The Art of Adaptation

by Linda Seger

  This is not to say that these subjects must never be attempted. There are many examples of adaptations that have done well in spite of the difficulties I’ve mentioned, but they’ve done well because of the writer’s ability to analyze the problems clearly and to create original solutions. When these problems are inherent in the material, you must think about it very carefully before plunging in.

  Great writers have found creative solutions to seemingly impossible translations. The true-life stories of Emile Zola, Florenz Ziegfield, General Patton, Gandhi, Karen Blixen, and the last emperor of China all won Academy Awards. The biographies of Eleanor and Franklin, King Edward and Mrs. Simpson, Golda Meir, Peter the Great, and the story of Roe vs. Wade all won Emmy Awards. These successes show that a true-life story, well done, has the potential to involve, fascinate, and inspire us.

  CASE STUDY:

  Reversal of Fortune

  In 1990 there were a number of great true-life adaptations, including Dances With Wolves, written and adapted by Michael Blake, Awakenings, adapted by Steven Zaillian, and Reversal of Fortune, adapted by Nicholas Kazan. I have great affection for all three of these films.

  I admired Michael Blake’s ability to create a three-hour film that felt like two hours. This success did not come just from the directing. Much depended on his ability to pace and structure the material.

  I was touched by Awakenings and cared deeply about the people in this film. I admired Steven Zaillian’s ability to take a simple theme about awakening to life and make it resonate on many different levels.

  And I was fascinated by Reversal of Fortune, the story of the Claus von Bulow appeal. There were a number of problems implicit in the material, which took smart writing, smart directing, and smart casting to overcome. This was a film that shouldn’t have worked—it had so many elements working against it. Yet by carefully thinking through the problems and creatively solving them, Nicholas Kazan was able to create a workable and intriguing script. Nicholas discusses his approach to the script.

  “This was one of the most difficult scripts I’ve written. There were times when I thought there was so much material, so many details in the legal case, so much information to cram into a film, and so many stories to tell, that at first I didn’t know how to do it. I had the transcripts of the two trials to work from, the two-thousand-plus-page depositions of Claus’s testimony in the civil-suit trial [which is the only place where Claus ever gave his version of the story], and I also had the depositions which he gave to the police, which were much more circumspect, to say the least. Evasive.

  “The story was also difficult because it’s about an appeal. And an appeal is based on a trial where the defendant has already been convicted. A trial is a very dramatic event, and most legal films are properly about trials. You lead toward the trial. The trial happens at the end. You render the verdict and then there’s the aftermath and the end of the movie. But an appeal is made up of one hundred seventeen pieces of paper, collated and bound together and added to a judgment. Then a couple of months later we get to hear the lawyers of each side talk to the judges for half an hour and answer questions, and then months later, there’s a verdict. It’s completely antidramatic.

  “I saw the structure of this film as unconventional. True, there’s a beginning, middle, and an end, but in a sense, this story began in the middle with the appeal. When I started working, I first came up with the final scene of the movie where he goes into the drugstore. I told it to Ed Pressman [the producer] and he laughed.

  “I also knew I had to summarize the case for the audience. But the problem is that part of the audience for the film knew a great deal about the case, part of the audience knew a little bit about the case, and part of the audience knew nothing about the case. So I had to summarize the case in a way that would not bore the people who already knew a lot about it. The only way I could see to do that was to have Sunny summarize the case, because no one had heard that viewpoint before.

  “Once I made that decision, that fractured the film for me. It meant that it had to be in certain sections. If I started with Sunny, and then she introduces Dershowitz, and then Dershowitz talks about Claus … then the structure was free. I knew I had to have flashbacks, because I had to hear Claus’s version of the events.

  “At the end of the film, Sunny says that ‘that’s all you can know, all you can be told, when you get where I am you’ll learn the rest.’ And I realized that that’s what’s exciting about any murder case, you don’t ever really know all the answers for sure.

  “I see the critical element of any story as having a sense of mystery, wanting to know what’s going to happen next. In this case I had to have as many little mysteries as I could have. Who is Alan? Who is this woman? Is she really his girlfriend? Will they knock out the medical testimony? Can we discredit their witnesses? Is Claus really guilty? Early on, Alan says that he wants to find out who Claus really is. I have him say that so the audience will also say, ‘Yeah, I want to find out who this guy is.’ All these dramatic questions are sprinkled throughout as a way of sustaining the mystery throughout the film.

  “I realized that if I was going to add Sunny in a coma to the beginning and the end, I had to have her in the middle or the audience would forget her. I could work other elements into these scenes. Sunny could talk honestly about her drug addiction. By cutting back to the body periodically, I could remind the audience that this woman’s life is essentially over. Here’s a life that’s ended.

  “My analogy for the film was juggling. I had to throw balls up in the air, and then one would come down, and then I’d throw a couple more up, and try to keep as many balls up in the air as possible so that you were constantly saying, ‘Oh yeah, what about that? And what about that?’ So I had this sense of all these things happening at once the way it really was because they had to discredit all the aspects of the case in order to have a chance at the appeal.

