movie adaptation essay

07 Adapting History and Literature into Movies

This essay offers an overview of adaptation, an initiation for the educated reader who is not a communications or film specialist. It will reference “The Social and Cultural Construction of Abraham Lincoln in U.S. Movies and on U.S. TV”—but mainly with an eye to the larger issue of cinematographic adaptation itself.

Apples and Giraffes

Literature and film, movies and books, compare like apples and giraffes, said contemporary American writer Dennis Lehane. 1 But they do compare. They do interbreed. As do history and film. But the question is: How and why do history, literature and movies fruitfully nourish one another? When apples, giraffes, and other exotica interbreed what results?

Many thousands of movies are adaptations from historical or literary sources. Hence the recent internet vernacular of “litflicks”—literature adapted into flicks, the flickering medium of the motion pictures. 2 History is generically dealt with by cinema in the epic, period, or historical film. Film historians generally distinguish the epic group from the strict historical group by its sheer size, expense, and the sumptuousness of the movie’s costumes and sets. The period film is distinguished by the production fact that it can be set in the far distant past or the immediate present, as in the Jazz Age, 1926 version of The Great Gatsby or with the achingly Sixties, 1969 film Zabriskie Point . 3

Although literature, history, and movies are distinct forms of communication thousands of solutions and accommodations have been found so they can get along and have fruitful relationships. The first key is the nature and tradition of adaptation itself. Tales evolve and one generation adjusts the stories of the past to the present time and to its modern needs and ways of story telling. “My dramas are but slices cut off from the great banquet of Homer’s poems,” wrote the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.). 4 But Aeschylus’ dramas were leaner and meaner, in search of a higher truth which synthesized moral opposites, profoundly simpler than anything all-embracing Homer ever wrote. For it is the singer, not the song, that makes the splendor of communication successful. And a story retold, as Aeschylus retold Homer, continues. What is beneath the surface of the story that has been told before and will be told again—a story that has been alive among humans for centuries or millennia?

Literature, History, and Movies

Consider how information exists and knowledge is distilled. How a story is told is as important as its subject matter. Thus, three fundamental points about how the nature of literature and history effect their relation to movies:

First, legend precedes historical fact. Did Nestor and Ajax in the Iliad ever actually exist and do what Homer claims they did? Until factual, textual proof is found this remains, at the least, an open question. The Iliad remains legend rather than history, literature rather than history, superstition rather than science. Hence, human culture as we know it shows that literature precedes history as a practice of inquiry, as a creative record of human events.

Second, a fundamental distinction exists between history and memory. History is then, memory is now. A judicious, critical management of documentary evidence allows history to get as close as possible to the facts of the past; then as it was then. Memory is the past remembered and reconstructed through the lens of the present and its building blocks. 5 Movies flourish in a popular, contemporary market place. They must entertain the sensibilities of the present. Anachronism is their delight and pleasure. Memory is their very breath. So history inevitably gets short-changed in movies—with some notable exceptions.

Third, with regard to the history of ideas, one distinguishes between an older meaning of literature as literacy and the cultivation of reading (dominant through the eighteenth century) and a newer reality and reference to literature as a body of writing which contrasts with erudition and which emphasizes wit, talent, and taste (which begins to dominate the older meaning by the end of the eighteenth century). 6 Story-telling movies that are not straight documentary or raw, live footage have a much stronger generic affinity to literature than to history. Thus the movie-history relation is more a connection rather than a similarity, an association rather than nearness. The difference is subtle but meaningful. The viewer can expect a movie to be like literature. But can you expect a movie to be history?

Two exceptions of note which prove the rule with regard to movies and history are documentary cinema and raw footage. Documentary cinema has a closer relation to history. Documentary can function like journalism or on-the-spot news, though news is “only the rough draft of history”—as publisher Phil Graham of The Washington Post once said. Conventional wisdom defines documentary as “relating to or found in documents: aiming at presentation of reality,” 7 “broadly: factual, objective.” 8

But look deeper and one often finds that the non-fiction film or photo which is about “real life” was treated subjectively and sometimes doctored just as much as a piece of fiction. Though documentary is relied upon as objective fact, as proven support for something, it can easily be a constructed, subjective artifact and be synonymous with social persuasion or propaganda. This is not a problem, but an asset for documentary, and a point to which this essay shall return. Raw footage is also known as “stock shot” and is film footage of actual, ordinary or exceptional events which is stocked away and then used as movie filler, a means to intensify mimesis in a fiction film or documentary, a way to cut production costs, or kept for historical record. One outstanding case of stock shot would be the Zapruder Film . This was the only live movie made of the John F. Kennedy assassination of November 22, 1963 by amateur cameraman and garment manufacturer Abraham Zapruder of Dallas, Texas. 9 This film has been used or referenced in about forty movies to date, including Oliver Stone’s 1991, bullying but engrossing movie JFK , a 1999, HBO Sopranos’ episode, and conspiracy theory documentaries of the last few years. 10

The vitality of adaptation and influence evolved in Western culture through various epochs down to the European Age of the Enlightenment, when the proprietary concept of plagiarism came into common play. Prior to that, new versions of old tales, such as European medieval romances, were considered to refurbish and refit stories that had been told before and would be told again and again. There was once a much stronger sense of the common property of culture. The change that came about during the European Enlightenment had to do with owning painting and art criticism, literature, natural philosophy, history, and music. 11

The originality, stylistic authority and proprietary rights of a composer and a composition became a major factor in the production, adaptation, and consumption of culture. This was capped by a new sense of individualism, a term and concept which did not come into common use in the English language until the early 1800s. 12 One result was the “self-made” author who could make a living from his writings and was deservedly proud that he could do so by selling his work to the public and did not have to toady to patronage. The Augustan poet, satirist, and translator Alexander Pope (1688–1794) was the first outstanding Anglo-American example of this. From his Homeric translations he made a net profit of the then very large sum of £10,000 and he bragged he could “. . . live and thrive Indebted to / no Prince or Peer alive.” 13

Precedents for plagiarism existed. Stealing from another person’s work among the literate elite in ancient Greece and Rome was taken as a cowardly sign that one lacked personal, creative integrity. Around the time Johann Gutenberg’s printing press was working (beginning in Strasbourg in the 1430s), the legal phenomenon of “letters patent” came into existence—a document from the monarch which conferred the privilege, or patent, to print, usually given to a Stationer’s Company or guild. It was the first Anglo-American law, the Occidental Copyright Law Statute of Queen Anne of England of 1710, which expressly guaranteed copyright. Which, in turn, was followed in the newly minted United States by the first U.S. Copyright Act of 1790. 14

The concept and practice of adaptation as a break from the original creation, and not as a refitting flourished once copyright and plagiarism were written into the granite of the law. The term’s two-fold original meaning adapted to this cultural, social, and economic change. First by the Latin etymology of adaptation: ad —“near, adjacent to,” and aptus : “to fasten, to fit.” While the secondary, derived meaning of adaptation as something “broken up” and “remade totally anew” adapted to the newer social and commercial sense in a world where “capitalism” was also a new word.

Cultural History

Final introductory note: This essay about adapting history and literature into film is a cultural history approach to the question of cinematographic adaptation. It highlights concern for cultural translation, with how the culture and language of the past has been transformed into the present.

Culture is not handed on like a baton in a relay race from one generation to another or from one nation to another. As it evolves, culture has to be reproduced. “A culture does not have an independent inertia.” 15 In classical terms, cultural history is a secular humanist, Aristotelian approach to culture. My a priori assumption is that all knowledge is gained and perpetuated by the close association between the human mind, spirit, and body conditioned by the environment of its time. No Greater Power—from archetypes, to Godhead, to Platonic “forms”—exists independently of our sensible world, of our human need to construct, guide, give and get what we require as human beings. Man is his own maker.

The ancient art and craft of adaptive communication means recreation. Beneath the surface of a story refurbished over the ages and updated by different media lies a heritage of useful knowledge which adds to well-being in proportion as it is communicated. The genesis of the forms themselves can now help us to figure out the relationship of literature to film, the written word to the visual image.

Malleable Forms and Contents

Protean Forms and Authenticity

In his classic study Novels Into Film (1954), George Bluestone argued that the novel is “protean because it has assimilated essays, letters, memoirs, histories, religious tracts, and manifestoes” 16 —and one may add: the folk tale, the play, epic, and romance. Film itself is also specially “protean because it has assimilated photography, music, dialog, the dance”—and one may add: literature and history, painting, visible color, audible sound, and the art of inducing a sleeplike trance.

But movies do more. Movies are distinct from both literature and history because a movie has to move on multiple tracks, combine two or more types of media. As the German American film theorist and perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) noted in 1938, a movie is a composite work of art which:

. . . is possible only if complete structures, produced by the media, are integrated in the form of parallelism. Naturally, such a ‘double track’ will make sense only if the components do not simply convey the same thing; they must complete each other in the sense of dealing differently with the same subject; each medium must treat the subject in its own way, and the resulting difference must be in accordance with those that exist between the media. 17

History has also assimilated different genres. But, more importantly, it has traditionally been considered to be of two sorts: the biographies of great people or the story of ordinary folk. This began as the long-standing distinction in history between the work of Thucydides and that of Herodotus. Thucydides wrote heroic political history which emphasized the interrelations of the highly privileged. Thucydides reserved the moral drama of historical tragedy for an elite (as did literature until the modern, industrial age). Herodotus’ work was pluralistic, polyvalent, democratic. His tone was colloquial rather than terse, his narrative was far more about people than abstractions. In the Herodotean words of Henry Ford’s amanuensis William John Cameron (1878–1955): “The history of historians is usually bunk . . . but history that you can see is of great value. It is not the past of the books, . . . it is the past of living men and women; folks pretty much like ourselves.” 18 The contemporary American cultural historian Karl Krober has updated these issues in his study Make-Believe in Film and Fiction (2006) and argued for a different set of contrasts regarding the fundamental differences between literature and movies. Literature, he claims, makes it easier to share subjective fantasies, it frees the mind from limits of time and space, and it dramatizes the ethical significance of ordinary behavior, while simultaneously intensifying readers’ awareness of how they themselves think or feel. Movies’ uniquely magnify movements to produce stories which are specially potent in exposing hypocrisy, problems of criminality in modern society, and the relation between nature and man, the private self and the natural environment. 19 In other words, movies are more like journalism—the rough draft of history. The American playwright, movie director and screenwriter David Mamet (1947– ) has put the matter more succinctly in basic building terms. Literature, he said (and a play in particular) “is like an airplane. You don’t want to have any extra parts there.” While “a movie’s more like a car; it can probably sustain a couple extra parts to make it look pretty.” 20

The protean blends of history and cinema match nicely in the epic spectacular. The movie set in an epic—the film’s stage arrangement, scenery, props, place and costumes—takes on such force of character that it has the strength of an actual subject. Like a documentary, an epic spectacular owes a great deal of its effectiveness to the coherence and apparent authenticity of all elements in the film. The set is a spine that must exist so the body of the movie can exist. The director must bring spine and body to life. And so history appears to be reborn in the epic movie. 21

Authentic setting both enhances the veracity of an epic movie and gives the popular audience a tantalizing insight into the people and places that helped to make history happen. MGM’s 1959 Ben Hur sent out second unit scouts to film locations in Italy, along with England, France, Mexico and Spain, to achieve this. Of course, this was a gross factual error. The creative point was not to achieve one hundred percent factual, historical accuracy, but to attain the emotional perspective of epic space. In character terms, the late Charlton Heston was beautifully cast with his stern, hawk-like features, intense, stoic expression, and sinewy, athletic frame. The point being that historical accuracy in the movie context should be judged by different rules than the dialectical, academic context of history. “There is no point in comparing the relative value of the various media. Personal preferences exist, but each medium reaches the heights in its own way.” 22 In the movie business, as opposed to the history business, authentic does not mean factually erudite. It means coherence. It means history recast into fresh dramatic form. At its best, the epic spectacular combines heroic political history with pluralistic, polyvalent and democratic themes—as in David Lean’s superb Anglo-American production Lawrence of Arabia (1962). It is a movie business formula that has produced hokum and rubbish, but also cinematic masterpieces and cutting-edge advances in narrative form and multimedia technology. In American cinema, it is a formula that has worked from D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) through the twentieth and twenty-first century Western, the Bible epic, war movie, sword and sandal Roman Empire film or British Empire movie, the disaster film, and the science fiction intergalactic adventure movie.

Word, Image, Technology

One last point about the material and conceptual nature of literature, history, and movies. Literature and history must have the word— logos . Their particular nature as media consists “precisely in the abstractness of language, which calls every object by the collective name of its species and therefore defines it in only a generic way, without reaching the object itself in its individual concreteness . . ., hence the spiritual quality of its vision, the acuteness and succinctness of its descriptions.” 23 As literature and history advance beyond their oral stage, they demand the written word (or print) conveyed by reading. The medium of movies needs images in motion which are conveyed by a projection on to a screen. In all works of art there is a hierarchy of media. For movies the image, iconos , dominates.

A movie gets to places literature and history do not. And then it delivers that place to its audience in a way literature and history cannot. The audience, in turn, must use their eyes for a movie to work. After all, are not literature and history forms of communication which are more available to a blind person? With literature and history the audience sees with their inner eye, not as much with their outer, physical eye. “Film creates a fully defined and immediate physical reality that requires dramatization and exploration; it brings characters visually realized into direct relationship with their environment and in immediate proximity to the viewer.” 24

Cinema also needs electricity. Movies could never have existed without the necessary technology. Print advanced literature beyond the spoken word and the written page and allowed mass media. But technology midwifed movies into their very existence. Technological determinism has played a much greater part in the creation of movies. From its modern inception, the technology also helps to distinguish the entertainment film from the documentary. In 1893 the American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison created the first film company to make and show movies to the public. The Edison Company filmed in a tar paper barn set on a swivel, in which the roof could be opened or closed so as to adjust to the sun. Edison’s unwieldy camera, the Kinetograph, was a large, fixed machine run by an electric motor to ensure smooth motion. The point here is that Edison’s “camera did not go out to examine the world; instead, items of the world were brought to it—to perform. Thus Edison began with a vaudeville parade: dancers, jugglers, contortionists, magicians, strong men, boxers, cowboy rope twirlers.” 25

In contrast, documentary cinema was first developed by Louis Lumière in 1895 by using the cinématographe camera which was a hundredth of the weight of Edison’s Kinetograph. The cinématographe was about the size of a small suitcase, very portable, and could film, print, or project. Edison’s movies were entertaining indoor performances. Lumière’s movies documented the world outdoors. His camera “was an ideal instrument for catching life on the run”— sur le vif , as Lumière put it. 26

The American film director, comedian and cartoonist Terry Gilliam has argued that the nineteenth century sense of cinema as a whole came from the flickering passages seen by riders in trains when they looked out at the passing landscape through the train window’s frame. 27 One technology inspired another. And without electricity in the 1890s neither the Lumière brothers in France nor Thomas Edison and George Eastman working together in America could have established the craft of filming and projection. (However, vigorous, mobile entertainment existed prior to the new technology—the street theater, the carnival, and the enthusiastic links of circus rings. So it was not the technology alone that provided the creative genesis.)

The novel dates back at least to Heliodorus (third century A.D.). In the long run the novel is a far more formal genre and has been a more creative medium than film. Both novel and literature are preindustrial arts, but movies are an industrial art. The novel also has a lengthy record as a class-oriented medium. For centuries the novel relied on the upper and middle-class elitism of literacy. Cinema was born as mass and popular cultures bloomed in urban civilizations in modern times. As critics have noted about cinema since its pre-World War One days of Nickelodeon entertainment, it is the most popular and democratic of art forms (although admission did not always cost only a nickel). The 1913 admission price to the spectacular movie Quo Vadis was the current equivalent of about $31.00. 28

Movies fed on the placenta of the popular, the common coin, and not on the support of a superior class. 29 Movies were ushered into existence by the common, human hunger for story. This is part of the special process which, together with other characteristics, helps to define American culture. “American man,” wrote Eric Hoffer, “is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.” 30 Every American group creates stories about its own heroes and villains which help to reinforce and provide identity for the group. In its relatively short run compared to literature and history, the movie business has democratically catered to wider audience needs and market demands.

The Visual Book

At the risk of arguing by list, note that the illustrated book has been around for a very long time. The written text has a huge history of visual relationships. Indeed, has the written text ever not been illustrated? 31 For our American cultural history purposes a fascinating detail in this long chronicle is that the very first best seller in America was an illustrated book. Indeed, it was a very illustrated book: Francis Quarles’ Emblemes (1635) and Hieroglyphikes (1638). These were each an emblem book—a work of moral and religious verse based on Bible quotations in which the word text was matched by allegorical illustrations. Quarles’ Emblemes and Hieroglyphikes were the best emblem books produced in England in English, and undoubtedly in America as well. 32

Which is to say that America was ever a nation with a strong preference for visual communication, long before the cinema. The entertainment industry, with movies and TV in particular, are to the United States what wine is to France or oil is to Saudi Arabia. One reason why movies made such great headway in the United States was because of the nation’s pronounced national taste for and tradition of visual communication and storytelling. Once twentieth-century U.S. mass media was established in 1930—with electric sound recordings, radio and movies—non-fiction book titles outnumbered fiction titles. The greater part of storytelling moved to the new media.

Types of Adaptation

When adapting from literature to film, one begins with the raw stuff, the subject matter of a short story, novella, or novel, of a play, history, biography, or with a poem, song, or folk tale. It is all good because it is ready-made and market-tested. The characters and stories are already popular. Now they have to be mass-produced. Three types of adaptation follow: loose, faithful, or literal. 33 Adaptation is by nature a translation into a different medium which expresses itself by using a different group of techniques, essential materials, and rules of creative harmony.

The loose adaptation takes the raw stuff and reweaves it into a movie as the director, producer, or studio wishes and as the movie needs. Contemporary cultural norms are often a determining factor. The various adaptations of James Cain’s all-American novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) became more overtly sexual as the times—and countries of adaptation—changed. One could easily imagine an effective and even momentarily pornographic adaptation of this steamy, laconic crime thriller at some point in the future. 34 In The Postman Always Rings Twice libidinal action is the narrative’s existential pumping force. Its eros and thanatos are deliciously extreme and invite loose play. 35

One should wonder about action. Overall, are Americans and American cinema prone to loose adaptations because of an emphasis on action as an end in itself within the civilization? “I need a little less talk and a lot more action,” is a common State-side saying. And as Anglo-American actor Michael Caine claimed in his autobiography: “The British make ‘talking pictures;’ Americans make ‘moving pictures.’” 36 This is not universally true, but good enough to be a rule of thumb. In American national tradition, a movie is a mover and a shaker, it tries to provide emotional satisfaction for it audience. Example: The 1935 film version of Jack London’s excellent Call of the Wild —starring Clark Gable, Jack Oakie and Loretta Young, was a fine film in its own way (billed with the tagline: “An Epic Novel . . . An Epic Picture!”)—but it typically lacked the level of thoughtful backstory present in the novel. 37 Plus, the very popular buddy character in the movie, Short Hoolihan, was played by Jack Oakie (1903–1978). Oakie was the inveterate scene stealer with the charm of a big, friendly, flappy, hairy dog. He was the nation’s loveable, pudgy, all-American, good time “Okie” character of the era. “No matter how hard I worked all day, I could always find a party to go to,” he wrote in his autobiography Jack Oakie’s Double Takes . 38 Just as the actors Richard Roundtree in Shaft (1971) and Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop (1984) provided audience interest because they integrated a new kind of American into the mainstream—a back-talking, thoroughly male, self-confident, Black protagonist—so did Jack Oakie in his time and place blend in a hearty contemporary figure: a working-class, funny and eventually successful White guy from Oklahoma or the Red River Valley country. 39

Jack Oakie’s popularity was more important than the integrity of Jack London’s original text. After Hoolihan-Oakie was shown to die in Call of the Wild ’s world premiere held at the Cathay Circle Theater in Los Angeles (an action true to the novel), the audience was so upset that a new ending was provided for the movie in which Oakie lived, so the public (and MGM’s box office) would not be disappointed. And would Jack London, champion of the rough and tumble working class (who wrote: “affluence means influence”), have been upset? Why not let Hoolihan-Oakie live? A traditional condition of action rather than reflection in American cinema was specially true through the 1950s and 1960s. Then something changed. By that time over five hundred art house or art theater halls flourished in the U.S.A. showing foreign films: in the Boston, Massachusetts area, for example, the well-known Brattle Street Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, or the Paris Cinema on Boylston Street in Boston. There was both an artistic and a market message here.

The new generation of Baby Boomer U.S. audience and film makers were subsequently receptive to and incorporated into U.S. films the serious aesthetic and social intentions of non-U.S. movies. At one level, this distinction gradually dissolved between the reflective-artistic qualities of U.S. and non-U.S. films, and consequently the number of art theaters rapidly dwindled. At another level, the American need for action, star power, and contemporaneity which could justify loose adaptation remained. Examples of loose adaptation in American cinema would be: The Best Years of Our Lives (1945, directed by William Wyler—adapted from the prose poem Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor 40 ), King Creole (1958, directed by Michael Curtiz, loosely adapted from A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins 41 ), or Disney’s Pinocchio (1940, loosely based on the original Italian version). The loose adaptation may add additional subplots and characters, change situation or setting. Some of the original, in spirit or in fact, still remains. Loose adaptation can also mean expanding only a few lines from an original text. The original Biblical story of David and Bathsheba—the approximately one thousand words of II Samuel 11: 2–27, 12: 1–24—is part of one of the oldest pieces of historiography in the Western world, II Samuel 9–20 and I Kings 11–22. It became the movie David and Bathsheba (1951, taglined: “For this woman . . . he broke God’s own commandment!”). 42 This loose adaptation of a Biblical text was earnest, austere and languid.

As often happens with folklore or Biblical texts, star power and storyline changes heightened the interest and drama of the plot. In the original Biblical version King David spies Bathsheba by chance: “And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.” (II Samuel 11.2) But in the adaptation directed by Henry King and written by Philip Dunne (which received the Academy Award nomination for Best Writing: Story and Screenplay), Bathsheba exposed herself on purpose in order to seduce David. Their subsequent betrayal was an expression of mutual complicity. The vicarious interest of the 1950s American women in the movie audience was heightened. Bathsheba was an agent, not just a victim. Like popular music and folk song, texts from the Bible, legends, or folklore have the nature of common property. Like popular song, the original text is anonymous or invented by an individual or group who yields it to the community. The story or song is then modified or taken apart in performance.

Arguably the most adapted source works are legends. Some film historians count the vampire legend as the single most adapted tale of all time. Could a legend be that tantalizing end point for history and beginning place for myth where all is possible? 43

The faithful adaptation takes the literary or historical experience and tries to translate it as close as possible into the filmic experience. Sometimes there are equivalents in film to the original way of saying or doing what happens in literature and history, and sometimes not. And “faithful” depends on the movie makers’ knack to be true to the original spirit of the raw stuff, the primary source. Faithful works from the inside out; loose works from the outside in. Loose has no problem with dismantling and reassembling, breaking up and remaking totally anew. Faithful wants to stay loyal to the intention of the original, to convey the heart and soul. So in a faithful adaptation, even if the movie went so far as to change the original story’s ending, the movie makers would want to make sure that they did not betray the core meaning.

Some outstanding twentieth century examples of faithful cinematic renditions of an original literary or historical text are: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943, directed by William Wellman; novel: 1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1940, directed by John Ford; novel: 1939), The Godfather (1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola; novel:1969), The Man Who Would Be King (1975, directed by John Huston, from Rudyard Kipling’s short story of the same name 1888), The Dead (1987, directed by John Huston, from the story in Joyce’s Dubliners, 1914 ), Dances With Wolves (1990, directed by Kevin Costner, adapted from Michael Blake’s novel of the same name, 1986–1988.)

The faithful adaptation has the thorny problem of the narrator and the general commentary. The narrator is the good shepherd who guides the flock of meanings in the original, word-based text. How do you replace such an important figure without loosing direction? In Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath , for example, seventeen percent of the novel were general commentary. In the movie’s faithful adaptation by John Ford and Twentieth Century Fox there was no voice-over narrator in the filmic space. 44 But each medium worked perfectly well on its own terms. The movie Grapes of Wrath maintained a serious narrative tone. It had mature quality of cinematic sound, coloring, photography and casting which helped to replace and even enhance the historical novel’s original voice. Dorothea Lange’s 1930s pitch-perfect photographic style was incorporated by the film’s Director of Photography Gregg Toland. Alfred Newman’s musical score achieved superb shading. The casting of the Joad family was done with vigor and depth: Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, solid as oak, yet vulnerable in her strength; Henry Fonda,—as Steinbeck himself said: “A lean, stringy, dark-faced piece of electricity walked out on the screen and he had me. I believed my own story again.” 45 The public relations department at Twentieth Century Fox possibly pushed this maturity too far. They emphasized the serious nature of the movie’s subject when it was released by stressing that Grapes of Wrath was only for an adult audience. It was taglined: “The thousands who have read the book will know why WE WILL NOT SELL ANY CHILDREN TICKETS to see this picture!” 46

The social conventions of 1940 also did not allow John Ford to end Grapes of Wrath with the novel’s last scene of young Rose of Sharon baring her breast and suckling the starving man who “was about fifty, his whiskery face gaunt, and his open eyes . . . vague and staring” and who hadn’t eaten for about six days. But Ford did manage to end his version with the book’s characteristic note of spreading the milk of human kindness. The movie draws to a conclusion with a concise version of the novel’s chapter twenty-eight farewell scene between Tom Joad and his mother.

A strong expression of a literal adaptation is often a play performed as a movie. This includes movies filmed on stage and in performance (as in the Broadway Theater Archive series 47 ). Or it could be a play such as Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman (1949) which has been faithfully transmuted at least three times into cinema: in 1951 (directed by László Benedek, starring Frederic March as Willy Loman), in 1966 (directed by Alex Segal, starring Lee J. Cobb, who had already appeared in Miller’s original 1949 production), and then in 1985 (directed by Volker Schlöndorff, starring Dustin Hoffman). A good example of an outstanding historical play literally adapted to film is Sunrise at Campobello , 1960, adapted from the 1958 stage drama about Franklin Delano Roosevelt written by the politically engaged Dore Schary. 48

What happens to the play transferred to film? Well, a film has incredibly more space than a stage. A movie can literally take the scenic arrangement outside and the medium offers the director all sorts of tempting forms of physical and psychological expansion. Franklin Roosevelt’s dramatic walk without crutches on his crippled legs to the podium, with one hand on a cane and the other hand clutching his son’s arm, to deliver the 1924 Presidential nominating speech for Al Smith before thousands of spectators at the Democratic Party Convention within the huge dome of Madison Square Garden is suitably heightened in the movie version.

Film offers a variety of focused and sustained camera angles. It expands or contracts our experience by virtue of the absence of the space-time continuum. Shots in separate spaces are edited together. Different times can be spliced, joined, or blended. The everyday sequential chain of experience is removed, intensified, or rearranged. The environment—the viewing filter of a dark theater or a quiet room—enhances the experience. This can make the literal adaptation of a visually contained text, like the rooms in Death of a Salesman , claustrophobic. Yet, by doing so, it heightens the play’s inherent tone of psychological oppression and impending doom. Each version of Death of a Salesman is enhanced by cinematic techniques of expressionism.

