Mounting the Men's Film Festival: A mockumentary web series. Webisode 1 - Power Cut.

BACKGROUND The script reflects the author's PhD research on developing funny screenplays. It draws from scholarship relating to comedy - particularly its reliance on perspective (Horton 1991) and deviance from what is considered the norm (King 2002, Mills 2005). While 'gender switch' may succeed in exploiting perspective - creating new norms from which to depart - it might also reinforce the same binaries it sets out to challenge. The script is a creative expression of those concerns, and a response to scholarship on screenwriting practice and gender, such as Jacey (2010). CONTRIBUTION The script is situated within a growing scholarly field of screenwriting practice, as well as wider bodies of work on gender in comedy and on screen. A creative articulation of questions around essentialism and subjectivities addressed by Moi (2001) and others, it offers new ways of thinking about gender hierarchies in comedy (Mizejewski 2014). At the same time it expresses a gendered critique of dominant screenwriting models, reversing the arguably default (male) perspective inherent in those structures (Dancyger and Rush 2007, Mulvey 1975). SIGNIFICANCE This original work is unique in offering a multi-layered, scholarly informed approach to the 'gender switch'. The world of the webisode reverses gender hierarchies, while also reflecting our own world back at us, double flipping the binaries it seeks to critique. It creatively answers the questions raised within its own text, deliberately employing 'otherising' as a narrative device, while also questioning its effectiveness. As a critique of dominant screenwriting models, the gender switch device is tested through practice. The device risks reinforcing those models' generic, hyperindividuated protagonists - especially those specific to comedy whereby the comic outsider is more easily negotiated as masculine (Mizejewski 2014) while still emphasising arguments around gendered, comic perspectives.