The Adaptation Industry : the Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation 9780415710541, 0415710545, 9780415999038, 0415999030

Table of contents :
Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction 1: What Are You Working On?: The Expanding Role of the Author in an Era of Cross-media Adaptation 2: World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers in the Contemporary Mediasphere 3: Making Words Go Further: Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers' Weeks as Engine-rooms of Adaptation 4: The Novel Beyond the Book: Literary Prize-winners on Screen 5: Best Adapted Screenwriter?: The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter in the Contemporary Adaptation Industry 6: Cultivating the Reader: Producer and Distributor Strategies for Converting Readers into Audiences Afterword: Restive Audiences and Adaptation Futures Notes Bibliography Index

Citation preview

The Adaptation Industry

Simone Murray’s book makes good on its promise to materialize adaptation studies. Murray frees the study of adaptation from its most persistent and constraining orthodoxies: the reliance on text-based analysis, the preoccupation with issues of fidelity, the privileging of individual over institutional agency. The Adaptation Industry gives us the first systematic examination of the way adaptations are produced: not as versions or translations of an original, nor as mere mediations between properly artistic fields of practice, but as a cultural form in their own right – and one whose ascendency in our time has not, until now, been at all adequately appreciated. This is a game-changing book which no one interested in cultural theory or the contemporary narrative arts can afford to ignore.

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The Adaptation Industry The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation

Simone Murray

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Simone Murray The right of Simone Murray to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ‘Everyday I Write the Book’ (Words & Music by Elvis Costello) © Copyright Universal Music Publishing MGB Australia Pty Ltd. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. WARNING: It is illegal to copy this work without permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Murray, Simone. The adaptation industry : the cultural economy of contemporary literary adaptation / Simone Murray. p. cm. — (Routledge research in cultural and media studies ; 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Literature—Adaptations—History and criticism. 2. Film adaptations— History and criticism. 3. Mass media and literature. 4. Cultural fusion. I. Title. PN171.A33 M87 306.4—dc23 2011024305 ISBN13: 978–0–415–99903–8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–80712–5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global

For K.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

6

xi xv 1

What Are You Working On?: The Expanding Role of the Author in an Era of Cross-media Adaptation

25

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers in the Contemporary Mediasphere

50

Making Words Go Further: Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks as Engine Rooms of Adaptation

76

The Novel Beyond the Book: Literary Prize-Winners on Screen

103

Best Adapted Screenwriter?: The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter in the Contemporary Adaptation Industry

131

Cultivating the Reader: Producer and Distributor Strategies for Converting Readers into Audiences

156

Afterword: Restive Audiences and Adaptation Futures

185

Notes References Index

192 216 245

List of Illustrations

Figures 2.1 Martin Amis caricature by Gerald Scarfe (1995), playing on A.S. Byatt’s remark that Amis was ‘turkey-cocking’ other writers through seeking an excessive advance 59 2.2 UK publishers’ rights policies, according to The Age newspaper (Melbourne) 66 2.3 The Wylie Agency’s homepage, graphically signalling global ambition 68 3.1 Berlinale at Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 promotional postcard (front) 87 3.2 Rear of postcard, detailing the Film and Media Forum’s 2009 case study: adapting Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy 88 3.3 Front cover of Random House Australia’s Film Rights Catalogue 2010 94 3.4 Authorial red-carpet appearance: Mariane Pearl and her son Adam flanked by director Michael Winterbottom, star Angelina Jolie and producer Brad Pitt at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of A Mighty Heart (2007) 96 3.5 Book festivals’ politics of distinction 99 4.1 The Man Booker Prize’s growing US brand profile, as revealed by Grove Atlantic’s US paperback front cover design for Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) 112 4.2 Author Patrick McCabe’s cameo as town drunk Jimmy the Skite in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of The Butcher Boy (1997) 120 4.3 Moral neutrality of print culture in Schindler’s List (1993): a professor of literature and history is deemed a ‘non-essential’ worker 122 122 4.4 Itzhak Stern’s underground hand-press 4.5 ‘Aging’ the professor’s forged papers with crumpling, gnawing of corners, and a spilt cup of coffee 123 4.6 Fascination with the mechanics of print culture: Schindler’s List (1993) 124

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4.7 Atonement (2007) 4.8 Front cover design of the published screenplay of The English Patient (1997), jointly credited to director Anthony Minghella and author Michael Ondaatje 6.1 Official website for The Reader (2008), showing attempts to remediate the codex format and flagging of the novel’s prize-winning pedigree (top left-hand corner) 6.2 Berlin Film Festival press conference for The Reader showing (left to right) actor David Kross, author Bernhard Schlink, actor Kate Winslet, scriptwriter David Hare, director Stephen Daldry and actor Ralph Fiennes (6 February 2009) 6.3 The Accompanied Literary Society’s official webpage, again reimagining the book format for the computer screen 6.4 Listing of Accompanied Literary Society sponsors including Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Company

124

129

177

179 181 182

Tables 5.1 Andrew Davies’s adapted film and television screenplays 5.2 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adapted screenplays 5.3 Laura Jones’s adapted screenplays

148 148 149

Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal transformations, but according to their modes of existence. The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. (Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Foucault, 1977) I have wanted to direct students to the texts and methods of sociology and social history, and to urge them to supplement their interpretative and critical readings of visual texts with attention to the institutional and social processes of cultural production and consumption. (Janet Wolff, ‘Cultural Studies and the Sociology of Culture’, 2005) Books are, finally, intricately interrelated to the rest of the media system – economically, socially, intellectually, even symbolically; and those who have envisioned or feared their wholesale removal from the system have generally underestimated that involvement. If one would predict the death of books, it is necessary to know how they live. (Priscilla Coit Murphy, ‘Books Are Dead, Long Live Books’, 1999)

Acknowledgements

The bulk of the research for this book was made possible by the award of a Discovery Project grant (2007–09) by the Australian Research Council. An earlier version of the Introduction appeared as ‘Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry’ in Literature/Film Quarterly 36.1 (2008): 4–20. Some of the theoretical apparatus of the current book was earlier worked through in ‘Books as Media: The Adaptation Industry,’ International Journal of the Book 4.2 (2007): 23–30, and ‘Phantom Adaptations: Eucalyptus, the Adaptation Industry and the Film that Never Was,’ Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies 1.1 (2008): 5–23. I thank the journals’ editors and referees for their encouraging early responses to the research findings. I am also grateful for the insights that arose from interviews conducted with various book- and screen-industry professionals: Elizabeth Haylett Clark (Society of Authors, London); Deborah Moggach (London); Lyn Tranter (Australian Literary Management, Sydney); Rick Raftos (Sydney); Fiona Inglis (Curtis Brown (Australia), Sydney); Antony Harwood (Oxford, UK); Julian Friedmann (Blake Friedman, London); Anthony Lacey (Penguin Books, London); Helen Fraser (Penguin Books, London); Nerrilee Weir (Random House Australia, Sydney); Annabel Blay (HarperCollins Publishers Australia); Ion Trewin (Man Booker Prizes, London); Bud McLintock (Costa Prize, London); and Kate Mosse (Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, London). For help accessing the enormous Booker Prize Archive at Oxford Brookes University in the UK I thank subject librarian for publishing Chris Fowler and archivist Eleanor Possart. Professor Roger Shannon of Edge Hill University in the UK generously provided access to a highlights DVD of his ‘Lost in Adaptation’ event convened in Birmingham (2005), as well as a transcript of his keynote address to the ‘From the Blank Page to the Silver Screen’ conference hosted by the Université de Bretagne Sud in Lorient, France (2007). Work-in-progress versions of the research project were presented at conferences convened by the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), the International Conference on

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the Book, the Association of Literature on Screen Studies (subsequently the Association for Adaptation Studies), the Institute for English Studies at the University of London, ‘The Lives of the Book’ conference at Nancy University, France, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (BSANZ). I have also enjoyed and benefitted from delivering seminars about my adaptation industry research at the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, the International Centre for Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK, and the Research Institute for Media, Art and Design at the University of Bedfordshire, UK. My three research assistants helped to realise this book in the most practical ways. I thank Belinda Mooney for energetically locating resources and transcribing lengthy interviews in the project’s early phase; Lawson Fletcher, whose extensive print and online research made him an expert on the Weinsteins and The Reader, perhaps to his surprise; and Kevin Patrick, who came on board in the later phases of the project and demonstrated fine, self-starting research instincts and heroic photocopying prowess. Beyond their invaluable practical help, each alerted me to analytical possibilities I hadn’t seen and on occasion spotted a few howlers before they became immortalised in print. My grateful thanks to members of the long-lived Posse for occasional hijinks and consistent friendship. Closest to home, Kieran Hagan lived with this project for several years. I thank him wholeheartedly for his humour and constructive disinterest, and especially for enduring this book’s writing-up, amidst much else.

Introduction

[T]he great innovators of the twentieth century, in film and novel both, have had so little to do with each other, have gone their ways alone, always keeping a firm but respectful distance. (George Bluestone, Novels into Film, 2003 [1957]: 63) I would suggest that what we need instead is a broader definition of adaptation and a sociology that takes into account the commercial apparatus, the audience, and the academic culture industry. (James Naremore, ‘Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation’, 2000b: 10)

The discipline of adaptation studies is nothing if not self-reflexive. Given its subject matter, it could hardly be otherwise. In scrupulously self-conscious manner, adaptation scholars are given to producing proliferating surveys of the state of the discipline, rigorous questioning of underpinning theoretical models, and rehearsings of the discipline’s historical trajectory. Adaptation studies’ habitual checking of its own academic pulse is not, of course, unique to it; other movements in the Humanities over recent decades manifest similarly reflexive self-consciousness – in particular cultural studies, women’s studies, and media and communication studies. Such neurotic academic self-scrutiny results from each field’s interdisciplinary origins, ensuring fundamental questions of theoretical models and methodological approach could never be simply taken as read, but had to be constructed and – specifically – defended against better established disciplines’ ongoing critique. Institutional settings also play a profound role in instilling such (not entirely unproductive) disciplinary insecurity. In adaptation studies’ case, its situation at the borderlands between traditional literary studies and the newly emergent, often outright recusant, field of film studies made courses analysing literary film adaptations institutional cuckoos in the nest – reluctantly tolerated by literature departments eager to stem the slide of undergraduate enrolments to film studies, but too closely associated with screen media ever to be entirely academically respectable. For the burgeoning discipline of film studies during the later

2

Introduction

decades of the twentieth century, courses in adaptation amounted to irritants: constantly reminding screen studies of its formerly handmaiden status to English departments and of literature academics’ sneering at the alleged simple-mindedness and lowest-common-denominator pandering of screen media. It did not help that adaptation studies scholars in the second half of the twentieth century were often their own worst enemies, producing a seemingly endless stream of repetitious and theoretically timid comparative book/film case studies that served largely to confirm both disciplines’ direst views of the field as an academic backwater. Spurned by the progressive wings of both host disciplines, adaptations studies turned in on itself, becoming in the process increasingly intellectually parochial, methodologically hidebound and institutionally risible (Leitch, 2007c [2003]; Murray, 2008a).

Around 2005 However, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, adaptation studies has witnessed a sea-change of such scale as to transform the dire disciplinary predicament summarised above. In dating this change to around 2005, I am conscious of the arbitrariness of any such dateline, seeming to rule out of contention as it does important works such as Sarah Cardwell’s overdue examination of the specifics of classic television series adaptations in Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (2002), Kamilla Elliott’s exploration of inter-mediality in Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), and the numerous collections edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (and colleagues), which, from the 1990s onwards, calibrated adaptation studies’ increasing engagement with popular culture (1999; 2000; 2007a). Yet by 2005 the sense of a discipline reconfiguring itself, shaking off inherited assumptions and re-examining all aspects of its self-conception was unmistakable. At the international level, the establishment of the new scholarly society the Association of Literature on Screen Studies (ALSS) prompted a series of important annual conferences, beginning in Leicester, UK (2006), Atlanta (2007), Amsterdam (2008), London (2009) and Berlin (2010). The society’s prompt name change to the Association for Adaptation Studies (AAS) severed the discipline’s long-standing and increasingly theoretically uncomfortable privileging of a specific subset of print texts in favour of an inclusivist conception of adaptation as a freewheeling cultural process: flagrantly transgressing cultural and media hierarchies, wilfully cross-cultural, and more weblike than straightforwardly linear in its creative dynamic. An accompanying motivation behind the society’s name change was to bring it more closely into line with the association’s incipient journal, Adaptation (2008– ), designed as a forum for fulllength, theoretically ambitious research articles, produced under the imprimatur of top-drawer academic publisher Oxford University Press.1

Introduction 3 Adaptation thus added to the long-running short-format journal Literature/Film Quarterly (1973– ), and was soon faced with another newly launched scholarly endeavour, the rather more specifically titled Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (2008– ), published by UK-based Intellect. While the establishment of a new international scholarly association and ambitious journals signalled renewal in adaptation studies’ institutional structures, the most important post-2005 development in theoretical terms has been the appearance of several path-breaking monographs and anthologies by leading international scholars. The trilogy edited by Robert Stam (two volumes in collaboration with Alessandra Raengo) and published by Blackwell prompt my choice of 2005 as adaptation studies’ watershed year: A Companion to Literature and Film (2004), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (2005), and Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (2005a). Stam’s key contribution has been to imbue adaptation studies with theoretical concepts derived from recent decades’ work in critical theory – specifically post-structuralism, post-colonialism and identity politics – and thus to reconceptualise adaptation as a process of endless intertextual citation. Stam’s admirably cross-cultural and multilingual range of examples, as well as his general emphasis on adaptation as intertextual dialogism, are echoed in Linda Hutcheon’s important A Theory of Adaptation (2006), which moreover goes beyond Stam in expanding its media foci well beyond the traditional dyad of film and novel (read as Literature) to encompass television, theatre, opera, music, computer gaming, and theme-park rides. Julie Sanders’ Adaptation and Appropriation (2006), appearing in the same year and from the same publisher as Hutcheon’s volume, similarly foregrounds theatrical performance as a key but often neglected concern of adaptation studies and – again in common with Stam and Hutcheon – emphasises audiences’ pleasure in actively counterpointing the familiar and the new in their experience of adaptations’ palimpsestic nature. Two more recent monographs, from scholars both strongly imbued with conceptual paradigms grounded in film studies, have contributed to the sense of accelerating momentum, building into adaptation studies’ veritable twenty-first-century ‘new wave’. Thomas Leitch’s appositely named Film Adaptation and its Discontents (2007a) probes the boundaries of extant adaptations models, staging raiding parties into territories typically ignored by the discipline because of the problematic issues they raise for traditional modes of thinking. Selfdescribing as ‘a study not so much of specific adaptations as of specific problems adaptations raise’, Leitch’s work examines adaptation’s limitcases, including non-fiction adaptations, adaptations from visual arts, computer-gaming adaptations and scriptural adaptations (20). Christine Geraghty, whose Now a Major Motion Picture (2008) similarly bears the strong impress of the author’s film and television studies training,

4 Introduction challenges adaptation studies to pay sustained attention to adapted texts themselves. Here the source text is itself emphatically marginalised and detailed textual analyses drawn in particular from genre theory elucidate specifically non-literary concepts such as mise en scène, editing, acting styles, lighting, sound and costume. Taken together, these monographs, often explicitly referencing each other and reviewed by other authors from within the group, bear testament to – and through their nearcontemporaneous appearance themselves accelerate – the pace of change underway in adaptation studies.2 Reading them alongside recent journal issues, and accompanied by first-hand experience of international AAS conference meets, there is an undeniable sense of intellectual ferment bubbling in the discipline. Adaptation studies is surely, to switch metaphors, stirring from its long disciplinary slumber, giving rise to a palpable sense of excitement that now might – finally – be adaptation studies’ time.

Lingering Blind Spots And yet, for all the sense of a discipline joyfully kicking over the traces of previously dominant and long-outdated thinking, there is much that stays obdurately the same. Granted adaptation studies discourse has moved on from its previously core business of comparative aesthetic evaluation (in which screen adaptations were, predictably, usually found wanting) to that of ideologically alert deconstruction – scrutinising adapted texts for their critical reworking of power structures often only covertly registered in source texts. In many of the scholarly volumes already mentioned there is also a throwing open of the disciplinary windows to engage with concepts of audience agency derived from reader response theory (in literary theory circles) and, particularly, cultural studies-style media ethnographies (dominant in film and television studies spheres). But overwhelmingly, the intellectual project which new-wave adaptation studies sets itself takes, paradoxically, a tamely familiar methodological guise: namely, textual analysis.3 The upshot of this under-examined preference for scrutinising nuances of texts is a curious and troubling disinterest in how adaptations come to be, specifically how the various institutional, commercial and legal frameworks surrounding adaptations profoundly influence the number and the character of adaptations in cultural circulation. Nudging adaptation studies beyond its intellectual comfort zone of textual analysis and closely related questions of medium specificity allows us to conceive of something often heralded in adaptation studies but not, to date, fully realised: namely, a sociology of adaptation.4 Such an approach takes us well beyond textual specifics and enables us to ask how the mechanisms by which adaptations are produced influence the kinds of adaptations released, how certain audiences become aware of adapted properties, and how the success of an adaptation may impact differently upon various industry stakeholders. A sociology of adaptation in fact

Introduction 5 provides an entry point for examining just how unexpectedly contested and fraught are the cross-media and cross-sectoral relationships that make adaptation possible. For adaptations set off fireworks not only in their disciplinary reception, but also in their very institutional creation. Adapted texts may be interesting, in short, not so much for their intricate ideological encodings, but for the way they illuminate the contexts of their own production – a sphere in which competing ideologies are just as prevalent, albeit largely ignored by commentators outside of the industries themselves.5 The foregoing should not be taken to suggest that the new wave of adaptation studies has had nothing pertinent to say about extra-textual dimensions of adaptation. Christine Geraghty, for example, breaks new ground in her chapter considering how film reviewing practices to an extent precondition audiences’ reception of particular texts by presenting them as adaptations (2008: 47–72). Yet this is, as Geraghty herself states, largely a contextual sideline to a study that is overwhelmingly textual in focus (5). When new-wave adaptation studies has discussed adaptations’ conditions of production and circulation, these fairly scanty examinations have tended to fall into one of two patterns. The first posits commercial contexts as irredeemably corrupting influences on art and culture, as in Robert Stam’s distaste for the suburbanisation and ‘aesthetic mainstreaming’ he sees as commonly imposed by Hollywood ‘in the name of monies spent and box-office profits required’ (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 43). This sketchily indicated but ominously named ‘adaptation machine’ typically debases Stam’s preferred genre of self-reflexive and playfully ironic literary texts, shutting down and anaesthetising their subversive potential (2005: 43).6 Linda Hutcheon’s otherwise welcome chapter on the ‘Who? Why?’ elements of adaptation – namely, the professional and commercial motivations for adapting familiar texts – also uncomfortably echoes Frankfurt School-style denunciations of commerce’s debasing impact on creative integrity. Not only the tone but also the very vocabulary of Adorno and Horkheimer can be heard in her lament at the lowest-common-denominator ethos of Hollywood, especially in her fatalistic and borderline economic–determinist conclusion that ‘the entertainment industry is just that: an industry’ (2006: 88). The second pattern of engagement with adaptation’s production context exhibits similarities with the first but is less arbitrarily dismissive. Thomas Leitch, perhaps reflecting his current principal identification with film rather than literary studies, devotes an innovative chapter to ‘postliterary adaptations’ such as comics, board games, theme-park rides and computer games, examining them as extensions of existing brand franchises (2007a: 257–79). Refusing simply to condemn these outright as beneath scholarly attention, Leitch rightly notes that an increasing proportion of Academy Award nominations for best adapted screenplay is derived from such non-literary sources. But his term ‘postliterary’ is

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Introduction

problematic for its implication that literary sources constitute merely one stage in the adaptation phenomenon’s narrative, beyond which it is now evolving. This sets up a false dichotomy between literary (old) and contemporary (pop culture) sources whereby classic books can be recognised as pre-sold brands, but contemporary literary fiction seemingly evades similar market logic, even though public recognition of a prize-winning recent novel may outweigh familiarity with a canonised but little-read text (refer also DeBona, 2010: 28). For a cursory glance again at Academy Award nominations simultaneously confirms that literary sources – especially prize-winning contemporary literary works – remain a rich source of inspiration for prestige screen adaptations.7 By exploring the limit-case of adaptations that are indifferent to traditional gauges of cultural esteem such as blockbuster film franchises based on comic books, Leitch implies that avowedly literary works, especially contemporary ones, lie beyond such a ‘market-driven approach to adaptation’ (278).

The Adaptation Industry The premise of this book is that considering contemporary literary adaptations through the prism of the adaptation industry throws new light on the processes by which adaptations come to be made, the forms they take, and the audiences who encounter them. The incorporation of the phrase ‘cultural economy’ in my book’s subtitle, yoking together two terms often considered antithetical, is designed to distance this book from adaptations studies’ previous over-easy association of commerce with cultural taint (ironic, given new-wave adaptation studies argues so strenuously in its turn against old-school literary studies’ assumption that adaptations are themselves an innately debased and debasing phenomenon). The Adaptation Industry is designed to showcase a broadly sociological approach to adaptation, foregrounding those issues usually pushed to the margins of adaptation studies work: the industrial structures, interdependent networks of agents, commercial contexts, and legal and policy regimes within which adaptations come to be. This encompassing adaptation industry both constrains and – crucially – enables adaptations in little-analysed ways. In particular, this study posits cultural and commercial concerns not as mutually antithetical or self-cancelling, but as complexly interrelated. It rejects on one hand political economy’s habitual demonising of market effects and, on the other, cultural studies’ easy slippage into market fundamentalism through bracketing off entirely questions of cultural evaluation in favour of a market-share-based cultural populism. Instead, this study invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of culture as always embedded in sociological contexts, encapsulated in his productive concept of the cultural ‘field’ (1993).8 In this analytical space structured by institutions, agents and the webs of relationships between them, attributions of cultural esteem may trigger significant

Introduction 7 commercial dividends and, contrariwise, commercial success has flow-on effects for cultural prevalence and evaluation. Examined in detail on a sectoral and cross-sectoral basis, the adaptation industry rapidly frustrates any scholarly attempts at neat disaggregation of culture and commerce. Through tracing the complex workings of the adaptation industry as they relate to contemporary self-described literary adaptations, this study makes clear that the cultural economy’s currencies of critical prestige and financial reward are both in play at all times, and that their relationship may be – if not in direct proportion – at least not in indirect ratio either. Considering the contemporary adaptation industry in such a deliberately contextual manner also means factoring in the influence of adaptation studies itself on the workings of the adaptation system. Such entanglement of the observer with that which is observed – akin to the Schrödinger’s cat analogy in the hard sciences – seems the necessary latest step in adaptation studies’ long history of self-reflexivity. For, unfamiliar and potentially uncomfortable though the idea might be, the ways in which certain contemporary literary adaptations are made available to and are avidly taken up by the academy for analysis, commentary and curricular incorporation themselves feed back into the adaptation industry’s workings. As James Naremore suggests in his formulation of the ‘academic culture industry’, we are ourselves agents in the system we seek to analyse. Thus, not only is the production apparatus that constitutes the adaptation industry the heretofore under-examined ‘dark continent’ of adaptation studies, it appears that we as adaptation critics and theorists have unwittingly been complicit in its operations all along. Surely then it is time we began to turn our attention to better understanding its workings.

Previous Waves of Innovation in Adaptation Studies In taking adaptation studies to task for its uncritical adherence to textual analysis as its governing methodology, I am not suggesting that adaptation studies has been devoid of innovation, only that such prior waves of innovation as have occurred have experimented within severely confined limits. To provide background and context to the current book’s underpinning argument in favour of an overdue materialising of adaptation theory, it is useful briefly to survey the major schools of adaptation studies that have developed during the discipline’s past half century, and to note – with a nod to adaptations studies’ own modus operandi – both their differences and their marked similarities. Characterising virtually all academic studies of book-to-screen adaptation is an attack on the model of fidelity criticism as an inadequate schema for appreciating the richness of and motivations driving adaptations (Marcus, 1971: xv; McDougal, 1985: 6; Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990: xix, 9–10; Cartmell and

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Introduction

Whelehan, 1999: 3; 2007a: 2; Ray, 2000: 45; Leitch, 2003: 161–62; 2007a: 16–17, 21; Hutcheon, 2006: xiii, 6–7; 2007; Geraghty, 2008: 11; Cartmell, Corrigan and Whelehan, 2008: 2). Such ritual rejections of fidelity criticism are frequently accompanied by revelation of fidelity critique’s moralistic, sexually loaded and near-hysterically judgmental vocabulary, with its accusations of ‘unfaithfulness’, ‘betrayal’, ‘straying’, ‘taking liberties’, ‘debasement’, ‘corruption’ and the like (Beja, 1979: 81; Naremore, 2000b: 8; Stam, 2000: 54; Hutcheon, 2004: 109; 2006: 7, 85; 2007; Stam and Raengo, 2005: 3; Hunter, 2009: 10). Unquestionably, rejecting the idea of film adaptation as a necessarily inferior imitation of literary fiction’s allegedly singular artistic achievement was an essential critical manoeuvre if adaptation studies was to gain entry to the academy. But most striking in reading back over 50 years of academic criticism about adaptation is not the dead hand of fidelity criticism, but – quite the opposite – how few academic critics make any claim for fidelity criticism at all. Bluestone’s own seminal study posited at its outset that ‘the filmmaker merely treats the novel as raw material and ultimately creates his [sic] own unique structure’, with the novel firmly put in its place as ‘less a norm than a point of departure’ (2003: vii, viii).9 A variation on the outright rejection of fidelity as directorial goal or critical norm involves taxonomically classifying adaptations by use of a sliding scale of graded ‘levels’ or ‘modes’ of fidelity, according to ‘whether the film is a literal, critical, or relatively free adaptation of the literary source’ (Klein and Parker, 1981: 9; also similar in Wagner, 1975: 219–31; Larsson, 1982: 74; Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999: 24; Andrew, 2000 [1984]: 29–34; Cahir, 2006: 16–17; Cordaiy, 2007: 34). Certainly this goes some way towards equalising the respective status of author and director, according screen adaptors relatively greater creative agency. But fidelity is an absolute value; once a source text has been ‘strayed’ from, the critical measuring stick of ‘fidelity’ loses its evaluative rigour. Given this, comparative gradings of fidelity are in fact closer to Bluestone’s outright rejection of the concept than may be apparent at first glance. Reading back through twentieth-century adaptation criticism, the suspicion grows that, while fidelity models may remain prevalent in film and television reviewing, in cultural journalism, and in everyday evaluations by the film-going public, in academic circles the ritual slaying of fidelity criticism at the outset of a work long ago ossified into an habitual gesture, devoid of any real intellectual challenge.10 After all, if no one in academe is actually advocating the antiquated notion of fidelity, what is there to overturn? It appears more likely that the standardised routing of fidelity criticism has come to function as a shibboleth, lending the guise of methodological and theoretical innovation to studies which routinely reproduced the set model of comparative textual analysis. Given this, it is welcome that adaptation studies’ most recent wave of critics are now tending to eschew not only fidelity discourse, but also the explanatory

Introduction 9 outline coupled with ritual rejection of fidelity discourse, as ‘it is widely recognised that it is time to move on’ (Geraghty, 2008: 1). Still, one has to marvel at the obdurate hold of a theoretical model that is mentioned in spite of the same critics’ claim that even stating that one will not be mentioning it is old hat. Like the psychologically repressed, fidelity discourse simply will not go away, when even declared refusal to engage with it brings the term paradoxically back into play (as has, of course, occurred here). It appears just as well that adaptation studies is predisposed towards self-reflexivity. The second significant wave in adaptation studies’ disciplinary genesis appeared from the late 1970s with the importation of principles of narratology from the traditions of Russian formalist literary theory, structuralism and Continental semiotics (Beja, 1979; Cohen, 1979; Ruppert, 1980; Klein and Parker, 1981; Andrew, 2000 [1984]). Theorists such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette and Christian Metz were heavily cited in this stream of adaptation work which lingered, in some cases, well into the 1990s (Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990; McFarlane, 1996).11 The surprise is the tenacity of narratology’s hold over adaptation studies, given that by the late 1980s post-structuralist distrust of the rule-seeking, pseudo-scientific predilections of structuralism had well and truly achieved dominance in the Anglophone academy. The structuralist-inspired quest to isolate the signifying ‘codes’ underpinning both literature and film had the worthwhile aim of dismantling received academic hierarchies of mediums in which literature occupied the apex, and the interloper of screen studies was relegated to the lowest critical echelons (Cohen, 1979: 3). It moreover recast adaptation as a two-way dynamic, where novelistic narrative techniques not only influenced film, but certain filmic devices were avidly imitated by Modernist writers well-versed in an increasingly visual culture (Beja, 1979: 51–76; Cohen, 1979: 2–10; Andrew, 2000 [1984]: 36). But the structuralist school of adaptation confines interrelationship of the two mediums strictly to the level of textual effects. Structuralism’s characteristic isolation of texts from circuits of production and consumption, or from sociologies of media culture generally, left its methodological impress upon adaptation studies. The effect was that, for all the narratological school’s self-declared and partially justifiable revolutionary rhetoric, the movement managed to entrench further the practice of textual analysis as adaptation studies’ default methodological setting and unquestioned academic norm.12 In what this discussion has previously posited as twenty-first-century ‘new-wave’ adaptation studies (chronologically speaking, roughly the third major wave of innovation in the discipline), the importation of concepts from post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism and cultural studies broke down one part of the self-isolating critical wall built up around the text, and opened up adaptation studies to concepts of audience agency.13 Emerging incrementally from the 1980s, but accelerating

10 Introduction after the turn of the millennium, this development (handily dubbed ‘The Impact of the Posts’ by one of its key proponents, Robert Stam) placed audience pleasure in intertextual citation front and centre of its critical concerns (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 8). Accordingly, fidelity criticism was deemed not only a woefully blunt instrument with which to examine adaptations, but wilful infidelity was in fact the very point: adaptations interrogated the political and ideological underpinnings of their source texts, translating works across cultural, gender, racial and sexual boundaries to secure cultural space for marginalised discourses. This poststructuralist reconceptualisation of adaptation as critique – which Stam terms ‘intertextual dialogism’ and Hutcheon dubs ‘transculturation’ – borrows from Bakhtin and Kristeva to posit culture as a vast web of references and tropes ripe for appropriating, disassembling and rearranging [italics in original] (Stam, 2000: 64; Hutcheon, 2006: xvi; Leitch, 2003: 165–67; 2007: 18; Hutcheon, 2004: 108–11; 2007; Aragay, 2005; Boozer, 2008: 20; DeBona, 2010: 5, 12). More specifically cultural studies-inflected concepts which also reinvigorated the study of adaptation included the permeability of high/pop cultural boundaries, overdue acknowledgement of extra-literary sources for adaptations such as pulp fiction, comic books/graphic novels and computer games, and recognition of resistant or oppositional audience decodings of texts in ways possibly not anticipated by textual producers (Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999; 2007a; Hutcheon, 2006; Leitch, 2007a; Geraghty, 2008). The recognition that audiences appreciate adaptations precisely because of the mass of existing pop-cultural knowledge they bring to them was decisive in weaning adaptation studies from its long preoccupation with the nineteenthcentury Anglo-American literary canon, and for introducing an ethnographic dimension into the analysis of adaptation. Yet, as so often in adaptation studies, it is a case of two steps forward and one back as, for all its productive theoretical innovation, this nowdominant third wave of adaptation studies has come at a price. I have outlined already how post-structuralism’s and cultural studies’ characteristic disinterest in conditions of cultural production has created a lopsidedness within adaptation studies between, on one hand, intense interest in audience consumption practices but, on the other, little countervailing attention to the production contexts, financial structures and legal regimes facilitating the adaptations boom.14 The blame for this imbalance cannot, however, be sheeted home entirely to post-structuralism, cultural studies and their affiliate ‘posts’. Political economy, the school of media studies dominant in UK, Canadian and Australian (if never US) academe during the 1960s and 1970s was, by the 1980s, engaged in a frequently bitter academic turf war with cultural studies over the relative merits of material and semiotic frameworks for analysing media (Curran, 1990). As a result, political economy was too impatient with the new wave’s rejection of economically

Introduction 11 grounded (neo-)Marxist cultural models to be inclined to investigate what reception theory had to offer for political economy’s understanding of adaptation. Furthermore, political economy’s traditional home in the social sciences (especially in politics and sociology departments) made industrial-scale cultural producers such as newspaper chains and television networks favoured media for examination, in preference to the traditionally Humanities-affiliated (and specifically literary studies-affiliated) format of the book. The content recycling function at the heart of adaptation was noted in passing by individual political economists from the 1970s in analyses of ‘synergy’ within the operations of globalised media conglomerates (Murdock and Golding, 1977; Whiteside, 1981). But as the waves of consolidation that brought book publishing into the fold of corporate media were at that time mostly yet to be felt, novels and short stories were paid only glancing attention by political economy as the most common source of adapted content. More rigorous attention has been paid by political economists to such book-format content’s subsequent franchising from film to theme-park, computer-game and spin-off merchandising forms, rather taking up the analysis mid-way through the adaptation process (Wasko, 1994; 2001; 2003; Elsaesser, 1998; Balides, 2000). A gap has therefore emerged, and remains evident. Neither macro-oriented political economy nor textual- and audience-focussed cultural studies was predisposed to examine the how and why of adaptation from the perspective of the authors, agents, publishers, editors, book prize committees, screenwriters, directors and producers who actually make adaptations happen. A final point to make in tracing how the study of the contemporary book–screen adaptation industry has slipped through the intellectual net of adaptation studies, cultural studies and political economy relates to the kind of texts chosen for analysis by these respective disciplines. As outlined in relation to Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, adaptation studies has traditionally focussed greatest attention on the nineteenth-century and Modernist Anglophone literary canon (Lupack, 1999; Cartmell, Hunter, Kaye and Whelehan, 2000). Cultural studies, for its part, originated in another disciplinary rebellion – this time against English literary studies’ adamantine hostility to investigating popular culture as a legitimate topic for academic inquiry. As a consequence, cultural studies has always preferred to examine demonstrably ‘popular’ genres such as romance novels, pulps, crime fiction, westerns or comic books whose very non-literariness badges them as suitable intellectual ground for cultural studies’ relativist semiotic project. The combined effect of these disciplines’ textual orientation is that the processes by which contemporary literary fiction is created, published, marketed, evaluated for literary prizes and adapted for screen have lacked sustained academic attention. That these powerful institutions forming the contemporary adaptation economy – with all the dynamism, alliances and

12 Introduction rivalry characterising economies of all kinds – have been overlooked by cognate disciplines has bequeathed to scholars a severely flawed understanding of how the contemporary adaptation industry actually functions. Attention to texts and audiences cannot of itself explain how these adaptations come to be available for popular and critical consumption, nor the intricate production circuits through which they move on their way to audiences, nor the mechanisms of elevation in which the adaptation culture industry – and hence adaptation scholars also – is fundamentally complicit.

The Costs of Textual Analysis as Methodological Orthodoxy Having sketched the background of adaptation studies to date and noted its methodological lacunae, I will proceed to examine in further detail how lack of attention to production contexts has compromised current understandings of adaptation. From there, I outline this book’s alternative model which aims to capture the complexity of the adaptation industry and thereby to contribute to a long-overdue materialising of adaptation theory. Adaptation critics’ comparative ignorance of book industry dynamics has perpetuated a distorted understanding of adaptation, distilled here to three oft-encountered ‘myths’ of adaptation studies.15 The first of these – and by far the most frequently encountered – is the claim that books are the product of individualised, isolated authorial creation, whereas film and television result from collaborative, industrialised processes (Beja, 1979: 60–62; McDougal, 1985: 5; Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990: 2; Reynolds, 1993: 8; Ray, 2000: 42; Stam, 2000: 56; Stam and Raengo, 2005: 17; Cahir, 2006: 72). As so often when seeking the origins of adaptation studies’ methodological rubric, the roots of this fallacy can be traced directly back to Bluestone (Leitch, 2003: 150): The reputable novel, generally speaking, has been supported by a small, literate audience, has been produced by an individual writer, and has remained relatively free of rigid censorship. The film, on the other hand, has been supported by a mass audience, produced cooperatively under industrial conditions, and restricted by a selfimposed Production Code. These developments have reinforced rather than vitiated the autonomy of each medium. (2003: vi)16 In seeking to debunk this myth of isolated authorial creation, I am not denying that a clear difference in organisational and financial scale exists between the writing of, for example, a battle scene in a novel and the filmic realisation of its equivalent. The problem arises from the fact that

Introduction 13 adaptation critics when they use the terms ‘book’ or ‘novel’ are in truth almost always speaking of ‘text’ – that is, they are invoking an abstract idea of an individual author’s creative work rather than the material object of the specific book in which that work is transmitted.17 As the discipline of book history has amply demonstrated since first emerging in 1950s France (curiously contemporaneous with the appearance of adaptation studies in the Anglophone academy), books have for centuries depended upon complex circuits of printers, binders, hawkers, publishers, booksellers, librarians, collectors and readers for the dissemination of ideas in literate societies (Febvre and Martin, 1990 [1958]; Escarpit, 1966; 1971; Darnton, 1990; Adams and Barker, 1993). Thus the book is demonstrably as much the product of institutions, agents and material forces as is the Hollywood blockbuster. Yet adaptation theorists regularly emphasise the power of Hollywood’s political economy as though books were quasi-virginal texts untouched by commercial concerns prior to their screen adaptation (Beja, 1979; Bluestone, 2003; Leitch, 2003).18 This leads to curious and easily disproved assertions that authors ‘have (for better or worse) been largely able to write whatever pleased them, without regard for audience or expense’ (Ray, 2000: 42), as ‘questions of material infrastructure enter only at the point of distribution’ (Stam, 2000: 56).19 Book history has amply demonstrated that the commercial substructures of book culture have existed since at least the Gutenberg revolution. But these industrial characteristics have become massively more pronounced since major book publishers were subsumed by global media conglomerates, especially from the early 1980s onwards (Miller, 1997; Schiffrin, 2001; Epstein, 2001; Murray, 2006). Critics of the contemporary book publishing industry frequently observe that the potential marketability of authors, and the optioning of their work for adaptation across other media, are key considerations in the signing of, especially, first-time authors – a phenomenon explored in detail in Chapter 1 (Engelhardt, 1997; Gardiner, 2000b; McPhee, 2001). Moreover, these considerations all come into play prior to contracting; thereafter the book will also be extensively costed, edited, designed, proof-read, marketed, publicised, rights-shopped at book fairs, distributed to retail and online outlets (hopefully), discussed in the literary public sphere, and readers’ perceptions of the work will have been extensively mediated through networks of reviews, book prizes, writers’ festivals, book signings, face-to-face book clubs or their electronic and online equivalents (Hartley, 2001; Long, 2003; Sedo, 2003; Mackenzie, 2005; Hutcheon, 2007; Newman, 2008). A complex literary economy therefore governs the production and dissemination of books from their earliest phases. Moreover, adaptation for the screen is not merely an addon or after-thought to this complex economy, but is now factored in and avidly pursued from the earliest phases of book production. This gives the lie to the oft-repeated mantra of authorial ‘autonomy’ prevalent in

14 Introduction adaptation studies and such critics’ demonstrably inaccurate juxtaposition of a Romanticised, solitary author–genius on one hand, with Hollywood’s ‘mode of industrial production’ on the other (Bluestone, 2003: 34).20 Further, understanding of the book industry economy fundamentally challenges adaptation theory’s always implicit – and often explicit – classification of books as ‘niche’ whereas film is designated a ‘mass’ medium (Beja, 1979: 60–61; Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990: 2; Leitch, 2003: 155; Hutcheon, 2006: 5). When analysing the weight of financial interests and industry strategising brought to bear on the release of new novels by bestselling writers such as Stephen King, Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyer – or even high-profile literary authors such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan or Annie Proulx – it is impossible to deny that the book industry is as thoroughly complicit in marketing and publicity processes as are its screen-media equivalents (Gelder, 2004; Brown, 2006; Phillips, 2007; Squires, 2007). Granted, the scale of campaign spend may differ between sectors, but the centrality of marketing to both industries is incontrovertible. The fact that book publishers and film studios increasingly find themselves affiliate divisions within overarching media conglomerates makes the incorporation of a season’s lead title into the production, marketing and distribution schedules of electronic and digital media holdings all the more feasible and attractive (Izod, 1992; Murray, 2006; 2007b). Indeed, as film studies political economist Thomas Schatz has recently argued, ‘distinctions between literature and film and between art and entertainment become meaningless when dealing with contemporary Hollywood’. Adaptation studies will, Schatz provokes, only be fully able to comprehend its object of study once it conceptualises book and screen media as components of a single, converged ‘global entertainment industry’ (2009: 80). A second myth of adaptation studies deriving from critics’ current dematerialised conception of the adaptation phenomenon is the belief that adaptation’s trajectory is necessarily from the ‘old’ media of the book to the ‘new(er)’ media of film, television and digital media. This assumed linearity is manifested explicitly in the titles of adaptation studies such as Brian McFarlane’s Novel to Film (1996) and Linda Costanzo Cahir’s post-2005-era Literature into Film (2006).21 Clearly, this fallacy stems from an historicist conception of media development in which mediums are seen to supersede earlier communication technologies in a process of serial eclipse. Instead, the reality of media environments over the last century has been that newer media do cannibalise the content of older media, but mediums continue to exist contemporaneously, rearranging themselves into new patterns of usage and mutual dependence. This complementarity of communications formats was noted in media studies as early as the work of Marshall McLuhan, and has since been repeatedly elaborated by medium theorists, notably Jay David Bolter and Richard

Introduction 15 Grusin in their exploration of cross-platform ‘remediation’ (McLuhan (2001) [1964]; Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Murphy, 1999; Holmes, 2005). That these intellectual trends in the broader field of communications have had so little impact within adaptation studies testifies to the parochialising effects of adaptation studies’ common institutional separation from social science-based programmes in media studies. Granted, even Bluestone devoted a paragraph to the observation that ‘[j]ust as one line of influence runs from New York publishing house to Hollywood studio, another line may be observed running the other way’ (2003: 4). But his discussion notes only the positive impact of film versions on sales of the original novel; he does not expand his perspective to examine how film content commonly forms the basis of new printform products, a phenomenon documented well before the 1950s when Bluestone was writing.22 Over 20 years after Bluestone, critic Morris Beja similarly dedicated two pages of an adaptation monograph to discussing the coexistence of novelisations and source novels, but he begins this potentially innovative line of inquiry with the tellingly digressive throwaway ‘incidentally’ (1979: 87). As far as the first two waves of adaptations studies were concerned, the book industry served as handmaiden supplying film-ready content to the screen industries; it was a relationship between mediums reciprocated only intermittently. By the time the third wave of adaptation studies first emerged in the late 1980s, the increasing evidence of adaptation’s print-based ‘afterlife’ in the form of ‘tie-in’ editions, novelisations, published screenplays, ‘makingoff’ books and companion titles had become incontestable. Equipped with their greater theoretical cognisance of popular culture, such adaptation scholars began to note the proliferation of such book-form texts, and even their circulation simultaneous with screen versions. Again, this belated recognition of adaptation’s two-way (or multi-way) traffic is flagged in the title of an influential anthology: Cartmell and Whelehan’s Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (1999). But such critics’ use of these ‘companion texts’ is – true to the discipline’s generally unacknowledged textual analysis bias – to treat them as convenient additional sites for semiotic analysis, not to examine how they came to be produced or their role in cross-promoting content franchises to a range of audiences (Whelehan, 1999: 5–6; cf. Izod, 1992: 101–02). What is still lacking in adaptation studies is a thorough understanding of whose financial interests these ‘spin-off’ print properties serve, the intellectual property and licensing arrangements by which they are governed, and how audiences experience this multi-platform encounter with broadly similar content – specifically whether audiences invest content consumed on different platforms with varying degrees of cultural prestige or authority.23 The third and final corollary of adaptation studies’ prevailing academic indifference to the adaptation economy is perhaps not as strongly marked as the first two, given it concerns the more abstruse concept of the rise and

16 Introduction fall of literary reputations. Literary prestige has remained a mostly marginalised topic in adaptation studies, being either already abundantly established in the case of ‘classic’ authors whose canonical works are adapted for the screen or, in the case of popular culture texts such as comic books or computer games, amounting to an irrelevant concern according to the relativist rubric of cultural studies (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 45; Leitch, 2007a: 258, 278–79). Rarely examined is the phenomenon of contemporary writers who self-identify as ‘literary’ authors whose work is adapted for other media, and how circulation of these broadly contemporaneous screen texts triggers inflation or devaluation of their literary stocks.24 The stock-exchange metaphor invoked here traces its origins to Bourdieu’s influential essay ‘The Field of Cultural Production’ (1983), with its telling subtitle ‘The Economic World Reversed’ (see Bourdieu 1993]). US literary sociologist James F. English has observed in his analysis of cultural prizes, The Economy of Prestige (2005) – a book itself intensively engaged with Bourdieusian theory – that the fascination of questions of literary value derives from their siting at the juncture of two philosophically hostile conceptual systems: the aesthetic and the commercial. The concept of literary esteem is never entirely reducible to either system operating alone, but is instead energised by its situation at the clashing tectonic plates of both systems. How adaptations factor into this innately volatile system for accrediting or withholding of literary reputation is a compelling topic mostly unexplored in relation to contemporary authors (as opposed to long-canonical, and more recently mass-market, authors such as Jane Austen).25 The topic’s interest stems also from its intermeshing with the broader literary and cultural economy of agents, editors, publishers, prize-judging committees, book retailers, and cultural journalists already mentioned. Focussing critical attention on literary reputations in the process of being ‘brokered’ within the adaptation economy provides a fascinating insight into the adaptation industry at work, and the shifting alliances and conflicts that inevitably arise between its nodal agents.

Proposing a New Methodology for Adaptation Studies From the foregoing, it will be readily apparent that this book’s key aim is to rethink adaptation, not as an exercise in comparative textual analysis of individual print works and their screen versions, but as a material phenomenon produced by a system of interlinked interests and actors. In short, adaptation studies urgently needs to divert its intellectual energies from a questionable project of aesthetic evaluation, and instead begin to understand adaptation economically and institutionally. To do so, it is necessary to move out from under the aegis of long-dominant formalist and textual analysis traditions to investigate what cognate fields of cultural research might have to offer adaptation studies in terms of

Introduction 17 alternative methodologies. These then need to be critically assessed for their own analytical blind spots, as well as for how they might profitably be combined into a hybrid methodology supple enough to capture the workings of the contemporary adaptation industry. Political Economy of Media The political economy strand of media analysis originates in the critiques of the early-twentieth-century Frankfurt School, reviving with an interest in issues of ownership and control of media in the 1960s and 1970s, and informing a more recent wave of research around the commercialisation of digital media. These most recent additions to the discipline have demonstrated the vital relevance of materially engaged critique for elucidating developments in the contemporary cultural sphere (Mosco, 1996; Schiller, 1999; Wasko, 2001; 2003; Doyle, 2002). Political economy’s realist, materialist and interdisciplinary methodology critically illuminates content’s key role in contemporary media industries. Technological convergence around digital platforms has coincided with increasing convergence of ownership amongst globalised media corporations to create a commercial environment favouring the multipurposing or ‘streaming’ of media content to orchestrate cross-platform franchises (Elsaesser, 1998; Balides, 2000; Murray, 2003a; 2005; Jenkins, 2006; Grainge, 2008). The key characteristic and commercial utility of contemporary media content appear to be its potential dissociation from any one media platform and its simultaneous replication across a range of mediums via digitisation. Clearly this is adaptation operating under a different name. However, for reasons that are more institutional than theoretical, political economy of media has, as outlined earlier, tended to relegate the book to the periphery of its analytical concern because of an inherited preference for broadcast and networked media. History of the Book The second cognate methodology proposed here, history of the book (also termed ‘book history’), traces its own complex disciplinary history from French historical studies, sociology, literary studies, bibliography and the history of ideas to coalesce as an academic discipline from the late 1970s. Like political economy, book history insists upon the material underpinnings of conceptions of culture, focussing specifically on the mechanics of print production, dissemination and reception. The field’s most productive innovation from the perspective of revitalising adaptation studies is its devising of various circuit-based models for conceptualising the flow of print culture in host societies (Darnton, 1990; 2007; Adams and Barker, 1993; Jordan and Patten, 1995). Specifically, these models of interlinked authors, printers, publishers, retailers and the like maintain

18 Introduction attention to the industrial and commercial substrata of the book trade, but they integrate these concerns with attention also to less tangible intellectual, social and cultural currents, demonstrating the interdependence of the two spheres. Less compelling for the current purpose is that book history – as its self-designation suggests – overwhelmingly confines its attention to pre-twentieth-century print cultures, and has to date generally failed to embrace the contemporary book industries as part of its academic purview (Squires, 2007: 7; Murray, 2007a). Cultural Theory Compelling as is political economy’s materialist conceptualisation of contemporary media industries, on its own it provides an inadequate schema for understanding the adaptation industry’s role in brokering cultural value. In contemporary globalised media conglomerates, book publishing is typically of relatively minor commercial significance in terms of its contribution to overall corporate revenues. Yet publishing divisions continue to enjoy a high profile within such conglomerates as a source of prestige and as ballast for corporate claims to cultural distinction. How is it that book content is increasingly dematerialised from the book format through digital technology and adaptation, while at the same time screen industries attempt to leverage books’ associations of cultural prestige and literary distinction across media platforms? On one hand, media industries would appear to be pursuing a culturally democratising agenda of making acclaimed literary works available to demographically broader screen audiences. But, at the same time, such industrial concerns allay audience suspicions of commercial exploitation by constantly reiterating film-makers’ respect for a content property’s prize-winning literary pedigree. Thus cultural hierarchies are, paradoxically, kept alive by the same industry that pushes audiences to consume near-identical content across multiple media platforms. Textually oriented cultural theory models are ill equipped to comprehend this nexus of commercial and cultural values at play in the modern adaptation industry. This is principally attributable to the fact that critical theory and cultural studies have tended to develop theories of cultural value in relative isolation from the material industry contexts that preoccupy both political economy and book history. Such disparate critical foci have given rise to a disjunction between, on one hand, cultural studies’ orthodox position of cultural relativism and, on the other, the media industries’ avid support of cultural hierarchy as evidenced in their marketing and publicity strategies emphasising consumer discrimination and cultural self-improvement (Collins, 2002). Into this conceptual gap this study imports Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production, as Bourdieu was himself attempting to establish some middle ground between traditional, Romantic-inflected art criticism’s deification of

Introduction 19 individual genius, and the economic reductionism of crude Marxism, whereby cultural products amount to nothing more than the mechanistic working-out of their context of production (1993: 29–73). Especially attractive in Bourdieu’s formulation is his focus on the role of various cultural agents (individuals, groups or institutions) who maintain some degree of willed decision-making within an overall context of a given cultural field (29–30). Moreover, the tightly interdependent field is itself constantly reformulated by the actions of these various agents as, ecosystem-like, the introduction of a new agent or actions of existing agents alter the functioning of the system as a whole.26 Apposite also for a consideration of the adaptation industry, the field exists in a state of ‘permanent conflict’ (34): agents may form tactical alliances but these are inevitably governed by self-interest and are hence inherently rivalrous and unstable. Beyond this, the current book proposes, the adaptation industry as a field possesses strong cultural memory in that the success of specific adaptations for any nodal point in the network prompts imitative or reactive behaviour in others. Given that this study examines specifically contemporary literary adaptations, Bourdieu’s model of the field is additionally compelling in its ability to hold together ‘economic profit’ and ‘symbolic profit’ as co-existing and circulating within – albeit often conflictually – the same system (48). But Bourdieu’s positing of these two forms of capital as inversely proportional in his ‘loser wins’ formulation (i.e. the less successful an artwork is in market terms the more it accumulates cultural esteem, and vice versa) appears of itself inadequate to capture how markers of contemporary cultural esteem such as literary prizes and film awards can have a phenomenal impact on the commercial fortunes of such products, a concept examined in detail in Chapter 4’s examination of (Man) Booker Prize screen adaptations (39).27 Thus the three methodologies outlined here could all already – hypothetically speaking – have converged on the issue of the contemporary adaptation industry, but have to date mostly failed to do so for reasons of their own. This anomalous state of affairs cries out to be rectified. By combining these three fields’ methodological insights, adaptation studies stands to gain a new, intellectually invigorating methodology: alert to the commercial and industrial structures of global media; wise to these systems’ simultaneous invocation and disavowal of hierarchies of cultural value; and capable of holding these two domains – the material and the cultural – in dynamic relationship.

Modelling the Adaptation Industry To begin with: an outline of the current book’s parameters and structure, along with some provisos. This book’s conceptual framework for modelling what I term ‘the adaptation industry’ derives from the aforementioned circuit models prominent in book history which chart the circulation and

20 Introduction flow of print communications between various book industry stakeholders.28 Substantially modifying such historically focussed models to reflect the dynamics of contemporary English-language adaptation, this book maps relationships between six key stakeholder groups: authors; agents; publishers, writers’ and film festival directors; literary prize-judging committees; screenwriters; and producers and distributors. Granted, this may appear at first glance a resiliently dualist book–screen model of adaptation, especially given new-wave adaptation studies’ increased attention to an expanded range of media formats: theatre, recorded music, comics, graphic novels, computer gaming, animation, toys and myriad other licensed commodities (Hutcheon, 2006; Leitch, 2007a).29 But to attempt to chart the interlocking industrial relations of all these interests would be tantamount to mapping the international creative industries as a whole; such a task is clearly beyond the scope of any one project. Instead, I choose the relationships between adaptation studies’ traditionally dominant (and manifestly still prevalent) book and screen mediums as a manageably delimited case study to demonstrate the potential of an innovative materialist and sociologically minded adaptation criticism. It is hoped that the current volume clears sufficient methodological ground for others in turn to detail the specific economies of adaptation between other mediums, in both contemporary and historical periods. One corollary of adapting circuit models from book history is an awareness of the historical specificity of book industry structures. Any mapping of the contemporary adaptation industry thus needs to take account of aspects of the book trade which have become pervasive only in recent decades. The timeframe for the current research is therefore circa 1980 to the present. This chosen period is broad enough to incorporate significant structural, technological and cultural changes to the modern book world: the growth of corporatisation and conglomeration from the early 1980s; the revolutionary impact of digital technologies on all phases of book production, distribution and retailing; the eclipse of the editor by the agent as the author’s literary mentor and champion; the elevation of book prizes in promotional campaigns by English-language publishers (notably the (Man) Booker Prize); the creation of international book fair and writers’ festival circuits; and the marked growth of ‘subsidiary’ rights in non-book media as a feature of standard author–publisher contracts during the period. The era also encompasses the boom years of ‘indie’ film-making as a significant niche within the mainstream cinema market, with developments such as the growth of the Sundance Film Festival and the rise of distributor Miramax marking out a distinct institutional circuit for prestige contemporary literary adaptations. Focussing industry-centred adaptation research on such a recent period is designed as a corrective to adaptation studies’ long privileging of ‘classic’ Renaissance, eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century and Modernist texts in its analyses (Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990; Lupack, 1999;

Introduction 21 Cartmell, Hunter, Kaye and Whelehan, 2000; Mayer, 2002; Elliott, 2003; Stam and Raengo, 2005). The much longer cultural histories of such texts cause them to enter the contemporary adaptation economy already freighted with critical approbation and/or notoriety. The exclusion of already-established ‘classics’ from the proposed model ensures the preexisting cultural baggage of ‘classic’ texts does not distort the findings or introduce variables that cannot be accounted for by the dynamics of the contemporary adaptation industry itself. This being said, there is no reason that the proposed materialist methodology should not also be applicable to others’ studies of ‘classic’ text adaptations occurring in earlier eras of the book, radio, film and television industries. A mapping of the contemporary adaptations industry must also acknowledge linguistic and geographic specificities. Overwhelmingly, adaptation studies has, to date, focussed on English-language texts, or upon film adaptations in languages other than English of Anglophone ‘classics’.30 This is one element of extant adaptation studies that I would argue in favour of retaining, not for the sake of tradition itself, but because it is important to recognise the variability of the adaptations process across countries and regional language groupings. Hence, the current study focusses upon content created, distributed and consumed within the Anglophone world. The US and UK still account for the overwhelming majority of the world’s English-language cultural production. Yet there are clearly points of access into these global distribution systems for content from historically ‘periphery’ English-language cultures such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland and – increasingly – India. That being said, typically if such second-tier media-producing countries wish to gain exposure to global Englishlanguage audiences for their content it is via collaboration with or through acquiescence to US and UK cultural gatekeepers. Undertaking detailed mapping of the contemporary adaptations industry thus not only informs debates around cultural value, but also enhances formation and implementation of cultural policy at national and supranational levels to facilitate cultural ‘contra-flow’. Chapter Outline Chapter 1 explores the figure of the contemporary literary author, and the way in which such authors increasingly serve as anchors for content brands spanning multiple media. Chapter 2 examines the boom in the rights business which makes possible legal adaptation of in-copyright content, and specifically the figure increasingly functioning as gatekeeper to such rights in fiction works – the literary agent. Where book contracts transfer rights to a work from the author to the publishing house, publishers have a keen interest in wider circulation of such content. Chapter 3 examines three key fora at which publishers ‘shop’ book rights to other

22 Introduction adaptations stakeholders, and market completed adaptations back to bibliophilic audiences: book fairs, screen festivals and writers’ weeks. In what ways, at these events and elsewhere, is the cachet of a prize-winning book conveyed via adaptation? Taking as a case study screen adaptations of (Man) Booker Prize-winning titles, Chapter 4 examines the screen industries’ various attempts to signal literary prestige in non-print media. Chapter 5 proceeds to examine that pivotal figure in adapting print content to screen: the screenwriter. The complex and often fraught relationship of screenwriter to their adapted text – and its author – is a recurrent theme of media discourse about screenwriting. But the recent emergence of a handful of celebrity ‘auteur’ screen adapters, whose badge is their assumed source-text ‘fidelity’, indicates both greater public awareness of the adaptation process and a simultaneous effacement of alterations made in the process of adapting. Weighted with financial responsibility for the success of an esteemed novel’s screen adaptation, film producers and distributors assiduously court approval of the literary public sphere, as discussed in Chapter 6. Such strategies are designed to transmute readers of the book into niche arthouse film supporters and, through incubating of such esteem into film industry critical awards, to ground an expanded publicity campaign for mass-market audiences. The Weinstein brothers’ successes with the Miramax-style arthouse blockbuster are scrutinised for what they reveal about the marketing and promotion of contemporary literary adaptations. Finally, the Afterword considers emerging frontiers in literary adaptation, specifically the grey area of unauthorised adaptations in the digital sphere, usually created by fan audiences. While currently more common in relation to mass-market and genre fiction, what do such intellectual property skirmishes indicate about corporate media’s complex relationships with literature’s no longer passive readers, but newly co-creating ‘users’?

Conclusion: Benefits of an Industry-centric Adaptation Model Critics have long remarked upon the prevalence of adaptation (Orr, 1992: 4; Naremore, 2000b: 15; Elliott, 2003: 4, 6; Hutcheon, 2004; 2006: xi, 2; 2007). Without question, the phenomenon of adaptation is steadily becoming culturally ubiquitous. Yet missing from this academic equation until very recently has been a production-oriented perspective to complement existing text- and audience-centric approaches. Analysing the adaptation industry thus helps hybridise the now coalescing discipline of adaptation studies’ governing methodology. However, rather than seeing production-focussed analysis as merely a corrective to existing critical imbalances and thus as an end in itself, the current book flags how conceptualising the industrial substructures of adaptation provides new understandings of which texts are commonly adapted, why they take the

Introduction 23 specific forms they do, and how they influence or respond to audience evaluation. Hence a focus on production issues in the digital age provides a new dimension to adaptation research, but it at the same time calls into question media studies’ traditional tripartite division into production/ text/audience categories. Production matters; but who the producers are in an era of infinite digital reproducibility, collective creation and ‘produserly’ media practice remains an open question (Bruns, 2005). Additional to these benefits accruing to the scholarly community in general are the pay-offs such a study promises for the commonly marginalised discipline of print culture or publishing studies. Rather than perceiving the book as the rapidly obsolescing poor cousin to everburgeoning screen media, studying the adaptation industry reveals the continuing prominence of book-derived content in the multimedia age. This is true whether or not print formats serve as audiences’ initial point of entry into a content franchise. For even a cursory glance at contemporary mainstream media culture reveals that audiences introduced to book content in screen-media versions often subsequently consume the same narratives in their original (graphic) novel format, or – particularly where the content is original to screen – audiences may seek out novelisations, making-of books or companion volumes to prolong, enrich and potentially complicate their immersive experience. Robert Stam’s briefly elucidated concept of ‘post-celluloid’ adaptation is apposite here (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 11). Although Stam’s use of the term appears to denote the impact upon film culture of technological developments in digital and online media, clearly digital content is also remediated into resolutely analogue formats such as the book. Audiences demand, evaluate and sometimes ‘rewrite’ such cross-platform content in unpredictable ways, disproving media historicists’ assumptions that younger audiences are necessarily most loyal to more recently developed mediums. Finally, the third constituency that stands to benefit from mapping of the contemporary Anglophone adaptation economy is the book, film, television, screenwriting and licensing sector practitioners who are engaged in the actual mechanics of adaptation at the cultural coalface. To date, such industry participants have been inadequately served: at one extreme they have borne the brunt of critics’ suspicion of a money-hungry and culturally rapacious ‘adaptation machine’ (as outlined earlier) or, at the other extreme, they have been inadequately served by relentlessly descriptive, rather than critical, ‘how to’ guides (Seger, 1992). For cultural producers in second-tier or traditionally ‘periphery’ Anglophone nations, it is especially crucial in cultural policy and cultural nationalist terms to understand how content passes through (or bypasses) dominant US and UK cultural networks to gain exposure to global English-language audiences. What are the mechanisms by which content is brokered on the global adaptation exchange, and what complex interplays of agents, institutions and commerce inflect cultural evaluation across different

24 Introduction territories? What specific industry phenomena trigger a rise or fall in cultural prestige for authors, publishers and producers, for what reasons and in the eyes of which audiences? Do adaptation industry agents always benefit symbiotically from the multi-platform circulation of content, or can a property’s rise to mass-market exposure in one media sector prompt devaluation of a property’s cultural currency in another? After all, for every reader who selects a tie-in edition on the basis of the familiar film artwork reproduced on the cover, there are others who will actively seek out a ‘purer’, more ‘literary’ pre-adaptation cover design (Marshall, 2003: A1; Steiner, 2006; Sorensen, 2009: 21). To what extent are relationships within the adaptation ecosystem mutually sustaining and to what extent do they evidence sectoral rivalries, commercial conflicts and long-standing prejudices about the cultural status of specific mediums? Such issues are endlessly intellectually piquant, and unquestionably contemporary in their relevance. Together they represent an exciting opportunity to help shift adaptation studies from its lingeringly marginal status at the fringes of literary and screen studies into perhaps the unifying discipline at the centre of contemporary communication studies.