A movie can accordion a play up or down, enlarge it or reduce it. Although the phenomenon of live performance—the smell of grease paint, the timber of the actors’ and actresses’ uneven voices, the emotions of the crowd, and even the creak of the theater’s seats, all of which are at the heart and soul of theater—are rarely there in a movie. The 1981 film Zoot Suit , the faithful adaptation of a play based on the historical incident of L.A.’s World War II 1940s “Zoot Suit Riots,” is an exception. 49  A Hollywood feature film needs a celebrity actor to pull in a big box office. And the star of the day may be a Brad Pitt or an Angelina Jolie or a Tom Cruise who may or may not be appropriate for the play itself. But they have the pull to secure the part. A case in point was the original film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie . Williams said it was “the most awful travesty of the play I’ve ever seen . . . horribly mangled by the people who did the film script.” Williams particularly disliked the choice of casting, with actress Gertrude Lawrence playing the mother Amanda Wingfield and Jane Wyman playing Laura Wingfield. But he thought the opposite way about Elia Kazan’s darkly brilliant adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire with fleshy, brutal Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski and a tremulous Vivien Leigh as pale Blanche DuBois. 50

A play as a play on stage, in contrast, concentrates and frames audience focus. On stage characters adapt to the same words and action at the same time and on the same plain. The stage space is a limited horizontal plain as opposed to the immense vertical plain of the movie screen. The stage has three dimensions and a movie two. But the absence of the space-time continuum in a movie provides oneiric depth. This is partly created by the sensation of inevitable flow. With a theatrical stage, each member of the audience individually chooses where to look, who to listen to, or who or what to hold on to most attentively. In a movie, the camera keeps making that choice and providing the small, medium, and big picture. The camera decides what you see and where you look and even who your ears perk up to the most. The camera is your eyes, it is inevitable flow. As the exuberant Russian director Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) declared, for a film perception of the world the most fundamental point is the “use of the camera as a cinema eye more perfect than the human eye for exploring the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe . . . . We cannot improve our eyes, but we can always improve the camera.” 51 Yet faithful types of adaptation tend to impose self-destructive limitations, to sacrifice power for loyalty, risk for reassurance. When Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay, Robert Benton directed, and Dustin Hoffman starred in the faithful 1991 movie adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s brilliant novel Billy Bathgate , the film was a flop. “We have seen this world before, in every gangster movie set in the 1920s or 1930s,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, “but never has it had less juice, been more dry and exhausted.” 52

Art is risk. Art is: “always pushing . . . always wanting to explore . . . you want to get yourself into trouble and see how well you can fight your way out of it.” 53 Whether it be a loose, faithful, or literal adaptation, at the end of the day, the final result of success or failure is not a matter of formula but finesse. How well you fight your way out of it. “It is not enough to show bits of truth on the screen, separate frames of truth” wrote Vertov. “These frames must be thematically organized so that the whole is also a truth.” 54

Documentary and Literal Adaptation

Documentary films seek a form of literal adaptation to be historically sound. But the nature of historical truth achieved by documentary is debatable. Documentary is not a verbatim representation. As noted earlier, conventional wisdom defines documentary as “relating to or found in documents: aiming at presentation of reality . . . broadly factual, objective.” Objective? As historian Erik Barnouw maintained, a documentary film director makes endless choices:

. . . of topic, people, vistas, angles, lenses, juxtapositions, sounds words. Each selection is an expression of a point of view . . . [thus] of course a propagandistic role is involved. One can hardly imagine a documentary . . . that is not propaganda—in the sense of trying to present evidence that may enlarge understanding and change ideas. A documentary cannot be ‘the truth’. It is evidence, testimony—which announces its topic, alerts our critical faculties, and at its best is part of the diverse testimony which is at the very heart of a democratic process. 55

A documentary is not fiction but faith. As propaganda itself—from its original Latin use: de propaganda fide , “concerning the faith to be propagated” [Vatican, 1622] 56 —documentary takes a stand, holds a cause. A documentary provides objective reality filtered. As a case in point, consider Ken Burns’ The Civil War (1990). It began literally as a time of war film. It was initially screened in the U.S.A. on PBS television in a national environment of intensifying patriotism as the Persian Gulf War developed in the fall of 1990. 57 Episode One: The Cause – 1861 ended with a very moving letter from a soldier to his wife, written July 14, 1861, which stressed his undying love and commitment to his wife, family, principles, and government. “I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government . . . . And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government.” 58 That soldier died fighting for his American cause shortly thereafter. The launch of Burns’ The Civil War was propitious.

Next, The Civil War was a movie made for TV. Television has a “bardic function” in most modern cultures. It is a social ritual which overrides individual distinctions and in which people freely engage in order to communicate with the collective, cultural self. 59 This has particularly been true in the U.S.A for open-access network TV and for Public Broadcasting Service TV. PBS programs a common, national schedule. Yet PBS is locally based in a non-profit organization (a university, state agency, or community organization). It receives almost 25 percent of its total revenue from viewer donations (“Viewers like you!” as most PBS programs begin by declaring.) And it is watched by about one third of the U.S. population each week. 60 The Civil War ’s success—the program amassed in the U.S.A. the largest audience for any series in public TV history, more than 14 million viewers watched each evening, while 39 million Americans tuned into at least one episode of the telecast—was reinforced by its TV channel context. 61 At its best, PBS TV is the community talking to itself. Its programs are not flashy frames for ads, as network TV can easily be. It seeks to accommodate itself to the actual community. Burns’ Civil War clicked with current U.S. mass media reality.

Third, among the viewers who saw The Civil War enthusiastically it was common to find this documentary called the best history lesson they ever had. As one person wrote: “. . . Burns, in a very real way, is that special teacher most of us have who convinces us for a while that there is, indeed, interest to be plumbed where there was never interest before.” 62 Though he is aware of its shortcomings as history, Burns has stressed the timely need for his documentary: “I don’t think the story of the Civil War can be told too often. I think it surely ought to be retold for every generation.” 63 It is a movie that adapts by updating historical reality.

Fourth, The Civil War had also been received by some Americans as “history with honey” and overweighted with “. . . visual rhetoric, maudlin music and lugubrious readings.” 64 Burns resurrects the gloomy Victorian sentimentality characteristic of the 1800s. But this is a spirit true to the realism of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and the Civil War itself. Burns’ literal version of that event is a deeply moral and emotional reading. One can hear a Civil War tone of awe, pain and lucid innocence from the voice of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn when he reflects on the mob action he witnesses at the end of Chapter 33 in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)—when two old men are stripped down, smeared with hot tar, stuck with feathers, each made to sit astraddle and crotch raw on a splintery wooden rail upon which they were jounced and bounced out of town. “Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world,” thought Huck. “It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” 65

Lastly, Burns takes his reading of the Civil War beyond maudlin grief and woe. The documentary updates the event by an integrated synthesis which involves the deep witness of the popular, ordinary viewpoint given by common soldiers, farmers, workers, immigrants, tradesmen and women of all minorities. The traditional occupation of transcendent ideals, the strategies and statistics of battles, the doings of great men and women is subdued—but not omitted. He makes of the event a story of tragic reconciliation. “Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in order to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive how that was possible” ( Civil War, Episode One: The Cause – 1861 ). It was a sublimely satisfying sacrifice. The documentary’s driving principle is separation followed by reconciliation and union.

A few points about Lincoln’s presentation in most U.S. documentaries and fiction films: Why have U.S. movies and TV found Lincoln so attractive? There have been about six hundred significant film and TV productions which have incorporated Abraham Lincoln, not counting his use in everything from TV variety to new programs. 66 Lincoln was a distinctly memorable subject for still visuals and later became a natural subject for moving pictures. He was a main dish of that meal which fed the public’s ongoing appetite for Civil War stories as the event which defined modern America. Lincoln was ready-made, market-tested, already popular and in the public domain—waiting to be mass-produced. He had also been a very entertaining man. Thus Lincoln the humorist became a great source of ongoing public entertainment. And he was far and away the most beguiling and diverting of early U.S. Presidents.

Finally, the subject matter of Lincoln, the Civil War, and slavery in fiction, film, or historical renditions has been a way Americans have tried to come to terms with tragedy. Abraham Lincoln’s monumental nature has served as a common, contested ground for coming to terms with American identity by Americans themselves; collective representation. (As the U.S.A. has become globally less self-confident over the past few decades, notice how Lincoln’s own heroic, legendary stature has diminished in the United States.) He is a figure Americans can publicly turn to in times of trial. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” of August, 1963 is inconceivable without the background of Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial. It is striking how Lincoln was quoted or noted on U.S. TV around the time of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. But Lincoln can also be dismissed, rejected, neglected, readjusted. Just like tragedy itself in the U.S.A.?

Questions of Film Medium

“All we have are words,” murmurs one of the characters in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot . Is this true? How important in a movie are words? How important that language itself be proper to the filmic experience? Could it be that the more outstanding the use of language is in a movie, the more it stands out and might even displace the viewing of a story.

A striking contemporary case in point would be the movies directed, written, or co-written by the contemporary American writer David Mamet, such as Glengarry Glen Ross (1992, directed by James Foley, screenplay by David Mamet) or The Winslow Boy (1999, directed and written by David Mamet, play by Terence Rattigan). At Mamet’s best his language drives the story forward with its sparks of wit, its brain tickles, his electric sense of timing—as in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981, directed by Bob Rafelson, screenplay by David Mamet), Heist (2001, directed and written by David Mamet), or Spartan (2004, directed and written by David Mamet). At Mamet’s cinematic worst, his linguistic eloquence slows the story down—as in House of Games (1987, directed by David Mamet, screenplay by David Mamet and Jonathan Katz), or The Spanish Prisoner (1997, directed and written by David Mamet). In this last case he is a mix of lumpy Samuel Beckett peppered with an overdose of Harold Pinter’s pregnant pauses. Mamet’s ambiguous success italicizes the question: Can language be too good for cinema?

Then there is the matter of speaking it out. If a character does not say what his or her problem is, then how does the audience know? If we are not told with words, then how is the audience told? And what do we know by the way we are told? It is in the nature of the film medium that a movie only has a few ways by which actors can reveal their thoughts. These are: by what the actors say, their facial expressions, body language, transparent action, or by context (often reinforced by music or sound) which reveals what the actors and actresses are thinking or feeling. 67 The bewitching but irascible Bette Davis (1908–1989) once complained on set: “I want it to be me who walks up that staircase, and not the goddamn music!”.

Whose language carries the story along? Is the movie narrated? If so, what kind of rapport is established by the narrator with the audience? As U.S. film director Mike Nichols said: “A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don’t.” Who or what establishes that trust? (In the glorious Hollywood epic The Vikings, 1958, only the sonorous voice of Orson Welles narrating could have established such aural trust in the audience.) Short story, novella, and novel have a viewpoint. Does a movie? Does the movie have one or many points of view? Can it have none at all? Can a movie seem to be only a camera?

The style and authorship of the screenplay matters. It can be key seasoning in the feast of the movie. Numerous great American writers have worked for and enhanced Hollywood writing scripts: F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Neil Simon, and Robert Sherwood to name only five. In some cases, people who were full-time screenwriters also turned out remarkable novels—notably screenwriters of Hollywood’s golden age, such as W. R. Burnett, Niven Busch, and James M. Cain. 68 Whoever wrote the screenplay must be factored in to the equation of failed or successful adaptation. Is it true—a point so often made that it is tiresome—that the inferior work of literature is the best raw material with which to make a superior work of film? That weak, sensational stories are given greater credibility and depth when made into movies? Though widely claimed, this is far from self-evident. This piece of conventional wisdom functions on the metaphor that great manure produces brilliant crops. Surely, the best Shakespearian film adaptations disprove this argument.

The issue of the quality of the original versus the quality of the adaptation is really a matter of the match of makers. John Ford made a masterpiece movie out of a masterpiece novel with Grapes of Wrath . But Hollywood’s 1956 version of War and Peace directed by King Vidor was a disaster, whereas the Russian, faithful adaptation version of 1968, Voyna i mir , directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, was a master work. I would personally contend that whatever results from an adaptation of literature to film depends on the ability and creative—often commercial or material—opportunities of the film maker. Weak books do not automatically make strong movies, nor do strong movies make weak books.

Finally, with regard to words, there is the matter of the veracity of language and the ethnicity of the characters. From the time of D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), the first Hollywood gangster film, the street-wise Italians and Irish were singled out. The movie characters spoke a rough patois of idiomatic gutter talk that thrilled or shocked many contemporary audiences. But it took decades before the movies were close to the original, the authentic street slang, or the use of a genuine street accent and ethnic terms.

The written word in literate America has been more articulate and daring with accents and vulgarities—dating back at least to the creation of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn characters in the 1870s and 80s. There is good reason to believe that Huck’s language in the classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was actually modeled on authentic African-American vernacular of the period. 69 But it was common in U.S. movies until the 1960s that a Jew would play an Italian—such as Paul Muni playing an Al Capone figure in the 1932 Scarface — The Shame of a Nation (adapted from the novel by Armitage Trail), or a Mexican would play an Indian, a Chinese person, a Frenchman, a Greek, or an Arab—such as the versatile and full-blooded actor Anthony Quinn actually did. Veracity did not count as much as getting the story told well on film.

Cans and Cannots: Genres

Genres of literature and film overlap. Each do gangster, detective, war, horror, romance, science fiction and western stories, the spy thriller, the propaganda story or the documentary, the comic and the tragic mode very well. A story told in one of the various wide-screen and wide-film photographic processes and viewing systems channel their message in a way only a movie can. Wide-screen effect can alter genre effect and meaning. Technical advantage has always been an important factor and was often developed by the U.S. movie industry as it was competing for the entertainment dollar with the written word, radio or live entertainment, and, later, with television.

The technical edge that American movies claimed over the written word and other forms of entertainment was shown by a history of spectacular visual promises. This started with Vitascope (first developed late 1890s), then there was Polyvision (first developed 1920s), followed by Vitarama (late 1930s), Fox Grandeur (1930s), 3-D (first U.S. use 1922, popular in the 1950s and, once again, today), Cinerama (1950s), Superscope, Panscope, Warnerscope, and Todd-AO (1950s), IMAX (Omnimax or Imax Dome [began 1970], Imax 3D [1990s]), and some of the newer digital delivery systems now used.

Movies are fundamentally a material culture, a plastic art—in the original sense of plastic as molding, shaping, fashioning or giving form to a yielding material such as clay or wax. Movies’ yielding materials are the flesh and blood of the actors and the technicians, the flickering celluloid photos or digital pixels which show and sound when reproduced before us on the screen. Movies are actually between 16 to 30 still photographs per second exhibited before us in quick succession. The human brain fills in the gaps and creates continuity. The phenomenon called persistence of vision. Literature—mediated by word, handwriting, or print—is far more immaterial and abstract. “Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean,” wrote Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie . “Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.” 70 Literature “is not reducible to the words on the page,” noted the sympathetic sage of the Beatniks Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982). In what we can define as literature “they are there because of the craft of writing. As an art, literature is the organization of words to give pleasure; through them it elevates and transforms experience; through them it functions in society as a continuing symbolic criticism of values.” 71

For writers who are specially psychological or who favor stream-of-consciousness writing or an intimism style, television is “arguably a more suitable medium than feature films” since a small screen favors “a concentration on character and dialogue rather than action and spectacle.” 72 One can see the success of small screen intimacy in U.S. TV shows ranging from I Love Lucy (1951–1957, starring Lucille Ball) through to Deadwood (2004–2006, HBO, starring Ian McShane) and Desperate Housewives (2004–present, HBO, staring Teri Hatcher).

Anglo-American examples of thickly psychological texts which do not lend themselves to an easy adaptation are the experimental novels of the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious life—those written by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, or William Faulkner. 73 But other forms of primary, interior narrative are also hard to translate into film. A notoriously spectacular goof when adapting literature of an intimism style to film was the 1959 adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank (directed by George Stevens) into Cinemascope format. As Chicago critic Dave Kehr noted at the time, The Diary of Anne Frank represented director George Stevens “at the height of his pretentiousness and the depths of his accomplishment.” 74 Cinemascope had its virtues. But in a story about alienation, fragmentation, and being in closed or narrow spaces, a contextual arrangement that emphasized width, height and open space was wholly inappropriate.

By taking the right creative liberties for the story at hand, a fine movie which is a faithful adaptation of a thickly psychological text—but not literal—can be made. Thus one has the acceptable 1969 Technicolor and Panavision version of William Faulkner’s The Reivers , the brilliant British 1969 adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love by Ken Russel, and the truly great Robert Rossen, 1949, film version of Robert Penn Warren’s Faulknerian opus All The King’s Men (1946; Pulitzer Prize in 1947). Notable with respect to creating a psychological, interior space in the outer, visual space of movies has been the incorporation of the brilliantly distortional techniques of the German cinema of Expressionism into U.S. movies. One can experience this, for example, in the Hollywood art of German-American director Fritz Lang (1890–1976, specially in his early Warner Brothers studio work of the 1930s and 1940s).

Creative liberty also means to use or not to use literature at all. As the American movie-going audience became more accustomed to mass media communication, a link with literary sources was considered less necessary for a movie. The earlier films of the Hollywood studios were quite conservative in this respect. Then U.S. independent cinema—ships that sailed without the need for literary ballast—began developing in the early 1950s, with a distinct and indigenous independent cinema movement existing by the late 1960s and 1970s. U.S. movies became less literary. From the 1930s to the 1960s in the U.S.A., the majority of major films were based on material that came from other forms, mainly literary, while most U.S. films nowadays are created from scripts written to be filmed directly.

Either way, a movie has to maintain the thrill that runs like a cross beam through the structure of the story. Commit this act of electrical transfer and the adaptation transmits something essential about the original. It adapts and fits the recreation near to the previous link in the chain of the greater story telling.

Voice and Narrator

The words of literature are spoken in a temper, tone, and voice—“voice of the Bard! / Who Present, Past & Future, sees.” 75 When adapting from literature to film, the problem of viewpoint and voice is specially evident when one has a strong first-person narrator in the original—like Huck Finn in Twain’s Adventures of Huck Finn (1884) or Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye (1951). This is unfair competition.Read their respective opening lines: “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ; but that ain’t no matter.” And: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it.” 76 The voice has spoken. It has been done. Twain and Salinger got it right the first time. No matter how good the actor, a voice-over on a movie sound track which uses the same words could not get the same effect. Because one has the original effect—the authentic original—produced by Huck and Holden themselves. Over time the voice-over technique has evolved and diminished. There is much less of it than there used to be. Anglophone movies until the 1950s easily used voice-overs of a literary nature in one of four ways. These ways were:

• as an objective narrator in a fictional film who brings us forward in time, who prepares us for an event, or comments on the action ( The Vikings , 1958, directed by Richard Fleischer, with the sonorous voice of Orson Welles);
• as a first-person narrator who participates in the film and who now gives us a subjective commentary on an scene in which he or she appears, or performs the narrative functions described in a fictional film in which he or she does not appear ( The Picture of Dorian Gray , 1945, directed by Albert Lewin; Dances With Wolves , 1990, directed by Kevin Costner; The Shawshank Redemption, 1994, directed by Frank Darabont;
• as a screen character whose thoughts we overhear ( The Lady in the Lake, 1946, directed by Robert Montgomery; The Barber , 2001, directed by Michael Bafaro; The 13 th Warrior , 1999, directed by John McTiernan;
• as a character in the film whose voice is heard in another character’s imagination (e.g., while reading that person’s letter or even that person’s mind ( A Letter to Three Wives , 1949, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz; Forbidden Planet , 1956, directed by Fred Wilcock, adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest ). Of course, these voices overlap, as voices often do. 77

In the post-World War II period American movies became more cinematic and less literary. They relied more on direct exposition by way of the camera or on a well-blended, simultaneous combination of what is seen and was is thought. So that when only the outside of a building or vehicle is seen, a character’s voice can enter inside. Or a character’s voice overlaps from scene to scene. This cannot be done in a literary text. Strictly visual presentation and a simultaneous narrative voice which is separate from visual presentation cannot be done in a traditional novel. But the modern graphic novel, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1973–1991), can achieve this simultaneity. 78

Hence, the options of the adaptor are clear. Literature adapted to movies has “to be severely altered, cut,” as U.S. actor and director Erwin Panofsky said, and needs to be seriously “enriched by interpolations to make good movie scripts.” 79 The creator becomes a destroyer in order to create. The individual responsible for writing the various stages of a film script “must be allowed to rearrange, cut and add whatever he feels is necessary to make the material work in cinematic terms,” as American screenwriter and playwright William Packard noted. 80

Screenwriting, Collaboration

Practically speaking, at least two major material actions must be done in the adaptation process. The screenplay taken from a book is the crucial link between the original literature and the final film. The screenwriter has to have removed and reproduced the story’s central axis into the screenplay, which must also possess the original’s driving passion. “You try to find what is the spine of the piece,” screenwriter William Goldman exclaimed, “plus, you have to think what was it that thrilled you? . . . What moved you?” . . . Now, you have to combine those two things somehow . . . Plus keeping the story straight.” 81 But that’s only half the battle, since “a screenplay is an imperfect reflection of the film.” 82

The remarkable U.S. novelist and screenwriter W. R. Burnett (1899–1982) solved this problem by first writing his own novels—which he would then rewrite and transfer into movie screenplays. When he could, he would also be present at the actual filming of the story in order to assist the director with dialogue needs and changes. Two of his spectacular successes in the gangster film genre were High Sierra (1941) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). 83 The contemporary American director Terry Gilliam first writes his own graphic novel version of his films in the previsualization technique of storyboarding, which he then transfers to the screen as his movie, such as in Brazil (1985).

The second major action required by the adaptation process—far longer and more elaborate—is the whole collaborative and creative process of the filmmaking itself. This is a process in which tinkerings and alterations, additions and subtractions, individual efforts and collaborations are done all along the line. Movies, as a medium of American popular culture, are a collaborative art by their very nature. Rarely can one man or woman make and distribute a work of popular culture, and certainly not a movie. The cinematic process includes at least a half-dozen steps along the way.

The Cinematic Process: Six Steps

First, the film maker has to locate a coherent story which an audience will accept and want to see told. Or, rather, re-told on screen. Shakespeare is always good fodder. Or even Herman Melville’s wordy and metaphysically extraordinary Moby Dick (1851) can succeed—if cut and re-fit into film with the gusto and finesse of John Huston. 84

Second, the producer has to figure out what the film will cost once it is adapted from this work of fiction and if he can pay for it. If the work is no longer copyrighted, all the better. Then there is no original intellectual property to worry about and no royalties to pay for a primary text. If it is an old story, the primary text might also be attractive because it is a costume drama—such as an adaptation from Charles Dickens or Henry James.

Third comes the matter of precedent. Has this kind of thing sold before? Since movies are a commercial industry—like cars, pencils, or the production of different brands and flavors of toothpaste, well, you figure it out—the bank wants to back merchandise with a good track record. If one brand of toothpaste hits upon peppermint as a smash hit with the consumer, then many other peppermint-flavored brands will soon follow. Likewise, adaptations from fiction come in batches: Henry James’ Daisy Miller (1974, directed by Peter Bogdanovich), The Europeans (1979, directed by Merchant-Ivory), The Bostonians (1984, directed by Merchant-Ivory). Then, about a decade later, a second wave: The Portrait of a Lady (1996, directed by Jane Campion), Washington Square (1997, directed by Agnieszka Holland), The Wings of the Dove (1997, directed by Iain Softley), Under Heaven (1998, directed by Meg Richman—also adapted from The Wings of the Dove ), Notting Hill (1999, directed by Roger Michell—a romantic comedy in which Hugh Grant meets Julia Roberts while she is in London filming an unspecified Henry James novel), and The Golden Bowl (2000, directed by James Ivory). Why was Henry James, that most intricate and brazenly baroque of all American highbrow writers, so often adapted to film? Henry James’ fat is made lean. And once slimmed down, Henry James sells. And, as James’ early contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” 85

One should see movies not only as fulfilling the requirements of a genre, but as part of a cycle, as film critic Jonathan Muby has insisted. A “cycle” was the term commonly used in America for movie types prior to World War II. This is where censorship—which has effected both literature and movies in America—enters in. Both violence or gangsterism in literature and movies can be socially threatening. They are dangerous expressions “of a larger disorganizing and destructive force,” cycles of violence and crime which threaten society. Especially when displayed in the mass media of movies they threaten society from within—they are cycles “vocalized from within the machinery of cultural administration.” 86 Henry James adaptations, on the other hand, have offered reassuring cycles of costume drama gentility which have been perfumed by frail trails of psychological insight.

The fourth step in the modern creative process of film-making is the pre-sale. In the movie industry, pre-sale has two meanings. Before you sell your commodity to the general public, you conduct a private sale of the product. This way one gains financial support to complete the product and may provide eventual profits for the investor. And as pre-sale is the formative period before sale, product production may be distant from the actual place of production and initial distribution. The maker can sell a product not yet produced in one country in yet another country far away. It is all part of the movie game. With a movie one can have outstanding actors, special effects, and a great story in hand—from which basis one sells the distribution rights prior to completion. Particularly abroad; overseas is a good place to sell. They buy on conceptual credit—Sherlock Holmes from the British for the Americans, Sylvester Stallone or Clint Eastwood from the Americans for the Europeans. If the final film is a bomb, the producer has made more money this way. If it is a blockbuster, everyone profits. Either way, the studio and the producer can enhance the initial production budget.

Fifth is a series of complications in the practical work of actually adapting fiction into film, the actual making of the movie, the production itself. This is a time and a place when words have to be juxtaposed with images. That is to say, when the original letter matters. But “fidelity to the original spirit of the piece is not always to the letter, because the letter does not necessarily work on film.” 87 Actions have to be transferred from descriptions to dramatizations, from slow to snappy timing. Time strictly controls the adaptation possibilities—90 to 180 minutes for a film, which is much less time than it takes to read and digest most books. The written story may be richly textured, and minor incidents, settings and characters have to be cut out, or down, or be consolidated. When a tale goes from fiction to film “shaping a story to be told with the minimum necessary number of scenes and characters and the most contained list of locations is a necessary part of the game.” 88 Most people in professional, corporate life are now acquainted with this practice—the need to adapt to a concise, word and visual presentation. This happens when one goes from a free-flowing, person-to-audience presentation of information to a form-fitting, power point presentation. One has to fit into the given frame. To accomplish this can be a straight jacket experience. Or it can condense and order one’s efforts like the composition of a sonnet for the one you love.

Finally, the sixth concern in the practical work of adaptation is the audience—or, as the American lyricist, musical comedy, author, and theatrical producer Oscar Hammerstein II reportedly called them: “That big black giant.” They are a devouring abyss which the producer ultimately cannot control and who finally decide if the creation works or not.

The whole collaborative and creative process of filmmaking itself shows us that adaptation is not one element transferred to another singular element. As with U.S. popular culture, the realistic paradigm is culture as a whole. Perhaps the fundamental issue is not zero to five stars, a series of qualitative rankings that range through poor, fair, good, better, and best. (Although, to be fair, excellence happens—as does its opposite.) But the fundamental issue is that “there is a totality of culture that pervades and surrounds a society rather than a culture that exists in tiers.” 89 A story is told and retold.

Film or Book?

The student, film buff, or movie connoisseur should give up the naive claim that a film should be faithful to the book. That is not the point of successful adaptation. Too many hands each play their part in moulding and shaping the completed movie. Adaptation requires originality. And it is a process of accretion, of leveling and tiers of the one story being built upon other tiers and each enriched by the ongoing telling. Recall Homer and Aeschylus, mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Is there one story of Achilles, one story of Odysseus? Each telling narrates, explains, reveals. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was a U.S. best seller in 1926, but it was told again in movie form in 1926, 1949, 1974, and 2000. 90 Gatsby is one story among many that stays alive for Americans by virtue of its cinematic renewal enriched with each telling. It is one story among many that helps to create community, gives life itself the form it lacks, and helps to insulate people from the tragedy of others.

