My wife says that a system like this could never work today, that it would be nearly impossible to assemble a team of writers that could accomplish such a task, and do it well. I say, what about television writing? Nearly all television in America is written by teams, why couldn't it work? I know that if some of my favorite series's could be serialized with a new novel two or three months, I would buy them, and perhaps get even more into them because I would have a constant stream of new material.

Any thoughts?

Television as well as movie writing is a little bit different, I think. Screenwriters (from what I understand) write scenes and dialouge. They don't have to worry about character descriptions--or descriptions in general--or thoughts or action. Those things are done by other people. Also, the directors and even the actors end up changing the dialogue as well as the scenes. It's one giant organic process. This is the one reason why there's a debate among academics on whether or not film can be studied in the same way as literature.

But in the world of fiction, there are serialized novels. Think of the Star Wars novels or the Dragonlance novels. Multiple authors for the same world.

As for the academic issues, academics like to believe that the meaning of a work can be reduced to psychoanalysis of the author. For one thing, the academics that attempt to psychoanalyze authors invariably get it all wrong. Any author that has had a significant amount of work critiqued will tell you this...and if you submit enough work of your own for critique, you will find it out for yourself.

For another thing, it is based on a ridiculous idea about art...namely, that it is the character of the artist that makes art Art. This is just plain silly. A work of art has its own existence, even after the artist has died and been forgotten...or is known only for the art left behind. We know virtually nothing about many of the world's greatest artists. What we do know of the remainder almost never has anything to do with their art.

Academics who argue that it is necessary to talk about the character of the artist are full of crap. And that is the only basis for saying that a work of art has to have a single auteur.

Themed anthrologies are a currently somewhat popular form of cooperative art. I have seen successful collaborations as well (and some atrociously not successful ones). With the internet, many famous authors communicate with their fanbases to hash out interesting new plots, characters, and elements of milieu.

The other professor said the problem with film is that there are too many people involved for it to be studied like literature. Should you study the screenplay? Should you study the direction? Should you study how the actors played the characters? He used Shakespeare as an example. We study his plays, not how they've been interpreted by directors and actors. So for this professor, though you can study a film as a piece of art, you can't study it like a piece of literature--as a coherent whole. But you could study a screenplay as a piece of literature.

I see both sides of the issue, but I tend to agree with the latter. There are too many factors that go into making a film for it to be studied the way we'd study a piece of literature. Just think what would have happened if Ben Afleck (sp?) had played Aragorn!

Outside of this one afternoon debate at my small alma mater, I'm not familiar with the topic.

Of course, you could argue that a non-written work is, by definition, not "literature", but that isn't the question. The question is whether film can be studied in the same way as literature. Because you deal with a finished product in which the information content is fixed, the answer is necessarilly yes. Every logical process that could be applied to an aperiodic sequence identified as a work of written literature can logically be applied to the aperiodic sequence that comprises a film.

The only difference is that one has a single, sole, auteur. But that is an illusion anyway, writers don't spring up out of nothing and create their work out of thin air. They are influenced by the world around them, what topics it is possible for Shakespeare to write about are just as dictated by circumstances beyond his single authorship as Jackson's work must take place within the limits of the technical and human resources he was able to command. The fact that so many modern writers tend to forget that what a writer can conceive is bounded by the world he inhabits is proof of how sharply those bounds constrict our thoughts.

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The other professor said the problem with film is that there are too many people involved for it to be studied like literature. Should you study the screenplay? Should you study the direction? Should you study how the actors played the characters?

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This other professor is begging the question, saying that you can't study film because, after all, which thing do you study? You study the finished film. To say that you have to study something else is to assume as a premise that the film itself cannot be studied. Then the premise becomes the conclusion.

Just think what would have happened if Hamlet had been about a tasty new breakfast made of scrambled eggs and diced ham! Imagine if Shakespeare had written King Leer instead of the play with which we're familiar. Imagine if Twelfth Night were about time traveling cyborgs out to kill Hitler!

The formula produces a lot of today's comic strips, of which Jim Davis' "Garfield" is perhaps the extreme example.

The formula accounts for series like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (both the classic and modern versions), and, to a certain degree, series like the "Left behind" titles currently sending evangelical types into piques of rapture.

If people knew how much the formula was applied in the graphics arts world, they'd plotz. You think that guy who paints all those lighthouse paintings has actually painted a single one of them in the last ten years?