Script Development: Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives 3030487121, 9783030487126

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Script Development Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives Edited by Craig Batty · Stayci Taylor

Script Development

Craig Batty  •  Stayci Taylor Editors

Script Development Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives

Editors Craig Batty UniSA Creative University of South Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia

Stayci Taylor School of Media & Communication RMIT University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-48712-6    ISBN 978-3-030-48713-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Compassionate Eye Foundation, Getty Images Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all of their contributors for such wonderful work and for a largely painless process of collating the book. Thanks, too, to the team at Palgrave, especially Lina and Emily—you got the book out of us! Thank you, Steven Chong, for your impeccable copy editing (and amusing sidebar comments). To colleagues and friends at RMIT University, the University of Technology Sydney and Central Queensland University for moral and academic support. And to Lucy Schmidt, for companionship, friendship and comedy in equal measures—to both editors, though clearly not in equal measures.

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Contents

Introduction  1 Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor References   6 Part I Looking into Script Development: Theories on Practice   7  riginality and Authorship in the Development of the Screen O Idea  9 Ian W. Macdonald Introduction   9 Assumptions and Definitions  11 Explaining Screen Idea Development Through Different ‘Lenses’  12 Single Authorship in Screen Idea Development  13 Notions of Originality  15 Group Creativity  16 The Doxa as Framework  19 The Creative Individual in the Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG)  20 Conclusions: Understanding and Studying Creativity in Screen Idea Development  23 References  26

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 ow Government Institutions Shape Script Development: H Comparative Case Studies of Screen Australia and the Danish Film Institute 31 Cath Moore and Radha O’Meara Introduction: Understanding Development Through Institutional Discourse  31 Context: Comparing Screen Industries of Small Nations  33 How Screen Australia Defines and Shapes Development  36 How the Danish Film Institute Defines and Shapes Development  41 Comparing Institutional Discourses of Development: Australia and Denmark  45 Conclusion  48 References  49  cript Development and the Post-Socialist Producer: Towards S a Comparative Approach to Cultures of Development 51 Petr Szczepanik Introduction  51 The Report on Czech Feature Film Development  53 Development Definitions According to the Core Professions  57 Development Practices Across Positions in the Field  59 Development Conflicts  60 The Myth of the Missing “Dramaturgs”  64 Conclusion: Towards a Comparative Research of Development in Local Industry Ecosystems  65 References  67  ultural Difference in Script Development: The Australian C Example 69 Glenda Hambly Introduction  69 Background  70 Screen Australia Development Culture  72 The Gatekeepers of the Industry  74 The Screenwriter Interviews  75 Screen Australia Versus the Audience  79 Australian Cinema Narrative  80 Conclusion  81 References  82

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 omplicating Cops and Criminals: Racial Politics in the C Classic Network Crime Drama 85 Caryn Murphy Introduction  85 ‘Shadow of Doubt’: A Story Idea Becomes an Outline  88 Investigating Racial Loyalty in the First Draft of ‘Robert Phillips’  91 Revising ‘Robert Phillips’: An Antagonist Becomes an Ally  94 Conclusion  97 References  98  elling Stories About Yesterday’s Hero for Today’s World: The T Script Development of the Chilean TV Series Heroes (2006–2007) 99 Carmen Sofia Brenes, Margaret McVeigh, Alejandro C. Reid, and Alberto N. García Introduction  99 The Link Between Script Development, Television Studies, and Anti-heroes 101 Writing and Producing Heroes, an Historical Biopic 102 Complex TV and the Anti-hero 104 The Narrative Strategies of the Anti-hero in the Script Development of Heroes 106 Conclusion 110 References 111  ordic Noir with an Icelandic Twist: Establishing a Shared N Space for Collaboration Within European Coproduction113 Rosamund Davies Introduction 113 Trapped: History and Context 114 Trapped: The Development Process 116 The Screenplay as Boundary Object 121 Nordic Noir as Boundary Object 122 Conclusion 126 References 127

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Part II Looking Out from Script Development: Practice into Theory 129  ympoiesis and Scripting Urban Terror: Decomposition of a S Writing Under Duress131 Joshua McNamara Introduction 131 Decomposing Tumbled Stories 134 Making with the Bodies of Others 137 The Palimpsest of Terror 141 Conclusions 145 References 146  cript Development and Social Change in Papua New Guinea147 S Mark Eby Introduction 147 Background Context 149 Overview 151 Gender-Based Violence 153 The Writers’ Workshop 154 Script Development 154 Structured Writing Process 158 Mentoring the Screenwriter from Storyline to Completed Script 160 Feedback on the Script 162 Summary and Conclusions 165 References 166  torytelling for Our Own People: A Reflection on Script S Developing with the Māori Filmmaker Barry Barclay171 Christina Milligan Introduction 171 Backstory 172 The Development Process 174 Conclusion 180 References 181

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 o Much Drama, So Little Time: Writers’ Rooms in Australian S Television Drama Production185 Noel Maloney and Philippa Burne Introduction 185 Storytelling Work 187 Writers’ Room Cultures 191 Production Economies 196 Conclusion 201 References 202  efining the Beats in the TV Sitcom205 D D. T. Klika Introduction 205 Development of a Beat Sheet 206 Bringing the Beats Alive 210 The Story Begins 213 Shaping the Narrative 214 Conclusion 217 References 217  ubjects of the Gaze: Script Development as Performance219 S Emma Bolland and Louise Sawtell Introduction 219 Script as Performance Site 221 Strategies for Development 223 Performing Script Development 228 Conclusion 233 References 234  he Promiscuous Screenplay: A Tale of Wanton Development T and Loose Authorship237 Siobhan Jackson Introduction 237 To Courier or Not to Courier 239 Authorship in Flux 241 Making the First Mark 244 The Problem with Structure 250 Why Did Lucy Run? 250

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Provoking Lucy 259 Unexpected Endings 267 References 268  oom for Improvement: Discourses of Quality and Betterment R in Script Development271 Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor Introduction 271 Locating Discussions of Improvement in Script Development Research 273 Written into Definitions 276 Tools, Resources and Methods 279 Programs, Partnerships and Mentoring 281 Responsibilities and Relationships 285 The Script Development Industry 287 Conclusion 288 References 289 Index293

Notes on Contributors

Craig  Batty  is Dean of Research (Creative) at the University of South Australia. He is author and editor of over 80 books, book chapters, journal articles and refereed conference proceedings and editor of 11 journal special issues. He has worked as a writer and script editor on various screen projects and speaks regularly at workshops and festivals on screenwriting, script development and creative practice research. He is editor of the Journal of Screenwriting and is on the editorial boards of Media, Practice and Education, the International Journal of Creative Media Research and the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. Craig is also Adjunct Professor at Central Queensland University and Visiting Research Fellow at Bournemouth University, UK. Emma Bolland  is an artist and writer with an interdisciplinary practice that includes literature, performance, moving image and expanded translations. Her practice-led PhD research project, ‘Scripting Silence, or The Expanded Screenplay as Auto-Practice and Art Writing’, positions screenwriting as a conceptual space, uncoupled from the endpoint of film. Her work is published across literary and academic platforms, and is held in collections including the V&A Museum Art Library (London), The National Poetry Library (London), the CDLA (France) and public museums and art galleries. She is a commissioning editor at Gordian Projects, a small press operating at the intersections of artist’s book, art writing, experimental literature and archive.

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She is an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art, specialising in language practices, at Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK. Carmen  Sofia  Brenes is a Professor of Poetics and Screenwriting at Universidad de los Andes, Chile. She is interested in the validity of Aristotle’s Poetics in current theory and practice of screenwriting. Carmen Sofia has given seminars and workshops and worked as a script consultant in various Latin American and European countries. She is the author of Fundamentos del guión audiovisual (2 ed.) (1992); Tema e trama di un film (2001); ¿De qué tratan realmente las películas? (2001) and Recepción poética del cine. Una aproximación al mundo de Frank Capra (2008). Recently, she co-edited Transcultural Screenwriting: Telling Stories for a Global World (2017). She has served as a member of the Executive Council of the Screenwriting Research Network (SRN) since 2012 and serves as its Chair. Since 2000, Philippa  Burne has worked as a television screenwriter, story editor and script developer in Australia, Europe (Iceland, Croatia, The Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia) and the USA. She has recently completed a romantic comedy feature, Three Acts of Love, for production in 2021 and is collaborating on a true crime television adaptation of Cuckoo by Andrew Rule. She lectures in the BFA Screenwriting at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her ongoing PhD research at RMIT University is looking at writing emotion. Rosamund Davies  is Senior Lecturer in Screenwriting at the University of Greenwich, UK. She has a background in film and television as script editor and story consultant. Her publications relating to screenwriting and screen media include ‘Screenwriting Strategies in Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1960)’ in the Journal of Screenwriting (2010); ‘Digital Intimacies, Aesthetic and Affective Strategies in Online Video’ in Ephemeral Media (2011); and ‘Don’t Look Now: The screenwork as palimpsest’ in the Journal of Screenwriting (2013). She is also the co-author of Introducing the Creative Industries (SAGE 2013). Mark Eby  is an independent filmmaker and media development consultant, based in Nashville, Tennessee. He is co-founder of Youth Media Papua New Guinea (YMPNG), a community-based association that supports engagement with social change through community education, media development and film production projects. He has a PhD from RMIT University and has led two Pacific Media Assistance

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Scheme (PACMAS) Innovation Grants that conducted a survey of media consumption in PNG Highlands village cinemas and produced a feature film that was a national hit. Among other Communication for Development (C4D) projects, the Aliko & Ambai Community Youth Toolkit was recently published supported by Oxfam PNG. Alberto N. García  is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the Universidad de Navarra, Spain. During 2018, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland. He has taught at the University of Stirling, Arizona State University and the University of the Andes, and a Visiting Professor in the MA Scriptwriting program at the Pontifical University of Salamanca. Since 2010, his academic work has focused on English-language television. His articles have been published in journals such as Continuum, Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Horror Studies. Alberto edited the volume Emotions in Contemporary TV Series (Palgrave 2016). Glenda Hambly  is a film and television industry professional. In 2019, she wrote, directed and produced the feature documentary Homeland Story. In addition, she has produced or written and directed three feature dramas, two of which, Waiting at the Royal and Fran, won major international and Australian awards. She has developed, written and edited for 15 television series and directed a children’s series. She has worked as a script executive for the Australian Film Commission and Screen West, assessed scripts for 20 years for five state and federal screen agencies and has taught screenwriting at Monash and RMIT universities in Melbourne. Siobhan  Jackson  is a screenwriter, director and senior lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music (VCA), University of Melbourne. She has recently completed her first feature film, You can say vagina, collaboratively devised and directed with Mischa Baka. Her research and practice examine improvising for the screen, alternative approaches to screenplay and performance generation and collaborative practice. D.  T.  Klika is Senior Lecturer in Television and Film at Middlesex University, London, UK. Her area of research and creative practice is the TV Sitcom, having written three pilots, two of which have garnered some success. Her interest is in how the sitcom works, bridging theory and practice that will enable a more confident approach when developing new shows. She is completing a PhD by creative practice that exam-

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ines the relationship between the sitcom and associated film comedy. Klika’s book, Situation Comedy, Character, and Psychoanalysis: On the Couch, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018, is now available in paperback. Ian W. Macdonald  PhD, FHEA, formerly of the University of Leeds, is now retired. He is the co-founder of the Screenwriting Research Network, a founding co-editor of the Journal of Screenwriting and the founding co-­ editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting. His book Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea (2013) has been described as ‘enlightening’ by the eminent film scholar David Bordwell, and ‘should be required reading for ourselves and our students’ according to Professor Jonathan Powell of Royal Holloway, University of London (and former Head of BBC Drama). Macdonald’s chapter on writer Eliot Stannard in the same volume is described as demonstrating ‘exemplary scholarship’ according to Emeritus Professor Charles Barr. Noel Maloney  lectures in screen and performance writing at La Trobe University, Australia. He researches contemporary scriptwriting in Australia, with a focus on industry conditions, script development, narrative genres and collaborative practices. He has written for radio and television drama, and more recently, theatre. His current research includes The Code, a practice-led, verbatim performance project that will combine live theatre and screen production to create resources for educating men about gender roles and their relationship to domestic violence. Joshua McNamara  is a researcher whose mixed-method approach incorporates ethnography, historical analysis and close textual readings into the study of complex urban media cultures. His most recent research offered a practice-based ethnography of film production in Nairobi, Kenya. He works as a lecturer in Screen and Cultural Studies at the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. Margaret McVeigh  is Head of Screenwriting and Contextual Studies at Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Australia. Margaret has worked in the media in Australia and overseas and is co-editor of the book, Transcultural Screenwriting: Telling Stories for a Global World (2017). Margaret has researched and collaborated internationally on cross-­cultural storytelling and is an Executive Member of the SRN (Screenwriting Research Network). She has published and presented at conferences in

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Asia, Europe, the USA, South America, on the creative process, the writing and making of transnational films and the development of intercultural competencies. Christina  Milligan is Senior Lecturer in Screen Production and Screenwriting at Auckland University of Technology. She has a background as a producer and executive producer of award-winning features and television series and as a development executive and assessor for film and television funding agencies. She researches in the areas of screenwriting studies and media industries studies and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Screenwriting. Her research interests flow out of her ongoing practice as an indigenous screen producer and she is particularly interested in exploring the contrasts between the voices of indigenous filmmakers and their Western counterparts. Cath Moore  is an award-winning screenwriter who tutors in screenwriting at the University of Melbourne. She also lectures at the Victorian College of the Arts, School of Film & Television and at the RMIT University. Her research focus is on the screenwriting capacities and preferences within contemporary Danish cinema and the child’s gaze on screen. Her research has been published in the Journal of Screenwriting and the Networking Knowledge special issue, ‘Gender and the Screenplay’, and she was a contributing author in the book The Films of Susanne Bier. Caryn  Murphy  is a professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where she also serves as the interim director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program. She holds a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-­Madison. Her research on race, gender and 1960s television has appeared in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Journal of Screenwriting and Media History, in addition to many edited collections. Radha  O’Meara  lectures in screenwriting in the Creative Writing program at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Radha’s creative practice research focuses on writing for the screen and writing graphic narratives. Her critical research concentrates on the intersections of contemporary screen cultures, screen industries and screen aesthetics, with a strong interest in serial television. She is co-editing a book on the Australian television dramas Prisoner (Cell Block H) and Wentworth, and her arti-

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cles have been published in the Journal of Screenwriting, M/C Journal and Senses of Cinema. Alejandro C. Reid  is a media executive with more than 20 years working in TV and Digital Platforms. Combining creativity with technology in his work, he has an MSc in Digital TV and an MBA. He has produced and directed more than 30 TV shows and series, including Viva el Lunes, Heroes, Pantalla Abierta, Machos and Festival de la Canción de Viña del Mar. His advertisement campaign for Cerveza Cristal won a Golden Lion (Venice) and a Grand Prix (Cannes). During his career, Alejandro has designed and supervised the construction of TV studios and has led the digital transformation of various TV stations. Louise  Sawtell is an experimental filmmaker and academic at the University of South Australia. Her practice-led PhD project explored a ficto-critical and feminist approach to writing stories for the screen. Her research has been published in New Writing, The Journal of Screenwriting and the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, and she is co-editor of the Networking Knowledge special issue, ‘Gender and the Screenplay’. Louise’s experimental short films have won awards and screened at film festivals. As a writer-director, she is passionate about telling female stories through a multidisciplinary film practice that challenges traditional and industrial storytelling models. Petr Szczepanik  (Charles University, Prague) has written several books on Czech and East-Central European screen industries. His research of the state-socialist production mode was partly published in Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Culture (co-edited with Patrick Vonderau, 2013). In 2015, he was the main author of an industry report on practices of screenplay development for the Czech Film Fund. He is now leading the Screen Industries in Central and Eastern Europe Research Group, Charles University. His latest publication is Digital Peripheries: The Online Circulation of Audiovisual Content from the Small Market Perspective (co-edited, 2020). Stayci Taylor  is a lecturer with the Media Program in RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication, where she co-manages the Master of Media degree. Her publishing and teaching interests are screenwriting, creative writing, gender, comedy and web series, and she brings to these her background as a screenwriter for film and television. In 2017, she co-­ edited a special issue of the Journal of Screenwriting on the topic of script

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development, and she has widely written in this area. Since completing her PhD by creative project, she has continued this practice approach in ­further screenwriting-as-research works, notably for TEXT journal and Melbourne Knowledge Week. Her television credits for broadcast include nine series of an award-winning bilingual serial drama and a prime-­ time sitcom.

List of Figures

Originality and Authorship in the Development of the Screen Idea Fig. 1 Synthesis of the ‘orthodoxy’ by the author based on a sample survey of 103 US texts/fragments (2015/16)

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Nordic Noir with an Icelandic Twist: Establishing a Shared Space for Collaboration Within European Coproduction Fig. 1 The Screen Idea System. (Source: Redvall 2013, p. 31)

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Script Development and Social Change in Papua New Guinea Fig. 1 Reading the script during auditions. (Eby 2014) Fig. 2 Aliko comforts Ambai after she is assaulted by her stepfather. (CSCM 2014) Fig. 3 Michael Hauge’s six-stage plot structure (Huntley 2007). (Courtesy of Write Brothers, Inc.) Fig. 4 Composite summary of the storyline outcomes of the writers’ workshop. (Eby 2017) Fig. 5 Aliko with her parents. (CSCM 2014) Fig. 6 Ambai (left) and Aliko (right) meet after a long separation. (CSCM 2014) Fig. 7 Aliko with her teacher and mentor. (CSCM 2014)

148 152 157 158 159 160 164

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Defining the Beats in the TV Sitcom Fig. 1 Narrative shape of At the Bar ‘Renovator’s Delight’ pilot

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Subjects of the Gaze: Script Development as Performance Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Conventional screenplay formatting Fictocritical screenplay formatting Image and text are developed as a dance on the page Victoria Lucas and Emma Bolland performing at ‘A Feminist Space at Leeds’, 2017. Photograph, Helen Clarke Fig. 5 Table reading set, S1 Artspace, Sheffield, September 2018

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The Promiscuous Screenplay: A Tale of Wanton Development and Loose Authorship Fig. 1 Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr), Jesse (Jesse Richards) and Rocket (as herself) in the throes of ‘bad’ sex. You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017) Fig. 2 Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) and Tom (Tom McCathie) get to know one another in You can say vagina (2017) Fig. 3 Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) washes Tom’s (Tom McCathie) beard in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017) Fig. 4 Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) calls her Mum in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017) Fig. 5 Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) and her mum (Liza Dennis) argue in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017) Fig. 6 Josh (Josh Price) meets Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) and Tom (Tom McCathie) for the first time in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017) Fig. 7 Josh (Josh Price) employs Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) to record an audio description for a porn film in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017)

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Introduction Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor

Script development is one process of many in the production of a screen work. It is a creative, commercial and social practice in which ideas, emotions, people and personalities combine and work within the practicalities, policies and rapid movements of the screen industry. It is experienced in multiple ways depending on the scale and stage of the project and the production culture within which it is practised. As such, we might suggest it is a process that resists both definition (Batty et  al. 2017, 2018) and delineation (Taylor 2015), because the elements of the practice—drafts, revisions, feedback and so on—may continue into other erstwhile discrete aspects of production. With the rise of new forms of digital technology, new kinds of script development are also being facilitated: online, for new and networked platforms, and for transmedia story worlds, all of which are challenging traditional notions of script development and are opening up new possibilities for practice.

C. Batty (*) University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Taylor RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_1

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In 2017, with colleagues Bridget Conor and Louise Sawtell, we co-­ edited a special issue of the Journal of Screenwriting on the topic of script development. This special issue comprised six articles that collectively investigated and showcased a variety of perspectives and case studies on the topic, across Australia, the UK, the US and Finland. As special issue editors, we contributed a lengthy article that drew together the extant literature from a wide range of outputs (academic, industrial and instructional), in order to make what we claim was the first scholarly attempt to ‘define the field’ (Batty et al. 2017, pp. 225–247). At the time we considered scholarship on the topic was still emerging and that this book would make a further contribution to addressing our gaps in understanding. The overwhelming response to our call for chapters—which necessitated the development of a second book (currently in preparation)—would suggest that scholars were engaging with the topic but that perhaps there was not yet a place to explicitly bring those ideas together. We came to understand that while script development is arguably still not as ‘theorised’ as other aspects of screenwriting—and its related fields, creative writing and screen production—the topic is certainly part of a rising interest in screenwriting and production studies over the past decade. Further, script development seems to intersect well with what is an increased appetite for practice-based and practitioner-informed research, particularly in PhDs that seek to test, experiment with or expand existing practices through the development and/or writing of an original screenplay (Batty et al. 2016). Therefore, we believe it is timely to produce an international edited collection that maps the terrain of script development—while not, as we have noted elsewhere (Batty et al. 2017, p. 225), suggesting that practices of script development need (or could) be limited or standardised by definition. In our Journal of Screenwriting special issue article, we asked if script development should be considered a sub-discipline of screenwriting studies (Batty et  al. 2017, p.  225). In the same special issue, Steven Price questioned the potentially fragmentary nature of script development research and suggested that one ‘way out’ of it is through considering broader industrial frameworks for analytical contexts (2017, p. 326). As he put it (2017, p. 325): a paradox of script development is that the very things that make it academically problematic – the reliance on single-sourced or unsourced anecdotes, the first-person narrative, the recounting of verbal dialogues – are the very

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things that allow it to reveal aspects of the production process that remain hidden from the researcher pursuing purely text-based materials.

This book, then, hopes to embrace this paradox by drawing on interviews, case studies, creative practices and ‘on the ground’ industrial experiences to bring together 16 chapters by well-known and emerging practitioner-­ scholars from Australia, New Zealand, the US, South America, the UK and Europe. Purposely comprising two parts, the book takes readers through various critical and creative aspects of script development, first looking ‘into’ the practice from a more theoretical perspective and second looking ‘out from’ the practice towards more ‘real-world’ theorisations of script development. While the two parts of the book make these differing approaches clear—hopefully speaking equally to those who research others’ creative practice and those who use creative practice as a mode of research—in reality the book is more porous, with authors drawing on different experiences, contexts and methodologies to stake their claims. The chapters emerge from, and detail, a wide range of script development practices, from feature film, to television series, to sitcom, to experimental writing, and cover a wide range of geographical and cultural arenas. The chapters provide a series of methods for analysing script development practices, case studies of script development ‘in action’, and what we hope will become a robust platform from which other studies of script development might be undertaken. Collectively, we believe this book represents a true international perspective on the critical and creative practice of script development. In Part I: ‘Looking into Script Development: Theories on Practice’, authors explore what script development is, does and is influenced by, from critical and theoretical perspectives. It draws together scholars whose research is able to conceptualise and interrogate script development practices from a number of perspectives, including creative labour, policy, screen studies and history. The chapters in this section use document analysis, original interviews and textual analysis to make their claims, setting solid foundations for how we understand how script development operates internationally. Ian W. Macdonald (UK) extends upon his seminal theory of the ‘screen idea’ to problematise ideas of individuality and authorship, and discuss the ‘sparks’ of collaboration generated by the power of the group. Cath Moore and Radha O’Meara offer a unique comparative analysis between the development cultures of Australia and Denmark, presenting a discourse

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analysis of publicly available documentation from two national screen funding bodies, focussing on how these bodies conceptualise and fund script development. Using over 60 in-depth interviews, Petr Szczepanik analyses the precarity of script development in the Czech Republic and how this leads to a (problematic) national film identity. Glenda Hambly examines the nexus of development practices of feature screenwriters and the script development culture of Screen Australia, the federal funding agency, basing her study on a survey of agency documents as well as interviews with key agency executives, 22 of Australia’s most successful feature screenwriters. Caryn Murphy’s chapter explores the development of a script for the crime drama Ironside (1967–1975) in order to examine script development in the context of the traditional US system of broadcasting, and constraints that include a desire to appeal to large audiences, satisfy the needs of advertisers and navigate a storytelling act structure necessitated by commercial interruptions. In a collaboration between scholars and practitioners, Carmen Sofia Brenes, Margaret McVeigh, Alejandro C. Reid and Alberto N.  García address script development processes of creating the anti-hero in the Chilean TV miniseries Heroes (2006–2007), a six-part historical series about Chilean national heroes. To conclude Part I, Rosamund Davies explores script development and writing within the context of European co-production. Through a case study of Icelandic crime drama Trapped (Ófærð) (2015), she examines some of the challenges and opportunities of collaborative screenwriting within this cross-nation context, which is subject to shifting geopolitical and economic realities. In Part II: ‘Looking out from Script Development: Practice into Theory’, authors explore script development from an ‘insider’ perspective, theorising the practice from the standpoint of having been involved in it. Drawing on creative projects, ethnographic studies and reflections on career trajectories, the chapters in this section investigate script development from a variety of lived experiences, where creative practice research features as a strong methodological anchor. The authors in this section draw on their experiences of writing, script editing, storylining, producing and directing across commercial, independent and community-based contexts. Joshua McNamara builds upon a long-term and multi-sited ethnographic study of script development practices in urban Nairobi, in order to explore how the detailed ethnographic writing-up of specific and localised practices can in fact form the basis for broader interrogations of

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contemporary global culture. Mark Eby focuses on script development as an illustration of how participation, community engagement, collaboration, facilitation, feedback mechanisms, stakeholder involvement and social change concerns were brought to bear on a creative media process in Papua New Guinea. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, Christina Milligan makes a rare study of the screenwriting practice of Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay (1944–2008), better known as a director of feature and documentary projects. Examining his writing process on the feature It Was Darkness (1997), she reveals a process that places creative discovery above commercial concerns. Through a case study approach that draws on qualitative interviews with writers, Noel Maloney and Philippa Burne analyse the script development models commonly found in Australian serial television drama: a highly industrialised script development model, which at first glance appears to rely on rigid and tightly managed hierarchies and processes. D. T. Klika likewise makes a study of form, this time the television sitcom and the script development processes inherent in a ‘closed’ or ‘circular’ narrative structure, arguing that while the sitcom begins with character, the comedy emerges from the character’s reactions that are articulated at an early stage of script development. Emma Bolland and Louise Sawtell outline their approaches to script development in relation to their respective projects, arguing for expanded notions of screenwriting and the screenplay, asking ‘What is enacted by putting ourselves in the picture? What is enacted by choosing to be the subject of the gaze?’. Siobhan Jackson then reflects upon the process of completing her own debut feature film to outline a flexible and generative mode of working outside of the commercial system, employing both alternative technologies (mechanical and organic) and unconventional content generation strategies. The book concludes with our own chapter, in which we unpack the oft-­assumed notion of ‘improvement’ in script development processes. This notion of improvement, or ‘betterment’, is alluded to in all of the book’s 14 other chapters, and here we tackle the topic head on. We use interviews with industry practitioners and analysis of Australian screen agency documents to explore and theorise the ways in which the goal of improvement might be espoused, valued and—on a very practical level— achieved and assumed by iterative processes. Script Development: Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives is intended as a foundational collection that, we hope, will inspire others to research and write about the practice. Through

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its variety of critical and creative contexts, and the rich experiences of its chapter authors and subjects, we position the collection as an introduction to the theory and practice of script development. Once introduced, of course, the terrain is open for others.

References Batty, C., Sawtell, L., & Taylor, S. (2016). Thinking Through the Screenplay: The Academy as a Site for Research-Based Script Development. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 9(1–2), 149–162. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script Development: Defining the Field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Batty, C., O’Meara, R., Taylor, S., Joyce, H., Burne, P., Maloney, N., Poole, M., & Tofler, M. (2018). Script Development as a ‘Wicked Problem’. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. Price, S. (2017). Script Development and Academic Research. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 319–333. Taylor, S. (2015). It’s the Wild West Out There: Can Web Series Destabilise Traditional Notions of Script Development. In Proceedings of the 2015 ASPERA Annual Conference: What’s This Space? 1–14. Available at http://www.aspera. org.au/research/conference-proceedings/annual-conference-refereed-proceedings-2015/. Accessed 15 Apr 2020.

PART I

Looking into Script Development: Theories on Practice

Originality and Authorship in the Development of the Screen Idea Ian W. Macdonald

Introduction This chapter examines whether, in screen idea development, we are right to focus on individual authorship as the source of originality in a situation that is observably a group activity. We usually default to the idea of a single author working within (and sometimes against) the rules of the game. We admire a writer’s ‘voice’, vision and talent, and think of group work as feedback designed to perfect that, to polish it in ways suitable for production. It seems as if we still lean towards the notion of an inexplicable Muse inspiring the Artist who then crafts it on to the page. The Artist’s Genius is then measured by the size and novelty of their contribution to the Work. Simple, no? Unfortunately not. Even in simple situations where one might expect the responsibility for the development of that work to be clear, there is more to it than that. The point they both realized the text had wandered into its own world was in the basement of the old Gollancz Books, where they’d got together to proofread the final copy [of Good Omens], and Neil congratulated Terry on

I. W. Macdonald (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_2

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a line that Terry knew he hadn’t written, and Neil was certain he hadn’t written either. They both privately suspect that at some point the book had started to generate text on its own, but neither of them will actually admit this publicly for fear of being thought odd. (Gaiman and Pratchett 2006, pp. 404–5)

Odd or not, the idea that the book itself might generate text could be a useful way of conceiving of a research approach to authorship in a group activity such as screen idea development. Nobody wants to deny the author credit where credit is due. I would like to claim credit for this chapter, but academic protocol is sensibly designed to ensure I reference the collective endeavours of other scholars, thus recognising any original contribution to knowledge as collaborative. The world of screen idea development is more opaque but follows the same process. Original (or novel) work is required but is not even necessarily the product of those credited with it. Our assumption about crediting a particular writer is convenient at best, and at worst skews the basis for research into screen idea development. On the surface, this can be accepted but, looking closer, it becomes hard (or impossible and even pointless) to attribute authorship or kudos for specific elements to specific individuals.1 In this chapter, following the work of R. Keith Sawyer around systems theories of creativity (2003, 2006, 2007, 2010), I argue that this is because the generation of new screen ideas is a collaborative creative process. I suggest that we need to rebalance our view of screen idea development so that we recognise originality as the product of multiple factors rather than emanating only from one individual blessed by divine insight and sublime skills. Here I discuss how we can recognise at least two views simultaneously—crediting the individual, alongside the centrality of creative group work—if we see the same thing as if through different lenses offering different perspectives. I refer to the power of groups to create new work, something more than the sum of their individual parts, emerging through their collaboration as ‘sparks’. What shapes this is the ‘doxa’, or the received wisdom about screenwriting that defines the idea during development and becomes the common discourse—and thus a lingua franca. I 1  This becomes clear with an example such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974) created by an acknowledged group whose members worked alone, in partnership and together to produce work that was unique, i.e. original. See Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years (2007).

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present an original survey outlining the Western ‘orthodoxy’ (i.e. the accepted way of developing ideas for the screen, within the overall doxa) in the form of a manifesto. I end by making two suggestions: first, that in the context of this complex form of idea development, we might reconsider ‘originality’ as being a practical engagement with, and ‘re-writing’ of, the orthodoxy; and secondly, that we might attempt to avoid the rigidity of discussing authorship attached to certain roles (director, writer, showrunner, etc.), by deciding on who—individually or collectively—can be considered ultimately responsible for each unique screen idea and its context. For l’Auteur read le Responsable!

Assumptions and Definitions Art is a social practice, says Janet Wolff (1993). Film is a social practice, says Graeme Turner (1999). In professional screen idea development, there are industrial imperatives and established practices, standardised documents and professional jargon, all supporting communication via a particular and specialist discourse, appropriate to the chosen medium, genre, and so on. I assume, therefore, that screen idea development is also a social practice. I use ‘Screen Idea’ here as a label for the singular project that people are working on (Macdonald 2003, 2004a, b, 2011, 2013). It is an imaginary concept. It does not exist but is shared, imperfectly, between members of the Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG). It names only what is being striven for, and is expressed concretely in different versions (synopsis, script draft, final film, etc.). Formally we can describe it as: Any notion held by one or more people of a singular concept (however complex) which may have conventional shape or not, intended to become a screenwork, whether or not it is possible to describe it in written form or by other means.

It follows, therefore, that ‘script development’ is a narrower process, being screen idea development associated with a particular (and often standardised) written form. For every screen idea, there is a work group—formal or less formal, small or large—that forms around it and shapes it towards what is seen as a successful outcome (Macdonald 2013). There is always an ideology in play here; a set of beliefs that are unquestioned during the process of screen idea development and which set the framework

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for how that development progresses. Some scholars have begun to use this approach to understand such collaborative creative development in screen production (e.g. Redvall 2013).

Explaining Screen Idea Development Through Different ‘Lenses’ Despite what might be assumed about the idea of a ‘framework’ for the group developing the screen idea, the process of screen idea development is not mechanistic or predetermined. Even while the “art world” (Becker 1982) that governs this ideology reigns over definitions of success, it is also a process directed by individual artistic decisions. The ‘group’ view doesn’t always sit well with a comfortable focus on a specific writer, or the desire to see the script as a literary document, and we value highly the idea of individual insight, which we tend to define as creative in essence, and original when seen as exceptional or new (i.e. novel). However, screen idea development will always produce original ideas, and take turns that are unknowable in advance. Originality cannot be predicted. Naturally, this is problematic for the industry, because originality (i.e. novelty in this context) is part of the standing agenda for commissioning any new work, and if it cannot be predicted and planned for, there is a risk of a poor return on investment. Previously I have posed the question “What determines development, and where is the creativity in this?” (Macdonald 2013, p.  81). Recent researchers have described the study of screen idea development as a “wicked problem” (Batty et  al. 2018), i.e. complex, difficult to define, difficult to generalise and so theorise. This complexity chimes with earlier media research that suggested complex creative tasks are best studied not just as simple individual actions but in parallel with other actions. Thus, they require at least a multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach (Richardson 2000). Our object of study (in this case, the screen idea as it develops) can be seen through multiple ‘lenses’, which allows us to recognise both the individual contribution (e.g. when referring to an ‘author’, or a creative leader like the showrunner) and, simultaneously, the process within group contexts, discourse and activities. For example, Cantor (1971) suggested that for Hollywood TV producers there were three value systems working simultaneously: (1) self-expression, (2) the craft of filmmaking and (3) financial and other reward. Ettema (1982, p. 91) suggested, as a way of

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understanding TV development, “three conceptual lenses” of (1) the fruits of individual labour, (2) the production routines of media organisations and (3) conflict within and among media organisations. However, such research has also tended to view the creation of media as a “negotiated struggle” within and between such systems (Cantor 1979), as “bargaining games” (Allison 1971), or as creativity constrained within work groups (Ettema and Whitney 1982, my italics). These terms all assume a simple antagonism between individuals rather than the messier mixture of conflict and collaboration that appears to characterise creative group work practices (Macdonald 2013, pp.  81–110).2 We might therefore adopt a view of such creativity as a complex, competitive and collaborative act of construction based around a shared set of values. Screen idea development, then, might be explained as a multistranded activity in which shared conceptual values (e.g. of what a film is, or a TV soap) are articulated by individuals as the basis for a new piece of work. Within this framework, others contribute suggestions that affect the outcome of this group activity. So the development of any new screen idea—and the final outcome, for good or ill—depends, at least initially, on (1) the exercise of, and complex interplay of, personal power; (2) the extent to which ideologies are shared and specific discourses employed; (3) the extent to which the screen idea fits the framework or template being used; and (4) the extent to which the novelty of the idea is seen to be appropriate to the brief.

Single Authorship in Screen Idea Development How then do we account for the practice of attributing single authorship or individual creative leadership, whether that be the writer, director, producer or showrunner? For example, what are we to make of the credit as writer for Andrew Davies on House of Cards (1990) followed by Beau Willimon’s credit as creator for the US version of House of Cards (2013–2018), for which Andrew Davies was credited as one of 21 executive producers, alongside Michael Dobbs, who wrote the original novels, and another 20 people credited as co-producers, associate producers and the like? Willimon is clearly the ‘head honcho’ (in Variety speak) for the 2  When asked how they wrote the novel Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett said, “mostly by shouting excitedly at one another down the phone a couple of times a day for two months, and sending a disk off to the other guy several times a week” (2006, p. 403).

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US version, but in such complex circumstances how can we identify the extent of creative and original contributions from individuals, and their significance? It becomes clear that it depends what ‘lens’ you are looking through. James Ettema’s 1982 study of the development of pilots for a US educational TV series concluded (perhaps surprisingly to us now) that “viewed through the lens focused on individual labor, the three pilots are undeniably the creative achievement of a single individual – the executive producer” (1982, p. 100).3 However, he then went on to recognise they were also the embodiment of the compromises reached between executive producer, advisors and their researchers, as well as being the result of what happened within meetings. “These processes cannot be understood apart from each other,” Ettema said (1982, p. 102). In 1982, Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley attempted to identify the commercial US TV producer as an ‘artist’—an authorial lens—based on interviews with clearly exceptional and powerful men, including Grant Tinker, Norman Lear and Quinn Martin. The main case study was of the practices and beliefs of Martin, who believed in the power of branding and attribution; presaging HBO’s famous dictum by about 20 years, Martin claimed “the audience is not merely viewing television. It is watching a QM production” (Newcomb and Alley 1982, p. 76). The audience were left in no doubt, either—the final caption was always “A Quinn Martin Production”, read out by a sonorous voice. Both these examples underline the ‘wicked’ view of development as complex, representing different sets of circumstances every time, with the consequent difficulty of making generalisations from such material. It also raises the question of whether or not there is always a fundamental struggle between originality (represented by the individual) and the framework and beliefs shared by all in the work group. Is it that simple?

3  Ettema’s conclusion may be based on an atypical form of ‘development’, in that his case studies were pilots produced with the intention of winning a commission. In those circumstances, and in that era and location, the executive producer might have been more in the driving seat and have exercised more power directly than during the development of, say, episode 4 in season 3 of a successful and renewed series.

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Notions of Originality Literary discussion of originality has placed it in opposition to plagiarism but without any sense that original ideas can be clearly recognised as existing “in any positive or objective sense, accompanied by textual features which would allow us to recognise them” (Macfarlane 2007, p. 13). The telling or retelling of stories was possibly seen as the same thing until European interest in scientific discovery in the 1600s focused attention on the ‘new’, the not previously known. In the 1660s, Abraham Cowley applied the ‘new’ to written works, saying “originality and not knowledge of the great works of literature is the foundation of true creativity” (Phillips 1984, p. 48). This placed creativity in opposition to those like Lope de Vega who, in 1609, advocated certain established Act structures (Koivumäki 2016). The poet Milton is thought to have queried whether the “rules of Aristotle should be kept or ‘nature’ to be followed” (Phillips 1984, p. 11); and in 1717 one commentator noted “it is not to be expected that a genius like Shakespeare’s should be so judged by the laws of Aristotle and the other Prescribers of the Stage” (Phillips 1984, p. 142). This opposition of such ‘laws’ with originality, as between constraint and creativity, has usually been seen as a struggle. For our purposes, let us assume that originality means a particular vision, shared with others, in the service of a singular project. It means something creative and innovative; a novel idea that may (or may not) be exciting in the manner of a new insight or discovery; a contribution to knowledge or understanding. There are various ways we can view authorship (e.g. see McIntyre 2012), but in Western culture our desire to attribute creative authorship— originality—to an individual is strong and perhaps lies with our understanding that the coherence of that originality may depend on an individual who embodies all the experience necessary to produce that original vision within the constraints of the prevailing system. The legacy to UK TV drama of the screenwriter Dennis Potter, for example, has been described as “a body of dramatic work of astonishing vigour and originality” and as “a worked example of how a writer should engage with society” (Naughton 1994, p. 5). To succeed, his work had to engage with the work of others within the context of media production at a specific time and place. On occasion, he railed against the contemporary TV context, but he also attempted to make the system work for him. We would not remove credit from Potter—individuals have unique perspectives and wisdom—but we

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also recognise that the expression of their insights depends on the contemporary framework. So, this is not the individual working alone but within a context that also shapes the screen idea, and which involves others. This way of viewing it supports the systems model of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1999; Redvall 2013, etc.), even where it could be said the individual traditionally plays a strongly authorial role, as in documentary practice. The work of De Jong, Knudsen and Rothwell (2012) on creative documentary focuses on the place of the authorial figure within the context of a field of narrative strategies, and Susan Kerrigan (2013) self-reflects on how a practitioner internalises their creative system, referring to her own “embodiment and immersion in the content of the domains and fields” of her chosen topic and her practices (2013, p. 111).4 R. Keith Sawyer’s work on creativity has, on the other hand, de-­ emphasised the individual (2003, 2006, 2007, 2010) and he has asserted that developing a creative idea spontaneously (whether in jazz, improvisation or performance) is always a group process, involving more than individual activity, and—importantly—more than the sum of that individual activity (2010). This recalls Gaiman and Pratchett’s observation quoted above. Screen idea development is surely the same process, even when parts of it, like script drafts, are worked on individually. The result is dictated, in the end, by the group of people involved, and how they work together.

Group Creativity To understand the way the SIWG works, we could employ the model of organisational politics from political scientist Graham Allison (1971), as suggested in Ettema (1982). This suggests four concepts addressing what drives or directs the individual within the group: (1) the “player in position” or their role; (2) the “stakes and stands” of these players, which are individual values, attitudes and goals as influenced by the player’s position. Differences here may give rise to organisational conflict, such as the producer (role) vs. the network executive (another role) over their beliefs about script content. Essentially “where you stand is where you sit”, says Allison (1971, p. 176). Then (3) there is power and the exercise of power, 4  For a recent detailed discussion of the systems approach to creativity within a higher education setting, see the valuable McIntyre et al. (2018).

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formally and informally; and (4) “action channels”, or the “regularised means for taking action on an issue which serve to structure and regulate the bargaining games” (Ettema 1982, p. 93). This would include familiar shared ways of working, including common craft skills. However, Allison’s model is based on bureaucracies, where groups act primarily to address a defined problem. In creativity research, it is also recognised that “puzzle formulation as well as puzzle solution is part of the creative process” (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1975), so is this when the focus might lie more squarely with the individual? But how does an individual begin to formulate their ‘puzzle’ unless they have an existing framework to start with? And how do they test out if it works without feedback from knowledgeable others? Sawyer argues “the best scientific explanation of creativity might be hybrid” (2010, p. 365). In other words, that there are two levels of creating new work—a subjective contribution from the individual, and then an inter-subjective contribution from the group—and that the best way of understanding this is what Sawyer calls “collaborative emergence” (2010, p.  365). A “collaborative emergent” is something that is a “constantly changing ephemeral property” of the interaction between the collaborators, which in turn then “influences the emergent processes which are generating it” (2010, p. 365). Applying Sawyer’s notions to screenwriting, we can see there is a bottom-­up process of creating and developing a new screen idea. At any one point in development, any one member of the screen idea work group could make a key suggestion (or “spark”, as Sawyer terms it) from an almost infinite number of possibilities; followed, seconds later, by another person—sparking off the first—doing exactly the same thing with another idea. The effect of these two, and the whole group, working together is complex, fast and unknowable in advance. The direction of development can change in an instant. This notion of collaborative emergence has important implications. It means we cannot explain the development of a screen idea through the study of only one person. Individual contributions can be observed within the work group; however, group and individual creativity combine. There are several reasons, according to Sawyer (2010), why even improvisatory theatre (where the drama is invented instantly and controlled serially, under time pressure, by individual actors in sequence), is not just the sum of those parts created. It is more than a series of individual contributions. There really is a creative chemistry around a specific group.

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There is inter-subjectivity, therefore, within a creative group but, according to Sawyer (2010), the key question is not how people in the work group come to share identical ideas and representations about what they’re working on; but how a coherent interaction between them can develop forward with only an approximation of an idea. This is, of course, what we mean by the Screen Idea; it impacts on how we might study script drafts, for example, as representing the approximate, rather than exact, Screen Idea at any one time. This means that originality—novelty—is a shared property. It does not, says Sawyer, have to be created simply by one person, in isolation or otherwise. It can be created by complex systems, often in small incremental steps. This happens all the time in science disciplines, for example. And at any one point in the creation of something, the potential creative trajectories are innumerable; within the writers’ room, for example. Returning to how we might study this, the only way of explaining how a particular script development process was generated—who came up with the idea, who wrote key elements, and so on and why—is by very detailed empirical study after the fact, such as in case studies. This may explain the prevalence of the individual case study in screenwriting research, leading to the sense of fragmentation in the field that Steven Price identifies (2017, p.  326). Paradoxically, however, the more ‘authors’ we find in a work group, the more we try to identify the main one among them. We can’t handle the detail, so we go for simplicity. This has a limitation, however; it closes off further study, outside the authorship (origination, and/or “ownership”) that we attribute to the work and to an individual. This is problematic because “what cannot be known”, says Sawyer, “a priori, [is] whether or not a given creation can be scientifically explained solely in terms of properties and laws about individuals” (2010, p. 378). As Hollywood knows (and is continually struggling with), there’s no guarantee, before the fact, that a successful showrunner will repeat a success. The (albeit slow) success of the TV series The Wire (2002–2008) does not guarantee the success of Treme (2010–2013) just as it is not possible to explain the development of The Wire by focusing solely on David Simon, even if he is clearly the key person in that process. I am not suggesting here that originality in screen idea development cannot emanate from the individual; just that Sawyer’s notion of ‘collaborative emergence’ is a more satisfactory explanation of creativity than assuming we need to find an individual genius. The focus on the individual

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is an imbalance, I suggest; a skew that is maintained by the ideology of the manuals. Every screenwriting manual is addressed to the individual or would-be writer and how they might address the demands of the industrial screenwriting system. The tone is about what you can do to improve your writing individually, separately, in what Bridget Conor calls an “atomised” situation for the worker (2010, p. 118). For example, Linda Venis’s Inside the Room (2013) is not really about the writers’ room. It’s a detailed account of what the individual needs to know about craft skills in the Hollywood TV context, written by professional individuals, addressing the individual reader as an individual ‘wannabe’. There is little or nothing in such orthodox advice literature that addresses group behaviour. Even so, the discourse that is the vehicle for the development of a screen idea is surely the same as that employed by the manuals and blogs. Such advice appears to be pervasive and consistent across the board. Does it really represent a coherent framework for screen idea development, in English-speaking regions at least? An analysis of this advice literature is required.

The Doxa as Framework An individual writer—perhaps the one who comes up with the new story idea—has to start somewhere in “formulating their puzzle” (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1975). Clearly their experience—of life, media consumption (as a viewer), and media production—is where it starts. Their understanding of media production exists in some relationship—from benign to hostile—to the current received wisdom or beliefs about how screen ideas should be developed. Pierre Bourdieu refers to these beliefs as the ‘doxa’, using Aristotle’s word for opinions and beliefs, to mean the body of beliefs about specific ways of working, within a specific culture (Bourdieu 1977, 1984, 1996, etc.; Honderich 1995, p. 206). The doxa therefore includes but is more than ‘the orthodoxy’, which is the expression (or codification) of the ‘right’ way of doing things. In screenwriting, we’re used to seeing manuals and blogs offering strongly orthodox advice (Alessandra 2010; Harris 2014; Lavandier 1994; McKee 1999; Snyder 2005; Venis 2013; Yorke 2013) often underlining the author’s own experience as media producer, teacher or advisor, to claim authority. In an attempt to determine clearly what the orthodoxy says and following from the work of Bridget Conor (2010, 2014), I conducted a survey in 2015–2016 of 155 US and UK advisory texts on film and TV

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screenwriting, ranging from blog fragments to books and websites. I conducted a discourse analysis that showed almost all texts sampled (95% US, 88% UK) as being in accord with, and indeed heavily in favour of, an identifiable orthodox framework for writing for the screen (Macdonald 2016, 2017). Analysis of the 103 US sources collected showed a high degree of similarity across them, which allowed a synthesis to be constructed in the form of a manifesto (or ‘Dogme’) for ‘good’ work (Fig. 1). This clearly indicates a high degree of coherence in the form of principles that can be applied with some confidence by the originator of a new screen idea. Of course, much of this seems obvious even to the casual film and TV viewer, which I suggest is not just because of our general familiarity with screen storytelling, but also the global pervasiveness of US-led practice. The UK sources surveyed were in very close sync with the US discourse, for example. This ‘manifesto’ clearly resembles the Classic Hollywood Narrative paradigm (Bordwell 1986, p. 157; Gaines 1992, p. 1; Thompson 2003; etc.), although it only partially represents the full range of media and genres (omitting franchises, games design, complex TV, etc.). But this material clearly intervenes generally in the process of screen idea development by claiming to be authoritative, indisputable and universal; claims that need detailed critical attention (Maras 2017). There seems little doubt that this framework represents industrial practice. The extent to which this happens in individual projects must surely be a question of how near or far the project is from the influence of the framework. For the individual within the SIWG, and for their attempt to be original, they clearly have to know the rules in order to break them in ways with which other contributors find they can agree.

The Creative Individual in the Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG) From the perspective of the creative individual in the SIWG—for example, a writer on a TV series—it might feel like they are contributing to a gradual build-up of ideas from a group of individuals, out of which emerges something satisfactory to all—or to most, at least. The submerged subjective sense of what is ‘right’ in this context is not queried; only whether the ‘spark’ catches fire. Experience tells the individual to develop something and a document (usually the script) is produced from the ideas shared.

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What makes a writer’s draft screenplay ‘good’ is ... 1. The 3-Act template, or variation, as the starting point for all moving image narrative structure in moving image narrative. 2. A main plot, plus sub-plots which support or ‘push’ the plotline. 3. A ‘2nd Act’ (middle) which develops/complicates the story, shows clear direction, and will be resolved in Act 3. 4. The presence of changing tension, rising and falling (sawtooth), and progressing in this fashion to a major climax towards the end. 5. A story based on emotion (which could be linked to subtext). 6. A central narrative question, of a problem or situation to be (re-)solved, and to which everything relates. 7. A structure and format (Master Scene) based on scenes, which individually advance the story and reveal character. 8. A scene structure which includes dramatic ‘beats’ as specific elements of action. 9. Scenes which can be built into sequences and collected into Acts, each of which also has recognisable structure. 10. A tendency towards action and pace. 11. A tendency to ‘show not tell’, despite a prohibition on specifying shots. 12. The restriction of shot-based narrative structures to designated ‘montage’ sequences. 13. Dialogue which reveals character, engages attention, progresses the narrative (as ‘verbal action’). 14. A sense of overall cohesion, or unity. 15. A central character (protagonist) with a goal, i.e. a motivation for action towards a clear objective. 16. A significant goal, with significant difficulty (stakes, obstacles) in achieving it. 17. (An) active character(s). 18. Drama that has ‘punch’. 19. The use of outward conflict, or relational conflict. 20. A tendency towards clarity of purpose, and narrative simplicity. 21. A main character with a flaw and a range of emotions (‘3D’), and/or ... 22. ... A character with fewer emotions but significant personal characteristic(s) which create a ‘signature’ or incite specific admiration.

Fig. 1  Synthesis of the ‘orthodoxy’ by the author based on a sample survey of 103 US texts/fragments (2015/16)

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23. A main character who changes, transforms, grows over the narrative (character arc). 24. Characters who relate to (rather than only conform to) character archetypes or roles. 25. A relationship to genre conventions. 26. Accurate conventional presentation on the page. 27. Awareness of commercial issues, particularly around structure, novelty and the current market. 28. Novelty, originality, the writer’s ‘voice’ (in most circumstances).

Fig. 1  (continued)

Acceptance of an individual’s ideas is the immediate target, and admiration of those ideas is the ultimate goal. They will feel fresh, novel and original while at the same time right. Their originator will expect, and often get, credit within the SIWG for their contribution. The focus of everyone’s discussion is on what else is new rather than what is the same within the traditional system of constructing a screen idea—this is a given, based on or around the doxa. So, it looks and feels like the writers are coming up with new and exciting ideas—and they are. But the doxa exists in advance of these original, new ideas. The doxa— indeed often the orthodoxy—is taken as read, as unacknowledged and unquestioned received wisdom. This permeates, surrounds, supports the way in which your screen idea will be developed, individually and collectively. Your colleagues in the SIWG will not recognise your contribution as a screen idea unless it matches their own understanding of the doxa. With that in mind, I would like to float one idea. It might not be too far-fetched to suggest that originality within screen idea development is about rewriting the doxa. We can imagine the usual process as starting with a group of individuals sharing a pre-existing, if hazy, notion of what a TV episode should be (for example), and then working ‘backwards’ to see what specific ideas they can come up with to realise it. This is not the ‘constructive’, forward-moving, tidy and linear view of screen idea development that we have assumed exists across the screen media spectrum (e.g. in Corner 2008, referring to documentary), but a much messier non-­ linear ‘de-constructive’ debate that occurs under the radar within the SIWG, in which the doxa is applied and tested. Questions, often unspoken but shared nevertheless, drive the development process: ‘Can we do that within the accepted doxa, or does it fall outside the “rules”?’ ‘What will

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this change do to that arc?’ ‘This moment needs a (more) powerful turning point, doesn’t it?’ However vague our own understanding of the right way of telling screen stories, the doxa is our starting point. It is not the blank sheet of paper, nor the flash of inspiration, although both these exist. It’s the way we talk to colleagues in the SIWG, and what we imagine we share, or have already shared, before we even give names to our characters. And then it’s about what the process, or processes, generate(s). So, essentially the manuals are right when they suggest that they provide the framework, and that all the writers have to do is invent the content. However, originality is not just about new and different content; it’s also about pushing the edges of the doxa. This is the rewriting part, where we (probably unconsciously) question what is almost always unquestioned in the conscious world.

Conclusions: Understanding and Studying Creativity in Screen Idea Development How then can we understand and define the process of screen idea development? I suggest it takes place under the following eight conditions: 1. Within, or in some relationship to, the doxa (received wisdom) of how the work should proceed; and employing the discourse associated with that. 2. Within (or in some relationship to) the organisational context of, and the specific brief for, how the work should proceed. This includes established ways of working (Sawyer’s ‘action channels’). 3. In relationship to individual roles; and individual values, attitudes and goals as tempered by those roles. 4. With the production of original/novel ideas (Sawyer’s ‘sparks’) articulated by individuals in relation to the conditions outlined above. 5. With the refinement of these, and production of more original/ novel ideas, in relation to earlier sparks and the same conditions, by other individuals. 6. With the synthesis, through discourse, of these ideas into a coherent whole by those in the SIWG. 7. In relationship to the extent to which power is exercised, formally and informally.

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8. With the collective acceptance by the SIWG that the process, and result, is legitimate under the prevailing structures and conditions. With these conditions in place, there is a collaborative emergence of a coherent original project. The actual process of development is unique to every screen idea (and every screen idea is unique) but all participants share the same goal; to create a new, previously unseen, piece of work. If this picture of the screen idea development process is in any way accurate, it presents a broader picture than the two common perspectives of screen idea development as a refining process based on individual contributions. In the first perspective (1), development is seen as a linear progressive individual creative shaping of a screen idea; with principles, techniques and methods associated with that. In the second (2), there is what Steven Maras has noted (2011, p. 276) as the “restorative” desire to increase the cultural capital of the screenwriter (e.g. in relation to the auteur theory valuing the role of the director above others); and this view favours the study of exceptional individuals. However, if we agree with Sawyer’s findings, both these perspectives seem too narrow and may restrict further research. What perspective can we therefore take? The essential first question for some scholars and writers (perhaps stemming from an interest in practice, and research by/through practice) seems to be, ‘How can I create something new—original—by using the development process to test out and clarify my vision?’ To the writer, as the person who is often the first person to set out this vision in concrete form (synopsis, treatment, draft script, etc.), it also becomes important that their way of doing things—their original voice—is not lost, obscured by those whose contributions follow theirs. The research question then becomes, ‘In what ways can I engage with the doxa to tell screen stories?’, leading to ‘How can this story be told?’ and ‘Can we use the doxa in a different (better, new) way here?’ It is clearly legitimate to study any practice this way, post facto. However, the (perhaps unspoken) motive behind this is sometimes one of ‘improvement’ or how we can learn the ‘best’ way of developing a screen idea. This comes with a flaw, however. We cannot establish a priori principles or laws that will always work the same way in the future; we can only make observations about how they have worked in the past. This view undermines the notion of a ‘best’ way and negates the fundamental assertion of many advice manuals and some scholarship that these principles are universal and timeless.

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In addition, our desire to assign authorship is hard to apply to screen ideas because development is usually an overtly collective process. Even so, we seem to need to assign credit to someone so that we can admire them and their vision, and we can “consecrate” their works (to use Bourdieu’s term). The problem is that, as consumers (critics, viewers, etc.) and even as academics, we cannot agree on which role to focus our attention—writer, director, producer, showrunner, and so on—with any degree of consistency. In academic books, for example, the APA style of referencing films requires us to quote the film producer as first author; a truly nonsensical rule when applied across the board.5 One suggestion is to look deeper, in academic research at least, for evidence of a Guiding Hand, the person(s) whose vision won through in the most coherent fashion, in that particular case. Instead of l’Auteur as some kind of originator, perhaps we might seek out le Responsable, the one(s) thought to hold greatest responsibility for what was developed and produced, in any given situation, and whatever their role/title. This is unlikely to become established outside academic circles and will not satisfy the popular desire to have an easy method of attributing authorship across the board but by using it as a question—who is le Responsable here?—it would serve to remind scholars that originality in screen idea development is not restricted to any specific role. Neither is it restricted to an individual, even while we continue to admire the work of individual people. We might discover a talented and unusual person, note the imaginative dexterity with which someone engages with the doxa, or see the novelty and freshness of another person’s vision or social message; but we’ll find this is still too narrow for our understanding of creative production. As argued here, we’re also likely to identify something that develops from the chemistry of several complex but unique processes of screen idea development operating together, from a one-off set of individuals uniquely brought together in a unique set of circumstances at that time and place, which produces a very specific result. And that is where originality—the production of work never seen before— really lies. Acknowledgements  These ideas have developed over the past few years and in three conference papers (Macdonald 2015, 2016, 2017). I thank all the ­conference 5  The style used in the peer-reviewed Journal of Screenwriting, for example, was developed specifically in response to the inadequacies of the major referencing methods.

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participants and members of the Screenwriting Research Network who responded to these thoughts and the ‘Dogme’ manifesto (Fig.  1), both in person and via email.

References Alessandra, P. (2010). The Coffee Break Screenwriter. Writing Your Script Ten Minutes at a Time. Studio City: Michael Wiese. Allison, G. T. (1971). Essence of Decision. Boston: Little, Brown. Batty, C., O’Meara, R., Taylor, S., Joyce, H., Burne, P., Maloney, N., Poole, M., & Tofler, M. (2018). Script Development as a “Wicked Problem”. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. Becker, H. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bordwell, D. ([1985] 1986). Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cantor, M. G. (1971). The Hollywood TV Producer. His Work and His Audience. New York: Basic Books. Cantor, M. G. (1979). The Politics of Popular Drama. Communication Research, 6, 387–406. Conor, B. (2010). Screenwriting as Creative Labour: Pedagogies, Practices and Livelihoods in the New Cultural Economy. London: Goldsmiths, University of London. PhD Thesis http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/2642/. Accessed 3 Sep 2012. Conor, B. (2014). Screenwriting: Creative Labour and Professional Practice. London: Routledge. Corner, J. (2008) [on documentary] in Creeber, Glen (Ed.). The TV Genre Book (2nd ed., pp. 123–127). London: BFI/Palgrave. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Implications of a Systems-Based Perspective for the Study of Creativity. In R.  J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of Creativity (pp. 313–355). Cambridge: CUP. De Jong, W., Knudsen, E., & Rothwell, J. (2012). Creative Documentary. Theory and Practice. Harlow: Pearson Education. Ettema, J.  S. (1982). The Organizational Context of Creativity: A Case Study from Public TV. In J. S. Ettema & D. C. Whitney (Eds.), Individuals in Mass Media Organizations: Creativity and Constraint (Sage Annual Reviews of Communication Research vol. 10) (pp. 90–106). Beverly Hills: Sage. Gaiman, N., & Pratchett, T. (2006). Good Omens, the Facts. In Good Omens (pp. 403–406). London: Transworld 2014 (Corgi Books).

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Gaines, J. (1992). Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars. Durham: Duke University Press. Getzels, J. W., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). From Problem Solving to Problem-­ Finding. In I.  A. Taylor & J.  W. Getzels (Eds.), Perspectives in Creativity. Aldine: Chicago. Harris, C. (2014). Complete Screenwriting Course. London: John Murray Learning. Honderich, T. (Ed.). (1995). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: OUP. House of Cards (1990), Wr: Andrew Davies; Dir: Paul Seed, UK, BBC TV for BBC; tx. (BBC1) 18/11/90-09/12/90, 57 mins x 4 eps. House of Cards (2013–2018), Cr.: Beau Willimon, USA, MRC for Netflix; 51min x 73 eps. Kerrigan, S. (2013). Accommodating Creative Documentary Practice Within a Revised Systems Model of Creativity. Journal of Media Practice, 14(2), 111–127. Koivumäki, M. (2016). Origin of Three-Act Structure Within Theory of Drama and Its Influence on Screenwriting Practice. In Screenwriting: Between Artistic Freedom and Norms, 9th International Screenwriting Research Network conference, Leeds, 8th–10th September 2016. Conference Paper. Lavandier, Y. (1994). La Dramaturgie. Les mecanismes du recit. Cinema, Theatre, Opera, Radio, Television, B.D. Cergy: Le Clown et l’Enfant. Macdonald, I.  W. (2003). Finding the Needle: How Readers See Screen Ideas. Journal of Media Practice, 4(1), 27–39. Macdonald, I. W. (2004a). The Presentation of the Screen Idea in Narrative Film-­ Making. PhD thesis. Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University. Macdonald, I.  W. (2004b). Disentangling the Screen Idea. Journal of Media Practice, 5(2), 89–99. Macdonald, I. W. (2011). Behind the Mask of the Screenplay: the Screen Idea. In C.  Myer (Ed.), Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice. London: Wallflower Press. Macdonald, I. W. (2013). Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Macdonald, I. W. (2015). What We Are Told: Screenwriting Wisdom in 2015. In Screenwriting Text and Performance, 8th International Screenwriting Research Network Conference, Royal Holloway University of London, 10th–12th September 2015. Conference Paper. Macdonald, I.  W. (2016). Dogme 2016: The Hollywood Screenwriting Orthodoxy. In Screenwriting: Between Artistic Freedom and Norms, 9th International Screenwriting Research Network Conference, Leeds, 8th–10th September 2016. Conference Paper. Macdonald, I. W. (2017). Dogme 2017: Screenwriting Orthodoxy in the UK and USA.  In Culture, Media, Equality and Freedom MeCCSA Conference Leeds 11th–13th January 2017. Conference Paper.

