The Art of Adaptation

by Linda Seger

  These decisions help craft the script into a workable dramatic story line. But the adaptor also has to translate the story into a commercially viable film.

  MAKING IT COMMERCIAL

  For many writers, commercial is a dirty word. It implies compromising, losing the integrity of one’s project, adding a car chase and a sex scene as a lowest common denominator to draw audiences.

  It is true that for many producers and executives commercial is a very limited concept. Many studios look to the last blockbuster to define it, to Die Hard 2, not to Driving Miss Daisy, which has already grossed over $100,000,000 in business. They define it by Total Recall, not by My Left Foot, a low-budget film that has made a respectable profit. They define it by the bottom line, not by the top line—quality.

  But it’s important to remember that entertainment is show plus business, and producers need to be reasonably sure that they can make a profit on their investment. There is a fine line between taking reasonable risks so that original projects get made, and making cautious decisions by assessing what has drawn audiences in the past.

  This fine line becomes particularly important when deciding what to adapt. There are many novels, plays, and true-life stories that are simply not commercially viable. They are too difficult to adapt and will resist any changes to make them adaptable. The adaptor and the producers need to make a reasonable assessment about what will work and what will be too difficult and not worth the investment.

  Personally, I believe that many projects are adaptable. I applaud the producers and writers who stretch the art of filmmaking by finding new subject matter and new stories. I’m delighted by the surprises—the books and plays we didn’t expect to work. Films like Driving Miss Daisy, Amadeus, A Room with a View, Ordinary People, and Reversal of Fortune all had problems implicit in the material that could have meant failure. Yet these problems were solved, proving that if you know what you’re doing and do it well, unusual stories can be successful. But how do you know what to do? And how do you make a seemingly noncommercial work commercial?

  A best-selling book might be read by a million readers, or perhaps four to eight million if it’s one of the biggest sellers. A successful Broadway play might be seen by one to eight million people, but if only five million people go to see a film, it will be considered a failure. If only ten million people watch a television series, it will be canceled. Films and television shows need to satisfy the masses to make a profit. Novels and plays have a more select audience, so they can cater to a more elite market: they can be thematic; they can deal with esoteric issues, or work with abstract styles. But the transition to film requires that the material be accessible to the general public.

  A number of decisions can make material more commercially viable. Strengthening the story line is a first step, for audiences like a well-told story. A good story has movement and focus and engages audiences from beginning to end. Most successful American films have a main character who is likable, sympathetic, and identifiable. While watching a film we like to cheer for the protagonist, wanting the best for this character and wanting him or her to achieve specific goals. We want the protagonist to win at the end. As audiences we expend considerable emotional energy wishing this character success.

  A sympathetic character is not a necessity in novels and plays, but it is something filmmakers look for when they are considering material. That does not mean that a story with a negative character cannot be adapted, however, and there are several techniques that writers use to accomplish this. Sometimes understanding is substituted for sympathy. Although we don’t necessarily approve of Scarlett O’Hara’s manipulation or deception, we understand much of it. We understand what’s driving her, why she does what she does. Although we might not admire the choices that Rusty makes in Presumed Innocent, we sympathize with his situation. In other cases positive characters are developed to balance the negative characters. In Reversal of Fortune, the sympathetic lawyer balances the decadent von Bulows. In The Little Foxes, the focus for the film changed from the cruel and manipulative Regina to her sympathetic daughter, Zan.

  As a rule, Americans don’t like their major characters to lose or to die at the end. We like happy endings. Perhaps it’s part of our idealism or optimism as a country, but most American films show the villain getting his comeuppance and the hero and heroine living happily together. Part of making it commercial means knowing your market. If you are aiming for the American marketplace, you need to be careful about your endings. You need to look carefuly at what kind of ending you have, and how you can make a sad ending satisfying. You might also need to gauge the spirit of the times. In 1990-91 we had a preponderance of sad endings in films, some of which were more emotionally satisfying than others. Think about how you feel about the unhappy endings of such films as GoodFellas, Godfather III, and Awakenings.

  In making the transition to film, many books or plays that are downers have had the endings changed in order to appeal to the wider demographics of film and television.

  This is not true with films from other markets. An Australian writer once explained to me why many of their main characters die at the end of their films. He said, “Your heroes always win. Lewis and Clark head out for the Oregon Territory, they explore it, and succeed in accomplishing what they set out to do. Our heroes set out to cross the desert, and they die.” In 1989 I consulted on the Australian film The Crossing. In the script the main character survived. But as they were shooting the story they decided he needed to die—an Australian ending for an Australian film.