1

What Are You Working On? The Expanding Role of the Author in an Era of Cross-media Adaptation

Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal I’d still own the film rights and be working on the sequel. (Elvis Costello, ‘Everyday I Write the Book’, 1983) All great songs are written by great song-writing partnerships like Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lennon and McCartney, Strummer and Jones. This is written by a combination of Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins. —(Elvis Costello introducing ‘Everyday I Write the Book’ on UK Channel 4 TV show The Tube, November 1983)1

When confronted by the vast, industrialised, complexly interdependent nature of the adaptation system as sketched in this book’s Introduction, it is tempting to seek reassurance and intellectual certainty by returning to the comfortingly familiar figure of the Author. Here, surely, is any adaptation’s irrefutable point of origin – finite, individualised and conveniently open to interrogation – and hence the optimal starting point for an intuitively humanist rather than bloodlessly systemic explanation of the adaptation phenomenon. Such an impulse to consecrate the Author as adaptation’s fountain-head fits easily with lingering Romantic conceptions of the Author as self-generative creative genius and truth-telling sage to a debased and profit-hungry society – the quintessential artist motivated by desire for posterity’s renown rather than by the sordidly mercantile wrangling of Grub Street. Such author-centric conceptions have, perhaps oddly, long remained particularly prevalent in the sphere of adaptation studies.2 This is no doubt in part because of myriad adapted literary authors’ disavowals of any financial or administrative interest in the making of screen adaptations of their work. From their published comments, it seems such authors prefer instead to follow Ernest Hemingway’s famed advice to any literary author whose work was being adapted: the best way for a writer to deal with Hollywood [is] to arrange a rendezvous with the movie men at the California state line: ‘you

26 The Expanding Role of the Author throw them your book, they throw you the money, then you jump into your car and drive like hell back to where you came from’. (Phillips, 1980: 6; cited in Cordaiy, 2007: 35; Donadio, 2007)3 An almost exact contemporary echo of this standard posture of authorial disavowal is found in a recent article in the UK’s Observer newspaper describing the typical role of authors in the making of screen adaptations of their work: ‘Normally when an author works with a film-maker, they just sign on the dotted line and then shake hands, before they are told, “Thank you very much. See you at the premiere”’ (Thorpe, 2010).4 Thus patted patronisingly on the head, authors are thrown the table scraps of artistic kudos before the entertainment machine gets down to business. Yet even this semi-facetious account of the hapless author’s brush-off – ‘See you at the premiere’ – should give us pause, indicating as it does that the author’s role has not in fact ceased with the handing over of the book and collecting of money but is, rather, incorporated into the highest profile marketing event for any feature film: the celebrity-studded red-carpet premiere. If authors are genuinely redundant to the adaptation economy, as commonly averred by authors themselves, why habitually solicit their involvement in such a film-centric event? The remark points up the fact that contemporary literary authorship, far from standing outside the adaptation economy, is in truth fundamentally a construct of that same economy. Whether specific authors choose to conform fully to its lineaments or not, the role of contemporary authorship can only be understood in the context of the book industry’s enmeshment, since the late decades of the twentieth century, within a globalised and conglomerate-dominated media landscape (Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 83). In such a converged system for producing and valorising the printed word, adaptation can no longer be considered merely a serendipitous but unlikely afterthought for a minority of already successful books. Rather, the possibility of multipurposing any particular content package across myriad simultaneous media formats has come to underpin the structural logic of the media industries and is consciously anticipated, stage-managed and pursued at every stage of a book’s pre- and post-publication life (Murray, 2006; 2007b). In such an environment, the author emerges as both the creative and commercial anchorperson for content franchises based upon their work. Commercially, authors (increasingly in collaboration with their agents, as explored in Chapter 2) license and exploit the proliferating range of primary and subsidiary rights spun out of book properties (Brouillette, 2007: 65; Squires, 2007: 25). While at the more abstractly cultural level, authors function as creative spokespersons and aesthetic guarantors for such trans-format media franchises – reassuring existing and potential

The Expanding Role of the Author 27 audiences of an adaptation’s artistic bona fides. As this last point suggests, these superficially distinct commercial and cultural roles are, in reality, constantly blurring, as authorial imprimatur becomes itself part of the marketing arsenal for a major-release film or big-budget television adaptation. The trend towards heavyweight literary authors being credited as executive producers on screen adaptations of their works (explored further in Chapter 4) encapsulates the convergent commercial and creative dynamics at play; such authors maintain significant leverage over script and casting decisions, while often also negotiating a percentage of the film’s profits in lieu of – or in addition to – their payment for film rights. In many ways such a creative overseer role has, perhaps counterintuitively, proven easier for adapted literary fiction authors to cultivate than for mass-market or genre fiction authors. Successive waves of Arnoldian, Leavisite and New Critical approaches to the teaching of literary fiction have deeply embedded (albeit often covertly) Romantic conceptions of author–genius and inculcated a lingering distaste or even (as outlined in the Introduction) a cultivated ignorance of the commercial realities of the book trade.5 In such a public climate, it matters more to film marketing and publicity what a Philip Roth thinks of the latest screen adaptation of his work than a Dan Brown. This rhetorically denied but latently enduring Romanticist undercurrent in twentieth-century literary theory provides illuminating insight into how, in the distinct but cognate field of adaptation studies, fidelity criticism has been able to maintain such an obdurate hold. Serving no production-related purpose, the ritual appearance of the author at the adapted film’s premiere can only be explained by the authorial imprimatur and creative blessing that the author presence is intended to bestow upon the adapted text. That is to say, Romantic myths of semi-divine and socially autonomous authorial genius are here being invoked by the adaptation industry itself to disguise its own operations. The adaptation industry by such means works insistently to cover its tracks – avidly playing into the cult of the celebrity literary author for its own commercial self-interest, but ever ready to point away from its own interventions. It thus encourages audiences and critics to conceive of adaptation as a process of dematerialised texts arising almost spontaneously from the twin creative visionaries of Author and auteurist Director (cinema studies’ own Romanticist construct). Through such acts of strategic self-effacement, the adaptation system manages, paradoxically, to reinscribe its power – at its most pervasive when least perceived. This chapter seeks to explore the neo-Romantic celebration of literary authorship within the context of the contemporary Anglophone adaptation industry. Its first part traces the various theories and constructions of authorship dominant in the academy during this book’s focus period of 1980 onwards, and seeks to explain how the mainstreaming of poststructuralist theories of the ‘death of the author’ was able to occur

28 The Expanding Role of the Author contemporaneously with the seemingly contradictory celebritisation of literary authorship both in the culture broadly as well as – amazingly – inside the academy itself. The chapter’s middle and third sections work to ground these larger theoretical debates about the shifting nature of authorship in the empirical realities of the adaptation industry, examining the various ways in which the evolving ‘author function’ has left its impress upon book industries’ rights management practices, and upon the spheres of screen industry scriptwriting, marketing and publicity (Foucault, 2006 [1969]: 284). Academic analyses reinforcing polarised views of either an all-conquering cult of celebrity authorship, or of authors sacrificed upon the altar of Hollywood profit-mongering fail to do justice to the nuances and complexities of the author’s role in the contemporary adaptation economy. As Bourdieu foresaw, authors still work within a predetermined cultural field over whose characteristics they have limited control, but the various strategic ‘plays’ they may make within this given context allow them a significant degree of individual – and collective – agency. The revival of the (never entirely dispelled) Romantic sanctification of authorship has been avidly cultivated by an adaptation industry whose very existence would – at first glance – seem to disprove it. The anomaly confronting analysts of the contemporary adaptation industry is that the drift towards author-centrism, the proliferation of rights management regimes, and the global reach of conglomerate media should have proven so harmonious a blend.

Conceptualising Authorship During the late decades of the twentieth century, three diverse modes for conceptualising authorship were in the ascendant. These arose principally from academic debates about the nature of authorship, but were energised and popularised by contact with broader cultural currents. For the sake of schematic simplicity, I have summarised them in what follows as, respectively, the post-structuralist school of ‘the death of the author’, book history’s recovery of the late-nineteenth- /early-twentieth-century professionalisation of authorship, and cultural and media studies-inspired analyses of the contemporary celebrity author. However, in practice much overlap and multiple cross-currents exist between these three ostensibly distinct schools, and some critical names attributed here to one school could well find other aspects of their work as easily attributed to another in a different context. Nevertheless, it is productive to untangle these three distinctive theoretical and methodological threads from the tangled skein of late-twentieth-century understandings of authorship as they constitute the necessary intellectual background to the reconfiguring of the author’s role in the contemporary adaptation economy which we are now witnessing.

The Expanding Role of the Author 29 The Death of the Author Roland Barthes’ seminal and much anthologised essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1986 [1968]) deserves its prominent place in studies of authorship if only for its key analytical insight in prising apart the sociocultural construct of the Author from the biological being who writes any given literary work (49). By critically identifying the resultant sanctified Author as the creation of regimes of culture and legal institutions, Barthes was able to adumbrate how the figure of the Author has been invoked in Western culture as a seemingly stable and individualised point of origin for a text (49). In his suggestive – if frustratingly vague – formulations, the invention of the Author serves ‘to impose a break’ on meaning (53). This, Barthes alleges, has enabled the (French) literary-critical establishment – his main target throughout the essay – to engage in a relentlessly biographical form of criticism ‘tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions’, all the while claiming to bracket off the search for authorial intention as a critical fallacy (50). For Barthes, this has had the deleterious effect of closing down the innate polysemy of all literary texts in order to buttress the authority of literary critics’ own orthodox readings. The overdue dethroning of this institutionally created ‘Author-God’ is thus, for Barthes, the necessary first step in celebrating instead ‘language itself’ and, through this manoeuvre, the newly liberated reader (53, 50). Stripped of the anti-establishment revolutionary rhetoric characteristic of the time and place in which the essay was written, it is easy to perceive in retrospect that the liberation of the ordinary reader could, in often the same institutional settings, slip easily into the elevation of the Theorist as super-reader and surrogate hermeneutic authority. Frequently anthologised as a pair with Barthes’s essay, Michel Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ (2006 [1969]) has been labelled a ‘riposte’ to his contemporary (Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 81). Yet in truth Foucault shares many of Barthes’ key tenets, in particular the idea that cleaving of ‘the author function’ from the biological writer constitutes an undergirding principle of post-Gutenbergian hyper-individualised and capitalist print culture (284). However, unlike Barthes’s quasi-mystical and notably de-historicised prose, Foucault specifically links the rise of the Author to the rise of ‘strict rules concerning authors’ rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters’, a link which has since been empirically substantiated in much greater detail by book historians and historians of ideas (285).6 For Foucault, the utility of the author function within institutionalised literary criticism lies in its power to classify, valorise and hierarchise a range of textual discourses, and thus to provide the conceptual ordering system essential for sustaining any academic discipline (especially, one might add, one with such shallow institutional roots as non-Classical literary studies) (284; Biriotti and

30

The Expanding Role of the Author

Miller, 1993: 4). Invoking an originative Author permits critics to project onto historical writers a singular creative ‘design’ or conveniently unified psychology which can rationalise groupings of even formally diverse and aesthetically uneven bodies of work (286). Like Barthes, Foucault is highly attuned to the strategic disciplinary ends to which the usefully protean author figure can be put. Buttressing the institutional positions and consequent cultural authority of establishment literary critics, the author function effectively ‘limits, excludes and chooses’ from amongst the array of possible readerly interpretations of any instance of print communication (290). Re-encountering Barthes’ and Foucault’s essays not in an 1990s undergraduate literary theory tutorial where I first read them, but from my current perspective as a print culture and adaptation studies scholar, most striking is their insistently dematerialised viewpoint. Both posit authors almost solely as sites of hermeneutic and aesthetic confrontation between literary critics, not as creative professionals with artistic and commercial motivations of their own. In fact, from the exclusively Francophone and predominantly historical examples scattered throughout both essays, it is clear that Barthes and Foucault conceive of authors principally as both dead and canonised, granting these theorists’ conceptual schemas limited scope for understanding the deliberate self-fashioning of contemporary literary authors. Also striking in revisiting these texts is the way in which the atomised, liquid, ‘liberated’ textual polysemy both theorists celebrate uncannily resembles the quite distinct way in which the largely stable and unitary book of Gutenbergian print culture has fractured into a panoply of intellectual property (IP) rights. The fact that these rights can be sold, licensed or otherwise exploited by outside parties under ever-proliferating IP regimes in the interests of profit generation and authorial image management fundamentally undercuts the pervasive anti-bourgeois, anticapitalist rhetoric of both essays.7 In the event, it was not so much meaning that multiplied infinitely, but the legal regimes to prescribe and control authorised use of book-derived content. Finally, Foucault foresaw that the socially constructed role of the author function would continue to modify along with its host culture, even predicting that ‘the author function will disappear’ (291). Quite the contrary, it has been largely through corralling the IP (intellectual property) rights arising from their work, specifically through the hiring of literary agents, that authors (admittedly the minority of the most critically and commercially successful) have been able to firmly entrench their position in the creative industries. From this newly powerful cultural vantage point, they have been invited ceaselessly to pronounce upon the ‘correct’ interpretation of their texts – this time not via the posthumous proxy of the ventriloquising literary critic but in person through the expanding apparatus of the celebrity-focussed media industries and a burgeoning ‘meet the author’ culture (Todd, 2006: 29).

The Expanding Role of the Author 31 Professionalising Authorship A second approach to conceptualising authorship, starkly opposed to post-structuralist edicts, has also developed over the course of the last 30 years. Largely coalescing around the interdisciplinary academic field known as the history of the book, such research takes a staunchly empiricist (and often specifically bibliographical and archive-oriented) tack in its quest to reconstruct the intermeshing material, legal and institutional circumstances surrounding the rise of authorship as a profession in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the first quarter of the twentieth. Although book history traces one line of its intellectual genealogy back to French thought via the Annales school of social and intellectual history, from its grafting onto the Anglophone academy from around the mid 1970s book history often served as an empiricist refuge from the high tide of post-structuralist-inspired abstraction then prevalent across the Humanities. As commentators have noted, however, there is an exquisite irony here (Price, 2002). For book historians’ investigations into the construction of the professional author in practice raised many of the same questions piquing followers of Barthes and Foucault: what is an author?; to what extent is an author an autonomous creative force in generating a text?; what obeisance is due to authors’ interpretations of their own work? Book historians have amply demonstrated that, in the context of the centuries-long history of the post-Gutenberg West, a specific range of forces began to converge in the late nineteenth century which proved crucial in catalysing modern conceptions of the author. With the gradual formalisation of enforceable international copyright in the wake of the Berne Convention (1886), and with rising public literacy brought about by universal primary education in Western democracies, writers began to enjoy an expanding range of remunerative outlets for their creative work, especially with the explosion of mass-circulation, advertising-supported magazines towards the close of the nineteenth century. The concomitant growth in foreign territory, translation and subsidiary rights clauses in authors’ contracts with publishers, and the often punitive conditions these forced upon authors because of their weak bargaining position, set the stage for the emergence of the professional literary agent as authoradvocate, business manager and creative mentor (Hepburn, 1968; West, 1988a; 1988b; McDonald, 1997; Delany, 2002; Gillies, 2007). Given these background developments in expanding markets for book-derived content and securing of more favourable contractual terms, Modernist writers without private incomes could, for perhaps the first time, make a living (albeit a precarious one) by their pen (Holgate and Wilson-Fletcher, 1998). The literary sphere was witnessing the embryonic development of the now familiar figure of the professional, organised, multiformat author.

32 The Expanding Role of the Author Academic book historians have not been alone in excavating this largely obscured history of writers’ changing material and legal status. Also emerging from the late nineteenth century were various professional associations and authorial lobby groups created expressly to represent the cause of the professional writer to parties both firmly within the literary field (such as publishers, reviewers, booksellers and librarians) as well as those predominantly outside of it (such as parliamentary committees, the legal community and the general public): the UK’s Society of Authors (1884) and Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (1959); the US Authors League of America (1912, subsequently the Authors Guild (1921)) and the Writers Guild of America (East and West) (1954); and the Australian Society of Authors (1963) and Australian Writers’ Guild (1962) amongst others.8 As part of their lobbying remit, such authorial trade unions have produced important writer income surveys, guides to standard-form contracts and submissions on book-related issues to various policy-making bodies, all of which prove useful primary source material for those seeking to trace the emergence of the professional author figure (Findlater, 1963; Klein, W., 1992; Pool, 2000; Australian Society of Authors, 2001; Haylett Clark, 2008). Author societies have also thrown into high relief specifically academic debates, disputing literary studies’ implicit presentation of literary history as a virtual baton race between individualised canonical authors, all seemingly sui generis masters of their own literary destinies. Works such as Victor Bonham-Carter’s two-volume history of The Society of Authors, Authors by Profession (1978; 1984), insist upon the valency of institutional and sociological approaches for understanding the changing literary sphere by positing authorial identity as largely a collective creation fashioned by canny use of the various legal, industrial and commercial tactics available at any time in the given field of play. With the richness of research resources abounding about the historical professionalisation of authorship, it is all the more striking that a study of the contemporary cross-platform author does not yet exist. There has been, regrettably, an almost total lack of intellectual engagement between post-structuralist strands of literary theory and the authors’ rights camp. Nor can this be simply put down to their siting in different institutional settings (one academic and one political–industrial). For from the 1980s onwards, creative writing programmes (often taught by practising fiction authors) proliferated in the same academic settings where ‘The Death of the Author’ had begun to ossify into a theoretical truism. Book historians, benefiting both from their position within the academy and their alertness to the material and institutional specifics of the writing life, might have been expected to form the bridge between these two wildly divergent and largely disconnected understandings of authorship, and thus to begin to theorise the particular characteristics of contemporary authorship in the adaptation economy. To some extent this has occurred, as in James L.W.

The Expanding Role of the Author 33 West III’s noting of the literary property’s fragmenting into a bundle of adaptable IP rights by the dawn of the mass media era: After the war . . . different ways of publishing one’s work, and adapting it to other media, began to emerge. . . . [S]tory material could be adapted for presentation on the radio, stage, screen, or lecture circuit. . . . The author set about tapping these new sources of income and learning how to exploit the full earning potential of what was now beginning to be called a ‘literary property’ . (1988a: 113) Yet, frustratingly, such productively systematising book history insights almost invariably stop short of the second half of the twentieth century, and thus cannot incorporate within their analyses the rise of conglomerate media – and specifically digital media – which has transformed the communications environment since the 1970s (Murphy, 2005: 204; Murray, 2007a; Squires, 2007: 7). Granted, trade magazines and broadsheet journalism provide informative commentary and analysis about specific developments in the adaptation economy (and are mined liberally throughout the present volume as a result). But they tend, by their nature, to be piecemeal, controversy-driven and only tangentially informed by or engaged with broader developments in academic cultural theorising. The upshot of these various intellectual disconnects is that we possess a rich and empirically grounded narrative of authorship’s changing lineaments from the Gutenberg era up until the birth of mass media. But how exactly the now familiar print culture author figure might be reformulated – or reformulate herself – in the era of conglomerate media and digitally enabled remediation remains tantalisingly under-analysed.9 Celebrity Author Culture Currently the most exciting body of work about the contemporary author figure arises from the confluence of contemporary literary studies, cultural theory, media studies and the emergent field of publishing studies. Such analysts have taken as their central foci the marked rise of the celebrity author as brand-name identity and the effect of such an ‘authorial economy’ on the workings of the book and creative industries more broadly (Gardiner, 2008). Within the literary fiction sector of the book trade, as much or perhaps even more so than in genre fiction sectors, the celebrity author’s presence is ubiquitous, whether bundled into the paratext of the book itself (author photographs, blurbs, bionotes), circulating in person (at writers’ festivals, book fairs, author tours, in-store signings, political protests) or virtually, via the media industries (newspaper profiles, book reviewing, television chat-show appearances, radio interviews and publishers’ websites) (Whiteside, 1981; Wernick, 1993; Look, 1999;

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The Expanding Role of the Author

Gardiner, 2000a; 2000b; Moran, 2000; Donadio, 2005; Ommundsen, 2007; 2009; Squires, 2007; York, 2007; Rooney, 2009). Academic analysts of the celebrity author phenomenon are alive to its relationship to the broader twenty-first-century reconfiguration of news and entertainment media around the figure of the celebrity, but are right to insist that literary celebrity presents its own characteristics, manifests in specific ways and comes laden with a distinctive variety of cultural capital (Moran, 2000: 4; Ommundsen, 2007: 249; York, 2007: 19–21). If we are wanting to conceptualise how the figure of the author has modified as a result of the accelerating adaptation economy of the present era, understanding the marketing of brand-name authors is essential. A point of consensus for almost all writers on the culture of authorial celebrity is that the figure of the author appeared, by the late twentieth century, to be displaying, in Sarah Brouillette’s phrase, ‘something of an identity crisis’ (2007: 11). Within the academy the author was routinely and unlamentingly pronounced to be dead, yet within publishing, book marketing, chain retailing and literary prize culture the brand names of a select group of critically esteemed and commercially successful literary fiction authors had never wielded more cultural clout (Wernick, 1993: 102; Gardiner, 2000a: 274; Moran, 2000: 58; Ommundsen, 2007: 247; York, 2007: 3). Critic Maurice Biriotti, co-editor of a critical anthology centred upon this very issue, What is an Author? (1993) (its title a direct borrowing from Foucault), noted the particularly odd conjunction within early-1990s literary academe of, on one hand, post-structuralist theory and, on the other, the incursion upon traditional ideas of the canon by various schools of identity politics: ‘ironically, just at the time when different voices were being heard (black voices, women’s voices, the voices of those in the margins), the Author’s death denied authorship precisely to those who had only recently been empowered to claim it’ (6). Amongst the most insightful critics puzzling over the simultaneous death and miraculous revivification of the author figure is UK scholar Joe Moran. Delving beneath superficial seeming contradiction, Moran reiterates that Foucault’s concept of the ‘author function’, as distinct from the flesh and blood author, was always the construct of a specific set of cultural circumstances. Hence, in the context of late-twentieth-century media culture, the celebrity author is in fact only the latest and most extreme incarnation of this long existent authorial persona. The celebrity author’s neo-Romantic gloss does not, for Moran, make Foucault’s analysis any less powerful; if anything it buttresses it. Most persuasive in this context are arguments that the contemporary celebrity author is specifically the creation of an age of media conglomeratisation, in which the majority of leading publishing houses are subsidiaries within an oligopoly of multi-sectoral transnational media corporations (Gardiner, 2000b: 65; Moran, 2000: 35; English and Frow, 2006: 41; Brouillette, 2007: 51). In such a setting, facilitating book publicity in affiliate radio,

The Expanding Role of the Author 35 television and print periodical divisions is both comparatively straightforward and actively encouraged by voguish management philosophies of corporate synergy (Moran, 2000: 39; Murray, 2005; English and Frow, 2006: 41; Squires, 2007: 24; Brouillette, 2007: 52). Celebrity authors, at the centre of such feverish, corporate-endorsed promotional activities, have not, however, simply passively acquiesced in others’ construction of their own extra-literary fame. Analyses of literary stardom by critics Joe Moran, Sarah Brouillette and Lorraine York are structured around multiple chapter-length case studies of authors ranging from John Updike and Kathy Acker (US authors composing Moran’s selection) to Salman Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee (post-colonial for Brouillette), to Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje (Canadian for York). These works analyse in detail how such figures have chafed under celebrity culture’s tendency to invoke the author’s biography to validate the alleged political or artistic ‘authenticity’ of their works. This marketing tendency has triggered in such authors an array of self-reflexive strategies for dissembling, parodying or generally complicating celebrity culture’s effects – instances of ‘authorial self-articulation’ which aim to jam the gears of readers’ over-easy conflation of biographical author with their marketed persona, and perhaps also with the narrators or other characters in their works (Brouillette, 2007: 62). The promotional shills of the book trade may, these celebrity authors’ works seem to argue, be ultimately inescapable given the book’s dual role as both communicative act and tradable commodity. But any self-respecting literary chronicler of post-modernity reserves the right to make sport with celebrity culture’s more absurd tropes. The problem with this lively and enticing field of celebrity authorship from the perspective of adaptation studies is not its bold melding of cultural theory, textual analysis and media studies, but rather that this interdisciplinary bent is not pursued to its logical conclusion. It is widely recognised that the authorial brand name works to transfer ‘promotional capital’ to other books by the same author (as where standard-themed covers are created for a celebrity author’s backlist reissues) as well as to books by different authors (whether through the direct endorsement of cover blurbs, or via the more diffuse halo effect of appearing on the same publisher’s list, and thus reinforcing a house or imprint identity) (Wernick, 1993: 93; Todd, 2006: 25, 32; Squires, 2007: 87). Equally, celebrity author studies invariably discuss the use of the author’s appearance and personality across television, newspaper and radio formats to promote their books (Todd, 2006: 24, 28; York, 2007: 12). But what the field has rarely to date examined is how celebrity author branding attaches itself additionally to incarnations of this same book-derived content in other media formats. The authorial appearance at a film’s premiere endorses not only the value (cultural and economic) of the adapted book, but is also designed to validate the broader franchise with

36 The Expanding Role of the Author which the book is associated. It is as though the academic subfield of celebrity author studies has been content to note the proliferation of subsidiary rights in book properties, but has been insufficiently curious as to where this licensed content ends up, and what role the author might continue to play in shepherding it to public prominence.10 The contextual pressures upon authors to conceive of their creative work as incipiently multiformat are present from the earliest phases of content creation: pre-empted by the conglomerate owners of much of the book publishing industry, itemised in the minutely detailed rights clauses bulking out publishing contracts, and foremost in the business strategies of their agent advisers.11 Given this, Juliet Gardiner is certainly correct in stating that ‘the selling of a book has happened long before it reaches the bookshop’ (2000b: 66). But a novel’s selling equally continues long after its purchaser leaves that bookshop and perhaps adds the movie ticket, the DVD or the licensed merchandising – a cross-media feedback process evidenced by film tie-in cover designs, published screenplays, ‘making-of’ compendiums and souvenir companion volumes.12 The book is not the final, definitive repository of a celebrity author’s identity (even if it is the first such iteration). Rather, books constitute only one of a number of potential media forms in which creative content can be embodied and through which authorial celebrity can continue to circulate publicly and replicate ad infinitum.

Authors in the Adaptation Economy The three broad conceptual shifts in contemporary formulations of authorship outlined above have played out primarily within the academy. But, as intellectual movements, they drew argumentative force and empirical ballast from changing formulations within the cultural industries; conversely, key theoretical phrases such as Barthes’s ‘the death of the author’ became commonly encountered (if less often understood) catchcries well beyond academe. In response to such circumstances, fiction authors adopted various stances: some perceived in the changing lineaments of authorship an opportunity to elevate their status vis-à-vis other book industry interests, whereas others (perhaps the majority) experienced the changes in industry dynamics more passively, through the shifting business practices of the book industries and their revised modes and procedures for author liaison. Book Rights: ‘Recognise that your Work is Multi-marketable!’13 The chief upshot of the book world’s increasing merger with the media industries from the 1980s onwards is that parties to a contemporary book contract no longer negotiate over a singularly conceived book, so much as an IP rights bundle and potential content franchise. US literary and film

The Expanding Role of the Author 37 agent Bill Contardi advises authors keen to keep pace with this key aspect of the book industry’s thinking by understanding their work as ‘a branded property’ (Baker, 2002: 27). The most direct evidence for this radical conceptual shift lies in the ballooning rights clauses contained in standard commercial book publishing contracts which itemise the exact division between author and publisher of rights to book content in every conceivable form. These expand in concentric circles outwards from the familiar codex format of the book: the primary rights regarding edition formats and royalties payments for publication in the home market; secondary or ‘subsidiary’ foreign territory and translation rights; digital and e-book reproduction rights; so-called ‘dramatic rights’ covering film, television, stage and radio adaptation (and almost always tying into these potentially lucrative merchandising rights)14 and what might now be called ‘true’ subsidiary rights such as those governing serial, audiobook, condensation, anthology and book-club agreements (Owen, 1992; Jefferis, 1995; Bide, 1999; Thornton, 2000; Lurie, 2002; Marcus, 2003; Beck, 2005; Zimon, 2006). New, or newly significant, categories of subsidiary rights are also proliferating in line with developments in media technologies and audiences’ consumption patterns: novelisation, computer gaming, graphic novel (aka ‘picturisation’) and animation rights are increasingly common.15 Rights deals may even break down an individual literary property into specific, transferable sub-properties of ever more fissiparous nature: rights to the storyline; character(s); individual chapters; and sequel and prequel rights (‘So Somebody’, 1982; Owen, 1992; Baker, 2002; Edwards, 2004; Davies, 2005; Langer, 2005, Masters, 2006; Raftos, 2008; Inglis, 2008).16 Publishers’ logic here is that if author contracts include the maximum tranche of rights, the publisher is guaranteed a percentage of any income derived from sale of those rights (typically a 50 per cent cut, although this varies significantly depending upon the rights category) (Lurie, 2002: 14). As Penguin Australia Rights and Contracts Manager Peg McColl articulated it in an industry seminar, publishers’ golden rule is to ‘buy widely, license narrowly’ (Australian Publishers Association, 2009).17 Whether the pan-format synergistic nirvana envisaged by corporate management strategists ever actually eventuates for a given property is not publishers’ key consideration here. The object of the exercise is to secure contractual rights over all potential incarnations of a book’s content prospectively and, it should be added, defensively because of the industry wisdom that ‘in publishing, you never know when a property will become valuable’ (Reid, 2000c: 14). But in seeking to acquire book rights so aggressively and often without increased payment to authors, publishers face opposition not only in the form of authors’ professional societies and literary agents, but also from the still nationally based nature of most publishing operations, even within multinational organisations (Murray, 2007c). Publishers wishing

38

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to acquire broad rights in a property must weigh the potential commercial benefit against the possibility that local publishers in a foreign territory, or a foreign sub-agent contracted by the author’s literary agent, may better appreciate the nuances of local markets and could thus enhance the brand-name reputation of the author in that market, thus benefiting all concerned (Raftos, 2008;Tranter , 2008; Harwood, 2008; Australian Publishers Association, 2009).18 Granted, publishers contracting broadly with authors could conceivably later sub-license specified rights to local operatives, but it becomes an issue of a publisher’s in-house skills, international contracts and interest level in negotiating a raft of such potentially time-consuming rights agreements. What these various legal, institutional and commercial changes represent, in concert, is what one publishing commentator has termed the ‘Swiss Army-knife’ nature of content in the twenty-first century (Thornton, 2000: 86).19 The book format is increasingly envisaged as only a temporary vessel for ‘liquid’ content, which may be decanted and reconstituted across the full gamut of contemporary media platforms (Murray, 2003a; Booth and Hayes, 2005). Conceptualising their work as a bundle of transferable IP rights represents a major conceptual shift for most literary fiction authors socialised into their profession along determinedly aestheticist, logophilic lines (Petrikin, 1997c; Cook, 2000). Yet, considering that the fee for purchasing film rights is commonly 1–3 per cent of a film’s total budget, the potential revenue for an author from film rights sales – or even multiply renewed options agreements – can be substantial, and probably much larger than any advance the author may have received from the publisher (Bradley, 2005). It is here that the figure of the literary agent enters the picture.20 For the transformation of the concept of the book, and of the role of the author, has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the literary agent in the publishing firmament. It was in the 1980s that the literary agent became an essential figure – rather than an optional extra – in the creative writer’s professional life (Bonn, 1999; Epstein, 2001; Rolley, 2005). Viewed from a macro-level industrial perspective, the growth of literary agencies was in direct proportion to the increasing conglomeration of publishing from the late 1970s onwards (Lurie, 1999). Economic rationalist managerial regimes put pressure on editorial budgets, leading to higher turnover of editorial staff and to outsourcing of many structural and line-editing functions (Hart, 1984; Lurie, 1999; 2001; Cook, 2000; Schiffrin, 2001; Phillips et al., 2005; Rolley, 2005). As a frontlist-driven bestseller mentality came to dominate within publishing conglomerates, it became a matter of professional survival for midlist fiction authors to secure optimal contractual terms (preferably for more than one book) at their first attempt. For if an author’s first novel failed to sell strongly, they would be unlikely to be contracted for another (Curtis, 1984;Hart, 1984; Lurie, 2001; McPhee ,

The Expanding Role of the Author 39 2001). With harried and poorly paid editors preoccupied by a lack of job security and shackled to the treadmill of searching for ‘the next big thing’, long-term author-nurturing fell decidedly by the wayside at most multinational houses (Holgate and Wilson-Fletcher, 1998). Such contextual developments perfectly suited the burgeoning literary agencies. With many publishers no longer accepting unsolicited manuscripts, literary agents were able to promote themselves to publishers as a time- and labour-saving quality-control mechanism, filtering author submissions, and matchmaking individual manuscripts with appropriate publishers’ lists (Hart, 1984; Greenfield, 1989; Cook, 2000; Lurie, 2001; Beck, 2005; Rolley, 2005). Literary agents’ role has steadily expanded to include the promotional task of preparing a first-time author’s ‘platform’ to the industry in order to ‘break[. . .] out new writers’, the hard bargaining of negotiating contractual terms, and – a task critical to the functioning of the adaptation economy – ongoing legal and commercial management of an author’s IP rights across all relevant media platforms (Beck, 2005: 57; Lurie, 2002: 12; Hart, 1984; Greenfield, 1989; Marcus, 2003). Bearing in mind that an agent’s standard fee is a 12.5–15 per cent commission rate, it is readily apparent why it is in an agent’s professional interest to ensure that all rights in a literary property are carefully accounted for, and that licensees are actively exploiting rights rather than simply stockpiling them (Petrikin, 1997a; Lurie, 2002; Aprhys, 2003).21 As legendary New York City literary agent Andrew Wylie encapsulates the agent’s rule of thumb, a literary right unexploited is effectively an interest squandered: ‘limit the license and push up the fees. That’s what it’s all about’ (Arnold, 2000: E3). For this reason, major international book fairs, including Frankfurt, London, Book Expo America, Bologna (for children’s books) and Guadalajara, Mexico (for the Spanish-language book market), include dedicated fora where publishers, agents and producers schedule full days of back-to-back meetings in order to pitch titles which may translate well to non-book formats (as analysed in detail in Chapter 3) (Marcus, 2003). Additionally, Monaco has in recent years hosted the annual Forum International Cinéma et Littérature dedicated solely to book-screen rights-trading,22 while film festivals and writers’ weeks internationally increasingly incorporate invitation-only industry events designed to bring representatives of the book and screen worlds together to catalyse adaptations deals (Rickett, 2006; George, 2007). The most recent entrant into the adaptation field is the figure of the scout, increasingly the ‘first step in the book-to-film development process’ and hence a player wielding ‘incredible influence over aspiring writers and the outcome of literary properties’ (Petrikin, 1998b: 1; Fleming, 1995b). Prevalent since the 1980s, the scout’s role bears close resemblance to that of the agent (and hence there is much professional traffic – and rivalry – between the two sectors) in that foreign rights scouts identify and write

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synopses of notable titles as a preferential early-alerting service for overseas publishing clients keen to steal a march on their competitors (Franklin, 2002).23 A second subgroup of scouts locates ‘film-ready lit. . . projects’ for studios or for name producers, directors or stars with sufficient industry clout to green-light an adaptation project through the cachet of their ‘attachment’ (Fleming, 1995b: 58; 1995a; Petrikin, 1998b; Quinn, 1999; Maas, 2001).24 Scouts typically conduct their business on a retainer basis, and so make it a professional priority to know the content preferences and artistic predilections of those engaging their services (Petrikin, 1998b). Because the market value of rights in a ‘hot’ book property is entirely a function of the adaptation economy’s forces of supply and demand, instigation and fanning of inter-industry ‘buzz’ or ‘heat’ is crucial (Bing, 2000: 9). Scouts’ attempts to pre-empt later bidders by granting preferential early access to promisingly adaptable properties on a ‘first-look’ basis has led to a slew of industry accusations about scouts circulating ‘slipped’ book properties (that is, manuscripts surreptitiously copied within publishing houses, presumably by lowly paid editorial staff, or proof or advance review copies passed to film personnel, often in defiance of stern prohibitions on the cover) (Quinn, 1996: 23; Bing, 2000: 129; Maas, 2001: 25; Lazarus, 2005: 4–5). No doubt with the advent of PDF proofs it has become even easier and less conspicuous to leak pre-press copies. This practice of ‘slipping’ has been roundly condemned by (some) publishers, agents and authors because a haphazard or substandard pitch of leaked material could jeopardise an intended and painstakingly coordinated official showcasing of the property (Petrikin, 1998b).25 This then risks saddling it with a poor first impression and shop-soiled familiarity, hence damaging its future value in the adaptation marketplace. Further complicating matters, however, some promisingly adaptable manuscripts or proposals are deliberately ‘leaked’ by publishers or agents – a process known as a ‘slip-slip’ – to stoke film industry recipients’ level of interest by contriving a commercially beneficial air of notoriety or the added allure of the contraband (Maas, 2001: 25).26 The power of the scout has made itself keenly felt in one of the most striking examples of the book and screen industries merging under the force of the adaptation economy: the proliferation of ‘pre-publishing film sales’ in recent decades (Petrikin, 1997b: 1; 1997a; 1997c; 1998b). This is a tactic of circulating a still-under-consideration or pre-publication manuscript to screen producers to secure interest in adapting it, the better to maximise the author’s bargaining power in subsequent contractual negotiations with publishers (Maas, 2001; Jinman, 2004; Cordaiy, 2007; Raftos, 2008). The rationale is that a property having been optioned ‘says to the sales reps and buyers and bookstores, “This must be commercial, because they want to make a movie of it!”. So perhaps the sell-in [by publishers to retailers] ends up being a little more enthusiastic and better’ (Langer, 2005).27 Predictably, this promotional tactic succeeds best with

The Expanding Role of the Author 41 established ‘brand-name’ authors whose screen rights may be sold on the basis of a still incomplete manuscript, even as little as a single-page synopsis or, in exceptional circumstances, a title alone (Fleming, 1995a; Sullivan, 2002).28 But it can occasionally also work for unknowns: in 1994 first-time British novelist (and former screenwriter) Nicholas Evans’ (still incomplete) manuscript The Horse Whisperer (1995) was famously optioned for US$3 million by Robert Redford and Hollywood Pictures prior to publication – gaining Evans veritable folk hero status and no small amount of envy amongst starving-in-a-garret creative writing students the world over (Nathan, 1994; Fleming, 1995a; Quinn, 1999; Raftos, 2008).

The Multiple Lives of the Author: ‘Author as Commodity’29 As the above developments attest, twenty-first-century authorship is no longer a single-medium (or even print-specific) role. In an adaptation economy characterised by media conglomeration, increasingly elaborate legal regimes for the ownership and licensing of content, and agents whose livelihoods depend upon the maximum cross-format exposure of clients’ creative work, contemporary authors have scented the wind and adapted their professional behaviours accordingly. In the academy, meanwhile, the field of adaptation studies has by now thoroughly digested the fact that a book does not necessarily predate a screen incarnation of the same content, but may in fact be derived from screen products (as outlined in this volume’s Introduction). This has for some time amounted to a truism in regard to writings about popular culture, where comics, computer games and television series are increasingly mined source material for feature films. But it is now – more surprisingly – becoming true also in the sphere of literary fiction. The flourishing of Hollywood studios’ specialist divisions for more experimental fare, coupled with the rise of the ‘smart’ film genre (of which Spike Jonze’s Adaptation is a quintessential example), and the concomitant rise of HBO-style, highproduction-value, long-format ‘quality television’ has meant that intellectually demanding, playfully intertextual, creatively nuanced content of the kind long associated with highbrow B-format fiction may now just as readily begin its life on the screen, or be incubated in print and screen formats simultaneously (Sconce, 2002; Biskind, 2004; McCabe and Akass, 2007). Author as Screenwriter Hollywood’s pejorative view of the stereotypical literary author was formerly that of a necessary, albeit tiresome, source of adaptable material: novelists’ individualist work ethos and anti-commercial preciousness too often reduced them to ‘those pesky people who . . . make us waste

42 The Expanding Role of the Author $100,000 writing the first draft before we get a professional to take care of it’ (Donadio, 2007). Perhaps in the wake of first-year undergraduates now being exposed to film studies courses at the same time as they take introductory literature units, such medium hierarchies appear to be becoming outmoded amongst content creators by a process of generational churn. Indeed, the book and screen industries are increasingly witnessing the phenomenon of twin-track authorship, whereby a writer works simultaneously on book and screenplay versions of a story with the intention of pursuing whichever is contracted first, and then converting the cultural and financial capital secured in one industry into enhanced bargaining power in the other (or, potentially, others).30 Certainly this puts an innovative spin on the question writers are forever asking each other: ‘What are you working on?’ The dual book/screen tactic has a decades-long history, dating back at least as far as the sentimental blockbuster Love Story (1970), Erich Segal’s ‘shopped-around screenplay[ ] that got nowhere’ until an agent ‘suggested the writer turn it into a novel, which, when published, could be submitted anew and then bought as a movie’ (Holt, 1979: 136; Wyatt, 1994: 149; Price, 2010: 107).31 Such a seemingly schizophrenic creative practice has proven remarkably successful in more recent times for US author Rex Pickett.32 Pickett wrote Sideways, his semi-autobiographical tale of mid-life disillusionment, male friendship and Californian wine tasting, as both a novel and screenplay. The manuscript was rejected by 15 publishers, before independent film director Alexander Payne, who was represented by the same agency, chanced to read it and optioned it in 1999. Pickett then reapproached publishers with evidence of Payne’s interest and St. Martin’s Press bought the book in February 2003 for a US$5000 advance, publishing it in June 2004 (Burkeman, 2005). Fox Searchlight (Fox’s arthouse specialist division) had in the interim greenlit Payne’s film, releasing it only months afterwards in October 2004. Profuse critical acclaim for Sideways, culminating in five Academy Award nominations, successfully crosspromoted the book (promptly repackaged in a tie-in edition with film-art cover design). The promotional push accelerated with the Oscar win for Payne’s co-written screenplay, which was in December 2004 itself published by screenplay specialist imprint Newmarket Press in filmthemed livery. With Sideways’ brand value now firmly established, further adaptations and tie-ins proliferated, including The Sideways Guide to Wine and Life (2005), a self-described ‘pocket-sized illustrated guide to the locations and wines featured in Sideways’, CD, cassette and disposable ‘Playaway’ audiobook versions (2005; 2005; 2009), and CDs of the film’s soundtrack (2005).33 All this led Pickett, not without justification, to crow: ‘I have summited the adaptation Everest!’ (Kung, 2004; Burkeman, 2005; Pemberton, 2005). The intervention of Payne – arthouse, auteurish director of offbeat, wryly intelligent fare for discerning, niche audiences – had already proven

The Expanding Role of the Author 43 crucial for another twin-track author. US novelist Tom Perrotta wrote a manuscript, Election, which remained unpublished until being optioned for film adaptation by Payne. Familiarly, Perrotta parlayed Payne’s demonstrated belief in the value of the material into a book publishing contract, with the published novel (1998) subsequently piggybacking on the critical success of Payne’s break-through feature film (1999). Perrotta’s later novel, Little Children (2004), was also adapted for the screen, this time by arthouse director Todd Field (2006). The two collaborated on the Academy Award-nominated screenplay, itself published by, once again, Newmarket Press (2007) (Donadio, 2007).34 The constellation of such cross-format examples around a single writer–director serves as a microcosmic instance of larger shifts within the adaptation economy. Simply put: content branding now generates greater audience loyalty than does media format. Mainstream audiences have come to self-identify not so much as booklovers or cineastes (demonising one medium to reinforce their association with another, valorised medium, as may previously have been the case, especially in the decades before the post-television proliferation of communication platforms made such either–or judgements manifestly archaic); rather, audiences’ behaviours mark them as enthusiasts for highly specific sub-genres of content – avid consumers willing to pursue their tastes across media in format-agnostic manner. In such a context, the specific medium in which a successful property first appears matters less than the scale of that success and the potency of the brand–audience attachment it generates (Murray, 2005). That authors are rising to meet the occasion represents, at one level, the logical culmination of book contracts’ and authors’ professional associations’ now routine encouragement for writers to conceptualise their creative work as innately ‘multi-marketable’. In the above examples, it is not so much a case of the publisher ‘buying widely and licensing narrowly’, as of the author strategically playing the various media sectors off against each other, the better to build a trans-sectoral content franchise. Much as conglomerate management might prefer to keep all incarnations of a prized property under a single corporate roof, to be synergistically exploited and cross-promoted by its various affiliate media divisions, here it is more commonly the author and their business strategist-cum-agent cannily parcelling up rights to specific incarnations of the media brand. It illustrates that, a century after the first emergence of the ‘professional’ author figure from the coalescing post-Berne Convention rights economy, a new generation of writers is seeking to turn the massifying logics of the adaptation field to their cultural and commercial advantage.

44 The Expanding Role of the Author Author as Actor In the above-mentioned film adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel Little Children, the author makes an intradiegetic appearance credited as ‘Small Man’.35 This further evidence of how closely the careers and public personae of twenty-first-century literary authors are bound into adaptations of their work has lengthy historical precedents. The 1920s middlebrow British author Elinor Glyn – coiner of the phrase ‘It Girl’ and chronicler of the Modern era’s invention of celebrity culture – regularly made cameo appearances as herself in early film versions of her novels (Weedon, 2008).36 Analysts of contemporary celebrity author culture James F. English and John Frow note the continuation of this trend in the form of ‘brand-name’ authors appearing as themselves in major films, most likely thinking of quintessential celebrity author Salman Rushdie’s uncredited book-launch-party cameo in the first Bridget Jones’s Diary film (2001) (2006: 42).37 Existing as yet at the periphery of critical attention, however, is a subtler brand of authorial cameos in adapted films and television series: those in which the author is granted a non-speaking, usually incidental walk-on role as an anonymous character. Recent examples of the trend include British novelist Zadie Smith appearing as an extra in a crowd scene in Channel 4’s miniseries (2002) of her award-winning novel White Teeth (2000);38 Michael Cunningham’s walk-on role in The Hours (2002) in the very Mrs Dalloway-ish context of ‘Man Outside Flower Shop’;39 British historical novelist Sarah Waters’s appearance in two BBC miniseries adapted from her works Tipping the Velvet (1998; 2002) and Fingersmith (2002; 2005) (in the latter as a maid); Russell Banks’s role as ‘Dr Robeson’ in The Sweet Hereafter (1997);40 John Irving’s cameos as ‘Stationmaster’ and ‘Referee’ in, respectively, The Cider House Rules (1999)41 and The World According to Garp (1982)42; and Australian author Luke Davies’s symbolically laden appearance as a milkman proffering some human kindness to the chaotic junkies in the film version of his novel Candy (1998; 2006) (Goldstein, 2006).43 Pulitzer prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks has gone on record as saying that when her seventeenth-century-set plague novel Year of Wonders (2002) is adapted for film she wants ‘to play a poxy corpse on a death cart’ (Wyndham, 2005a; 2005b: 8).44 Beyond the one-up smugness that such neo-Hitchcockian touches ignite in the more trainspottery reaches of film and literary studies academe (from which I’m not exempting myself here), authorial cameos serve the adaptation economy in multiple ways. For authors, it represents a chance for the usually solitary, housebound, intensely interiorised author to partake in the animated buzz and collaborative enterprise of screen production, a process that has tended historically to marginalise the author as potentially overly possessive and interfering. As Deborah Moggach reflects on her cameo appearance as ‘Woman on Bridge’ in her five-part

The Expanding Role of the Author 45 television adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank (2009), and her planned cameo in Tulip Fever: It’s fun! You want to put your little, tiny stamp on it – you want to be involved; you want to be one of the gang. The thing is that once it starts shooting your job is over and nobody knows who you are; you’re welcomed on set politely but you haven’t got any place there and you sort of just hang about. But if you’re an extra you’re involved in the process. (Moggach, 2008)45 The cameo appearance’s potential to provide hooks for celebrity–author newspaper interviews and profile pieces is not only gratifying for authorial egos but, more substantially, valuable for the promotion and publicity apparatus of the adaptation industry itself. Public alertness to an author’s cameo role bestows authorial imprimatur upon a screen adaptation – a writerly benediction especially important where fan readerships are restive about the possible travestying of a beloved book by the Hollywood machine. UK literary and screen agent Julian Friedmann even observes a growing trend to include in film rights contracts a clause stipulating that the author will refrain from negative publicity about the adaptation (‘Book’, 2009). A Romantic conception of the author as originating genius and creative overseer is here reified by an industrial process that would seem, on its face, to contradict it. Indeed, the two processes ought, logically, to cancel each other out completely. Nevertheless, sacralisation of the literary author and the commercial and publicity functions of the adaptation industry manifestly coexist, seeming to stoke each other in a symbiotic relationship. This paradox of simultaneous authorial elevation and putting the authorial persona to work for the commercial benefit of the industrially produced entertainment commodity illuminates why fidelity-based evaluations remain so intuitive for much of the film-going public, and so habitual for many adaptations scholars, despite their best attempts at theoretical disavowal. The genius of the adaptation industry’s workings is this mastery of self-effacement: the very textual phenomena that ought to point our critical gaze outwards towards the industrial dimensions of adaptation here disingenuously point once again back to the soothingly familiar figure of the creatively fecund, aesthetically uncompromised, splendidly solitary author. Author as Promoter To tease out some of the more extreme implications of the twenty-firstcentury literary author’s expanded role as brand ambassador and adaptation promoter, I want to return to contemporary adaptation studies’

46 The Expanding Role of the Author veritable favourite film: Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. The playfully selfreflexive and exuberantly metafictional aspects of Adaptation have so entranced textually oriented postmodernist critics that they have, perhaps, distracted them from an equally intriguing aspect of the film – the role in and around it played by author Susan Orlean. At one level an adaptation of Orlean’s bestselling book The Orchid Thief (itself expanded from her sprawling New Yorker article on the same topic), Adaptation was to have featured Orlean in a cameo as ‘Woman in Supermarket’ (a scene deleted from the film’s final cut) (Goldstein, 2006).46 Producer Edward Saxon optioned both Orlean’s magazine article and book, and he and Jonze encouraged an initially reluctant Orlean to allow use of her name in the film script itself (Boxer, 2002; Younge, 2003; Murray and Topel, n.d). This was both a necessary and sensitive negotiation, because Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay includes an entire subplot based around Orlean’s experiences researching and writing her article/book, and because Meryl Streep’s character takes such outrageous liberties in portraying Orlean as a drug-taking, gun-toting adulteress and amateur pornographer. Columbia Pictures further insisted on Orlean signing over to them life rights in the ‘Susan Orlean’ character so as to prevent either Orlean suing for defamation or any other studio producing ‘unauthorised’ sequels or prequels (Bing, 2002: 70). (In an equally fascinating twist, Columbia also sought ‘sequelisation’ rights to the ‘Charlie Kaufman’ character, but Kaufman’s lawyers refused to grant them – a discrepancy that may speak to the relative status of authors and screenwriters generally, or of Orlean and Kaufman specifically, in contemporary Hollywood (Bing, 2002: 70).) Orlean’s request that the film retain her book’s title – with an eye, understandably, to the typical sales fillip enjoyed by tie-in editions – was over-ruled by the producers, but Orlean was (at least publicly) mollified that ‘the title of the book is mentioned over and over in the film, and the [US hardback] book cover is shown’ (Seiler, 2003; Murray and Topel, n.d.). Despite what Orlean has summarised as ‘a whole lot of legal issues’ surrounding her involvement with the film, she has walked the red carpet at film award ceremonies, made pre-screening special appearances, written a Foreword to the US published version of the shooting script, and has spoken enthusiastically and with appropriately self-mocking irony about her whole adaptation experience in numerous media profiles (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002; Griffin, 2002; Kahn, 2002; Seiler, 2003; Younge, 2003). The appositely named Adaptation represents perhaps the logical end point of the contemporary literary author’s increasing absorption into the adaptation economy, not only as a provider of adapted source material, but as potential screenwriter, actor, promoter and general brand spokesperson. This radically expanded version of Foucault’s author function has become so culturally ubiquitous and commercially serviceable that, in the constantly converging realm of the modern media, it becomes increasingly futile to try to discern

The Expanding Role of the Author 47 where the previously distinct entities of ‘author’, ‘book’ and ‘film’ begin or end. The Anti-adaptation Author In his study Star Authors, Joe Moran pays particular attention to legendary ‘author recluses’ such as J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, whose adamantine rejection of the usual mores of celebrity authorship has, paradoxically, made them cult figures of literary folklore (2000: 54). Decades-old yearbook photographs, rumoured sightings, and tales of near-encounters here become grist for the mill of celebrity author-hunting broadsheet journalists, as these particular authors’ anti-publicity stance morphs into the perfect hook for new book coverage. In similar manner, the phenomenon of the anti-adaptation author – a literary author who trenchantly refuses to sell the film rights to a bestselling novel – enjoys a complex relationship to the adaptation economy as a whole. At one level, such authors serve as exceptions that prove the rule – throwing into high relief the norm of authors avidly soliciting and participating in screen adaptations of their work. But at a deeper level, the anti-adaptation author and the posture of literary ‘purism’ for which she becomes a figurehead has, with remarkable ease, been put to work for the adaptation industry’s own ends. Three notable authors, from diverse parts of the globe, are most readily identified with the anti-adaptation position. Though the novels in question were originally written in three different languages, it is significant that all became massive literary bestsellers in English (in two cases via translation) and thereby attracted the fervent interest of Hollywood producers. Gabriel García Márquez, luminary of the South American magical realist tradition, long refused to sell the film rights to his novel Love in the Time of Cholera (1985; English trans. 1988), a position attributed to his long-standing and vocal opposition to US cultural imperialism, particularly in Central and South America. Similarly, German novelist Patrick Süskind’s bestseller Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985; English trans. 1986) aroused great interest from screen producers eager to transfer its panorama of eighteenth-century European urban life to screen, despite the novel’s seemingly un-cinematic central concern with the sense of smell. Significantly, Süskind’s resistance to Hollywood’s many blandishments has been ascribed to his rejection of precisely the kind of promotional rounds authors of adapted novels are now routinely expected to make: The real reason behind Süskind’s refusal to sell the film rights to his novel was that he was completely averse to the kind of publicity other successful young authors normally crave, publicity that entails being

48 The Expanding Role of the Author photographed and interviewed, giving readings, appearing on TV talk shows and commenting on current events. (Jenny, 2006) Thirdly, Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has become famous for declining large Hollywood rights offers for her Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things (1997), stating uncompromisingly that ‘I don’t think cinema has to be the last stop for literature’ (Roy, 2001). James F. English uses the term ‘scandals of refusal’ to describe the inversely proportional relationship of actions whereby refusal of economic capital results in enhancement of an agent’s symbolic capital within the cultural field (2005: 218). Each of these cases gives heart to a numerically small but vocal subset of the literary community which perceives the relationship of books to film as essentially binary and oppositional – that cinema’s gain would signal literature’s loss. According to the logic of ‘literary puritanism’, to be anti adaptation is ipso facto to be more ‘truly’ literary (Langer, 2005). Of course, after holding out for some decade and a half against screen producers’ escalating offers, both Márquez and Süskind have in recent years sold the film rights to their novels: Süskind in 2000 for a rumoured €10 million and Márquez in 2004 for an estimated US$1–3 million (Jenny, 2006; Tuckman, 2004). Tellingly retaining the full titles of their source novels, Love in the Time of Cholera (2007) was shot predominantly in English and released to mediocre-to-poor reviews,47 while Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), marketed as an erotically charged period epic, premiered in Germany to reasonable success, and was cross-promoted with a range of tie-in merchandising including Thierry Mugler fragrances (Jenny, 2006).48 This would appear to leave Roy as the sole high-profile representative of the anti-adaptation position. Yet, much in the same way the adaptation industry reconfigures determinedly private author–recluses as public personae through the freakish novelty (pun intended) of their aversion to publicity, here Márquez and Süskind’s long refusal to sell the film rights became itself a signature theme of the film adaptations’ marketing and publicity pitches. Thus, whether or not an adapted novelist chooses to engage directly in promotional activities for a screen adaptation, their authorial persona – so much more pleasantly tractable and malleable to the publicity machine’s will – can be readily pressed into service. These novelists’ former gestures of refusal are not presented by the industry as vitiated by their subsequent changes of mind. Rather, the initial gestures of economic disinterest are themselves turned into fodder for the adapted film’s box-office-maximising publicity campaign.

The Expanding Role of the Author 49

Conclusion Where do such head-spinningly paradoxical phenomena leave the author’s role in the twenty-first-century adaptation economy? The conflation of authors and their works has a long history, in which the rise of print culture, the formulation of copyright, and the professionalisation of authorship are deeply implicated. While post-structuralist literary theory, book history and more recent cultural studies analyses of media celebrity have illuminated much about the construction of literary authorship, none of these fields has addressed directly the extrapolation of print-based celebrity across to other media. Foucault’s insight that the author function serves to classify, valorise and hierarchise texts in academic contexts has been much repeated, but rarely recalibrated to take account of the twenty-first century’s greatly converged media context. Every aspect of the contemporary adaptation economy functions to expand and replicate the authorial celebrity’s role in other media platforms: legally, the creative work is conceived of as a bundle of separable and individually alienable IP rights; institutionally, multinational media conglomerates span the gamut of analogue, digital and hybrid media formats; and commercially, the push to achieve synergy invites cross-promotion and adaptation of content into myriad simultaneously circulating forms. In such an environment, the contemporary author function has itself adapted to become a cultural mechanism for the classifying, valorising and hierarchising of adapted content: greater or lesser degrees of authorial involvement in an adapted project – ranging from rights seller at a minimum to executive producer, screenwriter, actor, or avid promoter at the other extreme – send potent signals to specific audience demographics, flagging varying degrees of authorial approval and validation. In this way, the author figure takes her place alongside the other individuals via which the industrial nature of screen production can be marketed to a society predisposed towards individualist explanations of cultural phenomena: the film star, the auteur director, the studio mogul. Yet each of these familiar cultural roles has always, at some fundamental level, been publicly recognised as working cooperatively and collaboratively within an industrial and overwhelmingly commercial context. It is the writer of books – presumed solitary, high-minded and aesthetically driven – who represents a far more thoroughly Romanticisable figure via which to promote adaptations arising from this same industrial and commercial environment. It is little surprise then that the figure of the author is ever more tightly imbricated in the contemporary adaptation industry. The wonder is that adaptation studies has for so long studiously averted its critical gaze from the fact.

2

World Rights Literary Agents as Brokers in the Contemporary Mediasphere

[I]t seems probable that the service which A.P. Watt began to render authors a hundred years ago will be increasingly in demand in the years ahead. (Rubinstein, 1975: 2358) [W]hether we like them or not, agents are here, they are flourishing, and their role is going to grow more, rather than less, important. (Flanagan, 2003: 12)

One of the most frequently encountered observations about changes in the Anglophone book world over the last 40 years is the rise to prominence of the literary agent (Baker, 1999: vii; Taylor, D., 1999: 1; Epstein, 2001: 6; Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 98; Thompson, 2005: 22). Whether the forum is a newspaper cultural supplement, a specialist publishing and bookselling trade journal, or a university creative writing workshop, a common theme of such discourse is the emergence of a seemingly intractable Catch 22-style double bind ensnaring aspirant writers: it is increasingly impossible to get published without an agent; while, conversely, it is not possible to get an agent without having already been published. The literary agent, commentators from each sector dolefully confirm, has become the most powerful of the book industries’ multiple gatekeepers. Yet such commentators may, counterintuitively, ascribe too great a degree of agency to the literary agent. Certainly literary agents have, since the 1970s, aggressively consolidated their position as essential intermediaries in the author–publisher relationship, and have capitalised on their resultant influence over broader book industry dynamics. But agents have, over the same period, equally been beneficiaries of tectonic shifts in the book industries which they did not themselves initiate. Agents have been able to exploit opportunities created by macro-level industry developments such as the growing conglomeration and concentration of book publishing, publisher job insecurity, the casualisation of editing, and the increased importance of digital rights. Rather than necessarily being

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 51 the prime mover in the book world over the last four decades, the agent has been as much a serendipitous beneficiary of structural industry realignments, as well as a convenient lightning rod for other stakeholders’ grievances with their own waning influence. What is indisputable, however, is that agents matter in the contemporary literary scene. The following discussion seeks to chart the influence of literary agents in three concentric, and interrelated, spheres of influence: contemporary national Anglophone book markets; the international book rights economy; and – at the broadest level – the media landscape through adaptation of book properties for other mediums.1 Considering how central literary agents have become to the functioning of the contemporary book world, it is striking how scant, and how partial, has been the material written about them to date. As with the research on authorship surveyed in Chapter 1, academic studies of agents derive loosely from the disciplines of book history, literary studies and cultural history. These chart the rise of the first literary agents in the Anglophone world from their emergence in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Studies of pioneering British and American agents such as A.P. Watt, J.B. Pinker and Curtis Brown develop detailed historical accounts of the growing professionalisation of authorship during this period, and are characterised by close attention to archival resources and the tracing of longitudinal trends (Hepburn, 1968; Bonham-Carter, 1978; West, 1988a; 1988b; Gillies, 1993; 1998; 2007; Bonn, 1994; McDonald, 1997; Delany, 2002; Barnes, 2007). However, the chronological frame of such studies is generally bounded, to use the specific example of one such scholar – Mary Ann Gillies – by the active careers of the agents themselves: from c.1880 when Watt established the first self-described literary agency, to Pinker’s death in the early 1920s (2007: 7). These studies of literary agents’ role in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century professionalisation of authorship seem, oddly, to disavow interest in the accelerating professionalisation of authorship in the latter half of the twentieth century and since (cf. Bonn, 1994; Delany 2002). A second rich body of resources about literary agents is derived from broadsheet newspapers, trade journals and generalist cultural periodicals. Such articles document how the literary agent has come increasingly to register on the consciousness of authors, publishers, book retailers and readers. Topicality and contemporariness are both the hallmarks and the drawbacks to this body of research materials: while they provide vital information charting periodic scandals and crises in the agenting business, by their very episodic nature they are incapable of contextualising these developments within long-term timescales or academically derived theoretical models offered by the history of the book, political economy of media, or cultural theory. A third and final body of research resources about literary agenting is found in the proliferating ‘how to’ books advising would-be writers, and

52 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers in the sub-genre of agents’ memoirs-cum-business-primers (Curtis, 1983; 1989; Baker, 1999; Australian Society of Authors, 2001; Klebanoff, 2002; Spender, 2004; Phelan, 2005; Earnshaw, 2007). These books are richly anecdotal, and benefit from often otherwise undocumented firsthand experiences of the book trade. Their relentlessly individualistic focus is, moreover, fairly representative of a profession populated in the main by rugged individualists and entrepreneurial non-conformists. But the research potential of the genre – penned by New York City-based agents, in the main – is too often marred by retrospective points scoring and egoriddled grandstanding. Suffice it to say that none of these self-memorialising agents are at risk of underestimating their personal influence on the course of the international book industries. What is noticeably absent from the extant literature about literary agents is an effective synthesis of these various scholarly, journalistic and autobiographical streams to create a coherent overview explaining the rise to prominence, and now pivotal position, of the agent. The contemporary book world and encompassing mediasphere have much to gain from viewing literary culture not through the inevitably atomising lenses of specific book titles, authorial careers, or publishing houses, but instead understanding each of these specific interests as emanations of a complex overarching commercial, industrial and legal machinery. Such a systemic approach does not go so far as to deny the agency of individuals – on the contrary, the business of author representation is one of the most individual-driven, small enterprise-dominated spheres left in the book industry, and is sought out by many publishing veterans for precisely this reason. But such catalysing figures nevertheless work within larger frameworks over which they have only limited – if any – control. To paraphrase Marx, literary agents may make book history, but they do so in print culture circumstances not always of their choosing. To capture the complexities of the contemporary book world in which today’s agents operate, both this determining big-picture macro-environment and the accumulation of micro-scale individual choices need to be borne in mind, and creatively interrelated. In the discussion that follows I attempt to forge such a synthesis first by outlining the role of literary agents, and by charting their increasing industry sway over authors, editors and publishers during the last 40 years. The analysis then turns to consider in sequence three pivotal moments which crystallised significant trends in agenting’s cultural profile: the infamous 1994–95 Martin Amis/Andrew Wylie saga surrounding The Information (1995); the 2001–02 controversy surrounding the same agent’s securing of remarkably lucrative international deals for first-time Australian novelist Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime (2002); and the well-publicised 2007–08 stoush between esteemed UK literary agency Peters, Fraser & Dunlop (PFD) and the former agents who decamped to establish the rival firm United Agents, taking the

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 53 majority of their clients with them. Each of these scandals acts almost as a strobe-light flash, freezing and framing in a striking way industry changes which usually pass too incrementally to be remarked upon. In relation to the most recent of these disputes, the crisis at PFD, UK publishing industry commentator Joel Rickett has lamented journalists’ reductionist treatment of the literary representation business as a series of ‘spat[s] between personalities’ (Addley and Fitzsimmons, 2008: 31). Granted, his criticism has merit, especially in relation to the relentlessly personalising drift of UK media coverage, whether broadsheet, tabloid or – increasingly – online. But my aim here is not to reinforce journalism’s standard tactic of presenting book industry upheavals as stand-offs between various warring Type-A personalities (Murray, 2004a). Instead, I aim to use these well-documented ‘spats’ only as jumping-off points for a more nuanced and contextualised analysis of how agents as a group became powerful brokers in the contemporary book world and – via the currency of book rights – in the broader mediasphere.

