Script development and audience influences: Towards a typology of audience-making practices

In this theoretical article, I offer new insights into script development as a negotiated and sociocultural process. Adapting the cultural studies concept of audience-making to screenwriting research, I argue that audiences are a contextual structure that industry practitioners contend with in various ways during negotiated script development processes. In doing so, the article addresses a research gap in screenwriting studies pertaining to the interplay between industry practitioners and audiences. I argue that audiences are embedded in script development processes, as feedback and suggestions for improvement are often based on notions of audiences and because audience analytics and direct feedback are increasingly employed during development, albeit to varying extents. To theorize this interplay, the article introduces a typology of four audience-making models deployed during script development. These models consist of imagined, measured, competent and creative audiences. Each model affords audiences different levels of agency during script development with implications for the creative process. This framework is especially timely, given the growing reliance on data-driven decision-making in contemporary screen production and the increased potentials for interaction between industry and audiences in the digital realm.