Adaptation for Screenwriters

Robert Edgar, John Marland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350036697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Escritura de guiones de cine

Develop the critical and creative skills to 'translate' a story from page to screen with this step-by-step guide to the process of screen adaptation you'll learn to: - interrogate a novel or short story to release its 'inner film'
- convert fictional prose into visual drama
- overcome the obstacles presented by different media 'languages'
- approach key strategic decisions - both technical and interpretive
- draft and re-draft your plot, characters and dialogue
- professionally format and submit your finished script In addition to examples taken from 'literary classics', contemporary novels, genre fiction, short stories, and biographical material, Marland and Edgar embrace the wider phenomenon of re-telling and updating existing stories, such as the 'appropriation' of popular figures, inter-film adaptation (sequels and 'reboots'), and development into other visual forms including graphic fiction and video games. Whether you are producing a faithful adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, or planning to pair up the crime-fighting duo of Sherlock Holmes and Batman, Adaptation for Screenwriters will be your guide.

Part 1

Concepts

1 Before You Start: Approaching Adaptation

1a) Preliminaries

Before you start there are some broad questions to consider, and foremost among these is the kind relationship you are going to establish with the ‘primary text’.

‘Fidelity’

Something which dominates discussion of film adaptation is the question of ‘fidelity’. What moral obligation has the film-maker to be ‘faithful’ to the original material? You can’t afford to entirely ignore the issue, because any adaptation obviously invites comparison, and the critical response almost inevitably revolves around the extent to which the film ‘agrees with’ its source. Nevertheless, there’s a danger in getting unnecessarily distracted and tangled up in ethical debates.

When the source material is historical or biographical, and touches on the lives of real people, then film-makers (like anyone else) must show concern for the ‘accuracy’ of their portrayal of story and character. However, when the material is fictional any sense of ‘responsibility’ is going to be a personal matter.

Some screenwriters are motivated by an affection for the book, and an accompanying respect for the fellow writer who produced it. They feel bound by a sense of duty, and want above all to ‘do justice’ to it. Others will see the primary text as little more than a resource, another body of story material to be quarried for script purposes. In which case they are perfectly free (within legal limits) to take any liberties they please. In other words, fidelity is an issue if you choose to make it one.

There is an argument that no adaptation can be absolutely ‘faithful’. What would this mean exactly? Even if one were firmly determined on be ‘true to the book’, it isn’t perfectly clear what one would be being true to. You could aim to faithfully reproduce several things: the plot (the narrative events and the order in which they are presented), the thematic content (what the book is fundamentally about, what it says), the ‘spirit’ of the original (its tone and tenor, its message) or the overall effect (the impact it has on the reader).

Any decent adaptation will deliver each of these elements (plot, themes, spirit and effect) in some measure, but they represent different priorities that you will almost certainly need to choose between. You could slavishly follow the plot and yet still not quite keep the ‘spirit’ of the thing. You could concentrate on conveying the same themes and ideas, and yet still not give the audience anything like the same experience.

Varieties of adaptation

Some adaptations are ‘tight’. The film-maker chooses to limit themselves, as far as possible, to what is ‘on the page’, striving to remain as close as possible to the content and purpose of the book. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and No Country for Old Men (2007) have been acclaimed for their keen ‘fidelity’ to the source they derive from. (In the case of the latter, the Coen Brothers have publicly joked that the exactness of their adaptation was achieved by one of them typing the script into the computer while the other held the spine of the book open flat.)

At the other extreme, some adaptations are notably ‘loose’, using the original piece of writing as a stimulus, radically re-working aspects of the story while completely jettisoning the rest, freely adding and subtracting, bending and refashioning the material in such a way that the eventual film may bear little surface resemblance to the novel as written.

For instance, the cinematic success of Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992) is almost entirely the result of the comprehensive changes made to the plot and atmosphere of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel. The film made claims to historical authenticity concerning American colonial history of the 1750s, but wisely extracted an adventure story from it.

It may come as a surprise to learn that Dr Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear annihilation, is an adaptation of Peter George’s Red Alert, a rather dour novel pointing to the dangers of the policy of ‘mutually assured destruction’. Kubrick’s first thought was to make an equivalently sober and solemn piece of polemic, but instead turned it into a comic masterpiece, far removed from his starting point.

For understandable reasons, film-makers developing a big franchise like Harry Potter (2001–11) or The Hunger Games (2012–15) typically strive to avoid exciting the displeasure of devoted and demanding readers. They usually stick close to the shape and feel of the original books. However, those responsible for the series of Bourne films (2002–16) showed no such inhibitions. The movies owe their success to completely ignoring almost everything between the covers of Robert Ludlum’s novels. The central idea, a trained assassin with total amnesia, is lifted out and developed in a completely new direction. Almost nothing else Ludlum wrote remains.

One of the first creative decisions to be made, therefore, is where to place your project on the spectrum between the meticulous and the mercenary, the conscientious and the cavalier.

• How are you going to hold the text: ‘up close’ or at ‘arm’s length’?

• Is it a jewel to be preserved, or a storehouse to be plundered?

Of course, your film won’t be an adaptation at all unless the script maintains a meaningful relationship with the prose work that prompted it, but the intimacy of that relationship is for you to determine.

