Screenwriting 9780813563428

Citation preview

Scr e e n w r i t ing

BEH IND THE SI LVER SCREEN

Behind the Silver Screen When we take a larger view of a film’s “life” from development through exhibition, we find a variety of artists, technicians, and craftspeople in front of and behind the camera. Writers write. Actors, who are costumed and made-up, speak the words and perform the actions described in the script. Art directors and set designers develop the look of the film. The cinematographer decides upon a lighting scheme. Dialogue, sound effects, and music are recorded, mixed, and edited by sound engineers. The images, final sound mix, and special visual effects are assembled by editors to form a final cut. Moviemaking is the product of the efforts of these men and women, yet few film histories focus much on their labor. Behind the Silver Screen calls attention to the work of filmmaking. When complete, the series will comprise ten volumes, one each on ten significant tasks in front of or behind the camera, on the set or in the postproduction studio. The goal is to examine closely the various collaborative aspects of film production, one at a time and one per volume, and then to offer a chronology that allows the editors and contributors to explore the changes in each of these endeavors during six eras in film history: the silent screen (1895–1927), classical Hollywood (1928–1946), postwar Hollywood (1947–1967), the Auteur Renaissance (1968–1980), the New Hollywood (1981–1999), and the Modern Entertainment

Marketplace (2000–present). Behind the Silver Screen promises a look at who does what in the making of a movie; it promises a history of filmmaking, not just a history of films. Jon Lewis, Series Editor 1. Acting (Claudia Springer, ed.) 2. Animation (Scott Curtis, ed.) 3. Cinematography (Patrick Keating, ed.) 4. Costume, Makeup, and Hair (Adrienne McLean, ed.) 5. Directing (Virginia Wright Wexman, ed.) 6. Editing and Special Visual Effects (Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel, eds.) 7. Producing (Jon Lewis, ed.) 8. Screenwriting (Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter, eds.) 9. Art Direction and Production Design (Lucy Fischer, ed.) 10. Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects (Kathryn Kalinak, ed.)

Scr e e n w r i t ing Edited by Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter

New Brunswick, New Jersey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Screenwriting / edited by Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter. Pages cm. — (Behind the silver screen series ; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–6341–1 (hardback) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6340–4 (pbk.) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6342–8 (e-book) 1. Motion picture authorship—History. 2. Motion picture industry— United States—History. I. Horton, Andrew, 1944– editor of compilation. II. Hoxter, Julian PN1996.S38 2014 808.2’3—dc23 2013042857 This collection copyright © 2014 by Rutgers, The State University Individual chapters copyright © 2014 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents Introduction  Julian Hoxter

1

1. Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928  J. Madison Davis 11 36 2. Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946  Mark Eaton 56 3. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967  Jon Lewis 81 4. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980  Kevin Alexander Boon 101 5. The New Hollywood, 1980–1999  Julian Hoxter 127 6. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present  Mark J. Charney

Academy Awards for Screenwriting Notes Selected Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

155 165 181 187 191

Scr e e n w r i t ing

Introduction 

Julian Hoxter

There is an inevitable “to-be-transcended-ness” that circumscribes the work of the professional screenwriter. Cinematography, editing, sound, costume and production design, makeup, casting, and acting are manifested in movies as solidly as the medium itself can allow. In simple craft terms, we can see the final fruits of the designer’s or the cinematographer’s labors in and as images onscreen. Above them, directors claim authorial dominion—or have had it claimed for them—through the intersection of the other crafts as film style and directed performance. Of all the crafts that are involved in the production of motion pictures, however, screenwriting is defined the most clearly by the instability of its own product. It is unique both in being at once present in the product of every other craft, as inspiration, as guide, and even as direction, yet (with the exception of instances of visual text such as intertitles) also simultaneously absent from the screen. The very nature of this material absence defines screenwriting as, to some extent, having already been moved beyond. Of course, audiences hear dialogue when it is present and we invest in characters as their onscreen actions and interactions unfold as drama. Indeed, it is easy to suggest that the traces of screenwriting and typically of its default text, the screenplay, may be discerned most clearly through the pleasures of structure and story. In this way the unseen work of the screenwriter must be evident in 1

2 Julian Hoxter

the finished film. However, there is always a necessary slippage between the two principal texts of moviemaking, one written and the other cinematic. As Steven Price writes in his pioneering study, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism, “The screenplay is not so much a blueprint as an enabling document, necessary for the production but transformed by directors, actors, vagaries of the weather, and a multitude of other factors that occasion the rewrites that are the bane of the screenwriter’s craft.”1 In that slippage lies part of the challenge for scholars and students of screenwriting to locate their object of analysis. For example, I am studying a shooting draft of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s screenplay for Let the Right One In (Låt den Rätta Komma In, 2008) in preparation for another writing project. Although the plotting of script and movie are almost identical, I was intrigued to find significant tonal differences in the screenplay when compared to the finished film. Lindqvist’s script, adapted from his own novel, places the central relationship between his young protagonist, Oskar, and the vampire, Eli, clearly on the track of love. The onscreen events occur much as they do in the script; however, the finished movie offers a much more ambivalent reading of the emotional track. The film’s story asks us to accept the distinct possibility that Eli is simply recruiting Oskar to be her next “daywalking” servant. This tonal shift between script and screen is both powerful and transformative, and it raises the question as to when and why, during the late stages of development and pre-production of the movie, the story(telling) changed. To study screenwriting, then, is to engage with the problem of uncertain or even contested authorship from first principles. A professional screenwriter may be the initiating author of a screen story, but the inevitability of future collaboration and transformation are written into the very formatting of her screenplay. While recent interventions in “screenwriting studies” by Price and Steven Maras have moved our conceptualization of the screenplay beyond the outdated and

Let the Right One In (2008). Slippage between script and screen. Screenplay by John Ajvide Lindvist.

Introduction 3

simplistic model of a blueprint for construction, professional screenwriters still present their work in a form ready to be taken forward by others.2 Hollywood screenplays, whether initiated by writers as “spec scripts” looking for a sale or by studios and other production entities as in-house assignments for jobbing screenwriters, are typically developed documents. These “socialized texts” bear the fingerprints of any number of script readers, producers, executives, accountants, directors, and, frequently, other screenwriters.3 All have had input into the script and few get screenwriting credit under the rules for signatories to the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) “Minimum Basic Agreement.”4 A simple check of a movie’s writing credits, therefore, often offers a poor accounting of those who have had a significant involvement in the creative process that carries a story idea through writing and to the screen. Typically, studies and histories of screenwriting present accounts of the development of story in terms of genre, in the context of the zeitgeist of a given period, or through case studies of the careers of individual writers. This kind of history often accedes to a default authorship—a received logic of screenwriting auteurism—that stops with the name or names on the screenplay or the credit on screen. The search for definitive authorship of the socialized text is probably a doomed undertaking both in pragmatic and scholarly terms. Besides, the industrial conclusion is frequently litigated to an abstraction by the arcane credit rules of the WGA. On the other hand, it is in the investigation of development that we access most directly and in any given period the workings of the Hollywood mind. Tracking the development process of a screen story through archives and anecdotal interviews offers another set of challenges for the historian, however. Much of the difficulty of writing the history of screenwriting lies in gaining access to the appropriate primary sources. Developmental (and even “final”) screenplay drafts are disposable artifacts. They may not be kept and are rarely offered by studios, much less by writers, for study either for contractual reasons or due to the formative nature of the documents. After all, few writers relish the prospect of having their rough work pored over and evaluated in public. For practical and commercial reasons, published screenplays (happily more abundant in recent years, with excellent new series such as the Newmarket Shooting Scripts) also mirror the movie on release as far as possible. Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers, Scott MacDonald’s important volume, deserves special acknowledgment here for reminding us that visual text has had an important if changing role in commercial and independent cinema and for bringing unconventional and avant-garde works to a wider readership.5 With the exception of certain collections of individual filmmakers’ papers, the same tendency toward the preservation only of shooting scripts limits the utility of many archives. In my own research, for example, I make as much use as I can of the screenplay collection at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California. The

4 Julian Hoxter

Herrick archive is in one sense quite comprehensive. It has been acquiring material since the 1930s and by now contains example scripts or screenplays of over 11,000 produced films. For a scholar of screenwriting this presents a treasure trove of material for historical and textual analysis, and yet most of the screenplays archived at the Herrick are late drafts or shooting scripts, formatted and prepared for production. However useful these documents are in their own right, they conceal much of the development process that predated them. Hence, in part, the problem of textual instability from a scholarly perspective. It is often hard even to define the end of the writing process. In the current tentpole era of big-budget studio production, for example, it is common for story development to be handed off back and forth between screenwriter, director, and effects house and for the responsibility for the final dramatization of spectacular sequences to be as much the province of the storyboard artists and effects teams as of the screenwriter(s). Justin Denton, the previsualization supervisor for Halon Entertainment, recalls working with director Peter Berg during preparations for Battleship (2012, scr. Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber): “The script was not complete when we started working with Pete . . . he walked me through scenes. I took notes and then we started animating in Maya.”6 Here we owe a debt to Steven Maras’s notion of scripting, a term he uses to broaden definitions of screenwriting into the alternative and experimental arenas and to “rethink the demarcation between creation and interpretation, writing and performance, and the boundaries between what is a matter of style and what is a matter of screenwriting.”7 Scripting offers a useful corrective to the assumed hegemony of the screenplay as the definitive marker of screenwriting and a reminder that we also need to look beyond the page in our attempts to understand the movie-writing process. Previous attempts to write the history of screenwriting have avoided asking many of the hard questions implicit in the above. In their different styles, both Tom Stempel’s useful study Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film and Marc Norman’s entertaining journalistic overview What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting view history in large part through what Maras calls the “practitioner,” “story and structure,” and “business” frames.8 He writes: “The practitioner frame tends to be about advice, experience and the so-called ‘creative process.’ The story and structure frame is primarily concerned with dramatic principles and storytelling problems. The business frame focuses on deals and pitching a project.”9 Although these frames offer only a partial account, they can be a useful starting point when carried forward with rigor. Importantly, however, Maras argues for a fourth, organizing frame, that of discourse: “Because the practice and discourse of screenwriting is interwoven, the history of screenwriting is inseparable from a history of discourses that surround and constitute screenwriting. Approaching screenwriting as a way of speaking about texts, [we find

Introduction 5

that] writing and production allow us to question received understandings of what screenwriting should or could be.”10 In this way, the frame of discourse allows the historian to examine and contextualize the accepted texts, vocabularies, and institutional and craft practices of screenwriting as constructions. For example, Janet Staiger argues that there is an important link between economic practices and aesthetic developments in early screenwriting.11 The standardization of the photoplay script in the first years of the last century was motivated by budgetary considerations as well as a need for quality control more than by the needs of drama. These in turn motivate the advice being sold to aspirants in early screenwriting manuals. Similarly, I suggest in my chapter in this book that there is a clear although initially “unofficial” link between changes to the economic and institutional model of screenplay acquisition (freelancing) and developments in the format and style of the screenplay (the new spec format) that is increasingly visible in scripts since the 1980s. Over time, this connection becomes institutionalized within Hollywood, commodified and resold to aspirant screenwriters as part of the marketable narrative of “breaking in.” The contributions to this current volume engage with some or all of these four explanatory frames to varying degrees. In the first chapter, covering the period from 1895 to 1928, J. Madison Davis tracks the development of screenwriting from its beginnings as an afterthought to the attraction of the moving image into a professional craft within an expanded industry. His account explores the influence of established writers who moved to motion pictures from other media (notably theater and print journalism) first as scenario writers and later, when the text of the motion picture story was expanding from scene list toward script, as “photoplaywrights.” Davis usefully chronicles the working relationships these early writers had with the emerging institutions of motion picture production and also public attitudes to movie writing as a newly glamorous career. It is sobering to be reminded that the salaries some scenario writers were already receiving in the early years of motion pictures did much to establish “the fantasy of a gold rush” for aspiring writers almost a century before Joe Eszterhas’s bloated paychecks in the “spec boom” of the late 1980s. Davis goes on to offer a series of biographical vignettes of photoplay and screenwriters, including a number of women from a period in which their influence waned as the movie business expanded. These include Frances Marion, who wrote The Son of the Sheik (1926), and Frederica Sagor Maas, uncredited screenwriter on Flesh and the Devil (1927). Toward the end of the period, Davis writes, such women were “gradually . . . being replaced—not so much as a policy, but as an indication that the movie business was now a serious business, and should, in the thinking of the time, therefore, be male.” In order to establish the emerging professionalism of the craft, he also provides accounts of the first para-industrial manuals and guides for aspirant screenwriters by the likes of

6 Julian Hoxter

Roy McCardell.12 In so doing, Davis reminds us that the history of the commodification of aspiration in American screenwriting is almost as long as the history of motion pictures. Mark Eaton begins his account of the period of “classical” Hollywood, from 1928 to 1946, by discussing the upheaval to screenwriting caused by the coming of sound. Dialogue replaced intertitles and writers were suddenly required to “come up with entertaining, funny, or intelligent speech” for actors to perform. Sound brought its own false dawn for screenwriters who assumed, naïvely, that their stock would rise in Hollywood alongside their skills in dialogue writing. Importantly, Eaton also notes emerging tendencies in this period toward multiple authorship in the scripting process and standardization in the format of the screenplay, as well as important steps toward establishing the hegemony of what would later be called the “three-act structure” of movie storytelling. Eaton suggests that the coming of sound and thus dialogue transformed genre writing and especially opened new opportunities for comedy. The little industry selling advice to screenwriters continued to make its mark in the period, with a new focus on deepening character development for the new talking pictures as “outspoken characters became more verbally, psychologically, and socially complex.”13 He goes on to offer an important partial corrective to the assumption that Hollywood was simply where writers from culturally respectable media went to sell out. Through a series of well-chosen examples, Eaton reminds us that the

The Grapes of Wrath (1940). The road ahead, with HUAC as yet unseen in the future. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, John Steinbeck

Introduction 7

movie industry sustained a generation of writers, Nathanael West, Clifford Odets, and Nunnally Johnson among them, through the period of the Great Depression and beyond. Besides, as Eaton writes: “Faced with a choice between becoming fettered to the studios or finding something else to do for a living, many writers were willing to make that Faustian bargain.” In the third chapter, Jon Lewis’s analysis of the craft between 1947 and 1967 chronicles the end of what had been a period of relative freedom and prosperity for screenwriters, despite the puritanical dictums of the Production Code. This was the period in which the Paramount Decision of 1948 had begun to transform the institutions of Hollywood and their relationships with the crafts. The resulting changes to the script development paradigm turned screenwriters into freelancers, gradually investing more power in their agents. Lewis writes that in this transitional period, screenwriters were now “no longer studio employees on the clock; they became independent contractors.” At the same time, in the postwar years, the rise of television began to lure movie audiences away from cinemas and back home. The emerging medium offered new opportunities for some screenwriters just as they were becoming scarcer in the movies. The Red Scare and the blacklist peeled away or cowed many progressive voices in Hollywood, however. Here, Lewis foregrounds the powerful racist and, in particular, antisemitic drivers of the congressional investigations of Hollywood writers and filmmakers at this time. He demonstrates how the progressive messages of Gentleman’s Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947) and Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947) provide an important counterpoint to the pernicious influence of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the years immediately following their release: “It is only in the committee’s reaction to these films” Lewis writes, “that we can appreciate the implicit and explicit connection between industry regulation in the postwar era and larger efforts to rid Hollywood of its Jews, especially its Jewish screenwriters.” Subsequently, a bleaker and more paranoid zeitgeist also pushed postwar cinematic storytelling into darker corners in the years after the Black Dahlia murder case revealed the skull beneath the skin of the Hollywood dream. In this context, Lewis offers case studies of In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950) and Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950). Both films position the troubled screenwriter in search of a moral and creative center, both in Hollywood and postwar America. However, he argues that in the hands of writers of the caliber of Abraham Polonsky (before he, too, was blacklisted), the crime film in the 1950s could also be worked as progressive political allegory. Lewis ends his chapter, most appropriately, on a note of ambivalence as he hands off the “problematic historical record” of postwar screenwriting, in which the accomplishments of HUAC turncoats such as the director Elia Kazan and the writer Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront [1954] and A Face in the Crowd [1957]) exist only at the expense of the careers of their “more honorable peers.”

8 Julian Hoxter

From the late 1960s through the 1970s, a period that is often referred to as the “New Hollywood,” American movie storytelling began once again to explore themes that had been impossible in the days of HUAC and the blacklist. In the fourth chapter, Kevin Alexander Boon argues that the French New Wave was the single most significant influence on the form and content of American screenwriting during this creative renaissance. At the same time, however, the role and craft of the professional screenwriter (as distinct from the writer-director) was marginalized even further in critical discourse by the reification of the director as the supreme creative force in movie production. This position was espoused by the intellectual wing of that same French import, auteurist film criticism, and its traces are still evident in the culture—even down to the citation format for movies in this current volume. After the end of the production code in 1968, Boon argues that “the moral compass of a screenplay shifted back into the hands of the screenwriter.” As exemplar of the resulting liberalization, he offers a case study of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), a film that also signals something of a shift in the new independent and countercultural films of the late sixties away from traditional screenplay form. The “plan-of-action” script for Easy Rider was similar to what would now be called a scriptment, being “more of a conglomeration of ideas and philosophies informing the production than it was a traditional script.” While this approach was hardly typical, even in independent filmmaking, the lack of adherence to established formal orthodoxies does mark a tendency in American independent screenwriting that would continue into the micro-budget and mumblecore scripting of the last decade. Boon goes on to chronicle the stories that began to push the boundaries of permissiveness in their representation of sex, violence, and decency in the period. Taking examples both from filmmakers emerging into the mainstream as well as from its exploitation and countercultural alternatives, he demonstrates that, while the underlying structure of movie storytelling was broadly consistent with past decades, its representational and thematic concerns were speaking much more clearly to the times. Cleverly, he also integrates here the influential film criticism of Pauline Kael as something of a transformative barometer of shifting public attitudes at the time. In the fifth chapter, I offer a series of conceptual frameworks for understanding the development of screenwriting in the 1980s and 1990s. This was the period in which the strategic and creative priorities of Hollywood institutions shifted due to corporate mergers and buyouts. Simultaneously, the studios’ control of the movie development process was challenged by the burgeoning power of the biggest talent agencies such as CAA and ICM. Independent production had a brief new dawn, beginning in the “Miramax-Sundance era,” while at the end of the period the working practices of many screenwriters were adapting to a new timetable of collaboration as part of the move into the production practices and accelerated development schedules of contemporary digital production.

Introduction 9

At the same time, screenwriters were fighting for a toehold in the new economics of the video (and subsequently digital) era. On the one hand, the late 1980s and early 1990s gave writers a brief glimpse of fame and fortune during the spec boom. The studios, however, got burned and soon retrenched, and the million-dollar script sales dried up. In the end, despite two WGA strikes in the 1980s, the position of the screenwriter in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood was much as it had always been. Rather than offering a straightforward narrative of writers and movies (in Maras’s terms, the “story and structure frame”), the chapter provides linked perspectives by working between the practitioner frame, the business frame, and what we might call the technology frame.14 In so doing it provides accounts of the freelance development paradigm as it operated in the period and of its commodification and even circumscription by the increasingly influential journalists and screenwriting teachers selling their keys to the code of Hollywood success. The transformation of the technologies of screenwriting, as writers adopted first the computer and then increasingly sophisticated software packages for screenplay formatting, had a material effect on the formatting and presentation of screenplays. The “new spec format” that emerged gradually and piecemeal throughout the period offered a leaner, dynamically reader-friendly, and more efficient commercial screenplay to justify on the page the bloated budgets of the “tent-pole” era to come. In the sixth and final chapter, Mark J. Charney assesses the state of Hollywood screenwriting in the decade after 9/11 through a series of scene case studies. Understandably, given the significant challenges involved in writing very recent history, his project explores thematic trends in contemporary screenwriting rather than arriving at definitive judgments about ongoing developments in the craft. He notes the important transfer of quality drama to cable television which is, in part, a response to the narrowing of opportunities for writers in Hollywood, where more and more blockbusters are planted to hold up a tent with no canvas. Charney recognizes in particular an affinity for “sub-textual communal insecurity” in the output of major screenwriters, whose work both directly confronts and, by implication, channels the ghosts of recent terror. Charney argues that escape from the bleak if (in their different ways) spectacular worlds of disaster, horror, and hyper-destructive action movies lies in the most recent incarnations of independent drama. “Indie character studies,” he writes, “privilege the world of the heart, which they imply remains constant in spite of the landscape that surrounds it.” He cites Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003) in particular as a rare exploration of human connection without a carnal resolution. This is a welcome tendency that he also locates in the comedy of Pixar’s animated features. Ironically, Charney credits an animation studio for allowing its writers, and the creative collective around them, to embrace depth of character more fully than do most live-action Hollywood movies in the digital era.

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Lost in Translation (2003). Human connection without a carnal resolution. Screenplay by Sofia Coppola.

Writing the history of screenwriting is fraught with complex challenges. Not least among them is the instability of the object of enquiry. The collaborative nature of story authorship in the movie industry and the challenge of accounting for development mean that we often fall back on the imperfect resonance of completed movie narratives to account for what it is that screenwriters actually do. Finished films reveal much of the screenwriter’s world and craft, but they conceal more. New trajectories in cinema and screenwriting studies have begun to address this problem, however. The analysis of process and practice and the application of new perspectives on the relationship between, to use John Thornton Caldwell’s term, “production culture” and production itself promise much.15 In the right hands, movie stories can be powerful and even dangerous things. We have long misunderstood, undervalued, and even persecuted their tellers. As an introduction to the subject, this volume unapologetically owes its reader a certain linearity and periodicity, and its six chapters offer starting points from which to begin a long overdue assessment of the screenwriter’s work.

1 Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 J. Madison Davis The screenplay is such an essential part of the moviemaking process today that it is hard to imagine a period in which it was unnecessary. Yet, at the very beginning of motion pictures, there was no necessity for many of the logistical elements so important in filmmaking today, and though the process from idea to movie may be in many ways inefficient compared to the manufacture of other products, each step in any process involving a new technology must be created and institutionalized. The ancestor of all screenplays was probably a note scribbled on the back of an envelope and not even recognized by its author as an invention. With the gradual improvement of motion picture technology and the discovery of the most popular—that is, “moneymaking”—forms of the medium, the filmmaker’s scribble evolved into what was called a scenario and then to what we now call a screenplay.

From Hardware to Software Long before the motion picture camera, there was a desire to animate the inanimate. In 1868, a paleolithic bone disc from the Dordogne was found. The 11

12 J. Madison Davis

opposite sides of the disc display different images. When spun, it creates the illusion of motion. A standing doe lies down, then stands, again and again. Movement is also believed to have been simulated in paleolithic caves by overlaying images that were made successively visible by firelight.1 The motion of firelight against drawings of multiple legs could also create the illusion of bison running.2 In China in about a.d. 180 Ting Huan invented a lamp with moving parts that simulated motion. When it was reinvented in 1833 it was called a zoetrope. The quest for moving images led to an alphabet soup of devices. The abracadabra names promised magic while invoking the wonders of Victorian science: the phenakistoscope (1841), the kineograph or “flip book” (1868), the praxinoscope or phantasmascope (1877), the zoopraxiscope (1879), the électrotachyscope (1887), and several others. The moving images created by these devices, however, were based on a single, repetitive idea—a horse trotting, a gentleman bowing, a couple eternally repeating a sexual movement. These images could be interesting, amusing, possibly mesmerizing, but certainly unable to hold a viewer’s interest for long. Combining innovations such as the reciprocating shutter and the continuous roll of celluloid ultimately led to the assembly of a camera capable of recording sustained moving images. In 1888, Thomas Edison filed notice with the patent office, describing a device that would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”3 William Dickson, an employee, was assigned to assemble the device, and in 1891 Edison filed patents for his Kinetograph (camera) and Kinetoscope (a peep-hole viewer). The Kinetoscope held about fifty feet of looped film, improving the duration of the images, and the device created a need for films. Even so, it took many Kinetoscopes to harvest the public’s money. The possibility of a single machine serving a larger audience had several inventors ahead of Edison. Louis Lumière is often credited with the first workable projector. The cinématographe, as the Lumière brothers called it, was a lightweight combination camera, developer, and projector, and the Lumières were the first to present projected photographic motion picture images to an audience in March 1895, La Sortie des usines Lumière á Lyon (Workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyons). A month later, Woodville Latham and his sons unveiled their Eidoloscope projector. William Dickson had given advice to the Lathams and soon left Edison to help form what became the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. In September 1895, C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat demonstrated a projector called the Phantoscope, which Edison Manufacturing agreed to build and produce films for, on the condition it be advertised as a new Edison invention, the Vitascope, which was subsequently unveiled in 1896. Edison later premiered a device of his own, the Projectoscope. Other competitors also offered projection systems, like the Biograph and the Kineopticon.4 As with the coming of any popular technology, manufacturers rushed in to grab the profits, and patent fights dragged on for years. Within less than two years the peepshow

Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 13

boom was replaced by a projection boom and films were regularly included in vaudeville shows. In the initial phase of motion pictures, the novelty that a photograph had become animated was thrilling, interesting in itself. This made it simple to be a filmmaker. Buy a camera and film anything: carriages in the Bois de Boulogne, ships docking, trains pulling into stations. Get the film developed and sell copies to entrepreneurs needing something to project. Among the surviving films from Edison in 1891 is William Dickson raising his straw hat. Another shows men in boxing gloves moving their fists, but not really boxing. In a third, an athlete swings his Indian clubs. It was all interesting, even breathtaking. There was no reason to plan or plot. None of them lasted a minute. Soon, however, such films became monotonous. The familiarity of the no-longer-magical mechanism shifted the viewer’s attention to the content, and the device, initially miraculous, earned a shrug. Moving pictures had to become more than just a mechanical novelty. Manufacturers had to evolve the device into a need, and the only way to do that was through its content. Eventually, the content—like recorded music or software—became a greater source of income than the hardware that employed it. And furthermore these films became comparatively cheaper to produce. Filmmakers sought more unusual or exotic things to film. Surviving Kinetoscope films from 1894 show a man sneezing and an athlete exercising with a rod, but then they elevate to the dancer Carmencita, the legendary Annie Oakley, Sioux and Japanese dancers, an Arab knife juggler, and a policeman’s slapstick chase of an acrobatic Chinese laundryman. This last film records a vaudeville act and suggests the future Keystone Kops comedies. By 1894, instead of men waving boxing gloves pointlessly, each of six rounds of a boxing match between Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing is advertised in the Edison catalog at $22.50, the 2011 equivalent of about $560 per round. Foreshadowing today’s pay-per-view, it was clearly successful. Another six-round fight between “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and Peter Courtney was arranged later that year. Portending YouTube, $10.00 (about $250 in 2011 dollars) that year got you a film of “Professor Weldon’s boxing cats.” In the progression of available product, one can see the filmmakers gradually expanding the potential of the medium, both artistically and financially.

Content Replaces the Novelty of Moving Pictures In 1896, at the request of the New York World, May Irwin and John Rice reproduced their comic kiss from the hit stage comedy The Widow Jones. Irwin was described by one adoring critic: “Elevation to stardom has not changed her in any respect. She is as round, as blond, as innocent looking . . . and as blue-eyed as ever.”5 The Edison catalog described the forty-seven-second film thus: “They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings

14 J. Madison Davis

down the house every time.”6 The most popular film of 1896 for Edison, it was reviled in editorials and engendered the first controversy about movie content. The guardians of morality reacted, as they usually do to new media, with alarm. One appalled critic commented, “Neither participant is physically attractive and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to beat when only life size. Magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over is absolutely disgusting.”7 Implicit in the attack upon The Kiss is the idea that the motion picture might actually have the power to affect society. What had once been merely a fascination with a mechanical marvel had evolved into taking film content with the seriousness previously reserved for spoken, staged, or printed content. Violent content was viewed as much less reprehensible. As the early film historian Charles Musser points out, executions were still considered a form of entertainment in turn-of-the-century America.8 In 1895, Alfred Clark, who replaced Dickson as head of Edison’s filmmaking, re-created the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. This mini-costume drama shows the nobles watching as the executioner brings down his axe on Mary’s neck. Mary’s head drops off and is lifted for display. The coordination of the cut that produces the special effect of Mary’s head toppling was a major technical advance in moviemaking. (The capability of film to shock is obviously a selling point; Edison offered the Execution of Czolgosz [President’s McKinley’s assassin] only months after the event.) The commercial appeal of the horror of a beheading is significant, whether or not the viewer had ever heard of Mary Stuart. Even something as brief as this vignette requires complicated arrangements: assembling the actors, costuming them, and gathering the props. The development of screenwriting accompanied the more elaborate making of films. Meanwhile, in France, parallel developments were hurtling forward. Georges Méliès claimed he independently discovered Clark’s technique when his camera jammed momentarily and the developed film revealed men changing into women and an omnibus into a hearse.9 Méliès’s playful imagination grasped the potential. Initially his films are mostly amusing tricks, although he also sold actualités, slices of life, like the Lumières and Edison. Méliès’s tricks, however, soon became more than tricks. As early as 1896, he created mini-dramas, as when a man fights with a giant insect in his hotel room, or his Christmas treat for that year, La Manoir du diable, which features a bat turning into Mephistopheles, who conjures creatures out of smoke and then does battle with two intruders, one of whom defeats him with a cross. In about three minutes, Méliès created the stock horror movie plot, with a beginning, middle, and end. What’s important to the development of the screenplay is that Méliès might have improvised all this with the costumes and sets available at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, which he had bought in 1888. However, his special effects had to be meticulously planned, stopping the camera, repositioning actors, and making sure that everything was in the same

Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 15

location and everyone holding the same pose. Méliès might well have kept all this in his head, but very little more complication was needed before it was necessary to create an initial schema of the film. In a rudimentary way filmmakers were inventing what would become a crucial step in the process of creating movies; they were inventing the screenplay. A lot of ink has been spent trying to sort out who first invented the processes of making feature films, and we cannot know who first sketched out what producers would soon call a scenario. There isn’t even consistency in what constituted a scenario nor the terms “continuity script” or just “script,” all of which were often interchangeable. Sometimes a scenario is simply a one-paragraph summary of the film, something akin to what we call a “treatment” or even a “pitch,” but as films lengthened, the brevity became inadequate for efficient production. The longer narrative forms to evolve from brief moving pictures had been foreseen by several early pioneers as a dream of the medium’s potential. As William Dickson stated in 1894, “Preparation have long been on foot to extend the number of actors and to increase the stage facilities with a view to the presentation of an entire play, set in its appropriate frame. . . . No scene, however animated and extensive, but will eventually be within reproductive power.”10 Two comic films released in early 1900 by Edison advanced the shift toward story. In Why Jones Discharged His Clerks, two clerks are playing cards. Jones, the boss, startles them, so they pretend to work, and Jones sits behind a screen reading the newspaper. A lady (using the term loosely) enters the office and is escorted to Jones. Behind the screen, Jones and she begin making woo. The clerks, in attempting to peek at this, knock the screen down on Jones, who furiously throws them out of the office. In Why Mrs. Jones Got a Divorce, a busy cook urges a boy to leave the kitchen. Mr. Jones comes home from a trip, greets the cook affectionately, and she embraces him, leaving flour handprints on his back. The boy, meanwhile, crosses the kitchen and presumably alerts Mrs. Jones, who marches into the kitchen. Jones denies a relationship with the cook, but Mrs. Jones sees the handprints. He falls on his knees to plead his case, but Mrs. Jones dumps a bowl of flour on his head and throws out both him and the cook. The Jones films are a little more than a minute long, shorter than most television skits. However, each has a rudimentary plot with a beginning, middle, and an end. Each has rudimentary characterization. The choreography of characters on the screen is complex as they negotiate the tables, doors, and screen in the first film, and the kitchen table, doors, and each other in the second. In the next year, Edison followed up with similar humorous films of “Uncle Josh” (played by Charles Manley). In 1902, there is even Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, in which he mistakes a kissing scene for reality and tries to stop it. The movies, barely a decade old, are already self-referencing, counting on the audience’s knowledge of previous films. It is clear that, as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth, the content of film became more complex and

16 J. Madison Davis

projectors extended the time limits imposed by the Kinetoscope loop. Yet the nature of that future content was momentarily uncertain. For a couple of years, filmmakers had ground out mostly the same sorts of films, gag pieces and actualités or re-creations. After making nearly 1,500 films, Louis Lumière lost interest and famously made one of history’s worst predictions: “The cinema is an invention without a future.” Unlike the Lumières, Dickson understood the potential of sustained storytelling. It is clear that by about 1903, narrative would become the future of commercial filmmaking and, along with it, some kind of preproduction blueprint would be necessary to contain costs and maintain story coherency.11

Borrowing from the Stage Where could one find sustained narratives in dramatic form? On stage, of course, and moviemakers turned to the theater almost from the beginning. The early film historian Patrick Loughney points out two early projects in particular that expanded the possibilities in lengthening film content. Joseph Jefferson had long had a popular career onstage, making his first appearance on the boards at age three. In 1859, he became a star with a production of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. He thought it could be improved and hired someone to rewrite it. Finding the part so successful for him after he returned to the United States, he never created another role for himself. In 1865, he played the part in London for 170 consecutive nights. By 1895, he was a venerated dean of actors, but also an investor in the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. William Dickson, who had “defected” from Edison, asked Jefferson to reprise his celebrated performance for the Mutoscope. The production was based on Jefferson’s playscript, which had been published by Dodd and Mead, and the text contained many of the elements of a screenplay. The stage directions and dialogue were in the book, as well as photographs and illustrations of the costumes, makeup, scenery, and other production elements. In certain respects, it was more detailed than usual playscripts, scenarios, and screenplays. Dickson’s problem was that the Mutoscope (a peephole device that worked like a flip book) couldn’t sustain anything more than brief scenes. To defeat this limitation, he handled it like the Edison company had handled boxing matches. He split the play into discrete scenes: “Rip’s Toast,” “Rip Meeting the Dwarf,” “Rip and the Dwarf,” “Rip Leaving Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip’s Toast to Hudson and Crew,” “Rip’s Twenty Years’ Sleep,” “Awakening of Rip,” and “Rip Passing Over Hill.” Later, the film was converted for the Biograph projector. Even though each scene was less than thirty seconds long and the total running time about three and a half minutes, Rip Van Winkle not only pointed up the potential for sustained storytelling, but demonstrated the utility of having a production plan as detailed as Jefferson’s playscript.

Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 17

The partial preservation of Jefferson’s legendary performance also, incidentally, demonstrates a serious function of the motion picture, the preservation of historical events and people. Jefferson died in 1905, but despite his age at the filming (sixty-seven), he shows the body language of a much younger man. His voice is also preserved for us in recordings made before his death. Rip Van Winkle would become a popular subject for filmmakers. Méliès made his own ten-minute version in 1905. In 1908, a one-reel version (longer than Jefferson’s eight episodes) starring Hobart Bosworth appeared. In 1921, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Jefferson’s son, repeated his father’s beloved role, and also had a role in the first Tarzan film that year. Initially, however, the concept of the sustained motion picture narrative was still ahead of its time, and there was little immediate follow-up. Another production that pointed up the potential of sustained narrative was born in religion. In 1879, a playwright named Salmi Morse completed a script of the passion of Christ. Morse’s production in San Francisco had several setbacks. The play was criticized by anti-Catholic Protestant leaders for being a commercial enterprise and for the impiety of stage actors portraying the divine. Critics accused the play of inflaming Irish Catholics and inducing attacks against the Chinese and the Jews, even though the author was a Jew. The city council passed an ordinance against portraying Christ on stage, actors were arrested, and it became impossible to continue. Morse tried to move the play to New York, but the aldermen shut it down. Even actor Edwin Booth denounced it. After Morse mysteriously drowned in the Hudson in 1884, James O’Neill, the actor who played Jesus (and the father of Eugene O’Neill), tried to get the play staged, but he was blocked again and again. In late 1897, Richard Hollaman, the president of the Eden Musée, a wax museum and lantern slide theater in New York, saw The Horwitz Passion Play. This film was produced in Hořice, in the Czech area of Austria-Hungary, and it gave him the inspiration to film a replica of the more famous passion of Oberammergau, staged every decade in Germany. Hollaman got possession of the costumes and playscript from Morse’s production and arranged for filming on the roof of the Grand Central Palace. When completed, The Passion Play of Oberammergau was of unprecedented length, almost twenty minutes, and comprised three reels. The film was a huge success, marketed not as a play but as a re-creation of Oberammergau. In other words, it was promoted as educational, mostly avoiding the play’s controversies. Often accompanied by live narration and music (such as a boys’ choir), the film sold for $580 and was to be shown in churches by traveling lecturers.12 Several rival Passions appeared almost immediately, and Edison marketed individual chapters of Hollaman’s film. Exhibitors sometimes combined them with chapters from other filmmakers.13 Many things about this film point to the future. Sometimes called the first feature film, it was usually shown in segments and with lantern slides. As the

18 J. Madison Davis

first biblical epic, a venerable genre that flourished through much of Hollywood history, it demonstrated that the “bigness” of a movie was a part of its attraction. Hollaman was not in the film business but hired specialists to deal with the myriad aspects of production, thereby simulating the factory style that would become the trademark of the studios, as well as the operating model for independent producers. It also created the model used by independent Christian films with screenings in places other than theaters. In the history of the screenplay, however, it occupies a special place as a full-length dramatic composition created from a preexisting manuscript. As the equipment improved and the public became more comfortable watching longer films, the story film became the dominant form of cinema. The scenario, often just a list of scene ideas, would become the “photoplay,” a document virtually the same as the screenplay. Musser dates the shift to story films as the predominant product at Edison Manufacturing beginning in 1902 and continuing in fits and starts through 1904.14 Méliès had always been more interested in the illusionist potential in filmmaking, but his theatricality perhaps put him ahead of the trend to story films. He had even worked with multi-reel films, such as a series on the sinking of the Maine, which occurred in 1898 and provoked many film companies to exploit it. Only one of Méliès’s five segments still exists: Visite sous-marine du Maine (Divers at work underwater on the Maine, 1898).15 Méliès’ Star Company in 1899 offered L’Affaire Dreyfus in eleven units, whole or separately. An unusual work for Méliès, it is sometimes called the first politically engaged film,16 made the year of Dreyfus’s retrial. Méliès was meticulously concerned with realism in these films, even choosing a lookalike actor for the title role. He was also as blatantly pro-Dreyfus as the great novelist Émile Zola, whose fight for Dreyfus is a major part of the Oscar-winning Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle, 1937). Fistfights broke out over the Méliès films; the government banned it and later all films on the Dreyfus case until 1950.17

Producers Turn to the Newspapers The scramble for audience-pleasing content for even short films left producers scratching their heads. Many did reproductions of other companies’ popular films, as the rules for copyright in the new medium were unsettled. (The law always takes a while to adjust to new media.) Quite naturally, filmmakers turned to previously existing materials: scenes from plays, mostly, but also books, current news, and sporting events. A scene from a play was all well and good if it was something like the end of The Widow Jones, something visually expressive, but much of what constitutes a stage play is dialogue, and reliable sound was decades away. Sometimes films were accompanied by live narrators, but this was not a convenient solution. The hunger for material increased and then for material

Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 19

with the pleasures of story. The solution was to buy scenarios appropriate for skits or stories from professional storytellers. The obvious first choice, once you had excerpted all you could from vaudeville, was to see what newspaper people could offer. After all, journalists ground out stories seven days a week, and were practiced in finding man-bites-dog episodes (or concocting them!). Journalists were also skilled in writing in a direct, popular style. Several streams of influence flowed together in the late nineteenth-century press to solidify the skills needed by the scenario writer. Méliès’s biographer Elizabeth Ezra remarks that his L’Affaire Dreyfus dramatized the transition between the written and filmic modes of documentary representation and that Méliès’s career ran parallel to literary figures (like Zola) gaining a voice in politics by means of the mass media.18 Fiction commonly appeared in newspapers of the time, usually serialized. Ezra quotes Susan Buck-Morss: “One has only to regard the format of a nineteenth-century newspaper . . . to see, literally, how thin was the line between political fact and literary fiction. News stories were literary constructions; feuilleton novelists used news stories as content.”19 Newspapers also introduced significant visual content in this period. The comic strip had become a regular feature in the 1890s, encouraged by the rivalry between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The man often called the first professional screenwriter, Roy L. McCardell, wrote for Pulitzer’s New York World and urged Pulitzer to publish The Yellow Kid, credited as the first Sunday color comic strip. It was so popular it created a merchandizing craze, and Pulitzer’s style of sensationalism earned the sobriquet “yellow journalism.” McCardell was among a select few, the half-dozen or so bylined columnists regularly published in those days, although one of McCardell’s biggest successes at the New York World was under a pseudonym—a serial exposé of factory work later combined to form a novel, The Wage Slaves of New York. As if his career hadn’t already echoed that of the modern screenwriter—being familiar with stories told in visual units and serial form—when McCardell moved on to a weekly entertainment magazine called Standard (ultimately, it became Vanity Fair in 1913), he did something even more like screen work. The reproduction of photographs in newspapers had only been possible since the 1880s and printing halftones on high-speed presses had only begun in 1897. In general, this resulted in the usual disaster photos of fires and train wrecks, along with politicians and stage performers in the latest fashions. Standard, however, ran mini-stories that consisted of several panels of staged sequential photographs. McCardell would write “about ten captions telling a more or less complete story. Then he and the boss would hire a lot of models—mostly girls— and go out and make pictures for the captions.”20 Essentially photographic comic strips, the effect reminds one of the still-photograph reconstructions of lost films. The similarity to film was not lost on Biograph, and the general manager there hired McCardell at $150 a week (roughly $4,200 a week in 2011) to

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Roy L. McCardell, as featured in Green Book Magazine (1915).

write scenarios for films. Reporters heard about the money to be made, and they “buzzed about the headquarters of filmmakers like flies around sugar barrels.”21 Russell E. Smith, for example, followed McCardell from the New York World into the screen trade and is credited on some thirty-three films. The writers’ fantasy of a gold rush was on, the literary equivalent of Lana Turner leaving Wallace, Idaho, and being discovered in Schwab’s Drugstore. The fantasy persisted. In 1926, Herman J. Mankiewicz attracted young writer Ben Hecht to Hollywood

Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 21

with a telegram that said, “MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS.”22 Today, as the joke goes, every idiot has a script. The princely salary offered by Biograph kept McCardell for only a year, as he began his remarkable output of freelance writing for major producers, even into the sound era. He received forty-three writing credits, the last in 1935, but he is known to have written many, many more without appropriate credit. Newspaper writers find nothing strange about writing without a byline. Edward Azlant contends that by 1915 McCardell had written over one thousand produced films, and that from 1913 to 1916 copyrights on thirty-nine McCardell films were registered, along with the sixteen serial episodes of McCardell’s The Diamond from the Sky.23 His last listed writing credit (which he also directed) is the short Ladies Love Hats (1935) starring Ernest Truex, whose career as a comic scene stealer lasted from his childhood in silent films to frequent television appearances through the 1960s.24 As the lead actor and subject suggest, McCardell’s best talents lay in light comedy. He wrote verse for Puck and other outlets, as well as comic pieces about the theater world. He authored racy novels of backstage life such as Conversations of a Chorus Girl (1903) and The Show Girl and Her Friends (1904). In 1909, his comedy set in the theater world, The Gay Life, opened on Broadway. With his exaggerated characters, he pointed the way for Damon Runyon’s style and the musical and screwball comedies of the 1930s. McCardell’s colorful language, particularly in Conversations with a Chorus Girl, provide the first appearance in print of slang terms like “Benny” (an overcoat), “club sandwich,” “chow mein,” “Tin Pan Alley,” “to fall for,” “five-spot” (five-dollar bill), “on the Fritz,” “high-sign,” “packing them in,” “peek-a-boo,” “wisenheimer,” and “kike.” Many of his successes were also family stories. Beginning in 1907, he published humorous sketches featuring the Jarr family in the New York World. The series was described by the New York Clipper as “world-wide famous and caused the old and the new worlds to laugh in unison.”25 The sketches continued for a dozen years, and though he tired of them, the money kept him on the job.26 In 1915, the Mr. and Mrs. Jarr series went to film, starring Rose Tapley and Harry Davenport (who also directed and would later, with Eddie Foy, found Actors’ Equity). It continued through eighteen one-reel episodes, and the familiar elements of today’s situation comedies are already present in them. McCardell also appeared in the live-action part of Winsor McKay’s legendary animated film Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). Probably McCardell’s biggest commercial success in his long career was the serial The Diamond from the Sky, described in publicity as “A Picturized Romantic Novel by Roy L. McCardell. The Greatest Ever!”27 The melodramatic story concerns a diamond found in a meteorite and the struggle two hundred years later between two scions of an aristocratic Virginia family for possession of it. Starring Lottie Pickford (the bibulous sister of Mary, who had turned down the part), William Russell, and Irving Cummings, The Diamond from the Sky was an

22 J. Madison Davis

action-oriented soap opera with an earl, gypsies, a baby swap, and even a sidekick hunchback named Quabba. It ran for a full thirty episodes (sixty reels) in 1915 over seven and a half months and was described in 1922 as “the biggest motion picture ever taken.”28 The first ten episodes were directed by Jacques Jaccard, who revised the script, but when he got stuck, the studio hired William Desmond Taylor, who rescued the serial on time and under budget. The company rewarded him with a two-carat diamond ring that he was wearing when he was murdered in 1922,29 an unsolved crime prominent in Hollywood lore. McCardell’s scenario was originally selected as part of a “contest” and supposedly plucked out of a mountain of entries in an envelope “streaked with red barn paint.”30 The prize was $10,000 (about $231,000 in 2011). As part of the promotion, the New York Globe, Chicago Tribune, and the American Film Manufacturing Company (which is credited with over 1,000 titles between 1910 and 1917) also offered a cash prize to whoever could suggest a sequel to the series. This helped keep viewers coming back episode after episode.31 A flyer handed out in theaters trumpeted: “The Diamond from the Sky” is a $20,000 prize photoplay. $10,000 was paid for the scenario, and now another $10,000 is being offered for the best suggestion, in 1,000 words or less, as a sequel to this remarkable picturized novel. The entire $10,000 will go to one person. How to Earn the Prize Follow every chapter of “The Diamond from the Sky” at this theatre. Read the story in the newspapers, then submit your idea of the most fitting sequel to this photoplay-novel. Your suggestion need not be more than 1,000 words in length—it need not possess any literary merit. What we want is a plot-germ—an idea. Write it out as simply as you can. It may read something like this: “Arthur Stanley proves that he is heir to the Earldom, and the ‘The Diamond from the Sky’ belongs to him. Esther agrees to marry Arthur, which makes him very happy, etc.” This $10,000 prize is open to every man, woman and child. Somebody is going to earn it—will it be YOU?32

Terry Ramsaye, an editor at the Chicago Tribune and judge of the first contest (which he claimed had 19,003 entries), was duly announced as the victor, implying—dare we say?—a certain phoniness to the whole competition.33 The sequel, now lost, was released in 1916 under the name The Fate of the Child; or, The Gypsy’s Trust, and was a total failure. Thirty episodes were enough, though that year McCardell also released a novelization of his scenario. For all his contributions to the birth of the screenwriting trade, what McCardell is primarily remembered for today is his 1915 scenario adaptation of Porter

Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 23

Poster of A Fool There Was (1915). Photoplay by Roy L. McCardell.

Emerson Browne’s play A Fool There Was, based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling, “The Vampire.” The poem itself isn’t about the undead, but about a woman who uses a man and tosses him aside. The play had been a success on Broadway, and neither it nor the film deals with the supernatural. A prominent man (played by Edward José) with a happy home life goes on a diplomatic mission, but meets “the Vampire,” a woman (Theda Bara) who has ruined a number of men and decides to acquire him as well. As Motion Picture News put it, “She accomplishes her

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desire (on the screen) by the profuse use of kisses and the absence of the accustomed styles in women’s fashions.”34 Nothing his friend or wife can do frees him from this destructive relationship, and the femme fatale becomes literally so as he lies dead on the floor at the end. This Fox film took kissing to a whole new level when the woman tells her degraded lover, “Kiss me, my Fool!” Motion Picture News commented, “Aside from the fact that it will do the very young little good, and perhaps harm, to witness the film, it is exceedingly excellent.” A less enthusiastic review in Variety found the ending “a bit broad” but admitted it had sex appeal. All the women were said to be “exceptionally attractive,” and “Miss Bara as the vampire scores easily.”35 As her debut—she was twenty-five—A Fool There Was created the first movie sex symbol and popularized the term “vamp.” Bara’s career also speaks to how the movie business had evolved. Fox fabricated an exotic background for Bara. She was said to be the love child of a French actress and an Italian sculptor and supposedly grew up in Egypt. In fact, her name was Theodosia Goodman and her parents were a tailor and a wigmaker in Cincinnati. When the reality was exposed, it only revved up further publicity. 36 Similar stunts had long been part of the competitive world of dailies at the turn of the century, and newspaper people brought many of their favorite stunts with them into the publicity departments. McCardell continued to be versatile throughout the silent era and into the 1930s. In the second half of the 1940s, McCardell left the public stage. In 1944, he is mentioned as being a speaker at a meeting of the Silurians, a newspapermen’s

Publicity photo of Theda Bara in her “man-eater” pose (c. 1915).

Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 25

club, honoring H. L. Mencken.37 About a year later, Hobo News announces that McCardell has replaced Robert Molloy as the Wall Street and society editor.38 It went out of business in 1948, during the period when the studios would soon be in trouble and television would begin to dominate the culture. In 1948, the Cumberland Times describes McCardell as retired, “several years past 70,” and still residing in Manhattan. White-haired and cigar-smoking in 1949, he maintained his optimism. “He isn’t sure what tangent television will finally take,” a newspaper reported, “but whatever direction it goes off in, McCardell will have a hand in it.”39 He died on June 9, 1961, at the age of ninety-one. He was cremated and interred in New Rochelle, where he and his family had lived for many years.40

The Scenario Writer Becomes the Photoplaywright The basic form of what constituted early scenarios developed relatively quickly because of the scene-based nature of film storytelling and the scenario’s use as a working tool of production. What most commentators on the scenario in early silent film cite as examples are not necessarily the working documents of production, which are almost entirely lost, but scenarios printed in the catalogues of companies such as Edison or Méliès’s Star Film. Intended to persuade exhibitors to acquire the films, the descriptions come across more as treatments, outlining the basic idea and pitching the film’s attractions. It is in the longer films (or, actually, series of films) that we see the breakdown of a full story into units of action set in a particular space and time. Méliès’s outline for his most famous film, Le Voyage dans la lune (A trip to the moon, 1902), though based on Jules Verne’s novel, is reduced to thirty brief descriptions of the dramatic units, beginning with the following:

1. The scientific congress at the Astronomic Club 2. Planning the trip. Appointing the explorers and servants. Farewell. 3. The workshops and constructing the projectile.41 One of the most famous images in world cinema, the projectile poking the man in the moon in the eye, is simply summarized as, “9. Landed right in the eye!!!” Number 17 is “Prisoners!!!” If this list, consisting of little more than jogs to bring up the images Méliès has already visualized, was actually used in production, one is reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s remark that he hated the process of filming since all the creative work was already done before that. One cannot help also noticing the remarkable coincidence that multiples of thirty units have been an ideal for many scriptwriters, promoted in standard advice books such as Syd Field’s Screenplay that advises would-be writers to create approximately thirty pages (or minutes) in the first act, sixty in the second act, and thirty in the third.

