Status and Prestige of the Screenwriting Profession in the Dynamics of Audio-Visual Production
Sylwia Szostak
sszostak@swps.edu.plSWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9119-1874
Abstract
Audiences, as well as media researchers, have rarely gained access to behind-the-scenes reality of media production. As a result, historically, there has been little knowledge of the day-to-day realities of film professionals. The recent interest of the Anglo-American academy in the perspective of media practitioners is uncovering previously hidden dynamics of the audio-visual industries. Inspired by John Thornton Caldwell’s production culture methodology, the author investigates the profession of a screenwriter by critically analysing the practitioners’ self-reflexive discourse. Such narratives reveal many of the nuances involved in audio-visual production, its social context and the status of the screenwriter in the Polish audio-visual industry. The author draws a rather grim portrait of the screenwriting profession as a film craft with a relatively low status, entangled in a network of dependencies and struggling with institutional misunderstanding of its key attributes.
Keywords:
screenwriter, production culture, work culture, film profession, self-reflective discourseReferences
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Authors
Sylwia Szostaksszostak@swps.edu.pl
SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9119-1874
Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural and Media Studies at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland. She obtained her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2014. She worked on the “Screening Socialism” project at the University of Loughborough, which investigated the role of television in everyday life during socialism. She has contributed to international academic journals, including: European Journal of Cultural Studies, The Journal of Popular Television and Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies. For several years she was professionally associated with Poland’s biggest commercial broadcaster – TVN. She gives lectures on television, production culture and the marketing of television content. She is a member of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) advisory board.
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