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Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Studio Hyperset — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 16:44:35 -0000

Thank you for the update, @twitter-86471704! I've updated the bibliography, and if you'd ever like to run this article in SCRIPT -- in addition to or instead of your blog -- let me know.

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

冷泉科理雄 — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 12:06:20 -0000

Hello, SCRIPT-journal. A website including the webpage I wrote about the scenario of Tanizaki's was suddenly closed without informing me of that. I have just reopened it on an entry in my shadow's blog. Here it is. ( http://ameblo.jp/maruki/entry-... )

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 19:09:56 -0000

As part of his thesis research into the Surrealist Lesescenario sub-cannon, Nicholas Roth, a PhD candidate at Cornell U, recently brought Benjamin Fondane's closet scripts to my attention.

- Paupières mûres (Eyes Wide Open). In Trois scénarii: Cinépoèmes (Robert Baze, 1928).
- Barre fixe (Horizontal Bar). In Trois scénarii: Cinépoèmes (Robert Baze, 1928).
- Mtasipoj. In Trois scénarii: Cinépoèmes (Robert Baze, 1928).

Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library maintains a digital version of this text in its online image database (http://goo.gl/3VwNm [accessed 24 March 2012]). (See item #1215303.)

Re: Chewed 05 & 10 and Other Selected Work

karl kempton — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 06:37:27 -0000

Thanks!

How do i reach you? I uplodaded the last section today, October 1st.

Karl

Re: Chewed 05 & 10 and Other Selected Work

Millennium Twain — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:58:26 -0000

Haku Karl!

I just posted your "Yak Tityu Tityu" story from the SloCoast Journal on Matilija Megaliths, which star Ancestor Effigy Park. I hope you will come and walk with me and expand the chorus of todas las cosas, our spirit family, returning ...

Canto Ko'o'shup, volver ...

Millennium

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 19:54:10 -0000

@Lesescenario recently brought this closet screenplay to my attention:

- Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, 月の囁き (Whispering Moon). 現代 (Gendai) (1921).

I'm afraid neither he nor I know the specific issue in which Tanizaki's Lesescenario appears. According to these Worldcat entries, bits and pieces of the periodical appear in various US research collections:

- http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/41204302 (accessed 18 September 2011).
- http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53917266 (accessed 18 September 2011).

If anyone investigates the topic further, and can help flush out the publication data, please post a comment below.

@Lesescenario also provides the following resources. The latter is his own response to Whispers:

- "月の囁き" ("Whispering Moon"), Wikipedia (31 August 2011). http://goo.gl/SrMtP (Japanese) / http://goo.gl/ApgnG (English) (accessed 18 September 2011).

- "谷崎潤一郎の「月の囁き」" ("Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 'Whispering Moon'"), Texpo (n.d.). http://texpo.jp/texpo/disp/40923 (Japanese/English) (accessed 18 September 2011).

Re: VVIISSIIOONNS and Other Selected Work

richard kostelanetz — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:46:55 -0000

Where in Florida are you, Andrew? Have we met? Corresponded? Bob Grumman recommends.

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:53:12 -0000

Relevant to Thomas' Lesescenarios, as well as the interests of the preceding article, Jacob Korg makes the following point in his 1953 review of The Doctor and the Devils ("Thriller into Art," The Nation [New York] [14 November 1953]: 413):

"Mr. Thomas's scenario suggests that the film script may have excellent possibilities as reading matter. In a literary form where everything must be visible or audible the author must supply his reader with vivid experiences, not with explanations of what he means to say. In addition, there is more resemblance between Mr. Thomas's old medium of poetry and his new one than might first be supposed, for movies, while essentially dramatic, are fluid and hypnotic enough to lend themselves to the poetic method of expressing ideas by means of images in suggestive combinations."

I have a PDF copy of this article. Requests for it -- for personal, non-commercial use -- can be submitted here: http://www.google.com/profiles/oqmelton#contact

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 01:14:02 -0000

Based on an email conversation with Nia Mai Daniel at the National Library of Wales, the NLW holds the 1947-48 typescript of The Shadowless Man which has "two holograph revisions in pencil (NLW MS 19979A)."

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 00:08:18 -0000

Based on email converstions with Nia Mai Daniel at the National Library of Wales and Jeff Towns of the Dylan Thomas bookstore in Swansea, Suffer Little Children was published in Christopher Mark Thomas' Ph.D thesis "The Film Scripts of Dylan Thomas" (University of Liverpool, 1997).

