From the Hollywood Paradigm to the Proppian Plot Genotype

Long dominated by the Hollywood memoir and the “how-to” manual, the art of the Anglo-American film screenplay has a relatively brief academic history.1 In Script Culture and the American Screenplay (2008), Kevin Alexander Boon argues: “Literary scholarship, while fully absorbed with drama, ignored the screenplay, and film studies, though aware of the screenplay as an interstitial cog in the filmmaking process, only occasionally cast a critical eye toward the written text, which had been the controlling narrative voice in most contemporary American film production for nearly a century.”2 The reasons for this neglect are not hard to discover. Unlike film, the drama of the theatre has strong historical ties to the university, with an academic pedigree defined by Aristotle’s Poetics and the art of William Shakespeare. In contrast, the beginnings of cinematic art and the film screenplay are somewhat shabby. Originating in the peep shows and nickelodeons at the turn of the twentieth century, the cinema, despite its rapid rise to financial importance, was long kept at arm’s length by the academy.3