Journal of Screenwriting 1.1

CONTENTS Editorials 3–6

Jill Nelmes

7–10

Ian W. Macdonald

Articles 11– 25

After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era Kathryn Millard

27–43

‘Everybody’s a Writer’ Theorizing screenwriting as creative labour Bridget Conor

45–58

‘…So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic’ The Screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group Ian W. Macdonald

59–81

83–97

99–112

Teaching screenwriting in a time of storytelling blindness: the meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish film-making Eva Novrup Redvall The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs Patrick Cattrysse Cyber-Aristotle: towards a poetics for interactive screenwriting Jasmina Kallay

113–129 Tonino Guerra: the screenwriter as a narrative technician or as a poet of images? Authorship and method in the writer–director relationship Riikka Pelo

131–148 Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on If.... (1968) Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard 149–173 Screenwriting strategies in Marguerite Duras’s script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960) Rosamund Davies 175–196 No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay in American indie cinema J. J. Murphy

Research Resources 197–202 Unpublished scripts in BFI Special Collections: a few highlights Nathalie Morris

Reviews 203–206 Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, Steven Maras (2009) 207–210 And the Best Screenplay Goes to…, Linda Seger (2008) 210–213 Authorship in Film Adaptation, Jack Boozer (ed.) (2008) 214–217 Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film, Torben Grodal (2009)

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ADVISORY BOARD John Adams, University of Bristol Robert Engels, California State University Adam Ganz, Royal Holloway, University of London Phil Parker, Script Developer (ex-Head of Screenwriting at LCP) Chris Walker, De Montfort University

EDITORIAL BOARD Sue Clayton, Royal Holloway, University of London Ken Dancyger, New York University Jim Hill, De Montfort University Steven Maras, University of Sydney Kathryn Millard, Maquarie University, Sydney JJ Murphy, University of Wisconsin-Madison Steven Price, Bangor University Isabelle Reynauld, University of Montreal Andrew Spicer, University of West of England Kristin Thompson, University of Wisconsin-Madison Paul Wells, University of Loughborough

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JOSC 1 (1) pp. 3–6 Intellect Limited 2010

Journal of Screenwriting Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.3/2

EDITORIAL JILL NELMES Principal Editor

The Journal of Screenwriting is a timely and much needed addition to the increasing number of published works on the subject of the screenplay. As Co-Editor Ian Macdonald points out below, it is surprising that there appears not to have been a journal on the subject of screenwriting previously, but as a result of this lack, a journal specifically devoted to the study of screenwriting has now been launched which aims to communicate and encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas in a more immediate way. There have been few arenas which allowed for writing and discussion of the screenplay with an academic focus; journals such as the Journal of Media Practice and Journal of British Cinema and Television (JBCTV) have championed the cause for further research by publishing articles and special issues on the study of screenwriting; Lina Khatib (2007: 106), editor of the Journal of Media Practice, has identified this as an ‘under-researched area’. John Cook and Andrew Spicer (2008: 213), in their introduction to a special issue on screenwriting in the JBCTV, pointed out that ‘discussion of screenwriting is a notable blind spot in both British cinema and television studies’. The number of academic books published on the subject is now happily increasing; Steven Maras’s recently published Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (2009) is one such example and an important contribution to the field, while Steven Price’s The Screenplay: Authorship, Ideology, Criticism is to be published later this year. The first Screenwriting Conference was held in Leeds last year and this year it will be in Helsinki, and on a much larger scale, as the number of papers to be presented has tripled; the associated

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Jill Nelmes

Screenwriters Network has also burgeoned. All these factors suggest there is a healthy, vigorous and growing interest in the study of the subject at an international level. Thus Intellect needed little convincing of the need for a journal which specifically studied the screenplay, responding to the proposal with great enthusiasm, and within a few months the first issue was being planned. In fact the conception and birth of the Journal has been remarkably straightforward. This could not have happened without the support of Ravi Butalia, Journals Manager, and the team at Intellect, especially Alanna Donaldson, who has dealt with the production stage so diligently. The tremendous support and good will provided by both academics and practitioners internationally has also been extremely heartening. This bodes well not only for the future of the Journal, but also for the subject of screenwriting as a discrete area. The Editors are pleased to have such a knowledgeable Editorial and Advisory Board associated with the project, who have given their unequivocal support to the journal. We are very grateful for their positive input during the initial stages of development and while in the process of publishing the first issue. Our thanks also go to those who gave such thorough peer reviews and their valuable time so willingly. The first issue of the Journal has greatly benefited from Ian Macdonald’s skills as Co-Editor; Ian has worked tirelessly and with great dedication, championing a system of referencing film and television which gives the writer equal placing alongside the director and is to be used for all relevant referencing in this journal – perhaps in future years this may become the accepted practice of referencing. Jule Selbo, as Reviews Editor, has dedicated herself to the task with supreme ease and efficiency. There is still a wealth of unexplored material on the subject of screenwriting and if this cannot be described as a new subject area – there have, of course, been previous academic works on the screenplay such as Wolf Rilla’s The Writer and the Screen (1973), Kristin Thompson’s Storytelling in the New Hollywood (1999) and Sarah Kozloff’s Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000) – perhaps we can view screenwriting as a subject which has been recently rediscovered, not solely with regard to the subject of film writing but also the writing of television and newer media forms such as interactive media. The Journal aims to highlight the importance of the study of the screenplay, to encourage the development of this expanding area of research and to be a forum for debate on the subject. There are many aspects of screenwriting history, theory and practice still to be investigated: the Special Collections at the British Film Institute and the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, for instance, are both treasure troves of information, holding thousands of screenplays, often with many drafts and accompanying letters (see Nathalie Morris’s piece on the BFI National Library’s Special Collection in 4

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Editorial

this issue). The development of new media forms such as computer games and how they are written begs further research, as does the question of the relationship between screenwriting theory and practice. The Journal will be a vehicle for promoting fruitful ways of writing about and analysing the screenplay, from textual analysis to studies of the industry to discussion of practice and theory. We hope the international links will continue to develop and encourage further research and possibly collaborative work, while enhancing and developing academic scrutiny and scholarly activity via research networks. This is an exciting time for the Journal and also for the study of screenwriting: there certainly seems to be an upsurge in publishing in the area and an acceptance that the screenplay has been a remarkably neglected area of study; it is the intention of this journal to at least partly redress this. The first issue of the Journal has already attracted a varied and fascinating mix of articles, which give a sense of the depth and breadth of the subject, and we are now preparing for the second issue, with the third issue in mind! Each issue will be jointly edited by the Principal Editor, Jill Nelmes, and the Co-Editors in rotation. For this issue the Co-Editor is Ian Macdonald; the second issue will be co-edited by Jule Selbo and the third by Barry Langford. The Journal will be published twice yearly in the first instance and the Editors hope you will find this issue a stimulating and thought-provoking mix of articles. We also hope the Journal will inspire you to contribute as we are very much dependent on your research and passion for the subject in this fascinating and developing field. REFERENCES Cook, John and Spicer, Andrew (2008), ‘Introduction’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 5: 2, November, pp. 213–22. Khatib, Lina (2007), ‘Editorial’, Journal of Media Practice, 8: 2, pp. 105–06. Kozloff, Sarah (2000), Overhearing Film Dialogue, Berkeley: University of California Press. Maras, Steven (2009), Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, London: Wallflower. Price, Steven (due 2009), The Screenplay: Authorship, Ideology, Criticism, London: Palgrave. Rilla, Wolf (1973), The Writer and the Screen, London: W.H. Allen. Thompson, Kristin (1999), Storytelling in the New Hollywood, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Jill Nelmes is a senior lecturer in film at the University of East London and a screenwriter. She has studied screenwriting at the National Film and Television School and at UCLA, is the editor of Introduction to Film Studies and is currently working on a ‘how to’ manual about writing the independent

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screenplay and also researching a book on British screenwriters. She is particularly interested in looking at the relationship between theory and practice in the screenplay and the collaborative nature of the film industry. Contact: School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of East London, E16 2RD. Phone: +44 208 223 7483 E-mail: [email protected]

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JOSC 1 (1) pp. 7–10 Intellect Limited 2010

Journal of Screenwriting Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.7/2

EDITORIAL IAN W. MACDONALD Co-Editor

This seems to be the first peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to screenwriting in the world. Good grief! you say, are you sure? After more than a century of screenwriting? Well, not quite, I reply, though the lack of any reference to such a publication in researches so far is a strong indicator. I await a flurry of postcards from those who know better than I do… Although in the 1980s there was an occasional series of papers published in Brussels under the title Cahiers du Scénario (still accessible at http://www.uee.be), collections of scholarly articles on screenwriting have usually turned up as occasional special numbers of film and media periodicals like Cinémas, Film History, the Journal of British Cinema and Television and Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture (see also Maras 2009: 187–88). The remarkable absence – until now – of a regular scholarly journal is probably due to film academics frying bigger fish, focusing on New Waves, semiotics and male gazes, and only intermittently recognizing a need to consider the formation of the idea for a screenwork as something of interest. An awkward and peripheral subject then, sidelined because of its problematic relationship to the apparently more concrete final ‘text’ of the film. Considered as rough sketches or the ‘blueprint’, or as incomplete or transitional, who would not look at the screenplay in its various forms as somehow inferior? More recent scholars have, however, begun to think of screenwriting as a practice involving more than writing a screenplay; and of the process of conceptualizing the screenwork as something more than merely part of production, or just a written text.