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Macfarlane, R. (2007). Original Copy. Plagiarism and Originality in 19th Century Literature. Oxford: OUP. Maras, S. (2011). Some Attitudes and Trajectories in Screenwriting Research. Journal of Screenwriting, 2(2), 275–286. Maras, S. (2017). Towards a Critique of Universalism in Screenwriting Criticism. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(2), 177–196. McIntyre, P. (2012). Creativity and Cultural Production: Issues for Media Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McIntyre, P., Fulton, J., Patton, E., Kerrigan, S., & Meany, M. (2018). Educating for Creativity within Higher Education. In Integration of Research into Media Practice. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan for Springer International Publishing AG. McKee, R. (1999). Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. London: Methuen. Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974); UK, BBC for BBC; tx. BBC2, BBC1 05/10/69-05/12/74, 30 mins x 46 eps. Naughton, J. (1994, June 12). Potent Clichés and Painful Truths. The Observer Review, p. 5. Newcomb, H.  M., & Alley, R.  S. (1982). The Producer as Artist: Commercial Television. In J. S. Ettema & D. C. Whitney (Eds.), Individuals in Mass Media Organizations: Creativity and Constraint (Sage Annual Reviews of Communication Research vol. 10) (pp. 69–90). Beverly Hills: Sage. Palin, M. (2007). Diaries 1969–1979. The Python Years. London: Phoenix. Phillips, P. (1984). The Adventurous Muse. Theories of Originality in English Poetics 1650–1750. PhD Thesis. Uppsala: University of Uppsala. Accessed 16 June 2018. Price, S. (2017). Script Development and Academic Research. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 319–333. Redvall, E.  N. (2013). Writing and Producing TV Drama in Denmark. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Richardson, L. (2000). Writing. A Method of Inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Sawyer, R. K. (2003). Group Creativity. Music, Theater, Collaboration. Mahwah: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates. Sawyer, R. K. (2006). Explaining Creativity. Oxford: OUP. Sawyer, R. K. (2007). Group Genius. New York: Basic Books. Sawyer, R.  K. (2010). Individual and Group Creativity. In J.  C. Kaufman & R.  Sternberg (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (pp.  366–380). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Snyder, B. (2005). Save the Cat! Studio City: Michael Wiese. Thompson, K. (2003). Storytelling in Film and Television. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Treme (2010–2013) Cr; David Simon; US, Blown Deadline for HBO; tx. HBO 11/04/10-29/12/13; 59mins x 38 eps. Turner, G. (1999). Film as Social Practice. London: Routledge. Venis, L. (Ed.). (2013). Inside the Room. Writing Television with the Pros. New York: Gotham. The Wire (2002–2008), Cr; David Simon; US, Blown Deadline for HBO; tx. HBO 02/06/02-09/03/08; 59mins x 60 eps. Wolff, J. (1993). The Social Production of Art (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Yorke, J. (2013). Into the Woods. London: Penguin.

How Government Institutions Shape Script Development: Comparative Case Studies of Screen Australia and the Danish Film Institute Cath Moore and Radha O’Meara

Introduction: Understanding Development Through Institutional Discourse This chapter presents a discourse analysis of publicly available documentation from two national screen funding bodies, focused on how they conceptualise script development. State funding agencies play significant roles in the screen industries, ecologies and practices of many nations, especially the development of feature films in smaller countries like Australia and Denmark. This analysis traces the language and frameworks embedded in public documents around feature film script development—which includes funding—as a means to better understand the cultural logics and industrial values they reflect and legitimise. By offering a comparative analysis of the discourse presented by Screen Australia and the Danish Film Institute

C. Moore (*) • R. O’Meara University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_3

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(Det Danske Filminstitut; DFI), this analysis explores the differences and similarities in how script development processes are discursively imagined, justified and practiced. The chapter focuses on the written language used on the websites of these government screen funding agencies. Online information and advice has been chosen as the central text for analysis due to its wide accessibility and influence. Much of the communication between Screen Australia and DFI and their stakeholders is managed through their website, from broad advice to funding applications. In this way, website text is pivotal in shaping ideas, relationships and practices in the screen industries of these two countries. With their institutional legitimacy bolstered by allocation of funding, government screen agencies can be understood as a key source of power that shape the wider social network of the screen industry. Existing analysis of online communication strategies employed by screen organisations is scarce. This study responds by specifically locating the screen agency website as an instructive and strategic policy platform that reflects and produces power relationships through its language. Documents from national funding agencies offer distinct visions of the pivotal roles that state funding agencies play in influencing and enacting screen practices, project pathways, professional roles, collaborative associations, career trajectories, screen works, institutional relations, industrial hierarchies and international networks. With its focus on the significant role played by government agencies, this chapter connects with a long tradition of scholarship on government film policy as both artefact and process (Hill and Kawashima 2016; Magor and Schlesinger 2009), as a distinct area of cultural policy often concerned with the specific economic and cultural features of film (Dickinson and Harvey 2005). Our research is distinguished from studies of film policy in its concentration on the broadly discursive implications of widely accessible information and advice, rather than policy itself. Discourse analysis of Screen Australia and DFI material will show that both agencies conceptualise tensions between creative and industrial logics and values, yet prioritise different frameworks. In particular, Screen Australia seems to highly value individual careers and commercial logics, whereas DFI seems to value the collaborative nature of filmmaking and cultural logics that arguably reflect a national preoccupation with egalitarianism. Our research thus helps scholars to understand the range of meanings and practices at play in structuring development processes and the politics in how they are prioritised.

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The primary method employed here is Critical Discourse Analysis, which examines how ideas, values and social relations are embedded in the everyday use of language. Critical discourse analysis draws on structural and sociolinguistics, and has been widely used across Humanities disciplines since the genealogical work of Michel Foucault inspired keen interest in connections between meaning, knowledge and power, with a particular focus on how power is exercised in relationships through language (Foucault 2002; van Dijk 1993; Weiss and Wodak 2003). Our study is part of a vast field of scholarship using critical discourse analysis to examine how patterns of knowledge are institutionalised (Mayr 2008). In this way, the language used by screen support agencies is treated as symptomatic of broader values, logics and power structures across the screen industries, because the government plays a significant role in shaping the production practices in small nations such as Australia and Denmark. Further, our analysis points to the implications of this language for practitioners, communities and industries who function dynamically in national media ecologies of small nations, where cultural values and production practices are significantly shaped by government bodies. It is hoped that the international comparative framework will de-naturalise the values and logics that dominate each particular national industry, and reveal the ideologies at work in their everyday language.

Context: Comparing Screen Industries of Small Nations Australia and Denmark share a number of features that make them interesting cases for comparison in terms of their cultures and economies. Most significantly, Australia and Denmark have relatively small populations (24.6 million and 5.7 million, respectively), highly developed economies, and active cultural sectors substantially supported by state funding. Both countries are also relatively socially developed and governed by constitutional monarchies. Both societies are dominated by majorities of white people of European ancestry with notable populations of diverse ethnic minorities. More broadly, the two countries are marked by numerous important differences. Denmark has a history as an imperial power, whereas Australia was formed through a history of imperial colonisation. Although both nations have small populations on a global scale, Australia is nearly five times larger than Denmark. Additionally, Australian

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geography is marked by a huge landmass and vast distances, and on the other side of the globe lies Denmark’s comparatively small collection of peninsulas and islands. The de facto national languages are English for Australia and Danish for Denmark, though it is notable here that around 86% of Danes are proficient in English as a second language. The similarities between Denmark and Australia are particularly significant in terms of screen culture, which is what makes them interesting cases for comparison in this study. The consumption of screen content in both Australia and Denmark is dominated by products from the US, and the style of local content is influenced by Hollywood’s domination. At the Australian box office for the period 2014–2018, all 50 feature films in the top ten each year were produced in the US, with 6 of those 50 films co-­ produced by the US and another country (UK, Australia or Aotearoa New Zealand), according to Box Office Mojo (July 2019). At the Danish box office for the period 2014–2018, 43 of the 50 feature films in the top ten each year were produced in (or co-produced with) the US, with 7 of those 50 films produced in Denmark, according to Box Office Mojo (July 2019). Thus, while Denmark has greater audience support for domestic feature films than Australia, the US prevails in box office takings in both countries. The screen production cultures of both Denmark and Australia are heavily reliant on government funding, which is generally justified by the significance of screen representations to cultural and national identities. As a Commonwealth of states and territories, Australia’s system of screen funding agencies operates at both state and federal levels. The major federal government agency is Screen Australia, and some of the major state-­ based agencies are Screen NSW, Film Victoria, Screen Queensland and Screen West. It is reasonably common for Australian feature films to attract development and/or production funding from both federal and state agencies. The Danish Film Institute is a government organisation situated within the Ministry of Culture and operates in accordance with the government’s Film Act of 1997. Mette Hjort suggests that the DFI was established to promote Denmark as a kulturnation (nation of culture), with film envisaged as a “device capable of leveraging other aspects of national culture into various transnational spaces of public visibility” (Hjort 2005, p. 16). With a smaller population size and land mass, Denmark relies primarily on the DFI as a centralised funding body, one that also supports regional areas through the FilmFyn and West Danish film funds. Australian

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and Danish government agencies and bodies support the development, production and distribution of screen content. These funding bodies play a major role in the screen production ecologies of each country. Australia produced an average of 38 feature films per year in the period 2007–2018, with each feature film having a total production budget of around AUD 8.57 million (EUR 5.29 million) (Screen Australia, Australian feature film production activity). In this period, Australian governments invested in an average of 26 feature films per year, amounting to an average annual contribution of AUD 34 million, or 12% of investment. Although the greater proportion of Australian feature film budgets are supplied by private investors, most features produced in Australia are supported by direct government funding (average 68% of features 2007–2018), with the federal government also providing offsets or tax rebates for film producers (Screen Australia, Australian feature films sources of finance). By comparison, the DFI invested in an average of 30 feature films per year in the period 2014–2018, and in 2018, the average total production budget per feature was EUR 3.13 million (AUD 5.14 million), with an annual DFI contribution of EUR 651,437 or 21% of investment (DFI “Facts & Figures”). Interestingly, there do not appear to be any Danish feature films produced without DFI funding, whereas roughly 32% of Australian features receive no direct government funding. This demonstrates that the rates of feature film production and government subsidy are very roughly similar between Australia and Denmark. Within this context of broad similarity, script development features somewhat differently in the rhetoric of screen agencies in Australia and Denmark. The contemporary DFI funding framework has, for example, been located as a cultural diversity model (Bondebjerg and Redvall 2013, p.  132), where script development is largely split into three core streams evaluating submissions according to artistic merit and/or marketplace viability. Screen Australia, on the other hand, categorises script development applications according to practitioner experience and the financial scope of the project. Despite increasingly global frames for working in and studying film culture (Hjort 2005, p.  29), situating film script development within a national context demonstrates how smaller players can still position themselves as cultural disruptors with transnational impact. Denmark’s domestic box office success affirms commitment to a national cinema where screen identities link film policy to cultural exports. The global success of “Nordic Noir” television series demonstrates how genre and region can

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circulate in transnational popular culture (Gustafsson and Kaapa 2015, p. 1). Individual Scandinavian nations are able to agitate dominant global forces through regional co-productions, made possible through the relatively similar approach to development frameworks and an institutionalised tradition of collaboration (Bondebjerg and Redvall 2013, p. 128). Studying these approaches to film development reiterates the impact of small nation film policy on global trends in screen content and as a cultural product with significant transnational reach. The small nation is a particularly salient framework, which distinguishes the strategies some countries use to negotiate a semi-peripheral role among the global forces of corporate conglomeration, shifting distribution pathways and new exhibition platforms (Flew 2018; Hjort 2005; Hjort and Petrie 2007). This comparison of online discourses of film script development published by Screen Australia and DFI will highlight how institutional language deploys a hegemonic conception of script development, which legitimises the dominance of certain practitioners and practices within industry. It reveals strategies national funding agencies employ in order to sustain and promote the development of screen products, practices and career pathways. Our analysis will examine how the language used in publicly available documents facilitates institutional engagement with screen practitioners, while reproducing frameworks of knowledge and practice involved in screen development processes.

How Screen Australia Defines and Shapes Development Screen Australia makes its policies, information and guidance publicly available through its website (www.screenaustralia.gov.au). This material tends to be written in a formal register, marked by impersonal address and predominantly one-way communication, but is rendered relatively accessible by short paragraphs, frequent use of bullet points and subheadings in simple language, such as “Why?”, “What?” and “How?” Industry jargon such as “feature-length” and “post-production” is not explicitly defined for the website reader, but some terminology is explained, such as “co-­ production” and “tax offset.” The website therefore implies that the reader comes equipped with a basic level of industrial knowledge, and is not aimed at an exclusive or highly specialist reader. The ideal reader of the Screen Australia website is probably a screen producer, because producers

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are invited to submit applications and contact staff. Nevertheless, the website’s language is readily comprehensible to anyone working in (and most hoping to work in) the Australian screen industry. Sometimes the language explicitly addresses first-time makers, for example, with the heading and link, “Starting in the Screen Industry?” This means that Screen Australia’s publicly available documentation can be very widely influential, and it is commonly used in Australian film schools to train future screen creators. The text of its website thus legitimises Screen Australia’s own institutional existence and power within the industry and nation, and also guides social practices far beyond the institution. This analysis will concentrate on Screen Australia’s material related to development of scripted feature films, though it is notable that development may also be supported through other schemes including the Producer Offset (tax rebate), the Co-production Program (which relies on bilateral arrangements with other countries) and Indigenous (for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmakers). In the late 2010s, Screen Australia reformulated its discourses and funding schemes from those focused on feature film or television series, to become “platform neutral.” This move is explicitly explained on the Screen Australia website as a response to greater technological and cultural media convergence, particularly in the realms of delivery and consumption. The website specifies that the Screen Story Development Fund supports development of projects for “any platform – series or one off … that capitalise on current and emerging digital platforms and audience opportunities.” This transition appears to be a work in progress given the Screen Australia website (as on January 2020) continues to organise file management protocols, pages and navigation around headings including “feature film” and “television and online.” As part of this transition, Screen Australia has embraced the language of “screen content,” which connotes instrumental use values over aesthetic or cultural ideals. Despite never explicitly defining the term “content,” the Screen Australia website seems to use it in ways that repudiate many forms and formats of media including news media, podcasts and most projects without commercial aims. Interestingly, Screen Australia separates scripted or drama projects from documentary projects entirely. In the way it organises online information and advice, Screen Australia treats development, production and distribution separately—and this is underpinned by the way the agency allocates funding. Funding at development stage does not indicate support in production or distribution stages.

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In this way, Screen Australia demarcates development as a significant and separate stage of screen creation, with priority as the first stage in a structured sequence. Despite this, approximately one fifth of the application for development funding concentrates on the “Pathways to Audience” and the guidelines recommend that applicants integrate planning for finance, production and distribution into the initial conception of the project and throughout the development process (Screen Story Development Fund, updated 1 October 2019). The “Pathways to Audience Guide” encourages applications for funding to address considerations including platform, duration, distribution partners, scale of release and release windows (Screen Australia 2019). Story development is thus framed by Screen Australia as both independent from, and integral to, other stages of screen creation. Screen Australia development funding for scripted or drama projects is divided into two programs: Generate, for lower-budget projects by new and emerging talent or creatively risky material; and Premium, for higher-­ budget projects by already successful content creators. These categories might reflect and fortify a bifurcation in the Australian screen production industry around budget size. It is worth noting that even “higher-budget” screen production in Australia would probably be considered low budget by Hollywood standards. On the Screen Australia website, the term “development” is most often coupled with “story,” suggesting an overwhelming emphasis on narrative. “Script development” is a term frequently heard in the Australian screen industry, but not one frequently found on the Screen Australia website. This perhaps reflects a growing emphasis on visual modes of development and commercial engagement, such as “sizzle reels” and “proofs of concept,” and a concomitant decreasing emphasis on textual documents such as treatments and screenplays. Nevertheless, Screen Australia provides extensive definitions and advice on what makes successful “story documents,” including synopses, treatments, outlines and bibles (Screen Australia, “Info Guide: Story Documents” 2018). This guide to story documents explicitly recognises that such documents shape production practices and screen content (p. 1). The guide implicitly empowers practitioners through the emphasis on point of view, personal meanings and emotional connections, while also explaining how to “sell” a concept or story commercially. The language of “creators” and “makers” eschews addressing practitioners in particular roles and widens the implicit address. “Story” is also emphasised particularly in the Generate program for newer

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practitioners, whereas the Premium program emphasises scale and ambition. Despite this emphasis on development as pertaining particularly to story, both programs state the key aim to be “culture and diversity,” something that is articulated solely in terms of the culture and diversity of practitioners and not in terms of the stories themselves. Likewise, the programs explicitly aim to support people through language of “talent” and “successful screen content makers.” Program aims describe the stories themselves less frequently than their personnel, using terms such as “bold,” “distinctive,” “ambition” and “scale.” These vague cultural and aesthetic qualities are also framed as less important than commercial and competitive values of “audience reach,” “finance” and “marketplace.” Development is discussed in the most detail in the documents supporting the agency’s specific funding provisions (Screen Australia, “Screen Story Development Fund” 2018). Development is treated here in varying ways, reflecting the wider contestation around the term as a notoriously variable with process with porous boundaries and multiple objects (Batty et al. 2017, 2018). Screen Australia advises that development may include, but is not limited to, production of written documents (treatment, scriptment, draft script, bible, reader’s reports), practices (research, writers’ rooms, table reads), engagement with industry professionals (as consultants and mentors) and the production of audio/visual materials (look books, proofs of concept and sizzle reels) (Screen Australia, “Screen Story Development Fund” 2019). Listing multiple suggestions in bullet points seems to suggest that all methods are equally valid. It is noted that development “takes time” (p. 4) and might proceed through multiple stages or phases, without specifying stages or sequences (Screen Australia, “Screen Story Development Fund” 2019). The aims of development are not stated here, and the language of “improvement,” often associated with development (Batty et al. 2018) is absent. Screen Australia asks applicants for development funding to describe their process in multiple ways: via a plan in written or video form, and via a budget, where development costs might total between AUD 10 k and 100 k. Given that many more projects apply than are funded, this application guidance probably directly shapes the development plans of dozens of screen projects per year and is more widely influential in the industry discursively. While this discourse implies that a process of development is effectively mandatory in screen content production, its vision of what development might look like is quite inclusive.

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In addition to support for the development of particular projects, Screen Australia supports development in many other ways. For example, as part of “Industry Development,” Screen Australia runs a program called “Developing the Developer,” a four-day workshop with a focus on development, which includes “established philosophies, development methodologies and tools across fiction story platforms as well as market context” (Screen Australia, “Developing the Developer”). This program has run each year since 2017 and is aimed at supporting and training people from diverse backgrounds to gain more work in the screen industry, and to enrich the field of professionals across the industry. “Developing the Developer” plays with the slippery and multiple meanings of the word “development” in the screen industry, and perhaps because of this, it also defines the roles and practices of development more explicitly than many of its other programs: For the purpose of this Workshop, ‘Developers’ means practitioners who already work in or aspire to work in story development, as a script reader; script assessor; script consultant; script editor; development executive; script co-ordinator; script producer; or, dramaturg and who are passionate about facilitating other people’s creative visions on any platform. (Screen Australia, “Developing the Developer”)

Further, in this context Screen Australia defines developers as distinct from the primary authors of a project, but acknowledges that those creators also do development work: This Workshop is not designed for creatives who wish to enhance their story development skills solely for their own projects. It is for creatives who are excited about primarily practicing in the development of IP generated from existing source material or from other writers and teams. (Screen Australia, “Developing the Developer”)

The Screen Australia website also features vast troves of content on the work of particular developers and the development of particular projects (e.g. Bizzaca 2019, 2020). This content implicitly explores what script development is and what good script development looks like, but it rarely explicitly discusses development. Such stories address an especially wide audience and sometimes verge on press releases about Screen Australia programs, decisions and achievements. This large swathe of material forms

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part of Screen Australia’s wider mission to project a vibrant, highly skilled and diverse national screen industry.

How the Danish Film Institute Defines and Shapes Development Information on script development guidelines, funding and government policy are publicly available through the DFI official website in both Danish (https://www.dfi.dk/) and English languages (https://www.dfi. dk/en). The aims of this bilingual resource are to support domestic engagement, education and participation, while also employing film as a cultural export, facilitating regional and international collaboration and visibility. DFI’s website focuses on the nature and function of screen development and production policy, and incorporates links to articles and interviews written by a wide variety of practitioners working in the film sector, from creatives to critics. Overall, the DFI website can be seen as a strategic endeavour aimed at facilitating broader discourse on Danish film culture that encourages a wide range of opinions and perspectives. Often these articles place Danish practitioners within a global context and respond to broader filmmaking concerns such as cultural appropriation. An interesting intersection in this regard is an article about Danish filmmaker Jannik Splidsboel and his documentary on an Australian Aboriginal community (Dam 2019). This chapter concentrates primarily on information available through the English language site regarding scripted projects, much of which appears to be duplication or translation of the Danish pages. The implied reader of DFI’s webpages in English is likely to be an international producer, director or writer looking to co-produce with a Danish producer or production company. While information on screenplay subsidies is available in English, applicants must be a Danish producer and applications must be submitted via Danish language application forms. Information on the English language website targets both established and emerging practitioners. Although this analysis examines how the DFI communicates cultural values and ideologies through three specific feature film development schemes, it is notable that additional support exists in numerous other funding strands. It is significant that the DFI website consistently uses language emphasising artistic merits, creative processes and experiences for both practitioner and audience alike. While commercial viability is certainly mentioned

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in relation to specific funding schemes, articulating film as a “project” denotes a series of interconnected and collaborative processes, relationships and discourses rather than a product with a marketplace imperative. The sustained use of language such as “risk-taking, experimenting, innovation, ambition, quality, production environment and diversity” further locates the DFI as an agency cultivating screen culture through sustained creative inquiries and imaginings. Interestingly, the DFI includes script development under the broader banner of “production funding.” This approach acknowledges screenwriting as a singularly defined craft, yet also as a key component of the greater production whole, where activities such as research or workshops are not confined to a specific production phase and may indeed overlap into numerous stages of screen creation. In this way, script development can be approached as a flexible arrangement of ideas, activities and relationships. The DFI seems less reliant on separating financial support into stages of production, or at the very least it allows room for practitioners to communicate their own best practice requirements. Framing script development in this way also assumes or establishes a collaborative working dynamic between the writer, director and producer from the very beginning of the process, again reiterating Denmark’s small film nation reliance on communication and cooperation. DFI’s “Terms for support for feature films” (2016) suggest that flexible contracting arrangements are applicable to the Commissioner and Market Schemes, and further assumes that above-the-line teams may have already been established and may play an instructive role within the story development and drafting process. It is interesting to note, however, that terms for screenplay subsidies do not ask for information on marketplace, audience, exhibition or distribution. The application process focuses solely on creative documents such as synopsis, treatment, screenplay and writers’ vision, traditionally viewed as part of the initial story development stage (DFI “Terms for support for feature films” 2016). An analysis of the logics prioritised in each development funds follows. DFI’s page on “Funding for Danish films” outlines the three main funding avenues for development funding: the Film Commissioner Scheme, the Market Scheme and the New Danish Screen talent development scheme. A largely formal register and heavily one-way communication is further simplified by short paragraphs and subheadings: “How to co-produce with Denmark,” “News from the DFI” and so forth. Use of jargon and industry terminology is mixed, possibly indicating a readership that is not

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clearly defined. Criteria are occasionally given context such as “specific target group, i.e. children and youth” (DFI “Funding for Danish Films”). However, other industrial terms such as “low-budget fiction” and “hybrid” are left unqualified. While terms such as “audience appeal” and “market position” are employed, industrial jargon that relates to financial imperatives is used sparingly. Language use focuses more on the aspirational qualities and artistic processes specific to each funding scheme, and lends itself to the language of improvement often associated with development (Batty et al. 2018). The Film Commissioner Scheme supports (selected) features, documentaries and shorts, prioritising artistic sensibility over form. It is aimed at practitioners making bold, unique and “artistically innovative films that challenge their audience.” This strand focuses on the creative vision of the practitioner and provides subsidies for screenplay development that include early concept development, synopsis, storyline, treatment, research, writing and dramaturgical assistance. This funding stream incorporates a more individualistic approach to assessment, by which applicants and the film commissioner (project officer) engage in a verbal dialogue, articulating possible strengths and weaknesses of the project. Screenplay development is thus imagined as a phase in a pathway towards further development and production investment, also supported by the scheme. Although audience appeal is noted as a criterion for successful projects, the remit for commissioners is to provide a continual stream of diverse films defined by their artistic, aspirational qualities. Danish policy specifically contextualises script development beyond the page, including rehearsals with actors, casting and location scouting. This conceptual plasticity not only counters more prescriptive notions of who and what may influence the script development process, but also what activities practitioners engage with throughout. As the title suggests, the Market Scheme supports commercially oriented projects focusing on popular story premises or genres. The language used to describe the Market Scheme assumes industry knowledge, with references to “production value,” “market position” and “economic viability.” Projects are also expected to find domestic success or target a specific demographic such as children. These projects contribute to 30% of Danish box office revenue commonly retained by local films. Aimed at emerging practitioners, the New Danish Screen funds the development and production of low budget fiction feature films, documentaries, hybrids, series and cross-media projects. It is framed as an initiative for first-time feature directors, “enabling manifested talents to grow

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and test out their ideas” (DFI “New Danish Screen” 2012). Associations are made between emerging practitioners and innovation, nurturing projects that deliver new audience experiences and providing a development space to experiment with form. However, the New scheme also supports more experienced practitioners who are “experimenting or changing course” (DFI, “New Danish Screen” 2012). With a focus solely on directors, this scheme assumes a more hierarchical power structure commonly associated with Hollywood production modes, one that preferences the director as the primary authorial voice and creative presence. Similarly, in annual DFI reports, it is only the director who is listed as author on subsidised films. A commercial imperative is less of a focus in the New scheme, with applications undergoing an “artistic assessment” by a project editor and artistic director. Subsidies relating to script development include treatment, research, screenwriting and series bible, suggesting that the scheme supports a range of story forms and media platforms. Language used to describe the New Danish Screen scheme alludes to an experimental environment where participants “grow and test out their ideas” (DFI, “Funding for Danish Films” 2019). This discourse highlights the small nation strategy of synergistic cooperation between the DFI and the Danish Film School, both intent on sustaining practices, practitioners and products. In this way, the Danish Film School’s commitment to fostering authentic voices and unique visions is further supported through DFI development policy. With further information on how members of the non-filmmaking public can access screen culture resources, the DFI can be viewed as a facilitating agency, responding to the diverse requirements of “stakeholders” within government, education, industry (both domestic and international) and the Danish film-viewing community at large. DFI suggests continued investment in digital storytelling, but its information and advice on development for digital storytelling seems scant. Information about DFI’s Commissioner and Market schemes connotes an egalitarian approach to authorship. The commonly referenced term here is “filmmaker,” which emphasises a process of making rather than stipulating clearly delineated roles. It is also interesting to note that only the New Danish Screen scheme refers to a financial framework, in this instance low-budget projects. In the 2019 DFI annual report, we can see a similar distribution of funds allocated to the Commissioner and Market schemes (although the total budget for most Market Scheme films was slightly higher). High-profile production companies such as Zentropa were also funded in both categories. Feature films (combining Commissioner

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and Market schemes) made up 51% of the DFI 2018 budget. As a low-­ budget initiative, the New Danish Screen scheme comprised only 8% of total subsidies. Within each of these schemes, funds are specifically driven towards both script development and production. DFI policy thus acknowledges the chain of production as a cohesive set of interconnected processes that inform one another, which implies ongoing commitment to or support for successful applicants. Implicit across all film funding policy is the assumption that the director or producer will apply, even if script development makes up a substantial component of allocated funds. This reaffirms collaboration as a cultural value practiced throughout the industrial sector, but also perhaps a hierarchical mechanism within the DFI prioritising producers and directors in contractual negotiations, if not the creative practice underlying each role. An interesting intersection in this regard is an article about Danish filmmaker Jannik Splidsboel and his documentary on an Australian Aboriginal community (Dam 2019). The DFI funding page also lists a set of companion opportunities, such as workshops aimed at “strengthening talent development.” Exactly how talent is defined or recognised is not made clear. Workshops are not specifically communicated as a script development opportunity; however, New Danish Screen guidelines emphasise development in relation to scriptwriting practices and specifically mention workshops. Alongside the three main funding strands, these satellite initiatives acknowledge the DFI’s commitment to servicing a national cinema culture through flexible funding frameworks. Language use on the website primarily locates the DFI as a public service, intersecting with wider industrial ecologies both at home and abroad.

Comparing Institutional Discourses of Development: Australia and Denmark Our analysis of how Screen Australia and the DFI speak publicly about script development reveals a number of interesting points of comparison, both similarities and contrasts. Both government agencies routinely perform a deft interplay of cultural, economic and aesthetic logics. Overall, the DFI tends to emphasise national culture and artistic values slightly more strongly, and Screen Australia tends to emphasise commercial values a little more strongly. This has implications for their conceptions of script development, which is described somewhat differently in terms of skills,

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timeframe and personnel. As institutions of small nations, both screen agencies actively court global audiences, but Denmark balances this with greater emphasis on national audiences and cultures. The language used by Screen Australia and the DFI appeals frequently to cultural, commercial and aesthetic values, although emphasis and tensions vary. The DFI seems to prioritise artistic quality and collaborative dynamics between practitioners. Danish “projects” strengthen a cinema culture, whereas Australian “content” serves a “commercial” purpose. Screen Australia employs a producer-oriented strategy, which highlights an industrial emphasis on the marketplace and shapes wider national screen ecologies. Screen Australia seems to have a more overarching emphasis on global commercial success for the screen content they fund, with artistic and cultural values following behind. Screen Australia uses similar language around aesthetics to the DFI. Both Screen Australia and DFI websites even use the very same words, such as “bold,” “talent” and “ambition,” which reveal an interest in creators at least as much as their films. The DFI’s conception of talent embraces long-term collaboration, but Screen Australia’s blueprint for talent seems to focus more on individuals. For the DFI, development is a more curious space to develop what a project could be; for Screen Australia, a key aim of development is proving that content can find commercial audience. This broad distinction accords with Mette Hjort’s (2005) observation that Danish screen practice is a place in which creatives can make interesting mistakes. Screen Australia’s two main funding streams both require applicants to engage with marketplace considerations, whereas the logic of the market is foregrounded in only one of the DFI’s schemes, the Market Scheme. DFI’s New Danish Screen and Screen Australia’s Generate schemes both target emerging talent and encourage low-budget feature development and production; whereas New Danish Screen has a slightly stronger emphasis on artistic evaluation and processes, Generate has a stronger emphasis on (implicitly popular, commercial) audience. Regardless of whether the project is low or high budget, applicants to Generate must demonstrate the project’s “Pathways to Audience,” drawing commercial viability into the development space. In this way, Australian screenwriters may be expected to work beyond their primary skills of storytelling and think more like producers. By contrast, Danish screenwriters are encouraged to remain within a creative space, leaving commercial agendas to producers and later stages of production. It seems that the major difference is that Screen Australia encourages candidates to establish marketplace interest

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during the development phase, whereas with most of the DFI script development programs, support for creative investigation is not dependent upon commercial traction in the project. In this way, DFI makes a distinction between screenplay, development, production and promotion subsidies, with the chain of production. Screen Australia tends to describe script development as a more distinct, finite phase that should be complete when production begins. The DFI tends to describe it in terms that are more flexible and suggest the possibility of an ongoing process throughout production. Neither agency subscribes rigidly to either supposition, rather it is a matter of nuance and emphasis. DFI funding models maintain support for a project through cohesive trajectory, whereas Screen Australia imagines a more linear process, offering support for projects at discrete moments. These institutions invest time as well as money, and Danish models allow continuous support over a longer period and more stages. Screen Australia is notably open to supporting range of development methods, but also demarcates a clear stage of development, which implicitly ends before production is ready to begin. These discourses speak to the institutions’ roles in constructing and maintaining a national cultural imaginary. Screen Australia seems particularly conscious of representing the nation to the world and somewhat less conscious of representing the nation to itself. DFI recognises that by trying to provide a diverse range of films that reflect specifically Danish realities, they may also collide with the world at large. This is the strategy of Denmark as a cultuur nation. Further, Screen Australia seems to more readily encourage development and production practices that emulate an imagined global standard, probably based largely on the global dominance of American screen products and processes. By contrast, DFI fosters active citizenry and culture, playing by local and regional norms. The DFI and Screen Australia imagine both national and international audiences for their films from development stage. However, the commercial logics of “Pathways to Audience” are foregrounded more strongly by Screen Australia than by the DFI.  When compared with its Australian counterpart however, the DFI seems more conspicuous in its support of aesthetic innovation through risk-taking and experimentation, keeping marketplace considerations at a distance from the development stage. Further, the DFI seems to readily support development and production of feature films that are popular principally with a Danish audience, whereas

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Screen Australia seems to expect an international audience for all the films it supports, with a national audience just a small part of that. Both DFI and Screen Australia show increasing interest in, and support for, international co-productions. Both Denmark and Australia are small nations with small production industries, but Australia seeks a global audience more hungrily. Danes also have stronger regional cultural ties and their films more readily speak to a regional Scandinavian audience. Both Screen Australia and DFI explicitly and implicitly associate international box-office success of films with other national financial and strategic priorities, including trade and tourism. This includes an active role for screen works in constructing national “brand value” (Bondebjerg 2005, p. 126). On the whole, both institutions facilitate broader commercial and cultural logics, which demand a flexible model of script development in order to service multiple local and global interests (2005). In general, the DFI’s conception of script development supports art “for the people” and indicates the pervasiveness of the Nordic welfare state ideology in conjunction with an industrial commitment to preserving a national cinema culture. Generally speaking, Screen Australia more readily integrates market logics into script development and seems more focused on finding a foothold as a minor player feeding into a global market. This loosely conforms with the strong neoliberal stance of Australian federal governments across the twenty-first century so far, for whom cultural supremacy and market success are manifestly linked. In this way, both institutions’ script development policies aim to enable international gatekeepers and emerging practitioners to create screen works for both local and global audiences.

Conclusion This chapter has offered a snapshot from the late 2010s of the ways in which two national screen institutions discursively construct and legitimise script development. The two agencies reveal the importance of some key tensions in global screen culture, yet they negotiate them in slightly different ways. Discourses of script and screen development are constantly in flux locally and globally, through ongoing negotiations of various participants and the shifting status of different media modes and platforms. As such, we look forward to seeing how Screen Australia and the DFI revise their values and priorities into the future. Further research in this space might analyse the nature and significance of institutional discourse in shaping production practices and cultures. In

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addition, further research might locate varieties of discourse and practice within locales, nations, regions or language groupings (see Hjort and Petrie 2007).

References Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script Development: Defining the Field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. Batty, C., O’Meara, R., Taylor, S., Joyce, H., Burne, P., Maloney, N., Poole, M., & Tofler, M. (2018). Script Development as a “Wicked Problem”. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 153–174. Bizzaca, C. (2019, February 5). Tim Pye Talks Aussie Screenwriters. Screen News (online). Available at: https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screennews/2019/02-05-tim-pye-talks-aussie-screenwriters. Accessed 30 Jan 2020. Bizzaca, C. (2020, January 25). Advice from 8 leading TV Writers. Screen News (online). Available at: https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screennews/2020/01-15-advice-from-8-leading-tv-writers. Accessed 30 Jan 2020. Bondebjerg, I. (2005). The Danish Way: Danish Film Culture in a European and Global Perspective. In A.  Nestigen & T.  Elkington (Eds.), Transnational Cinema in a Global North (pp. 111–140). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bondebjerg, I., & Redvall, E. N. (2013). Transnational Scandinavia? Scandinavian Film Culture in a European and Global Context. In M. Palacio & J. Turschmann (Eds.), Transnational Cinema in Europe (pp. 127–146). Berlin: Lit Verlag. Box Office Mojo. No date. Accessed 21 Jan 2019. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/ Dam, F. (2019, December 17). It’s Important to Know What’s Going On in Other Places. DFI News (online). Available at: https://www.dfi.dk/en/english/ news/its-important-know-whats-going-other-places. Accessed 30 Jan 2020. Danish Film Institute. Terms for Support to New Danish Screen, published 1 October 2012. https://www.dfi.dk/files/docs/2018-02/dfi-vilkaar-newdanish-screen-2012-english.pdf. Accessed 21 Jan 2019. Danish Film Institute. Terms for Support for Feature Films, published 1 July 2016. https://www.dfi.dk/files/docs/2018-02/Vilk%C3%A5r_SPILLEFILM_1_ jul_2016_UK.pdf. Accessed 21 Jan 2019. Danish Film Institute. No date. Funding for Danish Films. https://www.dfi.dk/ en/english/funding/funding-danish-films. Accessed 21 Jan 2019. Dickinson, M., & Harvey, S. (2005). Film Policy in the United Kingdom: New Labour at the Movies. The Political Quarterly, 76(3), 420–429. Flew, T. (2018). Understanding Global Media (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan Education.

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Foucault, M. (2002). The Archaeology of Knowledge (A.  M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge. Gustafsson, T., & Kaapa, P. (2015). Introduction: Nordic Genre Film and Institutional History. In T. Gustafsson & K. Pietari (Eds.), Nordic Genre Film (pp. 1–18). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hill, J., & Kawashima, N. (2016). Introduction: Film Policy in a Globalised Cultural Economy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22(5), 667–672. Hjort, M. (2005). Small Nation, Global Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Hjort, M., & Petrie, D. (2007). Introduction. In M. Hjort & D. Petrie (Eds.), The Cinema of Small Nations (pp. 1–19). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Magor, M., & Schlesinger, P. (2009). “For this Relief Much Thanks” Taxation, Film Policy and the UK Government. Screen, 50(3, Autumn), 299–317. Mayr, A. (2008). Introduction: Power, Discourse and Institutions. In A.  Mayr (Ed.), Language and Power: An Introduction to Institutional Discourse (pp. 1–25). London: Continuum. Screen Australia. (2018, July). Info Guide: Story Documents [PDF]. https://www. screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/133af42b-7abe-4ebc-a164-799c1c7a4614/ Story-Documents-Drama.pdf. Accessed 19 Jan 2020. Screen Australia. Australian Feature Film Production Activity, undated. https:// www.screenaustralia.gov.au/fact-finders/production-trends/feature-production/australian-feature-films. Accessed 31 Oct 2019. Screen Australia. Australian Feature Films Sources of Finance. https://www. screenaustralia.gov.au/fact-finders/production-trends/feature-production/ australian-feature-films/sources-of-finance Screen Australia. Developing the Developer, undated. https://www.screenaustralia. gov.au/funding-and-support/industry-development/people/past-initiatives/ developing-the-developer. Accessed 30 Jan 2020. Screen Australia. Pathways to Audience Guide, undated. https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/ad36c02b-4fb7-497a-bcc0-758a33ad0705/Pathwayto-Audience-Guide.pdf. Accessed 31 Oct 2019. Screen Australia. Screen Story Development Fund, updated 1 October 2019. https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/3b8a47f1-c350-4622adfd-2a1b34ef77ad/Screen-Story-Development-Guidelines.pdf van Dijk, T.  A. (1993). Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. Discourse & Society, 4(2), 249–283. Weiss, G., & Wodak, R. (2003). Introduction: Theory, Interdisciplinarity and Critical Discourse Analysis. In G. Weiss & R. Wodak (Eds.), Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity (pp.  1–32). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Script Development and the Post-Socialist Producer: Towards a Comparative Approach to Cultures of Development Petr Szczepanik

Introduction The organisation of feature film production, postproduction, and distribution seems to be internationally standardised to a much higher degree than practices of script and project development. One evidence of this is the pervasive globalisation of physical production, or so-called runaway production, which allows for different production tasks to be efficiently accomplished in different locations around the world by mixed international crews (Sanson 2018; Szczepanik 2016). This, however, does not apply to film development, which shows greater diversity and local specificity due to its embeddedness in the economic, sociocultural, and political realities of a given industrial ecosystem. Established development practices are manifestations of a particular market’s size and structure, production system and production culture, the level of the local industry’s reliance on public funding, and so on. In the case of the Czech Republic’s small

P. Szczepanik (*) Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_4

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fragmented and highly subsidised production system, development—as the experiences of its key stakeholders discussed below show—is generally short and underfunded, lacks professional standards and well-established division of roles, and is characterised by low selectivity. This chapter presents a new interpretation of qualitative data collected for an ethnographically informed industry report on feature film development in one particular production system, which a group of colleagues and I conducted on commission by the Czech Film Fund.1 The aim of the chapter is to reflect on the possibilities of using these data, despite their local specificity, for a comparative cross-national analysis of script development in small media markets. Based on more than 60 semi-structured interviews with key Czech film and TV producers, screenwriters, directors, and script editors/consultants, the 290-page report shows how the typical business model of Czech film producers limits possibilities for more systematic screenplay development and longer-term producer strategies. The original analysis identified four Bourdieusian types of development practices across all the professional groups that allowed us to differentiate systemic variations in response to the realities of the small market and the state’s cultural policy according to different levels of cultural and economic capital. While the features of the local screen industry ecosystem and the stakeholders’ responses to them are locally specific per se, the differences between the professional groups and the types of practices might be extrapolated to serve as a conceptual framework for comparative crossnational research. In meeting its objective (as stated above), the chapter contributes to what Craig Batty, Stayci Taylor, Louise Sawtell, and Bridget Conor call for in terms of a study of script development across the “many and varied practices, understandings and imperatives, over just as many different media, cultures and contexts” (2017, p. 226). This work has yet to properly begin. So far, we have seen theoretical and critical interventions pointing to industrial and sociocultural aspects of script development, to the richness and pitfalls of the “how to” literature, to the precarious position of the screenwriter, to the processual and collaborative aspects of writing for the screen, and to the multiform and contested genesis of individual screenplay texts. However, we still miss in-depth studies of development 1  The research team consisted of Johana Kotišová, Jakub Macek, Jan Motal, and Eva Pjajčíková. See Szczepanik et al. (2015a) for an English translation of the report’s introductory section.

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as a production practice and culture embedded in concrete industrial and policy contexts. This is something this chapter addresses specifically, adopting a producer (rather than screenwriter) perspective on development, which necessarily widens the definition of development. While script development remains the main focus of the chapter, it is systematically placed in the context of a broader industrial process of film development as approached and understood by independent producers.

The Report on Czech Feature Film Development In 2014, the Czech Film Fund commissioned our team of media scholars and sociologists to conduct an evidence-based, qualitative study of film development from both cultural and economic perspectives. The objective was to provide an empirical basis for policymaking: a deeper understanding of the external and internal conditions of film development that would assist in identifying its critical problems, and thus to help optimise a newly introduced public support scheme for script and project development. The Fund’s assumption was that development is the least documented but the most crucial stage of the film value chain in terms of determining the commercial success, artistic quality, and international competitiveness of Czech films. This assumption informed our main research question. A survey of the existing literature, especially of industry reports commissioned by film funds and institutes, quickly showed that there was very little to draw on2 and that the only comprehensive book on script development as an industry practice was Peter Bloore’s The Screenplay Business (2013), which served as our key model for conceptualising issues such as shared vision, creative triangle, and the independent film production value chain. After reviewing the literature, we divided the proposed research question into three descriptive research areas: the structure of the field (the relationships between the key stakeholders, the positions in the field of film production); the quantitative parameters (the length of development, number of projects in development, proportion of greenlit vs. cancelled projects, number of people involved, genre and thematic composition, share of the 2  Back in 2014, the only existing industry studies of contemporary feature film development practices we were able to identify were: AFC (2014); Rolfe et al. (2007); and Rogers (2007). Although they helped us specify our qualitative and quantitative questions, they could not be used as a model for our ethnographically informed in-depth study.

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total budget, composition of financial sources, fees of key personnel, etc.); and the qualitative features (the development process, its key stages and dis/continuity, collaboration within the creative team, working conditions, the impact of support programs and public institutions, etc.). The collection of data started with defining a representative sample: 50 Czech (fully national or majority co-productions) feature fiction films from 2009 to 2013 spanning across all typical genres and budget categories. This sample then helped us to list candidates for interviews in all key professional roles, which eventually resulted in 67 semi-structured interviews with 62 respondents.3 After analysing the pretest of interview questions, we finalised the list of questions for each professional group and predefined seven preliminary analytical categories that were later, after analysing more interviews, complemented by a further five questions. The final set of 12 categories or critical problems of film development serves— together with the four categories defined by the key professional roles and four types defined by the position in the field of production—as the structure of the report. The coding and analysis of the whole corpus of interviews, complemented by quantitative data derived from the Fund’s archive and other public sources, helped us to construct four types of development practices corresponding to four subfields or positions in the field of film production, which we called the Mainstream Arthouse, Mainstream Commercial, Marginal Arthouse, and Marginal Commercial. The definition of these types was induced from the qualitative analysis itself, not prescribed in advance. There is no place to list all aspects of the four types or subfields (it has been done elsewhere; see Szczepanik [2015a]), but for the sake of clarity, a short summary is necessary. Mainstream Arthouse is characterised by the highest field-specific symbolic capital but surprisingly also the highest budgets (€1–4 million) and production values, frequent international co-productions, and relatively strong festival presence. Producers are strong personalities pursuing their own styles, often initiating projects, and remain creatively involved throughout all the stages of development, production, and post-­ production. A typical film is a drama set in the recent national past reflecting on a socially significant topic, such as collaboration with the Communist 3  The group consisted of 26 film and TV producers, 20 directors and writers–directors, 12 screenwriters and script editors, 2 local coordinators of international support funds, a distributor, and an entertainment lawyer.

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secret police or the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II. The typical producer strategy is to combine national and European selective and automatic support (national rebates) with distribution and broadcast pre-sales to carefully navigate a strong authorial vision towards the mainstream by expanding its potential appeal to a wider viewership, without compromising the shared vision. The Mainstream Commercial type is defined by the primary focus on the national market, with budgets and production values slightly lower than the previous type (€1–2 million) and rare international co-­productions (aside from Slovakia) and festival presence. Producers are tough businesspeople pursuing their own strategies and co-initiating projects, suspicious of public institutions and European cultural policy. Their typical development strategy is to adapt a bestselling novel, ideally a lifestyle urban comedy, work with a proven writer and director, and shape the project so that it appeals to the widest (national) audience possible and meets the expectations of distributors and a commercial broadcaster or the Czech and Slovak Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs). Financially, they rely on pre-­ selling the distribution and broadcast rights in combination with automatic public support, occasional selective national support, and limited product placement. The Marginal Arthouse subfield relies on very low budgets (€0.15–1 million) obtained exclusively from public sources (national Czech and Slovak selective and automatic support, Czech and Slovak PSBs’ co-­ production), while the producer’s income is limited to the production fee with often negligible distribution revenues. International co-productions and presence at international festivals are more sporadic than in the case of the Mainstream Arthouse type. A typical example is a socially critical drama about Roma people mixing professional actors with non-actors. Producers do not initiate projects and avoid actively shaping a shared vision, but instead tend to accept a screenplay as is, focusing on securing the necessary public financing and providing production services to (often first-­ time) directors–writers. The marginal position in the field is a consequence of the producers and writers/directors intentionally distancing themselves from free-market principles, their commitment to alternative creative visions, but also of their occasional resorting to nonstandard or semi-­ professional practices (microbudget shooting, unpaid labour, merging established professional roles), especially in the case of first-time directors’ projects.

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The Marginal Commercial type is occupied by producers with low professional reputations, relying exclusively on private sources such as TV pre-sales and a significant portion of product placement. They receive virtually no public support (apart from automatic rebates), don’t do international co-production and have no festival presence. Their similarity with the previous marginal type is based not on aesthetic and cultural values, but solely on producer practices in development: accepting ready-made screenplays without any ambition of shaping their creative vision, reducing producer input to financing and production management, occasional resorting to semi-professional practices (microbudgets including a producer’s own money, merging professional roles, DIY marketing). A typical movie is either a lowbrow comedy or an exploitation thriller. Methodologically, the study builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field (Bourdieu 1996), ethnographically inspired production studies (Caldwell 2008), screenwriting and development studies (Bloore 2013; Macdonald 2013), creative labour studies (Conor 2014), and on critical culturalist analysis of the post-socialist production system (Pjajčíková and Szczepanik 2015; Adamczak 2014). The findings of the report supported the initial hypothesis that insufficient development indeed is the critical limitation of Czech film production, responsible for the weak performance of Czech films at international festivals and in foreign markets. Screenplays are underfinanced and underdeveloped, and producers approach their projects one by one, without any strategic continuity. This leaves screenwriters and partly also directors in precarious working conditions. The producers cannot afford developing diversified portfolios of projects and being sufficiently selective: virtually all projects that absorb minimum producer investment in early development are eventually rushed to production. The main reason is that the business model for many producers (the Mainstream Arthouse and the Marginal Arthouse) is based not on selling movies to the audiences but on producing itself (i.e. on the so-called production fee as a percentage of the production budget), which in turn prevents them from stopping projects in development that are perceived to have insufficient commercial or artistic quality and prospects for success. Another reason (in the Mainstream Commercial and Marginal Commercial type) is that private financiers and business partners are not willing to invest in development, and producers are too undercapitalised to do so themselves. Most screenwriters, directors, and even producers (apart from the Mainstream Arthouse) are generally not interested in attending and participating in international workshops and markets, or

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discussing their scripts with internationally renowned script editors. The degree of standardisation of development terminology, tools, and formats is surprisingly low. For example, there is a persistent ambivalence about differences between, as well as about the usefulness of, formats such as synopsis, treatment, screenplay, and the shooting script, due to a hybrid and vague set of standards partly adopted from the state-socialist studio practice,4 and partly imported from Western Europe or the US and promoted by European and national funding bodies. The public institutions distributing subsidies are only partially able to compensate for these deficiencies, which largely results not only from the limiting factors of the small national market and the state’s cultural policy, but also from the residues of the state-socialist production system (the fragmented market with no vertical and horizontal integration, the lack of professional standards). The report had practical effects on policymaking: the Czech Film Fund decided to strengthen its development support schemes (introduced in 2013) directed both at the first, screenwriter-­ driven development stage, and at the subsequent producer-driven project development5; in 2018, it also started an incubator to train script editors/ consultants (called “dramaturgs” in Czech terminology). So far, however, this has been insufficient to change the precarious working conditions of screenwriters, especially in the early stages of script development.6

Development Definitions According to the Core Professions Regularities in how script development is understood, perceived, and enacted are visible in each of the key professional groups composing Bloore’s (2013) “creative triangle”: producers, screenwriters, and directors (plus script editors and other supporting personnel). This section will survey these regularities across the entire field of film production before distinguishing between individual subfields. 4  Which insisted—due to the bureaucratic approval and censorship system—on a strict distinction between the so-called literary screenplay and the technical script (see Szczepanik 2013a). 5  See the history of the Czech Film Fund’s development schemes’ calls: https://fondkinematografie.cz/zadosti-o-podporu/archiv-uzavrene-vyzvy/vyvoj-ceskeho-kinematografickeho-dila.html 6  See http://en.dramaturgicky-inkubator.cz

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In the Czech Republic’s post-socialist media industry, the concept of development itself is still considered relatively new and somewhat artificial. The professional community agrees that it was imported by public institutions (the PSB Czech Television and the Czech Film Fund) and by the producers who were applying for development grants (mainly the MEDIA program) and entering international co-productions. Most producers define development quite broadly as a complex collaborative undertaking and distinguish between its individual components and stages, willing to indicate where they precisely begin and end. From their perspective, development usually includes all the steps of developing a final script from the initial story idea or pre-existing story material, preparatory formats (synopsis, treatment), and working versions; this stage is sometimes called literary development or “literary preparation” (the older generation uses this pre-1990 term from the state-socialist studio system). Producers generally acknowledge that development also consists of project development, primarily of putting together the core creative team and securing financial sources, and often also preliminary preparations for shooting, which include research, casting, location scouting, production design sketches, visits to co-production fora and co-production negotiations, devising the preliminary marketing plan, and so on. On the other hand, screenwriters and directors, especially older ones (in terms of both age and experience), are more reluctant to acknowledge and explicitly use the term “development”. If they do, it is in relation to the producer, grant applications, or international co-production. They tend to view development more narrowly, as a personal, intimate, continuous process concentrated around the writer. Its success depends on the level of protection from outside pressures and interventions; the level of the author’s control throughout the whole production process; interpersonal relationships within the creative triangle, mainly with the producer; as well on more subtle issues relating the viability of the theme, dramatic structure, and so on. The start of development is never clear-cut; it simply begins with a story idea taking shape; the end of the process is also open, since scripts are often changed during the shooting and even in postproduction. Writers and directors usually reject or dislike any formalised instruments and steps (development formats such as synopsis and treatment, pitching fora, development workshops, script editing analysis) and focus on the screenplay and its rewriting. If they do write synopsis, treatments, characters’ profiles or explications, they do so ex post out of necessity,

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typically for a grant application. The continuous process, lacking formalisation and any clear divisions between individual stages and spanning from the initial idea to the postproduction, is typical mainly for the directors who write their own scripts (which is the most common practice in the Czech film industry). Writers who do not direct their scripts tend to define development as writing and rewriting the screenplay, taking notes from various stakeholders, sometimes adding research (especially in the case of historical movies) and grant applications, which they are regularly asked to help with (without being remunerated for this work). Directors tend to also count casting, location scouting, and financing as parts of development.

Development Practices Across Positions in the Field One of the key findings of the industry report was that the more pronounced differences in how development is approached can be found between different positions in the field of film production rather than between individual professions. The differences were visible not so much between the Arthouse and the Commercial cinema per se but between their Mainstream and Marginal subfields, more so within the professional group of producers than writers and directors. This finding prompted our research team to replace a linear visualisation of the field with the “horseshoe” diagram adopted from the political theory of Jean-Pierre Faye, who designed it to indicate resemblances between the far-right and the far-left (see Szczepanik et al. 2015, p. 35). For the Mainstream Arthouse and Mainstream Commercial producers, development—even if they criticise its current institutionalised practices and public support—represents the core producer task and the defining element of the producer professional identity to such an extent that some are even prepared to delegate the physical production to another production company, which then takes the role of a production services provider. The producers take pride in initiating their projects, composing the creative triangle, and in being involved in the whole creative process of rewriting, having their say in key decisions about the story structure, the characters, and the genre characteristics. Although they don’t literally initiate all the projects themselves, sometimes entering as late as at the stage of the first full version of a screenplay, they like to see their role as deeply creative, bordering on co-authorship. Their strategies and producer styles are articulated not only in the selection of projects, but also in how they shape them, how they manage the

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creative team and, over a longer period of time, how they navigate the author’s career. While Mainstream Arthouse producers emphasise collaboration and shared vision, the Mainstream Commercial producers make decisions in a more authoritative way. While the Mainstream Arthouse producers acknowledge that international workshops, co-production negotiations, research, and other soft preparations are an important element of development, their Mainstream Commercial counterparts focus on working on a screenplay and casting (a “package”) with the objective of persuading their business partners (distributors, broadcasters) to pre-­ buy a portion of the rights. For the Marginal Arthouse and Marginal Commercial producers, it is more typical to act as coordinators and production managers providing their services to the writer–director. They regard themselves as humble facilitators, focusing on financing and practical preparations for the shooting, without really getting involved in analysing the screenplay and giving notes for other than economic reasons. Their aim is to secure financing and reduce all unnecessary costs if the financial sources prove to be scarcer than expected. They generally limit their requests for changes in scripts to practical cuts motivated by financial concerns, and help the writer–director move the script to production as quickly and smoothly as possible. Their strategic producer thinking is manifested by the choice of a project itself; more precisely, they would rather commit to a trusted writer–director than to a particular theme, story structure or style. But often they choose to work with first-time director–writers who are so eager to get their scripts produced that they are willing to waive their fees. Some of the Marginal Arthouse and Marginal Commercial producers go as far as claiming that development—considered an administrative invention imported from the “European producer system” rather than a natural stage of the production process—is just a necessary evil and that producing is possible without development whatsoever. But most of them, especially in the Marginal Arthouse type, are conscious of the lack of professional standards in their development methods, and expect to be pressured to develop future projects more systematically in the near future.

Development Conflicts Observing conflicts between stakeholders helps us understand the internal dynamics of development and its embeddedness in the local industry ecosystem. In the heavily subsidised and small film production system, the

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most basic conflict naturally concentrates on the distribution of public subsidies. The Mainstream Arthouse and Marginal Arthouse producers strongly support public subsidy schemes for development as a compensation for the lack of development financing sources and their resulting inability to build a longer-term strategy. The Mainstream Commercial and Marginal Commercial producers, on the other hand, express deep frustration that the Czech Film Fund supposedly favours Mainstream Arthouse and—what is considered even more controversial—Marginal Arthouse projects, despite the latter often failing to attract more than a couple thousand viewers in theatrical distribution. Since the Fund’s income partly flows from the so-called audiovisual fee (1% of the theatrical admissions fee), the Commercial producers consider themselves involuntary benefactors of the national film production. From their perspective, any support granted to Arthouse projects without considering their commercial viability seems unjustifiable. The Fund’s new development schemes add a new layer to the problem by directly financing screenwriters who don’t have producer backing (in the case of the first development stage scheme), as well as by supporting internationally oriented Arthouse producers travelling to festivals and co-production markets (in the case of the second, “complete development” scheme), thus diverting public money from what is—according to the Commercial producers—the key element of development, namely, adjusting the screenplay to satisfy consumer demand and the expectations of potential business partners. The Commercial versus Arthouse divide has not been the only controversy related to public support of development, however. Since the Czech Film Fund’s first development stage scheme allows authors to apply without having producer backing, and since many thus supported screenplays don’t get eventually produced, it has been criticised by different types of producers as a de facto screenwriting stipend. On the other hand, screenwriters themselves defend the scheme as a compensation for their financial insecurity and chronically underpaid work. The “stipend” allows younger and aspiring authors especially to experiment and show their talent without being limited by producers from the very start. Public support is not the only issue dividing producers and authors. Even more important are the material, legal, and psychological conditions of screenwriting labour, which can be labelled by the sociological term “precariousness” (see, e.g. Ross 2009). Precarisation is characterised not just by the low remuneration of screenwriters (roughly between €8000

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and €25,000 for a feature film screenplay, corresponding to approximately 1–2% of the average production budget), but also by other factors that increase job insecurity: the way they are contracted, paid, and given (or rather prevented from having) control over their work. The most critical part of screenwriters’ work is the first stage of development, from the initial story idea up to the first full draft of a screenplay. Producers often tend to regard this stage as free work driven by the author’s passion that does not need to be remunerated. They commonly expect screenwriters to continue with the writing and rewriting process without offering them a contract. Even after the first screenplay draft is accepted as a starting point for further development and the contract is signed, screenwriters do not have certainty of getting fully paid. Based on so-called step deals, the screenwriting fee is commonly split into three or four gradual payments (signing a contract—beginning of shooting—the end of shooting—a premiere). In some cases, especially in the Marginal Arthouse type, the main payment is contingent upon the producer winning public financial support. The full remuneration is thus deferred as long as possible, commonly across 2 years, which makes the income per screenplay below average if translated into a monthly salary. As a result, screenwriters—especially those who don’t direct their own scripts—must either work on multiple projects at once without having enough time to concentrate on their proper development or they have to take other jobs as journalists, “dramaturgs” for TV, or teachers. This, of course, disproportionately discriminates against all disadvantaged social groups, including women and older people. Writers thus effectively bear a huge part of the production risk, unlike any other film profession. The third key conflict does not so much divide the professional community internally but instead sets it against the most powerful public institution involved in local film production: the PSB Czech Television. As the biggest co-producer of Czech feature films, Czech Television has established its own processes of selecting, green-lighting, co-financing, co-­ producing, and even co-developing projects with independent film producers. Unlike some of its counterparts in Western Europe such as the BBC, Czech Television does not have any specific co-production quotas or agendas prescribed by law apart from a general obligation to support Czech film production. Czech Television’s internal organisation is based on a quasi-business relationship between its program and development divisions, the first acting as a source of demand and the latter as a supply side. Most of the feature fiction film co-productions are overseen by the

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“Film Center”, a specialised subdivision of the development division operated by a small team of one manager and one “head dramaturg”. The strategic objective behind co-producing Czech films is to fill specific programming slots with content that corresponds with the expectations of the slots’ target groups and with Czech Television’s regulation and public service mission. Yet the Film Center, established in 2012 by then-newly appointed management, attempts to do more: it has proposed a generous strategy of supporting both commercially attractive and artistically challenging films, including first-time directors, and declared its willingness to get involved creatively in all stages of the production process, including development. According to many commentators, the strategy has generally worked and the quality of film co-production, as well as the transparency of decision-making, has improved. Independent producers, however, have reported a major discrepancy between the PSB’s publicised ambition and the actual practice of green-lighting projects and overseeing production. Producers who have repeatedly co-produced with Czech Television have argued that the PSB is promising more than it actually provides, especially by imposing its overpriced in-kind contributions on independent producers instead of investing cash, and that it virtually blackmails them by asking for a disproportionate share of the lucrative broadcasting rights. More importantly, for this analysis of development practices, the producers were unhappy with the way the Film Center gives notes, requires changes in scripts and assigns in-house “dramaturgs” to work on projects. The dramaturgs, according to the producers, operate more as formal, administrative overseers than as real hands-on script editors or consultants, being of no real help throughout the development. The Film Center itself, having to rely on the green light from the upper management, had (according to them) no real producer power that would make the PSB’s strategy clear from the beginning. Instead, producers often felt they had to deal with a black box bureaucratic system of unpredictable decision-­ making in which just a few people make unpredictable subjective judgements about many projects simultaneously in development, without being able to act as real co-producers.