Creative licence

Adaptations of a ‘classic’ novel will often steer as close to the book as possible, signalling their respect for the original work, and keeping its loyal readership ‘on board’. However, even here there are exceptions. Alfonso Cuarón’s version of Great Expectations (1998) relocates the story to 1990s America, uprooting Dickens’ characters from the moral confines of Victorian England, going well beyond what readers could recognize from the novel they know.

Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining (1980) was famously disowned by Stephen King. Kubrick takes the mountain setting and the cabin-fever scenario, but creates a very different set of horrors, and leaves the supernatural elements of King’s story completely unexplained.

Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994) follows Winston Groom’s novel in telling the tale of a simple-minded man who inadvertently stumbles into the spotlight of history, oblivious to the significance of the situations he enters and the famous people he meets. But the movie might not have turned out to be such a heart-warming box-office success if it had included the verbal profanities and sexual escapades that spiced-up Groom’s characterization. Forrest on screen is a child in a man’s body, softened and sentimentalized for family viewing.

If you have read Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it may seem a bit of a stretch to call Blade Runner (1982) an ‘adaptation’. They are as different as their titles would suggest and deliver entirely different warnings regarding the future of mankind. Ridley Scott’s movie famously revolves around androids becoming human, when the original tale is about people becoming machines.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is openly ‘based on’ Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness but has little surface resemblance to it. The film’s plot is taken up with a similar river-boat journey. In both cases the object of the quest is Kurtz, a man who has ventured beyond the reach of ‘civilization’. But Conrad’s story of a colonial land grab in nineteenth-century Africa is transposed into a movie about American involvement in the Vietnam War. Coppola didn’t aim to ‘adapt’ Heart of Darkness, but to use it as a model or framework.

This rollcall of adaptations illustrates the rather rough and uneven relationship that can exist between fiction and adapted script. Some of these films have won great critical acclaim. None of them would exist without the fiction that inspired them. However, they all owe their success to asserting a considerable degree of independence and taking considerable creative liberties.

When it comes to your project, it is crucial to make an early decision about how scrupulous and exacting you are going to be in your approach to the task. Are you going to cling to the novel or use it merely as a point of departure?

The film is the thing

Whatever your decision, the overriding priority must be that the film succeeds as a film. Whatever ties bind you to the adapted text, your ultimate obligation is to make something which provides the audience with a satisfying cinematic experience. If you fail in that you fail in everything else. The imperative is not moral but practical and aesthetic, to make a movie that works on the screen. Too much unbending devotion to novel and novelist could strangle the entire project. A rigid obsession with ‘fidelity’ to someone else’s vision, might well result in a film with no discernible vision of its own. Clinging to the book might just scupper the script.

As you will find, an inevitable tension exists between the integrity of the novel being adapted and the integrity of the film being made from it, and all serious adaptations are generated from this friction of divided loyalties. This was certainly something Sally Potter experienced when writing and directing her film Orlando (1992). She may have wanted to remain true to the spirit of Virginia Woolf’s remarkable modernist novel, but she also recognized the need to be ruthless in subordinating the literary to the cinematic. Woolf’s radical experiments with time and character leave the reader with no logical explanation for the main narrative events; why the central protagonist remains forever young, or changes gender half way through the story. Knowing full well that film can’t withstand this level of playfulness, Potter supplies her audience with a narrative rationale, of sorts.

Figure 1.1 In Sally Potter’s adaptation of Orlando (1992), immortality is magically bestowed on the eponymous protagonist by the Queen and his change of sex comes as the result of a crisis of masculinity. However, given that it was Woolf’s intension to present a world in which time and identity are radically unstable, these narrative adjustments can’t be anything but inauthentic to the spirit of the book.

Exercise:

Where on the fidelity spectrum do you want your adaptation to sit? How much creative latitude are you going to give yourself? The answers are up to you, but you do need to provide them. It’s important to be clear from the outset about the approach you are taking, and the relationship you want between book and film.

Exercise:

Select a portion of your prose text (a few pages, a chapter) and sum up its content under four separate headings: plot (what happens), theme (the significant ‘issues’ involved), spirit (the essential attitude it conveys) and effect (the feeling it gives you as a reader). How straightforward or otherwise is it going to be to render each of these four elements onto the screen? Which is expendable, which is not?

1b) Translation

After settling some of these general issues it might be tempting to simply plunge straight in and get on with ‘writing the film of the book’. But it would probably be a costly mistake in terms of time and energy. Before you rush into anything, you need to be clear about the exact nature of the formal challenge you are taking on.

Minding the gap

Fiction and film obviously have a great deal in common. Both are popular forms of narrative entertainment. Both involve plot and character, take us on journeys of discovery, build fictional worlds and invite us to enter alternative realities. But, and it is a very big but, as vehicles of storytelling, fiction and film are radically different in what they do and the way they do it.

Radio differs from live theatre, theatre from ballet, ballet from opera. All are narrative forms that tell stories (and could of course tell the same story). As artistic forms they share many similarities, but they make use of entirely different resources and techniques, and engage with audiences quite differently.

So too with novels and movies. They are two contrasting methods of storytelling, two very distinct ‘systems of meaning’, and we need to differentiate between them if we want to understand what adaptation real...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Concepts
• Part 2 Adaptation
• Part 3 The Process
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint