Great Australian Script
My hero is the dying painter Ingres, found at the age of 87
laboriously copying a portrait by Holbein. When asked what he was doing,
he replied, " I am learning."
Quote:
By Garry Maddox
May 13, 2006
Ditch the Great Australian Novel - now everyone wants to be a screenwriter.
SCREENWRITER LAURA Jones, best known for An Angel at My Table, Oscar and Lucinda and Angela's Ashes, has spent a week chewing over scripts for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
In the bushland surroundings of a Jervis Bay eco-resort last month, she joined the Danish filmmaker behind Italian for Beginners, Lone Scherfig, the American screenwriter of Memoirs of a Geisha, Robin Swicord, and the Australian director of Romper Stomper, Geoffrey Wright, at an intensive workshop for scripts approaching production. Hothousing, it's called. It's one of the ways in which the film industry is responding to concerns that scripts are too often weak or underdeveloped.
Established writers and directors challenge filmmaking teams with questions, exposing the flaws in their screenplays and encouraging solutions. What's it really about? What's getting in the way of the storytelling? Do we really understand the characters? How do they relate to each other? Will the audience know what this scene is about? Who is the audience for the film?
It's all done behind closed doors and is reputedly very emotional at times. "Incredibly intense" and "unbelievably confronting" were descriptions from one participant this year. Jones thought the Aurora workshop, backed by the NSW Film and Television Office, was a positive experience despite the hazardous possibility of what she calls "creative meltdowns".
Along with sending scripts to boot camp, there's a new recognition from government agencies that films have to be developed properly. Unless it's a star-driven blockbuster such as Troy, audiences expect the script to make sense. And in arthouse cinemas, the most successful movies are often the best written.
The harsh reality is that only a small proportion of scripts get made into films. If you include no-budget releases, the Australian industry is producing just 16 to 19 feature films a year. That's well down on the average of 30 in the late 1990s and far below the tax concession-fuelled levels - 45 one year - in the 1980s.
Even so, scores of screenplays - maybe even hundreds - are written every year. It seems virtually everyone who makes a Tropfest short or who graduates from the increasing number of film schools has a feature in development. Then there are the writers who once would have tried the great Australian novel.
laboriously copying a portrait by Holbein. When asked what he was doing,
he replied, " I am learning."