I think Dennis Lehane was wrong when he said that movies and books compare like apples and giraffes. If one can understand literature and film as a continuum, as one story, then a person may delight in one vision retold and refreshed. Many filmmakers know this. “Because the ancient wisdom,” as David Mamet said, “is you get to write it three times: when you write it, when you direct it, when you edit it.” 91 You keep telling and retelling the story.

And, finally, it takes so many fingers to get the one job done: the original work of literature, the screenwriter and his screenplay, the film director (“Who makes decisions about choices already made by the film crew” 92 ), the producer who holds the money bags; the give, take, quirks and charisma of the main actors and actresses; the props, scenes and settings; the cameraman (director of photography), the lighting man, the movie editor, the music director, the art director, and the audience. Yes, you—a public audience who may even view various versions of the movie before it is finally released in order to determine the viability of a last cut. The audience is a public made up of individuals and a mass. And in all likelihood people will see the film because of word of mouth, chance, convenience or escapism, or fundamental hunger for entertainment—and maybe a touch of education, too. You are not dumb. You are the audience. The audience is a maker and an adaptor. The audience will finally decide whether the whole process succeeded or not. You buy the tickets.

1    Scott McCabe, “Reconciling Violence and a life in Literature: An Interview with Dennis Lehane,” The Writer’s Chronicle 39.1 (2006): 8–13. Lehane wrote Mystic River (2001), basis of the movie of the same name (2003) directed by Clint Eastwood. Full quote, p. 9 (when Lehane was asked how film influenced him): “We’re all products of pop culture. Hard to escape it. Film and books, though, are as different as apples and giraffes, but what I learned most from film is the concept of perpetual motion. Keep the story evolving.”

2    See, for instance, GA, “Review of The Triumph of Love ,” Time Out London 1781 (October 6–13, 2004), http://www.timeout.com/film/ reviews/81472/the_triumph_of_love.html (ac­cessed Sept. 14, 2010): “It sounds like some boring corseted litflick.” Also see the amazon.com Listmania! list “LitFLicks: Movies For People Who Like Books,” http://www.amazon.com/LitFLicks-Movies-People-Like-Books/lm/GPF2P0Z0Z7U (accessed Oct. 29, 2010).

3    The Great Gatsby , directed by Herbert Brenon (1926, Paramount); Zabriskie Point , directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1969, MGM/Carlo Ponti).

4    Aeschylus cited after Athenaeus 347e.

5    “Judicious, critical . . .” distinction neatly made by John Higham, “Historiography, American,” in The Oxford Companion to United States History , ed. Paul Boyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

6    René Wellek, “Literature and its Cognates,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas , ed. Philip P. Wiener, vol. III (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 81–89.

7    A. M. Macdonald, ed., Chambers 20th Century Dictionary (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1972).

8    Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , 10th ed. (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1993).

9    Which is 26.6 seconds long and consists of 486 frames; see Zapruder Film of Kennedy Assassination (1963) at the Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131658 (accessed Sept. 14, 2010).

10    JFK , directed by Oliver Stone (1991, Warner/Le Studio Canal/ Regency Enterprises/Alcor studio coproduction). See David R. Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2003).

11    E.g. with, respectively, accusations concerning the works of Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and Giovanni Bononcini (1670–1747).

12    The OED attributes its first use to the 1835–1840. Reeve translation of DeTocque­ville’s Democracy in America (1835; New York: Library of America, 2004).

13    Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle V, To Mr. Addison, Occasioned By His Dialogues On Medals (1733; London: Knapton, 1748).

14    The first recorded Anglo-American use of plagiarism is in scholar and theologian Richard Montagu’s Diatribe upon the first part of the late History of Tithes (London: Felix Kyngston, 1621). But the term does not come into common play until the second decade of the 1700s. The U.S. Supreme Court opinions in Wheaton v. Peters (1834) subsequently established copyright in America as something that existed primarily for the public benefit rather than for the work’s creator. The convoluted controversies of plagiarism and copyright continue to the present day, as in the spring 2008 case of J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter versus Steven Vander Ark’s online Harry Potter Lexicon) which Rowling finally won. See Steven Fox, “Tracking the Origins, evolution of copyright,” Buffalo Law Journal 79.84 (2007): 1A–17A; Marissa Babin, “Potter in Court,” The Harvard Independent , 24 April 2008.

15    Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press-Blackwell, 1997), 195–96. Essentially Cultural Studies means that mode of inquiry which examines culture as power. Cultural Studies considers how hierarchies, social and cultural needs and inequalities shape cultural symbols, symbolic codes, and the cultural assignment of meanings within a social system.

16    George Bluestone, Novels Into Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 7–8.

17    Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 215–16.

18    In an article probably written by Cameron under Ford’s name, as quoted in Charles M. Stowe article “Henry Ford and History That Is Not Bunk,” from: Clippings Books, Boston Evening Transcript , 38, p. 95, Saturday May 23, 1925, courtesy: Benson Ford Research Center, Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan. For the “heroic political” versus “pluralistic, polyvalent” distinction, see: Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited (1969; New York: New Directions, 1986), Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War , ch. 13, Herodotus, History, and ch. 14, 42–44, 45–47.

19    Karl Kroeber, Make Believe in Film and Fiction: Visual vs. Verbal Storytelling. (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006).

20    Susan Bullington Katz, Conversations with Screenwriters (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann-Reed Elsevier, 2000), 198.

21    Léon Barsacq, Le Décor de Film , rev. and ed. by Elliott Stein (Paris: Seghers, 1970); see especially: “The Role and Conception of Set Design,” 121–26.

22    Arnheim, Film as Art , 216.

23    Arnheim, Film as Art , 206.

24    Ira Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary , 2nd ed. (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 1997), 6.

25    Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5.

26    Barnouw, Documentary, 6.

27    Terry Gilliam’s History of the Movies , DVD, directed by Terry Gilliam (1995); see especially part 1 “Travels in time and space.”

28    As documented by Encyclopædia Britannica , Macropedia, vol. 12, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1974), 514. The 1913 edition cost $1.50. For U.S. dollar inflation calculation see http://www.westegg.com/inflation.

29    “Nickelodeon”: combination of the U.S. five cent coin, the nickel —which was used to view short films in small, box like and hand-wound machines—and Odeon—after the famed Theatre Odeon in Paris.

30    Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (New York: Perennial Library, 1954), 59.

31    A direct lineage exists from the illustrated rolls of the Egyptian Ramesseum Papyrus ( c . 1980 B.C.), through the 5th Century A.D. illustrations of Virgil’s and Homer’s works in the Vatican Library, the Byzantine codices of the 6th and 7th cent, the Hiberno-Saxon illuminatied Book of Kells at Trinity College Library, Dublin, and the Lindisfarne Gospels , in the British Museum, through the “golden age of illumination” (books and stained glass) in the high European middle ages, the 15th Century development of the European block book, Thomas Bewick’s pioneering wood engraving for books dating from 1779, Aloys Senefelder’s invention of book lithography around 1796, the Victorian era production of illustrated books and magazines by such masters as Daumier, Doré, Gavarni, and the perfect Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank blend, plus the famed English Yellow Book (1894–97). While the 20th and 21st Centuries have seen the mass production and an absolute plethora of this two-part media.

32    Like the man himself, Quarles’ illustrated books expressed conflciting sympathies between divine right monarchy and Catholicism versus the strong individualistic and Puritan elements of his upbringing. In America Quarles’ work was specially popular in early New England, beginning with the Pilgrim and Puritan era of Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony down through the time of the New England Transcendentalists. Quarles’ influence on the poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), for example, was pronounced. See Francis Quarles, Emblemes (1635) and Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638), ed. by Karl Josef Höltgen and John Horden (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1993), introduction; Carmen A. Prioli, “Emily Dickinson’s Reading of Francis Quarles,” Dickinson Studies 25 (1979): 3–7; David F. Bland, A History of Book Illustration , 2nd ed. (London: Faber, 1969); Diana Klemin, The Illustrated Book (New York: Potter, 1970). Also important as key, common, visual communications in America’s Colonial and Revolutionary periods were tavern signs, coins, and childrens’ primers.

33    A common film-analysis distinction, made, e.g., in Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies , 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999). See especially “Literary Adaptations,” 390–94; Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary , 6, “adaptation.”

34    The Postman Always Rings Twice , directed by Tay Garnet (1946); The Postman Always Rings Twice , directed by Bob Rafelson (1981); filmed in Italian as Ossessione , directed by Luchino Visconti (1942); filmed in French as Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Turn), directed by Pierre Chenal (1939)—never released in the U.S.

35    Eros: The drive for love, creativity, sexuality, self-satisfaction and the continuation of life and the preservation of the human species. Thanatos (death): The drive of hatered, destruction, the asexual, the tormented and tantalizing, the death of life and the human species. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents , trans. and ed. by James Strachey (1929; New York: Norton, 1961), ch. VI: 73–79; ch. VIII: 104.

36    Michael Caine, What‘s It All About (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 41.

37    The Call of the Wild , directed by William Wellman (1935).

38    Jack Oakie, Jack Oakie‘s Double Takes (San Francisco: Strawberry Hill Press, 1980)—published posthumously.

39    Shaft , directed by Gordon Parks (MGM/Shaft Productions, 1971); Beverly Hills Cop , directed by Martin Best (Paramount, 1984). Murphy’s role was originally custom designed for Sylvester Stallone.

40    MacKinlay Kantor, Glory for Me (New York: Coward-McCann, 1945).

41    Harold Robbins, A Stone for Danny Fisher (1955; New York, Simon & Schuster 2007), which is about a tough Jewish kid growing up on New York’s lower east side–far from the New Orleans Elvis Presley version. Harold Robbins (1916–1997) was famous for his sex, money, and power schlock loved by readers and hated by critics, such as The Carpetbaggers (New York: Pocket Books, 1961) and The Betsy (New York: Pocket Books, 1971)—pulp fiction successfully adapted to pulp film.

42    David and Bathsheba, directed by Henry King (RCF, 1951).

43    Matthew Bunson, The Vampire Encyclopedia (New York: Random House-Gramercy, 2000).

44    George Bluestone, Novels into Film (1957), 148.

45    John Steinbeck on watching The Grapes of Wrath , as quoted in John Walker, ed., Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s and Video Viewer’s Companion, 10th ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 289.

46    See: Grapes of Wrath taglines at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032551 (accessed Sept. 24, 2010).

47    Which has preserved 40 years of the best of the American stage.

48    Dore Schary (1905–1980) received Broadway‘s 1958 Tony Award for Best Play for Sunrise at Campobello . Schary was a staunch Democrat and liberal activist.

49    Zoot Suit , directed by Luiz Valdez (1981).

50    See Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1972) as quoted by William Packard, The Art of Screening (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 45; John Dean, “Urban and Theatrical Iconography in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’,”  in A Streetcar Named Desire: Critical Essays Anthology, eds. Gilles Menegaldo and Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris (Paris: Ellipses, 2003), 233–40.

51    Vertrov quoted from Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 58, in turn from David Robinson, The History of World Cinema (New York: Stein and Day, 1973).

52    Roger Ebert, review of Billy Bathgate , directed by Robert Benton, Movie Reviews (November 1, 1991), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/ 19911101/REVIEWS/111010303/1023 (accessed June 22, 2009).

53    Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who filmed Apacalypse Now , 1979) on the cinematographer’s art, quoted from Visions of Light , directed by Arnold Glassman (American Film Institute and NHK, Japan Broadcast Corporation, 1992).

54    Vertrov quoted from Barnouw, Documentary , 58.

55    Barnouw, Documentary , 58.

56    Though allusions to propaganda exist in ancient writings (e.g., Aristotle’s Rhetoric ), organized use of propaganda didn’t develop until after the industrial revolution and modern political revolutions (spec. U.S.A. and France) when mass media communications allowed propagandists to easily reach huge audiences and civilian soldiers needed to be informed and encouraged.

57    Persian Gulf War: on Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi military forces, on orders from President Saddam Hussein, invaded and occupied the small Arab state of Kuwait. Washington and Moscow cooperated intensely to oppose Iraq’s action. In November, 1990, the UN Security Council condemned the invasion. A U.S.-led military coalition gathered in the area. Then from January 16 to February 28, 1991, the Persian Gulf War was fought, Iraq expelled, and independence restored to Kuwait.

58    The Civil War, Episode One: The Cause (1861) , directed by Ken Burns (1990; PBS Home Video-Turner Home Entertainment).

59    John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (New York: Methuen, 1978), 85–100 (Ch. 6, “Bardic Television”).

60    Michael P. McCauley et al., eds., Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2002).

61    Gary Edgerton, “The Civil War—U.S. Compilation Documentary,” in Encyclopedia of Television , ed. Horace Newcomb (1997); see Museum of Broadcast Communications, Encyclopedia of Television at http://www.museum.tv/publicationssection.php?page=28 (accessed Sept. 8, 2010).

62    Walter Chaw, review of The Civil War , directed by Ken Burns, Film Freak Central Review (n.d.), http://filmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/civilwar.htm (accessed June 22, 2009).

63    Gary Edgerton, “The Civil War,” http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entry–code=civilwarth (accessed Oct. 29, 2010).

64    Elizabeth Jensen, “Some History, with Honey,” LA Times , January 11, 2003, http://articles.latimes.com/2003/01/11/calendar/et-jensen11 (accessed June 22, 2009); J. Hoberman, “Altered States: The power of nightmares: Russian thriller and Southern mock-doc imagine scary dystopias,” Villagevoice , February 7, 2006, http://www.villagevoice.com/ film/0606,hoberman1,72181,20.html (accessed Sept. 8, 2010).

65    Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 180.

66    Mark S. Reinhart, Abraham Lincoln on Screen: A Filmography of Dramas and Documentaries Including Television, 1903–1998 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999).

67    The first three ways suggested by David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 229, see especially ch. 7: 200–33, “Henry James and the Movies.”

68    Excellent coverage concerning whom can be found in Pat McGilligan, ed., Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).

69    Shelley Fisher Fishkin , Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

70    Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900; New York: Signet, 1979), 183.

71    Kenneth Rexroth, “Literature, Art of,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, Macropedia , vol. 10, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica , 1973), 1041–50.

72    David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel , 201.

73    Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel , 209.

74    Dave Kehr, review of The Diary of Anne Frank , directed by George Stevens, The Chicago Reader (n.d.), http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-diary-of-anne-frank/Film?oid=1053770 (accessed June 22, 2009).

75    William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience , edited, with a commentary, by Robert N. Essick (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2008); see here “Songs of Experience: Introduction” (line 1–2).

76    Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; New York: Norton, 1962), 7; Jerome D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951; London: Penguin, 1958), 5.

77    Konigsberg, Complete Film Dictionary , 449.

78    As Konigsberg notes, one should distinguish between off-screen voice and voice-over. Off-screen voice is not in the scene itself being shown; voice-over is when narrator or character is speaking on the sound track behind an image.

79    Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Film: An Anthology, ed. Daniel Talbot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 257–87.

80    Packard, The Art of Screenwriting , 41.

81    Screenwriters. Word into Image: William Goldman , DVD, directed by Terry Sanders and Freida Lee Mock (1984; Santa Monica, CA: American Film Foundation, 1984 ) ; Packard, The Art of Screenwriting , 46–47.

82    Goldman quoting Zanuck’s partner David Brown, in William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting (New York: Warner Books, 1983), 292.

83    High Sierra , directed by Raoul Walsh (1941); The Asphalt Jungle , directed by John Huston (1950).

84    Moby Dick , directed by John Huston (1956).

85    Ralph Waldo Emerson, lecture, attributed in Sarah B. Yule and Mary S. Keene, Borrowings (New York: Dodge Publishing, 1889).

86    Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster Film from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 64.

87    Michael Cox, “Reflections on Film Adaptation of Fiction,” in It’s a Print: Detective Fiction from Page to Screen , eds. William Reynolds and Elizabeth A. Trembley (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1994), 207–20, quote: 213. These six points are essentially a summary reading of Mr. Cox’s on the ground and in country experience as a professional Anglo-American producer, actor, stage manager, advertising and theatrical agent in his “Reflections on Film Adaptation of Fiction” essay.

88    Cox, “Reflections on Film Adaptation of Fiction,” 215.

89    Madonna Coughlin Marsden, “Twentieth Century: Popular Culture,” Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, http://gme.grolier.com/cgi-bin/article?assetid=0296908-0 (accessed June 22, 2009).

90    The Great Gatsby , directed by Herbert Brenon (1926); The Great Gatsby , directed by Elliott Nugent (1949); The Great Gatsby , directed by Jack Clayton (1974); The Great Gatsby , directed by Robert Markowitz (2000).

91    Katz, Conversations with Screenwriters , 198.

92    Said by U.S. director John Carpenter ( The Fog , Christine ) in the documentary Big John , directed by Julien Dunand (2006).

The Art of Adaptation: From Book to Film

The definition of what is a ‘good’ adaptation or a ‘bad’ adaptation can be considered subjective. People read books for several reasons and one of them being to entertain and enjoy the creation of another imaginary world, but, at the same time disagree with each other over a single visual adaptation. This must be understood when defining adaptations.

The English writer, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) once wrote an essay titled The Cinema 1 , in which she argued that the cinema has limitations of accurately displaying descriptive images that parallel the original words on the page of a book. The strength of words on paper is highly emphasised as making the most impact upon a reader, without the need or addition of a cinematic portrayal;

‘Even the simplest image such as “My luve’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June” presents us with moisture and warmth and the glow of crimson and the softness of petals inextricably mixed and strung upon the lilt of a rhythm which suggests the emotional tenderness of love. All this which is accessible to words and to words alone, the cinema must avoid.’

This imagery of the ‘red rose’ is Woolf’s version of beauty. This rich imagery of a warm rose differs from person to person, yet, the only person in control of this portrayal in the cinematic world is the director of the film. Audiences are shown a portrayal of the director’s ideal depiction of this warm rose, leading to the directors version of ‘beauty’, hence, possibly slipping under what fans call a ‘bad adaptation’. Does this then suggest that there is a limitation to what cinema and film can do in relation to producing an ideal, parallel adaptation to what the fans imagine?

Aesthetics of film production include animation, speed, technology and other mechanical elements, which are used to enhance the words on a page. Therefore, credibility must be given to the director’s choice of generating scenes, whilst agreeing on cast members, style of music and other aesthetics used to produce an adaptation. Just as much as books are viewed in their own entirety, film adaptations are also a piece of art on their own. For instance, The Twilight saga had been a hit between 2008 and 2012. The teen drama focuses around a young, teenage romance, which of course, may be favoured by some and disliked by others. This can be seen in the general reviews the film received from the public. However, the key importance is noticing the parallelism between the books narrative and the way this has been illustrated in the film. The narrative in the book had been elevated by the editorial process; the physical portrayal of a vampires ability to move at lightning speed, the type, rhythm and melody in the music that is chosen to illuminate certain scenes, the use of animation and green screen to create wolves and magnificent landscapes, and the powerful use of creating interaction between wolves/vampires and humans.

Similarly, an even greater controversy rose from some of the major scenes in the Harry Potter series as the film adaptations have disappointed many fans. For example, the death of Voldemort had been beautifully crafted by J.K. Rowling, yet the directors choice to Voldemort’s death had been illustrated through visual effects of Voldemort disintegrating into ashes. Again, a spectrum of opinions rose about the directors choices made with this scene, with some fans disappointed with the apparent inaccurate display of the original storyline. On the other hand, many fans loved the Harry Potter films due to the artistic and cinematic qualities that were put into the making of these films.

Notably, various international adaptations of classical plays and novels have aroused an interesting dichotomy of opinions. For example, Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet has been adapted multiple times, with differing directors and cast members over the years. The successful Indian director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, introduced a twist to the performance by enhancing the storyline through the addition of cultural influences, in his adaptation titled Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram-Leela. However, his movie sparked controversy even before its release, indicating the subjective attitude of defining a ‘good’ adaptation. One review on IMDb 2 , states:

“Brilliant performances by all, stunning and spectacular sets, fabulous music and a whole lot of colour.”

While on the other hand, the same review states:

“Poor story or should I say, no story whatsoever! The movie just keeps rolling and you end up thinking how is this scene different from the previous one? The story is so bad (and believe me I am not exaggerating even one bit) that nothing else works for the movie. All the viewers with me in the theatre were yawning and loudly calling out for the movie to finish. God knows why the critics are going gaga for this one. I had always believed in Rediff’s review and I just wish I had done the same this time as well. Rediff gave it just 1 star. Do yourself some favour, don’t watch it at all.”

The diverging opinions sprouting from this movie by many viewers indicates how two or more people can be jointly entertained by the same book and enjoy the creation of the author’s imaginary world, but disagree with one another over a single visual adaptation. Perhaps, the decisions made by the screen writers and directors of this film needed to embrace a more culture orientated atmosphere to illuminate the differences of perspectives culturally. The classical Romeo and Juliet had been adapted to fit the modern, Indian world which is full of vibrant colour, singing and dancing, yet, is still haunted by the original family feud. The vibrancy of the Indian adaptation had also been brought about by the directors decision in allowing Mrs Capulet to be the lead role rather than Mr Capulet in the Capulet household. This had changed the dynamics of the household making females the superior beings by embracing female superiority in the modern era. This had ultimately made a huge impact upon modern audiences who are familiar with the original play, but are now having to readjust to the addition of changing social and cultural influences in modern adaptations. In The Cinema , Woolf agrees that the film makers creation is indeed an art of its own as she argues that;

“the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him. He must make us believe that what he shows us, fantastic though it seems, has some relation with the great veins and arteries of our existence. He must connect it with what we are pleased to call our reality. He must make us believe that our loves and hates lie that way too. How slow a process this is bound to be, and attended with what pain and ridicule and indifference can easily be foretold when we remember how painful novelty is, how the smallest twig even upon the oldest tree offends our sense of propriety. And here it is not a question of a new twig, but of a new trunk and new roots from the earth upwards.” 3

Despite the subjective attitudes of audiences and their opinions about a film adaptation, the art of film adaptations lie in the collaborative cooperation of great screen writers, directors and film makers who condense, adjust, add and alter the original play or novel in order to create a “new trunk’. Therefore,

“It seems sometimes as if movements and colours, shapes and sounds had come together and waited for someone to seize them and convert their energy into art.” 4

Consequently, the subjective nature of deciding what makes a ‘good’ adaptation vs. what makes a ‘bad’ adaptation lies upon individuals and what they see as good cinematography or a good storyline. Ultimately, the decision lies in the directors’ hands, yet the audience subjectively decide their preferences for either the original play/book, or the films. It is impossible to impress every single fan as some fans appreciate the written qualities of the books while others enjoy the cinematic qualities in films. Whether the directors choose to parallel the books narrative in the film or diverge from it, the audience have little control over this decision. Yet, this interestingly creates discussion and debate amongst fans, critics and academics who become actively collaborative in producing theories, reviews, articles and other responsive materials in relation to such decisions. Thus, the directors of films are given credibility for their ability to insight discussion due to their creative and highly artistic qualities shown in their work. Much respect can be given to the production of films due to the substantial nature of using multitudinous cinematic techniques for the production of these sizeable films. Maybe, the purpose of producing and causing such differing views and conversations indicates who a ‘good’ director is?

Works Cited

• Woolf, Virginia, ‘The Cinema’ Selected Essays, ed. by David Bradshaw. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009), pp.172-6, p.175. ↩
• ‘User Reviews’ for ‘Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram-Leela’ in IMDb , [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2215477/]. ↩
• Woolf, Virginia, ‘The Cinema’ Selected Essays , p.175-6. ↩
• Woolf, Virginia, ‘The Cinema’ Selected Essays , p.176. ↩

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I think very few adaptations live up to expectations. It’s a difficult balance to get right, between satisfying existing fans and appealing to a new audience.

Some of the films I think got it right, or in rare cases bettered the original source material, are as follows:

1) The English Patient – I think the film was better than the novel. The novel is often described as a mosaic and, for me, the film puts the mosaic together more coherently and more interestingly than the book.

2) The Bourne Trilogy – Not really a fair comparison as the films don’t really resemble the books at all. However, I think the films were great and were much, much better than the novels. In fact, I think the novels were awful.

3) The Remains of the Day – An absolutely spot on adaptation.

4) Adaptation – This film transcends the original source material into something that is bizarre, touching and funny. Wonderful film-making.

There are probably more, but I can’t think of any others right now.

‘Remains of The Day’ remains, to this day, one of my favourite Merchant-Ivory productions. Exquisite in its adaptation. It was only afterwards that I read Ishiguro’s novel and, to be honest, I loved both novel and film.

Another film that could be added to your list is the 2014, Australian made sci-fi story ‘Predestination.’ I remember reading Heinlein’s short story ‘All You Zombies’ many years ago and wondering how it could be made into a film. When the Speirig Bros released their version I was curious – and then delighted with the result. Even the addition of Noah Taylor’s character worked within the context of the adaptation.

Can’t forget Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Those movies are by far the best “book-to-movie” adaptation ever made. Not for being at 1:1 transfer of the story off the page to film format, but for making an already great story much more palatable for everyday moviegoers who won’t spend the time slogging through pages and pages of descriptions of plants as the hobbits travel down the road, followed by a one-sentence line “Oh, and then Boromir died.” They aren’t perfect movies (“Looks like meat’s back on our menu, boys!”) but they’re the closest we’re going to get to a perfect adaptation.

There definitely are some situations where the movie is the better bet. I’ve read the LOTR books, but because they can be a bit of a “slog,” I’d be willing to say the movies are better.

Yes, The Remains Of The Day is that rare thing: both the novel and the film are well worth reading and watching. Getting the characters right is a job in itself for film directors, perhaps the most important job. Hopkins was magnificent as the butler. The lady who adapted Ishiguro’s novel only died last month. She was a novelist in her own right. But all the elements came together there. Hyperventilating now ends here.

I agree completely about The Remains of the Day, and disagree passionately about The English Patient. In the case of the former, the director knew the real love affair was with the house itself and the minutia of its day-to-day affairs. James Ivory got the calculus exactly right. We want for the butler, James, to desire Miss Kenton enough to risk something, but he literally cannot. The proper polish on a table means more than a flesh and blood woman.

The exact opposite issue marred The English Patient. Minghella tried to superimpose a traditional love triangle on a story that was more labyrinth and spiral than three cornered affair. Ondaatje’s novel is incomparably richer and more complex than the movie ever hints at. For one thing, the nurse’s love story is truncated by politics and history itself. After the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Kip renounces Hana, in part, because he sees her as a symbol of the West’s depravity. At every turn, the movie tried to superimpose and order that Ondaatje studiously resisted.

Agree about The English Patient. Couldn’t finish the novel, the film is one of my favorites.

I think the adaptation needs to capture the essence (or essences) of what it is that makes the book good.

Agreed, and that entails much more than just staying 100% accurate to details that are ultimately insignificant to the story. It may be an extreme/controversial example, but I think Stephen King’s The Shining and the Kubrick adaptation are a good example of this. The movie does leave out a lot of the lore of the Torrance family and the hotel, but it perfectly captures the sinister, paranormal nature of the hotel. Even though the fate of the hotel is completely off from the book’s telling, the ‘spirit’ of the hotel remains in both, and it shows that it was and will always be beyond just the infrastructure.

That is also subjective, though.

