A History of the Screenplay

ISBN: 9781137315700
DOI: 10.1057/9781137315700
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 A History of the Screenplay

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10.1057/9781137315700 - A History of the Screenplay, Steven Price

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A History of the Screenplay
Steven Price
School of English, Bangor University, UK

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10.1057/9781137315700 - A History of the Screenplay, Steven Price

© Steven Price 2013
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
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save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
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may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
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10.1057/9781137315700 - A History of the Screenplay, Steven Price

Contents

Acknowledgements vi

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Introduction 1

1 Prehistory of the Screenplay 22

2 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing 36

3 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 52

4 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 76

5 The Silent Film Script in Europe 99

6 The Coming of Sound 120

7 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 140

8 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 163

9 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 182

10 The Contemporary Screenplay and Screenwriting Manual 200

11 Screenwriting Today and Tomorrow 220

Conclusion: The Screenplay as a Modular Text 235

Notes 239

Bibliography 260

Index 271

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the British Academy for an award under their Small

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Research Grant scheme, which in combination with Bangor University’s
sabbatical arrangements enabled me to conduct some of the primary
research and to write up the results. The book has its origins in a
few chapters originally proposed as part of a project that became The
Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
I am grateful to the anonymous readers of that proposal for recognis-
ing that the material would be better organised as two separate projects;
to Christabel Scaife, who acted as editor on the first of them; and to
Felicity Plester, whose infectious enthusiasm and commitment to this
area of research has been a continuing source of encouragement. It has
latterly fallen to Chris Penfold actually to drag the thing out of me;
many thanks to both Felicity and Chris, and to Cherline Daniel, for
their extreme patience and unfailing courtesy.
The biggest change in the field since I completed the first of the
projects has been in the flowering of the Screenwriting Research Net-
work (SRN). While conducting research for that book I was under the
impression that I was almost alone in writing about this area; it turns out
that several other people were independently working on screenplays,
all of us under the same misconception. It has taken the growth of
the SRN to put these people in touch with one another. For that and
much more, I, like many others, am indebted to the tireless efforts of Ian
Macdonald and Kirsi Rinne, and to those who have been instrumental
in organising the annual conferences I have been fortunate enough to
attend: Kirsi at Helsinki in 2009, Eva Novrup Redvall at Copenhagen in
2010, Ronald Geerts and Hugo Vercauteren at Brussels in 2011 and J. J.
Murphy and Kelley Conway at Madison in 2013. Two further, related
developments have been the founding of the Journal of Screenwriting,
under the editorship of Jill Nelmes, and the establishment of the London
Screenwriting Research Seminar, co-ordinated by Adam Ganz.
Through these means I have encountered so many people whose
comments, advice and scholarship have been helpful that I could not
possibly name them all, but I must give warm thanks to Steven Maras,
J. J. Murphy and Paul Wells, while Margot Nash saved me from a
howler I was certain I hadn’t committed, but had. David Bordwell, Ian

vi

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 Acknowledgements vii

Macdonald, Jill Nelmes and Claus Tieber all generously gave me access
to some of their research findings. Outside the conference circuit I have
been grateful for the discussions, face-to-face and by email, with Joanne
Lammers, Patrick Loughney, Tom Stempel and Selina Ukwuoma. What
has emerged is a kind of loose-knit research community in which there is
no party line, people from a remarkably diverse range of specialisms are
welcomed, and while disagreements may sometimes be pointed, they

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are always good-humoured, generous and free of the aggressive pursuit
of self-interest. Who knew?
What has not changed is the unfailing helpfulness and meticulous
scholarship of the staff at the many different libraries whose archives
I have explored. I must especially thank Barbara Hall and Jenny Romero
at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci-
ences, Los Angeles; Karen Pedersen and Joanne Lammers at the Writers
Guild Foundation Library, Los Angeles; Patrick Loughney at the Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and Jonny Davies at the Reuben Library,
British Film Institute, London. On a much earlier visit to the United
States I benefited greatly from the assistance of Ned Comstock at the
Doheny Library of the University of Southern California, and Charles
Silver at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Closer to home, I learned a great deal from my doctoral students, Ann
Igelström and Chris Pallant, and Chris’s post-doctoral work continues
to interact productively with my own interests. Julia Knaus’s intern-
ship at Bangor University in 2013 has been a godsend, and Michelle
Harrison has uncomplainingly tidied up several loose ends left behind
when I embarked on a period of research leave. I am grateful to Domini
Stallings for the cover illustration, and to Russell Hall for assistance with
the final design; my thanks to Domini more generally, and to Joey and
Abigail, are beyond words.
Some of the material in Chapter 1 considerably expands on arguments
I previously presented in ‘The First Screenplays? American Mutoscope
and Biograph Scenarios Revisited’, Journal of Screenwriting 2.2 (2011);
conversely, the section on the AM&B scenarios in Chapter 2 is consider-
ably condensed from the same article.

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Introduction

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Among the ‘Thirteen Film Scores’ that Yoko Ono created in 1968 is
‘Film No. 4’, entitled ‘Bottoms’. Here is the remainder of the text: ‘String
bottoms together in place of signatures for petition for peace.’1
Is this a screenplay? From one perspective the question is quite point-
less: the text fulfils whatever function Ono intended it to have, whether
that be for herself or for anyone else to develop into a film; it is, per-
haps, a piece of conceptual art, or an open invitation, like her ‘Six Film
Scripts’ of 1964, which ‘were printed and made available to whoever was
interested at the time or thereafter in making their own versions of the
films, since these films, by their nature, became a reality only when they
were repeated and realised by other film-makers’.2
The question does matter, however, if we are interested in the his-
tory of the screenplay, because the Ono texts show that quite literally
anything could, in theory, function as a scenario. The word ‘sce-
nario’, which is one of the terms used before the coinage of our word
‘screenplay’ (and all such terms are problematic), captures very well the
sense of a pre-production idea for a film; and unless this idea is posited
within an industrial context, or at least one that requires a division
of labour, that idea can be retained in any textual form whatsoever,
or indeed just in the film-maker’s head. In the earliest days of cinema
many, perhaps most, films would have been made without written plan-
ning, while digital technology today means that distinctions between
writing, shooting and post-production stages are becoming increasingly
unclear. Arguably, both print culture and industrial-scale film-making,
both of which would seem to be necessary for screenplays to exist, are
in terminal decline, and today this opens up possibilities for radically
new ideas of what a screenplay could be.

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2 A History of the Screenplay

Conversely, today’s published screenplays and screenwriting manuals

pose a different problem: seen in their light, a history of the screenplay
would not be a piecemeal catalogue of innumerable different kinds of
material, but instead would be quite brain-numbingly repetitive. The
form appears remarkably consistent, even in terms of length, with the
typical script being around 120 pages long, with those for certain genres
such as light comedy and, in particular, children’s films being somewhat

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shorter—perhaps 85 to 90 pages. This is usually held to result from a
rule of thumb whereby one page equals one minute of screen time, a
convention that itself derives from industrial requirements: the length
of the script enables an initial estimate to be made of the length of the
proposed film. For similar reasons, the contemporary screenplay has a
striking regularity of format in such matters as scene headings (‘slug
lines’) and the lineation of the different elements of the text, including
the presentation of dialogue and prose descriptions of the action.
On these counts, ‘Bottoms’ is out, and we might suggest that the terms
Ono uses—‘score’ and ‘script’—are quite precise and apposite. Digging
a little deeper, we might discover that the word ‘screenplay’ does not
appear as a compound noun until the 1930s, a decade that also saw
the now familiar screenplay format emerging, in embryonic form at
least, following the introduction of sound. Yet neither the word nor
the form materialised out of thin air. The two-word term ‘screen play’
has a longer history, stretching back at least to 1916, when it referred
to the film rather than the script, for which other terms—‘scenario’ and
the just-emerging ‘continuity’—were in use.3 In turn, these had replaced
the rough outlines of action that formed the only written planning of
many films prior to the introduction of the industrialised Hollywood
studio system in 1913. Ono’s text is not a ‘screenplay’, but it has much
in common with these earliest forms of screenwriting in functioning as
a simple prompt or invitation to the film-maker.
A history of the screenplay, then, needs to explore several intercon-
nected texts and practices. It should be attentive to the relationship
between the written documents and their functions, distinguishing
between screenplays and screenwriting, the latter of which may encom-
pass both the composition of the texts themselves and other kinds of
cinematic ‘writing’ such as filming or editing. It also needs to exam-
ine the historical development of the screenplay as a particular kind
of script, its emergence from other kinds of cinematic pre-text such
as the scenario and the continuity, and the often confused relation-
ships between these various kinds of text and the terminologies used
to define them.

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 Introduction 3

Screenplays and screenwriting

In FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film (1988),

Tom Stempel affirms that following the introduction of sound,
‘screenwriters . . . were smart enough to master the new craft of writing
for talking pictures. The new craft, in fact, was not all that different from
the old.’4 Although Stempel writes this in the context of an account of
screenwriters as storytellers, there is perhaps an implication that master-

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ing this ‘craft’ required the mastery of a particular textual form, which
would tend to support the view that this form acquired its shape during
the silent period, with relatively straightforward alterations due to the
introduction of sound.
Marc Norman, whose general survey What Happens Next: A History of
American Screenwriting was first published in 2007, is more explicit:

By the end of the 1910s the screenplay had acquired its definitive
format, a text divided into individual, numbered scenes, each new
scene beginning with a capitalized slug line that usually included the
names of the characters in the scene and an indication of whether
the shot was day or night, and then a paragraph, perhaps as little as
a sentence, of scene description. The scene’s dialogue then cascaded
down the center of the page, interrupted by more scene description
when necessary. This format, still the industry standard, evolved from
multiple sources but mostly from Thomas Ince.5

This view is not necessarily either right or wrong; it is instead a matter

of perspective. If we are content to know simply that some elements of
today’s screenplays can be found in those of the silent era, and perform
similar functions, then Norman’s thumbnail sketch may be sufficient.
We are then left with a screenplay that has changed little over time.
If, however, we concentrate on the implications of his assumption that
this essentially unchanging text remains an ‘industry standard’, then we
might begin to focus attention on the relationships between industrial
and formal change. For example, clearly there must have been some
significant changes between the silent and the sound eras in the rep-
resentation of dialogue. We might then begin to look for evidence of
how the written text responded over time to the demands of differing
modes of industrial production. At this greater level of detail, we could
begin to think that what Norman might regard as rather trivial changes
in form are in fact crucial in identifying significant changes in industrial
practice.

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4 A History of the Screenplay

Beyond this, neither Norman nor Stempel (in FrameWork, at least)

are especially interested in the relationship between textual form and
industrial function. As the titles of their books suggest, their focus is on
screenwriting as an activity, rather than screenplays as material texts.
To the extent that this distinction can be made, a consideration of
screenwriting (at least in these two books) engages such matters as the
working lives and careers of a large number of individual writers at dif-

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ferent studios, their recurrent themes or story ideas and so on. Equally
important within this approach are matters of broader concern such
as censorship, the role of screenwriters’ unions, the complexities sur-
rounding writing credit, the work of blacklisted Hollywood writers in
the 1950s6 or the position of women screenwriters within the industry.7
What emerges is a kind of shadow history of Hollywood from the
writer’s point of view, a little like Richard Corliss’s 1974 ‘pantheon’ of
writers that shadows Andrew Sarris’ 1968 pantheon of directors.8 None
of these critics, however, is particularly interested in a screenwriter’s
style; instead, they are examining Hollywood film as a storytelling
medium, much as, in a different way, does the recent work of both David
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.9
In his 2009 study Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, Steven
Maras approaches screenwriting from a very different angle. Again, he
does not engage in any detail with screenplay texts themselves, but
whereas Stempel and Norman are interested in the working lives of the
writers, Maras explores the ‘discourses surrounding screenwriting’—the
construction of ideas about screenplays. Equally importantly, he follows
the lead of many practitioners and earlier commentators in extending
the meaning of the term ‘screen writing’ to include ‘writing not for the
screen, but with or on the screen. It can refer to a kind of “filmic” or
“cinematic” or audiovisual writing’. Maras promotes the term ‘script-
ing’ to accommodate these practices, and in part his book is an effort to
examine the causes and consequences of what he sees as the damaging
attention to the written document at the expense of these other forms
of scripting.10 Maras’s book is also exceptionally helpful in historicis-
ing both the term ‘screenplay’ and the emergence of the kind of text to
which it properly refers, and he notes the confusions that can arise from
using the word as an umbrella term to accommodate earlier, different
forms such as the scenario and the continuity.
Although each of these studies is very different from the others,
what connects them is that, aside from a very small number of quota-
tions here and there, the written texts themselves—scenarios, shooting
scripts, screenplays—are almost entirely absent. The present book, by

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 Introduction 5

contrast, makes these texts the centre of attention, and for this rea-
son, among others, it does not aim to reproduce the storytelling drive
of Stempel or Norman. Instead, while being organised in an approxi-
mately chronological fashion, it pauses regularly to examine matters of
textual interest and signs of historical change in the writing of cinematic
pre-texts. It is not especially interested in any particular writer’s recur-
rent narrative or thematic concerns, as Corliss is; and it engages only

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infrequently with the idea that the screenplay can function as a mode
of personal expression, although there are important exceptions, as in
the work of Carl Mayer and Ingmar Bergman. Instead, it aims to show
how prevailing relationships between screen writing and film industries
brought certain modes of writing into being at certain times, how and
why those relationships changed, and what the scripts resulting from
these changes typically look like.

An industrial history of the screenplay

Any commentary on screenwriting is bound to observe that it is tied

to a particular industry in ways that the novel, poem or even theatrical
play is not. These industrial contexts impose some limitations on the
properties of the text. As with other modes of writing, it makes sense to
examine screenplay form in relation to function, except that in this case
the focus is likely to be less on the expressive qualities of the text than
on the ways in which it engages the concerns of the other members of
a team working on the production of a film. This is certainly one of
the reasons why the most extensive studies of screenwriting have been
in relation to Hollywood cinema. Not only has Hollywood been the
world’s dominant film economy since the end of the First World War,
but it also took the lead in organising and dividing film labour into dis-
crete practices—producing, directing, shooting, editing and so on—and
adapting the film script to address these readerships. Consequently, sig-
nificant changes to the organisation of labour are likely to bring about
changes in screenwriting itself.
This is the approach taken in what is undoubtedly the most influential
account of the American screenplay, by Janet Staiger in her contribu-
tions to The Classical Hollywood Cinema, co-written with Bordwell and
Thompson, and published in 1985. Like Stempel and Norman, Staiger
analyses few scripts in any great detail. Unlike these other writers, how-
ever, she is concerned to show that changes in the mode of industrial
production necessitated changes in the forms that screenplays and their
precursors took. Working at this more particular level of generalisation

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6 A History of the Screenplay

enables Staiger to establish certain norms within which screenwriting

functions. There are exceptions to the rules—for example, when a pow-
erful producer or director was permitted to develop a particular project
in relative freedom—and certain parameters within them, but during
any given period film scripts would be presented in ways that enabled
them to fulfil their necessary industrial functions within the mode of
production that was dominant at that time.

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Because all subsequent studies of screenplay history need to take
account of Staiger’s work as a starting point, it is worth outlining here
the six major relevant stages in Hollywood screenwriting history that
she identifies in her contributions to The Classical Hollywood Cinema
and in her important essay ‘Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s
Continuity Scripts’.11 Each of these stages was dominated by a particu-
lar mode of production that led, where necessary, to the creation of a
particular form of written pre-text to accomplish its objectives.

1. During the ‘cameraman system’, essentially a one-person mode of

production that prevailed from 1896 to 1907, a script was not
necessary, other than perhaps as an aide-mémoire or memo to self.
2. 1907 to 1909 saw the emergence of the ‘director system’, which intro-
duced a rudimentary division of labour between a director, whose
role was akin to that of the theatrical stage director, and a photogra-
pher. With more than one person having to work on a project, the
‘outline script’, perhaps no more than a few words to indicate the
content of each scene and their sequence, often became necessary.
3. Between 1909 and 1914 the increasing size of companies and the
need to increase supply brought with them a more complex and
hierarchical structure. This was the ‘director-unit system’, in which
a company would utilise several directors, each working more or less
autonomously with a particular production team or unit. This saw
the introduction of the ‘scenario’ script, which developed the outline
into a properly narrative form, initially tailored to meet the desire
for a logical, continuous story within the 1000-foot length that had
become the standard unit for films manufactured for the distribution
exchanges and exhibited in nickelodeons.
4. The period between 1914 and the late 1920s saw the consolida-
tion of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of the producer.
Bookended by the establishment of the silent feature film at its begin-
ning and the emergence of talking pictures at its end, this period was
characterised by a ‘central producer system’ in which the manage-
rial control of budgets by a powerful producer necessitated a more

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 Introduction 7

complex form of ‘continuity’ script, which performed the function of

an industrial blueprint designed to monitor quality and to facilitate
more reliable projections of the financial costs of a given project.
5. The new industrial demands of the sound movie, in addition to
other burdens, made it almost impossible for a single producer to
oversee the whole of a studio’s output. Around 1930, then, the
‘producer-unit system’ emerged. In a fashion analogous to the earlier

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director-unit system, an individual producer—possibly specialising
in a particular genre—would now take control of a smaller number
of pictures. Meanwhile, the introduction of sound had created a tem-
porary rupture in the smooth organisation of scriptwriting, with the
improvisation of different ways of incorporating dialogue within the
script. Towards the end of 1932 the studios therefore attempted to
homogenise the formatting of scripts, leading to the establishment of
the ‘master-scene’ screenplay that, with some modifications, remains
in place today.
6. Staiger ends her analysis of screenplay texts themselves with Juarez
(1938), but the structure of The Classical Hollywood Cinema leads to
the inference that the end of vertical integration and, by the late
1950s, the emergence of the ‘package-unit system’ we are famil-
iar with today, in which less rigidly organised teams would come
together to work on individual projects, would have some effect on
screenwriting: logically, to less formulaic methods, with the particu-
lar form of a script being a matter for discussion between individuals,
especially the writer, producer and director.

This analysis has been overwhelmingly influential, not only in rela-

tion to Hollywood but in several significant studies of European
screenwriting, including Alexander Schwarz’s meticulous account of
German and Russian screenplays in the silent era,12 Colin Crisp’s monu-
mental study of the French film industry between 1930 and 1960,13 and
Thompson’s invaluable essay on silent screenwriting in all three of these
countries.14 All of these scholars help to establish that a proper under-
standing of screenwriting requires a recognition of the relationship
between industrial function and textual form.
Staiger’s account could be challenged or qualified in several ways, and,
importantly, she notes that there will be exceptions to and variations
within the norms she identifies. For example, higher-budget, prestige
pictures created by established figures might allow for a greater degree
of what we might term authorial input from a particular producer,
who might have personal preferences about how the script should be

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8 A History of the Screenplay

developed. For this reason, the films that have achieved the highest
acclaim and become prominent in attempts to establish Hollywood as
a cinema of ‘auteurs’ might be highly inappropriate examples if we
want to understand Hollywood as an industrial system that functioned
according to particular kinds of economic and creative practice.
It still follows, however, that the establishment of the norms them-
selves is exceptionally useful in providing a framework within which to

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understand historical change in screenplay form, and to some extent the
earlier chapters of the present study follow Staiger’s distinctions between
different kinds of screenwriting in different periods, though paths fre-
quently diverge. The materials examined in chapters 1 and (especially)
2 take forms that go beyond the mere aides-mémoire that would have
represented the limits of screenwriting competence required under the
pre-industrial ‘cameraman’ system. Chapter 3 discusses the ‘outlines’
and ‘scenarios’ of the pre-feature film era to 1914, while illustrating the
variety of texts subsumed under these umbrella terms. Conversely, the
silent feature ‘continuity’ provides the strongest evidence for a more or
less precise correlation between a particular mode of production and
a relatively invariant textual form—the soundest argument, that is, for
the screenplay as a ‘blueprint’. This is examined in Chapter 4. Chapter 5
draws on Thompson’s evidence that in the 1920s the American continu-
ity became an important influence on the organisation of screenwriting
labour in France, Germany and Russia, while also examining a variety
of texts that were created in these countries in the silent era.
Thereafter, Staiger’s periodisation becomes less significant as a model
for the present book, Chapter 6 of which details some of the ways in
which Hollywood attempted to adapt the continuity script to meet
the requirements of sound. The Classical Hollywood Cinema proposes,
slightly ambiguously and elliptically, that in the 1930s Hollywood then
effected a change from the numbered continuity to the ‘master-scene’
script that is the default screenplay format of today. However, both the
screenplay in the classical Hollywood sound era and the transition to
the master-scene script more generally are messy affairs. Chapters 7, 8
and 9 each tackle this transition from a different perspective. Chapter 7
aims to show that prior to the Paramount case of 1948 there is less
consistency in screenwriting than might be expected: the screenplay
is something of a hybrid of master scenes and shots, and there are
many inconsistencies and variant approaches both between studios and
within individual scripts. Chapter 8 turns to Europe to examine the
rise of the cinematic ‘auteur’ in the 1950s. Screenplays for films asso-
ciated with this development are often closer in form to the prose
treatment than to the shooting script, partly because this facilitated

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 Introduction 9

a greater degree of improvisation in filming. This in turn became an

influence on the ‘New Hollywood’ film-makers of the 1960s and 1970s,
while the emergence of the ‘master scene’ screenplay within America
in the 1950s was also important as a marker of the increasing indepen-
dence of the writer after the closure of the studios’ writing departments.
These developments are examined in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 traces
the rise to ascendancy of today’s master-scene screenplay as a stan-

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dardised form, partly in connection with the rise of the contemporary
screenwriting manual, with Chapter 11 looking at other kinds of recent
film writing.
The Classical Hollywood Cinema is, as it were, methodologically in sym-
pathy with the managerial practices it describes: that is, it organises a
huge body of disparate materials and procedures within a structural sys-
tem that assigns an appropriate place to each. To accomplish this, it
draws on what we might think of as two master narratives. The first
is derived from contemporary trade papers and screenwriting manu-
als. Like the manuals of today, these purport to describe accurately the
screenwriting forms prescribed by the American film industry and tend
to support Staiger’s own meta-narrative about Hollywood as a particular
kind of industrial system. These narratives also contribute to a certain
view of what a screenplay and its functions are. The second is the anal-
ysis of industry associated most prominently with Frederick Winslow
Taylor (1856–1915), who proposed a division of labour between the
‘conception’ and ‘execution’ stages of manufacture. Staiger applies this
to Hollywood cinema: screenwriting belongs to the ‘conception’ stage,
and the shooting of the film to the ‘execution’ stage.
Each of these master narratives, however, is open to challenge. Staiger
herself notes problems in placing too great an emphasis on represen-
tations of the early Hollywood film industry within the pages of trade
papers such as Motography, Motion Picture World and Nickelodeon, the reli-
ability of which is open to question, since while they may or may not
indicate the nature of screenwriting at the time, they certainly ‘do not
indicate what was actually occurring in the films’.15 A more fundamental
challenge is to the argument that the Taylorite model effected the sep-
aration of conception and execution—writing and filming—as fully as
the ‘blueprint’ metaphor suggests. Maras, for example, suggests that this
confidence in the ‘sovereign’ script is dubious at best, that any idea that
screenplays are ‘shot as written’ is fraught with difficulty, and that their
provisional status would be more clearly apparent if we were to reposi-
tion them in the context of the other kinds of re-writing, or scripting,
that take place continuously throughout the process of making a film.16
Such questions will recur throughout the present study.

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10 A History of the Screenplay

Furthermore, although Staiger’s analysis of the screenplay in relation

to an industrial system is indispensable, as is her methodology in chart-
ing the relationship between different kinds of screenplay and different
modes of production, it can only tell us so much about the nature of any
given script that was produced within that system: it begins with the
principle that the screenplay is an industrial document and proceeds
to assign individual features of particular screenplays to their appro-

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priate place within that framework. From other perspectives, however,
we might be interested in other potentialities within the written text
(e.g. as a form of expressive literature or creative labour), and want to
examine those aspects of the screenplay that exceed a purely industrial
function.
Perhaps the most helpful methodology for analysing screenplays in
these ways is provided by Claudia Sternberg, who distinguishes the ‘dia-
logue text’ from the remaining prose elements within a screenplay that
comprise the ‘scene text’.17 It is not difficult to think of screenwriters—
Harold Pinter, David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino are latter-day exam-
ples who immediately come to mind—whose dialogue is instantly recog-
nisable. Even within the scene text, however, there is still widespread
variation. Sternberg breaks the scene text down into three ‘modes’:
description (of set, characters and so on), ‘report’ (the presentation
of the series of actions, usually human) and ‘comment’. The com-
ment mode is routinely thought to be prohibited in screenwriting
because it breaks the convention that the scene text should contain only
what can be seen on the screen. Sternberg disputes this, holding that
‘screenwriters rarely miss the opportunity to use the mode of comment.
It is in this mode of presentation that ever newer forms and designs of
screenwriting shall be revealed.’18
This provides opportunities for the analysis of an individual writer’s
style, but of wider significance is the relationship between the mode
of production and the nature of the screenplay text. The most obvious
example is that the transition to sound required the writing of dialogue,
but more interesting are variations within the scene text, for example,
in the exploitation of the prose narrative or ‘treatment’ form by ‘auteur’
directors such as Ingmar Bergman (Chapter 8).

A terminological history of the screenplay

As this discussion shows, writing for film encompasses a large num-

ber of different kinds of text. However, the history of these writings
does not simply see one form replaced by another in a straightforward

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 Introduction 11

chronological sequence. Similarly, the words used to refer to these

documents do not reveal any clear pattern of terminological change,
with an older word falling into disuse and being replaced by a newer
alternative. One kind of text may be referred to by two different terms;
conversely, a single word like ‘scenario’ or ‘continuity’ may be used to
refer to more than one kind of text, which can cause still greater uncer-
tainty when, as is usually the case, a given film project generates more

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than one kind of document. Therefore, it may be helpful at this point
to give an account of the historical usage of some of the more common
terms we shall encounter in this book.

1. Photoplay. In 1912 the United States Copyright Office created two new
classifications for feature films, of which fictional films (as opposed to
non-fiction or animation) were designated ‘photoplays’. However, just
as a screenwriter today might be said to be ‘writing a film’, so too the
term ‘photoplay’ quickly came to be applied to written texts also. In the
same year of 1912, Epes Winthop Sargent’s oft-cited column in Mov-
ing Picture World changed its name from ‘The Scenario Writer’ to ‘The
Photoplaywright’, remaining under that title until 1918. Sargent also fig-
ured prominently in The Photoplay Author: A Journal for All Who Produce
Photoplays, with the caption ‘Who Can Produce Photoplays?’ appearing
on the cover of the June–July 1913 issue.19 The terminology can there-
fore contribute to confusion about the relationships between writing
and film in this period.
2. Synopsis. Maras’s summary of accounts of the synopsis in the silent
era suggests that the term was being applied to prose narratives of any-
where between 300 and 8000 words in length.20 Clearly, the same word
is being used to describe many different kinds of script, with varying
functions; moreover, a single narrative telling of a story can have differ-
ent kinds of utility. For example, in the silent feature era the synopsis
was routinely integrated into the continuity: as a separate item accom-
panied by other documents, including the script, or as a preface to the
script itself. In its shorter forms, it can function as a capsule condensa-
tion for purposes of pitching a story, assessing its commercial potential,
or summarising the narrative for executives who may be disinclined
to read a screenplay or continuity in full. A somewhat longer form of
prose narrative, of perhaps five pages in length, was used as the ‘sce-
nario’ for many of the shorter films of the 1910s, and could in this form
serve the function of a shooting script. This could even be the case with
longer narratives, under certain conditions, as for example in its deploy-
ment by many European ‘auteur’ directors in the 1950s, especially when

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12 A History of the Screenplay

augmented by dialogue in the form of a treatment (see below). As we

shall see, the dividing lines between a synopsis, a prose fiction form of
scenario and a treatment are relatively unscientific, and often a matter
for judgement.
3. Scenario. One form of scenario invites immediate comparison to
(but, therefore, confusion with) the synopsis: scenarists John Emerson
and Anita Loos, writing in 1920, define it as ‘a detailed synopsis of the

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plot in ordinary short story form’.21 Most such synopses are not entirely
ordinary, however, in being composed in the present tense. Moreover,
it was quite common for such scenarios to take a more paratactic form,
anticipating shot sequences by separating individual moments of action
within a scene by the use of dashes within the running text. For exam-
ple, the first scene of The New Stenographer, a comedy by J. Stuart
Blackton (Vitagraph, 1911), begins as follows: ‘Enter Cutey—goes to
his desk—picks up morning paper—begins to read. Enter Mr. Brown,
goes over to Cutey who puts paper down and asks him where the new
stenographer is. Brown goes to stenographer’s desk in center—moves the
chair—looks at watch—goes back to Cutey.’22 This begins to move the
scenario a little closer to the later ‘continuity’, in which shot type would
be specified (see below).
A dictionary definition of the scenario as ‘A sketch or outline of the
plot of a play, ballet, novel, opera, story, etc., giving particulars of the
scenes, situations, etc.’ (OED) may carry the suggestion that the mate-
rial should be divided into scenes: a ‘scene-ario’. The division of the
prose narrative into scenes is quite typical of the scenarios of the 1910s
that we shall encounter in Chapter 3, but Patrick Loughney has also ret-
rospectively applied the term to texts written between 1904 and 1905
for the American Mutoscope and Biograph company (Chapter 2), which
directly imitate the format of the theatrical play. Defining the scenario
in terms of its formal properties is becoming problematic, which is
hardly surprising given the range of media to which the OED’s descrip-
tion refers, or the imprecision of its alternate definition of a scenario
as simply ‘A sketch, outline, or description of an imagined situation or
sequence of events’.
Each of these definitions may carry the implication that a scenario
functions as a kind of rough draft or outline of action that will be
further developed in some later iteration. Yet OED also cites an 1884
piece in the Pall Mall Gazette, which refers to the writing of ‘an elab-
orate scenario . . . minutely setting down, not only the scenes as they
follow, the action of the personages engaged, the sense of all they have
to say, but even the “stage business” ’. This is similar to the OED’s

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 Introduction 13

cognate, film-specific definition: ‘A film script with all the details of

scenes, appearances of characters, stage-directions, etc., necessary for
shooting the film’, its earliest citation being 1911. A ‘scenario’, then,
can be either a rough sketch or a minutely detailed script, leading to
potential confusion with the ‘continuity’.
The distracting use of the same word to refer to both kinds of text
could be explained as resulting from a lag in recognising that one

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textual form had been superseded by another, or simply from a con-
temporary failure to develop a consistent terminological distinction that
would have been helpful to future historians. If so, the confusion per-
sisted for a remarkably long time, as Maras’s many revealing illustrations
suggest.23 In 1921, Frances Taylor Patterson was describing as a ‘scenario’
the composite document (containing a list of characters, plot synop-
sis, breakdown of scenes and the ‘plot of action’ or script itself) that
is usually referred to as the ‘continuity’. In 1924, Frederick Palmer also
mentions this possible meaning of the term ‘scenario’, alongside several
others, in describing the great ‘difference of opinion’ over the usage of
the word. The situation becomes no clearer following the introduction
of sound: Tamar Lane suggested in 1936 that ‘scenario’ could refer to
‘anything from an original story to a continuity’. The following year the
prolific Hollywood screenwriter Frances Marion, in the glossary to her
book How to Write and Sell Film Stories, defines ‘scenario’ as ‘A continu-
ity; a story with action, sound and all directions for photographing; a
shooting script’.24
Taking all of these inconsistencies into account, perhaps the easi-
est way to understand the scenario is, nevertheless, by contrasting it
with the continuity. Formally, the scenario breaks the action down into
scenes; the continuity is a more detailed breakdown that subdivides the
material into specific shots. This also assigns a place for each within film
production: the scenario renders the story in ways that are appropriate
for cinema by identifying discrete scenes, and the continuity is a later
iteration that transforms this material into a shooting script. The matter
is complicated in any number of ways, partly because of confusions in
the terminology, and partly because these definitions carry with them
the assumption that film production, including the writing, proceeds in
an essentially linear series of distinct stages.
4. Continuity. OED’s definition of the continuity as a ‘detailed sce-
nario for a cinema film; also, the maintenance of consistency or a
continuous flow of action in successive shots or scenes of a cinema or
television film’ immediately repeats the terminological confusion with
‘scenario’. More useful is the citation of G. F. Buckle’s Mind and Film

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14 A History of the Screenplay

(1926): ‘continuity . . . is the correct name for the working script’, if by

‘working script’ we mean what would now be called the shooting script.
Staiger implies that the word ‘continuity’ was not in widespread
usage in the early 1910s, since—referring to the producer who has most
widely been credited with bringing both industrial production generally,
and the continuity script specifically, to new levels of sophistication—
‘[Thomas] Ince’s scenarios had, by 1913, become what are now labeled

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continuity scripts’.25 By 1916, C. Gardner Sullivan, the best-known of
Ince’s writers, was explaining that ‘[e]ach scene in our continuity is prac-
tically a short story in itself they are so fully described’,26 and by the end
of the decade foreign visitors were reporting the conventional usage of
the term in American studios and suggesting its adoption as a method
of introducing greater efficiency to European film industries, as we shall
see in Chapter 5.
Nevertheless, as with ‘scenario’, there is significant slippage in the use
of the word both in the Hollywood of the time and in later critical and
historical studies. ‘Continuity’ may designate

(i) the dramatic text or plot of action, usually still termed the ‘scenario’
in the Hollywood of the time, written by a ‘creative’ writer;
(ii) a later modification of the scenario, which recasts it into shots
and/or contains additional technical detail supplied by specialist
studio workers if not by the ‘creative’ writer; or
(iii) the compilation of ‘breakdown’ documents of which the scenario,
together with the list of characters, plot synopsis, breakdown of
scenes and, usually, a post-production report, forms a part.

If the ‘scenario’ properly belongs to stage (i), and ‘continuity’

refers to composite document (iii), this leaves a highly troublesome
terminological confusion surrounding stage (ii). The word ‘continu-
ity’ appears to be generally, although not consistently, applied to both
(ii) and (iii). Essentially, the difficulty concerns whether or not, in a
given film project, a stage (ii) document represents a re-write of a sce-
nario stage (i), or whether instead the writer(s) proceeded immediately
to the fairly technical stage (ii) document without creating a ‘scenario’
first. This can obscure certain aspects of creative labour: the widespread
assumption is that stage (ii) would ordinarily be compiled by technical
experts, but there is no particular reason why an experienced scenario
writer would be incapable of also developing the ‘continuity’ text (ii),
or proceeding directly to it. The scale of the problem can be judged by

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 Introduction 15

a comment in the introduction to the anthology What Women Wrote:

Scenarios, 1912–1929, compiled by Ann Martin and Virginia M. Clark:

Although continuities reflect the scenario, they necessarily include

directorial intervention, and [ . . . ] cannot be proved to stem from the
original author of the scenario. In fact, the recordkeeping of the time
did not always distinguish between credit for the original story versus

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credit for scenario; thus definitive attribution can be problematic.27

A yet further complication—only slightly tangential to the present

problem—is that the term ‘continuity’ is often widely used to refer to

(iv) the editing sheet used by a studio editor to compile the shot
sequence; or
(v) what is now usually termed the ‘cutting continuity’, which is a
post-production document created by the studio for technical and
legal reasons to provide a written record precisely corresponding to
the release print of the film.

5. Treatment. This is defined in the OED as ‘A preparatory version

of a screenplay, including descriptions of sets and of the camerawork
required’, with a citation from 1928 describing it as ‘a sort of syn-
opsis’. In 1937, Marion identified the treatment as ‘an intermediate
step between the film story and the continuity’.28 Staiger indicates that
this had become a standard stage in the pre-production process in the
1920s, whereby the original material was translated into ‘lengthy prose
form prior to the more technically complex writing process of the next
stage’.29 As noted above, as a prose narrative the treatment has connec-
tions to both the synopsis and the short story form of scenario. Maras
helpfully draws attention to this spectrum in referring to ‘the extended
synopsis/treatment/scenario’, noting the possibility that ‘contrary to a
linear hypothesis the scenario does not merely “evolve” into the conti-
nuity script, or part of it, but informs the still-emerging notion of the
“treatment” ’.30
This question of the relationships between forms is crucial. With the
addition of dialogue, the treatment can be developed into a kind of
screenplay, and in this form became a distinct stage of pre-production
in France in the years following the Second World War. Treatments
also allow directors who prefer more improvisational methods to work
directly from it, without an intervening screenplay or shooting script
(see Chapter 8). All of these possibilities suggest that an understanding

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16 A History of the Screenplay

of the various forms of cinematic pre-text needs to take account of ideas

of production other than those that imply a strictly linear progression
from one iteration to another.
6. Screenplay. Very roughly, we can say that the screenplay is to the
shooting script what the scenario was to the continuity in the silent
era (always bearing in mind the instability of all of these terms): that
is, the screenplay casts a story into scenes, without further segmen-

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tation into defined shots. Arguably, the current understanding of the
screenplay as a document with very precise formal requirements derives
not from industrial practice but from the effect of screenwriting man-
uals, beginning with those written in the late 1970s. As we shall see in
Chapter 10, these argue for a separation of the screenplay both from
any later shooting script (by proscribing the specification of shot) and
from any preceding treatment stage (by prohibiting authorial narration
within the prose text).
As noted, Maras has traced the term ‘screen play’, as two separate
words, to 1916, when it was used to refer to the film, not the script.31
By the 1920s, ‘screen play’ can frequently be found on title pages
and other materials pertaining to the written text itself, when it often
appears to be synonymous with either the scenario or, in particular, the
continuity; the precise meaning of the phrase at this date remains fluid.
Broadway (Universal, 1929) had a ‘Screen Play and Dialogue Arrange-
ment by Edward T. Lowe, Jr.’, which may imply that the ‘screen play’
is a continuity modified to accommodate the ‘dialogue arrangement’.32
However, the same year, on a Warner Brothers’ script for The Gold Diggers
of Broadway, Avery Hopwood is credited with the ‘final continuity’, but
the ‘Screen Play’ is by Robert Lord. Here, ‘screen play’ indicates some-
thing like the older ‘scenario’, or the more recent ‘treatment’ or ‘screen
story’.33
Maras suggests that the compound word ‘screenplay’ did not come
into usage until around 1940, in the Academy Awards categories,34 and
notes that significant confusion has been occasioned by the retrospec-
tive use of ‘screenplay’ as a single word in describing texts written before
that date, as for example in the Library of Congress’s 1951 Catalog of
Copyright Entries: Cumulative Series, 1912–20, which ascribes an anachro-
nistic ‘screenplay by’ credit to writers on many films of this period.35
Maras accordingly considers the screenplay not so much in terms of
its formal properties, but as ‘underpinning a form of discourse’, which
emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, ‘that articulates a perspective on writ-
ing for the screen, a script-centred way of speaking about production,
and relations between different crafts’.36

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 Introduction 17

On the other hand, the title page of director James Whale’s per-
sonal copy of the shooting script for The Bride of Frankenstein (at this
date called The Return of Frankenstein), dated 1 December 1934, does
bear the credit ‘Screenplay [one word] by William Hurlbut and John
L. Balderston’.37 This suggests that we should be cautious in ascrib-
ing too much significance to this particular distinction. It is likely that
the terminological confusion surrounding the word ‘screenplay’ is con-

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nected to uncertainty in the years following the introduction of sound
as to exactly what form this document should take; for example, to what
extent, if any, it should differ from a ‘shooting script’. It is noticeable
that a definitive answer to these questions only took shape in the late
1970s, with the boom in manuals and ‘spec’ scripts, when the readership
for such screenplays had moved decisively away from film-makers and
towards other industrial gatekeepers such as script readers (Chapter 10).
7. Shooting script. As with the distinction between ‘scenario’ and ‘conti-
nuity’ above, the ‘shooting script’ could be defined by its relationship to
the screenplay: it constitutes a later iteration of the material, once cam-
era angles, shot specifications and so on have been inserted. During the
classical studio era, it is sometimes held to be synonymous with the con-
tinuity: ‘Under the studio system, a contract writer produced shooting
scripts—that is, scripts, whose slug lines, the lines in all caps proceeding
(sic) the bodies of description, identified shots rather than scenes.’38 This
is relatively clear, though some complications remain. While the itera-
tion marked ‘final’ in the Hollywood system is often held to represent
the ‘shooting script’, there are almost invariably significant differences
between it and the film, raising the possibility that a director has inter-
vened to produce a later iteration that might itself be designated the
shooting script. Moreover, since ‘screenplay’ becomes prominent as a
term and, arguably, as a form during the 1940s, it suggests that at this
time ‘screenplay’ and ‘shooting script’ could be synonymous. This con-
flation of terms has become more pronounced over time. Routinely, a
master-scene screenplay will form the final iteration of the script prior
to shooting, and will therefore be regarded as the ‘shooting script’ itself,
irrespective of whether or not the film-makers will demand rewrites of
particular scenes, or intervene themselves to break down some or all of
the scenes into shots.

We can think of the relationships between these various forms in sev-

eral different ways. We could, with Staiger, concentrate on historical
change, and see one form giving way to another; or we can think of
them as a series of different possible stages within an individual film

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18 A History of the Screenplay

production. As we have seen, however, in each case this linear way of

thinking about the relationships brings with it multiple problems of
distinguishing between terms, forms and functions.
Another way of conceiving the relationship, however, is to see these
forms as representing a palette of options that a writer or writers may
bring together in different combinations. Placing to one side the more
experimental kinds of writing, or alternatives to written texts, that we

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shall encounter in the final chapter, it is clear that most of the obvious
methods of writing a story for film—a brief outline of scenes, a prose
narrative, a dramatic script—came into use within 10 or 15 years of
the invention of cinema in the 1890s, and remain viable options for
film writing to the present day. Moreover, one form is often very diffi-
cult to distinguish from another, or is an extension of it: the synopsis,
short-story scenario and treatment all represent variations on a partic-
ular form of prose fiction, the distinction between scenes and shots is
not always readily apparent, and many kinds of screenplay, including
most of those written in the heyday of classical Hollywood, represent a
hybrid of different textual options.
Most of the time, when we encounter a screenplay that looks signif-
icantly different from what has come before, in reality it represents an
unusual combination of some of these elements, or an extension of their
possibilities. Arguably, the master-scene script develops out of the treat-
ment as well as out of the introduction of dialogue-intensive scenes
following the introduction of sound, while some writers, such as Paul
Schrader in Taxi Driver (1976), have created prose-intensive screenplays
that resemble a mixture of master-scene dialogue and the treatment
(Chapter 9).
A further way of thinking about these texts is to bear in mind the rela-
tionships between screenplays and other, less formal textual and verbal
communications. Largely missing from Staiger’s account, for example,
is what we might, in contradistinction to the managerial approach,
regard as the micro-narrative of each film project during the classical
Hollywood era. While the progress from inception to post-production
may have been overseen by a small number of producers, those pro-
ducers were in regular contact with the production teams tasked with
making the films, among whom were the writers. This contact took the
form of story conferences and memos, and less formal meetings and
discussions, as well as synopses, treatments and screenplay drafts. Focus-
ing on the oral dimension of screenwriting still places attention on the
work as an act of communication, but now the act is not so much the
issuing of a set of instructions as the development of a conversation.

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 Introduction 19

The scholarship of Claus Tieber is crucial in this, as in other ways, in

attempting to shift the perception of classical Hollywood screenwriting
away from industrial organisation and rule-governed textual variation,
and towards an understanding of it as a set of dialogues and other forms
of (frequently oral) communication between interested parties.39
These critical reorientations call into question the extent to which
written narratives in film industries should be regarded as industrial

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planning documents: ‘blueprints’, to use the term that has been applied
almost ubiquitously.40 In practice, screenplay texts during production
have usually had a more provisional status. Following the communica-
tional model, we might think of a screenplay as a kind of conversational
gambit: an accumulated set of suggestions, usually the product of mul-
tiple dialogues between different contributors, which forms a source
from which directors, actors, editors and others may diverge on set
and in post-production. There is little evidence that these discussions
were guided by story templates of the kind we are familiar with from
today’s screenwriting manuals. Instead, the production of films by dis-
cussion and negotiation is a particular illustration of what André Bazin
(and, later, Thomas Schatz) calls ‘the genius of the system’: an accu-
mulated but changeable pool of knowledge on which many people
would draw in creating films and, as a part of this process, creating
screenplays.

A note on the scope and content of this study: it is only relatively

recently that screenwriting research has begun to accumulate any sort of
critical mass. Film scholars, with some important exceptions, have natu-
rally focused on films themselves and have tended to regard screenplays
as, in effect, industrial waste products: what remains of value after pro-
duction is the film itself, not the screenplay. It is a view shared even by
many screenwriters. Jean-Claude Carrière, who began his career working
with Jacques Tati, became a key collaborator of Luis Buñuel and remains
perhaps the most eminent of European screenwriters, has remarked that
‘[e]veryone knows that when shooting is over, screenplays generally end
up in studio wastebaskets’,41 while Osip Brik, an important writer and
theoretician in the development of early Soviet cinema, similarly sug-
gested that ‘[t]he script drops into the wastepaper basket and ceases
to exist even as an archive document; the rare enthusiasts of the art
of script writing are obliged to study from the finished film’.42 This is
an exaggeration—script materials relating to the work of some of the
more eminent Soviet directors have survived—but it is symptomatic that
a substantial archive of scripts written for that most quintessentially

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20 A History of the Screenplay

British of studios, Ealing, survives only because it happened to be

retrieved from a skip.43
One consequence is that, as the authors of a recent article on early
British screenwriting observe,

[t]he issue of the systematic collection and preservation at a national

level of film and TV scripts has never been addressed, either in the

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United Kingdom or, apparently, elsewhere in the world except in
France (for a time), the United States (in part) and some countries
like Finland where indigenous film production is small and a source
of national pride.44

The screenplay archives of the British Film Institute are a hit-and-miss

affair, reliant on individual donations, and the situation in many other
countries is no better. On the other hand, extensive archives from some
former Soviet bloc countries are now becoming accessible, and the bur-
geoning internationalisation of the Screenwriting Research Network,
which was founded only in 2006, combined with the digitisation of
materials in archives around the world, holds out the prospect of the
dissemination of research into screenwriting in many different coun-
tries. At the moment, however, neither the primary nor the secondary
materials exist for anything approaching a comprehensive global survey
of screenwriting.
Partly for this reason, I have not attempted to engage with
screenwriting in countries outside the United States and Europe. One
can anticipate that significant studies of writing in other film indus-
tries, such as those of India and Japan, will emerge in the near future,
but any gesture in this direction in the present study would suffer from
inadequate data. In contrast, the Hollywood continuity script was not
only a form of screenwriting; it was also a method by which the stu-
dios kept a record of the production, and therefore Hollywood studios
were creating screenplay archives almost by default, dating in some cases
as far back as the 1910s. Some of these, such as those of MGM and
Warners, have been made available to scholars in major research centres.
Again, this helps to explain why the study of Hollywood screenwriting
has to date proved much more fruitful than studies of screenwriting in
other film industries. For all of these reasons, in addition to the indis-
putable economic and cultural dominance of American cinema since
at least the end of the First World War, Hollywood remains the neces-
sary point of departure for any attempt to explore the screenplay as a
generic form.

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 Introduction 21

On the other hand, the dialogue between Hollywood and European

cinemas is long-standing and direct and has significant consequences
for the development of the screenplay, in both directions. For example,
Kristin Thompson has established that once Hollywood had developed
the continuity script for the multi-reel silent film, France, Germany and
Russia began to consider it as a model for making their own industries
more efficient.45 In the other direction, the international success of

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European (and other) ‘auteurs’ in the 1950s influenced new generations
of American film-makers in the 1960s. The emergence of the ‘master-
scene’ script as the default screenplay form around this time owes much
to the relative autonomy of different American film workers in this
period compared to their positions within the integrated system of the
classical era before 1960, and to the availability of European models by
which not only directors like Martin Scorsese, but also writers such as
Paul Schrader or Robert Towne, could construct an identity as relatively
independent artists.
Equally revealing is that the script forms that emerged in the United
States before the establishment of the Hollywood system, around 1914,
are remarkably similar to those that arose more or less independently
in important European film-making countries at the same time. This
suggests that particular kinds of script—the ‘outline’, the pseudo-stage
play, the prose short story or the synopsis—were simply the most obvi-
ous forms that a pre-production written text might take, regardless of
the exact industrial circumstances under which the film itself would be
produced. Today, it is possible to speak of ‘the screenplay’ as possessing
a global form—and of more independently minded film-makers as act-
ing more or less purposely in rebellion against it. It is in this dialogue
between normative models, alternate forms and independent variation
that screenwriting history is written.

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1
Prehistory of the Screenplay

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There is something quixotic about the pursuit of the ‘first screenplay’,
which as Steven Maras warns ‘has proven unhelpful’ because ‘the search
for firsts and origins can have the tendency to “fix” the landscape in
particular ways, leading to a reductive view of the development and
institutionalisation of screenwriting’.1 Yet posing the question can nev-
ertheless function as a worthwhile heuristic device, a means of opening
up, if not necessarily providing definitive answers to, other, more sub-
stantial questions: What is a screenplay? In what ways, if any, does it
function as a ‘planning’ document? Does it presuppose the existence
of a written text? If so, must that text possess definable formal prop-
erties? In what ways is it distinct from other forms of writing? Is it a
product and corollary of the division of labour in early studio systems?
Is the terminology—scenario, continuity, screen play, screenplay and so
on—significant?
The earliest films were made by individuals or very small groups of
people who devised and filmed ‘actualités’: visual records of the move-
ment of trains, waves and wind, for example, that fascinated audiences
because such events could not previously have been presented in any
other medium. If written texts were required in the preparation of such
films, they would have been little more than notes that needed to
be comprehensible only to their authors. Similarly, any actual writing
involved in the preparation of the story films that appeared before the
end of the nineteenth century could have been rudimentary at best.
Roy P. McCardell, often credited as the first professional writer for films,
began working for Biograph in 1898. As Tom Stempel notes, his stories

must have been relatively simple, since the films of the period were
not much longer than a minute or so. At their least structured, the

22

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 Prehistory of the Screenplay 23

films of 1898 were still just photographs of interesting movement of

some kind. At their more complex, they consisted of a single action,
photographed in a single take, from one angle.2

No script from this period has survived, partly because at this date there
was no need for anything possessing even the functions, let alone the
form, of the modern screenplay. It is a logical inference that it was the

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introduction of longer and more complex narrative films in the early
years of the new century that heralded the beginning of screenwriting.
Narrative films have been estimated to comprise just 12 per cent of films
made in 1900, but 96 per cent of films in 1908,3 with actualités out-
numbering narrative films until as late as 1906.4 The length of films
increased from the initial limit of 50 feet to 250–400 feet by 1900, and
300–600 feet by 1903. The greater duration entailed the construction
of sequences linked into a coherent narrative. The ‘seemingly obvious
yet strangely elusive’ conclusion drawn by Edward Azlant is ‘that this
vital transition involves the birth of screenwriting, a craft that could
be fairly described as the prearrangement of scenes, right up to the
present’.5
Like the more recent work of Ian W. Macdonald, who prefers the term
‘screen idea’ to ‘screenplay’,6 and Maras, who substitutes ‘scripting’ for
‘writing’,7 Azlant here extends the concept of screenwriting beyond the
production of a written text and towards the idea of film writing as a
concept or a process, written or otherwise. For Macdonald and Maras,
this avoids a recurrent error in the study of screenwriting, whereby
the text is conceived as a stable blueprint from which the film is sub-
sequently made. This is rarely the case in actual film production, in
which the screenplay is subject to constant revision and creative prepa-
ration involves work in media other than writing. In the particular case
of early screenwriting, Azlant’s argument, that it designates a ‘prear-
rangement of scenes’ rather than, necessarily, an actual text, accurately
describes what was probably the practice of a large number of early film-
makers, and neatly sidesteps the desire to uncover the chimerical first
screenplay.
Indeed, anecdotal evidence for the general absence of writing in the
early years of film is strong. Gene Gauntier, who began working for the
Kalem company as late as 1907, recalls that at that date ‘[t]here never
was a scenario to hand, and Sid [Olcott], after finishing the previous
week’s work, would hang around the lean-to office waiting for some-
thing to turn up’.8 Such Micawber-like serendipity was widespread. The
anonymous writer of ‘The Confessions of a Scenario Editor’ records a

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24 A History of the Screenplay

film producer working in New York around 1907 remarking that ‘we
think up the whole thing as we go along’, and crucially noted that at
this time ‘scenarios’ could not even be defined: ‘We don’t know what
a scenario is either—a real scenario [ . . . ] it’s too early in the game’.9
The seemingly slapdash approach was not confined to America: British
pioneer Cecil Hepworth reports that he thought of stories and then
constructed the scenery before filming, but he does not mention any

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intermediary writing process.10
Something was happening, but there is little surviving textual evi-
dence of scenarios prior to 1904. One reason for this is conceptual:
pre-production documents of some sort must have existed, but they
cannot properly be called scenarios because the conventions that would
define them as such were not yet in place. More obviously, to all intents
and purposes any such material has disappeared, because of the transi-
tory and provisional nature of the work, the need for early film-makers
to practise neither the extensive preparation nor the diligent record-
keeping of the later studio system and the simple passage of time.
Consequently, the study of early scriptwriting is often a matter of infer-
ence and supposition, a working backwards from effect to cause, in
pursuit of texts that may never have existed in the first place.
The frustrating lack of material has contributed to three separate
but related areas of confusion in this field: the logical difficulties of
the argument from design, the confusion between a source and a sce-
nario, and the difficulty of knowing whether a particular document is a
pre-production script or a post-production synopsis.

The argument from design: The Lumière films

Stempel’s description of a 1902 film directed by Edwin S. Porter advances

a familiar argument: ‘It is obvious from the lavish production of Jack and
the Beanstalk that considerable pre-production preparation was done,
which suggests the use of a scenario of some kind.’11 Yet while a com-
plex sequence of events may require careful preparation, it does not
follow that the plans will be translated into textual form. Accordingly,
most commentators prefer to speak of the design, rather than the sce-
narios, of early films. For example, the first of the Lumière brothers’
pictures, Sortie d’Usine (1895), is not simply a documentary record of
workers exiting the Lumière factory. It is clearly a staged event: the doors
open on cue, and the workers exit the frame in an orderly fashion, indi-
cating rehearsal. The film, then, ‘reflects a number of carefully chosen

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 Prehistory of the Screenplay 25

decisions about sequential narrative’, and ‘its organization reflects an

order and direction akin to the movement one associates with tradi-
tional plot structure’.12 This is even more apparent in L’Arroseur Arrosé
(1895), the Lumière film widely accepted as ‘both the first film to tell a
story and the first film comedy’.13 A boy stands on a gardener’s hosepipe:
when the gardener inspects the nozzle the boy removes his foot, and
the gardener is sprayed with water. Louis Lumière recalled in 1948 that

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‘the idea of the scenario was suggested to me by a farce by my younger
brother Edouard’.14 It is fascinating, if perhaps misleading, that many
years after the event Louis would use the term ‘scenario’ in connection
with a film of 1895; ‘scenario’ here probably implies a mental concept,
or the filmic mise-en-scène, L’Arroseur Arrosé being ‘the prototype of
what Méliès called “vues composées” or “artificially arranged scenes” ’.15
There is no need to posit the existence of a written script for such a
simple narrative, even though ‘the event depicted is not discovered but
created, not recorded but acted, the whole a unified design’.16
Similarly, Marshall Deutelbaum finds little evidence of organisation in
Thomas A. Edison’s early Kinetoscope films, which contain much ‘dead
time and inconclusiveness’.17 Conversely, of three slightly later Edison
films, dating from 1898 to 1899, Kemp R. Niver remarks: ‘All show pre-
production thinking, either by use of a script or through rehearsal, and
are not news events but planned stories’.18 Both commentators, with
appropriate caution, avoid the assumption that design, or lack of it, in
such short films in itself provides strong evidence for the presence or
absence of a script. A more influential example concerns Porter’s early
narrative films, but since these conflate the argument from design with
the distorting effects of the post-production catalogue description, they
are considered below.

The accidental screenwriter

In studies of early screenwriting, there is a widespread confusion

between a source and a scenario. Several films of the late 1890s are
demonstrably based on surviving written texts, which arguably per-
formed the function of screenplays. The most commonly cited exam-
ples, however, are stage plays and newspaper articles that were not
written with films in mind. They therefore provide no evidence of either
screenplays or screenwriting practice, although they do reveal early
film-makers working methodically from textual adaptation through
shooting and perhaps to editing. The temptation to describe such texts

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26 A History of the Screenplay

as scenarios or screenplays, however tentatively, is a logical error that,

repeated sufficiently often, has led to a distorted view of screenwriting
activity in the period.
For example, Stempel argues that each of Thomas Edison’s films
of performing animals and circus acts, dating from 1895, ‘was just
that: an act that had been created and sometimes actually written
(even if not specifically for filming) before it appeared in front of

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the camera’.19 If so, the written plans for these circus acts provide
some of the earliest examples of what might be termed ‘the accidental
scenario’. Such texts are surprisingly prominent in the standard his-
tories of screenwriting. In August 1896, the former Edison associate
W. K. L. Dickson began preparations for a version of Rip Van Winkle,
based on a stage adaptation by Joseph Jefferson of Washington Irving’s
story. Dickson’s Mutoscope film, according to Patrick Loughney, ‘was
the first attempt by an American filmmaker to adapt the complete sto-
ryline of a well-known play to cinema’.20 This certainly makes Rip Van
Winkle of historical interest and, although it is pushing the claim a
little far, one might even accept that Jefferson’s play ‘survives—if not
as a true screenplay—then certainly as an important film-related pro-
duction text from 1896’. But Jefferson’s work was written for the stage;
there is no evidence that he intended to translate it to another medium,
or that either he or Dickson produced a new, written text from which
Dickson worked in creating the film. To describe it as ‘[t]he “screenplay”
on which the film was based’21 is to accord it an unwarranted status
in history.
Loughney follows in a long tradition of film historians who have
sought to find evidence of early screenwriting in other genres. The
two most frequently cited examples are Sigmund Lubin’s restaging of
a prize fight of 1897 and an 1898 film of the Oberammergau Passion
Play, adapted from a stage version written by Salmi Morse. The claim
that these films used scenarios was first made in Terry Ramsaye’s highly
influential A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through
1925, published in 1926. Ramsaye’s method was teleological and evolu-
tionary: he contemplated the cinema around him and looked backwards
in an attempt to discover how its magnificent achievement was antici-
pated in earlier, more rudimentary times. He regards early fight pictures
as ‘foetal films’, belonging to a stage before the medium developed
into an art form, yet demonstrating, in Lubin’s version of the Corbett-
Fitzsimmons fight, an advance through the act of re-creation. Lubin
did not have access to the fight itself, and instead engaged two men to
re-enact the encounter, their moves prompted by a third man reading

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 Prehistory of the Screenplay 27

aloud from a newspaper report of the fight itself. According to Ramsaye,

‘[t]his was art,—the re-creation of an event—and the “fight by rounds”
column was a scenario, but Lubin did not know it’.22
Ramsaye was hoping to find the missing link between such ‘foetal
films’ and art. One sign would be the discovery of a film that made use
of processes in script adaptation more closely analogous to those of the
golden age of silent cinema in which he was writing. Sure enough, he

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found it, and in the process made from Salmi Morse the Piltdown Man
of screenwriting history. In 1879, Morse had published his adaptation
of the Passion Play, which was intended for a New York stage production
in the 1880–81 season. The proposed performance had been banned on
religious grounds, however, and Morse’s version had never been staged,
a fact which contributed to his eventual suicide. In 1896 it was picked
up by Rich G. Hollaman, who used it as the basis for his filmed version
of 1898. The script, argues Ramsaye, thereby ‘bec[a]me the first motion
picture scenario’, because the film was ‘the first construction of a dra-
matic event especially for the camera’.23 Stempel accepts the Lubin and
Hollaman films as ‘[t]he two earliest known intentional uses of written
“plans” for films’,24 Loughney describes the Passion Play as ‘the Ur-text
in the history of the American movie screenplay’,25 and Azlant mem-
orably suggests that ‘[t]he current Writers Guild could do worse than
mark the spot where Salmi Morse threw himself into New York’s North
River’.26
The note of qualification in these remarks is appropriate, since it is
difficult to accept the stronger claims made for any of these texts. They
do not provide evidence of screenwriting activity in this period; if any-
thing, they provide evidence of its absence. The Corbett-Fitzsimmons
film can be said to have used a ‘scenario’ only in the sense that Lubin’s
actors were following precisely a series of actions outlined in a written
text, but that text was a newspaper article, and it would be more accurate
to say that it was being used as a prompt book. Similarly, Jefferson’s Rip
Van Winkle and Morse’s Passion Play each provided a source from which
the directors selected a number of story elements and, in the case of the
Passion Play, some of the dialogue. However, neither of these texts was
a screenplay or a scenario in any sense. They did not occupy an inter-
mediate stage between the sources and the films: they were themselves
the sources, and they were never intended for filming or considered by
their writers to be in any way related to cinema. Ramsaye concedes that
even Lubin himself would not have considered the newspaper report
to be a scenario. As for Salmi Morse, his Passion Play was published 16
years before the workers at the Lumière factory first walked before a

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28 A History of the Screenplay

motion picture camera. Morse drowned in the Hudson in 1884; had

he been fished out alive in 1898 to be told he was the world’s first
screenwriter, he would have been the beneficiary of two miracles on
the same day.

The catalogue synopsis and early narrative cinema

The brevity of early narrative films means that their storylines are often

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unintelligible to the modern viewer. Contemporary audiences would
have shared our incomprehension, had they not been aided in a number
of ways. Among the traits that Noël Burch has identified in ‘primi-
tive’ cinema is ‘nonclosure’, whereby the narrative is not self-sufficient
but instead depends on the audience’s prior knowledge of the events
the film purports to narrate, the use of explanatory intertitles, or the
presence of a ‘lecturer’ or on-stage commentator.27
The role of this exhibitor has been extensively analysed by Charles
Musser. As he points out,

[t]ravel lectures, Passion Plays and fight films all had recognizable
story lines. These earlier films were constructed, however, in such
a way that individual scenes, functioning as self-contained units,
could be selected and organized at the discretion of the exhibitor. The
exhibitor thus maintained a fundamental relationship to the narra-
tive as it was constructed and projected on the screen. [But i]n films
like Jack and the Beanstalk the exhibitor’s role was reduced to one of
secondary elaboration.28

As film-makers began to experiment with longer and more complex nar-

ratives that demanded greater internal coherence, the exhibitor started
to become redundant. By 1904 the Kleine Optical Company, citing
Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) as an example, was advising
exhibitors that one of the advantages of the ‘feature’ film was that ‘[t]he
public has been educated to appreciate these long films which tell an
interesting story, and need few words of explanation’.29 It is notewor-
thy, however, that a comparable role continued to be performed by the
Japanese benshi throughout the silent era, influenced by the indigenous
kabuki and Noh theatrical traditions.
The existence of the exhibitor has generated a serious difficulty in
the history of early screenwriting: it is very easy to misidentify as a
pre-production script what is actually a post-production synopsis pub-
lished in the motion picture catalogues that were in widespread use
from as early as 1894. These catalogues were circulated to exhibitors

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 Prehistory of the Screenplay 29

for advertising and promotional purposes, but also contained prose

descriptions from which the exhibitors would construct a spoken narra-
tive to connect the disparate sequences of varied films into a relatively
coherent programme. Occasionally, but influentially, material from
these catalogues has been claimed to represent pre-production scripts
prepared by the film-maker, rather than the post-production synopses
that most of them undoubtedly are.30

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When Georges Méliès published details of his films in his ‘Star’ cata-
logues, it was with the additional purpose of protecting his copyright in
the face of blatant piracy. The catalogues estimate the running times of
the kinds of film discussed below at between 15 and 18 minutes, and the
length of their footage at between 820 and 850 feet. Providing a synopsis
for a film of that length entailed the construction of a short prose nar-
rative, but unlike those of most catalogue descriptions, the synopses of
these longer Méliès films often divided the action into numbered scenes.
An example is A Trip to the Moon (1902). One catalogue printed the fol-
lowing text for what it described as ‘An extraordinary and fantastical
film in thirty scenes’:

Scene 1. The Scientific Congress at the Astronomic Club.

Scene 2. Planning the Trip. Appointing the Explorers and Servants
Farewell.
Scene 3. The Workshops: Constructing the Projectile.
Scene 4. The Foundries. The Chimneystacks. The Casting of the
Monster Gun.
Scene 5. The Astronomers Enter the Shell.
Scene 6. Loading the Gun.
Scene 7. The Monster Gun. March Past the Gunners. Fire!!! Salut-
ing the Flag.
Scene 8. The Flight Through Space. Approaching the Moon.
Scene 9. Landed Right in the Eye!!!
Scene 10. Flight of the Shell into the Moon. Appearance of the Earth
from the Moon.
Scene 11. The Plain of Craters. Volcanic Eruption.
Scene 12. The Dream (the Great Bear, Phoebus, the Twin Stars, Saturn).
Scene 13. The Snow Storm.
Scene 14. 40 Degrees Below Zero. Descending a Lunar Crater.
Scene 15. In the Interior of the Moon. The Giant Mushroom Grotto.
Scene 16. Encounter with the Selenites. Homeric Fight.
Scene 17. Prisoners!!
Scene 18. The Kingdom of the Moon. The Selenite Army.

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30 A History of the Screenplay

Scene 19. The Flight.

Scene 20. Wild Pursuit.
Scene 21. The Astronomers find the Shell again. Departure from
the Moon.
Scene 22. Vertical Drop into Space.
Scene 23. Splashing into the Open Sea.
Scene 24. At the Bottom of the Ocean.

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Scene 25. The rescue. Return to Port.
Scene 26. Great Fete. Triumphal March Past.
Scene 27. Crowning and Decorating the Heroes of the Trip.
Scene 28. Procession of the Marines and the Fire Brigade.
Scene 29. Unveiling a Commemorative Statue by the Mayor and
Council.
Scene 30. Public Rejoicings.31

Many historians, including Lewis Jacobs, Azlant and Isabelle Raynauld,

hold that these catalogue entries reproduce scenarios written by Méliès
himself prior to shooting the films. External evidence for this claim
is inconclusive. In his introductory comments to the ‘Star’ catalogue,
Méliès’s brother Gaston, in arguing that Georges ‘is the originator of a
class of cinematograph films which are made from artificially arranged
scenes’, records that he ‘conceived the ideas, painted the backgrounds,
devised the accessories and acted on the stage’, but says nothing about
writing.32 A cameraman recalled that Méliès ‘had the instinct of how to
put together a script. We could never figure out what kind of film we
were going to make. He had everything in his head, no written script’.33
It seems certain, as Elizabeth Ezra argues, that ‘most of Méliès’s early
films did not even use scripts’, although she holds that he did indeed
write some,34 and Méliès himself stated that he did, at least on occasion,
prepare written scenarios, although he considered that

the scenario as it was written had no importance, since my only pur-

pose was to use it as a pretext for staging, for illusion, or for scenes
with a pleasant effect. [ . . . ] Anyone composing fantasy films must
be an artist smitten with his art [ . . . ] searching above all to make
the skeleton of the scenario disappear behind the delicate arabesques
within which he envelops them. [ . . . ] You might say that the sce-
nario in this case is nothing more than the thread to be used to
tie the ‘effects’ to each other without creating much meaningful
relationship between them [ . . . ] the scenario is of only secondary
importance in this kind of composition.35

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 Prehistory of the Screenplay 31

Clearly the Méliès films indicate considerable pre-production

organisation and a more advanced conception of editing than is com-
mon in this period, and in light of the statement above it is at least likely
that some of his films were prepared in advance on paper. The question
is whether the Star catalogues reproduce these plans and, if so, what
they tell us about the nature of scenario writing at this time, at least as
Méliès conceived of it.

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The catalogue entry for A Trip to the Moon is sufficiently ambiguous to
make it impossible to judge its status on internal evidence alone. One
can make only partial sense of scenes 13–18, for example, in the absence
of the projected film, and this, along with the condensed note-form in
general, would be consistent with regarding the text as a mnemonic
device written by Méliès himself prior to staging and shooting. On the
other hand, the note form would be equally useful to an exhibitor wish-
ing to be either reminded of the sequence or prompted for appropriate
comments to deliver to the audience. Azlant notes that descriptions of
Méliès’s films were being numbered as early as 1900–01, and suggests
that the ‘scenario’ for A Trip to the Moon ‘indicates a movement away
from a rigid sense of the complete “tableau” as the basic unit’, as in
scenes 7–10 and 21–24. ‘These “scenes” ’, Azlant suggests, ‘display an
awareness of the ability to prescribe units shorter than a complete dra-
matic action, here governed by rapid change in location generated by
subject movement, and such abbreviated segmentation of continuous
activity would prove one of film’s most fertile lines of development.’36
Even granting that Méliès was at the forefront of such a reconception of
the possibilities of film, however, what Azlant here describes are devel-
opments in film, not scenario writing. They would only demonstrate an
advance in scriptwriting if it could be demonstrated that this text of
A Trip to the Moon really is a scenario.
A 1904 Star catalogue held at the British Film Institute further compli-
cates the issue. A Trip to the Moon, film 399–411 in the catalogue, appears
in the form reproduced above, except that it is in double columns.37
Most revealing of its possible status are the supplements appended to
the catalogue, which cast an entirely different light on A Trip to the Moon
and similar ‘scenarios’. ‘Supplement no. 16’, for example, contains two
different descriptions of Méliès’ Faust and Marguerite.38 On page two of
the catalogue is a list of 20 scenes for the film that is formally identical
to A Trip to the Moon:

1. The laboratory of Dr. Faust.

2. Appearance of Mephistopheles.

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32 A History of the Screenplay

3. The Vision of Marguerite.

4. Dr Faust Sells his Soul to Satan.
5. The Kermess.
6. Mephistopheles Seeks a Quarrel with the Students.
7. First Meeting of Faust and Marguerite.
8. Marguerite’s Garden.
9. The Temptation.

