Australian screenwriting: towards policy and education reform

Abstract

Australian screen storytelling is in a state of crisis. Culturally relevant stories that reflect the sensibility of Australians are disappearing from our television and cinema screens and rarely appear on the streamers. This has occurred while government ministers proclaim Australian stories are essential to well-being, social cohesion, and nation-building. In this article we argue that underlying the quantitative drop in Australian drama is a more fundamental problem: the capacity of Australian screenwriters to imagine culturally relevant stories. The origins of this lie in the internationalisation of screen industry policy, the programs and priorities of screen funding agencies, and the dominance of the Hollywood narrative paradigm in the training of screenwriters in higher education. Together, these influences have systematically eroded ‘Australianness’ in screenwriting. This article calls for research into policy frameworks and training to ensure a better place for Australian voices in education, screen development and production in future.

Introduction

A recent study by The Making Australian TV in the 21st Century (TMATV) research team found that failings in government policy has led ‘profoundly Australian screen storytelling to “the edge of the precipice”’ (Lotz et al., 2021; TMATV, 2024). At stake is not only free-to- air television drama, but also Australian feature films and drama made for the streaming services ('streamers’). Culturally specific content is fading from our cinema (George, 2022). Streamers provide only minimal access to Australian stories (Gooderick, 2023). The production and screening of adult free-to-air television drama has collapsed by 55% since the 2000s while children's drama has disappeared from the screens of commercial broadcasters (TMATV, 2024).

This article explores the causes and effects of this crisis in ‘profoundly Australian screen storytelling’ with a focus on screenwriting. Screenwriting is foundational to the production of Australian drama; stories and themes that reflect the nation and its people. However, the stories screenwriters choose to tell are significantly influenced by external factors: policy settings, production realities, and the educational training they receive or continue to access. We argue that alongside the collapse of culturally specific screen storytelling (in feature, free-to-air and streaming drama) is an even more concerning possibility: that the capacity of screenwriters to imagine and create culturally relevant stories has diminished. The expression of Australian voices has been systemically eroded by decades of government policy and higher education training which has ‘internationalised’ the screen industry.

We acknowledge that the dynamic and vexed nature of 21st century screen storytelling extends beyond government policy and education pedagogy to encompass broader local and global social/cultural shifts that shape audience taste and practices (fragmentation of audiences, convergence of media forms, globalisation, falling cinema attendance, etc.). However, our focus in this article is on the decisions Australian institutions could take to revitalise Australian storytelling.

Since the 1980s, screen policy has consistently privileged commercial over cultural objectives to the detriment of the latter. Screenwriters have been pressured to think ‘global’ rather than ‘local’ in shaping the stories they write. For decades, the ‘industrial model’ of screenwriting, that is Hollywood's production model, has been taught in universities and private training institutions as the most successful form to follow in constructing screen stories.

The corrosive effect of these factors on ‘Australianness’ in screenwriting – that is, the specific reflection of the sensibilities of a nation and its people – is the focus of this article. To address the negative impacts of this, we argue that research is urgently required into the content and form of contemporary Australian narratives to discern and articulate cultural relevance. This data can be used by government and screen funding agencies to secure a sustainable position for Australian screen storytelling. Additionally, a new framework for screenwriting education and an archive of Australian scripts are needed to give screenwriting students the skills and resources to once again write in Australian voices – their voices. If Australian screen stories are to be available to Australian audiences, we must ensure that current and future screenwriters are enabled and encouraged to write them.

Our analysis of the pressures on Australian screenwriters is divided into two parts. First, we consider the industrial context in which they work: the government's cultural and screen policies and the history of their application by the federal screen funding agencies. Second, we consider the tertiary training of screenwriters today and its importance in incubating Australian voices.

