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richardmurray

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    In my experience, less than ten percent of the black writers I have talked to throughout my lifetime have read or written a screenplay. The question is why? 
    I do not know exactly, I can not give a roadmap but I have ideas. 
    I will go back... when I was a kid, multiple times my parents took me to see plays. August Wilson, Black theaters around harlem. They never took me to see a white play, defined as a play written by a white person. Sequentially, I saw black art not merely from one perspective. This parallels my constant rant on black fantasy, which sums up to , I was raised with black fantasy so I didn't see King Arthur or Beowulf or disney princesses or saturday morning cartoons as places that needed black fantasy cause I had it in the books in my home. 
    I have the century cycle as part of my book collection. Why did I mention that? Many black people who say they love august wilson don't have his stageplays. August Wilson wrote the plays, in the same way Shakespeare wrote his and yes as a kid I thought of August wilson whenever we read shakespeare in class. My parents have two trains running and some others as singles, which i read during those early years. I have twilight zone scripts, which are,for me, invaluable in seeing technique for writing scripts/screenplays. 
    Now my personal life means nothing to answer the initial question. 
    I restate, why do less than ten percent of the black writers I talked to throughout my life, offline or online, not have read or written a screenplay? 
    I know black writers offline who won awards for their work, made revenue from their work. I have made connections with black writers online who have varying levels of financial return or awards to their quality. 
    I myself prefer writing poetry more than anything else. 
    But, I have written screenplays, read them. 
    Why have so few of my peers? 
    While I ranted/provided background composing this I see two points that are undeniable. 
    1.Screenplays are not finished products and black people in the arts in the USA, don't like that. Ownership is a big cultural idea in the black community in the USA. It stems from centuries of enslavement and nearly to centuries of abuse after enslavement. when an artwork is not finished, it is not owned. And no screenplay is ever finished, it is merely the template, no matter how elegant, for the video recorded interpretation by humans, what is commonly called acting.
    2.Screenplays structure is a thin lattice over anything goes sections. Meaning, outside some basics, the monolog or multilogs , the definition of scenes are open in their definition for screenplays. Education for black people in the USA after the war between the states, ending around ten years,  was wholly funded by whites and mostly trade or skill based in definition. Why ? Cause white religious organizations funded the schools and wanted the bible to be the sole literary device for the black community. On the other side , in the same time period you had the reading schools were all age groups were allowed to learn to read. But, these schools were not interested in forming or creating a alphabet or literature for black people's various dialects of english. These schools were purposed to teach english as accepted by  the white churches that funded most of them, who desired the british english. Remember, during that time most white people were still in a literary love affair with britain. Sequentially in the USA, the black communities first educated group, comprehend most black people did not go to school of any kind, had a very rigid sense of literature or writing. This was not , let the gullah/geehce/creole/delta communities create a literature to be the foundation for the future. This was, learn queen's english, read the bible.  Rigidity was deeply set in how literature was learned in the black community. Tuskeegee or Howard are probably the most well known black colleges and the former was a trade school and the latter a seminary. NEither was a place where black literature or literature in itself was open to philosophical debate. Thus in modernity, the legacies of those educational cultures exist in the black community. When you hear a black say, as I have, that their parents didn't want them to be musicians or artists, or their parents wanted them to have a better work ethic. That philosophy to learning comes from the trade school, the religious school. Which is the founding place for all black fraternitieis or sororities. What does this have to do with the structure of a screenplay. LEarning for black people in the past 160 years, circa, is constrained. With poetry, whose forms all have rules, or prose, that has accepted structures, it is easy for the black educated populace to adhere to those rules. But, with a screenplay, you are not in error if you don't do it like another, and that simple truth, is uncomfortable for many black writers, who like to be right. If you are going to play the game, you have to know its rules and abide by them, but what happens when the rules are open for interpretation. Can you imagine, can you accept that? 
     

    1. richardmurray

      richardmurray

      What is right with a screenplay? JAck Klugman said, Rod Serling was one of the few writers whose screenplay you can use unchanged. And yet, he worked on so many movies or television shows, that were profitable so... does a screenplay need to be something that is not changed? IS a right screenplay one that does not need to be changed? Dan Akroyd original blues brothers or ghostbusters was extremely long. The language in George Lucas's original star wars script was unused. The original screenplay for the film legend, which I love, was not doable. But does that mean they were wrong? I think the screenplay which is less than 200 years old, is free from the cultural binds that other literary forms are and black artists, as black people, are used to being right, based on our educational history. When nonviolence is the tool, and violence is rejected,  education becomes one of the few weapons you have.  But I Argue that with screenplays /stageplays there is no right.

      IN AMENDMENT

      I Think of Zora NEale Hurston, her fello black writers stated her work was wrong based on cultural perception, not truth

       

    2. richardmurray

      richardmurray

      a screenplay is a step in an artistic process, not a book, which is the final result in an artistic process. I have to admit, I am invigorated with this topic cause I think it reveals a black culture in literature.  If you read a shakesperean play and change all the dialog/settings/character descriptions to fit your time or place or want, you are not wrong nor is the stageplay wrong.

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