Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017

The unprecedented success of Italian crime drama serial Gomorrah – The Series (2014–present) has spurred much interest in the industry as well as a lively critical debate. Little attention, however, has thus far been paid to the creative process behind the series. This article contributes to filling this gap by investigating the branding strategies and the writing strategies that have informed the development process. Particular emphasis is given to the analysis of the storylining techniques employed in the development of the arcs of Season 1 with a view to unpacking how, in turn, these determine mechanisms of the viewers’ engagement with characters. As typical of much contemporary serial dramas, these are predominantly antiheroes and therefore our allegiance to them is questioned when problematic issues are raised, as in the case of violent actions and dubious moral choices. The investigation combines three interplaying methodologies – a genetic approach, close textual (quantitative and qualitative) analysis and a cognitive theoretical framework – to offer a general poetic model for analysing serial narrative. While the article deals with one particular case study, the more general aim is to contribute to developments in the field of cognitive studies of serial drama, with a specific focus on creative development and writing practices.

As the field of screenwriting studies has developed, the act of writing a screenplay has been dissected from a range of different perspectives. In this article, I explore the creative origins and development of a screenplay, as a producer of the New Zealand made-for-television film Nights in the Gardens of Spain (US title: Kawa, 2011). In the origination of this film, the orthodoxy of conventional development processes was not challenged despite the narrative being an exploration of a challenging subject, that of a married Māori man struggling to reveal and come to terms with his lifelong gay identity in a tribal-based society where many reject such identification. In unravelling the decision-making behind the film’s development, I suggest that the decision to take a conservative path in storytelling, while arguably doing a disservice to the autobiographical novel on which the film was based, nevertheless achieved the intentions of the producers, who saw in the story an opportunity to speak to nonindigenous New Zealanders about the reality of modern middle-class Māori lives. The article considers how this political intention shaped the content of the screenplay and the resulting film, and through this explores the producers’ role in the creative triangle at the centre of screenplay development.

Screenwriting manuals such as McKee’s Story (1999) or Snyder’s Save the Cat! (2005) uniformly instruct the writer to begin their work by defining a concept; from this, they will develop a structure and build the rest of the story. These manuals and their methods dominate in higher education and in the film industry. However, their methods’ overreliance on structuring the writing process may be at the detriment of considering more creative approaches to building a story. One such approach, criticized by McKee in Story, is writing dialogue in search of a story. Using interviews from Noah Baumbach, his collaborators, and other mainstream screenwriters, alongside my observations from my own writing and from teaching screenwriting, this article argues for the importance of allowing a screenplay to develop through writing dialogue in search of scenes, characters and story. It proposes that this method can enhance the quality of the individual character voice, form a stronger basis to structure a plot based on the development of characters, and enhance the reflective and creative skills required to complete a screenplay.

Writing the script for a documentary film can be problematic. According to some documentary filmmakers, it is not possible at all, because one cannot know beforehand what is going to happen. Nonetheless, a written script is often required to obtain financing for a documentary project. This article deals with different work practices and forms of documentary script. It analyses two case studies: the writer’s own films A Man from the Congo River (2010) and Kusum (2000). The first is the story of an engineer who worked in colonial Congo at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is based on diaries and other historical material, and therefore it was possible to construct a very precise script for the film. Kusum is an observational documentary film following the healing of a young Indian girl. The script was produced prior to production, but during the shooting process many core elements changed, including the main character and storyline. The form and dramaturgy of documentary films are created in the filmmaking process and in dialogue between the filmmaker and real people. A documentary script can be considered a hypothesis about the reality that the filmmaker will encounter via the process of filmmaking. Instead of ‘a screen idea’ we could speak about ‘a documentary idea’.

This article delves into the topic of the central emotion within a screenplay, and the extent to which it can grant the work coherence. It will demonstrate that the emotional core of the story consists in the profound, extended emotion that stems directly from its main theme. It will make these arguments by analysing the screenplay for Julian Schnabel’s The Diving bell and the Butterfly (2007), the screen adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir regarding his experience of ‘locked-in’ syndrome. As Ronald Harwood’s screenplay changes the thematic focus of the original novel, comparing the two texts reveals how different themes invoke different fundamental emotions. The article, drawing especially on the narrative theory developed in the screenwriting textbooks by Robert McKee (1997) and John Truby (2007), elaborates on an issue that has been ignored by other analyses of the movie: from the open-ended story of self-reflection that is told in the book, Harwood gets a closeended story of rebirth. The article highlights how the tension towards the protagonist’s internal goal determines the emotional nucleus of the plot. It also suggests that the emotional core is informed by ‘dramatic tone’ and argues that it consists in the ‘desire of justice’ regarding the main character’s destiny.

The article considers a connection between the theories of ekphrasis/enargeia and screenplay studies, and investigates how two different ekphrasis traditions are combined in the film Wings of Desire (1986) in the partnership between its screenwriters, Peter Handke and Wim Wenders. It begins with a brief review of these concepts in Greco-Roman oratory, then moves on to address ekphrasis in media. More specifically, ekphrasis is broached in Peter Handke’s theatre and literary works, which evolve into his screenwriting for Wim Wenders’ films. The article also contrasts the first draft of the screenplay for Wings of Desire with the final film, as it shares and analyses sections of Handke’s verses that are excluded from Wenders’ final film.

THE STORY OF THE MEXICAN SCREENPLAY: A STUDY OF THE INVISIBLE ART FORM AND INTERVIEWS WITH WOMEN SCREENWRITERS, MARÍA TERESA DEPAOLI (2014) New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 117 pp., ISBN: 9781454195214, e-Book, £26.00; ISBN: 9781433110344, p/bk, £26.00; ISBN: 9781433123818, h/bk, £104.00

ON STORY: SCREENWRITERS AND THEIR CRAFT, BARBARA MORGAN AND MAYA PEREZ (2013) Austin: University of Texas Press, 177 pp., ISBN: 9780292754607, p/bk, $19.95

FILM GENRE FOR THE SCREENWRITER, JULE SELBO (2014) Oxon: Routledge, 339 pp., ISBN: 9781138020832, p/bk, £30.99; ISBN: 9781138020818, h/bk, £95.00