The screenwriting context: government cultural and screen policy

It has been widely noted that the idea and ethos of cultural nationalism drove the revival of the Australian film industry in the 1970s (see Dermody and Jacka, 1987; O’Regan, 1996; Turner, 1994) and was the reason local content rules for television were introduced in the 1980s (Turner, 1994, 2018). Content produced was to have a ‘nationing agenda’ (Turner, 1994: 64) and was expected to represent an Australian sense of ‘identity, character and cultural diversity’ (Broadcasting Services Act, 1992). Alison Pennington and Ben Eltham argue, ‘the policy architecture established in the 1970s [Gough] Whitlam era created the foundation for the arts as a public good, and a strong role for government in funding and promoting it (2021: 4). It ‘created norms – still widely held among Australian people – about the centrality and importance of the arts to Australian identity’ (4). ¹ Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, ‘policy relied on the conviction that Australian screen stories should be told to Australian audiences by Australian practitioners’ (Lotz and Potter, 2022: 685). However, at the same time, there was a strong parallel impetus to define the screen industry as an economic commodity (Dermody and Jacka, 1988). During the 1980s, so-called economic rationalism became the ubiquitous approach to policy making and evaluation (see especially Pusey, 1991), including in arts and culture (Meyrick and Barnett, 2017; Phiddian et al., 2017). The precursor of the Productivity Commission, the Industry Assistance Commission, laid the groundwork in 1976, claiming that culture was ‘analogous to any service to be traded in the market’ (1999, also see Meyrick, 2023 for a detailed account).

The turn towards economic rationalism in screen industry policy was evident in new financing models aimed at commercialising screen production. In 1981, the 10BA tax relief scheme was introduced offering a 150% tax rebate to investors. Following this, the government established the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), a film bank investing in commercially oriented film and television projects that had secured a 35% pre-sale commitment. Justin O’Connor observes that when the ‘neoliberal revolution’ swept over the Australian government promoting a ‘creative industries’ model for arts and culture, it became ‘a full, unto-the-hilt buy-in to a powerful new political imaginary in which art and culture's transformation promise was hitched to a post-industrial economic vision’ (2024: 14).

Creative nation – national cultural policy #1

The ‘buy-in’ is evident in Creative Nation (1994), Australia's first national cultural policy, where culture and the economy are overlaid ‘in a policy narrative that rendered the former a serious means for fuelling post-industrial growth’ (Meyrick and Barnett, 2017: 6). Improving Australian life, adding to the nation's security and well-being, are set as the overarching goals of Creative Nation, but with regard to the screen industry, the policy goals are commercial. The creation of Australian stories hardly rates a mention. Concern is expressed that ‘the wave of global mass culture potentially threatens that which is distinctly our own’ (1994: 6), but the way the film and television sector can meet the challenge and compete internationally is defined as seizing the opportunities of ‘interactive multi-media production’. The sector is tied to harnessing the potentialities of the ‘Information Age’ and the ‘information economy’.

The fundamental change in film and television policy from the original paradigm of ‘cultural nationalism’ to a new paradigm of ‘internationalism/free trade’ was not publicly advertised. Rather, it was ‘institutionalized within the policy system without a challenge to existing ideas’ (Parker and Parenta, 2008: 610). Concepts of cultural protection were coated by a commercial agenda (industry development and employment) through ‘layering and drift’ (609). This allowed the two ideas to co-exist in the minds of policymakers. Thus, even as government ministers laid down new commercial policy pathways for the industry to follow, they continued to promote the importance of film and television's ‘nationing agenda’. For example, when Minister Alston introduced new tax incentives to stimulate foreign production in Australia in the early 2000s, he pronounced, ‘It is, of course, utterly crucial that our domestic film industry retains its cultural identity – that it continues to tell quintessentially Australian stories, in Australian voices’ (quoted in Parker and Parenta, 2008: 617). Four years later in 2005, the federal government entered into a trade agreement with the U.S. that blocked an increase in local content requirements on free-to-air TV. This followed the government's failure to apply strong local content regulation to the new television player, pay-TV. Minister Alston's comments exemplify a doublethink that became the norm. While introducing policies that limited the number of Australian stories being produced and screened, the government continued to link economic development to positive cultural outcomes, to the robust telling of Australian stories. In reality, the two objectives were mutually exclusive.

By 2008, screenwriters were working in an increasingly commercial, globalised environment. The government was focused on measuring the benefits of the industry econometrically, on jobs created, growth obtained and sales secured, rather than on the content produced and the public good that accrues from local stories that resonate with local audience. However, despite the economic policy focus, screenwriters themselves were still protected from the full brunt of its implications by a hangover of the ‘culture-first’ 1970s.

The screenwriting context: the Australian Film Commission

Australia's first screen funding agency, the Australian Film Commission (AFC), was established in 1975 at the peak of the cultural nationalism moment. According to its Act, it was ‘to encourage…the making, promotion, distribution and exhibition of Australian films’; films that were ‘to deal with matters of national interest to Australia’ and ‘illustrate or interpret aspects of Australia or of the life and activities of the Australian people’ (Australian Government, 1975). The AFC's influence on storytelling was so strong that Dermody and Jacka (1988) coined a label for the stories it supported: the ‘AFC-genre’, comprised of ‘picturesque period films’ (31) such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Breaker Morant (1980). In the 1980s, the AFC-genre faded as the foregrounding of narratives based in the nation's past gave way to films based in the present and set locally (Turner, 1994: 207). Graeme Turner identified culturally specific films like Proof (1991) and Death in Brunswick (1990) as ‘directly interested in the richness and diversity of contemporary Australian society’ (207).

