Review by Charles Deemer
FRAMEWORK
by Tom Stempel
Syracuse University Press
2000, 313 pages
ISBN 0-8156-0654-0
When my students first
learn about "the screenwriting life," most are shocked. They think of
screenwriters "as writers," and they think of writers as poets and
novelists, short story writers and playwrights -- creative artists who are like
CEO's in the development of their artistic works. The very notion that a writer
can be fired from a project which s/he originates strikes them as bizarre. If there is a problem, shouldn't the
writer be firing the director or the producer? Doesn't the buck stop with the
creative artist in whose imagination the story, the project, started in the
first place?
Reality, of course,
tells a far different story, and all screenwriters have war stories with which
to shock the uninitiated. I like to tell the story of my removal of a stage
play from production in New York a few years ago because the director insisted
that I add a scene which, in my view, would have ruined the integrity of the
work. As a playwright, I had the power to take my ball and go home. If the
project had been a film, I would have been fired and forced to watch another
writer ruin my baby.
How did screenwriters
become the janitors of the creative writing world? Well paid janitors, to be
sure, but by and large they are hired hands with little real power, which is
why screenwriting is an entry level position in the film industry. If you want
control, you become a director or a producer. How did such a strange power
structure come into existence?
I've heard the story
that screenwriters made a pact with the devil, exchanging artistic integrity
for wealth, but this book gives a more logical and historical answer. First
published in 1988, this reissue of "a history of screenwriting in the
American film" suggests that the screenwriters lot has roots in the very
way the entertainment and art form was developed.
The first
screenwriters were "scenarists" for silent movies. They were not, it
is important to note, the more mechanically inclined tinkerers and inventors
whose interest in photography reached for the cutting edge of "moving
pictures." Early motion pictures were spectacles, akin to the circus
sideshow, but with the success of "The Great Train Robbery," Stempel
writes, "the emphasis on narrative in American film (as well as
word-of-mouth publicity) was established."
A result of this was
the development of story departments in motion picture companies. This is
important because these departments hired writers as employees -- and those who
can be hired can be fired as well. The studio system developed, then, with the
role of the emerging screenwriter firmly in place. Stempel moves through the
silent film era with close looks at the major writers, directors and films that
define this stage in the history of American film.
With talkies, studios
turned more and more to playwrights to write dialogue -- it was presumed that
this skill was beyond the grasp of mere scenario writers. The pattern of
putting writers into compartments was established. Studios continued to seek
writers who had established reputations elsewhere, such as in fiction, but
those who came to Hollywood from New York and elsewhere failed at the
screenwriting craft more often than they succeeded. That screenwriting was an
independent, respectable craft was a notion slow to be accepted.
"While many
screenwriters looked to increase their power within the system by becoming
producers or directors or both, others looked to collective action: a screenwriters
union." A new Screen Writers Guild was formed in 1933 but screenwriters
gained little control over their work as a result. "Given the nature of
both the film industry and the filmmaking process," writes Stempel,
"it is most unlikely that such control could ever be obtained through a
collective bargaining procedure. Many Guild members saw this early and
downplayed the drive within the Guild for control, not only because of the
impossibility of getting it but also because of the anger such demands produced
within the studio managements." In 1954 the current Writers Guild of
America was born from a merger of the Screen Writers Guild with the radio and
television groups of the Authors' League.
In his chronological
overview, Stempel continues to discuss the Hollywood blacklist and the decline
of the studio system. He brings the story up-to-date by focusing on recent
writer-filmmakers who seem to have found a way to gain as much control as
possible over their work. But the lot of the pure screenwriter hasn't changed
much over the years from its roots as employee and support system.
Stempel closes with a
story to emphasize the point. At the 1998 Sundance Festival, screenwriter Paul
Schrader needed emergency medical help at a restaurant. An employee called 911,
and the conversation went this way:
"It's Paul
Schrader, the guy who wrote Taxi Driver. (Pause) No, he's not a taxi driver,
that's what he wrote."
Stempel's book traces
the origins of this kind of "artistic neglect" of the screenwriter to
the very origins of the film industry. It's difficult to imagine anything that
will turn it around soon.
-------------
Charles Deemer teaches screenwriting at Portland State University and is the author of "Screenwright: the craft of screenwriting" and "Seven Plays."