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10. The Gate of the City (Return and Procession of the Soldiers).
11. The Duel.
12. Death of Valentine, Brother of Marguerite.
13. The Church.
14. Mephistopheles Prevents Marguerite from Praying.
15. The Walpurgis Night.
16. The Celebrated Women of Antiquity (Grand Ballet).
17. The Prison.
18. The Death of Marguerite.
19. The Soul of Marguerite Ascends to Heaven.
20. The Kingdom of the Elect—Grand Apotheosis.

Following this is a more detailed prose description of each of the 20

scenes, with accompanying illustrations. In each case, the description of
the scene begins with the identical wording to that which appears in the
list of scenes, and then expands upon it. For example, ‘1. The Laboratory
of Dr. Faust.—In his laboratory, Dr. Faust, burdened with years, laments
that he has become old and can now no longer enjoy the pleasures of
youth. He consults his books and invokes Satan.’
The longer version is almost certainly a post-production description
of the film as made, because Méliès would have no need to write
what amounts to an aide-mémoire at this level of detail. For rea-
sons considered later in this chapter, the more precise the catalogue
description, the more likely it is to be a post-production synopsis of
the completed film. The relationship of the second catalogue descrip-
tion of Faust and Marguerite to the first is, once again, ambiguous.
On the one hand, it may suggest that the shorter version preserves
Méliès’s elliptical pre-production scenario, and the second is a reader-
friendly description of the film as shot. That would not explain why
the shorter form is more commonly found in the catalogue entries,
however, and it is at least possible that the shorter version is actu-
ally an abbreviation of a more extensive, but also post-production,
prose summary of the film. If so, it means that far from preserving
an early form of scenario writing, the version of A Trip to the Moon

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 Prehistory of the Screenplay 33

that so excited Jacobs and others is nothing more than a synopsis of

a synopsis.
Even if A Trip to the Moon really does preserve Méliès’s original script, it
tells us very little about screenwriting. Méliès had his assistants, but ‘he
had everything in his head’. Any written texts, therefore, were written
in a form that needed to be comprehensible only to himself and a very
few others with whom he was in immediate contact at his studio. Film

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production was little more than a cottage industry, albeit a highly prof-
itable one, and the division of labour that would become essential under
the Hollywood studio system was as yet barely visible on the horizon.
There was, therefore, no need as yet for the establishment of conven-
tions that would enable several people working on different aspects of
the same project to have access to copies of a single text.
The problem was not confined to Méliès, of course. A still more dif-
ficult case concerns Edwin S. Porter. Here the stakes are even higher,
because Porter has been credited not only as a pioneer of the American
narrative film but also as an innovator in the field of intercutting. In The
Rise of the American Film (1939), Lewis Jacobs printed what he took to be
the scenario for Porter’s The Life of an American Fireman (1902). As he
acknowledges, however, the text he reproduces is taken from the Edison
Catalogue, and internal evidence alone indicates that it is not a sce-
nario but a synopsis. Had it really been a scenario, it would have gone
a long way towards resolving the crucial questions surrounding Porter’s
editorial practice. As Musser explains,

[i]t is hard to give a precise narrative account of Life of an American

Fireman. The Edison Manufacturing Company, for example, offered
two quite different descriptions. In the oft-reprinted catalog version,
the opening scene shows a fire chief dreaming of his wife and child,
whom he subsequently rescues, while another description, offered
in the New York Clipper, emphasizes the film’s documentary quali-
ties over the elements of fictional narrative. Thus it becomes clear
that exhibitors could shape the spectators’ understanding of the
screen narrative along divergent lines through their live narration
and advance publicity (newspaper promotions, posters, etc.).39

Musser is particularly interested in the role of the exhibitor which, as

noted, is influential in the study of early screenwriting because narrative
coherence was often as much an effect of the exhibitor’s commentary as
of the editorial arrangement of the films themselves. Of more immedi-
ate interest in the present context, however, is the presence of multiple

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34 A History of the Screenplay

competing versions of the film. Life of an American Fireman presents a

fiendishly difficult case because the two different prose descriptions are
compounded by the survival of two different edits of the film itself,
one of which repeatedly intercuts between events taking place in two
different locations, and the other of which does not. If the former rep-
resents Porter’s intentions, and is not the retrospective work of another,
later editor, then the familiar case for Porter as an innovator in the

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field of cross-cutting could be sustained. The details of this problem
in the history of editing need not detain us here.40 A surviving sce-
nario for the film, of course, would be a material document in the case;
but a scenario, despite Jacobs’s assumptions, is precisely what we do
not have. Marc Norman’s account of the authorship of Fireman neatly
captures the critical ambivalence surrounding textual and other forms
of screenwriting: ‘Porter wrote it [but] there’s no evidence he wrote it
down’.41
The case for Porter as a pioneer in the history of narrative film rests
partly with Life of an American Fireman, but even more with The Great
Train Robbery (1903). There is no particular reason to doubt Ramsaye’s
claim that in adapting a popular stage play for The Great Train Rob-
bery, Porter wrote ‘a memorandum of scenes of a simple story of a train
hold-up, a pursuit, a dance-hall episode and an escape’.42 Niver takes
the story further, stating that Porter ‘began by writing a story in seven
scenes to enable him to use previously photographed film which he sup-
plemented by shooting several new scenes’.43 It is entirely reasonable to
suppose that in adapting an existing text written for the theatre into a
silent film of perhaps 12 minutes’ duration, Porter would have worked
directly from the source text, preserving a handful of arresting incidents,
and then placing them into a logical sequence—the ‘prearrangement of
scenes’ Azlant associates with the screenwriter. Even if this is the case,
however, it hardly constitutes a complicated case of adaptation; there
is no need to assume that Porter required a scenario as a mnemonic
device to hold such a limited plot together. Still more significantly, if
Niver is correct, Porter’s written work was, in part, not ‘prearrangement’
but something more akin to the commentary of the exhibitor, a narra-
tive developed retrospectively to hold together a sequence of scenes that
had already been shot.
Although it is universally recognised that the texts in the catalogues
are largely post-production synopses, the cases of Méliès and Porter indi-
cate that there is still widespread scope for disagreement about difficult
cases. Perhaps more significant than the texts themselves is that the
Méliès catalogues came into being partly in an attempt to establish

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 Prehistory of the Screenplay 35

ownership at a time when film piracy was rampant. A more effective

method of achieving the same end, however—and one that would
go a long way towards establishing the existence of pre-production
screenwriting—would be to reverse the practice: instead of countering
piracy by publishing a prose narrative of an existing film, the film-maker
could register a written text before the film was released. Among other
things, this would represent an attempt to copyright both the story

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idea and the resulting cinematic work. And in New York, in 1904, one
company had come up with that very idea.

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2
Copyright Law, Theatre and Early
Film Writing

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The problematic status of the catalogue entries examined in the previous
chapter arises, in part, simply because catalogues are one of the few
means by which writings connected with early films happen to have
been preserved. In a system of production that required the involve-
ment of only a handful of workers in the creation of a film lasting no
more than a few minutes, half-a-dozen words to summarise the con-
tent of each scene might be sufficient. An ‘outline’ script of this sort was
almost certainly used in the planning of many films before 1904, but for
such an ephemeral text to survive it would almost certainly need to have
been recycled within a commercial or legal document that had a better
chance of being preserved. This chapter examines a second, and more
promising, set of archival materials that promises to preserve examples
of early screenwriting: the scripts submitted to copyright offices for the
purposes of securing legal ownership of films.

Copyright classification and early American cinema

The details of the relationships between early American film scenar-

ios and copyright law are complicated.1 The first copyright disputes
in film revolved around hardware: for example, Edison films could
not be played on a Lumière projector, and vice versa. Consequently,
each company tended to dupe the prints of the other to create
products that could be used on their machines. As Peter Decherney
explains, however, around 1903 ‘patent disputes began to be settled
and the technology platforms stabilized’, and at this point ‘concepts
like originality and authenticity in moviemaking registered with pro-
ducers, who then needed to protect their content as well as their
technology’.2

36

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 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing 37

This need is bound up with the development of narrative cinema.

The ‘content’ in the earliest films—such as the ‘actualités’ that exploited
the medium’s unique capacity to reproduce movement, or rudimentary
narratives like those of the Lumières’ early experiments—was negligible.
From around 1902, however, producers and public were acquiring the
taste for longer and more sophisticated narrative films, such as those of
Porter or Méliès. This development was accompanied, at least in the-

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ory, by ideas of both written pre-planning and the legal protection of a
studio’s product; and as we saw in the previous chapter, rights to these
films as properties were being asserted in the catalogues circulated by
the studios to advertise them. Of course, a better and more obvious way
of doing this would be to copyright the films themselves; but this was
easier said than done.
The legal obstacle to protecting films was that they were not directly
accommodated within the classification of formats introduced by the
United States Copyright Office between 1900 and 1901, a situation that
would not be satisfactorily resolved until a discrete category was cre-
ated in 1912. In the interim, film producers turned their attention to
two classes that seemed promising, though both had their drawbacks.
The more technology-appropriate and precise of these categories, class H
(for ‘Photographs’), was inherently questionable because a film was not
a single picture but a sequence of images. The illogicality of attempt-
ing to copyright a film under this classification had raised problems
as early as 1902.3 The alternative classification, class D (for ‘Dramatic
Compositions’), raised the opposite problem: while it satisfactorily
accommodated the question of narrative (which a single photograph
seemingly could not), it implied publication in print form of a dramatic
text. The Edison company attempted to overcome this difficulty by reg-
istering their films under both categories.4 However, the relationship
between these two categories is a little more complicated—and this is
where it gets interesting for screenwriting.
The problem of copying did not just pertain to outright piracy in the
form of film ‘duping’; there was also the question of intellectual rights.
For example, in 1904 the American Mutoscope and Biograph Com-
pany (AM&B), which was the first company ‘in the United States, if not
the world, to make the decisive shift towards fiction “feature” films—
headline attractions that filled at least half of a thousand-foot reel’,5
issued an injunction against Edison, not for duping Biograph’s film Per-
sonal, but for issuing what we might today call an unauthorised ‘remake’
of it. On 12 November the injunction failed, and it was very shortly after
this (on 25 November) that Biograph submitted the first of a series of

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38 A History of the Screenplay

written texts in support of simultaneous applications for the registration

of its films as both ‘dramatic compositions’ and ‘photographs’.6
Although the logic is not always transparent, and although Biograph’s
lawyers did not make the argument explicitly, this appears to be more
than a simple assertion that dual registration should comprise a kind
of hybrid classification of a narrative film, whereby it is held to be a
special kind of dramatic composition (class D) because it is in photo-

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graphic form (class H). Instead, the film and the scenario were submitted
at the same time, but under separate classifications. The chicken-and-
egg logic must have been that securing rights on the written scenarios
(Class D) would establish a kind of intellectual copyright on the nar-
rative, which would then bolster their rights in the films themselves
(Class H); simultaneously, the Class H registration would constitute a
form of publication (as a film ‘photograph’) that would assist in secur-
ing the Class D registration for the otherwise unpublished typescript
scenario. In short, by means of registering the written text, AM&B was
attempting to copyright not just the film, but the narrative idea—in the
form of a scenario—itself.
Arguably, the ensuing legal debate about what constituted a ‘dra-
matic composition’ brought into being, both conceptually and formally,
the very idea of what we would now term the ‘screenplay’. Perhaps
surprisingly, the Photographic classification proved unproblematic: the
Copyright Office was willing to register the sequence of images AM&B
deposited in the form of a paper print of the film of The Suburbanite as
a single ‘Photograph’. However, on 1 December 1904 Thorvald Solberg,
acting for the Copyright Office, queried the separate attempt to regis-
ter The Suburbanite as a ‘dramatic composition’ in the form of a written
text. The document Biograph submitted in this case was simply a copy
of AM&B’s entry for the film in their Bulletin, which was an adver-
tising vehicle containing descriptions of the company’s new releases.
The Bulletin entry consists of a single-page, present-tense prose descrip-
tion of the action scene-by-scene, and a still more condensed ‘synopsis’
that restricts the description of each scene to a single sentence. Solberg
objected that ‘[t]he term “dramatic composition” as used in the copy-
right law has the ordinary meaning of . . . a play consisting of dialogue
and action’.7
AM&B appealed, arguing ‘that a dramatic composition does not nec-
essarily require dialogue’, and in the case of The Suburbanite ‘[i]t is
the sole purpose of the composition that this narrative or story shall be
represented dramatically by action, posture and gesture’.8 The lawyers
cited substantial legal precedent and their appeal was upheld, resulting

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 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing 39

in The Suburbanite receiving the registration number D5895, dated

25 November 1904, when the application was submitted. Neverthe-
less, AM&B decided to submit in future, not Bulletin texts, but what
Loughney calls ‘actual typescript copies of the original scenarios’.9 All of
these submissions were again successful. As a result, two different kinds
of text were now legally classified as ‘dramatic compositions’: prose nar-
ratives (The Suburbanite) and the purposely very different documents

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they submitted thereafter.

The AM&B scenarios, 1904–05

Having encountered legal difficulties with the attempt to register a

Bulletin entry as a ‘dramatic composition’, but having also established
‘that a dramatic composition does not necessarily require dialogue’,
AM&B now pursued the logical path and registered five texts under this
classification over a period of seven months: The Chicken Thief (copy-
righted on 17 December 1904), Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (6 March 1905),
The Nihilists (20 March), Wanted: A Dog (12 April) and The Wedding
(20 May).10 Precisely why the sequence stopped at this point remains
unclear, but in Kemp R. Niver’s words ‘AM&B applied for a copyright as
a “Dramatic Production” for a handful of their films [i.e. for their type-
scripts], and The Wedding was the last of these. From that time on, a
copyright was obtained for the motion picture only’.11
Each scenario was credited on the title page to Frank J. Marion and
Wallace McCutcheon, but copyrighted after the film had been shot.
This leaves some room for doubt as to whether the scenarios really
were composed prior to shooting, but strong evidence that they were
is provided by the corresponding paper print versions of the films sub-
mitted to copyright the productions as ‘photographs’. For example, in
the film version of the sixth scene of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, Tom
unsurprisingly does not ‘jump a fence with the pig’ in his arms, but
instead drags it through a gap in the fence. The climactic scenes of The
Nihilists, in which a sister and her brothers make two attempts to assas-
sinate a Governor in Czarist Russia, contain a whole series of changes.12
In general, this kind of disagreement between scenario and film tends
to indicate that the scenario was composed prior to shooting, since if
it were instead a post-production synopsis the discrepancies would not
have arisen.
There is no dialogue in any of the scenarios. They contain instead
two other, formally distinct types of material, corresponding to two of
the ‘modes’ identified by Claudia Sternberg in her analysis of screenplay

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40 A History of the Screenplay

texts.13 A scene always begins with material in the ‘mode of description’,

namely, ‘detailed sections about production design’. This is always
underlined, much as cognate material in published theatrical play texts
is usually in italics. This is followed by material in the ‘report’ mode,
namely, the temporal sequence of present-tense actions performed,
usually by human characters, within the scene; this is never underlined.
The meticulous distinction between these two kinds of material in the

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AM&B scenarios is illustrated in the aforementioned scene from Tom,
Tom, the Piper’s Son:

Scene 6.
Exterior deserted cottage at left of stage. Across the back, connecting
with cottage, so as to clear the way, is a rambling rail fence. At about
center, is a space between the rails sufficiently large for the passage
of a small boy, but small enough to impede the progress of a grown
person.
Tom gets out of the barn in safety and makes for a nearby vacant
cottage. He is obliged to jump a fence with the pig, but manages that
nicely. Not so with his pursuers. One fat woman gets stuck between
the bars and is released only after a great deal of tugging and pushing.

This formal distinction shows clearly the difference between the scenar-
ios and the Bulletin versions, since the latter consistently omit the set
descriptions and simply repeat the action reports verbatim, sometimes
with and sometimes without the scene headings.14 Consequently, the
Bulletin texts read as continuous, present-tense narrative prose, whereas
the scenarios resemble theatrical play texts shorn of dialogue.
Also absent from most of the Bulletin versions are the paratextual
materials that accompany the scenarios. These are the title page, a ‘cast
of characters’, indication of time or period and a scene-by-scene break-
down of locations. These pages of paratext help to give the scenarios a
degree of physical substance, with the longest piece, The Chicken Thief,
‘An Original American Comedy in a Prologue and Four Acts. By Frank
J. Marion and Wallace McCutcheon’, running to a total of 26 sides. Fol-
lowing the paratexts, the ‘prologue’ occupies page 4 and provides an
unusually detailed description of the title character:

As an introductory to this play, a single character is introduced; that

of a typical southern colored man. He is dressed in garments peculiar
to people of his race living in the south, and he is supposed to typify

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 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing 41

the plantation negro. His hat is an old crushed felt; his coat a linen
duster, and his vest and trousers are considerably too large for him.

The hero, or principal character, as described above, is eating with

great gusto a section of fried chicken, having a piece in either hand.
As he eats, he grins and gives other evidences of great enjoyment.

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The paratexts, and the designation of this shot as a ‘prologue’, further
indicate the ways in which The Chicken Thief in particular, but also the
remainder of the scenarios, have been constructed to resemble contem-
porary theatrical play texts. Between the Prologue and the first scene is
a single page (p. 5) containing just five words: ‘The Chicken Thief Act I’.
Pages 11, 15 and 23 repeat this formulation to complete the division
into ‘Acts’. The material in the Acts themselves runs to a total of 18
pages. Although Acts 2 and 4 contain a single scene apiece, Act 1 has
three scenes and Act 3 no fewer than five. Each scene commences on a
new page.
Although each of the scenes could be filmed with a single shot, there
is no internal evidence that Marion and McCutcheon are thinking in
cinematographic terms. Similarly, each of the total of eight scenes in
Acts 1 and 3 commences with the entry of a character or characters and
concludes with their departure: this might be regarded either as another
theatrical device or as being in keeping with a common mode of tran-
sition between scenes in very early cinema. This scene structure varies
only in the Prologue (which seems to indicate a single shot of a char-
acter who neither enters the frame at the beginning nor exits it at the
end: although the word does not appear, the ‘discovery’ of a character is,
again, common to both theatre and film), and in the single-scene Acts
2 and 4. Each of these two scenes shows a group of ‘plantation negroes’
at dinner, at least some of whom are discovered at the beginning of the
scene, with characters remaining on stage at the end and Act 4 closing
on a ‘tableau’. Action between scenes within an Act is largely, though
not entirely, temporally continuous and spatially contiguous: I.ii begins
‘[v]ery shortly after’ I.i ends and in the same location, for example, while
at the beginning of III.iii ‘[c]haracters enter R. U. in the same order that
they passed out of the previous scene’. Tellingly, the final direction on
the typescript is: ‘Curtain’.
The conception of the mise-en-scène as a three-dimensional stage
space perceived from a single vantage point, the methods of transition
between scenes and the technical terminology all show the scenar-
ios drawing on theatrical practice, but in ways that tended to be

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42 A History of the Screenplay

replicated by the film technology of the time. Meanwhile, the nature

of the correspondences between the scenarios and the films establishes
almost beyond doubt that the former were composed prior to film-
ing, and that during the production they served the function of what
we would today term a shooting script. Equally, however, it is indis-
putable that the degree to which the scenarios have been tailored to
resemble the theatrical play text, including the paratexts and the sepa-

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ration of the description of the stage set at the beginning of each scene
from the action within it, exceeds what would have been required to
meet a purely industrial purpose. In Loughney’s summary, the AM&B
documents ‘clearly suggest that early filmmakers relied on some basic
types of the theatrical scenario form to give organization to their longer
productions’.15

French copyright submissions, 1907–12

Similar arguments have been advanced concerning texts composed a

few years later, around 1907, in France. As in the United States, the study
of early film writing in France has benefited from the practice of deposit-
ing textual materials for copyright purposes, while being complicated by
a measure of uncertainty about the precise relationship between these
texts and the films themselves. Isabelle Raynauld has identified, from
scripts now held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, three distinct
stages through which French scenarios in the period from 1907 to 1912
would typically pass. She designates these stages Categories A, B and C:

The ‘A’ versions are very much screenplays in the contemporary defi-
nition of the term: a text divided into scenes, tableaux or shots, which
puts forth a description of the action to be shot, and which is written
before the shooting starts . . . . [T]he ‘B’ version or ‘deposits that con-
form to the film’, are intermediate versions and they clearly make
reference to the film. Nowadays this is called the shooting script, the
version closest to the film.16

Finally, the ‘C’ version ‘is without doubt the summary of a film written
after its completion. This is the version that is used to describe the film
and is what can be found, directly reproduced, in company catalogues
such as Pathé’s’.17
Raynauld puts the status of the C versions beyond dispute. A film
strip is attached as proof that the film has been shot, and the text is
labelled ‘to the copyist’, which Raynauld takes to mean ‘for publication’

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 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing 43

in the company catalogue. The C texts are essentially short summaries

of the material found in the B versions. It should be noted that, owing
in part to silent film’s elimination of the language barrier (other than
for intertitles), film distribution in this era was essentially international:
the ‘Star’ catalogues, published by Méliès’s brother Gaston in New York,
were for films made by Georges in France. Raynauld’s research pro-
vides additional reasons for regarding most catalogue descriptions as

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belonging to the C, and not the A, category, and further evidence that
the catalogues are unlikely to have reproduced Méliès’s own scenarios,
though Raynauld believes that they do.
Even more importantly, Raynauld makes a convincing case for the A
texts as ‘screenplays in the contemporary definition of the term’, the
anachronism aside. She establishes that the A texts represent an ear-
lier stage than the B versions, and that they indicate a conception of
a dramatic action at the conceptual, writing stage, prior to its trans-
lation into film. This is clear from her comparison of the A and B
versions of Le Noël du Miséreux (1908). For example, version A’s ‘In an
attic, three children sit on a pallet’ becomes, in version B, ‘In an attic,
three children sit around a table, which with a bed and two chairs make
up the sparse furniture of these poor people’.18 Raynauld includes as
an example of an A version a facsimile of the first page of the four-
page text for Le Bonhomme Noël (1907). Its designation as a ‘Scénario
de Scène Cinématographique’ precedes the title and list of characters.
There follows a detailed description of place and action:

SCENE I—LA PORTE DU CIEL.—Un mur de clôture dans lequel

s’ouvre une porte. A droite de la porte une guérite. Devant la
guérite un pliant et une petite table. Sur la porte un écriteau; “CIEL”
en plusieurs langues. Au premier plan, des nuages qui marchent,
limitant le champ en avant.

Un archange monte la garde dans la guérite. Saint-Pierre assis à la

petite table lit les journaux. Soudain la porte s’ouvre et le Bonhomme
Noël paraît, en livreur, sa hotte de jouets sur le dos.19

There is no significant difference between this and a conventional play

text written for the stage, but by analogy with the AM&B scenarios,
there is no good reason to doubt that Raynauld’s ‘A’ versions of 1907
are indeed among the earliest surviving examples of pre-production
writing for film. The search for ‘firsts’ in screenwriting history is
largely pointless; the significance is that within three years, in two

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44 A History of the Screenplay

different countries, a similar solution appears to have been found for

copyrighting films, that this solution involved the deposition of written
texts, and that those texts are indebted to the stage play for their form.
The more radical argument pertains to the category B scripts, which, if
Raynauld is correct, represent something significantly different from the
AM&B scripts because they denote a more cinema-specific mode of writ-
ing. As before, however, the issue is whether these are pre-production

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‘shooting scripts’ or post-production documents: not synopses this time,
but detailed descriptions or transcripts. Raynauld has only included in
this category screenplays without an accompanying filmstrip and in sev-
eral versions, including an A version that is dated earlier than the B
version.20 The B versions are marked by the words ‘dépot conforme à la
vue’ (‘deposit that conforms to the film’). Raynauld draws the following
conclusions:

This notice, ‘deposit that conforms to the film’, characteristic of ‘B’

versions, is of great importance because the ‘B’ versions manifestly
contain precise descriptions of actual elements to be found in the
film, such as intertitles and mise-en-scène directions, which ‘conform
to the film’. The ‘A’ version is then the script written prior to the
film, and the more elaborate and especially more precise ‘B’ version
is the one that corresponds to the actual film. As well as being what
could be called the shooting script and the revised version, the ‘B’
version also assures copyright protection of both initial subject, and
final film.21

What is troubling about the B versions, however, is precisely the thing

that looks most persuasive: they ‘manifestly contain precise descrip-
tions of actual elements to be found in the film’. Owing to the vagaries
of the production process, a film is always liable to differ significantly
from any pre-production screenplay; the more detailed the script, the
more noticeable the differences are likely to be. If the version B scripts
‘conform to the film’, the obvious question arises as to whether that
is because the director has reproduced exactly the elements of the
screenplay, or whether someone has performed the easier task of writ-
ing down a record of the film as shot. There are several reasons why this
might be done, not least that it ‘assures copyright protection of both
initial subject, and final film’.
Raynauld’s arguments for regarding the A versions as ‘screenplays’,
rather than texts that ‘have for too long been considered as mere

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 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing 45

advertisements22 ’, are invaluable. Meanwhile, the analogies with the

Library of Congress deposits suggest that the case for the B versions
as ‘shooting scripts’ remains intriguing but not proven, and that in
the present state of knowledge it is necessary to treat with caution the
view that French scripts of this period displayed a surprisingly advanced
recognition of the demands peculiar to the screenplay, and ‘that tech-
niques of montage, of continuity editing and of narrative inventiveness

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were at the forefront of the screenwriters’ preoccupations, even in the
early years’.23

Dialogue in early scenarios, 1905–12

The AM&B scenarios represent the first significant case in which sce-
nario form can be seen to owe as much to legal matters of copyright
as to the industrial demands of cinematic production. The Serenade,
a scenario written by William Selig (whom we shall encounter again
in the next chapter), and which received the Class D copyright clas-
sification on 1 May 1905, seems to have taken the opposite approach
to a similar problem by imitating not the scene text but the dia-
logue of the stage play. Loughney argues that ‘[b]ecause it contains
dialogue and instructions for the director and actors, it is truly a recog-
nisable screenplay and is the earliest known document of its kind yet
identified’.24
At first glance, this claim, like the text itself, beggars belief. Here is
the beginning of Scene 1 (the illiteracy and typographical errors are
in the original—the text has been tidied up in Loughney’s presentation
of the same material):

SCENE:—Garden scene—with balcony projecting from upper part of

house. (to left of Stage)
Enter Freddie,Cornet under his arm stops beneath Balcony, and
begins to serenade, Fannie, during the serenade„ Fannie appears on
Balcony,
FREDDIE.

(Stops playing) Ah! My loved one,my own sweet Juliet,come fly with
me,to a bower of rose’s do not turn me away, but whisper that one
dear short but sweet word, that means, all in life to me, say you will
this very night, elope with me, and be my wife.

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46 A History of the Screenplay

Fannie.

Yes I would go with you anywhere, fly with you to the end of the
Earth,were it not for my father,

OLD MAN.
(listening behind Balcony window) Ah! Ha! I see it all now, the Vil-
lain, that bargain counter three cent Dude, wants my daughter to

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elope with him,Oh! the Scoundrel! the Wretch! I’ll fix him.25

So it continues, for another eight desperate pages. If the AM&B scripts

look like stage plays but without dialogue, The Serenade is a sloppily pre-
sented and exceptionally badly written draft, apparently intended for
theatrical staging, dialogue-intensive and virtually unfilmable.
Suggestively, however, the title page proclaims it to be ‘A Dramatic
Composition. In Four Scenes. By W. N. Selig’. This is followed by a ‘cau-
tion’ that ‘Stage representation, Moving Pictures, etc. [are] positively
prohibited, without the written consent of the author’. As with the
AM&B scenarios, then, The Serenade is a multi-purpose text, but this time
the intention is still more explicit: the same text can be both used for
copyrighting purposes and considered as a scenario for either theatri-
cal or cinematic production. Though the latter looks highly unlikely,
Loughney points to the existence of a different version (in 12 scenes)
released in September 1905,26 and more recently has proposed, after
viewing the The Serenade film, that it derives from the Selig scenario. His
contention is that this and similar texts were created opportunistically
in the hope of exploiting either the theatrical or cinematic audience, or
both.27 If so, this well illustrates the fly-by-night quality of much of the
work being produced by the early American film entrepreneurs, though
it is harder to agree that The Serenade is ‘a recognisable screenplay’,
because the textual form has not been adapted at all to the industrial
demands of cinematic production.
On the other hand, still closer than the AM&B scenarios to the the-
atrical play script is the much later From the Manger to the Cross, or Jesus
of Nazareth, a Kalem production from 1912 written by Gene Gauntier,
two troublingly different versions of which appear to have been jointly
submitted for registration as a ‘dramatic composition’, and copyrighted
on 2 December 1912.28 The film itself was copyrighted on 23 October
1912, and released in January or February 1913.29 As with the AM&B
texts, then, the registration for copyright as a dramatic composition
was made after the film had been shot, even though the production

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 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing 47

was a lengthy one: the title page of the published text records that it
took ‘over three months in the photographing’,30 and some scenes (the
‘Flight into Egypt’ sequence) had already been shot before Jesus had
even been cast.31
The dates and terminology carry a more general significance, since no
satisfactory method for the copyright classification of films was estab-
lished ‘until 28 August 1912, when two separate classes (L and M)

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were created especially for motion pictures—Class L for fictional films
(photoplays) and Class M for non-fiction and animation films’.32 From
the Manger to the Cross was copyrighted as LU 56, indicating that it was
the 56th licence granted to a then unreleased (U) ‘photoplay’ (L).33
Loughney’s account of From the Manger to the Cross draws on the
film and on the 29-page pamphlet that Kalem chose to publish, a
decision Loughney reasonably suggests may have been a promotional
device,34 though it is highly likely that it was also bound up with the
developing issues in the copyrighting of films and scenarios. Loughney
describes this as ‘the earliest example of a fully developed modern
American screenplay’.35 The title page is followed by a three-page ‘syn-
opsis’, a three-page ‘light[ing] plot’, and the 21-page dramatic work
that comprises the bulk of the printed pamphlet and which is, roughly,
‘evenly divided between dialogue and stage directions’.36 In this sense it
presents, at least to the reader familiar either with the theatrical play
texts of the time or the screenplays of later periods, a more satisfy-
ing balance between scene text and dialogue than the earlier scenarios
considered above.
Loughney observes that the stage directions ‘are precise and indicate
the directional movements of the main actors in every scene’,37 citing
the beginning of the third scene as an example:

Street in Nazareth, showing doorway of Joseph’s carpenter shop;

women pass by, going to and from the well for water; huge jugs
on their heads. Joseph discovered working. Enter Mary, right upper
entrance; passes diagonally across to left first entrance, turns, smiles
at Joseph, drops eyes and exits.

There is indeed a fairly close resemblance between this and the action
in the corresponding scene in the film. However, as noted previously, a
measure of disagreement between the scene text and the film tends to be
more revealing, since it makes it less likely that the written text is simply
a transcription. For this reason, stronger evidence for the scenario as a
shooting script is that it makes no mention of the appearance, in the

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48 A History of the Screenplay

most readily available version of the film, of a camel that conspicuously

follows Mary into the shop as she exits scene 3.38
More problematic is scene 5:

SCENE V.—Street in Bethlehem. Left center an ancient inn, street thronged

with people.
(Enter) JOSEPH, left upper. He is leading a donkey on which is seated

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MARY. Comes down through crowd to inn and calls.
JOSEPH
Canst give us lodgings for the night, for my wife is very weary?
LANDLORD
What you ask is impossible. My house is filled, but in yonder street
there is a stable wherein you might find shelter for the night.
(Exit JOSEPH and MARY left first entrance.)

This gives a good indication of the general balance between dia-

logue and scene text in the scenario. In the film, however, the action
above is presented in a single, continuous shot, without dialogue titles.
This in itself is unremarkable: intertitles would be created in post-
production, need not correspond to those in the scenario, and could
be omitted or added at will. The problem is that the scene in the
film is performed in pantomime: no words (in intertitle or otherwise)
are exchanged, and instead the Landlord indicates with a resigned
parting of the hands that he has no room available, followed with
a gesture to indicate the direction in which Joseph should go to
find lodgings. Consequently, neither the scene text nor the dialogue
text of the scenario corresponds satisfactorily to what is seen on the
screen.
Again, this discrepancy does not necessarily compromise the argu-
ment for the scenario as a shooting script. It is worth mentioning,
however, that accompanying the published scenario in Kalem’s copy-
right application was a separate, three-page, typewritten ‘description
of the motion picture photoplay . . . to accompany application for copy-
right’. The wording implies that the typescript is a synopsis of the film,
and if that is all it is, it is not surprising that Loughney does not men-
tion it. However, a closer examination suggests that the typescript is a
great deal more interesting, and the scenario more troublesome, than
at first appears. It might reasonably be argued, for instance, that the
much briefer typescript version of scene 5—simply, ‘Joseph and Mary
seek shelter in a stable cave in Bethlehem’—not only accords with the

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 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing 49

typescript’s stated aim of describing the action, but also would illustrate
how the pre-production ‘outline’ scripts that we shall consider in the
next chapter functioned: by presenting a very brief indication of action
to be improvised during the shooting.
Such discrepancies leave the question as to the precise relationship
between the film and the published scenario—and, indeed, between
either of them and the three-page typescript—as one of speculation. Sev-

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eral possibilities suggest themselves. First, some version of the scenario
might well have been to hand during the filming: the director attempted
to follow the action closely, the discrepancies arise from the vagaries
of production and the substantial differences between Gauntier’s titles
and those in the film can be explained by the autonomous creation of
intertitles after filming. This might appear to be supported by a note
in the published text, in which Gauntier asks that ‘if the drama be
shown by means of motion pictures, wherever possible each scene is
to be enacted in the exact location as pointed out by leading author-
ities’; although, since the document in which this note appears was
submitted for copyright after the film had been shot, this is far from
conclusive.
The second possibility is that the three-page typescript could have been
used as an ‘outline’ script from which the director and actors impro-
vised; meanwhile the 21-page pamphlet version was compiled relatively
independently, possibly after shooting, with its exact formal similar-
ity to contemporary theatrical play scripts indicating that its functions
included securing copyright. (Perhaps significantly, the ‘Parts’ of the
typescript have become the more theatrical ‘Acts’ in the published ver-
sion.) In 1911, a scenario writer, George Rockhill Craw, had been advised
by the Copyright Office to submit his work as a ‘drama’, leading him to
assume (and to recommend to others) that dialogue should be added
to scenarios for this very reason, whereas intertitles would expose the
text as a work intended for film and not theatre, thereby compromising
the application. During the public debate that ensued, Solberg recom-
mended ‘that the safest course is to print and publish, and then register
as a book’.39 Coincidentally or otherwise, Gauntier’s script, published
the following year, exactly corresponds to these recommendations.
A third possibility—that neither of these scripts functioned as a pre-
text for the film—remains, though this seems less likely, since Gauntier
certainly ‘conceived’ the film. It is worth noting, however, that Robert
Henderson-Bland, who played Jesus, makes no direct mention of a script
in his book-length and (ironically) rather self-regarding recollections of

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50 A History of the Screenplay

the film. Only at the end does this Jesus remember where He came from,
in a belated acknowledgement of Gauntier, ‘who conceived the idea of
making the film [ . . . ] and portrayed the Virgin Mary’.40

In the current imperfect state of knowledge, some conclusions can nev-

ertheless be drawn to explain the peculiar conjunction of theatrical form
and cinematic function in the texts explored in this chapter, and they

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all follow from AM&B’s response to the initial refusal of the Copyright
Office in 1904 to register the Bulletin copy of The Suburbanite on the
grounds that ‘[t]he term “dramatic composition” as used in the copy-
right law has the ordinary meaning of [ . . . ] a play consisting of dialogue
and action’.
AM&B seem to have responded, consciously or otherwise, on three
separate but interrelated fronts. The first was conceptual: perhaps feeling
unable to do anything about the absence of dialogue, they maintained
that dialogue need form no part of a dramatic composition. Their suc-
cess in this regard opened the door to the idea of a new kind of dramatic
writing, and that idea is perhaps the seed of the form that we would
today term the ‘screenplay’.
The second was industrial: at some point, AM&B decided that the
same text that was submitted for copyright purposes could also func-
tion as a pre-production planning document, though it is not entirely
certain which of these two functions was conceived first. Moreover, if
Loughney is right and the paratexts indeed fulfilled the functions of pre-
production casting and set and lighting design,41 it would suggest that,
as early as 1904, AM&B was using the scenario in ways that many film
historians, notably Janet Staiger, have tended to associate with a some-
what later date—around 1909—when demand for an ever-increasing
supply of films led producers to begin using the script as a mechanism
for organising productions more efficiently. One of these methods, as
we shall see in the next chapter, included bundling the dramatic text in
with a range of other materials such as a plot synopsis, location break-
down and list of the characters.42 Certainly, these documents seem to
have been a standard part of American film-making almost from the
beginning of narrative cinema.
The third was formal: AM&B now created texts that resembled as
closely as possible the theatrical play scripts of the time. The report-
mode narrative form of The Suburbanite’s ‘Bulletin’ copy was framed with
set descriptions and paratexts so that, dialogue aside, the scenarios from
The Chicken Thief onwards could be passed off as stage plays. This had a
material dimension: the script was constructed as a relatively substantial

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 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing 51

artefact. The uncinematically prolix dialogue of The Serenade and From

the Manger to the Cross, scene texts that are relatively hypotactic com-
pared to ‘outline’ scripts, the luxuriously wasteful presentation of the
material in using entire pages merely to indicate act divisions, and the
bundling of the paratextual materials with the scenario all contribute to
a textual form that exceeds the requirements of the dramatic actions the
scenarios depict. The result, however, is a material (and, in the case of

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From the Manger to the Cross, published) document that could pass as a
relatively substantial play text instead of a brief cinematic sketch.
What the copyright submissions did not do, however, was create a
legal category of text that was peculiar to film writing. Instead, the Copy-
right Office was content to pass both narrative prose (The Suburbanite)
and documents formally resembling play scripts, with or without dia-
logue, as ‘dramatic compositions’. To the extent that these texts were
capable of performing the industrial functions we would now associate
with the screenplay, and could be subsumed under the contemporary
umbrella term ‘scenario’, a number of distinctions can become blurred.
It is easy to think that the Copyright Office erred in failing to create
a distinct classification for films in 1901, and that the opportunity to
establish either a formal or a legal foundation for the development of
film writing was missed. Nevertheless, these legal wrangles caused film
producers to concentrate on two modes of writing—narrative prose and
dialogue—that required only the addition of a technical vocabulary,
and a conception of the shot that was more cinematic than the con-
tinuous three-dimensional stage scene, to bring such a text into being.
By 1912, when From the Manger to the Cross was published, that had
already happened.

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3
Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17

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The AM&B dispute was a local reaction to a general problem of duping
in early cinema. The use of catalogues was another and, as in the case
of George Méliès’ Star catalogues, one effect was to circulate beyond
the immediate industrial confines of the production a range of textual
materials that, however problematically, contribute to the origins of the
screenplay. Copyright also helps to explain the textual form the AM&B
scenarios took. For both AM&B and Méliès, however, the real purpose
was to secure copyright on the film itself, so what we might call today
‘original screenplays’ were being created in the service of ‘original’ films.

The Ben-Hur case and ‘scenario fever’

While the companies resorted to law to protect their own property, they
displayed an altogether more cavalier attitude towards original mate-
rials generated by anybody else. The important Ben-Hur case of 1907
arose because the companies had not previously troubled themselves
about copyright law in creating film adaptations of pre-existing literary
texts. In 1907, the publishers Harper and Row initiated legal proceed-
ings against the Kalem film company on the grounds that Kalem’s 1907
film of Ben-Hur, for which Gene Gauntier had written the adaptation,
infringed Harper’s copyright in the source novel. Gauntier apparently
worked on the script for just two days, and the action focused largely
on the chariot race, but ‘[t]here was enough story left in the film for the
publisher of the novel and the estate of the author to sue Kalem and
win, establishing the copyright law in the area of film rights’.1
It would be four years before the case was finally settled, but its effects
were felt much sooner, as anxieties about copyright deterred the studios
from adaptation and prompted them to concentrate on ‘original’ stories.
Lacking, at this stage, in-house story departments of sufficient depth to

52

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 53

create enough material for the burgeoning industry, one response was
to invite the public to submit potential film stories for consideration.
So began the first wave of ‘scenario fever’.
The Supreme Court gave the decisive ruling on Kalem v. Harper on
13 November 1911:

An exhibition of a series of photographs of persons and things,

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arranged on film as moving picture and so depicting the principal
scenes of an author’s work as to tell the story, is a dramatization of
such work, and the person producing the film and offering them for
sale for exhibition, even if not himself exhibiting them, infringes the
copyright of the author.2

Crucially, Kalem had created a form of written scenario by paying some-

one ‘to read Ben Hur and to write out such a description or scenario
of certain portions that it could be followed in action’.3 With this deci-
sion, the Supreme Court arguably brought the category of the ‘adapted
screenplay’ into being, by offering a legal clarification of the ways in
which this intermediate text negotiated between the source novel and
the produced film. As Torey Liepa explains,

At issue in the Ben-Hur case was whether or not copyright could

be extended beyond the unlicensed reproduction of words from an
original text to wordless actions—in this case to silent film pan-
tomime. Kalem argued that copyright should not extend to ideas,
but only to specific, written expressions of those ideas. [ . . . ] Jus-
tice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. disagreed, decreeing that pantomimic
actions were in fact subject to copyright, and that motion pic-
tures constituted ‘a particular, cognate, and well-known form of
reproduction’[.]4

The ruling endorsed not only the principle of the AM&B copyright
claims—‘that a dramatic composition does not necessarily require
dialogue’5 —but also suggested that it cut both ways, since, equally, a
film without words could infringe the copyright on a written text.
The decision introduced a level of professionalisation into the area of
screenwriting, since studios and adapters now had to be more scrupu-
lous in acknowledging and paying for the use of source materials. On the
other hand, it did not establish any comparable level of protection for
screenwriters themselves, who were still burdened by having to produce
what Liepa terms ‘pre-commercial’ texts. The ruling in Kalem v. Harper

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54 A History of the Screenplay

offered protection to the writer of a previously published source text;

but unlike the writer of a published source novel, or the producers of a
commercially screened motion picture, the screenwriter had ‘published’
nothing whatsoever.
These factors help to explain the entirely contradictory views
advanced by film scholars as to whether ‘scenario fever’ was fuelled or
restrained by the 1911 Kalem v. Harper ruling.6 Anxieties about the costs

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of adapting published sources, the exponential growth in film produc-
tion and the primitive status of story departments in the early 1910s all
gave studios incentives to accelerate the solicitation of story ideas from
the public, directly and indirectly, via advertising, advice columns in
trade journals, writing schools, story competitions and so on. Yet despite
the proliferating methods by which the public was induced to pass ideas
to the studios, the extent to which the latter actually used them is
unclear: Kalem v. Harper seemingly granted the public at large access
to the film industry, but it also ‘render[ed] their material entirely sus-
ceptible to piracy from above’.7 Consequently, it is impossible to judge
how much of it was unconsciously borrowed or secretly stolen by the
companies.
Identifying the point at which the ‘fever’ subsided is also not straight-
forward. The demands of the ‘continuity’ script that accompanied
the development of the feature film in 1913–14 (considered in the
next chapter) required a fully professionalised approach to the final
preparations of the written text. This provided further grist to the
manual-writers’ mill by suggesting that only those versed in the more
esoteric arts of script writing could enter the portal, but it also suggested
that the studios’ recently created writing departments would function
as a closed shop by professionalising the craft. It has been argued that
a final outbreak of scenario fever followed the end of the First World
War, but if so, a series of lawsuits containing accusations of plagiarism
within material submitted by amateurs, alongside suggestions that the
studios had indeed been stealing some of that material themselves, was
enough to convince the industry finally to close the doors to outsiders.8
They would not open again until some years after the next world war
was over.

The ‘outline’ script

The period of ‘scenario fever’, whatever its precise boundaries, was

not one in which scripts possessed any uniformity of style or

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 55

presentation. Although the theatrical play script had become a model

for screenwriting as early as 1904, AM&B soon abandoned the
experiment of writing fully detailed scenarios for the joint purposes
of production and copyright. The text that Gauntier had hurriedly
prepared for Ben-Hur must have been something very different. In all
probability, it would have looked rather like the texts presented within
the Méliès catalogues: that is, in Edward Azlant’s description, ‘simply

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lists of the scenes to be shot, in the order of their eventual appearance
in the edited film’.9
Ben-Hur, however, was made in a more industrialised environment
than the ‘cameraman’ system in which Méliès worked. Gauntier was
being employed as a professional writer to turn pre-existing material
into a script for filming. Although the fatal error was to fail to ask per-
mission for the adaptation of the source novel, in other respects the
process resembles that described by Epes Winthrop Sargent, and which
Staiger proposes as a model for scriptwriting in what she terms the ‘direc-
tor’ system: ‘outside writers were invited to contribute suggestions, for
which they were paid from five to fifteen dollars. These mere synopses
were developed in the studio into scripts, since few of the writers pos-
sessed the knowledge of picture-making requisite to enable them to
develop the script.’10
What Staiger terms the ‘outline’ script arose, in her analysis, from
a transformation in the mode of production around 1907 from the
one-person ‘cameraman’ system to the ‘director’ system, the key dif-
ference lying in a division of responsibilities between directing, filming
and writing. She associates this with the need to generate an increas-
ing supply of stories for the burgeoning film industry: ‘When the
1907–08 shift to fictional narratives occurred, film production was able
to take as a model the stage director who controlled the choices of
scenery, costumes, and acting, and used a script as an “outline” of the
narrative.’11
In many respects the outline represents a step backwards from the
detailed theatrical scripts prepared by AM&B, even though the form of
those owes more to the demands of copyright than to the medium of
film. Given the constraints on the length of films of this period, and
the still small number of people who would need to consult such a doc-
ument, the outline could quite literally be written on the back of an
envelope. According to Gauntier herself, at the Kalem studio in the fate-
ful year of 1907, it was common practice for writer Frank Marion to
hand to director Sidney Olcott

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56 A History of the Screenplay

a used business envelope on the back of which, in his minute

handwriting, was sketched the outline of six scenes, supposed to run
one hundred and fifty feet to the scene—as much as our little camera
would hold. A half dozen words described each scene; I believe to
this day Mr. Marion holds the championship for the shortest working
scenario.12

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Such practices apparently continued sporadically into the early 1910s.
According to Louella Parsons, who at that time worked as a story edi-
tor for Essanay before becoming the doyenne of the gossip columnists,
‘[m]anuscripts came in on pencil tablets, torn envelopes and even on
bits of wallpaper’.13 Given its nature, a text like this was hardly likely to
survive; consequently, many of our ideas about the scripts of this time
are dependent on commonsense assumptions, combined with the rec-
ollections of the film-makers themselves, caveats as to the reliability of
which must always be applied. This casual approach to the scenario was
far from universal, however, and would soon become obsolete. More-
over, such accounts describe scripts that are ‘toward the more informal
end of the continuum’, and Staiger notes that more detailed forms were
also in place at this stage, though the example she cites from 1909 is
of a model that is less detailed than that developed at AM&B five years
previously.14

The J. Searle Dawley scenarios, 1910–11

Staiger proposes that the next transformation, the ‘director-unit’ sys-

tem accompanied by a ‘scenario’ script, was occasioned by several
industrial developments. First, more complex narratives necessitated the
drawing up of a scene plot that facilitated the shooting of scenes non-
chronologically—although, as we have seen, a similar document was
already in use at AM&B in 1904. Second, the growing sophistication of
film narratives required clearer preparation at the writing stage, but this
was complicated by the decision of distributors and exhibitors, around
1908, to standardise film length at 1,000 feet. ‘Thus both shooting out of
final continuity and the standard of clear, continuous action militated
for a script written prior shooting’, although this was not obligatory,
with D. W. Griffith’s working practices being the most conspicuous
exception.15
Five scenarios held in the J. Searle Dawley collection at the Margaret
Herrick Library (MHL) in Los Angeles illustrate one approach to script
writing under the director-unit system. Dawley was originally hired by

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 57

Edwin S. Porter as a director for Edison in May 1907, moving with the
company when it relocated to the Bronx later that year. An unpublished,
seemingly self-authored biography dating from the 1930s claims that
he directed 194 single-reel films for Edison, for ‘most of which he
wrote the story as well as directed’.16 In 1946, he recalled that there
were few ‘picture writers’ in those early days, although he singles out
Bannister Marwin, who was paid $25 per story, as one of the best; and

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although there were almost no copyright laws, Edison paid $100 per
story to respected authors like Rex Beach, Roy Norton, Richard Harding
Davis, Carolyn Wells and Sir Gilbert Parker. Yet in a 1921 article, Dawley
recalled:

In those days we never worked with a script. Scenario? No such ani-

mal anywhere around. I found it difficult in the beginning to figure
out ‘bits of business.’ There was nothing to go on really. Then again,
we never ‘shot’ with any logic, as far as I could see. We would go out
on location. Suddenly Porter would declare: ‘By jove, Dawley, here’s
a good place to take pictures.[’] And we would take pictures in that
place. I wasn’t used to anything like this. On the stage we had our
scenery and the plot. In pictures we found our sce[ne]ry and made
up our plot as we went along.

In 1946, Dawley recalls a slightly later period when,

[i]n 1912, the Edison Co sent me with a company of players to make

pictures across the continent. We started out without scripts or sto-
ries. It was my job to pick up interesting locations on the way and
build stories around them. The only planned script for the entire trip
was to be a picture made in Cheyenne called the ‘Charge of the Light
Brigade’ written around Baliclava.

Dawley’s recollections, like those of many early film-makers, are often

contradictory, unclear and unreliable. However, the Dawley papers do
show that, whether or not his earliest pictures were made without
scripts, a written scenario was being used for some films, shot on
location in spectacular surroundings, as early as 1910, well before the
continent-wide trek he dates to 1912; perhaps they were one and the
same excursion.
The location shooting is important, because it helps to explain why
the scenarios appear to be both pre-production planning documents
and invitations to extempore improvisation. The two earliest date from

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58 A History of the Screenplay

June 1910: ‘Home Making’ (scenario dated 13 June 1910, film released as
An Unselfish Love on 20 September 1910) and ‘Railroad Picture’ (21 June
1910, released as The Little Station Agent on 4 November 1910). As the
Edison synopses make clear, both of these were filmed in the Canadian
Rockies. The remaining three were shot in Colorado in June and July
1911: ‘Earthwork Construction Story’ (11 July 1911, released as The
Big Dam on 23 September 1911), ‘Pictures on the Wall’ (19 July 1911,

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released as The Sheriff on 16 September 1911) and Leaves of a Romance
(no. 703, 20 June 1911, released 7 October).
These typewritten texts appear to be multi-purpose documents: pre-
production scenarios that would be on hand during the shooting and
then used in post-production, with pencilled comments in the left-
hand margins recording how much footage was expended in filming
each scene (unless these handwritten annotations represent an esti-
mate). In a later era, they might be described as ‘shooting scripts’.
The picture becomes clearer in some respects, and more complicated
in others, if we use ‘Earthwork Construction Story’ as an example. Font
and minor aspects of lineation aside, the following reproduces exactly
the complete, two-page, single-spaced and apparently professionally
typewritten text:

July 19th , ’11

Length 1000 feet

#701
Earthwork Construction Story

Scene 1- Parlor
Hero proposes to girl and she accepts- she shows him letter from
Heavy, asking for her hand- Hero takes pen and writes across bot-
tom “Sorry old chap but she’s mine for life Ralph Sergeant” (Show
hand writing this note) Puts letter in envelope and addresses same.

----------------------------------------------------------------
2- Heavy’s office

Show him drawing plans – letter received – he opens same – shows

his dissatisfaction and hatred – flash letter on screen so that it may
be known that it is the same letter as in scene 1.

----------------------------------------------------------------

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 59

3- Six months later

Office connected with Hero’s house. He and girl who are now married
are working together upon plans of a large construction on which
they expect to bid.

----------------------------------------------------------------
4- Office of Construction Co.

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Heavy waiting for reply on his bid – Hero and girl enter – business –
Hero called into office (Subtitle about Hero winning contract)

----------------------------------------------------------------
5-Hero comes out of office and shows contract to wife. Heavy
revengeful – president calls attention to time limit in contract –
Heavy notices this point.
----------------------------------------------------------------
6- Earthwork Construction
Heavy directing Hero in background – hits upon an idea and leaves.

----------------------------------------------------------------
7- Home

Close view of Heavy making up as Italian laborer.

----------------------------------------------------------------
8- Earthwork Construction

Heavy gets job from Hero who does not recognize him.
----------------------------------------------------------------
9- Night view of Earthwork Constr.
Heavy disabling big machines.

----------------------------------------------------------------
10- Next day

Big machines break down – delays work.

----------------------------------------------------------------
11- Lunch hour

Heavy shows men ad – indicates that better wages will be paid –

incites them to leave.
----------------------------------------------------------------

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60 A History of the Screenplay

12-Paying off the men – big gang of men leave – Hero pleads with
them to stay – they refuse to do so – indicates that they are going to
get better jobs as shown in advertisement.
----------------------------------------------------------------
13 Home

Hero discouraged – wife tries to cheer him up –

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----------------------------------------------------------------
14- Ex. Telegraph Office

Heavy steals telegraph blank and takes message on same

----------------------------------------------------------------
15- Wood

Heavy engages messenger to deliver telegram.

----------------------------------------------------------------
16- Earthwork

Fake telegram given to hero – contents to state that he can get so

many men if he will come at once – he reads telegram and leaves
Heavy in charge.
----------------------------------------------------------------
17- Home

Tells wife what he is going to do and leaves.

----------------------------------------------------------------
18- Camp – noon hour

Men about to go to work – Heavy gets them interested in poker game.

----------------------------------------------------------------
19- Home

Friend of hero informs wife of conditions- she puts on man’s coat-

takes revolver and leaves with him.
----------------------------------------------------------------
20- Camp

Wife demands to know why the men are not at work – Heavy laughs
at her – gets mad and reveals his identity – she pleads with men –
they turn to her side – start to attack Heavy – she stays them and bids
him go at the point of revolver – he leaves – men go to work
----------------------------------------------------------------

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 61

21- Men working with all their might and main – girl urging
them on.

----------------------------------------------------------------
22- SUBTITLE: THE WORK IS FINISHED ON TIME
Men cheer –pick up wife on shoulders and carry her off triumphantly.

----------------------------------------------------------------

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23- Home
Hero comes on discouraged and disheartened – President arrives –
indicates that he has lost – wife enters – explanation and general
rejoicing.

The typescript ends with a column listing the characters: ‘Hero, Hero’s
wife, Heavy, Wife’s friend, President, Messenger Boy, Laborers.’17
The length of 1,000 feet does not record how much footage was actu-
ally shot, but instead indicates how long the release print will be, due
to the industrial standardisation noted above. These one-reelers would
play for around 15 to 18 minutes. Each project would be numbered
(in this case, 701) for studio record-keeping purposes; it does not mean
that 700 films had actually been made prior to this point. Like all of
the Dawley scenarios, the typescript of ‘Earthwork Construction Story’
is attached to a backing of lightweight card, on which is typed the film
title and number, and also the words ‘Stage Director’. This suggests that
it was in Dawley’s possession during the shoot: as Tom Stempel notes,
it has been folded in thirds, so as ‘to fit neatly into the director’s coat
pocket’.18
Pencilled annotations in the left-hand margin document the footage
shot for most (though not all) scenes, while scenes 2 and 7 have ‘Mon-
day’ written next to them, this word presumably having been inserted
either in anticipation of the filming or to record what was shot on each
day. More detailed annotations on other Dawley scenarios give a clearer
insight into how they were used during the filming. Brief, pencilled
remarks on the typescript of Leaves of a Romance reveal Dawley noting
picturesque scenes of valleys and waterfalls and suggesting places for
their insertion, while on the paper backing are what Stempel suggests
are additional scenes shot (‘#1 Distant view of valley from Helen Hunt’s
grave’, #2 [illegible], and ‘#3 Water fall at cascade’).19 The Kinetogram of
1 October 1911 duly notes ‘the exceedingly beautiful photography and
scenery throughout’.20

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62 A History of the Screenplay

The Kinetogram was an Edison promotional device, ‘A Semi-Monthly

Bulletin of Moving Picture News’, and its synopsis of 15 September
1911 reveals important differences between ‘Earthwork Construction
Story’ and the released film. The title has been changed to The Big
Dam, and names have been supplied for the Hero (‘George D. Bedford’)
and Heavy (‘John Dillon’). More significant are the indications that
Dawley’s crudely melodramatic plots were secondary to the Edison com-

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pany’s desire to exploit cinema’s potential for spectacular scenic realism.
As with each of the five Dawley films, the Kinetogram makes great play
of the commercial appeal of the magnificent settings. This was noth-
ing new. As early as 1902, in a ‘Special Supplement of Colorado Films’,
a Selig catalogue was enthusing that ‘[t]he very name of Colorado will
attract hundreds, yes, thousands and the exhibitor first on the spot will
reap a golden harvest. Look over this list and read carefully the descrip-
tions with each subject. If you don’t see dollars sticking out of every one
you must be blind indeed.’21 Not surprisingly then, the Kinetogram syn-
opsis of The Big Dam indicates Colorado as the location, and ‘[w]e are
shown wonderfully interesting scenes of the progress of the work’.
These scenes do not, however, appear in the scenario. They would
apparently have been inserted around scene 6, which is one of the
scenes that have no footage recorded in Dawley’s script. The same
holds true for scene 21, for which the corresponding synopsis in the
Kinetogram records that ‘[t]he contract is finished on time and we see
the tremendous dam completed with the wagons driving away one by
one’. For these scenes, the writer—presumably Dawley—has made no
serious attempt to preconceive the visual effect of the film, in this case
the pictorial realism that appears to be The Big Dam’s real raison d’être;
instead there is, in effect, a gap in the written text that will be completed
by the shooting and editing of the film.
Collectively, the scenarios suggest that Dawley’s method at this time
was to work out the simple plots in advance, improvise on set and then
revise the film at the editing stage, fitting the story to the pictures almost
as much as the other way around (‘we found our sce[ne]ry and made up
our plot as we went along’). With two or more films being made simul-
taneously, spectacular footage could be inserted into whichever film it
would fit (quite literally, given the thousand-foot requirement) with the
least disruption to the story. Already, then, we can see a tension between
two potentially opposing conceptions of the function of a screenplay—
to ensure narrative coherence, or to provide a pretext for other,
essentially pictorial, spectacular or improvised potentialities within
film—that in different ways have been locked in struggle ever since.

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 63

Selig studio scripts and others, 1908–13

A comparison of Dawley’s scenarios for Edison to those being written

contemporaneously by writers for William Selig’s studio suggests little
consistency in practice during these years. Selig, who founded the Selig
Polyscope Company in Chicago in 1896, was sued by Edison in 1905
for patent infringement, but later joined forces with him and others to
form the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908. The following year a

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Selig employee, Otis Turner, described the company’s working practices
in ways that suggest that at this stage the director-producer was also
a writer. Turner told the interviewer that ‘I write all my own scenarios
for the Eastern producing end [in Chicago], and Francis Boggs, an inde-
pendent producer for the Selig Co., now located on the Pacific Coast
for a year, writes all of his [ . . . ] we confine ourselves largely to melo-
dramatic subjects’, but also to comedies and ‘fine spectacles of Western
scenery’.22
If these subjects look indistinguishable from those being filmed
during the same period by Dawley, by 1910 the Selig studios had
nevertheless developed a method of scenario construction that accom-
modated industrial production in ways that the Dawley scripts do not.
The Selig papers at the MHL contain production records for a series
of short subjects produced as one- or two-reelers. Possibly the most
detailed and revealing is the typewritten script for Across the Plains
(1910), a Western adventure directed by Turner and written by Chris
Lane, at this stage entitled ‘The First Settlers’. Its ten pages comprise
a title sheet, list of characters, a two-page breakdown of the film’s
77 scenes and finally the scenario describing the action of the scenes
themselves.
This set of documents represents a considerably more sophisticated
approach to narrative film-making than the more happenstance meth-
ods of Dawley. There is a division of labour between director and writer,
possibly contributing to the more complex narrative storytelling. Across
the Plains divides the story into four sequences, each with its own title:
scenes 1–32 comprise ‘The First Settlers’; in scenes 33–49, ‘The Whites
Barricade Themselves Against the Indians’; in scenes 50–67, ‘the follow-
ing day, the Indians go on a buffalo hunt’; and finally in scenes 68–77,
‘after the hunt the Indians prepare for a barbacue’ (sic). Each of the 77
scenes appears directly to represent a shot (anticipating the numbered
continuity of the silent Hollywood feature), whereas the Dawley scripts
tend to present the story more theatrically, each number indicating a
scene (anticipating the master-scene form). The use of the shot rather

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64 A History of the Screenplay

than the scene as the numbered unit of segmentation is seen clearly on

the first page, which contains 11 shots:

“THE FIRST SETTLERS”

1. Prairie. With hills in background.

Old fashioned caravan dis, crossing the prarie (sic), the wag-

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ons contain, Men, women, and children, supposedly the first settlers.
One old prarie schooner has a horse and a cow hitched together,
another is drawn by a pair of mules etc. Several old time Plainsmen
on horseback are riding alongside of the caravan.

2. Wagon seat. Showing interior of wagon.

Sam Martin a manly young fellow and his sweetheart Sallie

Sims, dis. on wagon seat, Sam is driving, they are apparently very
attached to one another. In the interior of wagon can be seen a few
women, wives of the settlers, one is seated on floor of wagon, another
holds a small baby in her arms.

3. Tall grass. near where the caravan is passing.

Indian dis. crawling stealthily thru the grass, trailing the
caravan.

4. Top of hill. Looking down into the valley below.

An Indian dis. crouching close up to the camera and looking
down into the valley below, where the caravan can be seen passing
on its way.

5. Down in the valley.

Close up of the caravan, passing thru the scene.

6. Another part of valley.

The Indian of scene 2. dis. trailing the caravan.

7. A bit of prarie.
Several buffalo dis. grazing and wandering about.

8. Prarie.

Caravan dis. passing thru scene.

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 65

9. Another part of prarie.

Two Indians dis. mounted, having just ridden in, one of them
is pointing in direction of the Caravan, the other indicates that they
have been seen, both wheel their horses about and start to exit.

10. Prarie.
Caravan dis. it is coming to a halt, the plainsmen who ride

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alongside, are pointing in direction where the two Indians can be
seen riding swiftly away. The Plainsmen whip up their horses and go
in pursuit of the fast riding Indians, The others are pouring out of the
wagons and excitedly watching the Indians and their pursuers.
11. A bit of prarie.

The two Indians dis. riding swiftly toward camera, pursued by

the Plainsmen, who are firing at the Indians, all exit.23

As with the Dawley scripts, internal evidence suggests that the scenario
represents a combination of material written in advance of filming (‘Sam
Martin a manly young fellow and his sweetheart Sallie Sims’) with, as
the script progresses, more makeshift scenes leaving room for improvi-
sation. Scene 18 has a note: ‘It may take a scene or two for the plainsmen
to catch up with the wounded Buffalo. If so they can be inserted here’,
while another at scene 56, which shows the shooting of a buffalo,
enthuses that ‘As much footage can be obtained here as desired, and
inserted here, such as the Buffalo Fight, and any other good stuff that
can be taken.’ Possible places for inserting such footage are indicated
in scenes 60 and 61. Scene 15’s ‘Register a typical Indian village scene’
seems to use an imperative verb, while scene 26 contains the narra-
tive comment that ‘This scene is to register that they did not leave the
Buffalo on the prarie where it was killed—but carried it along as food.’
The scenarios are formally distinct from the many handwritten,
post-production records of editing in the Selig archive. The materials
pertaining to The Argonauts (General Film Co., 1911), initially entitled
‘In the Days of ‘49’,24 include a handwritten, five-page, 18-scene sce-
nario, which is not as professionally written as Across the Plains, in
places using a prose narrative in a series of master scenes rather than
a series of shots. There are annotations, apparently of actors and props
required, in the margin against each scene. More significant is that the
Argonauts material also includes an editing sheet, the scenes of which

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66 A History of the Screenplay

exactly correspond to those in the scenario, along with two draft lists
of intertitles and two images, of a clipper ship ticket and newspaper
article, to be used as inserts.25 Formally, the editing sheet is simply a
staccato record of the action of each scene, unlike the relative pro-
lixity of the scenarios. The existence of these two parallel documents
pertaining to the same film strongly suggests that the scenario is pre-
production and the records of editing post-production, although the

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tentative comments about the selection of shot material in the for-
mer may indicate that the chronological division between these stages
is unstable, and that, once again, the scenario may combine a record
of material already filmed with an anticipation of the action still to
be shot.
Either way, the large number of editing records in the Selig archive
shows that a process of industrial record-keeping for editing purposes
was already firmly in place as early as 1908. Records were completed
by hand on a standardised Selig Polyscope form, which in the case of
The Crooked Path (Selig Polyscope, 1909), for example, enters the pro-
duction number of the film (here, #206) and the name of the producer
(Francis Boggs) at the top, followed by the title of the film; columns in
the form below provide for the scene number and footage shot, room for
a description of the action in the scene and any remarks. For this film,
there are recommendations for tinting (‘blue tone’, ‘amber’, etc.). A list
of (inter)titles, again handwritten, is supplied on a separate sheet.26
Another form completed by Boggs, for The Cowboy’s Baby (Selig
Polyscope Co., 1908), shows how the narrative construction of a film of
this time would often only reach its definitive form in post-production.
It ends with a note to ‘Tom’: ‘This picture runs 1045 feet, including
announcements and letters. I think this will trim close to 1000 feet.
Should it become necessary to cut out a scene to bring it down—take
out scene no. 18—(It is 50 ft.).’27 Similarly, The Engineer’s Daughter (1909)
includes another ‘note’: ‘This picture was made over entirely [with
exception of some scenes] [ . . . ] as the thread over the story has been
changed somewhat, all of original picture except above scenes will have
to be thrown out.’28
Even more revealing of the role of the scenario in production is the
appearance of an ‘assembly’, indicating the editorial arrangement in
narrative sequence of the scenes and titles, among the script materi-
als for several Edison one-reelers in the early teens. Of particular interest
here is Aunt Elsa’s Visit, the scenario of which, dated 10 January 1913,
takes a form quite similar to that of Dawley’s Earthwork Construction
Story, but also incorporates titles:

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 67

Scene 1- Dining room- well-to-do

SUBTITLE: NO COOK AND AUNTY EXPECTED!
All seated at breakfast table, father, mother, young
lady twins and small boy brother – confusion at meal –
shows they have no cook – one of the young ladies
exits to answer bell – returns with mail – gives father
letter – reads – [“]Dear Will: – Expect me on the third

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to pay you that long promised visit – we haven’t seen
each other since I was eight years old, then you were
five. Your old maid, sister, Elsa. San Mateo, Cal.” All
more upset than ever.
Scene 2 Same
SUBTITLE: MORNING OF THE THIRD. NO COOK YET
The boy just finishing breakfast – starts to go – he
is called back – it is put up to the others to meet
aunty at the station – the girls refuse on account of
engagements – boy puts up awful kick but they give
him money and he consents to go.
The synopsis, which appears to have been drawn up for publicity
purposes (‘To see the film with its refreshing comedy is a delight’),
is dated three weeks later, 31 January. A list of titles on 10 February
gives the length in feet that each title would require, and the con-
tent of the titles (which, as is common at this time, give the names
of the characters and actors on first appearance) is inserted ver-
batim within the scene breakdown specified in the assembly of
17 February, as here:
SCENE 3- INTERIOR—-DINING ROOM—-FATHER KISSES
FAMILY—-
SUBTITLE:- The day that Aunty is to arrive.
SCENE 4:- INTERIOR—-DINING ROOM—-FAMILY SEATED
AROUND TABLE—-
SUBTITLE:- “The girls are going to have a party. Take this money
and keep your aunt out all day.”

Not surprisingly, both the titles and the scenes of the assembly accord
more closely with the film than does the scenario of five weeks earlier.29
The texts examined in this section show that from 1908 onwards the
scenario was routinely being bundled with other documents relating
to pre-production, such as location plots and scene breakdowns, along

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68 A History of the Screenplay

with post-production records of footage shot and expenditures incurred.

