Linda Aronson,
The 21st Century Screenplay.
Allen and Unwin, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-74237-136-8
Au$49.99 (pb)
512pp
(Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin)

Patrick McGilligan,
Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s.
University of California Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-520-26039-9
US$24.95 (pb)
264pp
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

In this fifth volume of the Backstory series, Patrick McGilligan conducts six of the 13 interviews which include Albert Brooks, Jean-Claude Carrière, Nora Ephron, Ronald Harwood, John Hughes, David Koepp, Richard Lagravenese, Barry Levinson, Eric Roth, John Sayles, Tom Stoppard, Barbara Turner and Rudy Wurlitzer.

Readers will immediately recognise that some of these names are best known for their work outside of Hollywood or might be more readily associated with decades other than the 1990s. As McGilligan freely admits, he has “fudged the name of the book” to include some of his favourite writers regardless of the decade in which they “peaked”. (p. 2)

The style and format remains much the same as previous volumes, essentially a question and answer one preceded by a short introduction and concluding with a filmography and occasional endnotes. There are some variations on this such as the Rudy Wurlitzer interview where Lee Hill has chosen sub headings such as “Monte Hellman and Two-Lane Blacktop” to characterise chapters in Wurlitzer’s career. The interviews in this book (as with its companion volumes) are subtly but significantly different from what we are used to in the Q&A form. They eschew the temptation to privilege ‘important’ career moments, instead providing anecdotal snapshots of these writers’ careers that includes messy collaborations and periods of mediocrity. This all adds up to a very economical but authentic set of case studies of what screenwriting is actually about. Moreover, it is the diversity of backgrounds, experiences and practice which marks this series and which puts to rest any ideas that screenwriters or writers generally are of a certain ‘type’. (Of course, anyone with an interest in writing who has read the interviews from The Paris Review would have learnt this long ago.)

Readers looking for in-depth profiles will not find them here. There is simply not enough space, and some may find the chapters on Nora Ephron and John Hughes a little slim. Nonetheless, the section on Ephron is remarkably economical in its portrayal of her extensive career, offering up some interesting examples about the success of the collaborative process between the writers, directors and actors with whom she has worked. It invites us to re-evaluate at least one popular stereotype, that of the disenfranchised screenwriter. In contrast to Paddy Chayefsky’s one time practice of insisting on the right to veto any changes to his screenplays, Ephron candidly suggests “it crossed my mind that Chayefsky had no understanding at all of the movie making process.” (p. 41)

The chapter on John Hughes reveals more about Hughes’ business side than his creative one. So we learn that whilst Hughes has a constant eye on the industrial dimensions of his work and his relationship with the studios, it is one which nonetheless seems to have coexisted remarkably untainted by personal or creative compromise.

The tone of enquiry is politely inquisitorial rather than investigative or probing on matters where we might have wanted McGilligan and his collaborators to dig a little more deeply. Nevertheless, it is possibly McGilligan’s respectful distance which has produced such a successful balance between revealing the mundane as well as the highlights. It is about screenwriting as work with the tinsel far removed.

Gavin Smith’s profile of Albert Brooks is one of the more comprehensive. It positions Brooks as a hyphenate, in this case also a director and actor, the kind of individual who seems to interest McGilligan most. Or perhaps it’s just that, with the exception of David Koepp, few of the subjects of this book originally set about consciously to position themselves as screenwriters, instead coming from backgrounds in prose fiction, journalism, playwriting or theatre. In the case of Stoppard for example, as most readers will already know, his work in screenwriting is more like a series of detours.

There are many producers who embrace the dictum that screenwriting is all about story and structure (as distinct from tone, style and character), and that the latter are largely the domain of the director. I would dispute this, but for those who believe that if the story is right, ‘anything else can be fixed’, Linda Aronson’s most recent volume will be of great interest. I would characterise this as a reference book rather than a screenwriting manual. It is certainly not something which is likely to provide much joy if read from cover to cover. But for those seeking to find a vocabulary to describe or review screenplay structure, this book is invaluable.

In her previous book Scriptwriting Updated (2000), Linda Aronson went to considerable effort to drag the screenwriting craft beyond the Classical Hollywood paradigms of the vast majority of these manuals. With her chapters on “Tandem narrative and sequential narrative” and on multiple protagonists, she brought discussion of screenwriting craft a much needed acknowledgement of the increasing possibilities for unconventional character configurations and non linear narration, preceding David Bordwell’s hefty “Mutual Friends and Chronologies of Chance” in Poetics of Cinema (2008), where many of the same films are discussed. (Bordwell has publicly acknowledged Aronson’s influence on this chapter during its work in progress.)

Importantly, Aronson has developed a vocabulary which can be useful for practitioners, editors and students for identifying certain narrative forms. It was with some enthusiasm then that I anticipated reading The 21st Century Screenplay. The “21st Century” aspect of the title relates for the most part, to “Part 4” (of six parts) of the new book which has been “massively rearranged to cover six, not four, main categories of parallel narrative, with many sub-categories. … ‘double journeys’ [Brokeback Mountain], ‘Fractured tandem’ [21 Grams, The Hours, Crash, Babel]” and so on. (p. xvi) Arguably, Aronson may have taken this taxonomy a little too far. I’m reminded of (the fictional) Charlie Kaufmann in Adaptation during a (fictional) Robert McKee seminar where a where a completed series of diagrams from McKee’s book Story float across the screen through a series of dissolves, accompanied by Kaufmann’s defeatist voice over.

To consider this a screenwriting manual to be read from cover to cover would be a mistake. It is more of a reference book whose ideas might be best tapped according to the project at hand. So, while it is likely to be useful for its taxonomy of narrative pattern, it should be approached with caution. There are potentially useful sections on creative thinking, a good survey of some classical screenwriting manuals and a comprehensive series of exercises and ‘development strategies’. And it is always interesting to read about case studies of ‘failures’. But I can’t help thinking that, like the Winchester rifle in Babel, it may prove dangerous in the wrong hands. And I’m involuntarily drawn to Rudy Wurlitzer’s comment that “you go into some producer’s room and there are four or five people there …”, (p. 233) and the possibility that these people might read Aronson’s latest offering and nothing else.

Syd Field’s screenwriting manual Screenplay (1979) has been around for over thirty years now, so amidst a history of sometimes hostile discussion around such books is it is interesting to read (in Backstory 5), that Jean-Claude Carrière knows Syd Field “very well”. He and Field have apparently had “long talks” about the utility of screenwriting manuals. “I think these books are useful. I find them very boring to read but they are useful in one aspect. You must betray them.” (p. 28)

Harry Kirchner,
La Trobe University, Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 4 November 2010