What a Screenplay Isn't

Imagine a gray cardboard box, the size and shape of a ream of typing paper. Let's say the box has, on its outside, a title and an author, in black Sharpie. Let's say the box has, on its inside, 420 double-spaced typewritten pages of dialogue and description.

Is this a novel? Well, yes.

Erase the slate. Imagine now a sheaf of paper, punched three-hole, with bright metal brads in the top and bottom holes. Let's say the sheaf has, on its outside, a title and an author, in twelve-point Courier type. Let's say the sheaf has, on its inside, 116 pages of dialogue and description.

Is this a movie? Well, no.

The above examples make a case that's a bit disingenuous, but, by any criterion, an unpublished novel bears more resemblance to a novel than does an unproduced screenplay to a film. Screenplays are, to use James Schamus's fine phrase, "brutally instrumentalist." They either become films, or they don't. Their worth is determined not by the quality of the writing but by which side of the previous sentence's comma they fall on. This is why the first question asked of a screenplay is "Who's attached?" This is why writers and nonwriters alike, from all walks of life, clutch screenplays to their chests as if they were Super Lotto tickets. This is why the craft of teaching the craft of the screenplay is for many more lucrative than the craft of the screenplay—and why the teaching of "structure" has in many venues supplanted the teaching of writing.

This is also why an uncommissioned screenplay is referred to as a "spec," as if it were less an expression than a speculation. Even in other arts whose history is equally tinged with the notion of patrons, of salary, of the work for hire, there's far less emphasis on the teleology. One would not, for instance, speak of a spec fresco.

A screenplay, of course, wants to become a film. But when that desire takes over, when it becomes the sole and supreme task, something gets lost. The screenplay becomes a legal document: "This Offering cannot be made without a Prospectus." And as such, it then disappears once its mission has been accomplished, leaving the purchaser to pull the lever and wait, hands cupped, beneath the spout.

Is there any way, then, of reclaiming the screenplay? Of recuperating its energies for something more playful, more intrinsic? Of untethering the screenplay from the dead lead weight of the movie it so desperately wants to become?

Half a century ago, Ivan Chtcheglov—a nineteen-year-old Parisian with a rage at the world as he found it and a teenager's bent for the manifesto—declared, "We are bored in the city, there is no longer any temple of the sun." He described an urban existence so shackled by utility that the accidental, the marvelous, the transcendent had been lost. He expressed his disgust in this manner: "Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life." The severity of his critique was matched only by the expansiveness of his program:

A mental disease has swept the planet. . . . Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.

The same might be said now of the screenplay. It, too, needs to be freed from its utility. It, too, needs to forget its planned itinerary—to open itself up to the beauty and terror glimpsed at the periphery of one's vision, or, perhaps, just around the next corner.

Such freedom entails a forgetting, to be sure, but also a remembering...