  “There is a kind of structure, but the structure is based on the mystery of the questions. I knew that Claus’s story about the first coma and the second coma were going to be very satisfying to the audience. I also knew that Claus’s story of the second coma didn’t completely answer all the questions, so there were other issues that needed to be raised. So I put the first coma about halfway through the film, and the second coma toward the end. I had all these issues—Did Sunny try to kill herself? Why didn’t Claus call the doctor? Why was Sunny’s nightgown hiked up? etc.—so I spaced them out for impact so that as you went through the film, you felt like you were learning more and more about the case. You were learning that Claus seemed to be innocent of injecting her with insulin, but perhaps there were other questions that also had to be addressed.

  “The film is billed as a comedy, and it obviously has a comic dimension. In fact, both Claus and Alan are extremely funny. Although I wasn’t allowed to meet Claus [because of a civil suit that restrained him from publicizing the case], there was a certain ironic tone that I extrapolated from the material. I knew I was writing extravagant characters. Some of the scenes with Claus and Sunny show this comedy. If you give people a good electric character with a good electric charge, and you have them rub up against each other, some of the interrubbing is going to have a comic dimension.

  “Some of the first lines of the film were meant to have a comic dimension. At the beginning, Sunny says, ‘Brain dead, body better than ever.’ I hoped people would laugh at it. I originally also had a line when Sunny said she was a vegetable, perhaps a brussels sprout. And there was a subtle line when she describes Alexandra Aisles, ‘Claus’s mistress, the very beautiful Alexandra,’ and you know from the way she says ’beautiful’ that she hates her.

  “Portraying the characters presented certain problems. The character of Claus is fascinating because he’s constantly flirting with people’s expectation and image of him that he’s this horrible human being. He seems to relish the fact that he’s seen in this way. It’s kind of a bizarre trait, but it’s certainly tantal
izing and makes you constantly go back and forth between liking him and disliking him, being intrigued by him, laughing with him, laughing at him, being alarmed by what he says. It’s a very three-dimensional portrait.

  “Alan Dershowitz, though, is really the protagonist of the film. He’s the active character. He’s the one that is seeking the truth, trying to reverse the conviction. But Dershowitz is always moving within the landscape of von Bulow, so it’s as if everything around him, every prop, should reek of von Bulow. Claus is the more intriguing character because he’s fascinating, ambivalent, ambiguous.

  “As a main character, Alan Dershowitz is, in real life, like Woody Allen. But if I portrayed him realistically, everyone would say, ‘He’s too much like Woody Allen. We’ve seen that character on film, and it’s Woody Allen, and I don’t know why you’re copying.’ The fact that he is that way and grew up in the same part of Brooklyn as Woody Allen and came from the same tradition where they telljokes and stories all the time didn’t help, so I had to diminish that aspect of him.

  “This was difficult, since Alan is a real living breathing person. And he’s someone that I greatly respect, so I had a kind of quandary. I didn’t want to portray him as a goody-two-shoes, since that gets boring. If I made up flaws, such as giving him a drinking problem, Alan would have grounds to sue me, since it’s inaccurate. I finally made him grouchy and someone who lost his temper. Alan didn’t like that, since he says he never loses his temper, but it was one of the few things that I could do that made him look more human so the audience would have more points of identification with him.

  “It was also difficult getting the audience to sympathize with a lawyer hired to reverse the conviction of a man that most people assume is horrible and guilty. Audiences are accustomed to having a rootin’ interest in their main character. Whatever the main character wants, they want. But in this case it wasn’t quite so simple because Claus may be a murderer, so if Alan says, ‘Let’s get him off,’ the audience will say, ‘I don’t want to get him off.’ I needed to deal with these concerns very directly and very early. That’s the reason for the long scene in Alan’s office when the team is assembling. He’s explaining that even if Claus is guilty, the lawyer has an obligation to defend the democratic process because if that process is not clean and fair, then innocent people will be convicted. Alan sees himself as the defender of the constitution. In that service, he defends people whom the audience might not like. In this case, it becomes more ambiguous as you see the evidence unravel, since maybe Claus isn’t guilty.

  “I’m sure there were students who didn’t want to work on the case for that reason, but this gave Alan a good chance to make his arguments to defend the process. I had to bring this argument up early so that the audience could get on Alan’s side and be rootin’ for him to succeed with the case.

  “There were several tricks with the character of Sunny. There was a great preponderance of evidence in the deposition showing that Sunny abused drugs. She smoked three or four packs of cigarettes a day, took huge amounts of laxatives, had prescriptions for various drugs all over the city. I wanted to honestly portray her as a depressed, semisuicidal person. Prior to each of her comas, Claus’s affair with Alexandra came to Sunny’s attention. That certainly made it look as though she was trying to kill herself. On the other hand, I had no desire to paint Sunny as an unpleasant and depressed and horrible person. Sunny was someone with too much money and she had very little interaction with the world. She could buy everything that she wanted except happiness. I felt we needed a few scenes that were unexpected and that showed a side of Claus and Sunny when everything was wonderful so we could get a sense of what the promise of this relationship was.

