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Screenwriting Screenwriting: Creative labor and professional practice analyzes the histories, practices, identities and subjects that form and shape the daily working lives of screenwriters. Author Bridget Conor considers the ways in which contemporary screen- writers navigate and make sense of the labor markets in which they are immersed. Chapters explore areas including: screenwriting histories and myths of the profession screenwriting as creative labor screenwriters’ working lives screenwriting work and the how-to genre screenwriting work and inequalities Drawing on historical and critical perspectives of mainstream screenwriting in the USA and UK, as well as valuable interviews with working screenwriters, this book presents a highly original and multi-faceted study of screenwriting as creative labor and professional practice. Bridget Conor is a lecturer in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London and previously taught at Goldsmiths College and AUT University in Auckland. She has published in the areas of screenwriting research and creative labor studies and her previous work focused on the production of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in New Zealand. Screenwriting Creative labor and professional practice Bridget Conor First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN And published by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Bridget Conor The right of Bridget Conor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial- No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Conor, Bridget, 1980- Screenwriting : creative labour and professional practice / Bridget Conor. 1. Motion picture authorship–Vocational guidance. 2. Motion pictures– Production and direction–Vocational guidance. I. Title. PN1996.C775 2014 791.4302’3–dc23 2013038497 ISBN: 978-0-415-64265-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-64267-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-08077-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Taylor and Francis Books Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: Setting the scene 1 1 Screenwriting histories and myths of the profession 14 2 Screenwriting as creative labor 39 3 Screenwriters’ working lives 59 4 Screenwriting work and the how-to genre 81 5 Screenwriting work: Who’s in and who’s out? 101 Conclusion: Screenwriting as good work 122 Appendix 1: How-to titles and authors 131 Appendix 2: Indicative publishing information for five ‘guru’ how-to texts 132 Bibliography 133 Index 149 Acknowledgements I would like to begin by acknowledging the incredible input and support of all the interviewees and collaborators who contributed to this project. They all gave generously of their time and experiences, sharing stories of their working lives as writers and teachers, offering critical insights into their professions, provoking me to think more deeply about screenwriting as creative labor and professional practice. Their integrity, dedication and talent have been sources of constant inspiration. Thank you to you all. I would like to thank my PhD supervisor at Goldsmiths College, Professor Angela McRobbie, for her support and guidance. Her work on creative labor and feminist theory has been deeply influential for this investigation and my ongoing interests in creativity, work and inequality. I am lucky to be working in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London and would like to thank all my colleagues and friends in CMCI. I would like to thank my mentor Rosalind Gill for her guidance and friendship throughout this project. Ros’ pioneering work has inspired me in many ways and her generosity and kindness have helped me immensely, both personally and professionally. I would also like to sincerely thank Christina Scharff, my dear friend and also a pioneer, someone I look up to and am very proud to work with. Both have served as generous, thoughtful readers and I am deeply grateful to them both. I would also like to thank a number of other academics and friends who have served as readers and supporters throughout the writing of this book, especially Kim Allen, Stephanie Taylor, David Hesmondhalgh, Andy Pratt, Rachel Liebert and Toby Miller. I would like to sincerely thank the members of the Screenwriting Research Network who encourage, challenge and innovate. It has been a pleasure to be part of a growing community of screenwriting scholarship and practice. Thank you to all my dear friends in Auckland, London and beyond who have carried me throughout this process – without you I’d be lost. Finally, undertaking this project would not have been conceivable or possible without the support and love of my family. My grandparents, the OzCons, Drs. Dee and Tee, Lindsay, Jeremy, Hannah and Joe, thank you for your generosity, kindness and awesomeness in every way. Acknowledgements vii Most importantly, thank you to Helen, Patrick and Sally. Words really can’t express how grateful I am to share your DNA. You are bricks, granite boulders of immeasurable power, and this book is dedicated to you, with love. Please note that a shorter version of Chapter 4 was published by Sage as ‘Gurus and Oscar Winners: How-To Screenwriting Manuals in the New Cul- tural Economy’ in the journal Television and New Media on 4 September 2012. Reprinted with permission. Introduction Setting the scene Screenwriting is a form of work routinely characterized as riven by the unas- sailable dichotomy between craft and creativity. In professional discourse and in popular culture, screenwriting is often framed and represented as the least creative form of writing due to a number of reasons; from its unashamed rigidity of form to its unapologetic commercial obligations; from its inherent collectivity that downplays and denies claims to individual creative authorship to its invisibility in comparison to other kinds of writing or filmmaking. This book analyzes screenwriting as creative labor. By doing so it offers a new and multi-faceted reading of screenwriting and of creative labor and makes a series of explicit analytical connections between screenwriting, creative labor and what has been termed the ‘new cultural economy’. Screenwriting as creative labor is an instructive case study precisely because it problematizes notions of creativity, craft and authorship as they are practiced and experienced. Screenwriting is not a new form of creative labor and it has a long and par- ticular history of professional practice. It has certainly changed over time and from industry to industry, and screenwriting requires particular modes of work, calculations and navigations across markets and locations. This kind of cultural work has always been immersed within, and been part of, a capitalist-intensive system of creative production that has contributed to its problematic claims to artistic legitimacy. Screenwriting within the mainstream Hollywood and British film industries in the contemporary moment demands complex forms of sub- jectivity in order to distinguish it from other forms of filmmaking and writing, and to make the work knowable and do-able. It is characterized by isolation and collaboration, industrial awareness and entrepreneurialism, egotism and insecurity, inequality and hierarchization. This book examines all of these fea- tures of labor and of practice, at the level of both industry and the subject, with a view to understanding what makes screenwriting so appealing for those who do it, or for those who wish to do it. This book is also interested in what screenwriting can tell us about the experiences of creativity at work more generally. First, how can screenwriting be distinguished from other kinds of cultural production? Screenwriting work bridges the discrete categories of ‘writing’ and ‘filmmaking’ and what is interesting when trying to define screenwriting work is 2 Introduction the porosity of these roles, the ways in which this profession interacts with other types of work: directing, producing, playwriting, fiction writing and journalism. Many people who define themselves as screenwriters also define themselves as other kinds of writers, or as writers in different mediums, or as producers as well as screenwriters, or as screenwriting teachers and script con- sultants or script readers. Thus, many workers are adjacent to screenwriting and to scripts as well as directly engaged in screenwriting work at different points in their career. This book will illustrate this porosity. From histories of early screenwriting in Hollywood to contemporary accounts of screenwriting work from London-based writers, to accounts of the profession from screen- writing manuals, screenwriting is consistently framed as inherently multivalent. Screenwriters often practice a number of these modes of creative production simultaneously but screenwriting is understood as offering a number of parti- cular attractions and benefits: form and structure, craft and collaborative pos- sibilities. It is also