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The Myth of the Missing “Dramaturgs” Special attention needs to be devoted to script editors or consultants, commonly referred to as “dramaturgs” in the Czech screen industry terminology. Dramaturgs are widely considered crucial yet it is the most underfunded, neglected, and precarised of all the professions involved in film development. The term “film dramaturg” originates from the 1930s, when it was adapted from theatre and the German film production system in which dramaturgs were understood to be not just script editors but also functionaries of the Nazi cultural policy and as pre-censors. The Czechoslovak state-socialist production system, especially in the late 1950s and 1960s, cultivated a tradition of “film dramaturgy” that balanced the bureaucratic, pre-censorship role with more practical and creative tasks of detailed script editing (so-called page-by-page dramaturgy) and development management. Dramaturgs operated in so-called dramaturgical or creative units that were gradually established in all the state-socialist studios of Eastern Europe and which effectively functioned as studio producer units. Especially in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, dramaturgs were the key personnel and heads of these units, responsible for scouting new talents, selecting story materials, putting together writers with directors, green-­ lighting or cancelling projects for production, and overseeing the whole production process. Their role was similar to today’s independent producers, although stripped of the usual financial and legal responsibilities (see Szczepanik 2013). The dramaturgs of the 1960s are considered vital facilitators of the Czech New Wave, and the older generation of screenwriters and directors still refers to their heritage when calling for the support, training, and standardisation of film dramaturgy today. However, this tradition of film dramaturgy was closely related to and dependent on the state-socialist studio system; it appears impossible to restore and implement it in the current fragmented production system in which production companies are so small and financially insecure that they can’t afford any permanent staff. (As indicated above, development is the stage of the film value chain which suffers most from the financial weakness of producers in a small market and their lack of longer-term strategy.) Apart from that, the historical concept of the film dramaturg is similar to that of today’s creative producer and development executive (an in-house employee, a producer’s right-hand assistant in terms of managing a portfolio of projects in development). Unlike West European or US script

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doctors, editors or consultants (see Bloore 2013; Bordino 2017), Czech dramaturgs have expressed their expectation to be hired to give the writer continuous feedback throughout the whole development process—as opposed to producing just one-off analysis (“doctoring” a script). However, most producers we spoke with were in fact not willing to give up a portion of their control or were not financially able to hire such personnel. The ideal type of dramaturg, ritually invoked by all the professional groups, thus remains a systemically impossible role in the current Czech production system. However marginalised, “film dramaturgs” do exist and they are even occasionally credited in the opening titles. The most common type is a salaried employee of Czech Television assigned by management to feature film projects co-produced with an independent producer. They usually don’t perform page-by-page dramaturgy but act as hands-off script advisors and mediators between the creative team and the institutional demands of the PSB. Sometimes freelancers are hired to conduct one-off script analysis, but this is often an opportunistic move to meet a funding scheme requirement or the national fund board’s expectations. Only very seldom did respondents acknowledge more consistent and close collaboration with a professional dramaturg. More often, they reflected on the deficiency of current Czech dramaturgy and on how they need to compensate for the lack of “real” dramaturgs by asking their crew members, fellow writers or even family members to provide feedback or, in the case of producers, by performing “dramaturgy” themselves (what they call “producer dramaturgy”), which can be anything from giving general notes to page-by-page analysis. The narrative of the missing dramaturg is the most striking paradox of the current Czech development discourse: the ever-present call for dramaturgs is confronted with the lack of a systemic place for them, financial resources to pay for their work, and professional respect to grant them the necessary authority and career motivation.

Conclusion: Towards a Comparative Research of Development in Local Industry Ecosystems The definitions, practices, and conflicts described above illustrate how development practices are embedded in the Czech industry ecosystem but they also show how identifying systemic development types and differences between professional roles allows for using such an empirical case

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study for comparative purposes. Nick Couldry’s and Andreas Hepp’s model of “transcultural comparative media research” moves beyond “territorial container thinking” by distinguishing between phenomena operating within and transgressing the framework of the “national-territorial” (Hepp and Couldry 2009). Accordingly, the post-socialist sociocultural and political context, the structure of the national market, as well as the influence of public financial support and the PSB all contribute to the local specificity of film development practices in the Czech Republic. This specificity is most clearly seen in the conflicts over public resources between different groups of stakeholders. Nevertheless, the industrial culture of development has been spread across national borders, with the concept itself perceived as something artificially imported. To compare its specific local manifestations, we need to pay attention to other criteria of difference than those based on political media systems (as famously proposed by Hallin and Mancini (2004) and applied to post-­ socialist Central and Eastern Europe by Herrero et al. (2017)). This chapter proposed systemic distinctions based on a Bourdieu-inspired analysis of the semi-autonomous field of cultural production: the differences between producers aiming at gaining field-specific symbolic capital versus those who are market-oriented; the differences between those at the margins and in the mainstream of the field; and the differences between screenwriters, directors, script editors, and producers—all of which increase our sensitivity to regularities hidden behind the seemingly messy, boundary-free and never-ending development process. Superimposed on the background of these distinctions, a conceptual grid of comparative criteria emerges that allows for more fine-grained comparisons of development practices: wider versus more limited definitions of script or project development; producer-driven versus writer– director-driven development; different kinds of financing strategies and motivations (for whom does one develop—for a producer, a fund, a business partner, or an audience group?; why does one initiate or cancel a project?); speed, length, (dis)continuity, and autonomy; the level of selectivity; standardisation and division of labour; collaboration and sharing; intimacy versus openness to external forces (marketing, product placement); the power hierarchy, (self)exploitation, discrimination, and precariousness; and so on. All these parameters could be applied to any industry ecosystem but their significance will depend on its specific realities and how they are “lived” by the stakeholders on the ground.

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Acknowledgements  This study was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (reg. no.: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/1 6_019/0000734) and by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic project “Research on the impact of current legislation and the European Commission strategy for Digital Single Market on Czech audiovisual industry: Evaluation of the copyright system and preparation of cultural politics within the DSM” (reg. no.: TL01000306).

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Pjajčíková, E., & Szczepanik, P. (2015). Group Writing for Post-Socialist Television. In V. Mayer, M. Banks, & B. Conor (Eds.), Production Studies, The Sequel!: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries (pp. 105–120). New York/ London: Routledge. Rogers, S. (2007). Writing British Films – Who Writes British Films and How Are They Recruited. London: UKFC. Retrieved from www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org. uk/files/downloads/uk-film-council-writing-british-films-who-writes-britishfilms-and-how-they-are-recruited.pdf Rolfe, D., et al. (2007). A Study of Feature Film Development and Screenwriter and Development Training in the UK. A Final Report for the UK Film Council and Skillset. Retrieved from www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/ study-into-film-development-and-training-in-the-UK.pdf Ross, A. (2009). Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York: New York University Press. Sanson, K. (2018). Stitching It All Together: Service Producers and the Spatial Dynamics of Screen Media Labor. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 21(4), 359–374. Szczepanik, P. (2013). The State-Socialist Mode of Production and the Political History of Production Culture. In P. Szczepanik & P. Vonderau (Eds.), Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures (pp.  113–134). New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Szczepanik, P. (2013a). How Many Steps to the Shooting Script? A Political History of Screenwriting. Iluminace, 25(3), 73–98. Szczepanik, P. (2016). Transnational Crews and the Post-Socialist Precarity: Globalizing Screen Media Labor in Prague. In M. Curtin & K. Sanson (Eds.), Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor (pp.  88–103). Oakland: University of California Press. Szczepanik, P., et al. (2015). Studie vývoje českého hraného kinematografického díla. Prague: Státní fond kinematografie. Retrieved from http://fondkinematografie.cz/assets/media/studie%20komplet.pdf Szczepanik, P., et al. (2015a). A Study of Feature Film Development in the Czech Republic (An Introduction). Retrieved from https://fondkinematografie.cz/ assets/media/files/H/EN/SFK_studie_2018_ENG_KOR2_2_3.pdf

Cultural Difference in Script Development: The Australian Example Glenda Hambly

Introduction This chapter provides a case study of script development in Australia. It examines the nexus of the development practice of feature screenwriters and the script development culture of Screen Australia, the federal funding agency. The study is based on a survey of agency documents as well as interviews with key agency executives and 22 of Australia’s most successful feature screenwriters. The criterion for judging the writers’ “success” is based on box office returns; the writers interviewed wrote the 20 films that attracted the largest audiences for Australian films between 1994 and 2013. The interviews illuminate the writers’ creative processes and provide critical insights into how creativity can be undermined by applying a narrow, prescriptive definition of script development. The study also highlights the tensions between global and local influences on screenwriting and development. It demonstrates the continuing strength of an Australian-specific form of cinematic narrative despite the ubiquity of Hollywood’s classical model and its promotion by Screen Australia. (The classical model is defined here as a linear, cause–effect narrative in three

G. Hambly (*) La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, Australia © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_5

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acts constructed around a protagonist pursuing a goal who faces an antagonist and obstacles, overcomes him/her/them and is positively transformed in the process.1) The case study is framed within the broader theoretical discussion that is current in the academy of how script development can be defined as a universal practice and whether a common language exists to describe it. A consensus is emerging that, as with screenwriting, an understanding of script development revolves around the application of the classical paradigm as defined in the “how to” manuals (Conor 2010; Macdonald 2004, 2010; Taylor and Batty 2016). Studies in Canada (Coutanche and Davis 2013), Ireland (Liddy 2014), and Britain (Conor 2010; Macdonald 2010; Taylor and Batty 2016) point to its ubiquity and dominance; however, this Australian sample suggests more in-depth explorations of the working practice of feature writers might produce less consistent results. On the surface, it appears that the classical model dominates development practice in Australia but when a screenwriter’s practice-specific perspective is invoked, a much more varied set of approaches emerges. The importance of considering individual local culturally inflected experience—as opposed to accepting global, generalised assumptions about screenwriting and script development (the “one universal model fits all” approach)—is a feature of this chapter.

Background Australia produced the world’s first feature-length film in 1906 but after a frenetic period of production, activity slowly died. The amalgamation of production, distribution, and exhibition companies led to controlled screening arrangements that discriminated against local films (Goldsmith 1999). For almost 60 years, the industry languished until it was revived in 1970 by government intervention. The “revival” was at the forefront of a wave of “new nationalism” that swept Australia, arising from the “social revolution” of the 1960s. This involved the widespread rejection of relying on Britishness as a marker of Australian identity and a concomitant desire to forge/reclaim a uniquely local identity. The film industry’s revival was argued on explicitly nationalist grounds as “a declaration of 1  This definition is drawn from Syd Field (1984) and Robert McKee (1997), pioneers of the contemporary “how to” write screenplays manual industry. See, in particular, McKee’s definition of “classical design” (p. 45).

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independence” (Adams 1981, p. 7). A national cinema was declared to be “the philosopher’s stone in Australia’s quest for national identity” (Dermody and Jacka 1988, p. 232). Many of the most popular films produced in the 1970s and 1980s fulfilled this goal by tapping into the nation’s cultural myths, reproducing explicitly Australian characters in a plethora of period dramas. Australia’s first federal funding agency, the Australian Film Commission (AFC), established in 1975 by the government to drive the industry’s renaissance, was writer friendly and culturally focused. According to AFC senior development executive Claire Dobbin (1986–2000), executives saw their role as “[supporting] filmmakers who were making a contribution to national culture” (personal interview, April 21 2015). The scripts chosen were those that “succeeded most in their own terms”. Risk taking was encouraged, scripts were judged on their inherent merits, the assessment and editing of scripts was undertaken by Australians, and marketplace considerations were not necessarily part of the conversation. Although government rhetoric at the time of the industry’s renaissance boisterously advanced a cultural objective, there was also a strong interest in economic goals and sustainability. By the 1990s, the balance between these polarities had started to shift. The adoption of neoliberal economic theory played a major role in turning the ideological focus from local to global; from a cultural to a commercial rationale for the industry. Post-­ modern/post-structural theory, asserting that all cultures and their representations are “constructed”, also played a role in undermining respect for a local cinema that embodied notions of national identity and culture. By 1985, the whole enterprise of an Australian national cinema was being dismissed as “naive and anachronistic” (Jacka 1988, p. 117). In place of the national, many film theorists and commentators described a new world order of “international”, “global”, or “trans-national” cinema subsuming or replacing outmoded local traditions. Development culture at the AFC continued to privilege the vision of the writer but here too change was underway, reflecting the overall political and intellectual environment. The new global industrial model of screenwriting, advanced in manuals written by Syd Field (1984), Linda Seger (2010), Christopher Vogler (1996), and Robert McKee (1997) arrived in Australia and found fertile ground. The AFC was not immune to the lure of the manual’s three-act, hero’s transformative journey paradigm, as writers and commentators have observed (Martin 1999; Millard 2014). However, while some executives at Screen Australia adopted the

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manuals’ approach to analysing scripts, overall development policy and practice remained culturally sensitive, eclectic, and open; writers were still encouraged to choose how they wanted to tell their stories. This changed fundamentally in the watershed year of 2008. The AFC was replaced by Screen Australia and a new, determinedly commercial development culture was introduced; the classical Hollywood paradigm was now openly promoted and applied by the agency.

Screen Australia Development Culture According to Veronica Gleeson, Senior Development Executive at Screen Australia (2008–2014), the new policy was driven by a desire to support scripts that could “consistently flow into the marketplace, be financed, sustain businesses” (personal interview, June 16 2014). A script’s potential to attract an audience and marketplace interest (distributors and sales agents who sell films to exhibitors) became a key criterion in judging its value. A close dialogue was established between the agency and marketplace to inform that judgement. Given its proven audience appeal, the use of genre was promoted over the AFC’s staple, drama. Crossover films that appealed to international as well as Australian audiences were sought. The Hollywood paradigm was adopted as the development model because it was believed to produce scripts with the widest audience appeal. According to Gleeson, a commonality of approach to script analysis provided agreement about “what is drama, what is a script, what works, what does not work, where are the anchor points that we can turn to” (2014). Gleeson observed that many screenwriters were not impressed by the new regime at Screen Australia that employed an “inciting incident, first-­ act turn, midpoint, third-act resolution” analysis. Writers responded with a sense of: “How dare you even raise that question around what I have written … There was a sense that did not apply to Australian screenwriting” (2014). When Screen Australia ran genre workshops, the reaction could be hostile: “there was the sense that the Death Star had arrived” (2014). Of course, not all writers reacted in this way and in any case, whether writers liked it or not, the policy change reaped the desired outcome. In 2008, drama comprised 60% of the AFC slate; by 2012, at Screen Australia, it had dropped to 40%. The remaining 60% of the slate was composed of “thrillers, crime films, romantic comedies and others” (Richey 2012). The ability of a key funding agency to shape the nature of cinema narrative is not limited to Australia. Changes in script development

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policy at the Irish Film Board have produced the same effect (see O’Connell 2012, 2014). In 2014, Gleeson described the classical paradigm as the “dominant narrative structure” in Australia: “it certainly is something that studio executives, people like me, producers, financiers, and a whole lot of people can refer to comfortably and say that is where it needs to sit” (2014). However, in 2017, Batty, Taylor, Sawtell, and Conor considered Screen Australia’s policies and guidelines and concluded that its approach to script development was more aligned to “alternative” practices than the “how to” manual market (Batty et al. 2017a). They based their assessment on the general remarks about development on Screen Australia’s website where “words and phrases like ‘flexible’, ‘responsive’, ‘diversity of tools’ and ‘bespoke approach’” were used (Batty et al. 2017b, p. 239). However, delving deeper into the Screen Australia website reveals a different picture. Since 2009, funding applicants have been given advice based on the principles of Hollywood’s classical narrative. For example, in that year on Screen Australia’s website, a guide to preparing key documents for submission advised applicants that a one-page synopsis must include [my italics]: “the event, without which the story would not begin; the decision and actions the characters take in pursuit of their goals; the obstacles and barriers they encounter” (2009, p. 4). “Major turning points”, it continued, were crucial to indicating the story’s structure. Screen drama “demands” a story that develops in a cause effect way with rising tension, ever more loaded conflict and something of value riding on the outcome (2009, p. 4). Little has changed since then. The current advice provided in an Info Guide: Story Documents linked via Tools and Insights For Starting In The Industry to Screen Australia’s Feature Film page, advises that a storyline for a feature project, where the storyline is largely singular [my italics], should convey a clear sense of structure specifying turning points in a cause-and-effect chain (2018, p. 6). The typical form of this includes: the setup and thematic idea of the story, the inciting incident, the actions the characters have to take, the major obstacles in their way, the climax and the ending  – both in terms of plot and emotional character journey (2018, p. 7)

It is a matter of conjecture as to whether “largely singular” suggests a single protagonist story is the norm, or whether it is an acknowledgement that multi-character stories can be told, but regardless, the Info Guide

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emphatically stresses the narrative form described above as the “common narrative basis” for all forms of screen storytelling: feature, documentary, TV, short, online, interactive, cross-platform and virtual reality productions (2018, p. 1). Since 2016, Screen Australia has provided an educational video featuring one of its assessors, John Collee, explaining to prospective applicants who are writing and developing feature films: “the fundamentals of how to get your script to cut through, and be less likely to fail, when submitting for funding”. Collee recommends the use of three acts and a transformative journey for the protagonist and cites John Yorke’s Into the Woods as his favourite book on the theory of screenwriting.2 Yorke’s book (2013) is recommended again at the end of Screen Australia’s Info Guide, Story Documents, along with other key authors in the “how to” canon: Field, McKee, Seger, John Truby (2008), Michael Hauge (2011), Linda Aronson (2010), etc. (2018, p. 14). Bridget Conor (2010) and Ian Macdonald (2004, 2010) have found a similar hegemony prevails in the UK where the manuals model also controls development discourse and is positioned as the industry norm. However, the nature of the “tools” of development recommended and applied by Screen Australia is particularly powerful in the Australian development and production context where the federal agency plays such a pivotal role.

The Gatekeepers of the Industry In Australia, the vast majority of script development on feature films depends on public money distributed by government agencies. There are six separate state funding agencies but the one federal funding agency, Screen Australia, dominates the sector in terms of its size, budget, and influence. Given its dominance, it usually sets the trend for the smaller agencies in relation to script development and production policy. Producers rely on Screen Australia not only for development money (writers must have teamed up with a producer to be eligible to apply) but also for the investment finance needed to produce the film. Very few small-to-medium range Australian films have been made without obtaining production investment support from Screen Australia. At the production investment 2  Yorke posits that the three-act transformative journey paradigm is a universal story structure; a product of human psychology, biology, and physics.

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application stage, when the final draft of the script is assessed, it is not unusual for script changes to be advised by agency executives and their assessors. Sally Caplan, Head of Production at Screen Australia, has observed how the development and production arms can differ in their approach to script assessment. She notes that as a broad principle, the reaction of a development executive to a treatment or first or second draft will be: “I can see there is really something here; now, how to fix it?” whereas production executives who read the project much later “would apply the paradigms or the three acts: is there a first, second, third act?” (personal interview, July 17 2014). In the course of researching a PhD thesis on Australian screenwriting and script development on which this chapter is based, I interviewed eight agency executives from six state agencies in addition to the two Screen Australia executives quoted earlier. No other formal structural approach beyond the classical Hollywood narrative was mentioned by anyone. Variations on the classical model are tolerated and sometimes encouraged, but the common view is that writers who do not use it are on shaky ground. Executives tend to equate writers who spurn the paradigm as spurning structure entirely. Given an orthodoxy is in place, you would expect feature screenwriters to observe it, but surprisingly this is not the case as the following data illustrate.

The Screenwriter Interviews The 22 writers interviewed were responsible for writing 203 of the most successful Australian films at the Australian box office over a 20-year period (1994–2013). Box office success is generally accepted as a measure of a film’s success despite the flaws inherent in this assumption.4 Each year Screen Australia updates a list of the Top 100 Australian feature films of all time, ranked by total reported gross Australian box-office,5 which was used in this study to identify the “top 20” films and their writers. The definition  Some of the films were co-authored by two writers.  A high-budget film with a large marketing budget may reap strong returns at the box office but when these returns are measured against the cost of making and marketing the film, the returns can be unimpressive. By contrast, a low-budget film might be much more profitable. Digital and video-on-demand releases and “ancillary” sales (e.g. DVDs) can lead to strong results for films that do mediocre box office business and some films succeed overseas but fail at the local box office. 5  Property of the author. The 2013 list is no longer available online. 3 4

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of what constitutes an Australian film has become elastic and contentious in recent times and needs to be briefly explained. Screen Australia classifies films as Australian if they are originated and developed by Australians and the key elements are predominately Australian, even if there is shared creative control with overseas partners and the projects are 100 per cent foreign financed (2015, p.  7). Thus, high-budget international–Australian films financed principally by Hollywood studios, such as Gods of Egypt (Iwanyk et al. 1994), are classified as Australian although there is nothing identifiably Australian about them. Given my research focused on Australia’s national cinema, I excluded films where the sole producer was foreign, creative control was shared with foreign producers or American accents predominated or were exclusively used. If I was unable to interview a writer whose film was ranked within the top 20 of Screen Australia’s 2013 Top 100 list either because he/she was ineligible or unavailable, I substituted the writer of the next highest-­ ranking film. Once I reached the 40th ranking (films that had recouped less than $6 million), I imposed a second criterion for selection: the writer had to have won an ACCTA Award for Best Screenplay.6 The in-depth, semi-structured interviews were all conducted in 2014 and took one hour on average; four were by phone, the rest were face-to-face. Following Sherry Ortner’s approach, I relied on the interviews to establish the social universe of script development for writers; the discourse of the culture (2012). My questions focused on three areas: (1) Writing Process: How did the writers shape their stories? Did they use the Hollywood paradigm or some other approach? (2) Script Development: What was their experience with the federal funding agency in its various iterations and with the state agencies? (3) Culture and Narrative: What was their view on cultural specificity? Did they see a tension between an Australian mode of cinematic storytelling and the American paradigm? The surprising and unexpected finding of the interviews is that, despite the hegemony of the Hollywood model, a minority of the writers subscribe to it. Seven of the 22 selectively used classical Hollywood narrative principles in structuring their “top 20” scripts; the remaining 15—almost 70%—did not. This contradicts a basic tenet of Screen Australia’s 6  When the strictly quantitative criterion failed to produce a full list, I used the highest qualitative criterion available in Australia which was the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Award for Best Screenplay. The AACTA awards are Australia’s equivalent of the Oscars.

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development culture that equates the classical paradigm with popular box office success. Note: the writers and their films are not identified in the summary that follows for the sake of brevity and because few are known outside Australia. Of the screenwriters who did subscribe to the classical paradigm, five applied it holistically and two preferenced its mythic aspect: the protagonist’s transformative journey. Many in this group objected to me calling the three-act structure, transformative journey model the Classical Hollywood Narrative (CHN). They argued the model did not belong to Hollywood or to the US; rather, it originated with Aristotle or even further back with our “cavemen” ancestors. In contrast to this group, the non-CHN writers viewed structure as arising naturally from the story they want to write, or from the character or theme they want to write about. The 15 non-CHN writers can be loosely grouped into three categories: Instinct and Creativity, the Structuralists and the Character First group. Four of the six writers in the Instinct and Creativity group had celebrated careers in other written mediums (TV, theatre, and non-fiction literature) and relied on their intuition as masterful storytellers to guide them as they wrote their “top 20” scripts. Three had never read the “how to” manuals canon and had no knowledge of the classical paradigm. The fourth had tried to read McKee but found him too formulaic. Two other writers also stressed the importance of instinct and intuition in their writing process. One described his working method as “not conscious” but nonetheless “educated”. When he works for Americans, he said, he writes like one, but when working on his own material he deliberately avoids thinking about the three-act structure. The other writer described a three-­ day McKee workshop she attended as a very useful tool for looking at what you had written but not for telling you how to write. She found “inspiration” to be the most remarkable aspect of development. Writing, she said, was as much an art as a craft, and reducing screenwriting to a set of rules ignored that fact. The three Structuralists viewed structure as pivotal in shaping their scripts but used the driving force of a theme or ideas, rather than plot or character, to determine what it should be. One writer used the story’s theme to inform the structure of every scene. Another, an American who usually writes with CHN precepts in mind, found the model did not suit the Australian novella he was trying to adapt. (The alternative structural approach he devised is described later.) A third writer used surprise, suspense, and juxtaposition (a dialectical approach which can substitute for

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direct conflict) as structural tools. Although well aware of the three-act structure, the writer deliberately subverted it by “misplacing” the climactic event in order to maximise the dramatic impact on the audience. One of the six Character First writers, who has had great success as a novelist, always relies on a character to determine a story’s shape. On the one hand, she worried that the CHN sucked the personality out of a story and was not drawn to its “graphs and lines”. On the other hand, she was prepared to analyse her script according to the three-act structure as the industry expected. The only Indigenous writer amongst the 22 described being forced to apply rules, such as those imposed by the CHN, as tantamount to “putting bamboo up my fingernails”. He views the paradigm as unsuitable for Indigenous cinema stories that invariably focus on community and family, not the individual who triumphs for him or herself. Another in the Character First group shies away from any rule-based “diagrammatic” approach to structure. He defined story as a character journeying through different states of mind. The point of these transitions from one state of mind to the next becomes the plot or story point. He believes his task as a writer is to explore the inner life of a character and fashion “contradictions” that allow the audience to interpret the character’s psychology and thereby enter the “sub-text” of the film. Of the remaining writers, one saw the CHN as an effective tool for a story about one person but not for group stories, which interest him most. He believes you must work with the material of each and every story to discover its natural shape. While he carried the three-act structure in his mind “instinctively” as an analytical tool, he said it did not drive his writing. The final two writers were also well versed in the CHN canon but had used their knowledge of it to subvert the classical storyline and write a story about an antihero. Many of these non-CHN “top 20” writers objected to the prescriptive nature of the CHN rules as outlined in the “how to” manuals and applied by the funding agencies. Given this, how were they able to develop and have their non-CHN films produced if they were swimming against the agency tide? The answer is creative independence. Script development on 11 of the 13 non-CHN scripts effectively occurred outside the control of the agencies. Development was either financed by the producer, by private investors, or the writers worked for free. Two additional “top 20” projects were slate funded by Screen Australia and allowed their producers to develop the scripts “in-house” (within the producer’s production company), independent of the agency. However, even if development occurred

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outside the agency’s control, the scripts were still assessed by Screen Australia at the production investment application stage.

Screen Australia Versus the Audience It is worth singling out two of the “top 20” films to illustrate the disparity between Screen Australia’s view of what makes a successful film and what appeals to Australian audiences. They also illustrate the negative pressure applied by the agency towards “non-orthodox” scripts. Red Dog (Ryan et al. 2011), according to its distributor Seph McKenna (Roadshow), was the most popular independent Australian film in 20 years. McKenna, an American who moved from Hollywood to Australia in 2006, was a devotee of the CHN. He reports having “real difficulty” with the script of Red Dog because it “didn’t follow a classic Hollywood three-act structure”; it was episodic, lacked a clear structure, a clear protagonist and a clear ending (personal interview, May 14 2014). Ironically, Daniel Taplitz, who wrote Red Dog, is also an American who works in Hollywood. As noted previously, he chose not to apply the classical narrative because it did not suit the project. Instead, he devised a complex circular, inner-and-outer structure for his multistrand, ensemble cast story that he bound together with the theme of community. Red Dog’s unexpected popularity, McKenna says, taught him the “big lesson” that you do not need a specific protagonist to drive a story that “hugely connects with audiences”. He now believes the adoption of the CHN by Screen Australia has been too “prescriptive” and the emphasis on genre was a “well intentioned mistake” because Australian audiences do not respond well to it (2014). According to Taplitz, the script of Red Dog was often challenged by Screen Australia when it was being assessed for production investment. The agency’s readers, particularly at the lower levels, were “looking for things like antagonists and conflict. You can almost see their checklists and they get wrapped up in it” (personal interview, November 5 2014). But the film’s creative team held onto their vision for the film and ultimately received the investment they needed. The film’s outstanding success generated confusion and soul searching at the funding agencies. The general response from the state and federal executives I interviewed was that the film was an aberration, an “outlier” because it did not conform to the favoured CHN. It apparently did not occur to them that the film tapped into an Australian narrative tradition that strongly appeals to local audiences. The nature of this tradition will be explored shortly.

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Like Red Dog, the breakout success of 2012, The Sapphires (Blight et al. 2012), is a multistrand narrative with an ensemble cast. It too was challenged at the production investment stage by Screen Australia. It was suggested to the writers, Keith Thompson and Tony Briggs, that they make radical changes to their polished final draft (which had been developed in-house at Goalpost Pictures), including shifting the balance of the story from country Australia to Vietnam and rewriting the group story so the four women shared a common objective (therefore standing as one protagonist and conforming to the CHN precepts) rather than allowing the characters to act individually (personal interviews, June 3 2014 and November 6 2014). The changes were not made. The film premiered in Cannes, won Best Film and Best Screenplay in the AACTA awards of 2013 and was an outstanding box office success in Australia. Seventy-four per cent of the writers interviewed expressed concern about the state and federal agencies’ development process on either their “top 20” or feature projects. They complained about the use of the classical paradigm, the agencies’ narrow view of what constituted a film and Australian scripts being filtered through the sensibility of international assessors. CHN proponents, whether in the agencies, the industry or the academy, assume that all screenwriters have internalised the classical paradigm because, as McKee claims, “Classical design is a mirror of the human mind” (1997, p. 62). But believing the model is universal, timeless, trans-­ cultural and the way all cinema stories are structured, whether writers are aware they are applying the paradigm or not, does not make it true. As the interviews show, writers conceive story structure in many and varied forms. However, beyond individual choice, cultural influences also play a major role in how the non-CHN “top 20” scripts are structured and characterised. To adequately explain the role of Australian cultural mythology in shaping Australian cinema narrative would require another chapter. All I can provide here is a very brief explanation.

Australian Cinema Narrative In National Fictions: Narrative, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative, Graeme Turner examined the narrative patterns in literature and film from their inception in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to the mid-1980s and identified a dominant paradigm driven by Australian cultural mythology. The myth privileges “the good of the community … over and above the good of the individual” and allows the

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individual “a modest level of survival rather than the romantic notions of transcending one’s physical conditions” (1986, p. 143). He found these values had produced particular narrative patterns that dominated literature and film: episodic structure, lack of narrative closure, rarity of highly individualised characters, a preference for “types” and “flat” characters used as indicators of social setting, group customs, community values, and beliefs. These same characteristics are evident in the 13 non-CHN “top 20” films; many are episodically structured, protagonists are reactive rather than proactive, subordinate to their setting and the vagaries of life. There is a group or ensemble focus, a reluctant or no particular hero, muted or no individual transformation. Although the writers of the non-CHN films brought a fully conscious, deliberative approach to structuring their screenplays, their choices were affected by the subliminal, unconscious langue of Australian culture. Local audiences respond well to these films because they express their shared lived experience. The national myth of the US has led to very different content and structure in its cinema narrative. Richard Slotkin analysed 400  years of discourse across literary, political, performative and cinema forms and concluded that “the myth of the heroic quest … is perhaps the most important archetype underlying American cultural mythology” (1973, p. 10). Whereas Australian mythology privileges the group and submission of the individual, and valorises the struggle for survival against the odds, US mythology valorises an individual’s ability to succeed, to remake one’s life and control one’s destiny; convictions clearly reflected in the CHN’s driving, cause–effect narrative built around an empowered individual. “The hero’s individual self-making and accomplishment [stand] in for national self-determination and exceptionalism: for the fundamental essence of America itself” (Levinson 2012, p. 23).

Conclusion As convenient as it would be for the industry at large, agency executives and everyone involved in training in the script development field to identify a common language and standardised practice, the temptation should be resisted. The classical model has achieved primacy as the lingua franca of screenwriting internationally although writers worldwide (Hollywood included) continue to write outside its conventions. This case study points to the flaws in deciding that script development theory should also be

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considered unitary and universally applicable. The varied approaches of the “top 20” writers in shaping their stories points to the importance of a varied suite of responses by everyone involved in development. The nature of the script should determine which development approach is applied. An awareness and respect for the variations that arise from creative difference, cultural specificity, Indigenous voices, and a female perspective in storytelling all point to the need for a broad and multifaceted approach to development.

References Adams, P. (1981). Forward. In S.  Murray (Ed.), The New Australian Cinema. Thomas Nelson: West Melbourne. Anastassiades, C. (2014, September 19). Personal interview. Aronson, L. (2010). The 21st Century Screenplay: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Tomorrow’s Films. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017a). Editorial. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 219–223. https://doi.org/10.1386/jocs.8.3.225_1. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017b). Script Development: Defining the Field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. https://doi. org/10.1386/jocs.8.3.225_1. Beattie, S. (2014, December 4). Personal interview. Blight, R., & Du Fresne, K. (Producers) & Blair, W. (Director). (2012). The Sapphires (Motion Picture). Australia: Goalpost Pictures. Bovell, A. (2014, June 25). Personal interview. Briggs, T. (2014, November 6). Personal interview. Caplan, S. (2014, July 17). Personal interview. Clarke, J. (2014, May 15). Personal interview. Conor, B. (2010). Screenwriting as Creative Labour: Pedagogies, Practices and Livelihoods in the Cultural Economy (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Goldsmiths: University of London. Coutanche, M., & Davis, C. (2013). 2012 Report on Canadian Screenwriters. Toronto: RTA School of Media, Ryerson University. Cribb, R. (2014, August 15). Personal interview. De Heer, R. (2014, August 7). Personal interview. Dermody, S., & Jacka, E. (1988). The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a National Cinema, Vol 2. Sydney: Currency Press. Dobbin, C. (2015, April 1). Personal interview. Elliott, S. (2014, July 28). Personal interview. Field, S. (1984). Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. New  York: Bantam Dell. Giannopoulos, N. (2014, June 10). Personal interview. Gleeson, V. (2014, June 16). Personal interview.

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Gleisner, T. (2014, May 22). Personal interview. Goldsmith, B. (1999). Settings, Subjects and Stories: Creative Australian Cinema. In A.  Sarwal & R.  Sawal (Eds.), Creative Nation: Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader (pp. 13–26). New Delhi: SSS Publications. Hauge, M. (2011). Writing Screenplays That Sell. London: Methuen Drama. Iwanyk, B., & Proyas, A. (Producers) & Proyas, A. (Director). (1994) Gods of Egypt (Motion Picture). United States, Australia: Thunder Road Pictures, Mystery Clock Cinema. Jacka, E. (1988). Australian Cinema: An Anachronism in the ’80s? In S. Dermody & E. Jacka (Eds.), “The Imaginary Industry” Australian Film in the Late ’80’s (pp. 117–130). North Ryde: Australian Film and Television School Publications. Jacobson, C. (2014, May 5). Personal interview. Jordan, G. (2014, June 4, 2014). Personal interview. Levinson, J. (2012). The American Success Myth on Film. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Liddy, S. (2014). First Impressions: Debut Features by Irish Screenwriters. In C. Batty (Ed.), Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context (pp. 130–150). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Macdonald, I. W. (2004). The Presentation of the Screen Idea in Narrative Film-­ Making (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Macdonald, I.  W. (2010). ‘… So It’s Not Surprising I’m Neurotic.’ The Screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 45–58. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.1.1.45/1. Marchetta, M. (2014, June 4). Personal interview. Martin, A. (1999, April 23–26). Making a Bad Script Worse: The Curse of the Scriptwriting Manual. Australian Book Review. McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper Collins. McKenna, S. (2014, May 14). Personal interview. Millard, K. (2014). Screenwriting in the Digital Era. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Molloy, M. (2014a, June 18). Personal interview. Molloy, R. (2014b, June 18). Personal interview. O’Connell, D. (2012). Irish Cinema 1994–2009: The Trajectory of Script Development Policy at the Irish Film Board. Journal of Screenwriting, 3(1), 61–71. O’Connell, D. (2014). The Irish Film Board: Gatekeeper or Facilitator? The Experience of the Irish Screenwriter. In C.  Batty (Ed.), Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context (pp.  113–129). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Olsen, C. (2014, June 2). Personal interview. Ortner, S. B. (2012). Against Hollywood. American Independent Film as a Critical Cultural Movement. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2), 1–21.

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Richey, A. (2012, August 3). Screen Australia: Increasing Focus on Emerging Producers with New Funding Tool. Screenhub. Retrieved from https://www. google.com.au/search?q=screenhub&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefoxb&gfe_rd=cr&ei=CV4KWb30FKfM8gfxlomYDQ Ryan, J., & Woss, N. (Producers) & Stenders, K. (Director). (2011). Red Dog (Motion Picture). Australia: Woss Group Film Productions. Sardi, J. (2014, May 16). Personal interview. Screen Australia. (2009). What Is a Synopsis? An Outline? A Treatment? Retrieved from https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/ae5708a4-05d9-4db0b5fb-4f999fdfed57/What-is-a-synopsis.pdf Screen Australia. (2013). Australian Content Box-Office. Screen Australia. (2015). Drama Report: Production of Feature Films and TV Drama in Australia 2014–15. Production of Feature films. Retrieved from https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/d6eb0e91-9267-4f0d-8c05cc2794279f79/Drama-report-14-15.pdf Screen Australia. (2016). Collee, J. Writing and Developing Feature Films. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux8QVwCCWls Screen Australia. (2018). Info Guide: Story Documents. Retrieved from https:// www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/133af42b-7abe-4ebc-a164799c1c7a4614/Story-Documents-Drama.pdf?ext=.pdf Seger, L. (2010). Making a Good Script Great. Beverly Hills: Silman-James Press. Slotkin, R. (1973). Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Taplitz, D. (2014, November 5). Personal interview. Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Script Development and the Hidden Practices of Screenwriting: Perspectives from Industry Professionals. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 13(2), 204–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1120314. Thompson, K. (2014, June 3). Personal interview. Tilson, A. (2014, October 31). Personal interview. Truby, J. (2008). The Anatomy of Story: Twenty-Two Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. New York: Faber & Faber. Turner, G. (1986). National Fictions: Narrative, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Turner, J. (2014, October 10). Personal interview. Vogler, C. (1996). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. London: Boxtree. Watson, D. (2014, October 24). Personal interview. Yorke, J. (2013). Into the Woods; A Five Act Journey into Story. London: Penguin Books.

Complicating Cops and Criminals: Racial Politics in the Classic Network Crime Drama Caryn Murphy

Introduction In the US system of broadcasting, television writers work within a set of constraints that include a desire to appeal to large audiences, satisfying the needs of advertisers, and navigating a storytelling act structure necessitated by commercial interruptions. Television storytelling has traditionally used clearly defined genres to ensure that programming will appeal to viewers, and so the codes and conventions associated with each story type provide additional limits for writers in the medium. These factors remain relevant in the present day, but were the most pronounced during the classic network era that began in the late 1950s and continued into the 1980s. This chapter explores the development of a crime drama script by Sy Salkowitz, a prolific television writer from this era, whose archived papers illuminate how a story idea moved from an initial inspiration to a completed episode. Salkowitz, like other writers of the time, strove to engage and surprise the viewer, even as he relied on formula.

C. Murphy (*) Department of Radio-TV-Film, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_6

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The classic network system in US television was characterised by the national dominance of three broadcasters (NBC, CBS and ABC) competing for the largest possible audiences. Michele Hilmes explains that in this era, “Centralized control increased along with homogeneity and standardization” (2007, p.  172). The close competition between the vertically integrated networks resulted in markedly similar programming; TV critics argued that the commercial drives of the medium resulted in the avoidance of social issues and overreliance on formula (Brown 1971, pp. 11–12). Jason Mittell notes that “least objectionable programming” formed an underlying logic of this system and that, “Shows that featured formal innovations, controversial content, or boundary-pushing ideas were passed over in favour of proven formulas, safe representations and efficient, inexpensive retreads” (2008, p. 46). The Civil Rights movement was an engine of social change in the 1960s, but prime-time entertainment programming avoided engagement with potentially divisive issues related to race. Public watchdog groups, including the NAACP, had long attempted to pressure broadcasters to increase and improve representations of African-Americans. In 1968, this scrutiny intensified with the release of the Kerner Report, the findings of a commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to study the root causes of racial tensions and uprisings in major US cities. The Kerner Report devoted an entire chapter to the role of mass media, stipulating that in order to quell growing racial tensions, one piece of the solution would have to address representations (1968). The recommendations of the Kerner Commission were not legally binding, but the widely publicised report raised questions about the public service responsibilities of broadcasters and was accompanied by renewed scrutiny from state and federal investigations (Hrach 2016). The Kerner Report recommended that all TV programming should strive to integrate, and did not single out any genres for specific consideration. Television’s popular crime dramas, however, arguably bore an additional responsibility for addressing racial disparities in representations. Jonathan Nichols-Pethick’s study TV Cops outlines the traditional formula of the genre as one that “champions an inherently conservative social agenda by focusing on the essential wisdom and virtue of those who enforce the law (police officers, district attorneys, etc.) and offer protection from all who threaten the social order” (2012, p. 2). In the 1960s, the vast majority of TV law enforcement heroes were white men, and the suspects and criminals that they engaged with, ripped from news

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headlines’ stories, served as symbolic representations of social problems. African-Americans were under-represented in prime-time TV, and so the presence of black performers as suspects and criminals in crime dramas took on an added significance. The investigations that arose in the wake of the Kerner Report examined both the circulation of limited stereotypes in representations and the lack of employment opportunities for African-­ Americans behind the scenes. The popular series Ironside (NBC, 1967–1975) was one of many prime-time crime dramas in the classic network era. It distinguished itself from the competition with an unusual premise: Chief Ironside (Raymond Burr), who consults on cases with the San Francisco police department that he used to lead, is wheelchair-bound. Aside from this novel approach, the series was substantially similar to contemporaneous crime dramas. This mix of innovation (a focus on an atypical central character) and formula (the traditional crime–investigation–resolution plot) is a hallmark of the classic network system. Ironside was designed to be similar to other popular shows, but distinct enough to intrigue viewers and gain its own following. Over the course of his career, Sy Salkowitz was a credited writer on more than 350 TV episodes. He wrote for a number of crime drama series but he also worked in other genres, including the western and the medical drama. Salkowitz wrote 35 episodes of Ironside and also supervised other writers to ensure that their scripts would suit the established tone of the series. The following sections of this chapter analyse the development of one of Salkowitz’s episodes, ‘Robert Phillips vs. the Man’ from its earliest story notes until its broadcast on 10 October 1968. As a case study, ‘Robert Phillips’ demonstrates the typical process of TV screenwriting in the classic network era. It is notable for Salkowitz’s efforts to address social issues by invoking the racial conflicts of the time and to develop the role of a black supporting character who regularly appeared in the series. Television writing involves a process of drafting and revising to create a story that functions within the constraints of the medium as well as the confines of genre. The development process of ‘Robert Phillips’ showcases how Salkowitz balanced an adherence to formula with an innovative approach.

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‘Shadow of Doubt’: A Story Idea Becomes an Outline ‘Robert Phillips vs. the Man’ was titled ‘Shadow of Doubt’ in its earliest stages of development. Sy Salkowitz’s undated handwritten notes sketch out his initial conception of an episode about a murder case involving two partners in an appliance store. His brief summary explains: Ted Bernard has been draining the store of funds for some time. Arthur Stavely gets on to it – accuses him. Big Trouble between them. Stavely has given Bernard a week to get money back in, doesn’t care from where. Bernard has tried to borrow money all over town and cannot – though he answers Stavely he will. (1968a)

The tension between the men culminates in Stavely’s murder. If these were the only elements of the case, investigators would presumably interview Ted Bernard, discover his financial difficulties, and establish his motive. This type of story would be too straightforward for a TV crime drama, particularly for an hour-long episode. The classic network era was characterised by a reliance on formula but narratives within the crime genre had to present enough false leads, misdirection, and twists to engage and hold viewer interest. In addition, the premise of Ironside is that the central character consults on unusual cases requiring his particular expertise due to their high profile or difficult nature. The case of a business partner committing a financially motivated murder would not necessitate the input of a specialist like Ironside. Salkowitz addressed these issues by placing the case within the social context of urban uprisings and the discourse of Black Power. His preliminary notes indicate that this would be a “Rap Brown story”, referencing the young chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who was charged with inciting a 1967 riot in Cambridge, Maryland (“Riots in 3 Cities”, 1967). Robert Phillips, a character inspired by the real-life charismatic leader, would encourage his followers to “take to the streets – take what they want” but he would not be responsible for Stavely’s murder (1968a). These initial story notes lay the groundwork for a script designed to mislead the viewer. Salkowitz includes two major pieces of circumstantial evidence against Phillips: He would be shown encouraging rioters to commit violence and he would be seen close to the scene of the crime.

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A complete outline of the episode, dated 9 April 1968, includes most of the characters and basic plot points that would appear in the finished product. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on 4 April and a wave of civil disturbances (sometimes called the Holy Week Uprising) unfolded across US cities in the days that followed. The episode’s treatment does not make specific reference to these events but at the time Salkowitz was composing it, every major American newspaper was covering the destruction wrought by protesters who were grappling with the death of the Civil Rights leader (Levy 2018). News reports were anxious about the possibility that Black Power militants such as Brown and Stokely Carmichael, who argued that violence could be a necessity in combating oppression, might replace King, who advocated non-violent resistance to institutionalised racism. In the outline, Phillips is conceived as a dangerous and unsympathetic character; he is not guilty of murder but he actively encourages others to engage in criminal activity. The story begins with newsreel footage of a neighbourhood riot showing Phillips urging on the proceedings. After it is revealed that Phillips is accused of murder, the police commissioner asks Ironside to prove him innocent in a moment meant to surprise the central character and the audience. The commissioner’s goal is to avoid provoking further violence in the city; he says that Ironside has been asked to consult because it’s “too explosive. If Phillips is guilty of that murder, I want it to be without a shadow of a doubt before we bring him to trial” (1968b). This teaser establishes that the safety of the city is in question because a possible race riot looms. It also functions to upend the typical story dynamics that arise when a detective investigates a murder suspect by positioning Ironside to help clear Phillips rather than incriminate him. Ironside attempts to collaborate with Phillips, and he asks a group of young black militants for help establishing their leader’s alibi. He is met with resistance at every turn; Phillips refuses his help, and his young followers are so concerned about facing prosecution for vandalism and thefts that they become obstacles in the investigation. As Phillips remains in custody awaiting charges, he begins to fantasise about the “impending disaster that now seems to float over the city”. Phillips tells Ironside that he expects a conflagration with the police when his followers attempt to free him. The outline explains, “Phillips is gleeful. It can only do good for his cause. It can only shake whitey up some more” (1968b). Phillips is not guilty but the synopsis makes clear that he is nevertheless a villain. Ted

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Barnard (whose name was slightly altered from the original notes) is guilty of murder, but more emphasis is placed on Phillips’s destructive aims. Notably, the outline says very little about Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell), Ironside’s assistant and the only African-American character in the show’s regular cast. When Ironside premiered with a two-hour episode that aired as a made-for-TV movie of the week in 1967, it spent a bit of time developing the dynamic between Ironside and Mark, a young black man who had been making bad choices before he was offered the opportunity to work for the former police chief. As the series became a regular part of the prime-time schedule in the fall of 1967, their relationship was rarely the focus of attention. Mark became one member of a team of people who assisted the wheelchair-bound detective, including police officers Ed Brown (Don Galloway) and Eve Whitfield (Barbara Anderson). An episode such as ‘Robert Phillips’ would suggest a greater opportunity for Mark’s involvement because of its investment in subject matter related to race. The outline, however, specifically mentions Mark’s presence in only two scenes. In Act I, Mark and Ed attempt to re-enact the murder at the appliance store, working to discover how Phillips could have stabbed Stavely. In Act II, Ironside and his team visit a group of young black militants to seek their help. The outline notes that the “young hotbloods” are “needling Mark … that he’s on the wrong side … hasn’t he looked into a mirror lately?” (1968b). This characterisation positions Mark in alliance with the law enforcement team, and clearly antagonistic towards the militants who are impeding the investigation. The script, discussed in the next section, alters this dynamic by substantially expanding Mark’s role and suggesting his personal investment in the politics of the case. The outline establishes the story’s basic structure. The teaser reveals that Ironside is charged with proving that Phillips is innocent. The beats in Acts I and II focus on the investigation, as Ironside meets with all the parties associated with the case. Each act is roughly split between beats that introduce information about the appliance store owners and beats about Phillips. At the halfway point, a police officer reveals that Phillips had publicly threatened Stavely. This would seem to indicate a stronger case against him but when the commissioner calls for a status update, the act concludes as Ironside dramatically announces that the militant leader is innocent. Act III continues to introduce new information related to the shady business dealings at the appliance store. It would seem that Phillips is about to be vindicated but the Act ends with his dramatic announcement

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that he would prefer to be unfairly prosecuted to inspire a violent uprising. The final act establishes that a riot could break out if Phillips is prosecuted. Ironside uses the threat of an uprising to encourage Barnard’s confession. As the outline concludes, Phillips is free to go but his lust for violence renders him a continuing threat to the city. This ending is unusually open-­ ended for a crime drama in the classic network system. The guilty party has been caught but the character who has been depicted as the episode’s clear villain remains free.

Investigating Racial Loyalty in the First Draft of ‘Robert Phillips’ The first full draft of the script, dated 17 May 1968, develops and clarifies the episode’s structure. Salkowitz constructs the script, beat by beat, to play upon viewer sympathies and attitudes about racism. The script follows the outline described above, opening with a teaser that emphasises the violence of the riots captured in the opening newsreel footage. Phillips’s dialogue encouraging the proceedings, reads, “If you’re pushed … push back! If you’re hit … hit back! If you’re cut or shot … kill! That’s what I said … kill!” (1968c). Black men are shown throwing bricks, destroying property and shouting, “Ashes! That’s what Phillips has been saying  – burn down the whole block!” This dialogue functions to draw a connection between the actions of the rioters and Phillips’s speeches, helping to make the case that Phillips is guilty of incitement. The action may initially seem primed to exploit social fears related to a ‘ripped from the headlines’ story but the episode itself is actually carefully constructed to avoid inflaming the fears of white viewers or the anger of black viewers. The narrative turns begin with the announcement that Ironside has been called in to attempt to exonerate Phillips. This twist puts Ironside (and the institution of law enforcement) on the side of the black militant from the opening moments of the story. Phillips’s followers are initially presented as a violent threat to the social order but each ensuing scene offers more information on the underlying conditions that led to the riot. In Act I, Ironside meets separately with Phillips and his followers; the militants distrust Ironside and state with certainty that they will not be treated fairly by the police because of racial prejudice. Their fears are rationalised for the viewer by a scene in which Ironside visits the Barnards in the hospital. Ted Barnard claims that he can’t remember any details of

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the attack and he is not certain who murdered his partner. Regardless, the script notes that his wife “bitterly” announces, “I hope they all rot in hell” (1968c). She expresses a generalised prejudice against black people, blaming “all” for the attack, without any specific proof. Scenes like this one offer indications that Barnard may not be a helpless victim; his association with racial prejudice is used to mark him as a suspicious character. In Act II, Ironside and his team visit the furniture store where the murder occurred. They have difficulty reconstructing the crime, and it begins to seem doubtful that Phillips committed it. Two white men from the “Law and Order Foundation” interrupt the investigators to encourage Ironside to pin the crime on Phillips. They are white supremacists and they see the accusation against Phillips as a perfect opportunity to remove him from the neighbourhood and the general population. Phillips and the militants have explained that they do not trust law enforcement, and these two gentlemen offer a narrative indication that this is justified. These seemingly respectable, professional white men believe that they can influence law enforcement to incarcerate a black man for a crime he did not commit. Ironside brusquely rejects their proposal, but the impact of this interaction is compounded by the next scene, in which he speaks with the dead man’s widow. He explains that there is no clear evidence against Phillips but the widow is certain that he is guilty, and she is vengeful. “I want him dead!” she screams, offering the viewer another insight into Phillips’s circumstances. The black militants are presented as unsavoury, but as the investigation continues throughout the episode, their resentment of white people and suspicions of law enforcement are presented as justified. Later in Act II, one of the militants explains to Ironside that the disturbance began because “a white cop shot a black boy” (1968c). Ironside is not investigating the uprising itself but this explanation makes it impossible for the viewer to attribute the neighbourhood unrest to the inherent violence or criminality of its residents. Further insight into the neighbourhood is developed in Act III. Ironside interviews Robert Phillips’s sister, who had argued with Stavely several weeks before he was murdered. She and her husband are presented as a respectable couple. They explain to Ironside that, like many in the neighbourhood, they purchased furniture “on time”, paying it off in regular instalments. Stavely incorrectly believed that they had missed payments; he called the sister names and repossessed her stove. In a follow-up scene, the store’s bookkeeper explains that mistakes in payment records are possible because “these people” pay in cash. It becomes clear that the white

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store owners were taking cash payments from the low-income black families in the neighbourhood, speaking to them in abusive language, and unfairly reclaiming their purchases. A third scene in the sequence introduces an accountant who explains that the furniture store was positioned to profit effectively because the store owners were responsible for financing. In this scene, Mark makes clear that he understands that this financial scheme relies on exploiting the black neighbourhood; they paid higher prices as a result of the instalment plan. This progression of events helps the viewer to understand the footage of the neighbourhood disturbance from the episode’s teaser. As Ironside gets more information about the dynamics of the community, the frustration that is evident in that footage becomes more coherent. In a pivotal scene, Ironside returns to visit the dead man’s wife. Her racial bias is made apparent when she refuses to allow Mark to enter her home. Although she is a widow, the episode is not sympathetic to her perspective. Like Mrs Barnard, she irrationally places blame on black people and Ironside’s disgust with her is readily apparent. Ironside informs the woman that her husband’s business was in financial trouble, and in a panic, she asks for a ride to her attorney’s office. In a triumphant moment, Ironside declines by turning her prejudice back on her, indicating Mark and telling her, “He doesn’t want you in his car”. By this point in the episode, the narrative has completely shifted from a focus on violence incited by a black militant to a focus on crimes encouraged or enabled by white racism. In the Act IV climax, Ironside and Mark visit the Barnards’ home, where black protesters have gathered on the sidewalk. Inside, Ironside confronts Ted with the accusations that he is a liar, thief, adulterer, and murderer. He initially declines to confess and Ironside threatens to tell the gathering crowd that he framed Phillips. Barnard expresses his fear of the black men, saying, “They’ll come in here and tear me apart!” (1968c). In what is clearly intended to be the scene’s biggest surprise, Ironside calls two men from the protest in to arrest Barnard. They are black police officers who he embedded with the protesters. The group did not have the potential for violence because they were being managed by the forces of law and order. It is a moment of irony, as the white man who is actually a murderer is fearful of the criminal potential of a group of people that he has criminally exploited with his business practices. In a significant shift from the episode’s outline, the discussion of race is overt and continuous in the full script. Mark’s role is substantially expanded

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and Salkowitz uses his characters to serve more than one function. In the Act II scene with the Law and Order Foundation and the Act III scene with the widow Stavely, Mark is present to highlight the racism of these other characters. In the scenes investigating the financial malfeasance of the appliance store, Mark functions as an interpreter for the viewer. His dialogue in the scene with the accountant underscores that the appliance store was profiting from the poverty and desperation of those who lived in the neighbourhood. Throughout the entire script, Mark functions as a figure whose loyalty might be divided between law enforcement (and his work for Ironside) and militance (his sympathy for the cause of Phillips and his followers). The script includes multiple scenes in which Mark endures abuse and taunts from Phillips and the militants, but he also claims that he sympathises with their position. At the midpoint of the episode’s outline, Ironside dramatically announces that Phillips is innocent. In the script, this scene is replaced by one in which Ironside and Mark meet with the police commissioner, who fears an impending riot. The commissioner “pauses next to Mark and drops his hand on his shoulder”, saying, “At least we know that when the chips are down, not everybody’s going to be against us.” After a pause Mark responds, “Don’t bet on it” (1968c). The script indicates that the Act fades out on the commissioner’s stunned reaction. There is no clear motivation in the script to indicate why Mark would feel drawn to the cause of the militants. This scene adds a new layer of suspense to the proceedings. Ironside has not yet determined the Phillips is innocent but Mark is indicating that no matter the verdict, his loyalty may not lie with the interests of law enforcement. As a result, Mark plays a far more involved role in this narrative than in a typical Ironside episode.

Revising ‘Robert Phillips’: An Antagonist Becomes an Ally In July and August of 1968, ‘Robert Phillips vs. the Man’ underwent seven rounds of minor revisions. For example, Mrs Barnard’s exclamation, “I hope they all rot in hell!” was changed to “I hope they all rot” in an 9 August revision (1968e). The omission of harsh language was a typical network note and may have been made in accordance with a request from NBC’s standards and practices. Salkowitz did not retain notes from the show’s producers or network censors, so it’s unclear what motivated the

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minor changes that he made to the dialogue and the story during this process. The most substantial revisions in these drafts address the characterisation of Robert Phillips and the episode’s concluding scene. Both the story outline and original script characterise Phillips as a provocateur seeking to inspire a riot. He not only doubts Ironside’s ability to help him prove his innocence but he actively impedes the investigation out of a desire to see a violent conflagration result. Revisions to the script during the summer of 1968 worked to soften his character into a more responsible leader. A revised script from 30 July contains two drafts of a scene that would have included Ironside, the police commissioner and Phillips discussing mounting tensions in the city. In both versions, Phillips worries that “You could lose valuable lives if the unnecessary presence of police starts something …” The commissioner states that Phillips would like that outcome and the leader responds, “We’ve got a communications gap, Mr. Commissioner. I never preached murder … I preached self-­ defense” (1968d). This exchange does not appear in the original script, and it was not included in the actual episode. It indicates that during the process of revising the script, the production was concerned about humanising Phillips. This same concern is evident in the many changes that were made to the episode’s conclusion. Throughout the script’s development, every version concludes with a last scene between Ironside and Phillips. The outline states that although a citywide riot has been avoided, Phillips will “find another way to start one. There is silent angry understanding between the two men. Ironside will find a way to stop him!” (1968b). The original script ends with Phillips promising that there will be other explosions. After he leaves the office, Ironside tells his team, “We’ll wait … from now on … for the sound of that bomb” (1968c). In the 30 July revision, Phillips makes his threat and exits. The commissioner says, “Something’s got to be done!” and Ironside angrily responds, “Well it won’t be done standing in an office!” (1968d). Each of these scenes attempts a dramatic finish to the story by emphasising the looming threat that Phillips still poses. Ironside has proved that he did not commit one particular murder, but the militant leader remains intent on wreaking havoc to further his political ends. As Salkowitz continued to revise, he reworked the last scene to better fit the story’s structure. The progression of the episode led the viewer to understand not only the details of the murder case, but the circumstances of the neighbourhood and the prevalence of racial animus among white

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people. In other words, the episode encourages an understanding of Phillips’s cause, which Ironside is aligned with throughout the episode (as he rejects the racism of the white people he interacts with). In the 12 August revision, Phillips offers a vague threat before exiting and the commissioner notes that they are all after the same goal. Ironside responds, “He knows. It’s just a question of which he thinks is the quickest way … his or ours” (1968f). Again, the beat includes the looming possibility of violence but in this version law enforcement insists that they support the ends that Phillips seeks. The actual episode includes a different iteration of the scene and the scripted revision is not included in Salkowitz’s papers, which suggests that the change may have been made during production. Ironside and his team are present with Phillips in the final scene, and the last lines of dialogue are as follows: Phillips: Ironside: Phillips: Ironside:

We’re going to get what we want, Mr. Ironside. You should. And there are people who’d like to help you. You can’t help me. You can’t. You didn’t think I could prove you were innocent, either.

A shot of Phillips considering this is followed by a shot of Mark standing behind Ironside and looking at Phillips. The moment resolves the question of Mark’s loyalty, not because he had to choose one side or the other, but because the two sides are united. This is followed by a shot of Ironside and a shot of Phillips smiling and subtly nodding, indicating that the two men share an understanding. This version recalls Phillips’s initial refusal to cooperate with the police and his distrust of law enforcement and turns it into the revelation that the institution might be supportive of his mission. Across drafts, the scene evolved from a depiction of Phillips as a violent threat to the social order to a depiction of the social order as an advocate of his agenda. By presenting law enforcement as benevolent and anti-racist, the episode ultimately functions to align the goals of the white-­ dominated institution with the goals of black militants. The closing scene suggests black radicalism should accept white goodwill rather than viewing the institution of law enforcement as an enemy.

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Conclusion Ironside, a popular crime drama from the classic network era, exemplifies the traditional conventions of its genre. Its individual episodes uphold respect for social institutions by reiterating the intellectual and moral authority of law enforcement. Each instalment introduces a crime, follows Ironside’s investigation, and concludes when the guilty party has been apprehended. Despite this clear reliance on formula, however, a study of ‘Robert Phillips vs. the Man’ reveals a far more complex and creative process. The murder case at the episode’s core is ‘open and shut’ but as Sy Salkowitz conceived of it, the surrounding context related to black militants and urban uprisings brought the story a sense of urgency and social relevance. A typical season of Ironside included at least 25 episodes, and each went through a similar months-long period of development. Writers including Salkowitz were able to engage and surprise viewers by playing with expectations and exploring characters in ways that could make individual episodes engaging and surprising. The Kerner Report suggested that TV programming needed to do more to acknowledge social change related to race in all types of programming. The widely publicised report was much discussed in the TV industry, in part because it was one facet of a larger cultural conversation about representations of race, civil rights, and equality. Salkowitz’s script addressed the recommendations of the Kerner Report by staging a conversation about racism, inequality and the root causes of riots. As his script developed, he moved away from a conclusion that would suggest that law enforcement was incapable of handling the threat posed by black militants. That bleak ending appeared in draft after draft, but it was ultimately rejected in favour of a resolution that fit the crime drama’s formula more effectively. Instead of suggesting that the forces of law and order would wait for the next volley from the revolutionaries who sought to unseat them, the episode concludes that law enforcement is anti-racist and supportive of a transformed society. Programming in the classic network era was criticised as escapist entertainment and the unrealistic conclusion of ‘Robert Phillips’ provides an example of how TV could elide and oversimplify difficult social issues. Despite its unlikely ending, it also demonstrates how a prolific television writer could use familiar genre elements to tell a story that asks viewers to sympathise with the perspectives of urban black people.

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As Sy Salkowitz drafted and revised ‘Robert Phillips vs. the Man’, it evolved from an idea to use a black militant as a decoy antagonist who would play upon the fears of viewers, misdirecting them until the last act revealed the real killer. The finished product became a more nuanced tale that acknowledged the forces that fomented urban uprisings, including white supremacy and economic exploitation of urban black people. Salkowitz worked within the classic network system, negotiating commercial and generic constraints that were presumed to discourage complex storytelling.

References Brown, L. (1971). Television: The Business Behind the Box. New York: Harcourt. Hilmes, M. (2007). NBC: America’s Network. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hrach, T. J. (2016). The Riot Report and the News: How the Kerner Commission Changed Media Coverage of Black America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Levy, P. B. (2018). The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mittell, J. (2008). The ‘Classic Network System’ in the U.S.  In The Television History Book. London: BFI. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. (1968). The Kerner Report: The 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. New York: Pantheon. Nichols-Pethick, J. (2012). TV Cops: The Contemporary American Police Drama. New York: Routledge. Riots in 3 Cities Laid to Brown and Carmichael. (1967, August 3). Los Angeles Times, p. 1. Salkowitz, S. (1968a). Handwritten notes, undated, Box 13, Folder 4, Sy Salkowitz papers, Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS). Salkowitz, S. (1968b). “Shadow of Doubt” outline, 9 April, Box 13, Folder 4, Salkowitz papers, WHS. Salkowitz, S. (1968c). “Shadow of Doubt” draft, 17 May, Box 13, Folder 4, Salkowitz papers, WHS. Salkowitz, S. (1968d). “Shadow of Doubt” draft, 30 July, Box 13, File 5, Salkowitz papers, WHS. Salkowitz, S. (1968e). “Robert Phillips vs. The Man,” revisions, 9 August, Box 13, Folder 5, Salkowitz papers, WHS. Salkowitz, S. (1968f). “Robert Phillips vs. The Man,” revisions, 12 August, Box 13, Folder 5, Salkowitz papers, WHS.

