Theorizing screenwriting as creative labour
ANALYSING TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF WITHIN SCREENWRITING LABOUR
The material and frequently brutal conditions of the screenwriting labour market have profound effects on how screenwriters them-selves function – their career trajectories, their creative and craft practices, their daily working lives and their self-perceptions are shaped by these specific dynamics of cultural production. The key question examined here is: what particular mechanisms of screen-writing labour and ‘technologies of the self’ are mobilized within screenwriting labour practices in order for writers to at least survive and perhaps prosper within this labour market and how do these both marginalize and empower screenwriters? Nikolas Rose empha-sizes this ‘double bind’, writing that modern power is exercised by both producing individual selves and constraining individuality (see Rimke 2000: 72). By way of conclusion, I offer a few preliminary thoughts on the areas in which disciplinary techniques and ‘tech-nologies of the self’ mobilized within screenwriting labour are visible and, using a reinvigorated theoretical framework, can be empirically investigated and analysed.20
In particular, certain features of the production of screenplays strike me as pivotal mechanisms in the dialectical process of the production and constraint of screenwriting labour in both historical and contem-porary terms. Firstly, the fairly rigid structure of mainstream screen-plays arguably acts as a set of coercive tools and sets standards and expectations within the industry. These rigidities are then perpetuated within ‘how-to’ screenwriting manuals, screenwriting courses and film and television commissioning and funding bodies.21 Secondly, the encouragement (usually by producers, studio bosses, agents and so on) of disinvestment in the screenwriters’ own work through concrete
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39 analysis of the specific discourses of creativity in the position of (as Macdonald, ready and willing to make these changes and rewrite scenes or whole scripts or be summarily fired or serially with many writers on one project and then often fed into complex credit arbitration processes that encourage intense competition between
practices such as ‘inequitable collaboration’22 which dilutes the author-ity of the screenwriter as a primary creative input and therefore affects the ability of the screenwriter to maintain control of their own work.
Also, the entrepreneurial mechanisms that require constant network-ing, pitchnetwork-ing, negotiation and meeting-taking are all practices that can discourage screenwriters in their pursuit of secure and rewarding work or force them to ‘play the game’ (often to their detriment) within a corporate cultural production system. All these factors are experienced by screenwriters at the deepest levels of the self – ‘how-to’ screenwrit-ing manuals that encourage writers to put their hearts and souls into their writing then, on the following pages, remind writers to subject and adapt those screenwriting selves to the everyday vicissitudes and brutalities of the industry.
However, all this does not preclude the very real benefits that screenwriting labour provides and the creative and artistic, as well as economic, rewards which the work offers. As Caldwell writes in relation to the resilience of the film and television production indus-tries and workers, ‘reflexivity operates as a creative process involving human agency and critical competence at the local cultural level as much as a discursive process establishing power at the broader social level’ (2008: 33). Screenwriters are able to exercise creative autonomy and freedom not possible for many other film production workers;
they can and do experience fruitful collaborations with fellow creatives and may be rewarded with both high remuneration and also critical rewards and recognition. It is this rich mix of individualization and col-laboration, constraint and reward, exploitation and autonomy within this work that an examination of screenwriting as creative labour can illuminate.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Conor, B. (2010), ‘‘Everybody’s a Writer’ Theorizing screenwriting as creative labour’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 27–43, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.27/1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Bridget Conor is a Ph.D. candidate in the media and communication stud-ies department of Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her disserta-tion is a critical analysis of screenwriting as creative labour in the British
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43 and North American film industries. She is also a lecturer in media and
film theory in the UK. Previously, Bridget taught and studied in Auckland, New Zealand, her research focusing on the globalisation of the New Zealand film industry.
Contact: Goldsmiths College, 8 Lewisham Way, New Cross London, SE14 6NW.
E-mail: [email protected]
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