The (im)perfect screenplay: a parody of craft and industry

Drawing on the author’s twelve years of teaching, researching and writing about screenwriting craft, this work draws attention to formulaic conventions and the industry in which they operate in the form of a parody of an episode of a hypothetical low-budget Australian soap opera. It is structured as a soap opera typically would be, with an episode containing parallel and tonally different storylines set in the context of a day, but deliberately exploits craft and convention to the extreme. In the vein of Victoria Wood’s Acorn Antiques, a television sitcom that parodied 1980s British soap operas, The (Im)Perfect Screenplay: A Parody of Craft and Industry seeks more critically to reveal the hidden (to many) craft techniques of screenwriting by creating an explicit awareness of how they operate within a well-known genre and format. By doing so, the work offers simultaneously a perfect and an imperfect screenplay. It contributes to the field of screenwriting in the academy through the performative potential of the screenplay as a research artefact.