‘One Fixed Point in the Compass’:2 The Rise and Rise of the Literary Agent The literary agent’s job description comprises three main tasks: to select manuscripts for placement with targeted publishers; to provide suggestions for and editorial feedback on manuscripts; and to negotiate optimal contractual terms and exploitation of book-related rights on behalf of their author–clients (Coser, Kadushin and Powell, 1982: 287; Lurie, 1988: 24; Bonn, 1992: 65; Franklin, 2002: 275–76). Given that all of these tasks were, prior to the literary agent’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, handled by either authors themselves or their publishers, it is fair to speculate as to why the agent emerged at all. In particular, it seems apposite to investigate what broader industrial shifts allowed the dramatic expansion of the agent’s role in the post-1960s book world. Authors have come to rely upon literary agents in direct proportion to the growing complexity of the creative industries and the increasingly arcane terminology employed in publishing contracts (Tranter, 2008). Few authors possess the legal qualifications, extensive commercial knowledge or – it has to be said – sufficient interest to be able to comprehend fully the standard terms of book contracts in the contemporary world. (There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule: British novelist Jeanette Winterson is well known in publishing circles to scrutinise her book and film rights contracts avidly and to pursue legal action to protect rights to her name; and bestselling Australian popular fiction writer Bryce Courtenay has dispensed with an agent and now handles all local rights issues himself (Lambert, 1998; Lurie, 2001).)3 Nevertheless, the majority of authors lack the expertise, time or inclination to consider their writing first and foremost as a tradable commodity. In this can be discerned

54 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers another of Romanticism’s lingering legacies, whereby too great an attention to the commercial aspects of writing threatens to undermine the author’s artistic self-conception. Even in circumstances where this Mount Parnassus vs. Grub Street tension does not trouble an author’s self-image, it at the very least takes valuable time and energy from the author’s principal task – writing. Publishers have long enjoyed the upper hand in exploiting authors’ demotion of commercial self-interest in favour of aesthetic highmindedness. As novelist Anita Desai expresses it with wryly circular logic, ‘I finally acquired an agent, rather guiltily, because it was so against my publisher’s wishes, which alerted me to the need for one’ (1995: 98). It may come as some surprise, given publishers’ demonising of agents as parasitic interlopers almost since the agent’s emergence, to realise that publishers may in fact prefer an author to be professionally represented (West, 1988a; 1988b; Bonn, 1994; Dowling, 2004; Tranter, 2008). The agent can act as a mutually convenient buffer in tense author–publisher negotiations, undertaking the tough-minded commercial haggling and thus leaving author and publisher free to revel in their shared aesthetic ambitions for a book. Acclaimed Australian children’s author Mem Fox describes how, once she was already in print, her publisher urged her to hire an agent: ‘“Talking to you directly is spoiling our relationship. We like you. You like us. We’d like it to stay that way, but trouble is looming. Get an agent for God’s sake. And ours”’ (Lurie, 1988: 26). The agent’s circuit-breaker role has also been endorsed by the Australian Society of Authors with a more robustly ballistic metaphor: ‘If your bullets are reasonably shaped, a good agent will fire them for you and allow you to keep your relationship with your publisher amiable’ (2001: 105).4 That agents are now able to present themselves as indispensable gobetweens in the author–publisher relationship depends crucially upon major structural shifts which the publishing business has been undergoing since roughly the 1960s. Many commentators have noted the effects of widespread subsumption of book publishers into multinational conglomerates under the impact of economic rationalist, deregulatory media policies, reaching a crescendo in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but never since abating (Whiteside, 1981; Long, 1985–86; Miller, 1997; Schiffrin, 1998; 2001; Epstein, 2001; Todd, 2006; Murray, 2007b). Because rampant title acquisition and short-term profits drive the business model of such publishers, many editors felt their professional role as author– mentors diminished and chose – or were forced – to move rapidly between publishing houses, leaving their former authors effectively ‘orphaned’ (Hart, 1984: 170; Look, 1999: 15–16; Franklin, 2002: 278; Rolley, 2005; Harwood, 2008). Agents were able to step adroitly into the gap so created and to cultivate ongoing, creatively nurturing relationships with authors, becoming ‘the one constant in the author’s life’ (Holt, 1979: 137). The agent thus usurped the Maxwell Perkins archetype of the editor as

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 55 creative mentor, a changing of the publishing industry guard nicely encapsulated in the title of a reflective essay by editor Gerald Howard: ‘Mistah Perkins – He Dead’ (Howard, 1993; Kleinfield, 1980: 9; Berg, 1997; Gardiner, 2000b: 67). Publishers also stood to benefit from the agent’s new profile and capabilities. The boom in university creative writing courses throughout the developed world during the same period created a glut of unsolicited manuscript submissions to publishers, which they – with their newly streamlined staff – were only too happy to outsource to agents as essentially free publishers’ readers. The agent, rather than the publisher, now took on the dubious mantle of ‘first filter of the slush pile’, to such an extent that many agents have now followed publishers’ lead in refusing to accept unsolicited submissions (Franklin, 2002; Waldren, 2002; Dowling, 2004; Rolley, 2005; Tranter, 2008, Inglis, 2008).5 For alreadypublished authors, the agent was able to perform much of the editorial labour on manuscripts that had formerly been undertaken by editorial staff in-house. That agents were prepared to finesse clients’ work prepublication on a commission basis concomitantly freed publishers to outsource to freelancers ever more of their copy-editing, or to abandon structural editing almost entirely in the rush to cut costs (Weisberg, 1991; Franklin, 2002). These macro-level industry upheavals have been extensively dwelt upon by commentators on the contemporary publishing industry, frequently in a tone of bittersweet lament for a putative golden age of high publishing standards since too-hastily abandoned. But such analyses tend to overlook a marked benefit of book imprints’ acquisition by multinational conglomerates: the increased profile and afterlife enjoyed by books adapted for other media formats. The bibliocentric snobbery and comparative ignorance of other media industries’ working practices characterising the former ‘gentlemen’s publishing’ era do not cloud the perspicacity of the literary agent, now charged with managing the proliferating subsidiary and non-book rights in clients’ contracts. Especially as agents’ income derives from a 10–20 per cent commission rate, literary agents have every incentive to pursue multiformatting opportunities for book content, and to familiarise themselves with the business practices of conglomerate publishers’ affiliate film, television and periodical divisions.6 To posit oneoff publication as the natural lifecycle of a book is, for an agent, tantamount to business suicide; in Sarah Brouillette’s phrase, agents are ‘in effect auctioning each iteration of a given title off to the highest bidder’ (2007: 65). The relative roles of author, agent and publisher have so shifted over the preceding four decades that industry veterans such as Jason Epstein even forecast a not-too-distant era in which ‘name-brand’ authors and their agents will subcontract out traditional publisher functions of production, marketing, publicity and distribution, and thus dispense with publishers entirely (2001: 19). While this is not yet in evidence

56 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers in any significant way, it is nevertheless notable that US literary agents are increasingly expanding their suite of services to incorporate book marketing and publicity, tasks previously the exclusive domain of publishers (Mayer, 1989; Kirkpatrick, 2002). The recently established New York City-based Folio Literary Management for example has announced creation of ‘an internal public relations department that would coordinate with a publisher’s marketing and publicity staff to push an author’s book’ (Larimer, 2006: 21). Despite some ongoing demarcation disputes, the general trend of increasingly porous agent and publisher roles is unmistakable. Considering the rise of the agent against such a backdrop of broad-scale industry realignment and restructuring disproves journalists’ too often glib assumption that the rise of the agent is attributable principally to the abrasive personalities and sharp elbows of the business’s most prominent practitioners. The agent’s rise in the literary firmament is due in part to serendipitous dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time, as well as partly to agents’ strategic savvy in exploiting the new opportunities presented by shifts in the book industries landscape. Hence literary agents have promoted the consistency of the relationship they can offer writer–clients, their commitment to building long-term authorial careers, and their ability to nurture and mentor creativity – the psychological hand-holding undertones of which claim go some way to explaining why author representation – in the UK and Australia especially – is overwhelmingly female-dominated (Lurie, 1983; Waldren, 2002; Michael, 2005, Inglis, 2008).7 Similarly, the fact that many agents were themselves former editors, abandoning the newly inhospitable marketingled environment of corporate publishing, validated agents’ claim to provide detailed manuscript assessment and structural editing advice as an author’s trusted first reader. Leading New York literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, stated in 2000 that ‘younger agents are doing more editing and giving more editorial advice than at any time in the last 25 years’ (Arnold, 2000: 3). It is a verdict with which Melbourne-based literary agent Jacinta di Mase broadly concurs, asserting that ‘the enhanced editorial role is one that agents have been forced into’ (Michael, 2005: 12).8 Unlike the inhouse editor, sandwiched between the frequently competing interests of creative author and bottom-line-oriented publisher, agents are unproblematically clear-eyed about where their chief loyalty lies. Securing authors the best possible advance, contractual conditions, and ongoing rights-derived income provides agencies’ bread and butter. This serves to concentrate agents’ minds wonderfully. The most tangible manifestation of literary agents’ now-established centrality to book-world operations is found in the hangar-sized, multilevel halls of the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. The late UK agent Giles Gordon stated that it was once unknown for agents to do business at the world’s largest and most important literary trade fair but that, by the

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 57 early 1990s, agents were attending in their hundreds annually to scout, promote and sell rights on clients’ behalf (1993: 172). Literary agencies of any scale from around the world now routinely reserve tables in Frankfurt’s dedicated Literary Agents’ and Scouts Centre, while larger transnational agencies such as The Wylie Agency rent whole stands in the general halls, with agency directors commonly attending the first day of the Fair in person (‘Andrew’, 2006). Celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Frankfurt’s Agents’ Centre in 2008, the organisers of the world’s largest book event went so far as to proudly dub the agents’ section ‘the most important working centre at the Frankfurt Book Fair’ – making it the book world’s veritable holy of holies.9 In recent years, Frankfurt convenors have additionally established a separate Agents’ Centre within the Book Fair’s dedicated Film and Media Forum (formerly named the International Agents Centre for Adaptations & Screenplay). This innovation is designed specifically for publishers, agents and producers to trade screen and other non-book rights to properties, and has been replicated at other major international book fairs – an important crossindustry trend explored in detail in the following chapter.10 It is difficult to imagine more concrete manifestations of agents’ now pivotal role in the contemporary global mediasphere.

‘I Don’t See Why Good Writers Shouldn’t be Paid as Well as Bad Ones’:11 Amis, Wylie and The Information Any discussion of literary agents must, perforce, make some mention of the 1994–95 scandal surrounding the publication of literary novelist Martin Amis’s The Information (1995), as the incident constitutes a highwater mark in public awareness of literary agents’ contemporary bookworld power. The Information saga, involving as it did leading New York-based agent Andrew Wylie, also foregrounded crucial differences in transatlantic attitudes to agents’ role and function within the Anglophone sphere. For the UK book world, within which the unfolding scandal of The Information chiefly took place, the incident represents the most highprofile importation of the US ‘superagent’ figure into the more ‘genteel’ structures of the British book community – a community whose selfperception was permanently altered as a result of the fracas. An avalanche of journalistic commentary about the circumstances of The Information’s publication already exists, so I intend here only to outline the bare-bones facts of the case as background to the contextual analysis that follows. In November 1994 Martin Amis, one of the UK’s most prominent and controversial literary authors, instructed his agent, the late Pat Kavanagh of the firm Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, to seek a £500,000 publishing advance for his new manuscript, The Information (Hillmore, 1994).12 Amis’s previous hardback publisher, the prestigious Random House literary imprint Jonathan Cape, declined Kavanagh’s

58 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers offer, details of the unmet asking price were leaked to the press, and a storm of controversy erupted, fuelled by allegations from fellow literary heavyweight A.S. Byatt that Amis’s demands were motivated by excessive greed and effectively diminished the pool of advance money available for first-time and mid-list authors (Weale, 1994; Alberge, 1995; Ellison, 1995; Amis, 2000: 247). By early January 1995, Amis had fired Kavanagh (thus also putting into hiatus his long friendship with Kavanagh’s husband, fellow literary author Julian Barnes) and had hired New York literary agent Andrew Wylie, earning Wylie his now ubiquitous predatory epithet – ‘the Jackal’ – from the UK media (Amis, 2000: 234, 247–48).13 Wylie secured a rumoured £480,000 advance from HarperCollins for the UK and Commonwealth rights to The Information as well as to a volume of short stories (Macdonald, 1995). The purchase price was, ironically, close to the earlier rejected offer Kavanagh had secured from Cape, and widely interpreted as a risky gamble by HarperCollins to bolster a massmarket-dominated list with some heavy-weight literary credentials (Hillmore, 1994; Delany, 2002). The deal sparked another round of negative publicity for Amis, focussing chiefly on his recent divorce, his choice of expensive US dental reconstruction, and endless riffs on how for Amis – chronicler of 1980s-style City-boy greed in his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989) – life appeared to be imitating art.14 The UK release of The Information was brought forward to capitalise on the spate of publicity; it appeared to mixed reviews in March 1995, and failed to earn out its advance (Cowley, 1997: 15; Amis, 2000: 253). In a further ironic coda, in December 1996 Wylie arranged for Amis to return to Cape in a four-book deal which also included return of Amis’s paperback rights from Penguin, where Cape had licensed them (Rawsthorn, 1996b; Cowley, 1999; Gardiner, 2000b). The Information thus remains the only Martin Amis title published by HarperCollins, now referred to by Wylie as ‘a temporary minder of Martin’ (Barber, 1999: 12). None of Amis’s subsequent publications at Cape has matched the impact of his preInformation 1980s critical and commercial successes.15 The lead-up to the US publication of The Information in May 1995 by Random House US imprint Harmony Books saw the details of the UK scandal once more rehashed but, interestingly, the US media’s take on the saga was as a quaintly puzzling, quintessentially British storm in a teacup (Yardley, 1995; Wilson, 1995; Sheppard, 1995; Gilbert, 1995). In part this difference in reaction can be attributed to the figure of the ‘superagent’ having become an established figure in the US book world since the rise of New York City-based agents such as Scott Meredith, Morton L. Janklow and Arthur M. Klebanoff in the 1970s.16 These agents specialised in the packaging of mass-market books as ‘properties’, pioneering now-standard practices of multiple submission of manuscripts to publishers, silent auctions, aggressive exploitation of subsidiary and foreign territory rights, and arranging ghostwriting of manuscripts under authorial brand names

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 59

Figure 2.1 Martin Amis caricature by Gerald Scarfe (1995), playing on A.S. Byatt’s remark that Amis was ‘turkey-cocking’ other writers through seeking an excessive advance © Gerald Scarfe

60 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers (Kleinfield, 1980: 9; Coser,, Kadushin and Powell, 1982: 300; Janklow, 1985; Lurie, 2001; Franklin, 2002; Klebanoff, 2002). The US literary scene, unperturbed by agents’ self-appointed role as maximisers of authors’ income, appeared baffled by their UK counterparts’ response to Wylie and Amis’ robustly commercial approach to publishing literary fiction. Perhaps perversely for a novel that depicts the baser machinations of the contemporary publishing world, The Information has also spawned a number of academic studies. These range from, at one end, literary criticalstyle reflections on the postmodern hall-of-mirrors effect of the book’s publication seeming to counterpoint the novel’s narrative: two writers – one a shambolic failure, the other rich and feted – locked in bitter rivalry (Howard, 1996).17 At the less textual and more contextual end of literary studies stand explorations by Joe Moran (2000), Hugh Look (1999), Juliet Gardiner (2000a; 2000b), Paul Delany (2002), Richard Todd (2006) and James F. English and John Frow (2006) of the Information saga as a prime example of authorial branding, thus radically complicating post-structuralist predictions of ‘the death of the author’ (see also Chapter 1). For Claire Squires (2007), The Information’s pre-publicity hype serves as an illustrative example of how marketing buzz, rather than editorial decision making, has come to dominate UK publishing. These works are commendable for being among the mere handful of academic studies critically analysing the role of literary agents in the contemporary book world, and I do not propose to reiterate their findings here. I prefer to analyse the Information saga as significant more for what contemporary journalistic commentators did not say about the events, rather than for what they incessantly did say. The incidents surrounding The Information in the mid 1990s captured in starkest form a phenomenon which had been growing incrementally throughout the 1980s, but which had not, to that point, fully registered upon (UK) public consciousness: that literary agents had become celebrities in their own right, their fame deriving from the accumulated lustre of their client list, and at points eclipsing that of any single client. As US writer Edwin McDowell observed of the literary world in a prescient 1989 survey, ‘the top agents are no longer just powers behind the scenes, but celebrities as famous as many of their clients’ (C26). But it was not until six years later that the celebrity–agent phenomenon could no longer be face-savingly dismissed by UK book publishers as a crassly American phenomenon. Moreover, The Wylie Agency, already by 1995 boasting offices in New York and London, struck a final blow against the nostalgic and even by then tottering notion that the contemporary book world could be divided into discrete national markets, each with distinctive business practices and specific agenting mores. Secondly, the journalistic feeding-frenzy set off by Wylie’s aggressive representation of The Information did not at any point allege impropriety on Amis’s part in hiring an agent, but solely that the business practices of

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 61 Wylie breached UK author representatives’ self-enforced Code of Practice forbidding poaching of another agent’s clients.18 This important distinction passed almost entirely unremarked in UK coverage at the time, and in academic commentaries since. Yet it is immensely significant, as it marks the final nail in the coffin of the debate (which had by that point been running for over a century) as to whether literary agents should exist at all, or whether (as was alleged by certain turn-of-the-century publishers) they represented an improper encroachment upon the ‘sanctity’ of the author– publisher dyad.19 By failing to posit the literary agent’s existence as the crux of the Information controversy, UK journalists and other commentators tacitly conceded that the agent had become an indispensable, even legitimate player in the late-twentieth-century book world. The third telling, and also less commented upon, aspect of the Information affair was the way it highlighted the introduction to the realms of literary fiction of agenting techniques previously honed in massmarket publishing. In packaging and hawking Amis’s literary wares with such commercial gusto, Wylie was adopting tactics previously identified with the likes of Meredith, Janklow and Klebanoff, so-called ‘superagents’ whose combined lists include(d) bestselling commercial fiction authors such as Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steele, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Sidney Sheldon and popular astrologist Linda Goodman. Wylie has taken every opportunity to display his high-literary contempt for these earlier agents – dubbing them the literary equivalent of heroin dealers – and thus to distinguish himself from the ranks of mass-market agents (Mayer, 1989; Painton, 1989). Nevertheless, his unabashedly commercial tactics clearly derive from such agents’ earlier strategies, albeit Wylie justifies his high asking prices for clients’ work on the premise that a classic book, over the course of its publishing history, will out-earn an over-hyped front-list seasonal bestseller (Barber, 1999). As Wylie later summed up his take on the Information furore, ‘what we were trying to do was to represent quality with the same kind of discipline that had been brought to the representation of bestsellers’ (Grove, 2007).20 Wylie’s espoused position may be in part a rational response to the contemporary hyper-commercial, conglomerate-dominated book world in which an esteemed literary fiction imprint such as Cape sits alongside mass-market imprints such as Century and Arrow in the corporate holdings of Random House, itself a component of German multimedia giant Bertelsmann. But Wylie’s oft-stated, implicitly Leavisite/New Critical position that there is manifestly ‘great’ writing and then there is selfevident ‘trash’ sits at odds with his business tactics: if the two classes of books can be handled in a similar manner (at least in theory) by the same agents, published by the same conglomerates, and distributed, sold and accounted for by the same industry retail networks, it suggests that the category of ‘literature’ may be as much a function of circuits of book industry circulation, valorisation and consumption as is mass-market

62 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers bestsellerdom.21 This interpretation goes to the heart of why the Information scandal touched a raw nerve in the UK book world, still in 1995 reeling from the seemingly endless cycle of mergers and takeovers characterising the 1980s, and punch-drunk from the deep recession of the early 1990s. The event proved not only that the UK book world could not be quarantined from transatlantic developments;22 it moreover demonstrated with uncomfortable directness that the semi-sacred category of ‘literature’ could no longer be insulated (if it ever actually had been) from the machinations of market machinery by the convenient fig-leaf that different agents and different houses handled different books differently. In the words of one astute UK commentator, such a taste-stratified view of the contemporary book world was, by the mid 1990s, wilfully anachronistic: ‘it is all about money, nowadays, the publishing business; our image of tweedy, decent publishers is about as usefully relevant, as contemporary or as accurate as an image of, say, a Britain still in charge of an empire’ (Lezard, 1995: 24).

‘Representing Writers Seamlessly around the World’:23 Hooper, Wylie and A Child’s Book of True Crime In a manner that must have proven immensely gratifying to the inveterately self-promoting Andrew Wylie, the agent was in 2001 once again playing a pivotal role in the unfolding narrative of literary representation. In a second agenting strobe-flash incident chosen here for case study, Wylie this time provoked not controversy over transatlantic publishing differences, but a different variety of tension around cultural globalisation: the conflict between established cultural nationalist paradigms in post-colonial countries such as Australia, and the internationalising, cosmopolitanising trends of the twenty-first-century literary marketplace. The long-roiling tension between Australia’s national cultural sphere, still feeling itself vulnerable in the face of British assumptions of superiority, and an aspirant class of local writers seeking global audiences came to a head over young Australian novelist Chloe Hooper’s debut A Child’s Book of True Crime (2002). The incident demonstrates the inadequacy of conceptualising the Anglophone adaptation industry solely in terms of a bilateral US–UK relationship, when inflows of creative content from countries of the Anglophone ‘periphery’ present important and revivifying challenges to adaptations studies’ usual (though always tacic) geographical parameters. Once again, my aim here is to outline briefly the facts of the case as necessary background for exploring more enticing questions of why the circumstances of the book’s publication ignited such latent tensions. Hooper was in the late 1990s a Fulbright postgraduate student enrolled in Columbia University’s prestigious Creative Writing Program. Upon the recommendation of visiting lecturer Philip Roth, already a star Wylie

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 63 client, Hooper in late 2000 approached The Wylie Agency’s New York office with the first half of a manuscript for her novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime. In a narrative twist straight out of would-be authorial fantasies, Wylie read the writing sample, accepted Hooper as a client the same day, and proceeded to arrange single-book publishing deals in 15 countries (Tabakoff, 2002; Steger, 2002; Wyndham, 2002a; Dapin, 2008). The silent auction process Wylie engineered in early 2001 for sale of the book’s Australian and New Zealand rights is indicative of the kind of short-timeframe, hyper-competitive, hype-inducing climate that Wylie strives to cultivate for clients’ work. The manuscript was emailed to major publishers, and Wylie and Hooper flew to Sydney, stating that they would receive best bids and detailed marketing plans for the title a few days hence (Lurie, 2001: 9; Davis, 2007: 129). This pressure-cooker process was designed, as a characteristically seigniorial Wylie puts it, ‘so everyone had to scramble like mad. I thought, “Anyone who scrambles hard enough will be worthy of talking to”’ (Dapin, 2008: 34).24 After significant controversy in the Australian book community over Wylie’s allegedly high-handed, manipulative and imperialising tactics, Random House Australia bought the title for an estimated A$75,000–100,000 and published True Crime under their literary fiction imprint Knopf in February 2002 (Lurie, 2001; Steger, 2002). Cape/Vintage in the UK and Knopf/ Scribner in the US successfully bid for the combined hardback and paperback rights and published almost simultaneously with the Australian publication date (Steger, 2002). True Crime was soon afterwards shortlisted for the UK’s Orange Prize, was named a New York Times Notable Book for the same year, and won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize for 2002 (Wyndham, 2002a: 15; 2002c: 17; Dapin, 2008: 31). Within weeks of the book’s publication, Wylie also negotiated sale of the film rights to production company Good Machine, responsible for previous hits Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2003) and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995). Random House Australia’s then Executive Publisher, Jane Palfreyman, was quoted as confidently predicting that ‘this [film] will definitely get made’, although, as of the time of writing, industry resource the Internet Movie Database shows no signs of the project being in active development (Wyndham, 2002b: 3). In a further coda, Hooper in 2006 won one of Australia’s top journalism prizes, the Walkley Awards, for her Monthly magazine feature about Aboriginal– white race relations in Queensland, and has since expanded this material into her second book, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (2008), which itself won Premier’s Awards for non-fiction in three Australian states.25 This second book publication is part of a further Wylie-negotiated two-book deal with Penguin Australia estimated to have secured Hooper an advance of over $300,000 (Dapin, 2008: 31). The circumstances of True Crime’s publication foreground in particularly stark fashion that the national cultural sphere is no longer a

64 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers self-evident first step in emerging Australian writers’ careers. The idea that Australian literature should be consecrated first and foremost by Australia’s own cultural institutions is a politically and emotionally resonant concept in contemporary Australia, dating most recognisably from the cultural nationalism championed under the Labor Prime Ministership of Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s (McPhee, 2001; Nile, 2002). This cultural nationalist model, tantamount to an article of faith for the Left-leaning Baby Boomers who dominate Australia’s cultural institutions, would endorse, say, Peter Carey’s career trajectory as optimal for an aspiring Australian author: Carey started out publishing short stories in Australian literary magazines, was first published in book form by independent publisher University of Queensland Press, won Australia’s major literary fiction prize – the Miles Franklin Award – twice, before proceeding to international critical acclaim and commercial success via a Booker Prize win (later subsequently consolidated and reaffirmed by a second Booker victory). Such a cursus honorum implicitly posits Australia’s own cultural apparatus as selector and guarantor of authentic, quality Australian writing, with subsequent international (and, specifically, British) acclaim merely serving to validate the perspicacity of Australia’s cultural arbiters in the first instance. In direct contrast to this widely – albeit often only implicitly – endorsed career pattern, Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan in a 2003 keynote address to the Australian Publishers Association observed ‘we have begun to see the phenomenon of our younger writers taking their first or second book to New York agents, who then cut them some large deals globally’ (2003: 12).26 This was patently a reference to the then still-recent memory of Wylie’s True Crime rights auction, but Flanagan’s remark is equally applicable to other youngish Australian-born writers. This expanding group might include Elliot Perlman (also a Wylie client), Nikki Gemmell (represented by David Godwin in London), or 2008 Booker-shortlisted novelist, Steve Toltz (whose debut novel A Fraction of the Whole bypassed Australian agents to be represented directly by Curtis Brown’s London office)27 (2003: 12; Pfanner, 2004; Inglis, 2008; Hawley, 2009).28 Such writers also strike deals with multiple publishers in multiple foreign territories – not, as formerly, necessarily with international subsidiaries of a UK ‘parent’ house – and derive greatest publicity from association with prestigious international book awards and from reviews in leading international newspapers’ literary supplements. Wylie’s Australian auctioning of a still-unknown Hooper’s manuscript provoked such ire precisely because it imperiously usurped the hard-won status of Australia’s cultural institutions to bestow imprimatur on local talent, prompting a defiant HarperCollins Australia Publishing Director Shona Martyn to declare she would not engage in the auction process (Lurie, 2001: 9).29 Australian literary agents also keenly resented Wylie’s incursion on what they regarded as their home turf: Australian agents I

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 65 interviewed deplored Wylie’s behaviour as ‘irresponsible agenting’ – overhyping a first-time author, driving up advances, and then tarnishing the author’s reputation and subsequent publication chances when the advance fails to earn out (Inglis, 2008).30 A third print culture sector in Australia, that comprising book reviewers for leading newspapers and cultural periodicals, also seems to have resented the metropole-comes-tothe-provinces overtones of Wylie’s gesture, albeit that this time they emanated from the neo-colonial centre of New York rather than from the nineteenth-century imperial ‘home’ of London. Australian reviews of True Crime unfailingly mentioned the book’s pre-publication ‘hyp[ing] to the max’, leading publisher Jane Palfreyman to note testily, ‘It’s been much better received overseas than in Australia’ (Goldsworthy, 2002: 8; Wyndham, 2002a: 15; Steger, 2002). The whole True Crime incident provides a fascinating insight into the complexly interlinked machinery of the literary economy: literary agenting and publication details feed into and crucially influence questions of critical reception and prize cultures; and the plaudits of critics and (overseas) prize committees are then eagerly reappropriated by cultural producers in the form of glowing cover copy, prize-associated publicity, and screen rights sales. The final intriguing aspect of the True Crime case is how Wylie’s actions, decried by the Australian book world as imperialising, perhaps unintentionally worked to reinforce a key tenet of the Australian cultural nationalist position – the ‘splitting’ of so-called ‘Commonwealth’ book rights into separate UK and Australia/New Zealand territories. The quasipapal division of the world’s English-language book markets into exclusive ‘British Commonwealth’ and ‘US’ (including Canada) territories arose from a profit-maximising non-compete agreement hammered out between the UK and US book industries in the destabilised wake of World War II. Under the terms of this tellingly named ‘Traditional Market Agreement’ (1947) the US book trade would concentrate upon its vast domestic market (which also ‘encompassed’ Canada – an assumption that in time became highly controversial amongst Canadian cultural nationalists); Great Britain would maintain exclusive rights to its smaller domestic market and those of other, non-Canadian dominions that had become crucial to British publishers’ profitability. Continental Europe’s growing Anglophone readership was classified as an open market (Owen, 1992: 54; New, 2002: 404; Nile, 2002: 29–30; Munro and Curtain, 2006: 3–4; Flood, 2007; Gerson and Michon, 2007; Savarese, 2007). The Australian book industry has long decried the UK publishing industry’s still-evident preference for bundling together ‘UK and Commonwealth rights’ (including Australia) in book contracts and their frequent refusal to consider purchasing a title if Australian/New Zealand rights have already been sold elsewhere. Antipodean critics claim that the practice artificially inhibits development of local writing and publishing cultures, reduces authors’ royalties from full ‘home’ (i.e. Australian) rate

66 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers to the substantially lower ‘export’ (i.e. UK) royalty rates, and – most galling of all – manifests a patronisingly anachronistic and offensively colonialist view of Australian culture on the part of the British book world (Savarese, 2007; Steger, 2008; Rosenbloom, 2008a; Tranter, 2008; Weir, 2009).31 In stinging words delivered by Henry Rosenbloom, Publisher at Melbourne-based independent house Scribe, in a speech at the 2008 Adelaide Writers’ Week, ‘This is a neo-colonial hangover . . . this is our country, this is our territory, this is our industry. We need these books more than you do and we’re entitled to them and you’re not’ (Steger, 2008: 5).32 In surprising contrast Wylie, the American accused over the Information affair of displaying an arrogantly imperialist attitude towards the British book world, here emerges as Australian cultural nationalists’ unexpected ally. This is because Wylie’s standard policy is to separate out his authors’ rights in each book property into individually contractible territories. Hooper has stated her gratitude to Wylie for insisting on striking a separate Australian publishing deal for True Crime on the grounds that ‘you’re an Australian writer and, at the beginning and end of the day, your home territory is the most important one’ (Steger, 2002: 7).33

Figure 2.2 UK publishers’ rights policies, according to The Age newspaper (Melbourne) © Andrew Dyson/Fairfaxphotos

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 67 Moreover, Wylie’s agenting strategy is distinguished by an attention to foreign territory and translation rights atypical in the industry, including particular scrutiny of clients’ work that may have dropped out of print in specific territories, and is thus not earning income for authors (nor, by extension, for their agent). Such a policy promotes – in this instance for Wylie’s Australian authors – optimal international exposure of their work – again a core principle of the established cultural nationalist position. In this, Wylie the agent displays commonalities with a publishing stakeholder who might, in other circumstances, be thought of as an opponent. Though agents and publishers frequently lock horns over the size of advances and which specific subsidiary and foreign rights are included in book contracts, publisher Michael Heyward, head of Melbourne-based firm Text, in fact displays a similarly internationalist outlook in striking publishing deals for authors for whom Text controls overseas rights (Bonn, 1992: 69; Gordon, 1993: 168). Heyward aims to create ‘a patchwork quilt of rights sales’ that will enable authors to live off their writing in a way that the small Australian market alone is unlikely to sustain (Sullivan, 2002: 6). To facilitate such deal making, Text in 2004 signed a joint venture with Edinburgh-based independent house Canongate (itself no stranger to the imperialising assumptions of the London book trade) and now conducts its Frankfurt Book Fair rights business out of Canongate’s sizable stand (Knox, 2004).34 Motivated by two quite distinct agendas, nationalist-minded Australian publishers and Wylie, the self-styled international agent, have thus, curiously, arrived at the same position on the hotly contested issue of ‘splitting’ territorial book rights. Once again, the entrenched nineteenth-century hostility between publishers and literary agents has been strikingly reconfigured by the shifting tectonic plates of the contemporary mediasphere. There is however no doubt, in spite of the above, that Wylie has his own imperialising ambitions. From its original New York City base, The Wylie Agency has spawned offices in London, Tokyo and Madrid, and is currently aggressively exploiting non-English-language rights markets globally, including a recent incursion into that bastion of cultural protectionism, France. The otherwise starkly minimalist Wylie Agency homepage boasts a single image of planet Earth viewed from space, a fitting emblem for Wylie’s ‘world rights’ ambitions and his touchstone that ‘you have to be international’ (Barber, 1999: 12).35 Wylie has stated repeatedly in interviews since the late 1990s that he intends to represent the best writers – whether living or via their estates – across all territories and in all languages (Barber, 1999: 12; Bockris, 1999; Grove, 2007). Hence Hooper is patently a mere bit-part player in a much grander agenting business strategy. Through his agenting of Hooper’s True Crime, Wylie perhaps inadvertently foregrounded how out of date Australia’s (and, by analogy, those of other post-colonial countries of the Anglosphere) traditional opposing

68 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers

Figure 2.3 The Wylie Agency’s homepage, graphically signalling global ambition

paradigms for thinking about culture had become by the opening years of the twenty-first century: on one hand the fading colonial inferiority complex famously dubbed ‘the cultural cringe’ and, on the other, the 1970sera cultural nationalist battle cry of Australians as their own cultural arbiters, presiding over a unified and clearly geographically defined cultural domain (Phillips, 1958). In a rapidly globalising world, both existing paradigms are manifestly cramping and nonsensical for aspiring post-colonial writers seeking maximum exposure to cosmopolitan audiences. Such literary readerships are more likely to self-identify along lines of literary tastes than with any monolithic concept of a nationally endorsed cultural identity. In this respect, Hooper’s native Australia may conceivably stand in not just for other Commonwealth territories but for any number of other countries formerly dependencies of Europeancentred empires. A text’s pungently authentic sense of place remains as powerful a lure as ever for readers of literary fiction, and Hooper’s ambitious, gothicinflected, true-crime tale plays up the haunted quality of the Tasmanian landscape as vividly as any nationalist-minded myth-maker of the past. But whether the actual book in the reader’s hands has been agented, published, printed, publicised, distributed, sold, consecrated or adapted by cultural

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 69 institutions based in the same country as that depicted in the text remains, for many twenty-first-century readers (including Australians), a marginal concern.36 Each of these nodal points in the adaptation industry network increasingly constitutes merely a portal feeding content into the global cultural matrix. But, that being said, not all portals in this network are equally sized or equivalent in power. It is this need – to keep in balance the proliferating originative sites of global Anglophone culture, and to do justice to the disparity of various geographical centres in the contemporary literary field – that constitutes a key ongoing challenge for any would-be mapping of the adaptation economy.

‘It Will Make a Book for Somebody’:37 PFD, CCS Stellar and United Agents The third and final strobe-flash moment in the development of contemporary literary representation as a business and cultural force over the preceding 15 years brings events up to the present. It involves the 2007–08 tripartite dispute between long-established London-based agency PFD, its recent corporate owner CCS Stellar, and the rival agency, United Agents, established by PFD staff aggrieved with the direction their former firm was taking. The unfolding saga was certainly, as regretfully observed by Joel Rickett, presented in the UK media as a series of very public jousts between major publishing and media industry personalities, some of whom had earlier featured in UK agenting’s other cultural freezeframe moment, the Wylie/Amis Information fracas of 1995. But the PFD incident deserves more analytic treatment than it has received to date for what it reveals about the latest key trend in authorial representation – literary agencies’ increasing absorption into converged, multimedia agencies representing clients’ work across an array of media sectors. This narrative of quirky, formerly independent businesses run by rugged individualists being subsumed into converged, bottom-line-oriented corporations provides an exact (and ironic) parallel to the debates of the 1980s around independent book publishers’ acquisition by international media conglomerates. In the 1980s, however, agents were seen as opportunistic bystanders profiteering from the conglomeration process; by 2008 agents had themselves become the object of the media’s accelerating drive towards consolidation. Some background information about the events at PFD is necessary, especially for audiences outside the hothouse, coterie environment of the UK book world, to appreciate the macro trends involved. Peters, Fraser & Dunlop (PFD) has long been established as one of London’s leading literary, theatrical, film and talent agencies. In 2001, the firm’s directors sold PFD to the sports and marketing agency CCS Stellar for £12 million (Byrne, 2007a; 2007b; Dalley, 2007). Yet by 2007, tensions had emerged between PFD and its new corporate parent over whether profits generated

70 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers by the subsidiary were being sufficiently reinvested in the core agency business (Marsh, 2007: 4; Dalley, 2007; ‘A Tale’, 2007). After an attempted £4 million management buyout on the part of PFD was rejected by CCS Stellar in August 2007, a substantial number of PFD agents (the exact number was hotly disputed in the media)38 resigned en masse and established a rival agency under the business name United Agents (UA) (Byrne, 2007a; Marsh, 2007: 4). Their choice of name was no doubt a pointed allusion to Charlie Chaplin and other silent-screen celebrities’ 1919 establishment of their own studio in defiance of the controlling tactics of the then-emergent Hollywood majors (Look, 1999: 26–27; Rickett, 2008). The fact that one of the senior PFD agents involved was Pat Kavanagh, formerly Martin Amis’s agent at the time of The Information’s first publicity, encouraged media commentators to draw explicit parallels between these two salacious dust-ups in the normally genteel agenting world (Marsh, 2007: 4). Around the same time, Caroline Michel, a former UK publishing executive and immediate ex-Managing Director of the William Morris Agency UK, was appointed Chief Executive Officer of PFD, presumably to stem the tide of resignations but, as it eventuated, seemingly exacerbating the problem (Byrne, 2007a). A very public battle by media leaks followed, clearly designed by the warring parties either to encourage PFD clients to stay where their backlist was held (namely, with PFD), or to follow their trusted agent (by implication to United Agents) (Boztas, 2007; Franklin, 2007). With negative publicity and a resultant haemorrhaging client list significantly debasing PFD’s market value, CCS Stellar in June 2008 sold the firm for £4 million (the figure rejected in the earlier failed management buyout) to a group headed by former newspaper editor and British media powerbroker Andrew Neil (Fenton, 2008; Hoyle, Alberge and Sabbagh, 2008). The new owners then began protracted litigation with UA over rights to revenue generated under contracts negotiated by PFD (Caesar, 2008). With Neil in charge of pursuing the disputed revenues, Michel – calling upon her previous corporate background – began a public campaign to reposition PFD as a ‘one-stop shop’, or ‘360-degree agency’, focussed on representing clients’ work across all media sectors (Pagano, 2008). This converged uberagency strategy was explicitly flagged as an ‘American approach’ and was clearly modelled on the ‘all-purpose’, multinational agencies such as William Morris, International Creative Management (ICM) and International Management Group (IMG) that dominate the US media and entertainment sector (Caesar, 2008; Holt, 1979: 138). The restructuring and repositioning of PFD are in many ways emblematic of the latest trend in literary representation’s development as a vital component of the book world and, more recently, of the broader mediasphere. Even during the 1970s when the US concept of the ‘superagent’ first emerged, such agencies were typically highly personalised small- to

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 71 medium-sized operations, usually run by proprietors who gave their name(s) to the business. They eagerly sought to ‘package’ books by brokering combined hardback/paperback rights deals, film and television spin-offs, and celebrity authorial brands, but these tactics were generally perceived as dynamic offshoots of an essentially book-centred business (Holt, 1979: 134; Coser, Kadushin and Powell, 1982: 301). Since the 1970s, the escalating consolidation and conglomeration of media ownership have brought books into ever-closer proximity to other media divisions. With the advent of digital technology, the technical basis for print communication is also now the same as that underpinning all other media sectors: digitisation. Hence, it was in many ways foreseeable that the somewhat eccentric, one-(wo)man-shop operations typifying much literary representation would themselves repeat the pattern of book publishing’s earlier merger, consolidation and massification. ‘Full-service’ agencies operating across multiple media sectors have maximum incentive to multiformat clients’ creative properties (Wasko, 2003: 20). For example, at the height of the dispute, Michel was rumoured to be offering incentive packages to agents staying with PFD to encourage them to broker screenwriting deals for book content already represented by the firm, and potentially also involving acting and film-making talent currently on PFD’s books (Byrne, 2007b; Caesar, 2008). Such a strategy allows the agency to charge not one, but up to three sets of commission on a single deal. Moreover, such a converged, multi-sector agency along US lines is best positioned to engineer its own content ‘packaging’, this time reaching far beyond the world of books to incubate projects which, from their inception, span multiple platforms. In the manner of major contemporary content franchises, such ‘franchisability’ may even constitute a content property’s very raison d’être.39 Such a vision of books as components in an overarching media system posited upon the principle of multiple cross-format adaptation raised the familiar, if now rather threadbare, objection from sections of the British literary establishment that ‘books are different’.40 Commentators decried what they perceived as ‘a plan to further “streamline” this still vaguely eccentric and mercurial industry into a profit-driven conveyor belt in which authors and actors would be expected to become all-singing, all-dancing “products”’ (Marsh, 2007: 4). The rhetorical echoes here of Diana Athill (2000), Jason Epstein (2001), André Schiffrin (2001) and others of the ‘lament’ school of publishing critique are unmistakable (Murray, 2006: 127; Squires, 2007: 13). It is important, however, to resist some of the oversimplifying binaries that charactered much UK media coverage of the PFD/UA dispute. There is no sense that PFD in its earlier incarnation was high-mindedly committed to preserving literature as a distinct sphere of human communication, whereas its new management regime under Michel and (later) Neil was newly intent upon expanding into other, more parvenu media

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sectors.41 PFD had, as mentioned earlier, long been active not only in literary representation, but also in the theatrical, film and talent agency sectors of the European market (Dalley, 2007). Nor, conversely, was Michel’s new phalanx of hires being directed to subordinate books to the status of mere afterthoughts in the content process, such as tie-in editions for blockbuster films. The book was still seen by the new generation of managers at PFD as a generator of prestige and content in its own right. For example, one of Michel’s early interventions was to appoint an agent solely responsible for managing rights controlled by literary estates – a signal that PFD was still keenly focussed upon book clients (and a gesture that became necessary after UA succeeded in signing the lucrative and highly active Ian Fleming estate, and an ever-opportunistic Andrew Wylie poached from PFD the prestigious Evelyn Waugh estate) (Hoyle, Alberge and Sabbagh, 2008; Addley and Fitzsimmons, 2008; Caesar, 2008). Nevertheless, it remains broadly true that Michel was recruited to head PFD precisely because her previous position at the helm of William Morris UK provided a model for how a European-based, predominantly literary agency could secure its future in a media environment where any defensive insistence on books’ uniqueness rings increasingly hollow. With novelist clients who also write screenplays, authors avid for their work to be adapted to film, television and even gaming formats, and publishers seeking eagerly to capitalise on a successful adaptation through tie-in editions, published screenplays or companion titles, positioning book content as obdurately format-specific fundamentally misunderstands the nature of digital technology, the brand loyalty of audiences, and the imperatives of the contemporary commercial media’s operating environment. Just as authors once loyally followed their editors from house to house, so now they follow their agent as agency partnerships dissolve and form anew. And just as in-house editors once voiced their hostility to the upstart book-world interloper of the literary agent, so now literary agents vent their hostility towards allegedly crass and money-grubbing agents from the formerly more removed worlds of talent, film and television representation. Agents, it would seem, have thus been hoist with their own petard. Long justifying their incursion into an overly-nostalgic publishing industry on the basis that new times called for new business measures, they find themselves unable to invoke traditionalist arguments now their own position is threatened with eclipse by a still-newer business model. The purpose of the foregoing case study – indeed of all three case studies analysed here – is not to weigh in and take up cudgels for either side, but to demonstrate how subject to fluctuation are the various stakeholder positions within the adaptation industry. This insight reinforces the need to analyse not only shifts in the content of contemporary media for what they reveal about host societies, in the manner of so much textually oriented cultural and media studies work. More broadly, we also need to consider how the changing structures of the media industries themselves

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 73 crucially influence which media texts become available for critical analysis. In addition, no part of this complexly interdependent, tightly competitive field, in the Bourdieusian sense, remains static. The texts moving through the commercial and institutional apparatus of the adaptation industry are themselves constantly changing, and so too are the components and relative influence of the industry stakeholders and networks via which they move. The word ‘adaptation’, when used in a media context, always retains an echo of its other, cognate meaning in the discipline of evolutionary biology (Hutcheon, 2006: 176–77), as noted in this volume’s Introduction. In just such a manner, we need to learn to conceptualise the media adaptation industry as a complexly interdependent and dynamic phenomenon – namely, as a cultural ecosystem.

Conclusion In 1975, an article in the UK publishing industry’s trade journal, The Bookseller, celebrated 100 years of literary agency A.P. Watt’s operations (Rubinstein, 1975). Its author forecast: ‘it seems probable that the service which A.P. Watt began to render authors a hundred years ago will be increasingly in demand in the years ahead’ (2358). It was a prediction that has proven stunningly accurate; not only is the A.P. Watt agency a thriving force in international author representation, but the industry that Watt pioneered has grown to become in many ways the power centre of the contemporary book world.42 I have utilised the three agenting controversies explored here as cultural freeze-frame moments emblematising key events and transitions in the agenting business over the previous 15 years. Curiously, the three incidents have been spaced at intervals of roughly six or seven years, long enough for the literary agent to have faded from the forefront of public consciousness, but not long enough for the outline of preceding agent dust-ups to have been entirely forgotten. Thus, through explicitly linking these three incidents, I have relied upon an underpinning agenting narrative detectable in journalistic coverage, in which the combatants of previous stand-offs reappear in subsequent conflicts in altered, though not entirely dissimilar, roles. This coterie cast of characters in the narrative of agency over the previous decade-and-ahalf suggests that such strobe-flash moments not only frame in dramatic tableaux industry developments which normally pass too incrementally to be observed clearly; they also function as a form of ritual bloodletting where members of what are in reality tightly interdependent (even incestuous) creative industries are permitted to air publicly long-standing grievances which spring from certain players’ longitudinal gains and encroachments on other stakeholders’ relative power. Thus the three agenting controversies analysed in detail here are doubtless sparked in part by inter-personal hostilities, but also by the bruised amour propre of other book- and media-world interests.

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That so many professional egos should have been damaged during the course of the agent’s growth testifies to how rapidly agenting’s sphere of influence has expanded. The Information incident demonstrated indisputably that the agent had become a celebrity in his own right, even in the resolutely author-centric world of literary fiction (Merritt, 2007). This agenting celebrity also overflowed the boundaries of national book cultures (always more an imaginary construct than industry reality), debunking the UK book world’s illusion of self-sufficiency, and exposing newly established post-colonial national cultural spheres to the destabilising forces of globalisation. The latest of agenting’s waves of expansion has seen literarycentred agencies moving ever closer to converged multi-sectoral enterprises boasting representation across the worlds of books, screen media, music, talent, sport and celebrity appearances. The agent has been in large part a beneficiary of the increasing enmeshment of the book with other media formats since the 1980s’ waves of conglomeration; the PFD crisis demonstrated that agents would not themselves be immune to the process. Precisely why this rapid book-world transition has taken place over a remarkably condensed timeframe can be answered with reference to a passing comment made by early US ‘superagent’ and practising commercial lawyer, Morton L. Janklow. In a 1985 article describing the (then still comparatively novel) role of the contemporary literary agent, Janklow referred casually – but tellingly – to ‘the variety of rights being sold under the guise of a book’ (408). This reconceptualisation of the book not as a semi-sacred cultural artefact, but as a package of dematerialised, exploitable IP rights was the key condition precedent underpinning the exponential growth of the agent since the 1970s. Such a rights bundle comprises, firstly, book-related rights of the kind that had long been standard in book-world contracts: hardback rights, paperback rights, foreign edition rights, translation rights, and book club rights. But, crucially, Janklow and his agenting peers also foresaw the pivotal importance of book contracts’ proliferating rights to control book content in extra-book formats: serialisation rights, film, TV and cable rights, as well as now digital rights, merchandising rights, computer gaming, character, prequel and sequel rights (1985: 407). Once the familiar cultural object of the book is rethought in this dematerialised, fissiparous manner, hiring of an agent to manage and account for these myriad rights becomes commonsensical, if not professionally essential. Symbiotically, once agents were commercially established, they had every incentive to enhance the range of rights that could be spun out of book content. The chicken-and-egg relationship between agents and rights gave even leading New York literary agent Lynn Nesbit pause as long ago as 1980, as she perceived the risk of publishing being reduced to ‘just a software arm of the entertainment business’ (Kleinfield, 1980: 9). Yet even Nesbit, now joint director with Janklow of Janklow & Nesbit Associates, would acknowledge that the media industry into which books

World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 75 have become subsumed is not all bad news for literary authors. Nesbit’s own clients, amongst them Hunter S. Thompson and Jeffrey Eugenides, have had their reputations enhanced by praised film adaptations of their work, and such cinematic esteem has built a virtuous circle benefiting their publishers through enhanced backlist publicity, tie-in editions and author celebritisation. Certainly, adaptation as a process existed long before the agent’s emergence in the nineteenth century, appropriation and reworking of cultural materials being evidently fundamental to the intertextual dynamic characterising culture itself. But the greatly enhanced scale and accelerating pace of the adaptation industry since the 1970s can only be properly understood in tandem with the rise of the literary agent. Of all the stakeholders in the adaptation industry – authors, editors, publishers, prize committees, screenwriters, producers, distributors and consumers – agents have registered the largest increase both in overall numbers and in industry profile over the past 40 years. Agents’ view of book contracts as bundles of IP rights not only revolutionised conceptions of publishing, but also put legally and financially savvy agents in charge of the media industries’ new currency – rights. Finally, this newly won industrial and legal centrality empowered agents to broker cross-media deals amongst adaptation industry stakeholders, and even to catalyse such deals from a project’s inception. Leading agents now typically angle to represent the maximum tranche of ‘world rights’ in agreements with author–clients. This is a mark of the most powerful agents’ newly cultivated global geographical reach. It could equally, however, be read as a register of agents’ collective ambition for their industry in the converged landscape of the twenty-first-century mediasphere.

3

Making Words Go Further Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks as Engine Rooms of Adaptation

What author doesn’t hope for a successful adaptation of his novel, what publishing company isn’t pleased to do a good deal and what producer is not delighted to have a good box office success or good viewing figures? Of course there are differing individual interests and they make themselves felt during contract negotiations. It’s like any other business: everyone represents their own interests. But the numerous successful film adaptations worldwide demonstrate that despite some marathon negotiations, the film and book world[s] depend upon one another. (Petra Hermanns, German film and television agent, Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter, 2005)

Within the academic discipline of literary studies, there is an increasing shift away from the traditional syllabus-constructing convenience of dividing subject matter along national lines into discrete categories of ‘British literature’, ‘American literature’ or, more recent and oppositional intellectual formulations, ‘Irish literature’, ‘Canadian literature’ and ‘Australian literature’. Such contemporary trends in disciplinary selfconception and programme structure draw in part on longer-running academic traditions of comparative literary studies, especially in the specialism’s traditional heartland of North America. More specifically, the new, consciously internationalist current in literary analysis derives from participants’ observations of the cultural world around them, in which genres, fashions, authorial careers and readerships demonstrably elude neat country-specific pigeonholes. Within a single-language market, such as the Anglosphere, cross-border traffic of texts is readily apparent, with boundaries between formerly nationally-defined markets becoming increasingly porous (as explored in Chapter 2). More broadly, practices of rapid and simultaneous translation of texts into multiple languages soon after first publication have begun to accelerate the emergence of a global literary culture. French literary critic Pascale Casanova, celebrating criticism’s sloughing off of the straightjacketing nation-state mentality, speaks glowingly of a ‘world literary space’ in which texts, authorial influences and markers of prestige float free of national boundaries,

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 77 meshing in a great web of cross-cultural exchanges (2004 [1999]: 3). In sympathy with such a manoeuvre, although better attuned to materialist analysis than Casanova’s exclusively discursive level of concern, Canadian scholar Sarah Brouillette analyses the transnational profile of a particular literary sub-genre – post-colonial writing, specifically that written in English. Neatly encapsulated in the title of her book, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), this innately transnational field forms the necessary backdrop against which contemporary star post-colonial authors’ works demand to be – and increasingly are – read. Such jettisoning of national in favour of international or global frameworks may serve to stroke the disciplinary ego of adaptation studies. After all, the discipline has been ahead of the curve in its enthusiastic embrace of transnational and cross-cultural analyses since the 1980s’ ‘Impact of the Posts’ which used non-hierarchically oriented post-structuralist and cultural studies conceptions of cultural production to track the migration of particular stories or narrative ‘memes’ across cultures (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 8; Hutcheon, 2006). Yet adaptation studies should resist the temptation to gloat at theoretically outpacing its literary studies stablemate. For adaptation studies has been remarkably reluctant to peer beneath the surface of the many texts transposed across languages and cultures to examine the underpinning institutional mechanisms that make such migrations possible, especially for contemporary texts. This chapter examines three international fora which collectively make up the engine rooms of the contemporary adaptation industry: book fairs; screen festivals; and writers’ weeks. While the authors and agents examined in the two preceding chapters are undeniably vital figures in the culture of contemporary adaptation, it is these three fora that constitute the locus at which the various actors in the adaptation industry convene to trade rights, incubate adaptation projects and market these back to key audience sectors. By recalibrating adaptation studies to examine the role and workings of such fora, this chapter (and the present book as a whole) seeks to shift academic attention from a near-exclusive preoccupation with individual texts as the dominant unit of analysis, to understand the system through which such texts move. In so doing not only can adaptation studies begin to perceive more accurately the impact of this encompassing system on the semiotic surface of individual texts; it can moreover begin to comprehend how the adaptation industry functions systemically to favour, exclude or generally shape the range of texts available. In a Bourdieusian sense, the aim of the current discussion is thus to map the encompassing ‘field’ of adaptations rights-dealing. Upon examining these three adaptation fora individually, most striking is that each of them is governed by the model of the circuit. The circuit charts an annual loop of related events distinguished from each other by their location, time of year, duration, size, age and perceived prestige as

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calculated relative to other nodes on the circuit. For example, the annual circuit of major international book fairs is composed of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in March, the London Book Fair in April, BookExpo America in May and, the largest of them all, the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. Similarly, the seasonal rhythms of film industry professionals are governed by the annual circuit of ‘A’-film festivals including Berlin in February, Cannes in May, Venice in August, Toronto in September, as well as the non-A-ranked but creatively and financially important Sundance Film Festival for independent productions held in Utah each January. Less well known than the above examples – perhaps because of the lower wattage of star power involved – is the international literary festival circuit that takes place in Australia’s Adelaide Writers’ Week in March, the Sydney Writers’ Festival in mid May, the Hay Festival (UK) in late May, the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August, the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, also held in August, and Toronto’s International Festival of Authors in October. Relations between festivals on the same circuit are typically rivalrous, with intense competition to secure the biggest-name attendees, much jockeying for preferable positions in the calendar, and concerted wooing of various public- and private-sector sources of subsidy and sponsorship (Owen, 2006: 80). But instances of cooperation between events on the same circuit are not unknown, particularly where audience catchments are deemed to be primarily local/national, such as the August 2008 live linkup between the Edinburgh and Melbourne writers’ festivals for an interview with star author Salman Rushdie.1 An intriguing recent development, central to the analysis that follows, is the increasing interpenetration of these various industry-defined circuits through cooperation, joint hosting of events and co-branding initiatives. Specifically, this has taken the form of book fairs and film festivals joining forces by dedicating one day of their respective programmes to developing cross-industry seminars, or the establishment at such festivals of sidebar events dedicated to adaptation rights-dealing. There are multiple motivations for these alliances across traditional industry silos. In part they are attributable to individual festivals’ attempts to steal the limelight from circuit rivals by expanding their areas of interest, and thus their potential range of sponsors and delegates. Partly also, inter-circuit alliances may be spurred by anxieties of medium obsolescence, as with book fairs’ cooperation with film festivals to rebrand themselves as cross-format rights marketplaces.2 But more pervasively, the shift from sector-specific to transmedia perspectives – as with literary studies’ change from nationalist to internationalist paradigms – is driven by changes in the encompassing cultural environment, in which formerly hard and fast distinctions between media sectors make decreasing sense in an era of digital media convergence, transnational media conglomerates and globally mobile creative talent. Taken together, these cross-sectoral interlinkages aim to

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 79 formalise and concentrate the previously haphazard encounters of the book and screen industries, and thus to catalyse the adaptation process. But drawing such institutional and economic structures into adaptation studies’ sphere of concern, I hope to delineate the powerful but little analysed global stock exchange for trade of rights in cultural properties. For Pierre Bourdieu, such ‘fields’ tend to be characterised by an inverse relationship between forms of economic and cultural capital, around which twin poles congregate ‘opposing camps’ of avant-garde and bourgeois cultural producers (1993: 101; 82–104). But in examining the role of the three selected fora in the trade of literary properties, it becomes readily apparent that markers of cultural prestige (such as international book awards) serve in practice to amplify a property’s desirability for translation, foreign rights sales and potentially lucrative screen adaptation (an issue explored further in Chapter 4). Conceptualising the fora of the book fair, the screen festival and the literary festival as a vital ‘network of cultural intermediaries’ demonstrates how the category of ‘literature’ is actively brokered, challenged and reformulated within a contemporary industrial and cultural context (Thompson, 2005: 33). In a very real sense it permits us a sociological window onto the making of the literary.

The Cinema and Literature International Forum: ‘A Veritable Bank of Ideas for the Film Industry’3 Over the preceding decade, the unmistakable trend in the adaptation industry has been away from serendipitous encounters between book and screen industry personnel in traditional media haunts towards formally convened, consciously stage-managed cross-sector events. In short, the adaptation industry has gone professional. British novelist Mil Millington provided an excellent example of just how serendipitous and informal such book-screen rights networking has tended to be in the past in his presentation to the ‘Lost in Adaptation’ symposium held in Birmingham, UK in December 2005. Millington described how publishers talking enthusiastically in a London bar about the first draft of his comic novel Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (2002) (itself based on his website of the same name) were overheard by a producer from leading UK production outfit Working Title, who subsequently contacted Millington through his agent and purchased the film rights. Millington was thereafter contracted to write a draft of the Working Title screenplay (Millington, 2005). Such haphazard communications between the book and screen industries about ‘adaptation-ready’ properties will no doubt continue to occur, but the formalisation and professionalisation of this process via book fairs and screen festivals have changed both the pace and scale of such discussions. In the future, an increasingly larger proportion of the trade in adaptation looks set to be incubated at consciously choreographed cross-industry fora.

80 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks The forerunner of the many such contemporary adaptation-themed industry events is the Forum International Cinéma et Littérature (Cinema and Literature International Forum (CLIF)), first staged in October 2001 in the European principality of Monaco (Masters, 2001; Nesselson, 2001).4 Over the course of its first three-day programme, the CLIF brought together publishers, literary agents, screen producers, directors, scriptwriters, authors and distributors to discuss and transact the business of adaptation. Influenced by its location, attendance at this first iteration of the CLIF was predominantly Francophone, with a smaller representation of Anglosphere delegates (Rickett, 2006: 18). The event was convened by French film industry public relations professional Claire Breuvart with backing from the principality’s government and the patronage of Monaco’s film-identified royal family, with the intention of making the CLIF ‘the leading international market for audiovisual writing. . . . Writers, publishers and directors are an obvious fit, and yet nobody’s tried to bring them together before’ (Nesselson, 2001: 17). This cross-sectoral rationale is constantly re-emphasised in the CLIF’s annual posters, which have come to feature some variation on an open book resting on a canvas director’s chair, with the famed waters of the Côte d’Azur sparkling enticingly in the background. Held annually since 2001 (with the exception of an unexplained hiatus in 2003), the CLIF offers a programme combining panel sessions featuring book and screen industry representatives, pitching sessions in which publishers pitch adaptable books to film and television producers, and one-on-one meetings between delegates to hammer out adaptations deals. As the CLIF has grown, the programme has become both more diverse, taking in the many additional formats to which creative content now migrates, as well as more explicitly commercial. An International Literary Adaptation Market was added in 2002, modelled on similar events at large film festivals such as Cannes in which properties are licensed for distribution in new markets; a Remake Market was added in 2006 for ‘adaptations’ of existing films to new versions created in the same medium; and since 2009 the cartoon and video game stream has become increasingly prominent, reflecting vital new markets for the adaptation of both print and audio-visual content (Sidhva, 2004; Masters, 2006; Cinema and Literature International Forum, 2007).5 Prior to each year’s event, publishers submit materials for the CLIF pitch catalogue, listing targeted book properties available for adaptation and providing for each title a plot synopsis, author bionote, territorial rights information and contact details for the film rights holder (Sidhva, 2004; Besserglik, 2005).6 Most intriguing are the attempts by the CLIF, as a still new event, to generate symbolic capital in the form of annual prizes. The Forum awards a growing body of prizes each year, including awards for Best Literary Adaptation for Cinema Film, Best Literary Adaptation for Television,

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 81 Best Scriptwriter of Literary Adaptations, Best Producer of a Literary Adaptation for Cinema, Best Actor in a Literary Adaptation and a Careerlong Achievement Trophy of Honour. Additionally, there are artfully named awards for Best Adaptable Novel and for Best Adaptable Comic/Graphic Novel, designed as obvious lures to producers present (or elsewhere) to purchase rights to a promising print property (Besserglik, 2005; Cinema and Literature International Forum, 2007). More broadly, these last two awards are also designed to reinforce the CLIF’s claim to be the pre-eminent forum for adaptations rights-dealing. The aspiration is that properties winning the awards will be fast-tracked for cross-format adaptation through displaying their newly acquired prize status and, conversely, that through the success of such adaptations the name of the Forum will become more widely known and its status in the annual book and film industry circuits will become more assured. Optimally, the process thus works to create a virtuous circle. The CLIF’s tactic does appear to be paying dividends: French novelist Gilles Legardinier’s novel L’Exil des anges (2009) (pitched as The Angel’s Exile) was pre-selected for the CLIF’s Best Adaptable Novel award in 2009, information proudly flagged on the pitch package prepared by the online adaptation-facilitating company Best-seller-to-Box-office.7 The book was subsequently selected as one of 12 promisingly adaptable properties for the much larger Berlin International Film Festival’s 2009 ‘Books at Berlinale’ sidebar event.8 But, as an interloper onto both the book and screen industry circuits, the CLIF’s relationship to other major industry fora can never be straightforward. It is a very recent entrant to a calendar structured around much longer established events (the Cannes Film Festival was first staged in 1946; the Frankfurt Book Fair’s modern incarnation dates from 1949). As such, the CLIF is obliged to be tactical and opportunistic. Thus the first CLIF was staged in October 2001, in a patent attempt to attract European and, specifically, transatlantic publishing and screen industry personnel in Europe for the late-October Frankfurt Book Fair (Vaucher, 2001). The CLIF has for several years now convened in March/April, presumably in an attempt, once again, to piggyback on (North American) industry traffic to the London Book Fair in April and so to offer publishers’ travel budgets the advantage of participating in two industry fora for close to the price of one. Rivalries and tensions are rarely aired publicly in such interconnected industries. Frankfurt Book Fair representatives have, for example, sat on CLIF panels, and Claire Breuvart, in recent comments, seems consciously to be positioning the CLIF in geographical, temporal and industrial terms in relation to the Cannes Film Festival: ‘The Forum’s future direction will be to focus on film financing. . . . If Cannes is at the end of the filmmaking process, we want to make Monaco a centre for film creation, from finding the right story to adapt, to securing the funds to make it onto the screen’ (Sidhva, 2004). But detectable beneath each

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expression of complementarity is the evident desire to distinguish the CLIF from its competitor events, including by reconstituting its boutique size as a unique selling point, as in Forum Director-General Hans-Stephan Kreidel’s remarks: Our specificity, compared with book fairs like Frankfurt or festivals like Cannes, is that here we provide the quality time and calm that are needed for publishers and producers to work together and reflect. If it works out, it’s a meeting of kindred spirits. (Besserglik, 2005: 14)9 Innovative in being the first dedicated event for catalysing adaptations deal making, the CLIF nevertheless has to tread warily to mark out its own territory in the already crowded cultural industries field. Similarly, formerly single-industry events stand poised to imitate the CLIF’s successes and to appropriate for themselves its cachet of adaptation industry innovation.

