From Pinewood to Hollywood: British Filmmakers in American Cinema

在电影/屏幕研究的更广泛范围内的剧本创作研究一直是一个被忽视的研究领域。外国作家和电影制片人的作用更不受关注，特别是来自英国的作家和电影制片人，他们构成了另一批从业者，这些从业者以前从未被认为是好莱坞重要和有影响力的群体。强调这个项目的研究问题将集中在整个电影过程中的编剧（S）的发展，意识形态和创造性的作用，并在美国电影史上的一个重要的三十五年期间的过程。在电影剧本创作作为一种学术研究被处理的地方，方法论的方法倾向于让导演们对文本和产品的所有权和责任进行辩论。这项工作确实将承认和参与各种各样的作者奖学金正在电影研究社区。但这也是一个批判性的审视，涉及到接受和英国电影制片人的作品在制片厂和观众层面上的看法，涉及到星星研究和英国艺术家之间的写作、表演和导演路线的联系，涉及到后结构主义和与通过电影文本产生的权力结构相关的意义语言，以及后福特主义资本主义的关键理论链，编剧们在好莱坞历史上不可或缺的制作过程。该项目将利用来自英国和美国的采访和档案文件等主要原始材料，从艺术和政治角度阐述英国编剧对美国电影文化的作用和巨大贡献。研究的框架将不仅考虑文本的作者身份问题，而且考虑工作室系统的经济和社会结构问题。基于这最后一点所提出的问题，研究的第二部分是研究在工作室系统内工作的跨国从业者的理论背景、作用和主要特征。电影剧本创作的历史，就像他们一样，往往集中在剧作家，记者和类似的人内部迁移到好莱坞的时期，他们以前通常从未在电影中工作过。理查德·科利斯（Richard Corliss）、汤姆·斯坦普尔（Tom Stempel）和帕特·麦吉利根（Pat McGilligan）的作品都在不同程度上令人钦佩地调查了这些移民非裔美国人群体，以及他们来到好莱坞电影公司并为之工作的原因。然而，没有人考虑过移民电影制片人（作家或作家/导演）从美国境外搬到好莱坞的作用和重要性，以及他们的举动和对主题的关注的关键和意识形态借口。这里的研究将断言，英国电影制片人带来了，并将继续带来，特定的社会文化，历史和政治思想，这些思想已经转化为好莱坞系统范围内的交替和动态文本。此外，最后，该项目打算专门侧重于跨-通过调查英国编剧和作家/导演，从世纪早期到20世纪60年代中期，他们前往洛杉矶，并在那里度过了他们的大部分工作生活。简而言之，从松林到好莱坞打算讲述一个被忽视的权力关系，工作室政治和文化映射的故事，从方法论上论证了英国对美国电影的影响，但特别是在编剧界。

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.