Screenplays exist for films. Because movies have only been made for about 100 years-a history much shorter than novels or plays-in the early days films mostly relied on literary works for their stories, and a screenplay (as opposed to the director's vision) was regarded as the soul of a film.

People love to tell the story of how Ang Lee, today a well-known international director, was camped out at home for six years writing screenplays. His second film, The Wedding Banquet, won the Golden Bear at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival.

In the history of Chinese and Western film, countless screenplays have been based on historical incidents, novels and plays. Western examples include Les Amours de la Reine Elisabeth and Frankenstein. In China, such works include the short Dingjunshan, the earliest Chinese dramatic film and based on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, as well as New Year's Sacrifice and The Family, which were based on works by Lu Xun and Ba Jin. Novels from the 1960s and 1970s by Chu Hsi-ning and Chiung Yao have also been turned into many movies. In the early days of Taiwan film many of the major screenwriters were, like Chang Yung-hsiang, originally writers of Chinese opera, whereas the most prolific screenwriter of the current era is Wu Nien-chen, a novelist.

Chen Yu-hsun's comedy Tropical Fish. A special characteristic of the Taiwan film industry is that most directors work from their own scripts. （courtesy of Central Studios）

In the West the concept of the director as the "auteur"-or prime shaper of the film's style-came to the forefront in the 1960s, turning the screenwriter into a figure of secondary importance. No longer the "soul" of a film, a screenplay was nonetheless still a blueprint for molding its visual imagery. Although the Taiwan film industry has fallen on hard times, the creativity of screenplays has not slipped. It's just that these days only a few screenplays can be turned into movies.

Yao Hung-yi, one of the younger generation of screenwriters, has written an extremely "cool" screenplay, Hit on the Head, Scared the Cat.

If unable to ripen into filmic fruit, can screenplays stand on their own as independent works of art? Although the film industry in Taiwan has fallen on tough times economically, prodigious numbers of screenplays are still being written in Taiwan. Who is writing them? What are they writing? And why are they writing?

Question: Who is the world's most popular screenwriter? Answer: William Shakespeare.

Film wasn't invented until 300 years after Shakespeare died, and he never wrote a single screenplay himself. But the films that have been adapted from his plays number in the hundreds. Spanning vast expanses of time and space, from the silent film era to talkies, his works have proven irresistible to the masters of Eastern and Western cinema.

Dramas worth a thousand gold pieces

With their eloquent literary style, Shakespearean plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet have been turned into movies-only to be redone by different directors in later years. The high esteem that film makers have for Shakespeare's plays just goes to prove a point: that a good script is hard to find.

The scarcity of good scripts is the same the world over. With so few good original screenplays, it has been calculated that about 30% of American movies in any given year are, like Jurassic Park and the English Patient, adapted from novels. With the block-buster potential of movies based on best-selling novels, publishing houses and agents show drafts of famous authors' books to film companies, so that before a book has even been published, its movie rights may have fetched millions of US dollars. Two such authors are Stephen King (Misery) and Tom Clancy (Red October).

There are no examples of movie rights to Chinese novels going for enormous sums, but in Chinese-language cinema there is the same quest for good stories. Kungfu novels by Jin Yong have been filmed repeatedly. For the next best thing and a safe investment, studios have often opted to breathe new life into a popular old movie with new faces and new film technology. Liang Shanpo and Zhu Yingtai, Song at Midnight, and A Chinese Ghost Story are all popular old Chinese films that have been refilmed. Disney's summer release Mulan is also a story familiar to all Chinese.

Film blueprint

Film people agree that the script largely determines a film's success or failure. "Screenplays are the key to the birth of a movie; they are the means by which something emerges from nothing," says movie critic Wang Chih-cheng. "Although it's possible to make a bad movie out of a good script, a bad script will certainly end up as a bad movie."

To make an architectural analogy, the script is the blueprint for a movie. After it's written, the next step is to go ahead and make the film. But with the problems afflicting the Taiwan movie industry, film makers, apart from competing for government grants, rarely find a company willing to invest in a new movie. The Taiwan film industry has virtually collapsed.