Book Fairs: ‘A Pool of Rights Available Worldwide’10 The lynchpins of the international publishing calendar are the vast book fairs at which publishers, editors, agents, retailers and technology providers convene in order to assess industry trends, network with international peers and, most importantly, negotiate the buying and selling of foreign territory and translation rights (Bing, 2000). As alluded to earlier, the major ‘A’ book fairs include Frankfurt, London, Bologna (for children’s books), BookExpo America (for North American rights) and Guadalajara, Mexico (for Spanish-language titles) – and roughly in that order of precedence (Think, 2007: 8). But beyond these tent-pole events lies an array of smaller, often regionally or nationally focussed book fairs convened in locations as diverse as Cairo, Cape Town, Moscow, Beijing, Abu Dhabi, Warsaw, Jerusalem, Madrid, New Delhi and Prague, many of which model their structure and rhetoric after the major events. There is general consensus, however, that the mighty Frankfurt Book Fair is the pre-eminent event in the book-publishing calendar, judged according to scale, longevity, its genuinely global cross-section of delegates, and the volume of rights business transacted in the German city each October (Obidike, 1980; Weeks, 1985; Catchpole, 1992; Staunton, 1996; Perman, 1998; Blake, 1999; Jakubowski, 2007). Frankfurt has long constituted a fascinating microcosm of the book industry at transitional moments in its development. The Frankfurt Book Fair’s origins date back to the medieval period (contemporary Fair directors insistently work into their public speeches some reference to Gutenberg’s display of his printed Bible at the Frankfurt Fair in the 1450s). This was followed by several centuries of eclipse by the rival Leipzig Book Fair. But the Frankfurt Book Fair was subsequently revived

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 83 in the aftermath of World War Two – emerging ‘like a phoenix’ of cultural pride from the ruins of Goethe’s shattered city (Weidhaas, 2007: 15). In its modern incarnation, the Fair focussed initially on trade between German publishers and booksellers (Maschler, 2005: 265; Weidhaas, 2007: 206). It was only during the 1950s and particularly the 1960s that the international orientation of the Fair became its defining feature, a development carefully cultivated through Fair directors’ selection of an annual national or regional ‘Guest of Honour’, beginning with ‘Latin American Literature’ in 1976, followed by ‘Black Africa’ in 1980, and featuring recently (and controversially) the 2009 choice of China (Perl, 1967; Abel, 1996: 92; Weidhaas, 2007: 149; 2009: 32–34).11 If Frankfurt represents the global book trade brought together in one place – ‘a mighty map of the publishing world’ in the resonant phrase of Australian former publisher and cultural commentator Hilary McPhee – it equally bears out the structural inequalities and centre–periphery dynamics of that volatile cultural field (2001: 198). In the most evocative and astute account of the atmosphere and politics of Frankfurt to be found anywhere, McPhee memorably recalls the colonial riff-raff of the Anglophone book world – the Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Scots and Irish – bonding and commiserating over their banishment to one of the Book Fair’s farthest-flung exhibition halls. For these ‘feeders’ of emergent writers ripe for multinational picking, too-often reluctant distributors of foreign titles republished under grudgingly granted licence from London or New York, the Frankfurt experience powerfully reinforced their status as satellites to the global publishing metropoles: the independent publishers from the fringes . . . congregated together, Fosters in hand, eventually confessing in the accents of Edinburgh, Dublin, Sydney and Toronto how few deals they’d actually managed to clinch. Australia and Canada and a few other ‘emerging’ publishing centres had national stands where the independent publishers pooled their resources to save money. . . . But nothing really helped to ease the torture: the crucial thing was not to show you were feeling it. (2001: 202–03) Reverential allusions to Gutenberg aside, the contemporary Frankfurt Book Fair has transcended the medium of the book itself to focus principally on the buying and selling of intellectual property (IP) rights deriving from books, what British cultural sociologist J.B. Thompson, reworking Bourdieu’s terminology, terms ‘intellectual capital’ (2005: 31). Terry Cochran, another of the mere handful of academic commentators on book fairs, similarly emphasises their role in the trading of immaterial property rights. Although, unlike Thompson, Cochran subjects this practice to an explicitly political economy critique:

84 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks international book fairs do not generally translate into direct sales to a consumer; the fairs’ primary focus relates to the management of ideas, whether the motivation derives from a desire for profit or the promotion of certain interpretations of history, politics, literature, and so forth. (1990: 6–7) The Fair expends limited energy extolling the virtues of great literature as such – it is, after all, a trade event driven by sales rather than by aesthetic judgements. Rather, the Fair promotes the continuing value of books as rights bundles, aiming to catalyse ‘the exploitation of literary works in a variety of forms’ (Owen, 2006: 28). Former Frankfurt Director and now historian of the Fair, Peter Weidhaas, dates this incremental shift in the Fair’s self-definition to the wave of publishing conglomerations underway from the mid 1960s: a development took shape that saw books, not as the independent medium they had been for centuries, but rather as a component of the communications industry – that vast entertainment behemoth that included media, television, film, music, reviews, and illustrated magazines, and eventually the entire spectrum of electronically generated media. (2007: 248–49) By the 1990s, this massification of the book had come to be accompanied by a dematerialisation, driven by the mainstream uptake of digital media technologies: Increasingly the individual product – the book itself – lost significance. ‘It is not a question of books, but of rights!’ These rights – sometimes including the digital version of a book – could be freely converted, transferred worldwide, and exchanged through the use of various media. (Weidhaas, 2007: 256) Encapsulating this shift, Frankfurt now self-describes as ‘the most important marketplace for books, media, rights and licences worldwide’,12 a cross-media rebranding neatly echoed in the slogan sported by Frankfurt’s main competitor, the London Book Fair, for its 2010 iteration: ‘Making words go further’.13 Frankfurt’s restyling of itself as a rights marketplace captures in microcosm the adaptation industry’s twenty-first-century view of the book: that of a content platform interlinked with more recently emerged media through networks of IP rights dealing. Precisely calibrating this emerging trend, Frankfurt has over recent decades added a number of

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 85 components to the overarching Book Fair event to facilitate international trade in book-derived content. Since 1978, Frankfurt has hosted an International Literary Agents and Scouts Centre which now occupies half a floor of a vast exhibition hall and offers a huge number of desks (organised with Teutonic precision by row and place number) for literary agents to stage back-to-back half-hourly meetings with publishers and other agents to negotiate sale of rights. Similarly, Frankfurt has since 1986 hosted an International Rights Directors Meeting for publishing house rights managers to discuss macro-level trends in the trade and management of book content (Kim, Moura and Owen, 2004: 44; Nawotka, 2008: 124). The Fair’s most intriguing recent innovation has been the establishment of the Comics Centre, introduced in 2000 and rapidly expanding year on year. It is especially popular with the younger German public who are permitted admission to the Fair on the weekend of its fourth and fifth days, and a significant percentage of whom dress up in elaborate cosplay outfits modelled on their favourite manga and comics characters. From the trade point of view, the establishment of the Comics Centre (currently housed in a section of one of the major halls dedicated to European publishing) acknowledges the surging popularity of comics and graphic novels as a segment of the print culture market, especially amongst the child and young adult audiences which make up the industry’s future mainstream demographic. In part the Comics Centre is also designed to facilitate repurposing of print-based comics material for the screen industries, specifically film, television, animation and computer gaming (Weidhaas, 2007: 222).14 It is enticing to speculate how many of comics adaptations currently flooding multiplex screens around the world could date their incubation to cross-media deal making at industry events such as Frankfurt, and how the growing success of comics adaptations reciprocally fuels the rapid expansion of Frankfurt’s specialist comics forum. The above innovations notwithstanding, Variety correspondent Jonathan Bing was correct in cautioning readers of the film industry bible back in 2000 that ‘The vast majority of rights transactions in the fair’s cavernous exhibition halls will be dedicated to foreign sales, and . . . that makes film dealings a low priority’ (129). My field research at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair confirms this as an accurate representation, although there are signs that the Fair is attempting to increase the event’s appeal to screen-industry personnel. Frankfurt’s most recent and concrete manifestation of the book’s enmeshment with the broader mediasphere is the establishment in 2003 of the Film and Media Forum (‘Frankfurt’, 2004; 2005; Hermanns, 2005).15 Allocated its own floor of the Fairground’s central Forum building, directly below the display of the annual Guest of Honour, the Film and Media Forum comprises a programme of expert speaker and panel events on the topic of cross-media adaptation. It includes a dedicated Rights Centre coordinating 30-minute back-to-back

86 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks pitching sessions between publishers, agents and film producers trading in book-derived subsidiary rights, as well as the two Book Fair cinemas that screen films related to the Forum programme. As of 2009, the Film and Media Forum programme additionally included for the first time presentations by ‘representatives of the trade of games, merchandising and music and social platforms’ [sic].16 The following year, the Forum expanded its cross-sectoral appeal by inaugurating Frankfurt StoryDrive – a dedicated media conference comprising keynotes, workshops and case studies revealing ‘the possibilities and opportunities offered by cross-, trans- and multimedia storytelling’.17 Such cross-media ‘speed dating’ demonstrates most dramatically how the previously serendipitous and haphazard ‘shopping’ of rights in literary properties is now increasingly formalised and consciously orchestrated within the book-fair circuit (‘Frankfurt’, 2005; Owen, 2006: 80). In a special partnership with the Berlin International Film Festival, Frankfurt’s Film and Media Forum now moreover declares one day of its calendar ‘Berlinale Day’, hosting a full programme of industry panel sessions, screenings of adapted properties, and awards for the best literary adaptation (‘Frankfurt’, 2005; ‘Berlinale’, 2008).18 To my knowledge the only other academic attention to this fascinating cross-industry development comes from UK film producer and professor Roger Shannon in his May 2007 keynote address to the ‘From the Blank Page to the Silver Screen: Readaptation’ conference convened by the Université de Bretagne Sud at Lorient, France: This attention to adaptation is evident also in the newly arranged forum that takes place at the annual and prominent Frankfurt Book Fair, where the Berlin Film Festival now collaborates on the showcasing of a new movie, based on an adaptation, at the Book Fair, and uses the event to generate increased ‘heat’ about the relationship between literature and film. At the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, the centrepiece Berlinale Workshop adaptation case study was the first volume of Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, the international mega-seller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (originally titled Men Who Hate Women) and its successful 2009 Swedish film adaptation. (Additional Swedish and English-language film and also television adaptations of the remaining volumes in the series are also in the works). Eva Gedin, Assisting Publishing Director of the book’s Swedish publisher Norstedts and Jenny Gilbertsson of Yellow Bird, the Swedish production house responsible for director Niels Arden Oplev’s successful film, discussed, inter alia, coordinating the slew of foreign rights sales for the book at the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair; the intense interest from film producers stirred by the strength of pre-publication foreign rights sales; and the optioning of

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 87 film rights to the whole trilogy still before the first book had even been published. Gilbertsson noted that novelisations of the in-production Swedish TV series could also be published, though publishing house Norstedts owns the sequel rights. Yellow Bird, as the film’s producers, however, owns the remake rights. As Gedin summed up the mutually beneficial cross-sectoral relationship: ‘The book has been so successful,

Figure 3.1 Berlinale at Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 promotional postcard (front) © Reproduced by permission of Frankfurter Buchmesse

88 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks and the film has been so successful, and it’s all merged’ (Berlinale, 2009). Demonstrably true though this win–win logic is, it was evident even in this panel session that each media sector was nevertheless manoeuvring to maximise their cut of the Larsson brand and fiercely guarding the rights that enable this.

Figure 3.2 Rear of postcard, detailing the Film and Media Forum’s 2009 case study: adapting Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy © Reproduced by permission of Frankfurter Buchmesse

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 89 Through staging such sessions, the Film and Media Forum’s organisers clearly aim to cultivate the same symbiotic relationship that drives Monaco’s CLIF, whereby the success of book–screen adaptations incubated at previous events validates the fair’s self-appointed position as the pre-eminent adaptations rights market. In the hopeful language of the 1996 seminar that led to the establishment of the Frankfurt–Berlinale partnership: ‘It Happened in Frankfurt’ (Quinn, 1996: 23). This complementary relationship between Germany’s two pre-eminent cultural events has, since 2004, become triangular, with the addition of Nuremberg’s International Toy Fair supplying further platforms for the licensing – and derivation – of adaptable media content (Mutter, Zeitchik and Baker, 2004: 12). Such alliances appear to be part of a larger strategic development by the Book Fair’s management to remodel Frankfurt as an ‘umbrella event’ hosting multiple specialist sub-fora appealing to different creative industry sectors, and thus to expand the Fair’s size, catchment and brand recognition (Staunton, 1996: 10). In keeping with the competitive logic underpinning the literary field, however, Frankfurt’s innovation has been swiftly copied by its major book fair rivals: Publishers Weekly noted in 2000 that ‘The evolution of the London Book Fair from a booksellers’ fair toward a rights fair has intensified . . . in recent years’ (Zaleski, 2000: 22). Equally, the organisers of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair announced in 2003 that they were ‘keen to develop a wider role for the event as a “children’s content marketplace”, rather than focussing exclusively on publishing. They hope [to] increase the exchange of copyrights between the books sector and TV and film production companies’ (‘Bologna’, 2003: 6). Just as various media sectors jockey to maximise their financial stake in a successful global franchise, so too the various engine rooms of adaptation vie to be the epicentre of the global adaptation industry.

Online Rights-Trading: ‘As Busy as Frankfurt, Seven Days a Week, 24 Hours a Day’19 This already complex picture of media sector jostling with media sector and of book fair competing with book fair was complicated still further by the emergence, from the late 1990s, of various online rights-trading websites that promised to shift adaptation’s engine room to the virtual sphere and so to make it a year-round affair. Adopting the triumphalist rhetoric characterising the boom years of Web 1.0, the dot.com rights revolution promised to reduce publishers’ travel and accommodation expenses through doing away with en masse book fair attendance, and to increase the accessibility and transparency of information about rights ownership for all (or at least for those with paid-up subscriptions). Beginning with the launch of RightsCenter.com in August 1999, the book industries witnessed the mushrooming of competing online rights dealing

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start-ups including GoodStory.com (established in 2000), Subrights.com (2000) and RightsWorld.com (2000) (Hilts, 1999; Reid, 2000a; 2000d; Baker, 2000a; 2000b; Owen, 2001). Frankfurt did not take this rhetorical and commercial assault on its pre-eminence lying down: as early as 1994 the Fair had issued ‘Virtual Frankfurt Book Fair’, a CD-ROM rights directory listing titles by all publishers exhibiting at the Fair. Continuing its campaign to co-opt its upstart rivals’ technological edge, by 1996 ‘Virtual Frankfurt’ had shifted to the World Wide Web as a fully searchable catalogue, and by 2001 the website had been upgraded to support online real-time rights negotiation and trading (Lottman, 1999; 2001; Baker, 2000a; Owen, 2001; Weidhaas, 2007: 266).20 The correction to this overcrowded market of competing services all essentially attempting to corner the same industry demographic came with the tech-wreck and post-9/11 economic downturn of 2001 (Rosenblatt, 2008). Having burnt through vast amounts of venture capital without being able to attract a sufficient volume of trade to become viable, all the enterprises other than the first-launched RightsCentre rapidly folded. UKbased rights authority Lynette Owen attributes the websites’ collapse to their founders’ insufficient appreciation of the interpersonal, hand-selling characteristic of the rights trade: For those of us in the field, the life blood of rights selling is face to face discussion with customers at least once a year, and preferably more often; it is often during the personal encounter that a rights sale is clinched. No company website or intermediary rights promotion service can be a substitute for personal knowledge and enthusiasm. (2001: 174) Former Frankfurt Director Peter Weidhaas, while admittedly a far from neutral commentator, avers: The book trade in general and the rights business in particular are both contact-intensive and communications-oriented operations of relative complexity. Any possibility that the real Frankfurt Book Fair could ever be replaced by an Internet clone is purely and simply a figment of some futuristic visionary’s fertile imagination. (2007: 268)21 As so often when revisiting the paradigm-shattering rhetoric of the 1990s digital mavens, their predictions of a sea-change in the way information societies would operate have been simultaneously both proven correct and revealed as a monstrous exaggeration. The tech-wreck survivor RightsCentre remains a vibrant online business, with its subscription-only Film Rights Directory (FRD), established in late 2000, now its major generator of online traffic and revenue (Baker, 2000a; Owen, 2001; Reid,

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 91 2001; Rosenblatt, 2008).22 But equally, the circuit of international book fairs continues to thrive, with Frankfurt in 2009 recording a staggering 290,000 attendees and 7,300 exhibitors.23 The future of online rights dealing seems assured as a digital complement to the media industries’ periodic face-to-face gatherings. Perhaps unconsciously echoing a very Bourdieusian conception of the cultural field – riven by ongoing rivalries and constant strategising amongst agents to gain tactical advantage – regular Publishers Weekly contributor Calvin Reid summed up this complementarity in describing RightsCenter’s prominent self-marketing at (perhaps ironically) international book fairs. For Reid, online rightstrading is ‘designed to fit into the book publishing industry’s ecosystem’ (2000b: 14).

Film Festivals: ‘Love Story on the Red Carpet: Book Meets Film’24 The phenomenon of the film festival is the locus where multiple cultural and commercial functions intersect: distribution marketplace for independent productions and informal distribution network; barometer of cinematic esteem as measured by awards and prizes; venue for the discovery and consecration of film-making talent; publicity and marketing launch pad; source of film financing and packaging; focus of campaigns of civic or even national rebranding; spotlight on social and political issues; and medium for cosmopolitan identity affirmation for often affluent cinephilic audiences and the sponsors who seek their brand loyalty (Wasko, 2003; Wong, 2008; Kaufman, 2009). The tensions generated by these competing motivations, along with the ever-greater visibility of film festivals in the mainstream media, have made critical analysis of film festivals a rich and currently burgeoning subfield within cinema studies research (De Valck, 2007; Iordanova and Rhyne, 2009; Porton, 2009a; 2009b). But even as such film scholars rightly lament the paucity of academic attention to the now decades-old phenomenon of the film festival, they have to date paid almost no attention to another role of film festivals – that of mediator of film’s relationship to the book and other media sectors, chiefly through their emergence as adaptation rights fairs. The mirror image of October’s ‘Berlinale Day’ at the Frankfurt Book Fair is February’s ‘Books at Berlinale’ event at the Berlin International Film Festival (BIFF), ‘a kind of exchange program’ announced in 2004 and first convened in 2005 (‘Frankfurt’, 2004; Mutter, Zeitchik and Baker, 2004: 12; Hermanns, 2005). Although the Berlinale’s participation in the Frankfurt Book Fair dates back to 2003, this more recent two-way consolidation of the relationship arose from a widespread perception that the book and film industries typically frequent separate industry events, rarely encountering each other or forging cross-media networks (‘Frankfurt’, 2004; 2005; Hermanns, 2005). This need to stage regular

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and adaptation-focussed liaison between professionals in the two industries is captured in remarks by German film and television agent Petra Hermanns, who emphasises the vital importance of representatives of the two industries ‘get[ting] to know one another and talk[ing] about it amongst themselves, at forums and festivals’ (2005). Hence ‘Books at Berlinale’ conceives of itself very consciously as helping ‘successful books enjoy a second life on the silver screen or TV’ (‘Frankfurt’, 2005). The ‘Books at Berlinale’ programme includes a chosen adaptation case study (in 2009 the post-Holocaust drama and German–US–Israeli co-production Adam Resurrected (2008)), a range of panel discussions and one-on-one ‘speed dating sessions’ between rights managers and film scouts and producers (“Frankfurt’, 2005). In ‘Books at Berlinale’’s dedicated ‘Books at Breakfast’ event, publishers pitch their top 12 adaptable bestsellers to assembled film producers. The organisers’ selection from all titles submitted for consideration by international publishers comprises ten adult titles and two children/young adults titles (the former category included, in 2009, Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winner The White Tiger).25 In pitching the event to the Berlinale’s primary audience of film producers, the organisers of ‘Books at Breakfast’ repeatedly emphasise both the prepublication, first-look newness and the established print-culture credentials of the material, even where these two qualities would seem to be in contradiction: The books to be presented are all bestsellers, award-winners, or brand-new publications, meaning that the producers also have the exclusive opportunity to secure film rights early, before the book hits the market. The books selected combine literary quality, popular success and a high screen adaptability. (‘Berlinale’, 2009) Desirable as is this shift away from ad hoc and individually initiated cross-industry exchanges to ‘the intensification and professionalisation of contacts between the two industries’, the phenomenon nevertheless raises questions about the selecting and filtering role played by such events in setting the mechanisms of the adaptation industry (‘Frankfurt’, 2005). For just as Hilary McPhee astutely reads the layout of the book fair hall as an encapsulation of various regimes of power operative within international publishing, so too do adaptation-incubating events such as ‘Books at Berlinale’ bring adaptation closely into contact with a range of economic, geographical and temporal forces which have not previously marked it so visibly. Accordingly, adaptation scholars should take an active interest in the kinds of ‘adaptation-ready’ texts routinely showcased to screen producers at such events and to weigh to what extent these festival and market choices influence which films appear at the local multiplex. Nor is it only a question of how the book industries whittle down the range of

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 93 their product for screen-industry tasting; scholars should equally be asking how such events’ prioritising of books with ‘exceptional screen adaptation potential’ might be having a knock-on effect on the book industry itself, with ‘twin-track’ creators penning both novels and screenplays simultaneously in order to better their odds of attracting cultural gatekeepers’ attention (Books, 2009). The Berlinale is currently the only A-film festival actively showcasing adaptable book properties, but it is not, as outlined in this chapter’s earlier discussion of Monaco’s CLIF, the originator of the format. The Berlinale’s publicists sidestep the issue of their event’s originality through some careful wording, proclaiming ‘Books at Berlinale’ to be ‘the world’s first market for literary adaptations to be linked to an A festival’.26 Having thus tried to steal Monaco’s thunder and demote its Francophone rival in the circuit hierarchy, the Berlinale can hardly object to other international film festivals mimicking the cross-industry format in their turn. Since 2007 the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has hosted ‘Books at MIFF’ in an uncredited Australasian emulation of both European models. As with the Frankfurt–Berlin alliance, ‘Books at MIFF’ arose from MIFF Director Claire Dobbin’s perception of a problematic dissociation between the two industries: ‘Publishers and producers never really have the conversations in Australia. They live in entirely separate worlds. If we can change this, it will be good for books, good for films and good for our national culture’ (George, 2007). The feeling is clearly two-way; Random House Australia Rights Manager Nerrilee Weir has participated in ‘Books at MIFF’ several times, being aware that publishers ‘don’t have that network at the moment. We really want that dialogue to be happening’ (‘Books’, 2007: 21). As she elaborates, ‘Books at MIFF’ productively pushes publishers outside of their normal rights-trading comfort zone: Film rights are something that you tend to sell almost by default in a way. You get some people interested, you know you’ve got a property, you go to your contacts, but it’s not like selling publishing rights where you know it inside out. You need somebody who knows who the players are. (Weir, 2008) As a result of participating in ‘Books at MIFF’ in 2007, Random House Australia produced its first dedicated film rights catalogue – which can of course also be circulated at book-focussed events such as the Frankfurt and London book fairs (Meyer, 2008; Random House Australia, 2008). By the third iteration of ‘Books at MIFF’ in July 2009, the still invitationonly event had expanded to include 21 publishing companies and literary agents, 30 Australian and international film financiers and 70 Australian and New Zealand film producers (George, 2007; ‘MIFF’s’, 2009).

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Figure 3.3 Front cover of Random House Australia’s Film Rights Catalogue 2010 © Reprinted by permission of Random House Australia

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 95 ‘Books at Berlinale’ also has a perceptible cultural nationalist undercurrent, with titles from prominent German authors such as Bernhard Schlink previously listed amongst the 12 chosen titles (an adaptation of Schlink’s The Weekend is now in production, which organisers attribute to the book’s earlier showcasing) (Berlinale, 2008; ‘Berlinale’, 2009). But for the organisers of Australia’s MIFF, the theme of highlighting national stories to global audiences is an even stronger imperative. This is no doubt due to Australia’s far smaller domestic market of around 21 million (compared with Germany’s approximately 81 million) and to the absence of a regionally distinct language functioning as in-built cultural protectionist measure. But these questions of degree aside, the format of MIFF is strongly reminiscent of the structure of both its Monaco and Berlin prototypes: a specialist industry panel analyses a recent adaptation; publishers pitch to producers ‘titles ripe for screen adaptation’; significant programme time is allotted to one-on-one rights negotiations; and the event’s organisers produce a catalogue listing rights details of all properties discussed at the event (‘MIFF’s’, 2009). At previous years’ ‘Books at MIFF’, the casestudy texts selected have included the arthouse period drama Romulus, My Father (2007), the screen adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prizewining Disgrace (2008) and, in 2009, director Robert Connolly’s thriller Balibo (2009), based on the true story of the Indonesian military’s murder of five Australian journalists during the 1975 invasion of East Timor. Mark Woods, Manager of the MIFF 37° South Market, notes that this most recent case study undermined the simple unidirectional logic that often pervades industry discussion of adaptation: This year our case study was Balibo, which brought the past two years together in so far as we had a book that led to a leading playwright (David Williamson) penning an adaptation with a leading director (Rob Connolly) and the film then led to another book being written about the shooting of the film.27 It is striking how closely this multi-trajectional logic echoes the most recent wave of theorisation in academic adaptation studies, as outlined in this book’s Introduction. The tired (and never entirely accurate) concept of content moving from book to film has been jettisoned to acknowledge that content proliferates across multiple platforms, often simultaneously, and frequently with print its subsequent not its initial incarnation (see Chapter 5 for further discussion of this point). Yet, for all their proliferation and increased scholarly interest, it must be acknowledged that such film festival publisher–producer meets tend to remain sidebar events to the screen festival programme proper. This fact most likely explains film scholars’ neglect of this aspect of the film festival, accompanied perhaps by the discipline’s lingering desire to get out from under the skirts of literary studies and its prejudicial medium hierarchies.

96 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks When films derived from books are scheduled in competition at the major film festivals, their publicity typically positions them as great films, not explicitly as great adaptations. This is in stark contrast to the Frankfurt Book Fair’s trumpeting of esteemed film adaptations during its Berlinale Day events specifically as adaptations from print materials to screen. No doubt this structural imbalance reflects the greater cultural clout of film in the twenty-first century compared with the anxiety-ridden book industry, ever fearful of imminent obsolescence. It is only in rare instances of a film derived from an autobiographical narrative that film festivals give red-carpet fanfare to a movie’s credentials as an adaptation, as in the 2007 Cannes Film Festival premiere of Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart (2007), at which memoirist Mariane Pearl and her young son appeared side by side on the red carpet with A-list celebrities ‘Brangelina’. But even here, the choreographed juxtaposition of author and actress is as much to emphasise Jolie’s bewigged similarity to Pearl in her praised performance as it is to emphasise the film’s status as an adaptation. With book publishing lacking the aura of drama and personalisation that

Figure 3.4 Authorial red-carpet appearance: Mariane Pearl and her son Adam flanked by director Michael Winterbottom, star Angelina Jolie and producer Brad Pitt at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of A Mighty Heart (2007) © Picture Media/REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 97 pervades the film industry, the intervening book becomes significantly marginalised as a necessary – but ultimately un-photogenic – intermediary between the main games of real-life drama and its cinematic recreation.

Writers’ Weeks: ‘The World’s Largest Public Celebration of the Written Word’28 Book fairs and screen festivals as key engine rooms of the adaptation economy are both industry-focussed, production-oriented events. They are complemented by the necessary third in this triumvirate – writers’ weeks – where adaptations are less often incubated than marketed to and evaluated by a key demographic of highly media-literate, often affluent, early-adopters.29 In common with book fairs and screen festivals, writers’ festivals have suffered from a paucity of academic attention until very recently. Humanities academics, it might have been thought, fit squarely within the demographic writers’ festivals seek hardest to attract but, despite this, Cori Stewart’s recently completed PhD on the topic locates only a ‘single sustained piece of academic research on writers’ festivals’ – tellingly, an unpublished PhD thesis by fellow Australian Ruth Starke (2009: 25). The overwhelming preponderance of commentary about writers’ festivals is journalistic or derives from cultural-sphere periodicals, and frequently speaks of festivals disdainfully as having compromised and commercialised literature (Ommundsen, 1999: 174). Hence the questions posed by Kerryn Goldsworthy in her 1992 article ‘In the Flesh: Watching Writers Read’ remain pertinent: When . . . we pay at the door yesterday or tomorrow to hear writers read and speak at festivals and readings, what is it exactly that we’re happy to be paying for? Who chose the writers, and on what basis? Where is the funding coming from? These questions should not be read as accusatory and paranoid. . . . These questions should simply be asked. (46) The recent wave of work on celebrity authorship cited in Chapter 1 of necessity touches upon the subject of author readings and public performances. But the background of such scholars in literary studies causes their work to fight shy of closely analysing the connections between books and other media that writers’ festivals readily manifest, both in their programming choices and in their audience behaviours. So to Goldsworthy’s searching questions about the role of writers’ festivals in defining ‘Literature’ we might append the further question: what role do writers’ festivals play in blurring the boundaries between the book and other media forms? In short, how does the writers’ festival function in the field of the adaptation economy?

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Writers’ festivals seem to be a strongly Commonwealth-derived phenomenon, with the leading global events (as outlined earlier) comprising the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Adelaide Writers’ Week, the Sydney and Melbourne Writers’ Festivals, and Toronto’s Authors at Harbourfront programme, in particular its International Festival of Authors (IFOA) component (Herbert, 2001; McPhee, 2001: 237–38; English and Frow, 2006: 43; Cameron, 2009). Beyond these headline events stretches an array of regional, city and even suburban writers’ festivals according this ‘least spectacular of all art forms with an opportunity to strut its wares in public’ (Ommundsen, 2009: 22; McCrum, 2006). Interestingly, long-established events such as Adelaide Writers’ Week were originally designed as fora exclusively for published writers, with the early years witnessing a certain hostility on the part of writers to members of the public who wanted to attend and ask questions. The decisive shift of writers’ festivals towards a consumption and audience focus is neatly emblematised by the establishment in Adelaide in 1986 of a second, smaller marquee, which hosted industry-focussed events while writers read to public gatherings in the larger tent (Starke, 2006). There is still invariably an industry stream of programming at writers’ festivals; especially in countries such as Australia that no longer convene national book fairs, much local-level rights-dealing by default takes place at the major writers’ festivals, away from the public gaze (Ommundsen, 2009: 21). But it is, on balance, accurate to say that writers’ festival programming over preceding decades has become overwhelmingly audienceoriented. It aims especially to cultivate a particular demographic of upper-middle-class, tertiary-educated attendees whose cultural consumption is likely to be omnivorous, and whose networks into the media industries tend to make them highly-courted cultural opinion-setters, including in the realm of adaptation. All book festivals brand themselves as celebrations of the written word, but it is interesting to observe the politics of distinction emerging between self-declared ‘literary’ festivals on one hand (favouring literary fiction, poetry, essays and perhaps plays), and the more broadly conceived ‘writers’ festivals’ on the other (more open to non-fiction, genre writings, graphic novels and digital experimentations) (Starke, 1998: xiv; Lurie, 2004: 11). It is at these more catholic-minded ‘writers’ festivals’ that adaptation has now attained a prominent, though little analysed, profile. Programmes of major international writers’ festivals have recently included celebrity screenwriter adaptors, talks by authors accompanying films adapted from their work, and panels on the joys and perils of the adaptation process – all strongly reminiscent of sessions now regularly featured at book fairs.30 Attempts by festivals to distinguish themselves from rival events within the same circuit afford a fascinating glimpse of contemporary understandings of ‘the literary’ in the process of being actively forged, sustained and challenged. Festivals’ staged proximity of

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 99

Figure 3.5 Book festivals’ politics of distinction

Literature to other media, and the permeability of media categories this suggests, are key ways in which contemporary notions of the ‘literary’ are enacted. Hence the fascination of writers’ festivals lies not so much in their self-stated claims to be ‘celebrations’ of some pre-existing category of ‘Literature’. Rather, for all their reticence on the subject, writers’ festivals are at their most influential as subtle but effective definers of Literature in the public mind. The gradual shift from ‘literary’ to ‘writers’ festivals has not passed without criticism; Australian cultural commentator Caroline Lurie laments that: The new type of festival visitor now expects a plentiful supply of fairly sophisticated catering with decent wine and good coffee, for which they are willing to pay. Inch by imperceptible inch, the demographic expands beyond passionate lovers of literature to a more general and well cashed-up audience who wants to hear and see the

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Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks latest Booker winner, the spunky author whose sexy novel was made into a film, the new black chick on the international circuit. (2004: 12)31

Intriguingly, the pejorative discourse long surrounding adaptation (as outlined in this volume’s Introduction) is here transferred from the adapted text itself onto the cultural institutions facilitating audiences’ connection with adaptations. If studying adaptations once raised the spectre of polluting the rarefied atmosphere of the university English department, such commentaries suggest it now threatens to spread the same contagion amongst the broader public. The real, if unspoken, target of Lurie’s rather reactionary critique is likely the morphing of the so-called ‘literary’ or ‘writers’ festival’ into a third variant – the thoroughly cross-media cultural festival, also known as the ‘festival of ideas’. Such events, of which the UK’s Hay Festival (held annually in late May) is the prime example, base their programming upon ‘quality’ cultural content, regardless of its medium of origin or destination via adaptation. They cater specifically to audiences who reject any hoary notion of a hierarchy of media in which the book occupies the pre-eminent position. Instead, such audiences actively pursue stimulating content across formats in a medium-agnostic attitude of cultural connoisseurship. Hence the Hay Festival’s enthusiastic embrace of former guest speaker Bill Clinton’s adept sound-bite description of it as ‘the Woodstock of the Mind’ (McCrum, 2006; Walker, 2008). In 2009, the Hay Festival programme boasted, inter alia, a series of film screenings, interviews with film directors, producers, screenwriters and stars (including director Stephen Daldry on his three films – all themselves literary adaptations or subsequently adapted to the stage), graphic novelists and comic book creators, celebrity (ex-)politicians, television personalities, playwrights, designers and musicians.32 Hay’s conception of its audience profile is best discerned through perusing its list of sponsors, which include the cross-media assemblage of The Guardian, Sky Arts TV, Sony, BBC Radio and Working Title productions.33 Nor is Hay a one-off or aberrant cultural event: its global exporting of the Hay formula saw the organisers recently given the Queen’s Award for International Trade with closely modelled, Haylabelled festivals now held in Segovia, Alhambra, Abu Dhabi, Nairobi and Beirut.34 Yet even against this background of global success for the Welshborders village, tussles over who has the right to define book culture continue. The association of Hay-on-Wye with books dates back to Richard Booth’s opening of an eponymous bookshop in 1961 and – in a bravura example of his talent for publicity – proclaiming himself ‘King of Hay’ in 1977. The Hay Festival itself is a more recent development, having been first convened in 1988 by Peter and Norman Florence with a handful of volunteers. During the intervening years, the festival has grown to huge

Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 101 proportions: it now attracts around 80,000 attendees annually and offers over 350 separate events (McCrum, 2006; Middleton, 2008; Moss, 2008; Walker, 2008; Engel, 2009). Because of its present scale, the Festival has for some years now been staged outside of the town itself in a complex array of tents and outdoor fora, thus reducing foot traffic through the town’s high street. This complaint has been at the heart of some segments of the village protesting against the festival, even in 2008 setting up a rival (far smaller) fringe event named the ‘Real Hay Festival’ (Moss, 2008). Recurrent amidst complaints about the celebritisation and commercialisation of Hay has been disquiet with the range of non-literary speakers invited, and the list of corporate sponsors the event now attracts. Snide references to the festival as ‘Waterstones-on-Wye’ (a reference to the UK’s dominant bookselling chain) or ‘Sky-on-Wye’ recur in UK media coverage of the dispute within the town (Johnson, 2009). Second-hand booksellers in Hay interviewed in October 2009 by the UK’s Marches TV were particularly aggrieved that Sony, to publicise its electronic Reader, was cosponsoring the event. Protest culminated in a made-for-publicity mock trial and execution of Booth as ‘King of Hay’ featuring regicides complete with pikes, axes and seventeenth-century military costume in an eccentric but decidedly pointed street-theatre protest at the way the town was being developed.35 Hay Festival founder and chief Peter Florence remains unmoved by the protests, however, and disinclined to capitulate to some townsfolk’s calls for the event to revert to being a second-hand book fair. Without cross-media corporate sponsorship, Florence makes plain, the Hay-style cultural festival would cease to exist: ‘We’re not trying to make money. We’re a charity. But without sponsorship we’d have a bunch of people in a field looking at cows’ (Engel, 2009).

Conclusion The significance of writers’ festivals for understanding the contemporary adaptation economy lies precisely in their range, variability and fractiousness. When we observe the tensions and demarcation disputes between so-called ‘literary festivals’, ‘writers’ weeks’ and ‘festivals of ideas’, we are observing the making of ‘the literary’ as a contemporary cultural category. More broadly, publishers’ increasingly cognate worlds of the book fair and the screen festival crucially stage-manage cross-industry encounters, showcasing certain literary properties for adaptation, while remaining less accessible to others. Rather than constituting some sacrosanct, pre-determined apex of print culture, the contemporary ‘literary’ world is in fact more accurately conceived of as an ongoing sociological process, actively fashioned through the collaborations and competition between cultural institutions in the same circuit, and now also between events historically part of different circuits. It is crucial that adaptation studies be attuned to these powerful sociological processes. For just as the

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discipline has now worked for some decades to expand the notion of ‘literary’ adaptation beyond a highly selective Anglo-American belleslettres canon to encompass works adapted from all print sources, we need equally to be cognisant that such debates are not solely played out in academic monographs, journals and conferences. The larger public conception of what constitutes ‘Literature’ is crucially mediated in part by audience-oriented events such as writers’ weeks. Less accessible to the public, but by no means less determining for that, are the predominantly industry-focussed book fairs and screen festivals which significantly filter which properties are taken up for adaptation, and in which media, so that they become available fodder for academic contemplation and analyses. A piquant question for adaptation studies researchers to ask themselves might thus be not the traditional (and otiose) one of ‘how does this screen adaptation differ from its source text?’ but rather ‘where did this adaptation begin?’. Such habitual self-reflection would challenge default recourse to methodologies of textual analysis. It should act as a spur to researchers to factor into their theorisations the economic, institutional and geopolitical circumstances facilitating the contemporary proliferation of adapted texts. We are, after all, living through these changes and risk being mere uncomprehending bystanders to them. Far preferable for adaptations scholars to assert themselves as participants in such developments, or at the very least as informed and critical observers of them. For this reason it is not only intellectually necessary but also an enticing prospect to understand how such adaptation industry formations are actively shaping individual scholarship and adaptation studies’ collective intellectual endeavour.

4

The Novel Beyond the Book Literary Prize-Winners on Screen

In general, the institutionalised academic division of labour has ensured that the discipline of sociology would tend to steer clear of any too direct encounter with literature proper. . . . Literary values were thus safely left to the literary critic, social facts to the sociologist. (Milner, 2005: 54–55) The governing impetus behind the present volume is to reconfigure the discipline of adaptation studies by rethinking adaptation sociologically – by asking how the traffic of content particularly between print and screen formats is facilitated, inhibited and everywhere subtly shaped by the institutional structures of the media environment, and what the significance of these processes might be for our understanding of adaptation. Given this key purpose, it might appear an eccentric choice to dedicate a chapter to the phenomenon of literary prizes. When literary prizes are discussed by the academic community, as they rarely are other than in tones of disparagement at their allegedly meretricious distortion of critical judgement, discussion tends to be preoccupied with the textual effects of prizewinners. Typically a self-declaredly innovative unit in a university literary studies programme might group together a number of cumulative winners of a particular literary award and read them together to deduce similarities in theme and writerly stylistics. It is not unknown for academic staff to set the shortlist for an annual literary award as the reading list for a literary studies unit, with the students acting as a kind of de facto jury, arguing the merits of the official judging panel’s decision.1 In recent years, however, a vibrant field of research has emerged which attempts to study the institution of literary (or more broadly cultural) prizes as a sociological phenomenon, concerning itself less with textual interpretation than with siting prizes in the context of the cultural infrastructure of a given society. For such critics, the literary prize is deserving of attention in its own right as a pivotal cultural function within the literary system, influencing in crucial ways the terms on which literature is produced, circulated and consumed. Yet such otherwise groundbreaking literary studies analyses tend to draw a cordon around the literary world, effectively

104 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen quarantining it from the wider media industries in a manner increasingly difficult to reconcile with corporate publishing’s converged multinational ownership structures and audiences’ medium-eclectic behaviours. For literary prizes do not have a significant impact only within the bibliosphere, but also on the wider cultural landscape through adaptation of literary prize-winning works for other media, notably film and television. It is this extra-literary life of the literary prize-winner with which this chapter is centrally concerned as it attempts to trace a perhaps counterintuitive concept: the life of the novel beyond the book. Literary prizes constitute a crucial but commonly overlooked node of the adaptation network. Chiefly, the literary prize’s role is to catalyse adaptation, by drawing attention to a particular text (or, increasingly, to a shortlist of highlighted texts), by broadening interest in the title beyond the reviews pages of the literary community, typically increasing sales and public recognition of the winning volume in the process and, through a combination of all of these factors, markedly increasing the likelihood of the title’s adaptation into other media formats. The previous chapter examined the creation of a number of awards designed specifically to facilitate adaptation of certain properties, particularly the various prizes instituted by adaptation rights marketplaces such as the Cinema and Literature International Forum (CLIF) in Monaco and the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. Better known and often longer-established than these awards however is a range of literary prizes in English-speaking countries whose effect on the adaptation industry may be more powerful precisely because they are awarded at arm’s length from adaptation rights-trading fora themselves. Globally, the pre-eminent literary accolade, both in terms of prize money and prestige, is the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded annually (and often controversially) by the Swedish Academy for an international author’s body of work. Within the US, leading literary awards for a single book include the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award and honourable mentions such as the ‘New York Times Notable Book’ badge. Within the UK and British Commonwealth, the leader of the prize field is undoubtedly the Man Booker Prize (known prior to a change of sponsors in 2002 as the Booker Prize), which in 2008 celebrated its fortieth anniversary with much self-congratulatory fanfare.2 The Booker is flanked in the UK by the more recently established womenonly Orange Prize for Fiction, the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book Awards, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, and a number of less publicly well-known but critically esteemed prizes such as the long-running James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Guardian First Book Award (previously the Guardian Fiction Award). In addition to their citizens being eligible for some of these UK-based prizes, many Anglophone Commonwealth countries have their own literary awards, such as Australia’s oldest and pre-eminent prize for fiction, the Miles Franklin

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 105 Award, the newly established Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, and the various state premiers’ literary awards, all bestowed annually. Similarly, Canada offers the Governor General’s Literary Award, open to Canadian citizens only, and Ireland the extremely lucrative and internationally minded IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, awarded to writers of any nationality working in any language. For the contemporary Anglophone author, the literary sphere is flush with award opportunities and their associated potential for additional income, career enhancement and showcasing of a book property to ancillary media industries. The current chapter selects for detailed case study the Man Booker Prize, awarded annually to a novel written in English by a citizen of the British Commonwealth (or South Africa or the Republic of Ireland, which, at various points, have resigned or remained aloof from the nostalgically imperial but functionally ill-defined organisation that is the Commonwealth). My choice is prompted partly by the profile of the Booker itself (including more recently in the US whose authors are not eligible for the award),3 its reliable facility in generating high-profile scandals, its track record of selecting winners who subsequently attain major literary status, and the high incidence of Booker-shortlisted titles adapted for the screen – occasionally to great cinematic acclaim. Particularly fascinating is that the management of the Man Booker Prize has recently – and rather belatedly – recognised the prize’s perhaps serendipitous reputation as an incubator of adaptation projects, going so far as to embrace this fact as evidence of the prize’s talent-spotting acumen and cultural centrality. This lends recent Booker pronouncements a self-consciousness regarding the prize’s relationship to the broader adaptation economy that is reminiscent of awards such as those given by the CLIF or the Frankfurt Book Fair. But the Booker and its growing flock of ‘Booker films’ attract greater public respect because facilitating adaptation was not the Booker’s original raison d’être and such films can thus be construed as cross-media endorsements of the Booker’s astute literary selections rather than as evidence of self-justifying event boosterism. All self-described ‘literary’ awards are given ostensibly for criticallydetermined excellence in textual composition, as opposed to the various ‘book awards’, commonly chosen by the industry itself, which recognise success in book design, marketing, publicity or contribution to retail turnover. But the sharp distinction that judges of literary awards have been keen to perpetuate between awards for a title’s artistic excellence and those recognising its commercial profile belies the extent to which even self-described literary awards have for several decades had a significant impact in the marketplace: prompting new cover designs and re-jacketing of a winning author’s backlist; reorienting bookshop layout by guaranteeing preferential display of winning titles; and also influencing readers’ reception of a work through mentions of a title’s prize-winning status in book reviews and the broader literary sphere. Hence even avowedly

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‘literary’ awards have long had important sociological effects which critics in recent years have begun to tease out. What remains opaque, however, is the sociological knock-on effect of literary prizes on a title’s chances of being adapted to other media, and the various motivations and strategies invoked by adapters to flag their property’s literary prizewinning pedigree to screen audiences (an issue also explored in Chapter 6). Hence the current chapter includes, in spite of the book’s Introduction abjuring such a methodology, some brief textual analyses of Booker film adaptations, not as cinematic close-reading for its own sake, but to investigate what these screen texts reveal about the adaptation industry from which they emerge.

Conceptualising Literary Prizes: Theoretical Approaches Literary prizes are a characteristically twentieth-century phenomenon, flourishing particularly in the last decades of the century (English, 2002: 126; Street, 2005: 822; Driscoll, 2008). Yet academic analysis of literary prizes in Anglophone countries has failed to keep pace with their proliferation, their burgeoning industrial sway, and concomitantly high levels of public recognition. The academy’s habitual responses to literary prizes might be grouped into four strategies. The first of these, and perhaps the most powerful because of its very covertness, has been simply to ignore literary awards as mere lotteries which at best signify contemporary judges’ esteem for newly published works but which indicate nothing of a text’s longevity, canonical worthiness or ‘intrinsic’ artistic value. When the discrepancy between such intellectual marginalising of prize culture and the fulsome journalistic coverage the phenomenon regularly receives became too great, the dominant critical mode for addressing prize culture shifted to one of outright disparagement. Prize culture was attacked for its commercialising, celebritising logic and its imposition of an allegedly inappropriate hyper-individualistic and competitive ethos on the process of artistic creation (‘Who’, 1989). By such reasoning the proliferation of prizes was itself a sign of their ultimate inconsequence, signifying a sectoral devaluation that promised the imminent collapse of the entire prize system under the weight of its own puffery (Hitchens, 1993: 16, 19). Former UK publisher and literary editor Robert McCrum provides a splendidly splenetic synthesis of such disparaging responses to prize culture in his comments about the emergence of a new prize-ordained literary genre: ‘Out of a swamp of greed, ambition and creative writing crawled a new Gollum, the “Booker novel”, trailing the slime of self-promotion’ (2006). The very excess of McCrum’s rhetoric perhaps indicates that the tactic of dismissing prize culture through vituperative disparagement was beginning to exhaust itself – paradoxically drawing attention to exactly that which it wished to relegate to the cultural margins. By the mid 1990s

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 107 a new strand of academic responses to literary prizes attempted to take seriously prizes’ new-found cultural centrality and to use various awards as pointers to ‘serious’ new literary fiction worthy of detailed textual analysis. So Richard Todd’s Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (1996) promotes itself in its back-cover blurb as ‘the first full study of the Booker-led explosion of literary fiction in the last fifteen years’, devoting its first third to discussion of the Booker’s establishment, rules and history of various scandals, and its later twothirds to thematically linked textual analyses of various Booker-winning or -shortlisted titles. In Todd’s phrasing the book’s rationale is to ‘both offer direction through the dense thicket of the fiction itself, and illuminate the various preoccupations of that fiction’ (1996: 1). While Todd’s book deserves praise for breaking new academic ground in rejecting the disparaging approach to prize culture in favour of positing the literary prize (albeit implicitly rather than explicitly) as a subject worthy of fulllength academic attention, the book is in other ways markedly methodologically conservative. The volume’s first third analyses the cultural context of the Booker largely through quantitative information about the UK book trade (posited unproblematically as the normative locus for reception of ‘post-colonial’ fiction), while the book’s remaining portion invokes fairly standard literary-critical close-reading techniques to elucidate the significance of Todd’s predominantly post-colonial and postmodern Booker choices. The reader is left to ponder why the intriguing cultural and commercial phenomenon of the Booker Prize is not itself being theorised. It is exciting in this context to note the efflorescence, from around the mid- 1990s but especially since the turn of the millennium, of a cluster of academic studies which proceed to do just this: to situate the literary prize in its social context and to tease out theoretically its workings (Moran, 2000; Squires, 2004; 2007). Reaching beyond the narrowly interpretive methodological toolkit of literary studies, such works almost all borrow from the research techniques and theoretical schemas of the social sciences, specifically French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural ‘field’ as articulated in The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996 ([1992]) – a materialist orientation to cultural analysis which they share with the present study (Huggan, 1997: 413; English, 2002: 110; 2005: 8; Squires, 2004: 41; Street, 2005: 821; Norris, 2006: 139; York, 2007: 28). Prominent postcolonial literary critic Graham Huggan as early as 1994 observed that the Booker Prize’s over-easy conflation with a growing body of post-colonial fiction (especially after Salman Rushdie’s watershed Booker win in 1981 for Midnight’s Children) served to mask the lingeringly imperial and highly-concentrated structures of Anglophone book publishing, centred either in the former colonial metropole of London or its neo-colonial challenger New York City (24). While the Booker’s juries clearly

108 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen recognise that top-quality literary fiction may emerge from the countries of the former colonial ‘periphery’, London’s literary establishment – sitting in medieval splendour at the Booker Prize dinner’s favoured venue of the Guildhall4 – reserves to itself the right to consecrate literary excellence in ‘Commonwealth’ writing. ‘Crucially,’ Huggan notes, ‘the seat of judgement remains British’ (1997: 418). Prize-winning Australian author (though not Booker winner) Robert Drewe wryly corroborates Huggan’s view of a paternalistic and patronising exoticism of the colonial margins by a book trade infrastructure that remains obdurately rooted within the imperial centre: Of course, prizes are nice for the winner, but you have to realise they’re a lottery. As for their importance, frankly it only really counts in terms of sales and reputation if you win an overseas one. The old cultural cringe still thrives in the media and in AustLit. Critics and journalists put immense stock in London or New York opinion. (Phelan, 2005: 85) Huggan’s breakthrough is to insist that post-colonial literary criticism cease blithely celebrating the success of the empire in ‘writing back’ to the former imperial power and instead raise its myopic gaze from the words on the page to consider the institutional and commercial context of their favoured novels’ production: ‘What emerges from these scattered speculations on . . . the Booker is the need for a much more detailed sociological study of the literature it promotes’ (1997: 426). Unfortunately, for Huggan the riptide of textual analysis proves too strong, and in the same article in which he makes this perceptive observation he devotes a lengthy section to analysing the treatment of the theme of history in various Booker-nominated texts – a ratio of analytical methodologies strongly reminiscent of Todd’s book.5 In his 1999 review of Todd’s Consuming Fictions, US literary academic James F. English had lamented this slippage back into the familiar rubrics of textual analysis in treatment of the literary prize and called for a fulllength study of the sociology of the prize system in its own right. Perhaps unsurprisingly, English proceeded to answer his own call in a series of publications culminating in his (itself prize-winning) monograph The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005). English’s triumph in this landmark volume is, by invoking a loosely though not uncritically Bourdieusian framework, to provide for the first time a thoroughly theorised model of the prize phenomenon as a device for the intraconversion of symbolic and economic capital. For the contemporary cultural prize (including literary prizes such as the Booker) controversy is inevitable because the prize mechanism itself exists to transact exchanges between the two fundamentally incompatible conceptual systems of culture and commerce: ‘Far from posing a threat to the

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 109 prize’s efficacy as an instrument of the cultural economy, scandal is its lifeblood; far from constituting a critique, indignant commentary about the prize is an index of its normal and proper functioning’ (2005: 208). Thus, analysing the phenomenon of the cultural prize provides critics with a means for understanding the complex interrelationship of artistic and economic forces at every point in the spheres of cultural production and reception. In a theoretical manoeuvre paralleling the present volume’s challenge to the discipline of adaptation studies, English argues compellingly for literary studies to wean itself from its narrowly (if baroquely theorised) habits of literary close-reading to ask how the structures of the literary prize system might themselves influence in crucial ways academics’ selection and readings of texts. With respect for English’s critical acumen and the wide range of cultural spheres he analyses (his volume ranges far beyond the literary academic’s comfort zone of book prizes to encompass film, television, music, visual arts, performance and architectural awards also), The Economy of Prestige fails to account for the interrelationships between these various creative fields. For English, the cultural capital associated with the literary prize represents good coin solely within the literary realm; his analysis is sectoral-specific rather than cross-sectoral in its failure to account for how award of symbolic capital in one media field has important flow-on effects for a property’s value in other media spheres. It is on this point that the current chapter builds upon but also departs from English’s analysis of the literary prize. I explore how literary awards do not merely legitimate symbolic capital in a particular cultural segment, but moreover actively facilitate the conversion of that capital into other media sectors, with potentially beneficial effects for the originating cultural industry. To this end, the remainder of the current chapter investigates how winning or even shortlisting for a major literary award such as the Booker Prize catalyses a particular content package’s adaptability and repurposable potential in multiple media, with what effects for those involved, and with which specific ramifications for the book industry as a whole.

‘It Just Shows What the Booker Can Do’:6 Prize Culture, Book Sales and the Rights Economy It is a truism of journalistic and academic commentary on book prizes that the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction has a seismic impact on book sales in the UK and Commonwealth – most spectacularly on retailers’ turnover of the winning title, but also of the other five titles on the shortlist.7 Announcement of the winner of the annual Man Booker Prize is built up to in a strategically managed teaser campaign which since 2001 has comprised an initial ‘longlist’ of eight titles,8 subsequently whittled down by the judging panel to produce a shortlist, before the live televised

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announcement of the prize’s now single annual winner (Huggan, 1997: 415, 424–25; Anderson, 1998: 26–27; Holman, 2003: 10–11; Norris, 2006: 139–40; Keneally, 2007: 166).9 Booker laureation’s booster effect on sales can by now be taken as a given; my concern here is, rather: what is the effect of Booker shortlisting on a title’s chances of subsequent screen adaptation? Let us take a generous estimate that perhaps 10 per cent of all published novels – whether literary or popular fiction – are optioned by screen producers. We can then further narrow the field with industry statistics that between 10 per cent (at the generous end of the scale) and 1 per cent (at the pessimistic end) of these options agreements actually result in further contracts being signed for sale of screen rights. The funnel is narrowed still further by considering only those rights sales leading to actually released films or broadcast television productions (Banki, 1982: 1–2; Bedford, 1985: 5–6; Seger, 1992: xii; Wyndham, 2005b: 5; Raftos, 2008). Publishers Weekly in a 1979 survey of book/screen-industry liaisons adopted a note of caution in surveying the plethora of recent New York-Hollywood rights sales: Still, the chances of seeing a book actually made into a movie are very slim. . . . Even for top-selling books that pull sizable rights sales on movie deals, most agents believe the odds against those books actually becoming films are conservatively 10–1. (Holt, 1979: 138) The outcome of this increasingly selective process is that only a tiny number of novels published each year – on the basis of the above rule of thumb perhaps as little as 0.1 per cent – will generate completed screen adaptations.10 In stark contrast, surveying Booker Prize-shortlisted titles between 1969 (the year the prize was first awarded) and 2009 (the most recent year for which the shortlist was available at the time of writing) reveals that an astounding 21 per cent of shortlisted novels have resulted in produced films or television adaptations. If we additionally factor in projects that are currently in production, or have been announced in the trade press as in development, the figure rises to 23 per cent.11 These calculations are broadly in line with the Booker Prize administrators’ own recent estimates. The Booker Prize’s London-based public relations agency Colman Getty distributes a list of Booker-winning and -shortlisted titles that have been made into films, and of screen adaptations of other titles by Booker-winning authors.12 Ion Trewin, Literary Director of the Man Booker Prizes, states: More than a quarter of all Booker prize-winners have been turned into films, and some great ones, The English Patient and Schindler’s Ark [sic] – both Academy Award winners – among them. And another 25 shortlisted novels have been filmed too. Atonement, Notes

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 111 on a Scandal and Empire of the Sun stand out in my mind. The prize has acted as an invaluable catalyst for some of the most imaginative film-making of the past four decades.13 The promotional fillip of shortlisting indisputably increases the value and likely sale of screen rights; as Richard Todd observes, ‘each year’s “winners” are not just the novelists and their books: the winners include publishers and agents who are positioned to negotiate foreign and film rights’ (1996: 81). Thomas Keneally’s memoir Searching for Schindler (2007) records the author being approached within days of his 1982 Booker win for Schindler’s Ark by two separate film production companies, UK-based Goldcrest (producers of the then-recent epic Gandhi, much admired by Keneally) and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, backed by the financial and distribution heft of Universal. In the event, Amblin overcame Keneally’s scepticism of both the flimflammery of the option process and of Hollywood’s ability to portray three-dimensional Nazis; Spielberg dispensed with the usual option agreement and proceeded straight to purchase of the film rights (173; 181–82; Trewin, 2008). Keneally discreetly sidesteps the question of the purchase price but allows ‘I was on my way to what every writer sometimes secretly dreams of: payday’ and that ‘it seemed I would be freed from want for some years’ (2007: 182, 184). Interestingly, there are recent signs that the Booker’s brand value has risen further in the US market since Canadian author Yann Martel’s 2002 breakout success with Life of Pi (currently in feature film production).14 US-based book industry commentators observe that ‘the Man Booker itself is morphing into something bigger over here. Thanks to last year’s winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, it seems to have become less foreign and more influential’ (Feldman, 2003: 10). This reading appears borne out by the increased flagging of Booker prestige in cover stickers for US editions of shortlisted titles; for example, the US Riverhead Books edition cover design for Sarah Waters’ 2002 shortlisted title Fingersmith still subordinates Booker laureation to ‘A New York Times Notable Book’, but its appearance on the front cover at all testifies to the penetration of the Booker brand within the US domestic market by this date (Waters, 2002). In more recent years Grove Press (the US division of multinational independent Grove Atlantic) found that adding ‘Winner of the Man Booker Prize’ strap-lines to its front cover designs for Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) piggybacked on existing publicity to increase sales massively (Trewin, 2008). Trewin cites a survey of public awareness of various book prizes undertaken for the US’s National Book Award (NBA) which did not specifically include the Booker amongst the various options survey participants could check, but which many participants proactively wrote into the survey in spaces allocated for comments. Trewin recalls his NBA

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Figure 4.1 The Man Booker Prize’s growing US brand profile, as revealed by Grove Atlantic’s US paperback front cover design for Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) Cover image from The Gathering, copyright © 2007 by Anne Enright. Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler. Cover photograph by Alan Powdrill/Getty Images. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 113 contact (and presumed book-prize rival) conceding on the basis of the survey findings that Booker has ‘a powerful brand’ (Trewin, 2008). The close proximity of the world’s dominant audio-visual industry in Hollywood suggests that the value of screen rights in Booker-shortlisted novels will only continue to appreciate.

‘The Dangerous, Glamorous Interface between the Two Sets of Values’:15 The Booker Prize Goes to the Movies In launching its fortieth anniversary celebrations in 2008, the management of the Man Booker Prize announced ‘The Booker Prize at the Movies’ – a programme of four paired film screenings and writer talks convened weekly throughout June 2008 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (Merritt, 2008: 3).16 The announcement of the programme specifically cites three kinds of evidence of the Booker’s success over the preceding four decades: book sales; new kinds of writing discovered; and films the prize has generated.17 This third rationale underlines just how tightly interlinked contemporary book cultures and the broader mediasphere have become, and the level of public awareness of this fact. Interestingly, this justification of a literary prize on the grounds of its links with film culture received no equivalent mention in Booker’s 1998 self-published volume celebrating the prize’s thirtieth anniversary (Booker, 1998). In fact, one of the most intriguing aspects of the ‘Booker Prize at the Movies’ series of events is that it highlights just how long the Booker Prize has been acting as a catalyst for screen adaptation, yet how belatedly the prize’s management seems to have realised this fact and contrived ways to capitalise upon it. The disjunction between the general public’s, creative industries’ and even Booker judges’ perception of the prize’s important role in the adaptation economy on one hand and the seeming obliviousness towards this fact on the part of the prize’s administrators on the other goes back almost to the origins of the award. Reading through the Booker Prize archive, permanently housed since 2003 at Oxford Brookes University in the UK, it is clear that during the first years of the prize in the early 1970s its Booker-appointed managers were preoccupied with securing newspaper, radio and television publicity first and foremost.18 It is only with judging Chair Angus Wilson’s otherwise rather reactionary speech at the Booker dinner in 1975, in which he comments favourably on the quasicinematic cross-cutting narrative techniques evident in that year’s winning title, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, that media beyond the book begin slowly to register in the archive as creative ventures in their own right.19 Jhabvala herself wrote the screenplay for James Ivory’s 1983 film adaptation of Heat and Dust – the first Booker winner adapted for the screen – and later established herself as one of literary cinema’s most prolific and respected adapters, particularly for her subsequent adaptations

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of classic works for Merchant Ivory Productions (see Chapter 5). In the years subsequent to Jhabvala’s win, Management Committee and press release documents note in passing such cross-media traffic as Fred Schepisi’s acclaimed film adaptation of shortlisted author Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972), that a film of Margaret Atwood’s shortlisted novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) was about to go into production, and winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s previous work as a screenwriter.20 But it took another judging Chair’s speech, this time by Fay Weldon at the 1983 Booker award dinner, to point out that the then imminent merger of the UK’s Writers’ Guild, the Society of Authors and the Theatre Writers’ Guild demonstrated concretely how transmedial contemporary writers’ careers had become (a point which Weldon, as a novelist, screenwriter and former advertising copywriter, could speak on with some authority): ‘for these days a writer increasingly is a writer, is a writer, is a writer – and can move easily amongst the various media’.21 Perhaps the Management Committee’s lingering skittishness regarding repurposing of Booker titles in other media stems from its disquiet at the dramatised extracts from shortlisted titles which were packaged into BBC2’s live broadcast coverage of this same 1983 Booker dinner. The Committee’s post-mortem of the year’s broadcast reveals much managerial headshaking over the readings’ apparent televisual clunkiness: I don’t think the two media mix, without the intervention of trained adapters, screenwriters etc. In TV terms they lacked any unity. . . . The whole effect was cheapening and a concession to “showbiz”; it detracted from the Prize’s concern with literary merit.22 In 1990 the Management Committee departed from form in appointing as judging Chair Sir Denis Forman, Deputy Chairman of the UK’s Granada Television, which at that time was still enjoying the critical afterglow of its lavish 14-part miniseries derived from Booker-winner Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, adapted under the title The Jewel in the Crown (1984) (the name of the first volume in Scott’s series).23 Forman’s speech unsurprisingly dwells on his core area of expertise in screen media, highlighting the distinctive narrative qualities of print and television, and evincing a rather reverent attitude towards ‘literature’ as compared with the industrial compromises inevitable in television production (a binary strongly reminiscent of adaptation studies’ founding theorist George Bluestone, as outlined in the Introduction to this volume). Forman posits adaptation in its familiar guise as a secondary form of accomplishment, wherein the craftsman’s faithful respect for the source text rather than original creative genius is key: the vision of the writer passed through the people making the programme and reached the screen through them, as if they were his

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 115 apprentices or perhaps colleagues, much in the same way that great painters used to collect around them a school of lesser artists whose work closely reflected that of the master.24 Granted Forman, as an upstart interloper from the field of screen media claiming ‘little knowledge of the publishing trade’, might have been playing up to his literary audience, underlining literature’s presumed greater cultural authority and quarantining from commercial concerns in a pre-emptively placatory gesture; Forman opens his speech with a selfdeprecating description of himself as ‘not a connoisseur of the novel but a workmanlike television chap with an appetite for a good story and a profound reverence for the English language’. Indeed Forman goes so far in this vein to posit the novel as an ‘unfettered’ format compared with ‘the greedy maw of broadcasting’ – literature rises above its competitor media as ‘one of the last strongholds of free writing’, requiring no ‘team work, no editorial committee, no third party of any kind’. This is an astonishing claim to make to a room full of publishers, editors, agents, publicists and critics, not to mention to the assembled prize administrators themselves, whose very jobs exist to mediate public perceptions of and access to fiction. Viewed in retrospect, at is as though, by the beginning of the 1990s, the administrators of the Booker Prize had not yet found a way comfortably to celebrate the facilitating and accelerating role played by the Booker in the broader media economy. Unsurprisingly given this dichotomy, public hunger to engage with Booker novels beyond the book found outlet at some remove from the auspices of the Booker Prize itself – in periodic on-air readings of shortlisted titles, especially by BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime programme,25 and one-off live events assembling several Booker-shortlisted authors in a London theatre for readings and audience question-and-answer opportunities.26 In 1995, with the involvement of long-time Booker Management Committee Chair Michael Caine drawing to a close, the Committee commissioned the discussion paper ‘The Booker Prize for Fiction: 1995 and the Future’, investigating various strategies for ensuring the longevity and continued public profile of the award in an increasingly crowded prize field. Compared with 2008’s ‘Booker Prize at the Movies’ campaign, most striking about the 1995 discussion paper is its absence of ideas as to how the Booker managers might capitalise on the screen industries’ demonstrated interest in adapting Booker shortlisted titles for the screen, and the public enthusiasm for such adaptations – not instead of but in addition to the source novels – whether these were encountered prior or subsequent to consumption of the screen version. The reasons for this curious disconnect between the Booker’s by then well-established adaptation catalyser role and the Management Committee’s silence on the point can probably be traced back to the Booker Corporation’s original motivations in sponsoring the prize in the late 1960s. Booker McConnell, an

116 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen agribusiness and food processing group with large holdings in the former British colonies of the Caribbean had, for tax-minimisation purposes, established a subsidiary division, Bookers Books. This entity purchased majority shares in the copyright-controlling companies established by the estates of lucrative popular fiction writers such as Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie.27 Booker’s then management conceived of the endowment of a literary award with the ‘main objective of enabling Booker McConnell to become persona grata in the literary field’.28 Not only would such a prize carry a serendipitous echo of the company name, but it would additionally serve as a public demonstration of Booker ‘giving back’ to the publishing community from the profits derived from these deceased popular writers’ estates. Yet, because Booker sought beneficial corporate association with the realm of prestige cultural production, the Booker Prize was conceived from its inception as a distinctly ‘high-art’ award for literary fiction only. Spy thrillers and crime fiction may have constituted important entries on Booker’s corporate balance sheet, but only literary fiction would accumulate sufficient cultural capital to justify outlay of shareholder monies. This original prize rationale had the perhaps unintended effect of wedding the usually business-trained Booker managers charged with administering the prize to a certain ideological paradigm and literary rhetoric grounded upon hard and fast distinctions between ‘great’ writing and manifest trash.29 Ironically, it did so in precisely those decades during which such Leavisite distinctions were coming under sustained attack and falling into discredit within the literary academy. Thus Booker managed spectacularly to catch the wave of one 1970–80s literary critical fashion in the form of post-colonialism – to the extent that from Midnight’s Children onwards Booker winners constituted almost a de facto reading list in contemporary post-colonial literature. But it simultaneously painted itself into a corner in relation to British cultural studies-inspired debates about the social production of cultural value because of its adamantine insistence that great literature was innately superior not only to popular fiction but to popular culture as a whole. One of the 1975 judging panel, Roy Fuller, fulminated in the Guardian newspaper against what has become known colloquially as the ‘Hampstead novel’, a British narrative typically limiting its horizons to the mid-life dilemmas and middle-class adulteries of people stultifyingly similar to those forming the social environment inhabited by their creators: ‘Novelists have to get away from writing the diary which they are doing at the moment: that is too easy. There is a public for it; but it is a television drama public, and it is there on TV’. Bringing the article to the attention of the Management Committee, Booker Management Committee Chair Michael Caine regarded Fuller’s jeremiad as ‘extremely perceptive’.30 Given such a starting position, it became almost impossible for the Booker Prize’s management to lend enthusiastic public support to Booker titles successfully

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 117 adapted to the screen. After all, it was the market failure of ‘the English novel’ and alleged creeping philistinism of late-1960s Britain that had prompted Booker McConnell’s subsidy of an annual book prize in the first place; if the market could itself be trusted to adjudge the value of Booker choices through rights-trading and cross-media production perhaps there was no need for Booker’s corporate largesse in the first place? The recently installed Literary Director of the Man Booker Prize, Ion Trewin – himself a former Times literary editor, publisher at Hodder & Stoughton, and Booker judge – deserves credit for charting the Prize’s way out of this self-defeating ‘culture versus trash’ binary logic. Trewin’s 2008 championing of ‘The Booker Prize at the Movies’, viewed in this light, is not only an adept means to enhance public awareness of the prize’s fortieth anniversary, but more fundamentally represents a harnessing of the Booker’s cross-media commercial impact as evidence of its cultural clout. Trewin recounts: This [2008] being the fortieth anniversary of the prize, we looked around for the kinds of things we could do that might celebrate forty years of the prize. And somebody . . . pointed out that the number of both prize-winners and shortlisted books that had either been turned into film or had been acquired for film but hadn’t been made was actually substantial. And wouldn’t it be a great idea to have a season somewhere . . . (Trewin, 2008) In this new formulation of the prize’s role, cultural esteem and commercial heft are presented as mutually enhancing. The Booker functions as a sifting device bringing contemporary fiction of the highest calibre to the attention of a broad English-language reading public; should film producers then take up this content to adapt for acclaimed films that only serves to bring the title, novelist and prize to a still wider audience, validating in turn the Booker’s role as sagacious judge of cultural value in the first instance. For cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, by contrast, the field of restricted production akin to high culture and the sphere of commercial mass production typical of the capitalist system are forever locked in conflict: ‘It is always an opposition between small-scale and large-scale (“commercial”) production . . . between the deferred, lasting success of “classics” and the immediate, temporary success of bestsellers’ (1993: 82; see also 113). Elevation of a cultural property’s stocks in the economic sphere serves, in Bourdieu’s conception, to reduce its symbolic capital in inverse proportion. The administrators of the contemporary Booker Prize evidently suffer from no such neo-Marxist qualms. But, as the following selected case studies of Booker-shortlisted titles adapted for the screen aim to highlight, neither of these rather reductionist

118 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen frameworks adequately captures the complexity of capital flows with which the Booker film is typically charged.