Telling Stories About Yesterday’s Hero for Today’s World: The Script Development of the Chilean TV Series Heroes (2006–2007) Carmen Sofia Brenes, Margaret McVeigh, Alejandro C. Reid, and Alberto N. García

Introduction The TV miniseries Heroes (2006–2007) was a six-part historical series produced to commemorate Chile’s 200  years of independence from Spain (1810–2010). The series, currently used as educational material in Chilean schools, was produced by Channel 13, one of the four biggest national TV stations in the country. The first episode aired on 23 March 2007 and the

C. S. Brenes (*) • A. C. Reid Universidad de los Andes, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M. McVeigh Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] A. N. García Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_7

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last on 19 May 2009. Each episode revolves around one Chilean figure who participated in defining events for the independence of the nation. Against this production background, this chapter addresses how the screenwriters created the persona of the anti-hero in the writing of this celebratory series. Heroes is a narrative where the key challenge was to create engaging characters who could be perceived as national ‘heroes’ in the context of a contemporary series when their historical actions were in fact those of ‘unheroic’ real people: individuals who the audience would actually consider ‘anti-heroes’ by today’s moral standards. In this chapter, we trace how the screenwriters of Heroes created the character of the hero/anti-hero as both protagonist and antagonist. Firstly, we outline the situation the writers faced in researching and recreating the real-life characters of Bernardo O’Higgins, José Miguel Carrera, and Manuel Rodríguez. This included the challenge of delving into the psychology of characters—who were by contemporary standards prejudiced misogynists who mistreated women, ordered murders, and fathered illegitimate children who they ignored—and presenting them as heroes, particularly when the target audience was school children. Secondly, we consider key strategies developed in the study of the anti-hero in television studies (Blanchet and Vaage 2012; García 2016) and distil these as a means of considering how to frame the creation of the anti-hero in screenwriting. As we will outline, there are four dramatic tools—moral comparison, family as a moral balm, victimisation, and remorse—used to build allegiance in the viewer. These strategies allow for a better understanding of the motives and the context that justify or explain the reprehensible actions of the protagonists despite the moral revulsion that those actions could cause in the spectator. Finally, we delve into the specificity of the script development of Heroes in relation to the depiction of anti-heroic protagonists. The narrative strategies involved in creating the figure of the anti-hero, while also exploring the complexity of the process of writing and producing the transposition to TV fiction of historical facts that could be controversial, are of particular interest from a screenwriting perspective in considering this series. The main narrative question was how to maintain and renew narrative interest while dealing with morally complex issues that cast these Chilean ‘heroes’ as anti-heroes with who an audience would not wish to identify.

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The Link Between Script Development, Television Studies, and Anti-heroes This chapter therefore contributes to the field of script development in what Mittell (2015) has termed “Complex TV” by focusing specifically on the development of character. It complements Fernando Canet’s recent essay on relationship arcs in serial anti-hero narratives (2019); Paulo Russo’s article regarding storyline and audience engagement (2017)— which focuses on the development of multiple storylines across the episodes of the TV series Gomorra; and Radha O’Meara’s study around character change in episodic television (2015). It also builds on Carmen Sofia Brenes’ (2018) work around issues and decisions the screenwriter must make when creating a feature film based on reality. Therefore, in this chapter, we focus on the development of the character in Heroes, in particular the development of the ‘hero’ character, specifically the creation of characters based on historical fact. To this end, we draw upon concepts from the established arena of critical TV studies where there exists a significant body of literature around the topic of audience engagement in TV series, particularly with anti-heroes (Blanchet and Vaage 2012; García 2016). In doing so, it builds on the work of Margaret McVeigh in her integration of narrative and screenwriting theory to consider the creative decisions made by the screenwriter. She notes that “the field of critical television studies […] rather than focus on the structural aspects of storytelling” is to foreground thematic and aesthetic analysis (2019, forthcoming). We will draw on findings from this field to help us understand how the audience can engage with characters who we would not historically have engaged with as the ‘hero’ before the recent series TV lead characters of, for example, Breaking Bad’s ‘everyday dad’ turned drug lord Walter White, or the beloved mafia dad Tony Soprano of The Sopranos. Notwithstanding, as the title of this volume makes clear, script development is the core aspect of this study, and both TV studies and anti-hero theory are subordinated to it. Research into script development is an emerging field. In their article, ‘Script Development: Defining the Field’, screenwriting researchers Batty et  al. interrogate the definition of script development and note that there is still much research to be done (2017, p. 240). Batty et al. also note that notions of plot, character, story, theme, and emotional impact are central to script development and they question: “What development actually entails: which aspects of screenwriting craft beyond plot are used in/by/for script development, and what tools are

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used to achieve this?” (2017, p. 228). The practice of script development may take many forms including primary research, writers’ rooms, readers’ reports, and investor feedback. Kerrigan and Batty posit that “These aspects give script development a strong sense of not only industrialization, but also emotion whereby constant negotiations are made between the self (ideas, visions, feedback) and the commercial product” (2016, p. 136). This investigation of script development in this chapter will be undertaken by investigating decisions made by the writers from the perspective of one of the writers involved in the project and a co-author of this chapter, Alejandro C. Reid.

Writing and Producing Heroes, an Historical Biopic Producing Heroes was a complex task. The first proposal was about the unknown heroes who built Chile with theirs ideals and effort because a lot has already been told in relation to the revolutionary ones. Thus, the first approach was to build the series around the lesser-known heroes who did a lot for the country but their lives were more those of the ‘common folk’. Any script based on a real character must be adapted to follow traditional script development techniques, and so the challenge was greater with these characters. However, in South America, there is no powerful public television entity, so the networks depend on big local audiences, and those audiences want the same stories repeatedly. In fact, the Heroes executive producers undertook a focus group study and its results changed everything. The people in the focus group did not really know the chosen characters, which they felt did not represent the values of Chilean independence. After losing the ‘first battle’—that is, the original idea of telling stories of unknown historical personas—the team went back to the traditional characters, the ‘national heroes’ popular to everyone, and developed the six episodes (Reid 2018). In any case, the writing of an historical TV series provides significant challenges to the creative team. Any documentary, film, or series based on fact usually starts with research. Because the majority of the past is only partially known, this process involves researching many types of documents—paintings, personal letters, private diaries, and places—where they still exist. In the case of Heroes, the screenwriters managed to get as much information as they could from factual primary sources: old letters, pictures from the national gallery, and private diaries of the characters. Historical documents can record the actions of the characters—what they

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did, when they did it, and where they did it. As producer Alejandro Reid from Canal 13, the production house that developed Heroes, observed: “We can track a character to a specific place, and to a specific moment. We can research and understand how those places were in the past from the architectural point of view and in a contemporary series develop them carefully to replicate them as they were” (2018). Once the writers had the facts, the task was to build the psychology of the characters. This is the most difficult phase in the research. To understand the psychology of the characters, the psychology of the writer must also come into play. For example, the two main characters of the series, O’Higgins and Carrera, had opposite approaches to independence, and depending on which researcher you ask, they will ‘prefer’ one of them as the ‘real’ hero. Consequently, the writer is the one who will make the psychology of the character work. You need the experience to make the theory work and you need the theory to drive experiences (Indick 2004) because the key challenge in writing an historical biopic is to try to understand the character behind the facts: How and why they performed certain actions and what were they thinking when they performed these actions. One device used in the series to reveal this character psychology is the figure of the confidant aide or the friend. “Having someone from the circle of the character who helps the writer to develop the story, although in real life he or she never existed, helps the audience to understand the internal world of the character and the inner motives that drive him” (Reid 2018). However, this is a script construct. To construct the psychology of the character, the writer aligns different sources of information and, above all, works to find his “own version of truth” (Bingham 2010, p. 10). This act of “interpretation”, as Rosenstone puts it (2014, p. 13), “necessarily implies taking a stand on what is narrated” (Brenes 2018, p. 214). As Reid explains, “Every historical series has a central spine which is based on the facts, writings, diaries and documents gleaned from the character’s life. But all that surrounds that central spine is fiction” (2018). The decisions that a writer must make in telling reality depend on the key ideas that the writer wishes to adapt from reality, and as adaptation theorist Thomas Leitch proposes, the process of adaptation allows for the removal or decreasing attention paid to source texts to allow adaptation to suit the purposes of the writer as the “work-in-progress of institutional practices of re-writing” (Leitch in Thornley 2018, p.  3). Consequently the writers decided to sacrifice historical fidelity for dramatic reasons, that is, fictionality and spectacle overcame rigorous truth. Writers kept the central facts of

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history but embellished some details to increase the dramatic impact of them. For example, Reid (2018) notes, “During the writings of O’Higgins we had to exaggerate some relations, for example, Carrera hits O’Higgins in one scene, which resulted in a duel, which was illegal in that time. But for today’s audience it is a clear representation of the tension between them”.

Complex TV and the Anti-hero In the case of Heroes, the de facto Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG)—the writers, producers, and directors who were involved in the project (Macdonald 2013)—aimed to tell the story of six Chilean leaders, depicting them as ‘heroes’, that is, as people who had played a vital and valuable part in the Chile’s history. This perspective immediately required that the SIWG work on the present perception of past events. As traditions have changed, it became apparent that “what was once perceived as a good or bad way of behaving is now perceived in exactly the opposite manner. The biggest challenge during the writing and producing process was to tell the story in a way it could be socially acceptable” (Reid 2018). This tension between fact and fiction in Heroes, as Brenes notes regarding another biopic film, was “not so much that each scene should be ‘historically correct’ (Vande Winkel 2007, p. 206) but that we understand why the authors have opted for presenting a particular scene in a particular way, […] without betraying the larger narrative” (Brenes, 2018, p. 214). In reality, the lives of these three characters were problematic. Bernardo O’Higgins was an illegitimate son and he fathered two illegitimate children. He was also a misogynist, denying women the right to an education. José Miguel Carrera, the strategist behind Chile’s independence, was much more focused on the military cause than on his neglected family. Manuel Rodríguez also fathered an illegitimate son, born the year he was killed. Rodríguez was so popular that a jealous O’Higgins ordered him killed in 1818. Given these unpalatable facts, what strategies may a screenwriter employ to create a “hero” as required by the series brief to celebrate and emotionally engage new generations with leading figures of Chile’s independence? How can a screenwriter create a character based on the life of a person who is, in fact, someone audiences today would regard as an ‘anti-hero’? What can we learn or theorise about script development regarding these anti-hero narratives? To propose an answer to this question, we turn to the field of critical TV studies, where the moral engagement between audience and anti-hero

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has been widely studied. Critical TV studies theory will allow us to shed light on how the screenwriters tackle problematic moral and dramatic issues during their script development. In this field, we specifically consider the work of cognitive media scholars Murray Smith (1995), Noël Carroll (2004), and Carl Plantinga (2010), who have provided some of the most comprehensive surveys of an audience’s emotional engagement with cinema and TV characters. According to them, the audience identifies with a fictional character when they observe their positive merits: their remarkable skills, courage in face of adversity or benevolent dedication to others—attributes that are examples of classical heroic traits. However, in the case of anti-heroes—such as those populating the Chilean TV series Heroes—these honourable talents coincide with some salient murky traits, including infidelity, violence, and psychopathy. In such cases, in writing the script, the screenwriter must use strategies that reduce the dramatic impact of the undesirable qualities by providing a wider contextual knowledge of the characters, including their backstory, their positive relations with other characters and several sympathy-triggering attributes. Drawing from Smith’s (1995) “structure of sympathy”, for allegiance to be successful in the case of an anti-hero narrative, the audience needs to build a balanced system of moral values for the character, the situation, and the fictional world in which they operate. To be precise, the latter cannot happen without the former. Thus what takes place is not an annulment of the moral criteria, but rather a reconfiguration of judgement grounded on dramatic and narrative causes (relating to the character and the situation, respectively). Consequently, when a character such as Bernardo O’Higgins performs immoral actions, our moral sympathy towards him gets affected. This moral tension emerges as part of the dramatic appeal of anti-heroic narratives. In this sense, the very nature of the serial narrative helps the audience’s engagement with the anti-hero because one of the essential tropes of the anti-heroic serial is that it questions, for dramatic purposes, our allegiance to the antihero as a strategy to advance the plot, generate suspense, and renew its dramatic conflict repeatedly. Writers have to rekindle cyclically the sympathy that viewers feel towards the anti-hero—despite his/her immoralities—so that the conflicts reproduce and the narrative can develop across multiple episodes or seasons. In short, we can recuperate our sympathy at regular intervals, precisely because of the specific form, duration, and dramatic needs of TV narrative. This affects how

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scripts are developed, because of the need of maintaining the dramatic tension over many episodes. This accent on a sufficient narrative and dramatic elaboration are noteworthy since TV series offer a wider prospect than other formats to develop characters, relationships, and plots, thanks to their protracted textual duration. This is, obviously, the first and most striking difference between the TV narratives and others of shorter length, such as feature films. As Blanchet and Vaage note, the duration of the serial narrative allows viewers to forge a more intense dramatic link with characters, since it increases the viewers’ perception of sharing a story with them, due not only to the duration of the narrative, but also because the audience’s life evolves alongside a show’s seasons (2012, p. 28). The broader and deeper knowledge of the character’s life—a more multifaceted understanding that is not limited to their criminal role—as well as the long accompaniment of the audience, manages to generate a familiarity between viewer and protagonist that allows the former to develop affective ties capable of overcoming the moral rejection of the actions of the latter. The greater the access to the intimate life of the characters – to their inner worlds, the foundations of their life projects, the understanding of the reasons for their conduct and conflicts – the greater the emotional complicity of the audience with them. Here, the “friendship” metaphor proposed by Blanchett and Vaage as a characteristic of TV anti-heroes acquires its fullness: The television narrative, expanded for hours, enables familiarity—friendship—with characters, thus promoting allegiance (2012, p. 28). However, the mere temporal exposition does not generate by itself moral sympathy for a character, particularly when the latter exercises questionable behaviours. Therefore, all TV narratives have a number of tools designed to strengthen allegiance.

The Narrative Strategies of the Anti-hero in the Script Development of Heroes The stories told in ‘O’Higgins’, ‘Carrera’, and ‘Rodríguez’ present a common enemy: the Spanish crown, which since the Conquest, exercised power in Latin America. However, it is interesting to note that in these episodes, there is no Spanish character that has enough development to be considered an antagonist. This decision was made to present the audience with the idea that sometimes your enemy is closer than you think.

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Therefore, the true antagonists of each story are the same patriots who star in the other two episodes. The three ‘heroes’ have the same goal: to achieve the independence of Chile; however, their actions do not align in doing this. From a script development point of view, each of the heroes was intended to also be enemies of each other at the same time. As Reid recalls, “We were trying to explain that one fact always has different perspectives and points of view” (2018). First, the anti-heroic protagonist enjoys a moral advantage over other evil characters because ‘moral comparison’ operates. There are different degrees of evil and, as Heroes progresses, the narrative predisposes the audience to interpret the Chilean dignitaries’ actions as ‘the lesser evil’. Without denying their ethical failings, the audience shows emotional loyalty for Carrera and O’Higgins despite their violent actions because their choices are perceived as much better than the other moral choices within this fictional world (the evilness of Spaniards). To observe the use of the strategy of the confrontation of evil as a way of configuring the anti-hero, we will analyse two scenes from ‘Carrera, the prince of the roads’, where the antagonism between the protagonist Carrera with Bernardo O’Higgins occurs. In the first scene (18 minutes), O’Higgins does not appear in person but is only mentioned by Carrera, then Supreme Chief, when he tells his subordinates that he will hand over command to O’Higgins to avoid a civil war and because he considers him to be the only general who “will not run to sign the peace with the Realists” (Chileans in favour of the Spanish regime). A few minutes later (28  minutes), we know that O’Higgins has signed a peace treaty with the Spaniards because he considered it “the most sensible” thing to do. In this second event, the character does appear on the screen. The scene occurs after a strong defeat by the Spaniards. Reid detailed how this issue was handled during the script development: “Each of the stories’ points of view reflects today, different perceptions of the characters, so the ones who believe that O’Higgins is the real hero will prefer his episode. From the point of view of the script development we equalized the different forces with a unique perspective on each chapter” (2018). Carrera arrives at the camp and finds O’Higgins worried. There is an argument between both characters that is filmed, as suggested by the script, through Carrera’s dialogue. O’Higgins appears as an ambitious person who wants to achieve “glory, power” and is portrayed as a fool and traitor, who “has provoked a battle between brothers”. The action ends

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with a gesture of goodwill on the part of Carrera: He will reconcile with O’Higgins to appear united in front of the troops and prevent them from becoming demoralised. This scene marks the trend of the rest of the film where Carrera’s ambition and personality appear as evil, but never as bad as the ambition and personality of O’Higgins. “The characters are moved to perform facts by internal deliberations”, Reid clarifies, “which we normally suppose or rebuild, but the real fact is unknown” (2018). In addition, he continues: “We had the story; we needed to present a perspective from each of the characters. We needed to move the character to the audience, so then the audience could feel with the character” (Reid 2018). Another dramatic mechanism used to emphasise the moral sympathy for the anti-hero involves family. The anti-hero’s family becomes a morally noble motive with which the audience sympathises. From a script development point of view, therefore, the family acts as a justifiable ‘excuse’ to perform drastic, dangerous, and ethically problematic deeds. However, in addition to being a pretext and a dramatic motivation necessary to sustain the narrative, the family unit acts as an element of characterisation for O’Higgins, Carrera, and Rodríguez. The sincere affection for their loved ones, which is threatened by Spanish demands and brutality, takes the protagonists closer to a quotidian drama where the audience can sympathise with the anti-hero. In the episodes that we have discussed, these noble motives are focused on two areas, the good of the Chilean homeland and the family of heroes. This is demonstrated, for example, in O’Higgins’ voiceover in scene eight of ‘Live to deserve his name’, the O’Higgins episode, where he laments the decisions he had to make: BERNARDO (OFF) This is the moment. How many sacrifices have been necessary to build this enterprise that nobody had faith on! We did it!(…) This has been my mission, and I have fulfilled it… now the future of America depends on the destiny of these four boards. Look at me father; have I been the worthy son of your name? (Kalawski and Larraín 2007, pp. 43–44).

The heroic and simultaneously tender tone of the scene justifies all the decisions and actions that we have seen before and will see later, including the order to shoot the brothers of José Miguel Carrera, O’Higgins’ staunch enemy.

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Victimisation is the third strategy to create a dramatically effective anti-­ hero. As Plantinga has explained, “we sympathize with characters when we believe that they are in danger and must be protected, when they are suffering or bereaved, or when we believe that someone has been treated unfairly” (2010, p. 41). Hence, the suffering of cruelty and injustice by others are usually sources of sympathy, both in real life and in fiction. To illustrate this strategy, we will use the first sequence of ‘Rodríguez, the son of rebellion’. The movie is told in a flashback by his father’s voiceover. At the beginning, we see the sick mother of Manuel Rodríguez and then we see a scene of a very young Rodríguez with his father. As Reid states, society at that time was so different from today, so the writers “needed to emphasize the distance between fathers and children; the kids where raised by the mothers” (Reid 2018). They talk about the act that will occur the next day, in which the board of the University of San Felipe will give its resolution on whether or not to give Manuel the title of doctor in law, taking into account that he has not been able to pay the expenses attached to the procedure, even if he has met the corresponding requirements. Manuel’s father doubts that they will give it to him, and he hurts for not being able to give his son an education. Manuel is convinced that they will give him the title. The following lines are exchanged: MANUEL Why you are so pessimistic? They can’t reject it! That would be an injustice. CARLOS [FATHER] When decision is in men’s hands, you cannot always expect justice, Manuel … (Cuevas et al. 2007b, p. 3)

Remorse is the last strategy employed by the screenwriters to promote sympathy for a morally compromised character. When a protagonist trespasses the limit of what the audience can morally stomach, writers usually rehumanise the character through a strong reaction of guilt. This can be seen when Carrera is devastated after witnessing the brutality his ‘Montoneros’ army committed on innocent civilians on his way to the Andes. By assuming their portion of culpability, the protagonists of Heroes get to decrease the scope of their wrongdoing, so that the audience can re-establish a marred moral sympathy for them. To illustrate this last

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strategy—remorse—we consider a scene from ‘Carrera, the prince of the roads’. It occurs in the last third of the Carrera episode (82 minutes). The men of Carrera travel with great difficulty through the Argentine pampa; their objective is to reach and cross the Andes Mountains and enter Chile. They are tired, without water and without enough ammunition to confront the army of José de San Martin, who has ordered their capture. When they arrive at a poor village, Carrera’s men enter and devastate the few soldiers who shelter in it, killing their children and chasing their women. In the scene we discuss, Carrera had just given the order to stop the looting. He gets off his horse and sees a woman crying, hugging her dead son. The sequence, as suggested by the script, is intercut with a medium shot zooming to a close-up of Carrera, and point-of-view shots of the woman with her child. The work of the actor, the music and the slow movement of the camera on the face of Carrera, allows us to understand his confusion and remorse. At that moment, the hero hears a girl screaming, defending herself from a man who drags her. Carrera orders the soldier to stop. Turning, he sees one of his trusted men who apologizes, saying: “But General, you said we could take what we wanted”. There is a close-up shot of the man’s hand caressing the neck of the girl, who is terrified. Carrera slowly raises the weapon and shoots his soldier, killing him. Then, he drops to his knees in front of the girl, hugs her and says: “Shhh, quiet, Javierita, quiet. Here is the dad [the article before the word dad is a Chilean idiom]”. Undoubtedly, Carrera is thinking about his daughter Javiera, whom he has left in Santiago with her mother. “We needed to build in one scene the atrocity of war, the remaining (sic) of a moral structure in our hero, the violent behavior of soldiers and at the same time redeem our character” (Reid 2018). The trait of conversion is added to the strategy of remorse, which helps to make the character acceptable.

Conclusion The writers of Heroes were presented with a challenging task. As producer Reid observes in the writing of this series based on real people and the creation of their characters: We can investigate the psychology of people of that time, we can try to follow some patterns to understand the normal behavior, but normally the heroes will not follow normal behaviors, the people who changed the history were special people, they didn’t followed (sic) the common path. (2018)

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The characters who are the heroes of this TV series were, following Reid’s comment, people just like O’Higgins, Carrera and Rodríguez. In this chapter, we have investigated the narrative strategies involved in creating the figure of the anti-hero as one aspect of script development, while also exploring the complexity of the process of writing and production that was derived from the transposition to TV fiction of historical facts that were controversial. As we have discussed, those whose lives are explored in this series are characters who, when viewed through a modern cultural and social lens, would be seen as non-heroic. By drawing on Smith’s (1995) “structure of sympathy” and applying García’s (2016) theory of creating audience engagement with an anti-hero, we have considered how the screenwriters and producers of Heroes were able to retell the story of ‘anti-­ hero’ figures from the past in a way that maintained narrative interest and audience engagement. The contribution to the script development field comes from the valuable insights that one of the writers of Heroes provides, engaging his writing process with the theoretical issues we have explored herein.

References Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script development: Defining the field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 225–247. https://doi. org/10.1386/jocs.8.3.225_1. Bingham, D. (2010). Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Blanchet, R., & Vaage, M. B. (2012). Don, Peggy, and Other Fictional Friends? Engaging with Characters in Television Series. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 6(2), 18–41. Brenes, C. S. (2018). Fact and Fiction in Jackie (2016): Revisiting a Biopic with Paul Ricoeur. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(2), 211–225. https://doi. org/10.1386/josc.9.2.211_1. Canet, F. (2019). More Therapy with Dr Melfi (The Character Who Guides Viewer Engagement with Tony Soprano): Relationship Arcs in Serial Antihero Narratives. Journal of Screenwriting, 10(1), 97–112. Carrera, el príncipe de los caminos (Carrera, The Prince of the Roads) (2007a, 113 min.). Writer: Rodrigo Cuevas Gallegos. Director: Cristián Galaz. Production company: Canal 13 and Delirio Films. Carroll, N. (2004). Sympathy for the Devil. In R. Greene & P. Vernezze (Eds.), The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am (pp.  121–136). Chicago: Open Court.

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García, A. N. (2016). Moral Emotions, Antiheroes and the Limits of Allegiance. In A.  N. García (Ed.), Emotions in Contemporary TV Series (pp.  52–70). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Indick, W. (2004). Psychology for Screenwriters: Building Conflict in Your Script. Los Angeles: Michael Wiese Productions. Kerrigan, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Re-conceptualizing Screenwriting for the Academy: The Social, Cultural and Creative Practice of Developing a Screenplay. New Writing, 13(1), 130–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/1479072 6.2015.1134580. Macdonald, I. W. (2013). Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McVeigh, M. (2019). Theme and Complex Narrative Structure in HBO’s Big Little Lies (2017). Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media Special Issue. Forthcoming. Mittell, J. (2015). Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. O’Higgins, vivir para merecer su nombre (O’Higgins, Live to deserve his name) (2007, 115 min.), Writer: Andrés Kalawski and Ricardo Larraín. Director: Ricardo Larraín. Production company: Canal 13 and Cine XXI. O’Meara, R. (2015). Changing the Way We Think About Character Change in Episodic Television Series. Journal of Screenwriting, 6(2), 189–201. Plantinga, C. (2010). ‘I Followed the Rules, and they all Loved You More’: Moral Judgment and Attitudes Toward Fictional Characters in Film. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 34(1), 34–51. Reid, A. (2018). Heroes: Producer. Notes and emails. Rodríguez, el hijo de la rebeldía (Rodriguez, Son of rebelliousness) (2007b, 119 min.) Writer: Rodrigo Cuevas Gallegos, Andrea Ugalde and Cristián Galaz. Director: Cristián Galaz. Production company: Canal 13 and Delirio Films. Rosenstone, R. A. (2014). History on Film/Film on History. New York: Routledge. Russo, P. (2017). Storylining Engagement with Repulsive Antiheroes. Towards a Cognitive Poetics of TV Serial Drama Narrative: The Case of Gomorrah – The Series. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(1), 5–21. Smith, M. (1995). Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thornley, D. (2018). Introduction: Scripting Real Lives. In D. Thornley (Ed.), True Event Adaptation. Scripting Real Lives (pp. 3–10). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vande Winkel, R. (2007). Hitler’s Downfall, a film from Germany (Der Untergang, 2004). In L. Engelen and R. Vande Winkel (Eds.), Perspectives on European Film and History (pp. 183–220). Gent: Academia, pp. 183–220.

Nordic Noir with an Icelandic Twist: Establishing a Shared Space for Collaboration Within European Coproduction Rosamund Davies

Introduction The practice of script development is a collective process in which a range of collaborators engage in dialogue and negotiation to produce a screenplay and ultimately a screen work (Macdonald 2004, 2010; Redvall 2013; Taylor and Batty 2016). Meanwhile, the process of coproduction involves the challenge of bringing together collaborators of different nationalities with different cultural frames of reference to collectively create a screen story that can appeal to both national and international audiences (Buonanno 2015; O’Connell 2015; L.  Cotta Ramosino, personal communication, January 2019). The practice of script development within an international coproduction thus presents two interrelated sets of challenges. In this chapter, I study the nature of these challenges in more detail and how they were worked through in the case of Season 1 of the European

R. Davies (*) University of Greenwich, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_8

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coproduced police thriller TV serial Trapped (2015). I draw on interviews with members of the Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG) (Macdonald 2010) regarding their experience of the development of the “screen idea” (defined by Macdonald as “any notion of a potential screenwork held by one or more people, whether or not it is possible to describe it on paper or by other means” (Macdonald 2004, p.  89). I also consider these accounts in light of Redvall’s notion of the Screen Idea System, which models the process through which a screen idea originates and is developed into a TV program (Redvall 2013), and Star’s theory of the “boundary object”, an object that allows different individuals or groups with heterogeneous skills, knowledge and interests to cooperate towards a common goal (Star 2010; Star and Griesemer 1989). My aim is to articulate the different ways, in which a “shared space” for collaboration, both physical and conceptual, was achieved, situated at the boundaries between the habitual spheres of practice of the various collaborators; and how it allowed them to negotiate effectively their shared understanding of and contribution to the development and execution of the screen idea. In doing so, I hope to provide an insight into the need to accommodate both shared understanding and differing interpretations within the process of script development.

Trapped: History and Context Trapped (Ófærð) (2015) is a ten-part series of hour-long episodes set in a remote port town in Iceland. Inspired by the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash that hit Iceland very hard, the fictional murder investigation is set in the present day but reveals a web of political and corporate corruption and personal tragedy dating back to the events of 2008. The series evolved from an initial collaboration between writer/director Baltasar Kormákur, an Icelandic director with Hollywood success (Contraband 2010; Everest 2015), and Icelandic screenwriter Sigurjón Kjartansson. Kormákur is director and chair of production company RVK Studios, for which Kjartansson is Head of Development. Together with Magnús Viðar Sigurðsson, executive producer at RVK, they developed the initial premise for Trapped. According to Kjartansson, the aim of the project was to make a TV series that would have international appeal and raise the profile of both the company and the country, and which would also be specifically Icelandic in inspiration and feel (S. Kjartansson, personal communication, September 2016).

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These three original collaborators, who had prior experience of working together and trusted each other, could be seen to form the kind of “creative trio” that Peter Bloore suggests is often at the core of successful script development (2012). However, as we will see later in the chapter, the script development team ultimately took on a different form. Kjartansson explained that the way that the original trio approached the project was to develop a story with settings and themes very specific to Iceland (e.g. its particularly severe exposure to the 2008 global financial crash, highlighted above; its extreme climate and isolated rural communities often in the winter cut off by snow for months at a time). At the same time, they also drew on universal crime genre conventions and, more particularly, the Scandinavian crime tradition “Nordic Noir”. The latter appealed to them because of both its concern with social problems and because it had already seen international success with series such as The Killing (2007) and The Bridge (2011) and was likely to appeal to a global audience (Kjartansson 2016). A genre “typified by its heady mixture of bleak naturalism, disconsolate locations and morose detectives” (Creeber 2015, p.  15), Nordic Noir tends to interweave three layers of story—“The Crime Plot”, “The Political Plot” and “The Family Plot” (Creeber 2015, p. 3)—to depict a world in which complex social problems reveal interdependency between the members of that society and the need for a collective approach to finding solutions. The first two plot types are evident from the premise stage of Trapped, as is the “disconsolate location”. Kjartansson emphasised the fact that he and the other series creators made a deliberate decision not to set the story in Reykjavik, the capital city of Iceland, because “one city is too much like another” (Kjartansson 2016). They chose instead a location more distinctively Icelandic in its landscape and weather conditions: an isolated small town surrounded by mountains, which has been snowed in by recent snowstorms, meaning everyone in the town is trapped inside it, including the killer. This location not only sets the mood but also has such narrative agency as to make it function almost like a character within the story, another feature characteristic of Nordic Noir (Roberts 2016). The “screen idea” (Macdonald 2004) at the heart of the project might therefore be defined as follows: “Nordic Noir with an Icelandic twist”. RVK’s strategy appealed to German producer Klaus Zimmermann, who came on board as executive producer on the project. Zimmermann cites the highly successful UK police series Broadchurch (2013), a British twist on “Nordic Noir”, as a crucial touchstone for him in understanding

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and articulating this central screen idea, both for himself and to the project’s financers, including the major funder, German TV channel ZDF (K. Zimmermann, personal communication, May 2016).

Trapped: The Development Process Kjartansson’s and Zimmermann’s explanation of how the series idea for Trapped was initially developed and pitched corresponds closely to the process theorised by Redvall as the Screen Idea System (2013). In her examination of the Danish television development process, Redvall builds on Macdonald’s notion of the screen idea and the related concept of the SIWG as a “flexibly constructed work group organized around the development and production of a screen idea” (Macdonald 2010, p. 47). This group includes not only writers and script and development executives, but also commissioners, financers, producers and other interested parties. Redvall’s aim is to provide further insights into how such work groups function. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s theories of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1988), the Screen Idea System models the interaction between three key elements that constitute both the structure and the process through which an idea originates and is developed into a television program. These are the individual (i.e. idea creators such as writers, showrunners, producers, etc.); the field (i.e. gatekeepers, such as channel commissioners, producers, etc.) and the domain (i.e. cultural trends and traditions, professional norms of best practice, etc.) (Redvall 2013) (Fig. 1). Redvall describes the development process as being one in which the individual comes up with an idea that both builds on established traditions and current trends within the cultural domain and yet also constitutes a novel interpretation or variation on them. The gatekeepers in the field assess the value of this new variation and decide whether it will be accepted and included in the existing domain (i.e. commissioned, produced, critically valued, etc.). The nature of this interdependent dynamic is that individuals need to have internalised the norms of the domain if they are able to contribute to new knowledge within it (Redvall 2013). This was the context within which Trapped was originated and developed as a series idea. Nordic Noir was the cultural domain in which the project was conceived and commissioned, constituting the first shared (conceptual) space that the project inhabited. In an increasingly global marketplace, the nature of this cultural domain was multiple, layered and

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Fig. 1  The Screen Idea System. (Source: Redvall 2013, p. 31)

international. As Creeber and Redvall have commented, when developing what is now known as Nordic Noir, Nordic series creators drew not only on national traditions but also on international trends in TV series, particularly North American (Creeber 2015; Redvall 2013). When Nordic Noir then found an international audience, in its turn it contributed to the development of a transnational cultural domain (Creeber 2015; Redvall 2016). In the case of Trapped, the addition of the “Icelandic twist” was what provided the novel variation on this existing cultural domain, which was recognised by the gatekeepers as having potential. Given the international ambition of the project, Zimmermann thought that it would benefit from a writing team that had experience on international TV series (Zimmermann 2016). At the beginning of 2014, he brought UK scriptwriter Clive Bradley (who had worked on police shows with an international reach, such as The Vice, ITV 2001–2003, Waking the Dead, BBC1 2008, Single-Handed, RTÉ One 2010) onto the project. Bradley, Kjartansson, Zimmermann and fourth team member, French script editor Sonia Moyersoen, eventually became what Bradley calls “the creative hub” of the scriptwriting process (C. Bradley, personal communication, 23 March 2016). Once the project was greenlit, it became the responsibility of this subset of the SIWG (Macdonald 2010), the script

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development team, to flesh out the initial pitch into a full set of episode scripts. They were, as Bradley points out, “an Icelander, a Brit, a German and a French woman. We wanted to serve it as an Icelandic story, but it was a very internationalised process” (Bradley 2016). The question remained, however, of how this “internationalised process”, involving four different people who lived in three different countries, was actually going to work. There were several key factors to consider. Logistics was the first issue. Zimmermann said that his experience working on international productions had convinced him that successful coproduction needs to be “something that you live, it’s not about brokering” (Zimmermann 2016). He felt it was important that the members of the script development team actually spent significant time getting to know each other and working in physical relation to each other in the same place, rather than relying only on document sharing and online communication. As executive producer, he sought to overcome the dispersed nature of the group and to find ways to bring them together. The second issue was negotiating the different roles taken by the members of the team, given their previous professional experience. Kjartansson, the series creator, had experience on Icelandic but not international productions. Bradley had international experience of writing successful crime dramas in English but no experience of working with a script editor. Moyersoen was a French script editor based in France. She and Zimmermann had worked together on several international coproductions in English. Zimmermann explicitly pointed to this range of experience as an important asset to the project, given that the series was to use Icelandic language but be aimed at an international audience. However, it would also involve all members of the team working together in ways in which they were not accustomed. A third consideration related to the different motivations that the different team members had for joining the project. Kjartansson, the Icelandic series creator, wanted to both explore the particular Icelandic experience of the financial crisis and put his country on the international production map. Zimmermann was keen to deliver an Icelandic Broadchurch for a global audience. Moyersoen was fascinated by the idea of a story set in Iceland, which she saw as a “fantasy land” (S. Moyersoen, personal communication, 19 September 2016). Bradley, like Moyersoen, says he was interested in Iceland as a setting for a crime drama, but knew little about the country (Bradley 2016). The script development process needed to

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bring together these different motivations and goals into productive dialogue, rather than pulling the project in different directions. Since it was not possible for the script development team dispersed across three countries to come together in physical space on a daily or a weekly basis, the logistics of place was addressed by structuring the script development through a series of bimonthly six-day script development meetings in Iceland, France and Germany, which ran throughout 2014 and into January 2015. At the first of these in February 2014, Kjartansson, Bradley, Moyersoen and Zimmermann met for a six-day session in an isolated house in rural Iceland. As Moyersoen explains, this meant everyone accepting “to be cut off from their own world … working from the morning until before going to bed … it means you have the intimacy” (Moyersoen 2016). These six-day sessions were, in one sense, non-stop work. In another way, however, as the writing team worked together, talked together, ate together, relaxed together—as the boundaries between life and work, leisure and work broke down—the process felt less like work and more like a holiday (Kjartansson 2016). For Kjartansson, this is how the process of writing works best: “Writing is 70% walking, talking, discussing. 30% is writing” (Kjartansson 2016). In the absence of daily or weekly contact between members of the script team, these intense bouts of living and working together provided a way to facilitate collective understanding and foster a sense of group identity among its members. Taking them out of their particular national production contexts and putting them into a very different, residential, “holiday” kind of space, which they all co-created by inhabiting and sharing it together, and in which they worked in physical relation to each other, helped to build familiarity and trust between them. It was not, however, only in the residential aspect that the script development process differed from the typical. All members of the script development team point out that, although they called these sessions writers’ rooms, they did not, in fact, function like an American-style writers’ room. The process on Trapped was less hierarchical. Although Bradley was the one who held the pen throughout, taking on the role of summarising each scene on the whiteboard, neither he nor any of the others took on an explicit showrunner role. All four members of the team were involved in agreeing every scene in great detail. “The movement into the scene, the focus, the beginning and the end … we put it on the board only when we were very, very sure of this.” (Moyersoen 2016). Initially, there had been the possibility that the episode outlines might then be shared between

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different members of the group to write up as scripts. However, at the first meeting, the members of the group agreed that Bradley would be the one to write a first draft for each episode that had been outlined, and revise it according to notes from the others. This approach was developed during the project and was not a mode of working any of the team had experienced before nor had planned in advance. Kjartansson comments that the ownership of the project was shared in a way that, as the creator of the series, he would not usually expect, saying: “I wouldn’t usually allow the producer in the writers’ room” (Kjartansson 2016). Moyersoen adds that, as a script editor, she would also not normally experience the same kind of shared ownership of the project, saying that in her experience, writers tend more typically to be defensive towards her contribution: “you need every time to prove that you are not a killer, that you want to help the project” (Moyersoen 2016). Clive, too, was experiencing a new kind of shared ownership. He had never worked with a script editor before but found Moyersoen’s input invaluable (Bradley 2016). Nor had he had the experience of writing scripts in English that would ultimately be translated and shot in a different language. All members of the team were working in a different way to what they were used to and, for Kjartansson and Bradley in particular, this meant ceding some ground to others, which they were not used to doing. Kjartansson stresses how important it was, therefore, that everyone understood how to work collaboratively (Kjartansson, 2016). Meanwhile, Zimmermann underlines the importance to the project of making sure that enough time (12 months), as well as physical space, was allowed for collaboration during the script development (Zimmermann 2016). There were clearly a range of factors in how the writing process was organised that contributed to successful collaboration: the choice of team members; the time and space given to allow them to get to know each other and develop mutual trust and understanding; the flattening of standard hierarchies and blurring of role divisions; all of which, in different but mutually reinforcing ways, helped to give a sense of shared ownership and enable effective collaboration. The residential “writers” rooms’ provided a literal and embodied “shared space” for collaboration. However, between meetings, when the members of the team had returned to their different countries, it was through the development documents—the series and episode outlines and script drafts—that the shared space for collaboration was maintained, as

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these were produced, circulated and revised between them. They functioned, one could say, as boundary objects within the project.

The Screenplay as Boundary Object The term boundary object is defined by Susan Leigh Star (2010, p. 602) as an object that allows different individuals or groups with heterogeneous skills, knowledge and interests to cooperate towards a common goal by creating a “shared space”, situated at the boundaries between their habitual spheres of practice. One of the key features of boundary objects, Star underlines, is that they constitute an arrangement that allows different groups to work together without consensus since they offer “interpretive flexibility” (2010, p. 602). Boundary objects can be both concrete or abstract and are indeed often both at the same time. Examples of potential boundary objects include a repository, such as an archive or a database, that can accommodate a range of deposits and uses; and “standardised forms”, such as a template or pro forma, which structure the sharing of information in a particular way, facilitating “common communication across dispersed work groups” (Star and Griesemer 1989, p. 411). They may also take the form of an “ideal type”, that is, an abstracted object, such as a model, map or even a description, a set of principles or concept that “serves as a means of communicating and cooperating symbolically” (Star and Griesemer 1989, p. 410). The standardised form of the screenplay could be considered a boundary object. During the process of development through to post-­production, screenplays are read by the many different readers who make up the expanded SIWG, including agents, producers, financiers, script analysts, actors, directors and so on (Sternberg 1997, p. x). These individuals each have different motivations and use the screenplay in different ways, as a means to understand both the economic and creative potential of the screen work. The same standard elements of the script—sluglines, action, description, dialogue, characters—therefore lend themselves to different uses. They might provide the starting point for an agent to explore the script’s star vehicle potential with a client, while on the other hand they might cause a producer to reject it because of its genre or budget requirements. A designer will use the screenplay as a starting point for designing the world of the film, the cinematographer the visual treatment and so on. Different participants in a screen production use the screenplay, and other development documents, as key sites of cooperation, facilitating

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discussion and collective action between a great number of different people, without them all needing to meet, or indeed to reach a consensus. This same process was evident in the development of Trapped as a series. The initial pitch document and pilot script served as boundary objects through which the team from RVK cooperated with Zimmermann, Bradley and representatives from ZDF to get the project commissioned. They were also the starting point for the collaboration between the four writers’ room participants. Although they never actually rewrote the episode outline agreed at the first meeting, at each bimonthly script meeting they would start the discussion by returning to it as a touchstone, confirming what would remain the same and what now needed to change in the episodes that remained. Following this, Bradley would write various drafts of the script, receiving notes from the other three. The script would then go to Kormákur for further notes before going to ZDF, who would also provide notes, before they signed off each script. At this point, Kjartansson would translate each script into Icelandic, since the production was to be shot in Icelandic, not English.

Nordic Noir as Boundary Object As discussed above, one of the key aims of the SIWG (Macdonald 2010) was to realise the foundational screen idea (Macdonald 2004) of “Nordic noir with an Icelandic twist”. This shared idea meant slightly different things to the different people involved in the script development team. Nevertheless, it provided a framework for their collaboration on how to develop it. The screen idea, as well as the physical script and other development documents, can therefore also be considered a “boundary object”, as I will go on to discuss below. According to Bradley, the way that the script development proceeded was to initially concentrate on developing the “Nordic Noir” elements: tightening up the crime plot and expanding and deepening the family story (Bradley 2016). This included bringing the identification of the body forward in the story, since “if you don’t know who the victim is, you can’t start to make investigations” (Bradley 2016), and also changing the identity of the murderer and introducing a second murder. These latter two changes, while adding complexity to the crime plot, also developed the family story. The first change was to make the murder of the initial victim an act of self-defence by a vulnerable and abused woman. The team then also decided to make the father-in-law of the

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protagonist (the detective in charge of the initial murder enquiry) the perpetrator of the second murder in an act of belated revenge for his daughter’s death. In this way, Bradley explained, both crime plot and family plot became more closely linked to each other and more fully interwoven with the political plot. They provide the building blocks through which the story develops towards the revelation that all within the town share some responsibility for what has happened, expanding the key themes of collective interdependence and responsibility that characterise Nordic Noir. Quite early in the script development process, the four members of the team took on particular, although not exclusive, responsibilities. Zimmermann had a developed sense of where this project should fit in the international market. Bradley led on plot and structure, outlining each episode on the board during the meetings and writing all the scripts. Moyersoen led on character development, maintaining that an understanding of the characters needed to underpin every scene of the story and every plot twist (Bradley 2016; Kjartansson 2016; Moyersoen 2016). Kjartansson, meanwhile, was the only member of the script development team who understood the culture and history within which the story was set and took responsibility for delivering the “Icelandic twist”, the necessary novel variation on the existing cultural domain. He brought to the project a deep understanding of the story world in which the plot played out, what was at stake for the characters and who they were as people, and ensured that the genre conventions were inflected with the specifics of Icelandic culture and setting. Bradley comments that “when we were developing it and I was writing it, you have to trust to the fact that Icelanders are making this and they all get the Icelandic detail. In terms of the story and the characters … you just write it” (Bradley 2016). Meanwhile, Kjartansson found that “to work with these international people really helped me to focus on what was essentially Icelandic” (Kjartansson 2016). These comments make clear that the different responsibilities assumed by the team members were developed intersubjectively because they worked together to develop the core screen idea of “Nordic Noir with an Icelandic twist”, and through this process began to discover what the idea actually meant in practice. I would argue, therefore, that not only the material development documents, but also the concept of “Nordic Noir with an Icelandic twist” itself functioned as a boundary object within the project. The latter took the role of an “ideal type” (Star and Griesemer

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1989) around which the team members negotiated a shared conceptual space. Although standard hierarchies had been flattened and role boundaries blurred, the concept of “Nordic Noir with an Icelandic twist” helped the team to define new parameters and priorities for each individual’s contribution to the collective project, making explicit what had been implicit. This is an important point because implicit motivations and concerns are often a feature and indeed a problem of script development (see Macdonald 2010; Millard 2010; Mazin 2018), prompting what screenwriter Craig Mazin has termed “inorganic notes” (Mazin 2018). By this he means that notes are often given to screenwriters that claim to relate to aspects intrinsic to the story but in fact are related to extrinsic factors: Like we want to hit a certain audience, an older audience, a younger audience, a whiter audience, a blacker audience. We are concerned about how this will play in China. We don’t know if we can get this on the schedule unless the budget is this. There is an actor that wants to do this movie here, and if we give them this one then they’ll do this one. There’s a million of those things… It’s what Lindsey Doran calls ‘a closeup with feet’ (Mazin 2018)

Mazin’s experience suggests that the “interpretive flexibility” of the screenplay as boundary object has its limits. He suggests the answer is for studio executives to be upfront about their real motivations rather than couching them as story concerns. However, it is also possible for people to be unaware themselves of implicit assumptions and knowledge that guide their actions. I have described elsewhere how this was evidenced in an educational videogame project aimed at student nurses (Davies and Flynn 2015). In this project, the technical understandings and assumptions that pertain to professional script development had become so internalized by the videogame script development team that they did not realize that the health professionals they were working with found it difficult to interpret and contribute to the project through the medium of script drafts, a document type with which the latter were unfamiliar. Meanwhile, certain key milestones in child protection and tenets of best practice had been so internalized by the health professionals that they did not realize the importance of explicitly stating what they were to the screenwriters, and explaining their crucial role as points of reference in the project (Davies and Flynn 2015).

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On Trapped, I would argue that the script development team’s awareness of trying to turn into a reality a concept that was named but not proven—since it was a new twist on an existing genre—helped them to constantly interrogate their aims and assumptions, rather than take them for granted. One small but telling example of this is cited by all the team members. This was a scene in which the first draft of a script episode written by Bradley had the protagonist go home and pour a glass of whisky after a challenging day. Moyersoen explains that “for Sigurjon [Kjartansson] it was very shocking because you know it’s zero tolerance in Iceland with alcohol before driving and nobody drinks alcohol, it’s not usual at all” (Moyersoen 2016). So at Kjartansson’s suggestion, this was changed to the character drinking a glass of milk, something that seemed an odd idea to the other members of the script team (Bradley 2016; Moyersoen 2016). Kjartansson comments that despite his initial shock, he was able to understand that Bradley’s aim was to adhere to the Nordic Noir genre conventions of conveying the private stress that afflicts the publicly successful detective. He therefore offered a culturally appropriate alternative in keeping with this initial aim (Kjartansson 2016). The point here is, first, that Kjartansson was easily able to articulate his disagreement in terms of delivery of the “Icelandic twist” and, second, that Bradley and Moyersoen were easily able to understand it in those same terms, notwithstanding the surprise they expressed at this difference in cultural norms from their own cultural experience, in which drinking a glass of whisky did not have the same connotations. As Moyersoen puts it, “we put the best of each universe in the series but in the end it was the Icelandic which won the battle in a way” (Moyersoen 2016). If, however, the team had not been negotiating their collaboration through the central concept of “Nordic Noir with an Icelandic twist”, it is not that difficult to imagine an alternative situation in which the dialogue might have been less productive. The examples I cited above provide evidence of how members of a collective project often do not specify the thought process and cultural assumptions behind their statements because they do not realise they aren’t immediately obvious to or shared by others. Kjartansson, unaware of the difference in cultural norms, might not have explicitly framed his objection in those terms but simply objected that to have the detective drinking whisky was completely out of character, while Bradley and Moyersoen might have insisted that it was completely in character, without getting at the heart of the misunderstanding.

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Instead, the screen idea of “Nordic Noir with an Icelandic twist” functioned as boundary object that enabled the members of the development team, notwithstanding their different individual interpretations of the idea, to respond to inaccurate cultural references and unexpected culturally specific traits as opportunities within the project, rather than experiencing them as problems and ineptitudes on the part of other members.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to lay out the various ways in which a shared space for collaboration was created for story and script development within the international coproduction of the television series Trapped. I have used Redvall’s model of the Screen Idea System (2013) to articulate the process through which the initial screen idea of “Nordic Noir with an Icelandic Twist” was developed, commissioned and financed through interactions between the expanded SIWG that established the validity of this idea as a novel variation on an existing cultural domain. This model foregrounds the importance of the cultural domain as a conceptual space that needs to be shared by all members of the SIWG. I have then used the idea of the “boundary object” to provide further insights, not only to these initial stages of idea development, but to the practical process of working up the screen idea into script form. In doing so, I have focused more specifically on the work of the script development team, looking both at how the team took on and developed the initial screen idea shared by the wider SIWG and at how they worked among themselves. Interviews with all the members of this team provided key evidence of their experience that a shared physical space, as well as a shared conceptual space, had been vital to the effectiveness of this collaboration. I conclude, therefore, that the shared space of collaboration on this project was physical, experiential and conceptual, and all these elements were equally important. Together, they enabled the members of the script development team to bridge the boundaries between the national production cultures and social norms that they had individually internalised, to build trust and negotiate parameters for collaboration and particular roles for each individual within the process. This did not mean that an entirely standardised and uniform vision of the project existed within the minds of the different members of the team. From beginning to end, the process was one of negotiation rather than stable consensus. What the shared

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space achieved was a conducive environment for this negotiation to achieve a productive outcome. Within nationally contained productions, many of the necessary elements—for example, co-location of group members, or a shared cultural domain—are likely to be already in place. Since these are often implicit rather than explicit elements in the script development process, there is a danger that in an international coproduction, they may go unrecognised as important but missing elements. I would suggest, therefore, that in the interests of a productive collaboration, explicit provision needs to be made within international coproductions to achieve such a physical, experiential and conceptual shared space. It is also true that even within nationally specific productions, the creation of a shared space cannot be taken for granted and is not necessarily achieved by relying solely on the circulation of script drafts and notes. Thus, the concept of a shared conceptual and physical space, and an understanding of the role of boundary objects in constructing it, are not only important to consider in relation to script development within the specific context of international coproduction, but also in relation to script development more generally.

References Bloore, P. (2012). The Screenplay Business: Managing Creativity and Script Development in the Film Industry. London: Routledge. Buonanno, M. (2015). Italian TV Drama: The Multiple Forms of European Influence. In I.  Bondebjerg, E.  N. Redvall, & A.  Higson (Eds.), European Cinema and Television. Cultural Policy and Everyday Life (pp. 195–213). Contraband. (2010). Dir: B. Kormákur; USA. Creeber, G. (2015). Killing Us Softly: Investigating the Aesthetics, Philosophy and Influence of Nordic Noir Television. Journal of Popular Television, 3(1), 21–35. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). Society, Culture and Person: A System’s View of Creativity. In R.  J. Sternberg (Ed.), The Nature of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, R., & Flynn, R. (2015). Explicit and Implicit Narratives in the Co-Design of Videogames. In A. Maragiannis (Ed.), Final Paper /Proceedings of the Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts Conference, DRHA2014, London. Everest. (2015). Dir: B. Kormákur; USA. Macdonald, I.  W. (2004). Disentangling the Screen Idea. Journal of Media Practice, 5(2), 85–99.

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Macdonald, I. W. (2010). ‘… So It’s Not Surprising I’m Neurotic’ The Screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 45–58. Mazin, C. (Presenter) (2018, March 18). Scriptnotes [Audio podcast]. Retrieved 27 May 2018. Millard, K. (2010). After the Typewriter: The Screenplay in a Digital Era. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1), 11–25. O’Connell, D. (2015). Small Nation/Big Neighbours: Co-producing Stories in a European Context. In I.  Bondebjerg, E.  N. Redvall, & A.  Higson (Eds.), European Cinema and Television. Cultural Policy and Everyday Life (pp. 239–256). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Redvall, E.  N. (2013). Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark. From ‘The Kingdom’ to ‘The Killing’. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Redvall, E.  N. (2016). Midsomer Murders in Copenhagen: The Transnational Production of Nordic Noir-Influenced UK Television Drama. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 14(3), 345–363. Roberts, L. (2016). Landscapes in the Frame: Exploring the Hinterlands of the British Procedural Drama. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 14(3), 364–385. Single-Handed. (2007–2010). Ireland/UK, Element Films; 47 min 13 episodes. Star, S. L. (2010). This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(5), 601–617. Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. Sternberg, C. (1997). Written for the Screen. The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. Taylor, S., & Batty, C. (2016). Script Development and the Hidden Practices of Screenwriting: Perspectives from Industry Professionals. New Writing, 13(2), 204–217. The Bridge (Bron/Broen). (2011–2018). Sweden/Denmark, SVT/DR; 1hr 38 episodes. The Killing (Forbrydelson). (2007–2012). Denmark, DR; 57 min 40 episodes. The Vice. (1999–2003). UK, Carlton TV; 60 min 28 episodes. Trapped (Ófærð). (2015). Cr, Exec. Prod., Dir: B.  Kormákur; Wrs: C.  Bradley, S. Moyersoen, Ó. Egilsson, J. Grimsson; Wrs. and Exec. Prods: S. Kjartansson, K. Zimmermann; Iceland/Germany, RVK Studios; 1hr 20 episodes. Waking the Dead. (2000–2011). UK, BBC Drama; 60 min 92 episodes.

PART II

Looking Out from Script Development: Practice into Theory

Sympoiesis and Scripting Urban Terror: Decomposition of a Writing Under Duress Joshua McNamara

Introduction Transcript from the Field The badass Somali motherfucker joins a local terror gang to promote his message of social injustice but ends up embroiled in kidnapping of an NGO worker. Previously, he was a peace-loving hip-hop artist — not previously in life, but in the previous ontology of an earlier draft. Now he’s a badass, the kind of violent antihero that Nairobi needs, by which we understand: what the director feels it needs. The softly spoken scriptwriter fights back with a stubborn refusal to sensationalise her characters. Lines are drawn. Terse phone calls are exchanged. Eventually the director gives in. The funders would never go for it anyway. They reluctantly accept that the film needs to be about terrorism, to some degree, but they can’t allow it to be ‘about’ terrorism. So the badass Somali motherfucker becomes a lover. His politics modify into a familiar cosmopolitan style of resistance. He’s a media-savvy humanist

J. McNamara (*) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_9

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now. No longer directly linked to terrorists, he’s a political activist working for a more tolerant, inclusive Kenya. His name is Mohamed — nickname, Momo  — a progressive Muslim struggling against the xenophobia of Kenyan society. Momo makes love to Sweetie, a Kenyan girl. Their sex symbolises a reconciled society. The camera will pan from a shot of her underwear on the floor (is this progressive? Islam, sex, innocence, love) to their two bodies intertwined naked on the sofa of a radio station. Her hand drapes across his chest as he gazes at the ceiling in a post-coital daydream. The once-was badass now runs a community radio station — not now in life, but now in the present ontology of this most recent draft. He works alongside a local Kenyan man, Kevo, and from their small station in Eastleigh they send out stories of corruption and poverty over the Nairobi airwaves. Kevo loves Sweetie too (the classic love triangle). Actually, no, Kevo is her brother (family suspense). Kevo rages at Momo about the affair (conflict!). Actually, no, Kevo accepts it (reconciliation of a broken society). He welcomes it (an excess of reconciliation). Kevo is one of the good guys (like us). The scriptwriter is happy. She can write to this spec. The funders are appeased. The director starts to eye up new ways he can sneak a bit of badassery back on the screen.

I spent the better part of 2013 working as an assistant scriptwriter for a feature film being made in Nairobi. Perched on the edge of the East African Highlands, the Kenyan capital is just the right distance from the civil instability of Somalia and Sudan to be a frontier city, a gravitational centre for migratory populations of prospectors, industrialists and humanitarians. In recent years, the city has become one of Africa’s major melting pots of creativity, economic liberalism and philanthropy. With a high density of NGOs and development agencies, it is not uncommon for international aid funding to find its way into Kenya’s cultural sector, where philanthropy and its proselytisations intermingle art, creativity and venture capitalism. Our film—Wazi?FM (2014; henceforth Wazi)—had been funded by the European Union as a brief ‘cultural output’ budget line on a large legal aid aimed at urban refugees living in Kenya. Telling the story of a young Somali man struggling for self-­ determination in a racially polarised city, the film was being made at a time of violent anti-state terror attacks from southern Somali extremists, and a growing impunity of brutal state reprisals against the city’s Somali

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populations. Wazi was centered around a suite of social and political tensions in the city: the legal defence of human rights; public ownership of urban space; freedom of speech; governmental accountability; police brutality; terrorism; entrenched xenophobia; the paternalistic heritage of international development. The stakes of its story were, according to its funders and producers, no less than the very future of Kenyan society itself. Yet, the project was also negotiated from various outsider perspectives. Envisioned by Italian producers and an Italian director who saw himself as a redeemed anarchist and anti-globalisation Marxist, Wazi was written by a British-educated Kenyan playwright more creatively invested in drama than politics, supported through legal aid funding from the European Union that was channelled through a Catholic non-profit organisation, and co-written by myself, a researcher and doctoral student whose first interest was to critique and dismantle a position often incommensurate with the constructive responsibilities of professional practice. At the crossroads of such vying interests, the writing of Wazi became a tangled mess of activism and avoidance, of personal politics and contesting ideas about how the social worlds of the city fit together; of unifying fantasies of transcultural humanism, and old-world European indictments of African failed states. I came ‘back from the field’ to write about this time of writing, with boxes of notebooks and annotated transcripts and an archive of emails. The end of fieldwork marks the start of what Michael Taussig calls ‘writingwork’: “magical projections through words into people and events” (2010, p. 26). But writing about writing poses an additional problem. The ‘magical projections’ of our scholarship are themselves captured by a preceding magic. Seen through the lens of ethnographic fieldwork, the acts of writing a script and the acts of writing about the writing of one are intimately entangled. Corruption, abuse, terror, community, friendship, reconciliation: in the writing of Wazi, these words were not simply themes in a script but nodal points in a manifold articulation that gives rise to contesting views of how the world fits together, and how narrative gives fixity to the world. They are entangled with our acts of scripting, writing, rewriting, critiquing, reviewing; of living and working and moving through the city; of remembering back to life in ‘the field’. The description of the writing of a script offered in this chapter presents a critique of what I see as the individualist/productive paradigm that presides over much screenwriting scholarship. Instead I seek to present an idea of script development as something inherently collaborative and

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decentered. Drawing on ideas from ecological philosophy that offer us an exciting new vocabulary for thinking about co-authorship, this chapter explores some of the tensions that surround acts of writing about writing under such methodological duress.

Decomposing Tumbled Stories Transcript from the Field For the first production meeting we gather on white plastic chairs in the concrete garden of the Cultural Video Foundation studio, a squat colonial townhouse on the humid hills that sequester the Karura forest. The project’s main scriptwriter, JC Niala, has come to discuss the work with its director Vincenzo Cavallo, producer Alessandra Argenti and myself, an academic or, as Niala jokes, a spy. Those who are brave enough sip espresso served from Cavallo’s stained stovetop brewer. “Be careful what you say around this guy. He records everything.” The discussion quickly turns to the recent failure of the project, as a rejected TV series pilot. Moving forward, as they put it, what is the culture (‘the real culture’) that the film needs to capture? “The most important thing, guys,” Cavallo has his hands on the table as though he’s going to launch himself into the trees. “Let’s not be cheesy … Like, let’s not put a football team where they’re all friends and play together … let’s not be cheesy. Fuck cheesiness, you know, because it destroys everything.”

The ‘script development’ turn announced in this volume invites us to explore the tumbling stories of our research. Thinking about the development is to think about those practices that Steven Maras has called “scripting” (2009, p. 2), evoking an object that is more than what we find on the page. Yet might we also go further and consider how the works of the scholar themselves reflect, embody and are mutated by the works of the script writer? Script development naturally summons the spirit of ethnography, an approach whose appearance in screenwriting scholarship has too neatly plucked out as a method “participant observation” from the difficulties of participant observation as a means of research. This challenge is a methodological one. How do we capture in writing the practices of writing, with all their palimpsestic echoes, while resisting the seductions of retreating to the authority of the ‘final draft’?

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I have presented elsewhere some early thoughts on how an ethnography of scriptwriting might rise to the task of bringing together practices of writing with states of ‘being written’, forming a new methodological synthesis for creatively “writing about writing” (McNamara 2018). I called this style of writing a ‘decomposition’, hoping to signal the textual specificity of the script as something simultaneously written and non-­written; that kind of writing which anticipates its own death as writing. It is this anticipation of material repurposing that captures the character of the ‘script’ as I imagine it: a temporary, nervous form that requires its own description as a text. To ask questions about such a script’s development, we are therefore asking more than just what practices ‘precede’ a film. Thinking about script development is an opportunity to go beyond product-oriented approaches and revisit the presuppositions of productive/textual relationships. The question here shifts. We no longer ask, “How are scripts developed (in what stages, with what logic, to what effect)”, and ask instead, “What else happens, to us, when we set about the task of trying to develop them?” Transcript from the Field Treatment after treatment: altered by the director (again), a realignment to give it more political grit  — then integrate feedback from the rest of the team. Calibrate: check for contradictions. Pass this by funders to check for conflicts of interest. Edit out anything too graphic (we can always bring it back in later) … then back to the writers to be adjusted, augmented, authored. Sites of contestation start to emerge — the things we keep coming back to, changing, changing back: ‘neighbourhood’, ‘friendship’, ‘terrorism’, ‘love’, ‘white’, ‘foreign’. Not only in words: how do we visually capture a sense of community? Of communalistic wholeness. One people. What does that actually look like? On the screen? Shot of a single street? Which street? Where is the camera? External references mutate: From ‘NGO rhetoric’, we start talking about Dogville and Do the Right Thin g… we watch their opening scenes, gathered around the editor’s PC.

