Adaptation for Screenwriters 9781350036673, 9781350036703, 9781350036680

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
All is adaptation
The territory ahead
The proposition
Screenwriting
Synopsis
Workshopping
Part 1 Concepts
1 Before you start: approaching adaptation
1a) Preliminaries
1b) Translation
1c) prima materia
Case study: Psycho, Dir: Alfred Hitchcock (1960)
Workshop: First contact
2 Thinking about form
2a) Talking pictures and narration
2b) Visualizing characters and interiority
2c) Summary/checklist
Case study: Great Expectations, Dir: David Lean (1946)
Workshop: Finding the film in the book
Part 2 Adaptation
3 Narrative re/construction
3a) Story and structure
3b) Six steps
3c) Scene and sequence
Case study: The Shawshank Redemption, Dir: Frank Darabont (1994)
Workshop: Orchestrating the screen
4 The human element
4a) Beneath the surface
4b) Action and interaction
4c) Culture and context
Case study: A Very Short Story, Ernest Hemingway, 1924
Workshop: Interrogating character
5 Faithful invention
5a) Creative interpretation
5b) Reframing the picture
5c) Researching the picture
Case study: Bullet in the Brain, Dir: David Von Ancken (2001)
Workshop: Gained in translation
Part 3 The Process
6 Developing the script
6a) The short film option
6b) Evaluating the story
6c) Writing the script
7 Adapting Hardy: a case study
7a) Adapting Thomas Hardy by Alan G. Smith
7b) Context – “The Withered Arm”
7c) The Withered Arm – The script
PART 4 Appropriation
8 Texts unbound
8a) Working between texts
8b) Intertextuality
8c) Hypotext and Hypertext
Case study: O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Dir: Joel and Ethan Coen (2000)
9 Textual play
9a) Bricolage and semiurgy
9b) Customizing the classic text
9c) Weaving fact and fiction
Case study: The Hours, Dir: Stephen Daldry (2003)
10 Other forms
10a) Graphic novels
10b) Video games
10c) Theatre
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Adaptation for Screenwriters

ii

Adaptation for Screenwriters Robert Edgar and John Marland

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © John Marland and Robert Edgar, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Robert Edgar, WT205, York St John University All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marland, John, author. | Edgar-Hunt, Robert, author. Title: Adaptation for screenwriters / John Marland and Robert Edgar. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019008310 (print) | LCCN 2019012017 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350036680 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350036697 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350036673 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Film adaptations. | Motion picture authorship. | Motion picture plays–Technique. Classification: LCC PN1997.85 (ebook) | LCC PN1997.85.M273 2019 (print) | DDC 791.43/6–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008310 ISBN: PB: 978-1-3500-3667-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3668-0 eBOOK: 978-1-3500-3669-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to Julia, Evan, Meredith and Agatha John, Marian, Annie and Mamma Rita

vi

Contents

Acknowledgements  x

Introduction  1 All is adaptation  1 The territory ahead  2 The proposition  2 Screenwriting  3 Synopsis  4 Workshopping  5

Part 1  Concepts  7 1 Before you start: approaching adaptation  9 1a) Preliminaries 9 1b) Translation  14 1c)  prima materia  17  Case study: Psycho, Dir: Alfred Hitchcock (1960)  18    Workshop: First contact  21

2 Thinking about form  27 2a)  Talking pictures and narration  27 2b)  Visualizing characters and interiority  37 2c) Summary/checklist 43 Case study: Great Expectations, Dir: David Lean (1946)  44   Workshop: Finding the film in the book  49

Part 2  Adaptation  63 3 Narrative re/construction  65 3a)  Story and structure  65 3b)  Six steps  68 3c)  Scene and sequence  78  Case study: The Shawshank Redemption,   Dir: Frank Darabont (1994)  85 Workshop: Orchestrating the screen  90

4 The human element  97 4a)  Beneath the surface  97 4b)  Action and interaction  107 4c)  Culture and context  118 Case study: A Very Short Story, Ernest Hemingway, 1924  121   Workshop: Interrogating character  123

5 Faithful invention  133 5a)  Creative interpretation  133 5b)  Reframing the picture  137 5c)  Researching the picture  141  Case study: Bullet in the Brain, Dir: David Von Ancken (2001)  143   Workshop: Gained in translation  147

Part 3  The Process  157 6 Developing the script  159 6a)  The short film option  159 6b)  Evaluating the story  163 6c)  Writing the script  168

7 Adapting Hardy: a case study  177 7a)  Adapting Thomas Hardy by Alan G. Smith  177 7b)  Context – “The Withered Arm”  178 7c)  The Withered Arm – The script  182

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PART 4  Appropriation  225 8 Texts unbound  227 8a)  Working between texts  227 8b) Intertextuality  232 8c)  Hypotext and Hypertext  236 Case study: O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Dir: Joel and Ethan Coen (2000)  239

9 Textual play  241 9a)  Bricolage and semiurgy  241 9b)  Customizing the classic text  244 9c)  Weaving fact and fiction  247 Case study: The Hours, Dir: Stephen Daldry (2003)  250

10 Other forms  253 10a)  Graphic novels  253 10b)  Video games  256 10c)  Theatre  260 Bibliography  265 Index  273

Contents 

ix

Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to all the students who have worked through the various adaptation modules at York St John University. Great thanks to our colleagues who have helped and supported us through the writing of this book: all in the Literature and Creative Writing teams in the Centre for Writing at York St John University, especially Dr Naomi Booth, Dr Richard Bourne, Dr Kimberly Campanello, Professor Abi Curtis, Dr Anne-Marie Evans, Dr Liesl King, Caleb Klaces, Rob O’Connor, Dr Helen Pleasance and Dr JT Welsch. Special thanks to Mark Herman, no mean adaptor himself. Special thanks to Georgia Kennedy and Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury for their expert advice and patience. Very special thanks go to Alan G. Smith for writing The Withered Arm, especially when he was so busy writing other scripts.

Introduction

This book is particularly intended for screenwriters looking to start on adaptation. It aims to guide the reader through the process, from first impulse to first draft and beyond. This book is also for those with a general interest in screenwriting, for whom adaptation affords a special insight into the decisions that shape the evolution of just about any film. Adaptation offers a unique glimpse into the engine room of screenwriting, a peep behind the screen as it were. Where an original screenplay is concerned it is impossible to distinguish between the original intention and the finished script. Even for the writer, the earliest thoughts and objectives are probably lost to memory. Adaptation lays bare these beginnings in that the inspiration and intention is clearly located within another text. The relationship between initial idea and final image is in full view. Knowing that the prime object was to tell this story or reproduce this experience, we can see how the film-maker has gone about it, and with what success.

All is adaptation In some sense all screenwriting is adaptation, in so far as it involves turning story ideas into screen images. Even where the starting point has no other origin than the screenwriter’s own imagination, the same transformation must take place, from the linguistic to the visual, from imagined concept to visual actuality. It is always a matter of converting pictures in the head into pictures on the screen with as little loss and compromise as possible. The process of decision-making is the same; sifting, selecting and sequencing narrative elements.

The only difference with an adapted screenplay is that its origins lie in a pre-existing body of words (someone else’s words) usually in the form of a novel or short story. And herein lies the rub. Books and films are not made of the same stuff. They don’t work the same way. We read them differently. Literary material resists conforming to the demands and limitations of the screen. Hence this book.

The territory ahead By film adaptation we typically refer to a novel retold as a feature film. Adaptation is what brought Gone with the Wind (1939), The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Godfather (1972) to the big screen. It’s what Peter Jackson did to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (2001–03), and what a succession of people have done to Harry Potter (2001–11). For some the term ‘adaptation’ summons up images of period dramas, bonnets and bustles, mop-caps and crinolines. But it also gave us Trainspotting (1996), Brokeback Mountain (2005) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). When we go to the cinema and encounter the words ‘Based on the novel by … ’, or pick up a book and read ‘Now a major motion picture’, we know we have entered adaptation territory. This territory was opened up by pioneer film-makers in the first decades of the twentieth century, as they toiled to unlock the potential of their new medium. Struggling to find stories and struggling to find the way to tell them, they turned to fiction and theatre for lessons in narrative, both models and materials. Some of the first screenplay credits ought by rights to have gone to the likes of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker, who (unknowingly) provided the stories and characters that filled many a silent movie theatre.

The proposition Adaptation was there at the dawn of commercial cinema, and it has been a mainstay of movie-making ever since. Far from being a marginal activity or side-line, it is virtually ubiquitous. Adaptation is a remarkably attractive proposition for filmmakers. In the first place, it taps into a deep reservoir of ready-made material – a rich store of stories and characters ripe for plunder.

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Adaptation for Screenwriters

Then there are economic reasons. Film is high-risk high-finance. No film proposal is a completely safe bet, but an adaptation can seem safer than some. It comes with a recommendation. The story has a track-record, it has evidently worked in another (albeit very different) medium. As a project to be pitched to a producer it has a builtin advantage in that in some sense it already exists. Hollywood sets great stock by IP (Intellectual Property). It helps along the conversation if you can place your pitch on the desk, and it has a barcode on the cover. A book in the hand is worth any number of ideas in the head. (More than one screenwriter with an original idea has gone to the lengths of writing it as a novel first.) If the name on the cover is a ‘name’, then you introduce the enticing prospect of product recognition, and the accompanying audience with is primed and curious to know what they’ve done to the book. Factors related to terms like ‘high culture’, ‘cultural capital’ and ‘the heritage industry’ enter when contemplating doing an Austen or a Brontë. Less cynical motives can lie behind the simple desire to put on a lavish spectacle of Henry James, or at last do justice to Stephen King. Not that these considerations will make the work of screenwriting any easier. Writing an adapted screenplay is neither an easy option, nor a shortcut to success. Screenwriting is difficult enough, but adaptation involves additional tasks and imposes additional constraints and we will turn to these.

Screenwriting Before it occupies rehearsal rooms, design studios, film sets or an editing suite, the film must first take shape in the scriptwriter’s mind. But it is important to remember that as a screenwriter you are not making a film. The making of films falls to directors, cinematographers, actors and the like. These are the people who finally determine the look and the sound of the thing. The screenwriter’s job is to conceive it, devise it and provide the cast and crew with a script, that curious hybrid document (part literary, part cinematic), which functions as a set of preliminary instructions for these other creative types to do their thing. What the script gives them is the anatomy of the story, the bone-structure of its characters and the human dynamics that structure and propel the action. What the audience will see is the director’s business, what significance it has will be largely determined by you. The script is the basis and framework for the enterprise.

Introduction

3

In total contrast to narrative fiction, film is a collective effort. As screenwriter, the film might start with you, but you have little or no control when the script leaves your desk. You set the wheels in motion, but then it’s all out of your hands. Like a football coach, your role is to send the production team onto the field with the best gameplan you can come up with. What they then do with it is ultimately up to them. In what follows we may refer to the film, but what we mean is your part in its production, the script; and that part is quite big enough. As is conventional we will identify films by reference to the director, but it is the screenwriter(s) to whom we give a collective word of thanks.

Synopsis Chapters 1–5 will examine: ●●

the relationship between author and screenwriter, novel and script;

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the challenges presented by the disparity in form between fiction and film;

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the difficulties inherent in moving a story from page to screen;

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the problem-solving skills required to successfully manage the transition;

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the sorts of radical intervention often necessitated by audience needs and expectations.

Our primary focus will be on film adaptation as a process: ●●

the preliminary decisions regarding approach and general methodology;

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the differentiation of filmic from un-filmic elements in fiction;

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the deconstruction and reconstruction of plot;

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the transportation of character from page to screen;

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the invention of creative strategies to deliver the story as a satisfying film.

Chapters 6 and 7 provide pointers and tips on how to start writing your own script. This includes notes on what a script is and practical suggestions about how to develop your own work. This includes a very short adapted script for you to edit and develop yourself. Chapter 7 includes a thirty-minute screen adaptation with commentary to see in practice how a writer has approached the task.

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Adaptation for Screenwriters

Chapters 8 and 9 examine the looser and increasingly complex world of appropriation. These chapters will examine how you can take references to books and use these in the creation of ‘original’ screenplays. The techniques and concepts of appropriation allow you which they use references an audience already have to generate meaning. Chapter 10 addresses other forms: games, graphic novels and theatre. This chapter considers how you can take the skills and knowledge you have developed in the first part of this book and apply it to other media.

Workshopping If you have picked up this book you are probably thinking of writing a screenplay based on a book you love. Every project is different, and we can’t hope to directly address the issues that will be specific to you and you alone. Nevertheless, the problems of adaptation typically fall into one of two categories: matters of form (what film will and will not allow you to do in transferring the story from page to screen) and matters of interpretation (when your personal response to the book urges you to make significant alterations to story or character – deletions and additions, departures and inventions). It is important to distinguish between the two. The first type is generic difficulties that plague every adaptation. The second type is always unique to the text you have chosen, and the film you want to fashion from it. Across all chapters we aim to address practical matters and the conceptual issues. In addition to a wide variety of writing Exercises, and brief Case Studies offering illustration of issues and solutions, the first half of the book incorporates extended Workshop sections designed to enhance the development of skills and strategies. To help explore both these dimensions, we have selected two texts for concentrated attention: a short story by Ernest Hemingway (text provided) and a novel by Patricia Highsmith (synopsis provided). These should be treated as ‘workbench material’ for you to practice and experiment. Time spent thinking through the challenge of ‘adapting’ these texts will sharpen the critical and creative faculties you will need for your own project. In citing existing examples of adaptation, we have selected some fictional texts that we think will help you to grapple with the most common problems. In particular, we have deliberately chosen to include some highly canonical novels by the likes

Introduction

5

of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not only are their stories and characters already widely known from page and screen, but they have received multiple adaptive treatment. There is perhaps no better school of adaptation than sitting down to compare what different screenwriters and directors have done with the same book. Classics are often drawn from a literary canon which is in itself is not particularly diverse. Adaptation of popular fiction is not so limited and a survey of titles in any bookshop will show the wealth of material available to you, and this is discussed in later chapters of this book. Historically speaking, the limited range of voices in the business of writing and directing film is also notable. For instance, there are significantly fewer female names the further back in to film history we look. This situation is changing and is evident in the range of names that we now see appearing on the screen as authors, screenwriters and directors. As a screenwriter you will be able to adapt classics to draw out contemporary concerns, rework characters and draw out buried meaning. You will be able to select from a range of different sources for adaptation across historic and contemporary fictions.

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Adaptation for Screenwriters

Part 1 Concepts

8

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,

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Adaptation for Screenwriters

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.

Before You Start: Approaching Adaptation

11

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 heartwarming 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

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Adaptation for Screenwriters

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.

Before You Start: Approaching Adaptation

13

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

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Adaptation for Screenwriters

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 really entails. One initial problem we experience is that we are so familiar with fiction and film, as consumers, that we are likely to overlook just how unalike they are. When talking about a novel we have just read or a movie we have just seen, we tend to describe them in very similar terms, ignoring the fact that the events and characters are made out of two completely different substances. Literature and cinema employ different languages, separate modes of communication. We already have a ‘tacit’ understanding of these languages (if we didn’t we would hardly know what was in front of us). Nevertheless, there is a world of difference between passively reading a language and being able to actively speak it. Learning to be a writer of any kind is a matter of making the transition from ‘consumer’ to ‘producer’, figuring out how to create the sort of experience we enjoy as readers or as part of an audience. It requires a radical adjustment of perspective. An even greater adjustment is required if when we are trying to reproduce on the screen the impressions we ourselves have received from the page. The adapting screenwriter needs to be actively ‘bilingual’, able to ‘translate’ from one language to the other. And there is nothing mechanical about it. Translation is seldom a straightforward matter of substituting one word for another. Successfully translating a lengthy and elaborate message from one language to another is a complicated intellectual process requiring both precision (alighting on just the right word or phrase) and creativity (when no such exact word or phrase seems to exist). There are ‘gaps’ which the translator has to bridge as best they can.

Change Meaning will not automatically transfer from one place to the other. With the possible exception of dialogue, adaptation is never a neutral operation simply cutting from the page and sticking it on the screen. Adaptation literally means change.

Before You Start: Approaching Adaptation

15

All adaptation is interpretation Where several possible words or expressions might suffice, choosing the one that is most appropriate requires fine judgement regarding the overall meaning and purpose of the communication. Just pick up different English translations of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), turn to the first page, and see the variations of word and phrase, structure and emphasis. Each variation reflects a decision about the manner, tone and intended meaning of the original Russian. In just this way, adaptation onto the screen involves innumerable interpretive choices.

All adaptation is intervention Not even the most ‘faithful’ translation can altogether avoid the need to invent. When metaphors and common idiomatic expressions are rendered ‘literally’ into another tongue, they often make no sense at all. If no direct verbal equivalent exists, we need to find the closest approximation, something analogous, something that has the same force or will convey a comparable impression. In the case of film adaptation, you may inherit a story and characters, but the prose text will not have given you everything the screen requires. You are obliged to create.

All adaptation is interpolation With or without our deliberate intention, when adaptation translates from page to screen it inevitably imposes new things. When you convert a written description into a set of visual images it will immediately gain new properties, overlaying the original text with qualities that were never envisaged by either the author of the book or its readers. Other kinds of material (visual, auditory, performative) are automatically inserted or superimposed. The original material is inevitably extended or distorted in some degree by being converted from one element of communication (words) to many (sound and vision).

Exercise: There is no such thing as Wholemeal Adaptation – nothing added, nothing taken away. The process always involves addition and subtraction. Take a short passage from your primary source, and in as much detail as you can try to

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Adaptation for Screenwriters

mentally visualize it for the screen. Now take your visualization and identify what the paint-box of your imagination has invented or interpolated, purely by virtue of translating the words into mental pictures.

1c) prima materia Approaching the task of adaptation, you need to take a firm grasp of the basic matter you are handling. Craftsmanship involves an intimate knowledge of the raw material. A potter knows clay, a tailor knows cloth. They know their stuff, as we say. Of course, the writer’s stuff is language. Every working day is a struggle to put the right words in the right order. The screenwriter toils to put the right words in the right mouths at the right time. For the adapting screenwriter there is an additional complication. Before you can wrestle with your own words, you must wrestle with someone else’s. What is more, you need to wrestle with a novel, a very different form of written expression, capable of doing very different things.

The novel There are plenty of scholarly books that examine the novel form, and how it works, explaining the essentials of fictional architecture and technique. But the first and most important thing to acknowledge is that novels are big. The American writer Henry James, once notoriously referred to nineteenth-century novels as ‘large, loose, baggy monsters’. He had in mind the lengthy, unwieldy fiction of a Melville or a Tolstoy; cavernous, omnivorous, panoptical, ‘all-life-ishere’, literary doorstops. These writers took up the novel precisely because it is the most commodious and accommodating form, capable of containing just about anything and everything. Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is an encyclopaedic whale of a book, full of myth, biblical echoes, nautical lore and descriptions of rather ghastly industrial processes, all topped and tailed with a ripping yarn about a mad sea captain hunting the fish that ate his leg. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) attempts to swallow the Napoleonic Wars, the processes of history and the meaning of life.

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Not all novels are as long or monstrously ambitious, but even a comparatively lightweight paperback can carry a remarkably heavy cargo. All novels are bigger on the inside. The essence of an entire life can be folded up in a few pages. Just a few sentences can open onto a huge expanse of narrative terrain. Even the shortest short story can be remarkably spacious once you get inside, revealing broad vistas, drawing us into surprising depths. What determines the depth and reach of fictional prose is not the number of words the writer employs, but the extraordinary plasticity of words themselves. Fiction, being nothing but words, can do anything language can do. Novelists can transport us anywhere they choose. A novel can send us across eons of time, and suddenly drop us into a single moment. It can expand our awareness to embrace the history of mankind, and then contract to concentrate on one specific event. It can span the vastness of the universe, and stop dead in its tracks to inspect a solitary grain of sand. And it can move backwards and forwards between these extremes at breakneck speed, in the glimmer of a sentence. As a mode of storytelling the novel is a uniquely protean invention. It occupies the same oceanic dimension as thought itself, and has the same boundless capacity to stretch and compress, speed-up and slow down, pull-out and zoom-in as the mind that created it. Being so inclusive and malleable the novel remains a remarkably resilient medium. There is something about the form that is almost infinitely adaptable. The actual experience of a novel is impossible for cinema to simulate, but thankfully that isn’t your objective. What you are aiming to do is join forces with the novelist, and collaborate in the making of something new.

Case study: Psycho, Dir: Alfred Hitchcock (1960) Books are rarely shaped like films. More often than not, from the film-maker’s perspective, the prose narrative simply starts in the wrong place. For example, Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho (1959). Those familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s famous movie adaptation are very surprised to open the book and find themselves immediately confronted by Norman Bates – and his mother. It’s a stormy night and a nervy Norman is alone with his thoughts amid the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Motel’s back parlour. Bloch wastes no time in taking the reader to the dark centre

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of things. The whole first chapter is devoted to setting up disturbing expectations, so that when a woman arrives at Norman’s door we already fear the worst. The beginning of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) could hardly be more different. The film opens on a blazingly hot afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona. It drops us into the world of Marion Crane (called Mary in the novel), her sex-life, her frustrated desire for marriage and respectability, and her impulsive theft of $40,000. The film announces itself as an urban thriller revolving around the themes of love and money, crime and punishment, temptation and redemption. It’s a full twenty-five minutes before Marion interrupts her flight to freedom, leaves the rain-lashed highway, pulls into the forecourt of Bates Motel and meets its strange proprietor. Only then does Norman enter the picture. From the point of view of adaptation this raises a host of interesting questions concerning form, genre, characterization and theme: ●●

Why ignore chapter 1 of Bloch’s novel?

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Why expand upon Mary/Marion’s character?

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Why bother to immerse us in her world?

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Why take the audience on such a long and circuitous route to Bates Motel?

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Why delay Norman’s appearance?

Hitchcock isn’t wasting time, he is using time differently, in order to place the viewer precisely where he wants them. His art is all about management and manipulation; conditioning the audience’s awareness in order to create tension and spring surprise. The structural changes to Bloch’s story were necessary for the kind of film he wanted to make from it. Bloch’s novel is deliberately unsettling from the start. Norman’s isolation, eccentricity and morbid inner life are straightaway front and centre. We are even presented with his gruesome reading habits, and his fascination with acts of atavistic violence. The book immediately signals something strange and dangerous ahead, and strongly hints at Norman’s part in it. For film this is far too direct. It gives away too much, too soon. Hitchcock’s Psycho re-designs the book’s narrative into a masterpiece of cinematic misdirection, and the process starts with radically re-engineering the plot in order to disguise Norman’s role in it. He appears to be no more than a minor character in

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a noir-ish crime caper, rather than the mysterious central figure in a psychological horror movie. For Hitchcock’s purpose it is crucial that we initially mistake Norman for something else. Other considerations also touch on genre. What Hitchcock and his screenwriter, Joseph Stafano, saw in Bloch’s novel was the potential to create a piece of modernized Gothic, with Bates Motel as an updated version of the sinister ancestral home where the ‘monster’ traditionally lies in wait for the unwary. Marion may be no ‘innocent maiden’, but she nevertheless fills the conventional role of the unsuspecting victim seeking shelter from the storm. As with Jonathan Harker approaching Dracula’s castle, we follow Marion as she blindly strays into an archaic and unfathomable region where her worldliness gives her absolutely no protection. The house overlooking the Motel is a visual signifier for the arrested development of its occupant. It is defined by comparison with the other ‘signs’ placed around it. The extraordinary is determined in relation to the ordinary. The Bates Motel is made all the more darkly antiquated and ‘back-woodsy’ for being set against the bright bustle and clinical efficiency of the big city. Likewise, Norman’s relationship with his mother is all the more ‘unnatural’ and enervating for being set against the natural vitality of Marion’s affair with Sam. By first dwelling on Marion, Hitchcock also allows us to see what Norman sees when she enters his lonely introverted world: a mature, independent, ‘modern’ woman. Hitchcock wants to set up a contrast between the sophisticated urban America she belongs to, and the forgotten backwater where he is stuck. It is a contrast, but also a point of connection. Both of them are trapped in widely different, but equally life-denying family situations. This is something the script clearly foregrounds when Marion and Norman get acquainted over milk and sandwiches. Each of these considerations, formal, generic, thematic, argues in favour of beginning the movie with Marion’s life in Phoenix. Of course, Hitchcock is leading us even further astray by these strategic manoeuvres. He is playing a much more elaborate game with the audience by creating the false impression that the film is telling Marion’s story, when in fact she is a minor character in a film that is really about Bates. The shock delivered by the infamous shower scene, and the audience’s disorientation when it’s over, is only possible because of those first twenty-five minutes, serving as a deceitful prologue to the main subject of the movie.

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A question for you: To hasten or delay? Assess the advantages and disadvantages of beginning your adaptation at different points in the given narrative. Should you speed up or slow down your audience’s progress towards the film’s central encounters?

Workshop: First contact The purpose of this section is to raise issues you will inevitably face when tackling your own project. Regard it as an extended warm-up exercise, designed to cut your teeth on something hard. The objective is to conceptualize Ernest Hemingway’s A Very Short Story for the screen. Imagine yourself tasked with adapting Hemingway’s miniature into a short film of 10–15 minutes. Imagine too that you are ordered to stay ‘faithful’ to it (leaving it an open question what this means). >>> >>> Ernest Hemingway: ‘A Very Short Story’ (from In Our Time, 1925) One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night. Luz stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed. Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth Before You Start: Approaching Adaptation

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certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it. Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night. After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarreled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that. He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had only been a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best. The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

Questions Set aside the final paragraph for the moment, and begin by asking the following:

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Is this good material to work with, and if so why?

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What potential does the story have as a film adaptation?

Adaptation for Screenwriters

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What ‘positives’ leap out at you?

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What holds your attention, or sticks vividly in your mind?

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What, in particular, piques your interest as a screenwriter?

The first time we read anything we tend to rush. We read for the facts, to find out ‘what happens’. Having done that, we now need to slow down, re-read the story and begin to focus on more specific issues.

Story: ●●

What do you feel the story is fundamentally about?

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What type of story is it?

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What is its overall tone?

Exercise: Find half a dozen individual words or phrases to sum up the story, and its impact.

Opportunities: ●●

What particular moments seem to call out for cinematic treatment?

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As a screenwriter, what makes these moments so imaginatively appealing?

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What additional pleasures might you bring to these scenes, and the adaptation as a whole?

Exercise: Choose three such events or scenes and visualize them as thoroughly as you can.

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Obstacles: ●●

What aspects of the story would be most problematic, and require the most attention?

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Again, setting aside the special difficulty presented by the way Hemingway chooses to end his story, what problems does it present to a film-maker?

Exercise: Identify at least one instance where you feel it will be tricky to convey something satisfactorily on the screen, and start to think creatively around this obstacle. So many question, in fact, once you start asking them you find the questions only multiply. But initially all we have are questions, so the more the merrier.

Interpretation One valuable outcome of this exercise may be catching yourself moving off the page, imposing speculations and interpretations of your own, and not just because Hemingway has given us so little information to go on. Notice this doesn’t seem to inhibit us much. In fact, one of the things this exercise should demonstrate is that it is only by adding our own imagination that the story holds up at all. Even when charged to be ‘faithful’ to the story, we will find ourselves ‘reading things into it’, importing our own assumptions and fantasies. Adaptation will almost inevitably mean reading between the lines – delving beneath the surface of events, and applying our creative intelligence. Because all reading does this. We make judgements based on our own experience and our own habitual reading of the world? We project something of ourselves onto the text, and never more so than when we are turning words into images.

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Viability Going back to the first questions, the answer is surely ‘yes’. This is good material to work with. One can’t fail to notice certain things that simply invite adaptation. In the first place the story is very distinctly about something, and about something we can all recognize. As to the type of story it is, it isn’t just one type. There is a lot going on in these 600 words, and it touches us in a number of ways. There is emotion. The story has a terribly poignant, even tragic, quality. We needn’t worry about revisiting such well-worn narrative territory. Young love always strikes a chord, and what seems conventional can form the backdrop to something more surprising. There are ideas. The story hints at some buried universal truth. Perhaps it says something about the mysterious forces that shape all our destinies, forces (whether external or internal) that lie beyond our control. There is spectacle. The story depicts a world that is both ravishingly beautiful and desperately ugly. The various settings (medieval roof-tops and operating theatres, hushed cathedrals and teeming railway stations) come immediately and vividly to mind. There is surprise. The story delivers a vicious kick in the gut. Exposure to cruelty and injustice excites an almost visceral response in us. Hemingway obviously aims to strike the reader a low blow, in the very pit of our stomach. He wants us to feel something of what our unnamed soldier feels. In other words, it has the potential to connect with an audience through the primary channels of communication: heart, head, eye and solar plexus. Hence it is a story worth returning to. And we will.

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2 Thinking about Form

2a) Talking pictures and narration This chapter will examine how fiction and film differ as forms of expression, and the typical obstacles that present themselves to any screenwriter attempting to transfer narrative material from one medium to another.

Narrative compression The first issue that confronts adaptation is the obvious disparity of scale. A novel can occupy us, on and off, for days or even weeks, whereas a movie is consumed at one sitting in a couple of hours. Any edition of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina will weigh in at over 800 closely printed pages. Its latest screen adaptation, scripted by Tom Stoppard (2012), runs to a mere 130 minutes. Christine Edzard’s 1987 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit lasts a virtually unprecedented six hours and was released in two parts, but in narrative terms it’s still dwarfed by the book. Novels by Tolstoy and Dickens are formidably heavy with plot, characters and relationships. No single film could encompass so much material. No script could render the whole narrative picture the author paints. It isn’t that films can’t be complex (in construction and meaning), but they don’t deal in this sort of complexity. The novel is a highly discursive form, prone to digression and narrative excess. Stories can unfold slowly. Characters can develop gradually. Novelists are seldom constrained in terms of time and space in the way film-makers are. They are enviably free to spin their yarn as far as they like, and in any direction. Such narrative elasticity and scope is not afforded to the screenwriter. Where fiction expands, film must contract. Where prose can spread and sprawl, film must be tidy

and trim. Adaptation is almost invariably going to be a process of reduction, cutting things out or condensing them down to fit the requirements of the cinematic medium. The dramatis personae will be reduced to a skeleton crew, sub-plots pruned back or removed altogether, the story ‘boiled-down’ to its bare essentials. This means making painful decisions. What to keep, what to cull. Things much loved or admired in the book may have to be disarranged or sacrificed altogether. And this cropping of the novel to fit the screen will almost inevitably result in some distortion.

Figure 2.1  Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men (2007) gives pride of place to Sheriff Bell. The Coen Brothers shrink his role and his story in order to widen the scope for other characters to have their share of the screen.

Exercise: With your own adaptation project in mind, begin to consider the sheer amount of story your original text contains, and in the light of this identify those aspects of the narrative (plot and/or character) that might be expendable. But consider too the consequences that would follow from their removal. Change in one place almost inevitably means change somewhere else.

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Telling and showing The world of a novel is almost entirely created through description. This is what gives novelists their narrative freedom. There is nothing physical or mental, visible or invisible, that a novel can’t invoke by merely describing it. Words communicate via thought rather than the senses, and primarily exist as ideas in the mind. Prose fiction has no difficulty dealing in abstractions. The world of a film is almost entirely created through display. It is largely limited to what we can see. And this contrast between descriptive word and displayed image has profound implications for adaptation. Take the first sentence of Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.’ True or false, it’s a general abstract proposition which will simply not convert into a specific visual image. It can be stated, but it cannot be witnessed, and so much fictional discourse is like this. Tolstoy’s second sentence addresses a more specific and tangible state of affairs, but one that is equally unphotographable: ‘Everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household.’One could potentially infer the truth of this declaration from an accumulation of visible signs (weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth), but not even a dozen tear-streaked faces could exactly express the condition of fatigued exasperation that the words convey. Of course, the sentence isn’t to be taken literally at all (not everything can be wrong). It’s a piece of hyperbole, an exaggerated gesture used for effect, standing in for the frowns and sighs we might expect to see and hear if we were to enter the Oblonsky home. The crucial distinction being noted here is between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’. Novels are all talk; films are mostly action. Novels speak to us; films pretend we are not there. Novels can explain; films have to ‘act it out’. This is fundamental. Almost every problem of adaptation can be traced back to the fact that novels can simply tell their tales, while films need to enact them. Film-makers must ‘put on a show’ and the screenwriter has to script it.

Exercise: In one of the few moments where Hemingway deigns to tell us things about his characters, he says they wanted to be married ‘so they could not lose it’. Is this a thought the couple could explicitly formulate? More to the point how would you formulate it, visually, and in dialogue?

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Exposition Screenwriters are dramatists, and dramatists communicate through the staging of physical events and the interaction of characters in dialogue. The objective is not to ‘tell’ the story. This we call exposition, and scriptwriters are meant to avoid it at all costs. Audiences shouldn’t be told what they can otherwise behold directly for themselves. Actions speak louder. Pictures paint etc. All scriptwriting involves smuggling in necessary story information without the audience realizing it. To be caught doing it is a capital offense, the equivalent of a boom being left ‘in shot’. It risks shattering the illusion, the suspension of disbelief, upon which the pleasure of the audience depends. Unfortunately, from the point of view of adaptation, novels are made up almost entirely of exposition. Some of this will be readily converted into action, but a lot of it will not. Of course, some ‘telling’ is permitted within drama; characters speak to each other (about events, about the world, about themselves). But talk that is merely explanatory must be kept to a minimum. The trick is to disseminate this information in such a way that what is said emerges quite naturally from the characters and the situation. If audiences feel they are being lectured or spoon-fed, they become mentally and emotionally detached. The scriptwriter’s job is to hide from view, keep narrativizing to a minimum, mobilize the characters, put them on parade, and have them ‘be the story’. Novels have no difficulty accounting for the past, and almost invariably equip the main characters with a backstory of some kind, that can be released all at once or leak out gradually. Films are much more firmly locked into the present, which makes such information difficult to communicate without characters becoming unnaturally wooden, reporting on each other or themselves for nakedly expository purposes. All drama faces this problem, but it is all the greater when it comes to adaptation, and the novelist has made the characters’ background indispensable to the story.

Exercise: Find a moment in your prose material where the reader is being told something important about your central character’s history. Can this just be ignored? If not, how might it be conveyed without the viewer being directly ‘told’? How is the audience to learn about these characters without being handing a CV or résumé?

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Narrative voice Stories don’t tell themselves. Whether aware of it or not, when reading prose fiction, we are always in the grip of a particular ‘voice’, holding and controlling our attention, telling the story and guiding us through it. This voice belongs to the narrator, the purveyor of the story, the master-of-ceremonies created by the author to preside over the occasion. Broadly speaking there are two kinds. A ‘first-person’ narrator resides within the story, as a character recounting first-hand experience, actively involved in the fictional world, and therefore logically restricted in their knowledge about it. A ‘third-person’ omniscient narrator stands outside the world of the story, enjoying a God’s-eyeview, and a perfect understanding of all things. Whether personally involved or impersonally detached, novels are typically held together by a single point of view. True, some novels deploy more than one narrative voice, perhaps swapping between two or more first-person perspectives, but at any given moment it is a single narrator conducting affairs. The narrator doesn’t merely tell the tale, they present it. The tone may be serious or comic, formal or casual, florid or prosaic, but everything the reader encounters passes through this stylistic filter. Incidents can be rendered happy or sad, trivial or profound, almost entirely depending on the vocabulary and idiom used. The narrator’s voice establishes the prevailing mood and colours every moment. However, this narrator is the first casualty of any adaptation. A movie can replicate the events that constitute a novel’s plot, but not the mediating consciousness that hovers over them. The verbal presence that guides and shapes the reading experience is going to be missing.

Exercise: Examine the narrative voice in the text you want to adapt. Does it come from a character or an omniscient presence? How does the tone impact on your reading experience? Is it energizing or world-weary, sophisticated or simple? Now, take a scene or episode, and think about the ways in which you might keep it consistent with the qualities you find in that voice.

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Exercise: Hemingway’s third-person omniscient narrator presents the story in an unfussy matter-of-fact way. What if you were to introduce another character to serve as a first-person narrator within the film? Who might that be? What ‘point of view’ would you give them?

Evaluation and commentary In addition to steering us through events, the narrator actively shapes our response to them. All verbal storytelling does this. There is an adjectival dimension to any extended description. The choice of one word over another, imports at least some element of judgement. The narrator simultaneously describes the bare facts and morally annotates them, constantly conveying an attitude towards what is narrated. Whether pronounced and explicit or merely implied by slight inflections in the language, these ‘asides’ crucially inform the reader’s intellectual, emotional and moral understanding. How a person or situation is described carries an implicit value judgement. When (in the third paragraph) Anna Karenina’s s brother, Prince Oblonsky, is introduced, waking up on the morocco-leather couch in his study, we are told ‘He turned his plump, pampered body over on the springs’. Under the guise of mere description, the reader is being encouraged to view him in a particular light. Through the words ‘plump’ and ‘pampered’ we hear a veiled criticism of his immature, cushioned and cosseted existence. These promptings come entirely from the choice of words (how else?), and the tone of mockery or disapproval that accompany them. When the narration is in the first person it also tells us something about the person speaking. Almost the first thing we know about Nick Carraway, the narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), is that he hates the complacency of wealthy and privileged people. So when he first claps eyes on his new neighbour, Nick informs us that ‘something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens’. In terms of narrative action, this simply describes a man taking the night air, but the description projects onto him something of Nick’s own mindset, his insecurity, his prejudice.

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Figure 2.2  Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby initially encourages the viewer to see Gatsby from Nick’s point of view, but the camera doesn’t convey the ironic distance that prose can.

It’s against this background of hostility that Nick’s growing admiration for Gatsby becomes meaningful and persuasive. And here lies the problem for any adaptation of the novel: losing Nick’s voice we lose something of the Gatsby only Nick comes to know, the Gatsby Fitzgerald wrote. The narrative voice always implies a set of values and standards against which characters and events are measured. A different narrative voice would result in a very different understanding of the story. Losing that voice has huge implications for adaptation.

Exercise: Select a passage and examine the narrator’s attitude does it. What imply towards characters and events? Is it morally severe, or ironic, or jocular? How is the narrative voice tilting your understanding and evaluation of people and events within the story? How else might you incline the audience’s moral sympathies in the same direction?

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Commentary Prose fiction typically follows a pattern of description and summary. The narrator gives us the facts, but then meditates on them, briefly or at length. The onward motion stops, the story treads water for a while and the narrator reviews where we have got to, allowing us to digest what has just happened and anticipate what is to come. Generally speaking, film is more plot-driven, and far less reflexive. Events are typically left to speak themselves. Characters can and do offer their own personal reflections, but these are inevitably short and what they can say is limited to their level of awareness.

Exercise: As you go through your chosen prose work, identify those passages where the narrative pauses and turns attention back on itself. Most of this material will be dispensable, but some of it may indicate moments in the narrative where you can calm the action and redirect the audience’s attention.

Subjectivity The novel’s great contribution to narrative art is interiority, the illusion of being inside someone else’s mind. A first-person narrator can directly tell us what they are thinking or feeling. An omniscient narrator can make the same report on everyone. We can be told (as fact) what the characters don’t even know about themselves, their unconscious yearnings, their deepest fears. If the first casualty of adaptation is the narrative voice, the second is this ability to take us into the otherwise invisible inner workings of the characters. The camera stops at the outskirts of the self. However attentively and vividly it illuminates the surface of a person it can’t pass beyond that limit. However, it is worth reflecting on the fact that this ‘limitation’ is precisely what film has in common with everyday life. The obstacles to reading people are no greater in the cinema than on the street, and we manage well enough there.

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Figure 2.3  The challenge for any dramatist is to present the available surface of things, the events and interactions and dialogue, in such a way that the interior life of the characters can be assumed. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel can leave us to judge for ourselves the meaning of Gatsby’s enigmatic gesture towards the green light across the bay.

Figure 2.4  Or explain his apparent dissatisfaction amid so much abundance.

We can take some comfort from the fact that audiences are hard-wired to ‘read’ the signs that humans transmit, and infer from what they see all the things they logically can’t (those thoughts and emotions supposedly stored up in the skull). There is a Sherlock Holmes in all of us. We are all experts in deduction and extrapolation.

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Exercise: Identify some internal feature of your central protagonist’s make-up, something hidden from those around them. How might you begin to use action and speech as external markers of internal states?

Exercise: Read the opening of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). The novel is a series of interlocking narratives, of which Lockwood’s is the first. Look at the way it provides context, sets the scene, paints character, evaluates and comments, and conveys a peculiar subjectivity (misanthropic and enjoying it!). Carefully assess how much of the literary in this text resists conversion to film. 1801. – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly, a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven: and Mr Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. ‘Mr Heathcliff?’ I said. A nod was the answer […] The ‘walk in’ was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, ‘Go to the Deuce’; even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathetic movement to the words; and I think that the circumstances determined me to accept the invitation: I felt interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself. When he saw my horse’s breast fairly pushing the barrier, he did pull out his hand to unchain it, and then sullenly preceded me up the causeway, calling, as he entered the court: ‘Joseph, take Mr Lockwood’s horse; and bring up some wine.’ ……

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2b) Visualizing characters and interiority Navigating the relationship between page and screen means understanding how words and images differ in the way we derive meaning from them.

Reading/viewing The great secret of prose fiction is the level of audience participation it elicits. Readers are induced into active partnership, adding the ‘visuals’ themselves. In this sense all reading is adaptation, converting physical print to mental pictures. When engrossed in a novel we are actually busy shooting a film in our heads. Those bits of the text that are amenable to visualization are being mentally staged and performed, and then privately projected onto the great synaptic cinema-screen we call the imagination. Film not only takes over this function, it presents real people in the act of doing real things. Film imagery is ‘given’ and ‘fixed’ and objectively there. This is something of a simplification, but the distinction is clear; everyone watching the 2012 adaptation will see the same Anna, Karenina played by Keira Knightley. There is no need to imagine her, her appearance, her mannerisms. In a sense film does our imagining for us.