  “One of my first notes to myself was to destroy the rich with sympathy. From my observations, rich people can have a terrible problem. Everyone wants their money so they have to hide. As a result they’re very far from the earth, very far from human roots, from their animal roots. I was seeking to contrast Claus, who was always perfectly dressed, with Dershowitz. The first time you see Dershowitz, he’s playing basketball by himself. So you go from somebody who’s cerebral, who doesn’t live in his body, to someone who’s out there playing basketball.

  “I also had another theme in mind. This is going to sound pretentious, yet I think we all thirst for justice, but we only find it in the arms of God. Claus says he wants ‘justice,’ but we can never be sure. Maybe this means he’s guilty and he wants to be acquitted. Alan really does want justice. He wants a pure legal system, but the system, because it’s administered by human beings who are innately fallible, is always impure.

  “And in the end, we don’t know what happened. Only Sunny knows. Sunny’s in God’s arms. She has found her own justice. But she can’t tell us what it is. All she can do is hint. Tantalize us with the mystery.”

  In 1991 the script was nominated for the Writers Guild Award, the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and the Golden Globe, and won The L.A. Film Critics Association Award for Best Screenplay, the Boston Film Critics Award, the Pen Center U.S.A West award, and the NATO/ShoWest Writer of the Year Award.

  4

  FROM FILM INTO FILM

  Film is powerful. It can move us to tears and laughter. Film images can haunt us through bad dreams. I still remember as a young girl being taken out of the theatre during a preview for King Kong. My mother didn’t want me to have nightmares about the horrifying, howling gorilla. (In those days, films took a long time to reach Peshtigo, Wisconsin. In this case, the 1939 film didn’t play until the early 1950’s.)

  Film characters concern us and pull us into their lives. It’s not unusual for audience members to think about a character for weeks or months after seeing a movie. Often characters inspire us, leading us to make new decisions. We fall in love with films, watching some over and over and continually finding more meaning with each viewing.

  Since film can have such an impact on us, it’s not unusual for producers and executives to look to the remake as a potential source of new films. What was popular and moving for one group of people has the potential to speak in new ways to contemporary audiences.

  The updating and reinterpreting of dramatic material is nothing new. Shakespeare has been updated innumerable times. The Peter Brook production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream placed the play in a circus atmosphere. The Merchant of Venice has been set in the eighteenth century. Every year there are Broadway revivals of classic plays with new interpretations, many of which are successful and bring new significance to the material. The remake and revival is a staple of the American stage. A high percentage of these productions succeed.

  Most film remakes, however, fail or have only limited success. Why? If it worked once, why can’t the best writers, directors, and actors make it work again? What are the inherent problems in the remake? When is a remake worth doing—and when should the original be left alone?

  WHAT QUALIFIES AS A REMAKE?

  There are a few major categories of film-to-film adaptations: remakes of American films; American versions of foreign, usually French, films; and short films expanded into feature films. Most remakes come from American films, a few being remakes of silent films, such as Cleopatra or Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments. Many come from the best films of the 1930’s and 1940’s, such as King Kong, Scarface, The Prisoner of Zenda, A Star Is Born, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, The Phantom of the Opera, Stella Dallas (Stella), A Man Called Joe (Always). The most successful adaptation of an earlier film was Heaven Can Wait, adapted from Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

  In most of these situations, the original film is based on a novel or a play, so the remake becomes an adaptation of an adaptation. Heaven Can Wait is based on a play by Harry Segall; The Postman Always Rings Twice is based on a novel by James Cain; Stella Dallas is based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. In some cases, the well-known adaptation is based on an earlier film: the Stella story was filmed in 1925, 1937 (the classic Stella Dallas),
and most recently in 1989.

  Among American remakes of French films, some of the most familiar are Breathless, The Man Who Loved Women, Boudu Saved from Drowning (Down and Out in Beverly Hills), Le Cadeau (The Toy), Diabolique (Reflections of a Murder), and Cousin, Cousine (Cousins).

  Another type of remake is the short film expanded into the feature film. In the last few years an increase in the number of film programs in universities and professional schools has led to more interest in adapting short student films into feature films. Many young filmmakers begin with an intention to use their half-hour film as an entree into the film industry, and, if possible, to turn it into a two-hour film that they can write, produce, and/or direct. George Lucas got his start with his student film, THX-1138, which became his first full-length feature film. James Deardon directed and wrote a short film that became Fatal Attraction.

  Remakes have also been made from other types of film. In at least one case, the remake (Memphis Belle) was based on a documentary.

  Television has had no more success with remakes than the film industry. Although some TV remakes, such as The Man in the Iron Mask with Richard Chamberlain or A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott, have been quite wonderful, others have received poor ratings and/or negative reviews. Some of these include Stagecoach, Indiscreet, Letter to Three Wives, Casablanca, The Sun Also Rises, Shadow of Doubt, and The Defiant Ones.

  If you’re going to do a remake, what do you look for? Why are so many remakes failures? What elements seem to be part of successful remakes?