The strange case of the three-column screenplay format in 1950s Czechoslovakia

In the nationalized Czechoslovak film industry, between 1952 and 1956, eight very rare three-column screenplays appeared. The historical evidence of this different screenplay format has been overlooked by historians up to now. Three-column screenplays are not just a dead end of screenwriting practice; they can also be read as evidence of basic tendencies within the Czechoslovak film industry in the 1950s. One effect of nationalization of the film industry was the attempt to standardize the organization of script development. The administrative intervention caused the modification of the script format, but instead of standardization, the effect was a multitude of formats, of which the three-column technical screenplays were a by-product. In this article I read these three-column screenplays within the industry context of the first half of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia and offer an in-depth analysis of particular three-column screenplays.1