Collectively, these reveal much about the transformation of the story
idea from the scenario to the release print of the film. The docu-
mentation accompanying the scenario had acquired a certain level of
consistency in appearance and function prior to the industry’s embrace
of the multi-reel ‘feature’ film in 1913–14. As we shall see in the next
chapter, however, it was only with this later development that the pre-

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sentation of the dramatic material itself became more or less regularised
with the introduction of the ‘continuity’ script.
Moreover, it is important to note that the short story and scenario
forms persisted until much later in the decade for short films, especially
when those films were made by relatively autonomous directors or com-
panies. An important case is that of Anita Loos, one of whose early
scripts, for The New York Hat (directed by D. W. Griffith in 1912), has
achieved some prominence, partly because the surviving film illustrates
well some of the narrative conventions in American film of this period.
The only surviving contemporary textual record, however, is a post-
production synopsis. The form in which Loos is likely to have written
The New York Hat can be gauged from the slightly later texts reproduced
by her biographer, Cari Beauchamp, who records that ‘[m]ost of Anita’s
scenarios were three to five typed pages told as stories. That was perfect
for a director like Griffith, who rarely used scripts’.30
Beauchamp’s book reproduces six such present-tense stories written
between 1912 and 1915, intended for one- or two-reel pictures, and a
single example of the more obviously cinematic scenario: A Ride with
Billy, which begins with a one-paragraph synopsis followed by the cast
of characters and then the 25-scene description of the action, told in the
now familiar form in which the progression of actions within a scene is
broken down by use of the dash:

1. O’Neils’ kitchen—Amy is wrapping up lunch at table—Marie

stands at mirror admiring herself—enter Mrs. O’Neil—Amy grabs hat
from table and pouts it carelessly on her head—picks up lunch—
kisses mother goodbye—waits for Marie who is still primping in front
of glass—Marie, without kissing her mother, slowly joins Amy and
they leave.31

In the short film, then, it was still possible for a director to work from a
scenario in the form of narrative prose, though as A Ride with Billy sug-
gests, for all but the simplest films (or the most idiosyncratic directors),
a more common procedure was to recast the story into scenes, with

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 69

the dashes indicating both the progression of the action and (possibly)
opportunities for further subdivision into shots.

The Mack Sennett scenarios, 1916–17

What none of the materials considered so far reveals is the spoken

dimension to much storytelling for film. This does emerge clearly,

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however, in the surviving materials for films made by Mack Sennett,
especially those compiled at the Triangle studio from the years 1916
and 1917. The Sennett materials show that in a relatively autonomous
company, especially those making shorter films, scripts could take any
form that best suited the needs of the unit. In this case, the written texts
are essentially a pause or intervention in a process of storytelling that is
as much oral and improvisatory as written and textual.
Despite the meticulous archiving of the Sennett collection at the
MHL, there is an element of chaos to these materials. It is the norm
for the main title to change multiple times, beginning with a dummy
title for the initial story synopsis (‘Haunted House Story’, for exam-
ple, became Done in Oil [1916]), and the stories themselves were in
a state of flux, often changing almost beyond recognition in the
progress from conception through to post-production. The file for Her
Nature Dance (Triangle, 1917) appears to contain materials for two or
three different story ideas, connected only by motif or title; the story
outline ‘The Nature Dancers’ of 13 October 1916, for example, oth-
erwise bears no resemblance to the scenario for ‘Saved by the City
Dump (Nature Dance)’ of 9 November.32 This suggests that, not sur-
prisingly, previously discarded ideas were picked up and recycled for
later use, in a further complication of the assumption that individ-
ual productions were discrete, integrated and developed in a linear
fashion.
The perfect Sennett file for present purposes would contain a com-
plete run of the most important documents: dated examples of all of
the three key pre-production stages (the story synopsis or outline, the
scenario and the ‘rehearsal continuity’), together with a record in the
(post-)production report of the dates of production, thereby confirm-
ing which written materials were created prior to filming. In the event,
none of the files is ideal, though several pertaining to the later films,
such as A Maiden’s Trust (1916) and A Clever Dummy (1917), do contain
the bulk of these documents. Looking at several files together it is pos-
sible to compile a quite accurate composite picture of how the written
texts worked in the process of film production.

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70 A History of the Screenplay

The pre-production writing process would generally pass through

three more or less clearly defined stages. First came a story synopsis
or outline, of differing degrees of detail, length and complexity. Next,
the story would be reworked as a ‘scenario’, which usually rendered
the story idea into recognisably cinematic form, with the inclusion of
‘cuts’ from shot to shot. Both the synopsis and the scenario could,
and frequently did, exist in several, usually chronologically consecu-

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tive, versions. By contrast, the final preparatory phase usually exists
only in a single iteration, as the ‘rehearsal continuity’, a term often
typed on the scripts themselves. It shows the effects of the exten-
sive period spent on rehearsals, which often exceeded that expended
on developing the story in the first place; the production report for
His Busted Trust (Triangle, 1916), for example, records that four days
were spent on the story and five on rehearsals. Even in the rehearsal
continuities, however, there are frequent indications of room for impro-
visation. After shooting, the problematically termed ‘continuities’ (cut-
ting sheets) often show multiple attempts to edit the material in
different ways, while the often barely literate ‘final synopsis’ is a record
of the film as shot, including intertitles, and again tends to reveal sub-
stantial differences from the story as it stood even at the rehearsal
continuity stage.
Some examples will show how the process worked in practice. The
documents in the folder for Done in Oil (Triangle, 1917) are in many
cases undated, and there is no production report.33 Nevertheless, the
internal evidence, supported by knowledge of the process from other
Sennett files, suggests that the sequencing of items in this folder is accu-
rate. Following these items in order shows how the project developed
from a rough idea delivered orally to the film as shot.
The sequence begins with a five-page story outline (‘Haunted House
Story’) which, very revealingly, is actually a transcript of a piece of oral
storytelling ‘as related by Mr. [Clarence] Badger’:

To begin with we have this haunted house; establish that it is

haunted; we don’t establish it on the opening of the story; we show
Swickard as a sort of a crafty character type, the owner of this house;
He owns this haunted house – it has the reputation of being haunted,
and it is a bug bear on his hands, and it is impossible for him to rent
it and it is impossible for him to sell it.

Badger goes back on himself to clarify, alter or add to events, even

remarking of one idea that it ‘might be stretching it a little bit too far’.

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 71

The second item is a transcript of a story conference between Bad-

ger, John Grey and Hampton Del Ruth, with the latter in effect tutoring
Badger in how to improve the story. Next, a three-page ‘scenario’ shows
the effect of the story conference: the seller is now a real estate agent
who has to sell low because of the house’s reputation, but after finally
selling it, is swindled into buying it back at a greatly inflated price after
being conned into thinking there is oil underneath. Beyond this, how-

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ever, the ideas rather run out, and the scenario ends lamely ‘Ad lib.’
Item 4 is a five-page, undated ‘rough rehearsal’ (identified as such on the
typescript) which clearly records the story at a provisional, pre-shooting
stage (‘Rodney enters—might run across bonfire—or something—finds
a piece of charcoal and writes on inside drum something [in] regard
to money being hidden in the basement or whatever we decide on’).
Despite the improvisatory quality, however, this has much of the detail
in shots and transitions associated with the more rigorously prepared
continuities considered in the next chapter:

FRONT OF HAUNTED HOUSE

Open up with Swickard chaing (sic) signs

REAL ESTATE OFFICE

Rodney reading letter that Mace and girl will arrive at a certain
time

FRONT OF HAUNTED HOUSE

Swickard has sign up and leaving

INTERIOR TRAIN
Mace, Fuller and Luther on –

REAL ESTATE OFFICE

Take Rodney away

STATION
Train arrives – Mace, girl and governess get off the train –
Rodney enters and greets them – all exit
PARK NEAR STATION

All enter – Mace leaves them on bench – tells governess to keep

eye on them – get some biz in park with governess – Mace exits

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72 A History of the Screenplay

The first dated texts in the folder (items 6 and 7) are from 13 November
1916 and are designated ‘scenarios’ by the MHL archivists, as is the
undated fifth item. It is impossible to be certain that these post-date the
‘rough rehearsal’, but certainly item 6 suggests an advance in detailed
conception. It is a peculiar amalgam of the two characteristic Sennett
forms of the short story and the paratactic inventory of actions, ren-
dered more unusual still by very specific suggestions for expository

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intertitles to preface individual scenes (which are unnumbered), such
as the first: ‘Under title “Real Estate Agent Unable To Sell Haunted
House” we see real estate agent on exterior of a rather nice bungalow
changing sign which reads “For Sale Completely Furnished $5000” for a
sign which reads “For Sale completely Furnished $500”.’ By the fifth
scene, however, the familiar style is back: ‘Int House: Father, daugh-
ter and agent on: Father and daughter delighted—they start to make
deal—sweetheart looks in window at them’, and so on. The numer-
ous indications of interior, exterior, type of shot and so forth make this
much more cinematic than item 7, a present-tense prose story from the
same day.
The absence from the Done in Oil folder of a production report or a pre-
cise means of dating the remainder of the synopses and ‘continuities’ (a
term that usually, and in most cases clearly, designates a post-filming
cutting sheet in the Sennett files) makes it harder to track the story
through to production and post-production than is the case with some
of the other films. The main interest of Done in Oil lies in its demonstra-
tion that story conferences, rather than the revision of textual iterations,
were the predominant means of story development, and that many of
the written ‘scenarios’ represent a temporary halt to development for
purposes of taking stock, as it were; in no sense can they be regarded as
a ‘blueprint’ for production.
A second example, from the following year, gives a stronger indication
of the sheer instability of the Sennett stories during the creative process.
A Clever Dummy (Triangle, 1917)34 began life as ‘Automat Story’, a two-
page, nine-paragraph, present-tense story outline, which was committed
to paper on 8 September 1916. In this version, a penniless inventor is
in debt to a lawyer who has invested in the inventor’s new creation—
an automaton servant girl. The inventor writes to an aunt, asking for
money to patent the invention. Her condition is that he must never
marry without her approval, and as she has never met him, she solicits
a reference. Sennett’s films inhabit their own closed universe: so the
inventor has of course already been married in secret, the referee is
the lawyer, and the automaton has been unfortunately destroyed. ‘This

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 73

places the young man in the position where he has no invention to

show his aunt and no money to make a new invention; neither does
he care to put his wife out of the house, nor does he know any way to
hide his wife from the aunt.’ So his wife will impersonate the automa-
ton. The lawyer intends that his own daughter marry the inventor, so
that he can gain access to the aunt’s fortune; to this end he installs him-
self at the inventor’s house along with his daughter, who becomes the

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victim of the wife/automaton’s jealousy. The daughter, however, has a
lover, who has ‘learned by some means’ about the aunt’s forthcoming
visit and tries to thwart any potential liaison by arriving at the house
disguised as the aunt. The inventor ‘overhears him plotting’, and when
the real aunt arrives the inventor mistakes their identities, ejecting the
real aunt and treating the fake one royally.

Many complications arise; the young inventor’s wife does some favor
for the old maid aunt who has returned to assert herself, thus getting
in her good graces; the scheming lawyer is found out and punished,
as is the sweetheart of the girl in his impersonation. The old maid
aunt approves of the young inventor’s marriage and turns over the
money to him.

The story is grammatically well presented, unlike some of the oth-

ers, while the plotting is tight in some areas, provisional in others.
An undated handwritten note indicates that the embryonic tale could
be a potential vehicle for the company’s juvenile lead (playing the
inventor), if the central conceit can be made sufficiently credible (!).
Some eight months lapsed, however, before the company set to work
on it again in earnest, generating two ‘scenarios’, each of three pages
(together with a further copy of each, with handwritten alterations),
both dated 17 May 1917. Attached stenographic notes suggest that,
again, these scenarios are the record of a story conference, which helps
to account for the staccato, unparagraphed succession of incidents:
‘Open story up on garbage can at back of house—pair of shoes along
side of it—Ragpicker comes along—picks up shoes’, and so on. There
are very frequent indications of cuts from shot to shot, anticipating the
editing stage.
Aside from the idea of the automatic figure, however, the story has
been transformed beyond recognition. There are now four characters: an
inventor, his daughter, the inventor’s assistant (‘Juvenile’) and ‘Janitor’,
to be played by Sennett star Ben Turpin. The inventor is an older man;
the automaton, to the extent that these things can be sexed, is male. The

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74 A History of the Screenplay

assistant is part-creator of it, and is in love with the daughter, as is the

Janitor. The father disapproves of both, however, so each takes revenge:
the assistant hides the automaton, while the Janitor substitutes him-
self for it. The father unwittingly presents Turpin as the automaton at a
demonstration for proposed investors, who, in testing the invention to
near-destruction, are actually torturing the Janitor. The assistant and the
daughter then successfully exhibit the real automaton, saving the father

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from disgrace; accordingly, he blesses their union and throws the Janitor
out of a window. Much of the second scenario, completed on the same
day, retains the material verbatim, but there is some tightening up of
the motivation: the father’s disapproval of the assistant is occasioned by
a quarrel, and the Janitor substitutes himself for the automaton in order
to be near the girl.
The ‘rehearsal continuity’ of the following day (the term is typewrit-
ten at the beginning of the script) is again largely similar, but with a
radical alteration to the ending: the Janitor/automaton is successfully
sold to the investors, who cart him off in a box in a truck, occasioning
a chase scene as the inventor, assistant and girl pursue them, accompa-
nied by the real dummy. The 43 ‘subtitles’ (intertitles) in a separate, and
presumably later, document further clarify the motivation and deepen
the ironic parallels, as with title 3: ‘The daughter favored her father’s
partner who had modeled the dummy after a lovesick janitor.’ The
final, post-production, four-page and substantially illiterate ‘final syn-
opsis’ shows that further significant changes were made at the shooting
and/or editing stages: in a risqué twist the girl changes clothes in front
of the dummy, while the ending has been altered once again, as the Jan-
itor/dummy exploits the opportunity provided by the demonstration to
steal money from the prospective buyers and runs away with the cash,
successfully pursued by the ‘Manager and the whole gang’.

To the extent that distinct and regularised formats can be identified

in American film writing prior to the emergence of the feature film in
1913–14, it seems sensible to propose that there were not two kinds of
script in use during this period, but three: the theatrical play script, the
outline script and the scenario. The word that appears most commonly
in contemporary discourses to designate a document used in the prepa-
ration of the dramatic action is ‘scenario’, but what emerges is not so
much a generic distinction as a continuum, with the ‘outline’ at the
minimalist end of the spectrum and the ‘scenario’ at the more detailed.
The form of scripts was not consistent between studios and film units,
which had their own ways of working; instead, different prototypical

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 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17 75

approaches to the two most common methods of segmenting a

narrative—via the scene or via the shot—were being explored. Writ-
ers were constructing documents appropriate to the particular tasks at
hand: prompts to a director during a semi-improvised shoot, prepar-
ing a production relatively fully in advance, attempting to negotiate the
minefield of copyright or creating a text that might serve more than one
purpose in more than one medium.

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From 1908 onwards, the scenario was routinely being bundled with
other documents relating to pre-production, such as cast lists, loca-
tion plots and scene breakdowns, along with post-production records
of footage shot and expenditures incurred, for legal, commercial and
industrial purposes. Collectively, these documents reveal much about
the transformation of the story idea from the scenario to the release
print of the film. The pre-production scenario was used for story confer-
encing and rehearsal purposes, but it was not slavishly adhered to: the
material would change both in performance and in the process of edit-
ing. Each of these production documents had acquired a certain level
of consistency, in function if not in appearance, prior to the indus-
try’s embrace of the multi-reel ‘feature’ film in 1913–14. Hollywood
now adapted to this new development by installing a more centralised,
producer-driven mode of production, with a standardised form of script
at its heart: the ‘continuity’.

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4
The Continuity Script, 1912–29

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Prior to 1913, a script could exist in any form comprehensible to the
relatively small number of people directly involved in making the film.
Around 1913–14, however, a set of developments within American film
production meant that the studios began to take a different approach
to the texts written in preparation for filming. In Staiger’s analysis, the
‘director-unit’ system was by 1914 in the process of being replaced by
the ‘central producer’ system, a more centralised mode of production
whereby the studio maintained quality and economic control over the
multi-reel ‘features’ that had now become the norm for narrative film-
making. The script form that emerged has been most widely dubbed the
‘continuity’.
The continuity had a dual function. First, it represented a more
specific visualisation of the action as it would appear on the screen,
precisely anticipating the number and type of shot and the anticipated
footage, for example, so that all of those working on the film would
understand exactly what was required during production. Second, it
assisted powerful studio managers in overseeing and anticipating the
budgets of large numbers of longer, more complex feature films.1 These
functions inevitably led to the metaphor that has become ubiquitous:
the continuity is a ‘blueprint’ for the film.
Its utility was enhanced by the range of textual documents with which
the script was customarily packaged or archived, and which became
fairly standardised for Hollywood feature films around 1914. These
documents themselves, however, did not greatly differ from similar
materials that had been used at some American studios in the pre-feature
era. Although the process varied from film to film, they would now
include some or all of the following: (i) relatively infrequently, a copy of
the source text, which could be either a property bought by the studio or
a story developed in-house; (ii) a synopsis of the story, usually no more

76

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 77

than a single paragraph or a page in length; (iii) a list of the characters,

perhaps accompanied by indications of costume; (iv) a ‘scene plot’ or
list of locations, recording which scenes (identified by number) were to
be shot in which location; (v) the ‘plot of action’ or ‘continuity script’
itself, presenting the action usually in terms of a series of specified shots,
which we shall discuss in detail below; (vi) a ‘title sheet’ detailing the
dialogue and narrative intertitles, which will sometimes appear in more

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than one iteration: a provisional list, drawn up before filming, to assist
in the understanding of narrative continuity, and a later version, com-
pleted after the filming but prior to the final editing of the film; and
(vii) a set of post-production documents detailing the footage shot and
the costs of production.
Both the terminology and the selection of the documents risks obscur-
ing some important aspects of creative labour. The continuity script
itself represents the final stage of pre-production work on the story, and
shares with the accompanying documents the industrial functions of
planning, budgeting and preparation for filming. Before the creation of
the continuity script, however, there must often have been some form
of ‘scenario’ that developed the story or adapted it into a series of scenes
and that became redundant for production purposes after the continu-
ity script had been completed. This meant that the writer of the story
and the compiler of the continuity were likely to be different people:
beginning around 1913, ‘a separate set of technical experts began rewrit-
ing all the stories. Although the companies might hire famous writers
to compose original screenplays, their material was then turned over
to these technicians who put it into continuity format.’2 The continu-
ity, then, was in many respects similar to what we would now term
the shooting script, with two important differences: it was prepared not
by the author or director, but by a specialist team of continuity writ-
ers; and its functions went beyond a breakdown of scenes into shots,
to include budgeting and instructions for other workers on the film,
including actors.
A second reason why the ‘scenario’ stage can disappear from view
results from the problems surrounding the term ‘synopsis’. In their book
How to Write Photoplays (1920), John Emerson and Anita Loos advise
novices that:

The first step in preparing a photoplay is to put it into plain English,

telling the entire plot in from 500 to 1,500 words. This is called
a synopsis. Unless you are experienced in scenario and continuity
work, just tell your plot. The editor will do the rest. [ . . . ] If your story

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78 A History of the Screenplay

is accepted, the editor will have it written into continuity form by a

staff man. Learn continuity, but don’t attempt to sell stories in that
form until you have thoroughly mastered it. Tell your story in the
synopsis just as you would want it written as a short story.3

As mentioned in the introduction, this shows that the term ‘synop-

sis’ can refer not only to the capsule account of the story but also to

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the story itself, which is superseded by the continuity script in studio
records. A similar point may be made regarding the somewhat later
‘treatment’, which became a standard stage in the process in the 1920s
and remains highly prominent today.4 This translated the source mate-
rial into a much longer prose form than that of the synopsis; it was often
augmented by sample dialogue, usually taking on the appearance of the
fairly lengthy short story told in the present tense. Again, the treatment
is of interest to historians of particular film projects, but is not primarily
a production document.
French visitors to Hollywood during the late 1910s were impressed by
the efficient division of labour and began reporting both the American
introduction of the continuity stage in pre-production and the terminol-
ogy. In 1923, the director Louis Delluc commented on ‘the importance,
in America or Germany, of the “continuity writer” [phrase in English].
It is time to realize that an idea for a scenario, however good it is, is not
a scenario’,5 while in 1925, the critic Juan Arroy was less impressed that
in Hollywood

the production is divided up in this way: the rights to some literary

work are purchased, it is assigned to be adapted by an experienced
scenarist, and then the d[é]coupage is assigned to a specialist ‘conti-
nuity writer’ [in English], then it is given to a director to be shot, and
finally the film passes into the hands of the monteuse. All these func-
tions are absolutely separate, and there is no point of contact among
them which would permit each of these artisans to review the work
of his predecessors, to apply his critical sense, and to correct their
faults.6

(‘Découpage’ refers roughly to the division of scenes into shots; the

‘monteuse’ was an editorial assistant to the director in France.7 )
It should be stressed that this kind of analysis, which suggests
that writing proceeded through a relatively efficient series of discrete
stages, can be contested. Patrick McGilligan, for example, remarks
exasperatedly that:

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 79

Before 1926, at least to judge by the official credits, there were no

screenwriters. The expression per se barely existed. The profession
was fragmented into specialties. [ . . . ] There were subspecies of gag-
writers, continuity writers, treatment writers, scenarists, adaptors,
titlists, what-have-you. [ . . . ] If one believes the myths, there were
no scripts, just disconnected bits and pieces of paper with enormous
gaps allowing presumed geniuses such as DeMille, Von Stroheim, and

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D. W. Griffith to extemporize as they roared along.8

While the ‘myth’ is largely contradicted by the documentary record, it

is not quite so outlandish as McGilligan suggests. The continuity script
is at once a narrative form (and one bound up with a complemen-
tary narrative of linear film production—the production ‘line’), and an
arrangement of many different kinds of material, any part of which—the
scene text, the formatting and especially the titles—could be re-worked
by one or more writers relatively independently of the remainder of the
text. Each of the two dominant readings of Hollywood film—as a narra-
tive medium or as a cinema of multiple attractions—is dependent to a
considerable extent on which of these perspectives receives the greater
emphasis.
The script becomes a co-product of a team of specialists, including, but
not necessarily confined to, the story writer, the adapter, the continu-
ity writer and the intertitle writer. Of course, it was possible for a single
person to encompass more than one, and possibly even all, of these
functions, and possible for more than one of them to be performed in
the same iteration. As an effect of this process, the continuity script,
especially with the addition of titles, becomes a palimpsest: a scenario
has the continuity writer’s technical directions laid upon it, followed
by the dialogue, intertitles and handwritten production annotations.
In such cases it is not so much that the scenarist’s work is re-written
as that it is preserved but augmented. Staiger’s comment on the gen-
eral relation between scenarios and continuities serves well for both
the microcosm of the iterations of an individual script and for the
macrocosm of historical change between eras: ‘The framework for the
continuity script already existed in the scenarios of the period.’9
Before considering the continuity script in detail, it is worth intro-
ducing two caveats about the apparently obvious connection between
script form and industrial function in the screenwriting of this period.
If we are interested in a piece of dramatic writing for film as a purely
industrial document, we need to focus on the continuity. Subsequent
critical debates about the ‘blueprint’ metaphor have therefore tended to

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80 A History of the Screenplay

revolve around its division of conception from execution: for example,

around whether or not the film really is little more than a straight-
forward realisation of material that has been planned in its entirety
on paper in advance. Such studies have therefore tended to focus on
the relationship between the continuity and what came after it. These
emphases, however, tend to marginalise what we might term the more
‘authorial’ status of the ‘scenario’ text; but if we are interested in the

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‘creative’ screenwriter—in what scenarists such as Marion Fairfax or
Frances Marion, for example, were actually writing—then we may wish
to consider the textual forms that came before the continuity and that
have been partially obscured by its technical construction. For such pur-
poses, the figure of the palimpsest is more appropriate than that of the
blueprint.
A second caveat concerning the industrial model returns once again
to the thorny question of the relation between copyright and textual
form. In August 1912, two separate legal developments combined in
ways which, in Torey Liepa’s analysis, helped to bring the Hollywood
studio system into being and restructured film writing so that it became
part of in-house production. On 16 August, the Sherman Antitrust
Act began proceedings against the Motion Picture Patents Company
(MPPC), which until that point had largely controlled east coast film
production, leading ultimately to the rise of independent producers
who would soon begin to move the centre of American film produc-
tion to the west. Eight days later, President Taft signed the ‘Townsend
Agreement’ into law, bringing into being the copyright classification of
films (as mentioned in the discussion of From the Manger to the Cross in
Chapter 2). Liepa suggests that the passing of copyright laws protect-
ing the business interests of newly powerful studios against freelance
film writers instigated, among other things, the development of the
‘continuity’ script, which then formed a template for film writing for
the remainder of the silent age, since ‘the written codification of edit-
ing patterns, as well as the inclusion of greater descriptive detail and
dialogue [ . . . ] were believed to bring unpublished screenwriting closer
to copyright’.10 In the event, however, attempts to secure copyright on
unpublished scripts proved fruitless until as late as 1978.

Thomas Ince and C. Gardner Sullivan

One of the figures most closely associated with the introduction of the
central producer system, and by extension with the development of

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 81

the continuity script, is Thomas H. Ince, who worked at the New York
Motion Picture Company before forming Triangle in 1915 with D. W.
Griffith and Mack Sennett. Ince, who created ‘Inceville’, the prototypical
Hollywood studio, in 1912, occupies a significant position in histories
of American film writing. He has been credited with ‘pioneer[ing] the
adoption of both scriptwriting and character dialogue in the silent cin-
ema, and in so doing creat[ing] a space in silent films for the audible

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dialogue that would emerge by the end of the 1920s’.11 Staiger, and more
recently Liepa, see these developments in the 1910s as being shaped by
the shift from the ‘scenario’ to the ‘continuity’ script, which itself was in
the service of the transformation of American film-making along quasi-
Fordist lines that emphasised efficiency and the rationalisation of the
workforce. Finally, Staiger uses Ince to advance what is perhaps the most
crucial (and contested) claim in her presentation of Hollywood as an
industry: ‘Ince’s use of the continuity script resulted in a two-stage labor
process—the work’s preparation on paper by management followed by
its execution by the workers.’12
Ince’s reputation as an industrial innovator can be exaggerated. As
Edward Azlant observes, although Ince can be credited with taking
‘to highly sophisticated levels’ the twin functions of the continuity
script (‘ “planning and construction,” one procedural or organizational,
the other qualitative or aesthetic’), nevertheless he ‘certainly did not
invent or institute the organizational use of the screenplay’. Scenario
departments had existed beforehand, while, as we have seen, the use
of accompanying documents pertaining to other aspects of produc-
tion predated Ince by several years; indeed, they were established
some time before their description by the prototypical screenwriting
guru Epes Winthrop Sargent in the 1911 article that Azlant cites.
More problematically, Azlant is inclined to credit Méliès and Porter
(problematically, as noted in Chapter 1) with developing rudimentary
forms of continuity, a form that was ‘reportedly used at Biograph by
1908, and was clearly indicated by a sample format reproduced by
Sargent in his July 29, 1911, article on screenwriting in Moving Picture
World’.13
Although these qualifications are significant, nonetheless the sample
pages Staiger reproduces of a crucially early example of an Ince script—
The Raiders, directed by Jan Hunt in December 1913—do tend to bear
out her arguments for the significant advance in industrial organisation
represented within the script. Following the paratextual title sheet con-
taining the cast of characters and the shooting dates, and the scene

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82 A History of the Screenplay

plot breaking down the scene locations, what Staiger describes as the
‘continuity script’ itself commences as follows:

SCENE 1 INTERIOR EVANS CABIN

TITLE: IN THE MOUNTAINS OF KENTUCKY, BILL EVANS,
THE MOONSHINER, AND HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTER.

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Bill Evans, tall gaunt mountaineer moonshiner seated at break-
fast table with wife and daughter—checked table cloth—homely
furniture and props—close of breakfast—demijohn of moonshine
on table—Evans pours out a drink in a tin cup—wife tall angu-
lar Kentucky type—wearing wrapper—Mary, the daughter, young
and pretty—hair in braids—Mary puts on sunbonnet and slips
silently unnoticed from cabin—Evans drinks his moonshine and
talks with his wife—rifle leaning against the table at his elbow—
another rifle over fire-place background—

SCENE 2 PRETTY SET OVERLOOKING WOODED ROCKY

MOUNTAIN TRAIL BELOW
TITLE: JACK KEANE, MARY EVANS’ SWEETHEART

Close up Keane, handsome young moonshiner—blue jeans—

hickory shirt, etc—watching trail below with rifle across his
knees—flash—
SCENE 3 EXTERIOR OF CAVE.

Bill Gale (heavy) a big raw-boned moonshiner on guard at cave

entrance with rifle slung across his knees, seated by the entrance
[...]

Clearly, this represents a much more fully visualised pre-text for a film
than any of the scenarios considered in earlier chapters. There is some
specification of shot type and a measure of detail in the presentation
of mise-en-scène. The second function of the script, to aid the efficient
production of the film, is implicit in this degree of detail, and explicit in
the accompanying paratexts that organise the shooting of the scenes out
of narrative sequence, while handwritten annotations on the scenario
itself show the scenes being crossed off as they are filmed. In this way the
scenario functions, alongside the other documents in the continuity, as
both a pre-production planning document and a post-production record
of the filming.

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 83

The year after The Raiders was filmed, the company was joined by
the most widely noted of Ince’s writers, C. Gardner Sullivan, who had
been writing scenarios since 1912. Sullivan has been described as ‘the
most important screenwriter of silent films’,14 although it is clear from a
comparison of his scenario for Satan McAllister’s Heir, shot almost exactly
a year after The Raiders at the end of 1914, to the earlier script that he was
working within already established conventions. In what the title page

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describes as the ‘scenario’, what mainly distinguishes Satan McAllister’s
Heir from The Raiders is the amount of prescriptive detail concerning
how the action should be shot and performed:

SCENE 1. CLOSE UP ON BAR IN WESTERN SALOON

A group of good Western types of the early period are drinking

at the bar and talking idly—much good fellowship prevails and
every man feels at ease with his neighbor—one of them glances
off the picture and the smile fades from his face to be replaced
by a strained look of worry—the others notice the change and
follow his gaze—their faces reflect his own emotions—be sure to
get over a sharp contrast between the easy good nature that had
prevailed and the unnatural, strained silence that follows—as they
look, cut—

SCENE 2. CLOSE UP ON SATAN AT HITCHING RAIL BEFORE

WESTERN SALOON

TITLE: “SATAN” McALLISTER, THE RICHEST, MEANEST AND

MOST HATED RANCHER IN THE WYOMING VALLEY

Satan is tieing his horse to the rail—he finishes and looks brazenly
about him—Satan is all that his name implies—he is a sinister gun-
fighter, a man-killer and despite the fact that he is without fear, a
bully of the worst type—he delights in hurting and abusing people
and dogs, and the more forlorn appearing they are the greater his
delight in tormenting them—everybody is afraid of him and hates
him—he knows this and revels in it—he exits, looking for trouble
at every step—

SCENE 3. CLOSE UP ON BAR: SAME AS 1.

Flash back to the men at the bar—they show Satan is coming and
wait uneasily, none of them knowing but that he will be singled
out for Satan’s abuse—15

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84 A History of the Screenplay

The clear directions for shooting and editing are complemented by

the detailed but only obliquely physical description of the villain in
scene 2, which amounts to a general recommendation about how the
role is to be performed. As Stempel remarks, ‘[t]he Ince scripts are, in
effect, letters to the production team, including but not limited to the
director’.16
Nevertheless, the nature and significance of the Sullivan scenarios

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in relation to the production process can be overstated. Although he
remarked in 1916 that ‘[a]ll of the business, no matter how unimpor-
tant, is . . . written into the scene’, so that ‘[e]ach scene in our continuity
is practically a short story in itself they are so fully described’,17 this
is clearly an exaggeration. While the ‘business’ is indeed carefully
described, and there is more comment in matters of interpretation of
character and indications as to how characters are to be played than is
the case in most screenwriting either earlier or later, there is relatively
little use of description. Unlike the mode of realism in prose fiction,
Satan McAllister’s Heir (more so, indeed, than The Raiders) is almost
devoid of redundant physical detail: the characters in the saloon are
‘good Western types’, while Satan ‘is all that his name implies’—but the
reader will have to supply that from his or her imagination. This may be
because ‘Inceville’ was so densely populated with contracted actors and
contained enough established sets that there was no need for the writers
to be specific as to visual appearance: the characters and locations were
already to hand.
Neither Staiger nor Stempel has found any evidence to support what
appears to be the myth that Ince scripts were stamped ‘shoot as written’,
although the occasional typed instruction to that effect has surfaced.18
Stempel concludes that ‘[t]here is . . . more than enough evidence to con-
clude that Ince did not consider the completed screenplay the end
result, but merely the first step in the process of making a film. It was
not necessary to follow the script exactly, as historians have assumed
Ince’s directors did.’19
Moreover, while there is a great deal more shot specification than will
be found in the later master-scene screenplay, an element of confusion is
introduced because, in the technical vocabulary of the time, no distinc-
tion was ordinarily made between a scene and a shot: a scene is a shot.
In this way the scenario or continuity form can be distinguished from
the later ‘master-scene’ screenplay. This problem appears to have exer-
cised Ince who, as Azlant shows, would frequently alter the scenarios for
this very reason:

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 85

the bulk of Ince’s notations involve aesthetic matters, such as fur-

ther segmentation, condensation, or omission of actions, changes
in plot development through cut-backs, changes in the language of
leaders, and even some blocking of camera and subject positions
within scenes.
Above all, it is the segmentation of actions to construct a film plot
that clearly was Ince’s primary, and eventually his almost exclu-

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sive, concern. If much of screenwriting resides in the design of
film narrative through segmentation and arrangement of actions,
then Ince’s notations actually represent a final rewrite of the
screenplay more than any incursion into the visual domain of the
director.20

Azlant’s description of Sullivan’s later Selfish Yates (1917) holds good for
these texts generally: ‘The script obviously lies somewhere between a
master-scene script, segmented only by scenes, and a densely detailed
shooting script or continuity, prescribing so many shots as to constitute
an exhaustive segmentation or blocking of the activity, thereby becom-
ing a definitive version of the ensuing film.’21 As we shall see, other
companies of the time were most certainly producing scripts that were
more precisely detailed, in this respect at least, than Ince’s.
Perhaps as significant as any innovations or improvements Ince may
have brought to the scene text is his increasing concentration on
speech. Liepa credits the Ince–Sullivan partnership, particularly in the
Westerns written for William S. Hart, with developing a vernacular style
of dialogue that typified the studio’s commitment to realistic detail and
anticipated trends in the American cinema of the 1920s, ‘featuring more
and more speech in its films and increasingly placing the demands of
genre and spectacle above those of narrative—until the desire to speak
burst off of the celluloid in audible form at the end of the decade’.22
By 1915, dialogue was accounting for more than half the intertitles
in Ince’s films, and Liepa describes two of his 1916 features as ‘almost
full-fledged “talkies” ’.23

The Immigrant (Paramount, 1915)

Before exploring the Ince scenarios in a little more detail, it is worth
noting that the screenwriting work at his studio was at least matched
by that at some others. A good example is The Immigrant, a typical
example of the then-dominant genre of romantic melodrama, written

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86 A History of the Screenplay

for Paramount by Marion Fairfax in 1915. The 38-page scenario begins

with Masha, the titular heroine, being saved by the gallant Harding
from unwanted advances aboard a ship bringing her to America. Also on
board is the villain, a successful engineer named Walton, who by under-
hand means employs Masha at his New York engineering company,
where Harding (in an example of the crude coincidence typical of
melodramas of this period) is just beginning his own career. Walton

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(implicitly) rapes her, then offers to marry her—for which she has ‘a
certain thankfulness’. Three years later, Walton is still keeping Masha
as his mistress but not as his wife (which she resents), and experi-
encing Harding’s honesty and professional success as a threat. Much
of the remainder of the plot hinges on Walton’s decision to sabo-
tage a huge dam Harding is building out west: Walton destroys the
dam but is killed as a result, the heroic Harding is injured rescuing a
child but is saved by Masha and the romantic couple can finally be
united.
In general, the film bears out the critical commonplace (D. W. Griffith
being an unavoidable example) that the technical advances in American
cinema of this period co-exist with a residual addiction to the simpler
forms of Victorian melodrama, arguably as a result of the commer-
cial, mass-market ambitions of Hollywood in general. This does not
mean that the storytelling itself has not advanced: the greater length
of film stories after 1914 demanded more from their writers than the
mere repetition of existing formulae, and although the story of The
Immigrant is crude in various ways, it is much more carefully con-
structed than any of those considered in the previous chapter. The dam
plot is remarkably similar to that of Dawley’s Earthwork Construction
Story, for example, but Fairfax brings in a number of effective dra-
matic ironies resulting from Harding’s ignorance of Masha’s true marital
situation.
The careful structuring of the plot is matched by a highly sophisti-
cated formal presentation of the script, described on the cover sheet
as ‘An original by Marion Fairfax’. The following extract comprises the
first and the beginning of the second page of the copy in Fairfax’s own
papers:24

1. Main title: “THE IMMIGRANT”

2. Producer’s Title:

3. Subtitle: A THOUSAND SOULS – A THOUSAND

DESTINIES.

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 87

Scene 1.
Long shot of Transatlantic liner, at night. Lighted. (Moonlight)
Ship under full headway.
4-5. Subtitle: FIRST CABIN
J. J. WALTON - THEODORE ROBERTS.
Scene 2.

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Smoking room. (Lighted)
Walton, playing cards, – keen sensual determined face. At a
glance a man of wealth and standing – Walton a big bug.
6-7. Subtitle: SECOND CABIN.
DAVID HARDING - THOMAS MEIGHAN.
Scene 3.
Second deck. (Moonlight)
Harding, looking at the moon, bored—lonely.
8-9. Subtitle: STEERAGE

VALESKA SURATT
as
MASHA, THE IMMIGRANT.
Scene 4.
Steerage deck. (Full shot) (Moonlight)
Immigrants lying about—crowded, hot. Russians and Slavs.
Masha frees herself from group, rising, stretching impatiently
as if rebelling against the confinement between decks. She
forces her way to the rail and stands looking out over the
water, her face full of passionate longing.
Scene 5.
CLOSE UP of Masha as above.
Scene 6.
Steerage deck. (A little longer shot)
Below-decks officer, passing, sees Masha – is strongly attracted
to her and very curious. He touches her arm. She turns, draws
back, flashes a frank smile and waits. He says to her, “Do you

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88 A History of the Screenplay

by any chance speak English?” She laughs in a spontaneous

way – a frank pleasant laugh – and replies:

10. Spoken title: “YES – I SPIK ENGLISH. I HAVE BEEN TO

AMERICA BEFORE – I HAVE GO TO SCHOOL.”
Officer comments upon this with exaggerated interest, delight-
ing Masha. He then asks her what she was thinking of when

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she was looking out over the water so earnestly, – and watches
her face grow tender as she replies:
11. Spoken title: “MY SISTER – MY MOTHER – I GO TO THEM.”
She starts to tell him about her people in America.

The script is typewritten on dedicated stationery, the numbers pertain-

ing to titles (numbers 1 to 11 in the extract) being separated from the
remainder of the text by a vertical red line. Also appearing in red type
are all of the ‘titles’: main title, producer’s title, ‘subtitles’ (narrative and
descriptive intertitles) and spoken titles. The use of red type ordinarily
indicated that the titles were provisional and could be replaced during
the editing. Fairfax’s text is certainly a pre-production script: at scene
20 ‘Harding makes arrangements with steward and pays the difference
in the fare. (Show that he hasn’t much money)’, while scene 133 calls
for a hacienda, ‘None of it too civilized looking, if possible to get.’ Yet
it is also presumably a revision, with fractional numbers having been
inserted for new scenes to maintain the previous version’s scene num-
bering, while in other places a series of scenes in a previous iteration has
been conflated to create one new scene.
That the producer’s title has yet to be supplied is a further sign of
the text’s provisionality within its production context. Such internal
evidence alone suggests that while Fairfax may have composed the
story, the scene text and even, perhaps, all of the titles, the script
has been prepared by studio specialists trained in how to format the
scenario—although it is not inconceivable that Fairfax could have done
this herself. While titles could be and generally were written by special-
ists, this was not invariably the case. Sullivan claimed in 1916 that at
Inceville all of the writers created their own intertitles: ‘I feel that the
subtitles must come from the author at the time he is writing the play,
for no outsider could be so thoroughly filled with the story and imbued
with the atmosphere while simply watching the finished production.’25
The scenario reflects technical advances in editing and composition
in the cinema of this period, with none of the theatrical awkwardness

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 89

of entrances, exits and other transitions in the Dawley and Selig scripts.
By contrast with the later scenarios we shall consider in this chapter,
Fairfax’s prose is remarkably lean and cinematic, with the description
and report modes being prominent in the scene text, and little sign of
authorial narration or comment. Type of shot is frequently though not
invariably specified. Perhaps most striking of all, however, are several
different modes of rendering speech, all of which are visible in the above

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passage, and in more condensed form in scene 138:

Living room. (Hacienda)

Walton walking up and down, waiting – evidently on a tension.

Japanese servant announces Mr. Munsing. (Harding’s secretary)
Walton says impatiently to bring him in – Munsing enters.
Walton greets him, says, “WELL, you’re here at last are you?”
Secretary protests that he came the minute he could. Walton
says, “What word have you?” Munsing replies:

70 Spoken Title: “THE DAM IS ALMOST COMPLETED –

WE’RE READY FOR YOU.”

Walton says, “Very well, Now, Munsing, your work is all cut out
for you – are you going to be able to put it through?” Munsing
says, “Yes, – I’ve got everything ready.” Walton says, “Have you
got men that you know you can trust?” Munsing says, “Yes,”
Walton looks at him – then says grimly:

71 Spoken Title: “BLOW IT OUT TONIGHT.”

Munsing says, “All right.” Walton starts to carefully outline
plan – Munsing listening very earnestly.

The dialogue is presented throughout in three different ways, the first

being the dialogue intertitles. The formal separation of the spoken
and subtitles from the other elements of the scene text—the two dis-
tinct numbering sequences for the scenes and the titles are especially
notable—is an indicator of their autonomous position in the produc-
tion context, since the physical title cards themselves would of course
have to be prepared and filmed independently of the dramatic action.
A second kind of speech is that reported directly within the scene text
(‘WELL, you’re here at last are you?’). Noting a similar phenomenon
of a ‘large amount of incidental dialogue, never to appear in the lead-
ers, which Sullivan supplies the various characters’ in Selfish Yates,
Azlant proposes that the purpose is to indicate character motivation

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90 A History of the Screenplay

and physical expressibility. This ‘coexpressibility’ of verbal and physical

action occurring simultaneously functions differently to the cognitive
material of the ‘leaders’ (a contemporary term for titles), which explic-
itly directs the spectator to a particular understanding of the action.26
It is also likely that by this date spectators and actors were sufficiently
well versed in lip reading ‘silent’ movies that a certain amount of dia-
logue could be reliably delivered in this fashion, obviating the need for

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interrupting the dramatic action with titles. This may also account for
the third kind of dialogue, that where only the gist of the conversa-
tion needs to be supplied (‘Walton says impatiently to bring him in’,
‘Secretary protests that he came the minute he could’, ‘Walton starts to
carefully outline plan’). Here the ‘coexpressibility’ is so easily readable
that the spectator need register only the import of the physical gesture
of which the speech forms a part.
A second version of The Immigrant, also at the MHL but this time
in the Paramount files, allows us to place the script in its industrial
context.27 This explicitly divides the script into five ‘parts’, in place
of the ‘subtitles’ (intertitles) indicating passage of time and mood in
Fairfax’s script. The main story difference is a radically condensed coda,
which cuts out Masha’s explanation to Harding that she was never mar-
ried to Walton. The Paramount papers contain a note crediting Fairfax
with both the ‘original story’ and the ‘scenario’, a copy of which appears
within the compilation of papers that comprise the full continuity. This
begins with seven pages of typewritten paratextual materials that pref-
ace the scenario itself. The first of these is a cover sheet stamped ‘master
file’, which gives the name of the ‘photoplay’, indicates that it is an orig-
inal, identifies Marion Fairfax as both ‘author’ and ‘author of scenario’,
indicates that the negative was finished on 16 November 1915 and gives
the names of the director, assistant director and photographer. Finally, it
records the length of each of the five ‘parts’, coming to a total of 4,614
feet. The next two pages give instructions for the colouring of scenes,
titles and inserts; finally, there are four sheets of titles, these comprising
both ‘sub’ (inter) titles and spoken titles.
The copy of the scenario that follows does not directly incorporate
these titles but instead tells the editor where each title is to be inserted.
The Paramount Files version, then, represents a disaggregation of the
script into its component parts, what we might think of as the scene text
(the Fairfax ‘scenario’) and the dialogue text (the title sheets). Clearly
this text, or rather collection of texts, has therefore been compiled for
the use of different specialists: the director and camera crew shooting

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 91

the visuals, the writers and makers of the titles, and the editor who will
combine them.
There are many indications that the Paramount version is almost
certainly the later of the two, not least that the red typescript for
intertitles in the version in Fairfax’s own files would conventionally
indicate that they are temporary, whereas the version in the Paramount
files serves the function of post-production record-keeping. The typing

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differs, and while the material is often identical, there are innumerable
minor changes of wording. The Paramount version records the footage
required for each intertitle, and where these have been altered it appears
to have been mainly in the interests of clarifying the action. For exam-
ple, spoken title 26 in the Fairfax version (‘IT’S UNDERSTOOD YOU
POLITICIANS ARE TO HAND US THE BIG STUFF. THERE’S A NEW CHAP
ACROSS THE HALL WHO’LL GRAB THIS’), becomes in Paramount spo-
ken title 27: ‘IT’S UNDERSTOOD YOU POLITICIANS ARE TO HAND
US THE BIG STUFF. THERE’S A YOUNG ENGINEER BY THE NAME
OF HARDING ACROSS THE HALL WHO’LL GRAB THIS.’ An even clearer
example is an insert of a telegram, which in Fairfax insert 65 is ‘ORA-
CLE, ARIZONA. J. J. WALTON, FLAT-IRON BLDG. NEW YORK. DAM
NEARS COMPLETION. MUNSING.’ Here the narrative point could be
missed, but not in Paramount’s version (insert 69): ‘DAM COMPLETED
IN TWO WEEKS. COME AT ONCE. MUNSING.’ Moreover, Fairfax’s
clearly pre-production description of a Hacienda at scene 133 (‘Quaint
terrace—rough pergola to one side—rustic table under old tree. None
of it too civilized looking, if possible to get’) has been entirely omitted
from the Paramount version.
The comparison suggests that the Paramount text represents a later
iteration than that held in the Fairfax collection, and that at least some
of the changes—the presentation of the intertitles separately from the
scenario, for example—would have been carried out by studio staff
rather than by Fairfax herself. In this sense it can reasonably be claimed
that the version held among the writer’s own papers is closer to her own
intentions, and that a comparison of the two texts gives some insight
into the ways that a ‘creative’ author’s work would be restructured by
studio specialists. Meanwhile, in the absence of further documenta-
tion it is hard to know exactly how much of the version preserved
in the author’s own collection is her unaided work; at the least, it is
highly unlikely that Fairfax is personally responsible for the highly pol-
ished and professional-looking typing and formatting of that earlier text
either.

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92 A History of the Screenplay

The Scarlet Letter (MGM, 1926)

We can be confident that the better-known Frances Marion was not
responsible for the material form of her scenarios, since in the words
of Cari Beauchamp, her distinguished biographer,

Frances preferred dictating, in part because the secretary was an audi-

ence whose reaction she could gauge, but most often she and Anita

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[Loos] wrote by hand on long yellow pads. Both also claimed never
to learn to type, as if the skill would make their careers and success
appear premeditated, but in reality they were seen using typewriters
on occasion.28

The generic appearance of continuities at this time suggests that they

were invariably subject to final polishing by studio staff.
What this leaves uncertain—from the continuities deposited as part of
the studio records, at any rate—is the extent to which ‘creative’ writers
might incorporate within their scenarios anticipations of the shooting
and editing, a function that in most readings of the system has been
ascribed to specialists. The question arises in the case of a script such
as that for The Scarlet Letter, because by 1925 Marion was among the
most eminent and experienced of writers and would certainly have been
familiar with the conventions of the continuity (in later years she was to
claim that she, Anita Loos and Bess Meredyth ‘were asked our advice on
virtually every script MGM produced during the thirties’).29 The Scarlet
Letter was a particularly difficult adaptation because it ‘was on the Hays
office “blacklist” of books that could not be filmed’, and the project
could only begin to proceed once Lillian Gish, who was to play Hester
Prynne, assured Hays that she would be ‘personally responsible’ for the
film.30 Marion herself was brought in after several other unsatisfactory
versions had been attempted.
As an indication of the liberties Hollywood felt able (or obliged) to
take with major literary works, the eight-page treatment by Wyndham
Gittens, dated 1 July 1925, is beyond parody. Gittens recommends ‘the
simple device of making the principals boy-and-girl lovers’, proposes
that ‘there need be no hint of “sin” other than the reaction of the minis-
ter’, suggests making the scarlet letter represent ‘some term of reproach
less shocking than “adulteress”—or, failing a suitable word, by chang-
ing the symbol to another letter which will permit of this evasion’, and
believes ‘a “happy ending” should be given to the story’.31 There goes
American Literature.

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 93

Marion’s own 113-page script bears a cover and title page, dated
30 December 1925, which describes it as a ‘scenario’. There is also a
studio slip stating this is a ‘complete OKAY script from F. Marion’. The
scenario contains 372 ‘scenes’, the term being used indiscriminately for
scenes and shots.32 Scene 30, for example, shows Hester in the coun-
tryside, and although the following six ‘scenes’ take place in the same
location, in each case it is the indication of a different shot (‘CLOSE

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SHOT OF HESTER; LONG SHOT; SEMI CLOSEUP GROUP OF PURITANS;
SEMI LONG SHOT OF HESTER; SEMI CLOSEUP GROUP OF PURITANS’)
that generates a new scene/shot number.
Beauchamp implies that this text in its entirety is the work of Marion
alone: ‘Frances’s solution was to open The Scarlet Letter with scenes and
camera directions to establish sympathy for the conflicts Hester faces.’33
It is difficult to prove the point about these directions from internal
evidence alone, but the script gives a very clear sense of Marion’s own
distinctive authorial style. Marsha McCreadie cites scene 10 as demon-
strating ‘that she understands film very well in its use of an image for a
visual equivalent for emotion’:34

SCENE 10 SEMI CLOSE-UP AT WINDOW

Close to the window is a rustic cage with a bird in it.

But a black shawl has been thrown over the cage; for
the bird’s song is forbidden to mount on the Sabbath.
A shaft of sunlight has fallen upon the cage. Hester’s
face, as she gazes at the cage, becomes wistfully sad.
Why should she hide its song, Hester asks herself in this
moment of faint rebellion. She draws the black shawl
away.

Certainly, the script contains remarkably few dialogue titles for a con-
tinuity of this period, other than in certain dramatic scenes, especially
those between Hester and Dimmesdale. Moreover, as in the combination
of reported speech within the scene text and parenthetical narratorial
commentary in scene 29, it often preserves a clear sense of autho-
rial commentary while minimising the intrusion of purely technical
direction:

SCENE 29 SEMI CLOSEUP REVEREND DIMMESDALE AND MIS-

TRESS HIBBINS
Reverend Dimmesdale listens to Mistress Hibbins.
“We were passing Mistress Prynne’s house – she stood

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94 A History of the Screenplay

by the window – she uncovered the bird – the bird sang – and then
if she didn’t deliberately go running out after the bird! And if that
wasn’t enough, Reverend Dimmesdale, we heard her whistle!” The
old lady purses up her lips and whistles – then gives an imitation
of Hester calling, “Come birdie, birdie!” beckoning to the bird.

Into Reverend Dimmesdale’s eyes comes a look of stern

condemnation. (He has known a rigorous school of religious train-

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ing, and it has made him stern and severe toward the transgressor.
He has no pity for the frailty of human nature, and is relentless
when he sits in judgment on his parishioners who have sinned.
The story of Arthur Dimmesdale is of a man who becomes guilty of
the very sin he damns in others, and his spiritual growth through
sorrow and repentance.)

“It is wicked of Hester Prynne to do this – and on the Sabbath,”

Mistress Hibbins is pleased to hear him say.

The ways in which the material text conforms to convention indicate

that studio specialists would have prepared and typed the physical doc-
ument itself. Conversely, there is nothing within the writing, including
the technical elements of titling, camera direction and shot selection,
that an experienced writer like Marion would have been unable to
provide unaided. That she and Gish were, in effect, given the author-
ity to bring a problematic adaptation to a successful conclusion also
invites consideration of authorial status in determining the degree of
input each might have had in deciding how the film would finally be
made. In any event, both The Immigrant and The Scarlet Letter shed
helpful light on the relationships between the authorial scenario and
the studio continuity, while giving some indication of the stability
of the form across different studios and throughout the period from
the beginnings of the Hollywood studio system to the end of the
silent era.

Love or Justice (1917)

In light of the preceding sections, it is worth returning finally to Thomas
Ince, in order to examine the interaction of authorial style, continuity
form and production in the studio that has been the most influential
in discussions of the position of the script within silent-era Hollywood
film-making. The Wisconsin Center for Film and Television Research
has recently placed online a set of documents relating to Ince’s 1917
production Love or Justice. This is doubly significant: it makes available
to scholars and the public an important set of primary materials relating

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 95

to an aspect of Hollywood film-making that is otherwise impossible to

research remotely, and it samples a collection that is central to Staiger’s
work on the relation of the screenplay to the formation of the classical
Hollywood cinema.
Collectively, the Love or Justice documents represent a sample of the
full run of documents that collectively comprises the ‘continuity’.35
Leaving aside a 1924 transfer of copyright letter (which is not rele-

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vant to the production) and what the website confusingly describes as
a ‘detailed scenario’ (which is in fact a printed pamphlet containing
the source story, ‘The Woman of It’, by Lambert Hillyer), the collection
comprises six documents directly pertaining to the production:

• A single typewritten sheet, the lower half of which contains a three-

paragraph synopsis of the story (again, a romantic melodrama).
Above this are the story number (no. 522), and credits for the
company, cast, writer, director and ‘supervisor’ (Ince).
• A two-page document giving the numbers of the scenes to be filmed
at each location, first the exteriors and then the interiors. The
pencilled deletion of these numbers on the typescript presumably
records that the scene number in question has been shot or edited.
• An eight-page ‘title sheet’ that combines dialogue and narrative titles
in a consecutive, unnumbered sequence; aside from inverted com-
mas for dialogue, no attempt has been made to differentiate between
these different title forms. The context for these titles is provided by
the next document:
• A 14-page sample of the ‘continuity script’ itself. The title at this
stage is still The Woman of It, and the title page tells us it is ‘by
Lambert Hillyer’. The dialogue and narrative intertitles recorded on
the title sheet have been inserted within the scenario, and appear in
an identical sequence in both documents.
• A post-production ‘complete picture report’, which is a standard,
one-page printed form that has been completed with details of dates
of production and the footage shot. Some additional, related detail
is provided on two further typewritten pages, one of which refers to
Hillyer as author of the ‘scenario’.
• A second post-production document, in this case a one-page budget
report that breaks down the actual expenditure for labour, materials
and so on.

As we have seen, a similar set of documents exists for films made by

most Hollywood studios during this period, revealing their industrial
functions, their standardisation in Hollywood in this period and their

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96 A History of the Screenplay

development from a similar, somewhat less detailed set of documents

compiled to accompany scenarios from a slightly earlier period. That
same context accounts for the annotations to the scenario. Over each
scene a large handwritten ‘OK’ covers the text, presumably to show that
the scene has been shot.36 Indications of additional shots have also been
inserted: ‘3A—close up table’ between scenes 3 and 4, for example, while
between scenes 6 and 7 a handwritten dialogue title has been added.

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The continuity, then, is not entirely shot as written, and generates three
further iterations after composition: first during the filming, with the
addition of handwritten annotations; a second, either before, during
or after filming, with the inclusion of the (mostly typewritten) titles
(assuming that the author of the scenario and the author of the titles
are not one and the same person); and a third—although the scenario
text itself may not change at this point—by becoming a part of the
composite series of texts that comprise the continuity.
However, what might be termed a purely industrial reading does not
wholly account for the nature of the scenario. Below the title and author
name on the first page is a preface, which performs a very different
function to that of a synopsis:

This is a story of the underworld; the underworld of a great city,

presumably New York, although the exact whereabouts will not be
definitely registered in the story. I do not wish to confuse underworld
with slums, for although they are often found together, they are not
inseparable. The crook of today is seldom a ‘tough’ and almost never
a tramp. Most of them have ingenuity enough to dress in a manner
which does not attract attention in any surroundings. If then from
time to time the Director finds statements which seem obvious and
superfluous, I hope that he will attribute them to an author’s desire
to picture the real New York underworld as it exists today, and not as
it has been so often picturized erroneously.

The whole paragraph at once separates the writer from the production
process (in using first-person narration and differentiating the writer’s
role from that of the director) while inscribing the text within that pro-
cess by implicitly making a recommendation about the overall desired
effect of realism. This duality—a text that is at once personal and
industrial, literary and cinematic—persists throughout.
The industrial role is evident in the specification of shot type, as at
the beginning of scene 2—after which, however, the mode immediately
changes:

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 The Continuity Script, 1912–29 97

SCENE 2. CLOSE SHOT ON NAN AT TABLE.

TITLE: NAN.
A woman of the underworld, lonely
despite the homage of her kind.
IRIS IN, to get Nan’s face. Hold this iris and then come in full
and get her sitting at table. Nan is a woman who has lived her
life in the underworld; a woman of the type which seems capable

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of but one real affection, and that a great and overpowering one.
Love with a woman of her sort is not a pretty thing, but a savage,
vicious passion that is rather hard to quell. Her attire would prob-
ably be a suit, not cut by a custom tailor, but at least thoroughly
modern and up to date in style. At present she is watching the life
around her in the cafe with a sort of amused smile, for despite the
fact that she reigns as a sort of uncrowned queen in her surround-
ings, she is generally bored and many times lonely. After a survey
of the room, Nan’s eyes swing to the left and she sits listening,
presumably to someone who is sitting there.

The paragraph contains some description and report essential to the

visualisation of the scene, and even a suggestion for costume design,
but overall the dominant mode is of narratorial comment. A sentence
like ‘Love with a woman of her sort is not a pretty thing, but a savage,
vicious passion that is rather hard to quell’ cannot be reconciled with a
purely industrial function: it does not even possess a particular use for
the actor who is to play the character. In such ways, the scenario repre-
sents a conflation of the technical and literary modes that exceeds the
purely industrial connotations of the blueprint. A reading that concen-
trates on industrial function would emphasise material that has been
adapted by the continuity writer(s) for production; but from a different
perspective, what is more interesting is the material that has not been
so adapted. In such ways the authorial voice peeps through the layers of
industrial structuring.
A similar argument could be made about the titles. Liepa observes that
‘Ince’s writers placed particular emphasis on dialogue writing, allow-
ing character utterances to stand alone within his films as distinct,
detailed and reified elements of the mise-en-scène’.37 Whether or not
this emphasis was peculiar to Ince, title writing becomes a distinct part
of film-making in this period, and one that can ‘stand alone’ in ways
that cannot always be reconciled with an exclusive interest in narrative
structure.

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98 A History of the Screenplay

The continuity is an industrial version of screenwriting. Stressing the

continuity as the final stage in a writing process (and this can be
questioned, in light of the frequent rewriting of both scene sequenc-
ing and intertitles) obscures other forms of storytelling in the period:
oral communication in script conferences, for example, or the creative
work of the writer in producing the scenario. Nevertheless, as a tex-
tual form it possesses a degree of stability across both the industrial

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and the public understanding of screenwriting that would never be
achieved again. The introduction of sound would momentarily throw
screenwriting into a state of confusion, and no comparably univer-
sal set of principles would emerge in place of the continuity. Before
examining these later developments, however, we shall see that the
continuity’s reach extended beyond the United States, to countries that
were simultaneously developing alternate forms of screenwriting.

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5
The Silent Film Script in Europe

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Any attempt to generalise about ‘national’ screenwriting practices in a
particular country during the silent era is dependent on a combination
of several factors: a substantial textual record, an advanced industrial
model that allows for the analysis of both scenarios and cinematic style
within a wider economic and technological framework and a tradition
of scholarship with the means to disseminate its results. Given the very
low priority that has been given to screenwriting research until recently,
the latter is liable to be a hurdle too far even if the other conditions have
been met.
In Great Britain, for example, a written ‘scenario’ of sorts seems to
have been in use at Cecil Hepworth’s company in 1904.1 As late as
1919, however, the director Maurice Elvey was complaining that ‘[t]he
number of people in London who can be trusted to turn out a sce-
nario on which a [director] can really get to work without fear of being
stopped by some technical error can be numbered on one’s fingers’, and
in 1921 his fellow director (and screenwriter) Adrian Brunel claimed
that ‘[t]wo or three [British screenwriters] are over-worked and are
over-producing—while the others chase about for commissions’.2 More-
over, the UK has never implemented any systematic approach to the
archiving of screenplays.3 Consequently, the surviving relevant materi-
als that have been unearthed to date are skimpy and patchy, with Eliot
Stannard, screenwriter on seven of Hitchcock’s first nine British pictures,
by far the most strongly represented in the research of Ian Macdonald,
whose ongoing studies in this field are the most likely source of future
discoveries.
The most important of these to date, for present purposes, are two dif-
ferent versions of Stannard’s 1921 adaptation of parts of Israel Zangwill’s
1891 collection of stories, The Bachelors’ Club. What appears to be the

99

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100 A History of the Screenplay

later of the two resembles the Hollywood continuity script in most

respects, with a numbered shot breakdown and a paratactic prose
form in the scene text, as in scene 215: ‘She looks at him—suddenly
perplexed—he gazes down at her—makes a half movement—then stops,
thinking—’.4 This style recalls kinds of scenario that appear to have sur-
vived into the earlier Ince continuities, such as The Raiders and Satan
McAllister’s Heir from 1913 to 1915, which were considered in the pre-

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vious chapter. Interestingly, a ‘note’ in this version (‘This in view of
Mr. Zangwill’s note to hold the affair in suspense, and not play it too
strong, which I think very good indeed’) appears to show Stannard as
the author of the continuity and attempting to influence the direction,
in contrast to the divisions of labour seen in the Hollywood studios by
this time.
More significant, in the context of attempts to define distinctive
or studio-specific forms of scenario construction, is the earlier ver-
sion, Stannard’s ‘Scenario Adaptation’ of Zangwill’s stories.5 Macdonald
sees this as illustrating ‘the English style’ of scenario writing that had
become standard by the late 1910s. The first scene of this text is
‘Ep[isode] 1. Sc[ene] 1’, the ‘episodes’ forming a larger unit of seg-
mentation (which perhaps owes more to the source stories than to
conventional screenwriting practice), and the ‘scenes’ being in a num-
bered sequence. This is followed by an expository ‘SUB[TITLE]’, a scene
heading in lower-case (‘Exterior picturesque and fashionable Country
Town Pub. Evening’), and a lengthy paragraph of scene text. After nine
sentences the paragraph is interrupted in what is (to those familiar with
Hollywood conventions) a most unusual way:

[ . . . ] Peter Parker hangs back shaking his head. The two bach-
elors step into the entrance of the saloon bar, still urging him
to accompany them.
SUB: But Peter Parker, in a fit of temporary insanity, has taken unto
himself a wife, whose sole recommendation was her Bank
Balance.
Peter Parker, played by . . .

SHOT A.
Close up Peter Parker from his friends’ eye line. He shakes
his head dolefully, hesitates, takes out his watch, looks at it,
shakes his head again and is about to turn miserably away
when one of his friends entering past camera, steps up to

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 101

him and taking him by arm, expostulates. Parker, planting

thirst, begins to give way and then with great self discipline
and determination holds out one finger and says,

SUB: “Righto, but only one.”

The passage is fascinating in a number of ways. Macdonald has noted

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the recurrence of the ‘plant’ direction in a number of British scripts of
this period (here, ‘planting thirst’), which seems to be a direction to the
actor and/or director to ensure that the required emotion is signified
to the spectator.6 The distinction in prose style between the hypotac-
tic ‘writer’s version’ and the paratactic ‘continuity’ version, adapted for
shooting, is also notable. Most important for present purposes, how-
ever, is the direction ‘SHOT A’. This makes the scenario a combination
of numbered master scenes (each scene being indicated by a scene head-
ing) and a separately numbered (or alphabetised) sequence of specified
shots. As noted, the distinction between scenes and shots is confus-
ingly absent in the silent Hollywood continuity—which did, however,
generally accord the intertitles their own separate number—and the
‘English style’ in this respect represents something of an advance on
contemporary American practice.
Meanwhile, although France was arguably the world leader in film-
making prior to the First World War, it pursued a very different approach
to industrialisation during the time at which American companies were
beginning to develop the prototypical Hollywood studio system. The
emphasis in France was in quite the opposite direction, towards decen-
tralisation and a ‘cottage industry’ approach that has persisted ever
since.7 While Hollywood was establishing the continuity script within
the central producer system, France remained wedded to a director-unit
model, with a number of powerful writer-directors at its core. Combined
with the effects of war, this left France in a vulnerable position and
confronted with American domination of the industry after the war.
As early as 1917, Charles Pathé was identifying a ‘scenario crisis’ and
arguing for something akin to the American continuity script as one
way out of it.
In retrospect, his ‘estimate that the amount of work for developing
a scenario for a four or five reel film would [be] a book of 200 to 250
pages’8 is remarkably prescient, given that this is the way that the French
découpage would indeed develop during the sound period in the 1930s.
That form of script, however, would continue to be in most cases the
responsibility of the director, and French cinema never did develop

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102 A History of the Screenplay

the Hollywood-style centralisation of production and the division of

labour that Pathé and others were calling for in the late 1910s and
early 1920s. There is general agreement among those working in French
cinema during the silent era that there was very little in the way of for-
mal scriptwriting, other than the often minimal work of a director in
preparing the adaptation of a literary source.9
Nevertheless, something resembling the continuity was coming into

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being in the hands of writer-directors like Marcel L’Herbier, in whose
work, according to a 1927 account by Jack Conrad, ‘[t]he montage seems
to be minutely foreseen, a priori, in the writing of the scenario. [ . . . ]
L’Herbier specifies in his decoupages the length of each shot, and this
must theoretically be scrupulously respected during the shooting’. How-
ever, in a remark that looks devastatingly laconic in light both of the
preceding chapter’s account of the Hollywood continuity and of con-
temporaneous attempts in Russia to impose an ‘iron scenario’ on its
directors, Conrad concludes that ‘[i]n actuality this does not happen,
because it is impossible practically’.10

Parallel screenplay forms in Europe and the United States

to 1929

The textual records of British and French screenwriting in the silent

period are too fragmentary to admit of much further generalisation in
the current state of knowledge. Nor is there a distinctly British style of
film-making in this period that would enable worthwhile speculation
on the nature of other written texts involved in their pre-production.
In France, Russia and Germany, however, the combination of what
might be termed a national style—forged by theoretical debate as well
as an aesthetics of film—and substantial surviving scenario texts in the
latter two countries has enabled Kristin Thompson to propose strong
relationships between screenwriting practices, the industrial mode of
production and a dominant film style during the silent period in each of
these countries. In all three cases, however, by the 1920s the film indus-
tries were looking to Hollywood for a model of greater efficiency, and
each identified the script as a key factor.
Even before then, however, writing for film was developing in ways
that strongly resembled what we have already seen in the United
States. In his study of German and Russian screenwriting for silent
film, Alexander Schwarz proposes a periodisation that is broadly simi-
lar to that we have seen in the United States. After the embryonic early
years, recognisable prototypical forms came into being in the pre-feature

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 103

film phase between 1907 and 1913. Schwarz reproduces parts of sev-
eral German texts written around 1912 that take a range of different
forms: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Das Fremde Mädchen (1910–13) is writ-
ten in narrative prose; the more complex Schatten des Lebens (1912)
is divided into many scenes (‘Bild’), each with detailed scene text,
though as it derives from a contemporary manual it should be treated
with caution; the excerpt from Hermann Lemke’s Siegfrieds Traum: Ein

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Kino-Dramatisches Mysterium (1912) contains two paragraphs of scene
text followed by a lengthy intertitle spoken by Siegfried; and Luise del
Zopp’s Maskierte Liebe (1911) includes handwritten annotations and cor-
rections, and a separate sheet of intertitles. Very similar kinds of text
were being produced contemporaneously in Russia between 1907 and
1913: Schwarz’s abridgment of what he identifies as ‘the first Russian
screenplay’, Visilij Goncarov’s Sten’ka Razin (Ponizovaja Vol’nica (1908),
contains six scenes, intertitles and an insert of a letter; a scenario for
Alexandr Voznesenskij, Jabloko Tellja (Slezy) (1912), reads as continuous
narrative prose.11
All of the texts from this period that Schwarz discusses have more or
less precise analogues in the kinds of film-related materials being pro-
duced at around the same time in the United States. This suggests that
while local demands of censorship or copyright undoubtedly played a
role in the development of film writing, the formal approaches to the
scenario that developed in different countries were prompted for the
most part by common-sense adaptations of similar, familiar genres:
the short story, the theatrical play script or the rudimentary outline form
of scene summary.
As in the United States and elsewhere, the period around 1913–14
was crucial in forcing screenwriting practices to adapt to the demands
of the feature-length narrative film. Significantly, however, whereas the
continuity script appears to have functioned more or less consistently
in Hollywood from around 1913 to the end of the silent era, Schwarz
proposes a significant break in Germany and Russia around 1923–24.
The later 1920s saw a movement towards greater industrial stabilisa-
tion, associated with both post-war reconstruction and envious glances
towards the industrial efficiency of Hollywood. This represented a chal-
lenge to the autonomy of directors, particularly in Russia, and in this
sense the more striking textual forms that we shall examine later in this
chapter represent something of an assertion of directorial independence
in the face of industrial or political orthodoxy.
Again, however, the similarities between these European industries
and that of Hollywood are as remarkable as the differences. Schwarz

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104 A History of the Screenplay

finds in the development of a given screenplay in France, Germany or

Russia a sequence of phases that are more or less analogous to those
we have seen in the development of the Hollywood continuity.12 Here
we shall use the German model, but indicate the French and Russian
analogues:

1. The ‘exposé’, or synopsis (the Russian term was ‘tema’ or theme).

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2. The ‘treatment’, a roughly 20- to 30-page prose version that gave
an indication of how the action could be structured into scenes or
sequences, with rudimentary indications of possibilities for dialogue,
camera directions and titles. The French equivalent was the ‘sce-
nario’, and a Russian approximation the ‘libretto’ or (confusingly
for those versed in Russian formalist criticism) the ‘sjuzet’. Viktor
Shklovsky described this as consisting ‘of plot and dénouement,
furnish[ing] the actor with an opportunity to act and provid[ing]
interesting material to film’.13 This appears to be the same kind
of document as the treatment in use in Hollywood at the same
time.
3. The ‘Rohdrehbuch’ (‘rough’ or ‘raw’ screenplay), a more specific and
detailed version of the treatment, which breaks scenes down into
filmable (though not numbered) shots, with intertitles, but lacks the
precise specifications of camera and dialogue that would be supplied
in the final iteration. In Russia this stage would occasion one of either
a technical or literary scenario. This resembles certain forms of sce-
nario and screenplay that use the master scene as the basic unit of
action.
4. The final iteration, the ‘Drehbuch’ itself, much like the English
‘screenplay’ or continuity, the French term being ‘découpage’. As we
shall see, in Russia, too, the ‘iron scenario’ was posited as an antidote
to the economic inefficiency that some critics attributed to the irre-
sponsible editing practices of some directors, in the work of whom
is often encountered a fifth stage: the preparation of the ‘montage
list’, which can mean variously (and problematically) a shot list, a
production record of the shooting, or a document to be submitted
for the approval of the censor.