‘The Bookish Temperament has Rarely Seemed So Sexy’:31 Booker-shortlisted Novels on Screen The already fraught commercial/cultural dual identity inherent in the Booker Prize’s set-up is further exacerbated in the case of Booker screen adaptations, for the adapted text must moreover straddle the distinctive media of print and the screen. On one hand, the established brand identity of Booker-shortlisted titles makes them compelling source material for film-makers. The fact that a Booker-shortlisted title already enjoys a level of public recognition gives it a certain pre-sold quality, demonstrating ‘a built-in audience’32 of potential film-going readers which serves to reduce commercial risk and thus facilitates production financing (see Chapter 6 for elaboration of this issue) (Kemp and Bulkley, 2004: 4; Higson, 2006: 71). It is no accident that Working Title, the UK production house responsible for many notable literary adaptations including Atonement (2007), has around 30 per cent of its development slate deriving from book options at any one time (Kemp and Bulkley, 2004: 4). Yet, on the other hand, the peculiarly literary qualities that the Booker shortlist typically celebrates – strongly interiorised point-of view, linguistic self-consciousness, playful metafictionality – tend to make these amongst the most difficult texts to translate to audio-visual media. British television comedian, and 2002 Booker Prize judge, David Baddiel is one of many to have taken the Booker to task for the over-representation of such novels, deemed by Booker’s detractors to evince its judges’ penchant for postmodern obscurantism. Baddiel’s tongue-in-cheek advice for the would-be Booker-winning novelist is: ‘Make your narrator an artist, a writer or an academic who can spend a lot of time thinking very deep thoughts about art, writing or academia’ (2002). Hence Booker adapters both desire to convert such properties’ literary acclaim into filmic prestige, but often seek to do so against the thematic grain of the novels themselves. Out of their struggle to achieve such a complex alchemy, film-makers have devised a number of onscreen strategies to flag Booker consecration and directorial reverence for print culture, while aiming to create a filmic text both commercially successful as well as critically esteemed by the cinematic community. As this summary might suggest, to carry off such a thing is no easy task. Hence the contradictory and perceptibly anxious nature of many Booker films as they attempt to broker the interests of multiple adaptation industry stakeholders. Borrowing from the useful terminological taxonomies of narratology, we can classify these various directorial strategies for referencing print culture into extradiegetic and intradiegetic varieties. Among film industry tactics for associating the cultural cachet of a celebrated author with

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 119 a screen adaptation of their work is hiring the author as an executive producer, a ploy which can in production terms ensure a useful source of on-hand knowledge about the narrative world conveyed in the book. Simultaneously, in terms of marketing and promotion, it serves to forestall aggrieved fans’ predictable complaints that their favourite author’s work has been debased by ham-fisted, faithless adaptation (see also Chapters 1 and 6 on this point). Thus the production notes for Atonement record that acclaimed British author Ian McEwan served as an executive producer on the project, a position which frees the novelist from the burden of overseeing the financial and daily shooting minutiae of a line or assistant producer, but which confers significant say in the choice of screenwriter, cast and possibly even director (Donadio, 2007; Hampton, 2007: v).33 Authors have also long worked as screenwriters on adaptations of their novels: Booker shortlistees Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Roddy Doyle, Anita Desai, Patrick McCabe and David Lodge all wrote film or television screenplays of their own works. Yet it is a decades-old cliché in film circles that the unfamiliarly collaborative nature of the screenwriter role can chafe against the novelist’s habitual (albeit relative) autonomy: Thomas Keneally recalls being ‘sacked’ – ‘in the nicest possible way’ – by Spielberg after delivering a first, overly long draft screenplay for Schindler’s List (2007: 193). At one remove from commissioning the author to draft an adapted screenplay is the practice of soliciting authorial commentary on screenplay drafts composed by others. Iconoclastic US director Neil LaBute has claimed that receiving A.S. Byatt’s imprimatur for his radical changes to the modern male protagonist of her Bookerwinning novel Possession (1990; 2002) was like being offered ‘the keys to the kingdom’: ‘Not only did Byatt O.K. the change [of nebbish British postdoctoral student Roland into a handsome, brash US expatriate]; she didn’t question the humor either. She got it. Humor makes us alive, and she wanted Roland to be alive on the screen’ (Zalewski, 2002a: 10). Securing Byatt’s blessing for what had been a troubled project long in Hollywood development turn-around enabled LaBute to transform one of the Booker’s most self-consciously literary winners into a more straightforwardly cinematic tale of transatlantic culture clash. In especially close author–director collaborations, novelists have engaged in avid publicity for a film adaptation, to an extent that goes well beyond the token red-carpet premiere appearance alluded to at the opening of Chapter 1. In the wake of The English Patient’s (1996) Academy Award success, novelist Michael Ondaatje and director Anthony Minghella even staged joint readings at New York Town Hall and in Ondaatje’s home town of Toronto, taking turns to read corresponding sections of the novel and the screenplay in a performative embodiment of the filmic text’s interrelationship with its print source (Minghella, 1997: 3; Stoffman, 1997: E5). With Ondaatje having served as a consultant on the film, collaborator on the screenplay, visitor to the set and adviser during the

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editing process, this intense author–director partnership proved, in the late Minghella’s words, a ‘blessed collaboration’ (Jaggi, 1997: 9; Gerstel, 1996b). Situated at the liminal zone between the extra- and intradiegetic spheres is the familiar opening-credit-sequence title stating that an adaptation is ‘based on the novel by . . .’, ‘from the bestselling book by . . .’, or ‘from the pen of . . .’. Adaptation studies has a longstanding interest in such onscreen markers of adapter self-consciousness which function as though to suture together audience familiarity (whether first-hand or not) with the source text and the work they are about to see (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 19). At times, such appeals to pre-existing audience knowledge are less attempts to claim cultural status in the eyes of arthouse audiences conceived broadly so much as sly winks to niche fan communities, such as the knowing in-joke in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of The Butcher Boy (1992; 1997) when Irish author Patrick McCabe makes a cameo appearance as the dishevelled town drunk, Jimmy the Skite. (Much to his credit, McCabe deflected the gesture’s neo-Hitchcockian pretensions with the self-deprecating parry: ‘That wasn’t acting . . . It was just being drunk’ (Lacey, 1998: 50).) In these and other instances outlined in Chapter 1’s survey of the contemporary author function, the novelist’s onscreen

Figure 4.2 Author Patrick McCabe’s cameo as town drunk Jimmy the Skite in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of The Butcher Boy (1997) ©1997, Warner Bros. Pictures

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 121 appearance bestows their imprimatur upon the screen adaptation of their work – lending it a charge of authorial lustre which will resonate in the story’s new medium. Characterising almost all Booker adaptations is a conscious onscreen reverence for print culture, conceived of in the rather clichéd visual terms in which cinema tends to flag high-art literariness (Higson, 2006: 74; Leitch, 2008b: 112). Exquisitely illustrated books, leather-bound first editions, hushed libraries, dusty archives, creatively tortured authors, glamorous publishers and disconcertingly well-dressed literary academics populate the Booker adaptation, as though mustered to evoke in visual terms the literary prestige of the source text. Here it is the accoutrements of print culture from centuries past rather than the less atavistic print culture commodities of the later twentieth or twenty-first centuries that tend to be fetishised; much like the discipline of book history itself, the Booker film appears to believe that a book becomes a more venerable and compelling object the further away its origins are from the present. In the least critically successful of Booker adaptations, cinema’s unctuousness towards the book takes the form of fawning voice-overs. Of course the voice-over has long been a bug-bear of cinema studies in its oedipal quest to throw off the overweening influence of literary studies in defining literature as high art (because based on the word) in contrast to cinematic popular-culture trash (because primarily image-based). This cinema studies adaptation truism is deliciously parodied in Spike Jonze’s metafictional riff Adaptation, in which anxiety-riddled adapter Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) berates himself for lazy use of voice-over in his draft screenplay – all communicated to the suitably knowing audience via, you guessed it, voice-over. Yet, film theorists’ rejection of voice-over as an ostentatiously borrowed and therefore insufficiently cinematic means of storytelling is not without some basis in the Booker film: the teethgrinding sequences in Possession where the characters intone Victorian poetry either on the soundtrack or directly to each other intradiegetically only serve to underline how at odds with its metafictional source material LaBute’s co-written screenplay seems to be.34 More subtle and thought-provoking exercises in filmic cross-referencing to a Booker pedigree serve explicitly to problematise print culture as a signifier of power. Consider, for example, the scene in James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day (1993) where the self-deluding aristocratic British Nazi sympathiser Lord Darlington reads an anti-Semitic tract in his library to steel his resolve in dismissing two German Jewish refugee maids. Thematically similar is the profusion of print culture in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), where the accumulating lists, passes, stamps, posters and endless paperwork underline the immensity of the bureaucratic machine administering the Third Reich’s ‘final solution’ (Keneally, 2007: 233). Particularly interesting is the way Schindler’s List presents print culture as in itself morally neutral, as in the sequence where a

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Figure 4.3 Moral neutrality of print culture in Schindler’s List (1993): a professor of literature and history is deemed a ‘non-essential’ worker © 1993, Universal Pictures

Figure 4.4 Itzhak Stern’s underground hand-press © 1993, Universal Pictures

professor of literature and history in the Krakow ghetto is branded ‘nonessential’ in a work detail queue, prompting the Itzhak Stern character (Ben Kingsley) to hurriedly forge the requisite papers on an underground hand-press, and then ‘age’ them convincingly with a spilt cup of coffee. Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film repeatedly employs the device of macro close-ups of a typewriter, its keys pitilessly hammering out individual

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Figure 4.5 ‘Aging’ the professor’s forged papers with crumpling, gnawing of corners, and a spilt cup of coffee © 1993, Universal Pictures

fates, firstly in the list-making of Nazi-party functionaries, and later – this time with an air of precarious deliverance – in the list of Schindler’s Jewish factory workers to be saved from annihilation. The device is borrowed almost shot-for-shot in a later, also justly praised, Booker adaptation: Joe Wright’s Atonement.35 In the latter film the extreme close-ups and explosive sound effects as Robbie’s typewriter keys punch out in impersonal Courier font his sexually explicit and personally catastrophic note to Cecilia are contrasted with the conventionally polite and apologetic handwritten missive he had intended to send.36 That Wright has spoken publicly of his dyslexia, and therefore having ‘never read any Ian McEwan’, casts his onscreen fetishisation of print culture in a particularly striking light (Dawson, 2007: 4; ‘Boy’, 2007: 19; Solomons, 2008: 36). Both films are scrupulous in positing print culture as fluidly appropriable. Print both plays a crucial role in sustaining regimes of power – political, legal and class-based – but also harbours a subversive and potentially dangerous self-revelatory quality. In the pivotal sequence in The Remains of the Day, the ‘sentimental old love story’ that housekeeper Miss Kenton attempts to pry from the grasp of the suffocatingly repressed butler Mr Stevens testifies to an emotional life trapped behind his facade of stifling rectitude and dutiful self-abnegation. Extending this thematic preoccupation with writing’s protean nature are the number of Booker films in which letters – misplaced, misdelivered, stolen or hidden – flag writing’s ability to externalise deeply private emotion, becoming in literary biographer Janet Malcolm’s exquisite phrase, ‘the fossils of feeling’ (1994:

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Figure 4.6 Fascination with the mechanics of print culture: Schindler’s List (1993)) © 1993, Universal Pictures

Figure 4.7 Atonement (2007)) © 2007, Universal Pictures

110). The Booker film, being by virtue of its very production history hyper-conscious of regimes of literary power, replicates this on screen through highly charged representations of print (and other) media; it is as though through reading the textual surface of these adaptations we might reconstruct the industrial, legal and cultural circumstances of their creation.

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Schindler’s Ark/List: Searching for Keneally Most intriguing of all Booker adaptations’ complex relationships with their print source texts is Schindler’s List. Keneally’s ‘novel’ was published in 1982 in the UK and Commonwealth under the title Schindler’s Ark and in the US under the title Schindler’s List (on the advice – subsequently regretted by the author – of Dan Green, publishing head of the book’s US publisher Simon & Schuster) (Keneally, 2007: 159).37 As is recounted in Keneally’s recent memoir Searching for Schindler (2007), the novel is a fictionalising of the survival story recounted to Keneally by Poldek ‘Leopold’ Pfefferberg, a charismatic and voluble Schindler Jew who by the time of their encounter in 1980 was running a retail business in Los Angeles. Keneally fleshed out Pfefferberg’s eyewitness account and detailed character portrait of Oskar Schindler, the ambiguous warprofiteer and unlikely saviour of hundreds of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, through 50 in-person interviews on several continents with surviving Schindlerjuden, visits to key sites in the Schindler story and painstaking archival research. The classification of Schindler’s Ark as a novel had been problematic right from the project’s inception. Attempting to forestall such queries, Keneally included an author’s note as a preface to the first edition which states in part: To use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course which has been frequently followed in modern writing. It is the one I have chosen to follow here; both because the craft of the novelist is the only craft to which I can lay claim, and because the novel’s techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar. I have attempted to avoid all fiction, though, since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar’s stature. (1982: 9–10)38 The issue of the book’s genre categorisation was a vexed theme in the book’s early reviews, one amplified by its Booker shortlisting in 1982 and which came spectacularly to a head with Keneally’s receipt of that year’s Booker Prize for Fiction (Keneally, 2007: 168; Trewin, 2008). The Chair of the judging panel, John Carey, referred explicitly to the controversy about the book’s genre-bending scope in his prize-announcement speech: About Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark there’s been some public debate: is it really fiction? We’re used by now, though, to novels that build themselves out of facts. It’s a logical conclusion of realism, and also a natural self-protecting strategy for the novel in an age overloaded with newsprint, newsfilm and documentation. We’re used, too, to the realization that history is, anyway, always a kind of fiction

126 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen – at best a version of and selection from a totality that can never be known. Keneally shuns make-believe, and that seems the only honourable course, given the magnitude of the tragedy he has to relate. . . . It seems to us that it opens a door.39 Debate about the correct category for the book was seized upon by journalists in Keneally’s immediately post-win press conference at which the author, primed by several drinks and in sound-bite mode, made the offthe-cuff quip that the book must be a novel ‘because the judges thought so, and who am I to argue with them?’ (Keneally, 2007: 168). Of course, such a convenient journalistic angle for the story of that year’s winner constituted another useful scandal of the kind for which the Booker had already by the early 1980s become famous; as Keneally notes, ‘like most controversy, it initiated a frenzy of interest in the book’ (2007: 168). The attendant scandal, combined with the importance of the book’s subject and its critical plaudits, made a tremendous and immediate sales impact: a letter in the Booker archive from Keneally’s publisher at Hodder & Stoughton, Ion Trewin (now Literary Director of the Man Booker Prizes), recalls an ‘avalanche’ of resulting sales with ‘orders for some 5,000 copies’ having been taken the day following the announcement; another letter, this time from Hodder & Stoughton Publicity Manager, Monica Cunningham, dated some nine days after the televised award, records ‘staggering’ sales (Booker archive, 1982 file; Keneally, 2007: 170; Trewin, 2008). Spielberg, as has been recounted, was alerted to this promisingly cinematic and artistically weighty property and lost no time in pursuing the film rights. However, the rights situation for Schindler’s Ark/List was complicated by the fact that the rights to Schindler’s story (what would now likely be termed ‘life rights’) had been sold to MGM by a hard-up Schindler for US$50,000 in the early 1960s, although the studio had done nothing subsequently with them (Keneally, 2007: 25–27). Hence Spielberg’s lawyers at Universal had both to extricate these rights from MGM as well as to secure the screen rights to Keneally’s novel (under both its US and UK titles, to prevent any rival project with a similar name emerging to spook investors and confuse the film-going public) (Trewin, 2008). Even once the various rights and permissions conundrums were resolved, the process of bring Schindler’s List to the screen over the course of the subsequent decade was, as Keneally recounts in his memoir, both convoluted and arduous.40 Regretting his decision to accede to US publisher pressure in renaming the book, Keneally attempted to get Spielberg to title his film adaptation after the UK edition – as Schindler’s Ark. Spielberg, however, declined, stating that the Old Testament motif of the Ark was a metaphor not easily realisable for cinema audiences reared on naturalism, but that lists were tangible things which could be powerfully emblematised on the screen: ‘From start to finish it would be a matter of lists’ (2007: 233). Hence it is clear that Spielberg’s attention was drawn

Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 127 to the book by the publicity attendant on its Booker win, and also that the completed film’s profusion of print culture artefacts was a key element in Spielberg’s creative planning from the earliest stages of the project’s development. Yet for Spielberg’s movie, the existence of Keneally’s book as mediating text between first-hand survival account and testamentary film is troubling, complicating the film’s claims to historical ‘re-creation’. With its cinéma-vérité black-and-white imagery, its neo-documentary ambitions, and its onscreen walk-past at the close of many of the real Jewish survivors portrayed in the film, Spielberg’s film appears acutely cognisant of its role in debates about the (lamentably still-disputed) historical veracity of the Holocaust (Fogel, 1994: 315, 320; Gelley, 1997: 10, 16). It is thus everywhere at pains to ensure that cinematic techniques are not seen to discredit the memory of those millions murdered under the Third Reich. In his director’s notes to the 2004 DVD release of Schindler’s List, Spielberg writes: ‘Virtually everything I’ve seen on the Holocaust is in black and white, so my vision of the Holocaust is what I’ve seen in documentaries and in books, which have largely been stark black and white images’. Elaborating upon his choice of film-making aesthetics for this project, Spielberg conceives of his own role in uncharacteristically nonfictional terms: I tried to be as close to a journalist in recording this re-creation, more than being a film maker trying to heighten the suspense or action or the pathos. The black and white and hand-held camera gives [sic] the film a sort of cinema verite, documentary feel. It embodied the truth we were trying to explore and communicate what happened. It made it seem more real, somehow. Tellingly, the film opens with barely any credit sequence, as though to dispel at the outset fears of ‘Hollywood-isation’ in Spielberg’s treatment of the Holocaust – a critical anxiety much articulated during the years of the project’s incubation. Most unusually for a Booker winner, the existence of Keneally’s work as source text is explicitly signalled to cinema audiences for the first time only in the third title of the closing credits, which reads ‘Based on the Novel by / Thomas Keneally’. It is as though the film were trepidatious of the distorting connotations of the term ‘fiction’ itself; certainly the film’s credits nowhere mention the book’s pedigree as a winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction. The finished surface of the cinema text in this respect stands in marked contrast to the closed ecosystem of the film’s production: Keneally recalls that when visiting the set of Schindler’s List he was gratified to observe that Spielberg shot with marked-up corresponding pages of Steven Zaillian’s screenplay and of Keneally’s novel clipped side by side at the base of his monitor. With disarming modesty, Keneally confides that he was ‘delighted to see the

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pages there’ as ‘it gave [Spielberg’s] invitation to me to attend the set a marginal validity which I was relieved to possess’ (2007: 259–60).41 Schindler’s List is both preoccupied at a thematic level with the appropriability of print culture, while wary of the implications of this idea in terms of the film’s own marketing and reception. Schindler’s List thus represents the most extreme example of the contradictory attraction– repulsion dynamic film-makers have long manifested with regard to Booker texts. Admiring their literary prestige, narrative power and depiction of a richly realised world, film-makers nevertheless venture into difficult terrain in trying to convey these same literary qualities in an audio-visual medium. Yet at the same time, film-makers remain powerfully aware that in order to impress their cinematic peers and mass audiences the film must, in the blunt words of Minghella, ‘stop kneeling in front of the novel and stand up for itself’ (Wolf, 1997: 19).

Conclusion What is clear, then, is that literary prizes matter. The fact is demonstrated beyond dispute by the sheer volume of media coverage dedicated to them, and makes itself felt even by omission when a film adaptation such as Schindler’s List takes pains to avoid mentioning them. Certainly the Booker Prize has become well-recognised for its role in constructing a virtual canon of contemporary post-colonial and postmodern fiction, and popularising such challenging work for diverse readerships. More recently, literary scholars have come belatedly to recognise and analyse the Booker’s powerful institutional role: it does not stand outside of the literary system, impartially bestowing laurels on its best and finest products; rather, the Booker has fundamentally changed the structure of the literary field itself. It has altered the time of year at which prizeaspirant literary fiction is published, its packaging, retail display, and reception by interpretive communities such as literary studies programmes and private book clubs.42 But what literary studies has not to date adequately recognised – a lacuna the present chapter seeks to address – is that the ripple effect of ‘Bookerisation’ extends far beyond the parameters of the book industry and in fact registers perceptibly on the broader mediasphere: the now year-long campaign culminating in the announcement of a singular winner consumes column inches, broadcast time and, increasingly, web pages; Booker shortlisting radically increases a title’s chances of adaptation for screen media; and a story’s prizewinning DNA can be clearly discerned in the extra- and intradiegetic markers of Booker screen adaptations. Film-makers continue avidly to cultivate literary fiction’s associations of cultural prestige, just as they attempt the complex alchemy of transmuting that literary esteem to a quite different audio-visual medium. This chapter’s case studies of a number of Booker-shortlisted screen adaptations attempt to explore the

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Figure 4.8 Front cover design of the published screenplay of The English Patient (1997), jointly credited to director Anthony Minghella and author Michael Ondaatje © Anthony Minghella and Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient: A Screenplay, Methuen Drama, an imprint of A&C Black Publishers Ltd

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Booker’s important incubator role in the contemporary adaptation economy. More broadly, the discussion also aims to gauge where contemporary literary fiction fits in today’s media system. One benefit of Bourdieu’s productive concept of the cultural ‘field’ is that it rejects simplistic centre–periphery models of influence (such as the metaphor of ripples emanating from a cast stone employed above) and permits us to see how, in the complexly interdependent structure of the field, changing a single element triggers myriad other changes amongst existing agents. With this in mind, it is possible to understand not only how the Booker influences screen media by driving adaptation traffic, but how those same adaptations generate a powerful feedback effect for the book industry. Just as the Booker film aims to transmute literary critical esteem into an audio-visual vocabulary, so too the book industry eagerly appropriates to itself a film adaptation’s critical plaudits. Witness the strategic release of film tie-in editions, published screenplays, spin-off and companion titles (explored in detail in the following chapter). For example, even prior to the Academy Award success of Minghella’s film The English Patient, the drip-feed of festival buzz and laudatory early reviews ensured that tie-in editions of the book began appearing in bestseller lists in multiple publishing territories. Furthermore, Minghella’s screenplay (1997), itself packaged with a tie-in cover design utilising the film’s poster art, achieved significant profile (Korte and Schneider, 2000: 94). Most astounding of all, a companion-themed edition of Tales from Herodotus (1997) (an important intertext in both the novel and film) was released by the usually sedate Penguin Classics imprint with the strapline ‘As featured in The English Patient’ reproduced at the same size as the book’s title on its front cover. This unlikely publishing package also proceeded to mount the bestseller lists, partly on account of it being displayed at point of sale in bookshops along with gift-book and ‘novelty’ non-book items. Writing in direct response to these phenomena, an again rather curmudgeonly Robert McCrum lamented at the time that ‘film and fiction are becoming so interbred that it will soon be meaningless to fuss over the distinction to be drawn between a new script and a new novel’ (1997: 15) – an observation highly reminiscent of the ‘twin-track’ approach to contemporary authorship explored in Chapter 1. But our response to this phenomenon need not be so testy. The general public’s familiarity with, and appetite for, Booker titles is increasingly mediated via film and TV adaptations. Even the Booker Prize has come to define itself publicly as in part a content incubator for esteemed screen adaptations. Such accelerating twenty-first-century developments highlight the fact that there is no longer a discernible ‘literary’ ecosystem, only a literary sphere of an encompassing media system (Korte and Schneider, 2000: 105). McCrum is correct to the extent that, in an era characterised by avid adaptation, impermeable boundaries between media can – and need – no longer be drawn.

5

Best Adapted Screenwriter? The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter in the Contemporary Adaptation Industry In Hollywood, screenwriters are bottom of the food chain – whatever goes wrong, it’s always the writer’s fault. (Joe Penhall, quoted in Lindrea, 2004) Film is not just a writer’s medium – it isn’t a writer’s medium at all really. (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala inSwaim, 1993) I’m more of a book guy than a movie guy. (Charlie Kaufman (the real one), quoted in Zalewski, 2002b: 2.1)

Let us return to adaptation studies’ favourite metafictional, self-reflexive meditation: Spike Jonze’s inspired film Adaptation. In the film’s opening scene, the character of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) lurks in the background of what an onscreen title would have us believe is the shooting of Jonze’s earlier, breakout feature, Being John Malkovich (1999) (also scripted by Charlie Kaufman). Sloppily dressed, socially awkward and painfully redundant to the process at hand, Kaufman is given to stealing furtive smiles and waves at Malkovich’s stars, John Cusack and Catherine Keener, who glance blankly at this industry hanger-on with the studied indifference of the famous going about their business amongst the plebeian wannabes. As the pseudo-documentary-style camera passes down though the on-set hierarchy of John Malkovich as the film’s eponymous star, to the first assistant director and then the cinematographer, Kaufman (identified in another onscreen title as ‘Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter’) is peremptorily ordered out of the soundstage by the assistant director, with the reprimand ‘You. You’re in the eyeline. Can you please get off the stage?’ (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: 3). Banished outside into the harsh Californian sunshine, the screenwriter is assailed by his customary anxiety and depression, wondering despondently ‘What am I doing here? Why did I bother to come here today? Nobody even seems to know my name’ (3). If the adapted literary author is inclined to feel a mere hanger-on when visiting a film set (as explored in Chapter 1), it appears the adapted screenwriter fares little better.1 Indeed, the onscreen Kaufman strikes a new low,

132 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter even for his despised breed; as the film’s later scenes of a furtively masturbating Kaufman attest, he is unable so much as to find the apocryphal starlet dumb enough to sleep with the writer. Though presented in the manner of ‘behind-the-scenes footage shot with a hand-held video camera’, Adaptation’s opening scene is in fact fictional (2002: 2). Yet it brilliantly encapsulates and expresses cathartically the long pent-up frustration and disgruntlement of an entire profession – the film-industry screenwriter, especially its subset of the Hollywood screenwriter. It is not for nothing that Adaptation won the 2003 best screenplay prize at the PEN Center USA West Literary Awards (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002).2 Although essential to film and television production, the contribution of screenwriters has been systematically marginalised from the earliest era of the film industry’s development. Screenwriters’ legal rights over their work, claims to artistic recognition and financial rewards have all been either dismissed as irrelevant in a lowstatus undertaking such as film-making or, as film came to be accorded artistic prestige on a par with its commercial heft, have been encroached upon by other screen industry professionals eager to advance their own claims to cultural and economic capital. Mirroring this industrial slighting has been academic literary and film studies’ long-standing, studied obliviousness to the screenwriter (Nelmes, 2007; Maras, 2009: 7). Breaking down neatly upon medium-specific lines, literary studies found the innately intermedial and often collaboratively written screenplay impossible to square with the Romanticised figure of the solitary author that had been enshrined in the discipline’s very theoretical and methodological foundations. Conversely, screen studies, seeking as ever to overthrow an intellectually overweening and often sneeringly patronising literary-studies paradigm, chose as its opening intellectual manoeuvre a rigorous examination of screen aesthetics and visual stylistics – by default rendering the written screenplay too literary an artefact to excite screen studies’ new guard. The eclipse of the screenwriter by other claimants to academic attention was near-complete once French-inspired auteur theory nominated the director as film’s authorial proxy and governing artistic consciousness. Much of this disciplinary history may be familiar from its recounting in the current volume’s Introduction, for this fate of being exiled simultaneously from two disciplinary camps is exactly the reason for adaptation studies’ own long relegation to the margins of academic legitimacy and institutional respectability. How curious then that adaptation studies should itself have dismissed the figure of the screenwriter as readily as had its foundation disciplines (Boozer, 2008: 3; Price, 2010: 57). Perhaps this disregard stems from the adapted screenplay’s status as both explicitly unoriginal as well as implicitly intermedial. It thereby appeared to exacerbate both of the problems with which adaptations studies was already wrestling and threatened to provide yet more rhetorical ammunition to

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 133 the fledgling discipline’s institutionally more powerful disciplinary opponents. Perhaps adaptation studies’ disregard of the screenwriter can be traced also to more methodological and theoretical concerns. Until the recent boom in screenplay publishing, print versions of shooting scripts were difficult to come by and therefore constituted less readily accessible empirical material than the traditional resources of the literary novel, on one hand, and prints or video recordings of the adapted films themselves on the other. Adaptation studies may moreover have been influenced by the screen industries’ comparative indifference to the screenwriter, with a paucity of detailed commentary in the industry trade press functioning to reinforce scholarly silence around this vital film-making role. Furthermore, adaptation studies to a large extent replicated screen studies’ romance of the directorial auteur, spawning variant studies on topics such as Hitchcock’s reworking of print source material or Truffaut’s screen adaptations. This was presumably because the second(or third-)hand adoption of French post-war auteur theory lent a theoretical sheen to adaptation studies – a discipline which has been, until recently, notably adverse to thoroughgoing theoretical self-reflection. Distained by mainstream cinema studies for its theoretical parochialism, adaptation studies attempted to curry intellectual favour by adopting the cineastes’ own dominant theoretical paradigm, despite its frequently poor fit. For all of these complex and mutually reinforcing reasons, the study of the adapted screenplay and its writer(s) has, until very recent years, remained thoroughly off the scholarly radar, to the detriment of all parties. Inclusion of the screenwriter in a book about the contemporary adaptation industry is crucial because it is in the figure of the screenwriter that the literary and filmic spheres most demonstrably converge. The very term ‘screenwriter’ suggests the fundamentally intermedial skill set required to construct, in screenwriting guru Syd Field’s phrase, ‘a story told with pictures’ (1979: 3). The screenplay is the essential document used for raising production finance and is the basis upon which screen talent typically becomes ‘attached’ to a project (Acheson and Maule, 2005: 314–15). The choices made by screenwriters in composing their scripts to a large degree set up the range of narrative and aesthetic decisions to be made by a film’s major visual stylists, such as the director, cinematographer and production designer (Rimmer, 2001: 131). Moreover, as the document that establishes a blueprint for the finished film, the shooting script can prefigure to a large extent issues of audience engagement with and reaction to a text, especially depending upon the degree to which the script is seen to remain ‘faithful’ to or depart from a familiar source text. Except for the very rare instances of improvisational or perhaps realityinspired, semi-documentary film-making, all screen productions involve the input of screenwriters at their formative stages (Maras, 2009: 2). More specifically for the purposes of the current project, all adaptation

134 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter industry traffic necessarily passes through the nodal point of the screenwriter. The present study has argued throughout for relinquishing the inherited idea of the book and screen worlds as two discrete industries which collaborate only on occasion, to reconfigure them instead as relative centres within a single, overarching, converged adaptation industry. But it is in this chapter that the balance of the current volume shifts decisively away from a model of the book industries as assiduously cultivating engagement with the screen industries (as has dominated in Chapters 1–4), to examine an industry figure liminally positioned between these two industry sectors, and more beholden to the screen world than to the print one, for all screenwriters’ frequent authorial identification. The screenwriter’s essential professional skill lies precisely in effecting a form of creative simultaneous translation between the semiotic systems of both print and screen domains, reconstituting the effects of one in the formal vocabulary of the other. While such translation metaphors are a commonplace in adaptation studies at the level of textual analysis, little attention has thus far been paid to the industrial role of the screenwriter as the key figure undertaking such translations.

Theorising Screenwriting and the Screenwriter For the reasons outlined above, academic neglect of screenwriting has tended to be pervasive, relegating the topic to ‘a semi-virgin field’ with ‘all screenwriters “Subjects for Further Research”’ (Stempel, 1988: xi; Corliss, 1975: xxvi). Such publications about screenwriting as do exist have tended to fall into the decidedly non-academic categories of the industry memoir or the how-to manual. A number of prominent Hollywood screenwriters, acutely conscious of public obliviousness to their profession’s filmic contribution, have penned insider accounts of Hollywood as seen from the writer’s perspective. Amongst these, William Goldman’s satirical Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983) and Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade (2001) have justly become classics. In a similar vein, Lenore Coffee provided an early account of a female screenwriter’s career in Storyline: Recollections of a Hollywood Screenwriter (1973), and Larry McMurtry (co-writer of the screen-adapted Brokeback Mountain (2005), discussed below) has penned a record of his screenwriterly experience within both the film and television industries in Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood (1987). Informative, anecdotal and suffused with first-hand knowledge as these books undoubtedly are, they do not attempt to provide a rigorously analytical or fully theorised study of screenwriters’ role in Hollywood’s contemporary globalised image culture. Scholars attempting to construct such an macro-oriented view of the contemporary adaptation industry might be tempted to consult the other established genre of screenwriting publications – how-to guides for writing screenplays. These texts are thoroughly – even obdurately – practical

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 135 in orientation, often explicitly addressing their imagined reader of the aspirant screenwriter in second-person voice: ‘This is a practical book. I hope it will be useful at every stage of your adaptation’ (Seger, 1992: xv). Given this avowedly hands-on and vocational intention, the screenwriting manual is characterised by a highly prescriptive, often domineering, ruleseeking approach to analysing screenplays, being concerned less with innovation than emulation of market-tested formulae. Itemisation of three-act plot structures, pseudo-geometric character arcs and models of inter-character conflict predominate in the genre. The earlier mentioned screenwriting guru Syd Field’s Screenplay (1979), a prototype of many such works, is currently in its fourth edition. Similarly, Robert McKee’s Story (1999), derived from his famous screenwriting seminars, has become so well-known that McKee scored his own impersonation in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation as the voice of screenwriting authority counselling a frazzled and creatively blocked Charlie Kaufman to ‘wow them in the end and you got a hit’ (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: 70). The proliferation and reliable sales of such titles demonstrate for publishers a sizeable segment of the public hungry to try their hand at screenplay writing. But from an academic perspective, the leadenly descriptive and emulative bent of such texts renders them virtually worthless in terms of critically understanding the role of screenwriters in the contemporary screen economy, let alone its adaptation industry subset. The origins of a theoretically self-conscious school of screenwriting analysis can be found in stirrings of discontent during the 1970s and 1980s with cinema studies’ orthodoxies of auteur theory. British political economist Graham Murdock has traced the wholesale critical sidelining of the screenwriter in the film and television industries to even earlier, pointing the finger at cinema’s silent origins: ‘The fact that it was silent for the first thirty years of its existence led to the elevation of stars and directors and the virtual eclipse of the writer as a significant figure’ (1980: 24). But this industrial reality did not become rationalised and perpetuated academically until the 1960s importation of Cahiers du Cinéma-style auteur theory into US film criticism to bolster the intellectual reach and institutional profile of the fledgling discipline. The auteurist contention that certain directors possess such a distinctive stylistic signature that they can be considered the guiding creative spirit of ‘their’ films effectively demoted all other behind-the-scenes creative film workers to the role of mere artisans, conscientiously dedicated to realising the visions of the genius–director. While conceived by its original proponents such as François Truffaut as a protest against the cinematic timidity of a certain kind of post-war French literary adaptation, auteur theory had the perhaps ironic effect of reinforcing literary criticism’s enshrining of the Romanticised author figure over and above the cultural system within which such creators work. Film theorist Dana Polan has pointed out that auteurist criticism has, in the decades since its first Anglophone

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articulation, responded to its many critics by generating new, more nuanced permutations – anointing women auteurs, non-Hollywood auteurs, the producer as auteur, the studio system as auteur – to the extent that ‘auteurs are now everywhere, not just in the stratum of directors’ (2001). But in the theoretical land-grab led by critical proponents of film industry personnel such as stars, producers, and – it should be added – film critics and theorists themselves, the screenwriter emphatically lost out. So it is that rhetorical salvos against ‘the pernicious auteur theory’ constitute a unifying thread between the few academic works about screenwriting to have emerged in recent decades (Dunne, 1988: vii; Maras, 2009: 97–100). A prime figure amongst such critics, Richard Corliss, lamented as early as 1970 the ‘retarding’ effect of auteur theory, with its overvaluation of the creative contribution of the director virtually eclipsing the artistic input of other film personnel (1992 [1970]: 607). According to Corliss, such studies amounted to ‘an endless coronation of the director as benevolent despot, in his [sic] enshrinement as solitary artist, with his collaborating craftsmen functioning merely as paint, canvas, bowl of fruit, and patron’ (1975: xviii). Contesting such historical marginalisation, studies by Corliss, as well as those by Tom Stempel (1988) and Marsha McCreadie (2006), unearthed case studies of notable screenwriters from Hollywood’s golden age, focussing (in McCreadie’s case) specifically on women screenwriters. Corliss has also challenged traditional auteurist precepts in calling provocatively for analysis of ‘the Screenwriter as Auteur’ and for an alternative ‘politique des collaborateurs’ in which the complex mesh of creative inputs by the gamut of personnel responsible for a film’s creation would be given due academic weight (1975: xxii, xxiii). Amongst these many ignored figures, Corliss acknowledges that the screenwriter of adapted materials is often the very lowest rung on the critical ladder: A screenwriter is, as often as not, the middleman between the author of the original property and the director – and the man [sic] who gets his hands on the flypaper last is the one whose fingerprints will show up first. (1975: xxvii) A framework for film analysis that corrects auteurism’s individualistic focus and tendency towards Romanticised hero-worship might be closer to Robert Carringer’s proposal for ‘an institutional context of authorship’, in which the misleadingly singular focus on the director is replaced by attention to the intermeshing artistic contributions of a cluster of film professionals including, inter alia, the screenwriter (2001: 377). A key contention of such an analysis is that all creative figures should be viewed within an industrial and economic framework which is acknowledged

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 137 both to enable certain kinds of artistic decision-making and to discourage or even prevent others. Amongst the Corliss school (if I may term them that) of critics contesting screenwriting’s academic marginalisation, William Miller strikes an unusually optimistic note. Writing in 1980, he regrets that the ‘the screenwriter is so often the forgotten man [sic] in filmmaking . . . shunted to the side much as a slightly embarrassing distant relative at a formal reunion’, but adds that ‘I think this situation is changing and that we will soon have a critical re-evaluation of the screenwriter and his [sic] contribution to the completed film’ (9–10). Miller’s optimism may have been premature, but it has ultimately been vindicated with recent years’ veritable new wave of screenwriting studies and dedicated academic fora. In 2008 the inaugural Screenwriting Conference was hosted at Leeds in the UK, with the following year’s event convened in Helsinki. An associated Screenwriting Research Network was also established to sustain digital communication in the hiatus between annual meetings. Deriving many of its submissions from these important scholarly networks, the new Journal of Screenwriting was launched by academic press Intellect in Bristol in 2009. Noting the previously scant and scattered appearance of academic journal articles about screenwriting, the fledgling journal’s editors announced that ‘the screenplay has been a remarkably neglected area of study; it is the intention of this journal to at least partly address this’, making it ‘the first peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to screenwriting in the world’ (Nelmes, 2009: 5; Macdonald, 2009: 7). Committing to walking its academic talk, the Journal of Screenwriting adopts a referencing system giving equal weight to both a film’s director and its screenwriter(s) (where these are different individuals) (Nelmes, 2009: 4). Unsurprisingly, given previous critical studies of screenwriting had tended to cohere around opposition to the disciplinary effects of auteur theory, the Journal of Screenwriting’s first issue contained three articles explicitly challenging auteur theory’s critical myopia and distortions of collaborative industrial practices. It is striking that the critical study of screenwriting has achieved these characteristic signs of disciplinary maturity – an annual conference, dedicated journal, and internet forum – at exactly the same time as adaptation studies was experiencing its own wave of theoretical rejuvenation and institutional profile-building through the launch of the international Association of Literature on Screen Studies and the journals Adaptation and Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (as outlined in this volume’s Introduction). An intriguing point of confluence between these two contemporaneous streams of academic innovation can be found in Jack Boozer’s edited anthology Authorship in Film Adaptation (2008), which focusses on the vexed role of the screenwriter vis-à-vis the more culturally established figures of the novelist and director. After a valuable survey of screenwriting’s disciplinary fate, Boozer argues convincingly for

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elevation of the study of the screenplay as a ‘script intertext’ between the book and the film. He proposes possible study of screenplay drafts in their plural form to better appreciate the dynamic industrial processes – not only the completed textual product – of adaptation (a theme returned to at this chapter’s close) (24). In this focus on the screenplay as the crucial mediating document between creative sectors, Boozer’s book joins important recent monographs by Steven Maras (2009) and Steven Price (2010) in placing the screenplay front and centre of its theoretical and analytic concerns and attempting to forge a hybrid theoretical framework attuned to the complexities and contradictions of this key artefact of contemporary culture. The figure of the screenwriter has, it seems, finally been welcomed back onto the metaphorical soundstage and belatedly been accorded its proper place in film-making’s creative ecosystem.

The Option Process and Screenwriterly Attachment to Projects Having sketched the shifting academic fortunes of the screenwriter as a recognised input into the film-making process generally, it is appropriate now to focus attention on the professional life of screenwriters working specifically on adaptations. The following discussion focusses on the crucial legal processes of options and rights sales agreements, as well as on the various industrial means by which screenwriters may become attached to adaptation projects. As outlined in previous chapters, film and television rights (collectively termed ‘screen rights’) are commonly the most valuable subsidiary rights in a literary property, and it is for this reason that virtually all authors with literary representation will quarantine these rights from the author–publisher contract (Holt, 1979: 135; Blake, 1999: 276). Hence a film industry party wanting to acquire screen rights to a book property commonly negotiates with an author via their literary agent in a two-stage process. An option agreement and rights sale contract are typically negotiated and signed at the same time, though enacted sequentially (Banki, 1982: 2; Bedford, 1985: 6; Seger, 1992; Lazarus, 2005: 10; Cirile, 2006: 43). An option agreement guarantees a party the exclusive right to develop an adaptation project for a specified period (typically one year) in exchange for a pre-determined fee. A number of annual renewals of the option may be contractually permitted, although these will often involve an escalating and non-refundable option fee to ensure that the film-industry party is actively developing an adaptation project rather than simply stockpiling rights in literary properties. In the eyes of agents and authors, the risk of taking screen rights off the market – as represented by a longer option period – must be offset by an increased option fee; to quote once more (in)famous US literary agent Andrew Wylie: ‘Limit the licence and push up the fees, that’s what it’s all about’ (Arnold, 2000: E3; see also Raftos, 1988: 5). Canny agents or

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 139 authors with sufficient industry leverage may even be able to negotiate a contractual requirement that the option-holder supply project updates as a pre-requisite for option renewal (Lazarus, 2005: 9–10; McColl, 2009). Should an adaptation project be successful in gaining conditional finance and attachment of onscreen and production talent, it may move into the second stage of the legal adaptation process: the enactment of the rights transfer contract or purchase agreement. As mentioned previously, this contact is always negotiated and signed at the same time as the option agreement, and the two agreements are further intermeshed by the option price being commonly calculated as 5–10 per cent of the total rights sale amount (Raftos, 1988: 5; Lazarus, 2005: 9). But, as explored in Chapter 4 in relation to Booker Prize-shortlisted adaptations, the proportion of optioned literary properties that actually survive the option process to achieve the assignment of rights stage is estimated to be as low as 10 per cent, unsurprising given the contingencies and inherent instability of every aspect of the film-making process (Holt, 1979: 138; Blake, 1999: 276). This characteristic complexity and unpredictability of the adaptation industry has given rise to legions of anecdotes by authors who had the screen rights to their books eagerly snapped up by screen industry players only to be met thereafter with thundering silence from once-fawning film contacts. The author’s fee under a rights sale contract is typically around 1–3 per cent of the proposed film’s total budget and contracts typically stipulate that this is to be paid on the first day of principal photography (‘So’, 1982: 6; Bradley, 2005: 13; McColl, 2009). Astute authors – once again commonly advised by canny agents – arrange for payment upfront by the film’s producers rather than agreeing to receive the author’s share as a percentage of the film’s gross (or even worse, net) profits (Bedford, 1985: 6; Raftos, 1988: 6; ‘Film’, 1995: 6; McColl, 2009). Once again, periodicals produced by author groups such as the UK’s Society of Authors are filled with tales of woe by beleaguered authors who agreed to such deferred payments only to find that Hollywood’s creative accounting had rendered even a blockbuster film adaptation an ostensible loss-maker on the studio’s books. Because the relationship between the various nodes on the adaptation industry network is a Bourdieusian one of inherent competition and strategic alliance, the professional status and bargaining skills of the various book and screen industry figures are crucial in determining the specifics of an adaptation contract. For example, more prominent authors may be able to negotiate (via their agents) a rights reversion clause whereby screen rights to a book property will revert to the author if the adaptation is not produced within a specified period of time (‘So’, 1982: 6). Similarly, the contracting phase is the point at which a rarefied group of star authors (as outlined in Chapter 1) may exploit their work’s market prominence and scarcity value to secure contractual perks such as an executive producer credit on a screen adaptation of their

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work or a script consultant fee, thus increasing their direct revenue from the adaptation as well as maximising authorial control over the creative property (Bedford, 1985: 6; Pristin, 1997; Hampton, 2007: v; Wilson, 2008). For example, Nobel laureate and two-time Booker Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee negotiated with Australian-based independent screenwriter–director partnership Anna-Maria Monticelli and Steve Jacobs a screen rights sale agreement giving Coetzee approval over the final screenplay adapted from his post-Apartheid novel Disgrace (which opts for a slightly more optimistic ending than does Coetzee’s relentlessly bleak book). Moreover, Coetzee’s UK literary agent David Higham took the unusual step of having the film’s producers sign a confidentiality agreement embargoing any details of how they obtained the notoriously publicity-averse Coetzee’s approval for their project or the script changes (Baum, 2006: 43). Writers of lesser literary renown may, on the other hand, be kept at arm’s length from screenwriters adapting their work: Susan Orlean writes of meeting Charlie Kaufman for the first time late in the Adaptation shoot, and ‘I was too embarrassed to say much to him, and he seemed too embarrassed to say much to me’ (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: ix). The legal rights to adapt a book property having been secured by a screen industry party, there are various ways in which a specific screenwriter may become attached to the project. Adapted scripts may, as in the example of Disgrace (2008), be self-generated by screenwriters themselves – known in the trade as ‘spec scripts’ (Seger, 1992). This do-it-yourself approach is more common in small- to medium-budget film-making for the obvious reason that only a modestly budgeted film would contain the option and rights-purchasing costs within the financial reach of an individual (or small group of individuals). A notable instance of screenwriters actively pursuing, contracting and developing rights to a literary property in such an independent manner is screenwriters Dianna Ossana and Larry McMurtry’s purchase from Annie Proulx of the rights to her short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’.3 Ossana has written of being so moved by reading Proulx’s short story in a 1997 issue of the New Yorker that she immediately contacted Proulx’s literary agent, purchased the rights with her and McMurtry’s own money, and agreed to Proulx having consultation rights on draft scripts as well as final script approval (Proulx, McMurtry and Ossana, 2006: 143–51).4 The financial and creative risks contingent upon such independent project development are enormous: Brokeback Mountain’s depiction of a gay love story between two 1960s Wyoming ranch hands doomed the project to seven years in the industry limbo known as ‘turnaround’ (146). While Ossana and McMurtry’s script was widely regarded within the film industry as brilliantly accomplished, it was seen as unlikely to secure lead actors willing to risk their box-office reputations by playing gay characters in an explicitly homoerotic story (Murray, 2007d; Boozer, 2008: 17).

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 141 The second, by far more common, process by which a scriptwriter becomes attached to a screen adaptation is through commissioning – also known as working ‘on assignment’ (Cirile, 2006: 42). The studio-system production line of in-house screenwriters and script editors that dominated Hollywood until the post-World War II Paramount Decree is now resolutely a thing of the past, replaced by a post-Fordist, freelancedominated network of temporary contracts which film historian Janet Staiger has termed the ‘package unit system’ (1985: 571; see also Wyatt, 1994: 68; Acheson and Maule, 2005: 326; Pokorny, 2005: 277; Gomery, 2009: 30; Scott, 2009: 164). As a result, many screenwriters now first become aware of potential script opportunities after being contacted through their agents by producers who have already secured screen rights (Bielby and Bielby, 1999: 65; Boozer, 2008: 17; Conor, 2009: 32). A screenwriter working on commission may be approached to discuss at length their ideas for an adapted script with the producers and director to test the waters of creative compatibility, then to write various synopses or treatments of a literary property, before finally being given the studio’s go-ahead and receiving a formal contract (Lazarus, 2005: 65–66; Weinberg, 2006). In such a market-based model of attaching screenwriters to adaptation projects, a successful track record in similar projects is clearly vital (Lazarus, 2005: 63). It is through such work-for-hire channels that, for example, screenwriter Robin Swicord became attached to the film adaptation of Arthur Golden’s bestselling Memoirs of a Geisha (1998; 2005), assisted by her previous adapted scripts for ‘womenfocussed’ properties such as Gillian Armstrong’s adaptation of Little Women (1994) (Weinberg, 2006). Similarly, Charlie Kaufman was commissioned by producers to pen the screenplay of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998) on the basis of his breakout success with his wildly iconoclastic script for Being John Malkovich (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: 121; Libby, 2002; Zalewski, 2002b). (It is impossible in this context not to think of the nervous, sweating, fictional Charlie Kaufman’s Hollywood lunch with glamorous film producer Valerie (Tilda Swinton) in which she schmoozes him by proclaiming ‘We all just loved the Malkovich script. . . . Boy I’d love to find a portal into your brain’ (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: 4).) For the freelance screenwriter working within such an uncertain and fluid economy, securing representation by a well-recognised and amply networked agent is essential to maintaining industry profile and a steady flow of work. In the credentialising phrasing of film industry sociologists William T. Bielby and Denise D. Bielby, ‘Representation by an elite agency authenticates a writer’s reputation’ (1999: 81). There is, finally, a third way in which screenwriters may become attached to projects which reflects the increasingly multinational and cross-sectoral reach of talent agencies, as outlined at the close of Chapter 2. Large agencies spanning literary, acting, directing and screenwriting

142 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter sectors (known as ‘full-service’ agencies) may ‘package’ talent so as to combine clients across multiple sectors, and then pitch the whole to a studio in exchange for 10 per cent of the total film budget (as opposed to securing 10 per cent commissions on each individual contract) (Lazarus, 2005: 19, 23; Holt, 1979: 135, 138; Bielby and Bielby, 1999: 67; Acheson and Maule, 2005: 326). Clearly, it is only a handful of the largest agencies – such as William Morris, CAA and ICM – that have the industry reach and extensive client lists necessary to construct such deals (Lazarus, 2005: 18). The existence of packaging tactics does suggest that the traditionally isolated figure of the screenwriter may have found ways to counteract the formerly marginalising power of the studio boss and the auteur director. Yet on reflection, the contemporary cross-sectoral talent agency may itself be coming to constitute a new form of studio system, able to parcel up the various talents at its disposal into teams of adaptation-ready creative personnel. In such a situation, an agent risks potential conflict of interest in including not necessarily the screenwriter best suited for a project, but one who is compatible with and agreeable to the other (major) acting and directing talent they seek to attach to a film (Holt, 1979: 138; Lazarus, 2005: 25). Similarly, studios or production companies tempted by a package that includes bankable A-list stars may settle for a suboptimal screenwriter component in order not to jeopardise the larger talent package on offer – potentially to the detriment of the adaptation project. Nevertheless, in the Bourdieusian conception of creative production as a stock exchange of competing interests, it is the traditionally most financially precarious and institutionally marginalised figures of the author and screenwriter who appear to have found a means to consolidate their bargaining positions. Now not only do such figures hire individual, commission-based agents, but agents have themselves consolidated into multinational corporate powerhouses. The traditional adaptation industry strongholds of publishers on one hand and film studios on the other have thus well and truly been put on notice that adaptation is no longer a process of simple negotiation between discrete book and film industries. Rather, it has become a process of tactical, project-based alliances across the adaptation industry as a whole.

The Screenwriter within the Adaptation Industry: ‘An Intermediary, Crossing and Re-crossing the Border between . . . Two Forms’5 The adapted screenplay can, of course, arise from a multiplicity of media, not only prose fiction. Nominees for the Academy Award category now termed ‘writing (adapted screenplay)’ have, over the past decade, included works adapted from comic strips/graphic novels, stage plays, musicals, biographies and real-life events.6 Perhaps it is only a matter of time before a work adapted from a computer game is nominated. However, the

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 143 present discussion analyses screenplays adapted from print sources and, more specifically, print sources which might loosely self-describe as ‘literary’. This choice represents more than simple blind adherence to adaptation studies’ long-held preference for high-cultural source material; the fact remains that a significant proportion of adapted screenplays still derive from esteemed literary properties and an analysis that aims to map in some detail the industrial workings of the adaptation economy cannot hope to chart the workings of the entire adaptation process between the full gamut of media industries. For the sake of analytical precision, a boundary has to be drawn around the material at some point. Moreover, self-proclaimedly ‘literary adaptations’ offer a particularly fascinating glimpse at how the high-cultural aspirations of aesthetically praised materials coexist with the economic imperatives of the adaptation industry’s various components. The process by which great art and great commercial rewards coexist, and the terms on which they do so, are evermore intriguing ones for the cultural sociologist. When a literary property is optioned and then sold for screen adaptation, typically there is no extant screenplay (unless the book’s author has pursued the tactic of twin-track authorship outlined in Chapter 1, in which case producers must both purchase the screenplay and option the original novel). It is thus open to producers to hire authors to adapt their own work for the screen. This has the advantage of mobilising the author’s deep knowledge of the source material and of forestalling potential reader objections about alleged ‘betrayal’ of a beloved literary novel; as Julien Thuan of the United Talent Agency observes, ‘It becomes very tricky when you factor in a well-known book. You have high expectations, what the fan base wants’ (Cirile, 2006: 42). However, the fact that authors hired to script screenplays of their own work frequently only undertake initial drafts before the material is passed to a dedicated screenwriter, or that authors are hired as co-screenwriters alongside screenindustry professionals, highlights that authors’ very closeness to the material can inhibit their reimagining the narrative for the distinctive aesthetic vocabulary of the screen. For the novelist accustomed to writing day-to-day in near-total isolation, the inherently collaborative nature of feature film-making can be a shock and even a creative affront (Lazarus, 2005: 69, 72).7 More typically, then, the scriptwriter adapting a property for the screen will be a writer other than the work’s original author. Anyone familiar with the journalistic subgenre of interviews with authors and screenwriters which appear regularly upon the release of a film adaptation will have noted in this regard the particularly charged vocabulary with which practitioners discuss the act of adaptation: ‘fear’; ‘torture’; ‘responsibility’; ‘respect’; ‘reverence’; ‘courage’; ‘brave[ry]’; ‘disrespect’. 8 We could trace a hypothetical continuum here between two extremes of the screenwriterly experience – the ‘overwhelmed’ screenwriter, awestruck by the

144 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter literary genius of the author, and the ‘ruthless’ screenwriter cutting and slashing mercilessly to rework the material for a different medium.9 It would be possible, were we so inclined, to comb interviews with screenwriters and adapted authors and to range their various comments across such a continuum in relation to these two poles of response. For example, Brian Helgeland, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who jointly adapted James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential (1997) with director Curtis Hanson, talks of his self-abasement in the face of Ellroy’s authorial genius:10 when it [the script] was done, my overriding fear was that he wouldn’t like it, in which case it would all have been a waste. All of it. Even if the movie came out and did well, it wouldn’t matter. But it got sent to him, and he read it and liked it and signed off on it. . . . The high point of the whole experience was that James Ellroy didn’t think I had messed it up. (Tarantino and Helgeland, 2003: 83) (It is worth noting, in this line, that where the adapted literary property is non-fiction, such as Mariane Pearl’s memoir of her husband Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and murder by Islamic terrorists, the screenwriter’s sense of responsibility to both the material and its author is amplified many times over; screenwriter of A Mighty Heart (2007) John Orloff states ‘as a writer, I had this incredible – I think everyone who had anything to do with the film – had this incredible onus and responsibility to get it right, and to make her feel that we got it right’ (Lemire, 2008).) For the screenwriter of fictional material who is prone to Kaufmanesque bouts of creatorly inferiority and low literary self-esteem, it unsurprisingly helps, as Australian film producer Margaret Fink has dryly noted, ‘if the author is dead’ (Wyndham, 2005a: 8). Closer to the ‘ruthless’ pole of the continuum, however, exist screenwriters who understand reworking material as necessary to ensure a successful transfer to the screen. Ian McEwan, writing about adapting Timothy Mo’s novel Sour Sweet (1982) for film, compares himself to a ‘hooligan builder’, knocking through walls and generally trashing the beautifully appointed and decorated nineteenth-century mansion of Mo’s novelistic prose (1988: v). Interestingly in the context of the structural changes to the book industry over the last few decades outlined in Chapter 2, screenwriter Stephen Schiff understands the adapted screenplay’s radical pruning and reshaping of a work as a contemporary echo of the creative mentoring formerly undertaken by the Maxwell Perkins model of book editors: Sometimes we screenwriters feel as if we are doing the stuff the legendary book editors once did – analyzing a novel and saying, albeit to ourselves: ‘No, this character wouldn’t do that; let’s omit it. No,

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 145 that’s a fruitless tangent; don’t go there. No, that minor character has the same function as that other minor character; why not combine them?’ Except that we have a freedom today’s frustrated editors can only fantasize about: we seize the book from its author and reinvent it to suit ourselves. (Schiff, 2002) A leitmotif of adapted screenwriters’ comments about their work is the paradoxical concept of having to destroy a work in order to realise a successful adaptation – of playing fast and loose with the source text in order to capture its unique, valued essence. As UK author and screenwriter Deborah Moggach writes of adapting iconic texts Pride and Prejudice and The Dairy of Anne Frank for film and television respectively, ‘Adaptation is a ruthless process – you have to dismember the book and reassemble it, so it must be approached with huge love and integrity. But when it’s done well, it is an act of creativity between everyone involved’ (Merritt, 2008: 3). Adaptation studies – in both its traditional form and even in its more recent ‘new-wave’ manifestations – is replete with such paradoxical and quasi-metaphysical speculations on the nature of artistic properties. In keeping with the present volume’s commitment to rethinking adaptation along economic lines, it is worth asking what industrial realities undergird these oxymoronic protestations of loyal disloyalty and which might prompt their constant reiteration. Viewed industrially, the most striking element of the adapted screenwriter’s professional life is the degree of structural exposure it involves at the interface of the print and screen industries. On one hand, screenwriters predominantly work in isolation and on a freelance basis, in marked contrast to other elements in the adaptation economy, such as publishers, producers and distributors, whose working life is typically more bureaucratised and hierarchically structured. The domestically located, self-reliant and frequently freelancing screenwriter would appear, therefore, to have most in common with the literary author amongst the various adaptation industry agents traced by this study. However, the screenwriter must endure all the creative isolation experienced by the literary author without the concomitant payoffs of a Romanticised rhetorical self-rationale, control over copyright in their creation, or even robustly defensible moral rights to attribution and the integrity of their creative work (Maras, 1999; Rimmer, 2001). In this sense, the role of the adaptive screenwriter is inherently liminal – even flagrantly contradictory – straddling a bewildering number of structural divides. Industrially, the screenwriter is both isolated as well as clearly subordinated to film industry legal and financial controls. Creatively, the screenwriter is charged with reworking often esteemed literary properties into the radically different aesthetic vocabularies of screen media. Philosophically, the screenwriter is obliged to create a technically original

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piece of work without any of the cultural kudos a widely internalised Romantic aesthetic reserves for the ‘true’ creativity of the literary author. Is it any wonder then that Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay of an adaptive screenwriter plunged into a morass of existential anxiety proved such a hit on the awards circuit amongst screenwriters themselves?11 As UK screenwriter Joe Penhall, adapter of celebrated literary works such as Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, observes lugubriously: ‘whatever goes wrong, it’s always the writer’s fault’ (Lindrea, 2004). The most recent, genuinely innovative wave of work in adaptation studies has shrugged off cultural criticism’s former thrall to the idea of original genius, a paradigm which had functioned to ensure adaptation studies’ intellectually marginalised status. Instead, postmodern-influenced adaptation scholars such as Linda Hutcheon rationalise audiences’ evidently unslaked appetite for adaptations via a ‘same-but-different’ logic: namely, that audiences derive pleasure from seeing familiar cultural properties reimagined in other media or in the same medium utilising different genres (Hutcheon, 2006: 4). Be that as it may, such arguments fail to account convincingly for the economic dimensions of the adaptation industry or to explain its products’ relationship to broader institutional and professional patterns. Approaching adaptation sociologically provides such alternative insights. Each adaptation into a new medium must, after all, succeed artistically, critically and financially on its own merits, and will be lambasted if it fails to do so. But, at the same time, each manifestation of an adapted property must build prestige for the overarching content brand – contributing to its cultural and commercial overheads, as it were. This is because the screen industries have an economic interest in ensuring the valuable brand of a much-loved and prize-winning book is seen to be enhanced – or at a minimum not debased – by its reimagining in a different medium. Conversely, the book industries have a substantial interest in the success of screen adaptations through beneficial publicity for tie-in editions, making-of books and possible novelisations. The sector of the adaptation industry focussed on literary adaptations constantly walks this fine line between cultivating the prestigious associations of critically celebrated and often prize-winning properties, while simultaneously ensuring that their screen adaptation secures vastly more in box-office returns and subsequent media sellthrough than even a bestselling book was likely to have achieved. It is, in short, a highly risky commercial exercise which can never be too explicit about its own commercial imperatives for fear of debasing the cultural esteem on which the entire enterprise is built. A rare, phenomenal crossformat success such as The English Patient delights author, agent, publisher, critics, director/screenwriter, producers and distributors, building business for each of these nodal agents through massive cross-promotion and tie-in products. But each beneficiary must respect that the value of the

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 147 property from which they collectively benefit can never be conceived principally in economic terms. Bourdieu was correct in his understanding that two competing – even inverse – logics are here at work. But his diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive spheres of restricted and mass production fail adequately to explain how cultural esteem has itself morphed into such big business.