According to Towns, Thomas publishes the full script "as an appendix" and "discovered [it] in the holdings of Lockwood Library at the University of Buffalo, NY."

Re: On the Codex Seraphinianus

Jenya G — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:08:26 -0000

Very interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 04:26:46 -0000

(cont'd)

Dylan's Lesescenarios follow:

- The Unconquerable People. Dylan Thomas: The Complete Screenplays (Ed. John Ackerman. Applause, 1995).

Dylan wrote this script in 1944 and sent it to the British writer/director/producer Donald Taylor. As Ackerman notes, for whatever reason, "No film was made" (52), nor was the script published in Dylan's lifetime.

- The Doctor and the Devils. Dent, 1953.

Like The Escape of Mr. McKinley, Dylan's most self-aware Lesescenario was filmed long after the script was written as a readerly script. Doctor was produced over three decades after it was published, in 1985 by Brooksfilms and Twentieth Century Fox, and starred Timothy Dalton, Jonathan Pryce, and the model Twiggy. Ackerman claims Doctor was "the first screenplay to be published as a book before its film production" (xxvi), as does Donald Taylor in the first edition's introduction. As "Production's 'dubious advantage'" illustrates, this assertion is decidedly debatable, as is Taylor's claim that "literary quality" is "unusual in the [screenplay] medium" (Donald Taylor, "The Story of the Film," The Doctor and the Devils, 135).

- Rebecca's Daughters. Little, Brown, 1965.

This script was also eventually produced, in a 1992 film starring Peter O'Toole.

- The Beach of Falesá. Stein and Day, 1963.

- Twenty Years A-Growing. Dent, 1964.

Respective adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1892 story and Maurice O'Sullivan's (Muiris Oacute Suacuteilleabhaacutein) 1933 novel, these unfinished scripts technically violate the Dylan-MacLaren-Ross prescription against adaptation. Nevertheless, no film has ever been made from either script, and whether or not he hoped to sell them for production purposes, Dylan seems to have worked on these without a commission.

Additionally, these two scripts were published as readable texts, albeit a decade after Dylan's death, in what were likely attempts by the publishers to cash in on Dylan's death. Nevertheless, I'm inclined to include these text in the Lesescenario canon for two related reasons: they illustrate Dylan's adaptation techniques and add two adapted closet scripts to the wider canon. The latter's important, at present, considering recent academic attention paid adaptation theory and the popularity of 21st centiry "remix" culture at-large.

- Suffer Little Children.

Ackerman's text publishes an excerpt from this script that the editor titles "Betty London." In the introduction to the excerpt, Ackerman suggests he excerpted "Betty" from a "196-page draft of Suffer Little Children which Dylan Thomas wrote in 1945" (260). Using Google, WorldCat, and the catalogues of institutions with significant Dylan manuscript collections (U Texas' Harry Ransom Center, The National Library of Wales), I'm unable to find an (un)published version of this script. I would reach out to Ackerman directly, to ask where and how he accessed Suffer, but he's recently deceased.

Anyone with information about this script is invited to post a comment below.

- The Shadowless Man. Dylan Thomas: The Complete Screenplays (Ed. John Ackerman. Applause, 1995).

- Me and My Bike. McGraw-Hill, 1965.

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 04:24:07 -0000

(cont'd)

Ackerman takes the second quotation from Bonamy Dobree's review of The Doctor and the Devils (The Spectator, 10 June 1953):

"His adventure in a new form, that of the published film-script before handling ... is extraordinarily powerful, actual as only a poet can make it; and this new form makes us wonder whether this may not be a pointer towards the way novels may be written in future. ... It is written, of course, in film language; we 'dissolve to', the camera 'tracks back', we see someone 'in close up'; but we soon get used to all this, and adapt our imaginations to the whole movement, or the series of disjointed movements which make up the whole. The question arises: Do we need to see it on the film? Perhaps the answer is: We shall not need to see it only when the script is written so well as this one. That will be a rare occurrence, but a master in the art of the novel might well become a master in this new form." (763-64)

In other words, like James Agee and many of the Surrealists, Dylan was acutely interested in writing reader-oriented screenplays and publishing them as a new form of literary expression. I use this spirit, as expressed by the preceding, to justify my assumption that several of Dylan's unsold, unproduced scripts were written as Lesescenarios or, at least, survive as de facto examples of the form, even if they weren't published in Dylan's lifetime and/or explicitly written by Dylan as closet scripts.

