented castle during winter; a serendipitous move that aligned with character, tone and plot. The location reflects the story of a man without emotional

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boundaries, and the idea that his home is his castle with much space and few people (Aakeson, 2015). Unburdened by artifice there is something inherently Danish about a storyworld concerned with ideas of home and the implications of geographical proximity to those you love. The acclaimed producer of En du elsker/Someone you Love (2014), Sisse Graum Jorgensen (2015) who was also involved in early idea development, understands the preoccupation many Danish filmmakers have with family: We are a small country; we live very close to one another… in America a lot of kids go to college far away, or just come back at holidays. In Denmark it’s a very different situation. I think we see our family a lot more, so maybe that’s why we tell those family-based stories so often.

While the dramatic currency of family may assist some small film nations to transcend the domestic marketplace, it also corresponds with the view that families on screen provide a means to engage with broader social trends (Berghahn, 2013, p. 11). However, Aakeson and Christensen’s previous film En familie/A Family (2010), which explores the difficult choices family members must make when their patriarch falls ill, also demonstrates the utility of family as a narrative source of conflict. Perhaps Danish practitioners invest so readily in the family as a dramatic nucleus because of the genre stronghold of Hollywood. Working within alternate genre frameworks that compliment rather than compete with Hollywood strongholds such as blockbuster action or superhero franchises can be located as a tactical and culturally informed component of idea development.

Finding a Third Way: Story Development as an Open, Extended Discourse While the initial idea development stage might produce divergent narrative pathways and enable a space in which collaborators play the ‘what if’ game, for many screenwriters there is at some point, a conscious shift into a more structurally defined process that aims to interpret‚ solidify, condense, and realise these ideas and disparate imaginings into more cohesive sequences that evoke a dramatic framework with direction and a narrative sensibility. This story realm can be both an expression of and separate process from initial idea development, one that allows for a deeper interrogation of the screenwriting craft through intersecting and ongoing discussions about the form and dramatic purpose of character, the plausibility and expression of plot, theme and aesthetic/stylistic considerations. While writer and director may locate different story issues according to their craft speciality, they work from a base of integrated norms (Redvall, 2009, p. 50) that supports ongoing negotiations and can be articulated as an adaptive strategy promoting story development as a flexible process shared by numerous creative ‘stakeholders’ rather than a

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defined stage involving above-the-line practitioners only. Indeed, while practitioner interviews may deepen stylistic—or in this case story—analysis (Hjort, 2012, p. 10), they also provide a retrospective platform from which to better understand the screen story practices of working groups. As Aakeson (2015) explains in conversation below, though this permissive ‘find and seek’ process allows previously unknown narrative layers to emerge, there are both challenges and benefits to consider. Cath Moore (CM):

Aakeson (KFA):

You are also playing with the idea of family through the secondary characters such as the maid who is very maternal towards Noa. Did you find this through the development process? I think this was actually added later on, because suddenly someone said, ‘is no-one taking care of this boy?!’ And then I thought ‘maybe you’re right, maybe someone would be looking after him.’ And then this idea of family starts up again and you see possibilities in a character who was originally just there to show that the main character is wealthy and can buy people. And so suddenly you think ‘oh we have a possibility for something else here.’

Sometimes you get really tired of all the voices and notes from outside and think ‘could you back off a little?’ And sometimes you’re really happy about it because it makes your material more vivid. I heard about these writer rooms in TV series in the States where you have five writers and everyone chipping in— we could never afford it in Denmark but I understand the idea of it. You have to kind of make a writers’ room yourself so you have stuff from the outside that you can use. I think also you get more experienced at knowing that this is a good note, this is in a way shitty but it’s right. Instead of always trying to defend yourself you bring the walls down a little. CM : KFA:

As a writer, did you collaborate with the actors? You always at some point know the casting. I think writing in Danish, and this goes for TV as well, you keep writing way beyond when you have the financing in place and you keep on because new ideas appear and once the actors come and they read and have a question like ‘I don’t understand why my character is doing this’ and you go ‘no, me neither’, because you have had your eyes elsewhere. And when the actors come, they have one issue, my character. Which is very good because all characters should have their own line of logic and focus, they have to make sense even though they are not the lead, the character’s journey has to make sense.

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CM : KFA:

It seems that finding actors who question the logic of their character’s narrative arc could be a helpful part of the writing process. Yes. And that goes also for the lines. You have to be open for feedback. I mean sometimes they complain in advance and you should listen because it has to be easy for them to talk like that. Pernille as a director works a lot with the lines in the pre-production process but once she starts shooting, she goes with whatever happens, and what they come up with. Basically, I don’t care. I want it to be alive.

And when you have a gift from an actor, something that works better you have to go with it. So you have a lot of voices during the writing process. We have to aim for a language that we don’t speak alone. You have to think, ‘I know something here, I have these abilities and you have yours and together we make something we could not do alone.’ This is really where you should be headed. And that was an epiphany for me and suddenly it was like ‘oh, this is what it’s all about.’ Not giving in, but relaxing and working together. CM :

KFA:

CM : KFA:

CM : KFA:

It’s interesting to me this dynamic between writer, director and editor—that you have a space where these two writers from the start and end of the production, connect. Are you there a lot during the editing process? Yes, not every day. But you know the scriptwriter knows what’s not there. If you’re in the editing room and you don’t know the script, then you don’t know what you can ask for, but I know about this scene, that you should really focus on this…usually you would get the scriptwriter in three or four times. That’s a Danish approach, you would say? Yeah, always. I’ve never not been there, in the editing room. I’m always away from the shooting because there’s no time for new ideas but sometimes if the location disappears and they have to find another one, I will write during the night-time of shoots but usually not because it’s rolling along. You sit back and do something else. With Pernille, when you’re feeding off each other how do you come to a decision about creative choices? You know in the end you have to make the director happy, or confident, that ‘this I can make.’ You have to convince them in some way that it’s OK they go out and think ‘let’s try something different.’ Of course my job, when we disagree as we often do, is to find a third way. So make them happy and be happy myself. It’s really tough to write something when you’re thinking ‘man, you really want this, are you sure?’ And I think then that you really have to find your people… those you turn back to and know you can go somewhere else with, because you’ve been there before and you had all these disagreements and you still found a way and you know can

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have different thoughts. So this is what you also have to do as a screenwriter, find your people. In this screenplay you see the impact of what this protagonist does but you as a writer seem interested not so much in moralising his actions but examining the consequences. It’s funny because there were so many conflicts during the writing about how tough he should be…so this is something that very often comes into the writing, the distributers etc. they want you to be gentle with the characters, to be light and gentle and we always go yes, we understand empathy but not sympathy, because stories are about something else than nice people doing the right stuff. I think for a lot of screenwriters it is always that battle between the practical considerations and those with a more emotional reading

Aakeson’s last comment highlights the difficulties of ‘acceptance finding’ (Redvall, 2009, p. 48) as a development strategy when dealing with external consultants such as financiers, whose gaze may focus on commercial imperatives rather than artistic intentions. Aakeson’s reflections also speak to a cultural knowledge that not only engages with these tensions but also considers scriptwriting as a continuous set of interactions rather than a temporally limited and linear creative labour.

The Creative and Structural Utility of a ‘Sound Universe’ One of the factors influencing the original construction of the screen idea was Christensen’s desire to include music as a key component. A more involved facet of subsequent story development then became the inclusion of diegetic music as a world-building device and collaboration with Danish songwriter Tina Dickow. If film style incorporates the texture of both images and sounds (Bordwell cited in Hjort, 2012, p. 9) then the use of diegetic Englishlanguage music provides not only a narrative sensibility and structure but also thematic layers to the screen story. I refer to song as the main component of diegetic sound in this screen story, stylistically structured to reference the brooding, soulful repertoire of the protagonist within. Indeed, critical analysis of the finished film often compares Thomas to Leonard Cohen and his ‘swooning guttural ballads’ (Mintzer, 2014). Drawing on the archetypical figure of Cohen arguably provides universal familiarity; a strategic shortcut into Thomas’ musical persona. Within the Aakeson/Christensen storyworld, song and the act of singing promote sub-textural meaning through lyrical content and tone. It also illuminates the screenplay’s deep structural concerns of redemption and healing, effectively training the viewer to respond to the cinematic image through a vococentric frame (Chion, 1994, p. 6).

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The creation, performance and reception of song also provide a critical mechanism with which to ‘see’ the narrative as a rhythmically oriented text that ebbs and flows, both through and alongside the musical compositions within. While music draws dramatic sequences within the screenplay together it also generates a storyworld in which character transformation is largely realised symbolically. Thomas’ rite of passage for example can be clearly tracked through the lyrics he sings. Producing and playing music is expressed in the screenplay as both a connective and destructive force that offers Thomas insight into his fears and desires. In this way, musical composition and collaboration between Dickow and Christensen facilitated the expression of characterisation, plot and theme within the screenplay. The selected interview transcripts below with Aakeson (2015) and Christensen (2015) provide insight into musical integration and inspiration during the story development phase. CM :

KFA:

CM :

KFA:

CM :

Christensen:

Because music is so much a part of the story itself, how did these external influences impact on that aspect of the screenwriting development process? Tina [Dickow] is Danish and a pretty big singer/songwriter. She had a go at it and suddenly she came up with the songs, and said ‘I’m writing like I’m someone else.’ And it was funny for her I think—to be a man—and write something completely different. And they (Dickow and Christensen) worked on the lyrics together. I was not a part of that. The music process was a big one, and one of those things where I was like… not for me… So structurally you would devise the plot and the scenes where there would be some kind of music and then they would go and contextualise that? We tried at some point to decide how many songs and we knew this from the Disney movies, sometimes it’s showstopping so you have to make some of the songs big… and figure out where we need the breaks structurally. Trine Dyrholm (who plays the character of Molly) is a reading actor, so she’s always part of the scriptwriting when she’s on Pernille’s movies. This project is interesting because of the musical element as a story telling tool. Everyone can have an emotional response, but it also reveals something about the characters. How soon did Tina come into the process? I work with this producer who had also worked with Tina and I had researched for a long time in the music world, to find out what is this relationship between the producer and the artists. So I met this guy and I made for him like a book with at this point, the character’s song—the song should be about this and this and I started talking about ‘well is this

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a ballad, what should the music sound like, which sound universe is it?’ And he went out and found someone who would actually produce the sound of the music and then I wrote like a recipe for each song. The tempo should be this, these are the instruments, a lot of poetry, words, slang, references to other music and then we gave it to some different artists and listened to a lot and then Tina came back with five songs from that recipe book. I gave her the lines in Danish and she just translated it into English. Christensen’s wonderfully visceral phrase ‘sound universe’ draws attention back to the aural component as a critical yet often overlooked layer of storyworld construction. When music becomes an essential aspect of character and plotting, songwriting can be situated as a story development practice that draws musicians and associated practitioners into the story development space. The dramatic code (Truby, 2007, p. 7) underpinning a screenplay amalgamates ideas on theme, subject and character throughout the plot. This process is an intricate interplay between explicit and sub-textural language not only through passages of dialogue but in this case, music as a therapeutic agent in the developing relationship between Thomas and his Grandson Noa. The composition and playing of music effectively reinforce the story world by ‘activating schemas that provide an interpretive framework for the visuals’ (Boltz cited in Hoeckner et al., 2011, p. 146). The diegetic playing of and listening to music as Chion (1994, p. 8) submits ‘expresses its participation in the feeling of a scene, by taking on the scene’s rhythm, tone and phrasing; obviously such music participates in cultural codes for things like sadness, happiness and movement.’ While Chion speaks of empathetic music this is often relayed in the feature film as a non-diegetic score accompanying the picture edit. In some ways the musically led interactions between characters mirrors the story development process, where director and songwriter both discover and devise a sound universe together. It is interesting to consider that despite Aakeson’s lack of creative input into the construction of lyrical content, the tone and narrative essence delivered through musical compositions has been woven into the narrative fabric of the screenplay. Accordingly, scriptwriting as a collaborative venture can be seen as either explicit—such as a with a co-author—or implicit within the text, in this case with a songwriter responding to the director’s ‘recipe book.’ Detailing the production of music generates a ‘greater understanding and perception of the passage of film time’ (Butler, 2006, p. 51) within the story world by allowing the reader of the script to track the developing character relationships. For example, including scenes of song recording sessions and informal guitar lessons between Thomas and Noa orients aesthetic and thematic expressions of the parent/child bond across dramatic sequences. However, it is the disconnected self, persistently encountered throughout the text that resonates most as a narrative expression of lyrical content and provides

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the story with a metamorphic momentum. From a textual perspective, sound has also been used within the screenplay to reference the void of grief, for example when Noa vacantly strums his guitar in the wake of his mother’s sudden death. Noa animates loneliness as ‘the solitary figure caught in the internal noise of their own atomization, as if it is them pressing the volume reduction button’ (Redmond, 2015). Seeking distraction, the repetitive strumming allows Noa to escape from the traumatic experience of watching his mother’s death unfold. Layers and moments of sound within scenes speak to the overarching thematic sensibility of the drama where life is inherently about reconciling loss. The multifaceted expression of music as therapeutic agent allows story collaborators Aakeson and Christensen to engage with the parent/child bond as a problematic but universally recognisable subject. The construction of Thomas’ character arc recognises that ‘adulthood brings with it a civic duty to control the dissemination of information about the world’ (Spiegal, 1998, p. 114), reiterating his responsibility to provide Noa a space of safety and stability. The major musical transactions embedded within the story reflect childhood and adulthood as intersecting realms both Thomas and Noa must negotiate as the plot unfolds. Through the lyrics Thomas also calls out to Noa, asking for understanding and solidarity. Having reconciled his parental responsibilities, the story ends as it began, with a charismatic stage performance and a protagonist finally capable of embodying the lyrics he sings. Located as a ‘language with easier access to the emotions’ (Harper, 2004), musical compositions of melancholy and malcontent have often been seen as a marker of the cinematic melodrama articulated through non-diegetic music layered on top of the image, rather than expressions of music referenced within the storyworld. In regard to the case study text, diegetic music extends the narrative, elevating the storyworld beyond parochial concerns. The playing, composing and teaching of music cohesively integrate plot, character and theme together ultimately providing a narrative backbone upon which Thomas and Noa’s transformative arcs are built. Given that musical schemas ‘influence how much viewers like or dislike a character and how well they think they know the character’s thoughts’ (Hoeckner et al., 2011, p. 150), the employment of musical composition as a meditation on Thomas’ emotional landscape is also a transnational communicative device, more so given the strategic use of English lyrics rather than Danish. The poetics of loss are mirrored within the lyrical content, exteriorising grief through song as poetic consolation. While music was for Christensen an important entry point into the beginning of a screen idea, the development of character was significantly shaped by the musical persona songwriter Tina Dickow expressed through her compositions. This approach reiterates Danish story development practice as a union of collaborative discourses extending across the spectrum of production.

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Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how the collaborative dynamic between story development practitioners can contextualise ideas on global storytelling from a Danish perspective and how the tacit knowledge (Hjort & Bondebjerg, 2003, p. 13) of filmmakers locates them as a valuable source of insight on process and creative intention. Exploring script development as a space in which ‘ideas, emotions, people and personalities combine, cohere, clash and are contested by the practicalities, policies and rapid movements of the screen industry’ (Batty et al., 2016, p. 149) promotes deeper engagement with the multifaceted components of the screenwriting craft and cultural logics at play within national film industries. Nash’s (2013, p. 151) reference to a spatial tension between practice and outcome leads one to view story development as a fluid process of being and becoming, facilitated by varying inputs, relationships and phases. This case study recognises the influence of cultural knowledge upon story development, reinvigorating Appadurai’s (1996, p. 4) placement of the imaginative space as one in which ‘individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.’ Although expressions of national culture often result in a homogenisation of ‘shared routines, habits and frames of reference’ (Lofgren cited in Hjort, 2005, p. 132), co-operative script development practices affirm synergistic partnerships as the kind of combative innovation small film nations often employ, offering new ways in which to interpret and research the role(s) of storyteller and the relationship between story development processes and the script as textual by-product. The parameters of any writer/director methodology are influenced, formally or otherwise, by the principles that underpin national screen industries. Accordingly, the prevalence of writer/director story partnerships in Denmark, certainly with regard to feature film production, demonstrates collaboration as a highly regarded creative arrangement, and an approach that remains active within a wider industrial pluralism of filmmaking traditions and tendencies (Bondebjerg, 2005, p. 138). However, as Aakseon (2015) reiterates, rather than idealistic notions of a democratically defined process it may be more helpful to understand Danish screen story collaboration as a dynamic space of engagement, fruitful only if all invested accept the shifting terms of engagement and how various inputs have been contextualised. Story development collaboration is subsequently forged as a commitment, not only to the evolving screen idea but the relationships that sustain any working group. The nature of narrative shaping where ideas are continually revised, reworked and reorganised between many story stakeholders challenges any assertion that screenwriting is simply a mechanical process of translating a story from abstract thought into textual form. Further research may also engage with the interpretive role a composer plays in story development, translating thematic ideas into musical form. One might also explore how risk-taking implicit within the creation of screen narratives (Hjort, 2012, p. 10) is mediated by collaboration as a distinct development practice.

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Redvall, E. (2009). Scriptwriting as a creative, collaborative learning process of problem finding and problem solving. Mediekultur, Journal of Media and Communication Research, 25(46), 22–55. http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/mediek ultur/article/view/1342. Accessed on 11 January 2018. Redvall, E. (2010). Teaching screenwriting in a time of storytelling blindness: The meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish film-making. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 59–81. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.1.1.59/1 Redvall, E. (2012). A systems view of film making as creative practice. Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook, 10, 1. http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/ journals/view-Article,id=13218/. Accessed on 10 January 2020. Schuerer, T. E. (2008). Music and mythmaking in film: Genre and the role of the composer. Heldref. Selbo, J. (2014). Film genre for the screenwriter. Routledge. Spiegal, L. (1998). Seducing the innocent: Childhood and television in Postwar America. In H. Jenkins (Ed.), The children’s culture reader (pp. 110–135). New York University Press. Submarino (2010), wr: Thomas Vinterberg & Tobias Lindholm, dir: Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 110 minutes. Truby, J. (2007). The anatomy of story: 22 Steps to becoming a master storyteller. Faber and Faber. Van der Heide, B. (1995). Boundary riding: Cross cultural analysis, national cinema and genre. Journal of Social Semiotics, 5(2), 213–237. http://www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/10350339509384451. Accessed on 10 January 2020. Waldeback, Z., & Batty, C. (2012). The creative screenwriter. Bloomsbury.

Scottish Modernism Goes to New Hollywood: Tracing the Script Development of Alan Sharp’s Night Moves River Seager

Introduction In the early 1970s Scottish fiction writer Alan Sharp entered Hollywood. In his home country, he had been developing a reputation as a promising young modernist author. His novels‚ A Green Tree in Gedde (1965) and The Wind Shifts (1967)‚ have courted comparisons to James Joyce, and generated controversy due to their heavy sexual content (Pendreigh, 2013). His output in Hollywood was remarkably high, with five films produced from his screenplays between 1971 and 1975, all on spec. Sharp had grown up as an avid film-goer in Scotland in the 1930s, and he credited this to his ease with writing Hollywood screenplays, remarking in a 1978 documentary on Scottish novelists that (Sharp, 1978): It was easier to write pictures in America than it was to write pictures – television – in Britain, because the American thing had already been formalized for me by all the movies I’d seen. I’d found the laws about America from the movies.

Sharp’s screenplays were heavily influenced by the genre conventions and motifs of the films he grew up with, but they were also routinely noted for their dark and subversive perspective. His violent Western Ulzana’s Raid (1972) has often been seen as an allegory for the Vietnam War (Cook, 2000, R. Seager (B) University of Dundee, Dundee, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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p. 175), while The Hired Hand (1971) has been described as ‘the first feminist Western’ (Cochrane, 1994, p. 84). Sharp was positioned as an outsider to Hollywood, albeit a deeply cine-literate one. He came from a background of literary modernism, and his scripts subverted archetypical American genre motifs. His work seemed to capture the post-Vietnam pessimistic zeitgeist, a time when traditional American heroes seemed less convincing, embodying an era and sensibility which was due for re-examination. Alan Sharp’s final original screenplay of the 1970s was also his most ambitious. An End of Wishing, later to be retitled The Dark Tower, and finally produced into the film Night Moves (1975) was, Sharp later commented ‘the most complex script I had written for years and the one to which I had entrusted the most faceted ideas’ (Horsfield et al., 1983). Like Sharp’s previous projects it was to be a subversion of a classic Hollywood genre, in this case, the private-eye noir. Commenting on his goals for the project, Horsfield et al. (1983) described the screenplay as a subversion of traditional film structure, stating: I wanted to take a detective story and set up a private eye who is made out to be the classic picaresque detective in an unravelling situation. Then, at some judicious point, I wanted to break from the detective story and change it over into an opposite genre - a melodrama, if you like.

Eventually Arthur Penn came on as director, attracted to the screenplay’s political allegory. Penn had often been credited with having kickstarted the ‘New Hollywood’ period with his film Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Similar to Sharp, his work was made up of subversive genre revisions. Initially Sharp and Penn’s partnership seemed perfect for the material, and the finished film is one of the most acclaimed of either’s career. But both creators were ultimately disappointed by the final result. Rather than being a linear progression, ‘in some contexts script development has less of a beginning and an end, and is rather more a continuous loop in which particular creative inputs can gain or lose control over time’ (Batty et al., 2017, p. 237). Night Moves is reflective of this, with Sharp maintaining his vision or screen idea for the project was never fully achieved in the filming process. This chapter utilizes two unseen drafts in the Alan Sharp Archive hosted at the University of Dundee (Scotland) to trace the development of the screenplay. Night Moves is, I argue, an example of screenplay development as a ‘continuous loop’, with Sharp returning to the screenplay in interviews and even a novelization after the fact. Sharp, I suggest, intended Night Moves to be a total revision of the detective genre screenplay, both stylistically and thematically. In doing so he introduced Joycean, modernist, and postmodernist elements into the form, many of which were minimized or removed in the finished film. I argue this led to Sharp’s disillusionment with writing original screenplays, and that his move into more anonymous, less auteurist forms of screenwriting for the remainder of his career was a result of this experience.

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From an End of Wishing to Night Moves In the 1970s a number of screenplays for detective films were produced that revised and subverted genre motifs, notably Robert Towne’s Chinatown (1974) and Leigh Brackett’s The Long Goodbye (1973). Now often described as a wave of neo-noir, key to all these films was a deeply held pessimism around structures of American society. Labyrinthine conspiracies and corrupt American institutions dominated their plots, and they came to reflect a time in America now associated with heightened anxiety around the nation’s place in the world. Horsfield et al. (1983) saw the private-eye genre as particularly suited to this sort of introspection, more so than other classic film genres like the Western, stating: I make a distinction between Westerns and Detective stories in that in Westerns, the heroes don’t really ask questions of themselves- they only ask questions of the circumstances in which they find themselves. In the detective story the heroes ask questions of themselves because they have perceived that the dilemmas they see outwardly are essentially internal dilemmas and they have to be solved from within.

Night Moves was positioned by both Sharp and Penn as a vehicle to comment on the pessimism of that moment in American culture. However, the screenplay’s narrative went through major changes over the course of its three drafts, suggesting some discordance over its development. This section will summarize each available draft, commenting on the stylistic and narrative changes that took place over the project’s screenplay development. The first draft for Night Moves was titled An End of Wishing. Only an incomplete, undated copy of the draft is available, numbering around 114 pages, and ending during the second act. One of the difficulties in this study is determining how divergent the rest of this draft was with the finished film. However, there is also the chance that this is in fact the complete document. Sharp did note in an interview with Nat Segalof that his first draft ended inconclusively, stating that ‘it hadn’t resolved itself’ (2011), so it is possible Sharp meant this literally—that this first draft was always an incomplete document. Either way, the text is highly interesting when considering the origins of this project. Written completely on spec, it offers a glimpse into Sharp’s earliest vision of how this story would develop. In some ways, An End of Wishing is remarkably similar to the first two acts of the finished film by Penn, albeit with a number of scenes fleshing out aspects of the story. Harry Moseby is a former professional surfer (changed to footballer in the third draft) who at middle age has found himself working as a private detective. Moseby’s work is far from glamorous, largely investigating divorce cases and mundane social altercations. In fact, the script opens with Moseby drawn into a social dispute involving a suburban woman alleged to be laying out poison for her neighbour’s dog, a particularly unglamorous example of detective work.

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Moseby’s seemingly stable life is thrown off-kilter when he discovers his wife Ellen has been having an affair with the effete-intellectual Heller. Heller is seemingly the opposite of the hyper-masculine Moseby in every way and is derisively described by Moseby as a ‘Jewish ectomorph […] sensitive type’ (Sharp, undated, p. 46). Concurrent to this, Moseby investigates a missing person’s case. Arlene Iverson, an aging former movie star, tasks Moseby with finding her runaway daughter Delly. On the trail for Delly, Moseby finds she is connected to a number of counterculture types: such as the young drug dealer Justin (who it is implied due to his assortment of confederate and Nazi memorabilia may have connections to the far right); and a Manson-esque hippie commune that Delly was thrown out of, for having ‘the worst vibes’ (undated, p. 63). Delly’s mother suspects that a Universal Studios script editor, Teddy Zeigler, had something to do with her disappearance. While on the trail for Delly, Moseby has a brief affair with a middle-aged divorcee, with whom he discusses hopelessness and her concept of an ‘end of wishing’. Finally, his search takes him to the Florida Keys, where he discovers Delly in residence with her stepfather Jack, and the mysterious femme fatale Paula. Moseby stays with this odd pseudo family, appearing to enjoy his time with them until one night, out on a boat owned by Jack, they discover a dead body. The draft then abruptly ends. The structure of this draft is considerably more episodic than the final film. Flitting from lead to lead, the story functions like a tour of American counterculture in the 1970s. Moseby investigates radical communes; Hollywood filmmakers; right-wing drug dealers, and finally the ramshackle pair of ageing hippies Paula and Jack. This counter-cultural environment is commented on at several points, such as when Moseby offhandedly states ‘They’re liberating themselves. Sooner or later there’s gonna be fighting in the streets’ (undated, p. 56). There is a decidedly political bent to this draft, and a realistic, pessimistic tone. The second draft, The Dark Tower, is the most radically different version of the text both narratively and stylistically. Functioning more as a pastiche of classic detective films, it features far less overt references to the counterculture and a generally more abstract tone. The first act remains broadly similar to the first draft, albeit with a Moseby who interacts more with the police (who are absent in other drafts). Things change significantly when Moseby arrives in the Florida Keys. In this version, Paula’s role is significantly reduced, and she and Tom Iverson (Jack in the original script) are involved in a drugsmuggling business with some sort of connection to the Hollywood insider Teddy Ziegler. Paula is a much more overt tribute to the classic femme fatale in this version, constantly smoking and asking Moseby where he was the day John F. Kennedy was shot. In the script’s climax, Moseby is shot by Delly when he attempts to uncover the drug smuggling ring, and Delly escapes Florida with Paula and Tom Iverson. In the final scene, Moseby awakes in bed

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at a hospital and realizes he has lost his leg in the preceding struggle. Overcome by his failure as the heroic detective, the script ends with a traumatzsed Moseby covering his mouth as he laughs hysterically. In general, this draft has a more hallucinatory, stylized tone than other versions, accentuated by several lapses into dream sequences as Moseby’s sanity fades. It is also probably the least successful draft. Falling back on stylized pastiche, it lacks the human melodrama of the other versions and is considerably more aimless in structure. Very few elements of this version made it into the final film. Being the most radically different version of the story among these drafts, this version of the screenplay seems to capture a moment of divergence in its development. The finished film remains very true to the third and final draft. Its first act is essentially identical to the first draft, with some dialogue changes, and some episodic segments excised. Considerably more time is devoted to Moseby’s relationship with Paula, as well as his somewhat paternal relationship with Teddy Ziegler, a stuntman in this version, who in previous versions was more antagonistic from the outset. The drug smuggling operation is replaced with a conspiracy to smuggle pre-Columbian art into the country, a plot point that calls to mind detective films like The Maltese Falcon (1941). Finally a successful conclusion is introduced, the narrative ending in a catastrophic series of violent events out at sea when Paula and Moseby attempt to catch the artefact smugglers. It concludes with Paula’s death. She is murdered by Ziegler‚ who is revealed to behind the central smuggling operation. In Zielger’s attack Moseby is shot‚ and left immobilized in a boat speeding in ever widening circles, a clear metaphor for his inability to function as the heroic detective archetype. It is notable how much of the second draft was abandoned, and how many elements of the first were brought back into the final version. It is tempting to view screenplay development and the redrafting as a linear process of revision and improvement, an additive procedure by which the final version of the narrative is achieved. As Alec McAulay writes ‘[r]eceived wisdom on the script-to-screen process infers that it is one of continual improvement and enhancement’, when in fact screenplay development is made up of competing interests that can shape the redrafting process in many ways (2014, p. 190). The divergence in Night Moves’ second draft is an example of this. It is a complicated, messy intermediary version of the narrative, a space where new ideas and tonal shifts were attempted. As this is a version of the text written once Penn became attached, it is indicative, perhaps, of the struggle Sharp found in adapting the narrative to outside influences.

The Kennedy Monologue During filming Sharp grew anxious with Penn’s directorial style. He felt betrayed by the editing process, voicing disappointment with the finished film. In particular, Sharp felt Penn had been pressured to make Moseby a more

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likeable, traditional protagonist. Sharp later stated that ‘there was conveyed to Arthur the idea that Moseby was not a particularly sympathetic character, as heroes should be’ (1983). There are some minor alterations in the editing that have the effect of softening Moseby. In the screenplay, for instance, Moseby learns of his wife Ellen’s affair by essentially stalking her, using his private-eye skills to catch her on a date. In the final film, it is edited to give the impression that he only accidentally saw her on a date with her lover, downplaying the obsessive and invasive aspect of his character, and making her accusation later on that he is treating her ‘like one of your crummy divorce cases’ less justified (Sharp, 1975a, p. 29). However, the greatest change in the editing was the removal of a monologue given by Paula which occurs around the second act of the film. Sharp saw this monologue as the centerpiece of the narrative, feeling it encapsulated its key themes around the loss of American innocence. He later stated (1983): The sequence consisted of a big two-page soliloquy by Paula while she was being made love to, which was a long kind of litany about her youth, the death of Kennedy and the disintegration of the dream. […]I felt that this scene, no matter what else didn’t work in the picture, said, “Well, this is what we’re about. We’re about something that is pretentious,” that is, about having a point of view on a very complex issue and yet trying to incorporate it into the genre of entertainment, if you like.

Sharp thought that Penn cut the scene because it was felt the monologue further detracted from the character of Moseby, stating ‘[h]e removed Paula’s long soliloquy because it made Paula so strong a character that Moseby’s reaction to her afterwards only enhanced the idea that he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing’ (1983). A version of this monologue occurs in the first and last draft of the screenplay, and each version ruminates on the narrative’s major existential concerns: the waning of American optimism as embodied by the death of Kennedy, and a sense of existential dread. This section will chart how the monologue changed from draft to draft over the screenplay’s development in an attempt to understand why it was so integral to Sharp’s vision for the project. The first version of the monologue isn’t given by Paula, but to an unnamed woman Moseby meets in a Florida hotel. The two drink Scotch in Moseby’s hotel room in a melancholy subdued scene. We learn she is recently divorced, mirroring Moseby’s own marital issues. Her monologue is where the draft’s titular ‘end of wishing’ arises, as she explains to Moseby that after divorce (undated, p. 79): WOMAN: You just realise that you’ve stopped expecting things, you’ve stopped wishing. When that happens, well it’s the end of something. […] For all your

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life you think things matter, what you do and you try to do one thing and not another and then you realise they don’t. Nobody’s keeping score.

This is a pared down, less developed version of what the monologue will eventually develop into. Later versions will be given to Paula and invoke the death of Kennedy. However, this version captures the loneliness and existential dread that would characterize this monologue across the screenplay’s development. The final draft’s monologue, the one eventually filmed and then cut, is the most detailed. It occurs while Moseby performs oral sex on Paula, and she describes her upbringing in the small-town of Malone, the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin. It is an extremely ambitious scene, and one can imagine how intimidating it would be both to act and to direct. Not only is it explicit, but it also requires that whoever plays Paula pull off a Joycean monologue, describing her idyllic American childhood shattered by the death of Kennedy— all while portraying herself being brought to orgasm. One can see why the literary Sharp, whose work was often described as Joycean stylistically, would be so attached to this scene, particularly with its parallels to the final chapter of Ulysses (1922). One can also understand why such a scene would be so intimidating in the editing of the finished film, with such grandiose themes at risk of turning into farce. The monologue begins with Paula describing her hometown Malone as an example of picture-perfect Americana, a place with ‘tree-lined streets’ cycled down by newspaper boys every morning, where ‘mothers have flour on their forearms from baking’ (1975a, p. 81). But everything changed, Paula explains, after the death of Kennedy. Recalling the news footage of the assassination, she describes it as if it literally pierced into her home, disrupting its serenity: ‘They shot Kennedy, right there, in the twilight of my living room’, she says (1975a, p. 82). The social disruption caused by this event becomes symbolized by the framed photographs and pictures in her suburban home becoming askew. She obsessively tries to straighten them after Kennedy’s death because, as she says, she’d never noticed ‘how they were all so crooked’ (1975a, p. 82). The death of Kennedy seems to reach into her seemingly perfect American life, pointing out its illusory nature. The concept of the safe, utopian American suburb is revealed as flawed and impossible by this traumatic media event. She describes this event in her life as an ‘end of wishing’, and she finishes her monologue as she reaches orgasm. Structurally, Paula’s monologue recalls Sharp’s modernist influences. It uses little punctuation, weaving in and out of different time periods, giving it a Joycean flavour. It is punctuated with ecstatic ‘don’t stop’s and ‘oh yes’s, calling to mind the Molly Bloom monologue that ends Ulysses. Bloom’s monologue is similarly punctuated by orgasmic ‘yes’s in a nostalgic streamof-consciousness. Viewed in these terms, this scene is an attempt by Sharp

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to translate the modernist style of his novels into the format of a Hollywood genre screenplay. This matches with his stated desire at the outset of writing the screenplay: to dissolve the structural motifs of a genre narrative. It turns the project not just into an example of genre revisionism, but an attempt to blend the structure of Hollywood screenwriting with stylistically Joycean, modernist techniques. The sequence is further fleshed out in one other version of the text: Sharp’s published novelization of the film released in 1975. Sharp viewed the novelization as a way to reclaim his vision of the story, with complete control. Scholar Matthew Asprey Gear notes that after production on the film ended Sharp sent a copy of the novelization to Penn with the sarcastic note ‘Do you think there’s a movie in this?’ (Gear, 2019, p. 133). Sharp would also recommend the novelization to interviewers, as a way to further understand his intentions with the narrative (1983). As such it is tempting to view the novelization as a fourth draft of the screenplay, a liminal document located somewhere between the screenplay development process and Sharp’s own body of literature. Indeed, this recalls Ronald Geert’s writing on published screenplays, in which he argues that it is ‘possible to develop ways of writing in which novel and screenplay could merge into a hybrid, transmedial text’. The Night Moves novelization might be seen as one such example of a transmedial document which ‘alludes to a film […] and nevertheless treasures its autonomous status as a literary artefact’ (Geerts, 2014, p. 126). It might also be understood as a work of parallel screenplay development, that both compliments, and puts itself in opposition to, the development of the finished film. Unsurprisingly, the novelization’s biggest change from the finished film is in Paula’s ‘end of wishing’ speech. Not only does Sharp re-insert the cut monologue back into this version of the narrative, but he also adds an entirely new monologue at the narrative’s end, once again by Paula, on the same themes. The first version appears almost verbatim as it did in the screenplay, written in prose form. The Joycean echoes in the dialogue are even more evident in this format, with the monologue delivered in a sentence that lasts 339 words, stretching over two pages, with little punctuation. The second version of the monologue comes at the end of the novel, when Moseby confronts Paula over her involvement in the smuggling case he can’t seem to fully understand. In the novel’s climax a defeated Moseby asks ‘what it’s all about’, and Paula’s replies with a succinct criticism of his entire worldview (Sharp, 1975b, pp. 141–142): It’s all about things not being what they seem. Can you live with that, Harryquesting for solutions, can you live with the fact there’s no solutions? It’s all changed, Harry, they’ve taken that away, or we’ve given it away, or maybe it was never there to begin with and we just told good lies.

Here Paula confronts the archetypical, Chandler-esque detective with something that does not fit within his rubric of the world: the notion that

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ascertaining a real, ‘objective’ truth may not even be possible. Furthermore, the imagined Americana from which belief in objective, sure truths emerge might never have really existed, and in fact have been just ‘good lies’. She goes on to once again invoke the death of Kennedy, this time stating (Sharp, 1975b, p. 142): When Jackie Kennedy threw herself across him in that open car what do you think she was doing, protecting him or trying to get out of the way of the next one? Well, I think she was doing both, at the same time, and that’s how it is and it’s not going back to whenever things were all one way no matter how much you want it to.

Part of why Sharp chose the Kennedy assassination as a recurring motif in the text becomes clearer in this final invocation of the event. That Jackie Kennedy was ‘doing both, at the same time’ (protecting her husband and trying to get out of the away of the next bullet) is an idea anathema to the rigid Moseby’s viewpoint of attaining ascertaining a single objective truth. Paula is accepting that there can be a multitude of truths and a multitude of answers. This is a standard refrain of postmodernist literature, a movement which questions ‘the universality of instrumental reason and other Enlightenment ideas’ and ‘challenge[s] linearity and notions of progress’ (Hogue, 2009, p. x). Horsfield et al. (1983) himself voiced relativistic, postmodern leanings, stating: [It’s] a simplification of reality - to think you are going to discover truth. You’ve only got to read the speculations of physicists to see that ignorance is the groundwork of our thought. The world and knowledge retreats from us. It’s like shining a flashlight out the back door. Where the light shines reveals only darkness (sic), so you go in and get a flashlight twenty-five times as big, but all you see is twenty-five times the amount of darkness.

This post-modern understanding of ‘truth’ is reflected in the narrative’s central mystery. It seems impossible to fully unpack who is really behind the smuggling scheme, as well as who precisely killed Delly, and how far exactly this conspiracy goes. On a more intimate level, it suggests the futility of Moseby’s own constant attempts to ‘understand’ and ‘solve’ the mysteries of his life. Moseby’s fatal flaw in the text is his attempt to view his life as a puzzle with singular, definite answers, and definitive catharsis. Similarly, the narrative denies the audience, who is constantly situated within Moseby’s point of view, any lasting catharsis or closure to the narrative’s mysteries. Instead the viewer must embrace Paula’s perspective, an acceptance of subjectivity and ambiguity. Sharp’s use of the novelization to further excavate these themes points to the way’s screenplay development can continue even after the film is finished. In writings like interviews, personal reflections and novelizations, the screenwriter can continue to revise the initial work and attempt to lay claim to an unoriginal, unabridged authorial vision. In a sense then, Sharp continued

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the screenplay development of Night Moves long after the film’s release, attempting to lay claim to an original vision of the work in liminal forms like the novelization and interviews. These liminal forms sit in a problematized space within screenplay development, both pointing to an original, untouched version of the narrative, while commenting on and responding to the finished film. Understanding the novelization as a fourth draft creates a fragmented form of screenplay development, one that seems to deny the closure of the finished film. In fact, it undermines the authority of the finished film in relation to the screenplay, instead pointing to some untarnished, unmediated vision of the narrative that is imagined to exist outside the screenplay development process.

Conclusion Alec McAulay notes that ‘[th]e hunch that one authored a better version of the film than that seen on screen is a Pyrrhic victory reserved for screenwriters, and one little explored’ (2014, p. 190). Night Moves ’ screenplay development is one such example of Pyrrhic victory. Sharp’s disappointment had a major impact on him, and afterwards he went on to focus on other aspects of screenplay development, mainly adaptations and script doctoring. His reasons for disliking the finished film are complex, and at times contradictory. He would later say that (1983): Night Moves was a disappointment to me, not so much because of the end product but because we had really excellent circumstances going in to make the film […] but, in the end, we didn’t really transcend the ancient dilemmas of ego and personal involvement.

Sharp’s experience seemed to have left him disillusioned with his ability to tell personal, conceptual stories within the Hollywood fold. Viewing the progression of each draft, one can see a literary-minded writer struggling to go about subverting the foundations of genre storytelling while working within a commercial screenplay development framework. His project was to destabilize the premises of the genre screenplay, upending its narrative features, and while the film was largely a critical success, the removal of its most ambitious and eccentric elements made clear to Sharp the limits of his control over the screenplay development process. Sharp’s move in the remainder of his career into adaptation and script doctoring, a more anonymized and less authorial form of screenplay development, reflects this. The production of Night Moves seemed to make clear to Sharp the extent to which screenplay development is a collaborative experience, and the ways that even minor differences in perspective between the screenwriter and director can lead to substantial changes in thematic content. In retrospect Night Moves was Sharp’s most ambitious and auteurist project, and his move into more anonymous forms of screenwriting afterwards perhaps

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allowed the writer a greater emotional distance from his work after his disappointment with the finished film. Gathering together the screenplay’s three drafts, the novelization, and Sharp’s own comments on the film, Night Moves becomes a case study of screenplay development as continuous, functioning sometimes in opposition to the finished film, and in a state of constant revision.

References Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Cochrane, D. (1994). Violence, feminism, and the counterculture in Peter Fonda’s The hired hand. Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, 24(3), 84–98. Cook, D. A. (2000). Lost illusions American cinema in the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979. Orig. publ.: Scribner, 2000: University of California Press. Gear, M. A. (2019). Moseby confidential: Arthur Penns’ Night Moves and the rise of neo-noir. Jorvik Press. Gear, Asprey, Matthew Moseby Confidential: Arthur Penn’s Night Moves and the Rise of Neo-Noir (Jorvik Press, 2019), p. 133. Geerts, R. (2014). ‘It’s literature I want, Ivo, literature!’ Literature as screenplay as literature. Or, how to win a literary prize writing a screenplay. Journal of Screenwriting, 5(1), 125–139. Hogue, W. L. (2009). Postmodern American literature and its other. University of Illinois Press. Horsfield, B., Sharp, A., & Grierson, J. (1983). “Night Moves” revisited: Scriptwriter Alan Sharp interviewed by Bruce Horsfield, December 1979. Literature/Film Quarterly, 11(2), 88–104. McAulay, A. (2014). Based on a true story: Negotiating collaboration, compromise and authorship in the script development process. In C. Batty (Ed.), Screenwriters and screenwriting: Putting practice into context (pp. 189–206). Palgrave Macmillan. Pendreigh, B. (2013, February 15). Obituary: Alan Sharp, writer. The Scotsman. Retrieved from https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-alan-sharpwriter-1590238 Segaloff, N. (2011). Arthur Penn American director. University Press of Kentucky. Sharp, A. (Undated). An end of wishing. First Draft: Warner Bros. Sharp, A. (1975a). The dark tower. Third Draft: Warner Bros. Sharp, A. (1975b). Night moves: The novelisation. Warner Paperback Library. Sharp, A. (1978). The odd man, Dir. Charles Gormley: Scottish Arts Council.

Alternative Approaches

Creating Kaleidoscopic Characters: Working with Performance to Develop Character Stories Prior to Screen Story Angie Black and Anna Dzenis

Introduction The critical and commercial successes of films by performance artist Miranda July, and theatre director now established filmmaker Mike Leigh, may see a well-timed challenge to modes of traditional filmmaking and established practices of screenwriting. Both Leigh and July use performance as the stimulus for the filmmaking practice, where collaborating with actors/performers before story or screenplay catalyses the importance of character truth in story creation. It is the research into character, undertaken by the actor and director in conversation and observation through improvisation workshops at the initial stage of story development, that allows for the actor’s character experience to align with the writer’s desire for the character response before beginning the screen writing process. It’s not uncommon for contemporary film practitioners to develop or utilise existing approaches to screen content/making through using alternative artistic practices, prior to screenwriting. Despite the successes of this approach to screen-based work it is however still seen as an alternative method of film production that differs from an industrialised model, where the screenplay is seen as a blueprint for the film. A. Black (B) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] A. Dzenis La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

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Compelling characters do not always appear on the page in the initial stages of screenwriting. Some characters are devised, developed and nurtured collaboratively over time by filmmakers. These filmmakers use lengthy development processes that involve working with actors and performance prior to story or script in order to create nuanced characters and in turn a greater verisimilitude to the world the characters inhabit. Two contemporary filmmakers, Miranda July in the US and Mike Leigh in the UK, use performance as the stimulus for their filmmaking practice. Both filmmakers collaborate with actors/performers before story or screenplay to develop a character experience to draw upon for the story creation which aligns more closely to a deeper screen representation of a character truth or reality. It is the research into character, undertaken by the actor and director in conversation and observation through improvisation workshops at the initial stage of story development, that allows for the actor’s character experience to align with the writer’s desire for the character response before beginning the screenwriting process. Although primarily discussing documentary films, Michael Rabiger attests to how “there should exist a great deal of truth in our fictional storytelling because that’s what makes it resonate with an audience” (2004, p. 15). This ‘truth’ is at times an elusive quality, but it could be understood as the inclusion of more diverse characters and stories that are often absent from film. This attention to character and story ‘truths’ was the motivating factor in wanting to pursue a different approach to working with film. This co-written chapter explores the filmmaking practice of one of the authors Angie Black, henceforth referred to by her surname. As a filmmaker, Black was drawn to examine alternative approaches to script development that involved working with actors and performance, such as those utilised by Miranda July and Mike Leigh, in developing the feature film, The Five Provocations (Black, 2018). This chapter highlights some of these approaches and the ways that they inspired, informed and contributed to the creation of this feature film that will be the central case study of this analysis. In doing so, we argue that there is a benefit in developing character in story creation, and that collaboration with cast at the initial stages of the screenwriting process can play a significant part in capturing compelling screen performances leading to greater character verisimilitude and emotional integrity in the completed film.

Miranda July: Performance and Kaleidoscopic Characters Miranda July’s auspicious foray into feature filmmaking took place when she wrote, directed and starred in the narrative feature film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). July’s strategy was to write an ensemble film that would be “as complex and kaleidoscopic as life”, with no stars attached so that the film would “appear to come out of nowhere with very little hype” and accompanying expectations (Wood, 2005). She certainly did that. The film was a success, both critical and financial, and won multiple awards at major

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international film festivals including the Caméra d’Or at The Cannes Film Festival. She describes her film as “the mundane is transcendent and everyday people become radiant characters who speak their innermost thoughts, act on secret impulses, and experience truthful human moments that at times approach the surreal” (Miranda July official website, 2012). July’s films present unique screen characters that are not derivative of female characters generally depicted on screens. The emotional sincerity of the characters that she creates gives them a naivety that lacks cynicism. In turn, these characters encourage a connection with the audience through their ability to form empathy and affinity for the characters. July’s phrase “kaleidoscopic as life” suggests that characters within a film could be likened to the coloured pieces of glass, that on rotation (or interaction) result in a myriad of changing perspectives. These characters reflect the diversity of the world we inhabit, resulting in differing views being presented. Most people are complex and we change our opinions and views of situations based on our interactions with other people. Not all interactions are spectacular but all are fascinating depending on how we look at them. July has no formal training and did not attend art or film school. Instead, she followed the model of learning by practice. She acknowledges that the commercial mediums are more defined by the funding sources than they are by artistic practice. This is an interesting suggestion and one that surely resonates with other artists of the film form. July maintains the importance of fluidity in the approach to her creative practice. She explains, “‘I always want the edges of my practice to be moving so I don’t become wed to a particular shape’” (quoted in Bryan-Wilson, 2004, p. 185). This comment further builds on July’s evocation of the kaleidoscopic, where experimentation and risk with creative practice is fore fronted. This fluid creative approach is rarely possible in an industrialised model of filmmaking. July’s process almost always begins with an immersive, often solo performance. July, a US live performance and video artist turned filmmaker emerged from the punk, feminist music and art scene in the early 1990s. Her approach to film production draws from her background in devising performance work that she uses as the primary initiator to story. July tends to integrate her performance work into a narrative fiction world in her films. This approach provided an excellent precedent for merging live performance work into a narrative fiction form that was at the heart of Black’s feature film project. Despite the success of You and Me and Everyone We Know (2005), July was not immediately interested in pursuing an industrialised and lengthy filmmaking process. Instead, she developed and wrote a live performance work called Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About (2006) (Mongrel Media, 2012). Part of this live performance incorporated a piece she devised called the ‘T-shirt dance’. In the performance, July climbed into a large T-shirt and pulled it up over her head hiding from the foot-stomping audience and into the serenity of the inner world of the Tshirt where she was free to create art. Although the live performance allowed

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her more creative scope to initially develop and trial her work, she wanted to explore this story in a more intricate way, so she wrote the screenplay for The Future (July, 2011b). Within the film The Future, both the characters of ‘Paw Paw’ the cat and the T-shirt (and subsequent ‘T-shirt dance’) were developed from her performance stage work. As with her first film, July made a conscious decision to keep the budget low and not to cast well-known actors. This enabled more creative control of her overall vision for her second film. Often second feature films struggle to capture the same attention that debut films achieve. For example, July’s second film The Future, although undoubtedly well crafted, seems to have a forced naivety to both the characters and the narrative that was not present in her debut feature Me and You and Everyone We Know. The struggle appears to be between keeping her unique voice and becoming trapped in the conventions of the screenwriting practice. But by maintaining practice in two forms, performance art and filmmaking, and not being lured into one while being increasingly more aware of the other, presents a difficulty. July had to fight off the potential investors who also wanted to secure star actors for the film The Future as a way of appeasing concerns about the script (July, 2011a, p. 115). Instead of complying, July began another project about “procrastination and inspiration, isolation and connection” (McSweeney’s, 2012), writing the book It Chooses You (2011). As a writer, she had greater control over the material and the book project created the answers for her film script. Much of what she found out in her investigation for her project It Chooses You ended up in the film The Future (McSweeney’s, 2012). July’s films do not necessarily strive for realism. However, the verisimilitude constructed in the worlds of the films is so convincing that when something extraordinary does happen, such as the character of the T-shirt approaching the front door in The Future, the audience is asked to see these moments as part of the narrative world. These scenes, or ‘moments’ in the film, slide the narrative from a realist contemporary depiction of the characters’ world into a type of magic realism. Whether these scenes work or not is up to the viewer. They do, however, provide a useful precedent through which to analyse the creation of kaleidoscopic characters.

Mike Leigh: Devising Character and Character-Based Improvisation (CBI) The second filmmaker who provided inspiration for a different approach to character creation and working with actors and performance before writing a screenplay is Mike Leigh. Leigh is a British writer and director well known for the realistic portrayal of people in his films that often operate as “sly domestic satires and heartbreaking ‘social realist’ dramas” (DiPaolo, 2013, p. 1). He is also known for devising narratives with a cast that allow room for experimentation and collaboration. Leigh’s films, particularly his earlier films Bleak

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Moments (1971), High Hopes (1988) and Life Is Sweet (1990), were often intimate, small-scale stories (and budgets), dealing with working people’s daily life struggles and relationships. Leigh’s films are complex character studies, developed with his cast over an extended rehearsal period. Investigation into this approach provides a useful avenue to focus on character reactions through a study of his process which involves research, discussion and improvisation. Improvisation has its roots in theatre and Leigh has adapted his way of working with performance in theatre to utilising improvisation for film. Although many filmmakers have adopted improvisation as a tool for either devising characters or as a rehearsal element, Leigh is arguably the most prolific and successful contemporary filmmaker working with improvisation. Leigh’s career began as a playwright and director of theatre in the 1960s, and a decade later he turned his craft to focus on television and film. It was in this early phase of theatre-making that Leigh developed his understanding of working with a cast to develop characters. Leigh’s approach to filmmaking begins by casting the actors before investigating a story or topic. He works with improvisation as a screenwriting tool and investigates performance using a character improvisation process of story development, whereby character development precedes the story. Leigh begins the process with a basic premise or area of investigation, but this is generally concealed from the cast until later. Working collaboratively with his cast, Leigh uses improvisation to develop characters and builds scenes through rehearsals which he then “distils” into a written screenplay (Clements, 1983). It sounds easy in theory but in practice, without time, money and access to a willing cast, this process can be challenging. Leigh’s initial approach to story development in his filmmaking craft can be loosely described as “collaborating with actors to create characters and relationships and a fully formed fictional community of characters. Then he constructs a basic plot. Then he holds improvisational rehearsals. Only then does he write the script” (DiPaolo, 2013, p. 2). Leigh’s process can be located within the wider filmmaking practice in which “most writers develop their plots first, concentrating on story construction, and then search for the characters that will make that story work” (Armer, 2002, p. 86). In his career as a producer, director and professor of screenwriting, Alan Armer was surprised that so few writers paid attention or “began their creative thinking” on character before story (2002, p. 86). Leigh dismisses the idea that he has a reproducible ‘method’ of production and warns of the “risks associated with codifying or quantifying his approach” (Marchand, 2013). However, ‘The Mike Leigh method’ of character-based improvisation (herein referred to as CBI) has been adapted by many filmmakers as an alternative or additional approach to an industrialised script-based practice of filmmaking. Leigh’s work is more critically acclaimed and wide-reaching than July’s, and his method of production provides a model for filmmakers. When making his films, Leigh has said that he “aspire[s] to the condition of documentary

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in the sense that you want to make it happen so that it’s completely threedimensional in front of the camera” (Cardullo, 2010, p. 6). It is this approach to capturing the accuracy in the minutiae of the everyday, especially with performance in Leigh’s films, that inspired this research. Ideally, collaborating with actors to create characters that are complex, flawed and grappling with moral dilemmas comes closer to experiences of everyday life. As in Leigh’s films, it is the detailed investigation of the familiar daily workings and interactions of diverse characters that allows for greater expression of emotional realities. Characters have the room to investigate morally complex issues and move beyond narrative conventions of genre or cinema tropes. Henri Lefebvre argues that “‘Everyday life should be a work of art’, indicating that performative interventions could change and enhance people’s lives” (Lefebvre quoted in Allain & Harvie, 2014, p. 181, emphasis in original). As Leigh explores in his films, Black was also interested in the complexities of characters that grapple with moral dilemmas beyond straightforward resolution that the spectator can predict and resolve. Leigh’s filmmaking approach provided an excellent model to initiate story development for The Five Provocations. One fundamental difference between Leigh’s films and Black’s is that the world of The Five Provocation’s narrative takes the perspective of a queer-identifying woman. Black’s world, as a female, queer filmmaker, became an important focus in which the character narratives would be shaped. Some aspects of Black’s process were similar to Leigh’s, including a lengthy, largely improvisatory rehearsal development “during which actors explore aspects of their characters and relationships, until a script emerges” (Salinsky & Frances-White, 2017, pp. 14–15). For Leigh, improvisation is largely used as a “behind the scenes” process of development rather than “an essential feature of the performance” (Salinsky & Frances-White, 2017, p. 15). Tom Salinsky and Deborah Frances-White suggest that Leigh’s scripts are “replicated faithfully as any other once shooting starts” (2017, p. 15). Improvisation is used in the development phase to facilitate the writing process but is less likely to be used in production once the script is finalised for production. This was not the case for the story development for The Five Provocations, where improvisation was used in the initial stages prior to screenwriting but also used throughout the filming process. The following case study will discuss how these approaches by July and Leigh inspired and informed the process undertaken in making The Five Provocations.

The Five Provocations: Developing Kaleidoscopic Characters and Spontaneous Performances The Five Provocations (Black, 2018) is a magic realist, ensemble drama feature film, navigating themes of loss and gender and sexual identity in four main characters. The making of the film explores a new way of working with actors

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by examining the capacity for spontaneity in performance through characterbased improvisation. The film produced merges live performance within a narrative fiction. Live performances, selected from Melbourne’s independent theatre scene, were used to create the provocations that drive each of the characters towards change. The purpose of this creative intersection was four-fold. Firstly, to create a film about the lives of contemporary, inner-urban characters in Melbourne and the way their day-to-day worlds unfold in their businesses, their work and their personal relationships. Secondly, to investigate unscripted and spontaneous reactions in performance work for film. This means that neither the characters nor the actors playing them would know that there was an intervention planned by the director. Therefore, actors playing characters in the film were not aware of what would unfold in the intervening scene, ‘provocation’, thus they experienced a live moment, and a spontaneous reaction was captured on film. Thirdly, to combine pre-existing segments of live performance from the Melbourne independent theatre scene and reimagine them in a fictional narrative world. These performances were selected with the purpose of provoking spontaneous reactions from the film’s four main characters, but also to be reframed for the screen and integrated fully into the feature film in a seamless way to enhance the narrative. Fourthly, to promote gender parity and screen diversity, both on screen and behind the lens. In Australia, there is minimal government film funding support for feature film script development without a script. This makes the experimental film development and production process of The Five Provocations a case study of an alternative practice within the independent filmmaking system, as well as a radical intervention. This film shares some common approaches with other Australian and New Zealand film practitioners who are also looking for more creative, collaborative, innovative methods of script/story development and filmmaking. What makes The Five Provocations an unusual and therefore interesting case study, is that it combines the development processes initially inspired by Miranda July and Mike Leigh to create a new process of script development. There are already many film practitioners exploring different models of script and project development as a way to expand beyond the rigidity of the industrialised film production model. When discussing an Australian context, filmmaker and academic Kathryn Millard suggests that the problem may not be that our scripts are underdeveloped (Millard, 2010, p. 12), but that they are overdeveloped to the point of losing the original spark that made the story stand out as innovative and interesting in the first place. Where The Five Provocations process differs from July’s approach (of developing a character for herself to play) is that the actors within the film were unaware of scenes or characters beyond their character world. And while they did receive a script before filming, they were not privy to the full film narrative. The actors were trained to expect surprise characters but did not know where they would be incorporated or that they would be expected to engage with a performer who had created a character for a live medium. This in turn created unscripted

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and unpredicted scenes and responses in the characters. These performances are intended to interrupt, disrupt and provoke each character’s story. The interruption offered a surreal, ‘unexpected’ character/actor experience that triggered hidden impulses in the character. The actor’s ‘in character’ reactions were an integral part of capturing a true response within the film. What can be seen as surreal or magic realist scenes merge with natural performances that investigate themes of sexuality and gender identities, with the intention of producing a challenging, provocative and memorable film.

The Five Provocations Production Process: Strategies for Capturing Kaleidoscopic Characters In order to provoke character responses, time was required to prepare the actor. There were six key strategies within the production process that were significant to crafting these moments. Strategy 1—Character Development Through Solo Improvisation Although the desire was to produce a narrative fiction film, it was important to let go of any preconceived idea about a certain type of narrative. This enabled the actors to work in a way that allowed both the actors and director to create and develop characters that were interesting and engaging in their own right without first considering story or narrative. Character development happened slowly and intermittently over a two-year period, through research, discussion, improvisation and workshopping. During this time working with individual cast members, Black began interconnecting the characters by planting characters in their backstories. Black created a chart, that helped her to visualise and link significant dates and possible meetings for each character. Once the relationships between each character began to form, Black devised exercises for the characters to meet in improvisational scenarios. These improvisation workshops were recorded as a documentation of the process and as scenes that Black later drew upon. Documenting the improvisation workshops drew Black’s attention to how actors used time to process thoughts and emotions. Watching a thirtyminute improvisation scene of a lone character live was more compelling than reviewing it on screen. The use of time is precious in film and the audience attention span can be short, particularly when watching a passive character being inactive. This can be a problem when depicting “real-life” characters and is potentially unappealing for audiences as passivity does not drive the narrative (Dancyger & Rush, 2007, p. 166). Black saw that her role as a scriptwriter was to turn these “real-life” characters into “dramatic characters” that “find themselves in the midst of crises that take over their lives” (Dancyger & Rush, 2007, p. 167). By carefully constructing some opportunities for conflict, the improvisation workshops produced dramatic and tense moments that could be distilled

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into a scene. Equally, however, they also produced moments of character inactivity and passivity that had no scope to drive the narrative forward. Often the improvisations also opened up too many multiple paths that inevitably led to less dramatic outcomes. Wanting to keep the integrity of the process, Black retained some of these moments in the film, albeit reduced significantly to fit into a commercial ‘feature’ timeframe of ninety minutes. Only once Black began to see the characters in action and interacting did she begin to write a screenplay. Throughout this phase she found that, as the director who is largely responsible for driving the narrative, she was placed in a degree of uncertainty about what would happen. Strategy 2—Writing a Screenplay Black wrote four characters’ stories, each told from the character’s perspective. Each story could exist as a self-contained short narrative, with a three-act structure of beginning, middle and end with a brief resolution. These stories largely emerged from witnessing the performances and character interactions in the improvisation work. Each story followed a linear narrative, where the key to its effectiveness would be a reasonably predictable narrative which, in turn, would allow for character identification (Dancyger & Rush, 2007, p. 155). The four stories interconnected in a chronological, episodic script that allowed each character to grow organically through the process and through the narrative. Black realised that if filmed chronologically it would allow for possible changes in the character as a result of the improvised provocation scenes. Black anticipated that these provocation scenes may change the narrative structure of the overall film, from linear to non-linear, which might also alter the film’s reception in making it appear more experiential and less conventional. Strategy 3—Concealed ‘Safe’ Scripts Following Leigh’s model, the actors would only know what their character would know. Black decided not to send the draft scripts to each cast member. Instead, she read the character story script to the actor playing that character. These ‘sessions on the couch’, were just between the individual actor and writer/director, so the actor could lie on the couch and fully absorb and question the motives of their character. This also meant that Black was able to hold some parts of the script back to gauge the actor’s reaction. Possibly, based on that reaction, Black would stop reading and take the scene in a slightly different direction. It became a cautious exercise in what to, and what not to, reveal. Each actor’s response was integral to the writing process. Instruction on the page was open to interpretation, depending on how pedantic the writing was. Reading meant that Black could eliminate certain other characters’ perspectives in the scene and ensure the actor would only know what their character would know. This form of aural storytelling also allowed the actors

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to visualise the narrative (and not the script) and add comments on whether they thought their character might react in a certain way or not. This gave the actor permission to consider only their own character’s actions and to make assumptions about the other characters, which is generally close to everyday life. The reason for this strategy was to capture an aliveness and freshness in the interaction as characters. Actor Sapidah Kian, who plays Marlena, said the sessions on the couch were like therapy sessions for her character (Black, 2019, p. 47). Black carried this strategy further into the process and decided that she would only give the actors the script of their own character story and just the scenes from the other character stories that their character appeared in. Strategy 4—Principal Photography Filmed Chronologically Black had planned to film each character story in a four-day block, scheduled to shoot in chronological order—because she suspected that the character might well take a different direction after the provocation scene. The First Assistant Director (1st AD), who was tasked with scheduling the film, thought the process was very unorthodox, but it took only one provocation scene before they changed their perspective on the approach. All crew and cast respected the process and understood that there was secrecy around story elements in the script. To provide some sort of gravitas for the importance of these concealed elements, the cast and crew were asked to sign confidentiality agreements and to honour the process. Only four people in the crew knew about the provocation scenes and received the full ‘confidential scripts’. This meant that Black was required to produce multiple versions of the same script. This first was a full draft (The Five Provocations ), which included scenes that were predictions of how the character might react to the improvised provocation scenes. This was in fact the shooting script, in that there was a desire to know what the film might be in terms of story and overall length, which included the possible scenarios of the provocation scenes. The second version was a script in four story chapters (Body Flux), not the full script. This version had chapter headings for each character story and all of them omitted the provocation scenes. This version, being ‘concealed “safe” scripts’, had alternative scenes written in the place where the provocations would ultimately take place. Black did not want to risk piquing the actors’ interest by revealing the title of the film, so the working title Body Flux was used for principal photography. Black also decided not to risk any of the crew having the full draft, so they were also given the Body Flux script. Strategy 5—Provocation The provocation scenes being largely unpredictable would play out as an improvised scene to provoke a response from the character. Each provocation was a selected work from a live performance, which became an unexplained

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additional character from outside of the narrative of the film. Other than the writer/director, the only people who had prior knowledge of the provocation scenes were the Co-Producer, the Director of Photography (DOP), 1st AD and Script Editor who had been given the full scripts. The 1st AD would clear the set. Sound crew would radio mic both cast members and then be concealed in a nearby room. The on-set vibe was electric, because no one knew what to expect from the actor. Black anticipated a possible scenario for how it might happen and considered there may be three possible reactions to the interaction: fight, flight or freeze. Black predicted how the character might react in order to prepare the filming of the scene to ensure that the camera would capture this moment. The brief to the DOP (Matt Jasper) was to ‘shoot documentary style’, meaning hand-held and using available light, focused on the actor for their response. The instruction was, ‘Don’t cut even if I say “cut!”’. Black and Jasper blocked the movement with each of the five provocateurs prior to the filming. Blocking movement for the camera is different from how these scenes were originally staged for theatre. The two, theatre and screen, are different spatially and how the movement is to be captured for the screen needs to be carefully considered and constructed. These scenes were shot single camera with Black spotting Jasper to ensure the coverage of the reactions was captured. Strategy 6—Documenting the Character Responses This involved documenting the responses of the main characters to the provocations. Once the initial first take of the scene was completed, Black scheduled time to debrief with the actor. The actor’s adrenalin was racing, and time was needed for them to process the scene and the feelings that the intervention provoked in the character and what this meant for the character’s world. Many questions were raised. How did the actor deal with an unusual character intervening into the realist world of the film? Does this moment break the verisimilitude of the narrative world or can the actor in character make the moment appear believable? How did the experience of ‘flow’ between the character in the scenario and actor awareness of the intervention function? Time was also scheduled to get coverage of the performers as the provocateurs because as the improvisations had revealed, improvisation live is one thing but improvisation on screen can be slow and may need to be edited for impact. Given that the actors had been exposed to unexpected characters in improvisations during the extensive character development phase prior to the filming, Black hoped that the actors, when confronted by these unexpected scenes, would be able to trust their actor’s instinct for what the character would do. These instincts can be compared to what Sharon Carnicke describes as “experiencing”, which derived from Stanislavski’s use of the Russian term perezhivanie (1998, p. 109). Carnicke explains her reading of Stanislavski’s use of experiencing as “what an actor feels when his entire series of exercises successfully

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releases their full potentials” (1998, p. 107). Carnicke calls on US psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s use of the term “flow” to further explain this state as “an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you don’t exist anymore” … “And it just flows out of myself” (quoted in Carnicke, 1998, p. 108). This term ‘flow’ is useful in analysing the work of the actor in character in relation to the unexpected spontaneous responses.

The Five Provocations: Casting the Actors Independent film producer Christine Vachon argues that the casting and working with actors is “the single most important element in a film” (Vachon & Edelstein, 1998, p. 145). She attests equal priority to maintaining an environment conducive to ensuring that the actors are able to create the very best performance. Interestingly, she places more emphasis on the cast and the acting than on the story or the visual aspects of the film. “The camerawork might be shaky, the plot might have holes, the audience might not even know what the film is about, but if your actors are compelling you can still keep people in their seats” (Vachon & Edelstein, 1998, p. 144). Given that the cast play such an important part of filmmaking, it is a strange practice that in mainstream cinema, actors enter the process once the script is ‘locked’ for production. Cynthia Baron and Sharon Carnicke draw attention to live performance being received differently from the acting craft mediated for screen. They suggest that “Live stage performance has been associated with legitimacy, complexity, and authenticity, while screen performance has often been viewed as something other than true acting” (Baron & Carnicke, 2008, p. 11). They highlight that observers of film often overlook “the training, experience, and creativity that actors bring to filmmaking” (Baron & Carnicke, 2008, p. 17). Screen actors draw on training and technique “to produce the gestures, expressions, and intonations that collaborate and combine with other cinematic elements to create meaning in film” (Baron & Carnicke, 2008, p. 17). Certainly, the actors cast in The Five Provocations are the most important element in this process, given their investment in devising and performing their characters. In allowing the actor greater collaboration in developing their character, it provides further investment in the performance. The actors’ contribution functions in much the same way as any other key creative artist contributing to the film. In most cases, actors are well trained in their performance craft and, like other contributors, bring their expertise to the creative collaborative art form that film is. Leigh says that he approaches his cast by saying, “Come and be in my film. Can’t tell you what it’s about. I can’t tell you what your character is. We’ll invent that as part of the process. And you will never know any more than your character knows” (Cardullo, 2010, p. 3). In much the same way, the actors were brought to The Five Provocations project with an initial primary focus to work with the director to devise character stories. Initially Black approached actors whom she had worked with before, because there is an element of trust

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in working without a script. There is also a great deal of hope that the work undertaken may eventually be both professionally rewarding and financially remunerated if the film is produced and sold. Leigh has a well-earned reputation and thus can apply for, and generally will receive, script development funds to begin his process, regardless of not having a screenplay as a guarantee of outcome. Steve Maras agrees that Leigh offers a “pluralists’ approach to screenwriting” but also cautions that because it offers a different approach, it “runs the risk of being misunderstood by a funding/theory nexus” (Maras, 2009, p. 170). In the absence of a screenplay with a recognisable story, tone and three-act narrative structure, we would suggest that this risk also applies to the casting process. The actor is required to place their trust in the filmmaker and the process. Leigh works initially one-to-one with each actor, developing a character who is ‘based’, in the first place, on someone the actor knows. The actor provides a list of real people and together with Leigh they select a person (or multiple people) to create a ‘base character’ as a starting place from which to draw characteristics (Marchand, 2013, pp. 44–45). Shortly into the process, Black realised that there were limitations to working with this method. Leigh works with “professional ‘character actors’ because their training and experience provides discipline and precision” that is required by the actor working with this approach (Marchand, 2013, p. 42). Of the actors cast in development in The Five Provocations, two had worked with the CBI method and the others had not. Because the actor is asked to draw from a base character or characters, the process becomes reliant on the actor’s capacity to observe real people. If the actor is unable to draw on their knowledge of everyday life and examine beneath the façade of the base characters selected, their ability to build a complex character is in jeopardy. The success of this phase lies in the ability of the actor, in conversation with the director, to draw upon experiences, including those from his or her personal history, outlook and perceptions of the world, likes, dislikes and attitudes (Marchand, 2013, p. 43). Black’s initial concept for the film was one that provided scope to explore with both actors and live performers. The conceptual idea is what Marchand refers to as the “initiating idea” (2013, p. 40). It was the dramatic terrain of the ageing woman as a woman in flux, often in relation to bodily change. For example, a woman nearing her fifties, on the precipice of menopause considers how that impacts on her world. This dramatic terrain influenced who Black cast in the film, along with the selection of provocateurs. Having a diverse cast was an important consideration and paved the way for more opportunity to represent contrasting viewpoints from the characters in the film. The diversity represented by the five main cast members is as follows: gender identity—3 female, 2 male, cultural heritage—3 Anglo-Saxon, 1 middle eastern, 1 indigenous Australian and sexual identity—1 queer, 1 homosexual, 2 heterosexual and 1 bi-sexual. Like Leigh, Black chose to work with professionally trained actors; ‘character actors’ who could draw on their training and practice for the discipline and precision that working this way requires (Marchand,

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2013, p. 42). The objective was to devise fully formed characters without relationships with one another, and eventually to introduce these characters in improvisation workshops. This interaction would allow the drama to develop and inform the narrative. Once all the characters had foundations that were drawn from the base characters, the characters were named and investigations into each character began through solo improvisations. Black compiled the discussions around character histories, characteristics, attributes and traits into a document for reference. These character notes were shared with the actors and became useful in decisions about the character and, eventually, the writing of each draft. The five actors who undertook extensive character devising work and play the main cast in The Five Provocations are Sapidah Kian, Rebecca Bower, Tony Moclair, Blake Osborn and Sarah Bollenberg. The intersection of working with actors using this CBI method and performers of the stage or performance space is challenging and without a certain outcome. Black was not entirely sure of how the intersection would work—perhaps as a device to create a dramatic effect in the narrative or more deeply to affect the shape of the character’s journey. As a writer/director, the temptation for Black was to create the script and place the characters (and the actors) within the constraints of the narrative. What makes this process an interesting experiment is relinquishing control, by not being overly prescriptive in shaping the narrative, but allowing the work to emerge naturally from improvisation and character development. This process allowed Black to invest in the actor as a creative collaborator. To some extent, this approach follows on from how Leigh works, where the actor creates the character and the director creates the drama. The actor has creative control over their character, yet the writer/director retains the ability to create dramatic interactions through orchestrating how all the characters interact and create relationships. This approach allows for the creation of character relationships, and through the conflicting relationships produces drama. Maras’ pluralists’ approach is useful when considering the converging contributions from cast members and performers in shaping the overall screenwriting process for The Five Provocations. An important part of this process to acknowledge is that the contributing performance artists (the provocateurs) had already constructed fully formed characters that they had devised and modified over time. These characters were created by, and belong to, the performance artists. The intention was to capture them just as they were presented. Once Black began writing the screenplay for The Five Provocations, it was a quicker and more efficient process than the extensive improvisation period had been. During the improvisation process, Black had been planting characters in each protagonist’s story so there would be connections and conflict for each character to resolve. Throughout this process, and the discussions with each actor, the character stories had already begun to emerge. The stories were being worked on and formed in the improvisational works. The task of writing the screenplay came down to how these stories intersected within the narrative.

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On the surface, the story is about four characters overcoming loss and dealing with the change that grief brings. Each story has its own narrative arc that begins with a character in conflict at a significant crossroad, facing decisions about how to resolve their inner conflict. The addition of the provocation scenes was the unknown factor. These scenes provided each character with an unexpected experience and an opportunity to see their situation differently.

Conclusion Miranda July and Mike Leigh are artists of the film form who came to filmmaking after emerging from another initial creative practice. As artists within the film form, they are exploring themes in their work and ways to reach beyond the conventions of a mainstream practice of filmmaking. In turning their attentions to filmmaking, they express a desire to communicate their particular vision to an established audience. Both raise questions about how a filmmaker/artist ‘performs’ as a filmmaker in an industry that demands significant box-office returns. How does an artist maintain a ‘voice’ in an industrialised production system that applauds the ‘auteur’ while paradoxically insisting on generalisation and universality? July and Leigh offer an alternative to the industrialised system of filmmaking, but both still write scripts before beginning principal photography. One possible explanation that this research raises is that both July’s and Leigh’s methods of production could be defined as ‘post-planning’. Bala Starr explains the term as emerging “from architecture and urbanism, but one that has more recently been used as an idea within curatorial practice. Hybrid terms like this suggest a way of crossing between disciplines, between straight lines” (Starr, 2012). ‘Post-planning’ applies to creative practitioners who start with the work in an embryonic form, then allow that work to grow into something before elaborating any idea about the outcome, finished work or audience. This term applies to the filmmaking approach adopted by July, Leigh and Black. It allows experimentation with creative projects before devising stories, which is very much at the foundations of The Five Provocations. To conclude, we present two ideas about script (or story) development processes. Firstly, July’s and Leigh’s methods of production can be defined as ‘post-planning’. Mike Leigh says, “I only do what all other writers, painters, and novelists do. All art is a synthesis of improvisation and order. You put something down and then you work with it. You discover what it is by interacting with it” (Cardullo, 2010, p. 3). Secondly, there are alternative ways that filmmakers can remain practising artists who maintain a ‘voice’ in an industrialised production system albeit outside the demands of significant box-office returns. After the release of her second feature film The Future, Miranda July said: I mean the problem with Hollywood, and it’s so totally clear to me now that I’m kind of inside of it, is that it’s totally irrelevant to most people. It doesn’t matter

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how creative, or how good a story you have, the actual system for making the movies is not inspiring, is not creative and it’s completely divorced from most people’s lives and the way that most people go about making things. (July, 2008)

To echo a shared thought from Adrian Martin’s reflection on the deleterious effect on filmmaking’s adherence to the screenwriting manuals dominance, it’s time to loosen the reigning models and make space for variances in performance, mood, rhythm and meaning (Martin, 2018, p. 333). We suggest that filmmakers would benefit from being open to learning from other creative practitioners in the story development process, from within and outside of the cinematic arts—for example, directors, DOPs, actors, writers, sound designers, composers, choreographers, producers and visual artists. Film is, after all, the pinnacle of the interdisciplinarity of creative practice, so it makes sense that, as film practitioners, we would look to performers for ways of diversifying the stories we tell.

References Allain, P., & Harvie, J. (2014). The Routledge companion to theatre and performance (2nd ed., pp. 71, 195). Routledge. Armer, A. (2002). Writing the Screenplay: TV and Film (2nd ed., p. 86). Waveland Press. Baron, C., & Carnicke, S. (2008). Reframing screen performance. University of Michigan Press. Black, A. (Director). (2018). The five provocations. Black Eye Films. Black, A. (2019). Capturing the moment: An investigation into the process of capturing performance on film and the five provocations: A feature film. PhD dissertation thesis, La Trobe University. http://arrow.latrobe.edu.au:8080/vital/access/manager/Rep ository/latrobe:43161. Accessed 16 Sept 2020. Bryan-Wilson, J. (2004). Some kind of grace: An interview with Miranda July. Camera Obscura (Vol. 55.19, Issue 1, p. 185). Duke University Press. Cardullo, B. (2010). “Making people think is what it’s all about”: An interview with Mike Leigh. Cinema Journal, 50(1), 1–18. Carnicke, S. (1998). Stanislavsky in focus. Harwood Academic Publishers. Clements, P. (1983). The improvised play: The work of Mike Leigh. London: Methuen. Dancyger, K., & Rush, J. (2007). Alternative scriptwriting: Successfully breaking the rules (4th ed.). Focal Press. DiPaolo, M. (2013). Introduction: The poetics and politics of comic-realist cinema. In B. Cardinale-Powell & M. DiPaolo (Eds.), Devised and directed by Mike Leigh. Bloomsbury. July, M. (Director). (2005). Me and you and everyone we know. IFC Films. July, M. (Director). (2011). It chooses you. McSweeney’s. July, M. (Director). (2008). Joanie 4 Jackie (previously known as Big Miss Moviola) A quick overview, Vimeo movie. Produced for Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts. http://vimeo.com/5326144. Accessed 14 June 2012.

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July, M. (Director). (2011a). The future. Roadside Attractions. July, M. (Director). (2011b). The future. ‘DVD extras: Making The Future’. Roadside Attractions. Leigh, M. (Director). (1996). Secrets & lies. Channel Four Films. Leigh, M. (Director). (2004). Vera Drake. Thin Man Films & Les Films Alain Sarde. Leigh, M. (Director). (2010). Another year. Thin Man Films. McSweeney’s. (2012). About Miranda July’s It chooses you. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, published 27 August 2012. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/aboutmiranda-julys-it-chooses-you. Accessed 30 Mar 2012. Maras, S. (2009). Screenwriting: History, theory and practice. Wallflower Press. Marchand, R. (2013). Devising and directing. In B. Cardinale-Powell & M. DiPaolo (Eds.), Devised and directed by Mike Leigh (p. 38). Bloomsbury. Martin, A. (2018). Making a bad script worse. In Mysteries of cinema: Reflections on film theory, history and culture 1982–2016. Amsterdam University Press. Millard, K. (2010). After the typewriter: The screenplay in a digital era. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 11–25. Miranda July official website. (2012). Me and you and everyone we know. http://www. mirandajuly.com/movies. Accessed 18 June 2012. Mongrel Media. (2012). ‘The future: Press kit’—‘In conversation with Miranda July’, 2011. http://www.mongrelmedia.com/index.php/filmlink?id=aa48addcb7fb-4cd0-909e-a9ff94f6b632. Accessed 12 Apr 2012. O’Hagan, S. (2004). I’m allowed to do what I want—That amazes me [Film]. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/dec/05/features.review. Viewed online 6 Feb 2018. Rabiger, M. (2004). Directing the documentary (4th ed.). Focal Press. Salinsky, T., & Frances-White, D. (2017). The improv handbook: The ultimate guide to improvising in comedy, theatre and beyond (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Starr, B. (2012). ‘Post-planning: Damiano Bertoli, Julian Hooper, Andrew Hurle, Alex Martinis Roe, Michelle Nikou’, exhibition/curatorial notes (Exhibition 31 March to 22 July 2012), Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. http:// www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/fromyear/2004/ toyear/2015/exhib-date/2012-03-31/exhib/post-planning-damiano-bertoli-jul ian-hooper-andrew-hurle-alex-martinis-roe-michelle-nikou. Accessed 14 June 2012. Vachon, C., & Edelstein, D. (1998). Shooting to kill: How an independent producer blasts through the barriers to make movies that matter. Avon Books. Wood, J. (2005). Interview with Miranda July. Me and you and everyone we know, DVD, directed by Miranda July. IFC Films.

Lean Script Development in the Available Materials School of Filmmaking: This Is Dedicated to The One I Love Andrew Kenneth Gay

Introduction The trade headlines of April 2012 carried good news for screenwriter Justin Lader and director Charlie McDowell. After years in development hell with their $5 million feature passion-project, Fighting Jacob—a “Jewish Raging Bull” about an OCD boxer—the long-time creative partners had finally landed financing and attached stars Jamie Bell and Kate Mara to the picture (Sneider, 2012). Lader had first drafted Fighting Jacob as a spec script in his second year as a graduate screenwriting fellow at the American Film Institute Conservatory in 2007–2008 (AFI Interview, 2017). His partner McDowell (the son of actors Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen, and step-son to Ted Danson) had also attended the AFI Conservatory, but their time in the graduate programme had not overlapped, McDowell having graduated in 2006 as the youngest directing fellow ever to complete that programme (Fleming Jr., 2012). Instead, the two connected through a mutual friend at AFI and cemented their relationship over Fighting Jacob, spending the next four years developing it as collaborators. Now, after several false-starts, it appeared their efforts would finally pay off.

The original version of this chapter was revised: Parenthetical note at the bottom of page 332 has been updated. The correction to this chapter is available at https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_42 A. K. Gay (B) Southern Oregan University, Ashland, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2022 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_23

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However, by summer that same year, financing for Fighting Jacob had already fallen through, Bell and Mara had departed the project, and Lader and McDowell were back in development hell. Fortunately, McDowell had recently signed with agent Joanne Wiles at ICM Partners, who also happened to represent actor, filmmaker and influential indie dream-maker Mark Duplass, a connection McDowell was able to leverage to get Fighting Jacob in front of Duplass in consideration for the lead role (Fleming Jr., 2012). Duplass enjoyed the script and agreed to take a meeting with McDowell in July 2012, but to McDowell’s surprise, Duplass showed no interest in jumping through the development hoops necessary to get Fighting Jacob off the ground and instead suggested a radical alternative. As Lader recalls (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015): It was obvious that Mark was creatively way more fulfilled [...] with movies like Your Sister’s Sister and Safety Not Guaranteed, those smaller-type movies, and the idea of making a movie that’s between two and five million dollars, that would take years to launch, sort of went against his philosophy of “take inventory of what you already have access to and then go make a movie”.

