From Pinewood to Hollywood: British Filmmakers in American Cinema

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The study of screenwriting within the wider confines of film/screen studies has been a constantly neglected area of investigation. Of even less focus has been the role of foreign writers and filmmakers, particularly from Britain, who have constituted another raft of practitioners never before considered as an important and influential community in Hollywood. The research questions underscoring this project will focus on the developmental, ideological and creative role of the screenwriter(s) in the whole cinematic process, and over the course of a vital thirty-five year period in American film history. Where screenwriting has been tackled as a scholarly investigation, the methodological approach has tended to privilege auteurist debates over ownership and responsibility for texts and product. This work will indeed recognise and engage with the wide variety of authorial scholarship going on in the film studies community. But it is a critical examination also concerned with reception and the way British filmmakers' work was regarded at a studio and audience level, with star studies and the connection across writing, acting and directing lines between British artists, with post-structuralism and the language of meaning related to power structures that have been generated through cinematic texts, and with key theoretical strands of post-Fordist capitalist, production processes that screenwriters have been integral to in Hollywood's history. Using primary source material such as interviews and archive papers from both the UK and America, the project will exemplify the role and the immense contribution of British screenwriters in artistic and political terms to American film culture. The framework for the research will consider questions not just of the authorship of texts, but of the economic and social fabric of the studio system as well. Drawing upon the issues raised by this last point, the second strand of investigation in the research is to examine the theoretical context, role and principal features of trans-national practitioners working within the studio system. Histories of screenwriting, such as they are, tend to focus on periods of internal migration to Hollywood by playwrights, journalists and the like who often had never worked in film before. Works by Richard Corliss, Tom Stempel and Pat McGilligan have admirably investigated to varying degrees these groups of migrant scenarists and the reasons for their arrival in, and work for, the Hollywood studios. None, however, have considered the role and importance of immigrant filmmakers (writers or writer/directors) moving to Hollywood from outside of the United States and the critical and ideological pretext of their move and concerns with subject matter. The research here will assert that British filmmakers have brought, and continue to bring, particular socio-cultural, historical and political ideas with them that have translated into alternate, and dynamic texts within the confines of the Hollywood system.Additionally, and finally, the project intends to focus exclusively upon the trans-national and transatlantic mapping of Hollywood's screenwriting history in its early studio years by investigating British screenwriters and writer/directors who, from the early twentieth century to the mid-1960s, travelled to, and spent much of their working life in Los Angeles. In short, From Pinewood to Hollywood intends to tell a neglected tale of power relations, studio politics, and cultural mapping that methodologically argues for an acute British influence in American film in general, but within the screenwriting fraternity in particular.