Juxtaposition Prose fiction proceeds by accumulation and interaction. Words shape each other, supporting or modifying, amplifying or qualifying, confirming or contradicting. As words and phrases collide and combine some possibilities of meaning are released, others curtailed or cancelled. Looking back to the opening of Wuthering Heights, Lockwood’s narration presents a curiously incongruous impression of the place (‘beautiful’ and ‘desolate’), which says as much about him as anything else. What a film adaptation should show us in response to this apparent contradiction is far from obvious. Images tend to remain individually discrete, with impressions built up via juxtaposition, one thing set beside another for comparison. Should Wuthering Heights, the farmhouse, be a blot on an otherwise picturesque landscape, or a natural outcrop of a savage and forbidding country? It can’t be both on the screen. In the novel Lockwood is reading Heathcliff for us. Beginning with ‘his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously’ and his ‘closed teeth’, the description continues across many chapters, with one detail augmenting the next, like individual brushstrokes Thinking about Form

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building a portrait, storing up a fund of impressions (and counter impressions). Lockwood interprets, evaluates and comments, on what he witnesses and hears. Note a ‘Go to the Deuce’ means ‘Go to the Devil’, but Heathcliff actually says neither. On the screen Heathcliff happens ‘all at once’, and we will read him in situ, within an already completed picture. Where fiction works via the gradual accumulation of details, film tends to use juxtaposition and contrast. A feature film adaptation that wanted to stay ‘faithful’ to the opening page of the book would make the most of the contrast between Heathcliff’s brusque manner, and Lockwood’s urbane refusal to be daunted or rebuffed: ‘A capital fellow!’. It is interesting to speculate why previous movies haven’t done so, but one reason might be that we would immediately witness Heathcliff’s wishes being contradicted. The famous 1939 adaptation directed by William Wyler turns Lockwood into an elderly bumbler stumbling through a snow storm, and secretly entering the house to find Heathcliff characteristically sunk in thought before a blazing fire. The image, framed by contrast, is suitably ‘Byronic’. It is this principle of juxtaposition that lies behind one of film’s central techniques: montage. This is the use of two or more succeeding shots to evoke ideas and establish connections between events. It is not the screenwriter’s job to compose individual shots or edit them together (even if it is an irresistible temptation when sitting at your desk). However, in a sense, the process of ‘editing’ the film begins with the script. Contrast and juxtaposition are important elements, both in shaping the progress within scenes, and shaping the relationship between them.

Exercise: With this in mind (working on Hemingway’s story or your own) identify moments where the close proximity of two contrasting things will have a marked impact.

Interpolation Words work by the slow incremental building of impressions. Visual images come whole and complete. The screen picture gives us an unrestricted view of the entire

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scene. Heathcliff and his home appear all at once. This does not always matter, but it makes certain effects more difficult to achieve. Successful storytelling often relies on strategic reticence, on the delay or withholding of information. Reveal too much too soon, or all at once, and the magic is gone. What the written word can leave deliberately vague or merely suggested is automatically solidified and particularized on the screen, and in ways that inevitably add to, and potentially distort, what sits on the page. Any rendering of Wuthering Heights on the screen will immediately introduce other, perhaps extraneous, material – details of landscape and weather, physical appearances, voice and intonation. Again, adaptation cannot avoid interpolation. The ‘superfluity’ of the cinematic image is an important factor to keep in mind if your general aim is to reproduce only what the novelist has given us.

Assertion Ironically, the cinematic image struggles to direct our attention to specific local features within the overall picture. No lingering on the image can guarantee the audience will isolate this bit of visual information from all the other bits of visual information competing for their attention. Not even a close-up will guarantee they see an object the way it is described on the page. Will we really see Heathcliff dig his hands into his waistcoat? In one sense we surely will, but film has a limited capacity to emphasis one detail rather than another, or to make us see it as especially significant. Will we see it as a sign of his ‘jealous resolution’ (such a pregnant phrase to describe his whole character)? In the Wyler adaptation we see Laurence Olivier sink his hands into his trouser pockets with just the right degree of studied indifference, but the audience is far more likely to be struck by the bloodhound at his feet and the woman’s stricken face peering out of the gloom at the intruder. Words point in a way images can’t. Things are singled out and underlined in the simple act of naming them. In the very first sentence, the man and the place are summed up in the word ‘solitary’, with all the connotations that has. In other words, prose fiction can impose ideas and assert meaning in a way film can’t. If you want to underline things, you have to use other means.

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Metaphor Ordinary language is saturated with metaphor. Even the least adorned prose will draw comparisons implying the unlikely way one thing is like another. Metaphor is so pervasive, so deep at the root of language, that we hardly notice them (‘the root of language’). In contrast film communicates metonymically. Where a metaphor makes a connection between dissimilar things, a metonym takes one thing and makes it stand for something more extensive. Metonymy is distinctly filmic because it converts abstract ideas, situations or relationships into concrete things. A series of briefcases going down a busy city street means ‘business’. A clutch of pencils and notebooks and a camera flash means ‘journalism’. Film relies on representative types of people and behaviour. It seeks out the instant that sums up an entire situation. The gate Heathcliff is reluctant to open stands for so much that is closed and intensely private in his nature. In pressing upon it Lockwood is opening up of the secrets held by the story. As a screenwriter you must communicate metonymically with your screen audience, but you may use metaphor to convey meaning to the person reading your script. This is something we will return to later.

Figure 2.5  Film can make metaphorical connections as one image or sound is implicitly compared with another. The opening of Apocalypse Now (1979) transitions from the spinning of a ceiling fan into the sound and image of a military helicopter, reflecting Captain Willard’s desperate need to get back into the action. But metaphor is not a dominant presence in film outside spoken dialogue.

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Exercise: Take a section from your primary material and identify where the language is being abstract, ‘assertive’ or metaphorical. What challenges does this present?

Exercise: As a writer Ernest Hemingway eschewed metaphor more than most, but even he couldn’t entirely banish it from his writing. His soldier isn’t physically ‘holding tight onto himself’ in the operating theatre. What is he doing? Why? And how would you convey this?

Single-channel/multi-channel With all these shortcomings it might seem surprising that anyone would even try to ‘turn a book into a film’. But in fact, for many people, this is exactly what happens. We’ve probably all had the experience of misremembering a novel, where the impact of the film adaptation has so thoroughly overlaid the original reading experience, that we can no longer disentangle the two. One could say the strength of film as a narrative medium is actually demonstrated by film adaptation, by the apparent ease with which a movie can perfectly superimpose itself on the book it is derived from, the ‘copy’ replacing the original, effectively erasing it, in the popular mind. This triumph of cinema is founded on its capacity to fill our senses. Novels create their world using only one resource. They address us via a single channel of communication, the written word. Film has at its disposal numerous resources and multiple channels. Film captivates the eye with the visual image, and everything presented within the visual frame (the so-called mise-en-scène, scenery and setting, stillness and movement, props and people). Film arrests the ear with recorded sound and music. The latter (so often overlooked) secretly functions like the voice of the absent narrator, escorting the audience

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Figure 2.6  It’s almost impossible to read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) without seeing Gregory Peck in the courtroom, such is the strength of the performance and the impact of the drama.

through the experience, providing a subliminal commentary, highlighting moments, connecting characters and events, telling us how we should be feeling about them, raising expectations, insinuating danger, letting us know when we can relax. Film encompasses all that is entailed by the word ‘performance’. It is theatre, but theatre magnified, heated-up and intensified beneath the unremitting gaze of the camera. Film offers all the fascination of watching folk in a crisis, in conflict or cooperation, working out a problem; plus triumph or disaster writ large on a human face.

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The extraordinary power of cinema comes from the potent coincidence of two things, the most ancient art of storytelling (physical drama), and the most modern image-making technology (delivering both spectacle and intimacy twenty feet high). On top of all this there is language too, spoken dialogue, the scriptwriter’s primary responsibility. As screenwriter, the camera-work and acting is not your business, but dialogue is. Your central function is to provide the words that will define the characters, promote and support the action. Indeed, most of the time the dialogue is the action. The chief objective is to make the back-and-forth of words between characters as revealing or enlivening as the moment demands. Our experience of film is fed by imagery, sound, performance and dialogue. What is more it can be all happening at the same time. Prose fiction is mono-linear. In film, different streams of meaning criss-cross, overlap, underscore, reinforce and energize each other. Film is a rich multi-layered experience moment by moment. On the page it takes time for atmosphere, character and action to develop. On the screen all are present simultaneously and have to be conceptualized as such in your writing of your script.

2c) Summary/checklist Prose fiction is characterized by qualities that film can’t, and shouldn’t, aim to emulate: ●● ●●

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narrative abundance (the sheer weight, density and range of storytelling) narrative elasticity (the effortless expansion and contraction across time and space) narrative complexity (the interweaving of story elements and abstract ideas)

As a bringer of story, the novel has no rival. It is the most commodious, flexible and densely involving narrative medium. No adaptation can be completely faithful, and to think so is something of a category mistake. Adaptations can’t include every particle of the plot, follow every twist and turn, every leap and shift, in the telling of the tale. They can’t directly inform or control the audience as a novel can.

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Once the process of adaptation begins, the novel’s dominant features instantly fall away: ●●

●●

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the prose (style and tone, metaphors and allusions, the sinuous sentence and the mot juste) the narrator (context and backstory, description and comment and explanation) the interiority (access to the inner landscape of characters’ thoughts and feelings)

To do We shouldn’t feel embarrassed that in narrative terms films are comparably simple, slender and straightforward. This doesn’t mean we can’t strive to encapsulate the book, and bring something of its vital essence to the screen. The adapting screenwriter has a plan: ●●

to identify the potential

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to cut, curb and condense

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to show not tell

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to circumvent exposition

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to convert abstractions into concrete visuals

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to convert description to depiction and enactment

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to externalize thoughts and feelings

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to dramatize – converting states and ideas into action

Case study: Great Expectations, Dir: David Lean (1946) The novels of Charles Dickens are great feasts of story, and no English novelist has been ‘adapted’ for the screen more often, but Great Expectations (1861) adopts a narrative method that sets a real challenge to any film-maker. The opening sequence of David Lean’s 1946 adaptation is a celebrated triumph of compression and augmentation which repays close attention.

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Written in the first person, the novel is narrated by the central protagonist, Pip, from the point of view of someone for whom all these events have already taken place. Pip is recounting his life, going back to his earliest memories (‘time past’) and slowly bringing us forward to the point of maximum self-knowledge (‘time present’). As we read, we are being provoked to ask how these events formed the man he has become. This relationship between past and present, innocence and experience, is deftly signalled in the very first words: ‘My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.’ With perfect economy, Dickens has Pip the Elder presenting his childhood self and introducing the dual perspective that will propel the entire novel. We are simultaneously with Pip the Younger, identifying and empathizing with him, and also placed at a distance from him, seeing the comic side of his inexperience and incomprehension. Seen from both points of view, things can appear at the same time both very funny and deeply sad, as with his ‘childish conclusion’, drawn from the arrangement of the family graves, that his five little brothers ‘had all been born on their backs with their hands in their pockets’. This childish idea passes through the filter of the narrator’s adult consciousness, a double effect almost impossible for an adaptation to achieve since the ironic narrative voice is no longer there to mix the impressions of light and dark. In its own way, Lean’s film creates the same double vision. Having said that you cannot simply put a book on the screen, Lean does just that. The first image is of a large copy of the novel being opened. The first words come from Pip the Elder reading the opening sentence. In an instant the film establishes its literary credentials (this is the movie of Dickens’ book). It may seem a rather stagey device, but it perfectly secures the double perspective and establishes the voice-over technique that periodically reappears, creating a verbal bridge from one major event to the next, articulating Pip’s growing feelings, marking moments of self-evaluation and reflection. After a few seconds fiction gives way to film as a gust of wind (from ‘off the marshes’) causes the fluttering pages to turn, and the image of the bright interior dissolves into a dark and stark panorama, as if the words were simply becoming pictures. But what follows is not Dickens in the least. We see Pip, as a tiny solitary figure in the distance, blown by the same wind, running across the vast outstretched horizon.

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As he comes closer we see that the landscape is occupied by a single man-made feature, one mentioned at the end of the chapter, though not in direct relation to Pip. Against the natural flat lines of the land and the water and the sky, Lean has erected two gibbets. Little Pip must literally pass beneath the shadow of the gallows, a foreshadowing of themes of crime and punishment that will dominate the story. Rearranging the novel’s imagery, the film-maker creates an alarmingly sinister atmosphere and alerts us to the forces that will twist Pip out of his natural shape. The churchyard scene also requires visual invention. We see Pip climb over the broken wall (a type of trespass), and approach one large gravestone (no confusion of smaller graves – being an orphan is harrowing enough). He uproots a rosebush, replacing it with a bunch of holly (touchingly naïve, and oddly symbolic perhaps). Nature turns increasingly un-natural as the wind suddenly whips up, and he looks overhead at the huge misshapen tree-limbs that in the words of the post-

Figure 2.7  In Great Expectations (1946) Pip is set against an imposing landscape and framed between gibbets. Ominous signs of what is coming.

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Figure 2.8  In this scene from Great Expectations (1946) we are placed alongside Pip, looking up at the creaking of a tree. This heightens tension and foreshadows what is about to happen next.

production script ‘look to Pip like bony hands clutching at him’. Of course, the script can say this, but the film cannot, it can only contrive to make us project our uneasy feelings onto his upturned haunted face. The script may assert (as written texts can) that ‘the tree looks sinister to Pip, like a distorted human body’, but what we hear is more important, the creaking of the branches is like the dry rasping sound of a body swinging from the end of a hangman’s noose. His apprehension mounting, Pip makes a run for it – and we run too – straight into Magwitch. As Dickens has it: ‘“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”’ Lean doesn’t furnish the church with anything as hospitable as a porch, and Magwitch can’t exactly rise from a grave, but the convict can come into frame ‘out of nowhere’ just the same. He doesn’t need those first three words either. A large dirty hand clapped over Pip’s mouth does the job far more effectively. Pip’s fear has summoned up a nightmare, literally clutching at him with its great knuckled fist, like a human embodiment of the animated hostility that everywhere surrounds him.

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Figure 2.9  Magwitch is added to the composition as another imposing figure, along with the gravestone and the church.

Where Dickens’ prose gradually builds an impression from rags, wounds and chattering teeth, Magwitch appears on screen fully composed. We do not see ‘a man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars’ etc. – and indeed how could we? What we do get is a great bald fleshy hulk of a man, by turns fearsome and almost pitiable (when he turns and shambles away thinking that Pip’s mother is in the vicinity). Sure enough, he can literally turn Pip upside down, and there is the clinking of ‘the great iron on his leg’, but this probably makes less impression on the viewer than the desperate way he snatches up and devours the apple (not bread) that falls from Pip’s pocket (more symbolism to play with). Having struck their bargain the opening sequence comes full circle with a prolonged shot of Pip retracing his steps. In the image of the running boy the film expresses metaphorically some of the futility of all Pip’s future striving to escape his fate.

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Workshop: Finding the film in the book Patricia Highsmith: Those Who Walk Away (1967) Over the next four chapters we are going to devote Workshop sections to a close appraisal of Patricia Highsmith’s Those Who Walk Away. Many of Highsmith’s novels have been adapted for the screen, including Stranger’s on a Train (1950), The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) and Ripley’s Game (1974). In fact, the latter has been adapted twice, in very contrasting styles, by Wim Wenders (1977) and Liliana Cavani (2002), offering strikingly contrasting illustrations of the adaptor’s art. Given cinema’s interest in Highsmith’s work, it may be significant that Those Who Walk Away has not been brought to the screen. Indeed, we’ve chosen the novel precisely because of the problems it presents – problems that are fairly typical of those faced by adaptation in general. We would recommend reading the novel in full if you want to get the most out of these sections, but the synopsis that follows should give a flavour of the book and a sense of its narrative shape. It is also a reminder that you will need to produce a breakdown of the prose you plan to adapt yourself. The aim of this section is to rehearse the process of reading for film, finding the cinematic potential and identifying the major difficulties. It might help to think of Michelangelo chiselling away to free the figure from the block of marble.

Synopsis Rayburn Garrett has come to Rome to meet his fatherin-law, Ed Coleman. Ten days ago, Peggy, Ray’s wife, committed suicide at their home in Mallorca. Ray and Peggy hadn’t been married long. Her death has left him numb with shock, and weighed down by an illdefined sense of guilt. It seems he couldn’t make her life worth living. As the novel opens the two men are leaving a restaurant. Ray feels the need to ‘explain’, as best he can, that there was nothing he could do to prevent Thinking about Form

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Peggy’s death. Coleman has another agenda. He pulls out a gun, shoots Ray at almost point-blank range, and leaves him for dead in the street. Ray survives (with just a flesh wound and a hole in his coat). He bears Coleman no ill will (the man has obviously become deranged by grief), but Ray wants it to be understood that he isn’t to blame for Peggy taking her own life. The ideas that Coleman has about their marriage (that Ray had affairs, that he neglected her, ignored her distress) are all mistaken. Once recovered from his mishap in Rome, Ray goes to Venice, knowing that Coleman will also be there. Coleman is surprised when Ray turns up alive, but seems intent on burying the past. They meet in the company of Coleman’s French ‘girlfriend’ (Inez Schneider), and a group of American tourists (Mr and Mrs Smith-Peters and Mrs Ethel Perry). At the end of the night, Coleman offers Ray a lift back to his hotel ….and throws him from his speeding motor-boat into the waters of the Venice lagoon. Again, left to die. Again, Ray doesn’t oblige. Instead he is rescued from drowning by a passing gondolier, Luigi, who helps him go into hiding on Giudecca, a small island in the Venetian lagoon. Among the boatman’s friends, Ray is nursed back to health, takes on a new identity (‘Filipo’), and concocts a story to explain his reluctance to go to the police and tell them about being attacked. His real motive seems to be a mixture of embarrassment, apathy and (again) pity for a man who has just lost his daughter. Nevertheless, Ray exacts some small revenge by allowing his disappearance to throw suspicion on Coleman, at least among Coleman’s immediate circle

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of acquaintances. He knows that Inez will be worried about him, and will start to wonder whether she is sleeping with a murderer. Ray licks his wounds and bides his time until he can find a way to ‘talk’ to Coleman, but in the meantime he is also enjoying the freedom of a life lived secretly among strangers. Days pass with Ray ducking and weaving across the city, drinking in cafes, buying newspapers, hopping on and off vaporetti, watching out for any sign of Coleman. Thinking. Remembering. He meets a beautiful young girl (Elisabetta) serving in a café (the Bar Dino), and invites her to dinner. He confides in her, in a somewhat coded fashion, but she doesn’t believe him when he tells his story. It is much easier for her to believe he is running away from an irate husband, than from a grieving father-inlaw. Elisabetta is still a girl living at home, and would like nothing better than to escape the world she knows. She wonders what stops Ray from just upping and leaving Venice (and we probably wonder the same). Ray reviews his situation and writes a letter ‘to dispel muddle’ – telling Coleman he is going to tell the police he simply fell into the canal and suffered a bout of temporary amnesia. The letter is never sent. Meanwhile, Inez and the others do indeed become suspicious (and then convinced) that Coleman has committed murder. However, they do nothing about it, closing ranks in a conspiracy of silence, partly to avoid troubling themselves, partly out of fear of what Coleman now seems capable of. Having been alerted to Ray’s disappearance, the Venice police ask to speak to Coleman. He freely expresses his disdain for Ray, and openly blames him for Peggy’s

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death, but he gives nothing else away, and the police have no reason to detain him. He begins to feel invulnerable. Even when he catches a glimpse of Ray walking into a bar, he simply resolves to try again at the next available opportunity (fantasising about crushing Ray’s head with a rock). Third time lucky. Enter Sam Zordyi, a private detective employed by Ray’s family back in America. He tracks Ray down, and spotting the bullet holes in Ray’s coat, starts to piece things together. Ray’s picture appears in the papers, and his real identity is revealed to his Italian friends. He now decides to contact the police, and brave their questions about why he allowed people to think he was dead. Time spent alone, and with Elisabetta, has simplified things in his mind. Ray again tells her his story, and this time she is a little more inclined to believe him. He says he just wanted to hide from his feelings and become invisible. He won’t denounce Coleman to the police. Asked why his wife killed herself he confesses his sense of mental defeat: “I don’t know. Really. I don’t know” (p.160). When they kiss goodnight, he feels a stirring of desire: ‘as if he had known her before, known her a long while’ (p.170). He heads off into the Venetian fog in a state of euphoria, feeling he has ‘cheated the grave’, feeling reborn into the world around him, when …. inevitably …. he runs into Coleman. There follows a chase scene, complete with blind alleys, doubling back, and a sudden collision. Coleman does indeed come at him with a rock, but this time Ray fights back, and it is Coleman who’s left blooded and unconscious on the ground.

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Ray is elated to have (literally) struck a blow in self-defence, but then wonders whether he has unintentionally become a killer himself. We learn he hasn’t, but roles are perfectly reversed. Now it’s Coleman’s turn to ‘go underground’, to recover from his injuries and throw suspicion on the other man. He pays Mario, a fisherman from whom he earlier hired a boat, to take him to Chioggia, a coastal town just south of Venice. When Mario vaguely suggests that, as her father, Coleman might bear some responsibility for Peggy’s suicide, Coleman explodes in rage, badly scalding himself with hot water in the process. Having been missing for two weeks Ray phones Inez, to explain everything that has happened. He then goes to the police. However, the story he tells isn’t very plausible. Out of compassion, he refrains from mentioning being shot in Rome or being thrown into the Venice Lagoon. To be continued …

The potential Reading Those Who Walk Away with adaptation in mind, we might immediately latch onto certain features: 1 The name Patricia Highsmith is a ‘selling point’, something not to ignore, given the importance of ‘visibility’ when it comes to pitching ideas and getting scripts read by producers. 2 The scenic possibilities of Venice are compelling, the grandeur of its architecture, plus the labyrinthine menace of its streets and canals, make it a perfect cinematic location for the story being told. 3 The main characters are sharply differentiated, dangerous and damaged, violent and vulnerable, pushed to the edge of reason, plunged into strange new circumstances.

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4 The relationships are intense, emotionally entangled and driven towards extreme confrontation. 5 Some of the action is high octane and vividly ‘visual’; brooding encounters and brutal attacks, hunting down and hiding out, spectacle and cliff-hangers. 6 There are gripping set-piece scenes like the rescue of a drowning man at the dead of night and candlelit flirtations ending in a passionate kiss. Over and above the events that take place, the novel touches on perennial themes. The story is a matter of life and death in the sense that the two central protagonists are involved in a deadly struggle, but it also delves into dark areas of the mind where big questions lurk regarding what makes life worth living, and whether there is rhyme or reason in it. In other words, it asks questions (albeit indirectly) about meaning and value, questions that come to the surface when we consider suicide and revenge, love and loss. The novel begins with a gunshot, but these events are really triggered by an ultimately inexplicable act, Peggy’s suicide, and what follows is a portrait of two men reacting to apparent meaninglessness in diametrically opposed ways. One (Ray) is emotionally paralysed. The other (Coleman) is consumed with rage. One looks inside himself for answers to why this has happened, asking himself if he is to blame. The other projects his pain and anger outwards, and looks for someone else to accuse.

The reservations However, as a vehicle for adaptation Those Who Walk Away also has plenty of limitations: 1. The story In terms of incident the novel is quite thin. There is not a lot of plot. For a ‘thriller’ the action is quite diffuse. Between the dramatic peaks there are long passages given over to characters seemingly moving at random, back and forth across Venice, in and out of streets and bars and boats. These lengthy passages are devoted to evoking a mood, but against this background the ‘interactive’ moments are few and far between, and highly repetitive in nature. The striking spectacle of Coleman lunging at Ray recurs no less than four times! This might be acceptable when distributed across 250 pages, but it’s going to look a little ridiculous in a two-hour movie.

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The novel also asks the audience to tolerate a remarkable number of coincidences. Ray and Coleman bump into one another with the frequency of fish in a fishbowl, walking in and out of the same restaurants, catching sight of one another across crowded piazzas. These chance encounters and accidental collisions threaten to shrink Venice to the proportions of a country village or a theme park. They are implausible. Decisions: Well, we could distil and concentrate the action – collapsing or clustering events to avoid any undue monotony. And/Or We could accept that our film will be heavy on atmosphere – less plot-driven, more meditative. 2. Genre Nor is the plot quite what we might expect from an author described on the cover of one edition as ‘The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer’. This is no ‘whodunnit’. There is no murder. There is a mystery (of sorts), but it is a self-murder mystery, and it remains a mystery. As readers, we are made to ask questions which the novel will not answer, or not in any clear or definitive way. What prompted this young woman to kill herself? Who or what was responsible for her mental state? Any responsibility Ray or Coleman bear for her death, is a subtle matter of conscience not criminality. There is no terrible secret, no revelation awaits. Decisions: Well, we could instil more doubt and suspicion regarding their culpability. (what if we show that Ray has neglected Peggy, what if we establish that Coleman has damaged her with his possessiveness?) And/Or We could take up the challenge of using the external apparatus of a ‘thriller’ to frame a psychological study of someone coming to terms with personal tragedy and their obscure role in it. 3. Violence The opening gunshot sets up expectations which the novel doesn’t quite fulfil. It doesn’t aim to. This isn’t a tale of gangster machismo. Cinema violence often tends

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to be cool and efficient, but the physical clashes in this book are neither. Coleman’s attempts on Ray’s life are decidedly inept, repeatedly unsuccessful, even faintly comic. At one point, they are literally throwing rocks at each other. Decisions: Well, we could re-arm our combatants – re-stage the fighting, choreograph it more ‘professionally’. And/Or We could accept that the story is not about super-heroes or hardened thugs – that what we have here is something more ‘realistic’ than the stylized violence we typically see on the screen. 4. Action There is suspense in the cat and mouse game played by the two male protagonists, but there is far more hiding than seeking. For most of the time, rather than ‘searching’ for Ray, Coleman simply waits for him to turn up. There is a sense of adventure in Ray’s clandestine excursions around the city, and his hiding out with his new Italian friends, but these episodes don’t so much advance the main action as delay it. The pace can be sluggish; the situation, frequently static. At one point, we are uncertain whether Ray has unintentionally done away with Coleman (which would be a fine Hitchcockian irony), but our doubts about his survival do not last long enough to serve as a major narrative device. When Coleman re-emerges a chapter or so later, it is no great surprise to the reader. Decisions: Well, to overcome the inertia we could inject more urgency and greater jeopardy into Coleman’s pursuit and Ray’s avoidance – raise the temperature and the stakes at every opportunity, less ‘hide and seek’, more ‘hunter and hunted’. And/Or We could reorganize the plot to create a real fear that Ray may have accidentally turned killer, and explore what he might do then. 5. Obscurity Without being high-flown or philosophical, Highsmith nevertheless dwells on Ray’s bewilderment in the face of life’s unpredictability. He seeks out solitude and 56

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anonymity. He remembers Peggy, and examines their married life together. But he is preoccupied by thoughts and feelings he cannot clearly articulate, even to himself. This creates a huge challenge for a scriptwriter. Ray is ‘transformed’ by his experience on Guidecca, but again the novel is less than fully explicit about what this amounts to, or how and why it comes about. He seems to ‘find himself’ in some sense, but precisely what he learns is far from obvious. Worse still the novel might seem to decline into some rather trite moralizing about ‘finding oneself among the poor and simple’. Decisions: Well, we could altogether ditch ‘Ray the introvert’, ’Ray the navel-gazer’ – set him more public objectives. And/Or We could deliberately create a narrative structure that moves between two distinct and contrasting zones, perhaps evolving two parallel stories – one centred on chase and escape, one focusing on Ray’s interior struggle with himself. 6. Our hero In narrative terms Rayburn Garrett is definitely the ‘hero’ of the story, because the action is primarily focalized through him. Events are presented from his perspective, and we judge their significance according to how he thinks and feels about them. However, in many respects – as a character – he does not quite fit the bill. He’s all thought and very little action. Screen heroes are almost invariably active in shaping their own destiny. Sooner or later it’s the deliberate choices they make that determine the outcome of the story. But what we have in Ray is someone more ‘done to’ than ‘doing’. Not only does he tend to be on the receiving end of things, but he is astonishingly passive in the face of Coleman’s murderous aggression. Even in his final skirmish with Coleman it takes someone else to step in and save him. Where a conventional hero would be proactive in tackling his problems, Ray tends to be reactive, a victim of someone else’s passion, rather than an emotionally charged figure in his own right. He lacks the sort of agency we expect from our ‘leading man’. Audiences might be reluctant to ‘identify’ with such a fatalistic, even masochistic, character. These are not normally attractive traits. Thinking about Form

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Worse still, Ray seems pretty dumb. Who accepts a ride from a guy who has already made an attempt on their life? Who sticks around in the hope they can appease a homicidal maniac with a quiet little chat? In the book, we are given Ray’s inner reflections, and these show him to be much more than an insensible and naïve punch-gag. But such interior complexity is (we know) going to be hard to convey in any detailed or nuanced way on the screen. Decisions: Well, we could pump up his virility – emphasis his stoicism and resilience in facing Coleman’s hostility. And/Or We could create compelling reasons for his refusal to lash-out and retaliate – make his determination to ‘clear his name’ a positive moral force in opposition to Coleman’s brute aggression. 7. Indistinct motivation Ray’s passivity touches on deeper issues of motivation. Characters are typically defined by what they desire. It is clear what Coleman longs for. But, again, Ray is more problematic. It isn’t at all clear precisely what he wants. What does he hope to say to Coleman, and why? Does he crave absolution of some kind? Could talking to Coleman realistically give him that? Does he simply wish to deflect Coleman’s hatred of him? Ray’s strategy seems vague and unfocused, even to him. Nor is there much urgency behind Ray’s craving to make his ‘confession’ (if that’s what it is). Again, in this regard the book is rather more leisurely than a movie can afford to be. Unless Ray is striving in some direction, he is unlikely to take the audience with him. Decisions: Well, we could give greater definition and focus to Ray’s need for ‘forgiveness’ and reconciliation – imbue him with more resolution and firmness of purpose. And/Or We could make Ray’s emotional lethargy a distinct issue – something he has to address and amend.

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8. Emotion One of the things recommending the novel for adaptation is the intensity of the emotions at the heart of the story, love and loss, grief and obsession, rage and mania. Except that the novel doesn’t quite ‘capitalize’ on them in the way we might expect. Highsmith doesn’t do melodrama. No garments are rent, not a tear is shed. This absence of sentimentality may be welcome, but in consequence she creates a somewhat chilly emotional terrain, that might seem at odds with the mainspring of the action. For much of the time, the story feels rather detached from its passionate core, as if Ray and Coleman have actually forgotten about Peggy. Of course characters can’t be maintained at the same emotional pitch for the entirety of a novel or a film, but there is a danger in detaching them from the feelings that are meant to define them. Those feelings are likely to seem less strong and less genuine. As a consequence, when we see Ray dallying with Elisabetta, or hear Coleman laughing with his friends, their status as ‘men of sorrow’ is potentially compromised. Decisions: Well, we could create further opportunities for them to demonstrate the strength and continuity of their feelings and inner compulsions – exorcise their demons. And/Or We could seek to follow Highsmith’s cynical streak, and explore the possibility that these men are less stricken by grief than they pretend to be, that Coleman’s show of anger is a mask covering something else, that it is only propriety that stops Ray starting an affair with Elisabetta.

Summary From the point of view of adaptation, the novel has ‘good bones’: ●●

a market identity

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visual spectacle

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some strong structural elements

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intense subject matter

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meaty conflict

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high-impact moments

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complex and universal themes to be explored

However, the flesh on these bones is a little loose: ●●

repetitive action

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too many coincidences

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violence that is almost comically clumsy and bungling

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uncertain motivation

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a preponderance of interior narration

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too little narrative surprise

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an underwhelming conclusion

In essence, the narrative requires trimming and tightening, character needs to be more sharply etched, interior experience and motivation must be externalized and made accessible. But these things do not represent insurmountable obstacles. In fact, they are the most frequent issues faced in writing an adaptation. Some problems can be remedied readily enough in a conventional way: collapse and reschedule story events, tweak the characterization to ensure clarity and coherence where needed, give the ‘hero’ someone to confide in, in order to make them more accessible to a visual audience.

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Perhaps this is a slightly unconventional (even rather bland) ‘thriller’, but the film has the resources to stimulate it into life.

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Perhaps the central protagonist seems a little prosaic and insipid, but live action has its own ways of enlivening characters and arousing our sympathy.

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Perhaps there is too little dramatic momentum, but we can do something about that – film is a dramatic medium.

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Next steps So, we have analysed the novel for its strengths and weaknesses. In the event we want to proceed, the next step has to be answering some pretty fundamental questions: ●●

How much are we prepared to change or invent in order to bring out the film we sense lurking just below the surface of the book?

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What sort of film (conventional or unconventional, pacey or slow, action packed or philosophical) do we want it to be?

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3 Narrative re/construction

This chapter explores the process of reconstruction necessary to convert the bulk of a novel into the lean and compact form of a movie. Some acts of adaptive reconstruction will be more radical than others, depending on local factors, but we will look at the process as it typically occurs.

3a) Story and structure Excavations Adaptation involves a stripping back to essentials. Having identified both the problems and the potential inherent in the original material, we now need to take an X-ray of its fundamental narrative bone-structure. From there we can locate the crucial plot-points and map them onto our script. However, it isn’t at all obvious what counts as ‘fundamental’ or ‘crucial’. This too is a matter of interpretation. When talking about ‘story’ it isn’t always perfectly clear what we are alluding to. It isn’t an object that can be neatly isolated and extracted. If you had to, you could tell the story of Anna Karenina in a breathless five minutes. Alternatively, you could take an entire evening trying to recall each significant twist and turn. Neither is the story of Anna Karenina. Both are versions of that story. Each, in some sense, is an adaptation (from writing into speech) of the complete version articulated to the full in Tolstoy’s novel. In fact, Tolstoy himself will have had slightly different versions of Anna’s history circling in his mind as he planned the book. The one he eventually fixed on the page becomes ‘the story’ by virtue of being the version we share in common. If we dig down looking for ‘the story’ of Anna Karenina, we will find there are varying depths through which we can descend. On the surface is Tolstoy’s written text, every

word, every turn of phrase, contributing to the reading experience. Below that lies the basic plot, the choreography of characters, their movements and interactions, their dispositions and decisions. Still lower down we might sense the author’s ‘message’, the underlying artistic intension motivating Tolstoy’s creative choices, the philosophical conception of humanity that shapes everything he writes. And lower down still lies something more elemental, not part of Tolstoy’s invention at all, but an archetypal structure shared by innumerable other novels and dramas. At bottom Anna Karenina’s story is a tragedy. When we meet her she is already a married woman with a son. Her husband, Alexis Karenin, is a bit of a cold fish, older and high-minded. The emotional void in her life is filled by a sudden and violent passion for a handsome young cavalry officer, Vronsky. They have an affair. They become bound to each other by the public disgrace of her adultery, and the birth of a daughter. Anna becomes ill, thinks she is dying, and returns to the family home. When she regains her strength, she leaves Karenin for good. But Vronsky’s passion cools, she misses her son, despairs, and so it goes. Even this superficial synopsis suggests that the essence of the story is something central to all tragedy, a ‘fatal flaw’ of character leading to an act of self-destruction. In Anna’s case it is her hopelessly divided nature, and her fateful decision to sacrifice everything for love. Thinking she is on the point of death she confesses to her husband that she is in fact two people. The convoluted language reflects her tangled inner life: I am still the same. But there is another woman in me as well, I’m afraid of her: it was she who fell in love with that man, and I tried to hate you, and I could not forget the self that had once been. I’m not that woman. Now I am my real self, all myself. (Part IV chapter 17, p.438) Her desire to be made whole, first by passion, then by reconciliation with her husband, and reunion with her son, is never quite satisfied. Anna is doomed by the contradictions written (literally) into her character and made intolerable by a rigidly repressive society. She is torn apart by incompatible desires. Tragedy is only one archetypal story pattern. Others would include Romeo and Juliet (the love story), Cinderella (rags to riches), Icarus (pride before a fall), Faust (a pact with the Devil) and Tristan (love forbidden). Each implies a particular narrative

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trajectory. Each supplies its own brand of narrative pleasure (the happy ending, merit rewarded, lesson learnt, justice done, romantic sacrifice and cathartic tears). Nor do these Ur-Stories necessarily exist in isolation. The greatness of Great Expectations (the novel) may be due (in part) to the way several of these elemental patterns are laid over each other.

Exercise: Which archetypal patterns underlie the text you are thinking of adapting? What implications does this have for what must be prioritized in your re-telling of the story, and for the sort of pleasure it should arouse in the audience? If this side of things intrigues you, see Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots (2004).

Journeys Every story is structured as a journey (literal or metaphorical), and the significance it has is largely measured by the distance characters travel, and the changes they undergo along the way. We follow the main protagonists along a narrative arc that passes from one emotional pole to another: sad/happy, frustrated/fulfilled, captive/ free. Indeed, any narrative can be broken down into a set of competing antitheses of this sort: pleasure/pain, love/hate, high/low, rich/poor, weak/strong, desire/rejection, security/insecurity, dependence/independence. Even based on this slim account of Anna Karenina you can see how the novel is organized around pretty much all of the above, and more. The richness and complexity of the text is largely a function of these conceptual elements and the degree to which they are problematized. Is Anna ‘weak’ for giving into her longing for Vronsky, or ‘strong’ in her defiance of convention? Has she demonstrated her ‘independence’ in wrestling free of a miserable marriage, or merely swapped one state of dependency for another? In this way the outcome of a story can resemble an argument over the relative value of things (head and heart, duty or desire). The argument may be a moral one (how one should live), or it may simply demonstrate that certain actions have certain consequences (sow this, and you reap that). Any story carries its own implied

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message; that we can (or can’t) overcome any obstacle, that we are (or are not) basically good, that the world is (or is not) meaningful. It is important to find the argument and the message that may be buried within the text you are adapting. How optimistic or pessimistic is it? Human versus Universe, win, lose or draw? Put another way, any story can be seen as a bearer of a submerged metaphor. It concludes with an unstated implication (‘life is … ’), to which the reader or viewer supplies the missing term. The way the story comments on ‘life’ (as a game of chance, a box of chocolates, an immeasurable gift, a painful ordeal or an irreducible mystery) probably defines our ultimate experience of it.

Exercise: The process of deconstruction and reconstruction must allow the film to follow the same emotional journey and deliver the same underlying ‘message’. With your story in mind, clearly outline the first and clearly articulate the second.

Exercise: Hemingway’s A Very Short Story leaves the reader in a very unusual place. You might describe it as a tragedy in miniature. What ‘argument’ or ‘metaphor’ does it seem to promote (‘life is … ’)? How might this shape the way you think about the story and the overall tone of an adaptation?

3b) Six steps Once we have decided what needs to be preserved (the ‘deep story pattern’, the thematic argument, the core metaphor), and once we have decided what we want the film to communicate (the experience that it should provide), we can make informed strategically focused choices about what is and is not disposable in the text we are adapting. Just as there are different levels to the story, so too there are different orders of structure. There is the overarching outer span of the narrative, encompassing

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the story as a whole. Within that lie distinct phases of action. Then there are the individual scenes with their own internal dramatic structure. It makes sense to work from the outside in.

Step 1: Beginning/middle/end The first stage of story re-construction is to mark out how the original narrative is organized as a whole. Although novels are typically subdivided into ‘parts’ or chapters, this is probably not going to determine the structure of the film. The discursive nature of prose fiction takes the reader into areas where your film cannot or should not go. Again, what we are primarily concerned with is the emotional journey of the central characters, and it is this that needs charting at an early stage. Any adaptation of a lengthy and complex novel will lose characters from the plot, and Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight (2008), based on Stephanie Meyer’s popular novel, is no exception. But Hardwicke and her screenwriter, Melissa Rosenberg, ensure that the emotional journeys of the main figures remain essentially the same. Keep the major narrative arcs intact, and disruption to the story and its dramatic impact will be minimal. Most books on screenwriting refer to films having a three-act structure. First the terms of the story are established; the characters are introduced, the situation is laid out, the ‘task’ is set. Think of Pip’s childhood at the forge, his love for Estella and the announcement of his ‘great expectations’. Then the middle phase commences, the characters are set upon their course of action (to defeat the monster, win the bride, solve the mystery). They gradually acquire what they need (understanding, tools, friends) to face and overcome the challenge. Think of Pip in London, learning to be a gentleman in the hope of winning Estella’s favour. Finally (and this phase is usually short) the journey is completed, the enemy is defeated, the ‘problem’ is solved, whatever reward the protagonists have deserved is meted out. Think of Pip discovering the shameful identity of his true benefactor, piecing together his ‘real’ history, his hopes seemingly dashed. Even A Very Short Story can be seen as a play in three acts: ●●

Act 1, the peace of Padua: love blossoms, but reaches its limit when they cannot be wed.

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Act 2, the hurly-burly of Military Encampments and Train Stations: the armistice sounds, they quarrel, they part.

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Act 3, Pordenone and Chicago: divided, disappointed and worse. The transition from union and harmony to separation and discord could hardly be more complete.

This tripartite framework may simply reflect the fact that all stories must have a beginning, middle and end. What process doesn’t? But it’s important to acknowledge the influence this universal design may have on the relationship between prose narrative and adaptation. Segmenting the story into phases allows you to think about the apportioning of action, and changes in pace and tone across the script.

Exercise: Whether or not you feel your original story has three distinct phases, identify the largest portions into which the story subdivides and characterize each in terms of its contribution to the whole. At what point does the preparatory phase end? At what point does the concluding phase begin? Should these transitions be marked, and if so how?

Step 2: Selection Having established the novel’s outer structure, we can now start to break it down into its smaller constituent parts. What follows is a sifting process, separating the essential from the inessential. And by ‘essential’ we mean those aspects of the novel without which the story’s conclusion would be incoherent or unsatisfying. Your adaptation needs to incorporate whatever the audience will need (in terms of understanding and empathy) when they arrive at their eventual narrative destination. Each moment of the novel or short story needs to be selected in or selected out on the basis of its relevance to the concluding action and the concluding experience you wish your audience to enjoy. This means the first part of the film you need to fix in your mind is the ending. If you don’t know where you are heading you can’t really plot your course. For reasons of your own you may want your ending to be very different. The conclusion to David Lean’s Great Expectations completely ignores the book. Lean takes Dickens’

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story of defeated hopes and abruptly adds a happy ending so that the film conforms to the traditionally romantic pattern: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Where Dickens deliberately leaves us unsure about the future, Lean insists Pip and Estella will always be together. Where Dickens leaves the struggle between Pip and Life hanging in the balance, Lean fixes it so that Pip wins an eleventh-hour victory. It runs completely counter to the novelist’s intensions. Words like ‘travesty’ and ‘betrayal’ may come to mind, but the relevant point here is that Lean’s decision about how the film should end has shaped everything that precedes it. He extracts and accentuates the fairy-tale elements in the novel in order to emphasize Pip’s journey from rough bumpkin to questing knight. Whatever doesn’t facilitate this transformation is deleted. Indeed, whole swaths of the novel are thrown away. The storylines featuring characters like Mr Wopsle, Orlick and Trabb’s Boy are completely cut out. The loss of Orlick, the apprentice at the forge, is particularly significant in that Dickens uses him as a reminder of the life of poverty and frustration Pip would have lived if he had not been randomly ‘blessed’ with future prospects. The decision to jettison sub-plots and minor characters in the interests of economy and simplicity is relatively straightforward. Choices around individual moments are more tricky and impossible to generalize.

