Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2015

New Hollywood Cinema: An In troduction, Geoff King (2012) 5th ed., London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 296 pp., ISBN: 9781860647505, p/bk, £16.00

A History of the Sc reenplay, Steven Price (2013) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 278 pp., ISBN: 978023029180, h/bk, £58.00; ISBN: 978023029181, p/bk, £18.99

The Creative Screenwriter: Exercises to Expand Your Craft, Zara Waldeback and Craig Batty (2012) London: Bloomsbury, 226 pp., ISBN: 9781408137192, p/bk, £9.99

Brian Winston is a British screenwriter who focuses on documentaries; he won an Emmy Award in 1985 for his work on Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, Episode 8, ‘Out of the Ashes’ (1919–1947). Other credits include A Boatload of Wild Irishmen (2010). In his keynote address at the Screenwriting Research Network Potsdam conference in 2014, Winston, with passion and humour and his knowledge, addressed the ‘script’ and engaged the audience of academics, graduate students and industry practitioners in re-assessing what signifies a screenplay in the world of documentary filmmaking.

Since Syd Field published his book Screenplay in 1979, the three-act structure has become a dominant tool for analysing screenplays and films. While the formulaic nature and constricting effects of this ‘paradigm’ have often been criticized by adherents of independent films, until now its explanatory suitability to classical and mainstream filmmaking has rarely been questioned as such. After commenting on the history of the concept, the article examines how well the model works in practice by statistically evaluating a large number of studies by different authors. This comparison reveals that there is a surprisingly low consensus on how to divide films into three acts. The discrepancies seem fundamentally due to the imprecision and vagueness of the paradigm’s core ideas, and thus neither the functions ascribed to acts nor the concept of plot points appear to be valid tools for ensuring consistency in analysis. Hence mainstream film needs to be seen as more complex – and structural analysis more a matter of interpretation – than the model allows for.

Films employing the fantasy/war genre are top box office attractions. There is much for the screenwriter, or for those who guide screenwriters, to consider in this fact. This article will explore the reasons for the popularity of this film genre hybrid and contrast these films’ lure to narratives in the war genre told through a straightforward, realistic method. The article will also investigate how the fantasy/war genre, using elements of the fantastical fairy tale or using the fantastical alternate plane in films such as Alice in Wonderland (2010), World War Z (2012) and Red Dawn (1984, 2012), provide a desired displacement for an audience in regards to conscious or sub-conscious anxieties regarding living in a world in constant war.

Film and television screenwriters who are accustomed to working in a linear, noninteractive mode of storytelling may find themselves struggling to communicate a coherent progression of plot, character and theme when tasked with providing multiple avenues for video game player narrative input. This may be especially problematic when writing single-player role-playing video games (RPGs), which have always permitted a certain co-authorial relationship between a game’s screenwriters and its players, due to the branching-path narrative complexity and performative or emergent gameplay possibilities that are hallmarks of the genre. Using a case study of the linear game, The Last of Us, in contrast to an analysis of the open-world role-playing games Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 3, I will examine reasons why a screenwriter may find himself or herself knowingly ceding narrative control to players due to reasons that relate to a player’s engagement with ideas of co-authorship.

An edited extract from a paper presented at the 7th Screenwriting Research Network Conference Screenwriting and Directing Audiovisual Media in Potsdam in 2014, this article used a case-study approach to analyse the creative dimensions and narrative components present in two of the collaborations between filmmakers Susanne Bier (as director) and Anders Thomas Jensen (as screenwriter). I note in particular how the Bier/Jensen filmography represents a significant shift in Denmark’s international cinematic visibility and will look closely at two Bier/Jensen films: After the Wedding (2006) and In a Better World (2010). The article also explores how the utilization of what I term the trans-prefix paradigm as a methodological tool may contribute towards a better understanding of the story mechanisms within the screenplay as text and its transnational capacities.