The creative quality of scripts, however, has not diminished. One standard for comparison is the screenplay awards sponsored by the Government Information Office. Each year these attract some 200 Chinese-language scripts from Taiwan and elsewhere to compete for only 10 cash grants. It's fiercely competitive.

It's worth asking, why are so many people still hard at work writing scripts?

"This is really quite abnormal," remarks Wang Chih-cheng, who has served on the panel of judges for the awards. To write a screenplay all one needs is a pen or a computer, and "most scripts are just being submitted to test their luck in the hope that they might win and get some money; most have no literary value and couldn't be filmed."

Lu Fei-yi, a professor of mass communications at National Chengchi University who has likewise served as a judge for the competition, agrees that the NT$30,000 prize provides enough incentive itself. Even though most submissions aren't any good, he believes that reading these works is worthwhile because the material these writers choose "can clearly point to the abilities and future trends of Chinese-language film and the creative consciousness of the entire group."

He describes it as an "obscure form of writing through which you can trace the interests and anxieties of the masses." For instance, he says that in 1993 and 1994 there were a lot of scripts dealing with gender issues. Because previously there had been few stories of this kind, he conjectured that feminists' long work tilling the social soil was finally bearing fruit, making sexual roles an important issue. Gays and lesbians had also became characters in these scripts.

The script is the soul

Because most films that apply for production grants have participated in the GIO's screenplay contest, the winning scripts provide a general idea of what kind of films will be produced over the coming year. But the economic outlook for the movie industry is gloomy, and over the last two years only about two films a year have been made from the ten that have won awards. This summer shooting is beginning on Chang Tzou-Chi's Light of the Black Night and Khan Lee's Tiaozi Abula.

What sort of lives do screenplays have if they're not made into movies? Can a screenplay have artistic value standing on its own?

Lu Fei-yi argues that a screenplay can't be viewed as a finished product because film involves the creation of images. In contrast, he says, "The novel is an independent literary art form, and scripts of theater plays can stand on their own." But even if the screenplay is written extremely clearly, when the director sees the actors or the shooting locations, the personalities of the characters and perhaps even the plot will be modified. The visual images depend entirely upon the efforts of the director on location.

The novelist Kuo Cheng, who has won the screenplay prize six times for such work as God's Dice, Last Winter, and UFO Diary, agrees that "a screenplay can't exist as an independent work of art," holding that it only has meaning if it is made into a film.

Huang Chien-ye, who is head of the Taipei Film Archive, disagrees. He points out that scripts form an important part of the history of the theater, and that over time the only dramatic artists that people remember are famous playwrights, such as Shakespeare and Ibsen.

"Playwrights had always been the 'soul' of these works," he says. "It wasn't until the 1960s with the theory of the 'auteur' that directors and actors became more prominent."

Even if a screenplay isn't turned into a movie, Lu Fei-yi believes that its use of different locations, the chain of cause and effect in the story line, and the images it employs to create atmosphere can all reveal trends in the visual arts.

He notes that in the past, when Hou Hsiao-hsien's style was popular, the plots had clear linear development. Now the work of Hong Kong director Wong Kaiwei is in vogue, and in many scripts time and space are fragmented in a severe fin de si嶰le vision that is nonetheless vibrantly colorful in its disjointedness.

The new generation arrives

The screenplays of younger writers most clearly show this break with the past.

As Lu Fei-yi sees it, the new generation of film makers are revealing tastes that differ markedly from their predecessors. Unlike the scripts of the "new wave cinema" era of the 1980s and early 1990s, which focused on documenting life in Taiwan, often telling coming-of-age stories about characters from various social groups, the younger generation is selecting largely urban topics that center around discussions of friendship, romance, and life and death. They show little interest in social and political topics.

Take, for instance, Chu Yu-ning's screenplay From Seven to Seven, which won an award in 1995: A young man argues with his girlfriend, kills her in a fit of rage and then spends the night on the run. In the apartment below him live a boring middle-aged couple. By juxtaposing these two different relationships, Chu describes "both the death of a life, and the life of the dead"-the kind of stuff that goes on all around us every day.

