Closet screenplay

Critical interest

Brian Norman, an assistant professor at Idaho State University, refers to James Baldwin's One Day When I Was Lost as a closet screenplay. That screenplay was written for a film project that suffered a setback, after which the script was published as a literary work. Lee Jamieson's article 'The Lost Prophet of Cinema: The Film Theory of Antonin Artaud' discusses Artaud's three Lesescenarios in the context of his revolutionary film theory. In French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907–1939, Richard Abel lists critical treatments of several Surrealist published scenario texts, including works by J. H. Matthews, Steven Kovács, Linda Williams, and Abel himself.

Quimby Melton's article 'Production's "dubious advantage": Lesescenarios, closet drama, and the (screen)writer's riposte' outlines the history of the Lesescenario form, situates it in a historical literary context by drawing parallels with Western closet drama, and argues that certain instances of closet drama might be considered proto-screenplays. Melton also contends that writing such readerly performance texts is an act of subversion, allowing (screen)writers to bypass production and thereby reassert narrative representation's textual primacy and reclaim a direct connection with their audience.

The comments section of Melton's article includes an ongoing discussion of the Lesescenario canon, and a list of examples is based on that article, that discussion, and Melton's Lesecenario Bibliography at Google Docs, which contains additional critical works.