Screenplays as literature?

[My2cents]

Screen are literature, suffereing editing is commun in books and autorship is irrelevant.

Yeah, in a perfect world.

[JCamilo]

In a normal world. Authorship is a modern invention and obviously suffering a big down with the e-book. Noboby knows who wrote the bible, the first faery tales, etc. Autorship or several authors is just normal.

Obviously, one reason you pointed can affect the publishing: scripts do not translate well without audio-visual references. So, their reading for enjoyment can a pain in the ***. But the reason why literature looks down to cinema (not script) is just that literature looks down to anything. Politically wise, language - text - speech - is more powerful than many other languages, so literature adquired a status which the newborn (100 years or so is just too little time) art cann't fight. Drama, Music, painting can "swallow" the pride due their age, but overall, literature imposes itself.

[stlukesguild]

Well, I would go so far as to say not a single movie - or maybe only a very select few can compare to canonized literature.

Little Hans talking out his backside again ... and he wonders why nothing he has to say is taken at all seriously. This sounds like the same sort of lame criticism directed at the early novels by champions of "serious literature" (ie. poetry).

Film is a whole different art form unto itself... as is opera... painting... sculpture. Any one of these may employ literary or narrative elements, but they are not literature and I truly cannot understand the continual obsession with dissecting such art forms into parts. The libretto of an opera or the screen play of a film is but one element of the whole. The music, the costumes, the stage sets, the lighting... all the visual elements are equally important and to suggest that the finest films (let alone the finest operas, paintings, etc...) cannot hold their own along side the finest works of literature is simply inane. Of course one expects individuals who have invested a degree of effort in one artistic genre to believe that for them no other art form speaks quite as deeply... but I don't know that many would take it to the point of suggesting that other art forms are somehow inherently inferior to their personal art of choice.

[stlukesguild]

Screenplays are literature. End of story. Only in a very few instances, however, are they truly great literature. In part, I think this is due to the strengths of film as a media. Unlike a stage play, film allows for an endless array of special effects and visuals, music, sound effects, close ups of actors and actresses, etc... all of which go toward conveying the overall whole. Most playwrights do not have access to as many visual and auditory effects (at least not until more recently) as the filmmaker and as such they are far more reliant upon the actual text... the spoken dialog... to carry the whole play. By way of comparison, one might look at a film like Streetcar Named Desire based upon Williams play and compare the importance of dialog vs a movie such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, where we go long stretches without any dialog and the visuals, sound, music, and action carry the film.

[My2cents]

In a normal world. Authorship is a modern invention and obviously suffering a big down with the e-book. Noboby knows who wrote the bible, the first faery tales, etc. Autorship or several authors is just normal.

Obviously, one reason you pointed can affect the publishing: scripts do not translate well without audio-visual references. So, their reading for enjoyment can a pain in the ***. But the reason why literature looks down to cinema (not script) is just that literature looks down to anything. Politically wise, language - text - speech - is more powerful than many other languages, so literature adquired a status which the newborn (100 years or so is just too little time) art cann't fight. Drama, Music, painting can "swallow" the pride due their age, but overall, literature imposes itself.

I see what you're saying about authorship and all -- and I agree.

But as to literature looking down on cinema, it's probably more accurate to say that non-writers, the director and the producer, have a better understanding of how words translate visually so that literature looking down on cinema is actually non-writers who know more about movie writing taking to task "writers" who know how to write for the page but hardly for the screen.

[JCamilo]

Yes, the writting is hardly a reading experience that we are used. But this happens wtih great writers too, at least those I read (Borges or for example, the script of 2001). The best script I read was Monty Python and the Holy Grail, still funny. But watching the movie before hand helped.