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Ian W. Macdonald

Screenwriting is now a broader academic subject than the industrial process of the same name, and its analysis involves approaches ranging from the sociological to the psychological. But the realization that there is more to the screen idea than scriptwriting has caused its own problems for academics, scattering potential publishing outlets right across media and cultural studies. Finally, there is now a small corner of the academic universe reserved for such work, and we all owe a debt of thanks in particular to Jill Nelmes and to Intellect for creating this space. Jill’s success in starting this journal has also coincided with a series of annual conferences, the first of which was held at the University of Leeds in September 2008 and which resulted in the setting up of the Screenwriting Research Network (join up at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk). The second conference takes place at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, in September 2009. In this issue we present a few of the issues facing screenwriting scholars at the present time, some of which surfaced at our first Leeds conference. We look at the appropriateness of current industrial practice, at theorizing labour practices, at understanding how they operate, and at how re-thinking screenwriting can change industrial thinking. We ask how mainstream screenwriting might deal with the challenges of terminological vagueness, and of interactive storytelling. The common assumption that the director is auteur is challenged in three articles which focus on the involvement of the writer in collaboration, and we discuss the methods adopted by those in the independent sector in the United States to get round the limitations of orthodox craft skills. Kathryn Millard questions whether ‘Courier 12 point’ typescript (and by implication a range of other practices) is the ‘natural’ way of presenting a screen idea, or is due for a complete re-think. Bridget Conor presents her investigation into theorizing screenwriting as a creative labour process, and I suggest it is time to consider screenwriting as the product of the Screen Idea Work Group, a common industrial grouping of key creative workers (and others). Eva Novrup Redvall provides a historical analysis that connects the Danish film industry’s adoption of new screenwriting practices with pioneering work around screenwriting at the National Film School of Denmark over the last 30 years. Patrick Cattrysse and Jasmina Kallay talk of mainstream industrial practice; Patrick on improving our understanding and use of key terms in script development, and Jasmina on assessing the merits (and difficulties) of using Aristotle’s Poetics as the basis for an interactive screenwriting poetics. Riikka Pelo, Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard and Rosamund Davies all present studies of how renowned film directors worked with their often less well-known screenwriters. Despite being revered as ‘the greatest Italian screenwriter’, Andrei Tarkovsky’s and Michelangelo Antonioni’s collaborator Tonino Guerra is still a ‘footnote’ says Riikka Pelo. Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard carries forward the discussion begun by Charles Drazin in the Journal of British Cinema and Television (2008) on the collaboration between Lindsay Anderson 8

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and his screenwriter David Sherwin; and Rosamund Davies offers some insights into the way that the experienced and respected writer Marguerite Duras approached her first screenplay for Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959). J. J. Murphy starts with Gus van Sant’s observation that the screenplay does not leave a lot of room for ‘the fun stuff’, and explains how US independent film has negotiated its way around (or without) the script. I hope it is clear from this range of contributions that our definition of screenwriting is a very wide one. It is not restricted to the written word, and is unconstrained by industrial demarcation. We are interested, in fact, in redefining the research and study of screenwriting in ways suggested by our contributors and our readership over succeeding issues. We now have the opportunity for a regular and sustained debate around screenwriting, a focus point for scholars who until now have been somewhat isolated. It is a great opportunity for us to think seriously about this neglected area, and to do something about grounding and cultivating it. It is with much appreciation of and grateful thanks to my colleagues Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo, to Alanna Donaldson and Ravi Butalia at Intellect, to our hard-working contributors, and to the anonymous peer reviewers without whom this process is impossible, that I admit to being delighted and proud to have had the opportunity to start the ball rolling, as Co-Editor of this first issue. REFERENCES Cahiers du Scénario (c.1985–89), 1–3, 6–15. Brussels: Université Européenne d’Ecriture, http://www.uee.be. Accessed 25 June 2009. Cinémas (1999), 9: 2/3, Spring, Montreal, University of Montreal. Film History (1997), 9: 3. Sydney [?]: John Libbey. Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Wr: Marguerite Duras, Dir: Alain Resnais, France/Japan, 91 mins. Drazin, Charles (2008), ‘If… before If…’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 5: 2, November, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 318–34. Journal of British Cinema and Television (2008), 5: 2, November, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Maras, Steven (2009), Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, London: Wallflower. Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture (2006), 3: 2, October. Sydney: Macquarie University, http://www.scan.net.au/scan/journal/. Accessed 26 June 2009.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Ian W. Macdonald is the research director of the Louis Le Prince Research Centre for Cinema, Photography and Television, in the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Leeds. His own research work has concentrated on aspects of screenwriting, a subject he has taught since 1993, both during and after his time as head of the Northern Film School at Leeds Metropolitan University (1992–2001). Most recently he has investigated the changing and establishing practices of early British screenwriters during

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the silent era. He is also Convenor of the Screenwriting Research Network, and encourages anyone interested in screenwriting research to log on to www.jiscmail.ac.uk and join up! Contact: University of Leeds, LS2 9JT. Phone: +44 113 343 5816 (incl. voicemail) E-mail: [email protected]

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JOSC 1 (1) pp. 11–25 Intellect Limited 2010

Journal of Screenwriting | Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.11/1

KATHRYN MILLARD Macquarie University

After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to contemporary debates about screenwriting as a process of developing the screen idea; about the ways in which formatting conventions from an earlier era of cinema may restrict innovation in screenwriting; and about shifting practices of screenwriting in a digital era in which images and sound play a potentially more significant role. Additionally, it questions the use of terms such as ‘blueprint’ to describe the relationship between the screenplay and the proposed film that it represents. The article draws on the author’s body of practice-led research as a writer and director of feature films and documentaries, as well as histories of screenwriting, film production, comics and the graphic arts.

KEYWORDS screenwriting scriptwriting screen practice research digital cinema independent film script development

INTRODUCTION In 2003, I directed a feature film Travelling Light (2003) which was loosely inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s visit to Australia to participate in Adelaide Writers’ Week in the 1960s. The script, which was in development for approximately six years, was funded draft by draft through the Australian Film Commission, the national film-funding agency 11

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then responsible for script development. The project was conceived as a multi-stranded narrative with an ensemble of characters at pivotal moments in their lives, all connected via their relationship to television; in particular, to a fictional 1960s variety show Adelaide Tonight, hosted by the equally fictional Ray Sugars. The screenplay utilized motifs of light and electricity to be played out across the film’s image and soundtracks. As is so often the case, however, as the project progressed down the financing route there came increased pressure for the screenplay to conform to a more classic, protagonist-driven, threeact structure. I, together with the script editor and producer, was advised by assessors and readers that we should complete the set-up more quickly, snip out those scenes about early television they deemed unnecessary, and focus more on a central character (thereby ensuring sufficient screen time to retain the prominent young Australian actress who was attached to the project). We were also encouraged to fill out the soundtrack with hit songs of the 1970s to ensure audience accessibility. These pressures did not come from the film distributors who were providing a distribution guarantee, but from the public broadcaster and government screen-funding agencies who would form a vital piece of the financing jigsaw if the script was to make it to the screen. Needless to say, my talk of independent cinema with its ambiguity, internalized character conflict and visual motifs as structuring devices did not go down well. Over the third, fourth and fifth drafts, the film was re-structured and pruned to fit a template more closely aligned to those promoted by the screenwriting manuals. In the process, temporal, stylistic and thematic complexity was significantly minimized. Finally I made enough changes to steer the film through the two state agencies, the Australian theatrical distributor, the Australian public broadcaster, the Australian pay-TV broadcaster and the European-based sales agent, who were all needed to secure the balance in federal film funding. The additional plot introduced at the last moment to provide the narrative closure demanded was undoubtedly the most ‘undercooked’ aspect of the script, introducing a false note to the characterization of Lou, our beat poet/trickster character. Despite a number of nominations, awards and enthusiastic responses, critical reactions to the film were sharply divided, and Travelling Light had difficulty finding its cinema audience in the narrow time-span within which even specialized, limited release films are expected to perform. While the claim is frequently made that Australian feature screenplays are under-developed, I would argue the opposite. My experience with Travelling Light, and my background as a script reader and assessor for various funding bodies, leads me to the conclusion that many scripts are over- rather than under-developed. The handful of screenplays and film projects chosen for development through government programmes all too often lose momentum and energy as a consequence of this selection. A selection which almost invariably subjects them to drawn-out rounds of assessment, reports, required 12

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revisions and yet more revisions – all justified in the name of critical rigour and industry imperatives. Along the way, screenwriters and their collaborators struggle to retain or re-inject into their screen ideas what social psychologist Abraham Maslow called in his diaries a quality of ‘aliveness’ (Lowry 1982: 37); an attribute that Maslow considered fundamental to works of art if they were to connect with their intended audiences. Early in his career, Atom Egoyan observed that many script-development and film-funding mechanisms seem aimed at delaying the production of the film as long as possible in the belief that this was a good thing (Burnett 1988). In all the many and various deliberations about Travelling Light it was invariably words on a page that were discussed, dissected and analysed, rather than images, sounds, gestures, rhythm or the cinematic qualities of the script. Yet the work of many innovative screenwriters and film-makers has long favoured audio and visual expressivity over plot and narrative drive, and their approaches provide a wealth of alternative scripting methodologies and structures for analysis. Scripts can be inspired by still photographs, visual art, sense memories, location pictures, video footage or popular songs. Acclaimed writers and film-makers, including Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, Tony Grisoni, Michael Winterbottom, Wong Kar Wai, Wim Wenders and Chantal Ackerman, have all developed methods of shifting between writing and production, working with both words and images. These writers and film-makers embrace cinematic scriptwriting. Some of the terms used to describe the resulting story designs include the road map, the open screenplay, the visual scenario and the ars combinataria screenplay (Millard 2006). As film-maker and screenwriting theorist J.J. Murphy suggests, ‘real innovation in screenwriting […] comes not from ignorance of narrative film conventions but from being able to see beyond their limitations’ (Murphy 2007: 266). SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT AS A PROCESS, NOT AN END IN ITSELF Increasingly I find myself interested in screenwriting and development processes aimed at realizing films within specific production contexts and parameters, rather than free-floating script-development programmes that can so easily become ends in themselves. As Australian playwright and dramaturge Noëlle Janaczewska notes in her blog entry ‘The Development Sceptic’, the most useful development of new playscripts is undertaken in contexts where the writer works with the company and collaborators who are committed to producing the play. Janaczewska is particularly wary of development programmes influenced by the development practices of film. She argues: Film has a whole host of development initiatives, most of which seem to exist to (a) provide an income stream for assessors, script editors, program directors, administrators and others, presumably

