by Linda Seger
Sometimes film uses a narrator to provide transitions. Although this is a helpful technique, there are more dramatic and imagistic methods available. In Driving Miss Daisy we got through twenty-five years of transitions without the use of a narrator, proving it can be done.
A film, like a novel, also presents a point of view, but to determine whose point of view the screenwriter asks different questions than the novelist. The screenwriter asks, “To what extent do I focus only on one character’s world, thereby only showing scenes that contain that particular character? To what extent do I work as a more omniscient teller of the story by spreading the focus among several characters?” In the film Ordinary People either Conrad or Calvin was in every scene. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest McMurphy or Chief Bromden was in every scene.
A filmmaker might decide to broaden the point of view by showing us some scenes of a villain planning a crime, of the protagonist trying to solve the crime, and perhaps of the love interest reflecting on why her sweetheart spends so much time solving crimes instead of paying attention to her.
Sometimes the point of view is the same in both novel and film, as with The Color Purple, Shane, and Rear Window, and sometimes the point of view changes. The novel Deliverance is told from Ed’s point of view, but as there are scenes without Ed in the film, it splits its point of view between Ed and Lewis. Although the novel A Room with a View focuses on Lucy, the film spreads the point of view. Most scenes include Lucy (as would be expected, since she’s the main character), but there are some scenes without her, such as the one between Miss Lavish and Miss Bartlett, a scene of George walking home in the rain, a scene of Cecil putting on his shoes, and even a flashback scene when Cecil describes meeting the Emersons and telling them about the house for rent. This last scene, however, seemed to me to spread the point of view too much, since it meant going inside Cecil’s head to show us Cecil remembering the experience. We do go inside Lucy’s head several times, as she flashes back to the kiss, and that’s appropriate because she’s our main character. It’s less appropriate to go inside Cecil’s head for a flashback about his experience. You may want to watch the film again to see what you think about this change in point of view.
SUMMARY
Novels and films express themselves in different ways. Fiction uses words to tell a story, describe character, and build ideas. Films use image and action. They are essentially different mediums that resist each other as often as they cooperate.
CASE STUDY:
Field of Dreams
Field of Dreams, written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson, was adapted from the book Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella. In 1990 the film was nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. It is a book that many considered unadaptable. I talked to Phil about his approach to the book.
“One day,” he said, “Lindsay Doran, who was an executive at Avco-Embassy, said to me, ‘I have this great book you’ve got to read.’ I asked, ‘What’s it about?’ She said, ‘It’s about this guy who hears a voice.’ And I said, ‘Stop, not interested.’ She then went on to tell me that the voice tells Ray to build a baseball field and that he kidnaps J. D. Salinger, and the more she said, the more I hated it. She begged me to read the book. Finally I agreed. I took it home, and it’s the only time in my life that I couldn’t put a book down. I loved it. I loved how audacious it is to start a book where a man hears a voice in the first paragraph that tells him to build a baseball field, and decides to follow it. When he goes to his wife, I expected her to tell him he’s crazy, but she says, ‘Well, if you feel you have to, then do it.’ I thought that’s the most original wife I’ve ever read. I thought, ‘This is a movie.’
“The book was very visual. The vision of a baseball field carved out of a cornfield was beautiful. Shoeless Joe showing up at night was wonderful. I saw in it many things that I love in movies: great characters and heart and emotions and surprises.
“When I started working on the screenplay, I decided that the ending should be a surprise to Ray and to the audience. In the first chapter of the book, the father is discussed, and he arrives about two-thirds of the way through the book. If I put off his arrival until the end, then the story becomes a mystery. ‘Why is Ray hearing these voices and why is he doing these tasks?’ At the end, he learns that all of this was to lead to reconciling with his father.
“Most films start with a character knowing what his problem is, and then having to take steps to solve it. This is a character who doesn’t find out until the end of the movie what it’s all about.
“I gave Ray more questioning and skepticism in the movie so that the mystery is never too far from the audience’s mind. When I wrote the first draft, I bought two copies of the paperback book and cut all the pages out and pasted them into a looseleaf book and wrote a screenplay that was from the book. I used the author’s scene descriptions and dialogue as much as possible. I started on page one with Ray hearing the voice and deciding to build the field. I showed it to Lindsay Doran, who said, ‘This guy’s crazy.’ Even though I had followed the book, the book had more backstory, more information about Ray so we get to understand him better. So I wrote a prologue to give more history of Ray and his family. And then, just in case the audience missed it, I gave him the line ‘I’ve never done a crazy thing in my whole life.’
“I felt I needed to give Ray more resistance to the voice, because the audience would resist it, and if he doesn’t, they’ll wonder about him. I kept asking myself, ‘What would I do if I heard a voice?’ I would first assume there’s a logical explanation. He asks his wife if there was a sound from a truck on the highway, or kids with a radio. At first he shrugs it off, but then it starts to bother him. In the movie, we added a scene where he goes to an ear doctor to have his hearing checked, but it turned out to be unnecessary. When we screened the movie for audiences, they were already with it. They didn’t need that extra beat.