Stand By Me is a brilliant adaptation of Stephen King’s original novella, and I think he’s said it’s his favourite adaptation. It’s very close to the original story, even down to Richard Dreyfuss’s narration. However, there’s a superficially very subtle change at the end, where instead of River Phoenix’s character pointing a gun at Kiefer Sutherland’s, as happens in the book, it is Wil Wheaton’s character. If you see the film first, and the way it develops that character, when you read the book it just seems wrong to be any other way.

Looking good JAbida and nicely done.:)

Thank you 🙂

I’m kind of unusual, I think, in that I actually like adaptations that diverge from the source material, as long as they do so in ways that are themselves enjoyable and well-executed. Inevitably, the nature of different media means that a particular technique that would work just fine in a book (for example) might not work on screen. I like being able to hold the two versions up to each other and say, “Oh, they’re doing this because it wouldn’t make sense for them to do it like that, the way the original does!”

What I mostly look for in an adaptation is, can it stand alone? To me, that’s the most important aspect of a good adaptation: it needs to be able to stand on its own and be accessible and enjoyable even to those who aren’t familiar with the source material. I think I see it that way because I watch a lot of anime, and if an anime based on a manga or novel (for example) is released in the US, there’s no guarantee that the manga or novel will be as well.

For me, the best book-to-screen adaptation was Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Despite changing the location from London to Chicago, it kept the spirit of the book – especially the characters. John Cusack really understood the text.

Great article. For those interested, Robert Stam has written some great books on the subject of adaptation.

Yes, I’ve read them all.

I think that the film Trainspotting, as a film in it’s own right, is as good as the book. They are very different in a lot of respects but, I think, Danny Boyle took the ideas, themes and styles from the book and made an excellent film. I think that’s the ideal, make them as good as each other, without sticking painstakingly to the text. That said, I think the Harry Potter films were far more entertaining and coherent than the books, so maybe that’s the ultimate adaptation.

Quite agree about Trainspotting. In fact, there was so much material from the book they didn’t use, they could have easily got another film out of it.

And quite agree about Harry Potter too. The fourth one particularly. They cut out entire subplots that took up 100 pages from the book, and it didn’t make the blindest bit of difference to the story, which just goes to show how bloated and self-indulgent the book was to begin with.

I think John Hodge did an amazing job of turning a seemingly unfilmable novel like Trainspotting into a brilliant script that captured the essence of the book and created a strong central narrative from what was essentially a collection of short stories.

I think that’s true of the last four books, where the books were long and plodding and the films shorter and more coherent, but not the first three. The first two films were, if anything, too faithful to the books and therefore felt far longer than they were.

The third film and book (“Prisoner of Azkaban”) the film and the book are excellent in different ways, but my preference is for the book.

I don’t know, I think they’re all really clumsily written. I thought they were translated well to film in so much as by dragging out, if you like, the first couple of books and then heavily editing the later ones they managed to create films of similar length. As regards the later books I’m glad they ditched all the bits where she had a go at dealing with “teen issues” which were absolutely excruciating. All that “it seemed everyone was snogging except Ron and Harry” – they’re all about fifteen, in real life that’s probably not the half of it but you’re writing a children’s book it’s not Byker Grove.

Normally it’s very difficult to make a film of a blockbuster book, because there’s just too much happening in 600-odd pages to fit into a two and a half hour film. “The Golden Compass” was a complete failure because it got nowhere near the complexity and extent of Pullman’s book.

But the Harry Potter books are really just comics, without any substance. You can discard great swathes of them and it makes no difference. As I recall the first 100 pages of the first book, nothing happened except a relentless and tedious swamp of Dudley Dursley being unpleasant to Harry, with no context and no purpose other than to indulge the author’s dislike of lower middle class suburban people. You could capture the whole lot in two minutes of film.

The main thing is capturing the feel of the book.

Of ‘period’ adaptations I think Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility is up there with the best although the amazing cast helps.

Great read. With books like Gatsby and Lolita, the weird thing is that there are people who haven’t read the books and who presumably go and see these movies instead; as though the one experience is a substitute for the other — and that by knowing what happens in the story, that’s all there is to it.

In the case of non-literary fiction, it’s less important; and as often as not, the film can be a less time-consuming way of delivering you the essentials of the plot (does anybody read John Grisham for his interesting perceptions or poetic prose style?)

A good essay with an interesting topic.

Clueless is way better than Emma.

I love “Wizard of Oz”, the original film starring Judy Garland. I read the book as a child and even at a very young age – I think I was seven – thought it was crap. But the film is stunningly good, with all the depth the book doesn’t have.

I’d say Kubrick and Coppola stand pretty much apart as the only filmmakers to consistently adapt challenging and complex books brilliantly – Clockwork Orange, 2001, The Shining, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now are all among the greatest adaptations ever. The only modern director that comes close for me is David Fincher, who did a superb job in adding a cinematic depth to the likes of Fight Club and The Social Network.

The best adaptations often come from the most straightforward source material, as the filmmaker can use the core events in a book to build their own meaning around. That’s part of the reason why some of the biggest flops (Breakfast of Champions, Bonfire of the Vanities, All The King’s Men off the top of my head) have been from books that are lengthy and/or hold complex ideas.

If you’re good enough, then a blatant disregard for the source material can work in your favour. I’m going from memory here, but I think there’s a good Hitchcock quote on adapting novels. Something along the lines of “I read the book once, then throw it away”.

I do find that is interesting how many times we circle over this topic not only here but in media as a whole, but some good inclusions to the wider discussion.

Has anyone read Oil! by Upton Sinclair, the book There Will Be Blood is based on? I’d be interested to hear how it compares with the original.

The film adaptation needs to have that sort of sensitive attention to detail that adds a bit of unique panache to it.

Best adaptation that comes to mind is the TV miniseries of John le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with Alec Guinness.

Much of the issue involving adaptation (really of any medium to another, but especially text to visual) is the question of personal investment. Books tend to become personal journeys for each individual reader—that individual can craft their own mental ideation of the characters and preceding events, and those visions are fluid based personal discretion. An event in a text, depending on the skill and intentions of the author, can be read a variety of ways. Film tends to be static—an event that happens on screen often locks out alternative interpretation, unless a surrealistic director (a la David Lynch) is at helm. This innate “reality” of film as a medium frequently denies the freedom of vision innate in literature—the movie belongs not the individual, but to all who see it.

But I digress. I appreciate your article.

Interesting to read about the viewpoints when it comes to books versus film and the ‘benefits’ or ‘pros’ to each.

Something fun to note about the relationship of Movies and Books is even when filmmakers were creating their own movies from scratch in say the 30s and earlier, they would actually write a full novel to coincide with the movie they created. It’s the idea that world building happens just as much on and off the screen.

The writers would also figure out what was more important to the story, and what was going on inside of the head of their characters. The nature of film is so action based, this exercise helped writers get everything out.

I personally cannot stand fidelity discourse. If people are going to gush over ‘books that are better than the movie’ then the same appreciation needs to be made for movies that are better than the book. What about the Exorcist? Amytiville Horror? Jaws? Die Hard?

I ponder if Wolff was right. While cinema and books represent a medium to tell a story, they are distinctly divided by their respective, story-telling toolsets ie. what works for books mightn’t for movies.

Further, fidelity of adaptation, as KateBowen puts it, is a moot point for the likes of Harry Potter or Twilight (or Game of Thrones). Their writing styles and multiple sequels suggest an avaricious parallel with Hollywood uninterested in concise, genuine story-telling between both mediums.

My thoughts are incomplete here but I’ve enjoyed having them.

Cinema and literature have had such an intense relationship throughout time, with the means necessary to create an adaptation only truly accessible in this present day. There’s also the idea that films have an unspoken maximum run time, so some things are cut. It doesn’t mean the editors and directors made the right decision, but this read has opened up an avenue of thought that is scarcely ever delved into deeply. Well done.

I liked James and the Giant Peach. The Witches was excellent – totally unsettling, with brilliant effects. I tend to like the adaptations of Dahl’s stories more than his books, really.

Mary Reilly – that was a very imaginative adaptation of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Very thought-provoking look at the complexities of good and evil – but seen from the perspective of a woman who loves both of those qualities in the same man. Very interesting, I thought.

Have you seen Spencer Tracy become Mr. Hyde, he’s absolutely terrifying.

What about The Matrix which was an adaption by implication of Neuromancer by William Gibson? Interesting concept!

Mind you I remember in a literature class being asked to define the three types of adaptation and replying: ‘Good, bad and indifferent’. As an answer got laughs but not many points from the lecturer!!

The adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird was very good.

Awesome essay – it’s always one of those polarising debates and you explored both sides well.

I’ve always felt that the difference between a good adaptation and a bad one is whether the screenwriter and director properly respect the source material. Not just taking the “juicy” parts while ignoring other aspects which build the plot and contribute to characterisation.

Take Stephen King for instance. I can only describe the recent output of adaptations (i.e. It and Pet Sematary) as a redemptive renaissance period for his works. They capture the horror and darkness without losing the substance and characterisation of his writing. With the obvious exception of Misery and Kubrick’s The Shining, a large amount of the old adaptations felt very underdone. With respect to those, they might not have been given the same budget/resources as these newer adaptations but there was still a lot lacking.

The greatest injustice adaptations do is in regards to narration. Film adaptations don’t allow for the steady stream of thought that many novels posses that facilitate a deeper connection between audience and character. In the case of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, the lack of personal narration in the film created an entirely different narrative and pulled most of the intended conversation away from the audience.

I feel like adaptations need to let go of the source material to a certain extent. Something that works in prose will not always work on screen. Also, I would rather the artists gave the film a new spin, rather than following the book to the letter and making a pale imitation with nothing to add.

Adaptation is interesting because there is even less of a baseline expectation than in other media. Of course, everyone has different opinions about any movie or book or song, but the framework for judgment seems a bit more standardized when its an “original” work. Some people hope for the “feel,” others the “characters,” and others still the plot is supreme. It’s quite the problem for practitioners!

I am one of many around the world who prefer the book over the movie 90% of the time.

One main example of this is the first Hunger Games. I loved the book – so much so I finished it in a 4 hour car ride. But the first movie left me so disappointed. I understand how difficult I can be fora movie to show Katniss hiding in a tree and waiting not to die, I just felt at the time there could have been more done.

The age old problem is: A writer can write for as long as he/she wishes too and the story follows this rule. A book can be a thousand pages long but a profitable mainstream movie can only last three hours at most. So much content must be cut that inevitably the greatest screen writer on the planet will trip up and cut something that they did not realise was integral to the story or god forbid a fan favourite element. At the end of the day the article answers its own question it is subjective, there is no science to it.

I’m not convinced that the idea of a “good adaptation” and a “bad adaptation” are relevant when it comes to art. Of course, to the paid critic the adaptation factor must contribute to his/her argument as to whether a film is good or bad. However, if we look at film as a standalone art as we would literature, painting, sculpting, etc., why does the fact that it is an adaptation matter? Suppose, for instance, a painter observed the statue of David and decided to paint an abstract version of the sculpture. Would a viewer look at the painting as a good or bad adaptation of the sculpted work? I think that’s unlikely. Shouldn’t this also apply to film?

If we use Stephen King’s “The Shining” as an example, it is well known that King despised the Stanley Kubrick version of his book, primarily because in the book the overheating boiler is almost like a character that Jack is constantly battling until it explodes and takes Jack and the Overlook down with it. Kubrick decided to leave the hotel standing and instead of taking out Jack by fire, he takes him out by ice. That is a significant plot change. However, as the reader and viewer, we the audience can decide that literature and film are separate entities that are unique even if they are based upon the same story. They can each be enjoyed and analyzed individually. They both have the same plot with the same characters and the same location. However, due to the artist’s interpretation, we get to enjoy different themes, a different tone, and the visual element missing from the novel.

In conclusion, I don’t think “good” and “bad” are the proper filters through which to view an adaptation. Each work of art deserves to viewed as a piece unto itself, even if the origin is based on another artist’s vision.

I think one of the main issues with movies or tv shows that originate from book is fan expectations. As this article states, we all view things in our own specific ways, so when something on screen doesn’t match the image in our head, it ruins the movie for us. I am guilty of this myself. I think by purging our own expectations before seeing a movie it can greatly increase the experience. I’ve also noticed that when I watch a movie and then read the book, I thoroughly enjoy seeing that same story told in what is usually more detail. Obviously, there have been some very good adaptations as mentioned in this comment section already, but I don’t think any adaptation will ever be received without complaints, especially if the book audience leans towards the more eccentric side.

So there’s an interesting tension at work here between how we interpret words and how we interpret visual imagery. Words tend to suggest a variety of possible meanings to the reader, for example, if I say “Jack drinks coffee” some of us will imagine it as black and piping-hot, others as iced and filled with cream and sugar. To my mind this is part of the beauty of the written word, and its always seemed to me that good authors take advantage of this inherent ambiguity. Conversely, images are very concrete – when we see Jack getting a piping-hot black coffee the other possible meanings of “coffee” are automatically eliminated. It would seem, then, that part of the adapter’s task is to consider the concrete image that will remain most faithful to the written word. This makes me wonder if books that are less precise in their imagery (“Jack ordered a coffee” versus “Jack ordered a large hot coffee with two sugars”) are inherently harder to adapt to the screen?

As a fan of both books and movies I have been a lover of this argument for a long time. Being an ardent reader of Cormac McCarthy’ I am often left bewildered at the butchering of his books into their perspective adaptations. I hope I don’t have to (obviously) mention The Road, but I will, and I digress.

It might not be so obvious that I generally prefer the book/novel to the adaptation? There are exceptions to the rule, and LOTR is, collectively, one of these exceptions. These movies have greatly beaten my imagination into a pulp. Peter Jackson and his entourage have decimated what I thought I could conceive that would be an epic adventure for everyone and their viewing pleasure. I was wrong. Their minds are beyond anything I would dare imagine.

Lately, I am also in awe of 21st Century television adaptations, Big Little Lies, automatically jumps first in line when I try to give an example on the spot. I couldn’t wait for Sunday night to watch, and the addition of Meryl forced me to watch every cringe worthy second, despite what my eyes wanted. I explain the show as “confrontational”, “raw”, and “very funny”. The book is funny, and dark and still compelling to read. The level of cringy-ness was low. This cross over I felt is the reason for it’s success during award season in L.A.

Typically when I see an adaptation I’m more excited to read the book first. I think I know what you’re thinking, and, no, it’s not so that I can point out all of the subtle, or vast, differences between the book and adaptation. (Disregard my comments on The Road) And how the movie ruined my love of the book. I’m not the type to point out “episode 213 scene 7, you said this…when actually it was this…” I’m not one of “those”. My excitement actually stems from LOTR. I enjoy the tug-o-war between my ego and my love of film and book and if my imagination could even possibly compete with the people responsible for the on screen version.

As for my absolute favourite to date, Mordecai Richler’s novel “Barney’s Version”(!!!!) Reading it on the Toronto subway to and from work over a decade ago brings back so many memories of missed stops and ignored conversations with strangers. I spent months toiling, reading, and re-reading chapters.

Too many people I spoke with thought it was dry, bitter, and angsty, but most importantly, not enough droll or drunken bitterness that Richler-ites have grown to crave. The movie starring a solid Canadian cast, but also including Paul Giamatti, helped to create a romantic sense of Canada during the 1970’s. Mordecai’s symbolic usage of booze, or really good scotch, to cigars, women and the Montreal Canadians in the book kept me glued, and seeing my imagination and revelling at something I could conceive has me locked every time I watch. And this from a staunch supporter of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Of course not one of my examples has anything to do with CGI or any graphical effects. They are important, but I don’t feel they are the reason books are adapted or why they are the reason the adaptation fails or succeeds according to us, the viewer. They simply provide an outlet to create the imaginative realm necessary for expression. But let’s be honest, most of the time these effects are worth mentioning, outside of the storyline, because they have the ability to make or kill the scene. I couldn’t imagine Little Shop of Horrors created after 1995?

I am one of the very few people who generally enjoy movie adaptations over most books, mainly for the fact of the visual representation of certain things. With constantly improving technology, the ease of creating the surreal imagery given in books will only get easier to match if not top. I enjoy the visual representation of the movies more than the text because at least for me I find it easier to immerse my self/find myself getting lost in the movie. In books, I find it harder to picture what I’m reading without having to reread what I just read. But that’s just my opinion on this from the alternative view of the majority.

Great commentary!

While I fundamentally agree, from what I’ve seen, the best adaptions tend to come from cinematic works where the author of the source material is heavily involved. For instance, The Perks of Being a Wallflower was handled almost entirely by the author who is also a screenwriter by trade, and it was nothing short of perfect. Even where the plot diverged from the source, it ended up being more a “director’s cut,” kind of experience than the frustration of wondering why on earth they felt the need to change something perfectly good.

An interesting essay! I do agree with you when you said that people can agree to love a book, but disagree on its adaption to film. I’ve always found it fascinating how people love similar aspects of a work but disagree on the same aspects of its adaption. Again, an interesting essay on a very interesting topic!

There’s definitely an overwhelming amount of difficulty when adapting a novel to film. With the Twilight series, (although I never read the whole series) I think that the first film worked well and I always imagined it to have that indie ‘artsy’ look. But as soon as they changed directors to finish the rest of the series, average became horrid — I don’t think Weitz, Slade and Condon really captured much of anything, making it so much cheesier than what it was; Compared to Catherine Hardwicke, who at least was able to manifest the relationship between Bella and Edward.

Great article! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to adapt podcasts to film or documentary and similar hurdles of how the medium is the message come up. This has been some nice food for thought.

I honestly love how you used an example of a Bollywood film! A lot of people believe that books are better than movies. I think it is because when people read a book, their imagination goes wild. They are the ones that are visualizing the story. Whereas in movies, the imagery is given to us and it spoils one’s creative scenes. By this, I mean that someone who has imagined a scene that occurs in the book ends up watching the same scene in the movie. This will likely upset then because it is not how they imagined it. In cases where people have not read the book and watched the movie, they are not likely to complain about the movie turning out bad.

Great article!!

As much as I hate the Percy Jackson adaptation, I do acknowledge that the movies actually brought a lot of new fans and readers to the books. There are always two sides of things, and even though I don’t wanna admit it, this favorite series of mine gained a bunch of new-comers after the movies came out, no matter how sucky they were…

I think a good/decent adaptation should convey the exact feeling that can be felt in the book version, allowing book readers to relieve their original memories in the live-action version and stimulating movie-goers’ curiosity about the book version (i.e. leaving them wonder how the author originally described every scene that eventually became the movie)

I think a balance needs to be reached between the two media. Francois Truffaut famously wrote about bad films based on literary works in his article “Une certaine tendance…” http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/a-certain-tendency-of-french-cinema-truffaut.shtml

Adaptations cost little to adapt into a film, so long as the writers and the filmmaker of said film stay true to the original material while changing things around a bit to make the story better or deviate from the original story to make a successful film. There are absolutely no development costs and time spent on creating original material. I believe that is why they are an attractive and lucrative proposition to producers and filmmakers alike. But that doesn’t excuse a bad film to spring from a good or great book or fairy tale. Cinderella for instance, has been adapted so many times that I believe that the audience are either getting fed up or annoyed, or both.

As I read this, I thought of Luca Guadagnino’s remake of the horror movie “Suspiria” and how this adaptation applies not only to book that become movies, but also movies that get remade. When the movie had first come out, I recall reading an interview with Guadagnino and Tilda Swinton. I wish I could find the exact interview, but I remember they said that the movie was not meant to be a remake, but rather a reimagined version of the original 1977 film.

I believe that’s a perfect and simple way to describe adaptations. As stated above, it truly is subjective. In every aspect.

That being said, I definitely do not like most film adaptations of my favorite books, but I believe that’s due to the way I had initially imagined everything. There’s a sort of aesthetic beauty in writing that simply cannot be conveyed into a single, somewhat “universal” visual.

There’s another wonderful movie that focuses on that difference- “Words and Pictures” which was released in 2013.

To get back on track, I am one who will go out of the way to watch an adaptation of a book. For example, I just finished Lev Grossman’s, “The Magicians” trilogy, and I’m excited to see the show. Though I know it will be no match for Grossman’s writing, I’m intrigued.

Maybe another large aspect of book to film adaptations is that, as an audience, we fall in love with a story so much that we want more. When we want more, we can read every book by that author, we can scour the genre, or related titles, but when a movie comes out, there’s a chance to see that story in a new light. It may be disappointing, but I personally believe that whether or not you enjoyed the adaptation, it is undeniable that you enjoyed the experience of being able to relive the story. If not visually, then in your head, while you wrestled with the director’s choices, shaking your head or wishing they’d done something differently. It’s entertaining at the very least.

All in all, I loved reading this article, and seeing all of the possible discussions that can flow in endless directions…

Thank you for this article! Adaptations of films are definitely subjective. A key part of this is most likely due to the high expectations for the adaptation of a book someone may have. I recently spoke to someone who read the book of a movie she had seen and her perception of the film once she rewatched it had changed. She enjoyed the film originally as she had obviously not known about the parts that were cut out of the film. Her opinions regarding the film had changed to disappointment once she realized what the film excluded. I found this to be interesting as it proves that the perception someone has prior to watching an adaptation does have a strong influence on their experience of the film. Due to budgeting reasons and time constraints, it is impossible, or pretty much impossible, to create a film that is completely true to the film. I remember there being controversy when production companies decided to split the final books of popular books such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games into two movies. Some thought that it was only done to create more revenue and others argued that it was the only way for the films to stay as true as they can to the books. It is difficult to compare film adaptations to books when they are two forms of media.

It would be really interesting to compare ‘Drive’ by James Sallies with it’s Nicolas Winding Refn adaptation. I strongly feel the movie does a better job in creating the world of pathos which the Driver inhabits. Have mixed feelings about ‘Driven:The Sequel to Drive’

People who judge and adaptation by how much it remained faithful to it’s source material are the worst audiences ever.

I find this topic of great interest – it is so disappointing when a favourite book is not realised in the way you have imagined it. I suppose to put it very simply, books and films are different. The editing processes in each case are different. The physical perceptions and surroundings of readers and film audiences are different. I think a successful adaptation from print media to film captures the spirit of the original but does not- indeed cannot – replicate the intricacies of plot. An excellent example of this is the film, Tom Jones (1963), directed by Tony Richardson and written by Henry Fielding (1749). Just as Fielding used new techniques and approaches to narrative, e.g. ‘breaking the fourth wall’ by having characters speak directly to the reader, so Richardson used novel film techniques and also had characters acknowledging the audience in a variety of comic ways. The dinner scene where Tom and his potential mistress gorge themselves on food is one of the most erotic scenes in the annals of film – and nobody takes their clothes off! It also has Albert Finney at the peak of his career and beauty. Another way of adapting literary classics to film, is to set it in modern times. I am a great fan of the film ‘Clueless’ (1985) which is a witty adaptation by director Amy Heckerling, of a favourite book of mine, Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ (1816). Heckerling roughly follows the plot of the original but the magic of the film lies in capturing Emma’s innocence and lack of worldliness (but fundamental good nature) in the character of Cher played by Alicia Silverstone – also a career high.

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Book to Movie Adaptations: From Page to Screen

By Corrine Asbell

Updated November 14, 2023

The process of creating a successful book to movie adaptation is a complex alchemy that involves balancing the expectations of ardent fans, respecting the source material, and creating a compelling cinematic experience. 

The journey from the printed page to the silver screen is a well-trodden path in the world of storytelling. 

It’s a path that has led to both triumph and tribulation, as filmmakers attempt to capture the essence of beloved books while translating them into a different medium. 

Jump to the list of 11 examples of successful book to movie adaptations.

The Challenges of Adaptation

Adapting a book into a film is a daunting task, primarily because the two mediums have distinct storytelling methods. 

While books allow readers to dive deep into characters’ thoughts and emotions, movies rely on visual and auditory cues to convey the narrative. 

There are many challenges that filmmakers face when making a movie with a novel as the source material, but we’re going to discuss some of the major obstacles.

Pacing 

The difference in the length and format between books and movies poses a significant challenge when adapting novels into films.

Movies typically have a limited runtime, commonly around two to three hours.

In contrast, books have the luxury of spanning hundreds of pages, allowing for detailed character development, intricate subplots, and a leisurely exploration of the story’s world. 

This inherent time constraint in filmmaking necessitates careful selection and compression of material from the source material.

Condensing a sprawling novel into a concise film requires filmmakers to make strategic choices about which scenes, characters, and plot elements to include. 

This selective storytelling process is often guided by the central theme or the core narrative of the book. 

Filmmakers must identify the key moments that drive the story forward and contribute to character development while leaving out less critical elements.

Filmmakers often need to distill the essence of a book’s narrative into its most compelling and visually impactful elements. 

This may involve sacrificing certain subplots or minor character arcs to maintain a tight and engaging storyline. 

The goal is to ensure that the film remains focused on the central themes and conflicts of the original work.

Visual Interpretation 

Films are primarily visual storytelling mediums. 

They rely on moving images, cinematography, and various audio-visual elements to convey a narrative. 

Unlike books, which rely on written descriptions to paint a mental picture, films allow audiences to see the story unfold in front of their eyes. 

This visual aspect can enhance the emotional impact of a story by immersing viewers in a world that’s both tangible and immediate.

Films have their own visual language and techniques, such as camera angles, lighting, and editing, which can convey meaning and emotion in ways that written words cannot. 

For example, a close-up shot of an actor’s face can reveal their inner turmoil, while a sweeping landscape shot can capture the grandeur of a setting. 

These visual choices are instrumental in shaping the audience’s emotional connection to the story.

Characterization 

Books have the unique advantage of allowing readers to access a character’s inner thoughts and emotions through narration, inner monologues, and introspection. 

Authors can delve deep into a character’s psyche, sharing their fears, desires, and inner conflicts. This intimate access to a character’s mind enables readers to form a profound and empathetic connection with them. 

Readers can understand the character’s motivations, even if those motivations are complex or contradictory.

In novels, authors have the space to provide detailed character development, often spanning many pages or chapters. 

Readers can witness characters evolve, grow, and transform as they journey through the story. 

Authors can introduce backstory, childhood memories, and other significant life events to give depth and complexity to characters.

In contrast, movies rely on visual and auditory cues to convey character traits and emotions. 

Filmmakers must rely on the actors’ performances, dialogues, body language, facial expressions, and even the music score to communicate the inner workings of characters. 

This visual and sensory engagement can be incredibly powerful, as it immerses the audience in the character’s world and allows them to interpret emotions and intentions through non-verbal cues.

The filmmaking principle of “show, don’t tell” is essential when portraying characters on screen. 

Rather than directly narrating a character’s thoughts and feelings, filmmakers must find creative ways to depict them through actions and visuals. 

For instance, a character’s hesitation, a tear in their eye, or a subtle smile can speak volumes about their emotional state.

Fidelity vs. Creativity 

The tension between fidelity to the source material and creative reinterpretation is a perennial debate in the realm of book to movie adaptations. 

On one hand, there are purists who argue for strict adherence to the book, believing that the essence of the story lies in the author’s words and that any deviation diminishes the authenticity of the adaptation. 

On the other hand, there are those who champion creative freedom, recognizing that filmmaking is a distinct art form that should be allowed to flourish on its terms, even if it means departing from the source material.

Fidelity to the source material has its merits.  

It honors the author’s intent and provides a sense of nostalgia for fans of the book who relish seeing their favorite characters and scenes faithfully reproduced on screen. 

It ensures that the adaptation retains the core themes, characters, and plot elements that made the book beloved in the first place. 

