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Drawing on internal studio correspondence, multiple screenplay drafts and the final film, this essay reconstructs the production history of Cornered to explore the ways in which Scott both compromised with and challenged the studios expectations and interventions. I argue that although Ceplair and Englund are correct in their assessment that studio meddling shaped the films political content in significant ways, Scotts complex negotiations during the films production ensured that Cornered remained a powerfully anti-fascist film.
Having returned to the United States to work on his screenplay about Malcolm X, James Baldwin was interviewed for the Los Angeles Free Press in 1968. The interview offers a rare and valuable glimpse of Baldwin’s style of engagement with a new generation of radical Black activists whose current vogue Baldwin understood as valuable, whose new appraisal of history Baldwin had both helped to create and needed to learn from, and whose dangerous predicament Baldwin recognized and felt partly responsible for. Ed Pavlić provides a contextual and historical introduction to that interview, which is reproduced here with permission from the Free Press.
James Baldwin was a vocal critic of Hollywood, but he was also a cinephile, and his critique of film was not so much of the medium itself, but of the uses to which it was put. Baldwin saw in film the chance to transform both politics and art—if only film could be transformed itself. This essay blends readings of archival materials, literature, film, and print culture to examine three distinct modes in Baldwin’s ongoing quest to revolutionize film. First, I argue, literature served as a key site to practice being a filmmaker, as Baldwin adapted cinematic grammars in his fiction and frequently penned scenes of filmgoing in which he could, in effect, direct his own movies. Secondly, I show that starting in the 1960s, Baldwin took a more direct route to making movies, as he composed screenplays, formed several production companies, and attempted to work in both Hollywood and the independent film scene in Europe. Finally, I explore how Baldwin sought to change cinema as a performer himself, in particular during his collaboration on Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley’s documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982). This little-known film follows Baldwin as he revisits key sites from the civil rights movement and reconnects with activist friends as he endeavors to construct a revisionist history of race in America and to develop a media practice capable of honoring Black communities.
The ten-reel production showed the German invasion of Belgium, the resulting famine, and the efforts of the Commission for Relief in Belgium to feed the population. It was never released and has since been lost to history, but one of its screenplays remains in the Hoover archives ( Schwartz, 2019 ). 2 Also known as Famine in Russia. Various footages of this film exist. The ICRC audiovisual archives have a version that combines the SCF film with another Soviet movie about the famine. 3 Although this paper does not focus on movies produced by the
This book recognises the importance of the playwright and The Spanish Tragedy for the development of early modern theatre and beyond. It aims to familiarise readers with the play which, literally, set the stage for the Elizabethan revenge tragedy boom. The book revisits theories of revenge, and examines the play's latest editions, stage productions and screenplay adaptations. It takes the reader on a rewarding journey from Kyd's Proserpine to William Shakespeare's Prospero and brings personal editorial accounts on what it means to edit The Spanish Tragedy in the third millennium. The book argues that the lasting position of The Spanish Tragedy in the Low Countries is of interest from a politico-religious perspective. It advocates a shift in the critical approaches to The Spanish Tragedy, away 'from debating whether the play reflects Habsburg Spain or Renaissance Italy to considering how it portrays Mediterranean culture in relation to early modern England and its desire to play a role in the European colonial expansion'. The book further argues that The Spanish Tragedy, which has been regarded primarily as a 'blood and guts' revenge tragedy, was actually written to promote the Protestant politico-religious ethos, represented by Leicester, against Catholic Babylon/Spain under Philip II. Kyd combines aspects of the anti-Leicester tradition with elements of the Spanish Black Legend as expressed in Antonio Pérez's Las Relaciones in order to depict Spain under Philip II as the evil enemy of Protestant England.
This book aims to demystify the place and power of the screenwriter within French film production, in creative and artistic terms, but also in the context of film criticism and film discourse more generally, whether that be in mainstream, popular or auteur cinema. Critical discourses on French cinema have tended to consider words to be of secondary importance to the image, regarding screenwriters as either over-dominant or completely eclipsed. The reality is, of course, that screenwriting has remained an integral part of the industry since the coming of sound. This book takes a number of key figures in the history of French screenwriting from the transition to sound to the present day, in order to explore the shifting function and position of screenwriters and major trends in screenwriting practice. It considers the industrial categorisation of screenwriting as adaptation, script development and dialogue writing, and explores creative practices around these three specialist areas – which are rarely as clearly defined as film credits might have us believe. It addresses and questions the myths that have emerged around certain writers in critical discourses, as well as the narrative mythologies that these writers have helped to shape in their films: from fatalism and the working-class (anti)hero to the small-minded petit bourgeois; from the neurotic protagonist to the naive fool of comedy. In doing so, it also reflects on the methodological challenges of screenwriting research, and the opportunities opened up by shedding light on these frequently neglected figures.
: Well, then. And how do I begin? You are very attractive. Most attractive. 1 So begins Ingmar Bergman’s screenplay Trolösa ( Faithless , directed by Liv Ullmann, 2000). This dialogue, which is a prologue to the story, is a playful depiction of the author’s creative process in developing a fictional character. Step by step, ‘the voice’ in the scene is given a body, name, and characteristics. In time, she becomes the character named Marianne. How faithfully does this scene
numerous correspondences can be traced throughout their films, as well as with other screewriting practices discussed in this volume. Sometimes associated with French comédie d’auteur , a sub-genre identified by Raphaelle Moine (2005: 223–32), 1 and autofictional narratives, they both use personal experience as prime material to nourish their screenplays and they write with regular co-writers; Agnès de
1957 with the American horror and fantasy writer Richard Matheson, who was responsible for writing the novel in the first place, coming to Britain to prepare a screenplay adaptation for Hammer Films. Hammer had just had a notable success with its first colour gothic horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957), which starred Peter Cushing as the scientist and featured a then unknown Christopher Lee as the creature, and the company already had Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958), its next
BBC’s ‘Third Programme’ in 1965. In the words of John Hall, who interviewed the author for a Guardian profile in 1970, Hines approached the play ‘with no medium in mind, and at epic length’.14 Although traces of the 4 Barry Hines Beckettian tenor of Billy’s Last Stand are evident in some of Hines’s later works, including his screenplays for the television film Two Men from Derby (1976) – which he claimed to be the favourite of all his w orks – and the unproduced Fun City of the mid-1980s, Hines developed what would become his trademark style of poetic