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[opening credits]
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[background music playing]
Okay, right. The state of screenwriting in 2014 is very
diffused. It's losing the old boundaries between screenwriter,
director, screenwriting and television writing. This year,
our speakers have reflected the multidisciplinary approach
to filmmaking. So, we have James Schamus, producer executive
of Focus Features for many years and a renowned screenwriter.
Emma Thompson, award-winning actor, screenwriter. Steven
Knight, award-winning writer and director. I think this
year, you're going to see three very different lectures.
Far more diverse than in the past.
[background music]
James Schamus is one of the world's great academics
as well as one of the world's
finest screenwriters, as well as the ex-head of one of the
two great independent studios. These events are very
particular genre. Which is the chosen pseudo-celebrity
in my case, vaguely famous kind of person stands on stage,
shares their wit and wisdom and somehow, the audience
is meant to be inspired and instructed, and a certain amount
of devices are supposed to have been delivered by the end
of the evening. This is a genre I can't imagine succeeding
at and so I'm pretty much going to do the opposite, which
is giving a lecture on German Aesthetics since the 18th
century to now and how they relate to cinema today. I assume
that all of you, having lived for some time in Britain,
Great, or lesser, depending on what happens,
[audience laughing]
have attended a production, so even school or community
production of a play by William Shakespeare. You know,
I don't know what. So, what was life? I don't remember
any what [stuttering] Much Ado About Nothing?
And let's just say that the players were
less than successful in their delivery of the play. I assume
that when you walked out of the theatre that night and
assuming that your child was not part of the production,
so you otherwise would have a different response, but you
just turn to your colleague, a friend, a date and said, "Oh,
that Shakespeare just sucks! You know,
that was so boring." No, you don't say that, Do you? You say,
"That was the worst production of Much Ado About Nothing I
have ever seen in my life." right? So, there's something
strange about that, because let me ask this question. Some
of you have gone to the movies this summer, not to the
cinema like here, but to the movies I assume. So
when you walked out of the movies and it was, let's say
Piece de Merde: Part 3 from Studio Crème de la Crap, whatever!
[audience laughing]
Starring 25 million plus 10% gross and his [stuttering]
his 5 million against three and a half percent gross
love interest [audience laughing]
and you walked out of the theatre and
I assume you did not turn to your date and say, "You know,
that film was terrible. The script was great, but the film
was, just what a terrible job they did with that script."
Have you ever done that in your entire life once even?
Oh you have? Probably it was somebody made a movie
off of your screenplay,
[audience laughing]
And so the crazy thing is the way
just that first distinction we make between the plays
and cinema, this is a distinction where film theory is
born really. About a hundred years ago, the first works
of film theory, Hugo Munsterberg, who is a hugely popular
public intellectual at that time, in 1916, he wrote the
first great book about film [stuttering] and film theory.
And these kind of comparisons say something. What do they
say is the question? You have completed a screenplay.
Okay, you've completed a screenplay. Have you completed
a work of art? If you're an artist, it seems to me self-evident
that your answer should be yes but if we put that question
in context, for example, you are a poet and you have now
taken your quill, dipped it in ink, and you have written
a poem this morning before breakfast. The poem is finished.
You've written a poem! When you finished writing a poem, you've
written a poem. It exists: in some way, shape, form, manner,
you have created a work of art. When you have created a
screenplay, when you have finished a screenplay, you have
created approximately 124 pages of begging for money and
attention.
[audience laughing]
That's pretty much what you've done.
and how that gets you into the art category,
is an interesting question. [mumbling] Or does it?
I'm from the United States. I'm a proud member
of a union that represents screenwriters but we don't
call ourselves a union. We call ourselves a guild because
we're really fancy. [audience laughing]
And we're writers. We are The Writers Guild of America.
So why did we end up calling ourselves
a guild as opposed to a union? Clearly there's something
going on there in terms of the trajectories and
histories of the ideology of authorship, ownership and creation.
And we have positioned ourselves as screenwriters in a
hybrid space in which, on the one hand, we want to create
intellectual property and on the other hand, we want to
get paid for it. And therefore, we often give up ownership
of it. Right? So we are creators, but not owners and it
says. So we're workers but we are not bosses of our own
art, which is very strange thing. An ideology that creators
and creative people rise above their fellow workers is
an ideology I find tremendously suspect and if not downright,
Of course I don't know what word would be wrong,
We want both good working
conditions and benefits and respects, but on the other
hand we want to pretend that we're not workers. That somehow,
we are something else and that causes a lot of anxiety
among my fellow screenwriters, I think.
The embeddedness
of this bizarre relationship between creativity and the
ongoing production of the concept of intellectual property
is of the essence of the screenwriter's life. It's actually
conditions how we feel about ourselves, about how we feel
about our work, and how we relate to the work and what the
work actually is, and now we'll understand a little bit more why.
Who's the guy who really created the screenplay
form that we all use? That's in final draft? That's encoded
in the very software that most of us writers use to write
on screenplays? This guy named Thomas Ince.
And if anybody remembers him now,
he was one of the most important people in the
history of cinema. He ran one of the biggest studios in
the history of cinema in Seville, and then he ended up forming
a company with a lot of major players including D.W. Griffith.
