Off the Page: Screenwriting in the Era of Media Convergence
320
Off the Page: Screenwriting in the Era of Media Convergence
320Hardcover(First Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520285644 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/12/2017 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Millennial Manic
Crisis and Change in the Business of Screenwriting
The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it.
IRVING THALBERG
Strike action, also called labor strike, labour strike, on strike, greve (of French: grève), or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances.
Wikipedia
The classic opening sequence of Robert Altman's The Player (1991), script by Michael Tolkin, follows fictional studio executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) as he navigates his way through a morning's work spent hearing movie pitches from screenwriters. In the course of the sequence Griffin brushes off unwanted contact from an aspiring writer, listens to a ridiculous proposal for The Graduate, Part II — from the original movie's screenwriter, Buck Henry, in a cameo — and another for a movie that promises to be "kind of like The Gods Must Be Crazy except the Coke bottle is now an actress ... sort of like Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman." Grist for his mill, Griffin pays the writers only marginal attention. Meanwhile, other characters snipe behind Griffin's back, reminding the audience that the career of a Hollywood dream master is only as secure as his last hit at the box office.
Hollywood metanarratives like The Player give us a particular kind of insight — limited, of course, but useful — into prevalent attitudes to craft and industry at the time of their production. To this end, the opening sequence of The Player is also engaging with the enduring myth of the desperate postclassical Hollywood screenwriter. Equally tagged by the success or failure of their latest screenplay, screenwriters in The Player perform their story ideas like court jesters before a bored monarch whose entire focus is on avoiding being dethroned. With their pitches the screenwriters are attempting to sell, rather than tell, stories. They are presented as objects of ridicule, despite all their conjuring in a shorthand dream factory productionculture sociolect that mixes and matches past films in a feeble attempt to break the barrier between the seemingly distinct worlds of originality on one side and uniformity on the other, which we discussed in our introduction. The humiliations for one ingratiating screenwriter continue when Mill inquires about casting options for the characters. The Hollywood executive's response to story is immediately to consider marketability — to consider the star "attachments" that might make any movie idea, no matter how unlikely or preposterous, worthy of development. In this way the divergent priorities of the two professions, the screenwriter who writes scripts and the executive who buys them, are lampooned in an almost surreal process, replete with intimations of its creative futility. In Hollywood, The Player is telling us, screenwriters pitch stories to executives who have no interest in them as stories.
These instances of linguistic shorthand and of industrial performance art, to borrow another term once more from John Thornton Caldwell, present the Hollywood screenwriter as a powerless, dismissible figure. The portrayal prevents them or the audience, as the Irving Thalberg comment opening this chapter acknowledges, from realizing their importance. As another film and media studies scholar, Bridget Conor, reminds us, the profession of screenwriting is often distinguished in popular media — and in the popular imagination — from similar occupations, such as playwriting, by the invisibility and powerlessness of its practitioners. Screenwriters, she writes, are "framed as 'hired hands' or replaceable cogs in the capitalist-intensive entertainment industries. Unlike auteur directors, they are not the subjects of retrospectives at film festivals and they are not viewed as creating fully autonomous art forms. Instead they are viewed as blueprint generators, or in extreme cases, as formula-driven 'hacks.'" The Player duly plays into that mythical construction, offering a satirical yet self-conscious view of the parlous position of the Hollywood screenwriter. Tolkin's script for The Player tells a good story from within Maras's "business" and "practitioner" frames of industry discourse. Yet missing from this Hollywood film, of course, is an exploration of the conglomerate studio model that — already in 1991 — was the force behind the limiting of opportunities for aspiring writers that accelerated after that period. In other words there are more powerful players involved in the transformation of Hollywood development toward the tentpole than mere studio executives.
The Player came out at a time in which, against all established industrial probability, some Hollywood screenwriters were experiencing a moment in which it seemed as if finally their status in the industry was rising. A few writers, notably Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) and Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct), were becoming famous for the multimillion-dollar sales their action and erotic thriller screenplays were achieving. The studios were also investing more in development and hence buying more screenplays. The late 1980s and early 1990s "spec boom" marks a short-lived golden age for Hollywood screenwriters. As we will examine in this chapter, the industrial relationships that now characterize screenwriting during the era of media convergence make the satire in Tolkin and Altman's film seem rather prescient.