Within the language of the film’s production discourse—in writer’s meetings, production meetings, funder updates, in the emails that follow

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different drafts and treatments as they circulate—‘community’ becomes a particular fixation, as might be expected in a story about friendship and love overturning racial hate. This was a word that was present in the very first version the film when it was pitched as a ‘community drama’ about urban refugees. Community, in a linguistic sense, became a way of organising thoughts about nationality and a politics of belonging in urban Africa. Community became a way of speaking about ‘tribe’ (which white foreigners do not speak about) or ‘ethnicity’ (which we speak about endlessly, albeit indirectly). The cinematographer then changes the conversation significantly when she starts to ask about the film’s community in relation to the composition of its shots. A community becomes something related to the low angle at which different people can be seen living on a single street. A single continuous shot: we follow the girl down the alleyway, drift over to the butcher, see the lovers whispering on the corner, visit the grandma brushing dust outside her front door, ‘community’ taking on two extra significations that in writing we had not considered: a spatiality of urban streets and the proximity of neighbours. Community came to be inflected by a series of unstable spatial, textual and political meanings. In writing the script, we came back time and again to these ideas of proximity, of the floating camera. Community was the ability to see each other, and to be seen by each other, without blinking. We started to reach for narrative tricks to hold this vision of community in the eventual viewers’ minds, while looking for devices or tricks to keep the story flowing, and the plot twisting. Transcript from the Field The divisive device of the mobile phone. Does Sweetie, Momo’s lover, have a phone? Doesn’t she then lose it? Is it found again and is this incriminating? Inside all of this discussion of a phone is a subtler conversation about how a Kenyan woman is attached — materially, physically — to a Somali family; how their lives (their stories … their movements around town) are interwoven. The phone becomes the way (the portal) for the audience (whoever that may be — we can’t seem to agree) to access this private world between a Somali and a Kenyan. Late August: The phone has become an almost a phantasmagoric device, encapsulating all the dramas of Nairobi’s social body. Everything comes down to the phone.

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We trace the movement of the phone across our treatments (across the city in our minds). The plot hinges on it. Our entire treatment of Nairobi has come to depend on placement of Sweetie’s phone.

The various ontologies of tumbling drafts created a schizophrenic multiplicity of character, place, theme and our careful arrangement of all three. Through this relentless process several nodal points emerged that anchored the discussion, to some degree, around which the writing of the script and the creation of the film congregated. These nodal points take on a kind of fixity themselves, holding common ground within the flow of the production’s contested discourse. They knocked onto each other, accumulating, forcing a reconfiguration of the story so that things are made sensible before disappearing and leaving behind only traces through the changes they had forced. And so, the device of a mobile phone, or disagreements over how the ‘wholeness’ of a community can be represented, mutated the story that, even when settled in the final draft, bore the scars of those transformations. Transcript from the Field Early September: We cut the phone. To reduce this multiplicity down into a definitive version (or final draft) would be to deny ourselves the story of how stories become stories.

Making with the Bodies of Others Decomposition is an entropic metaphor. It suggests the passage of time from a state of order towards disorder or chaos. Taken in this way, it dislocates our ideas of the ‘script’ from the telos of a final draft. This might seem slightly counter-intuitive to the experience of writing, which can sometimes feel like the building of harmony, and bringing disparate parts into a whole. Yet, this logic runs the other way too: that we start with a clear idea, a concept, a mandate from funders, and yet in the writing we then compromise, lose our trains of thought, work with others and the chaos of ambiguity sets in. Rather than moving from an open state of heightened potential into an organised final product, decomposition seeks to bear witness to the breaking down of coherence and the growth of disassembly.

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In this sense, it presents an opportunity to critique ‘production’ as the way we speak about making or creating texts. Production, as an economic and functionalist metaphor, proposes an anti-entropic creation of meaning (and therefore of economic value) presented in the promise of a final product. Even where Roland Barthes usefully distinguishes the ‘text’ as that thing “experienced only in an activity of production” (Barthes 1977, p. 157, original emphasis), allowing us to think of ‘texts’ as restless objects that resist closure, this economic metaphor persists in our imagination of the endpoint of writing. The individualist/productive paradigm that we see across much screenwriting scholarship derives in part from this anti-entropic tendency to see scripts as a building or accumulating of order (scene structure, character development, reconciling plot contradictions, etc.). Such an approach privileges writers as ‘originators’ of meaning—a comfortable place to put ourselves, considering we’re the writers. Transcript from the Field The woman — she was called Fatima, which was not her name — had been raped by two policemen, while a policewoman drove the van in circles around her neighbourhood. There is something impenetrable in how she describes that complicity. We sit in the corner of a small room, legs tucked under us and totally silent as a female lawyer talked Fatima through her memory of the ordeal. Fatima’s vulnerability comes from a lack of legal documentation, a lack of recourse to basic civil protection, which was why we were in the room. Somali urban refugees are denied a body — a civic body, a legal body with inherent rights; they lack even the legal embodied presence of the incorporated NGOs and foundations that seek to support them — while paradoxically it is precisely their dispossessed bodies, entangled within states of urban insecurity, that are the entry points of the most violent abuse. And we are entangled now too — complicit in a very different way. Fatima’s story is useful; for Cavallo, the director who is crouching beside me against the wall, it was another story sourced from ‘real life’, from which to draw inspiration and around which to structure our film’s narrative. She was source material, to lend our fictional film the credibility of a documentary. In the script: Momo and Kevo run their community radio station but maybe now they catch a policeman being ‘corrupt’. We can’t talk directly about the police rapes of Somali women. Not in an EU-funded film. The funders resist

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the idea of directly tackling state complicity in any way. One funder gives this paradox voice: “we cannot ignore it, but at the same time we don’t have to take a clear position which contravenes the position of the European Union, which has decided not to take any clear position.” We cannot ignore it, we cannot recognise it, and somewhere in the in-­ between there lives a film. ‘Corrupt’ becomes that ambiguous signifier with which we approximate rape, the other side of state terror. We consume her story, dislocating it and digesting it into a film script. Is this another act that denies Fatima her body? And the plot thickens: Momo and Kevo capture footage of corruption, and a corrupt cop comes after them.

The mutating theme of corruption, traced through the script’s versions, became compacted with a multiple sense of complicity: the complicity of the state with the abuse of refugees; of legal institutions incapable of protecting them; of us writers with this world of violence as we consumed and processed it for inspiration and nuance. Writers—like producers, cinematographers, funders and victims that bravely testify to terrible abuse—are parts of a deeper negotiation of meaning enfolded in complex practices of co-creation. This resistance to individualist fantasies of writers as originators of meaning pays respect to the bodies, stories and lives that we necessarily consume on the way, as well as the myriad ways that these co-minglings mark, and author, our work. This loss of individuality is what Swanson et al., in their opening to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, see in the symbol of a monstrosity, as “bodies tumbled into bodies” (2017, p. m10). Telling the story of the symbiotic dance of human and non-human co-living, Swanson et al. seek out a sense of ecological entanglement which can reframe the idea of “being”, by reminding us that society is not reducible to a population of dispersed individuals, but characterised by entangled and symbiotic collectives of cohabiting bodies. While their work is nested in a new wave of post-human ecological philosophy, the recognition by Swanson et al. that biological symbiosis is both central to all life as we know it, and profoundly antithetical to the individualism of contemporary society, has important trans-disciplinary implications for the individualist fixations of our scholarship. Repeating the now well-established observation that individualism has been a key

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feature of European Enlightenment, they suggest that such a position sees as monstrous and horrifying the denial of the primacy of the individual, observing that the “seductive simplifications of industrial production threaten to render us blind to monstrosity in all its forms by covering both lively and destructive connections” (Swanson et al., 2017, p. m7). The monstrosity of the script might follow a similar logic, and the entangled bodies of new ecological philosophy can teach us something valuable about our own clandestine complicity with stories of collaboration. In the writing of Wazi, there was no single author, nor indeed a collection of vying co-authors, but a tumbling struggle for meaning actualised through drafts and treatments, in which authority gave way to complicity. The tendency towards individualism in our understanding of writing— what I have called our individualist/productive paradigm—blinds us to monstrosity by reducing the life (and death) of the script into the textual decisions of the writer. Industrial production entails this reduction—it is necessary for the operation of the mythology of a ‘finished product’. Rather than production, then, the monstrous complicities of a script’s development might be described in what Donna Harraway (2017) has called sympoiesis. From the Greek for ‘making with’, this is not to be mistaken for making alongside—in the sense of co-authorship and collaboration—but a making with in the sense of symbiotic organisms making out of the bodies of each other. In the sympoiesis of writing, imaging, fearing, erasing, the bodies of our drafts tumble into the bodies of drafts; treatments into treatments; visions into new imaginings of a future film; source material into collaborator—eating each other, repurposing, digesting, co-evolving. Transcript from the Field We write on the top floor of a townhouse on a small hill behind an international school in the affluent, forested neighbourhood of Lavington. Niala hunches over an open draft on Celtx. I sit next to her at a small writing table in the corner of her guest bedroom, or maybe it’s her actual bedroom, I don’t know — either way, it would be impolite to look too closely at my surroundings. Printouts of various treatments are scattered over the table. A child plays quietly somewhere downstairs. We talk indirectly about rape, abuse, terrible bodily violence, terror. We are not interested in these things in themselves, but how they are configured or could be reconfigured in the story.

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I am being foolish, or unprofessional, but I get uncomfortable here. I think: What the hell do I know about rape or persecution at this level? My life has been sheltered from all of this — so has, I assume, Niala’s. We’re well-educated, middleclass, free. I’m a male, a British-Kiwi, white, wondering to what degree we can write about terrible forms of violence without actually writing about them, because my director wants to include ‘political truth’ but our funders don’t want to rock their geopolitical boat. I’m distinctly aware that Niala is a Kenyan woman. But then, we’re not really talking about abuse. We’re talking about its textual form. We’re as interested in its absence as its description  — we just need it to work on the page.

The distinction between fieldwork and writingwork become much less delineated when approached from a perspective of sympoiesis. The field and its contingencies overflow the writing and its plans; but the writing generates an excess of its own that overflows back into the field. The drafts that pile up, their versions and censures, have resonance; the relationships between everybody in the team evolve and breakdown and transform; nodal terms become contested, miscommunicated, misread. All of this seems to leave its mark on the page. The job of writingwork, increasingly, becomes the writing of our deep complicity with the form and character of the field.

The Palimpsest of Terror Transcript from the Field We are sitting in a coffee shop when the phones all go off at once and we dash into the local supermarket. There are no security guards at the gates or people on the tills. Everybody gathers before the screens in the electronics section. Gangsters break into … … local thugs … (… what has the city come to?) … no suggestions of terrorism… (Definitely Somalis) No more information yet. (That place was owned by an Israeli! It was definitely Somalis) … shots still being fired … as we speak … reports from the area say shots and loud noises like explosives were heard

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The Kenyan military have arrived … (We’ve been waiting for something like this to happen) … questions are being asked about that column of black smoke … [handheld footage, we’ve seen it before] More shots fired … The military have arrived. Confirmed al Shabaab terror … … have taken credit … The smoke is from the army … … the smoke is from burning mattresses … What mattresses? … who’s burning a mattress? I finally make it back across the city through the gridlock, through the gate of my apartment compound, behind the doubled front door. Isn’t a researcher meant to be skeptical of all the fear and the panic and move confidently through the kneejerking …? I doublebolt the door and check my bottled water supply. ‘What we know so far’ … grenades thrown into the Art café … Heavily armed attacker s… now we know, al Shabaab Who are they —? ‘The young movement’ #OneKenya. #OneNation. … The Red Cross appeals for blood donations … A city mourns. Cavallo calls to check that I’m alright. His wife, our producer, had left the mall after her weekly shop 15 minutes before the first grenade was thrown. (Days later he would show me the timestamp on her parking ticket — disbelief). “This changes everything, man,” he says down the phone. “Keep safe, brother.”

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The news of the Westgate attack reached me while interviewing a filmmaker at a cafe on the outskirts of Kibera slum. We watched the news trickle in on the screens of a local supermarket before the traffic calmed down enough for me to make my way home. Once home, I turned on the local news and started tracking Twitter feeds as #Westgate and #OneKenya started to trend, rich in misinformation, nationalism and racial hatred. By the afternoon, a thick plumb of dense black smoke beyond the trees could be seen from my balcony. What followed was a violent, four-day siege of Westgate, my local shopping centre, by a jihadist fundamentalist group from southern Somalia, al Shabaab. When Westgate was attacked, we were only days away from starting Wazi’s first day of shooting. The script was finished—as a product, it was finalised, approved, ready to go. In terms of its decomposition, we could say it was at an entropic maximum, its most chaotic state of ‘telling’ the once simple ideas of friendship and community overcoming xenophobia. Once it was safe to travel again, an ‘emergency production meeting’ was called for all parties involved in the film to discuss options going forward with a sharp awareness that both time, and funding, were running out. Transcript from the Field We sit around a table three blocks from the still burning shell of Westgate — an ‘emergency meeting’, to orient ourselves on new narrative territory. The funders want to pull the plug on the whole production. We placate them, make wild promises about reframing the story, desperately seeking to keep the film alive. But we are all unsure as well — what did this mean for the project? What sort of story were we now telling? Cavallo: “There are two moments in Kenya: before Westgate, after Westgate. Everything changed.” The conversation slips regularly, from discussions of story and plot, to personal stories of near misses, of people that we knew who were there, or nearly there, or how likely it was that we could have been there ourselves. Each of us had a story to add. It reminds us how close this burning building and all this death was to us — Isn’t it exciting? Isn’t that terrible? Morbid  — a horrible thing had happened. The bodies are still lying there, just up the road, a few blocks away. But amazing that it should happen now, right now.

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“It shows how important this film is.” The emergency meeting goes on all day. Its theme is whether or not we can salvage a film that would be released in a profoundly different sociopolitical context than that in which it was conceived and written.

The attack, as Cavallo suggested, had ‘changed everything’. Specially, it had changed the discourse upon which the film drew its social logic: a discourse based on decades of conversation around the human rights abuses faced by urban refugees, around police corruption and violence, around a growing xenophobia in urban Nairobi towards the city’s Somali populations. It was within the framework of these discussions that the film was started and funded. When Westgate happened, the public discourse on Somali refugees within Nairobi, which had previously been ambiguous, complex and contested, became a monologue of nationalism and anti-­ terror protectionism. The attack also, however, emotionally implicated the filmmakers and writers in the very thing that we had been treating as our ‘subject matter’. Suddenly, it was not just Somalis that felt the fears of violence, and not just Kenyans either—but us. This emotional implication within the subject of our work mutated the film’s story further. A new ‘Kenyan civic public’ emerged within our discussions, based as much on how the attack was being covered in the press as it was on how the attack felt to us, personally. The general consensus was that the script needed to be totally rewritten. Transcript from the Field Cavallo: … What we have to do basically … is to make this film as much … as like the perspective of a Kenyan. Argenti: Representative of their feelings. Cavallo: Because if we make this as a human rights thing, like from the perspective of a European who’s working here, it will be like, ‘Fuck off, get out of my country, you don’t understand what’s going on’. Argenti: They’ll say ‘You are external’ The script was being written for the same ‘people’ but a different ‘audience’ … a different ‘Kenyan public’, a different Somali refugee, a different cop.

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Suddenly, cops were the good guys. They were the anti-terrorist, pro-­ nationalist heroes. You couldn’t suggest cops were corrupt. Not right after Westgate. Suddenly Somalis in Nairobi didn’t matter as much  – they had been displaced within the city’s discourse on security and protection. The story had changed. Argenti: “What we have now is blind patriotism.” At last, after six hours, a compromise is reached. The corruption of the cop is no longer a sexual assault — if it ever was (it was, at one point, in the writers’ room). He’s complicit with terror. The antagonist is no longer the Kenyan state, but anti-state terrorism. National xenophobia is replaced with stoic nationalism. The body of Fatima’s story, full digested, is silently removed.

Once the emotional impact of the attack has passed slightly, it was conceded that only parts of the script needed to be changed—adjusted and tweaked. Many parts remained untouched, resulting in what could be thought of as a palimpsestic script that now bore the marks of emotional erasure and repositioning that nevertheless showed through, if you knew what to look for. The legacy of Fatima’s story was the greatest of these erasures, a story which had had a powerful effect across the writing, but which now needed to be concealed and downplayed. If we were to think, as many early urban social theorists have, of the city as a great organism, terrorism might be reframed from its more familiar setting as the primary form of ideological violence into something resembling an autoimmune disorder; of the body attacking itself. This is what we see, in the strongest sense, in the complicity of the writer and the violence of writing. The monstrosity of terrorism is not the act of primary violence itself, but our complicity with violence—our entanglement within its forms of logic, and its metabolic subsistence. The script is not just about terror—it became itself the subject of terror and, in a sense, was (through all of us, and our affective complicity) itself terrorised.

Conclusions As decomposing this East African script shows us, rather than a ‘production’, what we encounter is a field of enfolded negotiations between funders and producers, scriptwriters and directors, the city and its

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discourses of violence and protection, the co-mingling of victim and perpetrator, sufferer and artist. This sympoietic entanglement of subjects and objects, texts and contexts, stories that tumble into stories, resists the elevation of the writer as prima facie originator of textual meaning. The script, as a palimpsest of drafts, a site of social contestations and of nodal connections and antagonisms, is always written and unwritten, and always anticipating its disavowal as the ‘final version’. Studying such a thing through ethnography is to study its decomposition—the growth of entropy, in which meaning becomes more excessive; in which mess accumulates, rather than dissipates. To treat writing as a form of sympoiesis, rather than the activity of a production, affords us the chance to ask different kinds of questions about how writing happens, and what happens when it happens. As Michael Taussig puts in, “Who is telling stories nowadays? And who is telling the story about stories?” (2015, p. 17). I have said very little about the actual finished film of Wazi that ran along several film festival circuits, picking up an award in Zanzibar. This has been to avoid the product fetishism that I have mentioned already and to keep focused on the script as seen within a decompositional approach. What I have hoped to present here instead has been a kind of (painful) writing of an object that refuses to sit still on the page. I am doing this, in part, because I have not yet found another way to write about my monstrous complicity within the terror and suffering that we were writing about, that I am still writing about, profiting from, professionalising, digesting. It raises to us a question that should be central to our thinking about studying script development: who is telling the story about stories, and how can this story be told?

References Barthes, R. (1977). Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press. Cavallo, V. (Producer/Director), & Argenti, A. (Producer). (2014). Wazi?FM [Motion Picture]. Kenya: Cultural Video Foundation/CISP. Haraway, D. (2017). Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activism for Staying with the Trouble. In A. Tsing, N. Bubandt, E. Gan, & H. Swanson (Eds.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Maras, S. (2009). Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. London: Wallflower. McNamara, J. (2018). Decomposing Scripts: Ethnography and Writing about Writing. Journal of Screenwriting, 9(1), 103–116. Taussig, M. (2010). The Corn-Wolf: Writing Apotropaic Texts. Critical Inquiry, 37(Autumn 2010), 26–33.

Script Development and Social Change in Papua New Guinea Mark Eby

Introduction The Aliko & Ambai film project (Eby and Anton 2017) was conceived as a media initiative that would employ participatory approaches to create content with young people in Papua New Guinea (PNG) around the social issue of gender-based violence (GBV), with the intent to act as a catalyst for dialogue. It engaged with a local creative team, cast, crew and local communities as part of the production process and supported media development by focusing on capacity building for film production. The script development and production process, and the themes that emerged out of that process, were also the focus of practice-led research for a PhD project (Eby 2017) (Fig. 1). A key thread in the communication for development (C4D) process for creating content is to be responsive, to establish common ground and include community participation (PACMAS 2013). When applied to a script development process, to define the community is a crucial step. In this project, ‘the community’ shifted in different phases of the project but

M. Eby (*) Middle Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_10

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Fig. 1  Reading the script during auditions. (Eby 2014)

the first community established was a community of writers. I was able to bring several excellent writers, who had attended my classes at the University of Goroka, to a workshop where we were able to discuss the issue of gender-based violence and cinematic story structure principles. From this workshop, director Diane Anton and screenwriter Jenno Kanagio were chosen, and I mentored them through the script development process. From this emerged Aliko & Ambai, a coming-of-age story about two young women who become friends as they overcome tribal conflict, abuse and arranged marriage. Anton, Kanagio and staff members of the Centre for Social and Creative Media (CSCM) helped gather a group of collaborators with links to local communities, where we cast and shot the production at multiple locations. By producing a film and analysing the narratives and practice that emerged from the script development and production process, we were able to explore how young people currently experience social change in PNG. The implementation of this project began in March 2014, focusing on script development that started with a writers’ workshop. The first draft, written primarily by Kanagio in consultation with Anton and myself, was

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produced very quickly in about four weeks. Subsequent revisions were made well into the production period, with a final draft settled on about six months after the screenplay was initiated. The project explored the pressures of urbanisation, how young people striving for an education are negotiating the obligations and expectations of their traditional culture, how gender-based violence is exacerbated in these situations, and how these pressures and anxieties are creatively reflected through the process we created collaboratively. Script development created an environment where these issues came into focus and provided a unique forum for discussion and distillation of fully contextualised contemporary PNG storylines.

Background Context Most of PNG’s industries in the formal economic sector are still developing. The population remains largely rural and self-sufficient on their own land, growing their own food (Conroy 2010; Curry 1999; Little 2016; Sharp et  al. 2015). However, the informal economy at the village and urban level continues to grow and the interest in cinema is evident. In particular, the growth of the haus piksa (village cinema) venues that have been built in most Highlands communities where, for a small fee, people can watch pirated foreign films. An audience survey (Eby and Thomas 2014) conducted in haus piksa venues throughout the Highlands to investigate film-viewing practices in Papua New Guinea found that Hollywood action films are very popular, but so are romantic tragedies produced in Nigeria, the Philippines and India. Local audiences have expressed that they consider movies a source of informal education and entertainment (Eby and Thomas 2016). The popular film imports from Nigeria fall into the popular conception of melodrama through excessive emotion and the popular US action film favours a certain kind of excessive violence, drawing a connection between the two genres of excess (Cohan and Hark 2012; Gallagher 2006; Williams 1991). This research on popular tastes in PNG provides the background for the focus on conventional Hollywood storytelling structures in our script development process that will be described in this chapter. Our research also showed that people respond very positively to locally produced content (Menzies 2016; Thomas and Eby 2016), and a concern for how to better support local feature film production with funds available through Communication for Development and Social Change

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(C4DSC) sources was an intended outcome of this project. Theoretical debates in C4DSC have been around best practices for creating meaningful and culturally relevant content, egalitarian methods of participation, and establishing sustainable structural support for ongoing media and communication enterprises (Dagron and Tufte 2006; Dutta 2011; Manyozo 2012; Riaño 1994; Scott 2014). This chapter focuses on a detailed description and analysis of script development as an illustration of how participation, community engagement, collaboration, facilitation, feedback mechanisms, stakeholder involvement and social change concerns were brought to bear on a creative media process in PNG. Specifically, this phase of the project was designed to produce a script and provide writers with skills for ongoing film production projects. To this end, we developed a workshop to address both content development and scriptwriting techniques, and selected a pair of writers for ongoing mentorship in writing the script. Presentations from local experts, structured writing guidance and interactive exercises, in addition to the biographical knowledge each participant brought to the subject, influenced their storylines at the end of the workshop. The participants we brought together were an ongoing source of support and feedback for later stages of the project. How this C4DSC project might differ from more traditional script development projects was the strong emphasis and expectation from the funder that our project would focus on capacity building with participants who were new to the script development and filmmaking process, and produce a film that would engage with a serious social issue. There is the additional expectation that viewing the film might lead to behaviour change in the audience. These are high expectations for a narrative film project, and it was part of my role as facilitator to keep this in mind while, at the same time, allowing the creative process to take place without the heavy-handed didacticism that can seep into communication for development projects if they are micromanaged by bureaucrats. In this chapter, I argue that focusing on a difficult social issue such as gender-based violence requires a balance between expertise input and encouraging young Papua New Guineans to write based on their life experience. Capacity building for screenwriters requires structured mentorship and guidance while allowing for mistakes and discovery through the creative writing process with the aim to produce a story that has local cultural relevance for the target audience. Although The Screenwriter Activist: Writing Social Issue Movies (Beker 2012) explores mainstream movies in

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countries with developed industries, there are no screenwriting guides that have been adapted for a C4D framework to address social issues in developing countries with fledgling media industries, and that is where this project makes a contribution. In this chapter, I provide an overview of that process, define gender-based violence, describe the writers’ workshop and the way we approached script development through the creation of storylines, a treatment, and a step outline before mentoring the process of writing the script and getting feedback from the circle of support we created to nurture and critique the script, and then draw conclusions from the process.

Overview There were four different types of participatory communication activities in the script development stage of this project: 1. Activities focused on individuals delivering information through presentations or sharing their experience 2. Interactive activities that involved group discussions, exercises and theatre games 3. Solitary activities that involved writing and editing 4. Feedback on many of these activities, which required developing skills to negotiate and incorporate critique and suggestions These activities emerged from the process as the necessity arose. Bringing in people with expertise on certain social issues was a stakeholder requirement. Interactive activities created ways that social issues could be explored in a playful way that could translate into scenes in a script. To create a script, the screenwriter eventually has to sit down alone and write the scenes, and then the group could once again reflect on the written output. A writers’ workshop was convened as the first collective learning environment created for the project to incubate ideas, encourage peer-based learning, bring in expertise from the surrounding community, and establish the creative team that would continue with the project to its completion. It was also our first step in fostering participatory communication, which is a basic approach of Communication for Social Change (CfSC). In addition to acknowledging that some participants in the workshop had first-hand experience with gender-based violence, people with some expertise in the areas relevant to the aims of the workshop were brought

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in to lead discussions about content. These were people with expertise in C4D media initiatives, drama and collaborative scriptwriting, or GBV issues. The writing process after the workshop involved explaining the structures of plot and story structure within the script format, and reading and giving feedback as the writer met deadlines. As researcher and facilitator, I edited the script by removing scenes that appeared extraneous but the writer implemented additional scenes and dialogue. The core creative team included Kanagio, the primary screenwriter; Anton, who created the Aliko story, and myself as editor, and it was crucial to keep the communication channels open between us because the success of the project rested on Kanagio’s ability to successfully complete this very challenging task as a first-time screenwriter. Much of the time the communication only occurred between Anton and Kanagio while they negotiated the writing/feedback loop with each other. In follow-up sessions, writers’ workshop participants gave feedback on an early draft of the script and at the first screening of the film. Our creative team had to learn how to accept critique and suggestions without derailing the creative process. As the facilitator, I provided the structure and made sure people’s opinions were heard and valued (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2  Aliko comforts Ambai after she is assaulted by her stepfather. (CSCM 2014)

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Gender-Based Violence Given the parameters of the project, script development was conceived as an engagement with gender-based violence (GBV) through narrative that could impact a local audience in a way that might not be accomplished by a more conventional media campaign involving billboard messages and other intervention techniques. Gender-based violence has been defined as any form of violence used to define and maintain strict gender roles and unequal relationships within families, communities and states (Connell 2003; Eves 2010; Jolly 2012; UNFPA & UNIFEM 2005). It can be framed as violence that “defines and expresses masculinities through acts perpetrated against women” (Lepani 2008, p. 150) to demonstrate who holds the power in the relationship. The term also acknowledges that women are not always the victim as this kind of masculinity can also be directed at other men and boys who “challenge prevailing masculine gender ideologies” (Eves 2010, p. 49). These ideologies include beliefs in the dominant male position in hierarchy, narrow conceptions of masculinity, and anxieties about status (Connell 2003). Focusing on violence through the lens of gender directs attention to culture, how children are socialised to become adults, and emphasises the ways that masculine socialisation results in violence against women. The problem of GBV is profound and complex in PNG and has deep cultural and historical underpinnings (Lepani 2008). There has not been a published nationwide study conducted since the 1980s when the Law Reform Commission undertook a concerted effort that included surveys in 16 provinces supplemented by anthropological studies (Bradley 1985, 1988; Law Reform Commission 1987; Toft 1985). It was reported that 67% (two-thirds) of wives in PNG had been beaten by their husbands (Bradley 2001; Eves 2006; Law Reform Commission 1987). Follow-up focused studies over the years have confirmed that violence against women is endemic in all regions of PNG (Eves and Kelly-Hanku 2014; Fulu et al. 2013; Khosla et al. 2013; UN 1993). Our project is one of several media initiatives in the past few years that have addressed GBV in PNG (Koima 2014; Munau and Fernandes 2016; Bustin et al. 2016; Thomas and Kauli 2015) because its ongoing impact on development has been noted, and a variety of approaches have been researched and funded. With the possible exception of the unreleased PNG TV series Grace (Koima 2014), our project is the only one that has used fiction film script development as a method for addressing this issue.

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The Writers’ Workshop Our workshop took the approach of hearing from a variety of voices on the topic of GBV and reviewed how media initiatives have dealt with the subject. We also introduced local and regional examples of education entertainment to our participants that addressed social and health-related issues (Coleman 2012; Thomas et al. 2012a; Eggins and Ruti Youth Group 2012; Thomas et al. 2012b; Walker 2007–2016). A range of professionals gave presentations on their area of expertise, pointing out culturally specific ways that GBV manifests, who it affects, how accusations of sorcery plays a role unique to PNG, and how local family-focused programs deal with domestic violence. As a participant in the workshop, Anton observed, “I was also able to reflect on my own life and whether or not I had experienced this…. Usually we think that gender-based violence is beating the wife, but there are other forms, like a daughter [orphan] in a new family being deprived of food or money when these are her rights” (personal communication, 28 June 2015). The expansion of the idea of violence beyond stereotypical scenes of domestic abuse was an outcome of our process and led to richer, more complex narratives. In addition to their own experience with the issue of GBV, workshop participants were able to glean ideas from these focused discussions, and were able to work them out in an embodied way through theatre exercises that allowed both serious and playful role-playing interactions, and dialogue development. These were elements that influenced their stories at the end of the workshop. Through a range of inclusionary practices, we created connections between our participants and various experts, forming a group that cared about our project and were willing to continue to give feedback through its different phases.

Script Development Based on our research, local PNG audiences were avidly viewing Hollywood and Nollywood films with conventional cinematic storytelling structures (Eby and Thomas 2014). Therefore, our script development process focused on understanding these structures and attempting to emulate them. Another viable option would have been to focus on indigenous modes of storytelling and experiment with how those could be adapted to cinematic storytelling. This would have been more experimental and time-consuming, potentially beyond the time constraints of our

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project, but an approach that has a lot of potential for future exploration. I should note that local PNG artists and their expatriate mentors in the 1970s consciously invented art forms that took a pan-Melanesian approach by drawing on influences from multiple PNG cultural regions and weaving them together to create something new (Sullivan 2003). They moved away from a locally grounded identity by consciously trying to create art that reflected a national identity. This included Australian theatre director Greg Murphy, whose collaboration with the Raun Raun Theatre (Murphy 1978, 2010) fed off the energy of a newly independent PNG and a giddy era of experimentation but arguably became unsustainable, largely because many Papua New Guineans still prefer to highlight their local cultural identity based in clan affiliation and place. I note this to highlight that determining how to approach adapting indigenous modes of storytelling is complicated. In our project, we did not explore this in our script development process but we did in our film production process when portraying tribal conflict and the ‘bride price’ ceremony, where the local community took the lead and improvised those scenes. Our project initially approached the script as a blueprint for the film production, so being well versed in how to create a story that felt organic and brought the audience along for a meaningful and satisfactory experience was important when guiding young people through the writing process. In addition to the focus on content, script development for novice writers on our project required an exploration and adaptation of existing cinematic storytelling structures, which involved exercises to address plot and screenplay design. I found this particularly helpful for our participants whose experiences with traditional indigenous modes of storytelling are very different from conventional cinematic storytelling structures. Since some participants already had experience with writing short scripts1, we read and discussed those first. The workshop focused on producing storylines, and follow-up sessions to the workshop involved how to write a treatment, which is a three-to-five-page document that clearly communicates the story, focusing on the highlights. The final step before writing the script was to create a step outline.2 There is very little written about script development with Melanesian practitioners. In an interview, Alan Harkness (2005) describes the 1  Developed in screenwriting courses I taught at University of Guam between 2010 and 2012. 2  A way to outline every scene in the screenplay and can be up to 40 pages.

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screenwriting process for Marabe (Harkness and Ralai 1979), which gives some insight into the challenges of the cross-cultural collaboration in an earlier historical period. He worked with John Himugo, a talented University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) student. The subject was about unemployed youth forming gangs for the purposes of robbery in Port Moresby. Himugo’s idea was to create action scenes that involved car and motorcycle chases. Harkness says, “He kept coming to me with all these grandiose ideas” (2005). Harkness rather uncharitably dismisses this as “trying to write me his Pidgin English version of every American movie he’d ever seen” (2005). Harkness discouraged Himugo’s action-picture-­ oriented ideas and eventually Harkness received a script without a structure that he could discern. He characterised it as ‘dramatised documentary’. Harkness’ solution was to reorganise the scenes, but he never found the result satisfactory. Harkness only spent two years in PNG and his experience with Himugo highlights the complexities of mentoring and being mentored in cinematic story structure across a cultural and language divide. My assessment is that Harkness did not provide enough structure early on in the process of script development and did not communicate and explain certain storytelling principles that are common in cinema but might not be readily accessible to a novice Melanesian writer. In this section, I describe the structured approach I took in facilitating script development to avoid some of the problems Harkness describes. Cinema has its own storytelling conventions and structures (Batty 2012; Beker 2012; Bloore 2013; McKee 1997; Truby 2007) that we were trying to emulate in this project, and these needed to be communicated and understood early in the script development process because I was working with young inexperienced writers. I found the structure diagrammed by Michael Hauge (2010) to be very helpful. Using a six-stage plot structure, Hauge contends that mainstream Hollywood films are built on three basic components: character, desire and conflict. Protagonists confront conflict in their pursuit of a visible goal. Writers over the years have identified this with a variety of names: classic plot, the hero’s journey, goal-oriented plot, Aristotelian story shape, energeia plot, three-act structure, Hollywood screenwriting structure and the universal story (Sundberg 2013). There are additionally, of course, many alternative plots and stories. However, as the facilitator on this particular project, I narrowed the focus for this script exercise. I was interested in how the issues we had been discussing throughout the workshop, which certainly explored all kinds of conflict and obstacles in young people’s lives, would emerge

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Fig. 3  Michael Hauge’s six-stage plot structure (Huntley 2007). (Courtesy of Write Brothers, Inc.)

within the boundaries of a classic cinematic storyline, because in the end we wanted to produce a film that would entertain and educate local audiences, and whose narrative structure wasn’t too far removed from the movies they were already watching (Fig. 3). On the last day of the workshop, I asked participants to focus on character, desire and conflict and produce a storyline. They would need to develop a character with a desire that could be communicated to the audience and then create stumbling blocks to the achievement of that desire. They would focus on the six-stage plot structure with five turning points to help guide them in creating a storyline for a script. I realised this approach was highly structured, but I argue that it was important that we strive to create a ‘PNG version’ of the international movies participants see in their own village cinemas. Below I analyse the results of seven of the eight3 participants’ storylines.

3  One participant drafted a whole set of characters and began writing scenes instead of plot points.

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Structured Writing Process Having multiple participants each create their own storyline based on their understanding of the themes and issues explored in the workshop gave the project a variety of creative outputs and several options for the direction the screenplay could take (Fig. 4). The balance of group participation and individual contribution was one of the strengths of the project and also provided insight into the thematic preoccupations of our young Melanesian writers. Six of the seven storylines that came out of the workshop had female primary characters. Only one writer chose to write about an older man. The desire of the characters primarily revolved around completing their education, getting a good job and having a supportive family. These might be considered universal themes among people in transitional societies. The specific setting and turning points required by the structure is where the unique PNG perspective on these themes becomes clearer. Two of the stories addressed unexplained illness, sorcery and the burning of witches. A couple of the stories involved tribal fights and the burning of houses. Four of the stories addressed child abuse, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, rape or forced marriage. Two stories addressed dating and relationship issues, one specifically about teenage pregnancy and attempted

Fig. 4  Composite summary of the storyline outcomes of the writers’ workshop. (Eby 2017)

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Fig. 5  Aliko with her parents. (CSCM 2014)

suicide. These storylines were the primary output of the writers’ workshop (Fig. 5). Anton and Kanagio wrote the storylines that were eventually developed into a screenplay. Anton’s story about Aliko was set in both the village and the town, addressed issues such as the effects of tribal fighting, bride exchange for peace, forced marriage, child labour, peer bullying and the struggle to get a good education. It demonstrated complexity that could be teased out in a full-length story. Kanagio’s storyline was about a young woman in an abusive home who seeks a way out by searching for her biological father. Kanagio had already demonstrated ability as a screenwriter and he was available to write the script. He and Anton formed a writing partnership to see if they could combine their stories. When Aliko comes to town to live with her uncle, she forms a friendship with Ambai who lives next door. The story now has dual protagonists, which is already breaking the rules of the classic story structure that had been imposed, although Aliko’s story plays more prominence because the script begins with her story. Hence, the collaborative nature of our process (two writers) and my reluctance to favour one over the other also became reflected in our script (two heroes). Relying on the hero’s journey model focused the story on the two young women navigating obstacles in their lives and pursuing a very

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Fig. 6  Ambai (left) and Aliko (right) meet after a long separation. (CSCM 2014)

specific goal. The other characters in the story either provide support or make life more difficult for the two young women. In this way, the characters and story emerged organically and privileged the experience of the young women (Fig. 6).

Mentoring the Screenwriter from Storyline to Completed Script Following the writers’ workshop, my role as the facilitator was to mentor the screenwriting team to transform the storylines into a screenplay. Instead of ‘reinventing the wheel’, I used conventional approaches in a step-by-step process that provided structure and tasks that could be completed before moving to the next step. I argue that without a step-by-step structured approach, it is easy for the creative writing process to be overwhelming for beginner writers. The first step was creating a treatment. A treatment is an idea for a film that is expanded into a brief short story (Horowitz 2008). Since the main turning points were created in the storyline exercise, both Anton and Kanagio were able to expand the story quite easily.

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The next step in the process was to expand the treatment into a step outline, which turns the story into scenes, hinting at the dialogue but without writing the dialogue in script form. With feedback from Anton and myself on the step outline, Kanagio began writing the full-length screenplay. Kanagio took the majority of the responsibility to write the script but Anton described her collaboration process with him as highlighting her concern that the script reflect the experience of her community in an authentic way (a value that is also important to the C4DSC process). Kanagio is from a different region of PNG and local cultural differences and ways of doing things can be markedly different from one region to the next: Jenno was a bit flexible so when I went in and had a view of the script I told him, “No, I want it this way. Can you change it a bit?” Or … “No, this shouldn’t be like this. You shouldn’t include it.” And then he asks me why. “Because, well, in my community they don’t say such, or they don’t do this.” (personal communication, June 2015)

Kanagio was learning on the job, so he tended to include scenes that repeated information the audience already knew. This could be inexperience or a style of storytelling, but I saw my role as facilitator to adapt what might work in one storytelling environment to a more cinematic approach. My primary contribution at this point was to make sure the story was working within the structure, edit the English and Tok Pisin (one of PNG’s official languages) for grammar and word choice, and correct minor errors in script format. As a facilitator in a C4DSC process, I did not want to unduly influence the content but I wanted it to be presented in the best way possible. The dialogue of the script must be in a language that all the actors are comfortable speaking and in the everyday language of the audience, which is why the dialogue for the Aliko & Ambai script is written in Tok Pisin, except for the classroom scenes where English is used as the mandated language of instruction in the country. The local indigenous language was used when the local community improvised scenes. This is in contrast to the soap opera produced in Vanuatu, Love Patrol, for example, where all the Melanesian characters speak in English, a decision mandated by funders to reach a wider English-speaking audience in the Pacific (Drysdale 2014).

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After reading the script, one of the first major changes we discussed was the opening. In the first draft, the script opens with a chaotic tribal fight scene, but this is the disruptive event that sends Aliko on her journey. After this event, she faces one obstacle after another. If we were to follow the classic story structure design, the set-up stage of the story should portray Aliko’s life before it is disrupted. This might also give the audience a chance to see ‘normal’ village life in PNG and create scenes that Aliko and the audience can refer back to later in the story. Following the story structure, we had committed to (outlined by Hauge above), the disruption, or first turning point, comes about 10% of the way into the story. With this feedback, Kanagio created an additional series of scenes at the beginning of the script. My attention to the detail of the process here is to demonstrate what emerged from our script development process. Based on this experience, I argue that to fully support young writers, it required an exchange of ideas that is encouraged by C4DSC methodology. But then we created a creative process that turned that exchange of ideas into the creation of storylines, the development of a treatment, a step outline and then writing of scenes, always checking to make sure they aligned with the original turning points of the structure that was integral to our script development process. Of course, just understanding the process, structure and mechanics does not explain the creative and cultural insight and talent required of the writing collaboration, but having a history with Anton and Kanagio, who had both demonstrated a gift for writing and directing as students, gave me the confidence that they just needed a structure within which to function in order to reach their full creative potential. With additional scenes added at the beginning of the story, redundant scenes cut, and a rearrangement of some of the scenes so that Ambai is established early enough in the story as a primary character, we were ready to send the third draft out to the participants from the original script workshop and get feedback.

Feedback on the Script As a facilitator, I allowed most of the critique to come from our participants and key experts as a key methodology of C4DSC. I argue that this ongoing participation by those who had participated in the original writers’ workshop was crucial in our ongoing effort to hear from as many points of view as possible to ensure our story would be engaging, have an

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arc that made sense to people, respond to culturally sensitive concerns, reflect the theme of GBV in a way that resonated for our participants, and provide inspiration for young women overcoming numerous obstacles in their life. As part of the give and take of responding to critique, we may not have always got it right, as I explain below in regards to the resolution, but this became part of the learning process. Feedback about the script from the writers’ workshop participants included concern about the offensive language used, in particular the language used by the abusive stepfather. Questions about the backstories of characters allowed Jenno to make a few key clarifications. Comments were made about actions that seemed odd or out of place. Certain relationships needed clarification. One of our key experts had constructive feedback about leaps in plot development and critiqued the happy ending. A final critique came from two key experts who were much more critical of the script when viewing it as an educational opportunity around the issue of GBV; in particular, how the rape scene was handled and what follow-up steps were shown in the aftermath of this scene. In response to the critique that the assault shouldn’t just be a plot point but an opportunity to show how a young woman might best deal with the aftermath of the trauma, we added a range of scenes that show Ambai going to her closest friend, Aliko, for help and then going to a counsellor at the Goroka Family Clinic. Once actors started working with the dialogue on location, it was clear that much of it was still overwritten so, as we shot the film, there was an ongoing process of simplifying the dialogue so that the rhythm of conversation was easier for the actors and it didn’t sound like a series of monologues. Kanagio says that this was a key insight for him. “We had to cut down the dialogue so the actors could speak to each other. If they’re long paragraphs, the actors forget things. They were not trained actors” (personal communication, February 2015). While shooting a conversation, many times two or more sentences would be shortened to one sentence. And sometimes lines would be changed by the actors to sharpen the insult using current slang––or whatever could accomplish the objective of the exchange. Feedback from one of our key experts pointed out that the script portrays a Catholic orphanage in Goroka that helps resolve Aliko’s story, although there aren’t any orphanages in Goroka. I preferred Anton’s original impulse for her story resolution but because of several negative comments about both the fictional and religious nature of the resolution and the length of the film, the decision was made to cut the Catholic Sisters

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orphanage scenario and just strengthen the ties between Aliko and her teacher/mentor when she leaves her husband and goes back to town. In retrospect, this brought Aliko’s story to an ending too abruptly and also changed the dynamics of the resolution. In the original version, she ends up in a religious community, altruistically working with other orphans like herself, which allows her to complete her own education. In the revised story she finds refuge with her former teacher and mentor, who helps her to complete her education and is shown reunited with her close friends Ambai and Ethan, and a new friend who may be a romantic interest. These resolutions are significantly different, but in the negotiation of the storyline at the time, all the implications were not immediately obvious. The lesson I drew from this was that the original storyline should be respected and there are unexpected consequences of making changes while negotiating stakeholder concerns, even though there was an attempt to make these decisions collectively with full consensus among the core creative team (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7  Aliko with her teacher and mentor. (CSCM 2014)

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Summary and Conclusions Through this approach to script development, which was underpinned by Communication for Development and Social Change, it became evident that important lessons about facilitation, participation, content production and capacity building can be drawn from the process created by this project. First, as a facilitator, I had to ensure that structures were installed to give our participants the support they needed to produce a script. I did this by inviting young people I knew had potential as writers, creating a workshop that provided an incubator for storylines and then providing follow-up support for the screenwriting process. Second, our participatory process involved a range of people from different backgrounds and expertise that formed a partnership that provided critical feedback and support through the end of the screenwriting and film production process. Third, we used a variety of creative ways to engage with concerns of young people, focusing in particular on GBV as a way to produce locally relevant and meaningful content. Finally, to build capacity for script writers, I chose a structured approach to narrative construction, plot and script design that provided consistent support through to script completion. In response to the challenge of addressing GBV, the Aliko & Ambai project encouraged the production of life narratives that explored an ecosystem of interwoven factors that affect men and women in contemporary PNG. The strength of this project was not to take a position on the causes of GBV but to encourage the development of narratives that allowed young women and men to explore the obstacles to the achievement of their goals in life and imagine positive resolutions and outcomes. These solutions might not already be actualised but fiction supports the creative freedom to imagine things that do not currently exist. The conclusions drawn from this project are a contribution to the discourse about media for development and the theories and practice of script development by bringing together communication for development and social change approaches to content and process together with a screen production structure to writing a screenplay.

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References Batty, C. (2012). Screenplays: How to Write & Sell Them. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books. Beker, M. (2012). The Screenwriter Activist: Writing Social Issue Movies. Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au Bloore, P. (2013). The Screenplay Business: Managing Creativity and Script Development in the Film Industry. New York: Routledge. Bradley, C. (1985). Attitudes and Practices Relating to Marital Violence Among the Tolai of East New Britain. In S. Toft (Ed.), Domestic Violence in Papua New Guinea (Vol. Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea Monograph No. 3) (pp. 32–71). Port Moresby: Law Reform Commission. Bradley, C. (1988). Wife-Beating in Papua New Guinea – Is It a Problem? Papua and New Guinea Medical Journal, 31, 257–268. Bradley, C. (2001). Looking Back at the Law Reform Commission’s Work on Domestic Violence in PNG. Proceedings of the Family Violence Workshop (Discussion Paper No. 8), 32–41. Bustin, G. T., Cunningham, D. L., Hau’ofa, M., Marshall, E. L. (Producer), & Thiesen, J. (Director). (2016). Senisim Pasin [Documentary]. Papua New Guinea: PNG Tribal Foundation. Cohan, S., & Hark, I. R. (2012). Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge. Coleman, D. (2012). Not In My House: Handbook and Resource Guide. NSW & ACT: BCS LifeCare Baptist Community Services. Connell, R. W. (2003). The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality. New York: United Nations, Division for the Advancement of Women. Conroy, J. D. (2010). A National Policy for the Informal Economy in Papua New Guinea. Pacific Economic Bulletin, 25(1), 189–204. Curry, G. (1999). Markets, Social Embeddedness and Precapitalist Societies: The Case of Village Tradestores in Papua New Guinea. Geoforum, 30(3), 285–298. Dagron, A. G., & Tufte, T. (2006). Communication for Social Change Anthology: Historical and Contemporary Readings. South Orange: CFSC Consortium, Inc. Drysdale, R. (2014). Love Patrol hemi tuff tumas! What Role Can a Pacific Soap Opera Play in the HIV Response? PhD, University of NSW, Faculty of Medicine. Dutta, M.  J. (2011). Communicating Social Change: Structure, Culture, and Agency. New York: Taylor & Francis. Eby, M. (2017). The Story of Aliko and Ambai: Cinema and Social Change in Papua New Guinea. PhD, RMIT, Melbourne. Eby, M., & Thomas, V. (2014). CD Haus Distribution in the PNG Highlands: Baseline Report. Retrieved from Goroka, Papua New Guinea. https://www.academia. edu/32657043/CD_Haus_Distribution_in_the_Papua_New_Guinea_ Highlands_Baseline_Report

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Eby, M., & Thomas, V. (2016). Haus Piksa: The Informal Economy of Film Distribution in Papua New Guinea. Information Technologies & International Development [Special Issue], 12(4), 23–33. Eby, M., Thomas, V. (Producer), Eby, M., & Anton, D. (Director). (2017). Aliko & Ambai [Motion Picture]. Papua New Guinea: Centre for Social and Creative Media. Eggins, J. (Producer), Eggins, J., & Ruti Youth Group (Director). (2012). Mangona Mulugl Kit Murum (Broken Home) [DVD]. Papua New Guinea: Center for Social and Creative Media, University of Goroka. Retrieved from http://cscm-uog.org/wp/ Eves, R. (2006). Exploring the Role of Men and Masculinities in Papua New Guinea in the 21st Century: How to Address Violence in Ways that Generate Empowerment for Both Men and Women. Retrieved from Sydney. https://www.researchgate. net/publication/281852916_Exploring_the_Role_of_Men_and_ Masculinities_in_Papua_New_Guinea_in_the_21st_centur y_How_to_ address_violence_in_ways_that_generate_empowerment_for_both_ men_and_women Eves, R. (2010). Masculinity Matters: Men, Gender-Based Violence and the AIDS Epidemic in Papua New Guinea. In V.  Luker & S.  Dinnen (Eds.), Civic Insecurity: Law, Order and HIV in Papua New Guinea, Studies in State and Society in the Pacific, No 6 (pp. 47–79). Canberra: ANU E Press, State Society and Governance in Melanesia Program. Retrieved from http://epress.anu.edu. au/civic_insecurity_citation.html Eves, R., & Kelly-Hanku, A. (2014). Witch-Hunts in Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands Province: A Fieldwork Report. Retrieved from Canbera. http:// bellschool.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publications/attachments/2015-12/SSGM_IB_2014_4_0.pdf Fulu, E., Warner, X., Miedema, S., Jewkes, R., Roselli, T., & Lang, J. (2013). Why Do Some Men Use Violence Against Women and How Can We Prevent It?: Summary Report of Quantitative Findings from the United Nations Multi-­Country Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific. Retrieved from Bangkok. http://www.partners4prevention.org/sites/default/files/ resources/p4p-report.pdf Gallagher, M. (2006). Action Figures: Men, Action Films, and Contemporary Adventure Narratives. Springer. Harkness, A. (2005). Oral History/Interviewer: K.  Berryman. Oral History Program, ScreenSound Australia, National Screen and Sound Archive. Hauge, M. (2010). Screenplay Structure: The Five Key Turning Points of All Successful Scripts. Retrieved from http://www.storymastery.com/story/ screenplay-structure-five-key-turning-points-successful-scripts/ Horowitz, M. (2008). How to Write a Screenplay in 10 Weeks: A Fast & Easy Toolbox for All Writers. New York: ArtMar Productions.

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Huntley, C. (2007). How and Why Dramatica Is Different from Six Other Story Paradigms. Retrieved from http://dramatica.com/articles/how-and-whydramatica-is-different-from-six-other-story-paradigms Jolly, M. (2012). Introduction  – Engendering Violence in Papua New Guinea: Persons, Power and Perilous Transformations. In M.  Jolly, C.  Stewart, & C.  Brewer (Eds.), Engendering Violence in Papua New Guinea (pp.  1–46). Canberra ANU E Press. Retrieved from http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p182671/pdf/intro1.pdf Khosla, V., Mikami, A., Frank, L. B., Popal, I., Debeljak, K., & Shaw, A. (2013). Combating Violence Against Women Through C4D: The “Use Your Voice” Campaign and Its Implications on Audience-Citizens in Papua New Guinea. International Journal of Communication, 7, 2087–2104. Koima, M., Narakobi, E. (Producer), & Koima, M. (Director). (2014). Grace [Motion Picture]. Papua New Guinea: Tribal Voice Artslink. Law Reform Commission. (1987). Interim Report. Port Moresby: Papua New Guinea Law Reform Commission. Lepani, K. (2008). Mobility, Violence and the Gendering of HIV in Papua New Guinea. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 19(2), 150. Little, C.  A. (2016). The Precarity of Men: Youth, Masculinity, and Money in a Papua New Guinean Town. PhD, University of Toronto. Manyozo, L. (2012). Media, Communication and Development: Three Approaches. New Delhi: SAGE India. McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: ReganBooks. Menzies, S. (2016). Cinema Pasifika: Developing the Narrative Film and Television Sector in the Pacific Island region. Retrieved from Suva, Fiji. http://www.spc. int/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/film-mapping.pdf Murphy, G. (1978). Raun Raun Theatre: The Popular Folk Theatre of Papua New Guinea. Boroko: National Cultural Council. Murphy, G. (2010). Fears of Loss Tears of Joy: Raun Raun Theatre and Its Role in the Construction of a National Culture in Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press and Bookshop. PACMAS. (2013). Innovation Fund Guidelines Round 3 (24 May – 21 June 2013). Port Villa: Pacific Media Assistance Scheme. Riaño, P. (1994). Women’s Participation in Communication: Elements for a Framework. In Women in Grassroots Communication: Furthering Social Change. London: Sage. Scott, M. (2014). Media and Development: Development Matters. London: Zed Books. Sharp, T., Cox, J., Spark, C., Lusby, S., & Rooney, M. (2015). The Formal, the Informal, and the Precarious: Making a Living in Urban Papua New Guinea. State, Society and Governance in Melanesia (SSGM), 2015(2), 1–24.

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Sullivan, N. (2003). How Media Become the Message in Papua New Guinea: A Coda. Spectator  – The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, 23(1), 27–32. Sundberg, I. (2013). Alternative Plots (Part 1). Retrieved from http://ingridsundberg.com/2013/06/19/alternative-plots-part-1/ Thomas, V., & Eby, M. (2016). Media and Public Health Communication at the Grassroots: Village Cinemas and HIV Education in Papua New Guinea. In R.  K. Vemula & S.  M. Gavaravarapu (Eds.), Health Communication in the Changing Media Landscape – Perspectives from Developing Countries. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, V., & Kauli, J. (2015). Yumi Kirapim Senis: Our Images, Our Actions. Goroka: Centre for Social and Creative Media (CSCM), University of Goroka. Thomas, V. (Producer), Eby, M., Barry, K., Ilai, B., Kauba, A., Mel, M., & Theodoris, P. (Director). (2012a). Komuniti Tok Piksa [Film Series on DVD]. Papua New Guinea: Centre for Social & Creative Media, University of Goroka. Retrieved from http://cscm-uog.org/wp/ Thomas, V., Ilai, B. (Producer), & Theodoris, P. (Director). (2012b). Painim Aut [Motion Picture]. Papua New Guinea: Centre for Social & Creative Media, University of Goroka. Retrieved from http://cscm-uog.org/wp/ Thomas, V. (Producer), Munau, L., & Fernandes, A. (Director). (2016). Yumi Kirapim Senis: Community Actions Against Violence [Film Series on DVD]. Papua New Guinea: Centre for Social & Creative Media, University of Goroka. Retrieved from http://cscm-uog.org/wp/ Toft, S. (1985). Domestic Violence in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea Law Reform Commission. Truby, J. (2007). The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. New York: Faber and Faber. UN. (1993). Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Retrieved from http://www.un.org UNFPA & UNIFEM. (2005). Combating Gender-Based Violence: A Key to Achieving the MDGS. New York: UNFPA, UNIFEM and OSAGI (Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women. Walker, P., Dorras, J. (Producer), & Walker, P. (Director). (2007–2016). Love Patrol [Television Series]. Vanuatu: Wan Smolbag Theatre. Retrieved from http://visit.wansmolbag.org/the-love-patrol-series/ Williams, L. (1991). Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess. Film Quarterly, 44(4), 2–13.

Storytelling for Our Own People: A Reflection on Script Developing with the Māori Filmmaker Barry Barclay Christina Milligan

Introduction Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay (1944–2008) is recognised internationally as a foundational figure in indigenous filmmaking. A director of both documentary and drama, he was also a skilled screenwriter. At a time when very few features were written or directed by indigenous filmmakers, he was arguing strenuously that control of indigenous image-making should be in the hands of indigenous people themselves. Barclay sought to centralise te ao Māori or the Māori worldview in principle and in his practice. He was fierce in pursuit of what he saw to be tika, that which is true, upright and just, and his unwillingness to compromise was sometimes seen as intransigence. He was thus frequently at odds, not just with mainstream film funders and distributors, but also with some of his compatriots in the world of Māori filmmaking (Reid 2018). Yet from my perspective as an indigenous producer working with him later in his career, the process

C. Milligan (*) Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_11

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of developing a screenplay with him was a constructive, deeply creative experience where disagreements were always focused on enhancing the work itself. This chapter discusses Barclay’s writing process on the feature It Was Darkness (1997) and shows it to be true in many respects to what Margot Nash premised when she wrote of the “uncertainty, risk and entering unsafe territory” (2013, p. 151) that is implicit in a process that places creative discovery above commercial concerns. Despite the conventional genre to which It Was Darkness belonged, Barclay’s approach to theme, structure, character and setting displayed an originality and fidelity to his own philosophy of filmmaking that was rare in New Zealand cinema at the time.

Backstory Barclay came to prominence as a young filmmaker with his 1974 TV documentary series Tangata Whenua,1 transmitted in New Zealand at a time when all viewers watched the same single national channel. In John Reid’s words, the six-part series “crept up on its audience, quietly lobbing an incendiary device into living rooms around the country” (2018, p. 237), a comment reflecting the fact that most Pākehā2 knew very little about the indigenous Māori world. The series took viewers into the worlds of different iwi (tribes), giving local elders space and time to tell their own stories in their own dialects, and Reid’s comment indicates the yawning gulf at that time between settler and indigenous communities in New Zealand. During the making of the series, Barclay developed a methodology of filmmaking that continued to be the basis of his work throughout his career, an approach centred on community as he noted in an email to me many years later: “I would like to think there is a level of social conviction … a passion about community struggle … Here I think of Ken Loach, of course, film after film … With Loach, community counts, every single individual in it” (personal communication, 17 June, 2007). Barclay’s debut feature as a director, Ngāti (1987) written by Tama Poata, was the story of a fictional Māori community. It was easily accessible to mainstream, non-indigenous audiences, and it remains his most popular and best-known work. However, his subsequent trajectory as a 1  Tangata whenua  – tangata is ‘man’ or ‘human being’; whenua is land. The phrase is translated as ‘people of the land’ and is used to refer to all Māori. 2  Pākehā – commonly used term in New Zealand for New Zealanders of European descent.

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storyteller in both drama and documentary steered more and more towards a rejection of compromise with the expectations of mainstream investors or distributors. He laid out, in writings and public debate from the late 1980s through to the mid-2000s, a theoretical framework for indigenous filmmaking that he named Fourth Cinema (1988, 1990, 2003a, b), and his focus on community informed his thinking not only in terms of content and production but also reception. He argued “… if we as indigenous storytellers become hell-bent on satisfying the mass audiences and commercial barons … we may cease to be storytellers for our own people” (Barclay 2003b, p. 15). Barclay is here summarising one of his principal concerns: the consuming influence of the commercial imperative in cinema. As Stuart Murray observes: “The tendency such a system possesses to commodify its images is obvious, and the consequent evacuation of cultural specificity is exactly the threat … Barclay sees in the packaging of indigenous images” (2008, p. 19). While Barclay’s Fourth Cinema thesis was a validation of indigenous experience, it was not, however, a rejection of other cinematic practices. He recognised the danger of prescription, and from his early theorising he wrestled with the complexity of the arguments he was putting forward. In Our Own Image, he comments: A Māori film might be very violent, or frivolous. Māori films might deal with incest, robbery, or love under the apple tree—who is to say? A Māori film might have nothing whatsoever to do with what both Māori and Pākehā are pleased to think of as “the Māori style of life”. (Barclay 1990, p. 20)

This comment was made well before the emergence of the new generation of Māori filmmakers like Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, 2016; Thor: Ragnarok, 2017), for whom such sentiments are passé (Hokowhitu 2013, p.  116). When I was working with Barclay, however, the list of Māori filmmakers, let alone Māori feature films,3 was much thinner than it 3  The use of the term ‘Māori film’ in this article elides the fact that the question of what a Māori film is and who may tell Māori stories on film has a contested backstory in New Zealand (e.g. Hokowhitu 2007; Ka’ai 2005; Mita 1996; Pihama 1992, 1994). That the bestknown film internationally about Māori is probably still Whale Rider (2002), written, produced and directed by Pākehā, rankles with some Māori filmmakers and some theorists. Recent work by Māori theorists like Brendan Hokowhitu (2013) and Ocean Ripeka Mercier (2010, 2007) has moved the debate beyond its earlier incarnations. Mercier in particular has pursued an analysis of Taika Waititi’s films based on the principles of te ao Māori, applying

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is now and statements such as the above had yet to acquire the welcome patina of looking old-fashioned. The gulf between support for Māori filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s, when filmmakers such as Barclay and writer-director Merata Mita were establishing themselves, and the present day is striking. The New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC), the state-­ funded body that finances much of the film development and production in the country, now recognises the high value which Māori storytelling brings to New Zealand filmmaking, particularly from an international perspective, and funding specifically targeting the identification and growth of Māori screenwriting talent is growing year on year. When I was working with Barclay, such support lay in the future. However, by the late 1980s, the NZFC had loosened its earlier, somewhat heavy-handed control of the development of films and devolved considerable funding to the discretion of producers through its Producer Operated Development Scheme (Dunleavy and Joyce 2011, p. 89). It was through one of these schemes that I was able to commission the script development of It Was Darkness, a feature project on which I worked as producer with Barclay between 1995 and 1997.

The Development Process In January 1996, the New Zealand production company that I co-owned, TopStory Productions, signed an agreement with Barclay giving us an option on his screenplay It Was Darkness (TopStory 1996). Barclay and I had already been working together on the project for several months after he approached me to see if I would be interested in producing the film. It was a conspiracy story inspired by the worldwide indigenous response to the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). The HGDP was a very large international scientific project designed to collect biological samples from a variety of population groups to establish a database of human genetic diversity. Given its aim of collecting and storing blood and tissue samples, the HGDP ran into fierce opposition from indigenous peoples early on (Mataatua Declaration 1993; Mead 1996). A story based on such “new interpretive frameworks” to read the films through the protocols of the marae or meeting ground (2007, p. 39). Mercier applies the form of specific protocols of encounter on the marae in her readings of Waititi’s films and then uses this framework to explore films such as Utu (1983) and River Queen (2005). Both these films were made by Pākehā, telling historic stories of dramatic conflict between Māori and Pākehā. Mercier’s approach can thus be seen to enable the reading of a broad range of New Zealand films using a Māori methodology.