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while they try to get their own projects up, (b) generate activity and create the illusion that your project/screenplay is progressing, and (c) to explain why things can’t or won’t happen. (Janaczewska 2007) Many development processes simply shape screenplays to pre-existing templates, so that the distinctiveness of works can be gradually eroded, assessment by assessment, draft by draft. As Ian Macdonald argues in his discussion of the ‘screen idea’ as the basis for the proposed screenwork, development processes such as those held by CILECT involve writers in workshops in which ‘the screen idea was being shaped, altered and drawn towards what the professionals thought of as right, based on internalized experience and expressed as craft or lore’ (Macdonald 2004b: 91). Although the workshop Macdonald discusses was specifically aimed at screenwriters collaborating with directors and producers as part of their studies at film school, the methods used appear to be modelled on those used within the subsidized sectors of the film industry. That is, screenplays and projects are often selected on the basis of attributes such as originality and innovation, only to have these very qualities systematically minimized through the workshopping and script-development process. As Lewis Hyde suggests in his book about the archetypes of creativity, ‘works proceed according to their own logic […] Premature evaluation cuts off the flow’ (Hyde 2007: 187). BEYOND THE BLUEPRINT The screenplay is often referred to as a ‘blueprint’ for the film to come, but perhaps it is time to reconsider this term? After all, blueprints derive their name from the cyanotype photographic process developed by John Herschel in the 1840s (Ware 2008). Herschel coated paper with photosensitive compounds and then exposed it to strong light. In the process, areas of paper were converted to Prussian blue. The cyanotype, one of the tantalizing byways of early photography, did not find wide acceptance because many viewers were unable to accept the world rendered in shades of blue and white. The process, however, was widely used to reproduce architectural and engineering technical drawings until replaced by less expensive printing methods in the 1940s and 1950s and, more recently, by digital displays. Given the term ‘blueprint’ still carries with it this residue of technical drawing and specifications rather than fluidity and flux, it seems a less than ideal metaphor for the screenplay. The development of the screen idea inevitably involves collaboration, and therefore to concentrate solely on the screenplay as a source for the film-to-be seems unnecessarily restrictive. Collaboration involves reading and re-reading, notes, discussion and redrafting, creating and recreating something that represents 14

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a common understanding. The readers of the screenplay and other documents inevitably construct a version of the screen idea in their heads, which (unlike readers of novels) they then have to contribute to (Macdonald 2004b: 91). This process, too, has only intensified with the proliferation of digital technologies and the working methods they enable. In this era of digital cinema, previously discrete stages of preproduction, production and post-production tend to get collapsed into a single more fluid stage, in which images and sounds can be reworked to a much greater degree. Increasingly, elements of postproduction and pre-production can be happening simultaneously. Surely then, more than ever, the screenplay needs to be a flexible document? Film editor Walter Murch observes that ‘digital technologies naturally tend to integrate with one another’ (Murch 1999). Perhaps in this environment it is more appropriate to consider the screenplay as an open text that sketches out possibilities and remains fluid through the film-making process?

1. Cultural historian Thomas Hine uses the term ‘populuxe’ to describe a trend within architecture and design in the United States of America in approximately 1955–64: the design of everyday spaces and consumer goods aimed at a combination of populism and luxury. Hines suggests that ‘populuxe’ simultaneously looked back to the myths of the frontier whilst anticipating the coming space age. For more information about populuxe see Hine (1989).

COURIER AND THE SCREENPLAY ‘The screenplay […] is the record of an idea for a screenwork, written in a highly stylized form. It is constrained by the rules of its form on the page, and is the subject of industrial norms and conventions’ (Macdonald 2004b: 81). When I began writing screenplays in the 1980s (assembling images and text with scissors, paste and colour Xeroxes to construct the treatment for my first production) I was astonished to discover the degree to which scriptwriting formats were rigidly prescribed. Even now, the Nicholl Fellowships Guidelines, sponsored by the US Academy of Motion Pictures, warn that you can create a negative impression of your script through the following list of foibles and indiscretions: ‘Art on the script cover; Hard, slick Acco covers; Plastic spine binding; Commercial, College paper covers; Wimpy brads; Long “dangerous” brads; Cut “dangerous” brads’ (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 2008). Reading this list, a trip to the local stationery shop is beginning to sound surprisingly complex. The pitfalls awaiting the writer seeking professional acceptance and eventual production are many. The Nicholl Guidelines go on to advise against ‘a clipped or rubber-banded script on non-three hole paper, overly thick scripts, thin scripts, three-ring binding, color of card stock cover that inadvertently bugs a reader’ (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 2008, my emphasis). The number one convention, however, is that the screenplay must be presented in Courier 12-point font. Similar advice can be found in screenwriting training manuals and submission guidelines around the world. Why must it? Is it because this font conveys a sense of timelessness, thanks to its association with the typewriter? Yet the Courier font was designed not in the early twentieth century along with the first mass-produced typewriters, but much later, in the 1950s Populuxe era.1 It rapidly became one of the most popular

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2. In typography, kerning refers to the process of adjusting the spaces between letters.

fonts around, with versions available for almost every typewriter on the market. One of the first advertisements for the ubiquitous Courier claimed ‘a letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier which radiates dignity, prestige and stability’ (Vanderbilt 2004). Of course, this message is exactly what many screenwriting manuals and funding guidelines have long been trying to drum into aspiring screenwriters. Present your scripts in the approved formatting, and you not only imbue your work with ‘dignity, prestige and stability’, but announce your status as an insider in the film industry. In What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (Norman 2008: 190–96), Marc Norman reports that Preston Sturges was initially hired to write dialogue in 1930s Hollywood on the basis of his stage plays. Producer Jesse Lansky initially dismissed Sturges as an amateur when he offered to take Lansky’s idea straight from pitch to first draft (bypassing the conventional ten-page treatment common at the time). When, a month later, Sturges turned in a script, Lansky was forced to eat his words: [It was] a complete screenplay of proper length, complete to every word of dialogue, the action of every scene blueprinted for the director, and including special instructions for the cameraman and all the departments […] I was astounded. It was the most perfect script I’d ever seen […] I wouldn’t let anyone touch a word of it. (Norman 2008: 193) There are several ways to read this but it is hard to go past the view that, in Lansky’s eyes, it was Sturges’s command of screenplay formatting that accorded him the status of the true professional. THE PERSONAL COMPUTER AND THE RISE AND FALL OF COURIER One of the main 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.2 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. By 2004, however, Slate writer Tom Vanderbilt reported that the US State Department was replacing Courier 12 as its official font-in-residence. Courier 12, created in 1955 by IBM, is perhaps the most recognisable typeface of the twentieth century – a visual symbol of

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typewritten anonymity, the widespread dissemination of information (and a classification of documents), stark factuality, and streamlined efficiency. (Vanderbilt 2004)

3. Noted in personal communication with Ian Macdonald, June 2009.

Exiled from bureaucracies, the film industry remains one of Courier’s last strongholds. But for how much longer? Conventional wisdom in the film and television industries suggests that the screenplay is not only a creative document, but also one that encompasses production planning; providing information about locations, actors, sets, props, time of day and, most vital of all, timing. If the usual film formatting conventions are followed, then a page of screenplay equals one minute of screen time. I suspect, however, that the equation has never been as easily calculated as this convention might imply. Tom Pevsner, who started as second assistant director with Ealing Studios in the 1950s and completed his career in the 1990s as executive producer on the Bond films, says that the ‘rule’ of a page per minute has not always applied exactly; the duration of any section of the screenwork will depend on the director (Macdonald 2004a: 44–45). Pevsner mentions the example of the screenplay of One Two Three (Wilder and Diamond, c.1961) which was planned to increase in pace; it changed from a duration of about 50 seconds per page to about 20 seconds per page by the end. Macdonald notes that the unpublished script of One Two Three includes a message as a frontispiece which states ‘This piece must be played molto furioso – at a rapid-fire, breakneck tempo, suggested speed: 100 miles an hour – on the curves – 140 miles an hour on the straightaway’ (Macdonald, 2004a: 44n, original emphasis). This anecdote refers of course to standard film format, which is only one screen script format. There are other variations, particularly in TV where styles also differ between companies, and many (possibly most) of these TV formats do not conform to the ‘page-a-minute’ rule, always starting a new page with every new scene, however short.3 Different genres and styles of film-making, as well as individual director’s preferred patterns of coverage are likely to result in a much greater range of page to screen ratios than the idealized one minute of screen time per page of screenplay. Moreover, one cannot help but wonder if the enforcement of this equation does not nudge the screenplay towards a production and budgeting document, rather than a creative record of a screen idea – an idea in flux and transition, an idea on the way to becoming a film. Indeed, the insistence on a single method of writing and presenting a range of screen ideas across genres may primarily owe its existence to the need to efficiently process large numbers of speculatively written screenplays. This may be a response to the growing number of screenplays (fuelled in part, at least, by the growing number of screenwriting manuals and workshops), rather than a response to the needs of the development process.

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4. In his ‘evolving systems’ theory of creativity Howard Gruber proposes that each creative practitioner is a complex, organized and knowing system. His phenomenological approach to studying creativity involves taking individuals’ self-reports as points of departure and studying them within the historical, social and institutional frameworks within which they operate. For more information, see Gruber and Wallace (1989).

FLUIDITY: IMPROVISING THE SCREENPLAY Cognitive psychologist David Perkins is noted as saying that ‘a lively interplay between the developing work and the mind of the artist’ is an important factor in crafting large writing projects (John-Steiner 1997: 128–29). Novelist Anthony Burgess, for example, describes the early stages of new work as follows: ‘I chart a little at first […] lists of names, rough synopses of chapters, and so on. But one doesn’t over-plan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing’. Similarly, Nelson Algren is quoted as referring to a book finding its own shape in the process of creation (John-Steiner 1997: 128–29). Wong Kar-Wai ‘typically allows his stories to evolve as he films them; he simply sketches an outline of the story, finds locations, and begins shooting’ (Bosley 2001: 24 in Geuens 2007: 413). As Wong puts it, he does not really know what he wants at the writing stage, thus ‘making the film is actually a way for me to find all the answers’ (Tizard 2002: 197 in Geuens 2007: 213). The ‘evolving systems’ theory of creativity 4 proposes that major innovations across the arts and sciences are usually the result of extended periods of focused work on multiple, overlapping projects. Gruber terms this the ‘network of enterprises’, arguing that such a way of working increases the likelihood of cross-fertilization across projects (Gruber and Wallace 1989: 11–13). Canadian film-maker Guy Maddin uses just such a process. He describes the genesis of his mockumentary Brand Upon The Brain (2006), explaining that he was approached by Seattle’s not-for-profit The Film Company. They were willing to fund a low-budget feature providing that it was based on an original idea. Or as Maddin explains, ‘you can’t use an old pre-existing script that’s got the producer’s breath all over the title page’ (Douglas 2007). He was asked to write something new within a month. Since Maddin’s films typically revisit his autobiography, it was a given that some such scenes would be included: I didn’t have time to make up a lot of stuff, so I took some episodes from my childhood, one key sort of pivotal coming-together. I knew I didn’t have time to write dialogue, but I knew I had time to wing a film poem together […] especially if I started writing it later in the editing process, using title cards or narration. (Douglas 2007) In fact, his script never really existed as a traditionally presented and formatted screenplay. Instead, Maddin and his collaborators worked from a story outline with lists of sets and props. He also describes gradually introducing other elements into the mix. Fascinated by sound postproduction he invited the film’s team of Foley artists to contribute to a live performance, and his narration was partly inspired by benshi, the film explainers of Japanese silent cinema. Maddin’s work presents one possible model for opening up the screenplay, due to his insistence on working with cinematic elements from early in the process.

