I have always been a big fan of movies. There is a trend that recent high-scored movies were mostly adapted from books or novels, some from contemporary novels and some from past novels. My idea is to attempt to find connections between these novels and their corresponding adapted movies, in other words, their screenplays.
A screenplay is a written work by screenwriters for a film. It could be original or adapted from existing writing. My main focus is to analyze adapted screenplay and connect them with their original writings. The texts that I select are literary scripts. The original formats of those texts are PDF and HTML. They are born-digital and most of them could be regarded as transcriptions of the spoken words. Each year there were around 10 nominations (with repetition) for Best Adapted Screenplay of Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards. My primary goal is to collect and analyze the screenplays of 50 nominations from 2011 to 2015. (I might increase the time span if the analyzing process goes well.) Since these screenplays come from novels, I will compare literary genres, topics and periods. Usually one script is around 150 pages in PDF format. It could fit in normal analyzing tools. My main focus is to analyze high-scored movies (in this case, movies with nominations), so I include a range of texts that show variability. I am looking for entities between characters and common stylistic patterns among the screenplays. Jigsaw and Voyant will be used during the process of analyzing.
Original novels of adapted screenplay are not difficult to find but copyright is a problem. However, the good part of screenplays is that they are scripts that usually were open to the public by film production companies. I find the screenplays that I want to analyze mainly from official film production companies website and other online resources such as The Internet Movie Script Database (http://www.imsdb.com/) and True Stories for Film (http://www.truestoriesforfilm.com/). I could analyze them under academic and educational purposes. Besides, in screenplays, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated. [1] As Hoyt et al state in their work, “Visualizing and Analyzing the Hollywood Screenplay with ScripThreads”, “as semi-structured documents with formatting conventions analogous to a metadata schema, screenplays are ideally suited for automated computer parsing.”[2] Screenplays are originally suitable for computational analysis. Therefore, I could use these publicly available scripts to perform parsing and analyzing easily. Hoyt et al create a software called ScripThreads that visualizes and analyzes screenplay. Although it is still under development, its released version is very powerful.
For example, I downloaded the scripts of The Revenant as HTML file, converted it into text file and put into the software as input then I got a presence graph of the characters in the movie which displays thick thread when the character is active and thin when absent. Each character corresponds to different colors in the graph and the graph could be easily rotated to provide different views. Gray and white represent a scene shift. This software also provides absence graph that tracks out a character thread at a given distance during absence and force directed graph that is used to visualize character activity. So for scripts, I will mainly use this software to analyze with the help of zamzar.com, a powerful file conversion website.
Although I could use ScripThreads to parse the texts, there were different formats of the scripts that I downloaded. So I have to use some tools such as Sublime to reformat the text files.
My future analysis will seek for the answers of several questions below:
- What is the percentage of adapted screenplay on Oscar and Golden Globe’s best pictures nominations?
- Which years were the original novels written?
- Is there any correlation or relationship between the novels and the current culture or major events? (Why did directors or screenplay writers choose to make these novels into movies? What are the common characteristics of these novels?)
- What is common genres(e.g. fictions, autobiography), topics or themes of the adapted screenplay?
- How did the topics or themes of these adapted screenplay change during recent years? (I could connect theme keywords with Google Ngrams to analyze more.)
- What are the differences of presence in the movies between male and female characters?
- What are stylistic patterns among the screenplays?
[1] “Screenplay.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 14 Feb. 2016.
[2] Hoyt, Eric, and Kevin Ponto. “Visualizing and Analyzing the Hollywood Screenplay with ScripThreads.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly:. Web. 14 Feb. 2016.