Duplass told McDowell he had a story concept of his own he wanted to develop and an opening in his calendar in April 2013, just nine months away. He offered to hand his idea over to Lader and McDowell, and to finance the film himself, on the condition that they develop the new project in accordance with what Duplass (2015) has called, “the Available Materials School of Filmmaking”, a rapid and iterative ideation process built on creative constraints. In this case study of The One I Love (McDowell, 2014)—a film financed, produced, starring, and inspired by Mark Duplass but written by Justin Lader and directed by Charlie McDowell—we will examine the script development practices of this “Available Materials School”, through interviews with Lader and an analysis of the film’s development documents, in order to understand how this approach to development blurs the lines between conception and execution. Lader developed The One I Love in a unique series of iterations, beginning with a fairly conventional 10-page treatment (2012), followed by a 60-page scriptment (2013a)—a hybrid scripting form that draws from both screenplay and treatment conventions (Murphy, 2019, p. 227), about which little has been published and for which there are no gurus or manuals—after which he scripted out the third act in full shooting script format due to the unique special effects and performance demands of the plot (2013b). Finally, Lader continued to develop the script on set, when during production the unexpected decision was made to have Lader script each day’s shooting scenes for just-in-time delivery. As we will discover, the “Available Materials” mode of story development demonstrated in the making of The One I Love shares much in common with so-called lean (or agile) principles of product development employed by auto manufacturers, software engineers and entrepreneurs to mitigate risk through delayed decision-making and team empowerment (Poppendieck & Poppendieck, 2013). By embracing such lean script development practices, the

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team behind The One I Love “[left] themselves flexible, open to greater feedback and collaboration, and better prepared to strategically tackle obstacles and uncertainty” (Gay, 2014, p. 270).

Options Thinking in Lean Script Development Duplass has described the principles of his “Available Materials School” in multiple interviews and public appearances, including a keynote speech at the South-by-Southwest Film Festival in 2015: You’re going to write [your] script based upon what I call, “the Available Materials School of Filmmaking,” which is not, “It takes place in a spaceship,” because you can’t do that on a thousand dollars. But what you can do is take a meeting with everyone who loves you and everyone who wants to support you and say, “What do you have that you can lend to me at my disposal to make a film?”

As Duplass has argued, first-time filmmakers can no longer expect to secure lucrative distribution advances and development deals off their breakout festival films, and because of this, they should avoid gambling their early careers on expensive calling card films in hopes of attracting Hollywood adoration. Instead, Duplass presents his “Available Materials” approach as an alternative development pathway, a method of repackaging core creative interests in a low-risk, actionable plan: What is the beating heart of this thing […], and can I lift something out of there and put it into the realm of something that can be shot on my block, and in my home, and in my car, and in my office space, and in my dad’s truck, and with my son’s hoverboard, and all the things that are sitting around my house? I’m gonna gather them up, I’m gonna stare at them on the floor, and say, “I own all these things, and I own an iPhone, and I’ve got some friends, how can I put the beating heart of my really expensive dream project right into this stuff, so I can go make my movie starting next weekend?” And that’s the only way you can guarantee that you’re going to get your stuff made. (Duplass, 2016)

Duplass has followed this protocol, not only in the development of his own films, such as The Puffy Chair (2005), but also while producing features for other independent filmmakers, including but not limited to Lynn Shelton’s Humpday (2009) and Your Sister’s Sister (2011), Colin Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), written by Derek Connolly, and Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015), co-written by Chris Bergoch. The principles of “Available Materials” script development, as described by Duplass, share much in common with Kathryn Millard’s “manifesto for sustainable screenwriting” (2014, pp. 184–185), in which she urges screenwriters to “[r]esist unnecessary resources and funds that will co-opt your project”, to “[d]ecide on a setting and write for it”, to “[e]mbrace constraints

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— imposed, incidental or accidental”, to collaborate radically across “every aspect of designing and executing the screen idea”, and to “[d]evelop prototypes. Work quick and dirty”. Similarly, Duplass has urged screenwriters to develop their stories by taking inventory of available resources, locations and collaborators, by accepting creative limitations while resisting unattainable ideas, by radically empowering collaborators and inviting improvisation, and by deferring decision-making while scripting rapidly and iteratively. The term lean has been used to describe practices as dissimilar as automobile manufacturing (Krafcik, 1988), software development (Poppendieck & Poppendieck, 2013), entrepreneurship (Ries, 2011) and now screenwriting and script development (Gay, 2014). Originally coined by Krafcik (1988) to describe the Toyota Production System, the concept of lean has expanded to encompass several development and management practices across multiple industry sectors aimed at optimizing limited resources and reducing waste in the face of extreme uncertainty through iterative improvement and cyclical feedback, or what Eric Ries (2011) has deemed the “Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop” (p. 76). Lean approaches to product development may be best understood in the context of their dominant alternative: waterfall planning. In a waterfall system, conception and execution are definitively separated. Managers “translate their vision into a plan, and then focus all of their energy on methodically executing that plan. Work is completed in sequential stages. Effort on a downstream stage only commences when the preceding stage is completed […]” (Eisenmann et al., 2012, p. 14). The role of the conventionally developed screenplay in the Hollywood mode of production often exemplifies such waterfall planning. When development is complete, a shooting script is locked, production days are scheduled, the shot list planned, the actors perform their lines on set as written, and so on, until a completed film is tested with audiences and possibly scheduled for reshoots as needed. Lean systems, conversely, blur the line between conception and execution, delaying irreversible decisions and inviting collaborative alterations to the plan throughout the product development cycle. Lean software developers refer to this as “options thinking” (Poppendieck & Poppendieck, 2013, p. 53) and, as Mary and Tom Poppendieck explain (2013, p. xxvi): Development practices that provide for late decision making are effective in domains that involve uncertainty, because they provide an options-based approach. [...] A key strategy for delaying commitments when developing a complex system is to build a capacity for change into the system.

When available materials filmmakers defer commitment to certain details in their script development, they—like agile software developers—keep their options open, shifting their practice from a predictive to an adaptive process (Poppendieck & Poppendieck, 2013, p. 56). By building flexibility into their script development, they reduce the number of management decisions that must be made based on speculation (whether a particular location or prop

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can be secured in-budget, for instance) and increase the project’s capacity to pivot in the face of circumstantial shifts that might otherwise seriously disrupt production. As filmmaker Sean Baker explains of his own lean script development, “part of that scripting is allowing whatever is going to happen that day, that particular day — the events of that day — to become part of this, and to accept it” (qtd. in Murphy, 2019, p. 227). Such options thinking encourages team empowerment because, as Poppendieck and Poppendieck (2013, p. xxvi) argue, “[t]op-notch execution lies in getting the details right, and no one understands the details better than the people who actually do the work”. In lean script development, the writer develops their story with space for cast and crew to contribute insights from their own expertise, creating opportunities for collective authorship and on-set improvisation. The product of lean script development might take any number of forms, but in the “Available Materials School”, writing a scriptment has become the preferred approach. While most trained readers can easily tell the difference between a treatment and script, the exact borders between treatment and scriptment or scriptment and script are more difficult to determine. No formatting bible exists for scriptment writing, and no template can be found in Final Draft, Celtx or other screenwriting software. Scriptments do not always follow the page-per-minute convention as a rule, so they may be either shorter or longer than a typical 90–120-page feature screenplay. They often look more or less like screenplays, typed in Courier 12-point font with conventional ‘slugline’ (scene) headings and numbers for each scene, but like a treatment, specific dialogue cues are often avoided in favour of sparse lines of sample dialogue mixed in within the prose-like scene text. Also, like prose, the scene text may include character thoughts, feelings and backstory that would typically be avoided in conventional screenwriting. Both character actions and specific dialogue cues (when they are included) may be offered alongside alternative options—suggestions that the production might try it multiple ways. Lynn Shelton’s unpublished Triangle Movie scriptment (2010), which would become Your Sister’s Sister (2011), includes nine notes from the writer/director on ideas she would like to try during production, including alternative endings to the film: “NOTE: I would like to shoot the last two scenes two different ways: one where the test is positive and one where the test is negative” (p. 71). While popular among the practitioners of available materials filmmaking, the scriptment format itself is not limited to use in low-budget script development. Blockbuster Hollywood writer/director James Cameron is often cited as the father of the form (Murphy, 2019, p. 294), having written scriptments for many of his projects, including such antithesis films as Titanic and Avatar. However, Cameron (qtd. in Munt, 2010) describes his own scriptment work as “a moment in the creative process […] a flawed document, a work in progress, a detailed study for a painting”, used to capture early ideas that will inevitably be reworked into a conventional screenplay. The filmmakers of the

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“Available Materials School”, on the other hand, value the scriptment’s unfinished quality as a key facilitator of options thinking. As filmmaker Sean Baker explains, “for me what they allow is that room to find, to have those happy accidents and, especially in this style of filmmaking, to allow the outside forces to dictate certain things, but hopefully in a positive way” (qtd. in Murphy, 2019, p. 227). Because lean filmmakers reject the notion that conception precedes execution, their script development is an ongoing, iterative process, and scriptment-writing supports that choice.

A Humble Suggestion to Freely Ignore: Developing The One I Love After their initial development meeting in July 2012, Mark Duplass emailed Charlie McDowell his own idea for a feature. According to McDowell, “Mark sent Justin and I a one-line idea that just hinted at the tone and genre to play in. I sent it to Justin and he was like, ‘I think you cut off the email ‘cause there’s no story here,’ and I was like, ‘No, that’s all he gave us’” (qtd. in Rojas, 2015). Lader explains (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015): Mark’s idea was just a husband and wife arguing in bed, and the wife gets up to go to the kitchen, and we follow her in one take after she leaves her husband in the bed, and when she gets in the kitchen, her husband’s standing there, the implication being that there’s two husbands.

McDowell sought clarifications from Duplass: “‘Where does it go? What happens?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I just came up with the line’” (qtd. in Patches, 2014). Duplass left it up to Lader and McDowell to see where they could take his scene fragment, in part as a test to see whether they could fully commit themselves to available materials story ideation. As Lader puts it, “Mark finds the talent and gets everything going. He’s a great mentor, and he’s there to help creatively and spitball, but he’s not micromanaging” (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015). In the “Available Materials School”, it is common to develop scriptments for pre-determined collaborators. Duplass suggested they build the project around himself and actress Elisabeth Moss, who was also available during his April 2013 window. Moss and Duplass had met in 2010 but never appeared on screen together while co-starring in Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion (2012), and the two had been searching for an opportunity to work together since that time. Duplass also suggested that Mel Eslyn, assistant director of Safety Not Guaranteed (Trevorrow, 2012) and co-producer of Your Sister’s Sister (Shelton, 2011), should join the team as both assistant director and producer on the project, given Eslyn’s proven track record with his available materials approach. (Eslyn has since become President of Duplass Productions.)

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Lader and McDowell fleshed out the story and characters in conversation. They began, as Duplass coaches writers to do, by cataloging their resources. In Lader and McDowell’s inventory, they focused first on location. McDowell’s mother Mary Steenburgen and step-father Ted Danson owned an estate in Ojai, California, where the team could film most of the movie and also house the cast and crew at the same time. Lader had visited the property on multiple occasions and felt comfortable building a narrative that could take place almost exclusively at that location. They concocted a plot about a husband (Duplass) and wife (Moss) who retreat to a vacation home at the urging of their therapist (to be played by Danson) in hopes of rekindling their marriage. After settling in and exploring the estate, they discover that a guesthouse on the property harbours a magical ability to summon a double of their spouse, but the couple perceives each duplicate as an improved version of their partner. Having built the basics of plot and theme around their inventory, Lader set off on his own to write a ten-page treatment he titled, “Other Mark and Other Liz Movie”, using the actors’ real names for the characters. Existing characteristics of the Ojai property shaped the plot while he wrote. As Lader explains, “A plot point as significant as the guest house wouldn’t have occurred to me if I didn’t know there was a guest house on the property, and I can’t imagine the movie without it” (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015). In addition to the narrative significance of the guesthouse, a recording studio built by Steenburgen in support of her side-career as a Nashville songwriter inspired the incorporation of the same recording studio into the movie’s sci-fi conceit. The addition of the therapist to the plot did not break Duplass’s rule of available materials because they could dress one of the rooms at the Ojai property as the therapist’s office. Even before writing a longer scriptment, Lader exhibits his commitment to options thinking in his treatment. The word “maybe” appears a total of 16 times over ten pages, an abiding reminder that the details contained therein have been offered only as suggestions that remain open to alternative ideas. Some examples follow: a. Inside is really nice. Filled with books and pictures of past guests. Cozy. Maybe a big book where guests can sign their names along with the date and a recollection from their weekend. Maybe Mark thumbs through the guest book wondering if he and Liz will rekindle things enough to possibly sign it. (Lader, 2012, p. 2) b. That night, Liz heads into the guest house. Maybe she needs toothpaste or something. (Lader, 2012, p. 2) c. Maybe Mark goes into town for something and Liz says she has a headache (or it could be the other way around) and as soon as Mark leaves, Liz runs inside the guesthouse to see Other Mark while actual Mark is away. There could be sneaky moments like that. (Lader, 2012, p. 7)

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d. As she stares out the window Mark notices her do something she’s never done before. (Maybe a strange way she puts her hair in a ponytail, maybe the way she rubs her eyes, but something like that). (Lader, 2012, p. 10) Lader’s treatment even punts on the film’s climax: Then, in a dark and comedic twist that comes shockingly out of nowhere, something bizarre happens resulting in Other Mark’s immediate death. (This hasn’t been figured out yet, but maybe once he realizes that he lost both Liz’s to Actual Mark he decides to take off on his own but then some abrupt accident happens and he dies. Something that comes so far out of left field it’s hilarious. Like the ‘I shot Marvin in the face’ moment in Pulp Fiction). (Lader, 2012, p. 9)

Duplass, Moss and Danson all officially signed on to the project on the strength of the treatment, and Lader set about drafting a 60-page scriptment, with the characters now renamed Ethan and Sophie. Like the treatment that came before it, the scriptment for The One I Love is a document of options, even opening with the following production note at the top of its first page: *This movie will be largely, if not entirely, improvised. Please consider the minimal dialogue included as nothing more than a device intended to efficiently underscore certain points or emotional beats, hopefully making for a better read. Or as a humble suggestion to freely ignore. (Lader, 2013a, p. 1)

This degree of options thinking poses certain management challenges when scheduling a feature shoot, necessitating extensive preparation. Just as this approach to script development extends flexibility into the production stage, it also invites rigorous pre-production planning into an earlier phase of script development than is typical. As Lader notes (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015): While there was certainly a lot of exploratory risk in terms of the improvised dialogue, the story itself was dissected and discussed and taken apart and reassembled through the same gauntlet that most screenplays go through — perhaps even more so because of the element that had improvisation. The misconception with improv is that you’re making it up as you go, on the fly. If that were the case I could guarantee you that this movie would not have worked at all.

Producer Eslyn further describes the team’s approach to preparation:

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throughout the prep process, when working with only a ‘scriptment,’ I usually push for workshop sessions with the director and actors (sometimes the writer as well as myself, the producer, are part of this team). It is in these workshops wherein we often pinpoint the emotional beats that we need to hit per scene, and generally we come out of these with a good idea of how much time we would like per scene on set. (personal communication, Aug 25, 2015)

Lader further elaborates that these workshops served as both production preparation and additional script development: We read through the scriptment, talking about these characters, what they would do. It was incredibly helpful talking about personal things from our own lives and relationships. [...] I remember little jokey ideas or little moments that we would divulge from our personal lives that after the rehearsal, I would go back and add those or take something out and replace it. (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015)

Several scriptment revisions emerged from these sessions, but even when Lader incorporated details that emerged from these collaborative workshops, he kept the scriptment open to options thinking. For example, in a revision to scene 17, dated April 8, 2013 (just two weeks prior to the first day of production), the scriptment explicitly offers the actors alternative ways of doing the scene: Therapist asks each to mention one thing the other used to do that they no longer do. [...] Ethan mentions how whenever he would say I love you to Sophie, she would hate to say I love you too because repeating the phrase somehow diminished its sincerity. So after Ethan would say I love you, Sophie would respond by saying JINX and then it would turn into a playful routine between the two of them. [...] (An ALT to jinx if this feels like too much could be after Ethan says I love you, Sophie replies: Get a room). (Lader, 2013a, pp. 77A)

As Lader explains (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015): I could throw in a couple of alt lines, just as jumping off points, a lot of times when I haven’t figured it out yet. Like, ‘Ok, we need a sweet little couple catch phrase, I don’t really know what that is yet, but here are a couple of things to get the conversation started.

The scriptment serves as an emotional road map for the actors, rather than a script to be recited, even when specific lines are given. What matters is that the emotional landmarks of each scene are located and uncovered for the audience.

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The “jinx” bit is revisited in scene 25 of the scriptment (Lader, 2013a, p. 9), in an exchange between Sophie and Other Ethan. However, neither version of the exchange offered by Lader (“jinx” or “get a room”) appear anywhere in the completed film. Eslyn purposely scheduled the scenes of Sophie and Ethan meeting with their therapist towards the end of principal photography to make it possible for Duplass and Moss to improvise relationship behaviours and quirks of interaction between their characters throughout the shoot and retroactively work those habits into their therapy sessions. According to Lader (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015): The hope was that by the time we got to that scene we would’ve thought of a specific inside joke that the characters would share to take the place of jinx. If memory serves me, we had them try a couple of ALT lines […] and we’d later implement them into the therapist scenes when it came time to shoot. In editing, the emotional beat was felt without any variation on the jinx lines so it ended up feeling superfluous anyway.

Conclusion: Just-in-Time Script Development The One I Love makes for an interesting study of available materials script development in part because the circumstances of production forced the creative team to straddle two scripting practices throughout its creation. Early in its development it became clear that the movie’s third act, which would bring Ethan and Sophie together in the same room with their doppelgangers, would need to be more precisely scripted due to both the special effects challenges involved of doubling Duplass and Moss and the impossibility of the actors improvising with themselves, so Lader wrote 30 pages of conventional shooting script with full dialogue (Lader, 2013b). Nevertheless, a side-by-side comparison between the completed film and this 30-page fragment reveals that the actors rarely deliver the lines exactly as written but continue to improvise and ad-lib. “Even if they didn’t use my dialogue that I wrote to a T, they understood tonally and from a pacing standpoint the beats they needed to hit in the scene”, says Lader (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015). The film’s third act notwithstanding, prior to the start of principal photography, it was still assumed that the majority of the film would be improvised on set using the scriptment as a starting point. Eslyn scheduled fifteen days for principal photography, with all but two of those set entirely at the Ojai property, where the cast and a small crew lived together for the duration of the shoot. Two cameras were used to shoot most scenes, so two sides of an improvised performance could be captured in a single take. However, one significant difference between The One I Love and other available materials films, such as Your Sister’s Sister, is its sheer number of scenes: 114 in The One I Love compared to 78 in the scriptment of Your Sister’s Sister (Shelton, 2010). Part of what enables improvisation in many available materials films is that they tend to be developed from loosely plotted scriptments built around

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lengthy dialogue scenes that are fewer in number. The One I Love’ s intricate, sci-fi puzzle-plot meant the actors needed to keep their performances tighter, and the crew needed to complete more scenes per day during production. This led to a decision on the second shooting day to have Lader begin scripting out each day’s scenes in more detail for “just-in-time” delivery, mirroring another key lean development process (Poppendieck & Poppendieck, 2013, p. 72). According to Lader (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015): We didn’t have the luxury of spending six hours to find a two-minute scene in an exploratory way, so where I was of use was from a pacing standpoint. If a scene was supposed to be two minutes, I gave them a two-page script where we see the gist of it, and then they would see, ‘Oh, ok, so like for these four or five lines we have fun […] but by line six, she needs to say this, so he says that, which then pivots to the next scene where he goes to explore what was going on in the guest house.

This decision to have Lader write each day’s pages on set raises questions about the nature of lean script development using a scriptment. If Lader would end up fully scripting each scene, anyway, would he have been better off having developed a conventional screenplay from the start? I would argue that there is a distinct lean advantage in the unusual approach taken in the development of The One I Love. In drafting each day’s pages just-in-time, Lader further facilitated available materials creativity by preserving options and avoiding speculation. Writing in this way made him another improvisational performer on set. Each shooting day, Lader would receive his own call sheet of scenes he would need to perform on the page, and each morning, according to Eslyn (personal communication, Aug 25, 2015): The 5 of us would sit together, read through the pages, work through the scenes, all provide notes, brainstorms, comments on how this scene tracked with those we had previously shot, etc. From there, I’d call the crew to set, and we’d show them a rough blocking/rehearsal of what we had just worked through.

Neither Lader nor Eslyn are able to locate these daily script pages when asked. The fact that no one thought to archive these daily pages further speaks to how committed the creative team remained throughout production to a loose, adaptive creative practice, but one rooted in a clear narrative and thematic vision. “I don’t think we shot a first draft or something that was written on the fly”, says Lader (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015). “That implies that dialogue is, in essence, the screenplay. The story itself went through drafts and was very carefully plotted and thought out”. Indeed, the overall structure of The One I Love remains remarkably consistent across its conceptual iterations and its final cut. However, there are notable flourishes where the fruits of options thinking in the development of the script can be seen in the completed film.

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In the scriptment, for instance, Sophie knowingly cheats on Ethan with his copy multiple times, but according to Lader, that thread was dropped primarily based on Moss’s input about her character (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015). In scene 54 of the scriptment (Lader, 2013a, p. 21), Other Ethan paints a portrait of Sophie as they converse, but in the film, the scene is completely different, with Sophie and Other Ethan sitting on the floor, playfully riffing on two sets of Russian nesting dolls first introduced in scene 20. According to Lader, it was Duplass’s idea to bring back the Russian figurines (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015). The most significant change occurs in a major third act confrontation between the two Ethans, one that was meant to take place over a game of Scrabble. This scene had been scripted in detail before going into production as part of those 30 conventional script pages. However, on the day before the scene was to be shot, Duplass—who had once made a short film about Scrabble called “Scrapple” (2004)—casually mentioned how litigiously protective Hasbro is of their Scrabble trademark. This resulted in a significant last-minute reworking of the scene by Lader using poker in its place. On the whole, while Lader says he enjoyed the adventure of making The One I Love, he does not necessarily consider himself a convert to Duplass’s methods and still prefers more conventional approaches to script development (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015). He concedes, however, that the project never would have happened if they had waited until a conventional screenplay was ready to shoot. In adopting a lean approach, they ended up “reject[ing] script development in favour of production development” (Millard, 2014, p. 184). “There’s something freeing about being confident in what you’re doing and just going out and getting it done”, Lader says (personal communication, Feb 26, 2015). “Luckily I was surrounded by wonderful and incredibly smart collaborators who were all in”. From Duplass’s initial idea to the film’s first screening before a Sundance Film Festival selections committee, the film was developed and completed for delivery in roughly one year on a budget of under $200,000. The film premiered at Sundance in 2014, was picked up for distribution by RADiUSTWC (Stewart, 2014), and Lader received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay (SPIRIT AWARD SPOTLIGHT, 2015). Meanwhile, nearly a decade after McDowell’s first conversation with Duplass, Fighting Jacob is still categorized as “in development” on IMDb.

References The AFI Interview: AFI Alumnus Charlie McDowell on THE DISCOVERY. (2017, March 7). Retrieved August 10, 2019, from https://blog.afi.com/the-afi-interviewafi-alumnus-charlie-mcdowell-on-the-discovery/ Duplass, M. (2015, March 17). SXSW 2015 keynote address. Retrieved August 10, 2019, from https://youtu.be/nZeWOAliA6Y

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Duplass, M. (2016, March 5). Sun Valley Film Festival Screenwriters Lab Q&A. Video recording provided courtesy of the Sun Valley Film Festival. Eisenmann, T., Ries, E., & Dillard, S. (2012). Hypothesis-driven entrepreneurship: The lean startup. Harvard Business School Publishing. Fighting Jacob. (n.d.). Internet movie database. Retrieved October 3, 2019, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2229135/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 Fleming, M., Jr. (2012, June 12). ICM partners signs ‘Fighting Jacob’ Helmer Charlie McDowell. Deadline. Retrieved August 10, 2019, from https://deadline.com/ 2012/06/icm-partners-signs-fighting-jacob-helmer-charlie-mcdowell-285116/ Gay, A. K. (2014). Start me up: Lean screenwriting for American entrepreneurial cinema. Journal of Screenwriting, 5(2), 259–275. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.5. 2.259_1 Humpday. (2009). [Motion picture]. Wr./dir. Lynn Shelton. Magnolia Pictures. Kasdan, L. (Director). (2012). Darling companion [Motion picture]. Sony Picture Classics. Krafcik, J. F. (1988). Triumph of the lean production system. Sloan Management Review, 41. Retrieved October 3, 2019, from https://www.lean.org/downloads/ MITSloan.pdf Lader, J. (2012). Other Mark and Other Liz movie. Unpublished treatment. Author’s private collection. Lader, J. (2013a). TOIL 040813 blue shooting script. Unpublished scriptment. Author’s private collection. Lader, J. (2013b). TOIL—Scripted sequence (last 30 pages)—4.8.13. Unpublished script fragment. Author’s private collection. McDowell, C. (Director) & Lader, J. (Screenwriter). (2014). The one I love [Motion picture]. RADiUS-TWC. Millard, K. (2014). Screenwriting in a digital era. Palgrave MacMillan. Munt, A. (2010, June 3). “Am I crazy to make a film for only $100,000 or am I crazy not to?” Kriv Stenders goes micro-budget digital for Boxing Day. Senses of cinema. Retrieved October 3, 2019, from http://sensesofcinema.com/2008/australian-cin ema-46/kriv-stenders-boxing-day/ Murphy, J. J. (2019). Rewriting indie cinema: Improvisation, psychodrama, and the screenplay. Columbia University Press. Patches, M. (2014, January 20). Sundance preview: Mark Duplass is both mentor and star on set of ‘The One I Love’. Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved October 3, 2019, from https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sundance-preview-mark-duplassis-669161 Poppendieck, M. B., & Poppendieck, T. D. (2013). Lean software development: An agile toolkit. Addison Wesley. The Puffy Chair [Motion picture]. (2005). wr. Mark and Jay Duplass, dir. Jay Duplass. Duplass Brothers Productions. Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup. Crown Business. Rojas, M. (2015, November 28). Director Charlie McDowell and Writer Justin Lader on ‘The One I Love’. Cinemacy. Retrieved from http://cinemacy.com/director-cha rlie-mcdowell-crew-one-love/ Safety not guaranteed [Motion picture]. (2012). wr. Colin Trevorrow, dir. Derek Connolly. FilmDistrict Scrapple [Short film]. (2004). wr./dir. Jay and Mark Duplass. Duplass Brothers Productions.

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Shelton, L. (2010). Triangle movie. Unpublished scriptment. Author’s private collection. Sneider, J. (2012, April 27). ‘Tintin’ thesp Jamie Bell fights ‘Jacob’. Variety. Retrieved August 10, 2019, from https://variety.com/2012/film/news/tintin-thesp-jamiebell-fights-jacob-1118053229/ SPIRIT AWARD SPOTLIGHT: Justin Lader on his genre busting romcom/mystery/sci-fi-ish screenplay The One I Love. Film Independent. (2015, July 3). Retrieved October 3, 2019, from https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/ spirit-award-spotlight-justin-lader-on-his-genre-busting-rom-commysterysci-fi-ishscreenplay-the-one-i-love/ Stewart, A. (2014, January 23). Sundance: Radius-TWC Falls For ‘The One I Love’ (Exclusive). Variety. Retrieved October 3, 2019, from https://variety.com/2014/ film/markets-festivals/sundance-radius-twc-falls-for-the-one-i-love-1201067889/ Tangerine [Motion picture]. (2015). wr. Chris Bergoch, dir. Sean Baker. Magnolia Pictures. Your Sister’s Sister. (2011). [Motion picture]. Wr./dir. Lynn Shelton. IFC Films.

Pedagogy-Led Practice and Practice-Led Pedagogy: A Feedback Loop of Teaching and Screenwriting Hannah Ianniello and Marco Ianniello

Introduction As practitioner-educators, the co-authors of this chapter were invited to design a new screenwriting course for a Master’s degree programme in 2019, at The University Notre Dame Australia (Sydney Campus), which would also be co-taught by both of the authors. Essentially, the course would revisit screenwriting fundamentals but crucially, introduce feature film screenwriting skills and methods to a cohort only minimally experienced in writing screenplays. Marco has taught undergraduate screenwriting for more than ten years, and Hannah for three years—but this would be our first course for screenwriting at the Master’s level. This raised an opportunity, therefore, to examine the range of possible approaches to teaching screenwriting and to structure the course with innovation in mind. Alongside this teaching, we had decided to write a screenplay for which Marco had developed a concept the year prior. We have written several screenplays together before, primarily for television pilots and short films, however this concept was for a feature film, and a little out of our comfort zone. Marco’s reflection on his previous screenwriting courses highlighted how he

H. Ianniello (B) · M. Ianniello University of Notre Dame, Sydney, Australia M. Ianniello e-mail: [email protected]

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primarily referenced screenplays he had already completed.1 Yet with this collaborative feature screenplay project in mind, the opportunity to bring the two tasks together seemed serendipitous. Naturally, it raised the question: how might students benefit from the shared experience of their lecturer’s contemporaneous writing project? In addition, how might the structure of the course guide the writing project itself? Marco suggested that some of his strongest and most memorable teaching experiences were primarily in screen production courses (such as short drama and documentary) where projects he was working on were utilised in the course as active case studies. In these instances, Marco would update the students as to the progress of the film he was currently working on, discussing processes, problems and collaborative elements as a professional mirror to the projects on which the students were working. Through these initiatives, students would learn from the workflows of a professional project in production and Marco was also able to critically reflect on the process alongside teaching the workflows for the student productions. In these cases, students were involved from the beginning: viewing production documents as they were written, to storyboards and audition plans, through to watching documentary rushes and rough cuts. This process provided a crucial link between industry practice and the classroom. Marco then decided that he would like to emulate this for a screenwriting course also—particularly one aimed at the Master’s level. While the idea that industry practice should inform the structure and format of a class is perhaps not unique, our priority was to have each task support the other. Bennett et al. (2010), refer to this as the Artistic Practice-Research-Teaching (ART) Nexus. They acknowledge ‘Teaching tertiary students about artistic practice requires an understanding of the knowledge inherent in the practice’, as well as the importance of the experience of “being within” (rather than abstracted from) the arts practice, and researching through and within that practice … effective teaching of undergraduate and postgraduate students requires both recognition of, and the ability to draw from, all knowledge sources including those generated through this very specific encounter. (2010, p. 2)

Our own creative research process, in this case a screenplay in development, was deliberately integrated into the course. Our own writing practice would provide a trigger for student exercises, collaborative discussion and development of the students’ writing, while the framework of the Master’s course had the potential to encourage a structured approach to our writing with a deadline in mind, with reminders from key thinkers in the field informing our work. As discussed below, core texts from the likes of Linda Aronson (2010), Dara Marks (2015), Linda Seger (1994), Helen Jacey (2010), Kathryn Millard 1

In some cases, these films were also produced and directed by Marco.

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(2014), Syd Field (2005) and Christopher Vogler (1992) were addressed in class, reminding us as writers to consider the conventions of structure and narrative, and how these might be reflected or disrupted in our own writing. This was the first time Marco and Hannah had formally linked a project in development to the teaching of a course from its inception through to delivery. Ultimately, we found this setup to be particularly productive for both teaching and our practice—two sides of our academic positions that can often be at odds throughout the year. Murray, Barkat and Pearlman discuss a similar concept in their 2019 article, outlining how a ‘real-world’ style screen production course actually enabled them to achieve some balance between teaching and staff research time, as the two tasks were effectively embedded in one project (2019). The difference with this course was the intention to focus solely on script development, rather than the production of a film. This chapter will highlight how this pedagogy-led practice and practiceled pedagogy was structured in response to different modes of thinking and practice in the screenwriting process. Here we consider the concept of practiceled pedagogy through the lens of ‘practice-led research’ as outlined by Smith and Dean (2009) in their introduction to a collection of essays, Practiceled research, research-led practice in the creative arts. In addition, we hoped to develop a specific approach to teaching that allowed for flexibility in the script development process and the final product: for our students and our own writing. What we quickly found was the creative practice of writing the screenplay became a means of testing the course content we had developed for the Master’s students, and that our own script development processes benefitted from the structural requirements of the course. Batty, Sawtell and Taylor refer to this as ‘academic script development’. Through this term, they suggest that screenwriting produced within the academy can benefit from having the space for researched-based script development that may ultimately still be used within the industry (2016, p. 151). In addition, they suggest that (2016, p. 151): by thinking through the screenplay – i.e., using research to underpin creative practice, resulting in the creation of an ‘academic screenplay’ (see Batty and McAulay 2016) – we propose that the academy can operate as an important site for expanding and enhancing screenwriting practice, resulting in script development processes of a particular and special type.

Overview of the Course and Structural Plan of the Collaborative Project On reflecting on our own creative process, as well as the creative processes of our students, we realised that there were in fact two ‘modes’ that we used and wanted to encourage in our students as essential for the screenwriting craft. One mode is based on creative expression, experimentation and free thinking, while the other mode is a more highly structured, organised and

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pragmatic approach to writing. Craig Batty identifies the work of Nik Mahon in his book Screenplays, How to Write and Sell Them (2012), which connect with these two modes; Mahon suggests ‘divergent and convergent thinking as a way of starting to embrace creativity in the development process’ (2012, p. 19). Divergent thinking (intuitive), as thinking outside the box and looking in all directions for alternative ideas, and convergent thinking (critical), where one evaluates and assesses the viability of ideas that come out of divergent thinking (Batty, 2012, p. 19). Crucially, Batty and Waldeback also support this balance of ‘creative’ and ‘critical’ thinking in script development: ‘a combination of creative thinking and critical reflection; dreaming up ideas and then analysing them in context’ (2012, p. 31). As a useful expression of these two modes, we were reminded of the characters from Charlie Kaufman’s film Adaptation (2002)—Charlie and Donald Kaufman. Where the character of Donald is focused on screenwriting convention and craft (convergent/critical), his brother Charlie (Kaufman) approaches the writing more intuitively, unrestricted and perhaps therefore more unconventionally (intuitive/divergent). This idea is discussed several times throughout the film, as is clarified in the following scene: KAUFMAN There are no rules to follow, Donald, and anybody who says there are, is just – DONALD Not rules, principles. McKee writes: “A rule says, you must do it this way. A principle says, this works... and has through all remembered time.”

Then… KAUFMAN My point is, those teachers are dangerous if your goal is to do something new. And a writer should always have that goal. Writing is a journey into the unknown. It’s not building a model airplane.

The reality is that perhaps we all need a bit of both Charlie and Donald in us, which raises the question of how best to harness these two approaches in writing and teaching—particularly at the script development stage. It is worth noting here that Marco has a background in filmmaking, and therefore often perhaps approaches writing with more of a ‘Donald Method’ in mind—practically thinking about the screenplay as a whole, narrative structures and visual story telling informed by screenwriting craft and screen production practice. In contrast, Hannah has a background in writing literary

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fiction and poetry, which is necessarily less restricted by convention and used to finding an intuitive pathway—letting the story emerge, as it were, from the writing: therefore, definitely more of a ‘Charlie Method’. Yet both Marco and Hannah are aware of the importance of striking a balance of both approaches, willing and able to try on the other hats, depending on what is needed at the time. In addition, when considering the classroom, any selection of students will most likely feature both Charlies and Donalds, and it would be important to teach to both types of writers, while also perhaps encouraging a combination of characteristics in their development as screenwriters. It could be argued that at times these two elements are actually in competition within us all as screenwriters, due to the conventions of the medium. While one side of us embraces the intuitive, inventive approach, we are at the same time critically aware of the structures and conventions of screenwriting and Donald Kaufman’s ‘not rules—principles’ approach. Indeed, the screenplay is a document that needs to be accessible to every craft area involved in the filmmaking process, therefore the onus to be clear, concise and strictly structured according to screenplay convention is higher than other forms of creative writing. Yet, as Batty and Waldeback explain, this should not hinder the creative process: ‘The screenplay may be a form driven by commercial factors, and more than other creative writing is reliant upon shape and structure, but that does not mean the screenwriter’s creativity should be ignored’ (2019, p. 7). In setting up these parallel projects, the first task was to identify when it would be appropriate to use these two different modes for writing a screenplay: for our own practice, and for our teaching. Sue Woolfe examines creative process primarily in relation to novel writing, but also in reference to painting and other creative endeavours, and, as perhaps is expected, argues that the beginnings are often where the intuitive writing is needed. Through interviews with other writers, and examination of her own process, she concludes (2007, p. 39): that to start out with aims and objectives, notions valued in our culture and so often considered a necessary starting point for any endeavour, had nothing at all to do with the early stages of their creations.

This suggests what seems to be an obvious structure—that the Charlie side of thinking needs to come first, before the Donald side can take over. The process should start with intuition, but logic and planning need to be there for structure to work. However, our goal as collaborative screenwriters and educators was to strive for a more continual balance of the Charlie/Donald approach throughout the development of the screenplay. Yet it seems that balancing creative, intuitive, free-form writing and thinking with craft driven, structural and technical writing is not necessarily the focus of many screenwriting courses at university level. Indeed, when both authors studied screenwriting at undergraduate and Master’s levels themselves (at

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differing institutions), the emphasis was primarily about passing on the formatting guidelines and three-act structure notes, without much guidance in the production of new ideas for story and character. Batty and Waldeback make a similar point, as they argue that ‘Even the way in which screenwriting is taught focuses more on craft and rules than imagination and creativity’ (2019, p. 6). In acknowledging this, then, it almost seemed imperative that we begin with engaging the intuitive creative thinking in the classroom and in practice, to come up with a truly novel concept, and then employ the principles of screenwriting to solidify the writing.

The Screenplay in Development: Galway to Graceland As noted above, we decided that the structure for the course would be based on a practice-led approach not only for the course design, but crucially, also the classroom environment. This meant that it would be important to link the screenwriting literature (largely manuals used to frame the course) and workshopping activities to a current screenplay in development: in our case, a script called Galway to Graceland. This was a feature screenplay we had been entertaining the idea of writing for a few years—but kept being put on the backburner. Rather than let the teaching put a project on hold, we used the teaching as a means of motivating the writing of the script within the timeline of a 13-week semester. In order to align with how the students would be working, we aimed to follow the processes we would be guiding them through—from initial brainstorming to final draft—and commit to the assessment-based timelines in order to develop the screenplay both thoroughly and efficiently. The goal in following this structure was also to be able to relate to the students’ experience of writing, as well as highlighting how they are engaging in the professional process of script development. At this point, it feels pertinent to discuss the origins of the screenplay we were writing. Crucially, the starting point for the screenplay was a Richard Thompson song titled Galway to Graceland. It is a narrative song about a middle-aged woman who leaves her real family because she believes she is married to Elvis. In the song, she leaves her husband in Galway to travel to America to visit the grave of Elvis Presley at Graceland. The chorus shifts slightly throughout the song, but always ends with: To be with her sweetheart, She left everything From Galway to Graceland To be with The King.

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This song, which Hannah used to perform in a folk band, led Marco to the idea of writing a screenplay about this woman leaving her husband in the dead of night and then travelling from Galway to Graceland to be with the man she truly loves—Elvis Presley.

The Structure: Practice and Pedagogy To make the practice and pedagogy comparable, we will label the process of script development and course structure now in stages. The following sections outline firstly how we approached our ‘practice’, namely, the development of Galway to Graceland, and then the corresponding ‘pedagogy’ discussions of the student learning and development of the students’ screenplays. We have broken the development process (and semester) into four stages: Brainstorming and Research; Principal Writing; Editing and Rewriting; Workshopping and Live Read. Within the discussion of each stage, the process below maps what was occurring simultaneously from a practice and pedagogical perspective. Stage 1: Weeks 1–3 Brainstorming and Research: Intuitive Thinking Practice: Screenplay Development Initial brainstorming stages of writing our collaborative screenplay took place in weeks 1–3 of the semester. These sessions were largely about generating ideas through free association and open discussion, researching different time periods and concepts and not restricting ourselves by thinking about film budgets, practical constraints and specific structures. We encouraged each other to reflect upon our discussions, research Elvis by watching footage of him and reading biographies or listen to the song again. Essentially, we were actively attempting to harness our intuitive thinking, but it did come to a phase of structured planning—a map of the screenplay that would help us structure our writing down the line. We found we frequently start screenplay projects in this way, however, with literature and course planning framing our own writing, we were reminded to dedicate the first four weeks of the project to this ‘intuitive, free-form’ writing. At the core of this project was a ‘road movie’, from Galway to Graceland, so despite our experimentation with ideas and characters at this stage, we found that we often centred our discussions around the ‘physicality’ of that journey, which we were reminded of by the course literature. Batty and Waldeback describe the ‘physical journey’ as the element of the narrative that is a literal journey for the characters—a movement from one place to another, as opposed to an ‘emotional journey’ of internal development (2019, p. 30).

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After considering multiple factors such as historical events (e.g. Vietnam war), believability and period features (e.g. character contact with home— would there be mobile phones?), we decided to set the film in 1982 on the eve of Graceland opening to the public for the first time. At this point in her life, the woman, who we call Nancy, loves Elvis more than her husband, her son—and as a devout Irish Catholic, even God. Through the consideration of three-act structures and story architecture as outlined in many core screenwriting texts (Batty & Waldeback, 2019; Field, 2005; Yorke, 2014), this idea quickly evolved to have Nancy, when she arrives in America, meeting a mysterious man. She quickly discovers that this man, Aaron, believes he is Elvis Presley and is in disguise and in hiding from the rest of the world. This is a delusion he has created to escape his past, and despite this, they travel to Graceland. Pedagogy: Generating Ideas and Introduction to Screenplay Conventions As the majority of students had little to no experience writing for the screen, particularly feature screenplays, it was important to combine the discussion of creativity and idea generation with practical discussions around screenwriting craft and technique, micro and macro structures, visual storytelling and dialogue, amongst others. Exercises for generating ideas were based on a combination of character development and starting point scenarios, with visual stimulus a primary tool. It was quickly discovered that as Master’s level writing students, the class was very responsive to the activities, and they yielded positive and useful results. Structural discussions were often based around examples of screenplays, short films that were watched in class and more general discussion about television shows and films that the students were familiar with from their own viewing, prior to diving into the literature of manuals and practice-based scholarly articles. For example, in the first workshop, we examined the screenplay of the first scene of first episode of Mad Men (2007–2015) and then watched how it played out on screen. This opened up a discussion into the intricacies of screenplay structure, establishing character and visual storytelling. Later in this stage, we discussed ideas around the Central Dramatic Question through Game of Thrones, and three-act structure through the Terminator treatment and Taika Waititi’s short film, Two Cars One Night (2003). By looking at films and television directly, prior to being informed by the literature, we were promoting an intuitive response to craft. Once we did begin to discuss macrostructures through the consideration of industry discourse and scholarly literature, the films and screenplays used in these early discussions provided a foundation for more critical analysis. Three-act structures, as well as physical and emotional journeys, were the foundation for the macro-structure discussions—and these were the areas that fed into our own brainstorming discussions about Galway to Graceland. For instance, through the reminders from course readings, in particular Batty and Waldeback’s Writing for the Screen: Creative and Critical Approaches (2019),

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we became very aware that we did not want to let this concept, the physicality of this Galway to Graceland journey, drive the screenplay alone. Nor were we solely focusing our writing and teaching on screenwriting techniques and principles. The emotional journey and thematic considerations would need to be the driving factor, informing the physical journey—rather than the other way round. From here we were aware we needed to creatively and collaboratively respond to that in our screenplay. Students were encouraged to develop their screenplay ideas with intuitive, creative writing as starting point. This then led to more guided questions around their screenplay in development, focusing on theme and emotional journeys drawn on from the course literature. We used the materials we produced for Galway to Graceland as a working case study for the students to show them what we produced in the first stage of writing and how it informed the next development stage: writing the first draft. The materials we showed to students included thematic summaries, drafting the emotional and physical journeys of our two central characters and discussions around how this led to identifying the Central Dramatic Question (CDQ) and Central Thematic Question (CTQ) (Batty & Waldeback, 2019) of our screenplay. All this stemmed from intuitive, creative brainstorming focusing on emotion and theme, yet crucially the next step was going to be structural to inform the actual writing of the screenplay. Once again, we were able to harness this method of balancing Kaufman’s ‘Charlie and Donald’ in the classroom and our own writing. Through encouraging an intuitive approach at the beginning of the course, we also hoped to avoid a ‘writing to paradigms’ method which often dominates screenwriting ‘how to’ guides and industry seminars. Having said this, as writers and teachers we were also acutely aware that this Master’s programme needed to provide students with skills and knowledge (practice and theory) in professional screenwriting by encouraging them to be aware of the principles and conventions of three-act structure and story architecture. It was felt that the structures would be particularly useful when producing development documents in the early stages, but would hopefully not hinder discovery and experimentation in their creative process more broadly. Desmond Bell, in his chapter, ‘The Primacy of Practice: Establishing the Terms of Reference of Creative Arts and Media Research’, discusses Master’s level creative practice projects, as a ‘bundle of practice and theory’ (2018, p. 57), and highlights: Students can experience a gap between theory and practice in their productions and indeed one of the reasons that the research process is now held to be so central to the advanced art or media project is that it can contribute to bridging this gap. (2018, p. 57)

In this way, we tried to blend theory and practice through these initial stages so that their experience of developing a script fluidly ‘bridged the gap’ between the two.

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We introduced students to key screenplay development documents and feature film structural architecture by creating development documents for Galway to Graceland. These development documents included a sequence outline and step outline followed by a treatment. In addition, although not formally a screen development document, we had the students identify the Central Dramatic Question and Central Thematic Question of the screenplay, and discussed the importance of identifying and utilising these at an early stage in order to shape the script with the two questions as guiding principles. As this screenplay was to be written within the tertiary context, we were aware that these development documents were not being written for industry at this stage (that is; to secure funding or interest to write the screenplay draft). Instead, it was emphasised that in this case, the function of such documents was to ask key questions of their work and guide the next phases of writing. Ideally this would leave them open for new directions and discoveries, balancing creativity and screenplay logic. We took this thinking on ourselves also, and therefore ensured we did not write strictly bound to the structure of our development documents and encouraged our students to do the same. Not intending to diminish the intuitive and instinctive approach of the Charlie Method, for screenwriting and creative writing in general, as a Master’s level course we strove to ensure current and existing literature, both scholarly and industry manuals were threaded throughout the semester. Our key texts for the course were Craig Batty and Zara Waldeback’s Writing for the Screen: Creative and Critical Approaches and John Yorke’s Into the Woods. There were several other set readings including the writings of Linda Aronson (2010), Dara Marks (2015), Linda Seger (1994), Helen Jacey (2010), Kathryn Millard (2014) and some from the early gurus of industry manuals, such as Syd Field (2005), Christopher Vogler (1992) and Robert McKee (1997). As highlighted above, while we did want the students to avoid writing to paradigms and generic structures, we felt it was important to expose the students to the origins of script development theory in order to provide the foundational knowledge that often informs industry discussions, particularly in relation to structure. As Batty et al. (2016, p. 154) articulate, this also introduces the students to the concept of creative practice research: Commonly understood and experienced story structures such as the linear three acts may form the basis of most screenplays in the academy, but through research there is also the potential to broaden, deepen and innovate both the narratives themselves (content) and the ways in which they are developed (process). Here we encourage a deep engagement with theories of narrative practice and with narrative in practice, in order to generate the rigour required in creative practice research.

In regard to screenwriting manuals, we had both read them before and felt confident in our knowledge of screenwriting techniques and approaches. We knew where to direct readings for our students and could actively engage in

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discussions on them. However, we were unexpectedly surprised how productive and creative this process was throughout the delivery of this course, not just from a teaching and learning point of view, but also as screenwriters. We did not follow the manuals dogmatically or to formula at all; but it did significantly shape our approach to developing stories at the feature level and, crucially, the questions we asked of our work. For instance, when the structure of a student’s work was feeling unbalanced, or there was too much time spent on a generic introduction, we were able to return to Yorke’s (2014) breakdown of act structures and use that as a general framework for balancing the narrative. When there was tension around character development versus plot or action, we were able to draw on Batty (2011) and Batty and Waldeback’s (2019) discussion of ‘emotional and physical’ journeys. Or, when students’ work was experimenting with structure and or disrupting temporality, Aronson (2000) was particularly useful. We framed our creative writing in response to and alongside critical discussions of the literature and this was extremely productive. In our own writing, we found that reminding ourselves of the Central Dramatic Question (CDQ) or considering the balance between characters’ physical and emotional journeys (Batty, 2011), helped us focus on narrative direction with a very firm end goal in mind. In this way, the critical literature spoke to our screenwriting process, aiding editing and problem solving, and also informed the students’ own writing and our feedback for them. Perhaps we all became a little more Donald than Charlie Kaufman throughout the course, but it once again highlighted the importance to strike that balance in screenwriting practice. Stage 2: Weeks 4–6 Principal Writing: Writing in order to think and learn from others. Practice: Screenplay Development While we now had a loosely structured plan for the film, we decided it was time to re-enter the ‘Charlie Method’ and simply write—to see how the screenplay would emerge. This writing process was not strictly bound to the chronology of the structure crafted in the development documents, and we would instead write in any order we chose. This was a deliberate strategy to allow us as writers to experiment and not let form and physical structure dominate the first draft. Having written screenplays several times before, we were both aware of our own areas of strength and weakness, and have a tendency to divide up the screenplay scenes accordingly, keeping in mind that we do like to keep it roughly 50/50 balance. Although it is not an intentional divide, we have found that largely Hannah is more comfortable writing the scenes led by women, and Marco the scenes led by men. There are other factors driving the split too, however. For instance, Hannah has a background in music and performance, so she crafted the majority of scenes where these were a factor.

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Meanwhile, Marco’s background as a filmmaker and director means that he is more confident with scenes and sections that involve a lot of movement or action driving the narrative. Being aware of each other’s strengths and approaches, in many ways reminded us to not write strictly in one way. Therefore, based on our step outline and treatment, we each took on scenes to write—not necessarily in order—with an intuitive approach, where we would look at the possible scenes and choose to work on whichever we could visualise at the time. The objective and purpose of each scene was identified, yet we allowed ourselves the time and space to try multiple versions and make adjustments throughout the process of writing the first draft. While the initial stages of brainstorming and creative exploration in the same space allowed for discussion, debate and evaluation, we found that it was necessary to be separate for research and the writing of the screenplay itself. For the bulk of the first draft, we wrote individually in separate locations, through a cloud-based screenwriting platform. This allowed us to write in isolation with no editorial evaluation at that stage, and though we could each see what the other person was working on, we refrained from reading each other’s work. Once each of us felt ready to share what we’d done, we would individually read and edit each scene in order to see how they flowed together and what might be missing and discuss major changes or issues in person. It is also interesting to note that through the collaborative writing process, we have found our characters become more and more complex. For instance, in the process of reading and editing each other’s scenes, the subsequent discussions are always revealing different implied character traits and contrasting ways we may be thinking about our characters. In the end, we both bring different qualities to each character, and these combinations make for richer, more complex characters. These experiences are also beneficial for our teaching, as it reminds us to push our students outside of their comfort zones, juxtaposing or layering disparate ideas to make their characters or narratives more unique. Pedagogy: Screenplay Analysis for Learning The students were expected to be well into deciding on their screenplay project for the course now, with development documents due soon. In class, weeks five and six saw deep dive sessions for the students, analysing two screenplay texts: Jeff Nichols’ Loving (2016) and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad (2008–2013) pilot. Within this, there was also a lot of work on genre, voice and dialogue through close analysis of the screenplays, practice writing dialogue with specific genre-based cues and the identification of character traits through dialogue. One activity that proved useful for the students during this phase was looking at an episode structure map from a project we had written two years prior—a spec pilot for a series called Day’s End. The structure breakdown, with ABCD storylines based on Pamela Douglas’ Writing the TV Drama Series (2018), was shown to the class as an example of how shows are written and structured for television. The students then had to try and write one of the

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scenes as though they had been given that scene as part of a writer’s room. These were then read out and discussed, with the activity ending on a read through what we had written and how it compared. The activity was useful for students to see what it would be like working on someone else’s concept, being put on the spot to write, and then also to see how it is important to have a sense of where the story is going to get the most out of a scene. From the perspective of our own practice, by analysing the two screenplays with the students, and looking back over our own structure for Day’s End, we were reminded of the importance of the careful crafting of each scene, defining a scene’s purpose and objective, the balance between scenes and the economy of writing—particularly in the case of the Nichols script. This teaching and learning experience was extremely timely for our writing of Galway to Graceland as we were reminded to interrogate our draft and structure and scene balance and economy. We found that mid-way through the semester the teaching and writing were working in tandem and we found our writing benefit as a result. The screenplay writing gained momentum and we were only a few scenes away from completing the first draft. Stage 3: Weeks 7–8 Edit and Rewrite—Prepare for live read. Practice: Rewriting and Revision In our own practice at this stage, we now needed to complete the full first draft and edit the script. Several changes were made to the end of the screenplay at this point, with re-writing needed for many scenes throughout, and particularly the ending, while a close edit for consistency (i.e. of style, character and factual information) was needed. A key change, informed in many ways by the content, discussion and activities at this stage of teaching, was for the character of Aaron and his Elvis delusion. We had initially crafted Aaron’s emotional journey as one of ‘escaping reality’ to ‘accepting his reality’. By the end of the film, he would have to accept who he is when he is confronted by his sister in the final act. Yet through the writing, we felt we needed to give Aaron’s emotional journey more purpose and weight. We therefore decided that Aaron would have a wife and child from whom he was estranged. He would still be confronted by his sister who cares for him, yet in the final act of the film we would have Aaron visiting his wife and child. Aaron’s emotional journey shifted from ‘isolation and escape’ to ‘connection with his daughter and wife’. This late shift in Aaron’s emotional arc informed the writing’s final stages significantly, and it was partly the result of classroom discussions. As we workshopped students’ ideas, discussing ‘emotional journeys’ versus ‘physical journeys’ it really forced us to question our own screenplay in development and what was missing. This key change in the screenplay may have been made eventually had we not been teaching, yet the structure of the course, and the tight time frame,

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resulted in our writing benefitting from our teaching. By synthesising a project with teaching and learning activities, we were more critical of our own work and were to respond and act on this criticism in the process of writing the first draft. Pedagogy: Recapping and Screenplay Format In class, there was now a shift in focus to Hollywood convention formatting, information and a lot of recapping of structures and what we would be looking for in their screenplays. At this point we discussed how the semester would conclude with the workshopping of the students’ screenplay projects in development through a live table read. We took the time to inform students about this workshopping process, and that we would use our own first draft of Galway to Graceland as a practice session for workshopping. We had drawn up a template that would guide discussion of each workshopped screenplay, and we would use that for the Galway to Graceland reading also. Initial reactions to the news that the students would be asked to criticise our writing was, generally, an air of hesitation. Yet, by forewarning them, and assuring them that they could safely say whatever they liked, that we were comfortable with criticism—no matter how harsh—by the time the live read/workshop week arrived, the students were ready and willing to respond to the screenplay as though we were in an industry live read, and they were professionals providing feedback. Stage 4: Weeks 9–13 Live Read and Workshopping—Rewriting The goal of the final weeks of class was to introduce students to workshopping methods and re-writing considerations in a collaborative learning space. As soon as we began the process of reading Galway to Graceland as a commencement of the script workshop lessons, it was clear this would be beneficial for us as writers and teachers and it seemed, at the very least, to engage the students quickly. By putting the writing of a ‘work in progress’ screenplay on display for the students, it created what felt like a level playing field in the classroom. We began in part by expressing our own concerns about the screenplay, explaining that we hadn’t ‘heard’ the text yet, that there were many scenes we were not sure were working; indeed we were not sure that the central premise (that Aaron thought he was Elvis) was convincing at all. By opening in such a vulnerable way, it became less of a teacher/student relationship, and gave the room more of a sense that we were all writers, all creating a work from scratch and sharing our work for feedback. Through past experience, we had found that many are extremely hesitant to workshop their writing, so this was why we decided to ‘break the ice’ by workshopping our own screenplay first. Sharing early drafts of work for a table read as it is a very exposing process, and the impact of hearing the text for the first time can be confronting and sometimes disappointing. However, by

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leading with Galway to Graceland it set the tone for the table reads and workshopping, where it allowed us, as educators, to empathise with the students’ progression throughout the course and their writing experience. Students who had an interest in acting, or at least a level of confidence in reading, were selected for the main roles and Hannah read the big print. This was decided partly in order to maintain the momentum of the read, but also because the students would be reading their own ‘big print’ in the coming weeks in order to be involved in the process of the performance their own work. Students were invited to stop the reading after the first act, but all were happy to continue and the whole feature screenplay was read in class. As writers, this was rewarding for us as the live read of the work highlighted some issues with dialogue, and even accent, and the student’s feedback proved very useful also. After the session, we responded to many of the comments made and it really did inform future drafts and improve the work. In addition, by letting the students be critical of our writing, it meant that when it came time to workshop their screenplays, they were more able to critically assess each other’s writing, and more readily accept the feedback and criticism from us and their fellow students. Ultimately what occurred in the classroom was screenwriting practice discussed not only through literature of recent and influential manuals and screenwriting literature, and existing screenplays, but also through the script development of Galway to Graceland. Our own contemporary experience of writing informed all of our classroom discussions.

Conclusion At the end of the semester, the course—run for the first time—yielded some positive results for the students through a practice-led, or ‘practice-influenced’ structure that treated them more as equals than as beginner screenwriters. Through discussion with the students after the conclusion of the course, many cited the live reads and workshopping (both of Galway to Graceland and their own work) as key to their learning and understanding of script development. In addition, we were able to finish a screenplay ourselves, taking it from a vague concept through to final draft in thirteen weeks. The development of Galway to Graceland benefitted from following the 13-week structure as well as the reminders triggered by screen industry literature that informed both the writing and editing of the work. For this semester, utilising both our inner Charlie and inner Donald worked: striving to balance intuition, creativity, experimentation with a deep and critical knowledge of structure, form and convention informed by screenwriting manuals. Students also benefited from this two-pronged approach, particularly as some students lean more one way or the other (like the two authors of this paper), and there were therefore activities and discussions that suited everyone. It does seem that a departure from basing a course solely

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on the conventions was effective and emphasised the importance of emotional development, as Batty and Waldeback (2019, p. 6) similarly argue: It is the theme, story and emotion at the centre of the script that ensures its success, not just the technical manner in which it is constructed, and screenwriting is in danger of losing its heart if we do not reintroduce notions of creativity into its practice.

Of course, it would be unlikely that this formula would work every time for everyone or every story, but in this case, we found that designing and teaching a screenwriting course while actively linking our own script development to it was a productive, creative and engaging experience. Bennet et al. (2010) collate interviews from creative practitioner-educators with similar experiences in teaching creative practice. One composer noted that his ‘teaching and research have become integral to his creative practice’ (2010, p. 5) while a theatre practitioner cited ‘the significant interplay between their roles as artists and educators’ (2010, p. 4). A sound artist further suggested that ‘Creative practice is central to all my teaching and, within that, exploration, innovation and discovery are paramount. This approach makes the praxis between research/practice and teaching a real and vulnerable one’ (2010, p. 4). Therefore, it is clear that this kind of feedback loop between practice and pedagogy can not only benefit the students, but also the teachers, and has the potential to be utilised across all creative practice forms.

References Adaptation. (2002). Charlie Kaufman [wr]. Columbia Pictures. Aronson, L. (2000). Screenwriting updated: New and conventional ways of writing for the screen. Allen & Unwin. Aronson, L. (2010). 21st Century Screenplay: A comprehensive guide to writing tomorrow’s films. Allen & Unwin. Batty, C. (2011). Movies that move us: Screenwriting and the power of the Protagonist’s journey. Palgrave Macmillan. Batty, C. (2012). Screenplay: How to write and sell them. Kamera Books [Creative Essentials]. Batty, C., & Waldeback, Z. (2012). The creative screenwriter: Exercises to expand your craft. ProQuest Ebook Central. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Batty, C., & Waldeback, Z. (2019). Writing for the screen: Creative and critical approaches (2nd ed.). Red Globe Press. Batty, C., Sawtell, L., & Taylor, S. (2016). Thinking through the screenplay: The academy as a site for research-based script development. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 9(1–2), 149–162. https://doi.org/10.1386/jwcp.9.1-2.149_1 Bell, D. (2018). The primacy of practice: Establishing the terms of reference of creative arts and media research. In Screen production research (pp. 47–66). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Bennett, D., Wright, D., & Blom, D. M. (2010). The artistic practice-researchteaching (ART) nexus: Translating the information flow. Journal of University

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Teaching & Learning Practice, 7 (2). Available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/ vol7/iss2/3 Breaking Bad. (2008–2013). Vince Gilligan [cr.]. AMC. Douglas, P. (2018). Writing the TV drama series: How to succeed as a professional writer in TV (4th ed.). Michael Wiese. Field, S. (2005). Screenplay: Newly revised and updated. Random House US. Game of Thrones. (2011–2019). David Benioff; D. B. Weiss [crs]. HBO. Jacey, H. (2010). The woman in the story: Writing memorable female characters. Michael Wiese Productions. Loving. (2016). Jeff Nichols [wr.]. Universal. Marks, D. (2015). Inside story: The power of the transformational arc. Bloomsbury Publishing. McKee, R. (1997). Story: Style, structure, substance, and the principles of screenwriting. Harper Collins. Millard, K. (2014). Screenwriting in a digital era. Springer. Mad Men. (2007–2015). Matthew Weiner [cr.]. AMC. Murray, T., Barkat, I., & Pearlman, K. (2019). Intensive mode screen production: An Australian case study in designing university learning and teaching to mirror ‘real-world’ creative production processes. Media Practice and Education, 21(1), 18–31. Seger, L. (1994). Making a good script great. Samuel French Trade. Smith, H., & Dean, R. T. (2009). Practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts (research methods for the arts and humanities). Edinburgh University Press. Two Cars, One Night. (2003). Taika Waititi [wr.]. Blueskin Films Ltd, Defender Films, New Zealand Film Commission. Vogler, C. (1992). The writer’s journey: Mythic structures for screenwriters and storytellers. Studio City, CA: M. Wiese Productions. Woolfe, S. (2007). The mystery of the cleaning lady. UWA Press. Yorke, J. (2014). Into the Woods. Penguin.

A Comparative Study of the Novel O Quatrilho and its Adapted Screenplays: Researching the Script Development Process Clarissa Mazon Miranda

Introduction While thinking about the adaptation of novels to screenplays, we might imagine a screenwriter choosing a book they love and turning it into a work for the screen, hoping that it will be put into development (e.g. a ‘spec’ script); or a production company buying the rights and trying to capitalise on the novel’s brand, employing one or more screenwriters to develop an outline, treatment, and/or screenplay as soon as possible (e.g. a commissioned script). But how often do we hear of cases where the original author is involved in the adaptation process? While it can actually be common practice, and sometimes the original author even takes on a production credit such as Executive Producer (if not co-writer), there is not so much of this practice written about in screenwriting literature. This is especially the case when considering this collaboration between novel-author and screenplay-writer as a form of script development. To address this gap, this chapter presents a comparative study of the novel and the first draft of the screenplay of O Quatrilho (1995), a Brazilian film that had its screenplay—written by Antonio Calmon and Leopoldo Serran— developed with the contribution of the author of the novel—José Clemente Pozenato. As a basis for this research, I consulted the unpublished screenplays (first draft and final draft) of the film and undertook interviews with the José Clemente Pozenato and the Antonio Calmon. In this chapter, then, I map C. M. Miranda (B) Antonio Meneghetti Faculdade, Recanto Maestro, Brazil

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the script development process that was followed in order to arrive at the two archived versions of the screenplay. A systematic study is used to compare both texts (script and novel) trying to deconstruct where it was necessary to shift the focus of core aspects such as narrative, characters, space, and timing of the story during the adaptation development process. The interviews used in this paper are approached as complementary points of view regarding the reason why the texts were adapted in the way they were. Supporting this approach to adaptation and screen development, Jamie Sherry (2016) wrote: ‘contemporary screenwriting studies corresponds closely to the field of adaptation studies in a number of notable ways. Both fields have expanded and formalised themselves relatively recently, through a conflation of research, pedagogy and practice’ (2016, p. 12). Some historical facts of this production, supported by an overview of the plot of the movie that we present in the next lines, are useful in order to understand the process presented in this chapter. Pozenato’s novel O Quatrilho (1985) tells the story of two Italian immigrant couples sharing a house while working in a corn mill during the first years of Italian immigration to southern Brazil. The couples, comprising cousins Teresa and Pierina and their respective husbands, Angelo and Massimo, end up exchanging partners when Teresa runs away with Massimo to another city. After the lovers run away, the novel follows the story of Angelo and Pierina, who remain in their city and eventually fall in love. They also face the prejudice of the Catholic community, which opposes love outside marriage. Ultimately, they succeed, becoming one of the richest families in the region because of Angelo and Pierina’s business acumen. They also have many children, and society ends up accepting them. Thus, the novel depicts the transgression of social and moral rules in the context of a very Catholic and rural community. This book was adapted to the screen in 19951 in a film directed by Fábio Barreto and produced by LC Barreto Produções. It became one of the few Brazilian films to compete for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. When the reputed Brazilian producer Luiz Carlos Barreto read O Quatrilho and decided to make a film of it, he asked his son, film director Fábio Barreto, to direct while their company LC Barreto would be responsible for the production. He also called on the famous Brazilian soap opera writer and screenwriter Antonio Calmon to write the script. Calmon agreed and visited the author José Clemente Pozenato together with Fábio Barreto in 1994. The first version of the script was written after this visit and was sent to Pozenato to read. However, the budget for the film took a little while to arrange and when the film was finally going to be shot, the producers asked Calmon for a shorter version of the script. As he was already involved in a new soap opera by then, he asked a friend, Leopoldo Serran, also a soap opera and screenwriter, to create the final version. 1 The film can be viewed with English subtitles online at https://amara.org/en/videos/ 7omb0hYhq5Kn/en/574093/.

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This chapter is based on a comparative study of the book and the two unpublished screenplays2 to reveal those characteristics of the novel that helped in the script development process. This chapter draws on the works of screenwriting scholar Linda Seger (1992), Craig Batty and Alec McAulay (2016), and Jamie Sherry (2014, 2016) and adaptation scholars such as Gerard Genette (2006), Brian McFarlane (1996), Robert Stam (2008), Linda Hutcheon (2013), in order to theoretically frame this analysis. Scholars from both Screenwriting and Adaptation Studies inform this chapter. As Sherry outlines, both the field of screenplay studies and the field of adaptation studies ‘are preoccupied with the translatability of texts, how works exist in movement between forms, and the influences and creative decisions of practitioners’ (2016, p. 26). Interviews with Pozenato and Calmon, conducted in 2014 and 2016, are also important to this chapter’s exploration of this perspective.

Theoretical Framework The study of the process of adaptation of novels to screen is a relevant part of screenwriting practice research. While talking about script development as part of the screenwriting PhDs, Batty and McAulay (2016) explained that these graduate programmes have ‘historically included the writing of an original or adapted feature film alongside a critical thesis/dissertation’ (p. 2). Through a descriptive study of the novel and the script combined with interviews, this chapter also goes together with Sherry’s (2014) assertion that ‘examinations of adapted films focus primarily on the relation between the literary source text and resultant film text, failing to adequately interrogate the complex industrial and creative processes that take place during adaptation’ (p. 87). In discussions of adapted scripts, a point of contention is often the fidelity between the novel and script and, later, between the novel and film. For Hutcheon (2013), the writer’s concern should be to make the ‘script’, as a literary text, as well-suited as possible for the intended media. ‘If the idea of fidelity should not guide any theory of adaptation today, what, then, should do so? According to its occurrence in the dictionary, “to adapt” means to adjust, to alter, to make adequate’ (p. 29). Thus, despite the many aspects in common that allow adaptation from one media to another, the novel and the script diverge in certain ways, undoubtedly contributing to the spheres for each of these arts in contemporary society. From one perspective, film adaptations are the transformation of stories into other histories and are part of the beginning of the cinema history. According to Hutcheon (2013), the adaptation of stories and works is an essential form of human communication: ‘I firmly believe that adaptation is (and always has been) central to the human 2

The two accessed versions of the screenplay were made available by José Clemente Pozenato, who gave access to his archives in order to help the development of my Ph.D. thesis.

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imagination in all cultures’ (p. 10). It is only natural, after all, that people try to adapt the favourite stories of the public from literature into cinema. In Brazil, we can see adaptation as a pillar of cinema production. The adaptation of novels to television or cinema has become more common each year with the growth of funds designated for cinema and television production in the country. The year that O Quatrilho was released, 1995, is considered to be the beginning of the rebirth of the national industry of cinema in Brazil, which has suffered greatly as a result of the economic crises that the country endured in the 1990s with the so-called Collor Economical Plan. O Quatrilho and its running for an Oscar were important milestones in the so-called ‘rebirth of Brazilian cinema’ which happened in parallel with the adoption of a new currency in Brazil, the Real, in 1994. As a text with its own poetic properties, the screenplay requires a script development process that is unique and worthy of separate attention. According to Sherry (2016), ‘the textual analysis of the screenplay sees it framed within a discourse of its function as it becomes compared to its “intended” media, rather than being recognised as a discrete form with its own literary and poetic properties’ (p. 17). For McFarlane (1996), it is possible to speak of two strategies while adapting a novel for screen: ‘transfer’ and ‘adaptation proper’. Both strategies are important for this chapter because they are used as criteria to study the adapted screenplay of O Quatrilho. This description is presented below. As a result of this use of McFarlane’s theory, it is necessary to explain it with a little more attention to his study. The concept of ‘transfer’ involves transferring elements, such as the narrative, which can go from the novel to the screenplay. The second one (‘adaptation proper’) is a process of enunciation, which cannot be transferred, because novels and films deal with separate systems of signification. McFarlane went much deeper into the adaptation process. Although the space of this chapter does not allow us to explore it fully, these few lines about his study already make it possible to reflect that, while adapting a novel to film, the author will mix strategies of transferring elements of the novel to the screenplay and of creating new elements for the screenplay. For McFarlane (1996), ‘While the fidelity criterion may seem misguided in any circumstances, it is also true that many film-makers are on record as being reverently disposed towards reproducing the original novel’ (p. 22). This is a different point of view and shows that adaptation of novels to screenplays mean a new creative process and a new artistic work that differs and is original in relation to the point of inspiration that is represented by the novel. As McFarlane also points out: ‘It is equally clear, however, that many adaptations have chosen paths other than that of the literal-minded visualization of the original or even of “spiritual fidelity”, making quite obvious departures from the original’ (p. 22). It is important to note that in the course of developing a script for a story that will become a film, a screenwriter will encounter a lot of challenges, which may sometimes be even more complicated than those that they encounter in the development of an original screenplay.

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The Case Study of O Quatrilho In the case of O Quatrilho, Pozenato’s work was adapted by different writers in two phases. The examination of the adaptation of O Quatrilho was made possible through access to two different versions of the script,3 allowing insight into the significant work performed by the two screenwriters, who created their own original stories. Specifically, these authors were Antonio Calmon (first version) and Leopoldo Serran (final version). While considering the differences between these two works, it is relevant at this point to recall Genette (2006), who argued that in adaptation, the original text is not indispensable for the understanding of the final text. Instead, the final text is autonomous with respect to its meaning. However, many consider knowledge of the original text as a means of enriching the final text. ‘This duplicity of the object, in the order of textual relations, can be figured by the old image of the palimpsest’ (Genette, 2006, p. 45). Thus, for this study, it was important to have access to the novel to understand the nature of the change performed by the script development process clearly. The comparative study performed between novel and screenplays allows the examination of different narrative strategies noticed in each of those texts to be checked, and this allows us to observe the choices and creative processes that have to be undertaken in the script development process for O Quatrilho. This perception aligns with Stam’s (2008) discussion of adaptations as unique works, which he argued is realised ‘mainly because of the transition to an entirely different enunciation device’ (p. 10). In scenes whose narrative action was maintained quite similarly between the novel and the script, it is possible to observe the remarkable transformation brought to the text by the change in the narrative to a script, meaning that the script development in the case of an adaptation has in the enunciation device one of the means whereby it lends originality to the text. In an adapted screenplay, drawing on the tools that cinematic representation may offer later, the author changes dialogue, descriptions of gesture, image, music, special effects, and so on. For Stam (2008), the technical change regarding the different modes of interaction with the audience (between novels and films) limits the possibility of fidelity in adapted works. He wrote (Stam, 2008, p. 20): The passage from a uniquely verbal medium such as romance to a multifaceted medium such as the film, which can play not only with words (written and spoken) but still with music, sound effects and animated photographic images, explains the unlikely likelihood of a literal fidelity, which I would suggest qualifying even as undesirable.

3

The two accessed versions of the screenplay were made available by Pozenato.

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The future presence of the image and sound elements of cinema and the participation of the actors and other technical members of the team can always be foreseen in the script through means of the description of the openings of the scene, dialogues, technical notes, and notes focused on the actors.

Comparative Study of the Novel and Screenplays The author of this chapter developed a protocol that allows for a comparative study between the two existent screenplays of O Quatrilho, and also among them and the novel. The base of this protocol was to analyse the texts comparatively through the lenses of the categories identified by McFarlane (1996) in combination with elements of the literary texts: narrative, space, time, character. The result of the protocol is presented below (Table 1). Before using this protocol, the first process enacted was comparing the scenes of the novel that were included in the first version of the screenplay (written by Calmon) and those that were retained in the final screenplay (written by Serran). The novel is divided into four parts and this makes the process easier. The first and the third parts of the novel are analysed in comparison with the screenplay of Antonio Calmon. The second and the fourth parts are analysed in comparison with the screenplay of Leopoldo Serran. Eventually, a comparison between both scripts is carried out to identify the selected scenes. In this chapter, I demonstrate an example of the comparative analysis performed with only 1 of the 16 comparative tables organised for this study. Following the questions presented on the protocol, it is possible to see the main changes that were made to adapt the part of the novel in Table 2. In the plot of the adapted script, the presentation of the characters of Massimo and Pierina is different from that in the novel. The scene in which the couples talk at the table, appears in both plots, but at different times. The complicity between Teresa and Aunt Gemma also undergoes a change. While, in the novel, Teresa guesses that Pierina may be pregnant, and asks the aunt about it; in the adapted screenplay, Aunt Gemma reveals this to Teresa. This adaptation movement may indicate the need to synthesise the story. Teresa and Aunt Gemma’s conversation takes place more briefly in the adapted script and for some parts, Pierina and Massimo are present in the room. In the novel, the entire conversation involves only Pierina and Massimo and takes place in a separate room before the dinner party. The content of Table 2 is an example from Part 1 of the novel. Using the protocol to analyse all the tables organised in the study referring to this part of the novel, the result is as follows: When it comes to character transfer, the script retains all four protagonists of the novel. As for the secondary characters that are cited in the first part of the novel (not only in the extract mentioned in Table 2), they are all mentioned in the adapted script, but appear less

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Protocol for a comparative analysis of the novel and adapted screenplay

1. Distributional Functions 1.1 Cardinal Functions a) In the plot, are the key events in the story retained? b) Is any conflict deleted or added? c) Is there a difference in exposure, development, climax, and closure of the most important conflicts presented? d) What characters are retained between the systems? e) What is the characterisation of the characters retained in each of the systems? f) Are flat characters retained (names, professions, and formal relationships)? g) Is the complexity of the round characters altered? h) Is the structure of protagonists and antagonists maintained? i) In terms of time, how can the epoch, duration, and chronological time be analysed in each of the narratives? j) In each of the systems, what spaces does the plot run in? k) Are the main dialogues held between systems? 1.2 Catalyst Functions l) Do the scenes considered as ‘fillers’ in the novel appear adapted in any way in the script? m) Are there details that do not affect events despite being associated with particular characters retained? 2. Integrative Functions 2.1 Index Functions a) How are the psychological, social, and moral spaces present in the novel adapted in the script? b) Does the psychological time of the characters pass onto the adapted script in any way? c) How are the feelings expressed by the characters in the novel present in the script? d) Are personality characteristics and temperament of the characters maintained between the novel and script? 2.2 Information Functions e) In terms of language, setting, and soundtrack, are there any indications of these aspects in the script to help with your psychological ambience? f) Are there any indications of the nonverbal language of the characters in the script so that the actor can build his character with respect to his psychological space? Source Clarissa Mazon Miranda (2018)

often in the adapted script than they do in the novel. For example, the characters Bambina (Angelo’s sister), Metilde (Teresa’s sister), Giulieta (Teresa’s mother), Cosimo (family friend), Matilda (Cosimo’s wife), and Bepe (Tia Gema’s husband and Pierina´s father) are extras in the wedding scenes and the scene where there is a filo in Angelo’s family’s house, organised by Teresa. Father Giobbe’s importance enhanced in the script’s plot in relation to the novel’s, because the script includes the scene of his dialogue with Massimo and Pierina (Table 2) and this scene is not present in the novel. Dosolina and Augustinho (Angelo’s brothers), Pupà Aurélio (Angelo’s father), and Aunt

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Table 2 Comparison between the novel O Quatrilho and the script adapted by Antonio Calmon showing the moment when the protagonists, Pierina and Massimo, are cited for the first time in each text POZENATO, 1996, pp. 54–58 […] - I know, Aunt, I know - Teresa tried to smile. - You are very practical. I will never know how to govern the house like you. Cousin Pierina has someone to take off Teresa had the image of her wedding day before her eyes: Cousin Pierina, sitting beside her, loudly devouring her soup plate. The strong, plump arms, the thick waist. Pierina had married before Christmas, she should be expecting her first child. Fat as it was, you couldn’t tell - “Speaking of Pierina” she asked, “isn’t she waiting?” “- That one?” said Aunt Gemma. “If she really pulled for me, it won’t be anytime soon. I just didn’t want her to marry Massimo. Where have you seen, here in the colony, walking with those white gaiters? You see, it’s a bum, I thought. He is Father Giobbe’s nephew, but that means nothing. But Pierina was found of him I think Father Giobbe also gave a helping hand to get rid of his nephew. God forgive me. Massimo is very educated. He reads the Almanac, you know. Knows how to do all the math. Draws some amazing things, I can tell, really good. It was Massimo who made their house, the furniture, everything he did. It seems to be working, at least for now. Pray for God he continues. […]” During the conversation, without realizing it, the image that came to Teresa’s eyes was that of Massimo, in white gaiters, reading the Almanac. Suddenly she wondered if his hands were always wet with sweat like her husband’s. It was something she didn’t like. She looked down, embarrassed, afraid of turning red. Aunt Gemma cut the silence - Thinking of your little husband? Teresa shuddered - How did you guess?