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Maddin and Wong’s methodologies also have parallels with the improvisational processes of performers and musicians. Social psychologist and creativity theorist Keith Sawyer observes that improvisational theatre groups that do ‘long form improvisation’ almost always prepare a loose structure in advance; ‘good jazz improvisers have years of experience […] they build a repertoire of phrases, overall forms, and memories of other musicians’ famous solos and recordings […] When improvising, they draw on this material’ (Sawyer 2007: 170). In other words, they draw on these phrases and forms, modifying and embellishing them to suit the demands of specific situations. Yet in the film and television industries it is usually only actors who are given the latitude to improvise. Research conducted in the IT industries also suggests that successful innovators build on limited structures: ‘the critical balance for innovation is at the edge of chaos; not too rigid to prevent emergent innovation, but not too loose to result in total chaos’ (Sawyer 2007: 169). COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS Screenwriter Jim Taylor (Election (1999) and Sideways (2004)) argues that screenplays could draw more on comics and the graphic novel in their formatting and layout. ‘I’m hoping to figure out a new way to make screenplays more expressive,’ he says (Kretchmer 2006). Taylor points to the work of comic artist Chris Ware as one of his own inspirations for experimenting with the look of screenplays, since in Ware’s comics text is often more prominent than pictures. Taylor’s own experiments in creating visual interest include using a number of fonts and letterforms. In a sample page from Sideways he delineated characters with the use of different fonts and typefaces, formatting all of the Miles character’s lines in Comic Sans, and all of Jack’s in Chalkboard (Kretchmer 2006). Paul Wells’s Scriptwriting (in a series on Basic Animation) focuses on the role of narrative forms and concepts, images, sounds and music in the development of screen ideas (Wells 2007). Wells’s wealth of beginning points for generating audio-visual narratives include iconic images, sounds, sense memories, emotions, concepts and re-narrations of established myths and fairy tales. Similarly, structuring devices and methods of analysis include storyboards, friezes and ladders which combine sketches and hand-drawn text and event analysis. Many of these methods are drawn from the working methods of a diverse range of writers and directors. While Scriptwriting is aimed at those beginning to write for animation, it is the openness of this approach that makes it a valuable source of ideas for screenwriters more generally. In Comics as Literature (2007) Rocco Versaci notes that comics of all kinds are increasingly being adapted into films. While mainstream superhero films have long drawn on comics, less well-known and edgy material has been successfully adapted into high profile films too; Versaci (2007: 11) cites Sin City (2005) and V for Vendetta (2005) as examples. His analysis of comics suggests, though, that the form has considerably 19

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more to offer cinema than simply a stockpile of stories ripe for adaptation. For him, they are a form of graphic language that operates within a unique poetics. Comic narration blends and modifies features shared by other art forms – especially literature, painting, photography and film. Like literature, comics contain written narrative and dialogue, and they employ devices such as characterisation, conflict and plot […] comics blend words and pictures […] Unlike film, the images in comics are ‘read’ more like paintings and photographs rather than ‘watched’ like movies. (Versaci 2007: 13) Versaci contends that reading the interplay between the written and the visual is complex, and that comics do not happen in the words or the pictures but ‘somewhere in between’, in a process that requires the active participation of the reader to fill in the details between the panels. It is this filling in the space between the words and the pictures, he suggests, that fosters an intimacy between creator and audience (Versaci 2007: 14, my emphasis). For me it is this dynamic mix of words and images, the fact that images as well as words (and the relationship between the two) take centre stage from the beginning, that makes comics and graphic novels one particularly apt model for the screenplay. One artist/illustrator whose work I have found especially inspiring is John M. Muth. In his graphic novel M, Muth restaged Fritz Lang’s film (1931) about the investigation of a child murder with a neighbourhood cast and a collection of borrowed costumes (Muth 2008). He then produced watercolours based on stills from these re-enactments. His blurred, defocused images of his characters help convey the sense of an everyman’s version of M. His graphic novel juxtaposes stills of dramatic action and evidence from the investigation – maps, memos, bars of haunting music and dialogue bubbles. Muth’s M suggests yet another possible pathway for the screenplay, perhaps with collected and assembled images for those of us who do not have his skills as a visual artist. In her account of ‘breakthrough thinking’ across the arts and sciences, Notebooks of the Mind, cognitive psychologist Vera John-Steiner argues that images are a more nuanced form of representing ideas than words (John-Steiner 1997: 109). This is not to suggest, of course, that words such as the scene description within a screenplay cannot evoke images for readers. Indeed, in his discussion of the evolution of screenplay, Kevin Boon argues that the trend towards less technical information within screenplays, and a more distilled, literary style has been particularly pronounced over the last thirty years (Boon 2008). Boon describes this transition as cinema and television shaking off the influences of staged theatre and developing its own distinct literary form. He regards Robert Towne’s influential screenplay for Chinatown (1974) as a significant marker in this evolution. For Boon, though, the object of screenplay analysis is always this written documentation rather than 20

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the processes and collaborations that are part of both the development of the screen idea and its transformation into the screen work. Perhaps this arises from the fact that in charting the transitions in the formatting of the screenplay over the last century and more, Boon is primarily concerned with making a case for the film script as a distinct literary form. JUST ADD WORDS: FORMATS Since perhaps the early 1990s, the film industry’s standard software for screenwriting has been the Final Draft computer program, marketed with the slogan ‘Just add words’ (Final Draft 2009). While Final Draft’s main function is to assist writers in formatting screenplays to industry standards, it also contains an expert problem-solver based on Syd Field’s three-act structural paradigm. This generates reports and suggestions about how the screenplay could more closely fit Field’s paradigm. Other software programs such as Dramatica also include restrictive story paradigms (Dramatica 2009). Ironically, just as digital technologies and networked media are opening up new methods of sketching screen ideas and collaborating with others, much of the scriptwriting software may be serving to restrict the range of possible storytelling strategies on offer. Story templates from the likes of Syd Field, Christopher Vogler and Robert McKee have migrated across to digital platforms, along with Final Draft and its Courier font. On the other hand, some individuals and communities are developing shareware computer programs like Celtx, which allows writers to add ‘assets’ to conventional script layouts (Celtx 2009). These ‘assets’ can include video, stills, music and sound. Celtx also aims to build online communities who can respond to each other’s work. The potential source of innovation is when these features are seen as aids to screenwriting as well as pre-production and production. While programs like Celtx still have a long way to go in enabling a more fluid use of imagery, sounds and words in the development of screen works and ideas, they do perhaps point towards one new set of possibilities for the screenplay. Similarly, pre-visualization (‘pre-viz’) software such as Frameforge 3D (Frameforge 3D 2009) suggests new possibilities when used as a tool for generating writing and scenarios rather than as a director’s tool for the pre-production phase. CROSS-PLATFORM WRITING Want some screenwriting advice? Add drawings to your script. And then put your dialogue in bubbles. If recent studio acquisitions are any evidence, then the fastest way to get a movie deal these days may just be to turn your next Big Idea into a graphic novel. (Fernandez 2008) Thus wrote Jay Fernandez in The Hollywood Reporter. A new generation of screenwriters who have grown up in a networked world saturated

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with YouTube, TiVo, instant messaging, MP3s and cell phones as well as graphic novels are abandoning the idea of writing only for the movies. Instead they are embracing a more elastic, cross-platform approach. According to some commentators, the era of the speculative script with its armies of gatekeepers may have passed. US-based manager/producer Paul Young, for example, encourages his comedy clients to film excerpts from their speculative scripts and post them online. He sees producers, studios and distributors looking beyond the printed page for material to film. Many people are now used to watching material online and do not expect it to have high production values, Young suggests (Fernandez 2008). CONCLUSION We are all subject to what Susan Stewart calls the ‘self-periodisation of popular culture’, to the ways in which shifts in technologies and viewing platforms shape our experiences of viewing and watching (Straw 2002: 313). Courier, a product of the 1950s, could perhaps be regarded as the film industry equivalent of the Ploughman’s Lunch. If the Ploughman’s Lunch was a fake heritage item devised in the 1980s to bolster lunchtime trade in British pubs, then might we see Courier as a font maintained by a nostalgic film industry to keep itself aligned with the era of classic Hollywood? Media theorists Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn challenge the assumption that new technologies displace older systems with decisive suddenness. ‘Media change is an accretive, gradual process, always a mix of tradition and innovation, in which emerging and established systems interact, shift and collude with each other’ (Jenkins and Thorburn 2003: x). So much of cinema did not begin with film, but migrated across from earlier art forms and entertainments. Consequently, cinema’s histories can be found in photography, painting, portraiture, music, the fairground, the peep show, picture palaces, vaudeville, theatre, the nickelodeon, magic shows, travelogues, the illustrated lecture, the public science experiment, the book, the typewriter and the architectural sketch. Digital cinema continues to transform, to adapt and reconfigure itself. So much of the current era, with its proliferation of digital technologies, returns us to the beginnings of cinema and creates spaces to investigate the paths that were not followed, the possibilities not explored; the branching lines and loops, or the byways of cinema as Guy Maddin describes them (Marlow 2007). Film theorist Robert Stam notes: ‘Pre-cinema and post-cinema have come to resemble each other. Then, as now, everything seems possible’ (Stam 2000: 318). I think the same is true for the screenplay. As Lawrence Lessig argues, the most interesting ways to write are increasingly with images and sounds in addition to text (Korman 2005). The processes of screenwriting and film-making have been separated since the early years of cinema when Thomas Harper Ince, Hollywood’s answer to Henry 22

