An Account and Analysis of the Culture and Practices of Screenplay Development in the UK’

1 ‘An account and analysis of the culture and practices of screenplay development in the UK’ Harley Benedict Lyle PhD Thesis University of East Anglia School of Art, Media and American Studies June 2015 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 2 Abstract This thesis looks at screenplay development as an industrial process, worthy of critically rigorous industry-level study. It analyses in particular how screenwriters, producers and development executives in the UK industry make knowledge claims, how they talk about gaining this knowledge and how they talk about the aims and practices of screenplay development – all through the prism of in-depth interviews. In doing so it contributes to Production Studies debates around film, specifically by arguing for and illustrating the importance of the development process. This analysis further leads to a new model of film screenplay development as a separate field of cultural production, one whose norms, conventions and constitution have a great bearing on the industry as a whole. This thesis also adds to the current debates around screenwriting and the screenplay. In particular, in addition to explicating how those practitioners engaged in the work see the process, this study proposes a new way of looking at the purpose of the screenplay that has hitherto been underplayed. 3 List of Contents Acknowledgements 8 Introduction 9 Contents Description 10 Part I - Context Chapter One – Academic Context and Methodology 14 Production/Industry Studies 14 David Hesmondhalgh or John T Caldwell 16 Screenwriting Research Network 22 Theoretical/Analytical Framework 24 The Current Study 25 Research Questions 28 Methodology 29 Why interviews? 30 Access 33 Interviewee Selection – Quantitative or Qualitative 35 The Missing Director 37 Interviews 38 Interview Specifics 40 Auto-ethnography 42 Ethics 44 A Note on Working Definitions 47 Development 47 The Market and The Audience 47 The Screenplay/Script 47 Professional Roles 48 Screenwriter 48 Development/Script Executive 49 Producer 49 4 Chapter Two – Industrial Context and the Field of Screenplay Development 52 Introduction 52 Producing 52 Financing Production 53 An Example 57 Developing a Film 59 A Legal Distinction 59 Financing Development 61 The Development ‘Sector’ Recognised 63 The Field of feature film development: a sub-field? 66 Narrowing the Field 68 A Story of Distinction 69 Conclusion 74 Part II – Culture Chapter Three – Origin Stories 75 Introduction 75 Origin Stories 76 The Control Narrative – Producing 79 The Destiny Narrative – Writing 83 The Evolutionary Narrative – Developing 86 Mixed Narratives 89 A ‘Special’ Industry 93 The Missing Link – motivation 96 Conclusion 98 Chapter Four – Development Knowledge 101 Introduction 101 5 1. Knowledge of the Audience 104 By the numbers 107 The personal touch 114 2. Knowledge of the Screenplay 119 What is good screenplay? 120 A Personal Analysis 123 Screenplay Coverage 124 Story is King 130 Where does it come from and how is it claimed? 133 Formal Education 133 Art Versus Craft in screenwriting 137 Script Manuals/Short Courses/Training 140 Experience 144 An Exception 145 Screenplay and Audience 147 3. Knowledge of the Industry 148 Taste and Sensibility 149 Behaviour 155 Diplomacy 156 Benefits of a University Education 158 Taste and Behaviour 160 A Concluding note on Knowledge in Development 161 Part III – Practice Chapter Five – The Purpose of the Screenplay 163 Introduction 163 The Purpose of the Screenplay 163 6 1. Screenplay as Blueprint 164 Story Blueprint 167 A Note of the Screenplay as Literature 169 2. Screenplay as Financial Prospectus 170 The Package 175 3. Screenplay as Love Letter 177 Filmmaking first 182 Conclusion 183 Chapter Six – The Creation of the Screenplay 187 Introduction 187 Process 187 1. Conception 189 A Production Company Executive 190 A Production Company Account 192 Director as Producer 197 Adaptation 199 Adaptation versus Original 201 Field Generated 203 2. Execution 204 Preliminaries 204 Being On the Same Page 205 Interstitial Documents 208 Payment and Assignation 209 The First Draft 211 Replacing the Writer 213 More Drafts 214 Art World 215 Other Models of Creativity 216 3. The Screenplay out in the Field. 