The Hours

When I read David Hare's screenplay for The Hours the first time, I was blown away by its literary beauty. Screenplays are not supposed to be literary documents; they are supposed to be blueprints for movies, especially in the strange, special, writer-unfriendly reading environment in which spec screenplays are read. Hired screenwriters, being investments, have much more literary freedom. Still, Hare's screenplay struck me as suggesting a new form, part novella, part prose poem, a literary form one could read in a single sitting, poetic, moving, thrilling.

It's a literary tragedy that young writers cannot in any practical sense aspire to this kind of form. SCENARIO magazine tried to establish the screenplay as a literary form, "the magazine of screenplay art" its subtitle, but it failed, largely in my view for misreading its audience and producing a coffee table book, not a journal. At any rate, literary values continue to be cut from the spine of spec scripts and I can understand why. They are inefficient to read in a context in which one is looking for good stories, not good writing -- one is, in fact, looking for the blueprint to a movie.

But Hare's screenplay shows what glorious possibilities the screenplay has as a genuine literary document. If I were younger, I would start a magazine that published this form, and only this form, and I'd be a damn tough editor, demanding more economy than we are used to in prose writing, an economy that Hare has mastered.

I think I'll add Hare's script to the books I use in my screenwriting class, to be read at the end of the year to show the possibilities of the screenplay as literature. Inviting some bright student to take the ball and run with it.