Closet screenplay
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Related to closet drama, a closet screenplay is a screenplay intended not to be produced/performed but instead to be read by a solitary reader or, sometimes, out loud in a small group.
While any published, or simply read, screenplay might reasonably be considered a "closet screenplay," twentieth and twenty-first century Japanese and Western writers have created a handful of filmscripts expressly intended to be read rather than produced/performed. This class of prose fiction written in screenplay form is perhaps the most precise example of the closet screenplay.
This genre is sometimes referred to using a romanized Japanese neologism: "Lesescenario (レーゼシナリオ)" or, following Hepburn’s romanization of Japanese, sometimes “Rezeshinario.” A portmanteau of the German word Lesedrama ("read drama") and the English word scenario, this term simply means "closet scenario," or, by extension, "closet screenplay."[1]
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[edit] Critical interest
Brian Norman, an assistant professor at Idaho State University, called James Baldwin's One Day When I Was Lost a "closet screenplay."[2] The screenplay One Day When I Was Lost was written for a project to produce a movie, but the project suffered a setback. After that, the script was published as a literary work.
In his article "Production's 'dubious advantage': Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer's riposte"[3], Quimby Melton outlines the history of the Lesescenario form, situates the genre in a historical literary context by drawing parallels between it and Western "closet drama," and argues we might consider certain instances of closet drama proto-screenplays. The article also argues that writing these sorts of "readerly" performance texts is essentially an act of subversion whereby (screen)writers work in a performance mode only to intentionally bypass production and, thereby, (re)assert narrative representation's textual primacy and (re)claim a direct (re)connection with their audience.
[edit] Examples
- Asakusa Park, The Life of a Stupid Man, Shadow, and Temptation (by Ryunosuke Akutagawa)
- Divine Comedy (by Haruhiko Arai, based on Kyojin Onishi's novel of the same name)
- One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X (by James Baldwin)
- The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (by William S. Burroughs)
- Secrets on the Island (by Louis-Ferdinand Céline)
- Negrophobia (by Darius James [aka Dr. Snakeskin])
- The Escape of Mr. McKinley (by Leonid Leonov)
- The Birth of the Emperor/Record of Ancient Matters (by Hideo Osabe)
- Reality Is What You Can Get Away With and The Walls Came Tumbling Down (by Robert Anton Wilson）
[edit] References
- ^ Sanseido's Concise Dictionary of Katakana Words. Tokyo, Sanseido, 1994
- ^ Norman, Brian. “Reading a ‘Closet Screenplay’: Hollywood, James Baldwin’s Malcolms, and the Threat of Historical Irrelevance." African American Review 39.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2005): 10-18.[1]
- ^ Melton, Quimby. January 2010. "Production's 'dubious advantage': Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer's riposte." SCRIPT 1.1. http://scriptjournal.studiohyperset.com/issues/1.1/productions-dubious-advantage.php (accessed November 21, 2009) [2]
[edit] External links
- Akutagawa’s Asakusa, Asakusa Park (Trans. Seiji M. Lippit. nycBigCityLit.com, February 2004. http://www.nycbigcitylit.com/feb2004/contents/longerdraughts.html [10 May 2009]).
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Secrets dans l'îsle (Trans. Mark Spitzer. Cipher Journal, n.d. http://www.cipherjournal.com/html/celine.html [10 May 2009]).
- Seiji M. Lippit, “The Disintegrating Machinery of the Modern: Akutagawa Ryunosuke's Late Writings” (Journal of Asian Studies[3] 58:1 [February 1999]: 27-50).
- David Peace, “Last words” (The Guardian, 8 September 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/sep/08/featuresreviews.guardianreview13 [10 May 2009]).