CALMON, [199-], script without number of pages, sequence 14 and 30 SEQUENCE 14 - CHURCH OF SANTA CORONA - INT / DAY Father Giobbe is alone in the church. He gets rid of the stole and the surplice and blows out the candles. He starts stuffing the celebratory items in his suitcase. Sees a couple entering the church Smiles… FATHER GIOBBE Oh Massimo… MASSIMO(kissing father’s hand) Blessing, Uncle FATHER GIOBBE God bless you. (and to the woman also kissing hand) and you too, Pierina PIERINA (say nothing, shocked) FATHER GIOBBE So, nephew? How’s life? Did you settle down anyway? MASSIMO What can I do? I’ve seen that my destiny is to lead life the way it goes… You know I had other dreams… FATHER GIOBBE (interrupting) Nonsense. Dreams lead to nothing. You must be patient, Massimo, act according to the fate God has for you. You’re looking, pretty tired. Pierina is a good wife, hard worker… what are you complaining about? MASSIMO (heads down and says nothing) FATHER GIOBBE(to Pierina) And the bambino? When is he going to be born? PIERINA (death of shame) In six months, Father… FATHER GIOBBE Good, very good. I am very happy MASSIMO(looks in silence, showing no happiness) […] SEQUENCE 30 - BEPE’S HOUSE KITCHEN / ROOM - INT / DAY

(continued)

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(continued)

- In the beginning they are all like that. All stupid. They care about nothing. Stop thinking about him, otherwise you’ll be like Giulieta, with that sad face of skinny dog Teresa felt a rush of heat on her face. She got up, opened the kitchen door and took a deep breath. She felt the lunch food still weighing on her stomach. The conversation with Aunt Gemma, contrary to what she had expected, had hurt her. It was not what she would have liked to hear. So there was no love? But even the priest spoke of it! And if the desire of the body did not exist, why did the priest speak against these temptations? […] - Teresa has nothing to put on weight. You look very beautiful like that It was Maasimo talking. The hair, the beautiful teeth, the well-cut moustache. Teresa’s heart skipped a beat. Pierina elbowed her husband, mouth full of bread, “do not stick your nose where it is not your place.” Massimo laughed. Pierina is really stupid, Teresa thought, what did Massimo see in her? But she was afraid he would speak again. She would be capable of dying of shame. So she leaned her head against her husband’s shoulder, laughing, and said with as much security as she could muster: “Angelo likes me like that too, skinny.” I give less expense. […]

(Pierina loudly devours her soup plate. The strong, plump arms, the thick waist, she doesn’t even lift her head from her soup bowl.) TERESA (OFF) Pierina? AUNT GEMMA (OFF) Herself. She married before Christmas and is already expecting their first child. Pierina has no waist, Teresa. Men like fat, strong women (Teresa is looking at her cousin. Then she looks at her cousin´s husband. He does not bite the bread; he breaks it into small pieces that he takes to his mouth. He makes no noise while drinking from the bowl. The moustache is very well taken care of.) AUNT GEMMA (off) And I didn’t want her to marry Massimo… Where have you seen, here in the colony, walking with those white gaiters? You see, it’s a bum, I thought. But Pierina was found of him… (Teresa is absorbed, contemplating the couple. Aunt Gemma comes for more food on the table and plays with her.) AUNT GEMMA What’s up, Teresa? Didn’t like my food? (Teresa wakes up. She realizes that Angelo and Uncle Bepe are talking at the table, talking animatedly. Everyone looks at her.) TERESA(Embarrassed) No, Auntie, I’m not very hungry AUNT GEMMA Eat, you have to eat. You need to get fatter. Hey Angelo, Teresa is very skinny. What have you been doing? ANGELO (SMILES EMBARRASSED AND HIS FACE TURNS RED) MASSIMO Teresa has nothing to put on weight. She looks very beautiful like that TERESA

(continued)

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Table 2

(continued) (Her heart jumps) PIERINA (talks to her husband, the mouth full of bread) Don’t stick your nose where it’s not your place MASSIMO (gives a laugh) TERESA (embarrassed, she rests her head on the shoulder of her husband and says, laughing) Angelo likes me like that too, skinny. I give less expense

Source Clarissa Mazon Miranda (2018)

Gemma (Pierina’s mother, Teresa’s aunt and confidante) are the secondary characters present in other scenes in the script. However, there are dialogues and passages on their participation in the novel’s narrative that are cut out in the script. Aurélio, for example, gets a whole section in the novel, which is dedicated to showing his point of view on his life and the death of his wife, Rosa. In the adapted script, such depth and motivations are suppressed. Some minor plot conflicts are also synthesised in their passage to the adapted script. For example, the fact that Angelo waits for five years to marry Teresa (longer than normal at the time), and then takes care of his brothers before he can start a new family is not mentioned in the script. As for the setting and time of the narrative, both the novel and the script take place in the interior of the state of Rio Grande do Sul and during the same historical period. The period is not identified in either at first, but according to Pozenato, in an interview for this study in 2016, it was the 1910s, the period of Italian immigration to Brazil. The characterisation of costumes and scenarios in both the novel and the script accurately match this historical period. According to Pozenato, photos of the city of Caxias do Sul in the 1910s helped him compose the space presented in the novel and used in the script. The adapted screenplay bears a timestamp that is not seen in the novel. On the first page, before the sequences begin, Antonio Calmon’s script (1994) presents the following text: LETTERING (in silence, is emerging on dark fabric, from the bottom up, the sign) "Leaving their homeland in search of better days, large numbers of Italian immigrants went to the far America in the second half of the last century. A considerable portion of these adventurers landed in the far south of Brazil, where they, their children and grandchildren, subjected to the injunctions of time and environment, built a prosperous and

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relatively egalitarian society based on small rural property and later on trade, commerce and industry. ’O Quatrilho’ narrates this saga through the trajectory of a certain Angelo Gardone...” (p. 1)

This text introduces the reader to the period of Italian immigration in Brazil, facilitating the delimitation of the historical timeline in the script. Still, in terms of ‘time’, it is interesting to note how there is a variation in the speed and duration of certain scenes between the novel and the script. This aspect lends dramatic intensity to the script’s plot. Interviews with José Clemente Pozenato and Antonio Calmon About the Script Development Process To complement the descriptive analyses presented above, this section details the interviews with the authors. Calmon’s screenplay resembles the novel closely. As this study involved interviewing Calmon and Pozenato (Leopoldo Serran had passed away by this time), it is possible to hear in these authors’ own words their vision for some of the themes that have been discussed in this chapter. Calmon said that he was caught by the story during his first contact with Pozenato’s novel. ‘So at that time after I read the wonderful book of Pozenato, I went with Fábio to Caxias do Sul to meet him, to visit the places where the book went, and so on’ (A. Calmon, personal communication, November 27, 2016). Speaking about fidelity to the original novel, Calmon said: ‘It is important to reconcile them, but sometimes it is inevitable that one is unfaithful. And for the artist, between ethics and aesthetics, it is better to always stay with aesthetics’ (personal communication, November 27, 2016). In expressing this opinion, he seems to agree with Seger (1992), who noted that ‘Adaptation is both an art and a craft. You need to understand the material, the problems, and the craft of screenwriting to make the adaptation work. But no matter how much you may know about the craft of writing and adapting, it will still need your art—your creativity, insight, and talent’ (p. 219). Calmon’s approach to the adaptation of the novel seems to reflect this search for harmony between technique and aesthetics. Offering more detail, he explained: ‘I have no method whatsoever. I select the excerpts that render film scenes. I avoid making any scenes that do not belong in the book. I also try to use only the dialogue of the book and only adapt it when it is very necessary. I try to translate the book into the language of the cinema and into the head of filmgoers, since little number of people are readers in this country’. The novel is rich in dialogue and scenario descriptions. It is possible to say that the presence of these elements may have helped the adaptation. As Sherry (2016, p. 16) has stated:

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Indeed, many adaptations will jettison large amounts of plot, but will often retain notably faithful sections of dialogue, even in relatively unfaithful projects. The screenplay form can also transpose the movement of characters, place, location or other elements of physical action with comparative ease.

O Quatrilho is very rich in dialogue and action passages. In that sense, the novel helped the script development process. On the other hand, the elements that are a problem to adapt are not so present in O Quatrilho. As Sherry explains: ‘the third issue, or the ‘problem’ and ‘challenge’ for adaptors, is of course the specificity of literary devices found in first-person, conscious, internal narration; or the third-person, omnipotent narrator with their expositions on the thoughts, musings and unconscious compulsions of various characters’ (2016, p. 17). Pozenato shared his perspective on his participation in the adaptation process. He got to know Calmon when he visited him in Caxias do Sul. Once the first version of the script was ready, Pozenato flew to Rio de Janeiro to read it: ‘When he already had a first draft, he invited me to go to Rio. We talked a lot and he told me that he could do four films out of the novel, saying that he could not put the whole novel into a single film. As they saw that I had no problem with him changing the text, they began to consult me as a consultant, someone who could give an opinion’ (2016, personal communication). The four ideas for films that Calmon had while reading Pozenato’s novel are still in the latter’s memory. ‘One would be from the perspective of Angelo, who becomes a wealthy industrialist; another would be the perspective of the priests who follow the exchange of the couples; a third would highlight the friendship between an anarchist and a man of industry, which are important characters in the story; and the fourth would be to focus on the romantic story of the two couples who exchange partners. This last one won because the producers thought that this focus would attract a larger audience’ (2016, personal interview). Calmon himself said in his interview that the story of the couples had an undeniable appeal to the film’s audience: ‘This change of partners between two couples, taken from real life, that happened in remote Rio Grande do Sul, can seem at first glance so particular, but it is universal and can thrill people anywhere in the world’ (A. Calmon, personal communication, November 27, 2016). Bearing in mind these statements that share a little bit of the continuous contact among the novelist, the screenwriters, and the producers of O Quatrilho, it is possible to get glimpse of the process involved in the creation of the final screenplay and reflect on it.

Analysing the Collected Data The comparison between the novel and different versions of the screenplay, when possible, is a powerful tool for comprehending the different possibilities of script development. It is possible to say that, as in the case of O Quatrilho,

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when a novel is rich in dialogues and descriptions of scenarios and characters, it is possible to retain large parts of the novel in the screenplay, not because of a question of fidelity, but because of practicality. If you have a good story that has already been developed in terms of characters, dialogues, action, and space, a story that works for cinema, why create new ones? In this study, it is possible to see that some choices were made: secondary characters were removed because of limitations such as budget and time available to tell the story in the film. Many of the dialogues present in the film are taken directly from the book with minimum adaptations being made. One sees the momentum in the narrative increasing but, generally, the stories of the protagonists do not change. It is thus is possible to say that some novels are well-fitted for script development because they hold elements such as dialogue, characters, scenarios, and plots that can be used easily in the process of adaptation. Thus, it is possible to say that fidelity in the script development process of an adaptation might be a practical choice, if the novel allows it. The protocol of study developed may help the comparative study of novels and scripts in order to provide another analytical tool for aspiring screenwriters, having as its criteria the elements of a narrative considered in literature. If one can acknowledge that the process of developing a script is a process of literary creation (while acknowledging that the script is also a kind of text that writers are able to produce), such a comparative study makes screenwriters more prepared to produce new adaptations, because their logic is trained in seeing the scenes that can be adapted and identifying those that should be left alone in the novel. The interviews showed us the personal and unique perspectives of the screenwriter on his script development process while adapting O Quatrilho. Calmon has met half away both with the idea that adaptation is a creative screenwriting process in itself, as with the idea that this screenwriting process can benefit itself by the fact that some novels bring dialogues and scenes that can be almost fully used in the screenplay by having particular characteristics that help them meet the needs of a script, as it might be seen in a small example at Table 2 of this study. The perspective of the author of the novel, Pozenato, and the vision he had regarding the work both of Calmon and Serran is interesting, because he saw the aspects of the creative process of the screenwriter as an outsider in some ways. It is also possible to point out that an important part of the creative process of these two screenwriters lies in the choice of the story they wanted to extract from the many possibilities offered by the novel, and after that, their choices of the new scenes that needed to be created, and the elimination of scenes that were not necessary. When Calmon said that four films could be made from O Quatrilho, an important part of his creative process is apparent: What parts of the novel can be kept? Which characters are appropriate for the script? How can the momentum of the narrative be changed? Which scenes should be made more concise? These are all questions that the screenwriter of O Quatrilho had to answer creatively in order to get to the final version of the script. The

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uniqueness of the information revealed in the interviews lies in the fact that the subjects talked about the reality of filmmaking in Brazil, a situation that is very different from that which can be found in most developed countries.

Conclusion This study showed that the creative process is always present in the development of scripts for book adaptations. It is as present there as it would be when one is creating an original story. The question is whether a screenwriter is creating an adaptation of a novel, or an adaptation of true facts, or a script out of one’s own fantasies and ideas. Novels like O Quatrilho, which present most of their text in the form of dialogue, have a deep description of scenarios and do not pay much attention to directly describing the inner world of characters, tend to be well-suited for adaptation to cinema and the script development process can use a lot of the original text, even if there is no concern regarding fidelity. However, adaptation certainly requires a different set of skills during script development. It requires the screenwriter to carve out everything that does not serve their vision of what the script should be. Thus, it results in a new piece of text with its own poetics, and some screenwriters are more skilful in this work than others. As for the participation of the author in the production of the screenplay, the example of O Quatrilho seems to suggest that if the author can be flexible and understand the deep peculiarities of cinematic language, they can participate in and even help with the development of the script by offering new ideas. Finally, the example of O Quatrilho seems to be an interesting one because it shows a collaboration process between screenwriter and novel writer.

References Batty, C., & McAulay, A. (2016). The academic screenplay: Approaching screenwriting as a research practice. Writing in Practice. The Journal of Creative Writing Research. Issue 2. United Kingdom: National Association of Writers in Education. Available at: https://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/current-wip-edition-2/articles/the-academic-scr eenplay-approaching-screenwriting-as-a-research-practice.html. Accessed 13 Jan 2020. Calmon, A. (1994). O Quatrilho [Unpublished screenplay]. Genette, G. (2006). Palimpsestos: A literatura de segunda mão [Palimpsests: Literature in the second degree] (L. Guimarães & M. A. R. Coutinho, Trans.). UFMG, Faculdade de Letras. Hutcheon, L. (2013). Uma Teoria da Adaptação [A theory of adaptation] (A. Cechinel, Trans.). Editora UFSC. McFarlane, B. (1996). Novel to film: An introduction to the theory of adaptation. Oxford University Press. Miranda, C. M. (2018). A tradução intersemiótica do romance O Quatrilho para roteiros cinematográficos. Tese apresentada ao programa de Doutorado em Literatura da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. Universidade Federal de Santa Maria.

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O Quatrilho [Motion picture]. 1995. 120 min. wrs. Antonio Calmon, Leopoldo and José Clemente Pozenato, dir. Fabio Barreti Rio de Janeiro. LC Barreto. Pozenato, J. C. (1996). O Quatrilho. Caxias do Sul. Mercado Aberto. Serran, L. (1995). O Quatrilho [Unpublished screenplay]. Seger, L. (1992). The art of adaptation: Turning fact and fiction into film. Henry Holt and Company. Sherry J. (2014) Teaching adapting screenwriters: Adaptation theory through creative practice. In D. Cartmell & I. Whelehan (Eds.), Teaching adaptations (Teaching the new English). Palgrave Macmillan. Sherry, J. (2016). Adaptation studies through screenplay studies: Transitionality and the adapted screenplay. Journal of Screenwriting, 7 (1), 11–28. Stam, R. (2008). A literatura através do cinema: Realismo, magia e a arte da adaptação [Literature through film: Realism, magic and the art of adaptation]. Editora UFMG.

Scripting and the Multimodal Screenplay Within the Script Development Process David Moore

Introduction As an independent filmmaker and academic who has worked in this area for a long time, the driving impulse for the Ph.D. research I find myself in was to just be creative, no matter what, and to write a script—preferably without actually putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Relatedly, I wanted to consider the opportunities that the practice of improvisation might contribute to the script development process. And so I started to play with the idea of retelling or re-presenting stories through narratives already presented in the form of found-footage films. Halfway through the Ph.D., I find myself forming an understanding that the audio/visual process has become a valid tool to the improvisational scripting process in looking for inspiration, using a variety of visual textuality within the script development process that moves beyond mere words inside a writer’s mind. My research is supported by Steven Maras’s notion of scripting (2009) and Kathryn Millard’s multimodal screenplay (2014) where I am applying these ideas to create a reformed framework for the filmmaker—a term I use to encompass the screenwriter, the director and editor over that of the auteur— to advance the debate that screenwriting is no longer limited to the page, or a word-based artefact. I do this by utilising non-linear [video] editing technologies as part of the screenwriting process. If we consider this within the argument that Batty and McAulay (2016) state about screenwriting research D. Moore (B) University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_26

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as it pertains to the endeavours within my own practice, it presents screenwriters (and by association, the filmmaker more broadly) the opportunity of observing screenwriting as research and thereby affording the screenwriter an ‘intellectual space offered by the academy … [in which] to incubate and experiment with ideas, the intention being that their processes or screenplays – or both – change as a result’. In this chapter, I will therefore discuss how screenwriters and filmmakers can utilise alternative methods to script development by engaging with new ways of writing for the screen that go beyond the page.

Films Without Screenplays There have been countless films made without a script, so this is by no means a new concept. Many famous filmmakers have improvised films, the obvious contenders including John Cassevettes, Shadows (1958), Faces (1968) and Mike Leigh, Secrets and Lies (1996), Vera Drake (2004) and Gus Van Sant, Gerry (2003), Elephant (2003) to name just a few of their more well-known improvised films. But as often is the case, well-known directors—Altman, Scorsese, Rivette, Bertolucci and Godard—generally acknowledged for their improvisational approaches, sadly have little in recorded documentation to support the forays of their improvisation within the films (Wexman, 1980, p. 29). Each director varies in their creative approach, such as the famed Mike Leigh method who works with story outlines being only a few pages long, to entering into months of rehearsal to work out fully fleshed character development, plot and story (Berkeley, 2011, p. 64), to ultimately develop the ‘final shape of the screenplay’ (Millard, 2014, p. 127). Other filmmakers, such as Gus Van Sant, who is typically considered leftof-field in his approach to his films, is known for regularly committed to working in the ‘liminal space between the conventional and the experimental, between linear narrative and more poetic, lyrical forms of cinematic expression’ (Falsetto, 2015, p. 15). Van Sant’s scripts are described as ‘remarkably brief, even sketchy’ (p. 19) and in the case of his controversial1 Indie feature film, Elephant (2003) he abandoned the 23-page treatment completely, improvising on extensive casting sessions in which the film characters where based on the cast and their actual persona’s and the filmmaking progressing by randomly following the kids around the school during the production of Elephant (p. 112) in which the dialogue came from the sentences actually written on his floorplan: ‘These lines on the map was the footprint of the school’ (Murphy, 2007, p. 163). Likewise, in Guy Maddin’s film My Winnipeg (2007), the script is derived from his handwritten notes, drawings, doodles, coffee stains and scenarios, strongly contributing to a screenplay which Millard argues ‘function[s] as a container of creative ideas’ (Millard, 2008, p. 57) as opposed to years of 1 Matthew Danzico, Controversial ‘Elephant’ Gus Van Sant attacks high school violence in indie flick. The Eagle, 6 November 2003.

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draft iterations, producers’ feedback and ultimately, studio approvals. Maddin’s approach to his screenplay presents more like a scrapbook of memorabilia2 that has acted as a prototype for the description of what could constitute that which Millard describes as a ‘multimodal screenplay’ (p. 58). Millard argues that this multimodal screenplay has not replaced the written page but rather has ‘transformed’ it via the use of ‘images, sound and words’ (Millard, 2014, p. 136) and through quoting Photographer, Fred Ritchin, Millard identifies that the digital environment is ‘an initial recording of a preliminary script’ through which the writing is no longer page-based but ‘by the camera’ (p. 137). But this is where the challenges of non-traditional screenwriting start within my practice, as with any filmmaking process, what begins as the screenplay described as the blueprint—even acknowledged as an ephemeral document (Macdonald, 2016, p. 10)—and moves beyond the page into improvisation (loosely categorised as any improvisation beyond just performance, i.e. extra shots as one example). But this improvisation disappears into the finished film, an issue which Maras has identified as the ‘object problem’ (Maras, 2009, p. 11). In other words, the object, or its realisation becomes independent from the film and thus does not belong to the page or the screen. This separation of ‘concept and execution’ in film production is in direct opposition to the current Hollywood business model of the film assembly line, which focuses on an end manuscript for film production as a dominant feature of the Hollywood studio system model (p. 21). Therefore, like the script itself, this creates methodological issues where these forms, Maddin’s doodles and indeed, even the screenplay seem destined to vanish into the film (p. 6). As such, Maras declares that this relationship between the objects is diverse in this field of practice and is ‘yet to be fully resolved’ (p. 7). This is where Ian W. Macdonald delivers to both filmmakers and screenwriters an apparent solution within his notion of the Screen Idea: that an object that is not yet an object within a narrative can be destined to become a moving image (2016, p. 10). Macdonald argues that if the screen idea was to only focus on the script alone, it would be counterproductive, in that ‘Screenwriting is about more than just films, and more than just “writing”’ (2013, p. 10, original emphasis). Macdonald clarifies by borrowing a quote from Pasolini in that ‘… It is an object which is not yet an object’ (p. 10) in that each working draft, the notes attached, every iteration of the screenplay are ‘all fixed versions of the screen idea’ (Cardwell, 2015, p. 1). Ultimately, the screen idea itself is a non-existent entity because, what is evident is only the effect that surrounds the shape—or object (Macdonald, 2013, p. 15)— and only the creators decide the rules concerning this object (p. 17) of what ‘we can call the Screen idea’ (p. 12). Macdonald specifies the importance of this argument to academics is that rather than focusing on ‘the text of a script 2

Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg. An annotated script by Guy Maddin, replete with photographs, collages, animations and other My Winnipeg acrana (2009). Coach House Books.

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and seeing it as an incomplete blueprint for another text – the film – we can see it as an expression of something which is as complete as it is possible to be, at the point and the place it was written’ (p. 19). Within this somewhat effusive definition I believe there are grounds for an argument that these improvisational techniques seem to have little to do with screenwriting and more to do with improvisation of performance. Millard’s discussion on improvisation within film production relates traditionally to actors; the dialogue in delivery of verbal exposition as a primary focus, but I am yet to be convinced that this has little to do with the overriding development of plot and story. Filmmaker and academic, Siri Senje, discusses that following a normative approach to screen development or utilising improvisational practices of performance leaves the story, currently lost somewhere in between these two silos of practice. Senje articulates the traditional approach to the development of a screenplay is through the writing of a synopsis, treatment and script, and that it ‘could actually be an impediment, not just to writers’ creative processes but also to the development of quality projects’ (2017, p. 273). I agree with Senje that improvisation is primarily driven by working with actors—the Tovstonogov’s MMA technique of breaking the text up into the ‘smallest units of human action’ (p. 275)—and this has little to do with the overriding screenwriting practice within the script development process. Whilst Millard’s writing is both motivating and illuminating in the scope of new methods of screenwriting, it poses numerous questions as much as they allude to possible future directions around the subject of digital screenwriting. I would argue that many of the key features identified within Millard’s important text, Screenwriting in the Digital Era (2014), seemingly stand-alone from the writing process and thus, Millard has seemingly established a challenge for the writers—and the academy—on how the writer engages with, and rises to meet the improvisational challenges to liberate the screenplay, in whatever form that may take and what does the multimodal screenplay actually look like, and, more importantly, how it is useful in the process of script development? Drawing on contemporary approaches to screenwriting practice is filmmaker and academic, Margot Nash (2013), who examines the ‘discoverydriven process’ of script development (p. 149). Here, Nash highlights that a different perspective is needed for script development to diverge from the typically formulaic-driven approach prescribed by the plethora of screenwriting textbooks that rarely stray into ‘unknown and uncertain spaces of creativity’ (p. 149) in screenwriting. Specifically Nash contends that the traditional approaches of the Hollywood model only provide ‘strategies’ and add little ‘value’ to the part she identifies as the ‘discovery-driven process’ (pp. 149–150). Nash knows that the value of innovation lies in the ‘interplay of the known and unknown, of passion and reason, and of logic and intuition, that [is where] creativity lies’ (pp. 149–150). Nash’s own practice includes ‘reading, thinking, dreaming and debating’ rather than following the expository processes dictated by the rulebooks, as she likes to let story shapes ‘emerge out of the material’ which she identifies—like so many other

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artists—as ‘messy’ and this development needs time to ‘ferment’ unlike in the rulebooks where answers are rapidly tied up neatly (p. 150). Within my own practice of improvisational non-linear digital scriptwriting, I too like to let the story shapes emerge—as Nash contends—to build exposition within the process of improvisational script development through the methodology of audio/visual literacy, which I argue is the bridge between the relationship of Maras’s identified object problem and the multimodal screenplay in the writing that Millard proposes, and thus engages within new methods of script development. Finally, by adding Nash’s suggested discovery-driven processes and utilising another notion proposed by Maras, called Scripting.

Scripting From the outset of Steven Maras’s book Screenwriting, History, Theory and Practice (2009), he introduces key concepts pertaining to the history and possible trajectory for modern screenwriting. Within this, Maras proposes an important concept to the practice of improvisational digital screenwriting, in that of Scripting, by his own definition it pertains to a methodology that allows a ‘broader definition of screenwriting’ to specifically aid writers to consider the process within a ‘non-normative’ manner (p. 2). This has the potential to ‘expanding our understanding of screen writing … which goes beyond the manuscript – writing with bodies of light’ (p. 2). Whereas Millard (2016)— with her many conceptual approaches suggested within her texts—still broadly, and indistinctly, identifies that filmmakers are unhappy with ways to bring their stories to life off the page (p. 27), but Maras offers this remedy which could be identified as a new framework for screenwriters… Scripting also supports a methodology for writing with images, words and sounds in presenting a broader framework to the perception of what is a script. Maras (2009, p. 2, original emphasis) explains in his own words: This definition of writing is more distinct from the idea of writing a page-based object, but still occupies the space of ‘writing’ in an extended sense, or what might be also termed as ‘scripting’.

Maras clarifies that scripting may provide the writer a break away from the mainstream methods of scriptwriting and script development whilst allowing a ‘rethinking’ between the demarcation of creation and interpretation (p. 3). Finally, a logical question to ask here is what is the difference between Maras’s scripting and Millard’s multimodal screenplay? In reading both authors’ works on these two definitions, I believe that where Maras’s concept is broadly painted in sweeping brushstrokes where the ideology is presented and argued, Millard’s notion is tied to a definable methodology and multiple possible examples within her book Screenwriting in a Digital Era (2014) but in both cases, clear definitions of what scripting is and that of what the

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agreed form the multimodal screenplay may present is questionable. Essentially though, I do believe that both authors are presenting the same concept. I propose that within my practice and Ph.D. research, I will hopefully discover a definable methodology by combining Millard’s notion of composing for the screen with Maras’s scripting , to be combined within the notion of the multimodal screenplay to devise an approach to that which may truly represent a new methodology of screenwriting which I have titled ‘Digital Story Composing’, which is suitably encompassed within this by Millard (2016, p. 281): as pens, cameras and audio devices merge, as writing becomes a process that involves creating and combining images, sounds and words, the practice of composing is more relevant to screenwriting. Improvisation and pre-planned composition are not opposites, but part of a continuum.

Digital Story Composing Digital story composing is a method that I have developed for the writing of stories composed by the digital moving image first rather than the use of words, but not in an any random act of collage, bricolage or pastiche applied styles, it is aimed in building narrative. As Howard Gruber states ‘images are fundamental to creative thought’ (Smith & Dean, p. 66) and Millard (2014) reminds us that images preceded the development of screenwriting systems (p. 25). This is not to say that writing is not involved in this methodology of the multimodal/scripting screenplay, but it comes later in the process, in that after I have improvised a visual narrative I will sometimes return to a traditional script to help structure the exposition, or to write dialogue and voice-over as needed. Digital story composing utilises images through the use of found footage combined with non-linear [video] editing systems, where the story is developed ‘In front of a computer screen, headphones on, we dip into research notes, retrieve images from a digital camera roll and begin writing; words, images and sounds at our fingertips’ (Millard, 2014, p. 157). This statement by Millard aptly describes my process of script development.

Found Footage Michael Zryd (2003) defines found-footage films as a ‘specific subgenre of experiemental (or avante-gard) cinema that integrates previously shot film materials into new productions... Found-footage filmmakers play at the margins, whether with obscurity of emphemeral footage itself... or with the countercultural means excavated’ (pp. 41–42). So why use found footage, and specifically in an age where the digital camera is so prevalent, accessible and affordable for shooting your own footage? But I do use my own footage, I have many years of home videos shot on an iPhone and, in fact one of the driving impulses for my research was to use this media in some manner. The

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fascinating aspect about found footage is that it intrinsically has a narrative embedded within its images, and where the improvisation drives the creative impulse, it may either work for it or, against it ! Elijah Horwatt (2009) suggests that working with found footage is not dissimilar to the Surrealist artists’ strategy of collage and the exquisite corpse (p. 5); whilst art critic Hal Foster reminds us that the Surrealist tradition was to derive patterns of collection that lead to re-purposing of found objects (quoted by Horwatt, p. 5) whilst Zyrd quotes Lawder, in that found footage has the imbued quality of obliterating the original context (p. 51) here I find that there is something both exciting and disturbing in re-narrativising personal footage, in that the family history is quintessentially being destroyed. Zyrd describes it as: ‘We cannot be certain exactly why it was filmed. Yet what was filmed remains firmly fixed, only now surrounded by a thousand new why’s’ (p. 5). As such, the methodology of these major twentieth-century art movements—surrealism, dada, bricolage, collage and layering, (interestingly all analogue techniques)—will reveal methods that help inform digital story composing in its script development. This is where filmmakers have used the power of semiotics and the science of signs, with the ability inherent within the theory to interpret signs, symbols, codes and conventions to make new meaning, and, as such they have presented the order of the footage to create new shapes and connotations that are ultimately depicted, with the emotional constructs imbued into it via the sound and score design. It can be presented and also be vastly re-presented in its meanings to the original source materials. A theory tested and proven by filmmaker, Frank Capra in his found-footage film series, Why We Fight (1942–1945), where his ability to ‘radically’ restructure and depart from that of the documentary realism, within the new purpose of the narrative, thus replacing it with a new mythology and symbology. Capras’ ability to use semiotics meant he effectively systemised ‘meticulously’ assembled shortcuts to ‘compress’ a new presented meaning, thus proving the power of the theory (Sowada, 2019, p. 9). Zryd (2003) states that ‘all found-footage is, in fact, extremely malleable’ and that ‘experimental found-footage films mark a specific mode of film montage that hyperbolizes this malleability’ (p. 487). I propose that by applying the above methodological approaches of major art movements conflated with Maras’s/Millard’s ideological positioning in new methods of script development it presents an exciting perspective to renew and renovate screenwriting, as I have found within my own praxis experiments, where the overlaying of a new narrative to the context and historical notions can dramatically change from the embedded ‘true’ or ‘intended’ nature of the footage. Zryd continues that filmmakers have frequently used archival and found footage for figurative reasons to mould and re-contextualise images to conform to new narrative discourses (p. 49), writing: ‘Its iconography is the quintessence of stereotype’ (p. 50). Lawder states that found footage has the imbued quality of obliterating the original context (quoted by Zryd, p. 51).

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‘We cannot be certain exactly why it was filmed. Yet what was filmed remains firmly fixed, only now surrounded by a thousand new why’s’ (p. 5). And where many of the academics and filmmakers discussed above consider improvisation in front of the camera, for me it happens within the non-linear [video] editing environment, a notion supported by filmmakers like Errol Morris who contests that a large degree of his works is made in the edit suite (Millard, 2014, pp. 72–73), and the documentary that also uses this technique, Leviathan (2012), as a production it was edited like an ‘aesthetic collage’ in its workflow using the embedded qualities of script development within audio/visual literacy, something I propose that screenwriters largely ignore to their detriment. The screenplays’ exposition, indeed, the poetry of the words on the page suggested by the nuance of the writer who largely leaves it to the filmmakers to transmute the words into an on-screen effigy. Possibly/probably, as a filmmaker and a screenwriter I am trying to force filmmaking processes into the traditional realms of the writer, but as much of the improvisation can happen within the editing process through choices of ‘juxtaposition and structuring the material’ (Millard, 2014, p. 48) and I argue this can play a significant part in the storytelling that is directly applicable to the writing process within script development…

Visual Literacy Greg Loftin, in his article ‘Writing for the Cut: What can Screenwriters Learn from Film Editors about Storytelling?’ (2018), persuasively examines the impact of (non-linear video) editing on the screenwriting process. Loftin supports Morris’s earlier statement that most films are made in the edit suite, but Loftin takes this argument further by suggesting that the writing process is continued within the edit suite supported by quoting famous sound and film editor, Walter Murch who said: ‘You will learn more about how to put stories together at the feet of a good film editor than most anyone else’ (p. 86). But have you ever heard of a screenwriter involved in the editing process who wasn’t the director? In a similar vein to Loftin, I too argue that screenwriters can learn a lot about the use of visual literacy within screenwriting development to their benefit. But here, visual literacy is where an individual can become confused within the range of different definitions surrounding it, including Structuralism, Semiotics, Aesthetics/Arts, Visual Perception, Mental Imagery, Visual Rhetoric, Visual Syntax, Visual Grammar, Visual Communication, Visual Anthropology, Visual Communication Studies, Visual Design, Media Literacy and Media Studies (Burbank & Pett, 1983). From my experience, visual literacy is frequently taken for granted in its important contribution to both the screenplay and to the filmmaking process and I believe this is largely due to the convoluted definitions attributed to it, as identified above. Unfortunately, it has become a complex paradigm of conflated ideologies that date back to the inception of Structuralism, Semiotics and Linguistics as argued by

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Hawkes (2003, p. 10)3 through to the modern interpretation by John Debes, founder of the International Visual Literacy Association. Debes is thought to have coined the phrase as he presented the definition of Visual Literacy in 1969 as ‘vision-competencies’ where audiences see and simultaneously integrate the sensory experiences enabling a visually literate individuals to identify and interpret the presented stimuli. But this process of image choice in Debe’s sensory experience; we accept it as the more readily accepted industry-specific applications, such as: mise-en-scène, framing, ‘The Kuleshov effect’, lighting, editing and montage techniques, manipulating time and graphics. Art Departments regularly start the visual literacy process in the preproduction phase with the creation of mood-boards to establish the film’s ‘look’ for the director’s approvals. Screenwriters have also done this as well, consider the already mentioned Guy Maddin’s illustrated screenplay, in the book My Winnipeg. An annotated script by Guy Maddin, replete with photographs, collages, animations and other My Winnipeg acrana (2009), as an assortment of collage/bricolage and notes based on a much messier version as earlier identified by Millard. Filmmaker, Jean Luc Godard also prefers to work in this manner for his latest films, described more as illustrated treatments, or as filmmaker and academic Alex Munt (2016) describes them as ‘a hybrid document … in short a cut and paste job’ (p. 6) full of illustrations, cut-outs, scribblings, timelines, photographs and dialogue to coalesce narrative sequences, work on character and propositions for cinematography, together with images from cinema, art history, popular media and the internet. Godard uses it as a creative space to think through, explore and search for his idea—‘a scaffold for complex, yet coherent, shards of information interspersed within the broader narrative movements projected’ (p. 8). Again, the argument could be made that this approach is stepping on the proverbial toes of the filmmaker, but I argue, is it really that different from the screenwriters creating the character profiles? It’s just illustrated rather than annotated! To further expand on this notion of using artistic methods such as collage/bricolage, famed by twentieth century art movements within the filmmaking context is a similar proposition proffered via filmmaker, George Lucas identifies who describes the process like ‘layering’ as filmmakers (and, I contend, screenwriters) find a new workflow, which could resemble more of the artists’ concept of bricolage in production (Kelly & Parisi, 1997). Here, the filmmaker is likened (by Lucas) to resemble a painter, or an artist, by using layering to build their film. As Lucas states: ‘Filmmaking by layer means you write and direct and edit all at once. It’s much more like what you do when you write a story’ (quoted by Kelly & Parisi, 1997). Maras (2009) also confirms that in terms of a historical context, it is important to stay

3 Translation from Saussures’ Cours de Linguistiques Generales by Wade Baskin, Course in General Linguistics (1959). New York.

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open to the notion of what screenwriting could be, and therefore a prescriptive approach has been proven by history to be anything but linear, in that ‘screenwriting is thus a layered activity, drawing together skills, performance, concepts, experience and histories’ (p. 12).

Digital Story Composing: An Alternative Methodology for Script Development? Much of the process of digital story composing maintains a fundamental grasp of the skills encompassed within the discussion thus far. The filmmaker has a firm understanding of narrative structures, utilising audio and visual literacy and layering, briolage and other artistic strategies of integrating knowledge with technology, entwined within the methodology. To Start … The process of digital story composing commences in a fashion not dissimilar to creating a design, artwork or even in writing a screenplay… It begins with the finding of a strong image… A visual that invokes and engages the aesthetical requirements of being memorable, and to grab the audience’s attention, also for reasons in guiding the potential story directions. From there on, it involves a lot of research, looking for supporting footage and audio to connect story fragments via the audio/visual literacy process. This is similar to what filmmaker, Roberto Rossellini, describes that improvisational screenwriting requires as an ‘extraordinary amount of information’ (Rossellini & Apra, 1995, p. 115)—which one assumes is part of his research and not dissimilar to sourcing found footage to build a film—as he doesn’t believe in screenplays (or pre-writing) but rather sees cinema as an ‘oral tradition’ (p. 14) and this is true of digital story composing as well. Cataloguing The initial task of cataloguing and classifying the clips of found-footage aids in use within the praxis requirements for the implementation of a system to delineate the ‘writing’ from which to base the digital screenplay upon. Millard’s (2014) use of the term ‘accretion’ (pp. 72–73) seems to apply to this process of cataloguing, examining and placing the pieces of the jigsaw together thematically to encompass the ‘materials, emotions and desires as a way of giving expression to the world of the story’ (p. 181). To create a viable narrative via a systemic methodology, not unlike screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury in her approach to the screenplay for Robert Altman’s celebrated film Nashville (1975). In this film, the narrative was set over 5 story days where characters constantly overlapped in a kind of ‘mess that Bob loves’, says Tewkesbury as she reminisces (Dawson, 2013). Thus she organised a chart to map the characters’ days ‘… [it] was imperative to see every single character every single

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day so I laid out a grid’ (Dawson, 2013) thus the overlapping thematic structure was revealed for the characters via the process. ‘It’s like weaving a rug to get all the colours’ (Millard, 2014, p. 144). The systemisation and cataloguing of the found-footage clips for the purposes of creating a narrative will be unlike the normative workflow processes of editing in a typical film project. In the traditional filmmaking route, the film editor constructs the edit workflow via the use of a series of standardised documents—the screenplay, story boards, the shot list and continuity notes (which includes the directors’ comments on highlighted choices of shots from the day’s shoot, via use of log notes). None of these documents are useful here. Documentary filmmaking edit workflow processes are also similar but different, in that it follows the path of using a treatment, a pre-shooting script, a shot list, with the potential of continuity notes (dependant on budget and scope, where the footage is itemised and logged) and a post-shoot script where the structure is found. Many documentarians use an index card system to find a narrative structure with which to reveal their stories during the edit workflow—a similar process for the narrative screenwriters in structuring their screenplay. In this normative process, there is a story, a structure or a process for the editor to follow. The crucial point of departure here is that there is no traditional edit workflow process for this creative praxis. Digital story composing will guide the writing, and the notion of [traditional] screenwriting may still be useful to structure the efforts of the digital story composing process after or during the practice. I argue that the development of a cataloguing method is vital and necessary before any digital writing can commence, and the aforementioned catalogue, with its organisational structure, will be influential in the way the narrative concept is conceived. In observing theories pertaining to cataloguing of cultural objects that may be useful to digital story composing, the guiding principles highlighted within ‘Cataloguing Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images ’ (Baca et al., 2006) includes the importance of understanding the classification and indexing of topics (p. 2) and to be consistent with the establishment between the images, the groups and collections amongst the images (p. 3). This said, there could be numerous topics that can be cross-referenced within the project. Each classification could and, will lead to different story improvisations within the process of screenwriting. There are emerging technologies that one could use such as the new app Magisto (2019), which promotes its use of artificial intelligence (AI) to collate and distribute the best parts of one’s footage, including facial recognition software to aid in the organisation and editing within the praxis. Although I have tried this online software, its current shortcomings are that its web-based so the size of footage for gestating the media, limits the functionality of the outcome, but the notion of the software is still based on the same principles highlighted in the discussion above and could potentially be a great time-saver.

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Non-linear Editing within Digital Story Composing The non-linear editing is where much of the ‘writing’ will reside and it is not dissimilar to Margot Nash’s (2013) statement about artist Susan Norrie, on her process of creating art: ‘I like the idea of free falling into an unknown space’… Nash’s suggestion that it is in the ‘uncertainty’ of those ‘brave enough to enter this space’ (p. 151) where the rewards lie for those emboldened by this ‘discovery-driven’ praxis helps the artist to live the ‘felt experience’ and therefore gives the artist a ‘confidence’ and ‘desire’ to launch into these ‘unknown, uncertain spaces’ (p. 152). My interpretation of Nash’s ‘space’ is the use of the visual and auditory story elements within the edit workflows, and as Zyrd (2003) puts it: ‘I like that kind of proliferation and multiplication – opening out, and a kind of complexity and layering, layering, layering’ (p. 52). As non-linear [video] editing will be utilised in the process of constructing the exquisite corpse or colourful rug, as Millard put it (2014, p. 144), and in the examination of the story being constructed via post-production processes for the praxis, I again refer to Loftin’s notion of ‘Writing for the Cut’ (2018) where he also further expands the theories by film founders Kuleshov and Eisenstein (p. 85) and is applicable to the process. Here, I subscribe to Loftin’s notion that the act of cutting within the workflow is not an aberration but rather instituted to incite the aesthetics and lyrical possibilities that the audience can imbue with their own ‘imagination and subtext ’ (p. 92). He concludes with an analogy of poetry to that of the mechanical processes of ‘writing-for-the-cut’, whilst making the catharsis of image to sound and to story congruent, ‘alliteration, pattern, contrast, metaphor, paradox and rhyme are characteristics of both poetry and film editing’ (p. 91) and certainly all elements that will be used within the praxis. Here, Millard (2016) reminds us of what Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami states in that people do not listen to music to find a story nor look at abstract painting expecting to discover a narrative, but he also wisely counters that filmmaking is also heavily reliant on ‘too much storytelling’ (p. 147) and confirms Kiarostami statement that ‘the screenplay finds its final form as the film is being made’ (p. 146), a statement that strongly confirms the methodological approach of digital story composing. What I am proposing in this chapter involves a process of script development implemented via computer-based systems. I believe that these concepts are directly applicable via analogue systems as well, not unlike Maddin and Godards’ hybrid screenplays cited here, or that of the collage and bricoleurs as highlighted throughout this discussion. I encourage screenwriters and filmmakers alike to try writing a script using images first to explore the textural differences it can make to the process. Or you could even apply a soundtrack (or music accompaniment) to your character, not unlike film director, Sam Mendes who would make audio cassette recording of various music that he believed his film characters would listen to and he presents it to his actors as part of the rehearsal process (Lahr, 2018).

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Conclusion I propose that the use of digital story composing is illustrative of Batty and Baker’s (2018) assertion that ‘screenwriting and screen production are not mutually exclusive; they are and have to be recognised as discrete disciplines that generate their own research outcomes [and] artefacts’ (p. 76). I argue that it is clear there is no mutual exclusivity in these fields within this research and their relationship to the script development process, and in fact, the praxis presents the writing and production as innately intertwined and therefore has the ‘potential’ to lead practitioners down new roads of discovery and thus ‘Screenwriting can thus be used to teach things other than screenwriting’ (pp. 77–78). Therefore, as highlighted throughout this discussion, Millard (2014) has correctly identified that digital screenwriting can involve many methods: sustainable screenwriting, organizational improvisation or bricolage (p. 182) in that ‘Screenwriters, too, must be bricoleurs’ (p. 177). Consider as well that Maras encourages screenwriters and filmmakers to think about ways beyond the written words on the page of a screenplay, and finally, I also argue that is important to embrace the notion of ‘making do’ to ‘repurpose’ whatever we have ‘with a vengeance’, as in the tradition of any art form that embraces improvisation (p. 182), and to push the boundaries of what is expected or the established norms of script development.

References Batty, C., & Baker, J. D. (2018). Screenwriting as a mode of research, and the screenplay as a research artefact. In C. Batty & S. Kerrigan (Eds.), Screen production research: Creative practice as a mode of enquiry. Palgrave Macmillan. Batty, C., & McAulay, A. (2016). The academic screenplay: Approaching screenwriting as a research practice. National Association of writers in education, Writing in Practice (Vol. 2). https://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/current-wip-edition-2/articles/ the-academic-screenplay-approaching-screenwriting-as-a-research-practice.html#_ edn1. Accessed 8 Feb 2021. Berbank, L., & Pett, D. W. (1983). Visual literacy: An overview of theory and practice. Contributions to the Study of Visual Literacy IVLA Inc. Berkeley, L., (2011). Between chaos and control: a practice-based investigation into the creative process of an improvised micro-budget screen production. Australia: RMIT University. Cardwell, S., (2015). A sense of proportion: Aspect ratio and the framing of television space. Critical Studies in Television, 10(3), 126–130. https://doi.org/10.7227/ CST.10.3.7. Danizico, M. (2003). Controversial ‘Elephant’ Gus Van Sant attacks high school violence in indie flick. The Eagle. https://www.theeagleonline.com/article/2003/ 11/controversial-elephant. Accessed 23 Jan 2021. Dawson, N. (2013). “That’s the movie, that’s the kind of overlapping mess that bob loves”: Joan Tewkesbury on writing Nashville. Filmmaker Magazine. https://fil mmakermagazine.com/82780-thats-the-movie-thats-the-kind-of-overlapping-mess-

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that-bob-loves-joan-tewkesbury-on-writing-nashville/#.XpNIHVMzZTY. Accessed 12 Apr 2020. Elephant. (2003) [film]. Written and Directed by Gus Van Sant. HBO Films. Faces. (1968) [film]. Written and Directed by John Cassavetes. Falsetto, M. (2015). Conversation with Gus Van Sant. Rowman & Littlefield. Gerry. (2003) [film]. Written Casey Affleck, Matt Damon and Gus Van Sant and Directed by Gus Van Sant USA. Epsilon Motion Pictures, My Cactus, Tango Films. Hawkes, T. (2003). Structuralism and semiotics. Routledge. Horwatt, E. (2009). The work of art in the age of [CTRL]—C: Digital remixing and contemporary found footage practice on the Internet. https://search-proquest-com. ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au/docview/305044445/previewPDF/50587810C7294DB 3PQ/1?accountid=17095. Accessed 1 Mar 2020. Kelly, K., & Parisi, P. (1997). Beyond star wars: What’s next for George Lucas. Wired Magazine Issue 5.02. Conde Nast Publication. https://www.wired.com/1997/02/ fflucas/. Accessed 11 Apr 2020. Lahr, J. (2018, September 24). Sam Mendes’s directorial discoveries. The New Yorker Magazine. 2018 Issue. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/ 24/sam-mendes-directorial-discoveries. Accessed 1 Mar 2020. Leviathan. (2012) [film]. Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel. Arrete Ton Cinema. Loftin, G. (2018, March). Writing-for-the-cut: What can screenwriters learn from film editors about storytelling. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(1), 85–102. Publisher: Intellect. Macdonald, I. (2013). Screenwriting poetics and the screen idea. USA: Palgrave Macmillan. Macdonald, I. W. (2016). The object that is not yet an object: The screen idea. In por P. Cunha, S. Viegas, e M. C. Castro (Eds.), Atas do VI Encontro Anual da AIM (pp. 10–26). Accessed 3 Mar 2020. Maddin. G. (2009). My Winnipeg. An annotated script by Guy Maddin, replete with photographs, collages, animations and other My Winnipeg acrana. Coach House Books. Maras, S. (2009). Screenwriting: History. Wallpaper Press. Millard, K., (2008). Writing and improvising the digital essay Film: The book cake. Australia. ASPERA Conference, RMIT University. Millard, K. (2014) Screenwriting in the digital era. Palgrave Macmillan. Millard, K. (2016). The universe is expanding, keynote lecture. Journal of Screenwriting, 7 (3), 271–284. Munt, A. (2016). Film socialisme & the screenplay poetics of Late Godard. Screening the Past, no. 41 http://www.screeningthepast.com/2016/12/film-socialisme-andthe-screenplay-poetics-of-late-godard/. Accessed 24 Apr 2020. Murphy, J. J. (2007). Me and you and Memento and Fargo: How independent screenplays work. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. My Winnipeg. (2007) [film]. Directed by Guy Maddin. Canadia: Buffalo Gal Pictures, Documentary Channel, Everyday Pictures. Nash, M. (2013). Unknown spaces and uncertainty in film development. Journal of Screenwriting, 4(2). Nashville. (1975) [film]. Produced and Directed by Robert Altman. ABC Entertainment.

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Rosselini, R., & Apra, A. (1995). My method: Writings and interviews. Marsilio Publishing. Secrets and Lies. 1996 [film]. Written and Directed by Mike Leigh, Channel 4 films. Senje, S. (2017). Formatting the imagination: A reflection on screenwriting as a create practice. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3). http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezp roxy.lib.uts.edu.au/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=e903198d-170d-4f05-82de-71c 71f067ca2%40pdc-v-sessmgr03&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d. Accessed 29 Mar 2002. Shadows. (1958) [film]. Written and Directed by John Cassavetes, Lion International. Smith, H., & Dean, R. (2009). Practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts. Edinburgh University Press. Sowada, R. (2019). Tricked into truth: Why we fight and Frank Capra’s movement of the mind. University of Technology. https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/ 133281. Accessed 27 Nov 2019. Vera Drake. (2004) [film]. Written and Directed by Mike Leigh, Les Films Alain Sarde/Film Council. Wexman, V. (1980). The rhetoric of cinematic improvisation. Cinema Journal, 20(1). Special Issue on Film Acting. Autumn Edition (pp. 29–41). University of Texas Press. Zryd, M. (2003). Found footage film as discursive metahistory: Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99. The Moving Image, 3(2). http://www.jstor.org/stable/41167126?seq= 1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents. Accessed 6 Feb 2021.

Don’t Eat My Baby: Collisions, Development and Indigenous Consultation in the Australian Family Feature Film Screenplay, Dingo Rachel Landers

This chapter investigates the challenges of script development when adapting the YA novella by Jackie French for the Family Film Initiative launched by Screen Australia, the peak screen funding body in Australia. The appeal of the project—a story of how the first wild dog arrived in Australia from Asia and became a companion animal to humans—also created challenges requiring Indigenous consultation. As development proceeded additional challenges arose through the antithetical practices of documentary development (the team’s primary experience) and that of drama. A decision was made to apply a research methodology using scientific findings (including those that had inspired the novel) to shape the narrative development. Also critical was using these sources to re-imagine (because of the notorious Chamberlain case) the identity of the dingo for a broad family audience as that of a beloved and beneficial species, and to weave this into the narrative and character development. In this chapter I draw on my experiences as producer, director and script editor to provide an account of the script development process of Dingo. I first read French’s book Dingo: The Dog Who Conquered a Continent as chair of the Young People’s History panel for the NSW Premier’s History Awards. Of the 120 submissions, 2 of French’s books, Dingo and Pennies for Hitler made the short list of 3, an impressive, if unsurprising, achievement for this prolific author. While the latter book won, it was the story of the former R. Landers (B) University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_27

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I found most vivid and enduring. Dingo is, in a nutshell, a “what if” story inspired by the scientific discoveries made about Australia’s native dog in the late twentieth century. Unlike Australia’s unique fauna that evolved over 10s of 1000s of years the dingo arrived on Australia’s mainland relatively recently most probably from South East Asia. A DNA study of dingoes had conjectured that they were “so similar genetically that it [was] likely that all modern packs… descended from one pregnant female” (French, 2012, p. 154). For French, this hypothesis led to the question “how did she come to be here, one dog so long ago?” (French, 2012, p. 154). In her exploration to answer the above question, French worked with the most recent scientific findings available (Savolainen et al., 2004 p. 387): Archaeological data… indicates the arrival of dingoes to Australia sometime between 3,500 and 12,000. To reach Australia from the Asian mainland through the South East archipelago, regardless of route, a journey of at least 50 km over open ocean was necessary… (1,7). The dingo ancestors were therefore most probably introduced to Australia with the aid of humans in boats.

Out of this science French forged a story of how a young boy, Loa, along with a hated and hunted local wild dog are blown out to sea in a canoe. When the unlikely pair crash into a strange new land, they must work together to survive and make this place home. Everything about this novella seemed ripe for successful adaptation. It had a strong premise suitable for a feature film drama. It had a compelling hook, an adventurous and obstacle-strewn journey and an intense relationship between a child and a dog. All of these elements indicated the promise of audience engagement. It had the potential to be both a four-quadrant family film and highly cinematic, set between the lush tropical landscapes and white beaches of South East Asia (monkeys, terrifying giant boars) then crossing the ring of fire to the much more ancient continent of the Kimberley’s (Teichert, 1959)—of vast red cliffs veering up from the blue ocean, saltwater crocodiles, kangaroos and monstrous perenties. It also featured a dog—the one element in an uncertain screen feature financing landscape that was a strong indicator of box office success (Wakeman, 2019). At a deeper level it communicated a powerful story about strangers—a lost boy and an apex predator—who managed to adapt, survive and thrive in and not destroy a very different culture and landscape. A positive and joyful story of migration. In short, what could possibly go wrong in the script development process? Almost everything it seems. During the development period there were a series of discursive collisions that the creative team encountered, many of which could only be solved through practices of documentary development often antithetical to drama development practices in Australia. These collisions circulated around a series of issues—the interpretation of Indigenous protocols, the gulf between development practices, the limits and implicit bias of the hero’s journey story

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structure, which is often unquestionably favoured by film agencies, distributors and financiers (Hambly, 2020), and audience perception all of which impacted on how the screenplay changed for the better. Some issues seemed very particular to Australia. Others, such as how successful documentary approaches to development may be applied to drama, developing tools to challenge the limitations and bias implicit in the hero’s journey, and questions of audience perception, seemed to have resonances that made them relevant to a broader discussion about script development research.

Collision No. 1: Evolution vs Creation At the beginning of the development process none of the discursive collisions outlined above were detectable. My company had optioned the novella when the Family Film Initiative was announced (Screen Australia, 2015): Storm Boy… Babe… Paws… Red Dog… Paper Planes… Oddball… Australians make great family films that often find bigger theatrical audiences and have longer marketing tails than our other films. In an effort to develop a new wave of family films for local and international markets Screen Australia has developed [this] Initiative.

This new funding tranche was generated specifically in response to the success of family films in comparison to the paucity of these films, less than 3%, being submitted to the agency for screen development. The initiative attracted 112 applications of which 12, including Dingo, were selected for shortlisting. It was at this stage the first major collision occurred—albeit in slow motion. The criteria for the shortlisted projects were: “The quality of the family film (50%). The experience of the writer or team (25%). The viability of the project under a $7 million budget relative to its potential audience (25%)”. However, as Dingo included Indigenous characters, the team needed to also be cognisant of appropriate Indigenous consultation as detailed in Pathways and Protocols: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Working with Indigenous People, Culture and Concepts (Janke, 2008). This guide along with its earlier iterations had been an invaluable resource during the development of documentaries I had made that included Indigenous subjects and issues Whitey’s Like Us (Landers, 1999), Link-Up (Landers, 2004) A Northern Town (Landers, 2008). Our focus at this point was upon section “3.2 Initial Research and project development… key considerations” for drama production. These included: “was the film based on real events or real people”? No, in the case of Dingo. “Are the Indigenous characters leads”? (Janke, 2008, p. 21). Again, the answer was “no” as Loa the protagonist hailed from the area now known as South East Asia as did the dog. These characters human and animal dominated 80% of the narrative with Loa only meeting an Indigenous girl Arunna in the 3rd act and then her community on the final pages. Issues that were relevant included how the Indigenous community and characters would be represented once they were encountered

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by the protagonist Loa. The guide lays out clearly that filmmakers needed to be aware of “issues of authenticity, representation and cultural integrity” and that consultation should be sought (Janke, p. 21). Given the complexities depicting a community set so far in the past the team articulated the need for and the intent to obtain high level Indigenous consultation in the original application to Screen Australia. While the project was finally one of three selected for script development financing there were a series of complications én route which led to the decision to seek an above-the-line Indigenous collaborator rather than a fee-based consultant leading to partnership with Indigenous producer Jodie Bell. These complications provided an illustration of how fraught issues of Indigenous representation in Australian film can be—the result of a road paved by examples of lack of protocol by non-Indigenous filmmakers stretching from the 1930s Pituri (Chauvel, 1936) to the “magical” Aboriginals (Hogan, 2010) in Australia (Luhrmann, 2008). A few weeks before the shortlist workshop the Dingo team were contacted by an executive from Screen Australia stating there were concerns about the source material for the proposed adaptation and that the white author had inappropriately generated her story from culturally sensitive Indigenous creation material. The Pathways guide indicated that such material could refer to “secret or sacred” heritage material (Janke, 2008, p. 25). Furthermore, the book was regarded as offensive amongst the Indigenous community. We were familiar with critical issues surrounding culturally sensitive Indigenous material from experiences in our documentary practice and while we understood the concerns surrounding cultural appropriation those issues didn’t seem to be applicable in this case. Such sacred/community stories could include dreamtime stories such as those about the rainbow serpent, how various marsupials got their tails/spots/colours/pouches and certainly many about dingoes incorporated “into creation and “dreaming” knowledge” (AMRRIC, 2018). Again, these descriptions and criteria did not seem to apply to any of the material in the book. Nor could we locate any reference regarding the offensive reputation surrounding the book. What we did find was consensus from Indigenous community members, writers, cultural advisors, authors, and academics accepting the evidence of the archaeological record that pointed to the relatively recent arrival of the dingo and that such information was distinct to that of sacred/community/culturally protected stories about dingoes. The team decided to obtain more information with the nominated advisors at the 12-team shortlist workshop. The external industry script consultants at the workshop leant a great deal of support to Dingo as having strong story bones to adapt into a compelling family film. However, it was also clear that there was a much bigger concern about the narrative from the agency executives hosting the workshop. It was argued by a number of white executives that the DNA inspired “single pregnant female dingo” idea situated the narrative as an Indigenous creation story

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one that we did not (nor the book’s author) have any right to tell. The comparative example was given was about a team who recently attempted to adapt a 1974 children’s book The Nargun and the Stars by the white author Patricia Wrightson. This tale which had already been adapted for TV in 1977 and 1981 told the story of a white orphaned boy who encounters a variety of dreamtime creatures many drawn from the sacred stories of the Gurnai/Kurnai people. While Wrightson won the children’s book of the year award for it in 1974, over time, this text and others books she had authored that had clearly reworked culturally sensitive Indigenous material became, according to her publisher, “more prone… to be branded exploitation and misappropriation of Aboriginal culture” (The Guardian, 2010). While we as a team felt that Wrightson example was one of inappropriate appropriation we did not believe that the comparison to our project was valid. Despite this we seemed to be at an impasse and that the script development would not proceed. A week later our team received a call. It was Screen Australia. There had been a mistake. Dingo: The Dog Who Conquered the Continent was not the offending book. The story was not a creation story nor a culturally sensitive one and could receive funding. Despite the clarity of the protocols document, it was clear how complex and contradictory interpretations of this document by outsiders can be. In hindsight, it would have benefited the project to attach an above the line Indigenous creative in the very early application process. This was something that was addressed immediately upon receiving development financing. The Screen Australia family film screenplay development funding included money for an initial research trip to the Kimberley and modest fees for the producers and a significant fee for the scriptwriter who had been hired to adapt the screenplay ready for market attachment. In this financing structure—which placed the writer at the centre of script development rather than encouraging a collaborative team approach—lay the inadvertent origins of the second collision during script development.

Collision No. 2: Documentary vs Drama The most overt distinctions between the screen agency funded development of drama versus documentary in Australia involve time and money. In the majority of cases development funding for documentary is much lower than that of drama and it tends to be one-off funding in which the research, writing and fundamental pre-production building blocks, such as identifying subjects, establishing access, sourcing archive, budgeting and scheduling, commence. In this process the writer (who can also be the director and or producer) is seldom regarded as the centre of the development process. Most independent documentary practitioners view and utilise development funding as a one-shot financial injection to get the project into production. All those in the team and all the material, generated, written or otherwise, are directed towards that

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goal. In general, the time between documentary development and production is brief, 6–18 months and there is a strong sense that they are inextricably linked—there are very few professional documentary projects that languish in development limbo. They tend to be commissioned, financed, greenlit or failing this… abandoned. This is not the case of the funded development processes pertaining to feature film drama in Australia which could involve multiple development cycles of various drafts and take anywhere between seven to ten years on average (Padula, 2007) between early development funding and release (Robinson, 2020). These distinctions played out during the script development. The producing team, all of whom had substantial documentary credits focused on research to provide ballast for the dramatic engine of the screenplay which was viewed as a working document evolving in the service of the final production. We were working with a writer with substantial drama credits who preferred to work solo using the imagination rather than facts to shape the screenplay. There is no right or wrong way in either approach, but they were and are difficult to reconcile. The producing team mapped Loa’s and the dingo Oola’s sea journey from the islands of Indonesia to the giant ocean sand bar Cartier Island in the Indian Ocean to what is now known as Prince Regent National Park in the Kimberley region. One of the purposes was to clarify the stakeholders of these locations with whom we would need to work. We were also spending significant time with dingo experts and dingoes themselves identifying what makes them so distinct from domesticated dogs—their intelligence, speed, problem solving ability and temperament (Ballard & Wilson, 2019). Almost none of this material was incorporated into the script development by the writer who was reluctant to be hemmed in by research. In addition, what had not been addressed were structural problems in the book that had simply moved across into the screenplay. Much of the emotional glue of the French novella came from the interior monologues of both boy and dog— none of which could be “heard” in the screenplay. The book had little in the way of overt dramatic structure or clear transformational character arcs, and these remained chronically underdeveloped. While these dramatic problems had been identified and narrative solutions proposed in the by the entire team in an initial taut 10-page treatment, during the writing of the screenplay a number of these key collaborative decisions were reversed based on the writer’s individual instincts. Again, while such outcomes were perhaps the habits and expectations of the different development practices of documentary and drama such differences can be extremely problematic particularly as they were exacerbated by distinct approaches to narrative structure. Almost all written aspects of documentary development are focussed on the generation of short highly structured documents in lieu of a detailed script. The logline, the synopsis, the one page and the 10-to-20-page treatment are also often produced through a process that is iterative and intensely collaborative. These short documents provide a clear structural spine for the entire team to work from and if departed from represents a solid base to articulate the reasons for

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the change. In this case, structure was not paramount to the creative process of the drama writer we had hired. What is fascinating in terms of script development was that this Australian writer was not particularly unique in the way they approached screenplay development instinctively and individually rather than structurally and collaboratively. Joan Saures, the US born script editor and writer who was one of the key drivers of the Family Film Initiative had written extensively about an aversion to structure she had identified amongst Australian screenwriters: “I find too many writers here don’t understand that structure is what actually gives your story its shape and its momentum and engages the audience” (Saures, 2008, p. 2). For Saures, this aversion was partly to do with 1970s art house origins of independent Australian cinema in which, “Hollywood became a dirty word here and a lot of filmmakers threw out the baby with the bathwater… {motivated by the} idea that film structure is some form of cultural imperialism” (Saures, 2008, p. 2). This dislike or distain was also identified amongst a majority of Australian feature writers in the journal article Cultural influences in screenwriting: Australia vs. Hollywood (Hambly, 2020). Avoiding working within a structural framework or a least a shared and accepted vocabulary of things like inciting incidents, turning points, rising and falling action or shared ideas about how to navigate amongst the existing approaches to screenplay structure makes it difficult to reach common ground. This resulted in a lack of “unity in collaboration” (Batty et al., 2017, p. 229) and a script that was not ready to take to a distributor. This divided approach to the screenplay’s development would not have been so problematic if there were the potential, as had recently been the case, of receiving several rounds of feature film development funding without market attachment but with continuing years of funding cuts to Australian government screen agencies (George, 2018) this was no longer a reality. The complexity and range of script development practice has been increasingly debated and explored in a range of research publications. Many alternative pathways and insights are proposed to challenge “entrenched and even dated notions around the script development” (Batty et al., 2017, p. 233). Margot Nash provides a fascinating alternative to early-stage script development advocating risk and exploration rejecting the rigidity and rules of market driven development practice (Nash, 2014). Other practitioners, theorists and scholars such as Kathryn Millard (2014), propose alternative forms of development that are not “tethered… to commercial imperatives” (Batty et al., 2017, p. 235). While these offer potentially liberating development pathways for the future they can be hard to reconcile with the commercial realities of hiring a professional writer and having to work within the contractual constraints required by an agent and funding agencies. While “script development clearly means many things to many people” (Taylor & Batty, 2016, p. 215) what is almost unanimous in scholarly script development research is placing the writer and the writer’s “vision” at the centre of that process and practice. As noted above this is seldom the case in documentary development practice where most

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often the story is at the centre of development and the collaborators involved work together to bring this to fruition. It is interesting to contemplate what a similar script development process in screen fiction that decentred the writer in favour of intense collaboration would look like. Stephen Cleary articulated an extraordinary insight regarding this possibility in his recorded lecture series Aristotelian Wisdom for Screenwriters (Cleary, 2012, part 1). Cleary discovered that the way he had been working as a script advisor with writers was fundamentally flawed. While the process was emotionally intense and rewarding, it rarely, in Cleary’s view, improved the work. He came to feel that part of the problem about the way he was approaching script development process was, “because I placed them, the writer, at the centre of the process” (10:19). He came to feel that they were “developing ourselves and not the story… it was all about us, not about how to improve what was on the page” (10:34). Cleary was also dismayed by the functionality and rigidity of many “how to” script development texts and wanted to find a place where the poles of writer centric script development and technical jobbing craft elements met. In seeking an alternative, he returned to Aristotle’s Poetics which advocated the idea of the pre-existence of form in which stories exist apart from us and thus it is a writer’s task is to discover, not create, a story. This changed the way Cleary worked. He felt it was critical to separate the artist from the art and this fundamentally shifted his approach to script development. Cleary felt strongly that if the writer was separate from their work then “their relationship to the story is not the final authority on it… they do not, in a creative sense, have ownership of it” (31:20). Cleary asked, “what if it wasn’t their story” and answered, “doesn’t it belong to all of us?” (Cleary, 2012, part 1. 32:17). We agreed from this point to approach the development of this feature film drama as we would a documentary by placing the story at the centre of the development and to focus on creating the best circumstances to discover this story. Working as we all had in non-fiction for years we were used to creating highly cinematic screen content on low or limited budgets with small, highly skilled collaborative crews often in very difficult physical environments. Building on our hands-on collaborative practice the team resolved to let research and practical realities unearth the narrative. In addition, we would proceed with development in a non-hierarchised way which is reflective of the horizontal rather than vertical view of collaborative creative practice that dominates documentary (you do not see too many “A film by …” credit lines in documentary). We would also maintain focus on the audience, something we were used to because of the speed and connection between development and production in documentary practice. We hired a screenwriter who would embrace this unconventional approach and while it was challenging securing additional development funding without a distributor attached, we obtained a modest amount from Film Victoria. The undertaking ahead was to start again on the screenplay as collaborators confronting the next series of discursive collisions. Unlike the first two which

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were unexpected these were ones we had a strong sense of—a set of major narrative problems that needed to be solved. These circulated around three issues (1) How to represent pre-history communities and characters (2) The disconnect between the hero’s journey with its emphasis on return and the non-returning migrant story in Dingo, something we had to address as it so dominates the current commercial film financing market and (3) The realities of audience reception of the dingo that is for ever spliced together with the notorious Azaria Chamberlain case. Each of these would be broached from strategies of documentary development practice.

Final Collisions Fictional drama depictions of pre-history characters do not tend to represent a nuanced cinematic canon from which to build up a relatable story for a contemporary audience—from 1,000,000 years BC (Chaffey & Carreras, 1966), to Clan of the Cave Bear (Chapman & Sayles, 1986), to Early Man (Parks et al., 2018), the distant past is frequently represented as clumsy, hairy and monosyllabic. Furthermore, many fiction films depicting Indigenous communities, for example Emerald Forest (Boorman & Pallenberg, 1985), The Mission (Joffe & Bolt, 1986), Apocalypto (Gibson & Safinia, 2006) and The New World (Malick, 2005) have a tendency to reduce the characters to simplistic emotions and noble/violent savage tropes. There are notable exceptions in which character representations in these setting were complex and nuanced such as Ten Canoes (De Heer & Djigirr, 2006) Moana (Clements et al., 2016), and Tanna (Butler et al., 2015). These screen productions succeeded in connecting the past to the present in fresh and authentic ways through reference to combinations of archaeological research (Griffiths, 2018) and/or community consultation. In addition to our continuing community consultation during script development there was a continued focus on sourcing recent academic research to provide authentic dramatic building blocks for both plot and character. The two archaeological research publications of most significance to the screenplay development were Dingoes and Aboriginal social organisation in Holocene Australia (Balme & O’Connor, 2016) and Who let the Dogs In (Fillios & Taçon, 2016). Each of these texts provided analysis that that after their introduction to Australia, dingoes became rapidly absorbed into Indigenous community life as companions (in South East Asia they were hunted for food), and that “the adoption of the dingo as a new and effective hunting technology by women for the capture of small game may have increased prey encounter rates and women’s access to meat consumption… ‘Women’s best Friend’ may be a more appropriate term for dingoes” (Balme & O’Connor, 2016, p. 780). These research findings had a major effect upon the both the plot and the development of the main female character Arunna allowing her to be reimagined as an explorer and inventor—a character who could recognise and harness the power of a hitherto unknown animal. It also enabled us to re-envision our

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young male protagonist as nurturer and protector allowing the introduction of Arunna to take up some of the critical dramatic action driving the narrative in the second part of the second act. It provided much needed depth to the characterisation of the lead female dingo as antagonist and mentor to Loa for whom escape to the Australian Continent is a life-saving consequence but who is still poised between wildness and domestication. These ideas also gave us the critical complexity needed for the second turning point and the dramatic tension, high stakes the screenplay needed to catapult the audience into the third act, namely, the collision between the increasingly antithetical needs and wants of Arunna, Loa and Oola. In parallel to the discoveries above was the collision between the narrative of the non-returning migrant and that of Campbell’s monomythic hero’s journey that lays such critical emphasis on the return (with the elixir) of the albeit transformed hero to the ordinary world. It is well-established that post Star Wars (Lucas, 1977) this structure came to dominate almost all of fiction screenplay theory in the West (Yorke, 2014, p. 53) and thus has had great influence on screen agencies, and distributors. Because of its ubiquity we felt we needed to develop a strategy in the script development to address the issue. While documentary makers are committed to creating well-constructed stories, ethical obligations to tell the truth along with a broad range of content and modes—including the reflexive, poetic, observational, expositional, participatory, performative (Nichols, 1991) they rarely align to the structural rigidity of the hero’s journey prescriptions. In fiction, while there are variations of the hero’s journey almost all “how to” theorists espouse the innate essential nature of this structure. Yorke asserts that what “Campbell first articulated and Vogler popularised is nothing more than physics, a chain of cause and effect with beginning, middle and end seeking symmetry… It’s a natural byproduct of how we order the world” (Yorke, p. 226). One can comprehend why many screenwriters might find such ahistorical and apolitical assertions as unsubstantiated and seek to avoid structure altogether. There are surprisingly few challenges amongst screenwriting researchers to the assertions that hero’s journey is hard wired into all humanity. There are some who will take specific aim, for example, of the faux feminism of Disney heroines (Koushik & Reed, 2018, p. 237) predicated on notions of “universalism” that are in fact white and male or those who argue for a more nuanced, personal and collaborative approach into incorporating mythology into screenwriting (Clayton, 2007, p. 208). However, the most robust and wide-ranging scholarly criticism emerges from fantasy fiction research. Brian Attebery, in his (2014) monograph Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth attacks Campbell and fellow monomyth makers (Segal, 2004) with vigour. One of the things he highlights, which is little articulated in the screen industry, is how racist and misogynistic Campbell was and how much this impacted on how he generated his highly flawed ideas about story structure. Campbell had no issue making statements such as “there can be no doubt how unilluminated the stark-naked Australian savages

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may seem” but without question their ceremonies reflect the “great themes, the ageless archetypes and their operation upon the soul remain the same” (Campbell, pp. 141–142). For Attebery, Campbell’s theories were simply a part of patriarchal and colonial mindsets of the nineteenth and twentieth century obsessed with generating monolithic, unifying, pseudo-scientific theories. “The problem with Campbell’s monomyth as an analytical tool is that it always works because it simplifies every story to the point where nothing but the monomyth is left. It ignores the many mythic stories that do not have questing heroes, and it leaves out the culturally defined values and symbols that make each tradition unique” (Attebery, 2014, p. 108). Attebery further argues that, “Myths are not timeless; like the individuals who perform them, they reflect historical processes, and they change over time as the cultures that maintain them change. They are not universal, for the full significance of a myth depends on a web of associations and social interactions shared by storyteller and listeners” (2014, p. 20). A pattern of storytelling Campbell also excluded were those told by women and children in the form of folk lore or fairy tales. Stephen Cleary in a 2019 writing workshop observed this pattern of exclusion was particularly problematic when attempting to tell stories about women or characters without power (Cleary, 2019). Most protagonists in fairy tales never return but are transformed at the end of the story and transported into a different existence/realm—from Cinderella to the Ugly Duckling. This structure of permanent transportation and transformation is most aligned to the tale of migration and, unlike Campbell’s circular journey from ordinary world and back, is a far more common journey pattern of homo sapiens. These important insights resolved the issue of our non-returning protagonist Loa. By viewing the structure of the final act as more aligned to that of certain fairy tales than the hero’s victorious return we constructed a satisfactory conclusion, elevating aspects of wonder, transformation and transportation into a better world to replace the need of return anticipated by a film audience. The final collision in the screenplay development centred around the reputational issues and potential negative reception of our canine heroine Oola. All the anthropomorphising in the world would still not necessarily counter the association of our dingo lashed to the real-life Azaria Chamberlain case. Ignoring or imagining it could have no impact seemed to be unlikely. Even if the facts of the case in which 2-month-old Azaria was taken by one of the wild dingoes at the base of Uluru (Ayers Rock) in 1980 and her mother Lindy enduring years of false accusations of having murdered her baby are unknown by the public, what endures is the catch phrase “A dingo ate my baby” also falsely attributed to Lindy Chamberlain. The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Family Guy, Tropic Thunder, 28 Days, Two and Half Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Modern Family, The Office and even The Rugrats Movie are just a few examples of popular screen stories that feature this line. In one aspect this was relatively easy to address. As one reviewed the many pop culture references to babies and dingoes it was clear that almost every single one is a textual or

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verbal and not visual. It was the word dingo that elicited the association with the catchphrase and that for most people outside of Australia there is probably fairly vague notion of what a dingo in fact looked like. This led to the decision to change the title from Dingo to A Dog and Her Boy. Of much greater significance was that the case contributed to current perceptions about and threats to the existence of dingoes in Australia and this was something we needed to be cognisant of in illuminating and exploring the character development and arc of our dingo Oola. Despite having taken up occupancy in Australia 4000 or more years ago predating the golden age of Ancient Greece and well before the birth of Christ, in many areas of government legislation the dingo is not classified as native to Australia. It is poorly protected and frequently regarded as a feral pest—hunted, poisoned and facing extinction. This extraordinary animal—the sole domesticated animal deeply inculcated into Indigenous culture for thousands of years—is currently the centre of a contentious scientific debate as to whether its taxonomic status is that of a separate species (distinct from dogs and wolves) Canis Dingo or not (Jackson et al., 2017). Such a debate has serious implications and in Western Australia’s Biodiversity Conservation Act, “Dingoes are currently classed as unprotected native fauna and a declared pest” and thus can be killed anywhere in the state (DBCA, 2018). This is much to the dismay of many Indigenous communities and wildlife sanctuaries dedicated to the protection and breeding of pure-bred dingoes around the country. Dingoes are often maligned as vermin as were Aboriginals by early colonists (Australian Geographic, 2017). These facts deeply influenced every aspect of how Oola the dingo was represented in the script development. Building from dingo research (Cairns & Wilton, 2016) we took great care to ensure that all the unique characteristics of the dingo species (Koungoulos & Fillios, 2020) were evident in the unfolding action and that the character of Oola challenged stereotypes, was in harmony with her new environment and generated a strong empathetic sense in the audience that she and her kind must be protected. In many ways, allowing these twenty-first-century issues to influence the depiction of her fight for survival could help us more strongly connect the narrative to a contemporary audience and incorporate this subtext as a subtle call to action. Documentary practice is often motivated by social justice and we see this is a critical element of our audience engagement in our distribution strategy. In a country that has had more animal extinctions in the last 200 years than any other country in the world (Foley, 2020) the development of the film is finally informed by a real world need to stop yet another extinction event from happening.

Conclusion The collective experiences in the case study of the script development of Dingo would suggest that there is room to review and revise government funded drama script development practices in Australia drawing on many of the

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successful practical strategies manifest in documentary development practice. If script development is a “wicked problem” (Batty et al., 2018, p. 153) incorporating documentary development strategies into traditional script development may offer some more solutions that merit further exploration. At the very least seeking to strengthen the connection of feature film drama writers and teams to the realities and practicalities of production at every stage of development (rather than having writers work in a vacuum) would potentially help bolster a projects engagement with audiences and improve box office results exponentially. Other possibilities could include exploring script development processes that place the story and not the writer at the centre of script development promoting intense collaboration amongst creatives along with locating the tools and fresh perspectives that would support the writer in this different approach. It could also include investigating the utility of shorter more iterative documents in script development such as treatments/scriptments and interrogating the impact of research informing narrative and creating a shared awareness and language about story structure ideas from which teams could explore, challenge and/or adapt. Of most importance is the urgent need of a much broader awareness in the screen industry, particularly amongst screen agencies and distributors, that promoting ideas about the universality of the hero’s journey carry with them disturbing elements of implicit bias and prejudice often counter to the values of equity and diversity that such organisations purport to promote.

References A northern town. (2008). Landers, R. (Writer, director). Pony Films. About Us. (2020). Robinson, J. Danger Close. Lunar Pictures. https://www.lunarp ictures.com.au/about Animal Management in Rural and Remote Indigenous Communities. AMRRIC. (2018). Dingo. https://www.amrric.org/?s=Dingo Apocalypto. (2006). Gibson, M. (Director, writer). Safinia, F. (Writer). Icon Productions. Attebery, B. (2014). Stories about stories: Fantasy and the remaking of myth. Oxford University Press. Australia. (2008). Luhrmann, B. (Director, co-writer, co-producer). Bazmark Films Australia. Ballard, J. W. O., & Wilson, L. A. B. (2019). The Australian dingo: Untamed or feral? Frontiers of Zoology, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12983-019-0300-6 Balme, J., & O’Connor, S. (2016). Dingoes and aboriginal social organisation in Holocene Australia. Journal of Archaeological Science. Reports, 7 , 775–781. Batty, C., O’Meara, R., Taylor, S., Joyce, H., Burne, P., Maloney, N., Poole, M., & Tofler, M. (2018). Script development as a ‘wicked problem’. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.9.2.153_1 Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc. 8.3.22_1

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Burton, A. (2017, March 20). Outcast: the plight of the dingo. Australian Geographic. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2017/03/ the-plight-of-the-dingo/ Cairns, K. M., & Wilton, A. N. (2016). New insights on the history of canids in Oceania based on mitochondrial and nuclear data. Genetica, 144, 553–565. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10709-016-9924-z Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton University Press. Clan of the cave bear. (1986). Chapman, M. (Director). Sayles, J. (Writer). The Guber Peters Company. Clayton, S. (2007). Mythic structure in screenwriting. New Writing, 4(3), 208–223. https://doi.org/10.2167/new571.0 Cleary, S. (2012, March 21). Aristotle and Plato + catharsis. (Part. 1.) In Aristotelian wisdom for modern scriptwriters. The University of Melbourne. https://blogs.uni melb.edu.au/vcamcm-direct/2012/03/21/podcast-aristotelian-wisdom-for-mod ern-scriptwriters/. Accessed 10 Oct 2020. Cleary, S. (2019). Gender and power (Workshop). www.stephencleary.org Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions. DBCA. (2018). Government of Western Australia. Biodiversity conservation ant and regulations. https:// www.dbca.wa.gov.au/biodiversity-conservation-act Early man. (2018). Park, N. (Director). Burton, M., & Higginson, J. (Writers). Aardman Animations BFI. Eccleshare, J. (2010, May 10). Patricia Wrightson obituary. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2010/may/09/patricia-wrightson-obituary The emerald forest. (1985). Boorman, J. (Director). Pallenberg, R. (Writer). Christel Films. Fillios, M. A., & Taçon, P. S. C. (2016). Who let the dogs in? A review of the recent genetic evidence for the introduction of the dingo to Australia and implications for the movement of people. Journal of Archaeological Science, 7 , 782–792. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2016.03.001 Foley, M. (2020, July 20). Why is Australia a global leader in wildlife extinctions? Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/why-is-austra lia-a-global-leader-in-wildlife-extinctions-20200717-p55cyd.html French, J. (2012). Dingo: The dog who conquered a continent. Angus & Robertson. George, S. (2018). Why Screen Australia backs the films it does. Screen Australia. https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen-news/2018/02-14-why-screen-aus tralia-backs-the-films-it-does Griffiths, B. (2018). Deep time dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia. Black Inc. Hambly, G. (2020). Cultural influences in screenwriting: Australia vs Hollywood. Journal of Screenwriting, 11(1), 45–61. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc_00012_1 Hogan, J. (2010). Gendered and racialised discourses of national identity in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. Journal of Australian Studies, 34(1), 63–77. https://doi. org/10.1080/14443050903522069 Jackson, S. M., Groves, C. P., Fleming, P. J. S., Aplin, K. P., Eldridge, M. D., Gonzalez, A., & Helgen, K. M. (2017). The wayward dog: Is the Australian native dog or dingo a distinct species? Zootaxa, 4317 (2), 201–224. https://doi.org/10. 11646/zootaxa.4317.2.1 Janke, T. (2008). Pathways and protocols: A filmmaker’s guide to working with Indigenous people, culture and concepts. Screen Australia. Australian Government.

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Koungoulos, L., & Fillios, M. (2020). Hunting dogs down under? On the Aboriginal use of tame dingoes in dietary game acquisition and its relevance to Australian prehistory. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 58, 101–146. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101146 Koushik, K., & Reed, A. (2018). Star wars: The last jedi, beauty and the beast, and Disney’s commodification of feminism: A political economic analysis. Journal of Social Sciences, 7 , 237–258. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7110237 Millard, K. (2014). Screenwriting in a digital era. Palgrave Macmillan. Missing. (2004). Link up. Episode 2. Landers, R. (Writer, director, producer). Pony Films. The mission. (1986). Joffe, R. (Director). Bolt, R. (Writer). Goldcrest Films. Moana. (2016). Clements, R., & Musker, J. (Directors). Bush, J. (Writer). Walt Disney Pictures. Nash, M. (2014). Developing the screenplay: Stepping into the unknown. In C. Batty (Ed.), Screenwriters and screenwriting (pp. 97–112). Palgrave Macmillan. The new world. (2005). Malick, T. (Director, writer). First Foot Films. Sarah Green Film. Sunflower Productions. Nichols, B. (1991). Representing reality: Issues and concepts in documentary. Indiana University Press. One million years B.C. Chaffey, D. (Director). Carreras, M. (Writer). (1966). Hammer Film Productions. Padula, M. (2007). Case program. Reviewing the Australian film industry. Australia and New Zealand School of Government. Pituri (Uncivilised). (1936). Chauvel, Charles (Director, producer). Written by: Expeditionary Films. Savolainen, P., Leitner, T., Wilton, A. N., Matisoo-Smith, E., & Lundeberg, J. (2004). A detailed picture of the origin of the Australian dingo, obtained from the study of mitochondrial DNA. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS, 101(33), 387–390. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0401814101 Saures, J. (2008). Where Australian scripts fall down. Part 3. Eyes Wired Open Blogspot. http://eyeswiredopen.blogspot.com/2008/01/heres-second-transc ript-of-my-three.html Screen Australia. (2015, October 3). Program guidelines: Family film initiative. https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen-news/2015/10-06-call-for-scr ipts-family-film-initiative Segal, R. A. (2004). Introductory essay. In O. Rank, The myth of the birth of the hero: A psychological exploration of myth (pp. vii–xxxviii). Johns Hopkins University Press. Star wars. (1977). Lucasfilm Ltd. Lucas, G. (Director, writer). Tanna. (2015). Contact Films. Butler, M., Dean, B. (Directors, writers). Collee, J. (Writer). Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: Perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing, 13(2), 204–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1120314 Teichert, C. (1959). Australia and Gondwanaland. Geologische Rundschau, 47 , 562– 590. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01800675 Ten Canoes. (2006). De Heer, M., & Djigirr, P. (Directors). De Heer, R. (Writer). Palace Films.