Clearly, all of these countries were developing similar screenplay forms,

as well as analogous written stages in the development of a given film
project. Nevertheless, as Thompson notes, visitors to Hollywood from
France and Germany in the later 1910s and early 1920s pointed to
differences from their own systems, with greater or lesser degrees of

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 105

admiration. Moreover, in each of these countries, as well as in Russia,

a distinctive style of film-making had arisen—French impressionism,
German expressionism, Soviet montage—that can be associated in part
with a mode of production that involves significant variation in writ-
ing practices. Finally, it is notable that the structural organisation of
the models outlined above is at odds with what appears to have been
happening on the ground. In all of these countries, the voices of con-

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temporary commentators and industry insiders were repeatedly raised
in opposition to the prevailing ‘script crises’, directorial whim, cine-
matic illiteracy and the general disorganisation of the film industries
themselves, while many leading directors were attempting to resist the
imposition of efficiency measures, in particular the enforced separation
of writing from directing. Unlike in the relatively well structured and
harmonious environment of Hollywood, textual form was a site of con-
tention, and while this produced a degree of chaos, it also enabled major
writers and directors to create some of the most enticing written texts in
film history.

Carl Mayer and the expressionist screenplay

Between 1913 and 1924 the credits of a number of German films would
grant the screenwriter the ‘film by’ credit, such as Carl Mayer and Hans
Janowitz for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Mayer for Genuine
(1920), both of which were directed by Robert Wiene.14 Mayer stands
at the forefront of—indeed, is exceptional within—attempts to present
‘Weimar auteur cinema’ as an art form rather than merely popular enter-
tainment, legitimated partly by the perception of the writer as a ‘film
poet’.15 Siegfried Kracauer calls Mayer’s work ‘screen poems’ or ‘instinct
films’,16 and the poetic form is evident both in the manner in which
Mayer presents the scenario text and in his application of a new princi-
ple to the relationship between the written text and the film experience.
Mayer places comparatively little emphasis either on what is imagined
to be seen on the screen (unlike most forms of screenwriting) or on the
requirements of the technical crew (unlike the silent Hollywood conti-
nuity or the various kinds of ‘shooting script’). Instead, he anticipates
the emotional response of the spectator; and ‘anticipates’ is the right
word, since his writing is an attempt to capture the nervous excite-
ment of the viewer, with all his or her doubts and speculations about
the events unfolding on the screen.
In most respects his first script, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, written with
Hans Janowitz in the winter of 1918–19, is atypical. Until quite recently,

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106 A History of the Screenplay

the understanding of the Drehbuch for this film was largely derived from
Kracauer’s influential From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the
German Film (1947), which was itself indebted to Janowitz’ own account.
It was only in 1995, with the German publication of a copy previously
in the possession of Werner Krauss,17 the actor who played Caligari him-
self, and which David Robinson has convincingly argued to be ‘the first,
the last, and the only version of the Caligari script’,18 that historians

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began significantly to revise the received view of the nature of Caligari’s
written text.
The Caligari script is formally divided into six ‘Acts’—perhaps a legacy
of the move to multi-reel production rather than, necessarily, of theatre
(similarly, Grausige Nächte, directed by Lupu Pick in 1921, was billed as
‘A Film in Five Acts by Carl Mayer’).19 Unlike Mayer’s later work, Caligari
contains lengthy titles for both dialogue and exposition:

ACT 1
1. Scene: Large, elegant terrace of a country house

(viewed from the Park)

Evening atmosphere. Francis with a lady on his arm, Jane
with a Gentleman, followed by two Gentlemen and three
Ladies, step in cheerful mood onto the terrace, where a table
with a steaming bowl is prepared. They sit on the wicker
chairs placed there, and chat animatedly.

2. Scene: The Terrace.

(closer view, from the house)

View over the fine, ancient park lying in the evening atmo-
sphere. The landscape slopes away. Cheerful atmosphere.
Suddenly Francis casts a look at the road outside, where two
gypsy wagons with people trotting beside them slowly pass
by. Francis puts down the glass he has raised in a toast and
stares reflectively into the distance, while his wife quietly
and meaningfully goes to him and lovingly strokes his hair.
Surprised and disquieted, the guests question the couple.

TITLE: Yes, my friends, you do not know that dreadful tale of

Holstenwall, which the sight of these gypsies passing by brings back
as melancholy thoughts to Jane and me.20

Characteristic of the German Drehbuch is the justification of the text for

titles at the left of the page, with scene text towards the right. More

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 107

peculiar to Mayer’s later method, in Robinson’s view, are some of the

detailed descriptions of character and action, such as on Caligari’s first
appearance:

A spectral-looking old man, in a dark, flying cloak and high cylin-

der hat, trots along the street, following the procession. His hands,
clasped behind his back, hold a walking stick. His head recalls that

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of Schopenhauer. He stands still for a moment, and before going
on, solemnly leafs through the pages of a large book which he
takes out of his coat pocket. Then he appears satisfied and goes on
his way.21

This meticulous depiction of the scene, while certainly amenable to

recasting as a series of shots, does much to suggest that the writers are
prioritising mise-en-scène over montage in a way that is characteristic
of the German cinema of this time.
Given Mayer’s later innovations in writing the scene text, it is remark-
able that the titles in the Janowitz-Mayer script for Caligari have a
‘conventional narrative style’, whereas in German (though not English-
language) prints the titles are ‘staccato’, a result of ‘the film production
team’s attempt to integrate the titles into the overall expressionist design
in literary style as well as in their shape’.22 Mayer would dispense with
titles altogether for Der Letzte Mann (1924) and use them only spar-
ingly in Sunrise (1927), while Hermann Kappelhoff states that in Sylvester
(1923), ‘[n]ot only had the inserts disappeared almost entirely, they were
replaced by visual motifs with no relation to the plot: the surging sea, a
churchyard, a forest’.23
Still more important to the reassessment of Caligari is that the 1995
publication refutes Janowitz’ contention—promoted by Kracauer—that
Wiene’s frame story, which reveals the events to be a story told by a
madman, reintegrates an essentially radical critique of authority into
a conservative frame. What this overlooks is that the original scenario
also had a frame story, and one that is altogether more conservative:
as the extract above shows, in the original Janowitz-Mayer version the
story is related retrospectively from the security of an exemplary bour-
geois country house, suggesting that any potential threat has been
successfully contained.
Mayer’s post-Caligari texts aspire to the condition of poetry, present-
ing a method and form of writing markedly at odds with contemporary
American practice. A transitional phase can perhaps be seen in his
scenario for the lost film Der grüne Kuss (aka Der Bucklige und die

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108 A History of the Screenplay

Tänzerin, directed by F. W. Murnau in 1920), in which, according to

Jürgen Kasten,

the grammatical transpositions and abbreviations, the use of single

words as independent sentences, emphasis by means of unusual
punctuation and the elaboration of processes stretching over a num-
ber of scenes were not used throughout. Der grüne Kuss is one of

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Mayer’s earliest screenplays. But his technique, which he later per-
fected, condensation of language and abbreviation for the purpose of
designating the specific visual form were already employed here.24

The Mayer script for another Murnau-directed film of this period, Der
Gang in die Nacht (1920–21), again appears transitional. To judge by the
facsimile of a page of the Drehbuch reproduced in Patrick Vonderau’s
analysis, Mayer was still presenting the scene text in continuous para-
graphs, rather than as short lines suggesting a sequence of shots.25 Yet
the syntax now has the characteristic brief, emotional punches of his
better-known works: ‘He fights for breath. But she just looks at him. Hot!
Burning! Possessive! Pugnatious! Sparkling! Closer: But he gasps. Faster
and faster! Struggling more and more. Then: a cry! You!’ Vonderau sug-
gests that this methods represents ‘a stylistically heterogeneous mixture
of melodrama’s “canonized emotional poses” on the one hand and on
the other hand an attempt to translate emotional states into intensified
physical expression’.26
The recasting of such prose into a series of short lines in Mayer’s
subsequent work, beginning with Sylvester 27 and the better-known Der
Letzte Mann,28 also suggests a concern for the language as text, as poetry.
Indeed, Sylvester contains all of those characteristics of the 1927 Sunrise
scenario that are likely to seem peculiar to the reader familiar only with
American scripts: the lineation, the liberal use of exclamation and ques-
tion marks in the scene text to indicate emotional mood and, in place
of the more usual film-specific transitions (‘cut’, ‘iris’, etc.), conjunctions
or adverbs of time, often accompanied by an exclamation point (‘Und!’,
‘Jetzt:’, ‘Und da!’, ‘Doch!’, ‘Denn:’) that suggests a peculiarly child-like
wonder at the scene and an insistence that the reader follow, like a child
dragging an adult through the attractions of a funfair.
This is precisely the effect of Sunrise—arguably Mayer’s (and Murnau’s)
greatest achievement—especially in the sequences in which the young
married couple rekindle their love and start to see the world through
new eyes, as in scene 72:29

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 109

Ansass and Indre walking along in an embrace.

And now: as though visualizing their thoughts, everything is fading

away before extreme happiness.

The houses grow indistinct.

Slowly sinking into the ground?

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And also all the carriages and rolling traffic?
While we see just the two strolling along.

Through fantastic spheres.

The title page of the published facsimile of the German-language

typescript, with Murnau’s handwritten annotations, identifies Lied von
Zwei Menschen (‘Sonnenaufgang’ has been handwritten above) as a ‘Film
von Carl Mayer’. The title page of the English translation held at
the American Film Institute identifies Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
as a ‘Photo-play by Carl Mayer, Adapted from a Theme of Herman
Sudermann’s “A Trip to Tilsit”.’ That description (a translation of Mayer’s
‘Unter Verwendung eines Motivs aus Hermann Sudermanns: “Reise
nach Tilset” ’) helps to explain Mayer’s work as a kind of musical
variation on a ‘theme’.
For Sunrise, as was Mayer’s custom (but very much against usual
Hollywood practice), the writer worked in independence from the stu-
dio: Murnau had accepted an invitation by William Fox to make a
film in Hollywood, leaving Mayer behind to write the Drehbuch.30 Fox
had brought Murnau to the United States in an attempt to marry
Hollywood’s commercial reach and technological innovation with the
cachet of European art cinema. Yet the timing was not propitious:
although the film is now widely regarded ‘as a sort of fortuitous his-
torical accident by which the resources of Hollywood were put, for
once, at the service of a great film artist’, it was already the beginning
of the end of the silent cinema, and ‘prints of the film were prepared
with a synchronous music and effects track, making the film a curious
technological hybrid: not silent, but not quite “sound” ’, contribut-
ing to its financial failure.31 Moreover, a populist backlash had begun
against German art cinema, and the film suffered as a consequence of
its rumoured aesthetic radicalism and the director’s secretiveness during
production, so that ‘this “otherness” was spoken of as difference and
strangeness rather than progress and innovation’.32

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Arguably a stronger argument in favour of the film’s strangeness is

found in the form Mayer used to write the script, which reveals no
deference to Hollywood convention whatsoever. The page, again, is
divided into two columns, with scene-text description on the right, and
technical material—scene heading, camera and editing directions, and
titles—on the left. Scene numbers are absent; Murnau has inserted them
by hand on his copy, and they are present in the English-language type-

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script. Mayer de-particularises the story world, which is a Lithuanian
fishing village in the source, but unidentified in the retelling. Charac-
ters’ names are also absent from the German text, but supplied in the
English (although mistranscribed from Sudermann: ‘Ansas’ and ‘Indra’
have become ‘Ansass’ and ‘Indre’), and there are fewer than 20 titles.
Combined with the characteristically poetic lineation, this refusal to
conform to some of the most basic requirements of the conventional
film scenario helps to place the reader in the dream-like state the film
itself evokes.
Debates about the film often engage the question of the extent
to which Fox attempted to ‘Americanize’ it by bringing it closer to
Hollywood conventions, an argument that depends to a large extent on
changes to the source story. Although in certain respects Mayer follows
Sudermann’s source text quite closely, there are radical changes. The
short story begins with the homewrecker Buzse as a servant in the house
of the young married couple, the fisherman Ansas and his wife Indra.
Her father decides to throw Buzse out, resulting in her taking lodgings
in a nearby house. The ‘photo-play’ omits this altogether, instead mov-
ing us straight to the heart of the love triangle, with Buzse a vampish
outsider and the motivation left comparatively obscure. In Sudermann’s
tale, Indra knows full well that her husband plans to drown her, and her
willingness to go with him onto the lake becomes a suicidal act of self-
sacrifice. In Mayer’s version, the wife does not initially realise that her
husband may be planning to kill her; instead, her first intimation that
something is wrong comes as the couple begin their boat trip, when
the dog causes a commotion and the husband has to take it back to
shore. Moreover, the tragic twist to the ending of the story—the hus-
band drowns while the wife is saved—is eliminated, the vamp is driven
out of the town and the happy family is reunited.
Although Sunrise can reasonably be held to be Murnau’s crown-
ing masterpiece, and perhaps the best illustration of the fertile rela-
tionships between European and American film-makers in the silent
Hollywood era, the ‘photoplay’ credits—especially in the light of the
aforementioned German conventions regarding the attribution of film

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 111

authorship—allow us to place German writers generally, Mayer individ-

ually and the Sunrise script specifically at the centre of film production.
This was in contrast to the prevailing model in Hollywood, in which
with the exception of some directors of auteur status (who were often of
European extraction, such as Erich von Stroheim), the producer tended
to be the dominant figure. Instead, throughout his career Mayer ‘was
“writing films” rather than writing for film’, and so ‘is not adequately

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described as a “scriptwriter” ’.33 In the same year as he made Sunrise,
Murnau said that ‘we have a generation born and grown to manhood
since the motion pictures were invented, and yet so far, no great Poet of
the new art has arisen’. The remark is chosen by Lucy Fischer to preface
her discussion of poetry and narrative in the film,34 yet neither she nor
the director defers to the ‘film poet’ who was arguably the first writer to
transform screenwriting from the preparation of industrial pretexts into
a medium of literary expression.

Soviet Russia: Montage and the ‘iron scenario’

Anxieties surrounding the relationship between writing and film pro-
duction had surfaced in Russia before the 1917 Revolution: as early as
1913 there were ‘too many film-makers chasing too few ideas’,35 and the
problem of under-supply became acute thereafter. In 1923, prior to the
greatest advances in montage editing, concerns were being expressed
over a perceived ‘scenario crisis’,36 partly because the war and the Rev-
olution had eliminated many experienced writers, but also because
methods of production were perceived as wasteful. In 1924, 90 per cent
of scripts were being rejected, leading not only to suggestions for higher
pay for script writers but to concerted arguments for a more cen-
tralised organisation of writing in relation to film production.37 By 1926,
Soviet cinema journals were launching a ‘regime of economy’ campaign,
with Sergei Eisenstein’s cavalier approach to the shooting script of The
Battleship Potemkin (1925) being singled out for criticism. In 1927, Viktor
Pertsov, characterising the screenplay generically as a ‘half-finished liter-
ary work’, was still complaining of a ‘screenplay famine’, and therefore
a ‘plot famine’, in the industry.38 In December 1928, the Sovkino Work-
ers’ Conference held that ‘[t]he script crisis has not yet been overcome’,
and argued that screenwriting should be subject to centralised control
within the studios, with ‘specialist scriptwriters . . . prepar[ing] scripts for
particular directors’.39
The familiar debates between Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin,
among others, about montage editing and the role of the script need to
be seen in the contexts of these endemic ‘scenario crises’ and the moves

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112 A History of the Screenplay

towards economic and political control of the film-making process. The

1920s was a period when Hollywood scripting practices and their posi-
tion in the industrial process were arguably the most stable that they
would ever be; unsurprisingly, there were those in Soviet Russia who
looked to their ideological alter ego as providing a centralised model
that could solve their chronic problem of industrial inefficiency, with
the continuity script at its core. The most celebrated achievements of

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Soviet montage editing, then, took place against an ideological back-
drop in which the wholly contrary concept of the ‘iron scenario’ loomed
large.
It was a method propounded by Pudovkin in his 1926 pamphlet ‘The
Film Script’:

There is a belief that the scriptwriter should provide just the bare
bones of the action, leaving it to the director to flesh it out ‘cin-
ematically’. Nothing could be further from the truth. [ . . . ] All the
individual camera positions—long shots, close-ups, aerial shots, etc.,
all the technical devices—such as ‘fades’, ‘masking’, ‘panning’—that
help to link the sequence to the ones that precede and follow it, all
that constitutes and enhances the inner content of the scene must be
precisely calculated. Otherwise irreparable mistakes may occur in the
shooting of a scene plucked at random from the middle of the script.
So, the working or shooting form of the script provides a detailed
rendering of every part, however small, indicating all the technical
methods needed to shoot it. Of course, asking scriptwriters to write
in this way is the same as asking them to become directors. Neverthe-
less, the work of the scriptwriter must move in this direction. Even
if he fails to deliver a ‘steel’ script ready for filming, he must try to
furnish material that approaches the ideal form.40

There are evident connections between this view of the script,

Pudovkin’s ‘constructional’ theory of montage in which shots are linked
in sequences, and perhaps his best-known film, Mother (1926), the narra-
tive structure of which is not radically dissimilar to that of contemporary
Hollywood cinema in detailing the adventures of the protagonist as a
causal sequence of ultimately heroic deeds in overcoming a powerful
adversary.
In that same crucial year, screenwriter and critic Viktor Shklovsky used
the familiar metaphor—‘[t]he script should become the blueprint of the
picture’41 —while the critic Ippolit Sokolov was enthusing that in the

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 113

‘ “iron scenario” [ . . . ] nothing is left to chance. The picture ought to be

literally preliminarily edited before the filming begins. One should not
film a single frame until the entire picture is mentally edited.’ Finally,
‘[t]he scenes and shots ought to have numbers’.42 However, it is worth
noting Thompson’s observation that ‘in practice [the “iron scenario”]
approach to scripting seems to have remained largely an ideal goal
rather than a practical method until well into the 1930s’.43 The cur-

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rent researches of Maria Belodubrovskaya suggest that even this is an
overstatement, and that throughout the 1930s, in the absence of a pro-
fessionalised approach to screenwriting, the Soviet industry relied on
directors still wedded to the montage tradition to prepare scripts, which
consequently rejected the blueprint model.44 As we have seen with both
the Hollywood continuity and the French decoupage, in practice the
‘ideal goal’ of a rigid separation of written conception and filmic execu-
tion is likely always to be compromised by the exigencies of production,
for innumerable different reasons.
It was in Russia, however, that the politics of the debate were most
acute. Noting a distinction in terminology, Richard Taylor points out
that ‘[a]n “iron script” [ . . . ] was a full script delivered to a director ready
for filming. A “steel script” [ . . . ] was one that could not be altered.
By 1926 there was, of course, also an association with Stalin, “man of
steel”.’45 By the end of the decade the dearth of suitable screenplays
could be traced as much to the political problems of censorship, and the
ideological question of what might constitute permissible and appro-
priate themes, as to the industrial mode of production, for which
something akin to the Hollywood continuity script could have been
adapted. Cinema lay at the intersection of industry and ideology, and
writers were legitimately anxious that in a new production economy
that put the script and not the director at its centre, they would be
uncomfortably exposed.46
In light of these developments, Eisenstein’s theoretical pronounce-
ments, as well as his work on October (1928), appear remarkably coura-
geous. In a short essay in 1929 he gives a general, theoretical justification
for taking a position that is directly opposed to the blueprint model of
the iron scenario. Eisenstein proposes a radical separation between the
written text and the director’s cinematic interpretation, describing them
as two different ‘languages’.47 He gives the example of a survivor of the
Potemkin mutiny, who had stated that ‘A deathly silence hung in the
air.’ Eisenstein remarks that a writer might choose to place these words
in the script, because it

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sets out the emotional requirements. [ . . . ] And the scriptwriter is

right to present it in his own language. [ . . . ] Let the scriptwriter
and the director expound this in their different languages. The
scriptwriter puts: ‘deathly silence’. The director uses: still close-ups;
the dark and silent pitching of the battleship’s bows; the unfurling of
the St. Andrew’s ensign; perhaps a dolphin’s leap; and the low flight
of seagulls.

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The prose libretto, then, could function as a scenario precisely because
it didn’t need to anticipate the film in anything more than approximate
narrative or emotional terms. By contrast, for Eisenstein (repeating a
phrase he had first uttered in 1928), ‘[a] “numbered” script will bring as
much animation to cinema as the numbers on the heels of the corpses
in the morgue’. Consequently, he stated openly that ‘we are opposed
to the usual form of numbered detailed script (Drehbuch) and [ . . . ] in
favour of the film novella [libretto] form’.
However, between the polarised concepts of the ‘iron scenario’ as a
production blueprint, on the one hand, and of the writer and direc-
tor working with fundamentally different ‘languages’ demanding only
the freest translation between them, on the other, lies a range of tex-
tual possibilities. Nor were positions necessarily as entrenched as it at
first appears. By 1928, Pudovkin had changed his mind and, with Osip
Brik, was creating another kind of pre-production document that allows
for a directorial latitude akin to Eisenstein’s approach to the libretto.
Brik’s ‘treatment’ for Potomok Cingiz-Chana/Storm over Asia (1928) com-
prised a typewritten list (with handwritten annotations) of scenes, shots
or actions, each no longer than a few words or a short sentence:
the first three, for example, are ‘steppe’, ‘snowy steppe’, ‘Mongolian
steppe’. Pudovkin translated this into an equally elliptical form of
numbered shooting script (‘Landscape. Barren mountains’, ‘Mountains,
mountains’, ‘a wild animal’ and so on), with approximations of shot
length.48
Brik himself had in 1926 advanced perhaps the most radical con-
ception of the screenplay we have so far seen when he proposed that
‘[t]he screenplay should be written, not before shooting, but afterwards.
The screenplay is not an order to shoot, but a method of organising
what has already been shot. And we should therefore ask, not how a
screenplay should be, but what should be photographed.’ As Richard
Taylor remarks, however, ‘this extreme attitude contributed to the
chronic shortage of screenplays that affected the Soviet cinema in the
later twenties’.49

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 115

Soviet cinema of the 1920s therefore provides two completely oppo-

site directions for screenwriting. The first shadows Hollywood, moving
from the initial ‘tema’ or idea through the prose libretto to the ‘iron sce-
nario’ that in theory (if not in practice) could be filmed as written. The
second is an almost precise inversion of this: a conceptual hostility to
the idea of rigid pre-production causes the director to use the libretto as
the first stage in a deconstruction of the narrative, proceeding through a

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series of sequence outlines for filming and ending with, in Brik’s words,
‘[t]he re-working of material in the screenplay [which] is the last stage
of the work’.50
Some examples from the work of Eisenstein, the most excitingly
unsystematic of the Soviet film-makers—and therefore a stimulating
contrast to the idea of Hollywood as a factory of serial production—
show the range of textual materials that could result, including draw-
ings, diagrams, storyboards and voluminous annotations.51 The written
scenarios themselves were prepared with different collaborators, and
they were rarely more than provisional. The major unit of segmenta-
tion is the act or sequence—The Battleship Potemkin’s script is formally
divided into four acts, October’s into five—but in contrast to Hollywood
practice, Eisenstein at this time had no use for the division into scenes.
Eisenstein’s drastic irreverence towards the ‘shooting script’ is well
indicated by his approach to Potemkin. Alexander Lyovshin, his assis-
tant, recorded that after each day’s shooting in Odessa, rehearsals for
the following day involved crew members who ‘walked or ran through
the rehearsed mise-en-scène while Eisenstein made corrections in the
shooting script. Although 75 percent of the shooting script was ready in
advance, most of the remainder was determined in these rehearsals.’52
The quality of improvisation extended to most of the film, which was
expanded from a 46-shot sequence initially planned for a much larger
project, The Year 1905, after Eisenstein arrived in Odessa: as the direc-
tor recorded, ‘[n]o scene of shooting on the Odessa Steps appeared in
any of the preliminary versions or in any of the montage lists that were
prepared’.53
Jay Leyda reproduces what he describes as ‘the director’s shooting
script’, though the document is undated, and Leyda is careful to note
that ‘[i]t represents a particular stage in Eisenstein’s work on the film’,
after some footage had already been shot, and with—not surprisingly—
only a rough approximation of the intertitles.54 This version preserves
Eisenstein’s insertion of certain shot breakdowns, which are (presum-
ably) illustrations of the rewriting that Lyovshin observed, and which
reveal some of the director’s process of translating what is in many

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ways a quite straightforward narrative in the scenario into more vividly

realised shot series. Most notable in this respect is a radical rewrite of the
Odessa Steps sequence, with Eisenstein’s handwritten insertion of all of
the shots of the child’s pram as well as notes for the use of sculptures
at the Opera House, including one of stone panthers. Even so, in this
version of the scenario almost every shot is from within the diegesis,
and contributes to narrative progression, as does the overt division of

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the scenario into four sequences (not the five acts of the film as released),
with somewhere between 100 and 140 shots in each.
By contrast, the script for October (1928), written in collaboration
with Grigori Alexandrov, represents a quite remarkable kind of nar-
rative deconstruction, although this is partly because, again, the sce-
nario was provisional, and ‘a full version of the shooting script never
in fact existed—scenes were constantly re-worked during shooting’.55
As Schwarz’s chronology shows,56 there were no distinct stages between
synopses, screenplays, shooting scripts and production: all were subject
to continual revision, largely in reflection of the political compromises
that were forced upon the project. Eisenstein had been urged to pro-
duce another work of populist propaganda, along the lines of Potemkin;
instead, the script shows that the intellectual ‘formalism’ that caused
October to run afoul of the authorities was prefigured in the early writ-
ten, planning stages, and was not simply an effect of editing and the
pressures of production.
Where the text of The Battleship Potemkin is purely functional, an indi-
cation of the content of each shot, from the beginning the scenario
for October has literary qualities in excess of the requirements of any
blueprint:

1 Gold,
2 precious stones,

3 shimmering lights covered the tsarist crown, the imperial sceptre

and the autocratic orb.
4 The gold glittered,

5 the lights shone,

6 the gems sparkled,

7 until . . . until women’s bony fists rose out of the queues of the
hungry,

8 until calloused workers’ hand brought machines to a standstill,

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 117

9 until angry leaflets lifted into the air,

10 until the hungry trenches ceased firing,

11 until the people rose up and brandished their fists.

12 But see, they have risen.

13 and they have brandished their fists.

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14 And with that the crown began to grow tarnished and dull,
15 with that, the blinding radiance faded,

16 with that, the oppressive, crushing idol became visible . . .

17 The idol of autocracy, standing

18 on a massive, polished stone, against a sky darkened by ominous

clouds.

This is something other than a simple shot list. An almost universally

observed rule of screenwriting is that because the viewer experiences the
film as a series of actions unfolding in the here and now, the script must
report events in the present tense. The use of the past tense in October (at
least in this translation), by contrast, introduces the idea of literary nar-
ration. This quality is accentuated by repeated recourse to the rhetorical
device of anaphora: successive shots begin with the same word or phrase
(‘until’ in shots 7–11, ‘with that’ in 14–16), until they come to resemble
lines of poetry, again suggesting the stylistic and rhetorical organisation
of the literary rather than the screen text.
Nonetheless, this sequence functions well enough in indicating
the content of each shot—more so, indeed, than most Hollywood
continuities. Soon, however, this literary style introduces complications,
as in the use of similes:

45 The orators of the petty-bourgeois party poured forth like bal-

alaikas.
46 The telegraph machines tapped away like trilling nightingales.

TO ALL . . . TO ALL . . . TO ALL . . .

47 But, like ammonia hitting the nostrils, a question sprang to the
eyes:
T-O A-L-L?

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118 A History of the Screenplay

Each simile, by definition, introduces a comparison between two terms,

which cinematically suggests either a juxtaposition two shots (a cut
from the orators of shot 45 to be followed by a shot of balalaikas in a
succeeding shot 46) or the use of superimposition, a method Eisenstein
used extensively in the film. The scenario proposes no solution, how-
ever, and the problem starts to become insuperable at shot 47, the simile
of which introduces images that would produce a distractingly comic

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effect if visualised. This use of analogy is surprisingly prominent: shot
114, for example, notes that ‘As the drowning man clutches at a straw,
so the failing government reaches for the machine gun’. At times the
numbering seems to be used to provide a narrative rather than visual
breakdown of the action, as at 188: ‘The Bolshevik Party programme
was transformed into a weapon against infantry, cavalry and artillery’,
or, more extensively, at 206–10:

206 The Smolny prepared for a Congress of Soviets.

207 Its preparations were as intensive as for a major campaign.

208 The outcome of the insurrection more or less depended on the
armed soldiers.
209 In short, the outcome was in the hands of the Petrograd
Garrison.
210 And this is where the Smolny directed most of its preparatory
work.

These could be rendered as titles, but again, the scenario does not give
any indication of this, or of how the narration might otherwise be
incorporated within the montage.
Clearly, this is an incomplete scenario, but in any case it would not
be adequate to the demands of a system such as Hollywood’s, which
utilised a rather impersonal division of labour. In its very form, then, it
reveals something of the nature of the relationship between Eisenstein
and Alexandrov, his co-writer and co-director; the cinematographer
Eduard Tisse formed the third member of what could be considered
Eisenstein’s principal production team. As in the later case of Citi-
zen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), and indeed the screenplays of Ingmar
Bergman, to both of which we shall return, such a literary form of
scenario is a statement of a kind of artistic authority over the whole
production, and is therefore associated with ideas of the cinematic
auteur.

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 The Silent Film Script in Europe 119

It is not surprising either that Eisenstein proved incompatible with the

American studios with which he attempted to work in the 1930s, or that
October should have alerted the Soviet authorities to a potentially trou-
blesome ‘formalism’ in a director who had failed to produce the straight-
forwardly effective propaganda they thought they had commissioned.
It was to be his last major silent film. The General Line, which Eisenstein
had placed to one side to undertake the October assignment, was never

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satisfactorily completed. In the summer of 1929, Eisenstein made ulti-
mately abortive plans to add sound to The General Line, now retitled Old
and New, and compiled detailed notes for the music, to be composed by
Edmund Meisel.57 Although these annotations were compiled separately
from the film’s scenario, which the director was also preparing to pub-
lish in Germany, this attempt to reconfigure for sound a film that had
already, partially or wholly, been shot according to the practices of the
silent cinema was one symptom of cinema’s remarkably rapid transition
to sound. In this brief transitional period, from around 1927 to 1931,
screenwriting itself had to be radically transformed to accommodate the
new technology.

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6
The Coming of Sound

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By 1927, the continuity script had, for around 13 years, provided
Hollywood with a clearly structured and relatively efficient means of
structuring a story idea within the context of film production. The
appearance in that year of The Jazz Singer represented little less than
a heart attack, its effects immediately visible as the studios struggled to
find ways of adapting their writing practices to cope with the shock.
In time, the screenplay would be overhauled, with a measure of con-
sistency re-emerging once the transition to sound had been completed,
although an inter-studio consensus comparable to that surrounding the
continuity would never fully return.
In the interim, sound presented screenwriters with two overlapping
sets of questions. The first was, essentially, simply one of formatting:
How should dialogue be incorporated within the script? The second
engaged the studios’ short-term need to salvage what it could from
projects that had been undertaken with silent cinema in mind, but that
now needed to be reconfigured for audiences that were unwilling to turn
back the clock. Several solutions were attempted: the accidental inclu-
sion of dialogue within The Jazz Singer suggested that audiences might
temporarily accept the ‘part-talkie’, films that had originally been shot
silently could be reconfigured for sound, or the studio could simultane-
ously produce silent and sound versions of the same film. All of these
methods produced different headaches for the writer.

The beginnings of the sound film: The Jazz Singer (1927)

The Jazz Singer tells the story of Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a Cantor
who despairs of his son’s desire to pursue a career on the stage. After
running away from home to follow his dream, Jakie, under the name
Jack Robin, finds himself forced to choose between standing in for his
dying father to recite the ‘Kol Nidre’ for Yom Kippur in synagogue or

120

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 The Coming of Sound 121

performing at the opening night of the Broadway show that would make
him a star. He effects a reconciliation by choosing the former, although
in a dramatically weak conclusion the show is merely cancelled until
the following night, when Jakie’s performance of ‘My Mammy’ (in
blackface) in front of his mother brings the film to an appropriately
melodramatic conclusion.
It was not the first film to feature sound, Warner Brothers themselves

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having already released Don Juan (1926); nor was it an all-talkie, the
first example of which was Lights of New York (Warners, 1928). It was
not even planned as a ‘talkie’ at all, and the ‘Adaptation and Conti-
nuity by Alfred A. Cohn, from the Stage Play by Samson Raphaelson’
is, for the most part, a typical example of a silent continuity, with 401
numbered scenes (shots) and a separately numbered sequence of 162
titles.1 As initially conceived, its technological advance was supposed to
lie in its application of the Vitaphone sound-on-disc apparatus, which
was more fully integrated into the dramatic action than had been the
case with Don Juan. The continuity includes parenthetical indications
for the use of the sound recordings, and suggests some apprehension
about what may be achievable. In scene 43, as the young Jakie prepares
to sing at Muller’s Café, ‘The player plays the introduction to “Mighty
Lak a Rose” and the boy starts to sing. (The various shots for this will
have to be in accordance with Vitaphone technique and its necessities.)
Vitaphone singing stops, when cut is made.’
However, the film does, famously, contain two moments of spoken
dialogue: briefly, when the adult Jack Robin at Coffee Dan’s excitedly
exclaims ‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet’,
and a later and more extended section when he speaks to his mother,
for whom he is playing the piano, before he is stopped by his irate father.
These words were unscripted, and no suggestion that dialogue is to be
heard is present in the continuity, which instead contains examples of
the three ways of representing talk that had been in place since the
1910s (as seen in the 1915 continuity for The Immigrant in Chapter 4):
written intertitles, spoken words that are to be filmed in such a way that
makes it possible to for the spectator to lip-read, and words of which it
is necessary for the spectator merely to get the gist. All three can be seen
in the following short passage:

218. CLOSE-UP MOTHER

Her lips form the word “diamonds” in a startled manner as her

eyes reflect the glitter of the jewel. She looks up at Jack and
says:

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TITLE 73: “Are you sure it’s for me, Jakie?”

219. MED SHOT BOTH

Jack laughs as he says of course it’s for her. She shakes her head
at this unheard of extravagance. She tells him he shouldn’t
have spent so much money for her. Jack laughs heartily.
220. CLOSE UP JACK

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He tells her that it’s nothing at all, adding:
TITLE 74: “I got so much money, Mama, Rockefeller is jealous of
me—and Henry Ford is always trying to borrow
from me.”

The Jazz Singer’s script falls some way short of being an accurate
‘blueprint’ for the film. For example, scene 311, which does not appear
in the film, is merely a sketch, with no attempt at this stage to indicate
how the apparently dialogue-intensive scene is to be created:

Sara tells Yudelson that she is going to get Jakie [in hopes of persuad-
ing him to sing in his father’s place at Yom Kippur]. The latter tells
her it’s no use, but she is insistent, and he agrees to go along. Sara
tells Mrs. Rubin to remain there until they return.

Other directions are hesitant: in scene 2, ‘A shot may be made from an

auto or truck down the street showing the teeming life of the ghetto’;
scene 6 is a long shot of tenements, ‘Looking upward from the street
piano. This may be a very effective shot.’ And ironically, of course, the
continuity contains no reference to what would immediately become
the film’s main claim to fame. Even when it became known that speech
would be heard, the full significance of the innovation was not immedi-
ately apparent: an article in Motion Picture News of 8 July 1927 correctly
predicted that ‘what dialogue there is in The Jazz Singer will probably be
purely incidental’.2 Nevertheless, Warners rapidly put together a public-
ity campaign that incorporated references to the innovation of audible
speech, as well as to the Vitaphone technology more generally. The
revolution had begun.

The ‘part-talkie’: The Shopworn Angel (1928)

As with The Jazz Singer, The Shopworn Angel, released by Paramount on

29 December 1928, made much of its incorporation of sound. Unlike
that for the earlier film, however, the ‘Final Continuity’ by Howard

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 The Coming of Sound 123

Estabrook, dated 6 September 1928 but with extensive revisions from

the 7 and 8 September, at this date bearing the marginally different title
The Shop Worn Angel,3 was compiled in preparation for the production of
a ‘part-talkie’, with indications of sound effects throughout and audible
dialogue entering in the final sequence.
The continuity is prefaced by two single-spaced pages of additional
material incorporating short notes on ‘theme’ (the basic plot idea), a

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longer ‘digest’ (summary), which occupies most of the first page, and a
page of ‘character notes’ on the participants in the film’s love triangle:
the title character Daisy, her sugar daddy Bailey, and the young officer
William, with whom she falls in love. The story and characters combine
the familiar melodramatic tropes of the sympathetic good-time girl, the
‘woman with a past’ that catches up with her, and the fashionable Great
War setting seen also in Wings (1927), Hell’s Angels (1928), which we
shall consider below, and the more realistic All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930).
The continuity itself is divided into nine ‘sequences’, lettered A to I,
and is the first script we have so far examined to utilise this larger unit of
segmentation—though it will not be the last. Pencilled annotations in
a copy of the 6 September script held in the Paramount files renumber
the film as a continuous series of 342 shots.4 In most respects, sequences
A to H follow the familiar conventions of the silent continuity. Each is
prefaced by a short synopsis of the sequence and a tally of its scenes and
titles, with sequence A, for instance, having 39 scenes and a total of 12
intertitles and dialogue titles. Each ‘scene’ is in fact a shot, numbered
consecutively within each sequence (so sequence B commences with
scene ‘B-1’), and the script is often very specific as to the type of shot and
editing required: E-8 (‘CLOSE UP OF DAISY—across Bailey’s shoulder’),
for example, is followed by the reverse shot E-9 (‘CLOSE UP OF BAILEY—
across Daisy’s shoulder’). It also looks backward to an earlier version
of the continuity, indicating where scenes have been eliminated (e.g.
‘B-17—OUT’), and retains the standard silent practice of distinguishing
between pantomime and titles, as in a passage from scene A-20, in which
the heroine has failed once again to attend a rehearsal. The stage man-
ager first ‘speaks emphatically into the phone, registering—“Well, she
can’t get away with that stuff! I’ve stood all I’m going to!” ’; the crucial
plot point, however, is presented in a title: ‘the next time she misses a
rehearsal or show . . . she’s fired!’
Where sequences A to H diverge from the conventions of the silent
continuity is in the creation of separate columns: a little over four
inches for the ‘ACTION’, and then a further inch and a half for ‘SOUND

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124 A History of the Screenplay

EFFECTS’, with these headings provided at the top of each page, in order
to synchronise the matching of each to the other:

ACTION: SOUND EFFECTS:

FADE IN – Very subdued,

A-1 far away effect
of military

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band playing:
Impressive view of Congress, “Star Spangled
with President Wilson delivering Banner”.
his memorable address of April 2,
1917. (NOTE: This
must be very
soft and in no
sense an invi-
tation to make
audience stand
up. It is
LAP DISSOLVE INTO: merely atmos-
pheric music,
to create high
mood.)
A-2
CLOSER VIEW – of the President,
speaking the historical words:

TITLE 1. “Many months of fiery

trial and sacrifice
are ahead of us. It
is a fearful thing to
lead this great,
peaceful people
into war . . .”

The President continues his

impressive address.

A striking illustration is provided by scene A-25, in which Daisy takes a

shower. The sound effects column having suggested ‘In Old New York’
for incidental music, the continuity advises shooting the scene in two
different ways to avoid censorship problems in certain American states,
while also specifying that the two versions should be of equal duration
in order to maintain sound synchronisation. In addition to anxieties
about the possible effects of censorship, the continuity is often tentative

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 The Coming of Sound 125

or suggestive in other respects. For instance, there is advice on how scene

A-5 might be photographed, but there is also an indication that it might
not appear at all, while two alternate approaches to the filming of scene
A-7 are outlined. After scene B-13 the continuity indicates the potential
for cuts if the film is perceived to be too long, while sequences B and C
both offer alternate endings.
Historically, the most significant element of the script is the con-

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cluding sequence ‘I’, dated 7 September 1928. This is prefaced with a
note that dialogue as well as sound effects will now be present until
the end of the film, and a revealingly oxymoronic reference to ‘sound
titles’—that is, audible speech—in the enumeration of the sequence
elements: ‘Scenes: 19. Titles: None. Sound titles: 27’. The dialogue is
spoken in two specific scenes of this sequence: the wedding, which
begins the sequence, and Daisy’s broken-hearted return to the stage,
which ends the film. The scenes sandwiched between these two, in
which the broken-hearted Daisy wanders in New York, contain no actual
dialogue.
Throughout sequence ‘I’ there is no columnar separation of action
and sound effects. Instead, spoken dialogue is centred, rendered in
upper-case and in inverted commas. This represents a variation on the
presentation of dialogue in theatrical stage plays, although two kinds
of tautology suggest a measure of improvision in finding a solution to
the rendering of speech: it is both ‘SOUND’ and ‘DIALOGUE’, and the
scene text frequently feels the need to indicate that the character whose
speech is presented is actually talking. Both kinds of redundancy are
seen in this extract from the wedding scene:

- SOUND -
THE DRONING VOICE OF THE CHAPLAIN INTONING THE
WORDS OF THE MARRIAGE CEREMONY. [ . . . ]
- DIALOGUE -

The Chaplain says:

“INTO THIS HOLY ESTATE THESE TWO PERSONS PRESENT

COME NOW TO BE JOINED. [ . . . ]”

While this mode of presentation substitutes for the parallel columns for
action and sound effects earlier in the continuity, a quite different use
of columns is introduced at one point in sequence ‘I’s wedding scene, to
indicate double exposures:

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126 A History of the Screenplay

DOUBLE EXPOSE ABOVE DOUBLE EXPOSE ABOVE

DAISY’S HEAD – BLENDING WILLIAM’S HEAD –
MULTIPLE LAP DISSOLVES OF – BLENDING MULTIPLE LAP
DISSOLVES OF –

Daisy’s thoughts – William’s thoughts –

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(a) Daisy at wild, drunken (a) Vivid, flashing scene on
party. A revel in striking battlefield in France.
contrast. William advancing
bravely in close
foreground.

(b) Daisy being kissed by (b) CLOSEUP – of

unidentified men. Distinguished Service
Medal.

(c) CLOSEUP – of Daisy’s arm, (c) A home-coming

with bracelets. A cigarette in transport ship, moving
her hand. to pier, loaded with
hundreds of soldiers,
frantically greeted by
great crowds.

(d) Daisy’s luxurious bed, (d) CLOSE VIEW – William –

disordered, disarranged, and (in uniform) meeting
empty. Roses on the floor. daisy in ecstatic
Rose petals sprinkled over happiness, crushing her
the sheets. into his arms.

(e) A street – pedestrians. Daisy (e) A beautiful scene before

comes furtively along, a little vine-clad cottage,
registers seeing someone, bordered with roses.
hides in doorway, as William and Daisy in
William, in civilian clothes, foreground, ideally
passes through, apparently happy, playing with a
looking for her, registering little baby.
that he has seen her and
that she has disappeared.
He exits, still searching.

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 The Coming of Sound 127

While the technical questions posed by this particular series of shots

are unconnected to the problem of sound, a measure of the difficulties
they caused is that the scene was reworked in a separate document of
10 October.5
The slightly haphazard construction of the continuity is a conse-
quence of the awkwardness and transitional nature of the ‘part-talkie’
itself. Reviews of The Shopworn Angel remarked on the ungainly effect,

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the New York Times regretting that ‘producers have seen fit to tag on
to the end a talking chapter, which, while it does not actually hurt the
picture, at least unlocks the tongues of people who have been silent for
most of the time’,6 while the Los Angeles Times considered that the

[f]inal scenes with the spoken word, after the bulk of the picture
has been shown silent, burst upon one’s ears with the sudden and
disturbing effect of a calliope. The dialogue is intelligent enough in
The Shopworn Angel, what there is of it, but somehow it seems rather
unnecessarily dragged into an otherwise enticing vista.7

Silent and sound versions: The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1929)

The coming of sound brought with it an end to the trans-national

advantages of the silent movie and the creation, for a short period,
of simultaneously shot versions of the same film in different lan-
guages, such as The Blue Angel (in German and English, 1930) and The
Threepenny Opera (in German and French, 1931). In an indication of the
chaos threatening the film industry, a Los Angeles Times article published
in the wake of The Shopworn Angel recorded the statement of its direc-
tor, Richard Wallace, that his next film, Innocents of Paris, was due to be
made in four versions: two different silent edits for the American and
European markets, and two talkies, with different songs in the French
and English versions.8
Relatively straightforward was The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, an adaptation
of a comic stage play by Frederick Lonsdale, which was initially slated
for release in both silent and sound versions, although in the event only
the latter was released. Nevertheless, it had a complex history as a silent
continuity that went through many iterations before being reworked
for sound. The two scenarios completed by Hans Kraly are perhaps most
instructive in offering directly comparable silent and sound versions of
the same material, the silent scenario, dated 20 February 1929, being
‘okayed’ by Irving Thalberg on 22 March,9 and the sound version being
similarly ‘okayed’ on 2 March.10 The primary story difference between

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128 A History of the Screenplay

the two is that the silent version begins with a 22-scene sequence
in which Mrs. Webley is robbed in the street outside the house of
Mrs. Cheyney, who invites her indoors while Mrs. Cheyney’s butler
Charles succeeds in recovering the stolen items. This is omitted in the
sound version and replaced by exposition, during a telephone con-
versation, that offers a different explanation of how the women first
met. Otherwise the versions are remarkably similar in terms of story

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and scene structure, which allows for a clear understanding of how
analogous material is presented, especially regarding dialogue.
In many scenes there is no difficulty at all. For example, the sound
version repeats a 26-shot sequence set in a florist’s shop almost verba-
tim from the silent version (sound scenes 11–36, silent scenes 33–59),
with the exception of some minor changes in wording and an abbre-
viated version of one speech. It is possible to do this because, as we
saw before, continuities routinely include within the scene text rela-
tively insignificant dialogue that is to be understood via pantomime
or lip-reading (‘The saleswoman greets her with a smiling: “Good
morning, madam!” ’), reserving intertitles for particularly significant or
representative speeches (as when the saleswoman asks, ‘Your favourite
Madonnas?’). All of this material from scene 35 of the silent continuity
can be presented in the sound version (scene 12) simply by removing
the distinction between titles and other dialogue.
Other scenes show the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two
formats. Mrs. Webley is a chatterbox, and both scripts indicate that ‘[t]he
torrent of words flows on’ (silent scene 23, sound scene 7), but in the
silent version this is followed by a title of just 15 words, whereas the
analogous speeches in the sound version are inevitably more prolix and
occupy about a page, running into the age-old problem of how to write
the dialogue of a bore. Elsewhere, however, the sound version benefits
from the opportunities for rapid duologues. For example, silent version
scenes 122–25 present the following exchange:

INT. STUDY – CLOSEUP DILLING AND MRS. CHEYNEY

Dilling once more bends toward her and says:

TITLE: “I phoned you five times yesterday. Each time I was told you
were out. Were you?”
She shakes her head. Dilling nods with a smile. “Ah, I thought
as much!” Mrs. Cheyney tells him:
TITLE: “Twice I answered you myself and told you I was out.”

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 The Coming of Sound 129

In the sound version, the parallel episode occurs in the middle of a

lengthy conversation in scene 61. As one might expect, the dialogue
in the silent version is more condensed, and therefore arguably crisper,
but the sound version is more nuanced:

He moves toward her and the conversation continues in low

tones. Meanwhile, Dilling takes a step nearer to Mrs. Cheyney

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and says:

“Since noon yesterday, I’ve called you up five times. Each

time I was told you were out.”
She says, with mock gravity:
“What a shame!”
He asks:
“Were you out?”
She shakes her head:
“No. Each time I was in.”
He nods:
“I thought so.”
Mrs Cheyney tells him:
“Twice I answered it myself and told you I was out.”

Perhaps the most curious aspect of the sound version occurs in the final
scene (332), which begins with the same redundant method of render-
ing dialogue as we have seen above and in The Shopworn Angel, whereby
the scene text informs us that a character is speaking. Suddenly, after
about half a page, something resembling modern practice intrudes, con-
tinuing through to the end of the scene (and the script) some four pages
later:

He takes a step toward her, asks:

“You liked him?”

Mrs. Cheyney answers:

“I adored him.”

Dilling moves a little closer. In the dialogue that follows he works his
way gradually down the table toward her, the CAMERA FOLLOWING

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130 A History of the Screenplay

him. He speaks without looking at her, drawing patterns on the table

with his forefinger. But he comes ever nearer. He says:

“How much is that?”

MRS. CHEYNEY
As much as a woman can ever like a man she is not in love with.

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ARTHUR
Like to go with him?

MRS. CHEYNEY
I’d hate it. [ . . . ]

Within the same scene the formatting has changed: no longer is the
dialogue presented in treatment form, framed by narration and inverted
commas; instead, for these last few pages of this adaptation of a theatri-
cal play, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney has hit upon the stage play format itself
as being an appropriate means of presenting dialogue within the conti-
nuity. It would become the default method as Hollywood fully embraced
the sound era.

Remaking a silent film for sound: Hell’s Angels (1930)

Hell’s Angels is an oddity in many ways, not least because among other
things the dramatic action is largely a frame story for the spectacular
flying sequences that became an obsession with Howard Hughes, who
eventually took charge of the filming himself after falling out with a
series of directors.11 Shooting had begun on a silent version in October
1927, but the film would not be finally exhibited until May 1930. The
lengthy period of production is explained partly by Hughes’ perfection-
ism regarding the scenes of aerial combat, but of wider significance was
the coming of sound. With this in mind, late in the day (around May
1929) Hughes decided to reshoot the dramatic sequences, occasioning
major recasting and the recruitment of Joseph Moncure March. The
poet and writer, newly arrived in Hollywood, wrote a more or less com-
pletely new script that was dialogue-intensive and with scenes which,
with some significant exceptions and aside from a few camera direc-
tions, were in stage-play form. The two friends in the silent version,
Seaton and Cowan, have become brothers (the demure Roy and the
womanising Monte) in March’s, and the rewrite takes pains to dramatise
their relationship as well as those between each of them and Helen, the

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 The Coming of Sound 131

third major character. March’s script is divided into two ‘Parts’, which
are subdivided into ‘sequences’ and further subdivided into ‘scenes’: for
example, Part One has three sequences, the first of which has four
scenes.12
The sequence-and-scene structure proved beneficial when Howard
Estabrook was brought in to overhaul the writing once again for a sound
version, dated 27 September 1929.13 A cutting continuity of a silent

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version was compiled as late as 26 August 1929,14 probably specifically
to assist Estabrook, since the silent version had already been abandoned
and a copy of the cutting continuity appears in his personal files. He had
to work to incorporate the silent material (referred to in his continuity as
‘S[ilent] V[ersion]’) alongside much of March’s dialogue: in effect, he was
attempting to reconfigure both a silent movie and a text that substan-
tially resembled a stage play as a workable script for a sound film. In the
following account of Estabrook’s script, ‘S.V.’ refers to the silent cutting
continuity, ‘March’ to the Joseph Moncure March script that Estabrook
inherited and ‘Estabrook’ to the 27 September sound continuity that
incorporates much of the material from each of the other versions.
Estabrook’s nine sequences (A–I) shadow those in March. The first four
scenes of sequence A, which begin to map out the dramatic relationships
between the film’s three principal characters, are structurally similar in
all versions, and at several points Estabrook specifies where footage from
S.V. is to be retained. The two scenes that close this sequence in S.V.
are jettisoned. Conversely, sequences B (detailing the brothers’ adven-
tures in Oxford) and C (the declaration of war), some scenes of which
Estabrook incorporates almost verbatim from March, do not appear
in S.V. at all. Sequence D, which famously incorporates a Technicolor
ballroom sequence, is radically different in S.V. On screen, sequence E
is substantially given over to the stunning Zeppelin footage that had
already been filmed, using some dubbing and title cards, devices which
are less distracting than might otherwise have been the case because the
airmen are speaking German (today one might use subtitles). S.V. shows
that the Zeppelin sequence originally contained 332 shots and 26 titles,
but Estabrook simply records that 1,409 feet of material from S.V. is to
be inserted at scene E-5. Aside from this, the dramatic storyline in the
rest of this sequence and the beginning of the next differs significantly
between S.V. and the sound versions, much of the S.V. material being jet-
tisoned. The transition between Parts One and Two in March is marked
as an ‘intermission’ in Estabrook.
Sequence F shows both March and Estabrook rather self-consciously
incorporating references to the potential of sound, especially in scene 3

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132 A History of the Screenplay

(which has no direct equivalent in S.V.), in which the sound of a Victrola

running down dramatically shadows the sense of doom engulfing the
airmen in the mess hall:

VICTROLA: Smile!
Smile . . . .

S–

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mi –

le –

Sequence G, which dramatises Helen’s betrayal of Roy in France, is not

present in S.V. Conversely, Estabrook’s sequence H (like March’s) con-
sists in its entirety of the words ‘Bombing sequence’, ‘The Battle in the
Clouds’, and ‘MONTE and ROY are captured on enemy ground’, refer-
ring to material previously filmed for S.V., like the Zeppelin episode in
sequence E. The concluding sequence I, in which Roy shoots the cow-
ardly Monte to prevent him betraying the British to the Germans and is
then executed himself, is broadly similar in all versions, although March
presents it in two alternate forms.
Although Hell’s Angels is a spectacular oddity, and the history of its
writing is very much bound up with both the personal concerns of its
maker as well as its creation at a critical juncture in the development of
film technology, it is nonetheless representative of those approaches to
Hollywood film-making that are less concerned with linear storytelling
as the dominant mode. In some narrative genres, the story is essentially
a connecting tissue holding together a varied set of attractions, and the
most obvious example is the musical.

The emergence of the musical

Entire genres are unthinkable without sound: the screwball comedy,

for example, is dependent on rapid-fire, wisecracking speech, and the
prominence of this new element of dialogue is inextricable from the
development of the master-scene script, as we shall see in the next
chapter. Perhaps the most important new film genre ushered in by
sound, however, is the musical. With Don Juan, the attraction of the
technology had lain in the possibilities of eliminating the cost of live
musical accompaniment, rather than in furthering cinematic realism via
the reproduction of the human voice. Later, the ‘integrated musical’,

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 The Coming of Sound 133

in which the songs contribute to the development of the storyline,

would become one of the genres that most significantly helped to define
classical Hollywood style. In the interim, however, at the beginning of
the talkies, came what might be termed by contrast the ‘unintegrated’,
backstage musical: dramas set in Broadway theatres in which the pri-
mary function of the songs is less to advance the narrative than to
display the potential of the fledgling sound technology.

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Several continuities for films such as these evolved from projects ini-
tially conceived with silent cinema in mind. For example, the continuity
by Sarah Y. Mason, dated 11 September 1928, for Broadway Melody15
is mostly silent, but by the time the film was released in 1929, James
Gleason and Norman Houston would be co-credited as writers along
with Mason, and Broadway Melody would become not only a talkie but
the first musical to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. Like many
silent scripts, Broadway Melody lays considerable emphasis on means of
indicating sound visually. In scene 3, a series of close-ups and dissolves—
a policeman blowing a whistle, a fiddler, a ticket tout calling out and
so on—is designed to give an impression of a multitude of sounds
occurring simultaneously.
As with some of the other scripts we have seen during this transi-
tional period, such as The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, the rendering of dialogue
is formally inconsistent. Most scenes have titles for dialogue. However,
in a sequence in the theatre dressing room (scenes 48–56), dialogue is
indicated differently, beginning as follows:

TOP OF STAIRS – SHOT TOWARD DOOR GIRL’S DRESSING ROOM

A fat wardrobe mistress standing inside the door is bawling out the
effeminate dress designer, as the file of girls with elaborate head-
dresses attempts to enter the dressing room, but the headgear will
not go through. She indicates violently to him “There you are!” He
says cuttingly, like an old gossip:
“I designed the headdresses not the building.”

Shrugging off the blame. The wardrobe mistress gives him a cutting
thrust “I know that, or it’d have been done in lavendar (sic),” as she
starts to engineer the girls in, making them leave the headdresses
outside.

Script pages 29–33, from scenes 48–56, continue in this vein, although
at one point in scene 52 a dialogue title is indicated, for no obvious

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134 A History of the Screenplay

reason. Had Mason been following the conventions previously detailed

in connection with The Jazz Singer, one would have expected to find
both titles and indications for speech used regularly throughout the con-
tinuity. The anomaly of scenes 48–56 raises the possibility that Mason
was establishing the basis for a talkie, but was uncertain of her ground
and had not yet distinguished between audible and unheard dialogue.
For Universal’s 1929 adaptation of Philip Dunning and George

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Abbott’s play Broadway, Edward T. Lowe, Jr., initially compiled a silent,
898-shot continuity. A synopsis by Lowe, dated 2 February 1929, then
divides the material ‘in scene groups, with notes regarding the revue
numbers, off-scene music, and dance selections’, an arrangement that
informs Lowe’s ‘sound script’, which tracks the silent version shot by
shot. Instead of reproducing the often very substantial scene text of
the earlier version, however, the ‘sound script’ is a more technical doc-
ument. It borrows the shot numbers and headings from the previous
iteration, but otherwise confines itself to dialogue and brief indications
of sound (street noises, indistinct voices, orchestral music and so on).
The document can only be fully understood when read in conjunction
with the silent continuity; in this sense, it resembles, in function at least,
the list of titles compiled separately from the scenario of a silent film.
The grouping of the scenes in the synopsis, and the arrangement of
the sound script, also indicates some of the ways in which sound effects,
dialogue and song were being incorporated within a system that is oth-
erwise still heavily indebted to the conventions of the continuity. An ‘S’
designates scenes that will be shot silently but then synchronised for
the sound track in post-production. In places, a series of discrete scenes
in the silent version is replaced in the sound script by a single, con-
tinuous stretch of dialogue, which consequently appears as one scene.
Here we can see the beginnings of the transition to master scenes that is
a corollary of the introduction of dialogue in Hollywood cinema. This
change is particularly noticeable in Broadway’s sound script because, in
common with many of the other texts seen in this chapter, dialogue is
being reserved for particular scenes or sequences rather than being inte-
grated continuously within the narrative. Similarly, the script indicates
the presence or insertion of dances and songs, but not the words of the
musical numbers.
A text that better integrates dialogue and songs within the musical
continuity—or, perhaps, simply represents a later stage in the produc-
tion process—is the otherwise undated 1929 script for Gold Diggers of
Broadway (Warner Bros., 1929), marked as ‘final’ and with a note that
the dialogue is not to be altered in production. The title page casts

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 The Coming of Sound 135

an interesting light on the conventional understanding of a ‘backstage

musical’, because it describes the text as the ‘CONTINUITY of Front
Stage and Back Stage Story of “THE GOLD DIGGERS” (of Broadway) by
Avery Hopwood’.16
The distinction between front-stage and back-stage stories is signifi-
cant. The back-stage story is rendered in scenes that closely resemble
the master-scene format of later years. For example, scene 11, in which

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the chorus girls change out of their costumes, continues for three
pages largely comprising dialogue, with speakers’ names and dialogue
indented (although the dialogue continues to the right margin, as was
generally the case at this time). The scene text, which totals less than
one-fifth of the lines in the scene, specifies that a moving shot is to pass
along the length of a dressing table before pausing on a small cluster of
characters. Shot specification of this kind occurs frequently, but less so
than might be expected of a silent continuity, partly because the inter-
est in such scenes is deflected away from telling the story in shots and
towards telling it in dialogue, and partly because, in consequence, there
is no attempt to use shot type as a method of subdivision.
The back-stage scenes are written with a level of detail that resembles
both the silent continuity and the dialogue-intensive master scenes of
the sound era, but the handling of the front-stage scenes is markedly
different. Within the film, this material is substantially the work of
contributors other than the writers—composers of music and lyrics,
choreographers and designers—and the continuity defers to these col-
laborators. Prefacing the dramatic script is the list of characters (of which
only Ann Collins, played by Ann Pennington, as has been cast at this
point), following which is a list of the songs, indicating which character
sings the song and the location of the scene in which it is performed.
Within the continuity itself, scene headings for the front-stage scenes
merely indicate ‘theatre’ or ‘stage’, without elaboration, and with mini-
mal description of the content of the scene. For example, scene 2 notes
simply that Ann is leading the chorus in their performance of ‘Song of
the Gold Diggers’. In the next scene the words of the song are printed
out in full beneath its title (‘Dig, Little Diggers, Dig’) and credits (words
by Al Dubin, music by Joe Burke).
If song lyrics enter screenwriting as a relatively autonomous ele-
ment within the musical continuity, choreography presents a different
set of problems. The text of the continuity for the ‘Song of the Gold
Diggers’ scene records that ‘This is number where chorus are dressed
as forty-niners and dig the audience for gold’. The wording suggests
that the design and choreography, as well as words and music, have

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136 A History of the Screenplay

already been established, or are at least being planned by others. The

main choreographer of the front-stage numbers of Gold Diggers of
Broadway was Larry Ceballos, but it was with the giddy surrealism of
Busby Berkeley that choreography entered film in ways that, as far as
screenplays are concerned, became literally unrepresentable in words.
While the dramatic narrative of the Warner Brothers musicals on which
Berkeley worked after 1932 would be directed by others—Lloyd Bacon

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on 42nd Street (1933), for example—Berkeley’s celebrated designs oper-
ate in an autonomous fantasy realm that belongs to neither the front
nor the back stage story, and requires no substantial input from writers.
42nd Street passed through a series of textual versions, culminating
in a ‘final—master’ of the 22nd.17 This is a typical ‘final’ script of the
period in that it represents a hybrid of the earlier numbered continu-
ity and the evolving master-scene script. As in the continuity, scene (or
more accurately, shot) headings routinely indicate what kind of shot
(full, medium, close and so on) is to be used. This becomes potentially
illogical during lengthy, dialogue-intensive scenes, as here:

136. INT. MED. SHOT CORNER OF “YE EAT SHOPPE” RESTAURANT

(FORTY-SECOND STREET AND EIGHTH AVENUE)
Peggy and Terry occupy a table in one corner. At a table, by
himself, opposite, sits Billy, interestedly reading a copy of Vari-
ety. At a table directly in front of Terry and Peggy sit Ann and
Lorraine.

The discussion between these characters, and a waitress who enters at

the end of the scene, continues for 13 speeches, several of which are
prefaced by possible indications of eyeline matches, as when Peggy ‘sud-
denly notic[es] Billy, who is eyeing the scene disapprovingly[.] [Peggy]
smiles, and turns to Terry’. However, no further shot segmentation is
specified, even though the likelihood is that the scene will be edited as a
series of shots, rather than presented as the single medium shot specified
in the header. Here we can see that the conventions of shot specifica-
tion in the continuity are coming into conflict with the demands of
the dialogue-intensive scene, for which the master scene script, without
subdivision into shots (which can be determined later), appears more
appropriate.
Equally important is that 42nd Street resembles Gold Diggers of
Broadway in the contrast between the detailed exposition of the dra-
matic narrative on the one hand, and on the other the vagueness or
silence concerning the non-narrative elements: the songs and Berkeley’s

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 The Coming of Sound 137

dance/design routines. Some striking examples occur when the two ele-
ments come together towards the climax, as the performers deliver a
series of songs. The script has no trouble in presenting this as a series of
shots, because the location is clear: Billy and the girls are on the stage,
and although little attempt is made to specify the visual appearance
and spatial organisation of the scene, the action has been accommo-
dated readily enough within the conventions of the continuity script.

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The songs themselves (by Al Dubin and Harry Warren), however, are
unidentified, their presence merely cued:

333. FLASH MED. SHOT ORCHESTRA LEADER

and nearest musicians, all in immaculately full dress. Leader taps
baton on music stand and orchestra starts introduction.

334. CLOSE SHOT PEGGY AND LEADING MAN

She gives him tremulous look; he gives her an encouraging firm
handclasp and approving nod of head. Music goes into verse.
Peggy and leading man go into their duet.
335. FLASH. MED. SHOT. BACKSTAGE RIGHT
Andy, very excited, lining up chorus girls for their entrance.
Duet heard off.

The song that was used here was ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’. Similarly, soon
afterwards Billy sings:

343. FLASH FULL SHOT ORCHESTRA SIDE ANGLE

as orchestra leader starts Billy’s number.

344. CLOSE SHOT BILLY

singing number.

Again, no details of the number (which was ‘Young and Healthy’) are
given. The only song mentioned by name in the script is ‘42nd Street’
itself:18 at shot 362 ‘Peggy finishes tap, lights flood up, disclosing whole
company behind her on stage, joining her in final tap, in the “42nd
Street” number!’.
The songs, then, operate relatively autonomously of the dramatic
material. Berkeley’s work, meanwhile, is barely anticipated at all. 355–61
are ‘ALLOWED FOR TRICK SHOTS after production number is set’, but
to all intents and purposes the responsibility is passed to Berkeley, cre-
ating a lacuna in the script. What is most significant is that the lacuna
survives right through to the cutter’s copy of the final script, where the

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138 A History of the Screenplay

cognate shots form part of a sequence boxed in blue ink and marked
‘Berkeley’ in the margin. The cutter was using a copy of the same script
as was used for the ‘final—master’ (dated 22 September 1932), in which
the sequence is instead marked in pink as ‘Buzz’.19
Berkeley’s material is largely intractable to verbal representation,
which may explain its absence. A second explanation is that Berkeley
musicals were in effect a special case of the unit system of production,

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with the choreographer working semi-independently of the director and
writers of the dramatic material. Moreover, Berkeley’s work erased the
temporal and spatial organisation of classical Hollywood editing. The
continuity script was designed partly to complement Hollywood’s visual
style: the laborious if logical use of scene headings and divisions facil-
itated the segmentation of time and space into sequential narratives,
while the editing positioned the spectator securely in relation to the shot
and the story world. Famously, this is what Berkeley’s routines avoid, by
escaping the diegetically motivated action: having begun on the stage
set established by the narrative, he would routinely dissolve the realistic
frame and take the spectator on a surrealistic fantasy unrelated to the
constraints of theatrical time and space.
Unlike the essentially conservative ideology of the classical
Hollywood style, which situates the spectator within a narrative and
a field of vision that imposes boundaries to the possibilities for trans-
gression, it speaks volumes that a textual form designed to meet those
needs barely attempted to accommodate the erotic release supplied
by Berkeley. No written text could possibly do justice to such mind-
boggling sequences as the ‘We’re in the Money’ number from Gold
Diggers of 1933, for example, in which a troupe of chorines, naked save
for the pair of gigantic gold coins with which each dancer gamely strug-
gles to protect what remains of her modesty, is examined from any angle
that Berkeley could possibly get past the censor.
Berkeley is an exceptional figure in many ways, but the impossibil-
ity of accommodating his work within the narrative continuity form
typifies the nature of screenplays written for musicals. Moreover, the
development of this genre also reveals much about screenwriting of
the period more generally. All of the written texts considered in this
section are hybrid forms: the ‘sound script’ for Broadway is not so much
a later iteration of the silent version as an accompaniment to it; Gold
Diggers of Broadway comprises two formally distinct modes in repre-
senting the back-stage and front-stage action; 42nd Street is a kind of
incomplete text, a dramatic narrative dependent on supplementation by
the Berkeley material it cannot accommodate. In consequence, several

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 The Coming of Sound 139

textual elements familiar from the silent continuity fall by the way-
side: without supplementation, the script becomes relatively useless for
the purposes of estimating timings or budget, and many scenes are
not effectively visualised within the written text. The genre can appear
anomalous in these ways when considered alongside the integrated nar-
ratives of contemporary Hollywood genres such as the gangster film
or the historical costume drama. As the following chapter will suggest,

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however, the composite nature of the musical screenplay, which draws
together dialogue, scene text, song lyrics and separately-choreographed
dance sequences, is in many ways representative of classical Hollywood
screenplays in general.

