Screenwriting in the Studio System

The Classic Era Hollywood "Studio System" was an incredibly prolific time in film history, and shaped American cinema into what it is today. However, many characteristics of this time period were fairly unique to the era and system they belonged too, with modern cinema evolving from the mass-produced entertainment pieces of the early 20th Century to the somewhat more challenging and artistic works of today. In no place is this more pronounced than in the area of screenwriting for films. A major characteristic in the old studio system was the mass production of scripts. Hollywood screenwriters were not prioritized with creating artistically unique works or challenging films, but instead were simply payed to produce a product that the audience would consume the heaviest. This often meant the repetition of story formulas, characters, conflicts, and style. It also led to many films (some of which are consider the greatest of all time) being primarily "authorless" works, an accumulation of different writers that fit the project within different circumstances. Films like Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz are great examples of this kind of writing.

The effect on the films of the day were easy to see. Many films from Hollywood's Golden Area are formulaic, and often copy entire stories from previous films. Characters who seemed popular in one film would be brought back under a different name in another film, with the same actor to portray them. If audiences loved one film, they expected a very similar one to come out that they could love in the same way. However, many of these films were quite innovative, and some could say they benefitted from this writing system.


Gone With The Wind was written originally by Sidney Howard, but the length and need for revision led director David O. Selznick to seek out other writers to rewrite the script to his approval. This reflected the ideas of Classic Hollywood filmmaking: a film was not a writer's work, nor was it a director's. It was the studio's work and would be changed as seen fit by the producers in order to make an end product they thought would sell well and gain attention. Gone With The Wind certainly accomplished both of these things, and in the process became one of the defining films in the history of cinema. However, it stood as a representation of innovation within the studio system, a film which has a combination of styles, acting, and grandiosity that had been present before, but never accumulated in such a perfect way. The amount of people who were a part of Gone With The Wind's writing, and it's creation in general, reflected the epic atmosphere the movie was trying to represent, and the script's constant revisions and writing contributions served the film well due to it's content (long story, multiple story arcs). In this way, Gone With The Wind is a shining example of how the writing processes of Hollywood's Golden Age could produce something worth watching over all the rest.