Bill Demastes with Tom Stoppard outside London's Old Vic Theatre in 2010 at the opening night of the revival of Stoppard's "The Real Thing."

Bill Demastes of Louisiana State University spent  June 2011 at the Ransom Center on a fellowship reviewing material from various collections, including the Tom Stoppard papers, for his forthcoming book, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard. Demastes’s fellowship was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Endowment.

When playwright Tom Stoppard’s name comes up in conversation, most people will recognize him (with a little help) as the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the (co)author of the award-winning movie Shakespeare in Love. People who follow live theater will recognize him as perhaps the most important (certainly the most…

Click image to enlarge. Early draft of the screenplay for ‘Shakespeare in Love’ by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, 1998.

Of all the elements of filmmaking, the screenplay is arguably the most important. It is also the element most debated, discounted, discarded, and arbitrated. More often than not, the screenplay is an adaptation of another work—a novel, play, news story, biography, or even another screenplay.

The screenplay expresses character and narrative and is therefore the focus of interpretation by the director, actors, and designers. Furthermore, the screenplay is the foundation on which all the other artists and technicians base their work. Whether a scene takes place indoors or outdoors, for example, may affect the sets the art director designs and builds and…