Screenplay-Centered Production / 剧作中心制

Definition

Screenplay-centered production / 剧作中心制 is the principle that a screenplay’s character relations, theme, causal structure, and narrative commitments should coordinate a film or series across directing, acting, producing, and financing.

Current Synthesis

宋方金 presents the screenplay as a project’s constitution: collaboration can interpret and improve it, but production power should not casually dissolve its structure. This addresses a recurring screenwriter problem—the writer originates the story yet may lose credit, authority, or coherence as more powerful participants reshape the work.

The principle is not absolute writer control. Film remains collective, and the source itself values directors, actors, and production craft. The practical claim is narrower: disagreements should answer to an intelligible dramatic design rather than rank, celebrity, capital, or convenience alone.

Key Claims

• Character relationships and theme give a screenplay structural movement and meaning.
• Collective production requires a shared dramatic reference point.
• Director, actor, producer, and investor authority should not substitute for narrative reasoning.
• Credit and decision rules affect whether the originating design survives production.
• Screenplay authority remains compatible with revision when revision improves the whole work.

Evidence

• Coordinating constitution: 宋方金×罗永浩！故事必须有人讲下去 records Song’s explicit advocacy of 剧作中心制 and his comparison of the script to a project constitution.
• Structural method: 宋方金×罗永浩！故事必须有人讲下去 attributes to Liu Zhenyun the formulation that character relations are a script’s “legs” and theme its “soul.”
• Authority problem: 宋方金×罗永浩！故事必须有人讲下去 describes screenwriters as vulnerable to alteration, weak credit enforcement, ghostwriting, and pressure from capital, platforms, directors, and stars.

Counterevidence & Qualifications

The evidence is one screenwriter’s public industry account, not a comparative study of production systems. Treating a script as constitutional can preserve coherence, but it can also protect a weak draft or discount discoveries made through performance, editing, cinematography, and production. The concept therefore supports reasoned coordination, not automatic writer supremacy.

What Changed

• Created the concept from Song’s production-authority argument.

Related Concepts

• Author Commercial Film Balance / 作者表达与商业电影平衡 - broader negotiation between authored structure and production or market constraints.
• Personalized Film Industrialization / 个性化电影工业 - organization of production capacity around a distinctive authored system.
• Original-Story Data Legibility Trap / 原创故事的数据可见性陷阱 - financing and platform pressure that can weaken original screenplay authority before production begins.
• Screenwriter-to-Director AI Path / AI时代编剧导演化 - possible technical route for writers to carry more of the script into images directly.
• Film Set Power And Abuse - adjacent risk when production hierarchy becomes coercive rather than coordinative.