‘Star’ Literary Adapters The contemporary Anglophone screen industries have witnessed the emergence of the ‘star’ literary adapter: a screenwriter whose name functions as guarantor of adaptive fidelity and cultural quality. This is, of course, an inherently paradoxical permutation of celebrity culture, as not only is adaptation typically held to be a largely derivative endeavour, but so too is the screenplay traditionally regarded as a sub-literary form, at best a disposable necessity of screen production.12 As screenplay theorist Steven Price encapsulates the conventional view, ‘The screenplay adapted from the literary work can thereby seem doubly inferior, being both derivative and (usually) translated into a form that carries less literary value than the source story’ (2010: 54). Despite the aesthetic and ontological improbability of the ‘star’ literary adapter category, a handful of screenwriters stand out as having attained such status: British screenwriter Andrew Davies; the Anglo-German, Indian-by-marriage and now New York City-resident Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; and Australian adapter Laura Jones. Andrew Davies – dubbed ‘the adaptation maestro’ – is most readily associated with high-rating adaptations of Austen and Dickens classic novels for BBC/Masterpiece Theater miniseries (Lewis, 2006). Davies has, however, also adapted contemporary literary novels such as Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet (2002) and Affinity (2008), as well as popular fiction bestsellers such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Circle of Friends (1995) and the House of Cards trilogy (1990; 1993; 1995). Such is Davies’ brand-name recognition and industry standing that he is now able to initiate adaptation projects with major production houses: Davies has spoken of being so impressed by Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prizewinning novel The Line of Beauty (2004), that he raved about it to his agent, receiving the reply ‘well, you’d better adapt it, hadn’t you!’ (Howard, 2006). As adaptation scholar Deborah Cartmell stated in an interview with Davies, ‘You’re unique in that you’re known as an adaptor. You’ve actually created a whole niche’ (Cartmell and Whelehan, 2007b: 242). Underlining Davies’ considerable industry sway, the screenwriter now moreover enjoys a right of first refusal on UK television adaptations – an extraordinary industry anomaly and, in his own selfdeprecating phrasing, ‘a delightful position to be in’ (Cartmell and Whelehan, 2007b: 242). It is interesting to speculate whether Davies’ rise to celebrity adapter status has been facilitated by television’s

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Table 5.1 Andrew Davies’s adapted film and television screenplays Andrew Davies (1936– ) 2008 Little Dorrit (TV miniseries) 2008 Brideshead Revisited 2008 Affinity 2008 Sense and Sensibility (TV miniseries) 2007 Fanny Hill (TV series) 2007 Northanger Abbey (TV movie) 2007 The Diary of a Nobody (TV movie) 2006 The Line of Beauty (TV miniseries) 2005 Bleak House (TV miniseries) 2004 Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (screenplay) 2002 Daniel Deronda (TV series) 2002 Doctor Zhivago (TV movie) 2002 Tipping the Velvet (TV series) 2001 Othello (TV movie)

2001 The Way We Live Now (TV miniseries) 2001 Bridget Jones’s Diary (screenplay) 2001 The Tailor of Panama (screenplay) 2000 Take a Girl Like You (TV movie) 1999 Wives and Daughters (TV miniseries) 1998 Vanity Fair (TV miniseries) 1996 Emma (TV movie) 1996 The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (TV movie) 1995 Pride and Prejudice (TV miniseries) 1995 Circle of Friends (writer) 1994 Middlemarch (TV miniseries) 1993 To Play the King (TV series) 1990 House of Cards (TV series)

Table 5.2 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adapted screenplays Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927– ) 2009 The City of Your Final Destination (screenplay) 2003 Le divorce (screenplay) 2000 The Golden Bowl (screenplay) 1998 A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (screenplay) 1993 The Remains of the Day (screenplay) 1992 Howards End (screenplay)

1990 Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (screenplay) 1988 Madame Sousatzka (screenplay) 1985 A Room with a View (screenplay) 1984 The Bostonians (screenplay) 1983 Heat and Dust (novel/screenplay) 1981 Quartet (screenplay) 1979 The Europeans (screenplay) 1963 The Householder (novel/screenplay)

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 149 characteristic absence of auteur directors, permitting the screenwriter to achieve greater prominence than in the film industry almost by default.13 By contrast, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is recognisable as one of the longrunning Merchant Ivory film-making trio famed for high-fidelity film adaptations of E.M. Forster and Henry James novels – an acknowledged master at ‘adapting literary works to the screen with integrity and a respect for tradition’ (Jhabvala, 2006: 133). Yet, Jhabvala has also adapted contemporary Booker Prize-winning novels such as The Remains of the Day (1993) and her own early book, Heat and Dust (1983). For Jhabvala, established prize-winning literary cachet transfers, as though by cultural osmosis, to her adapted screenplays, carrying over ‘some of the “symbolic capital” [s]he has accumulated in the high-prestige cultural area of established “art” into a cultural sphere that is as yet less widely acknowledged’ (Korte and Schneider, 2000: 93). Laura Jones, probably the least well known of the three, works almost exclusively on screen adaptations of contemporary literary novels and memoirs including An Angel at My Table (1990), Oscar and Lucinda (1997), Angela’s Ashes (1999) and Brick Lane (2007). Jones’ strong commitment to collaborative working with female directors, notably Jane Campion and Gillian Armstrong, has tended perhaps to overshadow public recognition of her own incipiently auteurish status and to confine her recognition more within industry circles (Barber, 1996; Thorp, 1997; McCreadie, 2006: 80). Additional names could perhaps be nominated for the category of ‘star literary adapter’, such as Ronald Harwood (Academy Award winner for his adapted screenplay The Pianist (2002))14, along with Harold Pinter and David Hare. Yet in these last two cases, screenwriterly activity has tended to serve as a second string to the careers of prolific dramatists better known for their groundbreaking stage work (Korte and Schneider, 2000: 99). Significantly, ‘star’ literary adapters are distinguished from the general herd by having reconciled the poles of the overawed or ruthless screenwriter between which lesser-known writers tend to vacillate. This is, of course, in part a result of the strings of critically and commercially successful adapted scripts to their individual credit. Each is shielded from Table 5.3 Laura Jones’s adapted screenplays Laura Jones (1951– ) 2007 Brick Lane (writer)

1997 A Thousand Acres (screenplay)

2002 Possession (screenplay)

1997 The Well (writer)

1999 Angela’s Ashes (screenplay)

1996 The Portrait of a Lady (screenplay)

1997 Oscar and Lucinda (screenplay)

1990 An Angel at My Table (writer)

150 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter artistic intimidation by famous living writers they adapt by their own industry standing (or because they are themselves, in Jhabvala’s case, a Booker Prize winner). Conversely, star adapters are empowered to prune a novel for adaptation as ruthlessly as necessary without raising the trepidation or ire of living novelists because of their established reputation for lovingly faithful and literary-minded scripts. Freely undertaking the major changes that all adapters must make, they nevertheless preserve an air of pervasive ‘literariness’ in their adaptations, thus largely satisfying both the literary and filmic worlds which they straddle. Actual fidelity to the source material is beside the point here; Andrew Davies himself freely admits to hacking and slashing in order to reimagine a novel dramatically for the screen (Bunbury, 2008). More compelling for current purposes is the manner in which the ascribed ‘fidelity’ of the star literary adapter functions industrially: serving as a badge which enables in fact radically altered screenplays to circulate unproblematically amongst producers and audiences, allaying fears of disrespect or travestying screen treatment through the shibboleth of the auteur adapter’s name. Discernible here might almost be a fulfilment of Richard Corliss’s wish, back in 1975, for the emergence of the ‘screenwriter as auteur’ (xxii). Star literary adapters appear to have beaten all the odds: against the long tradition of disparaging screenwriters as the lowliest on the Hollywood food chain, and the further obloquy heaped upon the writer of ‘mere’ adapted screenplays, they have been able to carve out careers as significant professionals within the creative industries. Yet the name recognition of Davies, Jhabvala and Jones pales in comparison with that of Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman – the only screenwriter to rate an entry in Premiere magazine’s Hollywood ‘Power 100’ listing.15 The elusive screenwriterly holy grail of the possessory credit – ‘a Charlie Kaufman film’ – has not yet been officially bestowed upon films derived from Kaufman’s screenplays, but the adjective ‘Kaufmanesque’ is routinely employed in screen trade journals to describe a certain kind of mind-bending, narratively self-conscious cinematic jeu d’esprit (Cousins, 2004). Kaufman’s anomalously auteurish signature moreover persists despite the fact that the majority of his screenplays have been directed by others (Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, George Clooney) (Phipps and Tobias, 2006; Arnett, 2007). Perhaps the most resonant (and characteristically self-referential) evidence for Kaufman’s apotheosis as screenwriter–auteur comes from screenwriting guru Robert McKee: ‘he’s stepped out of screenwriting anonymity to gain national recognition as an artist’ (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: 131; see also King, 2009: 47). The implications of such an (admittedly tiny) group of screenwriters wielding significant industry leverage are as yet unclear. Potentially, the rise of the auteur screenwriter – especially of adapted literary works – promises to turn screenwriters’ typically intermedial and liminal industry positioning into a strength, enabling maximum manoeuvrability and cross-sectoral strategic alliances

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 151 in the fluid domain of post-Fordist, rapidly converging creative industries. In this sense, the Academy Award-winning Kaufman’s seemingly selfdeprecating confession that ‘I’m more of a book guy than a movie guy’ might be read as harbouring a secondary meaning.

Script as Blueprint/Script as Artefact As alluded to throughout this discussion, the received view of film scripts has long been that they constitute mere blueprints for the creative achievement of the finished screen work (Kohn, 1999; Maras, 1999; Korte and Schneider, 2000; Macdonald, 2004; Nelmes, 2007; Boozer, 2008). To cite again Richard Corliss’s lament at the pervasive denigration of screenwriters: ‘screenplays are rarely published (and barely consulted even then), while the films made from them are available at the flick of a TV channel selector’ (1975: xx).16 While largely true in 1975, this idea of the script as mere workmanlike preparation for the ‘real’ creativity of the achieved film has undergone a radical transformation, with scripts today increasingly esteemed as cultural artefacts in their own right (Maras, 2009: 4–5). This meteoric shift in the cultural status of the screenplay may be traced to several factors: the rise of academic film studies and the general cultural recognition of film-making as an art form; the institutionalisation of screenwriting courses within film schools and creative writing programmes resulting in a need for ‘settable’ canonical texts; and academic publishers’ targeting, since the 1980s, of the booming film– media–cultural studies market, especially for undergraduate textbooks (Boozer, 2008: 29; Price, 2010: 94–95). The script’s new guise as cultural artefact in its own right is dramatically illustrated by the growth of script-collecting and script-trading fora on the Internet. General auction site eBay competes with dedicated sites such as SimplyScripts,17 Script-o-rama,18 and ScriptShack19 in offering for public sale a huge range of script copies for notable films and television series, including those presently on release or in their current season. Admittedly scripts for cult films predominate, and the value of scripts does appear to be greatly enhanced by being autographed by star actors and/or directors, suggesting the typical script collector seeks a secondhand dose of star allure though owning items of celebrity memorabilia (McGurk, 2008). But the collectable script phenomenon cannot simply be attributed to such an object-driven view of the script as celebrity-touched commodity; creative achievement in the screenplay’s content is also clearly of import to script traders, as evidenced by demand for draft scripts of produced works, as well as for unproduced scripts. Given that scripts falling into either category cannot be considered direct blueprints for any realised work, demonstrated demand for such scripts must be attributed to valorisation of the art of screenwriting itself – an interest in the structural and wordsmith skill evident in the script qua creative work.

152 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter In the screen industries, copyright in scripts is almost invariably held by the studio – a point prominently flagged to script readers though stern infringement notices. As a result, online script traders’ admiration for the creative achievements of screenwriters exists very much in an intellectual property grey area (McGurk, 2008). The final and most ubiquitous evidence for the script’s elevated status as cultural document is the phenomenon of the published screenplay. Screenplays are now occasionally ‘published’ on DVD as part of extras packages, but the more familiar form of publication is via the medium of the book (Auerbach, 2006: 96; Boozer, 2008: 18; Price, 2010: 95). Several publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have built lists dedicated to publishing ‘shooting scripts’, namely Faber & Faber, Ebury, and Nick Hern Books in the UK, and Newmarket Press in the US. Such houses purchase the screenplay publishing rights to promising properties prior to a film entering production in order to accommodate the long publishing and retailing lead times required by the book industry (Quinn, 1996: 23; Korte and Schneider, 2000: 92). In an attempt to offset some of the risk this represents, screenplay publishers will often contractually stipulate a right to license the film’s artwork, poster designs and logos to ensure maximum consumer recognition of the screenplay’s relationship to the broader product franchise. The above imprints tend to publish original screenplays of broadly ‘alternative’ or auteurist film-makers as freestanding entities but, depending upon the availability of rights, there is also the possibility of publishing adapted screenplays bound in with the source novel or short story in an omnibus edition. Such ‘companion titles’ can additionally bundle Introductions by the screenwriter/s and directors reflecting upon their work, interviews with the original author and various production stills, costume designs and location-scouting notes, as do the companion volumes for films Brokeback Mountain (2006) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Salisbury, 2007) (Turney, 2007: 26). Where the film studio concerned is part of a multimedia conglomerate, typically the affiliate book division will gain first-look rights to produce such a book tie-in, a manifestation of what adaptation scholar Jan Baetens terms contemporary cinema’s embedding in ‘a complex set of intermedial hybrid structures’ (2007: 227). However, even the best laid plans of corporate synergy may be thrown over for a higher rights bid from an outside publishing house, or because of the difficulties inherent in coordinating inhouse release dates between various media sectors and across multiple territories (Quinn, 1999). A related bookish incarnation of the screen text is the ‘novelisation’ – commonly a prose reworking of a produced screenplay, written quickly on commission and issued to cross-promote a screen release. Novelisation has typically occupied the very lowest rung on the literary ladder (Holt, 1979: 137; Baetens, 2005: 47; Van Parys, 2009: 314). Woody Allen’s television screenwriter character in Manhattan (1979) sums up the

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 153 received view, shoring up his fragile creative self-esteem by heaping obloquy on a fellow character’s hackwork film novelisation. While it is true that genre fiction such as science fiction (SF), fantasy, horror and adventure titles dominated the genre from the 1970s (accompanied more recently by narratives set in computer-game worlds), the novelisation in fact traces its origins to the earliest decades of Continental cinema in the form of the ciné-roman (a book of silent-movie stills with lengthy textual captions or a loosely threaded narrative) (Baetens and Lits, 2004; Baetens, 2005: 48–49; 2007: 228–29, 233). Baetens also discerns ‘elite manifestations’ of the genre, as evident in novelisations of art films (2005: 54). This publishing feat, though rare, has been achieved twice by celebrated Australian screenwriter–director Jane Campion in novelisations of her cowritten scripts for The Piano (1993; 1994) and its follow-up, Holy Smoke (1999; 1999) (Gelder, 1999). While The Piano was in fact an original screenplay, Campion’s film employed many of the textual signifiers of the nineteenth-century classic novel adaptation; this, plus its Palme d’Or plaudits, made subsequent publication of an up-market novelisation commercially feasible (Campion and Pullinger, 1994). In circumstances where a novelisation and original novel coexist, marketing relationships between publisher and producer become more complex, because of the risk of novelisation sales cannibalising sales of the source novel. For this reason, publishing rights directors have long advocated withholding novelisation rights from screen rights contracts to prevent simultaneous appearance of competing products (‘So’, 1982). Additionally, publishers aim for contractual terms stipulating their right to incorporate film art and movie stills in a tie-in-edition cover design, so as to prioritise the novel over any novelisation in the mind of casual bookshop browsers – or at a minimum to bedeck the tie-in edition of the novel with equally filmic appeal (Holt, 1979: 136; ‘So’, 1982: 6; Baetens, 2005: 56; Richardson, 2008: 22; Raftos, 2008; McColl, 2009). What these various jockeyings for position amongst media sectors illustrate is that the published screenplay, novelisation, companion volume, ‘makingof’ book and tie-in edition are not sharply distinguished creative entities in the public mind but rather take up their place on a continuum of book– screen hybrids.20 As such, they do not constitute stand-alone properties, so much as affiliated, varied incarnations of an overarching content brand.

Conclusion So what should we ultimately make of this strange hybrid phenomenon, the published screenplay? As has been mentioned, recent scholars of screenwriting lament that the script has typically represented the forgotten intertext between the (often esteemed) novel and the (more widely known) screen adaptation (Nelmes, 2007: 107; Boozer, 2008: 2). Against

154 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter this doleful background, surely the published screenplay constitutes belated recognition of screenwriters’ creative contribution and industrial significance? A glance at Newmarket Press’s edition of Christopher Hampton’s screenplay for Atonement (2007), issued as part of their ‘Shooting Script’ series, should give screenwriting supporters keen to close the door on the ‘bad old days’ some pause. On one hand the book is handsomely packaged, bedecked with cover stills of the film’s stars and opens with an Introduction by the screenwriter himself, putting Hampton’s stamp on the creative handiwork within front and centre in the reader’s mind rather than having it eclipsed by the reputation of Ian McEwan’s critically praised and bestselling novel. However, the reader of Hampton’s Introduction encounters this caveat in the final paragraph: What you have in your hands is a transcription, made after the event, of the finished film. The dozens of scenes that fell by the wayside like exhausted soldiers on their way to Dunkirk had their place in the overall scheme of things, but to include any or all of them might seem like a criticism of the completed object: the film Atonement, of which this is the written record. (2007: viii) Contrary to the title of the publisher’s series, the published screenplay of Atonement is not in fact a ‘shooting script’, but an ex-post-facto transcription of the released film presented with the characteristic font, layout and stylistic vocabulary of a screenplay. Whereas the script-trading enthusiast or student of screenwriting might come to this text hoping for glimpses of the film not made (such as earlier drafts, deleted scenes, excised subplots), Hampton’s Introduction makes clear that nothing so troublingly intertextual or evidently provisional is being presented. Perhaps Hampton had become inured to this scheme of things through his experience of publishing his earlier screenplay to the film Carrington (1995). Hampton’s foreword to Faber’s edition of Carrington observes that the screenplay went through ‘a minimum of eight or nine drafts’ during the 18 years of the project’s gestation, and that the final cuts ‘were made, painfully, after completion of the film’. He adds that ‘it seemed right, however, to print here a text as close to the finished film as might be; and this is what will be found in the following pages’ (1995: np; cf. Korte and Schneider, 2000: 95). Given that Hampton was also Carrington’s director, this insistence on a ‘mnemonic’ screenplay version can only have been made by the book’s publisher, and says much about their conception of the readership for published screenplays (Price, 2010: 106).21 As screenplay theorist Steven Price observes of screenplays in their published version, these artefacts are in truth ‘not screenplays in any accepted sense of the term’ (2010: 106).22 That even a writer as celebrated as Christopher Hampton (both as an original stage dramatist and as

The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 155 an emergent ‘star’ literary adapter for screen) had his contribution to Atonement so subordinated to the achievement of the then relative neophyte director Joe Wright is telling. More broadly, Hampton’s squeamishness lest inclusion of Atonement’s deleted scenes appear ‘a criticism of the completed object’ underlines the workmanlike, embryonic screenplay’s lingering subordination to the masterwork of the ‘finished’ film. The inherently contradictory object that is the published screenplay thus suggests that, for the contemporary adapted screenwriter, it is a case of two steps forward and one step back. The very document that would appear on its surface to signal long-awaited valorisation of screenwriters’ artistic contribution functions, upon closer examination, to sideline it once again in favour of the famous novelist on one hand and auteurist director on the other. Such paradoxical texts indicate that the intermedial role of the screenwriter is still marooned between hierarchically oriented and industry-specific powerbases within the book and screen industries. In such an environment it will be up to screenwriters, their representative lobby groups and possibly also their agents (with all their potentially divided loyalties) to militate for increased profile, creative recognition and economic bargaining power in the converged, trans-sectoral adaptation industry that is emerging. Having been for so long literally and metaphorically banished from the soundstage of adaptation, it is incumbent upon screenwriters to seize this moment of industrial realignment and to attempt to restructure the cultural field to their professional advantage.

6

Cultivating the Reader Producer and Distributor Strategies for Converting Readers into Audiences

The Reader has a fanatical audience. The people who love The Reader love it. What you win on, in the first round of nominations, is passion, the people who vote No. 1 for your film. (Harvey Weinstein, quoted in Sctoodeh, 2009: 60) Classy package will appeal to upscale specialized auds and the bookish set. (Variety review of The Reader: McCarthy, 2008)

For traditional adaptation studies, it has long been both a point of principle as well as a fact easily verifiable from countless reviews and cinema-foyer conversations that fans of a particular book will not necessarily approve of a screen adaptation of the work. For the fledgling adaptation discipline such a state of affairs presented a stumbling block to the discipline’s own self-conception – if, after all, the book was always better, why study adaptations at all? Seeking to justify the respectability of its interest in cinema (and later television) adaptations, the discipline of adaptation studies attempted to balance claims for the fitness of the subject for academic research with scholars’ own primary loyalty to literature by virtue of their academic training and internalised (and often unrationalised) logophilia. Hence, a common argumentative trajectory emerged in much adaptation studies work which isolated the particular literary text (commonly a canonical novel) for study, and then minutely analysed one or more screen adaptations of it, in effect allowing the screen text a limited aesthetic validity, before the predictable closing gesture of reiterating the book’s superior cultural plaudits. Screen texts were thus accorded sufficient creative achievement to justify the existence of adaptation studies itself, but not such credence that the dominant position of literary studies in humanities departments came under threat from a rival, self-validating paradigm such as film studies. It is no wonder that film aficionados fumed at criteria of cultural appraisal that simultaneously sought to appropriate the popular profile and student enrolments associated with cinema while evermore disparaging the art form with faint and qualified praise.

Cultivating the Reader 157 Subsequent waves of adaptation studies emerging since the 1970s set about demolishing with gusto such chestnuts of audience denigration of films adapted from much-loved literary works, rightly pointing out how such judgements commonly function as displays of individuals’ cultural capital and reinforce inherited hierarchies of media formats. These later scholars have had little truck with audience members’ complaints of lack of fidelity in changes in narrative, or of protests that the reader’s subjective portrait of the characters does not gel with the casting decisions of directors and producers. Yet, for all new-wave adaptation studies’ impatience with audiences’ often unreflectingly pejorative judgements on screen adaptations, such scholars precisely replicate traditional adaptation studies in a key underlying assumption: that readers of a book are easily and unproblematically convertible into screen audiences. The assumed fungibility of the reader into the cinema-goer typically rests on the conception of a bestselling novel as a ‘pre-sold’ property – an already established cultural brand-name the demonstrated success of which in one medium looks likely to attract consumers in other media (Wyatt, 1994: 4, 15, 78; 1998a: 78; Austin, 2002: 114, 117; see also Maltby, 1995: 76; Wasko, 2003: 55; Edwards, 2006: 34, 45). Without question, this is key to the appeal of bestselling books and authors in the eyes of the screen industries; the established market profile of a particular narrative obviates the need for market research about the story’s attractiveness, thus heartening financiers, facilitating green-lighting and allowing marketing departments a rough idea of target demographics for the resultant adaptation.1 However, new-wave adaptations scholars, like their traditional counterparts, fatally overvalue bestselling works’ pre-sold nature, naively assuming the property’s almost talismanic cultural power is in itself sufficient to lure readers (or those who’ve merely heard of the text) into cinemas. In fact, even a cursory glance at the contemporary film industry registers the existence of a whole marketing and publicity apparatus employing many thousands dedicated to the task of creating film audiences – most definitely including for adaptations. Clearly, factors beyond the text and its reputational aura here come decisively into play. Film marketers’ chief tasks consist of creating buzz about a film property, converting public awareness into the all-important ‘want-to-see’ factor, and then delivering sufficient numbers of well-disposed audiencemembers’ posteriors to grace cinema seats. Sufficient audience numbers for the cinema release set up the film property’s subsequent sell-through in other exhibition windows such as DVD, pay-per-view, cable television, first-run free-to-air broadcast, and eventual syndication. Intriguingly, and despite the received wisdom that fans of a book are predisposed to be hyper-critical consumers of a screen adaptation, the involvement of the book world in this process of film marketing is crucial. Long after the screen rights to a literary property have been acquired, the cinema world remains intent upon cultivating readers through liaison with book-world

158 Cultivating the Reader stakeholders. Where a literary adaptation is produced within a major studio, such marketing-focussed liaison with the book world may begin at the project’s inception and be fanned throughout production and postproduction phases; the more culturally esteemed the contemporary literary property, the more intricately coordinated are book- and screenworld interactions. There is thus no stage in the life of such a literary adaptation that can be considered quarantined from marketing (Lazarus, 2005: 151, 156). In the case where a literary adaptation is produced by an independent production company and then subsequently acquired for distribution by a major studio or its specialty division (the more typical route for contemporary arthouse literary adaptations), book-world cultivation may begin in earnest only at the point of preparing the distribution strategy. Either way, the market positioning, advertising, release strategy and awards campaigning for the arthouse literary adaptation commonly recruit author, publisher, screenwriter, director, stars and literary-award kudos, all tightly choreographed to construct an early-adopter audience for the film from amongst the book’s existing readership. This audience will not in itself be sufficient to ensure the film’s critical or commercial success but, as will be explored, its imprimatur is the adapted literary film’s crucial launching pad. The encounter between reader and adapted film is thus anything but inevitable or serendipitous; Miramax cofounder Harvey Weinstein, the figure more than any other responsible for shepherding arthouse literary adaptations to mainstream success over the preceding 20 years, plainly underlines film marketing’s proactive, audience-recruiting bent: ‘It’s the distributors’ responsibility to find the audience’ (quoted in Perren, 2001: 34). Such a shift from conceiving of the arthouse adaptation audience as self-constituting, to a proper understanding of that audience as strategically constructed – actively, consciously, painstakingly – changes the nature of academic adaptation studies’ project. Paying attention to the structural, institutional and material contexts in which adaptations circulate highlights how individual critical and audience judgements (whether positive or negative) about an adaptation’s success are crucially inflected by the context of the textual encounter. Further, such a frame of analysis makes apparent that the cinema-goer’s or academic analyst’s engagement with a text in the first place is itself frequently the outcome of elaborately designed industrial strategies. Film scholar Amy Villarejo writes that Miramax’s sensationalist publicity campaign for Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) ‘alerts us to the importance of weighing how films circulate in cultural and economic contexts, rather than merely producing hermetic textual analyses’ (2008: 81). In the contemporary world, a film is increasingly ‘made’ in terms of its popular perception as much by its marketing campaign and distribution pattern as it is by the images and sounds recorded upon its negative. Indeed, if marketing is unsuccessful or non-existent, those recorded images and sounds may never be experienced

Cultivating the Reader 159 by an audience beyond the coterie of the film’s creative and technical personnel. Therefore, in a very real – if counter-intuitive – sense producers and distributors make film adaptations. Acknowledgement and exploration of their dual – and sometimes combined – roles are the necessary final analytical step in this study’s charting of the flow of creative content around adaptation industry circuits.

The Producer’s Role Paul N. Lazarus III, in his industry handbook Produced by . . .: Balancing Art and Business in the Movie Industry (2005), laconically summarises the film producer’s primary responsibility as ‘to get the movie made’ (xiv). This catch-all job description aptly encapsulates the plethora of financial, legal and administrative tasks which fall to the producer in the process of shepherding a film project from abstract concept to cultural and commercial artefact. Given the range of tasks involved, the producer’s role has, unsurprisingly, fractured into a range of sub-roles of greater or lesser industry clout. At the top of the film-making hierarchy, the executive producer oversees acquisition of the adaptable property, organises major production finance, and coordinates a project’s key creative talent, frequently through packaging deals (in collaboration with prominent agents, as outlined in Chapter 5) (Wasko, 2003: 24; Bordwell and Thompson, 2004: 24). Often powerful Hollywood players, leading stars or even, in rare cases, a star literary author, the executive producer’s practical involvement with the project may effectively cease after the development and pre-production phases, only making a renewed appearance at the anticipated awards ceremony. By contrast, the less grandiosely adjectivally endowed producer is likely to be tasked with the more hands-on and detailed functions of full casting and hire of technical crew, liaison with a screenwriter/s including oversight of successive screenplay drafts, and detailed budget and financial breakdowns. Given the role’s essentially managerial character, the producer might best be described as ‘a creative administrator . . . a judge of creativity’ (Houghton, quoted in Acheson and Maule, 2005: 316). Further down the pecking order are a number of line producers and associate producers whose roles involve devising and administering location budgets, coordinating shooting schedules and liaising with film laboratories, technical and logistical personnel. As the subtle differentiation in job titles suggests, who actually performs which roles in a given film’s production is in practice subject to a whole ecosystem of situational variables, career investments and competing egos. For producers working in-house on studio payrolls, liaison with the book world over an adapted property may begin at the inception of a film project. In-house producers may extensively cultivate a prominent literary author and their agent in order to acquire a desirable property on optimal terms. As the major Hollywood studios comprise subsidiaries within

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multimedia conglomerates with interests in a diverse array of communication formats, studio producers may begin coordinating cross-promotional activities with book, television, newspaper, magazine and computergaming divisions at early stages of the project’s life. These attempts to construct the brand franchise for a property, while most intense around popular fiction and especially children’s properties, occur also with literary fiction, often taking the form of elaborate websites enticing fans with production snippets, casting information and interviews with the author and the film’s key creative personnel. Thus the marketing approach to a book’s existing readership frequently begins some 18 months or more prior to the start of principal photography and represents an advance party of the studio’s marketing phalanx, set to allay audience fears of studio bad faith and to begin the first tom-tom beats of a media campaign that rises to a crescendo upon the film’s eventual release. Lacking the cross-sectional support and vast infrastructure provided by conglomerate backing, independent producers must begin grooming loyal readerships on a more modest scale. Because independent production companies working outside of the Hollywood majors typically have more constrained finances, the deals on offer to an author’s agent may be less lucrative, but this may be offset by promises of greater producer–author collaboration, such as hiring the author to draft a screenplay, or liaising with the author regarding selection of the director and other major creative talent. For independent producers adapting literary properties, the existing renown and reader goodwill attached to a strong-selling and/or critically feted book become even more valuable as forms of free film publicity. Hence literary-award kudos may be avidly promoted by independent producers, especially those of an auteurist/arthouse frame of mind who feel an affinity with the creative risk-taking and more muted commercial ethos characterising much literary fiction. Kindred spirits who are located at some remove from the heart of commercial book publishing and from the Hollywood studio system respectively, the literary author and the independent producer may collaboratively broker an insider-outsider aura from their joint project – appealing both to cultural cognoscenti, but also selling the allure of that cultural refinement to appropriable subsections of the mainstream film-going audience. Crucial to such a literary adaptation cross-over strategy is the role of the distributor. In the traditional film industry supply chain comprising successive phases of production, distribution and exhibition, real power has long accrued to distributors because of their indispensible role in connecting film texts with audiences. Hence distribution has typically represented the industry’s bottleneck where myriad independent and studio productions compete for distribution deals with a limited number of mainstream and specialty distribution companies (Berra, 2008: 162; Scott, 2009: 164). One effect of such market rivalries has been the emergence of the producer’s representative (also known as a sales agent or

Cultivating the Reader 161 entertainment attorney). Closely analogous to the broker role played by literary agents in the relationship between authors (producers) and publishers (distributors) in their quest to connect with readers (audiences), producers’ representatives work on a commission basis to bring completed films to the attention of key distributors via film festivals and special screenings. The producer’s representative lives or dies commercially by their ability to discern the best distributors for particular unsold film projects, to negotiate optimal terms of a resultant distribution deal, and to secure for the producer (and, via commission, for themselves) maximum payment in an industry notorious for creative accounting and opaque balance sheets (Lukk, 1997: 138; Lazarus, 2005: 152–53; King, 2009: 102–03; Kerrigan, 2010: 151–55). The rise of the producer’s representative correlates closely with attempts to bolster producers’ bargaining power in a cultural field strongly tilted against them. Such professionalisation of intermediary roles between players within the same media sector (literary agents, producers’ reps), or across media sectors (scouts), highlights how the flow of content across the adaptation industry may typically prove mutually beneficial to stakeholders, but that they remain simultaneously rivals – preoccupied with securing for themselves favourable terms and maximum commercial outcomes.

The Distributor’s Role Situated between the glamorised world of film production, and the banally familiar experience of local cinema-going, the distributor is frequently the industry sector about which the general public is least cognisant. Yet distribution is the locus of real power within the cinema world for the structural reasons outlined above, and is crucially determining of which kinds of films receive public attention, to what extent, or whether they fail do so at all (Moloney, 1999: 47; Acheson and Maule, 2005: 314–15; Wayne, 2006: 63–64; Gomery, 2009: 34). Distributors are chiefly responsible for the prints and advertising (P&A) dimensions of a cinema release, including organising and disseminating celluloid film prints, overseeing creation of film trailers, maintenance of a film’s website, production of print advertising materials and staging of previews and press junkets. Essentially, the film distributor creates, manages and monitors a film’s overall marketing campaign, including the timing and extent of a feature release and the rate of its expansion. Where a distributor acquires distribution rights to a film across several territories, the main distributor (frequently US-based) may also coordinate release dates in other countries. However, producers (and their representatives) may equally piece together a patchwork of distribution deals for specific territories much in the same manner that contemporary literary agents frequently parcel up and sell publication rights to demarcated territories amongst a variety of publishers internationally (see Chapter 2). While

162 Cultivating the Reader many distributors sign up already completed films from independent producers, distributors may also commit funding to as-yet-incomplete projects in return for guaranteed distribution rights to the finished film – permitting cash-starved independent film-makers sufficient funding to get the completed negative in the can. Overwhelmingly dominating global film distribution are the six Hollywood majors: Fox (a subsidiary of News Corporation), Warner Bros. Pictures (Time Warner), Universal Pictures (NBC Universal), Paramount (Viacom), Columbia Pictures (Sony) and Walt Disney Pictures (Disney). These companies, through their powerful lobbying group the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), maintain a tight oligopoly in global film which has endured with only moderate changes since the twentieth century’s opening decades of commercial film production. Prior to the Paramount Decree of 1948, the Hollywood majors comprised vertically integrated production–distribution–exhibition behemoths of formidable market power, able to control all stages in the life of filmed content. Having long since been forced to divest the theatre chains that had guaranteed captive audiences for the studios’ output, they now exist primarily as distribution companies, financing some high-budget in-house productions but more commonly acting as distributors for films produced by (semi-)independent producers under contemporary Hollywood’s package unit system (Miller et al., 2005: 296; Cook, 2007: 54; Bordwell and Thompson, 2010: 28; see also Chapter 5). Control over distribution nevertheless guarantees dominant commercial power in contemporary film: some 95 per cent of box-office receipts generated globally are earned by the ‘Big 6’ (Pokorny, 2005: 281). Mainstream commercial film production, while occasionally highly lucrative, is by its very nature an audience-maximising, risk-reducing mass-market enterprise and hence shies away from formal or tonal experimentation. For this reason, the much remarked upon rise of so-called independent film-making during the 1990s, especially in the US, offered a research and development laboratory for new directorial voices, innovative narrative styles and subject matter previously unpalatable to mainstream audiences. Rather than being destabilised or threatened by the growth of the ‘indie’ production and distribution movement, the majors have, during the course of the 1990s and since, sought to annex ‘independent’ film culture through acquisition or creation of specialty distribution divisions sometimes collectively dubbed ‘Indiewood’ (Hernandez and Rabinowitz, 1999; King, 2009): Fox Searchlight Pictures (Fox); New Line Cinema (Warner Bros.); Focus Features (Universal); Paramount Vantage (Paramount);2 Sony Pictures Classics (Sony); and – until 2010 – Miramax Films (Disney). Undertaking some in-house production but serving principally as distribution outfits, the specialist divisions of the majors are independent in spirit rather than in fact; their managers enjoy relative autonomy from the parent studio, so long as they remain commercially

Cultivating the Reader 163 viable in successfully tapping their identified niche markets (Biskind, 2004: 481). The specialist divisions’ core product is boundary-pushing, moderately experimental or prestige fare, for which they have developed a reputation and track record in attracting urban, professional, cineliterate audiences across the English-speaking world. Frequently these film projects arise from aspirant or marginalised industry figures seeking to explore less-charted film territory – often quirky, off-beat, characterdriven narratives told in unconventional styles and which stand in marked contrast to the special effects-laden, predictably plotted and thinly characterised fare of the Hollywood blockbuster squarely targeting the multiplex audience. Equally, specialist distributors may deal in prestige films that are the pet projects of leading Hollywood directors or even major stars often hoping to pursue greater creative freedom and awards accolades beyond the restrictive commercial imperatives of tent-pole studio film-making. Film commentator Edward Jay Epstein quotes an anonymous Disney executive’s terse summary of the specialty divisions’ creative incubator role, precisely situating them within studios’ broader corporate strategies: You can’t get directors of the caliber of Anthony Minghella [Cold Mountain], Martin Scorsese [Gangs of New York], and Quentin Tarantino [Kill Bill] to work on movies designed to get kids to buy toys and drag their parents to theme parks. . . . And these are the directors who win the Academy Awards. (2005: 240–41) The diverse independent film-making sector and the kind of tertiaryeducated, culturally cosmopolitan, frequently affluent audiences it seeks to attract are clearly a neat demographic fit with the phenomenon of literary adaptation. It is here that the spheres of literary fiction production and credentialising, on one hand, and independent film-making and distribution, on the other, can be seen to converge most dramatically. Specialist distributors’ business is structured around the international film festival circuit that takes in both (originally) non-mainstream festivals such as Sundance, Telluride3 and Tribeca as well as longer-established Alist festivals including Venice, Berlin, Cannes and Toronto. The former serve as key recruiting grounds and talent-spotting opportunities for distributors to view and sign up promising independent features, while the latter class of festivals constitute specialist distributors’ preferred venues for premieres of critic-friendly and award-aspirant films (Lukk, 1997: 120; Levy, 1999: 41; Kerrigan, 2010: 154, 164). As outlined in Chapter 3’s discussion of the established nexus between Germany’s annual Berlin Film Festival and the Frankfurt Book Fair, the film festival circuit is increasingly forging links with other content industries through themed sidebar events, specialist programmes and targeted prize schemes.

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The trend demonstrates a confluence of industry trajectories and marks out a clear demographic of culturally competent audiences which specialist film distributors are eager to cater for, especially through screen adaptations of contemporary literary properties. Promoting Robert Altman’s adaptation of various Raymond Carver short stories, Short Cuts (1993), Fine Line Features’ president Ira Deutchman remarked to the leading US book trade journal Publishers Weekly: ‘The more upscale nature of our audience overlaps more with people who read than does the normal Hollywood audience’ (Coffey, 1993: 28).4

Film Marketing: Seasonality, Width and Location If distribution can be considered the ‘making’ of a contemporary film, it is the specific marketing strategies employed by the distributor that determine whether a film succeeds or fails in the marketplace. Distribution campaigns centre upon the crucial elements of seasonality (the time of year at which a film is released), release width (the number of cinemas showing the film, including the rate at which this figure expands) and location (the geographical areas, from the level of nations, through metropoles down to specific neighbourhoods) in which the film is screened (Moul and Shugan, 2005). As film producer Paul N. Lazarus III summarises the challenge, the key to successful distribution is ‘positioning the picture in the marketplace with the right campaign, at the right time of year, in the right number of theaters’ (2005: 149). While film distributors have commercial return foremost in mind when devising distribution rollout for particular films, evidence of critical endorsement comes also, as we shall see, into consideration as a vital publicity asset for a particular class of films – currencies of commercial and cultural capital being deeply imbricated in the promotion of arthouse features. Rather than disdaining such commercial manoeuvrings as grubby machinations detached from the realm of film art, adaptation scholars would do well to ponder how their own encounters with screen texts which seem to cry out for discourse analysis may have themselves been crucially mediated by institutional and commercial modes of textual circulation. Nor is this a solely one-way relationship; widespread critical fixation upon particular film texts or auteurist directors may prompt reciprocal behaviour on the part of distributors, such as revivals, midnight screenings, classics packaging and incorporation into festival programming. Seasonality With Hollywood representing the overwhelmingly dominant commercial and cultural centre of global audiovisual production, the seasonal calendar most influential for film distributors is indisputably that of the United States. It has long been received wisdom within distribution circles that

Cultivating the Reader 165 blockbusters and especially family films are best released in the northernhemisphere summer when children and adolescents have more available leisure time, and hence can contribute optimally to total box-office figures. By way of similar logic, briefer US holidays and long weekends such as Independence Day and Thanksgiving also constitute attractive slots for major studio releases. One minor rider on this industry logic may be a film’s content: a Christmas-themed would-be blockbuster will opt for seasonal appropriateness over the summer’s longer holiday period to maximise ‘destination’ cinema visits by patrons attracted to seasonallyappropriate fare. By contrast, arthouse films (including the vast majority of literary adaptations) typically schedule their releases for late in the year in the run-up to Academy Award nominations (since 2004 announced in late January) culminating six weeks later in the global live broadcast of the awards ceremony itself (Moul and Shugan, 2005: 99–100). Distributors’ logic has been that Academy voters are likely to be most influenced by critical buzz surrounding a recently released film and that, conversely, voters are liable to have positive recollections of a film released earlier in the year of eligibility eclipsed by the marketing campaigns for later films. As a result of this distinctive seasonal clustering of blockbuster films on one hand and arthouse releases on the other, the distribution calendar had tended to fall into well demarcated alternating mass-market and prestige phases (Moul and Shugan, 2005: 85, 126). However, since around the turn of the millennium, distributors have experimented successfully with what Amir Malin of independent Artisan Entertainment terms ‘counterprogramming’, whereby an arthouse film’s release is deliberately scheduled against the opening weekend of a studio blockbuster to provide cineaste audiences with a palatable alternative to the marketing juggernaut and crowded cinemas primed for mainstream taste (Lyman, 2000: E1; Lukk, 1997: 121–22).5 Mark Gill, president of Miramax’s Los Angeles office, encapsulates this market-segmenting logic as the principle that ‘my mother needs something to see’; the archetypal regular cinema-goer may now be an adolescent or 20-something male, but the studios’ overconcentration on this demographic may leave an older, educated and specifically female audience underserved (Lyman, 2000: E1; Wyatt, 1994: 96). Producers and distributors thus seek, through catering to the arthouse market, to expand the total cinema audience. A pathbreaking film in this regard (as in many others) was Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape (1989) which ‘waited just a bit for that now established early August slot when the studio juggernaut is beginning to wear down and intelligent viewers are getting desperate’ (Pierson, 1995: 131; see also Biskind, 2004: 25–26; Berra, 2008: 167). Because the arthouse audience tends to be reviews-led, rather than influenced by the mass-market television advertising of the studio blockbuster, releasing a literary adaptation in direct opposition to a Hollywood tent-pole film may actually prove a cost-effective marketing tactic, picking up audiences

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disgruntled with the mainstream products on offer and thus more than usually receptive to the critical guidance of broadsheet newspaper recommendations. Release Width The aspect of film marketing given greatest attention in trade papers such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter is the ‘width’ of a film’s opening. This is because of the direct correlation between the number of cinemas exhibiting a film and the contemporary industry’s crucial indicator of mainstream success: a film’s opening weekend box-office grosses. This trend towards ‘opening big’ is the legacy of the blockbuster mode of saturation release pioneered by Steven Spielberg’s directorial breakthrough Jaws (1975), which demonstrated that, at a certain point, a film’s ultrawide opening served not merely to augment the film’s advertising campaign, it became it (Wyatt, 1994: 109–12; 2005: 229; Hunter, 2009: 21). Contemporary films tend to be released according to one of three dominant patterns, based upon anticipated audience numbers and their rate and modes of media exposure: wide release, involving simultaneous release on around 3,000 screens across the US and now, increasingly, simultaneous global release to maximise publicity and minimise piracy; limited release, involving a moderately scaled release of around 700 US screens for movies with anticipated middle of the road success; and socalled ‘platform’ or tiered release for prestige film projects (Wyatt, 1994: 19, 112; Pierson, 1995: 170; Lukk, 1997: 126; Epstein, 2005: 177–91; Lazarus, 2005: 154; Moul and Shugan, 2005: 92; Kerrigan, 2010: 161). Like counterprogramming, platform release strategies have been honed through close attention to the behaviours and predilections of the middleclass, tertiary-educated, inner-urban professional demographic which constitutes the core market for literary adaptations as well as, through no coincidence, for book retailers. Prestige projects typically open in only a handful of the largest North American cities (typically New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto) and seek to maximise critical praise, festival awards and preview screening buzz before expanding slowly. They attempt to build positive word of mouth sequentially, first amongst target demographics in the initial metropoles, then more peripheral locations (second-tier cities, state capitals, college towns) and so on to the smallest viable markets (Lukk, 1997: xiii). In the words of entertainment attorney and producers’ representative Mark Litwak, ‘specialty films are marketed with little, if any, television advertising. The distributor places much more reliance on benefit screenings, free publicity, festival showings, critical reviews, and other methods designed to spread positive word-of-mouth’ (Foreword to Lukk, 1997: xiii). The benefits for specialist distributors in rolling out literary adaptations in such a staggered and gradual manner are multiple. First, it has proven considerably

Cultivating the Reader 167 cheaper than ‘opening big’ because the targeted release kept P&A costs down as reels from one city could be couriered to and reused in others at a later point in the release schedule. Secondly, it means specialty distributors, who typically have weaker bargaining power vis-à-vis the largest cinema chains, do not have to compete directly for mass bookings against mainstream studio projects. Thirdly, the audience sector in question is most likely to respond to positive review, opinion-editorial and features coverage in weekly or monthly print periodicals which cannot be precisely coordinated to appear on a specific opening weekend, and which may also be consumed over the course of days or weeks rather than simultaneous with the date of publication (Perren, 2001: 31; Berra, 2008: 163; Kerrigan, 2010: 101). For the specialist distributor seeking to coordinate a platform campaign for a prestige literary adaptation, the chief marketing hooks are critical praise, awards plaudits, name stars and a pre-sold property. Again, Mark Litwak ranks industry motivations: In looking to market independent films . . . distributors like Sony Classics look for one or more of the following elements: cast, reviews and festival honors. Basically, distributors of independently made films sell them on the basis of either the cast or occasionally a name director like Spike Lee or Quentin Tarantino; on the basis of winning film festivals, especially the important ones like Sundance, Toronto, or Cannes; and on the basis of critical reviews from important media outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the trade papers. If an independent film does not have at least one of the aforementioned marketing hooks, the film is unlikely to interest most distributors. (Quoted in Lukk, 1997: 118) It is important to note here that opinion-setting periodicals such as the New York Times are precisely the outlets by which book marketers set most store and for the same reason: that they attract a predominantly well-educated and affluent urban readership with disposable income to spend on leisure activities that enhance their individual cultural capital. This extant readership is not, as the following section explores, in itself sufficient to ensure the commercial success of a film release, but its initial imprimatur functions as early-adopter endorsement which can in turn be exploited as the basis for a mainstream, cross-over publicity campaign. Vital in choreographing such release strategies is that, even though they are devised on a national (if not international) level, they must be implemented locally to preserve the intimate producer–audience dynamic on which the arthouse market thrives and by which it consciously distinguishes itself from the mainstream multiplex experience. Writing in the New York Times, film journalist Rick Lyman quotes Marcy Granata,

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president of publicity and corporate communications at Miramax, in explaining the importance of a grassroots, market-specific rollout: instead of spending a lot of money to generate excitement over one huge opening, smaller distributors must stage a series of small-scale openings, each week trying to attract the attention of a new crop of local critics and talk show hosts. . . . You treat the opening in Boston as if it were a national opening. The local, grass-roots effort becomes very, very primary’. (2000: 1) Location While selection of the largest and most media-concentrated metropolitan locales is clearly key in devising a platform release strategy, film distributors also pay minute attention to the demographic profiles of individual urban neighbourhoods when selecting exhibition outlets. Film marketing scholar Finola Kerrigan observes that ‘in negotiating with cinemas/cinema chains, it is important to match the film’s target audience with the demographic profile of the cinema’s catchment audience’ (2010: 99). The arthouse sector’s key consumer profile – educated, middle-class and predominantly female – favours selection of ‘destination’ cinemas in precincts boasting a high number of cultural institutions, educational providers, bars, cafes and restaurant culture. Such ‘upscale’ neighbourhoods (in US film marketing parlance) represent the natural habitat of the creative industries’ much mythologised ‘bobo’ or bourgeois bohemian, a subject alert to the potential of consuming carefully chosen cultural artefacts as a means to broadcast individual identity (Lukk, 1997: 127; Brooks, 2000). These are precisely (again no surprise) the inner-urban precincts in which independent bookstores with a high degree of community engagement have tended to hold out best against the encroachment of the chain stores since the advent of the ‘book wars’ of the 1990s (Miller, 1999; 2006; Epstein, 2001; Squires, 2007). Hence the Venn diagram-like dual focus of both book and arthouse film marketing sectors on a particular bobo demographic – earlier identified by Fine Line Features’ executives in promoting Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) – can be seen to have become standard industry practice some decade-and-a-half later. The 1990s is routinely viewed in both trade and academic writings as the period during which independent cinema (especially in the US) came of age and established a mainstream critical and market profile which had eluded it in the previous era of quasi-underground repertory and ‘art film’ cinema (Pierson, 1995; Holmlund and Wyatt, 2005; Holmlund, 2008). In this context it is not surprising that the early 1990s also witnessed a landmark platform release campaign for a literary adaptation that became the prototype for a whole sector of critically esteemed, Oscar-ambitious

Cultivating the Reader 169 releases. Howards End (1992), a Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel (1910), was approached by its US distributor Sony Pictures Classics as an opportunity to trial a new form of prestige release strategy. With Merchant Ivory’s established brand-name identity for producing lavishly costumed, artfully shot, consciously literary period adaptations, long-time screenwriting partner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s intelligent script, an A-list British cast including Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson, and Forster’s canonical ‘pre-sold’ literary property, Sony Pictures Classics felt it was handling a project ‘that has got Oscars written all over it’ (quoted in Lukk, 1997: 126). Such heritage film projects, precisely pitched to set Academy Award members’ quality-picture antennae quivering, are now rather cynically dubbed ‘Oscar bait’ by the blogosphere’s legions of Academy Awards amateur pundits (Berra, 2008: 173; Hunter, 2009: 10).6 Sony Pictures Classics opened Howards End unusually narrowly, premiering the film in 70 mm at a sole venue (Manhattan’s prestigious Paris Theatre, the US’s longest-operating arthouse cinema),7 slowly building critical buzz and word of mouth, and only expanding the film very gradually in the lead-up to the Academy Awards nominations. Eventually, propelled by critical eulogising and bedecked with nine Oscar nominations and wins for Thompson (Best Actress) and Jhabvala (Best Adapted Screenplay), the film played on 450 US screens – a considerable achievement for a decidedly highbrow, foreign, period adaptation (Pierson, 1995: 203; Lukk, 1997: 124).8 Tom Bernard, part of the Sony Pictures Classics team which trialled the ‘tortoiselike’ Howards End release, notes with satisfaction that the film ‘was a landmark in this new crossover of specialized film distribution’ and has since been imitated with success in release of films such as The Remains of the Day (1993), Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Dead Man Walking (1995), and Sense and Sensibility (1995) – all of them literary adaptations (Pierson, 1995: 203; Lukk, 1997: 128; see also Hernandez and Rabinowitz, 1999). It is not that the extant readership for such classic or contemporary works in itself guarantees sufficient audience to ensure a film adaptation’s success; rather, enthusiastic endorsement on the part of the book community can – if cultivated at the right time, in the right cities, and clustered around the right neighbourhoods – generate a critical groundswell that may serve as the impetus for a cross-over publicity campaign propelling a film adaptation ‘out of the arthouse ghetto’ and bringing ‘quirky new sensibilities to mass America’.9

Miramax and the Weinstein Brothers: ‘Campaigning for Oscar Nominations’10 Any discussion of arthouse literary adaptation over the preceding 20 years must, inevitably, weigh the impact of production–distribution company

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Miramax and of its semi-legendary founders, the Weinstein brothers. Hollywood heavyweights Harvey and Bob Weinstein began Miramax as a small-scale independent distributor in 1979 in upstate New York, specialising in rock concert, live comedy, foreign and underground features principally for the college circuit (Biskind, 2004: 13). From the mid 1990s especially, Miramax became synonymous with upscale, arthouse films which managed to cross over into mainstream, blockbuster successes (Wyatt, 1998b: 76; Cook, 2007: 55; Berra, 2008: 162, 170–71; King, 2009: 93). Beginning with the breakthrough of Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 Palme d’Or win at the Cannes Film Festival for sex, lies, and videotape, the Weinsteins guided a record number of arthouse productions to mainstream prominence, amongst them literary adaptations Trainspotting (1996), The English Patient (1996), The Wings of the Dove (1997), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Chocolat (2000), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–03) and Cold Mountain (2003) (Pierson, 1995: 127; Perren, 2001: 33; Berra, 2008: 163, 167). The need to capitalise rapid expansion prompted the Weinsteins to sign a co-distribution deal with unlikely corporate partner Disney in 1993, prior to outright sale of Miramax to Disney in 2005 (Wyatt, 1998b: 84; Perren, 2001: 30; Bordwell and Thompson, 2004: 16; Berra, 2008: 170; Sctoodeh, 2009: 60). Shortly afterwards, the Weinsteins founded and continue to lead their own production and distribution outfit, The Weinstein Company (TWC), which specialises in distributing independent-minded and arthouse film product in the key US theatrical market. In July 2010, in an announcement that many interpreted as signalling the end of a particular era of American ‘independent’ film, Disney announced the sale of Miramax. Despite reported interest from the Weinstein brothers in buying back their original company, Miramax was sold to US investment group Filmyard Holdings (James, 2010). Film scholar Alisa Perren proposes three criteria evident in Miramax’s choice of films during the company’s spectacular run of success from 1989: strong potential for festival-circuit and critical acclaim; edgy, boundary-pushing subject matter and/or avant-garde cinematic styles; and the ability to sustain marketing campaigns centred upon sensational, exploitation-style publicity (2001: 31–34). The classic Miramax film of the 1990s depicted liberal amounts of sex (frequently of non-vanilla varieties), nudity, drug use, violence or hot-button political issues to, in the words of Mark Gill, ‘maximiz[e] publicity value’ (Hernandez and Rabinowitz, 1999; Wyatt, 1998b: 80; 2005: 236, 241; Berra, 2008: 165–66; Villarejo, 2008: 79–84; King, 2009: 93–94). Examples include Scandal (1989), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), The Crying Game (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). MPAA classification rulings serving to restrict entry of certain age groups to particular Miramax films were repeatedly challenged by the distributors, and the resultant cause célèbre was then itself incorporated into Miramax’s

Cultivating the Reader 171 publicity campaigns, with the film’s posters typically foregrounding the controversial subject matter (Cook, 2007: 55). The best known of such Miramax sexploitation marketing campaigns concerned the depiction of underage sex and drug use amongst US teenagers in Kids (1995).11 Kids was derived from an original screenplay, but scripts adapted from literary properties also commonly attracted and thus necessitated the Weinsteins’ marketing savvy in exploiting the publicity-maximising possibilities of controversy. Marketing Stephen Daldry’s film The Reader (2008), based on Bernard Schlink’s controversial novel about a formative sexual relationship between an ex-concentration camp guard and an underage boy in post-war Germany, Harvey Weinstein achieved a personal best in pofaced understatement: ‘The Holocaust is a touchy subject, and then you throw in the sexual stuff, and it’s really difficult’ (Grover, 2009). This is where cultivating the existing prestige of a literary novel and its author becomes essential for sustaining a publicity-friendly, Lady Chatterleyinspired defence of groundbreaking, difficult ‘art’ in the face of cinema’s traditionally more circumspect stance on censorship, given its status as an avowedly mass medium of primarily visual power (Becket, 2006; Robertson, 2010). Invoking an adapted book’s literary critical praise and prize-winning pedigree provides film distributors with a defence to accusations that they are engaging in profit-motivated exploitation tactics. Although, of course, the involvement of a book’s author and the broader literary community may play into precisely such exploitation dynamics, as participants all the while continue claiming to abhor them. Thus book community endorsement provides a critical fig-leaf that is especially useful in the marketing of adaptations that are controversial for their subject matter, revealing how the early-adopter literary audience is useful to distributors not only as a preview-audience cheer-squad but also as media-savvy cultural and intellectual defenders of artistic expression. This returns us to the key question prompted by the Weinsteins: why do producers of arthouse literary adaptations so assiduously court bookworld institutions and loyal readers? Certainly it is not for box-office revenue alone; as Publishers Weekly correctly observes, ‘When you look at what a big book in publishing is versus how many people you need to go to a movie for it to be successful, the numbers are very different’ (Maas, 2001: 25). The Weinsteins’ motivation is rather more complex than this, breaking down into a three-pronged marketing and publicity strategy. First, loyal readers of an acclaimed novel are important chiefly as opinion-setting early-adopters; as outlined in the previous section, this group’s positive responses to a film adaptation can be used as a launch pad for a broader distribution and publicity campaign. In the second phase of distributors’ strategy, fan approval can be used as the base on which to build critical and reviewer praise at key festivals and especially in the build-up to the film awards season, culminating with the Academy Awards. Finally, nominations for the most prestigious awards (the

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Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and the respective New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Awards), and especially award wins (particularly for the ‘Big Four’ Oscar categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress), can be leveraged into a mainstream publicity campaign and distribution plan targeting the mass audience (Kerrigan, 2010: 169). For sporadic film-goers, the Academy’s list of Best Picture nominees functions as a convenient shorthand denoting industry consensus on the year’s most accomplished films. As Liz Manne, executive vice president of marketing for Fine Line, stated in relation to Australian film Shine’s nomination in the Best Picture category for the 1997 Academy Awards, ‘Now we have something that’s genuinely marketable in a mainstream way. . . . Moviegoers all over the world go to see the best five pictures of the year. Even if they only go to five, that’s what you’ve got’ (quoted in Klady, 1997: 9). The familiar post-Oscars box-office ‘bounce’ thus attests to the awards’ role as a conversion mechanism by which the esteem of literary and cineaste critical communities can be transmuted into commercial returns from mainstream audiences. The image of the Oscar statuette on a film’s publicity materials thus stands as a particularly resonant example of what James F. English describes as the prize system’s intraconversion of two ostensibly incompatible currencies: critical esteem and financial capital. The fact that the two systems of evaluation can be linked through the Weinsteins’ characteristic distribution strategy strongly echoes Chapter 4’s analysis of ‘the Booker effect’ in literature, again calling into question Bourdieu’s positing of the realms of restricted and mass-market production as relatively autonomous. It is important to bear in mind, however, that for most literary screen adaptations the mainstream audience should not be thought of as coterminous with the mass audience for a typical summer blockbuster. Rather, it comprises an accumulation of multiple niche audiences on an international scale (Perren, 2001; Raw, 2004; Eaton, 2006). If successful, this third and final phase realises the ultimate goal of the Weinsteins’ distribution strategy and that for which the name of distributor Miramax gained an almost auteurish power: the arthouse/mainstream quality indie cross-over (Biskind, 2004: 323; Villarejo, 2008: 81; King, 2009: 136). Three examples of slow-build marketing campaigns for disparate Miramax literary adaptations across a 12-year period serve to illustrate the Weinsteins’ increasing confidence and sophistication in imitating rival Sony Pictures Classics’ earlier success with Howards End and in further refining the staggered-release strategy. In 1996 Miramax had high hopes for UK director Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, an edgy, blackly comic look at life amongst Edinburgh heroin addicts adapted from Irvine Welsh’s cult Scottish dialect novel of the same name, and which had already proven a mainstream success in UK theatrical release after an innovative, youth-focussed distribution campaign by PolyGram. Despite the film being replete with strong Scottish accents and opaque Edinburgh slang,

Cultivating the Reader 173 Miramax was ambitious for the film’s transatlantic prospects, even distributing free copies of John Hodge’s published screenplay (1996) to every critic at Manhattan press screenings to bridge the cultural gap:12 Within the first two weeks of North American release, Trainspotting is already slated to move beyond the Los Angeles-New York-Toronto axis to 200 upper-end screens in 60 to 65 markets, already exceeding ‘art house’ proportions. Miramax’s test screening scores are its highest of the year: a 91-per-cent rating of excellent or very good (versus the average of 45 to 55 per cent). . . . ‘We do think it will cross over to the mainstream,’ says Miramax president of marketing Mark Gill. (Rothman, 1996: D5) Despite Miramax’s slowing down and redubbing of two sequences in which the characters’ Edinburgh brogues proved particularly impenetrable for US audiences, Trainspotting did not manage to replicate its UK success amongst transatlantic youth demographics. It was a Miramax property released later that same year, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, with which the Weinsteins perfected their staggered distribution formula, driving the film all the way to 12 Academy Award nominations, and wins in a remarkable nine categories, including the keenly sought Best Picture. Writing in mid-February’s lead-up to the Academy Award ceremony, Variety correspondent Leonard Klady presciently wrote: Miramax’s ‘Patient’ has already grossed $42 million in North America. Last weekend its distrib [sic] added 400 playdates to its run to bring it to 1,042 theaters and 79 more playdates following the announcement of nominees. Awards momentum should propel it to $70 million by Oscar eve, March 23. Major prizes would mean an eventual domestic B.O. [box-office] of more than $100 million. (1997: 9) By 2008 the Weinsteins, having departed Miramax and now overseeing their independently owned, self-named distribution company, engaged in an especially calculated and hard-fought distribution campaign for The Reader. The film, which had been earmarked as ‘an Oscar contender before filming begins’ on the basis of its literary pedigree, star cast and major creative personnel, premiered in limited release on 10 December 2008, before expanding on 25 December in the post-Christmas build-up to the Academy Award nominations, opening nationally across the US on 9 January 2009 (Alberge, 2007: 23). Upon the announcement of Oscar nominations in late January, Harvey Weinstein declared his intention to ‘expand the flick to play on 1,100 screens’ and ‘we’ll go to 2,000 if that goes well’ (Grover, 2009). Kate Winslet’s subsequent win in the Best

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Actress category may have been less than TWC had hoped to take home from five Academy nominations, but it was nevertheless sufficient to propel the film to a US domestic box-office total of $US34 million.13 All three of these examples, especially when considered consecutively, underline the extent to which producer–distributors of literary adaptations stage-manage public exposure to screen releases through a mode of concentric audience expansion. Far from assuming that readers of a book will, en masse, simply discover a film adaptation of their own accord because of prior familiarity with the source text, film distributors strive to engineer that particular classes of a book’s readership, in targeted metropolitan locales, will express their critical praise for a film adaptation at precisely the right moment in the film’s (inter)national rollout. The degree of cross-sectoral choreography involved and the human resources committed by distributors to achieving this result are quite staggering, and thoroughly belie adaptation scholars’ implicit assumption that loyal readers are seemingly naturally convertible into willing cinema audiences. In making the contemporary blockbuster literary adaptation it is clear that the stars required to align are not only those strolling the Academy’s red carpet, but a whole constellation of book and screen industry nodal agents distributed across the adaptation industry’s complexly intertwined circuits.

