Filmish energy: A textual analysis of Tony Gilroy’s screenplay, Michael Clayton (2006)

Abstract

This article presents a textual analysis of Tony Gilroy’s 126-page screenplay for Michael Clayton (2006) based on the Final Shooting Script, available online and published by Newmarket Press. Screenplays, in addition to being film production documents, can reach in digital and published forms a burgeoning audience that includes critics, scholars, academics, apprentice writers and the general public. And though it is well documented in screenwriting theory that screenplays can and should be analysed in line with works of literature, they remain under-investigated as texts in their own right. The screenwriting discipline, I argue, merits a corpus of close textual analyses of screenplays. This article makes one such contribution, presenting a digest of some key features and techniques in Michael Clayton, which combine to create writerly style and remind us of the richness and educational benefits of the screenplay-as-literary-object.