Yet the push to internationalise the industry and produce entertaining, Hollywood-style stories that would appeal globally, was also in place during this period. Dermody and Jacka (1987) termed the two parallel strands Industry 1 (culturally specific) and Industry 2 (international focus) (197–198). By 1987 they judged the two strands to be in an ‘uneasy, uncertain, unconfident stasis’ (200).

The AFC's control of the industry ended in 1988 when the government, acting on its economic vision for film and television, took production investment away from the AFC and handed it to a new organisation, the FFC. The FFC only funded productions which had secured a pre-sale market commitment of 35% of their budget. In effect this handed responsibility for which stories would be told to local distributors, international sales agents and market mechanisms (Maddox, 1996). The requirement of securing overseas sales pushed producers and writers to prioritise international market preferences in choosing which stories to tell, but there was still a place for stories that focused on the local. Continuing Industry 1 and 2 bifurcations, the AFC maintained control over script development funding and production investment for low budget features, which often led to the production of culturally specific narratives. AFC script executives saw their role in disbursing script development funding as supporting filmmakers ‘who were making a contribution to national culture’, by telling ‘different and unusual and powerful stories’ representing ‘different kinds of voices’ (Claire Dobbin quoted in Hambly, 2017, Vol 1: 47). The selection of scripts by the executives was personal. The aim was to find scripts that succeed on their own terms. Artistic risk-taking was encouraged and marketplace considerations were not necessarily a consideration in choosing which projects to support.

In the 1990s, a new pressure on writers to write beyond the ‘local’ arrived in the form of a succession of screenwriting manuals from the USA. These introduced Hollywood's narrative paradigm to Australian screenwriting discourse and practice as a ‘universal’ structural formula: cause-and-effect stories built on rising conflict and a protagonist's pursuit of a central goal formalised in a three-act structure/hero's journey template. The AFC was not immune to this influence (see Martin, 2018; Millard, 2014), but a script development ethos attuned to the individual writer's vision remained in place at the AFC until 2008 when a shift occurred with serious ramifications for screenwriters focused on expressing an Australian voice.

The screenwriting context: Screen Australia

When the AFC and FFC were merged to form Screen Australia (SA) in 2008, the new organisation began with a very different mandate to that of its predecessor. SA's ‘functions’ unequivocally reflected an economy-first policy dynamic. SA was ‘to support and promote the development of a highly creative, innovative and commercially sustainable Australian screen production industry’ (Australian Government, 2008). ‘The development, production, promotion and distribution of Australian programs’ came in second on the ‘functions’ list. A suite of funding mechanisms was introduced to further integrate the sector into international market logics, global funding and distribution arrangements (see O’Regan and Goldsmith, 2006). But what counted most for screenwriters was that for the first time, the commercial focus which had applied in the production sphere under the FFC, was extended to script development.

Veronica Gleeson, development executive at both the AFC and SA (2004–2014), describes 2008 as the ‘the line in the sand’ (quoted in Hambly, 2017, Vol 1: 43) between the old ‘subjective’ culture of the AFC, and the new ‘objective’ approach used to analyse scripts for development funding and production investment. The ‘objective’ approach involved applying Hollywood's narrative paradigm to measure how well a script was written. In addition to endorsing the Hollywood paradigm, SA heavily promoted the value of genre and ‘cross-over’ scripts, stories that appealed to international audiences. These three changes, it was believed, would lead to better commercial outcomes for the projects SA supported by ensuring their appeal to distributors, exhibitors and audiences.

The impact of SA's new vision for Australian screenwriting was swift. In 2008, drama comprised 60% of the AFC slate. By 2012, it had dropped to 40%. The remaining 60% was composed of ‘thrillers, crime films, action films, romantic comedies and others’ (Ritchie, 2012). Although SA's new development culture was never formally announced as policy, it became the practice of not only SA but also the State and Territory agencies that most often follow the lead of their more powerful federal counterpart. For example, in 2010 Film Victoria published statistical briefing documents for producers titled Australian Films and Genre and Genre and International Box-Office in ‘an effort to educate producers in genre and audience fundamentals’ (Ryan, 2012: 147). In their Script Development application form of 2012, Film Victoria asked applicants to nominate their story structure (3 or 5 acts), key turning points: inciting incident, first act turn, midpoint, etc., the protagonist and the protagonist's wants, needs and ultimate goal (Hambly, 2017, Vol 2: 16–19).

