The Unheard Song of Joy
The Unheard Song of Joy
This chapter illustrates some of the untapped riches of Preston Sturges’s unproduced screenplay for the musical Song of Joy, both in terms of its pivotal timing in his filmmaking career and its unappreciated achievements in screenwriting. When compared with Sturges’s other written-and-directed films, Song of Joy often shows less restraint and more exuberance in testing the boundaries of the Hollywood studio system, especially in terms of plotting, meta-cinema, and dialogue. Tracing these extremes clarifies why the script was so disliked and why so many studios rejected it. These analyses also illustrate the intensity of Sturges’s creative ambitions at this point in his career—that period between his roles as playwright and writer-director when he took an even more over-the-top approach to screenwriting.
Keywords: Song of Joy, screenplay, musical, plotting, meta-cinema, dialogue, studio system
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