The ascendance of the new generation is personified by Yao Hung-yi, who was born in 1972. Last year, he won a prize for his "cool" screenplay Hit on the Head, Scared the Cat.

In it, a man who has an unimportant job with a film company sees a stunningly beautiful woman on a crowded Taipei street. He strikes up a conversation with her, and they keep in touch and become quite close. The girl then reveals her feelings about her two old boyfriends, her mother (with whom she lives), her mother's boyfriend and her father (who still loves her mother even after divorcing her). And all the guy had wanted was to relieve the boredom of his life by doing something a little different, and maybe having some good sex. . . .

Overturning traditional narration

After Yao Hung-yi (who worked as an assistant cinematographer and assistant director on Hou Hsiao-hsien's movies Good Man, Good Woman and Goodbye South, Goodbye) won a screenplay prize for the script, the question he was most frequently asked was, "What does the name mean?"

In truth, the name of the screenplay doesn't have much connection to the plot. When Yao Hung-yi went with Hou Hsiao-hsien to Australia to edit Goodbye South, Goodbye, the editors discovered separate bits of film on which appeared the Chinese characters for "Hit on the Head" and "Scared the Cat" and they didn't know where to put them. Tao Hung-yi joked that the writer of Goodbye's screenplay Chu Tien-wen ought to write a screenplay with the title, but nobody paid any attention to him.

"The name is what got me started." Before writing Hit on the Head, Scared the Cat, all he had written was a journal, and he wasn't much of a reader. He compares his reading speed to that of "the 'fool' in one of Su Hui-lung's songs, who takes more than a year to finish one book." At Hou Hsiao-hsien's film company, however, Hou would assign books for his staff to read, and Yao diligently read the novels of Chang Ai-ling and Chen Chungwen, as well as translated works by foreign authors.

"Names are meaningless," Yao says, "but so are society, youth and the weather-aren't they?"

Wu Nien-chen once humorously described his feelings about Hit on the Head, Scared the Cat: "I resent the writer for not following the conventions of writing screenplays, but I also resent him for his brilliance-including his writing ability and his ability to overturn traditional narrative methods. By breaking the rules, intentionally smashing them, we get to see completely new possibilities for conceiving stories and images."

Upon reading a script like Yao's that "disdains traditional creative techniques," Wu Nien-chen, who has written more than 60 screenplays, can't help but give voice to an "old fogey's" complaints he had kept inside for years.

"The new generation's values and varied visual experiences-with documentaries, music videos, and Hollywood movies-makes for works that are a bit flippant, devil-may-care, perhaps even decadent. But old guys can't speak up and say anything, because once we do, we will have already betrayed our age. Society has long been this way-we've just been slow realizing it."

The brothers Lee

With so few movies being produced and opportunities to direct hotly fought over, are screenplays now calling cards that people use to get a foot in the door of the film industry?

Yao Hung-yi and Chu Yu-ning, who has won the screenplay award three times, share the same goal: to become directors. "If you want to succeed quickly, then writing screenplays is one way to go, because if you have a good story, then the words all by themselves can go half way to convincing people," Chu says. Chu was able to realize his dream this year, using his three-year-old script From Seven O'Clock to Seven O'Clock as the blueprint for his film Falling Up, Waking Down.

In 1990, Ang Lee won a screenplay prize for Pushing Hands. Though he had previously won an award for a short film, he had also, as people so often recount, just spent six years writing scripts at home. When he then won a Golden Harvest Award (a government-sponsored film production grant for experimental films), he was finally able to take his award-winning scripts for Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet and put them on the silver screen. Within a few years he was famous. Yet is it still possible to make a name for oneself through screenplays?

"Ang Lee is an exception to the rule," says Wang Chih-cheng, who believes that Ang Lee's success was the result of a complex combination of factors. Lee won major film festival awards and his movies have done well at the box office, but in the last ten years no one has followed in his footsteps. Wang believes that 99.9% of newcomers can't take the route Lee did.

