Abstract
The question of when the master-scene screenplay developed as a conventional form is far from straightforward. Until the late 1940s, at least, writers would usually work within a studio’s writing department under the supervision of a producer. Each iteration of the script marked a staging post in the journey of a story from the initial idea—which might have originated with anyone at the studio, or been spotted as a potential property by the studio’s story department—to the completion of the screenplay. As noted in Chapter 7, this would not be composed entirely in master scenes, but instead would include suggestions for camera angles and types of shot. This made it functional as a ‘shooting script’, which could, if necessary, be followed by a more precise segmentation by the director.
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Notes
Tom Stempel, FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 156.
John Howard Lawson, Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1949), p. 367.
Dore Schary [and Charles Palmer], Case History of a Movie (New York: Random House, 1950), pp. 59–60.
Lewis Herman, A Practical Manual of Screen Playwriting for Theater and Television Films [1952] (Cleveland: Forum, 1963), p. 169.
Ibid., pp. 170–71.
Bridget Boland, Screen Writing (London: British Film Institute, 1945). I am grateful to Ian Macdonald for drawing this to my attention.
Lindsay Anderson, Makinga Film (New York: Garland, 1977 [1952]).
William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting [1984] (London: Futura, 1985), pp. 199–205.
Breathless: Jean-Luc Godard, Director, ed. Dudley Andrew (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 27.
Matthew Bernstein, ‘Perfecting the New Gangster: Writing Bonnie and Clyde’, Film Quarterly 53.4 (2000), pp. 16–31.
Lester D. Friedman, Bonnie and Clyde (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 27.
Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), pp. 26–28.
John G. Cawelti (ed.), Focus on Bonnie and Clyde (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 158–65. Cawelti prints additional excerpts from the shooting script—the first 16 scenes, and the gun battle at Joplin (beginning part-way through scene 100 and continuing through scene 105)—on pp. 151–57. Confusingly, however, Cawelti’s otherwise very helpful account of the differences between the film and the ‘original script’ (pp. 138–45) uses that term to refer variously to both the undated master-scene script and the 6 September shooting script, without always clearly indicating which. Reference to the full shooting script, however, eliminates the confusion: Bonnie and Clyde, screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton, ‘Final’, 6 September 1966, BFI S4215. This is a copy of the shooting script referred to by Cawelti.
Cawelti, p. 142; Arthur Penn, ‘Making Waves: The Directing of Bonnie and Clyde’, in Lester D. Friedman, ed., Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 23–24.
Peter Cowie, The Godfather Book (London: Faber, 1997), p. 28.
Jenny M. Jones, The Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007), p. 20.
Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver (London: Faber, 1990), p. 4.
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© 2013 Steven Price
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Price, S. (2013). Master-Scene Screenplays and the ‘New Hollywood’. In: A History of the Screenplay. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315700_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315700_10
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