The new culture at SA was a major turning point for Australian screen storytelling. ‘Industry 1’ lost its dedicated place in the institutional system governing the distribution of public funds for script development. The adoption of Hollywood's narrative paradigm as the best model for constructing stories directly challenged the Australian narrative form (which we consider shortly), further disincentivising Australian storytelling.

The new digital world

Since the early 2010s, the pressures on screenwriters to tell international rather than local stories have intensified due to the effects of globalisation. The TMATV team have shown the significant impact caused by the combination of digital technologies, internationalisation, the relaxation of local content regulations and the growing domination of the streamers. Not only have the drama hours broadcast on Australian television collapsed by 55%, the stories that remain are not specifically Australian (TMATV, 2024; see also Lotz and Potter, 2022; Lotz and Sanson, 2022). Unfortunately, the decline continues. In 2024–25, overall annual drama production expenditure was an impressive 2.7 billion, but local productions accounted for less than half (Screen Australia, 2025). Of the 174 titles produced, only 71 were Australian. The rest were generated by international activity, that is they were foreign productions either filmed in Australia or post produced here. Matthew Deaner, CEO of the Australian Screen Producers (SPA), commented on the figures saying that they give ‘a headline appearance of strength, but mask a more fragile reality for Australian storytelling’ (Screen Producers Australia, 2025).

TMATV identify the government's long-standing policy of prioritising commercial interests ‘as a key threat to the creation of Australian drama that contributes to and strengthens Australian culture and identity’ (2024: 2). They argue the sector's major policy tools, the producer's offset and funds administered by SA, fail to deliver the proclaimed social and cultural objectives. There is no meaningful consideration of culturally specific content in the Significant Australian Content (SAC) requirement written into the producer's offset (Screen Australia, 2024: 12–13). If the creatives involved in a production are Australian or the project will be largely filmed in Australia, it passes the SAC test. After analysing the titles funded by SA, the principles guiding the organisation and its KPIs, TMATV concluded that ‘the priority of the organisation [is] economic development’ (Lotz and Potter, 2022: 692).

Today, the majority of Australians use streaming services as their preferred method for consuming screen content (ACMA, 2024: 3). Given the collapse in drama commissions from the commercial networks, drama producers are dependent on the streamers to finance their projects. However, the streamers in Australia and in Europe commission for global audiences (Eskilsson, 2022; TMATV, 2024: 7). Producers report that projects with cultural specificity are often deemed ‘too Australian’ or require a reduction in specificity to be regarded as commercially viable (Lotz and Potter, 2022: 687). Stan, the only Australian-owned streamer, has the best record for screening local content, but this comprised just 8.8% of its catalogue in 2023. Netflix averaged 4.1%, Apple TV + offered none (Gooderick, 2023).

Since 2020, the Australian production industry had pinned its hopes for a revival in local drama production on the extension of local content obligations to the streamers. In late 2025, when the government finally fulfilled its electoral promise to do so, the rate of investment imposed on the streamers was half the 20% industry groups had lobbied for. Julian Leeser, shadow Minister for the Arts, observed that ‘most streamers easily meet [the new rate of investment] already’ (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 2025: 5). SPA's CEO commented, ‘On its own [the new legislation] is not going to address the decline in commissioning of Australian stories’ (Slatter, 2025).

The irony of the government's weak response is that it occurred within the context of Revive, the government's national cultural policy launched in 2023. Unlike its predecessors, Creative Nation (1994) and Creative Australia (2013), both of which hitched art and culture's value to a transformational post-industrial economic vision, economic outcomes are hardly mentioned in Revive. For the first time in 30 years, the cultural value of Australian stories is paramount in public policy: ‘At the heart of this policy (Revive) is the goal to ensure there is a place for every story, and a story for every place’ (Australian Government, 2023: 10). Yet the doublethink conflation of cultural and commercial objectives continues in Revive's screen industry policy. While promising local content controls to prevent U.S. streamers from ‘drowning out the voices of Australian storytellers’ (87), it continues to emphasise the value of commercially oriented big budget projects and expanding the production of foreign projects in Australia.

What is Australian storytelling?

