One of the most common denouncements for a film is “There was no script”. Casual viewers say it all the time — witness the news-channel coverage of people exiting movie halls on Fridays, wiping the popcorn kernels off their shirts, looking intently into the camera and going “Gaane acche thay, par koi story nahin thi”. So do professional writers: most recently, I was so flabbergasted by the sketchiness of the second half of Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar that I wondered if someone had lost the only copy of the screenplay midway through shooting and if the crew had been forced to ad-lib the rest of the film.
But of course, everyone knows that even the most shoddily written, amateurishly executed movies do have hardbound screenplays — often multiple drafts put together by a number of people (in conjunction or at different times). This is something we take for granted today. And so, it’s instructive to read about the early days of Hollywood in Marc Norman’s book What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting.
Norman is an Oscar-winning screenwriter himself and he obviously went to a writing school that taught its students “Begin colourfully. Pull your readers in right from the first sentence”, because his book opens with the words “It’s July 1914, and here’s
D W Griffith, striding across the Hollywood Hills”. The Great War began that same month but Norman makes no reference to it, and I’m fairly sure the single-minded Griffith wasn’t much concerned with it either. The sentence that concludes this section reads: “America’s greatest director is making the greatest American film to date, and there’s no screenplay.”
The “greatest American film” is Griffith’s epic The Birth of a Nation, unprecedented in the scale of its ambition and revolutionary for the way it helped develop the medium’s grammar and brought it new respectability. But as Norman tells us, The Birth of the Nation, while based on a popular novel titled The Clansman, never had an actual script. One of Griffith’s associates may have prepared a rough scene break-up of some sort, but the director essentially carried the structure of the film in his head; camera angles, movements and gestures were improvised on the set. Karl Brown, an assistant cameraman who made notes about the shooting, was dismayed by the apparent shabbiness of some of the shooting decisions (“Nothing seemed to go together, nothing seemed to fit...I could not see how that mixed-up jumble of unrelated bits and pieces of action could ever be made into anything”) but like everyone else he was blown away by what finally unfolded on the screen.
Norman’s book contains much interesting history and trivia from those years. It chronicles the progression from the earliest “films” — 30-second shots of waves lashing a beach or trains pulling in at a station that startled their first audiences but soon lost novelty value, creating the need for proper stories to be told — to puerile narratives inspired by the cheaper newspaper comics, and thence to the radical idea of paying people to write scenarios in advance. Even copyright wasn’t an issue and filmmakers freely dipped into whatever material was available — until 1907, when the estate of author Lew Wallace sued the makers of Ben Hur (a version made nearly 20 years before Charlton Heston was born) and opened the gates for new standards of professionalism.
This is an entertaining account of a period that is in some ways as distant and unfathomable for a modern movie-buff as the Epic of Gilgamesh would be for a contemporary novel-reader. But some things don’t change. Who would deny that it’s just as possible to make a thoroughly incoherent film today as it was a century ago? The evidence is all around us.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer