“Oh for the Days of the Making-Of Featurette — Seriously,” sighed Fabrice Robinet in the New York Times in April 2018. With the respective demise and decline of the DVD/Blu-ray rental and sales markets, Robinet’s lament was that once ubiquitous “Making of” “extras” now seemed destined to be the preserve of niche streaming services, purchased downloads, and collector’s item DVDs and Blu-rays. In material terms, the elegy was largely for ease of consolidated access. After all, even in the heyday of DVDs, Jonathan Gray had observed that “one [did] not need either to buy, rent or rip a DVD to be able to access” “extras,” given the amount of material also available through traditional and online media outlets (2010, 108). My point here, contrary to Robinet’s perspective, is that while “new media” come and go, “Making of” texts endure; their forms and forums proliferate and morph along with media trends.
Paul Arthur noted in 2004 how readily the “making-of” documentary could be mistaken “as a unique symptom of our historical moment,” and pointed to its century-“long and hardy lineage” and its multitudinous forms from promotional shorts to cinematic features (39). While the “making-of” documentary is recognized (albeit still relatively critically neglected) as a “genre,”1 it is but one constituent of a larger enterprise of “Making of” sites that has flourished in varying forms since the advent of cinema. To an inexhaustive list that starts with “making-of” documentaries and featurettes, we might add novels, plays, films, museum exhibitions and (print and online) popular studies that re-present the making of popular or significant films. This wider range of “Making of” sites—perhaps because of its dispersal across multiple forms and media, and a critical tendency to leave such sites undifferentiated from/within a large field of promotional and/or paratextual objects—has not been considered in terms of a genre, or category of work, characterized by particular behaviours and possibilities. Part of the argument of this book is that “Making of” sites form a genre of cultural artefact with particular modes and properties discernible across a range of visual media. I hold that, rather than just “contribut[ing] to the ‘backstory’ of the adaptation” (Cartmell and Whelehan 2010, 26), the “Making of” genre itself (regardless of whether or not its filmic objects of interest are adaptations) operates in adaptive mode, oriented towards an adaptive blend of a film and its making.
The most commonly encountered constituencies of the “Making of” genre—documentaries/featurettes and popular studies—have readily lent themselves to consideration as “paratexts.”2 Considering a range of elements from book covers, titles, illustrations and dust jackets to authorial interviews and diaries, Gérard Genette chose the term “paratext” to denote those “productions” that “surround and extend” a text “precisely in order to present it … to ensure the text’s presence in the world” (1997b, 1).3 The potential for documentaries and studies of the making of a film to constitute such “productions” only increases in the context of Genette’s core conceptions of the paratext as “a threshold … that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back” (1997b, 2) and (in a co-option of Philippe Lejeune’s terms) as “a fringe of the … text” that influences “one’s whole reading of the text” (1997b, 2). Genette’s open invitation to “investigat[e]” “the paratext outside of literature” (such as “the credits or the trailer in film”) (1997b, 407) was taken up in relation to film and its associated materials, probably most influentially, by Jonathan Gray (2010). For Gray, “[p]aratexts are the greeters, gatekeepers, and cheerleaders … filters through which we must pass on our way to ‘the text itself’” (17). Gray explored “bonus materials such as … making-of documentaries” (19) alongside “Promos, Spoilers, and [as part of] Other Media Paratexts.” Gray’s goal was to rescue such paratexts from consideration “only in promotional and monetary terms” (7), and to establish them instead as “constitutive” (7) of filmic and televisual texts and the “meanings that we associate with them” (6). Gray’s mission did not, however, as Henry Jenkins points out, extend to consideration of paratexts “as themselves adaptations” (2017).
While Genette’s body of work does not engage with adaptation per se, his concept of the “hypertext” (as “any text derived from a previous text … through … transformation” [1997a, 7]) has been a staple of Adaptation Studies discourse. The full range of Genette’s taxonomies of trans-textuality (“all that sets the text in a relationship … with other texts” [1997a, 1]) lies outside the scope of this study. What is pertinent, however, is Genette’s insistence that his “types of trans-textuality” should not be viewed “as separate and absolute categories without any … overlapping” (1997a, 7). Both “the hypertext” and “the paratext,” he noted, “often act[] as … commentary [a further category of trans-textuality, which he named “metatextuality” (1997a, 4)]” (1997a, 8). Both adaptations and paratexts have the capacity to mediate textual meaning. They share the capacity to be at once “equivalent in status and also secondary or subsidiary” to a related text (to invoke Genette’s citation of Hillis-Miller on the “para” prefix [1997b, 1 ftn 2]), and even to “overtake and subsume their texts” (as Gray asserted of paratexts [2010, 39]).4
The boundary between paratext and adaptation is becoming increasingly porous in Adaptation Studies.5 What Mark Wolf refers to as “‘Making of’ material” (2012, 223) has already fostered tolerance of bi-textual orientation. In 2012 Jamie Sherry made the case for “the paratext as adaptation” in relation to what is arguably the most famous “making-of” documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991). Sherry situated this feature about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) (itself an adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) as offering a “parallel adaptation of Conrad’s novella” (2012, 374). In 2017, Simone Murray challenged Adaptation Studies to include digital paratexts, such as show-runner commentary, within its “ill-policed ambit,” on the basis of such paratexts’ “selective[ness] in their representation of a source text.” This coincided with Henry Jenkins’s call, in the same issue of Literature/Film Quarterly, for “the blurring of categories” pertaining to “textual and promotional practices” to impact on our conception of adaptation (2017). Driving all three arguments was the potential of their respective objects of inquiry to elucidate, challenge and in various ways contribute to our understanding of adaptation and its status within cultural practice.
“Making of” documentaries and popular studies are only two constituencies of the “Making of” sites considered in this study. This book is concerned with the wider “Making of” genre (museum exhibitions, novels, plays, films, as well as popular studies and documentaries) as an adaptive spectrum. Along with manifest adaptations of a film and its making, that spectrum includes sites that could be seen to fulfil a paratextual function (accessorizing, presenting and mediating a film text and its meaning) but which are also oriented towards the adaptive mode or simultaneously adaptations. An adaptation (“understood” in Henry Jenkins’s terms “as a version or retelling of the original” [2017]), forms, in its relation to its adapted text, a highly targeted instance of some of the general traits J. Hillis-Miller associates with the prefix “para,” and which Genette endorsed for the “paratext”: “at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority” (quoted in Genette 1997b, 1 ftn 2).
In exerting influence over a text and its meaning, a paratext (whether part of a physical work or distanced from it) operates “simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it” (Hillis-Miller, quoted in Genette 1997b, 1, ftn 2). An adaptation, in carrying its adapted text within itself, presents a more extreme version of this challenge to boundaries. This more extreme challenge is encompassed by another Genette-co-opted term—“palimpsestuousness”—which I explore below. Genette concluded that Hillis-Miller’s description of “[a] thing in para” as a “permeable membrane connecting inside and outside … confus[ing] them with one another, allowing the outside in, making the inside out, dividing them and joining them” aptly summarized “the activity of the paratext” (1997b, 1 ftn 2). Paratexts shade into adaptations when they enact this permeability between inside and outside through transpositive means,6 so that the content of the outside becomes a version of the content of the inside and vice versa. “Making of” sites—regardless of whether or not they can be viewed as paratexts—characteristically blur the making of the film (the outside) with the film (the inside), adapting each as a version of the other. Paratexts can produce “a version or retelling of the original” (Jenkins 2017), but in so doing they become ...