In tracking the impact on Australian storytelling of the foreign take-over of Australian production companies, TMATV researchers have called for a closer examination of their ‘textual output’ to ascertain the level of culturally specificity in the drama they produce (Lotz and Sanson, 2022: 698). This is the crucial missing dimension in Australian policymaking. The only way to navigate the conflation of economic targets with cultural goals in relation to Australian screen storytelling is an empirical examination of contemporary screen stories and screenwriting practices to discern cultural specificity and relevance, and to identify the content and forms of the current version of ‘Australianness’. The belief that Australian screen storytelling is flourishing in the current industrial environment is improbable, but only comprehensive research will prove it so. The work of Graeme Turner is pivotal in this regard.

In his pioneering study of Australian narrative form, National Fictions (1986), Graeme Turner identified how patterns ‘which dominate the Australian literary tradition also shape film narrative’ (6). Key attributes of the Australian narrative film form are:

Protagonists are inactive or passive, subordinate to their setting responding to forces lying outside their control.

Community is preferred over the individual.

The common structural form is episodic with a lack of narrative closure.

There is a preponderance of documentary realism and an absence of the stamp of the filmmaker's consciousness (54–104).

Broadly speaking ‘narrative’ is a culture's way of making sense of itself; ‘a story which people tell themselves in order to lend meaning to their social world’ (Wodak et al., 2009: 23). Turner argues that a storyteller is the (unconscious) conduit for this cultural messaging, drawing from a ‘bank of ideologically framed myths’ (1986: 19) which inform cultural perceptions thereafter. The materials for the stories, the detailed and individualised representations of life, are drawn from the narrative langue of the culture (langue being not only linguistic, but also ideological). In Australia, Turner posits ‘there is an ideological proposition that negates the value of individual action and legitimates powerlessness and subjection’ (9–10). This notion of the individual as powerless within their social environment is a central quality of the Australian narrative form.

The structural features of narrative formation in the USA, by contrast, derive from a national cultural mythology which privileges the empowered individual. American historian Richard Slotkin (1973) details the frontier myth of conquest and triumph driven by the actions of the heroic individual and concludes that ‘the heroic quest…is perhaps the most important archetype underlying American cultural mythology’ (10). Julie Levinson (2012) describes the ‘Myth of Success’ as the narrative form of the American Dream and the key component of American master narratives from the 18th century to the present. ‘The myth of success’, she writes, ‘with its fervid conviction that the opportunity for material attainment and spiritual fulfillment is every individual's birthright and is within each person's power, is central to American national identity’ (1).

Turner published his findings in the mid-1980s. Follow-up research found that despite the pressure from the screen agencies to employ the three-act structure/hero's journey template, a majority of Australia's most successful feature screenwriters ² between 1994 and 2013 continued to employ a narrative approach consistent with Turner's list of key attributes, if with modifications (Hambly, 2017, Vol 1: 109–111). ³ The portrayal of the disempowered protagonist remained central in these scripts. They were structured episodically rather than as linear narratives and featured a group or ensemble of characters. There was no one hero (perhaps sometimes a reluctant one) and they experienced muted or no individual transformation. However, the lack of closure identified by Turner had given way to an often qualified but a more uplifting ending. The emphasis on documentary realism had gone, and filmmakers were asserting a wider variety of individual styles.

Turner argued strongly that a nation's narratives ‘participate fundamentally in that culture's explanations of the world’ and that the Australian ‘accent’ in our narratives was expressed in ‘many, simultaneously harmonic and discordant voices’ (1994: 214). His strikingly original research into a local narrative form was completed at a particular historical moment in the late 20th century. The question for today is: how do screenwriters express that ‘accent’ in practices, forms and content in the even more diverse social and cultural landscape of 21st century Australia? (In 2023, SA's Seeing Ourselves (2023) reported on the level of diversity in cultural background, disability status and sexual orientation/gender identity on Australian television screens between 2016 and 2021 but did not investigate narrative structures or screenwriting practices in a complex way.) A practice-based and textual analysis of contemporary Australian screenwriting that combines research into practices, forms, content and cultural representation will be an invaluable first step in generating screen policies that better support the growth of local narratives.

We now move on to the second part of our article: the role of education in the decline of Australian storytelling, and the pressure on emerging screenwriters to use forms drawn from the American ‘bank of ideologically framed myths’.

