Abstract
Prior to 1913, a script could exist in any form comprehensible to the relatively small number of people directly involved in making the film. Around 1913–14, however, a set of developments within American film production meant that the studios began to take a different approach to the texts written in preparation for filming. In Staiger’s analysis, the ‘director-unit’ system was by 1914 in the process of being replaced by the ‘central producer’ system, a more centralised mode of production whereby the studio maintained quality and economic control over the multi-reel ‘features’ that had now become the norm for narrative filmmaking. The script form that emerged has been most widely dubbed the ‘continuity’.
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Notes
See, for example, Janet Staiger, ‘Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts’, in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 180.
Ibid., p. 190.
John Emerson and Anita Loos, How to Write Photoplays (New York: James A. McCann, 1920), pp. 30, 32.
Janet Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production, 1930–60’, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (eds), The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Styleand Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 146.
Louis Delluc, ‘Scénarii’, Comoedia 3763 (6 April 1923), p. 4; quoted in Kristin Thompson, ‘Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production: Implications for Europe’s Avant-Gardes’, in Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, eds., The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 352.
Juan Arroy, ‘La Monteuse’, Cinémagazine 5.39 (25 September 1925), p. 519; quoted in Thompson, p. 353.
Patrick McGilligan, Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 102.
Janet Staiger, ‘Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System’, Cinema Journal 18 (Spring 1979), p. 19.
Torey Liepa, ‘An Uneven Marketplace of Ideas: Amateur Screenwriting, the Library of Congress and the Struggle for Copyright’, Journal of Screenwriting 2.2 (2011), p. 190.
Torey Liepa, ‘The Devil in the Details: Thomas Ince, Intertitles, and the Institutionalization of Writing in American Cinema’, in Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon, (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, vol. 1: Origins to 1928 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012), p. 271.
Edward Azlant, The Theory, History, and Practice of Screenwriting, 1897–1920, diss. (University of Wisconsin-Madison) (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, 1980), pp. 162–63.
Tom Stempel, FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 42.
George C. Pratt reproduces the whole of what he terms the ‘shooting script’ of Satan McAllister’s Heir, including the cast and location lists and cost sheet, as well as the scenario, in Spellbound in Darkness: Readings in the History and Criticism of the Silent Film, vol. 1 (Rochester, NY: Universityof Rochester Press, 1966), pp. 135–55.
B. F. Barrett, ‘A Talk with C. Gardner Sullivan’, Motography 16.23 (1916), p. 1237;quoted in Liepa, ‘The Devil’, p. 279.
B. F. Barrett, ‘A Talk with C. Gardner Sullivan’, Motography 16.23 (1916), pp. 1237–38; quoted in Liepa, ‘The Devil’, p. 279.
Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 79.
DeWitt Bodeen, interview with Frances Marion, Film in Review (Feb.-Mar 1969), pp. 138–42; quoted in Marsha McCreadie, The Women Who Write the Movies: From Frances Marion to Nora Ephron (New York: Birch Lane, 1994), p. 28.
Marsha McCreadie, The Women Who Write the Movies: From Frances Marion to Nora Ephron (New York: Birch Lane, 1994), p. 32.
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© 2013 Steven Price
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Price, S. (2013). The Continuity Script, 1912–29. In: A History of the Screenplay. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315700_5
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