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an issue, which spoke to the heart of indigenous activism and which was coming from a filmmaker with unquestionable commitment to the indigenous point of view, offered the possibility of an original and intriguing film. It Was Darkness is a political thriller, an international story set among the Tūhoe people from the Urewera mountain region in New Zealand and the Pitjantjatjara (Anangu) people of the Central Australian desert. It centres around a modern intertribal Māori dance troupe who travel from the Urewera to tour throughout Australia. The dancers’ creative drive is political and their performances evolve to include both spiritual and political commentary relevant to the Aboriginal tribes they are travelling among. The troupe becomes caught up in a major smuggling operation that is revealed to be using their tour as a cover to transport crates of body tissues. This material is stolen from indigenous peoples in Indonesia and countries further north and is being trafficked to a North American black market via Australia and New Zealand. The dancers use the performance in Alice Springs at the climax of the film to blow the cover on the smuggling operation. The local people, assisting them, ensure that the worst of the traffickers is left alone with his awful contraband to die of thirst in the desert. My work with Barclay on the film required many hours of discussion and, in the days before emails were common, letters and faxes with written feedback. Barclay travelled to Central Australia to conduct research when he decided to shift the original setting of the story from Canada to Australia. In the period we spent together, he redeveloped the story to incorporate the Australian setting, working through several drafts of the film’s treatment and producing a first draft of the complete screenplay. In late 1997, my family decided to move to Australia and the production company was closed down, so with Barclay’s blessing, we passed the project on to another New Zealand producer. A rule of thumb among filmmakers worldwide is that only one screenplay in ten succeeds in being put into production (Bloore 2014, p. 80), and regrettably It Was Darkness did not prove to be the one in ten. As a film, it remains unmade. As a screenplay, it offers the opportunity to explore the script development process of an indigenous screenwriter challenging the Western worldview even as he used a conventional genre approach. The draft of the screenplay completed in 1997 is 235 pages long, roughly twice the length of the average screenplay. It does not conform to the standard technical layout of a screenplay and in fact Barclay was still

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calling it a treatment. It resembles more a cross between a novel and a screenplay, with very detailed visual description and not all of the dialogue in place. There is a very large number of major characters, the plot is extremely convoluted and it is not satisfactorily resolved. For all this, it has what Barbara Masel and Cory Taylor call the screenwriter’s “capacity to surprise (that) we experience as originality” (2011, p. 122). The characters come alive on the page, the action is absorbing, and the scene-setting is masterful, from the humid forests of the Urewera mountains, to the pitching deck of the freighter carrying the contraband across the Timor Sea, to the scorching red earth of the Australian desert. An extract from a scene called ‘A Meeting of Traitors’ gives the flavour. In it, Canadian arts festival director Donald Hanning and a New Zealand Pākehā undercover agent John Fowley meet at night with an Aboriginal police liaison, Yarrin Fraser: There are vehicles parked back in the dark, Yarrin is ready to leave. He looks appreciatively at Donald: ‘May your ancestors deal kindly with you.’ ‘And yours with you.’ Yarrin bursts out laughing: ‘At least you can escape yours. Mine – they’re all around. No escape!’ He waves in a restrained way, so do the Aborigines with him, it’s like a salute, and straight away they’re gone. Donald stands staring into the dark after them. ‘I could have quizzed him on where he’s going, couldn’t I? I could have said to him, “What is your next step, your next move?” “Lay your cards on the table – or else!” What do you think, John? Should I have done something like that?’ But who is there to do the answering to that sort of question so far out here on these remnant soils, soils ground and compacted and swept barren over millennia, soils sometimes under tropical forest, sometimes under glacier, soils hoisted as high as the Canadian Rockies, buried under billions of tonnes of salt-rich water, soils stubborn and dried and drained – and almost eternal. Donald turns to go back to the caravan, taking John with him. Behind them, it’s blackfella business. (Barclay 1997, pp. 207–8)

This is not conventional screenwriting. Such lengthy description slows down the reader’s progress in following the action. Yet this dense, poetic style consistent throughout the screenplay achieves the goal of bringing alive in the reader’s mind the look, the smell, the taste of the landscape in a story where landscape imbues the characters and the action with a rich subtextual depth; this is hardly original in terms of filmmaking but not

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usually spelt out in such detail in a screenplay. As Masel and Taylor note: “A screenplay is a personal investigation in which the writer publicly tests a private version of experience” (2011, p. 122), so it is no surprise that as an indigenous writer Barclay explores the landscape in this way. The landscape itself effectively becomes a character as the outback desert, where most of the action occurs, exerts an inescapable pressure on how that action unfolds and ultimately becomes the weapon of justice as the villain meets his fate. This agency of place is discussed by Stephen Turner in his consideration of Barclay’s philosophy: If tangata whenua means people-place, making people an expression of the historical being of the land, and not simply the people of it, then land, forest, and waters also have agency. These interconnected elements are historical actors in Fourth Cinema. They need to be understood as foreground and not as background or context. (2013, p. 166)

As Turner notes, properties of place “constitute a visceral and material element” in all Barclay’s work (2013, p. 173). Equally, the use of dancers as characters gives the film a sensual visual quality from the outset but Barclay writes the dancers’ action, both Māori and Aborigine, to imply a richer net of diverse indigenous traditions, with performances evoking within their modern choreography both cultures’ much older histories of gesture as a form of storytelling. This is the ‘camera ashore’4—the Fourth Cinema camera—linking kin, bringing together the old and the new indigenous experience across borders. As a story of indigenous activism, It Was Darkness can be seen to correspond strongly to Barclay’s earlier film The Neglected Miracle (1985). A feature documentary, The Neglected Miracle, was well ahead of its time in terms of its content. It explored “the geopolitics of the genetic resources needed to sustain our major crops” (Barclay, n.d.) and in the film Barclay brought his worldview to an exploration of the developing international concern regarding the patenting of seeds. The film ranges from Central and South America to Europe to outback Australia as it explores how seeds harvested from indigenous crops are genetically modified by Western companies; the subsequent patenting of the new genetic strains requires 4  Barclay used the metaphor of the camera on the ship (that of the arriving colonizer) and the camera on the shore (that of the indigenous people) to express his perception of the gulf between the cinemas of the modern nation-state and that of indigenous nations (2003a, p. 9).

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the indigenous owners of the base material effectively to pay for what was originally theirs. As Angela Moewaka Barnes notes: “Barclay’s articulation of genetic exploitation was visionary and expressed indigenous and Māori struggles before the full significance was realised” (2011, p. 193). Writing about the documentary, Barclay said: “the film becomes a metaphor about control among nations of the very guts of life – plants – but by implication, the metaphor speaks of control of many kinds” (1992, pp. 121–122). With its focus on the exploitation of human genetic material, It Was Darkness takes this concern over control of resources to an even darker place. Another of Barclay’s films, the dramatic feature Te Rua (1991) offers strong resonances with It Was Darkness in its thematic and character concerns. Te Rua is a complex political story of a group of activists seeking the return of misappropriated Māori taonga (treasures) from a Berlin museum. Like It Was Darkness, Te Rua sets up a group of characters in pursuit of a common goal but with varied, often conflicting motives, which are sometimes far more selfish than any of them will admit. In this, both narratives can be seen as more sophisticated than the earlier Ngāti, in the range and complexity with which Barclay sets the characters against one another, even as they pursue a common dream. In It Was Darkness, it is revealed that the trafficking of the stolen genetic material is being organised by a group of operatives acting with the secret compliance of a consortium of Western governments. Thus, like both The Neglected Miracle and Te Rua, It Was Darkness has at its heart the anger Barclay was driven to express at what he saw as the historical and ongoing lack of justice indigenous people experience at the hands of officialdom. Where the screenplay diverged from both its antecedents, however, was in its structure. It Was Darkness is a thriller5, and the thriller is a genre with some quite specific requirements: the audience must be kept constantly in a state of suspense, with each story element taking them by surprise while pushing the plot relentlessly forward. In this case, William Goldman’s dictum “screenplays are structure” (1983, p. 195) holds true, for without a correctly plotted structure, the thriller will not achieve the desired impact on the audience, no matter how interesting the characters and intriguing the set-up. We were to find, as the work progressed, that the technical 5  Te Rua was described as a “thriller” in a press release as it went into production but Barclay himself described it as an “action adventure” (Reid 2018, pp. 373–4). The finished film would be very difficult to recognise as a thriller.

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requirements of such a structure were the hardest writing problem to grapple with. My notes to Barclay at one point show the prevailing issue was the difficulty in finding a balance in terms of story weight between the story of the dancers and their political motives, and the story of the international smuggling operation (Milligan, personal communication, 25 April 1996). Barclay was strongly attached to exploring the dancers’ story, focused through the lead character, dancer Vanessa Potiki, but his concentration on them drew the light away from the overarching international story, which was underpowered as a result, as well as lacking enough screen time. Such difficulties assail many writers in the early stages of script development so there was nothing surprising in this. Based on the notes, however, I was clearly aware that addressing the needs of a commercial audience might struggle for Barclay’s attention, although given the early stage we were at and now still looking back, I can see ways to resolve such a conundrum. It is impossible to know how the finished film might have looked, had I or another producer succeeded in getting it made. That Barclay was shaping his story within a genre familiar to non-indigenous audiences in no way gives the lie to Murray’s assertion that “At heart, Barclay’s films are a refutation of the logic that European … modernity asserts a claim to a singular legitimacy, one that other cultures and other narratives can only … ever be ‘outside’” (2007, p.  100). The screenplay of It Was Darkness is imbued with a wairua (spirit) that speaks across indigenous borders, bringing together Māori and Aborigine characters in common cause to fight for the principle that was central to all Barclay’s work: the dignity of sovereignty (Barclay 1992, p. 118; Murray 2008, p. 67). We were working with a coproducer from CAAMA Productions, an Alice Springs-based Aboriginal media company, on the understanding that the film would be directed by an Aboriginal director and that an Aboriginal cowriter would join Barclay as the development of the script progressed (TopStory 1997). Genuine collaboration with our Aboriginal partners was so central to the project that the first draft, when it arrived on my desk, had a front page from Barclay headed ‘Cultural Authenticity’ that detailed areas in the script where he effectively apologised for writing dramatic events which he felt only an Aboriginal writer should be creating; we both accepted from the outset that ultimately such events could only be addressed authentically by an Aboriginal writer. This speaks to the depth of respect—dignity of sovereignty—that shaped not only the story and the script, but also the

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process of development itself. Māori screenwriters often discuss their difficulties in having their voices heard in the conventional development process, and in New Zealand little space has been found for non-mainstream approaches. The development process of Waru6 (2017), a film written communally by nine Māori women and directed by eight of them, shows that respecting the dignity of an indigenous approach can result in a film that not only speaks beyond the indigenous community but also succeeds in attracting a domestic and international audience.

Conclusion The period of script development, while it can be exceedingly draining for all concerned, is a time when anything is possible with the story and the film. This can create an intoxicating sense of freedom even when working within constraints. Nash speaks of the creative process inevitably involving uncertainty “and those brave enough to enter this space must prepare themselves for both frustration and the possibility of failure” (2013, p.  151). Barclay was no stranger to frustration and failure, but he was always able to bring a freshness and commitment to the writing process. At the time we worked together, the pathways that he and other indigenous screenwriters were laying down were still trod by few. The recent growth of niche markets and what feels like an explosion of interest in indigenous stories have helped open up government policymakers, such as the New Zealand Film Commission, and commercial investors like Netflix (Gruenwedel 2019) to the richness inherent in alternative ways of thinking, and alternative approaches to the development of screenplays and the production of films. It remains to be seen whether the resulting growth in indigenous screen storytelling sustains. An earlier version of this article appeared in Medianz 17(2), 2017, under the title ‘Storytelling for our own people: A reflection on working with Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay’.

6  Waru premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017 and was described by UK Observer film critic Mark Kermode as “a remarkable achievement – authentic, impassioned, unexpected  – that stands as a testament to the radical power of cooperative filmmaking” (11 Nov 2018).

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References Barclay, B. (1988). The Control of One’s Own Image. Illusions, 8, 8–14. Barclay, B. (1990). Our Own Image. Auckland: Longman Paul. Barclay, B. (1992). Amongst Landscapes. In J. Dennis & J. Bieringa (Eds.), Film in Aotearoa New Zealand (pp. 116–129). Wellington: Victoria University Press. Barclay, B. (1997). It Was Darkness: A Feature Film Treatment. Unpublished manuscript, May 13. TopStory Productions. Barclay, B. (2003a). Celebrating Fourth Cinema. Illusions, 35, 7–11. Barclay, B. (2003b). Exploring Fourth Cinema. Paper Presented in Hawai’i as Part of Summer School Lectures. Re-imagining Indigenous Cultures: The Pacific Islands. National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Institute. Retrieved from https://www.kainani.hpu.edu/hwood/HawPacFilm/ BarclayExploringFourthCinema2003 Barclay, B. (n.d.). Barry Barclay Filmography. Unpublished document. TopStory Productions. Barnes, A. M. (2011). Ngā kai para i te kahikātoa: Māori filmmaking, forging a path. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Auckland, Auckland. Bloore, P. (2014). The Screenplay Business: Managing Creativity and Script Development in the Film Industry. Norwich: University of East Anglia. Dunleavy, T., & Joyce, H. (2011). New Zealand Film and Television: Institutions, Industry and Cultural Change. Bristol: Intellect. Goldman, W. (1983). Adventures in the Screen Trade. New York: Warner Books. Greunwedel, E. (2019). Netflix Announces Pact with Canadian Indigenous Filmmakers. Media Play News. Retrieved from https://www.mediaplaynews. com/netflix-announces-pact-with-canadian-indigenous-filmmakers/ Hokowhitu, B. (2007). Understanding Whangara: Whale Rider as Simulacrum. New Zealand Journal of Media Studies, 10(2), 53–70. Hokowhitu, B. (2013). Theorizing Indigenous Media. In B.  Hokowhitu & V.  Devadas (Eds.), The Fourth Eye: Māori Media in Aotearoa New Zealand (pp. 101–123). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. (2016). Wr/Dir: Taika Waititi. Auckland: Piki Films. Feature film. Ka’ai, T. M. (2005). Te Kauae Mārō o Muri-ranga-whenua (The jawbone of Muri-­ ranga-­whenua): Globalising local indigenous culture – Māori leadership, gender and cultural knowledge transmission as represented in the film Whale Rider. Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2(2), 1–15. Kermode, M. (2018). Waru Review  – Death, Guilt and Māori Life Lessons in Eight Acts. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com Masel, B., & Taylor, C. (2011). Unscripted: The True Life of Screenplays. Lumina AFTRS, 7, 118–124. Retrieved from https://www.aftrs.edu.au.

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Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples of June 1993. First International Conference on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 12–18 June, 1993, Whakatane, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Retrieved from www.wipo.int/tk/en/databases/ creative_heritage/indigenous/link0002.html Mead, A.  T. (1996). Genealogy, Sacredness and the Commodities Market. Cultural Survival Quarterly, 20(2). Retrieved from https://www. culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/genealogysacredness-and-commodities-market Mercier, O. (2007). Close Encounters of the Māori Kind – Talking Interaction in the Films of Taika Waititi. New Zealand Journal of Media Studies, 10(2), 37–51. Mercier, O.  R. (2010). “Welcome to My Interesting World”  – Powhiri Styled Encounter in Boy. Illusions, 42, 3–7. Mita, M. (1996). The Soul and the Image. In J. Dennis & J. Bieringa (Eds.), Film in Aotearoa New Zealand (2nd ed., pp.  36–54). Wellington: Victoria University Press. Murray, S. (2007). Images of Dignity: The Films of Barry Barclay. In I. Conrich & S.  Murray (Eds.), New Zealand Filmmakers (pp.  88–102). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Murray, S. (2008). Images of dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema. Wellington: Huia. Nash, M. (2013). Unknown Spaces and Uncertainty in Film Development. Journal of Screenwriting, 4(2), 149–162. Ngāti. (1987). Wr: Tama Poata, Dir: Barry Barclay. Wellington: Pacific Films. Feature film. Pihama, L. (1992). Repositioning Māori representations: Contextualising Once Were Warriors. In J. Dennis & J. Bieringa (Eds.), Film in Aotearoa New Zealand (pp. 191–194). Wellington: Victoria University Press. Pihama, L. (1994). Are Films Dangerous: A Māori Woman’s Perspective on The Piano. Hecate, 20(2), 239–242. Reid, J. (2018). Whatever It Takes: Pacific Films and John O’Shea 1948–2000. Wellington: Victoria University Press. River Queen. (2005). Wr/Dir: Vincent Ward. Wellington: Silverscreen Films. Feature film. Tangata Whenua. (1974). Wr: Barry Barclay, Michael King, Dir: Barry Barclay. Wellington: Pacific Films. Television series. Te Rua. (1991). Wr/Dir: Barry Barclay. Wellington: Pacific Films. Feature film. The Neglected Miracle. (1985). Wr/Dir: Barry Barclay. Wellington: Pacific Films. Feature film. Thor: Ragnarok. (2017). Wr: Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost, Dir: Taika Waititi. Los Angeles: Marvel Studios. Feature film. TopStory Productions. (1996). Letter of Agreement, 26 January 1996.

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TopStory Productions. (1997). Letter of Agreement, 9 May 1997. Turner, S. (2013). Reflections on Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema. In B. Hokowhitu & V. Devadas (Eds.), The Fourth Eye: Māori media in Aotearoa New Zealand (pp. 162–178). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Utu. (1983). Wr: Keith Aberdein & Geoff Murphy, Dir: Geoff Murphy. Wellington: Utu Productions. Feature film. Waru. (2017). Wr: Stewart-Te Whiu, J.  Wr/Dir: Grace-Smith, B., Kaa, C., Gardiner, A., Wolfe, K., Maihi, R., Cohen, C., Jones, P., & Simich-Pene, A. Taranaki: Brown Sugar Apple Grunt Productions. Feature film. Whale Rider. (2002). Wr/Dir: Niki Caro. Auckland: South Pacific Pictures. Feature film.

So Much Drama, So Little Time: Writers’ Rooms in Australian Television Drama Production Noel Maloney and Philippa Burne

Introduction A key location for the development of scripted content in television drama is the writers’ room, a place where story developers, script editors, script writers and script producers gather to create stories, devise character arcs and plot episodes. They are intense, pressured environments in which story making is inevitably a collective activity (Caldwell 2008) but one often overshadowed, in the US at least, by the myth of showrunners that habitually casts them as single-handedly responsible for a show’s creation (Hadas 2017).

N. Maloney (*) La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P. Burne Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_12

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This chapter is concerned with writers’ rooms in contemporary Australian TV drama. It presents research based on interviews with 22 professional screenwriters who have worked within the last ten years in Australian scripted TV production.1 It focuses on their experiences in these pre-production environments, in particular the type of work they do, how they value it, and how the current changes occurring in TV drama production in Australia are shaping it. Research into Australian TV script development practices is limited. Greg Haddrick’s (2001) introduction to Australian TV script development in the 1990s provides a useful window into the highly systematised pre-production processes and key players of the time, but it is designed primarily as an introduction for emerging TV writers. In her influential study of US TV script development, Ros Walker (2013) briefly references Australian production economies and pre-production processes but does not examine the experiences of screenwriters in any detail. Her aim is essentially an economic one, to argue for the introduction of a US-style writer/producer system to Australia. While Walker reserves the term “writers’ room” for US TV production, we assume that the term is a transnational one used by writers in the US, the UK and Australia to position a set of pre-production practices in script development. Two key tensions emerge from the research. Participants valued the concept of “togetherness” when describing how they believed writers’ rooms were at their best. However, they use this ideal as a benchmark to measure the realities of writers’ rooms, especially the hierarchies and inequalities they must negotiate, and the particular forms of leadership that are at times required. Secondly, while they express a degree of optimism about the creative opportunities on offer in writers’ rooms, they are also aware of how contingent these are on development budgets, global shifts in distribution, markets and local funding policies. A call to participate in the research was advertised through the Australian Writers’ Guild.2 The interviews, of around 45 minutes each, were semi-­ structured; there were some standard questions, but participants were also encouraged to offer additional, open-ended reflections. These interviews 1  Participants in the study were required to have written at least three episodes of a TV serial or series that involved participation in story and/or script conference meetings, or worked in-house as a script editor, story producer and/or storyliner, for at least three months. 2  The Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG) is the professional association representing writers for stage, screen, radio and online.

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were recorded and transcribed, then analysed for codes and themes. Ten participants were females and 12 males. These writers represent broad experience across serial, series, comedy and children’s TV shows. Care has been taken to de-identify them: their workplaces and projects have not been specified and they have been renamed as “Writer A”, and so on. In interviewing the 22 participants for this study, we took a facilitative approach to enable them to reflect on the value of the work they did, their working conditions and the industry as a whole. Several participants noted that these interviews offered them new opportunities to discuss their work; they had not “thought about” nor “thought through” these issues before. In this sense, these interviews can be seen not simply as a transmission of information, but also as a process for enabling insight and reflection for the participants. The study draws on creative labour theory, which has yielded rich insights into self-exploitative practices in media production industries (Conor 2013). Rosalind Ursell’s study of TV workers paints a culture of self-deprivation in the name of creativity (2000). Angela McRobbie argues that exhortations to “be creative” disguise oppressive labour practices (2016, p.  11) and similarly, Mark Banks points to a willingness among cultural workers to self-exploit to attain a sense of creative self-­development (2007). Yet, what space do such critiques leave for genuine experiences of agency and satisfaction in cultural work? This is an apt question for the research this chapter draws on. Historically, screenwriters have been regarded as having low autonomy (Maras 2016), yet participants in this study offer a complex and nuanced account of work in writers’ rooms, and the cultural and economic pressures that shape it. They clearly differentiate between work that was well remunerated, provided a sense of agency and enhanced their sense of inclusion and well-being, and work they felt was isolating, shaming and frustrating; qualities that David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker label as typical of “good” and “bad” work, respectively (2011, p. 39).

Storytelling Work Writers’ room participants typically create or enhance characters, pitch stories and plot scenes, episodes, series and character arcs (Phalen and Osellame 2012). Depending on the size of the team, this activity is

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overseen either by a story producer, story editor or lead writer.3 This work is inherently verbal. The screenplay may be thought of as a primary activity of a TV writer but it is dependent upon ideas and stories initially shaped by pitching, debating, discussing and listening, as well as what Writer U describes as “awful silence”.4 Types of Room Participants in this study describe three different types of writers’ room in Australian TV drama production. A small group of writers, and often producers, might gather to develop a concept, characters, major story arcs and possibly a pilot episode scene breakdown to produce a “mini bible” for a new series. Sometimes rooms of this type work with blue-sky concepts that have no guarantee of production. Their purpose is to develop a concept that can be pitched to a network, funding body or production house. Many of this study’s participants have had experience creating a TV show from scratch in this manner. The strike rate for blue-sky projects is highly dependent upon the status of the story team, the genre and the market. Writers’ rooms can also develop, episode by episode, story by story, the scripts and related documents for a series that has secured broadcaster commitment. In the current TV production climate in Australia that favours short-run series with a small number of episodes, such rooms might only function for a few months to a year unless a second or third series is commissioned. Most of the participants for this study are currently working in these sorts of rooms. The staffing of these rooms varies, depending on the budget and the level of expertise. Some mini-series might have two writers, while others might have five or more. Such development work can at times open up divisions between writers and producers. Writer I describes a recent experience in which he, along with a small group of writers, was hired by a producer to create concepts, stories and characters for a crime series:

3  In the US, lead writers on a TV series are known as ‘showrunners’, a term popularised in the early 1990s to describe producer–writers who had overall creative responsibility for a show. 4  Note taking is an important part of these meetings and this is almost always done as a dedicated, formal activity by a script assistant, who then circulates copies to writers.

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The producer took it upon himself to jettison much of what we’d created to suit the whims of the network, which announced the show would go into production in four months’ time with only the first draft of the first episode written.

Finally, ongoing series such as Neighbours (1985–), Wentworth (2013–) or Home and Away (1988–) will be supported by writers’ rooms that are highly systematised: roles will be clear and story requirements well understood. Such rooms will be required to maintain a predetermined genre, concept or style, and work with given character and story conventions. Neighbours is unique in having an in-house story team (script producer, story editor, script editors and storyliners) that plots episodes outsourced to writers.5 Many of this study’s participants have worked in the Neighbours writers’ room, and most value this experience for developing efficient skills in plotting and in providing networks, although some perceived the absence of scriptwriters in the room as odd. As Writer L wryly observed, “It’s like presenting the recipe and all the ingredients and half-cooked food to the chef and saying, ‘Finish cooking it’”. Types of Work The abilities to listen to and support others are skills constantly privileged throughout the research we undertook. Writer T, for instance, argues that, you’ve got to be reading people and listening to other ideas at the same time … you have to make sure quieter people, introverted personalities, don’t get talked over and trampled in the rush to build story.

Writer F emphasises the need for writers to be “curious”, to give participants the “space” and not “shutting down” story too early. Additionally, an ability to maintain story continuity and a close acquaintance with TV production trends are considered essential. Screenwriting is typically framed as a craft rather than an art (Conor 2014; Price 2013), a tradition maintained by this study’s participants. Without craft, Writer E maintains, screenwriters “won’t make it”. It has a 5  From 2012 to 2017, Neighbours dropped its in-house story team and instead used a similar model to another Australian serial drama, Home and Away. Writers would attend a plotting meeting and then produce scene breakdowns. It reverted back to an in-house story team model in early 2018.

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transformative capacity. For Writer F, craft enables “a good idea to become something remarkable”. The concept of craft was described with a certain reverence. Writers should “hone” it, craft principles were “core”, and a writer’s craft “should be respected”. Yet, despite the importance attached to craft, the terms used by participants to describe it were fairly limited and predictable. The most common were “story”, “scripts”, “develop”, “plot”, “character” and “scenes”, in that order. By contrast, the more general concept of “story ideas” was afforded a far richer and more exuberant language. Ideas are “compressed”, “zany”, “amazing”, “distilled” and “crazy”, and arise by “leaving your ego at the door” and a “no holds barred” approach. The majority of writers believed that while some excelled in storytelling and others in writing, this disparity in talent was simply a reality that needed to be accommodated within the writers’ rooms. Nonetheless, several writers argued that the difference between storytelling and scriptwriting was artificially exacerbated by production systems that segmented screenwriting labour into separate forms of work, thus promoting artificial divisions of expertise. The verbal nature of development work also includes the need to defend story at all levels of production. For Writer T, a good producer is one who will “defend a story team”. Participants also noted how storytelling work, because of its verbal nature, is sometimes considered expendable labour. Several recalled a landmark dispute in 2000 between the Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG)6 and Simpson Le Mesurier, the producers of the ABC serial drama Something in the Air (2000), which highlighted how storytelling, as creative labour, could easily be exploited. An arbitration judgement found that the producers had not sufficiently remunerated writers for initial story development (Woods 2000). For many, good rooms are small rooms. In observing the show on which she was currently the script producer, Writer F noted: More than three writers and you find (some) people are not saying anything. It’s not their fault, there’s just too many other personalities in the room. If you took out some of the other people, you’d get better value out of those other people.

6  The Australian Writers’ Guild is a professional association that represents writers for stage, screen, radio and online.

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Writer F’s recent experience developing a comedy show offers some important lessons in keeping the writers’ room small and manageable: “We [initially] had about 10 people … it was a complete disaster because there were just way too many people in the room”.

Writers’ Room Cultures As John Caldwell has observed, film and TV workers analyse and theorise their work in complex ways, a process he argues is in itself culturally formative (2008). In this study, similarly, participants reflected on the ideas and concepts that shape their work and their industry. In particular, they articulated strong beliefs regarding collective authorship and its creative limitations, while also being highly attuned to production realities that produce power structures antithetical to their values. Democracies A key focus of the research was the extent to which screenwriters experience genuine collaboration in the writers’ room. Attitudes and expectations of teamwork in TV are culturally shaped. In her study of the BBC, Georgina Born observes the suspicion of teamwork among TV screenwriters (Born 2005), while Eva Redvall argues that the concept of “one vision”, driven by an auteur screenwriting approach, dominates the development of Danish TV scripted content (Redvall 2013). In accounts of US TV development, writers’ rooms are described as collaborative, fast-paced and relentless (Phalen and Osellame 2012), and shaped by the power afforded to showrunners (Kallas 2013). In his assessment of contemporary writers’ room practices in the US, Caldwell (2008) offers a sceptical account of how authorship is managed. While a showrunner’s vision may define a series, the volume of story it demands requires a team of writers to devise plots and character development. Such a process requires an aggregation of “voices” to work together and challenges concepts of individual authorship (Caldwell 2008, p. 212). Surprisingly, the terms “collaboration” and “collaborate” were not used at all by participants. Given the preponderance of these terms in creative and cultural industries discourses (Graham and Gandini 2017), their absence is notable. It could be that participants believed their experiences deserved more nuanced descriptors. There was certainly a tendency to marshal distinct metaphors to describe how they worked together. Writers’

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rooms were like “a band, in which everyone played”; the group worked best when there was a collective ownership of the story at hand and the needs of the show were uppermost in people’s minds. In a good room, “people will circle around the idea and work it”. This collective form of authoring has been disparagingly named “writing by committee”, an approach Caldwell argues provided economic benefits in the network era for production companies rationalising and systematising writing activities inside the company (2008, p.  212). However, Kallas suggests that the collective practices generated by writers’ rooms might enable a more courageous approach to storytelling (2013). Certainly, participants often had positive memories about writers’ rooms in which they had a sense of ownership and inclusion, or what Hesmondhalgh and Baker describe in their conceptualisation of good work as “investment” (p. 31). Of a particular show, Writer G recalls that “They [the writers] had a say about the characters … you really felt you were part of the show and not just some gun for hire coming in”. Such descriptions had a distinctly democratic flavour to them. Participants believed everyone should have an opportunity to speak but at the same time the difficult silences that sometimes arose during workshops should be tolerated. In a good room, there should be an acceptance that no one person tells a story in the same way. As well, a diversity of experience, cultures, gender and values should be welcomed. For Writer B, writers should hold to their voice: “you want to hear what people can offer and bring to it. Or, as Writer H puts it, “having that freedom for people to be able to say what they need to say is good.” Connected to this ideal was the belief that a good story was a group effort and that, when it emerged, there was a collective pride in what was achieved. A positive story is told about writers’ rooms operating at their best when writers work together to create narrative, but also for there to be capacity for individual agency and expression. As Writer O noted in relation to the drama series Wentworth, now in its seventh season: “I think the reason they’ve all stayed on is because it feels like they all have huge impact on the story, the characters, the show: they have real ownership over it”. Of Neighbours, both Writer H and Writer K believed strongly that ownership of story was shared throughout the in-house team. Of course, it could be argued that the ideal of “togetherness” in the writers’ room is strategic. As Hesmondhalgh and Baker have noted, working successfully in a team on short-term projects creates a degree of social

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capital: it strengthens the chances of finding contracts in the future. Additionally, it is important to be seen to work well with others (2011, p. 177). Some participants certainly supported this view, such as Writer C, who noted: It is very precarious; you really can’t offend people and you can’t get a reputation for being a dick. You can’t get a reputation for being the annoying one in the story room. Yeah, you have to be extremely collegial and professional – unless you’re the boss.

In addition to this notion of “togetherness”, there was a broad consensus that writers attended writers’ room first and foremost to serve the needs of the story. Writer O argued that, “The people who are successful are those who put the show first and always put the show first and give their best to it”. As Writer F put it, “let’s all try and do the best job that we can for this story and for this show”. Several participants pointed to behaviours that got in the way of this practice. For Writer L, “bring-all and share-all fests” are unhelpful. Instead, participants should practise “creative discipline” by reading the needs of the room. At times, story development required individual leadership; “someone to be accountable to moving it forward, toward building a story and a concept”. Writers who “starred”, behaved like “kings” or “queens”, or held up the process with unnecessary chatter, were seen in a negative light. As Writer H stated, “monarchs are not good for the process”. One participant pointed to the metaphor of a “well-run cabinet room” not relying solely on a prime minister for guidance. If someone dominates the room, story can fail. These Australian reflections on story ownership as something shared contrast markedly with studies of authorship in US TV story rooms. As Leora Hadas illustrates, US production companies will gladly anoint writer–producers as auteurs to legitimate and brand their projects, but in the process writer teams and the work they do are sidelined (Hadas 2017). Associated with the concept of “putting the show first” is the more specific practice of “relinquishing ideas”. Several participants noted that it was sometimes considered bad form to hang onto an idea during a story conference when it had already been rejected. As Writer Q observed, “You have to be able to throw your idea on the table and let it die there if

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nobody else picks it up, because it is collaborative. I think that’s really a hard balance”. Importantly, this act of sacrificing one’s story idea for the betterment of the show has an important social function within writers’ rooms. If a writer is willing to give up their idea with grace, it can demonstrate what Writer T calls “reasonable intelligence” and indicate a mature understanding of production realities. In her study of early and mid-career UK screenwriters, Bridget Conor theorises this relinquishment as “disinvestment”, a practice she argues is self-exploitative but also productive, in that it fosters “professional confidence” and “collegiality” (2013, p. 207). However, as Writer L observes, such a strategy can require an active moral compass: You’re there to do a job. You’re accountable to an objective. You have to keep reminding yourself that. How are you going to find that? What are you willing personally to bring to do it?

Hierarchies Creative hierarchies in Australian TV production have had a long entrenched history and have influenced writers’ room culture. Australian TV has been shaped by a small number of production houses, such as Grundy, Crawford, Southern Star, the ABC and Simpson Le Mesurier, which ran large development departments (Walker 2013). These companies maintained strict production boundaries where script departments often were kept quite separate and at times, isolated, from production. Greg Haddrick’s description of TV script development in the 1990s provides detailed insights into how such systems were once the norm (Haddrick 2001). Overall, participants considered these hierarchies and narrow production cultures a thing of the past but tensions between producers and writers remain, particularly in regard to story development. As Writer N explains bluntly: Producers oftentimes feel they have just as good a story instinct as any of the writers. We’re seen as having a pretty transferable skill and if we’re not doing a good job, it’s very easy to replace us and bring on someone else.

Writer B echoes these sentiments when he comments that “the industry is festooned with experts”. He recalls working on a show whose producer deliberately separated writers from the production team because he

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believed it would produce “creative tension” but it was “incredibly counterproductive”: If I was writing a creative producer’s course, the first thing I would do is get a whole lot of young producers in, say we’re not going to do anything for the next three weeks because I want you all to go away and write a script.

Conversely, many felt it important that writers become more acquainted with the production process. Writer D argues: I think that the lack of experience on set, in the edit suite, with designers, all of that production stuff that you get when you’re a showrunner or as close to what we have as a showrunner, is really important for writers to have.

For Writer U, the producer can easily evoke the network’s needs when attending a writers’ conference: “They know what’s going to fly with the broadcaster and what isn’t.” Writer U believes this created a form of second guessing in the writers’ room that could disrupt inventive story making. Writer C echoed this sentiment, noting that the producer could easily alter the power dynamic in the room: “You’ll get dropped in on by the producer to talk about the budget, and then you’ll suddenly realise, oh no, that person’s in charge”. One of the challenges Writer F cites for series development is the increased power of networks: [They] are determining what shows will be made. That is terrible because they’re just coming up with the same old boring old ideas that they’ve already done. That’s why the interesting shows come out of those little nooks and crannies of the television stations that no one really cares about.

Writer S offers a similar observation about the difficulties networks have in understanding the story making process, and how it so often begins with a small team of like-minded writers: Sometimes a network instigates a room and produces a show out of that, but it’s often not as good because it doesn’t have that original voice that’s been developed through camaraderie or looking at the world in a particular way.

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Writer G adds: I think the other important thing is that support, even outside of the writers’ room, from producers who understand that story is foremost and paramount and important. Because not all producers get that and so many producers want all that work to be done before they even come in.

Some participants felt the pressure by networks to respond quickly to scheduling needs had increased markedly. Writer L argued that, “What seems to be more popular these days is, ‘Here’s a timeslot, quickly make something to put into it’”.

Production Economies Participants pointed to the demise of terrestrial broadcasting and the rise of streaming services and short-run mini-series as key developments in Australian TV production. These changes have opened more discrete markets and, as a consequence, more diverse story opportunities. At the same time, they have altered the way scripted content is created. Budgets and Conditions Ongoing enduring dramas are now a rarity in Australian TV. The Matchbox serial The Heights (2019) is the first new serial to be produced in Australia for more than ten years. Once, long-running shows, offering 20 or more episodes per season, were the norm and productions such as McLeod’s Daughters (2001), All Saints (1998–2009), The Secret Life of Us (2001) and Blue Heelers (1994) built their viewership over several years. These shows maintained a core group of writers hired on rotation, with some writing two or more episodes a year. As several participants noted, there were more opportunities for new writers to try out. Writers’ rooms were staffed by a mix of in-house script producers and script editors who developed series and episode stories, and episode writers brought in to create a scene breakdown. A total of 36 Australian TV drama titles were in production for 2017/2018 with a combined budget of $295 m. Significantly, short-run mini-series7 productions comprised almost 65% of TV drama output. As a consequence, overall production hours have dropped. In addition, hourly 7

 Screen Australia defines mini-series as having 13 hours or less of screen time.

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production cost of mini-series has increased from $1.2 m to $1.5 m over the past five years (Screen Australia 2018). In Australia, government funding at state and federal level for new series TV script development has recently become more available for early concept creation as well as longer story and script documents. Until 2018, Film Victoria’s funding for TV drama development has fluctuated, due partly to a requirement that projects secure market commitment. This requirement has now been dropped (2019). Screen Australia reformed its development funding guidelines in 2018 to enable greater and more diverse access (2018). Screen NSW does not require marketplace attachment upfront, but it will not fund more than a mini bible development without established interest from a broadcaster (2019). Despite these funding initiatives, however, a common complaint from participants about early story development is that, in Australia at least, it attracts insufficient funds. Many bemoaned how Australian writers are increasingly expected to create new shows on smaller budgets. Writer E compared the current climate with development opportunities in the 1990s: “It was a proper amount of time, enough for people to do the research, a proper amount of time for people to try and break the show. It just wouldn’t be possible now”. Several writers used the US TV series Breaking Bad (2008–2013) as a benchmark for best practice in story development. As Writer E put it: Breaking Bad takes several weeks to [break] a story and we get two days. We can’t compete, but we have to compete because it’s an international global industry now. So, there’s an unrealistic expectation [in Australia] of what something is going to cost, and it’s also unfortunately the way that things work on an economic basis has changed as well.

Would Australian TV products benefit from adopting a US-style writers’ room model that provides greater in-house development time? The increased costs of such a model could be offset by lead writers taking on production responsibilities, and more efficient pre-production planning (Walker 2013). However, there is no local matching of the size of US and UK production budgets. Writer B notes how the entire $8 million budget for the Jack Irish (2018) series is no match for 2018 budget of The Crown at £10 million per episode. This shortfall, he says, encourages a dependence upon a particular form of dialogue: “you end up writing a whole lot of scenes with people in pubs talking”.

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How are these economies shaping work in Australian writers’ rooms? Not surprisingly, many participants reported that script development conditions were getting more difficult, with some strongly arguing that they were impacting negatively on working relationships. Writer L added that the precarious nature of screenwriting employment meant that writers often felt they had no choice but to work under difficult conditions: The working environment [this pressure] creates is calamitous. But if you can deliver, and you will, then it means next time they’ll shorten it again. They’ll be going: ‘But it can be done’. This is the terrible precedent: it can be done. So, it’s a race to the bottom, you know.

And if you work in-house on a production, according to Writer L, “You literally check out of your own life for six months and then you recuperate … [but] nobody’s going to say no, because everybody wants to be working. You fly in, fly out”. It is argued that such “feast or famine” work patterns are only made possible when workers are so invested in and defined by their jobs “that they push themselves to the limits of their physical and emotional endurance” (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011, p. 6). However, it is debateable as to whether over-identification with work causes the sorts of exploitative practices described by Writer L. As she and other participants have implied above, budgetary constraints and slender work opportunities mean screenwriters often have little control over their working conditions. There was little evidence in the interviews of what McRobbie calls the “ethos of passionate work”; a concept she argues enables the construction of an entrepreneurial self that is central to creative industries discourse and to forms of self-exploitation (2016, p. 74). Only two of the participants, Writer E and Writer G, spoke about the need to feel passionate about storytelling. Instead, participants tended to present themselves as knowledgeable craft practitioners8 with a critical eye on industry realities. This is not to say that participants did not feel the pressure to perform in certain ways. For instance, they noted how writers are expected to form productive relationships within the writers’ room. As several participants put it, this requires an ability to “work in”, “fit in” and “work with” 8  A previous study of Australian screenwriters building international careers noted how important it was for writers to be conversant with storytelling craft concepts, and to be able to articulate their application (Maloney 2019).

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quickly and effectively. As Conor has argued, the short-term gigs that characterise work in writers’ rooms demand a certain sociability (Conor 2014). In addition, participants noted there was often pressure to socialise outside of the writers’ room; a situation that blurred the boundaries between work and pleasure, which Gill observes is symptomatic of cultural work in general, where the “the entire self is an entrepreneurial work project that must be presented in all the right ways at all the right occasions” (2013, p. 198). For participants such as Writer N, however, it is a regrettable reality that screenwriting contracts are so dependent on social networking. Diversity Participants were asked to comment on problems of diversity, equity and the impact of the #MeToo Movement, in so far as they affected writers’ rooms. Overall, opinion clustered in three ways. A small minority of female participants were adamant that they had never experienced discrimination on the basis of their gender, and that women are “often in charge” of script development. For the most part, participants believed that writers’ rooms have become more equitable places that created more diverse stories. “Macho culture” had receded and the times were “exciting” with “broader perspectives” and “greater opportunities”. However, at times these opinions tended to be qualified. Things were “slow” to “get better”. While diversity was a commonly used term, Writer K felt many misunderstood the “complexities” of the term and it was often interpreted as meaning “fewer white people” and that “socio-economic” diversity remained a challenge. That lack of diversity just leads to a flattening of ideas in the room because people don’t have any real experience with hardship or what priorities are at the front of people’s minds when they aren’t well off and going to decent schools.

Several participants singled out Neighbours for its commitment to telling gender and culturally diverse stories. Participants also noted various industry initiatives, such as Talent Camp9 and The Other Project, which create 9  Talent Camp is a joint initiative by AWG, Screen NSW and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School that provides storytelling opportunities for creative workers from diverse

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entry-level opportunities for underrepresented or disadvantaged groups. Writer F also praised Blackfella Films’ indigenous series Ready for This (2015) for ensuring indigenous voices a place in the writers’ room. However, another minority of participants, male and female, insisted inequity remained a major issue. Writer N argued that the industry often paid lip service towards diversity but that in reality “decisions continued to be made by white men and most of the directors are men”. As Writer S noted, I did another half hour comedy room recently, and there were four male writers and me. They were discussing female characters, and then they would stop and ask me, is that what a woman would do? … whether I would have affected the gender balance of the actual story or not is an interesting question to me.

It should be noted that despite the cautious optimism expressed by many participants about increasing diversity in the industry, recent statistics suggest social and cultural disadvantage remains a problem. Of the 40 drama productions funded by Screen Australia in 2013–2015, only 35% of attached writers were female (Screen Australia 2015). In Screen Australia’s Seeing Ourselves report on diversity, a majority of TV drama writers believed Australia’s approach to diversity on screen did not compare favourably to overseas markets (Screen Australia 2016). Opportunities Many participants named shows such as Tidelands (2019), Secret City (2016), The Cry (2018) and Bloom (2018) as emblematic of a riskier approach to scripted content in recent times. However, the current climate that preferences shorter-run series was viewed as more problematic for both entry-level writers and those who rose through terrestrial production. Shorter-run series favour experienced writers over their emerging counterparts. Tidelands and Bloom, for example, have seasons of eight and six episodes, respectively, and small writer teams. One writer wrote all eight episodes of Tidelands, while another writer developed and produced Bloom, and wrote four of the six episodes (2018). background. Other initiatives by the AWG’s Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee, include the Equity Diversity Showcase, Focus on Ability, and the Emerging Talent Salon.

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Of the 22 writers we interviewed, 18 ascended through older broadcast models of TV production and, despite some misgivings, most looked back with a certain fondness for the opportunities they offered. In particular, these shows were seen to allow new writers to observe experienced writers at work and to try out; they enabled a stable of writers on rotation with ongoing work; characters were cherished; and given the storytelling style was developed over a period of time, episodes were easier to plot. As Writer L observed, “that model actually has more potential for grounding experience for younger writers and emerging writers, and room to house them within that model and bring them up”. Within the cohort of participants for this study, there were several self-­ described “jobbing” writers who have depended on long-running shows for regular incomes. These writers felt they lacked the contacts and experience needed to work in high-turnover and short-run series drama that favoured a more entrepreneurial approach. For Writer P, this latter form of work requires coming in “with your own vision” and “your own ideas”, something she didn’t regard as a personal strength. Instead, she prefers to freelance on existing shows but recognises that such opportunities have shrunk markedly in recent years: “I’m very engaged and I’ve got a lot of questions, but I’m not somebody who just generates ideas off the top of my head. I’m more someone who goes away and has a think”. Screenwriters in the US are reporting a similar situation for freelance writers, where streaming services are contracting smaller numbers of prominent writer–producers to develop and write short-run series. While some describe these new markets as a boon for writers, others suggest that only a small minority are benefitting (Laporte 2018).

Conclusion The 22 industry interviewees have provided a rich and complex picture of Australian writers’ rooms transforming from places that once operated as a link in a chain of cultural command to more vibrant locations in which writers have greater creative agency. More screenwriters are initiating and developing Australian drama TV than they did 20 years ago, and for some participants, it is an exciting time. However, this excitement and sense of opportunity is tempered by a range of economic, social and cultural dynamics. Writers were cautiously optimistic about the growing opportunities for diverse participation, but the playing field is clearly not level. Screenwriting work remains highly

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precarious. If there is one dominant reality these writers present, it is that story making requires time—and this what Australian screenwriters, in comparison to their UK and US counterparts, lack. In addition, production hierarchies continue to contest and diminish writers’ authority and status. However, with increasing demand for short-­ run mini-series delivered through streaming services, the separation of production from writing, and producers from writers, may cease to be useful if we are to foster a richness of Australian stories and storytellers. For Writer I, the future offered by streaming platforms seems positive: [T]he proliferation of new transnational distribution platforms means writers can take their projects directly there. Thus, cutting out the producers and securing better development deals, and more ownership creatively and financially of their projects. The producers who flourish will be those who make friends and partnerships with the best writers.

References Banks, M. (2007). The Politics of Cultural Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bloom. (2018). Playmaker (Producer). Australia: Sony Pictures. Blue Heelers. (1994–2006). Channel Seven Productions (Producer). Australia: Souther Star Entertainment. Born, G. (2005). Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Vintage. Breaking Bad. (2008–2013). High Bridge Entertainment (Producer). US: Sony Pictures. Caldwell, J.  T. (2008). Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham: Duke University Press. Conor, B. (2013). Subjects at Work: Investigating the Creative Labor of British Screenwriters. In P. Szczepanik & P. Vonderau (Eds.), Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Conor, B. (2014). Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice. Oxford: Routledge. Film Victoria. (2019). Funding for Development. Retrieved from https://www. film.vic.gov.au/funding/funding-for-development. Accessed 9 Apr 2019. Gill, R. (2013). Inequalities in Media Work. In P.  Szczepanik & P.  Vonderau (Eds.), Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Graham, J., & Gandini, A. (2017). Introduction. In J.  Graham & A.  Gandini (Eds.), Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries. London: University of Westminster Press. Hadas, L. (2017). From the Workshop of J. J. Abrams: Bad Robot, Networked Collaboration, and Promotional Authorship. In J.  Graham & A.  Gandini (Eds.), Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries. London: University of Westminster Press. Haddrick, G. (2001). Top Shelf, Volume 1 & 2: Reading and Writing the Best in Australian TV Drama. Strawberry Hills: Currency Press. Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2011). Creative Labour: Media work in three cultural industries. Oxford: Routledge. Home and Away. (1988–). Seven Productions (Producer). Australia: Southern Star Group. Kallas, C. (2013). Inside the Writers’ Room. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Laporte, N. (2018) The Death of Hollywood’s Middle Class. In Fast Company. 25 October 2018. New York: Fast Company Inc. https://www.fastcompany. com/90250828/the-death-of-hollywoods-middle-class. Accessed 3 Mar 2019. Maloney, N. (2019). Understand Employability in the Creative Industries. In J. Higgs, W. Letts, & G. Crisp (Eds.), Education for Employability: Learning for Future Possibilities. Rotterdam: Brill Sense. Maras, S. (2016). Ethics in Screenwriting: New Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McLeod’s Daughters. (2001). Nine Films and Television, Millenium (Producers). Australia: Southern Star Entertainment. McRobbie, A. (2016). Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Cultural Industries. Cambridge: Polity Press. Neighbours. (1985–). Fremantle TV (Producer). Melbourne: Channel 10. Phalen, P., & Osellame, J. (2012). Writing Hollywood: Rooms with a Point of View. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(1), 3–20. Price, S. (2013). A History of the Screenplay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ready for This. (2015). Blackfella Films (Producer). Sydney: ABC TV. Redvall, E. (2013). A European Take on the Showrunner? Danish Television Drama Production. In P. Szczepanik & P. Vonderau (Eds.), Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Screen Australia. (2015). Gender Matters: Women in the Australian Screen Industry. Retrieved from Sydey: https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/f20be ab8-81cc-4499-92e9-02afba18c438/Gender-Matters-Women-in-theAustralian-Screen-Industry.pdf?ext=.pdf. Accessed 9 Apr 2019. Screen Australia. (2016). Seeing Ourselves: Reflections on Diversity in Australian TV Drama. Retrieved from Sydney: https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/ getmedia/157b05b4-255a-47b4-bd8b-9f715555fb44/TV-Drama-Diversity. pdf?ext=.pdf. Accessed 9 Apr 2019.

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Screen Australia. (2018). Screen Australia Drama Report 2017–2018. Retrieved from Sydney: https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/2cdec8cbeb51-400b-9c88-2d14bcf83ca8/Drama-report-2017-2018.pdf?ext=.pdf. Accessed 9 Apr 2019. Screen NSW. (2019). Early Development 2017–2018. Retrieved from Sydney: https://screen.nsw.gov.au/funding/development/early-development/funding-approvals. Accessed 9 Apr 2019. Something in the Air. (2000–2002). Simpson Le Mesurier (Producer). Australia: ABC TV. The Heights. (2019). Matchbox Pictures (Producer). Australia: ABC TV. The Secret Life of Us. (2001). Artist Services (Producer). Australia: Channel 10. Tidelands. (2019). Hoodlum Entertainment (Executive producer). America: Netflix. Ursell, G. (2000). Television Production: Issues of Exploitation, Commodification and Subjectivity in UK Television Labour Markets. Media, Culture & Society, 22(6), 805–825. Walker, R. (2013). TV Drama Series Development in the US: New Possibilities for the Australian Industry. Retrieved from Melbourne: http://www.issinstitute. org.au/wp-content/media/2013/02/WALKER-Report-lowRes.pdf. Accessed 4 June 2019. Woods, M. (2000). ‘Air’ Writers Win Suit over Payment. Variety. Retrieved from https://variety.com/2000/biz/news/air-writers-win-suit-overpayment-1117783299

Defining the Beats in the TV Sitcom D. T. Klika

Introduction The sitcom is distinguished from drama or soap opera by having what is described as a closed or “circular” narrative structure wherein the plot returns to the original stasis, defined by Curtis as the re-situation (1982). In my book Situation Comedy, Character, and Psychoanalysis: On the Couch with Lucy, Basil, and Kimmie (2018), I analysed character behaviour to argue that the protagonist, in their attempt to dispel or deny the incident that has triggered the story, shapes the narrative in a way that reflects the “entrapment” of the show’s characters, a defining characteristic of this form of comedy (Mills 2005; Mintz 1985). While I argued that the sitcom begins with character, I now extend that premise to posit that the comedy emerges from the character’s reaction/actions to events that threaten their sense of self articulated at an early stage of script development: the beat sheet. In this chapter, I critically examine a beat sheet from one of my own pilots, At the Bar (2016), to determine how beats inform the shape of the narrative structure in this form of comedy.

D. T. Klika (*) Middlesex University London, London, UK © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_13

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Development of a Beat Sheet Writing the sitcom entails a number of stages of development (Smith 1999), both by the writer and within the writers’ room (Scarbrough 2017). Pamela Douglas writes that “[a] ‘beat sheet’, as used by some producers, is midway between a treatment and outline …” (2011, p. 163). For scriptwriter Ellen Sandler, the beat sheet “breaks the story” (2007) and centres on a character that has something at stake. Douglas also writes that “‘breaking a story’ means identifying the main turning points.” (2011, p.  159). It is the relationship between beats and turning points that is of interest here. Christina Kallas defines beats as “an interchange of action and reaction or emotional variations” (2010, p.  147). However, references to beat sheets are few and far between in the literature, and then only mentioned briefly (Sandler 2007; Smith 1999). Evan Smith (1999) offers that a main storyline in the sitcom has five to nine beats, with three to five beats for subsequent stories; as such, a beat sheet for a 22-minute episode is kept to one page. Turning now to one of my beat sheets, I critically examine the nature of the beats and how they inform plot, in turn shaping the narrative. The premise of At the Bar, the tag (short description), logline (which I define as the format of the show and its theme) and set-up (the world of the characters and the situation) are as follows: Tag: At the Bar, a comedy for anyone who has to work with their ex. Logline: A 13-part half-hour farcical studio-based comedy series set in barristers’ chambers – where the law is not always used for justice and winning is all that counts. Set-up: At the Bar centres on competitive barrister Teddy Thomas who thinks he is better at his job than he is; constantly juggling various demands in his life, in particular the ongoing battle with his ex-wife, a senior barrister at St James’s Chambers, Ruth Karp QC. Jeremy Butler demonstrates that each episode of Friends (1994–2004) taps into the inherent tension in the premise: the “lack (of the truth, of commitment in a relationship, of romance) [raises] the question of whether the protagonist’s desire [to find love] will be satisfied” (2002, p. 25). The premise of At the Bar and its inherent tension must therefore underpin each episode: two people divorced from each other must work

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together in the same profession. The storyline for the pilot episode, ‘Renovator’s Delight’ (2016), is as follows: Ruth Karp QC, President of the Bar Association, has decided to renovate the Association’s drinking room to attract the more respected and ‘higher class’ barrister. Teddy Thomas, as the Bar Association’s Treasurer and tight with money, has his own views on how and what should be renovated.

Thus, tension is further underscored by having the same two characters serving on the Bar Association (a body that oversees the profession). To maintain the tension and enable comedy, Tim Ferguson offers that characters must see the world from different perspectives (2010). Teddy thus views the Bar as a source of narcissistic gratification that delivers status and money to maintain wife number two, while his ex-wife Ruth uses the law and her role as President to wreak havoc on Teddy’s ego. Ruth is the one with power and knows it, while Teddy is the one who thinks he has power, and is what I nominate as the key character: trapped in a struggle of desire (to succeed) undermined by a fear (of failure). This fear is manifested and projected to the character of Carlos, the hapless junior barrister who assists Teddy and, more importantly, as a character represents everything Teddy either fears or hates about himself, causing Carlos to be the victim of Teddy’s attacks. As such, Carlos has no power and each character is related to Teddy by way of some power imbalance. Kallas links power and beats: “The variations in the beat are characterized by variations in the balance of power.” (2010, p.  147). Thus what lies at the heart of the sitcom is a struggle for power, developed at the beat sheet stage, further underscored by the premise and its inherent tension. Dara Marks suggests that narrative is best served by theme because it guides both the character’s action and the direction of the plot (2007). I posit that theme can assist in underpinning the choices offered and made by the character and is made at the beat sheet stage. I now propose that the premise of a sitcom world is further strengthened by a theme that guides both the series and the episodic narrative. The theme for At the Bar, the need to win at any cost, informs the choices and actions of each character. The next step is to expand the two stories into synopses: • Ruth wants the renovations approved and done by high-class builders, while Teddy thinks it is a waste of money and tries to get a less

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reputable firm to do the job. When the builders botch the job, Carlos, Teddy’s hapless offsider, offers the name of some builders he knows, who turn out to be the firm Teddy is suing for solicitors Larissa and Lindsay from Lohan and Long. • Teddy wants to change the artwork in the reception, and Mick, the floor clerk, thwarts him at every turn, but is determined to change the vase in the reception area. The desire by Teddy to replace the artwork is a response to being out-­ manoeuvred in the committee meeting by Ruth. Teddy’s action enables a subplot that mirrors the tension in the main plot, as he secures the name of the builders that renovated the reception area in the chambers, which Teddy thinks is reminiscent of a train station waiting room. This has two aims: to get on Mick’s good side and influence some change in the reception area by way of the artwork, or at least the decorative vase. The action of manipulation by Ruth has triggered a reaction by Teddy to take control elsewhere: an action–reaction by the central character. For Smith, “all theories of laughter, and all laughter stimuli, seem to depend on an underlying process of establishing, building and then releasing tension: incongruity creates comedic tension” (1999, p. 18). However, Smith does not apply theme to the underlying tension as Butler (2002) does, and I contend this approach enables both the comedic relief and incongruity; the nature of the comedy in the sitcom (Mills 2005). Smith continues: “a surprise twist releases tension. Truth and aggression increase tension. Brevity brings tension into high relief” (1999, p. 18). Tension is thus in a process of build and release and must be evident in the beat sheet; it is the thematic tension coupled with the character’s fixed view of the world that enables repeatability, another defining feature of this form. As is often recommended in the various writing courses I have undertaken, further explored in Debbie Danielpour’s article ‘Imitation and Adaptation’ (2012), I chose an episode of Fawlty Towers, ‘The Builders’ (1975), to analyse the plot and its beats to ascertain how the storylines interact to form and shape the narrative. In this episode, Sybil wants some building work undertaken while she is away. Basil hires the cheapest builder, stereotyped by an Irishman named O’Reilly. Misunderstandings occur and the door to the dining room is wrongly blocked off, while a new door is erected in front of the stairs instead of next to the dining room door. When the botched job is rectified after a panicked Basil demands that O’Reilly fix it or there will be consequences, and which miraculously

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transpires, much to Sybil’s amazement and embarrassment as her trusted builder has been called in. The twist arrives (as does Basil’s exposure) when Sybil’s trusted builder notes that the new door has weakened a loadbearing wall. This exercise proved useful in understanding how a character acts in their refusal to accept failure; they exhibit a form of dissociation resulting from cognitive dissonance when attempting to reset the equilibrium (and fix the problem). Furthermore, as Brett Mills notes, the sitcom is based in the theory of incongruity (2005)—someone or a group is at odds with the discursive frame within which they exist. (In Fawlty Towers, it is the world of the English shopkeeper.) However, while analysing an existing episode may offer a framework, it can only guide the plot of At the Bar because both its discursive frame (the law) and relationship between the couples is different. Yet the relational dynamics between the characters are similar: one has power (Ruth, Sybil), one thinks they have power but does not (Teddy, Basil) and one has no power (Carlos, Manuel). Furthermore, this example elucidates the importance of an object (a vase, the door) that links the plots as well as triggers the comic degradation (Mellencamp 2003). Therefore, when developing the beat sheet, several aspects need to be considered: for each action there is a reaction that reflects and maintains the characters’ view of the world yet must be at odds with other characters. Further, establishing an object to connect the plots (may) result in some form of comic degradation. In this early draft, the beats are in bold and the narrative connector (the vase) is noted in italics. There are three storylines: Ruth wants to upgrade the common room; solicitors are chasing Teddy; Teddy wants a new vase to spruce up the reception area. Beat sheet for ‘Renovator’s Delight’: 1. Meeting of the Bar Association: Ruth wants to renovate the common room and puts Teddy in charge, who has other ideas about how the funds should be spent. 2. Larissa, solicitor, chasing advice from Teddy. Teddy gives Carlos a job for upcoming meeting. 3. Teddy wants Mick to find the builders who did the reception 10 years ago, as they are cheaper than the ones Ruth wants to use. Teddy hates the new vase in reception. 4. Teddy complains to Honza (his mentor) about lack of style in this place. Honza tells Teddy to take initiative. Teddy organises new

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vase for reception, tells Clare (his secretary) to collect it and remind Mick about the renovation. Clare tells Teddy that ­solicitors Lindsay and Larissa are in reception. Teddy phones Carlos. The solicitors arrive and Teddy flirts with them. Carlos arrives and he has not done the work as his wife wants him to spend more time at home. Teddy loses it. 5. Teddy and Carlos working on the case. Clare comes in with new vase; Mick won’t have it in reception. Teddy sees she has got the wrong vase and then they realise that she gave Mick the wrong information about the renovation. Teddy yells at Clare to lock the common room before Ruth sees it. 6. Carlos and Teddy in meeting with Lindsay and Larissa. Ruth enters and says the job is botched and Teddy will wear the cost; Teddy lies. Mick comes in and says Clare has told him about the problem, and he’ll fix it. Ruth tells them they are both idiots. Carlos knows a builder – Teddy says to hire him. 7. Teddy gets Mick to oversee the job by Carlos’s builder. 8. Teddy working on the advice for Lindsay and Larissa, discovers that Carlos’s builders are the ones he is suing for Larissa. He tells Honza, who tells him he just needs to declare the conflict of interest. 9. Carlos admits he must commit to the work if he wants to succeed. Teddy throws the vase down and tells Carlos to fix it. Honza sees the vase. 10. Meeting room: Ruth admits to Teddy that he did do a good job and within budget. Teddy attempts to impress Honza and leans on the counter as the bar collapses. Mick arrives with the mended vase. From the floor amongst the rubble, Teddy says he has a clearer idea about how to approach the case – he’s no longer conflicted, and the vase will match the spirit of the place.

Bringing the Beats Alive Once a first draft is done, it is necessary to review the beats to ensure, as Sandler (2007) advocates, they are ‘active’ because they help visualise the scene as well as give action to the characters and emotional intention:

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Go through your story treatment and highlight every instance where you have characters telling, asking, or explaining something to each other … Now replace those verbs with emotionally active verbs …. (2007, p. 107)

Sandler offers concrete examples: Jen tries to get in the apartment. DO THIS: Take out the word “tries” and go for it – have your character DO whatever it is you described her as “trying” to do. For Example: Jen sticks the key in the lock and it breaks off in her hand. Even a simple, Jen turns the doorknob, it’s locked, is better. And now that she’s done something, you can go on and write the next thing your character does. She kicks the door and screams obscenities. She slides down the door in a heap on the floor and cries. (Sandler 2017)

In the beat sheet example above, there is a proliferation of verbs that could be more active; by changing them will assist in the following drafts and stages, for example: “Ruth admits to Teddy that he did a good job and within budget” becomes Ruth begrudgingly concedes that Teddy did a good job.

As another example: “Mick comes in and says Clare has told him about the problem” could become Mick comes in and gloats that Clare has confessed about the problem.