This brief moment in screenwriting history raises several interesting questions for the profession of screenwriting today. First, we should ask, how has the conglomeration of Hollywood studios impacted the craft of writing? A second question emerges directly from the first: what is the impact of globalization on the art and business of Hollywood screenwriting? In that changing environment, we should also ask: how has the screenwriter's union, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), fared at ensuring that the studios and the public know that the screenwriter is, in fact, the most important person in the moviemaking process? Or, more succinctly, what has the guild done to support the new convergent screenwriters of the twenty-first century, the era of ubiquitous screens of all sizes and in all parts of the wired world?
In addressing these questions, this chapter aims to set up the story we tell in later chapters — to offer a "prehistory," in the academic vernacular, or "backstory," in screenwriting parlance. Our goal is to show how Hollywood screenwriters, fresh from the boom of the early 1990s, returned to being cogs in the wheel of today's dream factory. Rather than open up new pathways for screenwriters, both already in and aspiring to be in the Hollywood tent, we argue that conglomeration and consolidation have limited the creative and economic possibilities of the Hollywood screenwriter. Ironically, a gradual process of craft-labor retrenchment was facilitated — sometimes with misguided good intentions and sometimes by dint of negotiated circumstance — by a kind of ideological collusion with the Writers Guild of America. How this came to be is, for us and we hope the reader, an interesting story.
THE BIG PICTURE
To appreciate the industrial and creative contexts in and for which Hollywood screenwriters are now working, we need first to explore the current economic state of the industry that inflects the market priorities of the studios. The best place to start is with the summer 2014 reports from the US popular and trade presses, the stuff Hollywood players sometimes actually read, that presented two contradictory takes on the economic health of the movie industry. On the one hand, the headlines reported a continuing decline in domestic box-office revenues. On the other hand, the international box office was booming. On the domestic front, sales of movie tickets in the US summer market had declined by 30 percent year on year. No summer movie made more than $300 million domestically for the first time in thirteen years. Overall annual ticket sales were also declining. Even the latest installments in well-established tentpole franchises performed below industry expectations. For example, Transformers: Age of Extinction, script by Ehren Kruger, made approximately $245 million domestically for Paramount, a 35 percent decline on the performance of the previous entry in the series, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, also written by Kruger, released three years before.
Industry analysts have noted that 2014 was a relatively fallow year in terms of major franchise releases. Competition from the World Cup and from other television attractions also seemed to have had a negative impact on moviegoing in the summer of 2014. Nevertheless, the figures do confirm Hollywood's struggle to maintain a substantial North American audience for big-screen movie exhibition. According to the official reporting of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the lobbying organization funded by and representing the major studios, domestic box office did increase from $7.75 billion in 2000 to $10.6 billion in 2010 before starting to decline. The actual number of tickets sold, however, decreased from 1.57 billion in 2002 to 1.34 billion in 2010.
Throughout the last decade, domestic and international box-office revenues have been sustained largely by the introduction of premium pricing for digital 3-D exhibition. In 2013 the MPAA reported that more than 80 percent of the world's approximately 135,000 screens now use digital projection systems; two years later, few can project 35 mm. Moreover, in that year 31 percent of the US/Canada population viewed at least one movie in 3-D. For context, between 2006 and 2013, the share of the domestic box office returned from 3-D exhibition grew around 70 percent. The number of movies released annually in 3-D rose in that period from eight to forty-five. This economic reality has increased the pressure on studios to produce more 3-D movies. Consequently, these pressures have also had a direct impact on how more and more tentpole movies are written and developed through script and previsualization to accommodate the needs of 3-D.
Fewer North Americans have been going out to the movies or, better said, going to see movies in movie theaters, but those who do are being channeled into watching a more limited range of genres, many of which are being reworked to be ever more spectacular. As a consequence, studio movies are increasingly expensive to produce, justifying the increase in the dollar cost of the moviegoing experience. Indeed, despite recent developments in online distribution, which allows access to movies and television on demand and thus away from theaters, recent studio production has been oriented more and more toward sustaining what remains of the distribution patterns of The Player era. The big-budget movie is being deployed to keep seats filled in the domestic multiplexes much like it did in the 1950s with CinemaScope and early 3-D, when viewers were increasingly turning to television.
