How many steps to the shooting script? A political history of scriptwriting
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Inspired by Staiger s concept of continuity script as a production blueprint, this paper goes further and asks what can development regimes and formats tell us about modes of production and production cultures. It is based on a serial analysis of 30 Czech scenarios and screenplays from the 1920s-1970s, complemented by sets of their development forms (thematic plans, loglines, synopsis, treatments, etc.). Historical shifts from loose scenarios of the 1920s to continuity scripts of the 1930s, to bureaucratization of script development under Nazis and Stalinism, and back to flexible directors' scripts in the late 1950s and 1960s prove that scriptwriting history is perhaps the most telling story of creativity under economic and political influence. It also reveals crucial differences between production modes in Hollywood and Europe, or, in the West and the East - by showing how "tame" scriptwriters operated vis a vis (always more powerful) directors, producers and censors. |
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