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7
The Hollywood Sound
Screenplay to 1948

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If the numbered continuity had become standardised within the
Hollywood of the 1920s, the hasty conversion to sound had resulted
in an ad hoc approach to resolving the technical questions confronting
the script at a time of rapid industrial change. There is little consistency,
at this transitional time, between scripts or often within the same script,
regarding such matters as how to present dialogue, where to position the
speakers’ names and how, in particular, to overcome the problem that,
with intertitles having become obsolete, precisely rendered speech and
action now occurred simultaneously. As Staiger remarks, ‘[e]ach studio
adapted the old script format differently’.1 This prompted suggestions
that the Hollywood studios should collectively introduce an agreed,
standard format for the presentation of scripts.
They certainly considered such a move. The first item in the ‘Pro-
ceedings of the Research Council, Quarterly Meeting, December 15,
1932’—published in summary form in the Academy of Motion Pic-
ture Arts & Sciences’ Technical Bulletin, supplement 19, December 23,
1932—concerns the ‘standardization of format of scripts’.

Problem: Since the introduction of sound, there has been no gener-

ally recognized format of scripts. As a result the placement, order,
numbering and display of the various parts—dialogue, action, set
descriptions, camera instructions, etc. vary widely among the studios
and are constantly subject to change. This unnecessarily complicates
the work of those who handle the scripts during production. [ . . . ]
Proposed: To conduct such surveys as may be necessary to establish
the basis for the various present practices. To correlate this informa-
tion and secure general agreement on a recommended form of script

140

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 141

that will be most legible, graphic, and convenient in practical use

by actors, directors, writers, executives and the various production
departments.2

That Darryl Zanuck chaired the meeting, and Irving Thalberg was an ex-
officio member of the Council, demonstrates the importance attached
to this initiative. Staiger argues that ‘[t]he form that eventually became

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standard (the master-scene) was a combination of theatrical and pre-
sound film scripts, a variant of the continuity synopsis used in the
1920s’.3 The evidence she presents is a facsimile reproduction of two
pages from a 1938 script for the Warner Brothers film Juárez (1939);
with this, Staiger concludes her history of screenwriting practices in The
Classical Hollywood Cinema.
Clearly the analysis is not intended to be exhaustive, but the implica-
tions are significant: that the Research Council’s proposal resulted in a
standardised form of screenplay that was adopted collectively by the stu-
dios; that the agreed form was the master-scene script; and that this was
adopted relatively quickly, by the end of the 1930s, with Juarez function-
ing as a representative illustration of these developments. Such conclu-
sions would tend to support the thrust of the argument in The Classical
Hollywood Cinema, namely that the studios introduced standardised
methods of production in the interests of economic efficiency.
The problem is that neither Juárez individually nor surveys of the
Hollywood sound screenplay generally support any of these conclu-
sions. Nor, indeed, does a second analysis by Staiger, published in the
same year as The Classical Hollywood Cinema, which proposes that the
sound film screenplay of the classical era represented a modification of
the continuity.4 Rather than effecting a step-change from the numbered
continuity to the master-scene screenplay in the 1930s, the introduction
of sound resulted in a hybrid form in which the conception of a scene,
as a unit of temporal continuity and spatial integrity, is compromised by
the need to draw attention to specific elements within the scene. This
leads to an element of confusion, because the word ‘scene’ tended to
refer both to master scenes and shots, with a new shot and a new scene
each introducing a new ‘scene’ number.
This confusion persisted at least into the 1950s, and is clearly
illustrated by a two-page document in the files of the screenwriter
James Seymour, headed ‘SHOOTING SCRIPT FORMAT’ and dated 26
March 1944.5 Seymour had been one of the writers on several of the
Warner Brothers musicals discussed in Chapter 5, including 42nd Street,
Golddiggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade. By 1943, however, he was

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142 A History of the Screenplay

working on a series of British films, and it is likely that this document

represents the distilled advice of a seasoned Hollywood veteran to his
new British colleagues. It is worth quoting in full:

From a technical picture-making point of view, a Shooting Script has

two primary purposes:

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1) To give the Production Department a clear idea of epoch, sets,
characters and times of day and thus simplify ‘breaking down’
the script for shooting schedules, costume plots, etc., and to
allow an approximate estimate of actual minutes of shooting
and screening time.
2) To give Producer and Director a clear idea of what the writer con-
siders the emphases and climaxes, by cinematically underlining
the writer’s intentions.

This should in no sense hinder the Director’s creative camera-work or

restrict his complete freedom of decision or action. The writer’s sug-
gestions of shots should act merely as springboards which may assist
and stimulate the Director’s inspiration. This corresponds, in music,
to a composer’s orchestration of his symphony to supply guide-posts
for his Toscannini (sic).
The purpose of a Shooting Script is definitely NOT to make entertain-
ing READING at the expense of concise clarity. All the entertainment
value in it should be translatable to and capable of expression on
the screen. It is not intended to gloss over with clever writing or hide
behind words story or character weaknesses or inconsistencies, which
inevitably become bald and magnified in screening.
For the convenience of all concerned, it would be wise—and a sim-
ple matter—to adopt a single tech[n]ical procedure in the writing of
Shooting Scripts. There are two common errors: either to break the
script up into too many scenes or not to break it up into enough. The
following might be suggested as a practical and simple technique:

1. Number all scenes and indicate ‘Inserts’ [here ‘without num-

ber’ has been scored through and replaced with the words ‘as
such’].
2. If it is not a direct cut from one scene to the next specify the
desired transition, as ‘Fade Out’ and ‘Fade In’, ‘Dissolve To,’ etc.
3. New scenes and scene numbers should show a change of set
(ie. Master Scenes)[,] that is—‘Exterior’ or ‘Interior’ and various

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 143

portions of a large set as ‘a corner’, ‘an alcove’, ‘by the fire-

place’, etc.
4. A new scene and scene number should be used for a new ‘set-
up’ only to achieve a definite desired dramatic effect, such as a
‘Close-Up’ for an individual’s important reaction or dramatically
important piece of business to which the audience’s attention is
to be drawn. This, in effect, underlines with the CAMERA things

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to be ‘punched over’ for story values.
5. New scenes and scene numbers should NOT be used merely for
a change of CAMERA ANGLE within a master scene for no other
reason than to break up what seems to the writer a too-long
dialogue scene. Thus a dualogue (sic) would not be broken up
into alternating close-ups of the speakers—except as specified in
Paragraph 4 above.
6. In general, then, nothing should be included in the Shooting
Script which has not a definite reason for being there. The aim
should be—as far as the technical format is concerned—to make
perfectly clear to Producer, Director and Production Department
the author’s intentions without any vagueness. It is then the
Director’s task to effect those intentions by his skill and artistry
without his having to cudgel his wits to find out what the author
is driving at.

While point 3 demonstrates the concept of the ‘master scene’, point 4

shows how it is ‘broken up’ by indications of a new camera ‘set-up’,
either for a specified shot (such as the close-up) or for what the
writer considers a ‘dramatically important piece of business’. Mean-
while, point 5 stresses that particular kinds of master scene, notably
dialogue-intensive scenes, may continue for considerable length with-
out additional segmentation by the writer.
It is possible, though unlikely, that Seymour is here offering advice on
the transformation of an earlier iteration—a master-scene screenplay—
into the next stage, a shooting script. If so, however, the same writers
would generally work on each iteration, including the ‘final’ iteration
being a shooting script that could then be subject to further modifica-
tion by the director. Moreover, as we shall see, the various drafts through
which a text would proceed in the classical era generally show writ-
ers bearing shot segmentation in mind once work on the screenplay,
as opposed to the synopsis or treatment, was underway. This leads to
an additional source of confusion: just as ‘shot’ and ‘scene’ can be
synonyms, so ‘screenplay’ and ‘shooting script’ can both refer to the
final iteration prior to shooting.

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144 A History of the Screenplay

The screenplays of this period were hybrids, and inconsistent hybrids

at that. Moreover, there is a gradual but perceptible evolutionary change,
through to the end of the classical studio era around 1960, whereby
shot segmentation, camera angles and parenthetical speech direction
became progressively less common, thereby bringing the shooting script
into closer alignment with the master-scene screenplay. The research for
the present study broadly confirms two of Claudia Sternberg’s conclu-

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sions, drawn from her sample of 43 screenplays from the beginnings of
the sound era to 1969: first, that during the classical sound era scripts
‘occupy a middle position’ between the master scene script, in which
‘only changes of time and location directly designate cuts’, and the
numbered script in which ‘each cut is predefined’;6 and, second, that
‘screenplays up to the 1950s tended to contain more detailed cam-
era and shot instructions. Since then the master scene script format,
which only registers changes of place and time, has become the standard
form’.7
It seems best to consider the continuity and the master-scene
screenplay in their pure forms as two ends of a continuum, the for-
mer segmented by shot and the latter by scenes, with most scripts
in practice falling somewhere within the spectrum. Nevertheless, the
coming of sound did have the effect of introducing into screenwriting
the dialogue-intensive scene, a development which occasioned the
recruitment of experts such as playwrights from the East Coast.8 If
the title-writers of the silent era had become redundant, the specialist
dialogue writers had entered to take their place.
Just as the dialogue-intensive scene in film can appear cinematically
uninteresting—Hitchcock’s ‘pictures of people talking’—so such scenes
in screenplays often take on the appearance of the stage play, with
a general absence of camera directions or even much in the way of
scene text. Since the default mode of filming and editing such scenes
quickly became the establishing shot followed by a succession of over-
the-shoulder shots/reverse shots, there was often no need for further
indications of shot type even when, as in the classical Hollywood sys-
tem, screenplays would generally include such directions elsewhere. In
short, the introduction of dialogue had the effect of creating a more
hybrid kind of screenplay, with dialogue-intensive scenes often rendered
in what now appears master-scene form, and other scenes not.
Meanwhile, analysis of a range of screenplays from different studios
suggests that, while the intentions of the Research Council are clear
enough, no inter-studio agreement on screenplay format seems to have
been implemented. Instead, the picture is a great deal more complicated,

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 145

and messier, with considerable evidence that there was a greater or lesser
degree of standardisation within studios, but little between them. Even
within a studio widespread variation can occur, largely as a result of dif-
fering modes of production: writer-director teams such as Billy Wilder
and Charles Brackett at Paramount might have their own methods of
working, while a powerful producer such as David O. Selznick at MGM
would bring different specialist contributors to a project at various stages

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of script development, resulting in a still more hybrid kind of text.
Moreover, screenplays themselves were (and are) inherently unstable.
During the course of a given production a range of script documents
would be generated, while even a ‘final’ draft was unlikely to represent
a ‘blueprint’, the release print of the film differing substantially as a rule
from any given iteration of the screenplay.

Juárez (1939)

Juárez is not a master-scene script, though this is not apparent from the
two script pages reproduced in The Classical Hollywood Cinema. One of
these shows the transition between scenes 41 to 42, which indeed is
occasioned by a change of scene (‘DISSOLVE TO: 42. AN ASSEMBLY
OF PEONS AND POORER-CLASS TOWNSFOLK’). The other (excerpted
from scene 32) contains no numbered transitions at all. This does cap-
ture something of the flavour of the screenplay, many scenes of which
are indeed lengthy, dialogue-intensive and uninterrupted by numbered
shots. In many other scenes, however, this is not the case. Immediately
following the DISSOLVE at the end of scene 42, scene 43 is:

CONTINUATION OF SCENE 42

This scene has already been shot. The speaker has said that he will not
sign the plebiscite; he has run out of the shot and up the stairway; he
has yelled, “Viva Juárez—Viva la República!”! The French soldier has
lifted his revolver, and the peon, mortally wounded, has fallen over
the railing of the balcony.9

By contrast, a note at the beginning of the screenplay indicates only a

rough approximation of a prologue that, in the event, did not appear in
the film:

NOTE: The following “Napoleon scene” will be preceded by a pro-

logue establishing and showing in several alternating “tableaux” the

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146 A History of the Screenplay

contrasting careers of Juárez and Maximilian from their birth to

manhood.

There will be no dialogue spoken by the characters shown in these

“silent” scenes, but a narrator’s voice will explain them.

The Napoleon scene is, therefore, the first scene of the pic-
ture in which the actors actually talk, and consequently through

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its development our main protagonists are brought into story
contact.

This shows that, in contrast to a silent continuity script which, in

theory, posits a clear distinction between a completed stage of con-
ception (writing) and an anticipated stage of execution (filming), the
Juárez screenplay is a transitional or living document, an intervention
in a process that has already begun and has many difficulties still to
overcome.
This provisional status perhaps accounts for an uncertainty that is
apparent in most screenplays of this period, and is well illustrated here.
While, as noted, there are many scenes that continue for several pages of
(mostly) dialogue, without occasioning any change in the numbering,
in others the screenplay is explicit in its shot specification, and in such
cases it is the indication of shot that generates a change in the number,
as here:

263. EXT. COURTYARD CONVENT OF LA CRUZ NIGHT

shooting over a large circle of Juarista infantry, on the door-

way. The Imperialists emerge to find themselves hopelessly
trapped.
CUT TO:

264. REVERSE ANGLE

shooting from the doorway over the Imperialists, to show
them hemmed in by the circle of rifles. They look around
them in bewilderment. Mejía raises a pistol to fire, but
Maximilian takes him by the wrist and draws down his arm.

MAXIMILIAN:
It is useless, Tomás.

CUT TO:

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 147

265. MED. SHOT ESCOBEDO

emerging from the Juarista ranks. Pan with him toward the
group. [ . . . ]

The screenplay specifies those shot selections that seem essential to a

visualisation of the scene, and each such specification would generate a
new shot number in the screenplay. Conversely, in a dialogue-intensive

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scene, which may read analogously to the dialogue of a stage play, no
such directions need intrude.

Presentation of the text elements

The specific terms of the Research Council’s initiative seem modest
enough: ‘a recommended form of script that will be most legible,
graphic, and convenient in practical use’. This is a simple matter of
formatting, as opposed to (for example) prescriptions concerning the
degree of permissible narratorial commentary in the scene text. Format-
ting might involve nothing more complicated than the capitalisation,
margins and indent settings of different elements—‘the placement,
order, numbering and display of the various parts’—so that scripts gen-
erated at different studios would have a similar appearance and therefore
be straightforwardly ‘legible’ in this literal sense. The extreme stan-
dardisation of the master-scene script in some of today’s screenwriting
discourses (see Chapter 10) suggests that it would have been perfectly
possible for the relatively centralised, oligarchical studio system of the
classical era to have agreed upon a standard screenplay format shortly
after the introduction of sound.
The objective was also achievable because, even if ‘the closer we
look at Hollywood’s relations of power and hierarchy of authority [ . . . ]
the less sense it makes to assess filmmaking or film style in terms of
the individual director—or any individual, for that matter’,10 Zanuck
and Thalberg were members of the Research Council, and among the
elite:

studio production executives like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg

at MGM, Jack Warner and Hal Wallis at Warner Bros., Darryl Zanuck
at 20th Century Fox, Harry Cohn at Columbia, and major indepen-
dent producers like David Selznick and Sam Goldwyn [ . . . ] were the
men Frank Capra railed against in an open letter to The New York
Times in April 1939, complaining that ‘about six producers today
pass on about 90 percent of the scripts and edit 90 percent of the
pictures.’ And these were the men that F. Scott Fitzgerald described

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148 A History of the Screenplay

on the opening page of The Last Tycoon, the Hollywood novel he was
writing at the time of his death, in 1940[:] ‘[ . . . ] Not half a dozen
men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their
heads.’11

Screenplays formed an important part of the equation, and that individ-

ual studios were indeed able to impose a marked degree of standardisa-
tion on the scripts written for their movies is one index of the producers’

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authority.
And yet the inter-studio standardisation of scripts didn’t happen—
though intra-studio standardisation did, at least up to a point. While
there are some consistencies between different scripts for Warner Broth-
ers, a comparison of the Warners scripts to those being produced
contemporaneously at MGM reveals almost no agreement on format
whatsoever. Apparently MGM, initially under the guidance of Irving
Thalberg (who ‘okayed’ many of the earlier scripts), created its own for-
mat that was followed consistently by producers and writers, with only
occasional variations, and which both preceded the Research Council’s
initiative in December 1932 and survived for decades after Thalberg’s
death in 1936.
The tight control exerted by MGM executives over the script is evi-
dent in the indication, on the title page of what might be considered the
‘final’ iteration of any given script, that it has been ‘okayed’ by a named
producer. The degree of standardisation, meanwhile, can be gauged by
extensive sampling. A survey of some two dozen MGM scripts, from The
Sin of Madelon Claudet (the script is called The Lullaby, after the source
play), which was ‘okayed by Mr. Rapf’ on 25 May 1931, through to Meet
Me in Las Vegas (titled Weekend at Las Vegas, ‘Okayed by Mr. J. Pasternak’
and dated 27 June 1955), reveals only a very few exceptions to a stan-
dard house style that persisted unaltered throughout the classical sound
period. A very short passage from The Sin of Madelon Claudet is sufficient
to indicate the difference from the Warners scripts:

3 EXT. HOUSE NIGHT

As they are leaving.

Larry
(whispering)
There’s that dog again.
Madelon
(whispering)
Co-co, go back. Go back.12

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 149

In the MGM script, the speakers’ names are in lower-case. With the
extreme left margin reserved for scene numbers, the dialogue text occu-
pies the next indent, with an additional indent for slug lines and scene
text, and speakers’ names centred. In most of these respects bar the posi-
tioning of the scene number at the extreme left-hand margin (which
was the norm across the studios), the Warners scripts are different. The
Warner scripts use upper-case for speakers’ names. The scene heading

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and scene text are justified at the first left margin (after the scene num-
bering), with dialogue at the following indent; in the MGM text, this
order is reversed.
It was the Warner rather than MGM style of presenting the text on the
page that was more widely adopted, however, which is another reason
why the Juárez script appears to resemble the master-scene screenplays
of today. Moreover, there is widespread consistency across the studios
for what became the preferred method of presenting dialogue. As we
saw, at the introduction of sound film-makers had hurried to find short-
term solutions to incorporating audible dialogue within a form that had
previously worked on the assumption that the words spoken by actors
could not be directly heard, with two obvious possibilities emerging:
alternation between scene text and dialogue, or an attempt to approxi-
mate their simultaneous occurrence by presenting them alongside each
other in two parallel vertical columns. The former quickly became
standard and is seen in all of the examples of dialogue shown above.
The use of parallel columns was still seen occasionally, however. The
Laurel and Hardy vehicle Babes in Toyland (1934) is one of the few
MGM scripts that radically varies from the studio’s house style for
screenplays.13 It uses the alphabetical method of distinguishing between
sequences, with five (A–E). Pages are divided into two even columns,
with scene text on the left, and sound effects and dialogue on the right:

A-15

MOVING CAMERA –
GARDEN PATH – EXT:
HOUSE.
Ollie and Stan hurry along
path.
Suddenly:
STAN: (Stopping)
Wait a minute!
OLLIE: Now what’s the matter?

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150 A History of the Screenplay

STAN: I forgot my Pee-Wee

stick!
(He dashes out of scene
towards house)
Ollie does a slow burn.
At that moment he hears:
SOUND: (Off-scene)

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Silvery tinkle of
sheepbells.

Seemingly to accommodate this mode of presentation, the pages are of

unusual dimensions, 8 × 13. 75 inches.
The screenplay for Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Paramount, 1935) is iden-
tical to Babes in Toyland in all of these respects (alphabetised sequences,
longer pages, scene and dialogue text in parallel columns). Significantly,
this holds true for all seven drafts, from the first, dated 28 November
1932, to through the last, dated 22 September 1934, showing that this
was a recognised working method rather than a format used to prepare
final versions of particular screenplays.14 One of the writers on Lives of a
Bengal Lancer was John L. Balderston, who with William Hurlbut is cred-
ited with the screenplay for Bride of Frankenstein (Universal, 1935; the
screenplay is at this stage called The Return of Frankenstein), which shows
slight variations in the presentation of some of the elements:15

A-12 BYRON . . . MED. CLOSE UP

BYRON
You hear –

CUT TO:

A-13 MARY, SHELLEY AND

BYRON . . . MED. THREE-SHOT
Even Shelley is brought out
of his concentration to
smile at his friend’s fancy.
BYRON

Come, Mary – come

and watch the storm.

He holds out his hand to her.

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 151

Other scripts to have employed the split-page screenplay format

include the prologue and epilogue pages of Paramount’s Alice in
Wonderland (1933, screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz) and the 20th
Century Fox war film Hell in the Heavens (‘adaptation and screen play’
by Byron Morgan and Ted Parsons, 1 August 1934).
That this mode of presentation was used for films of strikingly dif-
ferent genres at several studios in the period from 1933 to 1934,

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in screenplays authored by many different writers, suggests that it
was not simply aberrant, but instead represented a recognised alter-
native screenplay form. It persists to the present, with modifications,
in the written preparation of documentary films, and the current
research of Petr Szczepanik into the screenwriting archives of the for-
mer Czechoslovakia reveals that parallel columns were a regular feature
of Czech screenwriting in the 1950s, which Szczepanik ascribes to the
influence of the German Drehbuch.16 Perhaps the sporadic use of the
form in Hollywood in the period from the introduction of sound until
the mid-1930s also owes something to the large number of German film-
makers in the studios. However, it seems that after this date the format
fell into disuse for narrative Hollywood films.
Nevertheless, the two different ways of presenting scene and dialogue
text persisted for individual scenes requiring voice-over, or off-screen
narration. How Green Was My Valley (20th Century Fox, 1941) uses the
parallel-text method:17

1 CLOSE SHOT VOICE

Huw’s hands, the hands of I am packing my belongings in
a man about sixty, are care- the little blue cloth my mother
fully folding some shirts, ties used to tie around her hair
and socks into an old blue when she did the house, and
cloth. OVER SCENE comes I am going from my Valley, And
Huw’s voice: this time I shall never return.

The second method, of presenting scene text and voice text alternately,
is illustrated in the 1944 ‘Final’ script for Laura:18

FADE IN

1 FULL SHOT – EXT. SKY AND SUN – DAY

Veiled in mist, the sun gleams like a silver coin, giving a
sense of intolerable heat. OVER SCENE comes the voice of
Waldo Lydecker.

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152 A History of the Screenplay

WALDO’S VOICE (narrating)

I shall never forget this weekend—the
weekend Laura died . . .

2 FULL SHOT – (ESTABLISHING) – NEW YORK

The towers of the buildings are shrouded in mist. On the
entire length of Fifth Avenue the only vehicle is a lone bus
in the distance.

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WALDO’S VOICE (narrating)
A silver sun burned through the sky like
a huge magnifying glass . . . It was the
hottest Sunday in my recollection. A heavy
silence lay on the town. I felt as if I
were the only human being left in New York.
And in a sense it was true. For with
Laura’s horrible death I was alone – with
only my crowding, poignant memories of her.

These two methods of presenting voice-over remained viable alterna-

tives throughout the classical Hollywood sound era.
The widespread variations in the manner in which the text elements
are presented during this period demonstrate that the Research Coun-
cil’s seemingly simple objective was not achieved, and that the studios
operated in relative autonomy in matters of formatting. Since this kind
of formatting was a relatively straightforward procedure that could have
been implemented by central typing pools or agencies, and could have
been applied to any script regardless of the budget for the film, the
failure to implement a standard format suggests that differences in
Hollywood practices were not confined to (for example) A-pictures or
particular producers or directors.

Segmentation
As we saw in Chapter 3, the ‘acts’ and ‘parts’ of some of the early sound
feature films have their origins in the introduction around 1910 of the
reel, and the 1,000-foot length, as standard units of film length. Cer-
tainly there is no good evidence to suggest that film-makers in general,
either then or at any time during the classical period, were thinking
in terms of ‘acts’, or subordinating all other elements to the demand
for narrative coherence. The idea that they did seems to derive largely
from a retrospective re-reading of classical Hollywood cinema, begin-
ning around 1979 with Syd Field’s influential manual Screenplay: The

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 153

Foundations of Screenwriting, which posits the three-act structure as a key

principle of narrative film in general (see Chapter 10).
David Bordwell’s ongoing research into ‘whether studio screenwriters
of the 1930s and 1940s were consciously adhering to something like
today’s notion of a three-act structure’ has ‘found scattered evidence
from memos [ . . . ] that refer to a movie’s “first act” or “last act,” but
nothing that indicates a commitment to an overarching three-part lay-

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out’. In a 1947 story conference for Portrait of Jennie (1948), ‘Broadway
showman Jed Harris is reported as saying: “The second act–he must get
the picture back because that’s all he’ll ever have of her.’ ”19 Among pub-
lished sources, Bordwell has unearthed a few retrospective references to
acts in later interviews with writers and producers, and, more intrigu-
ingly, a handful of contemporaneous remarks, including a memo from
Darryl F. Zanuck showing concern about ‘the downbeat nature of the
last act’ of Viva Zapata! (1952), and a claim that when Preston Sturges
showed photographer John F. Seitz a cut of The Great Moment (1944),
Seitz responded: ‘Why did you end the picture on the second act?’20
But none of this amounts to a suggestion that a structure built around
acts formed any significant part of a discourse around screenwriting or
film-making in the Hollywood of this era.
The explicit segmentation of a script into ‘sequences’, however, was
fairly common; an example is Hell’s Angels, which was considered in the
previous chapter. Although that film may appear anomalous, because
of the circumstances of production as well as the conceptual separation
of the airplane action sequences from the dramatic narrative, the des-
ignation of ‘sequences’ is retained in a significant minority of films in
the sound period, including films that might be regarded as placing a
greater priority on narrative coherence than Hell’s Angels. Little Caesar
(First National, 1931), for example, has 15 numbered sequences. The
convention followed in Hell’s Angels of alphabetising the sequences is
more common: scenes are numbered consecutively within a sequence (if
sequence A has 38 scenes, for example, the scene following A-38 will be
B-1). The practice seems to have been in fairly regular use at Paramount:
Union Pacific (1938) has seven sequences (A–G); Double Indemnity (1943)
has five (A–E), and the writers of the latter, Billy Wilder and Charles
Brackett, would continue to divide their scripts into a small number of
relatively substantial sequences in their Paramount collaborations of the
1940s and 1950s. Other examples include Samson Raphaelson’s scripts
for Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (Paramount, 1932), with nine
sequences (A–I), and The Shop Around the Corner (MGM, 1940), with six
(A–F), although another Raphaelson script for Lubitsch, Heaven Can Wait

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154 A History of the Screenplay

(Fox, 1943), has none.21 In short, if a larger unit of segmentation is spec-

ified in a screenplay of the period, that unit will be the sequence, of
which there were more than the three or four units that would allow
for a correlation with ‘acts’. Meanwhile, although the explicit labelling
of sequences in this way is a feature of only a minority of scripts, the
sequence is nevertheless clearly the larger unit of segmentation in many,
if not most, screenplays of the classical era. As screenwriter John Howard

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Lawson remarked in 1949, the boundaries of the sequences are signalled
by the FADE OUT direction at the end of one scene followed by FADE
IN at the beginning of the next; ‘[t]here may be as many as twenty
sequences, but there are rarely more than eight or nine.’22
As noted, the period also sees the introduction into many screenplays
of quite lengthy master scenes, without further division into specified
shots, as a pragmatic response to the introduction of audible dialogue
into the more shot-intensive continuity script that prevailed in the
silent era. However, the master scene was not followed rigorously as a
unit of segmentation at any point during the classical era. One of the
more elegant solutions to the admixture of scenes and shots is seen in
Robert Riskin’s ‘Final Draft’ for Lost Horizon (Columbia, 1936). Slug lines
at the left margin, capitalised and underlined, record whether the scene
is interior or exterior, and the location (though he does not include
the day/night indicator). Underneath, Riskin simply numbers each shot
(and separately specifies the content of any ‘insert’) in a continuous
sequence throughout the screenplay, from 1 to 462.
For the most part, scripts until the end of the 1950s routinely specified
certain shot types, with close-ups (almost invariably), and even implicit
shot selection, generating a new scene number. The first four ‘scenes’ of
Rio Bravo (Warner Brothers, 1959),23 for instance, have the identical slug
line: ‘INT RIO BRAVO SALOON—NIGHT’. Scene 2 does not indicate a
change of location, but instead implies a close-up as Dude attempts to
retrieve a coin and a boot kicks the spittoon away from him. Scene 3
shows Dude looking up to see that the boot belongs to Sheriff John T.
Chance, the film’s hero. Scene 4 then shows the ensuing fight. All of this
is continuous action within the saloon, and therefore all one scene, and
in a master-scene script the second scene would commence with the cut
to the street (which is scene 5 in the script).
The logic, however, is far from consistent, and at times the numbering
sequence appears to be prompted less by a change of scene or shot than
by the simple desire to draw attention to an important detail: the ‘dra-
matically important piece of business’ mentioned in James Seymour’s
memo. This is seen in Johnny Guitar (Republic, 1953).24 At first glance,

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 155

this has some of the attributes of the master-scene script; on closer

inspection, the logic evaporates. For example, an enormously lengthy,
29-page episode in Vienna’s saloon is continuous in time and location,
and therefore, if it were a master-scene script, should be presented as a
single scene. In fact in the script it comprises 31 scenes (19–49), occu-
pying 29 pages, all carrying the slug line ‘INT. VIENNA’S’, some but not
all of which append a specification of shot. Some of these scenes are

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themselves very lengthy (scene 27, 7 pages; scene 45, 11 pages), others
merely a line. The scene breaks indicate close-ups, significant character
entrances and exits, and the like—there is the ghost of a theatrical sen-
sibility here—but a director or editor will of course segment the longer
‘scenes’ also.
The failure to remove the confusion surrounding the distinction
between scenes and shots may be a symptom of a well-established work-
ing practice: since everyone was used to working in this way, it wasn’t
perceived as a problem. In practice, it provided for a relatively greater
degree of independence in the preparation of a script than was the case
with the silent continuity.

David Copperfield (MGM, 1935): the screenplay as a

composite text

The scripts examined so far in this chapter suggest that ambiguities

surrounding aspects of segmentation, and the failure to implement
inter-studio agreements about formatting on the page, led to the cre-
ation of a wide variety of different kinds of script. There are also
examples, however, of significant variations and inconsistencies within
the same screenplay. A particularly striking illustration is the shooting
script of David Copperfield (MGM, 1935), which was approved by David
O. Selznick on 8 September 1934, with the ‘Screen Play’ credited to
Howard Estabrook and the ‘Adaptation’ to Hugh Walpole.
It must be stressed that David Copperfield is an exceptional case in
several ways, not least in being a pet project of Selznick, whose grow-
ing status and authority at the Metro studio at this time is exemplified
by his personal commitment to this expensive, prestige project.25 The
memos and story notes show that he was continually grappling with
two opposing urges: to retain certain episodes because they were well
known or inherently dramatic, and to condense or entirely eliminate
others in order to keep costs and running time in check. Selznick gives
a lower priority to plotting and audience identification with the protag-
onist than to the retention of memorable scenes and a small number of

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156 A History of the Screenplay

secondary characters. It was only possible for him to manage this suc-
cessfully because David Copperfield was an adaptation of a very episodic
novel, one which lent itself to a process of creation in which individ-
ual scenes or sequences could relatively easily be created, revised or
discarded without significant damage to the overall structure. This is
less likely to be possible with a more tightly plotted narrative, and there
are problems in drawing wider conclusions from David Copperfield about

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the relationship between screenplays and the narrative construction of
classical Hollywood films in general.
Instead, David Copperfield is valuable for present purposes in two par-
ticular ways. First, the version approved by Selznick is self-evidently
a composite document, comprising many different kinds of material
developed by various contributors, some of whom are identified within
it. Second, it was subject to a lengthy process of development that is very
fully documented within the studio archives. These two factors enable
us to see, with a greater degree of precision than usual, how the ‘final’
text was put together; and while the screenplay is atypical in many ways,
it does make visible practices of collaboration and revision that were
prevalent in the Hollywood of the time, but which remain relatively
obscure within screenplays whose ‘final’ iteration is more stylistically
consistent than that of David Copperfield.
The cover of the copy of Selznick-approved 8 September script at the
British Film Institute (BFI), which has been autographed by of all of the
major cast and crew, also shows that changes were made on 11 and 13
September; 6, 23 and 29 October; and 1 and 19 November.26 It is largely
identical to the personal copies of both Estabrook27 and director George
Cukor (with handwritten dedication by Selznick, a version approved by
Selznick on 10 October).28 For all of these reasons, we can think of this
as the most authoritative version, although as the changes post-dating
8 September show, it continued to be modified, and there are significant
differences between this document, which we might think of as the final
or shooting script, and the film as released; in particular, cuts were made
to the film in post-production, which especially reduced the role of Mrs
Micawber.
The 169-page script contains 277 scenes or shots, the transition
between many of which is a CUT. However, what is clear from the cor-
respondence and drafts is that, from the beginning, David Copperfield
was intended to comprise a series of sequences, each of which is marked
by a major change either of location or of time. Within the script, the
transitions between these larger units are invariably marked either by a
FADE OUT/FADE IN or by a DISSOLVE. While these markers are at times

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also found within a sequence, this is usually although not invariably

occasioned by the invocation of a specific cinematic device: a montage
or ‘IMPRESSIONISTIC EFFECT’, for example. Although it would be possi-
ble to segment the story very differently, by this method we can identify
some 32 discrete sequences.
Even the most cursory glance shows that these sequences comprise
many different kinds of material, and that the screenplay is the product

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of various hands. The cover and credits pages are of some interest: the
handwritten dedications on the former give the text a certain authority,
while the credits are laid out in emulation of the title cards of many
Hollywood films of this period. On first appearance of a major character
within the screenplay itself, the name of the actor follows in parenthe-
ses; Micawber is first seen on p. 51-A, where he is said to be played
by Charles Laughton, although in the event the role was played by
W. C. Fields, who receives top billing on the screenplay’s credits page.
Also prefacing the dramatic action is a list of six locations and a note
on period, including the idea that the costume designs will be based
on the original Victorian illustrations by ‘Phiz’. These aside, the first
page begins with a FADE IN on an IMPRESSIONISTIC MOOD before a
DISSOLVE to the Copperfield home and garden.
Thereafter, much of the script, especially in dialogue-intensive scenes,
follows the standard MGM format illustrated in the short extract from
The Sin of Madelon Claudet above. There are, however, extensive and
striking variations:

(i) On several occasions, most or all of a page or more will comprise

only scene text. Frequently in such places there are peculiari-
ties of expression, either of narratorial commentary or of verbose
description. At scene 85 a whole page—eight paragraphs—is used
to describe the minimal action of boys working at the warehouse of
Murdstone & Grinby, where David has been sent to work, while
scene 152 again devotes a page to describing characters sitting
in the Wickfield drawing-room. These are only the most extreme
examples of a novelistic tendency prevalent in the descriptive mode
of this screenplay, and reference to the source indicates that in such
places the scene text represents a surprisingly prolix summary of
the corresponding passages in Dickens, drawing extensively on the
original wording.
(ii) On other occasions we find the precise opposite: remarkably
detailed shot specifications, written in a paratactic style that resem-
bles the outline or scenario forms we saw in earlier chapters. For

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158 A History of the Screenplay

example, as the frightened David fails to satisfy Murdstone that he

has learned his lessons (scene 61), there is a ‘CLOSEUP—PROCESS
EXPOSURES: David as he struggles with the task—impressionistic
effect—Miss Murdstone’s hands and the glistening steel beads—
Murdstone’s cruel eyes staring mercilessly—his hands switching
(sic) the cane in the air. David’s face becomes smudged with fin-
ger marks—he is half in tears.’ This technique of breaking up the

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scene text by dashes strongly suggests segmentation into shots, and
is seen on many occasions throughout the screenplay; it strongly
contrasts with both the more novelistic material described above,
and with the conventional practice of breaking the scene down into
shots with capitalised and numbered slug lines (we might expect
individual close-ups to be specified for Miss Murdstone’s hands,
Murdstone’s eyes, and David’s face, for instance).
(iii) There is frequently a kind of art direction, in which the reader
is referred to non-diegetic sources, including the reference to
Phiz in the introductory material, as well as to photographs (of
Yarmouth, for instance), which have clearly been collected during
pre-production.
(iv) The screenplay explicitly states that scenes 109–27 from a previ-
ous iteration, set on the Kent and Dover roads, will be ‘by Slavko
Vorkapich’, and that some 200 feet of footage will be required.
This recalls the spaces left for the contributions of songwriters and
choreographers that we saw earlier in the continuities for musicals,
except that Vorkapich’s shot breakdowns have been inserted, lead-
ing these scenes to appear in forms that are completely unlike the
rest of the text. The Kent Road sequence, which contains a series
of nine shots, defines each by means of an abbreviation followed
by a few words of description, as it moves from a ‘L.S.’ (long shot)
of a donkey cart travelling through fog, to a ‘M.S.’ (medium shot)
of David, and finally a series of ‘C.U.’s (close-ups) of David as he
narrowly avoids colliding with the cart.
(v) This is followed by Vorkapich’s Dover Road sequence, which is
presented differently again: a page of scene text written in more
conventional narrative style, detailing the visions passing through
David’s exhausted mind as he makes his way towards Dover. Here
the types of shot (dissolves, moving shots, closeups) are speci-
fied within the scene text itself. Slightly different again is another
Vorkapich sequence, scene 173, which is a montage of shots narrat-
ing the development of David’s romance with Dora. The descrip-
tion of the rather clichéd series of images specifies how individual

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 159

effects are to be achieved, via diffusion, overcorrection, a particular

kind of film stock, and so on.
(vi) Less striking, but nonetheless peculiar, is the presentation of voice-
over when Dan narrates the fate of Little Em’ly. The text uses the
parallel-column method of situating the scene text on the left of the
page and the dialogue on the right, except that on pages 145 and
147 the latter is squeezed into a remarkably narrow column just an

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inch and a half in width, with a slightly wider dialogue column on
page 146.

The presence of these many different kinds of text in the same

screenplay gives some indication of its complex compositional history,
which can only be reviewed briefly here.29 Estabrook began by sum-
marising the entire novel, and then proposed which sequences to retain.
Discussions on this matter proceeded continuously with Selznick and, to
a lesser extent, with Walpole, who had initially been engaged to make
the dialogue both Dickensian and speakable. The two writers initially
composed drafts separately, then later iterations more collaboratively,
though Estabrook was always the lead writer. In the course of grappling
with problems of condensation, Estabrook proposed using Vorkapich
as an expert in the kinds of montage techniques that would enable
sequences to be drastically shortened, or eliminated altogether, without
making the storyline incomprehensible. Similar considerations account
for the decision to present the story of Little Em’ly’s ruination in a visual
montage with accompanying voice-over.
This accounts for most of the peculiarities of the screenplay. What
is less clear is why no attempt has been made to make it more consis-
tent in appearance or function; for example, by eliminating the prolix
set descriptions, which have survived from the earlier drafts, when
Estabrook was concentrating more on summarising Dickens than on
preparing a script for production. What emerges from a study of the
drafts is that certain scenes and sequences are being re-worked, added or
omitted, while others are retained from one iteration into another. So
long as the latter were functional, they were not substantially revised:
one scene may contain a whole page of continuous narrative prose,
while another may be carefully segmented into shots. Both could sur-
vive unaltered through to the shooting script, and the inconsistencies
do not appear to have troubled the writers, the producer or the direc-
tor, partly because of the continuous process of verbal and written
communication between them. This tends to confirm Claus Tieber’s
conclusions, from his study of the production history of films such as

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160 A History of the Screenplay

Grand Hotel (1932), that the screenplay needs to be considered within a

wider communicational context than the simple issuing of instructions
to a production team. Instead, there was a continual process of discus-
sion, editing and refinement between several collaborators, overseen by
Selznick, whose working methods drew partly on the latest iterations of
the screenplay, but also on their shared knowledge and understanding
of important questions related to specific aspects of the ‘screen idea’.

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Although the general consistency of the script formatting at MGM,
for instance, was overseen by a team of specialists from the producer to
the typing department, individual projects could deviate significantly
from these norms. In some cases, this was due to the personal interest
of a particular producer like Selznick. In others, the director might be
given considerable latitude. Writers working on such projects might also
develop scripts that deviate significantly from Seymour’s insistence that
‘[t]he purpose of a Shooting Script is definitely NOT to make entertain-
ing READING at the expense of concise clarity’. Our final example in this
chapter is the best-known of the exceptions that prove Seymour’s rule.

Citizen Kane (1941)

Citizen Kane is exceptional in many ways, but it is important to be

aware of two things. The first is that the Kane script iterations were
used for some of the standard financial and budgetary purposes, and
went through some of the standard formatting processes: ‘Amelia Kent
reworked the 9 May script [Manckiewicz’ second draft] into accepted
continuity form’; this was followed by a ‘breakdown script’, a form
which ‘contains only the scene designations and their physical descrip-
tions. It allows the architectural values of a script to be separated from
its literary values and formally stated for the purposes of budgeting the
production.’30
The second important point about the Kane script for present pur-
poses is that, while it went through many drastic changes, some of its
most striking elements were present from the beginning, including its
astonishing opening. After a description of the ‘vast gateway of grilled
iron’, we see

2. The Literally Incredible Domain of Charles Foster Kane

Its right flank resting for nearly forty miles on the Gulf Coast, it truly
extends in all directions farther than the eye can see. Designed by
nature to be almost completely bare and flat—it was, as will develop,

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 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948 161

practically all marshland when Kane acquired and changed its face—
it is now pleasantly uneven, with its fair share of rolling hills and one
very good-sized mountain, all man-made. [ . . . ]31

This material has survived verbatim from the first draft, which at that
point was called American.32 Later in the sequence, the description of
the garden in front of the castle in scene 10 concludes: ‘The dominat-

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ing note is one of almost exaggerated tropical lushness, hanging limp
and despairing—Moss, moss, moss. Angkor Wat, the night the last king
died.’33
This writing is very different from what might be expected in a
Hollywood screenplay and contains a great deal of material that is not,
in Seymour’s words, ‘translatable to and capable of expression on the
screen’. Kane’s ‘domain’, for example, is ‘literally incredible’ and extends
‘farther than the eye can see’: which means that in certain respects it
cannot be visualised. Moreover, much of what passes for description is
actually narration, that is, material in the ‘comment’ mode (‘it was, as
will develop, practically all marshland when Kane acquired and changed
its face’). Meanwhile, the reference to Angkor Wat is a simile: the reader
is invited to make a comparison between what is shown and something
else that is not. The use of similes in a screenplay, then, is by definition
literary rather than cinematic, as noted in regard to Eisenstein’s October
(Chapter 5).
It is as if the Kane script is being written in a style appropriate to the
scale of Welles’ ambition, rather than as a fully functional screenplay.
Even on the assumption that the description of Xanadu originates with
Manckiewicz rather than Welles,34 the former’s knowledge that he is
working for RKO’s celebrated wunderkind means that the text is already
showing the effects of collaboration. In short, the textual excess of
American is an index of Welles’ status, regardless of the extent of his own
involvement in the creation of this particular version of the screenplay,
and the point is confirmed by the contrast between this and the rela-
tively prosaic scene text of most contemporary screenplays. Equally, it
could be argued that the excess of the Kane script is a matter of genre, or,
if we do not want to see the film generically (e.g. as a drama or fictional
biopic), that the mode of writing is appropriate to its subject; it is not
difficult to see a connection between the style of the Kane script and the
ambitions of Kane, Welles or the film.
However, it is important to note that even in the brief quotations from
the texts mentioned earlier in this chapter, Laura contains several figures
of speech, including a sun that is ‘veiled’, towers that are ‘shrouded in

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162 A History of the Screenplay

mist’ and one overt simile (‘the sun gleams like a silver coin’). The rel-
atively poetic scene text could be regarded as generically appropriate to
the psychological film noir, and the more functional scene text of Rio
Bravo appropriate to the Western. In these ways, what Jeff Rush and
Cynthia Baughman call the ‘highly inflected screenplay’ can be seen to
have a precise cinematic purpose in approximating the tone or effect of
a film (see Chapter 11).35

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The later publication of Kane’s shooting script, accompanied by
Pauline Kael’s ground-breaking essay on the screenplay and the relation-
ship between Welles and Mankiewicz, had at least two consequences.
First, the intrinsic qualities of the script carried with it the possibility of
revisiting cinema history from the point of view of its written, rather
than its filmic texts, with the tantalising prospect of discovering a ‘new’
form of literature. Second, the competing claims to authorship of Welles
and Mankiewicz brought the screenplay, rather than the film, into focus
as a contested site. Both of these ways of thinking about screenplays
brought with them the necessity of documenting the material texts,
rather than confining oneself to anecdotal accounts of screenwriters in
Hollywood, in which the failures of major writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald
and William Faulkner have always loomed large. The writing of these
novelists had mostly evaporated in the heat of production, leaving
behind only bitter recollections and lamentations over the death of lit-
erature in the world of film. But Citizen Kane was published in 1971, at
a time when the screenwriter, both in Europe and in the United States,
was coming to be regarded as, potentially at least, the ‘author’ of a film.

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8
European Screenwriting, 1948–60

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As in the aftermath of the First World War, when changes in
screenwriting within other countries were influenced by the Hollywood
continuity, the years immediately following the Second World War saw
many European film industries considering their future anxiously in the
face of American economic influence. There is a seeming allusion to
this in the posters of Rita Hayworth that the protagonist Ricci posts up
in Bicycle Thieves (1948), a film which otherwise seems quintessentially
of its own time and place in post-war Italy, where the development of
neo-realism had at its aesthetic and ideological core a rejection of the
blueprint model of the screenplay.
In France, the Blum-Byrnes agreement in April 1946 opened the mar-
ket to American imports. In an attempt to protect domestic production
by concentrating on ‘quality’ films, in 1949 the Centre Nationale de
la Cinématographie (CNC) introduced a selective system of ‘bonuses
for quality’, awarded to established film-makers, initiating the ‘tradition
of quality’ that would form the backdrop to Truffaut’s polemical attack
on contemporary French screenwriting. Less apparent at the time were
the long-term effects of the anti-monopolistic Paramount case of 1948,
which began the process whereby the vertically integrated Hollywood
studios were eventually required to dispose of their exhibition outlets.
This marked the beginning of the end of the Hollywood studio system,
an industrial structure which, supported by governmental foreign pol-
icy, had projected a global reach and economic power that impacted on
‘national cinemas’ well beyond American shores.
Largely as a result of the Paramount decision, the Hollywood stu-
dios started to close their writing departments. As we shall see in the
next chapter, this is associated with the replacement of the numbered
shooting script by the master-scene screenplay, which was better tailored

163

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164 A History of the Screenplay

to the requirements of writers working relatively independently of the

studio system. This desire for independence—from the shooting script,
from the studio, from America and from a Hollywood that embodied all
of these things—made the years following the Second World War a time
of manifestos and factions in European screenwriting, surrounding such
questions as the status of the shooting script, the argument that certain
kinds of screenplay were literary rather than cinematic and the desire to

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find ways of film-making that liberated the director from the perceived
shackles of the written text.
One method of moving still further away from the shooting script
was to film directly from a prose story. Other than in the intermediate
forms of the synopsis and the treatment, the prose scenario had not
been a significant form in Hollywood production since the 1910s, but
it re-emerged as an important mode of film writing in many different
guises in European art-house or ‘auteur’ cinema of the 1950s. Within
little more than ten years, an era that had begun with the seemingly
unshakeable domination of the European film industry by American
economic and political power would end with American cinema increas-
ingly looking for inspiration to Europe and beyond, and in figures like
Cesare Zavattini, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, François
Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard discovering film-makers whose attempts
to create new forms of cinematic expression were intimately bound up
with a reconceptualisation of the role and nature of the screenplay.

Italian Neo-Realism, Cesare Zavattini and

Michelangelo Antonioni

Neo-realism emerged partly as a political and moral response to

fascism—although this familiar argument perhaps disguises continuities
between pre- and post-war cinema, and sidesteps political differences
between variant forms of realism that are too complex to be unpacked
in detail here.1 The movement is in ideological, aesthetic and industrial
opposition to the studio-bound ‘white telephone’ films of the Mussolini
era, preferring instead to shoot on location with amateur actors, and
demonstrating a suspicion of the script as a mechanism for creating nar-
ratives of escapist fantasy. Much like contemporaneous developments in
French film theory (especially in the work of André Bazin), neo-realist
cinema offers a glimpse of the possibility of an unmediated reality or
truth.
At least, these are some of the views on cinema advanced by Cesare
Zavattini, who like many screenwriters started his working life as a

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 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 165

journalist. He began writing screenplays in 1934 and became best

known as a theorist of neo-realism and for his work as a writer in
collaboration with the director Vittorio de Sica on Shoeshine (1946),
Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951) and Umberto D (1952).
For the most part, Zavattini worked within the large-scale collaborative
framework that characterised film writing in Italy, and to the extent that
it makes sense to speak of authorship in this context he can be seen as

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not so much a screenwriter but a dramaturg, working on story shape and
aesthetics, rather than as a lone author writing completed screenplays.
Nevertheless, he appears to have been solely responsible for the story
of Shoeshine, and according to one of the actors who appeared in that
film it ‘had a perfect shooting script, a perfectly fixed, well-worked-out
scenario. Only it was based on the truth’.2
It is what Zavattini means by ‘truth’ that makes him important in the
history of the screenplay, to which he often appears actively hostile. Like
many broadly contemporaneous writers in France, Zavattini conceived
of cinema as a form of writing in itself, and his dream of a world in
which cameras and film stock were as available to everyone as pens and
paper was an anticipation of Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo of 1948, in
which

the cinema is quite simply in the process of becoming a means of

expression, a form in which and through which an artist can express
his thought, however abstract it may be, or translate his obsessions,
exactly as is the case today with the essay and the novel. Better, there
will no longer be screenwriters, because in such a cinema the distinc-
tion between author and director no longer makes sense. The author
writes with his camera as the writer writes with a pen.3

Writing, by contrast, was by definition an intervention in, or distor-

tion of, reality. This is one more or less ontological way in which the
written text becomes a problem for Zavattini. A second, more specific
difficulty with the screenplay text was that the narrative fiction film rep-
resented this falsification of reality in an especially intense form: ‘The
putting together of one situation after another in a narrative line is not
so very difficult. The analysis of a situation or an action in depth is
extremely difficult.’4 To this extent, Zavattini’s aesthetics are in opposi-
tion to Hollywood at least as much as to Italian cinema under Mussolini;
if anything, it is the Italian left, in the form of a Marxist adherence to
nineteenth-century novelistic realism, that often appears the target of
his polemic.5

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166 A History of the Screenplay

Zavattini’s ideal is a precise inversion of the Hollywood continuity

script and its European analogues, the Russian ‘iron scenario’ and the
German Drehbuch. As we have seen repeatedly, the attempt to create a
cinematic ‘blueprint’ inevitably confronts the pressures and serendip-
ity of actual film production, so that the more precisely the script
attempts to anticipate the film, the more noticeable will be the varia-
tions between the two. Much the same can be said of the relationship

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between Zavattini’s ideals and his achievements: as Stefania Parigi drily
remarks, ‘his ideas [were] in large part contradicted by [their] prac-
tical applications’, because ‘his work as a scriptwriter [ . . . ] necessarily
imposed compromises’.6 Peter Bondanella, perhaps the foremost
English-language historian of Italian cinema, is dismissive: unlike con-
temporary Italian directors, ‘Zavattini emphasizes the most elementary,
even banal storylines Bazin prefers, and only Zavattini stresses the need
to focus upon the actual “duration” of real time’, so his best-known
statements contribute to a misrepresentation of Italian cinema of the
period.7 Among his ‘too frequently cited’ remarks, this is perhaps the
best known: ‘It is not enough to have the plane pass by three times; it
must pass by twenty times.’8 In his ideal cinematic world there would
be no script and—it sometimes seems—almost no story.
Yet this is too simple. Zavattini was well aware of the necessary contra-
diction between his theoretical ideal and the nature of cinematic form,
and that neo-realist film-makers were still obliged ‘to compose stories
invented according to tradition, and even more [ . . . ] to add to the stories
some elements of what they themselves had discovered’.9 Neo-realist
films—and here he cites the familiar examples, including Bicycle Thieves
and Umberto D—‘were inspired by the possibility of telling everything,
but, in a certain sense, they still involve translation because they tell
stories and do not apply the documentary spirit simply and fully’.10 The
real basis of his critique is that cause-and-effect, linear storytelling makes
the storyteller pass on by, as it were, rather than pausing to consider the
deeper implications of the moment,

to ‘stay’ there inside it [ . . . ] For example: let us take two people who
are looking for an apartment. In the past, the film-maker would have
made that the starting point, using it as a simple and external pretext
to base something else on. Today, one can use that simple situation
of hunting for an apartment as the entire subject of the film.11

It is not that nothing is happening: something crucial is happening, but

the narrative drive of conventional storytelling cinema has been forcing
us to overlook it.

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 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 167

Similarly, the statement that ‘[i]n neo-realism, the screen writer and
the writer of dialogue disappear; there will be no scenario written before-
hand, and no dialogue to adapt’12 needs to be considered not only in
relation to the idea of the camera as a pen, but also in the context of
a general argument about the nature of the film-making process that
Zavattini constructs against the conception-execution model which, as
we have repeatedly seen, has been a problem for many other film-makers

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and critics as well: ‘Everything is in flux. Everything is moving. Some-
one makes his film: everything is continually possible and everything is
full of infinite potentiality, not only during the shooting, but during the
editing, the mixing, throughout the entire process as well.’13
The simplicity of the storylines in Zavattini’s best-known films con-
trasts with the complex process by which the scripts themselves were
developed.14 Robert S. C. Gordon’s account shows the extent to which
Bicycle Thieves, for example, was a collaborative work. Zavattini became
gripped on reading a 1946 novel by an acquaintance, Luigi Bartolini,
and secured the rights after sketching out a treatment. Next, he, De Sica
and another screenwriter, Sergio Amidei, worked in detail on the story;
Amidei departed following a disagreement at more or less the same time
as another writer, Suso Cecchi, joined the team. Four additional writ-
ers also received screen credit, ‘but Zavattini always had the controlling
hand. [ . . . ] Bicycle Thieves, Zavattini insisted, was 90 per cent his own
work’.15 Even accepting this figure, it is clear that in this collaborative
environment the key factor in story development was the (formal or
informal) script conference, and the ‘90 per cent’ presumably includes
the work carried out in this context.
The typescript of Bicycle Thieves ran to 293 pages, subdivided into over
1,100 numbered shots, and so averaging three to four shots per page.16
The type is set in a narrow column of 30 to 35 characters per line, and
is simply a numbered series of actions:

1137.-
Giungono alla fermata e espettano.
Giunge un tram stracarico.

1134.-
Tra gomitate, spintoni, gente che
protesta, Antonio e Bruno riesco-
no a montare sul predellino.

1135.-
Il ragazzo sta per cadere all’ul-
timo momento, gli scivola un pie-

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168 A History of the Screenplay

de. Antonio lo sorregge e lo spin-

ge dentro.

1136.-
Bruno riesce ad entrare nel tram.
Riesce a trovare un posticino al
finestrino. Dai vetri del finestri-
no vede il padre che ancora sul

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predellino dove si regge a fatica
con un piede sul predellino e l’al-
tro lungo il bordo della vettura.

These scenes, in which father and son take a tram, form part of ‘a long,
extended, alternative ending scored out by hand’ on the typescript.17
In addition to the problem of collaboration, this presents us with
a highly detailed conceptualisation of the action that seems at odds
with Zavattini’s suspicions about the functions of a screenplay. On the
other hand, the relatively rudimentary physical presentation of the
typescript—which may owe something to the conditions under which
it was created—reveals none of the detailed planning functions for dif-
ferent members of a production team that characterise the Hollywood
screenplays of this period. As Mark Shiel puts it,

As with Zavattini’s adaptation of Bicycle Thieves from Luigi Bartolini’s

novel (1946) or Visconti’s adaptation of La terra trema from Giovanni
Verga’s I Malavoglia (1881), those scripts which did have literary
sources signified a refusal of loyalty to the written word, which was
seen to restrict the potential for realism. Neo-realist scripts were
usually collaboratively produced by several contributors and left
significant room for modification during shooting.18

The form of the script appears to facilitate improvisation, and it is

certainly noteworthy that the episode above was deleted from a film
whose ending has occasioned so much comment about the nature of
storytelling. Neo-realism generally, and Bicycle Thieves especially, is usu-
ally viewed as presenting relatively open, unresolved endings, with
a corresponding de-emphasis of the shaping narrative provided by a
script. This has prompted counter-arguments that the story is, in actual-
ity, carefully structured (e.g. around the two parallel thefts of a bicycle).
Shiel understandably takes issue with the reductive view of Bicycle
Thieves as ‘a “quest” that follows a “misdeed” that upset the “initial sit-
uation” ’.19 Equally, however, it is possible to overstate the degree of ‘the

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 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 169

attenuation of classical narrative structure, active characterization and

narrative closure evident in the film’.20
Zavattini appears multiply conflicted: as a strong-minded and inde-
pendent film theorist who was working in a production context that
prioritised collaboration, as a screenwriter working in an ideological and
aesthetic context that questioned the function of the screenplay, and as
a creator of well-structured stories who dismissed narrative fiction as a

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distraction from the need to engage with reality. To some extent his the-
oretical pronouncements represent an attempt to resolve these conflicts,
although in practice there remains a contradiction between his purist
conception of realism and the pragmatic demands of a storytelling mode
that is readily apparent in the films themselves.
If neo-realism flourished only briefly, between about 1946 and 1953, it
was still a significant inspiration on André Bazin and the younger critics
of Cahiers du Cinéma who would proceed to forge the French New Wave.
It also saw the beginning of the career of Federico Fellini, and influenced
the slightly later ‘internal neo-realism’ of Michelangelo Antonioni. Like
Zavattini, Antonioni was both a prolific writer yet suspicious of story,
and anxious to preserve the creative autonomy of the filming process.
For Antonioni, films are ‘documents, not of a completed thought, but
of a thought in the making’:21

Arranging scenes is a truly wearisome job. You have to describe

images with provisional words which later will no longer have any
use, and this in itself is unnatural. What is more, the description can
only be general or even false because the images are in the mind with-
out any concrete point of reference. You sometimes end up describing
weather conditions. [ . . . ] Isn’t it absurd? [ . . . ] As far as I’m concerned,
it’s only when I press my eye against the camera and begin to move
the actors that I get an exact idea of the scene; it’s only when I hear
dialogue from the actor’s mouth itself that I realize whether the lines
are correct or not.

Besides, if it were not so, pictures would be clumsy illustrations of

a script. It often happens, but I disapprove of making movies that
way.22

Antonioni wrote this in his introduction to a published collection of

four of his shooting scripts: Il Grido (1957), L’Avventura (1959), La Notte
(1960) and L’Eclisse (1962). These are essentially prose narratives inter-
rupted by stretches of dialogue, and as Antonioni points out, there are

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170 A History of the Screenplay

significant variations between the films and these scripts. His unfilmed
projects are often committed to paper in the form of prose stories, while
his completed but unproduced screenplay The Color of Jealousy (1971)
repeats the form of the earlier shooting scripts, but differs in placing as
much emphasis on mood, character or response as on the approxima-
tion of a series of shots, in this way retaining many of the functions of
a treatment:

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Matteo—that’s the man’s name—looks at his watch. He checks the
clock on the dashboard against his wristwatch. He does this while
recklessly but calmly continuing to drive on. In fact, he’s a very calm
sort of guy, about thirty-five, with longish hair that he sometimes
runs his fingers through. But despite his self-control, it’s obvious he’s
in a hurry and in a state of mental turmoil. His self-control comes
from his tendency to be self-critical, and this quality keeps his fits
of jealousy—which we shall shortly see—from becoming foolish or
ridiculous.23

Although this kind of character description is certainly not unknown

in other forms of screenwriting, seen as a body of work—screenplays,
shooting scripts, critical interventions, interviews—Antonioni’s writings
suggest that the auteur film-maker needed to be liberated from the pre-
scriptions of the conventional shooting script. It was in the work of
Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, however, that the use of the prose fiction
or treatment form would be most influentially and strikingly merged
with screenwriting.

Ingmar Bergman and the prose fiction screenplay

Bergman’s screenplays bear little resemblance to any we have seen in

previous chapters. Their unique style is well summarised by Birgitta
Ingemanson:

Reading like short stories and plays, their extensive stage directions
are replete with qualitative adjectives and verbs, metaphors, similes,
examples of personification, interior monologues, and other non-
cinematic features which are not normally found in a genre noted
mostly for its terse language, technical information, and line-by-
line dialogue. [ . . . ] [O]nly the reading public will benefit from their
information.24

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 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 171

The published screenplay for Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), the

untypical romantic comedy that projected Bergman from a national
to a global stage, illustrates these qualities well. It begins with a short
scene in the office of the lawyer, Fredrik Egerman, where his employ-
ees comment on the beneficial effect of their boss’s young wife on his
mood. Then:

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Fredrik Egerman whistles contentedly as he walks down the street
at a rapid, springy pace, occasionally greeting a passer-by. He is a
well-known and highly regarded man in this small town.

Now he walks into Almgren’s Photo Studio and is greeted at the door
by the shop owner’s wife, a fat, sweet-smelling woman in a light sum-
mer gown. She curtsies politely and asks him to be seated in the outer
office.25

Two things about this passage are immediately striking in the context
of conventional understandings of screenplay form: there are no slug
lines to indicate the transition from location to location, and it has a
narrative mode akin to prose fiction, with the inclusion of comments
that do not immediately translate into specified visual images: ‘He is
a well-known and highly regarded man in this small town’, and the
woman is ‘sweet-smelling’.
Something like Bergman’s present-tense, short story form, eschewing
the use of slug lines to segment the script into scenes, had been used
before: in the treatment stage commonplace in script development in
Hollywood production, and in John Gassner and Dudley Nichols’s edi-
torial recasting of screenplays into a hybrid form combining narrative
fiction and stage-play format in their 1943 collection of Twenty Best
Film Plays.26 These are quite different, however, from Bergman’s con-
sistent retention of the short story form within the shooting script (all
four of the screenplays in the collection in which Smiles appears have
the same format). A logical assumption would be that this form is a
result of editorial intervention at the publication stage. Birgitta Steene
remarks that ‘the writing stage for him is not the final stage . . . [i]n its
last, practical moment in the creative process, the Bergman script may
undergo noticeable changes’,27 and as Anna Sofia Rossholm explains,
‘Bergman’s published scripts are rarely identical with the unpublished
script versions used in the process of production, nor altogether adjusted
to correspond to the released film; the published script is often a hybrid

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172 A History of the Screenplay

of the shooting script and the film, which in itself represents a unique
version’.28
Nevertheless, Bergman’s characteristic approach is consistent between
stages. In the classical Hollywood system, script changes are ordinar-
ily the product of negotiations and communications, written and oral,
between the writer(s) and others involved in the production process,
especially but not exclusively the producer. While each version of the

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script remains provisional, it is, as it were, the end process of one phase
of production. Following the closure of the studios’ writing depart-
ments in the 1950s this often became true in a strictly contractual
sense, with a writer usually being commissioned to produce a certain
number of drafts (frequently three), the submission of a draft represent-
ing the culmination of one stage in a contracted series. For the auteur
writer-director Bergman, however, the series of drafts shows the writer
working through a set of problems identified in the handwritten note-
books with which he would commence a project. During the period in
which he was preparing Persona (1966), he spoke of a desire ‘[t]o be an
artist for one’s own sake’,29 and this is one way in which the writer-
director as ‘auteur’ is conventionally distinguished from the Hollywood
screenwriter: Bergman is in communication with himself, or at least is
attempting to communicate a personal vision to others.
The form of Bergman’s screenplays is arguably designed to speak to
both of these addressees: the artist himself, and a small community
of others tasked to bring the project to fruition. Rossholm’s detailed
exploration of Persona traces the complex processes of composition of a
work that represents perhaps the most radical departure of the director’s
career, most obviously in deconstructing the more familiar narrative
structures of his earlier films. For example, his notebook work on an
ultimately unfilmed project, The Cannibals, furnished material for both
Persona and The Hour of the Wolf (1968), which complicates the path of
textual transmission. Most of Bergman’s screenplays were
written in three versions: a handwritten screenplay draft, a work
script and a shooting script, later edited into the published
screenplay. [ . . . ] The script versions do not differ in style or mode
of writing (none of them contain technical details on camera move-
ment, etc.) Instead, the differences between the scripts represent
changes to the scenes and added or removed passages.30
Lorrimer’s erratic Modern Film Scripts series reproduces the same text
of Wild Strawberries as appears in the Four Screenplays collection that
includes Smiles, and is prefaced with a note:

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 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 173

The literary script in this book is identical to that used by Ingmar

Bergman when filming, except that: (1) the original script contained
numbers before each sequence indicating the estimated number of
shots which would be necessary for that sequence; (2) since this
script was prepared before shooting began, it contains sequences and
dialogue which do not appear in the final film.31

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The structure and narrative flow of a Bergman screenplay is conse-
quently far more ‘literary’ than is possible with the frequent and
intrusive slug lines of more conventional forms.
It is literary in another sense also, since it engages the distinctive prop-
erties of writing in ways that do not have a direct correlative in film.
One of the most remarked-upon aspects of Bergman’s style is the fre-
quent invocation of the sense of smell, as we have already seen in the
extract from Smiles. The title of Ingemanson’s article, ‘The Screenplays
of Ingmar Bergman: Personification and Olfactory Detail’, is prompted
by a 1960 article in which reviewer Hollis Alpert latches on to this pecu-
liarity in Wild Strawberries.32 Ingemanson demonstrates its appearance in
no fewer than nine screenplays, and one could multiply many times her
own examples, among the most striking of which are the ‘musty scent of
old wood and a dying house’ in Through a Glass Darkly (1961), the ‘cool
fragrance of salt and seaweed, wet wood and rain-soaked juniper bushes’
drifting in through an open window in Persona (1966), and the house
full of ‘whispering voices and a smell of coffee’ and ‘[t]he scent of with-
ering flowers . . . mixed with the cigar smoke and the smell of strangers’
in Cries and Whispers (1972).33
This is only one of many ways in which the Bergman screenplay
presents an overtly narrating voice. To take one of hundreds of possi-
ble illustrations, from Smiles of a Summer Night, ‘Out of the twilight, out
of nowhere, a melody is heard. It seems to have been born out of the
night, out of the bouquet of the wine, out of the secret life of the walls
and the objects around them’. Given the remarkably hypotactic qual-
ity of these texts, it is notable that ‘there is little evidence in the films
of an effort on Bergman’s part to portray personification (or any other
literary features) and olfactory detail cinematically’.34 In these ways
Bergman’s writing exemplifies the division between the literary and the
cinematic text we saw in Chapter 5 in connection with Eisenstein. One
can certainly consider Bergman’s scripts to be literature as much as filmic
pre-texts, and to represent a meditation within the self as much as a set
of instructions or communications with another. This is, in part, simply
because the writer-director has a more secure sense of the intentions of

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174 A History of the Screenplay

the written text than does the director adapting the words of another
person.
In Bergman’s writing, however, there is a more particular creative
sense of this relationship, in which the mode of writing is part of a holis-
tic creative method. Rossholm remarks that ‘Bergman did not consider
his screenplays as autonomous literary works but as parts of a process,
from initial impressions, to words, to cinematic images’.35 Ingemanson

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locates the source of the ‘haunting animation in Bergman’s screenplays’
in ‘the apparent conflict between his extreme distrust of words and ver-
bal communication on the one hand, and his nevertheless persistent
need to communicate with other people on the other’—those others
being, in this context, the actors and film crew, resulting in ‘his unusual
kind of screenplay with its extensive stage directions and abundant use
of literary images’.36
Bergman provides a fascinating illustration of the paradox that while
the function of a screenplay may lie in its anticipated transformation
into a different work in another medium, for that reason it generates
textual peculiarities all its own. Arguably, the more sensitive the writer
to the needs of the crew, and particularly the actors, the more impor-
tant it becomes to write material other than that which can be reduced
to the purely visual. As Steene puts it, ‘Bergman needed, at least up to
the writing of Persona (1966), to set down his theme and vision not
only in a minimal verbal way in order to clarify his cinematic intention,
but also in such a fashion that the printed text achieved its own auton-
omy of being’.37 As the contrast between this assessment and Rossholm’s
suggests, the idea of textual ‘autonomy’ seems to be bound up with
a notion of ‘literature’ as a form of writing that repays attention on
its own merits without reference to another sign-system such as that
of cinema. Equally, however, a literary text may well provide informa-
tion (e.g. pertaining to character) that is not strictly visual, but which
is nonetheless valuable to an understanding of the film story. Actors
often discuss matters of ‘motivation’ with the director, and it becomes
a logical responsibility of a writer-director working with an established
company, as in Bergman’s case. There is no particular reason why the
screenplay should not provide this information instead; indeed, com-
mentary of this kind was routinely present in the silent continuity, as
we saw in Chapter 4.
Bergman did not remain static as a writer. Steene notes a process of
textual pruning, beginning with Through a Glass Darkly (1960) and the
‘chamber film scripts’, culminating in Cries and Whispers (1972). There-
after, with Scenes from a Marriage (1973) he becomes more verbose, often

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 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 175

including commentaries on the scenes. This practice may owe some-

thing to his work in the theatre, and coincidentally, as we shall see in
the next chapter, at more or less exactly the same time Francis Ford
Coppola was using comparable methods derived from theatre practi-
tioners in compiling his ‘bible’ working copy of the screenplay for The
Godfather (1972).
Both in his working processes and within the films themselves,

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Bergman came to exemplify, in the 1950s, the notion of the film artist.
As a writer-director he epitomised the independent auteur, and his cin-
ema facilitated a view of film as personal expression, pursuing a logic
of symbolism or interior structure rather than that of narrative and the
goal-oriented protagonist. Very problematically, this would mesh with
ideas of the ‘auteur’ director being developed contemporaneously in
France by the soon-to-become-directors writing for Cahiers du Cinéma.
In the nouvelle vague, responsibility for the film would lie with the direc-
tor, with a corresponding reduction in the status of the screenplay.
Jean-Luc Godard, for example, may have idolised Bergman, but the
‘auteurist’ understanding of film-making in France arose from altogether
more local concerns.

