So it’s the end of Week 2 of quarantine in Romania and the end of Week 4 of the Masters course in screenwriting. Pre-production on the TV commercial I’m working on is going well but typically, after a very quiet year, the buses are starting to line up.

I went into the week planning to do some serious catching up on Week 2 and 3 coursework, which began with turning my premise into an outline, discussing Maras’s thoughts on Auteur Theory and feeding back on classmates short film outlines, even though they’ve moved on and are in Week 4. I’m determined to do everything that’s asked of me, even though giving feedback at this stage will be akin to talking to an empty room…hello? Anyone?

Then of course two more potential jobs came along and I’ve spent most of the week writing treatments for an Irish supermarket and a global travel agent. It’s not a great excuse – the dogs eaten my homework would be preferable – but it’s the truth.

The time that I have spent on coursework I’ve found tough but enjoyable. I’m still trying to crack my Wild West short film outline. Mainly because I have a theme, I have a setting and I have a character, but I don’t yet have the killer story with a great ending to explore those three things. At the moment I’m still going through different ‘what if’s’ waiting for inspiration to strike. I know from the day job you can’t force inspiration and you sometimes have to relax and trust that it’s in you somewhere and the process will let it out. But screenwriting is very different to directing commercials and it’s made me very aware that I don’t know what my screenwriting ‘process’ is? I’m hoping that by the end of this course in 2 years I’ll have a better idea.

So questions of the week are…what precisely constitutes a script? What does the role of screenwriter involve and what’s it’s place in society?

The text this week was on Auteur Theory which I found a little arduous. I’d forgotten how dense and un-reader friendly some academic texts can be. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked in advertising for too long but my reaction was to slightly recoil from it as many of the suppositions seem to be from people more interested in commentary and theory than in real world practice.

Born from my modest experience making films and adverts I subscribe to the school of thought of script as blue print. It’s the starting point, the launch pad, the seed, from which a film is grown. It is unarguably a valuable work of creative expression, but unless the writers aim is for it to live on a shelf and never be made, it’s an incomplete work or as Paul Schrader described it, an “invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.”

Recognising and accepting that seems to me to be part of the job of being a screenwriter. If the writer is looking for more ownership or recognition, then perhaps they should be writing novels where they can claim sole authorship. As for how society regards screenplays? I think the screenplay is seen as an incomplete work and really only of interest to cinephiles. It that respect it’s also definitely not revered in the same way a play can be, although perhaps that is due more to the film industries chosen structure of script ownership. If a script could be made by whomever wishes, that would certainly place scripts in a very different light…