Screenwriting education: dominance and disruption

In screenwriting education, Hollywood's narrative paradigm is promoted through script resources (O’Meara et al., 2023) and screenwriting manuals (Conor, 2014). In this section, we consider how these mechanisms have enabled the pre-eminence of that paradigm in Australia. We also explore the ways in which educators are calling it to account for the assumptions it makes about the treatment of the elements of screenwriting such as story, character, dialogue and development practices.

Policy has played a key ideological role in shaping screenwriting education. Petrie and Stoneman (2014) note in their study of filmmaking education in the USA, UK and Europe, that since the 1980s there has been a marked shift away from a holistic, auteur approach towards a market-focused, division of labour approach that favours professional specialisation, including in screenwriting. They tie this to the rise of a ‘creative industries logic where cultural pluralism loses out to the powerful monopoly of corporate interests’ (19). By the term ‘creative industries’, Petrie and Stoneman refer to a cultural policy concept that found nodal expression in the UK in the 1990s. In 1998, the Blair government's Creative Industries Task Force (DCMS, 1998) identified screen production, including screenwriting, as an industry that could be targeted for its economic as well as its cultural benefit as a rationale for investment. This was part of an overall strategy to reframe artists as entrepeneurial subjects in a market-orientated cultural economy (Banks, 2007; McRobbie, 2016). The UK approach influenced cultural policymaking in countries such as Australia, France, and South Korea, which also embraced the creative industries concept to reconfigure arts funding (see, e.g. Kim, 2021). Consequently, screenwriting education increasingly drew on this logic to promote successful screenwriting as entrepreneurial and market-savvy. In doing so, it has looked to Hollywood's narrative paradigm as both normative model and means of legitimation.

As Ian Macdonald (2023) points out, the Hollywood paradigm is globally pervasive and shared within industrial and education settings as ‘received wisdom about best practice’ (30). Its extraordinary reach is partly achieved through the privileging of a narrow band of Hollywood screenplays in screenwriting curricula. In researching reading lists in European, North American, South American, Australasian and Asian screenwriting programs, O’Meara et al., (2023) identify significant skews in the availability of screenplay resources, arguing that scripts in screenwriting curricula tend to originate from America, Hollywood in particular, and most are written by white males. Hollywood screenplays from films that are commercially successful, they contend, perpetuate a narrow model of ‘good’ screenwriting that in the absence of challenge from alternative approaches, acquire normative status (9). These resource limitations have a cultural and educational impact, ‘reinforcing Hollywood's global cultural dominance and its biases’ (11) and inhibiting ‘the flourishing of local, diverse and critical scholarship and the teaching of it’ (12). Reflecting on their own teaching experiences, they note that while students might question commercial exemplars, their writing is heavily influenced by the Hollywood mainstream (15). It is worth noting that this configuration of screenwriting contrasts with the broader discipline of creative writing, which is shaped by a relationship with literary studies and its attendant histories of academic critique (O’Meara et al., 2023).

The Hollywood narrative paradigm is also promoted through screenwriting ‘how-to’ resources. In her study of screenwriting education in the UK, Bridget Conor (2014) observes that how-to-write screenwriting manuals are key components of the curricula, appearing on the reading lists of many UK-based screenwriting programs. A central concept for these manuals is ‘structure’ (86). Well-known manual authors such as Syd Field (2005) and Linda Seger (1994) advocate cause and effect three-act plot ‘structures’ with a prescribed number of ‘turning points’ as foundational to good screenwriting and which, if followed faithfully, provide a pathway to film production.

Drawing on a survey of UK and US advisory manuals, websites, and blogs on film and television writing, Macdonald (2023) has summarised the attributes they see as essential to narrative construction. These include a three-act structure, a protagonist with a clear objective who changes, grows and transforms in the face of a potentially overwhelming antagonist, a reliance on a central conflict, and the privileging of external action and pace (31).

The manuals also promote a standardised approach to the task of script writing. These take an instrumentalist view of screenwriting and reinforce a formulaic approach to storytelling while claiming to represent best industry practice. Often, they use the term ‘craft’ to legitimise a narrow set of learnable principles, forms and techniques they deem essential for producing effective scripts (e.g., Field, 2005; McKee, 1997). Notably, their use of the term exists in striking contrast to Richard Sennett's (2008) capacious definition of craft as an embodied practice, grounded in community, motivated by intrinsic satisfaction, and valuing experiment.

Macdonald is circumspect about the extent to which the Hollywood paradigm should be challenged in education. In a university setting, he argues, students run the risk of being considered incompetent if they ignore it, as vocational programs require learning the dominant rules first (34). This claim certainly warrants further investigation, as it would indicate how entrenched the Hollywood narrative paradigm has become, and illuminate how it has been maintained.