France and the ‘New Wave’

The German occupation of France transformed what had previously

been relatively anarchic approaches to screenwriting in that country
into something more closely approximating those of the Hollywood stu-
dio system, implementing procedures which, after the war, would lead
to divisions of labour and a process of script development that resem-
bled their American equivalents. Ironically, then, ‘during the sound
period French scriptwriting practices moved steadily toward a more
and more rigid, elaborate, and formalized set of procedures, precisely
at a period when American practices were retreating from them’.38 The
demands of censorship and political control meant that by 1942 French
film-makers were obliged to submit a completed découpage (roughly
speaking, a form of shooting script) before proceeding to production.
In 1944, this process was further broken down into stages of script devel-
opment, requiring first the submission of a synopsis (to be assessed for
quality) and later the découpage and the dialogues (to be assessed for
‘morality’).
Colin Crisp’s analysis of French screenwriting manuals and magazines
suggests that after the war a new division of labour arose to accommo-
date the approximately five stages through which script development

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176 A History of the Screenplay

would now proceed—though the number of these stages, the discrimi-

nations between them, and the terminology are all unstable both within
the industry generally and in relation to a given project. Initially a scé-
nariste would be tasked with recognising suitable material (the initial idée
de film) and developing it into the first stage, a 10- to 20-page, present-
tense prose synopsis, aimed at attracting the attention of a producer. The
producer would then commission an adapteur to develop this story idea

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into more recognisably cinematic form, via the second stage—the traite-
ment of 30 to 50 pages, analogous to its American counterpart—and
the third, the continuité, which was akin to the master-scene script and
began the cinematic process of segmenting the action into around nine
to 13 sequences, with possibly ‘two or three larger plot units (acts), and
40–50 “scenes,” each of two to three typed pages in length: the continuité
might therefore look somewhat like a sketchy play, with bits of dialogue
indicated, of some 80–100 pages in length’. It would be packaged with
a synopsis and a list of characters and settings. A third worker, the dia-
loguiste, would then add to this the dialogue, resulting in the fourth
stage, the continuité dialogue. Finally, it was the director’s responsibility
to transform this material into the découpage technique, which inserted
technical directions and ‘concise sketches of the overall setup for each
individual shot’, to produce a text of between 125 and 200 pages.39
The découpage technique is, therefore, similar to the American ‘con-
tinuity’ of the silent era, as well as to the ‘iron scenario’ in Soviet
Russia, the German Drehbuch, and highly detailed forms of shooting
script in general. However, Crisp notes that the separation of writing
stages and roles was not universal, and in many cases what devel-
oped was not so much a rigid and chronological series of iterations as
an ongoing, collaborative team effort. In short, the French producer-
package system facilitated a spectrum of working practices, from ‘the
businesslike sequentiality of divided labor to the slightly orgiastic chaos
of an interactive houseparty’;40 and if that is not quite how Hollywood
presented itself, the Americans, too, were often more reliant on devel-
oping screenplays via formal and informal script conferences than is
apparent from the more purely industrial readings of its system, as Claus
Tieber argues.41 In any case, and making allowances for a few writers
such as Jacques Prévert who could act in more than one capacity, the
writing team became the norm in France, as did collaboration between
the writers and a director such as Claude Autant-Lara, who worked
repeatedly with the writing duo of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost.
This team was an especial target of François Truffaut’s notorious
polemic ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, published in
Cahiers du Cinéma in 1954. Truffaut argued against—and, arguably,

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 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 177

helped to construct in the process—a French ‘tradition of quality’, which

he considered to be dominated by littérateurs who were responsible for
excessive ‘psychological realism’.42 Truffaut accuses Aurenche and Bost
of being ‘essentially literary men’43 , and of having their own thematic
concerns which they impose on the material, regardless of the source
text they are adapting. Against these figures, Truffaut affirms the qual-
ity of the work of ‘Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques
Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati, Roger Leenhardt [ . . . who]

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are auteurs who often write their dialogue and some of them themselves
invent the stories they direct’44 . What concerns him particularly is the
idea that the meanings within a film can be traced not to the director but
to the writer(s), and although Crisp is hostile to the ‘expressive myth’
that Truffaut can be accused of propounding, his own analysis confirms
Truffaut’s to the extent that ‘[o]ften the expressivity of a text can more
confidently be connected to the scriptwriter than to the director, or at
least to collective authorship dominated by the scriptwriter’.45
The structures Truffaut attacks can be traced to the division of labour
outlined above, although this was not in actuality quite so inflexible in
French cinema as might appear from his essay, and arguably Truffaut is
laying the groundwork for a critique of Hollywood, which he did not
himself pursue, rooted in the putative division between literary concep-
tion and filmic execution. Going back a little further, Truffaut’s critique
of the role of the screenwriter echoed long-standing concerns in French
cinema following the introduction of sound. In the late 1920s and early
1930s, in common with their peers in other countries, some of the most
eminent French directors, such as Abel Gance and Marcel L’Herbier,
expressed anxiety about the literary effects of dialogue and the resulting
reversion to studio rather than location filming. Much of the accompa-
nying theoretical debate drew on ideas of the specifically visual nature of
film, and alongside the work of theoreticians in other countries, such as
Rudolf Arnhem, this helped to consolidate the view that dialogue rep-
resented the encroachment upon cinema of literature or theatre. That
the sound films of directors who had come from the theatre, such as
Marcel Pagnol and Sacha Guitry, were popular with audiences only com-
pounded the crime: dialogue-intensive, commercially successful films
were in opposition to ‘pure cinema’.46
Moreover, despite the greater authorial control that was available
to the French director in comparison to most of those in Hollywood,
resentment of the writer was fuelled by a legal peculiarity:

Prior to 1957, French law considered the scriptwriter to be the author

of a film. The law of 11 March 1957, regulating authorial rights and

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178 A History of the Screenplay

intellectual property, broadened the term and opened the legal way
to a concept of auteur cinema. But it still seems to give priority to the
written sign. Article 14 states that ‘the following shall have the status
of author of a cinematographic work: the author of the scenario, the
author of the adaptation, the author of the spoken text, the author
of the musical compositions, the director.’47

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It was the director, by contrast, who was elevated to pre-eminence in
Truffaut’s cinema of ‘auteurs’. However, the distinction is not straight-
forward: as he notes himself, many of the directors on his list of
exemplary auteurs also wrote their films, while in any case it was the
norm in France (unlike in the United States) for a director to be closely
involved in the writing stage during the construction of the découpage
technique. It is important to note, then, that Truffaut was not opposed
to screenplays per se, but to a particular kind and use of the screenplay,
in this industry, at this time; and his representation of that industry is
at the very least open to debate.
Aside from the promotion of the director as auteur, the New Wave had
two broad, immediate, yet long-lasting consequences for French ideas of
the screenplay, related to the two poles of what Alison Smith terms ‘a
hysterical relation with the concept of the screenwriter, where the role
is imagined to be everything or nothing’.48 The first was that it could,
in effect, be jettisoned: ‘the particularly high profile given to Jean-Luc
Godard’s and Jacques Rivette’s improvisatory script habits led to a New
Wave myth, the idea that a film could, in normal circumstances, be elab-
orated from a few sketchy typewritten pages’.49 While such approaches
may have liberated the director, the consequent lack of structure to
many French films—real or perceived—led to counter-demands for the
re-introduction of script development within the industry, a position
which in the 1980s became a matter of government policy.50
Ironically, Truffaut himself was generally content to work with fairly
conventional screenplay forms in preparing his own films, and col-
laborated extensively with others, very much in the French tradition,
in writing the texts. For the first of the films that comprise the semi-
autobiographical Antoine Doinel sequence, The 400 Blows (1959), he
began with his own original treatment (in the familiar form of a present-
tense prose story), but thereafter worked with Marcel Moussy, who
receives credit for the dialogue and co-credit for the adaptation. For
Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed and Board (1970), he developed the story in
collaboration with Claude de Givray and Bernard Revon via conferences
and the resulting story notes. The screenplays that emerged from this

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 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 179

work are, formally, fairly conventional master-scene scripts.51 It is not

entirely coincidental that, as we shall see in the next chapter, treatments
and master-scene scripts became the predominant modes of creating a
‘spec’ or ‘selling’ script in the United States with the ending of the classi-
cal studio system after the 1950s, since both were appropriate means of
telling a story in cinematic terms but outside the constraints of in-house
production.

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A second consequence of the New Wave, then (and perhaps paradox-
ically), was the emergence of the idea of the screenwriter as author. If the
film is no longer to be regarded as simply the execution of an idea that
had been pre-conceived in its entirety on paper, this cuts both ways:
the director is liberated from the constraints of the screenplay, but so
too is the screenplay liberated from having to prepare each aspect of
the film precisely. It becomes a relatively autonomous document, and
a genre in which a ‘serious’ writer might look to work for reasons not
entirely reducible to financial reward.
This idea of the screenplay as a document worthy of attention in
itself was now immediately married with another, typically French,
approach: the emergence of creative partnerships between directors and
writers who already had established reputations in their fields, and
then came together to create some of the most striking films of the
1960s at a time when the established Hollywood model was vanishing.
This development became associated with the ‘Second Wave’ or ‘Left
Bank’ directors, especially Alain Resnais’ collaborations with Marguerite
Duras (Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959) and Alain Robbe-Grillet (Last Year at
Marienbad, 1961). Within film history, this represents perhaps the first
time (other than in the work of writer-directors) that the voice of the
screenwriter could be said to have an authorial weight within the film
that is equal to that of the director. In transforming accepted notions
of what a screenplay could be, Duras and Robbe-Grillet produced texts
that can be regarded as major forms of experimental literature, not least
for the simple reason that they were immediately published and thereby
became part of an accepted canon of literary fiction.
They also form a significant variation on the collaborative model that
had sustained French cinema since the war. Robbe-Grillet devotes much
of the introduction to Last Year at Marienbad, which is significantly sub-
titled A Ciné-Novel, to discussing the collaborative process between a
writer and director generally and himself and Resnais specifically:

Alain Resnais and I were able to collaborate only because we had seen
the film in the same way from the start; and not just in the same

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180 A History of the Screenplay

general outlines, but exactly, in the construction of the least detail

as in its total architecture. What I write might have been what was
already in [his] mind; what he added during the shooting was what
I might have written.52

This sense of an absolute fusion of roles characterises the ‘ciné-novel’

itself. Unlike the emerging master-scene form, which tends simply to

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remain silent concerning the responsibilities of other members of the
production team, Robbe-Grillet’s text explicitly challenges divisions of
labour between writer, director, composer, editor, designer and even the
creator of the title credits:

The last two credit-pictures, instead of constituting separate shots, are

gradually revealed by a sideways shift of the camera which, without
stopping on the first frame when it is centred, continues its slow, reg-
ular movement, passes across a section of the wall containing only
woodwork, gilding, moulding, etc., then reaches the last frame, con-
taining the last name or names of the credits, which could begin
with less important names and end with the major ones, or even mix
them, especially towards the end. This last picture has a considerable
margin of wall around it, as if it were seen from farther away. The
camera passes across this without stopping either, then continues its
movement along the wall.53

Here the idea of the screenplay as a blueprint for production is replaced

by a notion of a film project as one that generates more than one work
of art—the screenplay as literature, and the film as cinema—not least
because Robbe-Grillet’s text, like certain other novelistic forms, possesses
a kind of omnipotence that is denied to most screenplays, which defer
to others the task of creating many aspects of the fictional story world.
A related development is Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, which is
practically unique in presenting almost the entire story as a series of
stills, thereby defamiliarising the sense of film as movement by drawing
attention to its actual status as a succession of frames. This makes it
uniquely well suited to re-presentation in book form. The cover of the
published text describes the book, like Last Year at Marienbad, as a ‘ciné-
roman’.54 It is a kind of photographic version of a graphic novel, with
the minimal text below the images—which takes on something of the
quality of the subtitles of a film—preserving the interplay between word
and text that is the essence of the film. What finally emerges from the
radical approaches to film-making in the French cinema in these few

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 European Screenwriting, 1948–60 181

short years from 1959 to 1962, then, is not so much the replacement of
the writer by the director as the creative interplay between written text
and visual movement, leading to the creation of strikingly new forms
of each.
Writing the introduction to a collection of his shooting scripts that
was published in 1963, Antonioni captures the historical erasure of a
particular kind of numbered shooting script:

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screenplays of ten years ago [ . . . ] were full of technical specification
such as P.P., F.I., C.L., dolly, pan, etc. Today all that has disappeared,
but in my opinion this isn’t enough. Screenplays are on their way
to becoming actually sheets of notes for those who, at the camera,
will write the film themselves. The turn being taken by other arts as
well, such as music and painting, inexorably headed towards freer
forms, authorizes us to think so. The world is changing. [ . . . ] Today
the movies have a different function, different rules. The Hollywood
myth has fallen. The movie myth has fallen. Right in Hollywood,
Marilyn Monroe commits suicide.55

At this moment it could seem as if Hollywood itself had died, while

European cinema had been reborn, ushered back to life by a generation
of auteurs. But it never really works that way. By the end of the 1950s
some American film-makers were looking enviously at the European art
cinema for inspiration, and finding the potential for a new model based
on the individual writer or director as ‘author’ of a film. This would
usher in the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’, accompanied by the different
kinds of film writing that would emerge from a combination of the
prose texts favoured by many European directors with a changed form
of screenplay that was relatively free of the shackles of industrial control:
the master-scene script.

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9
Master-Scene Screenplays and
the ‘New Hollywood’

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The question of when the master-scene screenplay developed as a
conventional form is far from straightforward. Until the late 1940s, at
least, writers would usually work within a studio’s writing department
under the supervision of a producer. Each iteration of the script marked
a staging post in the journey of a story from the initial idea—which
might have originated with anyone at the studio, or been spotted as a
potential property by the studio’s story department—to the completion
of the screenplay. As noted in Chapter 7, this would not be composed
entirely in master scenes, but instead would include suggestions for
camera angles and types of shot. This made it functional as a ‘shoot-
ing script’, which could, if necessary, be followed by a more precise
segmentation by the director.
A conceptual difference, at least, between this shooting script and
a ‘master scene’ screenplay was, however, beginning to become more
apparent at around the time of ‘Paramount case’ of 1948. This Supreme
Court anti-trust ruling enforced ‘divorcement’, the separation of produc-
tion and distribution from exhibition. Tom Stempel explains succinctly
the consequences for screenwriters:

The divorcement of the production and distribution sides of the busi-

ness from the theater side meant the companies could no longer
control guaranteed markets for their films. There was then no longer
a need for the studios to have all the talent under contract, since they
did not have guaranteed work for them. [ . . . ] Instead of working for
studio heads, [screenwriters] now found themselves working for inde-
pendent producers, directors, actors, and sometimes even themselves.
The changes brought about by the Paramount decision continue into
the present.1

182

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 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 183

By the middle of the 1950s, there were widespread closures of in-house

writing and production teams. With divorcement, in place of this
method of working came what Staiger terms the ‘package-unit system’.
The screenplay was no longer part of a process that would be han-
dled by an in-house story department or producer, but instead was
a discrete property for promotion or sale. The distinction between a
‘screenplay’ as a document written in its entirety in master scenes, and

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a ‘shooting script’ defined by the insertion of shooting angles and shot
specifications, seems to have become more distinct at around this time.
In 1949, John Howard Lawson, who was very much a Hollywood
insider, published his Theory and Technique of Playwriting and
Screenwriting, a rare example of a screenwriting manual of the classical
sound era. In attempting to address the probability ‘that many readers
of this book have only a vague notion concerning the written material
that guides production’,2 Lawson takes as an exemplary text Abraham
Polonsky’s screenplay for Body and Soul (1947):

FADE IN

1. EXT. TRAINING CAMP—NIGHT—CRANE

A MOVING SHOT through bright moonlight and deep shadow,
articulates an edge of a building, a tree, part of the outdoor
ring, a heavy sandbag slowly, but just barely, swinging in
the night wind, through a wide window facing on the clear-
ing, to CHARLEY DAVIS, asleep with moonlight nibbling on
his face.
2. CLOSE SHOT—CHARLEY ASLEEP
He is struggling with a nightmare, fear sweating on his face. Far
off a train whistle in a distant river valley SOUNDS a note of
melancholy hysteria, and Charley wakes up screaming.

CHARLEY
(calling desperately from the dream)
Ben . . . ! Ben . . . !

Sitting up, eyes open, he stares around the room. The nightmare
still winds within his mind as he wipes the cold sweat off.

3. CLOSE SHOT—WALL
where moonlight patterns changing branch shapes, and the
sandbag swings slowly in the wind like conscience from a
gibbet.3

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184 A History of the Screenplay

It is worth noting the more literary qualities of Polonsky’s scene text,

including the narrative insight that Charley is still half inside the night-
mare, and the unfilmable simile ‘like conscience from a gibbet’. As
we shall see in this chapter, such comment was by no means unusual
in the early forms of master-scene screenplay that would begin to dis-
place the numbered shooting script in the 1950s and 1960s. By the end
of the 1970s, however, a dominant discourse around screenwriting was

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beginning to insist that authorial narration of this kind was inadmis-
sible in screenplays (see Chapter 10). Shot specification, too, would be
prohibited. In 1949, however, Lawson is still seeing the numbered script
segmented by shot as the default format, and indeed he has chosen this
passage precisely ‘because it includes a great many technical phrases and
reveals their function’.4
Yet the following year MGM’s then head of production, Dore Schary,
in his Case History of a Movie (1950) was speaking of the master-scene
script as a clear alternative:

The Next Voice happened to be divided into 172 scenes. But a shoot-
ing script which would reach the screen in exactly the same length
might contain up to 500 scene numbers, if the writer and producer
felt it necessary to write out each camera angle in advance. But most
directors justifiably consider the handling of the camera as in their
province [ . . . ] [O]ur screenplay was written in a comparatively short
number of master scenes in which the action ran uninterrupted for
as long as five or six pages. When Ruby Rosenberg made his ini-
tial breakdown, he grouped the scenes into eighty short sequences,
each sequence linking a series of scenes which occurred in one set in
one more or less continuous progression [to assist in shooting out of
continuity].5

Two years later, Lewis Herman’s A Practical Manual of Screen Playwriting

for Theater and Television Films (1952) contains a section on ‘the master-
scene screen play’ (two words) which, although Herman is a much less
authoritative source than Schary, is also worth quoting:

Quite often [ . . . ] the writer may not even be permitted to write a

shooting script. He may be assigned to do a ‘master-scene’ script. He
will not be required to write in camera shots and angles. What will
be expected of him is simply a completed treatment. Where, in the
treatment, he merely indicated that certain dialogue be spoken, now,
in the master-scene script, he will write in all the dialogue. Where the
treatment merely suggests, in a literary style, the action to be taken,

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 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 185

this time the writer will indicate the same action, but in screen-play
form.6

After giving an illustration, Herman explains:

That is a master scene. No camera angles have been indicated. Only a

scene description, character action, and the accompanying dialogue

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have been attended to. [ . . . ] Working in this fashion, with master
scenes, the writer will simply fill in the undetailed segments of the
treatment, using as much of the treatment’s material as is feasible.

Herman then posits that the writer will enter into a dialogue with
the producer and others, progressively refining the script until a ‘final-
final screen play’ emerges.7 Collectively, these sources, when examined
alongside screenplays written in Hollywood in the 1950s, suggest that
the master-scene script was coming into focus, as a viable ‘shooting
script’ itself, at the beginning of that decade.
A ‘revised shooting final, February 9, 1950’ script for Panic in the
Streets, known at this stage as Outbreak, closely and fairly consistently
resembles the master-scene script; aside from a few numbered inserts,
the segmentation, with 144 scenes in its 160 pages, is consistent
by scene.8 As we saw in Chapter 7, however, Hollywood screenplays
through to the end of the 1950s were still tending to specify shots,
though less so in dialogue-intensive scenes, leading to the hybrid texts
characteristic of the period. Panic in the Streets routinely includes the
shot type in the slug line, which produces the kind of inconsistencies
we saw in 42nd Street (Chapter 6). For example, the heading for scene
28 is ‘INT. MORGUE ANTEROOM – MED. SHOT’, yet the scene contin-
ues for four and a half pages. Other scenes of comparable length will
indicate ‘FULL SHOT’ in the heading. It seems unlikely that it can be
envisaged that the scenes will not include any cutting, although a pos-
sibly associated peculiarity of the script is that it will routinely specify
that action is happening in the foreground or background, as if we are
to imagine the film to be shot consistently in deep focus, as in scene 4:

EXT. SAINTE PHILIPE STREET – FULL SHOT – NIGHT

Kochak is weaving toward CAMERA. Far in the b.g. the other three
can be seen pursuing. Poldi breaks into a run and catches Kochak in
f.g. There are a few whispered sentences in Armenian before Kochak
again throws Poldi off and staggers on past CAMERA. Poldi stands
looking after him angrily as Blackie and Fitch come up.

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186 A History of the Screenplay

The master-scene screenplay does not, however, appear to be a

response to the continuity script; that is, it does not seem to represent
a deliberate backwards step from the more fully realised numbered con-
tinuity, although it is worth noting that by this date the Hollywood
screenplay in general was making progressively less use of many ele-
ments prominent in the continuity, including shot segmentation and
specification as well as parenthetical direction of speech. Instead, to the

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extent that it makes sense to speak in evolutionary terms, it appears
more likely that the master-scene script emerged from two other,
separate developments.
The first is the introduction of sound, which occasioned the writing
of screenplays containing lengthy dialogue scenes without the interrup-
tion of camera directions. In this sense, we can say that master scenes
were being written from the beginnings of sound in the late 1920s and
certainly in the early 1930s, although it is less easy to identify entire
scripts from this period that could be said to be in master-scene form.
Going still further back, the scene as the unit of segmentation is present
in the earliest extant scenarios (Chapter 2), although these directly
imitate the form of theatrical play texts and do not otherwise signifi-
cantly resemble the later screenplay form. Unlike the silent continuity,
then, which as we have seen used three distinct modes for presenting
speech (the intertitle, directly reported speech within the scene text,
and vaguer indications that unspecified speech is occurring), in all of
these cases writers appear to have turned to the theatrical play as a
model for the presentation of spoken dialogue, and this occasioned
the introduction of scenes resembling those of the later master-scene
screenplay.
The second development influencing screenplay form at around this
time appears to have arisen from modifications to the treatment. A pub-
lished talk in 1945 by the British-Irish screenwriter Bridget Boland, who
was one of the credited writers on the UK version of Gaslight (1940),
offers a straightforward definition of ‘the master scene script’ as a doc-
ument that ‘gives the content of each scene in the film with all the
settings, action and dialogue given in detail, but no camera angles
or details of movement’. Importantly, however, Boland identifies the
creation of the master-scene script as the next stage after the treat-
ment: the director then has the option of using either the master-scene
script or a shooting script.9 This resembles the process of script develop-
ment in France at around the same time, in the late 1940s, where the
continuité dialogue similarly followed the treatment as a distinct stage
(see Chapter 8).

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 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 187

In 1952, in his book Making a Film, the future director Lindsay

Anderson presented parallel texts of two pages of the ‘treatment’ and
‘shooting script’ for the British film Secret People, directed by Thorold
Dickinson and released that same year.10 Here is an excerpt from the
treatment:

The cafe landing. MARIA is at the telephone. She is finishing dialling

a number.

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MARIA: (in a low voice) Hullo.
Is that you, Louis?
Shot of Foley Street room – empty and left in disorder.
Police are searching. One takes off the receiver and listens . . .
Maria by the telephone on the cafe landing and realising that
someone is on the other end of the line, repeats:
MARIA: Is that you, Louis?
LOUIS: Hullo.
MARIA whirls round and Louis is standing behind her. He takes the
receiver from her and replaces it.
LOUIS: Come inside. We can’t talk here.

And this is the equivalent passage in the shooting script:

E.52 INT. ANSELMO’S CAFÉ. FIRST FLOOR LANDING. DAY

(STUDIO)
MARIA is at the telephone. She is finishing dialling a number.

E.53 INT. LOUIS’ LONDON LODGINGS. DAY (STUDIO)

The Foley Street room has been left in disorder. Police are
searching. One takes off the receiver and listens . . .

E.54 INT. ANSELMO’S CAFÉ. FIRST FLOOR LANDING. DAY

(STUDIO)
CAMERA STARTS on C.S. of MARIA as, still by the telephone
on the café landing, and realising that someone is on the other
end of the line, she says:
MARIA:
Hullo. Is that you, Louis?
LOUIS’ VOICE:
Hullo.

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188 A History of the Screenplay

MARIA whirls round, CAMERA TRACKING to M.S. LOUIS is

standing behind her. He takes the receiver from her and
replaces it.
LOUIS:
Come inside.

The treatment requires only the addition of scene headings to resemble

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very closely the master-scene screenplay of today, while the shooting
script requires only the subtraction of the camera directions and num-
bering. In the British context it is notable that the proximity between
these two forms, at least at this time, is sometimes accentuated by for-
matting practices. In the treatment version above, the speakers’ names,
instead of following the usual Hollywood convention of appearing
approximately centred with dialogue below, is indented a couple of
tab spaces from the left margin, with the tab setting for dialogue being
placed in the middle of the page on the same line as the speaker’s name.
Dialogue thereby comes to occupy only the right-hand side of the page,
while the descriptive scene text runs across it. This presentation, which
resembles that often used for published stage plays, was in widespread
use for British screenplays as well as treatments in the 1950s; Janet
Green, for example, wrote several successive drafts for Victim (1960) in
this format.11
More generally, the form of the master-scene script can be seen to fall
somewhere between the treatment and the shooting script in terms of
level of detail, segmentation and presentation of dialogue. Meanwhile,
the above accounts tend to suggest that the historical emergence of the
master-scene screenplay (as opposed to individual master scenes in other
kinds of script) developed as a modification of the treatment, and so
to have been a stage in a writing process that could lead finally to a
shooting script; it does not seem to have been reverse engineered from
the numbered continuity.

The beginnings of the ‘New Hollywood’

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, American scripts continued to exist

on a spectrum, anywhere from a numbered shooting script to a master-
scene screenplay. A good illustration of the variant possibilities is
supplied by Charade (screenplay by Peter Stone; revised draft, 21 August
1962).12 On the one hand, as in the master-scene script, slug lines are
reserved for scene headings, and there are many scenes with much dia-
logue and minimal scene text; on the other hand, there is a great deal

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 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 189

of shot specification, though unnumbered. The beginning of the sec-

ond scene, for example, contains directions for an establishing shot,
three close-ups, a medium shot, a two shot and a moment at which
the ‘camera pulls back slightly’, all in half a page.
By this point, the consequences of divorcement meant that
screenwriting in Hollywood was no longer a closed shop. Studios
increasingly lost their identities and became absorbed within multina-

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tional conglomerates, leasing their facilities to independent producers.
These changes in the studio system were accompanied by a new stage in
the cross-fertilisation of the American and European film industries, as
younger writers and directors, many of them the first graduates from the
new American film schools, came under the sway of European art-house
cinema and prevailing concepts of the cinematic ‘auteur’, finding their
way into directing initially through the less costly method of writing
screenplays. The prime example is Francis Ford Coppola.13
Such figures were able to write their scripts in more idiosyncratic ways
than would have been possible under the old order, and this applies
as much to the formal properties of their screenplays as to any the-
matic or generic concerns. William Goldman, for example, wrote in a
wide variety of genres but consistently eliminated scene headings, rely-
ing instead on the cut from location to location within the running
scene text. The ‘final’ of one of Goldman’s best-known screenplays,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), has no master scenes, but
instead consists of 823 numbered shots.14 For this reason, one of the
screenwriting forms Goldman’s work least resembles is the master-scene
screenplay. Instead, it has much more in common with the ‘outline’
script of early cinema, the minimalism of Zavattini’s Bicycle Thieves script
and, most strikingly, the numbered continuity script of the silent era
and the shooting script.
In his part-manual, part-memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade,
Goldman discusses ‘the first four scenes’ of Butch Cassidy15 and gives
them titles. These correspond to the following shots in the screenplay
(although the Adventures text differs in places): ‘Butch Casing the Bank’
(shots 1–14), ‘Sundance Playing Cards’ (15–59), ‘The Ride to Hole-in-
the-Wall’ (60–83), ‘The Kick in the Balls’ (84–119). In a master-scene
screenplay, the first of these scenes would have the heading ‘EXT.
BANK—DAY’, and the action would continue without numbering of
shots. Goldman instead presents it as a sequence of 14 numbered shots,
each connected to the next by a CUT TO, and each with its own brief
heading that indicates not (usually) the type but the content of the
shot: ‘ALMOST THE ENTIRE SCREEN IN BLACK SHADOW’, ‘A MAN’,

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190 A History of the Screenplay

‘BUTCH’, ‘THE WINDOW’, ‘BUTCH’, ‘A DOOR’, ‘PAPER MONEY’,

‘A GUN’, ‘A WINDOW’, ‘THE DOOR OF A BIG SAFE’, ‘BUTCH’, ‘A BANK
GUARD’, ‘BUTCH’, ‘CLOSEUP—BUTCH’. The scene text below each of
these headings provides the detail and connecting narrative thread.

Bonne and Clyde (1967)

Like many of Goldman’s films, Butch Cassidy was a reinvention of a very

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American genre. Despite the novelty of his writing form, there is also, in
the detailed shot specification, something of the old studio tradition
whereby the writing team created a shooting script. Other emerging
American writers of the time were more directly influenced by European
cinema, often turning to the French New Wave for inspiration about
story ideas and structure, but also imbibing a spirit of independence
that affected the ways in which the script was written.
In some cases, the indebtedness was direct, notably in the impe-
tus François Truffaut gave to novice writers Robert Benton and David
Newman in the development of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), often regarded
as the first of the ‘New Hollywood’ films. The American duo had
drawn particular inspiration from Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960)
and Jules et Jim (1962), as well as from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless
(1959), which had been filmed in semi-improvisatory fashion, without a
‘proper’ shooting script, from a short treatment Truffaut had given to his
Cahiers colleague.16 Ironically, however, when Truffaut became involved
in the development of the script for Bonnie and Clyde, he tried to tem-
per the existentialist ethic the Americans had absorbed from the French
New Wave by encouraging them to adapt the material to the more con-
ventional narrative structures of a Hollywood against which Benton
and Newman thought they were rebelling.17 Nevertheless, in Lester
D. Friedman’s words, ‘Bonnie and Clyde ushered in a revolutionary era
of American film-making where auteurs replaced contract directors’,18
and this change had important consequences for how scripts would be
developed and presented.
Like the film school graduates (and indeed like most of the French
New Wave directors, who began as critics), Benton and Newman were
film buffs but industry outsiders: in their case, working for Esquire mag-
azine. Bonnie and Clyde was what today would be called a ‘spec’ script,
written up autonomously and then sent to people working in the indus-
try in hopes of a sale. They managed to interest both Truffaut and then
Warren Beatty, who paid the writers a fee to develop the material.19 From
the treatment they worked up a 129-page, undated master-scene script.
Some of the differences between this and the ‘Final’, 134-page shooting

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 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 191

script (dated 6 September 1966) are apparent from John G. Cawelti’s

reproduction of each iteration’s version of the ‘poem-reading’ scene.20
This shows an important change to the story: in the master-scene script
Clyde responds to Bonnie’s poem with indifference, prompting another
fight, whereas in the shooting script version he is elated, the episode
climaxing with love-making. This is in keeping with director Arthur
Penn’s general reorientation of the story towards a heightened sense

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of tragedy and confirms the movement away from the original presen-
tation of Clyde as homosexual; instead, the overcoming of his problem
with impotence becomes a key element of the story arc. Penn also less-
ened the comic-grotesque treatment of the antiheroes in Benton and
Newman’s versions.
More important for present purposes is that a formal distinction can
be established between the master-scene screenplay and the shooting
script. The master-scene version segments the action by scene, a new
scene being occasioned by a change of location and/or time: Bonnie
and Clyde in the car (scene 104), a policeman reading the poem at the
police station (105) and then back to Bonnie and Clyde at the car (106).
(As it happens, there has been a significant passage of time between this
and scene 104, but the change of location from scene 105 would prompt
the new scene number in any case.) The shooting script segments these
three scenes into 14 shots, prompted by a change of shot type and/or
content: the first episode at the car occupies shots 232–36, the police
station shots 237–38 and the return to the car, which represents a major
rewrite of the previous iteration, shots 239–44.
On the other hand, it must be emphasised that in the first scene of our
example the shooting script does little more than simply follow the indi-
cations laid down in the master-scene screenplay. The slug line at the
beginning of master-scene 104 (‘EXT. CAR—DAY’) becomes the shooting
script’s shot 232, the screenplay scene text’s ‘interior of the car’ becomes
shot 233 (‘INT. CAR’), and each of the two close-up shots on Bonnie (234
and 236) is explicitly signalled in the earlier version. This leaves 235, but
even here the shot type remains vague in the shooting script, which calls
only for ‘CLYDE AND BONNIE’, and therefore hardly represents a more
detailed breakdown than is found in the screenplay version. Similarly
striking is that much of the narratorial comment of the screenplay has
been carried over into the shooting script, with both versions appear-
ing equally relaxed about incorporating within the scene text material
that to today’s reader might appear more appropriate within the prose-
fiction form of the treatment. In each version of our sequence, we are
told that Bonnie and Clyde ‘have lived so much in cars that they tend

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192 A History of the Screenplay

to still spend much of their time in it (sic) rather than in a room’, while
Bonnie ‘has become totally fragile, the essence of herself’.
The shooting script incorporates changes made through to 22
December. It is prefaced by a two-page cast list, including brief notes
on the major characters; among other credits, Robert Towne is ‘Special
Consultant’. The scene text is highly detailed, with precise descriptions
of the appearance of the opening title cards, for example, in addition

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to the many specifications of shot type. A note within the scene set
in the town of Joplin (scene 100), where the first of the film’s three gun
battles takes place, specifies that ‘[t]he three major gun battles in this
film of which this is the first, each have a different emotional and cine-
matic quality’. In addition to the incorporation of film references within
the diegesis (a cinema showing Gold Diggers of 1933, a brief comment
about Myrna Loy), and several others featuring still photography, par-
ticular film styles and eras are explicitly referenced on many occasions:
the opening title cards should resemble those used in 1930s film serials;
one scene is directly compared to a Sennett comedy, another to a classic
Western gunfight. The self-consciousness of these reflections on visual
style within the shooting script captures the writers’ original desire to
bring to the American screen something of the cinematic liberation and
self-referentiality of the French New Wave.
There is also extensive use of the comment mode. In scene 5, for
example, a parenthetical note explains Bonnie and Clyde’s initial attrac-
tion, at first sight: ‘Already they are in a little game instigated by Bonnie,
sizing each other up, competing in a kind of playful arrogance. Before
they speak, they have become co-conspirators.’ Other parenthetical
comments direct the delivery of almost every line in their first conver-
sations, and specifications of this kind remain prominent throughout
the text. This conspicuous use of narration within the screenplay, espe-
cially concerning motivation, presents Bonnie and, in particular, Clyde
as possessing a degree of interiority that requires exploration, including
by each other. It also attempts to prescribe audience reaction, as when a
minor character, Eugene, mentions he is an undertaker: after this point,
the narration specifies, the audience is to realise the inevitability of the
gang’s demise. Perhaps significantly, Towne was one of those involved
in reworking the script, and was among those whose concerns about
this scene resulted in a significant re-ordering of the material, with the
‘undertaker’ scene now preceding Bonnie’s visit to her family, which
therefore becomes marked by her sense of impending doom.21
The treatment offered one way of interesting a prospective reader;
the master-scene screenplay was another, since it represented a more

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 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 193

detailed, advanced and cinematic realisation of a treatment, concentrat-

ing on narrative, structure and dialogue while leaving room for further
development by directors and others. To this extent it may be said to
embrace both writers and directors as ‘authors’ of the film: the writer
prepares a version but does not intrude on the territory of the direc-
tor. Although one would not wish to push the argument too far, it is
tempting to note the historical conjunction of the rise to prominence

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of the master-scene form and the existentialist protagonists of the ‘art
house’ films being made on both sides of the Atlantic, of whom Bonnie
and Clyde are exemplars: writer and hero are united in attempting to
retain their identity as individuals in relation to a corporate, political or
social world (Hollywood?) from which, by choice or otherwise, they are
ultimately alienated.

Easy Rider (1969)

Perhaps the best example of such a film is Easy Rider (1969), the ultimate
hippie affirmation of independence from convention. While Easy Rider
shows that by the end of the 1960s the master-scene script could be used
for the most radically unconventional movie, its production context was
equally eccentric, which explains some of the peculiarities of its form.22
The screenplay has a confused history that has never been satisfactorily
resolved: credited to Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and the established
screenwriter Terry Southern, it remains unclear how much input each of
the three had, with Southern and Hopper, for example, each claiming to
have written the whole of the script. Bert Schneider funded the movie
almost on a whim, with little or no control over the production itself:
the Mardi Gras scenes were filmed without a script, significant parts of
the action and dialogue were improvised, and the producer and director
of this film were also to be its stars.
This partly explains the presence of some aspects of the script that
appear unconventional in light of the assumption that the master-scene
screenplay separates the writing stage from that of production.23 The
Easy Rider screenplay is a provisional document: the very first scene,
for example, refers merely to the completion of otherwise undescribed
‘stunts’, towards the end is a note that the Mardi Gras scenes have
already been filmed, and conversely another New Orleans scene is yet to
be discussed. There are several other production notes, especially in ref-
erence to the use of specific locations: for example, Trona, California and
Taos, New Mexico are to represent the United States and the Mexican
sides of the border, respectively. We are some way from anything resem-
bling a ‘blueprint’, but on the other hand the narrative structure is clear

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194 A History of the Screenplay

and detailed. So, in most respects, is the formal presentation. Until about
two-thirds of the way through the screenplay is in master scenes, both
in formatting and in that new scene numbers are generated strictly by
the introduction of a new location or montage. After scene 78 (in the
diner), however, the unit of segmentation suddenly changes. From 79
to 100 (the sequence in which the travellers are attacked by the red-
necks), each new number is occasioned not by a change of scene but

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by a change of shot (e.g. to a close-up); thereafter, the script shows lit-
tle consistency in slug lines, which will at times be scene headings, and
shot specifications at others. Possibly this is an indication of the chaotic
nature of the writing and production stages.
Of more general significance is that master-scene screenwriting is far
from immutable, and like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider can be easily
distinguished from the screenplays of today. For example, unfilmable
comments intrude often, as when the narration affirms its sympa-
thy with the contemporary counter-culture. At scene 50, a travelling
montage shows us glimpses of a part of Arizona ‘in the heart of “God’s
Country”, where there exists some of the best samples of crass commer-
cialism in the Universe’. Wyatt’s famously enigmatic line ‘We blew it’,
with its implication of a transcendental truth glimpsed but lost, has a
written correlative in scene 53 as Wyatt and the Stranger look at the
dying sun: ‘Only Billy’s disgruntled MUTTERING, as he stumbles up
the path toward them, shatters some profound and crystal clarity that
seemed per chance within their grasp.’ A related form of narration occa-
sionally intrudes in the form of free indirect speech, as when Billy’s
horror at Wyatt’s decision to pick up a hitchhiker is expressed not in
dialogue but as an unverbalised thought: ‘(Picking up a stranger?!? And
us carrying all this loot! What the hell’s wrong with Wyatt!?!)’
The screenplay often refers to the ‘CAMERA’ as a viewer of or partici-
pant within the action, very many speeches have parenthetical dialogue
direction, there is a tendency to specify transitional devices such as
cuts or dissolves, and while the scene text does not usually explicitly
give indications of type of shot, there are many exceptions: montages
are often described in detail, with frequent specification of the use
of quick cuts, as for example to capture the atmosphere of the street
scene as Wyatt and Billy drive along Sunset Strip; and there is some
reference to pans and close-ups. On the first travelling shot of the motor-
bikes, the screenplay specifies that the effect should be one of romantic,
balletic freedom, and suggests using a current Chrysler advertisement
as a model; having established this effect, later, similar shots of the
motorbikes are to be edited using this first example as a kind of template.

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 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 195

With the exception of montages, which can be essential for reasons

of story development as opposed to editing, the dominant discourse
surrounding screenwriting today tends to prohibit these forms of narra-
tion and direction. Along with The Graduate (1967), however, Bonnie
and Clyde and Easy Rider were ushering in an era, and a mode of
film-making, in which writers could develop new kinds of screenplay
relatively unencumbered by the dictates of a studio. Instead, during

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the high point of the ‘New Hollywood’ in the early and mid-1970s,
the script often became a site of contention between different writ-
ers; new forms of script emerged to serve the needs of writer-directors,
with relatively conventional alternates being presented to executives
and financiers; and individual scripts hesitated between conventional
modes of presentation and the more personal, short story form of the
treatment.

The 1970s

The competing accounts of the authorship of Easy Rider are symptomatic

of changes in the perception of screenplays following the end of the clas-
sical system. Formerly, any disputes over the writing could be resolved
by the producer; in any case, writers were under contract to work,
according to more or less strict procedures and disciplines, towards the
final creation of a shooting script over which the writer would not have
any further say.
Matters were different in the New Hollywood. Robert Towne, for
example, is an important figure not only because of the quality of his
scripts, but because as both an original writer (notably in his disputes
with director Roman Polanski over Chinatown [1974]) and as a ‘script
doctor’ on films as significant as Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather
(1972), he illustrates the increasing recognition that the script is a site
of contention between competing parties. Towne originally scripted a
less downbeat ending to Chinatown in which the villain Noah Cross is
killed; the ending seen on the screen is substantially Polanski’s con-
ception. Earlier instances of this phenomenon included the dispute
about the authorship of Citizen Kane and, more generally, the suspi-
cion that left-wing writers were planting subversive messages in films
such as High Noon (1952, written by Carl Foreman) that might otherwise
appear to be representative of conservative American values. In general,
however, arguments about scripts within classical Hollywood were an
everyday occurrence between contracted workers that if necessary would
be resolved by management. In a post-classical Hollywood of relatively

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196 A History of the Screenplay

autonomous writers and directors, such disputes contribute to the rise

of the notion of the writer, nearly as much as director, as auteur.
A second kind of conflict, concerning which version of a screenplay
can be said to be authoritative, can be seen in the ‘bible’ text that Francis
Ford Coppola constructed for the making of The Godfather (1972). This
was a kind of private, parallel-text version of the script—a very personal
kind of treatment, and one that, for Coppola, in many ways took pri-

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ority over the more conventional screenplay that he debated with the
studio executives. The ‘bible’ was a huge spiral notebook, resembling the
theatrical prompt book (or ‘bible’) form, on each page of which Coppola
pasted a page from Mario Puzo’s source novel.

This massive tome [was] biblical in proportions [ . . . ] and he did not

circulate it among studio executives. It meant more to him than any
formal version of the script. He began by cutting up a copy of the
novel, and pasting pages down on each left-hand folio (except for
pages he intended to omit from the screenplay, which were pasted
in sequence with a bold, black marker pen line drawn across them).
On the right-hand page he typed his detailed observations on each
‘scene’: what it involved, what should be avoided, what should be
concentrated upon and how he would achieve this.24

Coppola broke the novel’s story down into five acts, subdivided into
a total of 50 scenes. Influenced by the theatre and film director Elia
Kazan, he provided a typewritten commentary on each scene, under five
headings: ‘Synopsis, The Times (how to preserve the 1940s period qual-
ity), Imagery and Tone, The Core (the essence of the scene) and Pitfalls
(issues to watch out for, such as pacing or clichés’.25 For example, in the
first scene—the wedding sequence, including Don Corleone’s meetings
with the supplicants—there are 13 separate notes on ‘imagery and tone’
alone. Note ‘k’ comments on Bonasera, which would be the first scene
in the film:

The scene with Bonasera is good and very important. It further

defines the Don’s power, and puts forth the essence of what it is the
Don refers to as ‘friendship’ i.e. a pledge of loyalty. It is the gathering
and manipulations of these pledges which give the Don his extraordi-
nary power in the first place. It is very important that after Bonasera
gives his pledge, that (sic) we understand he feels he is now under a
grave and frightening obligation to the Godfather. Bonasera must be
a super, super actor.

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 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 197

The ‘core’ of the scene is to establish the Don’s power, his relation-
ship with Michael, and ‘the fusion of family and business’, as well as to
‘[i]ntroduce all the main characters and sub-plots of the film’. Not sur-
prisingly, among the ‘pitfalls’ appears a handwritten note: ‘Too much
exposition’.26
The screenplay that Coppola showed to the executives, meanwhile,
passed through three completed drafts, the last of which was finished

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on 16 March, though it is dated 29 March.27 In contrast to the ‘bible’,
this is a relatively conventional master-scene screenplay, representing a
‘formal version of the script’ that Coppola and Puzo submitted to, and
debated with, Paramount’s executives.28 Nevertheless, it has significant
differences from the kind of screenplay examined in the next chapter.
This is most clearly seen in the segmentation. The sequence beginning
with Bonasera asking for Don Corleone’s assistance, and proceeding
through the wedding party, occupies the first 21 pages. The marginal
numbering of each of these scenes begins with the number 1, suggest-
ing that the writers are thinking in terms of sequences, much like the
method of dividing a script into alphabetised (rather than numbered)
sequences that we saw in earlier chapters. The scenes in the wedding
sequence, for instance, are numbered from 1A to 1S. However, there is
a total of 28 scenes within the sequence. The discrepancy is explained
by the numbering of scenes according to the precise location within the
house and grounds: multiple scenes within the same location are each
given the same scene number. For example, the scene heading for 1D is
‘INT DAY: DON’S OFFICE (SUMMER 1945)’. In this scene another sup-
plicant, Nazorine, asks the Don for help. After the Don issues Hagen
with instructions as to how to implement his proposed solution, the
next scene—‘1E EXT DAY: MALL (SUMMER 1945)’—takes us outside,
to Francesco Nippi and Luca Brasi, whom the Don has been watching
from within his office, to which we then return as the Don resumes his
conversation with Hagen. However, instead of recommencing with the
‘DON’S OFFICE’ heading, the scene is simply numbered ‘1D (CONT.)’,
without any heading. A series of shots then cuts between the two loca-
tions: the Don and Hagen in the office, and views of Michael Corleone
in the mall area where we have seen Nippi and Brasi, again resulting
in the alternating numbers of ‘1D (CONT.)’ and ‘1E (CONT.)’. To avoid
visual confusion, throughout the script all transitions between scenes
(or shots) are marked by a continuous black line across the page.
The Godfather screenplay thereby arranges material in three ways:
by sequences (relatively continuous narrative events), scenes (grouped
according to location) and shots (as the script alternates between

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198 A History of the Screenplay

locations). While the method of distinguishing between scenes and

shots is fairly consistent throughout the screenplay, however, the
sequence approach is intermittent. Perhaps one reason why Coppola
preferred the ‘bible’ is that the rearrangement of the material in the
screenplay obscures his initial, 50-scene segmentation of the story. More
generally, the bible is a very personal kind of text, while the screenplay
is something of a corporately engineered document, albeit one that is

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still idiosyncratic in a number of ways.
A third and final kind of conflict we can see in the screenplays of
this period concerns a dialogue we have been tracing over the course
of the last two chapters between the master-scene screenplay and the
treatment. The major unit of segmentation in Paul Schrader’s script for
Taxi Driver (1976), for example, is the sequence: ‘TRAVIS GETS A JOB’
(scenes 1–5), the credit sequence (6–11), ‘WE MEET TRAVIS’ (12–31), and
so on. This is an approach more commonly found in treatments than
screenplays—the sequence headings read like the chapter headings of a
novel—as is Schrader’s very prominent use of the comment mode:

‘When it rains, the boss of the City is the taxi-driver’—so goes the cab-
bies’ maxim, proved true by this particular night’s activity. Only the
taxis seem to rise above the situation: they glide effortlessly through
the rain and traffic, picking up whom they choose, spurning whom
they choose, going where they please.
Further uptown, the crowds are neither so frantic nor so glittering.
The rain also falls on the street bums and the aged poor. Junkies
still stand around on rainy street corners, hookers still prowl rainy
sidewalks. And the taxis service them too. All through the credits
the exterior sounds are muted, as if coming from a distant room or
storefront round the corner. The listener is at a safe but privileged
distance.29

This is presented as two numbered paragraphs (9 and 10) in the

screenplay itself (aside from the appearance of CREDITS and SOUNDS
in upper-case in the screenplay, the published version is identical).
Each of these paragraphs could also be described as a scene, with
implicit subdivision into shots. In Taxi Driver, however, the informa-
tion we might expect to find in a scene heading is very often presented
narratively within the text. The first shot, for example, is an exterior
of a garage. Shot 2 is seen from inside the garage, and should there-
fore begin a different scene. But instead of following master-scene logic

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 Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’ 199

by separating the scene elements, with capitalised headings above and

descriptive scene text below, Schrader presents the scene information as
part of the running text: ‘INSIDE GARAGE are parked row upon row of
multi-colored taxis’. In these ways, Taxi Driver is an outstanding exam-
ple of the interplay between the treatment and master-scene forms that
is characteristic of the New Hollywood screenplays of this period.
American screenwriters and directors working in the aftermath of the

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classical studio system, then, had relative freedom to develop a script
in the style of their choosing, even though compromises would often
have to be made in dealing with producers. ‘New Hollywood’ privileged
the idea of the individual film-maker in opposition to the ‘system’, of
course, and the canonical examples of screenplays from this era there-
fore tend to be self-selectingly unusual. The point still holds, however,
that this was a period of relative independence for screenwriters, in com-
parison to their predecessors working under contract in the now-defunct
writing departments. Nobody was insisting that screenplays had to be
written a certain way. By the end of the 1970s, however, this was about
to change.

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10
The Contemporary Screenplay
and Screenwriting Manual

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For Peter Biskind,

[t]he thirteen years between Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Heaven’s
Gate in 1980 marked the last time it was really exciting to make
movies in Hollywood, the last time people could be consistently
proud of the pictures they made, the last time the community as a
whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an audience
that could sustain it.1

The kind of film the passing of which Biskind laments is one that
New Hollywood writers and directors had modified from European cin-
ema of the 1950s, characterised by a relatively aimless protagonist,
or one who could not fully understand the motivations behind his
or her actions, or the actions of others. From Zavattini to Godard,
there is the idea that story itself is suspect, an act of bad faith that
places an externally imposed structuring principle on life; and traces
of this European influence, combined with the broader counter-cultural
and anti-establishment movements of the 1960s, can be seen in the
screenplays considered in the previous chapter, notably Bonnie and Clyde
and Easy Rider. One manifestation of this resistance to narrative was
the ‘open’ ending, in which significant questions are left unresolved, or
resonating in the spectator’s mind; a late example is Being There (1979).
By the end of the 1970s, for all the creative talent and initial com-
mercial success of the ‘New Hollywood’ directors, executives saw the
commercial future in the blockbuster and the event movie such as Jaws
(1975) and Star Wars (1977). The contrasting fortunes of Star Wars and
the economic catastrophe that was Heaven’s Gate dramatically accel-
erated a process that had long been apparent: for all their creative
achievement and critical acclaim, and despite Easy Rider’s remarkable

200

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 The Contemporary Screenplay and Screenwriting Manual 201

return on investment, the films of the ‘New Hollywood’ directors and

those who came in their wake had ultimately continued, rather than
reversed, the commercial decline of the American film industry. The
trust that executives had placed in auteurs was shown to be misplaced,
economically at least.
Commercially minded producers such as Don Simpson and Jerry
Bruckheimer were gaining traction in an industry that was undergoing

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significant transformation.2 In 1985, the divorcement decree of 1948
was revoked, permitting the studios to return to the vertically integrated
control of production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside this came
both ‘horizontal integration’ (the incorporation of formerly indepen-
dent studios within larger global conglomerates), so that a film could
be marketed across several different platforms—television and video,
for example—and the associated phenomenon of ‘synergy’, in which
products such as toys and soundtracks could be marketed to promote
the film, or vice versa. Ownership of multiple companies under one
umbrella organisation allowed a corporation to sell its products to its
own outlets.
Much critical debate surrounds whether or not, or the extent to
which, these industrial and economic changes were accompanied by
a transition to a ‘post-classical’, ‘high concept’ Hollywood aesthetic,
characterised in part by the fragmentation of narrative and its replace-
ment by a cinema of spectacle and soundtrack that catered to the media
companies’ multiple platforms. If this suggestion is correct, it has con-
sequences for the screenplay, which in Hollywood is almost invariably
a mode of storytelling. Although a full discussion of this question is
beyond the scope of the present study, there is no good reason to sug-
gest that story was displaced by visual spectacle or the showcasing of
popular songs on the soundtrack. Instead, what is remarkable is that any
putative transition to a post-classical Hollywood occurs contemporane-
ously with several changes within screenwriting culture, all of which
have the effect of increasing the visibility of the screenplay and reinstat-
ing story—albeit, perhaps, a simplified form of story—at the centre of
Hollywood discourse.3 Three developments are particularly notable: the
continued rise of the ‘spec’ script, Hollywood films that appeared to be
indebted to reproducible story templates and the rapidly growing num-
bers of screenwriting manuals, of which Syd Field’s Screenplay (1979) is
widely held to have been the first and most influential. Together, these
developments helped to solidify the screenplay into an object with more
precisely definable characteristics than at any time since the end of the
silent era.

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The ‘spec’ script

As noted in the previous chapter, the Paramount case of 1948 led, within
a few years, to the closure of writing departments in the Hollywood
studios. By the end of the 1950s, writers were no longer employees on
regular studio contracts but, in effect, were independent providers to
independent or semi-independent producers within a system in which
studios largely controlled financing and distribution. A particular pro-

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ducer or director might look to hire a given writer, as was Alfred
Hitchcock’s custom, for example; or a writer might seek to interest an
insider in a particular story s/he had to sell, as happened with Bonnie
and Clyde; or the two interests could be brought together, with a pro-
ducer looking to bring together a number of different elements, of which
a star might be one and a screenplay another, to attract funding from
external sources. These are some of the many variant possibilities within
the ‘package-unit’ system, which has had material effects on the nature
of the screenplay text. Rather than a version of a story that has been
tracked by a production team through previous iterations and is now
on its way to becoming something else—a shooting script or a film—a
speculatively written screenplay is a physical property, a ‘selling’ script,
written independently of production, and circulated to multiple reader-
ships in the hope of making a sale: if not of the screenplay, then of the
writer him- or herself.
While spec scripts had existed since the end of the classical system, if
not before, several additional factors converged to increase their produc-
tion from the late 1970s onwards. Among the least immediately visible,
but most wide-ranging, was the passing of the 1976 Copyright Act in the
United States. After this came into effect in 1978, screenwriters finally
achieved protection under the law for their unpublished scripts, which
gave writers an element of leverage in negotiating with producers or
funding providers.4 Some ten years later, a six-month writers’ strike in
Hollywood from March to August 1988 further fuelled the demand for
spec scripts, as did the rise of the film festival and the emergence of more
powerful independent distributors such as Miramax.5
Another important development was the emergence of the 12-point
Courier font as the default typeface for screenplays.6 Courier had been
introduced in the 1950s, but gained popularity because it was read-
ily accessible both for typewriters and for the home computers that
began to replace typewriters in the 1980s. Its widespread adoption
by the computing industry was due to Courier using the same fixed
width for each character; it therefore placed relatively small demands

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 The Contemporary Screenplay and Screenwriting Manual 203

on computer memory. As a further advantage, in combination with

the default master-scene format propagated by screenwriting manuals,
Courier helped amateurs to follow the supposed ‘one-page-per-minute’
rule, and therefore to offer spec scripts that gave some indication that
the writer was familiar with the idea of the script as a timing and bud-
geting document. Collectively, these developments caused screenplays
to take on a generic physical form, characterised not only by the over-

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all length of the document or the arrangement of the words on the
page, but also by what wasn’t there: screenplays were notable for their
‘white space’, which made the pages user-friendly for industry readers
and film-makers who needed to skim and annotate the script for their
own purposes.
The industry-wide adoption of Courier meant that aspiring
screenwriters could give their work a professional sheen. Since there
were no longer any in-house writing departments, the outsider could
feel that in these ways, at least, s/he could compete with others on
a level playing field. An additional factor in the growth of the spec
script was undoubtedly the perception that not only formatting but
also screen storytelling itself was something that could be relatively
easily mastered by the novice. This belief was fuelled by the kinds of
story that Hollywood was now making, and by the emergence of the
screenwriting manual as a kind of substitute training school for aspi-
rant novices, circumstances which also help to explain the growth of
the otherwise niche market of screenplay publication.

The ‘high concept’ story

The precise meaning of ‘high concept’ is disputed, but it certainly

includes an investment in visual style and spectacle, stars, and the
impact of the soundtrack. It is difficult to accept, however, that the
high concept film has ‘little commercial investment in narrative except
as a vehicle for the movie’s other pleasures’7 ; rather, it has ‘a sim-
ple, easily summarized narrative based on physically typed characters’.8
If anything, it reinstates linear storytelling at the centre of Hollywood
film-making after a decade in which the most lauded American films had
questioned the ideological assumptions behind story itself, if by ‘story’
we mean the journey of a goal-oriented protagonist towards a notion of
success (in love, in career, in money or in the overcoming of an adver-
sary) validated by a dominant American philosophy of progress. In the
New Hollywood, by contrast, there’s no success like failure, and failure’s
no success at all.

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It was an older kind of story to which high concept represented a

return. Writing in 1982, William Goldman pointed to what he saw
as a decisive shift in the kinds of film that Hollywood was making,
and suggested that by that date it was almost exclusively interested
in what he terms ‘comic-book movies’: films with melodramatically
unqualified distinctions between good and evil, and which take their
inspiration not from the observation of adult lives but from memories

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of other films, especially those associated with childhood or adoles-
cence. While the kind of movie Goldman is thinking of appears largely
synonymous with ‘high concept’, Goldman also identified Michael
Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) as a comic-book picture, which intrigu-
ingly implies certain continuities between the artistic seriousness of the
‘New Hollywood’ films and contemporaneous mainstream Hollywood
movies.9 The comic-book movie par excellence is Star Wars, which as
George Lucas acknowledged was modelled on Joseph Campbell’s The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book to which we shall return.10
Given the conjunction of propitious industrial conditions for inde-
pendent writers and Hollywood’s revived interest in simpler, more
generic modes of storytelling than had been in favour ten years pre-
viously, it is not surprising that Goldman could remark in 1983 that
‘[r]ight now, with movie companies fragmented and dying and with
money coming from all kinds of strange new sources, it is a golden
time to write screenplays’.11 It was also, as the success of Goldman’s
own Adventures in the Screen Trade (published the following year) would
suggest, a golden time to write screenplay manuals.

The re-emergence of the screenwriting manual12

While noting that screenwriting manuals have proliferated during other

periods when there has been a perceived crisis in story production,
notably the era of ‘scenario fever’ during the 1910s, David Bordwell
credits those that have emerged since the late 1970s with changing the
conception of storytelling in three main ways.13 First is the widespread
insistence that Hollywood screenplays and films are structured in three
acts. Bordwell finds little solid evidence that this was consciously used
as a structuring principle in Hollywood prior to its appearance in Syd
Field’s Screenplay in 1979, other than noting that the suggestion is also
found in Constance Nash and Virginia Oakey’s more rudimentary and
lesser-known Screenwriter’s Handbook, published the previous year. The
second emphasis Bordwell finds in the post-1978 manual lies in a par-
ticular notion of character depth, especially the idea that the protagonist

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should have some kind of character flaw, with the ‘arc’ of the character
lying in the recognition and overcoming of the flaw. Third is the idea
that this character undertakes a ‘mythic journey’, a notion derived from
Campbell.
All of these are venerable ideas. The three-act structure can be traced
back at least as far as Aristotle’s discussion of the beginning, middle and
end of a dramatic story in the Poetics. Aristotle’s notion of hamartia,

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the fault or error in or by the tragic hero, is arguably also the ultimate
source of the supposed ‘tragic flaw’ in the protagonist, which was a sta-
ple of Shakespearean criticism even before A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean
Tragedy (1904), perhaps the first sustained study of fictional charac-
ters that bears comparison to the ‘psychological depth’ and ‘backstory’
familiar from today’s writing manuals.14 Campbell’s Hero with a Thou-
sand Faces is a relative youngster, appearing first in 1949, but the book
is a study of mythic storytelling in general, and consequently the basic
narrative structure itself is familiar from any number of ancient and
modern tales.15
Also notable is that while the three concepts can be considered sepa-
rately, they are interdependent, and to some extent each is an expression
of the universal ‘monomyth’ outlined by Campbell: ‘A hero ventures
forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural won-
der: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won:
the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to
bestow boons on his fellow man’.16 This archetypal story has a very clear
tripartite structure—departure, initiation or adventure, and return—and
although in the above formulation it describes a series of events taking
place in an external world, it is equally tractable to the notion of an
inner journey, with the hero doing battle with the flaw within the self
that s/he overcomes at the end of the tale. This inner journey gives us
the ‘character arc’, and very frequently manuals will recommend that
it is the conjunction of the inner and outer journeys (or ‘motivations’)
that provides the story with depth. In short, the basic structural ideas
expressed in these manuals have formed a staple of Western, if not
global, storytelling since long before the beginnings of cinema. It is no
surprise, then, that reading films and screenplays in the light of their
arguments should enable us to see similarities in narrative films of dif-
ferent eras, though at this level of generalisation the arguments are both
indisputable and of debatable usefulness.
Bordwell is careful to qualify the idea that the manuals necessarily
support his arguments in favour of the continuing centrality of narrative
in the ‘post-classical’ era: they can only be ‘a fruitful point of departure’,

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206 A History of the Screenplay

and indeed ‘few screenplay manuals inspire confidence’.17 One reason

for this is their excessive specificity. For example, not only does Field
insist that screenplays have three acts (‘setup’, ‘confrontation’ and ‘res-
olution’), but acts one and two should also have a ‘plot point’, which
‘is an incident, or event, that hooks into the story and spins it around
into another direction’. Because Field has confidence in the one-page-
per-minute rule, this leads him to the remarkably precise assertion that

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in a screenplay for a two-hour film the first and third acts should be 30
pages each, with the middle act occupying 60 pages; the plot points,
meanwhile, should occur around pages 25–27 and 85–90.18 For Field,
then, not only acts but also plot points are not matters of interpreta-
tion; they are scientifically measurable. Beliefs of this kind have proved
damaging. The independent film-maker Tom DiCillo recalled taking a
screenplay to the Sundance festival in 1989 only to be told that ‘ “Plot
point A does not intersect with plot point B at the right page.” I said,
“I’m sorry, what is a plot point?” Everyone was saying to me, “This is
not a screenplay.” It was insane, destructive, and negative.’19
As Bordwell notes, another cause for concern is that Field,
Christopher Vogler, Robert McKee and others were not themselves noted
screenwriters, but instead began as studio readers or ‘story analysts’,
whose job was to write ‘coverage’ or appraisals of the flood of spec scripts
landing on studio desks. Rather than placing the screenplay directly
within a production context, then, it would be more accurate to say,
with Bordwell, that ‘the screenplay manuals were guiding hopefuls to
write scripts that would galvanize the frontline reader’.20
This invites several ways of thinking about the relationships between
manuals and screenplays themselves. First, manuals are undoubtedly,
to borrow Steven Maras’s phrase, one of the discourses surrounding
screenwriting, and in that capacity have also been of major interest
to Staiger, Thompson and Bordwell. In this sense they certainly have a
significant influence on screenwriting discourse within the academy, at
least. More problematic is a second relationship, namely to what extent
they represent a discourse from within screenwriting: that is, to what
extent can they be said to represent or emanate from film industries
or practitioners themselves, and what is the nature and degree of their
interaction with them? We shall return to this question, but less fre-
quently considered is a third relationship: To what extent can they be
said to represent a discourse from within screenplays themselves? This, in
turn, opens up the difficult question of what can be said to be ‘inside’
a screenplay text. We can approach this question by considering the

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manuals’ representations of perhaps the two most distinctive qualities

of screenplays: story structure and format.

Three acts? Revisiting classical Hollywood cinema

As noted, Bordwell has found no strong evidence that the three-act

structure was in conscious use in Hollywood cinema prior to the 1970s,

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and neither has Claus Tieber’s research into the story conferences and
memos that were a crucial arena within which story ideas were dissem-
inated. Further, Kristin Thompson has contested the notion that the
three-act structure has been dominant in Hollywood even since Field’s
Screenplay book of 1979 popularised the idea. Thompson also disputes
other proposals about story that routinely arise in screenwriting man-
uals, arguing that in most Hollywood films a protagonist usually has
not one goal but ‘at least two’, while the rule of thumb that one page
equals one minute of screen time is erroneous, because it demands the
co-operation of the director.21
With regard to acts, Thompson finds that instead of three, the first and
last of which each occupy about a quarter of screen time (as Field pro-
poses), the norm is four acts of equal length, Field’s middle act being
divisible into two. Where Field sees three acts in Terminator 2: Judg-
ment Day (James Cameron, 1991), for instance, Thompson sees four,
plus an epilogue.22 This phenomenon of commentators finding differ-
ent numbers of acts within the same film is not confined to mainstream
Hollywood; it is found with regard to ‘independent’ films, too. For
instance, Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush think Stranger Than Paradise (Jim
Jarmusch, 1984) has only a single act; J. J. Murphy finds three.23 More
generally, Bordwell has proposed that there are six parts to the ‘canon-
ical’ story: ‘introduction of setting and characters’, ‘explanation of a
state of affairs’, ‘complicating action’, ‘ensuing events’, ‘outcome’ and
‘ending’, whereas Paul Gulino sees a ‘division of feature films into eight
segments’.24
Clearly, something is going wrong here. Part of the explanation is that
much of the argument revolves around films, rather than screenplays,
and the former usually lack the unambiguous meta-fictional denota-
tions of units of action that we might hope to find in written texts.
In other words, it is difficult to prove that act divisions exist inside films;
it is rather a matter of judgement and interpretation, perhaps guided by
knowledge of traditional story templates. Just as Field’s three-act struc-
ture can be seen to draw on Aristotle, for example, Thompson’s four

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208 A History of the Screenplay

acts (‘setup’, ‘complicating action’, ‘development’ and ‘climax’) have

much in common with the exposition, complication, crisis and resolu-
tion of the nineteenth-century well-made play that was first popularised
in France by Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou, and which proved
influential on many of the most significant European dramatists later in
the century, most notably Henrik Ibsen.25
The difference between the theatrical play and the screenplay in this

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respect is that whereas act and scene divisions are explicitly identi-
fied within the script (although not always in Shakespearean texts,
for instance), this is rarely the case in screenplays. As we have seen
earlier, however, there are exceptions. Gulino suggests that his eight-
sequence model has historical sources, beginning with the introduction
of the 1,000-foot reel length which became standard in the 1910s. The
‘sequence’ for the multi-reel feature films that emerged in 1913 thereby
became married to the length of the reel, allowing Gulino to estab-
lish a principle of equivalence whereby one reel = one sequence = c.
10–15 minutes. By the late 1920s, screenplays were being divided ‘into
sequences identified by letter (A, B, C, etc.), a practice that lasted into the
1950s’, and in Gulino’s view the importation of playwrights to compose
Hollywood dialogue consolidated the structure of ‘an eight-sequence
structure married to three acts’.26
There is evidence to support some of this argument, although it can-
not be developed too far. Gulino concedes that the number of sequences
is a matter of readerly judgement and interpretation other than in
screenplays that are overtly composed in this fashion: his examples
are The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Double Indemnity (1944) and Air
Force One (1997). As we have seen, a minority of scripts of the 1920s
are indeed divided into alphabetised sequences, although it is far from
clear that this implied any prescribed running time. The sequences in
Hell’s Angels (1929), for example, are ultimately shaped by the nature
of the material in each: spectacular flight sequences rescued from the
silent version, dramatic material initially composed by Joseph Moncure
March and so on. Examples of alphabetised sequences can be found in
the 1950s, as in screenplays for Billy Wilder’s movies; yet as the small
number of sequences (four or five) in his scripts indicates, there was
no reason for films of this comparatively late date to conform to a reel-
based model appropriate for the shorter films of prescribed length in the
pre-feature era.
Historically, a still smaller number of screenplays or scenarios have
been consciously divided into acts, as opposed to sequences. As we saw
in Chapter 2, The Chicken Thief (1904) is, as its title page proclaims,

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 The Contemporary Screenplay and Screenwriting Manual 209

‘An Original American Comedy in a Prologue and Four Acts’, the first
and third of which are further subdivided into scenes. Given that the
piece was submitted for copyright as a ‘dramatic composition’, how-
ever, it would be unwise to draw further conclusions from this overt
imitation of the theatrical play-script model. More interesting is Roy
L. McCardell’s The Pain Flower: A Photoplay Drama of Modern Life (1915),
released by the Equitable Motion Pictures Corporation in 1916 as The

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Question.27 This is in many respects a conventional continuity of the
time, with detailed shot specifications, and packaged with many of
the usual documents, such as a synopsis, list of characters and sets,
and scene breakdown. In many other respects, however, it is fashioned
after the stage play, and prefaced with a note that makes the connec-
tion explicit: ‘ “The Pain Flower” should be enacted with restraint and
naturalness by capable and experienced actors conversant with society
ways, manners, attire and adjuncts—as Grace George and her com-
pany of players would mount, dress and enact such a drama for the
speaking-stage.’
The explicit indication of act divisions in scenarios, continuities and
screenplays, then, is in the early decades of cinema generally either an
indicator of indebtedness to theatrical conventions or a response to the
introduction of the multi-reel film, while those of later date indicate no
commitment to three acts as a structuring principle. In short, material
screenplay texts offer no support to the three-act hypothesis; although
undoubtedly many are amenable to interpretation in that light, other,
equally convincing methods of analysis are readily available.

