In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered…
Roland Barthes (1977: 147; original emphases)
INTRODUCTION.
The screenplay is the common starting point for almost all fiction films. How though can we study it, and the intention within it to become a film? Over the past century there have been many attempts to discuss effective ways of telling stories via this form, usually in the form of manuals (Stannard 1920; Margrave 1936; Vale 1998; Parker 1998; McKee 1999 and so forth), as well as attempts to consider the screenplay less as an industrial planning document and more as a literary form with artistic merit (Malkin 1980; Viswanathan 1986 and so forth). The former approach is restricted to working within parameters set by the norms of our film and wider cultures; screenwriting craft manuals overwhelmingly talk of being creative in relation to classic and normative patterns.1 The impression they give is that while there is certainly artistic licence to break rules, the screenplay itself is some form of sacred text – imperfect and partial perhaps but the basis to which the makers of the film always return.
The latter approach is less concerned with using the screenplay as a creative tool than it is with attempting to read the text as closely and accurately as possible. The goal is essentially to gain acceptance of this form of text as an object as worthy of major study as, say, the novel. On the back of this ride various concerns; about the lack of critical attention paid to work that must surely have merit, the desire to understand better how the script form is used, and about the position of the author – the screenwriter – who is perceived as being doubly neglected by commentators in both film and literary fields.
Both these approaches are valuable, but their common reliance on the screenplay as the tangible text privileges that text as the major – sometimes only – focus of study. Of course, ‘the scene text is the major carrier of screenplay information’, as Claudia Sternberg puts it (1997: 231), and it is certainly the most accessible form of the film in the pre-production stage but, as commentators like the director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1977) have pointed out, it is only a document on the way to becoming another document. This chapter examines the implications of the screenplay as something partial referring to a whole, a synecdoche, and the value of the concept of the screen idea as something residing between the players in the production process.
THE SCREENPLAY AND THE SCREEN IDEA
The screenplay itself is the record of an idea for a screenwork, written in a highly stylised form. It is constrained by the rules of its form on the page, and it is the subject of industrial norms and conventions. In what it can show and do in relation to the screenwork, it is partial; for example, the dialogue is quite clear to the untrained eye, but with other aural components (such as music) there are common industrial injunctions against specification.2 The visual is only approximated, not completely specified. The architecture of the page is important in identifying key visual elements, and how the visual interacts with time. Clearly this is a form that requires training and experience to use. It has been described as a ‘blueprint’;3 as ‘less than a blueprint and more than a libretto’ (Corliss 1975: xv), a ‘hint fixed on paper’ (Eisenstein in Mehring 1990: 7), and ‘a reverse pyramid … a platform you wear on your shoulders that a talented director can stand on and perform’ (Stern in Mehring 1990: 7). However, the screenplay is not the whole story, as writer-director Ingmar Bergman found :
Bergman finds that the screenplay is an inadequate medium for clearly indicating the visual qualities of his films, especially the way in which they are to be edited and the relationship between shots; in short it is impossible for Bergman to indicate in the screenplay how a film will breathe and pulsate. (Winston 1973: 115)
The sophistication that Bergman desired could result in a more detailed or unwieldy document, however. It is its general nature, in outlining the narrative in a dramatic structure and common dramatic form, which makes the screenplay an approximation, a sketch. This generality is nevertheless its strength, and is the reason for its centrality in the process of production.
There are some things the screenplay is not: it is not a finished piece of work (in relation to the screenwork – the finished film). It is not normally, by the start of shooting, the work of only one person, despite what it says on the cover. It is not complete, as a description of all the aspects of the screenwork. It is not image-based (surprisingly), and despite being text-based it does not appear literary in a traditional sense, except possibly in parts. There is never a definitive version of the screenplay of a film; by definition it must relate to the screenwork but also by definition it cannot, as more work must precede the final outcome and make the screenplay itself redundant. ‘The scenario dies in the film’ said writer-director Andrei Tarkovsky (1986: 134). At no point in its development can the screenplay be said to truly reflect the final screenwork. As a discarded piece of work, can it be considered except in relation to what it might have become? Given that the screenwork does not exist during preproduction, can we say that the potential screenwork exists? And does it exist in the text of the screenplay, or in the minds of those involved in production, or both?
Within the mind of a screenwriter there surely is, possibly only half-formed or ill defined, a potential screenwork which he or she must try to convey to those that will produce it. Before pen is set to paper, this idea has some form or basis. A professional screenwriter will identify its suitability and give it shape, based on the norms of the screen industries, and it becomes a ‘screen idea’. I use the term here to refer to the core idea of anything intended to become a screenwork, that is ‘any notion of a potential screenwork held by one or more people, whether or not it is possible to describe it on paper or by other means’. I use it therefore as a theoretical term, meaning a singular concept (however complex), which may have conventional shape or not, intended to become a screenwork. The value of this term is that it allows us to refer to an essence, the idea that (in all probability) the writer has had from the start and which is discussed within, and outside, the screenplay document.4 The screenplay is intended to convey (or at least record) the screen idea, but the idea itself is formed in the minds of all those involved in its production. Therefore, this essence is an idea shared with others during, the readers of the screenplay (script editor, producer, director, and others) particularly during what Sternberg has called the ‘blueprint stage’ (1997: 50–2) including script development, where the shared idea is discussed, made clear and changed. The screenplay itself is a record of the shared screen idea, redrafted in stages as the collaboration proceeds.
Conventionally in film it progresses from a very short synopsis and then treatment to five or six different variations of script form throughout and beyond production (Macdonald 2004: 50–1).5 Each version may contain several drafts. The written record of the screen idea may therefore occur in many tens of drafts, in highly different levels of detail, and in two main forms; synoptic and script. Any one document presents the screen idea, in essence, as a framework within which others will work. But the screenplay is not the screen idea in toto; that exists both within and around the screenplay, shared amongst its readers.
