Printing the Screenplay in Hollywood and Beyond

ERIN SCHREINER Printing the Screenplay in Hollywood and Beyond In 1957, Jean Shepard shifted gears in her theatrical career. Both she Erin Schreiner is a bibliographer and her business partner, Patricia Scott, had young children and, while living in New York City. Since 2008 she has worked with private and they found work, they weren’t earning quite enough to make ends meet. institutional collectors to describe, The business they opened, Studio Duplicating Service, was dedicated arrange, exhibit, and teach with their to the production of scripts for film, television, and theater. It began collections. At the New York Society humbly on East 9th Street with a couple of typewriters and an A. B. Library, she designed and launched City Readers, a digital humanities tool Dick mimeograph machine. Although Scott left the business after for the study of the Library’s institu a few years, Shepard stuck with it and succeeded. For the next forty tional archive. Erin writes regularly years, the shop supplied New York’s entertainment industry with the about bibliography, the history of reading, and the rare book world for lion’s share of the scripts produced by a rotating crop of aspiring film online publications, including Atlas and stage professionals who proofread, typed, printed, and bound the Obscura and LitHub. urtexts of plays, movies, and television shows. 28 Printed screenplays are an essential component of the filmmaking process, and print professionals were a critical labor force for the film industry throughout the twentieth century. Under the Hollywood studio system (ca. 1920-1948), juggernauts like MGM, Paramount, and RKO staffed their scenario, story, and stenographic departments with secretaries, typists, and mimeograph machine operators who printed for the entire studio. When the system collapsed, script production moved in part to independent businesses like Studio Duplicating Ser vice in New York and Barbaras Place in Los Angeles. In both settings, the people behind the typewriter and cranking the mimeo machine were engaged in a form of printerly labor that, until now, has been largely overlooked, in part because secretarial and clerical labor has been falsely defined as unskilled in the twentieth century. This article is concerned with the work done by secretaries and typists in Hollywood studios and at Studio Duplicating Service, and the impact of the shift in sites of production. By looking more closely the work done and materials produced by typists and secretaries in the film industry, we can begin to understand their labor as highly skilled, and as crucial to the process of textual creation in cinema. Script Printing In The Studio Era While the management and organization of printing operations var ied slightly from studio to studio, the labor of secretaries, typists, and mimeographers was consistent throughout Hollywood. As Erin Hill reports in Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production, sources documenting the growth, size, and functions of stenographic departments in Hollywood studios are rare, and her research draws heavily on internal studio publications like Warner Club News and RKO Club News for information on working conditions. 1 In a 1941 piece for RKO Club News, stereographic department super visor Wynne Haslam described her work with fifty or so typists who were the studios primary producers of printed matter. The women in opposite left: A script for the these departments—who were overwhelmingly white and female— film adaptation of Candy, by novelist Terry Southern in Studio Duplicating were responsible for “typing, proofreading, and assembling scripts, as Service’s characteristic faux-leather well as mimeographing departmental forms and legal agreements, and wrapper. Courtesy of Robert M. [issuing] a catalog of company-owned stories twice per year.” 2 Rubin. Secretaries working with Hollywood screenwriters prepared print opposite right: A script for er s copy for the steno pool, taking dictation and sometimes even the 1976 film Network by Paddy collaborating with a screenwriter to craft their story. In her memoir, Chayefsky printed in 1975 by the Hollywood secretary and script supervisor Meta Carpenter described Studio Duplicating Service, in the shop’s hallmark faux-leather wrapper. working in New York with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur on the Courtesy of Robert M. Rubin. script for Barbary Coast in 1935. PRINTING THE SCREENPLAY 2-9 For five months, I took down the dialogue and plot turns that Hecht and MacArthur dictated in rapid-fire fashion, MacArthur laying on the floor, feet on the couch, as he topped Hecht or was eclipsed by his collaborator with brilliant speeches, sight gags, and dramatic invention. In the last weeks, they took off the jester’s bells and gave us a tight, well constructed script, though I knew by then that Howard Hawks never filmed a screenplay as written.3 In this madcap environment, Carpenter was responsible for translat ing the screenwriter’s antics into text that they would review, correct, and return to her for retyping. She also notes an instance in which she pointed out a narrative inconsistency while working with William Faulkner. Secretaries were largely responsible for keeping up with con tinuity during the screenwriting process. In a 1936 article for the New York Times, studio secretaries were described as the guiding hands to screenwriters, who knew “all about screen technique, camera angles, exits, suspense, climax, and the clinch and fade-out to full orchestra music.• » 4 Carpenter noted that when she worked with William Faulkner on The Road to Glory, “the finished script was sent to the secretarial pool to be retyped and mimeographed.”5 Typists produced mimeograph sten cils from the copy they received from secretaries. Like typesetters and compositors, typists were responsible for creating the physical object from which many sheets were printed. The work required technical know-how, not only of the machines and materials they worked with but also the graphic conventions for scripts. These women were the resident experts in conventions for scene numbering, camera directions, dialogue, and other dramatic notations. A mistake on the stencil would have appeared in every copy of the script, and a major error could lead to real consequences in film production, which was expensive and relied on the cooperation of hundreds of studio staff members in a variety of departments. W hen movies were in production, even a slight delay could cost thousands of dollars. The mimeograph office produced the requisite number of copies— this could be quite large on a major production—and pages would be collated and bound in colored wrappers by stenographic department staff. Hill’s research—citing her study of studio publicity films in the absence of archival sources—indicates that mimeograph machine operators were men who worked in an annex to the stenographic department.6 Stenographic departments arose as part of the broader application of scientific management principles to the movie-making industry in the early twentieth century.' Rather than outsourcing script printing, motion picture studios created their own printing offices. Mimeograph technology offered studios an efficient means to that 30 | PRINTING HISTORY end. Small machines like those sold by A. B. Dick and Gestetner were relatively inexpensive and required minimal space for operation. As E. Haven Hawley notes, in-house mimeographic printing also offered privacy, an asset promoted by A. B. Dick in early advertisements.8 This was important to motion picture studios, which were in heavy compe tition for stories—an outside printer might sell a story to a competitor. Although mimeograph stencils were first prepared by hand, manu facturers quickly adapted them for use with the typewriter, pairing these two technologies for life.9 While not nearly as durable as stereograph plates, stencils were nevertheless perfect for printing in a motion picture studio. Hawley again notes that “a skilled operator could reuse a qual ity stencil and produce excellent results consistently,” and, as a result, stencils were filed for later use. 10 Screenplays typically went through multiple drafts, circulated among production, budgeting, and other studio staff, and saving stencils for later use saved time and labor—there was no need to retype a script when minor or even significant revisions were made to the text. Typists and mimeographers could prepare and print a stencil for the revised leaves alone, or a run of full scripts, by replacing only revised leaves with new stencils. Revision leaves in scripts are like cancels in printed books. Brad-bound scripts could be easily removed from their wrappers, with a secretary or production worker replacing the canceled leaf with the revision. Copyholders received revision leaves to update their scripts either on set during production A Quill brand mimeograph stencil. or within the studio in pre-production. 11 PRINTING THE SCREENPLAY 31 Even though finished films often diverged significantly from the Leaves from a revised final script for the 1950 film The Furies. These show original script, everyone involved in planning and production needed two combined strategies that printing to work from the same text to ensure continuity and successful col and secretarial staff used to track laboration between departments. Studio secretaries and typists devel revisions to the text: color coding, and oped three main strategies to help themselves and their colleagues keep show here

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