Fidelity can be particularly important when adapting works with well-established and passionate fan bases, as any significant deviations can lead to backlash and disappointment.

However, strict fidelity can also stifle creativity and the unique possibilities of the cinematic medium. 

Filmmakers must often make adjustments to accommodate the constraints of time, budget, and the visual language of film. 

This necessitates condensing, omitting, or reinterpreting certain elements from the book. 

Creative book to movie adaptations can breathe new life into a familiar story, offering fresh perspectives, innovative visual storytelling, and sometimes even improved pacing and structure.

Ultimately, the balance between fidelity and creativity in book to movie adaptations is a delicate one. 

The most successful adaptations find a middle ground, staying true to the spirit of the source material while embracing the unique opportunities that film offers for visual storytelling. 

They recognize that fidelity should not be a rigid rule but rather a guideline that can be bent or broken when it serves the narrative and artistic vision. In the end, what matters most is that the adaptation captures the heart and essence of the story, even if it takes a few creative detours along the way.

Factors Contributing to Success

What separates these successful book to movie adaptations from others? While every case is unique, several common factors contribute to their triumph.

Skilled directors, screenwriters, and actors who understand and respect the source material can elevate an adaptation.

Effective use of cinematography, art direction, and visual effects can transport viewers into the world of the book.

Movies that focus on well-developed characters and their emotional journeys tend to resonate with audiences.

Successful book to movie adaptations find a balance between honoring the book and introducing new elements that enhance the cinematic experience.

Examples of Successful Book to Movie Adaptations

The lord of the rings trilogy : adaptation of jrr tolkien’s lord of the rings novels.

When J.R.R. Tolkien penned The Lord of the Rings nearly seven decades ago, little did he know that his epic fantasy masterpiece would one day become a benchmark for successful book to movie adaptations. 

Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, released between 2001 and 2003, not only captured the hearts of Tolkien’s dedicated fanbase but also garnered critical acclaim and introduced Middle-earth to a new generation. 

One of the primary reasons for the trilogy’s success was its unwavering dedication to the source material. 

Jackson and his team showed immense respect for Tolkien’s work, meticulously recreating the vivid world of Middle-earth, its rich lore, and its memorable characters. 

They took care to ensure that the essence of the books was preserved, resonating with fans who cherished the novels.

Tolkien’s narrative, renowned for its depth and complexity, could have been challenging to adapt to the screen. 

However, the filmmakers skillfully condensed and streamlined the story without sacrificing its essence. 

The trilogy’s pacing, character development, and intertwining storylines kept viewers engaged across three long films.

The films also pushed the boundaries of visual effects and cinematic technology, immersing viewers in the fantastical world of Middle-earth. 

The seamless integration of CGI and practical effects created awe-inspiring landscapes, epic battles, and mythical creatures. 

The attention to detail and the breathtaking visuals transported audiences into Tolkien’s universe.

LotR’s successful transition from book to movie is a testament to the collaborative efforts of talented filmmakers, a dedicated cast and crew, and an unwavering commitment to honoring Tolkien’s original work.

You can stream the entire LotR trilogy on Max.

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The Shawshank Redemption : Adaptation of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King

When Stephen King ‘s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was first published in 1982, it garnered acclaim as a gripping tale set within the confines of a prison. 

Little did anyone know that this story would later become one of the most celebrated and enduring book to movie adaptations in cinematic history. 

The Shawshank Redemption , directed by Frank Darabont and released in 1994, is a shining example of how a book-to-movie adaptation can not only stay true to its source material but also transcend it in remarkable ways. 

Darabont’s screenplay remains remarkably faithful to Stephen King’s novella. 

While some adaptations take creative liberties, The Shawshank Redemption preserves the essence of the story, characters, and themes, capturing the emotional depth and moral complexity that made the novella so compelling.

The film boasts a stellar cast led by Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne and Morgan Freeman as Red. 

These actors delivered unforgettable performances that brought depth and authenticity to their characters. 

Freeman’s narration, in particular, has become iconic and synonymous with the film itself.

Darabont’s direction and the screenplay’s adaptation of King’s work are both masterclasses in storytelling. 

The film successfully maintains the novella’s gripping narrative and expertly captures the sense of hope and camaraderie that runs through the story.

Shawshank explores universal themes of hope, redemption, friendship, and the human spirit’s resilience in the face of adversity. 

These themes resonate with audiences of all backgrounds and make the story as relevant today as it was when the novella was written.

By maintaining the integrity of Stephen King’s novella while elevating it through exceptional performances, direction, and cinematography, the film has earned its place in the pantheon of great cinematic achievements. 

Its enduring appeal and timeless themes continue to captivate audiences, cementing its legacy as a true triumph in the world of book to movie adaptations.

You can rent Shawshank on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, etc.

To Kill a Mockingbird : Adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee’s classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird , has long been regarded as a literary masterpiece. 

Its transition from page to screen was a formidable challenge, yet the 1962 film adaptation directed by Robert Mulligan managed to capture the essence and enduring power of the novel.

The film remained remarkably faithful to Lee’s novel, preserving its central themes, characters, and plotlines. 

The screenplay, penned by Horton Foote, skillfully condensed the story while staying true to the heart of the novel, which resonated with both fans of the book and new audiences.

The movie delves into profound themes such as racial injustice, moral growth, and empathy. 

These themes continue to be relevant, making the film a poignant and thought-provoking experience for audiences, even decades after its release.

This book to movie adaptation has been used in classrooms around the world to educate students about social justice, racism, and moral integrity. 

It has played a crucial role in fostering discussions and promoting empathy and understanding.

The film’s casting was nothing short of brilliant. Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch is widely regarded as one of the most iconic performances in cinematic history. 

His embodiment of the principled and compassionate lawyer was so impeccable that he earned an Academy Award for Best Actor. 

The entire ensemble cast, including Mary Badham as Scout and Philip Alford as Jem, was equally exceptional.

To Kill a Mockingbird’s unwavering loyalty to the source material, outstanding performances, and timeless themes have secured its place in cinematic history. 

Beyond its artistic achievements, the film continues to inspire, educate, and provoke meaningful conversations about the enduring importance of justice, empathy, and the power of literature and film to affect positive change in society.

You can rent the movie on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, etc.

The Godfather : Adaptation of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather

When Mario Puzo’s crime novel The Godfather was published in 1969, it quickly became a literary sensation, drawing readers into the dark and complex world of the Italian-American Mafia. 

However, it was Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film adaptation that elevated The Godfather to legendary status, setting a new standard for book to movie adaptations. 

One of the primary reasons for the film’s success is its unwavering loyalty to Mario Puzo’s novel. 

Coppola and Puzo collaborated closely on the screenplay, ensuring that the essence of the story, characters, and intricate Mafia politics were preserved. 

Coppola’s direction and Puzo’s screenplay expertly condensed the novel’s intricate plot into a coherent and captivating narrative. 

The film’s pacing, character development, and the interplay of multiple storylines were skillfully executed, drawing viewers into the Corleone family’s web of intrigue.

The casting of The Godfather is often hailed as one of the most brilliant in cinematic history. 

Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Don Vito Corleone is legendary, earning him an Academy Award for Best Actor. 

The ensemble cast, including Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, James Caan as Sonny Corleone, and Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, delivered unforgettable performances that breathed life into the characters.

The film is replete with iconic lines and memorable scenes, from Don Corleone’s “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” to the horse head in the bed. 

These moments have become ingrained in popular culture and are often quoted and referenced.

Beyond its cinematic achievements, The Godfather has left an indelible mark on American culture. 

It has influenced subsequent films, television shows, and even real-life discussions of organized crime.

You can watch on Prime Video or Paramount+

Gone Girl : Adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Novel Gone Girl

When it comes to adapting a beloved book to the silver screen, it’s no easy feat to satisfy both avid readers and moviegoers. 

However, David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel Gone Girl managed to do just that. 

This dark, suspenseful tale of marriage, deception, and media manipulation became a benchmark for successful book to movie adaptations. 

David Fincher’s direction and Gillian Flynn’s screenplay combined to create a suspenseful, engrossing narrative. 

The film’s nonlinear structure, alternating between Nick and Amy’s perspectives, mimicked the novel’s style, keeping viewers intrigued and guessing throughout.

Fincher’s film stays remarkably loyal to Flynn’s novel. The adaptation preserves the novel’s intricate plot, multi-dimensional characters, and gripping narrative twists. 

Ben Affleck’s portrayal of Nick Dunne, a man entangled in a web of suspicion, garnered praise for its complexity. 

Rosamund Pike’s portrayal of the enigmatic and manipulative unreliable narrator Amy Dunne earned her an Academy Award nomination. 

The chemistry between the leads brought the complex characters to life and intensified the story’s suspense.

The film masterfully builds psychological tension, just as the novel does. 

The mystery surrounding Amy’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation keep viewers on the edge of their seats, driving the narrative forward with relentless suspense.

Gone Girl delves into timeless themes of love, marriage, deception, and the dark facets of human nature. 

These themes are as relevant today as when the book was first published, prompting viewers to reflect on the complexities of relationships and the role of media in shaping public perception.

By remaining faithful to Flynn’s captivating novel and combining stellar performances with expert direction, it succeeded in satisfying both existing fans and newcomers. 

The film’s enduring appeal lies in its skillful storytelling, timeless themes, and its ability to leave audiences pondering the dark complexities of human relationships.

You can watch on Max or Cinemax

Jurassic Park : Adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park

Michael Crichton’s science fiction novel about resurrected dinosaurs captivated readers and moviegoers alike. 

When Steven Spielberg brought this science-fiction thriller to life on the big screen in 1993, it became an instant classic and set a high bar for book to movie adaptations.

Jurassic Park was a story ahead of its time, exploring the ethical implications of genetic engineering and the consequences of playing with the laws of nature. 

The concept of dinosaurs being brought back to life continues to capture the fascination of viewers young and old. 

Jurassic Park tapped into humanity’s enduring curiosity about these ancient creatures, ensuring its appeal remains timeless.

Spielberg’s book to movie adaptation captured the essence of Crichton’s vision, making it accessible to a broader audience while maintaining the novel’s core ideas.

The film made history with its groundbreaking use of CGI and animatronics. 

The lifelike dinosaurs, from the awe-inspiring Tyrannosaurus rex to the cunning Velociraptors, brought an unparalleled level of realism to the screen.

Spielberg masterfully maintained the novel’s tension and suspense, delivering thrilling sequences that kept audiences on the edge of their seats. 

From the electrifying T. rex encounter to the heart-pounding Velociraptor chase, the film delivered on its promise of adventure and danger.

Spielberg’s ability to capture the wonder and danger of Crichton’s narrative, paired with groundbreaking visuals and a timeless story, resulted in a film that not only pleased fans of the novel but also introduced a new generation to the thrill of dinosaurs on the big screen.

You can stream JP on DirecTV or Fubo, rent on Prime Video or YouTube

The Silence of the Lambs : Adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

Thomas Harris’s chilling novel provided the source material for this psychological thriller directed by Jonathan Demme. 

At the heart of the film’s success is its unwavering loyalty to Thomas Harris’s novel. 

The screenplay by Ted Tally remains true to the novel’s intricate plot, its compelling characters, and the psychological depth that made the book a bestseller.

The Silence of the Lambs is a psychological thriller that delves deep into the minds of its characters, particularly the complex relationship between Clarice Starling and Dr. Hannibal Lecter. 

The film effectively captures the psychological tension and suspense that made the novel so gripping.

The film boasts an extraordinary cast led by Jodie Foster as Clarice and Anthony Hopkins as Lecter. 

Hopkins’ portrayal of the iconic cannibalistic psychiatrist earned him an Academy Award and remains one of the most chilling and memorable performances in cinematic history. 

Foster’s Clarice is equally captivating, showcasing her determination and vulnerability.

The film explores complex themes of gender and power, particularly in the interactions between Clarice and Dr. Lecter. 

These themes are as relevant today as when the novel was written, sparking important discussions about gender dynamics and women in law enforcement.

With its exceptional cast, intense psychological storytelling, and cultural impact, the film stands as a cinematic classic that continues to thrill and chill audiences. 

It remains a testament to the power of adaptation when executed with skill and dedication to the original work.

Stream on Max

The Great Gatsby : Adapation of the Novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Baz Luhrmann’s visually stunning adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel captures the opulence and excess of the Jazz Age. 

Luhrmann, known for his visually opulent filmmaking style, brought a unique and contemporary vision to The Great Gatsby .

 The film’s dazzling cinematography, extravagant costumes, and spectacular party scenes create a visually immersive experience.

While Luhrmann’s adaptation introduced some modern elements and stylized storytelling successfully transporting the Roaring Twenties to the 21st century, it remained remarkably faithful to Fitzgerald’s novel. 

The screenplay, co-written by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, preserved the novel’s themes, characters, and iconic lines.

The themes explored in The Great Gatsby, such as the American Dream, decadence, love, and societal disintegration, remain relevant in today’s society. 

The story has always been more than just a love story; it’s a commentary on the decadence and superficiality of the American Dream. 

The movie effectively highlights these societal critiques, making them resonate with contemporary audiences.

Luhrmann’s direction and the film’s narrative style created an engaging storytelling experience. 

The use of Nick Carraway’s narration and flashbacks added depth to the characters and plot, enriching the viewer’s understanding of the story.

This modern and visually stunning take on Fitzgerald’s novel allowed audiences to re-engage with the story, themes, and characters in a fresh and captivating way.

Rent on Apple TV, Prime Video, Google Play, etc

The Hunger Games Franchise: Adaptation of the Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins’s dystopian young adult series came to life in this successful film franchise. 

Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss Everdeen, a strong-willed heroine, resonated with audiences and solidified the adaptation’s success.

One of the most crucial aspects of a successful book to movie adaptation is its ability to remain loyal to the source material. 

The Hunger Games films meticulously retained the novels’ compelling storylines, character development, and socio-political commentary, ensuring that the essence of Collins’ vision remained intact.

The films captured the dystopian world of Panem with striking visuals, immersive sets, and meticulous attention to detail. 

From the stark contrast between the Capitol’s opulence and the districts’ poverty to the elaborate designs of the arenas, the films effectively conveyed the stark divide within this fictional society.

The trilogy delves into themes such as totalitarianism, the media’s power, wealth disparity, and the exploitation of youth. 

These themes resonated with contemporary audiences and prompted discussions on real-world issues, giving the story a sense of relevance and urgency.

The films paid special attention to character development, ensuring that viewers empathized with the characters’ struggles, growth, and relationships. 

The Hunger Games trilogy empowered young audiences by featuring a strong and relatable female protagonist in Katniss Everdeen. 

The films promoted diversity and explored complex gender dynamics, sparking important discussions about representation in media.

The Hunger Games will always be remembered not only for its thrilling action sequences but also for its meaningful social commentary and the lasting impact it has had on both literature and cinema.

The Revenant : Adaptation of Michael Punke’s Novel

Inspired by Michael Punke’s novel, this film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu is a visceral and visually stunning experience.

 Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as frontiersman Hugh Glass earned him an Academy Award, while the film itself was celebrated for its cinematography and storytelling.

González Iñárritu, along with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, crafted a visually stunning film. 

The Revenant is a visual masterpiece, characterized by breathtaking landscapes, long single-take sequences, and a sense of immersive storytelling that enhances the cinematic experience.

DiCaprio’s portrayal of Glass was also nothing short of spectacular. 

His physically demanding performance, complete with enduring extreme weather conditions and physically grueling scenes, earned him his first Academy Award for Best Actor. 

DiCaprio’s immersion in the character was crucial in bringing the protagonist to life with authenticity and depth.

Tom Hardy’s performance as the antagonist, John Fitzgerald, is a brilliant foil to DiCaprio’s Glass. 

Hardy’s portrayal adds depth to the character, creating a complex dynamic that fuels the film’s central conflict.

The film’s technical achievements, including its use of natural lighting, minimal CGI, and innovative camera work, set new standards in the industry. 

It showcased the possibilities of filmmaking and served as a testament to the dedication of the cast and crew.

Beyond its visceral storytelling, The Revenant delves into profound philosophical themes, exploring the human condition, the cost of survival, and the enduring power of the human spirit. 

The Revenant exemplifies the heights that a book to movie adaptation can achieve when executed with precision and artistic excellence. 

With its unwavering fidelity to the source material, stellar performances, technical brilliance, and emotionally charged storytelling, the film not only honors Punke’s novel but also stands as an enduring cinematic achievement.

The Social Network: Adaptation of the Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich

Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires , captured the essence of the rise of Facebook and its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, through sharp dialogue and strong performances.

The Social Networ k tells the story of Facebook’s inception and its tumultuous early years, making it a relevant and timely subject matter. 

The film explores themes of entrepreneurship, friendship, betrayal, and the impact of technology on society, resonating with contemporary audiences.

The Social Network delves into the complex personalities and motivations of its characters, humanizing tech titans and making their interpersonal conflicts and legal battles engaging and relatable.

Beyond the creation of Facebook, The Social Network offers a deeper exploration of the societal implications of social media. 

It raises questions about privacy, ethics, and the impact of online platforms on interpersonal relationships.

Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay is a tour de force of witty, rapid-fire dialogue. Sorkin’s clever writing not only captures the essence of Mark Zuckerberg’s personality but also adds depth to the characters and their complex relationships. 

The screenplay won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, showcasing its excellence.

David Fincher’s meticulous and visually arresting direction elevates the film. 

His signature style, characterized by dark and moody aesthetics, lends itself well to the intense drama and intrigue of the story.

The film has left a lasting impact on popular culture, influencing discussions on technology, entrepreneurship, and the social media landscape. 

It remains a reference point for exploring the origin of one of the world’s most influential platforms.

The art of adapting books into movies is as old as cinema itself, and it continues to evolve. 

While not every book to movie adaptation can achieve critical and commercial success, the best ones manage to capture the essence of the source material while making smart creative choices to suit the medium. 

As filmmakers continue to tackle the challenge of bringing books to the screen, the enduring allure of these book to movie adaptations lies in their ability to bridge two different worlds of storytelling.

Corrine Asbell is a former journalist and an unashamed video game aficionado. When not glued to her PS5 she’s rewatching Star Wars and trying to learn Swedish. Hej hej!

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Adaptation by Thomas Leitch , Kyle Meikle LAST REVIEWED: 29 September 2014 LAST MODIFIED: 29 September 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0116

Studies of cinematic adaptations—films based, as the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences puts it, on material originally presented in another medium—are scarcely a century old. Even so, particular studies of adaptation, the process by which texts in a wide range of media are transformed into films (and more recently into other texts that are not necessarily films), cannot be properly understood without reference to the specific period they were produced in. Each generation of adaptation studies has produced its own principles and orthodoxies, typically by attacking the orthodoxies and principles of the preceding generation. Adaptation studies have regularly alternated between polemics that attacked earlier assumptions in the field and readings of individual adaptations that have explored the implications of these attacks and so implicitly established new orthodoxies. The earliest work on adaptation, from Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture , first published in 1915, to André Bazin’s “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” first published in 1948, grapples with the general relationship between literature and cinema as presentational modes. The second phase, focusing mostly on adaptations of individual novels to films, follows George Bluestone’s highly influential 2003 study Novels into Film , originally published in 1957, in assuming a series of categorical distinctions between verbal and visual representational modes. Most studies of individual adaptations and their sources, and most textbooks on adaptation, have been produced under the influence of these assumptions. In this third phase, Robert Stam’s 2000 article “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation” rejects the binary distinctions between source texts and adaptations; Kamilla Elliott’s 2003 book Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate deconstructs the binary distinctions between verbal and visual texts; and Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn’s 2012 book A Theory of Adaptation emphasizes the continuities between texts that have been explicitly identified as adaptations and all other texts as intertextual palimpsests marked by traces of innumerable earlier texts. This third phase has generated most of the leading work on adaptation theory. An emerging fourth phase is heralded by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s 1999 study Remediation: Understanding New Media and Lev Manovich’s 2001 book The Language of New Media . Both are inspired by the rise of the digital media that establishes every reader as a potential writer. These analysts use a Wiki-based model of writing as community participation rather than individual creation to break down the distinction between reading and writing and recast adaptation as a quintessential instance of the incessant process of textual production. A leading tendency of this fourth phase has been to use methodologies developed for literature-to-film adaptation to analyze adaptations that range far outside literature and cinema.

General Resources

Earlier than any other area of cinema studies, adaptation began to generate a substantial body of resources specifically designed for teachers, students, and academic researchers. The dominance of the case study in the second phase of adaptation studies produced an especially comprehensive and wide-ranging series of literature-to-cinema filmographies, some aiming for exhaustiveness, others for greater selectivity and more extended analysis of particular novel-to-film or theater-to-film pairs. The prominence of college courses in film adaptation generated a number of textbooks focusing on cinematic adaptation, and later a series of essays considering the larger theoretical and pedagogical issues that were raised, or that could be raised, by focusing on adaptations.

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How To Write An Adaptation: A Complete Guide [With Examples]

Adaptations are a tricky business. If a story has been told previously in another medium, is it still possible to put a new spin on it?

How do we go about telling the same story but in a different way?

In the case of films, adaptations can be particularly challenging.

Film is a relatively young medium, and many of the stories that have been told within it are adaptations from other sources.  

How To Write An Adaptation

What is an adaptation in film.

An adaptation is a motion picture that takes a story from one medium and recreates it for another. Most commonly it refers to a novel or short story that is made into a feature film.

Some of the most famous examples are The Lord of the Rings, The Godfather and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

But adaptations can be found in all forms of media. A poem can become a ballet, a play can become another play or even a film, and so on.

An adaptation doesn’t have to be directly faithful to the original work — it just has to include the same characters or ideas, with some modification.  

Adapting a beloved book or play into a screenplay is an art form that balances original storytelling with faithful representation.

We’ll guide you through the intricate process of transforming source material into a compelling script that honors its origins while captivating new audiences.

We’ll jump into the essentials of selecting key moments, developing characters for the screen, and weaving dialogue that resonates.

Stay with us as we unlock the secrets to writing an adaptation screenplay that could be the next hit at the box office.

Selecting Key Moments From The Source Material

When adapting a book or play into a screenplay, it’s crucial to distill the essence of the source material.

We identify the pivotal moments that define the narrative arc and resonate with audiences.

These selected scenes ensure the screenplay remains true to the original story’s core.

They act as anchors that drive the plot forward and maintain thematic consistency.

To choose these moments, we consider the following:

• The significance to the overall story arc,
• Character development and transformations,
• Scenes that evoke strong emotional responses.

It’s not just about choosing any moment that stands out.

We must look for scenes that serve a dual purpose – advancing the story and deepening character relationships.

The opening sequence of The Godfather , for example, sets the tone for the entire film, introducing the main characters and their world in a powerful way.

Adaptation is also an opportunity for innovation.

Where the book or play might jump into introspective monologues, a film adaptation could transform these into compelling visual sequences.

Think of how Fight Club used visuals to translate an internal struggle into an external one.

By carefully selecting these key moments, we create a robust framework for our screenplay.

Every scene we choose is a building block that supports the creation of an engaging and cohesive cinematic experience.

As such, certain scenes may be condensed or expanded to fit the film’s pacing, ensuring that each moment on screen is impactful and purpose-driven.

In the end, it’s the careful balance of fidelity to the source material and creative liberties that defines the success of an adaptation.

Continuity in themes and consistency in characters guide us while we navigate the complexities of translating a written work to the big screen.

Understanding The Art Of Adaptation

Writing an adaptation screenplay involves a deep comprehension of the original work.

We jump into the essence of the narrative, exploring themes, characters, and the unique world the author has crafted.

The challenge lies in the distillation process.

We must identify what to keep, modify, or cut to ensure a filmable script while respecting the source material’s spirit.

Key to our success is recognizing the different storytelling tools at our disposal.

• Film is a visual medium.
• Books rely on the reader’s imagination.

We’re tasked with reimagining the internal monologues and rich textual descriptions into dynamic visual scenes.

Translating prose into compelling visuals and dialogues invites audiences into the story’s heart through a different lens.

Maintaining the story’s core elements becomes a balancing act.

We’re involved in weaving the narrative through scenes that capture the book or play’s climax and emotional beats without relying on its original form of exposition.

We often face the decision of whether to stay true to the original or to introduce new twists and perspectives.

Works like The Godfather show how films can become distinct entities that honor their source while crafting their own identity.

Developing character arcs and plot points for the screen requires a synthesis of the original text and our creative interpretation.

• We take cues from the source material’s dialogue.
• We infuse it with cinematic tension and pacing.

We understand that the art of adaptation is not about a direct translation.

It’s about capturing the essence and translating a story that stands on its own in the world of cinema.

Our goal is to create an experience that resonates with both fans of the original work and new audiences alike.

Developing Characters On The Screen

Adapting characters from a book to the silver screen presents its own set of challenges.

It’s not just about transferring a character’s actions; it’s about reimagining their essence in a visual medium.

Often, internal thoughts and motivations in literature are presented through extensive internal monologue.

In film, we must convey these elements through actions, dialogue, and visual cues.

We consider the subtler aspects of character development, like mannerisms and interactions with the environment.

These are critical in making characters relatable and memorable.

It’s vital to grasp a character’s narrative importance.

This means focusing on:

• How their journey impacts the overall story – Their relationships with other characters – The evolution of their personality throughout the narrative.

Let’s consider the protagonist.

We must ensure their goals are clear and that their struggle resonates with viewers.

This requires a deep understanding of their background, motivations, and character flaws.

Supporting characters also require attention – they should complement the protagonist and enhance the story.

We avoid making them mere plot devices, instead giving them their own arcs and depth.

We take note of character dynamics as they are integral to the story’s progression.

The chemistry between characters often drives the plot forward and adds layers to the narrative.

Screenplay adaptations often involve streamlining or combing characters to suit the film’s pacing.

We make tough choices, keeping the story’s integrity at the forefront of these decisions.

Understanding the role that each character plays in the narrative is a delicate balance.

We strive to keep the spirit of book characters alive while revamping them for film audiences.

Weaving Dialogue That Resonates

When we adapt a screenplay from a book or play, the dialogue is our paintbrush for coloring the emotions and motives of characters.

Dialogue must move the plot along while staying true to the character’s voice.

In screenplays, less is often more.

Practicing brevity while making each word count is crucial for dialogue that packs a punch.

Characters on screen communicate differently than they do on paper.

We must ensure that their words are not only heard but felt, creating a connection with the audience.

Subtext is as significant as the spoken words.

Through dialogue, we hint at underlying tensions or hidden motives, influencing how the audience perceives a scene.

Adapting dialogue involves making it crisp, realistic, and suitable for the visual medium.

Here’s what we pay attention to:

• Authenticity – ensuring characters speak as they would in real life,
• Pacing – balancing dialogue with action to maintain rhythm,
• Voice – giving each character a distinctive way of speaking.

Remember that actions often speak louder than words.

We work hard to let a character’s actions supplement or even replace dialogue to convey complex emotions.

Iconic lines in films like The Godfather or Casablanca weren’t just words; they were a culmination of context, delivery, and timing.

Our aim is to create moments that stand the test of time.

We value the magic that dialogue adds to cinematic storytelling.

Our goal is to craft conversations that draw audiences into the world we’ve adapted from page to screen.

Honoring The Source Material While Adding Originality

Adapting a screenplay calls for a delicate blend of respect and ingenuity.

We’re tasked with the challenge of staying true to the original book or play while infusing it with fresh perspectives that enhance the material.

To achieve this balance, we consider what made the book or play a success in the first place.

Core themes, unforgettable character arcs, and the story’s setting are often integral to this initial success.

We strive to preserve these elements to maintain the spirit of the source.

Yet, originality is the currency of our age.

We dare to add unique elements that set our adaptation apart.

This might involve:

• Introducing a new character that resonates with today’s audiences – Reimagining a scenario to reflect contemporary issues – Crafting a new plot twist that aligns with the original story’s message.

Our role is to craft dialogues and scenes that serve as homages to the original work while also standing on their own merit.

We want to create moments that spark a connection with new viewers and resonate with fans of the original.

Choosing what to keep and what to reinvent requires astute judgment.

Each decision is weighed against the impact it may have on the story’s essence and audience expectations.

We navigate the adaptation process with an acute awareness of the original creator’s vision.

Our goal isn’t simply to repurpose content but to blend the familiar with the novel to create an experience that honors its roots while growing new branches.

How To Write An Adaptation Screenplay – Wrap Up

Crafting an adaptation screenplay is a journey that requires a delicate blend of respect for the original work and the courage to inject new life into the story.

We’ve explored the art of selecting pivotal moments, reimagining characters for the screen, and the pivotal role of dialogue.

It’s about making every scene and line of dialogue count while staying true to the essence that captivated us in the first place.

By balancing these elements, we create adaptations that resonate with audiences and stand as a testament to the stories we love.

Let’s continue to honor the visions of original creators and delight viewers with our storytelling craft.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are key moments in adapting a book or play into a screenplay.

Key moments are pivotal scenes that define the narrative arc and resonate with the audience.

They serve as plot anchors, ensuring thematic consistency while driving the story forward.

How Can Innovation Be Incorporated Into An Adaptation?

Innovation in adaptation can be achieved by transforming introspective monologues into visual sequences, taking creative liberties while maintaining fidelity to the source material to keep the adaptation engaging and fresh.

What Challenges Come With Adapting Characters To The Screen?

Adapting characters to the screen involves reimagining their essence visually, and expressing their thoughts and motivations through dialogue and actions.

Tough choices may include streamlining or combining characters while preserving the story’s integrity.

Why Is Dialogue Important In Screenplay Adaptation?

Dialogue in a screenplay moves the plot and conveys character voices.

It should be brief and impactful, using subtext and action to express complex emotions and create memorable moments that resonate with audiences.

How Can Originality Be Balanced With Honoring The Source Material In An Adaptation?

Balancing originality with honoring the source involves staying true to core themes, character arcs, and settings while adding unique elements that enhance and distinguish the adaptation.

Choices regarding what to keep or reinvent should respect the story’s essence and audience expectations.

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Matt Crawford

Related posts, three act structure in film: a complete guide [with examples], what is a story outline: meaning, examples & tips for effective outlines, byronic hero in literature & film: crafting compelling heros, what are flashforwards in film & literature a quick guide, what are confidant characters in literature & film complete guide, what is political fiction in film & literature impact & role in writing.

Excellent documentation.

Thanks, Efren.

Hey I’d like to know when you’ve posted this article. I found it very interesting and I’d like to use it for a school work but I need to know the year of publishment to be able to use it. Thanks in advance !

Hi Dupuis, It was published 3rd March 2022. Matt Crawford.

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THEORIES OF ADAPTATION: NOVEL TO FILM

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International Journal of Innovative Knowledge Concepts- ISSN 2454-2415- Vol 1- 2017, 2017

Many film critics like have provided a base for the nature and method of the adaptation as an inter-relative idea between literature and film. The film script is not always an entirely new literary form. It simply translates. According to Balazs, the novel or drama should be regarded, as a potential raw material to be transformed at will by the writer of the screenplay. After that, the screenplay has an ability to approach reality, to approach the thematic and the formal design of the literary model and represent it with various viewpoints. The adaptation is also considered as an entirely new entity which provides several variations also. This paper attempts to explore the visual medium translation of the printed words by analyzing Shakespeare"s Macbeth in its various cinematic interpretations. Macbeth was adopted by many filmmakers across the world and this paper deliberates on three major adaptations: Indian version of Macbeth by Vishal Bhardwaj called Maqbool, Orson Welles"s version of Macbeth (1948) and Akira Kurosawa"s Japanese version of Macbeth called The Throne of Blood Introduction:

To what extent our innermost feelings can be revealed through our works? The unbearable face of human being cannot be hidden and what a director shot in a film may reveal the real sense of what is hidden from our eyes. Thus directors sometimes try to hide their dark side behind such interesting movies after having modified the events of the original text to achieve their end. This paper, however, is an overview about the technique of adaptation which varies from one adaptationist to another depending on the historical background of the screenplay writer. Although the director succeeds to project what is on one side of his curtain, he fails to hide what is on the other side that discloses his innermost feelings.

Journal of Screenwriting, 2016

The purpose of this paper is to show how recent research on the nature of dramatic language can further our understanding of the problematic nature of exporting Shakespearean texts on to the medium of film. This paper is written in three parts. The first part discusses the performance-orientation of dramatic language; the second part considers the possible choreography for spatial organization and kinesics suggested by dramatic language; the third part looks at some of the ways cinema neutralizes the performative potential of dramatic language. The central argument is that a successful modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare's plays will in some ways be hindered by the retention of the original script.

Studies in Literature and Language, 2010

This research is based on my multiple readings and re-readings of the novels of George Orwell for almost two decades. Orwell’s 1984, at least, is not just a very influent writing on our perceptions regarding surveillance: “Big Brother” is everywhere as discursive instance in our days; this may be a political and sociological starting point of discussion. Besides, it is a good example for discussing various aspects of how literature is used by readers – implying a whole debate upon the functions of literature. My reading of the filmic rewriting of Orwell’s 1984 (discussed in another study) revealed profound mutations in analysing the film as medium. It provided grounds for comparison, but not just for the sake of comparison (“comparaison n’est pas raison”, as Rene Etiemble emphasized in ‘60s). It is a fruitful starting point, as I try to focus on the relationships not only between film and literature, but also on dialectics of various approaches on the relationship between these media. The main goals are to observe and to evaluate what “degree of theoreticity” is admitted in our critical reading of adaptation. Comparatists should also investigate – as Claudio Guillén stated in Entre lo uno y lo diverso: introducción a la literatura comparada (1985) – how far can we go with categories or classes when they are subject of a comparative reading. In analysing the relationships between film and literature, one must not forget Susan Sontag’s claim in affirming that film, the narrative film namely (use of plot, characters, setting, dialogue, imagery, manipulating time and space) shares with literature the most.

As old as the machinery of film itself, literary texts have continually informed cinematic adaptations. The interaction of two discrete media evokes questions pertaining to the nature of adaptations. Are they a new text or is a text purely 'textual'? In light of adaptation theory and the history of cinema, this paper offers a brief assessment of this phenomenological inquiry. 'Fidelity' to the source literary text has conventionally been the primary criterion for assessing a film adaptation. This paper also explores this assumption and its transformation in the postmodern world.

Literature Film Quarterly, 2013

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BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW

From Pages to Premiers: The Case for Book To Movie Adaptations

The book is always better than the movie. Everyone knows that. But what if that’s not the point? 

From the saturation of book-based rom coms on Netflix to the high-production Hollywood book-adapted films that seem to pop out every month, it feels like book-adapted movies are a fairly recent 2000’s phenomenon. On the contrary, this film genre actually made its mark in media history over a century ago. 

The first recorded film based on literature was the 1899 movie Cinderella , directed by French director Georges Méliès in 1899. The film was adapted from the original Cinderella text written by French author Charles Perrault and was the first ever film adaptation of the classic tale. 

As the decades rolled on, more adaptations started to arrive on the silver screen. This resulted in the creation of a whole new film genre. Eventually, these adaptations became academy-award winning, iconic titles such as The Godfather I and II (1972 and 1974), Jaws (1975), Schindler’s List (1993) and Fight Club (1999)—each based on books of the same name. 

With this popularity came the now age-old debate: are the books better than the movies?

Past the 1900’s, popular book-to-movie adaptations included defining titles of the young adult literature genre, including the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Divergent series. The existence of these movies has defined pop culture history, and fan bases and fantastical worlds of these series have taken on lives of their own. With this popularity came the now age-old debate: are the books better than the movies? Though the discourse tosses and turns, the short answer to that question is always yes. But so what? 

Books and movies have often been pitted against each other as conflicting forms of media, especially when the latter is derived from a preexisting piece of literature. Some argue against its necessity—what’s the point of making books into movies? It seems like with the recent mass production of book-adapted films and series, quantity is prioritized over quality to satisfy fans. With the media oversaturation of book-based movies and series, it’s only expected for a debate regarding the devaluation of literature to emerge.

For some, compromising a book’s essence to fit ninety minutes of screentime is a crime against the original text. Characters are distorted and plot points are morphed, betraying the original soul of the story. Should literature be kept just that, literature, in order to preserve the narrative in its purest art form? Is fan service worth the warped adaptations of initially wonderful stories? 

For the longest time, I have been the book’s strongest defender in this debate. To me, books are always better, no debate is even warranted. But as I started to grow as a reader, writer, and conscious consumer of all forms of media, I soon realized it doesn’t really matter. 

But as I started to grow as a reader, writer, and conscious consumer of all forms of media, I soon realized it doesn’t really matter.

Art lives to be loved. If turning books into movies makes these stories more accessible, leading more people to love the tales being told, what’s the harm? 

It is almost unbelievable, the way that transforming books into movies ensures the immortality of the original text. What is on the internet stays on the internet forever, and for book-adapted movies, this is a good thing. They take on a life of their own. From Harry Potter to Twilight, most of these young adult series have shaped childhoods (including mine!). They inspired a love for stories within budding brains. Their movies spark a sense of curiosity and fantasy, and even encourage viewers to read. If you think the movie was good, wait till you read the book!

I remember being a part of these fantasy worlds and escaping into the movies and books with my friends. It was the purest form of excitement, and the popularity of these books and collective universes would not have been possible without its evolution into movies. By becoming large scale franchises, these books became worldwide phenomena. With that, they were able to take even more fans under their wing—to invite more people to love the stories being told.

Even when the movies are so terrible they are shunned for existing (not looking at you at all, Percy Jackson), the discourse it inspires only markets the original text. The debate becomes an endearing aspect of the book’s culture, and the excitement around the books live on.

As someone who loves escaping into the make-believe world of books and movies, the line between them has always been the most exciting to walk. The anticipation of seeing characters I’ve imagined come to life on screen and the teetering between satisfaction and disappointment is a process I always enjoy no matter the outcome.

Instead of just one version of the story, there are multiple that take on narratives of their own.

Turning these books into movies means making these worlds infinite. Instead of just one version of the story, there are multiple that take on narratives of their own. For instance, the infamous discrepancy between the way Dumbledore calmly questioned Harry in the Goblet of Fire, as the book says, and the way it was portrayed in the movie (who can forget “HARRY DID YAH PUT YAH NAME IN DA GOBLET OF FIYA!!”)

Adapting books into movies also means a new chance at diversifying and refreshing outdated plot values. Iconic books, though well-loved, are often written from western-centric and patriarchal perspectives with little or no space for diverse characters. Adapting these stories into modern movies means getting the chance to retain the heart of the story while refreshing it to be more inclusive. For instance, Hollywood’s most recent adaptation of the 1965 sci-fi novel Dune by Frank Herbert starring Timothee Chalamet and Oscar Isaac—though remained mostly faithful to the original text—included some significant casting differences in an efforts to be more inclusive. The character of Liet Kynes, originally written to be a white male, was gender swapped and played by Black actress Sharon Duncan-Brewster in the 2021 adaptation. The character of Chani, originally portrayed by white actress Sean Young in the 1984 production of Dune, was recast and played by Black actress Zendaya. In this case, it is clear to see how adapting books into movies gives young, diverse audiences the chance to see people like themselves playing the characters they love. 

And when did catering to fans become bad practice? Isn’t pleasing the audience and inspiring excitement the very point of these movies? Turning books into movies intensifies the existing adoration for these stories. The way I see it, the existence of these movies bring about so much good that the quality of them doesn’t matter in comparison. Art lives to be loved, and isn’t it a good thing that there is more to love in the world?

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Published by Vicky Chong

Vicky Chong is a senior at UC Berkeley who has written for the Berkeley Fiction Review, the Daily Californian, and Tatler Magazine Malaysia. Her favorite things include (in no particular order) dim sum, bathrobes, and chinchilla Instagram accounts. She can be found on Instagram herself @v1ckychong. View all posts by Vicky Chong

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Essay Evaluating an Adaptatioono

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Lesson Plans Using Film Adaptations of Novels, Short Stories or Plays

— with discussion questions and assignments.

For a list of movies frequently shown as adaptations of literary works, see TWM’s Adaptations Index .

Used appropriately, movies based on novels or short stories can supplement units based on the written original, enhance students’ interest in analyzing the written work, and motivate classes to excel in completing assignments that teach the skills required by the ELA curriculum. Filmed versions of plays supply the same benefits and often provide an experience that is close to viewing a live performance. Studying a cinematic adaptation of a literary work will show students how words are converted to visual media and allow a comparison of the written original to the cinematic version, permitting teachers to highlight the techniques of both film and the written word in telling a story. Presenting a filmed adaptation with high production values will demonstrate that movies can be an art form which communicates differently, but no less importantly, than the written word. Moreover, when used as a reward for having read a novel, a filmed adaptation can demonstrate that novel-length works of fiction usually contain a wealth of detail, information, and subplot that cannot be included in a movie. For all of these reasons, filmed adaptations of novels, short stories, or plays, are excellent resources for lessons requiring students to learn and exercise the analytical and writing skills required by ELA curriculum standards.

Note that novels and short stories can be analyzed for their use of the devices of fiction. Plays employ most of the devices of fiction but add the theatrical devices of music, sound effects, lighting, acting, set design, etc. Movies employ most of the fictional and theatrical devices as well as a separate set of cinematic techniques such as shot angle, focus, editing, etc. This essay focuses of the literary devices shared by written works, theatrical works, and film. For an analysis of theatrical and cinematic devices, see TWM’s Introducing Cinematic and Theatrical Elements in Film .

I. SHOWING THE FILM BEFORE READING A NOVEL, SHORT STORY, OR THE SCRIPT OF A PLAY

Usually, a filmed adaptation of a written work is best shown after a novel or short story has been read by students. This avoids the problem of students watching the movie in place of reading the book or story. However, in certain instances, where the written work is hard to follow or when students have limited reading skills, it is better to show the film before reading the written work or to show segments of the film while the writing is being read. Students who have difficulty reading a novel or a short story can often follow the conflicts, complications, and resolutions in a screened version that they would otherwise miss. For example, obscure vocabulary and difficult sentence structure in The Scarlet Letter and Billy Budd make these classics difficult reading for today’s students. The PBS version of The Scarlet Letter and the Ustinov version of Billy Budd are excellent adaptations which can serve as an introduction and make the reading more understandable. Viewing a filmed adaptation of a book by Jane Austen enables students to understand the story and avoid getting lost in the language as they read. (See “Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility as Gateway to Austen’s Novel” by Cheryl L. Nixon, contained in Jane Austen in Hollywood, Edited by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, 1998, University of Kentucky Press, pages 140 – 147.)

Plays, which were meant to be watched rather than read, are usually a different matter. Viewing a staged presentation with actors, a set, sound, and lighting is an experience more like watching a movie than reading a script. One of the few exceptions are the plays of Shakespeare which are usually better when read and studied before they are seen. Students need to be introduced to the Bard’s language in order appreciate a performance.

II. SCREENING ALL OR PART OF THE MOVIE IN SEGMENTS

A film can be segmented, or chunked, and shown before or after the corresponding segment is read by students studying the novel, story or play on which the movie is based. Have students keep up with the reading so that the timing is accurate and the events in the film do not get ahead of their presentation in the written work.

Several of the assignments suggested in Section IV can be modified for segmented viewing. The following assignment will allow students to exercise their analytical and writing skills after a segment of the film has been shown. The assignments can be modified to focus on specific elements of fiction or literary devices.

Discussion Question: What is the difference in the presentation of the story between this segment of the film and the corresponding sections of the [novel/story/play]? [Lead students into a discussion of any important elements of fiction or literary devices which are present in both or which are present in one but not the other.]

Assignment: [Describe a scene in the film.] Compare this segment of the movie with the corresponding sections of the [novel/story/play]. Cite specific examples to illustrate how the presentation in the two media either differ or are the same. Your comparison should include: (1) any elements of fiction and literary devices which are present in both or which are present in one but not in the other; (2) a discussion of the tone of the two presentations; and (3) an evaluation of the two presentations stating which you think is more effective in communicating the ideas contained in the story, including your reasons for that opinion. When you refer to the [novel/story/play], list specific pages on which the language you are referring to appears.

III. WATCHING THE MOVIE AFTER THE BOOK HAS BEEN READ

Comparing film adaptations with their literary sources can enhance students’ ability to analyze, think, and critique the writing, imagery, and tone of a literary work. Differences between the movie and the written work can be used to explicate various literary devices. The discussion questions and assignments set out below, as they are written or modified to take into account the needs of the class, will assist teachers in making good use of a filmed adaptation of a novel, short story, or play.

Before showing the film, think about whether you want to point the students’ attention toward any issues that you want them to think about as they watch the movie. This could be the use of a motif or other literary device or changes in theme. Many of the discussion question and assignments set out below can be easily adapted to be given to students before they watch the film, the discussion to be held, and the assignment completed after the movie is over.

IV. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR USE WITH FILMED ADAPTATIONS

Fill in the blanks with a number appropriate to the abilities of the class and the relationship of the written work to the filmed adaptation. To make sure that students complete the assigned reading, the exercises set out below require a thorough knowledge of the written work with references to page numbers of the text.

• Discussion Question: How is the presentation of [name a major character who appears in both versions] different in the [book/story/play] and the movie? [Follow up with:] Why did the filmmakers change the way in which this character was presented?

Assignment: Describe _____ characters which appear in both the film and the [book/story/play]. At least one of them should be a minor character. Specify how dialogue, action, and physical appearance in the movie define the individual. Using direct quotes from the written work, citing page numbers, describe the characters using the same criteria. Evaluate which presentation is best in allowing either the viewer or the reader to fully grasp the nature of the characters.

• Discussion Question: Were any scenes described in the [book/story/play] substantially altered in the filmed adaptation? [Follow up with:] Why did the filmmakers change the scene?

Assignment: Select at least _____ scenes from the film that were altered considerably from similar scenes described in the [novel/story/play]. Use direct reference to details in order to illustrate the differences. Cite specific page numbers when you are referring to anything appearing in the [book/story/script]. Evaluate the changes in terms of how well the intention of the scene is made manifest in either media.

• Discussion Question: What elements of fiction appear in the [book/story/play] but not in the film? Did this detract from the quality of the story told by the movie?

Assignment: Note _____ examples of elements of fiction that have been left out of the film but seem important in the [book/story/play]. Suggest reasons that may justify the elimination of the scenes, characters, subplots, or settings. Be sure to use direct reference, with page numbers, to the written work in order to support the opinion offered.

• Discussion Question: Did the filmmakers add any characters or events that do not appear in the [book/story/play]? Did this help to tell the story first suggested in the literary work?

Assignment: Often in movies, the screenwriters will add characters or events that do not appear in the original [book/story/play]. Note _____ examples of these additions and suggest reasons that they may have been written into the film.

• Discussion Question: How does the tone of the story told in the film differ from the tone of the story told in the [book/story/play]?

Assignment: Evaluate the tone created in the movie. Cite clear examples of color, visuals, editing, and music that may have contributed to the tone of any particular scene. Compare the tone created in the film to the tone created in the [book/story/play] using the same scene. Cite specific examples, giving page numbers, of the description that created the tone in the written work.

• Discussion Question: Did this film change the theme or any of the ideas presented in the [novel/story/play]? What were they? Did these changes improve on the story underlying both the written work and the movie?

Assignment: Ideas are the reasons stories are told. Themes are the major ideas in a story; however, most stories contain other ideas as well. Some films change the ideas presented in the work of literature from which they were adapted. Pay close attention to theme and other ideas in both the written version and in the movie and write about how they were changed. Evaluate the changes.

• Discussion Question: Which told the story better, the [novel/story/play] or the movie?

Assignment: Often a story will seem to be deprived of beauty or meaning by the changes made in a filmed adaptation. On other occasions, the experience of the written story will be enriched by watching a filmed version. Write an informal essay stating your opinion of the quality of the story told by the movie as compared to the [novel/story/play]. Justify your opinion with direct reference to both the film and the written work; for the latter, cite the specific page numbers for the passages on which you rely.

• Discussion Question: Compare the settings of the story in the written work and in the movie. Is the movie faithful to the [novel/short story/play] in terms of the settings used?

Assignment: How do the settings in the movie reflect the images of place found in the [novel/story/play]? Describe specific details in both the film and the work of literature that support your conclusion. When referring to the written work, cite page numbers.

• Discussion Question: Compare the use of visual images in the movie and in the [novel/story/play] in the description of the various characters.

Assignment: Using specific examples of written descriptions in the literary work and visuals in the movie, discuss the presentation of character contained in both.

• Discussion Question: Describe any important differences in theme between the story appearing in the written work and the story told on screen.

Assignment: Attitude toward subject, meaning the basic topic (such as war, love, politics) can shift dramatically between a [novel/story/play] and its movie adaptation. Explain through example any changes that can be seen between the attitude toward the subject expressed by the filmmakers and presented by the author of the [book/story/play].

• Discussion Question: Were any important motifs, symbols, or allusions included in the work of literature missing or changed in the movie adaptation? Why do you think the filmmakers made these changes?

Assignment: Important motifs, symbols, or allusions contained in a written work of fiction are sometimes missing or changed in the movie. Specify examples of these literary tools that are not a part of the filmed adaptation. Note any replacement motifs, symbols or allusions contained in the movie.

• Discussion Question: What, if any, were the changes in the plot between the [book/story/play] and the film?

Assignment: Rising action, an important part in the plots of both written fiction and movies, may be different in filmed adaptations. Note any changes. Describe details which are important in the written work that have been removed from the movie and details which are not in the [book/story/play] which have been added by the filmmakers. When referring to the written work, give the page numbers of any passages or details to which you refer. Justify the changes.

• Discussion Question: Which ending did you like better, the conclusion of the [book/story/play] or the way in which the movie ended? Explain why.

Assignment: Compare the ending of the [book/story/play] to the ending of the film. Illustrate how any differences either reiterate or obscure the intention of the original work. Cite specifics and support all assertions.

Movies with screenplays that are carefully adapted from novels, short stories, and plays can be an important part of lesson planning. Using the techniques described above, teachers can make film adaptations an integral part of the learning process.

Written by Mary RedClay and James Frieden .

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The 10 Best Literary Film Adaptations of the Decade

And then some..

As you may have noticed, over the past few weeks, we’re been looking back at the best books from the decade , from novels to poetry to nonfiction. As a sort of coda to that project, I’ve also polled the staff about their favorite literary adaptations of the decade, on both the big and small screens. Earlier this week, we published our list of the best television adaptations of the decade, and now, as promised, I present our list of the decade’s best films adapted from books.

Take note that we attempted to judge the films in question on their own independent merits; while many of us have read the books these shows are based on, we didn’t base our decisions on fidelity to, or creativity of departure from, the original text. We just wanted to pick the best movies.

As with the previous lists, the top ten big screen adaptations were chosen after a lengthy debate among the Literary Hub staff. It got testy, but in the end, we agreed—though many of us had to include our dissenting opinions at the end of the list. If we’ve missed your favorite, tell us why we’re wrong in the comments.

The Top Ten

Winter’s Bone (2010) Based on:  Winter’s Bone  by Daniel Woodrell (2006)

Debra Granik’s  Winter’s Bone (which she also co-wrote with producer Rosellini) is a beautiful, gritty, horrifying masterpiece. Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell and released in 2010, it is the story of a teenage girl named Ree (Jennifer Lawrence, before her rise to fame and giving the best performance of her career) who lives in the Ozark Mountains with her mother and younger siblings. She serves as the primary caretaker for her whole family—her drug-dealing father has disappeared, and her mother suffers from mental illness. When her family is threatened with eviction, she decides to track down her father. But the neighbors are resistant to her attempts to pry into her father’s life—and she is emphatically discourages by her uncle, a conflicted meth addict named Teardrop (John Hawkes) from searching any further. It is a brutal, cutting film—its pacing is incredibly suspenseful and the acting (often stony), is pitch-perfect. It is a movie of silence, of snow—muted sounds and colors. Until it isn’t, and it transforms into a shocking, scarring, and vibrant spectacle of horror. Debra Granik should direct every movie.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

The Social Network (2010) Based on:  The Accidental Billionaires  by Ben Mezrich (2009)

It’s not going to surprise anyone that David Fincher is has a prominent place on a list like this. His 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl claims one of the spots in the top 10. His 2011 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo very easily could have made it, too—it was arguably one of the most anticipated adaptations in several decades, and despite a lukewarm critical reception at the time has been aging pretty well into something closer to wide acclaim. Mindhunter gets a nod in the TV department. But the real crowning achievement of Fincher’s impressive decade is the one with no killers, no gore, and no brooding violence at all, really, except the violence done to the American social fabric thanks to the rise of a new class of reckless tech billionaires. Somehow, with its dark campus landscapes, Trent Reznor score, and unabashed displays of ambition, The Social Network turns out to be one of Fincher’s most insidious, disturbing works. The adaptation, from Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires , was done by none other than Aaron Sorkin, and like Mezrich’s book, the screenplay zeroes in on the lawsuits filed by the various founders and early developers of Facebook. Depositions have never been captured so perfectly on film, with Jesse Eisenberg as the seething anti-hero, Zuckerberg, facing off against rivals, enemies, and himself. Looking back almost ten years later, it’s incredible just how prescient The Social Network was about the principles and players behind social media. Fincher and Sorkin seemed to see clearly the insecurities and threats behind this strange force.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

True Grit (2010) Based on:  True Grit  by Charles Portis (1968)

True Grit , directed by Joel and Ethan Coen in 2010, is the second adaptation of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel of the same name. The first one, which was made in 1969 and starred John Wayne (in the November of his career), was a chipper, watered-down version of the original story, a vehicle for Wayne to pastiche his whole career as a crochety, no-nonsense cowboy. Wayne won an Oscar (kind of as a tribute) for his role as the crapulent, cantankerous, eye-patch-wearing U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, forever associating himself and his legend with the film. The Coen Brothers’ retelling of the story fully (productively) ignores that the first  True Grit  even happened, drawing its script from Portis’s grim novel, to focus more on the protagonist that the first film dismissed: Mattie Ross, a formidable fourteen-year-old girl who arrives in a small town to retrieve the body of her murdered father. Played to poker-faced perfection by Hailee Steinfeld (and Elizabeth Marvel, later on), Mattie hires Rooster (Jeff Bridges, who has in the last two decades found his calling playing sloppy, insouciant older men) to hunt down and take into custody Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), her father’s murderer. Also along for the ride is a patronizing Texas Ranger named LeBoeuf (Matt Damon, who pronounces it “luh beef”). While the film is structured around the hunt for the killer, it is more about the relationships between the three characters on the journey—or, really, the lack of relationships between them. The film eschews the traditional “it’s the journey, not the destination” cliché of so many expedition-focused stories—the yearning for a connection between them is there, but they are not able to bring it to fruition.