To study the screenplay alone as the source for the screenwork therefore seems unsatisfactory. A clearer focus might be on the shared screen idea itself, if we could see it. This is impossible directly, but we can observe the process of development of the screen idea. Development is, on one level, a formal planning process involving rights acquisition, financial terms and production scheduling (Bancroft & Davies 1989: 18). It follows, therefore, that all involved must share a similar cultural vision of the screenwork, even if only partly. Those involved in developing a particular screenwork form a specific group similar to Helen Blair’s notion (2001; 2003) of a semi-permanent work group (SPWG), in which she applies Norbert Elias’ theoretical framework of power relationships in terms of figurations and networked agency. In other words, the loose grouping of those involved in screenwork development – a Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG) – operate as any work group might in relation to both internal and external positions of power and status. Negotiations over the screen idea involve these as well as individual notions of habitus and personal disposition, as outlined by Pierre Bourdieu (1996). With only a few exceptions for individually produced work, the SIWG formation applies however the screenwork is produced, whether for commercial or non-commercial reasons, or whether it involves conventional or unconventional work practices. Essentially, there is always a screen idea with a congregation of people working on it. Film production defined as a ‘community of practitioners’ has been raised before by Bill Nichols, for example, who provided one definition of documentary practice as an institutional formation, a community of filmmakers with a shared sense of common purpose and a particular discourse (1991: 14-15; 2001: 25–6). The notion of the screen idea applies that to the unique grouping of individuals working on a specific production, and the question then is about their interaction and its effect on developing that idea.
On a basic – or ideal – level, collaboration involves reading and rereading, notes, discussion and redrafting, creating and recreating something that represents a common understanding. The reader(s) of the screenplay and other documents – who include the writer at that point – inevitably construct a version of the screen idea in their heads which (unlike readers of novels) they then have to contribute to. There is an imperative towards consensus, otherwise the screenwork will not get made. It also helps if everyone has a similar conception of what they are working towards.6
In seeking the source of the visualisation of the screen idea, Pasolini claimed that the ‘technique of the scenario’ is founded on the collaboration of the reader, a particular collaboration that ‘consists of endowing the text with a ‘visual’ completion which is absent but to which it alludes’ (1977: 42). He refers to the role of the reader in constructing the full ‘cinematic’ meaning of the text using cues from the screenplay, and claims that this operation involves a different ‘language’ from that involved in reading written text, a language based on a ‘system of ‘cinemas’ or of ‘im-signs’ (im-segni, images, imagination signs) (1977: 42–3):
The principal characteristic of the “sign” of the technique of the scenario is that which alludes to the meaning through two diverse paths concomitant (concurrent) and confluent. That is, the sign of the scenario alludes to the meaning according to normal path of all written languages and, specifically, literary jargon; but at the same time, it alludes to this same meaning, leading the viewer [sic] to another sign, that of the film in the making. Each time our brain, when confronted by a sign of the scenario, scans the two paths simultaneously – the former rapidly and normally and the latter specially and at length – to clean the meaning from them. (1977: 42; emphasis in original)
In asking what this fundamental im-sign is, Pasolini is unsure; he does not immediately assume the frame or a shot or a particular sequence of shots. He also rejects as arbitrary the notion that an im-sign might be part of a structure similar to a linguistic structure, like a ‘slice in the movement of images, of undetermined, shapeless, magmatic duration’ (1977: 44). The im-sign therefore appears to be Pasolini’s way of assigning a term to something as yet undefined; an attempt at using a quasi-scientific linguistic approach to describe what he is aware (as a filmmaker) must be considered when reading a screenplay and for which literary textual analysis is only partially applicable. The difficulty for Pasolini is that he does not appear able to identify the ‘grammar’ of im-signs, as the components of the moving image system of language. More than that, it appears to him to be still a developing thing. Film is:
…a stylistic system where a linguistic system has not yet been defined, and where the structure is not known or has not yet been described scientifically. A director, let us say, like Godard, shatters the cinematographic “grammar” before one knows what it is. (1977: 46)
Despite the difficulty of describing the moving image in linguistic and grammarian terms, Pasolini is clear about a number of things. Firstly, he acknowledges that the reader is involved in a collaboration with the writer in understanding the implications of the screenplay. Then there is something about these implications which refers to the screenwork that is to be constructed, something more than just prosaic instructions or a clear use of a language that has a grammar. His analogy here is to poetic symbolism, which also requires the collaboration of the reader, but one which must refer to an as yet undefined (unfortunately) cinematographic grammar. A screenplay is therefore a ‘metalanguage’ which moves from one system to another, a ‘process … from the passage of stage A to stage B’ (1977: 45). This concept appears to suggest that the screenplay holds simultaneously a narrative in literary form (stage A), and the moving image structure it is to become (stage B), and that the (trained or experienced) reader should be able to see (‘re-live’) both points on the passage from one stage to another as well as the passage itself.8
So the screenplay is a hybrid form, using both literary and other unknown criteria to describe two forms of the same thing, ‘a structure designed to become another structure’ (the title of Pasolini’s original 1966 article). This is a concept studied further by others such as Viswanathan (1986) and Van Nypelseer (1989), who suggest that the screenplay is not a visual text per se but one which describes principally the ‘message of the image’ (Van Nypelseer 1989: 59).9 The reason for such hybridity is easy to assume, in that there is a need for those involved in screenwork production to see in tangible form some record of what they work towards, and that necessarily this must use an appropriate medium (in this case written language) to describe what they will eventually produce using other media. This prosaic need does not help in understanding some of the power of the screenplay as an artwork in its own right; one commentator has argued that Pasolini’s un-made film St. Paul is powerful precisely because it exists between literature and film, and so ‘by an almost internal necessity cannot be turned into a film’ (Mariniello 1999: 76–7). The problem, as Pasolini makes clear, is that there is confusion over how to describe the moving image – it seems as if there is one grammar (of film) being described using another (the literary). The difficulty is then that the nature of the ‘metalanguage’ – the sum of these two parts – will remain un-analysable as long as this second grammar (of film) remains undiscovered or undefined, or even just vague and shifting.
However, the idea of a grammar or language just appears inappropriate. Pasolini was clearly proposing that cinema functions as (or by using) a language-type structure, even if it produces meaning by using other codes, such as gesture, environment, dreams and memories (Keating, 2001: 3), but his references to the terms ‘language’ and ‘meta-language’ are sometimes unclear. The assumption that there is a common basis for film analogous to the common structures of language is neither proven nor helpful. So the study of the screenplay as an object remains awkward; we recognise that it refers only partly and sketchily to the screen idea. Its appearance as a solid, literary object is undermined by the fact that it is both transitional and refers to more than what is on the page. The screenplay as text has a different status to that normally ascribed to most written objects.
