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Great Adaptations: A Winning Script Doesn’t Have to be Totally Original
During cinema’s early years, much of its fare was conveniently derived from melodramas and vaudeville skits that didn’t require sound in order for the plot to be easily understood. As title cards and ambient music gave way to talkies, fledgling writers began adapting material from novels and short stories appearing in Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. By the 1970s, cinematic adaptations of preexisting works accounted for nearly one-third of all films produced in the U.S.
Fiction and stage plays, of course, haven’t been the only sources of inspiration. Diaries, comics, board and video games, lyrics, psychological case studies, photographs and the 11 o’clock news provide no shortage of accessible fodder for big-screen entertainment.
Just because a plot is satisfying in one medium, however, doesn’t mean it will necessarily translate to box office success. Who among us hasn’t finished reading a great novel and been subsequently appalled when the film version was total drek? As producer-director Ian Lewis of The Farnham Film Company explains, “Perhaps the oft-quoted remark about bad books making the best films has to do with the fact that less literary books are mainly about plot, which is easier to mold into the story needs of a movie. Books like The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Bleak House are much harder because they play with the form and nature of the book itself. That they are written to be read is an essential part of their nature.” That said, Lewis candidly observes that a majority of book-to-film projects don’t work. “I confess that I would almost always rather read a book than see it on screen, so my first reaction to an adaptation is always ‘Why?’”
Determining what to keep and what to lose is unquestionably an angst-inducing exercise. After adapting Everything But the Groom and The Spellbox—two of my own published novels—into optioned screenplays, composing from scratch almost feels easy by comparison. Sending almost 75 percent of a 400-plus page book to the cutting room floor is like packing for a dream vacation but being restricted to one carry-on; the more superfluous the item, the more reason to leave it out… Even if it’s your favorite part. Theatrical scripts—though comparable lengthwise to movies—present additional conundrums of trading dialogue for action and moving beyond the parameters of a fixed set. No easy task for sure.
For screenwriter John Collee (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World), the challenge of adapting novelist Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring series to a film was encumbered by the sheer volume of source material. “All of O’Brian’s plots tend to meander a great deal,” says Collee. “He goes where the feeling takes him, which is not a luxury you can afford on film. This book is more focused than most: Our heroes chase a pirate ship from the Pacific into the Atlantic and the journey with all of its trials tests a lifelong friendship. Peter [Weir] and I took that simple idea and developed our own variation of the plot, jettisoning several elements from what originally existed in The Far Side of the World and replacing them with episodes from other O’Brian novels.”
Whatever is depicted, it’s essential that a film’s content resonate with contemporary audiences. Vitaly Sumin, president of VM Productions, is the writer-director-producer of Shades of Day, a feature adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story, White Nights. Relates Sumin, “In transporting the essential elements of White Nights from mid-19th-century Russia to modern-day California, I have underscored the universality of Dostoevsky’s tale as well as the commonalities of the human experience. The film proposes a certain reading of the book using it as a pretext to show the conditions of existence in 21st-century Los Angeles. I’ve never been particularly interested in the exact re-creation of stories by classical authors, including the appropriate attributes of the corresponding historical time involved. With all my respect and admiration for the great writers, I believe that as human beings we’re all equal—some of us simply serve as mediums for ‘the voices’ that help to discover the laws of the universe. Each classical fiction work represents for me a patent serving as base for the explorations of our own age.”
For Mark Fergus and writing partner Hawk Ostby (Children of Men), translating the heart and soul of existing material into cinematic terms is no simple feat. Says Fergus, “P.D. James had written a beautiful and haunting novel [with Children of Men], but one that presented big challenges in bringing it alive for the screen. It was understated and largely internal; much of the action was psychological rather than physical. I don’t think everyone believed this book was a good candidate for a film… But putting the novel in a template like Casablanca, which shared some of its thematic concerns and character dynamics, started to change that perception.
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- Comment by Okey oyunu on 5/12/11 at 7:12 am
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This story was published in the Guide to Making Movies 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Great Adaptations/A Winning Script Doesn't Have to be Totally Original
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