Why Screenplayology?

Welcome to Screenplayology: An Online Study for American Screenplay Studies.

As a graduate student in 2006, I was charged by my chair with the task of re-developing and teaching an existing course in the curriculum called Script Analysis. Wishing to bring a new level of academic rigor and scholarship to the course, I sought scholarly sources on the subject of screenplay studies. I was shocked to discover that few existed and most were difficult to find. My first discovery was Claudia Sternberg’s Written for the Screen: The American Motion Picture Screenplay as Text, and this text immediately became the template of my work. Little did I know in 2006, however, that I was but a single soldier in a building movement. Recent years have seen the publication of important texts, such as Kevin Alexander Boon’s Script Culture and the American Screenplay and Steven Maras’ Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice, as well as the creation of the Journal of Screenwriting, the first academic journal dedicated to screenplay studies. Academic recognition of the screenplay is on the rise.

This site is in its infancy and is essentially a collection of lectures from my Script Analysis class. This semester I will be teaching the class for the seventh time, and over the years I’ve found that my lecture have simply become too dense with information. Unfortunately, no single text book exists that covers everything I want my students to know, so I’ve created Screenplayology as a kind of online text book for my students. I hope to continue to develop and refine each section over time to include the latest scholarship in each area. I also wish to make this resource available to educators everywhere, as no other resource of this kind currently exists on the web.

This site is still under construction. Some areas cry out for expansion. Others may have typos or citation issues that I am in the process of fixing. I invite readers who see problems to contact me with suggestions or concerns. In particular, I do not wish to take credit for anybody else’s work, so if you find a missing footnote, please let me know immediately.

More than anything, I hope you enjoy your visit and find this site useful and informative.

Best,

Andrew Kenneth Gay, Visiting Instructor of Film @ UCF

Permanent link to this article: https://www.screenplayology.com/2011/01/06/why-screenplayology/

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