Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2024

There is a close relationship between pulp fiction and film noir. The link is the adapted screenplay. While there has been extensive critical work on film noir for almost 70 years there has not been an equally intense scrutiny of the process of adaptation and its product, the adapted screenplay. This article offers a critical discussion of the complex literary-cinematic ecology of the noir adaptation/screenwriting process for The Maltese Falcon and the role of fidelity in the adaptation as a key ingredient of the film’s success. The methodology involves examining the various factors, methods and players involved in the creation of the screenplay with an emphasis on a comparative study of the literary text and its screenplay. The article concludes that fidelity in adaptation was central to the film’s appeal and that the film’s success raised the profile of the novel. The level of screenwriting talent, the nature of the relationship between the screenwriter and the director and the depth of cultural resonance found in the original literary text were vital influences on the adaptation process and the resulting film. These factors turned The Maltese Falcon screenplay into a standard for future pulp to noir adaptations.

This article presents a textual analysis of Tony Gilroy’s 126-page screenplay for Michael Clayton (2006) based on the Final Shooting Script, available online and published by Newmarket Press. Screenplays, in addition to being film production documents, can reach in digital and published forms a burgeoning audience that includes critics, scholars, academics, apprentice writers and the general public. And though it is well documented in screenwriting theory that screenplays can and should be analysed in line with works of literature, they remain under-investigated as texts in their own right. The screenwriting discipline, I argue, merits a corpus of close textual analyses of screenplays. This article makes one such contribution, presenting a digest of some key features and techniques in Michael Clayton, which combine to create writerly style and remind us of the richness and educational benefits of the screenplay-as-literary-object.

This article discusses the vital importance of expanding a screenwriting curriculum to demonstrate screenwriting techniques and finding originality by initially deriving story ideas from students’ life experiences, emotional memories and insights. It highlights the inherent problem common to a number of screenwriting students who desire to ‘race for originality’ that tends to imitate films they have already seen rather than finding the inspiration from a world they are better familiar with. The article introduces examples and results where the stories have first been solidly rooted in the writer’s own experiences. The qualitative research question is, how do students benefit from learning to write from the inside? The article challenges the order in which basic elements must be disseminated to students and suggests that alongside the traditional structures and tools of storytelling in teaching screenwriting, teachers should first and foremost guide students towards the private sources of their individual experiences and memories, highlighting their unique potential and originality. The article is based on qualitative research materials collected from screenwriting workshops the author has conducted in various film schools in Finland and Belgium between 2017 and 2021 using an emotional mapping method.

The Knockout, a crime television drama, emerged during the Spring Festival holiday of 2023 and quickly sparked a wide discussion both online and offline. Different from previous shows of the same genre, it adopts a three-timeline narrative structure and abandons stereotypical characterization. The heroes are made of flesh and blood and the villains are not born to be evil and cruel. Their choices and the consequences echo the changes in Chinese society over the past twenty years. This article features our interview with the screenwriter Zhu Junyi and, from the perspective of sociocultural contexts, briefly analyses why The Knockout became a phenomenal hit, revealing changes in the screenwriting trend of main melody works. The interview consists of three parts, covering the ecology for screenwriters in China, the birth of The Knockout and Zhu’s characterization of the television drama script.

Review of: Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, Michael Schulman (2023)

New York: Harper, 589 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-06285-901-3, h/bk, USD 19.99