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Edwin S. Porter’s first major narrative film for Edison, The Life of an American Fireman (released in early 1903), is listed in seven units in the company catalog, but the description consists of little more than titles. The story of the film is slight, especially as Porter originally created it, and wouldn’t require the structuring that A Trip to the Moon would. Porter’s revolutionary The Great Train Robbery (released in December 1903) is a more complex narrative, exhibiting much more detail in the catalog scenario: Scene two: Railroad water tower. The bandits are hiding behind the tank as the train, under the false order, stops to take water. Just before she pulls out, they stealthily board the train between the express car and the tender.42 Note how the word “stealthily” elaborates on the writer’s emotional intention for the scene. Whether this scenario was derived from something already written, such as what was written for production, or entirely composed for the catalogue cannot be known. However, its details imply the necessity of more extensive pre-planning when the various aspects of filmmaking are more delegated than they would have been under someone like Méliès, the original auteur. Another major step toward the development of the screenwriter as a separate cog in the movie machine can be found in the factory-style production methods of Thomas Ince. An occasional actor, Ince first worked in motion pictures in 1910. By persuading Carl Laemmle to hire him as a full-time director, he created a precedent for the separate role of the director. Ince wanted to achieve the large effects he had seen in D. W. Griffith’s work and was attracted to the possibilities in westerns and Civil War movies. In 1911, wearing a borrowed suit and diamond ring to look successful, Ince applied for a position at the New York Motion Picture Company, which intended to establish a West Coast operation. Ince got the job at $150 a week and relocated to California. By year’s end, he was already organizing a true studio system. He carefully worked out his projects on paper (something even Griffith never did), inventing the use of a detailed “shooting script,” which also contained information on who was in the scene; and the “scene plot,” which listed all interiors and exteriors; cost control plans; and so on. He then broke down the shooting schedule so that several scenes could be shot simultaneously by assistant directors. He put a producer in charge of each movie and separated the roles of screenwriter, director, and editor, closely overseeing them all. By 1912, he purchased a ranch and leased 18,000 acres near Malibu. “Inceville” had stages, offices, labs, commissaries, dressing rooms, prop warehouses, and elaborate sets, including western sets, Switzerland, a Puritan settlement, and a Japanese village. He had cattle, not just for the movies, but also for farming. He raised feed for the animals and food for his employees. By using the principles

Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 27

Scene from C. Gardner Sullivan’s The Coward (1915). Written and produced by Thomas Ince.

of mass production, he did just that: mass produce. In 1913, he made over 150 two-reelers. He was soon making up to three two-reelers a week, a number impossible by individual improvisation. Ince also anticipated later practice by often assigning several writers to the same project. The practice of making feature films had become the new normal. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) provoked Ince’s five-reel The Battle of Gettysburg (1915). Another notable Ince achievement was The Italian (1915), the story of an immigrant gondolier and his struggles in the New World, co-written by Ince and C. Gardner Sullivan, who became one of the most influential photoplay writers. A journalist like McCardell, Sullivan worked at the New York Evening Journal when he tried submitting scenarios for extra money. His first sale was to Edison for twenty -five dollars, but afterward he sold a western to Ince for fifty dollars, then sixty more stories, and soon Ince offered him a full-time position. Recognition of his remarkable abilities came fast. Photoplay featured a profile of him in 1916.43 Sullivan went on to write the titles for The Battle of Gettysburg, Hell’s Hinges (1916, starring William S. Hart), and Civilization (1916), “Dedicated to that vast army whose tears have girdled the universe—The Mothers of the Dead.” The latter was Ince’s antiwar competitor to Griffith’s Intolerance, and it did better at the box office. Despite the allegorical nature of Civilization, Sullivan is credited with having brought a strong realism to the Hart westerns. A reviewer of Hell’s Hinges commented, “Both Ince and his head writer are now stepping outside the lane of convention, and thereby stepping into the bigger roadway of real life.”44 Sullivan worked with Cecil B. DeMille from the mid-1920s, and in 1924 the magazine Story World placed him on a list of the ten individuals who had contributed the

28 J. Madison Davis

Scene from Thomas Ince’s Civilization (1916). Photoplay by C. Gardner Sullivan.

most to the advancement of the motion picture industry from its inception. A prolific writer, Sullivan’s most remembered work is as supervising story chief of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). He was notable in the early 1930s for being a strong spokesman against censorship and the Hays Code, saying that it limited the production of satire. Obviously, Sullivan easily made the transition to sound, and his last credit dates to 1942, though he continued to work on screenplays through the 1950s. He died in Hollywood in 1965. Thomas Ince never made it to old age, becoming another Hollywood scandal when he died in 1924 on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht. The official story was that he had suffered a heart attack, but rumors persisted that Hearst had shot Ince in a dispute over Marion Davies.

How to Write a Photoplay In the period between roughly 1910 and 1920, the scenario had become the longer “photoplay,” and it was little different from what we now call a “screenplay,” a term not common until the 1940s. By the mid-teens, magazines were already flaunting the promise of a glamorous career as a movie actor or actress, but also as a screenwriter. The Moving Picture World announced that Roy McCardell, “who will write you anything from a cigarette advertisement to a grand opera and who was the first and still one of the most prolific photoplay writers,” would offer a series of articles for the New York World on making a living by writing. His first article was to be on the photoplay and was described as “sane,” to contrast

Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928 29

it with those by its competitors, who promised insane profits from photoplays. McCardell “holds out small inducement to the novice,”45 noted the columnist Epes Sargent, who then reprinted an excerpt from McCardell’s article: Frank Woods, a scenario editor, announced recently that within several months . . . he had examined 7000 motion picture manuscripts (or scenarios, as they are called) written by amateur authors and only ten of all these could be used, and then only after being rewritten. Mrs. Marion Brandon, editor for another film company, long ago gave up hope that any untrained scenario writer had any message for her, and she will not read manuscripts of picture ideas unless submitted by those who have had at least three moving picture ideas previously accepted. Yet, every person who can wield a pen or borrow a lead pencil is writing scenarios.46 F. Marion Brandon worked for the Eclair Company and is credited with three screenplays in 1914.47 Frank E. Woods, an editor at Mutual, was instrumental in getting movies taken seriously by being one of the first film critics, but he is also credited on some ninety scripts between 1908 and 1925, many with D. W. Griffith, including The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. He was also one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. After the observations from Brandon and Woods, McCardell endorses a guide to writing the photoplay (conveniently authored by Epes Sargent), which emphasizes professionalism. Sargent was the scion of a blueblood family who gained his reputation reviewing vaudeville, but he wrote under many pseudonyms. He sold story ideas to Vitagraph beginning in 1898 and became a scenario editor for the Lubin company in 1909. A fast writer, he claimed to have written hundreds of scenarios and one short comedy in forty-two minutes. He helped found Variety in 1903. By 1911, he was a regular columnist on screenplay writing and is considered, like Frank Woods, to be among those critics who refined the art of screenwriting.48 In another part of this same issue of Moving Picture World, an article brags about the noted authors who have been contracted to write for Mutual and D. W. Griffith, including Thomas Nelson Page (novelist), Paul Armstrong (playwright), John Kendricks Bangs (satirist), George A. Birmingham (hit comedy playwright), Zona Gale (novelist and playwright), Roy Norton (western writer), Mary Roberts Rinehart (mystery novelist), and the ever-productive Roy McCardell,49 among others. The point in promoting this list is to imply that the photoplay writer is now a respectable professional and will produce stories the equal of other storytelling media in content and quality. It is even pointed out that one novelist, Daniel Carson Goodman, had been a target of Anthony Comstock, the legendary censor. The movies were evidently not ready to give

30 J. Madison Davis

up the cachet of risqué subjects. Goodman’s first story for the screen was Sapho (1913), and he went on to credits for some twenty-eight titles. He was also the physician who first attended to the dying Thomas Ince after Hearst shot—or did not shoot—him. Sargent was not the only one offering guides to writing the photoplay. In 1912, James Slevin wrote On Picture Play Writing.50 Whoever he was, he is not listed as having any scenario credits. Louella Parsons, before she grew her frightening power to build or crush careers as a Hollywood gossip columnist, sold a script to Essanay for twenty-five dollars and served as a story editor. Writing about the movies, rather than writing movies, soon became her forte, but in 1916 she nonetheless published How to Write for the “Movies” to respond to “twenty thousand letters from ambitious photoplaywrights, begging me to help them write a scenario.”51 Frances Taylor Patterson is styled “Instructor of Photoplay Composition at Columbia University,” on the title page of her Cinema Craftsmanship: A Book for Photoplaywrights,52 but as Richard Koszarski commented, “Columbia University demonstrated a commitment to film studies throughout this period but without any notable acceptance from either the industry or the academy.”53 Patterson at least has one professional credit, in 1926 adapting Zalmen Libin’s Yiddish play De Gebrokene Hertser (Broken hearts) for Jaffe Art Films, a onemovie production company. How to Write a Photoplay by Arthur W. Thomas, published in 1914, is readily available at a number of internet sites. Thomas identified himself as the president of the Photoplaywrights’ Association of America and editor of Photoplay Magazine, though he appears to have been the editor only in December 1913 and was gone by November 1914.54 The Internet Movie Database holds no writing credits for anyone with this name. As is commonly true of how-to-write books of today, Thomas’s advice tends to center around almost everything except storytelling. Like Louella Parsons in her book,55 he tosses about terms that promise to make the aspiring photoplay author sound like an insider. Many of them are familiar today, like “dissolve,” “insert,” “interior,” and “unity.” Others seem to be terms of the time, like “bust—any part of a scene magnified or enlarged,” and “unexpectedness—an unlooked-for turn or surprise in a story.” He says that a comedy will generally run over forty scenes and a “farce-comedy” upward of seventy-five. (“Scenes” as a term in those days is interchangeable with what we call “shots.”) The writer should keep a carbon copy, be grammatical, and shouldn’t use copyrighted material. He promises that the work of the amateur gets the same respect as that of a professional. None of this advice gets to the essence of storytelling, which is, of course, what separates the amateur from the professional. As helpful as the guides promised to be, by the mid-teens the movie producers were relying on professional writers from the newspapers, stage, and other publishing media. Movies by then centered around storytelling, and writers inadequate in that skill would join the thousands rejected by Frank Woods and other studio editors.

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The most interesting part of Thomas’s book is the chapter on censorship, the perennial preoccupation of filmmakers and those who would protect us from them. Thomas advises authors to avoid stories that guarantee rejection. “Crime, debauchery, robbery and the like acts are not in the least elevating. How much better is the sweet love story that tells of devotion, kindness, purity, and trial?” Shakespeare and tragedies of the old masters can be filmed because they have a strong moral. War stories and “Indian plays” are not questionable because they are “stories of truth.” Plays that are irreligious, stories of race prejudice, those relating to the deformities of people or drinking, wife-abusing husbands, and crime without a moral are “not desired by any first-class studio.” “Write only that which does not need censoring,” Thomas advises.56 Of course, some of the best films in that period, and after, have these elements, because the primary power that has kept certain subjects out of films are the producers. “Self-policing” is the usually desired form of Hollywood censorship, but when a determined producer decides it is worth the uproar, as with Hollaman’s Passion Play of Oberammergau, Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw, or Otto Preminger’s Man with the Golden Arm, there is little to stop the film. Censorship, however, either internally or from the outside, implies that movies and the photoplays that lead to them are serious art. In 1915, Vachel Lindsay, who was becoming one of America’s best-known poets, published a book called The Art of the Moving Picture. In it he compares the art of the movie to that of painting. Early in the book he aspires to have influence upon “producers, scenariowriters, actors, and those who are about to prepare and endow pictures for special crusades.” He classifies all movies as having three prevailing elements: action, intimacy, and splendor. He then describes each, taking the critic’s usual view of the action film: “In the mind of the habitué of the cheaper theatre, it is the only sort in existence.”57 In a 1917 article, Lindsay at length praises a book by Professor Hugo Münsterberg, particularly for its analysis of Intolerance, and complains that “for the most part neither the book nor the film have been estimated in any but a nickelodeon way.”58 The photoplay manuscript by 1920 had basically reached the form that is familiar to all screenwriters. The less detailed “scenario” would now be called a “step outline” or a “scene treatment.” The later introduction of sound would mean dialogue was an important further obligation of the screenwriter, but silent photoplay writers were already considering and often writing the dialogue, and not just for the title cards. According to Hollywood legend, lip readers forced the actors to stick to the premise of the scene and not speak obscenities or plan lunch. In some ways, the writers were more powerful creatively than they are today. The writers shaped the raw material, revising it as necessary, and passed it on. In the factory system that dominated the industry it was inefficient for the actors, directors, and cameramen to meddle with the script.

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Women Shape Early Screenwriting Throughout the 1920s, many historians see a steady shift toward male writers in the film business. In the postwar period, there was a reaction against many of the social developments that had preceded the war. The role of women in the national discourse had gradually increased until they got the vote in 1920. The influx of Jewish and Catholic immigrants was changing America, and the awareness of the abuse of the African American underclass was increasing. In the early 1920s, thanks partly to The Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan claimed four million members and dominated the legislature of Indiana. Black performers were restricted on Broadway. Immigration laws were tightened. Almost from the beginning, women had played important roles in the development of the film business, but gradually they were being replaced—not so much as a policy, but as an indication that the movie business was now a serious business, and should, in the thinking of the time, therefore, be male. Women’s role in film had been highly significant in the early days when film was a borderline business, taken on by people who had few paths to “respectable” commerce. It has been estimated that during the 1910s, 1920s, and early 1930s, one-fourth of the screenwriters were women. Of films copyrighted between 1911 and 1925, half were by women.59 In the earliest period of filmmaking, Alice Guy, a secretary to Léon Gaumont in 1894, asked to make a narrative film to demonstrate the possibilities of the company’s camera. She directed a minute-long short, La Fée aux choux (The cabbage fairy), starring herself and two babies harvested from a cabbage patch. Guy was head of production within a year. Like most of the early pioneers, she was involved in all aspects of production from writing to shooting to directing. Guy constantly pushed the possibilities. She explored special effects and even made 100 films using a system of synchronized sound. Her 1906 production, The Life of Christ (La Vie du Christ), had twenty-five scenes, ran about thirty-three minutes, and included some 300 extras. She explored the use of color. She became the first woman to run a studio, founding the Solax Company in Flushing, New York, the biggest pre-Hollywood studio. In 1913, she directed twenty-two feature films. In 1914, she passed the executive functions to her husband and concentrated on writing and directing. She made approximately 700 films in less than thirty years, and she wrote and directed almost every genre from westerns to detective stories. She directed her last film in 1920, but continued writing, doing novelizations of scripts. Unfortunately, only a small number of her films survive.60 More typical of the aspiring writer, Lillian J. Sweetser was a housewife in Maine when she began submitting scenarios in 1910. The going rate was about twenty dollars a reel. In 1912, she finally sold one, The Call of the Drum. She found herself particularly successful with tear-jerkers. The Other Woman (1913), starring Norma Talmadge, was probably her most notable film. Later

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in life she would laugh about the corniness of her stories and admitted being embarrassed by her comedy Molly’s Mistake (1913). By the end of the decade the emphasis was on feature films and producers had become concerned about copyright violation. They preferred to buy stories from other media or to rely on in-house writers. Sweetser decided not to try for Hollywood and became a newspaper correspondent.61 An important aspect of the silent era is that it was more international than what followed. By reediting the title cards, a movie could be shown in any language. A lot of fertilization took place across language barriers. One of the most significant screenwriters of the silent era is Thea von Harbou. Born into a noble Prussian family, she published her first story at fourteen years old and a novel at twenty-two. She was adapting one of her own novels for the screen when director Joe May suggested she get help from Fritz Lang. The collaboration became one of the most successful in film history, and Lang later gave her most of the credit. Von Harbou and Lang were married and compiled a remarkable string of masterpieces: Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922), Siegfried’s Tod and Kriemhilde’s Rache (Die Nibelungen) (1924), and Metropolis (1927). They continued into the sound era with M (1931) and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933). She died in 1954 from a fall after a screening of one of her earliest films, Der Müde Tod (The weary death, 1921). Many other women made significant contributions as photoplay writers. The very prolific Frances Marion began work in Hollywood in 1912 and by 1917 had become Mary Pickford’s personal writer, penning Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Thea von Harbou (c. 1923) hard at work with Fritz Lang, probably on Metropolis.

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(1917), The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), and Pollyanna (1920). Studio executives initially hated Poor Little Rich Girl, but, once released, it became a hit, perhaps persuading them that a more feminine approach to movie content was good box office. Later, studio chiefs often insisted upon female characters, even in inappropriate contexts, as they believed that female companions had much influence over ticket buying. Marion later adapted The Scarlet Letter (1926, with Lillian Gish) and The Son of the Sheik (1926, with Rudolf Valentino and Vilma Banky). She wrote everything from westerns to serious drama, and continued into the beginning of sound as the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood, a status she held for a decade and a half. She adapted Anna Christie (1930), Greta Garbo’s first talkie, and revived the flagging careers of Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler. She earned two writing Oscars for The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1931).62 After Irving Thalberg died, Marion became frustrated with her male overlords. She wrote a book on writing the screenplay in 1937 and followed other female screenwriters like Anita Loos and Adela Rogers St. Johns to concentrate on novels, plays, and nonfiction. Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1928) had begun in Hollywood in 1912, writing for Griffith. St. Johns received her first credit in 1918. Frederica Sagor Maas left her studies in journalism at Columbia University to take a job as an assistant story editor at Universal Pictures. She studied movies frame by frame. In 1924, she headed to Hollywood. A year later, her adaptation of The Plastic Age, starring Clara Bow, made her one of the top screenwriters in town. She signed with MGM, but she was not happy with others taking credit for her work on such films as Norma Shearer’s The Waning Sex (1926) and Garbo’s Flesh and the Devil (1927). Like Marion, who helped found the Author’s Guild, she got a reputation as a troublemaker. To scan her credits is to see that MGM

Mary Pickford and Frances Marion on the set of Poor Little Rich Girl (1917). Scenario by Frances Marion.

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had categorized her as a specialist in sexual themes, but after sound and the coming of the Hays Code she had few successes. She managed to sell Miss Pilgrim’s Progress, a serious film about women typists entering the workplace, but it was warped into a 1947 musical, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. In despair by 1950 and under investigation by the FBI for being “Red,” she never wrote another script. She lived to be the forty-fourth oldest person in the world, dying at age 111 in 2012.63 Her memoir, published when she was ninety-nine,64 is a vivid picture of Hollywood in the silent era, when she knew Joan Crawford (“a gum-chewing tart”), Louise Brooks, and Irving Berlin. She once saw Clara Bow dance naked on a table at a party. Her opinion of films being written in the 1990s was not good. “There’s no lack of material, there’s just a lack of incentive to make anything else but what they consider box office. . . . It’s all in the same vein: sex, sex, sex, sex, sex and violence, violence, violence, violence.”65 Sagor Maas’s complaint is a familiar canard, but sex and violence were as integral to the popularity of silents as they are to contemporary cable television. Yes, there are different standards of propriety in different periods and places, and writers, being artists or simply greedy, always wish to go a step further. The 2012 flop of Cloud Atlas is a reminder of what happened with Intolerance, which was also a thematic trip through different characters in different times.66 The writers were mostly restricted by the financial concerns of their own producers, which remains true, but in the silent era there were numerous opportunities to explore what might work. In many ways the subjects and styles of films before 1929 are more various than those after, as the variety of active studios declined. Adultery (Sunrise, 1927), child abuse (Broken Blossoms, 1919), gangsters (Underworld, 1927), governmental corruption (The Racket, 1928), prostitution (Pandora’s Box, 1929), drug use (The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, 1916), religious fraud (Body and Soul, 1925), and interracial relationships (The Cheat, 1915) were all available as subjects. Writers were able to pursue whatever stories their producers allowed and the distinctive forms and structures of the screenplay that we still use today had evolved. The issue of how to write a movie had generally been settled. The continuing issue was what to write and what to say about it.

2 Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946

Mark Eaton

American cinema came of age in the 1920s, and despite a severe economic contraction during the Great Depression, the film industry only increased in both size and scope in the 1930s. The consequent demand for stories—whether in the form of original screenplays or adaptations of novels, plays, short stories, and other sources—meant that screenwriters played a significant role in the growing film industry. The increasing number of movies being made in any given year, as well as longer average running times for those movies, made the demand for material that much greater. A search for talented writers ensued, motivated not just by increased demand but also by a shared commitment to elevating the quality and respectability of Hollywood films.1 From the late 1920s to the late 1940s, screenwriters contributed much to a vertically integrated film industry that controlled the entire filmmaking process—from the page to the silver screen. The very content and form of what got written down on the page before shooting began were also changing. Whereas dialogue had a limited role in silent films, appearing as intertitles between shots, as Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White write, “the introduction of sound technology in the late 1920s proved to be one of the most significant advancements in the history of film narrative,” since it “enabled film narratives to create and develop more intricate characters whose dialogue and vocal intonations added new psychological and social dimensions 36

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to film.”2 Dialogue quickly became a standard feature of screenplays, requiring writers who could come up with entertaining, funny, or intelligent speech. A number of conventions also developed around the screenplay, which became more and more standardized not just in terms of various genres—gangster films, historical epics, horror films, musicals, screwball and other types of comedies, westerns, and so on—but also in terms of what film critics call classical Hollywood narrative. The 1930s and 1940s saw a consolidation of the basic conventions governing classical narrative, which include (1) focusing on one or two central characters; (2) constructing plots with more or less linear chronologies (even when flashbacks are used); and (3) implementing a realistic cause-and-effect logic according to which the central characters propel the plot forward by striving to overcome antagonists, internal conflicts, and other obstacles in order to achieve certain goals or perhaps some kind of self-transformation. In addition, classical film narrative tended to employ a three-part structure, following the ancient Aristotelian schema of beginning, middle, and ending. Although there were many variations to classical film narrative, not to mention alternative traditions that challenged notions of realism, linear chronology, and the omniscient point of view upon which classical narrative depended, classical Hollywood cinema nonetheless proved to be an immensely productive formula with enough flexibility to create a virtually unlimited number of stories of great depth and power.

Writing for a Sound Film Audience Audiences were clearly responsive to this new form of commercial entertainment, which along with automobiles and comparatively shorter work weeks transformed leisure time itself. Attracting roughly 50 million weekly viewers in 1920, Hollywood nearly doubled its average weekly attendance to about 95 million viewers per week by the end of the decade (some estimates put the figure as high as 100 million), around the time that the first Academy Awards ceremony was held in Los Angeles in 1929. This meant that average weekly attendance at some 20,000 theaters throughout the country was close to 80 percent of the United States population at the time, which was about 122 million.3 Economically and culturally, the film industry expanded its reach throughout the 1920s in spite of several scandals that had tarnished its image earlier in the decade. At the start of the period covered in this chapter, Hollywood was enjoying what can only be considered its boom years. Moving pictures were America’s dominant form of entertainment. The stock market crash of October 1929 sent the film industry reeling—along with the rest of the nation’s economy. During the Great Depression, movie theater attendance dropped from some 80 million patrons per week in 1930 to 70 million in 1931, then 55 million in 1932, while ticket prices also fell from thirty cents to twenty cents on average, even as the number of lower-priced ten-cent

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theaters increased to some 2,000 by the end of 1931.4 After the boom years of the late 1920s, it must have seemed as if the film industry was regressing to the nickelodeon era. Moreover, things got worse before they got better. As the film historian Tino Balio writes, “The bottom fell out of the market in 1933.”5 Fox, Paramount, and RKO Pictures all declared bankruptcy; Universal went into receivership and was forced to sell its chain of more than 300 theaters; Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer battled to stay in business. As it turned out, however, the film industry survived the Depression more or less intact. Attendance at movie theaters across the country rebounded to an estimated 60 million weekly viewers in 1934, and it continued to climb steadily upward in subsequent years, from 70 million in 1934 to 80 million in 1935 to 88 million in 1936. A decade later, movie attendance was still holding steady at about 90 million weekly viewers, just below its peak of 95 million from 1929 (although the U.S. population had grown by some 20 million people to more than 140 million).

Writing in Hollywood’s Golden Age Starting around 1928, Hollywood entered a golden age in which a relatively small number of studios—the “Big Five” (Fox, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., and RKO) along with the “Little Three” studios (Columbia, Universal, and United Artists)—benefitted from a vertically integrated film industry that allowed them to control film production from start to finish. In 1938, the U.S. Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against the eight major studios (no longer separated as “Big Five” and “Little Three,” and Fox now reorganized and renamed Twentieth Century–Fox) for monopolistic practices. After Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection to an unprecedented third term in November 1940, the studios signed a consent decree with the U.S. government, agreeing to produce “fewer and better” films starting the following year.6 Hollywood enjoyed relatively little government interference until 1948, when the Supreme Court finally forced the film studios to divest from the theater chains they controlled. That same year, the number of television sets in American households reached one million, and over the next ten years the major studios saw their overall box office profits decline by some 50 percent from a peak of $1.7 billion in 1946. Attendance dropped by one-third to roughly 60 million weekly viewers by 1950 and then by another third to 40 million weekly viewers a decade later, in 1960. Weekly attendance would never again reach the levels of the classical period.7 As a percentage of the U.S. population this decline seems more dramatic still: whereas nearly 65 percent of Americans went to the movies every week in 1946, by the end of the twentieth century less than 10 percent of Americans did so on average. In short, the “magical year” of 1946, as the film historian Richard Jewell

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calls it, “would mark the end of the boom era; soon, most Americans would rely on television for their visual entertainment and movies would become an occasional pastime, rather than a regular habit.”8 Raymond Chandler had predicted in 1945 that the “cold dynasty” of the studio system “will not last forever,” and indeed it did not last.9 But there can be no doubt that a large number of the films made during this classical period have lasted, or stood the test of time, as it were: a remarkable tribute not only to the studio system but also to the many talented men and women who wrote scripts for every last one of the films that viewers all over the world still enjoy today. Writers were crucial to the expanding cultural influence of cinema in the classical Hollywood period. Notwithstanding complaints about being mere cogs in the studio machine, screenwriters contributed to the making of any number of indelible film masterpieces during this period, from slapstick comedies such as Duck Soup (1933); to sophisticated romantic comedies like It Happened One Night (1934) and The Lady Eve (1941); to classic film noirs such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946); to the remarkable cornucopia of fantasies, historical epics, and westerns all released in what is widely considered Hollywood’s greatest single year, 1939, which featured, among many other gems, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Stagecoach.10 Writers were indispensable to this “golden age” of Hollywood between 1928 and 1946, even if they had legitimate reasons to gripe about their relatively low status and all-too-often exploitive treatment within the studio system.11 Familiar as writers’ complaints are, we must question whether such conditions were necessarily inimical to producing great films. Indeed, the sheer number and variety of great films made during the classical Hollywood period challenges us to reconsider longstanding pejorative constructions of the studio era from some film critics. The Production Code, for instance, has been viewed typically as a deplorable if not insidious form of censorship (always bad) that curtailed artistic freedom (always good). Echoing Virginia Woolf’s famous dictum about modern life, Thomas Doherty begins his book Pre-Code Hollywood (1999) by describing Hollywood’s self-imposed system of censorship in rather sinister terms: On or about July 1934, American cinema changed. During that month, the Production Code Administration, popularly known as the Hays Office, began to regulate, systematically and scrupulously, the content of Hollywood motion pictures. For the next thirty years, cinematic space was a patrolled landscape with secure perimeters and well-defined borders. Adopted under duress at the urging of priests and politicians, Hollywood’s in-house policy of self-censorship set the boundaries for what could be seen, heard, even implied on screen.12

40 Mark Eaton

The Production Code had been drafted as early as 1930 but was not fully enforced until 1934, when the Production Code Administration (PCA) was established under director Joseph I. Breen. The code consisted of three General Principles meant to establish guidelines for “appropriate content” in the cinema, followed by more specific “Particular Applications” elaborated under a section somewhat comically entitled “Don’ts and Be Carefuls.” While this section included a number of patently prudish rules against representing “the use of liquor” or “adultery and illicit sex” unless strongly condemned by the end, the basic moralistic thrust of the Production Code is best summed up in General Principal number 1: “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin.” By invoking the “dictates of good taste and civilized usage” the code sought to limit obscenity, or indeed any “treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant subjects which decent society considers outlawed from normal conversation.”13 In spite of the PCA’s restrictions, filmmakers managed to produce an extraordinary number of great films, as Doherty acknowledges: “Hollywood’s vaunted ‘golden age’ began with the Code and ended with its demise.” Arguably, the restrictions on content enforced by the Production Code, along with requirements to conform to genre conventions and contractual agreements that kept writers working for only one studio, had the effect of spurring creativity rather than stifling it, producing what Doherty aptly calls an “artistic flowering of incalculable cultural impact.”14 For all its faults, then, the studio system worked. In his book The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (1996), the historian Thomas Schatz agrees: “The quality and artistry of all these films were the product not simply of individual human expression, but of a melding of institutional forces. In each case the ‘style’ of a writer, director, or star . . . fused with the studio’s production operations and management structure, its resources and talent pool, its narrative traditions and market strategy.”15 Chronically underappreciated (and at times uncredited) writers who worked behind the scenes to help make the studio system work were less sanguine about what they regarded as a highly commercialized, industrial model of filmmaking. In his essay “Writers in Hollywood” (1945), Chandler bemoaned the fact that “the basic art of the motion picture is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. . . . But in Hollywood the screenplay is written by a salaried writer under the supervision of a producer—that is to say, by an employee without power or decision over the uses of his own craft, without ownership of it, and, however extravagantly paid, almost without honor for it.”16 The top screenwriters were indeed extravagantly paid. Twentieth Century–Fox’s two highest paid employees in 1938 were Shirley Temple and the screenwriter-turned-producer Nunnally Johnson. The highest paid writers in

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1938 included Ben Hecht and Preston Sturges, who made more than $140,000 that year. Anita Loos made $87,500, according to Leo Rosten.17 Whatever their salaries or relative status compared to the producers and directors, many writers did exercise considerable control and influence over their particular domain, the script, which in turn influenced the quality of what made it to the screen. “Screenwriters have traditionally been seen as the least powerful contingent in Hollywood,” writes the film critic J. E. Smyth, “but even before the Screen Writers’ Guild was certified by the National Labor Relations Board in August 1938, individual writers at several studios had an unusual independence and autonomy over their work. Often their story sense overpowered their producers.”18 The screenwriter Dudley Nichols, best known for collaborating with director John Ford on a number of film masterpieces including Stagecoach, declared in 1942, “I devoutly believe it is the writer who has matured the film medium more than anyone else in Hollywood.”19 By the standards of how it developed after the advent of synchronized sound in 1927, screenwriting in the silent era was somewhat limited in scope. Characters and storylines still had to be fleshed out and written down, of course, yet dialogue was limited to intertitles. Whereas silent films had emphasized a universally accessible and predominantly visual aesthetic of sight gags and the like, sound films replaced nonverbal communication with more elaborate dialogue, no longer delimited by intertitles, as the principal aspect of what film critics call diegetic sound, that is, sound emitted from people, animals, machines, musical instruments, or objects onscreen. The world onscreen was still black and white, of course, but it suddenly had an aural dimension. “Nonverbal communication in the cinema was never totally lost,” Frank Scheide has observed, “but the new technology fundamentally changed both the evolution and content of cinematic expression.”20 Synchronized sound caused a sensation when it was first introduced in The Jazz Singer (1927) with the unforgettable lines, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” Before long, moving pictures became, in effect, talkies. If film production was still more or less split between silent, sound, and hybrid movies in 1928, sound films would quickly dominate the industry, and the studios virtually stopped making silent films by 1930. Charlie Chaplin is the exception, of course, as he defiantly continued to make silent films into the 1930s, including two of his most successful comedies, City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). This development was good news for screenwriters. In April 1929, film critic and playwright Robert E. Sherwood predicted a “Renaissance in Hollywood,” the title of an essay published in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury in which he argued that the talkies would have “a profoundly salutary influence upon the movie industry” and that “the writer will now be boosted into a position of importance that is equivalent, at least, to that of the director.”21 A founding member of the Algonquin Circle, Sherwood became friends with Robert Benchley, Edna

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Ferber, and Dorothy Parker—all of whom would go on to write for the movies, as did Sherwood himself, who won a Best Screenplay Oscar for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Directed by William Wyler, The Best Years of Our Lives deals frankly with alcoholism and depression among three returning World War II veterans who must cope with the difficulties of transitioning to civilian life in a changing postwar American society. While Sherwood’s bold claim that screenwriters would soon acquire as much or more power as directors didn’t quite pan out, as we shall see, it is true that movies subsequently relied more heavily on dialogue, and furthermore that dialogue was increasingly marked by verbal sparring and word play, as evidenced by Mae West’s witty double-entendres in She Done Him Wrong (1933) and I’m No Angel (1933)—“When I’m good I’m very good. But when I’m bad I’m better”—or later, by the repartee of fast-talking dames such as those played by Rosalind Russell and Barbara Stanwyck in His Girl Friday (1940) and The Lady Eve (1941), respectively. The role of women performers and screenwriters in fomenting this revolution in dialogue writing should not be underestimated. “Story, screenplay, and all dialogue by Mae West,” the credit sequence for I’m No Angel proclaimed. As West herself declared, “I wrote the story of I’m No Angel myself. It’s all about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.” Recall that Hollywood was in the midst of an economic decline in 1933 when her two classic films She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel came out. As one grateful exhibitor apparently exclaimed: “Mae West was a life saver for an anemic box office.”22

Mae West and Cary Grant in I’m No Angel (1933), the top-grossing film of 1933. Screenplay by Mae West.

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Billy Wilder’s masterful film Sunset Blvd. (1950), with a brilliant Academy Award–winning screenplay by Wilder along with Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr., offers a wry commentary on the sound era in the following exchange between Joe Gillis (William Holden), a struggling screenwriter, and Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a washed-up silent film star: Gillis: I know your face. You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in pictures. You used to be big. Norma: I am big. It’s the pictures that got small. . . . There was a time when this business had the eyes of the whole wide world. But that wasn’t good enough. Oh, no! They wanted the ears of the world, too. So they opened their big mouths, and out came talk, talk, talk! Gillis: That’s where the popcorn business comes in. You buy yourself a bag and plug up your ears. Norma: Look at them in the front offices—the masterminds! They took the idols and smashed them. The Fairbankses and the Chaplins and the Gilberts and the Valentinos. And who have they got now? Some nobodies—a lot of pale little frogs croaking pish-posh! Gillis: Don’t get sore at me. I’m not an executive. I’m just a writer. Norma: You are! Writing words, words! You’ve made a rope of words and strangled this business! Unlike purported silent film actors for whom the transition to sound films was damaging to their careers, many well-known writers from the silent era made the transition to sound rather easily. Anita Loos and Frances Marion were equally successful in both the silent and sound eras, for instance. Robert E. Sherwood, in another bold claim, argued that in nearly thirty years of existence, Hollywood had produced not “one writer who is worthy of mention; the lone exception is the gifted Miss Anita Loos.” The most prominent female screenwriter of the period, though, was Frances Marion, who won Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1930 and again for Best Story in 1932, both for pictures featuring Wallace Beery.23 Screenwriting was notably one of the few professions in the film industry that remained relatively open to women. The transition from silent to sound films created a demand for new screenwriting talent. “Novelists and playwrights of acute sensibility and talent,” observes Richard Fine, “were lured to Hollywood by offers of huge amounts of money and the promise of challenging assignments.”24 The Coen brothers’ film Barton Fink

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(1991) describes how Hollywood studios lured East Coast writers when the aptly named Capital Pictures recruits the film’s eponymous playwright Barton Fink, who is still basking in the success of his recent play. Overcoming his ambivalence about giving up the stage, Barton decides to cash in on his Broadway success by accepting the offer of a lucrative screenwriting contract, and the Coen brothers signal his fateful decision with a telling cut—from a golden cash register in the background to the crashing of a wave against the rocks—which serves as a sort of brilliant shorthand for the exotic allure of going out to “the coast” for New York writers. Of course, Barton Fink goes on to show, as John T. Matthews contends, writing about William Faulkner’s stint in Los Angeles, “the destructive force of Hollywood on serious writers who sought to make fortunes there while preserving their artistic integrity.”25 Certainly many writers felt underappreciated if not downright disrespected in the studio system. Ben Hecht once complained that producers “outrank you in salary two to one. It’s like giving the printer $2000 a week for setting the type for the Great American Novel.” Producers dished out insults in return; Jack Warner famously dubbed screenwriters “schmucks with Underwoods.”26 Yet some writers embraced screenwriting as an opportunity to create a new form of literary art.

The Profession of Screenwriting The profession of screenwriting, like the film industry as a whole, was rapidly changing. No doubt the single biggest change in the craft was a newfound need for dialogue in the movies. As Balio points out, “Talking pictures added a new dimension to the craft of screenwriting—the ability to write realistic dialogue.”27 Not only was dialogue becoming much more realistic, but dialogue also made possible a different type of comedy than the kind pioneered by the comic geniuses Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Embarking on the production of his first sound film The Lion’s Roar (1928), for example, the director Mack Sennett observed, “Dialogue opens to the producer of the heretofore ‘silent’ pictures, the immense field of verbal humor,” not to mention “proper sound effects, such as the roar of lions, the rumble of an approaching train or the crash of breaking dishes.”28 Witty dialogue and sound effects played for laughs were not improvised during production, of course; they were dreamed up and written down by writers. Consider the unique case of the Marx Brothers comedies of the early 1930s. Although films like Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933) retained elements of slapstick from silent comedy, the Marx Brothers introduced comic forms of wordplay such as double entendres, wacky monologues, and sardonic asides. Self-consciously subverting emerging conventions of classical Hollywood cinema, the Marx Brothers created a number of brilliantly

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Groucho Marx in Duck Soup (1933), which brought a new comic sensibility with its funny, smart dialogue. Story by Bert Kalmer and Harry Ruby, additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin.

“anarchistic comedies” in collaboration with a team of writers including Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and S. J. Perelman, among others.29 Other changes in the craft of screenwriting included greater attention to characterization as well as a growing emphasis on genre conventions. Gangster films like Little Caesar (1931), Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) were enormously popular in the early 1930s, as were horror films like Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and King Kong (1933). The best writers also knew that if their characters’ actions were motivated, they would be plausible and realistic. “In order that the motion picture may convey the illusion of reality that audiences demand,” Frances Marion, author of How to Write and Sell Film Stories (1937), notes in a piece entitled “Scenario Writing,” “the scenario writer stresses motivation—that is, he makes clear a character’s reason for doing whatever he does that is important.”30 Her book also stressed the need for character arc and narrative closure. According to Marion, films must end shortly after the action gets resolved, “but not before the expected rewards and punishments are meted out. . . . The final sequence should show the reaction of the protagonist when he has achieved his desires. Let the audience be satisfied that the future of the principles is settled.”31 These authors articulate the now familiar narrative conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. The second phase of classical Hollywood cinema—the sound era—thus brought about two important stylistic changes in particular that had a major

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impact on screenwriting: (1) the elaboration of movie dialogue and characterization in films; and (2) the prominence of generic formulas in constructing film narratives. According to Corrigan and White: “The sensational arrival of sound technology opened a whole new dimension to film form that allowed movies to expand their dramatic capacity. Accomplished writers flocked to Hollywood, literary adaptations flourished, and outspoken characters became more verbally, psychologically, and socially complex.”32 For the next thirty years, writers helped develop an astonishing variety of characters, the conventions associated with various genres, and patterns of narrative conflict, coherence, and resolution that, along with the nascent visual language of continuity editing, combined to create a classical Hollywood cinema of unprecedented cultural power. The visual language and narrative principles of the classical style were actually more pliable and less restrictive than we might assume, yet together they functioned to convey information in a dramatically compelling fashion. The goal was to completely immerse the viewer in the story so, as Jewell writes, “that they would never think about the totally constructed and artificial nature of the experience.”33

Screenwriting during the Great Depression A mass exodus of writers to “the mecca of the movies,” as French writer Blaise Cendrars called Hollywood in 1936, was spurred on not just by the conversion to talking pictures, but also by the Great Depression. 34 During the early 1930s, many New York publishing houses filed for bankruptcy, and by some estimates roughly half of all Broadway theaters were forced to close. 35 With the doors of assorted publishing houses and theaters shuttered, many writers migrated west. As Ian Hamilton points out in his history of writers in Hollywood, “By the end of 1931, there were 354 full-time writers in Hollywood and another 435 working part-time.”36 Those numbers continued to climb: a decade later there were more than 1,000 members of the Screen Writers Guild. Even a highly selective listing of the writers who went to Hollywood includes many influentual members of the literary establishment: Maxwell Anderson, Robert Benchley, Charles Brackett, W. R. Burnett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Ben Hecht, Lillian Hellman, Sidney Howard, Nunnally Johnson, George S. Kaufman, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Frank O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, Donald Ogden Stewart, Preston Sturges, Thorton Wilder, as well as some wellknown British writers like Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Evelyn Waugh. As early as 1932, one Fortune magazine writer could joke, “More members of the literati work under [Irving] Thalberg than it took to produce the King James Bible.”37

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The longstanding myth of writers “selling out in Hollywood” has been dispelled in a number of ways, not least by pointing out that for all their complaints, many writers had little choice but to write for the studios.38 Consider Nathanael West, whose first three novels earned less than $800 in combined royalties. After The Day of the Locust (1939) brought him a paltry $300 in royalties, West jumped at the chance of a studio contract. Still, the influential critic Edmund Wilson condemned West’s move to Hollywood: “Why don’t you get out of that ghastly place? You’re an artist and really have no business there.”39 In fact, business is precisely what West did have there, as the author himself admitted: “Thank God for the movies. I once tried to work seriously at my craft but was absolutely unable to make even the beginning of a living. So it wasn’t a matter of making a sacrifice, but just a clear cut impossibility.”40 When Harold Ross of the New Yorker chastised another novelist-turned-screenwriter, Nunnally Johnson, for what he called “sucking around the diamond merchants of Hollywood,” he was merely expressing a view that was considered axiomatic. F. Scott Fitzgerald voices much the same concern when he warned his friend: “Listen, Nunnally, get out of Hollywood. It will ruin you. You have a talent—you’ll kill it there.”41 Neither Johnson nor Fitzgerald heeded this advice. Long viewed as the quintessential example of a promising writer who squandered his talent in Hollywood, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in California the very same day as Nathanael West in December 1940—two casualties of what Chandler called “the graveyard of talent.”42 In his essay “The Boys in the Back Room” (1941), Edmund Wilson observed that the deaths of both Fitzgerald and West on the same day was firstly an extraordinary coincidence of literary history, but secondly, echoing the largely negative view of Hollywood among the New York intellectuals, it was a tragic consequence of the “great anti-cultural amusement-producing center” that had grown up, “gigantic and vulgar, like one of those synthetic California flowers, and tended to drain the soil of the imaginative life of the State.”43 Faced with a choice between becoming fettered to the studios or finding something else to do for a living, many writers were willing to make that Faustian bargain. “If I do sell my soul to the cinema,” Robert E. Sherwood assured his mother, “it will be for a tidy sum.”44 James M. Cain was similarly candid, if also defensive, about the economic realities of his situation: “I work a few weeks a year, and collect the main part of my living expenses, which leaves me free to do my other work without having to worry about the rent.”45 William Faulkner was no less determined to keep his wits about him by segregating his commercial work, which he often likened to prostitution or slavery, from serious literary fiction: There’s some people who are writers who believed they had talent, they believed in the dream of perfection, they get offers to go to Hollywood where they can make a lot of money, and they can’t quit their jobs because

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they have got to continue to own that swimming pool and the imported cars. There are others with the same dream of perfection, the same belief that they can match it that go there and resist the money without becoming a slave to it. Before signing his first studio contract from MGM at $500 per week in April 1932, he wrote to his wife, Estelle: “I have the assurance of a movie agent that I can go to Hollywood and make 500.00 or 750.00 a week in the movies. Hal Smith will not want me to do it, but if all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.”46 Though fraught at times, Faulkner’s relationship to the studios proved to be lucrative. Faulkner sold his war story “Turnabout” (1932), which had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, to MGM for $2,250, and when director Howard Hawks persuaded Irving Thalberg to allow Faulkner to adapt his own story, the author returned a completed script five days later. The studio then asked him to create a romantic lead for Joan Crawford in the script. Faulkner quipped, “I don’t seem to remember a girl in the story,” but he accommodated the studio’s wishes anyway, and the film was retitled and released by MGM in 1933 as Today We Live.47 Yet Faulkner soon found himself embroiled in controversy surrounding Paramount’s adaptation of his novel Sanctuary (1931). Retitled The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1933), the project was “held up for extensive revisions” in early 1933 due to concerns about its “salacious” content. Will Hays, the

Today We Live (1933). Joan Crawford in a role William Faulkner created for her at the studio’s behest. Screenplay by Edith Fitzgerald and Dwight Taylor, with dialogue by William Faulkner.

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principal enforcer of the Production Code at the time, openly complained that “bad source material” (read, Faulkner’s novel) had resulted in problems adhering to the code.48 Faulkner’s close relationship with Howard Hawks helped him immeasurably throughout his “sojourn downriver,” as he once facetiously referred to the time he spent in Hollywood.49 On a hunting expedition with Hawks and Clark Gable, then at the height of his fame, Gable apparently asked Faulkner, “Do you write?” “Yes, Mr. Gable,” Faulkner replied. “What do you do?” But by the late 1930s Hollywood provided Faulkner with a reliable source of income. In 1937, for instance, he made $21,650 from Twentieth Century–Fox. And during the 1940s, Faulkner frequently worked as a “junior writer” at Warner Bros. in a corner office on the first floor of the Writers’ Building, cynically referred to as “the Ward” by the contract screenwriters.50 Serious writers were expected to complain about Hollywood, and so they did, often assiduously. Far from “producing literature,” Leo C. Rosten complained in 1941, writers were “feeding an enormous machine that converts words, faces, sounds, and images into some nine thousand feet of celluloid,” for the “system under which writers work would sap the vitality of a Shakespeare.”51 Whether their open contempt for the studios was a symptom of disillusionment or somewhat disingenuous is open to debate. “Like every writer, or almost every writer, who goes to Hollywood,” Chandler once remarked, “I was convinced at the beginning that there must be some discoverable method of working in pictures which would not be completely stultifying to whatever creative talent one might happen to possess. But like others before me I discovered that this was a dream. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s part of the structure of the industry.”52 Chandler worked steadily in Hollywood from the moment Paramount offered him a contract at $750 per week to work on an adaption of James M. Cain’s hard-boiled novel Double Indemnity (1944) with director Billy Wilder. Their collaboration was hardly free of conflict—“an agonizing experience,” Chandler once remarked, “[that] has probably shortened my life”—but the end result was a terrific film noir, which quickly raised Chandler’s salary to $1,000 per week, and, as he later recalled, “I learned from it as much about screen writing as I am capable of learning.”53 Another highly successful collaboration was the one that produced Citizen Kane (1941), though it has since generated much critical controversy about whether Orson Welles or Herman Mankiewicz was most responsible for the screenplay. Mankiewicz was a screenwriting veteran who, in the late 1920s, had helped convince the New York writers Ben Hecht, Nunnally Johnson, and his own younger brother Joseph to make the move to Hollywood. According to the film historian J. E. Smyth, “Mankiewicz had been one of the first to realize the potential power of screenwriters in sound cinema.” When an inexperienced but supremely confident Welles embarked on the ambitious project of adapting Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the screen, he faced considerable resistance

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among producers concerned about both budget and box office appeal. “Realizing that he was in trouble,” writes Smyth, “Welles asked the studio to hire screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz to show him the mechanics of good screenwriting.”54 The result of their collaboration was a compelling and stunningly complex, multilayered screenplay, originally titled “The American,” based in part on the life of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. Other screenwriters also acquired greater creative control by aligning themselves with established directors. Dudley Nichols had an extremely successful career working with John Ford on a number of classic westerns, for example, including Stagecoach. Similarly, Robert Riskin wrote a number of successful films for Frank Capra, including It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), and You Can’t Take It with You (1938). Still others brokered their success as screenwriters into directing or producing roles, such as Sidney Buchman at Columbia and Nunnally Johnson at Twentieth Century–Fox.

The Screen Writers Guild Perhaps the most significant issue screenwriters faced throughout the 1930s, however, was the studios’ resistance to their unionization. The studios employed a number of nefarious tactics, including pitting conservative screenwriters against the more liberal ones, threatening to blacklist screenwriters who supported unionizing, and simply stonewalling their demands for greater creative authority over the production of their scripts. “Led by writers who had made names for themselves as members of the eastern literary establishment,” writes Balio, “screenwriters bitterly complained about their low status in the studio system, the speed at which they were forced to work, compulsory collaboration, and the unfair assigning of screen credits, among other things.” The Screen Writers Guild (SWG) came into existence as early as April 1933, but it won recognition by the studios “only after a protracted and acrimonious battle.” While the National Labor Relations Board certified the SWG in 1938 as an official labor union, studios still resisted full recognition of the guild, and it was not until May 1941 that the studios finally signed an agreement with SWG, establishing among other things a minimum wage of $125 per week for writers; a minimum period of two weeks for writers receiving $250 or less per week; and a minimum period of one week for writers receiving between $250 to $500 per week. Significantly, the SWG also insisted on the right to arbitrate disputes arising over screen credits. Since the contract agreement applied mostly to the lowest paid writers, though, it was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Although the writers “won a few minor concessions,” Balio tells us, “the creative status of the writer remained as is.”55

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Writers’ complaints about the studio system tended to coalesce around three key issues: intermittent and temporary rather than full-time contracts; compulsory collaboration with other writers; and unfair assigning of screen credits. While salaries could be as high as $1,000 per week or more, “writers seldom worked the full year.”56 The median salary for writers under contract at the four largest studios in 1938 was $25,000 a year, roughly half of what they would have made if they were working the full year at $1,000 per week.57 Short-term contracts lasting between one and three weeks were typical; less often, writers might be hired on longer-term contracts of six months or longer. In between, they often found themselves unemployed for periods ranging from weeks to months to years. Moreover, even while under contract they might spend weeks waiting to get an assignment (albeit while still getting paid), and once the assignment came, producers sometimes expected a treatment or even a completed screenplay within a matter of days. No wonder writers chafed against the process and mercilessly ridiculed it. “When I get a summons from the studio,” the British comedic writer P. G. Wodehouse recalls in his trademark droll style, “I motor over there, stay for a couple of hours and come back. . . . The actual work is negligible. I altered all the characters to earls and butlers with such success that they called a conference and changed the entire plot, starring the earl and the butler. So I’m still working on it. . . . I could have done all my part of it in a morning but they took it for granted that I should need six weeks.” Wodehouse was equally cynical about compulsory collaboration within the studio system: “So far I’ve had eight collaborators. The system is that A gets the original idea, B comes into work with him on it, C makes the scenario, D does preliminary dialogue, and then they send for me to insert class and whatnot, then E and F, scenario writers, alter the plot and off we go again.”58 More often than not, many different writers contributed dialogue or scenes to the same screenplay. At least six writers variously worked on the screenplay for What Price Hollywood (1932), based on a short story by Adela Rogers St. Johns; they included Marjorie Dudley, Robert Pressnel, Gene Fowler, Roland Brown, Jane Murfin, and Ben Markson. In her book Hollywood: The Dream Factory (1951), Hortense Powdermaker wryly observes, “The idea seems to be that if one writer is good, five are better. . . . To receive major credit for a screenplay an individual writer must have contributed at least 33 and 1/3 percent.”59 Determining which writers got credit for their contributions to a script depended almost entirely on the producers’ whims, and assigning credit often had to be worked out through arbitration. As Fine points out, “The system of granting credits was corrupt and counterproductive” in that it “invidiously pitted writer against writer.”60 While the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz (1939) was officially credited to Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, no fewer than seventeen writers actually worked on the script, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, prompting the novelist Salman Rushdie to argue somewhat counterintuitively

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that the film is in some sense an “authorless text,” written not by one person but by committee.61

The Screenwriter as Auteur The most celebrated screenwriters of the period, however, enjoyed relative independence and creative control over their work. Preston Sturges refused to collaborate with other writers. After penning more than a dozen hits for three different studios, Paramount finally allowed him to direct his own screenplay, The Great McGinty (1940). Sturges was not only the first to get a combined writer-director credit but also the one most responsible for reviving screwball comedy. In Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Sturges brings his incisive wit to bear upon the film industry itself. The opening scene features the successful director of film comedies, John R. Sullivan, trying to convince skeptical studio bosses to allow him to make a more political, socially responsible film, like the one they have just watched in the screening room: Sullivan: You see? You see the symbolism of it? Capital and Labor destroy each other! It teaches a lesson—a moral lesson—it has social significance. Hadrian: Who wants to see that kind of stuff? It gives me the creeps! Sullivan: Tell him how long it played at the Music Hall. LeBrand: It was held over a fifth week. Hadrian: Who goes to the Music Hall? Communists! Sullivan: Communists! This picture’s an answer to communists! . . . It shows we’re awake and not dunking our heads in the sand like a bunch of ostriches! I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism! The problems that confront the average man! LeBrand: But with a little sex in it. This exchange nicely evokes the inherent tensions between artistic aspirations and commercial interests. For writer-directors like the fictional character Sullivan, films can be used to advance humane social causes, especially in troubled times. For the producers, in contrast, the only movies worth making are those that will give them a return on their investment. Conceding the point that “a

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Joel McCrea (right) in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941): “With a little sex in it.”

little sex” can help boost the film’s box office appeal, Sullivan insists that he wants to make an important film: Sullivan: A little, but I don’t want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document! I want to hold a mirror up to life! I want this to be a picture of dignity! A true canvas of the suffering of humanity! LeBrand: But with a little sex in it. Sullivan: With a little sex in it. Hadrian: How about a nice musical? Sullivan: How can you talk about musicals at a time like this, with the world committing suicide? With corpses piling up in the street! With grim death gargling at you from every corner! With people slaughtered like sheep! Hadrian: Maybe they’d like to forget that! Sullivan: Then why did they hold this over for a fifth week at the Music Hall? For the ushers?

