Abstract
For Peter Biskind,
[t]he thirteen years between Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Heaven’s Gate in 1980 marked the last time it was really exciting to make movies in Hollywood, the last time people could be consistently proud of the pictures they made, the last time the community as a whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an audience that could sustain it.1
The kind of film the passing of which Biskind laments is one that New Hollywood writers and directors had modified from European cinema of the 1950s, characterised by a relatively aimless protagonist, or one who could not fully understand the motivations behind his or her actions, or the actions of others. From Zavattini to Godard, there is the idea that story itself is suspect, an act of bad faith that places an externally imposed structuring principle on life; and traces of this European influence, combined with the broader counter-cultural and anti-establishment movements of the 1960s, can be seen in the screenplays considered in the previous chapter, notably Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider. One manifestation of this resistance to narrative was the ‘open’ ending, in which significant questions are left unresolved, or resonating in the spectator’s mind; a late example is Being There (1979).
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Notes
Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 17.
For a range of perspectives on these developments, see the essays in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998).
The most sustained study of these matters that is of direct relevance to story structure and the writing manual is Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Torey Liepa, ‘An Uneven Marketplace of Ideas: Amateur Screenwriting, the Library of Congress and the Struggle for Copyright’, Journal of Screenwriting 2.2 (2011), pp. 180–81.
Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2005).
See Kathryn Millard, ‘After the Typewriter: The Screenplay in a Digital Era’, Journal of Screenwriting 1.1 (2010), pp. 15–17.
William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting [1984] (London: Futura, 1985), pp. 151–58.
On Lucas’s indebtedness to Campbell, see David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 33.
William Goldman, ‘The Screenwriter’, in Jason E. Squire, ed., The Movie Business Book, London: Columbus, p. 52; cited in Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (London: Wallflower, 2009), p. 79.
Some of the most useful or influential manuals consulted for the following discussion are Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (New York: Dell, 1979); Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (London: Methuen, 1998); Lew Hunter, Screenwriting (London: Robert Hale, 1994); Michael Hauge, Writing Screenplays That Sell (Harmondsworth: Elm Tree, 1989).
Manuals that explicitly relate Aristotle to screenwriting include Lance Lee, A Poetics for Screenwriters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), and Ari Hiltunen, Aristotle in Hollywood (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2002).
The most influential and explicit appropriation of Campbell is Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters, 2nd ed. (London: Pan, 1998); also see Stuart Voytilla, Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1999).
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949), p. 30.
J.J. Murphy, Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work (New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 17.
Paul Joseph Gulino, Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 4.
For a full account of the influence of the four-act structure on modern drama, see Austin E. Quigley, The Modern Stage and Other Worlds (London: Methuen, 1985).
Roy L. McCardell, The Pain Flower: A Photoplay Drama of Modern Life (1915), Warner Brothers archive, USC.
Constance Nash and Virginia Oakey, The Screenwriter’s Handbook: What to Write, How to Write It, Where to Sell It (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), p. 44.
Christopher Riley, The Hollywood Standard: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style, 2nd ed. (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese, 2009), pp. xv–xvi.
Joseph McBride, Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless (New York: Vintage, 2012), pp. 179–80.
Esther Luttrell, Tools of the Screen Writing Trade, rev. ed. (Mt. Dora, Fla.: Broadcast Club of America, 1998), pp. 10, 141;emphasis in the original.
Jeff Rush and Cynthia Baughman, ‘Language as Narrative Voice: The Poetics of the Highly Inflected Screenplay’, Journal of Film and Video 49.3 (1997), p. 28.
Ann Igelström, ‘Communication and the Various Voices of the Screenplay Text’, Journal of Screenwriting 4.1 (2013), p. 46.
Ibid., p. 50.
Ibid., p. 48.
Ibid., p. 50.
Ibid., p. 51.
Claudia Sternberg, Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997), p. 84.
Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (London: Faber, 1994), pp. 86–90.
David Mamet, A Whore’s Profession: Notes and Essays (London: Faber, 1994), p. 383, emphasis in the original.
See Steven Price, ‘Character in the Screenplay Text’, in Jill Nelmes (ed.), Analysing the Screenplay (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 201–16.
Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script (London: Nick Hern, 2004), p. 8.
Jon Ronson, Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries (London: Picador, 2012), p. 323.
Kathryn Millard, ‘After the Typewriter: The Screenplay in a Digital Era’, Journal of Screenwriting 1.1 (2010), pp. 11–12.
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Price, S. (2013). The Contemporary Screenplay and Screenwriting Manual. In: A History of the Screenplay. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315700_11
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