The Playwright as Filmmaker: History, Theory and Practice

Abstract

This paper summarises my doctoral research into the work of dramatists who became filmmakers – specifically Preston Sturges, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Mamet, and Neil Labute. I began with the hypothesis that there is something distinctive about the work of filmmakers who have a background in writing for text-based theatre, an arena where the authorship is, on the whole, not a vexatious issue, as is the case in commercial cinema. Through case studies involving textual and contextual analyses of their films, i found common threads linking their work, in respect both of their working methods and their approach to text and performance. From this, i evolved a theoretical position involving the development of a tentative ‘dogme’ designed to smooth the path between writing plays and making films, and produced short no-budget videos illustrating it.