A History of the Screenplay

Today's Hollywood screenplays have a uniform appearance, but it has not always been this way. The earliest film writing used theatrical plays and prose fiction as models, and the silent cinemas of Germany, Russia and the United States all developed their own traditions, culminating in the unique 'screen poetry' of Carl Mayer. Hollywood studios adapted to writing for sound in different ways, while European author-directors such as Ingmar Bergman made film writing as personal a form of expression as poetry. Later, American writers as diverse as William Goldman, David Mamet and Charlie Kaufman showed that the screen writer could be as important and distinctive a figure as any director, while today's digital technology is transforming screenwriting once again. Steven Price traces the history of the screenplay, illustrating its transformations with detailed discussion of a wide range of examples from the beginnings of cinema to the present day.