To ‘gloat’ delivers a different performance to ‘squirm’; active verbs underscore intention in both action (comic performance) and dialogue (jokes). However, the beats still need to be distilled into the action–reaction moments. Focusing on the beats delivers the following: 1. Ruth wants to renovate the common room; Teddy demands to be in charge of the costs. Teddy despairs about the reception and gets Clare to order a new vase. 2. Teddy secures the name of the builders that Mick used and orders Clare to ensure that Mick is overseeing the colour scheme; reminds her to pick up new vase. 3. The wrong vase arrives and Teddy discovers that Clare confused the colour scheme for the common room with the colour of the vase.

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4. Ruth sees the common room and thinks the colour scheme looks like a carnival and orders it be changed declaring that Teddy will wear the cost. Teddy blames Clare. 5. Carlos knows a builder and Teddy impatiently orders that he be hired. 6. Teddy demands that Mick oversee the new builders. 7. Teddy discovers that Carlos’s builders are the ones he is suing. He smashes vase. 8. Ruth begrudgingly admits that Teddy did a good job with the costs of the common room renovation. Teddy grovels to impress Honza and, as he leans on the bar, it flips and chaos ensues. The main storylines have eight beats; the vase storyline, as a connector, has five beats while the solicitors chasing Teddy for advice has three beats. For Smith (1999), comedic tension is enabled by putting pressure on the threat of loss of some goal. It is this threat, be it a “a moment, a discovery, or an incident that alters the main character(s)’ goals, and/or cranks up a story’s dramatic tension” (1999, p. 91). The discovery of the mistake in the colour scheme and then the choice of builders increases the tension and threatened the loss of the goal (to refurbish the common room). In the Friends (1994–2004) episode ‘The One with All the Resolutions’, Rachel discovers that Monica is seeing Chandler (1999); tensions rise over two consecutive episodes as Rachel attempts to get Monica to admit she is seeing Chandler. With each ‘discovery’, Monica has a new ‘excuse’ as both characters attempt to outwit the other in an effort to expose the truth or hide it. Rachel clings to her idealisation that best friend Monica would tell her everything. It is the tension between what she wants (total honesty) and fear that the unity of the group is under threat that causes Rachel anxiety, while also attempting to expose the lies being doled out by Monica. However, by the episode’s end there is no change in the emotional stasis of the group or indeed the two friends. It is essential that the plot points ensure the re-situation. For Seymour Chatman (1978), plots that are causal in nature result when a character responds to an incident or events, whereas revelatory plots are centred on a problem that result in the revelation of some information; for him plots are constructed by the logic of narrative events within a hierarchy, kernels are “narrative moments that give rise to cruxes in direction taken by events” to force a change of direction in the plot or change to the character. In craft terms, these are the turning points or plot points “that hooks into the action and spins it around in another

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direction” (Field 1984, p. 26). Kristen Thompson prefers to use the term “turning point” “since it implies a crucial event or change” (1999, p. 23). Before returning to the beat sheet, it is essential to look briefly at the development of a series and an episode.

The Story Begins It is a tenet of dramatic screenwriting that a story begins when something happens: an action disrupts the equilibrium; be it an outward threat that triggers a call to action, a procedural problem or the conflict that will drive the show (Douglas 2011). This catalyst (‘inciting incident’) forces the protagonist to act. In order for the story to progress, the catalyst becomes a dramatic question (DQ): ‘Will the guy get the guy?’ ‘Will the murderer be found?’ And while in traditional narratives a problem or question is raised in response to the catalyst, the engagement comes from experiencing how the resolution comes about, resulting in some degree of ‘transformation’ of the character or resolution to the problem. However, in the sitcom, while the character must be active in achieving a goal (such as exposing Monica’s lies), they are not transformed emotionally—this is the nature of their ‘entrapment’—they deny some reality or truth (such as the reason for the lies). While each episode begins with a disruption, tension builds through complications as the character attempts to fix the problem or expose a situation, yet by the resolution there is no change to the character or the situation. I offer that this is why this form of comedy can be challenging to write—we naturally want answers to questions posed by story. Now I posit that when developing the sitcom, the theme and its premise should have a DQ for each episode, such as in Friends, will Rachel and Ross get together? The answer to the series DQ for each episode is ‘no’ (not this time) and the audience knows that. Thus I offer that, in the sitcom, each episode is driven by questions such as, ‘How will the character respond to the inciting incident that threatens their idealisation or the status quo?’. The premise of At the Bar is guided by the question ‘Will Teddy win over Ruth?’. The incident that triggers the pilot episode (Ruth wants to renovate the common room) may threaten some disruption to the equilibrium (Teddy wants to control the bank balance as a means of controlling Ruth’s ambitions) and while the events that follow expose misunderstandings and mistakes, by episode end they do not alter the situation; the negative response to the DQ is maintained. The pleasure comes

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not from satisfying the DQ or problem as traditional (Aristotelian) narratives demand (in both TV and film), but from the character’s response to the events triggered by the inciting incident; the comicality arises from the gap in how each character views the world and how the world views them (Ferguson 2010). Furthermore, if turning points are defined as moments wherein the character or story changes direction, then turning points must play a part in the relationship between character and plot, in turn shaping the narrative.

Shaping the Narrative When developing Community (2009–2014), creator Dan Harmon uses an eight-point system punctuated around a circle:

1. A character is in a zone of comfort 2. But they want something 3. They enter an unfamiliar situation 4. Adapt to it 5. Get what they wanted 6. Pay a heavy price for it 7. Then return to their familiar situation 8. Having changed (Raftery 2011).

Though Harmon has some change in the character (making his stories more akin to narrative comedy), there is a return to a familiar situation. Thus, the logic of the sitcom story must involve choices made by characters who are ‘threatened’ by events but act in ways that maintain how they see the world; in other words, responses by the character to the story must be at odds with choices that would enable some change in the character (as we find in traditional narratives). Picking up Chatman, the combination of kernels and satellites delivers the narrative, yet what he defines as satellites can be deleted without disturbing the logic of the plot. An example of satellites is when the characters in Modern Family (2009-) comment directly to camera about events in the story as they occur. On the other hand, kernels “cannot be deleted without destroying the narrative logic” (Chatman 1978, p.  53); they progress the story and, in some instances, change the direction of the narrative. Hence, satellites are minor plot points which serve to reveal the consequences of the choices made at the kernels. As such, allowance must

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be made for the consequences of the responses at those moments and which I argue is essential to maintain a balance between story (beats) and opportunity for comedy (performance and jokes). Examining the plot points of ‘Renovator’s Delight’, there is some similarity to Harmon’s eight-point system: 1. Situation established—titles depicting two divorced people working together 2. Inciting Incident: the common room is to be renovated and Teddy is in charge 3. Teddy decides to use Mick’s builders (takes control). Turning point. 4. Teddy orders new vase for reception. Wrong information given. 5. Ruth discovers botched job. Teddy lies. Gets Carlos’s builders (tries to remedy problem). Turning point. 6. Teddy demands Mick take control. 7. Discovery that builders are the ones he is suing for solicitors (story changes direction). Teddy smashes vase. 8. Counter collapses. Teddy exposed. Situation reverts to emo tional stasis. As noted, beats are developed by way of character actions (and reactions) and I now offer that plot points underpin the narrative structure of the episode and may incorporate multiple beats. However, for Harmon the character ‘pays a heavy price’ at point 6, yet in the example in this chapter, the character pays a heavier price at point 7; a turning point in the narrative. Critically examining points 3, 5, and 7, the character makes a choice (to take control, to lie, remedy) or there is a discovery (wrong builders), to which Teddy reacts by throwing the vase. I argue that the return to the ‘familiar situation’ occurs after beat 8 wherein the character does not change. Thus, Harmon’s point 8 ‘the character has changed’ should either be the re-situation (allowing for greater build-up of tension in the previous 7 plot points) or related to the larger narrative arc of the series, such as the on-off relationship of Rachel and Ross (Friends 1994–2004). Because this chapter, and indeed this case study, is focused on the characters’ relationship not changing (they are divorced and one is remarried), point 8 must be the moment of the re-situation, wherein the power dynamic between the characters has not changed. Being forced to fuse certain plot points is a further indicator that there are too many plot

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points, which restricts opportunity for jokes, linguistic banter and comic performance. By letting the main character respond to events delivered by the story in a way that is consistent with their view of the world, the narrative is forced to turn, not once or twice but three times, at points 3, 5 and 7 (when the narrative forces Teddy to act or he attempts to alter the outcome). Hence, understanding the nature of the character/s, their relationship with each other is essential when developing a beat sheet. Now, applying Harmon’s eight points to the beat sheet of ‘Renovator’s Delight’, merging the original beats four and five into the new beat four and six and seven into the new five, offers the narrative shape (Fig. 1). What is evident is that Chatman’s work enables nuances within plot points—kernels and satellites—yet it is the kernels that shape the narrative 1. Situation established – titles depicting two divorced people working together. 2. Inciting Incident: the common room is to be renovated and Teddy is in charge 3. Turning point. Teddy decides to use Mick’s builders. ( takes control) 4. Teddy orders new vase for reception. Wrong information given. Complication 5. Ruth discovers botched job. Teddy lies. Gets Carlos’s builders. 6. Teddy demand Mick take control. ( takes control ) 7. Discovery that builders are the ones he is suing for solicitors. Smashes vase.

1.

2. Incident

4.

8.

7.

3.

6.

8. Counter collapses. Teddy exposed. Reverts back to emotional stasis.

Fig. 1  Narrative shape of At the Bar ‘Renovator’s Delight’ pilot

5.

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and ensure story logic. This critical analysis has demonstrated that the story spine is centred on Chatman’s kernels while subsequent processes (outlines and script) utilise satellites as comedic diversions to deliver the humorous pleasure. Thus, the beat sheet enables a framework for a narrative structure that can ‘hold’ comic moments while asserting the re-­ situation; its purpose is to develop the spine of the story while maintaining the closed narrative structure.

Conclusion When creating a series, the writer/s must establish a world wherein the characters both depend on the dynamics of the situation and, despite the weekly threat to their idealisation, refuse to change or leave. Turning points determined by lies, attempts to fix/alter the situation, ensure a change in the direction of the narrative, as the character attempts to control events with increasing intensity, rather than change how they engage with the world. Thus, the closed narrative structure of the sitcom both maintains and reflects the characters’ entrapment. By focusing on the nature and intent of responses of each character at the crucial beat sheet stage, subsequent stages are then able to incorporate comic diversions (satellites). To that end, the more active the verbs, the more depth can be developed in the scene outline (stage two) and subsequently the script (stage three), wherein dialogue and jokes (‘punching up the script’) underscore action, bringing to the fore inherent tension evident in the premise and further underscored by an overarching DQ that is not resolved until the closing moments of the series, if at all.

References Butler, J. (2002). Television: Critical Methods and Applications (2nd ed.). London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Chatman, S. (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Community (2009–2014). Harmon, D. USA: NBC. Curtis, B. (1982). Aspects of Sitcom. In J.  Cook (Ed.), Television Sitcom: BFI Dossier no. 17 (pp. 4–12). London: British Film Institute. Danielpour. D. (2012). Imitation and Adaptation: A Screenwriting Pedagogy. In Journal of Screenwriting, 3:1 (pp. 103–118).

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Douglas, P. (2011). Writing the TV Drama Series (3rd ed.). Hollywood: Michael Weise Productions. Ferguson, T. (2010). The Cheeky Monkey: Writing Narrative Comedy. Sydney: Currency Press. Field, S. (1984). Screenplay. The Foundations of Screenwriting (3rd ed.). New York: Dell Publishing. Friends (1994–2004). Crane, D. & Kauffman, M. (Creators). USA: NBC. Kallas, C. (2010). Creative Screenwriting. Understanding Emotional Structure. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Klika, D.  T. (2018). Situation Comedy, Character, and Psychoanalysis: On the Couch with Lucy, Basil and Kimmie. New York: Bloomsbury. Marks, D. (2007). Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc. Studio City: Three Mountains Press. Mellencamp, P. (2003). Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy. In J.  Morreale (Ed.), Critiquing the Sitcom (pp.  41–55). New York: Syracuse University Press. Mills, B. (2005). Television Sitcom. London: BFI Publishing. Mintz, L. E. (1985). Situation Comedy. In B. Rose (Ed.), TV Genres (pp. 105–129). Westport: Greenwood. Modern Family (2009–present). Lloyd, C. & Levitan, S. (Creators). USA: ABC. Raftery, B. (2011). How Dan Harmon Drives Himself Crazy Making Community. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from http://www.wired.com/2011/09/mf_ harmon/all Renovator’s Delight. (2016). In At the Bar, Klika, D. (Wr.). Cannes Screenplay Contest, TV Comedy Pilot: Unpublished. Sandler, E. (2007). The TV Writer’s Workbook. New York: Bantam Dell. Sandler, E. (2017). Ellen’s Tips. Red Flag. Retrieved December 30, 2018 from http://www.sandlerink.com/index.php Scarbrough, M. (2017). The Evolution of a Sitcom Script. 15 Steps to No Fat. Retrieved December 30, 2018 from http://www.sandlerink.com/15Steps.php. Smith, E. S. (1999). Writing Television Sitcoms. New York: Perigee Books. The Builders (1975). In Cleese J. & Booth, C. (Wrs.), Fawlty Towers. UK: BBC. The One with All the Resolutions (1999–present). In Friends, Boyle, B. & Villandry, S. (Wrs.). USA: NBC. Thompson, K. (1999). Storytelling in the New Hollywood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Subjects of the Gaze: Script Development as Performance Emma Bolland and Louise Sawtell

Introduction What is enacted by putting ourselves in the picture? What is enacted by choosing to be the subject of the gaze? In this chapter, we outline our approaches to script development in relation to our respective scripts. The Iris Opens/The Iris Closes: Le Silence #2 (Bolland 2018 and iteratively ongoing) is at once a translation, writing through, critique and reimagining of the French writer and director Louis Delluc’s (1890–1924) post-­ production or traduction retour scenario (Delluc 1990 [1923]) for his Impressionist film Le Silence (1920). A tale of love, deception, and violence described as “a daring montage of different temporalities” the modernism of Le Silence develops from Delluc’s attempt to narrate memory mimetically: a rapid mix of events that ascribe to ideas of “the functioning of the unconscious” (Turim 1989, 69). As part of a practice-based research

E. Bolland (*) Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Sawtell University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_14

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into expanded screenwriting, the iterations of the script operate not just as screenplay but as intermedial essay (in relation to companion short films), as critical texts, as literatures, and as performance and reading scores. One in a Million Girl (Sawtell 2016), developed through a practice-led research project, tells two stories: a fiction, featuring the scenes for a proposed feminist musical; and process, where the author’s reflections and creative history are presented. This alternative model, a ‘fictocritical screenplay’, a term used for this project, shows how the creative and critical, practice and process, author and characters speak to each other. By highlighting the early stages of script development through this expanded form, a multiplicity of voices, including the author’s subjectivity, can be performed. In developing these scripts, we have chosen to be critical, vocal, physical, and autofictional/fictocritical presences that direct and demonstrate a performative process of script development, embedding and embodying our methodologies both on and off the page. These strategies of script development are markedly different to the discursive oral testing of a writers’ room, or to the directive re-visioning discussions or instructions of the production meeting in that the scripts, whether in final or fluid form, retain and in some instances foreground the trace of the performative interventions. We acknowledge, where relevant, established theories of script development in that we pay attention to “the relations between [written] screenplays and other, less formal, textual and verbal communications” because we agree that “[f]ocussing 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” (Price 2013). However, we each take Price’s idea of a discursive script development further in different ways in that this discursiveness can be both informally and formally improvised or performed, and that it remains visible in, and after, both text and ‘film’. The discursive-performative strategies—both public and private—that unfold below are critical of the second wave feminist orthodoxy that positions being looked at, being subject, embodying the subjective, especially in binary-gendered terms, as passive: a position articulated via (among others) Mulvey’s (1975) cinematic/male gaze, and Berger’s (1972) ideas in visual arts and advertising of men looking versus women watching themselves being looked at. In embedding ourselves in our texts, and in strategising the flux of performance, we are enacting fictocritical and autofictive acts of resistance to these second-wave

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orthodoxies—our performatively driven writing refigures subjectivity, and a female/non-binary/queer gaze, as active. We position performativity as a strategy that takes place in both the public and private realm. The artist and writer Renée Gladman, in her keynote address to the conference ‘Gestures: Writing that Moves Between’ at Manchester University in February 2019, commented that “I wondered what it would be like: the writer writing about writing the book that she is inside of?” (Gladman 2019). This act of doubling, both authoring and inhabiting, is central to performing the autofiction, fictocriticism and autotheory; ideas that intersect and are indeed sometimes indistinguishable. We embed ourselves in the script, recognise that ‘authoring’ is a subjective activity, and display this recognition in the production, development and dissemination of both creative and academic works. This means that both the private acts of writing and the public acts of testing are performances generative of reflection and development. We perform as the characters in our research—private moments of script development; perform the critique of and reflection on our research—such as the table reading described below; and to a greater or lesser degree perform our outcomes, whether material or speculative. In this chapter, we write in dialogue: a performative strategy that reveals rather than homogenises our different writing styles, and embeds aspects of our script development strategies into the text. We are embodying and revealing our live and internal discourses of scriptwriting and our performative academic co-authoring. In the section ‘Script as performance site’, we discuss why these particular scripts can be developed performatively. ‘Strategies for development’ articulates our positions as writers both inside and outside of the texts. In ‘Performing script development’, we explore where and how performance can happen during specific stages of the script’s development.

Script as Performance Site EB: I approach scriptwriting and the making of moving image from the perspective of an art-and-writing practice rather than an industry one. Delluc’s script Le Silence (Delluc 1990 [1923]) offers me multiple spaces to ‘put myself in the picture’ and to use autofiction and auto-theory as performative critical tools. The act of translation (from French to English) is itself performative in that I am enacting a struggle with language and its storyline. As a non-French speaker at the time of coming across Delluc’s

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text, I used the process of development to learn the language—misunderstanding, reading and writing towards understanding—as method. My uncertainties about some aspects of the plot are embedded in my text, and these uncertainties are reflected in the film fragments arising from my emerging script. This method of translation-as-performance mirrors the fact that Delluc’s film survives only as a partial nitrate. How can we be certain that the post-production script, published by Delluc himself in 1923, is an accurate account of the film? According to the screenplay, the film unfolds entirely via flashback; the spaces for time travel doubly framed in that they are often enacted; animated within the confines of photographs. When the camera, through the eyes of the male protagonist Pierre, looks at pictures of female characters, the pictures animate and the female characters move within these frames. The female characters are activated, performed, by this male gaze, and are literally put in the picture. This device of looking/framing also positions time as a substance, a souvenir in which the past returns; comes again. Time framed by the sites of cinematic writing, and time framed by the boundaries of the pictorial mise-en-abîme. Delluc’s configurations of picture/time/memory controlled by the male gaze provide an orthodox screenwriting territory that I subjectively invade via an autofictive/ creative-­ critical performed writing and reading that I describe as an “expanded screenwriting” (Bolland 2018). LS: My research also expands the possibilities of script development through a fictocritical approach to writing where the screenplay functions in two ways: “it provides a multimodal representation of the future film and it features the creative process through reflections about its development” (Sawtell 2015, 5). The fictocritical screenplay values the early stages of script development, making the work “a subject in process” (Brewster 2005, 400) rather than an “invisible process” (Nelmes 2007) that will disappear into the screen production. As a feminist musical that highlights and challenges representations of women on screen, I write and perform throughout the development of One in a Million Girl. Drawing from feminist film theory and its “dual composition” (Hollinger 2012, 7), I question the female representations featured in Hollywood musicals and offer an alternative way of expressing their songs and dances. Since its establishment in the early 1970s, Karen Hollinger claims, “feminist film theory always had a dual composition: the critique of mainstream cinema and the advocacy of an alternate or counter-cinema” (2012, 7), with the theory closely linked to women’s film practice.

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For this project, I play with the “dual-focus narrative” (Altman 1987) of the Hollywood musical by replacing the male and female leads, and a heterosexual relationship, with parallel stories about two female actresses navigating the changes to their positions in the industry. Both stories are fragmentary, The Star’s seen through memories, while The Teacher moves between classroom and the fictions her students create when they write their own roles. With multiple female voices heard throughout the film, including my reflexive one in the screenplay, One in a Million Girl moves beyond the “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 1975) of the dance to ensure women’s agency on the page, and later, the screen. EB: My tactics also address the problematics of Mulvey’s “to-be-­ looked-at-ness” via a resistant embodiment. By employing an autofictive and fictocritical strategy, speaking as an author from inside the script, speaking to rather than for the lens, and meeting the textual gaze of a speculative viewer, I offer an expanded view of what a script can be, constructing deliberately problematic relations between text and lens: Pierre regarde encore la photo. Regard the photographs of stone. It seems as if these images perform their own ‘encore!’. Once more, P—looks at the photograph. La photo s’anime. Visage expressif de Suzie. La-la-la! Li-li-li! The mise-en-abîme, the film doubly framed. The photograph is moving. S—’s face; animated, expressive. If we flash-forward, it is a GIF. Are GIFs photographs that retch, or films that stutter? I wonder, are we looking? Or do we watch? Are we writing in space, or in time?

These fragments offer few sluglines, rather they task the filmmaker with attempting interpretations of a kind of poetry. Thus, looking through the lens is also an uncertain, unfixed performance.

Strategies for Development EB: To reiterate, my performative strategies for developing The Iris Opens/ The Iris Closes: Le Silence #2 take into account the unreliability of the post-­ production published screenplay and draw on tropes of art writing and experimental literatures, and on Claudia Sternberg’s ideas of the working screenplay as a “literature in flux” (1997, 28). My autofictive approach to

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maintaining the screenplay as a literature in flux is also framed by an awareness of the traditions of cinematic writing in French women’s literature, most notably in Camille Lauren’s Cet absent-là (2004). This approach, in terms of ‘black-stuff’, privileges the subjective—the narratives internal to the drama—rather than the objective: the external, speculative camera and director. LS: While I write knowing that a screenplay will become a film—one that I will someday direct—it is a “transitional and transformational” (Maras 2009, 6) document. This provides an opportunity for a performative scripting process that takes risks with both the content and the way the story is presented. Filmmaker and academic Margot Nash recommends a “discovery-driven script development process” (2013, 150) valuing those initial messy moments of idea generation. As a representation of the early stages of script development, the fictocritical screenplay presents initial ideas, illustrations, reflections and multiple drafts of a scene. Unlike a traditional screenplay that only includes those details that will appear on screen, formatted to a specific template, this expanded form privileges my subjective experience as author and researcher of the creative work. This is shown when a scene moves from conventional (Fig. 1) to fictocritical (Fig. 2) as I experiment with the formatting and presentation of the text. While the actions and dialogue of The Teacher character remain the same in both versions, the fictocritical scene has the author’s ‘inflection’ to show “who is responsible for it” (Rush and Boughman 1997, 37). The scene is inflected with a question, ‘A lifetime?’, in the big print, but the reflection presented in the parallel text shows how the author’s subjective experience has influenced character’s actions. Across the pages of the fictocritical screenplay there is “perpetual interweaving” (Barthes 1975, 64) when I move in and out of the narrative as its author. With fictocriticism being “a mode of performance” (Nettelbeck 1998, 6), the ‘I’ is present in the text as a subject and active participant (Brewster 2005). As I write in ‘The Paperless Screenplay: Writing on, for and with the SCREEN’: “when I become the subject of the narrative, I can acknowledge the process of writing and my place within its meaning making” (2015, 37). This means that the process has equal value to the product. EB: I also privilege my subjective experience as author and researcher of the work on the page via typographies that resist industry norms. Conceptually, I reframe the subjective via the idea of the “s/objective” (Stetsenko 2017, 199). ‘S/objectivity’ politicises subjectivity by

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Fig. 1  Conventional screenplay formatting

positioning it as transformatively objective. Stetsenko understands ‘reality’ as being infused with subjectivity, writing that reality is “an arena of human struggle and activist striving that is therefore immanently and inherently infused, at its core, with emotions, passions, feeling, values, and interests—while not ceasing to be material and practical at the same time”. Stetsenko sees ‘reality’ as a state of flux, arguing that actions (and by implication transformations—change) are the sturdier, more tangible realities. This foregrounding of the subjective in relation to my script is strategic, and emphasises its continuing flux, its investigation of the silenced subject and the language of both collective and individual post trauma. La main de Pierre. Très soignée. Trois ou quatre bague d’un gout parfait. Your hand: so… elegant. Two or three blows and a taste… I would like the camera to capture the hand descending from above and to the side; a slanting blow caught in the quickest of edits, a fleeting, visual instant that is both more and less ambiguous than any text. La main, manus, manualis… Close-up of Pierre’s hand. It is very elegant, and adorned with three or four tasteful rings.

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Fig. 2  Fictocritical screenplay formatting

In the excerpt above, Delluc’s scene note appears in its original French, with my creative-critical first person interjecting between Delluc’s words and my translation. I chose to have the narrator interject here because Delluc’s note is key to his text in that it establishes an identity for Pierre via a visual description of the specifics of his present body—later references to the hand and the ‘tasteful’ rings provide the viewer with a visual referent that embeds recognition throughout the film. In contrast, the appearances of the female characters are never specified beyond ‘young’ and ‘beautiful’, and they appear as photographs that then animate in response to Pierre’s recollections: he literally holds them in his hands. The interjection of the ‘narrator’ emphasises the gendered positioning of the active or passive body in Delluc’s original. It is also in his hands that control of the body of the film is held. Cinematic time and cinematic action, in this case the flashbacks upon which the entire film is hinged, are translated as a substance, a souvenir in which the past returns; comes again. The narrator reinserts the lived

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experience of the dead woman, referencing the violence of his hands, and carrying this violence into the positioning of the camera and the gaze of the audience. The interjection is a further act of defiance in that it acts again with what Price refers to as “a common edict in the more formulaic of contemporary screenwriting manuals”, that “Camera angles and shot specifications should be omitted, as should parenthetical speech direction” (2013, 211). My line ‘La main, manus, manualis’ plays on the Latin manus (hand) and links Delluc’s use of Pierre’s hand as an activator of narrative to the orthodoxy of the screenwriting manual or handbook. LS: Play is vital to my script development practices as I experiment with formatting and presentation. The independent film industry where I situate my practice, one that is outside of the mainstream, provides a creative space for alternatives to the traditional screenplay form, which has the capacity to be “the product of an individual’s artistic expression” (Newman 2011, 28). Choosing to be unconventional by ‘writing’ with “images, sounds and gestures, as well as text”, the fictocritical screenplay becomes “the polar opposite of the mass production [and development] methods of industrial societies” (Millard 2014, 9) where the visual aesthetic of the writer, and later director, has a place alongside the action and dialogue that will appear on screen. In this development process, I place the scenes alongside the fragments of prose, poetry, reflection, character studies, dialogues, illustrations and visualisations of the story’s themes, which represent an experience of the script in development. As shown in Fig. 3, the document’s design accentuates the visual qualities of the scene.

Fig. 3  Image and text are developed as a dance on the page

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Performing Script Development EB: The first iterations of the script The Iris Opens/The Iris Closes: Le Silence #2 were developed via a series of film narration ‘performance papers’ in both performance space and academic contexts, co-opting symposia and conference environments as rehearsal room, gallery or stage. The accompanying moving image fragments—constructed from collages of original and appropriated footage—were designed to be hierarchically subordinate to the script that narrated them, deliberately reducing the screen to the status of prop. The last of these, staged at “A Feminist Space at Leeds” (University of Leeds, 2017) was the first time that the text was rewritten for two voices. This shift from single voice was prompted by the collegiate and participatory nature of the conference—a celebration of the work of the art historian Professor Griselda Pollock—which brought together artists and art historians who had been influenced by her contribution. It seemed important to develop the idea of speaking together and to take into account the needs of participatory readers. I invited the artist Victoria Lucas to read with me and, via rehearsal, refigured footnotes and scene directions as characters rather than asides (also refiguring the accompanying film fragments), setting the stage for a future development of a critical ensemble (Fig. 4). LS: Through various methods of performance, including improvisations between self and character, or self as character, I embody the emotions and actions that happen in the moment. Stream-of-consciousness monologues, both written and improvised into a recorder, deepen the characters’ development outside the more structured versions of a scene. In a similar way, Kath Dooley’s script development for Fireflies includes “the documentation of actor improvisations, character testimonials filmed on mobile phones and the generation of social media content for the film protagonists” (2017, 288). These personal explorations of character development, known as “under-writing” (Dooley 2017; Martin 2014), are not likely to be seen or published (in my case, they often are presented), but are vital for extra depth and layers to the proposed film. For me, being able to perform in the moment as the characters is essential when developing the lyrics and melodies of the songs featured in the story. As Eric Morris notes, “in order to feel the way the script tells you that the character feels, you must do something to make yourself experience the same life as the character” (1998, 85). Starting as an improvisation into an audio recorder, I become the character of The Star from One

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Fig. 4  Victoria Lucas and Emma Bolland performing at ‘A Feminist Space at Leeds’, 2017. Photograph, Helen Clarke

in a Million Girl with the initial idea to express how she must feel when she pretends to be someone she is not. I realise as I sing the initial lyrics that this act of pretending is not only for the public who view her films but for those who make them. When I continue to write the lyrics by performing as The Star, I am absorbed in a ‘being’ state, feeling what it is like to look back on a life of pretending, in the song ‘Every day’: Every day, I become a little less, Less than myself, Less for you. What is it you want from me? What more can I give? This is just an act of pretending.

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At a stage in the film where The Star expresses her frustration about her role in the film industry, developing the lyrics as an actor, rather than a writer, allows me to feel her emotional breakdown. This method of performing a character proved to be most effective when there was a song or monologue in the story where I could be fully immersed in the moment. EB: The next stage of development was part of a participatory research colloquium, ‘Adventures in Research: Screenwriting, Art Practice, and Performance’, held at Sheffield Hallam University, which I organised in partnership with Professor Craig Batty, then of the University of Technology Sydney.1 The day of talks and discussion included filmed table readings of A Vacuous Screenplay in Search of Rigour (Batty 2018), and of a new iteration of The Iris Opens/The Iris Closes: Le Silence #2 that I had rewritten for the day as a script for seven voices. The readers were invited to critique and interject as they performed, the resulting commentary potentially shaping the next iterations of the text. There were many different registers of commentary, addressing textures of languages, suggestions of sound and conceptual narrative. A particular comment from the perspective of professional/orthodox screenwriting and filmmaking has, paradoxically, offered a prompt for a potential filmed outcome for the script (see below). The remark ‘I can hear a radio play, but I can’t see the film’ prompts several questions. How is a script supposed to sound? What is a script supposed to look like? What is a film supposed to look like in relation to its script? Can an interrogation of the script be the film, or indeed vice versa? In terms of the sound and shape of a screenplay, Price (2013) indicates that many silent-era scripts resembled a ‘prose libretto’ “because [they] didn’t need to anticipate the film in anything more than approximate narrative or emotional terms”. This idea is an important one for my writing strategies: the links between the text to any material or speculative moving image are critical, poetic and fluid. A review of the footage from the filmed table reading and the critical commentary of the performers (which included myself as dramaturg)  Adventures in Research: Screenwriting, Art Practice, and Performance took place on 20 September 2018. In addition to Batty and Bolland, the contributing guests included Helen Blejerman, Jennifer Booth, Uma Breakdown, Grant Bridges, Allie Carr, Neil Crawford, Susannah Gent, Alexander McAulay, Phil Nichols, Nick Norton, Funke Oyebanjo, Hestia Peppe, Rommi Smith, and Isabella Streffen. 1

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suggested an experiment in intermedial essay form that comprises the coexistence of a published text and a short film or films. These form a poetic and theoretical dialogue but also operate as stand-alone works, neither reduced to an illustration of the other. The form of the film part of the essay continues to be shaped by a consideration of why we ‘couldn’t see the film’. Perhaps, it was because we were in it? Two of the ‘voices’ especially written for the ‘Adventures in Research’ table reading were the characters of SCÉNE and TIME. SCÉNE: We are gathered around a table. None of us are certain. Our actions are not prescribed. Whites, greys, blacks and silvers. Paper. Pencils. Pens. From time to time, we stand and stretch. We are conscious that we are watched. We are watched by the Iris. TIME: … a clock ticking. The pendulum swings. Pause. Count to three. One, two, three… wait… turn the page.

When preparing the space for the readings, I prepared the table where we sat as described in the excerpt above. A camera (the ‘iris’) was positioned a few feet away from either end of the table. We sat in the materiality of the scene that the voice SCÉNE described, and we unconsciously acted out both the uncertainty of a first reading and the stretching and standing resulting from a long afternoon sitting and concentrating at the table. However, this staging was not consciously planned in that I did not know how it would unfold; it took the performing of it to bring it into consciousness. Perhaps more deliberately, the voice of TIME always appeared at the bottom of the page and, as I had hoped, the other participants experienced the voicing of the words as direction—we waited, and turned our pages in unison. Despite not being able to ‘see’ the film, by performing the script we were making it (Fig. 5). LS: Still in the private realm, during the testing phase, I bring the characters out of the scenes to have a dialogue in development. This allows me to reflect about the process in a way that replicates the scenes. In the excerpt below, when I have a conversation with Wood, who represents Hollywood and conventional screenwriting practices, I acknowledge my alternative approach and the reasons for presenting the story in this way.

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Fig. 5  Table reading set, S1 Artspace, Sheffield, September 2018 A single spotlight in a studio. Wood is just outside of the light. Darkened by shadows. WOOD:

Who is responsible for this script?

Louise timidly steps forward. Into the spotlight. LOUISE:

I am.

WOOD: You think you’re smart. Think you can break the rules? We don’t have time to fix your mistakes. LOUISE:

I’m not asking you to fix them.

He throws the script to the floor.

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WOOD:

Why are you wasting my time?

LOUISE:

Have you read it?

WOOD:

I glanced at a couple of pages. It looks unprofessional.

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LOUISE:  I’m experimenting with the form, finding my own way through it. He grunts. LOUISE:

I feature scenes as separate stories. Each scene has a new page.

WOOD:

That’s why it is so heavy.

LOUISE:

Each event is worth exploring. These small acts matter.

He grunts. LOUISE:

I know you like the spectacle. That’s in there too.

Wood stares at her. WOOD:

Where are the sluglines?

LOUISE:

The screenplay doesn’t have them.

He grunts. LOUISE:

Locations are mentioned in the descriptions.

WOOD: Maybe if you wrote it the correct way, I could get my assistant to read it. LOUISE:

Maybe I don’t want you to make it.

WOOD:

Then why is it in my hands?

Pause.

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LOUISE:

I don’t know.

WOOD:

Then go!

Louise is unable to move. WOOD: Next! She bends down to retrieve her screenplay from the floor. Louise steps out of the light.

Conclusion Script development as performance lends itself to artists’ moving image, experimental moving image, or low-budget writer–director productions rather than industrial models. Strategies of performance, public and private, operate as acts of resistance against doxas of writing and production, and offer enlivened pathways for writing towards the image. Whether as authors, educators or makers, we put the writer ‘in the picture’ by including reflective and subjective voices in the texts. As ‘subjects of the gaze’ we perform the texts in a variety of contexts and envisage multiple endpoints for these scripts, not just as films but literary texts, artists’ books, art installations and performances. Therefore, our script development processes are continually performed in multiple spaces, both private and public, changing the way a screenplay can be viewed and experienced, and retaining the script’s agency beyond its imagined or realised production.

References Altman, R. (1987). The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barthes, R. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text (R.  Miller, Trans.). New  York: Hill and Wang. Batty, C. (2018). A Vacuous Screenplay in Search of Rigour. TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses (Special Issue 48), 1–18. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Bolland, E. (2018). The Iris Opens/The Iris Closes: Le Silence #2 Scene Notes 1–13. Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 11(2), 203–216. Brewster, A. (2005). The Poetics of Memory. Continuum, 19(3), 397–402.

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Delluc, L. (1990). Le Silence. In Ecrit cinématographiques III: Drames de Cinéma, scenarios et projets de films (pp. 45–50). Paris: Cinématheque Français Cahiers du Cinéma. [Editions du Monde nouveau, Paris 1923]. Dooley, K. (2017). Digital “underwriting”: A script development technique in the age of media convergence. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3), 287–302. Gladman, R., keynote address to the conference Gestures: Writing that Moves Between, Manchester University, February 2019. Hollinger, K. (2012). Feminist Film Studies. London: Routledge. Laurens, C. (2004). Cet absent-là: figures de Rémi Vinet. Paris: Leo Scheer. Maras, S. (2009). Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. London: Wallflower Press. Martin, A. (2014). Where Do Cinematic Ideas Come From? Journal of Screenwriting, 5(1), 9–26. Millard, K. (2014). Screenwriting in a Digital Era. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Morris, E. (1998). Being & Doing: A Workbook for Actors. Los Angeles: Ermor Enterprises. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16, 108–112. Nash, M. (2013). Unknown Spaces and Uncertainty in Film Development. Journal of Screenwriting, 4(2), 149–162. Nelmes, J. (2007). Some Thoughts on Analyzing the Screenplay, the Process of Screenplay Writing and the Balance Between Craft and Creativity. Journal of Media Practice, 8(2), 107–113. Nettelbeck, A. (1998). Notes Towards an Introduction. In H. Kerr & A. Nettelbeck (Eds.), The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism (pp. 1–17). Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. Newman, M. (2011). Indie: An American Film Culture. New  York: Columbia University Press. Price, S. (2013). A History of the Screenplay. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rush, J., & Boughman, C. (1997). Language as Narrative Voice: The Poetics of the Highly Inflected Screenplay. Journal of Film and Video, 49(3), 28–37. Sawtell, L. (2015). Re-crafting the Screenplay: A Fictocritical Approach. In Writing the Ghost Train: Rewriting, Remaking, Rediscovering, Refereed Conference Papers of the 20th Annual Conference, Australasian Association of Writing Programs, pp. 1–10. Sawtell, L. (2016). The Paperless Screenplay: Writing with, for and on the SCREEN. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 9(1&2), 33–46. Sternberg, C. (1997). Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Stetsenko, A. (2017). The Transformative Mind: Expanding Vygotsky’s Approach to Development and Education. New York: Cambridge University Press. Turim, M. (1989). Flashback in Film: Memory and History. London/New York: Routledge.

The Promiscuous Screenplay: A Tale of Wanton Development and Loose Authorship Siobhan Jackson

Introduction Rocket looks like she’ll stay in the chair and watch, is that cool? She likes being a part of everything. Pets! Weird, I know, but it might be kind of interesting. Weird-interesting. Is bad sex even worst-bad sex if a dog is watching? Maybe that makes it good-worst-bad sex? I mean bad-good, but good. She’s so cute. She can watch. Hey, Jesse, I reckon leave your clothes on so it’s harder for Lucy to find the tube. And same with you Lucy, keep some layers on so it’s a bit of a task to get to the bow. Man, it’s hot in here. Are you alright under there? I’m going to have to get into the wardrobe to get you all in frame.

Lucy and Jesse are not rehearsed for the scene, neither are they provided with a script. A fresh tube of toothpaste is strapped around Jesse’s waist, camera tape holding it just above his genitals. Lucy is wrapped in an elaborate criss-crossing of string, secured with a bow at about her belly button. Both Lucy and Jesse still have their clothes on and are covered in

S. Jackson (*) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_15

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a big white sheet. The sheet concealing Lucy and Jesse is funny. Their bodies move beneath it like a cartoon brawl—with an occasional hand or foot or item of clothing escaping the sheets perimeter. It is also practical, concealing the unusual prosthetics. Jesse is assigned the task of untying Lucy’s bow; Lucy has to remove the cap and peel the hygiene seal from Jesse’s tube. The observing canine, my pet dog Rocket, does whatever she likes, not being particularly task focused. She follows the movement of the sheet. She is a sighthound. Rocket looks a bit scared. Lucy, could you get weirded out by her staring and stop the sex to look at the dog? It’s too weird. Jesse you could try and shoo her away. Yeah, that’s great. So wrong. She’s not going anywhere. Jesse you really want Lucy to concentrate on your tube. Can you find the little silver seal thing, Lucy? Keep fiddling around. See how you go. Rocket is coming over.

Lucy and Jesse lie, spent and sweaty on the bed. Rocket lies beside them. Everything is quiet and still. The room smells minty, but the audience will never know (Fig. 1). The dog came that day because it was hot and I did not want to leave her at home. We filmed Lucy and Jesse performing the assigned tasks— untying the bow, releasing the paste. We filmed Rocket watching. And that was, more or less, how a poorly trained but curious dog, and two actors tasked with an amusingly intricate mission, developed, drafted and realised a sex scene for the screen.

Fig. 1  Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr), Jesse (Jesse Richards) and Rocket (as herself) in the throes of ‘bad’ sex. You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017)

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This sex scene features in a film called You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017) and the following is an incomplete and unreliable account of the unconventional, and in some way naive, approach taken in developing the film’s story content successfully to the screen. I say incomplete and unreliable not to be cute, but to be honest. Honest inaccuracy is just about all art and recollection can deliver. It will be honest or as honest as memory allows. In this chapter I hope to encourage the exploration of alternative ways of thinking about screen story development. Not rejecting the status quo but encouraging a cine-diversity that urges miscellany and artistic mischief as behaviours to refresh and recharge the development gene pool. In the 1840s, the potato blight hit the food crop of Ireland. The spud gene pool was narrow and within two weeks every potato had turned to mush. A million people died of starvation. I think screenplay development has room for a little fresh genetic infusion.

To Courier or Not to Courier Alfred Hitchcock is famously quoted as saying, “To make a great film, you need three things: the script, the script, and the script”. I tend to agree with this famous mantra, but with a small addendum: “To make a great film, you need three things: the script, the script, and the script, in whatever forms it takes.” You can say vagina had no screenplay in the traditional sense. But its content was written and it was developed. Rather than drafting to the page, it was fashioned more or less straight to camera, employing an assortment of unorthodox texts and provocations to goad it into being. It might be more accurate to describe the film as provoked rather than written—provoked by tasks and pets and the weather and games and poems and lists and karaoke and supermarket trolleys and phone calls and underpants and pornography and bathtubs and raisin toast and electronic pianos, and all manner of things besides. As with any drafting, much was thrown away, but little was predetermined on paper before it was physically apprehended on screen. Of course, we are not alone in this approach. The US independent film movement Mumblecore and the more recent German phenomenon Berlin Flow also play in this direct, improvised and unpredictable story world where an almost feverish desire for creative immediacy calls into question the need for conventional script development structures. Jakob Lass, a Berlin Flow

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adherent and director, calls his philosophy of making Fogma—simultaneously acknowledging and sending up the more famous, but rule-­bound Dogme 95 filmmakers, such as Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg— declaring there is only one worthy rule of making and that is that each Fogma film should select its own development rules with confidence. He asks: “How can we fuel our collective potential? How do we plan the unpredictable? How do we create a structure that gives us support and yet frees us?” (Lass, cited in Kaever 2014, para. 5). You can say vagina was made while we actively wondered the same things. As such, You can say vagina was perhaps unwittingly an Australian Fogma film, its story developed in the creative fog of not knowing, with scenes dug out of improvisation and a blithe disregard for end gaining. A feverish kind of immediacy that eschews goals and relies on making cinema in the moment without conscious story goals or assuming what should or would happen next. For sociologists Andrew Metcalfe and Ann Game: It is easy to become attached to goals. Goals promise certainty, and the anxiety they induce only makes their achievement seems more meritorious. The trouble is goals, even worthy ones, remove our sense of proportion and our sensitivity to what is happening around us. (2002, p. v)

In their description of the limitation of goals, Metcalfe and Game hit on a conventional psychology of making: if we have clear goals we have certainty, and if we have certainty we assume we know what we are doing, and that what we are doing has merit. But do we, and does it? Metcalf and Game were introduced to us by You can say vagina’s colourist when the film was nearly complete. He saw parallels in their thinking and our method, and while they could not directly influence the film’s development, arriving so late in the process, they could and did provide a language to guide our odd and sometimes misshapen feelings into clear and transferable thoughts—something more than idiosyncratic throwaway meanderings—perhaps even something as formal as employable development tools and viable production methods. Formalising our thoughts was, in many ways, anathema to our contrarian artistic natures. While the irony was not lost on us, we thought it dumb to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. Academic and filmmaker Kathryn Millard (2010) catalogues a multitude of ways industry has found to standardise and limit the potential personalities of the screenplay, or the ways and forms it might find to share

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what it knows. All of which, in varying ways, point to an industrial desire to conform, standardise and constrain ways of making (Macdonald 2004; Sawtell 2015; Senje 2017). The almost despotic desire of industry to dictate things as inconsequential as script font choice and size is representative of its inflexible attitude to how a screenplay should or could be developed, and assumes the necessity of having one, in written form, at all. The number one convention … is that the screenplay must be presented in Courier 12-point font. Similar advice can be found in screenwriting training manuals and submission guidelines around the world. Is it because this font conveys a sense of timelessness, thanks to its association with the typewriter? … Present your script in the approved formatting, and you not only imbue your work with ‘dignity, prestige and stability’, but announce your status as an insider in the film industry. (Millard 2010, p. 15)

Could a feature film happen by giving humble attention to the moment, actively turning away from the “dignity, prestige and stability” implied by industrial standards and conformity? Could worthwhile screen art be developed in a Fogma?

Authorship in Flux You can say vagina was developed collaboratively—promiscuously so— over a period of approximately two years, employing methods of working that were so wide-ranging in their artistic liaisons, and so unspecific about authorship, that if someone asked, “What happens to a time-based narrative when you hand scene structure over to your pet dog?”, You can say vagina could proffer an answer. Having more or less dispensed with standard industrial filmmaking norms (drafted screenplays, rehearsals, auditions, specific crew roles, agreed story goals, defined authorship etc.), and having committed to the idiosyncrasies of ‘promiscuous collaboration’, You can say vagina found itself writing its own rules of development. While the cinematic results are for others to judge, the open and generative nature of the process was a revelation. It is very easy to not make a feature film. We had spent years doing that. We were good at it. We knew lots of other people who were good at it too. After all, feature films are expensive and complicated to organise. They involve armies of people and you need to ‘know’ a whole lot of stuff. But

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what if one turned all that on its head? What if making a feature is just a thing that you do during the day with other people, like having a picnic or visiting your mum or going to the shops? Let us assume for the next little while that feature films are not complicated organisational nightmares or massive money pits. Let us say, just for now, that they cost whatever you need or want them to cost, and that development is not a long game but a short one. And let us also say that films do not have to be ‘great’. Average is okay. Let us just say. The playful and alarmingly frank pioneer of improvisational theatre Keith Johnstone is deft at reminding one to be candid, not clever, when sharing what you think you understand—or equally, what you have no idea about: I always think teachers should reveal everything to their students. Especially when they don’t know something. All the teachers I ever had always knew something. Which was really discouraging. They’d choose really good poems so then you’d think, ‘I could never write one like that’. (2016)

Substitute ‘teacher’ for ‘developer’ and one is reminded why it is so much easier to not make films than it is to make them. Traditional story development routes are full of discouraging potholes and are generally not ‘making’ focused. Millard implies in her support for alternative processes of script development that traditional development is perhaps not always fit for purpose: “Increasingly I find myself interested in screenwriting and development processes aimed at realizing films within specific production contexts and parameters, rather than free-floating script development programmes that can so easily become ends in themselves” (2010, p.  13). While Millard wrote this in 2010, little has changed on any systemic level in the intervening years. In addition to encouraging a candid confession of knowledge, or lack thereof, Johnstone also suggests that it is okay—maybe even good—to be average: There’s this terrible culture in which everyone is taught to do their best…if anyone knows how to get better by doing your best, then please … [there is a] book about athletes who’ve won world records, and it’s almost always when they weren’t trying. If they are really trying their best, they are using too many muscles … you learnt at school to tense yourself up, ‘I’ll do better, give me another chance.’ You just fill yourself with tension. That causes fear

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and, in my opinion, doing your best is the same as stage fright. But everybody says that. So, my recommendation is to be average, because then there is no stress. (2016)

In short: aim for average, abandon goals, do not be clever and develop in context. Average, rudderless, dumb, but specific—we could make that film. Releasing oneself from the tyranny of assumed rules of quality (that traditional development processes are so often chasing) was a radically enabling notion and became the unspoken philosophy underpinning our project. Could it eradicate artistic ego and promote collective ‘doing’ over individual ‘achieving’? We would see. In 1975, legendary Australian Rules football coach John Kennedy delivered an impassioned speech to his players at the Grand Final half-time break. Hawthorn were playing North Melbourne. North Melbourne led by 20 points. Kennedy beseeched his players with almost operatic fervour: “At least do something! Do! Don’t think, don’t hope, do! At least you can come off and say, ‘I did this, I shepherded, I played on, at least I did something’” (Kennedy 1975). He has since said of his 1975 utterings: We had a few academics in the side at the time and they were telling me what we should do and ‘I think this’ and ‘I think that’. It just got too much for me so I just said, ‘Don’t think, do something’…I got sick of the word ‘think’ and just wanted people to act. (Kennedy 2013)

Script development and football are not so different. You can ‘think’ a perfect screen story or performance or pass or goal, but until you do it— until it plays—it means nothing; it does not exist. Development, for us, had to translate directly into making or it risked being, as Millard describes, “an end in itself” (2010, p. 13). It was a risk but we figured it was better to risk making a bad film than make no film at all. Not everyone would agree that this was a sound professional strategy. And so, it was decided, we would make a feature film. The film did not have to be great, or even good; it just had to happen. The closest we came to goal setting was saying that if we come up with two killer scenes, we would consider the film a success. ‘Killer’ was not defined. Too much talking or definition or ‘thinking’ might stop things happening. It was time to ‘do’. Hawthorn lost the 1975 Grand Final, which made John Kennedy’s words all the more poignantly appealing.

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We made (developed) a list of things that we could point a camera at. The list was random and forgettable. ‘Karaoke’ was on it and perhaps ‘driving lesson’. The rest is forgotten. But it doesn’t matter what was on the list. We would point cameras at stuff, and something would happen. We would find a story in the making, rather than make a story we’d already found.

Making the First Mark Creativity expert Ken Robinson tells a story in his now famous TED talk ‘Schools Kill Creativity’ (2006) about a schoolgirl making a drawing. As Robinson explains, the girl’s teacher asks, “What are you drawing?” The girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in minute” (Robinson 2006). We did not know what our film looked like. Nobody knew. We would use the act of making to find out. A few months earlier, we had made a short film in a similar manner, Martin & Lucy (Baka and Jackson 2016). We had worked with a young actor that we liked, Lucy. She was young and relatively inexperienced. She was beautiful in entirely her own way and had enormous amounts of wavy hair. She was perhaps the most amenable person I had ever met. She might just have jumped out of a plane without a parachute if we had asked her, not because she was an idiot, but because she had an irrepressible faith in people. Early in The Great Gatsby, the narrator Nick Carraway describes Gatsby’s “gift for hope”: “there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (Fitzgerald 2008, p. 8). Lucy was a bit like that. As directors, we found the unusual openness of Lucy’s personality enormously attractive. We asked if she was interested in working with us again on something longer, not knowing what her role would be or what it would involve: an extension of the role she had already played for us, perhaps—but perhaps not. We would see what came. We needed to make a mark on the proverbial page. Lucy was that mark. I had known Tom for years. I cannot remember how we met—on set I guess. He has a beard, a long one. He wears his hair pretty freely too. He is smart and can talk keenly on a million different subjects. He was a lot older than Lucy and a lot gruffer. He was also a good deal more experienced as an actor. The contrast seemed interesting. He said yes. And so,

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the marks began to grow, and some possibilities started to drift into view. We had Lucy and Tom in front of the camera(s). We had Mischa and I behind the camera(s). And Max, a cinematographer friend, recorded sound. I borrowed my daughter’s DSLR and Mischa borrowed his dad’s. They matched. We were crewed. With no traditional script, and no concrete notion of the overall story structure or plot, we relied on what we came to think of as provocations and alternative texts to start scenes and nudge drama and characters into being, the sex scene being an example. That scene had come quite late in the film’s development, when characters and storylines had begun to take shape and insist on things. That was not the case in the earliest days of shooting—at first everything was raw and open and tentative. What could we do with those inchoate qualities? Could timidity and faltering exploration become part of our text? Could the atmosphere of making directly inform the content? Write it for us? We had access to an ugly, semi-furnished house. Why might Tom and Lucy be in it? Not sure. Let us put Lucy in the bath. Let us get Tom to teach her something. Tom knew a periodic table mnemonic. Let us see what those things will do to each other. How might they push and pull and tighten or fall apart? (Fig. 2) Tom, can you interrupt Lucy taking a bath and teach her that mnemonic? Yeah, I’ll wear the stripy dressing gown. Maybe have the paper with me? And Lucy, his interrupting you has you leave your undies and bra on. Like I’ve been interrupted just before getting undressed totally but still get in the bath anyway? Ah, yeah, that makes sense, awful sense. It’s awkward but interesting, maybe. There’s a tension in there somewhere. Let’s see where. Oh, my, it feels wrong, but will we try it and see what it says? I wore good undies today. Lucky!

Fig. 2  Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) and Tom (Tom McCathie) get to know one another in You can say vagina (2017)

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Let’s do it. Action. Oh, Lucy I reckon you might want to get out of the bath at some point. See if you can find a moment. If not, cool, anyway, see how you go. All good. Is the water a good temperature? Okay, action.

Lucy did find a way to get out of the bath and Tom did wear his stripy dressing gown. Her awkwardness and his bold stripes became essential to the film’s tone and its ongoing development. While a scriptwriting program was never employed while developing You can say vagina to the screen, transcribing scenes since has tangibly documented what this way of developing “within specific production contexts and parameters” (Millard 2010, p. 13) could look like. It has also confirmed in me the belief that a development process that privileges ‘doing’ over ‘thinking’ is not a crazy outlier idea but might just be a radically generative development method— not an indulgent, haphazard cinematic playground of ballooning ratios and aimless story hunting. You can say vagina was shot on a ratio of approximately 8:1 and the transcribed scenes are firm evidence that while the development methods may have been unorthodox, the results were not absurd or misshapen craft as a result. INT. BATHROOM. DAY Lucy, 21, sits in a half-filled bath. She wears her bra and undies, despite the water. She has her knees drawn to her chest, awkwardly hiding her body. She stares ahead. Tom, 50, sits on the closed toilet, slightly turned away from Lucy. He holds the newspaper in his hands. He chatters away, casting a glance to Lucy every now and then. He shows no particular interest in her semi-nakedness. He is caught in his own train of thought. TOM Little Beryl Brown chews nuts on Friday night. Which will give you the first elements of the periodic table. Hi Harry… LUCY (whispering) Hi, Harry

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TOM Which gives you hydrogen and helium. Little Beryl Brown: lithium, beryllium, boron. Chews nuts on Friday night, is carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fleuron and neon. Then NaMgAl, which is the symbols for sodium. Magnesium and aluminum. Sips chlorine ardently. So, silicon, phosphorous, sulphur. Argon comes next. Then potassium and sulfur. Yeah. Lucy moves to get out of the bath but hesitates, looking to Tom.

Think I might get out.

LUCY

Tom takes some time to acknowledge Lucy’s intention. He mutters a response.

Yeah, alright.

TOM

Tom leaves the bathroom. Lucy slowly stands, water running from her body and dripping loudly back into the bath. Protecting her body loosely with her arms she reaches for a towel and covers herself as she shuts the bathroom door.

As can be read, the scene plays with a very particular emotional awkwardness; one I believe exists because of the fragile balance between what the writers and players knew and what they did not know. By developing a screen story without a mutually agreed blueprint (that the script would normally provide), an unaccountable vividness grew in the performances and story spaces—a sparkle that had something to do with writing in real time—developing in the moment. I could not have fashioned the fragile, almost invisible reaction Lucy has to Tom’s careless but hilarious bathroom intrusion, on a page. It belonged to the process—it was dimensional—the result of the combination of bodies, texts, provocations, environment, nerves and the peculiarity of

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Fig. 3  Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) washes Tom’s (Tom McCathie) beard in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017)

development. At least I think it did. But there was no time or space to reckon with it critically then. It was early days in the shoot and things were only just starting to suggest themselves. Something good was happening but it was slippery and a bit reclusive; nothing was clear or obvious. What could we leverage from this mood we had created, this weird start, this peculiar method of dispatching story to the screen? (Fig. 3) Hey, Tom, let’s put you in the bath. Only fair. Tom, is it cool to get Lucy to wash your hair? Yeah, no worries. Wanna do my beard too? Do you wash beards? Yeah, of course. I never knew that. Is there special beard shampoo? Yeah, but you can use anything. Lucy, because you’re not paying any rent to live here I guess one of the things you have to do is wash Tom’s hair. And beard. Sorry about that. Weird. He leaves his undies on, I guess. Could he leave them in the bath water, just floating for Lucy to find later? Err, really? That’s kinda gross. Shit yeah. I guess we can cut it out later. Maybe it’s brilliant. Let’s try it. Okay. Let’s aim for totally unsexy. Probably a given. I feel weird. Okay. Action. Tom, Lucy, shampoo’s just behind you.

INT. BATHROOM. DAY Lucy stares into the bathtub as it fills with water. Fierce water sounds fill the room. Cut to: Tom sits in the bath. It is filled right to the top. He wears his underpants. Lucy shampoos his hair and beard. Tom enjoys the ritual enormously. Lucy works the hair with casual efficiency. Tom groans quietly.

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Lucy twists Tom’s beard hair around her finger before sitting back from the baths edge. Tom looks to her, childlike. Lucy taps his shoulder. He slides into the water to wash away the lather. Cut to: The tub has been vacated. A pair of men’s undies float in the abandoned water. Lucy leans in and takes the undies and wrings them out before draining the bath and hanging up the bathmat.

It is important to acknowledge that our actors were very generous, allowing us to observe their first and unfiltered reactions to very unusual situations. And not only observe, but preserve. They could not hide behind knowing; they could only work in the unknown, allowing their vulnerability and uncertainty to be part of the scene, part of the quality of the performance. Each actor we worked with responded differently to this style of story and performance development. In some it triggered talk to fill space, in others it encouraged silence and a certain psychological lingering. Above all, it imbued all the performances, and the writing, with a particular sort of truth, one that is often tongue-tied and fragile. Recognising this characteristic, an audience member kindly coined us our very own subgenre: ‘The Cinema of Awkwardness’. We came to love this quality in the story shapes and performances, the way it/they would arrive on screen with no notice or forewarning. It was a new and extreme experience for us as directors. It was like being on a precipice, looking into the unknown: anything could happen. It was exciting, full of possibility. What will she do next? How will she react? What will we do next? How will we react? Where is the story going? How will it navigate through this moment? Those feelings triggered something in us as writers and directors that became an integral part of our development method. It became clear to us that we would, and should, do what the actors were doing: be generous with our vulnerability, share our half-formed ideas, enact our ideas before we felt safe knowing what they meant or how they might fit in (i.e. everything we had been taught not to do as directors). Vulnerability became our strength. Uncertainty was not something to hide or avoid—it was a place where ideas could be allowed to remain fluid, to shift and evolve, unfettered by notions of the sensible, the good or the correct. As long, that is, as our performers felt (and were) safe, and understood that everything was on the table. We came up with some horrible ideas and some brilliant ideas. The film is inflected with both.

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The Problem with Structure It became clear, very quickly, that provoking performance by combining unusual texts and improvisation (especially when collaborating with performers who trust you), while not a complete sync, is a technique that generates a certain physical and emotional frisson that seemed infectious to performance. However, this way of working was not a natural ally to story structure or plotting. In fact, I would go so far as to say they were enemies. It is a working model that does not take into account the next thing you thought was going to happen in your story, and even less about the plot point insinuating itself ten minutes down the timeline. It is like building a house in the middle of an earthquake. This was an earthquake of our own making. In an attempt to deal with the novelty of it, we would shoot in bursts. Sometimes two or three days in a row. Sometimes just one. Then we would ‘write’ in the edit—shaping sequences in order to sniff out a narrative direction, a story thread to following or a psychology worth pursuing. This in turn would suggest scene ideas for our next burst of shooting. The method resembled an Exquisite Corpse—the collaborative drawing or word game played by the Surrealist in the 1920s, where each contributor would draw or write, having seen only a fragment, or nothing at all, of the preceding artist’s contribution. Disrupting the industrial norms of film production, and letting go of familiar film plotting techniques, changed us as makers. Suddenly, we were surrounded by story so fluid we were slipping in all directions. We ‘wrote’ and worked for story outcomes harder than we ever had before. Genre tricks and familiar story tropes did not cut it in this unexpectedly raw story space. It re-awoke in us a love for the fundamental principles of storytelling: reminding us to let go of things that were not working, respond openly to the story’s needs, not be too tidy with our thinking, giving our characters room to find a voice and use it, being open to lumpy sideways thinking (it is human), not forcing characters to do things that are not in their natures in order to advance plot and, finally, understand that there is never only one way.

Why Did Lucy Run? In her 2017 article ‘Formatting the imagination: A reflection on screenwriting as a creative practice’, Siri Senje discusses the possibilities and value of loosening the tight reigns industry has placed on screenplay

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development, suggesting “the emphasis in screenwriting [move] away from technical terms like structure and development into the world of art, in which concepts like creation and invention are paramount” (2017, p.  268, original italics). While Senje does not advocate abandoning the screenplay (in fact she is a great advocate for promoting the written screenplay as an autonomous artwork in and of itself), she does suggest it may benefit from a more ‘in the moment’ approach and less emphasis on procuring endless planning documents “predicting one’s screen story in various prose formats, first as a synopsis, then as a treatment … describing the screenplay’s action, scene by scene … commonly rewritten several times” (2017, p.  268). While acknowledging “the development field serves an industry where the need to pre-plan and predict is a driving force, as investment runs high” makes this obsession with ‘knowing’ highly predictable, she also reveals its absurdity: “Producers and commissioners want to know in advance what they will get … both logic and experience speaks clearly of the impossibility of predicting screen story success” (Senje 2017, p. 271). Why do we do it? Why has this inaccurate method of predicting quality become the assumed ‘best practice’? It can work, but in its most common form it is clearly not a panacea guaranteeing good cinematic art or even big bags of money. Whether writing to the page, as Senje does, or directly to the screen, as Mischa and I did, I cannot help but think Senje is on to something. For her it was about finding a model that allowed for “envisioning in the sheer act of writing” (Senje 2017, p.  271); for us it was about envisioning in the sheer act of making. Practically speaking, what might this ‘envisioning’ look like? Some way into making You can say vagina, Mischa and I became curious as to why our main character, now established to be Lucy, had run away from home. Or if she had indeed run away from home. We had no idea. Our exquisite corpse had revealed many things but not that. It is rare to be on set and to find the directors and actors not knowing something so seemingly fundamental about the screen story they are telling. Under more traditional development circumstances, the written script (perhaps even a pre-script treatment or synopsis) would have delivered solid answers to this question weeks, months or even years earlier. We had already shot quite a bit of the film, perhaps two-thirds (not that we knew that then), when we suddenly became insatiably curious about Lucy’s past. A story had begun to gather around our heroine and insist more ardently on certain story directions, or least story probabilities. We

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learnt that she had ‘escaped’ from somewhere or someone, she had changed her name (to Ruby) and was ‘trying things out’ in the big city. We began to get glimmerings of why was she doing the things she was doing. We wondered what Lucy’s mum might be like. Might she have had something to do with her running away? We wanted to find out. So, we wrote to what we did not know. We rang Liza. She was heavily pregnant. Brilliant. An unconventional text and visible provocation growing inside the body of our actor. A pregnant mother, a cheap motel room, a mobile phone, a car park and a daughter who has experienced a few weeks of freedom from small town life. There was certainly density in the texts and provocations galore. So, Liza, you’ve been stuck in this crappy hotel room for three days, waiting for your daughter to show up. She knows you’re here. I guess she’s avoiding you. You’ve left messages. We don’t need to tell you you’re eight months’ preggers. Hell, no. This mattress is weird. It seems to be slipping off the base. Three days sitting on this. Shit, eh? You want her to come home with you. She’ll call. And then she’ll show up. I wonder how cross I am? Pretty, pissed, I reckon. But I could be nice in parts. Totally. No worries.