THE SCREEN-READER
However, by recognising its hybridity as key and by shifting the focus of study more towards the process of which the screenplay forms a part, we might reach a more complete understanding of the narrative being told and understood. The role of the reader – in this case any reader in the professional context – now becomes more important. Professional norms inform and circumscribe what readers seek, such as Terry Rossio’s detailed 60-point checklist divided into (a) concept and plot, (b) technical execution and (c) characters (1997). This is used to guide readers in providing their review of a screenplay, or coverage. Jeff Rush and Cynthia Baughman have written about ‘the highly inflected screenplay’ (1997), as something which requires considerable careful analysis to be understood through inference and nuance. They differentiate between shooting scripts (as denotative documents or instructions) and screenplays (i.e. writers’ drafts) which rely on conventions and language, and therefore require more particular reading. Their claim emphasises the reader’s role and responsibility.
Narrative voice – that perspective that shapes and at times comments on the story – can be expressed through the use of screenplay language, which, properly interpreted, embodies the nuances of directorial style. (Rush & Bauman 1997: 28; my italics)
Sternberg (1997) takes a similar stance, analysing the ‘nature’ of the screenplay text through various components such as dialogue, and implying that close analysis by the reader can reveal the ‘hidden director’ that the screenwriter has become – an idea that has much in common with the notion of the Implied Author.10 Again it is the text that is the focus of study, along with the assumption that because it is the ‘major carrier’ of information and the most visible, close analysis will reveal both its unequivocal meaning and its artistic merit. The problem is that the screenplay does not contain everything that the reader needs to read it as a potential screenwork. As Sternberg’s work makes clear, there is much in the professional screenplay that is implied.11 The professional reader is (probably) experienced in reading material into such implications; the codes used will be familiar.12 The ‘close textual analysis’ approach to the script masks a more important observation; that the screen idea does not reside in the screenplay text alone but separately as the sum of all that the writer and reader understand about this and similar ideas. The instant the reader completes reading the screenplay, their vision of the potential screen-work exists and is shared (imperfectly) with the writer. This is a notion already outlined in relation to literary works, by Wolfgang Iser:
The literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the aesthetic to the realisation accomplished by the reader. From this polarity, it follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie half-way between the two. (1974: 274)
Effectively the narrative idea exists, of course, in the minds of those who share it. Those who have written on reader-response theory (as noted by Schneider 2005: 485) have discussed the strategic encoding of information by the author for the reader (Umberto Eco), the governing of the reader’s response by the codes of a cultural community (Jonathan Culler), and membership of an interpretive community (Stanley Fish). Iser’s contribution involved ‘picturing’ the text, anticipation and retrospection and the gaps in the text which allow the use of imagination (1974: 274–94). He refers to the difference between how one ‘sees’ in the act of reading, and seeing in actuality; and in doing so shows the main problem that writing, sharing and developing the screen idea presents:
With a literary text we can only picture things which are not there; the written part of the text gives us the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things; indeed without the elements of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not be able to use our imagination. (1974: 283)
Iser was interested in the ability of a written text to stimulate the imagination, but the goal of the conventional screenwriting process is actually the opposite – the ability of the text and imaginary to become a concrete object, the screenwork. A screenwork is developed from the human imaginary to the visually concrete, but when finished the film no longer directly involves the imaginary – it is there on the screen.13
The act of reading (or indeed listening) involves imagination – creating our own images – whereas watching a screenwork involves no such imagination. We watch concrete images on screen; the imagination needed when doing so is for what is not on screen.14 What is unlike a novel or other written text (or audio text) is that images are there – shots are presented, as Metz says, more as a statement than a word (1974: 116). On the other hand writing, reading and discussing a screenplay clearly involves the imaginary, in planning for visual and other realisation by describing the imaginary in specific terms. The early British screenwriters occasionally described their work as ‘picturising’, as in ‘picturised for the screen by Kate Gurney’ (1923). However, as these are word-pictures the requirement is on the reader to create them. As Pasolini pointed out a screenplay asks for the reader’s imagination as any story would, but also requires the reader to contribute towards an imaginary realisation – to read it, and to ‘write’ it or see it as a screenwork, in more concrete terms than in the conventional literary text.
Screen-readers are therefore both readers in the traditional literary sense, and also readers who are asked to bring their understanding of the current norms of screenworks to their view of the screen idea. The rather abstract notion of the screen idea then makes sense as something the reader comprehends and shares with others within a Screen Idea Work Group, within an unreferenced professional and cultural context where judgements are made according to individual habitus and in relation to (unclear and shifting) power structures. It recognises a process, a focus of activity around which the dialectic of production and reception is situated. It involves those narratological ideas mentioned above – encoding by the author, governing of the reader’s response by a cultural community, and membership of an interpretive community. During conventional production the screen idea is never fully defined or outlined – it cannot be until the screenwork is realised – but it is referred to in terms understood in detail by professional screen-readers. This must also be the case in unconventional production – negotiating processes within the SIWG take place in relation to the field and to assumptions of power and status even where the discourse and practices are dissimilar. Analysis of the screen idea itself is, as we have seen, only partially possible through the screenplay alone, and is essentially impossible except through an understanding of the process through which that idea is progressing. How the writer addresses his/her readers via the script is on the basis of who or what the screen idea is intended for; as a children’s TV serial, for example. How screen-readers view the idea and understand and contribute to the idea, depends on where they find themselves within the traditional development process and within the wider context.
This problematises the study of the screenplay as a written text. It clearly has value in the study of the work of an individual writer. As a creative work that is not intended to be a film, it could be taken on its stand-alone merits.15 But the study of the written text in relation to its ostensible intention, the screenwork, remains a partial activity, because it misses out other parts of the screen idea. Studying authorship and skills in using the screenplay form are only part of the story, so what else must we look at within and outside the screenplay?