  If you must kill off your main character (and I do not take the view that you must never do this—just be aware that it’s a risky decision), make sure that there is some other emotional center in your story. Make sure that we aren’t left grieving alone. Give us some other character who will grieve with us, and can help us understand the significance of the death so it becomes some higher victory. In Love Story, one main character died, but we saw the story through the eyes of the husband. We sympathized with him, and went through an emotional catharsis as we vicariously grieved with him over his wife’s illness and death. There was a similar catharsis in Terms of Endearment, Steel Magnolias, and Dark Victory.

  Making it more commercial also means simplifying, clarifying, sometimes spelling out a story line, and making sure that characters are not ambiguous. Novels and plays are more able to encompass ambiguities. Their story lines can meander off on tangents before coming back to the main focus. We may follow several characters and get involved in several individual lives. But film audiences can get confused if they don’t know whom to root for or are unsure as to who is the main character. Although there are occasional ensemble pieces with many focal characters (such as some miniseries, or even The Big Chill), generally a specific character will come to the forefront. Stand by Me dealt with the friendship of four boys, but Gordy was the focal character. Deliverance was a story about the wilderness journey of four men. The movie could have been an ensemble piece, but Ed became the focal character.

  Creating a commercial and viable adaptation means giving the story a clearer structure, so audiences can easily follow it. Film is usually a one-time experience. There’s no opportunity to turn back the page, recheck a name, reread the description. Clarity is an important element in commercial viability.

  CHANGES ARE ESSENTIAL

  There is only one kind of impossible adaptation—the one where the producer and writer do not have creative license. Changes are essential in order to make the transition to another medium. Some of these changes can be minor—changing Atlanta to Charleston for budgetary reasons, for instance, or changing the name of a character whose name is the same as a current news-maker’s, or changing a train to a plane, or creating a family of three children instead of five.

  Many changes are made for dramatic purposes. In the film Rear Window, the character of Sam, the houseman, was changed to the sassy Stella, who had an expanded role of nurse and helper. In 58 Minutes (Die Hard 2) th
e daughter was changed to the wife in order to raise the stakes. In It Happened One Night, the situation became more serious by having a detective chase Peter and Ellie rather than just having a man on the bus recognize them.

  These changes can be difficult for the original writer, who has struggled with creative choices only to see them so easily changed by the screenwriter. But not every adaptation has to follow the original. In fact, if adaptors have an exaggerated respect for every word, comma, and turn of phrase in the literature, they will be unable to re-form the material into drama.

  Many successful films have used the original material simply as a jumping-off point. Very little of the book My Left Foot is in the film. In the book there is no restaurant scene, no art gallery exhibit, no scenes about Christy falling in love with a nurse. But the spirit of the book is there—the story of a man learning independence and developing his talents.

  When screenwriters adapt nonfiction books (such as Games Mother Never Taught You, or Having It All), they will often take ideas from the book and imagine story lines that could express that theme. In Harper Valley P.T.A. situations from the song of the same name are used to create a drama. Sea of Love uses the song’s image of overpowering love as a starting place for its story line.

  Theatre directors are famous for using the classics to explore contemporary forms and issues. Peter Brook set his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the context of a circus. When I was a theatre director I directed The Comedy of Errors shortly after Star Wars was released. I set it in a galaxy far away, recreating the slave twins as droids. This change demanded cutting only one page of Shakespeare’s lines, which contained allusions to Belgium and France. Occasionally, contemporary adaptations of the classics have been the subjects of films. Most famous, perhaps, is the play and film West Side Story, which is based on Romeo and Juliet, or Steve Martin’s updating of Cyrano de Bergerac in Roxanne.

  There is no rule apart from the obligations of your contract that says you can’t use your imagination when working with the original material. The adaptation is a new original. The adaptor looks for the balance between preserving the spirit of the original and creating a new form.

  WHAT IS USABLE?

  Adapting a story is somewhat like finding the delphiniums in a garden that includes one hundred different flowers. It means choosing what’s important within material that might be very rich with complexities and a certain amount of chaos. Choices need to be made. Among all the themes, which is the one I want to explore? Among all the characters, whom do I consider the most important? Among the myriad plots and subplots, which ones are dramatically worth pursuing?

  Adaptation demands choice. This means that much material that you love may be let go. Events might have to be refocused. Characters who carried a great deal of weight in the book might be deemphasized. If an important plot line doesn’t serve the dramatic movement of the story, it could be dropped. With all these changes resonances may be lost, but the focus of the story line may be strengthened. A theme may be lost in order to make other themes clearer and more accessible. Making changes takes a certain amount of courage from the writer, but if writers are unwilling to make some changes in the source material, the transition from literature to drama won’t happen.

