Why plays are treated as literature, but screenplays aren't?

because we're a bad species

Because, with theatre, the only thing that remains intact from place to place and country to country is the play itself.

With film, the thing that remains intact is the actual film.

This isn't even difficult to think out.

>>8066915
Hollywood likes to keep screenwriters down because they're the number one threat to their system, its why they get no attention or fame despite being the most important role in film making by far

>>8066915
because plays along with poetry were the earliest forms of literature in the western canon.

I think it's also because film studies diverged from literature studies in academia and so studies of screenplays get put under film studies.

>>8066915
Scrpits don't circulate much outside of production circles and are published only afterwards, if the film garnered particular interest. The film itself is considered the finished product for mass consumption and some art is lost along the way to the market, like in the early days of comic book publishing, where a lot of drawings were discarded or destroyed after the publication of the actual books.