Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

Doing away with the 'Screenwriter'

The Cinema we know is no longer the cinema we have. The possibilities for making and writing cinema have never been more diverse, complex, sophisticated, hybridized and varied than they are now. Frankly there's never been a better time to be a screenwriter simply because there have never been so many screens to write for in so many forms and formats - theatrical, broadcast, feature, short, serial, online, streaming, download, mobile device, gaming, machinima, interactive, installation...

But to embrace those possibilities and exploit the opportunities there is a distinct cultural shift that has to happen in how we perceive the screenwriting process. It's time to stop thinking that a Screenplay has anything to do with Writing...

Francis Ford Coppola famously said "There is a misconception that we are surrendering something of art to a technology that will do it for us. That is never the case, cinema is technology." And yet whilst this idea is at the heart of all Movie-Making we still have a culture of Screenwriting that keeps the screenplay process somehow separate and apart from the rest of production. A culture that treats the screenwriter as a literary laborer toiling away in a dark room, arranging words in a literary endeavor.

But the screenplay is fundamentally removed for all other forms of 'writing' because it is wholly reliant on technology, indeed does not exist without it. Poem, Essay, Short Story, Novel all require nothing but words and a pace to inscribe them - dirt, cave wall, papyrus, paper. And whilst a stretching argument might be made to say that the Pen and the printing press are Technologies writing is certainly capable of existing without both.

Cinema by contrast certainly does not exist at all without the twin apperati of moving image Acquisition and moving image Display. Which brings us back to Coppola - "cinema is technology" - and a set of ironies and issues around the culture, method and perception of Screenwriting.

We may have dispensed with the typewriter in favour of the computer screen but the truth is that the great majority of tools for writing are little more than paper simulators. A whole range of dedicated contemporary screenwriting tools on the market (just as with word processors) do little more than construct screen-based re-creations of typed paper sheets for ring-binders and layouts of 3x5" index cards.

In this way, by the tools themselves, the silo of screenwriting - disconnected from production, from sound, from design, from storyboard and audio-visual concept, from location and space, is re-enforced. The screenwriter is pigeon-holed as a 'writer' like any other divorced from the technology that cinema cannot exist without. The screenplay's interpretation on the screen by a director is then re-enforced as a two-tier process whereby the screen-writer writes outside of and in abstraction of the audio visual construct of cinema and then has that construct applied to the screenplay after-the-fact.

Arguably the problem begins with the nomenclature itself. The name 'Screenwriter' is fundamentally wrong as the onus, through the word 'Writer' as the active part of the conjunction, is squarely on the act of 'writing, an art disconnected from technology and production and which of itself does not need technology and apparatus.

The name should by rights be 'Screenwright', just as Playwright. The connection being to a thing that is 'wrought' through tools, craft and construction. The Screenwright in this context evokes the same mantle as Shipwright, Wheelwright, Cartwright - the creators of the something that is 'wrought", built, assembled. And what is being Wrought is Not a collection paper and words, and certainly not a work of literature, but a Cinematic technology production.

Ultimately a screenplay is but one thing; a blueprint for production, an engineering plan for how a cinematic work may be constructed. And in this role it cannot, and does not, exist alone. Just as an architectural design requires more than the floor-plan dimensions a screenplay too is part of a package - storyboard, design concept, breakdown, sound plan and so on. These elements, like the architectural blueprint, are all just a means to an ends, all building blocks toward a complete cinematic product.

In architecture the blueprint, design sketch, perspective renderings, models, landscape, acoustics and lighting all directly influence each other. A aesthetically bold entrance might be reshaped to better fit the landscape. An interior altered to account for sound refraction. Window dimensions re-written on the blueprint to account of the the direction of the sun. All these elements are allowed and encouraged to influence the central plan - the building's screenplay.

And yet in traditional screen-writing there is a culture of forced separation, an entrenched idea that to allow production elements to influence the screenplay's creation is to somehow corrupt or limit the creative integrity of the 'writing'.

The Sydney Opera House, one of the great architectural works of the modern age, is scaled in such a way as to appear in perfect half-size proportion to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. No matter from where you look at the Opera House, from any angle, it always appears in perfect proportion to the bridge behind it. This is a work of architecture that is not just focused on itself but in its creation was acutely aware of its 'production' in the environment in which it sits. It makes perfect sense for the architectural 'writing' to be in concert and knowledge of the elements of production; allowing them to directly influence that creation. And yet we still most often  don't  treat the Screenplay in the same light.

This is not to say that the Screen-writer hasn't been capable of producing great works of cinema (or indeed that there hasn't always been cases of the singular Writer-Director where the writing is directly connect to production by way of coming from the singular person) but the culture of the Screen-Writer as opposed to Screen-Wright comes out of a very different cinematic landscape - one where cinema was a largely singular and unified medium. Now that cinema has opened up like a magnolia sprouting layers of variables, hybrids, alternatives and parallel forms (with much of the hierarchy of privilege associated with these forms dissolving)  the time exists to re-evaluate the culture of the Screenwriter.

Rather than simple paper simulation and digital replication of analogue processes we have an opportunity to explore how else a Screenplay might be 'wrought' in concert with technology rather than in abstraction of it. In broadstrokes this shift to the idea of 'Screenwright' is in essence about engaging a creative development process that is not just in concert with production but which is embedded in it. A process of screenwrighting that draws upon all elements of production; diverse elements from which the screenplay is wrought.

Posted at 12:00AM Nov 02, 2007 by Mike Jones in general  |  Comments[4]