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The Application of an ‘Eternal Dance’ Methodology in the Development of an Original Screenplay Rose Ferrell

Introduction Screenwriting researcher Steven Maras (2009) identified an ‘object problem’ in the field of screenwriting research when he noted that the screenplay is not an ‘“object” in any straightforward sense: it is a practice’ (p. 11). Maras went on to propose seven trajectories of screenwriting research, the seventh being ‘practice-based’ (Maras, 2011, p. 278). This chapter outlines creative practice research undertaken by a practitioner-researcher which proposes a new approach to the development of screen works. The approach is conceptualized as a dance, and from it, a methodology arises. The name given to this modelmethodology is the ‘Eternal Dance’. The eternal dance is a picture metaphor which can be used to represent screenplay structure and dramatic design. This justifies its description as a model. However, in practice it is less a model and more an approach to development because of the methodology implied which produces the model. The term ‘eternal dance’ refers to a set of codes and conventions through which the model is drawn; the model is, in effect, a form of visual shorthand. The drawings which are outcomes of the methodology reflect the screenwriter’s work back to themselves, and in this way open up the dramatic design to interrogation. Being image-based, the model pushes the writer to visualize R. Ferrell (B) Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Joondalup, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_28

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the drama more precisely. The discoveries made enliven the material because of the way images bring up new information and consolidate what is already known to the writer. The eternal dance is created by the writer in the flow of practice according to the needs of the project at that point in time. Therefore, the methodology offers a practice-led response to queries the writer has about their text. This chapter describes the features of the model and also its accompanying methodology. In closing, the chapter provides some reflections on its use in practice.

Script Development as a Field As Taylor and Batty have claimed, there is a ‘significant gap in academic and industry literature about script development as both a phenomenon and a practice’ (Taylor & Batty, 2016, p. 205). While in 1997 Claudia Sternberg proposed three stages in the life of screenplays, these being ‘property’, ‘blueprint’ and ‘reading material’ (Sternberg, 1997, pp. 48–59) stages, I have argued elsewhere (Ferrell, 2017b, p. 61) that Sternberg’s schema obscures what, to the screenwriter, is often the most painful but exhilarating and rewarding stage, the stage of ‘conception’. I see this stage as the point at which the screenwriter takes the germ of a ‘screen idea’ (Macdonald, 2004, p. 5) and makes the most important craft decisions about the content and form the story will take. This is when the ideas, characters and world are imagined, explored and developed into a coherent and meaningful storyline. In contrast with certain expectations and formulations of the industrialized development process, the conception stage I refer to is that stage which is generally undertaken by a writer on ‘spec’ (Thompson, 1999, p. 130), and occurs within the private world of the screenwriter/s. My intention in proposing a conception stage is to reflect the genesis of a screen idea from the perspective of independent screenwriting practice. In the case of an original dramatic screenplay, this is when the screenwriter creates something of high value from nothing using their own skills and ingenuity. This chapter is anchored in creative practice—where the focus is screenplaybased and writer-informed—because of the centrality of creative practice methodologies to the conception stage (Ferrell, 2017b, pp. 68–69). However, before I outline these methodologies, it is useful to place the conception stage within the longer process of development. From the early imaginings of any screenwriter other ideas and documents successively substantiate a dramatic concept into written forms. Siri Senje (2017) refers to a ‘Set Stage Chronology of Documents (SSCD)’, which make up a staged development process, and which “has been institutionalized in European and American script culture” (Senje, 2017, p. 267). Common documents include a synopsis, outline, treatment and successive screenplay drafts, though the stages and names of documents are varied across different industries and across different historical epochs.

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In reality, these documents are augmented by many other forms of creative work which are preparatory to the set stage documents. Biographies, timelines, floorplans, diagrams of structure are all part of the set of creative writing techniques which may be brought to the task. Batty and Waldeback (2008) note that the process is not necessarily linear, but could be considered circular or spiralling (p. 12) as documents are developed, reflected upon, edited and rewritten. At any stage the project may attract interest and/or finance. New dimensions are introduced as new stakeholders bring new ideas. Throughout these processes, the screenwriter draws on their skills and inherent qualities of personhood (Ferrell, 2017a, p. 110) to develop the voice and vision of the story as they collaborate to bring the project to production.

Creative Screenwriting Practice In its simplest sense, practice is doing. Maras sees screenwriting practice as ‘constituted in action, ideas and language.... [which] draws together skills, performance, concepts, experiences and histories’ (Maras, 2009, p. 12). The diagram below (Fig. 1), though not exhaustive, shows conceptually the many

Fig. 1 ‘All is “Doing”’: representation of the creative practice involved in developing a screen idea into a screenplay. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2020)

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processes which go into the development of a screenplay. Screenwriting practice involves imagining, planning, expressing/writing (Ferrell, 2017b, pp. 28– 29) and editing. Academic Carol Gray has documented the methods by which practitioner-researchers respond to identified queries and problems through practice in arts fields. The creative practice methods she identified comprise tasks of: observation; absorption (of ideas and embodied responses); collection; reflection; notation/annotation; and communication (1996, pp. 13–15). I extend these with imagining, visualizing, role-playing, ‘playing’/‘exploring’ and experiencing. These methods are inherently ‘situated’, ‘partial’, ‘locatable’ and ‘embodied’ (Barrett, 2007; Haraway, 1988) and involve technologies which integrate visual, tactile, kinaesthetic, experiential data into “rich” information’ (Gray, 1996, pp. 14–16). These processes are central to the activity of creating the dramatic design of any screenplay. The embodied sense of what is dramatic in screenwriting is developed over time through these imaginative and critical processes as they are honed through practice. As such, this creative work is not only essential to screenwriting, but is foundational to building craft skills in screenwriting (Ferrell, 2017b, pp. 29–30). Professor of Design Research, Peter Downton, speaks of a ‘meta-me’ who scrutinizes what the ‘me’ is doing (Downton, 2009, p. 112). The concept of two mes, one of whom is watching the other, reflects something about creative work itself, and the design process in particular, and the way in which a practitioner must be both creator and assessor/evaluator. A screenwriter alternately uses imagination, logic and craft skills to design a work, and then assess and refine it, rejecting some elements, and extending others. Without undertaking these different roles at different times, a screenwriter cannot hope to produce their best work. The eternal dance offers a set of tools by which the screenwriter can isolate ideas and test the dramatic design of their story quickly and effectively. It is this methodology which takes the eternal dance beyond other models of screenwriting and makes it such a valuable tool.

The Importance of Models Many species, including human beings, learn through imitation and mimicry of modelled behaviours (Alexander, 2012; Alvarez, 2005; Taylor, 2013). Humans are similarly able to decode representational models to achieve understanding. Peter Downton states that “models embody personal and disciplinary knowings and are richly communicative” (Downton, 2018, p. 134). Whether living and performative or two-dimensional static representations, models are central to how humans learn. Our mental models ‘play a major role in our perception of the world’ (Catmull & Wallace, 2014). The right models enable us to understand and manage the complexities of what it is that we encounter. Screenwriting in particular, abounds with models. These models are intended to define for us the structure of a screenplay, and yet often neglect or

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de-focus other dramatic elements which are the building blocks of this structure and dramatic design as a whole. These models tend to be based on a generalized view and seem to promote a ‘one-size-fits-all’ rubric. They are inevitably laden with cultural assumptions about what makes a good story. Because many important dramatic elements must be left out in order to condense the complexity of a screen work into an easy-to-comprehend twodimensional form, these models are not necessarily helpful in developing an approach to practice. Indeed, Carol Houtman argues for the need to offer a ‘choice of conceptual frameworks’, to free students from the ‘slavish adherence to models’ (Houtman, 2004, p. 102) which can quash creative and critical processes. In contrast to others, the eternal dance model produced through the methodology is directly related to the screen work the writer seeks to write. It opens up the drama to new interventions based on identified needs. Its methodology is founded on the writer’s performative and active engagement with the characters and situations. It involves a process of visualization of the story in response to queries or explorations posed by the screenwriter. Such visualization can accommodate either a macro-overview of story structure, plot and/or emotional arcs, or a micro view of single dramatic moments, beats, scenes or sequences. The eternal dance methodology can be performed at any stage in the development process, from the earliest formulation of the screen idea, to the latest stages of refinement of a final draft or shooting script. Inspired by dance, the codes and conventions which are employed are self-defined by the writer according to their needs.

The Advantages of a Dance Metaphor Dance has been associated with filmmaking and screenwriting since the invention of moving pictures in the nineteenth century. Twentieth-century screenwriter, Joan Tewkesbury (Nashville, 1975) spoke of a film having an “overall sense of choreography” (Sack, 1978, p. 11), and likened a screen story to a dance, where ‘each step has to lead to the next’ (p. 25). In the twenty-first century, screenwriter and academic, Virginia Pitts, used dance ‘to enliven and enrich the act of writing through processes of embodiment’ (2014, p. 61) when she incorporated choreographic workshops into the script development process of her short film, Beat (2010). She speaks of a process of ‘kinaesthetic writing’ which evolved out of a ‘dialogue between dramatic and choreographic improvisations’ (2014, p. 61). Dance is a theatrical medium, and a language. Dance has always been associated with storytelling. When looking for a model to guide my practice, the metaphor of dance offered a framework which incorporates action, emotion, intention and engagement between people and a world. The interactive dance environment also allows for devices such as stakes, complications and the whole gamut of human emotions.

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The drawings (Figs. 2, 3, and 4) are examples of dance notation. Each has been designed according to the sensibilities of their choreographer. Each stroke of notation has meaning and conforms to a code known to the person who drew it, and yet each is different. In proposing a dance metaphor for screenwriting, I do not mean to suggest that any one shape exists which will answer all screenwriters’ needs for a picture metaphor or tool. The methodology I am proposing offers a set of tools which a screenwriter can use to test the dramatic design of a story. The tools are applied by the writer within parameters set by her, and as suitable for her own needs and sensibilities.

Fig. 2 Examples of dance notation. ‘La Dance’ (Feuillet, 1709) From Recueil de dances by Raoul-Auger Feuillet, 1709, https://www.loc. gov/item/14002126/

Fig. 3 Examples of dance notation. ‘The Tango Square’ (Newman, 1914) From Dances of To-Day by Albert W. Newman, 1914, https:// www.loc.gov/item/140 09840/

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Fig. 4 Examples of dance notation. Pastoral (Isaac, 1713), From Mr. Issac’s new dance made for Her Majesty’s birthday by Mr. Isaac, https://www.loc.gov/ item/98160741/

The eternal dance arose through my own need for a working model that was able to reflect back to me the many elements of design in the complicated stories I write for the screen. I needed a model which could assist me to keep track of the beats when multiple storylines are woven together using a parallel narrative or multiple protagonist structure. I have found that the eternal dance methodology is flexible enough for me to use at any stage of the development process. The method also helps me to quickly identify areas where the characters and storylines are under-developed. The eternal dance is not intended to replace the common models available within the field of screenwriting. It offers something different: a strategy through which the writer can formulate their own model and can test dramatic elements in the context of the drama. It takes the writer beyond idealized models and deep into their own characters and story.

The Eternal Dance Methodology as a Model Below is an example of the eternal dance methodology as a model of screenplay structure. This example shows a rough sketch of the sequences in a hero’s journey/quest story which make up the first act of a feature film. In this regard, the model is more advanced than a concept, and yet is not as developed as an outline, in which the characters, world and what is at stake is made more explicit (Batty & Waldeback, 2008; McKee, 1999). It is clear from the information in the ellipses that there is a Protagonist and an Antagonist, each has allies and something is at stake which both parties care about. The pact formed at the final ellipses represents the protagonist’s commitment to the world of the second act (Heys & Turnbull, 2000), and to facing the problem

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Fig. 5 An example of the eternal dance methodology showing its most prominent features. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2019)

head on. While the text signposts for the writer the function of each sequence, colour coding on the ellipses indicate whose story is followed at any moment: the protagonist (black); or the antagonist (red). The diagram therefore implies features of the completed film: centres of action; an editing strategy (where ellipses occur simultaneously on the horizontal axis), etc. (Fig. 5). I have drawn the sequences (ellipses) in relation to a horizontal axis which not only indicates time passing, but also indicates a ‘neutral’ charge. McKee (1999) recommends that each scene ideally shifts a value at stake in the protagonist’s story from positive to negative or vice versa (pp. 35–36). Here, if black ellipses are above the axis the sequence turns out well for the protagonist. The use of ellipses (engagements ) and connecting lines (threads ) to represent a dramatic chain, are some of the conventions which underpin the eternal dance model. The table below describes the codes and conventions underpinning the method. This is followed by a brief description of the methodology when applied to a problem in an original screenplay, Calico Dreams (Ferrell, 2014).

Other Codes and Conventions of the Methodology The table (Fig. 6) describes the main features of the eternal dance methodology. The elements are simple lines and shapes which are intended to be drawn quickly by the screenwriter as part of the flow of their practice. The drawings are not expected to perform any other function than allowing the writer to respond in the moment to a provocation (a query or ‘what if’ moment) in the writing process. The features which make up the drawings are: threads; encounter; engagement; character; thought; sound/movement; axis of action; resistance; attraction. The screenwriter can invent further codes according to their needs.

The Information Captured The eternal dance is a visual shorthand which can depict elements of dramatic design as they are relevant to a query about the story (provocation). The premise underlying the methodology is that any drama is built on encounters

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Drawing

Dramatic Chain A complete set of engagements which show dramatic elements of a screen story; the site of enquiry according to a discrete provocation

(The whole drawing)

Thread indicates connection; time passing; movement. May indicate absent scenes (where these are not relevant to the provocation)

(freehand line) Encounter (Concept only) Terminology meaning any event or occurrence which interrupts the current action and causes a new action

(no drawing)

to begin

Engagement A dramatic event. Spans the time period during which two parties / elements interact, and at least one party is affected/changed through the interaction. Can represent a dramatic moment, beat, scene or sequence. Implies a location and circumstance. (an ellipse) Character Participant in the engagement; an actor (always depicted in relation to the ellipse which signifies the dramatic event). The direction of the nose indicates the direction the character is facing.

(a head with nose)

Other elements: Thought One of the ways in which a participant in an engagement can be affected (e.g., by a realization, revelation, cognition between participants). (light globe/ thought bubble) Sound / Impact / movement Indicates that an action occurring during an engagement has a physical manifestation which impacts some /all participants (and is significant in terms of the drama).

(audio/vibration symbol)

Fig. 6 (table). The codes and conventions of the eternal dance methodology. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2020)

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Axis of action The most direct line between two characters/dramatic agent/s or elements as they interact.

(dotted line between ‘engaged’ Characters / elements) Resistance / refusal [to interact] When one character/element resists the interaction.

(jagged line) Attraction When one character feels particularly drawn to an interaction, even though this may not be shared by all participants / dramatic elements. A one-sided emotional response between agents / elements (often foreshadows future action, such as in the case of a prop planted in the scene)

(three wavy lines)

Fig. 6 (continued)

between people and things occurring in time. Through successive engagements , a story progresses and a resolution is reached. Encounters are either interactive (an engagement), or not (a thread). A montage sequence is an example of a thread which is non-interactive (no character is changed by the scene/s). Each engagement/thread is about a single idea or action and ends when the action ceases and a further action is introduced. The writer may choose to express the dramatic chain through text or drawings or a combination of these. The dramatic chain may depict moments, beats, scenes, sequences or ideas, for example, attitudes, emotions, beliefs, etc. The writer focuses the dramatic chain using information which is meaningful to the provocation and their own needs.

Provocation: A Question of Point of View The dramatic chain below, which illustrates the methodology as used in practice, came about when I was developing the screenplay, Calico Dreams. The

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provocation concerned the passivity of the main character, Caroline (who was conceived of as a naif character) and the lack of her perspective in the opening of the first draft screenplay. This provocation called for an exploration of the points of view shown in the set-up. The query related to whether the audience would bond with Caroline as the main character. The methodology adopted included identifying the provocation; choosing the scenes to be explored; drawing the scenes according to the eternal dance methodology and annotating my responses; reflecting upon what the drawings showed; drawing conclusions which articulated what I had discovered. Questions I wished to investigate included whether Caroline’s point of view really was absent? Would she be understood to be the main character? Would she engender sympathy in the audience/readers of the screenplay? Was it necessary to change the scene order and/or content of the scenes to make Caroline’s point of view more prominent?

A Closer Look at Features of the Eternal Dance I began each dramatic chain by drawing the horizontal axis to represent time passing. I fitted the nine scenes of the opening sequence evenly across the page. It was not necessary to draw threads between scenes because they flowed consecutively. I used the codes described previously and added a key to show embellishments or modifications to the symbols. I also noted the time I took to do each chain with comments in the bottom righthand corner (20 mins). I later applied further groupings to the scenes (red = about Caroline; blue = about Nathan; black = about Madame Dream) since this also provided information on whose point of view was being revealed (Figs. 7 and 8).

Fig. 7 Sketch of the first ten pages of the feature film screenplay ‘Calico Dreams’ drawn as a ‘dramatic chain’ using the eternal dance methodology. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2019)

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Fig. 8 Reproduction of dramatic chain from Fig. 7 in electronic form. The methodology was used here to interrogate character interactions and point of view. Reproduced with permission (© Rose Ferrell 2019)

Description of Findings and Discoveries From the visual representation of the set-up, it was obvious that the first two scenes showed Nathan’s story; the second three scenes showed Caroline’s experience; the next two were about the Madame’s scheme to sell Caroline. This was followed by a scene which showed a development in Nathan’s storyline; and in the final scene Caroline and Nathan meet. Of course, I knew this information from the script. However, drawing it gave me new perspectives. Most importantly, I got to experience the action as I expected it to play out on set rather than in my imagination. The drama was concretised for me Steven Maras claims that a script is an ‘audio-imaging’ document (Maras, 2009, p. 67), and quotes Boyle who observes that ‘reading a script is a bit like viewing a film’ (Boyle, 1983, quoted in Maras, 2009, p. 63). My experience in using the methodology brought me onto the set during an imaginary production, where I experienced the undercurrents of emotion and the sense of place and setting as the actors might. I was brought into relationship with the text in a fully embodied way. From this I gained clarity about what was truly important in each scene. I found that I was ‘blocking’ the scenes as I drew. Small elements such as a letter or a glance took on larger significance because of the way I both felt the drama (as an actor) and planned its coverage (as a director) while drawing. I recognized elements of visual style in the writing. I came across issues of logic, and discrepancies where the description in the screenplay did not tally with my imagined playing out of events. I envisaged performances and came to understandings about things such as vocal intonation, gestural cues, details of hair and costume, scenes and settings which added important emphasis to the drama. The methodology emphasized a ‘grammar’ of screen visuals which helped to clarify which cues needed to be foregrounded in the writing. The richness of the process surprised me. Having drawn the scenes, I pondered how they related to point of view. I grouped them according to whose story they told. This extended my sense

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of the overall dramatic contour of the opening, and the way the scenes played against each other and created patterns of experience for the audience. I felt more empowered in my role as screenwriter than I have felt previously. I no longer felt at sea and directionless. I could see a way forward and I felt like I was captain of this ship (the drama I was trying to write). At the end of this experience I felt I knew much more about how point of view comes about, and what it means.

Reflection on Use of the Eternal Dance Although I do not consider myself a ‘drawer’, I enjoyed using the eternal dance methodology because through drawing I vicariously experienced the filmmaking process. I felt the drama intensely as I visualized it from the perspective of the lead actors. I found I could switch characters and reexperience the scenes from another character’s perspective or that of an onlooker. I could also experience the drama from the point of view of the director who was creating her artistic vision in reality on set. At other times, I felt like an audience member watching the story unfold in images, sound and music on a screen. For these short minutes I was taken into the world I had imagined in a powerfully embodied way. The writer has to think on many levels during the creation of a screen story. These things become focused in the process of writing the prose which describes the story. However, images offer a more condensed form of information. Kathryn Millard (2010) has proposed that there may be other ways to record or communicate screen works which are more suitable than text for an audio-visual medium. The film industry, of course, uses storyboards widely. My brief experience of the eternal dance strategy suggests that it is a highly suitable methodology for use by a single writer in many stages of the development of a screen work, because of the human capacity for an embodied empathy through vision, which excites vicarious emotional experiences. Yet I am not proposing that the eternal dance is suitable for use in communicating whole long-form screen works. It is perhaps interesting however, to consider the processes involved in the methodology. As a filmmaker, I have drawn storyboards from scripts. However, the eternal dance model is subtly different from a storyboard. Through its use I blocked the basic movements in each scene. I imagined the spatial relations between the characters, props and furnishings, gaining information about how these agents and objects create meaning. Though screenwriters commonly do this in their daily work of imagining the world of the drama, I was brought more fully into the world of the script through the methodology. I gained greater clarity about the many small moments which progressively create the emotional contours; that is, the dramatic design (Ferrell, 2019, pp. 67–68). The eternal dance invites the screenwriter to work within what some may consider directorial strategies, for example storyboarding, blocking, using floorplans, etc., and to combine these in a shorthand whose focus is dramatic design. This is

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not intrusion into another craft area. The eternal dance is a method which can prepare the screenplay more fully for its realization by a director. As Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard notes when writing of the film if…. (1968) the ‘constant interchange of creative practice’ (2010, p. 146) between screenwriter and director enriches a drama. Perhaps a final note should be made about the relationship between standardized models of screenwriting structure and the eternal dance as a strategy for developing dramatic design. There is a subtle difference between the two terms, ‘structure’ and ‘dramatic design’. Structure is often spoken of in relation to the ‘tent pole’ (Batty & Waldeback, 2008, p. 31) beats which form the framework around which a strong screen story is constructed. It is of course, vital that a strong structure underpins a screen story. However, in constructing screen stories, it is the smaller units—the dramatic moments—which are the building blocks to structure and to dramatic design. Much less seems to be written about design in this sense. I believe that this is because there is no easy formula for mastering design on this level; no quick fixes; no magic solution. Each screen story is unique; its internal dynamics obscured behind the tightly woven facade created by the seamless enmeshment of affective elements which can be as small as gestures or as large as explosions. Many, many small beats make up this dramatic design. Each one of these must be planted in the story, in the right order, at the right point, in the right form. Dramatic design is hard. It is the hardest thing about screenwriting. Designing the eternal dance methodology has been a major breakthrough in my own practice because I now have a strategy to assemble and test the smallest beats in a way which both streamlines a practice which is difficult, and enriches my understanding of both the craft of screenwriting and the specific drama I seek to design.

Conclusion The research in this chapter is framed within the broader discussion of script development, which is practice-based; that is, it describes research which has been carried out by a practitioner-researcher, and is about the practice of screenwriting. It describes a methodology, the eternal dance, which aids screenwriters in testing and deepening their dramas at any stage in the development process. The eternal dance also produces a model of the drama, though not always in its entirety. The eternal dance is a model-methodology which belongs to an early stage of development of a drama, called the conception stage. In contrast to other studies of script development as an industrial process, this stage is proposed to reflect that period in the early development of a screen idea when the concept is being developed by a writer independent of financial investment and production partners. The eternal dance is not intended to replace the common models available within the field of screenwriting. It offers something different: a strategy through which the writer can formulate their own model and can test dramatic elements in the context of the drama. It takes the writer beyond idealized

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models and deep into their own characters and story. The methodology enlivens the writer’s understanding of their characters, story world and action through the writer’s active engagement with the drama as they draw simple sketches of the unfolding story. The features, codes and conventions of the model were illustrated by two examples, one of which showed a generalized story framework, and another of which illustrated how the methodology can be a response to a query the writer has about the script. The methodology uses strategies which are shared with production crew, such as storyboards, floorplans and blocking. These illuminate the drama through its imagined physicalization. The greatest benefit of the eternal dance model-methodology is that, unlike other models, this model-methodology describes a staged approach to interrogating any part of a screen drama to uncover the building blocks of its dramatic design. Doing this gives enhanced focus to the writer as they return to the task of describing the unfolding story in words. The eternal dance is a way of thinking about, planning and visualizing the interactions and relationships between characters, events, elements of mise-enscene and the world. It can be used to depict the broad-stroke structure (tent pole beats) of a screen work, or the fine-grained dramatic moments embedded within beats, scenes or sequences. The ability to keep track of the ways multiple story threads interact, and how they influence the audience’s experience of the story, is a major advantage of the eternal dance methodology. Using it, the writer can plot either the action (plot) line of a narrative, and/or its emotional line (story arc). But perhaps its most useful aspect is that the terms of the eternal dance are defined by the screenwriter, in answer to questions which are posed in the flow of practice, and are central to the unique work she seeks to complete.

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Downton, P. (2018). The unmoored model adrift from the shores of purpose and function. Theatre and Performance Design, 4(1–2), 134–148. https://doi.org/10. 1080/23322551.2018.1467650 Ferrell, R. (2014). Calico dreams [Screenplay]. Ferrell, R. (2017a). Big hero 6. In C. S. Brenes, P. Cattrysse, & M. McVeigh (Eds.), Transcultural screenwriting: Telling stories for a global world (pp. 109–132). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ferrell, R. (2017b). Voice in screenwriting: Discovering/recovering an Australian voice. Exegesis and Screenplay, Edith Cowan University. Ferrell, R. (2019). Two screenplays, one writer, national voice. In C. Batty, M. Berry, K. Dooley, B. Frankham, & S. Kerrigan (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of screen production (pp. 61–74). Springer Nature Switzerland. Feuillet, R. (1709). Recueil De Dances. A Paris: L’auteur [Image]. Retrieved from the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/14002126/ Gourdin-Sangouard, I. (2010). Creating authorship? Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on If... (1968). Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 131–148. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.1.1.131/1 Gray, C. (1996). Inquiry through practice: Developing appropriate research strategies. No Guru, No Method? 28. Helsinki:UIAH. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3 (Autumn)), 575–599. Heys, L., & Turnbull, S. (2000). The second act story—Storytelling in mainstream feature film writing, development and production (National Tour 2000) [Workshop Manual]. Faraway Films. Houtman, C. (2004). Authorial voice and agency in filmmaking. Journal of Media Practice, 5(2), 101–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.5.2.101/0 Isaac. (1713). The Pastorall Mr. Issac’s new dance made for Her Majesty’s birthday. [Printed for I. Walsh ... and I. Hare, London, ?, monographic] [Image]. Retrieved from the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/98160741/ Macdonald, I. W. (2004). The presentation of the screen idea in narrative filmmaking (Publication Number 412852 (2 vols)). Doctoral thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University. Maras, S. (2009). Screenwriting: History. Wallflower Press. Maras, S. (2011). Some attitudes and trajectories in screenwriting research. Journal of Screenwriting, 2(2), 275–286. McKee, R. (1999). Story. Methuen. Millard, K. (2010). After the typewriter: The screenplay in a digital era. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 11–25. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc1.1.11/1 Newman, A. W. (1914). Dances of to-day. The Penn Publishing Co., monographic [Pdf]. Retrieved from the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/140 09840/ Pitts, V. (2010). Beat [HD]. V. Pitts; Pitts Productions. Pitts, V. (2014, January). Wrirting from the body: Kinesthetics and entrainment in collaborative screenplay development. Journal of Media Practice, 14(1), 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.14.1.61_1 Sack, C. (1978). Joan Tewkesbury on screenwriting: An interview. Literature/Film Quarterly, 6(1).

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A Collaborative Reflection Between Writer, Director and Actors: Table Read as Scriptwriting ‘Intervention’ Susan Cake

Comparing a script with the finished film can demonstrate how the words on the page translate into action on the screen. Without the development of the screen work, understanding this process in their own scripts can be more difficult for learners of screenwriting. This practice-led research project used a read-through of a narrative comedy screenplay titled Lean Management to examine how the creative collaboration of director and actors affected the script development process. The two-hour table reading involved professional actors and a director. The format began with a cold read followed by a discussion of the characters in the screenplay. Dialogue was then workshopped and the first two scenes were rewritten to reflect the characters’ comic perspectives that evolved from the discussion. The reading occurred in front of an audience of screenwriting students and provided an opportunity to ‘live test’ the script and examine the process of creative collaboration. An audio recording of the table reading allowed the discussions to be transcribed and examined. The findings indicate that conducting a table reading in front of a live audience can provide valuable real-time feedback, allowing understandings about the script to be articulated, challenged and reformed. As an example of collaborative reflection, the table reading suggests a strategy for scriptwriting as ‘intervention’ or formative assessment, which can help learners of scriptwriting to identify how effectively their words on the page convey their intended S. Cake (B) Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_29

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meaning. It also represents an opportunity to develop the kind of creative capabilities required by screenwriters such as openness and adaptability in creative problem-solving. Batty et al. (2018, p. 155) suggest research into script development processes ‘requires a dialogue between theory and practice – between academic analysis and practical experience – in order to define and address it’. This chapter examines the interaction of theory and practice enacted through examination of a table read of a screenplay. Lean Management is the final episode in a proposed narrative comedy television series (Fighting Fit ) and part of the creative output of my practice-led doctoral research. A table read (also known as a read through or cold read) is a term used to describe a process in which actors and other stakeholders such as writer, director and producer gather to read through the script (Goldman, 1983). The table read discussed in this chapter occurred within the context of screenwriting as creative practice-led research and screenwriting pedagogy within higher education. As writer-researcher, I was a participant observer in the table read. The iterative process of writing screenplays was embedded within an action research methodology ‘which involves a spiral process of planning, acting, observing, analysing, reflecting and then evaluation’ (Christie et al., 2015, pp. 15–16). The table read embodied a form of process reflection. Kreber (2004, p. 33) suggests in ‘process reflection we find out whether what we do works by seeking some form of evidence for its effectiveness’ often through external feedback. The table read was identified as a method for obtaining feedback from professional actors, a director and an audience and effectively performed the role of a focus group. While the table read was intended to simulate an industrial process, it was also an ‘authentic’ learning experience framed as a masterclass (Herrington & Herrington, 2008, p. 69). The screenwriting student audience was encouraged to provide feedback and the director was mindful of extracting lessons from the process. Ted Emery, venerable director of successful Australian television comedy programmes such as Kath and Kim (Riley & Turner, 2002–), agreed to direct the table reading. Throughout the session he explained the rationale behind his thought processes more than if it was a professional reading. Articulating his tacit knowledge was a key factor in enhancing the reading as a learning experience. In his opening statement, Emery emphasised discussions with the writer would usually be conducted in private—not in an open forum. So while the activity could be considered authentic, the context, embedded within the lecture activity, was not. My role as writer-researcher was also complicated by my role as a teacher within the screenwriting unit. As the writer, I was interested in observing how the words on the page translated into performance; specifically, what is required to communicate the character and their internal conflicts and motivations to the actor? What happens in the space between the words on the page and the actor’s performance and how might that performance be used to enhance the script? While I was keen to share the experience with students,

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I was concerned that the critique of my screenplay might undermine my credibility with them as a teacher. Overcoming these doubts required me to have the courage to risk failure. The notion of failure as ‘negative’ is deeply entrenched in our education system reflected, for example, in the grading of screenplays. Smith and Henriksen (2016) have argued creativity can be encouraged by embracing failure as part of an iterative creative risk-taking process which creates opportunities to learn and improve. The table read, executed by a professional director, presented an opportunity for creative collaboration and for screenwriting students to observe collaborative creative processes. It also presented an opportunity for collaborative learning. Hämäläinen and Vähäsantanen (2011, p. 173) have suggested collaborative learning ‘takes place by distributing participants’ own thoughts and expertise, by listening to and elaborating on the views of others and by the creative and shared knowledge construction of different thoughts and conclusions to reach common goals’. The opportunity to learn from a very experienced and successful director and have my work read by professional actors greatly outweighed my concerns. Steers (2009, p. 128) has argued that ‘[c]reative pupils need creative teachers with the confidence to take creative risks’. My desire to improve the script overrode any reservations I had about exposing my work to criticism and as a teacher I was eager to make the table read a process from which the students could also benefit. Kerrigan and Batty (2016, p. 132) have suggested ‘[S]cript development is the site where the exchange between the reader and the writer occurs and this is also the site where creativity occurs’. As well as facilitating an opportunity for creative collaboration, the table read was an opportunity for me to identify how effectively my script communicated my intentions to the director and actors. The script and mini-bible with extensive character profiles were sent to a casting agency that identified six actors for the ensemble cast. As the table reading was also data collection, ethics clearance was approved to make an audio recording of the session. The two-hour session began with the introduction of the cast and director. The director, Emery, explained the purpose of the session was to read the script, talk about the characters as written, let the actors talk about the characters and ‘see if we can’t make it dance just that little bit more by getting clearer definition with these characters…deciding who they really are and what their actual agenda is’. I explained the premise of the series and briefly outlined the episode. It is included here to provide context for the table reading as a case study. Fighting Fit is a narrative comedy about Tom, a lazy narcissist, who has to turn a rundown gym with its staff of misfit and unfit trainers into a going concern. When we first meet Tom his successful career as a body builder is over. He cooked his balls with gym candy and has to come to terms with his failed marriage and the fact that he’s now more bouncy than buff. He applies his narcissistic charm and (mis)understanding of management theories to motivate his staff. But ‘lean management’ does not mean firing fat people and

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it often falls to the team of personal trainers to keep the gym wheezing along. In each discrete episode, the gym totters on the brink of closure. The trainers fear for their jobs and swing between selling each other out and ignoring Tom’s bumbling management directives. By the time we get to the last episode, the obstreperous team are like family, a bickering, self-serving, dysfunctional family and Tom has a tough decision to make. Someone has to go, but who will it be?

I then introduced the characters and the actors who were playing them. Will it be Kurjak the uptight, Serbian body builder; Carol, who puts the personal into personal trainer; Roald, not so much the beating heart of the gym as the one who operates the defibrillator; Shanell, the diversional therapist (yes that’s a real job) from the local nursing home; or Rainbow, the naive masseuse who embraces natural therapies, new age spiritualism and Kurjak - mostly against his will.

The director explained that in a professional context there would be a flurry of pens and paper as participants prepared to take notes, the purpose being to seek improvement. The director also pointed out that the characters and scripts had been created by one person and that as an intern on Cheers he observed they had two writers for every character and that it was quite common practice to have more than one writer on a sitcom series. The six actors then read the script through from beginning to end and a student volunteer read the big print (scene headings and action description) and a small extra character role. The script was twenty-nine pages long and took roughly twenty-three minutes to read. In the excerpts transcribed from the audio recording included in this chapter, ellipses indicate pauses, removal of re-phrasing or repetition of words in order to report discussion more succinctly. Once the reading was completed, Emery addressed the student audience: ‘Before we start…I’ll save you any embarrassment, there’s not enough jokes in it…it’s written well but…Don’t be nervous about saying it’s not funny because I’ve already said it’. Had I internalised the criticism, it would have been difficult to continue to develop the screenplay. Steers (2009, p. 130) has suggested ‘flexibility and openness to alternative approaches’ are required characteristics for creative work. Similarly, Smith and Henriksen (2016, p. 6) have suggested ‘reflections on failure where struggling with uncertainty leads to contemplation and an ability to manage ambiguity’ is essential to creative success. I had to disassociate critique of my work from critique of my identity to deal with uncertainty in creative practice. If audible laughter is a ‘funny indicator’ I identified only eleven out of the twenty-three scenes registered laughter audible enough for the recorder to pick up at the front of the hall. This does not include observations of the actors or audience smiling or nodding or other non-verbal indicators to reflect a response to the performed scripted material. As Berger (2013, p. 210) argues, the nature of laughter, comedy and humour ‘is an enigmatic subject that has perplexed our greatest thinkers from Aristotle’s time to the present’.

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This is further complicated by Attardo’s (2003) explanation that laughter is not necessarily an indicator of humour or the lack of it. He cites extensive research that ‘has established beyond doubt that humor and laughter, while obviously related, are by no means coextensive’ (Attardo, 2003, p. 1288). Research into the role of humour in groups has shown that there are contradictory responses to stimulus where ‘discourse and interaction sequences can be funny to some people while viewed as offensive, coercive, or aggressive by others’ and that those responses are amplified in groups (Schaefer, 2014, p. 121). So while I can identify when people are laughing, determining why is more problematic. The director suggested Lean Management needed a funnier angle which hooked into the central idea of voluntary redundancies. I had written the episode to reflect Tom’s cowardice and duplicity: he asks for volunteers to leave but really he intends to fire someone of his own choosing. The director suggested the gap between comic reality and real reality was not illogical enough. He was right. I had taken the scenario directly from my own experience in the workplace. I hoped an audience might find humour in identifying Tom as a parody of an incompetent manager who spruiks management rhetoric in much the same way the character of Brent parodies inauthentic political correctness in The Office (Westwood & Johnston, 2012). The director suggested that a more illogical angle might be achieved by introducing a Big Brother style eviction or other totally incongruous scenario. The illogical in this example relates to incongruity theory of humour. Berger (2013, p. 210) explains this is ‘the difference between what we expect and what we get’. Incongruity theories would argue that the audience derives humour from having their expectations transformed by the juxtaposition or surprise of an incongruous element (Attardo, 2014). Whereas superiority theories might explain that the humour is perceived from a position of knowing more than the object of derision (Raskin, 2014). Pushing the comic premise towards a more illogical, funny angle provides a clearer conflict for each character to respond to. Drawing on his extensive experience as a director of character-driven comedies, Emery explained how each character’s unique perspective will drive their response to the funny angle in each episode. Vorhaus (1994) refers to the logic of the character as his or her comic perspective. ‘The comic perspective is a character’s unique way of looking at his world, which differs in a clear and substantial way from the “normal” world view’ (Vorhaus, 1994, p. 31). Emery referred to the example of Basil from Fawlty Towers (1975–1979): You don’t know what stupidity he’ll get up to subvert being caught... you’ve got anticipation because you’ve got knowledge of the cast, you know exactly what they’re going to do because they’ve been drawn so well...on top of that you’ve got surprise but within that surprise...it stays within the realm of that character or realm of that situation.

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The next stage in the table read sought to define more clearly each character’s comic perspective. The actors read the extensive character descriptions I had written from the mini-bible. Beginning with the character of Carol, it quickly became apparent that she was unnecessarily over-written. In my attempt to clearly define the characters, their motivations, internal conflicts and goals, I had overcomplicated matters and left little for the actor to bring to the character. I was aiming to create well rounded, multi-dimensional characters but the director ‘…just want[ed] to know something about her and let the scripts and the stories do everything’. The rest of the actors paraphrased their characters and together with the director they encapsulated the descriptions into a few words. For example: Carol: a forty-year-old woman in denial; Roald: an insecure, duplicitous sycophant; Kurjak: an impotent alpha male who likes knitting; Shanell: a manipulative flirt; Rainbow: an irrepressibly positive, naive hippie; Tom: an incompetent used car salesman who never loses face.

In simplifying each character to ‘a type’, the director was attempting to refocus the screenplay so that the conflict, and therefore the humour, was driven by each character’s comic perspective. Vorhaus (2012, p. 18) has suggested that the comic perspective provides the ‘set glue’ which keeps sitcom characters in conflict with each other as each character remains committed to the goal of proving the other wrong. As the extensive character profiles were stripped back, the director gave direction to the actors regarding their character. Exploring the character of Carol, the director suggested that comedic physical aspects of performance might come out of her paranoia about aging. This enabled me to visualise her character more easily to consider opportunities for humour based on performance. As writer I wondered if this process of refining the characters would redefine them beyond how I had conceived of them. In the example of Carol, I had identified her fear of aging, one that informed her inner conflict and motivated her to prove her worth as a trainer despite her age. The director asked the actor playing Carol to give Tom attitude when she delivered her lines. In the creative process of developing the character of Carol, I had chosen a cactus as a visual motif to reflect her prickly, survivor attitude. The refining process during the table read confirmed the way I had envisioned her yet allowed me to see more clearly how her comic perspective drove her responses to the narrative through conflict with the other characters. Theoretically, I understood that characters had to be easily recognisable (Sedita, 2006), but the table reading translated the theory into practice in a way that clarified each character’s comic perspective. Once the actors were clear about their character’s perspective, Emery asked them to ‘see if you can pull off those lines because they’re not written for the character now’. This is the scene as originally written:

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1.

INT. TOM’S OFFICE. MORNING 1 TOM sits deep in concentration at his desk. He taps a few number keys and peers at the computer screen. He’s annoyed at what he sees and jabs the backspace key viciously. The PHONE RINGS. Tom picks up. TOM (on phone) What! (pause) Darryl. No no, not a bad time at all. First rule of business – always make time for your bank manager. (worried) Numbers for the third quarter? Tom glares at the computer screen. TOM (CONT) They’re good, all in the green. (pause) That’s what I meant. Red. (pause) Sorry. When you said red I thought you meant black. The numbers are red. (pause)Did I say red? No, I meant black. Of course they’re black. All the numbers are in the black. (pause) Yep. Good. Look forward to it. He hangs up. TOM (CONT) Shit!

After the reading the director explained that the character’s main goal was to avoid losing face. This required deleting the stage direction (worried) and reworking the dialogue. My intention for the scene was to introduce the main problem, that the gym is in debt, and reveal Tom’s incompetence. I thought it would be a fair assumption that most people would understand the concept of a balance sheet being either in the black or in the red, with red being a negative state of affairs, so his reference to green would immediately flag his incompetence. Emery suggested the logic needed to be clearer: So the audience understands we’ve got to go to the logic --what’s happening on the other end of the phone? Have you seen your accounts? They’re all in the red! Yep. So you’re happy with that? No. No. Not happy with that at all. ...so it’s got to be bluster...I was hoping you’d notice...Numbers for the third quarter? They’re all in the red.[laughter] Ah, gotcha there. Only foolin’ they’re all in the black. No not a problem. Shit! You’re out.

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The director was articulating his thought processes to work through how Tom would react to save face. Added to this was the action the character would be engaged in. In the original script I had written in his frustration adding up the numbers. The director suggested he should be doing something totally unrelated to running a business. One of the actors suggested he might be looking at pictures of his ex-wife with her new husband on Facebook. Emery linked this to a speech later in the script in which Tom makes a reference to his ex-wife and suggested adding a visual element to flag it for the audience, adding another element to the actor’s performance of Tom: ... there’s always a look he gets when, and this is all writer, you’ve got to construct this for your character, you’ve got to tell the actor about these things you know, if you’re not sure, just tell them, the actor may or may not give you something, ... I let the writers get to the cast and chat about how they saw the character as well and even more comes out of it so that’s how that happens. So now you’re seeding something ...it’s a character trait...it’s the only time anything gets through to him and ... he is staring at them the bastards and he gets that look on his face...and if ever he’s thinking about them or talking about his ex-wife, he gets that look....one day I’ll get them...

When the actor read through the new lines the director emphasised that he didn’t want Tom to lose face and suggested he make a Sid James type laugh. I asked the director about giving directions in parenthesis (e.g. laughing) and he explained it was unnecessary: You would spell out something that the actor understands totally which is the used car salesman who never loses face....the writer will say when they’re watching the rehearsal, can you do a laugh? ... the actor has to see quite clearly what the joke is and where the logic and illogicality comes in … if you put in notes about a used car salesman who never loses face the way you write that speech will just naturally come to you...it’ll just come out...so you know...just put in there bullshitting, complete bullshitting and the actors will do the rest for you...

The reference to the writer’s input into how the characters are performed suggests an active collaboration in both interpreting and developing the script. The table read provided an opportunity for collective ideation which informed the dialogue. This supports Nash’s (2013, p. 159) argument that the ‘art of screenwriting lies…in the unknown spaces, hidden between the lines that lead to the active and imaginative participation of others’. The director’s experience would suggest that the writer’s participation in rehearsals would mitigate the need for extensive action description or even short parenthetical direction. As the actors and director worked through the lines of dialogue, the dynamics between the characters began to emerge. As Emery explained:

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It’s really as writers you can do so much but then you’ve got to get it to this situation, but if you can see this sort of stuff happening...If you look at the Fawlty Towers scripts...what is in that script is exactly what we’re seeing here now - that there aren’t many jokes. It’s character stuff and we are shifting the timing and shifting their performance to make sure that we never have a wasted minute of screen time... Let their character do it... and then you’ll get a director who’ll listen to you and you’re quite entitled to have a say about how you want something to be performed. You just don’t do it in an open forum like this. You get together and you do it from there.

By recommending that ‘you just don’t do it in an open forum like this’, the director is suggesting other stages in script development before the table read where shared understandings about the characters and their motivations occurs. The table read was an incredibly useful process for bringing the characters to life. It enabled me to see how their comic perspectives bounced off each other, bound to the central concept of the episode which drove both the humour and the narrative. Leaving room for the director to apply his creative vision was an important aspect of developing the script. Part of realising his vision involved ‘the work of removing some [of those] words in order to create gaps, or spaces within the text so that others might respond imaginatively’ (Nash, 2013, p. 155). In simplifying the characters to a ‘type’, the actors were then able to bring their own expertise to the role to build more nuanced characters. As the director stated, ‘…it’s no longer all about the gym. It’s all about characters and where they’re going to from here…’. Audience reactions added yet another layer to the collaboration by providing real-time feedback on the actors’ performances. The audience’s role in effectively ‘live testing’ the script was an unexpected valuable addition to developing the script. Responses were immediate, spontaneous and gratifying. While I had initially been nervous about conducting the table reading in the presence of a student audience, their responses added an unexpected vitality that energised the collaborative process. The table reading, as an example of collaborative script development, confirms Macdonald’s (2010, p. 48) argument that ‘screenwriters and their colleagues wish to reach amicable agreement about the screen idea…and that such collaboration is an important factor in deciding the eventual screenwork’. Framed as collaborative process reflection, the table reading also suggests a strategy for scriptwriting ‘intervention’ which can help identify how effectively learners of screenwriting are applying their craft. In assessing students’ screenplays, feedback can sometimes be perceived as punitive or subjective which can lead to resistance to make changes. The audience reactions confirmed the efficacy of the table read to script development and suggests a dialogic process in assessing student scripts, particularly at the formative stage when the assessment can be instructional. The involvement of the director and actors initiated a process of distributing responsibility for the effectiveness of the screenplay among the participants at

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the table reading. As writer, this was liberating; it removed the pressure on me as the sole generator of ideas. Hämäläinen and Vähäsantanen (2011, p. 173) have argued successful collaboration is achieved when ‘a group creates something that exceeds what any one individual could achieve alone’. The actors’ imaginative interpretation of their character’s comic perspective revealed how opportunities for humour can be derived from performance. The audience’s spontaneous responses to their performances provided confirmation that the changes were positively impacting the script. The director brought his ‘visual thinking’ which manifested in juxtaposing visual elements with dialogue and revealed how levels of incongruity can generate layers of humour. The actors’ and director’s imaginative participation in the table reading process allowed the characters’ comic perspectives to emerge more clearly and in doing so, revealed how important character dynamics are to creating narrative comedy. As an exercise in creative collaboration, performing the table reading in front of a live audience provided the opportunity for ideas to be tested in real time. Baker (2016, p. 75) has argued that ‘practice-led screenwriting research has very different goals to commercial scriptwriting’ which primarily aims for scripts to be produced as (ideally) profitable films or television programmes. The table reading process positioned the script as a ‘spec’ script; that is, an uncommissioned speculative script independent of any existing television series. The table reading showed the scripts had some way to go before they were production-ready although feedback from the participants that the script ‘has legs’ was gratifying. Macdonald (2004, pp. 262–263) has proposed that on one level a screenplay can be defined as successful if it elicits a positive response from a professional reader who ‘constructs some kind of imaginary screenwork from the cues given by the writer, and from their own conception of a (type of) screenwork, and matches that to what he or she is seeking’. The table reading provided an opportunity to simulate the final screen experience in a way which allowed understandings about the script to be challenged, articulated and reformed. Macdonald (2004, p. 267) has argued that seemingly natural constructs such as dramatic structure require analysis and theorisation in order to understand how they are applied but because ‘normal ways of working are not acknowledged but assumed as “natural”, it is sometimes difficult to see the linkage between practice and what creates that practice-the principles at work behind it’. The table read demonstrated circularity to this process where practice was theorised, via the contextual review and reflective practice, and incorporated into writing the scripts. The table read then articulated where the method of applying the principles of narrative comedy resonated or not with the audience. As an example of creative collaboration, the table read was an effective strategy for identifying how effectively I was applying my knowledge of screenwriting craft. It also provided an opportunity for the screenwriting student audience to observe creative collaboration in action by watching creative judgements about the screenplay be articulated and explored. The process also

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instilled greater confidence in my own creative capabilities such as receptiveness to other possibilities, persistence and flexibility in the approach to creative problem-solving (Steers, 2009). The table reading was also a lot of fun which reflects many beliefs about the importance of playfulness in fostering creative endeavours (Steers, 2009, p. 130). Kerrigan and Batty (2016, p. 132) have argued the importance of maximising ‘opportunities to improve screenwriting practice, as this should better prepare screenwriters for work in a critically demanding industry’. The table reading provided the opportunity to both develop the screenplay and my creative capabilities as a screenwriter which indicates the potential for a table reading to provide the kind of opportunity Kerrigan and Batty suggest.

References Attardo, S. (2003). Introduction: The pragmatics of humor. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(9), 1287–1294. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00178-9 Attardo, S. I. (2014). Encyclopedia of humor studies. In S. I. Attardo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of humor studies (Vol. 1). Sage. Baker, D. J. (2016). The screenplay as text: Academic scriptwriting as creative research. New Writing, 13(1), 71–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1133654 Batty, C., O’Meara, R., Taylor, S., Joyce, H., Burne, P., Maloney, N., Poole, M., & Tofler, M. (2018). Script development as a ‘wicked problem’. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.9.2.153_1 Berger, A. A. (2013). Why we laugh and what makes us laugh: “The enigma of humor.” Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 9(2), 210–213. https://doi.org/10.5964/ ejop.v9i2.599 Christie, M., Carey, M., Robertson, A., & Grainger, P. (2015). Putting transformative learning theory into practice. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 55(1), 9–30. Goldman, W. (1983). Adventures in the screen trade: A personal view of Hollywood and screenwriting. Warner Books. Hämäläinen, R., & Vähäsantanen, K. (2011). Theoretical and pedagogical perspectives on orchestrating creativity and collaborative learning. Educational Research Review, 6(3), 169–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2011.08.001 Herrington, A., & Herrington, J. (2008). What is an authentic learning environment? In Online and distance learning: Concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications (pp. 68–77). IGI Global. Kerrigan, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Re-conceptualising screenwriting for the academy: The social, cultural and creative practice of developing a screenplay. New Writing, 13(1), 130–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1134580 Kreber, C. (2004). An analysis of two models of reflection and their implications for educational development. International Journal for Academic Development, 9(1), 29–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144042000296044 Macdonald, I. W. (2004). Manuals are not enough: Relating screenwriting practice to theories. Journal of British Cinema & Television, 1(2), 260–274. Macdonald, I. W. (2010). ‘...So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic’ The screenwriter and the screen idea work group. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 45–58. https://doi. org/10.1386/josc.1.1.45/1

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Nash, M. (2013). Unknown spaces and uncertainty in film development. Journal of Screenwriting, 4(2), 149–162. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.4.2.149_1 Raskin, V. (2014). Humor theories. In S. I. Attardo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of humor studies (pp. 368–371). Sage. Riley, G., & Turner, J. (2002–). Kath and kim. Riley Turner Productions. Schaefer, Z. A. (2014). Humor and small group research In S. I. Attardo (Ed.), Encylopedia of humor theory. Sage. Sedita, S. (2006). The eight characters of comedy: A guide to sitcom acting and writing. Atides Publishing. Smith, S., & Henriksen, D. (2016). Fail again, fail better: Embracing failure as a paradigm for creative learning in the arts. Art Education, 69(2), 6. Steers, J. (2009). Creativity: Delusions, realities, opportunities and challenges. International Journal of Art and Design Education, 28(2), 126–138. Vorhaus, J. (1994). The comic toolbox: How to be funny even if you’re not (1st ed.). Silman-James Press. Vorhaus, J. (2012). The little book of sitcom. Bafflegab Books. Westwood, R., & Johnston, A. (2012). Reclaiming authentic selves: Control, resistive humour and identity work in the office. Organization, 19(6), 787–808. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1350508411422583

Hitting the Road: Performing the Journey as a Development Strategy in Paris, Texas and Goodbye Pork Pie Hester Joyce and Jade Jontef

Introduction This chapter discusses ‘performing the journey’ as a development strategy, inspired by Ernest Lehman’s well-documented description of a journey he undertook to iconic United States monuments, notably New York City, United Nations building and Mt Rushmore, used in his writing of North by North West (1959, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Wri. Ernest Lehman). Here we explore the development of two screenplays: Paris, Texas (1984, Dir. Wim Wenders, Wri. L.M. Kit Carson, Sam Shepard), and Goodbye Pork Pie (1981, Dir. Geoff Murphy, Wri. Ian Mune, Geoff Murphy) where writers ‘took to the road’ to enact the story, before writing and during production. The contrasting historical case studies are drawn from disparate production and historical contexts (USA/European independent, small national New Zealand) but share two things, a close relationship between director and writer and this unconventional approach to writing the story, that is, performing it. In each case the ‘journey’ forms an integral part of the script development process, and not only helps to structure the story but also performs a nascent form of the film, sourcing key images, locations and events for future use. Through this discussion we hope to offer insights into non-traditional

H. Joyce (B) · J. Jontef La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_30

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examples of scriptwriting where the enactment of each film’s journey consolidates the writers’ close relationships prior to and during their development and production.

Context Paris, Texas (1984, Dir. Wim Wenders, Wri. L.M. Kit Carson, Sam Shepard), and Goodbye Pork Pie (1981, Dir. Geoff Murphy, Wri. Ian Mune, Geoff Murphy) are examples of non-conformist script development where the participants’ relationship is the primary development method, as expressed through archival ephemera; letters, notes, marginalia, multiple drafts and interviews are the main research tool. Such documents allow us an insight into the minds of writers both in terms of the intimacies of their lives but also with respect to their relationship with writing. The material on Paris, Texas was collected from the Harry Ransom Centre, in 2015, Sam Shepard archival collection, and the Goodbye Pork Pie script drafts with marginalia and notes, and correspondence between writer Ian Mune and director Geoffrey Murphy was gifted by Mune to Hester Joyce circa 1997. The notion of the Hero’s Journey in screenwriting practice is embedded, arguably endemic (Batty, 2010; Clayton, 2007). Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters (1998) is among many screenwriting guides that source Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1956) for insights into the nature and making of ‘story’. Both projects were in the context of and informed by the ‘counterculture’ of the 1960s and 1970s, a social movement that was expressed on the margins of screen and literary cultural expression (Perkins, 1986, p. 16): Certain movements of disaffected middle-class youths in post-war capitalist society. Groups such as the Beats of the Fifties and the hippies and dropouts of the Sixties were, while by no means identical, united by a similar antipathy towards what they perceived as stifling conformity of bourgeois norms. They were primarily a social phenomenon but one which found a strong cultural expression in literature and cinema.

Arguably prompted by the literary movement of the Beat Generation (for example Kerouac, Ginsberg and their contemporaries) and invigorated by this ‘counterculture’, emerging filmmakers of the era rebelled against institutional structures. Both film productions under discussion served as outlets for antiestablishment politics and narratives, Wim Wenders (a European filmmaker) and Sam Shepard worked primarily outside the mainstream Hollywood studio system, while Mune and Murphy resisted formalised production processes within the New Zealand film industry.

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Paris, Texas (1984) In the process of writing the screenplay for Paris, Texas with Sam Shepard, Wim Wenders wrote a reflection on the script to date. The first half reads (Shepard and Wenders, note in ‘Film Outline’ November 1982): This is not a ‘script.’ It’s not really an ‘outline’ either. It is, rather, a description of a film. It won’t be in a more refined form before it comes to actual shooting. The film will be shot in chronological order and Sam will write it as we go along. I’ve made four films this way. It’s how I work best. It is also how LIFE works. And, as the film deals with a man whose perception is completely open, it seems necessary that the film’s perception too, stay open

Paris, Texas was a collaboration throughout 1982, 1983 and 1984 between director/writer Wim Wenders and actor/writer Sam Shepard. To credit these men in this way is to rather limit their roles as both can be described as ‘wellmade men’ skilled in a comprehensive range of creative modes, as will become apparent. The Paris, Texas script had multiple versions of the story and the journey of its development is reflected in the extensive number of drafts, and expansively annotated script documents as well as correspondence between Wenders and Shepard. Also, of interest are twenty-six notebooks containing handwritten notes and ideas related to the plays Shepard wrote, films in which he acted, story ideas, and his travels. These contain some of the sketches and observations he noted on his travels through Texas prior to the writing of Motel Chronicles, and during the development and production of Paris, Texas (Sam Shepard, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin). The film’s serendipitous title might just as easily have been ‘Venice, Texas’ or ‘Rome, Texas’. Wenders recalls having researched same named European towns in the USA and finding sixteen towns named ‘Berlin’ and twenty-two, ‘Paris’. The main character, Travis, is based on Sam Shepard himself, and the story is driven by an impulse to return to a plot of land that Travis has a title to. Shepard recalls, ‘We started with this idea of two brothers… and it turned into a whole other thing about the relationship between men and women’ (Vincent, 1984, p. 9). The story, as depicted in the film’s final cut, here described, is a pared down version: a contrast to the many shapes, we will discover, that the story took throughout the development. It begins in Terlingua Texas, a small town on the Mexican border where a man appears wandering, disorientated, along a desert road. When he reaches the small settlement Travis collapses and later

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wakes up in the town’s hospital. The doctor contacts Travis’ brother Walt and they are reunited and Walt takes Travis back to Los Angeles with him. Travis has been missing, presumed dead, for four years and his reappearance disturbs Walt and his family, including Travis’ son, Hunter, whom Walt and Anne, his wife, have adopted. (Hunter is called Billy in early drafts and played by Hunter Carson.) Travis searches out Hunter’s mother, Jane, to Houston and tries to put their lives back together. Jane is now working in a peepshow and Travis slowly reveals that he has returned because he wishes to reunite Jane with Hunter, a reconciliation that is realised. Travis’ journey was ‘performed’ by Shepard as detailed in his semiautobiographical Motel Chronicles (1982)—a collection of writings, poems and observations; the point-of-view of a man travelling nomadically through the Southern States of the U.S.A. where Shepard documents his childhood and his life as a ranch hand, waiter, rock musician, dramatist and film actor. These wanderings form the basis of the first two thirds of the film. Wenders documents Paris, Texas’ development, providing a chronology of the scriptwriting process through his commentaries—a meta-analysis of their process. The various drafts have further comprehensive commentary, alterations and rewrites handwritten by Shepard. Initially their process appears relatively conservative, as suggested by the following documents (Sam Shepard: An Inventory of His Papers): ‘Film outline,’ November 1982, rewrites 22 February 1983. ‘Film outline’ 2nd draft, February–March 1983, rewrites May 1983. ‘Descriptive script,’ June 1983, rewrites and some dialogue September 1983. The film’s shoot, in mid-1983, interrupted the script development somewhat and the script for the last (approximately) one-third of the story was written after this first period of production, as noted in these documents: Screenplay, 21 September 1983 (typescript), and final rewrites, September–November 1983 (Sam Shepard: An Inventory of His Papers). The first ‘Film Outline’ began as a prose story with an identifiable narrative arc and an opening sequence, somewhat mimicking, Wenders recalls, his search for the place-name title (Vincent, 1984, p. 9): It was a sentence in Motel Chronicles: the image of somebody leaving the freeway and walking straight into the desert [] …more of an image than a feeling – was just looking at a road map of the United States, ready to leave at any moment for some place you’ve found on the map. [] Even before he had a biography, before the boy and the woman, Travis was just someone lost looking at a map… a man travelling in an impulsive and restless way.

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This opening sequence, titled ‘Collapse of Travis’, is primarily ‘man alone’ and much of the first act is all scene text and is poetic and lyrical (Shepard & Wenders, 1982): Vast, empty landscape. Foreground, Redtail hawk just sitting on fencepost. Very still. Figure of a tall, thin man on horizon in distance. He moves slowly toward camera from distance. He has a slight limp and wears a cheap Mexican suit and tie, that show signs of severe exposure to the desert – sweat stains, dirt, torn at the knees. He wears Mexican sandals wrapped in tape and rags to hold them together.

Many of the rules of writing scene text are broken here, carrying the rhythm of likely shots through single phrases, partial or incomplete sentences, image frames or fragments and implied camera angles. Character notes and characterisation are rhetorically imbedded. A second ‘Film Outline’ was completed within three months (February–March 1983, with rewrites May 1983) that had a more formalised layout, though still all prose with indications of camera angles, shots and editing points, true to Wenders’ ‘This is not a script’ note. The first two thirds of this outline are similar to the resulting film’s first two acts. However, the final section, events after Travis finds Jane, was completely rewritten, departing from the influences of Motel Chronicles, and focussed on the resolution of Travis and Jane’s relationship.

A Vague Act Structure A ‘Descriptive script’ emerged in June 1983, and again in September 1983, with extensive dialogue as handwritten annotations that included a nascent act structure: a complete film story, including back stories for Jane and Travis, both as individuals and for their life as a couple. Wenders further notes that the script is ‘kind of thick, 143 pages’ and that the story was composed of four parts (1–45, Travis and Walt alone, until they arrive in Los Angeles; 46–78, Los Angeles; 79–144, Travis and Billy on the road, until they find Jane; 114– 143, Travis, Billy and Jane on the run). This climax and resolution weren’t used in the final film, and its evolution is described below. Wim Wenders’ comment here notes his resistance to any rigid development processes, even though production had begun (Shepard & Wenders, 1983c): This script appears in a somewhat unusual format, as it is only descriptive. It represents our story rather accurately. And it contains all the information necessary to understand the flow of events and to prepare the film for production […] We feel that this format will give us (and the characters in our story) some freedom inside the film structure of the story. The first draft of the dialogue will be ready shortly after the major parts have been cast.

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Therefore, for practical reasons, we advise you to keep this script in a ring binder.

By September 1983 Wenders is unconfident about the planned second half of the film, and the story’s and Travis’ resolution. In the development documents there are many versions of this final act, one of the more consolidated, is where Jane has become a heroin addict, the daughter of Big Jim Walcott, a Texan Tycoon, married to a rich man and in the control of a crazy ‘Preacher Man’ (who appears in Motel Chronicles ). This resolution, a reversion to a gangster retribution story, involved Travis and Hunter kidnapping Jane from her ‘life’, being pursued by the Preacher Man, precipitating a complex chase involving guns and drugs. There were at least two other final acts mooted.

‘Where Is the Script…’ By October 1983 the first two thirds of the film had been shot but filming was halted by the production company. The shooting schedule shows the production tracked both the chronology and geography of the script to Travis’ finding Jane: May 16, 3 weeks South Texas to Los Angeles, June 6–26 Travis in Los Angeles, June 26–July 17, Travis and Hunter on the road Texas, July 17– August Travis and Hunter, to Paris and Jane. The locations in Texas included Big Bend, Marathon (for Marfa), Fort Stockton, El Paso, Houston, Nordheim, Midland (for Corpus Christi) and Port Arthur as well as Deming, New Mexico and Benson, Arizona, many of the places catalogued in Motel Chronicles. With production underway and two thirds of the film ‘in the can’, script development continued as Wenders expressed doubts about the violence of the proposed last act. He later recalls he contacted Shepard asking him to simplify the last act—to delete the Preacher and also Jane’s father in favour of expanding Jane’s (Nastassja Kinksi) role (Wenders, 1983b, emphasis in original): Dear Sam, We’re back in Los Angeles, after 2 and a ½ week of shooting. Right now we’re not shooting. We had to interrupt for a few days because our cash flow from Europe got delayed once more. Part of the problems and the delay is the fact that our script isn’t finished. “Where is the script” (say the bureaucrats from Europe) […] The problem is, that the last part of the movie STILL feels like a different film altogether. […] It is not ONE PIECE, I feel. [] I’ll lay it out over the next

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few pages. I very much hope that you’ll like it. If there’s a chance that I could work with you during the coming weekend, I would consider coming up there to you in Iowa.

Wenders sends Shepard a complex document that is part reflection/commentary, production summary, part treatment, with new scenes and outline for the last act, of what he intended to shoot between October and December 1983 to finalise production and end the film. The credits for Paris, Texas read: director Wim Wenders, screenplay Sam Shepard, story adaptation, L.M. Kit Carson. Kit Carson, father of Hunter Carson (who plays Hunter in the film), suggested the now elegant solution of the film’s final act. In this Travis finds Jane working in a peepshow, where women chat and act out intimacies behind glass in response to male clients who can choose to be anonymous to them. Workers and clients talk to each other through microphones. Travis engages Jane, and in the course of their interactions slowly reveals that it is he who is watching her, that he realises he treated her badly, and that he wants their son to get to know his mother. Wenders describes the new ending to Shepard (1982): Well, this story is certainly not at all as “dramatic” as the ones we had before. Certainly less exotic. No heroin, no kidnapping, no crazy Preacher Man and no Texan Tycoon. There is much less “movie” in this story than in the others. It doesn’t become “reality” though. It still moves on the level of mystery that it always started out with. It still deals with Travis’ dream, only more so. It still deals with all the myths of the family and the home and everything man wants from a woman. But sort of simpler, without shifting gears in the middle from one movie to another. I would really know, with this story, what I am talking about.

Both Wenders and Shepard extoll the virtues of this improvisational, performative writing method. In their case Shepard’s experiential writing through Motel Chronicles laid inspirational foundation for the first half of Travis’ journey in Paris, Texas as well as the essentials of his character. Wenders then went on to re-enact his journey in following its chronology while mapping out the story through production. This experience led to refashioning a more successful, simplified ending—something that may not have occurred without the coincident withdrawal of production funding and its associated crisis. Shepard later reflected that for him writing was ‘always an act of desperation’ and that

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‘nothing could have been more desperate than the situation I found myself in in the Fall of ’83 or ’84…’ (Shepard & Wenders, 1983c).

Goodbye Pork Pie (1980) Goodbye Pork Pie is a New Zealand genre film in dialogue with the Hollywood tradition of road movie fugitives and outlaws on the run, attempting to satisfy the demands of both a national cinema and an international audience. The ‘buddy’ movie, as an identifiable sub-genre, was emerging from Hollywood (see Fuchs, 1993; Goldson, 1995; Mack, 2004). According to director and co-writer, Geoffrey Murphy, Pork Pie was designed ‘to play the same ground as Butch Cassidy’ (Beilby, 1980, p. 17). This is a dark comedy about the adventures of Gerry and John, who are chased the length of New Zealand (North to South from Kaitaia to Invercargill) by the forces of the law, in an illegally retained yellow rental Mini. (A Mini is a small British car, an iconic brand because of its boxy shape, created by John Cooper in 1969, now owned by BMW.) New Zealand is a collection of islands, two long narrow and one small round, separated by twenty-two kilometres of rough ocean, Cook Strait, between the North and South Islands—this geography having an impact on the way that the plot unfolds. Gerry and John are joined by Shirl, Gerry’s love interest, and as their journey progresses their law breaking intensifies along with the television news attention they receive. The idea for the script came from a story Murphy was told by a friend who was hitchhiking and was picked up by an odd couple. During the course of the journey, they were selling off various car parts and it transpired that this was a rental car (Beilby, 1980, p. 17). Murphy describes his approach to filmmaking, initiating the concept development: Normally what I try to do is get the script to a certain stage, and then go and talk to an experienced writer. I have found that it’s a good way to work, because they bring to scripts something that you can’t get any other way … Ian [Mune] was terrific value on Pork Pie – he made it possible.

Murphy roughed out a script as a series of vignettes, the narrative structure determined by a journey, complicated by geography, and with little character development, before he approached Mune. Mune (1997) recalls: As we did these little vignettes, I started seeing connections between them and then would suggest a new scene to connect them up, [] none of it was ever written down, and we adlibbed the dialogue. [] So that was really my function was to bring the humans in the story into this thing, which Geoffrey was very happy with, and you know he’s always given me credit for it whenever he talks about it.

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The Road Trip The draft storyline begins in Auckland where John meets Gerry, who has rented a car in Kaitaia (north of Auckland), then stolen it, driving it south. John is determined to get to Invercargill, far off in the South Island, and as they get chased and run out of money, they sell off bits of the car to finance the rest of the trip. Mune argues that the film was ‘pretty accurate about the size of the country’ because he, Murphy, Alan Bollinger (director of photography) and designer Pat Murphy, went firstly to Kaitaia and drove around the main street, working out the action and geography for Gerry’s opening sequence, including the rental vehicle and other props like keys and gloves that feature later in the story (1997). They worked out the Auckland scenes, the bus station and various shops, decided camera positions for the action, then drove through the country to Wellington. While the journey’s primary purpose was a locations scouting search Mune (1997) reflected that this also contributed to his writing of the screenplay. We worked out all the action; we worked out the roads, where we were going to put the dust in the back of the car, if it was damp, anything like that.I mean we really planned eighty per cent of the movie shoot on that journey, shot by shot, and discussed ideas about characters and their relationships.

Cars, Borders and Guns In contrast to the iconic big-winged American icons of road movies, choosing a yellow Mini as the runaway car was subversive, and provided idiosyncratic solutions to some of New Zealand’s more challenging geographic aspects. The Mini’s unconventional aesthetic played against established muscle car notions and gave the film, ‘an underdog quality’ (Murphy in Beilby, 1980, p. 18). The common small car created sequences of mistaken identity, confusion arising when other yellow Minis occupied by normal families entered frame. Murphy (cited in Beilby, 1980, p. 18) likened chasing the Mini to trying to catch a chicken. He used this analogy as inspiration for many stunts including the car’s crossing of Cook Strait Have you ever tried to catch a chook? Well, you’re the police car and the chook’s the Mini. The chook can somehow manage to do a right angle at fast speed, and you run into a wall. That’s how the stunts are set up, with that sort of feel.

The Cook Strait crossing was solved through a stunt in which the Mini is driven off a railway platform and into a moving railway cartage wagon destined for the cargo hold of the interisland ferry. The protagonists avoid pursuit and escape across in secret—a sequence that has become iconic within New Zealand cinema. Murphy had a friend working for ‘the railways’ and on a site

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visit, designed much of the Wellington car chase that ended in the railway wagon (Murphy, 1978b): The railway is being very cooperative so far – mind you, they don’t know what we’re up to yet. They’ve agreed to let us look around the Wellington railway yards and ride a goods train from Picton – Christchurch – Westport … all they know so far is that we are making a film about a couple of fugitives who make their escape on the train. By the time we see them we will have to know how much to tell them and when.

Mune remembers, ‘for weeks after that Geoffrey was working out heights, speeds, distances, how you could do it, and he didn’t give a **** about the story, he wanted that Mini to jump on to that railway carriage’ (1997). Ironically, despite the wacky brilliance for New Zealand audiences of the railyard ferry stunt, it meant nothing to overseas audiences. Mune explains that they could have created an imaginary New Zealand and just shot all the best landscapes, ignoring the impassable straits and nobody outside New Zealand would have known the difference, ‘that’s a gap - that piece of sea only means anything to New Zealanders’ (1997). Compounding the demands for markers of local content of a national cinema, the road movie genre was problematic as a car chase in New Zealand is constrained by the country’s island nature; there are no landed borders to escape across, only coastal wet ones. Pork Pie’s comedic form gave licence to create solutions, especially through innovative action sequences and stunts and lessened the severity of crimes that might trigger a police hunt. A comparison is the inciting incident that sets off the story in Thelma and Louise (1991), where Louise shoots a man to protect the more naïve and innocent Thelma and establishes the two as outlaws. In Pork Pie, the comedy licences the men to be boyish in their anti-establishment behaviour and what starts as a misdemeanour escalates as their journey progresses. The police pursuit of the two seems petty, allowing the heroes more sympathy. As Murphy points out, ‘The big take-off point is when they rob a service station and get away with $10.70 worth of petrol without paying. That’s their idea of crime’ (cited in Beilby, 1980, p. 17). In the late 1970s in New Zealand guns didn’t have the cultural capital they did/do in the United States. Hunting rifles, occasional police and military firearms were the only legal weapons. The absence of personal handguns means that narrative and plot events have to be idiosyncratic.1 The early drafts had a polarising effect on potential investors due to the antiestablishment tone, particularly because it was anti-materialist and ‘financiers are very reverent about property’ (Beilby, 1980, p. 18). Although the two lead characters were only petty criminals, they were unemployed, openly ‘smoked 1 Notwithstanding the tragic events of the Christchurch massacre in 2019 which revealed a more developed gun culture than was previously imagined.

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dope’ and were sexually promiscuous as well as openly sexist in their attitudes and behaviour towards women. Mune and Murphy maintained the rogue nature of the script with a motif, ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’ (Murphy, 1978b): Shirl decides that that is John and Gerry’s philosophy – decide anything, then provided it seems like a good idea at the time – pursue it with all determination regardless of outcome. They can use this catchphrase a few times […] when asked by the magistrate why she [Shirl], a girl from a good background and means, should commit these offences she replies, ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time.’

John and Gerry, watching the news report, recognise the line, as a message from Shirl to keep on with their quest while she remained self-determined. Gerry’s death in the climax contravenes comedy conventions. He lies injured in the middle of the road enabling John to make his escape, metaphorically passing the baton of non-conformity to him. Later Gerry’s death is announced by an unknown police officer in the phrase, ‘one of them’s bought it’.

Character The emotional journeys of the characters come through their relationships. As Mune recalls much of Gerry’s character came directly from Murphy: ‘Geoffrey loved Gerry’s attitudes, Gerry’s disconnected youth thing, he just loved it and would be coming up with ideas and lines and things’ (1997). Murphy addressed his concerns about establishing, motivating and defining character development when he ‘surveyed’ (Murphy’s term) colleagues for their reactions to the first draft. Murphy’s identification with the roguishness of the script is expressed in concern about characterisation (1978a, emphasis in original): I’m getting a bit anxious that the whole thing could become a DRAMA! (note the capitals)2 […] Now I suppose I’m in dangerous territory when I pause to question this, character sympathy is essential, but let’s keep a wary eye on these characters. I don’t really want to see the sense of adventure lost amongst three people very seriously coming to grips with their personal problems.

This letter continues with a detailed discussion of the emotional journeys of the two men and the woman hitchhiker they pick up along the way. There was criticism of a bet the two men take over Gerry’s ‘scoring with Shirl’, that she disappeared from the script without any fanfare signalled to some readers that the one significant female character was expendable. Murphy and Mune addressed these issues by having Shirl decide to have sex with Gerry (rather than it being a motivated by Gerry) and allowing her to voice her disgust 2

Murphy’s use of upper case for emphasis.

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when she finds out about the wager. They integrated her demise as a part of the police chase and suggest some emotional loss for Gerry when she is arrested. These were small but significant concessions and show the influence of the 1970s feminist movement in New Zealand.

Conclusion The script development of both Paris, Texas and Goodbye Pork Pie was idiosyncratic, approaches that served the writing of the stories better than any adherence to established screenwriting practices would have. Their primary texts, letters, outlines and screenplay drafts show that their filmmaking contravened screenwriting norms following a path embedded in relationship and founded on an artistic freedom, related specifically to the form and content of story/film itself. The archives reflect a truly collaborative approach to writing with documents showing extensive alterations to story versions, often with spontaneous handwritten notes and edits. In both cases early versions (treatments and so on) have extensive use of prose to construct the story and events, character notes and aesthetics, which enhanced the development of visual storytelling and visual style. Both productions avoided writing dialogue as long as possible, Mune and Murphy picking up dialogue from their own ‘improvisations’ as they took their road trip, while Wenders and Shepard waited until the actors were cast and used their contributions. In both cases time on the road provided fodder for narrative turning points and solutions. For Goodbye Pork Pie Murphy’s site visits clarified the logistics of stunts in particular, and the car chase sequences in general, while the inherent geographical challenges prompted story quirks and oddities that developed the ‘buddy’ genre. In Paris, Texas much of the visual aesthetic was derived from Wenders’ and Shepard’s intrinsic knowledge of the geography and landscape of the American South. The performance and completion of the journey through the production of the first two acts/three sections of the story motivated a reversal of a complex proposed ending. Shepard describes this process (cited in Vincent, 1984, p. 22): The way that this script was conceived actually was moment by moment. It’s very much a moment-by-moment thing in its original form. Until we got halfway through, we just never started thinking in terms of ‘where is it going?’

Letting the stories speak and trusting an improvisational writing approach has at its heart relationships between writers and directors. Mune remembers that many happenings from their locations trip ended up in the film, and Murphy recalls that they were rather like their two characters, ‘Ordinary guys who find that the combination of the two of them, and their ability to think laterally, creates a potential that neither could achieve as individuals’ (cited in Beilby, 1980, p. 17).

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Wenders maintains, ‘it’s even incredible we made up the story together. It never happened to me before’ and Shepard, ‘Just this moment, and the next, then the next, it was a great way to work […] It was a really good experience. Best experience working on a screenplay’ (cited in Vincent, 1984, p. 22). Such enactments, reminiscent of walking poetry or journeying writing, rather than complying with predetermined structural paradigms and established development conventions (outline, treatment, scene breakdown) instead rely on accident, happenstance and serendipity to inform their screenwriting.

References Batty, C. (2010). The physical and emotional threads of the archetypal hero’s journey: Proposing common terminology and re-examining the narrative model. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(2), 291–308. Beilby, P. (1980, May–June). Geoff Murphy on Goodbye Pork Pie: Interview. Cinema Papers, pp. 16–21. Campbell, J. (1956). The hero with a thousand faces. Meridian Books. Clayton, S. (2007). Mythic structure in screenwriting. New Writing, 4(3), 208–223. Fuchs, C. J. (1993). The buddy politic. In S. Cohan & I. R. Hark (Eds.), Screening the male: Exploring masculinities in Hollywood cinema (pp. 194–210). Routledge. Goldson, A. (1995). The New Zealand buddy movie: Men, cars and the rise (and fall) of the feminist thriller. Hecate, 21(1), 137–145. Goodbye Pork Pie. (1981). Dir. Geoff Murphy, Wri. Ian Mune, Geoff Murphy. AMA, New Zealand Film Commission, 105 mins. Mack, A. (2004). Buddy movies. Brandweek, 45(42), 18–20. Mune, I. (1997, August 13). Interview with Hester Joyce. Murphy, G. (1978a, November 18). Letter to Ian Mune. In Hester Joyce’s possession. Murphy, G. (1978b, December 21). Letter to Ian Mune. In Hester Joyce’s possession. Murphy, G., & Mune, I. (1978). “Meatballs” draft screenplay, annotations and comments. ‘Meatballs’ was the working title for Goodbye Pork Pie. In Hester Joyce’s possession. North by North West. (1959). Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Wri. Ernest Lehman. MGM, 136 mins. Paris, Texas. (1984). Dir. Wim Wenders, Wri. Sam Shepard, Story Adaptation, L.M. Kit Carson. Anchor Bay Entertainment [distributor], 180 mins. Perkins, R. (1986). Fun and games. Illusions, 2, 1–16. Shepard, S. (1965–2011). Sam Shepard: An inventory of his papers 1965–2011, containers 10.10–10.12: 11.1–11.9: 12.1–12.3, Harry Ransom Centre, The University of Texas at Austin. Shepard, S. (1982). Motel Chronicles, with Photographs by Johnny Dark. City Lights Books. Shepard, S., & Wenders, W. (1982). “Film outline,” November, rewrites 22 February 1983. Shepard, S., & Wenders, W. (1983a). “Film outline 2nd draft,” February–March, rewrites May 1983. Shepard, S., & Wenders, W. (1983b). “Screenplay, 21 September” (typescript), and final rewrites, September–November 1983.

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Shepard, S., & Wenders, W. (1983c). Paris, Texas, Screenplay “Descriptive script,” June, 143 pp, no pp numbers, no scene numbers, rewrites and some dialogue September 1983. Thelma and Louise. (1991). Dir. Ridley Scott, Wri. Callie Khouri. MGM/UA Home Video. Vincent, J.-P. (1984). Cannes film festival screening program. Vogler, C. (1998). The writer’s journey: Mythic structure for storytellers and screenwriters (2nd rev. ed.). Pan. Wenders, W. (1983a). Paris Texas, handwritten pages, scenes for new ending. 1983 Dialogue List, bound copy, April 1984. Wenders, W. (1983b, October 20). Letter to Sam Shepard “Where is the script?”

Development Across the Intercultural Divide: Scripting Stories with ‘Other’ Groups Christopher Gist

What the fuck is toxic masculinity? My dick is bigger than the Statue of Liberty. (Kemah Bob, 2019)

Introduction The ‘right’ to write across cultures is increasingly contentious, as much an issue in performance writing as it is in the fiction novel. Lionel Shriver commented at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival: Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are “allowed” to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.

In the opposite camp, writer of the TV series Queer as Folk (2000–2005) and It’s a Sin (2020), Russell T. Davies, avers that only gay actors should play gay characters in film and television (Carr & Gordon, 2020). I am a male Ph.D. student who, taking a different approach to the spirit of Davies’ current perspective, is writing a feature script centring on female and non-binary drag king performers. I describe this as In-group/Out-group (I/O) writing, where I am the Out-group writer and story editor, and a cohort of four drag kings—assuming the role of storyliners—are the In-group. C. Gist (B) University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_31

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Through this creative practice research I seek to extend the scholarship of script development, in this case using the method of an industry-standard writers’ room (of five people) to develop a feature film story, with the research asking how the development of a screenplay can be facilitated in a way that both ethically and creatively brings ‘cultural insiders’ into the process. In so doing, I hope to glean what approaches may prove either useful or problematic when someone from outside a particular culture or subculture develops a story centred in that culture. In this chapter, I discuss the processes and implications of this study through an autoethnographic lens, the autoethnography informing learning through reflection. While the Ph.D. is still in progress, I am already gaining valuable insights on questions such as storyliner selection and cohort identification, requisite levels of back-grounding for participants on story and character, preferred ways of meeting (the writers’ rooms took place during Covid-19) and, especially, the usefulness of being able to engage with the storyliners outside of the story meetings while avoiding the risk of unfair or ‘extractive’ practices. Regarding terminology, I use the words ‘participant’ and ‘storyliner’, and occasionally ‘subject matter expert’ (SME), interchangeably and eschew ‘subject’ as it unproductively connotes being acted upon.1 This is perhaps an antithetical approach to ‘traditional’ research, which typically observes its subjects. In my Ph.D., I actively seek to bring ‘insiders’ into the creative process, and my reflections on this process are always in concert with those of the storyliner-participants.

Background Two principal considerations prompted this inquiry. First, experience in writing and as a former drama commissioner for broadcasters in Australia and New Zealand has underlined that many screenwriters write outside of their direct personal experience: they dramatise someone else’s problems and emotions, conjure a character’s particular cultural sphere, interpersonal sphere and interiority. Further, in multicultural nations, writers are increasingly writing about cultures that are not their own, about the intersection of cultures, or writing in new contexts that must account for significant social movements or cultural changes (more recently #metoo, BLM, marriage equality, the Covid-19 pandemic and a global migrant crisis producing mass demographic shifts). Second is that script development is an emerging area of scholarship and, now that the foundations have been set by academics such as Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor, there is scope for analysis of specific topics such as intercultural film script development. Batty and Baker write in their chapter, ‘Screen production research: creative practice as a mode of enquiry’, that (2018, p. 70):

1

In Australia, the nomenclature storyliner is loosely akin to an in-house or staff writer.

