Oliver Gruner

“A Course of Non-Conformity”: Carole Eastman, Screenwriting Historiography and the New Hollywood

University of Portsmouth, UK

For a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Carole Eastman was one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriters. Penning the iconic Five Easy Pieces (1970), the critically admired The Shooting (1966) and the experimental, ambiguous Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970) as well as an assortment of television scripts and unproduced features that generated interest from high profile filmmakers at the time, Eastman built a reputation for complex narratives and an ability to capture a range of (historical and contemporary) dialects. Drawing on a range of primary documents – draft screenplays, correspondences, notes, trade and mainstream press reports – this paper explores Eastman’s career in relation to wider debates on screenwriting of the late 1960s and 1970s. Historians and screenwriting scholars such as Miranda Banks (The Writers), Kevin Alexander Boon (in Horton and Hoxter (eds), Screenwriting) and Steven Price (A History of the Screenplay) have detailed the transformations, developments and conflicts impacting on screenwriters, in terms of both their status within the industry and changing screenwriting practices. My paper contributes to such work, considering the ways in which Eastman navigated the ever shifting and highly gendered industrial landscape of 1960s and 1970s Hollywood while also, through her produced and, at times, unproduced, screenwriting projects, contributed to a wider conversation within Hollywood on the era’s political and cultural transformations. Heeding Price’s recent call to explore “the dialogue between structure and microhistory” (in Davies, Russo and Tieber (eds), Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies), I shift between a close analysis of Eastman’s scripts, notes and correspondences and a consideration of wider discussions then taking place within Hollywood with regard to film and feminism, the status of the screenwriter, popular auteurism and the screenplay’s form and style.

Oliver Gruner is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He is the author of Screening the Sixties: Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of Memory (2016) and co-editor, with Peter Krämer, of Grease is the Word: Exploring a Cultural Phenomenon (2019). He has published a number of essays on Hollywood screenwriters of the 1960s and 1970s and is currently writing a book on the subject, a project for which he received a Harry Ransom Fellowship at the University of Texas, Austin, in 2020 (undertaken in 2022).