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LeBrand: It died in Pittsburgh! Hadrian: Like a dog! Sullivan: What do they know in Pittsburgh? LeBrand: They know what they like! Sullivan: If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh! That’s no argument! If you pander to the public, you’d still be in the horse age. . . . I wanted to make you something outstanding— something you could be proud of. Something that would realize the potentialities of film as the sociological and artistic medium that it is. Sturges’s pungent satire undermines both Sullivan’s naïve idealism and the producers’ cynicism. Whereas the producers trust viewers to know what they like—to vote with their pocketbooks, as it were—the ostensibly socially responsible director is the one who is condescending and elitist. The mere mention of “communists” in Sullivan’s Travels seems, in hindsight, more than a little ominous. Toward the end of the period covered in this chapter, the film industry found itself once again subject to government scrutiny, an irresistible target of rabid anticommunism. In October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began nine days of hearings into alleged communist influence in Hollywood. Committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas singled out screenwriters for the most intense scrutiny, having earlier gone on record asserting, “90% of communist infiltration in Hollywood is to be found among screenwriters.”62 Nineteen suspected communists, labeled “unfriendly witnesses,” were subpoenaed to testify before the committee. Among them were screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr., and Herbert Biberman (who also produced and directed films), along with the director Edward Dmytryk and the producer Adrian Scott. The fallout from the HUAC hearings was a blacklist containing the names of nearly 300 individuals who were denied work in the film industry for many years to come. The 1947 HUAC hearings and the 1948 Supreme Court ruling against monopolistic practices in Hollywood sounded the death knell of the studio system, even as they inadvertently heralded a new era for writers in the film industry. Despite the lingering pall cast over the film industry by the blacklist, writers were no longer part of a vertically integrated studio system controlling the filmmaking process from start to finish, but rather freelance writers hired on a per film basis. Chandler once expressed the hope that if the studio system should ever come to an end, “somehow the flatulent moguls will learn that only writers can write

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screenplays and only proud and independent writers can write good screenplays, and that present methods of dealing with such men are destructive of the very force by which pictures must live.”63 Whether the new freelance system actually contributed to making better films is debatable, but one thing is clear: no longer under contract to a single studio unless the studio agreed to release them, writers could now ply their trade to any mogul—however flatulent—willing to take a chance on their scripts. The studio system was an economic behemoth that proved to be vulnerable on two fronts: first, to government intervention as a safeguard against monopolistic business practices; and second, to changing patterns in how many Americans would choose to spend their leisure time. While it lasted, though, the studio system was a remarkably successful method of moviemaking. Screenwriters were central to that enterprise, as crass and even philistine as it often seemed to be. However marginalized, underappreciated, and undercompensated screenwriters may have been, they still deserve credit—whether or not they received actual screen credits—for glorious work. Time and again screenwriters provided characters, dialogue, and stories for many indelible films. Behind the scenes, writers furnished words that, when typed in the newly established screenplay format, would then serve as blueprints for actors, directors, cinematographers, gaffers, producers, set designers, and others who brought their words to life through the alchemy of collaborative art. Without screenwriters, the brilliant films of Hollywood’s golden age could not have been made.

3 Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967 

Jon Lewis

Screenwriting in the postwar era in Hollywood was characterized by what many writers did not or could not do. Because of an industry-wide blacklist in force between 1947 and 1959, many screenwriters could not find work, could not get paid even after work was completed or receive payment on agreedupon advances, could not seek protection or remedy from the Screen Writers Guild, and could not write anything even allegorically progressive for fear of catching the attention of the various blacklist committees in federal and state government and at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). For writers, the Red Scare added a chilling of political speech to longstanding proscriptions on sexually suggestive images and dialogue, blasphemy, and violence that had since 1934 been enforced by the Production Code Administration (PCA). At the same time, in the fallout from the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (the so-called Paramount Decision), the studio system that characterized the classical era unraveled. Writers were no longer studio employees on the clock; they became independent contractors. While for some this meant bigger paydays, for others it meant the perpetual uncertainty of writing on spec, the time-consuming and dehumanizing task of pitching every script idea anew.1 56

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With this new system of story and script sales and acquisition, writers became increasingly dependent upon creative representation; indeed, agents became the primary beneficiaries of this transition era. One agent in particular, Lou Wasserman, and his company, MCA, began packaging scripts with movie stars and directors and selling complete (albeit spec) projects to the studios. MCA was so successful in packaging deals that in 1966 the agency bought out Universal and installed Wasserman as its chief executive. Wasserman ran Universal for nearly thirty years and wielded unprecedented influence at the studio and at the MPAA. The regulatory effect of the blacklist and PCA censorship and the disorienting and disconcerting changes in studio employment practices were made worse for writers thanks to cutbacks at the studios. These cutbacks were made in concert with a box office decline: a 43 percent drop from a high of $1.7 billion in 1946 to a low of $955 million in 1961. In 1947, 90 million Americans went to the movies every week. By 1957 average weekly attendance had fallen to 40 million. After sporting record profits of $120 million in the first full year after the war, studio profits fell steadily beginning the following year: to $87 million in 1947, $49 million in 1948, $34 million in 1949, and $31 million in 1950. Studios produced 375 features in 1941, and fewer than 150 in 1963.2 The bottom line for writers was easy to apprehend: such a decline in production meant that fewer scripts would be optioned and still fewer green-lit for production. For the studios, the transition era began with the confluence of several things going wrong at once. Particularly rankling was how quickly and easily all the good public relations the studios earned during the war through their patriotic cooperation with the OWI and the BMPA were forgotten.3 In such a tumultuous era, screenwriters found their access to executives diminished, their participation in daily studio life restricted if not eliminated, and their role in the production process irrevocably changed.

The Dahlia Hollywood had since the 1910s and 1920s been a place where one might venture to reinvent oneself, to get a second chance in a country built upon second chances. But while folks in the postwar era continued to move to Los Angeles for their second act, they found instead the end of the road: the hardly glamorous sprawl of modern Los Angeles, the endless accusations and suspicions of blacklist-era Hollywood, the drastic workforce and production cutbacks at the studios. While Hollywood seemed very much in decline, the city of Los Angeles kept growing; the population of the LA metro area tripled between 1940 and 1970. The drama, then, for film workers, screenwriters among them, involved navigating a transformed industrial and geographic landscape moving in very different directions.

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Key to the changing image of Hollywood in the first few years after the war is the story of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, an aspiring movie actress who in January 1947 was murdered, dismembered, and dumped by the side of the road. The Dahlia became an iconic figure in an increasingly dark celebrity narrative. The murder was front-page news for months and the “body dump” scenario would soon become a recurring symptom of Los Angeles’ postwar sprawl, a fate more likely for the plethora of industry fringe players than movie stardom or success behind the scenes writing scripts or shooting film. The body-dump narrative proved a telling backstory for the Hollywood noir In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950; scr. Andrew Solt, story by Edmund H. North, adapted from a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes). By all accounts, including North’s, the adapted screenplay used in the film was Solt’s. North had written a treatment that was ditched when Humphrey Bogart came on board to replace John Derek in the lead and the film was transformed from the story of a serial killer (per Hughes’s novel) to one focused on a self-loathing screenwriter.4 North had a prestigious career, including the sci-fi parable The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) and, with Francis Coppola, Patton (for which North won an Oscar). Solt, whose script was steeped in transition-era paranoia, would soon enough learn firsthand what sorts of traps were being laid for screenwriters at the time. In a Lonely Place proved to be his last major screen credit. When his movie career stalled (probably for political reasons), Solt began writing for the new medium of television, an attractive alternative for a number of other writers in the era.5 His credits on the small screen include the Lux Video Theatre and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The A (kernel or principal) story in In a Lonely Place concerns a disgruntled screenwriter, Dix Steele, struggling with the transitional-era Hollywood bureaucracy as well as his own ragged emotions. The film’s B (or satellite) story concerns a young woman found dead, dumped by the side of the road. Per Hollywood convention, the A- and B-stories in the film ultimately intersect. The film opens with the first flare-up of Dix’s temper at a stoplight on a busy Hollywood street. An actress pulls up next to him and asks if he remembers her. He doesn’t. “I was in a picture you wrote . . . for Columbia,” she says. He replies: “I make it a point never to watch pictures I write.” Dix, we later overhear at Paul’s, a bar he frequents with other Hollywood fringe players, “hasn’t had a hit since before the war.” The implication is that they don’t make movies like they used to—a quality assessment and an apt observation of the business in 1950. In an early scene at Paul’s a second young actress remarks on a previous encounter with Dix. The screenwriter politely puts her off: “I can’t tonight,” he tells her. “I got to read a book.” She presses a little: “Remember how I used to read to you?” to which he replies with a sweet bit of PCA-era double entendre: “Since then I learned to read by myself.” Rejected, the actress adds to Dix’s résumé as a troubled guy—as the guy “in a lonely place.” She asks: “Do you look down on all

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women or just the ones you know?” He replies, planning to get the last word: “I was pretty nice to you.” But the screenwriter loses control of the scene and the actress gets the last word: “Not to me . . . but you were pretty nice.” The line sets up Dix’s subsequent encounter with Mildred, the dumb but sweet hat-check girl who goes back to Dix’s apartment to recount the story of “Alaythea Bruce” (the title is really Althea Bruce—a running joke for Dix and the audience at her expense). The story is from a book Dix can’t bear to read but might still adapt for compensation, thus avoiding the trap of writing on spec. When Mildred consents to go home with Dix, she summarily ditches Henry, her humdrum date for after hours. In the film, everyone in Hollywood is trying to trade up; everyone, even the “good girl,” is willing to do most anything to get in on the action. “You make me feel real important,” she tells Dix. In Dix’s apartment the personal and professional overlap uncomfortably. He invites her to have a drink. He goes into his bedroom, and then emerges in a robe and slippers, his tie undone. She gets the wrong idea, but he sets her straight. “I took off my coat and put on this robe so I could be comfortable when I work,” he says. She’s spooked and insists she’s a good girl. Dix is unsympathetic and uninterested; he tells her she can go if she feels like it. She stays. Mildred pays dearly for this brief Hollywood encounter. After she leaves, she is murdered, her body left by the side of the road. Audiences in 1950 no doubt made the connection to Elizabeth Short, a woman like this hat-check girl with only the most passing interaction with a business she dreamt about incessantly. Dix is initially a suspect in Mildred’s murder. The cop in charge of the investigation, Brub Nicolai, knows Dix from their army days—indeed, he knows him well enough to harbor suspicion. At Brub’s house, Dix proposes a reenactment. The scene offers a neat satire of a studio story pitch for a spec murder mystery, albeit a story in which Dix is the likeliest suspect. In Dix’s version, Henry, the boring boyfriend, is the killer. But the pitch serves only to cast further doubt on Dix; he’s a sadist, if not also a murderer. He has Brub and his wife, Sylvia, reenact the crime: “It’s wonderful to feel her throat crush under your arm,” he says as he has Brub put his arm around Sylvia’s neck. The final two-thirds of the A-story focus on Dix’s stormy relationship with Laurel, a failed actress who lives across the courtyard at his Hollywood complex and is his alibi for Mildred’s murder. Laurel predictably becomes Dix’s love interest. She offers clerical help with Dix’s latest script; that she stands in for Mildred is at least interesting given Mildred’s fate. But unlike Mildred, Dix’s apartment is not just an office for Laurel. A breakfast scene makes clear that the relationship is consummated. And soon enough this conflation of the personal and the professional—a symptom of this new Hollywood—gets confusing for both of them. The film’s hectic climax cleanly caps the B-narrative. Dix’s scenario about Mildred’s murder and body dump is spot on; the boyfriend indeed has killed her. But the A narrative is a messy affair. Dix’s jealousy prompts Laurel to run, which

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Dix (Humphrey Bogart) pitches his version of Mildred’s murder in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). Screenplay by Andrew Solt and Edmund H. North.

is something she’s done before. It is only after their break-up that Dix is told by his agent that the studio is interested in buying one of his spec scripts. This is a film noir, after all; everyone’s timing is off. Dix’s uncertainty about things personal and professional fuels his paranoia. He is brought to the edge by a corrupted, dangerous, lonely, and dysfunctional place, by a self-loathing at his role as a screenwriter in an industry that produces so many awful films. He is also made paranoid by a relentless series of false accusations; he’s followed by the cops, forced to deal with interrogations concerning a murder he didn’t commit. He’s a suspect because of past acts; a trenchant allegory to postwar Hollywood. In a Lonely Place is a noir melodrama and an insightful reflection upon the complicated life of the postwar screenwriter.

The Paramount Decision The Paramount Decision, which took effect in 1948, put an end to the contract system that supported the industry’s entrepreneurial model. For screenwriters, this court decision profoundly uprooted and unsettled what had been a fairly equitable and secure mode of employment. Before divestiture, many of Hollywood’s employed screenwriters worked under contract for one or another of the studios. These exclusive, option contracts restricted screenwriters’ ability to shop their work. But in consideration for this exclusivity, writers got a steady paycheck

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and a place to go and do their work, a place that physically and symbolically involved them in the process of American moviemaking. The structured absence of studio space in the transition era heralded the arrival of a less coherent film business, one in which writers struggled to find their place. The Paramount Decision is the real-life subtext of the noir Hollywood melodrama Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950), for which the screenwriters Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D. M. Marshman Jr. shared the Oscar for Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay in 1951. The movie opens with a shot of a curbside in a filthy street gutter. We hear a voiceover that affirms what we see: “Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California.” Later, as the camera holds on the image of the screenwriter Joe Gillis face down in a swimming pool, the voiceover continues: “Nobody important, really. Just a movie writer with a couple of B-pictures to his credit. The poor dope. He always wanted a pool. Well in the end he got himself a pool—only the price turned out to be a little high.” What’s at stake here at the start is not what has happened, or to whom, but, à propos film noir, why, and how. The film begins with a variation on the body dump theme; the body is not murdered one place and then disposed of on the edge of town, but instead displaced, or more accurately left out of place. The narrator allows us to observe the body and then takes us back six months. The noir flashback recalls Wilder’s gambit at the start of Double Indemnity (1944) in which the insurance salesman Walter Neff tells us what he’s done: “I killed him for money—and a woman—and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.” We need to watch the flashback that comprises most of the rest of the movie to understand how and why.

Just a movie writer with a couple of B-pictures to his credit. The poor dope. He always wanted a pool. William Holden in Sunset Blvd. (1950). Directed by Billy Wilder, screenplay by Wilder and Charles Brackett.

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The first corpse, Joe’s, is followed by a second in the flashback—a dead ape, whose death is pointedly treated with more respect than the screenwriter’s. Joe is initially mistaken by Max (the butler) and then by Norma (the aging silent film star) for an undertaker and then later for a working writer; the key here is that he’s neither. We can track Joe’s story, his predicament as a Hollywood screenwriter geographically, as his story is characterized by serial displacement. He moves back and forth from a variety of LA-area locations, none of which works or fits: his tiny apartment in Hollywood, a posh golf course where he accosts his agent, Norma’s mansion on Sunset, the legendary Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset and Crescent Heights, Joe’s friend Artie’s crowded apartment, and the Paramount Studios lot. When we think about the space of American work for men in the 1950s, we think of the cubicle, brilliantly captured in the interior set for another of Wilder’s films in this era, The Apartment (1960, scr. Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond). It is interesting that what goes on off-site in that film—the use of a middle manager’s apartment by his boss and his boss’s mistress—regards the sorts of concessions and betrayals that are deemed necessary for success. For the middle manager C. C. Baxter, the workplace has two sites. One, the company office, is rigidly ordered. The other, “the apartment,” follows an alternative, improvised set of rules. A cubicle might be dehumanizing, but at least it was a place for a man to go and do his job. In Sunset Blvd., as in In a Lonely Place, the screenwriter searches unsuccessfully for his place in postwar Hollywood. He finds himself instead trapped in domestic space. The setting for his work is personalized and feminized. Success, there, involves tasks that are fundamentally dehumanizing, embarrassing, and emasculating. When Joe first agrees to doctor Norma’s Salome script, he is stowed above the garage; he is hired help, nothing more. But soon enough Max moves him into the main house. Joe balks at the move, but Norma puts the notion of consent in simple terms: “Do you want this job or don’t you?” The gigolo gig comes later; for the moment the drama is about where he works, not what he has to do to keep the job. Later, in a car outside Schwab’s—the site of discovery par excellence of the era6 —Norma hands Joe money for cigarettes. By this point he’s Norma’s escort, dressed in evening clothes she has purchased for him. Inside he meets his buddy Artie and Artie’s girlfriend, Betty. “Where have you been keeping yourself?” Betty asks. “I haven’t been keeping myself at all, lately,” he replies. His failure as a screenwriter is evident in and inherent to his acquiescence to his role as a gigolo. Joe’s liaisons with Betty at the studio after hours are pointedly set in a ghost town of unused sets and writers’ offices. It is in this setting that Betty muses over her failed attempts at becoming an actress. She narrates the scene: “All cardboard, all hollow, all phony, all done with mirrors [but] I like it better than

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any street in the world.” Later, in this same setting, Betty tells Joe that Artie has proposed marriage and then confesses that she is “not in love with him anymore.” And then, guiltily, she and Joe kiss. Set against the hollow, phony sets, Wilder shows us how even this “good girl” is taken in. Betty tries to trade up from Artie to Joe (from Jack Webb to William Holden), and for her trouble, she gets corrupted and ends up disappointed. Such is this new Hollywood scenario. Everyone does something bad, Wilder contends, something embarrassing, to get ahead. Near the end of the film, Betty ventures to Norma’s house and endeavors to fight for her man. That it is her role here to rescue Joe only makes matters worse for him. She is prompted by a call from Norma: “Do you know where he lives? Do you know how he lives? Do you know what he lives on?” Betty may not want to know the answer to Norma’s questions, but when she arrives she is nonetheless put off guard by Joe’s apparent acquiescence to life as a “kept man.” He isn’t much inclined to leave with her and instead offers to give her a tour of the house. “I didn’t come here to see a house,” she says, then asks, “What about Norma Desmond?” She doesn’t get that they are the same thing. Betty: Come on, Joe. Joe: Come on where? Back to a one-room apartment I can’t pay for? Back to a story that may sell and very possibly will not? Betty: If you love me, Joe. Joe: Look, sweetie—be practical. I’ve got a good thing here. A long-term contract with no options. I like it that way. Why Joe doesn’t or won’t or can’t leave with Betty is tied to a location—the Hollywood limbo or purgatory that is Norma’s rundown mansion. His dreams of success may well have once included the likes of a Betty at his side, but such success is possible only in the quiet and dark of the studio streets. And that’s not where he lives and importantly not where he or any other writer of his generation works anymore. Joe rejects Betty not because he doesn’t love her (he does) or because he loves Norma (he doesn’t), but because, as a writer, he must take this new gig or leave it and have nothing. He tells Betty that a Hollywood writer must be “practical” and can’t afford to be “admirable.” But what he does at the end is admirable; he sets Betty free from the sordid life he has made for himself. And it’s also impractical. After Betty leaves, Joe packs his bags, and when he tries to leave he takes a bullet in the back, a dramatic but nonetheless emblematic fate for the unmoored Hollywood writer, circa 1950.

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The Blacklist The Screen Writers Guild evolved out of an informal script writer’s club in 1933.7 Its founders included Donald Ogden Stewart, Phillip Dunne, Dorothy Parker, and Charles Brackett, who co-wrote Sunset Blvd. Like many of the other industry guilds, its formation signaled a fraying at the margins of the studio system. And its possible success in collective bargaining or organizing work stoppages threatened the stability and profitability of an industry that had become unstable and unprofitable. So, when HUAC strategically linked Screen Writers Guild membership (“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Screen Writers Guild?”) with Communist Party membership (“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”), they unintentionally and inadvertently did the studios a big favor. The blacklist formally began in 1947 when HUAC provided the studios with lists of writers, actors, and directors with communist affiliations. Their “proof” ranged from evidence of outright membership in the Party to alleged participation in one or another of a host of “communist front groups”: mostly progressive organizations like the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Screenwriters were the primary targets of the blacklist initially because of the two questions asked by HUAC. But a more cynical view suggests that writers were rather overrepresented in the various blacklists because the studios had always regarded them as eminently replaceable. The committee’s efforts to “clean up” the film business evinced an additional implied relationship between union activity, Party membership, and Jewishness. Even the Jewish moguls who still managed the studios seemed inclined to share this view, or at least they embraced it publicly. When HUAC made its recommendation to indict the so-called Hollywood Ten—the screenwriters Alvah Bessie (Objective Burma!, Raoul Walsh, 1945), Herbert Biberman (Together Again, Charles Vidor, 1944), Lester Cole (Blood on the Sun, Frank Lloyd, 1945), Ring Lardner Jr. (a 1943 Oscar for Woman of the Year, George Stevens), John Howard Lawson (a 1939 Oscar nomination for Blockade, William Dieterle), Albert Maltz (a 1946 Oscar nomination for Pride of the Marines, Delmer Daves), Samuel Ornitz (It Could Happen to You, Phil Rosen, 1937) , and Dalton Trumbo (a 1941 Oscar nomination for Kitty Foyle, Sam Wood), along with the director Edward Dmytryk and the producer Adrian Scott—for contempt of Congress, the MPAA at first assured those under investigation that it would oppose government regulation. “Tell the boys not to worry,” MPAA president Eric Johnston remarked on October 18, 1947. “There’ll never be a blacklist. We’re not going to go totalitarian to please this committee.” But just twelve days later—five days before the full House was scheduled to vote on the contempt citations—Johnston issued a stunning public reversal: “We did not defend them. We do not defend them now. On the contrary, we believe they have done a tremendous disservice to the industry which has given

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them so much material rewards [sic] and an opportunity to exercise their talents.” Indictments, incarcerations, and an industry-wide blacklist followed, all with the cooperation of the MPAA and much of it executed under its supervision. Precisely what happened in the intervening eleven days to prompt such a dramatic reversal in policy is still a source of considerable speculation. The blacklisted screenwriter Gordon Kahn (Ruthless, Edgar Ulmer, 1948), one of the original Hollywood nineteen,8 opined in his 1948 book Hollywood on Trial that the Ten were “sacrificed” as part of a complicated deal between the feds and studio ownership. “[The MPAA] would purge other writers, directors, producers and actors from the industry . . . [and] in return for all of this, [HUAC chair J. Parnell] Thomas9 would promise to call off any further investigation of Hollywood.”10 Attractive as Kahn’s theory was to like-minded studio workers at the time, no such conspiracy ever existed, and as things played out over the following decade, no such bargain was ever struck. But Kahn was right about the industry-wide panic, the roots of which lay not, as is commonly assumed, solely, or even primarily, in the politics of patriotism. More likely, what happened during those eleven days involved a backroom and boardroom struggle between the West Coast producers and moguls and the New York moneymen—and the New York moneymen won. This more likely scenario was affirmed at the time in the popular press. Writing for the New York Times, the venerable film critic Bosley Crowther wrote: “It should be fully realized that this action [the MPAA’s capitulation to the Thomas Committee] was engineered by the major New York executives, the industry’s overlords, and not the Hollywood producers, who form a different and subordinate group.”11 Six of the Hollywood Ten were Jews: Lawson, Maltz, Bessie, Ornitz, Biberman, and Cole. Of the four who were not, two, Scott and Dmytryk, were responsible as producer and director for Crossfire, a 1947 anti-racist, anti-antisemitic film nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, Screenplay.12 John Paxton, who would later pen The Wild One for Laslo Benedek in 1953, wrote the screenplay for Crossfire, adapted from a 1945 novel entitled The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks, who would later write the scripts for and direct The Blackboard Jungle in 1955 and In Cold Blood in 1967. The film was by design provocative and political. And it certainly worried a lot of people who believed in a Hollywood left-wing Jewish conspiracy. Indeed, Crossfire proved to be the film that most interested HUAC in 1947. Crossfire tells the story of a vicious, racist serviceman named Monty who murders a Jewish man in what today would be termed a hate crime. Adrian Scott pitched The Brick Foxhole, soon retitled Crossfire, in a 1946 memo to RKO studio executives William Dozier and Charles Korner as a modestly budgeted suspense picture prepackaged with A-list screenwriter Paxton and director Dmytryk. Scott proposed some key changes from story to screenplay: “This is a story of personal

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Monty (Robert Ryan), the racist killer in Crossfire (1947). Directed by Edward Dmytryk, screenplay by John Paxton.

fascism as opposed to organized fascism. . . . In the book Monty hates fairies, Negroes, Jews and foreigners. In the book Monty murders a fairy. He could have murdered a foreigner or a Jew. It would have been the same thing. In the picture he murders a Jew.”13 Despite its eventual notoriety, the film’s development was untroubled. Once the studio gave the project a green light, RKO production chief Dore Schary submitted Paxton’s screenplay to Joseph Breen, head of the PCA, which censored films at the time. Breen did not express a single concern about the picture’s progressive politics. In a memo to Schary, he made fairly innocuous suggestions: minimize the drinking, be careful not to condone prostitution (Ginny, a principal character in the screenplay, is the prototypical whore with a heart of gold), and insert a speech by an army major noting that the killer is not typical of army personnel. Otherwise Breen gave the film his OK.14 A number of those blacklisted who belonged to the Communist Party in the thirties and forties have since remarked that they first turned to the Party because it seemed to support the civil rights movement to a degree that the Democrats and Republicans did not at the time.15 With Crossfire, such a civil rights, if not explicitly Communist Party agenda, was at stake from the start, as Scott himself reveals at the end of his memo to Dozier and Korner: “Dmytryk, Paxton and I want to make this picture for two reasons. First, we are ambitious. We want to make fine pictures. This will make a fine picture. Secondly, and more important, is this: anti-Semitism is not declining as a result of Hitler’s defeat. . . . Anti-Semitism

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and anti-Negroism will grow unless heroic measures can be undertaken to stop them. This picture is one such measure.” Dozier and a third RKO executive, Peter Rathvon, responded positively to the film’s anti-antisemitic message—perhaps cynically, since Hollywood was abuzz with news about Fox’s production of a similarly themed picture, Gentleman’s Agreement. Rathvon concluded his response to Scott’s memo by lamenting “the sterility” of “general motion picture production,” implying impatience with the usual Hollywood escapist fare. Schary, himself a former Screen Writers Guild member, expressed interest in financing the film because it was politically meaningful.16 Schary was an interesting Cold War Hollywood player. After the Waldorf Statement was issued affirming the MPAA’s support of the blacklist, MPAA chief Eric Johnston asked Schary to speak to the Screen Writers Guild on behalf of management.17 Schary’s first words that night set the tone: “We do not ask you to condone this,” which at the time implied his sympathy for the guild members. When he was called in front of the house committee, producer Adrian Scott made explicit the relationship between his film’s content and the Hollywood nineteen. Scott’s statement began, “Individually a member of this committee may protest that he is not anti-Semitic. He may say some of his best friends are Jews. . . . Let the committeeman say he is not anti-Semitic. But let the record show he does the work of anti-Semites. . . . This is a cold war being waged by the Committee on Un-American Activities against minorities. The next phase—total war against minorities—needs no elaboration. History has recorded what has happened in Nazi Germany.”18 All ten of the unfriendly witnesses called to appear before the committee requested permission to read a statement into the record. But only two of their statements were admitted into evidence.19 Of the eight statements that were suppressed, five explicitly identified antisemitism as a motive behind the hearings. Ornitz made antisemitism an issue in his opening sentence: “I wish to address the committee as a Jew because one of its leading members [Mississippi congressman John Rankin] is the outstanding anti-Semite in the Congress and revels in this fact. . . . It may be redundant to repeat that anti-Semitism and anti-Communism were the number one poison weapon used by Hitler. . . . I am struck forcibly by the fact that this committee has subpoenaed the men who made Crossfire. . . . Therefore, I ask as a Jew, based on the record, is bigotry this committee’s yardstick of Americanism and its definition of subversive?”20 The analogy to Nazi Germany and to the antisemitic political platform that supported the Holocaust appears in several of the suppressed statements, most powerfully and memorably in the closing paragraph of Trumbo’s prepared (and suppressed) remarks: Already the gentlemen of this Committee and others of like disposition have produced in this capital city a political atmosphere which is acrid

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with fear and repression; a community in which anti-Semitism finds safe refuge behind secret tests of loyalty; a city in which no union leader can trust his telephone; a city in which old friends hesitate to recognize one another in public places; a city in which men and women who dissent even slightly from the orthodoxy you seek to impose, speak with confidence only in moving cars and in the open air. You have produced a capital city on the eve of its Reichstag fire. For those who remember German history in the autumn of 1932 there is the smell of smoke in this very room.21 When the committee moved unanimously to seek indictments for contempt of Congress against all ten unfriendly witnesses and brought the issue to the House floor, Rankin, who had been on the campaign trail in an unsuccessful bid for reelection and had not attended the hearings, spoke on behalf of the committee. He opened his remarks by referring to the few congressmen who spoke in defense of the Ten as “traitor[s] to the government of the United States.” He then segued into a brief speech on Hollywood’s “attempt to smear and discredit the white people of the Southern States,” and then produced a petition signed by a number of Hollywood luminaries condemning the committee: They sent this petition to Congress, and I want to read some of the names. One of the names is June Havoc. We found from the motion picture almanac that her real name is Joan Hovick. Another one was Danny Kaye, and we found out that his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky. . . . Another one is Eddie Cantor, whose real name is Edward Iskowitz. There is one who calls himself Edward Robinson. His real name is Emmanuel Goldberg. There is another one here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hesselberg. There are others too numerous to mention. They are attacking the Committee for doing its duty in trying to protect this country and save the American people from the horrible fate the Communists have meted out on the unfortunate Christian people of Europe.22 The House voted 346 to 17 to indict the Ten. The critical and popular success of Crossfire was complicated by all the attention the film and the filmmakers got in Washington, made worse for those who worried about Jewish Hollywood by the even greater critical and popular success of Gentleman’s Agreement, which won Best Picture and Best Director (Elia Kazan) in 1948. Paxton, who wrote Crossfire, and Moss Hart, who wrote Gentleman’s Agreement,23 both engaged antisemitism in their scripts but went about exposing the problem in fundamentally different ways. Paxton’s screenplay links antisemitism with racist violence in an effort to depict prejudice as sociopathic

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and pathological. Captain Finlay, the Irish policeman who is investigating the crime and is the voice of reason throughout the film, remarks, “My grandfather was killed just because he was an Irish Catholic. Hating is always the same, always senseless. One day it kills Irish Catholics, the next day Jews, the next day Protestants, the next day Quakers. It’s hard to stop. It can end up killing people who wear striped neckties.” The statement follows from Paxton’s (and Scott and Dmytryk’s) notion that one hate crime is basically like any other, given that the victim in the source novel was altered from gay to Jewish. Hart’s screenplay for Gentleman’s Agreement focuses on the presence of antisemitism in everyday American life. The antisemites in the film do not view themselves as prejudiced or racist and they are not fundamentally villainous like Monty in Crossfire. When the film’s hero, the journalist Phil Green, first ponders writing about antisemitism, he wonders if such an article is necessary anymore. “What can I say about anti-Semitism that hasn’t been said before?” he asks. His mother replies: “Maybe it hasn’t been said well enough.” Throughout, Hart casts antisemitism in pedestrian little dramas: Elaine Wales: I changed my name. Did you? Phil Green: Green has always been my name. What’s yours? Elaine Wales: Estelle Walovsky. I couldn’t take it. The applications, I mean. So one day I wrote the same firm two letters, same as you’re doing now. I sent the Elaine Wales one, and I sent it after they said there were no openings. Well, I got the job, all right. Do you know what firm that was? Smith’s Weekly. Phil Green: No. Elaine Wales: Yes, Mr. Green. The great liberal magazine that fights injustice on all sides. Resort Clerk: Well, we have a very high-class clientele, and, well . . . Phil Green: Then you do restrict your guests to Gentiles? Resort Clerk: Well, I would hardly say that, and in any event, there seems to have been some mistake because we don’t have a single free room in the entire hotel. Both Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire are message movies. Hart presents his message in Gentleman’s Agreement in a brief conversation between Phil and

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a Jewish academic, in which laying claim to ethnic heritage is viewed as a matter of pride: Professor Fred Lieberman: Millions of people nowadays are religious only in the vaguest sense. I’ve often wondered why the Jews among them still go on calling themselves Jews. Do you know, Mr. Green? Phil Green: No, but I’d like to. Professor Fred Lieberman: Because the world still makes it an advantage not to be one. Thus it becomes a matter of pride to go on calling ourselves Jews. Captain Finlay in Crossfire regards the tolerance for or apathy concerning the daily inconveniences and snubs of minorities in everyday American life as contributing factors to more violent attacks against folks who are somehow perceived to be “different”: “This business about hating Jews comes in a lot of different sizes. There’s the ‘you can’t join our country club’ kind. The ‘you can’t live around here’ kind. The ‘you can’t work here’ kind. Because we stand for all these, we get Monty’s kind. He grows out of all the rest.” The first run of both Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement preceded the HUAC hearings, and it is only in the committee’s reaction to these films that we can appreciate the implicit and explicit connection between industry regulation in the postwar era and larger efforts to rid Hollywood of its Jews, especially its Jewish screenwriters. After the blacklist took effect, films like Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement became impossible to produce; indeed, it became awfully risky for writers to have their names attached to any explicitly progressive project. The blacklist imposed a chill on overt political speech, so progressive writers turned to allegory and the genre film. The genre of choice for progressive screenwriters was the crime film. But even more obliquely political films drew attention to their writers, as Abraham Polonsky discovered in the early 1950s after the release of two films he wrote, the 1948 boxing/crime saga Body and Soul (directed by Robert Rossen, who was blacklisted from 1951 to 1953, then turned rat, named over fifty names, and got his career back) and Force of Evil (written and directed by Polonsky in 1951, his last screen credit until 1968). A quick look at these two screenplays reveals just how the crime film was used as a template for a progressive critique. Body and Soul tells the familiar story of a boxer, Charlie Davis, a working-class Jewish kid with ambitions, whose career is initially supported, then thwarted by the mob. Charlie regards boxing as a fast track to social mobility, a way out of the merchant class that characterized the lot

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of many first-generation Jewish immigrants. “You think I want to spend the rest of my life selling two-cent sodas?” he announces to his family, brazenly dismissing his father’s honest work as the proprietor of a candy store. Charlie’s mother prefers a safer though less swift route to success: night school. But Charlie wants money and he wants it right away. The A-story in Body and Soul chronicles Charlie’s ascent to the championship. “Better you should buy a gun and shoot yourself!” his mother says, disapprovingly. “You need money to buy a gun,” he replies, for the moment getting the last word. The B-story focuses on Ben, an African American boxer, a former champ at the end of his career. Ben is what Charlie will become if he’s not careful: washed up and beat up. Though Ben has seen his fair share of big paydays, by the time Charlie meets him, he’s broke and still beholden to the gangsters who ran his career, the gangsters who manage the sport and profit from the boxers’ risks. When Ben balks at the risk of one last big fight, the gangster who had previously bankrolled the fighter puts him in his place. He tosses some bills on the ground and says, “You only have to bend down to pick it up.” The remark is freighted, of course; audiences recognized what “bending over” might involve, and, moreover, how such a demeaning act might be a metaphor for the things he and we do for the money we want or need. Predictably, Ben eventually goes back in the ring and is much the worse for the experience. Ben’s death serves to put the A-story of Charlie’s success in a new

Charley (John Garfield) and Ben (Canada Lee) ruminate on the prizefight business in Body and Soul (1947). Directed by Robert Rossen, screenplay by Abraham Polonsky.

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context, one foreshadowed by the title: both men sacrifice their bodies and souls in exchange for social mobility. Before a fight Charlie is paid to lose, a gangster slyly puts Ben’s death and Charlie’s future in practical terms: “Everybody dies: Ben, Shorty, even you.” Later, he reduces winning and losing in the ring, living and dying in general, to a simple but telling economic imperative: “Everything is addition and subtraction. The rest is conversation.” The reduction of all narrative motivation to matters of cash, long a staple of crime films, suggested in these blacklist-era noirs a larger critique of capital accumulation as criminal in and of itself. To better appreciate and understand the political allegory at work here, consider Polonsky and Rossen’s dispute over the film’s ending, a dispute that rather characterizes their relative commitments to the progressive story they were telling. Rossen wanted a typical noir closure in which Charlie is killed at the end by the mobsters he betrays. Polonsky insisted on a tentatively happy ending in which Charlie, who has refused to throw the bout, responds to his adversary’s threats by brazenly repeating the gangster’s earlier remark: “Everybody dies.” As Polonsky remarked in an interview with Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner in 1997, Charlie’s decision not to throw the fight “is rooted in his dawning comprehension that he is fighting not only for himself, but for Ben and his neighborhood and everyone the system has ground down.” For Polonsky, Charlie is a working-class hero who must retain his dignity at the end of the film. Rossen’s ending, Polonsky argued, was tantamount to “killing off the proletariat.”24 Force of Evil, Polonsky’s first film as a director and his last before being blacklisted, is the story of two brothers, one “a corporation lawyer,” the other a small businessman. Both job titles are misleading. Joe, the attorney, has only one client, a mobster named Tucker; Leo, the small businessman, runs a local numbers bank. When Tucker makes his move to take over all the smaller numbers outfits, Joe negotiates for Leo a sweetheart deal to stay in business and to stay alive. But Leo wants nothing to do with Tucker. And he pays for such short-sightedness with his life. Leo’s death enables Joe to put economic ambition in context: “I found my brother’s body at the bottom there,” Joe tells us in voiceover, “where they had thrown it away on the rocks . . . like a dirty rag nobody wants. He was dead—and I felt like I killed him. I turned back to give myself up . . . because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way—like rubbish—then something was horrible and had to be ended one way or another.” Polonsky’s crime films focus on the lure of easy, fast money and critique a gangster capitalism that corrupts anyone and everyone who gives in to temptation. Other crime films focus on the corruption (by money—by moneyed interests) of formerly trustworthy institutions and agencies like the government and the police. In the opening scene in The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953, scr. Sidney Boehm, from a story by William P. McGivern), for example, we watch as a policeman takes his own life. The subsequent investigation by an honest cop

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introduces evidence of widespread police corruption and traces that corruption to a mobster with influence in state government and law enforcement. Other noir-era crime films introduced a new sort of American gangster who looked and behaved very much like any other businessman. The goal in these films is to efface the basic distinctions between honest and dishonest modes of business and of capital acquisition. In Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947, scr. Daniel Mainwaring), for example, the modern gangster is no longer an Italian or Irish ethnic stereotype, but instead an assimilated American chief executive seen conducting his business over the telephone, employing smart accountants to beat the system at the IRS. That such a gangster capitalism might also characterize the business of transition-era Hollywood is the pretext of James Poe’s faithful adaptation of Clifford Odets’s 1949 play The Big Knife, directed by Robert Aldrich and released in 1955.25 The plot concerns an unscrupulous studio chief, Stanley Shriner Hoff, who has some dirt on movie star Charlie Castle—a drunken hit-and-run committed by the star and witnessed by a bit player named Dixie Evans. All Hoff wants in return for a cover-up is Charlie’s signature on a multi-film contract. The notion that creative artists might be victims of corrupt studio executives was hardly new in 1949 or 1955. But the notion that an actor might have to betray someone or something to get work resonated with the blacklist, still very much in effect at the time. Odets knew plenty about his character’s predicament; neither he nor Charlie could work in 1955 without cooperating, without capitulating. In 1947, HUAC listed Odets as one of seventy-nine members of the film community affiliated with the Communist Party. And in May 1952, after initially dodging the committee’s questions, Odets named names from the Group Theater the committee had all heard before from Elia Kazan.26 Odets, whose stage characters often struggled against temptation and threats against family and livelihood to remain noble, paid for his compromise with a legendary case of writer’s block; he may as well have been dead like Charlie Castle, who commits suicide at the end of The Big Knife. Odets wrote seven plays in the five years before he left New York for LA, only three in the twenty-two years that followed. The script for The Big Knife turns on two successive scenes in Charlie’s living room, the first of which brings all the principal players together. In this first scene, Hoff ventures from the studio to Castle’s home to set the actor straight. He is accompanied by his erstwhile sidekick, a hard case wonderfully named Smiley Coy. Key to this scene is a Hollywood aspirant who isn’t at the house, Dixie. Hoff offers Charlie a simple deal: he’ll arrange for Dixie’s silence in exchange for Charlie’s signature on a multi-film contract. The deal is complicated when Coy reveals that Dixie is currently at a bar with someone on Hoff’s payroll. Charlie quickly ascertains the threat—that the price of Dixie’s silence is not only his signature but her life. Such are the choices for talent in this new

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Hollywood. The two men argue. Hoff gets impatient: “You some kind of special aristocracy because the female public wants to make love with you?” Charlie doesn’t argue that point, but angrily refuses to capitulate. Hoff exits with the telling line: “This man buries himself with his mouth.” Odets, who had named names, knew exactly what that meant. After Hoff leaves, Charlie exits the living room. In his absence Coy takes a phone call and then tells Charlie’s estranged wife that Dixie’s been hit by a bus leaving the bar with Hoff and Coy’s emissary. The scene seems initially a deus ex machina, a magical solution to everyone’s problems so that life can be restored to normal. But for Odets, getting “back to normal” in Hollywood, circa 1955, is never so simple. While Coy spins the story of Dixie’s death, he is interrupted by the sound and sight of water trickling down through the ceiling. Charlie’s fitness trainer runs upstairs to discover his boss dead. A true Odets hero, Charlie would rather die than give in, a sentiment Odets came to appreciate if not embody. The moral here is stated quite a bit earlier by the ill-fated and only superficially dimwitted Dixie: “I don’t care if I do see a snake. I’m sure I’d much rather see a snake than a Hollywood producer.”

The Sixties The 1960 release of Exodus (Otto Preminger) and Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick), both featuring onscreen script credits for Dalton Trumbo, provided a symbolic end to the blacklist. Both films featured progressive, political messages, and Exodus had at its core an anti-antisemitic theme, something screenwriters had shied away from after the flap over Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947. But even as the blacklist seemed to be officially over, the screenwriting community in 1960s Hollywood remained profoundly fraught. Everyday occurrences— bumping into someone at a studio, on a set, or even in a restaurant—dredged up memories of blacklist era slights and betrayals. Many of those involved were disinclined to forgive and forget. Case in point: Dalton Trumbo’s “Only Victims” speech delivered to the membership of the Writers Guild of America on March 13, 1970, in which he contended that blacklisted artists and informers alike “reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to . . . [that there was] bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides.” Trumbo concluded his peace offering with a rueful observation: “In the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us was compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he did not want to exchange. None emerged from that long nightmare without sin.”27

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The speech was meant to be conciliatory, but it prompted an immediate and angry reaction from, among others, Party hardliner and fellow Hollywood Ten screenwriter Albert Maltz. “To say, ‘None of us emerged from that long nightmare without sin’ is to me ridiculous,” Maltz remarked. “What did people suffer for?”28 Trumbo steadfastly defended his position; he had had twenty years to consider how the various committees blackmailed and bullied witnesses, how the choice between being a rat and being a martyr was often complicated by circumstances quite beyond the witnesses’ control.29 Maltz, on the other hand, continued to view Hollywood according to a simple dialectic—good guys and bad guys—so explanations and excuses didn’t much interest him. Both men had earned the right to speak on the subject, and Maltz was certainly right about one thing: a speech wasn’t by itself going to make up for all that went wrong in the 1950s. Indeed, what went wrong and what got lost in the 1950s stayed wrong, stayed lost through the 1960s. For example, for a full decade the Writers Guild failed to restore withheld advances, residuals, and screen credits to blacklisted writers. Over the same time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) stalled efforts to restore Oscar nominations and awards to blacklisted writers. Throughout the 1950s, many blacklisted screenwriters continued writing and submitted their work through “fronts,” stand-ins who volunteered for a modest payoff to sign and submit scripts written by screenwriters on the industry blacklist. This writing by proxy system was hardly secret. Studio executives played along in order to gain access to quality scripts. Some of the best screenplays of the decade were signed by fronts. For example, Robert Rich took credit and received an Oscar for the script for The Brave One (Irving Rapper, 1956). The not-particularly-well-kept secret at the time was that the screenplay was written by Trumbo. It wasn’t until 1975 that Trumbo finally received the Academy Award that should have been his in the first place. The Oscar winner the following year for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, went to the novelist Pierre Boulle for The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean) even though the writer didn’t speak English. Almost everyone at the ceremony knew that Boulle hadn’t written the script. And plenty knew who had. Still, it wasn’t until September 1984 that the (formerly) blacklisted writers Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson finally received their awards. It was too late for either man, however. Wilson died in 1978. And by the time the announcement came from AMPAS, Foreman’s ashes were en route to London, his longtime home in exile during the blacklist. But while memories and antipathies lingered, writers could begin to write without looking over their shoulders, so to speak, without worrying if a certain line or sentiment in their script might call undue and unwanted attention to their work. Even a cursory look at some of the best scripts and films from

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the decade after the blacklist reveals a wealth of politically progressive and satirical material, unthinkable a decade earlier: the trenchant critique of white-collar America The Apartment (Wilder, 1960, scr. Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond); the cynical Cold War parable North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959, scr. Ernest Lehman); the race-conscious gangland musical West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1961, scr. Lehman); the searing marital melodrama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Mike Nichols, 1966, scr. Lehman); the McCarthyesque Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962, scr. George Axelrod); the class-conscious, star-crossed romance Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961, scr. William Inge); the incisive family melodrama All Fall Down (Frankenheimer, 1962, scr. Inge); the fable of race and social injustice To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962, scr. Horton Foote, based on the novel by Harper Lee); the black comedy about nuclear annihilation Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964, scr. Terry Southern); and the historical melodramas Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961, scr. Abby Mann) and Ship of Fools (Kramer, 1965, scr. Mann). Even with a wider range of political themes made possible after the blacklist, there was still the PCA to contend with. So there’s one final story to tell here, one final industry shake-up. The strict content guidelines of the 1930 Production Code had been strictly enforced by the PCA since 1934. Studios routinely submitted scripts to the PCA for approval, and screenwriters were compelled to rewrite according to notes provided by the industry censors. But when the box office began to falter after the war, studios began resisting or challenging the code with films that would not have been produced at another more profitable and stable time. Exemplary among these code-challenging and code-breaking films were the bedroom farce The Moon Is Blue (Otto Preminger, scr. F. Hugh Herbert, 1953), the addiction melodrama The Man with the Golden Arm (Preminger, scr. Walter Newman and Louis Meltzer, from a novel by Nelson Algren, 1955), the story of an effeminate schoolboy and his sexual rescue by an older woman, Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli, scr. Robert Anderson, 1956), and the lurid white-trash melodrama Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, scr. Tennessee Williams, 1956). The Moon Is Blue, adapted from a slightly naughty Broadway romantic comedy, was a sweet and lightweight film. But in terms of its effect on film history, it was a heavyweight, with one of the most significant scripts of the era. The film challenged code restrictions but did so with a knowing smile and a wink. The PCA had always been more permissive with comedies, but the dialogue in the play and adapted for the film was pervasively problematic. For example, consider the following exchange between a young architect and a woman he meets by chance as they embark upon their first date:

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“Don’t you think it’s better for a girl to be preoccupied with sex than occupied?” Patty O’Neill and William Holden in Otto Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue (1953). Screenplay by F. Hugh Herbert.

Donald Gresham: Why are you so preoccupied with sex? Patty O’Neill: Who, me? Donald Gresham: Yes, you. Patty O’Neill: You really think I am? Donald Gresham: Well, you are always asking if people plan seduction or they’re bored with virgins or they have a mistress. . . . Now, if that isn’t being preoccupied with sex, I’d like to know what is. Patty O’Neill: You may be right. [She pauses momentarily.] But don’t you think it’s better for a girl to be preoccupied with sex than occupied? The script is filled with frank but comic discussions of premarital sex, long a taboo subject for the PCA. For example, after Cynthia, Donald’s sultry neighbor, dismisses Patty as “a professional virgin,” Patty and Donald have the following exchange: Donald Gresham: Look, nobody in their right mind could seriously object to being called a virgin.

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Patty O’Neill: OK, but it’s this ‘professional’ that makes me mad. I’d like to have that explained. Donald Gresham: It’s not necessary to advertise it. That’s really all the phrase means. Patty O’Neill: What’s wrong with advertising? Donald Gresham [exasperated]: People who advertise are anxious to sell something! So far as the PCA was concerned, such discussions were, however commonplace in the United States in 1953, indelicate and inappropriate on film. The PCA had warned the film’s producer/director Otto Preminger not to adapt the play, noting that the stage version of The Moon Is Blue would need extensive cuts and changes. But Preminger went ahead and made the film anyway, employing the playwright, F. Hugh Herbert, to adapt his work for the screen. When the film was submitted in advance of its release, the PCA refused to give the film a code seal. Preminger urged United Artists to release the film anyway. It did, and theaters through most of the country happily and profitably screened the film.30 That a code seal might not be necessary for a profitable release was a first rather giant step toward a more comprehensive abandonment of the old Production Code. Three years later, Tea and Sympathy, which was also based on a risqué and successful stage play, seemed headed for the same fate with the PCA. But at the last minute, executives at MGM got cold feet and negotiated with the playwright/screenwriter Robert Anderson to cooperate with the censorship board. Anderson reluctantly added scenes to reframe the play (which the PCA allowed might otherwise be left intact). The film’s signature speech delivered by the housemistress as she takes the boy’s virginity—“Years from now when you talk about this—and you will—be kind.”—had been the play’s curtain line, signaling the boy’s rescue from a troubled adolescence. In the film, the housemistress’s remark instead foreshadows a troubled adulthood (his) and a failed marriage (hers). 31 The MPAA moved slowly to revise and finally abandon the old code. In 1966 the trade organization appointed Jack Valenti as its new chief executive and commissioned from him a new censorship regime. While Valenti developed the new code, three popular Hollywood films anticipated the change: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (based on Edward Albee’s play), which depicted two troubled marriages and included risqué dialogue, like the proposed party game “hump the hostess”; the pastiche gangster picture Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, scr. David Newman and Robert Benton, 1967), which focused as much on the couple’s struggles in bed as their criminal exploits and ended with a scene

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of unprecedented screen violence perpetrated by law enforcement; and The Graduate (Nichols, scr. Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on a novel by Charles Webb, 1967), in which the answer to Benjamin’s question—“Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?”—is obvious to everyone except the graduate himself. In the fall of 1968 the studio members of the MPAA and the membership of the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO) moved quickly to adopt the Voluntary Movie Rating System. In doing so, they replaced a strict regime of regulation with a flexible and somewhat capricious system of film classification that relied on “variable censorship” and “parental guidance.”32 As the era came to a close, the PCA was finally and officially disbanded—the first bit of good news for writers in a long time.

Legacy: A Conclusion The vexing challenge for any account of screenwriting in this era involves how we assess the work that did get made. Case in point: the estimable writing for the screen by Budd Schulberg, a former Party member who named names to keep his career on course. Schulberg wrote scripts for two of the era’s best films: On the Waterfront (1954, which won the writer an Oscar) and A Face in the Crowd (1957), both for fellow-rat Elia Kazan. Schulberg was a compelling and topical storyteller. His work in this era— the two screenplays mentioned above and his novel The Harder They Fall (which was the source for the story told in the 1956 film of the same title directed by Mark Robson, scr. Philip Yordon)—are all tied by content and context to this tumultuous era. The Harder They Fall and A Face in the Crowd are both stories of corruption, not only of an American pastime (boxing and the media’s role in politics) but of an idea, or ideal (fair play, popular consent, democracy). On the Waterfront, the script most explicitly connected to Schulberg’s personal drama as a writer, focuses on the corruption of waterfront unions by mobsters, a thinly disguised allegory for Party infiltration into and corruption of the Screen Writers Guild. The script celebrates naming names as a matter of conscience and courage. Father Barry: Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary. They better wise up! Taking Joey Doyle’s life to stop him from testifying is a crucifixion. And dropping a sling on Kayo Dugan because he was ready to spill his guts tomorrow; that’s a crucifixion. And every time the Mob puts the pressure on a good man, tries to stop him from doing his duty as a citizen, it’s a crucifixion. And anybody who sits around and lets it happen, keeps silent about something he knows that

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happened, shares the guilt of it just as much as the Roman soldier who pierced the flesh of our Lord to see if he was dead. Today it is hard not to cringe at Schulberg’s rationalizations. They hardly excuse selling out his fellow writers. And they certainly diminish the value of his work because it owes its existence to the suffering of others. As the blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein noted in an interview with historian Paul Buhle: “By giving friendly testimony you were collaborating with some very bad people doing very bad things. These racists and anti-Semites running the congressional committees were the closest thing to Nazis holding positions of influence within the United States at the time. As far as I’m concerned, the buck stops there.”33 How, then, can we value work like Schulberg’s in light of the concessions he made to enable its realization on screen? How, then, can we assess the value of a film as accomplished as On the Waterfront when it exists because films written by Schulberg’s more honorable peers do not? Such is the problematic historical record of screenwriters and screenwriting in the first decades after the Second World War.

