ABSTRACT
The story of the development of screenwriting as a discrete practice is one of habitus, labour relations, cultural assumptions and inter-medial borrowings. It is a narrative lying within the larger one of cinema, following the same contours of growth and retrenchment and with the same concerns about how to match production technology with audience comprehension. But it also has its own history of creating and rationalizing specific ways of working, and of negotiating spaces for these within broader industry practice. This chapter introduces that history, during the silent era of the British film industry.