Invoking the Adaptation Industry Having established film distributors’ construction of the literary adaptation audience through a finely-honed strategy of concentric expansion, it is appropriate now to examine examples of other agents in the adaptation industry being invoked to authorise literary adaptations for cinema audiences. Such a survey also functions neatly as a recapitulation and summary of the adaptation industry model proposed in this volume’s Introduction and explored throughout the preceding chapters, involving as it does authors, rights holders, publishers, screenwriters, directors and film marketing and publicity personnel. The following examples help to put further flesh on the loosely Bourdieusian model advanced throughout the present volume: that the contemporary Anglophone adaptation industry comprises multiple book- and film-world agents both mutually dependent as well as locked into often unarticulated rivalries over maximising the cultural and commercial capital flows deriving from the adaptation process. Keeping Company with Wolves: Getting Distribution Wrong Reflecting on the allegedly hit-and-miss nature of US arthouse film distribution in the pre-Miramax era, Harvey Weinstein has spoken disparagingly of distributors who ‘slap out a movie, put an ad in the newspaper –

Cultivating the Reader 175 usually not a very good one – and hope the audience will find it by a miracle. And most often they don’t’ (quoted in Perren, 2001: 34). In an industry characterised by imitation of others’ successes, it is salutary to consider briefly an example of film distribution failing to capitalise upon existing audiences for a literary work and thus disappointing both critically and commercially. Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984) is an adaptation of a number of UK author Angela Carter’s short stories from her celebrated collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), in particular her tour de force feminist, post-Freudian reimagining of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale as a parable for nascent female sexual desire. Carter had, by the early 1980s, achieved significant profile as a brilliantly imaginative and linguistically dexterous author and, particularly through her association with feminist publishing house Virago, had become widely known amongst feminist and more broadly leftwing cultural circles in the UK and the countries of the former British Commonwealth (Murray, 2004a). Despite this seemingly in-built audience, the film’s US distributor Cannon foregrounded the werewolf theme in their marketing campaign and positioned Jordan’s adaptation not in the arthouse/repertory cinema niche but as a mainstream horror feature (Stanley, 1992). Somewhat predictably, the film’s psychoanalytical subtexts and startlingly unconventional gender politics failed dismally to resonate with predominantly young, male US horror film audiences, whose poor word of mouth effectively killed the film’s transatlantic prospects. Perhaps relying on the truism that a book’s existing readership is never, of itself, sufficient to recoup an adaptation’s production costs, Cannon made the fatal error of bypassing it altogether. Cannon thus failed to capitalise on the property’s existing public profile by neglecting to connect with fans of Carter’s work, and moreover failed to attract an alternative genre-film audience either. This bungled marketing campaign incited the chagrin of the film’s director, who believed his movie ‘required far more sensitive handling’, and Carter’s legion readers whose posts on Internet Movie Database typically declare the film a little-known gem (Stanley, 1992: 35).14 In collating the following examples of distributors’ conscious cultivation of the book-world community, I aim to counterpoise Cannon’s clumsy handling of an adaptation with examples of literary distribution adeptly harnessing existing public awareness of a literary work and channelling it to break through to mainstream audiences. Involving the Author Chapter 1 has analysed in some detail the phenomenon of the celebrity authorial persona and the conscription of this figure by the screen industries to publicly badge a screen adaptation as legitimately ‘faithful’ to its source text (whether or not it can actually be considered so is, of course,

176 Cultivating the Reader irrelevant, both for the purposes of the current study and of Hollywood itself). For distributors, the authorial seal of approval finds its most emblematic moment in the author’s appearance on the red carpet at an adaptation’s premiere. Thus, for example, Miramax flew Scottish author Irvine Welsh to the Cannes Film Festival for Trainspotting’s premiere, at which the feature received a rapturous ten-minute standing ovation (Gerstel, 1996a; Rothman, 1996). Even better for suturing together the authorial persona and a screen adaptation is the pseudo-Hitchcockian device of the authorial cameo, again as outlined in Chapters 1 and 4, for its suggestion of an author not merely stuffed into a dinner-jacket and dragooned into a premiere appearance, but one who has collaborated during the lengthy production phase of a project, and whose creative benediction thus suffuses the text itself. In this regard, Danny Boyle’s casting of Welsh (himself a former heroin addict) as long-time drug dealer Mikey Forrester in an early sequence of Trainspotting offers a knowing wink to cognoscenti audiences (Rawsthorn, 1996a; Paget, 1999: 136; Jeffers, 2006: 150).15 Welsh, playing up to the film’s hyper-knowing, postmodern attitude of cool irony and mocking self-referentiality, makes it clear in an interview published with the film’s screenplay that he was wise to Boyle’s game: It’s something that I would have done if I’d been him because its [sic] effective. It stops the author from criticizing the film because you can’t say, ‘Oh, my God, they’ve ruined my book!’ because you’ve been a part of the whole process and you’ve joined in. That’s a kind of frivolous thing to say, but I think that it always adds a bit of intrigue. (Hodge, 1996: 119) German author Bernard Schlink’s cameo appearance as an extra in the bicycling holiday/beer garden sequence in Stephen Daldry’s The Reader serves the same audience-assuaging purpose, though in the case of The Reader Schlink’s brief onscreen appearance is only the most visible textual trace of the author’s years-long involvement with the adaptation project.16 Schlink, Daldry and screenwriter David Hare undertook a lengthy tour of Germany to explore issues of the long-term historical legacy of the Holocaust, German war guilt, and the ambiguous feelings of Germany’s post-war generation towards that of their parents (Kaminer, 2008). This particularly close author–screenwriter–director collaboration, perhaps necessitated by what Harvey Weinstein rightly recognised as the project’s doubly controversial subject matter, is one the extensive production notes provided on the film’s website take pains to emphasise.17 In fact, not only does the website prominently flag above its main menu that the film is ‘based on the best-selling novel’, the website design itself consciously remediates the format of the codex book for the quite differently pro-

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Figure 6.1 Official website for The Reader (2008), showing attempts to remediate the codex format and flagging of the novel’s prize-winning pedigree (top left-hand corner)

portioned computer screen. The Reader’s main webpage flows into a series of paper-textured, deckle-edged subpages, as though to reassure the book’s millions of bibliophile fans that – despite the evidence contained in the lengthy production notes – the film represents a minimally mediated version of the book come to life. In situations where a contemporary (as opposed to classic) literary author is no longer alive, securing authorial imprimatur is, suffice to say, a rather more complex matter. It is, nevertheless, still possible. The initial phases of the marketing campaign for Robert Altman’s adaptation Short Cuts dwelt at length on the approval bestowed on the director by Raymond Carver’s window, the poet Tess Gallagher. In an interview for the Boston Globe (precisely the kind of broadsheet newspaper most commonly perused by the distributor’s targeted early-adopter US literary demographic), Altman spoke of Gallagher vetting his screenplay and explicitly stated her support for its departures at points from Carver’s narratives: I sent the script to her with great trepidation. She was terrific; she got it. She said, ‘Thank God you’re not doing one of those literal

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Cultivating the Reader translations’. She made a few comments on things she didn’t think Ray would have done in certain stories. In some cases, we made changes to listen to what she said. (Carr, 1993: A1)

Similarly, the lead-up to the film’s release saw tie-in Carver-focussed features appear in key metropolitan literary periodicals the New Yorker, and the New York Times, in which Altman drives home to any potentially sniffy literati the fact that Gallagher ‘talks about [the film] in superlative terms’ (Weinraub, 1993: 11). An extended interview between Altman and Gallagher even appeared in the front pages of the US literary world’s print apogee, the New York Times Book Review (Stewart, 1993). Gallagher’s remark to Publishers Weekly (again, an apposite choice of media outlet) that, ‘risking trespass’, she believed ‘Carver would have approved of the film’, perfectly illustrates how the right of imprimatur over a screen adaptation appears to pass, like the film rights themselves, to a deceased author’s literary executor (Coffey, 1993: 28).18 Despite Carver’s death in 1988, Short Cuts could thus be squarely positioned five years later by its producers and distributors as the meeting of – indeed almost a collaboration between – two giants in the depiction of contemporary American mores: author Carver and auteur Altman (Wyatt, 1998b: 83). Accompanying Literature In considering elements of the adaptation industry other than the author that can be recruited into the marketing campaign for a screen adaptation, I want to return to and examine in some detail The Reader. Such a choice, late in the present volume, might look like a reversion to adaptation studies’ wearyingly familiar methodology of the case study, and hence contradict my Introduction’s exasperation at the ubiquity of this practice. In fact, it is not any exceptionalism of The Reader (scholars’ usual reason for selecting a case study) that motivates this choice but rather its very typicality. Invocation of the full panoply of adaptation-industry agents in the marketing campaign constructed for The Reader serves as an exemplar of the Weinsteins’ current strategy for releasing an awards-friendly, upmarket literary adaptation. The release pattern of The Reader, as already mentioned, clearly evinces a deliberate strategy of incremental familiarisation amongst opinion-setting audiences. But in fact the Weinsteins’ cultivation of The Reader’s readers began as much as two years prior to the film’s formal premiere. During development and pre-production phases, key personnel were assembled whose cinematic track records, as well as their combined clout with the literary community, were designed to maximise the film’s chances of critical – and through this, commercial – success. British director Stephen Daldry, though a relatively recent entrant to the screen

Cultivating the Reader 179 world after a celebrated career directing for the stage in London’s West End, had previously guided Nicole Kidman to an Oscar-winning performance in his adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prizewinning The Hours (2002), itself an intertextual homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and thus a film with impeccable literary credentials. The screenwriter of both The Hours and The Reader was British theatre giant Sir David Hare, arguably the UK’s most esteemed living playwright and a major figure within Britain’s cultural establishment (Hare, 2008; 2009; ‘The Reader’, 2008). The collective cultural capital of director, screenwriter, and the book’s German author, Schlink, was combined with the film’s star wattage in the form of Winslet and Ralph Fiennes at the film’s international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2009. Not only is the Berlinale one of the festival circuit’s A-ranked events, as outlined in Chapter 3, but it also offered an important public relations opportunity given the story’s inextricable enmeshment with uniquely sensitive issues of Germany’s recent history. The Weinstein Company was clearly aware that incremental audience expansion solely in the domestic US market would prove insufficient; in terms of both cultural resonance and market size, the film’s success in Germany would be crucial to its fortunes in foreign markets, from which Hollywood now earns the majority of its revenues.19 Variety’s clear-eyed

Figure 6.2 Berlin Film Festival press conference for The Reader showing (left to right) actor David Kross, author Bernhard Schlink, actor Kate Winslet, scriptwriter David Hare, director Stephen Daldry and actor Ralph Fiennes (6 February 2009) © Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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assessment of the picture’s fortunes had already registered that, even with Academy endorsement, the picture’s ambivalent characterisation and arthouse mood predisposed it to achieve better foreign than domestic boxoffice success: ‘pic will have trouble crossing over to the general public Stateside. Offshore prospects look stronger’ (McCarthy, 2008). The Weinstein Company’s executive vice president for marketing, Gary Faber, meanwhile continued relentlessly to court literary-critical endorsement for The Reader within the domestic market as well. At the film’s US premiere in New York City (note, not the more typical film-world location of Los Angeles) in the same week as the Berlinale, Bernhard Schlink attended a standing-room-only question-and-answer session following a screening of the film’s (much disputed) final cut.20 Business Week’s correspondent, correctly diagnosing the motivation for this unusual premiere format, observed that ‘Some academy members were likely in the audience’ (Grover, 2009). The event was part of a broader platform-release campaign for which TWC had ‘invited Jewish groups from around the United States to early screenings and reached out to book groups’ (Kaminer, 2008). Such events attempted to control dominant public discourse about the film, counterbalancing some Jewish groups’ foreseeable objections to the film’s semi-sympathetic portrayal of a Nazi camp guard with respect for the artistry of the film-makers in handling a much-praised novel and Academy-Awards buzz for the performances of the film’s lead actors. An especially intriguing aspect of The Reader’s promotional campaign, and one illustrating how formalised and regularised interactions between the book and film worlds have become, was an exclusive preview of the film convened by the Accompanied Literary Society (ALS). This New York City-based, invitation-only group of celebrities, literati and cultural industries movers and shakers self-describes on its Facebook page as: a society of artists, intellectuals, tastemakers and cultural influencers with a mission to directly support literature, publishing and the arts. Accompanied brings together the intellectually curious, creates a haven for discourse and the love of books, and promotes authors, journalists, and artists through exclusive events. Conceived as a twenty-first-century incarnation of pre-revolutionary France’s famed literary salons, the ALS was established in 2007 by New York socialite Brooke Geahan who, in the words of novelist Jonathan Ames, ‘got inspired to start the Accompanied Literary Society because she attended a very non-glamorous reading of mine at Barnes & Noble . . . I thought it was glamorous enough but I guess she didn’t’ (Aleksander and Neyfakh, 2008). The principal concern of the ALS is, in the words of its website, ‘to extend the range and reach of literature’ by facilitating interactions between elite members of the book world and the bright and

Cultivating the Reader 181 beautiful of affiliated media industries (‘A Fashioning’, 2007; Aleksander and Neyfakh, 2008).21 Given to throwing ‘Book to Film’ fundraisers on Oscars night, the ALS would have envisaged a natural fit in hosting an invitation-only pre-release screening of The Reader in November 2008. The film’s director, Daldry, as well as other notables such as Michael Cunningham and Angela’s Ashes author the late Frank McCourt, were in attendance, and pictures and coverage of the event were circulated to scene-setting media outlets such as Vanity Fair to build positive prerelease buzz regarding the film’s artistic merit. How appropriate then that this ideal forum for showcasing an awards-aspirant literary adaptation should count amongst its sponsors representatives of both the publishing (Canongate Books) and cinema (Warner Independent) sectors as well as, more appositely, both Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Company.22 Not satisfied with utilising extant film- and book-world circuits such as major film festivals and international book fairs to normalise the production and distribution of adapted properties, representatives of the adaptation industries have now begun to convene their own fora to showcase their pick of adaptation projects. With convenors exercising exclusive control over scheduling, venues and guest lists, such micro-managed events represent a new frontier in distributors’ platform-release strategising, precisely engineering the optimal environmental conditions for

Figure 6.3 The Accompanied Literary Society’s official webpage, again reimagining the book format for the computer screen

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Figure 6.4 Listing of Accompanied Literary Society sponsors including Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Company

critical reception of adapted properties and – through that crucial conduit – cross-over mass-market success.

Conclusion The foregoing discussion has attempted to sketch some of the vast production and distribution apparatus that surrounds individual adaptations and which crucially mediates audience encounters with adapted film texts. Acknowledgement of this larger political-economic landscape is not unknown in studies of contemporary adaptations, although it is emphatically marginalised. Christine Geraghty’s Now a Major Motion Picture is innovative, as alluded to in the present’s volume’s Introduction, for her rare willingness to move beyond the confines of adapted texts themselves to examine ‘the cinematic culture that supports the films’ (2008: 48). In the second chapter of her book, entitled ‘Art Cinema, Authorship, and the Impossible Novel’, Geraghty investigates critical discourses surrounding adaptations of classic Modernist authors such as Proust, Woolf and Joyce, and finds film reviewers’ determination of the boundaries of the highbrow ‘art cinema’ and its more middle-brow variant, ‘heritage cinema’, precondition audiences’ reception of films in important ways (47–72).

Cultivating the Reader 183 The early sections of Geraghty’s chapter gesture towards the industry structures underpinning the genre of art cinema – specialist distributors/ exhibitors such as the British Film Institute, the importance of A-ranked film festivals and their prizes, and marketers’ foregrounding of auteur directors (50). But while she acknowledges that film producers and distributors create publicity packs that may be drawn upon by film reviewers, the overriding impression created by her analysis is of a film production and distribution sector offering up its products to a powerful critical lobby for approbation, damnation and/or classification according to various generic niches. The current chapter, through its analysis of the production–distribution marketing machine through which contemporary literary adaptations move, questions Geraghty’s presentation of the balance of power between reviewers and film marketers. For just in the way that the celebrity profile piece in newspapers and magazines has degenerated from an informal, off-guard encounter between the star and an often named journalist into a thoroughly choreographed, quasi-scripted ritual audience between the god-like celebrity, surrounded by public-relations minders and a battery of personal assistants, and largely tractable, semi-anonymous journalists, so too has the playing field of film reviewing been tilted strongly in marketers’ favour. This is not to argue that film marketing and publicity staff write mainstream reviews of their films (at least not in reputable publications, although pseudonymous reviewing on webfora is another matter), but they have at their disposable powerful means for shaping the critical reception of a contemporary literary adaptation. Through release of a film at the optimal time of year, choice of premiere districts in mediasaturated metropolitan locales, upmarket venues stacked with handpicked audiences, down to the rate and geographical scale at which a platform release is rolled out to build awards buzz and finally to attract mainstream audiences, there is nothing accidental about a modern audience member’s encounter with a screen adaptation. To date, adaptation studies has failed to apprehend the complexity and influence of film marketing’s role in the adaptation industry because of the methodological stranglehold of textual analysis and its related suppositions – in particular a superficial fixation on the ‘brand identity’ of the well-known source text as seemingly self-sufficient guarantor of an adaptation’s audience appeal. While name recognition for an adapted property is often highly significant for securing production finance and in facilitating green-lighting and casting, it is not in itself adequate to ensure that readers of the book will be readily convertible into cinema audiences. An analogy might be made with political marketing in democracies such as the US and UK where voting is non-compulsory: voter knowledge of a candidate and their policy platforms is important but ultimately futile unless that knowledge can be actualised through ‘get out the vote’ measures. Equally, potential audience members’ familiarity with a well-known source text (whether

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first-hand or vicariously through knowledge of its cultural reputation) is in itself insufficient. What is crucial for distributors is that the right audience members in the right locations give desirable responses to the film at the optimal point in the release cycle so that the wave of positive buzz so generated can be converted into the high-profile cinematic esteem of Academy voters and, through this, publicised to mass audiences globally. To build and maintain such an elaborate campaign for a film or (in the case of Hollywood’s specialty distributors) multiple awardsaspirant films in a single season requires enormous investment of human and financial capital. In this context, the various other stakeholders in the adaptation industry are called upon and expected to play their parts in the interests of the adaptation field as a whole. The extent to which they are willing to do so goes, however, to the very heart of the rivalrous codependency that drives the adaptation industry.

Afterword Restive Audiences and Adaptation Futures

When reading the work of political economists of film, I am often reminded of the climactic scene in that celebrated literary adaptation The Wizard of Oz (1939), in which plucky Toto pulls aside a curtain to reveal that the vast, glowering image of the Wizard and his booming voice are all so many smoke-and-mirror technical effects being produced by a cowering, utterly nondescript old man. The beguiling images, stirring narratives and glamorous personae of the Hollywood film are, political economists seem bent on reiterating, all reducible to an insatiable industry machine focussed on accumulating profit above all else. The reason such critics have, on occasion, lapsed into a shrill register is no doubt due to frustration at the overwhelmingly textual focus of most screen studies. This dominant analytic paradigm perhaps unconsciously perpetuates a strongly Romanticised mode of analysis which Bourdieu summarised as ‘the representation of culture as a kind of superior reality, irreducible to the vulgar demands of economics, and the ideology of free, disinterested “creation” founded on the spontaneity of innate inspiration’ (1993: 114). My aim with this book has been to steer an analytical course between these two extremes. Contemporary literary adaptations are products of an intricate, hugely complex institutional and industrial system. Importantly, however, the adaptation industry not only stymies the appearance of certain kinds of adaptations (as dour political economists tend to emphasise in keeping with their left-wing, economically deterministic mode); it also facilitates the appearance of others – including in the niche category of the arthouse literary adaptation with which this study has been principally concerned. The adaptation industry as a whole is both enabling as well as obstructive. Thus to appreciate adaptation as an industrial, economic and above all sociological process is not necessarily disillusioning – delegitimising our enjoyment of adaptations – but, rather, enlightening. The model elaborated in this study aims to highlight the processes facilitating the creation of certain kinds of adaptations (focussing, for argumentative clarity, specifically though not exclusively on adaptations between the book and screen sectors). Secondly, the focus has been on industrial structures shifting in

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response to new patterns of audience enthusiasm (in imitation of other agents’ successes for example) and for newly prominent media (such as comics). Like all ecosystems, the adaptation industry functions according to complex patterns of feedback and responsiveness, with changes in the role and status of specific agents affecting the structure of the field as a whole. Finally, pervasive throughout the present volume is the idea that detailed modelling of the adaptation industry allows us to see how the various contemporary media sectors are increasingly tightly converged into a single adaptation-industry network through conglomerate ownership structures, digital technologies and the ubiquity of the content rights economy. Within academe, the prevailing organisational logic has long been to relegate specific media platforms to discrete fields of study, so that as each new medium moved forward to challenge the printed book (hived off as literary studies’ main stamping ground), new, rivalrous disciplines such as film studies, television studies, digital media studies, computer-gaming studies and the like emerged. Adaptation studies’ tentative appearance in the 1950s predated, as has been outlined earlier, the emergence of film studies as a distinct academic undertaking, and for many decades the legacy of adaptation studies’ original academic liminality has plagued it. Intellectually neither fish nor fowl, it seemed always hamstrung by its insider-outsider status and was tolerated rather than embraced by medium-specific disciplinary rivals. Yet with ownership and technologically based distinctions between media platforms increasingly redundant in the twenty-first century, the time is now surely ripe for adaptation studies to turn its characteristic border-dwelling into its primary academic strength. If content is fluidly transferred across affiliate digitallyenabled media platforms as a matter of course in the contemporary cultural sphere, what is required is an explanatory framework for understanding why and, specifically, how this occurs. Various ‘new-wave’ adaptation scholars have articulated similar arguments in promoting adaptation studies as a discipline whose time has now come (as touched upon in this book’s Introduction). But to date their overwhelming focus on the semiotic richness of adapted texts and propounding of various theoretical schemas for understanding these have distracted attention from more sociologically focussed enquiries into how these various texts come to be produced, and the multidirectional distribution routes they subsequently take in accessing audiences. Contemporary adaptation is a cultural phenomenon thoroughly intertwined with legal regimes, commercial investments and status hierarchies between industry sectors and the individual agents within them. My aim throughout this volume has thus been not to castigate adaptations for being products of a (predominantly) profit-seeking industry, but to bring balance into contemporary adaptation studies by holding together both the specificities of adapted texts and their common adaptation context. Yes, adaptation is

Afterword 187 clearly proliferating, but beneath the beguiling surface of individual adaptation case studies lies an intricate institutional apparatus some decades in development and of formidable and growing power. If Dorothy and her companions wish to understand the newly disorienting Oz in which they find themselves, they must first pay attention to how the Wizard’s various levers, microphones and smoke machines actually function. The various stakeholders in the adaptation industry aim optimally for synergistic success in which each agent with an interest in a particular literary property benefits from its cross-promotion in other formats. However, even in the case of such cross-format successes, the adaptation industry is marked by intense competition, both over the extent of rights controlled by specific agents, as well as claims of accreting or eroding the cultural capital attaching to specific properties. Chapter 1 examined the rise of the celebrity author figure as an authorising marker for adaptations. Through both occasional cameo appearances within a screen text, as well as publicity appearances in support of adapted texts, authors have become more prominent in shepherding their works’ post-print manifestations. The irony is that the Romantic charisma of the author, which is here employed as guarantor of artistic integrity above and beyond screen-industry machinations, has itself become incorporated into the functions of the adaptation industry. The rise of the celebrity author has been concomitant with the elevation of the literary agent as the writer’s business manager and creative sounding-board. As explored in Chapter 2, the agent’s usurpation of the editor’s former mentoring role has led to an increasing instrumentalisation of the corporate publisher’s function. Yet, in a further irony, literary agents themselves now appear to be undergoing consolidation and conglomeration into cross-sectoral talent agencies capable of representing a content package across all media incarnations and throughout all phases of its commercial life. Interactions between the book and screen worlds have occurred since the earliest decades of the twentieth century, typically facilitated by agents, but publishers are fighting back by attempting, as examined in Chapter 3, to multiply the afterlives of book content through increasingly formalised cross-industry contact at book fairs, film festivals and dedicated adaptation industry fora. The proliferation of such staged events on the adaptation industry calendar has formalised, regularised and catalysed adaptations deal-making to the commercial benefit of all parties. Readers too appear ecumenical about the exact media format and sequence in which they encounter literary content, with adaptation-themed sessions and film screenings now commonplace at writers’ festivals internationally. The role of literary prizes in foregrounding ‘adaptation-ready’ books has been apparent in the Anglophone world for some decades, but it is only recently that administrators of major book awards have publicly embraced their role as adaptation catalysers, citing the number of

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shortlisted books subsequently adapted as an indicator of a prize in touch with the creative zeitgeist. Film-makers also attempt to cultivate audience familiarity with a book’s prize-winning pedigree through a range of extraand intradiegetic devices, as explored in Chapter 4. However, in the case of a semi-fictionalised historical account, a novel’s prize-winning status may in fact burden a screen adaptation as much as it consecrates it. Those agents most directly responsible for reimagining a book for the screen, namely screenwriters, have until recently been comparatively ignored by medium-specific academic disciplinary structures. Screenwriters’ liminal positioning and attempts to reconcile competing demands upon them from other adaptation industry stakeholders have manifested in polarised screenwriterly rhetorics of radical dismemberment and textual reverence, as outlined in Chapter 5. Intriguingly, the recent emergence of a seemingly oxymoronic figure – the auteur adaptive screenwriter, whose name acts as a badge of textual fidelity even while their actual practice radically reconfigures print texts for the screen – may have reconciled the two rhetorics, as well as providing an additional public persona to aid in the promotion of adapted works. It is producers and, in particular, film distributors who are responsible for choreographing publicity and marketing campaigns around resulting film adaptations, and who thus largely create public awareness of such products. Chapter 6 examines the enthusiastic recruitment of author, author representative, publisher, screenwriter, stars and director into marketing campaigns for literary adaptations, especially in the arthouse niche market. While other elements of the adaptation industry are readily pressed into service, distributors’ greater financial exposure ensures that, when push comes to shove, film industry interests predominate; this is evident even to the extent of creating hand-picked, literary-identified coterie audiences for early market-testing of awards-aspirant films, in the hope of crossing over to the lucrative mass market.

Fragility of the Rights Economy in the Twenty-first Century The examination of film distribution in Chapter 6 might suggest a docile, tractable audience, herded into attending specific films at pre-determined times, but this is not necessarily representative of all audience sectors in relation to adaptation. Alongside the dominant formal adaptationindustry economy examined in this volume, one characterised by trading of IP rights and prestige in exchange for money, exists the adaptation industry’s shadowy penumbra typified by audiences’ unauthorised reuse of literary materials. Adaptation scholar I.Q. Hunter rightly recognises that ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ adaptation obey no clear-cut distinctions: ‘The perceived differences between exploitation and adaptation are the products of, first, the cultural politics of legitimacy and, second,

Afterword 189 the vicissitudes of copyright legislation’ (2009: 23). By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is clear that the formal adaptation industry coexists and at its fringes intersects with an expanding realm of unauthorised adaptation activities undertaken by digitally enabled ‘produsers’ who create and distribute amateur adaptations more out of a fascination with particular texts than for personal profit. The best known of such sectors revolves around fan fiction, formerly an underground creative writing practice centred upon fan conventions but now globally disseminated and archived via voluminous Internet portals. The phenomenon raises the same kind of definitional questions with which traditional textually-focussed adaptation studies has long wrestled: to what extent can a fanfic prequel, sequel, parody or mash-up be considered an adaptation? Clearly the answer to this, as new-wave adaptation scholars have argued elsewhere in relation to degrees of textual borrowing, is that adaptation encompasses a broad spectrum of intertextual indebtedness. Some of these literary mash-ups are professionally published, such as Seth Grahame-Smith’s brilliantly packaged Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), a cross-genre splatter-fest which has now spawned its own franchise of ‘Deluxe Heirloom Edition’, audiobook, Kindle eBook, graphic novel, wall calendar and a feature film currently in development – these latter incarnations being effected, interestingly, through traditional adaptation industry rights-trading channels.1 It is true that Jane Austen’s work has long been in the public domain and could thus be considered legal fair game for textual reworking. But fanfic also exists around contemporary texts and not only in popular fiction genres, with fan fictions also reworking texts from the literary end of the fiction scale. Rare innovative experiments such as Remix My Lit, an Australia Council for the Arts-supported initiative, have trialled mashing up of contemporary literary writers’ work with authorial permission and under Creative Commons licence, subsequently reprinting the original short stories and selected mash-ups in book form (Barker, 2009; Murray, 2010).2 But more generally, the mainstream book world has been largely silent on the implications of fan rewritings of contemporary literary works, relegating fan fiction very much to a copyright grey area (Tushnet, 1996; Jenkins, 2006; Rimmer, 2008; Westcott, 2008; Van Parys, 2009). If fan fiction appears less readily identifiable as adaptation because it does not move out of the written medium of the source text, the audiovisual nature of fan films distinguishes them as more immediately recognisable trans-media adaptations. At one end of the fan film phenomenon are trailer edits where users working with domestic video-editing software recut trailers or entire films to create alternative iterations of familiar content. The YouTube-posted trailer edit of literary adaptation Possession (2002), for example, echoes much critical commentary on the film by omitting entirely the twentieth-century plot thread and focussing

190 Afterword exclusively on the Victorian-era romance between A.S. Byatt’s Christina Rossetti-like poet and Browning-esque man of letters.3 Less obviously derivative is the genre of fan-made films, also long a feature of science fiction and fantasy convention circuits but more recently accessible to mass audiences via user-generated video-hosting websites. These range from the shambolically, ludicrously amateur, through the quirky, to welldeveloped and -produced short films (Jenkins, 2003; Basement, 2005; Tedmanson, 2005). The high-water mark of the fan film to date is surely Born of Hope (2009), an unauthorised Lord of the Rings prequel imagining the family back-story of Tolkien’s character Aragorn and remarkable for its one-hour-plus running time, professional-quality production design, digital special effects, costumes, sound and editing (Lamont, 2010).4 In addition to the phenomenon of the fan film, we might add (semi-)authorised gaming adaptations of printed works. These range from, at one end, often technologically primitive and deliberately goofy games co-created with a book’s author and released online to build viral publicity for a text. But, similar to fan film-making, these user-generated games can increasingly take advantage of sophisticated game-creation software to produce gaming adaptations with the potential not only to create publicity for a printed text and its official adaptation franchise, but perhaps also to cannibalise audiences for these. What relationships can – and should – exist between the formal economy of adaptation rights-trading, characterised by proliferating subsidiary rights clauses in media industry contracts, and this shadow economy of unlicensed, user-generated adaptations of wildly variable quality and motivation? It is on this question that adaptation studies intersects most directly with ongoing debates in media and cultural studies over the implications of digitally empowered audience–creators. Media corporations, viewing the trend with marked alarm, have traditionally taken the position that amateur adaptations potentially threaten the brand integrity of specific media properties (especially in children’s markets) and risk co-opting consumers of official adaptation products. For these reasons, copyrights and trademarks should be vigorously enforced through cease-and-desist notices and, if necessary, litigation against infringers. However, fans angered by heavy-handed policing of corporate properties have staged effective online protest campaigns and boycotts which have generated damaging mass-media publicity, potentially alienating precisely the core audience sector for official adaptation products. Growing recognition of the counterproductiveness of corporate IP-enforcement strategies has led some media organisations more recently to take an at least superficially more collaborative approach, harnessing the grassroots publicity generated by fan creations and attempting to incorporate these partially into official pre-release marketing campaigns (Murray, 2004b; Grainge, 2008: 139; Milner, 2009: 492). According to this approach, fan creativity becomes categorised more as free research

Afterword 191 and development labour and on-tap market research. But how do such policies of turning a benevolent blind eye to fans’ unauthorised adaptations fare once fans move out of the non-commercial realm, such as by accepting paid advertising on websites attracting traffic with unauthorised adapted content, or leveraging skills, contacts and showreels built through participation in fan films into a career in the media industries proper (Lamont, 2010)? Issues such as these constitute the current front line of IP disputes between brand-focussed and revenue-oriented conglomerate media, and the mass creativity of individual audience members. They thus constitute an exciting new frontier also for adaptation studies, as recognised by the theme of the 2010 Association for Adaptation Studies conference in Berlin: ‘Rewriting, Remixing and Reloading: Adaptations across the Globe’.5 But it is salutary to recall, especially given cultural studies’ long history of celebratory accounts of audience ‘resistance’, that the shadow economy of unauthorised adaptation is highly unlikely to eclipse the official adaptation industry any time soon, if only because of demonstrable public appetite for the kind of high-budget production values, star attachments and formal distribution and exhibition that only the studio majors and their affiliates have the resources to secure. More realistically, the question becomes: to what extent can the formal adaptation industry and its unofficial penumbra coexist and even at their fringes intersect – through tapping of emergent audience sectors, cultivation of new genres, and hiring of promising fan talent? In all likelihood these two sectors of the adaptation economy – the official and the black market – will resolve themselves into an uneasy truce, with some overlap at the margins. Hence adaptation scholars dazzled by the displays of anarchic, exuberant creativity undoubtedly evident among web 2.0 hosting sites, should temper their enthusiasm for semiotic analyses of fan creations with a detailed understanding of the legal, institutional and commercial frameworks against which such activities appear to rebel. After all, it is not possible to appreciate fully the significance of user-generated adaptations unless the discipline has first developed a clear understanding of the formal adaptation mechanisms which such practices challenge, evade or complement. What is equally clear, however, is that the formal adaptation industry, only now beginning to be analysed, cannot be fully comprehended if quarantined off from users’ digital activities. These show every indication of becoming more plentiful, more widely accessible and more legally fraught as the twenty-first century progresses.

Notes

Introduction 1 The editors’ statement in the journal’s first issue makes Adaptation’s larger disciplinary ambitions explicit: ‘[The journal’s] very presence is testimony to the fact that adaptation studies has an important place in serious academic debate and is a discipline in its own right’ (Cartmell, Corrigan and Whelehan, 2008: 4). 2 See Leitch, 2005; 2007b; 2008a. 3 In reference to the discipline of film studies as a whole, leading political economist Janet Wasko makes a similar observation that the discipline has overwhelmingly focussed on textual analysis rather than on issues of economics and production – especially from a critical political economy perspective (2003: 12–13). Wasko concludes that: ‘These oversights need to be addressed if we are to understand film in its actual social context’ (13). 4 A full two decades before Naremore’s call for a sociology of adaptation (quoted as an epigraph to this Introduction), Dudley Andrew similarly wrote in his much revised and reprinted article ‘The Well-Worn Muse’: ‘It is time for adaptation studies to take a sociological turn’ (1980: 14; 2000, [1984]: 35). However, on closer examination, Andrew’s conception of ‘sociology’ turns out to be neither industrial nor commercial in orientation but residually textual: ‘we need to study the films themselves as acts of discourse’ (17). It is in fact more akin to Stam’s and Hutcheon’s subsequently articulated conceptions of adaptation as a discursive barometer for the social and historical preoccupations of a given culture. Andrew’s statement about a sociological turn in adaptation studies has been cited approvingly, though not entirely accurately, by Karen E. Kline in her identification of a ‘materialist’ adaptation studies paradigm (one of four paradigms she identifies as operative in the discipline) (1996: 74). Oddly, she expresses dissatisfaction that materialist attention to ‘the commercial system within which the film is produced’ encourages ‘formulaic’ neo-Marxist denunciations of adaptations as commercial corruptions of true (presumably literary) art (74–75). It is not clear why attention to contextual factors should necessarily adopt a Marxist perspective and denunciatory tone, and could not instead be predominantly descriptive, or even go so far as to highlight how production networks actually facilitate the adaptation of content from one medium to others. 5 I’m deliberately invoking here cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s strongly contextual understanding of art and literature (though never adaptation per se) as cultural ‘field’: ‘In short, it is a question of understanding works of art as a manifestation of the field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field,

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and all the determinisms inherent in its structure and functioning, are concentrated’ (1993: 37; italics in original). Thomas Leitch and Christine Geraghty have also separately critiqued Stam’s demonising of Hollywood and his polarising of artistic worth and box-office success as unduly binarised (2005: 236, 238; 2008: 10–11). http://www.oscar.com/ Analysing the appropriability of Bourdieu’s theories for a specifically feminist literary critique, Toril Moi makes a similar point. Moi insists that feminist literary criticism, as a textually and discursively dominated discipline, needs also to understand literature’s social and historical contexts of cultural production: ‘feminist criticism fails in its political and literary task if it does not study literature both at the level of texts and at the level of institutions and social processes’ (1991: 1018). Like the epigraphs to this book, Moi also approvingly cites British cultural sociologist Janet Wolff in support of such a project to understand ‘the social aspects of cultural production’ (1018). Bluestone reiterates this analogy of the novel as raw material later in Chapter 1: ‘What happens . . . when the filmist undertakes the adaptation of a novel, given the inevitable mutation, is that he does not convert the novel at all. What he adapts is a kind of paraphrase of the novel – the novel viewed as raw material’ (2003: 62). The tenacity of fidelity critique within film reviewing is exemplified, for example, by even internationally respected film critic David Stratton having recourse to the trope in his review of Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation (2006) of Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Running with Scissors (2002): ‘the faithful filming of a book is virtually an impossibility, and the film version has, of necessity, to be something different. The question to ask seems to be this: Is the film faithful to the spirit, to the essence, of the book?’ (2007: 22). Kamilla Elliott (2003) also incorporates much semiotic and formalist analysis into her recent study of adaptation, although her work historicises ‘interart’ debates and cross-pollinates this earlier semiotic tradition with analytical techniques derived from postmodernism and cultural studies (5). That cross-media transfer of content need not necessarily invoke a textual analysis methodology is demonstrated by a recent wave of research into the material and institutional conditions of rights-trading and cross-promotion between book publishing and the mediums of theatre, radio and film in the first decades of the twentieth century (see Weedon, 1999; 2007a; 2007b; Hammond, 2004; Adam, 2006). Guerric DeBona in his Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era (2010) employs similar vocabulary in terming this latest wave of research ‘revisionist adaptation studies’ (2). A partial exception here is Stam’s brief, half-page discussion of adaptation’s relationship to the development of copyright law in the early twentiethcentury film industry (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 31). This tantalising hint of the kind of issues a production-oriented adaptation criticism might illuminate finds much fuller expression in DeBona’s analysis of the cultural politics and production contexts operative upon a number of adaptations of the Hollywood studio era (1934–51) (2010: 8). DeBona’s ‘materializing’ approach to adaptation studies has much in common with the present volume, especially his ‘awareness of institutional and cultural politics as a dense sociological web, interconnecting and defining the practice of film adaptation’ (6, 21). However, his historical reconstruction of studio-era production contexts would, naturally, require radical amendment to account for the much altered dynamics of the contemporary period.

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15 There appears to be something about the previously glacial pace of theoretical innovation in adaptation studies that causes critics to vent their frustration in enumerated lists of ‘clichés’, ‘truisms’ or ‘fallacies’ currently plaguing the field (see Larsson, 1982: 70; Leitch, 2003: 149; Hutcheon, 2006: 52–71; Cartmell, Corrigan and Whelehan, 2008: 1–2). 16 Cited approvingly by Whelehan (1999: 6). 17 See, for example, Reynolds (1993: 16). 18 There are some promising signs that this consciously contrived false dichotomy is finally being challenged. Film scholar Andrew Higson notes that solitary authorial creation is merely ‘the conventional mythology of literary authorship. . . . But of course the publishing business also plays its part, in the guise of editors, marketing people, book designers, and so on, as does the business of criticism, literary reviews, and the like’ (2006: 72). Similarly, Cartmell and Whelehan (2007a) have recently called for adaptation studies to pay attention to the ‘commercial considerations . . . [of] the film and television industries’ in order better to understand the production contexts out of which adaptations emerge (4, 9). But, curiously, they exempt the book publishing industry from similar scrutiny. However, in a recent survey of ‘new-wave’ adaptation studies work published in the first issue of Adaptation, Leitch indicates that this theoretical oversimplification is now being called into question: ‘Is the movie subject to contextual pressures that inflect its meanings? Of course it is. So is the book’ (2008a: 69). In the same issue of Adaptation the current author undertakes an extended case-study example of how such an industrially focussed research methodology might analyse adaptation, taking into account both the book and screen industries (2008b). 19 Geraghty has also taken Stam to task for ‘ignoring the production contexts of literature while emphasizing those of cinema and television’ (2008: 11). Geraghty’s own book does not, however, investigate the impact of the book business on the phenomenon of adaptation in any detail, adopting – as mentioned earlier – a predominantly textual analysis methodology. 20 Tracy Chevalier, author of the novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000), made this point forcefully during a panel on adaptations at the 2009 London Book Fair (‘Book to Film Adaptations’, 2009). Outlining her own (fortuitous) experience of the adaptation process, Chevalier noted that authors already have extensive experience of ‘letting go’ of their text and working collaboratively through the production, marketing and publicity processes, as well as through dealing with unanticipated interpretations of their work on the part of readers. Interestingly, Chevalier also recounted that a proof copy of her novel was shown by her literary agent to a film agent for potential optioning, and that this film agent then passed it to one of his screenwriter clients, thereby stoking the interest of several film producers – all prior to the book’s publication. This is a relatively high-profile literary instance of the increasingly common mass-market fiction practice of ‘pre-publication film sales’ (explored further in Chapter 1). Indeed, large-scale international book fairs such as London’s are now designed precisely to catalyse such rightstrading between publishers, producers, screenwriters and literary scouts; foregrounding this growing trend was presumably the impetus for convening the ‘Book to Film Adaptations’ panel at which Chevalier spoke (see Chapter 3). Girl with a Pearl Earring is, of course, itself an adaptation or intertext of Vermeer’s identically titled painting. Leitch provides a detailed textual analysis of the book and film versions of Girl with a Pearl Earring in Chapter 8 of his Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, contextualising the pair as an instance of the broader phenomenon of ‘streaming pictures’ – films based on visual materials (2007a: 202–06).

Notes 195 21 There are a handful of notable exceptions to this general view emerging from the niche adaptations subfield of studying novelisations, e.g. Baetens (2007). The subtitle of Baetens’s chapter, ‘Novelization, the Hidden Continent’, aptly captures the currently hyper-marginalised nature of research into novelisations. 22 Many critics have similarly noted screen adaptations’ role in driving increased demand for the original novel: Ellis, 1982: 5; Izod, 1992: 97, 103; Orr, 1992: 1; Reynolds, 1993: 4, 10; Whelehan, 1999: 18 and Hutcheon, 2006: 90. 23 The ‘Adaptations, Cross-Media Practices and Branded Entertainments’ 2011 special issue of Convergence: International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies also aims to spark broader critical engagement with these issues (http://convergence.beds.ac.uk/callforpapers/crossmedia). 24 A rare and early exception to this general rule is John Orr, whose ‘Introduction: Proust, the Movie’ (1992) observes that (then) contemporary literary novelists such as Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, John Fowles, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing and Angela Carter were having their work adapted for highly accomplished films (4–5). Orr suggests that, in a feedback effect, these critically praised film adaptations in turn enhanced the literary reputation of the novelist – a passing observation that the current volume aims to test more fully. 25 Many critics have noted the role of screen adaptations of Austen’s works in popularising and expanding readerships for her novels (for example, Lupack, 1999; Stern, 2000; Aragay and López, 2005; Troost, 2007). 26 This ecosystem model of the adaptation industry echoes another metaphor borrowed from the biological sciences which has become increasingly prominent within ‘new-wave’ adaptation studies work – the Darwinian sense of ‘adaptation’ as fitness for a given environment. Linda Hutcheon has invoked biologist Richard Dawkins’ related concept of ‘memes’ – ideas that self-replicate across cultures and historical periods – as productive for a theory of adaptation as intertextual citation (2006: 31–32; Bortolotti and Hutcheon, 2007: 446–47). Spike Jonze’s inclusion of a Charles Darwin figure in a brief sequence of his much-commented-upon film Adaptation (2002), as well as the film’s various time-lapse sequences of the natural world, may have encouraged the efflorescence of such biological analogies in contemporary adaptation studies (Hutcheon, 2004: 108; 2006: 2; 2007; Stam and Raengo, 2005: 1–3; Sanders, 2006: 158; Leitch, 2007a: 257; Tomasulo, 2008: 165–66; Price, 2010: 62). Equally, Jonze’s dizzyingly inventive film might almost serve as an unexpected (and presumably unintentional) manifesto for a new, industryfocussed wave of academic adaptation studies due to its satirical attention to the intermeshing motivations and anxieties of screenwriters, authors, agents, directors, actors, producers and scriptwriting gurus. Articles about adaptation featured in the book and screen trade press, as well as broadsheet newspapers’ culture supplements, now also routinely refer to the film as an insight into a little-analysed sector of cross-media trade (Wyndham, 2005a; 2005b), and were in fact doing so even prior to the film’s official release (Maas, 2001). 27 The Booker Prize was established in 1969, and became the Man Booker Prize in 2002 with a change of sponsor (refer: http://www.themanbookerprize.co). 28 See Reynolds (1993) for the first, to my knowledge, use of this phrase in adaptation studies criticism: ‘The huge growth over the last few years in what could be called the adaptation industry makes this a cultural phenomenon that cannot be ignored’ (11). 29 This expanded range of media interests was also evident at the Association of Adaptation Studies’ 2009 annual conference at the British Film Institute in London, which included panel sessions on adapting comic books and

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computer games – topics seen as disciplinary growth areas by the membership (http://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/humanities/adaptations/adaptations-studiesconference-2009.jsp). 30 Stam and Hutcheon, both of whom trained in North American comparative literature programmes, are notable exceptions to this rule; both critics’ work on adaptation references a wide variety of texts from (mostly) other European language groups, in particular French-, Spanish-, Italian- and Portuguesespeaking cultures (see Stam, 2005a; Hutcheon, 2006). 1 What Are You Working On?: The Expanding Role of the Author in an Era of Cross-media Adaptation 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCXdN7maB4I. 2 cf. Deborah Cartmell, Timothy Corrigan and Imelda Whelehan’s contention that literary studies’ ‘romance with the author’ and ‘fetishization of individual genius’ has inhibited the growth of adaptation studies (2008: 2). There is some truth in this, although I would argue that the cult of the author has thrived within adaptation studies as well, a ploy perhaps adopted to help boost the field’s legitimacy in the eyes of normally suspicious literary studies colleagues. 3 Australian author Robert Drewe also endorses Hemingway’s advice, alluding to it as his ‘take-the-money-and-run view of the [adaptation] process’ (Phelan, 2005: 86). 4 A slight variation on this marginalising of the writer can be heard in actor–director Tim Roth’s reported comments at the second Forum International Cinéma et Littérature (FICL): ‘A writer is really the last person you want to see on the set, even the great ones. . . . While we’re collaborating on a screenplay, I always tell them, “This is the time to enjoy yourself, because once we start saying Action, it’s over!”’ (Goodman, 2002: 14). For more on the FICL and its competitor events, see Chapter 3. 5 Michel Foucault makes the point that even self-proclaimedly ‘textually’ focussed schools of literary criticism, which ostensibly castigate focus on the author as intentionalist fallacy, nonetheless constantly invoke the Romantic ideal of the Author as superior creative being and locus of (attributed) meaning in their very definition of what counts as a ‘work’ (2006: 282). Also writing in broadly post-structuralist vein, Andrew Wernick evinces embarrassment in even raising the subject in an academic essay of authors’ commercial profile: ‘The theme I want to bring to the surface is not easy to introduce, for it concerns the most banal, grubby and self-interested side of the writing process’ (1993: 87). Indeed, Wernick’s chapter is pervaded by unease with commodity culture’s impact on the book trade (as though the West had ever experienced print culture beyond the market). He even speaks, curiously, of late-twentieth-century book culture in lapsarian terms as ‘the fallen condition of writing’ (102). Such remarks stand at the logical endpoint of mainstream literary studies’ long-propounded dematerialisation of literature and elevation of the book as aesthetic creation over its properties as physical commodity. 6 See Eisenstein, 1979; Rose, 1993; Johns, 1998. 7 See, for example, Foucault’s description of ‘our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property’ now [in 1969] at the point of fracturing ‘given the historical modifications that are taking place’ (291). 8 Scholar of the contemporary book industry Sarah Brouillette for this reason rightly regards authors as ‘now thoroughly organised as a self-conscious class of quasi-professionals’ (2007: 54). 9 This idea of the late twentieth century witnessing a second wave of authorial

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professionalisation (or, more accurately, the latest developments in a longrunning trend towards greater authorial professionalisation) is captured in industry overviews such as that given by UK literary agent Antony Harwood: ‘what the industry has been going through for the last 20 or 30 years is becoming increasingly professional and business-like’ (2008). The probable reasons for this analytical lacuna are complex. Most scholars of celebrity author culture are trained in literary studies and are therefore predisposed to privilege print culture texts. Even when exposure to the theoretical schemata and methodological approaches of book history has provided such scholars with the tools for elaborating upon paratextual and contextual issues, there is still a lingering unease evident about placing literary texts within the same conceptual space as other (newer) media. Of course, the reasons for this may also be institutional, individual career-based and tightly inflected by (inter-)disciplinary politics. The field of adaptations studies, on the other hand, is ipso facto at ease with both print and screen media but it has to date tended, as outlined in this volume’s Introduction, to fight shy of contextual approaches, preferring to stage detailed interpretive readings of specific texts. The UK book industry’s acknowledged authority on rights, Lynette Owen, confirms that ‘licensing prospects for a book may be discussed long before a contract is signed with the author’ (1992: 43). Owen further observes that ‘increasing consolidation of publishers into large groups is undoubtedly affecting rights policy, in that many houses now seek to acquire rights that would otherwise have been licensed outside’, with the synergistic aim of exploiting ‘as many aspects of a property as possible “within the family” ‘ (1992: 53; 58). These phenomena are explored further in Chapter 5. Jefferis, 1995: 5. Dramatic rights can be a deal-breaker issue in author–publisher negotiations, with publishers often keen to obtain them and authors’ agents invariably insisting they be excluded from the publishing contract (Raftos, 2008; Inglis, 2008; Harwood, 2008). Australian literary agent Lyn Tranter states: ‘I’d be very surprised if any agent ever gave the film rights to a publisher’ as, after all, ‘they’re not filmmakers’ (Tranter, 2008). Agents are especially vigilant in policing the blurred boundaries between digital rights (which are often ceded to the publisher) and dramatic rights (which typically are not). For example, any digital book animation of a character veers – from the agent’s point of view – dangerously close to dramatic adaptation and hence may jeopardise separate pitching of the material to dramatic adaptors such as Hollywood studios whose contracts insist upon all dramatic and merchandising rights being transferred (Harwood, 2008). Harwood states that ‘I, as an agent, have to keep . . . dramatic rights absolutely squeaky clean’. Matthew Reilly, Australian author of a number of high-octane, technologically oriented, mass-market thrillers, reports significant interest from computer-game companies in adapting his novels (Phelan, 2005: 231; see also Waldren, 2002). From the agent’s point of view, it is essential that any gaming rights licensed to the publisher do not jeopardise potential sale of film rights in a book, as Hollywood studios of any scale typically insist upon exclusive dramatic and computer-gaming rights, the better to pursue corporate synergies. Australian book and screen industries agent Rick Raftos navigates this quandary by granting publishers rights to produce a game based on a book for use on a website promoting that book, but reserving rights to create stand-alone electronic games to the author for potential film sale (Raftos, 2008).

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16 Lynette Owen indicates in the fifth edition of her vade mecum, Selling Rights, how complex film producers’ motivations may be in acquiring book rights: ‘It has been known for film companies to acquire rights in a book in order to use only the title, or to use the personality of one character from the story in the context of a very different plot, or even to keep the property off the market and prevent anyone else from basing a competing film on it’ (2006: 260). The book trade press reveals that such practices are indeed occurring; Publishers Weekly in 2001 reported on the sale by an ICM agent to screen producers of rights to a book’s title and an individual chapter (Maas, 2001: 28). 17 This is a familiar adage not only in publishing but across the creative industries generally. Mark Bide also observes that, ‘When it comes to rights negotiations, publishers are typically exhorted to “acquire broadly, license narrowly”’ (1999: 71). 18 Industry parlance increasingly prefers the less hierarchical term ‘co-agent’ to the formerly standard ‘sub-agent’ (Harwood, 2008). 19 Viewing book-to-film content traffic from the opposite direction, Variety correspondent Chris Petrikin refers to the growth of subsidiary rights in books with an equally memorable phrase: ‘the writer-as-cottage-industry’ phenomenon (1998a: 53). 20 The role and impact of literary agents on the adaptation industry are explored in greater detail in Chapter 2. 21 UK literary agent Julian Friedmann, who specialises in screen rights deals, particularly emphasised this point in his seminar on the relationships between the book and screen industries at the 2008 London Book Fair: ‘You need to be in a position to exploit the rights rather than put them on a shelf and not exploit them’. He advises literary agents to ensure that screen iterations of content, especially those distributed digitally, actively cross-promote book versions: ‘Try and make sure that the film, whether it gets seen online, whether it gets seen on phones, whether it gets seen on television, or indeed maybe even theatrically, does whatever it can to help sales of the book’ (Friedmann, 2008). 22 http://www.forum-cinema-ecriture.com/. 23 The key forum for such scouting activities is the annual international circuit of leading book fairs attended by publishers, agents, retailers and – increasingly – by representatives of other media industries, as investigated in Chapter 3 (Bing, 2000; Meza, 2004). 24 For example, Hollywood producer Dede Gardner of Plan B Entertainment has spoken of receiving publisher galley proofs of Mariane Pearl’s memoir A Mighty Heart (2003), ‘along with everyone else in Hollywood, shortly before it was published’ (‘A Mighty’, 2007). Whether such proof copies are circulated directly by the publisher, or leaked and selectively disseminated by scouts, is a hot-button issue in the adaptation industry, as noted below. 25 Thriller writer John Grisham was reportedly so furious over leaking to scouts of a draft version of his novel The Rainmaker that he (temporarily) called off the film rights sale process (Fleming, 1995b). Then again, for some publisher clients, obtaining slipped manuscripts is precisely the reason to employ a scout. Dan Franklin, publishing director of Jonathan Cape (UK), in a piece aimed principally at an academic literary studies readership cheerfully reveals: ‘A scout’s job is to notify his or her client publishers of important or exciting books and, better still, to obtain a copy of the manuscript before it is officially submitted’ (2002: 273). 26 Publishers Weekly has a rhetorically overheated though undeniably fascinating exposé of this world of scouts, agents and publishers engaged in complex plays of bluff and double-bluff: ‘The business of selling books to

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Hollywood . . . is straightforward in appearance only. Simmering below the surface is a reality far more Byzantine, rife with moles and secret deals and clandestine alliances. Quite often, the book itself is secondary to the events surrounding it’ (Maas, 2001: 25). A book’s filmic potential is highly persuasive for commissioning editors; Dan Franklin lists amongst his key criteria in considering a manuscript that he be ‘convinced that this novel is exceptional, that it might win a prize or be bought by a film producer, and that the author has a very considerable career ahead of him or her’ (2002: 276). If film rights in a manuscript are sold while it is still under consideration this causes ‘everyone to look at the book in a completely different light’ (277). Claire Squires also notes publishers’ preference for incorporating into cover blurbs quotes from reviewers suggesting ‘the novel’s filmic qualities’, as though to persuade casual bookshop browsers that they will be getting in on the ground level of a content franchise that will soon become mass-market via cinema or television adaptation (2007: 83). These empirical examples substantiate Jan Baetens’ more theoretical contention that, in contemporary culture, ‘the book is read in relation to the cinema, from which it now derives its status and its legitimation, both in the case of a novel already adapted and in the case of a book that only has the potential of being adapted’ (2005: 56). For example, bankable thriller writer Dean Koontz’s novel The Husband was optioned for film before the book had been completed (Trachtenberg, 2007). Similarly, much-adapted author John Grisham’s title The Pelican Brief was conceived with Julia Roberts in mind for the lead role, and the screen rights facilitating this were sold prior to the book being written (Boozer, 2008: 8). By contrast, established, but not quite brand-name, British author Deborah Moggach recalls the excitement of film rights to her novel Tulip Fever (1999) being snapped up while still at proof stage by Steven Spielberg for DreamWorks, narrowly pipping Ridley Scott and other interested international directors: ‘Within a few days I was flying out to Hollywood. It was thrilling beyond words that my story about art, adultery and tulip trading was going to be made into a movie’ (2005; 2008). In the event, the film of Tulip Fever was cancelled shortly before the start of filming because changes to British tax legislation made the US ‘runaway’ production uneconomical (2005; 2008). In further evidence of the extent to which the book and film industries have merged, novelist and screenwriter Moggach initially conceived her highly visual story of an artist in the Dutch Golden Age as a screenplay, but then (presciently, as it turned out) wrote it as a novel because ‘a novel exists forever and a film may not get made’ (2008). Donadio, 2005: 27. British agent Julian Friedmann, of the Blake Friedmann Literary, TV and Film Agency, advises screenwriter clients to work on screenplay and prose versions of a story idea simultaneously, although for slightly different reasons. He states that if both versions already exist a film producer buying the script is also legally obliged to option the novel, thus ensuring two payments for the writer – and, of course, two cuts of commission for their agent (Friedmann, 2009). Cultural theorist Jan Baetens, writing about intermedial transfer of text in the twenty-first-century environment, notes an increase in authors writing ‘less with the intention of being read than with the aim of being adapted to film’, the screenplay and its filmic realisation being held to be ‘the only thing that really counts’ (2005: 56). Writing a decade after Love Story, screenwriting expert William Miller advises his readers that, ‘until recently, a beginning writer who wrote a good original screenplay was well-advised to write his screenplay into the form of

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a novel and have it published somewhere – holding his script in reserve ready to submit if a producer showed interest in the book. . . . Major studio story departments review novels – often in the galley-proof stage – ready to option any promising property’ (1980: 210). Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan also worked simultaneously on novel and screenplay versions of his The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998; 1998), although he has claimed that the constraints and opportunities presented by the different media made the two versions more dissimilar than similar (Bradley, 2005: 16). The film has also had an effect on tourism in California’s wine country, a trend about which Pickett has mixed feelings: ‘I started going to Santa Ynez, a little community that was really undiscovered. . . . It was a place to go and lick the wounds of all the travails I was going through. But now they have Sideways bus tours and stuff. It’s crazy’ (Burkeman, 2005: 6). The important role played by Newmarket Press and other screenplay publishers in the adaptation economy is explored further in Chapter 5. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404203/fullcredits#cast http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0323325/ Adaptation scholar Andrew Higson also notes this example (2006: 62). Intriguingly, in Helen Fielding’s first Bridget Jones book it is fellow Granta Best Young British Novelist alumnus Julian Barnes who smiles with ‘thin-butattractive’ lips in response to Bridget’s publishing-party faux pas (1996: 99). Presumably Rushdie’s post-fatwa global notoriety and the consequent familiarity of his image made him the more appropriate choice for the film’s British production company, Working Title Films. Nevertheless, Barnes also makes an uncredited appearance in the film as himself (http://www.imdb.com/ title/tt0243155/fullcredits#cast). Smith is also credited on the production as creative consultant (http://www. imdb.com/title/tt0334877/fullcredits#cast). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274558/fullcredits#cast http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120255/fullcredits#cast http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0124315/fullcredits#cast http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084917/fullcredits#cast Davies also used his time on set during Candy’s Sydney-based production to shoot a yet to be released documentary about the filming entitled Diary of a Milkman (Wyndham, 2005a; 2005b: 8; Davies, 2006: 10–11). Further instances of authorial cameos, and analysis of their cultural and commercial significance, are contained in Chapter 4. Regrettably, Moggach’s cameo in The Diary of Anne Frank also fell by the wayside, being edited out of the final version (Moggach, 2008). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/fullcredits#cast A poll of 7,600 viewers on The Internet Movie Database had rated Love in the Time of Cholera 6.2 out of 10 at the time of writing (http://www.imdb. com/title/tt0484740/). A poll of 47,397 viewers on The Internet Movie Database had rated Perfume 7.5 out of 10 at the time of writing (http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0396171/). Both Süskind and his publishers also did well out of Perfume’s screen adaptation: ‘Anne Messitte, publisher of Vintage Books [US], one of Bertelsmann’s paperback imprints, says sales of Patrick Suskind’s [sic] “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” jumped to more than 100,000 copies sold from 13,000 copies annually after the movie of the same name was released in 2006’ (Trachtenberg, 2007: W6).

Notes 201 2 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers in the Contemporary Mediasphere 1 This chapter – in keeping with the present volume as a whole – confines its analysis to Anglophone countries because of the markedly different profile of agents in other linguistically demarcated territories. For example, the French book world has long operated on the basis of direct author–publisher negotiations, as recently as the mid 1990s decrying the literary agent as a distastefully American import – ‘not . . . “une practique française”’ (Cloonan and Postel, 1997: 796; Delany, 2002: 209, n.47; Tonkin, 2008). New Yorkbased literary agent Andrew Wylie has in recent years moved to challenge France’s arguably paternalistic, publisher-dominated status quo by wooing several prominent French authors – including a pre-presidential Nicholas Sarkozy – to sign with The Wylie Agency and thus to reduce the ‘insularity’ of the French literary world (Taylor, K., 2007; Grove, 2007). 2 Rubinstein, 1975: 2358. 3 See http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005& context =slej. Winterson is in addition, however, a client of the William Morris Agency, London (see http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index. asp?PageID=217). 4 Prominent British agent Ed Victor summarises the three-way author–agent– publisher dynamic thus: ‘I’m the one who kicks ass; they [authors] don’t, because they’re adorable. But they want me to kick ass’ (Dowling, 2004). 5 To provide only a single representative example, Lyn Tranter of Australian Literary Management (ALM), one of Australia’s leading and longestestablished agencies, speaks of receiving in excess of 1000 uncommissioned manuscripts during 2004 and accepting only three (Michael, 2005: 13). When interviewed by myself in 2008, both Tranter’s volume of submissions and the proportion accepted had remained unchanged (Tranter, 2008). ALM has since closed its books to new authors unless recommended by an existing client. ALM’s website encapsulates agents’ desperation-induced hard-line response to this tsunami of unsolicited submissions, stating bluntly, ‘We do not consider scripts of any kind, or children’s books[,] by unpublished authors’ (http://www.austlit.com/about-alm.html). Encountering such rebuffs, the source of would-be authors’ Catch 22-style frustrations becomes obvious. 6 The former industry standard commission of 10 per cent has increasingly given way to a stock 15 per cent commission on local territory deals, with 20 per cent commissions typical for translation, film and other co-agented deals (Dowling, 2004; Raftos, 2008; Harwood, 2008). 7 Lyn Tranter observes of industry body the Australian Literary Agents’ Association (ALAA) that ‘the agents who belong to the association are all women’ (2008). Seehttp://austlitagentsassoc.com.au/members.html. 8 This sentiment was almost universal amongst literary agents interviewed for this project (Tranter, 2008; Inglis, 2008; Harwood, 2008). 9 http://www.frankfurt-book-fair.com/en/fbf/agencies/termsandconditions/ litag/ 10 http://www.frankfurt-book fair.com/en/fbf/agencies/termsandconditions/agents centre_film_tv/ 11 Andrew Wylie quoted in Barber, 1999: 12. 12 Kavanagh died in October 2008 (Callil, 2008; Tonkin, 2008). 13 Wylie’s nickname appears to derive from his alleged tendency to ‘poach’ already established authors whose careers have been ‘nurtured’ by other agents, rather than ‘breaking out’ unknown writers himself (Tranter, 2008). The example of Wylie’s representation of first-time novelist Chloe Hooper,

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outlined below, does however complicate this picture. Agent Antony Harwood also rightly points out the curiously passive and infantilising conception of authors connoted by the verbs ‘poach’ and ‘nurture’ (2008). Wylie’s notoriety and his epithet ‘the Jackal’ have even generated fictional parallels: Canadian publisher Anna Porter’s crime novel The Bookfair Murders (1997) centres upon the murder at the Frankfurt Book Fair of the ruthlessly hard-bargaining New York literary agent Andrew Myles, dubbed ‘the Jackal’ by his opponents in the book trade because ‘he’d found it much easier to wait until someone was already established and then go pluck them off the tree’ (163; 109). The importance of Frankfurt as an annual microcosm of global publishing is explored in detail in Chapter 3. Amis in his memoir Experience (2000) records that he was at the time suffering from a mouth tumour requiring removal of one jaw’s worth of teeth and multiple painful procedures, making allegations of ‘fritter[ing] a lot of [the advance] away on cosmetic dentistry’ particularly unjustified (210). It is also true to say that Amis’s most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow (Cape, 2010), is being hailed in some quarters as a return to authorial form. The first mention of the term ‘superagent’ I have come across dates from an illuminating 1979 Publishers Weekly survey article (Holt, 1979: 134–38). But the term (and its variants ‘super agent’, ‘super-agent’ etc.) became increasingly familiar throughout 1980s restructurings of the book industries, reaching a crescendo at the decade’s close (McDowell, 1989: C26; Gabriel, 1989: 62; Mayer, 1989: 1). It is also interesting how closely intertwined the careers of Meredith, Janklow and Klebanoff have been, particularly given the size of the US book market: Klebanoff was hired by Janklow’s law-firm-cum-literaryagency Morton L. Janklow Associates in 1972, and became a partner in 1978 (Klebanoff, 2002). In 1983 Klebanoff set up independently as a literary agent, and subsequently acquired Meredith’s long-established literary agency after the founder’s death in 1993 (Klebanoff, 2002: 1; 29; 96). Richard Curtis, another New York City literary agent of similarly high profile was, in addition, an employee of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the late 1950s (Baker, 1999: 62). This suggestion of life imitating art is made all the stronger when, early in the novel, the following exchange takes place between the rival writers: ‘that morning, he had found a long piece about how Gwyn Barry had switched agents, controversially taking his custom from Harley, Dexter, Fielding to Gal Aplanalp. “She’s already got me a huge deal on my next one.” “You haven’t finished your next one.” “Yeah but they like to do these things earlier now. It’s a campaign. It’s like a war out there. World rights”’(1995: 59). It is entirely possible, however, that this roman-à-clef exchange was inserted into the manuscript’s final draft after the controversy about Amis’ own move from PFD to Wylie as a further authorial wink at reviewers and readers.