BARTHES, THE SCREENWRITER AND THE SCREEN-READER
Literary and screen theory have for several decades debated the place of author and reader and the production of meaning. However, the location within one person of a particular way of presenting a story is clearly still important. ‘Authorship is the principle of specificity in the world of texts’ says Burke (1998: 202); retracing the work back to the author equates to working back to its historical, cultural and political embeddedness. In literary theory, Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968)16 had attempted to remove the idea of the author from textual production, on the basis of a wider view that language creates the work, and the writer writes it rather than ‘authors’ it. ‘Nothing comes out of nothing’, as true for literary creation as for organic nature, said Barthes (in Burke 1998: 23); and the source is not the power of a single transcendental imagination to generate ideas from nowhere, but the coming together in the writer of the discourses that arise from language. Despite Burke’s view, the convenience of ‘one author/one text’ does not address the complexity of how meaning is generated in a work of art (in Kohn 2000: 494), particularly in relation to the development of the screen idea into a screenwork. As Kohn points out: ‘in Barthes’ (1974) terms, screenplays are model “writerly texts” – open to being rewritten – as opposed to closed “readerly texts” which “can be read but not written … classic text[s]”’ (2000: 495).
Barthes’ work (in particular The Death of the Author and S/Z) includes a number of points that are useful to the analysis of screenwriting and the screen idea. Firstly, the notion that the text is a ‘tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture’ (1977: 146), that is, that there is no single theological meaning (the message from an ‘Author-God’). If meaning is cultural, and plural, then it resides in the first instance in the reader (including the ‘reader’ part of the writer), not the writer alone, because it is the reader that creates the meaning of the text from what is written. The surface meaning of a text may be suffused with resonances or nuance (normally described in terms of the author’s power of evocation), but it is the reader that finds that resonance from his own cultural experience, from comprehending (even unconsciously) the extent of that resonance from his own point of view. The writer does not figure here, as he/she is not creating or describing a universal essential truth (says Barthes); ‘his only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others’ (1977: 146). The shock of Barthes’ denial of the writer as creator is great, and difficult to accept, but it does place the writer firmly in a context that connects with others.
Barthes is referring to the individual writer (although he also referred with approval to the surrealist practice of collective writing17), but in screenwriting the process is multiplied by the collective involvement of many in the process of development, despite screenwriters and others emphasising authorial possession of aspects of ‘their’ work. Barthes’ assertion that the author of a book is plural is demonstrated more clearly with a screenwork, as an overtly collaborative process. This brings us back to the part played by the screen reader (that is, anyone who reads and contributes) in the construction of the screen idea.
Barthes goes on to say that ‘once the Author is removed the claim to decipher a text [that is, to find its true meaning] becomes quite futile’ (1977: 147). Barthes talks of ‘disentangling’ rather than deciphering the text, where (in a famous metaphor) the text is like an onion whose layers are peeled away to reveal yet more layers until finally nothing is revealed (ibid.). The idea that the locus of meaning is the text alone becomes problematic if the only place where the multiplicity of meanings is focused is the reader. This would also be true of screenwriting, made more complex because there is no definitive written text, and there is more than one reader involved. Deciphering the screenplay therefore means both establishing a coherent set of meanings by (and for) the individual reader, and agreeing a coherent set of meanings for the group of readers. Rereading a text is a process Barthes referred to in S/Z (1974: 15–16) as important in the disentanglement of the structure, the way of deconstructing the text’s unity and ‘naturalness’, making possible the discovery of the text’s plurality (Olsen 1990: 186). However, what Barthes refers to in S/Z is the rereading of a fixed text, Sarrasine; how much more complex, then, is the process in screenplay development, where readers are also de facto writers, expected to contribute further text for other readers, in a dynamic process of continual ‘refinement’? This occurs during ‘script development’, a process of reconstruction that along the way creates several new contributors to the screen idea and more readers in a collaboration. It is not a process of analysis alone, in an attempt to construct meaning from a (series of) fixed text(s); it is a process where the screen idea is disentangled and collectively reconstructed according to normative practices of screenwork production, within constraints and conventions. The screen idea – the essence of the screenwork – therefore exists properly in the consciousness of the writers and readers who produce the screenwork; the written text is only a (partial) record of it.
Barthes’ work in rethinking the place of the reader as other than a passive consumer also has strong parallels in the actual industrial requirements placed on the professional reader of screen ideas. In trying to bring together the notions of reading and writing in S/Z, Barthes is describing a silent and unobservable process that occurs (he asserts) between a single writer and a single reader, but in doing so he has also described the same (and more overt) process that occurs between writer(s) and readers who collaborate over the screen idea. Could the screen idea readers be seen collectively, as a ‘self’ made up of multiples? It is possible, if one were to re-separate the notions of writer and reader, to describe the process of screen idea development and production as a writer and a reader interacting on many different occasions, in different roles. In that way, there could be said to be a collective character to this ‘reader’ who is constructing the idea. It may be clearer to conceive of this as a second level of readership, a multiple ‘collective reader’ at a level above the individual one (which is itself composed of multiple and constantly developing elements). This second level of complexity has one main difference from the primary individual level – that its operation is more overt. It may be observed in action during script development, even as it contributes the development of the written text. Unlike Barthes’ work on Sarrasine, where the fixed nature of the word on the published page allowed Barthes to identify codes at work, the second level of readership in screen idea development (the ‘collective reader’) can be observed at work, in the process of de- and reconstructing that screen idea. However, three significant problems remain; that the primary (individual) level is still also operating and is less (or in-)visible, that the observer is also reading and constructing the screen idea, and that when production is complete, the viewer will also construct the text from the screenwork.
According to an article by Sheila Johnston (1985), in S/Z Barthes developed his arguments away from his previous attempts to present a single hypothetical model that could be applied to any narrative, towards the idea that each narrative is itself unique, its own model. As Johnston points out, citing Derrida, ‘each work of literature differs, obviously, from other works; equally, however, it defers to them, i.e. relies on them for its distinctive meaning’ (1985: 240; original emphases). This notion therefore locates a text (and its structure) within and against other social and cultural discourses. ‘A work of art, then, should be seen not mechanistically, as a closed system, a completed, inert object which will always remain the same, but dynamically, as an endless process of rereading and rewriting.’ (Johnston 1985: 240). Johnston is referring, of course, to a completed work, where the physical presence is virtually unchanging,18 and not to the uncompleted work which is the screenplay. How much more complex does this render the development of the screen idea? The awareness of the reader as a focal point in creating meaning within a given context, and the collaborative attempt at a shared system of meanings that operates in development, also creates a dynamic process which functions in a complex way. There is an oscillation between people and between meanings that appears to resemble the endless process of rereading and rewriting a work of art, with the difference that there is also at play a group dynamic (including power struggles) within norms of professional behaviour which involves roles, ‘ownership’ and leadership.19 The intertextuality that is fundamental to Barthes’ concept of literary meaning is, in this process, influenced (perhaps driven) by cultural concepts of film, TV, genre, the audio-visual industry and the audience. The process of script development of the realist text (the screenwork) is ostensibly to ensure, to confirm, the internal logic or intratextual economy (as Johnston puts it) of that text, but the external relationships that apply to this process (power, status, norms, negotiations and so on) are perhaps less well acknowledged.