But there are indeed many examples of people who have entered the film world by writing scripts. Ang Lee's younger brother Khan Lee was previously a businessman. As he puts it, all he had written before writing scripts were "compositions for school." But three of his scripts have won screenplay grants, and Tonight Nobody Goes Home won the award for best screenplay at the Asia Pacific Film Festival. These have made him an important figure in the movie industry. Now he is hosting a television show about movies, planning the content of film magazines and directing his own screenplay Tiaozi Abula, a cops and robbers film.

"Screenplays are just tools. If you can't film it, all the work you put in writing was for naught," says Lee. Becoming a director himself wasn't an overwhelming ambition for him, but whether he directs or someone else does, he'd trade 100 screenplays for just one script that is turned into a film. In his view, many of those writing scripts are thinking, "I could become famous, so why not try and see?"

Script and direction

Would-be film makers work hard writing scripts either because they want to write a screenplay and direct it, or else just because they only want to direct but think they can't do it unless they've written their own script first. In any case, there has been criticism that seemingly all of Taiwan's new directors are working from their own scripts. Limited by the narrowness of their own visions, they are unable to transcend personal experience.

"In the history of cinema, directors have traditionally liked to work with the same writers over and over again, cultivating understanding and good chemistry," says Huang Chien-yeh. "There are many examples of these relationships both in Chinese-language and foreign film." For instance, the Chinese director Li Hsing often worked with screenwriter Chang Yung-hsiang, creating such famous movies as Story of a Small Town and Beautiful Duckling.

"The advantage of directing a film yourself is that you can completely control the material; the disadvantage is that there's no-one else to bounce ideas off of," says Huang. "Especially after the concept of the director as 'auteur' took over in the sixties, the director's position has been paramount. No matter who wrote the script, in the end it's a Hitchcock or Hou Hsiao-hsien movie."

As scholars see it, there are advantages and disadvantages both to combining and to dividing the work of director and writer. It's hard to say which is better.

"When the studio system went out in Hollywood so did the idea that the work of screenwriting and direction should be separate," explains Lu Fei-yi. Before the 1960s, some major Hollywood studios, including Paramount and Columbia, filmed everything on studio sets. At the time, film making was like a production line, and often the writer of the screenplay wouldn't even meet with the director and wouldn't participate at all in the production. Before the 1980s a lot of movies were still being made in Taiwan. Back in those days kungfu film director Chu Yuan would shoot 30 films a year. As soon as he finished filming one movie, he'd start on another. He paid no attention to how they were edited.

"Film creators in Taiwan have stopped viewing finishing the script as the end of their work; they've seen that they can participate in the shooting," says Lu Fei-yi. Yet he also stresses that the film industry is still after profits, and when people write and then direct films themselves they may end up oversensitive to budget issues. For instance, very few screenwriters dare to write about the 1950s and 1960s because building the sets costs too much. Instead, they restrict themselves to writing scripts that require few sets and few characters and which tell stories happening around them. It becomes a vicious cycle.

Tseng Hsi-pa, who has taught script writing for more than ten years as a professor of mass communications, television and film at the World College of Journalism, holds that in looking for material, it's easiest to get a grip of one's own experiences, but stories about growing up or falling in love easily lead to similar sorts of film. A screenplay needs to examine social phenomena, vicariously transforming the experience of others.

No Titanics

"We can't write or film stories like Titanic, but stories like The Full Monty or Shall We Dance? are still possible to do in Taiwan," says Lee.

Shall We Dance? is the story of a middle-aged Japanese who has an affair, whereas The Full Monty depicts a group of unemployed Englishmen who become strippers. Both films did very well at the box office.

Lu Fei-yi and Wang Chih-cheng also both mention a film from Hong Kong that was "small in scale but big in design" called Made in Hong Kong. This film, for which movie star Andy Lau put up HK$500,000, was written and directed by Fruit Chan, who had worked for ten years as an assistant director. The film reflects the emotional states of youth-their feelings of emptiness, violence and indecision-many of which Chan had felt himself as a youth. The idea was to use the eyes of youth to look at Hong Kong's future in light of the 1997 handover.