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Ford, devised his industrial system of the continuity script as a basis for pre-planned productions (Staiger 1985: 191 in Geuens 2000: 83). Over ninety years later, the digital era offers the possibility of reuniting screenplay and film production in an expanded notion of the screenplay. REFERENCES Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (2008), A Few Notes on Formatting, http://www.oscars.org/nicholl/format.html. Accessed 31 August 2008. Boon, K. (2008), Script Culture and the American Screenplay, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bosley, R. (2001), ‘Infidelity in the Far East’, American Cinematographer, 82: 2, pp. 22–33. Brand Upon the Brain (2006), Wr: Guy Maddin, Louis Negin, Dir: Guy Maddin, Canada, 95 mins. Burnett, R. (1988), ‘Atom Egoyan: An Interview’, http://www2.cruzio.com/~ akreyche/aeai1.html. Accessed 24 May 2009. Celtx (2009), http://celtx.com/overview.html. Accessed 24 May 2009. Douglas, E. (2007), ‘Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!’, interview with Guy Maddin, http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=20244. Accessed 24 May 2009. Dramatica (2009), http://www.dramatica/com. Accessed 8 June 2009. Election (1999), Wr: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor, Dir: Alexander Payne, USA, 103 mins. Fernandez, Jay A. Evolution of a Screenwriter, Hollywood Reporter, 24th July, 2008. http://vivicardoso.blogspot.com/2008/08/evolution-of-screenwriter. html Accessed 3rd August 2009. Final Draft (2009), http://www.final draft.com. Accessed 8 June 2009. Frameforge 3D (2009), http://www.frameforge3d.com. Accessed 3rd August 2009. Geuens, J-P. (2000), Film Production Theory, New York: State University of New York Press. —— (2007) ‘The Space of Production’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24: 5, pp. 411–20. Gruber, H. and Wallace, D. (eds) (1989), Creative People at Work: Twelve Cognitive Case Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hine, T. (1989 [1986]), Populuxe, London: Bloomsbury. Hyde, L. (2007), The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 2nd edn., New York: Vintage. Janaczewska, N. (2007), ‘The Development Sceptic’, Outlier-NJ, 19 December, http://outlier-nj.blogspot.com. Accessed 24 May 2009. Jenkins, H. and Thorburn, D. (eds) (2003), Rethinking Media Change: the Aesthetics of Transition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. John-Steiner, V. (1997), Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ketchner, Andrea (2006), Screenwriter Jim Taylor Talks Comics, http://www.tsl. pomona.edu/index.php?article=1371. Accessed 3rd August 2009. Koman, R. (2005), ‘Remixing Culture: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig’, O’Reilly Network, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2005/02/24/lessig. html. Accessed 24 May 2009.

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Lowry, R. J. (ed.) (1982), The Journals of Abraham Maslow, Lexington, MA: Lewis Publishing. M (1931), Wr: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang, Dir: Fritz Lang, Germany, 117 mins. Macdonald, Ian W. (2004a), ‘The presentation of the screen idea in narrative film-making’, Ph.D. thesis, Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University. —— (2004b), ‘Disentangling the Screen Idea’, Journal of Media Practice, 5: 2, pp. 89–99. Marlow, J. (2004) ‘The reconfiguration of film history: Guy Maddin’ GreenCine, 28 April, 2004 http://greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID+118. Accessed 3rd August 2009. Millard, K. (2006), ‘Writing for the Screen: Beyond the Gospel of Story’, Scan, 3: 2, http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=77. Accessed 24 May 2009. Montage (2009), http://www.marinersoftware.com. Accessed 8 June 2009. Murch, W. (1999) ‘A Digital Cinema of the Mind? Could be’, New York Times, http://filmsound.org/murch/murch.htm. Accessed 24 May 2009. Murphy, J. J. (2007), Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work, New York: Continuum. Muth, J. (2008), M: A Graphic Novel Based on the Film by Fritz Lang, New York: Abrams. Norman, M. (2008), What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting, London: Aurum. Sawyer, Keith (2007), Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration , Cambridge, MA : Basic Books. Sideways (2004), Wr: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor, Dir: Alexander Payne, USA, 126 mins. Sin City (2005), Wr: Frank Miller, Dir: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, USA, 124 mins. Staiger, Janet (1985), Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts in Balio, Tina (ed.), The American Film Industry, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Stam, R. (2000), Film Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. Straw, W. (2002), ‘Re-Inhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful’, in E. Walz (ed.), Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on 15 Canadian Films, Amsterdam: Ropodi. Tizard, L. (2002), Moviemakers’ Master Class, New York: Faber and Faber. Travelling Light (1993), Wr/Dir: Kathryn Millard, Australia, 84 mins. V for Vendetta (2005), Wr: Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski, Dir: James McTeague, USA, 132 mins. Vanderbilt, T. (2004), ‘Courier Dispatched’, Slate, 20 February, http://www. slate. com/id/2095809/. Accessed 24 May 2009. Versaci, Rocco (2007), This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature, New York: Continuum. Wells, P. (2007), Scriptwriting, Singapore: Ava Publishing. Ware, M. (2008), ‘Alternative Photography’, http://www.mikeware.co.uk/ mikeware/John_Herschel.html. Accessed May 24 2009. Wilder, Billy and Diamond, H. A. L. (c.1961), One, Two, Three, [Based on a oneact play by Ferenc Molnar]. [Munich?] [The Mirisch Company?] 179 pp., (unpublished screenplay, Thomas Pevsner collection, Leeds Metropolitan University).

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SUGGESTED CITATION Millard, K. (2010), ‘After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 11–25, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.11/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Kathryn Millard is a writer and film-maker and is Associate Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her credits as writer, producer and director include award-winning features, documentaries and essay films. Kathryn publishes on topics including screenwriting, screen history, colour, photography, creativity and collaboration. She is currently carrying out further research on the increasingly blurred boundaries between screenwriting and pre-visualization software, and the creative possibilities that this represents for screenwriters. Her feature-length essay film about Chaplin imitators, The Boot Cake, was released in 2008. Contact: Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 2109. E-mail: [email protected]

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Transnational Cinemas ISSN 2040-3550 (2 issues | Volume 1, 2010)

Aims and Scope

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JOSC 1 (1) pp. 83–97 Intellect Limited 2010

Journal of Screenwriting | Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.83/1

PATRICK CATTRYSSE Emerson College European Center; Antwerp University; Université Libre Bruxelles

The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs ABSTRACT Screenwriting manuals tell us that narratives should have a protagonist and that a protagonist should have an important dramatic goal to achieve. With respect to this goal, manuals often mention another common distinction, that between a protagonist’s ‘want’ and ‘need’. Wants are generally understood as external and/or conscious dramatic goals, whereas needs are defined as internal and/or unconscious dramatic goals. This essay argues that these tools could be made more powerful if defined in a more precise way. Whereas wants refer to the goals of characters at the level of story, needs play at the level of the interaction between plot and real audience. This re-definition links the wants and needs debate with the much wider and far more complex study of audience involvement and its relationships with the value systems expressed in a narrative and those experienced by a viewer; a subject which stretches far beyond the limits of a single article.

KEYWORDS character design protagonist dramatic goal want need empathy

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1. Few exceptions confirm the general rule; see Bordwell (1985:13ff.; 2006: 247–248), who does also consider the study of screenwriting manuals. 2. For more information, see http://ec.europa. eu/education/ policies/educ/ bologna/bologna. pdf. Accessed 5 June 2009. 3. For example the Catholic University of Louvain association, or the University of Antwerp Network connecting Belgian Universities with colleges. 4. I understand narrative studies in its broader post-1980s sense, that is as ‘post-classical’ (Herman 1997) or ‘contextual’ (Fludernik 2005: 44) narrative studies involving the input from a whole range of disciplines such as rhetorics, pragmatics, cognitive studies, psychology, cultural studies, etc.

INTRODUCTION Although screenwriting manuals on the one hand and academic narrative studies on the other have both dealt with storytelling, they have managed to do so by largely ignoring each other for many decades.1 As a consequence, both practitioners and theoreticians have missed opportunities to learn from each other. One can surmise several reasons for this situation. Screenwriting manuals serve a purpose that is very different from that of narrative studies. As a consequence, the terminology developed on both the practical and the theoretical side of storytelling is considerably different. From a practitioner’s point of view, academic jargon is often considered too sophisticated and not practical. From an academic’s point of view, the practitioner’s terminology is considered imprecise and confusing. However, bridging the gap between theoreticians and practitioners would benefit both parties. Several initiatives may assist in achieving that goal, though needless to say there is still a long way to go. For example, the Bologna decision to restructure European higher education according to the bachelor-master (BA-MA) structure compels non-university tertiary education institutions (TEIs) to reinforce the academic component in their objectives.2 At the same time, it requires universities to consider more and new aspects of vocational training. Following the BA-MA Bologna indications, institutional collaborations and networks have been set up between university and non-university TEIs.3 In the particular case of screenwriting it is worth mentioning the international conference on ‘Re-thinking the Screenplay’ held at the University of Leeds in September 2008, to be followed by another at the Helsinki University of Art and Design in September 2009, with a third being planned for 2010. These conferences and other initiatives could launch (or perhaps re-launch) a discipline called Screenwriting Studies, where both ‘traditional’ academic research and practice-oriented research could join forces. More concretely, this implies that know-how from practical writing classes can encounter academic narrative studies.4 Such a meeting represents a typical interdisciplinary situation with all the complex problems and obstacles associated with a clash of different cultures: that is, different mentalities and attitudes, different intra-disciplinary points of view, differences between what is commonly known and what is not, different discourses or language use such as register and terminologies, etc. Consequently, academics will have to find ways to communicate better with practitioners, and the latter will also have to make efforts to meet the former halfway. In order to bridge the gap between theory and practice, some sort of new ‘interlingua’ may have to be developed which is sophisticated enough to meet academic standards of precision, but not so sophisticated as to appear pedantic to the practice-oriented writer or trainer. Since a language never functions outside specific user contexts, some common ground will have to be developed in order for that ‘interlingua’ to be used socio-pragmatically and culturally in common (and therefore more efficient) ways by both practitioners and academics.

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It is within this larger context that I venture a very modest contribution. It deals with one, rather widespread, terminological confusion in the normative discussion about protagonists, dramatic goals, and more specifically in the use of the terms wants and needs. Screenwriting manuals tell us that narratives should have a protagonist and that a protagonist should have an important dramatic goal to achieve. Why this is so is not always clearly explained but one may assume that it is less difficult to interest audiences in someone rather than in something – hence the protagonist of the story – and that it is easier to interest audiences in someone who wants something than in someone who does not want anything; hence the dramatic goal. The types of problems or dramatic goals protagonists may run into have been widely discussed in screenwriting manuals. Dramatic goals can be concrete or abstract, external or internal, short term or long term, temporary or final, static or dynamic, simple or layered, conscious or unconscious, etc. With respect to this goal, screenwriting manuals often mention another common distinction, that between a protagonist’s want and need. In what follows, I claim that these tools could be made more powerful if defined in a more precise way. At the same time, what follows puts into practice a shift towards the aforementioned ‘interlingua’ between academic and practitioner, in the hope that the over-specialized academic and the imprecise practitioner may begin to find their common ground.

