Some attitudes and trajectories in screenwriting research

Maras, Steven

doi:10.1386/josc.2.2.275_7

Cited by 15 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The wisdom of this approach is that it takes into account the organic nature of screenwriting practices, including the changing status of both a film and script at every stage of the process of production. This Foucauldian approach, dubbed "discourse frame" by Maras, is one that takes into account the key moments when screenwriting standards were debated, refined and normalized, and it analyses screenwriting on many fronts -such as history, practice, and theory-which it considers to be tightly bound (see also Maras, 2011;Chiarulli, 2014). Thus, the history of screenwriting is closely bound to the techniques applied by cinema practitioners (Fumagalli, 2020).…”

Section: Creative Process Creative Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

«Strong Curtains» and «Dramatic Punches»: The Legacy of Playwriting in the Screenwriting Manuals of the Studio Era

Chiarulli

2021

Communication & Society

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The Hollywood Golden Age was a revolutionary moment in the history of cinema and is pivotal to understanding the historical passage of a peculiar new art form –screenwriting. This early film period, from the Tens to the Sixties, was determined by key interactions between the respective forms of cinema and stage. Together, these interactions form a wider screenwriting “discourse.” There are reoccurring disputes in film scholarship over the paternity of the conventions and techniques of screenwriting. One solution is that techniques of theatre playwriting persisted extensively in the production practices of classical Hollywood cinema. Whether or not its professionals were aware of this is at the heart of this dispute. It is possible to identify the contribution of screenwriting manuals from Hollywood’s Golden Age toward the standardization of screenwriting techniques. The article aims to examine in the screenwriting manuals of this period some statements by practitioners who document the normalization and codification of the narrative structures used in screenwriting over time –in particular, the three-act structure. The validity and origin of the three-act structure are constantly debated among screenwriters. While this formula was known to the early writers of the Silent Era due to its legacy throughout centuries of playwriting and literature, it reappeared in the Seventies in the guise of a new theory. This article attempts to fill in certain gaps in the history of the theorization of screenwriting practices by juxtaposing statements found in screenwriting manuals and the statements of scholars and educators of this field. Ultimately, narrative conventions belonging to the tradition of theatre, as well as technological exigencies were integral in shaping the cinema techniques in use today.

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Section: Creative Process Creative Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

«Strong Curtains» and «Dramatic Punches»: The Legacy of Playwriting in the Screenwriting Manuals of the Studio Era

Chiarulli

2021

Communication & Society

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“…My approach to screenwriting research was inclusive and could well have been mapped onto several of the attitudes and trajectories identified by Steven Maras (2011), had such a critical appraisal of the discipline been available in the early 1990s. The multi-strandedness of Written for the Screen accounts for the brevity and historical or theoretical underdevelopment of some of its parts, but I would argue -having looked across the current spectrum of researchthat the central questions and preoccupations still hold interest, having led, in the meantime, to more sustained and diversified theorization under various framings, such as history, authorship, culture, philosophy and poetics (Maras 2009;Price 2010;Nelmes 2011;Boon 2008;Nannicelli 2013;Macdonald 2013).…”

Section: Reading and Writing As/in Screenwriting Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The multi-strandedness of Written for the Screen accounts for the brevity and historical or theoretical underdevelopment of some of its parts, but I would argue -having looked across the current spectrum of researchthat the central questions and preoccupations still hold interest, having led, in the meantime, to more sustained and diversified theorization under various framings, such as history, authorship, culture, philosophy and poetics (Maras 2009;Price 2010;Nelmes 2011;Boon 2008;Nannicelli 2013;Macdonald 2013). Even though I engaged only peripherally with the more abstract concerns and debates about the screenplay's invisibility, disappearance or 'ghostliness' (Price 2010: 50-53;Marshall 2008), I addressed the specificities of authorship, the relationship between text and performance, the verbal system that accommodates a multi-channelled medium, and the cinematic-technical and cinematic-literary competence of different readerships.…”

Section: Reading and Writing As/in Screenwriting Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Written to be read: Apersonal reflection on screenwriting research, thenand now

Sternberg

2014

Journal of Screenwriting

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Having been identified as an early contributor to the intensifying academic study of the (American) screenplay and screenwriting, the author presents a personal account of the circumstances which led to her own research in the 1990s and the publication of Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text in 1997. Additionally, she offers some reflections on the consolidation and institutionalization of screenwriting research and sketches a number of possibilities for future work in the field.

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“…This survey not only shows the variation inherent in these cultural products but also pinpoints areas that are worth investigating more closely and in depth. From the product perspective, studies in [20], [21] show that there is no final script on which to base firm conclusions and pointing to the importance of other texts that refer to the screen idea. However, according to [22] this object problem affects not only TV scripts, but also television works, primarily because of media convergence, fan texts, and serialization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forecasting the Success of Television Series using Machine Learning

et al. 2019

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Television is an ever-evolving multi-billion-dollar industry. The success of a television show in an increasingly technological society is a vast multi-variable formula. The art of success is not just something that happens, but is studied, replicated, and applied. Hollywood can be unpredictable regarding success, as many movies and sitcoms that are hyped up and promise to be a hit end up being box office failures and complete disappointments. In current studies, linguistic exploration is being performed on the relationship between Television series and target community of viewers. Having a decision support system that can display sound and predictable results would be needed to build confidence in the investment of a new TV series. The models presented in this study use data to study and determine what makes a sitcom successful. In this paper, we use descriptive and predictive modeling techniques to assess the continuing success of television comedies: The Office, Big Bang Theory, Arrested Development, Scrubs, and South Park. The factors that are tested for statistical significance on episode ratings are character presence, director, and writer. These statistics show that while characters are indeed crucial to the shows themselves, the creation and direction of the shows pose implication upon the ratings and therefore the success of the shows. We use machine learning based forecasting models such as linear regression, K Nearest Neighbors, Stochastic Gradient Descent, Decision Tree and Forests, Neural Network, and Facebook Prophet, to accurately predict the success of shows. The models represent a baseline to understanding the success of a television show and how producers can increase the success of current television shows or utilize this data in the creation of future shows. Due to the many factors that go into a series, the empirical analysis in this work shows that there is no one-fits-all model to forecast the rating or success of a television show. However, because the variables are statistically significant, they are still able to optimize and affect the rating positively.

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Some attitudes and trajectories in screenwriting research

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

«Strong Curtains» and «Dramatic Punches»: The Legacy of Playwriting in the Screenwriting Manuals of the Studio Era

«Strong Curtains» and «Dramatic Punches»: The Legacy of Playwriting in the Screenwriting Manuals of the Studio Era

Written to be read: Apersonal reflection on screenwriting research, thenand now

Forecasting the Success of Television Series using Machine Learning

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