“On Story is film school in a box, a lifetime’s worth of filmmaking knowledge squeezed into half-hour packages.”
—Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times

Austin Film Festival (AFF) is the first organization to focus on writers’ creative contributions to film and television. Its annual Film Festival and Conference offers screenings, panels, workshops, and roundtable discussions that help new writers and filmmakers connect with mentors and gain advice and insight from masters, as well as reinvigorate veterans with new ideas. To extend the Festival’s reach, AFF produces On Story, a television series currently airing on PBS-affiliated stations and streaming online that presents high-caliber artists talking candidly and provocatively about the art and craft of screenwriting and filmmaking, often using examples from their own work.

On Story—The Golden Ages of Television explores the transformation of television’s narrative content over the past several decades through interviews with some of TV’s best creators and writers, including Garry Shandling (The Larry Sanders Show), Carl Reiner (The Dick Van Dyke Show), Issa Rae (Insecure), Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), Greg Daniels (The Office), Paula Pell (Saturday Night Live), Noah Hawley (Fargo), Liz Meriwether (New Girl), David Chase (The Sopranos), Alan Yang (Master of None), Marta Kauffman (Friends), Jenji Kohan (Orange Is the New Black), and many more. Their insights, behind-the-scenes looks at the creative process, production tales, responses to audiences’ reactions, and observations on how both TV narratives and the industry have changed make this book ideal for TV lovers, pop culture fans, students taking screenwriting courses, and filmmakers and writers seeking information and inspiration.

Derided as simple, dismissed as inferior to film, famously characterized as a vast wasteland, television nonetheless exerts an undeniable, apparently inescapable power in our culture. The secret of television's success may well lie in the remarkable narrative complexities underlying its seeming simplicity, complexities Kristin Thompson unmasks in this engaging analysis of the narrative workings of television and film.

After first looking at the narrative techniques the two media share, Thompson focuses on the specific challenges that series television presents and the tactics writers have devised to meet them--tactics that sustain interest and maintain sense across multiple plots and subplots and in spite of frequent interruptions as well as weeklong and seasonal breaks. Beyond adapting the techniques of film, Thompson argues, television has wrought its own changes in traditional narrative form. Drawing on classics of film and television, as well as recent and current series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, and The Simpsons, she shows how adaptations, sequels, series, and sagas have altered long-standing notions of closure and single authorship. And in a comparison of David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, she asks whether there can be an "art television" comparable to the more familiar "art cinema."

In 1990, American television experienced a seismic shift when Twin Peaks premiered, eschewing formulaic plots and clear lines between heroes and villains. This game-changing series inspired a generation of show creators to experiment artistically, transforming the small screen in ways that endure to this day.

Focusing on six shows (Twin Peaks, with a critical analysis of both the original series and the 2017 return; The Wire; Treme; The Sopranos; Mad Men; and Girls), Television Rewired explores what made these programs so extraordinary. As their writers and producers fought against canned plots and moral simplicity, they participated in the evolution of the exhilarating new auteur television while underscoring the fact that art and entertainment don't have to be mutually exclusive. Nochimson also makes provocative distinctions between true auteur television and shows that were inspired by the freedom of the auteur series but nonetheless remained entrenched within the parameters of formula. Providing opportunities for vigorous discussion, Television Rewired will stimulate debates about which of the new television series since 1990 constitute “art” and which are tweaked “business-driven storytelling.”

This unique, comprehensive introduction to screenwriting offers practical advice for the beginning writer, whether college student or freelancer. Based on their experience as professional writers and as teachers in a large, successful screenwriting program at California State University, Northridge, the authors provide a progression of assignments at manageable screenwriting lengths for beginners. They lead students through development of a premise, treatment, stepsheet, and, finally, miniscreenplay—essential elements in writing a longer script.

A major feature of the text is the use of many example scenes from contemporary and classic American films, such as On the Waterfront, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Godfather, The Graduate, Tootsie, and more. Other scenes are drawn from international films and dramatic literature. The criticism of these scenes invites students to develop their own comparative models, while simultaneously providing exposure to the central analytical terms of good dramatic writing.

The authors also place screenwriting within the larger tradition of dramatic writing in order to put the beginning writer in touch with the wealth of art, experience, and practical ideas the drama contains. They provide an up-to-date, practical discussion of marketing and copywriting a screenplay, with addresses of relevant professional societies. Most importantly, they never offer an ill-advised shortcut or restrict students to only one way of thinking about a character, situation, or scene. In The Understructure of Writing for Film & Television, the student's thought and creativity are central.

Required to sign away their legal rights as authors as a condition of employment, professional writers may earn a tidy living for their work, but they seldom own their writing. Writing for Hire traces the history of labor relations that defined authorship in film, TV, and advertising in the mid-twentieth century. Catherine L. Fisk examines why strikingly different norms of attribution emerged in these overlapping industries, and she shows how unionizing enabled Hollywood writers to win many authorial rights, while Madison Avenue writers achieved no equivalent recognition.

In the 1930s, the practice of employing teams of writers to create copyrighted works became widespread in film studios, radio networks, and ad agencies. Sometimes Hollywood and Madison Avenue employed the same people. Yet the two industries diverged in a crucial way in the 1930s, when screenwriters formed the Writers Guild to represent them in collective negotiations with media companies. Writers Guild members believed they shared the same status as literary authors and fought to have their names attached to their work. They gained binding legal norms relating to ownership and public recognition—norms that eventually carried over into the professional culture of TV production.

In advertising, by contrast, no formal norms of public attribution developed. Although some ad writers chafed at their anonymity, their nonunion workplace provided no institutional framework to channel their demands for change. Instead, many rationalized their invisibility as creative workers by embracing a self-conception as well-compensated professionals devoted to the interests of clients.