“I also gave Annie [the wife] a little more skepticism than she had in the book. She makes jokes about it.
“But when he hears the voice that sends him to Boston, I needed her to go along with this, so I created a dream for her where she dreamt she saw Ray at Fenway Park with Terence Mann. When she hears that Ray had the same dream, that was enough to overcome her skepticism. Several times in the script I have him repeat that he doesn’t know why this is happening. I felt I needed that dialogue once in a while to acknowledge to the audience that the character knows this is crazy.
“I cut the film very tight so there wasn’t much time for the audience to sit back and think. I didn’t want to have long sequences where the audience would have time to ask questions, or decide that something didn’t make sense. I wanted them to stay caught up in what Ray is caught up in. And the way to do that is to keep the film moving.
“I combined the characters of Mark, Bluestein, and Ray’s twin brother into Mark, Annie’s brother. He’s the villain of the piece, but I had him played as the nicest person on earth who really believes he’s saving his sister and brother-in-law by buying the farm. I cut out a character called Eddie ‘Kid’ Scissons who’s an old-timer from Ray’s town, presumably someone who had played in the major leagues—although later we discover that was just a story he told. He’s a wonderful character, but I have this theory about what I call ‘cul-de-sacs’ in stories. It’s like you’re going straight down a road, and you leave the main road and take one of these cul-de-sacs, but when you return, you’re back just where you left off. I realized this Scissons character was not going to help move us closer to the end of the story. This was something I could lift out without hurting the film.
“In the book, Ray kidnaps J. D. Salinger. I wanted to change this. I knew we’d have legal problems and I felt that using a real person’s name would take us out of the movie because almost everything else was fictionalized. Well, Shoeless Joe and Archie Graham were real, but they’re not people we know much about in real life
.
“In the first few drafts, I just wrote the character as Salinger because I was juggling so many other things. Then I wrote another character who was a pale imitation of Salinger, and I realized that I didn’t have a clue who this guy was and what he was doing. So, for the first time in my life, I thought, ‘What actor would it be fun to see in this role?’ My first thought was he should be a big guy. A really big guy. I had just seen James Earl Jones on Broadway in Fences, and I thought I’d like to see someone have to try to kidnap James Earl Jones, and then the whole scene came to me full blown.
“I wondered, ‘Who is this guy?’ I can make him more than just a novelist. I decided to make him a famous sixties icon—a civil rights, antiwar activist. Then after I created this character, I realized that without James Earl Jones, it was a totally lily-white movie. In a movie that purports to be about America and about baseball, his presence became even more important.
“Since I was creating a new character [Terence Mann], I had to set him up for the audience. In the book, when Ray says, ‘I know whose pain I have to ease: J. D. Salinger!’ it hits like a lightning bolt. But now I had to create all this information about this fictionalized character. So I added the scene at the school where they’re considering banning his books. During that scene, Ray realizes whose pain he has to ease—Terence Mann. And the audience needs to know who that is. Then Annie says to Ray, ‘What does this have to do with baseball?’ so Ray goes to the library and does some research about Mann, which gave me a chance to add more information about this character.
“I felt this book was really steeped in the sixties spirit—about a guy who’s facing a problem that all of us who are fortysomething have—‘What do we do with all those ideals and dreams and feelings that really defined our generation and that we’re proud of having? Can you still hang on to your dreams when you get older?’ Creating Terence Mann as a sixties icon helped get across part of what the movie was about.
“In the book, the players leave the field by going through a door in the outfield fence. We had all these special effects companies saying to us, ‘We’ll use video beams and laser zaps as they disappear,’ and the production designer was drawing diagrams of the outfield fence, but none of them looked right. Then I realized what was wrong. Why would a farmer who’s struggling for money spend time and money to build a fence in the outfield? Let’s just let the corn serve as ‘the fence.’ And I decided that instead of lasers and such, we needed to be simple—they just disappear, they just fade out.
“One trick to doing this kind of film is to treat it as if it’s real. It’s important to keep it simple. Somebody defined the movie as magical realism. I expect they saw it as a film about magic and fantasy, but I never wanted to play into that. It’s told totally realistically. It’s actually somewhat similar in spirit to Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Stephen Spielberg, which is about a character who has a vision and resists it and then finally goes along with it.
“While writing the screenplay, whenever I was in doubt, I would trust the book. That’s what got me there. One of my goals was for people to feel about the movie the way I felt about the book.
“Thankfully, Bill Kinsella [the author] was very happy with the film. While I was writing the screenplay, I had a nightmare about people who loved the book coming after me with knives. I was nervous about what Bill would think so I sent him a long letter, explaining that I felt I needed to make certain changes—such as moving the father to the end, changing J. D. Salinger, etc., and I hoped he wouldn’t mind too terribly much. He sent back a postcard, ‘Dear Phil, do whatever you have to, to make it a movie. Love, Bill.’”