4 The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 

Kevin Alexander Boon

The period in American cinema dating from the late 1960s to 1980s is variously referred to as the American New Wave, New Hollywood, postclassical Hollywood, and the American Renaissance. The year scholars claim the period began varies depending on what individual critics consider most significant. Most date the beginning of the period from 1967, the year Bonnie and Clyde was released, or 1968, the year the Hollywood Production Code ended, but nearly everyone marks the end of the period with the release of writer-director Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate in 1980, one of the worst box office failures in the history of American cinema. The American New Wave represents a period of significant transformation in form and content for the screenplay.1 This transformation is attributable to a number of key events, but the most significant influence over the American New Wave was the French New Wave during the 1950s and early 1960s and its establishment of the auteur theory. More than any other factor, the auteur theory shaped the philosophical underpinnings of screenwriting and American filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s with its advocacy for the director as the “author” of a film, establishing, as the French film historian Ginette Vincendeau notes, “the centrality of the cinematic auteur as supreme creative force.”2 As early as 1948, Alexandre Astruc argued that the scriptwriter should direct his/her own scripts (i.e., the director should author his/her own film), claiming that for auteur 81

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filmmaking “the scriptwriter ceases to exist, for . . . the distinction between author and director loses all meaning.”3 Astruc’s notion of le camera stylo is that the camera is the author’s pen and that film is the medium upon which he or she inscribes his or her vision. Adapting Astruc, postwar French film critics identified particular writer-directors; their nuanced conception of the auteur was one of a writer-director, not all directors. Later versions of the auteur theory elevated most directors to auteur status among hoi polloi, prompting audiences, news media, and cinema reviewers to perceive film as largely the work of a single voice rather than an intersection of creative voices. Paradoxically, auteur theory both increased and diminished the perceived status of the screenplay, which had long languished in the shadows of film production, hampered by its prevailing status as an interstitial production document. The acknowledgment of writer-directors as writers increased when their popular characterization was upgraded from studio production personnel to creative talents. This was a boon for the writer-director, and it engendered the screenplay with an artistic cachet that had evaded it since the early days of film. But it also elevated the reputation of the nonwriting director (metteur en scene), effectively devaluing the screenwriter and reinforcing the traditional view of the film per se as the legitimate work at the expense of the screenplay. This muddling of authorship is evident especially in the work of well-respected directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, whose work inspired the French critics. Hitchcock did not write his own films, yet he is frequently posited as their author. Psycho (1960), for example, is generally perceived in popular culture as Hitchcock’s work, not the work of Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay,4 nor the work of Robert Bloch, whose novel is the basis of the film. Hitchcock’s vision certainly influenced Stefano’s screenplay, but it could also be argued that Stefano’s vision influenced Hitchcock’s film. For instance, Stefano “bracketed dialogue that seemed long” in his screenplay.5 Hitchcock, though he filmed the bracketed dialogue, cut it from the final film, raising the question: whose edit was it? Stefano’s or Hitchcock’s? Is the cut a literary edit or a filmic one? Even if we argue that it is both, we still have evidence for the diminished stature of the screenplay (and the screenwriter) in film production. By elevating Hitchcock, auteur theory inadvertently diminishes Stefano. Some might claim that discussions of films such as Psycho deal with the film and therefore have no obligation to screenplay, but that merely illustrates the invasiveness of the problem. One cannot completely separate the screenplay from the film (or vice versa) without great effort, and tracing the authorial origins of individual elements of either is nearly impossible. Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga is perhaps closest to an accurate assessment of a film’s authorship when he claims that an “auteur film” is more accurately an “auteur’s film.”6 It is important to stress that these observations refer to how auteur theory influenced popular culture and shaped audience perceptions of film

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authorship rather than what is written by advocates of auteur theory. Critics were aware early on of the theory’s limitations. Andrew Sarris in “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” acknowledges that “auteur theory itself is a pattern in constant flux” and refuses to “endorse a Ptolemaic constellation of directors in a fixed orbit.” 7 Despite critical reservations about the extent to which auteur theory could be applied, the theory’s influence over public opinion in the 1960s and 1970s attributed authorship to directors, regardless of quality or the extent of their participation in a particular production. The French critics were clearly interested in identifying the best directors as auteurs; however, their efforts led to popular characterization of nearly all directors as authors of their films. Despite these complications, auteur theory did set the ground for advances in screenplay form and content by valorizing the writing of auteur directors and expanding narrative possibilities within the genre. Liberated from its standing as a production document used by studios in the manufacture of products for consumers, the screenplay became an artistic unit in its own right, allowing a creative influx of fresh screenwriters, such as Terry Southern and Paddy Chayefsky, and freeing existing screenwriters, such as Waldo Salt, to approach their screenwriting as an artistic craft. The result was a series of finely crafted, artistic screenplays of surprising emotional depth and literary mastery. Salt, for example, originally worked for MGM where he largely wrote studio pictures before being blacklisted in 1951. The Hollywood blacklist was irretrievably broken by John Henry Faulk’s legal victory over AWARE in 1962, a decision that held organizations financially responsible for activities related to blacklisting people in the entertainment industry, and writers like Salt reentered the Hollywood mainstream. Salt’s screenplays after returning reflect changes within the genre. His earlier screenplays, such as Mr. Winkle Goes to War (1944) and The Flame and the Arrow (1950), were well crafted but typical Hollywood productions. His first feature screenplay after the dissolution of the blacklist was Midnight Cowboy (1969), which won an Academy Award and broke new ground for American film. In 1973, his screenplay for Serpico earned him another Academy nomination and a Golden Globe. He followed Serpico with Day of the Locust (1975) and Coming Home (1978), the latter of which earned Salt another Oscar for writing. Each film, in its own way, challenged traditional viewpoints and contributed to a new era for the American screenplay, one that reveled in literary writing and eschewed the safer, mainstream screenplays of the 1950s. Auteur theory also exerted influence over screenplay form. The film scholar Francis Vanoye makes an important distinction in Scénarios modèles, modèles de scénarios between the program scripts largely in use prior to the French New Wave and the plan-of-action scripts preferred by French New Wave filmmakers, who were concerned with flexibility and the freedom to shift structure to accommodate chance. Many of the scripts of the French New Wave were written

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with the awareness that their writers would also be filming the work, and they therefore embraced a looser execution than for screenplays created as studio productions.8 In the studio system, a film was departmentalized, sometimes resulting in directors being assigned screenplays. Although well-known directors, such as Howard Hawks, could take liberties and deviate from what was on the page, what was on the page could not be written with any expectation of deviation. The screenwriter had to lay out every particular for a studio production, whereas directors of the French New Wave could render a more general outline of sequences and scenes. We might argue that within the conventional program script, filming served the screenplay, while in the films of the French New Wave, the screenplay began to serve the filming. In a 1974 interview, French New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette reflects on this distinction, citing his dissatisfaction with La religieuse (1966) because “the text had been so written and rewritten and revised” that he was “no longer listening to the actors” and that “changing anything during shooting was out of the question: we had done all the condensing possible during the process of adaptation, and the text had become the Bible!”9 Rivette goes on to say, “I reject the word ‘script’ entirely . . . in the usual sense. I prefer the old usage . . . which it had in Commedia dell’Arte, meaning an outline or scheme: it implies a dynamism, a number of ideas and principles from which one can set out to find the best possible approach to filming.”10 Michel Marie echoes Rivette’s position when he states that the plan-of-action script “is more open to the uncertainties of production, to chance encounters, and ideas that suddenly come to the auteur in the here and now of filming,” and he referred to it as “the New Wave’s ideal.”11 The plan-of-action script resulted in lower budgets, more spontaneity, and greater creative collaboration and is the ideal we find in play in the American production of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) on the cusp of the American New Wave.

Easy Rider All accounts of Easy Rider’s production characterize it as a confusion of creative conflict, particularly during the film’s formation. Like films of the French New Wave, Easy Rider represents “new ways of producing and making films (cheaply, quickly, outside the mainstream . . . [with] lighter technologies . . . [and] more ‘realist’ aesthetics.”12 Much of it was shot with exteriors using natural light, and Dennis Hopper (sometimes with Peter Fonda) is credited with claiming this was intentional, saying, “God is a great gaffer.”13 Local residents performed in key scenes. Makeshift rigs were hobbled together to save money. And a fair amount of dialogue was improvised. The screenplay, like the plan-of-action scripts of the French New Wave, was more of a conglomeration of ideas and philosophies informing the production than it was a traditional script, and it resembled scripts

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Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969).

used by some key French New Wave directors, such as François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. It provided direction and a story arc, but not the point-by-point outline typically found in a program script, and it represents a hazy collaboration between director Hopper, Fonda, and Terry Southern. The goal of a plan-of-action script, as characterized by the French, is to promote free-form creativity, spontaneity, flexibility, and opportunities on set to capitalize on mistakes and unforeseen opportunities. Easy Rider exemplifies all of these elements and represents a significant break from the popular American films of the 1950s and early 1960s, embracing several ideas that remain with us through the rise of the blockbuster in the late 1970s and into the twenty-first century. Further, it reflects the ideals of the French New Wave. Consider Alexandre Astruc’s comments from 1948: “Our sensibilities have been in danger of getting blunted by those everyday films which, year in year out, show their tired and conventional faces to the world.”14 Dennis Hopper makes a similar claim at the end of the 1960s: “At every love-in across the country people were smoking grass and dropping LSD, while audiences were still watching Doris Day and Rock Hudson.” This parallel is not by chance. Hopper was familiar with the French movement, as Peter Biskind notes when he claims that Hopper liked how the absence of “traditional optical effects” among French New Wave directors “created a different aesthetic.” The associate producer, Bill Hayward (who called Hopper “the worst editor that’s ever been”), said that Hopper “dug in his heels” after a “prestigious French director attended a screening [and] told Hopper he had created a masterpiece.” If true, this story reveals Hopper’s appreciation for the French and helps

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explain his approach on the film. However, with the French filmic sensibility came notions of the cinematic auteur as supreme creative force, an idea that may have prompted infighting among the filmmakers and confused the issue of screenplay authorship. It was contractually agreed that Fonda, Hopper, and Southern would share the screenwriting credit, but Hopper wanted exclusive credit, possibly because it suited the French notion of a film auteur. Hopper argued that he was the creative force behind the screenplay, claiming that “he shut himself in Southern’s office for two weeks and wrote the script himself.” Conversely, Southern claimed that Fonda and Hopper “only got script credit because he [Southern] did them a favor.” As he put it, “Neither of them [Hopper or Fonda] are writers. . . . They can’t even write a fucking letter.”15 David Tully softens but essentially supports Southern’s claim when he writes about “the intensely collaborative nature of film, and the impossibility of ascribing sole authorship of the screenplay to any one party.” Tully goes on to say, “It’s likely that Southern worked alone in harnessing the mass of raw material culled from these meetings into a workable script.”16 Tully defends his position with similarities between Easy Rider and Southern’s other works (The Cincinnati Kid, Red-Dirt Marijuana, Razor Fight) and points out the scarcity of Fonda and Hopper in future writing credits. But “who wrote what?” is an unresolvable conundrum for Easy Rider, as it is for many screenplays. By all accounts, Fonda, Hopper, and Southern discussed the script at length, each offering up ideas about how the screenplay should unfold. Some ideas can be traced back to an authorial source, such as the title, which all three agree originated with Southern, but identifying an author (or auteur) is impossible. Easy Rider exemplifies the difficulties inherent in attributing authorship to a single creative vision. Hopper won the award for Best First Work and was nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1969 for his work as director, but was Easy Rider the result of his singular artistic vision? None of the literature about the production seems to indicate so. Easy Rider is best described as the product of numerous creative forces that are largely untraceable back to a singular vision. Easy Rider exemplifies the authorial paradox empowered by French New Wave philosophies. In positing a central creative voice, it empowers writers and writer-directors to view themselves and their work as more than the creation of interstitial production documents for commercial enterprise, which opens the field for more innovative screenplays, but at the same time it limits our willingness to fragment authorship into more accurate, but less manageable, parts, which ultimately results in misattribution and obfuscation. The French New Wave helped establish the fertile ground from which the American New Wave emerged, and contributed to a new way of looking at film production that freed screenwriters and filmmakers of constraints imposed by assembly-line film production techniques, but its influence over the creative

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explosion in the American screenplay during the late 1960s and 1970s must be shared with two other events. The power of the American studios was in decline in the 1960s as a result of declining box office, competition from the new medium of television, and a 1948 Supreme Court ruling against major studios (Loew’s, RKO, Paramount, Warners, and Fox) that divested them of their theaters in order to provide “the fullest diversity of film content.”17 The goal of the ruling did not have an immediate impact, as Howard M. Frumes notes when he points out that “the apparent demise of the original studio system . . . [did not result] in independent film producers holding any meaningful power.”18 But it did open the door. The way studios operated changed and the contracts with creative talent changed, which helped liberate writers and writer-directors and opened up new narrative possibilities. As studios reduced the number of B-movies they produced, new markets opened for independent film producers and made films such as Easy Rider, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969), and John Cassavetes’s Faces (1968) possible. American screenwriters were further liberated by the end of the Production Code in 1968. In the absence of the code, filmmakers could follow their creative instincts without outside influence and embrace a freedom of subject matter more akin to European filmmaking. However, the end of the code was not the end of moral intrusions into the creative filmmaking process. Geoffrey M. Shurluck, the first director of the Motion Picture Association of America’s Code Administration, was seventy-four years old when the ratings system launched, and he formerly oversaw the Production Code, having taken over from Breen in 1954.19 The new ratings system still exerted influence over content, but their power to influence a project at the script level was significantly diminished. Screenwriters writing in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, when the production code was at its most powerful, were aware from “Fade In” that the code’s influence could keep a film from being made. The moral authority of the code’s enforcers loomed over the shoulders of writers while they worked. There was considerably less intrusion into the writing process under the ratings system. Screenwriters were freer to follow their own artistic voice in the scripting of the film, leaving production personnel to negotiate with the MPAA over ratings. The difference is structural and significant. The code issued mandates. The ratings system issued opinions. While their rating decisions could dramatically impact box office revenue, they could not officially scuttle an American film. Thus, the moral compass of a screenplay shifted back into the hands of the screenwriter. The original Production Code as drafted in 1930 lists thirty-seven particular applications (including subsets) of the code. Of these, eight relate directly to violence and violent graphics. Eight relate to sex—ten, if we include the two references to dancing, which refer to sexually suggestive dancing and nudity in costumes. Six relate to crime—in particular, anything that might show how a crime is committed. Two are racist. One is sexist. Three are attempts to protect

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religion from criticism and two are to protect governments from criticism. Of the remaining five, four relate to profanity, vulgarity, and other assumed obscenities, and the last one is a prohibition against the depiction of revenge. Jody W. Pennington notes that “among the novel qualities of many American films made during the period known as the Hollywood Renaissance was the routine inclusion of sexual behavior the Production Code had forbidden.”20 Indeed, each of the thirty-seven particulars outlined in the original code (and its revisions, which altered the code to restrict depictions of drug trafficking and abortion and to make slight amendments to existing restrictions) have increased prevalence in screenplays during the American Renaissance.

A Perfect Storm of Sex and Violence The elimination of the code opened the floodgates for screenwriters to artistically employ sex and violence or to exploit them for prurient moviegoers. We find the latter in the bevy of screenplays for sexploitation and grindhouse films released in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Screenplays such as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (Jonah Royston and John C. W. Saxton, 1975), I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978), and The Pig Keeper’s Daughter (Bethel Buckalew, 1975) pushed the limits of sexual content in film to new levels for the simple reason that sex sells.21 But other, more aesthetically driven writers and writer-directors were also liberated. Consider the home invasion scene from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971):

Int. Home—Night They go roaring in. Mr. Alexander is kicked in the face and goes down. Georgie leaps on him. Pete jumps up and down on the settee. Dim grabs hold of Mrs. Alexander. Alex whistles piercingly. Alex: Right, Pete. Check the rest of the house. Alex turns to Dim who holds the struggling Mrs. Alexander. Alex: Dim . . . Dim sets her down but holds her firmly. Alex starts to sing—“Singin’ in the Rain,” accompanying it with a kind of tap dance.

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Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Alex: (singing) I’m singing in the rain . . . He kicks Mr. Alexander accenting the lyrics. Alex: (singing) Just singing in the rain . . . He clubs Mr. Alexander with stick, in the time to the music. Alex: (singing) What a glorious feeling, I’m happy again. He pushes a rubber ball into Mrs. Alexander’s mouth and binds it with sellotape. Alex: (singing) I’m laughing at clouds so dark up above. The sun’s in my heart and I’m ready for love. Let the stormy clouds chase . . . He kicks Mr. Alexander again. Alex: (singing) . . . everyone from the place. Come on with the rain . . . He puts ball in Mr. Alexander’s mouth and sellotapes it. Alex: (singing) . . . I’ve a smile on my face. I’ll walk down the lane . . . to a happy refrain. I’m singing . . . just singin’ in the rain.

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He knocks down the bookcases and moves to Mrs. Alexander being held by Dim. Starts to repeat on song as he cuts slowly up each leg of her cat suit, until she is naked. This coincides with the song finishing. He turns to Mr. Alexander. Alex: Viddy well, my little Brother. Viddy well.22 This scene would have been impossible under the Production Code, as would numerous screenplays written after the code was abolished. Lifting “moral” restraints from filmmaking provided writers and writer-directors a broader palette and opened the door for new creative talents. Screenplays that previously would not have been produced began to dominate the box office and garner awards. Paul Mazursky’s first film, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, 1969), which deals openly with wife swapping, received four Academy Award nominations, including one for Mazursky and Larry Tucker for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay. More importantly for the film industry, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, like Easy Rider, generated a high rate of return for the investment. Its $2 million budget returned over $30 million at the box office. The high profits made it easier for new writer-directors to break into an industry that had virtually locked them out until the 1960s. Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls cost $1 million to make and grossed over $40 million at the box office. Woodstock (1970) cost $600,000 and grossed over $50 million. Jules Feiffer’s Carnal Knowledge (1971) pulled in over $28 million and a Writer’s Guild nomination. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was made for a little over $2 million, considerably more than many of the early American New Wave films, but it also returned a sizeable profit, bringing in over $26 million at the box office and four Academy Award Nominations, including one for Kubrick’s screenplay. Even peripheral, cult films made money. John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), which was filmed for between $5,000 and $10,000, brought in more than $7 million worldwide during its first two years. Sex during the American New Wave became currency, and writers integrated it into most films during the period in one manner or another as a matter of course. At one extreme were writer-directors such as Paul Morrissey, whose early collaborations with Andy Warhol resulted in Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), and Blood for Dracula (1974). Morrissey’s screenplays pushed the boundaries of acceptable content. Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) questioned the nature of “indecency” and exposed his work to a wider audience, ultimately leading him to more mainstream, more “‘respectable’ scripts,”23 such as Hairspray (1988) and Serial Mom (1994), later in his career. At the other extreme, mainstream screenplays increasingly employed nudity and

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sexual situations. Buck Henry’s screenplay for Catch-22 (Mike Nichols, 1970) featured full frontal nudity, sexual situations, and prostitution. James Dickey’s script for Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) featured violent rape. Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972), adapted screenplay by Jay Presson Allen, originally received an X rating for its depiction of sexual libertinism,24 but nevertheless went on to win eight Academy Awards, plus a writing nomination for Allen. The bottom line was that changes during the late 1960s and early 1970s economically and artistically revitalized the film industry. Attempts by independent, guerrilla writer-directors to discover just how far they could challenge public sensibilities in the absence of an official boundary expanded narrative possibilities for all writers. The screenwriter’s ability to craft visceral, human drama, without restraint, infused the industry with fresh, artistic visions that had never been seen on mainstream theater screens before. In the early 1960s, the mere presence of an exposed female breast created shockwaves. By the early 1970s, sodomy, such as we find in Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972), was on mainstream screens. In the case of Last Tango in Paris, we find a script that explores a grieving American’s attempt to detach sex from the vicissitudes of life, to isolate sex as an important but separate experience. Bertolucci and Franco Arcalli’s screenplay is wholly reliant on the liberal depiction of sexual situations and relations. Sex is not added into the story to spice it up or sensationalize it for audiences; the story could not be told without it. As David Sadkin puts it, “Sex is an integral and central metaphor in the movie . . . [and] it is constructed upon a screenplay that is as tight, and, in its own way, predictable as a play by Ibsen or Strindberg.”25 The highly influential film critic Pauline Kael was famously affected by the film, raising it to the status of high art in her review for the New Yorker. Kael confesses in her review that Last Tango in Paris “made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing.”26 Like many other productions from the period, Last Tango in Paris received awards and made money: at a cost of a little over a million dollars, it grossed nearly $100 million by 1980. Violence (and its cousin, gore) was equally and concurrently at work in the scripts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Violence had been present since the early days of film. Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) contained violence, as did Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and thousands of films since, even after the Production Code was instituted. What changed during the American New Wave was the intensity of the representation. Violence prior to the end of the production code was plentiful, but nuanced. The predominant techniques relied on implication and allusion rather than graphic representation. Like a tilt-up to a window shade implied sex prior to the 1960s, violence was often relegated to the shadows—a silhouette clutches its chest in response to a gunshot and falls to the ground. Blood was seldom seen and never viscera.

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Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972).

Physical violence was out of frame, unrealistically simplified or cloaked by cinematic technique, as in the following key scene from John Huston’s 1941 screenplay for The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade first encounters the murder of his partner, Miles Archer. 7. Med. Shot—The Alley-way as Spade enters. It is bordered on one side by a waist-high fence. Spade crosses to a place where a ten-foot length of the top rail of the fence has been torn from a post at one end and hangs dangling from the other. He looks down. 8. Long Shot—The Hillside Shooting over Spade’s shoulder. From the foot of the fence the hillside drops steeply away. Fifteen feet down the slope a flat boulder sticks up. Two men stand in the angle between the boulder and slope. One is pointing a camera. A bulb flashes and we get a momentary glimpse of a body lying on the boulder. Other men with lights move up and down the slope. One of them raises a torch so the beam strikes Spade in the face.27 This 1941 screenplay description of a murder scene is representative of the subdued presentation of violence in Hollywood screenplays prior to the American New Wave. The murder scene is whitewashed of all brutality, reducing the corpse to a figure down a slope momentarily glimpsed in a flash of light. By the time Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown arrived in 1974, violence was foregrounded and often employed by talented screenwriters to heighten dramatic tension:

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He starts to get into his car but Mulvihill and a smaller man stops him— Mulvihill pulling his coat down and pinning his arms—holding him tightly. The smaller man thrusts a switchblade knife about an inch and a half up Gittes’ left nostril. Smaller Man: (shaking with emotion) Hold it there, kitty cat. 112 Close—Gittes frozen, the knife in his nostril, the street lamp overhead gleaming on the silvery blade. The Smaller Man: You are a very nosey fellow, kitty cat . . . you know what happens to nosey fellows? The Smaller Man actually seems to be trembling with rage when he says this. Gittes doesn’t move. Smaller Man: (continuing) Wanna guess? No? Okay. Lose their noses. With a quick flick the Smaller Man pulls back on the blade, laying Gittes’ left nostril open about an inch further. Gittes screams. Blood gushes down onto his shirt and coat. Gittes bends over, instinctively trying to keep the blood from getting on his clothes. Mulvihill and the Smaller Man stare at him. The Smaller Man: (continuing) Next time you lose the whole thing, kitty cat. I’ll cut it off and feed it to my goldfish, understand? Mulvihill: Tell him you understand, Gittes.28

Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Screenplay by Robert Towne.

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This scene illustrates the significant contribution realistic violence can make to dramatic effect. It provides a moment of visceral certitude to the film noir genre, stimulating a strong emotional reaction from audiences that was seldom present in noir films of the 1940s and 1950s. When blood gushes from Gittes’s slit nostril, the danger Gittes faces is not only understood by audiences but felt. Pauline Kael articulates this transition from allusion to explicit expression in her review of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). She writes, But people also [in addition to the depictions of the outlaws’ sex lives] feel uncomfortable about the violence, and here I think they’re wrong. That is to say, they should feel uncomfortable, but this isn’t an argument against the movie. Only a few years ago, a good director would have suggested the violence obliquely, with reaction shots . . . , and death might have been symbolized by a light going out, or stylized, with blood and wounds kept to a minimum. In many ways, this method is more effective; we feel the violence more because so much is left to our imaginations. But the whole point of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ is to rub our noses in it. . . . The dirty reality of death—not suggestions but blood and holes— is necessary.29 The artistry of implication to which Kael refers is still in play. We find contemporary writer-directors dodging explicit violence to capitalize on human imagination. Quentin Tarantino left out the actual amputation of the policeman’s ear in Reservoir Dogs (1992) for this very reason. But this strategy is not always preferred, and just as explicit violence was “necessary,” according to Kael, in Bonnie and Clyde, it was equally necessary in numerous screenplays written in the late 1960s and 1970s: A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Deliverance, and Chinatown are all narratives that would have lost potency had the violence been whitewashed. Of course, this was not the case for all screenplays, and just as the lifting of the production code opened the floodgates for the exploitation of sex, it likewise opened the floodgates for the exploitation of violence. Numerous films were produced solely to sensationalize and cash in on the new freedom. Roger Corman, who had been limited to tamer fare prior to the American New Wave, embraced both sex and violence, making them the foundation of nearly every movie he produced. Corman unabashedly admits that his aesthetic was fueled by money. His insistence on heavy doses of sex and violence in his films resulted in a bevy of violent B-movies, such as The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (Corman, 1967), Bloody Mama (Corman, 1970), Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme, 1974), Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel, 1975), and Deathsport (Alan Arkusch and Nicholas Niciphor, 1978). Though films such as these are of questionable

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Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton.

aesthetic quality, deriving most of their appeal from camp, they served the important function of testing the boundaries for previously banned narrative elements. What they did for sex, they did equally for violence, often within the same stories. Exploitation screenplays pushed the boundaries of acceptable content, particularly in the horror genre. In 1962 horror films were still produced in the style used by Universal in the 1930s in films such as Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932), and The Invisible Man (Whale, 1933). For these films and all their descendants (e.g., House of Frankenstein [Erle C. Kenton, 1944], Son of Frankenstein [Rowland V. Lee, 1939], Werewolf of London [Stuart Walker, 1935], Bride of Frankenstein [Whale, 1935], and so on), horror was engendered largely through the use of shadow and light and implication, as it had been in the silent era with films such as Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), and Waxworks (Leo Birinsky and Paul Leni, 1924). The means of generating fear in an audience remained relatively unchanged into the early sixties when films such as 13 Ghosts (William Castle, 1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (Corman, 1961), The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fischer, 1961), The Raven (Corman, 1963), and The Old Dark House (William Castle, 1963) flickered onto screens. Even Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Psycho largely follow the same techniques established decades earlier. In 1963 Herschell Gordon Lewis produced Blood Feast (widely considered the first “splatter film”). This exploitation movie marks the first significant introduction of blood and gore to film, but Blood Feast was an anomaly and

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most horror pictures of the 1960s continued with the traditional format. In 1968 George Romero and John Russo penned Night of the Living Dead and launched the zombie horror subgenre. Not only were Romero’s zombies visceral and grotesque and much of their undead antics explicit, but the story and structure of the screenplay varied dramatically from traditional horror fare. The monsters in Night of the Living Dead were multiple, unlike the single-monster films of Universal and the copycat films that followed, and they multiplied fast. In Night of the Living Dead we find a screenplay that breaks with previous patterns and echoes a changing horror aesthetic. Like Easy Rider, Night of the Living Dead was an independent production that broke into markets previously dominated by studio-produced films. But Night of the Living Dead, like Herschell Gordon Lewis’s films, was peripheral to the mainstream film industry. It took years before it received recognition for its contributions to cinema. Nevertheless, films like Night of the Living Dead furrowed the ground for the use of graphic violence in more mainstream screenplays. A key turning point in mainstream graphic violence came in 1973 with the production of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. Though Kael dismissed the film as “aggressively silly,”30 The Exorcist did play favorably in mainstream theaters and effectively changed the game for horror films that followed. In roughly five years, horror had shifted from allusion and implication to explicit depiction, as evident in the graphic nature of the following scene from The Exorcist: Chris races up the stairs and runs to Regan’s room. Regan: No! Please! No! Chris opens the door and sees objects rapidly flying around the room. We hear a last gasp scream from Regan until Chris turns to Regan and covers her mouth with horror. Regan/Demon: Let Jesus fuck you! Regan has the crucifix gripped in her hand and is plunging it into her bloodied vagina. There are fresh cuts all over her face, streaming with blood. Regan/Demon: Let Jesus fuck you! Let him fuck you!!! Chris runs over to Regan and tries to pry the crucifix from her hand. They struggle for the crucifix. Regan then grabs Chris’ head and pushes it into her bloodied crotch.

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Regan/Demon: Lick me! Lick me! Chris’ face emerges covered with Regan’s blood. Regan slaps her mother and sends her flying to the floor. Chris screams in pain. Sharon and Willie race up the stairs. Sharon: Chris? The door closes by itself being held shut by a chair. They both bang on the door to help her. Chris looks up to see that Regan’s wardrobe is moving toward her. Chris scurries out of the way. We turn back to Regan who is sitting with her back to us, but she has spun her head in a 180-degree angle, facing backward (Chris). Chris looks up at her. Regan/Burke: Do you know what she did, your cunting daughter? Chris turns away and screams, bursting into tears.31 The violence in The Exorcist, like the violence in Bonnie and Clyde and the sex in Last Tango in Paris, is central to the narrative. Blatty’s original list of possible directors for his screenplay included a number of key American New Wave directors, such as Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Mike Nichols. These directors passed on the project and Warner Bros., which financed the film, was planning on using Mark Rydell (who went on the direct On Golden Pond [1981]), but Blatty objected, preferring the fast-paced style of William Friedkin over the slower style of Rydell.32 Faster pacing would soon become the standard among mainstream screenplays. The Exorcist effectively raised the bar for all screenplays and transformed the style of horror films from noir-esque studies in allusion to graphic, fastpaced studies in visual terror. The increased use of violence, blood, and gore in horror led to another turning point in 1980 with the appearance of Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980), which begins an explosion of splatter films in the 1980s, and ultimately led to the torture porn films in the twentyfirst century.

The Changing Industry The increased use of sex and violence are the most noticeable narrative shifts during the American New Wave, but they are not the only factors to exert major influence over screenplays. The lifting of prohibitions against presenting religious figures as villains and the end of the Association of Motion Picture Producers’

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attempts to discourage the presentation of criminals as heroes expanded the ability of writers to employ villains and nontraditional heroes as protagonists and gave rise to the antihero. The most obvious antiheroes are perhaps the gun-toting macho heroes personified in the novelist-turned-screenwriter Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft (Shaft, directed by Gordon Parks [1971]; Shaft’s Big Score [Parks, 1972], Shaft in Africa [John Guillermin, 1973]), the novelist Brian Garfield’s Paul Kersey (Death Wish [Michael Winner, 1974]), the screenwriters Harry Julian and Rita M. Fink’s Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry [Don Siege1, 1971], Magnum Force [Ted Post, 1973], and The Enforcer [James Fargo, 1976]),33 and others, who resist authority and function by their own existential set of rules, the way Rick Blaine did in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). However, unlike Blaine, the macho antiheroes of the American New Wave were not reappropriated by systems of authority by the end of the screenplay. The antihero is an existential character who faces off against an unaccommodating world. Whether he’s hyper-violent like Alex in A Clockwork Orange or a nebbish like Alvy Singer in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), the antihero is a microcosm of psychological drives and often conflicting moral standards. This type of character was present in European films and films of the French New Wave, notably in the character of Michel Poiccard in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), but it did not get a foothold in American screenplays until the American New Wave, when the antihero dominated many of the best screenplays of the period, such as Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, parts I and II (Coppola, 1972 and 1974), John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979), Mardik Martin and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973), Robert Towne’s Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), and numerous others. Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976) directly articulates the existential nature of the antihero with a quote from Thomas Wolfe’s “God’s Lonely Man”: “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”34 The quote prefaces the screenplay but does not appear in Scorsese’s film; it is a literary element designed to articulate the mood of Travis Bickle, the central character, as a morally indecipherable man sinking beneath the detritus of contemporary culture. Bickle is not like previous protagonists such as Charles Foster Kane (in Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941]), whose character also could not be divined. Herman J. Mankiewicz’s screenplay for Citizen Kane implies that clear distinctions between good and evil are possible, just not determinate for his protagonist. But Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver calls into question the indeterminacy of good and evil itself. Bickle’s killing spree at the end of the film is responsible for his being labeled a “Taxi-Driver Hero”35 by the media, but we know that he could have just as easily been branded a villain had his first desire to assassinate Charles Palantine succeeded.

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Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Screenplay by Paul Schrader.

The existential antihero formed the backbone for American auteurs. This shift is apparent in the emergence of Woody Allen, one of the period’s most significant writer-directors and one of cinema’s most prolific auteurs. Allen’s alter-ego personified the everyman of the 1970s, struggling for identity in a universe devoid of moral absolutes. In his study of Allen’s films, Richard A. Blake notes that with Annie Hall (1977), “life becomes more important [for Allen] than formulations about life,”36 and thus existence becomes more important than philosophy in Allen’s work. By the second half of the 1970s, the radical young directors of the late sixties and early seventies were being supplanted by writer-directors who could deliver mainstream blockbusters. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg dominated the box office and drove the industry toward big-budget films produced with an eye toward opening weekend box office returns. Writers and writer-directors, such as Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Brian De Palma, who had fueled innovation during the late 1960s and early 1970s, became industry monoliths as budgets rose and concern for profits drove studios to exert more control over productions. The screenwriter-director Jon Favreau articulates this change when he says, “What happened was, in the seventies, all those filmmakers that did get final cut, the budgets grew and grew, and each one, one after the other, had a financial disaster that almost tore down the studios.”37 Costly failures changed the willingness of studios to divest themselves of control in order to allow auteurs to create. Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975, scr. Bogdanovich) lost nearly $5 million for Twentieth Century–Fox. William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977, scr. Walon Green) lost around $12 million for

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Paramount and Universal. The failures came to a head with Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980, scr. Cimino), which ran way over budget and nearly bankrupted United Artists, with losses totaling over $40 million. Countering these huge financial failures were the “blockbusters” that appeared during the second half of the 1970s, beginning with Spielberg’s Jaws (1975, scr. Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb) and followed by Lucas’s Star Wars (1977, scr. Lucas). These screenplays largely rejected the existential antihero and returned to more traditional protagonists. The story arc of Star Wars is a conventional bildungsroman tracing the transformation of Luke Skywalker from a naïve boy to a heroic man of ideals. The closest the script comes to an existential character is Han Solo, who is introduced as “a tough, roguish starpilot about thirty years old. A mercenary on a starship, he is simple, sentimental, and cocksure.”38 Han appears to be a man with his own moral compass, but by the end of the screenplay he kneels before “Senator Leia,” a willing member of the Alliance and a supplicant to authority of the aristocracy. Like Rick Blaine’s tenacious autonomy, Han Solo’s rebellious nature is not a statement of individual power, but a reflection of his quest for an appropriate master narrative to follow. By 1980, the American New Wave was essentially over. The daring screenplays of the late 1960s and 1970s had been largely supplanted by big-budget, star vehicles that promised investors mammoth (and rapid) returns at the box office. Rather than a single creative group producing a collection of movies, the industry had become a coalition of creative groups producing a single movie. For the screenwriter, though, a door had been opened. Auteur theory had inadvertently increased the status of the screenwriter by associating scripts with the newly elevated role of director. Interest in screenwriting grew well into the 1990s,39 and though screenwriters (as opposed to writer-directors who were, by extension of their roles as directors, acknowledged for their writing) still had to fight for recognition of their contributions to film, independent screenwriters had an easier time generating interest in their work. During the American Renaissance, screenwriting became more of a literary occupation, along the lines of being a novelist or a poet. Rather than a mere cog in the machinery of the Hollywood assembly line, screenwriters became individual artists in control of their own literary visions. As a result, screenplays became more daring and adventuresome, their format more tightly constructed and focused, and the screenplay began to emerge from the shadows behind the screen and take its place as a literary genre in its own right.

5 The New Hollywood, 1981–1999 

Julian Hoxter

The term “New Hollywood” usually refers to a period from the late 1960s until the early 1980s in which the demographics of the cinema audience skewed younger, and a new generation of filmmakers—many influenced by the counterculture and trained in film schools—refreshed Hollywood storytelling, speaking more authentically to the times. What is perhaps less well understood is that a second and much more fundamental transformation of the Hollywood industry took place in the following two decades. If the impact of the first New Hollywood was largely creative, the impact of the second was in transforming the economics of moviemaking and the structure of the institution itself.

Hollywood in Transition In the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood screenwriters had to adapt to increased competition in the freelance arena as well as to the introduction of new technologies. The necessity followed opportunities created by the transformed economic model, tracking the rise and targeting the production slates of independent producers of all kinds. The independent producers Carolco (famous for producing First Blood, Ted Kotcheff, 1982, scr. Michael Kozoll, William 101

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Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone; and Rambo: First Blood Part II, George Cosmatos, 1985, scr. Stallone and Jim Cameron) and Cannon (infamous for producing Death Wish II, Michael Winner, 1982, scr. David Englebach), for example, specialized in action and general exploitation movies, respectively, but at different budgetary levels. Writers also fought hard through their guild to receive fair compensation from the burgeoning ancillary markets of cable and home video. To account for the development of screenwriting in this period, then, we must understand something of the emerging context in which Hollywood writers were working. According to the film historian Stephen Prince, the institutions of Hollywood cinema changed more radically in this period than at any time since the majors lost their theater chains as a result of the Paramount Case in 1948: “Hollywood entered a period of tumult in which the roiling changes were like a fermentation process, producing a more refined and powerful industry once it subsided.”1 The industry by turns responded to and attempted to get ahead of unprecedented new opportunities for the exploitation of its product through emerging technologies and markets. In 1993, studio receipts from VHS sales totaled $5.9 billion; by 1997 the figure had risen to $9.8 billion.2 More importantly for screenwriters, according to the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the split in residual payments for their members between television and the new supplementary markets had already “shifted from roughly two-thirds television in 1982 to two-thirds supplementary markets in 1986.”3 The financial implications of this shift prompted two strikes in the 1980s in which the WGA won some concessions in residual payments, but did nothing to change the status of screenwriters in Hollywood. At the same time, Hollywood studios were being bought up in a series of mergers beginning in the early 1980s. First Coca-Cola and then Sony bought Columbia, Matsushita bought MCA, the parent of Universal, Time merged with Warner Communications, News Corp. bought Twentieth Century–Fox, and MGM was broken up, sold, and resold.4 As a result, one Hollywood major after another found itself strategizing for a future as a relatively small cog in the media division of a vertically integrated corporation. The mergers were driven in large part by a search for synergies and marketing opportunities across media. In the case of the Japanese mergers, the painful lessons of the VHS/ Betamax home video format competition also spoke to the importance of keeping the production both of hardware (VCRs) and software (movies) in-house. One consequence of this reorganization was an increasing tendency for riskaverse studios to look for risk-averse product they could develop across media, a product that would create revenue streams for as many entities as possible within the parent corporation. Going forward, the studios would deem worthy of development those big movies that would also sell sound tracks, novelizations, comic books, toys, and other spinoffs and merchandise, that could have

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extended paydays in ancillary distribution, and would play happily in every international market. In the late 1970s, Hollywood had been riding a boom in ticket sales as younger people were keeping their regular moviegoing habit longer. The increase was also fueled by a new string of successful blockbusters, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) being perhaps the most famous but, contrary to popular critical opinion, hardly the first. The success of these films further encouraged the majors to focus on the “big picture” once again. Despite expensive high-profile box office failures, such as Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), budgets for studio pictures continued to increase in the new decade to match aspirations.5 Many of the new big-budget movies raided the traditional B-movie genres for their inspiration in a spirit of nostalgic pastiche and spectacular reinvention. The influence of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977), and Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) on genre filmmaking in subsequent decades was considerable; however, at the start of this period, independent low-budget genre pictures were also enjoying high visibility. Their production was now being financed by the promise of revenues from the rapidly expanding home video market. Nowhere was this more evident than with the resurgent horror film. American horror in the late 1970s and early 1980s typically borrowed the gaudy clothes of European excess to dress up the utilitarian story formulae of the many “slasher films” that followed in the footsteps of Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). Indeed, by May of 1981, the proliferation of movies mining this bloody vein was prompting Scriptwriter News, a biweekly information sheet for freelance screenwriters, to encourage its readers to jump on the bandwagon, under the headline: “The ‘Grade B’ Movie Makes a Big Comeback That Can Make You Money.”6 Movie development would become increasingly polarized between high- and low-budget pictures. As the writer-producer-director Walter Hill lamented: “The middle ground has largely fallen out of the studio system.”7 The home video boom encouraged more than just low-budget horror. Companies such as Vestron, Carolco, Hemdale, New Line, Miramax, and later Castle Rock, Imagine, and Morgan Creek increased independent production of all kinds in the 1980s. The increase in independent genre production certainly offered new opportunities for writers, and sometimes in the most unlikely places. Vestron, known principally for making low-budget horror movies, also produced a number of art movies. They even bought into an unlikely low-budget, three-picture relationship with Ken Russell after releasing Gothic (1986). Russell made films as diverse as Lair of the White Worm (1988), Salome’s Last Dance (1988), and The Rainbow (1989) for Vestron. Dan Ireland, a producer on several of those films, remembers: “Vestron couldn’t have been more pleased, it gave them instant credibility and attention to be working with directors the likes of Ken Russell.”8 And as Russell described it to me over lunch one day: “I would make one for them and then one for me.”9

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In the late 1980s, however, a particular incarnation of American independent film began to make a new space for itself as an emergent alternative to the idea of a meretricious, corporate, and cynical Hollywood mainstream in both the industrial and public consciousness. Financed in part by presales to foreign territories as well as the anticipation of income from the new ancillary markets, this “movement” was driven by imaginative purchases by (then) independent distributors such as Miramax and by the expansion of the small Sundance Film Festival into an important finishing school for promising writer-directors and a powerful market for independent films. Since the 1970s, the Independent Feature Project and the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers had fostered alternative cinematic visions through their administration of NEA grants (AIVF) and by helping independent filmmakers find distribution (IFP). However, they were typically working at the margins of both public awareness and the cinematic mainstream. It was the commercial success of Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, winner of the audience award at Sundance in 1989 and distributed creatively by Miramax, that opened a new door for independents. Made for $1.2 million, it grossed around $25 million domestic on a record 536 screens and finally proved to the majors that there was real money to be made from “prestige” independent films.10 It didn’t take long for revenue streams from independent film to be co-opted by Hollywood through corporate buyouts and new distribution pacts with independent production companies. The majors also retooled and expanded their own specialty “classics” divisions to cash in on the domestic indie boom. By 1999, according to the film historian Yannis Tzioumakis, it was already becoming clear that, in economic terms at least, independent film was now little more than “a ‘euphemism for a small-studio production’ . . . independent film has become an ‘industrial category,’ much like genre and auteurism, which the controllers of the industry have been utilizing increasingly to market low-budget films that do not contain any conventional commercial elements.”11 Looking forward, the legacy of the “Miramax-Sundance” boom was that a loose but broadly consistent American independent aesthetic—character driven, personal, often formally playful—remained as a kind of marketable hybrid between the alternative edges and the Hollywood core.12 In institutional terms, however, “prestige indie” would become little more than niche programming for the majors. Many of the new millennium’s first generation of independent voices, “mumblecore” filmmakers among them, would emerge from a burgeoning micro-budget culture enabled variously by the availability of newly affordable digital filmmaking and distribution technologies and by a hugely expanded festival circuit—another legacy of Sundance. No matter how it was eventually mainstreamed, the independent production boom enabled important new voices to enter or find a more prominent place in the film culture, including writers and directors of the caliber of John Sayles

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(Return of the Secaucus Seven, 1980), Kathryn Bigelow (The Loveless, 1982, scr. with Monty Montgomery), Penelope Spheeris (Suburbia, 1983), Joel and Ethan Coen (Blood Simple, 1984), Alex Cox (Repo Man, 1984), Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, 1984), Alan Rudolph (Trouble in Mind, 1985), Paul Schrader (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, 1985), Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It, 1986), David Lynch (Blue Velvet, 1986), Hal Hartley (The Unbelievable Truth, 1989), Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, 1990), Richard Linklater (Slacker, 1991), Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, 1992, scr. with Roger Avary), Allison Anders (Gas, Food Lodging, 1992), Kevin Smith (Clerks, 1994), Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, 1997), Wes Anderson (Rushmore, 1998, scr. with Owen Wilson), and Charlie Kaufman (scr. Being John Malkovich, 1999). The boom also fostered filmmaking from groups that had rarely, if ever, been allowed their own distinct voices in Hollywood. Stylistically and narratively diverse, often intentionally shocking, Desert Hearts (dir. Donna Deitch, scr. Natalie Cooper, 1986), Poison (dir./scr. Todd Haynes, 1991), The Hours and Times (dir./scr. Christopher Munch, 1991), The Living End (dir./scr. Gregg Araki, 1992), and Swoon (dir. Tom Kalin, scr. Tom Kalin and Hilton Als, 1992) blazed a trail toward a New Queer Cinema. The new economics of independent film also helped give voice to another generation of black writers and directors. There was Spike Lee, of course, but also Joseph B. Vasquez (dir./scr. Hangin’ with the Homeboys, 1991) and Matty Rich (dir./scr. Straight out of Brooklyn, 1991).13 The studios caught on, promoting a few of their own emerging black writer-directors like John Singleton (dir./scr. Boyz N the Hood, 1991) and, over time, playing more story and casting decisions toward the African American dollar. Just as opportunities for screenwriters were expanding in the independent sector, the majors were producing fewer movies. Nevertheless, as budgets increased, and agencies began offering scripts as the wrapping paper for packages of talent, these were the decades that seemed to promise instant fortune from a multi-million-dollar screenplay sale. At least, that was the story sold to aspiring writers by consultants, journalists, gurus, and sometimes snake-oil salesmen, more and more of whom were setting up shop just outside the gates of the industry. The competition for script sales and writing assignments became fiercer than ever, with more and more aspiring writers entering the freelance market. The rituals of the freelance arrangement even began to affect what screenplays looked like on the page. The emerging technologies of screenplay production also influenced screenplay format. This was the period in which screenwriters abandoned the typewriter for the computer, and were served with increasingly sophisticated software that imposed its own norms and standards in formatting. Besides, the spec screenplays of the 1980s and 1990s were increasingly being written to be read. They were formatted as much for the convenience of the front rank of Hollywood’s gatekeepers, the script readers, as for actors, directors, and producers.

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The Freelance Paradigm in the 1980s and 1990s The relationship between writers and Hollywood studios had been transformed between the downsizing of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s. With screenwriters no longer on contract to studios, a revised acquisition paradigm, with its own rituals of project development, had emerged to fill the product gaps left by the contraction of in-house studio story departments. The norm for projects not initiated in-house was for freelance writers to pitch story ideas to producers, or to submit “spec” screenplays in the hopes of a lucky sale or a development deal or to impress their way into studio assignments. The market for screenwriting in Hollywood reflected the contraction in studio output.14 Sales opportunities, even for those with the right contacts, were now harder to come by. An agency script reader noted in 1981 that “years ago, a star could approach a producer with a story written by a friend and chances are if the star has good box-office draw, the script would be produced. But that was in the days when Warner Bros. or MGM or Paramount produced 200 films a year—not fifteen like today.”15 The freelance market was also fickle. It had infatuations with buying pitches, and other moments when it put its faith more firmly behind spec screenplays. An agent at Broder, Knurland, Webb, Uffner reflected the mood in 1998: “Pitches are very hot right now. . . . Eventually the trend will go back to spec scripts. The spec script will always be imperative to the development process, because you’re that much closer to getting the movie made.”16 Conversely, Joe Roth, president of Twentieth Century–Fox back in 1990, worried about the lure of buying a “finished” script: “You’re coming up with an instant hit, a movie you didn’t have the night before. You manipulate yourself into thinking you are reading a finished picture.”17 Of course a spec sale wasn’t, and still isn’t, a guarantee that a screenplay would actually be produced.18 Playing into the lure of selling the “shovel ready” movie was the growing practice of talent agencies packaging projects. With talent no longer on contract, studios were forced to do business with agencies, and the power of deal making began to shift in their direction. In the 1980s, the three most important agencies, William Morris, CAA, and ICM, were effectively a cartel. Successful packaging was exemplified by the aggressive strategy of Michael Ovitz at Creative Artists Agency with movies such as Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982, scr. Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal), Rhinestone (Bob Clark, 1984, scr. Phil Alden Robinson and Sylvester Stallone), and Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988, scr. Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow). “By floating to the majors a package of readily assembled talent (screenwriter, director, stars),” Prince notes in his history of 1980s American filmmaking, “Ovitz could leverage production deals in a highly persuasive way. Accepting the package made the studio executive’s job much easier.”19 Packaging reinforced the shift in power from studios to agencies, and helped to inflate payments to a

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few successful screenwriters. However, as Triad agent Rhonda Gomez noted in 1990, packaging and price inflation did little to improve the lot of the average Hollywood writer: “A few years ago, a lot of writers could make a living. Now it’s getting like the Screen Actors Guild, where a few stars are getting lots of money and the majority are starving.”20 Indeed, in 1988 WGA spokeswoman Cheryl Rhoden complained to the Hollywood Reporter that “in any given year, half our membership doesn’t work at all.”21 Although the studios no longer had screenwriters on long-term contracts, they still found effective ways of controlling them. Masters of this art were Barry Diller and Michael Eisner at Paramount in the early 1980s, both notorious for micromanaging writers with notes and memos. Executives would agree on script notes before a meeting, presenting a unified front and giving writers little option but to accept most of the notes if they wanted to stay on projects. A resulting memo would be messengered to the writer before a meeting, whose agenda, when it finally occurred, was to go over its points in turn and get the screenwriter to accept as many of them as possible, urged by executives—all of whom radiated the confidence that they knew as much about screenwriting as any writer did.22 Walter Hill recalls his own experience of development at Paramount with 48 Hrs. (1982): “Michael [Eisner] would have some general notion about the script, and he’d put it in the pipeline, then Those Who Also Serve would try to implement them with specific ideas. So the notes you were getting represented a committee trying to assuage their boss. Classic studio procedure.”23 The realities of Hollywood for many screenwriters notwithstanding, as the output of the majors was contracting, the pool of aspiring writers increased. Freelance spoke “opportunity” to many, and reports of multi-million-dollar script sales helped the steady flow of spec screenplays. As early as 1981 “Betty,” an experienced studio script reader, was explaining that “since most writers are independent, and production quantity is at an all-time low, there are more unproduced scripts floating around than ever before.”24 Writing in Creative Screenwriting, Michael Lent quotes an unnamed studio vice president: “There are so many to read, even a recommended script can take a while. There’s just so much out-and-out bad writing out there. Everyone is writing a script. It’s a jungle. You’ve got to machete it down in some way.”25 The winnowing was accomplished by an accumulation of industrial rituals, rules, and precedents born of expediency, tradition, and established professional practice that could seem by turns arcane and picayune. To succeed, it was now even more important that a screenwriter develop acting skills alongside abilities as a writer. Among the most important of these skills was pitching, “in many ways a kind of performance art. The ability to effectively reduce a sixty or ninety minute narrative to two or three spoken sentences carries a premium in Hollywood.”26 Guinevere Turner (co-scr., Go Fish, 1994) spoke for many writers when she admitted to a sense of incredulity at this ritual: “I had no

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idea that selling oneself was going to be such a huge part of the process, and that your ability to write is secondary only to your ability to walk into a room and present your ideas. Self-presentation is so huge, and I’m so bad at it. I always want to walk in and say, ‘Just let me do it. I swear to God, it’ll be amazing.’ . . . It’s just existential madness to me, you know? But that’s how you get the job.”27 The rituals of access in the freelance spec market were already frustrating writers in 1980. In November of that year, Variety reported the concerns of writers attending an educational conference with producers and development professionals sponsored by the Beverly Hills Bar Association: “No matter how eager producers and studio exex [sic] claim to be for new writing talent, there is a complicated series of rules to be learned about how to approach them. And the rules don’t always make sense, the speakers admitted.”28 Part of following the rules meant learning how to navigate Hollywood’s gatekeeping process. Gatekeeping is the system by which studios, agencies, and producers manage the flood of spec screenplays. Gatekeepers at agencies and studios separate the wheat from the chaff, under whatever definitions of wheat and chaff are in fashion at the time and in their particular organizations, before any screenplays actually reach the desks of their employers, the producers, development executives, and agents. In 1981, Scriptwriter News was already offering its own advice on dealing with gatekeeping, calling it an “uncharted region of creative decision.” This overstated assertion was published under the title: “Readers: The Writer’s Best Friend Can Be the Writer’s Worst Enemy. A confidential report on how to get your script past the agents and the producer’s first line of defense.”29 Development executives often gave clear instructions to their readers. Perhaps unsurprisingly Karen Moy, executive director of Creative Affairs for Columbia Pictures in 1999, was interested in “compelling characters, a well-told story with conflict, a strong visual sense [and] snappy dialogue.”30 However, she also reminded her readers that they were working for a studio: “This means they’re to look for fresh takes on mainstream commercial material, but they should also acknowledge good quality of writing in the more esoteric or small pieces. This latter type is unlikely to be made at a studio, although some of these writers do get hired to work on writing assignments for the studio.”31 The reader’s job is to assess the quality and viability of a submitted spec screenplay. A script reader may be an established, trusted professional, regularly employed by the studio, often at piecework rates; or simply this week’s intern, straight out of her first film school screenwriting class and set to read through the slush pile. Either way, the reader produces an analytical “coverage” report on the screenplay, commenting on issues of style, structure, and character development as well as a number of practical considerations, such as the film’s potential budget. Coverage reports are typically graded “Recommend” (very rare), “Consider” (rare), or “Pass” (almost always). Writers aspire to a “Recommend” or “Consider” for their talent or potential, even if their script

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gets a “Pass.” These two passing grades open the proverbial door a crack, and can make the considered or recommended writer eligible for potential studio writing and rewriting assignments. This coverage is what the executives may actually read, in the first instance, and it informs their response to the writer’s agent or representative. In this way, coverage forms the basis of the development narrative of a screenplay. It can do much to set the creative agenda. The downside of the larger pool of writers was that, by the late 1990s, “studios and production companies are covering double and even triple the number of scripts handled just ten years ago.”32 This increase in the volume of material to be read and analyzed often had the effect of decreasing the amount of attention an individual script received. One development executive quoted by Michael Lent in Creative Screenwriting admitted in 1998 that in order to keep up with the flow, “his coverage time per project has gone from two hours down to forty-five minutes.”33 As the time pressure on readers increased, so the old lesson of writing for first impressions gained renewed traction. By the end of the 1990s, increasing recognition of the rituals of gatekeeping had begun to have a knock-on effect on the look of the established “master-scene format” in which screenplays were presented.34 In other words, spec scripts were starting to look different on the page, and this had an effect on storytelling, if not so much on the structure of stories themselves. For those writers who needed extra guidance in preparing for the development game, there was a whole support industry willing to help.

The Para-Industry Inasmuch as the history of screenwriting in the 1980s and 1990s is the history of increased aspiration, so it is equally the history of the commodification of that aspiration. Although the initial move to a freelance paradigm predated the 1980s by decades, it was from the start of this era that its mysteries were most comprehensively packaged to potential screenwriters. Many were enticed by the narratives of “breaking in,” sold to them via what might be called the screenwriting “para-industry.” I use the term para-industry here to describe the work of screenwriting teachers, consultants, journalists, and professors (notably Syd Field, Robert McKee, Richard Walter, Lew Hunter, John Truby, Christopher Vogler, and the co-editor of the present volume, Andrew Horton). They published material and offered services in parallel with, and in support of, the primary functions of screenwriting—writing and selling screenplays. In addition, the para-industry had its own technology sector, developing increasingly sophisticated formatting and story development software. Although the history of this para-industry is almost as long as that of cinema, its influence and its penetration within American screenwriting culture

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certainly increased from the late 1970s.35 This period saw the publication of more and more craft-oriented manuals as well as other explanatory and journalistic material marketed both at established and, in particular, aspiring screenwriters. The para-industry thrived on the continual demand from aspiring writers for what the film scholar David Bordwell described as a “reading of the runes” of shifts within development culture and the freelance market.36 In January of 1981, for example, Scriptwriter News was advising its readers to avoid writing big-budget movies in the wake of the Heaven’s Gate budget scandal. The assumptions about Hollywood budgets over the longer term were largely misplaced, but the newsletter’s attempt to divine recent industry history as a guide to screenwriters in their choice of new spec projects is still instructive.37 Write small. This is the most popular piece of advice being passed to entertainment writers in Hollywood, presently gripped in what is coming to be known as the Heaven’s Gate effect. . . . The Heaven’s Gate debacle is the obvious result of young, inexperienced filmmakers being given free reign [sic] and unlimited budgets, a practice which began some five years ago following the success of Jaws. . . .“Taking chances is out here,” says one Paramount executive. “If it were possible, they’d put a dollar limit on every frame.” The inevitable result is a general trend away from big budget projects and multi-million-dollar performers. The advice is solid: write small.38 Besides, there was some uncomfortable truth hiding in the bad advice. The increasing costs of production and—equally important—marketing and distribution in the 1980s were indeed encouraging studios to base their development decision making on past models of success. “Instead of a seat-of-the-pants process, people were grasping for a rational framework to make decisions, and the only rational process available was precedent and analogy.”39 In other words, executives only wanted to green-light stories that allowed them to cover their own backs. The development of The Writers Computer Store from a small storefront on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1982 into an online sales and training network with its own in-house online magazine, and of Creative Screenwriting from a quarterly academic journal in 1994 to a full-color bi-monthly magazine by the end of the 1990s, can serve as snapshots of the para-industry’s expansion. The Writers Store (as it is now known) began by specializing in building computer packages for writers. It currently operates three websites including the online incarnation of the store itself (now located in Burbank), the Writers University dedicated to online creative writing instruction, and the magazine Scriptmag.com (formerly Script magazine and the StoryLink website). The Writers Store’s model was followed in Europe in 1996 by The Screenwriters Store.

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Although it ceased print publication recently, Creative Screenwriting was sustained for many years by the expanding market for products and services to support the screenwriter in her work. Its first quarterly issue, in Spring 1994, contained only two small black-and-white text advertisements, one for Robert McKee’s Story Structure seminar and another for “Video Pitch,” as well as a single page of classifieds. These touted script consulting services, software, and classes. The twenty-nine separate color advertisements in the November/ December 1999 issue of Creative Screenwriting offered similar (or in the case of the long-running “Dov S-S Simens 2 Day Film School,” identical) products and services. Now, given both the wider distribution of the magazine and the increased commercial viability of its advertising clients, their products rated a more professional format throughout. The how-to manuals of the para-industry typically sold variations on “threeact structure” as a one-size-fits-all template for Hollywood storytelling. Although it was Syd Field who popularized the term in his influential book Screenplay (1979), it had been in use among screenwriters prior to this date.40 In the simplest terms, the three-act model modernizes lessons from Aristotle’s Poetics by way of Lajos Egri’s assertion in The Art of Dramatic Writing that character drives plot.41 A three-act story establishes (first act), develops through conflict (second act), and resolves (third act) a protagonist’s struggle to achieve, or sometimes heroically to fail to achieve, a particular goal. The “revelation” of three-act structure didn’t so much change the way screenplays were written as give 1980s Hollywood story development a default common language. This, in turn, Bordwell argues, encouraged the publication of more and more of the same kind of advice from the para-industry: “Once the three-act template became public knowledge, development executives embraced it as a way to make script acquisition routine. . . . Today most screenwriters acknowledge the three-act structure, and around the world it is taught as the optimal design for a mass-market movie.”42 But many screenwriters resented the implication that they wrote—or should write—to formulae, Shane Black (scr. Lethal Weapon, 1987) for one: “People respond to people who have passion and who like to play. They don’t respond to plot point number twelve on page 32 a la Syd Field.”43 Learning the “inside language” of the screen story had always been a key lesson offered by the para-industry. In 1919 the Palmer Plan was already exhorting its readers toward such ends: “The studious men and women possessed of imagination and creative ability, who learn to tell their stories in the language of the screen . . . will be the successful photoplaywrights of the future.”44 In 1981, the way a spec screenplay looked on the page was still high on the “breaking in” agenda. Screenwriting journalists and Hollywood script consultants began to encourage their readers and clients to move away from the typically blocky presentation of typed master-scene format and toward a more flexible and dynamic

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style of presentation. The resultant revisions to format gradually reoriented the screenplay toward the pleasure of the read.

Toward a “New Spec Format” Richard Walter, at UCLA film school, was correct when he wrote in 1988 that “there is not and never has been an official, authorized screenplay format. Formats vary among production styles. . . . They also vary within forms; writers utilize format creatively to assert their personal style and taste.”45 And yet it is equally true that many screenwriters obsess over format, and aspirants view its “mastery” as an important prerequisite to success. It is also true that the most prominent examples of writerly success they were offered in our period, and the advice they were being given by the para-industry, promoted a gradual transformation of the appearance of the script on the page. Screenwriters have always looked to the work of their peers for inspiration and guidance on matters of style and storytelling. When a writer has success, either creatively or financially, his or her scripts are pored over and his or her approach to matters of craft are dissected and much discussed. To use the old screenwriters’ maxim, talented writers have always “borrowed” from fellow talents, whereas beginners and hacks merely copy. From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, the Hollywood screenwriter whose work was probably most influential in this way was Shane Black. The Hollywood screenwriting website The Black List recalls: “There have been many forces of nature impacting screenplay style

Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon (1987). Screenplay by Shane Black, herald of the “spec boom.”

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over the years, but there are only a very few actual screenwriters to whom we can point as having a singular influence on the narrative form. Shane Black is one of them . . . he spawned a zillion copycats. None as good as him of course, but no matter. Hollywood was flooded with scene description that attempted to ape Black’s distinctive narrative voice.”46 Lethal Weapon, a violent tale of the redemption of a self-loathing policeman, invigorated the action movie and reached number ten at the box office in 1979. Black went on to million-dollar paydays with more genre-stretching action stories, including The Last Boy Scout (Tony Scott, 1991) and Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993). Famously, he was paid the enormous sum of $4 million for The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlan, 1996). Black’s staccato, ironic “hyper pulp style” broke many of the “rules” of screenplay format along with the “fourth wall” between story and reader.47 He was known for editorializing and speaking directly to his industry readers in the middle of scenes, with what insiders began to call “Shane Blackisms.” Here Lethal Weapon’s Detective Riggs is in a fight: Punk #1 charges. Riggs makes mincemeat of him. The BELT flashes out—CRACKS like a whip. Shatters the Punk’s nose. Screaming, the Punk pulls out a gun— Riggs launches a perfect kung fu kick. An impact they can feel in Peoria.48

And later in the story, when gunplay is called for: For your information, gentle reader: The Beretta Belle .9 millimeter handgun offers fifteen bullets in its magazine, and one in its chamber. For you math majors, that’s sixteen.

[same scene, later] Arm held rock steady, FIRING SHOT after SHOT, on some of them he isn’t even looking, and when the coroner finally examines the sniper’s body he will discover a total of nine bullet wounds, all of them fatal. BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM. Click. Riggs dumps the empty magazine.

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Snaps in a new one. Stuffs the gun in his waistband. Tosses away his cigarette, and walks back across the sand toward his car.49

Shane Black’s success was exciting to many of his peers because he used the screenplay page as his personal sandbox, and invited the reader to be his playmate. James L. Brooks said of Black’s script for The Long Kiss Goodnight: “Shane has a real voice. The craft of the script is extraordinary. The guy can write dialogue. Anyone who’s a sucker for a great line is going to have a great time with this.”50 Appropriately enough, Black’s own style emerged from an admiration for the work of other writers, unconventional stylists in their own right, William Goldman among them: I studied William Goldman’s writing style, especially the scripts for Marathon Man and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I found both of those to be really riveting, entertaining in their own right, as if you were reading a condensed novel good for one sitting. Similarly, Walter Hill’s scripts for Alien and the original 48 Hours when they were looking for a Clint Eastwood kind of pairing—I thought these were wonderfully written scripts. . . . I didn’t realize as I was reading them, that these were very unusual. . . . I assumed there weren’t many rules and you just sort of did whatever you wanted to stylistically and had fun with it.51 Copied for the liberated layout of his writing on the page as well as for his narrational voice, Black’s example was taken up as part of a broader move in screenwriting culture toward what some writers now call the “new spec format.” This is a loose and contested category at best, and not confined to spec screenplays. Nevertheless, although it had not created a clear standard by the end of our period, the priorities of a revised screenplay format were beginning to come into focus in the culture. In 1981, the reader “Betty” was already reminding writers to minimize cinematic direction: “As far as stage and camera direction, they should be as simple and precise as possible. They should be used to enhance the feeling you are trying to achieve. But don’t go overboard because you are a writer, not a director or cinematographer.”52 In 1999, Robert McKee was also warning his readers to avoid writing in “a thick block of single spaced prose” and rather to use short lines, split with white space to imply shots or moments as the scene develops.53 Andrew Horton also advised his readers to “keep it simple and, above all, an easy read.”54 Looking back on our period, David Trottier, author of The Screenwriter’s

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Bible, observed that “throughout the 1990s, there has been a movement toward ‘lean and clean’ screenwriting: Shorter screenplays, shorter paragraphs, shorter speeches, more white space and the omission of technical instructions. It should come as no surprise that this gradual evolution continues to refine spec style.”55 In 1998, Lent was also reporting on a new, sparer spec style, with “a look and flow conducive to . . . a pared down read.”56 He noted common format changes in recent screenplays including the loss of “cluttering distractions” such as cut to’s, continueds, and mores; the use of triple spacing between scenes; the inclusion of brief action statements in parentheticals (within dialogue); and a general paring down of description to the “barest essentials.” He reminds his readers, however, that these emerging rules apply to the world of the spec screenplay and that “produced, established writers play by a different set of rules.”57 A full analysis of changes in screenplay format in the 1980s and 1990s is beyond the scope of this current chapter, but we can illustrate development with a few targeted examples and comparisons. To show the extent of the stylistic transition we can start with a simple comparison between the screenplays for two high-budget Hollywood genre movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark (scr. Lawrence Kasdan), the highest box-office earner in 1981, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, scr. Ehren Kruger), the second highest earner in 2011. Of course the latter is out of period, but it gives a very clear illustration of where things were going. In this scene from Kasdan’s screenplay (shooting script) for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones is chasing a Nazi convoy. The layout is typical of the masterscene format of the period. The paragraph is dense and the writing focuses on orienting the reader within the space of the action. Our attention is drawn to character reactions that imply but do not specify shot structure. EXT. DESERT ROAD–DAY The convoy is entering rougher country. The narrow mountain road we’ve seen earlier ascends ahead. To the wide of the road are tall boulders. Suddenly, Indy shoots out from between two rocks and rides directly for the truck. The Armed Nazis in the back of the truck can see nothing because the canvas hides their view. But Gobler, Belzig and the Gunner in the rear staff car have a brief line on him. Belzig points and the Gunner fires away at Indy, the bullets kicking up and near Indy’s horse.58

Compare the above to this example from an earlier draft of Kruger’s Transformers 3 (released in 2011 as Transformers: Dark of the Moon). This is indicative of the

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new approach to writing action description, in its most pared-down form. Here, villainous Decepticon robots attack: EXT. DESERT—NIGHT—CONTINUOUS Ratbat swoops in, flying by the facilities’ RADAR INSTALLATIONS, SHORTING them out as he passes. Frenzy and Ravage JUMP the FENCE. Buzzsaw and Lazerbeak fly overhead BLASTING the ground in front of Frenzy and Ravage causing LAND MINES to DETONATE. With a clear PATH in front of them Frenzy and Ravage sprint further into the facility. Buzzsaw and Lazerbeak DESTROY the control tower.59

Both the style of the writing itself and its display on the page are very different. The explanatory prose and the blocky paragraphing of Raiders have been replaced by a series of brief, encapsulating sentences. White space separates thought-images clearly and draws the reader from one to the next, almost before the meaning of the individual sentence has registered. The writer is far less interested in “locating” the reader or in indicating explicit perspective. The style in which Transformers 3 is written assumes that cinematic specificity will be addressed in a second order of scripting in pre-production and pre-visualization to come.60 This is less a “screenplay as blueprint,” waiting to be implemented, and

Transformers (2007). Kinesis from page to screen, the “new spec format” at its leanest. Screenplay by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

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more a “screenplay as concept sketch” to be carried forward by further creative collaboration. The writing style jettisons prose to sustain the speed of the read and to generate a kind of affect; a visceral excitement in the reader. What is paramount in a screenplay of this kind is to establish and maintain kinesis-in-prose: to show how fast the story moves. Kruger’s screenplay is a fairly extreme example, to be sure. While it works as a kind of stylistic yardstick against which other scripts can be measured, it doesn’t answer the question of how far screenplay format had developed by the turn of the millennium. The answer is by no means clear or simple, but we can address the question by comparing similar, high-budget screenplays from the first and last years of our period, the scripts for the top-grossing movies of our bookend years, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, scr. Leigh Brackett and Kasdan) in 1980 and, conveniently, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (scr. and dir. George Lucas) in 1999. Both were in-house productions at Lucasfilm rather than specs, so they had no gatekeeping script reader to appease with friendly formatting. This comparison also offers insight into the impact of technological change on screenplay storytelling. By the time of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, immersive digital special effects had become commonplace in high-budget genre filmmaking. The Phantom Menace blazed that particular technological trail, however, making it a very useful marker. The Empire Strikes Back navigates action in a battle sequence with a series of conventional cuts around perspective and across space. Note that shots are called in the description: EXT ICE PLAIN—HOTH—POV WIDE SHOT—A thin horizontal line cuts across the bleak landscape. Small dot-sized objects begin to appear on the horizon: the wind begins to pick up. EXT ICE PLAIN—HOTH EXTREME CLOSEUP—The giant foot of an Imperial snow walker crashes thru frame, kicking up snow and ice. It rises out of frame. EXT ICE PLAIN—POWER GENERATOR—GUN TOWERS MED SHOT—The Rebel Officer lifts a pair of electrobinoculars to his eyes.61

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The special effects of the early 1980s were mostly practical and mechanical, using props and pyrotechnics, models and miniatures (increasingly with computer assistance for complex movement effects), and cinematographic, combining image elements through optical printing and other analog and chemical post-production processes.62 To this end, the perspectives of complex effects shots or sequences are often flagged explicitly and discreetly in screenplays, to assist in budgeting, planning, and pre-production. Compare the example above to a fully digital battle scene from The Phantom Menace, at the end of our period. EXT. NABOO GRASS PLAINS—DAY (FX) . . . A red ray shoots out of the generator and blasts into a large dish on the back of the second FAAMBA and spreads like an umbrella over the assembled WARRIORS. The Federation tanks begin to fire on the GUNGANS, but they are protected by their energy shield. The tanks stop firing, and the GUNGANS CHEER, until they see the doors to the massive transports open, and ranks of BATTLE DROIDS are pulled out and lined up by a squad of STAPS.63

Note how the flow of the read—and of action—is freed both from specific shot calling and scene changes. Our navigation of the story space is simply suggested in the description. It is written as a flow of action to be “covered” from many vantage points within the digital space of the battle. The simple master-scene style tells us that, in the digital era, complex special effects no longer have to be deferred to in the writing. In the finished film we will follow the action from numerous virtual camera positions, around and above the battlefield. The action is not split as frequently by white space as is Kruger’s script, but the hand-off to collaborators for further development is already implicit in the writing. The transition from analog, first to digital and, with The Phantom Menace, to fully “immersive” digital special effects, has had a significant impact on storytelling, in terms both of what is now possible to be shown cinematically, and of when the detailed cinematic writing of the sequence actually occurs in the development process. As Kathryn Millard notes in an essay on screenwriting in the digital age, collaboration “has only intensified with the proliferation of digital cinema, previously discrete stages of pre-production, production and post-production can be happening simultaneously.”64 In an interview with Wired magazine in 1997, Lucas raved about his new digital working practice on Phantom Menace: “Instead of making film into a sequential assembly-line process where one person does one thing,

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Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999). Beyond the blueprint, George Lucas’s digital experiment in screenwriting by “layering.” Screenplay by George Lucas.

takes it, and turns it over to the next person, I’m turning it more into the process of a painter or sculptor. You work on it for a bit, then you stand back and look at it and add some more onto it. . . . You basically end up layering the whole thing. Filmmaking by layering means you write, and direct, and edit all at once.”65 The floating action of Lucas’s screenplay for The Phantom Menace is scripted cinematically as it is integrated into the ongoing “layered” process of design and previsualization. If the scripting of some high-budget genre movies was changing to accommodate a new appreciation of digital possibilities, what of more conventional dramas? The winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1999, Alan Ball’s screenplay for American Beauty, offers a sense of the emerging style, especially when compared to the formatting of our first example from Raiders of the Lost Ark.66 Note the use of white space, and the splitting up of action into briefer, encapsulated narrative elements: EXT. BURNHAM HOUSE—MOMENTS LATER CLOSE on a single, dewy AMERICAN BEAUTY ROSE. A gloved hand with CLIPPERS appears and SNIPS the flower off. CAROLYN BURNHAM tends to her rose bushes in front of the Burnham house. A very well-put together woman of forty. She wears color-coordinated gardening togs and has lots of useful and expensive tools. Lester watches her through a WINDOW on the first floor, peeping out through the drapes.67

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We can discern a similar stylistic development by comparing two screenplays from one of the most famous writers of our period, Joe Eszterhas. On the page, Eszterhas’s style is visceral and direct. He works his readers’ hormones and emotions the same way the movies made from his writing were intended to work an audience in the cinema. Over time, his style changed from terse, short sentences in block paragraphs (Eszterhas continued writing on his typewriter long after most screenwriters had transitioned to computers), to shorter, teasing paragraphs. From at least the time of Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), his phrasing in moments of heightened violence or eroticism is now often split with ellipsis. We can see the change by comparing examples of similar scenes of his trademark sexual violence, written around a decade apart. The first is from Jagged Edge (Richard Marquand, 1985): The woman wakes suddenly, opens her eyes wide feels the knife. Her expression is that of mute horror. He moves atop her, kneeling over her—she is starting to cry soundlessly, her body shaking. He pulls out a rope. He ties her hands to the bedpost. He moves with almost surgical detachment. He tears the sheet off. She is wearing satin pajamas. He ties one foot, and then the other, to the bedpost. He gets back on top of her, the gleaming knife in his hands.68

The second is from Jade (William Friedkin, 1995): QUICK CUT—Longer than the others: The hatchet rises into the air . . . the hatchet chops into the man’s neck . . . into the jugular . . . blood bursts . . . explodes . . . cascades . . . And as the MUSIC CLIMAXES . . . we pull back and see the man against the black marble wall. His hands are chained to the wall by two big brass rings.69

Some established filmmakers used a pared-down format in the mid-1980s. This example is from David Lynch’s screenplay for Blue Velvet (1986): He looks for a few more good rocks to throw and while looking through some tall grass and weeds, he sees something strange. He looks closer. It is a HUMAN EAR, covered with crawling ants.

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Jeffrey immediately stands up and looks around. All he sees are houses—some laundry drying—a very peaceful scene. No one seems to be around—No one seems to be watching him.70

Importantly, not all independent scripts showed a change of format. Compare the joint winners of the Sundance Film Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award in 1999. While Audry Wells’s screenplay for Guinevere used a mixed style, with some action formatted as short paragraphs and some as blocks of text, Frank Whaley’s script for Joe the King was still using blockier format. Harper re-enters the foyer. As she passes the cake room, she turns her head to see a circle of giggling, slender BRIDESMAIDS flirting with the BUDDIES of the groom. In their gleaming, satin gowns, the girls are a vision. Harper walks towards them, hoping to join the group—but she is edged out by a prettier, SEXY GIRL, who stands right in front of her. Harper contemplates the back of the Sexy Girl’s neck as the girl flirtatiously fingers her necklace with her dainty manicured hand. The girl feels Harper’s presence and shoots her a quick, nasty look over her shoulder.71

In the extract from Guinevere (above), paragraphs break on action or shifts in Harper’s gaze. Shots are not called, but each discrete action paragraph implies (in a similar manner to McKee’s advice) a developing cinematic structure for the scene, supporting Harper’s psychology. This paragraph-to-shot structure is in fact followed closely in the movie scene. If the state of screenplay format in 1999 seems somewhat confusing and even contradictory, that’s a reasonable reflection of a craft in flux. Many writers were developing their writing styles to suit the slowly emerging consensus for a leaner format. We need to be careful, however, about assuming that all writers followed this trend; they didn’t. Similarly, we should not ascribe a tendency in formatting and storytelling to the idiosyncratic style of much imitated writers like Black or Eszterhas, or to a single concern of spec screenwriters. These were important catalysts, but so were the developments in digital production technologies in the more spectacular genres. The same is true of an unprecedented transformation in the technologies of screenwriting itself.

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The New Technologies of Screenwriting By 1999, most screenwriters were writing with computers. They were also using dedicated screenplay formatting software and, to a lesser extent, story development software. These technologies had transformed, and would continue to transform, according to screenwriting professor Richard Walter, aspects of the writer’s own production process “in ways previously unimagined.”72 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1984 8.2 percent of American households had a personal computer. By 1993, this figure had risen to 22.9 percent. By the turn of the millennium, 51 percent of U.S. households would own a computer, 41.5 percent with internet access.73 By this metric, a snapshot survey of its readers conducted by The Freelance Screenwriter’s Forum in 1991 suggests that, perhaps unsurprisingly, screenwriters were early adopters of personal computers, and significantly ahead of the national curve.74 The newsletter breaks down its demographics by category of writing tool, with a computer (61 percent) already far ahead of either a dedicated word processor (18 percent) or the venerable typewriter (24 percent). Among those computer users, IBM PC and PC clones (71 percent) dominated, with Macintosh products achieving 10 percent penetration into this particular readership market. Among the incentives pushing screenwriters to convert to computer use by the late 1980s was the availability of the first script formatting programs. The development of software to assist in the screenwriting process had begun with Scriptor from Screenplay Systems. This was followed by a second generation of software, led by the Warren Script Application, that linked better with Microsoft Word and, in 1988, Word for Windows. Its successor program, Script Wizard, still integrates with the latest incarnations of Word. The Warren Script Application was packaged routinely with PCs purchased at The Writers Computer Store in the early 1990s. The Warren Script Application was itself superseded for many writers with the emergence of third-generation screenwriting programs. These facilitated online collaboration and moved a project more seamlessly all the way from first draft through production. In other words, built into the design of these new programs was an assumption that the screenwriting process was not a solitary endeavor. The third-generation programs, such as Movie Magic Screenwriter and the industry leading Final Draft (first released in 1991), were also stand-alone products, not requiring another word-processing program on which to piggyback. Once again, the publications of the para-industry were on hand to demystify computers and to encourage their uptake by screenwriters. As early as 1988, Richard Walter saw the need to dedicate eight pages of the first edition of his book to help his readers make sensible purchasing choices and to work with the new technologies.75 In 1994, Rich Wilson, writing in the newsletter Screenwrite now!, reflected on how far software had come in the preceding decade: “It’s 1984,

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and out of at least a dozen programs, I’ve only one that can handle two-column video scripts, one that can handle screenplays, and none at all that work interactively with a WYSIWYG . . . screen display. . . . Finally we reach 1994, and it’s a radically different situation. Now there are several products designed specifically to edit and print the various film and video formats, and most word processors can do a decent job as well.”76 Common to the formatting programs was the assumption that there were standard elements of screenplay style such as scene headings, parentheticals, and transitions as well as established rules for the formatting of dialogue and description that every writer should use, and use in the same way. On one hand, the basic functionality of word processing enabled stylistic experimentation; on the other, simple keystrokes “intuited” default formatting by enabling automatic transitions between elements on the page/screen. For example, hit “Tab” after “Return” in Final Draft and the format is set up automatically to enter a character name before dialogue. Increasingly, maintaining an idiosyncratic writing style might now force the established screenwriter to kick against the programming. At the same time, these programs encouraged new writers to standardize format by learning the lessons taught by the software’s default settings. Another assumption by these early programmers was that screenplays would still be presented in Courier font. Courier had been the standard typewriter font for screenplays since it was designed in the 1950s. Despite its distinctly “old school” appearance and association with predigital technology, Courier has remained the default font for screenplays written on computers. In fact, it offered distinct advantages for the screenwriter coming to grips with the computer age: “One of the reasons that Courier was able to migrate successfully from the typewriter to the first personal computers in the 1980s was that it did not require much memory. This is because Courier is a fixed pitch font, in which every character has the same width, and therefore requires no kerning [adjustment of spaces between letters]. Although perhaps even more important to note is that the packaging of Courier with the first PCs ensured that users would be able to replicate typewriter-looking documents, enabling a smooth transition to the new era of word processing and personal computing.”77 Final Draft even developed its own font, “Courier Final Draft,” to resolve spacing problems with the digital version of Courier and with Courier New (released with Windows 3.1). This spacing fix helped to guarantee that the old Hollywood equation, in which one minute of screen time corresponds to a single screenplay page, would continue into the digital era. The conventions of screenwriting assumed by these programs do not end with format. Final Draft developed an integrated “Ask The Expert” function with Syd Field to “identify, define and solve any screenwriting problems. The software” offers a glossary that conforms to the standard paradigm of three-act structure.78 If there was a sense in which even their own software was boxing writers into

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narrow definitions of storytelling, there was a window in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which it seemed as if the tradeoff might at least be more lucrative.

A False Dawn for Hollywood Screenwriters As we have seen, packaging and budget inflation led to a few writers—mainly specialists in the action and thriller genres—becoming famous for their million-dollar spec sales. The spec boom, such as it was, lasted about as long as it took for many of the most expensive and well-publicized purchases to fail as movies, Joe Eszterhas’s Jade and Shane Black’s The Long Kiss Goodnight among them. A larger-than-life character, a screenwriter who made it onto Premiere magazine’s “100 Most Important People In Hollywood” list, Eszterhas in particular offered writers a brief fantasy of empowerment in his well-publicized confrontations with Hollywood powerbrokers. In 1989, he became notorious for his leaked correspondence with CAA head Michael Ovitz, detailing their clash over Eszterhas’s decision to leave CAA for International Creative Management. In one letter he claims Ovitz even threatened him that “my foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out.”79 As his star began to dim, Eszterhas’s tendency to replay the same erotic thriller formula over and over in his writing was parodied in a competition, appropriately enough in Premiere, to create your own Joe Eszterhas story, “accompanying this with a comically neo-Proppian chart mapping out the repetition of types” from his thrillers.80 Marc Norman, for one, in his history of screenwriting, is dismissive of Eszterhas’s legacy: “He helped establish stratospheric paydays for those who could deliver that year’s killer app, the perfect original. But the screenwriter as Player was not a solution either. Eszterhas’ career affected nobody but Eszterhas.”81 Indeed, many writers look back on the period with more resentment than nostalgia. Ryan Rowe (writer of Charlie’s Angels, McG, 2000) recalls that in the late 1980s and early 1990s “people were making half-a-million-dollar deals on handshakes. . . . But then the studios got burned.”82 Observers like Chris Gore, editor of Film Threat magazine, came to feel that it had all been a big scam: “There was all this buzz, all these bragging rights and all these ego-driven deals. But really what happened was that screenwriting turned into an industry preying on all these people from Michigan or someplace who think they’re going to come out here and write a screenplay and make $1 million overnight. It became like the lottery.”83 Over time, the studios reacted by bringing more projects back in-house and the Hollywood spec market declined into the new millennium. As Fred Dekker (co-scr., RoboCop 3, Fred Dekker, 1993) acknowledged in an interview given in 2001: “Screenwriters are back to being the bastard children of Hollywood. . . .

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There was a bit of a backlash to all the big screenplay deals in the late 80’s and early 90’s. We’re paying for it now.”84 For most established Hollywood screenwriters, however, the promise of a brighter future had never rested with the hope of an improbable and spectacular deal. These writers were more concerned with ensuring that they got their share of the revenue streams from the developing ancillary markets. To secure their modest piece of the new pie, established writers flexed what little industrial muscle they had in collective bargaining through the Writers Guild of America. The WGA regularly negotiates changes to the standard contract, called the Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA), between its members and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The MBA sets basic compensation rates for writers as well as pension and health benefits, working conditions, and levels for residual payments. In both 1981 and 1988, contract negotiations between the WGA and AMPTP broke down and the writers went on strike. In 1981, a key demand was for a stronger position on residuals from pay TV and ancillary markets. After a lengthy dispute the deadlock was broken with the eleventh-hour brokerage of Lew Wasserman, and the writers claimed the resulting deal, including 2 percent residuals from home video, as a victory. In 1988, following a rollback of video cassette residuals in the 1985 agreement, the five-and-a-half-month strike focused on preventing further rollbacks to the MBA, improving residuals from foreign markets (and from dramatic one-hour TV shows in domestic syndication), a range of health and welfare issues, and asserting writers’ creative rights. That writers needed a guarantee that they be given the first rewrite on any script they sold and that they be allowed on set during production is indicative of their continuing lack of power and status in the film and television industries. Winning the battle over first rewrites would not change this underlying problem. Moreover, although they ended up with gains in the arena of creative rights, these were hard to enforce because, as James Ulmer wrote in the Hollywood Reporter, “the guild cannot legislate the working relationship between a producer and a writer.”85 After the usual slow-motion, ritual “danse macabre” between the parties, and amid significant acrimony from within the writers’ own ranks, their 1988 strike ended with limited gains.86 The hope that the resulting contract would make it “the strike to end all strikes” was misplaced thanks to further changes in the economic model of moviemaking in the years ahead and to a tendency from both sides to start the next war at the contract deadline.87 By 1994, despite the strikes and the enrichment of a few in the spec boom, John Truby was so exercised by the conditions under which writers still operated in Hollywood that he wrote a passionate manifesto—a cri de coeur for writers to reassert their rights: “Writers are still losing badly to the producers. We have almost no control over our work. We can be replaced at any time. We do not own our work. We are paid less than the other ‘creative’ members of a production. Our

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efforts are consistently unrecognized by the larger community, and relatively few of our numbers can make a living wage.”88 Truby’s call for reform died at the feet of established self-interest and in the fear of upsetting the very small applecart. The writers would need to strike again in 2008, and a survey of screenwriters by the WGA would report in 2012 that “screenwriters believe their status in the industry has significantly deteriorated over the past several years. The most flagrant studio practices contributing to this decline, ranked in order of frequency, are: free rewrites, sweepstakes pitching, late payment, free prewrites, and idea theft.”89 These matters, however, are the proper concerns of the next chapter.

6 The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present Mark J. Charney Many periods in the history of Hollywood screenwriting can be defined, at least in part, by the rise of creative movements, or developments in particular genres, as well as changes to the social and cultural context, and in the taste patterns of audiences. However, the modern entertainment marketplace is as complicated and dense as the technology that continues to encourage its growth and continued experimentation. American movie culture in the past decade has, of course, been overshadowed by the legacy of 9/11. It was a domestic catastrophe on the scale of Pearl Harbor, and the first of its scale since we developed the means to communicate images instantaneously. When we also take into account the cultural impact of the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan wars, another rise in global terrorism, the impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the near collapse of the American monetary system, and mass killings such as the elementary school slaughter in Connecticut in 2012, we can understand why the work of American screenwriters in the first years of the twenty-first century exhibits two sharply contrasting tendencies. Either their screenplays reflect the struggle to confront avatars of the violence so prevalent in the country, or they mask this fear, and the attendant moment of national insecurity, with stories that capture 127

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small moments of beauty inherent in the human soul. Both tendencies, ironically, attempt to capture the American instinct to believe that the human spirit is indomitable enough to face up to and even overcome events that threaten to spin out of our control. In other words, the modern entertainment marketplace, as a commercial entity, is striving to use new technologies of communication to uncover and to exploit national anxieties in narrative form, in a manner that is simultaneously entertaining and alienating. In this chapter, I analyze pivotal scenes from recent blockbusters and independent films that represent these tendencies and tensions in contemporary American screenwriting. The language and structure of these case study examples exemplify from different perspectives the essence of a twenty-first century marketplace in transition. In recent years, Hollywood has deployed, and also strived to accommodate, a series of rapid technological advances that have been instrumental both in enhancing the experience of moviegoing and expanding cinema away from the movie theater and onto new screens and delivery platforms. An early marker for the integration of conventional moviegoing with emerging online experiences was laid down by The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999). This film began a trend in small-budget independent horror films that reflected American paranoia and fear of the unknown. Blair Witch succeeded in large part due to creative internet marketing and opened the door for a loose cycle of supernatural horror movies that were more interested in affect than narrative coherence. Blair Witch also popularized the use of supposed found footage as a narrative device. It was followed in this regard by the Paranormal Activity series (Oren Peli, Tod Williams, Henry Joost, and Ariel Schulman, 2009–2013), Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), and Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012). To account for the most significant of the recent trends in American movie storytelling, however, we also need to examine a range of material, both mainstream and independent, that speaks both to the zeitgeist and to the transformed industrial marketplace of the last decade. In this way, recent screenplays that explore the human potential for evil—whether on a grand, terroristic scale, as with The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), or at the level of the individual, dehumanized by a will to power and the lure of unfettered capitalism, as with There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007), or as markers for a genre hybridity that speaks to a desolation at the heart of America, as with No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)—offered a provocative contrast with another kind of escapism. Independent films such as Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003), Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004), and O Brother, Where Art Thou (Joel Coen, 2000), deployed character-driven narrative as paeans to a fantasy of American purity. For their part, the animated worlds of Pixar, especially Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), have exemplified trends in contemporary Hollywood animation away from narratives of individual wish-fulfillment and toward a cinematic

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redefinition of family for the twenty-first century. We also note the importance of the franchise (tent-pole) movie in contemporary Hollywood, including popular film series, such as Harry Potter (2001–2011), and the adaptations of The Hunger Games books (to date, The Hunger Games [2012] and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire [2013]), which recast the young adult novel as a primary source for epic. While these clusters of films certainly do not cover the entire sweep of American screenwriting in the last thirteen years, they do identify major trends, especially as they speak to an American preoccupation with narratives that reflect, or seek to capture the better angels of an increasingly complex nation in crisis.

New Formats, New Markets American audiences delight in planning for an apocalypse, while simultaneously fearing what such upheaval may bring. This seemingly contradictory impulse finds its roots in a likewise contradictory aspect of American culture, which is represented nowhere more prevalently than in the narrativization of “disaster cities” such as New Orleans and New York. New Orleans not only found itself the subject of a number of documentaries, theatrical productions, and other media representations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina but, just as importantly, also inspired films such as The Dark Knight series. These films metaphorically recast the destructive power of a natural disaster into antagonistic figures like Bane and the Joker, the latter a figure embodying mythic levels of evil. Conceptually, Americans love the idea of apocalyptic threats, because the impulse to overcome them activates the powerful cultural myth of a country that is strong, permanent, and downright indestructible. However, behind this mask of confidence lurks paranoia and insecurity. America in the twenty-first century has proven itself to be a country markedly divided in terms of political power, while suffering through a period of the worst economic distress since the Great Depression. Major Hollywood screenwriters in this era clearly attuned themselves to this subtextual communal insecurity, incorporating the impulse both to confront and to fear natural disaster, political threat, and terrorism. Of course, for commercial reasons they needed to frame it in a manner that would appeal to four-quadrant audiences. Money still guides most screenwriting projects, and while this may seem cynical, it does not imply that the drive to depict and to popularize current events makes for poor cinema. In fact, the effort to represent American struggles honestly, while still keeping audiences lining up at the box office, often results in a tension that has the potential to elevate films such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2013) and The Hurt Locker (2008) in the public imagination. In short, Hollywood has been doing everything it can to halt the slide in moviegoing, from reembracing 3-D to building more IMAX screens, collaborating with the video gaming industry, and introducing D-BOX MFX systems. All

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these strategies attempt to reinvent filmgoing as an experience that movie lovers cannot share on their flat-screen televisions and home 3-D/surround sound systems. As Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster explain in their excellent account of the digitalization of cinema in 21st-Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation, “VCRs, along with a host of other factors, eventually killed drive-ins, making it possible to view a film at home with ease and convenience; DVDs wiped the VHS format out of existence a few years after their introduction.”1 With the advent of video-sharing sites like YouTube, the public became enamored with shorter clips, homemade images, and personal narrative. Also, as Dixon and Foster explain, “YouTube’s target audience is an advertiser’s demographic dream: 44 percent female, 56 percent male, [with] the 12–17 year old age group dominant.”2 Significant amongst the threats to cinema audiences, of course, are the premium cable networks such as HBO and Showtime, which release quality dramatic shows with narrative arcs that span generations, through multiple seasons. Americans found their Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) in shows such as HBO’s The Sopranos (1999–2007), which expertly captures the attempts of New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano to justify his violent activities within the framework of his family, the church, and his status in the community, all the while illustrating a contradictory—yet very contemporary—level of sensitivity in his therapy sessions that humanize his inhumane activities. Such serial television series, from Lost (2004–2010) to Big Love (2006–2011), from True Blood (2008–present) to The Walking Dead (2010–present), from Sons of Anarchy (2008–present) to Breaking Bad (2008–2013), accomplish what cinema now struggles consistently to achieve, an epic sense of journey, growth, and change. Latterly, basic cable channels such as FX (The Shield, 2002–2008) and AMC (Mad Men, 2007–present) and, even more recently, purveyors of on-demand movie streaming such as Netflix (House of Cards, 2013), have caught up with the trend and have invested in their own quality drama series and co-productions. In an attempt to mimic these well-conceived and critically acclaimed series, we find many films increasing their running times and DVD releases adding even more to their length. Famously, the extended versions of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy added a great deal of material to the original movies. In this way, the distributor obviates the profit motive of movie theater exhibition practices—and also assumptions about the attention spans of movie audiences—by releasing versions of the same intellectual property tailored to specific platforms and subsidiary markets. In spite of shorter attention spans, and an ever-quickening editing style (all encouraged by sites such as YouTube), lengthier films are actually attracting audiences. Christmas 2012 alone saw comedies such as This Is 40 (Judd Apatow) exceeding two hours, with blockbusters such as The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Jackson), Lincoln (Spielberg), Skyfall (Sam Mendes), and Les Miserables (Tom Hooper) nearing three hours (with no intermission). But this is

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a more recent development. At the turn of the millennium, American audiences were falling in love with the horror film once again.

Found Footage If The Blair Witch Project did not begin the fascination with raw, “homemade” pictures, it certainly reinvigorated it. Myrick and Sanchez’s script traces the misadventures of film students played by Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard as they endeavor to produce a documentary about a local legend, the Blair Witch. After interviewing members of the town about the witch herself (necessary to build suspense and exposition), the three journey into the woods where they experience supernatural adventures that ultimately defy conventional resolution. The film is supposedly composed of the raw footage discovered after the trio’s disappearance. Some audiences were physically sickened by the low-budget, handheld, shaky camera feel of the movie, but the rawness of the experience and the gritty nature of the storytelling were enough to draw hordes of people to the theater. The huge buzz before its wide release was carefully designed to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy. Even the unconventional format of the screenplay, available online, reflected the independent nature of the film: it represented an easily readable blend of playwriting and screenwriting, foregrounding the centrality of the dialogue, supported by off- and onscreen directives as parenthetical elements.

Eduardo Sánchez’s Blair Witch Project (1999). Screenplay by Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez.

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In a pivotal scene from the middle of the film, for example, the three students are discussing sounds that they have heard the past two evenings. After deciding not to light a fire as on the previous two nights, possibly to stave off the unwelcome visitors, they snap off their flashlights and retire for the evening: Heather: (whispers) What’s that sound? (shudders with fear) (Sounds grow louder and closer) (The tent begins to shudder and shake as if something is attacking. All scream in fear) Mike: Go! Fucking go! (They break free of the tent and bolt away) Escaping the tent, they hide watching the campsite, trembling and afraid. Ultimately, in spite of the very frightening mysteries, we never discover definitively whether the fable is real or if the three are eventually defeated by a combination of poor planning, inept navigation, and their own overactive imaginations. In the film’s concluding scene, Heather and Mike approach a mysterious house where they hear Josh screaming. After Heather finds Mike, standing, facing the far corner of the cellar and away from the audience, she screams and drops the camera; as the screenplay delineates, “(16 MM drops on its side and the film jitters) (No Sound).” The film ends here. We never really discover much about the three college students, other than they like to drink, have good senses of humor, and scare easily, but audiences did not ask for answers or for complex characterization. The simple scares backed by a viral marketing campaign that played off the faux realism of the “found footage” were enough to generate over $140 million dollars in domestic gross, and almost that much again internationally from a film budgeted at around $60,000.3 The success of Blair Witch foreshadowed that of the very popular horror series Paranormal Activity, the first of which was produced in 2007 for less than $15,000, also using inexpensive digital cameras and mostly unknown actors. As with Blair Witch, the first Paranormal film, written and directed by Oren Peli and released nationwide in 2009, provides few answers to the mysteries it creates, opting to increase tension through clever staging and a strategic use of sound, creating an uneasy diegetic space polluted by creepy, offscreen ambient noises. In the second film of the series, for example, the residents of a possibly haunted house affix a camera to a fan that slowly oscillates horizontally to record potentially paranormal activities in both the living room and the kitchen while the characters sleep. The tension this simple movement creates is enormous, because

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we wait anxiously as the fan moves, anticipating some violent disruption in one of the rooms. The imaginative staging is not, however, effectively supported by the screenwriting. The payoffs are disappointing—a rack of pots falls from the ceiling, or a shadow crosses the screen. In most of the Paranormal films, as with Blair Witch, the fun lies in the anticipation. The final reveals in all four films (through 2013) are brief, enigmatic, and confusing. These four Paranormal films, each written, directed, and produced by a different team,4 emphasize rhythm and ambient noise above narrative logic and characterization. Much happens offscreen, and although characters do reappear, as in Blair Witch, none of them actually explains the mythos behind the supposed haunts that follow them from childhood to adulthood. Such found-footage films focus their simple pleasures in jolting an audience, not unlike the experience of walking through a haunted house with a group of cohorts holding hands. The screenwriters care very little for identifying or representing the world outside the affected home and, although the filmmakers exploit new video technology, especially through night shoots, these films find their success by staying within a closed environment. In 2008, another found-footage film, the monster movie Cloverfield, written by Drew Goddard, also achieved success at the box office. Unlike the Paranormal series, however, its story is much more interested in placing its characters in a broader context and an external environment. In so doing, it raised the ambition of the found-footage film toward allegory. Cloverfield was the first 2008 release to gross $100 million dollars and certainly had more of a direct historical hook, as J. Hoberman writes in Film after Film: “The movie combined Blair Witch’s subjective camera with War of the Worlds’ use of 9/11 imagery—more amateurish than the former and campier than the latter.”5 Tracing the adventures of six New Yorkers on the night of a friend’s going-away party as they encounter a monster and several parasites, “Cloverfield appears as one of the key movies of the 9/11 decade—taking a world-historical disaster as its subject, creating an animated movie from photographic material, attempting to represent the new social-real and emphasizing film (or at least, cinema) as an object.” Goddard provides minimal characterization and a sketchy narrative structure, unlike classical scripts that flesh out character and incident. We meet the six New Yorkers and come to understand a few of the relationships between members of the group. They attend a going-away party. They are attacked. Many of them die. The film ends. A sequel looms. The promotional material, which depicts the Statue of Liberty with her head ripped from her torso, New York burning in the background, certainly elicited images of 9/11. Most of these found-footage films deploy their reality effects as mechanisms to deflect conventional characterization. If we are being shown “reality,” what need do we have of character arcs? The films’ screenwriters offer just enough backstory to prepare characters for the peril ahead. Once the action begins

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in earnest, the audience witnesses increasingly bewildering activity and the narrative unfolds through theme-park scare tactics. When they work, these attractions are enough to draw an audience, especially since the found-footage films are usually superimposed on another genre to flesh out the story and further the appeal: The Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity films with horror; Cloverfield with disaster and the monster movie; and Chronicle with science fiction.

Superheroes Certainly more substantial in terms of their commitment to script and story, but also primarily intent on attracting an audience, are contemporary superhero adventure films. The superhero film is the most profitable blockbuster genre in the early twenty-first century and, in this latest iteration, mythic characterization is almost as important as violent and dynamic action. This tendency is based on the assumption that contemporary audiences long for heroes who have increasingly complex storylines and fully fleshed out backgrounds. Since 2000, there have been a healthy number of films based on graphic novels and comic books, but arguably none is more representative of the modern marketplace than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), based on a script by Nolan and his brother Jonathan. To date, Nolan’s Batman trilogy (its other films being Batman Begins [2005] and The Dark Knight Rises [2012]) has earned over $1.2 billion worldwide. Audiences and critics alike praised The Dark Knight, sparking a healthy debate about its political allegiances. Particular attention was drawn to the status of the film’s story as political allegory in a period haunted by acts of real-world terrorism. Many saw the plot as an all-too-obvious allusion to George W. Bush’s war on terror, claiming that it espoused conservative ideology. In “What Bush and Batman Have in Common,” Andrew Klavan in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the symbol of the bat projected onto “the surface of the racing clouds” suspiciously resembles a W: “There seems to me no question that the Batman film ‘The Dark Knight,’ currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.” In “The Dark Knight: An Essay on Justice in the Age of Terrorism,” Michael Karounos supported Klavan’s interpretation, but in less extreme terms. Karounos explored the movie’s warring ideologies, explaining that Gotham, in its corrupt and perverted state, necessitates a “‘dark,’ not a ‘white’ knight” like Harvey

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Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008).

Dent (the crusading Gotham City district attorney, who becomes the villain Two-Face): “Viewed metaphorically, the screenplay seems to argue that virtuous methods are impotent against evil and that society needs a ‘white’ knight to keep order in times of peace, and a ‘dark’ knight to restore order in times of war.” He attributes the popularity of the film to the script’s connection to contemporary events: “The Dark Knight is so immensely popular because it is clear to everyone, two weeks after the tragedy of Mumbai, that we are presently at war and have been at war with the same idea for hundreds of years.” He compares Batman’s campaign against a nihilistic terrorist—the Joker—to the “Israeli hunting down of the Munich terrorists,” and the Joker’s random acts of violence with 9/11. Ultimately, he proposes that the movie brazenly asks the question, “How does a just society deal with terrorism?”6 Similarly, in “The Dark Knight: Hollywood’s Terror Dream,” John Pistelli connected all three movies in Nolan’s Batman series to books by Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) and Susan Faludi (The Terror Dream), both of which examine how Americans process catastrophe, from “engineering catastrophes which so stun and demoralize populations that they find themselves unable to prevent their commons and their public treasures [from being] transferred to private hands” (Klein) to “how the American political class, including many self-proclaimed liberals, seized the September 11 attacks as an opportunity to reanimate the genocidal American frontier myth” (Faludi).7 Other critics contended that the film tilted to the left. Jeff Spross and Zack Beauchamp, in “Liberalism’s Dark Knight and Christopher Nolan’s Defense of Civil Society,” wrote that Nolan’s films “have nothing specific to say about the

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main debates that define American politics.” Rather, they believe the real message of the trilogy is philosophical in character: “Nolan is mounting a layered defense of liberal democracy against its authoritarian opponents.”8 In any case, The Dark Knight laid claim to being one of the most important films of its era, with a screenplay that cleverly exploits parallels between the Bush administration’s take on terrorism and Batman’s form of vigilante justice. The Dark Knight, while hardly indicative of the entire superhero genre, represents the American fascination with using movies as a public focus for the processing of national trauma. This is never more clearly expressed than in the moral quandary the Joker springs upon two distinct groups of people, criminals and ordinary Gotham citizens, with each group trapped on separate ferries in the harbor: The Joker (O.S.): There’s no need for all of you to die. That would be a waste. So I’ve left you both a little present.

Ext. Penthouse, Prewitt Building—Night The Joker stares out over the harbor, at the ferries. Talking into a cell phone. Holding a detonator, with two buttons. The Joker: Each of you has a remote to blow up the other boat.

Int. Passenger Lounge, Prisoner Ferry—Night The Prisoners and Corrections Officers listen. Appalled. The Joker (O.S.): At midnight, I blow you all up. If, however, one of you presses the button, I’ll let that boat live. You choose. So who’s it going to be—Harvey Dent’s most wanted scumbag collection . . . or the sweet innocent civilians? (beat) Oh, and you might want to decide quickly, because the people on the other boat may not be quite so noble. The Nolan brothers have crafted the type of smart screenwriting that not only creates tension, but also subtly reassures Americans that they are indeed an honorable people worth saving. For as dark and egocentric as the citizens of Gotham may be, when given such a choice, neither the criminals nor the citizens destroy the other to save themselves:

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Everyone stares at the remote. One minute left. The Businessman stands. Walks over and picks it up. Businessman: No one wants to get their hands dirty. Fine. I’ll do it. Those men on that boat made their choices. They chose to murder and steal. It makes no sense for us to die, too. He looks at the other passengers. No one makes eye contact.

