Query: Screenplays as literature?--multiple responses

From: *Leo Enticknap* <[email protected]>

Steven Rust writes:

I am finding many of the responses to whether or not film scripts can count
as literature quite reductive and oddly reactionary. Of course they count
as literature. No, they are not the same as a film. No, they do not all
read well. Yes, they are meant to be performed.


...and Mike Frank writes:

all the many comments suggesting that screenplays are NOT literature are
compelling [leo recommends them but only as a study tool to see what the
director did with them, and not as a work of intrinsic interest]


I suspect that I'm guilty of misintepreting the original question, in that
in my earlier response I was considering the status of screenplays as
historical source material (i.e. the extent to which the objective study
and analysis of them can inform our understanding of human activity in the
past), not as literature (the subjective assessment of their standalone
cultural value and/or significance).

To that end, they CAN be works of intrinsic interest, but the question I'd
always ask is what they can tell us that the finished film cannot.  Unlike
the written form of stage plays or music, they are not the only, in many
cases not the definitive and in most cases not even the principal element
of creative or authorial expression within the finished artefact; and
unlike works of literature (in the commonly understood definition, which is
an extended piece of written prose created by a single individual and
intended to be read directly by his or her audience, without any other
mediating processes or technologies involved, except possibly translation),
they are not intended to be read directly by the end audience.  In short,
they are working documents.

Examples of situations in which I would wish to consult a screenplay might
include:

1.  If the finished film does not survive at all (e.g. 'London After
Midnight', 'The Mountain Eagle')
2.  If the screenplay describes scenes that were filmed, but for which the
film does not survive (e.g. 'Greed', 'The Magnificent Ambersons')
3.  If there are substantive differences between early drafts of the
screenplay and what was actually filmed and/or released (e.g. 'Mission to
Moscow')
4.  If evidence in the screenplay helps us to establish which creative
professionals involved in the production process determined which specific
aspects of the finished film (e.g. the disputes between Goebbels and Veit
Harlan during the pre-production of most of the latter's major propaganda
films).

If none of these issues are present, what objective justification is there
for studying a screenplay if you have access to the finished film?

Finally, Steven Rust writes:

But to suggest that they have no literary merit because they do not conform
to our canonical expectations of what counts as literature is a circular
argument.


Isn't it ironic, then, that the vast majority of published written
screenplays are of titles that do conform to canonical expectations (i.e.
either celebrated by critics/academics, commercially successful or both) of
what counts as a culturally significant movie?

Leo

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From: *Frank, Michael* <[email protected]>

but of course we can "Accept [screenplays] for what they are" and it goes
without saying that we should "value what students can gain from studying
them in relation to the finished film" . . .  but the fact that they have
heuristic value does not make them literature . . . we can study all sorts
of things that throw light on finished films - historical background,
technical specifications, filmmakers biographies, to say nothing of
critical studies - but that does not make any of them literature

presumably the crucial question here is whether a screenplay can be read as
an independent work of what we used to call "art"  without reference to the
movie, in exactly the same way that shakespeare plays are more often than
not read and taught in our schools . . . sorry, but i don't see what's
reactionary - oddly or not - about that

mike

**********




From: *Jackson, Tony* <[email protected]>

not sure about this and it's pretty obvious; but i wonder if  one issue
with screenplays as opposed to plays (not) being lit is that the
relationship between the written doc and the final mimetic story is
relatively loose?

in other words the screenplay is taken more as a kind of blueprint or plan
for a story, rather than as the story itself, and so it's pretty normal to
change things even drastically as shooting goes along. i've thought of this
in relation to some of beckett's plays, like krapp's last tape. beckett
writes out explicit movements/directions etc, not unlike a screenplay. but
i assume no one would feel at liberty to alter or even throw out beckett's
directions?? so to read the 'play' is to read what you see on stage.

as far as i know, the screenplay in general isn't untouchable in this way?
the remake of psycho, being a unique instance, supports this idea.

anyway this means that in relation to the finished film you have either a
written doc that is simply the same as the film, except it's in writing; or
you have one that's different from the film. the one that's the same is of
no use as far as i can tell (having been pissed off at paying for a dark
knight 'screenplay' that was identical to the film). who needs it?

someone actively interested in a film can learn from screenplays that are
different from the film, but it would be like studying earlier, discarded
drafts of poems. for a while they pubbed earlier drafts of yeats' poems in
college lit textbooks so you could study his thinking process. this was
illuminating, but wouldn't itself be thought of as literature. it would be
only a special case use of the earlier written docs. same with a screenplay?

the larger (and older) issue: sometimes i wonder if film as an art has
literature envy, in the way that the humanities tend to have science envy...

 tony j

Tony E. Jackson | Professor
UNC Charlotte | Department of English
9201 University Blvd. | Charlotte, NC 28223
Phone: 704-687-4216 | FAX: 704-687-3961
[email protected]
http://www.amazon.com/Technology-Novel-Writing-Narrative-British/dp/0801892449/

**********
From: <[email protected]>

Of course screenplays are literature, but I would suggest that the most
likely reason they are overlooked as reading material is because they are
overshadowed by the films themselves. Also few people are interested in
reading them--sometimes even directors and producers themselves. They are
frequently considered a conceptual outline or a rough draft of a film and
were never intended to stand alone as reading material.

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