2
WHY THEATRE RESISTS FILM
Theatre is magical. Beginning with the first play I ever saw, I was entranced. I have vague memories of tall men dressed as soldiers, of the chorus singing the song “Sweethearts” (from the play Blossom Time) and, as we filed out, of passing the actors on their way to their dressing rooms. They seemed like wondrous people, and I stared, as seven-year-olds are asked not to do.
Many theatre performances have moved me. A Chorus Line inspired me to remain in drama, at a time when that decision meant great sacrifices. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest silenced me by its power and impact. The Caucasian Chalk Circle overwhelmed me by its richness of theme and color, and Stacey Keach’s performance in Cyrano de Bergerac made an incredible situation believable.
When theatre works, we come away from it moved, touched, swept up, involved. Our feelings and our intellect are engaged. We are captivated.
As a former theatre director, I know that some nights theatre happens, some nights it doesn’t. When it doesn’t work, the theatre is a dead, tedious, and uninspiring space. It is movement by rote, performed by sleepy actors walking through their lines and movements. Whether theatre is bad or good doesn’t depend on whether it’s acted by professionals or amateurs. One of the most exciting performances I’ve seen was a high school production of Oklahoma! One of my most tedious theatre evenings was spent watching a New York touring company perform A Little Night Music.
Theatre is more than a play. Like the screenplay, the play is a blueprint, a catalyst for another art form to emerge. It is a particular integration of talents and a relationship between audience and actors that creates theatre. Adapting the play is not the same as adapting a novel or short story, which are art forms in themselves. The play is not the art form until it’s gone through its magical transformation into theatre.
But where does this magic come from? What makes theatre work?
THEATRE: AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN ACTOR AND AUDIENCE
Although the beginnings of theatre are a mystery, “acting out” seems to be a natural human expression that can be traced back thousands of years. The early Egyptians and Persians acted out rituals that celebrated the life and death and rebirth of the land. These rituals’ dramatic structure showed this sequence and coincided with the flooding of the Nile.
The Greeks enacted rituals in praise of Dionysus, the god of fertility and wine. The epic poems of Homer, which were stories about the gods and men, were originally sung by only one person. Later, another actor joined the storytelling, adding dialogue and telling the stories through action, rather than speech.
Several hundred years after Homer, the Greeks began their day-long theatre celebrations. The entire town would come to watch reenactments of the great tragic stories as well as broad comic improvisations and plays about satyrs, who were half man, half animal.
In some of the early Persian and Egyptian enactments the entire community participated. In other rituals there was a differentiation between actor and audience, but the audience was not simply a group of people watching—the audience participated emotionally. There was an exchange of energy between actor and audience. Aristotle spoke about tragedy as a purgation of the basic emotions of fear and pity. Watching theatre was cathartic, for the individual and for the community. Although the form of theatre changed, the spirit remained. It’s this spirit that is captured by the script of the play, and carried through between actor and audience in the performance.
When audiences enter a theatre, they give themselves over to involvement in this special world. They take part in an exchange of energy that happens among the actors, and between the actors and the audience. Some theatregoers describe the experience of watching great drama as invigorating, others as leaving them feeling physically exhausted. Some talk about a hypnotic absorption in the proceedings on stage, or a rapt attention that makes them feel in tune with the actors and the unfolding drama. I have sometimes almost stopped breathing while watching a play, as if the actor were weaving such a magical spell that I dared not breathe or I would destroy the fragile moment.
This particular dynamic between actors and audiences can’t be captured by any other medium. When I directed the play The Visit as part of my doctoral dissertation project, several people asked me if I had filmed the play, to create a permanent record of my theatre project. I
told them that you can’t make a record of theatre, because once you’re recorded it, it’s no longer theatre, but film. It is the nature of theatre to disappear with nothing but the memory of the experience. There is no way of recording, or even explaining, what happens on the nights when the play, the actors, and the audience all work together to create this energy. Theatre is an art form carved in snow. It is impossible to preserve anything more than the experience itself.
THEATRE IS THEMATIC
Theatre turns a microscope upon the human condition. Hamlet used another metaphor, speaking of “turning a mirror up to [human] nature” by focusing on those themes that are human-centered. This is what theatre does best. Theatre tends to be more thematic than film. It does not need a strong story line to work. Many playwrights begin with a philosophy, inventing their characters to embody the theme they want to explore. Others create characters with a problem, looking at the human condition by exploring their struggles, dreams, fears, and desires.
Theatre does less well with the large tapestries of a War and Peace or a Gone With the Wind; the latter, for instance, about the passing of an old order, would not do well as a play. Yet Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, about the selling of the old family home and cherry orchard, is also about the passing of an old order, but it works well as a theatre subject. Why? Because one is concerned about the larger tapestry of a social, political order; the other makes its subject small, personal, and intimate. Gone With the Wind looks beyond Scarlett’s concerns to Southern rituals and life-styles and the land and the politics. To do that, it needs both a rich cast of characters and a wide-angle lens that can scan all the images that convey that theme.