Screenwriting manuals and screenplay format

More substantial is the argument that screenplays should be formatted

in more or less precise ways. Maras observes that:

The uniqueness of the screenplay itself is a complex issue. In terms

of scripting practices there is little that is exclusive to the screenplay
that is not present in the scene-based organisation of the scenario,
the shot-by-shot format of the continuity script, ‘the read’ of the
extended synopsis or dialogue of the playscript. Viewed in this light,
the distinctiveness of the screenplay is elusive.28

As we have seen, the various kinds of text Maras mentions here

have all been utilised and combined in distinctive ways by different
screenwriters at different times, and in various industries and modes of

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210 A History of the Screenplay

production. Attempting to prescribe a particular form for the screenplay

can therefore appear unnecessarily constricting.
Yet there is today a dominant form of screenplay, and one that cer-
tainly does not exist solely within the pages of screenwriting manuals.
In 1978, Nash and Oakey could write that ‘there are no absolute rules
concerning the format in which a film script is typed’.29 In 1988, another
manual considered that ‘within a general set of guidelines, acceptable

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screenplays vary somewhat’.30 By contrast, Christopher Riley, author
of today’s self-proclaimed ‘most accurate, complete, authoritative, and
practical guide to standard script formats ever published, written by
a guy who came to Hollywood to make his career as a screenwriter
and instead accidentally became Hollywood’s foremost authority on
industry standard script formats’ spells out the dangers for the novice
who is reliant solely on screenwriting software such as Final Draft.
In Riley’s estimation, these programs do not answer the questions his
book addresses: ‘too many writers who think they’re turning in profes-
sionally formatted scripts are in fact often turning in scripts that brand
them as amateurs. [ . . . ] The fact is that a standard format exists today in
Hollywood’, and Riley describes it in the minutest detail.31
Although this is highly prescriptive, it is also essentially correct.
As Joseph McBride, who is not only the author of one of the best
recent manuals, but also a distinguished film historian, screenwriter and
academic, puts it:

Like any other art form, but even more so, screenwriting follows
certain conventions. [ . . . ] Screenplay conventions can be broken by
adept practitioners of the craft for valid creative reasons, and all good
scripts have particular problems they solve in unusual ways, but if
those conventions are disregarded, chaos will ensue. Someone who
writes in a blissful or willful ignorance of the professional format will
be immediately recognized as unprofessional, and such work will be
tossed into the circular file.32

Most of the basic conventions of current screenplay formatting have

been noted elsewhere in this book. Many are important (such as the
observation of conventions for the indentation of different text ele-
ments like speakers’ names, dialogue, scene text, etc.), but two aspects
of the contemporary screenplay are particularly worth emphasising
here because they help to position it in relation to other kinds of
screenwriting.
First are the conventions that help to establish the scene as the unit
of action, which is defined by continuous action in one place. A change

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 The Contemporary Screenplay and Screenwriting Manual 211

of place generates a new scene. Basic scene headings (‘slug lines’) usu-
ally take a tripartite form: interior/exterior, identification of place and
time of day (e.g. EXT. PARK—NIGHT). Camera angles and shot speci-
fications should be omitted, as should parenthetical speech direction.
Collectively, these conventions distinguish the master-scene screenplay
from the numbered and shot-specific kinds of shooting script, and help
to separate those aspects of creation that belong to the writer from those

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that are the province of other professionals such as the director, photog-
rapher, editor and actor. The contrast between this and the silent-era
continuity is marked.
Second is the instruction that only those things that are to appear
on the screen should appear within the scene text, with some possible
leeway for character traits.33 Here we may recall the three ‘modes’ that
Sternberg distinguishes within the scene text: description, of the mise-
en-scène and design; the report mode, which describes the sequence of
actions (e.g., the movements of a character); and, finally, the ‘comment’
mode, which is the most significant in the analysis of screenplay texts
because, as Sternberg observes, authorial commentary within the scene
text is routinely discouraged: the job of the screenwriter is to visualise
the action, not to comment or advise upon it.
This establishes a very clear place for the screenplay in ideas of film
production. Most obviously, by eliminating technical directions such
as shot specification, it separates the ‘screenplay’ from, and places it
prior to, the ‘shooting script’. This gives the ‘spec’ screenplay of today a
different look to those master-scene screenplays considered in the pre-
vious chapter, which were written with the production process clearly
in mind. Secondly, it also separates the screenplay from any anterior
‘treatment’ stage by eliminating the more literary, expressive qualities
of the short story form. In these ways it helps to identify the screenplay
as a particular kind of object, and as a relatively autonomous document,
intended for particular kinds of reader, but removed from the process of
production.

‘Inflected’ and ‘uninflected’ screenplays

An alternate discourse, however, sees the screenplay as being only

about production. The second edition of Esther Luttrell’s Tools of the
Screen Writing Trade (1998) proposes that ‘a screenplay is nothing more
than a set of notes to a production crew’, and suggests that an impor-
tant role of the screenwriting tutor consists in ‘teaching a roomful
of published writers the art of translating their prose into production
notes’.34

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Yet it is doubtful whether the comment mode is ever eliminated as

fully from the screenplay as the prescriptions of screenwriting manuals
might suggest. The work of Jeff Rush and Cynthia Baughman implies
that the discrepancy arises from a distinction between ‘shooting scripts’,
which ‘might be read as denotative blueprints or instructions’, and
‘screenplays’, which ‘can be understood only as a form of writing that
communicates much of its meaning through the connotative nuances

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of language’. In their analysis, the use of modifiers and irony in ‘highly
inflected’ screenplays, such as David Lynch’s script for Blue Velvet (1986),
for example, is essential in conveying the tone and, therefore, mean-
ing of a shot; it is not a superfluous literary flourish, but essential to
an understanding of the shot or story itself. The cumulative effect of a
sequence of such moments is that ‘[w]e have been taught how to read’
the script.35
Another way of approaching this discrepancy, however, would be to
suggest that it arises from the ambivalent nature of a screenplay’s scene
text. Here the ongoing work of Ann Igelström is especially notewor-
thy. Igelström begins by drawing a distinction between two kinds of
information in a screenplay: first, references to the ‘extrafictional world
where the potential film will be produced’ (directions as to kind of
shot, for example)—Luttrell’s ‘set of notes’; and, second, ‘information
refer[ring] to the fictional story world where the story takes place’ (loca-
tions, characters’ names and so on).36 Stronger still are the consequences
of Igelström’s distinctions between the three ‘levels of narration’ in a
screenplay text. One of these, the ‘personal fictional voice’ (in most
cases, that of a character), ‘provides the reader with information about
the fictional story world’ and ‘is situated in the dialogue’.37 Of more sig-
nificance in the present context is the relationship between the other
two. First is the ‘extrafictional voice’, which ‘is responsible for the
fictional story world and information that refers to the extrafictional
world’ of production, for example by providing the information in the
scene headings.38 The extrafictional voice is often, though inaccurately,
assumed to be synonymous with the author or writer of the screenplay.
The second is the ‘impersonal fictional voice’, which is ‘the narrat-
ing voice that provides the reader with information about the fictional
story world (e.g. actions, characters and setting)’.39 Igelström’s example
is from Tony Gilroy’s published screenplay for Michael Clayton (2007): a
character is sitting on a toilet, ‘trying to fight off a panic attack using a
breathing exercise she read about in an airline magazine’. The informa-
tion is provided by a voice that does not appear as a character within
the story world: therefore, this voice is ‘impersonal’. The crucial point,

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and the source of the ambivalent nature of the screenplay as both a pro-
duction document and a form of dramatic fiction, is that ‘[b]oth the
extrafictional narrating voice and the impersonal fictional voice [ . . . ]
exist in the scene text. It follows that it is not always easy to separate
the two’.40
Igelström proposes that there is a spectrum: a text that included many
direct indications of camera angles, for instance, would lie at one end of

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the spectrum, while another that eliminated any such reminders of the
‘real world’—for example, in comprising only description and report,
or in being written in free indirect speech—would lie at the other. This
makes it very difficult to accept that the material in a screenplay refers
only to the extrafictional world of production. A screenplay is also, in
narrative cinema, a medium for storytelling, and there is always a kind
of bleeding through from the extrafictional to the fictional world, and
vice versa.
This tends to confirm what we have seen throughout screenplay his-
tory: that its language can rarely be reduced to the purely denotative,
and that metaphors, similes and other figures of speech are part of
its condition. While Claudia Sternberg’s contention that ‘screenwriters
rarely miss the opportunity to use the mode of comment’ perhaps over-
states the case,41 there is nevertheless a marked discrepancy between
the familiar, theoretical argument that the scene text should present
only material that can be mentally visualized as taking place on an
imaginary screen, and what is actually found within screenplays them-
selves, in any era. Confining ourselves only to those produced in the
classical Hollywood system, and to those considered in earlier chapters,
we could cite Love or Justice (1917), David Copperfield (1935), Citizen
Kane (1941), Laura (1944) and Body and Soul (1947) as texts in which
Sternberg’s ‘comment’ mode, and an interplay of Igelström’s ‘voices’,
are pronounced.
Put simply, for Sternberg comment becomes an indicator of the autho-
rial persona. This allows her to focus not so much on how a screenplay
conforms to a system but, rather, how variations within it reveal ‘the
individualism of the author [ . . . ] that becomes manifest in the relation-
ship between dialogue and scene text, and the design of the modes of
report, description and comment’.42 Although Igelström’s analysis sug-
gests that this ‘individualism’ can be conceived differently (and needs
to be, given the multiple authorship and re-writing that characterizes
many forms of screenwriting), the extent to which a given writer can
experiment within the scene text is often a sign of authorial style and
status.

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A simple illustrative example is provided by the work of Quentin

Tarantino. Although his screenplays are presented in fairly conventional
master-scene format, the prolix dialogue marks Tarantino as an unusual
writer in a cinema and screenwriting culture that still tends to adhere
to the inaccurate cliché that film is a visual medium. More significant
in the present context is the nature of the scene text. For example,
in Pulp Fiction (1994), ‘The 27-year-old Butch Coolidge is dressed in

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boxing regalia: trunks, shoes and gloves. He lies on a table catching
a few zzzzzz’s before his big fight. Almost as soon as we cut to him,
he wakes up with a start. Shaken by the bizarre memory, he wipes
his sweaty face with his boxing glove.’ Shortly afterwards, ‘As Butch
steps into the hallway, the crowd goes apeshit’; later, ‘In the room,
black boxer Floyd Ray Willis lies on a table—dead. His face looks like
he went dunking for bees.’43 Although the description largely confines
itself to recording what is seen and heard, it does so using adjectives
(‘bizarre’), similes (‘like he went dunking for bees’) and a distinctive
lexis (‘zzzzzz’s’, ‘apeshit’) that give the text a quality of goofy irrev-
erence, which becomes especially striking at moments of heightened
anxiety or violence. In Rush and Baughman’s terms, it is a ‘highly
inflected’ text in which the ‘connotative nuances of language’ teach
us how to ‘read’ a certain attitude it adopts towards the events it
describes.
This is equally true of those texts that occupy the opposite end of
the spectrum. A distinctive characteristic of David Mamet’s writing, for
example, is the extreme minimalism of the scene text, which works
as far as possible to eschew comment altogether. As Mamet puts it,
‘[t]he job of the film director’—and by this he also means the job of
the film writer—‘is to tell the story through the juxtaposition of uninflected
images—because that is the essential nature of the medium’.44 Mamet
holds to this principle so resolutely that it becomes a mark of his autho-
rial style, revealing an adherence to a purist conception of ‘uninflected’
film-making, while also indicating by contrast how infrequently other
screenplays in fact accord with the supposed orthodoxy of the ‘unin-
flected’ script.45 In this way, the seemingly purely denotative script
becomes richly suggestive of a particular stance towards screenwriting
itself.
Ultimately, the distinction between denotative instructions and con-
notative expression is questionable, as is shown by a simple direction
within a seemingly casual conversation in Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004):

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CLEMENTINE
[ . . . ] I’m getting too old for this. But it keeps
me from having to develop an actual personality.
I apply my personality in a paste. You?

JOEL
Oh, I doubt that’s the case.

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CLEMENTINE
Well, you don’t know me, so . . . you don’t
know, do you?

JOEL
Sorry. I was just trying to be nice.

CLEMENTINE
Yeah, I got it.

There’s a silence.
CLEMENTINE (CONT’D)
My name’s Clementine, by the way.

JOEL
I’m Joel.46

‘There’s a silence’ is, arguably, a simple instruction: there must be a

pause in the delivery of the dialogue at this point. Yet clearly there
is something more at work here. A post-Pinter generation can hardly
be unaware that the direction of a pause or silence within dialogue is
an indication that language is being used as a medium through which
the struggles for power between characters are being played out. There
is also something suggestive about the phrase ‘there’s a silence’ itself.
It has become a favourite device of the journalist Jon Ronson to indicate
a moment at which an interviewee’s mask slips, and the subject of one
of his stories certainly had grounds to object that Ronson ‘buried [his]
attacks in clever, sneaky little phrases like, “There is a silence.” ’47 In the
Kaufman script, the phrase is uttered by Igelström’s ‘impersonal fictional
voice’, but that voice is still adopting a position towards the characters
and their situation under the guise of providing the reader with mere
production information.
The extract above is taken from the published ‘shooting script’ of Eter-
nal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which suggests that the distinction

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216 A History of the Screenplay

between this and a ‘screenplay’ is a good deal murkier than might

appear. Yet it is also undoubtedly the case that the vast majority of
screenplays do not circulate within a production context. Instead, they
are ‘selling’ scripts, used for purposes of development and fund-raising,
and for these purposes the master-scene script has become a global form.

Development and funding

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An index of the master-scene form’s ubiquity can be gauged from
a single illustration: the work of film development consultant Selina
Ukwuoma. Ukwuoma has been a script consultant at the Berlin Film Fes-
tival since 2008, and was previously a development executive in London
at Cuba Pictures, the production arm of the Curtis Brown agency,
a role that involved talent scouting, script reading, pre-production
and script development. The Berlin festival is a global event, with
the 12 aspiring writers annually chosen being drawn from entrants
from across the world; Ukwuoma alone has acted as mentor to writers
from Australia, the United States, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Hungary,
India, Romania, Turkey, Argentina, Serbia, Brazil, France, Colombia,
Uganda and Belgium. Her colleagues throughout this period have
included Gyula Gazdag, the Hungarian director, artistic director at
Sundance Institute and Distinguished Professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the New Zealander Marten Rabarts, for-
merly artistic director of the Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam and now
Head of Development for India’s National Film Development Corpo-
ration; and Franz Rodenkirchen, a German script consultant working
for the TorinoFilmLab, the Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam, and Media
(the European Union’s support network for audiovisual industries). Oth-
ers who have worked alongside Ukwuoma at Berlin have included
the dramaturgs Louise Gough, a New York-based Australian, and Ruth
McCance, formerly of Scottish Screen and now based in Sweden, both
of whom also work for the pan-European Sources 2 script development
organisation; and Lucile Hadzihalilovic, a French producer, director,
script consultant and collaborator with the French-based Argentinian
director Gaspar Noé.
The remarkably diverse range of nationalities and industries repre-
sented by this list gives some indication of the global reach and inter-
relation of film networks. Those mentioned have very different views
on cinema, storytelling, methods for writing the screenplay and the
relation between script and film. On the restricted matter of screenplay
format, however, festivals such as Berlin (and Sarajevo, where Ukwuoma

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 The Contemporary Screenplay and Screenwriting Manual 217

also works) insist that the aspiring writers chosen for tutelage refine their
scripts in fairly precise accord with the master-scene template.48 This
global reach of the form is evident in other ways too, being promoted
via screenwriting software such as Final Draft, or in the screenplays
printed privately by the studios for the ‘consideration’ of members vot-
ing for best screenplay in the Academy Awards. Regardless of the kind
of story these screenplays tell, they are almost invariably presented in

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master-scene form.
As this shows, it is possible to keep separate the two dominant ideas
about the contemporary screenplay that we have considered in this
chapter: that it has a more or less specific textual form, and that it is
governed by a particular narrative mode. In practice, this distinction is
less easy to maintain once the screenplay begins to circulate within the
wider film culture. Unlike scripts generated inside the studios of the clas-
sical system, which had specific purposes within a system of production,
one of the major functions of today’s screenplay is as a ‘selling’ script.
The growth in film festivals, of which the best-known probably remains
Sundance, and the emergence of powerful independent distributors, of
whom the most celebrated (but also, perhaps, the most commercial) is
Miramax, provided opportunities of securing funding and production
for film projects that otherwise would not receive the backing of major
studios, or would have to go through years of development and review
before finally seeing the light of day; and the screenplay plays a central
role in the process of evaluation.
This does not mean that such films or screenplays are fully ‘inde-
pendent’, however, and different film-makers have commented on the
relationships between such developments and the nature of screenplay
form. Writer-producer James Schamus states that

[t]he original sin of the American independent cinema, when it

shifted away from the avant-garde [in the 1980s and 1990s], was the
introduction of narrative [ . . . ] because what you haven’t done is seize
the means of exhibition, marketing, and distribution, and so you end
up having to play by the rules of the big boys.49

This comment implies a crudely direct equation between narrative itself

and a corporate establishment, suggesting that an independent film
without sin would have to be one that preserved the suspicion of story in
the New Hollywood and, before that, in the French New Wave. We shall
return to this argument in the final chapter. The point is more subtle,

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218 A History of the Screenplay

however, because ‘independent’ film production remains largely depen-

dent on external sources of funding, distribution and exhibition, and
for these purposes the pre-production screenplay is a crucial document.
It becomes a proposal, telling the story and selling the film idea to
potential backers, who in turn, should they agree to finance the project,
may subsequently refer back to the screenplay as representing a kind of
legal agreement or contract. When Steven Soderbergh showed the dailies

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of Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) to one of his backers, he was told that
‘You have a commitment to shoot what’s written in the script’.50
Such considerations impact on the nature of screenplay form, tend-
ing to consolidate the status of the ‘master-scene’ script. As noted, this
originally emerged from the need to accommodate dialogue within the
sound film, and independent and avant-garde film-makers have some-
times argued that both the form of the master-scene script and its use
in attracting funding have led to a preponderance of dialogue-driven
scenes. This concern was expressed in 1991 by the editors of the ‘script
issue’ of the independent film-oriented Millennium Film Journal:

For commercial films, scripts and storyboards function not only as

patterns to work from: they also form an essential part of the ritual
of raising funds. In the film industry, a script is initially presented
as a business plan—data intended to convince a client, a potential
investor, of the soundness of a story, an approach, a design, a strat-
egy, a concept. Since investors need to evaluate one putative project
against another, the form of the film script is fairly invariable, consist-
ing of pages of dialogue interspersed with short descriptive passages.
It is an unhappy fact that these same documents are later used as
blueprints for production, since they result in films that tend to
be quite dense in dialogue, often containing, for minutes on end,
nothing but heads talking against intricate backgrounds.51

Such arguments help to explain the persistence of the ‘blueprint’

metaphor surrounding the screenplay, although it is debatable how
frequently, in practice, the script that is ‘initially presented as a busi-
ness plan’ remains unaltered through the production process, which
is invariably a matter of negotiation. As we saw with The Godfather,
the story can exist in two different forms: the selling script circu-
lated for funding and studio purposes, and the version that the film-
makers develop out of sight. Soderbergh’s backer, for example, expressed
surprise that the nudity he thought the screenplay promised never
materialised on the screen.52

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 The Contemporary Screenplay and Screenwriting Manual 219

In some countries, the dissemination of normative ideas about

screenplays have taken the form of national initiatives connect-
ing screenplay ‘development’ to governmental and non-governmental
sources of national film funding, recalling the ‘scenario crises’ of earlier
eras. The danger is that identified by Kathryn Millard, whose experi-
ence in working on a film funded by the Australian Film Commission
was that the script remained ‘in development for approximately six

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years’ and ‘as the project progressed down the financing route there
came increased pressure for the screenplay to conform to a more classic,
protagonist-driven, three-act structure’.53 Partly in consequence, Millard
is today at the forefront of both creative and critical approaches that
look for alternatives to such pressures towards centralisation and con-
formity. Nor are such alternatives difficult to find. Indeed, as we shall
now see, at the very moment when globalised methods of dissem-
inating the dominant norm of the conception-and-execution, three-
act, protagonist-driven, master-scene-formatted screenplay are at their
height, new digital technologies are also today pulling the screenplay in
the opposite direction, towards a complete rejection of this model and
even, perhaps, of the very idea of the screenplay itself.

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11
Screenwriting Today
and Tomorrow

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This book has explored a range of different kinds of text in the attempt
to show which forms of writing became normative at particular times
in Western film history, why they attained that status, and what caused
the adoption of new, alternate or hybrid forms that would challenge or
replace those norms. A project like this entails certain assumptions, espe-
cially about the formal definition of different kinds of screenwriting.
There is also a more acutely political problem, which is well articulated
by Steven Maras as ‘a tendency to define a particularly dominant model
of industry practice as a normative form of practice that others must
either follow or situate themselves against. Thus, exciting possibilities
in the realm of screenwriting practice are pre-positioned in the space of
“the alternative” ’.1
Any response to this charge must acknowledge that a study of norms
and variations risks the organisational, if not the willfully political, def-
inition of other kinds of writing in this way, and that this is likely to
lead to their marginalisation: for example, by grouping them together
in a separate chapter. My justification for doing just this is threefold.
First, Maras is able to argue for a greater ‘pluralism in filmmaking and
screenwriting’ partly by distinguishing between ‘a primarily page-based
form of writing for the screen, focused on the script as a manuscript,
and an extended idea of screen writing not necessarily limited to the
page or a page-based format for script writing’.2 If, however, our princi-
pal object of enquiry is indeed ‘the script as a manuscript’, this option is
unavailable. Second, then, if we accept that most—though by no means
all—writing of screenplays takes place either within, or in recognition of,
‘a particularly dominant model of industry practice’ (the global influ-
ence of Hollywood), this influence is likely to be traceable within the
text, if only in the form of variations on the prevailing Hollywood

220

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 Screenwriting Today and Tomorrow 221

model. In short, the textual form is inextricable from the mode of pro-
duction, and it is the effects of this conjunction, and not the myriad
other possible ways of writing for film, that the present study has been
attempting to follow.
Thirdly, however, the mode of production is currently undergoing
radical transformation, largely because of the introduction of relatively
cheap methods of digital film-making. In consequence, a range of possi-

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bilities for screenwriting that were previously the preserve of the auteur
writer-director or the avant-garde film-maker have become available to
all. The peculiarity of the present moment is that at the same time as the
global dissemination of the master-scene screenplay has caused popular
conceptions of ‘the screenplay’ to be compacted into a single, seemingly
immutable form, massive technological and industrial changes in the
modes of film production have enabled an explosion of different possi-
bilities, which call into question the very purpose and existence of the
screenplay as a pre-production document. The present chapter discusses
not only these new forms of writing, but also their antecedents in film
writing prior to digitisation.

Improvisation

Improvisation has a long and healthy history within screenwriting, one

that tends to be obscured by the ubiquity of the blueprint metaphor.
In the pre-feature film era, studios such as Selig and Edison left space
in their scene outlines for improvised action during location shooting,
and the records of story conferences involving slightly later film-makers
such as Mack Sennett show that improvisation was a feature not only of
the working process, but in some cases was also visible within the scripts
themselves. Even in the classical sound era, a form of improvisation can
be seen in the textual gaps that leave room for material to be supplied
by specialists such as a choreographer like Busby Berkeley, or a montage
editor like Slavko Vorkapich. Later, improvisation proper became par-
ticularly attractive with the introduction of lighter, hand-held cameras
that facilitated shooting outside the studio, as in many of the films of
the French New Wave.
The latter development was a particular influence on the directo-
rial and writing methods of John Cassavetes, beginning with Shadows
(1959). As Ray Carney puts it, whereas Hitchcock is an exemplar of the
‘blueprint’ model of production (although there are significant excep-
tions in which a post-production stage took the film far from the
screenplay, such as The Birds), Cassavetes represents ‘a sense of creation

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222 A History of the Screenplay

as a process of exploration and discovery’.3 An improvisatory qual-

ity extends to Cassavetes’ scripts themselves, since ‘rather than being
a gradual process of refining an original, each of the revisions more
commonly functioned as a series of tangents away from the previous
versions. Each draft was less a refinement than a reimagining of the
story’.4 Even more than with other screenplays, this makes confident
identification of the script for a Cassavetes film problematic. While his

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films bring to the screen a quality of spontaneity that is in part the result
of improvisation, ‘that spontaneity was (almost) always scripted and
refined in take after take’.5 Indeed, as Cassavetes remarked, the script
‘was structured very carefully to set up a whole new way of thinking so
that the audience could not get ahead of the film’.6
Moreover, the script was often in a state of incompletion and flux.
In his introduction to the published text of his 1968 film Faces,
Cassavetes states that, having ‘wanted to do a film that would allow
the actors the time and room to act’, he worked with ‘a 215-page unfin-
ished treatment’.7 The published version is a parallel-text edition, with
the written script on the right-hand page and an editorial transcription
of the film soundtrack on the left. Around half of the soundtrack pages
are completely blank (in only a very few cases is the opposite the case);
those containing text display marked discrepancies from the script. This
slightly obscures the fact that the script itself continued to be revised: in
a slightly different recollection of the process, Cassavetes estimated that
originally it ran to about 270 pages, and expanded to around 320.8 The
published text tells us more about the editing of the film than about the
shooting, or indeed the writing: the differences between the script and
soundtrack versions are explained partly by continual reshooting and
controlled improvisation, with the scenes as written being quite freely
adapted in performance, and partly by the editing of the film itself, with
hours of footage being omitted from the cut transcribed in the book.
The relation between script(s) and film in Cassavetes’ work is super-
ficially quite similar to that of the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos,
who remarks that ‘the final shooting script you will find only if you
take it off the finished print of the film. If you compare that with the
script I have when I start shooting, you will find there are huge dis-
crepancies between them’.9 Yet the working methods are quite different.
Although Angelopoulos regards himself as ‘basically [ . . . ] the author of
my own scripts’, in developing them he would work with ‘another per-
son who will play the devil’s advocate, the psychoanalyst or whatever’;
afterwards, another collaborator would take on the role of reader to the
(always handwritten) script Angelopoulos developed.10

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 Screenwriting Today and Tomorrow 223

The texts themselves have none of the prolixity of Cassavetes’,

although Angelopoulos appears uncommitted to any one approach to
writing for film:

Sometimes my films are the exact mirror of the script; other times,
the script is in the form of notes and then the filming process is very
dependent on improvisation. In some cases, there is a dynamic that

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allows you to use improvisations, while in others you have the feel-
ing that you have to follow exactly the written script. This depends
entirely on the material you have to work with and does not depend
at all on the circumstances surrounding the making of the film. [ . . . ]
For example, Landscape in the Mist [1988] is an exact copy of the script
while The Travelling Players [1975] began from notes. Voyage to Cythera
[1984] is very far from the original script and The Beekeeper [1986]
very close to it.11

Within this pragmatic approach, perhaps the most notable aspect of

Angelopoulos’ screenwriting is the discrepancy between the terseness of
the prose style and the length of the corresponding scenes in the film,
creating a space for improvisation, or for the film to breathe. Andrew
Horton notes that the scripts bear no relation to the one-minute-per-
page rule of thumb: the original script for Ulysses’ Gaze was 69 pages
long, while the film ran to almost three hours. Horton’s estimate is
that a page in an Angelopoulos script is equivalent to four or five min-
utes’ screen time, ‘[a]nd while Hollywood has developed a very strict
code of rule for format, Angelopoulos certainly does not follow them
in any rigorous manner’.12 As the director puts it, ‘Everybody knows
I shoot long scenes, but only my closest collaborators know that I
write these short sentences, almost like Hemingway. [ . . . ] I write in
prose, like a short novel. In fact, you could publish my scripts as lit-
erature. That’s what I do now. Previously, I didn’t “write” at all, in that
sense’.13
A current film-maker committed to improvisation, the Hong Kong
director Wong Kar-Wai, first trained as a writer; on becoming a director,
he at first imagined that he would work like Hitchcock. Much as we saw
with Cassavetes, however, he soon discovered that he operated at the
other end of the spectrum, and this was precisely

because I was the writer, [and so] I knew how to change [things] on
set. So finally I said, “Why bother?” And also, you can’t write all
your images on paper, and there are so many things—the sound, the

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224 A History of the Screenplay

music, the ambience, and also the actors—when you’re writing all of
these details in the script, the script has no tempo, it’s not readable.
It’s very boring. So I just thought, it’s not a good idea [to write out a
complete script beforehand], and I just wrote down the scenes, some
essential details, and the dialogue. I give the rhythm of the scenes to
the actors and skip all these technical things.14

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In practice, however, when making a film ‘normally we shoot without
a script, or without a real script or [even] a fake script, but we have an
idea. My way of working has always started with short stories’,15 with
writing and editing taking place during the shooting.
This is a radically different approach to film-making from most of
those we have previously seen. On the other hand, the description
of a script as ‘the scenes, some essential details, and the dialogue’,
without ‘all these technical things’, sounds remarkably similar to the
distinction between a master-scene screenplay and a more detailed
shooting script. Similarly, working not from a screenplay but from a
short story is not too far removed from the practice common in the
French New Wave of shooting from a treatment, while even the cre-
ation of the script not prior to production but ‘at the end of the
day [ . . . ] only when the film is finished’16 has antecedents in Soviet
montage, or indeed in the widespread practice of creating a new ver-
sion of a screenplay for publication. As we have noted previously,
approaches to writing for film that seem radically new can often be
seen as a re-thinking or re-combination of forms such as the out-
line or short story that have been in use ever since the beginning of
screenwriting.
Although Wong Kar-Wai began refining his working methods prior
to the widespread introduction of digital technology, distinct stages
of pre-production, production and post-production in film-making are
increasingly dissolving as a result of technological change. A previ-
ously marginal or ‘alternative’ mode of script writing is thereby likely to
become increasingly central, and much the same can be said of impro-
visation. With digital cameras and editing now making location work
and re-shooting a much cheaper option than was the case with cellu-
loid, the fully realised, ‘blueprint’ form of screenplay is likely to become
increasingly displaced by the kinds of semi-improvisatory relationship
between writing and filming that has previously been most common as
a method used by auteur writer-directors, or by those working outside
the Hollywood system.

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 Screenwriting Today and Tomorrow 225

Independent, avant-garde and digital cinema

Because the screenplay has historically been tied to a studio or corpo-

rate method of film production, for purposes of quality and budgetary
control as well as for more directly artistic reasons, the notion of inde-
pendence from the script has tended to be implicated within notions
of ‘independent film’ more generally. The concept is problematic and
can be defined in many ways, not least because successful independent

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companies tend to become absorbed into or co-opted by larger studios,
as in the case of the relationship between Pixar and Disney. The word
itself often carries a political and perhaps even a moral connotation, as
in Jim Jarmusch’s affirmation that ‘[a]nyone who makes a film that is
the film they want to make, and it is not defined by marketing analysis
or a commercial enterprise, is independent’.17
We can, however, attempt to distinguish between several different
kinds of ‘independent’ film, each of which challenges the dominant
model in different ways: the ‘American independent’ film, which often
retains a relatively conventional notion of screenwriting but implicitly
offers a critique of mainstream narrative conventions; avant-garde cin-
ema, which frequently takes an entirely different approach by foregoing
narrative altogether; the kinds of independence conferred by working
within media other than written texts; and the kinds of film-making
enabled by the ongoing transition to digital platforms. In practice,
of course, a single film may exhibit aspects of some or all of these
approaches.
For J. J. Murphy, the American independent film is not wholly
divorced from the commercial imperatives of Hollywood, but nei-
ther does it adhere uncritically to its aesthetic conventions; instead,
it actively contests them. Contrary to the assumption that this quasi-
oppositional stance is most evident in the visual or even aural style of a
given film-maker—that is, in directorial style—Murphy concentrates on
the mode of storytelling, finding that between the early 1980s and the
mid-2000s, American independent feature films ‘developed a distinct
approach to film-making, centering on new conceptions of cinematic
storytelling’, and that ‘its narrational strategy lies somewhere between
classical Hollywood cinema and art cinema’, ‘represent[ing] a hybrid
form that [ . . . ] freely incorporate[es] elements from both’. Much like
Kristin Thompson’s analysis of ‘New Hollywood’ storytelling, Murphy
traces these developments back to the script, which ‘is the heart of the
creative originality to be found in the independent movement’.18

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226 A History of the Screenplay

Murphy suggests that ‘if someone were to follow the prescriptions

found in the standard manuals, it would be virtually impossible to write
a truly independent film’.19 Inevitably, however, in the face of the pro-
liferation of self-help guides and associated attempts to homogenise not
only format but also narrative paradigms, there has arisen what might
be termed the ‘anti-manual manual’; and there is significant overlap
between the films considered in some of these manuals and in those

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that form the basis of Murphy’s analysis. It is a rhetorical commonplace
for writers to claim an element of originality for their work, but in some
cases there is a conscious attempt in these books to outline new or alter-
native approaches to narrative form, often in response to the success of
groundbreaking films themselves.
The notion of innovation or going against the grain is overtly present
in the very titles of such studies as Linda Aronson’s Scriptwriting Updated:
New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen (2000), Aronson’s
follow-up The 21st Century Screenplay: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing
Tomorrow’s Films (2010), Josh Golding’s Maverick Screenwriting: A Man-
ual for the Adventurous Screenwriter (2102), and Ken Dancyger and Jeff
Rush’s Alternative Scriptwriting, which was first published in 1991 and is
currently in its fifth edition, with the subtitle changing frequently, from
Writing Beyond the Rules (1991) to Successfully Breaking the Rules (4th edi-
tion, 2007) and Rewriting the Hollywood Formula (5th, 2013). These books
call attention to such formulaic conventional structures as the three-
act paradigm or the arc of character development, and encourage the
writer consciously to work against them—much as the illustrative films
do themselves.
Prominent among the examples in these books is a selection
from among a spate of films that emerged in the 1990s and
early 2000s, including Pulp Fiction (1994, written and directed by
Quentin Tarantino), The Usual Suspects (1995, directed by Bryan Singer,
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie), The Game (1997, directed by
David Fincher, screenplay by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris),
The Spanish Prisoner (1997, David Mamet), Run, Lola, Run (1998,
Tom Tykwer), The Matrix (1999, the Wachowskis), Fight Club (1999,
directed by David Fincher, screenplay by Jim Uhls), The Sixth Sense
(1999, M. Night Shyamalan), Memento (2000, written and directed by
Christopher Nolan), as well as the ongoing writing career of Charlie
Kaufman, including Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002) and
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). In light of the fraught rela-
tions we have been tracing between storytelling and certain notions of
independent cinema, it is notable that the jolt such films give to the

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 Screenwriting Today and Tomorrow 227

spectatorial system, as it were, is tied to narrative: they often feature

disorientatingly unusual shifts in the time scheme, for instance (Pulp
Fiction, Memento), or otherwise expose the story world as a fictional con-
struct (almost all of the above). Although there is a cinematic playfulness
at work in these films, in defamiliarising received notions of how cin-
ematic stories are told they self-reflexively bring the screenplay as an
otherwise hidden structuring mechanism uncomfortably close to the

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surface.20 It should be stressed that the innovation in these screenplays
themselves does not extend to matters of presentation: in most respects
they are quite straightforward examples of the master-scene format
(though not of narrative structure), and strictly in this sense their
publication tends to validate currently dominant conventions.
A second kind of ‘independent’ film is more radical: experimental,
avant-garde and certain forms of ‘art’ cinema that are, at least for the
purposes of production, more or less completely divorced from major
studios or other forms of financial obligation. For present purposes, a
difficulty with work created in this way is that, precisely because it is
divorced from mainstream and commercial cinema, it enables more or
less anything to function analogously to a screenplay text. Considered
strictly in this context, such projects become self-selectingly marginal
to studies of the relationships between screenwriting and industry, pre-
senting problems similar to those posed by early cinema: a ‘screenplay’
becomes not a definable form but any kind of document, written or oth-
erwise, that provides purely local solutions to creative questions posed
in the making of an art work in a different medium.
Precisely for this reason, of course, they possess great value in the
exploration of the creative process of individual film-makers, as was
illustrated by panel of four excellent papers on ‘Alternative Forms of
Scripting’ presented at a 2013 conference in Madison, Wisconsin. J. J.
Murphy examined the effects of Norman Mailer’s use of improvisa-
tion, especially for Maidstone (1970); Line Langebek and Spencer Parsons
took a detailed look at Cassavetes’ work, especially Faces, comparing the
relationship between the actors’ performances and Cassavetes’ continu-
ally changing script to the kinds of improvisation found in jazz; Mark
Minett’s archival research shows that Robert Altman’s films were indeed
scripted in detail, but that in The Long Goodbye (1973), for example,
Altman permitted Elliott Gould to ad-lib Marlowe’s lines as long as this
did not alter the narrative spine; and John Powers presented a range of
materials used by Stan Brakhage in creating such films as Arabic 0 (1981)
and I . . . Dreaming (1988), including song lyrics, storyboards, drawings,
hieroglyphs and word lists.21 Research like this positions avant-garde

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228 A History of the Screenplay

and independent cinema within a narrative about screenwriting that

extends the scope of that term to include various kinds of ‘scripting’
beyond the familiar industrial text. Taken in this sense, the avant-
garde does not reject screenwriting; rather, the screenplay rejects the
avant-garde, the practices of which cannot be accommodated within the
functions for which the conventional screenplay text has been devised.
Scripts written in connection with the avant-garde Millennium Film

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Workshop, which was established in 1966 by Ken Jacobs in Manhattan’s
Lower East Side, illustrate this very clearly. The Workshop defines itself
as being ‘dedicated to the exhibition, study, and practice of experi-
mental film, video, and new media’, and ‘non-commercial independent
film’. It ‘engages ideas and issues rarely covered in mainstream media’,
and ‘is fed by low cost access to facilities, equipment, and workshops’.22
The Millennium Film Journal published in its ‘Script Issue’ in 1991
a range of documents produced by film-makers associated with the
Workshop. These texts ‘preceded or were otherwise involved in the pro-
duction of film-works: materials that, in loose terms, might take the
place of a script or a storyboard in a more commercial film project’.23
All of these, in some sense, constitute the kinds of ‘notes to self’ that
characterised writing in the early ‘cameraman system’. Contrary to any
putative ‘blueprint’ function, Ann Marie Fleming’s text for You Take Care
Now (1989) contains detailed written material, including indications of
dialogue, but does not describe what will appear on the screen, instead
leaving spaces marked ‘picture’. Some of the other documents resem-
ble conventional storyboards, but John Moritsugu’s ‘plans’ for Der Elvis
(1987) combine drawing, newspaper cut-outs and handwritten text to
produce a collage that gives a clear indication of some of Moritsugu’s
ideas for the film (such as ‘Film in black and white slo-mo à la Eraserhead
food scene, but don’t fuck it up like [David] Lynch’), without enabling
any other reader to visualise the progression of the proposed film in a
manner analogous to that of the conventional screenplay.
Still others indicate modes of thinking and working that anticipate
the creative possibilities that would later be unleashed by digital soft-
ware. Yvonne Rainer’s written text for Privilege (1990) again resembles a
familiar screenplay with handwritten annotations, but this is followed
by a visual representation of how the physical cutting of the film into
strips will be achieved. Lynne Sachs’ documents for The House of Sci-
ence: A Museum of False Facts (1991) combine relatively familiar forms
of screenwriting (there are specifications for voice-over and on-screen
narration) with sketches, storyboards and other kinds of artwork.

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 Screenwriting Today and Tomorrow 229

What is most striking today is that these experimental film-makers’

approach to the cinematic pre-text, which can broadly be characterised
as a combination of provisionality, mixed media and the ability to
record a personal creative process, is precisely what has subsequently
been enabled as an alternative to conventional screenwriting by the
ongoing transformation of large areas of film production to relatively
low-cost digital platforms. Instead of anything resembling a studio sys-

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tem with homogenised approaches to the production and formatting
of screenplays, we are likely to have a largely piecemeal, fragmentary
field in which almost infinite numbers of individual film projects will
generate hundreds of different kinds of material that could be desig-
nated ‘screenplays’. Moreover, as Kathryn Millard suggests, if we think
less in terms of the ‘screenplay’ and more in terms of the ‘prototype’,
then significant numbers of different kinds of pre-planning become
available to the film-maker: animation, maps, graphic novels, story-
boards, sounds, ‘proof of concept’ videos and ‘digital remixing’. As she
notes, ‘the boundaries between writing and production are increasingly
stretched in a digital era’.24
Meanwhile, digital software such as Redboard, and hardware such
as the Simulcam, are increasingly erasing the distinction between pre-
production conception and filmic execution on which, as we have seen
repeatedly, many conventional assumptions about screenwriting rest.
The Simulcam, a technology developed by James Cameron for the pro-
duction of Avatar (2009), allows the director to see close estimations of
how green screen scenes would look in their final state, at the moment
of capture. Such aesthetic transformations would traditionally have
been planned for in pre-production, through the use of concept art,
inspirational sketches and storyboards, but not actually achieved until
post-production. The Simulcam conflates these processes, and in doing
so turns the director’s on-set screen into what is effectively an inter-
active storyboard. At a much simpler level, software programs such as
the non-proprietary, open-source CeltX provide not only conventional
screenwriting programs comparable to Final Draft, but also possibilities
for incorporating other media such as images, videos and storyboards.
This facilitates approaches to film-making that erode familiar distinc-
tions between phases of production, enabling revisions to the script
to take place alongside the shooting and editing of the film. By such
means, too, the monolithic conception of the screenplay outlined in
the previous chapter is being overturned by cheap and readily avail-
able methods of production and distribution, returning film-making

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230 A History of the Screenplay

and screenwriting to the cottage industries they were at the beginning

of cinema.
Another striking manifestation of some of these possibilities is the
Hitrecord website, which is essentially an open-source, interactive space
encouraging new forms of collaboration.25 Writers can upload their own
short stories or screenplays, to be developed, storyboarded or filmed by
others. This more directly creative function brings with it the dangers

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posed by too great an influx of material, leading to one manifestation
of the contemporary problem of an over-supply of digital production
combined with instant distribution. To manage the material, Hitrecord
therefore also provides opportunities for users to work as curators, by
sifting and editing the contributions and setting up lines of production.

The digital archive and the e-text

This curatorial function is seen also in the digitisation and archiving

of screenwriting material of earlier periods. In April 2012, Warner Bros.
Digital Publishing launched its ‘Inside the Script’ series of downloadable
eBooks with four titles: Casablanca (1942), An American in Paris (1951),
North by Northwest (1959) and Ben-Hur (1959). Each of the titles contains
a ‘shooting script’, which incorporates hypertext links to stills from the
film, and a variety of often previously unpublished production materials
from a range of archives in Los Angeles.
At time of writing, more than a year after the initial launch, Warner
Bros. has yet to create additional titles, although they are promised.
As with many publishing ventures that seek to respond to developments
in software technology, Warners may be holding fire until the conse-
quences of developments in the hardware platforms become clearer.
Certainly the series is upfront about the challenges presented by the
still fledgling status of eBook publishing: each title in the series is pref-
aced with recommendations about how to use the book, depending on
which devices and platforms (iBooks, Kindle) are being used to view it,
and the ‘word from the editors’ tailored to each title notes that eBook
formats (ePub, Mobipocket) present the designers with peculiar difficul-
ties. Consequently, the screenplay texts have been customised for the
platform: they are not facsimiles of the kind found on websites that
purport to disseminate vintage screenplays (often illegally); nor do they
in all instances preserve the formatting conventions of the texts they
reproduce. Instead, partly to standardise the series and partly to accom-
modate the limitations of the platform, each of the texts appears in an
identical Courier font. The aim is to create an audiovisually enhanced

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 Screenwriting Today and Tomorrow 231

text ‘that is as much like reading a script in print as possible’, in full

acknowledgement that the series is an experiment, and that subsequent
developments in eBook technology will produce advances in future pub-
lications. Hence, perhaps, the wait-and-see nature of the series as it
currently stands.
Although the current state of technology and of the market for eBooks
accounts for some of the strengths and weaknesses of the series, more

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familiar, old-school problems in screenplay publication remain. All four
texts purport to present the ‘shooting script’, but the problems with
this concept—which, as we have seen, implies a stable, completed text
of which the filming is a realisation—are not explored. The notori-
ously unstable production of Casablanca generated an equally notorious
tangle of texts, and with commendable openness, the editors of the
Casablanca e-text note that

this shooting script didn’t exist in this particular form before prin-
cipal photography began in May of 1942. Because Casablanca was
being written and rewritten as it was in production, this script ver-
sion is instead a reconstruction of what the shooting script might
have been. It also includes revisions that were made to the final film.
In some ways, it is a hybrid and has aspects of a continuity script as
well.26

That leaves the reader very much in the dark as to what s/he is read-
ing. There are commercial constraints on what the ‘Inside the Script’
series is attempting to achieve, and the decisions taken with regard to
Casablanca are in keeping with a conception of the series as an accompa-
niment to a film, in the manner of a DVD or Blu-Ray extras programme,
rather than something that exploits the possibilities of the medium to
present a radically new way of understanding screenplay texts.
This is disappointing, especially given the resonant introductory
description of this version of Casablanca as a ‘virtual script tour’.27 While
the supporting materials in the introductory chapters include an excel-
lent and remarkably full, illustrated discussion of how the script was
developed by different hands, the presentation remains constrained
by the limitations of the print-text format of a linear, chronological
account of which writer contributed what and when. This looks like a
missed opportunity. The potential of the digital text with hypertext links
lies instead in the possibility of revealing how a screenplay text selects
from and represents a range of variant materials (preceding drafts, treat-
ments, story memos, etc.) that can be eliminated or reinstated at will.

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232 A History of the Screenplay

Links within the ‘shooting script’ to production stills are merely a dif-
ferent way of presenting an illustrated text, whereas hypertext links to
variant script materials have the capacity to change the reader’s percep-
tion of what a ‘shooting script’ really is. This would have been especially
valuable in the case of Casablanca, because it would have performed a
properly curatorial function while obviating the need for the creation
of a ‘shooting script’ that is openly an editorial construct created for the

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series itself.
The potential of the digital hypertext in the field of literary studies has
been demonstrated by the collaboration between T. S. Eliot’s publisher
Faber and Faber and the high-end digital producer Touch Press’s iPad
version of Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land. The app allows the user to
switch freely between various audio and visual readings of the poem, or
to move instantaneously from one place in the text to another. Hyper-
text links direct the reader to scholarly notes on lines in the poem—but
not, significantly, to the drafts, which are instead presented in facsim-
ile in a separate section. Consequently, the app is still structured in a
way that preserves the stability of the author’s final intentions, rather
than taking the alternative route of enabling a freer exploration of how
that version results from the creative dialogue surrounding the pro-
cess of composition and editing by Eliot and (perhaps especially) Ezra
Pound, a process that remains detectable in the fragmentary nature of
the ‘finished’ poem.
Perhaps it is not surprising that this approach prevailed, given the
involvement of Eliot’s long-standing publishers, and the poem’s status
as a cornerstone of high modernism. But the Touch Press edition of The
Waste Land, and Warners’ Inside the Script series, are pointers to the
likely future of the understanding of the screenplay, since in embryonic
form they embody the twin forces guiding current screenplay research:
scholarly investigation of mountainous but so far little-studied national
and studio archives, and the light this is shedding on the screenplay
as a ‘literature in flux’28 that in many cases achieves no final form,
but instead represents a nexus of multiple possibilities generated by a
plethora of writers.
Anna Sofia Rossholm’s current research at the Ingmar Bergman
Archive in Stockholm illustrates well the interrelation of these
two developments.29 The archive ‘mainly consists of notebooks,
manuscripts, production documents and letters spanning Bergman’s
career from the 1930s until the end of his life in 2007. Notebooks and
manuscripts are digitized and made accessible through a database that
gives new visibility to Bergman’s working methods and the creative

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 Screenwriting Today and Tomorrow 233

process’.30 As Rossholm’s exploration of this collection shows, advances

in digital technology are impacting on both the creation of archives and
the theoretical understanding of texts and textual editing. Drawing on
John Bryant’s work in describing the digital archive as a ‘fluid text’, she
points out that

Jacques Derrida’s notion of the archive as an event in itself, an act

of ‘archivization that produces as much as it records the event’ [ . . . ]

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is particularly foregrounded in the digital archive where the database
and the scanned manuscripts are a form of remediation of the orig-
inal drafts. [ . . . ] Compared to a book edition, the digital archive
is a less authorial form of publication where alternative narratives
in different manuscript versions are presented side by side without
hierarchical order[.]31

Noting the connection to the Touch Press Waste Land, Rossholm notes
that ‘[s]uch an interface where writing, sound and images can be inter-
linked is particularly suitable for publications of screenwriting where
scripts, or other forms of screenwriting pretexts, could be presented
together with films or extracts of films’.32 The Warners series is a step
in this direction.
Equally pertinent, however, is that screenwriting, especially in cases of
multiple authorship such as Casablanca, can present problems for ideas
of literary authorship, the authorial persona and the authorised text that
preserves the writer’s final intentions. Paul Keegan, Faber’s poetry edi-
tor, notes that in working on the Waste Land project ‘I was concerned
that the text be at the centre . . . it’s still important that the poem have
a chance to survive in all its strangeness’, and two of Eliot’s own read-
ings of his poem are among its most striking features.33 Yet authorship,
final intentions and ‘the text’ itself are precisely what is at issue in
screenwriting. In many film industries, notably Hollywood, the writer
lacks ownership over the material and is liable to be rewritten by others,
while unlike the literary poem, the screenplay is a constantly evolving
text in the service of a different medium. For all of these reasons it is
more provisional and evasive than a published poem like Eliot’s, and
for these reasons also the open, hypertextual form is ideally suited to its
presentation, market and financial considerations notwithstanding.
These qualities of provisionality and openness also help to explain
why ‘genetic’ criticism is starting to emerge as a leading methodological
approach in current screenplay research. The hypertextual representa-
tion of a screenplay perhaps comes the closest we can currently imagine

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234 A History of the Screenplay

to what is otherwise the unrepresentable movement of what genetic crit-

icism terms the ‘avant-texte’. Like the editing procedures outlined by
Jerome McGann,34 this approach marries the familiar critical approaches
of textual analysis and scholarship with a more post-theoretical under-
standing of texts as radically unstable products of social and textual
negotiations. Genetic criticism ‘examines tangible documents such as
writers’ notes, drafts, and proof corrections, but its real object is some-

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thing much more abstract—not the existing documents but the move-
ment of writing that must be inferred from them’.35 This ‘movement
of writing’ is the ‘avant-texte’, which is in many ways comparable to
the ‘screen idea’ underlying the collaborative work on screenplays and
other documents and practices created during work on a film project. For
this reason, genetic criticism appears to complement very well ongoing
archival research into existing screenplays, combining traditional schol-
arship into material texts with methods for examining collaboration and
the anticipated realisation in another medium.36 The still-emerging pos-
sibilities of hypertext publication promise to make this ‘movement of
writing’ something that can be grasped more tangibly by the reader.
Digitisation will take dead screenplays out of the metaphorical wastepa-
per basket and re-animate them, at the same time as it threatens to kill
off the three-act written screenplay once and for all.

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Conclusion: The Screenplay
as a Modular Text

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Screenplays compiled during production almost invariably reveal their
provisional nature. Individual pages of revisions will ordinarily be dated
in the upper left-hand corner, and the presence of multiple dates shows
when the page in question was inserted, either to replace a previous
iteration or as an addition to it. During the 1930s, these pages began
to be colour-coded, eventually resulting in the convention whereby the
first set of revision pages would be printed on blue paper, followed by
pink, yellow, green and gold, reverting to white at the sixth revision.1
This convention is difficult to reconcile with the ubiquitous
‘blueprint’ metaphor, because instead of indicating a radical separation
of conception and execution, it shows the screenplay in a state of change
both before and during production. Indeed, in some circumstances it
may continue to evolve afterwards, as in Osip Brik’s recommendation
that the Soviet director’s screenplay should show the result of the work
in compiling the montage from exposed film, or in preparing a ver-
sion for publication. To the extent that the blueprint metaphor remains
valid, it is principally in relation to the silent continuity from 1914 to
1929, although even in those cases there are ordinarily significant dif-
ferences between what is envisaged in the written text and the release
print of the film. Moreover, the continuity script frequently contains
material devised during an earlier stage of composition (the scenario)
that exceeds the purely industrial function implied by the blueprint
metaphor.
For these reasons, Claudia Sternberg’s radically different conception of
the screenplay as ‘literature in flux’ initially appears more convincing.
This trope presents the screenplay not as a stable, efficient version of
a film in alternate textual form, but as a continuous and unpredictable
series of stages in the production process, and this better accords with

235

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236 A History of the Screenplay

some of the empirical evidence about how screenplays were actually

written both during the classical era and afterwards, with multiple writ-
ers or writing teams working on a project before and during the filming
process.
However, what the dating and colour-coding conventions reveal is
that not all of the text was in flux. On the contrary, significant sections
are retained from multiple previous iterations, including, very fre-

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quently, material from quite early stages in development. A screenplay
of this kind has quite literally been assembled by taking some pages
from one iteration, more from a second, still others from a third, and
so on, and placing them together in a provisional sequence. Moreover,
something resembling this latter-day convention can be found at the
very beginnings of extant screenwriting. In 1904, AM&B attempted to
present their Bulletin copy of The Suburbanite as a ‘dramatic composi-
tion’. Thwarted by the censor, for subsequent copyright submissions
they then used the description of the action as the basis for both the
Bulletin advertising and the scenarios themselves; the same piece of text
was being flown into two different documents. Meanwhile, the scenar-
ios themselves were constructed by combining this report-mode account
of the action with a mode of scene description derived from the con-
ventions of the contemporary theatrical play script, producing a textual
form that is visibly composed of two different kinds of material.
Neither the conventional screenplay of today, then, nor the ear-
liest surviving screenwriting texts, can comfortably be described as
blueprints; neither do they show the text in a state of flux. Instead, each
is a compilation of pre-existing materials that have been combined in
a particular order to achieve particular effects. Some of these materials
may continue to be re-written, but this will not ordinarily be the case
with all of them. This suggests that the screenplay is neither a blueprint,
at one end of the scale, nor ‘literature in flux’ at the other. Instead, it
occupies a middle position: the screenplay is a modular text.
This is an appropriate description of most of the forms of
screenwriting examined in this book. The ‘outline’ script composed
for narrative film-making around 1907–12, prior to the advent of the
multi-reel feature, facilitated an element of improvisation by providing
a skeleton of action from which a director like J. Searle Dawley could
deviate; for example, to accommodate location shooting. The continu-
ity script that developed thereafter presents the strongest case for the
blueprint model, but it is also very evidently comprised of distinct ele-
ments: the dramatic material of the scenario, the intertitles and the
editorial work of the continuity writers. This model came under stress

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 The Screenplay as a Modular Text 237

with the advent of sound, which Hollywood attempted to accommodate

by incorporating discrete elements within the script, as in the appropri-
ately titled ‘part-talkie’, or in the salvaging of material from the silent
cutting continuity of Hell’s Angels. For the remainder of the classical stu-
dio era the Hollywood script is, roughly, an amalgam of the continuity
form and dialogue scenes, which often take on the appearance of those
in the master-scene script. In all of these cases, the modular construc-

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tion is apparent not only in the paradigmatic forms but in individual
film projects, as material from previous iterations is incorporated, often
verbatim, within the latest re-write.
In this way, the idea of modular screenwriting captures something
of the nature of celluloid films themselves, which are produced by
the juxtaposition of exposed strips of footage, some of which may
then be subject to later treatment or substitution. Meanwhile, Staiger’s
description of the ‘package-unit’ system that arose in Hollywood around
1955 as one characterised by ‘component packaging’2 is equally appli-
cable to the screenplays that service it. With the ending of in-house
screenwriting at the Hollywood studios, the script becomes one element
among many assembled by a producer, and one that invites re-working
section-by-section by several different writers.
Yet not all forms of screenwriting can comfortably be accommodated
within this model, especially those originating outside the studio system
of the United States. The scripts of the Soviet-era directors were most cer-
tainly ‘in flux’. Conversely, the auteur writer such as Carl Mayer, or the
writer-director such as Ingmar Bergman, often operates in more or less
explicit opposition to such an idea. In general, individual authorship is
less amenable to the conception of the text as an assemblage of compo-
nent parts, which can always be provided by different writers. Moreover,
an auteur need not necessarily draw on a script that resembles the stan-
dard screenplay forms, often being able to work from his or her notes, in
whatever form s/he chooses, or indeed from no script at all. In this way
some of the ‘independent’ film-makers noted in Chapter 11 are not dis-
similar to their counterparts in the ‘cameraman’ system that prevailed
in early cinema.
In one final way, too, the material in the first and last chapters shows
screenwriting coming full circle. Digital film-making carries the poten-
tial to erase the distinctions between pre-production, production and
post-production: text, images, film, processing and editing can all be
effected at relatively low cost, on the same computer, at the same time.
There is a long way to go, and the reasons why screenwriting emerged
in the first place, which were as much legal as industrial, have their

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238 A History of the Screenplay

counterparts today in the uses of the script as a basis on which to attract

funding. Yet the return to a mode of film-making that resembles the
cottage industries of early cinema has the potential to eliminate many
of the divisions of labour, and the phases of production, that helped to
bring the written film script into being. There will be no more need for
the wastepaper basket, because the paper to go into it will no longer
exist. The future of the screenplay is, perhaps, annihilation. In its end is

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its beginning.

10.1057/9781137315700 - A History of the Screenplay, Steven Price

Notes

Introduction

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1. In Scott MacDonald, ed., Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent
Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 22.
2. In MacDonald, p. 19.
3. See in particular Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice
(London: Wallflower, 2009), p. 82.
4. Tom Stempel, FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 2nd
ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 62.
5. Marc Norman, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting
(London: Aurum, 2008), p. 42.
6. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the
Film Community, 1930–1960 (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980).
7. Lizzie Francke, Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood (London: British
Film Institute, 1994).
8. Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema [1974]
(New York: Overlook, 1985).
9. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern
Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Kristin Thompson,
Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
10. Maras, pp. 1–2.
11. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985);
Janet Staiger, ‘Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts’,
in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, rev. ed. (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 173–92.
12. Alexander Schwarz, Der Geschriebene Film: Drehbücher des Deutschen und
Russischen Stummfilms (Munich: Diskurs Film, 1994).
13. Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993).
14. Kristin Thompson, ‘Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production:
Implications for Europe’s Avant-Gardes’, in Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer
(eds), The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 349–67.
15. Staiger, ‘Blueprints’, p. 178, n. 8 and n. 9.
16. For an extensive discussion, see Maras, pp. 117–29.
17. Claudia Sternberg, Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture
Screenplay as Text (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1997), pp. 71–76.
18. Sternberg, p. 74.
19. Torey Liepa, ‘Entertaining the Public Option: The Popular Film Writing
Movement and the Emergence of Writing for the American Silent Cinema’,

239

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240 Notes

in Jill Nelmes (ed.), Analysing the Screenplay (London: Routledge, 2011),

pp. 15–16.
20. Maras, p. 91.
21. John Emerson and Anita Loos, How to Write Photoplays (New York: James
A. McCann, 1920), p. 19.
22. The New Stenographer, scenario by J. Stuart Blackton [1911], Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
23. Maras, p. 91.
24. Frances Marion, How to Write and Sell Film Stories (New York: Covici-Friede,

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1937), p. 372.
25. Janet Staiger, ‘Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the
Rise of the Studio System’, Cinema Journal 18.2 (1979), p. 20, emphasis added.
26. B. F. Barrett, ‘A Talk with C. Gardner Sullivan’, Motography 16.23 (1916),
p. 1237; quoted in Torey Liepa, ‘The Devil in the Details: Thomas Ince,
Intertitles, and the Institutionalization of Writing in American Cinema’, in
Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon, (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell
History of American Film, vol. 1: Origins to 1928 (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2012), p. 279.
27. Ann Martin and Virginia M. Clark, ed., What Women Wrote: Scenarios,
1912–1929 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1987), p. viii.
28. Marion, p. 374.
29. Janet Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production, 1930–60’, in David
Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge,
1985), p. 146.
30. Maras, p. 91.
31. Ibid.
32. Broadway (Universal, 1929), Screen Play and Dialogue Arrangement by
Edward T. Lowe, Jr., Cinema-Television Library, USC.
33. Gold Diggers of Broadway (WB, 1929). Undated continuity, ‘Screen Play by
Robert Lord’, AMPAS unpublished scripts collection, MHL.
34. Maras, p. 86.
35. Steven Maras, ‘In Search of “Screenplay”: Terminological Traces in the
Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries: Cumulative Series, 1912–20’
(2009), Film History 21.4, pp. 346–58.
36. Maras, Screenwriting, p. 6.
37. Facsimile reproduction in The Bride of Frankenstein, Universal Filmscripts
series: Classic horror films—Vol. 2 (Absecon, NJ: MagicImage Filmbooks,
1989).
38. Jeff Rush and Cynthia Baughman, ‘Language as Narrative Voice: The Poetics
of the Highly Inflected Screenplay’, Journal of Film and Video 49.3 (1997),
p. 29.
39. Claus Tieber, Schreiben für Hollywood: Das Drehbuch im Studiosystem (Vienna:
Lit Verlag GmbH, 2008).
40. For critiques of the ‘blueprint’ analogy, see Maras, Screenwriting, pp. 123–29;
Steven Price, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2010), pp. 44–47; Kathryn Millard, ‘After the Typewriter:
The Screenplay in a Digital Era’, Journal of Screenwriting 1.1 (2010),
pp. 14–15.

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 Notes 241

41. Jean-Claude Carrière, The Secret Language of Film, trans. Jeremy Leggatt
(London: Faber, 1995), p. 150.
42. Osip Brik, ‘From the Theory and Practice of a Script Writer’, trans. Diana
Matias, Screen 15.3 (1974), p. 99.
43. Nathalie Morris, ‘Unpublished Scripts in BFI Special Collections: A Few
Highlights’, Journal of Screenwriting 1.1 (2010), pp. 197–98.
44. Ian W. Macdonald and Jacob U. U. Jacob, ‘Lost and Gone for Ever? The Search
for Early British Screenplays’, Journal of Screenwriting 2.2 (2011), p. 162.
45. Thompson, ‘Early Alternatives’, p. 350.

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1 Prehistory of the Screenplay
1. Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (London: Wallflower,
2009), p. 29.
2. Tom Stempel, FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 2nd
ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 5.
3. Edward Azlant, The Theory, History, and Practice of Screenwriting, 1897–1920,
diss. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1980), p. 79.
4. Robert C. Allen, Vaudeville and Film 1895–1915: A Study in Media Interaction
(New York: Arno Press, 1980), pp. 159, 212–13; cited in Tom Gunning, ‘The
Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, the Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in
Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI,
1990), p. 56.
5. Azlant, p. 65.
6. Ian W. Macdonald, ‘Disentangling the Screen Idea’, Journal of Media Practice
5.2 (2004), pp. 89–99.
7. Maras, pp. 171–72.
8. Quoted in Stempel, p. 7.
9. Anon., ‘The Confessions of a Scenario Editor’, Photoplay (August 1914),
p. 166.
10. Cecil Hepworth, ‘Those Were the Days’, Penguin Film Review 6 (April 1948),
pp. 33–39; reprinted in Harry M. Geduld, ed., Film Makers on Film Making
(Indiana UP, 1967), pp. 26–32.
11. Stempel, p. 6.
12. Marshall Deutelbaum, ‘Structural Patterning in the Lumière Film’, Wide
Angle 3:i (1979), p. 30.
13. Ibid., p. 35.
14. Georges Sadoul, ‘Lumière—the Last Interview’, Sight & Sound 17 (Summer
1948), pp. 68–70; quoted in Geduld, p. 24.
15. David Robinson, Georges Méliès: Father of Film Fantasy (London: BFI, 1993),
p. 22.
16. Deutelbaum, p. 35.
17. Ibid.
18. Kemp R. Niver, The First Twenty Years: A Segment of Film History (Los Angeles:
Artisan Press, 1968), p. 8.
19. Stempel, p. 3.
20. Patrick Loughney, ‘From Rip Van Winkle to Jesus of Nazareth: Thoughts on
the Origins of the American Screenplay’, Film History 9.iii (1997), p. 279.

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242 Notes

21. Ibid., p. 278.

22. Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through
1925 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926), p. 288.
23. Ibid., pp. 370, 366.
24. Stempel, p. 3. Loughney’s research shows that Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle in
fact has a stronger claim than either.
25. Loughney, p. 280.
26. Azlant, p. 64.
27. Noël Burch, ‘Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach’,

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in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 486–89.
28. Charles Musser, ‘The Early Cinema of Edwin Porter’, Cinema Journal 19.i
(1979), p. 23.
29. George C. Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness: Readings in the History and Criti-
cism of the Silent Film, vol. 1 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press,
1966), pp. 36–37; Janet Staiger, ‘Mass-Produced Photoplays: Economic and
Signifying Practices in the First Years of Hollywood’, Wide Angle 4.iii (1980),
p. 18.
30. See Charles Musser, Thomas A. Edison Papers: A Guide to Motion Picture
Catalogs by American Producers and Distributors, 1894–1908: A Microfilm
Edition (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1985), esp.
pp. 11–15.
31. Complete Illustrated Catalog of Moving Picture Machines, Stereopticons, Slides,
Films, Kleine Optical Company, Chicago (November 1905), pp. 256–57;
reprinted in Pratt, pp. 23–24. The same outline of A Trip to the Moon is also
printed in the Star Films catalogue (New York: 1904), p. 25.
32. Complete Catalogue of Genuine and Original ‘Star’ Films (Moving Pictures) Manu-
factured by Geo. Méliès of Paris (New York: undated), n.p. It is more convenient
to refer to film, rather than page, numbers in this catalogue, which con-
tains several individually paginated ‘supplements’. The catalogue is formally
undated, and the BFI tentatively dates it as ‘1907?’, but the films in the
supplements are ‘copyright, 1904’, which seems the likelier date.
33. Quoted in Robinson, p. 26; my italics.
34. Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2000), pp. 13–14, 17.
35. John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès (Boston:
G.K. Hall, 1979) pp. 109, 143–44.
36. Azlant, pp. 74–75.
37. Complete Catalogue, p. 25.
38. Faust and Marguerite: A New and Magnificent Cinematographic Opera in 20
Motion Tableaux, in the Complete Catalogue, supplement 16, pp. 2–8. In the
original, each scene is described on a separate line, as is A Trip to the Moon.
39. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907
(New York: Scribner’s, 1990), p. 327. Musser presents both catalogue and
Clipper versions in full in Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison
Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991),
pp. 214–18.
40. See, for example, Martin Sopocy, ‘French and British Influences in Porter’s
American Fireman’, Film History 1.ii (1987), pp. 137–48; Musser, ‘The Early

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 Notes 243

Cinema of Edwin Porter’; André Gaudreault, ‘Detours in Film Narrative: The

Development of Cross-Cutting’, Cinema Journal 19.i (1979), pp. 39–59.
41. Marc Norman, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting
(London: Aurum, 2008), p. 20.
42. Ramsaye, p. 416.
43. Niver, p. 31.

2 Copyright Law, Theatre and Early Film Writing

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1. For a more detailed account, see Steven Price, ‘The First Screenplays?
American Mutoscope and Biograph Scenarios Revisited’, Journal of
Screenwriting 2.2 (2011), pp. 195–213. Like all later scholarship in this area,
mine is indebted to the work of Patrick Loughney, most widely circulated
in the following articles: ‘In the Beginning Was the Word: Six Pre-Griffith
Motion Picture Scenarios’, Iris 2.1 (1984), pp. 17–31; ‘From Rip Van Winkle
to Jesus of Nazareth: Thoughts on the Origins of the American Screenplay’,
Film History 9.3 (1997), pp. 277–89; ‘Appendix: Selected Examples of Early
Scenario/Screenplays in the Library of Congress’, Film History 9.3 (1997),
pp. 290–99.
2. Peter Decherney, ‘Copyright Dupes: Piracy and New Media in Edison v. Lubin
(1903)’, Film History 19.2 (2007), p. 114.
3. See Decherney, and also André Gaudreault, ‘The Infringement of Copyright
Laws and Its Effects (1900–1906)’, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema:
Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 114–22.
4. Decherney, p. 118.
5. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907
(New York: Scribner’s, 1990), p. 375; cited in Steven Maras, ‘In Search of
“Screenplay”: Terminological Traces in the Library of Congress Catalog of
Copyright Entries: Cumulative Series, 1912–20’, Film History 21.4 (2009), p. 352.
6. See Maras, p. 353. On the dating of the copyright applications, see Price,
pp. 200–02.
7. Quoted in Loughney, ‘Appendix’, p. 292.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 294. For reasons noted previously, however, the word ‘scenario’
remains problematic.
10. These scenarios are held in the Motion Picture Reading Room, Madison
Building, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., although The Wedding was
unavailable when I visited in July 2010.
11. Kemp R. Niver (ed.), Biograph Bulletins 1896–1908 (Los Angeles: Locare
Research Group, 1971), p. 160.
12. See Price, p. 205.
13. Claudia Sternberg, Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture
Screenplay as Text (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997), pp. 71–76.
14. There are two exceptions, The Chicken Thief and The Wedding. For discussion
of this point, see Price, pp. 201–07.
15. Loughney, ‘In the Beginning’, p. 30.
16. Isabelle Raynauld, ‘Written Scenarios of Early French Cinema: Screenwriting
Practices in the First Twenty Years’, Film History 9.3 (1997), p. 264.