5. This is also part of this ‘other’ practitioner’s culture. Trainers pass on knowledge and expertise in workshops such as the European programme ‘North by Northwest’ (which included tutors from University of Southern California) who ‘mention’ this in their workshops. Unlike the academic tradition, the oral tradition prevalent in such workshops does not have written references.

WANTS AND NEEDS: EXAMPLES According to oral tradition,5 the terms want and need originated with screenwriting guru Frank Daniel, but since then several other screenwriting commentators have applied the terms, adapting them sometimes to their particular needs. Table 1 shows some examples taken from Trottier (1998: 24–28), Cowgill (1999: 45–46) and McIlrath (2004: 36). I add two more examples in order to support my argument. The definitions of want and need given by the sources mentioned above reveal two recurring parameters: external vs. internal and conscious vs. unconscious. One parameter does not necessarily exclude the other. EXTERNAL WANT VS. INTERNAL NEED Several critics use the concepts want and need to distinguish an external goal from an internal one. For example, in The Screenplay: A Blend of Film Form and Content, Margaret Mehring writes ‘a character can be driven to achieve one goal while being simultaneously compelled to seek a very different and conflicting goal. It is this warring between the external and internal goals that is the essence of great drama’ (Mehring 1990: 195). Mehring associates the want with an outer, physical struggle and the need with an inner, psychological one. This distinction is taken up by several other commentators such as Vogler (1992: 17), who distinguishes a protagonist’s external journey from his

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Title

Want

Need

Gone with the wind (1939)

Scarlet (Vivien Leigh) wants (among many other things) Ashley, who is married.

Scarlet needs Rhett Butler, who is not married.

Casablanca (1942)

Rick (Humphrey Bogart) wants to forget about Paris and bury himself in Casablanca.

Rick needs to discover what happened in Paris (in order to regain his proper self).

Some Like it Hot (1959)

Joe (Tony Curtis) wants to cheat Sugar into a relationship.

Joe needs to love Sugar (‘tell her the truth’).

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) wants the custody of his son.

Kramer needs to become a good father.

Romancing the Stone (1984)

Joan (Kathleen Turner) wants to find the stone.

Joan needs to find love.

Witness (1985)

John Book (Harrison Ford) wants to catch the corrupt cops.

Book needs to relate more compassionately to others.

Moonstruck (1987)

Loretta (Cher) wants to marry Johnny because he is a safe bet.

Loretta needs to marry Ronny whom she loves.

Twins (1988)

Vincent Benedict (Danny De Vito) wants $5 million.

Vincent needs the love of a family.

Pretty Woman (1990)

Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) wants to further his career.

Lewis needs to follow his heart.

The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) wants to continue his professional career as a lawyer who never lost a case.

Kevin Lomax needs to seek moral justice and not prevent perverts and gangsters from escaping their rightful punishment.

Traffic (2000)

Robert Wakefield wants to fight the drugs cartel on an international scale as a politico-judicial problem.

Robert Wakefield needs to fight the drugs problem on a family scale as a medical or a healthcare problem.

Analysis: the author

Table 1: Protagonists’ wants and needs in Hollywood films.

internal journey, or Lucey (1996: 51ff.) who refers to an A-storyline which deals with an external problem – winning a law suit, destroying the monster – and a B-storyline dealing with internal problems, usually of a psychological nature, such as regaining self-esteem, acquiring independence or love, etc. Finally, a similar distinction can be found more recently in Batty (2006: 12) who explicitly titles his article ‘Wants and Needs: Action and Emotion in Scripts’. Batty also associates the want with a literal, 86

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physical journey and the need with an internal, emotional one (see also Batty 2007: 45). CONSCIOUS WANT VS. UNCONSCIOUS NEED A second group of screenwriting experts associate want and need with a conscious vs. unconscious dramatic goal. This is believed to be how Frank Daniel originally understood the concepts. Others have picked up this definition, such as Robert McKee (1997) who uses want, need and goal interchangeably, but who indicates that a protagonist may have a conscious desire and a self-contradictory unconscious desire: ‘the most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these complex protagonists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction’ (McKee 1997: 138). David Trottier indicates that if the central character has a conscious goal, beneath it may loom a great unconscious need: The need has to do with self-image, or finding love, or living a better life – whatever the character needs to be truly happy or fulfilled. This yearning sometimes runs counter to the goal and sometimes supports or motivates it. The Crisis often brings the need into full consciousness. (Trottier 1998: 24) Finally, in a similar vein, Mark McIlrath (2004: 35) distinguishes between a want as a conscious objective and a need as an unconscious one. In agreement with Trottier, he argues that the need may become visible to the main character in the end. As a consequence, the need may become the explicit objective in Act 3 (see McIlrath 2006; 2007: 40). SOME PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS The examples script-experts advance to illustrate their concept of need – finding love, fighting a low self-image – show how a need defined as an ‘internal goal’ may easily shift into (or be associated with) a need defined as an ‘unconscious goal’, even though an internal goal need not necessarily be unconscious. Physical actions are often associated with a conscious goal whereas character evolutions are frequently treated as evolving in an unconscious way. That is why some authors even combine both parameters to distinguish a want from a need. David Trottier connects the conscious want with what he calls the ‘Outside/ Action Story’ and the unconscious need with the ‘Inside/Emotional Story’; ‘usually the need is blocked from within by a character flaw. This flaw serves as the inner opposition to the inner need. This character flaw is obvious to the audience because we see the character hurting people, including himself’ (Trottier 1998: 25). In a similar way, Cowgill suggests that ‘the character’s need… refers to his unconscious motivation and comes from a depth of his psyche of which he is often

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ignorant’ (Cowgill 1999: 45), and that ‘what a character needs is often the psychological key to understanding his inner obstacles’ (Cowgill 1999: 47). Furthermore, irrespective of the parameters used to define the concepts of want and need, the examples mentioned above show two more common aspects of the want and need dilemma. Firstly, the development of a conflict between an inner and an outer or between a conscious and an unconscious goal can help to establish more psychological depth and to ‘dimensionalize’ characters (Lucey 1996: 52) so as to avoid the narrative becoming too cartoon-like. Secondly, when a conflict is written in between the want and the need, it is shown to the audience that the more protagonists go for their want, the further away they drift from their need. Hence, applying the want vs. need terminology, a story with a happy ending is a story where the main character abandons his want in time to go for his need, whereas a tragedy represents a narrative where the main character sticks to his want and thereby loses his need. A ‘Hollywood happy ending’ then is, as the joke goes, when the protagonist exchanges his want for his need in time and therefore ‘deserves’ to obtain his want in the end after all. In spite of these common features, I would argue that the respective parameters external vs. internal or conscious vs. unconscious are not accurate enough to describe the aforementioned examples of wants and needs in a precise way. PROBLEMS WITH THE EXTERNAL VS. INTERNAL PARAMETER To associate want and need with an external vs. internal goal or journey appears to be problematic in more than one way. Firstly, a dramatic goal refers to an intention, an objective. One may therefore assume that all intentions are internal. That is why beginner screenwriters are often advised to watch out for intentional writing, and not to write intentions that readers of the script (e.g. director, actors) will not be able to see, hear or dramatize, e.g. ‘He wants to buy cigarettes’. Furthermore, a closer look at the examples given as external vs. internal goals reveals that to verbalize dramatic goals in narratives is subject to interpretation. Sometimes the dramatic goal is very clear, concrete and visual; at other times it is not (and for the sake of my argument I discount those narratives which do not seem to present a dramatic goal). Consequently, the external vs. internal nature of the goal often depends less on the goal itself than on the interpretation or perception of the goal, that is, on the level of abstraction of its expression. For example, if we consider The Devil’s Advocate (1997), we could say that Kevin Lomax’s want is to further his professional ego while his conflicting need is to develop his moral judgement. In this case, both want and need would be considered as internal. However, one could also say that his want is to win the case against the paedophile while his need is to abandon the defence of the client, in which case both want and need could be seen as external. 88

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Conflating external and internal ‘goal’ with external or internal ‘journey’ as some critics do (e.g. Mehring 1990, Lucey 1996, Batty 2007) may be even more confusing because the goal generally refers to the end point of the journey, while the journey (whether external or internal) refers to the process, i.e. the way(s) to reach that goal, or not, entirely or partially. The distinction between an external and an internal journey of a character is, I suggest, a very useful one (and also a very old one). Whereas in ‘external journey’ the word ‘journey’ is used in a literal sense to indicate a real voyage or a series of events and actions, the ‘internal journey’ refers to a metaphorical journey indicating psychological changes a character may or may not go through. In other words, the outer and inner ‘journey’ refer to the old distinction between plot (understood here as the course of events) and character design. Both plot and character represent the two inseparable sides of the same dramatic coin. Obviously, between the two, numerous relationships can and probably should develop. If the distinction is clear between character change understood (in a metaphorical way) as an ‘inner journey’ and the external, literal journey, the concepts want and need – which seem to refer to goals rather than to journeys – may be confusing here. Also, to the extent that the concepts internal and external goals describe very well some differences such as the internal goal ‘to become a better father’ (e.g. Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979), and the external goal ‘to nuke a meteorite’ (e.g. Armageddon, 1998), the terms want and need may not be required at all. PROBLEMS WITH THE CONSCIOUS VS. UNCONSCIOUS PARAMETER To define want and need as the respectively conscious and unconscious dramatic goals of the main character is also problematic for more than one reason. Firstly, several critics (e.g. Trottier 1998, Cowgill 1999, McIlrath 2007) acknowledge that near the end, the unconscious need may become conscious. If both the want and the need are conscious, how does the conscious vs. unconscious parameter help to distinguish want and need in a precise way? Secondly, in some examples the need not only becomes conscious towards the end of or in Act 3, but it is as conscious within the character’s mind as the want, and from the very beginning. The Devil’s Advocate (1997) starts with country lawyer Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) who has never lost a case and who is defending a child rapist. When, in a not too subtle way, the suspect is shown masturbating in court while the D.A. is questioning his victim, Lomax is outraged and asks the judge for a short recess. He runs into the bathroom and confronts himself in front of the mirror. At that moment, Lomax experiences an inner conflict, made obvious to the audience through the cliché of having him looking at himself in the mirror: what shall he do? Follow his want or his need? Go left or right? Continue his list

