Screenwriting ed. by Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter (review)

Screenwriting is one of the most recent additions to Rutgers University Press's Behind the Silver Screen series of film history books. Each of the books in this ten-volume series explores how film has evolved and changed over the years through the lens of a key production role. This study focuses on the contribution of the screenwriter, and like the other books in the series, Screenwriting includes an introduction by one of the editors and six contributed chapters covering discrete periods of film history from the silent era through to the present day.

In his introduction, Julian Hoxter lays out one of the greatest difficulties in studying the history of screenwriting: although the screenwriter is necessary for the other film departments to produce their work, the screenplay itself is absent from the final product in a way that, for example, cinematography, acting, and production design are not. Add to this the fact that scripts go through many revisions and frequently have multiple writers, sometimes uncredited, and one can easily imagine the special challenges film historians face regarding screenwriting.

J. Madison Davis overcomes these challenges with a comprehensive overview of the dawn of screenwriting in the silent era ("Machine to Screen: The Evolution toward Story, 1895–1928"). In this chapter, we learn about scenario writers such as Roy L. McCardell, who came to film from journalism. Davis notes that the birth of the film industry brings with it the birth of the para-industry catering to aspiring writers who long to obtain the inside secrets to creative and financial success in the movies writing photoplays. The final section of this chapter addresses the careers of women screenwriters of the silent era, notably Alice Guy, Frances Marion, and Frederica Sagor Maas. Unfortunately, writing for film soon seemed to become a more serious business, and female screenwriters became much less common in Hollywood with the advent of sound.

In chapter 2, Mark Eaton covers "Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946," an era marked not only by the birth of sound but also by the beginning of the Production Code, a form of selfcensorship adopted by the studios. Eaton describes how the face of screenwriting changed dramatically at this time and how, as movie attendance exploded, the Great Depression drove many prominent literary figures to Hollywood, including William Faulkner, Nunally Johnson, Clifford Odets, and Thornton Wilder, to name a few. Many of these established writers played an important role in helping establish the Screen Writers Guild, which was able to negotiate fairer treatment from the increasingly powerful studio system. Movie attendance reached an all-time high in 1946, and shortly thereafter, screenwriting and the film industry in general underwent another period of upheaval.

Jon Lewis's chapter, "Postwar Hollywood," describes the grim realities of the film industry from 1947 to 1967. The Black Dahlia case exposed the seedy, dangerous underbelly of Hollywood. The US Supreme Court Paramount decision attempted to dilute the power of the studios. The House Un-American Activities Committee and the blacklist severely censored the kinds of stories that could be told and who could tell them. This chapter is made more interesting by Lewis's shrewd analysis of representative screenplays such as In a Lonely Place (1950, dir. Nicholas Ray) and Gentleman's Agreement (1947, dir. Elia Kazan) to illustrate the forces at play in this era. In general, Screen-writing does an excellent job combining the larger historical context and specific textual evidence, and it does it best in this chapter. Lewis concludes with a challenge: in the postwar era we have to consider the work that did get made in the light of the fact that there was work that could not get made.

Kevin Alexander Boon's chapter focuses on "The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980." As the Production Code ended, writer-directors influenced by French New Wave and Italian neorealism pushed the envelope on structure and content with films such as Easy Rider (1969, dir. Dennis Hopper), A Clockwork Orange (1971, dir. Stanley Kubrick), and Last Tango in Paris...