But this is a Western, which means that the relationships that form are not limited to humans. Mattie’s most loving connection will be to Little Blackie, the shiny horse she picks out for herself to ride on the trip. He will (spoiler) ultimately give up his life to save hers, carrying her to medical care after an accident. Horses in  True Grit , seem to play a particularly large role in the film’s construction of a moral hierarchy and are represented as providing integrity to an otherwise cold and chaotic world. As emblematized most obviously by the strutting, gauche Rooster, the wild west of  True Grit  turns everything and everyone into animals. As Mattie (her family’s breadwinner, now) tries to avenge her father, she is truly on the hunt for humanity and support—someone who can help her carry her family through this hard time. But humans, with their nominal superiority of morality and thought, will almost always fail her. And the film beautifully, sadly, darkly, watches humanity leave her with nothing—like the horses who love her back, she too must live as a beast of burden. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) Based on: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré (1974)

Swedish purveyor of moody, broody atmospherics Tomas Alfredson ( Let the Right One In ) conjures the beige-hued, ashen-faced world of jaded British spycraft so impeccably in his adaptation of John Le Carré’s seminal 1974 novel that you can almost smell the stale cigarette smoke and flop sweat, feel the scratchy suit fabric and stained shag carpeting. Gary Oldman plays the latest incarnation of Le Carré’s beleaguered-but-deceptively-cunning career intelligence officer George Smiley, here brought out of retirement and tasked with rooting out a Soviet mole in the upper echelons of the secret service. Alongside him is a rogue’s gallery of stony-faced British acting royalty: Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Hurt, and Tom Hardy, to name but a few. These are men whose emotional lives have been slowly eroded by the grim rituals and moral compromises of service. The whole thing is just so damn bleak, but in a transfixing kind of way. I know that’s a strange argument to make for exalting a film to Best of the Decade status, but Alfredson’s remake is such a fully realized vision that every time I sit down to watch TTSS (usually in the dead of night) I am instantly transported, mesmerized. It’s paradoxical, but there’s something both deeply soothing and deeply unnerving about following Oldman’s stoic, melancholy Smiley through the ruins of this fallen kingdom—a post-Kim Philby landscape of stagnating enmities and vanished idealism.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

The Hunger Games (2012) Based on: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)

With all due respect to everyone who got really mad at Martin Scorcese for saying superhero movies weren’t art, I don’t think that The Hunger Games is great art—but I do think it’s a great adaptation. Not only does it capture the spirit of the book in all its distinctly YA-flavored but still genuinely frightening glory, but it’s also highly entertaining. This is the kind of movie that I’ll watch any time I see it on a screen—much like a character in The Hunger Games unable to look away from the Hunger Games. For one thing, the casting is impeccable: Stanley Tucci at his campy best as Caesar Flickerman! Woody Harrelson as loveable grump Haymitch Abernathy! Wes Bentley! Remember him from American Beauty ? He became a director after all! The director of the Hunger Games! This movie’s montage game is also really strong. I think probably what happened was that the directors gave one overarching note on the screenplay, and that note was “Can this be a montage?” And the answer was often yes! As is the answer to “Should I watch The Hunger Games ?” Jennifer Lawrence is also in it.

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Gone Girl (2014) Based on: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012)

Although Gone Girl needs no introduction, here I go anyway. Gone Girl , the movie, was adapted from Gone Girl, the book, first published in 2012 by Gillian Flynn to immediately become a bestseller. Flynn’s Gone Girl went on to sell two million copies in its first year. The psychological thriller, directed by David Fincher—director of every film you’ve heard of , including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo —starred Rosamund Pike, Ben Affleck, Neil Patrick Harris, and Tyler Perry (among the producers is also Reese Witherspoon) with Gillian Flynn at the helm, writing the screenplay, and was released to wide critical acclaim in 2014, grossing to $369 million. Meanwhile, Rosamund Pike’s performance as Amy Dunne earned her nominations for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. With all the official praise out of the way, now I get to lapse into the story that became a phenomenon.

Gone Girl opens on the day of Amy Dunne’s disappearance, the same day that marks the beginning of the unravelling of her husband Nick Dunne, who is being accused of her murder. In due course, the narrative pulls out from the investigation into Nick Dunne’s culpability and Amy Dunne’s found diary entries, to switch over to Amy, who really, is alive and framing her husband for her murder to punish him for being a bad husband. He is no longer the man she married. The film opens the same way that it closes, with an intimate close up of Amy who is lying down, and staring back at the camera, in a look that should seem affectionate and flirty but instead is unnerving in how ruthless it is. The line Nick speaks over this scene—held too long for comfort—is, “What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?” These words reverberate throughout the movie only to toll again at the finale.

The film is full of chilling contrasts that augment its tension and reinforce its suspense. Notable is Fincher’s excellent depiction of Gone Girl ’s noir aesthetic: evident, for example, in the very dimly lit, empty (albeit in the morning) bar that Nick and Go own, where they play board games while drinking scotch and making light of crude jokes that make one squirm. They also complain about Amy. Excellent in the film is Detective Rhonda Boney: straight-faced, with a southern accent, and a wry humor that disarms New York-endorsed snob Nick just a few minutes into their meeting. A great scene: Nick has just called the police after seeing the living room furniture overturned and the front door ajar, and as procedure requires, Detective Boney evaluates the house; she steps into his bedroom and inquires, casually, about this profession. Nick says he’s a writer. He also owns a bar, named The Bar. “Oh, The Bar,” Boney says, “Love the name. Very meta.” Detective Boney is everything we’ve been taught the crime detective should be, only she is no fool, and she is not arrogant. That is more than we can say about her younger, male lieutenant who is blood-thirsty: he wants Dunne arrested, no matter the evidence. I could go on quite a while about the details of this movie, but the last and very important note I will end on is Amy’s chilling monologue that introduces her true persona to the audience.

Wearing sunglasses and driving with one arm out the window—the arm from which she drew blood to stage a convincing crime scene—Amy is cruising down a country road in the sunlight and we, at this point, know what she did. Here, she gives her iconic “cool girl speech,” the speech that makes a convincing case for the adage, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” The beauty of the speech is that it is dramatic, dripping with anger and, even though we know Amy is a psychopath, and we know we would never take things that far . . . . yet, there’s a flash of a second where we—the audience—nod along and say, yes. Yes. After praising it so highly, it would be cruel to leave you hanging, so here’s a piece of that monologue: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl . . . . Hot and understanding. Cool girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind. I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.” It keeps going—the monologue, in the film, in the book, in your head. Thus is the effect, the phenomenon, of Gone Girl .

–Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Carol (2015) Based on: The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952)

In the dining room of a nondescript hotel by the side of the highway, Therese and Carol are sharing breakfast when a man can’t resist the chance to intrude. Sitting down at their table, he peppers them with questions, and they reply with brief, vague answers, as a parallel but much more interesting conversation plays out between their faces; the subtle raised eyebrow, the mocking nod, a world of communication in plain sight yet utterly hidden to the man in front of them. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt —a book that broke new ground when it was published in 1952 for portraying a lesbian relationship that does not end in despair or death— Carol communicates so much with this kind of unspoken connection and understanding, which made it possible for queer women to find and love each other in an era that would have preferred they remain invisible.

The love story between two women, which begins in the holiday season of 1952, is equally joyful and mindful of the many dangers posed by society’s resistance to queerness and queer sexuality. A.O. Scott wrote for The New York Times that viewers watch the two lovers “in public places, hidden in plain sight, cloaked in unspoken assumptions that are at once painful and protective.” Unlike so many other queer narratives, though, an awareness of that danger does not overshadow their intimacy; instead, it casts light on the tactics that queer women had to employ in order to survive, with incredible results.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

The Handmaiden (2016) Based on:  Fingersmith  by Sarah Waters (2002)

Park Chan-wook’s radical adaptation of Sarah Waters’s novel (by radical I mean he transmuted the action from Victorian-era Britain to 1930s colonial Korea, which was just as rigid and striated by class) was hands-down my favorite film of 2016, never mind my favorite adaptation of a novel. It starts slow, and quiet, which only makes what eventually unfurls—involving an elaborate, multi-faceted con, a torture chamber, a lesbian awakening, a library of porn, and an octopus—that much more striking. Every moment of this film, which is both a love story and a thriller, is gorgeous, and hypnotic, and sexy, and weird as hell. It is beyond good.

And though I know we’re not supposed to be considering the adaptation process, this one was remarkable: it improved upon a book that I already loved. As I wrote back in 2016 , the film “excised everything I didn’t like about the book (an over-complicated, fairly slow third act, for one thing) and replaced it with what I really wished for—the collaboration between these two strange, powerful women. The experience of watching the film reminded me of reading contemporary retellings of fairy tales—it’s a deeply satisfying wish-fulfillment that takes something already good and vital and twists it until it’s unbearably delicious, until it’s exactly what you want. This felt like a feminist reimagining of an already feminist novel.”

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Arrival (2016) Based on: “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (1998)

What if language was the key to knowledge, not only about your neighbor, but about strangers and yourself as well? By the end of  Arrival , the Denis Villeneuve film based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 short story, “Story of Your Life,” the viewer understands this as the movie’s central question. Linguist Louise Banks (played by the ever-reliable Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are called by the US Army to help study one of twelve extraterrestrial spacecrafts that have positioned themselves in scattered locations around the world. What Banks and Donnelly discover aboard the craft are two amorphous alien specimens, which they call “heptapods,” that communicate using a complicated system of logograms, or written characters that represent a word or phrase. This straightforward set-up lays the groundwork for a moving, and often anxiety-inducing, investigation of language, empathy, and miscommunication.  Arrival ’s surprising endgame cemented it as one of the most heartfelt movies of the last decade. The film’s meditative aesthetic is also boosted by a rather primal, ruminative score by the late, great Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Call Me By Your Name (2017) Based on:  Call Me By Your Name  by André Aciman (2007)

André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name , initially thought he would dislike director Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation; from the moment he arrived on a visit to the set, he wrote for Vanity Fai r , it was clear that Guadagnino’s vision for the film was significantly different from the one that had driven his own writing. But the final result, which he saw at the Berlin International Film Festival, and in particular the film’s infamous last shot, floored him. “The ending captured the very spirit of the novel I had written in ways that I could never have imagined or anticipated,” he wrote.

In Guadagnino’s hands, Aciman’s narration of the interior, obsessive Elio, a prodigious 17-year-old, becomes a series of languid Italian summer days over which a love story unfolds between him and Oliver, the older graduate student who comes to stay in their family’s house over the summer. Filmed in the Lombardy region of Italy, the film is so visually lush as to seem unreal, and the intensity of the connection it explores—and all the self-searching that follows it—is almost painful to watch, as Timothée Chalamet (Elio) and Armie Hammer (Oliver) bring a palpable chemistry and sense of constant, unresolved desire to their roles. Its setting, “Somewhere in Northern Italy,” is deliberately vague, Anthony Lane noted for The New Yorker —”the point of a paradise is that it could exist anywhere but that, once you reach the place, it brims with details so precise in their intensity that you never forget them,” he wrote. This film is a paradise worth your time and definitely one of the best adaptations of the last decade.

Dissenting Opinions

The following adaptations were just barely nudged out of the top twenty, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) Based on: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

What happens when someone you love turns out to be a monster? We Need to Talk About Kevin (WNTTAK) understands the complexities of love, grief, anger, and mourning intimately. Based on Lionel Shriver’s 2005 novel of the same name, the film has quickly surpassed its source material in both reach and reputation. Told from the perspective of Kevin’s mother, played to intense perfection by Tilda Swinton, WNTTAK begins with a lonesome Tilda, living in a rundown house and visiting her teenage son in prison. He’s done something terrible, something so terrible that Swinton’s neighbors no longer talk to her, but what? A gradual series of flashback sequences reveals Kevin’s difficult upbringing, his mother’s growing suspicion of his psychopathy, and finally, the explosive violence that lands him in prison in the first place.

If you prefer to end every film with the sensation that everything is pointless and we might just as well curl up in the fetal position and die (but also love exists and is very creepy), then this film is for you! It’s also part of a continuum of complex attitudes towards motherhood stretching back to Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child and beyond. Motherhood is ambiguous. So is love. And so is that ending. . .

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

The trailer for the film  Cloud Atlas , directed by the Wachowski sisters, is the single most moving work of cinema ever made. It is basically as long as a real movie (a 5 minute and 42 second-long movie trailer!) and it is more enjoyable than watching the actual whole film of  Cloud Atlas , an extremely ambitious and staggering epic that tells a giant six-generation, cross-continental, time-jumping narrative packed with very famous movie stars (though are they performing as people of other races, at times? Yes. Yes they are.) The novel on which the film is based, which was written by David Mitchell, is a beautiful, complicated tale of different individuals at different moments in time, from an 19th-century voyager in the Pacific, to an impoverished family in a futuristic primitive world. Mitchell’s book is subtle and the connections between the six different stories within are more like soft threads. The film on the whole transforms the book in a somewhat awkward literalization of many of its smaller details (the movie becomes all about reincarnation in a way the book only touches upon it)… but this movie trailer, which can’t tell the full story of the movie (though it kind of tries, with its expanse), is a collection of stunning notes, coming together much more smoothly and (helpfully) vaguely than in its full iteration. You go watch this trailer, with its perfect deployment of that one M83 song and snare drums and lonely piano themes and stunning colors and heartbeat-matching montage cut points and slow motion and Jim Broadbent and gravelly voiceovers like “I believe there is another world out there, a better world—and I’ll be waiting for you there” and you TELL me that it does not deserve to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. You look me eye and tell me.

The Great Gatsby  (2013) Based on:  The Great Gatsby , by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Here are just a few of the (myriad) reasons why Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 lush-as-fuck and much-maligned adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus is actually one of the great cinematic achievements of the 21st century: (i) The trailer. Remember how excited we all were when this dope trailer  dropped? Remember how alive it made us feel? (ii) The soundtrack: Beyoncé and André 3000 covering  Back to Black , Jack White covering  Love is Blindness and, most especially, that young and beautiful Lana del Rey song (which I still listen to on the regular on my runs) Luhrmann pipes in over  this glorious montage  of Nick and Daisy hitting golf balls into the ocean and flinging beautiful silk shirts around the room. (iii) The  party scenes . Just look at them all there, having a grand old time with their money and their sparkly clothes. (iv) The casting of Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher as George and Myrtle Wilson. Dead on. (v) The way DiCaprio’s Gatsby  says the line  “I’m certainly glad to see you, as well.” So intense. DiCaprio, the boyishly handsome rhino and Millennial/Gen Z model enthusiast who has spent a decade in roles that require him to look perennially on the brink of a complete mental breakdown, was born to play this role and I will brook no argument there (vi) Joel Edgerton absolutely going for it as Tom Buchanan. Not since Billy Zane’s Cal Hockley I enjoyed a wealthy shittheel villain so much. (vii) The way the movie wisely tones down the anti-Semitic Meyer Wolfsheim caricature. Good note, Baz. Good note. (viii) That  Leo-raising-a-champagne-glass gif  we all know and love. (ix) The way Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway adds that flourish to his sanatorium framing device novel at the movie’s close. All movie codas should be as bold in their purist-trolling  as this .

Much Ado About Nothing (2013) Based on:  Much Ado About Nothing , by William Shakespeare (1623)

Certain people in the office groaned when I announced that I wanted to write about this film, but those people are foolish. Look, no one would claim that this Much Ado About Nothing , directed by Joss Whedon and staged in his own house, is  better  than the official  Much Ado About Nothing , directed by Kenneth Branagh in the ’90s (two more groan-worthy things), but it’s certainly more elegant, and hey, it’s the same play (my favorite). You can’t really mess up this play, which contains the best character in Shakespeare’s oeuvre—or maybe I’d give Beatrice and Puck a shared top billing, but the point stands. Perhaps most importantly, if you are a fan of other works created by Joss Whedon, ahem, this movie can be understood as an extended piece of fan fiction in which Wesley and Fred finally get together instead of the latter dying tragically in the former’s arms before they’ve even slept together. I mean, look at them, up there. Trust me when I say it’s very  satisfying.

Snowpiercer (2013) Based on: Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette

Snowpiercer !!!!!! It’s so good, y’all.

Snowpiercer is a 2013 Korean-American production directed by indie darling Bong Joon-ho and based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob with a striking (get-it?) premise. In an apocalyptic scenario where the world has become too frozen to sustain human life, the only survivors are on board a train called Snowpiercer , barreling around the world just fast enough to preserve the lives of those onboard – but all survivors are not equal. We begin the narrative in the “third class” section of the apocalypse, as we learn about the train’s highly stratified class system, held in place by a rigidly applied system of barbaric punishment administered by a terrifying Tilda Swinton.

The oppressed masses soon begin a rebellion against their fur-clad overlords, and as they journey from the back of the train through gradually increasing opulence, fighting their way to the engine car, audiences are forced to question if this kind of survival is worth surviving at all. Snowpiercer also gets mad props most creative/prolific arm removal – like, five characters get their arms cut off this movie. Each in a different way. Something to know ahead of time, especially if you’re planning a drinking game around it.

A perfect action film with a solid Marxist message that draws strong visuals from its comic book origins and takes narrative inspiration from video games, Snowpiercer is one of the must-see films of the decade.

The Edge of Tomorrow  (2014) Based on: Hiroshi Sakurazaka,  All You Need Is Kill  (2004)

The 2014 Tom Cruise sci-fi actioner  The Edge of Tomorrow AKA Live Die Repeat is adapted from Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s light novel,  All You Need Is Kill , but perhaps the true ur-text is the 1993 Harold Ramis/Bill Murray classic  Groundhog Day . What’s it about? Well, the plot is almost beside the point; its the premise here that’s everything: it’s the near future, and aliens have invaded Europe, and Cruise—a combat-unready military PR sleazeball—is dragooned by Brendan Gleeson into active duty for a D-Day style invasion, where he is almost instantly killed only to awaken the day before with his memory intact and forced to live through the slaughter again and again and again. Until, that is, with the help of badass warrior Emily Blunt, he learns to become a mechanized-bodysuit-fighting master and to better understand his enemy and, maybe,  himself ? I know, but it’s incredibly satisfying. There’s just so much glee to be had in the bonkersness and boldfaced derivativeness of the conceit, the video-game action sequences and the scenery-chewing supporting performances—and, of course, in watching Cruise (as the type of smarmy bastard that usually gets described as “playing against type” but always seems to suit him best) get 86-ed over and over. To watch this movie is to appreciate how little so many of its genre-mates are able to enjoy themselves, and how little they seem interested in your enjoyment.  The Edge of Tomorrow , above all else, knows what I need to enjoy myself, and it wants me to have it.

–Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Inherent Vice (2014) Based on: Inherent Vice  by Thomas Pynchon (2009)

The reputation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of Pynchon’s gonzo-PI novel has been growing fairly steadily since its first release, when, let’s be honest, it was hard to know exactly what to make of this thing. First off, like just about any PI story worth its salt, the “plot” doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Sense isn’t the point. (See, e.g. The Long Goodbye , book and movie; rinse, repeat.) Atmosphere is the point—an ambiance, some style, a little confusion, a little tension, and in this case a fine, drug-laced balancing act somewhere between ennui and paranoia, a certain feeling in the air that went hand-in-glove with the mourning of a decade’s promise, innocence lost, friends disappeared, dead and gone. Based on the 2009 Pynchon neo-noir, Inherent Vice is set in 1970s “Gordita Beach”—a stand-in for Manhattan Beach in its scruffy bohemian heyday—and follows the dubious private eye casework of one Doc Sportello, a man capable of walking the city’s mean streets in the mode of Chandler’s Marlowe, though in this case the streets are full of 1960s washouts and burnouts, and the bete noir is one Bigfoot Bjornsen, the LAPD’s local fascist hippie-hater. That’s a fairly ineffable mood but Paul Thomas Anderson manages to capture it along with some help from Joaquin Phoenix, Katherine Waterston, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro and a long, strange cast of characters. What starts out seeming to be an exercise in oddness and unexpected detour slowly, almost inexplicably morphs into something far more tender and poignant, a weird, lovely meditation on the people and scenes that move in and out of our lives, gone forever.

Elle (2016) Based on: Oh… by Philippe Djian

Elle is a brilliant, disturbing movie that I will not watch again. Isabelle Huppert plays Michèle Leblanc, the artistic director of a video game company, who is one day raped in her home by a masked assailant. After the assault, Michèle does not call the police but instead cleans up the blood and broken glass, and resumes her life. One might list  Elle  among a long list of “rape revenge” movies, as many critics have, though it was immediately clear that the film was attempting something much bolder than the usual fare. The fact that director Paul Verhoeven wasn’t able to convince American actresses or film studios to make the film says something about the ugly frankness of Elle’s Machiavellian attempts to rebuild her life and self-image after such a heinous violation.  Elle , which was released in 2016, the year before the #MeToo movement spiked in popularity, was an inadvertent bellwether of soon-to-be-revived debates around male and female power, sex, and sexual ethics. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Lady Macbeth (2017) Based on: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov (1865)

Has there ever been a protagonist more terrifying than Katherine, the Lady Macbeth of William Oldroyd’s haunting adaptation of Leskov’s novella (itself inspired by Shakespeare’s most famous female character)? Sure, a lot of characters are cold, and a lot of characters start with one little murder and then work their way up in intensity (of method and victim), but as I’ve written in this space before , most of them don’t, well, win  at the end, and most of them aren’t played by Florence Pugh, who nails Katherine as a blank, amoral antiheroine in a fairy tale—one of the original fairy tales, where people routinely die, disappear and get dismembered—who suffers, more than anything else, from idle hands. It’s a shame more people didn’t see this film, despite its disturbing imagery; any lovers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Catherine Lacey and yes, the Bard himself, should seek it out.

Hidden Figures (2018) Based on:  Hidden Figures  by Margot Lee Shetterly (2016)

Based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling nonfiction book of the same name, Hidden Figures tells the little-known story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson—the brilliant black women who were behind one of NASA’s greatest achievements. (Had you heard of them before this? I certainly hadn’t.) Without these women breaking down barriers and fighting for a seat at the table, astronaut John Glenn never would have been successfully launched into orbit. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe do an incredible job of bringing these women to the forefront of this Space Race story. There is one scene that has stuck in my mind, years after I’ve seen it. Because segregated bathrooms are still in place at NASA when the events of this film unfold, we see Taraji P. Henson running across the campus grounds, crossing a great distance to go to the “colored bathroom.” At first, it’s almost played up for a little bit of comic relief. But as it goes on, we see the toll it takes on her work. Then her white male supervisor berates her in front of her colleagues for leaving her desk for so long, and she finally fires back telling them where she’s been going for forty minutes at a time, screaming that this is something they would never even have to consider. It’s a real turning point in the movie, a cleverly included detail that hits on a terrible reality of the time. But Hidden Figures doesn’t hit you over the head with it. It doesn’t linger in this injustice. The movie is also filled with joy and laughter and small victories and strong female friendship. The story itself is heartwarming and inspiring, and the film adaptation is a fitting celebration of these game-changing women.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) Based on:  Can You Ever Forgive Me?  by Lee Israel

I find it very comforting to watch characters act out of desperation and that’s not something I intend to examine at all! Even if you don’t share my totally unremarkably interest in downward spirals, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is worth watching. Adapted from Lee Israel’s memoir of the same name, the film is part buddy comedy (Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant play Israel and her friend/partner in crime Jack Hock), part heist, and all spiny dark comedy. It’s also, as A.O. Scott writes , “catnip for the bookish,” as the crime in question is selling forged correspondence from literary giants including Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward. One of the things I love about the film is that while it certainly doesn’t glamorize Israel’s crime spree (she forged 400 letters, which I think qualifies as a spree), it does respect her talent as a mimic. The script—written by Jeff Whitty and the brilliant Nicole Holofcener—is funny and mean and very, very tense, and Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel is one of my favorite Unlikeable Women of the decade.

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other adaptations that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

127 Hours (2010)  · The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)  ·   Moneyball (2011)  · Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) (2011)  · Jane Eyre (2011)  · Anna Karenina (2012)  · Cloud Atlas itself (2012) ·   The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)  · Cosmopolis (2012)  ·   Under the Skin (2013)  · Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)  · The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)  · Divergent (2014)  ·   Room (2015)  ·  The Diary of a Teenage Girl  (2015) · The Martian (2015)  · Still Alice (2015)  · Spotlight (2015)  ·   The Lost City of Z (2016) · If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)  · Blackkklansman (2018)  · We the Animals (2018)  · The Sisters Brothers (2018)  · The Wife (2018).

Emily Temple

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Adapting to Adaptations: A Look at the Relationship between Book and Film

When talking about adaptations, a common thing one might hear is “That’s not how it happened in the book!” But surely there is more to adaptations than simply loyalty between film and book. One must delve deeper to understand the relationship between books and films when an adaptation is made. There is bound to be discussion (when examining adaptations) of what novels can do that film can’t and vice versa. Novels are verbal and use words to tell a story, while films are visual and rely on images to do the telling. But there is more to the balance between a book and its film adaptation. Once one fully comprehends the relationship between book, film, and adaptation, one can see that adaptations should be treated as a literary art form of their own. Adaptations are a category of their own and should be treated accordingly.

In order to discuss the relationship between book and film in adaptations and the reasons behind the controversy of that relation, it is important to first look at the history of adaptations in order to understand the background surrounding that industry. By doing so, one can see the way adaptations have evolved throughout the years and the manners in which the opinions regarding adaptations have changed and varied and even adapted to the current era. We will examine the ways in which adapting literature to film is viewed in our society and the reasons behind both praise and critical reception of adaptations.

Although adaptations from page to stage had been done by Shakespeare in the 1600’s, film adaptations took quite a long time to come about. It wasn’t until Georges Méliés began to see film as a means for personal expression that film was even thought of as literary. Méliés was the first to adapt a work of literature for the screen. In 1902, he adapted Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon into the black-and-white, silent, science-fiction film A Trip to the Moon. Named one of the 100 greatest films of the 20th century by Village Voice, A Trip to the Moon was not only widely popular for its special effects and innovative animation, and for being the first known science-fiction film, but also because it did something else, too: it created a domino-effect. Méliés went on to produce many more adaptations over the next years such as Gulliver’s Travels (1902), Robinson Crusoe (1902), and “The Legend of Rip Van Winkle (1905). After him, many French and Italian filmmakers started making their own adaptations of classic books. Americans, of course, followed using novels, poems, plays and short stories.

Adaptations were greeted positively at first, with critics thinking them educational and innovative. Influential film artist D. W. Griffith: “Early movies were met with praise not only for their innovation, but for the promise they offered in educating their audiences.” Film critic Stephen Bush said in the 1911 The Moving Picture World, “An epic that has pleased and charmed many generations is most likely to stand the test of cinematographic reproduction… after all, the word “classic: has some meaning. The merits of a classic subject are nonetheless certain because known and appreciated by comparatively few men. It is the business of the moving picture to make them available to all. Jack London believed that motion pictures could break down the “barriers of poverty and environment” and provide “universal education”. Paramount magazine (1915) stated: “The greatest minds have delivered their messages through their book or play. The motion picture spreads it on the screen where all can read and understand- and enjoy”.

The popularity of adaptations continued to rise over the next years. So much so, that in 1939, nearly every film competing for an Academy Award was an adaptation; adaptations of such classics such as Of Mice and Men, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Wizard of Oz, and Wuthering Heights. Between 1927 (when the awards were created) and 1977, three fourths of awards for “Best Picture” went to adaptations. Some of the most popularly adapted authors included Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, and Sienkiewicz. Film adaptations remained popular in the following decades.

