Abstract:
As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated with the life of the gangster. However, not the average street toughs and hit men of the real world, I am talking about the Hollywood gangster. They are the classic film antiheroes, characters who can be just as evil as the most devious and deplorable of movie villains, but for some reason, you always want them to be the last man standing in the ultra-violent shootouts in which they usually find themselves. The gangster genre has been around since the early days of motion pictures, and before The Godfather completely turned the genre on its head, the three most famous and notorious gangsters in film history were Rico Bandello of Little Caesar (1931), Tom Powers of The Public Enemy (1931), and Tony Camonte of Scarface: The Shame of the Nation (1932). By first exploring the actual history of the gangster genre, and then examining the protagonists of those three landmark films, I will write the screenplay for my own Prohibition-era gangster film. I hope to not only write a screenplay for a film that could be successful in Hollywood today, but also create a character that could have lived alongside the on-screen gangsters of the genre's golden era of the early 1930's.