Finally, it should be noted that Ackerman's main introduction, as well as his individual script introductions, stand as execellent examples of script-focused, "literary" close readings. As I suggest in "Production's 'dubious advantage,'" and Kevin Alexander Boon suggests in Script Culture, these are fairly rare. Those looking for a methodological touchstone can do no better than Ackerman's text.

(cont'd)

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 04:23:42 -0000

An enthusiastic and prolific scriptwriter, Dylan Thomas wrote dozens of scripts for film and radio productions. Most famous among these is, perhaps, the radio/stage (and later film) drama Under Milk Wood. Thomas' scripts have been collected into two major collections: Dylan Thomas: The Complete Screenplays (Ed. John Ackerman. Applause, 1995) and The Doctor and the Devils and Other Scripts (New Directions, 1966).

There's a good deal of ambiguity surrounding many of these scripts vis-agrave-vis their inclusion in the emerging Lesescenario canon. Most of Dylan's scripts were produced, that is, used to make documentaries, feature films, and other stage/radio dramas. Obviously these, which include the vast majority of the scripts published in the Ackerman text, are not closet scripts. Others, however, are more equivocal.

Labeling the following Dylan scripts Lesescenarios, I've avoided any that were (a) explicitly written for production and (b) produced in Dylan's lifetime. (I outline the importance of the latter below.) For those scripts whose production intentions are unclear, I've relied heavily on the following quotations, both taken from Ackerman's introduction (xxvii-xxviii).

Ackerman takes the first quotation from Julian MacLaren-Ross' Memoirs of the Forties (A. Ross, 1965):

"[Dylan and I] also shared another ambition, which was to write a film script, not a Treatment as the story-form is called, but a complete scenario ready for shooting which would give the ordinary reader an absolute visual impression of the film in words and could be published as a new form of literature. Carl Meyer, the co-author of Caligari and creator of many of the great early German silents, who invented the mobile camera or rather caused it to be moved about, is said to have written such scripts, but neither Dylan nor I could get hold of a script by Meyer, and the only ones we knew which almost succeeded in doing what we had in mind were those printed in The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein.

"The rules we laid down ourselves were that the script had to be an original specially written in this form and not any kind of adaptation, and that actual film production must be possible. Our main obstacle consisted in the camera directions, which if given were apt to look too technical, and if omitted would lose the dramatic impact of, for instance, a sudden large close-up, which Dylan however hoped could be conveyed by one's actual choice of words. In fact we were attempting the well nigh impossible, as anyone who has read the printed versions of Marienbador L'lmmortelle [sic] by Robbe-Grillet will realise, and perhaps Dylan himself in The Doctor and the Devils came as close to it as any writer ever will." (129-30)

(Presumably, MacLaren-Ross is conflating two Alain Robbe-Grillet projects, namely, the films L'Anneacutee derniegravere agrave Marienbad [1961], which Robbe-Grillet wrote, and L'Immortelle [1963], which he wrote and directed.)

(cont'd)

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:37:19 -0000

Graham Greene wrote a number of production-oriented screenplays and film treatments. These are listed in the author's Wikipedia and IMDb entries and discussed -- and, in the case of The Future's in the Air and The New Britain, reprinted -- in Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader (Ed. David Parkinson. Penguin, 1993). However, because of their production focus, I'm reluctant to classify any of these texts as Lesescenarios.

Greene's unproduced "film stories and treatments," as Parkinson labels them, are somewhat more nuanced. However, I'm also reluctant to consider any of them closet screenplays because: (a) Greene didn't write any of them in script form, to be read rather than produced, and, for the most part, (b) these pieces have clear origins as short fiction projects and/or production-oriented commissions.

Both "The Blue Film" and "All But Empty" are, like William Faulkner's "Golden Land" or Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust, stories about film culture rather than Lesecenarios. Moreover, "No Man's Land" was, according to Ian Thomson's Guardian review, "commissioned in 1950 by the film director Carol Reed" ("Review: No Man's Land by Graham Greene," Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/book... [25 December 2005]). While Reed, according to the same review, never actually produced a film based on the treatment, "No Man's Land" was written with an eye toward production and, perhaps more importantly, reads more like a novella than a screenplay.

