Gabriel García Márquez’s Scriptwriting Workshop: Screenwriting pedagogy and collective screenwriting in Latin America

Abstract

Abstract This article explores three volumes published in Latin America in the 1990s under the banner ‘Gabriel García Márquez’s Scriptwriting Workshop’. These volumes compile transcripts of the workshops for Latin American screenwriters that the Nobel Laureate taught at the International Cinema and Television School in Santo Domingo de los Baños, Cuba, in the 1980s and 1990s. García Márquez’s scriptwriting workshops were practice-based and production-oriented, generating film and television scripts that were subsequently brought to the screen. Therefore, while these workshop texts were disseminated throughout Latin America as manuals for aspiring screenwriters, these collected transcripts also disclose processes of creative collaboration taking shape within localized industrial contexts. Drawing on contemporary research on screenwriting manuals, critical industrial practices and forms of corporate and situational authorship, this article explores García Márquez’s workshop as a window into the craft training of screenwriters and the development of forms of collective screenwriting emerging at the intersection of literary and cinema movements in Latin America.