UNIVERSITY OF JOS

FACULTY OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION

SESSION:
2022/2023

COURSE CODE:
MAC 221

COURSE:
INTRODUCTION TO FILM SCRIPTWRITING

QUESTION:
A SUMMARY PRESENTATION OF JAMES MONACO HOW TO READ FILM
PAGE 421-509

GROUP 6 MEMBERS
S/N NAMES MAT. NO
1. PETER EDOH JAMES UJ/2020/AR/0224
2. AJIYA BONGSI JOSEPH UJ/2020/AR/0326
3. TREASURE OJIAKU UJ/2020/AR/0131

LECTURER:
REV. FR. GABRIEL GOWOK

18TH OCTOBER, 2023

INTRODUCTION

Media, the plural of medium, broadly describes all channels of communication,

including everything from printed paper to digital data. Media comprises news, art,
educational content, and any form of information that can reach or influence people,
including television, radio, books, magazines, and the internet.

Mass media refers to the news and information that reaches a large number of people,
while local media, e.g., newspapers, and regional television/radio stations, serves the
needs of the communities or urban areas in which they are located.

Despite the rambunctious proliferation of electronic media during the last half of the
twentieth century, film, that great nineteenth-century invention, still predominates. As
a group, Hollywood producers spend most of their time and make most of their money
doing television. In Europe, "film" wouldn't exist if television networks didn't help fund
it. The greatest financial success any filmmaker or actor can have is not a theatrical
blockbuster but a long-running television series. Even within the feature film business
itself, considerably more than half the income from an average production now comes
from television and video distribution, not from theaters. Film is at the hot center of this
mix of businesses and technologies; clearly it should be seen in the context of the
broader communications and entertainment industry known collectively as "the media."
We've alluded to this context throughout; now it's time to examine it in more detail.
Video technology is important because of its continuing, ever-growing impact on the art
of movies. The history of television and the other electronic media provides the
backdrop for the continuing story of film ... and leads inexorably to its future.

PRINT AND ELECTRONIC MEDIA

Written language is the prototype for all media. For seven thousand years, it has
provided a workable and flexible method for getting information from one person to
another. But it was not until the invention of movable type by Johann Gutenberg in the
fifteenth century that "written" messages could be mass-produced so the author could
communicate with a large number of other individuals simultaneously. This "multiple
reproducibility" is the prime characteristic of media. Between 1500 and 1800 the
production of books developed into a major industry. It was the concept of the
newspaper or journal, quickly produced and appearing on a regular schedule, that
suggested the second vital element of the media (a corollary of the first)—the open
channel of communication. Books are produced in quantity, but they are each singular
events, limited to their subjects. Newspapers and magazines are open, in both time and
space, to continuing and various uses. Although print was immediately recognized as a
socially revolutionary force, it was not until the nineteenth century and the rise of a
massive literate middle class that printing realized its full potential as a medium. It took
us collectively a lot longer to learn to read print than to learn to read films. Significantly,
the rise of the electronic media in the twentieth century was much more rapid, since no
particular skill was required for comprehension. Print media also benefited from
technological advances in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The steam-powered
press had been developed by Friedrich Konig in 1810; rotary presses, which operated
continuously rather than intermittently, date from the 1840s through the 1860s. Richard
March Hoe is credited with inventing the first rotary press in 1846. Twenty years later,
the stereotype printing plate was first patented in England. The combination of steam
power, rotary design, and one-piece stereotype plates greatly increased the speed and
flexibility of presses. The typewriter, invented by C. L. Sholes in 1867 and first produced
by Remington in 1874, and the Linotype typesetting machine, invented in 1884 by
Ottmar Mergenthaler, made the preparatory processes much more efficient. In 1880,
the New York Graphic printed the first halftone photographs, although it was a decade
and more before this important technique gained wide acceptance among newspapers
and magazines. Earlier technological developments in printing had been quantitative:
they increased the speed and flexibility of the process, but they did not affect its basic
nature. The halftone process, on the other hand, was a qualitative advance, making the
reproduction of photographs an integral part of the technique of printing. It was at this
point, more than a hundred years ago, that the long courtship between print and image
began. It is now being consummated in the marriage known as "multimedia." The basic
problem with reproducing photographs in print was that the photographic process
produces a continual and infinitely variable range of tones from white through gray to
black, while the printing process is essentially "binary" — any given space on a printed
page is either white or black; there are no gradations in between. The technique of the
halftone solved this problem in an ingenious manner: the continuous space of the
photograph was broken up into discrete parties—as many as two hundred per linear
inch—which could be translated into the binary language of print. If 50 percent of a
given area was actually printed, then that area would appear a medium gray; if f 00
percent was printed, it would be black, and so forth. In its way, the concept of the
halftone was as important in photography as the understanding of persistence of vision
was in the development of motion pictures: both utilized basic physiological fads of
perception in simple yet powerful ways. Moreover, the concept that underlies the
halftone process—the translation of a continuous range of values into a discrete
quantified system—was to become one of the most significant and widely effusive
intellectual devices of the twentieth century: television, phototelegraphy, telemetry,
and—most important—computer technology, all rest on this basic "dialectal" concept

RADIO AND RECORDS

A young Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, was the first of a number of experimenters to

perfect a workable system of radiotelegraphy. In 1896 and 1897 he demonstrated his
"wireless" telegraph in England, and soon powerful corporations were formed to exploit
the commercial value of the invention. Unlike telegraph cables, radio signals were not
subject to sabotage: the military value of the invention was seen immediately.