Exercise: Focus on the conclusion of your film as you currently envisage it. Write a brief prose description regarding what is revealed or affirmed (to the characters and/or the audience) in the final scene or scenes. Now ‘reverse engineer’ the story. What must be in place during these climactic moments for the audience to understand what is at stake? What aspects of the original story now seem indispensable?

Exercise: Make a preliminary list of the ‘hinge’ moments in your original material; perhaps around a dozen or so. Clearly define what irreplaceable function they perform? Now build up the spaces between these nodal points with the original story material that now seems necessary for carrying your audience from one to the next.

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Exercise: What storylines, characters or incidents are you on the point of eliminating? Spend time thinking about the consequences of this. Will the main characters be seen in the same way? If not, how might you compensate for the loss?

Step 3: Time Even after making decisions regarding which story events to include, there is still the matter of arranging and scheduling them. The art of storytelling is very much to do with the organization of ‘time’ to shape and control the experience. In the telling of any story there is a divergence between ‘story time’ and ‘text time’, between the amount of chronological time that transpires within the world of the story, and the amount of narrating time devoted to telling us about it. Novels can dwell on a single moment for page after page. Years can be skipped in a trice. Wherever possible films typically squeeze events together to avoid unnecessary leaps and jolts in the storyline. Why leave weeks or months between encounters when ‘the next day’ will maintain continuity and momentum? Why spin the romance over a period of years when you can give them one golden summer? As we know, prose fiction can expand and contract, move backwards and forwards in time, with total ease. Films and their scripts are locked more rigidly into the present tense. They pass through time as we do, with hardly any deviation. Of course, via the magic of editing, films jump from one moment to the next, but within those moments they mostly move in a linear fashion at the speed of ‘real’ events. We are familiar with ‘flashbacks’ (and even ‘flash-forwards’ can occur), but by and large films are stuck in a perpetual ‘now’. So scripting the novel will almost inevitably involve an ironing out of the story into a straight sequence. This often makes withholding story information and retaining suspense even more problematic, but that may be the price you have to pay.

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Exercise: Select a moment of transition when there is a sudden and extreme shift in time (forwards or backwards). Experiment with different ways of handling temporal shifts like this. How might you make use of nonlinear methods like flashback?

Step 4: Causality If ‘time’ is the first organizing principle of narrative, then ‘causality’ is the second. Events are arranged in time, but they are also connected by a narrative logic that makes them coherent and meaningful. What happens is not sensible or relevant unless it is located within a pattern of cause and effect. We talk about ‘following’ a story because it leads us by logical steps from one situation to the next. Causality is the connective tissue that holds the body of the story together and makes it one complete whole. Without it we would have nothing but a series of random and arbitrary events. The causal links connecting the original story cannot be lost without risking incoherence and incomprehension. Unfortunately, a lot of these connections are supplied by the narrator telling us things we would not otherwise know (previous history, the choices characters have made etc.), and with the narrative voice stripped out we may have to furnish explanation and continuity in other ways. There are two orders of causality that we must look for in the original material; outer and inner. Outer causality involves collision with the world. Characters are knocked about like balls on the billiard table of life. They get wounded in battle, get frustrated by rules, get letters (wanted and unwanted) in the post, people fall in and out of love with them. They are shaped by the impact of external pressures and external events. Inner causality involves collision with oneself. Characters are shaped by interior (‘chemical’) factors, hopes and fears, desires and dispositions over which they may have little or no control. They also make decisions that subsequently register on the world around them and in turn impact on others.

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In drawing out material from your prose text you need to keep intact the causal chain that connects events and makes them ‘readable’. You can’t afford to drop any plot-point or explanatory factor that will leave the audience struggling to make sense or empathize.

Exercise: Having sifted through the ‘facts’ of the story you are working on, now look to the primary causes operating on the characters. Move from ‘what’ to ‘why’. Again, with the end of the story in mind, what are the factors (impersonal causes or personal reasons) that lead to the eventual outcome. Establish this clearly for yourself, then look precisely at where you are drawing your evidence. In so far as it is only conveyed via the narrator, this requires serious attention when it comes to adaptation. What moments within the story will you perhaps need to amplify to maintain a clear and coherent pattern of cause and effect?

Step 5: Point of view Another pressing question relates to the story’s emotional centre of gravity. However populated or complex, the action will typically emanate from (or circulate around) one central character. They may not dominate the action, but they are the character most exposed to and shaped by events, which means we see things most often from their perspective. We identify with their struggle, as they confront problems and attempt to work them out (Anna, Pip). Any adaptation must put the audience in the same relationship. We need to be sure whose story we are re-telling, but it isn’t always straightforward. The title tells us who The Great Gatsby is going to be about, but the novel itself doesn’t put us directly inside his frame of reference. The principal viewpoint belongs to the narrator, Nick Carraway. We may ‘identify’ with Gatsby, attracted by his glamour, sympathetic to his plight, but that is because we see him through Nick’s eyes. The events are mediated (‘focalized’) through his thoughts and feelings, in accordance with his changing perceptions. This creates a problem for any adaptation of the novel.

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Hemingway’s story presents another problem of perspective. Here we really would have to decide whose story it is. Luz and the soldier seem equally important, but in structural terms this isn’t quite true. Although it would be possible to balance the action between them, there are three factors that argue in favour of making him the main protagonist. First, he is the wounded party, both literally and metaphorically. Most of us withdraw our sympathy from Luz when she chooses to abandon him, take up with another man and write an ill-conceived (and hurtful) Dear John letter telling him theirs was nothing more than puppy-love. Sympathy withdrawn from her will automatically accrue to him. Secondly, he is the character who experiences the most. They are mutually in love, but his devotion (and neediness) seems greater. He experiences war and waiting and separation more painfully than she. His ‘emotional journey’ is longer and more intense. Thirdly, he is the character we are with at the end. He knows how things end up. He receives her letter. She receives nothing in reply. The story’s final jolt affects him, not her. It seems to be his loss, his tragedy, his ‘fall’, that the story invites us to reflect on. This means that any adaptation would need to position the audience to gain maximum insight into his experience. In some respect this would shape every scene, and determine the kind of additional material you might add. The audience would need to spend quality time with them both, in order to feel acquainted, informed, involved and invested in them, but increased access to his thoughts and feelings would be a priority if the full impact of these events is to be felt by the audience.

Exercise: Which character is the central focal point of your story? How does the narrative position the reader to inhabit them intellectually and emotionally? To what degree is film going to allow you to replicate this relationship for your audience? Where the narrator is responsible for manoeuvring our understanding and sympathies, how can this be done through dramatic action and/or dialogue?

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Exercise: In the ‘scenes’ between Luz and the soldier how might you gently encourage the audience to see and feel things more from his point of view. Note: this doesn’t mean turning Luz into a minor character, underplaying her role or making the audience ‘cool’ on her. If you did that the importance we attach to his loss would be greatly diminished.

Step 6: Conflict All drama involves a fight. Any narrative can be characterized as a field of conflict where competing energies collide and clash. Most often we have a struggle between good and evil, love seeking to exert itself over hate or indifference, the forces of order (e.g. justice) attempting to overcome the disruptive forces of disorder (e.g. criminality). It can be presented as a battle of wills between individuals with different agendas, or as a struggle against impersonal forces – conventional society, nature or ‘fate’. In approaching adaptation it’s important to identify the human dilemma at the heart of the original story. Reading with adaptation in mind means looking for the origins and contours of the conflict that promote the action. Why has the central protagonist run into this problem, to what degree are they responsible for it, what strategies do they adopt to overcome it? To what extent are the problems, or the barriers to solving them, within the characters themselves? The answers to these questions may or may not be simple, but we need a clear idea of what our protagonist wants and what stands in the way of them getting it if we are to bring out the drama latent in the fiction. Luckily both novelists and screenwriters are in the conflict management business, creating it and resolving it. The difference is that novels can explore the nooks and crannies of inner conflicts with consummate ease. They have no difficulty presenting the interior rifts and contradictions that menace complex characters in complex situations. Nor is there anything preventing the detailed diagnosis of social realities. Film, in contrast, rests on exterior appearances where psychological and sociological facts are often hard to see. The task then is to find ways of externalizing the one and personalizing the other. This means concentrating the action into dramatic

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moments of personal engagement, the courtroom cross-examination, the lovers’ quarrel, the shoot-out on Main Street. Looking at manifestations of conflict in other adaptations can be very instructive. The individual circumstances are unique, and the contours of their relationships bring different features into play, but our three ‘classic’ novels exhibit underlying tensions and dynamics that are very similar. Anna falls in love and commits a social ‘crime’ in betraying her husband and abandoning her domestic role. Pip is taught by Estella to be ashamed of his lowly state, and leaps at the opportunity to leave the forge and become a gentleman. Jay Gatsby wants to shed his murky past, enter the privileged and wealthy elite of Daisy Buchanan, and win her back with a dazzling display of success. All three characters are social anomalies, hovering between identities. Each in their different ways falls foul of dreams and passions. Pip and Gatsby strive to make themselves socially acceptable, but cannot shed the taint of criminality in their past. Both base their existence on an idolized and idealized woman who remains forever out of reach. Both are thwarted by a combination of social prejudice and female insensitivity. Examine your source material and it is likely to tell a tale of conflict, instability or displacement, both public and private. Characters are trying to move from one state to another, and trying to change themselves or remove what is in their path, in order to get there. It doesn’t much matter whether the surface issue is finding a husband or avoiding nuclear Armageddon, it is the underlying ‘structure of conflict’ running through the story that we need to locate and extract. Whatever contributes to this structure is of value. What doesn’t isn’t. Adaptation will inevitably gravitate to those elements that put dramatic flesh on prosaic bones. This is where the adaptation may start to re-expand the story, furnishing ideas with visual energy.

Exercise: Identify and characterize the signature conflict within your novel or short story. How will you bring it onto the surface of the film, embodied and animated by action and interaction? Single out a moment (courtroom, bedroom, barroom) where the nature of the conflict crystalizes, and the issues visibly come to a head? Or will you need to stage your own dramatic bouts to bring ‘the fight’ out into the open?

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3c) Scene and sequence As far as possible the process of selection should strive to retain the underlying logic (the pattern of relationships and conflict) that defines the story, propels it forward and makes it cohere. Within this overarching narrative structure you can then start to think about the sequencing of events. This is where the script may start to seriously depart from the novel.

Ignition Your examination of causality and conflict will have revealed the crucial scenes that change the course of the narrative; an established pattern is broken, a secret uncovered, a decision made. These moments need to be at least as sharply etched in the adaptation as they are in the original. The Bulgarian-French polymath, Tzvetan Todorov, posits that all stories share a disarmingly simple triadic structure whereby they move through distinct and defined stages of equilibrium/disruption/equilibrium. They begin in a state of ‘normality’, life as it might have remained (Anna’s marriage). Something then disrupts this status quo, throws up a challenge, creates a dilemma (meeting Vronsky). The rest of the story is the working out of these complexities, until some sort of resolution is found, and a new ‘equilibrium’ is established. In Anna’s case the new equilibrium is not a happy one. As with the so-called ‘three-act structure’ (not the same thing), this idea is best regarded as a tool of analysis rather than a rule to apply. Indeed, according to Todorov it applies itself, being a description of what any story does automatically. In the first place every story has its inciting moment which sets in train all that follows. Some fictions leave us in no doubt about where and when this occurs; Little Red Riding Hood meets the Wolf, the body is found in the library etc. Others make identifying the narrative spark a matter of interpretation.

Exercise: Where is the disruptive moment in your story? Does the reader travel to it, or does in precede the opening of the book? How are you going to ensure its gravity and impact is properly felt?

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Rhythm When episodes in the book are erased, collapsed or compressed the resulting film narrative will take on a distinct life of its own, and a quite different narrative rhythm may emerge. The pace and pulse of the action will change, and the progression from one key moment to the next will have a different velocity and momentum. In the interests of the adaptation as film, there is also a need to vary and contrast scenes, alternating them to present the story from different angles or emphasize different factors. Scenes that have the same general tone or tempo can become monotonous. Action needs to rise and fall, shift in mood and intensity. Ensuring dramatic diversity may mean departing radically from the novelistic presentation of the story. One thing that makes A Very Short Story so cinematic is the range and arrangement of incident. We go from the bustle of the party on the roof to the quiet intimacy when the others leave them alone, from the tension of the operating theatre to the stillness and calm of the hospital corridors, from the solemnity of the Duomo to the spit and sweat of the front. The looser fabric of a novel will seldom offer such stark contrasts. As an adapting screenwriter you will usually need to engineer them yourself. A simple transition from one moment to the next can help highlight the opposing elements within the story. If the lovers leave the Cathedral to find a truck waiting to take our soldier back to the front, their helplessness in the face of history is shockingly underlined. Having them emerge from the dimly lit interior, blinking into the light, and suddenly separated without warning or proper farewell, would make its own comment on ‘two little people’ tossed about in an unpredictable world. Showing Luz abruptly abandoned on the steps of the Duomo, later followed by the receding image of her on the platform at Milan station, would create its own internal symmetry. Indeed, the story seems designed to promote echoes and reflections of this kind – two hospitals, two soldiers and two postal deliveries. The story commences with romantic love on a rooftop, and ends with sordid sex on a backseat. He is heroically wounded at the beginning, and ignominiously infected at the end. Not all fiction is as shamelessly schematic as Hemingway’s vignette, but repetitions and echoes of this kind are the stuff of fiction. Find these internal systems of connection and correspondence and they will most likely offer visual means of drawing the action into a thematic whole.

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Quiet moments Narrative selection can’t be made solely based on considerations of plot. Between the essential turning-points lurks material just as valuable and necessary, but easily overlooked. The most innocuous incidents may serve a vital purpose of establishing situations, character and relationships. They are the equivalent of the easily disregarded fact that is deliberately planted as a clue in a murder mystery in order to be recalled and deciphered later on. Even in A Very Short Story there is an apparently redundant detail which serves no essential function in terms of forwarding the action towards its conclusion. The soldier, we are told, does the nurse’s rounds while Luz sleeps. But what this apparently superfluous moment does (as Hemingway evidently knows) is tell us something important about them and their relationship. The fact that ‘there were only a few patients, and they all knew about it’ tells us something about the strangely intimate atmosphere of the hospital. The fact that ‘they all liked Luz’ tells us something about her, even when she breaks the rules she is popular and easily pardoned. The fact that ‘as he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed’ tells us something important about him, the pleasure he derives from the very idea of her, and the idea of her being ‘his’. Any screenwriter would want to find a visual way of communicating this, perhaps having him return to his room only to gaze at her before deciding not to disturb her sleep and quietly closing the door behind him. The value of this moment is in the suggestion, initially subliminal, later confirmed, that his love for her is more ‘selfless’ than hers for him, that he is more ‘idealistic’ than she. Their relationship is asymmetrical from the start, with a greater weight of dependency on his side (he is the one being prepared for the operating table, waiting for letters, being told to go home and get a job). This moment in the hospital corridor plants a seed. In so far as it hints at some hidden imbalance in the relationship, it provides the sort of connective tissue that is required for the story to evolve coherently. Without it what later happens might seem merely arbitrary, ‘just one of those things’. Events must seem to grow out of character and situation or the story has no unity. She is ‘practical’, he is the ‘dreamer’. She can move on, he can’t. A story has to be more than the sum of its parts, and that extra element is the invisible reason behind things; the story beneath the story.

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Exercise: A rationale of this kind is required for virtually every moment in an adaptation. Find a moment in your original material that is less than strictly necessary to the plot, but establishes an important emotional fact or causal link. Assess how this sits within the pattern of action. What purpose does it serve? How to guarantee it makes its point for the audience?

Climax Then again there may be moments in the original text that are full of unrealized potential that need the screenwriter to galvanize them into dramatic life. Pip’s final meeting with Miss Havisham is just such a moment. Neither Pip nor the reader learns anything new. Pip already knows his benefactor is the convict Magwitch, not her; that she was merely stringing him along as part of her ongoing revenge against the male sex. In fact, in the novel, Pip is already reconciled with the old woman, who has already awoken to the terrible wrong she has done him. Estella is away in Paris. His real motive for visiting is to borrow money. They part amicably enough, and Pip leaves to take a turn around the grounds of the house. On returning he finds her ablaze, her dress having presumably caught fire. He seeks to save her, but she is terribly burnt. Servants and a surgeon are in attendance. She dies some time later. However, David Lean makes this scene the dramatic high-point of the movie. A defeated but dignified Pip confronts the woman who has deliberately led him on and tormented his affections. He walks in with the stately and confident air of the mature gentleman he has actually grown to be. He is not scrounging. He has come to speak with Estella who is sitting and knitting at the old lady’s side. Lean and his screenwriters have thoroughly re-orchestrated the scene to be a climactic moment, a final reckoning, between wounded hero and ghostly foe. In addition to the context, the choreography of the scene itself is radically altered to steer us towards a moment of visual epiphany. As Pip turns away and Estella joins him to say a rather cool farewell, we are given Miss Havisham’s physical point of view.

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Figures 3.1 and 3.2  These images in Great Expectations (1946) show us with great directness and immediacy what tips Miss Havisham into the deepest remorse at what she has done and cannot reverse. The narrative and visual orchestration of the scene is a fundamental part of the film’s structure.

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What we/she sees is Pip and Estella, their backs turned to her, looking for all the world like a couple at the altar about to take their marriage vows. Miss Havisham’s story has come full circle. She sees that Pip is as unhappy as she was when jilted on her wedding day. Estella tells Pip that she is still incapable of love, and is about to make a loveless marriage to another man. She leaves. Pip turns his invective on Miss Havisham, slamming the door on his way out. The vibration dislodged a log from the fire which ignites her dress. He immediately returns, tries to save her with the moth-eaten tablecloth, destroying the remnants of her wedding breakfast and the rancid cake, in the process. She disappears in a confusion of dust and smoke. No lingering death. No servants or surgeon. Only Pip, ‘orphaned’ again, amid the chaos and decay. The whole scene has been directed towards these two compound images (the altar and headstone) images we can ‘read’ without the aid of additional comment or explanation. As such it is a perfect example of what can be done in taking the

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Figures 3.3 and 3.4  The scene in Great Expectations (1946) concludes with a sustained, distant and elevated shot of Pip on his knees beside the bare, smooth and elongated surface of the table, which now resembles a blank gravestone marking the death of all his dreams, an echo of the childhood moment in the churchyard.

complexity of incident and theme, and distilling them into moments for the eye and the ear alone. It is a radical re-routing of Dickens’ novel that nevertheless brings us back to it with renewed dramatic force.

Exercise: Taking this comparison of novel and film, why do you think Lean and his screenwriters made these changes? Why have Estella there? Why the slammed door? Why have Miss Havisham die on the spot? These considerations of compression, continuity and causality will almost certainly rehearse decisions you need to make about your own adaptation.

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Exercise: Find the climactic moment in your novel or short story. Imagine it on the screen. What might you draw from elsewhere in the text to augment and intensify it?

Case study: The Shawshank Redemption, Dir: Frank Darabont (1994) In Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982) the main character is the first-person narrator, Red. The story of Andy Dufresne is embedded in Red’s account of his time in Shawshank Penitentiary, an account that is inevitably limited to what he has seen, heard or imagined. The film, The Shawshank Redemption

Figure 3.5  The novella begins with Red telling us about himself, admitting his own crime, and describing his first glimpse of Andy entering prison. However, the film, The Shawshank Redemption (1994) opens with Andy sitting drunk in his car and loading a handgun, before we transit to a courtroom where he is being tried for the murder of his wife and her lover.

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(1994), written and directed by Frank Darabont, makes liberal use of voice-over to retain a sense of Red’s impression of things, but it obviously sheds the bulk of the prose narration. For both texts it is important that we observe Andy from the outside and from a slight distance so that the film can pull off the story’s big narrative surprise.

Figures 3.6 and 3.7  Whilst there are visual parallels in the presentation of Andy and Red in The Shawshank Redemption (1994) there are striking contrasts in setting, clothes and manner– establishing the contrast between innocence and experience.

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The film positions us as the jury, invited to read the signs for ourselves. Andy’s version of events seems implausible (he just wanted to scare them, he gave up and threw the gun in the river), but so does his failure to come up with a better story. In the novella Red tells us that it took him years to reach the conclusion that Andy was innocent. Watching the film we are probably in two minds, but the important thing is that we have emotionally attached to him as a character, and we are in no doubt that the film is about him and his struggle with the law. Andy’s sentence in court is immediately followed by Red being refused release by the parole board. The juxtaposition establishes similarities and differences that form the basis of their relationship. Naturally enough, given the passage of twenty-eight years, King gives us several Head Wardens and Guards, some more cruel than others, but all similar enough to emphasize the depersonalization of prison life. To concentrate our antipathy, the film gives us just one Warden Norton and just one Senior Guard Byron Hadley. Wherever possible an adaptation will collapse multiple characters, melding them into one representative figure with whom relationships can be more extensive, complex and intense. Despite being a feel-good movie, The Shawshank Redemption doesn’t duck some of the real horror of prison life. Andy’s way of dealing with ‘the sisters’, a gang of sexual predators threatening to brutalize him at any moment, is to use his financial expertise to sort out Senior Guard Hadley’s tax affairs, in return for physical protection. Here Darabont slightly departs from King, in that in the novella Bogs Diamond is found beaten to a pulp in his cell before Andy and Hadley have contracted their arrangement. King has Red speculate that Andy may have bribed the guards to do it. The film tidies this up in terms of cause and effect. Andy solves Hadley’s problem, Hadley returns the favour by applying his boot to Bog’s neck. Taken from a novella this adaptation is obliged to expand rather than contract the material. From the page or so devoted to the minor character of Brooks Hatlen, Darabont devises a story-within-a-story about the 68-year-old prison librarian, who weeps at being released after thirty years, and who dies miserably and alone in a care home six months later. The film doesn’t present him as ‘a tough old con’, nor tell us how he ‘killed his wife and daughter after a losing streak at poker’. Instead, he is a gentle old man, first seen taking a maggot found in Andy’s food and feeding it to a baby bird hidden in his pocket. Once Brooks is released Darabont even grants him his own voice-over confessing his inability to cope with life in the real world.

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Figure 3.8  In the Shawshank Redemption (1994) we are reminded of the presence of Brooks. This sets up dramatic tension about what will happen to Red.

King’s veiled suggestion that he may have taken his own life is graphically confirmed when we see him swinging from a beam where he has carved the words ‘Brooks was here’. The treatment may be sentimental, but our emotional engagement is important for the various functions his story performs. In the first place it provides a necessary distraction from Andy’s predicament, delaying the central plot, and giving a stronger impression of prison-time having passed. But it also works as commentary on the main action, a frightening warning of what could face Andy and Red if hope fails them. After almost a life-time in jail Hatlen is the embodiment of what prison can do to man, an object lesson in how prolonged institutionalization can make it impossible to live on the outside. Andy and Red can talk about this, but Hatlen’s sad story demonstrates the proof of it, and suggests what lies ahead for Andy unless something else happens.

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In King’s story Red summarizes Andy’s escape in one sentence: ‘In 1975, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank.’ The film re-stages this climactic moment for maximum dramatic impact. In the previous scenes we have heard Andy on the point of despair, and seen him sitting in the dark of his cell clutching a length of rope. In the novella Red mentions suicide at several points, but not in connection with Andy. In the film Red spends the worst night of his life fearing for his friend, and we too have been misdirected by Andy’s sombre mood. The next morning, when Andy does not attend rollcall we too fear the worst. Of course, the film is actually teeing-up the big ‘high’, as the baffled Warden demands to know how a prisoner could just disappear into thin air. The film even allows Red to witness the miracle at first hand. He is ordered into Andy’s cell to explain what has happened, so that we can get the celebrated image of Warden, Senior Guard and Red all staring in thunderstruck amazement when the means of Andy’s deliverance is revealed. Not being alongside Dufresne as he escapes, Red can’t narrate the physical details or draw out their symbolic significance in the way the film does. When Andy emerges from the sewers into a fast-flowing river the symbolism of baptism and rebirth is

Figure 3.9  In the Shawshank Redemption (1994) we share and enjoy the Warden's initial bewilderment on his discovery. The scene is constructed so we arrive at this image.

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palpable. Standing arms outstretched gazing upward into a downpour of rain, he is unmistakably ‘born again’ into freedom, fulfilling the implications of King’s title. But the religious connotations are already there in the revelation of the empty tomb, and the secret hidden in the Bible. These structural changes perform numerous functions: foregrounding character, securing sympathy, concentrating antagonism, expanding narrative, adding suspense, intensifying drama, amplifying irony and thematic resonance.

Workshop: Orchestrating the screen Patricia Highsmith: Those Who Walk Away (1967) Having answered some first-order questions about the strengths and weaknesses of the novel as potential material for adaptation, and after establishing the sort of cinematic experience we are aiming for, we now need to lay out the body of the novel and wield the knife. As far as Patricia Highsmith’s was concerned nothing in the book was ‘excess to requirement’ or redundant, everything was necessary to her purpose as a novelist. But re-telling the story in a truncated form creates different pressures and different priorities. We need to decide what, in terms of our film, is strictly indispensable, and what is not. In order do this, we need to outline the novel’s structure by producing a chapter by chapter breakdown, highlighting: ●●

significant locations

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essential plot points

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key dramatic ‘scenes’

With the plot laid out in this way we can begin to see important patterns:

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movement across the physical space of the story-world

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the rhythm of dramatic peaks and troughs, suspense and surprise, pressure and release

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ironic symmetries, reversals and inversions

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psychological highs and lows; fluctuating fortunes.

Looking for such patterns there are things we might immediately spot about Those Who Walk Away: 1. Recurring movement The lives of these characters revolve around a number of locations, too many in fact. If the story is to be concentrated and condensed down, a lot of Ray’s excursions across Venice must be eliminated. In the book these are opportunities for Highsmith to create a glamorous backdrop, and give Ray a chance to think and remember (things we can’t have him doing on his own in the movie). The sight of him bobbing and weaving around, popping in and out of cafes, wine bars or restaurants will provide lots of visual spectacle and local colour, but to over-indulge the sight-seeing risks seriously lowering the film’s blood-pressure, and making the audience impatient for the main event to resume. 2. Rescheduled scenes Ray and Coleman have just three verbal exchanges. Although they go ‘head-to-head’ in the first and penultimate chapters, it is their confrontation in chapter 5 which does most to establish the curious chemistry between them. This prolonged eye-balling must be protracted, and made a pivotal moment in our understanding of the two characters. However, its placement is problematic. As a cinema audience, it might seem weird to see them calmly sitting across from one another only minutes after witnessing one trying to gun the other down. So we might want to find a way to space out these events, bringing forward other episodes (e.g. Coleman’s fishing expedition, or Ray’s meeting with Inez) to help create a phase of relative calm between these more intense moments. 3. Focalization One important decision is going to be about narrative perspective. It comes as a bit of a jolt when we come to chapters 12 and 13. Up until this point we have spent every moment with Ray, but suddenly he drops out of the picture and we are seeing things from Coleman’s point of view. This has its uses in the novel – temporarily

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deflecting attention from Ray, conjuring the impression that a greater amount of time has passed during which he has got to know his new environment and begun to heal. This switch of perspective could serve the same purpose in the movie, and create some welcome dramatic irony when we know (though Coleman and his confederates do not) that Ray has survived. But this would be a major decision in the adaptation process. Giving Coleman his own scenes, Highsmith produces an entirely different narrative geometry. The story now has two sides to it. We may not like or approve of Coleman, but suddenly he has a certain narrative equality. He is made more three-dimensional, more emotionally tangible, and our capacity to empathize with him is hugely increased. And this might be the decisive reason for following the book at this point. Creating some sympathy for Coleman brings us into closer alignment with Ray’s own attitude towards him, so that we can appreciate how Peggy’s death has unhinged her father as much as it has confounded her husband. 4. Relationships Another important structural component is provided by the women in the story. If Peggy’s death has plunged Ray into despair, he is lifted out of it (at least in part) by Elisabetta. Her innocence allows Ray to say things he needs to say (and we need to hear), and it stands in stark contrast to the suspicion and deceit that characterizes Inez’s relationship with Coleman. Perhaps both pairings should be ‘arranged’ in such a way as to bring out these contrasts. Helpfully, the bond between Ray and Elisabetta develops in easy conventional stages. He sees her from a distance, gets to talk to her, invites her to dinner, visits her home, etc., culminating in a touching farewell, and an erotic kiss. At which point (having told her what he might have hoped to tell Coleman) Ray feels suddenly liberated, experiencing something like an epiphany (even the sight of children playing in the street delights him). Basically, without flourish or fanfare, the story enacts an instantly familiar trope: ‘Love redeems’. Warmth, patience and loving attention have brought Ray back to emotional life, back to himself. The trick will be to allow the audience to feel this through what they observe. In terms of structure everything needs to be arranged in such a way as to deliver this moment. It isn’t so much a revelation, as a moment of rejuvenation. Rather than something new, what Ray learns is something very old – old and easily lost. He takes

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back his true identity, symbolized in his reclaiming his real name. Having his faith in humanity restored he can again face the unknowable and unfathomable with renewed strength. At this point we might say that Ray’s inner journey is virtually complete. He is ready to return to the world. He’s spent a long time in a mental fog, and it now begins to clear. Of course, if we know anything about such stories we know that this moment of calm will be short-lived, that the romantic interlude is in part designed as a distraction for the audience, and that the (real) fog will lift only to reveal Coleman still lurking there. And so he is. Highsmith never bothers to explain how Coleman could have picked up his trail (one of the ‘coincidences’ the film would need to address), but this moment is more than anything symbolic. For the first time, Ray fights back. Pelting a rock at a man already prostrate on the ground is not exactly a glorious affirmation of his manhood, but it marks a desire to assert himself against circumstances. His life now seems worth actively preserving: ‘[Ray] felt growing elation because he had stood up to Coleman […]. For the first time, he had struck a blow back’ (p.178). 5. Reversals Another obvious pattern emerges from the parallels, symmetries and inversions that develop in the story. Roles are totally reversed when Coleman is injured, disappears, goes ‘underground’ in Chioggia, falsifies his identity and is reported missing in the papers: ‘He was dead, faceless to everyone, because nameless’ (p.181). It’s Ray’s turn to speculate on the fate of his adversary. With suspicion now thrown onto him, he too is summoned by the police. The tables are turned. Both men ‘kill themselves off’ (p.204). The way their fortunes reverse and mirror one another could seem highly schematic, but as a structural aid it’s invaluable in creating points of contrast that reveal character. In their encounters with simple Venetians, Ray is befriended, Coleman is friendless. Ray shows sensitivity and gratitude. Coleman exhibits only distrust and paranoia; Mario helps him, but only out of self-interest. 6. Alternate worlds The essential difference between the two central figures is also illustrated in their interaction with a wider circle of people. When Ray takes refuge on Giudecca it

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sets up a contrast between two distinct worlds, ‘America’ (made up of ex-pats like Coleman, and tourists like the Smith-Peters), and ‘Venice’ (made up of ordinary working people like Luigi and Elisabetta). The structure of the film will be informed by the oscillation between these two worlds, and their differing ‘climates’, attitudes and values. Where the Americans seem insular, calculating and mutually suspicious, the native Italians are welcoming, relaxed and open-hearted. As Ray sees for himself, ‘The oil of affection was there’ (p.181). They save his life, they take him in and their solidarity stands in sharp contrast to the indifference that characterizes those huddled around Coleman. This cultural stereotyping is pretty blatant, but it is something that can be emphasized or softened, played up or down as we see fit.

Second synopsis You could say that there are two plot synopses for any novel or film: a physical one charting what happens in the outer world of the story and a psychological one concerning the changing internal condition of the characters. Reading a novel through the lens of adaptation, we need to capture both these movements (the outer and the inner) and find ways of bringing them together, before the ‘mind’s eye’ of the audience. Ray’s emotional ‘journey’ can be broken down something like this:

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Bereavement and Bewilderment at Peggy’s Death

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Rome – Attempt at Restoration/Communication with Coleman

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Failure/Being Shot

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Physical Healing

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Venice – Attempt at Restoration/Communication with Coleman

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Failure/Being Thrown Overboard into the Lagoon

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Physical Healing

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Giudecca – Attempt at Restoration – Communication with Elisabetta

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Success – Communication with Elisabetta/Puts up a Fight with Coleman

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Psychological Healing

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Police Headquarters – Restoration/Communication Impossible (Acceptance)

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Leaves Venice for the Future

Decisions to retain or jettison aspects of the physical synopsis must be made in the interests of clearly charting this psychological process from frustration to release, from paralysis to action, from living in the past to facing the future. The filmic re/construction of the story must prioritize this over everything.

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4 The Human Element

Having read for plot, we can now read for character. If narrative events form the body of a story, then character is its heart and soul. For the story to have any meaning we must understand the significance it has for the characters. It’s because of them that we care about the outcome. However, the greatest problem of film adaptation is in the realm of character. With the automatic loss of the fictional narrator we are immediately deprived of access to the psychological depth and complexity a novel provides. Subjectivity remains stubbornly resistant to visual representation. Film cannot spend ten minutes in a character’s thoughts no matter how good the actor is. The adapting screenwriter is thrown back onto the dramatic resources of action and dialogue from which the audience must infer an interior life.

4a) Beneath the surface Attributes Your characters already exist and possess exterior features that are easily transferred to the script (age, appearance, demeanour, etc.). These matters can be left to the casting director and make-up artist. However, their interior features are a good deal less accessible, and bringing them out will require some subtlety and cunning. First you need to know what these inner qualities are. Alighting on the exact adjectives will be crucial, and have definitive consequences.

Truly interesting characters are multi-dimensional. They are not made of just one substance. They may have dominant characteristics (passion, practicality, ambition, complacency, idealism, cynicism, generosity or selfishness), but these qualities will be moderated, modified or compromised by others. They may exhibit kindness and cruelty, cowardice and courage. Anna is, by turns, passionate and prudent. Gatsby is ambitious, yet unworldly. Characterization may need to be greatly abbreviated or curtailed. The full variety of attitude and behaviour they exhibit across the extent of the novel may be impossible to fully encompass on the screen. Nevertheless, you should aim to capture as much of this range as possible. The co-existence of consistency and variability is what will make them seem real and rounded on the screen. If they aren’t a cliché or stereotype in the book, they shouldn’t become one in the film. Elizabeth Bennett, heroine of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), remains one of the best known and best loved characters in English fiction because she is a perfect combination of intelligence and virtue. Her quick wit is a match for anyone. Her integrity has her rise above the triviality, snobbery and spite of her society. Characters do not exist in isolation, and we ‘read’ them against the background of others. The camera tends to magnify differences, so it is for the script to select what characteristics are enlarged, and the context in which they are viewed. Elizabeth’s clarity of mind and calmness of temperament is best seen amid the shrill fluttering of her silly sisters and the solemn pomposity of the wider society that surrounds her.

Exercise: It is essential to ‘know’ your character, and alight on the right adjectives to describe them. Drawing from the primary text, write a character profile for each major character. You might start by listing the descriptive words that instantly come to mind. How thoughtful, sensitive or self-aware are they? Are they optimistic or pessimistic? Pinpoint moments in the novel where these qualities are most clearly displayed, and where they have most impact on the story. These are almost certainly moments that need a permanent place in the script.

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Exercise: Mark your central characters on a scale of one to ten for intelligence, sensitivity, confidence, self-awareness, humour, determination, resourcefulness and realism. Which of these scores (high or low) has the most impact in the book, and therefore in the film? What features of action or dialogue will bring these qualities to the surface?

Change One consequence of cutting down the novel is that some aspects of your character can inadvertently disappear, leaving their actions looking inconsistent or arbitrary. In the transition from book to film characters need to remain capable of realistic and believable change. Jane Austen has seen to it that Elizabeth’s character is capable of both steadfastness and growth. Her angry outburst at Mr Darcy following his first marriage proposal perfectly reflects her self-respect, but her acceptance of his second equally reflects her honesty. She admits she was wrong about him.

Exercise: Taking your central character, identify their most extreme traits and conduct, and the moments where they exemplify these qualities. How will you present these potentially conflicting impressions? Are there moments of transition that will need concentrated and calculated attention in order to retain coherence of characterization?

Past Fictional characters are seldom born on the first page. The full arc of their development usually begins before the point at which the novel opens. An adapted

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script needs to minimize and expedite biographical information, while being careful that nothing is lost that will make the character fuzzy or perplexing. How much of Gatsby’s life before he came to West Egg can be conveyed, in dialogue or flashback, without altogether impeding the flow of the story? It is also important to the novel that Gatsby’s true identity is heavily contested. He is an enigmatic figure, manufactured out of gossip and speculation. Reveal too much, make him too accessible, and the air of mystery may disappear.

Exercise: Stories almost invariably involve characters discovering in themselves hidden resources that answer the challenge presented to them in the story. What surprising qualities does your main character ‘pull out of the bag’? When and how this occurs has important ramifications for the development of character and plot.

Present The story sets the central protagonists a test. They are confronted with a situation to which they must respond. It may arise by chance, or as a result of their own actions. Either way it ultimately presents itself as a dilemma. It may be a race to win, a puzzle to solve or a trap to escape. Whatever the nature of the task it must be clearly laid out if the film adaptation is to properly reflect the character’s situation. Pip and Gatsby set themselves to win a great prize. Elizabeth Bennett has to reconcile her desire to help her family and her determination not to compromise her principles. Anna Karenina seeks escape from a stifling social role. Each scenario places a burden on the character, and sets the terms by which we will judge their success or failure. They can’t just walk away or step over the problem. All dramatic situations ensnare the protagonists, exert pressure and exact a price. Film can probably present the physical circumstances of the story was well as any novel can, but their exact psychological response to the situation will largely elude visual treatment. Film can’t place the audience in the character’s head. What it can

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do is strive to place the audience in their shoes, so to speak, permitting us to feel the predicament from the character’s standpoint, and to imagine how those shoes must pinch.

Exercise: The situation as found in the novel may need some simplification in the film, but it must still clearly establish the rules of the game (romantic, detective, combative) that the story is about to play out. Describe the character’s ‘situation’ in as few words as possible. This will form the essential centre of the story you are retelling. Now enlarge your description to encompass as many aspects of the fictional situation as possible. This then forms the story’s circumference. The question for any adaptation is how far you can move outward from centre to circumference within the time limit imposed.

Motivation The original material has also given the characters desires and objectives, but what might be straightforwardly announced on the page may be more difficult to convey on the screen. Their motives may be undeclared to those around them, and even remain unknown to themselves. Nevertheless, as screenwriter you need to know what makes these people tick, and reveal it via dialogue and action. The actor playing the part shouldn’t have to go back to the book to ‘find their character’. Motivation defines character and generates action, but (again) it is seldom singular or straightforward. Anna Karenina doesn’t just want a fling. Pip doesn’t just want cash. Their deeper promptings elude easy categorization. Likewise, Magwitch acts out of gratitude towards Pip, but also out of ironic delight at his ability to ‘make’ a gentleman. Miss Havisham acts out of resentment towards men, but also out of a delight at her ability to ‘make’ Estella a weapon of her vengeance. Elizabeth’s melting attitude towards Darcy may well have its origins in seeing his vast estate at Pemberley! Some fictional characters are intriguing precisely because their motivation remains so mixed. What does Gatsby see in Daisy? Retain the ambiguity, and you retain something essential to the character.

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Figure 4.1  Having grown rich in Australia, Magwitch decides to do something for Pip, partly out of gratitude for what the lad did, and partly because he reminds him of his lost daughter who would be about Pip’s age. Lean’s film also lays emphasis on the ex-convict’s relish at being the source of Pip’s new-found respectability. The mix of motives reflects the tangled plot and the thematic relationship between money and morals: a theme central to the novel and film versions of Great Expectations (1946).

Exercise: The nature and intensity of their desires may ebb and flow, intensify and recede, within the extended complexity of a novel, but it will probably need to remain more constant within the tighter narrative framework of a movie. Take your central character. What is their primary interest? Now without any reference to any description or dialogue in the prose text, write a short speech (just a few lines) in which they vividly and frankly express their paramount desire or fear. These are unlikely to be words you can place in their mouths, but as you compose the script they should form the background to what they do say.

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Exercise: Having fixed on the centre of their motivation, now see if you can dig down to something even more fundamental. Think of Gatsby. He doesn’t just long for Daisy because of who she is in herself. She represents something, something to do with life having a higher meaning. What about your character? Are they spurred on by ordinary material considerations or something more abstract, even universal?

Opposition Characters are driven by desire, but the story is also shaped by what opposes them. In addition to knowing their aims and objectives, the audience needs to understand what obstacles stand in their way, and what they are willing to do to overcome them. Certain forces press upon your protagonist to follow a course of action. Certain other forces press upon them not to follow that course of action. The friction between the two generates the dramatic heat that makes the story interesting, its outcome uncertain. As we know, the engine of any drama is conflict. There are four main types: a) relational conflict (individual vs. individual) – characters in competition, having different objectives, or coveting the same ‘object’ (think Pip and Bentley Drummle, Gatsby and Tom Buchanan) b) environmental conflict (individual vs. nature) – the character is battling the physical environment (think Ahab and the Whale) c) social conflict (individual vs. society) – the character at odds with the demands or expectations of a group (think Anna and ‘respectability’) d) internal conflict (individual vs. self) – characters engaged in a private struggle between opposed aspects of themselves, or contradictory impulses (think Jekyll and Hyde) Obviously (c) and (d) present the greatest challenge for adaptation.

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Again, really interesting fictional characters are embroiled in conflicts that cross and entangle these various possibilities. Elizabeth’s independent spirit puts her at odds with her family and indeed with her own material self-interest. Both Pip and Gatsby struggle for social acceptance, but the final obstacle to happiness is the very object of their desire; neither Estella nor Daisy is capable of returning the love they crave. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), is one of the most enduring of modern myths. One reason for this is the way it intertwines so many different lines of stress. In addition to being the very epitome of a man divided within himself, Dr Jekyll opposes both society and the natural order in his quest to prove his scientific theory. The unusually fragmented structure of Stevenson’s novel, which effectively isolates Jekyll from active engagement with other characters, means that relational conflict is far less pronounced. But films typically remedy this by filling out his social world, and making him actively conflicted within it.

Figure 4.2  Film adaptations, like Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), almost invariably place Jekyll in a romantic context. A fiancée and a prospective father-in-law represent the social conventions he is rebelling against. They also allow him to rehearse his arguments and express his frustrations. Even where the conflict is primarily to do with ideas it is vital for a film adaptation to have a flesh-and-blood antagonist on hand to represent the abstract forces opposing the protagonist.

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Figure 4.3  Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1996) is a postmodern riff on the myth of Jekyll and Hyde. Dr Jekyll doesn’t know what he is about to unleash upon the world. The anonymous narrator in Fight Club doesn’t know what he has unleashed upon himself. Of course, David Fincher’s 1999 adaptation seriously leads us astray in giving Tyler Durden such a well-defined physical presence on the screen.

Exercise: In Chapter 3 we looked at how conflict constructs the action. Here we need to consider how it expresses itself in terms of character. What obstacles does your central character face? Who or what is the ‘antagonist’? Where in the script will the nature of this struggle be most palpable? How, in action and dialogue, will it be expressed?

Status At some level conflict involves a struggle for power. This too can take several forms: a) position – who rises and who falls within some institution or hierarchy b) control – who gains mastery over the situation, who gets to impose their agenda on others c) autonomy – who achieves independence, fulfilment and freedom from external claims.

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Stories almost inevitably involve the main characters in a change in status, a change that can be measured by the ‘material’ values operating within the world of the story or by alternative ‘spiritual’ values with which the reader or viewer is encouraged to identify. In one sense Pip’s social trajectory couldn’t be clearer, he starts low, suddenly rises, but then falls back again. The novel reveals the ‘illusory’ nature of the whole process. His social elevation amounts to a loss of genuine gentlemanliness which resides at the forge in the person of gentle Joe. The whole social structure is a pack of lies and a pack of cards. The novel ends with Pip standing at last on his own two feet. What he has lost in great expectations he has gained in experience and self-knowledge. He has achieved a higher status within our estimation. In the eyes of the reader he is a better (if not altogether happier) man. This shift of value, from the material to the spiritual, is one of the most common tropes in all storytelling, and one that film audiences (more than most) have come to expect. Hence David Lean’s departure from Dickens’ rather downcast (or at best ambiguous) ending. Lean’s adaptation has Pip soar above every realistic prospect, to finally win his beloved prize, his status magically transformed to that of fairytale Prince bringing Sleeping Beauty back to life. Having been virtually powerless throughout the story, Lean rewards him with the miraculous power to kindle a fire in Estella’s frozen heart. Traditionally, Hollywood has loved telling the story of the individual who triumphs by remaining ‘true’ to themselves. Perhaps this is why certain classics like Pride and Prejudice keep being remade for the screen. Elizabeth retains her integrity and gets her man and the fortune. What’s not to cheer?

Exercise: Where do your central characters stand on the social scale: high/low, dominant/ subservient, powerful/powerless? Where does the issue of their status become most prominent? What signals of a significant change in status will you need to incorporate in the script? This is where the question of appropriateness in voice and dialogue is going to loom large in your thinking.

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4b) Action and interaction Characters on the page are primarily revealed through description. Characters on screen are revealed through their actions, reactions and interactions. It’s in direct contact with others (in collaboration or confrontation) that character is most clearly displayed, and often the adapting screenwriter must add to what the novelist has given them.

First impressions Presumably the novelist’s presentation of the central characters has succeeded in securing the reader’s interest, but if this is purely on the basis of what we are told in the narration we need to find other means of doing this. We need to bring the audience alongside the characters, and spark their curiosity (‘Who is this?’ ‘Why are they there?’‘What are they doing?’). Getting the audience to ask questions will make them latch onto the character, and begin to see affairs unfold from their perspective. Showing them in their settled daily routine will single them out and establish a norm. Presenting them in their signature manner reacting to some familiar state of affairs will engage audience identification or curiosity.

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Figures 4.4 and 4.5  Without a word the characters of Forrest Gump (1994) and Anton Chigurh (the psychopath in No Country for Old Men (2007)) are introduced by signature actions. Gump’s simplicity is silently announced by his emotionless stare, and his pressing a feather in the pages of a children’s book. Chigurh is just as emotionally blank, but we have no difficulty reading this absence as demonic.

A novel typically introduces character by stages. The reader takes imaginative possession of them in the way they might take possession of a complex object, learning and unlearning things about it, viewing it from numerous angles, inspecting it inside out. Cinema audiences do not get that opportunity. The character enters the space all at once. We will know them more fully as we go along, but like meeting a real person, first impressions are important. At the opening of his Great Expectations David Lean lays stress on Pip’s innocence, vulnerability and isolation. The boy’s determination to tidy his parent’s grave, his helplessness before Magwitch, his courage in keeping his promise of bringing food and a file – all establish a baseline to his nature. When Pip later succumbs to less noble impulses and Dickens’ story threatens to decline into a snob’s progress, the audience can draw on this deposit of sympathy invested in the first third of the film. We forgive Pip the man, because for so long we were immersed in Pip the boy (and continue to hear in voice-over Pip the Elder describing them both from a knowing distance). We would have little difficulty persuading an audience to identify with Hemingway’s lovers. The roof-top party would centre on them. When ‘the others’

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go down stairs, our attention will focus on their mutual attraction. How they are ‘different’ is less important to establish in these opening moments than the fact that briefly such differences don’t matter.

Exercise: How will we first glimpse your main characters? What thoughts or emotions will they immediately elicit? How will this appropriately position the audience? Of course, a lot depends on where you want the film narrative to begin, but one consideration will be the need to immediately identify the primary character on the screen.

Rituals In contemplating which scenes are essential, it’s important to prioritize moments that place your characters in situations that expose their motivation, illustrate their predicament and dramatize their conflict. Each scene should aim to present in graphic form some aspect of the story’s tangled predicament, and convert mental states (purposes, aspirations, doubts, dependencies) into the visible traffic of signs (words, gestures, interactions, ‘things’) going back and forth between the characters. For this reason, drama, on stage or screen, loves a get-together. The need to externalize and ‘make visible’ interior pressures places a high value on scenes where characters are thrown together, confronted by difference, pushed out of their safety zones, squeezed into situations with a high level of social consequence, from which they cannot easily escape. Workplaces, prison cells, courthouses, interrogation rooms, hospital wards, all provide high drama and high stakes of one sort or another. The balls and assemblies that structure Pride and Prejudice are rigorously formal encounters, heavily rule-governed, with a rigid code of conduct. They represent points of intersection between the public and the private where competing values clash, and characters negotiate for space and precedence. Such occasions have a combative quality. Whether jostling over dance partners or waging an ever-so

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Figure 4.6  Faced with the lack of ‘action’ involving the character of Jekyll himself, the earliest adaptations of the novel invented representatives of the established scientific community with whom he could lock horns. Putting Jekyll in a lecture theatre in front of an audience of enthusiastic students and hostile professors solves the problem of exposition too. We can hear his controversial ideas and feel the climate of frustration, excitement and scandal they provoke around him (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (1931)).

polite war of words, characters are jockeying for position within a quite vicious environment. In contrast, the parties thrown by Jay Gatsby seem like a free-for-all. In the book he seldom makes an appearance at them, but they function as a form of elaborate courtship display. He hopes Daisy will turn up, see what he has become, and his American dream will come true.

Exercise: Unremarkable acts like shopping, cooking and travelling on a bus can take on useful ritual elements. What rituals (large and small) will help structure your adaptation and externalize your central characters? Where might you place them to more fully enact themselves?

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Exercise: How might the rituals in A Very Short Story (drinking party, surgical operation, letter-writing, letter-reading, station departures, etc.) help you to structure it as a short film? If you were to expand the tale into a feature length movie, what other ‘social ceremonies’ might you introduce to expand the story and develop the characters? As a means of ‘collapsing’ story events you may well find you need to do this for your own adaptation.

Transgression Strictly coded ritual events help to highlight acts of non-conformity: Darcy refusing to dance, Elizabeth refusing his proposal, Heathcliff turning his back on his guest and Gatsby neglecting to host his own parties. Each signals that they stand ‘above the fray’, playing by different rules, pursuing other priorities. They are marked as being ‘out of the ordinary’, unpredictable and somehow more ‘real’ because of it. Their determination to deliberately transgress social norms intrigues us and encourages us to expect the unexpected. It is what makes them, in their different ways, romantic figures. They lay claim to an enviable freedom that makes them seem secure within their own private domain.

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Figures 4.7 and 4.8  The screen kiss has always been where the talking stops and we witness the characters move into another order of reality. In Héctor Babenco’s 1985 adaptation of Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, Valentin kisses his gay cellmate Molina goodbye. In Stephen Daldry’s 2002 adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours Laura Brown kisses her friend Kitty at the kitchen table. Both are complex ‘transgressive’ moments where one character moves into uncharted territory in an attempt to reach across to the other.

Figure 4.9  Catherine Earnshaw’s relationship with Heathcliff is already socially transgressive, Andrea Arnold’s (2011) reinterpretation of Wuthering Heights introduces the additional the element of race. Equally striking is the intimacy of the film-making which may make our own viewing pleasure feel like an intrusion.

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Fiction often turns on acts of transgression. Characters break the law, fall in love with the wrong person, get out of their depth, etc. Realist texts tend to focus on social transgressions. Anna walks out on husband and son, in defiance of the roles imposed on her. Fantasy texts tend to feature crimes against extra-societal laws. Both Dr Jekyll holding his cup of poison and Captain Ahab holding his harpoon are on mad missions to destroy the natural order and defy God.

Exercise: Where in your primary material are there elements of transgression that need to be witnessed and vividly felt by the audience? How might the film be made to ‘turn’ on such moments?

Exercise: A Very Short Story is full of transgressions: an affair between nurse and patient, a sexual betrayal and a cruel brush-off. How might these ‘offenses’ be deepened to intensify the drama (inventing a hospital matron to object to their relationship, showing Luz with her Italian major, perhaps at the very moment the soldier is reading her letter giving him the kiss-off )?

Choices As in real life, in books and films people reveal their true selves when they are under pressure, forced to make decisions and act. The stories that are most engaging involve characters making meaningful moral choices that pose questions. Were they right or wrong? What would we do? Elizabeth Bennett, rejecting the loathsome Mr Collins, makes a decision that defines her character, sets her above the materialism that surrounds her and cements our admiration for her independence of spirit.

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Crisis Stories mount to a crisis. This is where the opposing poles of force, between protagonist and antagonist, internal objective and external resistance, change and inertia, are at their most energized. Something’s got to give. However, novels are seldom as tightly (we might say schematically) constructed as is the average movie, and they don’t always maximize the dramatic punch in the way a film wants to. The most devastating or rejuvenating moment doesn’t always fall where a film probably needs it. What is Pip’s moment of crisis in the book? David Lean’s adaptation organizes events with great economy to create a sense of psychological crisis. Pip’s plan to save Magwitch fails. He goes to the lawyer Jaggers, who reveals the final details of Estella’s true history. From there he visits Magwitch in the prison hospital, to tell him that the daughter he thought dead is in fact alive, living as a lady, and that Pip is in love with her. Magwitch promptly dies. Leaving the hospital, Pip falls into a delirious state and collapses. When he comes round we see Joe smiling down at him. He has been brought back to the forge to recover. In a sense Pip’s crisis is the full weight of the plot falling on him, his recognition of the amount of deceit and destruction he has been entangled in since childhood. If he pulls through, the film seems to say, it is because the forge remains, and Joe remains. Pip can come home. It is most helpful if your protagonist actively shapes the world around them, rather than just having things happen to them. One difficulty with Great Expectations is that Pip makes too few decisions. He would seem altogether too insipid if it weren’t for the whirl of strange characters around him, and the fact that he is narrating his own story, in full awareness of what a puppet he has been. He is somewhat redeemed by his lively attempt to spirit Magwitch out of the country, turning the novel into an adventure story. Note as well, how important it is for Lean to turn Pip into a hero at the last, dragging down the curtains, letting in the light, saving Estella from herself, governing his future in a way he has been unable to govern his past. Lean is following Dickens’ thread, but pulling it tighter to create a simpler, more clearly emblematic picture. The ‘moral’ of the story is there on the screen. Novels are seldom as neat and tidy as an adaptation needs to be. The final phase of a novel can be quite diffuse in its resolutions, and it often falls to the adapting screenwriter to impose a conclusion that conforms to the moral and aesthetic expectations of the audience.

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Exercise: Dickens wrote two endings. The first is clear-cut and miserably sad. The second (as now published) is rather ambiguous, with Pip foreseeing ‘no shadow of another parting from her’, while Estella is content that they be ‘friends’. Neither ending satisfies our desire to see Pip’s suffering rewarded. If we feel Lean’s conclusion is both too ‘neat’ (and wilfully unfaithful), it would be a useful exercise to contemplate what else might be done. Lean plainly sacrificed the book to make a successful film. Fidelity to the novel was trumped by other priorities. What major considerations should dominate your thinking as you approach the end of your story?

Exercise: Hemingway’s story might also be said to suffer from an inactive hero. Luz is more immediately ‘interesting’, if only because she does make decisions. The soldier is inconveniently passive, waiting on letters, acting on instructions, things just happen to him. His one ‘act’ (in the taxi cab) is inadvertently self-destructive. Given the importance of ‘moral choice’, something seems missing if this story is going to work on the screen as more than a series of unfortunate events. What would you do to engineer the necessary sense of agency into his story?

Others Characters seldom get through stories alone and unaided. They need help and support to accomplish their goals, people to stand with them, force them to make decisions, confront, advise, provoke or inspire them. So when it comes to discriminating between those characters that are needed and those that are not we should start by observing their function as confidantes, providers and provocateurs. If they don’t deepen our understanding of the protagonist or heighten our response to the story they are probably expendable. Those that remain must be essential aspects of the environment, opening opportunities for action and reaction. Elizabeth Bennett needs her sister Jane. Pip

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needs his friend Herbert Pocket. The confessional exchange of information so crucial to communication on screen will only be possible in relationships between characters. We need them to talk to one another, so we can eavesdrop.

Exercise: Look at the relationships in the novel that are going to allow you to externalize thoughts and feeling, and create patterns of action that reflect the inner life of your fictional characters. Select a moment where your central character is most intensely engaged with another person – planning, disputing, etc. There may be useful dialogue here, but more valuable still may be the opportunity to reveal their underlying thoughts and feelings.

Things The screen will automatically ‘dress’ the characters and the world they inhabit. Much of the mise-en-scene can be handed over to the art department and the props manager. But there will be aspects of the visual world that can be made integral to the script, where the audience’s full attention can be focused on some object, carrying a freight of meaning far in excess of what might be expected.

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Figures 4.10 and 4.11  These contrasting objects of desire define Cathy’s two worlds of the wild moor and the ‘civilized’ drawing room in Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011).

Figure 4.12  In Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) Molina’s scarf (red as it happens) is a sign of fidelity to Valentin, in whose revolutionary cause Molina becomes ambiguously implicated after his release. Together with his obstinate silence in the face of state violence, it represents the triumph of love over repressive force. The Human Element

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To create a fearful atmosphere David Lean draws upon Dickens’ reference to gallows and leg-irons, details that are both realist and emblematic of the theme of crime and punishment. The motif of fire which runs through the novel (the heat of the forge, and light without warmth in Miss Havisham’s room) also structures the film. The mirror in which Jekyll sees himself transformed is both a practical object and an expression of the ‘otherness’ that Hyde represents. These are examples of film ‘talking through objects’, and harnessing meaning around visual properties. Adaptation needs to seize on such things.

Exercise: What objects might you take from your primary text to help ‘speak’ about your character and further the story as a whole?

4c) Culture and Context If characters weren’t engaged with things that concern us we wouldn’t really care about them. What is more, if they weren’t placed within a recognizable context we couldn’t understand them.

Values Fictional characters sit within an intellectual and moral framework of interlocking attitudes towards issues of class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, etc. This context informs how they see the world, what is ‘right and wrong’, ‘normal and abnormal’, and it’s the climate within which they make their choices. They may seek independence and freedom, but the story is largely predicated on them being constrained by social forces, and subject to certain ‘rules’ of behaviour. However, attitudes change. The beliefs and values operating within the story may not be ours. Prose texts can take their time initiating us into the fictional world and how it works. In film, contexts must be quickly established. The audience must be

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positioned so that they can appreciate how society impinges on these characters, shaping their ideas and framing their behaviour. If an adaptation fails to do this, it is likely to fail the novel. This charge could certainly be levelled at Roland Joffé’s 1995 adaptation of Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). The novel tells the story of a religious community in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, and the moral anguish that follows the scandal of a child born out of wedlock. However, Joffé’s version pretty much empties out what makes the novel such a serious and haunting work of fiction, reducing a story of social oppression and spiritual anguish in the face of puritan austerity, to one of erotic passion between a priest and his parishioner. The film is more interested in sensation than substance, and the script allows the audience to feel very little of the moral pressure behind the puritan belief in sin and damnation. It grants the protagonists (another) happy ending, and the historical reality that the novel explores is just wished away. The cultural shifts between 1642 (history), 1850 (novel) and 1995 (film) are considerable, and producing a ‘respectful’ adaptation would involve nothing less than the translation of an entire worldview, relocating the imagination of a largely ‘secular’ audience into a deeply held ‘religious’ frame of reference. Even where novels aren’t obviously ‘discussing’ issues or staging debates, fictional characters still occupy a world of ideas (about justice, liberty, duty etc.) governing their actions. These ideas must also exist as realities on the screen. Transposing the action (in time or space) is always more than a matter of ‘updating’ the story. In relocating to contemporary America, Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998) drops everything that defines Pip as a social creature in the book. As such he is Pip in name only. All adaptations will be skewed towards the values of the present, but in re-contextualizing the story some of the social obstacles and pressures need to be retained or the particular human problematic just evaporates.

Money If an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is to be more than a pretty ‘costume drama’ it needs to convey the indecorous reality driving the plot. It really matters that one of the Bennett daughters must ‘marry well’ if the family’s fortunes are to be restored. The Netherfield estate is ‘entailed away’, meaning it can only be inherited by a male

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relative, and Mr Bennett has no sons. Today such a scenario will (and should) excite a palpable sense of injustice, but any adaptation should also convince the audience that for the Bennetts this is the way things are, and that Elizabeth’s determination to marry for love not money is no small matter. Economics (and in particular the economics of matrimony) is the central fact of life here. Lose that fact and it becomes no more than a frothy romance. The predicaments of Pip and Gatsby are also conflations of love and money. Each is fixated on a woman and the delusion that she can be won by wealth and social position. Each fondly hopes that transplanting themselves into high society will transplant them into her heart. Again, characters shouldn’t come out of nowhere. In addition to possessing individual traits, characters belong to a nexus of social relationships; nation, family, gang, etc. Their social situation (class, religion, politics, education and home life) is a defining factor. You need to allow the audience to understand ‘where they are coming from’, both in terms of their backstory and where they currently stand in the world. It may then be easier to communicate what these characters think, where they want to go, and why.

Exercise: What do your characters believe? What ideas or codes motivate them? Are they driven by a concern for morality, money, justice, freedom or their own individual pleasure? Do they represent a cause or embody a set of values? Where in your script will these be ‘articulated’ most strongly?

Exercise: Given the social setting, how are values and cultural norms established in such a way that we can understand the concerns and expectations of characters? If you intend to relocate the story in terms of historical period or moral ethos, how are you going to inform the audience what is at stake?

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Exercise: Where does your adaptation invite you into contentious areas – screen violence, bad language, sex? Where might the project touch on cultural sensitivities? Where might you be in danger of giving offense?

Case study: A Very Short Story, Ernest Hemingway, 1924 Hemingway’s story does not take place in a social or historical vacuum. No story does. In fact, on close inspection there are numerous contexts which crucially impinge on the characters, shaping and perhaps distorting their relationship, influencing and perhaps determining the outcome. One of the few things we can be sure of is that Luz and her soldier are Roman Catholics. We are told that ‘they went into the Duomo and prayed’. The solemnity of the moment (candle-light and shadows, worshippers flitting here and there, the echoing silence) would be easy to capture on screen, but not so the complexity of feelings that accompany it: ‘They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates’. On the one hand, there is something childlike and playful here, as if they are conducting their own private ceremony? Should we see and hear them making their own vows? Should we establish something of their respective relationship to the Church? LUZ (Looking up at the ceiling) It reminds me of being a girl. The soldier catches a rather reproachful look from a passing nun. SOLDIER Yea, getting a good cuff from Fr O’Flynn. Reminds me too.

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If the priest they approach addresses Luz as ‘My Child’, several interesting connections might be made between past, present and future. This is after all the apotheosis of their ‘boy and girl affair’. On the other hand, the moment is tinged with anxiety, even fear: ‘They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.’ Couples often want to make a public demonstration of their love, but there is a telling shift of emphasis in that last phrase. It is as if ‘it’, their affair, needs some sort of external support, or it will dissolve away. It does. After their selftheatrical, even slightly desperate moment in the Duomo they are never ‘united’ in quite the same way again. Of course, the historical context for the story also impinges here. Our soldier is about to return to the front. Their love is incubated in the drama of a massive conflagration (the First World War) but is unable to survive outside it. The turning point in their romantic fortunes seems to come when peace is declared: ‘After the armistice they agreed he should go home.’ The story is a common one. People cling to one another amid the intense thrill of the unknown. There is something of the heightened holiday romance about these two Americans cast far adrift in a foreign war zone. But once the ‘holiday’ is over and ordinary life resumes, something is indeed lost. Once Luz sends him back home she realizes she doesn’t want to join him. They are brought together by war, separated by peace. If one was to seek to expand the story, then their common religious faith (or their different attitudes towards it) would constitute important background. So too might the issue of class. The hints are faint, but Hemingway plants details that any adaptation would build upon. The soldier is to return to Chicago, a city which in 1918 had a reputation for being violent, unlawful and unlovely. We are told ‘It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States’. Both ‘drink’ and ‘his friends’ are undesirable from her point of view. He comes, as they used to say, from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’. This presumable puts Luz on the ‘right side’. She, we are told, ‘would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her’. She, in contrast, is a New Yorker – confident, resourceful. We learn she stays behind in Italy ‘to open a hospital’. Not having ‘known’ Italians before, she starts another affair with a battalion major. Most US Army nurses were working class, but some came from affluent backgrounds, grabbing an opportunity for adventure. Is Luz a girl escaping the confines of her 122

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class background, and demanding her lover do the same? What would make him unacceptable, when it comes to visiting her (and her family)? What is the ‘career’ in which she hopes he will succeed? Notice, too, the other things we aren’t told, his age, his rank. How crucial those decisions would be for any adaptation. We might also ask (Hemingway doesn’t tell us) about the nature of his injury, and how that might introduce an additional dimension to the story. One context into which we, as readers and audiences, almost inevitably throw characters is that of Freudian Psychoanalysis. Whatever their scientific validity, Freud concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression have had a powerful and lingering impact on our thinking and our language. Not only can we interpret fictional characters using these categories, but we probably find them impossible to describe without deploying notions derived from psychoanalysis: ego, id, fixation, denial, libido, the pleasure principle, the oedipal complex. Key concepts of Freudian psychology have become a feature of how we read page and screen, and they have found their way into this book too. In thinking about his relationship with Luz and ‘the bottle’, we probably slip into the role of armchair psychologist, diagnosing his dependency and self-medication in terms of some fundamental insecurity. Being shot at might be reason enough for turning to alcohol, but we can also point to one of the oddities Hemingway drops into his story. Before the soldier’s operation we are told: ‘He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time.’ His fear of giving himself away (his love for Luz? his fear of death? some military secret?) seems like a ‘clue’ the author is offering the reader and screenwriter alike. Our soldier is terribly vulnerable. What would happen if he let himself go?

Workshop: Interrogating character Patricia Highsmith: Those Who Walk Away (1967) Rayburn Analysing fictional characters is not unlike analysing psychiatric subjects. Indeed, many psychoanalysts have made the reverse comparison. Sigmund Freud, the Godfather of the profession, famously used characters from literature to help describe and explain what he found in his patients. He looked into their stories to

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find patterns and triggers from which to extract a deeper narrative that connected past to present, and account for otherwise inexplicable behaviour. To develop a clearer idea of Ray’s inner life, one that we can project on the screen, we need to do a similar job of detective work. As a character, Ray Garrett is quite difficult to ‘get hold of’. He is a slightly remote and undefined figure on the page. Film audiences don’t object to a mystery, but they must be able to engage with it. He mustn’t be vague and wishy-washy on the screen. His ‘passivity’ must be made explicable and interesting, if he isn’t to appear stupid or pathetic. But such is the impact of modern psychological ideas (and especially Freudian ideas), that audiences are constantly alert for what may be hidden in a characters’ past or lurking behind the masks they wear.

Guilt Ray’s ‘problematic’ may be difficult to articulate, but we might discern several separate strands to it. In the first place he is a recent widower. His disorientation is due to a state of shock, but also due to some obscure sense of responsibility for Peggy’s death. We discover that Ray was visiting another woman when Peggy took her life, and Highsmith could have established this as the reason for his self-reproach. But Ray was not having an affair. The novelist raises the prospect of infidelity only to immediately eliminate it again. If he ‘wronged’ his wife, it was not in any conventional or objective way. The fault (if there was a fault) ran deeper than any specific thing he did. We are taken to a less clear-cut place in his conscience. What haunts him isn’t just the violence of Peggy’s suicide, but the implication that her marriage to him didn’t make her life worth living. It wouldn’t be at all difficult to put this thought into Ray’s mouth and make it central to his feelings of self-doubt. Would marriage to another man have made her life more liveable? Does he lack something as a human being that would have made a difference? Decisions:

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To what degree is he a man in mourning for his dead wife? To what degree is he a man in mourning for his good opinion of himself?

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How do we signal his self-loathing (an indifference to his own safety, a desire to drown in drink, lose himself in the shadows)?

Adaptation for Screenwriters

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Do we need to see more of their wedded life than the novel gives us, and if so will it endorse or conflict with Ray’s tormented sense of having been inadequate?

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Ray could verbalize these self-doubts, but how might the film also provide a context for him to address them? Do we need to see him ‘being enough’ in his relationship with Elisabetta?

Confession Ray suffers from a double-bind: ‘The damnable torture of being misunderstood and maligned, combined with the inability to speak to defend himself or even to find an ear: the circumstance, ludicrous rather than pitiable, to anyone who was not in it’ (p.88). Whatever the nature of his ‘guilt’ he feels compelled to ‘confess’, but Coleman will not give him a hearing. He is looking for some kind of absolution, but Coleman denies him any such comfort or closure. Ray’s frustrations don’t end there. Nearly killed by Coleman’s rage, he still can’t turn him in to the police. The father’s rage and the husband’s sadness come from the same place: ‘He’s a man crazy with grief, too, you see’ (p.169). Not only is he prone to inaction and silence, Ray’s prime objective is inconveniently modest. He doesn’t aspire to a heart-felt reconciliation with his father-in-law, he just wants to talk, for it to be understood that there was nothing he could do to save Peggy’s life. None of which helps to raise the emotional temperature of the story to a suitably dramatic level. Another ‘difficulty’ with Ray-as-Hero is that he comes across as rather ‘needy’, seldom an attractive trait. We may appreciate why he is desperate to protest his innocence, but why should the audience care what Coleman thinks? Added to which, being the suspicious creatures that they are, audiences will almost inevitably expect some surprise in the narrative pipeline. Discovering there isn’t one could come as a terrible disappointment. Decisions: ●●

Does Ray have to crave something more decisive, than mere ‘understanding’? Does Coleman have to refuse Ray something more tangible than a mere ‘conversation’?

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How to establish beyond doubt that Ray is telling the truth, and that there is no dark secret to be revealed?

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Status Reading the novel, it is interesting that Highsmith does provide other ‘clues’ to Rayburn’s insecurity. His feeling that life is drained of meaning goes further back than Peggy’s death: ‘It began long ago’ (p.86). The limited amount of backstory we are given implies an element of social anxiety: ‘His […] family had a thin but rich new surface. Therefore, there was, somehow, nothing for him to stand on’ (p.59). He might appear posh, but his confidence and sophistication doesn’t run very deep: ‘afflicted with an inferiority complex, passably attractive, fairly rich, though without any great talent’ (p.208). His class status, based on recently acquired wealth, is precarious. The nouveau riche are typically represented as both ostentatious and lacking in good taste. Jay Gatsby on the Grand Canal? Decisions: ●●

Do we make him a troubled product of American self-confidence – affluent, privileged and insulated from life’s hardships? (Coleman hints towards this).

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Do we expose the nervous boy beneath a thin golden veneer of worldly sophistication?

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How should Ray’s social insecurity reveal itself? Too much concern to be seen as sophisticated? Too ‘proper’?

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How might all this suggest something about his marriage to Peggy? Is there something of the gilded cage about it? She, we are told, was unprepared for life – yet prematurely world-weary and bored by it.

Non-being Coleman believes Ray secretly longs to put an end to himself: ‘His eyes were begging for it’ (p.98). Well, Ray doesn’t exactly want to die, but it isn’t clear whether he positively wants to live either. Peggy’s death has caused him to question the value of life, and he has no answer. In a way Coleman’s function in the narrative is to force that question to a crisis. The eventual answer, thanks to Ray’s experiences of Giudecca and Elisabetta, is a positive ‘Yes’.

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But the question, as posed by Highsmith (albeit implicitly), may go even deeper. If we go looking for clues to Ray’s sense of self we find a clutch of telling phrases: ‘It was as if he were invisible, a ghost’ (p.85), like ‘no-one’ (p.117). Coleman speculates that ‘Ray wanted to feel dead’ (p.140), ‘to get away from himself’ (p.157). There is something rootless and hollow about him at a philosophical as well as a psychological level. And here we can do some profitable research beyond the limit of the text we are adapting. Highsmith’s work is often said to be influenced by Existentialism, a body of philosophy which asserts that human beings are motivated by a primal fear of freedom and personal responsibility. We will do anything to hide from the fact that we are free to choose the way we live. Is Ray Garrett suffering an existential crisis of being? The ‘existential moment’ is the realization when looking over the cliff edge that throwing oneself over or standing still is entirely a matter of free choice, predetermined by nothing and no-one else. It is just the kind of thought that a brush with suicide might prompt. Is Ray suddenly confronted by a void at the centre of his life. Anna Karenina on the Grand Canal? At Peggy’s death ‘a curtain of unreality had come down between him and the world’ (p.63), but this quality of unreality seems to pre-date their marriage. Perhaps, fundamentally, this need to feel real is behind his desire to be ‘understood’. To be understood is to be ‘seen’ for what one really is, and therefore there. The restorative power of Venice (its people rather than its palaces) is in its capacity to dispel this sense of non-being. Might this ‘loss of reality’ explain his refusal to defend himself in the face of naked aggression; at least physical pain is real. Fight Club on the Grand Canal? Decisions: ●●

Do we suggest that at some level he feels he deserves what Coleman dishes out to him? Has Ray a masochistic streak – at least inviting violence as a judgement on himself? We need to decide whether the Rayburn on screen is merely looking to avoid pain or is unconsciously seeking punishment. Does his yearning for anonymity amid the backstreets of Venice shade into a desire for final oblivion – an unconscious death-wish?

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Does his aimless wandering around the watery labyrinth of Venice have a meaningful importance after all? Do we show him brooding on his wounds and on the waters below? Is he circling around the idea of suicide himself?

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Coleman’s verdict is that Ray is ‘weak and neurotic’. Again, not particularly attractive characteristics with which to lumber our protagonist, unless we can encourage the audience to see in him a man with courage enough to look into the abyss of his own inadequacy, and honestly acknowledge what he finds there.

The question, as ever, is how to ‘materialize’ this ‘loss and return of the real’ so that the audience may ‘see’, and so feel it. What might visually signify his self-doubt and insecurity? How might his transcending or accepting it be made manifest? Ray’s fevered reverie might make us think of Pip’s collapse on leaving Jaggers’ chambers allowing the transition from his old delusional view of himself into a reasserted reality.

Reflections Thinking about one character, means thinking about them all. We read Ray through Coleman, and vice versa. Indeed, they are bound together in curious ways, as hare and hound, as ‘father and son’, as men grieving over the same loss. They show a remarkable degree of insight into each other. They may be locked in a deadly struggle, but they also share an undercurrent of feeling that Ray acknowledges even if Coleman does not. In other words, Ray and Coleman form what is termed a dyad, two characters in a mutually reinforcing relationship (e.g. master/servant) within which neither can easily affect any change in themselves. They are caught in a vicious circular embrace. Nothing will satisfy Ray but being ‘heard’ by Coleman. Nothing will satisfy Coleman but silencing Ray for ever. Decisions:

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How can this intractable situation be established and reflected through what we see and hear – through the way their actions echo and mirror each other?

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How many duplications, reversals and inversions might we plant in the script before the exercise begins to seem contrived and artificial – that is before we notice that there is a designer behind the design?

Adaptation for Screenwriters

Coleman But Coleman too is a bit of a conundrum. To be told he is both a ‘self-made man’ and ‘a sponger’ (living off the wealthy women he pursues) creates a seriously incoherent impression. In an attempt to make Coleman both imposing and contemptable, Highsmith seems to have thrown together conflicting impressions which any adaptation would need to iron out. We will return to him in Chapter 5.

Peggy Peggy is a haunting presence in the book, but she hardly exists as a person and this may be the point. She is defined by a lack of fulfilment that the novel does not quite explain. Ray ‘had had no idea of her mental state and was sorry he hadn’t noticed the signs’ (p.151). It is as if we are expected to spot what he missed. Having led what Coleman calls ‘a sheltered life’, she had unrealistic and disappointed expectations of marriage. Her remark that ‘the world is not enough’ (p.87) becomes her signature utterance and may be a muted accusation against the men who have ‘sheltered’ her from the world. Her romantic and idealistic nature may have been to blame, but both men are implicated in the fact that she found no lasting satisfaction in marriage. In the conversation at the Excelsior Hotel Ray mentions her psychiatrist, and her need to ‘talk with someone else besides me, someone who’d try to explain to her what reality was’ (p.41). Coleman immediately relates ‘reality’ to sex, as if Peggy was a reluctant partner and Ray made improper demands. If anything the opposite is true, but sex failed her: ‘It was like reality and not reality with Peggy’. Another reality deficit. Decisions: ●●

In the first instance, we need to decide how much of a visual presence Peggy is to be. Do we see her at all, and if so is she only a suicide discovered in a bathtub? Do we get flashbacks representing Ray’s memory of her? Do we show signs of her disappointment and depression? These choices will inform the audience’s impression of their marriage, and of the life Ray has lost.

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Another question: What do we do with sex? Not that the novel presents any ‘sex scenes’ as such, but when Ray realizes that ‘their marriage was not

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working out, not succeeding in making either of them happy’ (p.179) he relates this failure to Peggy’s sexual appetite – being both insatiable and unsatisfied. Coleman accuses Ray of making too many demands on his daughter, but it is ironically rather the reverse. Given that intimacy and excitement are in short supply we may want to maximize these elements. It will also be impossible to convey what Ray has lost without showing at least a glimpse of the life they had together.

Elisabetta In the novel, the primary function of ‘the peach-faced girl’ is to be a confidante with whom Ray can unlock himself. He actually does all his ‘confessing’ to her, even while he is playfully reinventing his identity (pp.70–1). What she conveniently provides for an adaptation is total licence to indulge in full-blown exposition, revealing everything the audience needs to know. Characterizing Elisabetta will characterize the side of Italy (passionate, generous and relaxed), that Ray evidently warms to and is healed by. Her desire to leave Venice and the limitations of her home life is an ironic reversal of his own appreciation of the city and its people. Her scepticism about him reflects his scepticism about himself, but the fact that she finds him interesting and attractive (even perhaps dangerous) transfers to him the sort of positive qualities we need him to have. But managing Ray’s relationship with this young girl is going to be a delicate operation. If mishandled it could serious damage his ‘character’, and much more besides. Too physical, and he will seem callous and exploitative. Too cool, and she won’t seem anything more than a conveniently placed ear. If she is to play a serious part in his ‘recovery’ there must be something transformative in the feelings they exchange. Their first ‘date’, described in Chapter 6, is a moment of reflective calm after some fairly frenzied action. Any adapting screenwriter could do worse than start here, in an attempt to find Ray’s ‘voice’ and the tangled impulses that are at work in him, as the scene moves through successive stages of intimacy from initial awkwardness to gentle teasing, from embarrassed innuendo to shared confidences. Defining their ‘friendship’ will establish something important about Ray’s capacity for sympathy, consideration and restraint.

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Their last evening together marks just how far Ray has come, under her influence. He seems to have learned something about love – that it should be selfless rather than self-serving (p.225). Perhaps he couldn’t fully live up to this in his marriage, but he can rehearse it with this young girl. The story is about how ‘difficult’ it can be to say just what you mean. He finds something in her freshness and generosity that allows him to drag the truth to the surface: ‘It was easy to say it in Italian, the simple words that did not sound emotional or false, only like the simple truth’ (p.231). Their relationship has been a sort of therapy; confirmation that life can go on. Decisions: ●●

There is no getting away from the fact that Elisabetta is going to represent the potential ‘love interest’ in our film. And we need to make some clear decisions about this. How far do we (they) go in their relationship? Can we risk making Ray seem like a heel, dallying with a beautiful young girl only weeks after his wife’s death? Is their relationship more sentimental than romantic? Is Ray tempted to start an affair, but restrains himself for her sake?

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Nothing will make Ray more ‘sympathetic’ than his interactions with this young woman. Should we bring her character forward, involving her in his secret, drawing her more fully into his world? Or should she remain at a distance, uncontaminated by the sickness surrounding him?

Minor characters Other figures in the story, will serve our understanding of the main characters. Their histories and individualities as found in the book will need to be sacrificed or altered so that they function as efficient reflections of the main action. What role an adaptation would find for Inez will depend on how tightly she can be woven into the deadly game being played out between the two men. In the novel she is concerned for Ray’s welfare, but when she thinks he may be dead she doesn’t seem too concerned about sleeping with a murderer (p.214). Working on the larger canvas of a novel Highsmith can keep this from looking like a blatant contradiction, but a film probably couldn’t. Do we make Inez another facet of Coleman’s corrupt world, or does she become another victim of his monomania?

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The other characters clustered around Coleman’ are motivated by a mixture of fear and fascination. They are always going somewhere, consuming something, dancing edgily around each other. The Smith-Peters show a self-centred indifference to anything beyond their narrow circle of mutually insulating self-interest. When Coleman allows them to believe he has done away with Ray they look at his hands with a sort of awe, and instinctively close ranks: ‘We’ll all stick together’ (p.158). The fact that they are all implicated in a non-crime only makes their spinelessness more contemptable. Even the ‘bit-players’ on the fringe of the main action, like Antonio (Coleman’s enforcer) and Mario (the fisherman who helps Coleman), have a more than narrative function. Collectively they represent those who turn a blind eye. As Ray remarks to Inez, ‘Some people are like that. They’d rather walk away, or push the body into a canal’ (p.212). It is this thought that gives the book its title (though probably not the film!). And lastly, what of Highsmith’s Detective Zordyi? His role is to half-guess the truth and thwart Coleman’s murderous outburst, but we might ask if he would be more than a distraction on screen. Couldn’t the local constabulary be trusted to do this? Nor is it helpful that Zordyi has been sent out by Rayburn’s state-side family to find him. Perhaps he can stay home.

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5 Faithful Invention

5a) Creative interpretation Everything so far has assumed a broad attempt at ‘fidelity’, but we have also acknowledged that infidelity is both inevitable and desirable. It may happen as an automatic consequence of retelling the story using different tools. Or it may occur as the result of strategic decisions reflecting your response to the story and the way you want to retell it. If we look at texts that have been adapted repeatedly, we can see the way personal preoccupations and diverse cultural contexts have resulted in very different treatments. Some inventive adaptations bring out the latent content of the story, others distort or overwrite the original material in the act of dramatizing a preferred reading. It is important to spot the difference. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) has been subject to some very radical revision. With increasing frankness adaptations have revealed the ‘real’ motive behind Dr Jekyll’s experiments, offering to solve the ‘strange case’ with the help of our friend Dr Freud. Some have imposed a textbook psychoanalytic interpretation on the story, clearly presenting Jekyll’s physical makeover as a symbolic transfiguration from ego to id. Stevenson is never explicit about Hyde’s nocturnal activities, leaving it to the reader’s imagination. But no adaptation would forgo the opportunity to follow him into this uncharted territory. Almost every film has invented depravities for him to enjoy, and these have almost always been sexual.

Figure 5.1  Rather incongruously Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 adaptation opens with Dr Jekyll displaying his prowess at the keyboard (his having a mighty stop-organ installed in his drawing room). Presumably this is to suggest delusions of grandeur. Organists do look and sound like masters of the universe.

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Figures 5.2 and 5.3  Victor Fleming’s 1941 remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde makes no bones about Hyde being a blatant sex fiend, and invents a ‘dream sequence’ in which Jekyll is in a wild frenzy, driving a coach pulled by the two women in his life (Hyde’s ‘lover’ and Jekyll’s fiancée).

Figure 5.4 In Jekyll’s ‘dream’ Ivy is imagined as something uncorked from a bottle. In the context of the film’s treatment, this nakedly Freudian symbol makes perfect sense.

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This may seem unremarkable. The novella is unmistakably a coded account of the repressed energies bubbling beneath the sober exterior of the Victorian professional gentleman. Unfortunately, Jekyll’s world does not extend beyond a rather narrow circle of male acquaintances. It comes as a surprise to readers that there is not a single significant female character in the book! There have been film treatments of the story that use the motif of a ‘split personality’ to explore issues of social hypocrisy and drug abuse. Others have played on themes of gender and race, a female Dr Jekyll, a black Mr Hyde. Each reflect anxieties or preoccupations that have little direct relation to Stevenson’s fiction, but potentially a great deal to say to the film’s audience. Some interventions are more limited and localized, but no less striking in their own way. One of the most memorable moments in The Shawshank Redemption comes when Andy commandeers the warden’s public-address system to broadcast an aria from a Mozart opera, The Marriage of Figaro, to the entire prison. The scene has no basis in King’s novella, but it develops Darabont’s personal theme: the liberating power of art. That transcendent power is evident on the face of every prisoner, and in Red’s voice-over: ‘For the briefest of moments every last man in Shawshank felt free’. The scene is much loved for its combination of heroism (Andy will pay for this) and the touching juxtaposition of hardened men and melting music. But it is perhaps most memorable because it sticks out at an odd angle from everything else in the picture. It feels like a detached set-piece, and so it is.

Exercise: Once you have started to insert additional material it isn’t easy to know where to stop. One piece of invention can quickly give rise to another. If and when you are inventing an incident or scene apply the following tests: (a) is this serving the interests of the book (however you conceive them) and (b) is it integrated into the texture of the film as a whole?

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5b) Reframing the picture You may feel you need to do something quite radical to the structure of the story in order for it to hold up on the screen. Novels often recount past events in broken instalments, through narration and dialogue, in such a way that the reader only very gradually pieces them together. In the interests of economy and immediacy installing a prologue bringing backstory and context to the forefront of the film’s narrative can be very effective.

Figure 5.5  Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of The Great Gatsby puts Nick Carraway in a psychiatric hospital being treated for alcoholism. It also makes him a writer. The movie we are going to watch is Nick’s therapy. This may be a slightly hackneyed devise, but it is a perfectly serviceable means of retaining his narrative function.

Sometimes the original narrative material is just too reticent, and the film needs an explanatory framework to support what appears on the page. Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) is a good example. The movie’s lengthy opening sequence is a complete invention. Its complex overlapping symbolism and the iconic image of the drowned girl in her father’s arms has no equivalent in the pages of Daphne du Maurier’s original short story. Unusually, Roeg and his screenwriters, Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, needed to extend the narrative as well as overcome some other (not untypical) ‘obstacles’ confronting them from a cinematic point of view.

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The first words of the story drop the reader into the middle of a conversation between a husband and wife, John and Laura. They are sat at a restaurant table in Venice (yes, Venice), sniggering and making up unpleasant stories about their fellow tourists. Gradually we realize their conspiratorial games and the entire holiday are all part of John’s attempt to coax his wife out of her depression following the death of their daughter Christine. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this, but it throws up a number of problems for the film-maker. For one thing a film audience is going to struggle to find emotional coherence in what they see and hear. Witnessing the couple’s rather juvenile antics, we are likely to view them as silly and rather mean. To then learn that they have only recently lost a child could make them seem positively callous. It would make it hard for us to sympathetically attach to them. The prose narrative readily remedies this confusion by giving us direct access to John’s secret concern for Laura’s mental health, and drawing attention to the psychological complexity surrounding bereavement and healing. Far from having put this family tragedy behind them, they are still struggling to cope with it and return to something like their former selves. The movie dramatizes their antics in the restaurant, but only after an opening scene in which the trauma they have experienced is indelibly impressed on the viewer. In du Maurier’s version we are told Christine died in hospital, of meningitis. In the film she dies in a freak (and freakishly anticipated) accident. There is obviously more theatrical intensity and visual impact in a sudden drowning than in a natural and gradual medical decline, but in staging the inciting incident in this operatic way Roeg isn’t just creating a more heart-rending spectacle. Nor is he merely ensuring that his audience is immersed in the intense emotion from which the events of the story emerge. He is also taking the opportunity to generate a web of interconnected imagery which will pattern the entire film. Other invented elements which the movie adds include John’s career (as a restorer of church architecture), the theme of ‘vision’ (sight and foresight) and the ‘supernatural presence’ of the hooded figure John is destined to encounter at the film’s conclusion. These features are all established in the prologue, creating the impression of a visual puzzle which we the audience are meant to solve. Roeg turns du Maurier’s story of love and loss into a fully cinematic experience, rich in imagery and physical action. By making John an art restorer the couple’s visit to

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Figure 5.6  The intense pain and loss that lingers in the background of du Maurier’s short story is powerfully foregrounded and emotionally amplified in the film, but only because Roeg and Co have radically revised the story of Don’t Look Now (1973).

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Venice is given greater plausibility and purpose, and the theme of retrieving the past is given added force. The city is now more than a convenient venue. With its crumbling churches, canals, bridges and dark alley-ways it becomes a place rich with unstated significance. Christine’s death by water is so thematically integral to the film that it might seem incredible that du Maurier didn’t write it that way. So, the prologue does a number of vital jobs, fleshing out the narrative context, installing the emotional weight of the characters’ experience, embedding ideas and motifs that can resurface throughout. But, for all the reinvention, it is as if Roeg is merely following up a set of implications and possibilities buried within the original text. It’s the same story, but more fully realized. What Nicholas Roeg does in Don’t Look Now Francis Ford Coppola does in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) – but from very different motives. Looking to revisit and revitalize one of cinema’s oldest characters Coppola alights on two big ideas. The first is to present his version of the Dracula story as ‘the real thing’, supposedly bypassing previous cinematic distortions and going back to the original book (hence the rather clumsy title). The second is to make Dracula not only sexy (this has been done to death), but romantic. That the second idea invalidates the first can be overlooked as long as it’s a box-office hit. The combination of horror and romance is now commonplace (think Twilight), but in 1992 this seemed a fresh and exciting possibility. Vampire as hero. Vampire as tortured soul. However, affecting this transformation also necessitated by-passing what Stoker actually wrote, and imagining a different origin for the vampire race. So Coppola front-loads the movie with a pre-history in which Dracula is a medieval warrior; noble, brave and selfless. His beloved wife, Elisabetta (it is not an uncommon name), tricked into believing he has been lost in battle, throws herself from the castle walls, and having committed suicide is forbidden a proper Christian burial. Returning to find her dead, he is heart-broken and enraged. He rejects God and unleashes a terrible curse upon himself. At a stroke Dracula is humanized. The heartless villain of Bram Stoker’s novel is transformed into a suffering victim, tormented by cruel fate, an object of pity as well as terror, tragically misunderstood. Dracula is given motivation and purpose we can identify with. Driven by hatred for what has been done to him, he is nevertheless conflicted by the prospect that Jonathan Harker’s fiancée, Mina, is the reincarnation

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of his lost love. Should he or should he not claim her back for his own? Should he condemn her to a life-in-death like his? Dracula as moral philosopher no less. This is decidedly not Bram Stoker’s Dracula, yet the prologue provides a perfectly logical framework within which to bring him back to life on the screen.

Exercise: Opening your film with a beautiful roof-top spectacle is an immediately attractive proposition, but there might be compelling reasons for beginning your own re-telling of A Very Short Story somewhere else entirely, with a prologue introducing one or other of the two main characters (in New York or Chicago or the Italian battlefront), before they meet and fall in love. What are the pros and cons, and what consequences would flow from each of these choices?

5c) Researching the picture The benefits of research cannot be predicted. You can’t know in advance what it might yield to investigate beyond the confines of the novel or short story you are adapting. Reading reviews or criticism might curtail your own imaginative response or enlarge it immeasurably. Knowing more about the author or reading more of their work might get in the way or open new ground. If the story embraces things you are unfamiliar with (historical, military, medical, etc.) you may need to know just a little or you may need to know a lot. The point is, you never know what you might find useful until you look. If we take our research into Patricia Highsmith a little further we will find that she was also influenced by ideas derived from The Human Mind (1930), a book by the American Freudian psychoanalyst Karl Menninger, in which he draws dozens of thumbnail portraits of different psychological types encountered in his practice. According to Joan Schenkar’s critical biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith (2009), she came across these case histories as a child, finding echoes of her own unusual imagination. In addition to offering an abundance of material for a budding novelist, Menninger’s book also promoted the view that the mentally ill are very little different from healthy

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individuals, and that the slippage from one state to the other is almost imperceptibly slight. This is something Highsmith illustrates again and again in her work. Most intriguing of all, Menninger’s personality profiles return repeated to the ability of the subject to ‘accommodate for reality’. At the head of his chapter on ‘Personalities’, he quotes the novelist Samuel Butler: All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings; living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when we fail flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die. In quiet, uneventful lives the changes internal and external are so small that there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is also great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with little accommodating power. A life will be successful or not, according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes. Samuel Butler The Way of All Flesh (1903) The ground-plan for Those Who Walk Away could be found here: in a story of two men, only one of whom can adjust (just) to the new reality; the other unable to alleviate the strain goes ‘mad’. Funny that the book we are looking at, and the film we are imagining, should turn out to be about adaptation! As a popularizer of Freudian ideas, Menninger’s description of psychological types also utilizes one of Freud’s key clinical distinctions, between the neurosis and psychosis. Both conditions are characterized by a loss of reality, the difference being that the neurotic remains responsive to external reality, whereas the psychotic substitutes external reality with a version of their own internal reality. Something (some circumstance or trauma) causes them both to withdraw into a world of their own making. The neurotic avoids an intolerable piece of reality by repressing it. The repressed content, under certain conditions, will then ‘return’ and exert itself in symptoms that require attention. In contrast, the psychotic deals with the intolerable facts by remodelling reality in such a way that psychologically these facts ‘do not exist’ for them at all. It is interesting that Rayburn and Coleman seem capable of ‘reading’ each other so well. To Coleman Ray is a ‘neurotic’. Ray may not call Coleman a psychotic, but he

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knows that the older man is locked into a picture of the world that he cannot change. Ray eventually accepts something about himself, and about the inexplicability of loss. Coleman does not. He is in a state of denial so absolute that nothing can alter it, he cannot accommodate for this new inexplicable reality, he cannot adapt. Such speculations may seem to take us far away from the world of screenwriting, but reaching out beyond the novel into the intellectual and imaginative hinterland of the author could offer a valuable resource from which to generate a clearer picture of the human dynamics that govern the story. Patricia Highsmith is interested in the twisted heart. Whether the product of spiritual evil, existential terror or psychological illness it is her primary fictional subject, and it needs accommodation – adaptation – on the screen.

Exercise: Only you will know what order of invention is appropriate to your adaptation, so let us go back one last time to Ernest Hemingway. We could begin our short film in Padua, or in a little town called Fossalta di Piave, the place where Hemingway received wounds that led to a spell in an Italian hospital in 1918, and an affair with a nurse he wanted to marry. Can you hear the sound of a typewriter? Voice-over anyone?

Case study: Bullet in the Brain, Dir: David Von Ancken (2001) In 2001 Hypnotic Films released Bullet in the Brain, a short film written and directed by David Von Ancken, based on the celebrated short story of the same name by Tobias Wolff, first published in The Night in Question (1996).

Synopsis A sharp-tongued book critic, known to us only as Anders, is waiting in line at the bank. When the woman ahead of him complains about the poor service he agrees with her, but in an outrageously sarcastic and belittling tone. When two masked

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men burst in brandishing guns, Anders is merely amused, seemingly oblivious to the danger, and offers a running commentary on tough-guy posturing, and their use of lines lifted from old movies. When the gang leader uses one too many pulpfiction clichés, Anders explodes with disdainful laughter: ‘And at that the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head.’ The story then moves into a different dimension and register: ‘After striking the cranium the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lightening that flashed around it. Once in the brain […] the bullet came under the mediation of brain time.’ Time stands almost still, and in another cliché which Anders would have loathed, we are told his life ‘passed before his eyes’. In fact, Anders is afforded only one memory, one defining moment from his childhood. The reader only reaches this memory after being told of all the things (wife, children, job) he did not remember. What he does remember is a hot late summer’s day and a baseball game with boys from the neighbourhood. And the reason it is worth remembering is for a visiting boy from Mississippi, and a single ungrammatical phrase he used: ‘Short’s the best position they is’. Those last two words echo slowly down the channels of Anders’ brain in the last extended instant of his life. The story is about memory and identity, an awakening to something early in life and a loss of that something somewhere along the way. We can hardly believe that the Anders in the bank queue (insensitive and acerbic) is the Anders at the pick-up game (all open-mindedness and wide-eared wonder). The reader is invited to ask how one could have grown from the other, and what those odd little words (‘they is’) signify. There is a lot that one could say, but what is interesting from the point of view of adaptation is that Von Ancken evidently didn’t think he had enough material even for a sixteen-minute film, or that starting where Wolff starts would produce the required on-screen contrast between man and boy. But having decided to expand what Wolff has written, to further investigate the character, and dramatically embody the themes, where to go? Prolonging the scene in the bank would not establish anything new and would possibly detract from the impact of the sudden act of violence. The answer was to provide a prologue that leaves the rest of the story intact, but enlarges our view of Anders, and establishes an emotional background

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against which to compare the idyllic images of the past with which the film will end. So, Von Ancken’s film starts with Anders impatiently fighting his way through a crowded city street, presumably on his way to the bank. A full head taller than anyone else, with a faintly ‘back-woods’ appearance, he is set well apart from his surroundings, moving defiantly against the grain of the modern metropolis. Without a word spoken his dissonant and tightly wound character is established. The hectic street scene fades, to slowly reveal him (earlier) standing stock still in front of a lifeless class of students. Book critics, when they are being book critics, aren’t giving much away about themselves, so the film makes Anders a college professor, teaching creative writing! Instantly, the theme of language and the wonder of words opens wide. Anders sits there in painful silence against the backdrop of a huge empty blackboard. His attention is not on the students, but on his watch, which he slowly adjusts and winds and holds to his ear. Whether racing to the bank or making his audience wait for him to speak, he is preoccupied with the clock. What he cannot know is that, in more ways than one, he is ‘running out of time’.

Figure 5.7  In Bullet in the Brain (2001) Anders’ self isolation is emphasized by the blank screen created by the blackboard .

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We witness a terrible classroom bully, scoffing, scornful and manipulative. When he deigns to speak, he starts up a scalding tirade about their failure as writers: ‘What amazes me isn’t that what you have written is contemptibly bad; that is a given. It’s that you continue to turn up here every week.’ The contempt is all his. He smugly accuses them of smugness and ‘soulless-arrogance’. He criticizes their powers of expression, when his own monologue is cliché-ridden and almost incoherent. He is angry and frustrated. He wants something original from them, something ‘real’, authentic and beautiful: ‘But I don’t hear it, people’. The religious note (‘people’) is deliberate. The actor Tom Noonan brings to the part the towering stature, wild beard and militant baldness of an Old Testament prophet. There is something of the fire and brimstone evangelist about this Anders. He thirsts for a ‘sign’, but he is talking to a wall of blank faces he has beaten into silent submission. He speaks of ‘salvation from the rational’, and in a slightly shocking gesture he kneels before one of them and asks ‘Do you believe? Do you believe in the chance that you can be changed by something as timid as a word?’. As an audience we can probably make no more sense of this than his students do, but it prepares us to understand what is to come. Anders was ‘changed’ by a word. A love of poetry was lit under him by what Wolff calls ‘those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music … They is, they is, they is’. Unfortunately, there are no more happy chances for Anders. Habit and routine have eaten him away. As the original story tells us later on: ‘He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.’ The film replaces ‘writers’ with ‘his students’, and we later see him at his desk gleefully blue-pencilling their work. Whether it is genuine anger at third-rate composition or shame at his third-hand profession (‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, criticise/teach’), he has become bitterly incapable of responding to people. All he hears are recycled words: ‘Oh, bravo,’ Anders said. ‘Dead meat.’ He turned to the woman in front of him. ‘Great script, eh? The stern, brassknuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.’ The prologue helps to build a bridge between Anders present and Anders past, with a compound dramatic image standing for the entire pattern of a life of hope-fuelled disappointment. It strengthens the thematic connections between language and

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memory, meaning and the loss of meaning. What is more it traces the shape of something we might regard as universal: the loss of innocence and wholeness, something decidedly ‘American’ perhaps (the first thing we see on the screen is the fluttering of the Stars and Stripes). Von Ancken has written his interpretation into the film. The classroom scene is a pure invention, but re-reading Wolff’s original story it seems like an extension rather than a departure. To this extent we can call it ‘faithful’. Any one of us would have done something different, but in so far as the film-maker’s creativity has grown straight from the fertility of the literary soil, it is a flowering tribute to the source of its inspiration.

Workshop: Gained in translation Patricia Highsmith: Those Who Walk Away (1967) In examining the novel, we have measured its suitability for adaptation. We have made tentative steps to push the story into a slightly different shape (emphasizing this, extending that) for purposes of plot efficiency, sharper characterization and greater thematic resonance. We have drawn-out and built-up contrasts: Ray the contemplative introvert, Coleman the impulsive extravert; Ray the privileged boy, Coleman the ‘self-made man’. What if we give ourselves more creative licence? We have reflected on the need to tighten the structure through selection, compression and re-sequencing some of the action. But there is something about the novel that will appear quite strange to the screenwriter, something that Highsmith has put in the background of the story, that any film adaptation would seize upon and seek to put front and centre.

Concept Something that Ray, Coleman and Peggy have in common just cries out to be part of the film’s visual and thematic landscape. They belong to a very particular world, the world of art: Coleman and Peggy as painters, Ray as an art dealer hunting Europe for work to exhibit in his New York gallery. Inexplicably, having established this backstory Highsmith does virtually nothing with it in terms of plot, and it plays no

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material part in the story. Yet for an adaptation this is a gift, a perfect opportunity to see characters express themselves ‘in action’, revealing ‘outwardly’ aspects of their inner selves that might otherwise stay locked and hidden in the pages of the book. Whether in painting or talking about painting they would be characterizing themselves and the way they see the world in a wonderfully direct and natural way. All the emotions that run through the story could be expressed visually in the form of concrete images on the screen. Not only is it an undeveloped feature of the story, it also represents another discordant element in Highsmith’s characterization of Coleman. In every other respect he is presented as materialistically driven, having ‘bluster[ed] his way into moneyed society in America, carrying off one of the prizes as a wife, forging to the top of his engineering firm, forming a company of his own soon after, and then quitting the business cold’ (p.180). Our conventional cultural assumptions about ‘art’ and ‘artists’ are radically challenged by such a strange biography. Of course, in real life renowned poets can have successful careers in banking and insurance, and oil executives can become archbishops, but film audiences expect characters to exhibit a singularity of identity, where all their parts hang neatly together. It is a bit much for Coleman to be an engineer, businessman, entrepreneur and an artist. These competing impressions don’t so much create a three-dimensional character, as a cardboard cut-out sporting conflicting images on its opposite sides.

Decisions ●●

Again, Coleman needs simplifying. Why not just make him ‘the Artist’, but at the same time take Highsmith’s hint that he is a man for whom painting is bound up with money and machismo, power and prestige. Think Picasso, minus the humility! An artist, yes, but a man who likes to control people the way he controls the figures on his canvas.

On the one occasion Highsmith does make direct thematic use of Coleman-the-Artist, it happens to be highly revealing. Chapter 8 describes him in the act drawing people from a peculiar overhead angle, reducing people to faceless and barely recognizable shapes. As a sign of his elevated, detached and distorted attitude to the world, it is almost too literal. Coleman sits in judgement above the world like a vengeful god.

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Decisions ●●

If this is the view from Coleman’s mental window, what does it suggest about his more immediate relationships? Did he view his daughter from the same cold distance? Is his violence an extension of his contempt for the world, or just reaction to losing his one human connection? The novel leaves this in some doubt, but in the interests of clarity the script will need to steer the director, actor and audience towards an answer.

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Having already identified themes of reality and identity within the story, the field of visual art also opens irresistible opportunities to express and vivify what is at stake in the conflict between Ray and Coleman.

Still we may feel there is more we need to add to what Highsmith has given us, if the film is to ‘cut through’ cinematically.

What if ●●

What if, at the Excelsior Hotel, in front of everyone, Ray asks Coleman to donate a painting to his gallery? Instantly it would pull together narrative threads left loose in Highsmith’s story – giving Ray a positive reason to visit Venice, giving expressive form to the struggle between them. Coleman as Artist-God, Ray as talentless supplicant. Coleman may sponge off women, but he can accuse Ray of being the real parasite. Would this give us what we need, an older man who is physically vigorous, decisive, even reckless, and a younger man who is intellectually internalized and racked by uncertainty?

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What if Ray asks for one of Peggy’s paintings, one of those we are told Coleman seized in Mallorca? Again, Coleman would be characterized by grabbing what he wants, while Ray, spoilt and spoon-fed, expects it to be returned to him by right of inheritance. And these attributes could become visual signatures, Coleman snatching and clutching, Ray unable to hold onto things. And what would this painting say about her? The novel tells us Coleman disapproved of her work. Why? Because it represented her independence from him? Because she was more artistically adventurous than he, or less? Did she ‘betray’ his aesthetic ideals. What if his past rejection of her work is the source of Coleman’s guilt in relation to Peggy’s death?

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What if (a further stretch) it is a painting of Peggy, one painted by Coleman himself? The novel features a photograph of Peggy that Coleman jealously guards. Why not a painting? Coleman’s possessiveness could be concretized in this one object. Peggy is already reduced to a disputed image. Turning that image into a physical object which Ray and Coleman can wrangle over has obvious dramatic utility.

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What if the content of the painting is the crux: Peggy as child, Peggy as bride, Peggy as an idealized abstraction? Each picture would tell a different story concerning father and daughter. Perhaps a painting by Peggy herself might give an even more disturbing version of their relationship, something Coleman wants to keep secret and hidden. What sort of painting do we want Coleman to produce; impossibly sentimental, coldly unflattering, savagely fierce, mysteriously cryptic or physically lurid?

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What if the image is genuinely disturbing? Given the way Peggy’s sexuality is treated, it might be tempting to take Coleman’s ‘monstrosity’ into even darker areas. Is the picture too revealing? One reason for not going down this route lies in the novel itself. For an artist of the mid-twentieth century Coleman is oddly prudish: ‘Do you think I wanted her to grow up knowing all the – the dirty side of life the way most girls do?’ (p.42). Does this refusal to accept Peggy as an adult woman suggest other aspects of their relationship? A second reason for steering away from a more extreme treatment of sexuality might be that such a development would overshadow every other aspect of the story, and throw the balance of the film entirely away from Ray’s internal struggle.

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What if we never see the painting – or see it only at the film’s conclusion?

Channelling their antagonism in this way and focusing on the ownership of a painting could open up dramatic possibilities that were never part of Highsmith’s overt intentions, but are only one small step beyond them. This is not so much departing from the novel, as drawing upon its narrative resources and drawing out its thematic implications. Firming up this context would give greater substance to the personal conflict and a larger resonance to the tragedy behind it. Questions concerning ‘Art’, what it is, and what it does, vivify and concretize the contested perceptions of husband and father. In ‘re-presenting’ reality does art reveal what is truly there, or falsify it? Does it shed light on reality, or caste the obscuring shadow of the artist over it? If we look at

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Coleman’s painting of Peggy are we presented with the body of the subject or the mind of the painter? Is art a liberating enterprise, or merely the exercise of power? Now that’s a topic for a screenwriter! Again, these speculations do not form an active part of the novel, but they are already implicitly there in our reading of it. More important still, they provide a means of making tangible the opposing psychological dispositions of the characters, and furnishes a way of manifesting the very elemental struggle at the core of the book. Both Ray and Coleman lay claim to the memory of the dead girl. A picture of her both substitutes for her physical presence and visually represents what in her absence she has become, an image. The painting would bestow on the movie the metonymic element in which all the emotions and issues could converge. To speak of the dead woman as ‘territory’ is grotesque, but it brings out a wider political and cultural dimension that may surface too. Peggy is caught between ‘daughter’ and ‘wife’ with no independent space of her own. Turning her into a commodity, an artefact – created, contested and exchanged, she is re-made as the projection of their fears and desires.

Decisions ●●

What if some portion of Ray’s deliverance from his mental torment is the recognition of this (in fact there are hints enough in the novel itself )? What if, having been handed ‘the painting’ – presumably by Inez (Coleman having been ‘taken into custody’) – he promptly destroys it: ‘Coleman didn’t paint Peggy, ….he painted over her’?

Research If we were looking to tie things together still further, we could take advantage of the setting. The city’s biannual festival of art, the Venice Biennale, could plausibly account for all the characters converging there. The publication of Highsmith’s novel coincides with a striking cultural moment. The 1964 Exhibition introduced continental Europe to American-inspired Pop Art. In 1968 students nearly closed it down, protesting at the commercialization of the festival by the awarding of prizes. This generational conflict might easily fit the story we are evolving around father and daughter.

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Decisions ●●

Should Coleman be the Godfather of Pop Art (think Andy Warhol), or is he hostile to everything it represents? Which would better capture his materialistic and controlling personality? Is Coleman all about the prizes, the fame and the money? Does he ridicule the hippy idealism of the 1960s counter-culture, or cynically exploit the zeitgeist for his own financial ends?

Playing the drama out against this backdrop would provide both narrative coherence and spectacle. Rather than hotel bars and restaurants, characters could meet in the US National Pavilion, surrounded by a swirl of artists and groupies, garish fashions and even more garish canvasses. Amid such heady excitement and visual excess, Ray’s retreat to Giudecca would be even more striking. In addition, this context would provide the film with a signature ‘look’: long hair, rollneck sweaters, checked trousers and elasticated boots, not to mention a rocking soundtrack!

Decisions ●●

Screenwriters don’t get to cast actors or pick the music, but doing both (in your head) can provide the sort of internal guidance you need to impose a particular flavour or tone to the whole shebang.

Opening If we choose to make these creative interventions, they should probably shape the film from the beginning. There may be no need for a ‘prologue’ as such, but we do need to decide between the two dramatic ‘openings’ presented in the book. We could follow the opening pages and drop the audience into the conversation Ray and Coleman are having – and Bang! Or we could begin with the inciting event that lies behind that conversation, Ray’s discovery of Peggy’s body bleeding into the bathtub. Both are as startling as any film-maker could wish, but therein lies the problem. On the screen, the impact of one could easily overshadow and weaken the impact of the other. Of course, Peggy’s suicide (narrated retrospectively in the book) could be rendered in a ‘flashback’, but where to put it so that the audience isn’t overwhelmed or even confused? 152

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One solution would be to meld the two together to create a visually immersive complex set of impressions which (handled with care) could help to establish the overall tone of the film, one in which past and present are continuously cutting into one another. What if the opening shots move back and forth between the conversation on the street (with initially ‘cryptic’ exchanges regarding ‘her’) and Ray entering the house in Mallorca, walking past workrooms, up the stairs, into the bathroom. The precise visual details are for a director to decide, but the script can orchestrate the action so that the sight of Peggy’s body and the gunshot coincide in a sudden doubleblow that conveys the swirling emotional confusion Ray is experiencing, as well as immediately tying together the three key factors of death, grief and rage.

Motifs After a ‘blackout’, both screen and soundtrack might slowly return to reveal Ray – wounded, disorientated and astonished to be alive. The following scene could follow the novel, showing him before a bathroom mirror slowly washing his flesh wound, with Coleman’s words and images of Peggy returning to him as blood and water, constant presences in the film, slowly drip back into the basin. Here we might have a repeated motif that at any moment can cue us into Ray’s memory and emotion: the slow climbing of stairs, the sound of running water, a hand upon a door-handle, another hanging limp and dripping blood. Nothing more explicit is needed. Wherever hands are at work; painting, caressing, snatching, ‘killing’, there would be a reference to the tragic well-spring of the story. The rhythm of repetition would become an integral part of the film’s unfolding narrative. In the interests of clarity, economy, dramatic force and thematic unity, there’s quite a lot in favour of such a strategy. Coleman’s subsequent assaults could retrigger, extend and enhance this memory-scape, including other telling details, or swiftly edited ‘out-takes’ from their married life (making love, paint-brushes swirling in a beaker of water, a burning canvass, who knows).

Anti-climax Having dealt with the potentially overwhelming beginning of Those Who Walk Away, we must consider its potentially underwhelming climax.

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In chapter 19 the tension steadily builds, until Coleman suddenly bursts through a crowd of tourists and once more launches himself at Ray. But he is easily thwarted, his length of lead pipe is confiscated, he goes rigid with impotent rage, falls down, bangs his skull and hurts his elbow. Ray is saved, again, by the intervention of his pal Luigi. It is an ignominious conclusion to their warfare, and one that risks them both looking limp and foolish. As readers, we are probably thinking, ‘is that it?!’ But then this was never going to be an action movie, with a final shootout on Main Street. The thriller aspect has to be psychological. With this in mind, we can follow the novel and stage the final reckoning in the relatively secure surroundings of the police station. They are at last in ‘a locked room’, but just when we expect a verbal showdown Coleman clams up: ‘Why is my affair’ (p.242). As scriptwriter we would have to make it our affair, finding ways to satisfy the audience’s need for finality.

Closing Whatever we think this novel is about needs to be ‘made available’ to the audience (as thought or feeling) as the film closes. Over and above what happens, what do we understand to be at stake? Our reading so far has emphasized ‘reality’ as the key concept. The book is a thriller (of sorts), but it also has something quite profound to say about the human impulse or tendency to supplant reality with something else, to convert real people into images and projections that serve our own selfish demands. (We see something like the same thing in Bullet in the Brain). The challenge for our adaptation (as so often) is how to externalize these implications. One strategy has been to invent a portrait of Peggy, both as a sign of her objectification and as an object we can see these men fighting over. But Highsmith herself provides another ‘device’ which could serve this purpose very nicely. A silk scarf may seem like a flimsy and trivial thing on which to focus at the conclusion of the story. Nevertheless, it does an important job in the novel, and could do a valuable service in our movie. Highsmith explicitly described it as ‘a false prop’ (p.214). Both men clutch at it as a ‘memento’ of the dead girl, even though it never belonged to her. Ray bought it only days before, ‘on impulse’, as the sort of thing Peggy might have worn. On first sight Coleman craves possession of it, and steals it to deprive Ray of the privilege: ‘Now he carries it in his pocket all the time. He guards it’. This he can

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own. Again, it serves as a token substituting for the real thing: ‘People carry crosses. They’re not the real cross’ (p.215). The scarf is a false relic. Again, there is something here about the real and the manufactured, the actual and the artificial, ‘authenticity’, which the subject of art could perfectly point up in the film. Is there something ‘inauthentic’ about grief, once it has turned the subject into an object – once it is promoting an idea of someone that replaces the person they were?

Coda The last pages of the penultimate chapter are full of curious moments, as Ray seems to break down at the spectacle of Coleman’s descent into madness. You will need to investigate them for yourself, and decide their significance for the film. There is a danger that we have created a Coleman who is much more interesting than Ray, who in the end simply (yes) walks away. His plans are unclear, as is the tone of the last pages. But there are things we might latch onto: the fact that Ray is pleased at the thought of Elisabetta getting married (should he stop outside Bar Dino, and give her a distant benediction), his gazing at the children at play (signs of restored health and normality of vision), his refreshed appreciation of the city: ‘The expanse of San Marco made again the vast “Ah-h” in his ears’ (p.246). He smiles at pecking pigeons. In the final chapter Inez pronounces Coleman insane: ‘Absolutely out of his head. On the subject of you and his daughter’. But Ray retains his admiration for the older man: ‘Coleman had conviction, even if the conviction was mad’. Was it lacking the capacity for such passions what made Ray feel unreal even in the face of personal tragedy? Has contact with Elisabetta and Co rekindled some of that life in him? Has Coleman’s deathly intensity reawaken in him a sense of the real? How should these sentiments be made explicit? Does he need to express gratitude to Coleman? Should Inez offer him the picture of Peggy, and Ray refuse it: RAY Coleman’s a good painter, but it isn’t a good likeness?

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INEZ What did he get wrong? RAY That she was more than his daughter – just as she was more than my wife. He only painted what he saw. What did you see?

INEZ

RAY Something I didn’t understand. The older woman’s final advice seems insensitive: ‘You should have more confidence in yourself – Find another girl to marry’. Highsmith tells us ‘Ray had no reply to that’ (p.249), but this might be the moment for him to say, and for the first time, exactly how he feels about Peggy: ‘Didn’t you know – I’m on my honeymoon. Peggy and I decided to postpone it till the gallery opened. We were going to come to Venice – and forget painting for a while’. And with that he can fly off, an empty seat beside him, but less alone than Coleman raging against the emptiness. Coleman is submerged in a fictive past, Ray has retrieved something from the wreckage. Of course, by adding uplift and transcendence, we could be accused of the very sentimentality Highsmith’s novel assiduously avoids. Other possibilities will suggest themselves to the attentive reader of Those Who Walk Away. With Psycho in mind we might be tempted by a final image of an incarcerated Coleman turning from a sketch he is drawing, and grinning at the camera. Zombies never quit, right? Well, yes. But that last moment will be the lasting impression through which the whole of the film will be viewed and remembered in retrospect. Is that what you would want? Think about it.

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Part 3 The Process

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6 Developing the script

This chapter draws together the practical advice about the adaptation of prose to screen. It deals with generic questions, tips and pointers. It considers some of the key decisions to be made before starting the process of adaptation. Analysis then develops with a short story, Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour (1894) as an exemplar for you to then work with your own examples. You are also provided with a draft short film, a very short film at six minutes in length. Questions are posed about some of the decisions made in this adaptation so you can evaluate it, rewrite sections, change the setting, change the time period, the characters or even start again from scratch.

6a) The short film option There is a focus on short film in this final section as this provides a good testing ground for your skills as a writer before committing yourself to the task of adapting a novel. This still uses the information and advice identified in this book but focuses on a form that, generally speaking, tends to be more straightforward in structure. It is an obvious but important point to remember that short film tends to be more straightforward in structure because it is shorter in length. This comparative simplicity in structure allows you the room to ‘play’ with form. Short film can be more experimental, and this allows you creative room as a screenwriter. While there are always exceptions to any rule, general principles of short film include: ●●

Few characters – ideally no more than three.

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Limited locations – you can still travel in time and space if you need to but avoid having to introduce new locations.

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Avoid sub-plots – there is little time to develop your main sub-plot.

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Dialogue should be essential – this is a maxim for all scripts, but in a short film there is little space and time for too much general chatter. All dialogue must count.

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Use genre – an audience will know where they are from cinematic convention. Use this to your advantage in establishing genre at the start of your film – even if this is somewhat loose.

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Plunge your audience in to the action – there isn’t always the time to slowly set up events, so we can start in the middle of story action.

Short film can be more like a fable and you can use techniques as they suit the form of your story. It is a good idea to watch as many short films as you can to see how different writers and directors have used different techniques. It doesn’t matter if they are adaptations or original dramas, the devices others have used can be incorporated in to your script.

What is a script? This might seem to be a fundamental question to be asked so far in to this book. It is something that it is important to remind yourself of and for you to decide for yourself. There are many books that make a claim to how you should write a script, many of them ‘how to’ guides to selling a screenplay. What many of the them miss is that what a script is first and foremost is a writerly document; it is something which bears your hallmark as a writer. Unlike the writer of prose fiction or even the stage dramatist your work is rarely seen outside the crew who make the film. This leads to what is perhaps the most misleading metaphor for what a script is – a blueprint. In real terms the script does serve some of the functions of a blueprint as it is a necessary prerequisite for the film that follows. However, a blueprint carries with it connotations of a technical document which a crew will follow to create a film. Not only does this negate the creative input of the film production team (including actors) it has the potential to reduce your own creative approach to the work that is being developed. While a script is not then a blueprint it is a foundation for that which follows and as such it has to conjure the essence of the film. You are presenting a piece of writing which is intended to make the reader ‘see’ the film as a film. This is not the same as

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the private imagined space of prose fiction, your work is intended to appear in a different place with related formal differences. This perhaps leads to some otherwise obvious statements about the nature of script, but these need to be stated. Part of the challenge of adaptation is distancing yourself from the way the prose writer uses words to the way that you will use them as a screenwriter.

Considering structure Perhaps the best way to start your script is to consider structure. It is common for scriptwriters to work with a synopsis and a treatment. It might appear that in having a prose ‘original’ you have an existing synopsis, but remember that prose fiction is intended for a different audience. It can be useful to you as a screenwriter to write a brief synopsis of the story that you are going to tell, bearing in mind this will be in screen. This will aid you in deciding what your adaptation will be about. Don’t rely on the text. Read the story and then work from your imagination, not from your memory. This synopsis will provide you with a brief document which will allow you to evaluate what is now your story and the various decisions you might make about structure and form. Once you have a clear sense of what your film is about you can start the process of considering structure: ●●

Start by noting down the key scenes in the short story or novel you are adapting, make sure this is in linear form as it is in the book.

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This is essentially a step outline/step treatment, a device that allows you to evaluate the structure of your script. This is where you can start experimenting.

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Be efficient with your scenes, note down what is in the book and then consider how this might work on screen. Delete and add scenes as you see fit.

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Ensure your film has a clear narrative sequence, you can disrupt this, as long as there is one somewhere.

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Ask yourself what the story is about, this is your act of interpretation. From evaluating the structure of your work is your film going to say something else?

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Ask yourself other fundamental questions about what you want your adaptation to say. It doesn’t have to be the same as the prose fiction and arguably can’t be. Make sure you are clear about the meaning of your work.

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Once you have an outline structure you can begin with your script. ●●

Show rather than tell, this is a cliché because it is true, show whenever you can.

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Use all the channels of communication that film offers you, this means voice, sound effects, music and graphics in addition to images.

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Identify what dialogue can be used in your film. You can always edit this further later.

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Establish environment first, this can be swift or you can dwell on location.

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Establish characters in relation to space, they can fit in, or seem at odds in the environment you have created.

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Consider whether/how you are signifying genre, and what this will do to locate an audience in a story world.

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Never describe what characters are thinking, that can’t be shown.

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Avoid voice-overs. You can use voice-overs and many films do but the temptation is go straight to the voice-over as a device, as telling a story is easier than showing. Avoiding the use of this will demonstrate when it is essential.

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Dialogue should be used where essential, take freely from what the prose writer has used, but remember that people in novels speak differently from people in films.

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Draw out specific signifiers of place and time. Prose can do this very quickly and very efficiently with a couple of words. Your task is to make this visual where possible. You should also use other channels available in cinema, such as music.

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Allow events to unfold, don’t pre-empt what we are going to see.

The question to keep asking yourself throughout the writing process is ‘what do you want your audience to feel?’ Like any artistic form film should have an emotional impact first and foremost, what do you want that to be and how are you going to achieve this? The prose writer whose work you are adapting will have used techniques suitable for prose. The question is how you make this work on screen via your development of a script. Always remember that first and foremost you are a writer dealing in script.

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6b) Evaluating the story The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin (1894) seems to have many of the characteristics that would make it particularly suitable for translation to short film form. There are two main characters, one central location and a central event. However, the story is fraught with problems for the screenwriter. Much is told and little shown and much is implied. Mrs Mallard’s death through joy is a statement of fact and is so central to the meaning of the piece that it has to be foreshadowed through action as a medical condition. We also have to have something of an understanding of her relationship with her husband to understand that she is happy that he is dead (and so are we) and we understand her relief, regardless of the fact that she dies. Chopin’s story doesn’t specify a particular time and place, this can only be inferred as America in 1894 by direct reference to the author herself. However as this will appear on screen a decision has to be made about location (spatial and temporal). From this will come a series of expectations of how people would have or will behave. There is a sense that our lead character is trapped in a situation that she would otherwise wish to escape. A later Victorian setting presents opportunities for enclosed or trapped social settings in which this could happen; although this could be easily translated to the 1920s, 1940s or 1970s. Historical location presents us with an opportunity as well as a problem. The presence of modern technology and modes of travel would seemingly allow for confirmation of Brently Mallard’s welfare. He would also have been able, in theory, to get a message home. The setting has to be one where such modes of communication are limited otherwise convoluted reasons have to be developed for communication not to take place. This has to be set against telling a more contemporary story. The content of the story remains consistent. This is the story of a woman trapped in a deeply problematic relationship and who is initially shocked to lose her husband, but that this is quickly overtaken by her joy at her freedom. Our understanding of her desire to be free has to be maintained in order for the dual tragedy of the ending to be effective. This is a deeply psychological story and therein lies the challenge in terms of adaptation. Some of the structural and representational issues are identified below:

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Knowing that Mrs Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

There is little information about the central character at this stage although later we discover that she is young. This will be something which will be seen straight away.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of ‘killed’. He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

This opening provides us with a great deal of information about what has happened and who is providing the information. This is crucial but gives a great deal of the story early on.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralysed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There is an emotional dimension to Richards and his assurance that it was Brently Mallard who was killed. The relationship between Mallard and Richards is therefore important. The implication is that he shouldn’t be cognisant that his wife might be pleased at her husband’s death.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

The initial response is important – that we consider her response to be one of grief, later to be replaced with joy.

She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

This passage suggests physical action which can be used as part of the script if required.

There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

This passage allows for action and a mood of the environment, which can be translated to earlier in the story.

She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

Again this suggests environment, but this seems to be much more important. The weather suggestive of her mood.

She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

This section represents a movement in her response, where she moves from a character who is distraught to one who is relieved.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching towards her through the sounds, the scents, the colour that filled the air.

This section is problematic as it raises questions. This can be inferred through action, but this in itself might be vague. It could be reflected through the comments of others on her behaviour, although that might suggest that action has to take place over a longer time period.

Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will – as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: ‘free, free, free!’ The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

The action in this section can be replicated but the mouthing of the words seems somewhat unnatural in practice and rather quick for the realism that we associate with film. Again there may be a way to translate this in to action which appears to be more believable in a film.

She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and grey and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

This view of her future is important but is difficult to translate to screen as it is told with emotion, but without clear form. This might relate to the point above, where we might see her making some significant changes in her life which show the freedom she has been afforded.

There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.

This suggests that she has been stifled by social convention and by a domineering partner. This is something that will have to be established earlier or alongside her actions for us to understand her response. This is about the flow of information to the audience and there are benefits to this being established alongside.

And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

This is an important contradiction in Chopin’s story but there is a question as to whether this needs to be in the adaptation. Should this be a loveless and controlling marriage which she is happy to escape?

‘Free! Body and soul free!’ she kept whispering.

Again this wouldn’t translate well to screen – it doesn’t sit well with contemporary representation.

Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. ‘Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door – you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.’

This build up is important to the drama of Brently Mallard’s return.

‘Go away. I am not making myself ill.’ No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.

This dialogue might work, but this is dependent on the temporal/historical setting.

Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

This vision of the future is important to underline the tragedy of her husband’s return.

She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

The continued presence of all the characters allows for a broader response to his return which could usefully show the surprise.

Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’s quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

There is a great deal of information given in this last section. Without some other form of delivery this is impossible to get across. To reveal anything of this earlier would be to dispel the important surprise. There is also a potential for humour to creep in via adaptation which would not work with the film.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of the joy that kills.

This final section can be delivered through the inclusion of an epilogue and a doctor or can be implied, dependent on how far she has cast aside his memory earlier on.

6c) Writing the script 1 EXT. MINE TOP – DAY

 A piercing sun hovers over the empty black hole of the mine entrance. A rugged landscape full of rugged men, all in line, ready to descend in to the bowels of the earth.  Amongst them is the ruggedly handsome BRENTLY MALLARD (35), wearing clean overalls. He slowly makes his way to the front of the queue of miners. He’s stoic, taking his turn underground.  A grizzled man thrusts a set of papers in to his hands. This is RICHARDS (55) and he is clearly not happy about being here.

2 INT. MINE SHAFT – DAY

 BRENTLY enters the wire cage lift ready to descend in to the depths of the earth.  A few grubby miners enter the cage. He neatly side steps them, despite the cramped conditions. A flash ofconcern plays across his face as the cage descends sharply.

3 EXT. SUBURBAN STREET – DAY

 Daylight pours down an overly idyllic suburban street. Principal titles play over children in short trousers playing with sprinklers, riding their bikes in the endless summer sunshine. Music plays: The Monkees ’Daydream Believer’.  The sound becomes tinny and slightly distorted as it morphs into the sound from a transistor radio on someone’s front porch.

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4 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, KITCHEN – DAY

Judging by the equipment in this kitchen we aren’t in the 21st century – not even close. LOUISE MALLARD (30) is sat at the kitchen table, and is rolling her sleeve down as DR SMITH (65) is packing a Gladstone bag.

DR SMITH You’ll be just fine Louise. You’re as healthy as I am.

DR SMITH coughs loudly in to his hand as Louise looks on, a smile playing round her mouth.

LOUISE Thank goodness for that.



DR SMITH Brently still away?



LOUISE Yes, but Rachel is still here.

DR SMITH  Good... It’s nice to have family around. DR SMITH exits, leaving LOUISE sat at her kitchen table holding her arm gently and carefully. We wait with her for a little too long, the all pervading silence becoming oppressive. LOUISE looks at the table, unmoving. 5 EXT. THE MALLARD HOUSE – DAY The house is too perfect, right down to the white picket fence and beautiful birdsong. LOUISE is outside her perfect house, mowing her perfect lawn, hitting perfect stripes each time. JOSIE (35) appears from the kitchen door. Developing the Script

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JOSIE Louise... Louise!

LOUISE can’t hear for the noise of the petrol mower. JOSIE runs over and taps her on the shoulder.

JOSIE Louise. Its Brently...

LOUISE looks momentarily panicked.

JOSIE ... on the phone.

LOUISE hurries to the house, the petrol mower left, ticking over. 6 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, KITCHEN – NIGHT LOUISE is at the kitchen table with JOSIE, the remnants of a simple meal on the table. They are laughing and joking. JOSIE gets up and goes to a bunch of delivery flowers on a nearby kitchen top. A note and the packaging are piled next to the sink. JOSIE takes a vase from a shelf and carefully arranges the flowers as LOUISE watches.

JOSIE So, how is Brently?



LOUISE He’s fine. Busy... Always busy.

JOSIE  I couldn’t work down a hole like that. Dark. Difficult. LOUISE pauses, pensive and silent.

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JOSIE  Don’t worry yourself. He’ll be fine. JOSIE misreads LOUISE’s silence as concern and looks at her sister with care. She’s almost simpering. We sit with them uncomfortably — we’re there for just a moment too long. 7 EXT.THE MALLARD HOUSE – DAY Another blistering day – a pleasant valley Sunday. LOUISE is sipping a coffee and enjoying watching the world go by. She walks idly down to the front of her house, stopping by the border. Absentmindedly she runs her foot along the edge of the low fence. Suddenly she gives the thin fence a sharp kick, the unexpectedly forceful blow cracking and splintering the wood. LOUISE looks up sharply. Relief, no one saw her. She hurries to the house regardless. 8 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, KITCHEN – NIGHT The kitchen is empty and beautifully tidy. Rain pours against the window. A doorbell sounds and we hear JOSIE answer the door. There is muttering. JOSIE call for her sister. 9 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, LIVING ROOM – NIGHT We enter part way through a conversation. RICHARDS is sitting on the edge of a couch, his hair slicked back from the rain. JOSIE is sat opposite listening intently. LOUISE is hold her hand and wrist, as if she is supporting her weight, despite her being sat down.

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RICHARDS  I didn’t know until I got back you see. I was in the air when the accident happened. The call came from the office when I got home... There is silence. What can anyone say? LOUISE continues to look at the floor. ... I came straight here as soon as... LOUISE gets up and walks out the room, pulling the door behind her. RICHARDS falls to silence. 10 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, BEDROOM – NIGHT

LOUISE is sat on her bed, her knees drawn to her chest, sobbing.

JOSIE (O.S.) You okay in there?... Lou?

She is clutching a picture of herself and BRENTLY in happier times. The picture goes falls, limp in her hand.

11 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, LANDING -DAY

JOSIE is standing next to the bedroom door, her arms folded against herself – a desperate attempt to provide herself with comfort. It doesn’t look like she’s slept well. Her voice becomes more and more urgent.

JOSIE Louise, open the door! Come on ... open the door.

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JOSIE leaves the frame and O.S., whilst we stare at the door, we can hear the dialling of a phone and JOSIE asking for DR SMITH.

12 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, BEDROOM – DAY

LOUISE hasn’t slept either, but she looks rather better on it. The photograph is lying on the bed face down.



LOUISE is looking in the mirror and brushing her hair.

13 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, KITCHEN – DAY

DR SMITH is deep in conversation with JOSIE. They look through the window, as startled as us at the sound of a petrol engine starting.



Close inspection shows them LOUISE pushing the lawnmower quickly up and down, cutting stripes in the opposite direction to yesterday.



She runs over the central path, catching the concrete on the blades as she goes. The desperate and damaging scraping noise doesn’t deter her – she carries on regardless.

14 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, KITCHEN – DAY

LOUISE joins a startled looking DR SMITH and JOSIE. JOSIE  For heaven’s sake Louise. You’ll make yourself ill.



LOUISE (With a laugh) Make myself ill?

LOUISE takes her sister round the waist and gives her a familial hug.

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LOUISE  Perhaps I should look after myself then. Perhaps I’ll take a holiday!

They are stopped by the sound of a doorbell, which JOSIE leaves to answer. The is a brief awkward silence between a beaming LOUISE and a quizzical DR SMITH.



JOSIE returns with a much drier but rather crumpled RICHARDS. She has a beaming smile. JOSIE  Mr Richards stayed at the hotel last night. He’s come back with some news. Now are you feeling? Okay, Louise? LOUISE  I’m fine Josie. Dr Smith, I’m fine. Mr Richards, I’m fine. I’m free, body and soul.



The exuberance coming from LOUISE is halted as DR SMITH looks outside with surprise bordering on shock. RICHARDS  You see the call came before we confirmed the facts. I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you before, well... I didn’t mean to cause you any...



LOUISE follows DR SMITH’s gaze to see a smiling BRENTLY stood in the middle of the path. He’s looking directly at her, a smile playing across his lips.



RICHARDS’s apologies audibly fade as LOUISE collapses.

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15 INT. THE MALLARD HOUSE, BEDROOM – NIGHT  BRENTLY is sitting on the edge of the bed, forlorn. He has been through some tough times but this has almost finished him off.

DR SMITH enters the room and stands in front of him. DR SMITH  I’m so sorry Brently. It was her heart. It must have been the joy that killed her. DR SMITH Pauses and goes, leaving BRENTLY to his own  thoughts. He stands. Sees the picture lying on the bed, replaces it on the dressing table, pausing to eye the frame with pin point accuracy. Happy with the alignment he leaves, closing the door behind him. We wait in the room alone, unmoving. FADE TO BLACK END

Questions There are many questions to be asked about the story, but this section focuses on the choices made in presenting this script. The question is not whether this is a ‘good’ adaptation or not, we know that is a question that is impossible to answer. Instead we need to ask whether this is an ‘effective’ script.

Opening ●●

Do we need that opening sequence (‘prologue’) in which we see Brently?

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If we lose the prologue in the mine how will we know who Brently is when he arrives?

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Will his identity be obvious by Louise’s reaction?

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Should we only ‘see’ him through her eyes (looking at photos, his belongings, his lawn, his fence)?

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What dis/advantages would accrue from starting as Chopin does (a blank screen, Josie telling her story)?

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How would our sympathies be engaged or complicated in each case?

Relationship ●●

How is their marriage expressed via the picket fence and the flowers?

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What other means might convey that she has experienced him as a ‘powerful will bending hers’?

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How might we secure the audience’s sympathy for a woman who is ‘disappointed’ to see her husband still alive?

Atmosphere ●●

What is achieved by those moments where we linger ‘a little too long’, at the end of Scenes 4 and 6?

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How else, as screenwriter, could you create a feeling of restraint followed by release as she begins to think about the future?

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How might you use montage (perhaps in Scene 10) to allow for an impression of time passing, thoughts settling, realization dawning, etc?

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●●

Where, and how, might you choose to expand the script?

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What would have to be added for you to do this?

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If you add material how do you maintain the dramatic tension that is more easily achieved in short film?

Adaptation for Screenwriters

7 Adapting Hardy: A Case Study

This chapter represents the culmination of the process of adaptation. Here the screenwriter has taken the short story “The Withered Arm”, by Thomas Hardy, and adapted it as a piece of short screen drama. The short story is available online, via The Victorian Ghosts website. It is advisable to read the short story first and then review the research undertaken in to context and then the script. You can always revise and develop the script or write a version of your own.

7a) Adapting Thomas Hardy by Alan G. Smith Thomas Hardy can be regarded as one of the great literary figures of the nineteenth century. A novel such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is considered as a ‘classic’ along with novels by Dickens, Eliot, Austen and others. These writers and their work are still regarded as the property of the academy and were soon commandeered and adapted into the service of the audio-visual domain in the BBC’s early stages in 1936, informed by its Reithian responsibilities of educating and entertaining the public. Since that time they seem to have pleased and satisfied the viewing public in what appears to be their never-ending appetite for film and television adaptations of what is perceived as the classic literary past. Whether for the purposes of film or television, adaptations of these writers’ work find themselves grouped in the domain of ‘costume’ or ‘heritage’ drama, which still seems to be much in demand both in the UK and in the United States. The phenomenon of heritage surrounds Hardy as it does other canonical writers of the nineteenth century and the appeal, often nostalgia for a time of perceived security, relies for its delivery on its attention to detail in terms of period costume,

visually stunning landscapes, magnificent country houses and the casting of wellregarded actors. Adaptations of Hardy’s work certainly provide the picturesque landscape and the odd stately mansion (Mapperton House, Dorset, for example, used as Boldwood’s Jacobean residence in the 2015 film Far from the Madding Crowd) but Hardy and his created Wessex has largely appealed to film and TV audiences through nostalgia for a rural life that has largely vanished. Satisfying this appeal for simplistic rurality has shaped the way that screen adaptations of his work have taken and the way Hardy is perceived today; the light-hearted and idealized pastoral snapshot of rural England as presented in his second published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), has tended to dominate the screen presence of his work. The writer quickly moved on following this novel, yet most adaptations show a reluctance to do so.

7b) Context – “The Withered Arm” “The Withered Arm” was first published in 1888 in a collection of short stories entitled Wessex Tales. The story was probably set in the 1830s, the only clue to this being the execution of Rhoda’s son for the felony of arson or being near a ‘rick when it was fired’. The nineteenth century was a time of great social unrest in rural Dorset and the south of England in general, the poor enduring a period of great economic hardship. The introduction of threshing machines in the late 1820s (evidenced in Tess of d’Urbervilles) resulted in farm workers losing their winter employment or experiencing severe pay cuts. Those that did not move to the towns and cities in search of work protested in what was called the ‘Swing riots’, breaking machinery and setting fire to hayricks; the protesters were punished accordingly, with over six hundred imprisoned, five hundred transported and nineteen executed. In 1834, six years before Hardy’s birth, impoverished farm workers in the village of Tolpuddle, Dorset attempted to form a trade union and although this was totally lawful, six of its leaders were arrested and subsequently sent to penal colonies in Australia. Hardy was aware that he was living in a time of rural depopulation and wished to preserve for posterity some of the folkloric elements that he grew up with in Dorset which he then transferred to his Wessex; many of these elements included tales of witchcraft, the various practices themselves and the people who practised them. In terms of subject matter, ‘The Withered Arm’, with its focus on witchcraft and the world of the supernatural, sits in direct contrast to the pastoral romances

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that the genre of heritage has often reduced Hardy’s work to; but this story and its dark content does not stand alone. Throughout his oeuvre, in his stories, novels and poems, Hardy’s writing is riddled with references to dark tales of witchcraft and the supernatural. In “The Withered Arm” Hardy displays not just one element of the supernatural but three: Rhoda Brooks being ‘hag-rid’ or ‘hagrode’ while asleep, the witch, ‘hag’ or incubus riding her being her former lover’s new wife Gertrude Lodge; Rhoda herself being accused of ‘overlooking’ or casting the ‘evil-eye’ on Gertrude and the custom of consulting white witches or ‘Conjurors’. In his book Dorsetshire Folk-lore first published in 1922 John Symonds Udal lists a number of instances of supposed witchcraft, evidenced by reports from local newspapers in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Dorset, particularly in connection with being ‘overlooked’; the term usually referring to being given the ‘evil eye’ by a witch and the victim then suffering, and usually dying as a result. In terms of hag-ridding Hardy himself claimed that an ‘aged friend’ had told him about a lady who lay down on a hot afternoon and awoke to find herself being ridden by an incubus which she eventually flung to the floor. The ‘aged friend’ has generally been thought by Hardy scholars to be his mother Jemima and is perhaps an example of him trying to conceal what he considered to be his humble background and the class of people who believed in such things; certainly it is among the rural and less educated in Hardy’s stories that the belief in witchcraft is the strongest. On her first visit to Conjuror Trendle Gertrude takes part in a procedure known as ‘oomancy’ or divination using eggs to find out who her enemy is, who has ‘bewitched’ her. Trendle’s son, also a Conjuror, features in Tess of the d’Urbervilles when Dairyman Crick is considering going to see him to find out why his cream will not turn to butter. In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1885) the local Conjuror is named Fall, who Michael Henchard consults for a weather forecast in connection with the harvest. Henchard does not take Fall’s advice and when things go wrong he questions whether ‘some power was working against him’. Although Henchard, has consciously lifted himself above such rustic beliefs as witchcraft, there remains a level of uncertainty within him, as to its existence; one suspects that this could also apply in a small degree to Hardy as well, given that matters of the occult are so often referred to in his work. Around the area of Egdon Heath in particular, the manifestation of witchcraft and the supernatural are almost regarded as ordinary everyday experiences, this is most evident in Hardy’s 1878 novel The Return of the Native where, as in ‘The Withered Arm’, it becomes difficult for the reader at times to decide who is overlooking whom. Adapting Hardy: A Case Study

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In “The Withered Arm”, Hardy places a tremendous burden on the shoulders of his character Rhoda, thought by some to be a witch and capable of ‘overlooking’; these feelings about her existing before the deterioration of Gertrude’s arm and mostly caused by the fact that she had a child out of wedlock, described by Hardy as her ‘fall’. The narrator tells us that Rhoda does not know why she is suspected of witchery and the reader can only speculate that some in Holmstoke thought that she bewitched the wealthy Farmer Lodge, luring him into their liaison, hoping that he would marry her when she became pregnant. In Hardy’s story the child that resulted from their relationship is not named, I have called him Edward in my script, in the belief that giving him an identity aids the process of showing the strong bond between the boy and his mother; I wished to stress this and have made it manifest in some of their dialogue together. Although films of the thirty to fifty-minute format are regarded as ‘medium length’ and ideally should be shorter for submission to film festivals, one of the main challenges to writers working in a shorter film format is the little time one has to establish and develop character. I wanted my audience to know of the love both Edward and his mother shared for each other, making his death in the end even more powerful. The horror and devastation that Rhoda endures in the story and the mental state she is eventually reduced to is shown in the final scene of the script; it is here that we see Rhoda’s hunched and frail body walking across the bleak night-time heath, her right arm periodically ‘shooting forward trying to grab the incubus but only managing the evening air’. This is a departure from the original story where Hardy has an old and frail Rhoda eventually returning to Holmstoke to continue her work as milkmaid, with the narrator adding that those who knew her background could only ponder the sombre thoughts going on inside her head. The ending I chose shows Rhoda the haunter (in that it was her fingers, despite her innocence, that were imprinted on Gertrude’s arm) being forever haunted, her movements echoing the horror of the action of her nightmare from which she was never able to fully recover. Apart from this ending I have kept the main ‘hinge points’ or ‘cardinal functions’ as the narratologist Roland Barthes called them, transferring the ‘risky moments’ of the narrative from the original story and I would claim that my script captures the essence and spirit of the hypotext. I have not made an overt use of accent in my script mainly because writing dialogue phonetically can make the reading of it difficult and as a writer possibly submitting

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my work to a production company, I obviously want to make this activity as easy as possible! Although accent is probably best left to the director and actors working on the script, I have used a ‘clipped’ form of dialogue for some of the characters, mainly the milkmaids and the working people; this then allows me to let Farmer Lodge and his wife Gertrude speak for the most part in standard English. In the case of Gertrude it is important because I want to stress the fact that she is from an urbanized middle-class background and show how being in and around Egdon changed her. The ‘outsider’ coming into a rural community and thinking it idyllic at first and believing that rationalism will solve any of its mysteries is a well-used trope in folk horror and I feel “The Withered Arm” and many other short stories by Hardy nudge towards this genre. When Gertrude realizes the severity of damage to her arm and the negative effect that her disability is having on her marriage, she is reluctant at first to seek help in supernatural form from a white witch but eventually accepts the ‘fact’ that she needs to have her ‘blood turned’. She also accepts that in order to achieve this, she will have to rub her arm against the neck of a still warm corpse. In the original story a desperate Gertrude cries out for there to be a hanging and states that she does not care whether the person executed is guilty or innocent. I have not included this, being content in my script with Gertrude expressing, when the hanging is imminent, the hope that the condemned man is not granted a reprieve; this coming from a formerly kind individual who noticed the poor state of Edward’s clothing and bought him some boots, proving that the general environment of Egdon Heath, Wessex has a profound effect on its inhabitants. In the penultimate scene in the jail, all the characters are left bereft: Gertrude lies dead on the floor, Farmer Lodge acknowledges his guilt in Gertrude’s demise and Rhoda sobs over Edward’s coffin; on a lighter note, even the menacing hangman Tommy West feels let down, mourning the loss of his ‘trifling fee’. Although Farmer Lodge’s behaviour in the story is reprehensible, having no involvement with Rhoda and his son Edward, when they are practically penniless, offering little support to Gertrude and even being ashamed of her disability, I would not describe him as evil. I would say he is totally self-centred and thoughtless, and in the end very sorry for his behaviour. In both Hardy’s story and my script Lodge leaves Holmstoke, the narrator in the original adding that he was never to return, dying two years later. If we ignore for a moment that Hardy has Rhoda’s son caught up in the historically accurate ‘Swing riots’, for which he is executed, the real ‘evil’ in this story is the supernatural

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itself. For it is the malevolent supernatural force in this tale that plays the role of the antagonist; it is the force that draws the two women together, locked in the shared space of a nightmare that was to go on and wreck both of their lives. Using the setting of Egdon Heath in my script I restore the landscape to what it was intended to be by Hardy, a bleak and menacing space free from the clichéd sentimental imagery that the heritage genre has placed on it.

7c) The Withered Arm – The script

THE WITHERED ARM Adapted by Alan G. Smith

Based on the short story by Thomas Hardy

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FADE IN: EXT. ROAD ACROSS EGDON HEATH. SUMMER’S DAY. A handsome new gig with two horses travels along a road over the heath, the driver is FARMER LODGE and sat beside him is a very pretty young woman GERTRUDE his new wife. Farmer Lodge, who is smartly dressed, is about twenty years older than Gertrude, he has sandy to red hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. The gig passes a pond and then descends a hill. Gertrude looks round excitedly. GERTRUDE It all looks so very lovely. Farmer Lodge leans over and kisses Gertrude on the cheek. FARMER LODGE  You look so very lovely too my dear, I can’t wait to show you off. The gig travels on, Gertrude observing the scenery around her with enthusiasm. On the road in front of them is a boy (EDWARD) of about twelve carrying a heavy load. As the gig approaches he turns round and stares intently at the pair in the gig. Gertrude notices the boy staring. GERTRUDE Why does that young boy stare so? Farmer Lodge looks angrily at the boy. FARMER LODGE  You’re bound to attract some

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 stares. I told you it would be the way, locals aren’t accustomed to a lady such as you. The boy continues to stare his eyes locked onto the gig and its occupants. GERTRUDE  He looks so pitiful though, his load so heavy and his clothes, boots and britches in such a state. Can’t we stop and offer him a lift? FARMER LODGE  Take no heed, these country lads are as tough as anything. That load will seem nothing to him, nothing. GERTRUDE He just looks in such a poor state. The gig passes the boy who keeps his eyes focused on it. INT. PARLOUR/ KITCHEN. RHODA’S COTTAGE. NIGHT. The dark cottage is lit by candles. RHODA, a pale and thin woman in her thirties, is serving up a meal to her son Edward who is sat at the table. Edward attacks his plate enthusiastically. RHODA  Well then, you saw them, what does the new Misses Lodge look like? There is a pause whilst Edward finishes chewing his food. 184

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EDWARD  She looked sort of young and had fair hair I think. RHODA  Only think? And did your father speak at all? EDWARD  Not to me no, he looked angry, like he’d never seen me afore and that I had no right to look at him. RHODA  Ashamed of his own kin. I you to do something else, Holmstoke church tomorrow have another good look at

want go to and her.

Edward somewhat reluctantly nods that he will. EDWARD  I’ll do as you say mother, but you need not fret, she’ll not be as pretty as you. Rhoda smiles she has tears in her eyes. RHODA  What would I do without you Edward Brook? INT. HOLMSTOKE CHURCH. MORNING. Edward sits in his best clothing at the very back of the church which is well attended. The Vicar is about to start the service but delays matters by a few seconds as Farmer Lodge and his young wife walk in.

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Their arrival causes a commotion with all the congregation turning round to look at the couple. Gertrude looks extremely embarrassed. Farmer Lodge nods politely to everyone. Edward stares at Gertrude and she in turn takes special notice of him. INT. PARLOUR/ KITCHEN. RHODA’S COTTAGE. NIGHT. Rhoda and Edward sit together at the table eating. EDWARD This is lovely mother. RHODA Tell me about the new Misses Lodge? Edward speaks as if reading from a list. EDWARD  She’s very pretty, she has light coloured hair, blue eyes, wears fine clothes... INT. COWSHED. HOLMSTOKE. EARLY MORNING. There are THREE MILKMAIDS next to each other milking their cows and gossiping. Rhoda sits on a stool somewhat apart from the rest also milking. SUSAN is a milkmaid of about Rhoda’s age. SUSAN  Well you should a seen her yesterday at church. She looked a real picture she did, expensive clothes an that.

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ANNIE  This be Farmer Lodges’ new wife, what she look like in herself then? SUSAN  She’s pretty, light coloured hair, blue eyes, wears fine clothes and has hands that have not seen work of any sort. ANNIE (loud whisper)  Wedding ring will fit nicely then. Bet it’ll nettle the evil one wild don’t you? A young milkmaid (PAULINE) of about seventeen leans her head to the side of her cow so that she can see Susan.

PAULINE Evil one? Nettle Rhoda? Why?

Rhoda hears her name being mentioned but doesn’t look up. SUSAN  Ah yes, you wouldn’t know, too young. Her boy Edward was fathered by Lodge, Rhoda be about your age. Pauline looks shocked, she turns round to look at Rhoda and then back to Susan. PAULINE  Oh that be truly wicked, shameful. Who’d ever have thought that of her.

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SUSAN  Talk of the village at the time. Disgrace. Neither of them speak now and Lodge don’t have anything to do with the boy. Rhoda presses her head against the cow she is milking, her eyes full of tears. INT. BEDROOM. RHODA’S COTTAGE. NIGHT. The room is lit by a candle by the side of Rhoda’s bed. Rhoda pulls on her nightdress and goes to the bedroom door. RHODA Goodnight now my Edward. EDWARD (O.S.)  Goodnight mother. Don’t you be fretting, it’ll all settle down. Rhoda smiles and speaks to herself quietly. RHODA  Bless you my Edward, your an old head on young shoulders, bless you. Rhoda extinguishes the candle at the side of her bed. All is still and silent. RHODA’S DREAM/ HALLUCINATION. Rhoda is woken up. The candle is now lit again and the figure of Gertrude Lodge is sat across her chest riding her as if she were a horse. Gertrude is wearing a pale

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silk dress and a white bonnet and her features are shockingly distorted. RHODA HEARS A MIXTURE OF THE MILKMAID’S DESCRIPTION OF GERTRUDE. SUSAN (O.S.)  She’s pretty, light coloured hair, blue eyes, wears fine clothes and has hands that have not seen work of any sort. ANNIE (O.S.) (loud whisper) Wedding ring will fit nicely The pressure on Rhoda’s chest gets heavier and heavier as the blue eyes peer cruelly down. ANNIE (O.S.) (CONT’D) (loud whisper)  Bet it’s driving the evil one wild don’t you? SUSAN (O.S.)  Hands that have not seen work of any sort.

ANNIE (O.S.) Wedding ring will fit nicely then.

Gertrude is laughing, leering as she thrusts her left arm forward so that her wedding ring is in Rhoda’s face glittering in front of her eyes. Struggling, Rhoda swings out her right hand seizing Gertrude left arm and whirling her backwards off the bed.

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There is a LOUD THUD as Gertrude’s head hits the floor. RHODA’S DREAM/ HALLUCINATION ENDS. INT. RHODA’S COTTAGE. BEDROOM. NIGHT. Rhoda shoots bolt upright in the darkness. She is breathing heavily and is in a cold sweat. Shaking, she manages to relight the candle. RHODA  Oh, merciful heaven, that was not a dream, she was here! Rhoda glances down at the floor but there is no-one there. INT. PARLOUR/ KITCHEN. RHODA’S COTTAGE. DAY. Rhoda clears plates from the table as Edward starts to rake out the debris of the fire, he looks up towards his mother. EDWARD  Did you fall out of bed in the night mother? RHODA No, why do you ask that? EDWARD  I just heard a thud that’s all. Be about two I heard clock chime. Rhoda face shows that she is troubled by this. RHODA No, no I didn’t. EXT. YARD. RHODA’S COTTAGE YARD. DAY.

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Rhoda is sweeping the yard in front of the cottage. Edward is seated on a stool skinning a rabbit. Rhoda looks up to see Gertrude Lodge walking towards the gate carrying a basket. Rhoda recognises Gertrude’s face from her dream. FLASHBACK TO THE SCENE OF RHODA’S DREAM/ HALLUCINATION. The pressure on Rhoda’s chest gets heavier and heavier as the blue eyes peer cruelly down. Gertrude is laughing, leering as she thrusts her left arm forward so that her wedding ring is in Rhoda’s face glittering in front of her eyes. END OF FLASHBACK. EXT. YARD. RHODA’S COTTAGE. DAY. RHODA  What the? What she doing here? Edward puts down the rabbit and looks up. EDWARD  Oh, em, I think I know. I saw her yesterday. Gertrude approaches the gate and smiles. GERTRUDE  Oh I’m so pleased I’ve got the right cottage. I just bought these. Gertrude hands over the basket she is carrying to a shocked and bemused Rhoda. The basket contains a pair of boots.

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GERTRUDE (CONT’D) I hope you’ll accept these, I noticed when I saw your son that his boots were. (pauses)  Well, a bit worn. And em he explained your situation, life being a bit of a struggle. Edward walks over to the gate. RHODA (shaking her head) We, we don’t need your charity. GERTRUDE  Oh please. If not for yourself please, for the boy. Edward takes the boots from the basket EDWARD Thank you ma’am. Edward turns to his mother.

EDWARD (CONT’D) She’s just bein kind mother.

Rhoda passes the empty basket back over the gate. GERTRUDE  I have only recently moved in, just trying to get to know folk. I would love to call in again if I can?

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Gertrude smiles, doesn’t wait for a reply and walks away. EDWARD She were only bein kind mother. INT. PARLOUR/ KITCHEN. RHODA’S COTTAGE. DAY. Rhoda and Gertrude are sat at the table drinking mugs of tea. GERTRUDE  This is very kind of you, and I am glad the boots fitted. He is a lovely boy and you must be very proud of him. And thank you so very much for this. Rhoda nods and smiles as Gertrude drinks from her mug. GERTRUDE (CONT’D)  I like walking and this is the nearest place to where I live and to be completely honest I don’t know many people. RHODA  How you finding it here? Hope you’re not suffering from the damp of the water meads, some do you know. GERTRUDE  No. No I’m generally fine, but now you remind me, I have one little ailment which puzzles me. Gertrude puts down her mug, gets up and walks over to Rhoda and uncovers her left arm.

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GERTRUDE (CONT’D)  It’s nothing serious, but I can’t make it out. On the pink surface of Gertrude’s arm there are distinct marks of where Rhoda’s fingers seized it in her dream. Rhoda is shocked. RHODA How, how did you come by these? GERTRUDE  Well this will sound strange but I was in bed one night a couple of weeks ago, I’d been dreaming about being in some strange place and I awoke suddenly with a sharp pain in my arm. At first I didn’t know where I was till the clock striking two reminded me. FLASHBACK TO THE SCENE OF RHODA’S DREAM/ HALLUCINATION. Struggling Rhoda swings out her right hand seizing Gertrude’s left arm and whirling her backwards off the bed. END OF FLASHBACK. INT. PARLOUR/ KITCHEN. RHODA’S COTTAGE. DAY. Rhoda slowly shakes her head from side to side. RHODA  My God, oh my God, I can’t believe this. Looking concerned Gertrude places her hand on Rhoda’s arm.

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GERTRUDE Are you okay? RHODA Yes. Er yes, yes I’m fine. EXT. MARKET PLACE. CASTERBRIDGE DAY. SOME WEEKS LATER. Gertrude and Rhoda meet up where both are shopping. GERTRUDE  Oh Rhoda, you’re just the person I want to see. My poor arm seems a lot worse. Let’s go over here and I’ll show you. Both women move to a quieter area and put down their baskets. Gertrude rolls up her sleeve and shows Rhoda her arm. GERTRUDE (CONT’D)  See how shrivelled it is? It hurts terribly and my husband has made me see a doctor, but he didn’t seem to know what it was. He prescribed some ointment but it’s no better. RHODA That’s awful. GERTRUDE  My husband said that it looks like the finger marks from some witch, or the devil himself. (pause)  And he then says that he doesn’t believe in such things. Gertrude rolls down the sleeve.

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GERTRUDE (CONT’D)  I was going to come and see you, for someone has said that there is a man on Egdon Heath, a Conjuror? A Conjuror Trendle? Reluctantly Rhoda nods in acknowledgment. GERTRUDE (CONT’D) And that he could help me.  They also said, and your name was  particularly mentioned, that you would know where he lives. RHODA (irritated) Me? Me. Oh yes I would wouldn’t I! (to herself) Bein what they all think I am. GERTRUDE Sorry I don’t understand. RHODA  You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t. Yes, yes I know of this man, this Conjuror Trendle, but do you know what he is, what he does? Gertrude shakes her head. RHODA (CONT’D)  A conjuror is another name for a witch. GERTRUDE (shocked)  Oh no thank you. Most definitely not! I do not believe in it. I

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want nothing to do with anything like that. Nothing at all. Gertrude buttons up her sleeve says goodbye and departs. Rhoda is left in the market place muttering to herself. RHODA  All talking again, I’m the evil witch, because of my Edward. I’m the sorceress, who would know of the whereabouts of the exorcist. INT. PARLOUR/ KITCHEN. RHODA’S COTTAGE. DAY. Rhoda is in her kitchen preparing a meal. There is a knock on the door, looking out of the window she sees a very pitiful looking Gertrude on her doorstep. Rhoda opens the door and invites Gertrude in. Gertrude is obviously distressed and near to tears. GERTRUDE  Oh Rhoda. I’ve come to ask you a favour. RHODA  Whatevers the matter with you? Come in and sit yourself down. Rhoda guides Gertrude over to the table where they both sit. GERTRUDE  I know I said when I saw you two weeks back that I didn’t believe in witchcraft. Well I’m getting absolutely desperate. Look it’s getting worse.

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Gertrude rolls up her sleeve to show Rhoda. From just above her wrist up to the shoulder the skin has shrivelled to that of the arm of a very elderly person. The area in which Rhoda gripped has now turned blue. On seeing this Rhoda shoots back in her seat. RHODA You poor soul. GERTRUDE  It’s getting worse and because of that I want a favour from you. (pause)  Will you take me to see this Conjuror Trendle? RHODA (shaking her head)  Oh no, no I’m really not happy about doing that. Not happy at all. GERTRUDE  Please, please you must. I have no-one else to turn to and I am so very desperate. Please. RHODA  As I say I’m far from happy, but I do know where he lives. GERTRUDE  Please, please you must show me, you must. Rhoda gets up and walks over to the sink. She turns to face Gertrude.

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RHODA  I’m not liking it Gertrude, not liking it at all. But very well then if I must. You be ready for tomorrow morning? GERTRUDE  I can make anytime, my husband always seems to be away on business these days. (pause)  Always away. Away from me for that matter. But he must not know. Rhoda nods her head in understanding and empathy. RHODA  He won’t find out from the likes of me. Very well. Be at the end of the lane by ten tomorrow morning and we’ll walk across the heath. GERTRUDE  Oh thank you so much Rhoda, thank you so very much. Gertrude gets up from her seat and gives Rhoda a hug. She gathers her belongings and closes the door behind her. RHODA  She might not be thanking me tomorrow.

SERIES OF SHOTS:

EXT. COUNTRY LANE/ EGDON HEATH. MORNING.

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It’s a bleak and windy autumn day as Rhoda and Gertrude set off walking. They walk in silence, both looking sullen. Eventually the two women descend on a cart track leading to Conjuror Trendle’s cottage. EXT. OUTSIDE CONJUROR TRENDLE’S COTTAGE. LATE MORNING. There are hens in the yard and CONJUROR TRENDLE is cutting wood in an adjacent barn. On seeing the two women Conjuror Trendle puts his saw down. He is a grey-bearded man in his sixties with a reddish face. CONJUROR TRENDLE  Now then, what can I do for you ladies on such a miserable day? Trendle looks enquiringly at Rhoda’s face.

CONJUROR TRENDLE (CONT’D) Now I think I know you from Holmstoke, Rhoda? Rhoda Brook?

RHODA  It is. But it’s this lady here that I’ve brought to see you. CONJUROR TRENDLE  Very well, how can I help you young lady? Gertrude rolls up her sleeve.

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CONJUROR TRENDLE (CONT’D) Oh that be nasty, very nasty.

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GERTRUDE  Yes it is. I have seen a doctor but he wasn’t much help, I tried some ointments. But unfortunately as you can see they didn’t work. Gertrude is close to tears.

GERTRUDE (CONT’D) I’m desperate.

Conjuror Trendle slowly shakes his head. CONJUROR TRENDLE  No, no ma’am, no ointments or medicine will get rid of this. He lightly runs a finger over Gertrude’s arm and looks into her face. CONJUROR TRENDLE  (CONT’D) You won’t want to hear this, but this my dear is the work of an enemy. Rhoda physically moves away from the two. GERTRUDE Enemy? What enemy? Gertrude shakes her head, she is slightly indignant.

GERTRUDE (CONT’D) I don’t think I’ve got an enemy!

CONJUROR TRENDLE  Unfortunately enemies you certainly have. Now I can if you want try and show you who these enemies are.

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Conjuror Trendle leads Gertrude down the path towards his cottage. He looks at Rhoda and indicates that she too is welcome, she shakes her head and settles on a bench near the back door. Gertrude and Conjuror Trendle enter the cottage. INT. PARLOUR/ KITCHEN. CONJUROR TRENDLE’S COTTAGE. DAY.

CONJUROR TRENDLE Sit yourself down my dear.

Gertrude sits at the table, the door is left open and she can see Rhoda sitting on the bench outside. Conjuror Trendle and fills it with a cupboard. With something to the

takes a glass from his dresser water, he also takes an egg from his back to Gertrude he murmurs egg, which he then breaks.

Conjuror Trendle retains the yolk of the egg in the shell but pours the white in to the glass. He gently shakes the mixture before handing it to Gertrude. CONJUROR TRENDLE  (CONT’D) Now you take the glass to the light and look at it very closely. Gertrude goes to the back door and inspects the glass as the white of the egg mixes with the water. CONJUROR TRENDLE  (CONT’D) Now do you catch the likeness of any face as you look? For if you do then that will be your enemy. GERTRUDE No. I can’t say that I do. Although I...

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Gertrude stares intently at the mixture, she then looks at Rhoda sat on the bench and then back to the mixture.

GERTRUDE (CONT’D) Oh no, no!

Gertrude seems in shock and drops the glass on the floor. EXT. OUTSIDE CONJUROR TRENDLE’S COTTAGE. LATE MORNING. On seeing and hearing Gertrude’s state of shock and witnessing the breaking of the glass, Rhoda walks up the path to the lane where she waits with her back turned towards the cottage. INT. PARLOUR/ KITCHEN. RHODA’S COTTAGE. NIGHT. Rhoda and Edward sit at the table eating. EDWARD Lovely drop of broth Mother. Gertrude puts her knife and fork down her meal not touched. RHODA  I’m just not hungry, not hungry at all. Edward carries on eating with enthusiasm. EDWARD  Are that lot in the dairy getting at you again? RHODA  I’ve had enough of things, they’re saying I’ve overlooked Gertrude Lodge and she now thinks that too.

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Rhoda plays with a piece of bread in her fingers.

RHODA (CONT’D) How would you feel about leaving?

EDWARD What leaving here? RHODA  Yes leaving here, I know I could get some work the other side of the Hintocks and I’d leave all that lot behind. Edward stops eating and puts down his cutlery. EDWARD  You know I’ll go wherever you go although it do seem a shame. Rhoda nods in agreement with and picks up her knife and fork. RHODA  Just let’s see what the spring brings shall we. INT. BEDROOM. FARMER LODGE’S HOUSE. DAY. Gertrude a pathetic and pale figure sits distraught on the edge of a lavishly curtained four poster bed. She is in her night dress. Her left arm is bandaged from shoulder downwards and is immobile by her side. Farmer Lodge is kneeling down in front of a cupboard angrily discarding its contents. FARMER LODGE  Dammed if you won’t poison yourself with these apothecary messes and witch

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mixtures some time or other. You’ve been spending too much time listening to village nonsense. GERTRUDE  I only meant it for your good, so I could be attractive again for you. FARMER LODGE  My good? My good? How on earth can it be for my good. I’ll clear out the whole lot, and destroy them. GERTRUDE  Yes your good! You just don’t seem to want to be seen with me anymore. FARMER LODGE  Oh this one again. Business trips, business trips that’s all, I’ve told you, you would only be bored. GERTRUDE  It’s not just the trips. You just don’t seem to want me, you don’t look at me, touch me, love me. Gertrude is now sobbing. Farmer Lodge stands up and walks over to the door, he shakes his head.  What your Come down I’ll send the mess.

FARMER LODGE saying is nonsense. when you’re ready. a girl up to clear

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Farmer Lodge exits out of the door. After a few moments Gertrude stands up and makes her way to a large mirror on the wall. She studies her reflection and her arm in particular. GERTRUDE  What on earth am I to do? There is only the Conjuror. EXT. RHODA’S COTTAGE. DAY. Rhoda and Edward finish stacking their belongings on to a cart attached to a horse. Both look back to the cottage as they leave. INT. PARLOUR/ KITCHEN. CONJUROR TRENDLE’S COTTAGE. MORNING. Gertrude sits down in a chair by an open fire. Trendle also sits down and notices that Gertrude is shaking.

CONJUROR TRENDLE Get yourself warm my dear.

He looks at her face and then her left arm hanging uselessly by her side. CONJUROR TRENDLE  (CONT’D) Now I’ve seen you before. You’re the lady who’d been overlooked that’s right isn’t it? GERTRUDE  Sadly it is. And I’ve come to see if you can do anything more for me? Trendle slowly shakes his head.

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Gertrude sheds her top coat, uncovers her left arm and lifts it up towards Trendle, again he shakes his head. CONJUROR TRENDLE  You think too much of my powers my dear, I’m old, and I’m weak now. GERTRUDE  Isn’t there anything you can suggest? The arm is ruining my life, my marriage. Gertrude is very close to tears. GERTRUDE (CONT’D)  My husband doesn’t want to take me anywhere, be seen with me, look at me or have anything to do with me. He’s ashamed of me, ashamed! Gertrude breaks down crying. CONJUROR TRENDLE (calmly)  That is his loss young lady, his very great loss, let me assure you of that. Trendle leans forward and gives Gertrude’s right arm a reassuring and kindly squeeze. CONJURER TRENDLE  Unfortunately I can’t really help you, it’s too much for me to attempt. I simply don’t have those sort of powers anymore.

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GERTRUDE Nothing you can do? Or advise? Anything please? CONJUROR TRENDLE  There is only one chance of doing it known to me. It has never failed in afflictions of this kind. But it is hard to carry out, especially hard for a woman. GERTRUDE Tell me! Tell me please. CONJUROR TRENDLE  Are you sure? It’s not a pleasant thing. She nods her head. CONJUROR TRENDLE  (CONT’D) Very well then. You must touch with your damaged arm the neck of a man who’s just been hanged. Gertrude looks horrified. GERTRUDE  Oh goodness! How can that, how can that do good? CONJUROR TRENDLE  Long as he’s still warm it will turn the blood and change the  constitution. But, not easy to do. You’d have to bribe the hangman at Casterbridge.

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GERTRUDE (shaking her head) I don’t think I could do it. CONJUROR TRENDLE  Well that is a matter for you to decide. Lots have done it before, I used to send dozens for skin complaints, though perhaps not such a pretty women as you. Gertrude still fighting back tears stands up, she fastens up her sleeve and puts her coat on. GERTRUDE  Can I pay you for this? For your time? CONJUROR TRENDLE  No my dear, you owe me absolutely nothing. I can only wish luck. (pause)  And can I be as bold as to say something? GERTRUDE Yes of course. CONJUROR TRENDLE  Your husband if he acts as you say, doesn’t deserve you my dear, he really doesn’t. Gertrude gives a feint smile. Conjuror Trendle opens the door for her and she leaves, Conjuror Trendle waits until Gertrude is out of sight before he closes the door. INT. DRAWING ROOM. FARMER LODGE’S HOUSE. DAY.

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Gertrude is seated at the table reading the newspaper her left arm hanging by her side. Farmer Lodge enters the room looking agitated. Gertrude does not look up. FARMER LODGE  Would you put the paper down for a minute please Gertrude? Gertrude lowers the paper. Farmer Lodge speaks gravely. FARMER LODGE  (CONT’D) I’m going away for a few days on business. Tiresome business unfortunately, and I’m unable to take you with me. Now I know I... GERTRUDE When are you to go? FARMER LODGE  Tomorrow first thing and I probably won’t get back till next Monday. Depending on various details sadly beyond my control. As I said I know what I said before but... Gertrude calmly puts the paper down and tries not to look too pleased. GERTRUDE That’s fine. FARMER LODGE  Fine? Fine then. I’ll be going first thing. I thought after what we’d discussed, I thought you’d be upset.

