Abstract
This chapter offers a critical survey of philosophical debate about the nature and definition of screenplays, their relationship to finished motion pictures, and the screenwriter’s claim to authorship. Screenwriting may be studied as a kind of (literary) art practice in its own right and as an integral part of most sorts of filmmaking. This chapter focuses on the latter and outlines some of the ways in which screenwriting and screenplays connect to a number of philosophical questions about motion pictures—in particular, authorship, ontology, and evaluation in both artistic and ethical terms [1].
[1] For a sustained discussion of screenwriting as an art practice in its own right and screenplays as literary artworks, see Ted Nannicelli, A Philosophy of the Screenplay (New York: Routledge, 2013).
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Notes
- 1.
Syd Field, The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting (London: Ebury Press, 2003), 9.
- 2.
Ibid., 10.
- 3.
Alex Epstein, Crafty Screenwriting: Writing Movies that Get Made (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 1.
- 4.
Lance Lee, A Poetics for Screenwriters (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 30.
- 5.
Craig Batty and Zara Waldeback, Writing for the Screen: Creative and Critical Approaches (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 2.
- 6.
Anthony Friedman, Writing for Visual Media (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2014), 199.
- 7.
Nannicelli, A Philosophy of the Screenplay, especially chapters 1, 2, and 9.
- 8.
See Ted Nannicelli, “The Ontology and Literary Status of the Screenplay: The Case of ‘Script-Fic’,” in Journal of Literary Theory 7, no. 1–2 (2013): 135–153.
- 9.
Nannicelli, A Philosophy of the Screenplay, 17.
- 10.
See Lynne Rudder Baker, “The Ontology of Artifacts,” Philosophical Explorations 7, no. 2 (2004): 99–112.
- 11.
For a recent example, see David Kipen, The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (New York: Melville House, 2006).
- 12.
See, for example, Denise Mann, “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Management TV: The Collective Author(s) of the Lost Franchise,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, ed. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John T. Caldwell, 99–114 (New York: Routledge, 2009). Note that one can accept this moderate claim without a wholesale endorsement of some of the more extravagant assertions of critical theory pertaining to the author as merely a construct of (post)industrial capitalism.
- 13.
Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 71.
- 14.
Livingston, Cinema, 70.
- 15.
Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (New York: Overlook, 1985).
- 16.
Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125.
- 17.
Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 121.
- 18.
See C. Paul Sellors, “Collective Authorship in Film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 263–271.
- 19.
Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, 72–76.
- 20.
Sarah Cardwell, Andrew Davies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 18.
- 21.
To the best of my knowledge, the metaphor was first used in 1926 by Russian theorist and critic Viktor Shlovsky. See Denise J. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era 1918–1935 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991), 68. For a skeptical discussion of the history of thinking of the screenplay as a blueprint, see Steven Price, A History of the Screenplay (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 22.
Janet Staiger, “Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 173.
- 23.
Maras, 41–42.
- 24.
Maras, 43.
- 25.
Maras, 1–2.
- 26.
Maras, 3.
- 27.
Steven Price, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 45.
- 28.
Ibid., 44–46.
- 29.
Ted Nannicelli, “Instructions and Artworks: Musical Scores, Theatrical Scripts, Architectural Plans, and Screenplays,” British Journal of Aesthetics 51, no. 4 (October 2011): 399–414.
- 30.
Stephen Davies, “Notations,” in A Companion to Aesthetics 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, and Robert Hopkins (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 441–443.
- 31.
Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 100.
- 32.
Davies, “Notations,” 441–442.
- 33.
The following argument, advanced in more detail in Nannicelli, “Instructions and Artworks,” is indebted to Davies’s line of reasoning in “Is Architecture an Art?” in Philosophical Perspectives on Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 129–145.
- 34.
On this point especially, I indebted Davies’s arguments in “Is Architecture an Art?”
- 35.
Nannicelli, “Instructions and Artworks,” and Nannicelli, A Philosophy of the Screenplay.
- 36.
The argument in this paragraph should be understood as contingent upon our actual cinematic practices being as they are rather than involving a modal claim. That is, we can imagine our creative practices being slightly different such that cinema was a performing art, and the faithful execution of the instructions in screenplays resulted in multiple instances of the same cinematic work. In such a context, screenplays would correctly be regarded as work-specifying notations. See Nannicelli, “Instructions and Artworks.”
- 37.
For good discussions of this sort of claim and the interaction between art and ethics more broadly, see Noël Carroll, “Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research,” in Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 235–271; and Berys Gaut, “Art and Ethics” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd ed., ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (New York: Routledge, 2013), 394–403.
- 38.
Ariston Anderson, “Hollywood Reacts With Outrage over ‘Last Tango In Paris’ Director’s Resurfaced Rape Scene Confession,” TheHollywood Reporter (December 3, 2016), available at http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-reacts-disgust-outrage-last-tango-paris-directors-resurfaced-rape-scene-confession-95 (accessed December 8, 2016). The video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=021jNOEVytQ&feature=youtu.be
- 39.
For a supporting argument in defense of this claim, see Ted Nannicelli, “Moderate Comic Immoralism and the Genetic Approach to the Ethical Criticism of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 169–179. I take it that in the Last Tango in Paris case, the genetic approach to ethical criticism ought to be especially plausible, given that the moral flaw inheres in the work’s manifest properties—that is, the actual violation and humiliation of Schneider is visible on the screen.
- 40.
The following discussion is drawn from Ted Nannicelli, Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2017), 42–45.
- 41.
In this example, another option would be to recognize this as a case of joint authorship along the lines of what Livingston proposes. I am admittedly describing this particular case rather simplistically in the interest of space. For a sustained, detailed discussion, see Robert L. Carringer’s The Making ofCitizen Kane, Revised Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
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———. 2013a. A Philosophy of the Screenplay. New York: Routledge.
———. 2013b. The Ontology and Literary Status of the Screenplay: The Case of ‘Script-Fic. Journal of Literary Theory 7 (1–2): 135–153.
———. 2014. Moderate Comic Immoralism and the Genetic Approach to the Ethical Criticism of Art. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (2): 169–179.
———. 2017. Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective. New York: Routledge.
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Price, Steven. 2010. The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
———. 2013. A History of the Screenplay. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sellors, C. Paul. 2007. Collective Authorship in Film. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (3): 263–271.
Staiger, Janet. 1985. Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts. In The American Film Industry, Revised Edition, ed. Tino Balio, 173–192. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Youngblood, Denise J. 1991. Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era 1918–1935. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Nannicelli, T. (2019). What Is a Screenplay?. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_10
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