A Brief History of the Script and Scriptwriting - Text 4
In the 1930s, the arrival of sound and speech shook up this system, and each studio developed its own model. But the dialogue was often incorporated into this continuity script (taking the place of the intertitles).[6]
In the mid-1950s, with the collapse of the studio system and the decentralization of production, another kind of preparatory document saw the light of day and would become the dominant form of the script: the master scene script. This essentially textual document showed the overall structure of the narrative through the way it was broken down into titled and numbered scenes (a scene being defined as having unity of action, time and place). It quickly described the decor, characters, actions and expressions in the stage directions and set out the words exchanged in the dialogues. To make the document more readable and also no doubt to better distinguish between scriptwriting and directing, the master scene script provided very few indications with respect to directing or editing the film. Aesthetic and technical information, such as the angle of view, shot scale, camera movements and transitions, were now reserved for other production documents such as the shooting script, the storyboard[7] and the overhead diagram.
This distinction between scripting and directing, between the script and other previsualization documents, can give rise to two diametrically opposed conceptions of the relative role of scriptwriting and the script in film production. In the former case, scriptwriting is seen as an essential moment in the film’s conception and directing as merely executing it. Here the script becomes the master document, the film’s guiding plan. In the latter case, directing is seen as an activity as decisive as scriptwriting in the conception and making of a film (staging and cinematography are also a kind of “writing,” as is editing moreover). Here the importance of the script is downplayed and involves mostly the story and the dialogue, while other previsualization documents gradually manifest their importance.[8]
This tension between these two conceptions of the script is periodically revived, particularly when the question is posed of who, the scriptwriter or the film director, is the true author of the work. In cinema, the director has come to assume that honour (at least since the “auteur theory”), but in television the scriptwriter is still seen as the principal author of a television series (as if the story, the characters and the dialogue have more importance than the mise en scène and the cinematography).
It is important to note that this conception of scriptwriting and the script, which today has gradually taken hold in the United States and around the world to the point of becoming hegemonic, is not self-evident. Other film – and scriptwriting – practices clearly exist beyond the industrial fiction film, including in particular independent cinema, documentary and so-called “experimental” cinema, in which one can write and rewrite scenes while shooting and later while editing, or shoot and edit without a script, etc. The digital revolution and the appearance of new, more immersive and interactive media will also transform the way in which audiovisual narrative is conceived and prepared.
