In Focus: Writing for the American Screen

On July 7, 2005, the Writers Guild of America, West, filed suit against an array of television producers and broadcasters, claiming what Jacques Derrida had argued forty years ago (and St. John had proclaimed two thousand years ago): reality is written. Or, at least, reality television, whose thousand-plus exploited writer/producers labor without benefits or workplace protections. But why is it, asked the New York Times, that it is the Writers Guild that is doing the suing? "Is the work done," they ask, "on reality shows really the same as writing"? For one reality writer, the answer was a resounding yes: "We have to take all the little bits and give it a clear story arc, give it structure. . . . That, to me, is writing."

The imbrication of an articulable narrative into the flow of experience—indeed, the understanding of "experience" as in itself a form of narrative comprehension—has blossomed in the past hundred years concurrently with the rise of the regime of intellectual property: if it can be written, it can be owned. Over the course of the last century, cinema (and television) has organized much of our leisure time around the consumption of industrial-strength, corporate-owned narratives, but cinema has also helped us understand ourselves, at the very core of our beings, as narratives, too. In Oliver Sachs's words: "We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative—whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a 'narrative,' and that narrative is us, is our identities."

Of course, this begs the question of who is writing us, and what they're getting paid.

Part of the answer to that question comes in the following pages of this In Focus. In it, five hard-working practitioners tell fragments of their stories, and share with us what it's like being on the assembly lines of the American narrative factory, where capital and labor combine to make the stories of our lives. If I emphasize writing as work here, it is partially because, in the context of the pages of a scholarly periodical such as Cinema Journal, I wanted the contributors to this section not to feel intimidated (as many initially were) by the sophistication of you, their audience. As workers, they can maintain their dignity, even if they come to you without endnotes, and somewhat underdressed, for these pages.

But I also emphasize screenwriting as labor because it provides a ground for real solidarity between the contributors to this In Focus and CJ's readers, most of whom know full well what it means to work in large institutions whose existences depend on the production and marketing of intellectual properties, and where, as a rule, "making sense" is a "collaborative" process—one in which intelligibility requires succumbing to protocols and dictates that are often in great tension with the original thoughts and inspirations that motivate our work.

As you read through this section, you'll see something of a common theme emerge: the eternal struggle between writing as "structure" and the more, shall we say, primal communicative scream that keeps most writers at their desks. Howard Rodman raises a pointed and eloquent cry against the tyranny of Syd Field and Robert McKee–inspired "structure" in American screenwriting, pointing, from his position as chair of USC's legendary screenwriting program, at a kind of Bataillean excess, a remainder of "real" memory, longing, and experience, that animates those who still would practice screenwriting as an art. José Rivera speaks of his oscillation between playwright and screenwriter, and shows how the transition from stage to screen in his case mirrors a kind of transmigration of dialogue into description, of language into picture, as the writer seeks in a way to take ownership of the image by creating it in a dense and sensuous forest of words. (This old rhetorical trick was called by the late Hellenic sophists ekphrasis, the creation of images by words. You can get a good dose of it in the Ad herrenium, sometimes called the first work of art criticism...