Summary
The postmodern nature of motion picture authorship is examined, focusing on how the collaborative process results in the disappearance of the screenwriter. Topics include the impermanence of all working screenplays, and the manners in which screenwriters participate in the mutability of text and subservience to a motion picture production structure.
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Extract
Standpoint: Disappearing Authors: A Postmodern Perspective on the Practice of Writing for the Screen.
The practice of writing for the screen is unlike most other current forms of creative writing in that individual authorship is usually neither privileged nor valued, as it is with the novel, the poem, or the play. The writer of the screenplay or teleplay in most cases is one member of an amorphous unconnected creative collective (the term "team" does not always apply here) that includes the director, producer, crew members, other writers, even actors changing words on the set. It is as if the work is too large for any one creative force and demands the attention of multiple minds. Each screenplay absorbs the efforts of numerous individuals until it becomes impossible to determine or remember or care about who contributed what passages. It is through this practice that, in a postmodern sense, authors "disappear" into the works they help write.
This disappearance is never logical or planned; it just happens, haphazardly, by chance, illogically. Most screenwriters are not happy about this process, but nevertheless learn...See the full content of this document
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