The appeal of such manuals in the education setting is understandable. With their assumptions about a universal narrative structure, and directive approaches to screenwriting, they presume to offer screenwriting students assured pathways to success (Conor, 2014). Manuals will often quote successful writers praising the narrative formulas they advocate and attesting to their positive effects. McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. (1997), for example, includes acclamations from several notable Hollywood creatives.

The manuals also contribute to what is perceived to be a lingua franca among screenwriters. In an interview-based study of Australian screenwriters pursuing television writing careers in the UK and the USA, interviewees stressed the importance of demonstrating knowledge of concepts such as ‘turning points’ and ‘rising conflict’, and of being able to deploy these in script development meetings (Maloney, 2019). In a subsequent study of Australian writers working in television writers’ rooms, screenwriters aimed to present in a similar way – as knowledgeable craft practitioners who valued accepted, that is Hollywood concepts and models, with an eye on ‘industry realities’ (Maloney and Burne, 2021). Such practiced displays of knowledge contribute to an industrial reflexivity in screen production where writers navigate hierarchies, build identities, and assert creative agency as a matter of ‘commonsense’ and ‘self-theorising’, to legitimate themselves (Caldwell, 2008).

The ‘skillification’ and ‘marketisation’ promoted by manuals have affected screenwriting pedagogy in distinct ways. As Siri Senje (2017) notes, such an approach renders screenplays as products rather than creative texts and encourages screenwriting education to focus on an industrial process in which planning documents such as synopses and treatments, often used to greenlight different phases of script development, are normalised as part of the writing process. An underlying assumption is that script development is predictable. If the stepping stones are followed, there is greater guarantee of a marketable product. However, if the training of screenwriters is constrained in this way, if the material students read and teachers depend on reproduces Hollywood's narrative paradigm, where, Senje asks, does this leave the ‘imagining writer’? (269). For Kathryn Millard (2014), screenwriting manuals, in the way they universalise story on the one hand yet promote a narrow conception of it on the other, rob screenwriters of cinematic history. Mass market story forms and mainstream screenwriting practices are valorised, while alternative ways of storytelling are hidden from view. Adrian Martin (2018) adopts the same position as Millard. In addition, he notes how using a limited set of terms and metrics to ‘develop’ and assess scripts, fails to acknowledge a wide range of screen offerings that explore dramatic ambiguity, rely on spectacle, or engage imaginary worlds (333).

Disruptions

Of course, many Australian screen productions push back against the Hollywood paradigm, both in terms of narrative and script development. Jocelyn Moorehouse's genre-defying The Dressmaker (2015) was one of Australia's highest box office grossing films of all time. Exposure (2024), a streaming series produced for Stan, situates its provocative narrative in Sydney and Port Kembla, while the highly praised ABC TV miniseries, Goolagong (2025), avoids the dramatic highs and lows typical of sporting biopics to tell a more thoughtful, nuanced, and place-based story about Australian tennis legend, Yvonne Goolagong Cawley. Freed from the strictures and ‘milestones’ required by film funding agencies, Australia's independent non-funded film sector has a rich history of resisting the so-called universality of the Hollywood paradigm not just in the stories told, but in their making. In her debut feature film, The Five Provocations (2020) Angie Black used a spreadsheet as a primary writing tool to manage the complex improvisations and rhizomic story world (2019). Working from a simple synopsis, David Easteal created his film The Plains (2022a) using a single camera, fixed inside a car during a repeated journey along Melbourne's eastern freeway, to tell the story of a work colleague's relationship with his dying mother (2022b). Steven Maras (2009) coined the term ‘scripting’ to capture such unorthodox practices, where screenwriting is seen more broadly as ‘encompassing writing with bodies, with the camera and with light’ (172). However, despite this apparent diversity of adventurous screen narratives, as noted earlier, the opportunities to make place-based screen narratives that disrupt the Hollywood paradigm are rapidly diminishing.

It is heartening then, to see educational institutions exploring new ways of negotiating the boundaries between film education and the screen industry and challenging the way screenwriting is theorised and practised. Educators are recognising the need to move beyond a narrow, skills-based approach, and to encourage film students to be creative in cross-artform and interdisciplinary environments. In 2018, educators interviewed for a study of screenwriting in the UK and Europe showed a strong understanding of their program's history, and the economic and cultural forces that have shaped it (Maloney, 2018). They focused on moving beyond the Hollywood paradigm by developing curricula that emphasised creative collaboration, critical awareness, and different and dynamic ways of engaging with the film and television industry. For teachers such as Adam Ganz at Royal Holloway University (London) and Phillip Parsons at Goldsmiths College (London), narrative structures are mutable and varied. They argue that screenwriting should be taught as an emergent practice, rather than a predetermined object (11).