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244 Notes

17. Ibid., p. 262.

18. Ibid., pp. 260–61.
19. Ibid., p. 258.
20. Ibid., p. 259, Raynauld’s emphasis.
21. Ibid., p. 260.
22. Ibid., p. 257.
23. Ibid., p. 258.
24. Loughney, ‘Appendix’, p. 294.
25. The Serenade, scenario by William N. Selig, 1905, LoC.

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26. Loughney, ‘Appendix’, p. 295.
27. Discussion with the author, summer 2010.
28. From the Manger to the Cross, or Jesus of Nazareth, scenario by Gene
Gauntier, in What Women Wrote: Scenarios, 1912–1929, ed. Ann Martin
and Virginia M. Clark (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America,
1987).
29. Ann Martin and Virginia M. Clark, ‘A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of
What Women Wrote: Scenarios 1912–1929’ (Frederick, MD: University Press of
America, 1987), p. 1; Loughney, ‘From Rip van Winkle’, p. 286.
30. Loughney, ‘From Rip Van Winkle’, p. 286.
31. Robert Henderson-Bland, From Manger to Cross: The Story of the World-Famous
Film of the Life of Jesus (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), p. 30.
32. Loughney, ‘Appendix’, pp. 298–99.
33. Martin and Clark, ‘A Guide’, pp. vi, 1.
34. Loughney, ‘From Rip Van Winkle’, p. 286.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 287.
37. Ibid.
38. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-y-81BMLA4, accessed 12 February 2013.
39. Torey Liepa, ‘An Uneven Marketplace of Ideas: Amateur Screenwriting, the
Library of Congress and the Struggle for Copyright’, Journal of Screenwriting
2.2 (2011), pp. 185–86.
40. Henderson-Bland, p. 74.
41. Loughney, ‘From Rip Van Winkle’, pp. 282–83.
42. In David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London:
Routledge, 1985), pp. 121–27.

3 Outlines and Scenarios, 1904–17

1. Tom Stempel, FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 2nd
ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 8.
2. http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/222/55/, accessed 14 February
2013.
3. ‘The “Ben Hur” Case’, The Bioscope, 22 February 1912, p. 533; quoted in
Torey Liepa, ‘An Uneven Marketplace of Ideas: Amateur Screenwriting, the
Library of Congress and the Struggle for Copyright’, Journal of Screenwriting
2.2 (2011), p. 183.
4. Quoted in Liepa, p. 183.

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 Notes 245

5. Letter from Drury W. Cooper, on behalf of AM&B, to the Register of

Copyrights, 6 December 1904, transcribed in Patrick Loughney, ‘Appendix:
Selected Examples of Early Scenario/Screenplays in the Library of Congress’,
Film History 9.3 (1997), p. 292.
6. For a detailed critical summary, see Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History,
Theory and Practice (London: Wallflower, 2009), pp. 139–40.
7. Liepa, ‘Uneven’, p. 180.
8. Maras, pp. 140–41; Torey Liepa, ‘Entertaining the Public Option: The Popu-
lar Film Writing Movement and the Emergence of Writing for the American

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Silent Cinema’, in Jill Nelmes (ed.), Analysing the Screenplay (London:
Routledge, 2011), esp. pp. 17–20.
9. Edward Azlant, The Theory, History, and Practice of Screenwriting, 1897–
1920, diss. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1980),
p. 82.
10. Epes Winthrop Sargent, The Technique of the Photoplay, 2nd ed. (New York:
The Moving Picture World, 1913), p. 8; quoted in Janet Staiger, ‘The
Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930’, in David Bordwell, Janet Straiger
and Kristin Thompson (eds), The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and
Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 118.
11. Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930’, p. 117.
12. Gene Gauntier, ‘Blazing the Trail’, Woman’s Home Companion 55.11
(November 1928), p. 181; quoted in Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of
Production to 1930’, p. 119.
13. Louella Parsons, The Gay Illiterate (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1944) p. 21;
quoted in Stempel, p. 11.
14. Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930’, p. 119.
15. Ibid., p. 126.
16. The autobiographical information about Dawley in this paragraph is drawn
from the ‘career information’ folder, J. Searle Dawley papers, 1-f.18, MHL.
17. Earthwork Construction Story, scenario, 19 July 1911, J. Searle Dawley papers,
1.f-1, MHL.
18. Stempel, p. 15.
19. Ibid., p. 16.
20. The MHL has helpfully inserted a copy of the Kinetogram blurb into the
relevant folder of each of the Dawley films.
21. Quoted in David Emrich, Hollywood, Colorado: The Selig Polyscope Company
and The Colorado Motion Picture Company (Lakewood, Colorado: Post Modern
Company, 1997), p. 14.
22. James E. McQuage, ‘Making “Selig” Pictures’, Film Index 4.47 (November 20,
1909), pp. 4–6; reprinted in Kalton C. Lahue, ed., Motion Picture Pioneer: The
Selig Polyscope Company (Cranbury, N.J.: A.S. Barnes, 1973), pp. 57–63. The
quotation is on p. 58.
23. Across the Plains, scenario by Chris Lane, William Selig Papers, 9-f.155, MHL.
24. The Argonauts, scenario, William Selig papers, 9-f.162, MHL.
25. The Argonauts, cutting continuity, William Selig papers, 9-f.163, MHL.
26. The Crooked Path, cutting continuity, William Selig papers, 10-f.204, MHL.
27. The Cowboy’s Baby, cutting continuity, William Selig papers, 10-f.201, MHL.
28. The Engineer’s Daughter, cutting continuity, William Selig papers, 11-
f.222, MHL.

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246 Notes

29. Aunt Elsa’s Visit (Edison, 1913): scenario, 10 January 1913; synopsis, 31
January 1913; titles, 17 February 1913, MoMA.
30. Cari Beauchamp and Anita Mary Loos, Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film
Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003), p. 33.
31. Ibid., p. 33.
32. Her Nature Dance, Mack Sennett papers, 29-f.272, MHL.
33. Done in Oil, Mack Sennett papers, 16-f.148, MHL.
34. A Clever Dummy, Mack Sennett papers, 12-f.104, MHL.

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4 The Continuity Script, 1912–29
1. See, for example, Janet Staiger, ‘Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s
Continuity Scripts’, in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, rev. ed.
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 180.
2. Ibid., p. 190.
3. John Emerson and Anita Loos, How to Write Photoplays (New York: James
A. McCann, 1920), pp. 30, 32.
4. Janet Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production, 1930–60’, in David
Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (eds), The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985),
p. 146.
5. Louis Delluc, ‘Scénarii’, Comoedia 3763 (6 April 1923), p. 4; quoted in Kristin
Thompson, ‘Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production: Impli-
cations for Europe’s Avant-Gardes’, in Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, eds.,
The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 352.
6. Juan Arroy, ‘La Monteuse’, Cinémagazine 5.39 (25 September 1925), p. 519;
quoted in Thompson, p. 353.
7. Thompson, pp. 352–53.
8. Patrick McGilligan, Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s
Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 102.
9. Janet Staiger, ‘Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the
Rise of the Studio System’, Cinema Journal 18 (Spring 1979), p. 19.
10. Torey Liepa, ‘An Uneven Marketplace of Ideas: Amateur Screenwriting, the
Library of Congress and the Struggle for Copyright’, Journal of Screenwriting
2.2 (2011), p. 190.
11. Torey Liepa, ‘The Devil in the Details: Thomas Ince, Intertitles, and the
Institutionalization of Writing in American Cinema’, in Cynthia Lucia, Roy
Grundmann, and Art Simon, (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell History of American
Film, vol. 1: Origins to 1928 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012), p. 271.
12. Staiger, ‘Dividing Labor’, p. 21.
13. Edward Azlant, The Theory, History, and Practice of Screenwriting, 1897–1920,
diss. (University of Wisconsin–Madison) (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University
Microfilms International, 1980), pp. 162–63.
14. Tom Stempel, FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 2nd
ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 42.
15. George C. Pratt reproduces the whole of what he terms the ‘shooting script’
of Satan McAllister’s Heir, including the cast and location lists and cost sheet,
as well as the scenario, in Spellbound in Darkness: Readings in the History and

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 Notes 247

Criticism of the Silent Film, vol. 1 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press,
1966), pp. 135–55.
16. Stempel, p. 42.
17. B. F. Barrett, ‘A Talk with C. Gardner Sullivan’, Motography 16.23 (1916),
p. 1237; quoted in Liepa, ‘The Devil’, p. 279.
18. Staiger, ‘Dividing Labor’, p. 20; Stempel, pp. 43–44.
19. Stempel, p. 44.
20. Azlant, p. 172.
21. Ibid., p. 326.

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22. Liepa, ‘The Devil’, p. 275.
23. Ibid., pp. 283–85.
24. The Immigrant, scenario by Marion Fairfax, Marion Fairfax papers, 1-f.6,
MHL.
25. B. F. Barrett, ‘A Talk with C. Gardner Sullivan’, Motography 16.23 (1916),
pp. 1237–38; quoted in Liepa, ‘The Devil’, p. 279.
26. Azlant, p. 322.
27. The Immigrant, scenario by Marion Fairfax, Paramount scripts, MHL.
28. Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women
of Early Hollywood (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 79.
29. DeWitt Bodeen, interview with Frances Marion, Film in Review (Feb.-Mar
1969), pp. 138–42; quoted in Marsha McCreadie, The Women Who Write the
Movies: From Frances Marion to Nora Ephron (New York: Birch Lane, 1994),
p. 28.
30. Beauchamp, p. 175.
31. The Scarlet Letter, treatment by Wyndham Gittens, 1 July 1925, Turner/MGM
scripts, 2526-f. S-286, MHL.
32. The present account draws on the studio original: The Scarlet Letter, complete
OK screenplay by Frances Marion, 30 December 1925, Turner/MGM scripts,
2526-f. S288, MHL. Exactly the same text is reproduced in Motion Picture
Continuities, intro. Frances Taylor Patterson (New York: Columbia UP, 1929),
except that the latter slightly alters the punctuation in places, as well as
the numbering, because the original ascribes a shot number to the opening
‘TITLE’ (‘A Sunday morning in Spring’) and the published text does not.
33. Beauchamp, pp. 176–77.
34. Marsha McCreadie, The Women Who Write the Movies: From Frances Marion to
Nora Ephron (New York: Birch Lane, 1994), p. 32.
35. Love or Justice (Kay-Bee, 1917), continuity (extracts), http://www.wcftr.
commarts.wisc.edu/collections/featured/aitken/continuity/, accessed 7
February 2013.
36. Stempel (p.44) notes the alternative possibility that they indicate ‘Ince’s
approval of rough cuts’.
37. Liepa, ‘The Devil’, p. 289.

5 The Silent Film Script in Europe

1. Ian W. Macdonald, ‘Screenwriting in Britain 1895–1929’, in Jill Nelmes (ed.),
Analysing the Screenplay (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 45.
2. Quoted in Macdonald, pp. 47, 49.

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248 Notes

3. Ian W. Macdonald and Jacob U. U. Jacob, ‘Lost and Gone for Ever? The
Search for Early British Screenplays’, Journal of Screenwriting 2.2 (2011),
pp. 161–77.
4. Macdonald, ‘Screenwriting in Britain’, p. 55.
5. Ibid., p. 54.
6. Conversation with the author.
7. Richard Abel, ‘People 1890–1930: The Men and Women Who Made French
Cinema’, in Michael Temple and Michael Witt (eds), The French Cinema Book
(London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 25.

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8. Quoted in Kristin Thompson, ‘Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode
of Production: Implications for Europe’s Avant-Gardes’, in Lee Grieveson
and Peter Krämer (eds), The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2004),
p. 351.
9. Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993), pp. 285–86.
10. Quoted in Thompson, p. 354.
11. Alexander Schwarz, Der Geschriebene Film: Drehbücher des Deutschen und
Russischen Stummfilms (Munich: Diskurs Film, 1994), pp. 43–44, 51–52.
12. Schwarz, pp. 104–07.
13. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘The Film Factory (Extracts)’, in Richard Taylor and Ian
Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents,
1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 167.
14. Jürgen Kasten, ‘Green Kisses and the Laughing Horror of the Big Lie:
On Darkness in Film History, on Screenplays and Lost Films’, in Michael
Omasta, Brigitte Mayr and Christian Cargnelli (eds), Carl Mayer Scenar[t]ist:
Ein Script von Ihm War Schon ein Film: “A Script by Carl Mayer Was Already a
Film” (Vienna: Synema, 2003), pp. 97–99.
15. Hermann Kappelhoff, ‘Literary Exploration of the Cinematographic Image:
Carl Mayer and the Poetry of Weimar Cinema’, in Omasta, p. 169.
16. Siegfied Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychlogical History of the German
Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 96.
17. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari: Drehbuch von Carl Mayer und Hans Janowitz
zu Robert Wienes Film von 1919/20 (Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek,
1995).
18. David Robinson, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (London: BFI, 1997), p. 14.
19. Kasten, p. 106.
20. Robinson, pp. 17–18; Drehbuch, p. 51. The translation used here is
Robinson’s, but his lineation, in which all the text is left-justified and contin-
ues to the right margin, differs from that of the printed German text, which
lineates the text as here. Moreover, facsimiles of the original Drehbuch indi-
cate that the scene text of both the typewritten and handwritten scenes was
offset in the manner indicated, though this has not been preserved in the
German print version.
21. Robinson, p. 19; Drehbuch, pp. 52–53.
22. Dietrich Scheunemann, ‘Once More on Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’,
in Dietrich Scheunemann (ed.), Expressionist Film: New Perspectives
(New York: Camden House, 2003), p. 144.
23. Kappelhoff, p. 177.
24. Kasten, p. 105.

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 Notes 249

25. Patrick Vonderau, ‘ “Two Figures Stand High up on a Cliff: Shadowy”: On

Carl Mayer’s Screenplay Der Gang in die Nacht’, in Omasta, p. 114.
26. Vonderau, p. 115.
27. Rolf Hempel, Carl Mayer: Ein Autor Schreibt mit der Kamera (Berlin:
Henschelverlag, 1968), pp. 111–28.
28. Schwarz, pp. 305–06.
29. AFI SP.COL. #27, v.5. The English text is a translation of Mayer’s German-
language Lied von Zwei Menschen, held in the same archive (#27, v.4).
A facsimile of Murnau’s copy of Mayer’s text, complete with the director’s

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handwritten annotations, has been published in Sunrise (Sonnenaufgang):
Ein Drehbuch von Carl Mayer mit handschriftlichen Bemerkungen von Friedrich
Wilhelm Murnau (Wiesbaden: Deutschen Institut für Filmkunde, 1971).
30. Lucy Fischer, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (London: BFI, 1998), p. 12.
31. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice
(New York: Knopf, 1985), pp. 91–92.
32. Allen and Gomery, p. 102.
33. Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), The BFI Companion to German Cinema (London: BFI,
1999), pp. 172–73.
34. Fischer, p. 52.
35. Richard Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917–1929 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 9.
36. Denise J. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935 (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 13.
37. Youngblood, p. 25.
38. Viktor Pertsov, ‘Literature and Cinema’ [1927], in Richard Taylor and Ian
Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents,
1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 164–66.
39. ‘Sovkino Workers’ Conference Resolution: Sovkino’s New Course (Extract)’,
in Taylor and Christie, p. 243.
40. Vsevolod Pudovkin, ‘The Film Script (The Theory of the Script)’, in Richard
Taylor (ed.), Vsevolod Pudovkin: Selected Essays (London: Seagull, 2006),
pp. 33–35.
41. Quoted in Youngblood, p. 68.
42. Quoted in Thompson, p. 360.
43. Thompson, p. 360.
44. Maria Belodubrovskaya, ‘Plotlessness: Lessons in Soviet Screenwriting’,
conference paper, 6th Screenwriting Research Network conference:
Screenwriting in a Global & Digital World, Madison, Wisconsin, 21 August
2013.
45. Taylor, Vsevolod Pudovkin, p. 301, n. 24.
46. Youngblood, pp. 133–38.
47. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Form of the Script’, in Selected Works, vol. 1: Writings,
1922–34, trans. and ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988), pp. 134–35.
48. Schwarz, pp. 282–85.
49. Richard Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917–1929 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 34.
50. Taylor, Politics, p. 34.
51. See Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow, Eisenstein at Work (New York: Pantheon,
1982).

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250 Notes

52. Leyda and Voynow, p. 23.

53. Quoted in Sergei Eisenstein: Three Scripts [Battleship Potemkin, October and
Alexander Nevsky], ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Diana Matias (London: Lorrimer,
1974), p. 13. Subsequent quotations from Eisenstein’s scripts are from this
edition.
54. Leyda, in Sergei Eisenstein: Three Scripts, p. 15.
55. Ibid., p. 49.
56. Schwarz, p. 342.
57. Leyda and Voynow, pp. 38–40.

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6 The Coming of Sound
1. The Jazz Singer, ed. Robert L. Carringer (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1979).
2. Edwin Scallert, ‘Vitaphone Activity in Hollywood’, Motion Picture News, 8 July
1927, pp. 35–36; reprinted in The Jazz Singer, pp. 175–79.
3. The Shopworn Angel, Howard Estabrook papers, 10-f.132, MHL.
4. The Shopworn Angel, final continuity by Howard Estabrook, 6 September
1928, Paramount scripts, MHL.
5. The Shopworn Angel, Howard Estabrook papers, 10-f.133, MHL.
6. Mordaunt Hall, ‘The Screen’, New York Times, 1 January 1929, p. 61.
7. Edwin Schallert, ‘Pathos of Love Story Stressed’, Los Angeles Times, 14 January
1929, p. A7.
8. ‘ “Gag” Men May Take Hope’, Los Angeles Times, 13 January 1929, p. C16.
9. The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, complete OK screenplay (silent version) by Hans
Kraly, 22 February 1929, Turner/MGM scripts, 1635-f. L295, MHL.
10. The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, complete OK screenplay (sound version) by Hans
Kraly and Claudine West, 2 March 1929, Turner/MGM scripts, 1635-f. L297,
MHL. No continuity writer is credited on either the sequence synopsis or the
continuity for this version; the MHL inventory credits the sound version to
Kraly and West.
11. The following discussion of Hughes’ plans for the film draws on Donald L.
Barlett and James B. Steele, Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard
Hughes (New York: Norton, 1979), esp. p. 66, and Charles Higham, Howard
Hughes: The Secret Life (New York: G.B. Putnam, 1993), esp. pp. 46–49.
12. Hell’s Angels, dialogue script by Joseph Moncure March, undated, Howard
Estabrook papers, 8-f.92, MHL.
13. Hell’s Angels, ‘final’ script by Howard Estabrook, September 27, 1929, Howard
Estabrook papers, 8-f.94, MHL.
14. Hell’s Angels, continuity of silent version compiled by Douglas Biggs,
August 26, 1929, Howard Estabrook papers, 8-f.91, MHL.
15. Broadway Melody (MGM, 1929), continuity by Sarah Y. Mason, September 11,
1928, Victor Heerman papers, 1-f.13, MHL.
16. Gold Diggers of Broadway, undated [1929] continuity, AMPAS unpublished
scripts collection, MHL.
17. See 42nd Street, ed. Rocco Fumento (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1980), pp. 14–21.
18. 42nd Street, p. 193.

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 Notes 251

19. 42nd Street folder, Warner Brothers collection, USC. See also Steven Price,
The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010),
pp. 104–05.

7 The Hollywood Sound Screenplay to 1948

1. Janet Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production, 1930–60’, in David
Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (eds), The Classical Hollywood

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Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985),
p. 322.
2. ‘Proceedings of the Research Council, Quarterly Meeting, December 15,
1932’, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Technical Bulletin, supplement
19 (23 December 1932), p. 1.
3. Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production, 1930–60’, p. 323.
4. Janet Staiger, ‘Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts’,
in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, rev. ed. (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
5. James Seymour Collection, Writers Guild of America West Records, Writers
Guild Foundation Library & Archive. Thanks to Joanne Lammers for drawing
this to my attention.
6. Claudia Sternberg, Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture
Screenplay as Text (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997), p. 209.
7. Ibid., p. 75.
8. See, for example, Tom Stempel, FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the
American Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), pp. 63–69.
9. Juárez, ed. Paul J. Vanderwood (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1983), pp. 83–84.
10. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio
Era (New York: Pantheon, 1989), p. 5.
11. Ibid., pp. 7–8.
12. The Sin of Madelon Claudet (MGM, 1931), dialogue continuity by Charles
MacArthur, Motion Picture Scripts Core Collection, MHL.
13. Babes in Toyland (MGM, 1934), screenplay by Frank Butler and Nick Grinde,
‘Final Script’, 28 July 1934, Motion Picture Scripts Core Collection, MHL.
14. The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Paramount, 1935), Paramount Scripts collec-
tion, MHL.
15. The Bride of Frankenstein (Universal, 1935), Universal Filmscripts series: Clas-
sic Horror Films, Vol. 2, Absecon, NJ: MagicImage Filmbooks, 1989, p. A-4.
16. Petr Szczepanik, ‘Micropolitics of Screenplay Development: A Political His-
tory’, conference paper, Screenwriting in a Global & Digital World, Madison,
Wisconsin, 21 August 2013.
17. How Green Was My Valley (20th Century Fox, 1941), screenplay by Philip
Dunne, ‘2nd revised Final’, 18 April 1941, p. 1.
18. Laura (20th Century Fox, 1944), ‘Shooting Final, April 18, 1944’, ‘Screenplay
by Jay Dratler, With revisions in this version by Ring Lardner Jr., Samuel
Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt’, BFI S18036, p. 1.
19. “Portrait of Jenny Story Conference”, 29 April 1947, David O. Selznick
papers, Harry Ransom Research Center, Austin, Texas, p. 2, cited in http://

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252 Notes

www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/12/17/a-dose-of-dos-trade-secrets-from-
selznick/, accessed 12 September 2013.
20. Rudy Behlmer, Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at Twentieth
Century-Fox (New York: Grove, 1993), pp. 173–74; James Curtis, Between
Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1982), p. 173.
Both cited in an email from David Bordwell to the author, 21 August 2013.
21. Samson Raphaelson, Three Screen Comedies by Samson Raphaelson: Trouble in
Paradise, the Shop Around the Corner, Heaven Can Wait (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1983).

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22. John Howard Lawson, Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1949), p. 370.
23. Rio Bravo (WB, 1959), final draft screenplay by Jules Furthman and Leigh
Brackett, 26 February 1958, BFI S6285.
24. Johnny Guitar (Republic, 1954), screenplay by Philip Yordan, 8 October 1953,
Motion Picture Scripts Core Collection, MHL.
25. Schatz, pp. 167–68.
26. David Copperfield (MGM, 1935), screen play by Howard Estabrook, adapta-
tion by Hugh Walpole, 8 September 1934, BFI S5237.
27. Howard Estabrook papers, f-58, MHL.
28. George Cukor collection, f-96, MHL.
29. David Copperfield, f. D-208 to f. D-223, Turner/MGM scripts, MHL, and
Howard Estabrook papers, David Copperfield, f-57, MHL.
30. Robert L. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996), p. 26.
31. The Citizen Kane Book (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971), p. 91.
32. A facsimile of the first page is reproduced in Carringer, p. 20.
33. The Citizen Kane Book, p. 95.
34. On the disputed extent of Welles’ involvement in the first draft of American,
see Carringer, p. 18.
35. Jeff Rush and Cynthia Baughman, ‘Language as Narrative Voice: The Poetics
of the Highly Inflected Screenplay’, Journal of Film and Video 49.3 (1997),
pp. 28–37

8 European Screenwriting, 1948–60

1. See Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London:
Wallflower, 2006), pp. 26–29, and Peter Bondanella, A History of Italian
Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 25–26.
2. Quoted in P. Adams Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1985), p. 87.
3. Michael Temple and Michael Witt, eds., The French Cinema Book (London:
British Film Institute, 2004), p. 177.
4. Cesare Zavattini, ‘A Thesis on Neo-Realism’ [1952–54], in David Overbey, ed.
and trans., Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism (London: Talisman,
1978), p. 74.
5. Stefania Parigi, Cinema—Italy, trans. Sam Rohdie (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2009), p. 15.
6. Ibid., p. 19.

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 Notes 253

7. Bondanella, p. 62.
8. Zavattini, p. 70.
9. Ibid., p. 72.
10. Ibid., p. 73.
11. Ibid., p. 71.
12. Ibid., p. 76.
13. Ibid.
14. These have not been well served by publication, since in most cases the avail-
able ‘screenplays’ are in fact transcriptions of the films. The version of Bicycle

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Thieves in L’Avant-Scene Cinema 76 (December 1967) is a description of the
film; that in the ‘Associazione Amici’ text is a technical breakdown of the
film, shot by shot. Similarly, the version of Umberto D in L’Avant-Scene du
Cinema (April 1980) is a ‘Découpage integral après montage et dialogue in
extenso’.
15. Robert S. C. Gordon, Bicycle Thieves (London: British Film Institute, 2008),
pp. 22–25.
16. A facsimile of p. 289 in Gordon’s monograph closes on shot 1,136 (Gordon,
p. 35).
17. Gordon, p. 35.
18. Shiel, p. 12.
19. Jacques Aumont et al., Aesthetics of Film (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1999), p. 111; quoted in Shiel, p. 55.
20. Shiel, p. 55.
21. Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews
on Cinema, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi, trans. Andrew Taylor
(New York: Marsilio, 1996), p. 58.
22. Michelangelo Antonioni, ‘Introduction’, Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni
[Il Grido, L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse], trans. Roger J. Moore (New York:
Orion, 1963), pp. xiv–xviii.
23. Michelangelo Antonioni, Unfinished Business: Screenplays, Scenarios and Ideas,
ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi, trans. Andrew Taylor (New York:
Marsilio, 1998), pp. 118–19.
24. Birgitta Ingemanson, ‘The Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman: Personification
and Olfactory Detail’, Literature/Film Quarterly 12.1 (1984), p. 26.
25. Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, trans. Lars Malmström
and David Kushner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 6.
26. John Gassner and Dudley Nichols, eds., Twenty Best Film Plays (New York:
Crown, 1943). See Steven Price, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and
Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 27–28.
27. Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2005), p. 53.
28. Anna Sofia Rossholm, ‘Tracing the Voice of the Auteur: Persona and the
Ingmar Bergman Archive’, Journal of Screenwriting 4.2 (2013), p. 138.
29. Ingmar Bergman, ‘The Snakeskin’, in Persona and Shame, trans. Keith
Bradfield (London: Calder & Boyars, 1972), p. 15.
30. Rossholm, p. 143.
31. Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries, trans. Lars Malmström and David
Kushner (London: Lorrimer, 1970), p. 7.
32. Ingemanson, p. 32, n. 2.

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254 Notes

33. Ibid., p. 28.

34. Bergman, Four Screenplays, p. 70; Ingemanson, p. 29.
35. Rossholm, p. 138.
36. Ingemanson, p. 30.
37. Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2005), p. 53.
38. Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993), p. 301.
39. Ibid., pp. 301–03.

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40. Ibid., pp. 306–07.
41. Claus Tieber, Schreiben für Hollywood: Das Drehbuch im Studiosystem (Vienna:
Lit Verlag GmbH, 2008).
42. François Truffaut, ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, in Bill Nichols
(ed.), Movies and Methods: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976), p. 224.
43. Ibid., p. 229.
44. Ibid., p. 233.
45. Crisp, p. 317.
46. Temple and Witt, p. 94; Crisp, pp. 286–93.
47. Alison Smith, ‘People 1960–2004: The Other Auteurs: Producers,
Cinematographers and Scriptwriters’, in Michael Temple and Michael Witt
(eds), The French Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 204.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Susan Hayward, ‘State, Culture and the Cinema: Jack Lang’s Strategies for the
French Film Industry 1981–93’, Screen 34.4 (1993), p. 384.
51. François Truffaut, The Adventures of Antoine Doinel: Four Autobiographical
Screenplays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971).
52. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad: A Ciné-Novel, trans. Richard
Howard (London: Calder, 1961), p. 6.
53. Ibid., p. 16.
54. Chris Marker, La Jetée (New York: Zone, 1992).
55. Antonioni, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii.

9 Master-Scene Screenplays & the ‘New Hollywood’

1. Tom Stempel, FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 2nd
ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 156.
2. John Howard Lawson, Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1949), p. 367.
3. Quoted in Lawson, pp. 368–69.
4. Ibid., p. 370.
5. Dore Schary [and Charles Palmer], Case History of a Movie (New York: Random
House, 1950), pp. 59–60.
6. Lewis Herman, A Practical Manual of Screen Playwriting for Theater and
Television Films [1952] (Cleveland: Forum, 1963), p. 169.
7. Ibid., pp. 170–71.

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 Notes 255

8. Outbreak (Panic in the Streets), screenplay by Richard Murphy, revised

shooting final, 9 February 1950, Motion Picture Scripts Core Collection,
MHL.
9. Bridget Boland, Screen Writing (London: British Film Institute, 1945). I am
grateful to Ian Macdonald for drawing this to my attention.
10. Lindsay Anderson, Making a Film (New York: Garland, 1977 [1952]).
11. I am grateful to Jill Nelmes for confirming this point.
12. Charade (Stanley Donen Film, 1963), screenplay by Peter Stone, revised draft,
21 August 1962, Motion Picture Scripts Core Collection, MHL.

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13. Stempel, pp. 197–207.
14. William Goldman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, final, 15 July 1968,
BFI S18546.
15. William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood
and Screenwriting [1984] (London: Futura, 1985), pp. 199–205.
16. Breathless: Jean-Luc Godard, Director, ed. Dudley Andrew (New Brunswick,
N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 27.
17. Matthew Bernstein, ‘Perfecting the New Gangster: Writing Bonnie and Clyde’,
Film Quarterly 53.4 (2000), pp. 16–31.
18. Lester D. Friedman, Bonnie and Clyde (London: British Film Institute,
2000), p. 27.
19. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll
Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), pp. 26–28.
20. John G. Cawelti (ed.), Focus on Bonnie and Clyde (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 158–65. Cawelti prints additional excerpts from
the shooting script—the first 16 scenes, and the gun battle at Joplin (begin-
ning part-way through scene 100 and continuing through scene 105)—on
pp. 151–57. Confusingly, however, Cawelti’s otherwise very helpful account
of the differences between the film and the ‘original script’ (pp. 138–45)
uses that term to refer variously to both the undated master-scene script
and the 6 September shooting script, without always clearly indicating
which. Reference to the full shooting script, however, eliminates the con-
fusion: Bonnie and Clyde, screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton,
‘Final’, 6 September 1966, BFI S4215. This is a copy of the shooting script
referred to by Cawelti.
21. Cawelti, p. 142; Arthur Penn, ‘Making Waves: The Directing of Bonnie and
Clyde’, in Lester D. Friedman, ed., Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 23–24.
22. For the Easy Rider production, see Biskind, pp. 61–75.
23. Easy Rider, screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern,
Donn Cambern papers, f. 9, MHL; BFI S2715.
24. Peter Cowie, The Godfather Book (London: Faber, 1997), p. 28.
25. Jenny M. Jones, The Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay (New York:
Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007), p. 20.
26. Reproduced in Jones, p. 20.
27. The Godfather, screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, third
draft, 29 March 1971, BFI 18610.
28. Cowie, pp. 26–27.
29. Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver (London: Faber, 1990), p. 4.

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256 Notes

10 The Contemporary Screenplay and

Screenwriting Manual
1. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll
Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 17.
2. For a range of perspectives on these developments, see the essays in Steve
Neale and Murray Smith (eds) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London:
Routledge, 1998).
3. The most sustained study of these matters that is of direct relevance to

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story structure and the writing manual is Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in
the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
4. Torey Liepa, ‘An Uneven Marketplace of Ideas: Amateur Screenwriting, the
Library of Congress and the Struggle for Copyright’, Journal of Screenwriting
2.2 (2011), pp. 180–81.
5. Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of
Independent Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2005).
6. See Kathryn Millard, ‘After the Typewriter: The Screenplay in a Digital Era’,
Journal of Screenwriting 1.1 (2010), pp. 15–17.
7. Richard Maltby, ‘ “Nobody Knows Everything”: Post-Classical Historiographies
and Consolidated Entertainment’, in Neale and Smith, p. 39.
8. Murray Smith, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History’, in Neale
and Smith, p. 12.
9. William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood
and Screenwriting [1984] (London: Futura, 1985), pp. 151–58.
10. On Lucas’s indebtedness to Campbell, see David Bordwell, The Way
Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), p. 33.
11. William Goldman, ‘The Screenwriter’, in Jason E. Squire, ed., The Movie Busi-
ness Book, London: Columbus, p. 52; cited in Steven Maras, Screenwriting:
History, Theory and Practice (London: Wallflower, 2009), p. 79.
12. Some of the most useful or influential manuals consulted for the follow-
ing discussion are Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting
(New York: Dell, 1979); Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style,
and the Principles of Screenwriting (London: Methuen, 1998); Lew Hunter,
Screenwriting (London: Robert Hale, 1994); Michael Hauge, Writing
Screenplays That Sell (Harmondsworth: Elm Tree, 1989).
13. Bordwell, pp. 28–35.
14. Manuals that explicitly relate Aristotle to screenwriting include Lance Lee,
A Poetics for Screenwriters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), and Ari
Hiltunen, Aristotle in Hollywood (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2002).
15. The most influential and explicit appropriation of Campbell is Christopher
Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters,
2nd ed. (London: Pan, 1998); also see Stuart Voytilla, Myth and the Movies:
Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films (Studio City, CA:
Michael Wiese Productions, 1999).
16. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1949), p. 30.
17. Bordwell, p. 28.

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 Notes 257

18. Field, pp. 8–9.

19. Quoted in Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, p. 76.
20. Bordwell, p. 28.
21. Thompson, pp. 14, 367.
22. Ibid, pp. 40–42.
23. J. J. Murphy, Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays
Work (New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 17.
24. Paul Joseph Gulino, Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach (New York: Contin-
uum, 2004), p. 4.

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25. For a full account of the influence of the four-act structure on modern drama,
see Austin E. Quigley, The Modern Stage and Other Worlds (London: Methuen,
1985).
26. Gulino, pp. 3–4.
27. Roy L. McCardell, The Pain Flower: A Photoplay Drama of Modern Life (1915),
Warner Brothers archive, USC.
28. Maras, p. 6.
29. Constance Nash and Virginia Oakey, The Screenwriter’s Handbook: What to
Write, How to Write It, Where to Sell It (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978),
p. 44.
30. Hauge, p. 112.
31. Christopher Riley, The Hollywood Standard: The Complete and Authoritative
Guide to Script Format and Style, 2nd ed. (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese,
2009), pp. xv–xvi.
32. Joseph McBride, Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless
(New York: Vintage, 2012), pp. 179–80.
33. Hunter, p. 129; Hauge, p. 127.
34. Esther Luttrell, Tools of the Screen Writing Trade, rev. ed. (Mt. Dora,
Fla.: Broadcast Club of America, 1998), pp. 10, 141; emphasis in the
original.
35. Jeff Rush and Cynthia Baughman, ‘Language as Narrative Voice: The Poetics
of the Highly Inflected Screenplay’, Journal of Film and Video 49.3 (1997),
p. 28.
36. Ann Igelström, ‘Communication and the Various Voices of the Screenplay
Text’, Journal of Screenwriting 4.1 (2013), p. 46.
37. Ibid., p. 50.
38. Ibid., p. 48.
39. Ibid., p. 50.
40. Ibid., p. 51.
41. Claudia Sternberg, Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture
Screenplay as Text (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997), p. 84.
42. Sternberg, p. 74.
43. Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (London: Faber, 1994), pp. 86–90.
44. David Mamet, A Whore’s Profession: Notes and Essays (London: Faber, 1994),
p. 383, emphasis in the original.
45. See Steven Price, ‘Character in the Screenplay Text’, in Jill Nelmes (ed.),
Analysing the Screenplay (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 201–16.
46. Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script
(London: Nick Hern, 2004), p. 8.

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258 Notes

47. Jon Ronson, Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries (London: Picador, 2012),
p. 323.
47. Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, p. 31.
48. Conversation with the author.
49. Quoted in Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, p. 21.
50. Ibid., p. 31.
51. Millennium Film Journal 25 (Summer 1991), p. 5.
52. Quoted in Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, p. 76.
53. Kathryn Millard, ‘After the Typewriter: The Screenplay in a Digital Era’,

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Journal of Screenwriting 1.1 (2010), pp. 11–12.

11 Screenwriting Today and Tomorrow

1. Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (London: Wallflower,
2009), p. 171.
2. Ibid.
3. Ray Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the
Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 187.
4. Carney, p. 137.
5. Tom Charity, John Cassavetes: Lifeworks (London: Omnibus, 2001), p. xi.
6. Quoted in Raymond Carney, American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes
and the American Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
p. 111.
7. John Cassavetes, Faces (New York: Signet, 1970), p. 8.
8. Carney, American Dreaming, p. 92.
9. Quoted in Dan Fainaru (ed.), Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews (Jackson: Univer-
sity Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 142.
10. Ibid., pp. 141–42.
11. Ibid., p. 74.
12. Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997), p. 183.
13. Quoted in Fainaru, p. 103.
14. Peter Brunette, Wong Kar-Wai (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005),
p. 126.
15. Ibid., p. 124.
16. Ibid., p. 125.
17. Quoted in J. J. Murphy, Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent
Screenplays Work (New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 4.
18. Murphy, pp. 6, 16.
19. Murphy, p. vii.
20. Steven Price, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2010), pp. 22–23.
21. J. J. Murphy, ‘Cinema as Provocation: Norman Mailer’s Assault on the
Screenplay’; Line Langebek and Spencer Parsons, ‘Cassavetes’ Screenwriting
Practice: Improvising the Emotions’; Mark Minett, ‘Altman Unscripted?’;
John Powers, ‘A Pony Not to Be Ridden: Screenwriting and the Avant-Garde
Cinema’, conference papers, Screenwriting in a Global & Digital World,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 22 August 2013.

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 Notes 259

22. http://millenniumfilm.org/about/, accessed on 22 February 2013.

23. Millennium Film Journal 25 (Summer 1991), p. 5. The following texts consid-
ered in this section appear partially or wholly in this issue of MFJ: Ann Marie
Fleming, You Take Care Now (1989), pp. 10–11; John Moritsugu, Der Elvis
(1987), pp. 37–41; Yvonne Rainer, Privilege (1990), pp. 50–55; Lynne Sachs,
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), pp. 58–61.
24. Kathryn Millard, ‘The Screenplay as Prototype’, in Jill Nelmes (ed.), Analysing
the Screenplay (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 156.
25. http://www.hitrecord.org/, accessed 19 May 2013.

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26. Casablanca: Inside the Script (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Digital Publishing,
2012), p. 17.
27. Ibid., p. 19.
28. Claudia Sternberg, Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture
Screenplay as Text (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997), p. 28.
29. See also Maaret Koskinen, ‘Out of the Past: Saraband and the Ingmar
Bergman Archive’, in Maaret Koskinen, ed., Ingmar Bergman Revisited,
(London: Wallflower, 2008), pp. 19–34.
30. Anna Sofia Rossholm, ‘Tracing the Voice of the Auteur: Persona and the
Ingmar Bergman Archive’, Journal of Screenwriting 4.2 (2013), p. 135.
31. Ibid., p. 136.
32. Ibid., p. 137.
33. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/video/2011/jun/07/ipad-apple-the-
wasteland-apps-video, accessed on 6 February 2013.
34. For a discussion of McGann in relation to screenwriting, see Price, pp.
100–02.
35. Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, ‘Introduction: A Genesis of French
Genetic Criticism’, in Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden
(eds), Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-texts (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 2.
36. See Steven Price, ‘The Screenplay: An Accelerated Critical History’, Journal of
Screenwriting 4.1 (2013), pp. 94–95.

Conclusion: The Screenplay as a Modular Text

1. Judith H. Haag and Hillis R. Cole Jr., ed., The Complete Guide to Standard Script
Formats, Part 1: The Screenplay (Los Angeles: CMC, 1980), pp. 111–14.
2. Janet Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production, 1930–60’, in David
Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (eds), The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985),
p. 330.

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Bibliography

Abbreviations

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BFI: Reuben Library, British Film Institute, London.
LoC: Motion Picture Reading Room, Madison Building, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
MHL: Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
Los Angeles.
MoMA: Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
USC: University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Primary
42nd Street (WB, 1933), ed. Rocco Fumento, Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1980. This reprints the ‘final’ continuity credited to Rian James and
James Seymour. See also the cutter’s copy of the ‘final—master’ continuity, 22
September 1932, Warner Brothers archive, USC.
Across the Plains (Selig Polyscrope Co., 1910), scenario by Chris Lane, William
Selig Papers, 9-f.155, MHL; handwritten cutting continuity by Otis Turner,
William Selig Papers, 9-f.156, MHL.
Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos, ed. Cari
Beauchamp and Anita Mary Loos, Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003.
Antonioni, Michelangelo, Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni, trans. Roger J.
Moore, New York: Orion, 1963.
Antonioni, Michelangelo, Unfinished Business: Screenplays, Scenarios and Ideas, ed.
Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi, trans. Andrew Taylor, New York: Marsilio,
1998.
Argonauts, The (General Film Co., 1911), scenario, William Selig papers, 9-f.162,
MHL; cutting continuity, William Selig papers, 9-f.163, MHL.
Aunt Elsa’s Visit (Edison, 1913), scenario, 10 January 1913; synopsis, 31 January
1913; titles, 17 February 1913, MoMA.
Babes in Toyland (MGM, 1934), screenplay by Frank Butler and Nick Grinde, ‘Final
Script’, 28 July 1934, Motion Picture Scripts Core Collection, MHL.
Bergman, Ingmar, Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, trans. Lars Malmström and
David Kushner, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.
Bergman, Ingmar, Persona and Shame, trans. Keith Bradfield, London: Calder &
Boyars, 1972.
Bergman, Ingmar, Wild Strawberries, trans. Lars Malmström and David Kushner,
London: Lorrimer, 1970.
Bonnie and Clyde, screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton, ‘Final’,
6 September 1966, BFI S4215.

260

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 Bibliography 261

Bride of Frankenstein, The (Universal, 1935), Universal Filmscripts series: Classic

horror films—Vol. 2, Absecon, NJ: MagicImage Filmbooks, 1989.
Broadway (Universal, 1929), Screen Play and Dialogue Arrangement by Edward
T. Lowe, Jr., Cinema-Television Library, USC.
Broadway Melody (MGM, 1929), continuity by Sarah Y. Mason, 11 September
1928, Victor Heerman papers, 1-f.13, MHL.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, screenplay by William Goldman, final, 15 July
1968, BFI S18546.
Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Das: Drehbuch von Carl Mayer und Hans Janowitz zu Robert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of Sydney - PalgraveConnect - 2014-02-01

Wienes Film von 1919/20, Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1995.
Casablanca: Inside the Script, Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Digital Publishing, 2012.
Charade (Stanley Donen Film, 1963), screenplay by Peter Stone revised draft, 21
August 1962, Motion Picture Scripts Core Collection, MHL.
Chicken Thief, The, scenario by Frank J. Marion and Wallace McCutcheon,
1904, LoC.
Chinatown, by Robert Towne, 3rd draft, 9 October 1973, BFI S17788; published in
Robert Towne, Chinatown and The Last Detail, London: Faber, 1998.
Citizen Kane: The Shooting Script, by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, in
The Citizen Kane Book, London: Secker & Warburg, 1971.
Clever Dummy, A (Triangle, 1917), Mack Sennett papers, 12.f-104, MHL.
Cowboy’s Baby, The (Selig Polyscope Co., 1908), cutting continuity, William Selig
papers, 10-f.201, MHL.
Crooked Path, The (Selig Polyscope, 1909), cutting continuity, William Selig
papers, 10-f.204, MHL.
David Copperfield (MGM, 1935), Turner/MGM scripts, f. D-208 to f. D-223,
MHL; Howard Estabrook papers, f-57, MHL; screenplay by Howard Estabrook,
adaptation by Hugh Walpole, 8 September 1934, BFI S5237.
Done in Oil (Triangle, 1917), Mack Sennett papers, 16.f-148, MHL.
Earthwork Construction Story, scenario, 19 July 1911, J. Searle Dawley papers,
1.f-1, MHL.
Easy Rider, screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern, Donn
Cambern papers, f. 9, MHL; BFI S2715.
Engineer’s Daughter, The (Selig Polyscope, 1909), cutting continuity, William Selig
papers, 11-f.222, MHL.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script, screenplay by Charlie
Kaufman, London: Nick Hern, 2004.
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Juárez (WB, 1939), by John Huston, Aeneas MacKenzie and Wolfgang Reinhardt,
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the First Years of Hollywood’, Wide Angle 4.3 (1980), pp. 12–27.
Staiger, Janet, ‘Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts’, in
Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, rev. ed. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 173–92.
Staiger, Janet, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930’, in David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style
and Mode of Production to 1960, London: Routledge, 1985, pp. 85–153.
Staiger, Janet, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production, 1930–60’, in David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style
and Mode of Production to 1960, London: Routledge, 1985, pp. 309–37.
Steene, Birgitta, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide, Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2005.

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Stempel, Tom, FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 2nd ed.,
New York: Continuum, 1991.
Sternberg, Claudia, Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as
Text, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997.
Szczepanik, Petr, ‘Micropolitics of Screenplay Development: A Political History’,
conference paper, Screenwriting in a Global & Digital World, University of
Madison-Wisconsin, 21 August 2013.
Taylor, Richard, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917–1929, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979.

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Taylor, Richard (ed.), Vsevolod Pudovkin: Selected Essays, London: Seagull, 2006.
Taylor, Richard, and Ian Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema
in Documents, 1896–1939, London: Routledge, 1988.
Temple, Michael, and Michael Witt (eds), The French Cinema Book, London: British
Film Institute, 2004.
Thompson, Kristin, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical
Narrative Technique, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Thompson, Kristin, ‘Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production:
Implications for Europe’s Avant-Gardes’, in Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer,
eds, The Silent Cinema Reader, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 349–67.
Tieber, Claus, Schreiben für Hollywood: Das Drehbuch im Studiosystem, Vienna: Lit
Verlag GmbH, 2008.
Truffaut, François, ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, in Bill Nichols
(ed.), Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976, pp. 224–37.
Vogler, Christopher, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and
Screenwriters, 2nd ed., London: Pan, 1998.
Vonderau, Patrick, ‘ “Two Figures Stand High up on a Cliff: Shadowy”: On Carl
Mayer’s Screenplay Der Gang in die Nacht’, in Michael Omasta, Brigitte Mayr
and Christian Cargnelli, eds, Carl Mayer Scenar[t]ist: Ein Script von Ihm War Schon
ein Film: “A Script by Carl Mayer Was Already a Film”, Vienna: Synema, 2003,
pp. 111–22.
Voytilla, Stuart, Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50
Unforgettable Films, Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1999.
Youngblood, Denise J., Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935, Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1985.
Zavattini, Cesare, ‘A Thesis on Neo-Realism’ [1952–54], in David Overbey, ed.
and trans., Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism, London: Talisman, 1978,
pp. 67–78.

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Index

Note: The letters ‘n’ following locators refer to notes

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Across the Plains (1910), 63–5 Ben-Hur case (1907–11), 52–4
acts, see segmentation, units of Benton, Robert, 190–1
actualités, 22–2, 37 Bergman, Ingmar, 5, 10, 118, 164,
aide-mémoire, 8, 22–3, 30, 33 170–5, 232–3, 237
American Mutoscope & Biograph Berkeley, Busby, 136–9, 221
(AM&B) (studio), 37–42, 44–6, bible script, 196–7
50–1, 52–3, 55–6, 236 Bicycle Thieves (1948), 163, 165, 166,
see also copyright; stage play 167–9, 189
Anderson, Lindsay, 187 Biskind, Peter, 200
Angelopoulos, Theo, 222–3 blueprint (metaphor), 180, 235–6
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 164, conception and execution, 9, 79–80,
169–70, 181 81, 84
Argonauts, The (1911), 65–6 continuity and, 7, 8, 76, 235
Arnhem, Rudolf, 177 denotation and, 212
Arroseur Arrosé, L’ (1895), 25 development and, 219
Arroy, Juan, 78 funding and, 218
Astruc, Alexandre, 165 improvisation and, 221–2, 224
auteur, 7–9 iron scenario and, 112–14
Bergman as, 10, 170, 172, 175 production and, 19, 23, 97
French New Wave and, 175, 177–8 neo-realist rejection of, 163, 166
New Hollywood and, 21, 189, contrast flux; improvisation;
190, 201 modular text
screenwriter as, 111, 197–6 see also division of labour
script forms and, 8–9, 12, 118, 164, Blue Velvet (1986), 212
170, 237 Body and Soul (1947), 183–4
Weimar cinema and, 105 Boland, Bridget, 186
authorship, see auteur Bondanella, Peter, 166
avant-garde, 227–8 Bonhomme Noël, Le (1907), 43
Azlant, Edward, 23, 27, 30–1, 34, 55, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), 190–3, 195,
81, 84–5, 89–90 200, 202
Bordwell, David, 4, 153, 204–7
Babes in Toyland (1934), 149–50 Bottoms (1968), 1–2
Bachelors’ Club, The (1921) 99–101 Brackett, Charles, 145, 153
Battleship Potemkin, The (1926), 111, breakdown script, 160
113–14, 115–16 Breathless (1959), 150
Baughman, Cynthia, 162, 212, 214 Bride of Frankenstein, The (1934),
Bazin, André, 19, 164, 166, 169 17, 150
Beauchamp, Cari, 68, 92–3 Brik, Osip, 19, 114–15, 235
Belodubrovskaya, Maria, 113 Broadway (1929), 16, 134
Ben-Hur (1907), 52, 55 Broadway Melody, (1929), 133

271

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272 Index

Bucklige und die Tänzerin, Der/Der grüne Dancyger, Ken, 207, 226
Kuss (1920), 107–8 David Copperfield (1935), 155–60
Burch, Noël, 28 Dawley, J. Searle, 56–62, 62–3, 66, 86,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 89, 236
(1969), 189–90 Decherney, Peter, 36–7
découpage, 78, 101–2, 104, 113, 175
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (1920), see also continuity; Drehbuch; iron
105–7 scenario
découpage technique, 176, 178

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Campbell, Joseph, 204–5
Carrière, Jean-Claude, 19–20 Deutelbaum, Marshall, 25
Casablanca (e-text), 230–2 dialogue
Cassavetes, John, 221–2 in early scenarios, 45–51, 53
parenthetical direction of, 144, 186,
catalogues, 28–35, 42–3
192, 194, 211
see also copyright
in scene text, 121, 133–4
Charade (1962), 188–9
screenplay format and, 120, 125,
Chicken Thief, The (1904), 39–41, 50,
129–30, 133–4
208–9
speech in silent film, 81, 85, 89–91,
Chinatown (1974), 195
93, 121
Cimino, Michael, 204
voice-over, 151–2, 159
ciné-roman, 179–80
see also intertitles; part-talkie; stage
Citizen Kane (1941), 160–2, 195, 213
play
Clever Dummy, A (1917), 69, 72–4
DiCillo, Tom, 206
colour-coding, 235–6 Dickson, W. K. L., 26
columns, 110, 123–4, 125–6, 150–2 digital archive, 232–3
comment mode, 10, 39–40, 84, 89, 97, digitisation, 1, 221, 237–8
147, 161, 171, 184, 191–2, 194, division of labour, 1, 6–7, 9, 55, 63,
198, 211–14 78, 101–2, 175–7, 180, 238
see also narration; similes see also blueprint
continuity, 2, 6–7, 68, 76–98, 103–4, Don Juan (1926), 121, 132
113, 138 Done in Oil (1916), 69–72
master-scene script and, 136 dramatic composition, see stage play
plot of action, 13, 14, 77 Drehbuch, 104, 106, 114
scenario and, 13–15, 77, 79–80, 81, see also continuity; découpage; iron
90–1, 92–4, 98 scenario
see also découpage; Drehbuch; iron Duras, Marguerite, 179
scenario; pre-production
documents; scenario Earthwork Construction Story/The Big
continuity writers, 77–9, 88, 92–4, Dam (1911), 58–62, 66, 86
97, 160 Easy Rider (1969), 193–5, 200
Coppola, Francis Ford, 175, 189 Edison, Thomas A., 25–6, 63
copyright, 29, 34–5, 36–9, 42–51, Edison (studio), 33, 36–7, 57–8, 62,
52–4, 80 66, 221
see also catalogues Eisenstein, Sergei, 111, 113–19, 173
Corliss, Richard, 4–5 Eliot, T. S., 232–3
Courier font, 202–3 Elvey, Maurice, 99
Cowboy’s Baby, The (1908), 66 Emerson, John, 12, 77–8
Crisp, Colin, 7, 175–7 Estabrook, Howard, 122–3, 131–2,
Crooked Path, The (1909), 66 155–6, 159

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), 179
(2004), 214–15, 226 His Busted Trust (1916), 70
exhibitor, 28 Hitchcock, Alfred, 99, 144, 202,
Ezra, Elizabeth, 30 221, 223
Hitrecord (website), 230
Faces (1968), 222 Hollaman, Rich G., 27
Fairfax, Marion, 80, 85–91 Hughes, Howard, 130
Faulkner, William, 162 hypertext, 231–2, 234
Faust and Marguerite (1900), 31–2

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Fellini, Federico, 169 Igelström, Ann, 212–13
Field, Syd, 152–3, 201, 204, 206–7 Immigrant, The (1915), 85–91
Finland, 20 improvisation, 57, 62, 65, 178, 221–4
Fischer, Lucy, 111 Ince, Thomas, 3, 14, 80–5, 100
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 147–8, 162 independent film, 225–7
flux, 69, 167, 222, 232, 235–7 Ingemanson, Birgitta, 170, 173–4
contrast blueprint; modular text intertitles, 28, 44, 74, 98, 104, 121,
Fleming, Ann Marie, 228 140, 236
400 Blows, The (1959), 178 in assembly, 66–7
42nd Street (1933), 136–8, 141, 185 in continuity, 77
France, 7, 42–5, 78, 101–5, 163, and copyright, 49
175–81, 221 dialogue, 85, 80, 93, 97, 106, 123,
Friedman, Lester D., 190 128, 131, 133–4
From the Manger to the Cross (1913), footage of, 91
46–51 ‘leaders’, 90
numbering of, 100–1, 121, 123
Gang in die Nacht, Der (1920–21), 108 placement of, 110
Gassner, John, 171 post-production, 48–9, 70
Gauntier, Gene, 23, 46, 49–50, 55–6 pre-production, 72
genetic criticism, 233–4 provisional, 88
Germany, 7, 102–11 ‘sound titles’ (audible speech), 125
Godard, Jean-Luc, 164, 175, 178, ‘subtitles’ (narrative and
190, 200 descriptive), 88, 89, 90,
Godfather, The (1972), 175, 195, 196–8 100, 106
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), 138, style and, 97, 107
141, 192 title sheets, 77, 90, 95, 103
Gold Diggers of Broadway, The (1929), writer of, 79, 88, 90–1, 96, 144
16, 134–6, 138 iron scenario, 104, 111–15
Goldman, William, 189–90, 204 see also continuity; découpage;
Gordon, Robert S. C., 167 Drehbuch
Great Britain, 20, 99–101, 102 Italy, 163, 164–70
Great Train Robbery, The (1903), 28, 34
Griffith, D. W., 56, 68, 79, 86 Jacobs, Lewis, 30, 33–4
Gulino, Paul, 207–8 Janowitz, Hans, 105–7
Jarmusch, Jim, 225
Hell’s Angels (1928), 130–2 Jazz Singer, The (1927), 120–2
Hepworth, Cecil, 24, 99 Jefferson, Joseph, 26–7
Her Nature Dance (1917), 69 Jetée, La (1960), 180
Herman, Lewis, 184–5 Johnny Guitar (1953), 154–5
Hillyer, Lambert, 95 Juárez (1939), 141, 145–7, 149

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274 Index

Kael, Pauline, 162 Marker, Chris, 180

Kalem v. Harper, see Ben-Hur case Mason, Sarah Y., 133–4
Kar-Wai, Wong, 223–4 master-scene screenplay, 163–4, 176,
Kappelhoff, Hermann, 107 178–9, 182–99
Kasten, Jürgen, 108 auteur and, 21
Kaufman, Charlie, 214–15, 226 continuity and, 85, 135
Kracauer, Siegfried, 105–7 dialogue and, 132, 186
Kraly, Hans, 127 emergence of, 7–8, 141, 144, 182–8
evolution of, 2–3, 194–5, 211

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L’Herbier, Marcel, 102, 177 format of, 2, 147, 149, 209–11
Last of Mrs. Cheyney, The (1929), funding and, 216–18
127–30 New Hollywood and, 188–99
Last Year at Marienbad (1961), 179–80 shooting script and, 9, 190–2,
Laura (1944), 151–2, 161–2, 213 211, 224
Lawson, John Howard, 154, 183–4 spec script and, 163–4
leaders, see intertitles treatment and, 18, 186–8, 192–3,
Letzte Mann, Der/The Last Laugh 198–9
(1924), 107, 108 see also scenes; screenplay
Leyda, Jay, 115–16 Mayer, Carl, 5, 105–11, 237
libretto, 104, 114–15 McBride, Joseph, 210
Liepa, Torey, 53, 80, 80–1, 85, 97 McCardell, Roy P., 22, 209
Life of an American Fireman, The McCreadie, Marsha, 93
(1902), 33–4 McCutcheon, Wallace, 39–41
Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The (1935), McGilligan, Patrick, 78–9
150 McKee, Robert, 206
location plot, 40, 67 Méliès, Georges, 25, 29–33, 34, 43, 52,
location shooting, 57, 62, 65 55, 81
see also improvisation memos, 18, 153, 155, 207
Loos, Anita, 12, 68, 77–8, 92 MGM (studio), 92, 145, 148–50, 155,
Lost Horizon (1936), 154 157, 160, 184
Loughney, Patrick, 12, 26, 27, 39, 42, Millard, Kathryn, 202n, 219, 229
45–6, 47–8, 50 modular text, 236–7
Love or Justice (1917), 94–7, 213 compare blueprint; flux
Lubin, Sigmund, 26–7 Moritsugu, John, 228
Lucas, George, 204 Morse, Salmi, 26–8
Lumière (studio), 24–5, 36–7 Murnau, F. W., 108–11
Luttrell, Esther, 211–12 Murphy, J. J., 207, 225–6, 227
Lynch, David, 212 musicals, 132–9
Musser, Charles, 28, 33
Macdonald, Ian W., 20n, 23, 99–101
Mamet, David, 10, 214, 226 narration, 16, 33, 96, 118, 130, 161,
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 151, 162 184, 192, 194, 212–13
manuals, 2, 9, 183, 204–7, see also comment mode; storytelling
209–11, 226 Nash, Constance, and Virginia Oakey,
Maras, Steven, 4, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 22, 293, 299
23, 206, 209, 220 neo-realism, see Italy; Zavattini
March, Joseph Moncure, 130–1 ‘New Hollywood’, 9, 181, 188–99,
Marion, Frances, 13, 15, 92–4 200–1, 203–4
Marion, Frank, 39–41, 55–6 New Stenographer, The (1911), 12

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New York Hat, The (1912), 68 title sheet, see intertitles

Newman, David, 190–1 see also blueprint; continuity;
Nichols, Dudley, 171 documents; outline script; plot
Niver, Kemp R., 25, 34, 39 of action; post-production;
Norman, Marc, 3–4, 5, 34 scenario; story conference;
synopsis
October (1928), 113, 116–18 Prévert, Jacques, 176
Ono, Yoko, 1–2 prose narrative, see short story
oral storytelling, see story conferences

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prototype, 229
outline script, 2, 6, 36, 49, 54–6,
Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 111–12, 114
74, 103
Pulp Fiction (1994), 214, 226–7
see also catalogues

Pain Flower, The (1915), 209

Raiders, The (1913), 81–3, 84, 100
palimpsest, 79–80
Panic in the Streets (1950), 185 Rainer, Yvonne, 228
Paramount case (1948), 8, 163, 182 Ramsaye, Terry, 26–7, 34
Paramount (studio), 145, 153 Raynauld, Isabelle, 30, 42–5
Parigi, Stefania, 166 reels, see segmentation
part-talkie, 120, 122–7 rehearsal continuity, 69–72, 74
Pathé (studio), 42 Resnais, Alain, 179–80
Pathé, Charles, 101–2 Riley, Christopher, 210
Penn, Arthur, 191 Rio Bravo (1959), 154, 162
Persona (1966), 172, 173, 174 Rip Van Winkle (1896), 26–7
photoplay, 11, 90
Riskin, Robert, 154
Pinter, Harold, 10, 215
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 179–80
piracy, see copyright
plot of action, see continuity Robinson, David, 106–7
Polanski, Roman, 195 Rossholm, Anna Sofia, 171–2, 174,
Polonsky, Abraham, 183–4 232–3
Porter, Edwin S., 24–5, 28, 33–4, 37, Rush, Jeff, 162, 207, 212, 214, 226
57, 81 Russia, 7, 21, 102–5, 111–19
post-classical cinema, 201
post-production documents, 77, 95
assembly, 66–7 Sachs, Lynne, 228
budgetary, 68, 77, 95 Sargent, Epes Winthrop, 11, 55, 81
cutting continuity, 15, 131 Satan McAllister’s Heir (1914),
editing sheet, 15, 65–6, 70 83–4, 100
footage, 95 Scarlet Letter, The (1925), 92–4
screenplay as, 114–15, 224 scenario, 2, 6, 56–75
see also intertitles; pre-production continuity and, 13–15
documents
definitions of, 12–13
prearrangement, 23, 30–1, 34
scenes in, see segmentation
pre-production documents, 50–1
character list, 40, 61, 63, 77, 81, 123 short story and, 12, 74
rehearsal continuity, 69–72, 74 synopsis and, 11–12
scene (location) plot, 40, 63, 67, 77, treatment and, 15
81–2, 95 see also continuity
title page, 40, 46, 63 ‘scenario fever’, 52–4

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276 Index

scenes, 12–13, 74–5, 100, 182–3 Secret People, (1952), 187–8

dialogue in master scenes, 132, 134, segmentation, units of
135, 136, 141–3, 144, 154, 186 acts, 40–1, 49, 106, 115–16, 152–3,
master scenes, 63, 65, 101, 141–2, 176, 196, 204–6, 207–9
184, 210–11 episodes, 100
stage plays and, 41–2 parts, 49, 90, 131
see also master-scene screenplay; reels, 6, 56, 61, 63, 208
scene headings sequences, 63, 115–16, 123, 131,
scene breakdown, 63, 67 153–4, 156–7, 176, 184, 196–8,

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scene headings, 124, 138, 185, 188–9, 207–8
197–9, 211–12 see also scenes; shots
in continuity, 138 selling script, see ‘spec’ script
extrafictional voice in, 212 Selfish Yates (1917), 85, 89–90
format of, 149, 154, 211 Selig, W.N., 45–6
in master-scene screenplay, 191 Selig (studio), 63–6
omission of, 171, 173, 189 Selznick, David O., 145, 147–8, 155–6,
scene/shot confusion in, 18, 84–5, 159–60
93, 101, 136, 141, 142–4, Sennett, Mack (studio), 69–74
154–5, 185 sequences, see segmentation, units of
shot specification in, 136 Serenade, The (1905), 45–6, 51
‘slug line’, 2–3, 17, 211 Seymour, James, 141–3, 154, 160–1
see also master-scene screenplay; Shoeshine (1946), 165
segmentation; scenes Shiel, Mark, 168
Schamus, James, 217 Shklovsky, Viktor, 104, 112
Schary, Dore, 184 shooting script, 13–14, 17–18, 42–5,
Schatz, Thomas, 19, 147–8n 47–8, 77, 111, 115–16, 142–3, 181
Schrader, Paul, 18, 21, 198–9 Shopworn Angel, The (1928), 122–7
Schwarz, Alexander, 7, 102–4, 116 short story, 11–12, 40, 51, 68, 69,
‘screen idea’, 23, 160 72–3, 77–8, 84, 103, 164, 178
screenplay, 2–3, 16–17 see also Bergman; scenario; synopsis;
compound noun, 2 treatment
distinctiveness of, 209–10 shots, 63–4, 74–5, 82, 100–1, 115–16,
ephemeral status of, 19–20, 24, 55–6 117, 146–7, 182–4
hybrid, 8, 18, 136, 138, 141, 144–5, see also continuity; scene headings;
171–2, 225, 231 scenes; segmentation; shooting
industrial history of, 5–10 script
page-per-minute ‘rule’, 2, 207 similes, 117–18, 161–2, 170, 184,
screen play (two words), 2, 16–17 213–14
standardised formats, 147, 152 Sin of Madelon Claudet, The (1931),
terminology and, 10–18 148–9, 157
see also master-scene screenplay; Smiles of a Summer Night (1955),
segmentation; ‘spec’ script 171, 173
screenwriting, 2, 4 Smith, Alison, 178
screenwriting manuals, see manuals Soderbergh, Steven, 218
Screenwriting Research Network, software, 229
vi, 20 Solberg, Thorvald, 38, 49
script conferences, see story Sortie d’Usine (1895), 24–5
conferences sound effects, 123
scripting, 4, 23 source texts, 25–8, 76

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Soviet Russia, see Russia story conferences, 18–19, 69–71, 73,

‘spec’ script, 17, 179, 202–3 159–60, 167, 207
see also screenplay; story story departments, 19, 53–4, 182–3
departments Suburbanite, The (1904), 38–9,
speech, see dialogue 50–1, 236
split-page screenplay, see columns Sudermann, Herman, 109–10
stage play, 21, 74, 103, 144, 209 Sullivan, C. Gardner, 14, 80–5, 88, 89
early scenarios and, 38–42, 43–4, Sunrise (1927), 107, 108–11
Sylvester (1923), 107, 108

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45–6, 50–1
literature and, 177 synopsis, 11–12, 15, 68, 70, 76, 77–8,
well-made play, 207–8 95, 104, 116, 123, 176
see also scenes Szczepanik, Petr, 151
Staiger, Janet, 5–10, 18, 50
aide-mémoire in ‘cameraman Tarantino, Quentin, 10, 214, 226
system’ 6, 55 Taxi Driver (1976), 18, 198–9
continuity in ‘central producer Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 9
system’, 6–7, 14, 76, 79, Taylor, Richard, 113–14
81–2, 95 Thalberg, Irving, 141, 147–8
master-scene script in theatre, see stage play
‘producer-unit system’, 5, 140–1 Thompson, Kristin, 4, 7–8, 21, 102,
104, 113, 206, 207–8, 225
outline script in ‘director system’, 6,
Tieber, Claus, 19, 159–60, 176, 207
55–6
title page, 40, 46, 63
scenario in ‘director-unit system’,
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1905), 39–40
6, 56
Towne, Robert, 21, 192, 195
spec scripts in ‘package-unit
treatment, 78, 92, 104, 164, 184–8,
system’, 6, 183, 237
195, 211, 224
see also blueprint (metaphor);
and auteur film-makers, 8, 10, 170,
division of labour
178–9
Stannard, Eliot, 99–100
comment mode and, 191
Star Wars (1977), 200, 204
improvisation and, 222, 224
steel script, 113
scenario and, 12, 15, 18
see also iron scenario screenplay and, 15–16, 129–30,
Steene, Birgitta, 171, 174 184–5, 192–3, 198–9, 211
Stempel, Tom, 3–4, 5, 22, 24, 26–7, 61, synopsis and, 12, 15, 18, 78
84, 96n, 182 Trip to the Moon, A (1902), 29–33
Sternberg, Claudia, 10, 39–40, 144, Truffaut, Francois, 163, 176–9, 190
211, 213, 235
Storm over Asia (1928), 114 Ukwuoma, Selina, 216–17
storytelling
character arc, 204–5 vertical integration, 7, 201
high concept, 201, 202–3 Vitaphone, 121, 122
ideology and, 165, 166, 217 voice-over, 151–2
mythic journey, 205 Vogler, Christopher, 205n, 206
open ending, 200 Vonderau, Patrick, 108
self-reflexive, 226–7 Vorkapich, Slavko, 158–9, 221
three acts, 204–6, 207–9
see also narration; segmentation; Walpole, Hugh, 155, 159
story conferences Warner Brothers (studio), 148–9

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278 Index

Warner Bros. Digital Wild Strawberries (1957), 172–3

Publishing, 230–2 Wilder, Billy, 153, 208
Waste Land, The (e-text), 232–3
Welles, Orson, 118, 161–2 Zangwill, Israel, 100–1
white space, 203 Zanuck, Darryl, 141, 147–8, 153
Wiene, Robert, 105, 107 Zavattini, Cesare, 164–9

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10.1057/9781137315700 - A History of the Screenplay, Steven Price