Course Information

Instructor: Kevin Royal Johnson and Erin McGuirl

Location: Los Angeles

Mode: In-person

Dates: August 5–9, 2024

Tuition: $1200.00

Course Description

What kind of text is a screenplay? How were they made, and by whom? How did their form and function change over time? In this course, students will explore these questions by learning about the history, development, and bibliographical identification of the American film script, from the Silent era to the end of the twentieth century.  

Screenplays are guides to the creation of another work of art: a motion picture. Students enrolled in The Celluloid Paper Trail will learn to see scripts as “blueprints” for films and to identify the material cues that tell how they fit into the larger filmmaking process, revealing the contributions of both credited and silent participants in their creation. The course will teach students to complete a full bibliographical analysis of the film script and identify common office duplication methods. Working from their analyses of the scripts themselves, students will finally experiment with incorporating material evidence into critical arguments about the history of film and production studies, with a focus on queer and feminist bibliography and the history of women in film. 

Librarians, archivists, graduate students, faculty, and rare book dealers are encouraged to take the course. This course is intended for anyone interested in deepening their knowledge of screenplays as material artifacts of film production: if you work with screenplays and/or cinematic archives, this course is for you. It will also be of interest to individuals who study or work with non-letterpress material texts and twentieth century archival collections, and to booksellers, curators, and librarians whose institutions sell or acquire (or may in the future) cinematic archives and screenplays. 

Hands-on exercises using archival film scripts will be an integral part of the course, and the week will include field trips to the Margaret Herrick AMPAS Library. Participants are asked to bring a laptop for daily use in course exercises.