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."