Lu Fei-yi points out that Hong Kong's film industry is also in a slump this year in comparison to its performance over the previous three years. When Hong Kong film makers were making gambling and gangster movies, films such as Made in Hong Kong didn't have a chance. In his view, the Hong Kong film industry had previously prospered by embracing a professionalism of mass production. Screenplays were the exclusive province of just a handful of writers, who were unapologetic copycats. Now that the industry has collapsed, new ideas are being seen in scripts.

Yet most movie people agree that the making of films is a commercial activity. It's not possible to get too wrapped up in your own wishes when thinking about the cast and the target audience.

"Scripts that have commercial selling points are harder to write than those that are strictly personal," Kuo Cheng says. In his view, understanding the market is of paramount importance. There have to be commercial selling points. For instance, in The Wedding Banquet, there is the scene when the Westerners in attendance at a Chinese wedding express surprise over the drunken tomfoolery of the Chinese, or there is the scene in Pushing Hands when the elderly Sihung Lung uses his kungfu to fight off dozens of men. One was a "literary Bruce Lee," the other a "martial Bruce Lee." He argues that you don't need too many of these commercial selling points, that one per picture is enough.

Wang Chih-cheng regarded Kuo Cheng's UFO Diary as one of the scripts most deserving to be filmed of those winning awards in 1996. Kuo Cheng had his fingers on the pulse of the times in writing about the high tide of emigration that took place as the result of a best-selling book predicting a mainland invasion during the extra lunar "leap month" of 1996. Yet, as he explains smiling, it wasn't filmed before its shelf life had expired, and now it is only of humorous or historical interest.

For 80% of those who finish scripts now, the story is over. Most scripts are never turned into films. Even if they are, the films quickly leave the theaters and the box-office receipts are poor. It's a case of "damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

The script may be the embryo of a film, but what a long way it is from the written word to the filmed image!

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Are screenplays calling cards for newcomers to the film industry? The new director Chu Yu-ning won Government Information Office awards for three different screenplays, and today he is finally turning one of them into a completed film, Falling Up, Waking Down. (courtesy of Chu Yu-ning)

Screenplays reflect future trends in Chinese-language cinema and are an expression of the collective creative consciousness of the masses.

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People love to tell the story of how Ang Lee, today a well-known international director, was camped out at home for six years writing screenplays. His second film, The Wedding Banquet, won the Golden Bear at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival.

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Chen Yu-hsun's comedy Tropical Fish. A special characteristic of the Taiwan film industry is that most directors work from their own scripts. (courtesy of Central Studios)

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Yao Hung-yi, one of the younger generation of screenwriters, has written an extremely "cool" screenplay, Hit on the Head, Scared the Cat.

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Although the Taiwan film industry has fallen on hard times, its creative powers haven't diminished. One standard for comparison is the GIO screenplay awards. The photo shows award-winner Chang Tzou-chi, whose film Light of the Black Night has received a production grant and is now being shot. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

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Wu Nien-chen, Taiwan's most prolific writer of screenplays, working on location during the shooting of Buddha Bless America. (photo by Vincent Chang)

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New director Khan Lee doing casting for Tiaozi Abula. Scripts are the blue prints for constructing a film. After the words are down on paper, the next step is to mold the visual images.

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Screenplays exist for films. The greatest hope of screenwriters is to see their works actually up on screen. (photo by Vincent Chang)

Although the Taiwan film industry has fallen on hard times, its creative powers haven't diminished. One standard for comparison is the GIO screenplay awards. The photo shows award-winner Chang Tzou-chi, whose film Light of the Black Night has received a production grant and is now being shot. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）

Wu Nien-chen, Taiwan's most prolific writer of screenplays, working on location during the shooting of Buddha Bless America. （photo by Vincent Chang）

New director Khan Lee doing casting for Tiaozi Abula. Scripts are the blue prints for constructing a film. After the words are down on paper, the next step is to mold the visual images.

Screenplays exist for films. The greatest hope of screenwriters is to see their works actually up on screen. （photo by Vincent Chang）