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GERTRUDE  I’ll miss you of course, the house is so empty when you’re not around, but business is business and as you said I would probably be bored. FARMER LODGE  Yes. Yes it is. I’m glad you see it that way. Farmer Lodge exits the room looking relieved. Gertrude picks up the newspaper again. GERTRUDE (to herself)  Execution for the felony of arson. To be hung at Casterbridge on Saturday morning. EXT. OUTSIDE FARMER LODGE’S HOUSE. DAY. Gertrude, carrying a small bag, comes out of her garden to meet JOHN, a young man in his twenties who is leading a horse towards her. JOHN  Here she is ma’am and a true lady she be herself, Lady by name, lady by nature. GERTRUDE  She is indeed John, Lady is the steadiest horse in the stables. John takes the bag off Gertrude and ties it to the saddle. He then offers his arm to help her mount Lady.

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GERTRUDE (CONT’D)  Thank you John. Now you know the  masters away, if I’m not in by ten tonight will you see to it that the house is all locked up please? JOHN  Certainly miss, enjoy your visit. I know you’ll be fine with Lady. Gertrude and Lady move off slowly away from the house. SERIES OF SHOTS: EXT. COUNTRY LANES/ OPEN HEATHLAND. LATE AFTERNOON. Gertrude rides her horse with her left arm hanging by her side. She takes a very steady pace. After riding over the heath she arrives at a pool where her horse takes a drink. GERTRUDE  How I loved it all when I first arrived, it all looked so very lovely. Now its dismal and cursed like my arm, why did this have to happen? SERIES OF SHOTS: EXT. HEATHLAND/ COUNTRY LANES/ APPROACHING CASTERBRIDGE. EARLY EVENING. Gertrude continues to ride steadily and now takes the downward track towards Casterbridge.

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The first inn she comes to is the White Hart which has its stable adjoining it. Gertrude leads Lady into the stable yard. EXT. STABLE YARD. WHITE HEART INN. EVENING. The OSTLER, an elderly man, comes out to greet Gertrude and Lady. OSTLER  Evening miss. Shall I be relieving you of your mare? The Ostler walks slowly over and pats the horse on the neck. Adjacent to the stable is a harness-maker’s shop where a group of noisy youths are gathered at the door looking inside. Gertrude points over towards the youths. GERTRUDE What’s going on there? OSTLER  Oh that, that’s all to do with hanging tomorrow. Stanley in there be making the rope. Gertrude’s right hand jumps over her body to clutch her immobile left arm and awkwardly she tries to dismount, the Ostler helps her down.

OSTLER (CONT’D) You don’t mind. There you are miss.

He then starts to undo the saddle and bag from the horse. OSTLER (CONT’D)  Yes, the rope always gets a bit of interest. Tis sold by the inch afterwards. Adapting Hardy: A Case Study

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Gertrude takes the bag from the Ostler, who lowers his voice. OSTLER (CONT’D)  Now if you wished miss I could get Stanley to save you a bit. That’s if you’d like some, I could get it at a good price? Gertrude looks shocked. GERTRUDE  No! No, I am not interested in anything like that. OSTLER But you’re here for the hang-fair? GERTRUDE (agitated)  No! No I am not. Well not in the way you think. The Ostler shrugs his shoulders. OSTLER  It don’t matter what I think miss. I’ll make sure your mare is well fed and watered. INT. FOYER. WHITE HART INN. EVENING. The inn is busy Gertrude stands at the bar talking to the landlord. He hands her a set of keys and points to the stairs the other side of the room. Gertrude, clutching both her bag and the keys in her right hand, makes her way over.

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EXT. STABLE YARD. WHITE HART INN. NIGHT. Gertrude is talking to the Ostler and he is indicating how she can get to the hangman’s house. Gertrude gives the Ostler some money and he watches her leave the yard, her left arm still hanging by her side. OSTLER  Tommy West be hangman’s name. Good luck with things, I wish you well. SERIES OF SHOTS: EXT. CASTERBRIDGE TOWN. NIGHT. The town is still busy as Gertrude, makes her way through the streets. She finds her way to the hill on which the prison building rests. Looking up she can make out people busy erecting the gallows. Gertrude walks to the left of the hill by a river passing the outskirts of the jail. After a further hundred yards or so she finds herself outside the executioner’s cottage, it stands by the river and close to a weir which emits a steady roar. EXT. TOMMY WEST’S COTTAGE. NIGHT. Gertrude stands hesitating a few yards away from the cottage when the door opens and TOMMY WEST the hangman comes out carrying a candle. He is in his forties, tall, powerfully built and dressed totally in black. Gertrude tries to make herself heard above the roar of the weir. GERTRUDE Hello! Is it Tommy West!

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WEST (angrily) Who wants him and why! GERTRUDE To speak to him a minute. WEST  I be Tom West and was just going to bed. His eyes scrutinise Gertrude and his voice sounds menacing. WEST (CONT’D)  You know what they say early to bed early to rise. But I don’t mind stopping a minute for such a one as you. West reopens the door and shows Gertrude in. INT. PARLOUR. TOMMY WEST’S COTTAGE. NIGHT. The room is dark and for a few moments only illuminated by West’s candle. He lights some more candles. WEST Now then miss how can I help you? GERTRUDE I’ve come about tomorrow. WEST (smiling)  If you’ve come about the knot you’re wasting your time, one knot is as merciful as another if you keep it under the ear.

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Gertrude shakes her head. WEST (CONT’D)  No? Or is the unfortunate person to be hung tomorrow a relation, or someone who’s been in your employ? GERTRUDE  Neither. What time is the execution? WEST  Twelve o’clock, or as soon after the London mail-coach gets in. We always wait for that, in case of a reprieve. GERTRUDE A reprieve? I hope not! West seems momentarily shocked by Gertrude’s seeming heartlessness and then smiles. WEST  As a matter of business so do I. But there would be some would say he deserves one, the lad is just eighteen and was only present by chance when the rick was fired. GERTRUDE Yes, yes of course. I only meant. WEST  It don’t matter what you meant. There won’t be a reprieve, they’re obliged to make an example of him.

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GERTRUDE  I only meant. I only meant that I want to touch him for a charm, a cure of an affliction. WEST (nodding)  Ahh, now I understand. I’ve had such people come in the past years. But it didn’t strike me that you looked of a sort to require bloodturning. What’s the complaint? Gertrude rolls the sleeve of her left arm up. WEST (CONT’D)  Ah, yes it’s all a-scram, withered. I’ve seen worse. Twas a knowing-man that sent you here, whoever he was. GERTRUDE  You can contrive for me all that’s necessary? WEST  Well, I got into bother once for allowing it. West runs his deep black eyes over Gertrude. WEST (CONT’D)  But still. Still perhaps I can manage it, for a trifling fee. GERTRUDE Thank you. Thank you.

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WEST  It? ‘He’ you mean, for at the moment he breathes as you and I. GERTRUDE  I’m sorry, of course, of course I feel... West laughs and shakes his head. WEST  Lady, no need to feel sorry! The boy is locked in a place of gloom above us. Mine will be the first face he sees in the morning and the last he sees on this earth. West takes Gertrude by the right arm and leads her to the door which he then opens. He points up the lane towards the town. He has to shout above the noise of the weir. WEST (CONT’D)  Now, you be waiting at the little wicket gate there in the lane. Gertrude leaves. SERIES OF SHOTS: EXT. CASTERBRIDGE TOWN. DAY. Gertrude makes her way through the town to the jail. Street sellers are out shouting and selling their wares. There is a party atmosphere on the streets and crowds in numbers are jostling to get a good view of the gallows.

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Gertrude walks by the side of the river. She approaches the small wicket gate and waits. After a few moments West opens the gate, he is dressed in a black three piece suit, he allows Gertrude to pass through. INT. CASTERBRIDGE JAIL. DAY. WEST No reprieve, the youth will die. Gertrude offers a weak and glazed smile. WEST (CONT’D)  We cannot dally long afterwards though, as I’m informed that the relatives want the body for burial. Gertrude goes up one flight of stairs followed by West. The stairway is dark as is the room she arrives in. West indicates that she should take a seat in one of the chairs that are lined up against three of the bleak brick walls. The room is empty except for two large pieces of stone in the centre which are about four feet apart. West walks through a stone archway bearing the inscription ‘County Jail: 1793’. The archway leads to the only light that floods into the room. From this space Gertrude hears the frantic crowd outside excitedly anticipating events. Above this babble of noise Gertrude hears a single voice of someone.

UNKNOWN VOICE (O.S.) Last dying speech and confession.

The town clock strikes twelve. This is followed by silence, then, from the audience below, a collective noise of shock.

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On her seat Gertrude hears the reaction from the spectators below and bows her head. She rolls up the sleeve of her left arm. Her head is still bowed as she waits. In a business like manner West comes through the arch and walks towards her. Gertrude stands up, she is shaking violently, unable to keep still. Two men emerge through the vivid light under the arch carrying a coffin which they then slam down on the two pieces of stone in the room. They both then exit under the arch. Gertrude aided by West walks over to the coffin, he then takes a firm hold of Gertrude’s damaged arm. There are voices of people coming up the stairs behind Gertrude. As Gertrude’s arm is about to make contact with the neck of the corpse she steals herself to look down. She is horrified and screams hysterically when she finds out that the neck she is about to touch is that of Edward Brook. GERTRUDE Edward! No! No! No! Gertrude turns round to see Farmer Lodge and Rhoda in the room. Despite West’s efforts in trying to steady her Gertrude collapses and there is a LOUD THUD as her head hits the floor. FLASHBACK TO THE SCENE OF RHODA’S DREAM/ HALLUCINATION. Struggling Rhoda swings out her right hand seizing Gertrude’s left arm and whirling her backwards off the bed. There is a LOUD THUD as Gertrude’s head hits the floor.

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END OF FLASHBACK. INT. CASTERBRIDGE JAIL. DAY. In tears and in fury Rhoda rushes over towards Gertrude. RHODA  You, you! Why are you here now? Why? This is the very thing that Satan showed me in my vision. Why why? Rhoda is bending over the unconscious Gertrude shaking her. Farmer Lodge rushes over and pulls Rhoda away. RHODA (CONT’D)  Haven’t you done enough to me? Don’t I still see your face and wedding ring night after night after night.

FARMER LODGE Please Rhoda! No! Let her be.

Gertrude lies on the floor, her eyes fixed and open. Farmer Lodge, his face taught with anxiety, kneels down besides Gertrude’s body shaking his head. FARMER LODGE (CONT’D)  Oh Gertrude what have I done. What the hell have I done? Rhoda sobs over Edward’s coffin. West looks round at the carnage in the room and shrugs his shoulders.

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WEST What now my trifling fee? EXT. HOLMSTOKE CEMETERY. DAY. A small group of people including Farmer Lodge stand round an open grave as Gertrude’s coffin is lowered in. Watching from the other side of the cemetery wall are John and Gertrude’s horse, Lady. EXT. FARMER LODGE’S HOUSE. MORNING. Farmer Lodge stands outside his house and hands a white envelope to a smartly dressed gentleman. The two shake hands. He then boards a gig with a driver and two horses which then moves off away from the farm. EXT. EGDON HEATH. NIGHT. Its raining and the wind blows fiercely. Rhoda walks slowly her head and shoulders hunched up over her frail body. Periodically her whole body goes into violent spasm, her terrified face looking towards an invisible tormentor, her right arm shooting forward trying to grab the incubus but only managing the evening air.

FADE OUT: END.

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PART 4 Appropriation

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8a) Working between texts This chapter examines appropriation both as a form of adaptation and as a form in its own right. Appropriation might be loosely described as the taking of a core feature or aspect of a text and then reusing of this in another text. As will become clear in the following discussion, this is most often a matter of character or characters. However, this is not always the case and there is the possibility of taking setting, event or narrative form; in fact many practitioners have done this. As a writer you can make assumptions about the knowledge your audience will have of an element or elements of pre-existing stories and/or texts and how you might be able to incorporate these in to your ‘new’ work. The essence of appropriation is that we are ‘adrift in a sea of signifiers’ that exist between texts and between forms, and writers can use these as they see fit. This presents you with an opportunity beyond direct adaptation. This can be seen with an example such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Stephen Norrington, 2003), where characters from some of literature’s most wellknown stories are taken and placed in a single narrative. In this film you can see H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain fight alongside Mina Harker, Captain Nemo and the Invisible Man. This consciously playful text functions because of our general knowledge of those ‘classics’, even if we are not familiar with the details. This isn’t purely an exercise or test of the audience’s direct knowledge of the source material, rather we know who the invisible man is as an extra-textual character whether or not we have read H.G. Wells original. This knowledge might come from seeing Claude Rains in James Whale’s

Figure 8.1  Characters from history meet, in Time After Time (1979). The past and present blur in this use of historical literary figures.

1933 adaptation of Wells’s 1897 novel, or from David McCallum’s 1975 TV portrayal, or from the 1992 Chevy Chase vehicle, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, directed by John Carpenter, or from Hollow Man (Paul Verhoven, 2000). In fact, our knowledge comes from all these sources and the numerous other adaptations and reinterpretations of the story. Each of these versions adds something new and extends our range of cultural references. We are located in a world of film, television, literary and other popular cultural references and this means that the scriptwriter can exploit implied knowledge on the part of the audience. As a writer you can assume that your audience will fully understand the concept of the invisible man without any reference to the ‘original’. Appropriation occurs when such references are used and developed in the creation of new stories. This suggests interplay not only within texts, but across texts and also across forms. To complicate matters further The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is itself an adaptation from a graphic novel (1999), and this somewhat different process of adaptation will be discussed later. In addition to the use and re-use of characters the process of appropriation can involve extending an existing text or series of texts and can be applied to those works which seek to use a story ‘universe’, and by virtue of using it develop that world beyond its origins. This can perhaps be most readily seen with the Star Wars franchise where in addition to the developing ‘canon’

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of films, outlining the Skywalker saga, there are numerous novels, animated films and graphic novels. In fact, after the original film was released in 1977 a novel was written and published in 1978 as a sequel in case the film wasn’t a success and didn’t warrant a second movie. Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, by Alan Dean Foster, took the story in a very different direction to The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and omits Han Solo as a character. Therefore the theories and processes of appropriation outlined here involve a blurring of the distinction between what might be termed ‘strict’ adaptation (as discussed in previous chapters), and what might constitute an original work using direct references to previous films or even an original take on a character or scenario that already exists. This creates opportunities for the screenwriter in generating new concepts and new scripts by using references that an audience will ‘read’, often without recognizing that they are doing so. As the following two chapters discuss, the very idea of originality in writing for the screen is a problematic one. It is however not the most pressing of issues for the screenwriter keen to develop a film based on pre-existing material and to use an audience’s cultural knowledge. It is a process which can benefit you as a screenwriter seeking to exploit cultural signifiers to allow you the opportunity to create something which is not only drawing on that which already exists but is predicated on that which already exists.

Genre Plenty has been written about genre and how it functions and there are myriad texts that can be consulted from the point of view of analysis. The term itself comes from the Latin meaning kind or class. However, genre is much more than a system of categorization, it is far more wide-reaching and far more complex than that. It is possible to argue that the very process of working within a genre is to appropriate that which went before. Genres are formed through the use of tropes that appear across different texts; epic scenery in the Midwest for the Western or the trench coat of the Film Noir detective. They are also formed through the use of narrative sequences, as can be seen in classic Westerns as the gunfighter rides in to town to help the isolated community via a gunfight only to then leave alone. Character can also signify genre, be it the femme fatale, the action hero or

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the morally questionable detective. Genres develop as their conventions become tested and challenged. There is little that has been written about the form and function of genre from the perspective of the scriptwriter when examining the process of adaptation and appropriation. It is through this consideration that it is possible to see a transition from adaptation to appropriation, where appropriation is a little ‘looser’. In these terms a clear distinction can be made between popular prose fiction and film as film has always had genre at its core. In the process of adaptation there is the potential movement of a literary text being moved in to a genre form, even without the original text being of that order. This doesn’t mean that a piece of literary fiction will suddenly become a Western or science fiction film, however as audiences of film we are used to certain genre conventions, and texts will use these to communicate quickly. For example, there is an argument that David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) is given a happy ending, or at least the possibility of one, due to the dominance of romance and the expectation of the form of closure offered by this genre. Genre has subtly different rules in cinema than literary fiction and audiences can have differing expectations of what they might rightly expect from particular genre pieces. These rules are about communication and operate on two main levels. First, this is aesthetic. Certain images will suggest certain genres and with that will come certain genre expectations. This is not to say that these expectations have to be met but these expectations will be raised nonetheless. This is something that you can turn to your advantage in playing against expectations. These are audience expectations of what genre the original text might have belonged to and how this might morph in the process of translation to screen. Secondly, this is in narrative form. There are particular plot lines that work with particular genres and work across genres. A text such as Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1998) is significantly changed in Roger Michell’s 2005 film of the same name. This transformation is dictated by an inevitable shift in time, but it also appeals to a cinema audience’s desire for concise genre fare. Michell draws out the narrative threads that make this a thriller. This might suggest why Clarissa becomes Claire and why there is a reduction in her standing as a character. It is important for the protagonist to have someone to rescue; in fact this forms the basis of the film. When

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Figure 8.2  This kind of living space is what we expect of a stalker in a movie, and specifically in a thriller. The film of Enduring Love (2004) delivers what we expect, using a shorthand.

we are shown the interior of Jed’s accommodation we find the photographs on the wall, and the rest of the property in squalor. The film doesn’t have the time to explore Jed’s character and we don’t have a Joe as narrator to give us some insight. The recourse is then to the genre that is familiar and the signifying practices and the narrative form that we expect. This leaves the audience in a familiar territory, comfortable in what they are watching. It can make for a strong critical response and the two versions of Enduring Love suffer in comparison as they are fundamentally different in form and in genre. This raises questions about the nature of your adaptation in respect of how it may conform to filmic genre conventions. In doing this you may retain characters, key events and settings, and yet might be writing something which conforms to a different filmic genre, and with this the meaning of the piece may change. Rather than this being a problem this allows for opportunities. For example, in Blade Runner (1982) Ridley Scott brings out the detective qualities of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The question for your script is how far you drawn on the generic conventions a book might be using and how far you are using the conventions of film genre, thus signifying a whole array of other films, each with their own inherent meaning.

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Exercise: Draw out the plot line of a novel or short story from a piece of literary fiction; a text where the genre isn’t so clear. What are the essential plot points without which the story would not work? You should differentiate between the main plot and sub-plots. Focusing on the main plot line, what genre is suggested? In further conceptualizing your work maintain the aesthetic of the original but follow a genre-based narrative form. Consider how buried the genre might be, but how this might position your audience. This is a covert use of genre convention.

Exercise: Take any piece of genre prose. What is there in the genre text that can be taken on to the screen? Something such as the original studio release of Blade Runner added a Noir voice-over, welding another genre on top of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction text. When the studio re-released Ridley Scott’s director’s cut the voiceover was removed, but the noir setting remains, albeit in less obvious form. How might you draw out the themes of a text by the integration of other genres?

8b) Intertextuality The concept of intertextuality comes from the French semiotician, Julia Kristeva (1941–). It stems from the Latin word, intertexto, which means to cross threads while weaving. This is a useful metaphor to bear in mind as it strikes at the heart of how contemporary texts work and presents both an opportunity and a problem for the scriptwriter. Kristeva (as with subsequent semioticians) is interested in the sign systems that a text uses to communicate with other texts and by virtue of this with an audience. This is important to the writer. What this idea also highlights is that we exist in a world of texts where the boundaries between literature, film, television and other entertainment forms have broken down. The process of transposition of one form to another in ‘conventional’ adaptation would then become a process where bits of other adaptations become welded to the original along the way. These elements being the result of being cited in a culture that is defined by texts.

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Intertextuality also provides opportunities in being able to draw on a range of otherwise unconnected texts to generate meaning. Kristeva’s ideas develop from earlier ideas about language derived from another theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin identified that all human communication is dialogic. By this he meant that every utterance is a contribution to an ongoing and ultimately developing dialogue. Film is dialogic in that it is part of a body of other films, including and beyond belonging to a specific genre. A film will refer (however obliquely) to other films, and is a response to them. The meaning a film has is therefore developed and generated in this manner. We interpret a film in relation to its resemblance to other films, and the associations (conscious or otherwise) it has for us. As a writer you need to engage deliberately in this conversation with the familiar, and ensure as far as possible that the connections viewers make are consistent with your intentions. In these terms then taking inspiration and references from other sources isn’t a form of plagiarism, rather it is to tap in to the heritage that films have. What is crucial is to mould these references in to something which appears to be new and different. Meaning is generated from the intertextual connections you make by including specific references to other texts. These can be implicit within that which you construct. For instance, when John Travolta starts dancing with Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction (1994) it is impossible to separate Travolta from his history in films such as Saturday Night Fever (1978). More than that, Tarantino uses this as a knowing aside to the audience, allowing us to join in and to play the game. This form of intertextual reference might be seen as a form of enhancement to the narrative, where it does little to add to the narrative flow, but provides broader context. Tarantino has commented on how the scene itself was influenced by Jean LucGodard, specifically the Madison dance scene in Bande a part (aka Band of Outsiders, 1964). This latter point is buried within the film and would be arguably less visible to the audience. One of the most enduring films of modern times Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) takes heavily from other textual worlds. The Jedi are an order of medieval warrior knights wielding swords of light instead of metal. Luke is a young King Arthur, and Obi-Wan Kenobi is Merlin. Han Solo is a brash Lancelot, and Princess Leia a feisty Guinevere. R2-D2 and C-3PO are a bickering comedy double act; one twittering but endearing, the other pompous and bossy, they are essentially Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and

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Costello. Their antics and function in the film are recognizable from our knowledge of the rich tradition of the film comedy duo. In formal terms the narrative point of view and the use of frame wipes as transitional devices were directly inspired by an Akira Kurosawa film, The Hidden Fortress (1958). The climax, the pinpoint attack on the weak spot in the Death Star’s defences, is influenced by British war films such as The Dam Busters (Michael Anderson, 1955) and 633 Squadron (Walter Grauman, 1964). Evidently in the process of developing the film Lucas edited in footage of the Second World War dogfights to demonstrate how the action would look. Other writers and directors use direct intertextual references to connote meaning. In Tom Stoppard, Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown’s script for Brazil (1985) there are direct references to Sergei Eisenstein’s iconic film The Battleship Potemkin, in particular the Odessa Steps sequence. This reference, among others, works to emphasize the totalitarian world of the film. It functions as a dramatic scene for those who don’t know the originating film and reinforces the message for those who do. The same scene was used again in The Untouchables (Brian DePalma, 1987) to comment on Al Capone’s Chicago. The examples above suggest approaches for the writer and strikes at the heart of screenwriting. On one hand you are writing something which is intended for an audience and thus you are thinking of how you can communicate with that audience. This allows you to then take references from other texts and use them in how you build your screenplay, considering how the references connote meaning to an audience. On one level this can be the ‘first audience’, the crew who are going to make your script in to a film. These would be signifiers that would not be seen on screen but aid the reader in visualizing your work. Again, it is Terry Gilliam who provides an example of this with his 1981 film Time Bandits. In a moment of transition between time periods our intrepid heroes arrive in ancient Greece and encounter Agamemnon fighting the Minotaur. GREEK WARRIOR  (removing his helmet, revealing himself to be none other than Sean Connery. He grins as only Sean can. (This is the sort of creepy stage direction that helps get the stars interested.) Well you’re certainly a chatty little fellow …

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Figure 8.3  When Connery appears on screen in Time Bandits (1981) there is a process of signification to him as a cultural figure, as well as an actor.

This line conjures not just the physicality of Connery, rather the aura of the all the films he has been in. This use of intertextual references within your script is as valuable as those that may appear on screen. In fact, the intertextual references might serve for both audiences, the producers of your work and the audience of the subsequent film. The references that appear on screen can be as clear and as blatant as Woody Allen’s use of Bogart in Play It Again, Sam (1975) or can be far more subtle, where an audience might only get a hint of the resonances of the link. Interestingly the phrase ‘play it again, Sam’ is never used in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), this misquote being one which exists outside the frame of the film coming from the cultural world that surrounds it. It is the process of being immersed in a world of fictions, all quoting each other back. The second use of intertextual referencing is to connote meaning for the writer, although this leads us to a consideration of the function of hypotext and hypertext.

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Exercise: Write the opening scene of a piece of genre film. This shouldn’t be a direct adaptation, but you might take inspiration from a piece of prose fiction. Include an intertextual reference from another film. For instance, you might write the opening to a romantic comedy but include the music from a well-known action movie. How does this direct reference to another film impact on your audience’s understanding of the other?

Exercise: Choose any piece of prose fiction you know well, but make sure it hasn’t been adapted or you are unfamiliar with the adaptation. Write the opening scene in script form. Once you have a rough first scene in rough first draft consider how you might use a visual reference to a film of a similar form. Try and include one intertextual reference which is visual. This might be something which emulates the iconic opening to a film, such as Blade Runner or Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979). Evaluate how effectively this linking of your film to another aids understanding for the audience.

8c) Hypotext and Hypertext The concepts of Hypertext and Hypotext derive from the work of the narratologist Gerard Genette. By Genette’s definition the Hypotext is the originating text and the Hypertext is the newer piece of work which uses the Hypotext without referencing it directly. If you think about hyper as above and hypo as below the concept becomes easier to conceptualize and to use in practice. This is evidently different to the concept of intertextuality which is reliant on direct references to previous texts and therefore has a different function. For you as a screenwriter there is a significant difference between a conscious referencing of other text/s in part via the process of intertextuality and the process of hypotextuality. In Genette’s terms this is about taking the essence of an earlier

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(anterior) text and using it as the foundation for a new text. In some ways this could be seen at the essence of adaptation; this is a point raised by Robert Stam in New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics. An adapted film being the hypotext and the prose being the hypertext. If this were as far as it goes it would only be worthy of a footnote in this book and would feature in earlier sections. There is more conceptual use for the screenwriter in these critical and analytical concepts. It provides us with a different mode for writing which is based on the essence of an ‘original’ hypertext and becomes a hypotext in translation. This is at the level of narrative form and is evident in the examination of how a character such as Sherlock Holmes functions. There have been multiple adaptations of Conan Doyle’s stories across a range of media. Perhaps the most iconic is the ITV series that ran from 1984 to 1994 produced by the ITV network in the UK, staring Jeremy Brett. There is an argument to be made that these stand out as they are texts which bare the hallmarks of Conan Doyle’s ‘originals’. This is something that the BBC series, Sherlock, (2010–17) also utilized. Despite being set in contemporary London the TV episodes are clearly based on Conan Doyle’s stories; “A Study in Scarlet” (Conan Doyle, 1886) becomes “A Study in Pink” (2010). This is a knowing updating of the stories where there is a reuse of the

Figure 8.4  In the BBC’s Sherlock (2010-17) the signifiers of Holmes remain, although the setting has been changed. Many of these are developed through their use and reuse.

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originals to appeal to the aficionado while also allowing those less familiar with the stories to engage with the characters. Holmes is an unusual example in that the first adaptations were produced before Conan Doyle had finished writing the canonical works. There is already a blurring of references between the written word, stage adaptations and screen adaptations. This is further compounded by the relationship between visual adaptations and Sidney Paget’s original illustrations that are as responsible for defining the aesthetic of the character as the written words. Holmes exists in a sea of signifiers from the outset. The intertextual referencing occurs within and across different versions of the Holmes adaptations. There is then increased distancing from the originals in a series such as Elementary (2011–) where Sherlock works in twenty-first-century New York and further still in House (2004–12), where Sherlock Holmes becomes Gregory House a misanthropic doctor. In House the character of Holmes sits underneath the surface, present but almost invisible. It is in an examination of how Holmes functions as Hypotext that it is possible to see the function of this as a device for the writer. Holmes is the character that forms the Hypertext for the Hypotext that is Batman. Of course, Batman is also an amalgam of generic references to Noir-influenced films and hard-boiled detective fiction, but the core elements of the character are firmly rooted in Sherlock Holmes, without any direct referencing to character or to any direct ‘original’. The characteristics of an almost superhuman detective with a remarkable intelligence and physical prowess becomes the foundation for Batman in Detective Comics #27 in 1939, with these origins being lost in the middle of time. There remains a trace of this hypertext though, a broader implicit knowledge of where these texts came from. This is useful for the screenwriter in a similar way to the use of intertextual referencing. There can be a reasonable assumption that the tropes of certain texts will be well enough known culturally to sit underneath your text and to influence the reader at a level to which they might not be aware and about which you need not make any direct referencing. This is then to appropriate the essence of a text not simply for inspiration but because the structure and form of the text is implicitly known to the reader of your script and the audience of your film.

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Exercise: Take the core characteristics of a genre-defining character. This is perhaps most readily done with a detective. List their traits and attributes and other core characteristics. Use these to ‘build’ another character; importantly this character should function within the same genre or form. Using this character conceptualize the opening of a drama. How quickly does your knowledge of the character allow your audience access to the drama? How clearly can your original be seen? If this is clear, is this a reworking of an evident source (as with Elementary) or is the character further embedded (as with House)?

Exercise: Take a setting which is familiar. Sherlock Holmes’s London for example. Use ancillary characters to populate the city, people such as Inspector Lestrade and Mrs Hudson. Write the opening to a film which uses some of these familiar signifiers of place, genre and story. Follow this by including a character of your own who will work with and then against expectations.

Case study: O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Dir: Joel and Ethan Coen (2000) It is difficult to find a contemporary text which doesn’t contain some form of referencing of other texts, and it is worth examining contemporary films to see how these references are carefully woven in to the fabric of the story, enhancing its signifying power. A film that stands out as ‘original’ but which is entirely based on other texts is the 2000 film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. This example uses a variety of different techniques and references in its construction, some of which are buried deep within the film and others which are far more evident and clear to the audience. The title of the film comes from Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941). In this film Joel McCrea plays John L. Sullivan, a film director who wants to make an adaptation of a (fictional) book about the Great Depression, O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Coen brothers are therefore making a film

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version of a book that never existed. Their film referencing the playful references in Sturges’s earlier example. Sullivan’s Travels is also an intertextual reference to Gulliver’s Travels; this reference to Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satirical masterpiece itself perhaps Sturges commenting on America of the 1940s. Other popular cultural references within the film include the character Tommy Johnson, played by Chris Thomas King. As a travelling virtuoso blues guitarist Tommy Johnson is a thinly veiled Robert Johnson. The myth surrounding Robert Johnson is that he sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play the guitar for fame and fortune. Tommy’s journey in the film echoes this and provides some explanation of what may have happened to Robert Johnson himself. This incorporation of an American cultural myth commensurate with the great depression itself draws on the Faust myth. This myth sits under a great many stories through the modern period, such as Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (c.1592) and Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814) through to contemporary films such as The Devil’s Advocate (1997). The specific reference to Robert Johnson can be read specifically or the more deeply embedded Faust myth can work independently. Either way this myth works with the character within the film to both explain his skill and work alongside other signifiers of religion. The narrative of O Brother, Where Art Thou? follows that of Homer’s The Odyssey; this functioning as the Hypotext. The film is ‘based on’ and while not an adaptation in and of itself many of the figures that feature in the Odyssey make an appearance. The central protagonist has the first name Ulysses Everett McGill, himself an echo in function, but not characteristics, of Homer’s protagonist. He, and his co-travellers, encounter sirens, a cyclops (Big Dan Teague) and Poseidon (Sheriff Cooley). The references to some of these characters, such as Cooley, are predicated on a clear knowledge of the source material that has influenced this work. Others, such as the sirens, are more easily recognizable; sirens as figures have broken free of their source text, now functioning as signifiers in their own right. In these terms O Brother, Where Art Thou? works as a text which is appropriating a source text rather than adapting it directly for the screen. Within the film there are intertextual references back to a classic of American cinema and there are direct references to specific American myths. These intertextual references have their own specific lineage which allow them to function as cultural myths. Our understanding of the film is not based on a conscious ‘reading’ of these myths; the narrative still works in its own right.

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9 Textual Play

Much critical consideration has been given to the ‘playful’ nature of contemporary texts. This is critical playfulness, not to be confused with a lighter or meaningless from of play. The form and theories of the postmodern are well established and the idea of being playful forms part of this. This encompasses self-referential devices which form a great deal of contemporary films. This is almost going full circle where there is a knowing nod to the audience; a sharing of the reference.

9a) Bricolage and semiurgy The concept of bricolage develops from theorists of postmodernism. In terms of its relevance to the screenwriter we can see this as distinct from the artistic practice of collage, where there is a clear picture made from other elements. Very important those previous elements are known and recognizable to an audience. In bricolage there is an eclecticism to the practice and is where the references are not so clearly identifiable. This is what Jean Baudrillard refers to as semiurgy, we are seated in a culture where there is interplay between references. In practice this means that while a character such as Sherlock Holmes influences Batman as hypotext, there is a further layer of complexity to the further appropriations of the character. For example, Guy Richie’s 2009 reinterpretation of Holmes in Sherlock Holmes re-creates the central character as an action hero. Of course, many of these elements are already there, buried in Doyle’s original stories. Holmes physical prowess comes to his recuse in many instances, no more so that in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892). In this story Holmes and Watson are faced with the villain of the piece, Dr Grimesby Roylott. Roylott shows his physical strength and intimidates our heroes by bending a poker with his bare hands before leaving 221b Baker Street. Holmes then casually bends it back in to shape. However connected to the ‘original’ this character trait

is, this is not what Richie is returning to in his film and in his 2011 sequel Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. His films and Robert Downey Jr’s performance are based on a wealth of action films that precede this. This is, of course, partly due to genres being brought together but it is more than this when considering what is being appropriated. In Ritchie’s case this is the character of Holmes as refracted through a series of adaptations where the cerebral leads and where he is at the same time writing against this by using the characteristics of the wise-cracking action hero. This is something which extends across a number of contemporary texts and arguably is the function of being ‘adrift in a sea of signifiers’ and this is a contemporary phenomenon connected to the proliferation and interaction between screen and other media. As many theorists of the postmodern argue, there is an a-historical stance to many modern texts. Thus, Guy Ritchie’s Holmes is at once a Victorian set film, which draws on a modern filmic lineage to tell its story, but where one of the

Figure 9.1  This is taken one step further in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) which recreates Hyde as the Hulk. In this film Jekyll’s physical change sees him become much bigger, and muscle bound, able to tear building apart with his bare hands. This echoes the 2003 Ang Leedirected version, Hulk. This form of bricolage allows for a playful interaction between texts, beyond direct intertextual referencing and beyond simple integration of genre.

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Ur-texts of the action figure is Holmes himself. This can be seen in the contemporary use of Mr Hyde from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). This text forms the basis of the Hulk as a comic book character, first appearing in The Incredible Hulk (1962). The tale of the scientist who, through experimentation transforms himself in to a beast; revealing the darker side of humanity is very familiar as a narrative trope. A case of appropriation and hypotext. This is in theory something which is liberating for the writer. Contemporary cinema (and increasingly television) provides something of a playground where references are there to be used and developed as the writer sees fit. This is on one level freeing as the restrictions that often inform adaptation give way to an a-historical appropriation of references as they develop. This in turn gives way to new genres, with films such as Sherlock Holmes and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. However, at its extremes this can lead to confusion for the writer and for the audience, and while the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen makes for a good analytical and conceptual example it was not a successful film at the box office or with critics. It is perhaps due to the intensity of the references thrown at the audience, and suggests that perhaps what an audience crave is some grounding in that which is familiar. This is what Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes provides, familiarity even though some of the references are indirect. They remain known and therefore are comfortable. The family film Sherlock Gnomes (2018) perhaps best evidences the pervasiveness of Holmes as a figure; this is a 3D animated film that is intended to appeal to the whole family. It uses the familiar character tropes of Holmes and, of course, everyone will understand the character. We already know him.

Exercise: In many ways using these ideas as a prompt for writing is difficult as the films we watch are often products of a society and time; as a writer you might not always be aware of your own influences. Perhaps the most important exercise is to return to a piece of writing you have undertaken. This doesn’t have to be a piece of adaptation or conscious appropriation – it is better if it is a piece of original writing. Examine your work for traces of those things that you enjoy or are familiar with. Ask yourself what characters, events or settings are present in or behind your work. Ask yourself how these references can be more fully used and developed.

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Exercise: Take a dominant cultural character such as Holmes. They don’t have to have the ‘classic’ status attached, it might be that they are currently well known. Draw out their main defining characteristics and use these to create ‘new’ characters. The trace of the old will remain beneath and shouldn’t be seen by your audience, but your knowledge of them will help you to shape and develop your own work.

9b) Customizing the classic text If the extremes of playfulness can be challenging for an audience, it might suggest why the ‘classic’ endures and still forms the mainstay of cinema and television. The process of customizing, developing and changing a ‘classic’ text is important to consider, not as simply a process of adaptation, but as a process of appropriation. Shakespeare’s plays have been translated to the screen numerous times and the case study in Chapter 6 has shown how the Coen Brothers O Brother Where Art Though? is a retelling of The Odyssey. But no text has been more used, refashioned and redeveloped than Dracula. This is a text which brings with it a series of specific and unusual problems. As a novel Dracula is not the first vampire story published and in itself is based on pre-existing folklore and myth. It is also, in part, based on John Polydori’s The Vampyre (1819) in addition to a range of Eastern European folktales imparted to Bram Stoker on his travels as a theatrical agent; if we are to believe the legends. From its outset it is a text that is customized from other texts and at the same time becomes the Ur-text for all future vampire stories, to the point where it is referenced (in revisionist form) in the film adaptation of Interview with a Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994). The ‘original’ that inspired the appropriated novel becomes incorporated in to the film adaptation. Published in 1897 the first adaptation was a theatre piece also written by Stoker. This was performed before the book was published, effectively setting the text up as one which would be forever in flux. The first screen version was a Hungarian film produced in 1921, some twenty-four years after the publication of the book and close to the start of feature film. Dracula, in some ways like Sherlock

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Holmes, is a figure that from the outset belongs to a range of different media and functions across and between those media. There is much about the text that makes it open to interpretation and allows for it to be used and reused across time. Much of this is to do with the potential for storytelling that is offered by the vampire myth, taken and developed by Bram Stoker in his novel. As a character Dracula is something of a blank canvas and this allows for a great deal of artistic licence in developing the character. This ranges from the animalistic presentation of the count in Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958), through the psychological complexity of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1994) to the teen angst of the Twilight series of films (2008–11). The mythic dimension of the story allows for the use and reuse of the classic to deal with a variety of different socio-cultural issues. In essence there is a use of the text and myth to deal with an ideological position in a covert manner. This is not to suggest some dreadful conspiracy through film, more that certain texts allow for a discussion of particular issues in a way that is perhaps ‘safer’ than tackling them head on. This provides you with a great deal of opportunity as a screenwriter in choosing and using a text which is familiar enough for an audience through a range of adaptations and even other appropriated examples for you to discuss and debate an issue. This is playing with myth or with texts that have taken on mythic qualities.

Figure 9.2  Shadow of the Vampire (2000) uses the myth that informed Stoker and then Murnau, in loose adapted form. In this film Murnau is using a ‘real’ vampire to play Nosferatu character.

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There is a well-documented academic debate that Stoker’s text was, in part, dealing with issues of sexuality in a way that was palatable to Victorian society. Coppola’s (very loose) adaptation of the novel draws out some of the themes of the original, but in an era where other issues of sexuality and monogamy are being discussed. Bela Lugosi’s career defining portrayal of Dracula in Tod Browning’s 1931 version of the film opened up implicit discussion of America’s relationship to Europe. The Lost Boys (1987) is essentially a teen action movie which couples the Peter Pan story with Dracula and debates issues of youth morality in playful form. Stoker’s Dracula has been therefore worked and reworked across the history of literature, television and cinema to produce a malleable text which is equally at home in the hands of Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark, 1983), Robert Rodriguez (From Dusk till Dawn, 1996), Jim Jarmush (Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013) or in the Underworld or Blade series.

Exercise: Approach any text which you can categorize as a ‘classic’. Address what it is about the text that might lead you to think of it as a classic. Consider the context in which it is set and what the underlying themes of the text might be. In revisiting the text for adaptation consider how you might keep the historical period the same. How might this allow you to deal with contemporary issues?

Exercise: The second exercise is to draw on the mythic qualities that emerge from a text by virtue of it being a classic. What is the text ‘saying’ or discussing beneath the surface? How might these issues be relevant in contemporary society. Once this has been undertaken try changing the time period in which the text is set. What would have to change beyond the setting? Use this as the basis to develop an original idea for a story which is based on a clear source text, but where that reference is not so simply identified to your audience. For example, if you are using Dracula, develop a vampire character but don’t use the iconic name.

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9c) Weaving fact and fiction One form that has received little practical comment in theories of adaptation is the autobiography or memoir. Biopics are a mainstay of cinema, particularly when drawing on individuals with iconic status, such as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) or Jimi Hendrix: All by My Side (John Ridley, 2013). There are other films which play with the status of representation, such as Todd Haynes depiction of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There (2007). There are further films which are clearly an amalgam of ‘real’ experiences, such as This Is Spinal Tap (1984) or Velvet Goldmine (1998). However, texts which appropriate elements of ‘fact’ from a significant part of cinema, even those which are not necessarily considered to be pieces of non-fiction. However, this would require detailed consideration in its own right; here we are concerned with how ‘fact’ can and is used as part of fiction. The result of this is where there is then a blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction in the generation of new material. This provides you as a screenwriter with opportunities. The use of factual references has a specific function in how the text might be received by the audience. The use of fact has a function in what it signifies to an audience. In essence it provides a sense of authenticity which might be otherwise lacking. This is an authentic function beyond the suspension of disbelief which is an essential part of the process of watching cinema. The second effect of the inclusion of factual material is the intrusion of the fictional in to the real and vice versa. Films such as A Study in Terror (1965) and Murder By Decree (1979) give Sherlock Holmes the chance to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper. The ripper murders were commensurate with Holmes, but would never have made the original stories for the same reason that a current crime is unlikely to be fictionalized until well after the event. This is the case with a film such as Zodiac (1997), where James Vanderbilt’s screenplay is based on Robert Graysmith’s book, Zodiac (1986). There is distance in time from the original murders to allow this film to be made. This is the same as a film such as The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) where Terence Winter’s script is based on Jordan Belfort’s 2007 memoir of the same name. Even a film such as Hampstead (2017) which is inspired by a ‘real’ event (a news story) is developed in to an original screenplay. The real event that sits behind this film becomes a useful framework for structuring it, and has the added advantage of being a good marketing tool, but does not inform the process of adaptation as it impacts on audience understanding of the film.