Today's big-budget movie, almost always made and projected with high-definition digital technologies, is also intended to increase audience attendance in international markets, which have now eclipsed US domestic exhibition in terms of total revenue generation. In 2010 the MPAA reported that international box-office receipts made up 67 percent of revenues for first-run cinema exhibition. According to the association's statistics, in 2013 the global box office had risen 4 percent, year-on-year, to $35.9 billion. In the last decade much of this growth came in the Asian market. As the MPAA reported: "In 2013, the Asia Pacific region ($11.1 billion) surpassed EMEA [Europe, the Middle East, and Africa], and became the top region in international box office."
Chinese demand for spectacular Hollywood movies appears insatiable. After only two weeks of its summer 2014 release, US media were reporting that Transformers: Age of Extinction had become the most successful movie in the history of Chinese cinema exhibition, pushing Avatar into second place. In mid-July the Los Angeles Times noted that the movie's take in China alone was outpacing revenues from domestic US distribution. Its success was driven in part by the production's well-publicized, if at times fractious, coproduction and product-placement deals with Chinese companies, the location of major sequences in China, and the casting of well-known Chinese actors like Li Bingbing in supporting roles. Produced as much for the Chinese market as for the American market, Transformers: Age of Extinction also benefited from the rapid expansion in the Chinese exhibition sector during the last decade. The number of Chinese cinema screens increased from thirteen hundred in 2002 to more than thirteen thousand in 2012. The movie's international take, as of this writing, is estimated at $841,965,423, for a total of $1,087,404,499.
As a consequence, when today's Hollywood screenwriter pitches an idea to the conglomerate studios or the production houses that sell to the studios, the writer has to cut his or her creative cloth according to international as well as domestic tastes as never before. As the producer Lynda Obst (Sleepless in Seattle; The Fisher King) observes: in contemporary Hollywood "pictures are not chosen on gut as in Sherry [Lansing's] day — or David O. Selznick's for that matter — but on whether they are properties that can be marketed into international franchises." Screenwriters today are taught this lesson multiple times and in multiple contexts: by film schools, by the paraindustry, by agents and managers, and by their potential employers in studio development. For example, UCLA's Richard Walter recently reported that his school is coming under increasing pressure from students to structure their screenwriting MFA program explicitly around franchise trends and genre adaptation. The economic importance of the international box office has begun to eclipse that of the domestic one in terms of development decisions major Hollywood studios are making, and many aspiring tentpole screenwriters are eager to retool their craft education toward mastering the current widget.
In 2014 the economic power of the international box office effectively green-lit its first tentpole sequel. In 2013 Pacific Rim, script by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro, combining a variant on the giant robot (mecha) trope with the giant monster (kaiju) and alien invasion tropes, failed to meet domestic revenue expectations against its budget level. Nevertheless, it is getting a second installment based on the success of the film in Asia. The sequel is scheduled for release in 2017. As Forbes reported in June of 2014, Pacific Rim "was a wholly original film, intended to be a franchise-starter, which basically bombed in America. Yet thanks almost exclusively to the strength of its overseas box office, it's getting a sequel along with an animated episodic television series to boot." The movie made $111 million from Chinese audiences alone.
Given the targeting of its subject matter, influenced by Japanese popular cultural texts such as Mobile Suit Gundam and Gojira, the relative success of Pacific Rim in Asia is perhaps unsurprising despite the cultural and political tensions across the region. It is clear that, as the domestic market "softens," as the Hollywood Reporter likes to describe a weakening market, increasing pressure is being placed on producing spectacles that can appeal to international audiences. It is not simply that this latest iteration of the globalization of American popular culture has arrived — like many preceding iterations — thanks in no small measure to the hegemony of Hollywood; rather, conglomerate Hollywood understands that, under its tentpole paradigm, the continued ability to control the changing marketplace for cinema necessitates a reorientation of product toward international taste publics. To sell that spec script or get attached to a script in development, and thus to help the industry maintain its global hegemony, today's screenwriter must also be able to navigate the entertainment needs of multiple cultures and also have some appreciation of their textual practices.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Off the Page"
by .
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.