Barthes’ distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ is a useful one for the screenplay form, as a form which presents both a narrative that is intended to be read easily and with pleasure, and an invitation to consider and imagine ways in which this narrative is to be realised. ‘The readerly is what we know how to read and thus has a certain transparency; the writerly is self-conscious and resistant to reading’ (Culler 2002: 22). This was a distinction that Barthes applied between classic realism and modernist reflexive literature, but can be considered as a distinction between works that claim to depict things as they are, ‘naturally’, and those that point up or create their own narrative construction, such as hypertexts.20 In screenwriting the conventional approach outlined by screenwriting manuals appears typically realist, in that it:
…pretends to be an innocent representation, a mimesis, a reality … controlled by the principle of non-contradiction … with a narrative structure which makes us read horizontally from start to finish, revealing a single unified meaning. It employs rhetorical devices which tie together the writer and reader in the production of meaning. (Olsen 1990: 184)
The goal of most screenwriting manuals is to advise on creating just such ‘good’ scripts, those which read easily, and which work as ‘page-turners’ in creating a surface ‘unity’ (Field 1994: 8-9). That this approach appears often to be taken as ‘natural’ is something that Barthes fought against, as ‘it makes the reader an inert consumer of the author’s production, [and] is always assigned an origin (an author, a character, a culture)…’ (Olsen 1990: 184).
This could apply to a viewer as a consumer of a mainstream screenwork, but the professional reader is not an inert consumer; s/he is producing meaning from both the written text and other references, as Pasolini suggests the reader does at what he calls Stage B. The writerly text requires the reader to produce meaning from a ‘galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds’ (Barthes 1974: 5). This is a more ‘difficult’ process for the reader, one in which plurality is clearer.21 The process is more writerly (Kohn 2000: 495 passim), even if the screenwork itself is (or is intended to be) readerly. For example, a writerly text
…is not a finished product ready for consumption. Such [writerly] texts invite the reader to ‘join in’, and offer us some kind of ‘co-authorship’… Barthes writes ‘the networks are many and interact, without any of them being able to surpass the rest … it has no beginning, it is reversible, we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively claimed to be the main one (S/Z: 5). (Olsen 1990: 185)
While many conventional screenplay texts clearly have beginnings, and follow a realist ‘readerly’ approach in their narrative, the process of development of that text is indeed reversible, and readers gain access to the text through whatever ‘entrance’ seems appropriate – as director, producer, actor and so on. It is as if development and production, as a writerly process, has been grafted on to a readerly (or proto-readerly) text. The writerly text is not representational – it is intended to show its plurality rather than be mimetic (‘advance pointing to your mask … this is all Barthes finally asks of any system, any work of art or literature’) (Burke 1998: 52). However, the basic intention of the process of development – to produce a screenwork – appears conventionally to move a screen idea towards a screenwork that can be consumed and accessed easily. It is an industrial process of shaping a writerly text into a readerly one, towards a screenwork that presents in some way a (fairly) seamless view of a world, if not the real world. Elsaesser and Buckland’s comparison (2002: 146– 67) of the readerly film with the logic of the video-game concludes that ‘the pre-determined structure of narratives excludes the possibility of interactivity – that is, that interactivity is incompatible with narrative structure. Narratives are inherently readerly – it is narrative that makes a text readerly’ (2002: 167). This view therefore supports the notion that the interactive writerly process of development, the results of which are recorded in successive drafts of a screenplay, is necessarily directed towards the creation of the readerly.
Barthes’ later ideas about pleasure (plaisir) and jouissance in the reading of the text – a development of his earlier distinctions of writerly and readerly (Culler 2002: 82) – and his concept of the influence of the body (replacing the mind), helps to understand how those involved in reading and judging the screen idea might react. Plaisir is a general pleasure of euphoria, fulfilment and comfort that accompanies the readerly text, ‘one we know how to read’ (Culler 2002: 83). It is the pleasure of the familiar, a variation of the known that confirms our beliefs and drives further down into our subconscious any awareness of how that text operates. Plaisir is what the viewer of mainstream cinema will generally feel.
Opposite this is jouissance, the pleasure that ‘discomforts … unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language’ (Barthes 1975: 14). It is closer to what the reader of the writerly text feels, in having to work at the meaning. One might also propose that the professional screenreader’s stated search for ‘originality’ (Macdonald 2003: 32) is a search for jouissance. It is recognition of the ‘edgy’, the challenging of norms which nevertheless relate sufficiently to those norms to allow the reader to hang on to, or create new meaning. If plaisir comes from a direct or clear meaning, jouissance comes from a lack of clarity, from an estrangement or shock value; the ‘corporeal “grain of the voice”’ (Culler 2002: 79).
The professional screen-reader may take a position as a proxy for the later viewer, making arguments for the production green light on the basis that an audience can be reached, and on maximising that audience. Any such argument is based on beliefs about known behaviour, which will incline judgements towards the readerly. The suspicion is then that professional screen-readers, in a less adventurous market,22 will tend towards the readerly when developing conventional screenworks and move away from the writerly, and jouissance. And if (as Sheila Johnston suggests, 1985) readerly and writerly are to be viewed as opposite extremes of a spectrum, it becomes problematic for a screen-reader to seek a screen idea that is both. It could explain why the complaint has been heard for almost the whole of cinematic history that there are no ‘good’ screenplays around.23 Writers are also aware of this requirement, and if the end result of the industrial process is intended to be plaisir for the viewer, is it surprising that what screenwriters propose will tend towards the familiar, the seamless and the comfortable? An ‘original voice’ is different. The industry appears to seek what they regard as originality (Macdonald, 2003: 37), and one could argue that this is what provides jouissance for the reader. One might then also consider that the industrial process begins to shape and absorb it into that which produces plaisir. A screen idea which retains something of this originality while having been put through the process may well be regarded as critical success. This brings us to looking more closely at the process of shaping the screen idea, of development.
THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT AND THE SCREEN IDEA
If the individual level of reading is not observable, the ‘second level’ of collective reading and rewriting practice is. Semi-structured interviews with professionals involved in the development process have suggested a belief in four common goals; realisability, an appropriate structure, a clear thesis and some aspect of originality (Macdonald 2004: 244). Their experiences and actions were in line with personal strategies ‘guided by their interests linked to their position in the structure of the field’ (Bourdieu 1996: 199), which invokes a shared belief in the nature of the field and a shared process of shaping the screen idea in relation to that belief. This would apply whether it was a mainstream development process or another, oppositional or alternative, one; although in the latter case practice might be different.
Unfortunately direct evidence of a particular development process is not available. It has however been staged as role-play for educational purposes; notably at the CILECT conference ‘Triangle 2’, held at Terni, Italy in 1998, which had as its purpose the demonstration, analysis and strengthening of the creative relationship between writer, director and producer, seen as key participants in any screenwork production (Ross 2001). Although the participants for each project comprise students and experienced professionals, and the tone is therefore instructional (in places at least), the transnational nature of the project groups and the serious intention to develop a professional proposal for each film provides an insight into the normative processes of screenplay development.24
The transcripts of two projects25 were analysed for common signs of method and progression. The process within each firstly took the form of question and answer, of establishing understanding of the proposal and of the ‘world’ it presented. Secondly (and shortly after the start of the process), the questioning referred to dramatic conventions and genre, so clearly placing the proposal into a framework that was taken as a given. Knowledge of this framework was assumed or explained (but not questioned) during the session. The process here was one of probing and testing, similar to defending a thesis, which then opened out into a shared discussion involving raising problems and solutions to those problems. The assessment criteria became overt during the conversation; the internal structure and argument (story) were being tested for consistency and internal logic, as well as against other criteria (dramatic, logistic, aesthetic, genre, market, examples of successful films).
Discussion left the written text (shared before the session) behind, so that the only location for the screen idea was within the discussion, or (with subsequent sessions) in the initial introduction at the start of discussion. The general discourse was (in both cases) around the creation of a classic text, and on occasion it became clear what the professionals felt were the conventions, as professional screenwriter Neville Smith confirmed.
In movies, why do heroes find love and why do they end up doing the job? It’s always because they don’t want to do it. Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do! … [in movies] people are made to do things because that’s drama! (Smith in Ross 2001: 36)
All participants made suggestions, with the professionals affirming or rejecting. The process, described by a student as ‘being forced to constantly talk about the ideas, having to explain precisely what had actually changed in the last 24 hours’ (Ross 2001: 76), was one which encouraged verbal encapsulation (such as a high-concept description), and using other films as shorthand for ideas (such as ‘going down the Marnie route’). The students’ reaction to this process was initially shock at the ‘violence’ shown to their ideas (Ross 2001: 37), then appreciation (that they were being given suggestions) and wistfulness, when they realised that they were being led away from their original ideas – ‘the most difficult thing to understand was when our tutors’ tips were taking us further away from the idea we had of our own film’ (Ross 2001: 37); ‘this is not the film I wanted to make’ (Ross 2001: 73). The process was one in which the screen idea was being shaped, altered and drawn towards what the professionals thought of as right, based on internalised experience and expressed as craft or lore.
Despite different roles, all participants contributed. The screen idea was ‘rewritten’, overtly and sometimes in the face of resistance from some, by the participants. Readers here were active participants, making meaning not just from a written text but from verbal discussion, sometimes in complex and even confusing ways as understanding and contribution oscillates between the participants. It is not possible to decide who was the ‘author’ of this screen idea, other than the collective character of the group and the norms and conventions that inform it. The underlying drive is towards making the shared idea ‘readerly’; what was unacknowledged were the underlying criteria for this. The process, which appears to be writerly (in that it is essentially one in which writer and readers deconstruct and reconstruct the screen idea together), has a purpose that aims towards the readerly.
The conclusion from analysing this exercise is that in a conventional context the focus is the screen idea rather than on text on a page. Control and negotiation over that idea determines the screenwork. Andrei Tarkovsky, the director and co-writer of Solyaris (Solaris, 1972) and Zerkalo (The Mirror, 1974) and an avowed ‘author’ of his own films expressed the struggle behind ‘highly commercialised productions’.
The director’s task is merely to co-ordinate the professional functions of the various members of the team. In a word it is terribly difficult to insist on an author’s film, when all your efforts are concentrated on not letting the idea be ‘spilt’ until nothing is left of it as you contend with the normal working conditions of filmmaking. (Tarkovsky 1986: 126)
Tarkovsky’s own working method as ‘author’ director also relied on the conceptualisation of a screen idea which was then developed with others, even while it was closely retained by Tarkovsky himself. In his description of the development of The Mirror, Tarkovsky talks of working in close collaboration ‘with his literary colleagues’ (1986: 127)26 but of leaving a great deal to be finally thought out during shooting, as a deliberate point of principle (1986: 131). Earlier films were, he says, more clearly structured (ibid.), but on The Mirror there were no prescriptive plans for scenes or episodes as complete visual entities; ‘what we worked on was a clear sense of atmosphere and empathy with the characters’ (1986: 132). His focus was on the inner state, ‘the distinctive inner tension of the scenes to be filmed, and the psychology of the characters’ and not ‘the precise mould in which it will be cast’ (ibid.). This is clearly a personal working method, but one which had concluded that the screenplay was not a fixed, final or unambiguous document:
This account of the making of The Mirror illustrates that for me scenario is a fragile, living, ever-changing structure, and that a film is only made at the moment when work on it is finally completed. The script is the base from which one starts to explore… (Tarkovsky 1986: 131)
Tarkovsky is essentially stating the same case as those working in the ‘Triangle 2’ script development exercise, though from a different perspective. Whatever the extent of collaboration, from a major commercial production with many screen-readers to a much tighter production centred around a single auteur, all those involved work on a concept of a screen idea informed by their own involvement in its development. For them the screenplay or other script is an aide-memoire. In his popular account of his own practice Adventures in the Screen Trade, Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman includes fascinating interviews with the other creatives on a film, about their personal working methods and their particular understanding of a script. Designer, cinematographer, editor, composer and director have views of the script based in most detail on their professional specialisation, but this common demarcation does not preclude their reading of the script as a general reader and contributor to general development. Editor Dede Allen said ‘I think Morris, the father, came off as a much richer character in the story. In the screenplay, I had very little feeling for Morris emotionally. I miss a feeling of loss on Morris’ part.’ (Goldman 1996: 384). The cinematographer saw the film as ‘simple Americana, structurally and visually’ (381), and the designer felt the ending was slightly unresolved. Like ‘Triangle 2’ these interviews are artificial exercises, but they illuminate clearly the approach of non-writers who nevertheless felt they were contributing to the development of the whole screen idea. The collaborative nature of this process is neatly illustrated by Goldman in describing his own acceptance of it – ‘if enough people tell you you’re drunk, it’s not inadvisable for a screenwriter to consider lying down’ (Goldman 1996: 398).