Int. Passenger Lounge, Prisoner Ferry—Night The Warden slowly hands him the remote. The Prisoner looks at it. He looks the Warden in the eye . . . Then tosses the remote out the window. Warden, prisoners, and officers are stunned. . . .

Int. Passenger Lounge, Commuter Ferry—Night The Businessman stares at the remote in his hands. Finally, he puts it down. Sits down. Waits to die. The clock strikes midnight. As Batman intervenes and prevents the Joker from detonating both ships, he defends the residents of Gotham: “This city just showed you that it’s full of people ready to believe in good.” Nonplussed, the Joker insists that the transformation of Harvey Dent, instigated by the Joker himself, is all that he needs to create the chaos that will collapse the moral order. In the Batman series, Nolan as screenwriter spends the first third of the initial film in his trilogy describing the mythos of his emergent hero, while also defining the seeds of evil that will ultimately challenge him physically, personally, and philosophically. This is a similar structural tactic to that deployed in most superhero origins films (even hearkening back to Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman). In the screenplays of the sequels, the evil manifests itself earlier in the movie, usually threatens a massive, innocent population, and, more often than not, is successfully overcome. Its most important impact is on the character of the hero, whose belief in humanity becomes more and more depleted

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over time. The hero can withstand only so much before the evil that surrounds him begins to taint his views about the world. Nolan’s Batman is especially interesting because he must resort to dark means to defeat his enemies, and the screenplay’s tension springs in part from its parallels to current events and sensibilities. As Nolan explained, “I think of any of the superheroes Batman is the darkest. There is an expectation that you’re going to be dealing with more disturbing elements of the psyche. That’s the place he comes from as a character, so it feels appropriate to this character.”9 The Dark Knight is one of the most popular films since 2000 both because it holds a mirror to uncomfortable contemporary reality for viewers and because it reflects a world where, through “dark” and “white” means, good finally triumphs over analogs of the complex challenges we face.

There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men The protagonists in There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men (both 2007) are part of an ugly, angry, frontier America—Gotham, as it were, in Little Boston, California, and West Texas. Writer-directors Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers, respectively, depict a frontier that may be less gruesome and busy than that of The Dark Knight, but it is certainly just as violent and unpredictable. The characters Plainview from Blood and Chigurh from No Country even serve as effective counterparts to the nihilistic Joker. J. Hoberman directly associates this emphasis on homicidal maniacs in recent movies with the ongoing wars fought by the United States during the last decade: “Why this preoccupation with homicidal sociopaths? America had been at war for the past four and a half years—with, to cite the top-polling documentary, No End in Sight. Nothing like war to make you ponder the definition of murder and wonder who is enabled to commit it.”10 Whether it is war, the bleak economic landscape, or the natural disasters prominent over the past few years, these films exemplify a tendency toward nihilism that is one of the prominent guiding characteristics in American cinema since 2000. In Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, based very loosely on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, we follow the life of capitalist Daniel Plainview, whose self-interested machinations guarantee him financial success but destroy any semblance of humanity we may have identified in him from his early years. The script is quick to suggest that the aptly named Plainview is completely self-motivated, quick to judge people superficially and immediately, and singularly uninterested in what may lie beneath the surface. He is a man who trusts what he sees (plain view), so faith, which comes in the form of one Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), remains uninteresting to him, a joke played on folks stupid enough to look for such answers.

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007).

The script traces Plainview’s meteoric and violent rise to power, not unlike the title character in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). In both films, the protagonists are left isolated, angry, despairing of humanity, and disruptive to society. But Plainview is much more violent, a tendency we recognize in him from the beginning. As Anderson explains, “I guess what I like in my movies is where you see a character change by maybe two degrees as opposed to the traditional movie change of ninety degrees. . . . I think it’s just a monitor I might have on myself as a writer to not make any false scenes.”11 As the title promises, blood is indeed spilled, and most of it by Plainview’s own hands. He not only kills the imposter who briefly takes on his brother’s persona, but he abandons his adopted son and brutally murders Brother Eli in the film’s startling and enigmatic conclusion. Plainview does not believe he is above the social order. He is the social order, so he pays no attention to anyone, or anything other than he seeks to create. Anderson’s screenplay offers a searing condemnation of unbridled capitalism, intimating that Plainview’s success comes at an impossible price. Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men (based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same title) is defined almost entirely by action. But unlike Plainview, he reacts more than he acts. Whereas Anderson bases his script very loosely on their source book, the Coen brothers diligently capture the darkness and barren nature of the McCarthy novel. After finding $2 million through a failed drug deal, Llewelyn skips town, abandoning his wife for a hopeless adventure throughout the desolate West Texas landscape that he seems to understand may represent the end of life. From the scanty details that the Coen brothers supply, we understand

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that Moss is neither a good husband nor a happy man, but happiness is not a quality shared by many folks in McCarthy’s bleak story world. Chased by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hyperbolically violent hit man, who, like Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, decides on the fate of potential victims with the flip of a coin, Moss spends most of the film running. Both Chigurh and Dent justify their actions by playfully introducing an element of fate to determine their victims’ futures: the coin decides, not them. But whereas Dent is brought to the dark side by the nihilistic Joker, Chigurh approaches violence as a profession—cleanly and without remorse. The primary difference between Chigurh and Plainview is that while Chigurh kills professionally and dispassionately, Plainview is spurred to violence by extreme emotional reactions and a desire for power. Both films are unconventional masterpieces, with There Will Be Blood too enigmatic for many and No Country for Old Men too violent. Both are frontier films that owe much to the western genre, capturing images of rugged idealism gone awry. The landscapes of California and West Texas (both were filmed in the same area of West Texas) offer an opportunity for the screenwriters to depict undeveloped, vulnerable territories, placing mostly white men in areas filled with gullible, weak citizens striving to populate a new land and falling prey to varying forms of outlaw justice. The films’ screenwriters, who share the common tendency in recent American cinema to mix genres, wink gently toward the western but combine it with loose tropes from the biopic and the detective story, to present an almost existential wasteland of the American soul. The scripts of both There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men indicate in their different ways an American fascination with unrestrained power and what it breeds. There Will Be Blood plays with our once-innocent preoccupation with Horatio Alger/Howard Hughes stories of financial success and personal transformation, and No Country for Old Men with plain outlaw justice. No Country for Old Men is not a western in the traditional sense, in that it does not pit bad against good. In fact, critic Rob Mackie of The Guardian calls the film a “crime western noir horror comedy.”12 Moss is in no sense of the word a good man; he initiates his own demise by stealing money, and although he’s certainly morally preferable to the film’s psychotic mad man, Chigurh, we learn very little about him in the course of the film. We identify more with the sheriff, Bell, who is pulled into researching the crime. He is a passive protagonist, however, someone whose career has already bled him of his will to fight crime and who laments, in true “old man” terms, the state of the country and the violent, selfish people who inhabit it. Like There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men defies convention, depicting an American West polluted by big business, corporate skyscrapers, and inherent greed. The story imposes complete desolation upon this mythic

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landscape, filling it with un-heroic violence, a world resistant to love, relationships, and, ultimately, even money. In this way, the beauty of the Coen brothers’ screenplay is less in what is said or depicted than in what is missing. As Joel Coen said in an interview, “People pursuing business where they have no business. It has something to do with the way we’re attracted to stories: there’s a very direct relationship of character and story to landscape, or location. . . . It’s hard for us to write a story that can take place just as easily here or there. It has to be specific. The ‘here’ is where you start.”13 This is evidenced late in the film after Moss is killed and Chigurh has his final meeting with Moss’s wife, Carla Jean:

Bedroom Door The door opens and Carla Jean enters holding her hat and veil. She throws the light switch and stops, hand frozen, looking into the room. After a beat: Carla Jean: I knew this wasn’t done with. Chigurh sits at the far end of the room in the late-afternoon shadows. Chigurh: No. Carla Jean: I ain’t got the money. Chigurh: No. Carla Jean: What little I had is long gone and they’s bills aplenty to pay. Yet. I buried my mother today. I ain’t paid for that neither. Chigurh: I wouldn’t worry about it. Carla Jean: . . . I need to sit down. Chigurh nods at the bed and Carla Jean sits down, hugging her hat and her veil. Carla Jean: . . . You got no cause to hurt me. Chigurh: No. But I gave my word. To your husband.

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Carla Jean: That don’t make sense. You gave your word to my husband to kill me? Chigurh: Your husband had the opportunity to remove you from harm’s way. Instead, he used you to try to save himself. Carla Jean: Not like that. Not like you say. Chigurh: I don’t say anything. Except it was foreseen. A beat. Carla Jean: I knowed you was crazy when I saw you settin’ there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me. Chigurh: Yeah. Things fall into place.

House Exterior Minutes later. A beat. The front door swings open and Chigurh emerges. He pauses with one hand on the jamb and looks at the sole of each boot in turn. He goes to the pickup in the driveway. In this scene, the Coen brothers defy expectations by ignoring the requisite and expected emotional response from Carla Jean, instead fashioning an almost drawing room conversation between a psychotic hit man and Llewelyn’s wife. It is completely devoid of emotion and fear, not unlike the unyielding landscape that surrounds the “couple,” and Chigurh calmly explains that her death is preordained when he says, “Except it was foreseen” and “Things fall into place.” Carla Jean neither pleads for her life nor seems angry about her inevitable fate; she is just resigned. Quiet, introspective, and even perversely wise, the folks who inhabit No Country for Old Men defy expectations, giving this bleak movie a darkly comic tinge.

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Indies The best remedy offered by screenwriters to such bleak and unforgiving perspectives lies in the small independent screenplays that closely examine characters who are caught up in much more charming struggles. In the twenty-first century, it is independent films, and not disaster or superhero movies, that represent the new brand of escapism, often ignoring the troubled zeitgeist, unlike the superhero films that tend to exploit it. Indie character studies privilege the world of the heart which, they imply, remains constant in spite of the landscape that surrounds it. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) is one such film, especially as it pertains to the troubled landscape of the heart. The setting for the story is Tokyo, as two displaced Americans find themselves isolated in a foreign land. It’s a simple tale of an unlikely friendship between Bob (Bill Murray), a middleaged actor, and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a much younger woman. Bob has traveled to Japan to shoot an advertisement for a whiskey company, indicative of a career on the decline. Charlotte is “deserted,” at least temporarily, by her photographer husband. She is new to marriage and insecure about the models her husband shoots. For his part, Bob and his wife of twenty-five years are experiencing a full-fledged midlife crisis. Both Bob and Charlotte are lonely and both are experiencing culture shock, especially because neither understands the language or, as they readily admit later, the people. The intimacy of their initial meeting in a bar promises the perfect buildup for a cross-generational romance: Charlotte: What are you doing here? Bob: My wife needs space, I don’t know my kids’ birthdays. Everyone wants Tiger Woods, but they could get me, so I’m here doing a whiskey commercial. She looks at him. Charlotte: Oh. She lifts a cigarette, he lights it for her. Charlotte: I’ll just have a beer. He makes small talk about the pickled seaweed breakfast and jet lag, and they commiserate about not having slept in days. Bob: What about you? Why are you here?

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Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2007).

Charlotte: My husband’s here for work—he’s a photographer—and I just came along . . . I’m not really doing anything right now, and we have some friends who live here. Bob: How long have you been married? Charlotte: Two years. Bob: Try twenty-five. Charlotte: You’re probably just having a mid-life crisis. Did you buy a Porsche? Bob: I’m thinking about it. Charlotte: Twenty-five years . . . that’s a long time . . . Are you still in love with your wife? Bob: Yes . . . I don’t know, I don’t know her anymore. I don’t know if you can be in love with one person the whole time. I was . . . actually I was in love with her sister first, when I was twenty-one. And one day her sister said to me she wanted to move to Paris, so I said ok, and she said no, she wanted to move to Paris with François, and she’s still married to him. And I moved in with Lydia . . . but I always really liked Lydia.

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Charlotte: (amused with too much info) Oh. Bob: What do you do? Charlotte: I’m not sure, yet . . . I graduated last spring. Bob: What did you study? Charlotte: Philosophy. Bob: Oh, what do you do with that? Charlotte: I don’t know, but I can think about it, a lot. Bob: It takes a while to figure it out. I’m sure you will, though. Charlotte: Thanks. I’m sure your mid-life crisis will work out too. Bob: Thanks. They clink glasses. The scene isn’t unlike the “cute” meeting of traditional romance films such as When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989) or You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998), which pit potential lovers in an initial combative relationship, inevitably transitioning from misunderstandings and squabble to affection and trust. Instead, the setup in Lost in Translation is a bit too honest and the characters, while funny, are too realistic for typical romantic comedy. Johansson and Murray’s characters have an undeniable chemistry that comes primarily from a shared sense of humor, a sardonic twinkle in their eyes, and the ability to verbally joust with one another in spite of their age difference. Although Lost in Translation is a movie about intimacy, writer/director Coppola wisely resists romantic closure. Both Bob and Charlotte remain committed to their respective spouses, at least sexually, and the movie expertly captures that lovely, fragile, magical moment when new friends connect. After an evening out together, for example, they return to his hotel room where the conversation grows even more intimate. Charlotte confesses, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be. I thought maybe I wanted to be a writer . . . but I hate what I write, and I tried taking pictures, but John’s so good at that . . . and every girl goes through a photography phase, like horses, you know dumb pictures of your feet.” After reassuring her that she will eventually find her place in life, Bob admits that he and his wife are seeing a counselor: “We used to have

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fun, she used to like to go places with me for my movies and we would laugh at all the weirdos, but she’s tired of it all. She never wants to leave the kids, she doesn’t need me, and they don’t need me. I feel like I’m in the way.” They discuss everything, from her parents to the birth of his children. The audience is led to believe that this is the moment when passion should overwhelm the two, but instead they simply share stories. As Coppola explained in an interview, “I can only say why I wanted to make the movie . . . It’s about moments in life that are great but don’t last. They don’t go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you.”14 Although the film is often analyzed in terms of its examination of cross-gender, cross-culture, and cross-generation communication, the beauty of Coppola’s script is that it captures a moment, fraught with tension, where two unlikely people come together and actually share their lives, but not their bodies. Another indie film about intimate relationships from this era is Alexander Payne’s Sideways, winner of the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (by Payne and Jim Taylor). Based on a novel of the same name by Rex Pickett, Sideways tells the story of Miles Raymond, a middle-school English teacher in San Diego who takes his soon-to-be married college roommate, Jack Cole, on a road trip through the wine country of Santa Ynez. Taylor and Payne play with the buddy format here to good advantage, putting their unlikely duo in realistic situations with more at stake than “couples” in most buddy films. In an interview with G. W. Hatchett, Payne admitted that he and Taylor enjoy stretching genre boundaries. When asked what particular genre they favor, Payne responded that he mostly writes comedies, but that they are perceived differently in the twenty-first century: “I was called a satirist but in today’s film climate it seems like dark just translates to being real. Whatever comes natural to me and my cowriter James Taylor, we just write whatever we find as funny. It isn’t something you can force.”15 Like Lost in Translation, Sideways tells a simple story. The script is more broadly comedic than Coppola’s, mixing realism with occasional moments of slapstick. While the story focuses on the friendship between struggling, unhappy would-be novelist Miles and his rowdy ex-roommate Jack (who desperately needs to have a final fling before he marries), the best writing is in the scenes between the two unlikely friends and the women they meet in wine country. Miles expresses interest in sensitive waitress Maya; Jack is attracted to her friend Stephanie. While the film’s surface tension is built around the lies the men tell (that Jack is single and available, and that Miles’s book has been accepted for publication), the real charm of the film is firmly rooted in the honest conversation. After the four have dinner, socialize, and drink wine, Stephanie and Jack head to bed. Meanwhile, Miles and Maya share intimate details about themselves and actually bond, each gently accepting the flaws the other tentatively expresses. The

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Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004).

conversation is strained and awkward at first, and although the two genuinely like each other, they don’t connect until they discuss wine, a subject they both know better than they know themselves. When Maya asks Miles why he is so into Pinot, his beautifully crafted response moves her: Miles: I don’t know. It’s a hard grape to grow. As you know. It’s thinskinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet that can grow anywhere and thrive even when neglected. Pinot needs constant care and attention and in fact can only grow in specific little tucked-away corners of the world. And only the most patient and nurturing growers can do it really, can tap into Pinot’s most fragile, delicate qualities. Only when someone has taken the time to truly understand its potential can Pinot be coaxed into its fullest expression. And when that happens its flavors are the most haunting and brilliant and subtle and thrilling and ancient on the planet. After this “confession,” Miles coaxes Maya into explaining her affection for wine, which, she admits, began with her ex-husband’s showy cellar. But then she shares her relationship with wine, very different from Miles’s personal perspective: Maya: No, but I do like to think about the life of wine, how it’s a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing, how the sun was shining that summer or if it rained . . . what the weather was like. I think about all those people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be

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dead by now. I love how wine continues to evolve, how every time I open a bottle it’s going to taste different than if I had opened it on any other day. Because a bottle of wine is actually alive—it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks—like your sixty-one—and begins its steady, inevitable decline. And it tastes so fucking good. Now it is Miles’s turn to be swept away. Maya’s face tells us the moment is right, but Miles remains frozen. He needs another sign, and Maya is bold enough to offer it: she reaches out and places one hand atop his. Miles: (suppressing his panic) But I like a lot of wines besides Pinot too. Lately I’ve really been into Rieslings. Do you like Rieslings? Rieslings? She nods, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips. Come on, Miles. Finally—Miles (cont’d): (pointing) Bathroom over there? Maya: Yeah. As Miles is soon to discover, his abrupt departure temporarily severs the potential for a physical connection, and although he attempts an awkward kiss in the kitchen, Maya departs, frustrated. The beauty of the scene, of course, is in Payne and Taylor’s language, the subtle ways that he has Miles and Maya reveal things about themselves. Maya’s description of wine evokes her passionate life force, her true understanding of transition, of the moment and when the moment passes. Her interest in horticulture is obvious, but so is her interest in humanity, framing wine, giving it almost a human life, from the moment of conception to the inevitability of decline. Miles’s monologue is much more personal and confessional, an admission of his flaws and needs. But it also represents an uncharacteristically confident plea that he is worth the trouble, especially if someone is patient and generous enough to tap into his “haunting and brilliant and subtle and thrilling and ancient” Pinotlike potential. As Payne explains, “If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things that you’d forgotten about, you’d weep looking at that day. Somewhat dramatic things happen, and you don’t even always notice them—that’s what life is.”16 The discussion between Miles and Maya is beautifully written because it captures the dramatic in the banal, and although it is as talky as Lost in Translation is quiet, it truly explores two individuals who use wine as conduits to confession. Payne and Taylor’s depiction of Maya and Miles owes much to the writing of Woody Allen, a master in creating characters that are charming, awkward,

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and so massively insecure that they have trouble making lasting, honest connections; they fumble, discuss, and pontificate. But unlike Allen’s neurotic characters, the sexual attraction, while it is palpable for couples in both Lost in Translation and Sideways, is never realized. Even Allen’s cross-generational characters usually take satisfaction in easy sexuality, and the difference in age is rarely an issue. The popularity of Lost in Translation and Sideways actually depends on maintaining the innocence of its characters. It reflects not only a return to old-fashioned values, so comforting in times of disruption, violence, political reform, and uncertain economic conditions, but also a desire to spend time with real people. For American audiences who are accustomed to films that express violence, anger, frustration, and disruption these small, character-based stories are examples of true escapism, privileging the heart and mind over the physical. Other recent films that fall into this category include Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006, scr. Michael Arndt), Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007, scr. Diablo Cody), Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, 2007, scr. Nancy Oliver), Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011, scr. Allen), The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010, scr. Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg), and Before Sunset (Richard Linklater 2004, scr. Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy)—small gems that offer intimate glimpses of character. Although many of them directly confront the environment in which their characters live, they are primarily concerned with taking their audiences on an internal journey. Another comedy that hearkens back to old-fashioned values while experimentally and humorously embracing a mythic structure is the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), based loosely on Homer’s Odyssey, with a nod to Preston Sturges’s 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels. In that film, a celebrated director plans to make an allegorical film called O Brother, Where Art Thou? about the country’s economic struggles during the Great Depression. The Coen brothers conceived O Brother, Where Art Thou to pay homage to the Depression at a time when the American economy was just beginning to tank. It’s a ribald comedy that has little to do with relationships and everything to do with cinematically representing the frantic pace of America. Set in Mississippi in 1937, the Coen brothers’ script chronicles the misadventures of three convicts who escape from a chain gang—Ulysses Everett McGill, Pete Hogwallop, and Delmar O’Donnell. They set out on an epic quest to recover $1.2 million purportedly hidden by Everett before his incarceration, but, as we discover later, this search is mainly a ploy to reunite Everett with his wife. The story parallels the Odyssey, from a blind fortuneteller to a musician who claims to have sold his soul to the devil, from seductive sirens to a one-eyed/Cyclops Bible salesman. As Edward Guthmann writes: “For better or for worse, they layer their films with references and allusions, crowd them with visual gags and musical cues, animate them with wiggy, cartoonish performances and invest each frame with so much stimuli that it’s impossible to

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absorb it all in one viewing.” But as Guthmann admits, it’s not the frantic nature of the film, nor the clever musical references, nor even its sweet description of the South that makes this movie both appealing and problematic: “‘O Brother’ is so alive with antic business and cultural and literary winks that one almost misses one of its themes: that our nostalgic regard for a bygone rural Americana—that dreamy, benign world of grit and pluck and harmless eccentricity—is really a smoke screen for the racism and venality that in many ways defined that time and place.” Guthmann admires what he calls the idea of “simultaneously saluting and undermining our notion of a benevolent South,” but he feels that the antics in the script ultimately disrupt the potential for meaning.17 And, indeed, because of the screenplay’s frenetic pace and picaresque structure, the movie is a romp, as noisy as Lost in Translation is quiet, and the amount of stimuli—from the popular sound track to the visual imagery—is, indeed, at times, comically overwhelming. It was the movie’s “nostalgic regard for a bygone rural America,” as well as the theme-park ride structure, that appealed to American audiences at the advent of the twenty-first century. With so much uncertainty over what the new century would bring, the genuinely insane adventures of these three convicts made O Brother a cult favorite, even for audiences who did not appreciate or understand the references to Homer. As silly and Three Stooges–like as their antics may be, Everett, Delmar, and Pete are usually stronger, more resilient, and more generous than the folks they encounter and, more often than not, they succeed in their endeavors. Despite their criminal histories, Everett, Delmar, and Pete remain true representatives of a moral American sensibility. We see it not only in Everett’s quest to reclaim his wife, but also in their occasional inadvertent heroism, as evidenced in a scene where they disrupt a Ku Klux Klan meeting to free their friend Tommy. The joy of this screenplay is not only that it places these men in heroic positions, defeating dark, stupid, prejudiced foes, but that it also lightheartedly reaffirms the idea of faith. Although Everett is critical of a baptism in an earlier scene,

The Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).

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where Pete and Delmar are almost hypnotized by the beauty of the scene and the promise of salvation, by the end of the film, when Everett prays for divine help during an impending arrest, the skies part and the entire valley is flooded, saving the men from hanging. When Everett is finally reunited with his wife, the idea of family is restored and order comes to quell the frenetic lifestyle the men have experienced. The last image, of a blind man rolling by on his railway handcar, his voice joining with Everett’s daughters while the family walks hand in hand down the street, reaffirms the American values of family, faith, and harmony.

Disney/Pixar Family Values No film company is more interested in harmony and family values than Disney/Pixar, a studio that has made some of the most memorable and remarkable films of the last thirteen years, including Monsters, Inc. (Pete Docter, David Silverman, Lee Unkrich, 2001, scr. Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson), Finding Nemo (Stanton and Unkrich, 2003, scr. Stanton), The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004, scr. Bird), Wall-E (Stanton, 2008, scr. Stanton and Jim Reardon), Up (Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009, scr. Docter and Peterson), and Toy Story 3 (Unkrich, 2010, scr. Michael Arndt). Taken as a collective they reveal much about how well screenwriters of animated films embraced depth of character in the early twenty-first century. The driving force in most of these animated movies, popular with both conservatives and liberals, is the belief in and establishment of family. Although Pixar was not bought by Disney until 2006, the animated films from both companies evince a fundamental value that family, either blood-related, as in The Incredibles and Finding Nemo, or extended through affection, understanding, and communal support, as in Up and Toy Story 3, can solve most any conflict or predicament. In Monsters, Inc., monster-friends Sulley and Mike form an unconventional relationship with a very young human girl named Boo, who ultimately teaches their world the value of laughter over fear. After losing his mother to a barracuda attack, Nemo the clownfish deserts his father, Marlin, and is captured. Marlin befriends Dory, a friendly blue tang with an appropriately piscine shortterm memory problem, and enlists her aid in his quest to rescue his son. Their myriad adventures, especially when pitted against a shady dentist with a massive fish tank, helps Marlin transcend his over-protective nature and convinces him to trust Nemo. In Brad Bird’s screenplay for The Incredibles, the Parr family, a group of super humans who must hide their powers from civilians, band together to defeat the Omnidroid and realize that they need their combined familial powers to overcome the world’s most threatening foes. In Wall-E, Earth in the year 2805 is massively covered with garbage, and it takes a small trash compactor (Waste

152 Mark J. Charney

Allocation Load Lifters–Earth Class, or WALL-E) with an all-encompassing crush on an Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (EVE) to rescue humans from their own passivity. In Up, after the death of his beloved wife, Ellie, Carl Fredricksen befriends Boy Scout do-gooder Russell. Their unlikely friendship enables Carl to accept life without Ellie and to make good the promise he made to his wife to visit Paradise Falls. And, finally, in Toy Story 3, a bag of toys mistaken for trash sends Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and his friends to Sunnyside Daycare, where they must work together as a family to defeat the bully toy Lotso and his destructive cohorts before they ultimately find a new home with a little girl named Bonnie who still enjoys playing with toys. In all these screenplays, order within each particular universe is threatened, and very real characters teach audiences that the best method of success comes from teamwork, or at least companionship. As in early Disney films, such as Bambi (Disney animation unit, 1942) or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney animation unit, 1937), the protagonists of animated films in the contemporary marketplace often lack a conventional family structure, with either one parent missing or some similar sense of loss, sending the major characters on adventures that illustrate the value of creating an extended family, learning to trust one another, and exploring what life has to offer through measured and calculated risk. But these films are much less simple than they may appear. As J. Hoberman writes about Wall-E, “For much of the movie, this endearing protagonist is the earth’s last vestige of humanity. The descendants of the planet’s former inhabitants drift through space in a giant shopping mall, too bloated to do anything other than drink their Happy Meals and watch TV. Could that be us?!”18 Noting that Barack Obama took his daughters to see the film and called it a “great flick,” Hoberman asked, “Did he identify with the weird little Waste Allocation Load Lifter—community organizer for an extinct community?”19 In his article “The Hidden Message in Pixar’s Films,” Kyle Munkittrick wrote, “Pixar films contain a complex, nuanced, philosophical and political essence that, when viewed across the company’s complete corpus, begins to emerge with some clarity.” After examining Disney and Pixar films to establish a set of rules and conventions that end with the assertion that “being human is not the same as being a person,” he added, “The message hidden inside Pixar’s magnificent films is this: humanity does not have a monopoly on personhood. In whatever form non- or super-human intelligence takes, it will need brave souls on both sides to defend what is right. If we can live up to this burden, humanity and the world we live in will be better for it.” In other words, through communal thinking and community-minded/ extended-family creation, Pixar’s protagonists are human, certainly, but until they transition into what Munkittrick calls personhood, they cannot begin to assess the world around them, much less succeed in changing it for the better.20

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Conclusion Partially because of film’s widespread ability to educate and entertain, and partially because of Hollywood’s emphasis on success and stardom, screenwriting in the twenty-first century has become quite a business in itself. Since 2000, more and more students are fighting to enter graduate programs in screenwriting, hoping to break into the business, to discover networking possibilities, and to become a recognized authority. Sites on the internet rank programs, which are also distinguished by differing areas of professional focus. Contests for the next great screenplay abound, from the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards to the Eleventh Annual Script Pipeline Screenwriting Competition. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences offers the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, a competition with multiple awards of $35,000. Screenwriting guides are the new self-help mantras for creative writers, and, as Richard Walter, chair of the UCLA Screenwriting Program and author of Essentials of Screenwriting, tells his students: “Every well-established writer, without exception, was once totally unknown and inexperienced. Regarding the competitive nature of the business, I tell them that they are literally trying to traffic in their own imagination. They’re trying to sell their dreams.”21 From screenwriting software such as Final Draft to a website called scriptdelivery.net that offers to “pitch your screenplay to Hollywood” (for a fee), the contemporary marketplace has attempted to teach aspiring students of screenwriting to market their imaginations, not only to express themselves, but also to affect the world around them. Screenwriting has become a business in the twenty-first century, one that offers more promise that it could ever fulfill, and one that continues to represent a way to dream that impossible dream. Film can be both dependent upon and impervious to the world around it. Contemporary American screen stories transcend context while still borrowing heavily from the struggles and triumphs of the social and cultural environment. As cinema becomes more omnipresent, finding its way onto phones, iPads, and even wristwatches, Americans are asked more frequently not only to understand the images, but to participate in them as well. In the digital age, more people have the opportunity to express themselves visually, and this is true both on sites such as YouTube and even in educational settings. Moreover, as film grows increasingly personal and accessible, we will see more of the world reflected within it, processed, reimagined, and metaphorically defined. If the IMAX and D-Box MFX motion-seat theaters do not continue to attract and maintain audiences, the days of movies as events may be nearing an end, but cinema in its new, expanded context will likely remain the most resonant form of popular entertainment, with screenwriters as the artists who help to craft and shape the perspective of their particular worlds.

Academy Awards for Screenwriting The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has changed the titles and even the number of its writing awards many times. Initially there were three awards, for the familiar categories of “original” and “adapted” scripts, as well as a short-lived award for “Title Writing.” Although the “original” and “adapted” categories were reconceptualized through the years, the Academy’s intention to recognize achievement in both areas remained broadly consistent. The list below, based on information from AMPAS’s own Academy Awards database, notes these changes by year. 1927/28

Writing (Adaptation) , Benjamin Glazer, Seventh Heaven, from Austin Strong’s play Seventh Heaven Writing (Original Story) , Ben Hecht, Underworld Writing (Title Writing) , Joseph Farnham (this award was not associated with any specific film title) Special Award, Charlie Chaplin, The Circus

1928/29 Writing , Hanns Kraly, The Patriot, from Ashley Dukes’s translation of Alfred Neumann’s play De Patriot and Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s story “Paul I” 1929/30 Writing , Frances Marion, The Big House 155

156 Academy Awards

1930/31 Writing (Adaptation) , Howard Estabrook, Cimarron, from Edna Ferber’s novel Cimarron Writing (Original Story) , John Monk Saunders, The Dawn Patrol 1931/32 Writing (Adaptation) , Edwin J. Burke, Bad Girl, from Vina Delmar’s novel and play Bad Girl Writing (Original Story) , Frances Marion, The Champ 1932/33 Writing (Adaptation) , Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason, Little Women, from Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women Writing (Original Story) , Robert Lord, One Way Passage 1934 Writing (Adaptation) , Robert Riskin, It Happened One Night, from Samuel Hopkins Adams’s story “Night Bus” Writing (Original Story) , Arthur Caesar, Manhattan Melodrama 1935 Writing (Original Story) , Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, The Scoundrel Writing (Screenplay) , Dudley Nichols (originally declined, but received statuette by 1949 per AMPAS), The Informer, from Liam O’Flaherty’s novel The Informer 1936 Writing (Original Story) , Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney, The Story of Louis Pasteur Writing (Screenplay) , Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney, The Story of Louis Pasteur 1937 Writing (Original Story) , William A. Wellman, Robert Carson, A Star Is Born Writing (Screenplay) , Heinz Herald, Geza Herczeg, and Norman Reilly Raine, The Life of Emile Zola, from Matthew Josephson’s book Zola and His Time 1938 Writing (Original Story) , Dore Schary, Eleanore Griffin, Boys Town Writing (Screenplay) , Ian Dalrymple, Cecil Lewis, W. P. Lipscomb, and George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, from Shaw’s play Pygmalion 1939 Writing (Original Story) , Lewis R. Foster, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Writing (Screenplay), Sidney Howard (posthumously), Gone with the Wind, from Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind 1940

Writing (Original Screenplay) , Preston Sturges, The Great McGinty Writing (Original Story) , Benjamin Glazer, John S. Toldy, Arise My Love Writing (Screenplay) , Donald Ogden Stewart, The Philadelphia Story, from Philip Barry’s play

1941

Writing (Original Screenplay) , Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, Citizen Kane Writing (Original Story) , Harry Segal, Here Comes Mr. Jordan Writing (Screenplay) , Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, from

The Philadelphia Story

Harry Segall’s play Heaven Can Wait

Academy Awards 157

1942

Writing (Original Motion Picture Story) , Emeric Pressburger, The Invaders Writing (Original Screenplay) , Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner Jr., Woman of the Year Writing (Screenplay) , Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, Claudine West, and James Hilton,

Mrs. Miniver, from Jan Struther’s newspaper columns

1943

Writing (Original Motion Picture Story) , William Saroyan, The Human Comedy Writing (Original Screenplay) , Norman Krasna, Princess O’Rourke Writing (Screenplay) , Philip G. Epstein, Julius J. Epstein, and Howard Koch, Casablanca, from

1944

Writing (Original Motion Picture Story) , Leo McCarey, Going My Way Writing (Original Screenplay) , Lamar Trotti, Wilson Writing (Screenplay) , Frank Butler and Frank Cavett, Going My Way, from Leo McCarey’s story

1945 1946 1947

Murray Burnett and Joan Alison’s play Everybody Comes to Rick’s

Going My Way Writing (Original Motion Picture Story) , Charles G. Booth, The House on 92nd Street Writing (Original Screenplay) , Richard Schweizer, Marie-Louise Writing (Screenplay) , Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend, from Charles R. Jackson’s

novel The Lost Weekend Writing (Original Motion Picture Story) , Clemence Dane, Vacation from Marriage Writing (Original Screenplay) , Muriel Box, Sydney Box, The Seventh Veil Writing (Screenplay) , Robert Sherwood, The Best Years of Our Lives, from MacKinlay Kantor’s novel

Glory for Me Writing (Original Screenplay) , Sidney Sheldon, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Valentine Davis, Miracle on 34th Street Writing (Screenplay) , George Seaton, Miracle on 34th Street, from Valentine Davies’s story

Miracle on 34th Street

1948 Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Richard Schweizer, David Wechsler, The Search Writing (Screenplay) , John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from B. Traven’s novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 1949

Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Douglas Morrow, The Stratton Story Writing (Story and Screenplay) , Robert Pirosh, Battleground Writing (Screenplay) , Joseph L. Mankiewicz, A Letter to Three Wives, from John Klempner’s novel

1950

Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Edna Anhalt, Edward Anhalt, Panic in the Streets Writing (Story and Screenplay) , Charles Brackett, D. M. Marshman Jr., and Billy Wilder,

Letter to Five Wives

Sunset Blvd. Writing (Screenplay) , Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All about Eve, from Mary Orr’s short story

“The Wisdom of Eve”

158 Academy Awards

1951

Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Paul Dehn, James Bernard, Seven Days to Noon Writing (Story and Screenplay) , Alan Jay Lerner, An American in Paris Writing (Screenplay) , Harry Brown and Michael Wilson, A Place in the Sun, from Theodore Dreiser’s

novel and Patrick Kearney’s play An American Tragedy

1952

Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Fredric M. Frank, Theodore St. John, Frank Cavett,

“Tribute to a Badman”

1953

Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Dalton Trumbo, Roman Holiday (due to the blacklist, the award was given to a “front,” Ian McLellan Hunter; Trumbo was not awarded his Oscar until 1993, posthumously) Writing (Story and Screenplay) , Charles Brackett, Richard Breen, and Walter Reisch, Titanic Writing (Screenplay) , Daniel Taradash, From Here to Eternity, from James Jones’s novel From Here to Eternity

The Greatest Show on Earth Writing (Story and Screenplay) , T.E.B. Clarke, The Lavender Hill Mob Writing (Screenplay) , Charles Schnee, The Bad and the Beautiful, from Charles Bradshaw’s story

1954 Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Philip Yordan, Broken Lance Writing (Story and Screenplay) , Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront Writing (Screenplay) , George Seaton, The Country Girl, from Clifford’s Odets’s play The Country Girl 1955 Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Daniel Fuchs, Love Me or Leave Me Writing (Story and Screenplay) , Sonya Levien and William Ludwig, Interrupted Melody Writing (Screenplay) , Paddy Chayefsky, Marty, from Chayefsky’s teleplay Marty 1956

Writing (Motion Picture Story) , Dalton Trumbo, The Brave One (due to the blacklist, the film credits

Robert Rich, an alias for Dalton Trumbo, as the screenwriter; Trumbo was not awarded his Oscar until 1975) Writing (Screenplay, Original) , Albert Lamorisse, The Red Balloon Writing (Screenplay, Adapted) , John Farrow, S. J. Perelman, and James Poe, Around the World in Eighty Days, from Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days

1957

Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , George Wells,

and Michael Wilson, The Bridge on the River Kwai, from Boulle’s novel The Bridge on the River Kwai (due to the blacklist, Foreman and Wilson were not awarded their Oscars until 1984, posthumously)

1958

Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , Nathan E. Douglas and Harold Jacob Smith, The Defiant Ones (Nathan E. Douglas was a pseudonym for blacklisted screenwriter Nedrick Young, whose name was officially recognized by the Academy in 1993, posthumously) Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Alan Jay Lerner, Gigi, from Colette’s novella Gigi

Designing Women Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Pierre Boulle, Carl Foreman,

Academy Awards 159

1959

Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , Clarence Greene (story),

Maurice Richlin (screenplay), Russell Rouse (story), and Stanley Shapiro (screenplay), Pillow Talk Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Neil Paterson, Room at the Top,

from John Braine’s novel Room at the Top

1960

Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , I.A.L. Diamond and Billy

1961

Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , William Inge,

Wilder, The Apartment Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Richard Brooks, Elmer Gantry,

from Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry Splendor in the Grass Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Abby Mann, Judgment at

Nuremberg, from Mann’s teleplay Judgment at Nuremberg

1962 Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , Ennio de Concini, Pietro Germi, and Alfredo Giannetti, Divorce, Italian Style Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Horton Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird, from Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird 1963 1964

Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , James R. Webb,

How the West Was Won Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , John Osborne, Tom Jones,

from Henry Fielding’s novel The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , Peter Stone and Frank Tarloff,

Father Goose Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Edward Anhalt, Beckett, from

Jean Anouilh’s play Beckett

1965 Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , Frederick Raphael, Darling Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium), Robert Bolt, Doctor Zhivago, from Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago 1966 1967

Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , Claude Lelouch (story,

screenplay) and Pierre Uytterhoeven (screenplay), A Man and a Woman Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Robert Bolt, A Man for All

Seasons, from Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , William Rose, Guess Who’s

Coming to Dinner? Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Stirling Silliphant, In the Heat of

the Night, from John Ball’s novel In the Heat of the Night

160 Academy Awards

1968 Writing (Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen) , Mel Brooks, The Producers Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , James Goldman, The Lion in Winter, from Goldman’s play The Lion in Winter 1969 1970

Writing (Story and Screenplay, based on material not previously published or produced) ,

William Goldman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Waldo Salt, Midnight Cowboy,

from James Leo Herlih’s novel Midnight Cowboy Writing (Story and Screenplay, based on material not previously published or produced) ,

Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North, Patton Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Ring Lardner Jr., M*A*S*H, from

Rickard Hooker’s novel Mash: A Novel about Three Army Doctors

1971 Writing (Story and Screenplay, based on factual material or material not previously published or produced) , Paddy Chayefsky, The Hospital Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Ernest Tidyman, The French Connection, from Robin Moore’s book The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy

1972 Writing (Story and Screenplay, based on factual material or material not previously published or produced) , Jeremy Larner, The Candidate Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather, from Puzo’s novel The Godfather 1973 Writing (Story and Screenplay, based on factual material or material not previously published or produced) , David S. Ward, The Sting Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist, from Blatty’s novel The Exorcist

1974 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Robert Towne, Chinatown Writing (Screenplay Adapted from Other Material) , Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, The Godfather, Part II, from Puzo’s novel The Godfather 1975 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Frank Pierson, Dog Day Afternoon Writing (Screenplay Adapted from Other Material) , Bo Goldman and Laurence Hauben, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, from Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

1976 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, based on factual material or on story material not previously published or produced) , Paddy Chayefsky, Network Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , William Goldman, All the President’s Men, from Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s book All the President’s Men

Academy Awards 161

1977 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, based on factual material or on story material not previously published or produced) , Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall Writing (Screenplay, based on material from another medium) , Alvin Sargent, Julia, from Lillian Hellman’s novel Pentimento 1978

Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Robert Jones (screenplay), Waldo Salt

(screenplay), and Nancy Dowd (story), Coming Home Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Oliver Stone, Midnight Express,

from Billy Hayes and William Hoffer’s novel Midnight Express

1979 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Steve Tesich, Breaking Away Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Robert Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer, from Avery Corman’s novel Kramer vs. Kramer 1980 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Bo Goldman, Melvin and Howard Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Alvin Sargent, Ordinary People, from Judith Guest’s novel Ordinary People 1981 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Colin Welland, Chariots of Fire Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Ernest Thompson, On Golden Pond, from Thompson’s play On Golden Pond 1982 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , John Briley, Gandhi Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium), Costa-Gravas and Donald E. Stewart, Missing, from Thomas Hauser’s book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice 1983 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Horton Foote, Tender Mercies Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , James L. Brooks, Terms of Endearment, from Larry McMurtry’s novel Terms of Endearment 1984 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Robert Benton, Places in the Heart Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Peter Shaffer, Amadeus, from Shaffer’s play Amadeus 1985

Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , William Kelley (story, screenplay), Earl Wallace (story, screenplay), and Pamela Wallace (story), Witness Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Kurt Luedtke, Out of Africa, from Isak Dinesen’s memoir Out of Africa, Errol Trzebinski’s book Silence Will Speak, and Judith Thurman’s book Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

1986 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A Room with a View, from E. M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View

162 Academy Awards

1987 1988

Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , John Patrick Shanley, Moonstruck Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Bernardo Bertolucci and

Mark Peploe, The Last Emperor, from Henry Pu Yi’s autobiography From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Ronald Bass (screenplay) and

Barry Morrow (story, screenplay), Rain Man Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Christopher Hampton, Dangerous

Liaisons, from Hampton’s play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, as taken from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses

1989 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Alfred Uhry, Driving Miss Daisy, from Uhry’s play Driving Miss Daisy 1990 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Bruce Joel Rubin, Ghost Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) , Michael Blake, Dances with Wolves, from Michael Blake’s novel Dances with Wolves 1991 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Callie Khouri, Thelma and Louise Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , Tom Tally, The Silence of the Lambs, from Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs 1992 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Neil Jordan, The Crying Game Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Howards End, from E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End 1993 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Jane Campion, The Piano Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , Steven Zaillian, Schindler’s List, from Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark 1994 1995

Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Quentin Tarantino (story, screenplay) and

Roger Avery (story), Pulp Fiction Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , Eric Roth,

Forrest Gump, from Winston Groom’s novel Forrest Gump Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Christopher McQuarrie,

The Usual Suspects Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , Emma Thompson,

Sense and Sensibility, from Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility

1996 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, Fargo Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , Billy Bob Thornton, Sling Blade, from Thornton’s short film Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade

Academy Awards 163

1997 1998

Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Ben Affleck and Matt Damon,

Good Will Hunting Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , Curtis Hanson and

Brian Helgeland, L.A. Confidential, from James Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard,

Shakespeare in Love Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , Bill Condon,

Gods and Monsters, from Christopher Bram’s novel Father of Frankenstein

1999 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Alan Ball, American Beauty Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , John Irving, The Cider House Rules, from Irving’s novel The Cider House Rules 2000 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Cameron Crowe, Almost Famous Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , Stephen Gaghan, Traffic, from Simon Moore’s teleplay Traffik 2001 Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) , Julian Fellowes, Gosford Park Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) , Akiva Goldsman, A Beautiful Mind, from Sylvia Nasar’s book A Beautiful Mind 2002 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Pedro Almodóvar, Talk to Her (Hable con ella) Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , Ronald Harwood, The Pianist, from Wladyslaw Szpilman’s book The Pianist 2003 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation Writing (Adapted Screenplay), Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King 2004

Writing (Original Screenplay) , Pierre Bismuth (story), Michel Gondry (story), and Charlie Kaufman

(story, screenplay), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Sideways, from Rex Pickett’s novel

Sideways

2005 Writing (Original Screenplay), Paul Haggis (story, screenplay) and Bobby Moresco (screenplay), Crash Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, Brokeback Mountain, from Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” 2006 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine Writing (Adapted Screenplay), William N. Monahan, The Departed, from Alan Mak and Felix Dhong’s film Infernal Affairs

164 Academy Awards

2007 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Diablo Cody, Juno Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men, from Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men 2008 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Dustin Lance Black, Milk Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire, from Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A 2009 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , Geoffrey Fletcher, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, from Sapphire’s novel Push 2010 Writing (Original Screenplay) , David Seidler, The King’s Speech Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network, from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires 2011 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash, The Descendants, from Kaui Hart Hemmings’s novel The Descendants 2012 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , Chris Terrio, Argo, from Antonio J. Mendez’s book The Master of Disguise and Joshuah Bearman’s article “The Great Escape” 2013 Writing (Original Screenplay) , Spike Jonze, Her Writing (Adapted Screenplay) , John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave, from Soloman Northrup’s autobiography

Notes Introduction

1 Steven Price, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory, and Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), xi.



2 Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory, and Practice (London: Wallflower Press, 2009).



3 I use the term from Price, The Screenplay, x.



4 The Minimum Basic Agreement is the standard contract negotiated by the Writers Guild of America with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). It sets out basic compensation rates for writers as well as pension and health benefits, working conditions, and levels for residual payments.



5 Scott MacDonald, Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).



6 Joe Fordham, “War Games,” Cinefex 130 (July 2012): 14.



7 Maras, Screenwriting, 3.



8 Tom Stempel, Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 3rd ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Marc Norman, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008).



9 Maras, Screenwriting, 11. 10 Ibid., 15.

165

166 Notes to Pages 5–18

11 Janet Staiger, “Mass-Produced Photoplays: Economic and Signifying Practices in the First Years of Hollywood,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).



12 Epes Winthrop Sargent, “The Photoplaywright,” Motion Picture World 19, no. 1 (January 3, 1914): 282.



13 Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 360.

14 Maras, Screenwriting, 11.

15 John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

1 Machine

to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928

1 Marc Azéma and Florent Rivère, “Animation in Palaeolithic Art: A Pre-echo of Cinema,” Antiquity 86, no. 332 (2012): 316–324.

2 Cave of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog (Studio City, CA: Creative Differences, 2010).

3 “History of Edison Motion Pictures: Origins of Motion Pictures—the Kinetoscope,” American Memory, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edmvhist.html.



4 Brian Manley, “Moving Pictures: The History of Early Cinema,” ProQuest Discovery Guides (July 2011), http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/film/review.pdf.



5 “The Virtual Gramophone: Canadian Historical Sound Recordings,” Library and Archives, Canada, July 7, 1998, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca.



6 Tim Dirks, “The 100+ Most Controversial Movies of All Time,” accessed November 4, 2012, http://www.filmsite.org/controversialfilms1.html.



7 “The Virtual Gramophone: Canadian Historical Sound Recordings.”



8 Charles Musser, “The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter,” in The Wiley Blackwell History of American Film, ed. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (1979; rpt. Blackwell Publishing, 2012).



9 Tom Gunning, “A Trip to the Moon (1902),” http://soma.sbcc.edu/.../ATriptotheMoon/Iluminations_Meleies_Gunning, accessed October 7, 2012.



10 Quoted in Patrick Loughney, “From Rip Van Winkle to Jesus of Nazareth: Thoughts on the Origin of the American Screenplay,” Film History 9 (1997): 277.

11 There are several contradictory accounts of who first used a scenario written for a film. Patrick Loughney, “In the Beginning Was the Word: Six Pre-Griffith Motion Picture Scenarios,” Iris 2, no. 1 (1984): 17–31.

12 Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 135-141; also Loughney, “Rip Van Winkle,” 280.

13 Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 120-125. 14 Musser, Nickelodeon, 235.

15 Elizabeth Ezra, George Méliès (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 65.



16 Georges Sadoul, George Méliès (Paris: Seghers, 1970), 28.



17 Michael Brooke, “Dreyfus Court Martial—Arrest of Dreyfus,” Georges Méliès: An In-depth Look at the Cinema’s First Creative Genius, http://filmjournal.net/melies.

Notes to Pages 19–25 167 18 Ezra, George Méliès, 69.

19 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 140.



20 Epes Winthrop Sargent, quoted in Edward Azlant, “Screenwriting for the Early Silent Film: Forgotten Pioneers, 1897–1911,” Film History 9, no. 3 (1997): 231.



21 Benjamin B. Hampton, A History of the Movies (New York: Covici-Friede, 1931), 30; quoted in Azlant, “Screenwriting for the Early Silent Film,” 233.



22 Quoted in David Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (New York: Knopf, 2004), 170.



23 Azlant, “Screenwriting for the Early Silent Film,” 233.

24 Internet Movie Database, s.v. “McCardell, Roy L.” and “Truex, Ernest,” http://imdb.com, accessed October 25, 2012. 25 “McCardell’s Jarr Family in the Movies at Last,” New York Clipper, January 15, 1915; rpt. Andrew Sholl, “Re: An Essay on Vitagraph Comedies,” September 28, 2009, http://www. silentcomedymafia.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12, accessed October 27, 2012.

26 Steve Massa, “An Essay on Vitagraph Comedies,” Silent Comedy Mafia, June 2, 2009, http:// www.silentcomedymafia.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12, accessed October 27, 2012.

27 Display advertisement, Reel Life (August 7, 1915), 33; rpt. “The Diamond from the Sky (1915),” The Silent Film Still Archive, http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com/diamond_from _the_sky.htm, accessed October 27, 2012.

28 Thomas Lansing Masson, Our American Humorists (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1922), 241.

29 Hans J. Wollstein, “The Diamond from the Sky (1915),” Allmovie, http://www.allmovie. com/movie/the-diamond-from-the-sky-v139570, accessed November 2, 2012. 30 Edward Azlant, The Theory, History, and Practice of Screenwriting, 1897–1920, vol. 1 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 129. As with many sources, Azlant repeats Kalton C. Lahue’s assertion (Bound and Gagged: The Story of the Silent Serials [New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968], 125) that the prize was $5,000. The surviving publicity says $10,000.

31 Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 18–19.

32 “The Diamond from the Sky (1915),” Silent Film Still Archive. 33 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 267. 34 Motion Picture News, January 23, 1915, rpt. http://www.silentsaregolden.com/reviewsfolder /fooltherewasreview.html, accessed November 5, 2012. 35 Variety, March 12, 1915, rpt. http://www.silentsaregolden.com/reviewsfolder/foolthere wasreview.html, accessed November 5, 2012. 36 Janelle Vreeland, “Theda Bara & the Hollywood Marketing Machine,” Lonelybrand Culture, March 9, 2012, https://lonelybrand.com/blog/theda-bara-the-hollywood-marketing -machine.

37 “Silurians to Set Up Journalism Award,” New York Times, November 26, 1944, http://www .nytimes.com, accessed November 2, 2012.

38 Jack Harris, “An Informal History of the Hobo News,” Collier’s, October 6, 1945, 27. “People Who Read and Write,” New York Times, September 9, 1945, http://www.nytimes .com, accessed November 2, 2012.

39 J. William Hunt, “Across the Desk,” Cumberland Times, July 11, 1948, 5, 8.



40 “McCardell, Columnist, Author, Dies: Noted Writer Was Native of City; Was Local Newsman,” Cumberland Sunday Times, June 11, 1961, 3:21.

168 Notes to Pages 25–35

41 Kevin A. Boon, Script Culture and the American Screenplay (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008); Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), 27-28. Ours is reprinted from Tim Dirk’s filmsite review of the film, accessed on January 7, 2011: http://www.filmsite.org/voya.html. Dirk’s version differs only in minor detail from that of Jacobs.

42 Boon, Script Culture, 6. 43 Alfred A. Cohn, “A Sunlight Dumas: C. Gardner Sullivan, The Speed and Power King of Authorial Inceville,” Photoplay Magazine 9, no. 6 (May 1916): 145–146.