218 More Development 219 Conclusion 221 7 Part IV – Implications Chapter Seven – Authorship 223 Introduction 223 The Debate 223 A Film By 226 Alternative Models 228 Joint Authorship 228 The Producer as Creative Leader 230 Chapter Eight – Conclusion 238 Separate and Distinct 239 Culture 241 A Narrow Field 243 Education 246 Practice 248 Policy Implications 251 The Way Forward – Research 253 End Words 257 Appendix A 259 Bibliography 261 8 Acknowledgements This study was fully funded and enabled by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to whom I’m eternally grateful. My deep thanks must go to my primary supervisor, Brett Mills, for trying to show me how to be an academic, for his patience and for his insight. Many thanks, likewise, to Professors Giles Foden and Mark Jancovich, for launching me on this particular path and for their invaluable support along the way. Mark, in particular, was a great help in the early stages. None of this would have been possible without the support of my interviewees, listed in the Appendix, who were all extremely generous with their time and their opinions. This thesis would have quite literally been nothing without them. It is not always easy to be put on the spot, but they all did so willingly and with good grace. Lastly, and most importantly, I want to thank Annalise Davis for her support, encouragement and good humour – without which such a project would have been impossible. 9 Introduction I have worked in the film industry for the last fourteen years, moving from assistant to script reader to development executive/consultant. At one level or another I’ve been involved in the on-going development and/or assessment of creative material, in particular screenplays. I had no formal training for this before I got work and little since. Like most of my colleagues, I was expected to ‘pick up’ the necessary knowledge through experience and listening to others. Making the move into scholarship, though, involved a rethink of the whole process of screenplay development and my involvement in it. What was it I had in fact ‘picked up’? What makes a good script, a successful project or a pass? What is the best way to take a story and guide a project through from an initial idea to a screenplay? How is such ‘knowledge’ constructed? And what are the cultural mores and values that underpin the whole field of screenplay development? Moving into academia also gave me a chance to see how scholars had attempted to account for the development process, a process that through my experience I had previously thought so central and important to the whole filmmaking process. It turned out that such an account wasn’t readily forthcoming, that film studies in particular and academia in general hadn’t grappled with this issue to nearly the extent that I thought necessary. As Ian W. Macdonald (2003, 33-34) said: ‘further investigation is required, particularly of the whole process of development and of the elements that drive it: the current market, industrial custom and practices, and the roles and personalities within those practices.’ In the following section, I shall look in more detail at the academic context of this thesis – the burgeoning fields of production studies, critical industry studies and screenwriting studies. But what I felt strongly when I started on this research project, which is still the case after gathering my evidence, is that the voices and views of the people carrying out the work of development haven’t been sufficiently taken into account thus far – certainly not as regards screenplay development (especially in film as opposed to television) as an industrial process in UK. 10 Consequently, I intend to analyse how development practitioners in the UK industry a) make knowledge claims, b) talk about gaining this knowledge and c) talk about the aims and practices of screenplay development – all through the prism of in-depth interviews. In doing so I will contribute to Production Studies debates around film, specifically by arguing for (and hopefully illustrating) the importance of the development process. This analysis further leads to a new model of film screenplay development as a separate field of cultural production, one whose norms and conventions have a great bearing on the industry as a whole. In doing so, this thesis will also add to the current debates around screenwriting and the screenplay. In particular, in addition to explicating how those practitioners engaged in the work see the process, this study proposes a new way of looking at the purpose of the screenplay that has hitherto been underplayed. Again, based on the claims of practitioners, this thesis seeks to add to the ongoing debates around the screenplay as regards authorship, creative control and ontology – which are not only academic concerns, but also industrial ones as evidenced by the pronouncements from the likes of the Writers Guild of Great Britain (WGGB 2009) and The Federation of Screenwriters in Europe (FSE 2006). Screenplay development is an absolutely crucial phase in the production of any film. It is the stage of the process where the very film itself is first conceived, and then developed from a germ of an idea to a screenplay that raises finance and is ready to shoot. As this thesis will attest, a raft of creatively central decisions are made during this process and the personalities involved in the creation of the screenplay – far beyond simply the writer – have key roles to play in the very nature of that screenplay (and consequently, any film that is subsequently produced.) This fact, more than anything else, is the spur for and purpose of this thesis.

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