Cirrus@Austlit

'It is an unusual step to publish a collection of unproduced scripts. Rarely, if ever, are scripts treated as texts in their own right and seen as deserving of publication, irrespective of any staging or production. This perceived unpublishable status of unproduced scripts fosters a sense that such scripts are not a suitable focus of scholarly discussion. They are dismissed as somehow amateur or unworthy; this despite the fact that many of the most successful scriptwriters have written at least one script, usually many more, that never ‘made it’ to stage or screen. Are these works somehow less worthy of critical discussion, or weaker examples of the writer’s creative and research processes, than their produced works? I would argue that they are not.' (Author's introduction)

This special issue of TEXT was proposed in order to address the absence in journal publications of unproduced scripts for either stage or screen. Seven scripts have been included, and each of these is a contemporary intervention in the changing landscape of scriptwriting. This special issue addresses a little of the current political economy that affects that landscape. All seven writers are currently working in higher education and are writing or rewriting scripts of one form or another on a permanent basis. The publication of scripts has traditionally only happened post-production, as a kind of validation of the script’s successful production, either for stage or screen. This special issue is a step towards reading these scripts as valued material culture in, and of, themselves.' (Author's introduction)

'This work is a creative and Foucauldian-style ethical intervention into the author’s childhood memories. Specifically, it re-imagines a moment in the author’s youth when he first acknowledged his sexuality and gender difference. The script fuses non-fiction and fiction methodologies to produce a dramatic narrative. The finished work is neither fact nor wholly imagined. The script was developed using an interdisciplinary approach including factual research (evidence from author diaries and interviews with family members and such like) and fiction techniques such as associative and stream-of-consciousness writing. In this way, a script was produced that adheres to the core components of the “true” story whilst refiguring others to emphasise aspects of the author’s experience that were wholly internal and even non-verbal (associations, imaginings, latent feelings etc). The result is a work that operates both as memoir and as an intervention into memory. ' (Author's abstract)

'Adam is a television producer with an enviable track record. He has produced 10 factual shows, including the Logie-winning 'Australia’s Best Gardens'. Frankie is a younger ‘rising star’ within the production company, climbing her way to executive

producer in just a few years. Her impressive show 'Pensioners Win Prizes' has kept the company and her job afloat – even if there are awkward looks and hushed allegations of rigging whenever it is mentioned. So when Adam and Frankie are thrown together to work on a new family-based factual entertainment show, all hell breaks loose. Frankie has, after all, just returned from Hollywood – with a fresh way of thinking about narrative structure and character conflict. Frankie Goes to Hollywood is a black comedy that, through exaggeration, parodies the way that factual entertainment shows are put together – or at least are critiqued as being put together. Drawing on scholarly research from film, television, media and cultural studies, the screenplay expresses ideas and concerns about the manipulation of subjects, presenters and experts into characters for the sake of gaining a bigger audience. ' (Author's abstract)

'This script is dedicated to the memory of Susanne Chauvel-Carlsson, and was inspired by a chapter in Elsa Chauvel’s book, My Life With Charles (1973). This is the story of the making of a dream, a dream to capture the essence of a narrative set in the South Seas, a story of a mutiny of the soul when The Bounty sailed into Matavai Bay in 1789. In 1932, the young Australian filmmakers Elsa and Charles Chauvel set sail with their cameraman Tasman Higgins to travel 15,000 miles by steamer to Papeete and Pitcairn. Leaving their toddler daughter Susanne with grandparents back in Stanthorpe, the trio set out on a journey that would take six months to complete, to gather film footage never before seen, of Tahitian dancers on location in Tahiti for their film, In the Wake of the Bounty. ' (Author's abstract)

'This work uses the creative nonfiction form of a dramatic script to explore the story of Eliza Fraser and a woman’s relationship to place. Using questions of relevance to the contemporary explorer juxtaposed with the documented history of Eliza Fraser’s experiences after a shipwreck in 1836, documentary evidence and place-based research were transformed to create a one women show. The script was developed following research and blogging in the role of Eliza Fraser across a four-month period. In shaping the arc of the script, consideration was given to the concept of a tragic hero and the female version of the ‘hero’s journey’ (Campbell 1990; Murdock 1990) including domestic imprisonment, journey through the underworld, symbolic death, discovery of the mother figure, female tradition, magical flight and rescue. Eliza’s alienation from the place and its people raises questions about what it means to belong, both then and now. ' (Author's abstract)

'Salvation is a realisation of Hassall’s creative research into themes associated with white inheritance of Australian landscape. The work transforms theoretical investigation of landscape from post-colonial and spatial positions into theatrical exploration and questions Euro-centric associations of historical and future place, asking ‘What will we leave behind?’ Salvation voices some uncomfortable national silences to investigate and provoke socio-cultural questions pertaining to identity, nation, race, class and gender. Salvation questions the ideological or mythological perceptions that may promote a sense of the significance of dominant (white) European society in the Australian landscape. Salvation may read as a metaphor that voices Australian racial, environmental and cultural tensions. Salvation claims the value of landscape as central to the themes investigated and to the cultural knowledge statements that are embedded within the fiction. ' (Author's abstract)

'This project takes its impulse from Franz Kafka’s fragmented, fanciful, and fantastic Amerika (the man who disappeared), published posthumously in 1927. The script investigates the application of auto/biographical and screen memoir research to the construction of multiplatform narratives collating material collected from the 1950s to the present day drawn from my family’s travels in Zambia. This is a collaborative project that includes archival family and public footage, photographs, magazines, audio and visual interviews. This output takes the form of ‘screenplay as work of art’, as screen memoir, underpinned by themes of home, place, memory and migration. ' (Authors abstract)

'This work contextualises contemporary academic discourses on Aboriginal subjectivity in the writing of a television series; written as creative practice that identifies the way we continue to debate the nature of Aboriginal consciousness. The work posits autobiographical ethnicity as an analytical position from which the screenwriter writes, in that it separates itself from current Indigenous studies. This approach reveals a parallel tradition of intellectual and creative development beyond that which is connected to an act of colonisation. Thus there are possibilities for contributing to the development of new theoretical and conceptual frameworks that move away from historical essentialist constructs of cultural identity that position

‘race’ in a binary based upon exclusivity and colonisation. The script explores the tensions created through grappling with this oppressive playing out of ‘race’ as it is constructed through contemporary inter-family relationships. Only by decoupling

Aboriginality from historically constructed essentialist fantasies can we acknowledge the richness of diversity within Aboriginal families in a rapidly emerging Aboriginal First Nation screenwriting culture. ' (Author's abstract)