ADVANCING FURTHER, POINTING TO THE MASK
My argument has been that in studying screenwriting and the screenplay in relation to the screenwork, the focus needs to be on the screen idea rather than the written text. The screenplay itself is clearly an important document which, during the ‘blueprint’ stage, represents key narrative elements which are to be realised. We can value the screenplay as a document which can be written skilfully in relation to conventions. It is a strong indicator of what those who develop it believe will make a ‘good’ film, so it also tells us something about their attitudes towards film itself. But in relation to the screenwork itself the danger in describing a screenplay as a ‘blueprint’ is that the analogy suggests both a detailed final plan, and an accurate representation of what it is to be. Difference from the screenplay is inevitable, even where the ‘plan’ is clearly followed. The inestimable Hollywood writer William Goldman refers erroneously to the famous crop-duster scene in North by Northwest (1959) as ‘filmed exactly as [Ernest Lehman] wrote it’ (2000:175 [his italics]). This is not true, even if the narrative structure is the same.
The screenplay form is more of a framework, perhaps even a pro-forma, and each version of a screenplay is a snapshot of a moment in the development of the screenwork. It’s not even a complete picture; it’s a clue as to how the production was going, and under current conventions it is clearer about dramatic structure and dialogue than it is about the visual look of the film. In practice, it is the screen idea itself which is the actual focus of attention despite the fact that it exists only virtually. The screenplay as aide-memoire is defined in relation to the wider field by the Screen Idea Work Group. This has implications for how the SIWG see their screen idea and how they develop it.
Wolfgang Iser’s notions of ‘picturing’ a written text and of understanding anticipation retrospection and the ‘gaps’ in that text, suggest that they produce, in an ordinary reader, an imaginary that is personal and individual. It is clearly the same for the professional screen-reader, except that development of this imaginary is directed towards the concrete, and that the shape of this development is shared and negotiated with others in the development community that is the Screen Idea Work Group. The individual view of the screen idea is therefore also connected to what lies outside the written text. What becomes more important in conventional development is the influence of industrial and cultural norms and assumptions used within that process that might otherwise be hidden or remain unacknowledged. In this sense I disagree with Kohn’s quoting of Deleuze and Guttari (1987) to claim that the screenplay (as literature) has ‘nothing to do with ideology’ (2000: 504), as it seems clear that development - of which the screenplay is a part – is designed to shape or confirm a screen idea in a particular relationship to the field. Therefore understanding the role of the screen-reader is helpful in understanding the process of screenplay development in several ways outlined by Barthes: in understanding the collaborative process that creates and shapes the screen idea; in locating the screen idea as a shared concept within that process (and regarding the screenplay as a partial record of that); in observing and considering the elements that make up that process of collaborative development; and in understanding that process as dynamic and complex during which meaning is explored, shared and created. Unlike the production and reading of a novel, the process of screenplay development is overt and thus observable.
For the non-professional and academic reader, reading a screenplay may occur often only after seeing the screenwork. The screen idea for this reader is then an amalgam of both the screenwork and a version of the screenplay text. To complicate things further, published versions of screenplays (Sternberg’s ‘reading material’, 1997: 48–9) are often tidied up, obscuring some of their meaning, or shooting scripts are released (via the internet, for example) as being a close simulation of the extant screenwork, rather than the potentially more interesting writer’s earlier drafts. In these cases, the reading exercise is clearly as an aid to interrogating that finished screenwork. This is different from the process of development, though it can illuminate it. On the other hand, the study of unproduced screenplays (or those of films we have not seen) starts the process for us of sharing in the development, if only virtually, in the development of a screen idea. We share in the visibility of the idea behind the film, at a point when it was not fully formed. A screenplay poses such questions as ‘how would this look?’ and we answer them in our imagination much as Iser outlines for the novel-reader. It is unsurprising that our reactions to and conclusions from the written text then concentrate on that text, as in ‘have I understood this correctly?’ or ‘what does the presentation tell me about the idea here?’. It is right to read the written text carefully, but the danger is assuming that this is the complete ur-text for the screen idea. When we read any screenplay, we need to accept it as one expression of an ongoing discussion amongst collaborators, and one that in any case privileges some aspects more than others.
Barthes’ distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts is helpful in understanding the conventional process of screenplay development as one in which writerly activity is conventionally directed towards the production of a readerly text. Barthes’ later distinctions between plaisir and jouissance seem also to be helpful in considering the screen reader’s search for ‘originality’, and in understanding the tension between the originality that professional readers commonly seek and the drive towards the familiar that is industrially desirable. Barthes’ preference for the writerly, in opposition to the usual public’s search for the easy, the readerly, is similar to the preference some of us have for that which makes us work at narrative more – say, for example, in the emerging ‘genre’ of world cinema. In producing writerly work, we are looking at challenging frameworks, in maintaining the openness of possibilities that we see in a script or which we discuss with others when making a film. In his preface to Barthes’ S/Z, Richard Howard says (of literature) ‘if we were to set out to write a readerly text, we should become no more than hacks in bad faith’ (1974: ix), and what some of us find difficult in the classic realist screenwork (and in the screenwriting manuals that serve them) is the requirement to conceal all, and pretend that this is the best, the only way to do it. The screenplay, however, reveals more and the process of script development is open, at least until it finishes with the completed screenwork.