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few publishing houses and even fewer academic journals publish—and therefore give visibility to—screenplays. For any serious study of screenwriting practice to occur, there needs to be an accessible body of work to analyse and discuss, which might also usefully include writers’ notes or annotations, and/or reflections on the development process.

On definitions, elsewhere in this book other writers define development, and so I will not rehandle the issue. Suffice to say, on development generally, Peter Bloore’s book, The Screenplay Business: Managing Creativity and Script Development in the Film Industry (2012), remains a notable work, and Craig Batty, Stayci Taylor and Louise Sawtell have led a focus of development research in Australia (e.g., Batty et al., 2017; Kerrigan & Batty, 2015; Taylor & Batty, 2016). Outside of screen, literature searches generally return a preponderance of interracial work (notably ‘white writing black’: Lempert, 2012; McCall, 2011; Miley, 2006; Offler, 2017), with far less scholarly work examining other spheres of interculturality. It may be worth drawing the distinction between this research work and discourse analysis of queer theory—my research is a partnership with drag kings as I research script development, rather than researching LGBTQIA+ populations per se.2 Fundamental to my research has been the creation of a professional story room that replicates conventional industry practices, so as to increase the utility of the findings for both the industry and the academy. This has meant choices about what format the screen story will take (i.e., TV series, mini-series, telefeature or feature film). This decision was influenced by the availability of the storyliner-participants, budget and drafting schedule. Since all of the storyliners have other jobs, it was not possible to employ them full time over a number of weeks as one would for a TV series or mini-series, and funding limitations provided their own constraints. This made the feature film format the most suitable. For some in the screen sector, the application of storyliners to feature film development may seem novel. In my experience, it is something common to the telefeature and, I suggest, already has an analogue in feature film development in the form of regular meetings with the development team [director, studio, producer (s), editor]—a group that Ian Macdonald has described as the Screen Idea Work Group, ‘a flexible and semi-formal work unit that congregates around the screen idea, and whose members contribute to its development’ (2010, p. 46). The feature film in this context remains an authored product as it is the writer who is the source of the original idea and who shapes the material, as ever determining what goes in, what is removed, and employing screenwriting craft skills to ensure that the work appeals to its anticipated audience. I also point to the possibility that, with the premiering of feature films on streaming services, the progressive hybridising of film and 2 While definitions vary and are contested, historically drag kings were identified as females performing in male attire, enacting male archetypes and stereotypes.

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TV is very likely to see the further melding of techniques and approaches. Writing in the Journal of Screenwriting, Sotiris Petridis comments that ‘Netflix has blurred the line between television and film, with Adam Hart stating that there is now a convergence of film and television on such streaming services’ (2020, p. 211).

Who Should Be in a Story Room? Contrary to some of the issues discussed below about ‘group think’, my reflections to date suggest that, inter alia, shared experience within the group is important in story generation in this research, with the coda that there is a great deal of nuance in this discussion about storyliner selection in I/O contexts. Before getting into theories on group creativity dynamics, hovering above it all are two major considerations attaching to these categorisations: (1) is there a universal human nature? (2) if not, is there somehow a defining homogeneity that supports taxonomies founded on terms such as culture, subculture, race and so on? My answer here is to make a foundational assumption about the values driving this I/O engagement: rather than there being iron curtains between cultures, personalities vary within all groups, making bridgeable the apparent ‘cultural chasms’ promoted by the contemporary hardening of cultural categories. On the question of who should be in the writers’ room, some of the primary considerations not yet interrogated in script development that influence both I/O and general development practice are as simple as how many writers or storyliners are needed. The optimal number is a guess. So, too, is what types of people will work most productively together (e.g., extroverted, introverted, silent, critical, provocative, unconventional, minority opinion holders, majority opinion holders). What mix of ages, genders, ideologies and biases is the most productive? What group techniques or styles of leadership work best to stimulate creativity, and how may this attach to different groups of varying diversity? We do not have the film and TV research yet about whether it is more creatively productive to devise as a group or to work by oneself; here, repeated studies in other areas show that productivity in creative settings is usually greater with people working separately rather than in a group. Regarding I/O practices specifically, which of any of these factors vary across cultures and to what extent? Does this apply equally with subcultures? It is a lot to consider. Bernard Nijstad and Wolfgang Stroebe, in their paper ‘How the Group Affects the Mind’, describe group effects on performance as either ‘cognitive stimulation or cognitive interference’ (2006, p. 186). Factors to consider here are identified by business school academics Terri Kurtzberg and Teresa Amabile, who describe curvilinear results in productivity that suggest that an optimal number of extroverts is beneficial, beyond which productivity declines. Kurtzberg and Amabile further identify conflict management as another key determinant of group effectiveness, wherein too much agreement reduces innovative creation and that, in fact, conflict can be useful in preventing ‘group

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think’ (2001, p. 287). The nature of the conflicts is also key. Kurtzberg and Amabile (2001, p. 290) describe: Three main categories of conflicts: task-based conflict, which pertains to discussions and debates about the work being done; relationship-based conflict, which pertains to the interpersonal interaction among group members; and processbased conflict, which pertains to the strategies, plans, and division of roles and responsibilities...

Of these, Kurtzberg and Amabile note that some conflicts within task-based work can be useful, but that relationship-based or process-based conflict is damaging. Further, conflict in task-based is curvilinear: a threshold amount of task conflict enhances outputs; anything that spills into relationship conflict diminishes the work and is very hard to rectify within the group (2001, p. 290). I have observed this in other I/O work when I was working professionally in Hungary: hidden group tensions based on religion and other cultural markers arose at the story table during a strong difference of opinion. One of the storyliners fired a portmanteau slur that included ‘gypsy’ at another storyliner, and the relationship damage proved irreparable. Of course, there is competing commentary about collaborative productivity versus individual productivity in screenwriting. US screenwriter Eric Haywood (2015) highlights the utility of ‘gang banging’ a script (many writers on one script) to meet deadlines: sometimes [it is] the entire staff collaborating on a single script simultaneously. The idea is to literally work as a “gang” (as opposed to you writing an episode all by yourself) to “bang out” a script as quickly as possible. Gang banging a script can reduce the time required to deliver a draft to the showrunner from roughly a week down to as little as 24 hours or less.

In an allied area, Nell Greenwood and Robyn Gibson (2020) have assayed writings on pedagogical approaches to screen creativity, referencing the observations on ‘flow’ by authors such as Dorothea Brande and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Here, flow is a state of unselfconscious, optimal creative output akin to being ‘in the zone’ for athletes. These are multiple considerations for group creativity, and they highlight the need for a body of research work on collaborative script development practices. These many considerations are also useful markers as I track my own experiences and decision-making through an autoethnographic approach to research in my Ph.D.

What Is Shared in a Group? As a starting point for deciding who to engage for I/O work, I return to the question of what is shared. This also bears on the warning above about ‘group think’. In my early observations from the Ph.D., there can be a benefit in

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people who identify as of a particular culture working collectively on a drama pertaining to that culture. They know the area. The world-building is fast. Good ‘noticers’ (that is, story people) identify differences and connections. What is shared saves time, and the good noticers bring freshness to the narrative. By contrast, I recently engaged in a virtual story room where many of the participants were cultural peers of mine and yet the story generation outcomes were significantly different to the experiences I have had with the drag king storyliners. I put this down to the type of idea on which the team is being asked to work. In the virtual story room, people were developing a period mystery story, something well outside their personal experiences; in my Ph.D. research, the drag kings are telling a version of their story. At this early stage of data gathering and analysis, my feeling is that there are identifiable efficiencies in a story group cohort of cultural insiders that turn group think to advantage. Yet I also feel that this advantage turns on other qualities attributable to the individuals within the group.

The Process of Forming Group The Insider-group of four came together following university ethics approval. Potential participants were identified through websites and social media. I spoke with one candidate, who connected me with the next, snow-balling to the next two. Criteria included that the participants identified as drag king performers and that they had an interest in making screen content. Competency and maturity were further criteria: the four participants ended up being aged mid-twenties and older. Each of the potential participants agreed to join the research, and I had the necessary numbers for the participant group within several weeks. Amongst the paperwork required for ethics was an agreement that outlined the particulars of the engagement, including credit. This was deemed an important aspect of any such study given the aforementioned principle of partnership, which would go hand in hand with values of mutual knowledge transfers. This idea of partnership also altered other normative industrial practices. In the normal day-to-day of organising story meetings and hiring people, my expectation of the conventional process is that the subject matter expert (SME) is given the meeting dates and, if they are unable to attend, someone else is employed. In this case, the dates were structured around the SMEs’ schedules, and the locale was planned to be the most mutually convenient (until Zoom became the necessary tool). While I would expect in the conventional setting to provide as much detail as possible relevant to the development stage (as it was with this set of story meetings), I would not in the normal industrial process expect that the story producer or story editor would be engaged in any pedagogical sessions on craft or on the participants’ personal projects outside of the story room, and this was offered as part of knowledge sharing. Self-reflexively, I was navigating early relationship-building for a partnership-based enterprise and, in short, the usual approach was inverted: all

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of the storyliners were SMEs, and the arrangements and requirements for the story meeting worked around the SMEs rather than, in the industrial setting, the lone SME working around the requirements of the story meeting. Considering the importance of both a complementarity that facilitated communication and a need for a definable cultural distance, the process of determining which cohort of SMEs to consider hinged on sufficient cultural disparity that defined me as the outside writer while also affording the insider participants sufficient cultural distance from the ‘mainstream’ to be able to be described as a cohort. The identification of this cohort sprung from some earlier story research I had undertaken when co-writing DragQueensland (2011), a theatre project commissioned by the Queensland Music Festival, during which the research interviews for content development revealed various instances of normalised prejudice and violence arising from that prejudice. The participants in this new drag king research identify variously as female, nonbinary and lesbian, and the world of drag kings is subculturally distinct as a cohort. In fact, despite RuPaul Charles’s celebritising of drag queens globally, the idea of drag kings is so novel to many that explanations of my research have often had to include an explanation of what a drag king is, an observation also noted in Vogue Magazine in 2018 (p. 1): Drag has gone mainstream, and it’s been a long time coming: RuPaul’s first show started airing on VH1 back in 1996. But where are the kings? When I asked that question, more than a few people had their own for me: What’s a drag king?

What are immediately visible or definable of the cultural and other differences are gender, age (I am at least a generation older than the oldest of the participants), experience of the In-group’s female queer spaces and backgrounds in performance (mine is writing) and, from there, are the manifold less visible psycho-sociological features constitutive of my upbringing and social context against those of the participants. At this stage of the research, this means me developing deeper knowledge of the particularities of drag subculture and, equally, of the differences in I/O views of mainstream culture. For example, global issues in my youth focussed more on energy availability and the chances of Reagan dropping the bomb than environmentalism and identity liberalism. Within this, I theorised that the shared cultural pillars and influences of being Australians living in Melbourne and working in the arts sector provided important areas of overlap that facilitated communication. This brings me to what I now regard as one of the preeminent qualities influencing the group’s creative output. I noted above that an interest in making screen content was a criterion for inclusion. Having (to date) experienced two story meetings with the storyliners, I now broaden that to include people who are driven to tell a particular story. I return to my experience with the virtual story room here: the drag kings have an engaging, emotional, entertaining set of experiences about which they are passionate; in

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the virtual story room (another project), people were motivated by writing in a particular genre rather than having a particular story to tell. For script development, this strongly suggests to me that creative productivity (less cognitive inertia, greater heterogeneity of ideas, greater idea relevance and applicability) is enhanced by group mission to tell the story, engaged reflexive leadership, responsiveness to group maturity, and a steadfast avoidance of the blocks to collaborative communication.

The Story Room Process and Making the Room Function The story room process for the research was designed to replicate the experience of professional story development, although some in the Australian industry (and elsewhere) may argue that the use of storyliners in feature film development is novel in some respects (see below for more on this). None had worked as a storyliner before, and while they knew one another to varying degrees, my personal experience of each of them had been limited to emails and phone calls. I provided the proposed story approach and outline, the characters, a starting point for the sense of tone and style, and details of how the session would run. They were remunerated at the Australian Writers Guild rate and will each attract the credit ‘Story By’. During my Ph.D. Confirmation of Candidature (end of first year), one panel member underscored the cautionary tales of extractive practices that have arisen in some areas of screen content making and, usefully, the university ethics process prefigured some of these concerns in underlining agency as a central tenet of research practice. As a consequence of Covid-19, the participants and I met via Zoom for a four-hour session in September 2020 to develop the elements described above towards the first draft script, with a colleague kindly acting as a note taker. This was followed up with a second four-hour session in January 2021. At the time of writing, another is planned for May 2021. Not having any personal relationships with the participants prior to this project, I had no idea how the group would work as a productive story room. This, of course, was the point, but it provoked an internal tension between the ambitions of the ‘researcher self’ and the ‘story editor self’: in academic terms, any of the possible outcomes is of interest and contributes to new knowledge even if the story generation fails, while the story editor self is geared to making the creative work hum. Given the time constraints (a typical story room on a 90-minute project could run across several full days), my plan was to try to accelerate the collegiality and productivity of the story workshops through an uncritical and relaxed environment, a structured approach to working through the material (a traditional technique), and/or through the application of less traditional techniques (e.g., if it quickly appears that a participant is struggling within the group, to make space within the session for the participant to work individually and return with expanded ideas based on a structured list of story or character ambitions). A major concern here for a new group was the usual

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relationship-building required between myself and the participants, overlaid in this case with any potential anxieties within the group about my intentions or about how the material would be treated. My Ph.D. co-supervisor at the time highlighted the concerns of some in the LGBTQIA+ community about the history of negative media representation, and that that anxiety may, however unconsciously, build walls.

The First Meeting I went into this first story room unsure of how much time would be spent acquainting the participants with storylining practices or how far I could push things. As such, the running order I planned for the first story meeting was: • First hour: central idea, central characters/relationship, theme—the ‘Astory’ problem of the film and of the central character(s). In the characters’ emotional and physical worlds, what are we protecting, what are we changing? Tone and style (genre). Audience. • Second hour: world and character building, scale, expand on theme, ‘Bstory’. • Third hour: scenarios, sequences, major turns in the story, potential outcomes/resolution. • Fourth hour: broad brushstrokes on entertainment elements, humour, review narrative progression, reassess tone. To some extent, it was predictably explorative and the concepts more abstract—that is, broad brushstrokes on characterisations, the world, scenarios and how relationships and goals operated in ‘drag kinging’—but the participants proved to be natural storyliners and generous contributors. When technical problems took me away from the room for five or ten minutes, there was very active conversation (which I heard in the recording later) about what life was like in the night club’s dressing room, how drag kings engaged with drag queens and other behind-the-scenes ephemera. I was conscious here of Kurtzberg and Amabile’s admonitions about task-based, relationship-based and process-based conflict, but the storyliners’ energetic and respectful discussions indicated that problematic conflicts would be outside the spirit of the room. I drew early inferences about what issues concerned or interested each of the participants in relation to drag kinging so that those thoughts could be mapped through the developing narrative. An early off-the-cuff remark (‘Everyone loves a daddy’) was key in establishing one of the characters and in developing a central relationship. Next came thoughts about gender politics, and about occupations where gender politics may be troublesome. This solidified into careers and problems for the film’s characters.

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By the end of the first story meeting, I had copious notes on story and character options and world-building, and had begun formulating research reflections founded on my progress with the group. I noted above that the shared cultural pillars and influences of being Australians living in Melbourne might provide important touchpoints for discussion, and this proved to be the case. On reflection, it was problematic that I had not seen one of the nightclubs that hosted king nights due to Covid-19 restrictions at the time of the first story meeting (a location visit will happen before the third draft). While I attribute the collegiality and productivity to the participants’ inherent generosity, I also think the options for broad and deep engagement can be maximised by the level of native interest the story editor has in the topic. So, while I am conscious of how some greater level of cultural familiarity on my part could have accelerated the process, my observation at this stage is that an incredibly productive environment can be fostered by keen questioning and story editing that unfolds at a rate that is respectful of the group’s willingness to engage. As another reflection on leadership of the room, my focus in this meeting was to provide as much time as possible to giving voice and exploring each new idea that arose. Something I have learned from previous story rooms, which bears on group theory about mixes of personalities, is that quieter voices may make observations from which the group might quickly move on, but it is well-worth noting those less-attended comments. As an outside writer working with insider writers (facilitating their process), it quickly becomes apparent that there is great value in the story editor noting these less-attended comments and cycling back to them at a later appropriate moment, because these varied views can in fact deepen the interiority of characters. Over the three months following the first writers’ room, the copious meeting notes became the first draft. I played with many presentations and, ultimately, being worried about stakes, added in a new story strand where the central character’s grandmother was dying. I was finding my way, picking up on what issues were hottest within the group, what sensitivities existed, and what self-reflexivities might encourage teasing or playfulness or deeper insights. In short, it was as much about finding narrative and characters as me identifying where the lines lay on the socio-political topography.

The Second Meeting The second meeting consisted of the storyliners critiquing this first draft script to further develop the characters, consider alternative stories, and deepen the emotional core and themes. The running order provided to the storyliners itemised the detail we would be considering: • World-building. • Each character’s arc—ways to increase access. Do they all have distinctive characteristics? What can be added to make each more memorable, are

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their wants relatable or, at least, understandable. Need more or different characters? Examine each of the story threads/plot lines. Bolster or remove threads that don’t work: the romance, Dezi’s [one of the central characters] struggle, Abby’s attempts to support her mum. Pitch of the humour. Pitch of the political.

The new story strand that ‘added a body’3 (the central character’s grandmother on her deathbed) was the first to be discussed. Prior to the meeting I had explained this addition but also, by this stage, had very much felt the need to be able to engage with the storyliners on an ad hoc basis between the formal story workshops to discuss such new additions. I avoided this because I did not have the budget to remunerate them for this extra time, which is an important point for script development in the I/O (or any) writer context in that this is professional work for which people’s time and talents must be compensated. Further, during the three months of writing, my ongoing wider research into drag king culture and performance had raised some questions. As a small example, a performance of Hugo Grrrl’s ‘Mad Butcher’ (2020) set a benchmark in visual humour and I wanted the storyliners’ take on explicitness as an option for the film. And, inevitably, the more voices one hears on a topic, the more one begins to consider where the consensus sits within a community. This then becomes a consideration about when to stop: how many people need to be interviewed before the research is comprehensive enough? In this context, the answer is to have sufficient detail to confer credibility on your fictional world. As the second story meeting progressed, and my relationship with the group was more mature, the discussions became deeper and I felt very comfortable that the thoughtful and varied voices I had amongst the storyliners were serving the story with credible and representative characters and scenarios. A notable step in this second meeting was the refining of detail that had been broader in scope in the first meeting. As an example, ‘scenes we can see’ are incredibly helpful in story design and, not uncommonly in story rooms, come from specific interrogation of the generalised comment. In the first workshop, a question such as ‘What’s the night club like?’ produced answers about the size of the club, the music, and its audiences. In the second workshop, with the characters now much more described, the question became ‘Who should the character deal with there?’. More specific still, ‘Who owns the club and what have they said to you about your act?’ revealed particular moments of such interest that they will feed directly into the second draft. The important note here is about the ‘maturity’ of the room and how high rapport 3 ‘Adding a body’ is common short-hand for raising the stakes through the addition of a death, murder, etc.

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makes space for the storyliners to address such questions as their most painful encounter, their greatest loss, their greatest love. Again, I note that all of this must suit the moment—it cannot ever feel like interrogation. Reflecting on my role in story room leadership, I entered the meeting very open to changes. My impulse to raise the stakes with a possible grandma death did not work to hold the interest of the group and, as a point of further reflection for the next draft, I will reassess whether there is another solution to the question of stakes, or whether there is a problem with stakes at all. On process, I felt that in the Zoom setting, I—and perhaps the others—felt more drained earlier than would occur in a face-to-face setting. As a consequence, rather than hourly breaks, we took breaks in response to the energy in the ‘room’. I draw an early inference that face-to-face is more conducive to group flow; that the rhythms of intense discussion in script development (spontaneous perspective-shifting interjections, free-flowing conversations, collective energy) are harder to replicate in online fora, the mechanics of which channel one speaker at a time. The broad comments from the participants in this second meeting on the draft were: • Reduce or remove one of the family storylines about the ill grandmother. The storyliners felt that this family story came at the expense of dramatising life in the club, and that, as potential viewers of this story, they wanted to live in the king club world much more. • Expand why the central character Abby is a drag king and wants to be in the community. The story currently shows Abby connecting with her absentee father and it potentially reads as if ‘daddy issues’ are Abby’s main motivator. This may misrepresent for many drag kings why they do drag in real life. As a consequence, we had a deeper discussion about motivations which, for the storyliners, is very much to do with artistic expression and the response of a singularly welcoming and warmly receptive audience at drag events. • There is a moment where Abby hangs up her king costume at the end, which the storyliners felt again weighted the father aspect of the story with too much significance. This led to a change in Abby being one drag character who performs as a number of different personae (a la Kemah Bob performing as Lil’ Test Ease). • Another aspect of Abby’s life is that she has been a dancer in the past. The storyliners were interested in dramatising why Abby had left the dance world and, especially, how the dance world seeks to control bodies/queer bodies. By contrast, the king community celebrates diversity of bodies.

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Themes the storyliners wanted to see further developed included: the differences between being accepted and being celebrated in the drag king community; the community as a distinctly non-binary and queer space where alteregos can be expressed and celebrated; and the club as a space to unpack and share everyday experiences through performance and bring joy to others i.e. break-ups, funny interactions; and different feelings about self and about bodies. On the social politics, one of the characters in the film story works as a teacher and is in the process of being sacked by the principal. The feedback from the storyliners included ideas to make the school principal more nuanced and less of an obvious homophobe/villain. The group commented that they find ‘performative woke’ people more insidious than frankly homophobic people. Further, the storyliners felt that the school’s employment of the Dezi character as a teacher could be token and that, perhaps in this story strand, the school was responding to pressure from parents or the media to change their diversity policy to earn ‘woke’ points. This led to explorations of when the participants had experienced feeling like the ‘other’, and how to dramatise the sense of anger in the queer community at marginalisation and how the anger comes from trauma. The storyliners also considered unexpected artefacts of drag king performance in the layers of audience response—that the mediated masculinity on stage can provoke sexual interest, in itself a complicated sentiment in audience members identifying as lesbian. As an outside writer, I would not have known these emphases nor how to dramatise them in a way that was wholly accurate to the In-group community.

Conclusion: Implications for Script Development As an outside writer, it was novel to work with a group wholly new to me but who, amongst themselves, shared a pre-existing group dynamic. I may have previously thought a greater variety of voices in a traditional story room environment would have sparked a wider range of discussion, but in this research context the participants’ familiarity with one another accelerated the rate of story development, and the range of discussion was certainly broad enough. Here, the considerations noted above about group dynamics and group think also serve to highlight how specific storylining is as a category of creative endeavour, particularly in this context of feature script development. While it may be that group think in long-run TV series produces biases that affect the breadth or variety of story positions, there are elements of group think that serve feature length script development by accelerating important story elements. By contrast, I recall the development sessions on an adult drama series I had commissioned where a greater proportion of the day was spent world-building as middle-class writers considered what were the features of working-class criminality. Further, it appears to me that the productivity of the group is ‘weaponised’ when two elements cohere: that the story goals engage the group’s concerns, and when the story editor is as equally interested in the

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concepts being considered. Passion for telling the tale will be a major criterion for me when next I select a story room. On reflection, I was also lucky to have people whose expertise in content making spanned stage, short-form screen content, and screen direction. This meant knowledgeable input on many story elements, and from different craft perspectives. It was fortuitous that there was a diversity of political views, but a learning at this stage is that, depending on the project, it could be worthwhile having longer and more wide-ranging discussions to understand participants’ points of view on areas the screen story will investigate. Another observation is that, in hindsight, I suspect I was simply very grateful to have had such a positive response from all of the participants when I first approached them, that I did not want to upset the apple cart by employing anything that smacked of a job interview. Prior to my broader research of drag king performance, I would not have anticipated the tremendous delight I found in the ridiculing of some pillars of male behaviour, a delight amplified by the shaking up of assumptions that come from the distinctive point of view of the drag king (for example, woman as man patronising women). Yes, there is the subversion in appropriating versions of masculinity but, rather than an unmediated critique, I found a shared interiority in the participants’ acute observations of simple male cruelties and anxieties. I noted that a failing of the process was not having access to the participants during the writing of the first draft, but it was important to replicate professional conditions, and time outside of the story meetings had not been budgeted. The participants have generously offered to be available as needed while I write the second draft, which I take as a positive sign of the trust developed from the project to date. I will know much more about how the participants regard the success or failure of the development process once I have completed the research and collated the participants’ reflections (the final stage of research data collection in the Ph.D.). Some early learnings about what worked include: • A respectful engagement with as complete an explanation as possible of the aims and approach of the work. • An approach that sought to develop a rapport, but understood that one may not develop. • Seeking out people with an established interest in screen content making, and whose familiarity with one another conferred a level of cohesion. • An honest description of how story decision-making generally proceeded. This meant both a willingness on my part to change material (for example, losing complete story threads and bolstering others) while also needing to adhere to those elements (such as theme, rhythms, balance) that would make a feature film story cohere. • That this was not about ‘digging dirt’ or insisting on difficult personal revelation.

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• A personal work history in the area. On the final point, and in terms of my ‘entitlement to author’, it makes sense that the writer or artist is credentialed in some way to develop the material. I hoped my professional and academic credentials provided the participants with some certainty that this would be a serious creative and academic exercise. Then comes the multiplicity of considerations and possibilities that bear on collaborative work, some of which I have touched upon above, and how those factors contribute to a screenplay that promises to engage so strongly with the proposed audience that it will attract the people and resources to proceed to production. What is ineluctable in In-group/Out-group creative practice is respectful, non-extractive engagement where the participant’s agency is assured through a process founded on mutuality and, optimally, a knowledge transfer that progresses the participant’s own ambitions and interests.

References Batty, C., & Baker, D. (2018). Screenwriting as a mode of research, and the screenplay as a research artefact. In Batty, C., & Kerrigan, S. (Eds.), Screen production research: Creative practice as a mode of enquiry. (pp. 67–83). Palgrave Macmillan. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Bloore, P. (2012). The screenplay business: Managing creativity and script development in the film industry (p. 9). Routledge. Bob, K. (2019). The Paddock, Channel 4, United Kingdom. https://www.channel4. com/press/news/fresh-comedy-talent-be-showcased-new-live-stream-comedy-event Carr, J., & Gordon, E. (2020). Only gay actors should play gay character because “you wouldn’t black someone up...”. The Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co. uk/news/article-9136573/Only-gay-actors-play-gay-characters-says-former-Doctorscreenwriter-Russell-T-Davies.html Greenwood, N., & Gibson, R. (2020). Creativity and the unconscious in the screenwriting classroom: A review of the literature. Journal of Screenwriting, 11(2), 139–156. Grrrl, H. (2020). The Mad Butcher. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VYi0y 9ToA0 Haywood, E. 2015. Writer’s room 101: Your first Gang Bang. Script Magazine. https://scriptmag.com/features/writers-room-101-first-gang-bang Kerrigan, S., & Batty, C. (2015). Looking back in order to look forward: Re-scripting and reframing screen production research. Studies in Australasian Cinema, 9(2), 90–92. Kurtzberg, T., & Amabile, T. (2001). From Guilford to creative synergy: Opening the black box of team-level creativity. Creativity Research Journal 2000–2001, 13(3&4), 285–294. Lempert, W. (2012). Telling their own stories: Indigenous film as critical identity discourse. The Applied Anthropologist, 32(1), 23–32. Macdonald, I. W. (2010). “...So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic”: The screenwriter and the screen idea work group. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 45–58.

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McCall, S. (2011). First person plural: Aboriginal storytelling and the ethics of collaborative authorship. UBC Press. Miley, L. (2006). White writing black: Issues of authorship and authenticity in nonindigenous representations of Australian aboriginal fictional characters (p. 6). Master thesis, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology. Nijstad, B., & Stroebe, W. (2006). How the group affects the mind: A cognitive model of idea generation in groups. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3), 186–213. Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Offler, N. (2017). An exploration of collaboration: Aboriginal and non-aboriginal relationships in ethnographic filmmaking (p. 6). Doctoral thesis, School of Social Sciences, The University of Adelaide. Petridis, S. (2020). TV miniseries or long-form film? A narrative analysis of The Haunting of Hill House. Journal of Screenwriting, 11(2), 207–220. Phelps, N. (2018). Drag kings. Vogue Magazine. https://www.vogue.com/projects/ 13541679/drag-kings Shriver, L. (2016). I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lio nel-shrivers-full-speech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fad Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: Perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing: THe International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 13(6), 204–217.

Unique Contexts of Script Development

Productive Interventions: Collaborative Script Development for Stories About Mental Health Issues and Suicide Fincina Hopgood

Introduction You want to write a film that explores youth suicide in rural communities, or you are developing a web series about the daily experience of living with anxiety. Perhaps you have been commissioned to write a series of scripts for a long-running TV soap, and the storyline you have been assigned follows a character’s journey through diagnosis and treatment for bipolar disorder. Where do you start your research? How do you meet the challenges of creating a dramatic narrative that engages audiences while also portraying mental illness accurately and responsibly? How do you avoid writing characters that are clichés or perpetuate negative stereotypes? And how can you ensure your script does not contribute to the stigma and discrimination experienced by people living with mental health issues? Drawing on a case study of one Australian intervention for scriptwriters, Mindframe for Stage and Screen, this chapter explores the role that writers can play in fostering empathy for lived experience and supporting mental health awareness through the stories they tell. With a focus on the relationship between Mindframe for Stage and Screen and the practice of script development, this case study also highlights the importance of consultation and collaboration between the mental health sector and the writing industry to create accurate, responsible and emotionally engaging stories about mental F. Hopgood (B) University of New England, Armidale, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_32

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health for the screen (and stage). While Mindframe for Stage and Screen is designed to support writers across theatre and performing arts, as well as film, television and new screen media forms, the focus of this chapter will be primarily on scriptwriting for commercial film and television. The recent controversy about the portrayal of suicide, depression and sexual assault in the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why (2017–) has been a catalyst for global debates in the media and the academy about the responsibilities of the screen industry when telling stories about mental health issues, particularly stories targeted at younger audiences.1 These debates have coincided with broader developments in the creative industries, across government policy, industry research and media commentary, which have raised awareness of issues of representation and the importance of diversity in the stories we see on screen.2 Questions have been raised about authenticity and lived experience, and the importance of providing access to the means of production for minority and marginalised communities to tell their own stories.3 While this program was developed a decade prior to these current debates, Mindframe for Stage and Screen demonstrates how a targeted program can productively intervene in the script development process to address issues of diversity and authenticity. To place Mindframe for Stage and Screen in its industry context, this chapter begins with a brief survey of current debates and production trends in screen portrayals of mental illness and suicide, before explaining the program in more detail and how it relates to the practice of script development. The discussion of the Mindframe guidelines and resources is illustrated with quotations from screenwriters who contributed to the development of these resources, while case studies and industry examples demonstrate the program “in action”. The chapter concludes by considering the challenges ahead in the program’s second decade and the pathways forward for writers wishing to develop authentic and sensitive stories about the lived experience of mental illness and suicide.

1 See Hopgood (2019) for an overview of these debates regarding portrayals of mental health on screen. 2 For example, in 2015 government agency Screen Australia published a report Gender Matters: Women in the Australian Screen Industry and established the Gender Matters suite of initiatives to address gender imbalance in the Australian screen industry (Screen Australia, n.d.). The following year, Screen Australia (2016) published another research report Reflections on Diversity in Australian TV Drama, which led to the formation of the Screen Diversity and Inclusion Network (SDIN). SDIN members include media organisations, screen agencies and industry guilds committed to diversity both on screen and behind the camera (Screen Australia, 2017). See also Quinn (2016) and Maddox (2017). 3 For an example of how these issues are being discussed in the Australian screen industry, see the ACMI Conversations panel discussion “Mainstreaming disability and appearance diversity” (2018) with screenwriters and disability advocates hosted by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), available on YouTube.

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Writing Screen Stories About Mental Illness and Suicide For many years, mental health professionals and researchers have written about the negative influence of mainstream commercial film and TV portrayals of mental illness. These studies focus on the tendency of news and entertainment media to reinforce stigmatising stereotypes and condescending clichés about mental illness, such as the psycho killer and the mad genius. In a 2006 survey of the extensive literature on this issue, Canadian anti-stigma researcher Heather Stuart suggests it is time to move beyond these studies of negative portrayals and instead focus on what cinema and television can do to foster a greater understanding of mental illness, and to reflect the realities of lived experience. When a film or TV show invites the viewer to identify with a protagonist living with mental health issues, this empathetic relationship can provide insight into lived experience. This insight has the potential to raise awareness and promote understanding of the mental health issue being portrayed. These are essential factors for reducing the stigma of mental illness, which is based on ignorance and fear. This fear is often sustained by the myths of mental illness that are reinforced in the narratives of popular culture (Stuart, 2006, pp. 102–103). The rise of the diversity movement in the screen industry over the past decade,4 combined with the lobbying of mental health organisations, has led to greater awareness among screen producers of the importance of portraying mental illness and suicide responsibly. Programs such as Mindframe for Stage and Screen focus on educating scriptwriters about the social and emotional impacts of these portrayals on people living with mental health issues, and on broader community attitudes towards mental illness. Gradually, we are seeing more complex and nuanced portrayals of mental illness in commercial film and television, some of these created by or in consultation with people with lived experience. A 2014 study by the Glasgow Media Group in collaboration with the UK mental health charity Time to Change, concluded that television portrayals of mental health issues such as depression and bipolar disorder are becoming more authentic and have led to a positive change in public attitudes towards mental illness (Time to Change & Glasgow Media Group, 2014). This study, Making a Drama Out of a Crisis, surveyed over 2000 British viewers to assess the extent to which these portrayals improved their understanding of mental health issues, changed their views about people who experience these issues, and encouraged them to talk with family and friends 4 While issues of gender and race in the American industry, in both production roles and on-screen representations, have tended to dominate discussion in the mainstream media (see, for example, Levin, 2018), the impact of the diversity movement has extended to screen industries in other countries and includes aspects such as sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity and cultural background. For a global assessment of diversity on screen, see UNESCO’s information paper “Diversity and the film industry” (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2016).

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about mental health. The study praised shows such as Homeland (2011–), Coronation Street (1960–), EastEnders (1985–) and Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019) as examples of positive, authentic portrayals that “normalise” mental health problems and move away from stereotypes and myths that associate mental illness with violence and tragedy (Time to Change & Glasgow Media Group, 2014, p. 2). In Australia, the ABC has been at the forefront of developing content about mental health issues since 2014 when it launched the Mental As … initiative to coincide with Mental Health Week, held annually in October. Mental As … comprised a week of programming across a range of media forms (documentaries, short films, comedies, panel discussions, and radio) with the aim of raising awareness and funds for mental health research (Hopgood, 2014). The line-up of programs included the premiere of the acclaimed 3-part documentary Changing Minds, filmed on location in a psychiatric hospital in Sydney, and showcased comedian Josh Thomas’ award-winning, semi-autobiographical dramedy series Please Like Me (2013–2016), which originally premiered on ABC2. Drawing on Thomas’ experiences caring for his mother who lives with bipolar disorder, Please Like Me has been widely praised for its empathetic portrayal of bipolar disorder, with its shared focus on the emotions and frustrations of both the person with the diagnosis and their carer or support person.5 The authenticity and complexity of this portrayal are grounded in the series’ script development process, which involved Thomas consulting with his mother and seeking her approval of any scenes dealing with her condition: “She has the highest level of script approval, higher than the ABC or the America network” (Thomas quoted in Wilson, 2014). The return of ABC’s Mental As … in 2015 was less successful, receiving some harsh criticism from people with lived experience (Razer, 2015), and the initiative has not been repeated in subsequent years. In 2018, an Australian version of the British reality TV format How “Mad” Are You? was developed by SBS and Blackfella Films, who consulted with the national mental health charity SANE Australia. SANE provided support for the lived experience participants who appeared on the show and help-seeking information for viewers, distributed across print and social media to accompany the show’s publicity and initial broadcast. Despite the evident care with which the show was produced, the critical and popular reception was mixed, with many viewers hostile to the reality TV format as a vehicle for raising awareness of mental health and exploring the sociocultural biases and assumptions underpinning

5 Among the show’s many accolades, in 2015 Thomas won the AACTA Award for Best Screenplay in Television for the season 2 episode “Scroggin” (episode 7) in which the characters of Josh (based on Thomas) and Rose (based on Thomas’ mother) spend the entire episode bushwalking and talking about Rose’s illness, how she feels about it and how Josh feels about his role as her carer.

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concepts of “illness”.6 This example illuminates the tensions between the codes and conventions of entertainment media and the role of the media in reflecting and shaping community attitudes towards mental health. The industry conversation about how best to tell stories about mental health issues on screen has evolved rapidly over the past five years, fueled by the scrutiny of consumer advocates and activists on social media, as well as the lobbying of mental health organisations such as the UK’s Time to Change and SANE Australia, with its media monitoring program StigmaWatch. These developments raise challenges for screen producers and writers who must balance commercial imperatives with ethical responsibilities when developing screen media content about mental health. A key development in the Australian screen industry’s conversation about diversity was the publication in 2016 of a research report by Screen Australia, the federal government agency for screen industry funding. This report, Seeing Ourselves: Reflections on Diversity in Australian TV Drama, surveyed 199 Australian TV dramas screened between 2011 and 2015, and documented key indicators of diversity such as cultural background, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability status—the latter of which included mental health. The report stressed the importance of research and consultation as key strategies for “getting diversity into the script” and ensuring authenticity by drawing upon lived experience as part of the script development process (Screen Australia, 2016, pp. 25–27). With the demands of industry funding bodies such as Screen Australia for more diverse and authentic representations, scriptwriters now arguably have increased ethical responsibilities to meet, in addition to the creative and commercial demands of their craft. These responsibilities point to the need for expert advice and consultation, which Mindframe for Stage and Screen offers.

What Is Mindframe for Stage and Screen? Mindframe for Stage and Screen is a program managed by Australian mental health organisation Everymind. It is part of the Mindframe National Media Initiative, which is funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Health under the National Suicide Prevention Leadership and Support Program to ensure accurate and responsible reporting and portrayals of suicide and mental health issues across all branches of the news and entertainment media. The Mindframe Initiative comprises programs specifically designed for journalists, police and the public relations sector, as well as scriptwriters. The guidelines and resources for these programs are freely available on the Mindframe website (www.mindframe.org.au). Workshops, tertiary sector training and individual consultations with writers about specific projects or media 6

See, for example, the criticisms of the show in the Comments field of my article in The Conversation (Hopgood, 2018) following the broadcast of How “Mad” Are You? on SBS in October 2018.

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stories complement these online resources and are key components of the Mindframe Initiative. Workshops and training sessions are hosted by industry collaborators such as the Australian Writers’ Guild, RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication, and local community arts organisations such as Cinespace in Footscray, Victoria. In these workshops, Mindframe staff focus on educating writers, journalists and others working in news and entertainment media about the importance of the program’s guidelines and the media’s role in contributing to or reducing the stigma of mental illness. In scriptwriting workshops, facilitators present facts and figures to challenge stereotypes and provide writers with the information they need to produce more accurate, responsible portrayals, while people living with mental health issues speak about their experiences. The aim of these workshops is to encourage writers to develop alternative stories that show mental illness as a part of everyday life, as Mindframe’s Jaelea Skehan explains: “What scriptwriters say is good writing is actually true representation of life rather than stereotypes […] They’ve found the information to be enlightening, and the richness of personal experience they get, can help them develop a character in a creative but realistic way” (Hagan, 2011). In 2007, when the Mindframe Initiative was established, the Australian Writers’ Guild partnered with SANE Australia and Everymind (then known as The Hunter Institute for Mental Health) to develop one of the program’s key resources: Mental Illness and Suicide: A Mindframe Resource for Stage and Screen. This resource provides “practical advice and information for people involved in the development of Australian film, television and theatre. It is designed to help inform truthful and authentic portrayals of mental illness and suicide” (‘About this resource’, Mindframe resource, 2007, n.p.). The 36-page booklet, which can be downloaded from the program’s website, “provides information about audience impact and key issues to consider when developing storylines that include either mental illness or suicide” (‘About this resource’, Mindframe resource, 2007, n.p.). The booklet addresses common misconceptions and provides concise factual information about suicide and specific mental health issues including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, eating disorders, personality disorders and substance use disorders. The Mindframe website and social media channels complement this resource by providing more detailed and up-to-date information to ensure the program responds in a timely way to current issues and industry developments.7 Mental Illness and Suicide: A Mindframe Resource for Stage and Screen (also referred to as ‘the Mindframe resource’) was developed in consultation with scriptwriters, to ensure it would meet the industry’s needs. As 7 The Mindframe website notes that the booklet Mental Illness and Suicide: A Mindframe Resource for Stage and Screen “is in the process of being updated and rebranded” but it is still available for download as at 19 March 2020 from this URL: https://mindfr ame.org.au/industry-hubs/for-stage-and-screen/mindframe-guidelines.

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one writer observed: “I don’t want to be told what to write about, but I want to be informed about what I write” (‘About this resource’, Mindframe resource, 2007, n.p.). Essential to the development of this resource was the contribution of people with lived experience of mental illness and suicide. In a collaborative workshop with scriptwriters and mental health agencies, consumers of mental health services and carers were invited to share their views about the impact of film and television portrayals on community attitudes towards mental illness and their own self-image. Throughout the Mindframe resource booklet, these views are recorded in brief but powerful quotations that give voice to their lived experience. Negative portrayals in popular culture commonly associate mental illness with violence and socially undesirable behaviour. These portrayals contribute to feelings of shame and social isolation for people living with mental health issues: “[they make] me feel like I am crazy and that one day I will act like they are portraying. This makes me scared” (Mindframe resource, 2007, p. 3). While much of the discussion about media portrayals tends to focus on how these representations affect community attitudes towards people living with mental health issues, what is often overlooked is the demonstrated effect these portrayals have on help-seeking behaviour and the serious health consequences of self-stigma. As one of the workshop participants commented: “I had not really considered the whole concept that stigma could actually be worse than the symptoms of mental illness … I was aware they [people living with mental health issues] were affected by portrayals on film and television, but not to the extent that these portrayals may discourage people from seeking treatment” (Mindframe resource, 2007, p. 4). One of scriptwriters involved in developing Mindframe for Stage and Screen acknowledges the commercial pressures of their craft and how these may conflict with creating accurate and truthful portrayals in a writers’ room: “I think at times under the pressure of production [we] do resort to stereotypes. The problem is, not only do you perpetuate a stereotype but you miss out on a better story” (Mindframe resource, 2007, p. 1).8 Despite the time pressures that constrain script development when writing serialised television in Australia (Batty et al., 2018, p. 163), the long-form narrative of a TV series may provide writers with greater scope than the feature film format for developing storylines about mental illness with care and complexity: “An interesting challenge would be to give a major character a mental illness, then you can actually carry the storyline through and deal with the long-term consequences and you don’t have to cure them immediately” (Mindframe resource, 2007, p. 7). The imperative for scriptwriters to avoid clichés and negative stereotypes about mental illness does not mean every story has to have a happy ending. Indeed, realistic portrayals are consistent with creating accurate and authentic 8

All quotations from workshop participants—both scriptwriters and people with lived experience—are presented anonymously in Mental Illness and Suicide: A Mindframe Resource for Stage and Screen (2007).

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stories, as one writer suggests: “For me it’s about honesty. It doesn’t mean you have to portray everyone and everything as positive and wonderful, but I just think you need to have your facts right” (Mindframe resource, 2007, p. 2). Still, there remains the inherent tension between the competing demands of realism and entertainment in any scriptwriting project. The challenge for the writer is how to navigate these demands and resolve this tension, particularly when film and television often exploit mental illness for dramatic effect: “The big problem we face is that drama is life with the boring bits taken out … audiences want colour, they want bizarre, it’s not exciting to watch everyday life… its [sic] about finding a way of doing that so it’s compelling. This resource is a good start” (Mindframe resource, 2007, p. 30). As a product of collaboration and consultation between the Australian screen industry and the mental health community, Mindframe for Stage and Screen is designed to help writers negotiate the competing discourses of commerce and creativity that shape script development (Batty et al., 2018, p. 156). The program provides scriptwriters with research material and resources, including expert advice and stories from lived experience, to embed accuracy and authenticity in the development process.

Industry Case Studies and Examples In the decade since Mindframe for Stage and Screen was established, several film, television and theatre projects have been developed using the program’s guidelines and resources. As part of their research, writers for these projects have consulted with Mindframe staff for advice on specific mental health conditions or sought feedback on drafts at various stages of the script development process. Mindframe staff offer assistance with the development of initial concepts, contacting relevant experts and reviewing scripts “to ensure they won’t cause harm to vulnerable audiences” (Mindframe Industry Hub: For Stage and Screen). Mindframe staff provide a range of services for different projects, based on the needs of individual writers. Their impact on the script development process is analogous to other development roles, as described by Batty and colleagues: “the role of those working in development roles is not to solve problems within the script, but rather to raise questions and indicate where things may not be working. It is then up to the writer to arrive at solutions to these script issues” (Batty et al., 2018, p. 158). This points to the dialogic nature of the consultation process between Mindframe staff and the writer, with the shared aim of improving the script’s portrayal of a specific mental health issue. An early example of writers collaborating with Mindframe for Stage and Screen is the script development process for the character Samantha Fitzgerald (played by Simone Buchanan) on the long-running Australian soap opera Neighbours, who developed bipolar disorder. In 2008, the Neighbours story development team conducted extensive research and worked with Mindframe and the media centre at SANE Australia to ensure the popular TV series’

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portrayal of bipolar disorder was accurate and sensitive to lived experience. Buchanan also consulted with her brother, who lives with bipolar disorder, to ensure her character reflected the reality of living with the condition (Hagan, 2011). Speaking about her experience portraying Samantha, Buchanan emphasised the value of consulting with someone with lived experience to inform her performance: “Having access to someone with lived experience definitely helped. It was great to have contact throughout my role. Having no access would have made the role tough to understand the disorder” (McNaughton, n.d.).9 One of the first instances of collaboration between the Mindframe program and Australian scriptwriters, Neighbours ’ portrayal of Samantha’s experience of bipolar disorder was well received by the mental health community, according to Buchanan: “I received ‘Thank You’ letters from people who live it daily. It was really important to some fans that the details were correct” (McNaughton, n.d.). In a story on the SANE blog about her experiences as a carer, Buchanan’s mother Jo recalls the collaborative process that underpinned the development of Simone’s character: “Whenever a word in the script could be interpreted as ‘stigmatic’, Simone brought it to the writers’ and producer’s attention and they promptly eliminated it. This would never have happened in the past, when TV shows favoured dramatic sensationalism over truth and reality” (Buchanan, 2018). Across the various resources provided by Mindframe for Stage and Screen, two key factors are considered essential to the process of developing scripts about mental health issues accurately and responsibly: research and access to people with lived experience. In an interview published on Mindframe’s website, screenwriter and Australian Writers’ Guild member Nick Burnett provides advice for fellow writers working on projects dealing with mental illness. He echoes Buchanan’s view of the importance of research, expert advice and the insights of lived experience for developing these stories: “Do your research. […] Speak to people who live with mental illness. Speak to psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors. Just be accurate” (Terol, n.d.). In his screenplay The Tale of the Unknown Man, which he describes as a sci-fi thriller with a difference, Burnett challenges the conventional view of people living with mental health issues. The protagonist of Burnett’s screenplay is a police detective who experiences a psychotic episode and must deal with this while pursuing his goal of hunting a supernatural killer. In developing the screenplay, Burnett drew upon his own experience living with Schizoaffective Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (Terol, n.d.): it was important to show the audience what it’s like to have a psychotic episode and show the hero recovering from that and going about his everyday life. […] 9

Buchanan’s interview with Mindframe staff member Kim McNaughton (n.d.) is published on the Mindframe website as one of several downloadable resources in the Mindframe Industry Hub: For Stage and Screen.

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Mental illness isn’t a death sentence. […] There seems to be this myth in society that if you get a mental illness then your life’s somehow over. Too often films portray the crazy person who’s beyond help. Whereas most of us with mental illnesses just get on with our lives.

This insight from Burnett demonstrates the value of including lived experience as part of the script development process. As one scriptwriter observes, “Something I hadn’t thought about was how well-adjusted people living with a mental illness could be and how they can have a regular life with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia” (Mindframe resource, 2007, p. 10). Incorporating lived experience in the script development process can encompass insights from families and carers as well, which opens up further storytelling possibilities: “If you focus not just on the person with the illness but the drama it creates for people around them, then you’ve got all really interesting kinds of conflict to resolve. The key is looking at the complexity of it” (Mindframe resource, 2007, p. 12). Burnett’s determination to create a fully rounded protagonist who is not defined by his illness resonates with the words of acclaimed Australian screenwriter Jan Sardi.10 When asked what advice he would give screenwriters developing stories for characters with a mental illness, Sardi responded: “Don’t treat them any differently to other characters. Make them three dimensional, with a challenge or challenges to deal with and conflict to face in order to find their place and purpose in the world. That’s what good drama is about” (McNaughton, 2013). Sardi is best known for writing the Oscar-winning film Shine (Scott & Hicks, 1996), about pianist David Helfgott who experienced a mental breakdown and was institutionalised for many years before his triumphant return to the concert stage. Shine represented a turning point in screen portrayals of mental illness, signalling a shift towards more empathetic representations particularly in the biopic genre, alongside other acclaimed films such as An Angel at My Table (1990), A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Iris (2001) (Hopgood, 2017, pp. 166–167). Sardi is explicit about his intent as a writer to create an empathetic relationship between Shine’s protagonist and the viewer: “The principal job of the dramatist is to try to put the audience inside the skin of a character, so you know what it feels like to be them. That’s what I did” (McNaughton, 2013). While Shine was released a full decade prior to the establishment of Mindframe for Stage and Screen, as President of the Australian Writers’ Guild for eight years (2011–2019) Sardi was actively involved in promoting the Mindframe guidelines and resources, building on the Guild’s formative role in the program’s development. In a survey of 254 Guild members conducted by Mindframe in 2013, Shine was listed as the most memorable Australian film featuring mental illness. In an interview conducted 10

Sardi’s extensive screenwriting credits in film and television include The Notebook (2004), Mao’s Last Dancer (2009), Love’s Brother (2004) and the television adaptation of Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River (2015).

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later that same year, Sardi (cited in McNaughton, 2013) reflected on how he approached the task of portraying the protagonist’s illness: At the time I wrote Shine, no one, including his own doctor knew what David’s illness was so I was reluctant to put a label on it. […] It’s a mistake to set out to write a film or play about ‘mental illness’. Rather, the aim should be to write in a way that illuminates why someone behaves the way they do in the light of the challenges they face.

In developing the script for the award-winning short film All These Creatures (2018), writer-director Charles Williams sought to illuminate the challenges of living with mental illness not just for the person who is unwell but for their family also: “I wanted to show both sides of what this experience is like so the audience could have compassion for the father [who is unwell] but also feel the threat of the situation” (Bartlett, 2019). Drawing on his childhood growing up in country Victoria, Williams wrote a 13-minute drama about a child attempting to understand their father’s mental illness: “For me, the themes of mental illness and domestic instability were very much a reality growing up. […] When you’re a child in that environment, all you see is the damage and a fear of how much of that you are going to inherit. But as you get older you try to form a deeper understanding” (AAP, 2018). Script development for All These Creatures was a dynamic process of collaboration and consultation, partly as a result of Williams’ “open” approach to casting the child at the centre of the story, irrespective of the actor’s race or gender. Once Ethiopian-Australian actor Yared Scott was cast as 12year-old Tempest, this influenced the casting of the father, Mal (played by Mandela Matthia) and other family members. Williams consulted with local Ethiopian-Australian advisors “to help make sure the film was accurate and sensitive to their culture” (Bartlett, 2019). Similarly, when writing about mental illness, Williams consulted with Mindframe and SANE Australia in addition to drawing upon his own experiences: “They read the script and were very encouraging about the depiction” (Bartlett, 2019). Williams was aware of the ethical obligations inherent in writing about mental illness: “Ultimately I felt it was important to tell this story personally, with my own understanding, but I also wanted to be careful that I wasn’t going to cause further pain” (AAP, 2018). All These Creatures was critically acclaimed at festivals around the world, including Cannes where it won the short film Palme d’Or in 2018. To convey the emotional life of his characters and the impact mental illness has on their lives, Williams employs a rich tapestry of images and sonic elements. Many of these sounds were written into the script (Bartlett, 2019) with the film’s aesthetic praised by critics at Cannes: “What sets William’s piece apart is a sense of wonder in the smallest details” (Bray, 2018). The international success

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of All These Creatures speaks to the resonance of its empathetic, compassionate portrayal of mental illness, with a script forged from lived experience and collaboration with the community.

Challenges Ahead Despite the progress made over the past decade in moving away from negative, stigmatising portrayals of mental illness and suicide, scriptwriters and mental health organisations still face challenges in developing and supporting new, original and authentic stories for stage and screen. The commercial and ethical challenges of producing screen stories about mental illness and suicide were highlighted by the controversy about the first season of the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why in 2017. The series’ explicit portrayal of suicide was condemned by mental health organisations worldwide as irresponsible and potentially harmful. Its arrival in Australia on the Netflix streaming platform threatened the progress that Australian film and television producers had made over the previous decade towards more responsible portrayals, and provoked “a renewed sense of urgency” in the advocacy and lobbying efforts of mental health organisations (Hopgood, 2019, p. 96). In response to the global alarm raised about 13 Reasons Why, Mindframe partnered with Australian youth mental health organisation headspace on a coordinated media response to the first season, issuing press releases, publishing opinion pieces in print media, and ensuring widespread dissemination via social media of help-seeking information for any viewers distressed by the series’ content.11 The following year, headspace and Mindframe partnered again to successfully lobby Netflix Australia to provide more comprehensive content warnings to accompany the release of season two of 13 Reasons Why. Mindframe and headspace also produced supplementary online resources, including videos and contacts for local mental health services, which were published on the Netflix Australia website. These resources were designed to support young viewers who might be distressed by the show’s content and to foster meaningful, informed conversations with teachers and parents about the range of mental health issues portrayed in the series’ second season (Hopgood, 2019, pp. 94– 95). This is another example of Mindframe’s “productive intervention” in screen stories about mental health issues and suicide but in this case, the intervention occurred at the point of exhibition and reception, rather than during the script development and pre-production phase. This demonstrates how the Mindframe for Stage and Screen program is evolving in response to industry developments and addressing the concerns of the mental health community in the age of streaming (Streaming Across Borders, n.d.). The eventual decision by Netflix to edit explicit scenes from the first season of 13 Reasons Why— albeit two years after the show first aired—has been welcomed as a positive 11 For a detailed analysis of the responses to 13 Reasons Why from mental health organisations and people with lived experience, see Hopgood (2019).

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step forward in Mindframe’s collaboration with the screen industry (Skehan, 2019). Scriptwriters need to be aware of their responsibilities when developing stories about mental health issues: “As writers we are in a very powerful position. We shouldn’t abuse that power out of ignorance” (Mindframe resource, 2007, p. 19). It is incumbent upon writers to employ strategies such as consultation, collaboration and/or co-production with the mental health community in order to embed diversity within their script development process. It is particularly important that scriptwriters with lived experience—whether as a consumer of mental health services or a carer for someone living with mental health issues—are supported to tell their story, or to draw upon their own experiences in order to develop more authentic portrayals. While the criticisms of ABC’s Mental As … and SBS’s How “Mad” Are You? and the controversy about Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why may deter some scriptwriters—who fear “getting it wrong”—from developing stories about mental illness and suicide, the current diversity movement in the creative industries, combined with growing community awareness of mental health, should be seen as encouraging writers to persist with exploring new ways of portraying mental health issues on stage and screen. With statistics showing that approximately 1 in 5 Australians will experience a mental illness each year—which in turn will affect many others (family, friends and colleagues)12 —these are timely, topical and important stories that will resonate with many in the audience. This emphasises the value of lived experience, consultation and collaboration in the practices of script development. Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Elena Terol Sabino, Senior Project Officer, Mindframe for Stage and Screen at Everymind and Dr. Michelle Blanchard, Deputy CEO and Director of the Anne Deveson Research Centre at SANE Australia, who provided valuable support for my industry research for this chapter.

References AAP Newswire. (2018, December 11). Aust filmmaker’s life may inspire Oscar. The Riverine Herald. Retrieved from https://www.riverineherald.com.au/aap-entertain ment/2018/12/11/358969/aust-filmmakers-life-may-inspire-oscar?amp=1 Abbott, T., Wang, L. (Producers), & Thomas, J. (Creator/Executive Producer/Writer/Director). (2013–2016). Please Like Me [Television series]. Pigeon Fancier Productions, John & Josh International, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Participant Media (2014–2016).

12 The Mindframe website uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and provides a helpful overview of current statistics about mental illness and suicide, accompanied by the following advice: “It is important to remember that these numbers represent individuals families, carers, colleagues and communities impacted by mental ill-health each year in Australia” (retrieved from https://mindframe.org.au/mental-health/data-statistics).

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Commission Television New Zealand (TVNZ), Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Kohan, J. (Creator/Producer), Friedman, L., Hess, S., Herrmann, T., Vinnecour, L., Tannenbaum, N. K., & Burley, M. A. (Producers). (2013–2019). Orange Is the New Black [Television series]. Tilted Productions, Lionsgate Television. Levin, S. (2018, February 27). Despite reckoning on Hollywood diversity, TV industry has gotten worse. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.thegua rdian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/feb/27/tv-industry-diversity-women-people-ofcolor-decline Luby, S., Parker, L. (Producers), & Reid, D. (Producer/Director). (2015). The Secret River [Television series]. Ruby Entertainment. Maddox, G. (2017, August 1). Screen diversity and inclusion network pushes for more diverse TV. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh. com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/screen-diversity-and-inclusion-network-pus hes-for-more-diverse-tv-20170731-gxm5kq.html McNaughton, K. (n.d.). Actor Simone Buchanan talks to Mindframe about the importance of research in theatrical portrayals of mental illness. Mindframe for Stage and Screen Resources. Retrieved from https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/mindfr amemedia/assets/src/uploads/Simone-Buchanan-accurate-portrayals.pdf McNaughton, K. (2013). Shine scriptwriter Jan Sardi talks to Mindframe about portraying mental illness. Mindframe for Stage and Screen Resources. Retrieved from https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/mindframemedia/assets/src/upl oads/Jan-Sardi-talks-to-Mindframe-about-portraying-mental-illness.pdf Mental illness and suicide: A Mindframe resource for stage and screen. (2007). Developed by the Hunter Institute of Mental Health in partnership with the Australian Writers’ Guild and SANE Australia for the Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Programs Branch, Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing. Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved from https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws. com/mindframemedia/assets/src/uploads/Stage_and_Screen_Resource_Book.pdf Mindframe industry hub: For stage and screen. Retrieved from https://mindframe.org. au/industry-hubs/for-stage-and-screen Quinn, K. (2016, August 24). Screen Australia diversity report finds Australian TV still lacks colour. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh. com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/screen-australia-diversity-report-finds-austra lian-tv-still-lacks-ethnicity-20160824-gqzoay.html Radclyffe, S., Scott, J. (Producers), & Sardi, J. (Director). (2004). Love’s Brother [Motion picture]. Australian Film Finance Corporation (AFFC), Film Victoria, Great Scott Productions, Love’s Brother & Co., Sarah Radclyffe Productions. Razer, H. (2015, October 5). Not so nice: Razer on ABC’s guileless Mental Health Week. Daily Review. Retrieved from https://dailyreview.com.au/not-so-nice-razeron-abcs-guiless-mental-health-week/31063/ Scott, J. (Producer), & Beresford, B. (Director). (2009). Mao’s Last Dancer [Motion picture]. Great Scott Productions. Scott, J. (Producer), & Hicks, S. (Director). (1996). Shine [Motion picture]. Australian Film Finance Corporation (AFFC), Film Victoria, Momentum Films, The South Australian Film Corporation. Screen Australia. (n.d.). New directions: Gender matters. Screen Australia. Retrieved from https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/new-directions/gender-matters

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Place, Presence and Play: A Listening, Co-Active Approach to Story Development Marianne Strand and Christina Svens

Opening Image Grandma? Grandma? Do you hear me? I’m here now… I’ve been thinking about something. Do you remember when we talked about space? You said it’s eternal darkness. And I thought we become stars when we die. Stars, or flowers… I don’t believe that anymore. I believe we become wind! Because when we breathe, it’s like small winds. And when we don’t breathe, we don’t live. And then, breathing is part of the air. The great wind. Isn’t that true, Grandma? Weren’t you there that day? Only you know how it happened when Adrian disappeared….

M. Strand (B) Independent filmmaker, Harads, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] C. Svens Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_33

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In a series of images, we follow a girl, Astrid 8, through a grove of birch trees. She is talking to her grandmother, whom she believes is in heaven. Something has happened that Astrid can share only with her, and that secret is something we, the audience, are to take part in. This is the start of the short fiction film Ormtyglar [Snakereins ] (17 minutes), targeted at children (6–9 years). The film had its premiere at Folkets Bio, on February 15, 2019, has been screened in various festivals and formed the basis for an art exhibition in Norrbottens Museum, Luleå in the summer of 2018. It is presently being distributed with the animated short Alla döda små djur [All the dear little animals ], presented as Two small films about the big questions (see Appendix). Snakereins is a film made of stills. As such it readily gives associations to browsing through a photo album, or perhaps sitting in the lap of a parent, being read for. The activity of browsing can also be a reminder of storytelling as a work of the hand, in this case scriptwriting, a word derived from the Latin scribere—to write. This chapter explores how the story took shape through a working model where the target group has been involved in the various phases of the filmic process. The still image format and the fact that the scriptwriter worked in several roles, provides the vantage point; apart from writing the film, Strand worked as producer, first assistant director (FAD) and took an active role in post-production. The writing process thereby came to glide between functions, which affected the story. Svens, who has examined the theatre director’s creative process, contributes with an external perspective on the scriptwriting process, and draws parallels to children’s theatre research, in which a structural closeness between play and artistic work is formulated. This analytic lens corresponds to the fact that children’s play has inspired the story and was used intuitively as a method of directing. The chapter has grown out of a dialogue between us, the scriptwriter and the stage art researcher, a conversation that has given space for associations and suggestions. The purpose has been to investigate play as a dramaturgic entrance to the task of creating action and content in a story and to open up new perspectives on script development. The analysis is analogous to artistic research that explores artists’ work processes as both dealing with a material and at the same time working in this material (Bornemark, 2018). We deal with a material consisting of the first draft as the starting point for the film process, and the film as the final result, where place and body are the main tools in tracing the scriptwriter’s process of working in this material. The ambition is to clarify script development as a multi-layered process in this specific cooperation between scriptwriter and director. We also want to learn from how children play while they at the same time are being involved in the making of a film as co-creating actors. How do their actions affect the script development? The research interest in how play as a creative principle informed the story and script development process leads to the following questions: How have the scriptwriter and the director transformed children’s real play to fictional characters’ play? How does this process

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relate to the artistic working in the material? As children carry the story as the main characters, they are vital as story elements along with the settings and their unique details.

From Play to Production Children’s play and the specifics of a setting are here dealt with as coexisting phenomena, turning into story and production. Key concepts are potential spaces and play, seen both as the content of the story and as a method of storytelling. Artistic choices in extension to writing, such as visualized perception and working with stills, illustrate a mixed approach of documentary and magic realistic storytelling. Potential Spaces Artistic processes and play have several common traits, for instance, they exist in a field of tension between the outer, material world and the inner, subjective world. Both art and play are made in such rooms, which Donald Winnicott (1995) calls potential spaces . Artists give form to this tension between the outer world, which can be perceived, and the subjective perception of it. This tension generates new artistic ideas and is also the place of fiction. Christina: How was Snakereins conceived? Marianne: The story grew out of a specific place, my garden by this time, a few miles south of Stockholm. It was an old garden with fruit trees and a pond, surrounded by hedges and an aspen grove. A few hundred meters away there was a stable with meadows, and a railway track. Nearby there was a sand pit and a lake. Taken together these were places that both could entice and pose danger to kids. From this scenery and the play and conflicts between my daughter and her friend, a story emerged that came to revolve around the strong, often ambivalent feelings between siblings. The story was called Snakeplay and a short summary of it could be: Two siblings are playing in an outhouse. They fight over a leather strap, the sister, 8, wanting it for reins for the horse they’ve built, and the brother, 3, sees it as a snake. The sister wins by force, but soon finds her brother is gone. Separated, the children experience the surroundings from different points of view and states of mind. When they at last are reunited, something unexpected and fantastic happens. The wooden horse has come alive. Christina: How would you describe the writing process? Marianne: Initially as a way of perceiving. Moods and atmospheres generated images, which mixed with memories and fantasies. A material took shape in which I began to discern a pattern. Scenes crystallized with children characters

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doing and saying things. I followed them so to speak, watching and listening. When I discerned the story thread, I tested it on my daughter and then on others. By telling and getting feedback, the chain of events was gradually chiseled out.

This way of working, where an initial play of one’s own before inviting others to take part in a co-creative process, can also be described as enabling a sharing of potential spaces. Potential space is a philosophical perspective on play as an activity with intrinsic value. At the same time, it is offering points of contact with ideas on play and artistic processes as having common fictional frames, where artists can learn from play and its logic (Gjervan, 2013). Marianne: It strikes me that children’s play is a recurrent theme in my stories as a source of conflict and forward movement. Christina: Children’s play in itself often possesses an inherent forward movement in making up whats going to happen next. Transferred to the creative process, what about the transition from script to production? Marianne: After having finished the script, around 2009, I collaborated with a director who wanted to produce it and we even made a short pilot. When financing eventually failed, the project was put aside. Several years later, working with Charlotta, “Lotta”, Lennartsdotter, the script was brought to light again. Having made several documentary television series for kids, Lotta was keen to make a fiction film. With her documentary experience and my magic realistic story, we established a common vision; and by winning a script competition arranged by Filmpool Nord and Film in Västerbotten, we got the means to produce the film. Christina: The first draft of the script is quite different from the finished film. I especially think about how in the original version the siblings play separately. They do not share a common play world at the outset (Ritchert & Lilliard, 2004). How and why did this change? Marianne: Lotta and I chose to work with her kids, Astrid (8) and Adrian (3). We soon saw that their way of playing could be integrated in the story. Even though they belong to different age groups, they tend to play together. It was interesting to see how they moved between sharing and falling out of a play world (Schwarztman, 1978). This affected the alterations we made. In the early version the sister was in focus, being alone with the responsibility for her brother, encountering existential loneliness for the first time. By working with Astrid and Adrian we got a great opportunity to follow them and observe their play and interactions with the settings. What intrigued us was to visualize their different perception and comprehension of reality, due to their respective age and maturity level. This got a lot more space in the film than in the original script. Christina: Allowing oneself to trace experiences as they present themselves to the conscious mind manifests a phenomenological starting point (Merleau Ponty, 1999). In the film it is primarily the girl’s subjective experience which is given form. Her knowledge about risks and her sense of responsibility affects her way of experiencing the environment, which becomes increasingly cold and

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threatening. The boy, on the other hand, explores the surroundings with all the curiosity that characterizes a three-year-old. We see him doing things in the physical realm, he has his own ways of playing, and we can sense some of his impressions, though less portrayed than his sisters’. Marianne: We followed Astrid more closely, as her experience of falling out of the state of play was vital for the story. But the scenes in which the brother runs around with a red pinwheel and lies in the hammock looking up into the treetop are visualizations of his point of view. We didn’t fully, consequently, probe subjective experiences for his part, there simply was not enough time and resources for that. And perhaps it might have pulled us away from children’s film to art film, had we gone through with it. Clearly though, the brother has a bigger part in the film than in the original story. The first script was to be an 8 min long film. The longer format also has to do with the fact that we followed Astrid and Adrian’s pace and rhythm. That produced a quite slow film, slow cinema for kids so to speak. Christina: Maybe also the pace has to do with the use of still images. At the start the plan was to use moving images. Why did you decide to use stills? Marianne: We soon realized that the budget didn’t admit a full-scale production. Pondering ways to simplify the project we came to the conclusion that stills, in combination with moving images, could be a realistic model. Suddenly a path opened to do something that not only felt possible but liberating and enticing. Christina: That you—in my understanding—by force of budget limitations had to take several roles, how did that affect this playful entrance? Marianne: It entailed close collaboration between Lotta and me during the whole process, which presupposed openness and dialogue. This gave us flexibility.

This is in a sense an articulation of the scriptwriter’s contact with play as a kind of improvisation method. It resembles how children’s theatre research views the stage artist’s creative process as a dramatic play that explores and clarifies the fictional frames, i.e. where the story takes place, who is there on the stage, and why (Gjervan, 2013; Szatkowski, 1992). Christina: How did you as a scriptwriter relate to your functions as producer and first assistant director? Were there any clashes between different role-related needs and demands? Marianne: Not really. The story was very clear to me, I felt that I was somehow embodying it and I trusted Lotta as director. That made it easy to work with the possibilities of the present in which budget, conditions as weather, light and the children’s energy were vital. Lotta quickly sees and uses what is genuine, and working with her children provided us with an authentic relationship as the basis for the story. If the kids were absorbed in something, we filmed it, even if it wasn’t planned. Authenticity ruled. At the same time all decisions were related to the essence of the story.

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Documentary and Magic Realistic Approaches The director’s documentary orientation towards the children’s improvisation in play and the scriptwriter’s magic realistic way of looking for intensified moments constitute complementary perspectives on the material. The documentary level gives fresh impetus concerning the kids remaining in their authentic play space. The magic realistic level derives from the girl falling out of that space. This tension influences the script development, for instance in selection of scenes and images in relation to the different levels of the children’s play. Christina: How do you perceive the work process compared to other script processes? Marianne: Previously I had either written scripts which had been shot by a director, with limited creative dialogue after the shooting script had been accepted, or I had directed my own (short) films. In the latter case it had also been necessary to work in different roles. What was new with Snakereins was working closely with the director during the whole production period, and in a way that united a documentary method with the dramaturgic demands of a fiction story. A great advantage of being a writer on set was that it made it possible to follow what was happening during the shooting and to refer to the core of the story, which facilitated improvisation. Now I got a feeling for what was realistic to strive for when it came to the children as actors. Christina: And how was the work process affected by using stills instead of moving images? Marianne: It wasn’t as important to make the scenes float and stick together, which gave us more freedom. Lotta could, for instance, interrupt during a shot, adjust something or improvise. This made it possible to choose the most distinct pictures. After shooting Lotta and I looked through the images to see what worked or was missing, and out of our discussion I revised the script for next day’s shooting.

The working method of playing in authentic improvisation has interleaved the establishment and development of the script, during shooting and in postproduction. The artistic method has implicated visualization of the characters’ points of view. The artistic play in finding possible settings for the story delve deeply into potential spaces in the children’s play. Astrid’s and Adrian’s way of transforming their inner sense of the material situation is followed closely and sensitively by the director, and the scriptwriter is searching for poetic logic in line with the story.

Writing as Belonging to Settings and Spaces This part deals with environmental effects on the children that in turn have an impact on the use of props, the creation of settings and dialogues, and the transformation of specific atmospheres into children’s play. The script development process concentrates on unifying observations of the ongoing play with the setting, to tie in with the artistic inner experience of the place. A

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starting point lies in mutual listening and viewing, an environmental resonance in those observing and those observed, where the atmosphere on-site substantialises and speaks to the script writer on-site. Playing in Actual Places and Fictional Spaces A thought concerning potential space is that place as a story-technical element harbours the tension between material and the fictional (Gjervan, 2013). Space gives volume and the places you film become interesting vantage points where important experiences are made. Christina: If we abide for a while at space as an aspect of scriptwriting, how would you say that the story and the process of rewriting connect to the geographical places? Marianne: Before shooting we had to transfer the story to the new environment. The original location, Hemfosa, is a small village with mixed coniferous forests and meadows. It has a sense of mystery and intimacy, while Svartlå in Northern Sweden, is characterized by the river and pine forests. The landscape is vast and mighty, which affected the story both by the overriding atmosphere and new details. During the spring of 2017 Lotta and I made location research. Her family had access to an old country house by the river with several smaller buildings. We decided to use the kitchen in the main building and one of the outhouses, a former forge. There was no railway track here, so the river contributed with the sense of danger we were looking for. A steep sandy hill leading from the river up to the forest worked as replacement for the gravel pit, and a forest spring corresponded to the pond in the original story.

Looking for physical places that were possible to be transformed into fictional means finding material qualities that can activate the artistic process to give form to the fictional space. Place, like body, is a narrative element that needs to be activated to enrich your way of creating action. Christina: You brought the children along during location scouting. What function did their presence have in the research phase? Marianne: By bringing Astrid and Adrian along, Lotta and I could absorb the environments together with them and observe their experiences. They ran around, played and showed us things. There were many details and impressions that aroused their curiosity, aversion or unease. All this was helpful when it came to incorporating the new elements into and adjusting the story. Christina: The children incarnated the characters by exploring the places by playing, with play being a goal in itself. They had no awareness of any fiction frames (Gjervan, 2013), while you related your impressions to the story trying to answer questions of where, who and why. How did the children’s play function in the film? Marianne: I think the scenography inspired play. We created a play stable and brought things there that were partly new to Astrid and Adrian, like jingle

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bells, buckets, brushes, and partly well-known such as the two wooden horses we borrowed from the local school. It became a cozy room with old rag carpets and soft light. They started to play there immediately. Christina: The objects you offered the children are part of the outer material reality that Winnicott (1995) presents as one side of play; that which in theatre research is described as the scene’s social dimension of reality (McAuley, 1999, 2003). There children’s play expresses their subjective experiences of and fantasies about the material world.

McAuley (1999) points out that physical spatiality interacts with the fictive in creation of meaning, and according to Gjervan (2013) the space of reality, as time, disappears into play. Imagination and experience contribute to a condensation of space, and let the fictive space arise. Christina: Your creative process, then, gives form to a tension between the concrete and this condensation, which demands a delimitation of fictional space, so that you create possibilities for the children to let their play add to the story. Gjervan (2013) describes this as activating the space of the story, alongside other dramaturgical elements, as body, in this case the children. You decide both what you are going to play and how you are playing in the common dramatic game that becomes the film. As new images are shot the play contract is renegotiated, where you create frames for the children’s play, and this in turn gives new material to the film. Marianne: And the deeper we got into the shooting process, the more Astrid became active, suggesting what her character could say. I come to think of how children sometimes play, commenting themselves at the same time. Christina: Play researcher Goldman (1998) describes how kids can structure play as a story, and then be both author, director and actor at the same time. This takes us to child actors as co-creators. How did Astrid and Adrian relate to their parts? What did it entail for them to keep their names? Marianne: Adrian was just being himself. For Astrid it was sometimes a game and sometimes a task. She moved in and out of her role, almost like in the documentary films she had taken part in. In Snakereins the artistic demands were higher though, there was an agreement about participation and effort that Astrid was ambivalent about. This ambivalence marked her relationship to most things, also to Adrian, which proved to be a great asset as this inner tension was essential for the main character. Christina: What role did the children play for the changes in the story? Marianne: Adrian was curiosity-driven and keen to do the things we suggested. He contributed with spontaneous actions and lines, as in the scenes where he is picking flowers and watering the greenhouse. The idea when the horses had pooped to muck after them was his. Astrid had difficulties to concentrate, so we mostly had only one shot to go for her participation. If a retake was necessary, she got very frustrated. Then we had to pause and let her and Adrian rest or play freely. Her strength is authenticity. While some kids her age can be very self-conscious and hide their feelings, Astrid is always sincere and present. What proved helpful was when her dad, Johan, who was the photographer

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on set and also acted as the father in the film, participated in the play. He could for instance ask Astrid to go and get hay for the horses. A remarkable concentration arose, where Astrid, Adrian, and Johan seemed to have entered a sphere of their own. Their interaction made us want to use Johan’s voice in the climactic scene at the spring. The girl then hears her father’s condemning words within her, blaming her for the brother’s disappearance. Christina: In the early version she hears whispers from the trees and sees herself sitting in a tree staring gravely. Now the frightening experience is shifted to her father’s (imagined) reaction. Marianne: The relationship to her parent has become more important in the film. The father’s voice gives form to the girl’s fear of losing his love because of her failure to take care of her brother. This is probably a more accessible situation for children than the original, more poetic or grotesque visualization. But the environment also plays an important part here. The rustle of leaves in a grove of deciduous trees is easy to associate with whispers. The atmosphere in a great pine forest is different. You sense the vastness, and there is a more austere mood. Here it felt more natural to use a darker, more sinister vocalization, and it seemed logical that the sound came from the dark spring by the mire. Christina: If we turn from images to words, how did you work with the lines? Marianne: Johan got written lines but when it came to the children Lotta asked them to say things in their own way. For Astrid it is difficult with written lines. The fewer the words and the more room for improvisation, the better. When she grasped a situation emotionally, she was very expressive, using her own words. In the scene at the river for instance, her listening to the water made it possible to bring forward lines with genuine feelings of dread and worry. It was almost spooky how close she came to her character in perspective and feelings. In that way the emotional score of the story was intact all through the process, while details and environments were transformed.

The work with lines expresses contact with textual spatiality, that is, that speech harmonizes with place to help it become concrete. In that the attributes ease the children’s process, so that it finds the right level in the mutual play (McAuley, 1999). In this sense working with attributes links the children’s reality and their fantasy with the fictive world. Marianne: The snake/the rein provided a natural link between fiction and reality, and it caused real conflict between Astrid and Adrian. The buns and soft drink that the sister carried on a tray also linked reality and story. Most of all the (living) horse composed a powerful link, evoking the siblings’ amazement and delight.

Play presupposes a shared view about when the participants are inside the fiction or not. Play is delicate and can break, as happens with the failure to agree upon what the leather strap really “is” (Jensen, 2013). For the girl it is a rein to use for her feigned horse. Her use of the strap lies—as is often the case with older children—close to reality. When the brother pretends that the strap

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is a snake, the sister is put off. The snake to her is an irrelevant association that only makes the play impossible. When the play falls apart, the sister is cast into its opposite: fear and strategic thinking. The brother continues playing, for him anything is possible, and the strap is right now a snake that he cares for and feeds. Perhaps the strap might also be something that gives him a sense of contact with his sister, while he moves around the garden by himself. Marianne: He sticks to the snake/rein all through the story. When the sister finds him at last, sleeping in the kitchen, he still holds on to it. He soon uses it to pull her with him, when they hear the ice-cream van. And once they are outside, the strap finally becomes reins to be used for the living horse they’ve found. The circle is closed. Other objects having an impact on the story were found by following Adrian around. He wanted to drive the tractor, climb the ladder to the tree house and pick berries, for instance. As raspberries and blueberries were ripe, we could use the stains he got from eating them, giving him a “bloody” look, something that made Astrid (in the story) think he was hurt.

A relation to different dimensions of play while shooting is evident. The team was busy with the overall story, the children played both outside of and inside the scenes. In addition to that special “bubbles” were created when Johan played with the kids in an actual scene. Bubbles that burst and were recreated, or renegotiated, in line with play’s dramaturgy. Marianne: Play is often conducted by the individual(s) with most power. Among children it is the individual with the highest status, but here there were adults with an artistic agenda, under pressure, causing cracks in the imaginative stream. I have wondered what facilitated the moments of genuine play during shooting.

Neuroscientist/psychobiologist Jack Panksepp (2005) talks about a specific state of play, that resembles joy but not necessarily appears joyful. That recalls Gadamer’s (1997) description of how play can possess a spirit of its own, that allures the player, who is absorbed in the game. Then a sort of movement is built, which is without a goal. The player is absorbed because he/she has a unique task, that matches her/his capacity. Marianne: Maybe that is why the game is interrupted when there is a need to make a retake, with immanent risks of creating moments to fall out of the play. I can imagine that for Astrid that could have been taken as a form of criticism, forcing her to be self-conscious, in a state where she was totally present, absorbed by the game. Christina: And then you had to offer unstructured play instead. Because shooting requires structured, organized play for the filming to run according to the production plan.

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Zooming out and looking at how the kids play in the movie, we can discern a movement from “as if-play” to “what if-play” (Goldman, 1998). The latter can be read into the horse that sort of answers a question like “what if my wooden horse was alive?” In that creative step the children have become more independent, more actively forming their world. The same capacity perhaps inspires the girl to turn to her (dead) grandmother for comfort. The artistic work is about keeping the children in their fantasy and playing and catching moments that can become emblematic in a magic realistic way. Marianne: Astrid wears different clothes in the frame story, a blue dress. It was actually Lotta’s shirt she insisted on wearing, she seemed to feel that it suited the situation. And it really underlined the more contemplative, almost ceremonial mood of these scenes.

The children play in different ways and connect with the environments on different levels depending on their age and maturity, which influence the settings of the scenes. The film, somehow, presupposes structured as well as unstructured play. While the children in a serious and intuitive way connect with the places, they work themselves into the story. Even so that Astrid approaches a kind of level of thematic spatiality (McAuley, 1999) where she instinctively understands the theme the scene is to portray. For the artists the mutual play is about following the children perceptively and catching them sometimes falling out of the real play, of the play in the story or of the settings in the shooting situation. The method is marked by researching the location by listening to and observing the place in the process of identifying its atmosphere. In this sense, script development is about being in the material, in the environment and adopting to the children’s ways of listening to the surroundings. Further it is about observing how their way of being affects the work with the material becoming the film.