In her head and body, Lucy had the experience of everything we had shot to date to draw on. The actor and the character were ready to write. Ready to be provoked. Ready to call mum (Figs. 4 and 5).

Fig. 4  Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) calls her Mum in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017)

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EXT. CAR PARK. DAY Lucy stands under a tatty brown awning in a car park behind a shop. There are a few milk crates scattered about. She’s on the phone. LUCY I, I, couldn’t come and see you. MUM Lucy. LUCY I’m calling now though. How are you? MUM What if I was calling you? What if I was calling you?

Pardon.

LUCY

MUM What if you were calling me? Um, yep.

LUCY

MUM It wouldn’t be very nice would it? LUCY No, it wouldn’t be very nice. MUM I don’t come to the city very often at all. So, I’ve been sitting in this hotel, waiting, wasting my money that I don’t have. LUCY You didn’t need to come down, Mum. Why?

MUM

LUCY It’s okay. Well why, why come down?

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MUM Yeah, but I need you to come back with me, I need your help. So of course, I need to come down because you don’t return my calls any other way. Do you? Lucy meanders around the derelict space. MUM So, I have to come down here, don’t I? How else am I going to see you? Yep, yep. Yeah, arh …

LUCY

MUM It’s as if you don’t like me or something. You don’t like me, do you? LUCY Pardon! MUM It’s like you don’t even like me LUCY I do like you Mum, you’re not, you’re not … why wouldn’t I like you? MUM Well, you don’t ignore someone. Especially you mother. Lucy finds a brick on the ground and kicks it along the ground. Sorry about that.

LUCY

MUM (a crack in her voice) I don’t think you’re very sorry.

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Fig. 5  Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) and her mum (Liza Dennis) argue in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017)

INT. CHEAP MOTEL ROOM. DAY. Lucy and her mother embrace. They are perched on the end of an unmade bed. The room has a smattering of cheap furniture. MUM Nice to see you. They release from an awkward, but extended embrace. Mum’s very pregnant belly is revealed in full. MUM But, I’m a bit pissed off with you, though. I’ve been here for three days, Luce. Yep, sorry.

LUCY

MUM It’s not very fair. Is it? LUCY No, but, yeah, no, sorry. But you didn’t have to, umm, come down though.

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MUM I know I didn’t need to come down, but I did come down. Didn’t I? Mum rubs her pregnant belly. She and Lucy look everywhere but at one another. Lucy fidgets, anxious and pissed off. LUCY Look, I’m really sorry that I made you wait. MUM It’s just not very fair, really Lucy. Liza rubs her belly more vigorously. MUM (cont) I really didn’t want to be here, you know. I’m tired, I’m becoming even more emotional at the end of the pregnancy and I didn’t want to have to come down here. But I came down here because I need you to come home with me because I need help. I think it’s pretty blood selfish of you. I’m a priority. The baby is a priority. And I want you to come home with me please. LUCY Yeah, no. Lucy shakes her head trying to squirm out of the situation. No!?

MUM

LUCY Not today. Not for a little while, Mum. Lucy looks her mum in the face. Her mum looks straight back. LUCY It’s good you’ve got a priority now, though. It’s a step in the right direction. MUM What the fuck! Lucy motions to her mother’s belly.

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LUCY You’ve got a fresh start. MUM I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon! Who do you think you are speaking to me like that? What, now you’re living down here you’re, all wise and … as long as it suits you and makes you feel better. Is that what’s going on? LUCY No, I just feel like its adequate. It’s nice. Liza looks to her belly and rubs it. MUM (whispered to her belly) It’s alright … see you’re hurting the baby. I can feel that she’s not happy. Go do whatever. I wasted my time and my money. I’m exhausted. LUCY I love you mum. MUM No, you don’t. If you loved me you would have called me earlier. Wouldn’t you? Your priorities are screwed up in the head. LUCY I wonder why? MUM You don’t leave someone sitting here days, they come down and see you and go out of their way for you and … LUCY But you didn’t even ask me to come down, you just come down because you wanted me. MUM So! I don’t have to ask you to come down. I’m your mother. I don’t have to ask anything of you.

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LUCY You didn’t, you didn’t, you… MUM Oh, sorry, I didn’t inform ‘Lucy’ that I was coming down. Ruby. Ruby now.

LUCY

MUM You know what. You’re delusional. You want to change your name now you’re living in the city. I’m still going to call you Lucy, sorry, whatever. You know what, go. You make me feel sick. I don’t need this from you. Thanks, see ya later.

LUCY MUM

You’re an arsehole. Mum watches her daughter leave. Her emotions mixed.

It was confirmed: Lucy had run away from home, and now we knew why. Our development process told us. Irish fiction writer and educator Colum McCann suggests one should “Write about that which you want to know. Better still, write towards that which you don’t know” (McCann 2017, p. 4). And that is what we did. The film wrote about that which it wanted to know. Better still, it wrote towards that which it did not know. Now, of course, McCann is talking about written texts—prose—but a ‘text’ does not know what it is or what it looks like? It does not know whether it is a screenplay or a person or a location or a hot day or a pregnant belly. And if it does not know, who are we to discriminate? As Kathryn Millard suggests, when evoking the term “cinematic scriptwriting” there are many ways to imagine a screenplay other than just words on a page—what is stopping makers from slipping between words and images and production specifics (2010, p. 13)? Why discriminate? Why limit? We wrote the find-out-why-Lucy-ran-away scene with two very particular bodies, a shitty motel room, a broken bed, ugly construction noise outside and the confusion of love, feelings of guilt and displays of fear. A combination of texts and feelings that allowed a scene about the pressure

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and complexity of maternal love, the desire to find independence and the fear of losing control to emerge. We wrote it and we did not write it. I like to think we found it the Senje way, through a “sheer act” (Senje 2017, p. 271). Increasingly, I have come to believe that traditional script development has privileged technique and craft over individual expression (Senje 2017, p. 268), which has profoundly limited, even discouraged, ways of thinking about and making film as art. While there are many thinkers and makers who agree (a list worth making on another occasion), it remains true that sitting outside the walls of convention can be very lonely, anxiety ridden and financially stressful. Is it worth the trouble? Yes. Emphatically, yes. What is art if it does not question whatever current gatekeepers are insisting is ‘right’ and ‘best’ and ‘good’? Knowing what has gone before and loving the traditional forms of one’s practice is one thing; tugging one’s forelock and falling in line with all its conventions is no less than obsequious obedience. Millard intelligently looks to filmmaker and screenwriting theorist JJ Murphy to remind us that “real innovation in screenwriting […] comes not from ignorance of narrative film conventions but from being able to see beyond their limitations” (Murphy 2007, p. 266, cited in Millard 2010, p. 13). Hear, hear!

Provoking Lucy Once we had finished You can say vagina, Mischa was asked by a friend, “So, what’s your film about?” He responded, “Well, we found the loveliest actor we could and subjected her to strange and evermore awkward and appalling situations to see if she would ever get cross”. And basically, he was right. That is what we did. And in a way that is what every piece of drama does. It may not be the loveliest person; it may be the meanest (Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, 1951), the most beautiful (Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), the most marginalised (John Merrick in The Elephant Man, 1980) or the most stoic (Harry S Stamper in Armageddon, 1998). Drama tests the status quo. It prods it and pokes it and tries to enrage it—or as screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (2018) might describe it—chases it up a tree, throws stones at it, then sees how it may or may not get down. You can say vagina’s conceit, if it were to claim one, was to develop drama (chase a thought up a tree and hurl stones at it) by giving priority to doing and being over thinking and planning. It was a way of imagining

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the possibilities of developing screen drama through the medium, not for the medium. We wanted to engage the form of cinema to develop the work rather than developing work (a script) for the form. To us, this just made sense. We had no clear idea of what would happen and neither did we want to know. That was the point. We wanted to make a film from the inside out, rather than from the more traditional outside in. It was not a better way; just another way. While this ‘other’ way meant we may not have known exactly what was going to happen next in terms of story direction or character revelations, we could assume something if we put our actors (and ourselves) in situations that where pregnant with suggestion. We also (not always, but often) gave our actors very literal things to do—squeeze orange juice, put washing on, withdraw cash from an ATM, describe exactly what they see and so on. This combination delivered some interesting results. For example, we had free access to a small sound recording/voiceover booth. It is at the end of a sloping corridor that makes you feel underground: tucked away, secret. If you are blind and you want to enjoy pornographic movies, one way to do so is listen to audio descriptions. There are people employed to voice and record those descriptions. Lucy needed a job. Washing Tom’s hair was only temporary. We asked Josh to meet us in the cafeteria. We talk about this and that. Josh had played some scenes with Tom and Lucy the day before. Josh portrayed a sound archivist for us, recording Tom voicing bird calls. My friend Miklos had reminded me of Tom’s special talent for mimicking birds when I bumped into him on the street a few days before. Shit, I had forgotten about that. Of course. Brilliant. Really? That’s his thing. He’s really good at them. They’re probably even accurate, if I know Tom. I heard him do them at a party. It was a weird party.

Tom’s character needed a talent. Something he was proud of, even arrogant and self-congratulatory about. Josh recorded his calls for a national archive. Tom was so pleased. Tom and Josh hit it off straight away. Lucy was a bit on the outer. So, when Josh invited Lucy to do some sound recordings with him—private ones—she was rapt. He had noticed her (Fig. 6). The next day we let Josh and Lucy know that the scene we were imagining would involve watching pornography and asked them if that was okay. Yeah, that’s fine. Not much more was said. After all, their characters had met the day before. Josh got familiar with the equipment in the

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recording booth. Lucy got settled in the soundproof cubicle. Josh explained the job and Lucy did the job. Texts, provocations, tasks (Fig. 7).

Fig. 6  Josh (Josh Price) meets Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) and Tom (Tom McCathie) for the first time in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017)

Fig. 7  Josh (Josh Price) employs Lucy/Ruby (Lucy Orr) to record an audio description for a porn film in You can say vagina (Baka and Jackson 2017)

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INT. SMALL RECORDING STUDIO/ADR SUITE. DAY Josh, 30s, sits at a computer, surrounded by sound recording equipment. A young woman, Lucy (now known as Ruby), can be seen on the other side of an internal window. She is in a small, dimly lit soundproof booth. She wears headphones. JOSH Okay, umm, whenever you’re ready. LUCY/RUBY Sorry, I can’t see anything. Oh, there we go. JOSH

Oh, sorry.

Ruby looks to a monitor off screen, and describes what she sees. LUCY/RUBY There’s a man, ah, standing inside a house, and a schoolgirl comes out and she’s really happy and they’re talking. Well, she touches his shirt. And she’s looking at him quite like excited, er, intently, as he’s putting his hand through, in the front of her underpants. He does it again and he’s, um, sort of pushing inward and she’s enjoying it and sort of playing around with the area in between her legs. And now he’s licking it. Josh shakes his head. Ruby stops her commentary and waits for his instruction. Josh pushes various buttons so Ruby can hear him in the booth. You can say vagina. Okay, I can. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

JOSH

LUCY/RUBY JOSH

LUCY/RUBY He’s sort of licking around her vagina, a bit more and now he’s yeah. She’s really enjoying it. Her skirts still on, that’s fun. And now he’s got a finger in her, vagina. And his penis, um, (she giggles) into her … We’ll just … Lucy continues to giggle.

JOSH

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Can you hear me? Yeah, I can.

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JOSH LUCY/RUBY

JOSH Yeah, yeah. We’ll just go back and do that again. LUCY/RUBY Go back. Okay. Sorry. Lucy continues making embarrassed apologies as Josh recues the tape and explains what he needs her to do. JOSH No, no, we just, well, the laughter is good. I enjoy the laughter. But, um, we might … No, I know, sorry.

LUCY/RUBY

JOSH No, that’s okay, totally fine. Ah, okay, ah we’ll just go back. When you see playback, um, just start describing again. Josh squints at the computer screen, cueing the picture for playback. JOSH Just give me one second. LUCY/RUBY She, um, he is entering her and they’ve picked up a rhythm and she’s rubbing herself quite heavily, and um, they’ve slowed down and now he’s taking his penis out and has decided to place it into her (hesitates), bottom hole. And she looks like she is in quite a bit of pain but I think she’s in … JOSH Sorry, Lucy, if we just try and, um, hm, what’s the word, if we can keep the vocab, um, like you said bottom hole there. Yeah.

LUCY/RUBY

JOSH If you can, like, arsehole is good…

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Arsehole, okay.

LUCY/RUBY

… or anus is good. (giggles) Anus.

JOSH

LUCY/RUBY

JOSH Sorry, um, awkward I know. But, um, yeah. So, Arsehole, anus. If you … Thank you.

LUCY/RUBY

JOSH No, no, no, that’s, no, thank you. Thank you for doing this. This is great. (bright) That’s okay.

LUCY/RUBY

JOSH Arsehole, anus, er, ah, bum hole even, just bottom hole … LUCY/RUBY Yeah, it doesn’t have, it doesn’t have a good ring to it does it? JOSH Yeah, yeah, so let’s, ah, I’ll let you go for a bit longer this time, but yeah, so just feel free to play with the vocab. You can do bum hole, anus. Vagina can be pussy or cunt. Um, penis could be cock or dick or um … (awkward giggle). Sorry, but yeah, yeah, I’m just trying to be business-like but um … Dick, cock!

LUCY/RUBY

JOSH Dick, cock, umm, cunt, pussy … Cunt, pussy!

LUCY/RUBY JOSH

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Cunt, pussy … Arsehole … Arsehole … Anus … Anus … Bum hole … Bum hole … Okay.

LUCY/RUBY JOSH LUCY/RUBY JOSH LUCY/RUBY JOSH LUCY/RUBY

They both giggle. Sorry. Poo hole.

LUCY/RUBY JOSH

Josh looks pleased with himself, happy with his silly word plays. JOSH Yeah, you know, yeah, just, yeah, I’ll, yeah, just let you play. Umm, alright … Okay.

LUCY/RUBY

JOSH … I’ll just, we’ll just pick up, we’ll just pick it up there, we’ll just keep it going. Right from there.

LUCY/RUBY JOSH

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Yeah, actually, no, maybe I’ll go back, I’ll go back. It’s alright, I’ll go back. Okay, just one second, sorry. Josh clicks away on the computer cueing up the picture. Lucy pulls faces suggesting the vision that is slipping past on her monitor is both amusing and dirty. JOSH Okay, and just whenever, whenever you’re ready, Lucy. LUCY/RUBY Umm, and his cock is in her pussy and she’s rubbing herself and really enjoying it and you can’t see him but I think because he’s hard he’s enjoying it too. And, um, she’s lifted up her legs and now he’s removed his cock is placing it into her arsehole. Ruby pauses, pleased with her more assured vocabulary. LUCY/RUBY And she’s in pain and pleasure all at once and he’s slowed down quite significantly, er, and now he’s sped up a bit, and she’s started rubbing herself again and to continue enjoying it, I think … Josh stares silently at Ruby, transfixed by her descriptions. LUCY/RUBY … but mainly she looks like she’s in quite a bit of pain. Now, it’s a close shot of her and she still looks, well, hypnotised, and you can’t see which hole he is in now, but I’m assuming it is still her arsehole. Josh gently nods in hypnotised approval. Yeah.

LUCY/RUBY

This was the scene that delivered the film its title. A man tells a woman she can say vagina. Not even that made Lucy cross. We were very impressed. It was also one of the scenes we considered ‘killer’. Killer because it did unexpected things, things that people do when they are in their bodies and not in their heads. Actors are very good at being in their bodies; I would suggest they are much less likely than a director to retreat into their heads to solve a problem. They are trained that way, thank goodness. Lucy and Josh are both very smart people, smart enough to negotiate ideas without hiding in cleverness. Cleverness can be such a brittle cover for fear

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and insecurity, and in my experience it rarely uncovers truth. I write this knowing I am not a psychologist nor philosopher nor brain expert, but sharing this intuitive feeling is the most honest—and I hope useful—way of explaining what made this scene ‘killer’. The method we employed to develop the scene allowed no time (for actors or directors) to think up smart quips and socially astute commentary on the relationship between pornography, power or gender relations—rather, it gave the actors a task to complete that was suggestive, strange and impossible not to respond to, but practical enough to allow them to stay in their bodies and ‘do’ rather than ‘think’ (remembering football coach John Kennedy’s “Don’t think, don’t hope, do!”). Our actors played the moment rather than playing the idea of the scene, and that gave it subtext and shape and truth. The scenes driving idea came through the actions rather than us having to find actions to convey the idea. We developed it inside out. Mischa and I could never have written this scene as honestly and awkwardly on paper for exactly the reasons I describe. Our conceit was to put the right combination of texts in place to allow the scene to play, and play it did. We all got out of our heads and into the room and did what humans do—we engaged in behaviour, or misbehaviour, depending on your point of view. There are certainly many ways to avoid the tedium of cleverness in art, but the great Fauvist, Henri Matisse, put it as clearly as any when he implored, “Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out” (n.d.). I would have to agree.

Unexpected Endings Lucy’s did eventually get cross, ironically, with herself more than anyone else, and it was ‘killer’. We had chased Lucy up a tree and thrown stones at her, and she did eventually climb down, guided by her new talent for getting cross. This made our film a success, at least by our own measure. ‘Two killer scenes’. But to experience that unexpected miracle it is necessary to watch the film right to the end of the final scene. When shooting what became the film’s final scene, we had no idea where it would feature in the finished work. That absence of certainty and ‘knowing’, even at what would turn out to be the most critical of story moments, was typical of the film’s development method. In all honesty, we did not ‘write’ the film; we found it. We found it while shooting a game of

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dramatic, awkward and hilarious treasure hunt. We had scattered unconventional titbits on a development path, followed them, tripped over them and, in the process, discovered a film. I am not for a moment suggesting that You can say vagina was an accident. We worked hard to find it and find it we did. We might have looked a motley search party, but we were well guided by our own unconventional development strategy. ‘Average, rudderless, and dumb’ turned out to be smart (enough), specific and generative. It is unlikely we will develop a film in exactly the same way again—not because it did not work; it did. Rather, because it was specific, and that is the point. It was a process custom fit to meet the demands and idiosyncrasies of this film, of this ‘promiscuous collaboration’. It suited the moment in which we found ourselves needing to make—and that is the key script development lesson of You can say vagina. So much traditional script development is obsessed “with the mechanics of plot and action” suggesting “a desire to devise a formula for screenplays so they can imitate and repeat prior box office successes” (Schock, cited by Batty et  al. 2017, p. 228) but as we know (Senje 2017, p. 271), financial or critical ‘success’ are almost impossible to predict and no amount of refining of traditional development seems to be able change that. You can cay vagina could not have been made by pursuing traditional development or funding models. There was no way to predict its success or failure. It existed in the moment. It was a bespoke project designed and developed out of what we granted ourselves permission to make. Sure, that made it cheap, which necessarily excluded many things, but crucially it did not exclude our making it. I wish more cinema happened this way, insisting itself into being rather than waiting for permission. A big budget project may come but not if we do not make and make and make. So, while we/you wait, ‘do something’, custom fit, be specific to production contexts and aim for average—and you never know, interesting things just might find their way to the screen.

References Baka, M., & Jackson, S. (2016). Martin & Lucy. Australia. 7 minutes. Jack Baka Productions. Baka, M., & Jackson, S. (2017). You Can Say Vagina. Australia. 74 minutes. Jack Baka Productions. Batty, C., Taylor, S., Sawtell, L., & Conor, B. (2017). Script Development: Defining the Field. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3). UK. Intellect Limited.

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Fitzgerald, F. S. (2008). The Great Gatsby. Melbourne: Penguin. Johnstone, K. (2016). Don’t Do Your Best. TEDx Talks. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=bz9mo4qW9bc Kaever, O. (2014). Direct and Feverish. Spiegel Online, Germany. Kennedy, J. (1975). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2RzO-DY72Q Kennedy, J. (2013). Story Behind ‘Don’t Think, Do!’ on Open Mike. FoxSports: Australia. Macdonald, I. (2004). Disentangling the Screen Idea. Journal of Media Practice, 5(2), 89–99. Matisse, H. (n.d.). Available at: https://arthive.com/publications/3099~Henri_ Matisse_in_quotes_about_art_colours_and_beauty. Accessed 16 Jan 2020. McCann, C. (2017). Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice. London: Bloomsbury. Metcalfe, A., & Game, A. (2002). The Mystery of Everyday Life. Sydney: Federation Press. Millard, K. (2010). After the Typewriter: The Screenplay in the Digital Era. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(1). UK. Intellect Limited. Robinson, K. (2006). Do Schools Kill Creativity? Monterey: TED. https://www. ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/ details?language=en. Sawtell, L. (2015). Re-crafting the Screenplay: A Fictocritical Approach. In Proceedings of the 20th of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference, Melbourne. Senje, S. (2017). Formatting the Imagination: A Reflection on Screenwriting as a Creative Practice. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(3). UK. Intellect Limited. Sorkin, A. (2018). Aaron Sorkin Teaches Screenwriting. Lesson 10. Film Story Arc. Masterclass.

Room for Improvement: Discourses of Quality and Betterment in Script Development Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor

Introduction The ultimate goal of script development might be, as Peter Bloore (2012) has stated, to get the script in a good enough state that it can be produced. One way to interpret this perspective is that the goal of script development is to facilitate improvement of the script. The continuum of this process could be seen as the improvement of the ‘screen idea’ (Macdonald 2013) from its initial concept or kernel, to its various development documents and script drafts. While script development has been defined as often not a linear process (Batty et  al. 2017), and a practice that is certainly

C. Batty (*) University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Taylor RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Batty, S. Taylor (eds.), Script Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48713-3_16

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contingent on the tastes, perspectives and goals of various stakeholders (Kerrigan and Batty 2016), we propose that implicit and assumed in the discourse is that the goal is to improve the script—and, therefore, the wider project in question. As Alec McAulay (2014) has identified, however, script development does not always lead to a ‘better’ script or screen work—but if we identify improvement as the central goal of script development, we can then begin to explore, problematise and theorise the ways in which this goal might be espoused, valued and, on a very practical level, achieved. To begin with, the very notion of improvement suggests that there is an ideal to which script development is working: but it is less clear who sets this ideal, and if it is one shared by those involved in the process. It may be useful to uncover when this ideal is even articulated to those taking part; and how often it might change. Further considerations lay in identifying the tools, resources or other discourses that are being used to set the markers for improvement: including existing produced works, audience data, screenwriting how-to guides, script consultants and gurus, broadcast and network executives’ stated preferences. In this chapter, we investigate the notion of improvement as it relates to script development discourse and experience. We draw on two datasets to achieve this: script development guidelines from Federal (national) and State/Territory (regional) screen agencies in Australia, and interviews with script development professionals. Screen agency documents were collated and analysed in 2018 for their explicit or implicit directives towards improvement, including analogous concepts such as betterment, quality and success. These were then considered in relation to 14 interview transcripts, the results of which were themed into groups to create theoretical concepts for discussion. The 14 interviews were conducted with industry professionals from Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US in 2017. These interviewees, who have been anonymised for reporting purposes (named as participants 1–14), have worked in a variety of script development roles across these countries, including as screenwriter, script consultant, script editor, story editor and storyline writer. Many of them also have experience of teaching screenwriting in universities, colleges and private training organisations. This rich and diverse dataset is useful for comparing lived experiences—of both developing and being developed—with the discourses espoused by screen agencies.

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Locating Discussions of Improvement in Script Development Research While still a nascent field of academic research, extant studies of script development exist in and across a range of disciplines, including screen and digital media, creative industries, creative labour and business (Batty and Taylor 2015, 2018; 2020; Bloore 2012; Conor 2013; Joyce 2003; Lyle 2015; Macdonald 2013; Munt 2008; O’Connell 2014; Taylor 2014, 2015a, b; Tofler, Batty and Taylor 2019, Wreyford 2016). This scholarship has provided definitions, experiences, and theoretical and practicebased approaches to script development—and while none have written specifically on the idea of improvement, they have all alluded to it in some way. As Macdonald argues, ‘in screenwriting the process is multiplied by the collective involvement of many in the process of development’ (2004, p. 265). Kerrigan and Batty (2016) have further noted how, because script development is not a singular individual pursuit, screenwriters become conditioned agents who internalise the expertise and views of their peers in the work they deliver. These agents are thus arguably conditioned to notions of improvement and seek to reach its resulting ideal(s) through their practice. Collaborative authorship potentially problematises this proposition (Conor 2014), however, where multiple understandings of writing and filmmaking ‘excellence’ can result in multiple practices of script development, each striving for their own version of quality and betterment. Further, given script development is a social, cultural and creative practice in which ideas, emotions and personalities combine with the practicalities, policies and movements of the industry to create, refine and tell a story in the best way possible under the given circumstances (Batty et al. 2017), questions arise around the possibilities for conceptualising a shared understanding of improvement. It is always going to be at the behest of worldview, taste, experience and context. Will reader reports on script outlines, judging notes on competition entries, face-to-face discussions with script consultants and page requests by network executives ever share the same ideal? Writing about the process of script editing on animation series The Simpsons (1989–), Paul Wells makes an interesting point about the potential practice of improving for improvement’s sake: ‘Older material can thus seem stale and unfunny simply because it has survived drafts and

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interventions, and so the script editor must make sure that newer material actually solves a problem or improves the quality of the script’ (2014, p.  161). Writing of a similar predicament, where it was felt the script regressed in quality due to the sheer need to be seen to develop, Alec McAulay has made the rather stark personal observation ‘that the best film achievable may in fact have been Draft 5 of a script that progressed in diminishing quality from that point on for another six drafts due to some misfire in the collaborative process’ (2014, p. 190). Steven Price discusses there is, at best, a ‘metaphorical implication of an evolution towards a progressively better text’ (2017, p. 329), pointing out: If there is a problem with the notion of script development within an intermedial form, there is also a difficulty in describing or conceiving of these practices as script development, which implies a linear process  – both in terms of the replacement of one iteration by the next. (2017, p. 329)

Some of this clearly comes down to the collaborative nature of script development, and the potential for different shades of understanding and therefore practice. In a recent article, Alex W.  Bordino (2017) writes about the complex nature of the script doctor, a role used to help the development of the script yet one that can come with its own challenges of authorial control and, practically in the US context, credit. This raises questions around what the benefits are for those in such roles, beyond the fee, and how these might inform the practice of improvement. This sentiment echoes that of Dióg O’Connell (2014), who questions how Irish screenwriters worked with the Irish Film Board to develop their scripts— was this process writer-user-friendly and did it facilitate improvement, did it merely prove to be a bureaucratic gatekeeper? Some of the more ‘creative’ approaches to script development that are documented point to a different perspective about improvement, namely, that sometimes the idea and/or script improves because the focus is not on the script itself, but on the writer or filmmaker’s creative process. Margot Nash (2014), for example, advocates playful approaches and embracing ‘the unknown’, which she argues can create better quality work due to its discovery-driven process (not bound by rules). Similarly, Siri Senje (2017) talks about the liberating process of alternative models of development, such as visual stimulation (as a form of creative exercise) and non-rule-based approaches to story and structure finding.

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Many of the chapters in this book too have spoken of or alluded to improvement—all of them with different contexts and concerns, and all of them drawing on stated or assumed notions of quality, rigour and other tenets that embody precepts of ‘betterment’. Macdonald, for example, begins the book by arguing that collaborative script development works better than individual authorship, because the power of the group generates more creative energy and ‘spark’ than the work of the isolated writer. In their analysis of Australian and Danish script development funding discourses, Cath Moore and Radha O’Meara allude to two types of improvement: generating a better script through a guided process, and in the case of Denmark, improving the nation’s emerging screen talent through funded periods of exploration and experimentation. In his discussion of the Czech film industry, Petr Szczepanik claims that self-serving practices limit the reach and therefore international success of that nation’s output, alluding to the fact that there may be better ways to work to improve the scripts and final screen works. Many of the chapters’ discussions of improvement are not limited to the scripts themselves, but also extend to the reach of the final works. For example, writing of Sy Salkowitz, a scriptwriter for US show Ironside, Caryn Murphy reports how Salkowitz was able to navigate network constraints creatively and successfully to tell an important story of racial inequality that, essentially, improved extant representations of black characters in crime drama. Through the process of script development, he was able to achieve his own goals of bettering black depictions. Also writing of historical matters that television can address, Carmen Sofia Brenes, Margaret McVeigh, Alejandro C. Reid and Alberto N. García analyse how difficult pasts were able to be made more palatable through the creation of anti-heroes for popular television. Here the task of script development seemed to be to create ‘better’ versions of history—or, an improved sense of the current day—by raising important questions about shifting morals and ideologies. Mark Eby’s discussion of teaching script development to small communities in Papua New Guinea tells us not only of the way those communities’ skills have improved, by perhaps more importantly, how in this context script development for social change can help them improve the communities in which they live, namely, in their response to gender-­ based domestic violence. In terms of improvements in industry practice, Christina Milligan’s exploration of filmmaker Barry Barclay’s indigenous-led approach to theme, structure, character and setting, which she argues displayed an

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originality and fidelity a philosophy of filmmaking that was rare in New Zealand cinema at the time, gives us insights into how both content and industry can be improved. For the Australian television writers’ room, Noel Maloney and Philippa Burne use data from their interviewees to reflect on industry and story practices in a way that also suggests where issues arise and improvements can be made: the way that writers’ rooms operate, the way that writers can better their chances of being heard, improving cultural representations and so on. Finally, Emma Bolland, Louise Sawtell and Siobhan Jackson, in their respective chapters, allude to some of the commercial and critical issues facing screenwriters, proposing new ways of working that either defy popular discourse or that play with them, deliberately and reflexively, to expand script development practices. These new ways of working allow in fresh ideas and challenge existing representations, which ultimately have the power to progress both industry and culture. By reviewing the literature, including the contents of this book, we can consider the idea of improvement in script development very broadly. Rather than being contained simply to the betterment of the script in question, we can see that it takes place on a variety of levels: story, script, industry, culture and society. In other words, thinking about script development through the lens of improvement opens it up to being, as we have argued elsewhere about script development more generally (Batty et  al. 2018), a ‘wicked problem’. Improvement possesses a set of assumptions that are questionable, multi-dimensional, dependent on context and culture, and importantly, that can make or break a project and—in many cases—the experience of the screenwriter. We now turn to Federal and State/Territory discourse, and our 14 industry interviews, to uncover how improvement is spoken of—explicitly and implicitly—in these arenas. We offer the results of this in the form of a set of themes that we have identified as being relevant to both practice and academic scholarship.

Written into Definitions Here we explore how notions of improvement are woven into definitions of script development, and/or when improvement is a stated goal of this process. Federal agency Screen Australia was the only agency to include a specific definition of script development, as opposed to its goals and outcomes. Highlighting the process, practice and uniqueness of each project it may fund, Screen Australia states:

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Creative story development involves art, craft and heart. It’s a process that needs to be flexible and responsive, embracing a diversity of tools and approaches that will enrich and focus the creative vision at the heart of a story so audiences will be engaged and entertained across a variety of delivery platforms. We therefore encourage you to design a bespoke approach to development that will keep the project’s momentum up, its purpose alive and the audience in clear view. (Screen Australia 2017a, p. 2)

This suggests that while the goal is to improve the script or idea and certainly ensure its readiness for market pitching, the process itself should be agile and appropriate to the form. As part of their script development overviews and definitions, State and Territory agencies had a broader view of its purpose, arguably more pointed about how improvement and quality would be measured. For example, Screen NSW is interested in ‘projects that contribute to the NSW screen industry, while remaining viable in terms of budget and script development plans’ (Screen NSW, n.d.-a). The South Australian Film Corporation looked for a strong track record from the key creatives and its ‘potential to enhance the South Australian screen industry’ (South Australian Film Corporation 2018a, p. 4). For Screen Queensland: Screen Development investment provides support for Queensland writers and producers to create high quality screen projects capable of engaging local and international audiences, winning critical acclaim and achieving commercial success. Funding is to support producers, writers and their projects as the foundation of a successful and sustainable screen industry. (Screen Queensland, n.d., p. 3)

Further, Screen Tasmania’s ‘Originate’ development fund ‘supports the development of linear Tasmanian screen content that results in increased local screen creativity and production’ (Screen Tasmania 2018, 2). Clearly, for these agencies, script development is also about ensuring improvement of the State and Territories’ business activities and revenue, measured through increased screen production. In this way, we can view their concept of script development as being driven by a return on investment: script development serves a project that is producible, attracting jobs and income (direct and indirect) to the region. For our interviewees, when asked to define script development, many of them also spoke of its tangible, ‘product-based’ nature: the forward movement of both the script and that script’s underlying idea, concept or

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premise. Notions of forward-moving practices of betterment included: ‘to make the script as good as it can possibly be’ (P1); ‘a creative concept is turned into a script’ (P3); ‘to find the depth and complexity in a script, to make the storytelling satisfying, surprising, engaging and transforming for the audience’ (P4); ‘To make sure that the script achieves as high a level of truth and beauty as possible under the circumstances’ (P5); ‘the process whereby you build the viability of the project by focussing on the screenplay’ (P7); ‘shaped, moulded, re-worked, added to, refined, given detail and form’ (P9); and ‘bringing a script to its full potential’ (P13) so that it is ‘acceptable’ [for industry]’ (P12). One broader view, which aligns with Screen Australia’s definition above, was that: the writer should also see doodling, riffing, sketching and experimenting irrespective of perceived outcome - as a part of script development. Similarly, one should not perceive script development merely as putting words on a page. One can develop a script by chewing over some thoughts on a long walk in the woods. (P5).

In other words, improvement is also about one’s practice and having the ability to develop a screen idea. Other views saw improvement as manifest through how well the writer is supported to deliver the script, positing the purpose of script development closely with the development of the writer’s abilities—especially important for future and long-term work. For one interviewee: ‘Morale and confidence is key to creative work, and failing to realise that by treating the process as a technical troubleshooting exercise is a sure way to kill a script stone dead’ (P3); and for another: It’s beyond getting money and getting a script editor, it’s way more than that, it even comes down to your own relationship to the work and how that evolves over time and becomes more focussed [… and] the process by which writers are supported to do all of the above. (P10)

It would be unlikely that any of the data mined from industry documents or interviewees would negate notions of improvement in development of scripts or content, but what is of interest here are the ways in which this is assumed—and assumed to be linear. It is also promising to note that holistic ideas of improvement run through the data in terms of wider practices beyond the project in question. In the next section, we delve deeper into

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practical considerations of how goals for betterment—of both project and practice—are considered, or at least advised, to be achieved.

Tools, Resources and Methods We examined the literature and data to further uncover how script development is practiced, and the tools, resources and methods that are used to facilitate its various aspects of improvement. This investigation allows us to assess whether there are shared assumptions about what might make a project ‘better’, and how these assumptions might be structured into development practices—taking into account how, as one interviewee pointed out, ‘Like any creative process there’s a level of alchemy […] what’s a process for one project isn’t going to be good for another project’ (P11). When looking at screen agency guidelines, it is significant that the overwhelming direction given is not on what, but on who should be involved in script development. This tells us a great deal about the underlying discourses of who might have the ‘key’ to making a project better. Screen Australia’s story development fund can include fees for key creatives (e.g. writer, producer, director) or a script editor, table reads and actor workshops, time to develop a series bible or outline, visualisation materials, research, project development workshops or budgets and legal fees (Screen Australia 2017a, pp. 2–3). While this points to a broad spectrum of possibilities for project improvement, embracing the core concept or idea, the script itself, and the production of materials that can be used for pitching and deal brokering, there is a clear sense here that other people will help the writer unlock an improved work. Regionally, Screen Queensland’s ‘Talent Development’ investment fund (up to $15,000) helps writers develop screenplays specifically alongside an experienced script editor or mentor (Screen Queensland, n.d.). For Screenwest’s Documentary and TV Development Fund, $25,000 was available to companies or individuals for scripted drama or comedy series. While not as explicit as Screen Queensland, these funds could include fees for the writer, script developer and key creatives (Screenwest 2017). For Screen Tasmania’s (2018) various development programs, a portion of the funding was required to pay a script editor or producer to assist in the development process—a clear indication that the script and its market placement is deemed a measure of betterment.

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All of these State and Territory guidelines make it clear that for a script to improve, an ‘expert’ is needed to guide the writer. Whether a script consultant, script editor, script doctor or other such role common in script development practices (see Batty and Taylor 2019, pp. 461–462), there is a clear indication that the writer cannot do this alone with mere paid development time; nor, unlike as detailed by Siri Senje (2017) and Cath Moore and Radha O’Meara (this collection), can they make the work better by taking part in creative exercises and other such ‘ancillary’ creative talent advancement activities. For Australia, then, this sends out a strong signal about what improvement looks like: the script needs to be taken to a point where it can be produced. On working with others, such as script editors and script consultants, our interviewees reflected on what a good method would look like, and as such how improvement could be achieved. ‘A creative team whose egos are absent, who participate with enthusiasm and don’t get [bad] feelings when their ideas are rejected’ (P9) was suggested by one, implying that in good script development there has to be reciprocity and respect for all ideas and perspectives. For script development to work well, there should also be a shared vision of the project and its aims: ‘effective script development needs agreement from the outset on what is trying to be achieved’ (P1), ‘allowing all parties to explore ideas and agree on the fundamental elements of the film that they are planning to make’ (P6). There are also clear suggestions that improvement exists on a spectrum, where a project requires different tools, methods, resources and stakeholders at different times, each best suited to assisting the pursuit of betterment as and when appropriate. This is most evident in the support from Screen NSW, which at the time of our research had a number of script development initiatives for film, television and virtual reality projects. These initiatives ranged from early stage work to advanced script development. Early Development funding supported pre-draft and early draft costs, during which funds could be used for the development of treatments and scene breakdowns, a first draft, an episode for television or promotional trailers (Screen NSW, n.d.-a, p. 2). Advanced Development, for which creative teams, not just individuals, could apply, gave funding that could be used for further drafts or the development of pitch materials and other costs associated with the getting a script ready for production (Screen NSW, n.d.-b). This structured acknowledgement that improvement means different things at different times, and requires specific resources and stakeholders,

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chimes with this from one of our interviewees: ‘These goals can be abstract, philosophical and also be informed by specifics such as genre and reference films. As the script progresses the goals can involve more practical considerations such as scope, budget, location and schedule’ (P7). Another noted that ‘each stage of development is important and needs to be successful if the next stage is going to work’ (P1). […] They offered an example they had heard about screenwriter Graham Lineham [Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd], who puts off writing the script until his creative tank is bursting with ideas and he cannot wait any longer to get it down on paper. If he starts too early, he finds himself scratching his head. The persistent theme through the interviews is that processes (for, as it is implied, achieving the best possible draft) are highly dependent on individual practice and experience. Yet through the agency documents, it was the who, not the what, that was associated with best practice for bringing the most out of an idea or creator. With that in mind, we looked more closely at those services designed, or at least intended, to foster good writing practices and, by extension, ‘better’ products.

Programs, Partnerships and Mentoring Beyond general script development initiatives and funded collaborative work, we found various specific programs and mentoring opportunities available to writers and creative story teams. These tend to be more targeted towards market readiness or take a ‘hot house’ approach to deliverables. Such programs and mentoring opportunities speak to the spectrum of improvement highlighted above: projects that are identified as having more merit are ‘fast tracked’ or similar to quicken the rate at which that improvement can be measured. However, as one interviewee warned, writers ‘have to tread a fine line between responding to notes for the project’s market viability, with defending their creative vision for the script’ (P7). Film Victoria’s ‘Incubator Feature Script Intensive’ comprised a six-­ month program in which creative teams would write a new draft of their feature film with a quick turnaround. The scheme was tailored to the needs of each individual project, with workshops held between the creative team and a script consultant to prepare the project for the next stage of production (Film Victoria, n.d.). This scheme saw the hiring of an experienced consultant and strict timeframes as a method of quickly making the work better—better here meaning market ready. Taking a similar

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approach, and noting its very targeted name, Screen NSW’s ‘Amplifier’ program also used advisors to assist creative teams with feature film projects, again to make them market ready, with a program designed to provide direct pathways to the end market, including engagement with distributors and exhibitors. Screen NSW will work with the teams for the entire life of the selected projects. As part of the program, advisors will also have an on-going relationship with the filmmaking teams over an extended development period to further enhance their creative relationship. (Screen NSW, n.d.-c)

For Screen Tasmania (2018, p. 1), the ‘New Writers Fund’ was targeted more clearly at the ideas and stories underpinning scripts, not necessarily their market potential. This scheme’s recognition ‘that the creation of quality screen content requires well-crafted scripts to realise the full potential of bold, original ideas’ places an interesting focus on what ‘better’ projects might look like: bold and original ideas. Specific to the Australian context is the support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners. The South Australia Film Commission (SAFC) was one such supporter, providing up to $15,000 for Aboriginal long-form drama and factual works at any stage of development (SAFC 2018b). Structured in three stages, this scheme views improvement as a linear process that seemingly also parallels the improvement of the (emerging) talent involved. Stage 1 invited all applicants to take part in a development workshop that assists the participants with a development plan to be considered for funding; Stage 2 gave these participants a grant to develop a short treatment or synopsis of their story; this would then advance to Stage 3, where a much larger grant assisted the writer with the creation of a longer treatment or draft screenplay (SAFC 2018b). With a shared interest in targeted partnerships that see script development shift focus towards marketability, financing and eventual production, the signal is clear that at some point in the process, those with specific expertise—namely, market knowledge and business acumen—are employed to offer a different perspective on the project being developed, improving its chances of gaining production financing. Interestingly, one of our interviewees commented that considering ‘the idea of an audience, a lot of script development doesn’t operate with that in mind – it’s not about being commercial, it’s about being attuned to a specific audience’ (P10). This is also echoed in script development literature, which rarely

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focuses on the intended audience of a project, even if it espouses that scripts are written to be produced and consumed. This poses questions that often trouble discussions and analyses of script development around the stages at which script development shifts into becoming film or television development more generally. It is not always clear how the role or relevance of the writer changes, and how this impacts upon the writer’s capacity in the pursuit of improvement. Screen NSW and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) were partners for the ‘Half Hour Drama Development Initiative’, which focussed on developing content for prime-time television and looked for diverse, character-driven projects. Script development involved two stages for this scheme. First, a one- to two-page pitch document, followed by a masterclass in half-hour drama with an option to develop the project and workshop materials over a 60-day person; second, over a 12-month period that included mentoring and feedback, a series treatment or bible would be produced (Screen NSW, n.d.-d). Industry mentoring and the production of industry-ready documents was at the heart of this scheme’s discourse of improvement, and with the help of the ABC, a strong sense that the national broadcaster would provide the people, tools and methods required to achieve this. There were similar industry partnerships across Australia. The Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Content Group Australia and SAFC ‘Matched Market Development Initiative’ was a partnership that gave South Australian screenwriters an opportunity to develop their projects with an attachment to the screen market. The aim of this initiative was to support projects ‘from the page to script with distribution already in place, to assist with the financing of the production’ (SAFC 2018c, p.  1). Screenwest’s ‘Feature Film Development Track’ gave funding for scripted features to reach various structured milestones across a 12-month period, with each milestone assessed by an industry panel and the agency’s Development Coordinator (Screenwest 2017). ‘Accelerator TV POD’ was an initiative offered by Screen Canberra to develop high-quality television and ‘learn how to bring high-concept, serialised storytelling to the screen’ (Screen Canberra, n.d.). This five-month course delivered a series of workshops by eminent story developer Karel Segers, in which participants learned how to develop, write and pitch projects, including learning how to work within the writers’ room model. Networking was a key part of this initiative, and at the end of the program a pilot episode and project bible were developed (Screen Canberra, n.d.). All of these clearly posit that

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once a screen idea is ‘ready’, it can only improve—at least in its potential to be produced—with some form of industry uplift. This usually includes the writer taking on another role, either formally (such as a having market attachment) or informally (such as being mentored to deliver industry documents a pitching forums). In 2019, the QLD Writers Centre partnered with Screen Queensland to run ‘Adaptable’, a scheme aimed at facilitating screen adaptations of published books—fiction and non-fiction—which worked as a marketplace type of event in which selected authors met with and pitched their works to screen producers. This scheme took place again in 2020, and was billed as ‘an exciting opportunity for 25 successful authors to get a fully completed work in front of producers at the Market Day’, where successful authors ‘will have an opportunity to pitch published and/or publication-­ ready novels, short stories, biographies, and non-fiction works with potential for screen adaptation to producers, showrunners, and screenwriters’ (Adaptable 2020). A different kind of script development, focussed on the specific act of translating texts into series and films, this offers another view of improvement that sees a process whereby a page-based work, which likely already has an audience, is fashioned by industry mentors into formats that better suit the screen. These screen agency initiatives position script development as a practice that is ultimately at the behest of industry professionals, not the project’s core ideas or content, if the project is to go further than the page. While this is a clear reality of the industry, and its need for scripts to be packaged up into digestible pitches and development documents that others can easily and quickly understand, it raises interesting questions about when a screen idea is ‘ready’ to be taken to the next level, what happens once the writer has delivered that ‘ready’ piece of work, and if/how the writer stays with the project as it moves through the chain of development (beyond script development). One interviewee spoke of this approach to script development, and the dangers of leaving this stage too quickly, which provided a reminder of the sometimes-different agendas or stakes determining what improvement looks like—or indeed, when, how and by whom it is measured: some people view script development as a means to make a script more marketable and commercial, i.e., from an industry rather than a writing perspective. In fact, producers/financers almost certainly see it as that way, which is

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why scripts with a good idea, but which are way under-developed in terms of craft, go into production. (P4)

Responsibilities and Relationships While agency guidelines clearly point to the need for relationships between those involved in script development, including ‘third party’ mentors and through network or broadcaster partnerships, they do not talk about the nature of those relationships. Our interviewees, however, had quite a lot to say about relationships. As those who develop and who have been developed, it is perhaps not surprising that the lived, felt experience came up as something they wanted to talk about. In terms of further understanding notions of ‘improvement’, we examined the interviews for clues as to how these relationships are conceptualised, and the nature of script development relationships when it comes to making a project better. We asked, ‘how do these intersect with the structural aspects of script development?’ A common notion that emerged was that of competing demands and stakes, and how that manifests in the lived experience of the process. For example, ‘every person in the chain might have a different goal in mind, some of which have nothing to do with the script. Sometimes pleasing superiors, jockeying for position or competing with colleagues can be a factor with development personnel’ (P3). The suggestion here is clear: power plays a key role in how improvement is enacted, with personal and professional relationships flavoured by ‘who knows what’ and, ultimately, whose views enable survival. One interviewee spoke of how ‘good “developers” will always work to get the writer to write their best, not manipulate, impose, coerce or distort’ (P5)—a clear sign of what enabling improvement looks like for them. But as another reminded us, ‘A balance has to be made between making what the writer believes to be the best script and the need for the writer to remember who is paying their wage and what is important for their career’ (P6). On the specific role of script editing, which some of our interviewees had undertaken as a professional industry job, and all of those who write had encountered, there was a sense that this is a central role within script development that deals squarely with issues of improvement. Script editors are employed to help improve a script—from structure to dialogue to story continuity—and they also work to filter the notes of other

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stakeholders, thus having to negotiate various views of what might work better. As one interview said of script editing: I feel that my role is as a collaborator to bring out the best in the writer’s ideas, without doing any of the actual scriptwriting myself. Here I am a sounding board for ideas, a person with whom to test ideas, to discuss and thrash them out, to find the unexpected and the exciting. (P4)

Another said that while ‘a script editor is used almost as an intermediary between writer and producer […] they might also act in an ambassadorial role and deflect any conflict’ (P6), which suggests the role of the script editor is to improve the process, not just the script. But as P10 spoke of, sometimes this intermediary role can seem like it is actively hiding things between the stakeholder and writer: ‘What’s being lost in translation?’. Nevertheless, the role of the script editor, if understood and practiced well, is judged to be a central one that can improve a project in ways the writer might not have ever imagined. In relation to the agency initiatives and documents referred to above, we might say that while they often talk of funding script editors to assist writers, best practice in script development relies on a harmonious and/or respectful relationship between the two parties. Some interviewees spoke of bad experiences of script development, where the very relationship itself seemed to be at the centre of the problem. A bad experience ‘is usually characterised by ignorant or egotistical executives/editors/producers who insist on their implementation of bad notes’ (P5). This can result in a script regressing rather than improving, likely because there are differing views about what improvement means to that project (and the writer). Bad experiences were put down to ‘network commissioners who are unnecessarily heavy-handed and in my opinion, keen to show the production company who’s boss, who wields the ultimate power’ (P9), and in terms of ongoing relationships and future projects, ‘A bad script development process may not necessarily result in a bad script, but will leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth of the writer’ (P6). One interviewee spoke of this aspect strongly, reflecting on a feature film that had been successful in attracting script development funding and had gone through a number of drafts: we were excited to get the feedback, because we’d done what they [development executive] wanted, but got kicked in the teeth on their way out the

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door – they said it wasn’t as good as the first draft – this was profoundly upsetting and demoralising. (P10)

The Script Development Industry In determining the nature of the script development industry, and how that very industry might be improved, we decided to ask our interviewees what they felt could be done to improve the experience of script development. Though it is often understood as a ‘hidden practice’ (Taylor and Batty 2016), script development represents a large portion of the screen industry, and indeed there are far more people working in development than there are writers. Screen Australia specifically acknowledges this as an industry, and it has run various ‘develop the developer’ initiatives to help improve the practice and provide career direction. For Screen Australia, developers are those with the title ‘script reader; script assessor, script consultant; script editor; development executive; script co-ordinator; script producer; or dramaturg’ (Screen Australia 2017a, p.  2). Its three-day workshop model, which has often included guest tutors from the UK and the US—another sign of how improvement is valued—is used to increase ‘the pool of talented experts in the field of story development’ (Screen Australia 2017a, p. 2). The structure of this workshop sees the building of participants’ craft and analysis skills in script development, using a ‘practice-­ led and experiential’ (Screen Australia 2017b, p.  2) pedagogy for those wishing to extend their careers in script development. For those who have little or no industry experience, the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) runs a 12-week Industry Certificate in Script Assessment, which focuses ‘primarily on how to think critically about screenwriting, in all forms, and how to turn that analysis into useful feedback’ and sees students ‘learn how to write effective Script Coverage for an employer, Script Assessments for a Funding Agency and write script notes to provide guidance for a Producer or Screenwriter’ (AFTRS 2020, n.p). There was a rather grim outlook from one of our interviewees, who said that ‘most of the people who are involved in the process are not trained, relying instead on gut feeling’ (P6). So, is there a shared, transparent understanding of what improvement is and how it can be enacted; or is it more the case of personal taste or tacit knowledge? If the latter, how might the process be improved—is it even possible, or does it rely solely on the experience of the developer who will get better at their job over time? This dichotomy was echoed by an interviewee, who said that script

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development could improve through ‘More understanding of the creative process by broadcasters and institutions that use development as part of their industrial process, more understanding of the complex power relationships involved when working with freelance writers’ (P3). But as another interviewee offered, ‘Once the machine gets more important than the thing it’s producing, then the point of the process is lost’ (P5).

Conclusion As McAulay has noted, ‘Received wisdom on the script-to-screen process infers that it is one of continual improvement and enhancement’ (2014, p. 190). This chapter has looked to the literature, agency discourse and insights from our interviewees to try and unpack this notion of improvement and understand more closely what might otherwise be assumed. While, as we have acknowledged, it is clearly unlikely we would ever uncover cases where the goal of script development was to diminish the quality of the script and subsequent screen work, the processes, methods and expectations of improvement in collaborative screenwriting practices are understood in different ways. When looking at Australian screen agency guidelines and programs, we can see that assumptions about improvement are woven into the discourse, and that there are promising and encouraging guidelines for creative processes that are not necessarily prescriptive or linear. Most programs have an emphasis on collaboration and market potential, with funding more likely given to creative teams rather than individual writers. In this way, it is also clear that the ‘who’ rather than the ‘how’ runs through this discourse, where notions of iterative improvement are attributed to recruiting experienced personnel. This idea came through less strongly in the practitioner interviews, many of which cautioned that overly consultative processes can lead to conflicting agendas and loss of original flair and/or intention. It became clear from these interviews that ideas of improvement applied to both viable product and personal process, as such: Looked at in one way, the goal is to arrive at a script that can be produced. But this has to be seen as a goal which enjoys a relationship to quality. So the goal is tempered by a desire to have a script develop in the most truthful way within the parameters of the production. (P5)

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On the spectrum of improvement are different tools, resources, methods and stakeholders recruited and employed to develop a script and, hopefully, bring it to the screen. While practitioners, agencies and scholars alike advocate in different ways for flexible, discovery-driven processes, the practical realities around the pressures of finance and distribution may see various stages of development fall prey to multiple (often experienced as ‘too many’) interventions and prescriptive procedures. This can see a split of focus in the development process, where already ‘The scriptwriter has responsibilities to the script and the funder’ (P6). Time pressures also come into to play where, for example, ‘Fixing a script can seem like a welcome alternative to the difficult job of searching for authority inside the material’ (Masel and Taylor 2011, p. 119–20). Improvement is a subjective term and difficult to quantify, as we might note of the very notion of script development itself. This chapter has offered some perspectives drawing on key sources where discussions of script development occur. We give the last word to one of our interviewees, who succinctly expresses the challenges of pinning down implicit and explicit expectations around improvement in script development: I would measure it in terms of how far the script moved forward. That the external pressure to get it done wasn’t the main focus for everyone, so there was time for everyone to concentrate on story and character, not random deadlines. But then how do you quantify how far a script has moved forward? Good luck with that. (P11)

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Index1

A Aboriginal, 175, 176, 179, 282 Activism, 133, 175, 177 Africa, 132, 136 Agency of place, 177 Alternative development, 73, 180, 239, 242, 274 American cultural mythology, 81 Australia, 2–4, 31, 33–35, 38, 45–48, 69–74, 76, 76n6, 77, 79–80, 175, 177, 186, 188, 196, 197, 200, 272, 280, 283 Australian cinema narrative, 72, 80–81 cultural mythology, 80 Australian Film Commission (AFC), 53n2, 71, 72 Authorship, 3, 9–25, 44, 191, 193, 237–268, 273, 275

B Barclay, Barry, 5, 171–180, 275 Beat action-reaction, 211 and power, 207 sheet, 205–211, 213, 216, 217 Berlin Flow, 239 Betterment, 5, 194, 271–289 Boundary object, 114, 121–127 C Capacity building, 147, 150, 165 Character, 5, 23, 58, 71, 87, 100, 115, 131, 156, 172, 185, 205, 220, 245, 275 Civil rights, 86, 89, 97 Classical Hollywood Narrative (CHN), 75–81 Classic network system, 86, 87, 91, 98 Co-authorship, 59, 134, 140

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Collaboration, 3–5, 10, 13, 36, 41, 45, 46, 54, 60, 65, 66, 113–127, 140, 150, 155, 156, 161, 162, 179, 191, 288 Collaborative emergence, 17, 18, 24 Communication for Development and Social Change (C4DSC), 149–150, 161, 162, 165 Community engagement, 5, 150 Comparative research of development practices, 65–66 Continuum, 271 Co-production, 4, 36, 48, 54–56, 58, 60–63, 113–127 Creativity, 10, 12, 13, 15–19, 23–25, 69, 77, 116, 132, 187, 244, 277 Crime drama, 4, 85–98, 118, 275 Cultural anthropology, 153 Cultural production, 66 Czech film and television industry, 52, 62, 63 Czech Film Fund, 52, 53, 58, 61 D Danish Film Institute, 31–49 Decomposition, 131–146 Directing, 4, 162 Dramatic question (DQ), 213, 217 Dramaturgy, 64, 65 E Ecological philosophy, 134, 139, 140 Emotion, 1, 102, 149, 225, 228, 273 Ethnography, 134, 135, 146 Experience, 3, 4, 6, 15, 19, 20, 35, 41, 44, 52, 58, 70, 76, 81, 103, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 124–126, 137, 148, 150, 151, 154–156, 160–162, 172, 173,

176–178, 186–189, 191, 192, 195, 199, 201, 224, 227, 228, 249, 251, 252, 267, 272, 273, 276, 279, 281, 285–287 F Facilitation, 5, 150, 165 Feedback mechanisms, 5, 150 Film Victoria, 34, 197, 281 Fourth Cinema, 173, 177 Funding agencies, 4, 31, 32, 34, 36, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 79, 287 G Gender-based violence (GBV), 147–154, 163, 165 Geopolitics, 177 H “How to” manuals, 70, 73, 77 I Idea development, 9–14, 16, 18–20, 22–25, 126 Improvement, 5, 24, 39, 43, 271–289 Indigenous storytelling, 82, 154, 155, 180 Individualism, 139, 140 Industrial culture, 66 International, 2, 3, 32, 33, 41, 44, 47, 48, 51, 53–56, 58, 60, 71, 72, 113–115, 117, 118, 123, 126, 127, 132, 133, 140, 157, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 197, 198n8, 275, 277 television, 117, 126

 INDEX 

Interview, 3–5, 14, 41, 52, 54, 69, 75–80, 92, 114, 126, 155, 186, 187, 198, 272, 276, 281, 285, 286, 288 Ironside, 4, 87, 88, 90, 97, 275 J Justice, 177, 178, 206 K Kenya, 132, 143 Kerner Report, 86, 87, 97 L Landscape, 115, 176, 177 Le Responsable, 11, 25 M Māori filmmaking, 171 Media development, 147 Mentorship, 150 Monstrosity, 140, 145 Mumblecore, 239 N Narrative, 2, 5, 16, 38, 65, 69, 72–76, 79–81, 88, 91–94, 100, 101, 104–111, 115, 133, 136, 138, 143, 148, 150, 154, 157, 165, 178, 179, 192, 205–209, 212–217, 222, 224, 227, 230, 241, 250, 259 New Zealand, 3, 5, 34, 172, 173–174n3, 174–176, 180, 272, 276

295

O Originality, 9–25, 172, 176, 276 P Papua New Guinea (PNG), 5, 147–165, 275 Performance, 16, 56, 175, 177, 211, 215, 216, 219–233, 243, 247, 249, 250 Plot, 73, 77, 87, 89, 101, 105, 106, 115, 122, 123, 136–139, 143, 152, 155–157, 157n3, 163, 165, 176, 178, 185, 187, 189–191, 201, 205–209, 212, 214–216, 222, 245, 250, 268 Post-socialist media industries, 58 Post-socialist producer, 51–66 Practice-led research, 147, 220 Practitioner, 4, 5, 16, 33, 35, 36, 38–44, 46, 48, 155, 198, 282, 288, 289 Precariousness, 61, 66 Premise, 43, 87, 88, 114, 115, 205–207, 213, 214, 217, 278 Prime-time, 86, 87, 90, 283 Provocation, 239, 245, 247, 252, 261 Public support, 53, 55, 56, 59, 61 Q Quality, 42, 46, 53, 56, 63, 177, 243, 249, 251, 271–289 Queensland Writers’ Centre, 277 R Red Dog, 79, 80 Refugees, 132, 136, 138, 139, 144

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INDEX

Relationships, 19, 23, 32, 33, 42, 53, 58, 62, 90, 101, 106, 135, 141, 153, 158, 163, 198, 206, 209, 214–216, 223, 267, 278, 282, 285–288 S Salkowitz, Sy, 85, 87–89, 91, 94–98, 275 The Sapphires, 80 Sawyer, R. Keith, 10, 16–18, 23, 24 Screen Australia, 4, 31–49, 69, 72–76, 78–80, 197, 200, 276–279, 287 Screen Canberra, 283 Screen idea, 3, 9–25, 114–116, 122, 123, 126, 278, 284 Screen NSW, 34, 197, 199n9, 277, 280, 282, 283 Screen Tasmania, 277, 279, 282 Screenwriting, 2, 4, 5, 10, 17–20, 42, 44, 56, 61, 62, 69–72, 74, 75, 77, 81, 87, 100, 101, 133, 134, 138, 151, 155n1, 156, 160, 165, 174, 176, 189–191, 198, 199, 201, 213, 219, 220, 222, 227, 230, 231, 241, 242, 250, 251, 259, 272, 273, 287, 288 Script editing, 4, 58, 64, 273, 285, 286 Sitcom, 3, 5, 205–217 Slotkin, Richard, 81 Sovereignty/indigneous sovereignty, 179 Spark, 3, 10, 17, 20, 23, 275 Spectrum, 22, 279–281, 289 Stakeholder involvement, 5, 150 Storylines, 43, 73, 78, 101, 149–151, 155, 157–162, 164, 165, 186n1,

189, 206–209, 212, 221, 245, 272 Storytelling structures, 149, 154, 155 Sympoiesis, 131–146 T Television and civil rights, 97 production, 62, 185–202 screenwriting, 4, 5, 20, 101 Tension, 32, 46, 48, 69, 73, 76, 86, 88, 95, 104–106, 133, 134, 186, 194, 195, 206–208, 212, 213, 215, 217, 242 Terror, 131–146 Text, 9, 10, 19–21, 32, 37, 52, 103, 135, 138, 146, 220–228, 230, 231, 233, 239, 245, 247, 250, 252, 258, 261, 267, 284 Theme, 58, 60, 77, 101, 115, 123, 133, 137, 139, 144, 147, 158, 163, 172, 187, 206–208, 213, 227, 275, 276, 281 Thriller, 56, 72, 114, 175, 178, 178n5 ‘Top Twenty’ films, 79, 81 Turner, Graeme, 11, 80 Turning point, 23, 73, 157, 158, 160, 162, 206, 212–215, 217 U US television, 86 W Writers’ workshop, 148, 151, 152, 154, 158–160, 162, 163