Alternative ways of navigating and challenging mainstream methods can also be found in the work of screenwriting educators in Australia. In designing a new screenwriting MA course for the University of Notre Dame, Hannah Ianniello and Marco Ianniello (2021) combined the teaching of three-act narrative structure with an open-ended approach to other elements. Filmmaker and educator Margot Nash (2013) opts for a discovery-driven approach in her teaching, where narrative structure emerges organically from the type of story being told. She rejects the orthodoxy of screenwriting manuals, valuing ‘the unknown’ and ‘the uncertain’, encouraging students to ‘get out into the unknown to hunt and gather images, sounds and ideas’ (2013:150). Craig Batty and Zara Waldebeck (2019) note how screenwriting has come to be seen as a ‘mechanical’ form of writing, centring on structural design and a narrow skill set. They advocate greater emphasis on process and imagination rather than marketability (6). Drawing on research in cognitive psychology into divergent and convergent thinking, creative flow, and the impact of emotion, Margaret McVeigh (2023) argues for a creativity-centred approach to screenwriting education in which ‘craft’ is just one aspect. A recent manifesto produced by Australia screen production educators uses a queer methodology to critique what they consider to be heteronormative assumptions about goal-orientated characters, success and narrative closure in traditional screen narratives. Instead, it promotes notions of queer kinship and failure (Taylor et al., 2023). ⁴

In summary, we note the pivotal role the Hollywood paradigm is playing in screenwriting education but also the challenges to its dominance. Gert Biesta (2016) argues that to have real impact educators must allow risk to ‘bring something into existence that cannot be guaranteed in advance’ (231), rather than relaying on pre-given skills. As O’Meara et al. (2023) write, such an approach requires giving up the convenience of relying solely on the existing ‘canon’ (16) when teaching students how to become screenwriters. This in turn calls for resources that better facilitate a diversity of stories, models and writing practices, and provide students with the opportunities to create culturally relevant narratives. We argue that an evidence-based educational framework for the teaching of screenwriting in a range of higher education and professional settings is needed as a matter of priority. Such a framework, informed by industry consultation and learning and teaching research, would broaden the disciplinary domain to position it as a creative practice shaped by cultural histories, policies, and industrial practices, rather than merely a technical and commercial craft that can be replicated around the globe.

In addition, there is a clear need for a national archive of Australian screenplays and script development materials to help shape this return to culturally specific storytelling. Screenplays are frequently lost once production ceases, and when they are published their provenance is often unclear. A national archive would preserve screenplay drafts and associated development documents, assist copyright protection, and give researchers, educators and practitioners better access to script development processes and outcomes. Importantly, it would provide students with the tools to ‘situate themselves within their immediate communities of practices’, ‘reckon with, diversify and put a local spin on the screenwriting canon’ (O’Meara et al., 2023: 15–16).

Conclusion

Despite the return of a cultural focus to Australian cultural policy, Australian screen stories face an uncertain future. This, we have argued, is the result of decades of screen policy that has prioritised commercial outcomes over cultural relevance. Internationalisation, ineffective local content regulations, deficient definitions of cultural specificity and the impact of streaming have combined to corrode ‘Australianness’ in screenwriting. In addition, screenwriting education has promoted Hollywood scripts, narrative structures and script development practices, to the detriment of Australian screen narratives. It is not only screen stories that have suffered, but national culture more broadly; Australia's cultural understanding and appreciation of its own places, peoples and times.

We propose a way forward. Firstly, research is self-evidently needed to identify how the abandonment of cultural goals has affected Australian screen storytelling, screenwriting practices and education. What constitutes local, relevant screen storytelling now? To what extent are culturally relevant screen narratives being produced? Such research can provide the insight needed to inform, in a nuanced way, culturally relevant screen policy. It can also inform an educational framework that provides space for Australian storytelling in screenwriting pedagogy. An archive of Australian scripts that examples Australian screenwriting for research, education and practice is essential. If we want, as government after government proclaims, Australian screen stories to be available to Australian audiences, we must ensure that current and future screenwriters have the support and encouragement to write them.