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of wins in court and let this pervert go free or abandon his client and allow justice to run its due course? The stakes of the dilemma are raised because if Lomax abandons his client now, he will be barred from his profession as a lawyer. Both journeys, both choices, may be perceived and described as equally external or internal (as mentioned above) but, above all, in the mind of the protagonist they are both very conscious from the very beginning. In Some Like it Hot (1959) one may assume that Joe (Tony Curtis) is also very conscious of the fact that he should not lie to Sugar, that he should tell her the truth. However, when Daphne (Jack Lemmon) confronts him with his immoral behaviour, Joe(sephine) replies that one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. Thirdly, when looking at the examples mentioned in screenwriting manuals it is not always clear how conscious or unconscious protagonists are about their need. For example, is Scarlett (Gone with the Wind, 1939) conscious of the fact that she should marry Rhett Butler? Probably not. Is Rick (Casablanca, 1942) conscious of the fact that he should discover why Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) abandoned him in Paris? At first he is not, but as the narrative progresses, he is. In Traffic (2000) judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) wants to become President of the United States of America and in order to achieve that goal he accepts a high profile job to fight the international drugs cartel in Mexico. This represents his want. However, about thirty minutes into the movie, the audience discover that Wakefield’s daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is taking all kinds of hard drugs. When the audience see how one night a boyfriend collapses after an overdose and she and a couple of her friends dump the boy on the street in front of a hospital, the audience realize that there is a conflict between what the main character Wakefield wants to do and what he needs to do. Wakefield wants to fight drugs on an international scale as a politicojudicial problem but he needs to tackle the drugs problem at a family level, i.e. in his own family, and this as a medical healthcare problem. At that moment, however, Wakefield is not so much unconscious of his need as entirely unaware of it; he does not experience any inner conflict. In fact, he is convinced that his daughter is doing as well at school as at home. It is only forty minutes later when Wakefield discovers his daughter taking drugs in the bathroom that the protagonist catches up with the level of knowledge of the audience and is confronted with the conflict previously shown to the audience; the conflict between his want (to fight drugs on an international scale) and his need (to fight drugs on a family scale). A fourth problem is that ‘knowing’ or ‘being conscious’ of a need that conflicts with a want offers no guarantee of continuous inner dramatic conflict in the character. In Casablanca (1942), Rick realizes along the way that he should hear Ilsa out in order to learn what happened in Paris, and that inner struggle is dramatized through action (drinking) and dialogue. However, in Some Like it Hot, Joe knows that he should not lie to Sugar but he puts this knowledge aside without great difficulty 90

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until the very end. In The Devil’s Advocate, Kevin Lomax ‘knows’ very well what he should do but after a few seconds he decides not to follow his need and to go for his want by defending the pervert. After that, the moments of inner conflict are rare even though he runs into an increasing opposition from his need. As the narrative progresses, Lomax’s relationship with his religious mother becomes troubled, his wife is raped, turns mad and kills herself, and finally Lomax has to commit suicide in order to prevent the antagonist – the Devil himself – from achieving his satanic goal. In Trottier’s (1998) terminology, the audience see how Lomax’s inner ‘flaw’ develops into a growing opposition to his need. It is only at the end of the narrative, when it has been shown how the path of his want leads to total loss, that, at least temporarily, the protagonist chooses the path of his need. Finally, if the need is, and remains, unconscious to the character (as in many gangster movies and crime stories), i.e. if characters find themselves in a dilemma of which one part remains unknown or unconscious to them, how can there be an inner conflict? The answer to that question is simple: there cannot. Still, intuitively screenwriting manuals recognize a conflict, but to the character that conflict is neither internal vs. external, nor conscious vs. unconscious. It plays on an altogether different narrative level.

6. Here I adhere to the common narratological distinction, generally ignored in screenwriting manuals, between story (or fabula) understood as the diegetic content which through some act of narration is represented in a plot (or sjuzet) understood as the narrated story. 7. Obviously not all narratives present characters with inner conflicts between wants and needs. For example, in one-dimensional hero stories such as James Bond or Indiana Jones, the respective wants and needs coincide.

PROPOSAL FOR A RE-DEFINITION Some critics already hint at a possible solution to the terminological problem. McKee, for example, remarks that while the protagonist may be unaware of his subconscious need, the audience sense it (1997: 138). In a similar way, Trottier signals that whereas the need may be unconscious, blocked from within by a character flaw, this character flaw is obvious to the audience (1998: 25). The common feature that binds the examples mentioned above does not lie in the conscious or unconscious nature of the character’s want or need, or in the external or internal nature of it. As we have seen, the conflict is not always played at the level of the character, that is, at the story level. However, the conflict does always play at the level of interaction between plot and audience.6 The conflict (if there is one)7 plays between what a character wants to do and what they should do. While what the character should or should not do may (or may not) correspond to a more or less concrete idea within the character at the story level, what the character needs to do or should do is always meant to be clear in the hearts and minds of the audience. It is the audience who judge what a character should or should not do, and they do that (consciously or unconsciously) on the basis of another well-known ancient Greek concept called ‘doxa’ (from Plato) or ‘endoxa’ (from Aristotle). Doxa or endoxa refers to the dominant opinions, norms and values shared by a group of people in a specific time-space context. Trottier’s ‘flaw’ (1998: 24) already hints at a moral aspect of the want-need dilemma. If the want deviates from

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8. Another of Frank Daniel’s concepts (see Howard 2004: 52ff.) 9. For the sake of clarity I need to specify here that the concept of ‘audience’ refers to real, empirical audiences, not to imagined ‘implied readers’ or ‘narratees’ as is often the case in structuralist narratology.

the reigning endoxa, a moral conflict may arise between the want and the need. If all goes well – that is, if the audience empathize with the main character – this conflict may reinforce the ‘hope/fear’8 that the audience are experiencing vis-à-vis the protagonist.9 If the audience empathize with the main character, they hope that the protagonist is going to abandon their want and go for their need, but at the same time they fear that because of reasons such as an inner flaw, material profit, etc., the protagonist will choose their want and thereby lose their need. If we consider the want-need dilemma as a conflict between the character and the audience rather than between the character and herself/himself, this shifts the central focus of the conflict from the story level to the level of interaction between the plot (as a narrated story) and the audience. At the story level all kinds of options remain open: the character may never learn about a conflict between their want and their need or may learn about it after the audience do, or they may be informed at the same time as the audience. The character may be more or less (un)conscious of an inner conflict, feel troubled by the conflict and act upon it or not. The inner conflict at story level may play immediately or start only later on. THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS RE-DEFINITION Does a re-definition of wants and needs solve all possible problems with respect to dramatic goals? Certainly not, because the concept of endoxa represents a rather slippery notion which is linked with another ghost-like idea, the audience. Whereas critics and journalists often like to pretend there are only two types of audiences – the mass audience and the cinephiles – it is now generally accepted that there exist many different types of audiences who should be considered as complex, heterogeneous and ever-changing groups of individuals. Consequently their respective endoxas show not only common features but also important differences. One may assume therefore that public expectations about what a character should and should not do differ accordingly. In other words, redefining the concepts of want and need as suggested above links the discussion with the interesting but very complex and quite different problem of audience interpretation and audience involvement. Since Plato and Aristotle, scholars in sociology and cultural studies have of course suggested several mechanisms to describe (en) doxas in more specific ways. The Greek concept has similarities with Bakhtin’s theory of ‘heteroglossia’ and Volosinov’s account of ‘multi-accentuality’ (as in Fiske 1992: 298–299). It also recalls Stanley Fish’s ‘interpretive communities’ (Fish 1976), Pierre Bourdieu’s study of taste, ‘field’, ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1979) and Stuart Hall’s ‘preferred’, ‘negotiated’ and ‘oppositional’ readings (Hall 1980). What these and other so-called poststructuralist theories have

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in common is the notion that texts do not have one fixed meaning and that different people may ‘read’ texts in different ways – ways that were not always intended by the writers. Among other factors, people’s socio-cultural position for example co-determines the interpretation process in different ways (Fiske 1992: 292). In order to illustrate this, Fiske describes an interesting experiment about a group of homeless men who watched the movie Die Hard (1988) on a VCR in their church shelter (1992: 302). These men rarely watched television because it generally advocates values such as family life, work and leisure, which are irrelevant to them. Fiske describes how these men enthusiastically cheered when the villains destroyed a police armoured vehicle and killed a ‘good’ guy, but switched off the VCR before the end, when the hero and the police force restored law and order and reconfirmed the dominant ideology they so much despised. Fiske’s anecdote and the aforementioned theories link the discussion of audience interpretation with that of audience involvement. Instead of rooting for the main character and its dramatic goal, Fiske’s viewers experienced what in German is called ‘Schadenfreude’;10 they hoped the protagonist would lose and they turned off the VCR when he started to win. This also suggests another line of research that is of interest to this study: the study of narrative empathy and other types of cognitive-emotional audience engagement with narrative fictions.11 The cognitive-emotional impact of a narrative plays at different levels. While reading or watching, readers-viewers consciously or unconsciously react to the ways a narrator behaves, the ways an agent acts at the level of story and the ways the narrator assigns features to the ‘narratee’.12 Narrators may behave in a sympathetic and agreeable way, but also in sexist, racist, unreliable, and other ways. These ways may or may not motivate the reader’s or viewer’s interest in the narrative. As explained above, ‘events’ and ‘existents’13 at the story level may refer to characters wanting things that are on a par with the reader’s or viewer’s hopes and fears, or not. And finally the use of any narrator, whether through telling or showing, not only creates a diegetic world, but also ‘creates’ an addressee or, in narratological terms, a narratee. The very act of narrating suggests features of a narratee. These features concern what a narratee does or does not know, likes or dislikes, feels or thinks, etc. For example, in the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1998) the narrating character, Stevens, addresses his narrative to a ‘you’ in the text, the narratee. When Stevens talks about butlering, he assumes the narratee knows certain things about the subject, and so does not explain these elements. Stevens also assumes other items may not be known to the narratee – hence he explains these things. The same goes for certain assumptions with respect to ‘normal’ social, political, economical and cultural values or ideas that are ‘taken for granted’ by the narrator. When in Romeo is Bleeding (1993) the narrating character Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman) is enjoying the

10. Malicious delight (trans. the author). 11. See for example Zillmann (1991), Smith (1995), Tan (1996), Grodal (1997), Coplan (2004), Keen (2006) and Keen (2007). 12. The concept is well known in structuralist narratology but generally ignored in the world of screenwriters and screenwriting trainers. It refers to the person to whom the narrator is narrating/addressing. As the narrator is to be distinguished from the flesh and blood writer, so the narratee must also not be confused with the flesh and blood reader/viewer. 13. See Chatman (1978).

