| | | | | | result of the bickering between writers and directors has necessarily been beneficial to cinema. In fact, I would argue that our modern charged-up screenplays have their own best interests in mind instead of those of the film. The fundamental concern of writers is for the script to catch the interest of agents, readers, and producers during the pitch session. It is the "here" and the "now" that is affirmed. The goal of writers is to come up with a screenplay that flies, material that pitches well. Ignored, unloved, and resentful, writers have given up on the very medium they work for. They no longer care what happens on the screen. They have taken refuge in their own neck of the woods. Whatever happens after the contract is signed is no longer their responsibility. It is up to the directors, if they can, to do something with the product. Even in commercial Hollywood terms, what we are witnessing here is an abject withdrawal, a complete turn around, from Ince's basic philosophy. No longer conceived for the long run, as a helper to the production process, the script now serves the sole and immediate needs of writers, their financial goal. 21 Today the Writers Guild could advertise a new motto: "Each screenplay for itself." | | | | | | | | | To counteract such hostile and, in the long run, self-destructive tactics, I would like to take a second look at the entire procedure of writing for the film. In The Art of Photoplay Making, published in 1918, Victor O. Freeburg publicized the steps through which a narrative would become a film. He saw the operation as taking place in three distinctive steps: the selection of the materials, their arrangement in some order, and finally their performance or execution during the shooting of the film.22 In my view, these premises are as good as any to open the discussion. As just mentioned, the trend today is to keep the writer in charge of the first two stages of the production and to assign the director only the last stage. I believe this arbitrary division of labor to be a fundamental mistake because it undermines the chance of producing a more varied kind of cinema. To start with, it once again demotes the director to the level of a mere technician: someone who deals with the actors and coordinates the different technical fields. Second, more insidiously, it establishes the screenplay-property at the core of the film project, meaning that the story as written is complete and that it needs only visualization to become a gratifying film. This system thus locks in a drama whose essence is expressed mostly | | | | |