Rewriting and Script Development This part deals with rewriting and script development where observations of associative play and daily revisions of the material affect the story. Reflections after shooting give new form and imply dramaturgical effects in a script development method searching for new story frames. Christina: After shooting you went through every day’s pictures and revised the script for the next day. Tell me more about how this was done. Marianne: When the children had gone to bed Lotta and I studied the pictures, relating them to the story thread. What had we got, what was missing, what felt genuine or superfluous? It was a bit like an associative play but as we were tired after a long day, we had to be effective and think practically. We could discover, for instance, that we lacked close-ups on certain details, which opened for catching such motives during the next day. The images of the

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frog and the horseshoe are such examples. We also had to let go of certain ambitions, like portraying hazardous objects which Adrian unknowingly passes (axe, beehive). Looking at the pictures and making a rough selection also opened for new ways to create contrast and movement. Christina: One significant alteration from the original script is the use of a retrospective narrative point of view. The original story was a short psychological drama, outplayed in present time. Why and how did you come up with this new solution? Marianne: During shooting we started to feel a growing need to establish who is telling this story and why. Perhaps the use of stills demanded some kind of clarification of the storytelling, to portray it as an action. Christina: It seems to me that you were exploring the dramaturgy of play in an intuitive way, and maybe in that process you needed contours to meet the artistic ambition. The narrative point of view is centred in a special place: the birch grove. How did this setting impact the structure? Marianne: The environment affected the story in a profound way. First, we had the farm, with traces of an older generation’s rural life. The contrast between the wild and dramatic landscape and the light, graceful birch tree groves nearby was powerful. Astrid responded to this setting with a more thoughtful mood, shown in the way she looked at a flower or walked through the grass. Lotta and I arrived at letting the whole course of events be a story that the girl confides to somebody. Our first idea was that she wrote to her mother, who wasn’t there, and who maybe but not surely would return. We imagined a letter that the girl carried while moving through the grove. We would hear her reading from it, telling her mother that everything was well but that she longed for her. The film would then show us a contrasting truth, which we thought could create an exciting crack between what the audience sees and what the fictive mother learns. But creating a charged situation outside the story could easily divert focus, so inspired by the historical atmosphere we got the idea that Astrid turns to her deceased grandmother, and that this conversation takes place in this special place. The events that the film portrays are something Astrid only shares with her grandmother, and the viewer. The birch tree grove was the room that made this communication possible. This solution offered an embracing frame for the film. Christina: The method and the setting then gave the film a frame, and perhaps also a higher key? I am thinking that in the original story there is a tension between meeting the awesome (the autoscopic hallucination) and the sublime (the horse). During shooting there is in addition a sliding towards portraying what seems to be the girl’s personal faith, yes, faith as creative action, a ritual. Marianne: I think you are right. The original version was also more fragmented and mysterious and would perhaps have been more of a film for adults. Lotta and I discussed if the framing with the grandmother would let the film more readily address both children and adults. By introducing an adult character, the film could invite double identification. A question we also pondered, and still discuss, is what makes a film a “children’s film”, and what qualities make it a film for all ages. What are your thoughts on this? Christina: I think it is all about an equal note, of consequent solidarity with a child’s view of and experience of life. To see the world from a child perspective and deal with the major existential questions can appeal to adults as well.

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Perhaps also openings for the viewer, regardless of age, to fill in his/her own experiences will add to that, an invitation to see reality from new angles. If the story promotes self-reflection and identification in adults and children alike, it doesn’t talk over the heads of kids by flirting with adults, as certain Disney animations can do by alluding to sex (Ice Age). It sticks to a level that examines existential concerns unbound to age.

In daily discussions of the shootings new ideas appeared that implicated rewriting for next day’s work. This was part of the artistic play, with explicit effects on the story, particularly the need for identifying a narrative point of view and a comprehensible story frame that enables immersion in the motif. The solution to creating the story frame emanates from Astrid’s way of responding to the environment. How the actual places are creating resonance in her and her responses, spread like ripples to the artists.

Perception, Story Structure and Communication This part presents a reflection on script writing as a cement through a creative process of dramatic play that generates communication on different levels that has dramaturgical effects. The film holds two kinds of story structures, two ways of being and perceiving, that are in conflict, with effects on the viewer who shares the siblings’ different ways of perception. The result is a film inviting the targeted audience as much as adults to grow sideways by applying both pathic and gnostic ways of perception. Christina: If you look back at the development process, what did you learn from it? Marianne: I learned to be more perceptive and to rely more on my gut feeling, focusing on what happens now instead of what is to be. Applied to script development I got a deeper understanding of how dramatic action can grow from the interaction between place, actors, artists and objects. How it is really a question of communication taking place on different levels. Christina: It is exciting how script development can be a cement all the way through a process of dramatic play like this. The scriptwriter taking part making deeper and deeper experiences shows a way to “grow sideways” (Brinch, 2018) in a shared process with the children. The girl in the story develops a new perspective on life by relating to her grandmother. She creates a story in which she is safe and loved, and this helps her to process the guilt she feels over her brother’s disappearance. Astrid, as an actor, grows into an understanding of her role and becomes co-creative, affecting the story in itself. And you as creators seem to grow into a more passive way of working, by being present, following and observing, an activity that must be based on trust. The work process then becomes a form of investigating self-reflection that takes place in the material and affects the film.

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This investigating self-reflection and working in the material, manifests an analogy between the artists’ process and the concept of growing sideways. The concept suggests that “the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives and their motions, may pertain at any age, bringing ‘adults’ and ‘children’ into lateral contact of surprising sort” (Bond Stockton, 2009). The siblings’ different ways of being and playing in the mutual dramatic play could be compared to different dramaturgical models, that in turn also mirrors separate perceptions of time and reality. The brother, who saunters around probing the surroundings, letting the impressions wash over him and doing things for their own sake, has no goal. He waters for instance for a long time, just for the fun of it. This could match so-called mood dramaturgy, and a way to gain experience that is called pathic, by him being emotionally gripped by the situation (Gjervan, 2013). The sister is included in a classical story structure with a movement forward and an identified goal. Here we have a cause-and-effect chain and clear turning points. Her way of approaching reality can be seen as gnostic (Gjervan, 2013), that is, relying on knowing as an intellectual approach. The film thereby holds two kinds of story structures, two ways of being and perceiving, that are in conflict, with effects on the audience being with the siblings’ different ways of perception. Children’s dramatic play and artistic processes are based on the same type of fiction frames (Brinch, 2018, p. 285), where play can give form to time as nonlinear and makes the boundary between stage and audience more afloat. In this process the scriptwriter in a similar way moves between shooting situations and rewriting. Christina: I see that as a kind of dissolvement of accepted positions in the work that is reflected in the finished film. This can create new possibilities of recognition for the audience. A story doesn’t have to be linear according to the traditional dramaturgic model but still must be possible to grasp. Helander (2011) points out that maybe it isn’t what the adult world, including the film industry, often holds, that the audience’s understanding builds on comprehensibility of design language. Letting the process develop on its own terms and impulses and affect the language of form as you have done, expresses trust in children understanding the story without it being traditionally structured. They comprehend at an emotional level and a language of form in line with play facilitates for them to meet even advanced artistic expressions. Children’s theatre research shows that the structure of play can test dramaturgic conventions in children’s drama (Helander, 2011) so why not also in scriptwriting for children’s film. Marianne: What would it mean for children’s film as a genre if kids’ ways of playing, that is, the associative way of creating action and movement, was used in the script process? This would be very interesting to explore but requires that the industry opens up for more experimentation and playfulness. Then a child perspective can really be integrated in new ways of creating film stories, as in new forms of screening film and sharing filmic experiences.

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Building a story structure based on two different ways of perception, pathic and gnostic, creates opposed structures and a dramaturgic clash that has interesting effects on the multi-layered communication with the targeted audience as well as accompanying adults. Addressing the audience as being in a process here and now, invites an identification with the characters’ experiences and implicates a growing sideways regardless of age. A conscious use of children’s play could also be of further interest for script development and filmmaking.

Closing Image Christina: I think about the ending of the film. The script version reads: The siblings ride through the garden, out onto the dirt road. The boy sits before his sister, who holds the reins they have put around the horse’s neck. Further away, in a crossing, the ice-cream van is parked, tiny as a toy car in the vast, billowy landscape. Christina: What is the essence of the story’s alterations when it comes to its content? Marianne: There has been a movement from the sister’s loneliness and isolation towards an experience of belonging to something greater. She has connected to an inner strength, and the rein relates to both her and her brother’s fantasy worlds, being useful in the present as they lead and are carried by the horse. Christina: To me the story describes a transition from the loss of play’s paradise to an experience of existential strength, where a new level of play can take place. How do you explain this transition? Marianne: There were different causes, at different levels. The landscape clearly posed a wider context which affected Lotta and me. Our collaboration implied sharing a vision entirely which produced a sense of freedom and joy. It was a collaboration built on deep trust, which I think impacted our understanding of the story.

Summary The chapter has explored script development as a multi-layered form of dealing with a material and working in this material, where storytelling elements as place, body and objects are used in tracing the scriptwriter when working in the material. Transferred to the field of script development, the concept of potential spaces (Winnicott, 1995) implies that artists are processing their impressions like children are improvising in playing, as an interplay between one’s inner world and the outer objects. Playing as an artistic method working with child actors has influenced the script development in moving in between potential spaces in the children’s play intersecting the artist’s dramatic play, as a form of story development while transforming the children’s play into artist’s dramatic play.

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Transforming children’s real play into fictional characters’ play, working with the material in a mutual play is about following the children perceptively when entering their play. Further it implies catching moments, when they are falling out of the real play or of the settings in the shooting situation, in order to transform these moments into the story. The method is marked by researching the location by listening to and viewing the place in the process of identifying its atmosphere. Being present in the situation, close to the director’s documentary approach to shooting and at the same time tracing the magic realistic possibilities important to the scriptwriter has guided the work in the shooting situation and is used in the script development. Dramaturgical implications in the transformations concern visualizing the character’s point of view and clarifying how the children’s different play rhythms were affecting a tension that carried the story and script development forward. Script development is about being in the material, in the environment and adopting to the children’s ways of listening to the same. Further to observe how their way of being affects the work with the material becoming the film. The communication between place, individual body and objects in listening and observing, is analogous to the concept of growing sideways in allowing an investigating self-reflection that brings all participants into lateral contact of surprising sort, as well as addressing both children and adults in the audience. This examining approach has a firm foundation in trust in the process while finding a path to reach an artistic result and differs from current script development processes. Seeing play as a dramaturgic entrance to children’s film, a method where place, presence and play are equal aspects of a listening and interactive way of making a story, might open for new perspectives on dramaturgy.

Appendix Snakereins, a short children’s film: original synopsis: A girl has to tend to her younger brother when their mother hastily is called to work. The girl’s plan to go to the stable with the halter and headrope she has bought for “her” horse, is cancelled. The promise her mother makes that the siblings can buy ice-cream from the ice-cream van later does nothing to soothe the girl’s disappointment. When her brother in an unseen moment cuts the headrope into parts and makes snakes of it and lets the animals swim in yogurt that he has just spilled, the girl gives word to her frustration telling him that she wishes he were dead. She goes to get a cloth to wipe up the mess, and a few seconds later he is gone. She goes outside to look for him, but he is nowhere to be seen. While searching for him, her anger gradually turns into worry. Aware of the places that could be interesting and at the same time risky she continues down the dirt road, the railway track, the ditch, the gravel pit and the pond. Her worry

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turns into fear and guilt. The familiar surroundings now seem cold and hostile. The girl hears accusing voices whispering in the trees, and suddenly sees a dark version of herself sitting in a tree staring threateningly at her. Frightened she starts running but falls. Lying on the ground she bargains with fate/God and promises to relinquish the things hitherto have seemed so important, like new riding boots, if only her brother is safe. Deeply troubled she returns home to call her mother, but finds her brother, calmly sleeping in the couch with the ice-cream money in his hand. She hugs him, tearful with relief, but the brother does not understand her reaction, he only wants ice-cream. The siblings go out into the garden. Something has changed. There is a fog, and the laundry line has been torn down, sheets and towels are scattered in the grass. Soon they hear a muffled sound and are astonished to see a big beautiful horse grazing on the lawn. The girl stares at the animal, wonderstruck. Slowly she approaches it, followed by her brother. A few minutes later the torn down laundry line is used as a headrope, the sister leading the horse, which carries the brother who is beaming with pride and excitement. The little company moves along the dirt road to meet the ice-cream van, which has finally arrived. Snakereins was shot in the summer 2017 and was first screened in February 2019. The film is distributed by Folkets Bio. Team Scriptwriter, producer, first assistant director: Marianne Strand Director, producer: Charlotta Lennartsdotter Still photography: Johan Jansson Drone footage: Per Olsson Sound technician: Fredrik Bredemo Sound design and mix: Christoffer Demby Editor: Elisabeth Andersson Music: Magnus Andersson Lagerqvist Animation, text, after-effects: Magnus Fredriksson Link to Film https://vimeo.com/272923562 Password: Orm

References Bond Stockton, K. (2009). The queer child or growing sideways in twentieth century. Duke University Press. Bornemark, J. (2018). Det omätbaras renässans : en uppgörelse med pedanternas världsherravälde [The renaissance of the immeasurable: A settlement with the pedantral world domination]. Volante. Brinch, R. (2018). Att växa sidledes. Tematik, barnsyn och konstnärlig gestaltning i Suzanne Ostens scenkonst för unga [To grow sideways: Themes, aesthetics and notion of the child in Suzanne Osten’s theatre for young audiences]. Stockholm University dissertation, Stockholm University Press.

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Gadamer, H.-G. (1997). Sanning och metod. I urval [Truth and method] (A. Melberg, Trans.). Daidalos (Originally published 1960). Gjervan, E. K. (2013). Lekens dramaturgi – nye muligheter for barneteatret? [The dramaturgy of play—New opportunities for children’s theatre?]. Nordic Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 6(9), 1–11. Goldman, L. R. (1998). Child’s play: Myth, mimesis and Make-believe. Berg. Helander, K. (2011). Det var roligt, och så lärde man sig nånting, men jag kommer inte på vilket det var. Om barnteater och receptionsforskning [It was fun, and you learned something, but I don’t remember what: On children’s theatre and reception research]. LOCUS (3–4), 81–97. Jensen, M. (2013). Lekteorier [Playing theories]. Studentlitteratur. McAuley, G. (1999). Space in performance, making meaning in the theatre. University of Michigan Press. McAuley, G. (2003). Place in the performance experience. Modern Drama, 46, 598– 612. Merleau Ponty, M. (1999). Kroppens fenomenologi [Phénoménologie de la perception] (W. Fovet, Trans.). Daidalos (Original published 1945). Panksepp, J. (2005). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press (Original published 1998). Richert, R. A., & Lilliard, A. S. (2004). Observers’ proficiency at identifying pretence acts based on behavioural cues. Cognitive Development, 19, 223–240. Schwartzman, H. (1978). Transformations: The anthropology of children’s play. Springer-Verlag. Szatkowski, J. (1992). Et dramaturgisk vende. Perspektiv for teatervidenskaben. Dramaturgiske modeller og forestillingsanalyse [A dramaturgical turn: Perspectives for theatre research: Dramaturgical models and performance analysis]. BUNT: Bulletin for Nordiske Teaterforskere, 10, 28–52. Winnicott, D. W. (1995). Lek och verklighet [Playing and Reality] (I. Löfgren, Trans.). Natur och kultur (Original published 1971).

Crafting Immersive Experiences: A Case Study of the Development of Three Short Narrative Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) Projects Kath Dooley

Introduction Cinematic virtual reality (CVR) is an emerging medium that has been utilised to offer a range of immersive experiences to the viewer. Featuring varying levels of interactivity, it can be defined as a high-resolution virtual reality experience that allows the user to look around a 360-degree or 180-degree world that is created through live-capture video and/or computer-generated imagery, in either a monoscopic (2D) or stereoscopic (3D) view. Spatialised sound elements augment the vision, drawing attention to action unfolding in the spherical space. Ross and Munt note that it ‘is also referred to as “Film VR” or “Live Action VR”, referring to CVR’s frequent alignment with lensbased cinematographic moving image practice’ (2018, p. 192). An additional label associated with the form is 360-degree video, or more simply, 360video. CVR is most commonly a pre-rendered format, offering a fixed viewer experience and a constrained vantage point for the viewer, whereas more interactive or ‘game-like’ VR forms offer open-ended experiences with real-time rendering. The ‘cinematic’ aspect of the format points to the potential for the inclusion of narrative elements that give rise to a specific emotional experience, which play out to a predetermined conclusion. CVR experiences may be viewed through head mounted display (HMD) goggles, on large screens or via online platforms. K. Dooley (B) Curtin University, Bentley, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

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This medium has steadily grown in popularity over the last five years, with increased interest from audiences, curators and practitioners. In 2018 it was reported that 22.4 million Americans were already virtual reality users, with 82 million VR headsets estimated to be in use by 2020 (Yulio Technologies, 2018). Prominent feature film directors Kathryn Bigalow, Ridley Scott and Alejandro González Iñárritu have created VR works for commercial or film festival release; these being just a few of the traditional media makers who have explored the form to date.1 Despite this growing popularity, little work has been done to analyse writing and development processes associated with VR formats. To explain this situation, Ross and Munt suggest that ‘this rapidly progressing field has […] been overlooked by the genuine excitement, and novelty, of a new digital model of audio-visual production’ (2018, p. 192). This chapter will explore the challenges associated with the development of short narratives in the CVR format, with a focus on three projects that were produced in Perth, Western Australia in 2019 as case studies. In the context of this chapter I define short narrative virtual reality as ‘story-based drama, documentary or hybrid productions that feature a beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in that order’ (Dooley, 2017, p. 162). The projects to be analysed are the result of a series of six introductory VR filmmaking workshops that ran from March to June, led by Perth company Visor Immersive. A cohort of approximately 20 students, many of whom were experienced ‘traditional’ screenwriters and filmmakers, were coached through the process of preproduction, production and postproduction of a CVR work, working in groups to synthesise their knowledge. The three short CVR works that resulted are Checkpoint (2019, writer/director Mel White), Under the Bed (2019, writer/director Brian Hennings) and CPR (2019, writer Suzanne Ryan, director Karim Ghanim), all of which are approximately three minutes in length. I will argue that, in the development phase, the challenges that these projects presented for their creators are emblematic of broader industry challenges for the development of CVR projects. Through an analysis of practitioner interviews and screenwriting documents I will demonstrate that firstly, the emerging nature of the medium leads to uncertainty around the presentation of screenplays, related development documents and other conceptual material. This creates opportunities for creative approaches by writers and developers. Secondly, the 360-degree or 180-degree format calls for a consideration of elements beyond those normally explored in the writing of a traditional screen narrative, such as story world, story structure and character arcs. Additionally, the creator or writer must consider audience experience 1 Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, 2014; The Revenant, 2016) launched his VR work Carne Y Arena (Flesh and Sand) at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival in 2017. In the same year Ridley Scott produced a 360-degree video to promote Alien: Covenant (2017) and Kathryn Bigalow made the VR documentary short The Protectors: Walk in the Ranger’s Shoes in conjunction with National Geographic.

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within the story world so as to best utilise the spherical space. By exploring these issues, I aim to highlight emerging practices in the area of narrative VR and to add to scholarship in this area.

Background The term ‘script development’ has been used to label a wide array of activities and is therefore ‘complex, contested and contingent on context’ (Batty et al., 2017, p. 226). It may refer to a process of rewriting undertaken with input from producers, script editors and/or other collaborators, to the production of short-form ‘proof of concept’ work, or to writer’s room processes, to give a few examples. Batty et al. observe that the literature exploring this subject ‘is wide, varied and multi-faceted; and […] arguably fragile and still emerging’ (2017, p. 240). Further to this, a group of scholar-practitioners from Australia argue that ‘the complexity of script development – both as a creative/professional practice and an area of research – makes it a “wicked problem”’ (Batty et al., 2018, p. 154). I would suggest that the emerging and non-uniform nature of CVR as an audio-visual medium, and the limited scholarly exploration of its development processes to date, adds another layer to this problem but also creates an opportunity for further research. A growing number of scholars have touched upon the subject of writing and directing for narrative virtual reality to date (see Dooley, 2017, 2018; Fearghail et al., 2018; Larsen, 2018; Mateer, 2017; Ogle, 2019; Ross & Munt, 2018), offering some insight into emerging practices of development in doing so. Mateer explores how the traditional film director’s craft can be applied in a 360-degree immersive environment, a study that also illuminates issues for screenwriting (2017). Ogle explores the challenges for screenwriters working in interactive storytelling mediums, presenting a conceptual model of relevance to CVR (2019). Following Spierling (2012), she suggests that the use of conceptual models that foreground interactivity can foster better conceptualisation and writing for new film mediums such as CVR (Ogle, 2019, p. 4). On a related note, I explore a series of concepts related to immersion and interactivity, such as audience acclimatisation to 360-degree environment and the directing of viewer attention in this space (Dooley, 2017). The problems associated with these notions suggest the need to consider a new screen grammar for CVR as ‘360-degree projects have no screen edge: the world of the project surrounds the viewer’ (Dooley, 2017, p. 164). On a similar note, Fearghail et al. explore methods used by contemporary VR filmmakers to tell stories in a 360-degree space, noting the need to ‘guide’ the viewer’s attention so that story beats are not missed (2018). These texts suggest the need for an audience-focussed development phase that emphasises interactivity as well as narrative development. Other authors explore emerging script formats for CVR. Larsen notes that contemporary ‘filmmaking in virtual reality (VR) restricts the screenwriter with its technological shortcomings and there is little agreement on how stories

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should be told in the new format’ (2018, p. 73). Ross and Munt explore new forces on the screenplay, and new screenwriting practices for CVR, with a focus on the unfolding of narrative in 360-degree space (2018). Of significance to this chapter is their exploration of ‘how to write, on the page, for spherically spatialized action’ (2018, p. 199). Further to this subject I have noted specific script formats, development techniques and methods of collaboration for cinematic virtual reality with reference to three short Australian works (Dooley, 2018). As with Ross and Munt’s article, this research analyses the physical expression of a screen idea in written or other form, providing insight into emerging development practices for both fiction and documentary works. This Handbook of Script Development chapter builds upon this research by offering further insight into the challenges associated with development, noting that the CVR format has continued to gather steam and mature in the years since this earlier research was published.

The Projects---An Overview The CVR works that I will now explore were produced so as to allow course participants a complete overview of the process of crafting a work, from writing and development to postproduction. A time limit of three minutes was established as a project parameter so as to ensure projects were manageable for production within a reasonably short time frame. This short duration is not unusual for CVR works; this being a result of practitioners grappling with new technologies for both creating and viewing (see Dooley, 2017, p. 164). Despite this and other limitations, such as one shooting day per project and the use of a single location, the three works are all ambitious and innovative final products. Checkpoint is a 360-degree post-apocalyptic drama that is filmed in a single long take. The viewer is positioned in the backseat of the family car at night, with a father in the driver seat, mother in the passenger seat and a young female child adjacent. The parents seem fearful and agitated as they arrive at a sinister checkpoint that is patrolled by armed guards. When asked for passports, they are unable to produce one for their young daughter, and she is snatched from the backseat by one of the guards, despite her parents’ frantic protests. At the same time, a series of other vehicles break through the roadblock, creating chaos. Ignoring the danger of gunfire and rogue vehicles, the mother jumps from the car to try to retrieve her daughter. The anxious father then steers the car through a chaotic scene, as various unknown others flee the checkpoint. As he approaches an open space, the mother reappears with the daughter in tow, and they jump back into the car to safety. Under the Bed is a 180-degree dramatic thriller, in which all action is filmed from the viewer’s vantage point under a queen-sized bed in a bedroom. A woman enters the room and bends down to address the viewer under the bed, saying ‘Stay there. Stay quiet. Nothing is going to happen’. As she springs to her feet, an agitated male character enters the room. He has heard voices and

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wants to know to whom the woman is talking. An argument follows, which leads to a violent struggle on the bed. It becomes clear that the female protagonist has deadly motives. At one point the male victim is flung downwards so that his head hangs off the side of the bed. He looks into the darkness and appears to ‘see’ the viewer. His shock is short lived, however, as the woman drags him back up onto the bed and delivers a final, murderous blow. With the male character dead, she returns to the floor on her hands and knees and motions for the viewer to come out from under the bed, an action that ends the narrative. CPR is a short 180-degree CVR experience that places the viewer in the position of a man who has collapsed in the public space of a café/bar. A female bystander checks his vital signs and declares that he is not breathing. She then attempts to give him CPR and is helped by a passing nurse. After a couple of minutes this treatment works, much to the relief of all involved. The 180-degree format of the latter two projects limits the viewer’s range of vision; however, it is still possible to look up, down, and left and right within the 180-degree space. This format is a popular choice for filmmakers wanting to produce a work in stereoscopic VR, perhaps because it allows for a shooting style more akin to traditional filmmaking, in which a film crew can more easily work in the off-screen space. One high profile work produced in this format is feature film director Robert Rodriguez’s The Limit, a 20-minute action narrative produced in 2018. It must be noted that viewer interaction within the three CVR works is limited to three degrees of freedom (3DoF), meaning that the viewer can look up and down and turn left and right from a fixed central axis. The works are designed to be viewed using an Oculus Go headset but have also been viewed via YouTube in 2D mode. The authors of these projects have a variety of experience as writers of film, television and creative fiction. Suzanne Ryan, writer of CPR comes from a television background where she would write her own documentary story segments as a story producer (Ryan, 2019). She has also recently co-written a web series. Brian Hennings, writer of Under the Bed is a published author of short stories, novellas and non-fiction texts, as well as having written short and long form drama for the big and small screen (Hennings, 2019). Mel White, writer of Checkpoint, is a graduate of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and has written several short films, working mainly in the science fiction genre (White, 2019). Involvement in the three projects listed above was the first VR writing experience for all three writers. I will now explore two development ‘problems’ for CVR that have been identified from my analysis of interviews with the practitioners of these projects. These problems evidence the complex nature of the development stage for this emerging medium, which calls for decisions to be made about how best to present a screen idea for the CVR format, and how best to situate the viewer in relation to the narrative.

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Problem #1: The Screen Idea on the Page Screenwriting, as a professional activity, is one that is often bound by convention in regard to script layout, font and formatting. In regard to the film and television industries, one can note the screenplay’s status as both a creative document and a logistical blueprint. In regard to the latter, the use of Courier twelve-point font and other formatting considerations mean that a drama screenplay can be quantified and dissected for planning purposes, with one page of script equalling roughly one minute of screen time according to Australian convention. Moreover, in regard to traditional media forms such as film and television, I would suggest that the script development phase has also historically been bound in convention, and this often involving a progression from ‘small documents’ (e.g. a synopsis or outline) to full story treatments and draft screenplays. This is not to say that all screenwriting and script development has been undertaken in a uniform way. Writers such as Millard (2014), Price (2013) and Ross and Munt (2018) note many variations in the former. Furthermore, the advent of digital technologies has created new opportunities for the expression and development of a screen idea. I have previously argued that while VR production calls for detailed planning documents that can also function as a blueprint for realisation, the standard script, as referred to above, ‘is only one of many means that may be employed to bring a project to fruition’ (Dooley, 2018, p. 183). The approach taken by the three Perth writers confirms this finding, as three different styles of presentation can be observed. But moreover, the three different approaches evidence a quest by each practitioner to find the most effective manner through which to communicate the specificity of their CVR vision. This has been influenced by their prior experience as writers but also by their own research into emerging VR script formats, which has resulted in different styles of layout. For example, as I have explored elsewhere (see Dooley, 2021) Mel White’s script for the 360-degree project Checkpoint is colour coded, with text in four different colours indicating action unfolding in the four quadrants (north, east, south and west) surrounding the viewer (see Figs. 1 and 2). A key on the first page of the script illustrates the viewer’s position in the car with a colour for each direction they might choose to look. (As mentioned earlier, the viewer is placed in the backseat of the car as is the centre of all action.) The reader can then go on to peruse the text with an idea of the direction in which action occurs, in the absence of screen directions that make this explicit. The visual nature of the key provides an effective means of visualising the narrative events in the 360-degree environment. White remarks that she ‘wonder(ed) how people write what’s happening with every direction’, but then was given no specific direction by the leaders of the VR course (White, 2019). She therefore ‘did research online’, finding a variety of resources, before settling on the idea of colour coding each direction (2019). She comments that this approach ‘was interesting because you could […] have the map in front of you and then you follow along’ (2019).

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Fig. 1 The colour-coded key to the screenplay for Checkpoint (2019) (Courtesy of Mel White)

Meanwhile, Brian Henning’s script for Under the Bed is presented in a format that resembles the traditional drama screenplay, albeit with additional descriptions that indicate where in the spherical space the action is unfolding. This meant adapting the industry standard format that he was familiar with. He suggests that: in a 360 world you have to somehow come up with a format where you’re writing not only what the people in front of you are doing but the people behind you […] at exactly the same time, because the viewer could choose to be watching what they’re doing. (Hennings, 2019)

He also notes the screenplay’s status as a planning document, commenting that ‘there’s a lot of considerations from a screenwriting point of view [as to] how do you bring all this stuff together to make a document that can easily be translated into action on a set’ (Hennings, 2019). The development phase involved consideration of these factors, so as to find his own workable solution. Ryan’s screenplay for CPR is different again, involving information presented in two columns for picture and sound, respectively. As with Under the Bed, the ‘picture’ section includes written notes on the direction of action occurring within the 180-degree space. Ryan remarks that this choice of formatting reflects her television background, and particularly her work in advertorial video (Ryan, 2019). This approach is similar to that of CVR practitioner Sprott Woods, who also separates vision and sound into separate boxes for each scene (Woods, 2016). This approach highlights spatialised sound elements, rather than incorporating them into visual descriptions, as is often typical of the traditional film script.

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Fig. 2 The opening page of the screenplay for Checkpoint (2019), Draft 1 (Courtesy of Mel White)

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I argue then, that the development stage for narrative CVR involves development of not just a screen idea, but also decision-making about the best means to present this idea. As Ross and Munt aptly note: the design of the page, and other material provided alongside, is not simply a question of how much technical information is provided prior to the shooting script/theatrical prompt book that is taken into production. Instead, this information has its own organizational impact that can interact with and influence the visual regime initiated by the text. (2018, p. 199)

We cannot know how White’s adoption of a visual key to illustrate the 360degree world of her project may have impacted her film crew’s reading of the story; however, it is notable that this is a significantly different approach to that taken by Ryan and Hennings for their 180-degree work. Each of the three writers has considered how their screenplay best reflects the 360-degree or 180-degree spatialisation, so as to communicate narrative information and character relations, as well as directional cues for the audience.

Problem #2: Development of the Audience’s Role CVR narratives place the viewer within a 360-degree or 180-degree world as either character or witness, which impacts on their experience of plot and character. While the level of interactivity associated with this format is limited and does not affect the unfolding of a predetermined narrative, the choice of where to look gives the user a small amount of agency. This is in direct contrast with traditional media formats, which are viewed from an external and fixed vantage point. The latter generally offers a passive viewing experience from a ‘safe’ distance. The development of CVR narratives therefore calls for a consideration of this viewer agency. As Ogle rightly suggests, ‘the traditional storyteller maintains artistic control, [while] the interactive story author must consider interaction as a tool that can be used to discover or affect the outcome of a story’ (2019, p. 7). One key decision for the CVR writer concerns the point of view of the viewer in the story, given the implications that this has for character relations within the story world. Larsen suggests that mid-2010s’ VR filmmaking was dominated by firstperson POV protagonists that he describes as ‘speechless amnesiacs in pushcarts’ (2018, p. 75). This comment refers to a first-person positioning of the viewer, who moves through scenes of action without the ability to move or speak. Larsen also notes the use of third-person POV, as is common in traditional cinema, in works such as the serialised VR sci-fi work Invisible (Jaunt, 2016). As an alternative to these two viewer vantage points, he suggests the use of a ‘second-person sidekick POV [which] can be the modification that allows screenwriters the necessary narrative control, while audiences still get

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full presence and interactivity to the point where it does not overly sidetrack the story’ (2018, p. 79). The second-person sidekick might be addressed directly by other characters, therefore still giving the viewer a first-person POV, but they are not the main protagonist of the story (Larsen, 2018). One commonality of the three case studies explored in this chapter is that they all adopt a first-person POV for the viewer. More interesting, however, is the way in which each project casts the viewer in the role of a character whose limited movement is justified by their given circumstances. As Hemmings notes, ‘all of [the viewer roles] were written around the conceit that the person has to stay where they are’ (Hennings, 2019). This decision appears to have been made consciously in an effort to work with the restrictions of CVR interactivity. For example, in the opening seconds of Under the Bed, the viewer is addressed by a female character who urges them to stay still. Reflecting on his screen idea, Hennings recalls how he pondered ‘how do I make it make sense that someone’s in the scene but can’t do anything?’ (2019). By placing the viewer in a restricted position under a bed as a hidden witness to a murder, the lack of movement was justified. Likewise, the viewer of Checkpoint adopts a physically restricted character position of young child in the backseat of the car, which can be justified in terms of the story world. On this subject, White (2019) comments: that was something I thought about, [that] a little kid wouldn’t really be able to do much, might not even really understand what’s going on, but [could] understand the tone and the feeling and how scary it was even if they couldn’t speak yet.

Furthermore, each of the writers describes how the fine tuning of the viewer’s role and their experience of the narrative was a key aspect that drove the script development process. This meant considering the use of space and dialogue, so as to encourage viewer identification with a specific role, and to direct attention to relevant actions on screen. The undertaking of rehearsals with actors and test shoots with crew aided this development. On this point in regard to Checkpoint, White describes how her reversals with the actors cast to play the roles of ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ led her to change ‘the order of some action or who said some things and where they were in the space’ so that the experience ‘made more sense’ (White, 2019). Additionally, a stunt team from local company Rebel Workshops provided feedback on action sequences within the script, which ‘opened up a lot more possibilities’ in terms of what could be filmed (White, 2019). White (2019) recalls a key problem that was identified during the development stage: Some people didn’t understand that the camera [the viewer] was a kid. So […] [including] more interaction with the kid (the camera), was really important, which I didn’t really do in the first draft.

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To remedy this problem, the final draft script includes moments when the mother turns and speaks to the viewer as child, addressing them in the firstperson. This clarifies the viewer’s role: that they are a character that is involved in the unfolding drama, rather than being an invisible witness. This positioning perhaps aligns with Larsen’s ‘second-person sidekick POV’, in that the character is present but in a secondary role to the main protagonists (Larsen, 2018). As such they do not drive the story but are taken along for the ride. In CPR, the viewer is aligned with the collapsed and immobile male character that receives medical assistance. The sound of this character struggling to breathe precedes the visuals of the piece; these allowing a view looking up from the floor. At one point this view fades up and down from black, as though the protagonist has lost consciousness. Ryan describes how, in response to feedback from the course leaders and participants, she redrafted the dialogue that appeared in initial drafts of the script so as to better focus viewer attention on the experience of the collapsed protagonist with whom they are aligned. Excess dialogue spoken by bystanders at the margins of the 180-degree space was minimised so as not to distract from this experience. She comments (Ryan, 2019): I had to then physically remove some of that dialogue so it didn’t become confusing for the audience as to, who’s my subject right now? That became really, really important with regard to sound and [focusing] the viewer’s attention.

This approach follows Jerald’s advice that the VR creator provide a ‘core experience’ in a virtual world (2015, p. 229). By removing excess dialogue from secondary characters, Ryan ensures that the viewer’s eye is not drawn to focal points that distract from the primary action of the medical emergency that is unfolding. In regard to Under the Bed, Hennings describes how his script development process involved a consideration of the space underneath and around a bed, so as to best engage the viewer. He recalls thinking that (Hennings, 2019): [The] space under the bed becomes a safe space but who/what can invade the space? […] I knew that there would be almost a natural safety of the edge of the bed, that people would be beyond that but [there would] also [be] the ability for people to come in under the bed. In the writing phase I was thinking a lot about, how do we play with that?

This comment demonstrates that audience experience of the work was a key consideration during the writing process. One can observe that proximity of other characters to the protagonist in Under the Bed varies throughout the narrative, with several key story beats involving ‘contact’ between the viewer and the two protagonists. By ‘contact’ I mean that other characters either speak or make eye contact with the viewer. At the conclusion of the work, after

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the male character has been murdered, the female protagonist kneels down and reaches under the bed, beckoning the viewer to come forward. This invasion of the ‘safe space’ is an unsettling but engaging means through which to end the work.

Conclusion In this chapter I have demonstrated how, for the writers of the three CVR case studies, the script development phase called for a foregrounding of the problem of audience role and audience interaction with story events. I’ve also explored how the emerging nature of the CVR medium creates uncertainty about script development practices in regard to script formats. I would argue that these issues are not unique to the three projects but are reflective of the wider practices of CVR creators. Moreover, on the second point, it is my opinion that considerably more work will need to occur in the CVR space before any ‘standardised’ approach to screenwriting and script development can be ascertained. I agree with Larsen, who suggests that it is ‘likely that little consensus regarding story format will be agreed upon by VR filmmakers until we achieve near-experiential realism by 2030’ (2018, p. 77). As technologies change, formats and development processes will likely also transform. Following my 2018 study of three CVR works, I concluded that the creators of these projects ‘approach to the development of their projects that is somewhat driven by their previous experience and by that of their collaborators’; this relating to work in film, television and gallery contexts (Dooley, 2018, p. 187). When considering the three projects produced in 2019, this statement would appear to hold true. The approach of the three writers interviewed for this chapter has similarly been shaped by their backgrounds in the film and/or television industries and by their feedback from cast and crew. Batty et al. pose the question: ‘Does script development depend on media/format?’ (2017, p. 241). Based on this research, I would suggest that current CVR development is influenced by a range of practices and approaches associated with older media formats, as well as by the opportunities associated with 360-degree space. The challenge for the screenwriter is to find an approach to development that fosters engaging storytelling in the new spatiality of 360 or 180-degree vision. A consideration of viewer engagement with story elements is key to this quest.

References Batty, C., O’Meara, R., Taylor, S., Joyce, H., Burne, P., Maloney, N., & Tofler, M. (2018). Script development as a ‘wicked problem.’ Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Checkpoint. (2019). Written and directed by Mel White. Visor Immersive.

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CPR. (2019). Written by Suzanne Ryan, Directed by Karim Ghanim. Visor Immersive. Dooley, K. (2017). Storytelling with virtual reality in 360-degrees: A new screen grammar. Studies in Australasian Cinema, 11(3), 161–171. Dooley, K. (2018). Scripting the virtual: Formats and development paths for recent Australian narrative 360-degree virtual reality projects. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 175–189. https://doi.org/10.1386/jocs.9.2.175_1 Dooley, K. (2021). Cinematic virtual reality: A critical study of 21st century approaches and practices. Palgrave Macmillan. forthcoming. Fearghail, C. O., Ozcinar, C., Knorr, S., & Smolic, A. (2018, December). Director’s cut-analysis of aspects of interactive storytelling for VR films. In International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (pp. 308–322). Springer. Hennings, B. (2019). Personal interview with Kath Dooley. Conducted 16 August. Invisible. (2016). Six-episode VR TV series. Written by Melisa Wallack. Directed by Simon Crane, Michael Lukk Litwak, Jerome Sable, Julina Tatlock, Doug Liman. Jaunt VR Jerald, J. (2015). The VR book: Human-centered design for virtual reality. Morgan & Claypool. Larsen, M. (2018). Virtual sidekick: Second-person POV in narrative VR. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(1), 73–83. Mateer, J. (2017). Directing for cinematic virtual reality: How the traditional film director’s craft applies to immersive environments and notions of presence. Journal of Media Practice, 18(1), 14–25. Millard, K. (2014). Screenwriting in a digital era. Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting. Palgrave Macmillan. Ogle, G. (2019). Screenwriting for new film mediums: Conceptualizing visual models for interactive storytelling. Journal of Screenwriting, 10(1), 3–27. Price, S. (2013). A history of the screenplay. Palgrave Macmillan. Ross, M., & Munt, A. (2018). Cinematic virtual reality: Towards the spatialized screenplay. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 191–209. https://doi.org/10.1386/jocs. 9.2.191_1 Ryan, S. (2019). Personal interview with Kath Dooley. Conducted 16 August. Spierling, U. (2012). “Implicit creation”: Non-programmer conceptual models for authoring in interactive digital storytelling (Ph.D. thesis, University of Plymouth, Plymouth). https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/1195 The Limit. (2018). Written by Racer Max and Robert Rodriguez. Directed by Robert Rodriguez. STX Surreal. Under the Bed. (2019). Written and directed by Brian Hemmings. Visor Immersive. White, M. (2019). Personal interview with Kath Dooley. Conducted 27 September. Woods, S. (2016). Formatting a script for VR-Sprott Woods. https://www.sprott woods.com/virtualreality/2018/4/17/formatting-a-script-for-vr. Accessed 22 Nov 2019. Yulio Technologies. (2018). VR stats every business leader should see. https://3sr05l 2l7ihe1u4u613nqp53-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/ virtual-reality-stats-boss-magazine-1.jpg. Accessed 2 Oct 2019.

The Screenplay as a Means of Communication: The Case of Notorious Claus Tieber

Introduction The organisation of script development differs according to time, place and—most of all—mode of production. A screen idea is transformed into a screenplay by the SIWG, the Screen Idea Work Group (Macdonald, 2013, p. 72). Within Hollywood’s studio system this SIWG was clearly defined and hierarchically constructed (see Schatz, 1996, p. 105; Tieber, 2008, p. 124). But even in the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, the 1930s and 40s, some writers managed to evade the interference and creative control exercised by the studios and producers. The case I will analyse in this chapter demonstrates how freelance screenwriter Ben Hecht and director Alfred Hitchcock developed a crucial scene from Notorious (1946) without submitting to the influence of their producer. The various versions of this scene in script form that are held in diverse American archives are evidence for the problem they had with it and help trace the solution they came up with. Moreover, these screenplay versions can be interpreted as a means of communication between the members of the SIWG and as such, they help us to understand the specifics of script development and the functions of the screenplay during this process. My analysis of this material closely adheres to Ian Macdonald’s succinct thoughts on the development process: ‘The whole of screenwriting is a conversation, about what people want to say as well as how best to say it’ (2013, p. 226). C. Tieber (B) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected]

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Independent Film Production in Hollywood: David O. Selznick Alfred Hitchcock was brought to Hollywood by independent producer David O. Selznick for Rebecca (1940). After this film Hitchcock was lent to independent producer Walter Wanger for Foreign Correspondent (1940), for which Ben Hecht wrote the final monologue of the main protagonist. This was the first brief collaboration of Hecht and Hitchcock. Later Hecht did some uncredited work for Lifeboat (1944), but their first official collaboration was Spellbound (1945). Editor Alan Osbiston described the special collaboration of Hecht and Hitchcock (McGilligan, 2003, p. 355): It was a staggering experience. Hecht would come in with a few pages of script and read it to Hitchcock and then Hitch would read it back to him, then they’d act the parts. Hitch would say, ‘OK, you’re the girl. I’m Grant. Now, we move from here to there.’ And they’d move all around the hotel suite acting and playing their lines. Hitch would say, ‘I’ll come from over here ... no, that doesn’t work because, you see, our camera is over here. I want that dialogue to come over here. Ben, you’ve got to pull that line up to here so that I can play it in front of the camera here.’ The whole thing was worked out in the most minute detail.

Untypical for the script development of Spellbound was the fact that it was conducted in New York by the film’s screenwriter and director, far away from the influence of producer David O. Selznick. Selznick was not pleased with these circumstances, but there was little he could do. He was worried that Hitchcock’s love for details, his ‘gags and bits of business and tricks’ (Leff, 1998, p. 119) as he called it, may stand in the way of a clear-cut narrative structure. He put all his hopes on Hecht, whom he saw as script supervisor, not just as a screenwriter. Maybe not surprisingly then, Hecht’s screenplays for Hitchcock differ from his scripts for other directors. They are more detailed and include more camera positions and movements. However, they are still far from being blueprints for the films. Hecht’s typical stylistics are easily recognisable in every version of the script for Spellbound (1945), starting with opening explanatory titles, which are typical for Selznick–Hecht collaborations. Visual motifs in the script are a sign of Hitchcock’s influence. Generally speaking, there seems to be a partition of work: Hecht was responsible for the narration and the dialogue and Hitchcock for the visuals. It was Hecht’s task to integrate Hitchcock’s visual motifs into the narration. It is thus impossible to detect whether the focus in a given scene was Hecht or Hitchcock’s idea. The dialogue is clearly written by Hecht: lines such as ‘Kleptomaniacs for lunch! They’ll steal the food out of your mouth’ or ‘Darling, will you love me just as much – when I’m normal?’ (Hecht, 1945a, p. 68) are clearly Hecht’s style and do not show up in other Hitchcock films. Hecht, the screenwriter of gangster films such as Underworld (1927) and Scarface (1934) also shows his trademark style with lines like: ‘You carried it off

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like a grade A gun moll’ (Hecht, 1945a, p. 68). Similar expressions can be found in Hecht’s screenplays for Scarface (1932) or The Frontpage (1931, based on the 1928 play).

Notorious (1946) The film tells the story of Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), daughter of a convicted Nazi, who becomes a US. agent and infiltrates a Nazi circle in Rio de Janeiro. Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), the boss of the circle, wants to marry her, but she falls in love with US agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant). The development process started with a simple screen idea for another film for Ingrid Bergman (after Spellbound). Hecht wrote an outline, which Selznick copyrighted as Notorious in October 1944 (Schatz, 1996, p. 392). The idea was that Bergman should play a ‘fallen’ woman under a false identity, who went undercover into an espionage circle. Another starting point was the short story ‘The Song of the Dragon’ by John Taintor Foote, published in 1923 by the Saturday Evening Post. Selznick had bought the rights long ago. In midDecember 1944 Selznick sent a wire to his assistant O’Shea: ‘While we are frantically trying to get a Bergman going we lose sight of the fact that we have Mr. Alfred Hitchcock sitting around waiting to start another Bergman’ (Selznick, 1944). Selznick suggests letting Hitchcock work with Hecht on Notorious, pointing out Hecht’s legendary writing speed. He expects that they could be finished with the script within two or three weeks. This would be the only chance to start shooting in February 1945. Hecht and Hitchcock were both in New York and free to work. Selznick wanted to take advantage of this situation, although he was not happy about the duo working without his supervision. Thomas Schatz describes the Hecht–Hitchcock collaboration as follows (1996, p. 393): The Hecht – Hitchcock combination was both paradoxical and productive: Hecht’s undisciplined, high-speed working methods were countered but not stifled by Hitchcock’s more deliberate approach to script preparation. Moreover, Hecht’s mastery of dialogue and plot machinery complemented Hitchcock’s genius for coming up with dramatic and highly cinematic situations, though without any real idea of how to get his characters from one situation to another.

Hecht and Hitchcock worked in New York on the ‘Dragon’ treatment and returned to Hollywood to discuss it with Selznick. Throughout December 1944 and January 1945 Hecht and Hitchcock met several times a week to work on the screenplay. Frank Nugent (cited in McGilligan, 2003, p. 367) commented on the collaboration in the New York Times: Mr. Hecht would stride about or drape himself over a chair or couch, or sprawl artistically on the floor, Mr. Hitchcock, a one hundred- and ninety-two-pound

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Buddha (reduced from two hundred and ninety-five) would sit primly on a straight-back chair, his hands clasped across his midriff, his round button eyes gleaming. They would talk from nine to six; Mr. Hecht would sneak off with his typewriter for two or three days.

Thus, the SIWG for Notorious was different from most of the others at that time: the producer was on the other side of the continent and could only communicate with the rest of the group via memos and letters. In addition to that, the director was part of the group from the very beginning, which was seldom the case in the studio system.

First Treatment On 9 January 1945 Selznick International Pictures (SIP) copied the first treatment by Hecht and Hitchcock. These 50 pages, written in prose, include a short epilogue that takes place after Sebastian’s arrest by Brazilian authorities, which was supposed to play out as follows: Rumour on the streets of Rio has it that Sebastian was executed by his own people after having been found out as the head of a Nazi spy organisation. They gossip about Alicia as a woman ‘rotten through and through’ (Hecht & Hitchcock, 1945a, p. 46). After a dissolve we see Alicia back in New York. She is with Wally’s parents (‘Wally’ turned into ‘Devlin’ during the development process). She shows them a letter by the president, saying that she was acting on behalf of the United States, which allows her to stay in the country and wait for Wally/Devlin. Many details of this ending remained in the screenplay during much of the development process. The technique of having the action ‘discussed’ by uninvolved folks on the street is a kind of outside commentary on the plot and on the main characters. Hecht clearly enjoyed what David Bordwell refers to as ‘self-conscious narration’ (Bordwell, 1985, p. 58). The narration draws attention to itself by installing a commenting instance in the screenplay, characters not used before or after, a kind of Greek choir—thus in a sense a very theatrical and not very efficient way of storytelling. But the device is able to show the contrast between the dialogue and the diegetic reality. Upon reviewing the treatment, Selznick criticised certain twists of the story and added some question marks and exclamation points (see Leff, 1998, p. 180). At the end he demanded: ‘More Hitch!’ (Leff, 1998, p. 182). In Selznick’s view, the treatment was dominated by Hecht—a Hecht who would seldom shy away from repeating himself. Selznick was missing Hitchcock’s ‘signature scenes’ within this version.

Second Treatment A month later, Hecht and Hitchcock finished another version of the treatment. This version, in size and format almost similar to a screenplay (115 pages)— included a crucial scene, which was rewritten several times. I will focus on

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this scene, because it encapsulates the working mechanism of the SIWG in that the scene constantly being changed and adapted throughout the film’s development tells us a lot about this process in terms of storytelling, script development and the communication between the members of the SIWG. Devlin (Grant) and his boss discuss the mission Alicia (Bergman) is assigned. The version of 10 February 1945 has this scene short and clear cut. Devlin’s boss merely says: ‘We’ve arranged for her to meet Sebastian at the President’s palace tomorrow at three o’clock. Mr. Beardsley is handling that. Thereafter, you’ll be her contact, Devlin’ (Hitchcock & Hecht, 1945b, p. 31). In this version, Alicia does not know Sebastian and the chance that the mission might fail is not discussed. This may be because Alicia is characterised as a prostitute and Devlin and his boss trust her erotic qualities to seduce Sebastian. The relationship of Alicia and Devlin is complicated by Hecht’s dialogue. In the first third she says (ibid., p. 34): So much for your love. One look at me without make-up – and it’s out the window. (...) (she presses against him – and kisses him fiercely) Thank you – Liliom.

The reference to the main character of Ferenc Molnar’s most famous play might go unnoticed by those not familiar with Hungarian literature, but it nevertheless is evidence of Hecht’s cultural background. During the script development process such references were mostly cut, at least in Hollywood’s studio system. But the main problem of this version was not cultural references, rather the circumstance that the male protagonist, Devlin, has nothing left to do after he convinced Alicia to accept the mission and become a spy for the US. After that the character almost disappears. Selznick feared that no star would accept such a role: ‘No leading male star would want to portray a character who did so little’ (Leff, 1998, p. 185). After reading this second version Selznick repeated his former comment in a more precise version: ‘More original Hitch’ (ibid.). Like Hecht, Hitchcock too was not immune of repeating himself. Selznick was not satisfied with Hecht’s dialogue: ‘These lines, too many of which are horribly coarse without being witty, and many of which contain jokes and words that date back to the Hecht and MacArthur of Front Page’ (ibid., p.187). On 13 March 1945 Hecht and Hitchcock sent a new treatment to Selznick, 95 pages long. In said scene Hecht added representatives of the Brazilian authorities who discuss that the first meeting of Sebastian and Alicia shall now be at a riding tournament. At the end of this version Alicia and Devlin stand trial because of drunk driving and the story finishes with a purely comedic scene: The judge receives a letter and the two go free and marry—happy end.

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Considering its time and the regulations of the Production Code, Notorious ’ handling of sexuality was quite risky. This version is blatantly obvious about it (Hitchcock & Hecht, 1945c, p. 61): DISSOLVE to the Sebastian bedroom Alicia’s evening dress lies flung on a divan. Alex’ dress suit lies on a chair. The two are in twin beds. Alicia is sleeping.

Such an almost explicit sexual reference was not to be allowed by the Production Code Administration. Alicia’s character was one of the main problems in development. Another topic that was newly introduced in this treatment is the idea that Alicia must get some mysterious papers from the Nazis; however, it remains unclear what they are about. In sum, the problems Hecht and Hitchcock were facing at this stage of the script’s development were: • Alicia’s character: she is more or less a prostitute • the relationship between Alicia and Devlin: he loves her, but must convince her to sleep with another man • the Nazi conspiracy is never specified. These points had to be solved according to the requirements of the production code and the conventionalised verisimilitude of Hollywood storytelling. The further development of the scene in question can also be read as dramatisation of the script conferences: the characters in the screenplay are discussing the plausibility of the plot just like Hecht, Hitchcock and Selznick, thus mirroring the process of the writing itself. After Selznick’s repeated criticism of the dialogue, Hecht delivers a dialogue treatment on 16 April. In this version the analysed scene is rewritten: After briefly explaining Alicia’s mission, one of the agents, Picra, says: ‘That is more like opera than politics, gentlemen’ (Hecht, 1945b, p. 27). The verisimilitude of the whole operation is discussed here for the first time in development. I want to emphasise that the entire spy plot, the very idea for the story, is addressed within this scene. Given the circumstances of the development process and after examining story conference minutes as well as Selznick’s famous memos, this conversation can and should be read as discussing the problems of screenwriting within the screenplay itself; a tendency that can be detected from this point onwards up until the final shooting script. The possibility that Sebastian might not fall in love with Alicia is also discussed (Hecht, 1945b, p. 27):

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PICRA But what if this Sebastian ignores her? BEARDSLEY He won’t ignore Miss Huberman – I guarantee that.

Two pages later, after Devlin has left the room, one of the agents informs the others that Alicia has met Sebastian before and that he once was in love with her. In this version the scene tries hard to validate the feasibility of the operation. Hecht’s screenplay versions address two different audiences: • producer David O. Selznick: Hecht uses the screenplay as a medium to communicate with the producer on the other side of the continent • the audience of the planned film: Hecht uses a gimmick to smooth over the improbability of the plot by explicitly hinting at its unreliability. An audience whose concerns are represented by a character and answered by another, sees its own doubts silenced—at least in theory. What is new in this version is the information that Alicia and Sebastian know each other, as he used to be a friend of her father. This makes the mission more likely and allows for new constellations and options. If Alicia knows Sebastian already, then the re-writing of her character into an easy-living, production-code compatible character instead of a prostitute, could avoid potential censorship issues. A former relationship between Alicia and Sebastian also intensifies the emotional tension between Alicia and Devlin. Thus, a simple and relatively small change in the backstory of a character is able to solve multiple problems at once. At the end of this treatment, Devlin is sitting in a street café as he hears rumours about Alicia. One woman alleges that Alicia is a Nazi spy. Devlin holds a letter in his hands, written by the president of the United States, Harry Truman, who thanks Alicia for her efforts (Hecht, 1945b, p. 99). Devlin starts forward with the letter as if he were going to show it to the gossiping table. He sinks back in his seat, the gesture unfinished and returns the letter to his pocket.

In this version, Alicia dies, but her commitment to the US and her work to uncover the Nazis remain a secret. A depressing ending and certainly hard to accept for a producer like Selznick. The letter would be nothing more than a deus ex machina, at odds with Hollywood conventions yet able to end the film on an uplifting note. Thus, the problems with the screenplay were still not solved and the development process took much longer than Selznick expected. The whole project was becoming expensive for him. In contrast to the expected quick writing process, Hecht had already been working on the story for three months and had earned $60,000. As an independent producer Selznick wanted to sell the film, but the high costs of his writers would minimise his profit.

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At the beginning of May 1945 Hecht and Hitchcock finished a so-called ‘temporary screenplay’. The scene under analysis now reads as follows: BEARDSLEY I can assure you, Dr. Picra, that the girl we have brought down is perfect for the job – from every point of view. PICRA But it is so theatrical an enterprise. Sending out a young lady to win the love of a Nazi underground leader – to become his sweetheart – and betrayer. That is more like opera than politics, gentlemen. BEARDSLEY Granted, it’s theatrical. But so is the thing we’re up against. There’s no better way of getting at it quickly and thoroughly than sending a woman after this fellow Sebastian. He’s the head of the whole Nazi business down there and directing their work.

(…) PICRA (quietly) I know – I know. Despite all this – it still does not sound entirely reasonable to me. A young lady flinging herself at a Nazi underground leader. Surely this man Sebastian has enough sense in his evil head to become a little suspicious at this lovely stranger assaulting him. PRESCOTT You are quite right, Excellency. We selected Miss Huberman, however, because she is not a stranger to Sebastian. Our information is that he was very much in love with her four years ago. He saw a lot of her – and her father at the time.

(…) PICRA This is very interesting – and makes the enterprise a little more reasonable. (Hecht, 1945c, pp. 38–40)

This version discusses the verisimilitude problem at length, which seemed solved with the idea that Alicia and Sebastian know each other and have a backstory. However, there is no need to write this scene with such elaborate details. Again, I read this version by Hecht as being addressed more to Selznick than to the film’s audience. It even appears that Hecht is mocking Selznick doubts by mirroring and including his concerns through one of the characters. This version already contains the most famous scene of the film in the wine cellar. Here it is Alicia, not Devlin (as in the finished film), who checks the

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bottles in search of the Nazi’s secret. In this version, too, Alicia dies at the end. Alicia is sent to the Nazi ring to find some information for the US government. In Hitchcock’s terms she is looking for the MacGuffin: ‘the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is’ (Truffaut, 1984, p. 138). In Notorious, the MacGuffin is the key to the wine cellar, which Alicia has to procure from Sebastian’s key ring. In this version of the screenplay the MacGuffin is not yet specified, however. Hecht wrote some lines that sound like an inner monologue for Prescott, one of the agents, reasoning about the perfect MacGuffin (Hecht, 1945c, p. 47): PRESCOTT Our information on Sebastian is vague but ominous. It may be a propaganda ring, or a sabotage ring. But I have a hunch it’s something else – something much bigger. Nazi science preparing something for the next war.

Again, these lines sound more like the minutes of a story conference, a meeting of members of the screen idea working group—than an actual dialogue. At this point the whole project was in trouble: Selznick did not like the static screenplay, all too often characters were just sitting around and talking. He claimed that this would ruin the film, especially since the dialogues were bad. In his view there was too much dialogue and too little structure, he missed a recognisable beginning, middle and end. Selznick also feared that Hecht was bored of the project or not at the top of his writing game. He was even considering replacing him with another screenwriter: ‘I really couldn’t play hearts again with a man who in his day and age uses such a line as “That’s what you think”’ (Leff, 1998, p. 197). Selznick thought that Hecht and Hitchcock had lost sight of their central theme. Selznick regarded the death of Alicia as a twist that was completely inappropriate for this story (Leff, 1998, p. 197). Another ‘temporary screenplay’ was finished on 11 June counting 162 pages. Here the scene in question included only a brief explanation of Alicia’s mission and its probability (Hecht & Hitchcock, 1945d, p. 36): PICRA But it is so theatrical an enterprise. Sending out a young lady to win the love of a German propaganda chief – to become his sweetheart – and betray him. That is more like opera than politics, gentlemen. Why not simply take him into custody?

For the first time, the question why Alicia has to meet Sebastian at all is posed, which logically leads to the MacGuffin.

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Sold to RKO Due to the rising production costs, Selznick was trying to sell Notorious: screenplay, director and leading actress—the whole package. But selling it was only possible if the Production Code Administration (PCA) as well as the FBI (Devlin is an FBI agent), and the Office of War Information (OWI) would approve the screenplay. But PCA head Joseph Breen considered the screenplay ‘definitely unacceptable’, mostly due to Alicia’s character. A prostitute who is praised at the end—even when dying—was not acceptable for the PCA (Breen, 1945). After the end of the war, it became easier to get films approved by the PCA (the OWI closed in September 1945) and so Selznick was able to sell Notorious to RKO. The change from Selznick to RKO results also in a new SIWG, now including a representative of the studio.

Clifford Odets For the rewrites RKO hired Clifford Odets. Odets was a well-known political playwright for New York’s Group Theatre before he came to Hollywood. Adding another screenwriter to the SIWG, especially in the final phases of the development process, was a normal procedure within the studio’s system. In his version he raised the passion between Alicia and Devlin and let them have sex—Hollywood style: ‘They kiss. Far off the pounding surf. FADE OUT’ (Leff, 1998, p. 208). Odets also turned the character of Sebastian into an aristocrat. Alicia’s character, by contrast, was endowed with hints of high-brow culture: she sings Schubert songs and quotes French poetry. Hecht’s reaction to the changes was short and to the point: ‘Merde! … This is really loose crap!’ (Leff, 1998, p. 208). Since Hecht refused to rewrite Odets’ version as long as RKO was not paying him extra, Odets wrote another version using the pseudonym A.B. Clifford. Ultimately though, Hecht wrote a final version that Hitchcock, RKO and Selznick accepted. This ‘Final Script’ was finished on 18 September and counted 136 pages. The scene now reads like this (Hecht, 1945d, p. 31): PICRA I do not question the girl. Such is not my objection. I simply question why you don’t take the German chief into custody.

This is the point where the backstory comes in. Alicia’s past was created and changed during the script development process according to the demands of the producers and the regulations of the Production Code. The amount of Alicia’s backstory that is actually mentioned and presented in the final screenplay is the result of the negotiations and discussions during development. At this stage a new idea is presented to make the plot more plausible (Hecht, 1945d, p. 31):

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PRESCOTT That’s the beauty of the situation, Excellency. Miss Huberman, according to our information, knew Sebastian four years ago.

Continuing (Hecht, 1945d, p. 31): PRESCOTT Sebastian was very much in love with her then – he saw her very often. PICRA I see, I see, this information makes the enterprise more plausible.

The end of this ‘final’ version is rather absurd. Madame Sebastian (Alexander Sebastian’s mother), Alicia and Devlin drive off in a car, they have an accident, and in the end Madame Sebastian points a gun at Devlin (Hecht, 1945d, p. 134): Mme. Sebastian and Devlin staring at each other over the wrecked car. She lifts her hand – the gun is still there. Devlin looks this way and that, prepared to duck. But Mme. Sebastian suddenly turns and falls down in the sand. A wave washes over her head.

In an epilogue, Alicia and Devlin are dancing in Miami. She is wearing a wedding ring. Other women are talking about her, saying she was ‘notorious’, a spy. In this late version Hecht still insists on having characters without any other function in the screenplay comment on the main characters. The happy ending is fixed, only the way to achieve it is somewhat obstructed by the rather unlikely car accident. In the final film, the scene under analysis in this chapter is actually very short. Here is its final incarnation (Hecht, 1945e, n.p.): PRESCOTT Miss Huberman was chosen not only because her father gives her an ideal background, but because Sebastian knows her.

This is news for Devlin. PRESCOTT Oh yes, he was once in love with her. DEVLIN Oh, I didn’t know that.

The verisimilitude problems are solved, Alicia’s character is accepted by the PCA, and the circumstance that she knows Sebastian already makes it easier for Breen to accept the character and the film. A long and winding road

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of script development leads to a small but crucial scene, easily overlooked in most of the analyses of the film. Its importance can only be recognised in reconstructing the development process of its screenplay via its various versions. These archival documents are evidence for the development of the very premise of the film and its connection to multiple contexts: narration, production and Production Code.

Conclusion The scene used in this case study is far from being the most recognisable in the film. Nevertheless, this scene is of eminent importance to the whole film. The female protagonist’s mission is defined, her goal—although not outlined in detail—is explained, the story reaches a triggering point. The tension between Devlin and Sebastian starts here. The development of this scene clarifies in which direction the whole production was heading, and whose influence was dominating in which version. The final scene is unthinkable without the explicit and implicit influence of Selznick on the one hand and the PCA on the other. Hecht tried many different solutions for a very detailed and precise problem. His scenes are not only possible solutions, but also ways to think and to communicate about the problem. There are few screenplays in which one can read the thoughts of a screenwriter about a writing problem within its very dialogue. The reason for the existence of this specific case is due to the fact that producer and screenwriter were not able to be in permanent communication, as would have been the case if Hecht and Selznick were both staying in Hollywood. Therefore, the development of the screenplay for Notorious is based on oral communication between Hecht and Hitchcock and on written communication between Hecht and Selznick—both via Selznick’s memos and Hecht’s screenplay versions. In addition, every filmmaker involved had to consider the demands of the Production Code. In the end, Notorious is generally considered one of Hitchcock’s best films, according to Thomas Schatz it is one of the ‘sexiest movies ever made in Hollywood’, even if the two lovers are separated for most of the film (Schatz, 1996, p. 399). Notorious is the result of these extraordinary circumstances and a useful example to show that screenplays are a means of communication in more than one sense. Script development in the context of classical Hollywood meant that a group of people—the SIWG—was trying to find the best solutions for the problems they had to deal with. It was not the simplified struggle of ‘artist versus producer’, but an earnest and passionate discussion. In the case of Notorious, some of the arguments of this discussion can be found in the very dialogue of the many versions that were written during this process. At some stages the analysed scene reads like minutes of story conferences. The history of this specific development process gives insight into the workings of an historical SIWG, its conditions and how it shaped the final screenplay.

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Screenplay development can thus be seen as the process in which the screen idea is made into a final (shooting) script. In the classical studio system creative producers were an essential part of Hollywood’s SIWG. The analysed case differs in some respects from script development in the major studios: Selznick was an independent producer, Hecht a freelancing screenwriter. The development process took place without the direct involvement of the producer, where Selznick could not participate in the discussions and instead communicate his demands and wishes in written form. Once the problems of the script—some of them can be found within the analysed scene—were detected and agreed upon, Hecht and Hitchcock tried to find solutions. The way to the final script was not linear, but more a series of trial and error. The analysed case is evidence that screenplay development and thus screenwriting itself is a collaborate endeavour, although the SIWG is hierarchically structured. Solutions were found not on the basis of creativity alone, but during discussions and negotiations in the contexts of storytelling, production costs and censorship. Acknowledgements All versions of the screenplay for Notorious were consulted at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, Los Angeles; and the Film Study Centre at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

References Breen, J. (1945, May 25). Memo Joseph Breen to David O. Selznick. Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin Bordwell, D. (1985). Narration in the fiction film. University of Wisconsin Press. Hecht, B. (1945a). Spellbound. Screen Play by Ben Hecht. Suggested by the Novel “The House of Dr. Edwardes” by Francis Bleeding. Adaptation by Angus Macphall. Final Script September 1945 (British Film Institute). Hecht, B. (1945b, April 16). Notorious, Dialogue Treatment. Ben Hecht. Hecht, B. (1945c, May 9). Notorious. Temporary Screenplay. From Alfred Hitchcock. Hecht, B. (1945d, September 18). Notorious. Screenplay by Ben Hecht. Additional dialogue by Clifford Odets. Hecht, B. (1945e). Dialogue and Cutting Continuity on Notorious. Prod. #522. Hecht, B., & Hitchcock, A. (1945a). Notorious. Treatment from Alfred Hitchcock and Ben Hecht Copied 1/9/45. Hecht, B., & Hitchcock, A. (1945b, February 10). Notorious. Treatment by Alfred Hitchcock and Ben Hecht. Hecht, B., & Hitchcock, A. (1945c, March 13). Notorious. Treatment by Alfred Hitchcock and Ben Hecht. Hecht, B., & Hitchcock, A. (1945d, June 11). Notorious. Temporary Screenplay. Leff, L. J. (1998). Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick. Weidenfeld & Nicolson Macdonald, I. (2013). Screenwriting poetics and the screen idea. Palgrave Macmillan. McGilligan, P. (2003). Alfred Hitchcock: A life in darkness and light. Wiley.

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Schatz, T. (1996). The genius of the system: Hollywood filmmaking in the studio era (Paperback Ed.). Metropolitan Books. Selznick, D. O. (1944, December 15). Telegram David O. Selznick to: Mr. O’Shea. Selznick Collection UT. Tieber, C. (2008). Schreiben für Hollywood. Das Drehbuch im Studiosystem. Lit Verlag Truffaut, F. (1984). Hitchcock. Simon and Schuster.

Between Video Games and Television Shows, Towards Meta Script Development Practices? Marida Di Crosta

Introduction Increasingly inclined to exploit original content via multiple platforms, television producers and video game creators have recently been experimenting with more coordinated ways of developing scripts and storyworlds, in the wake of the widespread transmedia storytelling trend. These unprecedented collaborations aim to optimise the revenue stream of a new IP (short for ‘Intellectual Property’, which has superseded the term ‘content’ within the overly franchise-driven Hollywood industry) while meeting their respective demanding audiences’ expectations. In fact, the attractiveness of the serial format appears to outstrip the economic and industrial logic which used to characterise the development of licensed video games derived from popular television series. Indeed, a cultural shift has recently occurred in the relationship that digital games cultivate with their audio-visual forerunners. While for decades cinema was the main reference for game narratives and aesthetics, the increasingly important position that serialised television shows occupy in our cultures and the changes that this has induced in both writing and reception practices have started to influence the way many game designers approach storytelling and narrative structures within digital environments. Serial narratives allow additional opportunities for continuity, reiteration and recurrence—as do most video game engines. Once unusual, episodic gaming has now found more proponents and adherents, inducing considerable shifts M. Di Crosta (B) Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, Lyon, France

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_36

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not only in the way digital entertainment is consumed but also developed (Di Crosta, 2018). Drawing on seriality and other transmedia storytelling principles, a few productions have been exploring the narrative and aesthetic possibilities of combining these two rather distinct forms, in the media, in industries, representational systems, narrative techniques but also viewer activities. Announced as the first experience of an interconnected video game and television series, Defiance (USA, 2013–2016) was the result of a close collaboration between NBC Universal’s Syfy network and the Californian-based game company Trion Worlds. After more than two years’ joint work, their teams developed a massively multiplayer online (MMO) third-person shooter which shared its sci-fi themed universe and several story elements with a thirteen-episode television drama. The second case in point, Quantum Break (Remedy Entertainment, Microsoft Studios, USA, 2016) blurred even further the border between narrative-focused games and serial drama. In an attempt at integrating the two forms into one seamless sci-fi narrative experience, each ‘act’ of the time-travelling action game was combined with a twenty-minute correlated live-action episode selected from among four different options. In both cases, to make their game and show connect up, professionals from each side had to negotiate two rather disparate script development practices. Artists, game designers and software developers, television writers and producers, as well as network executives and digital editors, were all asked to collaborate and communicate regularly in an effort to understand, sometimes even take on board, unfamiliar methods from the other medium. However, the cultural difference between the two sides is hardly surprising, knowing that in even more traditional production contexts, the script development’s purposes and functions ‘are specific to different industries and the cultures within which they are situated’ (Taylor & Batty, 2015). What seems most relevant, beyond any failures or the anecdotal accounts surrounding the development of both Defiance and Quantum Break, is the opportunity they have provided to reflect on the nature and implications of the adjustments and redefinitions which this dual-media production process entails. What can this teach us about script development? Can we make empirical and theoretical use of certain interrogative strategies, practical tools and methods elaborated in such specific, albeit infrequent contexts? As the following analysis will highlight, the significant gap between their respective approaches to script development was as much a matter of culture, shared references and communication skills, as it was of medium-specific technological issues and practicalities. Although the two collaborations differed greatly in extent, production strategy, and inter/trans-media narrative interactions, their development ultimately raised a number of similar issues, which were structural as well as organisational. Should they start by elaborating a unique double script based on the same universe or conceive one for each medium? Should two instalments be developed simultaneously? How should character and sets be handled to fulfil requirements for both live-action

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production and CGI characters and sets? How could ‘real-time’ game events be synchronised with episodes that would be broadcast later? Most crucial of all, who (which kind of cross-cultural professional role) would be in charge of overseeing cross-over and game-show interplay throughout the bimedia script development process? In truth, combining video game and television forms is almost inevitably a risky choice, as proved by the long history of critical and commercial failures of game adaptations of popular shows (Clarke, 2013; Elkinton, 2009; Gray, 2014). On the one hand, the already elaborate path from script to screen becomes further complexified by the technological and interactive nature of the video game medium. Unlike licensed TV-to-game adaptations, a video game connected from the outset with the creation of a television show needs to be developed concomitantly, or at least in a synchronised manner. Accordingly, issues such as synchronicity, media temporalities, story timelines and other forms of time-related interdependences—within the storyworld as in real life—prove crucial at many levels of the script development process. Indeed, coordinated cross-productions like Defiance and Quantum Break intrinsically question script development as a significant practice within the games industry where the term ‘game development’ in reality defines the entire production process. In other words, the pertinence of a specific stage or activity such as the ‘game script development’ appears questionable, given that designing an interactive game can scarcely be compared to screenwriting, even for the most narrative-driven games. By mining numerous interviews, announcements and press conferences contemporary with the Defiance and Quantum Break releases, this chapter will explore these particular and doomed-to-fail experiences to hopefully extrapolate some more extensively useful tools for script development in the age of media convergence.

Script Development Against the Odds: The Challenge of Defiance In the planning stages since 2009, and anticipated by a massive promotional campaign, the Western-influenced sci-fi drama Defiance was released in April 2013 with the tagline ‘Watch the show, play the game, change the world’. Produced by the Syfy network and Five&Dime Productions, the television series consists of thirteen episodes of 43 minutes. The first season was shown twice, the last episode being broadcast on August 28, 2015. Developed by Trion Worlds, the correlated video game is a massively multiplayer online third-person shooter. As a digital persistent world, Defiance the game carried on for another five years after the series’ cancellation. However, until 2015, the show and the video game worked as two complementary facets of one story unfolding within a single diegetic universe and sharing the same ‘mythology’. Reasonably popular within the Hollywood entertainment industry at the time, the term drew on earlier forms of extended

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narrative, either ‘branching’ or ‘encyclopaedic’ (Jenkins, 2009). Its main references were to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings mythological folklore-based narrative structures and World Building techniques. For transmedia producer Jeff Gomez, mythology is the storyworld blueprint (Andersen, 2010). It designates a full set of valuable details created while elaborating a fictional world, making it richer and worth exploring as a transmedia franchise. Compared to a television drama bible, it contains more elaborate thematic underpinnings and a stretched story arc for writers, producers and other script developers to refer to over time.1 During crossmedia script development, an established mythology typically prevents both storyworld and intersectional narratives from becoming broken up by the interpretation of third parties. In the particular case of Defiance, a shared narrative with synchronised chronology was by definition essential to make the interplay work, since some of the events occurring in the series were supposed to have an impact on the game, and vice versa. Although they followed distinctive story arcs according to their medium, the scripts were based on the same back-story. Set on a fictional post-apocalyptic planet Earth, the story takes place in the near future. Devastated by a fifteen-year war against the Votans, an alliance of several extra-terrestrial species, the Earth has been drastically altered, its modified topology forcing the last survivors of the conflict, either aliens or humans, to cohabit in a few specific areas. The game is set around San Francisco Bay, now reduced to a dangerous conflict zone, whereas the television show takes place in the mining city of Defiance, erected on the remains of Saint-Louis (Missouri). While the players embody Ark Hunters fighting to collect remnant pieces of alien technology at the behest of an obscure industrialist, the show focuses on the entanglement of conflicts and alliances among Defiance’s rival families struggling for power. Far from the West Coast, protected by an energy barrier, the town has experienced fifteen years of relative peace when tension starts mounting between the human McCawleys and the Castithan Tarrs. The situation becomes even tenser with the arrival of a couple of outsiders escaping the Bay Area – namely, former elite officer Joshua Nolan (portrayed by Grant Bowler) and Irisa (Stéphanie Leonidas), his adopted daughter of Irathian origin.

The two main characters’ cross-over represents the first and most discernible example of the game-show interweaving. To make the transition work, Defiance was released in a synchronised but slightly unconventional way which gave players a two-week head start. While Trion Worlds presented the game online on 2 April, Syfy broadcast the series’ first episode on 15 April. This allowed Nolan and Irisa’s characters to fulfil some of the game’s early and ethically questionable campaign missions before crossing the borders to seek 1

The term used in video games culture would normally be ‘lore’. Also drawn from folklore-related vocabulary, it defines the ensemble of existing knowledge and stories about a specific game universe.

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redemption for these acts as the show’s protagonists. This narrative tactic recurred throughout, characters in one medium having cameos in the other, and vice versa. Several other events or episodic missions were conceived to arch over, allowing ‘round trips’ between the media. When a disease affecting only humans hit the town of Defiance, for example, a timed mission was set up ‘live’ within the digital universe to respond to the emergency. The players then had a week to find all the ingredients of the cure, fight opponents and launch a space rocket to transport the cure to Defiance in due time. The package from the game’s Bay Area would then appear on TV as part of the following episode’s narrative. However, neither audience needed to know what had happened outside their respective medium of choice, both the game and the show being designed (rather paradoxically) to also work as stand-alone dramas. Then again, for a player watching the series as well, the feeling of connecting more deeply with the story would be rather unique, having contributed with her/his actions in the video game to making things happen in the show. Despite its many failings, as an unprecedented way of stretching storytelling beyond television boundaries, Defiance challenged established script development practices. How and with what consequences? Before exploring further this attempt at jointly developing a digital game and a live-action show, it is worth detailing the scope of the production in terms of budget and expectations. To be sure, beyond the creative challenges and the transmedia storytelling constructed discourse, the stakes were high for both Syfy and Trion Worlds. To achieve the cross-media experience, Syfy invested $40 million in the television production, while the development of the connected video game cost around $70 million. As Myles McNutt (2013) noted regarding the riskiness of Defiance’s production strategies: This is particularly true in the case of such a unique production culture, one where the precarity of television production – driven by a flawed Nielsen ratings system – is merged with a video game industry where costs are steadily rising as competition only grows fiercer.

In fact, the video game industry was facing saturation of the MMO roleplaying market, and the rise of online platforms having crashed the monthly subscription’s business model (Graser, 2013). After a short attempt to sell it on subscription, Defiance’s game content would mainly be offered in free mode. For its part, Syfy was looking for a way to overcome the hiatus between the seasons while winning back the many viewers disappointed by the network’s impoverished offer of sci-fi content since the end of Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009). Created by Rockne S. O’Bannon, author of Syfy’s Fairscape, Defiance was intended to reconnect the network with both its audiences and the brand identity.

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From Script Development ‘Mythology’ to a Mythology Coordinator The countless vicissitudes endured by both teams throughout the script development endowed Defiance’s narrative mythology with a parallel ‘production mythology’ (McNutt, 2013). A few weeks before release, a two-sided conference held during the 2013 Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (D.I.C.E.) Summit editionprovided first-hand insights.2 Trion Worlds’ Vice President of Development Nick Beliaeff and Syfy Original Programming President Mark Stern described at length various ‘sticky points’ and the numerous adjustments they had had to negotiate over the years to avoid the TV-to-game adaptation being unsuccessful. As Beliaeff recalls in his talk, it all started with game professionals assessing Syfy ‘in-development’ scripts: Mark’s troops sent us a bunch of scripts they thought were perfect for games, I think what’s cool is we saw what later on became a bunch of pretty successful shows, so part of us on the game side got to see into the underbelly of the world of television. But we also realized that we’re doing a deep 24/7 world and we’re looking at treatments for pilots close to a character study… It just wasn’t deep enough for us and I think that’s where we had this moment where we realized that if we approach things traditionally like, between games and Hollywood where someone’s first and someone’s second we were going to get a traditional result and I think that was something we wanted to avoid because I think if you look at a license or licensee relationship generally the licensee has to make a compromise and their product suffers and we didn’t want to do that and so we had to take this moment and just stand back and completely change our approach and we have these series of seminal meetings up at Mark’s offices in L.A.

One of the most decisive choices made conjointly during these ‘seminal meetings’ consisted in establishing a unique storyworld accessible by two distinct entries—one for each medium. While San Francisco and its iconic Golden Gate Bridge appeared an obvious choice for the game, an original but equally recognisable setting for the show was harder to find. Eventually, Stern opted for Saint-Louis’ Getaway Arch, the Mid-West being a location relatively unexploited in television dramas. Providing each development team with its own ‘sandbox’, the two separate settings allowed the scripts to feature both shared and separate story events. If they had set both storylines at the same location, the video game developers would have been forced to digitise everything in advance, months before the shooting, thus obstructing the week-to-week narrative of the show. In fact, during the television production phase, Trion Worlds would end up having to make many adjustments to accommodate the game’s creative schedules. Unfortunately, game developing is a much less 2 See the 2013 D.I.C.E Summit video archive. Available at: https://www.dicesummit. org/. Accessed 4 January 2021.

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flexible process, and each tardy decision by television developers potentially resulting in weeks of wasted effort for the digital production side. As Trevor Elkinton (2009, p. 224) notes about film-to-game adaptations: Whereas constant change is often the rule in film and television script development, the impact of last-minute changes and ongoing design fluctuations is far more detrimental to game development where design, art and programming efforts often take months or years of work to produce results.

Most of the difficulties in coordinating two-media developments are due to their distinct systems of representation. Defiance’s production mythology abounds in anecdotes about the game vs. television cultural gap. For instance, when Trion Worlds’ developers met Syfy producers to show them their new water physics—the result of sleepless months of coding—Stern, lifting a bottle of water, replied: ‘We can do water too, we just film it’ (Morris, 2013). Similarly, the game team reacted in panic to Stern’s idea of introducing horses as a main mode of transportation to emphasise the ‘new frontier’ feeling. They suggested flying vehicles instead, making the television team panic (and veto) in return. However, from Stern’s perspective, this only demonstrated how far removed the development teams were initially in terms of culture: We really had to figure out what we didn’t know or what we needed to learn of each other’s process, how to speak to each other, their development process is completely the opposite of a television film development process where you start with character and story and narrative.

The multiple alien species’ size and shape raised equally critical issues. A favourite sci-fi post-apocalyptic video game subject, their design had artists competing in imagination. To fit into a television production, however, they needed to be neither too large nor too distorted, since real human actors had to portray them, and this meant costumes, props and make-up being used and removed throughout the show’s seasons. Indeed, as Defiance game producer Nathan Richardson states, with about 150 people working on it, the persistent game offers a model of an open world designed as a living environment. However, it still includes a diegetic universe and storylines, albeit in constantly evolving, nonlinear forms. Moreover, involving World Building and World Destroying in equal measure (Joyce, 2018), the post-apocalyptic genre has always been a favourite of video game designers and players for the scenario opportunities it provides for the gameplay. As a ‘best example of gender-medium coevolution’ (2018, p. 100) it provides a mode of storytelling which dovetails perfectly with the digital medium’s capacity. Significantly, this mode of storytelling relies on World Building, the difficulty of adapting the story within a game having increased creative focus on the creation of worlds containing embedded narratives to balance the players’ agency and scripted events (authorial control, for example). Thanks

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to the amount of World Building in Defiance—the design of an imaginary terraformed planet, the creation of multiple alien groups with specific languages, as well as landscapes, bestiary, vehicles, EGO devices and other fantastic powers—the mythology was vast enough to provide a number of derivative narrative elements. For Syfy Defiance showrunner and executive producer Kevin Murphy, the success in developing a fictional world spanning two platforms was due to the early choice to elaborate a shared mythology. However, producers on both sides were soon struggling to monitor the entire story universe. To avoid further conflicts and difficulties, they decided to create a new role, namely, a Mythology Curator. Murphy’s long-time collaborator Brian Alexandre would be in charge of ‘keeping the mythology straight’ during development. As the showrunner recalls in an interview (Willmore, 2013): We all had big bibles at the beginning, but no one was keeping them up to date, so they become useless because there are a million new ideas happening. He [Brian] basically maintains an ongoing wiki, which allows anyone on the production staff, the costume department and the game side to instantly get access to all of the show’s designs and designs for the game.