44 Julian Johnson, “The Shadow Stage,” Photoplay Magazine 9, no. 6 (May 1916): 112.



45 Epes Winthrop Sargent, “The Photoplaywright,” Motion Picture World 19, no. 1 (January 3, 1914): 282.



46 Qtd. in ibid.

47 The Editor 39 (January 25, 1914): 230.

48 Azlant, “Screenwriting for the Early Silent Film,” 246–249.



49 “Noted Authors to Write for Mutual,” Motion Picture World 19, no. 1 (January 3, 1914): 29.



50 James Slevin, On Picture Play Writing (Cedar Grove, NJ: Farmer, Smith, Inc., 1912).



51 Louella Parsons, How to Write for the “Movies” (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1916, preface.



52 Frances Taylor, Cinema Craftsmanship: A Book for Photoplaywrights (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920).

53 Richard Koszarski, “Making Movies,” in Hollywood: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Thomas Schatz (New York: Routledge, 2004), 43.

54 Anthony Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 49



55 Parsons, “The Glossary of the Photoplay,” How to Write for the “Movies,” 6–10.



56 Arthur W. Thomas, How to Write a Photoplay (Chicago: Photoplaywrights’ Association of America, 1914).



57 Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 1, 8.



58 Vachel Lindsay, “Photoplay Progress,” New Republic (February 17, 1917), 76.



59 Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 11.



60 “Alice Guy-Blaché,” American Women—Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ awhhtml/awmi10/silent_camera.html; “Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968,” National Women’s History Museum, http://www.nwhm.org/; “Alice Guy-Blaché,” http://www.britannica.com/.



61 Mark J. Price, “Silent Memories: Grandmother Wrote Photoplays in Early Days of Movies,” Akron Beacon Journal (January 27, 2003), http://www.welcome to silent movies.com.

62 Lynda Obst, “Oscars for Doorstops,” New York Times, May 18, 1997, http://www.nytimes .com. 63 Douglas Martin, “Frederica Sagor Maas, Silent-Era Scriptwriter, Dies at 111,” New York Times, January 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com, and Mike Barnes, “Silent Film Era Screenwriter Dies at 111,” Hollywood Reporter (January 6, 2012), http://www.hollywoodreporter.com. 64 The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). 65 Jenn Shreve, “The Shocking Frederica Sagor Maas,” Salon.com (August 13, 1999), http:// www.salon.com. 66 Charles Poladian, “‘Cloud Atlas’ Flops at the Box Office,” International Business Times (October 31, 2012), http://www.ibtimes.com.

Notes to Pages 36–44 169

2 Classical

Hollywood, 1928–1946



1 Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).



2 Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 219.



3 Lucy Fisher, “Introduction,” in American Cinema of the 1920s: Themes and Variations, ed. Lucy Fischer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 15.



4 Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 13–36.



5 Ibid., 15.



6 Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 19–21.



7 Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7.



8 Richard B. Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood 1929–1945 (New York: Blackwell, 2007), 51.



9 Raymond Chandler, Later Novels and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 1000.



10 In her book Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), Catherine Jurca disputes the critical consensus that 1939 was Hollywood’s greatest year. Instead, she argues persuasively that 1938 was the greatest year in classical Hollywood cinema.

11 Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema.

12 Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1.

13 Balio, Grand Design, 48. 14 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 1. 15 Schatz, The Genius of the System, 6. 16 Chandler, Later Novels and Other Writings, 994. 17 Leo C. Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 322.

18 J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 20.



19 Ibid., 126.

20 Frank Scheide, “The Mark of the Ridiculous and Silent Celluloid: Some Trends in American and European Film Comedy from 1894 to 1929,” in A Companion to Film Comedy, ed. Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 35. 21 Robert E. Sherwood, “Renaissance in Hollywood,” American Mercury 16, no. 64 (April 1929): 431, 433. 22 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 186–187. 23 See Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

24 Richard Fine, West of Eden: Writers in Hollywood, 1928–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 3.

25 John T. Matthews, “Faulkner and the Culture Industry,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51–52.

170 Notes to Pages 44–51 26 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 187. 27 Balio, Grand Design, 182.

28 Rob King, “’Sound Came Along and Out Went the Pies’: The American Slaptstick Short and the Coming of Sound,” in Horton and Rapf, A Companion to Film Comedy, 68.

29 Balio, Grand Design, 263–264. 30 Frances Marion, “Scenario Writing,” in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made, ed. Stephen Watts (New York: Dodge, 1938), 33, quoted in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 19.

31 Marion, “Scenario Writing,” in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 36.



32 Corrigan and White, The Film Experience, 360.

33 Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema, 151.

34 Blaise Cendrars, Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

35 Balio, Grand Design, 83.

36 Ian Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood, 1915–1951 (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 43.

37 Richard Fine, James M. Cain and the American Authors Authority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 40. 38 Tom Dardis, Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, and James Agee (New York: Scribner’s, 1976). See also Tom Dardis, “The Myth That Won’t Go Away: Selling Out in Hollywood,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 11 (1983): 167–171.

39 Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1970), 341, 338.

40 Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood, 165.

41 Ibid., 188–89.

42 Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 6.

43 Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), 47.

44 Fine, West of Eden, 100.

45 Ibid., 156.



46 Ibid., 157, 99.



47 John T. Matthews, “Faulkner and the Culture Industry,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 60, 65–69.

48 Balio, Grand Design, 57. 49 Fine, West of Eden, 157.

50 Ibid., 92, 107.

51 Leo C. Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 308–309. 52 Fine, West of Eden, 130–131. 53 Chandler, Later Novels and Other Writings, 1041. 54 Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema, 319. 55 Balio, Grand Design, 9, 85, 10.

56 Ibid., 83–84.

57 Fine, West of Eden, 92.

Notes to Pages 51–65 171 58 Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood, 50–51. 59 Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory, 169, 155. 60 Fine, West of Eden, 122.

61 Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, 2nd ed. (London: BFI Classics, 2012).

62 Fine, West of Eden, 234. 63 Chandler, Later Novels and Other Writings, 1000–1001.

3 

Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967



1 “Writing on spec” is the industry term for writing on “speculation”—writing original work not solicited and/or contracted in advance by a studio or production company.



2 Box office data is notoriously unreliable. But while the precise numbers vary, the basic trend does not. The decline after the war was steady and for over two decades irreversible. The figures cited here are based in part on U.S. Department of Commerce statistics, the Film Daily Year Book (volumes 92–118, for the years 1947–1961—see: http://onlinebooks. library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=filmdailyyrbk), and the discussion and analysis of box office and industry data by Thomas Schatz in Boom or Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 291–303.



3 The Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs, commonly referred to as the BMPA, operated under the guidance of the OWI, the Office of War Information, during the war. The studios adhered to the patriotic mission proposed by these agencies by making movies that supported the war effort. In exchange for such a service, studio executives and the New York–based moneymen who financed the industry expected some consideration after the war. But they didn’t get it. Instead, they got the blacklist and the Paramount Decision.



4 For more on the evolution of the script, see Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place (London: BFI, 1993), 54–63. Polan contends that Solt’s script was subjected to significant changes by the director Nicholas Ray and the films’ stars, Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.



5 A number of feature film writers worked on TV scripts as well. Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar for his script for In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1968), wrote for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Naked City, and Route 66. Bernard C. Schoenfeld, who wrote Macao (Josef von Sternberg, 1952) and a handful of crime films, made his living writing for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and Peter Gunn. The playwright Garson Kanin wrote the noir melodrama A Double Life (George Cukor, 1947) and the hit film comedy Adam’s Rib (Cukor, 1949); he got plenty of work on TV, including as the creator/writer of the series Mr. Broadway.



6 The mythos of Schwab’s was built on the urban legend of Lana Turner’s discovery, but most historians today contend that Turner was discovered not at Schwab’s but at the Top Hat Malt Shop.



7 The Screen Writers Guild became the Writers Guild of America (with two divisions, East and West) in 1954 to accommodate members writing for television and radio.



8 The committee at first expressed interest in nineteen Hollywood creative artists, but in the first round of hearings only ten were required to appear and testify. In addition to the Hollywood Ten, the committee publicly expressed interest in Bertolt Brecht (who, after embarrassing testimony in closed session left the United States), Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, Lewis Milestone, Larry Parks, Irving Pichel, Robert Rossen, and Waldo Salt.



9 Thomas was, within a year of the celebrated hearings, found guilty of embezzling government funds and sentenced to three years in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Among his fellow inmates there were Ring Lardner Jr. and Lester Cole. Thomas pled nolo

172 Notes to Pages 65–68 contendere, declining to take the stand at his trial. While parole was denied for all of the Ten, both Thomas and a fellow Red-baiter, the former congressman Andrew May (who was convicted on bribery charges stemming from a Defense Department scandal and served time in federal prison with Dalton Trumbo in Ashland, Kentucky), were paroled after serving less than a year. 10 Gordon Kahn, Hollywood on Trial (New York: Boni and Gaer, 1948), 189. Kahn’s book remains a very useful if decidedly one-sided compendium of who said and did what in the fall of 1947.

11 Bosley Crowther, “Light on Film’s Anti-Communist Move,” New York Times, December 7, 1947, 85.



12 Members of the committee assumed that Dmytryk, whose name was vaguely Eastern European, was Jewish. For the record, he wasn’t.



13 Scott’s memo to Dozier and Korner is reprinted in its entirety in Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (New York: Anchor Press, 1980), 441–444.



14 For an extended discussion of the development and release of Crossfire see Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle for Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 18–21. Dore Schary’s papers, which include the memos cited here, are housed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.



15 While the committee contended that Communist Party membership amounted to treason, a number of formerly blacklisted writers, directors, actors, and producers were first attracted to the Party in the 1930s when the Soviet Union was an ally. Many of those blacklisted cite as a principal reason for their interest in the Party domestic concerns about civil rights. In his blacklist memoir, Inside Out (New York: Knopf, 1996), Walter Bernstein makes explicit the connection between Party affiliation/membership and the civil rights movement—and then between the civil rights movement and Jewishness: “We were all urban, middle-class intellectuals shaped by the Depression and the war. About half of us were Jews, which did not seem to me to be disproportionate. This was where Jews belonged, wherever there was a struggle for human rights. This was what being a Jew meant” (134–135). Blacklisted screenwriter Guy Endore spoke for a significant percentage of those blacklisted in the forties and fifties when he reflected in 1964: “I wasn’t really a Communist. I didn’t agree with [all of the Party’s doctrines]. [What] united me with it was simply the fact that they represented the most extreme protest against what I saw going on in the world. . . . I was a Communist only in the sense that I felt it would stop war and it would stop racist feelings, that it would help Jews, Negroes and so on. I wasn’t a Communist in wanting the Communist Party to run the world or in wanting the ideas of Karl Marx to govern everything” (Guy Endore, Reflections of Guy Endore, UCLA Oral History project, 1964, 132 and 140).



16 Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 318, 441–444.



17 The Waldorf Statement was issued on December 3, 1947, by Eric Johnston, the president of the MPAA. The missive took its name from the famous hotel in New York City, the site of the meeting attended by nearly fifty of the studio’s West Coast executives and East Coast moneymen that ended with the crafting of the statement. The most telling line in the twopage press release is its second sentence: “We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ and we will not re-employ any of the 10 until such time he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.”

18 Kahn, Hollywood on Trial, 106–108.

19 Alvah Bessie’s and Albert Maltz’s statements were the only two admitted into evidence.

20 Kahn, Hollywood on Trial, 98–99. 21 Ibid., 84.

22 Ibid., 176–177.

Notes to Pages 68–81 173 23 Both Paxton and Hart received Oscar nominations, but neither won. George Seaton took the Academy Award for Best Writing, Screenplay, for his script for Miracle on 34th Street. 24 Abraham Polonsky, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, ed. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 115. 25 Poe was an accomplished screenwriter in his own right, specializing in adapting major works of stage and literary fiction to the screen. His credits include the Oscar-winning script for Around the World in Eighty Days (Michael Anderson, 1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), Lilies of the Field (Ralph Nelson, 1963), and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969). 26 Unlike Kazan, his former colleague at the Group Theater, Odets was for the rest of his life tortured by what he did at HUAC. 27 The speech is reprinted in its entirety in Dalton Trumbo, Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, ed. Helen Manfill (New York: M. Evans, 1970), 569–570. The speech was delivered on March 13, 1970. 28 A detailed discussion of Maltz’s reaction to Trumbo’s speech can be found in Victor Navasky’s Naming Names (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991), 388–401.

29 Speaking to Navasky about Maltz’s response to the speech, Trumbo argued: “What are you to do . . . about a homosexual caught by the FBI and given the choice of informing or being exposed—in a time when homosexuality was regarded differently than it is now? . . . It’s a choice I wouldn’t have wanted to make, and I’m not prepared to damn him. . . . Hate is just a goddamned unhealthy thing” (Naming Names, 392).



30 The film was banned in the fairly small-market states of Kansas, Maryland, and Ohio and in small, selected cities in New Jersey and Wisconsin. For more on the court cases attending these bans, see Edward De Grazia and Roger K. Newman, Banned Films: Movies, Censorship, and the First Amendment (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1982), 240–241.

31 Bosley Crowther gave the film a positive review but recommended leaving after the housemistress’s famous line, thus avoiding her voiceover postscript speaking to the film’s closing scene, which Crowther found “prudish and unnecessary.” Bosley Crowther, New York Times, September 28, 1956, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/ review?res=9505E7DF163EE03BBC4051DFBF66838D649EDE. 32 “Variable censorship” was a legal concept borrowed from important obscenity cases, mostly concerning serious literature (like James Joyce’s Ulysses). All films no longer had to be suitable for all audiences, hence the age-based classifications. The initial Voluntary Movie Rating System adopted in 1968 included only three designations: G, M, and R. All three depended upon parental judgment, not industry self-censorship. The X rating was not copyrighted and initially viewed as the sort of thing studio films would never get. 33 Polonsky, Tender Comrades, 48.

4 

The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 1 The American New Wave represents the third major evolutionary period for the screenplay. The first occurred during the silent era when a young movie industry wrestled with the vicissitudes of creating film narratives and filmmakers tracked narrative elements of their projects with rudimentary documents, such as shot lists, brief scenarios, and character lists. The second occurred across the late 1920s and early 1930s as the film industry retooled for sound, and the new challenges of sound generated a need for new writers familiar with the demands of dialogue, such as novelists and playwrights who flooded to Hollywood to cash in on the industry’s need to accommodate audio-based narratives. One might argue that the screenplay is currently entering a fourth transformative stage as the industry shifts to digital filmmaking.

174 Notes to Pages 81–92

2 Peter Graham with Ginnette Vincendeau, eds., The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (1968; repr., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.



3 Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra Stylo,” in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (1968; repr., New York: Doubleday, 2009), 22.



4 The first draft of Psycho was actually completed by James P. Cavanaugh, but Hitchcock never shared his version with Stefano; thus, we might assume that Cavanaugh’s literary influence over the final film is minimal. Cf. Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick, Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 58.



5 Ibid., 59.



6 Quoted in Terrence Rafferty, “Now Playing: Auteur vs. Auteur,” New York Times, October 22, 2006, late ed., final, sec. 2, 13.



7 Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 563.



8 Francis Vanoye, Scénarios modèles, modèles de scénarios (Paris : Nathan Université, 1999).



9 Jacques Rivette, interview with Carlos Clarens and Edgardo Cozarinksy, in Sight and Sound (Autumn 1974): 195.



10 bid., 196.



11 Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School, trans. Richard Neupert (London: Blackwell, 2003), 77.



12 Ginette Vincendeau, “Fifty Years of the French New Wave: From Hysteria to Nostalgia,” in Graham and Vincendeau, The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, 1.



13 “On the Road,” DGA Quarterly (Winter 2009): 65.



14 Astruc, “Avant-Garde,” 31.



15 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 52, 70, 70–71, 68, 68–69.



16 David Tully, Terry Southern and the American Grotesque (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 156.



17 Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997), 349.



18 Howard M. Frumes, “Surviving Titanic: Independent Production in an Increasingly Centralized Film Industry,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal (1999): 526.

19 Vincent Canby, “For Better or Worse, Film Industry Begins Ratings,” New York Times, November 1, 1968, 41. 20 Jody W. Pennington, The History of Sex in American Film (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2007), 39. 21 One of the code’s prohibitions concerned titles. The code reads: “Salacious, indecent, or obscene titles shall not be used.” 22 Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange (screenplay, n.d.), n.p. (personal collection of the author). 23 John Waters, Pink Flamingos and Other Filth: Three Screenplays by John Waters (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), viii.

24 The film was re-rated.

25 David Sadkin, “Theme and Structure: Last Tango Untangled,” Literature Film Quarterly 2, no. 2 (Spring 1974): 162.

26 Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: Tango,” New Yorker, October 28, 1972, 138.



27 John Huston, The Maltese Falcon (screenplay, final version, n.d.), 15 (personal collection of the author).

Notes to Pages 93–103 175 28 Robert Towne, Chinatown (screenplay, third draft, October 9, 1973), 43–44 (personal collection of the author).

29 Pauline Kael, “Onward and Upward with the Arts: ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’” New Yorker, October 21, 1967, 161.



30 Pauline Kael, Taking It All In (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 128.



31 William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist (screenplay, shooting script, 1973), n.p. (personal collection of the author).

32 Cf. Blatty’s interview in William Baer’s Class American Films: Conversations with the Screenwriters (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2007).

33 Screenplay credits: Shaft, Ernest Tidyman and John D. F. Black; Shaft’s Big Score, Tidyman; and Shaft in Africa, Tidyman and Stirling Silliphant. For Death Wish, Brian Garfield and Wendell Mayes. For Dirty Harry, Harry Julian and Rita M. Finks and Dean Riesner; Magnum Force, Finks, John Milius, and Michael Cimino; The Enforcer, Finks, Silliphant, and Riesner; and Sudden Impact, Finks and Joseph Stinson.



34 Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver (screenplay, shooting script, 1976), 1 (personal collection of the author).



35 Ibid., 111.



36 Richard A. Blake, Woody Allen: Profane and Sacred (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1995), 66.



37 Jon Favreau, Dinner for Five (season 2, episode 6), February 24, 2003 (IFC).



38 George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope (screenplay, revised fourth draft, January 15, 1976), n.p. (personal collection of the author).



39 A major turning point in the spec screenplay occurred in 1990 with Shane Black’s historic spec sale of The Last Boy Scout for $1.75 million, which generated a flurry of high-priced spec sales in the industry.

5 

The New Hollywood, 1981–1999



1 Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), xii, 2–3.



2 Edward Jay Epstein, The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality behind the Movies (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2010), 90.



3 Charles R. Slocum, “Residuals and the Price of Scripts,” Writers Guild of America West Newsletter, December/January 1988, 13. Residual payments are similar to royalties. They are payments received after the initial release of a movie. Thus writers receive residuals when a movie gets a cable or terrestrial TV play, or when copies are sold on video—or now on DVD or digital download.



4 Paramount was something of an exception as its parent corporation, Gulf & Western, streamlined and reinvented itself as Paramount Communications Inc. in 1989.

5 Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 213.

6 “The ‘Grade B’ Movie Makes a Big Comeback That Can Make You Money,” Scriptwriter News, May 11, 1981, 49.



7 Patrick McGilligan, ed., Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 120.



8 Ken Ireland, “Remembering Ken Russell,” http://trailersfromhell.com/blog/2011/11/29/ remembering-ken-russell/, posted November 29, 2011, accessed November 19, 2012.



9 Ken Russell, conversation with the author, March 2006.

176 Notes to Pages 104–109 10 Yannis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema: An Introduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 274. Tzioumakis cites figures obtained from http://www. boxofficeguru.com/s.htm.

11 Ibid., 247.

12 Michael Z. Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 13 Tzioumakis notes that “in 1991 alone, fifteen films by black filmmakers (not all independently financed and/or distributed) found their way to the theatres, a number that was higher than the number of such films released in the 1970s and 1980s together.” Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema, 269. 14 For example, there was a total of 166 MPAA feature film releases in 1994. “US Entertainment Industry: 2004 MPA Market Statistics,” Motion Picture Association Worldwide Market Research, http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/MPAA_US/ M050309M.pdf, accessed November 2, 2012, 14.

15 “Readers: The Writer’s Best Friend Can Be the Writer’s Worst Enemy. A confidential report on how to get your script past the agents and the producer’s first line of defense,” Scriptwriter News, June 29, 1981, 77.



16 Laura Schiff, “Agent’s Hot Sheet,” Creative Screenwriting, May/June 1998, 6.



17 Aljean Harmetz, “Thrills? Millions? ‘Spec’ Scripts Bring Big Bids,” New York Times, posted July 8, 1990, accessed September 6, 2012, 3.



18 Joseph McBride, e-mail message to author, September 15, 2012. McBride offers an estimate of the ratio of script purchases to movies produced in 1980: “I once did a study for my own interest at Daily Variety on how many projects were announced that became films eventually. I found that one out of four reached the screen. I was the keeper of a card file system I devised so that we weren’t reporting things we had reported earlier.” This ratio certainly increased in our period, and not in the writers’ favor.

19 Prince, A New Pot of Gold, 168.

20 Harmetz, “Thrills? Millions?,” 3.

21 Kenneth Winnikoff, “WGA, Producers Go to Wire as Strike Talks Remain Deadlocked,” Hollywood Reporter, March 1, 1988, 1

22 Marc Norman, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (New York: Harmony Books, 2007), 408.

23 McGilligan, Backstory 4, 118.

24 “Readers: The Writer’s Best Friend,” 77.



25 Michael Lent, “Beyond Syd Field: A New Spec Format,” Creative Screenwriting, March/April 1998, 5.



26 John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 81.



27 Peter Hanson, and Robert Herman, eds., Tales from the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 70.



28 Joseph McBride, “Frustrated Tyro Scripters Doubt H’wood ‘Needs’ Them,” Variety, November 26, 1980, 7.



29 “Readers: The Writer’s Best Friend,” 73.



30 Nancy Hendrickson, “Sleeping with the Enemy: What Writers Can Learn from Hollywood Readers,” Creative Screenwriting 6 (1999): 56.

31 Ibid.

32 Lent, “Beyond Syd Field,” 4.

33 Ibid.

Notes to Pages 109–115 177 34 The term “master-scene format” refers to scenes in a screenplay written as if the reader was viewing them in long shots. In other words we “see” everything in the scene, as with a “master” or establishing shot. The usual assumption is that the scene will be “covered” in detail by a series of shots when it is finally filmed, but the description of the action in the screenplay does not specify these unless absolutely necessary.

35 Frederick Palmer, Palmer Plan Handbook: Photoplay Writing Simplified and Explained by Frederick Palmer (Los Angeles: Palmer Photoplay Corporation, 1919), among others.

36 David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 28.

37 Average negative cost (ex. marketing) per feature in 1984: $14.4 million. Average negative cost in 1994: $34.3 million. The figure in 2000 was $54.8 million. “2004 MPA Market Statistics,” 19.



38 “Write Small,” Scriptwriter News, January 26, 1981, 2.



39 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-’n’-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 404.



40 Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (New York: Delacorte Press, 1979).



41 Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946).

42 Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 29.

43 Erik Bauer, “Sex, Violence and Spec-Scripts: Interview with Shane Black,” Creative Screenwriting 3, no. 3 (Winter 1996): 35.

44 Palmer, Palmer Plan Handbook, 15.

45 Richard Walter, Screenwriting: The Art, Craft, and Business of Film and Television Writing (New York: Plume, 1988), 117.

46 Scott Myers, “Scene Description Spotlight: Lethal Weapon,” at The Black List, http://blog. blcklst.com/category/shane-black/, posted by Scott Myers on January 5, 2012, accessed October 12, 2012. 47 Michael DeLuca, executive at New Line Cinema, quoted in Bernard Weintraub, “With Hollywood Money, Trust Someone under 30,” New York Times, July 18, 1995, http://www. nytimes.com/1995/07/18/movies/with-hollywood-money-trust-someone-under-30.html, accessed July 23, 2012, 2.

48 Shane Black, Lethal Weapon, revised draft, July 26, 1986, Script Collection, 36517, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA.

49 Ibid.

50 Bernard Weintraub, “The Talk of Hollywood; A Script Strikes Gold: $4 Million,” New York Times, July 25, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/25/movies/the-talk-of-hollywooda-script-strikes-gold-4-million.html, accessed July 23, 2012, 2.

51 “Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout),” from Best of Creative Screenwriting Interviews, 1994–2004, at The Black List, http://blog.blcklst.com/category/shane-black/, posted by Scott Myers, June 26, 2012, accessed October 12, 2012.

52 “Readers: The Writer’s Best Friend,” 79.



53 Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (London: Methuen, 1999), 399.



54 Andrew Horton, Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 134.

55 David Trottier, “The New Spec Style: Your Guide to the Latest in Formatting Rules and Rumors,” Screenwriting Center Newsletter, http://keepwriting.com/tsc/spec.htm, accessed October 24, 2012.

56 Lent, “Beyond Syd Field,” 5.

178 Notes to Pages 115–124 57 Ibid. 58 Lawrence Kasdan, Raiders of the Lost Ark, revised third draft, August 1979, http://www. dailyscript.com/scripts/RaidersoftheLostArk.pdf, accessed September 9, 2012. 59 Ehren Kruger, Transformers 3, initial draft, November 24, 2009, http://tformers.net/pdf/ tf-3-script-leaked.pdf, accessed September 9, 2012. 60 Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (London: Wallflower Press, 2009). Here I use Maras’s term “scripting” to imply a move away from the notion of the screenplay as “blueprint,” especially in the digital era, and to problematize an assumed and complete separation of the phases of conception and execution in the screenwriting process. 61 Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, The Empire Strikes Back, fifth draft, February 20, 1979, Script Collection, 30121, Margaret Herrick Library.

62 Christian Metz, “Trucage and the Film,” Critical Enquiry 3, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 657–675. This reflects much of Metz’s distinction between the pro-filmic and the cinematographic.



63 George Lucas, The Phantom Menace, fourth draft, June 13, 1997, salmon revisions, August 10, 1998, Script Collection, 33496, Margaret Herrick Library.



64 Kathryn Millard, “After the Typewriter: The Screenplay in a Digital Era,” Journal of Screenwriting 1, no. 1 (2010): 15.

65 Kevin Kelly and Paula Parisi, “Beyond Star Wars: What’s Next for George Lucas,” Wired, February 1997, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/fflucas_pr.html, accessed November 10, 2012. 66 A comparison with the Academy Award winner in 1980, Melvin and Howard, written by Bo Goldman, is perhaps less helpful, as Goldman’s idiosyncratic style clearly comes under Lent’s rubric of a different set of rules for the already produced.

67 Alan Ball, American Beauty, undated draft (bound as 1999), Script Collection, 33216, Margaret Herrick Library.



68 Joe Eszterhas, Jagged Edge, revised draft, November 2, 1984, revised through February 12, 1985, Script Collection, 24444, Margaret Herrick Library.



69 Joe Eszterhas, Jade, draft dated October 20, 1994, Script Collection, 36724, Margaret Herrick Library.



70 David Lynch, Blue Velvet, revised third draft, July 24, 1985, Script Collection, 18826, Margaret Herrick Library.



71 Audry Wells, Guinevere, undated draft (bound as 1999), Script Collection, 33761, Margaret Herrick Library.

72 Walter, Screenwriting. 168. 73 Appendix Table A. Households with a Computer and Internet: 1984 to 2009, Bureau of the Census, http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/, accessed September 23, 2012. 74 The Freelance Screenwriter’s Forum 2, no. 1 (1991). 75 Walter, Screenwriting, 168–175.

76 Rich Wilson, “Screenwriting + Computers,” Screenwrite now!, September/October 1994, 31.



77 Millard, “After the Typewriter,” 16.

78 “Ask The Expert” V 1.0.8, Final Draft 8, software documentation, accessed October 29, 2012.

79 Kim Masters, “Battle Royal,” Premiere 3, no. 6 (September-February 1989–90): 26. Joe Eszterhas was paid $1.25 million for his rewrite of Flashdance (1983) and for the screenplay for Jagged Edge (1985). His price went up to an astonishing $3 million for the erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992). This was the peak of his success, before he lost favor with the public and critics alike by repeating his story formula too many times, with Sliver (1993) and Jade (1995).

Notes to Pages 124–126 179 80 Linda Ruth Williams, “‘Meisters of Porno-Noir’: Key Players in the Cinematic Erotic Thriller,” in The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 150. Williams further notes that “Joe Eszterhas has made a lot of money writing the same film several times over” (149). 81 Norman, What Happens Next, 445. 82 Dana Kennedy, “Screenwriters Adjust to Being Bit Players Again,” New York Times, December 9, 2001, 3, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/movies/film-screenwriters-adjust-to-being-bit-players-again.html?src=pm accessed July 6, 2012, 1. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 James Ulmer, “Final Scene Scripted in Strike as Writers OK New Contract,” Hollywood Reporter, August 8, 1988, 25.

86 Del Reisman, “Notes on a Flight from JFK to LAX,” Writers Guild of America West Newsletter, February/March 1988, 7.



87 Ulmer, “Final Scene Scripted,” 25.

88 John Truby, “Why the Producers Are Winning and What Writers Can Do about It,” Creative Screenwriting 1, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 83.

6 

89 Chris Keyser and David Young, e-mail to WGAW members, July 24, 2012.

The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present

I wish to thank two excellent graduate students for their work in helping me to research and compile the material for this chapter: Ryan Bruce, for his discussions about envisioning the structure of the piece, and especially Kristen Rogers, not only for her thorough and imaginative suggestions, but also her uncanny ability to analyze and examine screenwriting throughout the last thirteen years. 

1 Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, 21st-Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 13.



2 Ibid., 23.



3 Box office figures vary from site to site. The figures cited here are from http://www.boxofficemojo.com/.



4 The first in the series was written by Peli; the second film by Michael Perry, Christopher Landon, and Tom Pabst; the third film by Landon and Peli; and the fourth film by Landon.



5 J. Hoberman, Film after Film, Or, What Became of 21st-Century Cinema? (London: Verso, 2012), 167–168.



6 Michael Karounos, “The Dark Knight: An Essay on Justice in the Age of Terror,” ChristianCinema.Com: Faith-Affirming and Family-Approved Entertainment, December 30, 2012, http://www.christiancinema.com/catalog/article_info.php?tPath=3&articles_id=5936.



7 John Pistelli, “The Dark Knight: Hollywood’s Terror Dream,” Dissident Voice: A Radical Newsletter in the Struggle for Peace and Social Justice, July 26, 2008, http://dissidentvoice. org/2008/07/the-dark-knight-hollywood%E2%80%99s-terror-dream.



8 Jeff Spross and Zack Beauchamp, “Guest Post: Liberalism’s Dark Knight and Christopher Nolan’s Defense of Civil Society,” Think Progress, Center for American Progress Action Fund, July 26, 2012, http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/07/26/581591/ dark-knight-christopher-nolan/?mobile=nc.

180 Notes to Pages 138-153

9 Christopher Nolan, “Writer/Director Christopher Nolan Talks about ‘The Dark Knight,’” interview with Rebecca Murray, About.com Entertainment: Hollywood Movies, February 17, 2013, http://movies.about.com/od/thedarkknight/a/darkknight70408.htm.

10 Hoberman, Film after Film, 278. 11 Scott W. Smith, blog entry, “Screenwriting Quote #165 (Paul Thomas Anderson) from Best of Creative Screenwriting Vol. 1 (1994–2000), Interviewed by Kristine McKenna and David Konow,” Screenwriting from Iowa . . . and Other Unlikely Places, March 28, 2012, http://screenwritingfromiowa.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/screenwriting-quote-165 -paul-thomas-anderson/.

12 Rob Mackie, “DVD Review: No Country for Old Men,” The Guardian, June 2, 2008, http:// www.guardian.co.uk /film/2008/jun/02/dvdreviews.thriller?INTCMP=SRCH.



13 Tom Shone, “The Coen Brothers: The Cartographers of Cinema,” The Guardian, January 27, 2011, http://guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan27/coen-brothers-interview-true-grit.



14 Greg Allen, “Interviewing Sofia Coppola about Lost in Translation,” Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Program, August 31, 2003, http://greg.org/archive/2003/08/31 /interviewing_sofia_coppola_about_lost_in_translation.html.

15 Paul Contos, “‘Sideways’ and Behind: An Interview with Writer/Director Alexander Payne,” GW Hatchet, October 28, 2004, http://www.gwhatchet.com/2004/10/28/ sideways-and-behind-an-interview-with-writerdirector-alexander-payne/?mode+print. 16 Ibid. 17 Edward Guthmann, “Manic Mythology/Coens’ ‘O Brother’ Blends Homer with Music, Gags, and Bizarre Characters,” San Francisco Chronicle. December 29, 2000, http://www. sfgate.com/movies/article/Manic-Mythology-Coens-outrageous-O-Brother-3302374.php. 18 Hoberman, Film after Film, 181.

19 Ibid., 182.

20 Kyle Munkittrick, “The Hidden Message in Pixar’s Films,” Discover: The Magazine of Science, Technology, and the Future, May 14, 2011, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2011/05/14/the-hidden-message-in-pixars-films/#.UObgA6X3BeU.

21 Patrick A. Horton, “Interview with Richard Walter, Chair of the UCLA Screenwriting Program,” screenplay.com, January 22, 2013, http://www.screenplay.com/t-RWalter_Interview. aspx.

Selected Bibliography Azéma, Marc, and Florent Rivère. “Animation in Palaeolithic Art: A Pre-Echo of Cinema.” Antiquity 86, no. 332 (2012). Azlant, Edward. The Theory, History, and Practice of Screenwriting, 1897–1920. Vol. 1. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. Baer, William. Classic American Films: Conversations with the Screenwriters. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2007. Balio, Tino. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Banks, Miranda. Scripted Labor: A History of American Screen Writing and the Writers Guild. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Beauchamp, Cari. Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Belton, John. American Culture, American Cinema. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Bernstein, Walter. Inside Out. New York: Knopf, 1996. Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Blake, Richard A. Woody Allen: Profane and Sacred. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1995. 181

182 Selected Bibliography

Boon, Kevin Alexander. Script Culture and the American Screenplay. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Caldwell, John Thornton. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960. New York: Anchor Press, 1980. Corrigan, Timothy, and Patricia White. The Film Experience: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2012. Crowther, Bosley. “Light on Film’s Anti-Communist Move.” New York Times, December 7, 1947. Dardis, Tom. “The Myth That Won’t Go Away: Selling Out in Hollywood.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 11 (1983): 167–171. ———. Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, and James Agee. New York: Scribner’s, 1976. Decherney, Peter. Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. De Grazia, Edward, and Roger K. Newman. Banned Films: Movies, Censorship, and the First Amendment. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1982. Dixon, Wheeler Winston, and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. 21st-Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Egri, Lajos. The Art of Dramatic Writing. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. Epstein, Edward Jay. The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality behind the Movies. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2010. Ezra, Elizabeth. George Méliès. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Field, Syd. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. New York: Delacorte Press, 1979. Fine, Richard. James M. Cain and the American Authors Authority. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. ———. West of Eden: Writers in Hollywood, 1928–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. Fisher, Lucy. “Introduction.” In American Cinema of the 1920s: Themes and Variations, ed. Lucy Fischer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Frumes, Howard M. “Surviving Titanic: Independent Production in an Increasingly Centralized Film Industry.” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal. 1999.

Selected Bibliography 183 Graham, Peter, and Ginnette Vincendeau, eds. The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks. 1968. Repr., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Hall, Sheldon, and Steve Neale. Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Hanson, Peter, and Robert Herman, eds. Tales from the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Hoberman, J. Film after Film, Or, What Became of 21st-Century Cinema? London: Verso, 2012. Horton, Andrew. Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Horton, Andrew, and Joan Magretta, eds. Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation. New York: Fredrick Ungar Publishers, 1981. How to Write a Photoplay. Chicago: Photoplaywrights’ Association of America, 1914. Hoxter, Julian. Write What You Don’t Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters. New York: Continuum Books, 2011. Hunter, Lew. Lew Hunter’s Screenwriting 434. New York: Perigee Books, 1993. Jacobs, Lewis. The Rise of the American Film. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old And New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jess-Cooke, Carolyn. Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Jewell, Richard B. The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929–1945. New York: Blackwell, 2007. Jurca, Catherine. Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Kael, Pauline. Taking It All In. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. Kahn, Gordon. Hollywood on Trial. New York: Boni and Gaer, 1948. Kennedy, Dana. “Screenwriters Adjust to Being Bit Players Again.” New York Times, December 9, 2001, 3. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/movies/film-screenwriters-adjust -to-being-bit-players-again.html?src=pm. Koszarski, Richard. “Making Movies.” In Hollywood: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Thomas Schatz. New York: Routledge, 2004. Lev, Peter. The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Lewis, Jon. Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle for Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Macmillan, 1915. Maras, Steven. Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. London: Wallflower Press, 2009. Marie, Michel. The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Trans. Richard Neupert. London: Blackwell, 2003.

184 Selected Bibliography

Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1970. Masson, Thomas Lansing. Our American Humorists. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1922. McGilligan, Patrick, ed. Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle, eds. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. London: Methuen, 1999. Metz, Christian. “Trucage and the Film.” Critical Enquiry 3, no. 4 (Summer 1977). Millard, Kathryn. “After the Typewriter: The Screenplay in a Digital Era.” Journal of Screenwriting 1, no. 1 (2010). Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ———. “The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter.” In The Wiley Blackwell History of American Film, ed. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon. 1979. Repr., Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Hill and Wang, 1991. Newman, Michael Z. Indie: An American Film Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Norman, Marc. What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting. New York: Harmony Books, 2007. Palmer, Frederick. Palmer Plan Handbook: Photoplay Writing Simplified and Explained by Frederick Palmer. Los Angeles: Palmer Photoplay Corporation, 1919. Parsons, Louella. How to Write for the “Movies.” Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1916. Pennington, Jody W. The History of Sex in American Film. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2007. Polonsky, Abraham. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. Ed. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Prince, Stephen. A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Raubicheck, Walter, and Walter Srebnick. Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Rosten, Leo C. Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941. Sadkin, David. “Theme and Structure: Last Tango Untangled.” Literature Film Quarterly 2, no. 2 (Spring 1974). Sadoul, Georges. George Méliès. Paris: Seghers, 1970. Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Selected Bibliography 185

———. “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”: The American Talking Film History and Memory, 1927–1949. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Schatz, Thomas. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. ———. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Slevin, James. On Picture Play Writing. Cedar Grove, NJ: Farmer, Smith, 1912. Slide, Anthony. Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Smyth, J. E. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Snyder, Blake. Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007. Sponsler, Claire. Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama In America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Tales from the Script. Grand River Films, Jade Tiger Films, 2009 (DVD). Taylor, Frances. Cinema Craftsmanship: A Book for Photoplaywrights. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920. Thompson, Kristin. Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Truby, John. “Why the Producers Are Winning and What Writers Can Do about It.” Creative Screenwriting 1, no. 2 (Summer 1994). Trumbo, Dalton. Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo. Edited by Helen Manfill. New York: M. Evans, 1970. Tully, David. Terry Southern and the American Grotesque. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Tzioumakis, Yannis. American Independent Cinema: An Introduction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Vanoye, Francis. Scénarios modèles, modèles de scénarios. Paris : Nathan Université, 1999. Walter, Richard. Screenwriting: The Art, Craft, and Business of Film and Television Writing. New York: Plume, 1988. Williams, Linda Ruth. The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commercials. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950.

Notes on Contributors Kevin Alexander Boon is an associate professor at Penn State University, where he coordinates the English program for the Mont Alto campus and oversees the Mont Alto Film Project. He is the author or editor of eleven books, including Script Culture and the American Screenplay. He is also an award-winning poet and short-story writer, a skilled composer and musician, a produced playwright and screenwriter, and the producer/director of the feature film Two Days Back (2011).

Mark J. Charney is a professor emeritus in Clemson University’s Department of Performing Arts, where he served both as director of theater and chair of English. He has published a critical analysis of the writing and life of southern novelist Barry Hannah and several articles on film and popular culture, especially about the television show Twin Peaks. He received the David Mark Cohen Award for playwriting for The Power Behind the Palette, and his work has been staged in Washington, D.C., New York, Jakarta, Bangkok, Connecticut, and California. He serves as the associate director of the National Critics Institute at the O’Neill Theatre Center, and as national director of both the 187

188 Notes on Contributors

Institute for Theatre Journalism and Advocacy and the Dramaturgy Initiative through the Kennedy Center’s American College Theatre Festival. Charney now serves as chair of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University.

J. Madison Davis has served as the senior professor in the Professional Writing Program of the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications since 1991, teaching fiction, nonfiction, and screenwriting. He was named a Gaylord Family Endowed Chair of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2008. His first novel, The Murder of Frau Schütz, was voted one of the five best first mysteries of 1988 by the Mystery Writers of America. Since then, he has published seven more novels, including The Vertigo Murders, Law and Order: Dead Line, and The Van Gogh Conspiracy. He has also published several nonfiction books, including Dick Francis; Conversations with Robertson Davies; Stanislaw Lem: A Reader’s Guide; The Shakespeare Name Dictionary (with A. Daniel Frankforter); and The Novelist’s Essential Guide to Creating Plot. He writes a column on international crime writing in fiction and film for World Literature Today.

Mark Eaton is a professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, where he teaches American literature and film studies. He also teaches frequently in the graduate program at Claremont Graduate University. He is coeditor of The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern World (2006), a finalist for the Arlin G. Meyer Prize. He is working on a book titled Suspending Disbelief: Religion and Pluralism in American Fiction after 1950. His work has also appeared in American Literary History, Boston Book Review, and Modern Fiction Studies, among other journals, and he has contributed to a number of collections including A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–1950 (2009) and A Companion to Film Comedy (2012).

Andrew Horton is the Jeanne H. Smith Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma, an award-winning screenwriter, and the author of thirty books on film, screenwriting, and cultural studies, including Screenwriting for a Global Market (2004), Henry Bumstead and the World of Hollywood Art Direction (2003), Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay (2nd ed., 2000), and The Films of Theo Angelopoulos (2nd ed., 1999). His screenplays include Brad Pitt’s first feature film, The Dark Side of the Sun, and the much-awarded Something in Between (1983, Yugoslavia, dir. Srdjan Karanovic). He has given screenwriting workshops around the world, including Norway, Germany, England, and the Czech Republic.

Notes on Contributors 189

Julian Hoxter is an associate professor of cinema and screenwriting coordinator in the Cinema Department of San Francisco State University. An award-winning educator and filmmaker, and a prize-winning screenwriter, Hoxter is a rewrite specialist, and story consultant for independent features. He is the author of Write What You Don’t Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters (2011). A second book on screenwriting, The Pleasures of Structure: Learning Screenwriting through Case Studies, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic.

Jon Lewis is a professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon

State University. He has published nine books, including Whom God Wishes to Destroy . . . Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood; Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry; and, most recently, Essential Cinema. Between 2002 and 2007, Lewis was the editor of Cinema Journal. He is the series editor for Behind the Silver Screen for Rutgers University Press.

Index Page numbers followed by f indicate figures. Allen, Jay Presson, 91 Allen, Woody, 98, 99, 148–149, 149, 161, 164 All Fall Down (1962), 76 Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), 3, 125, 165n4 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), 28 All the President’s Men (1976), 160 Almodóvar, Pedro, 163 Almost Famous (2000), 163 Als, Hilton, 105 Amadeus (1984), 161 AMC cable channel, 130 American Beauty (1999), 163; screenplay, 119 American Film Manufacturing Co., 22 American in Paris, An (1951), 158 American Mercury, 41 American Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 12, 16

Academy Awards: categories for, 155; first ceremony, 37; 1920s, 155; 1930s, 156; 1940s, 156–157; 1950s, 157–158; 1960s, 159–160; 1970s, 160–161; 1980s, 161–162; 1990s, 162–163; 2000s, 163–164 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), 75, 155; Herrick Library of, 3–4; Nicholl Fellowships of, 153 Actors’ Equity, 21 Affleck, Ben, 163 agencies. See talent agencies agents, rise of, 57 Albee, Edward, 78 Aldrich, Robert, 73 Alexander, Kevin, 187 Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV series, 1955–1962), 58 Algren, Nelson, 76 Alien (1979), 103, 114 All About Eve (1950), 157 191

192 Index American New Wave, 81, 86, 91, 173n1; changes associated with, 97; end of, 100 ancillary markets, 103, 104, 125. See also residuals market Anders, Allison, 105 Anderson, Maxwell, 46 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 105, 128, 138, 139 Anderson, Robert, 76, 78 Anderson, Wes, 105 Anhalt, Edna, 157 Anhalt, Edward, 157, 159 Anna Christie (1930), 34 Annie Hall (1977), 98, 99, 161 antisemitism, 66–67; and anti-antisemitic theme, 74; of congressional investigations, 7, 80; in Crossfire, 69–70; of HUAC, 67 Apartment, The (1960), 62, 76, 159 Apatow, Judd, 130 Apocalypse Now (1979), 98 Araki, Gregg, 105 Arcalli, Franco, 91 Argo (2012), 164 Arise My Love (1940), 156 Aristotle, 111 Arkusch, Alan, 94 Armat, Thomas, 12 Armstrong, Paul, 29 Arndt, Michael, 149, 151, 163 Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), 158 Arriaga, Guillermo, 82 Art of Dramatic Writing, The (Egri), 111 Art of the Moving Picture, The (Lindsay), 31 Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF), 104 Association of Motion Picture Producers, lifting of prohibitions by, 97–98 Astruc, Alexandre, 81–82, 85 At Long Last Love (1975), 99 attendance, movie theater: during Great Depression, 37–38; in late 1970s, 103 audience, movie-going. See box office auteur, screenwriter as, 52–55

auteur theory, 8, 81, 82; limitations of, 83; and screenplay form, 83; status of screenwriter in, 100 Author’s Guild, 34 authorship: attribution of, 86; default, 3 Avary, Roger, 105 AWARE, 83 Axelrod, George, 76 Azlant, Edward, 21 Baby Doll (1956), 76 Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, The (1947), 157 Bad and the Beautiful, The (1952), 158 Bad Girl (1931), 156 Balio, Tino, 38, 44, 50, 51 Ball, Alan, 119, 163 Bambi (1942), 152 Bangs, John Kendricks, 29 Banky, Vilma, 34 Bara, Theda, 24, 24f Bardem, Javier, 140 Bartel, Paul, 94 Barton Fink (1991), 43 Basic Instinct (1992), 120, 178n79 Bass, Ronald, 106, 162 Batman Begins (2005), 134 Batman series, 134, 137 Battleground (1949), 157 Battle of Gettysburg, The (1915), 27 Battleship (2012), 4 Bay, Michael, 115 Beauchamp, Zack, 135 Beaufoy, Simon, 164 Beautiful Mind, A (2001), 163 Beckett (1964), 159 Beery, Wallace, 34, 43 Before Sunset (2004), 149 Being John Malkovich (1999), 105 Benchley, Peter, 100 Benchley, Robert, 41, 46 Benedek, Laslo, 65 Benton, Robert, 78, 95, 161 Berg, Peter, 4 Berlin, Irving, 35 Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), 130

Index 193 Bernard, James, 158 Bernstein, Walter, 80, 172n15 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 91, 92, 162 Bessie, Alvah, 54, 64, 65 Best Years of Our Lives, The (1946), 42, 157 Beverly Hills Bar Assoc., 108 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), 90 Biberman, Herbert, 54, 64, 65 biblical epics, 18 Bigelow, Kathryn, 105, 129 Big Heat, The (1953), 72 Big House, The (1930), 34, 155 Big Knife, The (1955), 73–74 Big Love (TV series, 2006–2011), 130 Big Sleep, The (1946), 39 Bird, Brad, 151 Birds, The (1963), 95 Birinsky, Leo, 95 Birmingham, George A., 29 Birth of a Nation, The (1915), 27, 29, 32, 91 Biskind, Peter, 85 Bismuth, Pierre, 163 Black, Dustin Lance, 164 Black, Shane, 111, 112–113, 114, 121, 124 Blackboard Jungle, The (1955), 65 Black Dahlia murder case, 7, 58 black audiences, 105 black filmmakers, 105, 176n13 blacklist, in entertainment industry, 7, 54, 56, 64–74, 83, 171n3; and Communist Party membership, 66; consequences of, 65; end to, 74; and progressive projects, 70; regulatory effect of, 57; writers on, 64 Blair Witch Project, The (1999), 128, 133, 134; innovative format of, 131; screenplay, 131f Blake, Michael, 162 Blake, Richard A., 99 Blatty, William Peter, 96, 97, 160 Bloch, Robert, 82 Blockade (1939), 64 blockbusters, 100; increasing length of, 130; in late 1970s, 103; mainstream, 99; rise of, 85; superhero films as, 134 Blood Feast (1963), 95 Blood for Dracula (1974), 90

Blood on the Sun (1945), 64 Blood Simple (1984), 105 Bloody Mama (1970), 94 blueprint: preproduction, 16; screenplay as, 116, 178n60 Blue Velvet (1986), 105; screenplay, 120–121 Blumberg, Stuart, 149 B-movies, 87, 103 BMPA, 57 Boal, Mark, 164 Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), 90 Body and Soul (1925), 35 Body and Soul (1947), 70, 71f; story, 70–72 Boehm, Sidney, 72 Bogart, Humphrey, 58, 60f, 171n4 Bogdanovich, Peter, 99 Bolt, Robert, 159 Bonnie and Clyde (1967), 78, 81, 95f, 97; review of, 94–95 Boogie Nights (1997), 105 Boon, Kevin Alexander, 8 Boorman, John, 91 Booth, Charles G., 157 Booth, Edwin, 17 Bordwell, David, 110, 111 Bosworth, Hobart, 17 Boulle, Pierre, 75, 158 Bow, Clara, 34, 35 Box, Muriel, 157 Box, Sydney, 157 box office: and American New Wave, 100; data, unreliability of, 171n2; declining, 87; postwar decline, 57 Boyens, Philippa, 163 Boys Town (1938), 156 Boyz N the Hood (1991), 105 Brackett, Charles, 43, 46, 61, 64, 157, 158 Brackett, Leigh, 117 Brandon, F. Marion, 29 Brave One, The (1956), 75, 158 Breaking Away (1979), 161 Breaking Bad (TV series, 2008–2013), 130 Breathless (1960), 98 Breen, Joseph, 40, 66, 87 Breen, Richard, 158

194 Index Brick Foxhole, The (Brooks), 65 Brickman, Marshall, 161 Bride of Frankenstein (1935), 95 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957), 158; Academy Award for, 75 Briley, John, 161 Broder, Knurland, Webb, Uffner, 106 Brokeback Mountain (2005), 163 Broken Blossoms (1919), 35 Broken Hearts (1926), 30 Broken Lance (1954), 158 Brooks, James L., 114, 161 Brooks, Louise, 35 Brooks, Mel, 160 Brooks, Richard, 65, 159 Brown, Harry, 158 Brown, Roland, 51 Browne, Emerson, 23 Browning, Tod, 95 Buchman, Sidney, 50, 156 Buckalew, Bethel, 88 Buck-Morss, Susan, 19 Buhle, Paul, 72, 80 Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs (BMPA), 171n3 Burke, Edwin J., 156 Burnett, W. R., 46 Bush, Pres. George W., 134 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), 114, 160 Butler, Frank, 157 Cabaret (1972), 91 Cabbage Fairy, The (1894), 32 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (1920), 95 cable television, 102; networks, 130; sex and violence in, 35; transfer of quality drama to, 9 Caesar, Arthur, 156 Caged Heat (1974), 94 Cain, James M., 46, 47, 49 Caldwell, John Thornton, 10 Call of the Drum, The (1912), 32 Cameron, James, 102 Campion, Jane, 162 Candidate, The (1972), 160

Cannibal Holocaust (1980), 97 Cannon Films, 102 Cantor, Eddie, 68 capitalism, gangster, 73 Capra, Frank, 50 Carnal Knowledge (1971), 90 Carolco Pictures, Inc., 101 Carpenter, John, 103 Carson, Robert, 156 Casablanca (1942), 98, 157 Cassavetes, John, 87 Castle, William, 95 Catch-22 (1970), 91 Cavanaugh, James P., 174n4 Cavett, Frank, 157, 158 Cendrars, Blaise, 46 censorship, 28; Hollywood, 31; regulatory effect of, 57; “variable,” 79, 173n30. See also Production Code Chabrol, Claude, 85 Champ, The (1931), 34, 156 Chandler, Raymond, 39, 40, 46, 47, 49, 54 Chaplin, Charlie, 41, 43, 44, 155 character arc, 45 Chariots of Fire (1981), 161 Charlie’s Angels (2000), 124 Charney, Mark J., 9, 187–188 Chayefsky, Paddy, 83, 158, 160 Cheat, The (1915), 35 Chicago Tribune, 22 Chinatown (1974), 92, 93f, 94, 98, 160; violence in, 93–94 Cholodenko, Lisa, 149 Christian films, independent, 18 Chronicle (2012), 128, 134 Cider House Rules, The (1999), 163 Cimarron (1931), 156 Cimino, Michael, 81, 100, 103 cinema. See film Cinema Craftsmanship (Patterson), 30 Circus, The (1928), 155 Citizen Kane (1941), 49, 98, 139, 156 City Lights (1931), 41 Civilization (1916), 27, 28 civil rights movement, 66 Clark, Alfred, 14

