Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2016

This article seeks to open discussion on the history of Japanese scenario (shinario). It examines the notion of scriptwriter as author and the unique working spaces assigned for writers during the flourishing of the studio system in the 1950s. It also addresses the appearance of scenario reader that was prompted by extensive script publishing that placed the scenario in a focal position in film culture. Presented and consumed in this manner, scenarios both complemented and contested screenviewing experience and the emerging canon of Japanese cinema.

Production design not only sets the scene for the action of a film or television series, it holds great potential to convey story and character information. However, most literature on production design describe how the work of production designers only begin in pre-production when they are ‘given a script’ in order to execute a text. This article argues that the production designer can play a crucial part in the screenwriting process by contributing to the narrative and character design from an early stage. Focusing on the use of production design in the development, writing and production of the Danish drama series Arvingerne/The Legacy (2014–), the article analyses the implications of creator Maya Ilsøe’s close collaboration with the series’ production designer Mia Stensgaard. This collaboration not only centred on creating a special visual universe for the series, but also involved having the production design perform crucial back story and character information related to the inheritance drama and to the portrayal of the artist matriarch Veronika who was intended to haunt the lives of her children throughout the series even though she dies in the very first episode.

In ‘The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs’, published in Journal of Screenwriting in 2010, screenwriting analyst Patrick Cattrysse offers a revision of character ‘want’ and ‘need’, a common trope in screenwriting guides and manuals, to develop a protagonist’s arc throughout a story. His revision expands on this theory to include the audience and their subconscious connection with a character. This connection can generate feelings of sympathy and empathy, which can lead to identification. It can also create feelings of fear or anxiety in the audience based on their knowledge of the character. In ‘Her body, himself: Gender in the Slasher’ (1987), film analyst Carol Clover identifies the ‘Final Girl’ theory, a trope found in the horror ‘slasher’ subgenre. The Final Girl is easily identifiable for both screenplay readers and film spectators and is an ideal theoretical model to explore the revision that Cattrysse speaks of, in a practical setting. This article investigates how the screenplay and screenwriter can play a leading role in better understanding the implied reader or spectator in film studies. It concludes that scholarly research into screenwriting can benefit the writer in a practical setting.

Over the last 25 years, evolutionary science has reinvigorated not only the human sciences but also literary criticism and film theory. Drawing on models of human behaviour advanced by evolutionary psychologists Bernard et al., Lövheim and Zuckerman et al., we propose that the application of an evolutionary framework will illuminate our understanding of film protagonists and their associated audience appeal. We report the development of a new instrument to assess differences in film protagonists’ emotions, motivations and character traits across 34 scales: the Assessment of Protagonists’ Traits, Emotions and Motivations Questionnaire (APTEM-Q). The results of a preliminary study comparing protagonists in 100 popular, recent American and Chinese films indicate that the questionnaire is comprehensive and that four protagonist motivations and emotions predict whether a film is preferred at the American or Chinese box office. Using this four-factor model, we found cross-cultural consensus in the way these psychological attributes are perceived. These findings are consistent with evolutionary theories, which would suggest that screen characters’ traits, motivations and emotions are writers’ emulations of universal adaptations to evolutionary selection pressures, reshaped through aesthetic and cultural processes.

The subject of this article is the screenwriting discourse in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1954. In a small national film industry like the one in Czechoslovakia, there were always significant influences of bigger film industries (e.g., United States, Germany, USSR). After World War II, the USSR inspiration became dominant and many Soviet production and screenwriting manuals were translated into Czech. I will explore how the cultural transfer changed the screenwriting discourse in Czechoslovakia, first in a historical perspective and then through an analysis of the following topics: frameworks of screenwriting discourse; screenplay development; authorship; and screenwriting organization. The methodology of screenwriting discourse analyses will be used to explore how Soviet manuals transformed screenwriting discourse after the nationalization of the Czechoslovak film industry in 1945.

SCREENWRITING IN THE DIGITAL ERA, KATHRYN MILLARD (2014) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pp., ISBN: 9781137319104, eBook, $69.99; ISBN: 9780230343283, h/bk, $95.00; ISBN: 9781349344659, p/bk, $90.00

THE TV CRIME DRAMA, SUE TURNBULL (2014) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 224 pp., ISBN: 9780748640881, h/bk, £65.00; ISBN: 9780748640874, p/bk, £19.99

DRAMATIC STORY STRUCTURE: A PRIMER FOR SCREENWRITERS, EDWARD J. FINK (2014) Abingdon: Routledge, 212 pp., ISBN: 9780415813693, h/bk, £95.00; ISBN: 9780415813716, p/bk, £21.99; ISBN: 9780203067987, e-book £20.89

THE SCREENWRITER’S ROADMAP: 21 WAYS TO JUMPSTART YOUR STORY, NEIL LANDAU (2013) Burlington, MA and Abingdon, OX: Focal Press, 310 pp., ISBN: 9780240820606, p/bk, £15.99; ISBN: 9781138136137, h/bk, £90.00