Interestingly, there is not all that much difference structurally between radio and
television. The esthetic and formal history of television since 1948 in the U.S. is
consistent with the history of radio between 1922 and 1948 (although, since the advent
of network television, radio has been forced to specialize esthetically). In a sense, it is
more useful to speak of "broadcasting," which includes both, than to differentiate too
strongly between the two. Both serve the essential socializing function of mediating the
world around us. Formerly isolated individuals and communities are brought into
relatively intimate contact with a central source (if not with each other). This was a
radical shift in cultural patterns. The problem is that these media are unidirectional.
Anyone who has ever watched an infant grow into a child with television as a surrogate
mother can testify to the remarkable power of the electronic media, fn helping to create
new needs (for Barbie Dolls or licensed breakfast cereal on the one hand, or continual
fictional stimulation or the omnipresence of a human voice on the other), in inculcating
shared values, and in defining the general shape of the culture, television and radio
have no equals. The print media, because they do not have a human presence of their
own, because the reader controls the experience, and because they must be actively
decoded or read, have not a tenth the power of the electronic media; nor does film,
which, although it does have a presence and need not, strictly speaking, be decoded,
nevertheless stands as a separate experience: it takes place in the movie house, not in
the home. This elemental force may be more clearly seen in contemporary radio than in
television, since radio can be apprehended so much more easily (that is, it is not
necessary actually to look at it), fn this respect, radio still serves as a model for
television, a medium which, in contrast to film, puts more emphasis on the sound
component than on the image. The essential purpose of radio is not only to tell stories
and convey information but also to create a pervasive aural environment. The ultimate
product of this is Muzak, a continuous stream of carefully designed and programmed
music constructed to create a specific mood: sound as architecture rather than
meaning. Much of contemporary radio, whether talk or music, tends in this direction.
Dead space is to be abhorred; what is important, as any disc jockey knows, is the
continuous flow. Psychologically, radio serves a "stroking" function: it is artificial but
very much needed company. Likewise, much of television is designed to accompany the
flow of the day. Visual information, paradoxically, although often useful, is not
necessary. There is no particular need to watch a talk show or television news, and most
television drama is generally comprehensible without visual input. As a result, it is not
uncommon for people to "read" a newspaper and "watch" television simultaneously. It
became clear early in the history of commercial radio that the concept of personality
would dominate the medium. Even more than film, radio heightened the effect of
celebrity because the "variety" program allowed stars to be free of fictional, artificial
roles and to play "themselves." Radio shows were often indistinguishable from their
stars. The basic form had been taken over from vaudeville, but the master of
ceremonies now dominated the proceedings. Jack Benny, George Burns and Grade
Allen, Fred Allen, Bing Crosby, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and Easy Aces all
followed a well-defined form—the basic Characteristic of which was a seamless weave
of fictional and real elements.

TELEVISION AND VIDEO

Television is more like radio than it is different from it. As with radio, the concept of flow
is all-important; the product of both media is continuous and continuing, within both
the smaller unit of the show and the larger unit of a day's or evening's programming.
Moreover, because of the relatively poor quality of the televised image (as compared
with theatrical film), television depends heavily on its audio component. The curved
screen, the low resolution, the flat contrast, the difficulties of broadcast reception (or
cable reception, for that matter) all work to reduce the effectiveness of the television
image. The density of visual information is low, which is made up for in part by a density
of programming, compressed sequencing, and insistent, busy audio: dead space and
dead time are to be avoided at all costs; the flow must continue. In 1961, Newton
Minow, then Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gained a certain
notoriety when he indicted American television as "a vast wasteland." The phrase stuck.
Even now, four television generations later, the "wasteland" is the metaphor of choice
for most critics of this entertainment and information medium that is at the center of
American life. Perhaps we are blaming the messenger for the bad news. If television had
never been invented, radio would have continued its role as the glue that holds our
society together, and Newton Minow very likely would have made the same speech in
1961—but about radio. There is, however, a significant semiotic difference between the
two media: the "illustrated radio" which has dominated our lives for half a century
demands a different kind of our attention from its pure audio cousin. The very fact that
television has an image track as well as a sound track forces producers to choose
material with a visual component and lures viewers into a scary evening-long paralysis
which is vividly reflected by the phrase "couch potato." Paradoxically, just because the
image track of television is so weak, the medium demands our obsession with it. We
need to work hard to comprehend it. This is what Marshall McLuhan was getting at
when he called television a "cool medium."