Index 195 Clark, Bob, 106 Clark, T.E.B., 158 Clerks (1994), 105 Clockwork Orange, The (1971), 88, 89f, 90, 94, 98; scene from, 88–90 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), 103 Cloud Atlas (2012), 35 Cloverfield (2008), 128, 133, 134 Cody, Diablo, 149, 164 Coen, Ethan, 105, 128, 138, 139, 141, 142, 149, 162, 164 Coen, Joel, 105, 128, 138, 139, 141, 142, 149, 162, 164 Cole, Lester, 54, 64, 65, 171–172n9 Collings, Pierre, 156 Columbia Pictures, 102 comedy: “anarchistic,” 45; and coming of sound, 6; Keystone Kops, 13; Marx Brothers, 44; romantic, 39; slapstick, 39; wordplay in, 44–45 comic strips, 19 Coming Home (1978), 83, 161 commodification, of screenwriting, 109 communication: new technologies of, 127–128; nonverbal, 41 Communist Party membership, and HUAC, 172n15 computer: in screenplay production, 105; software, 122, 153 Comstock, Anthony, 29 Condon, Bill, 163 Conrad, Joseph, 49 “continuity script,” 15 Conversations of a Chorus Girl (McCardell), 21 Cooper, Natalie, 105 Coppola, Francis Ford, 58, 87, 94, 98, 99, 160 Coppola, Sofia, 9, 128, 143, 146, 163 copyright, rules for, 18 Corman, Roger, 94, 95 Corrigan, Timothy, 36, 46 Cosmatos, George, 102 Costa-Gavras, 161 Country Girl, The (1954), 158

Courier font, 123 coverage reports, 108–109 Coward, The (1915), 27f Cox, Alex, 105 crafts, in motion picture production, 1 Crash (2005), 163 Crawford, Joan, 35, 48, 48f Creative Artists Agency (CAA), 8, 106, 124 Creative Screenwriting, 109, 110, 111; consulting services of, 111 credits, screen, unfair assigning of, 50, 51 crime film: American gangsters in, 73; moneyed interests in, 72–73; money metaphor in, 71; as progressive political allegory, 7; used for progressive critique, 70 critics: auteurist, 8; film, 29; French film, 82; of Pauline Kael, 8, 91, 94, 96 Crossfire (1947), 7, 65–66, 66f, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74; story, 65–66 Crowe, Cameron, 163 Crowther, Bosley, 65 Crying Game, The (1992), 162 Cumberland Times, 25 Cummings, Irving, 21 Curse of the Werewolf, The (1961), 95 Curtiz, Michael, 98 Dalrymple, Ian, 156 Damon, Matt, 163 Dances with Wolves (1990), 162 Dane, Clemence, 157 Dangerous Liaisons (1988), 162 Dano, Paul, 138 Dark Knight, The (2008), 128, 134, 135, 135f, 138, 140; screenplay, 136–137 Dark Knight Rises, The (2012), 134 Dark Knight series, 129 Darling (1965), 159 Davenport, Harry, 21 Daves, Delmer, 64 Davies, Marion, 28 Davis, J. Madison, 5, 188 Davis, Valentine, 157 Dawn Patrol, The (1930), 156 Day, Doris, 85

196 Index Day of the Locust, The (West), 47 Day of the Locust, The (1975), 83 Day the Earth Stood Still, The (1951), 58 Dayton, Jonathan, 149 Dead Poets Society (1989), 162 Death Race 2000 (1975), 94 Deathsport (1978), 94 Death Wish (1974), 98 Death Wish II (1982), 102 de Concini, Ennio, 159 Defiant Ones, The (1958), 158 Dehn, Paul, 158 Deitch, Donna, 105 Dekker, Fred, 124 Deliverance (1972), 91, 94 Delpy, Julie, 149 DeMille, Cecil B., 27 Demme, Jonathan, 94 Denton, Justin, 4 Deodato, Ruggero, 97 De Palma, Brian, 99 Departed, The (2006), 163 Derek, John, 58 Descendants, The (2011), 164 Desert Hearts (1986), 105 Designing Women (1957), 158 dialogue: with introduction of sound, 6, 37; in The Long Kiss Goodnight, 114; in silent film, 31; in sound films, 41 Diamond, I.A.L., 62, 76, 159 Diamond from the Sky, The (1913–1916), 21–22 Dickey, James, 91 Dickson, William, 12, 13, 15, 16 Dieterle, William, 18, 64 digital era, 9; production technologies in, 121; special effects in, 117, 118; stylistic development in, 120 digital filmmaking, 8, 130; newly affordable, 104; shifts to, 173n1 Diller, Barry, 107 Dirty Harry (1971), 98 Disney/Pixar family values, 151–152 distribution technologies, newly affordable, 104 Divorce, Italian Style (1962), 159

Dixon, Wheeler Winston, 130 Django Unchained (2012), 164 Dmytryk, Edward, 7, 54, 64, 65, 66, 69 Docter, Pete, 151 Dr. Strangelove (1964), 76 Doctor Zhivago (1965), 159 Dog Day Afternoon (1975), 160 Doherty, Thomas, 39, 40 Donahue, Heather, 131 Donner, Richard, 137 Double Indemnity (1944), 39, 49, 61 Douglas, Melvyn, 68 Douglas, Nathan E., 158 Dowd, Nancy, 161 Dozier, William, 65, 66, 67 Dracula (1931), 45, 95 Dressler, Marie, 34 Driving Miss Daisy (1989), 162 Duck Soup (1933), 39, 44, 45f Dudley, Marjorie, 51 Dunaway, Faye, 95f Dunne, Phillip, 64 DVDs, 130; running times increased on, 130 Easy Rider (1969), 8, 84–88, 85f, 90, 96; innovative screenplay of, 86 Eaton, Mark, 6, 188 economics of moviemaking, 101, 125; ancillary markets in, 104; and black audiences, 105; increasing budgets, 103; independent films in, 104, 105; and market for screenwriting, 106; polarization of, 103; and rise of talent agencies, 106; and risk-averse products, 102–103; in twenty-first century, 132 Edison, Thomas, 12; comic films released by, 15; surviving films from, 13 Edison Manufacturing, 12, 25; story films of, 18 Egri, Lajos, 111 Eisner, Michael, 107 Elmer Gantry (1960), 159 Endore, Guy, 172n15 Enforcer, The (1976), 98 Englebach, David, 102

Index 197 entertainment, modern: Disney/Pixar family values, 151–152; found-footage films, 131–134; indies, 143–151; marketplace, 127–129; new formats, 129–131; new markets, 129–131; and superheroes, 134–138 Ephron, Nora, 145 Epstein, Julius J., 157 Epstein, Philip G., 157 Essentials of Screenwriting (Walter), 153 Estabrook, Howard, 156 Eszterhas, Joe, 5, 120, 121, 124, 178n79, 179n80 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), 163 Executon of Czolgosz (1901), 14 Exodus (1960), 74 Exorcist, The (1973), 96, 160; scene from, 96–97 Ezra, Elizabeth, 19 Face in the Crowd, A (1957), 7, 79 Faces (1968), 87 Faludi, Susan, 135 Fargo (1996), 162 Fargo, James, 98 Faris, Valerie, 149 Farnham, Joseph, 155 Farrow, John, 158 Fate of the Child, The (1916), 22 Father Goose (1964), 159 Faulk, John Henry, 83 Faulkner, William, 44, 46, 47–48, 48, 49 Faxon, Nat, 164 feature films: costs of production for, 110, 177n37; first, 17–18 Feiffer, Jules, 90 Fellowes, Julian, 163 Female Trouble (1974), 90 Ferber, Edna, 42 Field, Syd, 25, 109, 111, 123 film: “auteur,” 82; as authorless text, 52; cultural influence of, 39; digitalization of, 130; expanded context of, 153; gangster, 45; horror, 45, 95–97; introduction of, 199; multi-reel, 18; omnipresence of,

153; sound, 41; transition from silent to sound, 43; women’s role in, 32 Film after Film (magazine), 133 film industry: changes in, 102; entrepreneurial model of, 60; factory system in, 31; government scrutiny of, 54; during Great Depression, 36; monopolistic practices of, 38; in 1980s, 103; overlords of, 65; postwar regulation in, 7; revitalization of, 91; and Screen Writers Guild, 64; and television’s arrival, 38; vertically integrated, 36, 38. See also studio system filmmakers: black, 105, 176n13; early, 18 filmmaking: digital, 104; impact of digital effects on, 118–119, 119f. See also digital era film noir, 60, 61 Film Threat (magazine), 124 Final Draft program, 122, 153 Finding Nemo (2003), 151 Fine, Richard, 43 Fink, Rita M., 98 First Blood (1982), 101 Fischer, Terence, 95 Fitzgerald, Edith, 48 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 46, 47, 51 Flame and the Arrow, The (1950), 83 flashbacks, 37, 61 Flashdance (1983), 178n79 Flesh (1968), 90 Flesh and the Devil (1927), 5, 34 Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), 90 Fletcher, Geoffrey, 164 Fonda, Peter, 84, 85, 86 Fool There Was, A (1915), 23–24, 23f Foote, Horton, 76, 159, 161 Force of Evil (1951), 70, 72 Ford, John, 41, 50 Foreman, Carl, 75, 158 Forrest Gump (1994), 162 Fortune magazine, 46 48 Hrs. (1982), 107, 114 Fosse, Bob, 91 Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 130 Foster, Lewis, 156 Fowler, Gene, 51

198 Index Fox, 38 Foy, Eddie, 21 Frank, Fredric M., 158 Frankenheimer, John, 76 Frankenstein (1931), 45, 95 freelance development paradigm, 9 freelance market, 4, 5, 7, 106 Freelance Screenwriter’s Forum, The (magazine), 122 French Connection, The (1971), 160 French New Wave, 8, 81, 83–84, 85, 86, 98 Freund, Karl, 95 Friedkin, William, 97, 99, 120 Froeschel, George, 157 From Here to Eternity (1953), 158 Frumes, Howard M., 87 Fuchs, Daniel, 158 FX cable channel, 130 Gable, Clark, 49 Gaghan, Stephen, 163 Gale, Zona, 29 Gandhi (1982), 161 Garbo, Greta, 34 Garfield, Brian, 98 Garfield, John, 71f Gas, Food Lodging (1992), 105 gatekeeping, Hollywood, 108, 109 Gaumont, Léon, 32 Gay Life, The (McCardell), 21 Gelbart, Larry, 106 Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), 7, 67, 69–70, 74; dialogue from, 69–70; story of, 68–69 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Loos), 34 Germi, Pietro, 159 Gerson, Daniel, 151 Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), 21 Ghost (1990), 162 Giannetti, Alfredo, 159 Gibney, Sheridan, 156 Gibson, Mel, 112f Gigi (1958), 158 Gillespie, Craig, 149 Gish, Lillian, 34 Glazer, Benjamin, 155, 156

Glover, Danny, 112f Godard, Jean-Luc, 98 Goddard, Drew, 133 Godfather, The (1972), 94, 98, 160 Godfather Part II, The (1974), 98, 160 Gods and Monsters (1998), 163 Go Fish (1994), 107 Going My Way (1944), 157 Golden, James, 160 Goldman, Bo, 160, 161, 178n66 Goldman, William, 114, 160 Goldsman, Akiva, 163 Gomez, Rhonda, 107 Gondry, Michel, 163 Gone with the Wind (1939), 39, 156 Goodman, Daniel Carson, 29, 30 Good Will Hunting (1997), 163 Gore, Chris, 124 Gosford Park (2001), 163 Gothic (1986), 103 Gottlieb, Carl, 100 Graduate, The (1967), 79 graduate programs, in screenwriting, 153 Grahame, Gloria, 171n4 Grant, Cary, 42f Grapes of Wrath, The (1940), 6f Great Depression, 129, 149; film industry during, 36; movie attendance during, 37–38; screenwriting during, 46 Greatest Show on Earth, The (1952), 158 Great McGinty, The (1940), 52, 156 Great Train Robbery, The (1903), 26, 91 Green, Walon, 99 Greene, Clarence, 159 Griffin, Eleanore, 156 Griffith, D. W., 26, 27, 29, 34, 91 Group Theater, 73 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), 159 Guillermin, John, 98 Guinevere (1999), screenplay, 121 Guthmann, Edward, 149–150 Guy, Alice, 32 Gypsy’s Trust, The (1916), 22 Haggis, Paul, 163 Hairspray (1988), 90

Index 199 Halloween (1978), 103 Hamilton, Ian, 46 Hammett, Dashiell, 46 Hampton, Christopher, 162 Hangin’ with the Homeboys (1991), 105 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), 161 Hanson, Curtis, 163 Harbou, Thea von, 33, 33f Harder They Fall, The (1956), 79 Harder They Fall, The (Shulberg), 79 Harlan, Renny, 113 Harry Potter series (2001–2011), 129 Hart, Moss, 68 Hart, William S., 27 Hartley, Hal, 105 Harwood, Ronald, 163 Hatchett, G. W., 146 Hauben, Laurence, 160 Havoc, June, 68 Hawke, Ethan, 149 Hawks, Howard, 48, 49, 84 Haynes, Todd, 105 Hays, Will, 48–49 Hays Office. See Production Code Hayward, Bill, 85–86 HBO cable network, 130 Hearst, William Randolph, 19, 28, 50 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 49 Heaven’s Gate (1980), 81, 100, 103, 110 Hecht, Ben, 20, 41, 44, 46, 49, 155, 156 Heerman, Victor, 156 Helgeland, Brian, 163 Hellman, Lillian, 46 Hell’s Hinges (1916), 27 Henry, Buck, 79, 91 Herald, Heinz, 156 Herbert, F. Hugh, 76, 77, 78 Herczeg, Geza, 156 Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), 156 Herrick, Margaret, Library, of Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, 3–4 Hill, Walter, 103, 107, 114 Hilton, James, 157 His Girl Friday (1940), 42 history of screenwriting, 3, 4–5 Hitchcock, Alfred, 25, 76, 82, 95

Hobbit, The: An Unexpected Journey (2012), 130 Hoberman, J., 133, 138, 152 Hobo News, 25 Hoeber, Erich, 4 Hoeber, Jon, 4 Holden, William, 61f, 63, 77f Hollaman, Richard, 17, 31 Hollywood: boom years, 37; censorship system of, 31, 39; “classical,” 6; in economic decline, 42; gatekeeping in, 108; Golden Age of, 38–44, 55; and government interference, 38; greatest single year of, 39; Jews in, 7; 1960s, 74–79; and Paramount Decision, 60–63; postclassical, 81; postwar era in, 56; writers in, 6–7. See also New Hollywood Hollywood Nineteen, 65, 67, 171n8 Hollywood on Trial (Kahn), 65 Hollywood Renaissance, 88 Hollywood Reporter, 125 Hollywood Ten, 64, 65, 172n17; indictments sought for, 68 Hooker, Rickard, 160 Hooper, Tom, 130 Hopper, Dennis, 8, 84–88, 85, 85f, 86 horror films, 45; and American paranoia, 128; commercial appeal of, 14; explicit depiction in, 96; as studies in visual terror, 97; in twenty-first century, 131 Horse Feathers (1932), 44 Horton, Andrew, 109, 114, 188 Horwitz Passion Play, The (1897), 17 Hospital, The (1971), 160 Hours and Times, The (1991), 105 House of Cards (Netflix series, 2013), 130 House on 92nd Street, The (1945), 157 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 7, 54; antisemitism of, 67–68; blacklist initiated by, 64; cold war waged by, 67; cooperation with, 7, 73; witnesses blackmailed and bullied by, 75. See also blacklist Howard, Sidney, 46, 156 Howards End (1992), 162 How the West Was Won (1963), 159

200 Index How to Write and Sell Film Stories (Marion), 45 How to Write a Photoplay (Thomas), 30–31 How to Write for the “Movies” (Parsons), 30 Hoxter, Julian, 189 Hudson, Rock, 85 Hughes, Dorothy B., 58 Hughes, Howard, 31 Human Comedy, The (1943), 157 Hunger Games series, The (2012, 2013), 129 Hunter, Ian McLellan, 158 Hunter, Lew, 109 Hurt Locker, The (2009), 129, 164 Huston, John, 92, 157 Huxley, Aldous, 46 ICM. See International Creative Management idea theft, 126 Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975), 88 IMAX screens, 129–130 I’m No Angel (1933), 42, 42f In a Lonely Place (1950), 7, 58–60, 60f, 62 Ince, Thomas, 26–28, 28, 30 In Cold Blood (1967), 65 Incredibles, The (2004), 151 “indecency,” 90. See also Production Code Independent Feature Project (IFP), 104 independent film producers, 87, 101 independent film production, 96, 104; boom, 104–105; in 1980s, 8, 103; in 1990s, 8 “Indian plays,” 31 industry regulation, in postwar era, 7. See also film industry Informer, The (1935), 156 Inge, William, 76, 159 Inside Out (Bernstein), 172n15 International Creative Management (ICM), 8, 106, 124 internet marketing, 128 Internet Movie Database, 30 Interrupted Melody (1955), 158 intertitles, 1, 6, 41 In the Heat of the Night (1967), 159, 171n5 Intolerance (1916), 27, 29, 31, 35

Invaders, The (1942), 157 Invisible Man, The (1933), 95 Ireland, Dan, 103 Irving, John, 163 Irving, Washington, 16 Irwin, May, 13–14 Isherwood, Christopher, 46 I Spit on Your Grave (1978), 88 Italian, The (1915), 27 It Could Happen to You (1937), 64 It Happened One Night (1934), 39, 50, 156 Jaccard, Jacques, 22 Jackson, Peter, 130, 163 Jade (1995), 124, 178n79; screenplay, 120 Jaffe Art Films, 30 Jagged Edge (1985), 178n79; screenplay, 120 Jarmusch, Jim, 105 Jaws (1975), 100, 103 Jazz Singer, The (1927), 41 Jefferson, Joseph, 16–17 Jefferson, Thomas, 17 Jenkins, C. Francis, 12 Jewell, Richard, 38–39, 46 Jewishness: civil rights movement and, 172n15; and HUAC, 64 Jewison, Norman, 171n5 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 161, 162 Joe the King (1999), 121; screenplay, 121 Johansson, Scarlett, 143, 144f Johnson, Joseph, 49 Johnson, Nunnally, 6, 7, 40, 46, 47, 49, 50 Johnston, Eric, 64, 67 Jones, Robert, 161 Joost, Henry, 128 Jordan, Neil, 162 José, Edward, 23 journalism, yellow, 19 Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), 76, 159 Julia (1977), 161 Juno (2007), 149, 164 Kael, Pauline, 8, 91, 94, 96 Kahn, Gordon, 65 Kalin, Tom, 105 Kalmar, Bert, 45

Index 201 Kanin, Michael, 157 Karounos, Michael Kasdan, Lawrence, 115, 117 Kaufman, Charlie, 105, 163 Kaufman, George S., 46 Kaye, Danny, 68 Kazan, Elia, 7, 68, 73, 76, 79 Keaton, Buster, 44 Kelley, William, 161 Kenton, Erle C., 95 Kershner, Irvin, 117 Keystone Kops comedies, 13 Khouri, Callie, 162 Kids Are All Right, The (2010), 149 King Kong (1933), 45 King’s Speech, The (2010), 164 Kiss, The (1896), 13–14 Kitty Foyle (1941), 64 Klavan, Andrew, 134 Klein, Naomi, 135 Koch, Howard, 157 Korner, Charles, 65, 66 Koszarski, Richard, 30 Kotcheff, Ted, 101 Kozoll, Michael, 101 Kraly, Hanns, 155 Kramer, Stanley, 76 Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), 161 Krasna, Norman, 157 Kriemhilde’s Rache (1924), 33 Kruger, Ehren, 115, 117 Kubrick, Stanley, 74, 76, 88, 89, 90, 97, 99 Kurtzman, Alex, 116 L.A. Confidential (1997), 163 Ladies Love Hats (1935), 21 Lady Eve, The (1941), 39, 42 Laemmle, Carl, 26 L’Affaire Dreyfus (1899), 18, 19 Lair of the White Worm (1988), 103 Lamorisse, Albert, 158 Lang, Fritz, 33, 33f, 72 Langley, Noel, 51 Lardner, Ring Jr., 54, 64, 157, 160, 171–172n9 Larner, Jeremy, 160

Lars and the Real Girl (2007), 149 Last Action Hero (1993), 113 Last Boy Scout, The (1991), 113 Last Emperor, The (1987), 162 Last Tango in Paris (1972), 91, 92f, 97 Latham, Woodville, 12 Lavender Hill Mob, The (1952), 158 Lawson, John Howard, 64, 65 Lean, David, 75 Ledger, Heath, 135f Lee, Harper, 76 Lee, Rowland V., 95 Lee, Spike, 105 Lehman, Ernest, 76 Lelouch, Claude, 159 Leni, Paul, 95 Lent, Michael, 107, 109, 115 Leonard, Joshua, 131 Lerner, Alan Jay, 158 Lethal Weapon (1987), 111, 112f, 113; screenplay, 113–114 Letter to Three Wives, A (1949), 157 Let the Right One In (2008), 2, 2f Levien, Sonya, 158 Levinson, Barry, 106 Lewis, Cecil, 156 Lewis, Herschell Gordon, 95, 96 Lewis, Jon, 7, 189 Libin, Zalmen, 30 Life of an American Fireman, The (1903), 26 Life of Christ, The (1906), 32 Life of Emile Zola, The (1937), 18, 156 Lincoln (2012), 130 Lindqvist, John Ajvide, 2 Lindsay, Vachel, 31 Linklater, Richard, 105, 149 Lion in Winter, The (1968), 160 Lion’s Roar, The (1928), 44 Lipscomb, W. P., 156 Little Caesar (1931), 45 Little Miss Sunshine (2006), 149, 163 Little Women (1933), 156 Living End, The (1992), 105 Lloyd, Frank, 64 Long Kiss Goodnight, The (1996), 113, 114, 124

202 Index Loos, Anita, 34, 41, 43 Lord, Robert, 156 Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), 163; DVD, 130 Lost (TV series, 2004–2010), 130 Lost Horizon (1937), 50 Lost in Translation (2003), 9, 128, 143, 144f, 145–146, 149, 150, 163; screenplay, 143–145 Lost Weekend, The (1945), 157 Loughney, Patrick, 16 Loveless, The (1982), 105 Love Me or Leave Me (1955), 158 Lubin Co., 29 Lucas, George, 99, 100, 103, 117, 118, 119 Ludwig, William, 158 Luedtke, Kurt, 161 Lumière, Louis, 12, 16 Lux Video Theatre (TV series, 1950–1959), 58 Lynch, David, 105, 120 Maas, Frederica Sagor, 5, 34–35 MacArthur, Charles, 156 MacDonald, Scott, 3 Mackie, Rob, 140 Mad Men (TV series, 2007–2014 ), 130 Magnum Force (1973), 98 Maine, sinking of, Méliès film on (1898), 18 Mainwaring, Daniel, 73 Maltese Falcon, The (1941), 39, 92 Maltz, Albert, 54, 64, 65, 75 Man and a Woman, A (1966), 159 Manchurian Candidate, The (1962), 76 Man for All Seasons, A (1966), 159 Manhatten Melodrama (1934), 156 Mankiewicz, Herman, 20, 49, 50, 98, 156 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 157 Manley, Charles, 15 Mann, Abby, 76, 159 Manoir du diable, La (1896), 14 Man with the Golden Arm, The (1955), 31, 76 Man with the Golden Arm, The (Algren), 76 Maras, Steven, 2, 4 Marathon Man (1976), 114

Marie, Michel, 84 Marie-Louise (1945), 157 Marion, Frances, 5, 33, 34f, 43, 45, 155, 156 Markson, Ben, 51 Marquand, Richard, 120 Marshman, D. M. Jr., 43, 61, 157 Martin, Mardik, 98 Marty (1955), 158 Marx, Groucho, 45f Marx Brothers comedies, 44 M*A*S*H (1970), 160 Mason, Sarah Y., 156 mass production, in studio system, 27 master-scene format, 109, 111–112, 177n34 Matthews, John T., 44 May, Andrew, 171–172n9 May, Joe, 33 Mazursky, Paul, 90 MCA, 57, 102 McCardell, Roy, 6, 19, 20f, 24–25, 29; The Diamond from the Sky, 21–22; freelance writing of, 21; humorous sketches of, 21; photoplay writing of, 28–29; scenario adaptation of, 22–23 McCarey, Leo, 157 McCarthy, Cormac, 139 McCrea, Joel, 53f McGivern, William P., 72 McKay, Winsor, 21 McKee, Robert, 109, 111, 114 McMurtry, Larry, 163 McQuarrie, Christopher, 162 McTiernan, John, 113 Mean Streets (1973), 98 Méliès, Georges, 14, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26 Méliès Star Film, 25 Meltzer, Louis, 76 Melvin and Howard (1980), 161, 178n66 Mencken, H. L., 25, 41 Mendes, Sam, 130 mergers, in New Hollywood, 102 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 34, 38, 83, 102, 106 Metropolis (1927), 33 Metropolitan (1990), 105

Index 203 Meyer, Russ, 90 Midnight Cowboy (1969), 83, 160 Midnight Express (1978), 161 Midnight in Paris (2011), 149, 164 Milius, John, 98 Milk (2008), 164 Millard, Kathryn, 118 Miller, Seton I., 156 Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA), 125, 165n4 Minnelli, Vincente, 76 Miracle on 34th Street (1947), 157 Miramax, 104 Miserables, Les (2012), 130 Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), 105 Missing (1982), 161 Modern Times (1936), 41 Molloy, Robert, 25 Molly’s Mistake (1913), 33 Monahan, William N., 163 Monkey Business (1931), 44 Monsters, Inc. (2001) Montgomery, Monty, 105 Moon Is Blue, The (1953), 76, 77f, 78; banned, 173n30; dialogue from, 76–78 Moonstruck (1987), 162 Moresco, Bobby, 163 Morrissey, Paul, 90 Morrow, Barry, 106, 162 Morrow, Douglas, 157 Morse, Salmi, 17 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 56; and blacklist, 64–65; old code abandoned by, 78; support for blacklist, 67 Motion Picture News, 23–24 motion pictures: first projected photographic, 12; history preserved in, 17; sustained narratives for, 17 Movie Magic Screenwriter, 122 Moving Picture World, 28, 29 Moy, Karen, 108 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), 50 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), 156 Mr. Winkle Goes to War (1944), 83

Mrs. Miniver (1942), 157 Mulligan, Robert, 76 mumblecore scripting, 8 Mummy, The (1932), 95 Munch, Christopher, 105 Munkittrick, Kyle, 152 Münsterberg, Hugo, 31 Murfin, Jane, 51 Murnau, F. W., 95 Murray, Bill, 143, 144f Musser, Charles, 14, 18 Myrick, Daniel, 128, 131 Mystery of the Leaping Fish, The (1916), 35 narrative: of American purity, 128; classical Hollywood, 37; in commercial filmmaking, 16; conventions of, 45; and introduction of sound, 36–37; linear chronology in, 37; in Paranormal films, 133; point of view in, 37; three-part structure of, 37 narrative closure, 45 National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), 79 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), SWG certified by, 50 Netflix, 130 Network (1976), 160 New Hollywood, 8, 81, 101; freelance paradigm in, 106–109; new screenwriting technologies in, 122–124; new spec format in, 112–113; and screenwriters’ expectations, 124–126; screenwriting para-industry in, 109; in transition, 101–105 Newman, David, 78, 95 Newman, Walter, 76 Newmarket Shooting Scripts, 3 newspapers: reproduction of photographs in, 19; stories from, 18–19. See also specific newspapers “new spec format,” 112–113, 114, 116f New Wave films, 90; American, 81, 86, 91, 97, 100, 173n1; French, 8, 81, 83–84, 85, 86, 98 New York Clipper, 21

204 Index New Yorker (magazine), 47, 91 New York Globe, 22 New York Motion Picture Co., 26 New York Times, 65 New York World, 28 Nicholl Fellowships, 153 Nichols, Dudley, 41, 46, 50, 156 Nichols, Mike, 76, 79, 91, 97 Niciphor, Nicholas, 94 nickelodeon era, 38 Night of the Living Dead (1968), 96 No Country for Old Men (2007), 128, 138– 142, 139–140, 164; screenplay, 141–142 No End in Sight (2007), 138 Nolan, Christopher, 128, 134, 135, 137, 138 Nolan, Jonathan, 134 Norman, Marc, 4, 124, 163 North, Edmund H., 58, 60, 160 North by Northwest (1959), 76 Norton, Roy, 29 Nosferatu (1922), 95 Oberammergau, passion play of, 17 Objective Burma! (1945), 64 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), 128, 149–151, 150f Odets, Clifford, 7, 46, 73, 74, 173n26 Odyssey (Homer), 149 Office of War Information (OWI), 57, 171n3 O’Hara, Frank, 46 Old Dark House, The (1963), 95 Oliver, Nancy, 149 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), 160 O’Neill, Eugene, 17 O’Neill, James, 17 One Way Passage (1932), 156 On Golden Pond (1981), 97, 161 On Picture Play Writing (Slevin), 30 On the Waterfront (1954), 7, 79, 80, 158; dialogue from, 79 option contracts, 60 Orci, Roberto, 116 Ordinary People (1980), 161

Ornitz, Samuel, 54, 64, 65 Osborne, John, 159 Ossana, Diana, 163 Other Woman, The (1913), 32 Outlaw, The (1943), 31 Out of Africa (1985), 161 Out of the Past (1947), 73 Ovitz, Michael, 106, 124 pacing, in mainstream screenplays, 97 packaging deals, 57 Page, Thomas Nelson, 29 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards, 153 Palmer Plan (Palmer), 111 Pandora’s Box (1929), 35 Panic in the Streets (1950), 157 paragraph-to-shot structure, 121 para-industry, of screenwriting, 109–112 Paramount Communications, Inc., 38, 106, 107, 175n4 Paramount Decision, 56, 60–63, 102, 171n3 Paranormal Activity series (2007–2013), 128, 132, 134 Parker, Dorothy, 42, 46, 64 Parks, Gordon, 98 Parsons, Louella, 30 Passion Play of Oberammergau, The (1898), 17 Passion Play of Oberammergau (Hollaman), 31 Paterson, Neil, 159 Patriot, The (1928), 155 Patterson, Frances Taylor, 30 Patton (1970), 58, 160 Paxton, John, 65, 66, 68–69 Payne, Alexander, 128, 146, 147, 163, 164 pay-per-view, 13 Peckinpah, Sam, 94 Peli, Oren, 128, 132 Penn, Arthur, 78, 97 Pennington, Jody W., 88 Peploe, Mark, 162 Perelman, S. J., 45, 158 personal computers, increasing use of, 122

Index 205 Peterson, Bob, 151 Phantom Menace,The (1999), digital battle scene from, 118, 119f Philadelphia Story, The (1940), 156 photoplay, 18; how to write, 28–31; standardization of, 5 Photoplay (magazine), 27, 30 photoplaywrights, 5, 26–28 Pianist, The (2002), 163 Piano, The (1993), 162 Pickett, Rex, 146 Pickford, Lottie, 21 Pickford, Mary, 33, 34f Pierson, Frank, 160 Pig Keeper’s Daughter, The (1975), 88 Pillow Talk (1959), 159 Pink Flamingos (1972), 90 Pirosh, Robert, 157 Pistelli, John, 135 Pit and the Pendulum, The (1961), 95 “pitch, the,” 15, 107 Pixar’s animated features, 9, 128 Place in the Sun, A (1951), 158 Places in the Heart (1984), 161 plan-of-action script, 84, 85 Plastic Age, The (1925), 34 Poe, James, 73, 158, 173n25 Poison (1991), 105 Polan, Dana, 171n4 Polanski, Roman, 93, 98 political allegory, 134 politics, and screenwriting, 58 Pollack, Sydney, 106 Pollyanna (1920), 4 Polonsky, Abraham, 7, 70, 71, 72 Poor Little Rich Girl, The (1917), 34, 34f Porter, Edwin S., 26, 91 Post, Ted, 98 Powdermaker, Hortense, 51 Precious (2009), 164 Premiere (magazine), 124 Preminger, Otto, 31, 74, 76, 77, 78 Pressburger, Emeric, 157 Pressnel, Robert, 51 Price, Steven, 2 Pride of the Marines (1946), 64

Prince, Stephen, 102 Princess O’Rourke (1943), 157 Producers, The (1968), 160 Production Code, 7, 8, 39, 49; end of, 81; enforced, 40; moralistic thrust of, 40 Production Code Administration (PCA), 28, 35, 39, 56, 66; disbanded, 79; end of, 87; established, 40; moral authority of, 87; original, 87–88; seal, and profits, 78; strict content guidelines, 76; taboo subjects for, 77 “production culture,” 10 Psycho (1960), 82, 95 Public Enemy (1931), 45 Pulitzer, Joseph, 19 Pulp Fiction (1994), 162 Puzo, Mario, 98, 160 Pygmalion (1938), 156 Queer Cinema, New, 105 Racket, The (1928), 35 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), 115, 119; screenplay, 115, 116 Rainbow, The (1989), 103 Raine, Norman Reilly, 156 Rain Man (1988), 106, 162 Rain People, The (1969), 87 Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), 102 Ramsaye, Terry, 22 Rankin, Rep. John, 67, 68 Raphael, Frederick, 159 Rapper, Irving, 75 Rash, Jim, 164 Rathvon, Peter, 67 ratings system, 87 Raven, The (1963), 95 Ray, Nicholas, 7, 58, 60 Reardon, Jim, 151 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), 33 Red Balloon, The (1956), 158 Red Scare, 7, 56 Reeves, Matt, 128 Reiner, Rob, 145 Reisch, Walter, 158 Reitman, Jason, 149

206 Index Religieuse, La (1966), 84 Repo Man (1984), 105 Reservoir Dogs (1992), 94, 105 residuals, 102, 125, 175n3 Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), 105 rewrites, 2; first, 125; free, 126 Rhinestone (1984), 106 Rhoden, Cheryl, 107 Rice, John, 13–14 Rich, Matty, 105 Rich, Robert (pseud.), 75, 158 Richlin, Maurice, 159 Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 29 Rip Van Winkle, Mutoscope production of, 16 Riskin, Robert, 50, 156 Rivette, Jacques, 84 RKO Pictures, 38, 67 Roberts, Stephen, 48 Robinson, Edward, 68 Robinson, Phil Alden, 106 RoboCop 3 (1993), 124 Robson, Mark, 79 Roman Holiday (1953), 158 Romero, George, 96 Room at the Top (1959), 159 Room with a View, A (1986), 161 Rose, William, 159 Rosen, Phil, 64 Ross, Harold, 47 Rossen, Robert, 70, 71, 72 Rosten, Leo C., 41, 49 Roth, Eric, 162 Roth, Joe, 106 Rouse, Russell, 159 Rowe, Ryan, 124 Royston, Jonah, 88 Rubin, Bruce Joel, 162 Ruby, Harry, 45 Rudolph, Alan, 105 Runyon, Damon, 21 Rushdie, Salman, 51 Rushmore (1998), 105 Russell, Ken, 103 Russell, Rosalind, 42 Russell, William, 21

Russo, John, 96 Ruthless (1948), 65 Ryan, Robert, 66f Rydell, Mark, 97 Ryerson, Florence, 51 Sackheim, William, 101–102 Sadkin, David, 91 Salome’s Last Dance (1988), 103 Salt, Waldo, 83, 160, 161 Sanchez, Eduardo, 128, 131 Sanctuary (1931), 48 Sapho (1913), 30 Sargent, Alvin, 161 Sargent, Epes, 29 Saroyan, William, 157 Sarris, Andrew, 83 Saunders, John Monk, 156 Saxton, John C. W., 88 Sayles, John, 104 Scarface (1932), 45 Scarlet Letter, The (1926), 34 scenarios, 15, 18, 31 scenario writers, 5, 19; development of, 25–26; professionalism of, 29. See also writers “scene plot,” invention of, 26 scenes, use of term, 30 Schary, Dore, 66, 67, 156 Schatz, Thomas, 40 Scheide, Frank, 41 Schindler’s List (1993), 162 Schisgal, Murray, 106 Schnee, Charles, 158 Schrader, Paul, 98, 99, 105 Schulberg, Budd, 7, 79–80, 158 Schulman, Ariel, 128 Schulman, Tom, 162 Schwab’s drugstore, 62 Schweizer, Richard, 157 Scorsese, Martin, 98, 99 Scott, Adrian, 54, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69 Scott, Ridley, 103 Scott, Tony, 113 Scoundrel, The (1935), 156 Screen Actors Guild, 107

Index 207 screenplay, 1, 11, 28, 143–151; after dissolution of blacklist, 83; and American New Wave, 81; as artistic unit, 83; assumed hegemony of, 4; complex effects flagged in, 118; as concept sketch, 117; control of, 40, 41; development narrative of, 109; development of, 3, 4; for Easy Rider, 86; evolutionary periods for, 173n1; exploitation, 95; graphic violence in, 96; inventing, 15; during late 1960s and 1970s, 87; as literary genre, 100; paragraph-to-shot structure in, 121; presentation of, 111; published, 3; “spec,” 106, 175n39; standardized, 37; three-act structure of, 111; violence in, 94 Screenplay (Field), 25, 111 Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism, The (Price), 2 screenplay format: changes in, 115, 116; in 1980s and 1990s, 115; in 1999, 121; software, 122 screen story: development process of, 3, 4; “inside language” of, 111 Screenwrite now! (newsletter), 122 screenwriters: as auteurs, 52–55; blacklisted, 75; compared with writerdirectors, 100; compensation for, 40–41; computer use by, 105, 122; creative control of, 50; and demand for stories, 36; early, 19–21; early twenty-first century, 127; in independent sector, 105; and introduction of sound, 31; Jewish, 7; marginalization of, 8; and narrative form, 112–113; recent terror used by, 9; studio control of, 107; unseen work of, 1–2; women, 5, 32–35 Screenwriter’s Bible, The (Trottier), 114 Screen Writers Guild (SWG), 41, 46, 50; and blacklist committees, 56; certification of, 50; communist infiltration into, 79 Screenwriters Store, 110 screenwriting: after 9/11, 9; as afterthought, 5; and auteur theory, 81, 82; business of, 153; defined, 1; during Great Depression, 46; history of, 3, 4–5; impact of sound on, 46; instability as object of

enquiry in, 10; “layering” experiment in, 119; “lean and clean,” 115; as literary art, 44; market for, 106; para-industry, 109–112; problem of authorship, 2–3; profession of, 44; in 1980s and 1990s, 8, 109; in silent era, 41; technologies of, 9 screenwriting studies, 2–3, 10 scripting, 8; micro-budget, 8; notion of, 4; use of term, 178n60 scriptment, 88 script readers, 105, 108 Script Wizard, 122 Scriptwriter News, 103, 108, 110 Search, The (1948), 157 Seaton, George, 157, 158 Segal, Harry, 156 Seidler, David, 164 Sennett, Mack, 44 Sense and Sensibility (1995), 162 Serial Mom (1994), 90 Serpico (1973), 83 Seven Days to Noon (1951), 158 Seventh Heaven (1927), 155 Seventh Veil, The (1946), 157 sex: after Production Code, 88–97; during American New Wave, 90; as central metaphor, 91; as central to narrative, 97; in 1990s films, 35 sex, lies, and videotape (1989), 104 Shaffer, Peter, 161 Shaft (1971), 98 Shaft in Africa (1973), 98 Shaft’s Big Score (1972), 98 Shakespeare in Love (1998), 163 “Shane Blackisms,” 113 Shanley, John Patrick, 162 Shapiro, Stanley, 159 Shaw, George Bernard, 156 Shearer, Norma, 34 She Done Him Wrong (1933), 42 Sheldon, Sidney, 157 Sherwood, Robert E., 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 157 She’s Gotta Have It (1986), 105 Shield, The (TV series, 2002–2008), 130 Ship of Fools (1965), 76

208 Index Shocking Miss Pilgrim, The (1947), 35 “shooting script,” invention of, 26 Short, Elizabeth, 58, 59 shots, use of term, 30 Show Girl and Her Friends, The (McCardell), 21 Showtime cable network, 130 Shurluck, Geoffrey M., 87 Sideways (2004), 128, 146, 147f, 149, 163; dialogue from, 147–149 Siegel, Don, 98 Siegfried’s Tod (1924), 33 Silence of the Lambs, The (1991), 162 silent era: horror in, 95; international aspect of, 33; opportunities in, 35; screenwriting in, 41; serials, 22 Silliphant, Stirling, 159, 171n5 Silverman, David, 151 Sinclair, Upton, 138 Singleton, John, 105 Skyfall (2012), 130 Slacker (1991), 105 “slasher films,” 103 Slevin, James, 30 Sling Blade (1996), 162 Sliver (1993), 178n79 Slumdog Millionaire (2008), 164 Smith, Hal, 48 Smith, Harold Jacob, 158 Smith, Kevin, 105 Smith, Russell E., 20 Smyth, J. E., 41, 49–50 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), 152 Social Network, The (2010), 164 Soderberg, Steven, 104 Solax Co., 32 Solt, Andrew, 58, 60, 171n4 Son of Frankenstein (1939), 95 Son of the Sheik, The (1926), 5, 34 Sons of Anarchy (TV series, 2008– ), 130 Sopranos, The (TV series, 1999–2007), 130 Sorcerer (1977), 99–100 Sorkin, Aaron, 164 sound: advent of synchronized, 41; changes brought about by, 45–46;

diegetic, 41; introduction of, 36; and screenwriting, 6 Southern, Terry, 76, 83, 85, 86 Spartacus (1960), 74 spec boom, 124–125, 125; of late 1980s, 5 spec format, 5; “new,” 9; toward new, 112–113 special effects: digital, 117; early use of, 14–15; of 1980s, 118 spec market, rituals of access in, 108 spec scripts, 3, 106; master-scene format for, 109 Spheeris, Penelope, 105 Spielberg, Steven, 99, 100, 103, 130 Splendor in the Grass (1961), 76, 159 Spross, Jeff, 135 Stagecoach (1939), 39, 41, 50 Staiger, Janet, 5 Stallone, Sylvester, 102, 106 Standard (magazine), 19 standardization, of photoplay script, 5 Stanton, Andrew, 128, 151 Stanwyck, Barbara, 42 Star Is Born, A (1937), 156 Star Wars (1977), 100, 103 Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), 117; screenplay, 117 Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), 118, 119f; “layered” design and previsualization in, 119 Stefano, Joseph, 82 Steinback, John, 6 Stempel, Tom, 4 step outline, 31 Stevens, George, 64 Stewart, Donald E., 161 Stewart, Donald Ogden, 46, 64, 156 Stillman, Whit, 105 Sting, The (1973), 160 St. John, Theodore, 158 St. Johns, Adela Rogers, 34, 51 Stone, Oliver, 161 Stone, Peter, 159 Stoppard, Tom, 163 story development software, 122 Story of Louis Pasteur, The (1936), 156

Index 209 Story of Temple Drake, The (1933), 48 storytelling: impact of digital special effects on, 118; of photoplay writers, 29 storytelling, movie: “New Hollywood,” 8; pushing boundaries of, 8; “three-act structure” of, 6. See also narrative Story World (magazine), 27 Straight out of Brooklyn (1991), 105 Stranger Than Paradise (1984), 105 Stratton Story, The (1949), 157 Straw Dogs (1971), 94 studios, Hollywood: mergers of, 102; postwar cutbacks of, 57 studio system: classical period of, 38, 39; compulsory collaboration in, 51; declining profits of, 57; demise of, 54–55, 87; mass production of, 27; origins of, 26; screenplays created in, 84; success of, 40; writers’ complaints about, 51; writers in, 44 Sturges, Preston, 41, 46, 52, 149, 156 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, The (1967), 94 Suburbia (1983), 105 Sullivan, C. Gardner, 27–28, 28 Sullivan, John R., 52 Sullivan’s Travels (1941), 52–53, 53f, 149 Sundance Film Festival, 104, 121 Sunrise (1927), 35 Sunset Blvd. (1950), 7, 61–63, 61f, 64, 157; dialogue from, 43, 63 superhero film, 134 Superman (1978), 137 Supreme Court, U.S., 1948 ruling of, 54, 56, 87 Swanson, Gloria, 43 Sweetser, Lillian J., 32–33 Swoon (1992), 105 talent agencies, 8, 106 Talk to Her (2002), 163 Tally, Tom, 162 Talmadge, Norma, 32 Tapley, Rose, 21 Taradash, Daniel, 158 Tarantino, Quentin, 94, 105, 162, 164

Tarloff, Frank, 159 Taxi Driver (1976), 98, 99f Taylor, Dwight, 48 Taylor, James, 146–149, 163 Taylor, William Desmond, 22 Tea and Sympathy (1956), 76, 78 technologies: digital, 121; distribution, 104; introduction of new, 101; and modern entertainment, 127–128; role of screenplay in, 11 television: in American households, 38; emergence of, 25, 87; flat-screen, 130; rise of, 7; writing for, 58. See also cable television Temple, Shirley, 40 Tender Mercies (1983), 161 “tent-pole” era, 9 Terms of Endearment (1983), 161 Terrio, Chris, 164 Tesich, Steve, 161 Testament des Dr. Mabuse, Das (1933), 33 Thalberg, Irving, 34, 46, 48 Thelma and Louise (1991), 162 There Will Be Blood (2007), 128, 138–142, 139f 13 Ghosts (1960), 95 This Is 40 (2012), 130 Thomas, Arthur W., 30, 31 Thomas, J. Parnell, 54, 65, 171n9 Thompson, Emma, 162 Thompson, Ernest, 161 Thornton, Billy Bob, 162 Tidyman, Ernest, 98, 160 Titanic (1953), 158 Today We Live (1933), 48, 48f Together Again (1944), 64 To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), 76, 159 To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 76 Toldy, John S., 156 Tom Jones (1963), 159 Tootsie (1982), 106 Tourneur, Jacques, 73 Towne, Robert, 92, 93, 98, 160 Toy Story 3 (2010), 151 Traffic (2000), 163 Trank, Josh, 128

210 Index Transformers (2007), 116f Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (2011), 115, 117; screenplay, 115–116 Trash (1970), 90 Treasure of Sierra Madre, The (1948), 157 “treatment,” 15 Trip to the Moon, A (1902), 25, 26 Trotti, Lamar, 157 Trottier, David, 114–115 Trouble in Mind (1985), 105 Truby, John, 109, 125–126 True Blood (TV series, 2008– ), 130 Truex, Ernest, 21 Truffaut, François, 85 Trumbo, Dalton, 54, 64, 67, 74, 75, 158, 173n29; “Only Victims” speech, 74–75 Tucker, Larry, 90 Tully, David, 86 “Turnabout” (Faulkner), 48 Turner, Guinevere, 107–108 Turner, Lana, 20 Twentieth Century–Fox, 38, 99, 102, 106 Tzioumakis, Yannis, 104 Uhry, Alfred, 162 Ulmer, Edgar, 65 Ulmer, James, 125 Unbelievable Truth, The (1989), 105 Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), 15 Underworld (1927), 35, 155 unionization, resistance to, 50 United Artists, 78, 100 United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. See Paramount Decision Universal, 38, 57, 102 Unkrich, Lee, 151 Up (2009), 151 Usual Suspects, The (1995), 162 Uytterhoeven, Pierre, 159 Vacation from Marriage (1946), 157 Valenti, Jack, 78 Valentino, Rudolf, 34, 43 Vanity Fair (magazine), 19 Vanoye, Francis, 83

Variety (newspaper), 24, 29, 108 Vasquez, Joseph B., 105 VCRs, 130 Verhoeven, Paul, 120 Verne, Jules, 25 Vestron, 103 video, home, 102; market, 103; new economics of, 9; VHS/Betamax competition, 102 video games industry, 129–130 video-sharing sites, 130 Vidor, Charles, 64 Vincendeau, Ginette, 81 violence: after Production Code, 88–97; as central to narrative, 97; dramatic effect of, 94; foregrounding of, 92–93; graphic representation of, 91–92; mainstream graphic, 96; in 1990s films, 35; sexual, 120 Vitagraph, 29 Vitascope, 12 Vogler,Christopher, 109 Voluntary Movie Rating System, 79, 173n30 Wage Slaves of New York, The (McCardell), 19 Wagner, Dave, 72 Waldorf Statement, 67, 172n17 Walker, Stuart, 95 Walking Dead, The (TV series, 2010– ), 130 Wallace, Earl, 161 Wallace, Pamela, 161 Wall-E (2008), 128, 151–152 Walsh, Fran, 163 Walsh, Raoul, 64 Walter, Richard, 109, 112, 122, 153 Waning Sex, The (1926), 34 Ward, David S., 160 war effort, studio support of, 171n3 Warhol, Andy, 90 Warner, Jack, 44 Warner Bros., 38, 97, 106 war on terror, 134 Warren Script Application, 122

Index 211 Wasserman, Lew, 57, 125 Waters, John, 90 Waugh, Evelyn, 46 Waxworks (1924), 95 Weary Death, The (1921), 33 Webb, Charles, 79 Webb, Jack, 63 Webb, James R., 159 Wechsler, David, 157 Welland, Colin, 161 Welles, Orson, 49, 50, 98, 139, 156 Wellman, William A., 156 Wells, Audry, 121 Wells, George, 158 Werewolf of London (1935), 95 West, Claudine, 157 West, Mae, 42, 42f West, Nathanael, 7, 47 westerns, 27 West Side Story (1961), 76 Whale, James, 95 Whaley, Frank, 121 What Price Hollywood (1932), 51 When Harry Met Sally (1989), 145 White, Patricia, 36, 62 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), 76, 78 Why Jones Discharged His Clerks (1900), 15 Why Mrs. Jones Got a Divorce (1900), 15 Widow Jones, The, comic kiss from (1896), 13–14 Wiene, Robert, 95 Wilder, Billy, 7, 43, 49, 61, 62, 63, 76, 157, 159 Wilder, Thornton, 46 Wild One, The (1953), 65 Williams, Michael C., 131 Williams, Tennessee, 76 Williams, Tod, 128 Willingham, Calder, 79 Wilson (1944), 157 Wilson, Edmund, 47 Wilson, Michael, 75, 158 Wilson, Owen, 105 Wilson, Rich, 122 Wimperis, Arthur, 157

Winner, Michael, 98, 102 Wired magazine, 118 Wise, Robert, 58, 76 Witness (1985), 161 Wizard of Oz, The (1939), 39, 51 Wodehouse, P. G., 51 Wolfe, Thomas, 98 Woman of the Year (1942), 64, 157 women: among early screenwriters, 5; in dialogue writing, 42; screenwriting of, 32–35, 43; vote in 1920, 32 Wood, Sam, 64 Woods, Frank E., 29, 30 Woodstock (1970), 90 Woolf, Edgar Allan, 51 Woolf, Virginia, 39 wordplay, comic forms of, 44 word processors, 122, 123 writer-directors, 90, 99; black, 105; compared with screenwriters, 100; emergence of, 82; independent, guerrilla, 91; mainstream blockbusters of, 99; writers: on blacklist, 64; “breaking in,” 5; freelance, 54, 106–109; in Hollywood, 6–7; from newspapers, 18–22; photoplaywrights, 5; portrayed in film, 61–63; and Production Code, 40; reliance on professional, 30; restricted, 35; salary for, 51; scenario, 5; “selling out” of, 47; sense of inequity of, 125–126; serious, 49; strikes of, 125, 126; and studio system, 39, 44; transition to sound of, 43; writerdirectors as, 82. See also scenario writers; screenwriters Writers Computer Store, 110, 122. See also Writers Store Writers Guild of America (WGA), 74, 171n7; and blacklisted writers, 75; collective bargaining through, 125; credit rules of, 3; Minimum Basic Agreement of, 3; and 1980s strikes, 9; on residual payments, 102 Writers Store, 110 Writers University, 110 writing credits, limitations of, 3 writing on spec, 56, 59, 171n1

212 Index Yellow Kid, The (comic strip), 19 Yordan, Philip, 79, 158 You Can’t Take It with You (1938), 50 Young, Nedrick, 158 YouTube, 130 You’ve Got Mail (1998), 145

Zaillian, Steven, 162 Zarchi, Meir, 88 Zero Dark Thirty (2013), 129 Zola, Émile, 18