  The material will often fight the writer. The work of the adaptation depends, then, on understanding what is intrinsically undramatic about each form. By knowing where and why the material resists the transition, writers and producers are better able to know what material is not worth the effort, and what problems need to be addressed in order to make the adaptation work.

  PART ONE

  WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

  1

  WHY LITERATURE RESISTS FILM

  There is something delicious about reading a good book. I have been an avid reader since the age of seven. Having begun with the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, I moved to the richer fare of Jane Eyre and Little Women, Gone With the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Because of my frequent airplane trips, I have recently been reading a number of best-sellers. On my way to New Zealand I found myself stranded in Honolulu for a day because of airplane troubles, and spent the time mesmerized by Presumed Innocent. Curled up in a wicker chair at the Sheraton Hotel I read for hours, fascinated by the unfolding of the story, by the rich characters, and by what the book was telling me about obsession and marriage, politics and power. When I watched the film the story came to the forefront. I wanted to be able to follow every clue, to watch it unravel, and to clarify some of the parts of the book that I’d forgotten. When the film worked well, the story was clear and involving. At other times I was confused and bewildered, which lessened my enjoyment of it.

  But the experience of reading a novel is quite different from watching a film. And it’s exactly this difference that fights translation into film. When we read a novel, time is on our side. It is not just a chronological experience, where someone else determines our pacing, but a reflective experience. Rarely do we read a novel in one sitting. In fact, part of the joy of reading is going back to the book. The reading, putting it down, thinking about it, sometimes reading a page twice is part of the pleasure. It is a reveling in the language as much as reveling in the story.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF THEME

  Novels, unlike films or plays, communicate all their information through words. The words express much more than story and events, images and character—they express ideas. Occasionally you do see a novel that is purely story—usually a short novel that’s not particularly known for its literary merits. All of the great novels, however, and most of the good ones, are not just telling a story but are pursuing an idea. They are about something significant, and this theme is just as important as the story line, if not more so.

  The best films also have strong themes, but in a film the theme serves the story. It’s there to reinforce and dimensionalize the story, not to replace it. In a novel, the story often serves the theme.

  The book Gone With the Wind is as much about the lost South as it is about Scarlett’s relationships and struggles. The theme gives depth to the story. When I watch the film, however, the story sweeps me along. The story becomes the most important and the idea about the lost South is not what I remember best. I remember Scarlett and Rhett and the burning of Atlanta and Melanie and Ashley.

  The novel gives me many more layers. It follows its thematic line by building up detail after detail, page after page, about the manners and rituals and parties and hierarchies of the South. Even the characters reinforce the theme. In passages such as the following, the characters are defined thematically, in terms of how they relate to the Old South.

  Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch [Scarlett and the Tarleton twins] were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books. Life in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still new and, according to the standards of Augusta, Savannah and Charleston, a little crude. The more sedate and older sections of the South looked down their noses at the upcountry Georgians, but here in north Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no shame, provided a man was smart in the things that mattered. And raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.

  As the book unfolds, we see the disappearance of this way of life and how the characters react to the New South. Scarlett, through many compromises, is able to bend with the new era of Reconstruction. The book-loving, less practical Ashley is not. Rhett finds his integrity in the New South. Frank Kennedy becomes a hero while trying to preserve certain values of the Old South. In the beginning of the film Gone With the Wind, words on a scroll sum up this important theme from the book:

  There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton
Fields called the Old South …

  Here in this patrician world the

  Age of Chivalry took its last bow …

  Here was the last ever to be seen

  of Knights and their Ladies Fair,

  of Master and Slave …

  Look for it only in books, for it

  is not more than a dream remembered,

  a Civilization gone with the wind …

  As the novel explores the idea of the lost South, it also takes its time giving us other layers of the story.

  BUILDING UP DETAIL

  Have you ever noticed that a book may take fifty or one hundred pages to give you the information that you get in three minutes of film? In Bonfire of the Vanities, the events in the first fourteen minutes of the film take up about eighty-nine pages in the book. When I worked on the adaptation of Christy by Catherine Marshall, the first image we created for the film corresponded to thirty-two pages of the book. Even in a short novel such as 58 Minutes (the basis of the film Die Hard 2), it took forty-six pages in the book to create what we see in the first few minutes of the film. In Gone With the Wind, what happens in the first one hundred twenty-seven pages of the book is presented to us in less than thirty minutes of film.

  Film is much faster. It builds up its details through images. The camera can look at a three-dimensional object and, in a matter of seconds, get across details that would take pages in the novel. Film can give us story information, character information, ideas and images and style all in the same moment.