Decomposing scripts: Ethnography and writing about writing

As a field whose founding gesture has been to go behind and before the audiovisual text, screenwriting scholarship has become an exciting new frontier for ethnographic approaches to writing about writing. However, so far there has been very little attention paid to what doing an ethnography of script writing might actually entail. What challenges are specific to writing an ethnography on the practices of writing a script? What opportunities does working on script writing offer us as scholars seeking to establish a better understanding of both the narratological and discursive qualities of the practice of writing itself? Rather than retreat to a familiar understanding of ethnography as documentary observation, this article proposes that productive answers to these questions might be found in turning to more experimental approaches to writing ethnography. Understanding the script as a unique kind of writing that anticipates its own death as writing, this article suggests a new genre of ethnographic writing, one not simply appropriated from cultural anthropology, but expressed within the specificity and strictures of researching screenwriting. I call this genre of writing about writing in anticipation of death, a decomposition.