Back in the old days, they used to have just production
units that included a core of actors and they would just
go out for a day and say, "You know what?" It was said to
Tom, "We're going to make a movie. I don't know, like a
gypsy is going to you know- a gypsy family with the circus
is going to-- take a baby, a white baby and then they'll
be a chase and then they'll get the white baby back."
And he said, "That's a great idea. Go for it!"
Then they come back and they run the rushes and he say,
"What are these elephants?
How much this cost? What's the budget?"
You know, it was just all kind of amorphous
He said, "Look, I've come up with a great
idea. It's called a screenplay and this is going
to- I'm not going to approve any movies going out, until
I see the screenplay. And I give it to guy who we now
call the Assistant Director, who's going to break it down.
Then, I'm going to send it to my accountants and they're
going to budget it. Then I'm going to give you this
much money to do it. And so, if you want elephants, you
got to put it in the script and maybe even in capital so
that they'll pay attention. [audience laughing]
and I'll provide you a budget
and don't go over budget because it's going to
come out of your, it's coming out of your salary, kind of thing.
And he really rationalized what was essentially a chaotic
serial production approach to film making.
He did it through the medium, guess what?, of the screenplay.
I started by working as an intern at a small production
company. My first day at work, I offered to read every
script they had in development as well as the- even the
stuff that was being rewritten. So I don't read earlier
drafts and I stayed up all night and read, I think 12 or 14
scripts. The next morning, I wrote a proposal to rewrite
one of them that seem to be stalled. I had no experience.
But since they had already invested all this money in a
project that was stalled, they bizarrely said yes.
The screenplay was really the control function for the way
in which time and money was organized in these production units.
To this day, we've adapted pretty much whole
what Thomas Ince has created as the ability for the money-- the
capital, to really organize and yay or nay because they
had a piece of paper rather than a bunch of people standing
around and said waiting for them. It's a lot easier to say,
"You know what it says 2 elephants" [slashing sound]
"One", rather than go on set and go, [bang sound] "Okay"
"Now, two" now, there's one. So it
turns out that the work that we do is work that both creates
and inspires and catalyzes and motivates. But just as importantly,
it is the grounds on which control and money and the executives
and all those types, like me sometimes, intervene in the
most effective way. When you're actually writing a screenplay
and say, you come up with a draft, so to speak, and you're
now rewriting your draft. What is a new draft? Is a new draft
the amount of rewriting you did on it in one day or two,
or three, or four? What a new draft is, is essentially
that point in time when you are required to hand over your
work to the producers and therefore call it a draft and
you hope get paid for that draft. So, the words on the
page are really the matrix for the introduction of capital
into the process. And that means that, at that moment,
something else happens. That those words do become not
simply words and not simply inspired creations, but
they become a place where we conflate two separate ideologies
and two separate economic practices. One of those
ideologies is the ideology of authorship. We all assume
most of us, unless you're really trained lawyers or nerds
like me, that authorship has something to do with another
regime of how we organize the results and proceeds of that
process and that's copyright. But if you look at
the history of copyright, you'll notice something very
strange. Copyright from its inception had nothing to
dta with authorship. When you made a movie, let's say
in 1904, you would shoot the movie and they would copyright
every single frame, separately. So, now what happens? How
about your company and they made you decide to make a really
funny movie. The movie is going to be called How a French
Nobleman Found His Wife Through the Personal Ads?
What happens if you're the producer of that film and 2 weeks
later, a movie appears called Personals. Well, that's what
happened. So, of course, Company A-- I think it's Lubin,
sues. They go, "You can't. That was our- You can't. You
just ripped us off." Right? And the defendants replied,
"No, we didn't. Not one frame of our movie was your copyrighted
material. Not one. It's our movie." And at this point, it
goes up to the appeals court, and the decision is made
by the judge. He said, "Just a bunch of shots lined up one after
the other, don't actually make up a movie." It turns out
that they're showing things, but a movie.
And this is actually the property that the makers of the
movie own is the telling. Not even the story, but
the telling and that was the elegant solution. Suddenly
capital now can find a locus in an object that is completely
abstract. And yet recognized in law as the essence of its
investment. That is to say this narrator. We screenwriters
like to think of ourselves as that person. But of course
that person is actually the embodiment of vast sums of
capital. That congeals around this eventual texts that are
screenplays inspired. So, you find this idea of the ideology--
the author, transforming itself into a new kind of author.
The kind of author that you see at the end of every film,
where it says, "For the purposes of copyright, the author
of this film is 20th Century Fox." Right? It's not
una filma de James Cameron, right? It's the money, money
is the author. Money is the author. I think the ideology
of attempting to lift oneself into the sphere of art, and
therefore, demanding the respect is due to an artist, is a false
road. I don't think we are artists and it doesn't mean
I think we're lesser people or contributors. We are workers
and I think workers demand respect. As I can go on like
this honestly for, like, hours as you can tell, but I do
hope at least that little piece the evening or not so
little piece of evening, laid some track for the kind of
conversation we can now have, which could be things like--
Where do you get your ideas from? Do you come up
with five points while taking note, taking a shower? The answer
is yes. [audience laughing]
Oh my God, that's been me the whole time.
[audience clapping]
Okay. That was advice. Amazing. [END]