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The examples cited above are much closer to a ‘conventional’ form of adaptation, using the structure and character of the source material to fashion an original script. Fincher’s work, for example, is very different to a text such as Murder by Decree where the real intrudes in to the fictional. However, it is important to consider the semiurgical and mythic qualities of a character such as Jack the Ripper and why this figure should work so well in this context and is reused in other fictions, for example with From Hell (2001). This can then provide a framework for how you might use similar devices to create your story. In effect appropriating from fact and fiction (myth) to generate an original screenplay. What we have with a figure such as Jack the Ripper is a character who has slipped in to myth. This is aided by the fact that the Ripper was never caught and this aids the sense of mystery and thus speculation about the figure. From the outset, the Ripper has been caught in fictional discourse that lends itself to storytelling. There is a ‘Ripper industry’ that features numerous texts seeking to explain who the ripper was and how they evaded capture for so long. This includes the crime writer Patricia Cornwell (Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, 2017) and screenwriter and director Bruce Robinson (They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, 2016). This suggests there is something in the story that entices storytellers: the unsolved mystery. The stories of Jack the Ripper fit in to a pattern of urban

Figure 9.3  In Time after Time (1979) Meyer has the Ripper meet H.G. Wells, who is recast as a reluctant action hero after being transported to 1979 Los Angeles. Meyer’s conceit is that Wells actually invented the time machine.

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myth, developing from the stories of Spring-heeled Jack. In these fables, Springheeled Jack had various horrific visages and clothing, occasionally with supernatural characteristics. In this sense there is always a weaving of the distinctions between fact and fiction in the development of a screenplay which takes from a range of cultural references to develop something new. The writer director Nicholas Meyer has continued with this theme approach and with the playful use of the blending of fictional characters with real figures. The Seven-PerCent Solution (1976) is an adaptation of Meyer’s own 1974 novel and sees Holmes being ‘treated’ by Sigmund Freud. This film attempts to get behind the character of Holmes and draws playfully on the mythic elements of the story discussed earlier in this chapter.

Exercise: Take an iconic event in recent history. This should be something well known to an audience at large, although you don’t have to expect them to know the precise detail of what happened. A financial irregularity, sensational murder trial or similar would work well. Use this as the basis for your story. Write in a character who works with the ‘reality’ of the event. This could be a bystander who takes us on a journey, or it could be a detective who gets to the ‘truth’ that was otherwise absent.

Exercise: Repeat the above exercise but this time take a historical event – something that happened more than fifty years ago. Use a fictional character who is commensurate with that event and who is well enough known for the references to connote meaning to an audience. This does not have to be a detective, although they do lend themselves to this form of story. For example, if you wanted to tell a story about the Napoleonic Wars how would a character such as Mr Wickham from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice help you? This would be an amalgam of all the various adaptations that have been made as much as the original prose.

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Case study: The Hours, Dir: Stephen Daldry (2003) Michael Cunningham’s 1999 novel, The Hours, presents a difficult challenge for the screenwriter. The acclaimed scriptwriter David Hare undertook the challenge for the 2002 film of the same name, directed by Stephen Daldry. Hare’s screenplay and Daldry’s subsequent film of The Hours is at once an example of adaptation, appropriation, customizing a classic and weaving fact and fiction. The book and subsequent film takes Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) and uses this as the basis for the interaction between three characters across time and allows for the connection between them. The most contemporary of the characters is Clarissa Vaughn, a thinly veiled Clarissa Dalloway. Hare uses the threads that Cunningham draws from Woolf’s original text in her characterization. Clarissa Vaughn follows similar narrative tropes, this being a day in her life as she offers emotional support to her dying friend, Richard. Flowers feature significantly, as they do for Clarissa Dalloway; the connections being made across time but with Vaughn having some of the independence that Dalloway is seeking. This is a clear intertextual use of Dalloway in the creation and development of Vaughn. However, there is a blurring of fact and fiction within the piece as both novel and film open with the suicide of Virginia Woolf herself. Hare draws on Cunningham’s use of Woolf’s suicide note as a dramatic device, with Leonard Woolf encountering the letter and rushing to try and save Virginia; we already know he is too late. Hare’s dramatization of these events is, of course, supposition for dramatic effect. This presence of the ‘author’ of the text that is being used as the basis for the film adds a level of authenticity to the related narrative in the presence of the film. The relationship between the characters is confirmed through the move to 1951 and to the character of Laura Brown, herself reading a copy of Mrs Dalloway. This is in part as an imagined escape from the situation she finds herself in; one of domestic drudgery and an inability to fit in to the role that society expects of her. This includes her role as ‘housewife’ and mother to Richard. Through this intertextual narrative in 1951 we move to the contemporary and 2001 where it is identified that Richard is the grown-up child we see in 1951. His own mother’s obsession with the novel, Mrs Dalloway, has translated in to his own occupation as a writer and his ‘creation’ of Clarissa Vaughn as Clarissa Dalloway in his own work. In doing this there is a blurring of the line between the use of a real character in Woolf and the creation of a fictional

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writer in Richard, while treating them as equals. This is equally true of the treatment of Clarissa Vaughan and Dalloway as fictional characters. The complexity of these intertextual relationships creates an experience that becomes increasingly immersive with every discovered point of convergence. The interweaving of realities and fictions raises issues of authorship and authority, when the boundaries between texts and between authors begin to blur. In Mrs Dalloway Clarissa Dalloway thinks she spots a member of the royal family in the West End. Michael Cunningham has fun when his Clarissa thinks she spots contemporary American royalty in the form of a famous a movie star. Was it Meryl Streep or perhaps Vanessa Redgrave? Another game: in 1997 Vanessa Redgrave played the title role in a screen adaptation of Mrs Dalloway (dir. Marleen Gorris). But the reader/viewer is afforded yet another level of intertextual delight, as Meryl Streep goes on to play Clarissa Vaughan in the film version of The Hours. As if to confirm or compensate for the ‘death of the author’, Cunningham gets to make an anonymous, un-credited appearance as a film ‘extra’ in the adaptation of his book. He can be spotted standing on the street, beaming at Clarissa Vaughan on her way to the flower shop. But in this fleeting appearance he is both ‘acknowledged’ by the film and kept invisible as an artist in his own right. The novel is an acknowledged homage to another author, whose reputation and status undoubtedly drew attention to Cunningham’s own novel. Understandably, the film devotes a lot of time to staging Virginia Woolf as writer, almost as if it was an adaptation of a text written by her. Woolf’s ‘presence’ in the film, as literary celebrity, dominated the pre-production publicity, in conjunction with the surprise casting of Nicole Kidman (famed for her beauty, partner of Tom Cruise, another cinematic royal) to play the part. The most intense focus fell on the prosthetic nose she was forced to wear as a vague approximation to Woolf’s equine profile. It could be said that in the promotion and reception of the film the fixation on Kidman’s transformation from Hollywood star to frumpy modernist intellectual, eclipsed everything else, including the playful intertextual relationships built into the novel and extended onto the screen. Alternately the media hype might be seen as adding still further layers to the interplay between authors and texts. ‘Nicole Kidman’ (or what is popularly believed about her life and career) is yet another text appropriated by and continued within The Hours. The real actress, and the very unreal

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nose, become another narrative dimension spinning off from Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway. The intertextuality of the actor’s relationship to her role becomes an instance of the cinema’s relationship with literature as a whole. Literature is serious, but drab. Film is a phenomenally expensive putty-nose. Film has difficulty representing artists. Movies tend to fall back on a number of clichés revolving around social dysfunction, neurotic discomfort and emotional fragility. Kidman’s depiction of Virginia Woolf as artist is contracted into a series of frowns and bouts of morbid dreaminess. The camera lingers on her selection of a preferred pen, on the domestic chaos and her incessant smoking. These become the standard external markers of an agitated creativity. The subliminal message is that ‘the life of the mind’ entails distance from common reality and terrible mental frailty. Acts of artistic endeavour and intellectual construction are nowhere to be seen. We watch her embrace the role of female eccentric. She knows ‘in theory’ how a woman in her position should manage her servants, but she can’t put it into practice. Her fictional Mrs Dalloway, fits into conventional English society much better than she, the author, ever could. In this, and in other ways, Woolf’s fictional creation is presented as a substitute or compensation for her own awkward, indecisive and unworldly self. As history this is dubious. The representation of Woolf has serious biographical inaccuracies, collapsing time in such a way as to suggest that Mrs Dalloway was her swan song. It wasn’t. Kidman’s performance is generally characterized by a sort of vagueness and abstraction which runs counter to Woolf’s real-life reputation as a wit and sharp critical commentator. The real-life Virginia Woolf was not a reclusive invalid. She was a lover of parties, of the social scene and of London in particular. Like the novel, the film could be said to over-emphasize her fragile mental health, climaxing in her gathering hysteria in the scene at Richmond Station. We seem to want our geniuses to totter on the edge of railway platforms and remain largely unfit for ordinary life. In so far as this is the case The Hours (fiction and film) conspires to contribute to the extensive cultural text called ‘the suffering artist’.

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10 Other Forms

This chapter examines ‘other forms’ that you may encounter when considering adaptation. Many of the principles established in earlier chapters apply to any form of adaptation; there is consistency in the adaptation to the screen, regardless of the originating form. These include underlying assumptions about fidelity, narrative form, etc., as outlined in earlier chapters. However, there are specific formal considerations that different texts suggest that are important to examine if you intended to transpose from a form other than prose to the screen. This list of other forms included here is not exhaustive and there may be other forms that you wish to adapt. Many of the principles established below will apply across a variety of forms and sub-forms. At root the process of adaptation does not change, you are still in the business of transposing from one form to the next; however, the building blocks of the originating form are different and this requires a different process of conceptualization. This understanding of the function of the originating form (structurally and culturally) is crucial as the first act of adaptation is one of interpretation. At a basic level the nature of forms other than prose means that your adaptation will mean a move from the visual to the visual. Or rather a move from the visual to words (script) which are intended to be turned into images. This adds a layer of complexity to the process that requires further consideration.

10a) Graphic novels There has to be a distinction made from the outset between comic books and associated graphic novels and graphic novels which are produced in their own

right. In part this is a cultural consideration, which places different expectations on the two forms. Arguably what is shared is their form, and this is what is considered below. There is, however, a different set of assumptions about the graphic novel which sit alongside prose fiction as a respected form which has the capacity to deal with serious issues. This is most clearly evident in the work of Alan Moore and films such as From Hell (Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes, 2001) and V for Vendetta (James McTeague, 2005) which tackle serious and often adult issues. Graphic novels have a history and a respect attached to them which perhaps did not exist in the same way twenty-five years ago. Texts such as Maus (Art Spiegelman, 1991) have evidenced the power of the graphic novel to tell stories in a different way to prose. The integration of text and image has been in existence for as long as the printed word, from the illuminated manuscript, through William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) and his illustrations for Dickens. The difference with the presentation of the pages in the graphic novel is in the complete integration of the image and the work, with the image taking on more importance in terms of interpretation and omnipresence. This presents the screenwriter with a different series of challenges where the images, settings, etc., appear to have been provided ahead of the process. There is an element of truth to this as there are images which can form the basis of what you adapt. In the same way that there might be the perceived need to be ‘faithful’ to the original with prose, the same could be true with the graphic novel. The problem of sticking closely to the ‘original’ is perhaps heightened in this case as a graphic novel appears to be almost like a story board; the implication being that you could almost do without a script and get straight to the production of the film. In the process of adaptation it is important to consider what is absent from the page that is essential in a film script. Primarily this is movement, graphic novels are made up of a series of ‘frames’ which when read in linear form create meaning. Some graphic novels infer movement by breaking the frame and moving one scene to the next, even breaking the linearity of reading. Film scripts are broken into discreet scenes but often will indicate movement as CUT or FADE. Films also have movement within scenes; again, this is indicated in the description in your script. This can be implied within the frame of the graphic novel but the cells are often static.

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Time is treated differently in graphic novels and films: a graphic novel will inevitably be able to hold on a scene for a long time, essentially due to the nature of a still image. The reader can pause on the image in order to derive meaning. The frames have to be read in order for the narrative progression and plot to unfold, although it is easy for a reader to engage with a text, moving backwards and forwards through the text as they choose. However, the individual cell is essentially a piece of mise en scène and has a similar function to that which is developed in cinema. A scene might be developed across a range of cells, each of which might allow us a different view of action in the same way that a camera might. Tone is often something which is interpreted by the reader and while parameters are set by the author these are often somewhat open in a graphic novel. A film such as The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci, 2018) uses Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin’s 2010 graphic novel original and has been rewritten by Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin and Peter Fellows to draw out the comic absurdity afforded by the political games involved in the graphic novel’s interpretation. In the graphic novel, the humour is implied and the film draws this out to provide a darkly comedic film which highlights the deeply problematic issues inherent in the subject matter. Dialogue is often limited in a graphic novel and the rule that you should show rather than tell (whenever possible) holds out. This perhaps makes graphic novels a good source for adaptation in that the first act is to translate the image on the page to the image on the screen. The majority of graphic novels are extremely limited in their use of boxouts and there are rarely passages of dialogue. This is something that you then have to develop in line with the general advice given to writing original scripts. Keep the dialogue essential and make sure it aids characterization and develops the plot but avoid exposition. There are also graphic novels which take comic book characters and use them as part of the narrative form of a text which presents a complete narrative in its own right. This is of a different order to those graphic novels identified above. This is where an author is appropriating characters from other texts in order to create a unified text which is based on an audience’s knowledge of the character across a range of texts. This makes those examples difficult to work with and perhaps explains why a text such as Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, 1989) has yet to be tackled. Any adaptation of Arkham Asylum would

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necessitate a reworking of the character in respect of depictions of the character in screen and in comic books since, or it would require a complete rejection of these depictions.

Exercise: Start the process of adapting a graphic novel. This should ideally be a text which has not been adapted. It is useful to select a graphic novel which doesn’t feature a well-known character. This provides you with a ‘blank canvas’ for adapting a text. Consider what an opening scene is intended to do; establish setting, and tone, and occasionally character. Consider what your opening description would be, what words do you use to capture what exists in the opening few frames? How do you indicate movement? Use the progression across the frames to indicate this.

Exercise: Take a scene in a graphic novel that features two or more characters but which doesn’t have any dialogue. If there is text in the frame which progresses the plot, this can be discounted. Write the scene as a script, using description. Evaluate the scene in the progression of the narrative. What dialogue would be included and what voice would the characters have?

10b) Video games The video game industry has developed exponentially over the last few years. The move to photorealism, online play, etc., has provided an increasingly immersive experience. The technical capabilities of gaming consoles have led to the development of expansive narrative-based games. These games draw on film narratives and in turn inform film narratives. Games such as the highly successful Uncharted series (Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2007–17) take inspiration from the Indiana Jones movies, which in turn take their inspiration from 1930s to 1950s Saturday morning cinema featurettes: this is a form of inter- and hypotextuality in

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operation as outlined in Chapter 6. Films such as San Andreas (Brad Payton, 2015) or the Fast and Furious series (2001–) take on the aesthetic of the video game in turn, this being taken to the logical conclusion in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Jake Kasdan, 2017). In this last example a 1990s game console transports the protagonists into a game world in which they ‘play’ the characters in the game, thus playing on our knowledge of video game conventions. This is a form of appropriation, but there are also more ‘direct’ adaptations which require some consideration. Games on screen are not a new phenomenon as the 1985 production of Clue (Jonathan Lynn) from the board game Cluedo identifies. This is again the use of a popular cultural artefact on screen with a pre-existing audience. This audience will be aware of the codes and conventions, and gameplay of the original and will therefore be using these as part of the narrative frame of the film. This is no different from video games; however the process of play is much more complicated than with a board game and as such the adaptation of a video game presents you with specific problems. Some of the concerns are similar to those identified above in the consideration of graphic novels. This is particularly true if you were to approach adapting a game such as L.A. Noire (Rockstar Games, 2011) which itself draws very heavily on film noir as source material. In fact, this was the first video game to be shown at a film festival (the Tribecca Festival, 2011) suggesting the distinctions between forms were starting to blur then. There are multiple cases of this, with the Call of Duty series (Activision 2003–) perhaps being the most notorious. As games have become increasingly sophisticated, they have an aesthetic which is much more like cinema. This doesn’t extend to narrative however, too much story would interrupt gameplay and as such there will always be fundamental limitations in form when considering adaptation. Dialogue can be extremely limited and has to be re-written for the cinema screen. The function of bridging sections of gameplay doesn’t make for effective dialogue in a film. The plot points of a game are inevitably different in a game to where they would be in a film. The text time is fundamentally different in a game to a film; where a film will last for exactly, say, two hours, a game can last for weeks of continual play. The functions of the moments of story outside a gameplay are then intended to function as moments of pause and narrative exposition to lead to the next section. Tension and conflict is created by the action of playing the game and while it might be furthered by the moments of story this is

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not where it resides. In a film script, of course, tension is created by the complexities of plot development. The game then becomes an outline for a film at best. A form which can provide the essentials of story, characters, events and settings, but structurally can do little else. The appropriation of characters, settings or titles of a game is a much looser thing and thus falls into the realms of the intertextuality identified in Chapter 6. The aspect of form that is fundamentally different is the protagonist. Games will occasionally provide some backstory for the player’s character, a facet used playfully in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. But during the game the player (you) are immersed in the action. This gives the perception of control and choice, although this is within parameters. Games which have the option of online play extend this universe and cast others, often strangers, as comrades and antagonists. This immersive quality is where a second fundamental difference between forms lies. If you have the option of choosing a character to play, you may be given a line or two by the way of biography and perhaps a power or weapon that will aid you in your quest. It will not give you specific traits and attributes, the essential building blocks of characterization. These are not necessary as the game is not asking you to empathize or relate to the main character; you are that character. The function of the scriptwriter in working with the game as source material is to then take the available core characteristics and to generate a character that functions within the film while not working against the expectations of the gamer. Most games are full of action, despite their other generic connections. Most games that have been adapted for the screen then feature as action movies, which themselves generally don’t have huge complexity in characterization, instead functioning as spectacle. There is then an inevitable connection in form. This is the point where the game diverts away from cinema in having so many options available and also connects in that we are being introduced to characters who we have never met before and with whom we will spend some significant time. We do have to create a ‘hero’ who will undertake the journey for us. This is where the function of cinema in terms of its ability to make us empathize with a character, to feel for a character and for us to live through them is played out. Paul W. S. Anderson’s Alien vs. Predator (2004) takes the audience on a journey with Alexa Woods, wanting her to survive through and feeling the peril as the rest of the ensemble cast are killed off, good and bad characters alike. Alien vs. Predator is in part

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understood because it is a game built on the integration of two film franchises, as reflected through graphic novels. The phenomenon of game to screen has perhaps reached its logical intertextual conclusion with the production of Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug, 2018), itself being both a remake of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) (itself the adaptation of a game originally produced in 2001 by Core Design) and inspired by the 2013 reworking of the game. A film such as Ready Player One (2018) which itself is adapted from a novel (Ernest Cline, 2011) comments on an extant gaming culture but which also has implicit references to a film such as Batteries Not Included (1987) which had involvement from Spielberg himself.

Exercise: Take a Point-of-View shooter game. Follow the progression of the game as it develops. There will inevitably be settings and many of these will be detailed. It is also likely that there will be other characters, most probably an antagonist. For the gameplay to work there has to be moments of jeopardy. You will have the core elements of a story. What is absent in these games is the ‘hero’, as the player is positioned in this role, feeling an emotional response. The exercise is to develop a character who you can drop into this story and to assess how that character would respond to the situations the gameplay initiates. This can then form the basis of your plot.

Exercise: Games tend to be action based. Even games which seek to follow a narrative in some detail will have moments of high drama. As we have discussed, there is an interplay between film and games. Choose a game that is genre based, something like Uncharted would serve this purpose very well. Identify how the game is using overt genre tropes or even cliché as a short hand to ensure the pace of the game is maintained. Write a step outline of all the key plot points in the game. Use these as the basis for a step outline of a film. Assess what can be kept and what has to go.

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10c) Theatre The majority of adaptations are of prose to screen, hence the majority focus of this text. If you were to list the number of films you have seen which are based on stage plays it would most likely form a significant list. The motivations for the film company are similar to their choosing a novel; cultural kudos would perhaps explain why Shakespeare remains so rich for screen adaptation. Examples stretch from the earliest silent films that were made (examples) to the most current examples on screen. There is also a ready-made audience with popular stage productions, extending to include popular musicals, which have been a mainstay of Hollywood cinema for years. In theory, theatre should be the easiest of forms to move from stage to screen. What is being adapted is a script to another script, words intended for performance to another text intended for performance. The fundamental differences in form make this an equivalent in complexity to the movement from prose to screen. Stage drama stands as distinct from graphic novels in that there are no images, save from where you may have seen a stage production. This in itself highlights the issue; a stage production is a version of the play and thus in many ways your production is another version of a stage production, albeit one for the screen. However, to limit your work to this conceptual framework is to limit yourself significantly. It is important to consider what is absent in a stage play that you would find in a script for screen. First, this is the presentation of description and action. Generally speaking, stage plays are light on description of space and action. This is in part because stage plays deal in representational space whereas films deal in realism. This requires a different level of engagement on the part of the audience. This is best exemplified by the Charlie Kaufman scripted and directed Synecdoche: New York (2008) where Caen Cotard is directing a stage play which involves a car crash. The ‘real’ crash on stage demonstrates the artifice of the form when presented as real. It is commonplace for major theatre productions to be screened to cinemas as a live event, but this does not make it a film. In these terms, then the screenwriter has a series of decisions to make, based on how they want to interpret their source text. First, this is the physical space, which has to be created and developed and given a sense of realism conferred by a

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physical space. For example Baz Luhurmann’s 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet is set on Venice Beach in Los Angeles and Mark Herman’s Little Voice (1998) is located in a rundown seaside town in the north of England. In each of these cases there are connotations of environment that provide parameters from within which an audience will interpret the story. The second consideration is voice. Depending on the form of theatre being considered, films such as Frost/Nixon (Ron Howard, 2008) exploit the intimate settings of the stage and recreate this on the screen. The dialogue then works for the screen. With the adaptation of a ‘classic’ there is arguably an acceptance of the use of the original dialogue, this is evident in most Shakespeare adaptations. This is nothing new and the use of theatre as a source material can be seen in examples such as Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1950). There can also be a considered use of voice and speech to create character. The thinly disguised Bullingdon Club is given life via the creation of character through voice in Laura Wade’s Posh (2010). This is both in intonation in character voice and through what the characters say. This allows for a transposition to the screen (by Wade herself ) in The Riot Club (2014). However, in other examples dialogue can appear to be ‘stagey’ and lack the realism often required by cinema audience and thus a process of translation from stage direction to screen description occurs. Where there might appear to be a similar use of dialogue in many stage to screen adaptations there is often a process of editing that has occurred to fit the precise and finite time available for screen drama and therefore the script. This process of time is then the third consideration. If the stage is a medium for voice first (where silence is used, but as a result of voice) then the screen is a medium of action. This requires some further editing to allow the time for audience to see rather than being told. The above considerations are assuming that the piece of theatre in question is in itself of a classic, melodramatic or realist form. There have been and are many examples of experimental theatre forms which present their own challenge. These have been turned in to films where there is a recognition of the prior form, that this is a screen production of a stage artefact, films such as Oleanna (1994) or Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and Tom Stoppard’s own adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) might fall into this category. This suggests options to you in using theatre as a source material. There is a conceptual question about how you will use space. Theatre uses what we might think of as

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imagined space which links to theatrical form. There is the possibility of using the theatrical form on the screen; this would inevitably mean changing some of the devices the stage dramatist might use to bring their work to the screen. This is perhaps most evident with the work of a dramatist such as Bertolt Brecht whose alienation effect was achieved by drawing attention to the artifice of the theatrical experience. This is perfectly possible when you are sat in a space where the issue of proximity means that there can be physical interruptions in the space. This was achieved by Brecht by devices such as characters changing costume on stage and bringing on banners identifying the political message of the play. The recorded nature of film means that such devices would look odd on screen rather than highlighting issues with form. While experimentation in film form is commonplace, it is unusual in stage to screen adaptation. An example such as the 1969 film adaptation of Oh! What a Lovely War takes the 1963 play by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre workshop and moves this to the screen. The proximity of the performers is lost, alongside the ability the audience has to look to the side to see the slides from the First World War projected against the action on the stage. Attenborough translated the essence of Littlewood’s work in using the end of the pier show as a running theme throughout. It is easy to underestimate how important the relationship between text and performance is. In theatre we are in the presence of people with the concomitant dangers and tensions involved. This is always absent in cinema and thus emotion has to be conveyed and tension has to be developed in a different way. The screen in Oh! What a Lovely War highlights a fundamental difference in screen adaptation from a text intended for the stage. Framing is significantly different on stage than in screen based media. A theatre audience can look wherever they choose during the performance and it is the job of the director and actors to force attention on a particular part of the stage. Film directs an audience where to look. In adapting a piece of theatre for the screen you have the opportunity for a moment of intimacy for example, where it might otherwise not occur or appear. This decision can be driven by what is implied by the text. However, it does put you directly in the place of being a director, thinking about how the play should look and picturing that before translating it back to a piece of paper. The process of adaptation can of course work both ways and there is a contemporary phenomenon of films being turned into successful stage plays and, particularly,

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musicals. These are interesting examples to consider as they show the above process in reverse. The film is chosen because of popularity and because it lends itself to the musical form. An audience approaches the text with knowledge of the original production and the stage dramatist can use this to their advantage in creating the representational space with connects to the ‘real’ original film; examples of this include Billy Elliot (2000) and Brassed Off (1995). There is also the contemporary phenomenon of large budget West End or Broadway productions of ‘juke box’ musicals which are themselves appropriations of songs with a story being built from or around these. There is also a recent rise in the number of stage plays which seeks to continue or get behind a story, such as Wicked or Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. There are also those where the process is iterative and based on the broader cultural success of the artefact. This is arguably the case with the textual interplay between the various forms of Little Shop of Horrors. In the case of The Producers, Mel Brooks created a film (1967) depicting a stage musical, which became a stage musical (2001) and when this became a huge success a screen adaptation of the stage musical was produced (2005).

Exercise: The simplest exercise you can undertake in considering the process of adaptation from stage to screen is to take a play script and follow what happens on screen. This form of transposition can include noting down what images have been created on screen, where action has been added and where dialogue has been edited or changed. It is worth following this exercise with a classic and with a more contemporary example. From this, you should take a piece of contemporary drama and follow the same process. What would remain and what would be edited? What decisions do you have to make about setting, how much is given and how much do you have to decide and make concrete in your adaptation? At what point does your new script become something that is so far away from the original that it borders on becoming appropriation rather than adaptation?

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Exercise: Take a play script which uses a form of theatre which works against the realist that dominates in cinema. A text which is absurdist or epic in form would present you with significant problems. Conceptualize this for the screen. Consider what can be used and what needs to be radically reworked to fit the form of cinema. Evaluate what point do you lose the original, instead using it as (at best) inspiration for a piece of film. This perhaps suggests the limits of each form in comparison with each other.

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Wade, Laura. Posh, London: Oberon Books, 2010. Wells, H. G. The Invisible Man (1897), London: Penguin Classics, 2012. Wolff, Tobias. The Night in Question, New York: Bloomsbury, 1997. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway (1925), London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando (1928), London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2004.

Filmography *batteries not included (1987), [Film] Dir. Matthew Robins, USA: Amblin Entertainment. 633 Squadron (1968), [Film] Dir. Walter Grauman, UK: Mirsch Films. A Study in Pink (2010), [TV Programme] BBC1. A Study in Terror (1965), [Film] Dir. James Hill, UK: Compton-Tekli Film Productions/Sir Nigel Films. Adaptation (2002), [Film] Dir. Spike Jonze, USA: Good Machine/Intermedia/Propaganda Films. Alien vs. Predator (2004), [Film] Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson, USA: Davis Entertainment/ Brandywine/Impact Picture/Impact Picture/Stillking Films. American Friend, The (1977) Dir. Wim Wenders, Germany: Road Movies Filmproduktion/Wim Wenders Productions/Les Films du Losange/Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Anna Karenina (2012), [Film] Dir. Joe Wright, UK: Working Title/Studio Canal. Apocalypse Now (1979), [Film] Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, USA: Omni Zoetrope. Battleship Potemkin (1925) Dir. Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union: Mosfilm. Billy Elliot (2000), [Film] Dir. Stephen Daldry, UK: BBC Films/Tiger Aspect Pictures/Working Title Films. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), [Film] Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, USA: American Zoetrope/Osiris Films. Brassed Off (1995), [Film] Dir. Mark Herman, UK: Miramax. Brazil (1985), [Film] Dir. Terry Gilliam, UK: Embassy International Pictures/Brazil Productions. Bullet in the Brain (2001), [Film] Dir. David Von Ancken, USA: David Von Ancken. Clue (1985), [Film] Dir. Jonathan Lynn, USA: Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Dam Busters, The (1955), Dir. Michael Anderson, UK: Associated British Picture Coroporation. Death of Stalin, The (2017), Dir. Armando Iannucci, UK/France: Main Journey/Quad Productions. Devil’s Advocate, The (1997), Dir. Taylor Hackford, USA: Regency Enterprises. Don’t Look Now (1973), Dir. Nicolas Roeg, UK/Italy: Casey Productions/Eldorado Films. Doors, The (1991), Dir. Oliver Stone, USA: Bill Graham Films/Carolco Pictures/Imagine Entertainment/Ixtlan.

268

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Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), Dir. Rouben Mamoulian, USA: Paramount Pictures. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Dir. Victor Fleming, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Dir: Stanley Kubrick, UK: Hawk Films. Dracula (1931), Dir. Tod Browning, USA: Universal Pictures. Dracula (1958), Dir. Terence Fisher, UK: Hammer Film Productions. Enduring Love (2004), Dir. Roger Michell, UK: Pathe Pictures/Paramount Vantage. Fight Club (1999), Dir. David Fincher, USA: Foxx 2000 Pictures/Regency Enterprises/Linson Films. Forrest Gump (1994), Dir. Robert Zemeckis, USA: Wendy Finerman Productions. From Dusk till Dawn (1996), Dir. Robert Rodriguez, USA: Dimension Films/A Band Apart/Los Hooligans Productions. From Hell (2001), Dirs. Albert and Allen Hughes, USA: Twentieth Century Fox/Underworld Entertainment. Frost/Nixon (2008), Dir. Ron Howard, USA/UK/France: Imagine Entertainment/Working Title Films/StudioCanal. Glengarry Glenn Ross (1992), Dir. James Foley, USA: Zupnik Enterprises. Gone with the Wind (1939), Dir. Victor Fleming, USA: Selznick International Pictures/MetroGoldwyn-Mayer. Great Expectations (1946), Dir: David Lean, UK: Cineguild. Great Expectations (1998), Dir. Alfonso Cuaron, USA; Art Linson Productions. Great Gatsby, The (1974), Dir. Jack Clayton, USA: Newdon Productions. Great Gatsby, The (2013), Dir. Baz Luhurmann, Australia/USA: Village Roadshow Pictures/ Bazmark Productions/A&E Television/Red Wagon Entertainment. Hampstead (2017), Dir. Joel Hopkins, UK: Ecosse Films/Scope Entertainment. Hidden Fortress, The (1958), Dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan: Toho. Hollow Man (2000), Dir. Paul Verhoven, USA/Germany: Columbia Pictures. Hours, The (2002), Dir. Stephen Daldry, UK/USA: Scott Rudin Productions. Hulk (2003), Dir. Ang Lee, USA: Universal Picture/Marvel Entertainment/Valhalla Motion Pictures/Good Machine. I’m Not There (2007), Dir. Todd Haynes, USA/Germany: Endgame Entertainment/Killer Films/ John Goldwyn Productions/John Welles Productions. Incredible Hulk, The (2008), Dir. Louis Leterrier, USA: Marvel Studios/Valhalla Productions. Invisible Man, The (1933), Dir. James Whale, USA: Universal Pictures. Jimi Hendrix: All by My Side (2013), Dir. John Ridley, UK/Ireland: Darko Entertainment/Freeman Film/Subotica Entertainment/Irish Film Board/Matador Pictures/AIBMS. Jumanji (1995), Dir. Joe Johnson, USA: Interscope Communications/Teitler Film. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017), Dir. Jake Kasdan, USA: Columbia Pictures/Matt Tolmach Productions/Radar Pictures/Seven Bucks Productions.

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Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1985), Dir. Hector Babenco, Brazil/USA: HB Films/FilmDallas Pictures. Last of the Mohicans, The (1992), Dir. Michael Mann, USA: Morgan Creek Productions. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The (2003), Dir. Stephen Norrington, UK/Germany/Czech Republic/USA: 20th Century Fox/Angry Films/International Production Company/JD Productions. Little Dorrit (1987), Dir. Christine Edzard, UK: Sands Films. Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Dir. Roger Corman, USA: The Filmgroup/American International Pictures. Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Dir. Frank Oz, USA: The Geffen Company. Little Voice (1998), Dir. Mark Herman, UK: Miramax/Scala Productions. Lost Boys, The (1987), Dir. Joel Schumacher, USA: Warner Brothers. Manhattan (1979), Dir. Woody Allen, USA: Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions. Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), Dir. John Carpenter, USA: Le Studio Canal+/Regency Enterprises/Alcor Films/Cornelius Productions. Mrs Dalloway (1997), Dir. Marleen Gorris, UK: First Look Pictures/Newmarket Capital Group/ BBC Pictures. Murder by Decree (1979), Dir. Bob Clark, UK/Canada: Canadian Film Development Corporation/Famous Player/Highlight/Murder by Decree Productions. Near Dark (1987), Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, USA: F/M Entertainment. No Country for Old Men (2007), Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, USA: Scott Rudin Productions/Mike Zoss Productions. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Dir: Joel Coen, UK/USA/France: Working Title Films. Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Dir. Richard Attenborough, UK/Accord Productions. Oleanna (1994), Dir. David Mamet, USA: Bay Kinescope/Channel Four Films/The Samuel Goldwyn Company/The School Company. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Dir. Jim Jarmusch, UK/Germany: Recorded Picture Company/ Pandora Film. Orlando (1992), Dir. Sally Potter, UK/Germany: Adventure Picture/Lenfilm Studio/Mikado Film/Rio/Sigma Film productions. Play It Again, Sam (1972), Dir. Herbert Ross, USA: APJAC Productions. Pride and Prejudice (2005), Dir. Joe Wright, UK/USA/France: StudioCanal/Working Title Films. Producers, The (1967), Dir. Mel Brooks, USA: Crossbow Productions/Springtime Productions/ UM Productions. Producers, The (2005), Dir. Susan Stroman, USA: Universal Pictures/Columbia Pictures/ Brooksfilms. Pulp Fiction (1994), Dir. Quentin Tarantino, USA: A Band Apart/Jersey Films. Ran (1950), Dir. Akira Kurosama, Japan: Herald Ace/Nippon Herald Films/Greenwich Film Productions.

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Ready Player One (2018), Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA: Warner Bros Pictures/Amblin Entertainment/Village Roadshow Pictures/De Line Pictures/Access Entertainment/Dune Entertainment/Farah Films and Management. Riot Club, The (2014), Dir. Lone Scherfig, UK: Blueprint Films. Ripley’s Game (2002), Dir. Liliana Cavani, Italy/UK/US: mr. mudd. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), Dir. Tom Stoppard, UK/USA: Brandenberg/ WNET Channel 13 New York. San Andreas (2015), Dir. Brad Peyton, USA: New Line Cinema/Village Roadshow Pictures/ RatPac-Dune Entertainment/Flynn Picture Co. Saturday Night Fever (1977), Dir. John Badham, USA: Robert Stigwood Organization. Scarlett Letter, The (1995), Dir. Roland Joffe, USA: Allied Stars Ltd/Cinergi Pictures Entertainment/Hollywood Pictures/Light motive/Moving Pictures. Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The (1976), Dir. Herbert Ross, USA: Winitsky-Sellers Productions/ Herbert Ross Productions/Universal Pictures. Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Dir. E. Elia Merhige, Luxembourg/UK/USA: BBC Films/Madman Films/Saturn Films. Sherlock Gnomes (2018), Dir. Sherlock Gnomes, UK/USA: Paramount Animation/MetroGoldwyn-Mayer/Rocket Pictures. Sherlock Holmes (2009), Dir. Guy Ritchie, UK/USA: Silver Productions/Wigram Productions/ Village Roadshow Pictures. Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011), Dir. Guy Ritchie, UK/USA: Silver Productions/ Wigram Productions/Village Roadshow Pictures. Shining, The (1980), Dir. Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA: The Producer Circle Company/Peregrine Productions/Hawk Films. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), Dir. George Lucas, USA: Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Dir. Irvin Kersher, USA: Lucasfilm Ltd. Strangers on a Train (1951), Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA: Transatlantic Pictures. Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Dir. Preston Sturges, USA: Paramount Pictures. Synedoce: New York (2008), Dir. Charlie Kaufman, USA: Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. Talented Mr Ripley, The (1999), Dir. Anthony Minghella, USA: Mirage Enterprises/Timnick Films. This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Dir. Rob Reiner, USA: Spinal Tap Prod. Time after Time (1979), Dir. Nicholas Meyer, USA: Warner Bros./Orion Pictures. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Dir. Robert Mulligan, USA: Brentwood Productions/PakulaMulligan. Twilight (2008), Dir. Catherine Hardwicke, US: Temple Hill Entertainment/Maverick Films/ Imprint Entertainment/DMG Entertainment. Untouchables, The (1987), Dir. Brian De Palma, USA: Paramount Pictures.

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V for Vendetta (2005), Dir. James Mc Teigue, UK/USA/Germany: Warner Bros. Productions Limited/Virtual Studios/Silver Pictures/Anarchos Productions Inc/Vertigo/Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg/Funfte Babelsberg Film. Velvet Goldmine (1998), Dir. Todd Haynes, UK/USA: Killer Films/Newmarket Capital Group/ Channel Four Films. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), Dir. Baz Luhrmann, USA: Bazmark Productions. Wolf of Wall Street, The (2013), Dir. Martin Scorsese, USA: Red Granite Pictures, Appian Way Productions, Sikelia Productions, EMJAG Productions. Zodiac (2007), Dir. David Fincher, USA: Phoenix Pictures.

272

Bibliography

Index

adaptation interpolation 16, 38–9 invention 87, 137, 140, 144–56 varieties of 10–12 viability 25 antagonist 258 Apocalypse Now (1979) 12, 40 audience reception 15, 37 Austen, Jane (Pride and Prejudice, 1813) 98–101, 109, 113, 115, 119–20 authentic 247 authenticity 247, 250 author 250 authorship 251 autobiography 247 Bakhtin, Mikhail 233 Batman 238, 241 Baudrillard, Jean 241 BBC 177–82 biopic 247 Blade Runner (1982) 12 Blake, William 254 Bloch, Robert (Psycho, 1959) 18–21 blueprint 160 Booker, Christopher (The Seven Plots, 2004) 67 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) 140 bricolage 241–2 Bronte, Emily (Wuthering Heights, 1847) 36–9 Bullet in the Brain (2001) 143–7 Butler, Samuel (The Way of All Flesh, 1903) 142

causality 73–4 characterisation 37–9, 56–8, 92–5, 97–116, 123–32, 255, 258 Chopin, Kate 159, 163 classic 244–6, 261 climax 81 closure 154–6, 230 collage 241 Conan Doyle, Arthur 237 crisis 114 dialogic 233 dialogue 255 Dickens, Charles 44–8, 70–1, 81–4, 101–4, 106, 114–15, 120, 254 Don’t Look Now (1973) 137–40 dramatic conflict 76–77, 103–104 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931) 104, 110, 134 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941) 134 Dr Strangelove (1964) 10–11 Du Maurier, Daphne (‘Don’t Look Now’, 1971) 137–40 Enduring Love (2005) 230–1 exposition 30, 130 faithful 254 fiction/film 14, 17–18, 43–4 fidelity 9–10, 147, 151, 253 Fight Club (1996) 105 Fitzgerald, F. Scott (The Great Gatsby, 1925) 32–33, 74, 77, 98, 100, 104, 110–111, 120

Forrest Gump (1994) 12, 107–8 Freudian psychology 123–4, 133–6, 141 Freud, Sigmund 249 gameplay 257 Genette, Gerard 236 genre 20, 55, 66, 229–33, 236, 242 Great Expectations (1946) 44–8, 70–1, 81–4, 108, 118 Great Expectations (1998) 11 Great Gatsby, The (2013) 35, 137 Hardy, Thomas 177–78 Hemingway, Ernest (‘A Very Short Story’, 1925) 21–5, 29, 32, 41, 69–70, 75, 79–80, 108–9, 113, 115, 121–3, 141 Highsmith, Patricia (Those Who Walk Away, 1967) 49–60, 90–5, 123–32, 142–3, 147–56 Hollywood 260 homage 251 Hours, The (2002) 112 hypertext 235–38 hypotext 235–38, 240–1, 243 hypotextuality 256 inciting incident 78 intertextual 250–1 intertextuality 232–236, 252, 258 Jack the Ripper 247–48 Johnson, Robert 240 King, Stephen (‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’, 1982) 85–90 Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) 111–12, 117 Kristeva, Julia 232–3 Last of the Mohicans, The (1992) 10 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The (2003) 227–9, 242–3 melodramatic 261 memoir 247

274

Index

Menninger, Karl (The Human Mind, 1930) 141–2 metaphor / metonym 40–1, 68, 151 mise-en-scène 116–18, 255 Moore, Alan 254 motifs 116–18, 153 multi-channel communication 41 musical(s) 265 myth 240, 244 mythic 248 narration 31–4, 45–7, 137 narrative compression 27–8, 54–5 No Country for Old Men (2007) 10, 28, 108 non-fiction 247 objects 116 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) 239–40 original 254 originality 229 Orlando (1992) 13 Paget, Sidney 238 Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) 254 photorealism 256 plagiarism 233 Plot development 258 point of view/focalisation 45–7, 74–6, 80–3, 85–7, 91–2 postmodern 241 postmodernism 241 prologue 140, 137, 144–7, 152 protagonist 258 Psycho 18–21, 156 realism 260–1 research 151 rituals 109–11 Scarlet Letter, The (1995) 119 scenic organisation 79–82, 89, 91 Schenkar, Joan (The Talented Miss Highsmith, 2009) 141 semiurgy 241, 248

Shakespeare 244, 260–1 Shawshank Redemption, The (1994) 85–90, 136 Sherlock Holmes 237–9, 241–3, 245, 249 Shining, The (1980) 11 short film 159 signifiers/signification 229, 235 social values 118–120 spectacle 258 Stevenson, Robert Louis (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886) 133–136 story board 254 story time/text time 72 structure 19–21, 65–71 subjectivity 34–35

Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981) 234–5 Todorov, Tzvetan 78 Tolstoy, Leo (Anna Karenina, 1878) 65–7, 98, 101, 103 transgression 111–12 Twilight (2008) 69 Ur-stories 65–8 Ur-text 243–5 Vampire 244–5 voice 261 Wolff, Tobias (‘Bullet in the Brain’, 1996) 143–7 Wuthering Heights (2011) 112, 117

telling/showing 29 three-act structure 69–70, 78

Index

275

276

277

278