Screenwriting double function of anonymity for female authors in Hollywood and critical issues of authorship in cinema: two screenplay case studies: Grace of my heart and Edward Scissorhands

2014-01-23This dissertation examines the authorial issue of screenwriters and writer-directors alongside the production of female authors in cinema. I consider their work to serve a double function of anonymity in Hollywood, since the director is considered the preeminent author in cinema, not the writer. In this case, while most films are assigned to male directors, female authors (screenwriters and writer-directors) have been largely absent from the spotlight, a historical fact that remains to this day. ❧ Chapter 1 analyzes the historical development of the auteur theory in France and the United States since the mid-20th century, and shows how writing in cinema has been basically neglected by film criticism, a fact that, nevertheless, has never been completely accepted by screenwriters. This chapter also analyzes the impact of Pauline Kael’s 1971 book-length essay for the New Yorker on Citizen Kane (1941), where she argued that writer Herman Mankiewicz was the primary author of the screenplay and not the other way around (director Orson Welles) as it was the general assumption of the time. The auteur theory was already fairly established by the 1970s, so when Kael’s essay de-emphasized Welles’ role in the creation of the film, it generated quite a frenzy of discontent among critics and academics (including Andrew Sarris), unlike most of her other writings. Later, Kael ended up publishing her essay in a book, and she included the screenplay with it, which made this a rare type of publication, since most often screenplays remain unanalyzed and unpublished material, making most people unaware of their existence when critics write about film. Kael’s essay, and its “clashing” offspring, at least had the sudden advantage of forcing critics to look at the screenplay when analyzing Citizen Kane. This generated a debate, which in itself signified a major gain for screenwriting, because of the implicit screenwriting function of anonymity in cinema, where the director is considered the author. ❧ Chapter 1 also relates topics such as the unionization of writers in Hollywood, and the issue of “possessive credit” usually appropriated by directors in the form of “a film by” on- screen description so contested by the Writers Guild of America. This chapter examines the history of cinema and offers that cinema may be a historical anomaly among the other performing arts, such as theatre and television, where the writer has always been considered the primary author. Historically, as long as there is a writer, the writer has always been evoked as the author, except in cinema. ❧ Therefore, Chapter 1 discusses and unveils issues of directorial possessive authorship by proposing that the writer (or writers as the case may be) is the primary creator of the story, characters and dialogue, while the director comes second in line, by “adapting” a screenplay that had already been written and imagined by somebody else. Thus the director films a screenplay as his own creation, while it has been not been created by him or her on the page. This proposed writer-based view of authorship in cinema counterpoints the auteur theory argument (with Sarris focusing primarily on Hollywood directors as auteurs) by proposing that the writer is the one who creates and envisions the film first – not the director (who comes in later). Thus, the writer is nearly always the one who creates and builds the material first, unless the director also writes her or his own material. In which case, such writer-director should clearly be thought of as an auteur, but only insofar as the film is written and directed by the same person. ❧ Chapters 2 and 3 complement Chapter 1 with two contemporary case studies. Two unpublished screenplays from the 1990s are analyzed: one screenplay by screenwriter Caroline Thompson (for film Edward Scissorhands, 1990), and another screenplay by writer-director Allison Anders (for film Grace of My Heart, 1996). Passages from both screenplays are cited and examined in each chapter. Because of the screenwriting positioning for female authors within Hollywood, the issue of being an “outsider” from within the system is largely evoked in Anders’ film Grace of My Heart, where the trajectory of the songwriter and aspiring singer protagonist parallels the auteur struggles for female writers who aspire to being one day the complete auteur of their own work. In Edward Scissorhands – merging modern and fairytale symbolic elements – Thompson portrays Edward, the protagonist, as the “outsider artist” dislocated to an equivalent feminine position within the home sphere. Feeling excluded in his physical appearance, and castrated in his dreams of belonging to the real world, which is located evidently outside of his exotic castle, Edward sublimates all his energy into creating art, all the more removed even from the home sphere where he has been initially sheltered. Although Edward never gives up on making his sculptures, his work never becomes exactly visible either. ❧ Therefore, the individual chapter analysis of each of these two screenplays, Edward Scissorhands and Grace of My Heart, can be read from a feminine marker of the screenwriter as an outsider from within the Hollywood system, serving as a double layer and a function of anonymity for female authors in Hollywood. As I have attempted to demonstrate, citing from both screenplays and their production history, both films have creatively originated in writing and from the screenplay first – in other words: in the mind of the writer, as the intellectual and imaginative creator, who sets up the story through its authorship roots. In the case of Allison Anders, a complete auteur in the sense that she writes and directs her own material, she was keenly able to tap into the collective unconscious (so to speak) of frustrated writers who have auteuristic aspirations, but feel that they have to adjust to the way the entertainment business works with its division of labor. In the case of screenwriter Caroline Thompson, not a “complete” auteur as Anders (at least not in the case of the film Edward Scissorhands), but still the creator of her own screenplay worldview, the isolated artist depicted through the figure of Edward remains even more secluded than any of the characters in Anders’ film. The artist at heart is thus typecast as an “outsider” from the beginning. As I have attempted to make evident, both stories and screenplays reflect, mirror, and bring to light the notion of the double function of anonymity in Hollywood for female authors