From Page to Screen to Page Again: Writing and Reading Japanese Film Scripts

So far the only comprehensive history of Japanese scriptwriting is History of Japanese Scenario (Nihon shinarioshi, 1989), by Shindō Kaneto (who was also a renowned director and scriptwriter). This two volume work extends from early silent cinema to the 1980s when it was published. Shindō provides detailed accounts of the life and work of numerous scriptwriters, placing them into the context of several rises and declines in the film industry. From this and other similar accounts emerges an understanding of different types of scriptwriters, a kind of taxonomy which takes into account writers’ backgrounds, recurring themes in their work, genre diversity, their capacity for innovation and so on. As such, this comes close to the typology employed by Richard Corliss in his 1974 book Talking Pictures: Scriptwriters in the American Cinema. Corliss was a notable film critic, and also a student of Andrew Sarris, the godfather of an auteurist approach to cinema that recognises directors as sole authors of the film. Corliss, building on the work of his mentor while trying to polemicise with it, makes a bid to present something of a counter canon comprising scriptwriters such as Dalton Trumbo.