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14. See for example Lavandier (2005: 43, 45), Iglesias (2005: 61ff.), Williams (2006: 93ff.), etc. 15. See for example Vogler (1992) and especially Vogler (2007), who concentrates on the story of a hero with a moral dramatic goal and a happy ending. 16. See for example Armer (1993: 5ff.), Iglesias (2005: 61ff.), Lavandier (2005: 44ff.).

sight through his binoculars of a man having sex with two women, he addresses the narratee in a direct way: JACK GRIMALDI (V.O.) (Chuckles) I bet you know what he was thinkin’, don’t ya? You’d have done just what he wound up doing, I’ll bet. Some (actual) viewers of this scene may agree with his supposition and enjoy the view, others may not. Even though not all narratives present narratees in such a conspicuous way, the examples show that during the actual reading/viewing process a narratee may partly or entirely correspond with (or differ from) the actual reader/viewer on an individual as well as a sociocultural and political level, in terms of moral and other values, opinions, beliefs, sensibilities, etc. In turn these differences and similarities may have an impact on different types of empathetic engagement. In this sense, cognitive narrative studies meet the aforementioned sociological and cultural studies approaches. As Ralf Schneider explains, ‘[the] kind of emotion [that] results from empathy and how intense it is in each case depends on the recipient’s attitude towards a character, which is (sic) turn influenced by his or her value system in general’ (Schneider 2005: 136). Screenwriting manuals do not entirely ignore the problem. Several authors offer advice with respect to the so-called ‘un-sympathetic’ protagonist and how to increase the chances of obtaining audience empathy with that character and its goals.14 They suggest turning this main character into a hero and have him or her meet impossible challenges; or also assigning ‘positive’ features to the main character next to the negative ones, and to have other characters in the story admire the main character; or victimizing this ‘unsympathetic’ main character and making his or her antagonist(s) even ‘worse’ than (s) he is, etc. However, most screenwriting manuals focus on audience empathy with a protagonist and a dramatic goal that corresponds with what ‘the’ audience would like the main character to do.15 The re-definition of want and need offered above includes narratives that contain a character who goes after a goal the audience disagree with. Why audiences remain interested in watching characters who pursue something against the audience’s wishes is an interesting question. Why do audiences continue to watch Scarface (1983)? Or all those other crime stories and gangster movies for that matter? In order to experience criminal acts by proxy? Or to wait for that satisfying moment when the villain finally gets what (s)he deserves?16 The success of crime stories and gangster movies suggests that a gap between what a character wants and what an audience feel a character should want does not necessarily destroy viewer motivation. Fiske’s (1992: 302) anecdote about the homeless men watching Die Hard on a VCR shows

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at the same time that narratives with conflicting wants and needs hold some risks, including the risk that the value system of the character deviates so much from that of the viewer that the viewer abandons the narrative. As suggested at the beginning of this section, these questions stretch far beyond the limits of a single article. They fit in the even larger debate about aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic experience. Audience empathy with one or more characters should be considered next to other possible viewer motivations for connecting or disconnecting with a narrative. Some viewers may continue watching because of the choice of actors or actresses, or vice versa. Others may continue watching because of the music, or the photography or because the movie was shot in their hometown. Since the point of view adopted here is that of the screenwriter, the scope should be limited to those motivations that fall into the working field of the screenwriter. By way of conclusion, I turn back to the discussion about wants and needs. It should be clear to screenwriters that they may write conflicts between what a character wants and what she/he needs according to an audience. However, to the extent that there is not one homogeneous audience, there is not one homogeneous need. What screenwriters intend does not always translate into what viewers interpret. One can doubt that the screenwriters of Die Hard intended to write a conflict between a want and a need with respect to their protagonist John McClane (Bruce Willis)? And who says that all viewers watching gangster movies experience a conflict between a want and a need? What should we think of the huge success of ultra-violent video and computer games where the dramatic goal of the player-protagonist consists in murdering as many people as possible as fast as possible? The links between the value systems of a narrative and those of a viewer on the one hand, and empathetic viewer engagement on the other continue to fascinate scholars. Further research will have to come up with more convincing explanations. The next challenge will consist in turning those findings into workable writing tools. REFERENCES Armageddon (1998), Wr: Oliver Stone, Dir: Brian De Palma, US, 170 mins. Armer, A. (1993), Writing the Screenplay. TV and Film, Second Edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Batty, C. (2006), ‘Wants and Needs: action and emotion in scripts’, ScriptWriter, 31, pp. 12–18. Batty, C. (2007), ‘Physical wants and emotional needs’, ScriptWriter, 32, pp. 45–51. Bordwell, D.; Thompson, K. and Staiger, J. (1985), The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bordwell, David (2006), The Way Hollywood Tells It. Story and Style in Modern Movies, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1979), La Distinction. Critique sociale du Jugement, Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

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Casablanca (1942), Wr: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Dir: Michael Curtiz, US, 102 mins. Chatman, S. (1978), Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, London: Cornell University Press. Coplan, A. (2004), ‘Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62:2, pp. 141–152. Cowgill, L. (1999), Secrets of Screenplay Structure. How to Recognize and Emulate the Structural Frameworks of Great Films, Los Angeles: Lone Eagle. The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Wr: Jonathan Lemkin, Tony Gilroy, Dir: Taylor Hackford, US, 144 mins. Die Hard (1988), Wr: Jeb Stuart, Steven de Souza, Dir: John McTiernan, US, 131 mins. Fish, S. (1976), ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, Critical Inquiry 2:3, pp. 465–485. Fiske, John (1992), ‘British Cultural Studies and Television’, in R. C. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. Television and Contemporary Criticism. Second Edition, London: Routledge, pp. 284–326. Fludernik, M. (2005), From Structuralism to the Present, in J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz (eds), A Companion to Narrative Theory, London: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 36–59. Gone with the wind (1939), Wr: Sidney Howard, Oliver H. P. Garrett, Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling, John Van Druten, Dir: Victor Fleming, Sam Wood, George Cukor, US, 226 mins. Grodal, T. (1997), Moving Pictures. A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Herman, D. (1997), ‘Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 112:5, pp. 1046–1059. Hall, S. (1980), ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–139. Howard, D. (2004), How to Build a Great Screenplay, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Keen, S. (2006), ‘A Theory of Narrative Empathy’, in Narrative 14:3, pp. 207–236. Keen, S. (2007), Empathy and the Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iglesias, K. (2005), Writing for Emotional Impact, Livermore CA: WingSpan Press. Ishiguro, Kazuo (1998), The Remains of the Day, New York: Vintage Books. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Wr: Robert Benton, Dir: Robert Benton, US, 105 mins. Lavandier, Y. (2005), Writing Drama, Cergy Cedex: Le Clown & l’Enfant. Lucey, P. (1996), Story Sense. Writing Story and Script for Feature Films and Television, London: McGraw-Hill. McIlrath, M. (2004), ‘Creative treatments’, ScriptWriter, 17, pp. 34–37. McIlrath, M. (2006), ‘Beyond Aristotle’, ScriptWriter, 26, pp. 38–42. McIlrath, M. (2007), ‘Story Patterns’, ScriptWriter, 35, pp. 39–44. McKee, R. (1997), Story. Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, New York: Harper Collins. Mehring, M. (1990), The Screenplay. A Blend of Film Form and Content, London: Focal Press. Moonstruck (1987), Wr: John Patrick Shanley, Dir: Norman Jewison, US, 102 mins. Pretty Woman (1990), Wr: J. F. Lawton, Dir: Garry Marshall, US, 119 mins.

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Romancing the Stone (1984), Wr: Diane Thomas, Lem Dobbs, Howard Franklin, Treva Silverman, Dir: Robert Zemeckis, US, 106 mins. Romeo is Bleeding (1993), Wr: Hilary Henkin, Dir: Peter Medak, US, 100 mins. Scarface (1983), Wr: Oliver Stone, Dir: Brian De Palma, US, 170 mins. Schneider, R. (2005), ‘Emotion and Narrative’, in D. Herman, M. Jahn, and M-L. Ryan (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London: Routledge. Smith, M. (1995), Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Some Like it Hot (1959), Wr: Robert Toeren, Michael Logan, Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond, Dir: Billy Wilder, US, 120 mins. Tan, E. (1996), Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Traffic (2000), Wr: Stephen Gaghan, Simon Moore, Dir: Steven Soderbergh, US, 147 mins. Trottier, D. (1998), The Screenwriter’s Bible. A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script, Third Edition. Expanded &Updated, Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. Twins (1988), Wr: William Davies, William Osborne, Timothy Harris, Herschel Weingrod, Dir: Ivan Reitman, US, 105 mins. Vogler, C. (1992), The Writer’s Journey. Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters, Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Vogler, C. (2007), ‘Christopher Vogler and the Dark Side’, ScriptWriter, 36, pp. 34–38. Williams, S. (2006), The Moral Premise. Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success, Studio City CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Witness (1985), Wr: William Kelley, Earl W. Wallace, Pamela Wallace, Dir: Peter Weir, US, 112 mins. Zillmann, D. (1991), ‘Empathy: Affect from Bearing Witness to the Emotions of Others’, in Bryant Jennings and Dolf Zillman (eds), Responding to the Screen: Reception and Reaction Processes, Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 135–168.

SUGGESTED CITATION Cattrysse, P. (2010), ‘The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 83–97, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.83/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Patrick Cattrysse is Head of the Flanders Script Academy (FSA). He is a researcher and trainer in storytelling and screenwriting at different universities and film schools, among them the University of Antwerp, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Emerson College European Center, the FSA, and the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (San Antonio – Cuba). To receive current information on courses available at the FSA, please email patrick.cattrysse@ telenet.be or visit www.vsa-fsa.org. Contact: Raamlolaan3, B-3120 Tremelo, België. E-mail: [email protected].

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