The dedicated collaborative website gradually included each solution emerging from the writers’ room about Defiance’s customs and ways of life. Murphy quotes the legal system based on private penitentiaries as a case in point. First formalised in a report (by a staff writer who was an L.A. County deputy sheriff), it was completed by the showrunner’s notes then integrated into the wiki under the mythology coordinator’s supervision. His work allowed the producers from both sides to check entangled script details—e.g. about the Vegas Prison governor, a character of the game linked to characters from the television drama—as well as reconciling possible discrepancies. As an overarching script development meta-role, a mythology coordinator appeared essential to the process. As Quantum Break was to show, the addition of a real understanding of both interactive and traditional development issues could lead from a mythology coordinator being seen by the television industry as an entry-level ‘ultimate super fan job’ to a more creative position closer to the writers.

Script Development in the Hands of a Game Narrative Designer While the time-travelling thriller Quantum Break differed from Defiance on many levels, it did provide additional insights on cross-media script development from the specific perspective of coordinated storytelling. However, as a Microsoft Studio title, Quantum Break was not the result of a partnership between players from different industries. With a major video game publisher financing both production and distribution, neither the development nor the

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release of the game and its correlated show involved a network. Moreover, the whole duration of the live-action sequences was far from the magnitude of Defiance’s three television seasons. Although Microsoft executives had initially considered releasing the complementary miniseries as a standalone, they eventually made it accessible directly from Internet, via streaming or download. Freed from the burden to succeed on television, Quantum Break narrowed its audience to players only. Its production, like that of Defiance, crossed industries, however, requiring a collaborative script development process. In fact, Remedy Entertainment developed the game in Finland, while Lifeboat Productions Inc. produced the correlated episodes in Northern California— just as they had produced a few years earlier Bright Falls, the miniseries prequel to Remedy’s cult game Alan Wake (2010). Like its predecessor, Quantum Break shares with its counterpart show most of the characters, with the actors portraying them on screen also serving as voiceover and physical models for their digital version. Shaw Ashmore portrayed the hero Jack Joyce, and Aidan Gillen his nemesis Paul Serene. Directed by Sam Lake and written by Greg Louden, Mikko Rautalahti and Tyler Smith, the game plays out in five ‘Acts’ ending with branching narrative options. Dubbed ‘Junction Points’, each of these leads to correlated show episodes. Directed by Ben Ketai, the latter are the work of TV writers Ron Milbauer, Josh Corbin and Terri H. Burton, producer Robert J. Wilson, and Lifeboat’s veteran executive producers Jaime Burke and Amy S. Kim. The story begins on the campus of (fictional) Riverport University. It pits two former childhood friends against each other, giving the players the scope to experience events from both points of view. After a six-year absence, Jack Joyce is back in his hometown at the behest of his childhood friend Paul Serene. Enthralled by the possibilities of time travelling, Paul is working on an experiment based on the Chronon particle machine created by William Jack’s estranged brother William. Despite William’s admonitions, Paul persuades an unaware Jack to test the machine, but its explosion causes a time breakdown. Taken a few years forward, Paul can now see the future while Jack (the player’s avatar) has the power to manipulate time. He will use it to travel back and forward to avoid impeding destructions, fighting against a cold-blooded version of Paul and his Monarch Solutions’ secret army.

Once a game’s act as Jack Joyce has been played out, the players switch to their antagonist’s point of view Paul for a pivotal decision, before (possibly) watching an episode of the show. While a story where time breaks and can be frozen allowed the exploration of multiple potential futures and other intriguing situations, by definition, its structure and chronology proved complicated. Going from past to future, from game to show and vice versa, Quantum Break’s story and timelines inevitably ended up becoming entangled. Unlike Defiance, difficulties in developing both the interactive and television scripts were due here less to the extent of the storyworld than to the

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complex time-traveling narrative which combined both interactive and television writing. A double-skilled script developer was needed to ensure crossscript consistency and communication between both teams—game writers, artists, programmers and level designers on the one side, television writers and producers on the other. Newly hired at Remedy as senior Narrative Designer, Australian artist Greg Louden endorsed this role. Beyond his willingness to blend gameplay and storytelling, his talent in visual design3 allowed him to navigate crucial issues in merging both the video game and televisual representational systems. Like Trion Worlds’ artists for Defiance, Remedy’s had to design the art for the game while keeping in mind that it was also going to physically materialise later in actual sets, props and costumes for the show. For Lifeboat, scouting a location that had already been created in a video game represented a real challenge. Rather than finding already existing locations, the television production company would end up building sets from scratch—sometimes too meticulously. When Lifeboat received from Remedy an unfinished game interior environment to reproduce, apparently it was not obvious that a colourless 3D shape display was going to take the place of a missing object (for example, a lamp). Their real-size reconstitution was so literal that it contained an actual ‘white box’. For their part, the artists from Remedy’s modelling team were left rapt in wonder at the sight of the 3D digital costumes they had designed actually tailor-made for the show by the television production staff—a materialisation they had only seen in (post-release) Cosplay. As the final script for the live action was eventually developed near the end of the game production, both teams became keen on making the show and the game overlap smoothly. On board since the beginning, Louden had four years of game and cross-development behind him, and led from Finland the process of helping the production company adapt the pace to the constraints of interactive script development. As the Narrative Designer states in an interview (Takahashi, 2016): There was a lot of collaboration. The game and the show really connect. That’s from countless Skype conversations and conferences and screenplay reviews. The show guys would read the game scripts and the game guys would read the show scripts. I’ve read so many screenplays of the game and the show – I’m more than familiar with it all.

Since reviewing appeared to be a key issue and in a video game, involving multiple steps—from scripts to 2D and 3D animations, to combats and gameplay—Louden set up a specific ‘narrative review’, a process as uncommon in game development as his position as Narrative Designer. While a clear job definition is hard to find, each studio tending to give its own, it always lays down the same founding principle, namely, the distinction between designing 3 He worked at Framestore in London as part of the team winner of the Oscar for Visual Effects for Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013).

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a game and writing a game. Stephen Dinehart, one of the first industry professionals publicly advocating the use of storytelling techniques to enhance games, created his own role of Narrative Designer in 2006 while developing Company of Heroes (Relic Entertainment, THQ). In an attempt to bridge the cultural gap between scriptwriting and game design, that same year Dinehart set up an online ‘Narrative Designer Explorer’. He describes the job core as championing the story and narrative production pipeline for an entire game, focusing on the impact of the narrative on the game’s flow. Dinehart repeatedly emphasises ‘excellent writing’ and ‘custom writing solutions’ in games as a prerequisite, aiming specifically to connect story, gameplay, nonlinear dialogues and narrative, as well as facilitating the development process (Dinehart, 2009, pp. 77–78): The final scripts, as delivered, should contain all of the gameplay and storytelling elements with indicated transitions. (…) From video game screenplays to arrays of nonlinear dialogue, each piece must tightly interweave in a narrative concinnity to create a rich sense of game story.

For his part, Louden described his position on Quantum Break as: a blend of review the I’m a level game with

a story guy and a level designer. I work with the writing team and screenplays with them, and then I work with the level designers – designer myself, working on Act One of the game. I work across the the writers and propagate the story.4

He also worked on optional storytelling for the branching narratives, locating the different sequences where they belonged in the game flow, and helping to enhance the show’s connection with more cross-over characters and locations. In fact, interweaving interactive and linear narrative sequences implies particular script development techniques. With the story structure involving several layers, the Quantum Break live-action screenplay had the scenes shot twice, with different options and endings. To fit all the possible changes induced by the players’ choices, each episode had several variants (around forty). Louden recalls vividly how difficult it was to develop different alternate versions for branching narrative purposes—the same character dying or surviving in the television script according to the interactive script. To keep every element in mind and facilitate script development, the Narrative Designer elaborated a series of tools detailing the complexity of the convoluted overlapping narrative structure. One was a chart dedicated to time travel, showing where characters were situated in time. Even more elaborate, the game timeline used colour-coding to distinguish three different elements to be monitored during development: blue for the story, red for combat and green for different gameplay formats. 4 Quotation from his talk at the GameDevDays conference in Tallinn, Estonia, 5 April 2017.

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Conclusion: the Emergence of New Roles and Models The exploration of these two experiences brought out how script development, already a complicated process within the same culture, becomes even more laborious when it implies collaborative coordinated work across two medias/industries. Most of the critical factors come from the two conspicuous differences between television dramas and video games. The first is the ontological difference of the nature of the images themselves and the implications at both narrative and representational levels. The border between writing and producing, conceiving imaginary worlds and having moving images made is so blurred in video game development that reaching the ‘green light stage’ entails completely different criteria. Particularly when validation will be made not on a developed script basis but by testing the game engine—the second essential difference from a television drama being—obviously—the interactivity. However, it is precisely this tension between story and game, scriptwriting and interactive design, continuity and hiatus, that has provided practical solutions to the industry professional involved, as well as valuable insights on the practice of script development in general, opening up new, additional perspectives. It has also brought to light two new development roles, one being the Mythology Coordinator, and the other the Narrative Designer. In fact, despite similarities between the Defiance and Quantum Break coordinated productions, blending narrative with interaction, a television show with video game does not necessarily turn script development into an analogous process. Although both experiences involved a third-person shooter, the development of Defiance mostly drew on World Building, while Quantum Break focused on story, timelines and tiered narrative structures. Their function was to ensure continuity and consistency across the media, bridging the information and communication gaps between the two sides. However, while the first intervened more as a ‘development facilitator’, the second was closer to the writing, assessing and reviewing of several kinds of scripts, while keeping an eye on the meta-storytelling and the merging of linear and interactive narratives. While game scholars tend to identify the World-Builder as a Narrative Designer’s predecessor (Mauger, 2018), creating imaginary worlds and writing game scripts seem like two distinct functions. At least in the case of Quantum Break, the Narrative Designer created and reviewed the adaptive storytelling by working with both game writers and television writers, acting more like a story analyst and script editor, at times even as an executive story producer. In other words, what emerged within the game industry as a storytelling-focused position modelled on traditional scriptwriting models, the role of the Narrative Designer could cross even more boundaries to become an Interactive Screenwriter in view of future (streaming) television development—as already seen in the Netflix choose-your-own adventure Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch (2018) or the interactive Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2020).

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References Andersen, M. (2010, November 18). Jeff Gomez reveals secrets to transmedia franchise development at Cinekid. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/2010/11/jeffgomez-reveals-secrets-to-transmedia-franchise-development-at-cinekid/. Accessed 4 Jan 2021. Clarke, M. J. (2013). Transmedia television. Bloomsbury Academic. Di Crosta, M. (2018, September). Entre jeux episodiques et series televises. Sciences du jeu. https://journals.openedition.org/sdj/923. Accessed 4 Jan 2021. Dinehart, S. E. (2009). Writing for real-time strategy games. In W. Despain (Ed.), Writing for video game genres: From FPS to RPG (pp. 69–78). A K Peters/CRC Press. Elkinton, T. (2009). Too many cooks: Media convergence and self-defeating adaptations. In B. Perron & M. J. P. Wolf (Eds.), The video game theory reader 2 (pp. 213–236). Routledge. Gray, J. (2014). In the games: The creative and textual constraints in licensed video games. In D. Mann (Ed.), Wired TV (pp. 53–71). Rutgers University Press. Graser, M. (2013, March 27). Defiance project is part TV, part videogame—And that’s part of the problem. Variety. https://variety.com/2013/tv/news/defiance-projectis-part-tv-part-videogame-and-thats-part-of-the-problem-1200329352/. Accessed 4 Jan 2021. Jenkins, H. (2009, September 10). The aesthetics of transmedia: In response to David Bordwell. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/09/the_aesthetics_of_transmedia_i. html?rq=mythology. Accessed 4 Jan 2021. Joyce, S. (2018). Transmedia storytelling and the apocalypse. Palgrave Macmillan. Mauger, V. (2018, September). Design Narratif: Considerations prealables a son etude et a l’analyse de compositions ludofictionnelles sous le modele EST. Sciences du jeu. https://journals.openedition.org/sdj/985. Accessed 4 Jan 2021. McNutt, M. (2013, January 21). Production mythology, release reality: SyFy’s Defiance. Antenna blog. http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/01/21/productionmythology-release-reality-syfys-defiance/. Accessed 4 Jan 2021. Morris, C. (2013, February 7). Hollywood, games biz unite around ‘Defiance’. Variety. https://variety.com/2013/digital/news/hollywood-games-biz-unite-aro und-defiance-1118065827/. Accessed 4 Jan 2021. Takahashi, D. (2016, March 11). How remedy controlled a complicated story across Quantum Break game and videos. Venture Beat. https://venturebeat.com/2016/ 03/01/how-remedy-kept-control-of-a-very-complicated-story-across-the-quantumbreak-games-and-video-episodes/. Accessed 4 Jan 2021. Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2015). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: Perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing, 13(2), 204–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1120314 Willmore, A. (2013, March 15). Kevin Murphy talks SyFy’s TV series/transmedia project Defiance. indiewire. https://www.indiewire.com/2013/03/kevin-murphytalks-syfys-tv-seriestransmedia-project-defiance-40134/. Accessed 4 Jan 2021.

Developing Texts for Animated Opera: A Unique Case Study Olga Kolokytha

Introduction A script is a pre-arranged document and its development involves a set of institutionalised practices, but it also has functions that depend upon those involved in its production process (Batty et al., 2018). Script development is also not easy to define; Taylor and Batty (2016) explore the understanding of script development through the lens of those who are involved in the process such as screenwriters, editors, consultants and executives and acknowledge the manifold interpretations of the term, arguing there are no clear boundaries for its beginning and end. Batty et al. (2018) approach it as a complex process, with a variety of people involved in its different stages, having different and even conflicting objectives; the process and different stakeholders of script development pose, in turn, questions of power and control, subjectivity, taste and quality, which make it an intriguing research area. Script development can also come as a result of cultural policy and the management strategy of cultural organisations (Batty et al., 2018). This chapter highlights a unique process of script development in opera using the case study of The Cunning Little Vixen project, the first one-hour animated treatment of The Cunning Little Vixen opera by the Czech composer Leoš Janáˇcek, written in the early 1920s. The opera itself is based on text and images that appeared in the local newspaper in Brno, where Janáˇcek lived. The O. Kolokytha (B) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected]

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chapter traces the course of the development of the original text, the opera and the animated work and discusses the process of developing the different versions. It follows an interdisciplinary approach and is based on scholarship ranging from musicology (Sheppard, 2011) to opera translation studies (Apter & Herman, 2000; Burton, 2009), historical evidence on the creation of the original and the opera (Chew, 2009), material from the project and interviews with key figures in the project’s development. The chapter explores an unusual practice of developing text in opera and highlights script development as a complex process that entails the interplay between text, language, music, lip-sync and cultural differences and particularities, to enable a meaningful adaptation of the work.

The Case Study in Context The concept of an hour-long animated opera film was instigated by the European Opera Centre and its Honorary President Kent Nagano. The aim of the project was to provide an introduction to opera and bring a high-arts art form closer to audiences that would or could not attend opera performances. The idea was taken up by BBC Television and the resulting project, an animated cartoon version of Janáˇcek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, is the first hour-long animated opera in the world (Foster, 2018). The Cunning Little Vixen is a very particular opera, not simply because a realistic and a fantastic world alternate, but also because there is a human and an animal world that sometimes interpenetrate (Sheppard, 2011). Most of the characters of the piece are animals: the main character, the Vixen, a female fox, is joined by other animals and insects such as a badger, a mosquito, a grasshopper, a frog, a cockerel, a woodpecker and chickens (Foster, 2018). The main idea, therefore, was to make a film instead of an opera production, in which the characters would be depicted in their right scale and would be convincing for the audience (Wilson in Kolokytha, 2017). The animated version of The Cunning Little Vixen was commissioned by BBC Television and co-produced with Opus Arte and Los Angeles Opera in co-operation with the European Opera Centre (Kolokytha, 2018). The first language version recorded was in English in 2002 and the translation of the libretto from the original Czech was made by the renowned theatre and opera director and librettist David Pountney. Some adaptations were made to this in the course of work on the project. The animated film was broadcasted during Easter 2003 first by BBC2 in the UK with an audience of 700.000, and then in more than 14 countries with an estimated audience of approximately three million to date. The DVD1 was released worldwide by Opus Arte in 2003 and was based on the English translation, on which the animation was created. Other language versions were developed and recorded

1

See https://www.operaeurope.eu/recordings.

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in Spanish, Catalan,2 Czech and French, using the same animated film and orchestra recording. People singing rather than talking and the appearance of huge mouths, teeth and tongues may be natural for an opera stage but can be quite problematic on screen, so using another medium to take opera outside the opera house is an option that can produce fascinating results (Kennicott, 2005). Already back in 1940, Sabaneev argued that the way forward for opera is to use the opportunities offered by the new animated cartoon, which would benefit the big operatic works that needed rejuvenation (Sabaneev, 1940). There is an inherent element of narration in comics, even though some of them are not narrative, that is expressed through both language and a series of pictures, and the construction of this narrative element can be compared to that of works of literature (Pratt, 2009). Comics can also be compared to films, as both contain words and storytelling takes place the same way, but in different visual media (Pratt, 2009). Kennicott (2005), offering an overview of the collaboration between opera and film, argues that film can make opera more lively, intimate and believable by audiences and more accessible to those who cannot afford it. Wells (2016) discusses how animation can be used as an instrument for adaptation and argues that characteristics of animation such as anthropomorphism, condensation and sound are used as screenwriting tools. He argues that animation is an appealing art form for audiences and particularly children and can be used as a tool to facilitate engagement, familiarise with and offer a new approach to an alien and complex art form and its language, as well as enabling accessibility and empathy through humour and emotion; disconnecting the complex language of a text with the help of animation, allows a meaningful engagement with the text and its story (Wells, 2016). The common element between comics, film and opera is the text, which in opera is referred to as libretto. The characteristics, importance and position of the operatic libretto have been stressed by many authors (see for example Child, 1921; Roberts, 1979; Simonton, 2000; Weisstein, 1961). The libretto offers a useful addition to the field of script development through dramaturgy, as it is interlinked with the dramatic action and its role is central not only to understand the plot and context, but also to communicate emotions and convey different layers of meanings. What makes a libretto an interesting case to consider in a discussion on script development, is that, unlike literary texts and song lyrics, it is created together with, and to serve, music and dramatic action, and therefore conforms to certain patterns and particularities. Librettos can be shorter than dramatic texts, sometimes, as Weisstein (1961, p. 19) argues, to the point of embarrassment. They can be originating from literary works or be written just for an opera; they can be translated to be accessible in a language other than the one they have been written to, and then altered for surtitling purposes. The 2

A second DVD of the Spanish and Catalan versions was distributed separately.

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contribution of this case study to a handbook of script development is not just that it discusses the libretto; it traces the script development process from the early text before it becomes a libretto, follows it through the different stages until the animated film, where it focuses on the French version. It includes practices such as translation and adaptation, which are very common in opera and integral parts of the operatic script development process, to identify the rationale for the changes and development of the text to serve the creators’ wishes and the needs of the audiences.

Language and Text in Opera Opera shares a very intimate relationship with text, as the latter is not only strongly connected to language and plot as in the case of drama, but also to music. Through opera one can see how libretti are conceived, produced and received; text in libretti does not only signify a verbal expression but is also used as a medium to convey elements of the music and the production, which all function interdependently (Desblache, 2007, 2009). To situate script development practices within the operatic context, this section discusses the role and development of text in opera, as well as related issues such as translation, adaptation and surtitling. The dominant role of text in opera is seen in what is thought to be one of the first operas performed in the early seventeenth century, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which was called ‘favola in musica’ (fable in music), and its importance grew more with the development of the form (Desblache, 2007). Opera in translation became common practice from mid-seventeenth century and a trend towards performances of operas translated into the language of the country where they were performed was established in the nineteenth century (Desblache, 2007). From the second half of the twentieth century, the priority given to the understanding of the text came as a result of multiple factors including the increasing number of operas in the repertoire and the need of audiences for more accessibility to the form (Desblache, 2007). In a society that is dominated by text, it is only natural that the attitude and approach of the audience to opera would change (Burton, 2009). The changing attitudes to text and the shift towards more language accessibility in opera reflect both an awareness of audience demands and a need to avoid exclusion of those groups not familiar with the language or the artform; nowadays the texts of operas are available in a range of formats, which include summaries of the librettos, translations and surtitles (Desblache, 2007). Audiences do not only attend opera to enjoy the music but are keen to know details of the sung texts, which led to the flourishing of opera surtitles in theatres and subtitles on television, video and DVD (Burton, 2009). In opera, music works as a subtext that creates meanings and symbolic interpretations, so surtitles provide audience the means to grasp the music, dramaturgy and acting on stage (Desblache, 2007; Virkkunen, 2004). The invention of surtitles is a significant development in the history of opera (Virkkunen, 2004) but not

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one without problems—not just because conductors and producers were not keen to have the audience’s attention diverted from the action on stage, but also because of the restrictions that music poses on the text (Desblache, 2007, 2009). Matamala and Orero (2008) offer a concise bibliography on opera translation in various languages and from different scientific areas. A sensitive approach to the translation of opera texts includes a reflection of issues that are not encountered in translation of prose and make it an art rather than merely a craft (Burton, 2009; Virkkunen, 2004). Orero and Matamala (2007) discuss the challenges of the translations of opera that are meant to be sung, and the constraints put upon them by both musical and vocal demands and by the existence of a musical and verbal aural system that coexist, constraints among which humour, rhythm, naturalness, staging and audience particularities are particular concerns. They argue that good opera translators must have knowledge of music, of historical and cultural contexts, of playwriting and be able to adapt historical, cultural and humoristic references. Apter and Herman (2000) distinguish between translation in opera and drama, and argue there are problems in opera translation that can pose difficulties in it being perceived as drama by the audience, either because of the training of the singers, or because of opera itself and its performance history. Opera translators, although sometimes facing the same problems as drama translators, need to take into consideration the additional challenge of making a translation that fits pre-existing music and construct a performable opera translation in a way that a non-native speaking audience could fully enjoy as a theatrical experience (Apter & Herman, 2000). Desblache (2009) highlights the problems of cultural transfer in libretto translation, also with reference to the music constraints. Conveying cultural dimensions is more difficult when these are related to humour and especially in surtitling, where the message of the text is summarised; having the text shown on a screen may prove harmful for the timing and immediacy necessary to communicate the message and its subtleties (Desblache, 2009). Shifting away from the original text and creating versions that have been through additions, deletions and changes from the original source are referred by Low (2013) as adaptations, as opposed to translations. A characteristic of adaptations is the intentional change of the text and the cultural content and the creation of meanings that may not be in the original but are used to serve a particular purpose. All adaptations are based on the original source and comprise more changes than those that would have been created with simple translations, but are of no lesser quality to them (Low, 2013). An extensive literature review of adaptation is offered by Geerts (2016), who looks at adaptation from stage to film, argues that the choice of screenwriters has an impact on the final result and sees a recent trend of acknowledging the value of the transformation that takes place during the creative process in both screenwriting and adaptation. Going further from the concept of adaptation, Low proposes the term replacement text to characterise the phenomenon of

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completely different texts used to be sung to an existing music, which do not derive from the original text and could be created by people who do not know the language of the original text (Low, 2013). The shift towards more language accessibility, the flourishing of opera surtitles and the use of replacement texts inform practices of script development which come as a result of cultural organisations’ change of attitude towards more inclusion and engagement of audiences. Although this shift to outreach and consideration of the needs of the audiences in opera initially took place for pragmatic reasons—to address issues such as ageing audiences, perceptions of opera as an elitist artform, to justify the social role of institutions receiving public funding—and was not met without resistance (Desblache, 2007, p. 164), it developed into the norm and, particularly in the case of surtitles, actually became quite popular (Desblache, 2007, p. 167).

The Development of the Text in the Opera and the Project To detail the different aspects of script development on this project it is essential to see how the text developed from the beginning, since the process of script development took place from very early on in the course of the piece. Chew (2009) refers to how the original came to life: Bohumil Markalous, the arts editor of the Brno newspaper Lidove noviny, discovered around 200 drawings of a fox during a visit to Prague and to Stanislav Lolek’s studio and thought to use them for a comic novel series in the newspaper. The general editor of the newspaper asked Rudolf Tˇesnohlídek, who was writing court case reports for the newspaper, to write verses to accompany the drawings but in the end Tˇesnohlídek was allowed to write in prose, which enabled him better to interpret the black-and-white drawings. These drawings appeared in the newspaper from April to June 1920, telling the story of a female fox and including anthropomorphised forest animals with comic characteristics (Chew, 2009; Sheppard, 2011). The narrative is based on groups of drawings that create comic episodes with a clear story-line but of little literary quality; as Tˇesnohlídek combined fiction with stories from the court reports involving people from the lower strata of society, he kept the lisp and registers of speech to create a comic effect (Chew, 2009). Janáˇcek, who was in his 70s at the time, is said to have been introduced to the newspaper story by his housekeeper (Tyrrell, Janáˇcek, online, in Kolokytha, 2017), and was inspired to compose an opera from it. Janáˇcek made changes to the story, which originally has a happy ending but not in the opera where the Vixen dies, and made the piece more philosophical, reflecting on the cycle of life (Chew, 2009; Foster, 2018; Tyrrell, Cunning Little Vixen, online). The libretto was written by the composer himself, who kept some of the funny scenes and elements of the original text (Chew, 2009; Sheppard, 2011) but used an approach that is against the narrative structure of Tˇesnohlídek:

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he took exact lines from the original and reduced words to the minimum, sacrificing coherence, dialogue and realism in an unparalleled way for him, one which makes the narrative bizarre and does not help the plot to develop (Chew, 2009). The libretto was actually treated with criticism, most probably because it required a quickness of imagination that proved difficult for the audience (Sheppard, 2011). The libretto text was not actually based on a cartoon (Sheppard, 2011): Lolek’s drawings were not published as a caption comic strip but as a half-folio page of text with a couple of the pictures printed along with it. This was so popular among the newspaper readers that was later reprinted as a novella and it is this combination of words and images that Janáˇcek worked with to compose the opera (Sheppard, 2011). In the Vixen project, animation allowed the production of original versions with new casts in different languages. The rationale behind the project was to make opera an artform appealing to, and accessible by everyone, especially by young audiences, and doing it in the language of the audience was the way to achieve that. The big difference in animation in comparison to an opera production is that in animation the audience has more direct connection to the story and the characters. When the Vixen is talking in the animation, it is actually a vixen talking and not a singer who pretends to be a fox, which makes a difference on the way the audience perceives and understands the piece. All language versions were based on translations and adaptations of the English version text, on which the animated film was created. As it was important to match the lip-sync but also to be consistent with the cultural differences and particularities of each language, lip-sync and remaining close to the world of the film were the factors that dictated the choice of the experts who translated and adapted the text. These experts worked with both the text and the animated film to make sure the translation matched the lip movement of the animation, and provided advice to the singers during each version recording (Kolokytha, 2017). The French version is used here as an example of the transfer from one language version to another but also helps indicate how different this process is from both surtitling, and writing text for a new piece or translating for an already existing one.3 For the French version, the adaptation of the English text was undertaken by the music and a stage director, both native French speakers. The adaptation was actually influenced by the animation, the action, the atmosphere and the expression of the characters, but also depended on the actual moment in time where it was made. There is a gap of seven years between the English and the French versions and interviewees argue that if the French version was made sooner there would have been differences from the existing one that would take into consideration the culture of the time. 3

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE44QnoCT1g for a behind-the-scenes footage of the recording of the French version, made in partnership with the Opéra National de Lyon.

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Both the music and stage directors worked together, scene by scene, breaking each scene into phrases and sentences and then working with each one. The text was put together with the music right away instead of making one after the other—so first text, then rhythm and then putting these together with the animation part. This was important also for the lip-sync, since it would be strange for the audience to hear a sound that would not correspond to the lips of the respective animated characters—this would probably work in scenes where the music is fast, but does not work with longer notes. According to the music director, it is important to sing the text and feel where the stresses are or are not—it is all about being very natural with the language. As the visual element is inherent in narration, style, rhythm and images are factors that had to be considered in the adaptation of the French version. Rendering the same image that works well in one language in another may not have the same impact on the audience, no matter how engaging it is in the original, and entails a substantial amount of work. There were instances where parts of the text had to be changed completely from the English to the French, such as in the hens scene: the phrase ‘The egg mass production line’, sung by the hens, is not funny at all in French and had to be translated in ‘Nous sommes les cocottes minutes, trois œufs frais à la minute’ (we are the pressure cookers, three eggs per minute), playing with the words cocotte, which is a funny way to talk for a hen, and cocotte-minute, the pressure cooker in French. This phrase is quite funny in French, but is not at the original at all. Later in the piece the Vixen says ‘I still remember the night we were married, the next day I could not move a muscle’, which if translated for a French audience, has a strong sexual interpretation that it does not have in English. The translation chosen was ‘Je me souviens de notre mariage, nous étions fous d’ amour, l’un pour l’autre’ (I remember our wedding, we were crazy with love one for the other) which was completely different from the original. A further example is in the scene with the Vixen and the badger, when the Vixen sings ‘since you are a grumpy bachelor, here’s a whiff of something feminine’ and then she urinates over him. This had to be changed into ‘ça suffit, je vais te corriger. Tiens! je vais te parfumer’ (that’s enough, I am going to correct you, I am going to perfume you) which is not easy but would not be considered vulgar. It was crucial to have a music director working together with a stage director, whose contribution was not just in the language, but also in the dramatisation of the text. A stage director’s knowledge of drama, of the choice of words for a good play, of what acting on stage means, of the process of putting a play together, the organisation of the individual scenes and their progression and of the reaction of the audience was essential for the translation and adaptation of the piece. The key to a successful transfer to another language according to the interviewees was to have the freedom to make changes. Trying to remain as close

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to the original language as possible might at the end sound artificial and not communicate the message to the audience, when the key is to make the language sound natural. Also, it is important to consider that the rhythm of the music comes with the original language, so the transfer needs to pay attention to how best combine the two rhythms by choosing the right words and phrases to allow the audience to feel close to the piece through the language and the text. This process is much easier when a character’s lips are not in view, because it actually allows to remain as faithful to the original text as possible. What is sometimes problematic in translations is the inability of the translator to build each scene ‘as a place within a place’ as one of the interviewees says, and finding and rethinking ways to communicate effectively the message to the audience from one language to the other. A good translation needs closeness not to the individual words, but to the spirit and the message of the phrase, which can be achieved only if the language is the translator’s mother tongue. As one of the interviewees says ‘this is the reason why it is possible to make a good translation when one translates into their mother tongue, as this makes it possible to feel what the background in every word and every sentence is, the way it is done, the drama, the level of language and how to get across the nuances of the language you translate from; all these, one only knows when it’s your language’.

Conclusion The script development process in this case study is unique in three aspects, namely the development of the opera libretto from the original text, the development of text for the animated opera project from the opera, and the development of different language versions from the text for the first film. There are three different levels of narration/communication in the animated version, unlike the traditional two that exist in opera—the text, the music and the animation, which are all independent but interconnected at the same time. Because of the interplay between all these levels, factors for script development here include translation, lip-sync, characterisation and cultural functions of text. The way language and text are used, integrating cultural elements and making use of cultural particularities in order to bring the piece closer and make it more familiar to audiences, has a more direct effect in the way people see, experience and perceive opera. As one of the interviewees says ‘the perfect example is when you see a paragraph in English and you absolutely understand ever word, then you see the same paragraph in French and it has a different connection to you. It is the same with opera: you see the surtitles and you see what is happening, but when the message is conveyed in your language there is a difference connection with you. That way people can think that opera is for them and not just intellectually understand it, because they can understand it through the translation’.

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This case study of an animated opera highlights two practices of script development: first, one that comes as a result of cultural policies that prioritise access to culture for a wide audience. To that extent, The Cunning Little Vixen project is unlike any conventional opera, as there is no other opera in the world that appears as a new film in so many languages; English, French, Catalan, Castilian and Czech to date. Second, a script development practice that is initiated out of a consideration of opera as an artform that can be close to the heart, the soul and the understanding of audiences. In the context of script development, language and text are used here as tools that, although the most explicit means of communication, are not taken for granted but are treated as fluid, flexible and developing instruments that enable different audiences to connect with and appreciate opera both as a cultural experience and as intellectual/ personal understanding.

References Apter, R., & Herman, M. (2000). Opera translation: Turning opera back into drama. Translation Review, 59(1), 29–35. Batty, C., O’Meara, R., Taylor, S., Joyce, H., Bourne, P., Maloney, N., Poole, M., & Tofler, M. (2018). Script development as a ‘wicked problem.’ Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. Burton, J. (2009). The art and craft of opera surtitling. In J. Diaz Cintas & G. Anderman (Eds.), Audiovisual translation: Language transfer on screen (pp. 58–70). Palgrave. Chew, G. (2009). The adventures of “The Cunning Little Vixen”: Leoš Janáˇcek, Max Brod and their predecessors. Austrian Studies, 17 (Words and Music), 113–132. Child, H. (1921). Some thoughts on opera libretto. Music & Letters, 2(3), 244–253. Desblache, L. (2007). Music to my ears, but words to my eyes? Text, opera and their audiences. https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/art icle/view/185/116. Accessed 20 Sept 2019. Desblache, L. (2009). Challenges and rewards of libretto adaptation. In J. Diaz Cintas & G. Anderman (Eds.), Audiovisual translation: Language transfer on screen (pp. 71–82). Palgrave. Foster, V. (2018). Barlows’ Cunning Little Vixen: An evaluation of the European Opera Centre’s First Educational Project. Liverpool John Moores University. https://res earch.edgehill.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/20055087/Final+Report.pdf. Accessed 2 Oct 2019. Geerts, R. (2016). From stageplay to screenplay to film—Tragic to melodramatic: The case of The Broken Circle Breakdown. Journal of Screenwriting, 7 (1), 99–112. Kennicott, P. (2005). Opera and film: Can this union be saved? http://www.washin gtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56556-2005Jan7.html. Accessed 20 Mar 2017. Kolokytha, O. (2017). Innovative approaches in traditional contexts: The Cunning Little Vixen project. In A. D. Evmenov (Ed.), Textbook on management in the sphere of culture and media industries: Innovative approaches and technologies (pp. 12–16). Ministry of Culture of Russian Federation.

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Kolokytha, O. (2018). Networks and synergies in the cultural sector: A case study in opera in ENCATCscholar issue 9. http://blogs.encatc.org/encatcscholar/?p=2064. Accessed 25 Sept 2019. Low, P. (2013). When songs cross language borders. The Translator, 19(2), 229–244. Matamala, A., & Orero, P. (2008). Opera translation. The Translator, 14(2), 427–451. Orero, P., & Matamala, A. (2007). Accessible opera: Overcoming linguistic and sensorial barriers. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 15(4), 427–451. Pratt, J. (2009). Narrative in comics. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Special Issue: The Poetics, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Narrative, 67 (1), 107–117. Roberts, C. (1979). Puškin’s “Pikovaja dama” and the Opera Libretto. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 6(1), 9–26. Sabaneev, L. (1940, January). Opera and the cinema (S. W. Pring, Trans.). The Musical Times, 81(1163), 9–11. Sheppard, J. (2011). How the “Vixen” lost its mores: Gesture and music in Janacek’s animal opera. Cambridge Opera Journal, 22(2), 147–174. Simonton, D. K. (2000). The music or the words? Or how important is the libretto for an opera’s aesthetic success? Empirical Studies of the Arts, 18(2), 105–118. Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: Perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing, 13(2), 204–217. The Cunning Little Vixen project DVD. https://www.operaeurope.eu/recordings. Accessed 20 Mar 2017. Tyrrell, J. (online). Cunning Little Vixen, The. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Ed. Stanley Sadie. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/ O008664. Accessed 25 Apr 2017. Tyrrell, J. (online). Janáˇcek, Leoš. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/ grove/music/14122. Accessed 25 Apr 2017. Virkkunen, R. (2004). The source text of opera surtitles. Traduction Audiovisuelle, 49(1), 88–97. Weisstein, U. (1961). The libretto as literature. Books Abroad, 35(1), 16–22. Wells, P. (2016). Jonathan Myerson’s The Canterbury Tales: The screenwriting sovereignty of animation. Journal of Screenwriting, 7 (1), 65–81.

From Comedy to Drama: The Curious Case Study of Queenpin Rafael Leal

“Some things here will have to change.” Fátima, Queenpin, episode 01

Introduction Queenpin 1

is a TV series created by Marton Olympio and me in 2012, about the widow housewife of a mafia leader who takes over control of the criminal association—and imposes her own agenda. What makes it a curious case study for the field of script development is the fact that the series was created as a half-hour comedy, but when the network greenlit it for production, they asked for one-hour drama episodes, a TV format distinct from the original. So how does such a radical structural change work? This chapter looks back on Queenpin’ s script development, from the initial idea to the final screenwork, to establish a deeper understanding of the work’s core transformations during this process. As co-creator and head writer, I am able to offer a unique point of view on the development process, drawing on my own experience, as noted by Eva Novrup Redvall (2014): “practice-based research like this can offer many interesting perspectives on the industry, and having industry networks is useful for helping researchers gain access to these often-well-guarded sites of production” (p. 226). 1 The original title in Brazilian Portuguese is A Dona da Banca.

R. Leal (B) Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_38

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Defined by Susan Kerrigan (2018) as “where the researcher is making a screen work and observing their own actions whilst making it” (p. 11), the practitioner’s perspective enables an insider’s look into the creative process involved in the script development, allowing the comparison of the creative decisions made by Olympio and me with theories of story structure, as proposed by screenwriting orthodoxy, in this case, paying special attention to Robert McKee’s Story (1997) and Pamela Douglas’ Writing the TV Drama Series (2011). Batty et al. (2018) define script development “as a gradual, time-bound process of improving a ‘screen idea’: the object (idea) at the heart of a collaborative process of devising for the screen” (p. 154). Central to the study of script development, the screen idea is, in Ian W. Macdonald’s (2013) words, “any notion held by one or more people of a singular concept […] intended to become a screenwork, whether or not it is possible to describe it in written form or by other mean” (p. 4). He sees each treatment of the script as a photogram of this dynamic singular concept, as it could freeze its form at any specific time. In this study, whenever possible, I try to bring creation and production together, because many of our creative decisions were influenced (or even determined) by factors related to execution, considering the conditions of production in Brazil at that time. This analysis is favoured by the understanding of script development as a process, avoiding isolated analyses of the conception, scripting and production phases. In a way, this approximates this study towards what Steven Maras (2009) calls “a novel account of scripting beyond the separation of traditional models of conception and execution (…) as well as new ways of comprehending the shifts taking place” (p. 22). This study aims to contribute to script development research through the lenses of Screenwriting Poetics, as it considers the final script the result of a recursive and non-linear process of creation, which I will try to describe and to reflect upon. In the words of Macdonald (2013), “a poetics – an explanation of how an artwork is constructed – is an attempt to make sense of the doxa” (p. 111) or, in this case, how we managed to fulfil financial, technical and narrative expectations from producers and the network while developing the story we wanted to tell. Part of the motivation for this present study is “about refocusing attention from the screenwork alone, towards an understanding of what informs the construction of that screenwork” (Macdonald, 2013, p. 111). Therefore, in addition to my experience and to each draft of the pilot script, the writers’ room logs are another important source of information, as we recorded in detail the discussions which led to Queenpin’ s final format as a comedic one-hour drama. Before entering the discussion of Queenpin’s script development, I will situate it in the unique sociopolitical moment in which it began, and describe how this impacted Brazilian production cultures at the time and the series

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structure itself. In 2012, when Dilma Rousseff succeeded Lula as President of Brazil, the country was still growing; entire neighbourhoods were being removed and rebuilt for the World Cup and the Olympic Games, and Brazil had big dreams for the huge oil reserves just found beneath the salt layer in the ocean. Since 2011, when new Cable TV regulations were made law, establishing a minimum weekly quota of Brazilian independent content on every cable channel, there was an overall optimism in the Brazilian audiovisual industry: the increased demand for Brazilian content would open opportunities for creators and independent production companies. This law also stipulated that telecom companies could be part of the cable TV market, but that they should start paying a mandatory contribution owed by all players in the sector—as a recognition that they were part of the audiovisual chain. This tax funds ANCINE—the Brazilian Film Agency— and significantly increased the amount of resources available for audiovisual production in Brazil, especially in project development and independent or regional production. The new model made Brazilian production skyrocket, from 30 feature films in 2003 to 143 in 2016 (Ristow, 2016). Globosat is the cable division of Grupo Globo, the largest communication group in Latin America and known for its widely exported telenovelas. In 2012 Globosat created a script development programme, bringing Robert McKee to Brazil to present one of his famous Story seminars, attended by 200 screenwriters, Olympio and I among them. After three long days of seminar, Globosat announced they would give each of us one access code that would allow us to submit a project to their contest: they would pick up and option ten series projects to receive a script consultancy with distinguished TV writers, which included Marta Kauffman (Friends, Grace and Frankie), Barry Schkolnick (Law & Order, The Good Wife) and Dan Halsted (from Management writers’ agency). Marton and I had been writing together since 2009, and we had one project ready for submission, a procedural drama called 60 Gone, about the Missing Peoples Department of the São Paulo Police. But since we had a second access code, we needed a new project to submit. Therefore, spurred on by this opportunity, Marton and I decided to develop one of our other ideas into a TV project, plus a first draft pilot, as required by the contest. Since we already had a drama, we decided to write a comedy to improve our chances of being selected—and so we set about developing Queenpin.

Genealogy of the Screen Idea Rio de Janeiro, summer of 2012. I had just binge-watched The Sopranos for the first time, which inspired me to write a mafia series set in my hometown. At the same time, I wanted to avoid themes such as drug dealing in

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the slums, or jogo do bicho,2 because they had already been subjects of many important Brazilian films and series, such as City of God and Sons of Carnival 3 and Marton and I agreed that we wanted something fresh. In terms of world building, I started looking for a local environment, easily recognizable as Rio de Janeiro, where we could tell a mafia story, and soon the popular open-air market known as Saara4 became a natural choice and was incorporated into the screen idea from the beginning. With up to 250,000 customers per day in December, Saara has around 1200 stores selling almost everything, from weapons to Carnival costumes and imported goods. The stores are spread over ten blocks of 130-year-old buildings, which had traditionally been owned by Jewish, Arab and Portuguese immigrants, but over the course of the last decade, the area has seen an increasing number of Chinese merchants buying stores, which made it a perfect setting for four different mafias in conflict and one character keeping them from fighting. Just as David Chase’s The Sopranos had influenced the choice of theme and world, we also drew on Machado de Assis’ The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas 5 (1881) when establishing the main narrative device—the voice-over of a recently deceased character who conducts the narration and comments on the events depicted in the series—which survived throughout the whole script development process. Having settled on our world and setting, it was time to research the broadcaster, an important and often overlooked step. We knew we had to research which of the Globosat’s channels were producing fiction, and for whom. Most independent fictional series exhibited by Globosat were being aired by GNT, a channel focussed on a female demographic, which opened the possibility of centering our series on a strong, female lead. Comparing with other comedy series bought by GNT, such as Bitches 6 it became clear that our series should have a strong procedural component, meaning that the protagonist Fátima, rising to the mafia’s leadership upon the death of her husband, would have to deal—in her housewife mindset—with a different mafia challenge every episode, as a self-contained A-Story. Pamela Douglas (2011) defines procedurals as “shows that crack their cases each episode, where the emphasis is on the puzzle more than arcs for the continuing cast” (p. 146) and, in these terms, considering the tradition of Brazilian TV comedies, we opted for a series in which the case of 2

Brazilian Portuguese for “animal game,” a traditional and popular though illegal lottery based on animals. 3 The original titles in Brazilian Portuguese are, respectively, Cidade de Deus and Filhos do Carnaval. 4 An acronym in Brazilian Portuguese for Society of Friends of Alfandega Street and Surroundings. 5 The original title in Brazilian Portuguese is Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, widely regarded as one of the most important books of Brazilian literature. 6 The original title in Brazilian Portuguese is As Canalhas, and I was part of the screenwriting team for its third season.

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the week would prevail over the long arc, and therefore could be broadcasted in any given order, out of the original sequence. At the same time, we decided that Fátima’s experience in a place of power would progressively transform her manner and outfits, inspired by then-president Dilma Rousseff and emphasizing this parallel between the President and our character. Throughout our creative partnership, Marton and I have established a division of labour: following the initial brainstorm, we had roughly drafted the main and supporting characters and the principal conflicts for a dozen episodes, as well as briefly discussed the pilot’s plots. In the following days, Marton prepared a first version of the episodes’ synopses and I outlined the first episode. We then exchanged documents for crossed rewriting, as we have been doing for the last decade. Two weeks before the (tight) deadline, we divided the scenes between us and wrote the pilot episode, cross-rewriting it afterwards.

A New Beginning Now that the screen idea had taken the shape of a submittable pilot script, the scripting process gave place to submission, firstly to the Globosat contest. Eventually, 60 Gone was selected for the consultancy workshop, after which it had its rights optioned by Globosat, though it has not yet been produced. But this is a whole different story, and the focus now is on the steps that eventually led to a commission, five years after initially developing the idea, and how in the process, the comedy became a drama. After 2012, when we created Queenpin, we pitched it to most Brazilian networks producing fiction at that time, broadcast and cable, without success. We even tried to rewrite the pilot to relocate the story to São Paulo, the largest Brazilian city, where there is a commercial neighbourhood called 25 de Março—with a multi-ethnic occupation very similar to Saara, only larger, much larger, as São Paulo is home to more than 20 million people. In the end, we decided to bring our series back to Rio, as the São Paulo strategy ultimately did not work out. In 2016, two years after Marton and I founded a production company7 focussed on script development, we decided to apply to the Creative Nucleus Public Call, funded by Ancine. This call selected several production companies and funded the development of a portfolio, consisting of a minimum of five projects. Queenpin as well as 60 Gone were natural options to be part of our proposed portfolio, as we picked, from among our projects, those in a more advanced stage of development, which meant we had introductory texts such as synopsis, character description and season arcs, required by the Public Call, already written and refined. Eventually, we were selected by the Public Call, securing funding to develop five of our projects; Queenpin was one of them. 7 The company is named Dédalo, Brazilian Portuguese for Daedalus, the father of Icarus in the Greek mythology.

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A few months later, during the 2017 Rio Content Market, in Rio de Janeiro, I had the opportunity to pitch some of our projects to CineBrasilTV, an independent network that had been signing many independent productions, mostly funded by Ancine. At this time, we had more than just a pitch: we had development funds, therefore, allowing more of the network’s limited budget to go to the production itself. The network executive instantly fell in love with the idea and wanted to sign the series for production, but she also warned us that they would not be able to finance the whole series budget within their funding limit. In an effort to reach a deal, I promptly suggested producing fewer episodes, which she accepted. “One more thing,” she said, “we want one-hour episodes.” Surprised by this unexpected counter-offer, I consulted co-producer Clelia Bessa and she agreed to the new terms. In summary, we agreed to produce five one-hour episodes, with the same core characters from the first version, exploring the same setting, but with everything shaped into a new distinct form. Most importantly, we were supposed to keep the comedic tone. Without knowing the complex challenges we would face to transform one thing into another, we signed the series for production. In the next section, I will detail those challenges for the next stage of Queenpin’s script development: the writer’s room, where in addition to recreating the series as a comedic drama, the goal was to produce detailed outlines for the five episodes, which would be distributed among the writers to be developed into scripts.

Challenges in the Writer’s Room Excited by signing our first deal, and in preparation for the writer’s room, Marton and I went through all the Queenpin material we had, double checking for outdated pieces of Fátima’s story. Considering the trajectory of the screen idea from the starting point to the first day of the writer’s room, more than five years had passed, and Brazil had undergone major social transformations in these years. Our script development process would not be unaffected, not only because of the political and cultural contexts’influence on the theme but also because of its effect on the writers’ moods. In this vein, there are a few facts worth mentioning: in 2014, the FIFA World Cup ended in a 7 × 1 German victory against Brazil, leading to a nationwide crisis with the national team, in 2016, street protests against a 20-cent increase in public transportation fares quickly escalated into crowds demanding Dilma’s removal, and finally, in this same year, Rio de Janeiro hosted the Olympic Games. Initially restricted to just Marton and me, the screen idea workgroup (SIWG)—according to Macdonald (2013), “made up of everyone who contributes something to the development of the screen idea, whatever their professional title” (p. 11)—had grown with the addition of screenwriters Ana Pacheco, Marcelo Andrade and Sylvia Palma, assisted by Daniel Quintal. In

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this scenario of political effervescence, the workgroup assembled for six weeks, for six hours a day and five days a week, amounting to 180 hours of discussion. In structural terms, to rebuild a comedy series as a drama has significant implications. As a mostly procedural half-hour comedy, the first version’s episodes depicted the protagonist facing one ordinary mafia conflict which was completely solved within each episode. We were now aiming at a one-hour episode, with a more serial narrative component, developing the main plot over the course of the season and thus giving the protagonist a series-long conflict, as reiterates Batty et al. (2018, p. 164): Serialized drama stories are typically designed to engage an audience’s curiosity and irony. In this genre, audiences are often privy to character deception, and they watch to see what will be revealed. In order to achieve such story intricacies, script development processes must produce detailed backstory, maintain character development and ensure continuity.

Heading in this direction, we spent the first week developing the series’ core conflict, building something greater and more complex than the daily challenges leading a store owner’s mafia from the previous version. As we demolished the starting material, the intense gentrification process happening in Rio was recurrently brought up in the Writer’s Room, indicating a narrative path we were interested in pursuing, letting it “emerge from a project’s needs, rather than pertaining to an expected format” (Batty et al., 2018, p. 162). To accomplish this, the solution we found was to improve the series’ symbolic field, a concept in screenwriting that deserves deeper development. Echoing the concept of the screen idea, it starts long before its formal creation and travels a long way until received by the spectator, who will actively produce meaning from the sounds and images conveyed. It is related not only to an artwork’s implied statements, or to its ideology or message, but also to its production, financing and distribution contexts, and in our case this meant an effort to make the protagonist deeper and more interesting as she fights the alienation of our cultural heritage. Sewing a symbolic conflict into the series signified materializing something immaterial. As we decided to discuss it in our story, we had to turn an immaterial concept—gentrification—into conflict for Fátima. It is worth noting that before the World Cup and Olympic Games, intense gentrification took place in Rio, raising housing costs in many neighbourhoods and thus expelling their traditional inhabitants to faraway, cheaper areas of the city. As a strategy to join the symbolic discussion about these recent urban transformations, we created a huge urban renovation project of the Saara area, which would bulldoze all the old buildings and build new ones, funded by the mafia. We also decided that Ignácio would be forced into accepting these plans, but that with his death, Fátima would firmly oppose them, along with the cultural changes that would come with them.

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Finally, the series’ first version was designed according to a traditional threeact structure, while “television dramas on networks have for decades been written in four acts” (Douglas, 2011, p. 21). This single fact made almost all our synopsis useless, unfit, as the conflicts were not complex enough to render longer and deeper stories. Perceiving this, we discussed the need for three levels of conflict—extraordinary conflict—covering different areas of the character’s life that could produce enough dramatic material. This follows the understanding that “to achieve complexity, the writer brings his characters into conflict on all three levels of life, often simultaneously” (McKee, 1997, p. 215). By three levels of conflict, McKee means extra-personal, personal and inner (or psychological), and considering this, we decided that like Dilma, Fátima should endure violent political dispute and the betrayal of allies, all while keeping her family together after her husband’s death. This looked like a strong set of challenges: as an extra-personal conflict, Fátima faces gentrification materialized by the mafias’ efforts to impose their renewal plan, on the personal level, she deals with her daughter Luisa, her son Igor and her mother-in-law Inês. And on the inner level, Fátima doubts who can she trust while performing her political duties within the Association. This new step in the creative process—adding another layer to the symbolic field—proved to be an opportunity to review the relationship between Fátima’s story and Dilma Rousseff’s, no longer from our cartoonish point of view from 2012, but now taking into account her traumatic and illegitimate removal from office. By knowing the tragic circumstances that befell Dilma, and by writing to Fátima a series of analog situations faced by Dilma, such as an impeachment process, we made our protagonist a more layered character, whose actions would be able to offer a metaphorical account of the political turbulence in Brazil during that period.

Writing on the Walls At least since 2013, Marton and I have been perfecting and adapting our development methodology to the Brazilian conditions of production, especially in terms of timetable, size and composition of the SIWG. As Batty et al. (2018) point out, “script development (…) is not about bringing out the creative best in the story, but is rather a time-driven process of producing shoot-able scripts” (p. 163). Therefore, after two weeks of comprehensive discussion, we needed to move on to the next step in the development process: to fill in the whiteboard on the wall. The Season Board is a table where the rows, one for each main character, display diachronic narrative information, or what happens to each character throughout time. The columns, one for each episode, display synchronic dramatic information, or what happens to all characters in a given period of time. By doing this, we found out that many of the characters we had in the first version were useless in this new format, as they were not organically involved in the planned plots, while a few others were created to fulfil new

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narrative needs in the story. Additionally, considering our expected budget, a reduction in the cast was more than necessary, and this was the opportunity to implement this. Despite being immersed in a stage prior to the script writing itself, we initiated a series of virtual meetings with Barry Schkolnick, who joined our SIWG as a script consultant, making it possible for us to take his notes into consideration before we advanced to script outlining. He appreciated the screen idea and made one particularly insightful remark: a character who will narrate the series in voice-over, is still a character who could also benefit from conflict and transformation just like any other, even though the character is dead. We added an extra line to the Season Board to write down Ignácio’s changing point of view towards the events depicted in the series, which led to a progressive change in the attitude present in his voice-over. Since we had a narrator in voice-over, we could introduce a non-linear narrative, as he could conduct the events in diegetic time, making them easier for the viewer to assess. This strategy proved itself useful, as it gave us the opportunity to rewrite the voice-overs after we had agreed on the episode’s final cut, deciding what Ignacio still needed to explain. This included improving his transformation as narrator and his overall rhythm, making evident that the script development process continued right through to post-production. Preceding the individual experience of writing the actual scripts, the last step in the development process that took place in the writer’s room was the episode outlining, which consists of arranging the scenes sorted in the Season Board into a narrative stream, potentially led by causality, connecting them over the proposed four acts and establishing the main turning points. The limited number of scenes led us to recognize that we would not be able to spare enough scenes to introduce every character and conflict planned in the Season Board, and therefore we came up with the solution of using some strategic event scenes, such as the Association’s meetings and Fátima’s birthday, in which most of the characters were present, in order to introduce them all in a single moment. Despite being more expensive and more complex to shoot, event scenes ultimately saved money by reducing the number of required shooting days.

The (Re)writing Process Taking into account the definition of development offered by Peter Bloore (2012), as “the creative and industrial collaborative process in which a story idea [ …] is turned into a script; and is then repeatedly rewritten to reach a stage when it is attractive to a suitable director, actors and relevant film production funders” (p. 9, as cited in Taylor & Batty, 2016, p. 214), this section analyses the development of the protagonist throughout every draft of the pilot, considering what William Rabkin (2011) states as the basic rule of

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serial television: that “audiences might tune in for the premise, but they will only come back for the characters” (p. 31). After Marton and I concluded the writing of the first draft, it was translated into English and sent to the script consultant, whose notes were critical as usual, and who felt our main character was completely uninteresting. Considering the collection of notes, often contradictory, provided by the SIWG, we hastened to complete the second draft. Rewritten by Marton and polished by me, roles switched in every draft, this draft removed the opening scene that we inherited from the earliest half-hour draft and started with Fátima’s display of strength in taking over her position as leader. Concerned about keeping the comedy present, Marton came up with a whole new comedically toned plot, where Fátima could apply her mafia skills. Despite noting some progress, Barry was still unable to see Fátima as the strong character we wanted her to be, and felt that some scenes were underdeveloped, needing further clarification to better fit the chain of events portrayed in the episode. This round of notes helped us to understand that although we wanted the series to be about Fátima, we had been writing a pilot mostly about Ignácio, which had the effect of rendering her a seemingly less important character. At that stage, we felt that we had a script that was good enough, especially considering the stage of development that most Brazilian series have reached when their screen idea is forced into production. At the same time, we knew we could do better, as we were working on a flexible timetable, and had full support from the network and the co-producers. As Dedalo’s first production, we saw Queenpin as a unique opportunity to display our style, aiming to be popular—meaning designed to attract a broad audience—and at the same time staying away from the aesthetics of the telenovela,8 as we did not want to dispute the international space with solid and well-established players such as Globo. On the contrary, we intended to partner with them to distribute our content, created in a format they were lacking: a mainstream contemporary international series. To develop the fourth draft, we made some radical changes, starting from the opening scene, Fátima’s introduction. As her comedically toned plot was completely unrelated to the series’ main conflict, we needed to build a plot that would bring Fátima closer to rather than farther away from it. This echoes what Rabkin (2011) understands that truly defines a character: “his goal and the choices that he makes in trying to obtain it” (p. 33). At the same time, we wanted to create an impactful scene to open the series, putting into practise our conviction that TV narratives should strike the audience from the first moment, grabbing the spectator’s attention as soon and as strongly as possible.

8 The telenovelas have for decades been the most popular product of Brazilian television, exported to almost every country around the world, and according to researcher Silvia Borelli, they have consolidated “a narrative pattern considered dissonant, both to classical and standard models and to popular traditions” (2001, p. 30).

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This challenge was addressed in an unusual setting: Fátima, Ignacio’s body and an unrealistic cremation room, where against the advice of her advisors, she decides to cremate him, thus not allowing the traditional funeral ceremony at the Association’s headquarters. This scene met all expectations, properly introducing the protagonist, revealing the skills she will make use of while facing the main conflict. This solution made it to the screenwork. In addition to Barry’s notes, which this time demonstrated enthusiastic approval, highlighting the impressive evolution of the script, we also received comments from the network and our co-producers, who expressed general approval of the script but still noted the need to downsize. We decided to save the pilot from the cuts as much as possible, as it would most likely have the highest number of spectators compared to the four following episodes. Nevertheless, more supporting characters disappeared in the fifth draft, as part of a renewed effort to reduce the cast and other expensive elements, such as extras, external shootings and rain scenes. The same happened to the whole comedically toned plot, which was not needed anymore, as we created a different introduction for Fátima, and it was therefore discarded. Sensing that this part of the script development process was coming to an end, after the fifth draft, the only drastic change made in the pilot’s script was transplanting a subplot into the second episode. Other changes were mainly motivated by production, such as the anecdotal substitution of Ignácio’s bronze bust, to be destroyed by Fátima in a scene in the fourth episode, with his painted portrait, considerably less expensive, to be ripped into shreds. This replacement resulted in no considerable aesthetic losses and allowed us to invest in other key moments of the series.

Conclusion This study is an attempt to recall and analyze the trajectory of Queenpin’ s screen idea, from its earliest moments to the shooting script, focussing on its pilot script and bringing together the worlds of creation and production, as well as academia, in the context of the Brazilian film industry. It is also an opportunity to explore how the script development approximated or distanced itself from orthodox screenwriting beliefs in every one of the many different steps between an abstract idea and a production-ready script, and the back and forth in the middle. As a result, a conclusion that becomes evident is that script development is recursive rather than linear, and that this recursiveness needs to be taken into consideration when planning the process, as many changes may be needed in the scripts and the writers, in the Brazilian context, traditionally do not accompany the production process after script delivery. After the creative process was finally completed, I was left with the impression that ideal conditions would include a few more weeks gathered in the writer’s room. Had we more time, which also means a higher budget, writers would start writing their scripts based on more discussed, matured outlines, and therefore the scripts would probably need less structural rewriting. Marton

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and I spent innumerable hours discussing solutions for the script—a discussion that could have taken place in the writer’s room, benefiting from the presence of the complete SIWG. Lastly, it is important to observe that Queenpin’s script development was never aimed at any external “perfect formal model,” as there is no such thing. On the contrary, its outcome reflects accurately the balance of forces inside the SIWG: the result of the tensions between styles, personal backgrounds, moods and ideologies of the screenwriters involved in this curious creative process.

References Batty, C., et al. (2018). Script development as a ‘wicked problem.’ Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.9.2.153_1 Borelli, S. H. S. (2001). Telenovelas brasileiras: balanços e perspectivas. São Paulo em Perspectiva, 15(3), 29–36. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-88392001000300005 Douglas, P. (2011). Writing the TV drama series. Michael Wiese Productions. Kerrigan, S. (2018). A ‘logical’ explanation of screen production as method-led research. In C. Batty & S. Kerrigan (Eds.), Screen production research (pp. 11–27). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62837-0_2 Macdonald, I. W. (2013). Screenwriting poetics and the screen idea. Palgrave Macmillan. Maras, S. (2009). Screenwriting: History, theory and practice. Wallflower. McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, structure, style and the principles of Screenwriting. Harper Collins. Rabkin, W. (2011). Writing the pilot. Moon&Sun&Whisky. Redvall Eva Novrup. (2014). Working the writers’ room: The context, the creative space and the collaborations of Danish television series Borgen. In C. Batty (Eds.), Screenwriters and screenwriting. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978 1137338938_14 Ristow, F. (2016). A quantidade de filmes nacionais lançados, ano a ano. https://inf ograficos.oglobo.globo.com/cultura/a-quantidade-de-filmes-nacionais-lancados-nocinema-ano-a-ano.html Taylor, S., & C. Batty. (2016). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 13(2), 204–217.

‘You Never Know Who is in Control’: German Transmedia Content Development Sarah Renger

Introduction The art of storytelling has always been subject to change. In this era of media convergence, transmedia storytelling has emerged as a distinct new form of narrative activity taking place across multiple interconnected media platforms. Textual components of a complex narrative, called a ‘world’, are distributed and thereby serialised: each media platform can be interpreted as one instalment of a serial transmedia world, and the story told in one platform is different from the one in another. The new interconnectedness of multiple media platforms through a narrative whole, so-called connected narration, affects the way in which transmedia projects are being produced, which in turn affects the process of script and project development. The conditions under which transmedia stories and worlds are produced impose on the creators of transmedia worlds the challenge of maintaining coherence and a sense of completeness across media platforms; the overall narrative must never feel redundant, while suspense must be created across the entirety of the platform architecture. In this endeavour, creators based in different industries must work together from the very beginning of the content development process to achieve narrative consistency as well as the sense of ‘worldly’ coherence across all media. Collaborative writing across different industries is called for in the production of any transmedia world. S. Renger (B) Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Potsdam, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_39

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Research on transmedia storytelling and world-building (Dena, 2009; Evans, 2011, 2020; Hills, 2012; Jenkins, 2006; Klastrup & Tosca, 2004; Long, 2007; Maj, 2015; Mikos, 2016; Ryan, 2013; Scolari, 2009; Thon, 2016; Tosca & Klastrup, 2020; Wolf, 2012) has thus far neglected the German market; equally, the script and content development process has received hardly any sustained analytical attention. This chapter sheds light on German transmedia content development process. It examines the complex relationship between the creative process and the finished product of a transmedia series by following an interdisciplinary approach, based on poetics (Eco, 1997), combining the qualitative analysis of the German transmedia project Netwars/out of CTRL (2014–) (in the following Netwars ) with interviews with German creators of transmedia series. Netwars is a great example not only for transmedia storytelling on different screens: Netwars enables an across media experience with shifting boundaries between fact (documentary) and fiction (science-fiction) on five different platforms: as a television documentary, a web documentary, a graphic novel app, an eBook/audiobook/paper book, and soon as a television series but also for analysing the still ongoing script development process. This chapter focusses on German script and content development process in the context of transmedia storytelling.

Terminology Transmedia stories involve different media that, in their turn, imply different processes of script development. Not all stories are based on a script; especially, the term script is used within the film and television industry. Given the circumstance that transmedia stories can incorporate a book, game, or social media, is script development the appropriate term for describing the creative practise of creating a transmedia story and world? This chapter uses the term content development process to describe the initial phase of writing the story and building the world; thus, the term content development process of transmedia projects is synonym to the script development process of a television series or a film. As transmedia stories play out across a variety of different media, the question of how to refer to the person engaging with them is not a trivial one. Existing research has tended to use terms that are wedded to one particular medium. The appropriate term should be media-independent, experiencefocussed—as storytelling is a social experience—, and inclusive with regard to the degree of activity ascribed to the individual engagement with a story, which ‘must be understood as inherently transmedia’ (Evans, 2020, p. 15); the relatively passive process of viewing a film as well as the activity of playing a game must both be covered. In light of these requirements, this chapter proposes the new term experient. This term does not specify which medium is currently in play; it makes no assumptions regarding an individual’s level of activity; and, quite clearly, it emphasises experience—the overall aim of transmedia content

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development—as the Portuguese producer Nuño Bernardo (2014, p. 116) puts it, transmedia stories invoke and enable ‘experiences’: A transmedial experience should invoke the most human elements of the storytelling tradition. From beginning to end, a transmedia story should be a social phenomenon, one which draws people together and unifies them through shared experiences.

Transmedia projects and series will be considered ‘text’. The transmedia universe as a whole can equally be regarded as text. ‘Text’ should thus not be taken as synonymous with ‘media platform’. While the latter denotes media platform architecture as the structural aspect of world-building, ‘text’ is located on the narrative level, referring, e.g. to narrative techniques and mechanisms. ‘Universe’ denotes the entire transmedia world with all its media platforms. Finally, the term ‘creator’ denotes writers, authors, filmmakers, directors, game designers, producers, and transmedia designers—in short, the entire community of professionals involved in the content creation process of a transmedia project—, as ‘author’ in and of itself does not take sufficient account of the interdisciplinary collaboration found in transmedia production contexts, especially during the initial phase of writing the story and building the world.

Academic Perspectives on Defining Transmedia Storytelling: A New Form of Storytelling? Both academia and industry question if transmedia is a buzzword or new storytelling experience (Arte, 2014; Ryan, 2015, 2016). In order to draw out what is new about transmedia storytelling a definition of transmedia storytelling is needed, because the term transmedia is still often used in an indistinct or inconsistent way (Veugen, 2016). This is useful to understand the new context of content development processes that are distinct from script development processes of a film or television series. Marsha Kinder (1991) coined the term transmedia and called it a ‘supersystem’ indicating the multi-platform and multimodal expansion of media content. In 2006, Henry Jenkins (2006, p. 98) adpoted the term in the context of his analysis of media convergence culture, by defining transmedia storytelling as follows: a ‘transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best’. The majority of research on transmediality is based on this definition covering four defining principles: a medium’s narrative ability, added narrative value, intertextuality, and a systematic narration process. When a transmedia story is told across different media platforms, it should ideally play to the respective advantages of each platform. The medium’s narrative abilities are one of the defining principles of transmedia storytelling

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because the story is influenced by the medium even as the narrative remains independent. The structure of narrative is not simply independent of any particular medium; it is universal. The universal narrative structure is, as Mahne (2007) argues, not confined to a single medium. In other words, different media have different degrees of narrativity (Herman, 2002; Prince, 1982). Besides universal narrative features, every medium contains certain narrative characteristics, which should be considered during the content development process of a transmedia story and world. Each platform, or new text, provides added narrative value to the overall story (Jenkins, 2006). Jenkins (2011) argues that the function of each text is to lead to additive comprehension. Jenkins’ reference point is the notion of additive comprehension put forward by game designer Neil Young, according to which each new text adds a new piece of information to the whole. Based on this notion of additive comprehension, transmedia storytelling is different from adaptation. Adaptation and transmedia storytelling may be similar, but the conceptual differences between them matter, especially during the content development process. Unlike adaptation, transmedia storytelling adds something new and canonical to the overall story and world. Given the fact that every medium has an impact on a story, the narrative value added within each medium can only be defined in relation to that specific medium. Crucially, though, every new media platform adds narrative value while, at the same time, being faithful to the overall transmedia story established through the connections between media platforms. Therefore, writing transmedia stories requires a different approach to content development than adaptation in so far as the overall story is portioned across different media platforms requiring collaborative team writing. It matters to every transmedia story that all media platforms are connected to one another—but the question remains how this relationship should be designed so as to enable each platform to add narrative value. Intertextuality is necessary for any explanation of transmedial connectivity between media platforms in order to enable smooth changes of media platforms. The fourth principle of transmedia storytelling, listed by Jenkins (2007, n.p.) is related to the creative process—he refers to it as a systematic narration process, arguing that ‘[t]ransmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels’. Jenkins emphasises that transmedia storytelling is based on each medium’s own contribution to a systematic narration process. What does he mean by ‘systematically’? Does it mean that a transmedia story has to be conceived of as transmedial from the outset or can ‘systematically’ also refer to extensions of existing stories or storyworlds? Long (2007, pp. 19f.) draws a distinction between these two forms of transmedia narratives1 : 1 Ryan (2013, n.p.) also knows two distinct forms of transmedia storyworlds: snowball effect projects generate a variety of prequels, fan fiction, and transmedial adaptations on account of the popularity of their core text, while a systems project is ‘conceived from the very beginning as a project that develops over many different media platforms. Storyworlds

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There is often a noticeable aesthetic difference between those transmedia narratives that were designed with transmediation in mind and those that weren’t. A story intended to be told across multiple media types, or crafted with later expansion in mind, will often be woven with a notably different mindset from one that’s originally intended to be a self-contained independent narrative.

As a consequence, the creation and production processes greatly impact the aesthetics of transmedia stories. Long (2007) makes a distinction between true transmedia, allowing a ‘unified and coordinated entertainment experience’ (Jenkins, 2007, n.p.) and more open stories, and transmedia franchise situated in a more restricted world. So, the question when the decision for transmedia storytelling was made will impact the transmedia storyworld’s character as open or closed. Attention also needs to turn to the influence of autonomous platforms within the transmedia world-building. The question whether or not consuming output on one media platform can enable an experient to understand a story has an impact on the emergence of different types of transmedia projects. There is no consensus around this issue. Jenkins (2006) postulates that no text is autonomous whereas Dena (2009) argues the opposite, using the term transfiction to describe media platforms that are interdependent in so far as the overall story can only be understood by consuming all platforms. Hybrid forms of transmedia projects could be those in which one core platform is flanked by others with an ancillary function: ‘While [in this case] the core text is autonomous, the accompanying texts just make sense in correlation with it’ (Zimmermann, 2015, p. 24). The authors’ disagreements indicate the variety and breadth of types of transmedia work. According to Jenkins (2006), transmedia storytelling is a product of media convergence. Especially the proliferation of digital forms, makes it possible for projects to be created across different media platforms from the very start of the creative process. By contrast, expanded transmedia stories can mainly be found to use pre-media convergence culture material. What is new about transmedia storytelling is primarily related to the content development process, which can be characterised as crossmedia planning, shifting the focus from storytelling to world-building.

become commercial franchises, and the purpose of the developers is to get the public to consume as many different media as possible’. Weaver’s (2013, p. 8) two approaches to transmedia storytelling are called native and additive: ‘you either create a story that can only be told across multiple platforms or you take a story from one medium and add other media to it to deepen the world created in the focus medium’.

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Industry Perspectives on Defining Transmedia Storytelling and Its Impact on Creating Transmedia Worlds A variety of definitions for the term ‘transmedia storytelling’ are offered not only in academia but also within the German industry context. Various concepts have been subsumed under the term, and different terms have also been applied to same phenomenon. Although there are variations, all creators interviewed were in agreement that defining transmedia storytelling is not an easy endeavour. The examination of creators’ definitions is of crucial significance for the analysis of transmedia content development as it may provide a basis for understanding different approaches as well as outcomes. The first point to note is that not every creator interviewed even uses the term ‘transmedia’ or ‘crossmedia’ due to a disinterest in categories and definitions and the vacuous notion of the term ‘transmedia’, for example. Some have their own personal ways of defining it; for some, transmedia world-building is its keystone while other see it has pivoting around storytelling practises. Many creators are reluctant to use the word ‘transmedia’, for reasons that mirror those found in academic literature. Creator, author and director Janna Nandzik calls ‘transmedia’ a ‘buzzword’, and transmedia designer and creative director Lena Thiele speaks disparagingly of the ‘transmedia label’ applied to projects that are not really transmedia. Game designer Severin Brettmeister finds that most projects given the label do not deserve and should instead be called (crossmedia) marketing. All three find that ‘transmedia’ is a label employed for commercial purposes in contexts where it does not accurately describe the narrative tools used in a particular project. The criticism of ‘transmedia’ as a mere selling point goes back all the way to 2010. The majority of interviewed creators observe a ‘transmedia hype’ in Germany with a peak around 2013. Projects such as Alpha 0.7 (2010) and Wer rettet Dina Foxx? [Rescue Dina Foxx] (2011), Dina Foxx—Tödlicher Kontakt [Dina Foxx—Deadly Contact] (2014) demonstrated that the sales impact of the ‘transmedia’ label was indeed considerable, as the many awards and reviews make amply clear; reviews tend to focus on the projects’ structure over and above their narrative. This really shows that the motivation to write a transmedia story and build a transmedia world influences the narrative construction of the whole transmedia project due to a different approach to transmedia content development process. If a transmedia universe is built for commercial purposes, the focus is on the whole structure, while transmedia projects that are created due to its complex narrative or topic that is best represented transmedial, the focus during the content development process is more on the narrative. Creators are keen to emphasise, however, that these are observations of actual use rather than their own definitions of the term. In their own understanding, ‘transmedia’ denotes qualities found on a narrative level. Most of the creators interviewed in this study draw a line between transmedia and

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crossmedia, and also distinguish it from branded storytelling and marketing. The crucial difference is recognised as the presence of autonomous media platforms and the question of media platform architecture, which different creators discuss in different ways. Some recognise that all platforms of a transmedia project have to be accessed in order fully to understand the story: all platforms are connected on a narrative level to such an extent that missing out on one platform is equal to missing out on a piece of the story. Strikingly, the argument whether or not platforms are autonomous is the one cited most often by the creators, although some creators adopt the exact opposite stance to the one put forward by the others: their criterion for transmedia is that every platform can exist on its own while still being connected to all platforms. Their own projects include autonomous media platforms. To conclude, the architecture of media platforms is crucial for everybody’s definition of transmedia storytelling, which impacts the content development process in so far as the individual understanding of transmedia storytelling influences the narrative construction of a transmedia universe. Therefore, the first step during the content development process is to agree on a common understanding of transmedia stories and worlds. According to many of the creators interviewed in this study another crucial element of transmedia storytelling is world-building. Media platforms are connected through a storyworld: the storyworld is key, as it tells the stories of different characters. Interestingly, creators from outside the film industry posit the world element as central for transmedia storytelling: Felix Mertikat, art and creative director of Netwars’ graphic novel and Severin Brettmeister, game designer of Dina Foxx—Tödlicher Kontakt, and Lena Thiele, transmedia designer of Netwars and whose roots are in digital, interactive storytelling, argue that world-building is essential in creating transmedia projects and differs from the development of mono-medium stories such as film. They argue that mono-medium stories differ from interactive in so far as in film development storytelling is central and no world is created whereas in the development process of interactive media such as games the very first step is to create a world. For the creators mentioned, world-building is a natural (first) step in content development for transmedia storytelling. The creators discuss different types of creation process that have to be combined in the development of transmedia projects, as will be examined below. Taken together, the creators’ statements indicate that the individual’s profession influences their understanding of transmedia storytelling and its content development process. Creators’ Experiences of Creating Complex Transmedia Universes The production of transmedia projects calls for new forms of collaboration. Given that the transmedial story universe expands across different media with different narrative affordances, new forms of collaboration are necessary and, as a consequence, creators from different industries have to work together, even during the initial project development process of content development.

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This section examines the role of interdisciplinary collaboration as well as transmedia showrunner during this content development process by arguing that different industries bring different approaches to the content development process of transmedia series. Interdisciplinary Collaboration All German transmedia creators interviewed agree that the development and creation of transmedia projects call for new forms of collaboration, for example, collaborative writing. Considering that a transmedia story is told across multiple media platforms, it is necessary that these different media platforms are narratively interconnected. Consequently, various trades and professions from different media industries such as film, television, comic, games, and print have to collaborate. In the German context, this is a considerable challenge, as many German professionals have little to no experience in collaborating across disciplines, especially at such an early point as the content development process, as the creators confirmed. Although mono-medium texts such as a film and television shows require a form of collaboration during production, writing, and creating a transmedia story calls for much more intense and prolonged forms of collaboration or else narrative coherence will be put at risk. Narrative coherence has to be enabled across different media platforms with different narrative affinities which are connected in different ways within the whole transmedia universe. Hence, narrative coherence depends on the transmedia world-building and media platform architecture and is challenged by an interdisciplinary writing team. This aspect of developing narrative arcs across different media platforms is distinct to, for example, mono-medial forms such as television series. Furthermore, Germany’s tradition of auteur cinema and of venerating the one ‘auteur’— usually the director—as the main artist who exercises total control over their work (Grob, 2007) continues to influence television production practises. Television films and sometimes even entire series are created and written by a single person. The creators interviewed mention a total of four main challenges with regard to collaboration: personality and professional background, time, communication, and an appreciation of individual media platforms, which will be discussed in the following. Transmedia designer Lena Thiele sums up the requirements for collaboration: less ego and more willingness to work together—a challenge for most people in the film industry, she says. As a matter of fact, willingness to collaborate is a function of professional backgrounds and experiences. Working practises differ sharply across industries: Creators from the game industry, for example, are more used to collaboration during content development than creators working in film. In addition, the personality of the creator also influences their willingness to cooperate. Filmmaker Ralf Pleger calls himself an author-director and prefers to work on his own. He is, therefore, not the

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type of author and director who is naturally inclined to be comfortable in crossmedia or transmedia projects: I’m quite open to that – I guess I am what they call an auteur, so I do my own thing and hatch an idea and work out my own little Gesamtkunstwerk. I write my own scripts and implement them myself. That’s where I feel most comfortable. That does not mean that I don’t know other configurations. I do, and I accept them, but on the whole I’ll feel less comfortable in them. And that’s where another conflict is on the horizon already: whether an author or a director will even be willing to be part of a content development process that is team-driven.

His understanding as a writer/director who is working on his own is also the reason why Wagnerwahn [The Wagner Files] (2013) had three separate production departments: one each for app, graphic novel, and film, and each working separately. The only instance of collaboration was that Pleger screened the film clips and interview clips for use in the app. The creators describe their difficulties, especially with regard to timing and scheduling. Connecting the media platforms of a transmedia series on a narrative level requires time—and time is money, which some German transmedia series simply did not have. Time matters in two ways: whether there is or isn’t enough of it to carry out the necessary work together, and whether or not production is run efficiently. Time available has repercussions for communication within the project; time is needed especially when teams are larger. Creator, author, and director Janna Nandzik argues that transmedia projects are challenging in terms of collaboration because so much time is needed to things talk through in person rather than via telephone or Skype, which are prone to misunderstandings. The majority of creators interviewed had to collaborate with colleagues across Germany and, in some cases, even across the globe. The different languages spoken by different disciplines leads to inefficiencies and may adversely affect the shared vision. Game designer Severin Brettmeister argues that communication, even on a lexical level, puts a huge strain on crossdisciplinary teams. This is in line with Bennett and Medrado (2013, p. 110) arguing that collaboration between digital and television production cultures in the UK is described as difficult due to differences in language: ‘As a senior executive explained, the challenge of integrating multi-platform production into an established broadcast television production culture is one of ensuring that everyone speaks the same language’. Besides communication, different levels of experience can also make it challenging to work in interdisciplinary teams. The greatest differences tend to be found between film and television industries on the one hand and the game industry on the other. Problems are confounded by different notions of what individual media are about, and what they are able to do in terms of narrative potential and interactive storytelling.

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How do creators address the challenges of collaboration? Almost all creators interviewed mention round table conversations2 as one key element of collaboration. These discussions alternate with phases during which everybody works on their own. The precise role and impact of the round table is evaluated and experienced differently by different creators. Most regard it as a helpful tool of collaboration, although some are critical and see it as a time waster. Others again feel it inhibits the flow of their creative juices. Game designer Severin Brettmeister describes the development process of Dina Foxx—Tödlicher Kontakt in the following way: The process of collaboration was challenging and problematic, because the team of ten to thirteen people focused on developing the story rather than creating a world. In terms of the game this was often a waste of time and ineffective.

This quotation really illustrates the passions associated with different steps of the content development process. As far as successful tools of collaboration are concerned, some creators mention documents shared on cloud servers, useful especially when the team is spread out over different locations. Transmedia designer and creative director Thiele adds a script workshop to the list of useful collaboration tools. This section has demonstrated the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration during the initial phase of content development that is characterised by collaborative writing of narrative arcs across different media platforms and by creators with different professional backgrounds and experiences. Transmedia Showrunner Although, taken together, not all of the abovementioned tools were successful, collaborative production of a transmedia project cannot do without a ‘unified author’ (Evans, 2011, p. 31). This institution is the guarantor who makes sure that every piece of the story is conceived and implemented in view of the entirety of the transmedia storyworld. All the creators interviewed emphasise the importance of this role for transmedia content development. In 2010, the Producers Guild of America responded to changes in the media landscape by creating a Transmedia Producer credit. A transmedia producer is responsible, on the one hand, for long-term project planning, i.e. the development and production of the transmedia project, and, on the other hand, for narrative continuity and the story’s coherence. Although these functions do not differ from the responsibilities of a film or television producer, they are intrinsically more sophisticated in transmedial projects because of the involvement of different media platforms, which result in bigger teams across 2

Round table conversations are not comparable to a writer’s room with a strict hierarchy and rules, rather they are more informal discussions and exchange in order to update each other.

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different media industries. Therefore, Evans (2020, p. 28) defines the role of the transmedia producer as follows: The role of transmedia producers, consultants and marketers is precisely to make use of the different affordances of each technological platform and the texts that are constructed for them. The ability to recognize, understand, interrogate, analyse and create for differences between media forms was described as a key feature of this role.