"The Stranger's Hand" began its life as short fiction, and while it was purchased, and eventually produced, by the Italian Director Mario Soldati (as La mano dello straniero, 1954), Greene ultimately abandoned the treatment Soldati commissioned him to write, turned the production's scriptwriting duties over to Guy Elmes, and served as one of the film's associate producers. Additionally, like "No Man's Land," Greene's residual fragment reads more like short fiction than a screenplay.

One could plausibly consider both "Jim Braddon and the War Criminal" and "Nobody to Blame" Lesescenarios. However, I'm disinclined to accept either as such.

Based on his introduction to The Tenth Man (reprinted in the Parkinson text), Greene wrote both texts as "ideas for films" (667), though, as he notes of "Braddon," "nothing came of it" (667). In this way, these stories are not unlike James Agee's Lesescenarios The House, Man's Fate, and Dedication Day. However, each reads less like a Lesescenario and more like short fiction and a novella, respectively, and Greene notes he wrote "Nobody to Blame," as a production-oriented treatment for the director Alberto Cavalcanti (671).

The style of "Braddon" is very script-like: present tense, paratactic, character and continuity-driven. (Greene even includes a logline.) As such, it reads like Greene's most plausible attempt at a true Lesescenario. However, based on the discussion that precedes it in the Tenth Man introduction, one might reasonably assume Greene wrote the text for MGM. Even if he didn't, it's reasonable to assume he wrote it as some sort of commission with production intent, considering his clear, career-long preference for writing broad-based "film prose" only when directly commissioned to do so by filmmakers and/or other commercial interests.

Re: Chewed 05 & 10 and Other Selected Work

karl kempton — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:09:35 -0000

Hi, Ed: To answer to your question -- yep. Thanks for comments and attention. Warm regards.

Re: Chewed 05 & 10 and Other Selected Work

Ed Varney — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:56:19 -0000

Cool stuff. Are you the Karl Kempton I knew in Vancouver daze? Either way, keep up the good work.

Re: Selected Work

Quimby Melton — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 20:23:19 -0000

Agreed. Carol's work is amazing. #13 -- the Lascaux figures dancing across a partially erased manuscript -- haunts me. ~Q.M., SCRIPTjr.nl editor

Re: Selected Work

Virginia Stetser — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 19:56:25 -0000

Visual Poetry at its best...

Re: Selected Work

márton koppány — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:57:47 -0000

Thank you, Rosaire!

Re: Selected Work

rappel — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:51:07 -0000

It's a pleasure to see so many of these in one place, Maacuterton.

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 03:17:52 -0000

While there have been at least five film versions of Maxim Gorky's play The Lower Depths, including Jean Renoir's 1936 adaptation Les Bas-fonds, Gorky's own adaptation was neither finished nor produced. Instead, it was found among his papers after his death, in 1936, and, in form, favors the Lesescenarios of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

Gorky's Lesescenario was published as Descent to the Lower Depths, in the 1939 edition of Films, immediately before Agee's Man's Fate.

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 06:19:50 -0000

Echoing the Boon epigraph, Agee, in a 1937 application to the Guggenheim Foundation, wrote the following, under the header "Moving picture notes and scenarios":

"Much can be done, good in itself and possibly useful to others, even without a camera and money, in words" (The Collected Short Prose of James Agee. Ed. Robert Fitzgerald. Ballantine, 1970. 164).

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 05:58:14 -0000

The original publication data for Agee's Dedication Day and The House follow. I've also added this information to the Lesescenario Bibliography.

Dedication Day was first published in the April 1946 issue of Dwight Macdonald's journal Politics (April 1946) and was reprinted in the 1948 edition of the annual New Directions anthology New Directions in Prose and Poetry.

The House was first published in Horace Gregory's anthology New Letters in America (Norton, 1937).

Re: Production’s “dubious advantage”: Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer’s riposte

Quimby Melton — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 08:23:33 -0000

I should clarify one point: in section two of Ape and Essence, Huxley only introduces the narrator's monologues and the Belial "semichorus" dialogue with off-set names. He presents other character dialogue in a more customary prose format.

To my eye, this blend of formatting styles -- one script-like, one comfortably novelistic -- heightens the text's sense of genre hybridity.