There are eighty-two broadcast television channels available in each market area of the
United States. For various technical reasons, however, fewer than half of these are
usable, and, in practice, few cities have more than twelve over-the-air stations available.
Moreover, only twelve of the eighty-two are powerful VHF stations; the other seventy,
operating on a different frequency band (UHF), are considerably weaker and, with few
exceptions, have remained marginal operations. Only seven of the twelve VHF channels
are in operation in any one area (and far fewer in most areas outside the major urban
centers), a fact that has allowed the commercial broadcast networks—NBC, CBS, ABC,
and now also FOX—to dominate the airwaves both economically and esthetically since
the commercial birth of television in 1946. Although their power has lessened since the
cable revolution of the 1980s, they still clearly dominate the medium.

"BROADCASTING": THE BUSINESS

Ironically, the commercial potential of broadcasting was demonstrated almost

accidentally. Like many other amateur radio operators, Frank Conrad, a resident of
Pittsburgh and a researcher for Westinghouse, was in the habit of transmitting program
material—music, news, and so forth—as well as conversing with other "hams." Late in
September 1920, the Joseph Home department store in Pittsburgh ran an advertisement
in the Pittsburgh Sun that called attention to Conrad's amateur broadcasts and offered
for sale an "Amateur Wireless Set" that could receive them. The response was
immediate. Westinghouse officials, who had known of Conrad's hobby but had never
given it much thought, now perceived the commercial value of broadcasting. As Erik
Barnouw put it in his invaluable history of broadcasting, Tube of Plenty (1975): What
had seemed an eccentric hobby, or a form of exhibitionism, or at best a quixotic
enterprise pursued by visionaries ... was suddenly seen as a sound business concept that
could yield rich profits through the sale of receivers. Conrad was immediately put to
work building the first commercial transmitter, which on October 27, 1920, was
assigned the call letters KDKA.

"TV": THE VIRTUAL FAMILY

Because it is a continuing rather than a discrete experience, television has an

extraordinary ability to mediate between the viewer and reality. Films may last two or
three hours, during which time we live in their world. Television is ongoing, never-
ending, whether in the context of a single day's programming or in regard to the series
and the serials that are its native forms. Moreover, television happens in our space, in
our time. It becomes part of our reality. For an average American family, watching
television nearly seven hours a day (according to annual Nielsen surveys), television is
the background to everyday life—a background that often overwhelms the foreground.
As a consequence, it mediates not only between the viewer and reality but also
between reality and fiction. We're all confused. Because it is both an entertainment and
an information medium, sometimes we find it hard to distinguish between the
essentially fictional nature of the first and the essentially nonfictional nature of the
second. "Reality-based" programming, as we have seen, is often a contradiction in
terms. Much has been written about the socializing influence of television—the effect
repetitive violence has on children, the tendency of the television world to become the
real reality for people addicted to it, and so on. The sum effect of this powerful medium
is that, as Raymond Williams said in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, it has
made drama a part of life: It is clearly one of the unique characteristics of advanced
industrial societies that drama as an experience is now an intrinsic part of everyday life,
at a quantitative level which is so very much greater than any precedent as to seem a
fundamental qualitative change [emphasis added]. Drama, which even as late as the
heyday of the movies was a separate experience, is now seamlessly integrated into our
lives—and dominates many of them. A shooting takes place on the street and people
automatically turn to look for the cameras. Often there aren't any. The Vietnam War
(1963-75) was filmed, edited, and broadcast the next day; the Gulf War (January, 1991)
was offered live as it happened to screens around the world. Real stories are retold as
docudramas and "news" is re-enacted because the cameras often miss the first take. But
most important, as Williams noted, is the sheer volume of dramatic media to which we
are exposed, day in, day out, year after year.

In the 50s, there was THE NELSON FAMILY which literally grew up on television and
became the prototype. Their competitors were THE ANDERSON FAMILY of FATHER
KNOWS BEST.

In the 60s, The Novel Saga: the 26-episode British series - The Forsyte Saga (1967)

In the seventies, there was the Bunkers of Quens and All in the Family began to reflect
real family issues.

In the 80s, there was The Huxtable clan. In the Nineties; The Cosby Show. The Simpson
ruled the 90s. There was Friends, Living Single, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and in the 20s,
How I met your mother and a host of other comedy series that dominated the screens.

CONCLUSION

For more than half a century, first film, then television inculcated that suffocating
passivity that so concerned Aldous Huxley and others. But the balance is now shifting.
Not because we heeded the warnings of the social critics and took action, but rather
because the image and sound technologies that are now maturing bring the powers of
production to us. Media has evolved and has become a powerful tool for nation building
and empowerment.