The plurality of a screenplay text, situated as it is in the middle of an ongoing discussion about how it should be developed, is the exciting thing. Classic realist screenplays are designed to become more clothed in readerly comfort eventually, but for the moment they are naked, revealing more of the artifice and structure than the makers wish to see in the final screenwork. The possibilities of the screen idea recorded in the script are (if not endless) open not closed, plural not fixed in the singular. Barthes prized the writerly literary text for making the reader a producer of that text rather than a consumer, thus gaining access to ‘the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing’ and avoiding the poor freedom of only being able to choose between accepting or rejecting the text (1974: 4). In the process of developing the screen idea the screen-reader is also producer of that text, recognising the plurality inherent in the peculiar document that is the screenplay. The reader actively seeks to create both vision and meaning, to ‘see’ a film even as they turn the pages regularly in accordance with the conventional ‘page-a-minute’ convention of master-scene screenplay construction.
What of the screen idea represented in the screenwork itself? It is a succession of concrete images, not word-pictures as in the script. Film images exist unambiguously in the finished work – they are there, on screen. If screen idea development by the practitioners is finished the viewer must still construct their screen idea, and what remains of the writerly process lies in the opportunity for the viewer to continue to work at the meaning, significance and narrative possibilities of what is on screen. The ‘constituency of viewers’ as Bill Nichols has termed them in relation to documentary practice (1991: 24; 2001: 35) constructs a screen idea from what Nichols calls ‘recipe knowledge’, based on prior knowledge as well as what is demonstrably in the screenwork. At one end of the spectrum the readerly classic realist film usually produced for the commercial markets directs the viewer and closes off possibilities; at the other the writerly film offers the viewer the opportunity to produce meaning(s). Many screenworks will have elements of both. Bergman and Tarkovsky and their collaborators were no strangers to the conventional professional industrial processes for example, but their work also shows an awareness of a screen idea behind the screenwork that allows the viewer a more open-ended involvement. We see the importance of knowing what processes are employed, the people involved in them (the Screen Idea Work Group) and their relationship(s) to the field, in congregating around a singular screen idea.
I have been arguing here that the study of screenwriting and screen-reading benefits from the concept of the screen idea because, instead of focusing on the screenplay as a proto-screenwork in a different form, it allows us to consider it as part of a more complex process. This way it accommodates both the centrality of the screenplay as a core document and its ephemerality as a way-station in the process of production. It is one way of countering an over-reliance on the written text, while not breaking faith with that text. It is a concept that can be understood in relation to narrative and cultural theories, and can be considered with others such as cognitive and framework theory (though I have not addressed this here). It links commercial and artistic practices and offers a way of understanding both. It suggests a way of discussing the potential screenwork creatively in relation to a particular industrial framework, while at the same time making the relationship with that framework clearer. And it allows us to take the study of what film-makers intend for the screenwork further, towards an understanding of what they thought was ‘good’ in relation to a particular time and culture. Importantly, finding the way into the screen idea behind a film opens up possibilities rather than closing them down. As screen-readers (and ‘writers’) we might then rely less on the documented ‘blueprint’ and more on an understanding of what lies behind it, of the potential of the screen idea thus described. This applies whether we make films or study them, or both.
These opinions raise, I hope, many more questions than answers…
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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GLOSSARY OF TERMS
| Blueprint: | Sternberg divides reading a screenplay into three types: property, blueprint and reading material. These correspond to the commissioning stage, the production stage and the text as seen by a critical readership, for example when published (1997: 48–59). |
| Continuity: | See shooting script |
| Coverage: | ‘A synopsis of the screenplay, and an analysis of the recommended course of action’ (Rossio 1997: 1) produced by a professional script reader. The analysis may be detailed but rarely extends past two pages. |
| Cutting continuity: | Shooting script used in editing. |
| Property: | See Blueprint |
| Scenario: | ‘An old term for screenplay; most commonly used today to refer to plot or storyline’ (Singleton & Conrad 2000). Quotes used here from Pasolini and Tarkovsky both refer to scenario, meaning screenplay. |
| Screen Idea: | The ‘screen idea’ is a term that Philip Parker has used to describe the start of a screenplay’s development (Parker 1998: 57). See also Lucy Scher (2003) on shaping ideas and a story for the screen in ‘Finding the Story in Your Idea’, ScriptWriter, 13, November, 6–10. The term is used here to refer to the core idea of anything intended to become a screenwork, that is ‘any notion of a potential screenwork held by one or more people, whether or not it is possible to describe it on paper or by other means’. |
| Screenplay: | Usually a term for a film script, often the writer’s draft, in Master Scene format. In this essay I mean any draft in any script form, except a published version. |
| Screenwork: | The completed film, TV drama, and so forth. A term from Parker 1998: 10. |
| Script: | Used here generically to mean any written outline for a screenwork. |
| Shooting script: | An often very detailed script, possibly as a shot-list rather than in Master Scene format (for example, Alien III (1992)) and perhaps with additional notes and drawings in MS. |
| Synopsis: | In this chapter I use the term ‘synopsis’ to mean anything written in the present tense of a line or two to a full treatment. |
| Treatment: | A prose synoptic outline of the narrative, usually in the present tense, and probably from 10 to 30 pages long (Friedmann1995: 45–6; Parker 1998: 45–7; Frensham 1996: 176–8; McKee 1999: 414–16). This is variously termed a ‘treatment’, a ‘synopsis’ (if extracted from a novel), an ‘outline’, a ‘story outline’ or ‘storyline’. Terms are used inconsistently or vaguely; for example, Parker (1998: 42), Tobin (2000: 66) and Hauge (1991: 246) suggest shorter treatments are sometimes called outlines, Rossio (1998: 5) suggests outlines are longer than treatments, while Field (1994: 166) suggests ‘outline’ is a term used especially in US television, and may be from 28–60 pages in length. McKee (1999: 415) and Parker (1998: 42–3) refer to inconsistent use. The term ‘treatment’ is also used to mean a collection of several documents. There appears to be consensus over style and purpose generally, in several components of the basic treatment: it is written in prose, in the present tense, has minimal dialogue (using quotation marks), covers all the points of the story as it will appear on screen, and is intended to elicit emotion or enthusiasm in the reader. It may be analogous to the verbal ‘pitch’, and its length is designed to provide a quick but substantial introduction to the proposed screenwork. It will include all major scenes and is intended to show dramatic structure as well as story. |
| Ur-text: | The essential, core text; the one with the original and supposedly fixed meaning. |
NOTES