- Title
- Communication, creativity and consilience in cinema: a comparative study of the top 20 Return-on-Investment (RoI) movies and the doxa of screenwriting
- Creator
- Velikovsky, Joseph Tesla
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Within the discipline of Communication - and the domain of movie-creation, including movie screenwriting - this study explores aspects of the problem-situation around accurate guidelines for movie success. Movie performance research reveals that 70% of movies do not `break even’ or recoup their production budget in cinema release (Vogel 1990, 2014) and that 98% of screenplays presented to producers go unmade (Macdonald 2004, 2013). Successful (thus, creative) screenplays and movies are rare. In order to illuminate this problem-situation in ways that may be useful to both screenwriters and screenwriting instructors, this study examines fifteen key guidelines of the screenwriting orthodoxy, derived from a set of four contemporary screenwriting manuals: guidelines which partly comprise the current `doxa’ or how screenwriting is often taught. In this study these movie story-creation guidelines are then compared to the relevant observed story traits of the 20 highest, and also to the 20 lowest Return-on-Investment movies (with RoI defined as: `audience-reach / production-budget’) in order to test these fifteen (15) guidelines of the current screenwriting orthodoxy. The Theoretical Perspective of the study is Evolutionary Systems Theory, including the Systems Model of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1988-2014) and Bourdieu’s practice theory (Bourdieu 1977-1996) to examine, understand and explain key aspects of movie-creation by screen storytellers, and movie-reception by audiences. The research perspective also draws on David Bordwell’s neo-formalist film poetics (1997-2013), Macdonald’s screenwriting poetics (2004, 2013) and scholarship in the domain of Evocriticism (Boyd 2009, 2010, Carroll 1995, Gottschall 2012) and Evolutionary Psychology (Buss 2012), influenced by E. O. Wilson’s (1998) vision of consilience. As a result of this comparative analysis of `the screenwriting orthodoxy versus movie RoI’ it is demonstrated that certain of the screenwriting-manual guidelines are contradicted by the empirical evidence, and thus some revised and additional screenplay guidelines are presented, also noting suggested areas for further research.
- Subject
- communication; creativity; consilience; cinema; top 20 RoI; return on investment; evocriticism
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1324018
- Identifier
- uon:24940
- Rights
- Copyright 2016 Joseph Tesla Velikovsky
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 6 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 481 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |