The Silent Screenwriter: The Re-discovered Scripts of Eliot Stannard

Abstract

Before any film is made it is an idea – a ‘screen idea’. I use this term here as a descriptor for what is to become the film, before it is complete. As such, the writer, producer, director and others discuss it, fight over it, compromise or triumph over parts of it. The screenplay describes it, but it never exists in concrete form until it is produced as the screenwork; it is something that exists only as an understanding between people. It is there, in the ether between people, not an object but referred to as an object. It is subject to social pressures, normative pressures, power struggles, inaccurate description and misunderstandings, and conventional ways of working. It occupies a space in which forces are at work struggling to reconcile what is being proposed with many other things, including individual perceptions of what is ‘good’ in this context, and with what Pierre Bourdieu called consecrated work.1 So this is a dynamic space, a ‘field of force’ in the sense that Joe Kember uses it, where it ‘usefully emphasizes the play of social pressures taking place between intricately positioned agents and institutions in any communicative transaction’.2 It involves the habitus and dispositions of those agents, but as an industrial process it involves formalization for the sake of efficiency, clarity and financial risk reduction. One of the documents produced as part of this formalization is the script or various versions of the script. It can tell us not only about the screen idea under discussion at that point, but also the assumptions being made about what constitutes a good screen idea, the elements seen as essential for an understanding of the screen idea, about what is expected from a writer and therefore others such as the director, about institutionalized practice in general, and also about the writer’s own responses to these.