Academy Awards History Question

A question for the historians

Sweetie said:

A question for the historians

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Yeah, I tried to find articles explaining this to no avail.
Thought I'd try here for funsies in case any film buffs knew.

you need zero understanding of the craft to come up with a story. anyone can come up with a potentially good story.

It takes a strong understanding of craft to actually type that story into a good screenplay.

It is quite interesting that it took a while to name it ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY.

At first, only adapted stories were rewarded. As these stories were rewritten for movies they became Screenplays. Here the word PLAY stands for story, like the stage-play was a story written for the theater. Soon the movie making business grew and it was decided that from now on stories being made up specifically for movies should also be rewarded side by side with adapted screenplays. The focus was still mainly on stories and this new category was called BEST STORY. Story-inventors still ruled, but that was about to change...

... as experts writing specifically for movies started to populate the studios. Spec stories were wanted and the real screen-writers knew about marketing and visual language and they had to be rewarded for best original screenplay. The Oscar for best stories stayed for a while, until the Academy decided that the category was unnecessary.

sfoster said:

you need zero understanding of the craft to come up with a story. anyone can come up with a potentially good story.

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So by "story" here you mean just "premise" or the whole fleshing out of scenes/acts/beginning-middle-end? Because the latter I would say is not always very easy.

Still don't understand the difference between the "story" and "screenplay" award 1940-1956

i was referring to just the premise. it's a typical story by credit. this academy award might be something different though. it was so long ago.