The transmedia producer has to be more involved in the writing and creation process, which requires more writing skills than ‘only’ that of safeguarding narrative continuity and coherence across platforms; therefore, this chapter proposes the creation of the role of transmedia showrunner, mirroring the role of the showrunner in quality television series. Krauß (2018a, 2018b) defines the television showrunner as an author/producer hybrid who most commonly spearheads the writer’s room. Clarke (2013, p. 13) emphasises that the television showrunner is not only responsible for the script and editing of episodes ‘but also for the maintenance of an entire textual world’. Similar to a television showrunner a transmedia showrunner guarantees the ‘one vision’, enables narrative consistency, and is the interface between author and producer. However, their task is more complex because the whole narrative universe is told across different media platforms. A transmedia showrunner is strongly involved in the initial content development process, but their responsibilities extend into the content implementation process where they have to do with film production, website programming, and/or the design of a visual narrative. A transmedia showrunner is endowed with decision-making authority. Industry and scholars tend to agree that a story is not the same if it is told in a different medium—but retelling the same story in a different medium is not even the point of a transmedia project. Every story cannot be told in every medium, as some elements work best, for example, as a book, film, or comic. Some elements will, however, work regardless of medium, and transmedia showrunners have to be able to understand and shape them. Furthermore, as Dowd et al. (2015, p. 37) argue, each ‘medium lays the groundwork for the introduction of the next element and the next and the next’. Transmedia showrunners need to envisage a story playing out across media platforms in order to be able to maintain coherence and plan ahead. Narrative coherence and interconnectivity rely on collaboration as discussed above. Germany has less experience with collaborative creation. Krauß (2018a, 2018b) as well as Weiß and Gößler (2014) argue that the German television industry does not provide ideal conditions for quality and innovation to emerge. Krauß (2018a, 2018b) sheds light on how difficult it is to establish the concepts of a showrunner and a writer’s room in the German television series landscape. This is largely due to tighter content development budgets and precarious employment conditions for authors. Krauß (2018a) argues that

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German television series production culture is characterised by power hierarchies which lead directly to authors’ precarious positions. In many cases, clearly discernible forms of agency are missing (Krauß, 2018b) and German public broadcasting bureaucracy stands in the way of anything similar to the ‘one vision’ principle. In fact, the German public broadcasting system leads to cacophony rather than the principles and values behind both the writer’s room and the underlying ‘one vision’ approach represented by the showrunner. With regard to Netwars, the creators describe the work process as rather disjointed and solitary, which one might expect has impacted the interconnection of media platforms. However, Netwars demonstrates that the team was able to disseminate the project’s main argument—its one vision—of ‘You never know who is in control’ across all media platforms and therefore enabling narrative coherence. Horizontal narration occurs on both thematic and narrative levels: the topic of cyber warfare is developed across all storyworlds based on the message that ‘You never know who is in control’. In fact, it is this message that truly represents Netwars’ arc-shaped serial transmediality, as it enables consistency across fictional and non-fictional storyworlds. A look at collaborative practises of German transmedia projects reveals that creators in this study were often responsible for a broad spectrum of tasks and that one person very often had too many. Creator, author, and director Janna Nandzik, for instance, was in charge of all app and online content, the Facebook profile, and she wrote and directed all television episodes too. That was a lot and she says she did not have enough time, ending up writing television scripts while still editing earlier television episodes and answering Facebook comments. This resulted in ‘digital overload’, from which Nandzik says she had to recover after About:Kate (2013). Art director and creative director Felix Mertikat as well as transmedia designer and creative director Lena Thiele also speak about their work overload. Mertikat was art and creative director as well as illustrator of Netwars ’ graphic novel. In the face of the lack of time and his double role, Mertikat describes the development process as excessively demanding. One important lesson learnt by all the professionals interviewed is the advantage of an involvement of all participants early in the game, even if this makes for a cumbersome and challenging process. In spite of all the difficulties encountered along the way, the creators also describe their experiences of collaboration as great examples of a shared pioneering spirit. Interviews indicate that, for most, collaboration across industries to the extent encountered here was a first. In other words, the production culture of German transmedia series is not based on well-established structures. However, these proven substantive and operational structures are essential for project efficiency and the safeguarding of artistic freedom. Writer’s rooms and showrunners are part of them, and they work in the context of quality television series. It is one sign of transmedia series being a niche practise that these structures have not yet been adopted.

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Conclusion In the era of media convergence, transmedia storytelling has emerged as a distinct new form of narrative activity taking place across multiple interconnected media platforms calling for a new approach to the content development of transmedia narrative worlds, and new forms of collaboration. This new culture of content development is marked by interdisciplinary, and other collaborative, forms of working. The function of a transmedia showrunner is indispensable. This position is situated in between content development and production and has to maintain a project’s one vision across all storyworlds. The need for a transmedia showrunner is strongly related to the nature of a project’s internal communications; it would ease decision making while securing the transmedia project’s one vision. This chapter has demonstrated practises of transmedia content development aiming to obviate the impression of ‘You never know who is in control’.

References About:Kate. (2013). Transmedia, Ulmen Television. Alpha 0.7—Der Feind in dir [Alpha 0.7—The Enemy Within You]. (2010). Transmedia, Zeitsprung Entertainment. AMOS. Transmedia designer of Zeit der Helden. Arte. (2014). Crossmedia, Transmedia oder Hypermedia? Hauptsache die Mauern zwischen Film, Kunst und Internet durchbrechen. Arte. http://creative.arte. tv/de/folge/crossmedia-transmedia-oder-hypermedia-hauptsache-die-mauern-zwi schen-film-kunst-und-internet. Accessed 30 December 2017. Bernardo, N. (2014). Transmedia 2.0. how to create an entertainment brand using a transmedial approach to storytelling. Beactive Books. Bennett, J., & Medrado, A. (2013). The business of multi-platform public service: Online and at a profit. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 146(103), 113. Brettmeister, S. Game designer of Wer rettet Dina Foxx? Büttner, S. Head author and producer of Alpha 0.7 . Clarke, M. J. (2013). Transmedia Television. New Trends in Network Serial Production. Bloomsbury. Costa-Zahn, K. Producer of Dina Foxx—Tödlicher Kontakt and Wer rettet Dina Foxx? Dena, C. (2009). Transmedia practice. Theorising the practice of expressing a fictional world across distinct media and environments. Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney. Die Kulturakte [Culture Files]. (2010–2015). Transmedia, Gebrüder Beetz Filmproduktion. Dina Foxx—Tödlicher Kontakt [Dina Foxx—Deadly Contact]. (2014). Transmedia, teamWorx Produktion für Kino und Fernsehen GmbH, UFA Lab. Dowd, T., Fry, M., & Niederman, M. (2015). Storytelling across worlds: Transmedia for creatives and producers. Focal Press. Eco, U. (1997) [1962/1967]. Opera aperta. Bompiani. Evans, E. (2011). Transmedia television: Audiences, new media, and daily life. Routledge.

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Violet City: Script Development from Novel to Green Screen Fantasy Feature Dave Jackson

Introduction In this chapter, I track the development process of Violet City, as a case study to illustrate the ways in which a novelist/scriptwriter worked with a director/co-producer to complete a micro-budget green screen fantasy feature. The chapter explores the script development involved in adapting the novel as a screen work and ways in which screenplay development continued into post-production and editing to compensate for limitations in terms of compositing, SFX capability and continuity. I also discuss some challenges to relationships amongst the roles contributing to script development in the context of bringing a micro-budget feature to completion. When adapting and co-producing my novel for screen, I embarked on a story development process that stretched deep into post-production, writing and rewriting voice-overs and scene cards and making extensive editing suggestions to finesse the narrative until we achieved a platform for the film on Amazon Prime. In their article Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting perspectives from industry professionals, Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor, observe ‘Less certain are the boundaries of where script development begins and ends’ (2016, p. 215). Our project reflects this uncertainty. In my role as screenwriter, I had a limited window of opportunity to produce a workable adaptation of my novel D. Jackson (B) Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_40

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before principal photography began. All screen works are works in progress until final cut, but because we skipped the more usual preliminary stages, such as treatments and multiple screenplay drafts it meant we had to shape much of the eventual film in post-production, experimenting with various storytelling techniques to cover necessary exposition, expand characterisation and the story world. In The Screenplay Business: Managing Creativity and Script Development in the Film Industry, Peter Bloore (2012, p. 9) gives this definition of screenplay development: Screenplay development is the creative and industrial collaborative process in which a story idea (either an original idea or an adaptation of an existing idea, such as a play, novel, or real life event) is turned into a script; and is then repeatedly rewritten to reach a stage when it is attractive to a suitable director, actors and relevant film production funders; so that enough money can be raised to get the film made.

As a writer/director/co-producer of the team, funding the film ourselves, our project took a more fluid approach to story development.

The Project In early 2010, I began discussing with my Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) colleague, John Maxwell, ways in which we might use Liverpool Film School as a resource to produce a micro-budget feature film. Inspired by the notion that our practice and research should help drive our teaching, we decided to see if we could use LJMU’s equipment, talent and facilities and link Creative Writing, Drama, Film Studies and Media Production departments in a pilot project we naively thought could become the first of many. Our desire to develop and produce a feature film ourselves was also due to frustrating experiences in the mainstream with commissions, funding agencies and development executives, where commercial concerns took precedence over creative integrity. We had both experienced frustration, having projects commissioned and then abandoned in so-called development hell—what Barbara Schock refers to as screenwriters, ‘toiling under the tutelage of a team of business people, endeavoring to give them what they want, all the while realizing that there is little chance that their script will ever get made’ (1995). Between 2001 and 2005 I had a low-budget science fiction feature in development with the UK Film Council for their New Steps Beyond slate. That process involved numerous treatment and screenplay drafts over a four-year period before the project was finally abandoned. During that time, I began a fantasy novel and commentary for my doctorate entitled Violet City: Personal and Cultural Mythologies in the Creation of a Fantasy Novel, and John Maxwell had co-produced two low-budget features. With the collapse of the Film Council and UK Lottery funding prioritised towards the 2012 Olympics, he felt his producer’s career had stalled. He also

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had a yearning to direct, having recently experimented with a number of short film projects using green screen technology. My background in post-punk independent music made me wonder if we could find ways around ‘development hell’. Instead of waiting for the equivalent of an established authority to take an interest in our stories, could we find a way to produce them ourselves? John’s experiments using green screen started us thinking about ways in which this might provide a broader canvas in terms of setting, rather than going the limited location route of many micro-budget films. An obvious reference point for this idea was Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005). He read Violet City and proposed turning the 100,000-word novel into a 120-minute feature film. His plan was to shoot actors against a large (45-foot) green screen and to create the entire fantasy world in post-production. Using green screen and computer technology seemed an ideal way of realising the story on screen. At this early stage, he was sure we could get 3-D modellers from the university’s games department to help design and animate the fantasy landscape, its creatures and assets. We decided that finding ways to construct and integrate these elements into the footage was something we would put off until we had shot the main actors.

The Novel Violet City was partly an homage to the fantasy fiction I had grown up with in the late 1960s and early 1970s—writers such as Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, H. P. Lovecraft and Mervyn Peake—as well as the comic books and androgynous sci-fi influenced rock music of that era. I was attempting to remythologise Liverpool and its landscape through the prism of my own cultural ‘psychogeography’ in a similar way to the way that Moorcock uses London in his own fiction or Phillip Pullman uses Oxford. Although set in a secondary fantastic world, much of the landscape, architecture and character motivations were rooted in my family and personal history. For instance, the protagonist’s alcoholic father was based on stories my father told me of a grandfather I never met, and the relationship between father and son influenced and developed out of theirs. The images and story elements that went into the novel had begun as what Adam Ganz (2012) calls a ‘lens-based’ project. He says that screenwriting, as a ‘mediated form’ of dramatic writing has ‘the lens inevitably at the centre of the practice’ and that ‘implied framings and close ups’ are important aspects of the screenwriter’s craft. What became the novel began as a rough draft for a shorter screenplay in 1996. That screenplay was deliberately imagistic and lens based, showing rather than telling its fantastic elements and influenced by films as diverse as City of Lost Children, (1995) Night of the Hunter (1955), Masque of the Red Death (1964), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and David Lynch’s Dune (1984). These influences would combine with later influences when I came to adapt the novel that had once imagined itself as a screenplay.

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In fantastic fiction, great store is placed on the notion of world building, creating the landscapes, social structures, biological, technological and magical rules of narratives in order to give them a sense of internal plausibility. Some novelists use faux historical prologues or adopt an omniscient narrator to get across what Jeff Vandermeer calls their ‘world-view’. He defines world-view as ‘What you as the writer know about the world of the story’ and ‘story view’ as, ‘What the characters know and believe about the word’ (Vandermeer, 2013). In both the original screenplay and the novel, ‘world-view’ is revealed in an immersive manner via what happens visually or is provoked through dialogue within the ‘story view’ and by extension what the reader/audience learns as the story unfolds. Because the script seemed unfilmable in 1996, I had put it aside, only returning to the story when I decided to use it as the basis for my novel, turning a linear, fast cutting, present tense narrative into a greatly expanded multi-protagonist prose work. I had added more characters and subplots and explored key characters’ inner lives, as well as giving more thought to world building, internal plausibility, technology, flora, fauna, science and attitudes to the ‘supernatural’. The novel reveals its world and its backstory through character point-of-view rather than using the perspective of an omniscient narrator. I focalised the story through several key characters whose chapters alternate during the narrative. I had the luxury of travelling in time inside characters’ minds, something impossible in screenplay without overdoing voice-over, flashback or expository dialogue. I could provide unspoken schemes and reminiscences, and describe the city, modes of dress and forms of transport in much more detail.

Adapting the Novel While the degree of detail in the novel proved useful in terms of informing assets, costume and an image library, I needed to reverse much of the process I had gone through when expanding the original speculative script. The story structure and characters had changed significantly since that version, but I could revisit the spine and some of the style of that script while breaking the novel apart, cutting and conflating scenes, characters and subplots. However, there was a significant time constraint on developing the screenplay if we were to take advantage of facilities offered in LJMU’s Film School. We were to begin shooting in two months’ time, for a six-week period during the summer and needed a workable draft within a month to begin rehearsals. While the director set up the production, I began distilling the multi-protagonist novel into screenplay form. Due to the urgency of the task, I decided, perhaps unwisely, against writing a formal treatment and began a first draft screenplay. I had three texts on which to base the screenplay—the original script, the novel and my Ph.D. reflective commentary, which provided a further source of ideas and images to help define the look, tone and themes of the film.

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Fig. 1 Violet City (2016), courtesy of John Maxwell and Dave Jackson

Our plan to create locations and assets after shooting most of the live action seemed to mean that we would able to keep the book’s impossible settings such as a mountain shaped like the tower of Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral with a vast pool of acid in its central cave. Using computer technology, we hoped to create a gothic cityscape serviced by airships and hot air balloons and reveal the palatial interiors of the city’s mansions. Where the development of my New Steps Beyond project for the Film Council had felt hampered by limited locations, SFX and conflicting development notes, adapting the initial draft for Violet City would suffer few of these constraints. I was free to write the screenplay of the novel that I saw in my head, using a cornucopia of diverse influences and images (Fig. 1).

Synopsis To illustrate the choices made in adapting the novel to a screenplay, it is useful to provide this brief synopsis: Flynn’s violet-eyed mother, a social outcast in a superstitious mining village, disappears in a ferry disaster shortly after his birth. His alcoholic father claims he saw her snatched away by a demon. Few believe him. Years later, Zeb, an exiled false friend, lures teenage Flynn (who has recently inherited his mother’s vibrant eye colour after an ‘accident’ in the fungus mines) to Violet City. Flynn discovers that ‘violet eyes’ are sought by Lord Splaine (one of the jaded aristocrats who rule the city-state) who is doing the bidding of a race of androgynous immortals, the Empusa, who encourage and feed off dark human passions in the citizens. These creatures force violet eyes (who unknowingly carry their gene) to breed on their behalf, producing more of their kind. With the aid of a street ruffian and Professor Mercuria (a sort of female Van Helsing), Flynn struggles to overcome the creatures, only to discover that, though violet-eyed breeders may perish during reproduction, their Empusa

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offspring are a necessary evil. They were bio-engineered in a previous age to guard against an alien menace seeking access through an interdimensional rift inside Cathedral Mountain.

Considerations Developing the screenplay, I was as conscious of what I hoped the look of the film would be as I was of telling the story and creating the characters. As well as the original influences that inspired the earlier script and novel, I was also thinking about films in a style that Suzanne Buchan calls ‘New Expressionism’ (2011). The Brothers Quay’s Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), and Esteban Sapir’s The Ariel (2007) were particularly on my mind. I wanted to create a gothic, dreamlike spectacle, revealing the ‘otherworldliness not only of objects, but also the live-action characters’ (Buchan, 2011). The dark monochrome look of these films also suited our intentions in terms of matching backdrops to live action. However, where each of those films tends towards a certain absurdist whimsy, I wanted Violet City to obey a stricter internal logic and have a structure closer to that of an adventure movie. I was also conscious that I needed to consider ways in which actors would move against a two-dimensional background and that certain modes of transport described in the book would be problematic to fake on set or construct in post. Dirigibles and boats would be easier to persuade an audience with because they float or glide across the screen, but horse drawn carriages were out. We decided that Violet City would have a canal system instead of roads and that its citizens would travel by barge or by skiff. This decision inspired a sequence where Lord Splaine watches a robbery from the window of his barge. It also gave the protagonist and various other characters a means of negotiating the city that had not appeared in the novel.

Conflating and Condensing Using Transitions and Flashbacks In the new screenplay, I needed to conflate and condense important information conveyed in the longer, information rich chapters of the novel. An example of this is the opening sequence. I took key images from the opening chapter of the novel, where Flynn’s mother attempts to leave Pale Haven and is plucked from Aaron’s grasp after the steamer she was aboard capsizes, and then transitioned between this and a later chapter where Flynn’s father drunkenly peers through a glass-bottomed dingy, watched from the beach by his now teenaged son. EXT. RIVER—NIGHT

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An airship glides across the face of a full moon. Beneath it, AARON, raw-boned, early forties, sits drinking from a jug in a glass-bottomed boat, surrounded by underwater lamps. He peers drunkenly through the glass hull to the riverbed and sees: EXT. VILLAGE STREET—DAY Aaron, in his late 20s, struggles past rows of purple shutters and doors, lugging a heavy carpetbag. His fine-featured young wife, KATHARINE, walks ahead, cradling their baby, FLYNN. She ignores the turned backs of drably dressed VILLAGERS and coos to her child, her eyes hidden behind tinted glasses (Fig. 2). The airship silhouetted against a full moon above Aaron’s dingy, establishes the weird fiction style of the film, as well as a mode of transport that will prove important as the story progresses. By sculpting in time, the information and images contained in two chapters merge into a single sequence. Omitted in this sequence is Katharine’s backstory—how she came to Pale Haven, and hints as to why she is leaving. Elements of exposition revealed though internal monologue in the corresponding chapters in the novel are absent in these scenes. With the screenplay in its early stages, this did not seem problematic. I felt that Professor Mercuria could reveal this later in the story. However, once the backgrounds were in place and we started editing, cutting and reorganising the structure of the film, it did prove problematic and lead to the late introduction of a voice-over. The process of adapting the novel to screen meant finding ways to conflate characters and scenes without losing key story information and the direction of the narrative. I needed to signpost clues to the nature of the world through imagery and reveal backstory through dialogue and limited use of dream/memory sequence. In the screenplay, Flynn’s precognitive dreams hint at the true nature of the Empusa and the fate of his mother, and there is a

Fig. 2 Opening shot (2016), courtesy of John Maxwell and Dave Jackson

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‘recording’ inside Cathedral Mountain that eventually provides the revelation of the danger that eradicating the Empusa poses. With time running out, I was having difficulty reducing the script to 120 pages. Certain story elements from the novel needed cutting or distilling. I had a subplot concerning a young violet-eyed girl who paints predictive paintings. Imprisoned by Lord Splaine, she fools him into believing his enemies are dead. The character was important in setting up the idea that he collects violet-eyed individuals for later use and fundamental to bringing about the conclusion of the novel. After discussion with the director, I decided to replace the girl with a minor character who appears only briefly to establish that Splaine collects violet-eyed individuals and to cut the predictive painting subplot completely. There were still several interlinked storylines inherited from the novel that I needed to prioritise and distil. Although Flynn’s story was the main thread, various supporting characters had distinct storylines, which only intersected with his tangentially before the late stages and the climax. Rather than following the Syd Field model for Hollywood three-act-structure, my developing screenplay had a looser multi-stranded structure and quite an extended set up, as each of the story strands needed introducing. This would involve some radical re-structuring in post-production. Although intent on reducing the page count, I felt I needed to give more in scene descriptions than conventional wisdom regarding the writing of scene directions might imply (Tucker, 2018): The mistake of overwriting usually happens when a writer veers too far into a prose style of writing. In an effort to make the reader really feel what it’s like to be in the scene, we sometimes overdo it when it comes to the amount of decorative language that doesn’t actually help make the script producible.

Actors would be performing in front of a giant green cloth, and I thought that they, the director and crew needed a greater sense of the imaginary space around them. Though this runs counter to the orthodoxies of much discourse around brevity in big print/action, the screenplay would also be an important guide in post-production, especially because the director had chosen to work without storyboards. I needed to offer guidance to whoever was constructing the backgrounds and assets in post-production. In the absence of a completed script, the director had assembled a crew, actors, make-up artists, costume and prop-makers. I farmed out pieces of script as I wrote, and costumers, make-up artists and prop builders would question me or refer to the novel about design and consistency. During this period, I was seeing characters I was writing ‘come to life’ via our collaborators’ contributions, and this fed back into the ongoing writing process. Everyone was working for subsistence expenses, so a certain amount of leeway in terms of creative interpretation was involved, and the world building became a dialogue between, writer, director and production crew.

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With the script still at 170 pages, John decided there was no time to wait for me to edit it down. We would develop the story as we progressed. At this stage, the draft told most of the story in linear fashion, eschewing voice-over narration, using Flynn’s visions inside Cathedral Mountain and his dream/memory sequences to hint at historical events and provide personal backstory. In this early version, Professor Mercuria is shown translating a long lost History of the Empusa and writing in her notebook, but it’s only when she discusses it or when Flynn repeats what he’s read in her book that we learn what she’s discovered or been thinking. We organised a mass read through with two experienced lead actors to play Flynn and Zeb, and a large cast of semi-pros, amateurs and people who just looked the part in other roles. We blocked out and rehearsed key scenes in front of the green screen, set up floor to ceiling in a lecture room. There followed an intensive period of filming, during which the lack of storyboards and in-depth discussion in terms of story development became problematic when the director began to improvise around certain scenes, adding elements that worked against the flow of the narrative or that contradicted some of the characterisation. Equally, there were parts of the script where, in my haste, I had not made the logic of certain scenes as obvious as I thought. This was where overfamiliarity with the source material caused me to take the director’s understanding of my intentions for granted. In a scene where it was imperative for a character to fear a group of debauched aristocrats, the director instead had the character pass them drugs before his exit. Had I not happened to be on set and intervened, the scene would not have made sense within the context of the story. There is a sequence that takes place between three rooms on the same floor. The central room is an observation chamber where Lord Splaine can see two seductions taking place on either side through one-way mirrors. It is important that all three rooms are easily accessed from the outside corridor because a captive is about to arrive and interrupt proceedings. However, the director suddenly decided that it might look better if Splaine were watching through a glass floor in a room above. This would have made the corridor scene impossible and the view from above would have been difficult to shoot and build in post. I managed to convince him to stick with the original scenes, but could tell that my interruptions were starting to grate. The narrow time period we’d allowed ourselves to fully develop our shared vision of the story before going into production was starting to negatively impact on character consistency, the inner logic of world and significant story elements (Fig. 3). While it offered creative freedom in terms of imagining exotic locations, the process of shooting on green screen, especially without storyboards, allowed us to put off certain practical decisions, which proved problematic when trying to construct the backgrounds, vehicles and other assets in post. Because of this ‘make do and mend’ process, we offered hostages to fortune, which came back to haunt in compositing and editing.

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Fig. 3 Lord Splaine and Lady Ezcargoza (2016), courtesy of John Maxwell and Dave Jackson

There is a scene where Flynn picks up a shaving mirror to see that his eyes have changed colour and are glowing violet. There were no mirrors to hand on set, so the director suggested the actor use a paper plate to hold as a stand in, erroneously thinking we could ‘fix it in post’. This proved impossible and we had to edit around it. To an extent, our naivety in terms of what we thought we might accomplish with our limited resources in post-production allowed us the imaginative freedom to pursue the project. Yet, it made the task of producing or working around some of our over ambitious scenarios extremely difficult. Certainly, more time spent in developing the script with the limitations of shooting on green screen in mind would have been fruitful. Unfortunately, it was time we did not have. The limited availability of actors meant shooting the film out of sequence. George McGuire who played Flynn’s charismatic best friend, Zeb, and one of the only professional actors on the project was only available for the first two weeks and we shot all his scenes first. Some scenes, constructed in post, were between actors who had never physically met. We decided to add most of the Empusa scenes after the first tranche of filming, but there were a few scenes where they needed to be present with the other actors, specifically a major fight scene. The director put actors in purple full-body costumes to play the nearly invulnerable humanoids and enlisted a fight co-ordinator who had been working on the Game of Thrones production in Northern Ireland to help choreograph the violence. However, this lead to a major on-set disagreement when we came to shoot a scene in which Flynn confronts and destroys one of the Empusa. In both the novel and the screenplay, Empusa can kill at a touch and are only vulnerable to weapons forged from pieces of their ancestors’ skeletons. Flynn retrieves a knife made of this substance, discarded in a cat and mouse standoff between an Empusa called Belphoebe and Carson, the female lead.

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Fig. 4 Empusa over Violet City (2016) courtesy of John Maxwell and Dave Jackson

Unaware of its potential, he throws it into the Empusa’s heart, killing it from a safe distance. I arrived on set to find Flynn and the Empusa stand-in engaged in a wrestling contest, and the director, happy to indulge his actors. The fight instructor seemed unaware that this should not happen at this point in the story. The actor playing Flynn, enjoying his fight scene, tried to justify this anomaly and the director, a little in awe of the fight instructor, started to back him up. This sparked an argument, but the director eventually saw my point and changed the blocking for the scene. I sensed that my interference on set was resented, echoing aspects of the wider professional industry where writers are sometimes banned from being on set (Fig. 4).

Post-Production Because various collaborators had failed to deliver, the director was doing all the editing, compositing, modelling, SFX and dubbing, and had developed an understandable sensitivity to criticism. He worked alone on the film over the next couple of years and by the spring of 2013 had a very long edit of the film. Looking at the edit with fresh eyes, I realised that a number of plot elements were missing or not sufficiently signposted within the action. This gave the film a confused and abstract quality, something that I had hoped to avoid. Aspects of the story that had seemed to work on the page and in our original read-throughs, no longer seemed clear. Key elements had been skipped-over. There was insufficient coverage in certain scenes, chief amongst which was an ambitious battle sequence. The lack of storyboarding meant the positioning of actors within the frame had sometimes made it difficult to synchronize the backgrounds in a convincing manner. The director and I decided that the best way around these problems was for me to revisit the screenplay and find a way to provide a more effective through line and much needed exposition. As we

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were dubbing all the dialogue, there was an opportunity for me to rewrite the occasional line to produce clarity. I suggested we give Professor Mercuria an epistolary voice-over, beginning with her letter warning Katherine to leave Pale Haven. We had the character deliver this over the opening sequence, and then continue her voice-over as she gradually translates a book on the Life Cycle of Empusa, writing her discoveries in her notebook. Her musings needed linking to scenes in which she appeared or in which the action related to her thoughts as she recorded them in her notebook. However, we still had the problem of supplying information to which this character was not privy. I thought of using old-fashioned scene cards to fit the early cinema stylings and the primitive special effects we were using. We had always had in mind that we should aim for a sort of German Expressionist look for the film. The director preferred to try an omniscient narrator first, although I had doubts about how an audience would respond to two different voiceovers. My job was to go through the film, indicating places on the timecode where this freshly written voice-over would fit. I reasoned that the omniscient narrative voice should be set up from the beginning, giving a sense of a storyteller commencing a tale beginning with the line: ‘Every full moon, Aaron went hunting the demon that took his wife’. I needed to resist the temptation to put in too much detail, but once we had a narrator present, it seemed we needed recurring beats of this voice throughout the film. While I was out of the country, the director arranged a semi-public screening with the film still at 150-mins. The audience reaction was less than favourable, particularly to the omniscient narrator. In response to this, we decided to keep Mercuria’s epistolary voice-over but replace the narrator with a few well-placed scene cards, done silent movie style. This meant trimming back the narrator’s comments to just a few words on each card.

Is Editing Script Development? Where does script development end? Our story development process had been ongoing, through filming, post-production and the decision to write voiceovers and scene cards, as we sculpted the shape of the narrative into something we hoped would work. However, we still needed to reduce the length of the film significantly. In order to do this, the director asked me to make extensive editing notes. I went through the nearly three hours of footage, comparing it to elements in the screenplay and making detailed suggestions for shortening shots, scenes and sequences. Justifiably proud of some of his striking composites, the director had a tendency to hold shots for too long, would enter scenes too early and stay with them too late. Because I was so familiar with the story and characters’ motivations, I could see moments where we failed to show an important image that was supposed to coincide with a line of dialogue. Between us, we gradually honed the film down by a further 30 minutes.

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After a further test screening, the director decided that the set-up before the story shifted to Violet City was too long and that we needed to get there quicker. After the opening flashback montage, we originally established Flynn’s relationship with the friend who would betray him, showed how the attack of a carnivorous plant triggered his genetic inheritance and showed Zeb escaping the mining village to avoid the irate fathers of pregnant daughters. We then cut to months later and Flynn receiving a message from Zeb, asking him to join him in Violet City. It is only then that we transition to Violet City to find Zeb in charge of a street gang. John suggested we cut most of this and open with Flynn already preparing to join his exiled friend in Violet City. I was reluctant to lose all the background that established their relationship, but agreed that we needed to get Flynn into the action quicker. I suggested transferring a truncated version of the set up sequence into the first of Flynn’s dream sequences, while he is in hiding, stowed aboard an airship bound for Violet City. This trimmed off another eight minutes of screen time, and with some further adjustments, we got the film down to a reasonable length. Because of this process, I have come to regard our collaborative editing process as part of our ongoing script development process. Accepted industry practices might regard script development as pertaining only to the period before production begins, but our editing process became part of our story development, as we revisited and tweaked the original screenplay as a guide to the final cut.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have uncovered the ways in which script development can be understood in the context of a specific green screen film production. Over the case study, I have drawn some conclusions. For us, the notion of script development became a flexible concept, which responded to the specific circumstances of a specific production. Our initial rush into pre-production allowed us little time to follow the more conventionally accepted methods of script development. We did not have time to go from treatment through multiple script drafts to shooting script and storyboards. Our window of opportunity between the decision to make the film and the availability of production facilities was two months. Because of that, we chose to improvise and effectively ‘play’ the development process ‘by ear’. Otherwise, the film would not have been made. This meant that I did not develop a screenplay that fully anticipated many of the challenges we would encounter during filming and post-production. I should have thought more about envisioning shots and scenes in a way that allowed us to build environments that our actors could inhabit convincingly. Though the comparative freedom from ‘big print’ restrictions allowed for imaginative leaps when writing scene descriptions, more consideration of

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practical limitations, and trimming or cutting the more epic scenarios would have saved time in compositing and editing. Our urgency did not allow a sufficient period for me to test certain plot threads and to excise scenes and minor characters that inhibited the forward flow of the narrative. Therefore, instead of having a cut off period before the film went into production—or until the film was shot—our screenplay development continued throughout filming and on into post-production and editing until we finally trimmed Violet City to 103 minutes. Driven by the desire to bypass the long and uncertain gestation periods we associated with ‘development hell’, and by a narrow circumstantial timeframe, we launched into a ‘now or never’ project that would not have been made had we spent months or even years on traditional script development.

References Batty, C., & Taylor, S. (2016). Script development and the hidden practices of screenwriting: Perspectives from industry professionals. New Writing, 13(2), 204–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1120314p.215 Batty, C., & Taylor, S. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 226. Bloore, P. (2012). The screenplay business: Managing creativity and script development in the film industry. Routledge. Buchan, S. (2011). The Quay Brothers: Into a metaphysical playroom (p. 250). University of Minnesota Press. Ganz, A. (2012). ‘To make you see’: Screenwriting, description and the ‘lens-based’ tradition. Royal Holloway University of London. Schock, B. (1995). Intelligent screenplay development. Filmmaker Magazine. http:// filmmakermagazine.com/58169-intelligent-screenplaydevelopment/-VSslpZSUfgU Tucker, C. E. (2018, January 13). Screenplay Readers. Retrieved January 31, 2021, from Screenplay Readers: https://www.screenplayreaders.com/screenplay-actionand-description/ Vandermeer, J. (2013). Wonderbook: The illustrated guide to creating imaginative fiction. Abrams Image.

Checking The Black List Twice: The Ambiguous Industry Role of Script Development Services Anthony Twarog

Introduction In October of 2012, when the screenwriting brand The Black List launched a professionalisation service for aspiring screenwriters, it was joining an already crowded field of competitors: much like Scriptapalooza, Script Reader Pro, Script Arsenal, and various other services, The Black List sold customers feedback on scripts; much like Script Pipeline, InkTip, and Spec Scout, The Black List sold customers the ability to make their scripts accessible to development workers. Trade publications and prominent development workers had largely ignored The Black List’s competitors, however—or worse, had condemned them as scams exploiting amateurs from the margins of the industry—what Stephen Galloway of The Hollywood Reporter described as “a dark corner of the mainstream entertainment business” (2018, para. 4). The Black List represented something new. The company’s co-founder and public face, Franklin Leonard, had been a development executive at high-profile companies like Overbrook Entertainment, Universal Pictures, and Appian Way Productions, and he had leveraged his status to bring prominent development workers on board as participants in The Black List. Unlike its competitors, The Black List appealed to customers from the brightly lit centre of Hollywood. Trade publications and prominent development workers have in turn hailed The Black List as transcendent among script development services—services A. Twarog (B) University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_41

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that sell participation in industrial script development to aspiring screenwriters. “Unlike so many of the moving parts in this cottage industry”, Galloway concludes in the same article quoted above, “Black List is well regarded within Hollywood” (2018, para. 4). Ascribing the legitimacy of The Black List to its proximity to the perceived centre of the film industry, champions of the service have endorsed Leonard’s claims that The Black List is an advocacy tool for undiscovered writers. “For years people have been asking me how to get their scripts to Hollywood”, Leonard told The Hollywood Reporter at the launch of the service in 2012: “Short of endless rounds of unanswered query letters and screenplay competitions that may, in the best-case scenario, attract the notice of a few people, I never had a good answer. We built [The Black List] to provide one” (Siegel, 2012, para. 4). Promoted as an industry-authorised means for aspiring screenwriters to participate in script development, The Black List ambiguously frames its users as both consumers and freelance screenwriters, participants in the film industry who are nevertheless low enough in the industry’s hierarchies that they must pay (rather than be paid) to work. In this chapter, I analyse the texts created by Black List workers, supporters, and critics in their efforts to manage the role of the company in script development. These texts include interviews, blog posts, podcasts, and articles, as well as the Black List site itself. In addition, Leonard has created nearly 40 posts on the popular forum site Reddit since joining the site publicly in 2013 and has engaged in lengthy exchanges about the Black List brand with Reddit users. Weighing the public discourse surrounding The Black List against the practices and history of the site, I have tried to keep in mind Caldwell’s (2009) insistence that media industry disclosures reveal more about the narratives their authors want to promote than they do about their purported objects. The purpose of this chapter is not to assess the value of The Black List for consumers but rather to untangle some of the varied motivations that shape the role of The Black List in script development. I argue that the site’s ambiguous role as both a consumer service and a professional tool masks its direct participation in industrial script development and, in so doing, renders the work of the site’s readers and users less visible.

Theorising the Consumer Screenwriting Industry Companies that target consumer screenwriters date back to the silent film era. Indeed, much of the scholarship on the consumer screenwriting industry examines the “scenario fever” and popular film writing movements of the early twentieth century (see, e.g. Bailey, 2014; Curran, 2019; Lester, 2018, Liepa, 2010; 2011; Morey, 2003). Examinations of the more recent history of the industry are less common, but scholars tend to examine contemporary screenwriting products and services as reflections of the dominant views about screenwriting aesthetics (Maras, 2009; Murphy, 2007; Thompson, 1999), or else as means for professional screenwriters and development workers to

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negotiate their roles in the film industry (Bernardi & Hoxter, 2017; Conor, 2014). However, the mass of participants in such services are not professional screenwriters: they are amateurs, hobbyists, aspiring professionals, and media workers in other areas. As I argue in this chapter, the consumer screenwriting industry does more than reflect the shifting beliefs and practices of professional screenwriters: it constructs screenwriting as a popular practice, constructs distinctions between professionals and amateurs, and constructs the role of the film industry in screenwriting culture. In an era when the means to produce and distribute media are more widely accessible than ever, services like The Black List are the front lines in a continual negotiation between participants in screenwriting discourse about who can lay claim to being a screenwriter and so participate in film production. As Maras (2009) argues, screenwriting is not a coherent object of study but rather a discourse with contested, sometimes contradictory meanings. Recent efforts to define script development have demonstrated that it is an equally ambiguous object of study and an inherently collaborative process (Batty et al., 2017). This is not to deny the fact that screenplays and screenwriters are frequently overlooked authors in American cinema but is meant to suggest that the image of the professional screenwriter as the primary creator of the screen idea distorts the actual processes of script development (MacDonald, 2013) and erases the work of script analysts, interns, assistants, managers, agents, executives, screenwriting consumers, and the screenwriting consumer industry in creating the conditions of possibility within which industrial screenplays are developed and produced. Such services and personnel are active, influential participants in the industrial process of determining what stories will be told. This chapter builds on media industry research that draws out the unjust structures of power endemic to contemporary media industries. As Conor et al. (2015) argue, contemporary media industries reproduce systemic inequalities through various means: the “informality … of hiring practices which largely exist outside formal channels and are enacted through contacts and word of mouth” (p. 10); “the deeply entrenched culture of ‘working for free’” (p. 9); “the prevalence of second-jobbing or indeed multi-jobbing” (p. 9); and the fact that these conditions, which disproportionately affect women and people of colour, are worsening in media industries. The Black List reproduces industrial modes of work but also masks their reproduction by positioning users as consumers rather than media workers. As the following pages demonstrate, however, framing The Black List as either a consumer service or an industrial service belies the site’s long-term ambitions to digitize the script development process for professional and aspiring screenwriters alike.

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The Legitimisation of The Black List Endorsements of The Black List from media workers tend to follow a similar pattern: the author (or blogger or podcaster) expresses scepticism about the value of The Black List for screenwriting consumers, citing the range of similar services already available and their reputations as mere moneymaking schemes. However, Leonard ultimately convinces the author (or blogger or podcaster) that The Black List is different. For example, Beejoli Shah of Gawker penned an article titled, “Are All Screenplay Services Bullshit? The Black List Might Not Be”. Shah describes consumer script development services as generally “worthless” before noting that a conversation with Leonard “really brought [her] around on what the site offers – and how it differs from other services” (2013, para. 22). Shah cites the participation of vetted industry professionals and the nominal cost of the service as key factors in her conversion. Shortly after the launch of The Black List in October of 2012, established screenwriters Craig Mazin and John August brought Franklin Leonard onto their podcast Scriptnotes to discuss the Black List service and express their scepticism about its value for aspiring screenwriters. August notes that his “knee jerk reaction” to hearing about The Black List “was that it felt weird that the business model was based around charging fees for people with dreams” (August, 2012, para. 55). Similarly, Mazin expresses his scepticism about The Black List but ultimately contrasts Leonard with “a world of charlatans who prey on you [aspiring screenwriters] out there” (August, 2012, para. 67). What Leonard has that the charlatans do not, Mazin suggests, is “insight”. Mazin continues: “If they had insight they would probably be doing what John [August] does or Franklin [Leonard] does. They don’t” (August, 2012, para. 67). Connecting Leonard’s insight to his professional experience working at the perceived centre of the film industry, Mazin associates the potential for The Black List’s customers to get their money’s worth with Leonard’s participation in the development process at its most profitable centres. In the conversion narratives of Mazin, August, and Shah, what distinguished The Black List was Leonard’s personal insight into industrial script development, his authority to virtualize and, in so doing, to reproduce the dominant industry practices governing how writers get hired, how aspiring screenwriters understand their labour, and how development companies structure their internal hierarchies. Promoting The Black List as an authentic (and therefore admirable) recreation of the development process for those not yet drawn into its practices, trade publications and development workers have also positioned the service as a means for the site’s users to gain access to an authoritative Hollywood from which other services are too distanced to truly represent. Far from an open door to Hollywood, The Black List constructs itself as a buffer between the public and the insular professional community that the site represents. As I argue in the following section, framing The Black List as a permeable barrier between aspiring professionals and the professional world of screenwriting renders the work of script readers less visible.

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The Cost of The Black List One of the most frequent criticisms levelled against The Black List is that its feedback is not worth the cost, not only because the site provides less than a page of feedback per script but also because the site poorly pays its readers. At its launch, The Black List distinguished itself in part by costing far less than any of the other prominent feedback services available at the time. Whereas coverage services like Scriptapalooza and Script Pipeline, for example, currently charge between $150 and $200 for minimal coverage on a featurelength script (Screenplay Coverage, n.d.) (General Notes, n.d.), The Black List charges customers only $75 for script comments (Register, n.d.); when the site launched in 2012, the Black List charged customers only $50. As a result of this low cost, however, The Black List initially paid its readers only $25 for comments per feature-length script (Leonard, 2014a), significantly less than the industry standard, which a creative executive put at $40–$60 for freelance coverage in 2014 (Lockhart, 2014). However, public debates about the cost of The Black List coverage have focused on the value of the feedback for customers rather than the precarity of Black List readers. Along these lines, exchanges between customers and Leonard have positioned the debate about the wages for Black List readers as a question about the quality of the feedback rather than the pay rates for Black List workers. For instance, when Leonard created a Reddit post recruiting readers for The Black List in 2014, the most upvoted comment sarcastically referred to the site’s “high quality readers” and suggested that they’d have to make less than minimum wage in order to write quality feedback, given the flat rate The Black List paid readers for feedback (ethomephone, 2014). Leonard responded that experienced readers take only two hours to read and cover a full-length script for The Black List, since the site requires readers to write only three paragraphs of comments (Leonard, 2014b). However, a follow-up commenter quickly pointed out that this meant that experienced readers for The Black List were still only getting paid $12.50 an hour (dedanschubs, 2014). Leonard’s most common response to these criticisms has been to note that readers hired by the site, in the words used on the Black List hiring page, “have a minimum of one-year, full-time experience (i.e. not interns) reading as, at least, employed first filters for major Hollywood financiers, studios, networks, production companies, agencies, or management companies” (Jobs at The Black List, n.d.). Addressing the concern that the feedback may be substandard, both users and The Black List set aside the question of whether or not the site’s readers are underpaid. In his 2013 interview with Shah, Leonard claimed that the site’s readers are experienced professionals who are “either between jobs or taking the careers in different direction [sic]” (Shah, 2013, para. 12). Many who have criticized The Black List for paying readers less than the industry standard have done so by way of suggesting that the site can only afford inexperienced readers and therefore that the feedback The Black List offers has little value. However,

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framing the work of Black List readers as a consumer satisfaction issue rather than an industrial issue renders the work of those readers less visible and therefore more precarious. According to the Black List hiring page, “all readers are hired on a freelance basis” (Jobs at The Black List, n.d.). And Leonard has promoted the selectivity of Black List hiring practices by noting that fewer than 15% of qualified applicants are hired as readers (Leonard, 2015c). Acknowledging the active role of The Black List in industrial script development reframes the platform and recenters the experiences of its media workers (both its users and readers) in their efforts to find and keep paid work. Of course, The Black List does not reproduce every aspect of conventional industrial script development. Whereas professional screenwriters in most cases would never see coverage written for their scripts, writers who receive feedback through The Black List can take their comments and publish them wherever they like. Some customers publish their comments to express their dissatisfaction. In his responses to these posts, Leonard often stands by the reader comments but sometimes sympathizes with the writer, suggesting that the script readers failed to provide consistent feedback or score the scripts fairly. In response to a complaint about inconsistent Black List coverage on a 2015 Reddit post, Leonard wrote: “Trust me: the only person more dissatisfied with a poor quality evaluation than you is me. I want to know which of our readers aren’t delivering you an exceptional product so we can let them go” (Leonard, 2015b). When other commenters made similar complaints, Leonard continued: “If readers get regular, legitimate complaints along those lines at all frequently (more than twice per one hundred scripts), we let them go” (Leonard, 2015a). Although Leonard has rarely been so explicit about firing readers who provide substandard feedback, the tenor of his comments has always been that he and the company keep a close eye on customer satisfaction. Pursuant to this, writers who receive feedback from The Black List can in turn rate their readers on a scale of 1 to 5 (Leonard, 2015a). In an already precarious field, script readers for The Black List face the additional scrutiny of customer satisfaction. Industry professionals weighing in on the debate about the amounts that The Black List charges its customers and the amounts that it pays its readers have similarly framed the debate around the customer experience rather than the employee experience. For instance, Mazin in Leonard’s ScriptNotes interview contrasted the low cost of Black List feedback with the norm by way of suggesting that Leonard was not out to scam customers (August, 2012). August then pointed out that readers were getting paid less than standard, but largely by way of prompting Leonard to explain that Black List customers would receive a shorter-than-average amount of feedback. Along these lines, the development executive-turned-screenwriting guru Stephanie Palmer, wrote a post on her blog Good in a Room suggesting that readers decline to use the Black List feedback service on the grounds that the site’s low-paid readers inevitably wrote “sloppy” comments (Palmer, 2018).

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Even where industry professionals have criticized The Black List for underpaying readers, then, they have done so by way of suggesting that feedback was of little value to customers. Conceiving of The Black List as an instructional tool for amateur screenwriters rather than a professional tool for development workers, industry professionals and customers alike have as a consequence evaluated the site’s hiring practices for their impact on customer experience rather than their participation in exploitative industry practices.

The Black List as an Industry Tool Although The Black List is primarily a tool for aspiring screenwriters, Leonard and co-founder Dino Simone initially created the service as a tool for professional screenwriters and development workers. As far back as 2009, Leonard and Simone, a software engineer, had been working on an idea for a site that would use an intricate system of tags and a sophisticated recommendations algorithm to help development executives quickly find material that was right for their needs (Nguyen, 2016). In October of 2011, a year before the launch of the existing Black List service, Leonard and Simone launched a service (also called The Black List) that would track “Hollywood’s most popular scripts in real time” for established development workers (Finke, 2011, para. 1). Available exclusively to verified industry professionals, the site charged subscribers $20 a month for access. Once Leonard and Simone launched the current Black List service a year later and began charging writers, verified industry professionals were able to use the site for free (August, 2012). Although The Black List has shifted its public promotional emphasis to aspiring screenwriters, the site still reflects an ambition to incorporate more and more professional screenwriters into the userbase and so to digitize the script development process for professional media workers. Leonard has stated publicly that he wants to make The Black List an everyday tool for professional screenwriters and development workers. In response to a question on a 2013 Reddit thread about how long writers should pay to keep their scripts on The Black List, Leonard wrote that “[i]t’s becoming increasingly common for writers to query representatives and producers with their Black List script link in the query, both as an easy means for the recipient to track down the script and to validate its quality from a third party” (Leonard, 2013a). Elsewhere in the same thread, Leonard noted that the company was “working toward a comprehensive database of every single script that anyone with the resources to get a movie made may want to be aware of” (Leonard, 2013b). Describing the security concerns of development workers as one of the larger obstacles to this goal, Leonard wrote that the company was “on an education tour both within the writing community and the agency and management company world explaining the benefits of listing scripts on the site, and thus far that’s been very successful in addressing this issue” (Leonard, 2013b). Campaigning for professional writers to host their scripts on The Black List, Leonard has positioned the database as a means to

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profit not only from aspiring screenwriters but more broadly from the digital flow of unproduced scripts. Many of the features of the Black List site reflect this broader ambition. For example, screenwriters who host their scripts on The Black List are required to first create profiles that highlight their professional experience (or lack thereof), representation (or lack thereof), and any financing (or lack thereof) attached to their scripts. In addition, writers can note any directors attached to the project, as well as any source material on which the script may or may not be based, and any awards that the script may or may not have won. Writers who leave these fields blank nevertheless have them appear as such to industry professionals, highlighting the fact that their scripts lack representation, financing, attachments, source material, and awards. Indeed, beyond a logline and a series of genre tags, the first thing industry professionals see on a Black List script listing is the writer’s profile, replete with professional connections or conspicuously blank fields (Bury Me When I’m Dead, n.d.). Below this section, industry professionals can, if they choose to do so, scroll down to read coverage from Black List readers. The design and features of Black List script listings prioritize the potential for a deal and the ease with which an industry professional might rationalize taking on an otherwise unproven entity. As Ashton and Conor (2016) note, sites like The Black List are “monetising speculative screenwriting labour” (p. 105). Despite this, the dominant discourse—in the online screenwriting community and trade publications—positions The Black List as a buffer between the “professional” centre of Hollywood and the “amateur” public, allowing The Black List to reframe speculative work as hobbyist work in promotional discourse while maintaining an interface that positions the same work as professional work. Blurring the lines between amateur and freelance work, The Black List does not collapse industry hierarchies so much as it positions its users on a spectrum of professionalisation which reproduces the established hierarchies of work in the film industry.

Conclusion Platforms like The Black List are making an argument about the future of script development: namely, that script development services are necessary intermediaries between screenwriters and development workers in an ever-expanding digital marketplace. Whether development workers will be convinced in the long run that this is the case remains to be seen. However, I have argued in this chapter that the stakes of platformized script development are also more immediate: script readers are less visible and more precarious when script development platforms position themselves as neutral intermediaries; screenwriting consumers drawn to these platforms by their rhetorics of meritocracy are hierarchized in ways that reproduce existing imbalances of power in the film industry; and working screenwriters on script development platforms are more entrenched in freelance work (and free work) than ever.

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Of course, The Black List is a business; it exists in part to survive and grow through profit, and the digital flow of unproduced screenplays is a growth market only to the extent that script development workers are willing to pay for new scripts and hire new writers. The purpose of this chapter is not to call on The Black List to fulfil its implicit promise to revolutionize script development but rather to call on scholarship to acknowledge the broader scope of script development beyond professional work. Script development is both a culture and an industry, and it incorporates the labours of all who participate, even the unpaid. To acknowledge the participation of consumer platforms in script development is to acknowledge that their consumers are not simply hapless amateurs: they are media workers, too, labouring on behalf of the platforms they use (and paying to do so). Script development services are more than buffers between development workers and the public, or mouthpieces for working screenwriters looking to influence screenwriting discourse. They and other such contact points are the very means by which the film industry and its consumers are constructed as distinct. They ensure that all roads lead to the established centres of the film industry for screenwriters. Positioning themselves as checkpoints along the way, script development services profit from their efforts to reproduce in a digital marketplace the dominant hierarchies, habits, and beliefs of industrial script development.

References Ashton, D., & Conor, B. (2016). Screenwriting, higher education and digital ecologies of expertise. New Writing, 13(1), 98–108. August, J. (2012, October 25). Scriptnotes, Ep 60: The Black List, and a stack of scenes—Transcript. https://johnaugust.com/2012/scriptnotes-ep-60-the-black-listand-a-stack-of-scenes-transcript Bailey, T. (2014). Normatizing the silent drama: Photoplay manuals of the 1910s and early 1920s. Journal of Screenwriting, 5(2), 209–224. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Bernardi, D., & Hoxter, J. (2017). Off the page: Screenwriting in the era of convergence. University of California Press. Bury Me When I’m Dead. (n.d.). The Black List. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/75466 Caldwell, J. (2009). Cultures of production: Studying industry’s deep texts, reflexitve rituals and managed self-disclosures. In J. Holt & A. Perren (Eds.), Media industries: History, theory, and method (pp. 199–213). Blackwell. Conor, B. (2014). Screenwriting: Creative labor and professional practice. Routledge. Conor, B., Gill, R., & Taylor, S. (2015). Gender and creative labour. The Sociological Review, 63(1), 1–22. Curran, S. C. (2019). Early screenwriting teachers 1910–1922: Origins. Accelerated Education Publications Limited. dedanschubs. (2014, February 23). Does that mean you pay $25 for 2 hours? Geez, you’d get more working at McDonalds... [Comment on the online forum post The

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Black List is hiring.]. Reddit. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://www. reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/1ynfsj/the_black_list_is_hiring/ ethomephone. (2014, February 22). High quality readers that they will pay less than minimum wage for how many hrs it takes for good coverage. [Comment on the online forum post The Black List is hiring.]. Reddit. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/1ynfsj/the_ black_list_is_hiring/ Finke, N. (2011, October 12). The Black List launching web site that tracks most popular scripts in real time. Deadline. https://deadline.com/2011/10/blacklistlaunching-web-site-that-tracks-most-popular-scripts-in-real-time-182180/ Galloway, S. (2018, July 31). Why are so many wannabe screenwriters getting scammed? The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ why-are-wannabe-screenwriters-getting-scammed-1130919 General Notes. (n.d.). Script pipeline. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https:// scriptpipeline.com/shop/general-notes Jobs at The Black List. (n.d.). The Black List. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://blcklst.com/jobs/ Leonard, F. [franklinleonard]. (2013a, December 16). The honest answer is that it varies widely. There have been scripts that have been scooped up within their first [Comment on the online forum post I am the founder of the Black List, the annual list of Hollywood’s most liked unproduced screenplays. Ask Me Anything.]. Reddit. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwri ting/comments/1t0c95/i_am_the_founder_of_the_black_list_the_annual/ Leonard, F. [franklinleonard]. (2013b, December 18). Great question. Biggest flaw: We could have a more complete database of ALL of the scripts circulating in Hollywood, by [Comment on the online forum post I am the founder of the Black List, the annual list of Hollywood’s most liked unproduced screenplays. Ask Me Anything.]. Reddit. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwri ting/comments/1t0c95/i_am_the_founder_of_the_black_list_the_annual/ Leonard, F. [franklinleonard]. (2014a, February 22). On an hourly basis, we pay a little more than the major agencies pay their freelance readers. As I said [Comment on the online forum post The Black List is hiring.]. Reddit. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/1ynfsj/the_ black_list_is_hiring/ Leonard, F. [franklinleonard]. (2014b, February 23). It takes a high quality reader about an hour and a half to read a script in full and about [Comment on the online forum post The Black List is hiring.]. Reddit. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/1ynfsj/the_ black_list_is_hiring/ Leonard, F. [franklinleonard]. (2015a, May 27). Writers are able to rate their readers on a scale of 1–5 after their evaluation posts. Obviously, people who receive [Comment on the online forum post My recent evaluation from The Black List.]. Reddit. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwri ting/comments/37i8di/my_recent_evaluation_from_the_black_list/ Leonard, F. [franklinleonard]. (2015b, May 28). You should have (and still can) email us and let us know that this was your experience. Point blank, if [Comment on the online forum post My recent evaluation from The Black List.]. Reddit. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/ 37i8di/my_recent_evaluation_from_the_black_list/

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Leonard, F. [franklinleonard]. (2015c, August 16). All of our readers have at least a year of experience working as at least a paid assistant to a [Comment on the online forum post The Black List: Ask founder Franklin Leonard anything. Right here. Seriously.]. Reddit. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://www.reddit.com/ r/Screenwriting/comments/3h5dj7/the_black_list_ask_founder_franklin_leonard/ Lester, P. (2018). “Why I am ashamed of the movies”: Editorial policy, Early Hollywood, and the case of camera! The Moving Image, 18(1), 44–86. Liepa, T. (2010). Entertaining the public option: The popular film writing movement and the emergence of writing for the American silent cinema. In J. Nelmes (Ed.), Analysing the screenplay (pp. 7–23). Routledge. Liepa, T. (2011). An uneven marketplace of ideas: Amateur screenwriting the Library of Congress and the struggle for copyright. Journal of Screenwriting, 2(2), 179–193. Lockhart, C. (2014, April 21). Q & A: How can I get a job as a script reader for a studio or agency? Screenwriter’s Utopia. http://www.screenwritersutopia.com/art icle/c14ad90c Macdonald, I. (2013). Screenwriting poetics and the screen idea. Palgrave Macmillan. Maras, S. (2009). Screenwriting: History, theory, and practice. Wallflower Press. Morey, A. (2003). Hollywood outsiders: The adaptation of the film industry, 1913–1934. University of Minnesota Press. Murphy, J. J. (2007). Me and you and Memento and Fargo: How independent screenplays work. Bloomsbury Academic. Nguyen, S. (2016, June 21). How Franklin Leonard’s Black List is reshaping Hollywood. Harvard Magazine. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/07/outsid ers-insider Palmer, S. (n.d.). Script coverage: Is it worth it? Good in a Room. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from https://goodinaroom.com/blog/script-coverage/ Register. (n.d.). The Black List. Retrieved January 11, 2021, from https://blcklst. com/register/writer/ Screenplay Coverage (n.d.). Scriptapalooza. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from http://www.scriptcoverage.com/products/ Shah, B. (2013, November 5). Are all screenplay services bullshit? The Black List Might Not Be. Gawker. http://defamer.gawker.com/are-all-screenplay-services-bul lshit-the-black-list-mi-1458939273 Siegel, T. (2012, October 15). The Black List launches paid script service. The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/black-list-lau nches-paid-service-378934 Thompson, K. (1999). Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding classical narrative technique. Harvard University Press.

Correction to: Lean Script Development in the Available Materials School of Filmmaking: This Is Dedicated to The One I Love Andrew Kenneth Gay

Correction to: Chapter “Lean Script Development in the Available Materials School of Filmmaking: This Is Dedicated to The One I Love”: S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_23 The original version of the chapter was inadvertently published with parenthetical note at the bottom of page 332 “(Shelton has since become the President of Duplass Productions.),” which has now been changed to “(Eslyn has since become the President of Duplass Productions.)”. The book has been updated with the changes.

The updated original version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_23

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_42

C1

Index

A adaptation, 2, 5, 230, 256, 258, 261, 262, 304, 359–364, 369–372, 392, 394, 443, 478, 533, 536, 537, 546–549, 551, 552, 572, 585, 586 alternative filmmaking practice, 309, 310, 313 animation, 2, 3, 5, 92, 188, 192, 196, 197, 497, 540, 546, 547, 551–553 anthology films, 175 archive, 98, 99, 109, 115, 165, 188, 189, 192, 195, 196, 219, 231, 233, 243, 337, 360, 361, 395, 448, 517, 536 artistic work method, 69, 362, 486, 487, 495 Asian films, 268, 275, 276, 392 aspiring screenwriters, 138, 371, 599–602, 605, 606 audience, 3, 48, 50, 52, 53, 64, 66, 69, 95, 96, 98, 104, 124, 129, 130, 135, 149, 154–156, 163–165, 169, 172, 173, 181, 183, 188, 190, 191, 194, 196, 197, 219–221, 223, 226, 227, 229–231, 234, 235, 237, 244, 245, 268, 269, 283, 303, 310–312, 316, 320, 323, 330, 335, 363, 370, 383, 384, 386, 391, 393, 397–403, 417, 419, 421, 425, 426, 428, 429, 431–434, 444, 446, 453, 459, 461–463, 465, 469, 470, 474, 476–479, 481, 486, 496–500, 504,

505, 511, 513, 514, 523, 524, 531, 535, 539, 546–554, 563, 566, 588, 590, 596 audience engagement, 222, 392, 402 authorship, 121, 122, 125, 129–131, 230, 257, 331

B Bollywood, 148, 217–222, 225

C CBI, 312, 313, 321. See also character-based improvisation character, 47–53, 55, 56, 59, 62, 63, 65–67, 69, 93, 94, 97, 103–105, 107–109, 114, 115, 117, 122, 124, 131, 137–142, 144, 149, 152, 153, 156, 163, 164, 166–171, 177, 181, 189–192, 194, 196, 197, 202–204, 206, 207, 209, 211–214, 221–223, 225, 226, 252, 255, 257–260, 262, 269, 271–274, 280, 283–290, 300, 301, 309–323, 331, 333–336, 338, 344–349, 351–353, 360, 361, 364, 365, 368, 370–372, 376, 383–386, 391, 393, 396, 399, 401, 402, 408, 411, 413, 414, 416–419, 421, 425–434, 439, 441, 443, 445–448, 451, 452, 458–463, 469, 472, 474–479, 486, 487, 489–493, 496,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Taylor and C. Batty (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7

611

612

INDEX

499, 500, 504, 506, 511–514, 519–527, 532–539, 541, 546, 547, 549–553, 560–567, 572, 573, 575, 578, 580, 586–588, 590–593, 596, 598 character-based improvisation., 313, 315. See also CBI character development, 149, 166, 209, 313, 316, 319, 322, 348, 351, 376, 391, 402, 444, 447, 563 cinematic virtual reality., 5, 147, 503, 506. See also CVR collaboration, 1, 2, 6, 61, 113, 125, 149, 154, 217, 220, 221, 230, 231, 233, 234, 237, 238, 241, 243, 259, 276, 280, 281, 287, 288, 291, 310, 312, 320, 329, 359, 372, 397, 398, 403, 425, 427, 432–434, 439, 469, 471, 476, 477, 479–481, 489, 499, 506, 518, 519, 531, 532, 540, 547, 571, 575–581 collective script development, 138, 173, 180, 184, 192, 197, 279, 281, 402, 432 comedy, 47, 51, 52, 56, 64, 92, 138, 151, 165, 425–429, 434, 444, 446, 447, 472, 557, 559–561, 563, 566 communication, 3, 66, 87, 93, 94, 99, 148, 150, 151, 155, 156, 218, 232, 234, 328, 332–338, 361, 369, 370, 410, 457, 458, 474, 496, 497, 499, 500, 517, 521, 528, 532, 540, 542, 553, 554, 559, 576, 577, 581 confidence, 55, 94, 125, 136, 141, 145, 168, 238, 270, 355, 386, 427, 435 consumers, 171, 473, 475, 481, 600, 601, 607 corrective culture, 142 creative, 2, 5, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 60, 61, 69, 70, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93–96, 99, 100, 107, 118, 121–129, 131, 132, 136, 137, 141–143, 149, 154, 157, 164–168, 172, 173, 178, 180, 181, 188, 192, 198, 214, 215, 218, 221, 223, 227, 231, 232, 237, 241, 243, 246, 254, 258, 259, 261, 279–284, 286, 287, 289, 291, 296, 311–313, 315, 320, 322–324, 327–332, 336, 337, 342–346, 349–352, 356,

361–363, 371, 372, 376, 378, 380, 381, 383, 385, 392, 395, 397, 398, 403, 409–411, 425–428, 430, 433–435, 439, 452, 454, 455, 457, 458, 463, 465, 470, 473, 474, 481, 486, 488–490, 492, 495–497, 504, 505, 507, 508, 517, 529, 535–538, 549, 558, 561, 564, 565, 567, 568, 570, 572–575, 578, 580, 586, 592, 593, 603 creative labour, 122, 127, 130, 132, 281, 287 creative practice, 227, 272, 311, 323, 324, 337, 343, 349, 350, 356, 398, 407–410, 420, 426, 428, 452, 465, 570 criticism, 93–95, 139, 141, 142, 153, 170, 223, 302, 354, 355, 400, 427, 428, 447, 472, 473, 481, 494, 522, 551, 574, 595, 603 cross-cultural, 4, 163, 164, 166, 171–173, 234, 533 culture, 2, 3, 93, 95, 125, 128–130, 147, 148, 152, 163–166, 169, 170, 173, 177, 182, 183, 219, 225, 233, 235, 236, 238, 242, 243, 245, 246, 253, 259, 260, 263, 268, 272, 273, 275, 276, 291, 297, 345, 362, 392, 395, 401, 402, 408, 446, 451, 452, 454, 456, 457, 461, 471, 475, 479, 526, 531, 532, 534, 535, 537, 542, 551, 554, 558, 571, 573, 577, 580, 581, 601, 607 CVR, 503, 504–509, 511, 512, 514. See also cinematic virtual reality

D developer, 62, 69, 150, 155, 157, 242, 330, 504, 532, 534, 536, 537, 540, 573 development executive, 4, 88–93, 97, 153, 157, 586, 599, 604, 605 digital screenwriting, 378, 379, 387 digital story composing, 380, 381, 384–387 directing, 6, 56, 69, 88–90, 92, 151, 157, 170, 177, 181, 188, 237, 260, 267, 272–275, 284, 317, 318, 327,

INDEX

344, 350, 351, 378, 384, 430–432, 464, 486, 505, 508, 509, 511, 524, 528, 563, 591, 592, 603 director, 48, 49, 52, 59, 61, 64, 70, 90–93, 96, 97, 104, 121, 122, 125–128, 137, 138, 143, 144, 176–178, 180, 181, 183, 202–205, 207, 219, 220, 242, 251, 254–256, 258, 260–262, 267, 269–275, 280–282, 284, 286, 289, 291, 296, 304, 309, 310, 312, 313, 315–317, 319–322, 324, 327, 331, 332, 335, 352, 360, 375, 376, 382, 383, 385, 386, 391, 395, 418–420, 425–434, 437–439, 443–445, 448, 453, 479, 486, 488–490, 492, 500, 501, 504, 505, 507, 517, 518, 520, 526, 546, 551, 552, 565, 571, 574–578, 580, 585, 586, 588, 592–597, 606 docudrama, 163, 164, 166 documentary, 2, 4, 103–105, 107, 108, 113–115, 118, 177, 182, 188–190, 192, 193, 196, 198, 295, 310, 313, 319, 342, 381, 382, 385, 391–400, 402, 403, 472, 487, 488, 490, 492, 500, 504, 506, 507, 570 drafts, 53, 55, 61–63, 66–68, 89, 97, 99, 113, 123, 139, 140, 142–144, 149, 165, 166, 168, 170, 179, 209, 213, 223, 257, 259, 296–302, 304, 305, 317, 318, 322, 327, 331, 334, 337, 346, 349–355, 359, 370, 377, 396, 408, 411, 417, 438–441, 445–448, 453, 455, 458, 460–462, 464, 476, 486, 488, 508, 512, 513, 558, 559, 561, 565–567, 586–589, 593, 597 drag king, 451, 453, 456, 457, 459, 461–464 dramatic design, 407, 410–412, 414, 419–421 dramatic structure, 96, 97, 254, 396, 434 dramaturgy, 97, 251, 256, 486, 490, 492, 494–500, 547, 548

613

E emergence, 49, 69, 70, 180, 217, 513, 535, 542, 573 emotion/emotional, 2, 154–156, 167, 169, 194, 224, 226, 229, 231, 232, 234, 236, 237, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245, 271, 274, 282, 283, 287, 288, 290, 305, 310, 311, 314, 335, 336, 347–349, 351, 353, 356, 381, 396, 398, 411, 418, 419, 421, 447, 448, 457, 459, 460, 469, 471, 479, 493, 498, 503, 523, 547 empathy, 138, 142, 143, 223, 287, 289, 311, 355, 402, 419, 469, 471, 472, 478, 480, 547 engagement., 125, 167, 227, 231, 233, 280, 291, 350, 403, 411, 414, 416, 421, 454, 456, 460, 464, 465, 514, 547, 550, 570. See also audience engagement entertainment industry, 533 essay film, 187, 189, 198 European television, 261 executive, 61, 89, 93, 94, 98, 121, 124, 144, 151, 258, 261, 275, 359, 394, 532, 538, 539, 545, 562, 577, 603

F factual TV storytelling, 2, 4 feature film, 59, 60, 62, 68, 90, 123, 147, 148, 180, 181, 184, 191, 208, 230, 241, 242, 280, 281, 289, 291, 310–312, 314, 315, 323, 341, 350, 361, 376, 392, 396–398, 403, 413, 417, 452, 453, 458, 464, 475, 504, 507, 559, 586, 587 feedback, 2, 53, 62, 64, 66–68, 136, 137, 139, 143, 145, 149–151, 153, 157, 179, 198, 256, 261, 271, 273, 274, 286, 329, 330, 351, 354–356, 377, 425, 426, 433, 434, 463, 476, 488, 512–514, 599, 603, 604 film censorship, 225 filmmaking, local, 267, 268, 276 filmmaking, low-budget, 59, 61–63 film production, 217, 247, 281, 309, 311, 315, 377, 378, 438, 518, 565, 579, 586, 597, 601

614

INDEX

First Nations cinema, 183 floor plan, 376, 409, 419, 421 found footage, 115, 380, 381 Fourth Cinema, 183 freelance, 93, 150, 151, 157, 254, 517, 600, 603, 604, 606 funding, 3, 55, 59, 61, 64, 66, 68, 89, 90, 92, 93, 106, 123, 130, 149, 150, 152, 157, 183, 311, 315, 321, 350, 391, 393, 395–398, 443, 453, 473, 550, 561, 562, 586

G gender, 2, 50, 55, 122, 124, 125, 127–129, 131, 132, 152, 244, 314–316, 321, 454, 457, 459, 470, 471, 473, 479, 537 genetic criticism, 202 German television, 147, 251, 253–255, 258, 259, 262, 263, 579, 580

H history, 47, 103, 106, 109, 123, 126, 163, 165–167, 173, 176, 188–199, 201, 207, 223, 230–232, 234, 236–241, 258, 270, 321, 361, 381, 383, 391, 459, 465, 528, 533, 548, 549, 587, 593, 600 Holocaust, 187, 188, 191–194, 196–198 humour, 52–55, 63, 139, 169, 428–430, 433, 434, 459, 461, 547, 549

I improvisation, 217, 237, 309, 310, 313, 314, 316, 317, 319, 322, 323, 330, 331, 334, 336, 337, 375–382, 384, 385, 387, 411, 443, 448, 489, 490, 493 Indian screenwriting, 218 Indigenous, 166, 176, 181, 183, 184, 187, 190, 194–196, 198, 226, 234, 242, 268, 272, 274–276, 321, 391–395, 399, 402 indigenous screenwriting, 276 indigenous voices, 184, 276 indigenous world-view, 183, 184

In-group/Out-group (I/O), 451, 454, 455, 457, 461, 465 innate storytelling, 136, 387, 400 international, 2, 3, 62, 123, 124, 126, 130, 138, 147, 164, 167, 168, 171–173, 276, 311, 393, 444, 479, 566 interviews, 3, 4, 97, 103, 108–111, 113, 114, 116, 122, 130, 131, 144, 148, 151, 154, 156, 157, 176, 178, 181, 184, 189, 190, 193, 196, 202, 206–208, 218–222, 238, 242, 246, 252–256, 258, 259, 280, 285, 288, 296, 297, 302–304, 327–329, 345, 356, 359–361, 368–372, 438, 457, 461, 464, 477, 478, 504, 507, 514, 533, 538, 540, 546, 551–553, 570, 574–578, 580, 600, 603, 604 L lean script development, 328, 329, 331, 337 learning, 67, 170, 176, 198, 271, 275, 311, 324, 347, 351, 352, 354, 355, 426, 427, 452, 464. See also learning and teaching learning and teaching, 351, 353, 354 libretto, 546–551, 553 literature, 96, 302, 303, 346–351, 355, 359, 362, 371, 408, 438, 453, 471, 505, 521, 547, 549, 560, 574 low-budget. See filmmaking, low-budget M M¯aori filmmaking, 148 medieval pilgrimage, 48 memorialization, 194 mentor, 123, 136, 137, 145, 154, 180, 267, 274–276, 332, 400 Millard, Kathryn, 107 modernism, 296 multimodal, 375, 377, 571 N narrative, 2, 3, 48, 53, 54, 56, 63, 64, 66, 67, 109, 124, 127, 130–132, 135, 151, 152, 165, 169, 182,

INDEX

188–197, 217, 220–224, 227, 232, 251, 256, 262, 274, 279, 281–291, 297–300, 302–304, 310–312, 314–319, 321–323, 333, 337, 343, 344, 346, 347, 350–352, 360, 362–365, 368, 371, 375–377, 380, 381, 383–386, 391, 393, 394, 396, 398–400, 402, 403, 413, 421, 425–427, 430, 433, 434, 438, 440, 444, 446, 448, 456, 459, 460, 469, 471, 475, 491, 496, 497, 503–508, 511–513, 518, 531–542, 547, 550, 558, 560, 563–566, 569, 571–581, 585, 588, 591, 593, 596, 598, 600, 602 neo-noir, 297 Netflix, 49, 95, 171, 172, 217, 256, 454, 470, 480, 481 New Zealand film, 175, 176, 180–182, 184, 315, 438, 444–446, 448, 452 noir, 296 notes, 6, 51–53, 59–61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 87–99, 104, 105, 108, 113, 125, 137, 139–143, 150, 151, 153, 157, 176, 178, 182, 183, 202, 203, 206, 214, 254, 270–273, 285, 295, 297, 302, 304, 322, 331, 334, 337, 346, 352, 356, 362, 364, 369, 376, 377, 380, 383, 385, 397, 407, 409, 417, 420, 428, 432, 438–441, 448, 453, 455, 457, 458, 460–464, 474, 496, 503, 505–509, 511, 512, 523, 535, 537, 538, 552, 557, 565–567, 574, 589, 596, 602, 603, 605, 606

O opera, 2, 5, 141, 169, 254, 255, 360, 476, 522, 524, 525, 545–551, 553, 554

P performance, 62, 138, 238–240, 244, 288, 290, 309–318, 320, 322, 324, 328, 336, 337, 351, 355, 377, 378, 384, 409, 418, 426, 430, 432–434, 448, 451, 454, 457, 461, 463, 464, 477, 546, 548, 549

615

play, 48, 52, 55, 70, 88, 128, 138, 141, 157, 164, 166, 180, 226, 233, 260, 262, 267, 276, 283, 284, 288, 291, 301, 310, 315, 318, 320, 322, 332, 363, 367, 375, 380, 382, 410, 418, 439, 443, 444, 451, 469, 479, 486–500, 503, 512, 513, 518–521, 525, 533, 539, 552, 570, 571, 586, 593, 594, 597 plot development, 149, 251 point of view, 165, 196, 233, 300, 351, 362, 368, 416–419, 464, 489, 496, 497, 500, 509, 511, 524, 539, 557, 564, 565 political economy of cinema, 219 Portuguese screenwriting, 203, 205 post-modern/post-modernism, 296, 303 potential spaces, 487, 488, 490, 491, 499 power, balance of, 89, 90, 92, 141 precarity, 535 prehistory, 399 presence, 54, 109, 180–182, 191, 192, 194, 198, 209, 245, 252, 364, 369, 433, 491, 500, 512, 568, 575 process, 3–5, 47–49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 59–62, 64, 67–70, 87–92, 95, 99, 100, 104, 105, 107, 108, 122, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 136, 139, 140, 142–145, 147–157, 163, 164, 172, 173, 176, 177, 179–183, 188, 192, 194–198, 202, 204, 209, 214, 215, 217–219, 221, 223, 225, 233–235, 237–239, 241, 243, 244, 246, 251, 253, 254, 256–258, 261, 262, 270, 271, 273, 274, 276, 280–286, 288, 289, 291, 296, 299, 302, 304, 309–311, 313–324, 328, 330–332, 335, 337, 342–347, 349–352, 354, 355, 359–364, 369–372, 375–380, 382–387, 391–393, 395–398, 401, 403, 408–411, 413, 414, 418–420, 425–427, 430, 432–434, 437–441, 448, 452, 453, 455–460, 462–465, 470, 472–474, 476–479, 481, 486–493, 495–500, 504–506, 512–514, 517, 519–523, 526, 528, 529, 532, 533, 537–540, 542, 545, 546, 548–553, 557, 558, 560–565,

616

INDEX

567–580, 585, 586, 588, 591–593, 596, 597, 601, 602, 605 producer, 2, 61, 64–68, 87–89, 91–95, 97, 121–123, 125–128, 137, 140–144, 149–153, 156, 165, 176–180, 203, 205–207, 215, 217, 219, 252–258, 260, 261, 267, 274, 283, 284, 288, 313, 320, 324, 332, 334, 335, 359, 360, 370, 377, 391, 394, 395, 426, 453, 456, 471, 473, 477, 480, 486, 489, 501, 505, 507, 517, 518, 520, 523, 526, 528, 529, 531, 532, 534, 537–540, 542, 549, 558, 562, 566, 567, 571, 578, 579, 585, 586, 605 production studies, 122, 253, 254 Q qualitative research, 148 quality TV, 124, 252, 253, 260–262, 579, 580 queer film, 314 R reflection, 3, 105, 131, 194, 197, 227, 230, 246, 287, 303, 324, 341, 344, 408, 410, 419, 425, 426, 428, 433, 439, 443, 452–454, 460, 462, 464, 497, 498, 500, 549, 600 relationships, 47, 67, 87, 89, 92, 93, 98, 114, 115, 118, 123–125, 143, 167, 169, 170, 180, 189–191, 194, 196, 198, 211–214, 223, 225, 229, 231, 232, 234, 236, 238, 244, 246, 255, 267, 269, 275, 280, 282, 283, 288, 289, 291, 299, 313–316, 322, 327, 335, 336, 354, 365, 377, 379, 387, 392, 398, 418, 420, 421, 437–439, 441, 445, 447, 448, 455, 456, 458, 459, 461, 469, 471, 478, 489, 492, 493, 521–523, 531, 536, 548, 564, 570, 572, 585, 587, 597 S screen diversity, 315 screen idea, 47, 55, 56, 60–62, 65, 69, 225, 279, 282, 287, 290, 291, 296,

330, 377, 408, 409, 411, 420, 433, 453, 506–508, 511, 512, 517, 519, 529, 558–563, 565–567, 601 Screen Idea Working Group, 253, 262, 453, 517, 525. See also SIWG screenplay format, 66, 104, 143, 203, 302, 328, 345, 354, 425, 433, 504, 506, 508, 509, 520 screenplay labs, 267–270, 274–276 screenplay layout, 203 screen storytelling models, 411, 419, 420 screenwriting consumers, 600–602, 606 screenwriting discourse, 2, 105, 122, 143, 148, 601, 607 screenwriting history, 198, 379, 384, 600 screenwriting paradigms, 349, 350 script consultant, 2, 4, 62, 136, 148, 152, 163–165, 172, 173, 276, 394, 565, 566 script coverage, 148 script development organisations, 138 script doctor, 3, 304 script editing, 137, 143 script editor, 2, 4, 87, 88, 91, 94, 96, 97, 123, 136, 137, 139–141, 143, 145, 148–153, 298, 319, 391, 397, 505, 542 script executive, 2, 89, 153, 542, 601 scripting, 95, 217–219, 221, 227, 328, 330, 331, 336, 337, 375, 379, 380, 558, 561 script literacy, 153 scriptment, 55, 331–338, 403 script notes, 97, 137, 139 script readers, 2, 4, 150, 152, 602, 604, 606 series ‘small documents’, 140, 508 series bible, 140 short children’s film, 500 show don’t tell, 139, 272 showrunner, 3, 4, 121–132, 251–263, 455, 538, 576, 578–581 SIWG, 517, 520, 521, 526, 528, 529, 562, 564–566, 568. See also Screen Idea Working Group story, 3, 48, 51–54, 56, 61–69, 88, 93, 97, 98, 105, 108, 123, 124, 126,

INDEX

127, 130, 135–145, 148–150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 163–173, 175–183, 187–192, 194, 196–198, 201, 202, 204, 206, 207, 211, 212, 214, 215, 220–224, 226, 229, 230, 232–234, 237–242, 244–246, 256–259, 268– 276, 279–285, 287–291, 296–299, 302, 304, 309–318, 320–324, 328, 330–334, 337, 344–346, 348, 349, 351, 353, 356, 360–365, 369–372, 375, 376, 378–380, 382–386, 391, 392, 394, 395, 397–401, 403, 408–414, 418–421, 430, 437–446, 448, 449, 451–464, 469–471, 473–481, 486–500, 504, 505, 507, 508, 511–514, 519–523, 525, 528, 532–539, 541, 542, 547, 550, 551, 558, 560–565, 569–576, 578, 579, 585–588, 590–593, 595–597, 601 story analysis, 542 storyboard, 273, 275, 342, 419, 421, 592, 593, 595, 597 story structure, 64, 95, 268, 350, 393, 400, 403, 411, 497–499, 504, 541, 558, 588 storytelling models, 268 streaming distribution, 164, 171

T table read, 4, 53, 55, 354, 355, 425–427, 430, 432–435 teaching. See learning and teaching television, 2, 4, 5, 49, 51, 61, 97, 103, 121–130, 132, 136, 139–141, 143, 144, 148, 150, 151, 154, 155, 163, 164, 169, 171, 172, 176, 177, 224, 252, 254, 256, 258–262, 295, 313, 341, 348, 352, 362, 426, 434, 444, 451, 454, 470–472, 474–476, 478, 480, 507–509, 514, 531–539, 541,

617

542, 546, 548, 564, 566, 570, 576–580 television production, 122–129, 131, 138, 362, 535–537, 540, 576, 577 television series, 49, 121, 123, 128, 252, 254, 255, 260–262, 426, 434, 488, 531–533, 570, 571, 576, 579 television writing, 51, 540, 542 theme, 51, 55, 65, 137, 141, 148, 150, 152, 168, 172, 191, 197, 202, 205–209, 211, 213, 223, 226, 267–270, 272, 275, 281, 282, 284, 288–290, 300–303, 314, 316, 323, 333, 349, 356, 369, 401, 459, 460, 463, 464, 479, 488, 495, 525, 559, 560, 562, 588 theme development, 149, 203, 208 360-video, 503 translation, 141, 153, 164, 170, 171, 189, 194, 198, 205, 210, 235, 244, 383, 546, 548, 549, 551–553 treatment, 53, 55, 61, 97, 104, 105, 140, 169, 170, 220, 254, 328, 331, 333, 334, 348, 350, 352, 359, 376, 378, 383, 385, 396, 403, 408, 443, 448, 449, 469, 475, 507, 508, 519–523, 536, 545, 558, 586, 588, 597 U universalism, dangers of, 183 V video games, 2, 5, 531–538, 540–542 W writers’ room, 2, 60, 138, 147, 251–253, 255–263, 285, 452, 454, 460, 475, 538, 558 writer’s voice, 138