18 Established in 1975, the UK’s Association of Authors’ Agents (AAA) is the industry group representing Britain’s literary agents. Prominent in its Code of Practice is the requirement that ‘No member shall knowingly represent the client of another agency, whether or not that other agency is a member of the Association. Failure to enquire as to a client’s agency relationship shall be considered a violation of this rule’ (Rule 6(b)). The Wylie Agency, although it has a highly active office in London, is not listed on the AAA’s online Directory of Members (http://www.agentsassoc.co.uk/index.php/Welcome).

Notes 203 19 Chief amongst such publishers virulently objecting to the ‘parasitic’ presence of the literary agent were William Heinemann and Henry Holt (see West, 1988a: 79; 1988b; Bonn, 1994; Delany, 2002). 20 Antony Harwood, a former colleague of Wylie’s at Gillon Aitken Associates (now Aitken Alexander) in London in the mid 1980s, attributes the UK reaction to the Wylie/Amis controversy to ‘the Brits consider[ing] it vulgar for artists – writers – to earn good money. That’s all it was about. It wasn’t a record-breaking deal by any means. But he was a literary writer and they hated that. They wanted him starving in a garret not burning half a million for a couple of books’ (2008). 21 For all Wylie’s insistence that he represents only top-quality writing, foregrounded by the roll-call of illustrious authors’ names on The Wylie Agency’s website, the firm also represents some rather more mass-market authors such as business figures William H. Gates, Sr and Larry Ellison, as well as celebrities known principally for activities outside of literature including Lou Reed, Annie Leibovitz and Tipper Gore. The Wylie Agency also represents organizations such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation Inc. (http://www.wylieagency.com/CLIENT%20LIST.htm). The role of awards such as the (Man) Booker Prize in consecrating ‘Literature’ – and literary adaptations – is explored in detail in Chapter 4. 22 Dan Franklin, publishing director of Jonathan Cape (UK), also emphasises how interrelated the two dominant centres of the English-language book trade have become, where ‘major London publishing houses . . . have sister companies in America’ and thus can be keenly aware of and considering purchasing a novel being auctioned in New York even before that auction is over (2002: 272). 23 Andrew Wylie: ‘What we’re trying to do is represent writers seamlessly around the world, so that the same principles that are brought to their work in the home territories are applied outside’ (Bockris, 1999). 24 Dan Franklin in 2002 published the book chapter ‘Commissioning and Editing Modern Fiction’ in which he describes the auction process surrounding an anonymised book which is surely Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime: ‘Novel A was a first novel by a young Australian woman, a recent graduate of a well-known creative writing course in the United States taught by a prominent American novelist whose books are on the Cape list [as are Roth’s]. It was being sold by one of the very best literary agents in New York, who had told me about it six months earlier at the Frankfurt Book Fair’ and who ‘intended to sell the English language rights in three separate territories’ (270–71). Interestingly, Franklin quotes directly from the submission letter that the agent sent with the manuscript, evoking Wylie’s characteristic take-no-prisoners ‘negotiating’ tone: ‘If you are interested in publishing, we would ask you to submit your offer . . . by the end of the day on Tuesday, February 27. On Wednesday 28 and Thursday 1 March [the author] will meet with the publishers who have presented the four best offers; and we’ll make a decision on Friday 2 March’ (271). Franklin concludes his anecdote by stating that Cape acquired the novel in question with a bid that was ‘unquestionably higher than would have been the case in a conventional auction’ (274). 25 h t t p : / / w w w . w a l k l e y s . c o m / w i n n e r s / 2 0 0 6 / w i n n e r s / h o o p e r . h t m l ; http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9780241015377 26 Flanagan’s spirited overview of the strengths and challenges of Australia’s book industry was widely reported in Australian cultural-sphere media at the time, and has since been (re)published in both the Australian Society of Authors’ (ASA) publication Australian Author and David Carter and Anne

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Galligan’s collection of print culture essays, Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing (2007). http://www.readings.com.au/interview/steve-toltz This twenty-first-century trend for Australian authors to contract with overseas agents stands in marked contrast to the advice Australian Author magazine offered writers as recently as 1991: ‘Unless you happen to travel abroad a lot and have lots of time to woo the overseas prima donnas, it is best to concentrate on the Australian agents, most of whom have good overseas associates’ (Barker, 1991: 16). Publishing academic Jenny Lee cites Australian Society of Authors statistics indicating a similarly internationalist trend, even amongst writers with Australian-based agents: in 1991, only 5 per cent of Australian literary agents’ clients had overseas book contracts, whereas by 2001 some 20 per cent did, rising to as much as 30 per cent at some agencies (2007: 28). It is interesting that, in all of the furore in the Australian book trade over splitting of Australian and New Zealand rights from ‘Commonwealth rights’, no Australian commentators questioned the implicitly imperialist attitude this represents on the part of Australian publishers towards the (admittedly small) New Zealand market. This is a common criticism of agents insisting upon large advances for author–clients: ‘Authors that [sic] demand very high advances may find it harder to get a publisher the next time round and be damaging her or his career in the long term. In theory the agent should take the long-term view, but this is not always the case’ (Look, 1999: 16). For demographic, cultural and perhaps environmental reasons that are open to speculation, Australia has long been British publishers’ most lucrative export market – ‘ very much the jewel in the British bulldog’s crown’ (Munro and Curtain, 2006: 3; Owen, 1992: 54; Nile, 2002: 29; Rosenbloom, 2008c: 176). However, this role may now be coming under pressure from the rising profile of Anglophone Indian markets as a result of the increasing affluence of the demographically vast Indian middle classes. It is no coincidence that Adelaide Writers’ Week has, since 1998, played occasional host to the Australia Council’s Visiting International Publishers (VIP) programme, designed to increase foreign rights sales for Australian books (see: http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/about_us/artform_boards/ literature_board/australian_literature_abroad). Hence several high-profile UK publishers could have been expected to be – and in fact were – in the audience for Rosenbloom’s intentionally inflammatory speech (Inglis, 2008). The slightly amended text of Rosenbloom’s address was subsequently republished on his blog (2008b) with the subtitle ‘Perfidious Albion’ (http://www.scribe publications.com.au/blog/territorialrightsandwrongsakaperfidiousalbion) and in the US-based journal Publishing Research Quarterly’s Australian-themed issue (2008). The piece additionally sparked ‘spirited debate’ at the 2008 London Book Fair (Rosenbloom, 2008c: 175). Other literary agents also prefer to split off Australia/New Zealand and Canadian rights from British Commonwealth and US territories respectively in order to ensure a title is published with maximum enthusiasm and attention in each territory, rather than simply being dutifully distributed in branchoffice fashion for a head office elsewhere. There is also the likelihood of deriving greater income from four territorial rights deals as opposed to two; but ‘it’s not just about the money, of course; I think the book will be better published’ (Harwood, 2008). For further analysis of Text’s role in debates over contemporary cultural flows see Murray, 2008b.

Notes 205 35 http://www.wylieagency.com/ 36 Paul Delany makes a similar point about the transnational nature of the contemporary literary marketplace: ‘For books, . . . regardless of where they are written or read, bestsellers are made in London and New York, as surely as film stars are now made in Hollywood and only there’ (2002: 190–91). Graham Huggan has also written scathingly about the (Man) Booker Prize’s colonialist ideological underpinnings whereby ‘Commonwealth’ writing is judged worthy and consecrated by the imperial centre (1997). 37 British author Nick Hornby (a former PFD, now United Agents, client) on the PFD/United Agents conflict (Armitstead and Chittenden, 2007: 8). 38 The stated number of agents resigning across PFD’s literary and talent divisions ranges in media commentary from a low of six (Marsh, 2007: 4) to a maximum of 85 (Cadwalladr, 2007: 4). The stories from which these estimates are taken were published over three weeks apart, which accounts for some – but not all – of the discrepancy in numbers as PFD’s woes escalated. 39 Thomas Leitch discusses cross-format brands such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Japanese children’s franchise Pokémon as designed specifically for maximum repurposing: ‘The ultimate purpose of this confluence of genres is a marketing synergy that will boost the stock of the film, the game, and any possible sequels and spin-offs’ (2007a: 272–73). Such analysis is familiar in political economy studies of popular media, but has – as Leitch points out – been almost entirely absent from literary discussions, suggesting the largely aestheticist discipline’s unease with economically based frames of analysis (274, 279). 40 Books are Different was the title of an influential 1966 publication recounting the 1962 legal defence of the retail price maintenance policy enshrined in the UK’s Net Book Agreement (NBA). Legal counsel for the British book industry successfully argued in the case that the NBA was exempt from the provisions of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1956 on the grounds that ‘books are different’ from other consumer items because of their cultural importance (see Feather, 1988: 190–91). The NBA subsequently crumbled in late 1995 when various bookselling chains flouted its publisher-stipulated prices and began mass-discounting of certain loss-leading titles (see Nile, 2002: 34; Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 130; Todd, 2006: 20–21). 41 There is a history of tensions between literary and other divisions of consolidated, cross-sectoral agencies. In the late 1980s, the film and television division at ICM (US) voiced resentment at its alleged cross-subsidising and hence ‘propping up’ of the literary division, causing leading ICM literary agent Lynn Nesbit to leave and enter into partnership with Morton Janklow as Janklow & Nesbit Associates (Gabriel, 1989: 62). Antony Harwood also recalls the issue of film agents subsidising book agents causing ‘terrible tension’ at Curtis Brown (UK) in the early 1990s (2008). 42 http://www.apwatt.co.uk/ 3 Making Words Go Further: Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks as Engine Rooms of Adaptation 1 The event was made possible by the two host writers’ festivals being run simultaneously (albeit on different sides of the world) and was promoted as celebrating the naming of Edinburgh and more recently Melbourne as UNESCO Cities of Literature (http://www.mwf.com.au/2008/content/mwf_ 2008_events.asp?name=2427).

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2 For example, the London Book Fair self-describes as ‘the global marketplace for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels’ (http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/ files/irc_4pp_brochure_lo__final.pdf). 3 Cinema and Literature International Forum 2007 programme (3). 4 http://www.forum-cinema-litterature.com/accueil/accueil.php 5 The relationship between the study of remakes in film studies and the discipline of adaptation studies is curious. While remakes form a currently flourishing subfield of film studies, there has tended to be less intellectual traffic between the two disciplines than might have been expected from their common concern with intertextuality (Forrest and Koos, 2002; Verevis, 2006). This could be attributable to adaptation studies’ decades-long investment in the idea of adaptation as defined by a transfer of content across mediums (cf. Hutcheon, 2006: 170). Equally, it might trace its origins to cinema studies’ chafing against adaptation as a methodological paradigm too grounded in literary studies assumptions to be of much benefit to the emergent discipline (see the Introduction). 6 Given the Francophone dominance at the CLIF, it is mostly publishers rather than agents who pitch screen adaptation rights. This is a reflection of the comparative weakness of the literary agent in the French book world so that screen rights are less often retained by the author but transfer to the publisher under the publishing contract (see Chapter 2) (Vaucher, 2001; Nesselson, 2005). 7 http://www.bs2bo.com/1/en/testayantsdroit/test3.php 8 http://www.buchmesse.de/imperia/celum/documents/Books2009_booklet_ final. pdf. This rival event is discussed in detail below. 9 Industry attendance figures at the CLIF typically hover around 150–300, whereas industry attendance at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair was 152,530 (Besserglik, 2005; Masters, 2006; http://www.buchmesse.de/en/fbf/general/ facts_figures/). That is not to say, however, that a smaller-scale event is necessarily less productive; Barcelona-based literary and film agent Anna Soler-Pont states of the CLIF ‘The Frankfurt Book Fair is comprehensive, but you see people for only fifteen minutes. Here you meet them several times – that’s what makes Monaco unique’ (Rickett, 2006: 18). 10 Long-time Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) Director Peter Weidhaas’s description of the annual Fair (2007: 258). Subsequent FBF Director Volker Neumann makes the same point, albeit with a more specifically cross-media emphasis, in describing the Fair to Variety as ‘a treasure trove of film material’ (Meza, 2004: 18). The similarities with the CLIF’s self-description in its 2007 programme are striking. 11 Guests of Honour have also been selected at the sub-national level, such as the Book Fair’s 2007 choice of ‘Catalan culture’ (not, interestingly, ‘literature’), which predictably sparked controversy about the membership and parameters of such a category (King, 2006; 2010). 12 http://www.frankfurt-book-fair.com/en/fbf/general/ 13 http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/ 14 http://einfo.book-fair.com/einfo_aum/jsp/lageplan_aum_en.jsp?event=00019 15 http://www.book-fair.com/en/fbf/programme/key_focuses/film_tv/index.html 16 http://www.frankfurt-book-fair.com/en/fbf/programme/key_focuses/film_tv/ 17 http://storydrivefrankfurt.com/conference/ 18 http://www.book-fair.com/en/fbf/programme/key_focuses/film_tv/index.html 19 Hilts, 1999: 15. 20 At the time of writing, the online Frankfurt Rights Catalogue listed over 22,000 title entries (see https://en.book-fair.com/networking/search_find/ titles/search.aspx).

Notes 207 21 For observations in a similar vein, see also: Biggs, Cunnane and Gallagher, 2004; Owen, 2006; Weidhaas, 2009; Beilby, 2009 and Moeran, 2010; cf. Meyer, 2009. 22 http://www.rightscenter.com/ 23 http://www.buchmesse.de/en/fbf/general/facts_figures/ 24 http://www.frankfurt-book-fair.com/en/fbf/programme/key_focuses/film_tv/ 25 http://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival/berlinale_co-production_market/ Berlinale_Co-Production_Market.html 26 (http://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival/berlinale_co-production_market/ Berlinale_Co-Production_Market.html). 27 Email communication with Mark Woods (25 Sep. 2009). 28 The self-description of the Edinburgh International Book Festival: http:// www.edbookfest.co.uk/. 29 The vital importance of this key audience segment for the adaptation economy is explored further in Chapter 6. 30 For example, the programme of the 2009 Hay Festival featured Canadian author Anne Michaels introducing a screening of the film adaptation (2007) of her novel Fugitive Pieces (1996), as well as UK celebrity screenwriter Andrew Davies discussing his BBC television adaptation of Dickens’ Little Dorrit (2008) (http://www.hayfestival.com/wales/downloads/DraftProg 09.pdf). As part of the programme of the 2009 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, German novelist Bernhard Schlink addressed a screening of the film adaptation (2008) of his novel The Reader (1995) and took questions from the audience afterwards (http://www.mwf.com.au/2009/content/mwf_2009_ events.asp?name=2237). At the 2009 Edinburgh International Book Festival graphic novelist Mark Millar spoke about the process of having his comics adapted by Hollywood (http://media.edbookfest.co.uk/bookfestival/index. php?q=node/224). 31 Lurie is prominent within the Australia book world, having formerly been a literary agent and sometime publisher, reviewer, freelance journalist and teacher (http://www.mwf.com.au/2007/content/standard.asp?name=LurieC). 32 http://www.hayfestival.com/wales/index.aspx?skinid=2¤cysetting= GBP&localesetting=en-GB&resetfilters=true 33 Hay Festival 2009 programme downloadable from: http://www.hayfestival. com/wales/index.aspx?skinid=2¤cysetting=GBP&localesetting=enGB&resetfilters=true. 34 http://www.hayfestival.com/wales/index.aspx?skinid=2¤cysetting= GBP&localesetting=en-GB&resetfilters=true 35 The intriguing – and quintessentially British – Marches TV coverage of the ‘execution’ of King Richard can be viewed on YouTube: http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=9yks3_LcubM. I am grateful to Paul McShane, Convenor of BookTown Australia, for drawing my attention to the recent ‘troubles’ in Hay in his engaging December 2009 presentation for the Centre for the Book seminar series at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. 4 The Novel Beyond the Book: Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 1 The Booker Prize Archive notes that as early as 1981 Dr Dorothy Goldman of the Adult Education Department at Keele University in the UK was offering an evening course entitled ‘Booker Books’ (Management Committee minutes dated 16 February 1981). Similarly, Georgetown University’s Department of English Literature, which has a long association with the Booker Prize, has taught such a course since 1995 (http://www.themanbookerprize.com/ perspective/articles/1281; Booker archive, 1998 file). Booker executive

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Michael Caine also noted with pleasure in his speech to the 1986 Booker dinner ‘the growing number of courses at universities and polytechnics studying the Booker Prize selections over the years’ (Booker archive, 1986 file). The Booker’s Prize’s fortieth anniversary celebrations included an exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (Fiction, 2008), a dedicated panel at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival (Herbert, 2008), an exhibition at the library of Oxford Brookes University (UK) where the Booker archive is housed, and a publicly voted ‘Best of the Booker’ competition (won, like the 1993 ‘Booker of Bookers’, by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children). This is in contrast to the Man Booker International Prize, first awarded in 2005, which is open to living writers of all countries whose work is available in English. It is awarded biannually not for a single title (as is the original Booker) but for an author’s body of work (http://www.themanbookerprize. com/prize/about-man-booker-international). In its early years the Booker Prize convened award lunches at prestige London venues such as the Stationers’ Hall, the Café Royal, and Claridge’s, but by the mid 1980s the Guildhall had become the default venue for the Booker’s now black-tie dinner ceremony. A brief excursion to the newly renovated Great Court of the British Museum in 2002 has proven to be more the exception than the rule. Huggan’s 1997 article was subsequently reworked and published under the same title as Chapter 4 of his monograph The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001). Publicist Rachel Alexander’s remarks on multiple countries trying to claim DBC Pierre (aka Peter Finlay) as their own upon his 2003 Booker Prize win for Vernon God Little (Clee, 2003: 5). The number of titles shortlisted for the Booker has fluctuated, with as few as two titles making the shortlist in 1975. Since 1996 shortlists have uniformly comprised six titles. The prize was split in both 1974 (between Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton) and 1992 (between Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth), before the Booker Prize Management Committee changed the rules in 1993 to state that ‘the Prize may not be divided nor withheld’ (Booker archive, 1993 file). The reasoning behind this push for a single award is recorded in the Booker Prize archive as early as 1970, in response to a request by distinguished judge Rebecca West that the prize be divisible: ‘I am told that the reasoning behind the “one big prize” theory is to give the prize maximum importance and excitement and to give maximum publicity to novel writing – and reading – as a whole. To split the prize would, it is argued, diffuse the impact of the biggest, [sic] sincle [sic] prize for a single book in a single category of writing’ (correspondence by David Powell of Booker plc, 24 April 1970). The release of the Booker’s annual longlist has been a subject of some controversy, including amongst Booker judges. Senior UK literary academic Hermione Lee used her 2006 judging Chair’s speech to complain: ‘I have mixed feelings about the existence of the longlist. Although it allows attention and sales of titles which aren’t going to make it onto the short list [sic], it also adds a double dose of humiliation for the excluded writers, it truncates the judges’ initial reading-time by a month, and it emphasizes the commercial aspect of the whole process. I myself wish the prize could revert to just having a short-list, but perhaps a slightly bigger one’ (Booker archive, 2006 file). The award of the Booker Prize was first broadcast live in primetime on BBC2 on 20 October 1981, the year of Salman Rushdie’s win for Midnight’s Children, making it a watershed year for the Booker Prize in several regards.

Notes 209 10 Book rights authority Lynette Owen is in harmony with statistics derived from other sources on this point: ‘The proportion of films based on literary works should be seen in the context that between 5% and 10% of options are exercised and of those perhaps one in ten finally proceeds to production; television options have a higher success rate than film options’ (2006: 252). 11 My research collated 49 released films and broadcast made-for-television films/miniseries derived from the total of 236 shortlisted titles. An additional five projects are listed on the industry standard Internet Movie Database as in development at the time of writing (http://www.imdb.com/). This is in contrast to film scholar Andrew Higson’s figures of eight Booker winners and six Booker-shortlisted titles having been adapted for the screen between 1980 and 2004 (2006: 62). 12 Colman Getty was hired in 1993 to refresh the Booker Prize’s image and to broaden its media coverage from news and literary areas into features (Booker archive, 1993 file). 13 http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1079. This list was circulated and presumably compiled in early 2008, before the announcement of the 2008 and 2009 shortlists, accounting for the difference between Colman Getty’s calculations and my own. 14 As of the time of writing, the Internet Movie Database lists Life of Pi as ‘in development’, with the film scheduled for 2012 release. See http://www.imdb. com/title/tt0454876/. 15 Judging Chair David Lodge’s remarks to the 1989 Booker dinner on the changes wrought by and on the Booker Prize during the 1980s: ‘The climate of the nineteen-eighties has created a new phenomenon, the literary bestseller, often written by a comparatively young or previously unknown writer, and the Booker Prize has contributed to that climate. . . . [W]e do seem to have reached a very critical point in the social history of the novel, and the Booker Prize is now situated on the dangerous, glamorous interface between the two sets of values [commercial and cultural]. . . . The growing commercial importance of the Prize has tended to generate a certain amount of hysteria around the event, and certainly produces considerable psychological strain for writers, publishers, agents and, not least, judges’ (Booker archive, 1989 file). 16 http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1022. The films screened were Possession (2002), The Van (1996), A Month in the Country (1987) and Atonement (2007). 17 http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/booker40 18 http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/speccoll/booker.html 19 ‘I have seemed to speak deprecatingly of the other media but it is surely Mrs Jhabvala’s command of the cinema that makes Heat and Dust with its perfect, simple and direct cutting into two parallel narratives so unusual a thing (certainly so unusual this year) a masterpiece that in size and, to first taste, [sic] is slender’ (transcript of 1975 Chair’s speech in Booker Prize archive, 1975 file). 20 Respectively, Booker Prize press release dated 4 October 1979; press notes dated 1986; and press notes dated 1989. 21 Booker archive, 1983 file. 22 Undated, unsigned memo in Booker Prize Archive file for 1983. The Management Committee also circulated approvingly amongst its members copies of Christopher Priest’s article ‘Books and the Box’ from the UK book trade publication The Bookseller with the following sections underlined: ‘There appear to be two main difficulties in producing programmes about books. The first is that books are inherently non-visual, and the second is that almost none of the presumed audience will have read the books. . . .

210

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24 25

26

27 28 29

30 31 32

33

34 35

36

37

Notes

[T]his revealed another inherent problem of television: any film “version” of a book is a form of editorialising, and can only convey a particular view’ (5 November 1983). Paul Scott’s Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977, shortly before his death in early 1978. The Jewel in the Crown was first published in 1966, and Scott’s repackaged quartet of novels went on to achieve huge sales in the wake of the miniseries’ popularity and critical acclaim. Booker archive, 1990 file. For example, in September–October 1991 Book at Bedtime broadcast extracts from the year’s shortlisted titles, and the following year temporarily renamed itself Booker at Bedtime for the same purpose (Booker archive, 1991 and 1992 files). On the Sunday before the 1994 Booker Prize announcement London’s Almeida Theatre, as part of its ‘Stage Lit’ series, held readings by three of the year’s shortlisted authors, with actors reading from the three other shortlisted titles, all chaired by former Booker judge Fay Weldon (Booker archive 1994 file). A similar event was hosted by the Almeida in 1995 (Booker archive 1995 file). See the speech by Booker Company Chair Jonathan Taylor to the 1996 Booker Prize dinner (Booker Archive, 1996 file). See also Todd, 1996; Huggan, 1997. Book Executive Committee paper dated 27 August 1974. Such sentiments were still being reiterated by the Chair of the 1995 judging committee, Tory party Member of Parliament George Walden, who used his award-dinner speech to lament Britain’s alleged cultural decline, grumbling that ‘already the newspapers, Parliament, television and the radio are pretty well thought-free zones’ (Booker archive, 1995 file). Booker Management Committee minutes dated 31 July 1975. Zalewski, 2002a: 10. The phrase belongs to Australian-born film director Phillip Noyce, who is working on a feature film adaptation of Tim Winton’s 2002 Bookershortlisted novel Dirt Music, scheduled at the time of writing for 2010 release (quoted in Wyndham, 2005b: 5). McEwan states in the Atonement DVD extra ‘Novel to the Screen’ that he saw and gave notes on every script draft, ‘on the full understanding that they can be accepted or rejected’ (2007). McEwan also served as an Associate Producer on the film adaptation of his novel Enduring Love (1997; 2004) (http://www. imdb.com/name/nm0568605/). WGA screenwriting credits for Possession list David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones (for more on whom see Chapter 5) and Neil LaBute (http://www.imdb. com/title/tt0256276/fullcredits#writers). The device appears to be a favourite one in the adaptation canon, and not only for fictional adaptations. All the President’s Men (1976), based on Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1974 account of their breaking of the Watergate cover-up story, repeatedly uses close-ups of the journalists’ typewriters, and in fact the film’s trailer is structured around this conceit (http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fLdCZm7qgs). I am grateful to Deborah Cartmell for pointing this out in response to an earlier version of this research. Adaptation scholar Christine Geraghty has also noted Atonement’s ‘foregrounding of media signifiers’, including this ‘huge close-up show[ing] the black letters as they are typed onto the soft texture of the paper, ending with a forceful full stop’ (2009: 95; 98). Keneally records in his memoir Green’s concerns that the title Schindler’s Ark would offend American Jewry with its connotation of Jews’ passivity in the

Notes 211

38 39 40

41

42

face of the Holocaust (2007: 160). Keneally reluctantly conceded the point: ‘I certainly had no sense that this would be my best-known book, and that the two-title issue would haunt me and generate questions for the next twenty years and more’ (2007: 161). I note that my own university’s library shelves Schindler’s Ark in its nonfiction section reserved for historical studies of the Holocaust (Dewey Decimal Classification category 940: ‘General history of Europe’). Booker archive, 1982 file. It did, however, at least get made. This is in contrast to the long-anticipated film adaptation of D.M. Thomas’s 1981 Booker-shortlisted title The White Hotel – a novel also concerned with legacies of the Holocaust – which became mired in what is known in Hollywood as ‘development hell’. In 2008 Thomas, perhaps hoping to salvage at least some writerly mileage from his scarifying experience, published Bleak Hotel: The Hollywood Saga of The White Hotel, a chronicle of the trials and tribulations of Hollywood’s 25-year attempt to film the novel. It is, in the words of one early reviewer, ‘a tell-all, behind-thescenes glimpse at the sometimes nefarious manner in which movies are funded and made (or in this case, not made) in Hollywood’ (Totaro, 2009: 21). Should Keneally’s and Thomas’s recent memoirs signal a burgeoning genre of novelists reflecting in detail on the process of screen adaptation of their work, this will prove a boon to future industry-oriented adaptation scholars. The anecdote is strikingly reminiscent of on-set accounts of New Zealand director Peter Jackson meditatively reading the equivalent scene in another much valorised book – Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954) – before shooting a particular scene in his adapted film trilogy (2001–03). These accounts of directorial fidelity to famed source texts appear to proliferate in circumstances where there is particular anxiety about the effect of big-budget film-making on a fiercely-guarded or controversial text. In relation to contemporary productions, the likelihood that such anecdotes are circulated online by studios themselves to placate restive fans in anticipation of a film’s release cannot be discounted (Murray, 2004b). The ascendancy of book prize culture has also registered in international rights agreements between publishers: Anne Beilby of Melbourne-based house Text notes that Commonwealth publishers selling literary fiction titles into the UK market sometimes now stipulate in their contracts that the UK purchaser must submit the title for consideration for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize and/or other leading awards. This bargaining tactic has emerged because Booker administrators have capped the number of titles that can now be submitted by a publishing house (an attempt to make judges’ reading load more manageable) and because for a title to be eligible for the award it must have been published in the UK and thus cannot be submitted by Commonwealth publishers directly. Such contracts sometimes also include a clause guaranteeing a bonus payment in the event that the title is shortlisted for a prominent award (Australian Publishers Association, 2009).

5 Best Adapted Screenwriter?: The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter in the Contemporary Adaptation Industry 1 Ian McEwan, reflecting on the process of adapting Timothy Mo’s novel Sour Sweet (1982) for the screen, describes a feeling of screenwriterly superfluousness once shooting begins that is remarkably similar to Adaptation’s opening scenes: ‘As the actors arrived and read their parts through, I made some final adjustments and prepared to go abroad. The production offices were filling with strangers, people from wardrobe, design, casting, location.

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5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

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Everyone had a set of instructions. Work on the film was only just beginning, and it was time for me to fade out’ (1988: xi). In similar retiring vein, John Hodge, screenwriter of UK independent hits Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996), compares the writer’s role to that of a ‘constitutional monarch, consulted on everything on the understanding that the answer would be “yes”. This is the writer’s lot: anyone who doesn’t like it should learn either to lie or to work with actors. I began to plan my retirement’ (1996: viii). Steven Maras observes that it was only as recently as 2001 that the Writers’ Guild of America secured for screenwriters the right ‘to visit the set of the motion picture they have written’ (2009: 197). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/awards. Admiration for the film extends also into the burgeoning academic field of screenwriting studies: Steven Maras’s Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (2009) incorporates a still of Nicolas Cage in character as Charlie Kaufman into its front-cover design. Aside from the technical advantage that adapting a short story requires less material to be cut to create the script than does a full-length novel, short stories are typically also cheaper to option than novels because they represent a smaller proportion of a writer’s creative output (Harrison, 2006: 69). Ossana’s essay ‘Climbing Brokeback Mountain’ reveals the working relationship between herself, McMurtry and Proulx to have been an unusually close one for an adapted screenplay (Proulx, McMurtry and Ossana, 2006). Ossana recalls receiving Proulx’s approval of their first script draft, noting ‘I felt fortunate to have her input’ and that Ossana ‘carried a copy of Annie’s short story with me every day on set while producing the film’ (146; 149). Ossana is credited on Brokeback Mountain as a producer and McMurtry (the better known of the screenwriting partnership) as an executive producer, preserving for the screenwriters an unusually prominent role in the film’s production (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388795/fullcredits#cast). This is no doubt a legacy of the project’s independent origins and its arthouseoriented production house, Focus Features. Ian McEwan on writing the screen adaptation of Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet (1982) (1988: vi). http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/oscarlegacy/2000-2009/ index.html The writing phase stands, of course, in marked contrast to the collaborative processes involved in editing, publishing and publicising a book. These terms are taken, respectively, from: Tarantino and Helgeland, 2003: 83; Lindrea, 2004; Ramin, 2004: 16; Lemire, 2008; Dudar, 1992: 20; Seger, 1992: 9; Howard, 2006; Dudar, 1992: 20. The term ‘overwhelmed’ is used by screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs in relation to Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (1993), for which he wrote the adapted screenplay (2001) (Abeel, 2001). By contrast, ‘ruthless’ is employed in: Dudar, 1992; Abeel, 2001; Wyndham, 2005a; Howard, 2006. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119488/awards http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/awards For a typical example of such views see Wolf Rilla’s backhanded compliment: ‘Though adaptation of any kind must always rank creatively below originally conceived material, its interpretive function is of a very high artistic order’ (1973: 152–53). Dennis Potter was for many years a rare exception to the rule that television was too culturally ‘debased’ a medium to support a pantheon of auteurs. However, the growth of ‘quality television’ from around the turn of the millennium, driven particularly by the commissioning policies and critical

Notes 213

14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21

22

successes of niche cable channels such as HBO, has prompted an efflorescence of creator–writer auteurs such as Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon (The Wire) and Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) (McCabe and Akass, 2007). http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0367838/awards As a guest of the 2008 Melbourne Writers’ Festival (in itself an interesting barometer of screenwriters’ increasing literary respectability) Andrew Davies confessed himself ‘a big fan of Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation’ (‘Faithfully’, 2008). It is debatable whether, even in the 1970s, Corliss was being unduly pessimistic about the availability of published screenplays. Writing in 1979, Syd Field stated, ‘many screenplays have been reprinted in book form and most bookstores have them, or can order them’ (12). Similarly, writing in 1980, William Miller confirmed, ‘I have a fair number of screenplays on my bookshelves: published copies by Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, a copy of Citizen Kane’ (9). http://www.simplyscripts.com/ http://www.script-o-rama.com/ http://www.scriptshack.com/shop/enter.html?lmd=39541.507616 Thomas Austin highlights the circularity of the relationship between the source text, the screen adaptation and the tie-in edition: ‘the film is pre-sold by the novel, which in turn is re-sold on the back of the film’ (2002: 126). Similarly, writer–director Anthony Minghella’s Introduction to the published screenplay of The English Patient (Minghella and Ondaatje, 1997) notes: ‘One significant aspect of this published text is the extent to which it differs from the script I began shooting with. The evolution of the material has continued in post-production as scenes have been compressed or eliminated and, in particular, the structure of the film . . . has been radically revised’ (xv). Stuart Laing makes the similar point that the published film script, ‘unlike a published play-script, is not so much an instruction manual to be turned into a performance, as an attempt to provide a written equivalent of one definitive performance’ (1999: 138). Film economists Acheson and Maule confirm, in pithier fashion, that ‘the only definitive script is the one written after the negative has been produced’ (2005: 315).

6 Cultivating the Reader: Producer and Distributor Strategies for Converting Readers into Audiences 1 UK literary agent Julian Friedmann, in a London Book Fair seminar about adaptation, remarked: ‘If the writer is already a brand name . . . it’s much easier for [the producer] to raise money. So financiers feel comfort’ (Friedmann, 2009). 2 Paramount previously owned and distributed DreamWorks SKG in an agreement which ended in 2008. 3 Author Salman Rushdie was guest director of the Telluride Film Festival in 2001 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/sep/08/telluridefilmfestival. salmanrushdie). 4 Fine Line was subsequently bought by New Line and became the studio’s specialist division. 5 Producer–distributor Artisan Entertainment was bought by Canadian outfit Lions Gate Entertainment in 2003 and operations were merged. 6 Australian television sketch comedy programme The Chaser’s War on Everything in 2009 produced a parody of the quintessential Academyaspirant film none too subtly titled Oscar Bait. A Holocaust-set story of a

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13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

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‘gay, wheelchair-bound Jew’, the spoof short announces the film to be ‘based on true market research about what the Academy likes’ and ostensibly overseen by ‘Academy Award seeking producer’ Harvey Weinstein, no less (http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj78anyCkM). This rather questionable-taste sketch, seemingly a melange of Oscar favourites My Left Foot (1989), Schindler’s List (1993), The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008) (themselves all literary adaptations), screened on Australia’s public-service broadcaster ABC1 in mid 2009. Interestingly, it was not this sketch but another aired during the same programme, in which terminally ill children were encouraged to ‘Make a Realistic Wish’, that caused public outrage, prompting the ABC’s Managing Director to appease taxpayers by pulling The Chaser off air for a fortnight, questioning the critical judgement of the ABC’s head of television programming, and forcing Chaser team member and executive producer Julian Morrow to issue several public mea culpas. http://www.theparistheatre.com/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104454/awards Harvey Weinstein quoted in ‘Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans.’ (1997) Time 21, Apr.: 40. Grover, 2009. The Weinsteins founded the company Shining Excalibur Films solely to handle release of Kids because corporate parent Disney was fearful of negative publicity tarnishing the head company’s ‘family-friendly’ brand identity (http://www.imdb.com/company/co0144562/) (Biskind, 2004: 211–15; King, 2009: 109). Only moderately impressed by the film, People Weekly US critic Leah Rozen expressed doubts about the scalability of this promotional tactic, noting wryly, ‘Sorry to say, but Miramax has no plans to hand out the screenplay when Trainspotting unspools at your local film palace’ (1996: 17). http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=reader.htm http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087075/usercomments. At the time of writing The Company of Wolves had a cumulative rating of 6.6 out of 10, based on 5,445 votes. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117951/ ‘From Book to Film’, http://thereader-movie.com/site/ ‘From Book to Film’, http://thereader-movie.com/site/ Gallagher has more recently returned to public prominence with her decision to publish the original versions of multiple Carver short stories radically edited for their initial publication by Carver’s former editor Gordon Lish (‘Rough’, 2007). Random House/Knopf, publisher of Carver’s celebrated collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) had threatened to block publication of the unedited stories on the grounds of copyright infringement, but the volume, entitled Beginners, subsequently appeared in the UK under the Chatto, Bodley Head and Cape imprint in October 2009. The whole incident has sparked interesting speculation over the nature of editorial intervention in the production of literature and whether texts are the creation of Romanticised individual consciousness or of a more socially based process of collaborative production – much like the revisionist view of adaptation as an industrial phenomenon advocated in the present volume (Campbell, 2007; Ley, 2010). Schuker, 2010. Box Office Mojo statistics record that The Reader achieved 68.6 per cent of its total lifetime grosses (US$74 million) from foreign markets (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=reader.htm). Roiling conflict over The Reader’s final cut and release date had become the dominant media story about the film from September 2008, threatening to

Notes 215 eclipse Faber’s carefully designed campaign of literary cultivation. Briefly, the dispute arose over whether Daldry, finetuning the Broadway musical adaptation of his earlier film Billy Elliot (2000) by day while editing The Reader by night, would have a final cut of the film ready in time for 2008 Golden Globe contention. Harvey Weinstein, with TWC’s financial situation foremost in mind, was agitating strongly for a November 2008 release. Another of The Reader’s executive producers, Hollywood mogul Scott Rudin, already had both Revolutionary Road and Doubt in contention for the 2008 Oscar season, and supported Daldry’s request for more post-production time and thus a 2009 release date. Rudin’s threat (subsequently acted upon) to take his name off The Reader’s credits opened up a further front in the dispute. Moreover, the question of whether Kate Winslet would secure Oscar nominations for both Revolutionary Road (directed by her then husband Sam Mendes) and The Reader, and would thus be competing against herself, added an extra celebrity frisson to the more industry-centric release-date conflict. Eventually, a US release date of 12 December 2008 was arrived at as a compromise, making the film eligible for the all-important 2008 Academy Award competition (Zeitchik, 2008; ‘Happy’, 2008; Goodwin, 2008; Adams, 2008; ‘Itching’, 2008; Grover, 2009). 21 http://www.accompaniedliterarysociety.org/ 22 http://www.accompaniedliterarysociety.org/ Afterword: Restive Audiences and Adaptation Futures 1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks &field-keywords=Pride+and+Prejudice+and+Zombies; http://www.imdb.com/ title/tt1374989/ 2 http://www.remixmylit.com/ 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c5W9lvuLM8 4 http://www.bornofhope.com/ 5 http://www.literatureonscreen.com/?q=node/28;http://www.gbz.hu-berlin. de/Eventsstorage/international-conference-201crewriting-remixing-andreloading

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Index

Academy Awards 5–6, 42–3, 119, 129–30, 142, 144, 151, 163, 165, 168–74, 180–1, 183, 213n6, 214n20 Accompanied Literary Society (ALS) 180–2 actors 151 Adaptation [film] 41, 46, 121, 131–2, 135, 140, 195n26, 213n15 Adaptation [journal] 2–3, 194n18 adaptation studies 1–4, 7, 35, 41, 45, 49, 95, 100, 120, 132–4, 137, 143, 146, 156–84, 186, 190–1, 192n1, 197n10, 206n5; biological metaphors in 73, 195n26; ‘myths’ of 12–16; sociological approaches to 4, 6, 16–17, 20, 22–3, 79, 92–3, 101–2, 103, 146, 158, 164, 174–82, 184–7, 194n18; successive waves of 7–10, 15, 77, 101–2, 145, 157, 186, 189 Adiga, A 92 agents see literary agents; see also talent agents Allen, W 152 Altman, R 164, 168, 177–8 Ames, J 180 Amis, M 52, 57–62, 70 Andrew, D 192n4 Annales school 31 A.P. Watt 51, 73 Armstrong, G 141, 149 arthouse films 158–85, 188 Artisan Entertainment 165, 213n5 Association for Adaptation Studies (AAS) 2, 191, 195n29 Association of Literature on Screen Studies (ALSS) 2, 137 Athill, D 71

Atonement [film] 110, 118–19, 123–4, 154–5 ‘attachment’ to screen projects 133, 138–42 Atwood, M 114 audiences 9–10, 15, 18, 23, 43, 120, 128, 133, 146, 150, 157–84, 185–91; at writers’ festivals 98–101; creation of unauthorised adaptations by 189–91; fan attitudes and behaviours among 22–3, 45, 120, 143, 156, 189–91, 211n41; medium-neutrality of 104; of arthouse cinema 120 Austen, J 147, 189 Austin, T 213n20 Australia Council for the Arts 189 auteur theory 22, 27, 49, 132–3, 135–7, 142, 149–50, 152, 155, 160, 164, 172, 178, 183, 212n13 authors 12–14, 16, 20, 21, 25–6, 80, 98, 120–1, 131, 137–9, 142, 146, 152, 155, 158–60, 171, 174–8, 180, 188, 194n20; adapting own work 143; advances 38; and literary agents 38–41; anti-adaptation 47–8; as executive producers 27, 49, 119, 139–40, 159–60; as screenwriters 41–3, 49; at film premieres 26–7, 35, 46, 119, 176; cameo appearances by 44–5, 49, 120–1, 176, 187; celebrity authorship 28, 33–6, 44–9, 71, 75, 77, 97, 101, 106, 139, 175, 187; ‘death’ of 28–9, 32, 34, 36, 60; marketability of 13; professionalisation of 28, 31–3, 49, 51, 54, 139, 196n9; Romantic conception of 25–8, 34, 45, 49, 54,

246

Index

132, 135, 145–6, 187, 196n5; theories of 28–36; ‘twin-track’ authorship 42–3, 72, 93, 114, 130, 143 Baddiel, D 118 Baetens, J 152–3, 195n21, 199n27, 199n30 Bakhtin, M 10 Banks, R 44 Barnes, J 58, 200n37 Barthes, R 9, 29–31, 36 BBC 44, 100, 114–15, 147 Beilby, A 211n42 Beja, M 15 Berlinale Day [Frankfurt] 86, 91, 96 Bernard, T 169 Berne Convention 31 Bertelsmann 61 Bielby, D 141 Bielby W 141 Biriotti, M 34 Bluestone, G 1, 8, 12, 15 board games 5 Bolter, JD 14 Bonham-Carter, V 32 book clubs 180 Booker Prize 19, 20, 22, 92, 95, 100, 104–30; 140, 172, 205n36; 207n1, 211n42; archive 113, 207n1; 208n2; broadcasting of 114, 208n9; dinner announcement of 108, 110, 113–14, 209n15; fortieth anniversary of 113, 117, 208n2; history of 113, 115–17; impact of 105, 109–13, 117, 126, 209n15; judging of 113, 117–18, 125, 209n15, 210n29; Man Booker International Prize 208n3; name of 104; profile in US of 111–13; readings from titles shortlisted for 115; rules of 105, 107, 109, 208n7; scandals associated with 126; shortlisted titles adapted for screen 105–30, 139, 147, 149–50; thirtieth anniversary of 113 book fairs 13, 20–1, 33, 39, 77–9, 82–9, 97, 101–2, 181, 187, 194n20, 198n23; awards at 86; Bologna Children’s Book Fair 78, 82, 89; BookExpo America 78, 82; collaboration with film festivals 78, 85–9, 91–7; comics and

graphic novels at 85; competition from online rights-trading 89–91; Frankfurt Book Fair 56–7, 67, 78, 81–91, 93, 96, 104–5, 163, 201n13, 206n9, 206n10; Guadalajara 82; literary agents at 85–6; London Book Fair 78, 82, 89, 93, 204n32, 206n2, 213n1; post-colonial dynamics of 83, 92; rights-trading at 82–9 book history 13, 17, 19–20, 28–9, 31–3, 49, 50, 121 book prizes 13, 16, 18–19, 20, 34, 64–5, 103–30, 158, 160, 177, 187–8; celebritising effect of 106; Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes 104; Costa Book Awards 104; effect on adaptation of 104; Governor General’s Literary Award 105; Guardian First Book Award 104; IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 105; James Tait Black Memorial Prize 104; judging of 105–6; Miles Franklin Award 104–5; National Book Awards 104, 111; National Book Critics Circle Award; New York Times Notable Book 104; Nobel Prize 104, 140; Orange Prize 63, 104, 211n42; Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 105; Pulitzer Prize 104, 179; theoretical approaches to 103, 106–9, 128; see also Booker Prize book retailing see bookselling book reviewing 13, 32, 105, 146, 207n31 Books at Berlinale 81, 91–3 Books at MIFF [Melbourne International Film Festival] 93–5 Bookseller 73, 209n22 bookselling 32, 34, 36, 40, 83, 101, 105, 109, 128, 130, 152, 168 Booth, R 100–1 Boozer, J 137–8 Bourdieu, P 6, 16, 18–19, 28, 73, 77, 79, 83, 91, 107–8, 117, 130, 139, 142, 147, 172, 174, 185, 192n5 Boyle, D 172, 176 Breuvart, C 80–1 British Film Institute (BFI) 183 Brokeback Mountain 134, 140, 152 Brooks, G 44 Brouillette, S 34–5, 55, 77, 196n8

Index 247 Brown, C see Curtis Brown Brown, D 27 Byatt, AS 58, 119–21, 190 CAA 142 Cahiers du Cinéma 135 Cahir, LC 14 Caine, M 115–16, 207n1 Campion, J 149, 153 Cannon 175 Canongate Books 67, 181 Cardwell, S 2 Carey, J 125 Carey, P 64 Carringer, R 136 Carter, A 175 Cartmell, D 2, 15, 147, 194n18, 196n2, 210n35 Carver, R 164, 177–8, 214n18 Casanova, P 76 CCS Stellar 69–70 Chaplin, C 70 Chase, D 212n13 Chevalier, T 194n20 Cinema and Literature International Forum (CLIF) see Forum International Cinéma et Littérature (FICL) cinematographers 133 ciné-romans 153 circuit models 77–8, 81, 91, 93 Clinton, B 100 Clooney, G 150 Cochran, T 83 Coetzee, JM 35, 95, 140 Coffee, L 134 Colman Getty 110, 209n12, 209n13 Columbia Pictures 46, 162 comic books 5–6, 10, 16, 20, 37, 41, 80–1, 85, 100, 186 companion volumes 15, 23, 36, 72, 130, 152–3 Company of Wolves, The [film] 175 computer games 5, 10–11, 16, 20, 37, 41, 72, 74, 80, 85, 142, 153, 160, 186, 190, 197n15 Connolly, R 95 Contardi, B 37 copyright see rights Corliss, R 136–7, 150–1, 231n16 Corrigan, T 196n2 creative industries 20, 30, 33, 53, 73 creative writing programs 32, 55, 62, 106, 151

Crying Game, The 158, 170 cultural capital 34, 79, 109, 116, 157, 164, 167, 174, 187 cultural festivals see writers’ festivals; see also film festivals cultural imperialism 47 cultural nationalism 62–9 cultural policy 21, 23, 32, 78, 80, 204n32, 205n40; and film festivals 91, 93–5; and writers’ festivals 97 cultural studies 1, 4, 6, 9–11, 16, 18, 28, 49, 72, 77, 116, 151 Cunningham, M 44, 179, 181 Curtis Brown 51, 64, 205n41 Cusack, J 131 Daldry, S 100, 171, 176, 178–9, 181, 214n20 Darwin, C 195n26 Davies, A 147–50, 207n30, 231n15 Davies, L 44 DeBona, G 193n13, 193n14 deconstruction 4 Delany, P 60, 205n36 Desai, A 54, 119 Desai, K 111 Deutchman, I 164 Dickens, C 147 digitisation 14, 17–18, 20, 22–3, 33, 37, 49, 50, 71–4, 78, 84, 86, 98; of rights-trading 89–91 directors 27, 49, 80, 95, 100, 118–19, 132–3, 135–7, 141, 146, 151–2, 155, 158, 160, 163, 167, 174, 177, 183, 188 distributors 20, 22, 80, 91, 145–6, 156–84, 188, 191; role of 161–4 Dobbin, C 93 Doyle, R 119 Drewe, R 108, 196n3 Ebury 152 editors 16, 20, 38–9, 50, 54–6, 115, 144, 187 Elliott, K 2, 193n11 Ellroy, J 144 English, JF 16, 44, 48, 60, 108–9, 172 English Patient, The [film] 110, 119, 129–30, 146, 170, 173, 213n21 Enright, A 111–12 Epstein, EJ 163 Epstein, J 55, 71 Eugenides, J 75 Evans, N 41

248

Index

Faber and Faber 152, 154 Faber, G 180, 214n20 fans see audiences feminism 9 fidelity criticism 7–8, 10, 22, 27, 45, 133, 147–50, 157, 175, 193n10, 211n41 Field, S 133, 135, 231n16 Field, T 43 Fielding, H 200n37 Fiennes, R 179 Film and Media Forum [Frankfurt] 85–9 film festivals 22, 39, 77–9, 91–7, 101–2, 161, 163, 167, 171, 181, 183, 187; academic analysis of 91; awards at 91, 163, 166–7, 170, 183; Berlinale 78, 81, 86–9, 91, 93, 95, 163, 179; Cannes 78, 80–1, 96, 153, 163, 167, 170, 176; collaboration with book fairs 78, 85–9, 91–7; Melbourne 93–5; Sundance 78, 163, 167; Telluride 163, 231n3; Toronto 163, 167; Tribeca 163; Venice 163 film marketing and publicity 157–84, 188; cross-over strategy 160, 167–74, 182, 188; exploitationstyle 170–1; location 164, 168–9, 183; seasonality 164–6, 183; significance of reviews for 165–7, 170–1, 182–3; width 164, 166–8, 183 see also distributors film studies 1, 3, 121, 132–3, 135–6, 151, 156, 185–6 see also auteur theory Filmyard Holdings 170 Fine Line Features 164, 168, 172, 213n4 Fink, M 144 Flanagan, R 64, 200n32 Fleming, I 72 Florence, P 100–1 Florence, N 100 Focus Features 162, 212n4 Forster, EM 149, 169 Forman, D 114–5 Forum International Cinéma et Littérature (FICL) 39, 79–82, 89, 93, 95, 196n4, 206n9; prizes awarded at 80–1, 104–5 Foucault, M xiii, 29–31, 34, 46, 49, 196n5, 196n7 Fox 162

Fox, M 54 Fox Searchlight 42, 162 franchising 26, 35–6, 43, 71, 160, 199n27 Frankfurt Book Fair see book fairs Frankfurt School 5, 17 Franklin, D 198n25, 199n27, 203n22, 203n24 Friedmann, J 45, 198n21, 199n30, 213n1 Frow, J 44, 60 Fuller, R 116 Gallagher, T 177–8, 214n18 Gardiner, J 36, 60 Geahan, B 180 Gedin, E 86–7 Gemmell, N 64 Genette, G 9 Geraghty, C 3, 5, 182–3, 193n6, 194n19, 210n36 Gilbertsson, J 86–7 Gill, M 165, 170, 173 Gillies, MA 51 Glyn, E 44 Godwin, D 64 Golden, A 141 Goldman, W 134 Goldsworthy, K 97 Gondry, M 150 Good Machine 63 Gordon, G 56 Grahame-Smith, S 189 Granada Television 114 Granata, M 167–8 graphic novels see comic books Green, D 125, 210n37 green-lighting 40, 42, 157, 183 Grisham, J 198n25, 199n28 Grove Atlantic 111–12 Grusin, R 14–15 Guardian 100, 116 see also book prizes Gutenberg, J 29–31, 33 Hampton, C 154–5 Hanson, C 144 Hare, D 149, 176, 179 HarperCollins 58, 64 Harwood, A 196n9, 197n14, 201n13, 203n20, 205n41 Harwood, R 149 Helgeland, B 144 Hemingway, E 25–6

Index 249 ‘heritage’ cinema 182 Hermanns, P 76, 92 Heyward, M 67 Higham, D 140 Higson, A 194n18, 200n37, 209n11 history of the book see book history Hitchcock, A 133 Hodder and Stoughton 117, 126 Hodge, J 173, 211n1 Hollinghurst, A 147 Hollywood 13, 28, 45–8, 70, 113, 119, 127, 131–2, 136, 139, 141–2, 159, 162–5, 176, 179, 184, 197n14, 197n15, 198n24, 199n28, 207n30, 211n40; 214n20 specialist divisions in 41, 158, 162–3, 167, 184 Hollywood Reporter 166 Hooper, C 52, 62–9, 201n13 Howards End 169, 172 Huggan, G 107–8, 205n36, 208n5 Hunter, IQ 188–9 Hutcheon, L 3, 5, 146, 192n4, 195n26, 196n30 identity politics 3 independent films 158, 160, 162–3, 167–8, 170 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) 113 Intellect 137 intellectual property (IP) see rights International Creative Management (ICM) 70, 142, 205n41 International Management Group (IMG) 70 International Toy Fair [Nuremberg] 89 intertextuality 3 Irving, J 44 Ishiguro, K 114 Ivory, J 113, 121 Jackson, P 211n41 Jacobs, RN 212n9 Jacobs, S 140 James, H 149 Janklow & Nesbit Associates 74, 205n41 Janklow, ML 58, 61, 74, 205n41 Jhabvala, RP 113–14, 119, 131, 147–50, 169, 209n19 Jonathan Cape 57–8, 61, 63, 203n22

Jolie, A 96 Jones, L 147–50, 210n34 Jonze, S 41, 46, 121, 131, 135, 150, 195n26 Jordan, N 120, 175 Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 3, 137 Journal of Screenwriting 137 Kaufman, C 46, 131, 140–1, 144, 146, 150–1, 213n15 Kavanagh, P 57–8, 70 Keener, C 131 Keneally, T 111, 114, 119, 125–8, 210n37 Kerrigan, F 168 Kidman, N 179 Klebanoff, AM 58, 61 Knopf 63 Koontz, D 199n28 Kristeva, J 10 LaBute, N 119–21, 210n34 Laing, S 231n22 Larsson, S 86–8 Lazarus, PN 159, 164 Lee, J 204n28 Leitch, T 3, 5–6, 11, 193n6, 194n18, 194n20, 205n39 librarians 32 licensing 15, 20 Lions Gate Entertainment 213n5 Lish, G 214n18 literary agents 16, 20, 21, 26, 30–1, 36–43, 50–75, 79–80, 111, 115, 138–40, 146, 159–61, 187–8, 194n20, 197n14, 207n31; and globalisation 62–9, 74–5; and writers’ estates 67, 72; at book fairs 56–7, 85–6; codes of practice of 61; commission rates of 55; consolidation of 69–74, 187; contract negotiation by 53–5, 58; editing by 56; gender imbalance among 56; marketing and publicity role of 56, 60; origins of 51; relationship with authors 54–7; relationship with publishers 53–7, 67; rise of 73–5; role of 53–7; subagents 38, 198n18; ‘superagents’ 57–8, 70, 74, 202n16; see also talent agents literary festivals see writers’ festivals literary prizes see book prizes

250

Index

literary studies 1, 6, 33, 50, 78, 95, 97, 103, 116, 121, 128, 132, 135, 196n2, 197n10, 206n5; internationalist approaches to 76–8; role in defining ‘Literature’ of 98–101, 143 Literature/Film Quarterly 3 Litwak, M 166–7 Lodge, D 119, 209n15 Lurie, C 99, 207n31 Lyman, R 167 magazines 31 Malcolm, J 123 Malin, A 165 Man Booker Prize see Booker Prize Manne, L 172 Maras, S 138, 211n1, 212n2 Márquez, GG 47–8 Martel, Y 111 Martyn, S 64 Marxism 11, 19, 52, 117, 192n4 Mase, Jacinta di 56 McCabe, P 119–20 McCarthy, C 146 McColl, P 37 McCourt, F 181 McCreadie, M 136 McCrum, R 106, 130 McEwan, I 119, 123, 144, 146, 154, 211n1 McFarlane, B 14 McKee, R 135, 150 McLuhan, M 14 McMurtry, L 134, 140, 212n4 McPhee, H 83, 92 McShane, P 207n35 media and communication studies 1, 15, 33, 35, 72, 151, 190 media conglomerates 13–14, 17–20, 26–8, 33–8, 41, 43, 49, 50, 54–5, 61–2, 69, 71, 78, 84, 104, 152, 160, 186, 190, 197n11 merchandising 11, 36–7, 48, 74, 86 Merchant Ivory 149, 169 Meredith, S 58, 61 Messitte, A 200n48 Metz, C 9 MGM 126 Michaels, A 207n30 Michel, C 70–2 Millar, M 207n30 Miller, W 137, 213n16 Millington, M 79

Minghella, A 119–20, 128–30, 163, 173, 213n21 Miramax 20, 22, 158, 162, 165, 168–74, 176, 214n12 Mo, T 144, 211n1 Moggach, D 44–5, 145, 199n28, 200n45 Monticelli, A 140 Moran, J 34–5, 47, 60 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) 162, 170 multipurposing 26 Murdock, G 135 Murphy, PC xiii Naremore, J 1, 7, 192n4 narratology 9, 118 Neil, A 70–1 Nesbit, L 56, 74, 205n41 Net Book Agreement (NBA) 205n40 Neumann, V 206n10 New Line Cinema 162, 213n4 Newmarket Press 42–3, 152, 154 Nick Hern Books 152 novelisations 15, 23, 37, 87, 146, 152–3 Noyce, P 210n32 Ondaatje, M 35, 119–20, 129 option process 13, 38, 86, 110–1, 118, 138–43, 194n20, 209n10 Orlean, S 46, 140–1 Orloff, J 144 Orr, J 195n24 Ossana, D 140, 212n4 Owen, L 90, 197n11, 198n16, 209n10 ‘packaging’ 71, 142, 159, 162 Palfreyman, J 63, 65 Paramount 162 Paramount Decree 141, 162 Paramount Vantage 162 Payne, A 42–3 Pearl, M 96, 144, 198n24 Penguin 63, 130 Penhall, J 131, 146 Perkins, M 54, 144 Perlman, E 64 Perren, A 170 Perrotta, T 43–4 Peters, Fraser & Dunlop (PFD) 52–3, 57, 69–74, 202n17 Pfefferberg, P 125

Index 251 Pickett, R 42 Pinker, JB 51 Pinter, H 149 pitching 80, 86 Pitt, B 96 playwrights 100 Polan, D 135 political economy 6, 10–11, 17, 51, 83, 185, 205n39 Porter, A 201n13 post-colonialism 3, 9, 77, 83, 107–8, 116, 128 post-structuralism 3, 9–10, 27–8, 32, 34, 49, 77 Potter, D 212n13 Premiere 150 pre-publication film rights sales 40, 87, 92 Price, S 138, 147, 154 Priest, C 209n22 print culture 23, 49, 101, 121–23, 127 prizes see book prizes producers 20, 22, 47, 80, 86, 92–3, 100, 110, 117, 136, 139–41, 143–6, 150, 153, 156–84, 188; as associate producers 159; as executive producers 159; as line producers 159 see also independent films producers representatives 160–1, 166 production designers 133 Proulx, A 140, 212n4, 212n9 publishers 14, 16, 20, 21, 29, 32, 38–43, 50, 75, 80, 82–9, 92–3, 101, 111, 115, 121, 138, 142, 145–6, 151–3, 158, 174–5, 187–8, 207n31 Publishers Weekly 89, 91, 110, 164, 171, 178 publishing 18, 34, 71; in France 67, 201n1, 206n6 publishing studies 23, 33 Pynchon, T 47 Raengo, A 3 Raftos, R 197n15 Random House 57–8, 61, 63, 93–4, 214n18 reader response theory 4 Reader, The [film] 156, 171, 173–4, 176–7, 178–81, 213n6, 214n19, 214n20 Reilly, M 197n15

remakes 80, 87, 206n5 Remix My Lit 189 Rickett, J 53, 69 rights 15, 20, 21, 26–33, 36, 49, 50–1, 53, 55, 77, 79, 83, 130, 186–91, 197n11; Creative Commons 189; in film scripts 152; sales at film festivals 91–7; film rights 25, 38, 45, 47–8, 53, 63, 71, 79, 87, 93–4, 111, 126, 138–9, 141, 157, 159, 178, 198n21; growth of subsidiary rights 36–43, 74–5, 86, 138; novelisation rights 153; online rights-trading 89–91; sales at book fairs of 82–9; ‘splitting’ of 65–9, 204n29 Rilla, W 212n12 Rosenbloom, H 66, 204n32 Roth, P 27, 62 Roy, A 48 Rudin, S 214n20 Rushdie, S 35, 44, 78, 107, 208n2, 208n9, 213n3 Russian formalism 9 Salinger, JD 47 Sanders, J 3 Saxon, E 46 Schatz, T 14 Schepisi, F 114 Schiff, S 144 Schiffrin, A 71 Schindler’s Ark/List [book] 125–8 Schindler’s List [film] 110, 119, 121–8, 188, 213n6 Schlink, B 95, 171, 176, 179–80, 207n30 Scott, P 114, 210n23 scouts 39–41, 92, 161, 194n20, 198n26 screen festivals see film festivals screenplay publishing 15, 36, 42, 46, 72, 129–30, 133, 151–5, 173, 176, 213n16 screenplays see screenwriters screenwriters 20, 22, 28, 46, 71, 80, 100, 119, 131–55, 158–9, 174, 188; as celebrities 98, 147–51, 188; as executive producers 212n4; attachment to projects 140–2; commissioning of 141; freelance 141; manuals for 134–5; marginalisation of 132–7, 150–1, 153–5; memoirs by 134; prizes for

252

Index

132; relationships with authors of 140, 143–5, 149–50, 212n4; sociological approaches to the role of 136; status of scripts by 151–5; theorisations of 134–8; who are also dramatists 149, 154–5, 176, 179; who are also novelists 79, 113–14, 119, 143, 145, 160; women as 136, 141, 149; see also option process; see also screenplay publishing Scribe 66 scriptwriters see screenwriters Segal, E 42 semiotics 9 sex, lies, and videotape 165, 170 Shannon, R 86 Simon, D 212n13 ‘slipping’ 40 Smith, Z 44 sociology see adaptation studies Soderbergh, S 165, 170 Sony 100–1 Sony Pictures Classics 162, 167, 169, 172 Sorkin, A 212n13 Spielberg, S 111, 119, 121–23, 126–8, 166, 199n28 Squires, C 60, 199n27 Staiger, J 141 Stam, R 3, 5, 10, 23, 192n4, 193n14, 194n19, 196n30 Starke, R 97 stars 35, 40, 47, 49, 62, 77–8, 96, 100, 131–2, 135–6, 139, 142, 147–51, 154–5, 158–9, 163, 167, 169, 173–4, 179, 183, 188 Stempel, T 136 Stewart, C 97 structuralism 9 studios 14, 158, 162, 165, 167, 191 see also Hollywood Sundance Film Festival 20 Süskind, P 47–8 Swicord, R 141 Swinton, T 141 talent agents 69, 72, 141–3, 147, 155, 159, 187 see also literary agents Tarantino, Q 163, 167 television 156, 160 Text 67, 211n42 textual analysis 4, 7–9,16, 35, 106–7, 134, 183

theme-park rides 5, 11 The Weinstein Company (TWC) 170, 173–4, 178–80, 181–2, 214n20 see also Weinstein, B and Weinstein, H Thomas, DM 211n40 Thompson, HS 75 Thompson, JB 83 Thuan, J 143 ‘tie-in’ editions 15, 24, 36, 42, 46, 72, 75, 130, 146, 152–4, 213n20 Todd, R 60, 107–8, 111 Tolkien, JRR 211n41 Toltz, S 64 Trainspotting 170, 172–3, 176, 214n12 translation 76, 79 Tranter, L 197n14, 201n5, 201n7 Trewin, I 110, 117, 126 Truffaut, F 133, 135 UNESCO 79 United Agents 52–3, 69–73 Universal Pictures 111, 126, 162 Variety 85, 166, 173, 179 Victor, E 201n4 Villarejo, A 158 Vintage Books 200n48 Virago 175 Walt Disney Pictures 162–3, 170, 214n11 Warner Bros. Pictures 162 Warner Independent 181 Wasko, J 192n3 Waters, S 44, 111, 147 Watt, AP see A.P. Watt Waugh, E 72 Weidhaas, P 84, 90, 206n10 Weiner, M 212n13 Weinstein, B 22, 169–74, 178–80, 214n11 Weinstein, H 22, 156, 158, 169–74, 176, 178–80, 181–2, 213n6, 214n9, 214n11, 214n20 see also The Weinstein Company Weir, N 93 Weldon, F 114, 210n26 Welsh, I 172, 176 West, JLW 32–3 Whelehan, I 2, 15, 194n18, 196n2 Whitlam, G 64

Index 253 William Morris Agency 70, 72, 142 Wilson, A 113 Winslet, K 173–4, 179, 214n20 Winterbottom, M 96 Winterson, J 53 Winton, T 210n32 Wolff, J xiii, 193n8 women’s studies 1 Woolf, V 179, 182 Working Title Films 79, 100, 118, 200n37 Wright, J 123, 155 writers’ festivals 13, 20, 22, 30, 33, 39, 66, 77–9, 97–101, 187; academic analysis of 97; Adelaide

78, 98; audience orientation of 98–102; Commonwealth basis of 98; distinctions between 98–102; Edinburgh 78, 98, 207n28, 207n30; Hay 78, 100–1, 207n30; Melbourne 78, 98, 213n15; role in defining ‘Literature’ 98–102; Sydney 78, 98; Toronto 78, 98 Wylie, A 39, 52, 201n1; and Amis 57–62, 69; and Hooper 62–9 Wylie Agency 57, 60, 63, 67–8 York, L 35 Zaillian, S 127