Nowadays, film adaptations aren’t strictly literary classics but rather span across a broad range of genres such as mysteries, thrillers, horror, and romance novels. Some of these more modern adaptations include Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, Carrie, The Godfather, and Pelican Brief. According to 1992 statistics, 85% of all Oscar-winning “Best Pictures” are adaptations. And it’s no wonder; there are countless film adaptations that virtually defined their ages and provided catch-phrases and concepts significant to the popular culture. Some of these include Slaughterhouse-Five, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Catch-22, The World According to Garp, and Being There, among many others that addressed important and controversial contemporary issues.

Despite the growing popularity of adaptations, there are a lot of concerns and arguments against adaptations, and they’re not all for the same reasons. One such argument is that adaptations work against the uniqueness of film. Film is its own creative art form and using other works to adapt them to film stifles that creativity and prevents original work from being produced. This growing popularity of adaptations not only dissolves the barrier between literature and film, but it creates a stigma that film is there to serve as another medium for which to display literature, rather than existing as its own separate entity capable of narrative merit.

But the disdain against adaptations doesn’t seem to stem simply from the viewpoint that adaptations shouldn’t be made at all, but rather, that they shouldn’t be made into film. “It does seem to be more or less acceptable to adapt Romeo and Juliet into a respected high art form, like an opera or a ballet, but not to make it into a movie” (Hutcheon, 3). So the concern is not that adapting will reduce the quality of the original work, but that it is actually the form or medium it is being translated to that matter. In this case, a film is thought to lower the original, causing the general disdain for adapting works of literature-particularly classics-into film. Director Alain Resnais once claimed he would never shoot an adaptation because “the writer [had] completely expressed himself in the novel and wanting to make a film of it is a little like re-heating a meal.”

There are certain authors that actually enjoy adaptations of their work such as William Styron, author of Sophie’s Choice, who, although he liked aspects of the film, deliberately chose to stay uninvolved with the process. Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, thought that Universal pictures created a “flawless translation” of his book, but said that ultimately, he doesn’t like the how “clankingly real” and “industrial” film is.

This is not always the case, however. Another argument against adaptations is that combining both mediums could only end up harming them both. Virginia Woolf (1926) in “The Movies and Reality” claimed that alliance between cinema and literature was “unnatural” and “disastrous” to both films; but the short end of the stick would ultimately be the original work since adaptations hurt the books that are being adapted. Hannah Arendt claimed that the problem with adaptations was that films used novels as material to appeal to the masses when it ran out of ideas of its own and that the real issue is that the “material…must be prepared and altered in order to become entertaining”. It is these alternations that are detrimental to the original work and the reasoning behind opposition to the practice of adapting classic literature to film.

Consider the case of J. D. Salinger’s story “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” was made into a 1949 film called My Foolish Heart. Except for a framing story, there is little resemblance between the film and the book. The story was transformed from an exposé of the suburban society into a sentimental love story with a happy ending. He was so traumatized by the experience that he decided never to get involved with adaptations again. My Foolish Heart remains, to this date, the only authorized adaptation of Salinger’s writings to film. And now the world will never see a film adaptation of Catcher in the Rye because of it. Then there is the case of Willa Cather, whose novel A Lost Lady was adapted very loosely into a film in 1934. The film did not live up to the novel’s reputation and is now generally regarded as nothing more than mediocre. As a result, Cather stated in her will that she would not release any rights to any of her literary works.

With this overwhelming amount of negative reception for adaptations, one has to wonder how they’re still alive and kicking in this day and age, full of cynical and hyper-critical audiences and critics. Hutcheon theorizes that the explanation behind this is that even though adaptations are thought of as inferior and secondary creations, they are familiar, and people derive pleasure from the familiar. “Part of this pleasure” Hutcheon explains, “comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise” (Hutcheon, 4).

People are innately attracted to the familiar, what they know won’t let them down is comforting. This is the reason directors and producers keep churning out adaptations, because they know they will sell. Adaptations inherently come with a pre-established fan base. If the original work has already gathered a following, then the possibilities of making money are greater than with an original script. There is, of course, a variety on the reasons behind this audience’s attendance. There are some that will attend an adaptation simply because they want to remember their original experience with the book fondly. There are also those who will want to uphold the standards of the original by scrutinizing every detail and comparing it by evaluating its faithfulness to its source. There will be the people that are so against adaptations that they just want to watch an adaptation crash and burn (which ironically, supports the adaptation with their presence regardless of their intent). And then there will always be those who have never even read the original work, but feel like they should have and will therefore use this adaptation as a means to stay “in the loop”. Whatever the case, there is no denying that adaptations sell. This gives some further insight into the phenomenon of the popularity of adaptations despite their reputation as lesser and inferior art.

Despite arguments such as Virginia Woolf’s, adaptations can actually end up being mutually beneficial for the original work and the film adapting it. Books helped by adaptations: reprinted books with a picture from the movie with the slogan “Now a major motion picture”. There are many instances of “forgotten” books or literature that has slipped through the cracks- whether it is old or new- that film adaptations actually bring back to life, so in a way, adaptations give those books an audience and got them noticed. By the same token, a film can benefit from not only the pre-established fan-base of a book, but also from using its name as a marketing strategy. Such is the case with films such as Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, and Emma.

Then there’s, of course, the relation of book to film in terms of how faithful the adaptation is to its original source. Many critics’ views are that faithfulness is not a matter for textual analysis but rather for work on the way adaptations are received; faithfulness matters if it matters to the viewer. Strictly following the original source to the letter only becomes an issue when the intended audience is expecting it or demanding it. This is especially important when dealing with iconic works such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserablés or with works that already have a very large and faithful following like Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, or Lord of the Rings. There are also many critics and reviewers that put themselves in the role of the viewer who has not only read the book, but is expecting the film to be faithful to it. This is a mistake. Critics should not pretend to be the fan-base of the original work and in turn analyze (and criticize) an adaptation on the basis of its faithfulness to the original book. They should instead view the adaptation as an art form in and of itself and judge it accordingly, focusing instead on its literary and cinematographic merit apart from its “source”.

One thing adaptations should never do is pretend that they’re not adaptations. This is to say, that there are instances in which a film is not recognized as an adaptation because this is never acknowledged or perhaps the book is not well-known. Although this may be the case, adaptations should strive to be recognizable to anyone who is familiar with the original work, regardless of whether the adaptation is faithful to the source or not. As Catherine Grant stated: “The most important act that films and their discourses need to perform in order to communicate unequivocally their status as adaptations is to [make their audiences] recall the adapted work, or the cultural memory of it…there is no such thing as a ‘secret’ adaptation” (Grant, 57).

Recall; this is an interesting notion that often goes unmentioned when discussing adaptations. But it’s actually what, ultimately, the audience, as both readers of the original work and film enthusiasts long for when watching a film adaptation. Author Christine Geraghty focuses less on the way books are adapted and the process involved, and more on the ways in which the film adaptations cause us as viewers to recall things by watching them. Her book Now a Major Motion Picture, delves into the mental and emotional aspects that adaptations have on the audience, specifically for those who have read the original work before watching the film adaptation. She claims that adaptations often carry emotional weight, and that “familiar stories and generic references fold into one another, one setting can be seen through another” (Geraghty, 11). However, this is not to say that film adaptations shouldn’t be treated as autonomous works in their own right.

Barbara Tepa Lupack, author of Take Two: Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to Film has a similar train of though. She claims that the reason adaptations have so much controversy and criticism surrounding them is because “when we assess an adaptation we are not really comparing book to film but rather interpretation to interpretation- the novels that we ourselves have recreated in our imaginations out of which we have constructed or own “movie” and the novel on which a filmmaker has worked on a parallel transformation” (Lupack, 10). So we’re really comparing our own experience of the book to the director’s experience of the book. The reason it is imperial to keep this in mind, is that once we put into perspective our own personal reasons for judging a film adaptation roughly it becomes more clear that there are some unreasonable expectations set for adaptations that are almost impossible to fulfill without leaving at least one malcontent critic. One is far better off enjoying the memories that adaptations stir-up from the original source, or letting oneself be transported to a new unknown word (if one is not familiar with the original work). And if an adaptation is regarded as an art form of its own, then this process becomes simpler and more enjoyable for all.

Whether one is for or against adaptations, disregarding them as lesser art is a mistake because we will ultimately be closing off on the opportunity to experience both cinema and literature in a different light, one that only adaptations can provide. “An adaptation is always, whatever else it may be, an interpretation. And if this is one way of understanding the nature of adaptation and the relationship of any given film to the book that inspired it, it’s also a way of understanding what may bring such a film into being in the first place: the chance to offer an analysis and appreciation of one work of art through another.” (Lupack, 61-62). It is important to give credit to both the adaptation as well as the original work; although it is true that an adaptation wouldn’t exist without the original work, an adaptation should be respected as its own work as well.

Cited Works

Hutcheon, Linda. A theory of adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Geraghty, Christine. Now a major motion picture: film adaptations of literature and drama. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. Print.

Lupack, Barbara Tepa, ed.. Take two: adapting the contemporary American novel to film. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Print.

Grant, Catherine. “Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of Auterist ‘Free’ Adaptation” Screen 34, no.1 (Spring 2002):57.

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Harry Potter and the Adaptation from Novel to Film

Submitted by: Robyn Joffe

Harry Potter and the Adaptation from Novel to Film  

By Robyn Joffe

For as long as people have been making movies, people have been making movies based on books. Films have also been adapted from several other forms such as television shows, theatrical plays and even other movies. More recently, entire book series have been adapted, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the still in progress Harry Potter series . With six of the seven books written, and five films finished (four of them released), the Harry Potter franchise has a lot to offer scholars interested in the how-to's and the results of adapting books to film.

The Harry Potter films, which started with the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in the year 2001, depict the events covered in the books in a more filmic fashion. The films bring Rowling's words to life; however, as is nearly always the case in adapting work of one form to another, the transitions can be less than smooth. As Deborah Cartmell, senior lecturer in English writes, "An adaptation is undeniably an appropriation of the text, and although the plot remains the same, the telling ’ or the interpreting of it ’ radically changes from one generation to the next." 1

From time constraints to a director's need for artistic expression to casting choices to how a film is promoted, the process of transforming a book to a film can be fraught with peril. Other such issues surrounding direction, characterization, pacing and chosen content (among others) can also contribute to a film's eventual success or failure. Though the resulting movie may in fact be a good film, the question that must be asked is whether it is a good film version of the book . Though most published academic works covering the adaptation of a book to a film focus on classic novels, such as those by Shakespeare or Jane Austen, adaptations are not made merely from acclaimed literary masterpieces. What the Harry Potter series lacks in academic acknowledgment, it more than makes up for in mass popular appeal.

For this reason, this essay will dissect the Harry Potter books and their resulting films, paying particular attention to what issues in the process of adaptation were most relevant to each, and see what, if any, perils were encountered in the making of them. In doing so, this essay will make use of both scholarly and amateur sources, because while authoritative texts are more often relied upon (and with good reason) in essays such as this, the opinions fueled by the unquestionable knowledge of the Harry Potter fan base (in regards to the content of both the books and films), are not necessarily any less valid than their more academically informed counterparts.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)

Graham Greene, one of the first major literary talents to show an interest in writing for films (and one who often adapted his own short stories) once described the screenwriter as "a ˜forgotten man' once the film went into production, since after that point other hands might make alterations to the screenplay." 2 In a much more recent book, the same sentiment was expressed: "Despite the excellent compensation, a Hollywood scriptwriter is a low man on the totem pole, and much of his work ’ sometimes all of his work ’ is not used." 3 However, for Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves, working with director Christopher Columbus was an experience in the opposite. In fact, Columbus described their collaboration ’ which went from script development through production ’ as "something of a dream situation' 4 and Kloves further explained that "Chris has been willing to listen to any idea, and he doesn't think it's right until we both agree it's right, which is great." 5

Columbus also went a step further in welcoming the continued involvement of not just the screenwriter ’ but the original novelist as well; "My desire was to remain faithful to the story, the characters and the integrity of those characters ... I realized that I had found a solid collaborator [in Rowling]. And it was important because she knows this world better than anyone else." 6

Producer David Heyman also noted that Rowling "has been given the freedom to exert perhaps more influence on the Potter films than is usual when a book is adapted for the screen." 7 This is no doubt due to the fact that the book series is not yet completed, or as Kloves himself put it; "It's the only time I've ever been involved in a story without an ending ... And you would think [Rowling] would tell me something [about it], since I am writing it. But she won't." 8 Along with script approval, author J.K. Rowling had one other demand: that the actors playing the British characters actually be British. Thus, casting began.

Casting a film that is being adapted from a book can often become very controversial, especially if fans get wind of which actors are being considered beforehand. Because many novels that are made into films are not illustrated, the reader has created a picture of each character in their mind, according to any descriptions from the book, and accepting an actor who may not entirely fit that description or picture is something that many fans find hard to do. On the other hand, it is not always only a matter of a fan being unable to let go of his/her own interpretation of a character. At times, the decision to cast a certain actor in a certain role can be questionable no matter how good they might be.

An example of this would be the casting of Alan Rickman in the role of Professor Severus Snape. Though Rickman is a very talented actor, he was also fifty-five years old when the first movie was released, whereas at the start of the series Snape is supposedly only thirty-two years old. 9 While one might think that the age difference does not matter so long as the appearance is appropriate, the difference ’ particularly as it's more than twenty years ’ has an effect on that as well. In the book, part of Harry's perception of Snape is that "his eyes were black like Hagrid's, but they had none of Hagrid's warmth. They were cold and empty and made you think of dark tunnels." 10 Snape's youth, coupled with his demeanor, present a more tragic juxtaposition in the book than they do in the film because in the film that juxtaposition does not even exist. How can it when the embittered contempt that emanates from the character is easily understandable, rather than jarring, in the lined face of an older actor?

The choice to cast Rickman has also lead to another unforeseen side effect among Harry Potter fans: Lust.

The newfound Snapemania was sparked in part by the casting of actor Alan Rickman ’ well-established as "the thinking woman's sex symbol" ’ in the role. Rickman's feline movements and mellifluous voice give the Potions Master a sensuality absent from the page. And beyond the shoulder-length black wig and black contact lenses Rickman wears, no attempt is made to ugly him up. 11

This has even led to Rowling herself questioning whether those who profess their love of the character are talking about Snape, or Alan Rickman, and (as the same thing has occurred in the case of Harry's nemesis, Draco Malfoy) lamenting the humanizing effect that an attractive actor tends to have on the villainous characters he portrays; "Isn't this life, though? I make this hero ’ Harry, obviously ’ and there he is on screen ... but who does every girl under the age of fifteen fall in love with? Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy." 12

Aside from these and other slight deviations, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (known as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States 13 ), is remarkably faithful to its source text. In fact, BBC film reviewer Adrian Hennigan wrote that Columbus treated "J.K. Rowling's debut novel with a reverence that wasn't even accorded to the Bible." 14

However, not all deemed such devotion praise-worthy, and the film "was criticized by many as being too faithful to the book." 15 One summed the film up as "an adaptation which paradoxically undermines itself by aiming at a faithful replication of the source text' 16 while others merely declared that "a commitment to fidelity (in response to the perceived demands of readers/viewers) compromises the processes of adaptation." 17 However, on the other side of the spectrum, respected critic Roger Ebert wrote that the film had succeeded in doing "full justice to a story that was a daunting challenge ... During [the film] I was pretty sure I was watching a classic." 18

There are a couple of issues that help explain this broad range of reactions ’ aside from the obvious reality of people having different opinions. One of these issues is that this book and film are the first of a series, and so while the actual plot is one of mystery, it doesn't appear until rather late in the actual story ’ the time up to that point being taken up by Harry's introduction to (and the setting up of) the wizarding world. In fact, in the shooting script for the film, the titular Stone is only very obliquely referred to for the first time on the twenty-second page; "Hogwarts business. Very secret' 19 and once more on the forty-third; "the third floor corridor ... is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a most painful death' 20 before the characters are confronted with the actual mystery on page fifty-five:

HERMIONE Didn't you see what it was standing on? [...] It was standing on a trapdoor, which means it's not there by accident. It's-

HARRY Guarding something. 21

This means that the actual plot of the first film doesn't start until fifty-five pages into the script, completely ignoring a rule that is not just for "adaptation, it's a rule of screenwriting in general. You've only got about thirty pages to set everything up. Establish your main characters ... ground the audience in the world where your story takes place, introduce the dramatic problem, and move into the second act." 22 Lagging with the opening could add to any pacing problems that might develop, as well as become the source of accusations of too much fidelity by critics. And yet, because this introduction is not just for this film but for the entire series, it's (arguably) necessary, because the plotline revolving around the Philosopher's Stone might be the focus of the first film, but Harry's place in the wizarding world remains a focus of each of the films that follow. To breeze through it would be inexcusable, making the resulting ambling movement towards the main plot of the film all but unavoidable. However, it is worth it to remember that that introduction is part of what the audience is there to see.

The other issue that must be highlighted when discussing the expectations of both fans and critics is the overwhelming, ever-growing Harry Potter phenomenon that accompanies the release of every single bit of news even remotely relating to the series. As Suman Gupta wrote in a chapter of his book entitled Movie Magic : "Very seldom have films been so preordained to be blockbusters, received so much media attention before they appeared ... been anticipated with so much informed readiness." 23

Perhaps Professor Philip Nel put it best when he wrote that "the film does no violence to readers' imagined versions of characters and events, but it does not offer its own creative vision." 24

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

This film, like the first, was directed by Christopher Columbus and written for the screen by Steve Kloves. Because most of the creative team was the same, most of the commentary towards the process of creating this film is similar as well. However, there are some significant differences and additional issues unexplored in the topic for the previous film that warrant its own ’ albeit shorter ’ discussion.

Structurally, the second film is quite different from the first, as the introduction to the entire Harry Potter universe isn't necessary this time around. As Rowling put it; "The first one is episodic ... And Chamber is a more linear structure so it was easier to translate to screen." 25 However, it is also the longest Harry Potter film (though, to be fair, it only beats Goblet of Fire by four minutes), and the pacing suffers for it. As one critic wrote, "You get the sense that its makers have tried to film a novel instead of make a movie' 26 while another pointed out that "watching the film, I mostly felt sensory overload as one special effect was piled atop another. In fact director Chris Columbus has scrupulously avoided anything like genuine emotion." 27

To be fair, he was worrying about other things - namely, his young stars.

Casting these kids at the beginning of Sorcerer's Stone was, in a way, horrifying. I spent the first two weeks on that film trying to get them to look away from the camera, stop smiling and be able to utter one line so I could cut around it. 28

The experience (or lack of same) of his actors contributed in a large way to how Columbus was able to shoot both of the Harry Potter movies he filmed. As none of the child actors had ever done anything professional before ’ aside from Daniel Radcliffe, who had only had a few small roles ’ the movie had to be shot and edited around them. The first two Harry Potter films owe their less-than-sophisticated look to the fact that prolonged camera shots and wide angles were simply not possible in most cases involving the young stars ’ and neither was the endless repetition that can otherwise be associated with film-making. In fact, Columbus "rehearsed very little with the children since ... he didn't want to lose their spontaneity." 29

In Columbus' words; "When we wrapped on Chamber of Secrets , their performances had improved immensely, and they had become seasoned professionals. I felt my job was complete' 30 and with his job complete, so was the second film.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

It is in the discussion of the third film in the Harry Potter series that a more intricate and varied discussion on the pros and cons of the adaptation process can truly commence. This is not to say that discussing the first two films is without merit, but that as the books get longer (indeed, the third one is the first of the series to break 300 pages), and the plots grow more complex, the resulting portrayals on film offer more topics to debate.

Another reason that this progression reflected so obviously on the film series was that Christopher Columbus, director of the first two films, stepped back into the role of co-producer (with David Heyman and others) on this film, leading to Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón being hired to direct. Having previously brought his unique visual style to films like A Little Princess (and consequently proving he could work with children), Cuarón was drafted to lead the Harry Potter series in a new direction: "My approach was that I wanted to do a character driven piece, with cool visual effects, rather than a visual effects movie with some characters running around." 31

At the same time, Cuarón was conscious of the fact that he was stepping into an already-established universe, admitting that "it was one of [his] hesitations" before accepting the position. 32 He solved that dilemma by resolving to serve the material: "and the material meant before anything else the book, and then secondly the position of this film in the franchise of Harry Potter." 33

His overall success may be debatable, but what cannot be questioned is the dramatic change made in the look of this third film. As Columbus remembers: "Most of our sets were already built, but Alfonso had a desire ’ as did our production designer Stuart Craig ’ to open up the picture." 34 Using more wide-angle and tracking shots to heighten the sense of drama, 35 Cuarón was intent on facilitating the overall flow of the film, as well as creating lasting visual connections throughout. 36 Particular focus was paid to images relating to time (Harry spends several scenes in and around a large clock tower at Hogwarts), and identity (there are numerous scenes that start or end on a close up of a character's eye), in keeping with the themes Cuarón had chosen to highlight. The use of darker colours, more haunting music and dramatic lighting ("high contrast, more shadows") also contributed to the "very different look and feel from the previous films." 37

Perhaps the most important decision made to create this result, however, was one that was more philosophical than technical: "One of the things we decided was that in order for the magic to spring forward more naturally, it had to come from a real and honest place ... What we sought to create was a sense of reality in which the characters interact with each other." 38

Cuarón felt that choosing Michael Seresin for the film's cinematography would help to achieve that goal:

One thing that I felt was perfect for Michael was that we have this magical universe that he could really ground. Because he has got that grittiness, and that grittiness comes from the fact that he is a single-source light cinematographer. He's very naturalistic in that sense. I felt it would be a good marriage with the material. 39

And he seems to have succeeded. As Sloan de Forest, editor and contributor to Scribbulus , writes: "[In] the third film, I saw an immense, imposing Hogwarts drained of its warmth but injected with a unique style and grainy realism not present in the first two films." 40 The film was lauded by both critics and fans as being "the closest any of the films has gotten to capturing the enormously pleasing essence of the Potter books' 41 and there seemed to be a tentative collective agreement that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was a truly great movie. But that does not mean it was a great movie of the book , and as this is the difference that this essay seeks to highlight, more in depth examination is necessary.

The unique thing about the book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , is that it is arguably not a story in and of itself ’ but the story of a story, which gradually unfolds throughout the book, finally leading to its climactic reveal and the ensuing repercussions. The book covering Harry Potter's third year at Hogwarts is not about Harry Potter's third year at all, but about the events leading up to his parents' deaths twelve years before.

It is fitting, then, that with this book comes the introduction of several new characters, including two of particular importance: Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor Remus Lupin, and the escaped titular Prisoner of Azkaban, Sirius Black. One interviewer notes that their "connection with ... Harry's parents is a major factor in Azkaban's back-story' 42 but though most of that quotation is true, it is the use of the word "back-story" that is the problem.

As Amy Z wrote in her essay An Elegantly Woven Tapestry: Plotlines in Prisoner of Azkaban , "it's true that there is no single central plot in [the story], because one candidate (Quidditch) lacks gravitas, and another (Sirius [versus] Harry) proves to be an illusion." 43 Instead, in the absence of an obvious main storyline, it is the so-called "back-story" that takes centre stage; "while Harry is going about his life ... there is another drama mostly invisible to him (and to us, until the second reading): that of Lupin, Black, Snape, and, if you think about it, Pettigrew." 44 In Prisoner of Azkaban the back-story becomes the main plot, as even though the events transpired twelve years previous, they are unfolding to Harry in the present and the story's climax happens when the truth is finally revealed to all. In that way, there was no conclusion to the events in the past, instead, it was as if those involved were put on hold, held in stasis until Harry's third year at Hogwarts when they were at last able to play it out:

"Everyone thought Sirius killed Peter' said Lupin, nodding. "I believed it myself ” until I saw the map tonight. Because the Marauder's Map never lies... Peter's alive. Ron's holding him, Harry."

"If you're going to tell them the story, get a move on, Remus' said Black, who was still watching Scabbers's every desperate move. "I've waited twelve years, I'm not going to wait much longer."

"Harry' said Lupin hurriedly, "don't you see? All this time we've thought Sirius betrayed your parents, and Peter tracked him down ” but it was the other way around, don't you see? Peter betrayed your mother and father ” Sirius tracked Peter down ”" 45

As Amy Z writes: "We think the story is about Black trying to kill Harry, so the plot seems focused on that; but that's not what the story is about. It's about Sirius in a whole different way, and it's as much about Pettigrew." 46 With the misunderstandings cleared up and the truth of the events of twelve years before revealed, the climax of their story becomes the climax of the book itself ’ one which ultimately ends in near disaster, allowing the fallout to finally occur.

In discussing how she has conceptualized the third book, Harry Potter fan Kelly Parker writes:

I think the third book is more about setting up the series for later on and dealing more with the past and how it is affecting Harry and the entire wizarding world now. It's not so much about his schooling ... his schooling takes a back seat to finding out about his godfather and dealing with all of that. I personally think this is one of the most pivotal books in the series. 47

Unfortunately, Alfonso Cuarón apparently did not see it in exactly the same way: "This film is concerned with confronting [the characters'] innermost fears ... It's [also] a journey of a character's seeking his identity and accepting who he is. To step out of the shadow of his father, for instance, is one of the themes." 48 Putting aside the question of whether or not this is true, the difference of opinion as to the main focus of the story obviously resulted in the exclusion of certain things.

One of the most often cited examples of such an exclusion is the actual back-story of Harry's parents and their friends. Included in this example are several key pieces of information that are either missing from the film entirely, or mentioned in vague generalities that are easily glossed over. The most important piece of information that is introduced in this story is the betrayal of Harry's parents that led to their deaths. It is in this book that we learn that Voldemort could not just go and attack the Potters, and that they would have been safe had they not trusted the wrong person, because of the preparations they had taken before going into hiding:

"Dumbledore told them that their best chance was the Fidelius Charm."

"How does that work?" said Madam Rosmerta, breathless with interest. Professor Flitwick cleared his throat.

"An immensely complex spell' he said squeakily, "involving the magical concealment of a secret inside a single, living soul. The information is hidden inside the chosen person, or Secret-Keeper, and is henceforth impossible to find ” unless, of course, the Secret-Keeper chooses to divulge it. As long as the Secret-Keeper refused to speak, You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting room window!" 49

The fact that Sirius Black was thought to be the Potters' Secret-Keeper, and therefore the only person capable of betraying them, is rather central to how he became the titular Prisoner , having been sent to Azkaban without a trial. The fact that Peter Pettigrew was the actual Secret-Keeper, and therefore the only possible betrayer of the Potters: " ˜ Lily and James only made you Secret-Keeper because I suggested it,' Black hissed ... ˜I thought it was the perfect plan... a bluff... Voldemort would be sure to come after me ... It must have been the finest moment of your miserable life, telling Voldemort you could hand him the Potters,' " 50 is also central to understanding the story. However, interestingly enough, the word "Secret-Keeper" is never spoken even once during the entire film, and the importance of the role is instead glossed over, when it is referred to at all: "Well, now, years ago, when Harry Potter's parents realized that they were marked for death ’ do you remember? ’ they went into hiding. Few knew where they were. One who did, was Sirius Black ’ and he told You-Know-Who!" 51

Aside from being factually wrong, as it was Harry and not his parents who was marked for death, the use of the word "few" and the phrase "one who did" instead of " the one who did" would imply that more than one person knew where the Potters were hiding. This would, in turn, mean that more than one person would have been able to betray them, rendering Sirius Black's immediate condemnation inexplicable ’ and potentially Peter Pettigrew's later one as well.

Although it minimizes the betrayal of the Potters, the vagueness that resulted from the absence of the word "Secret-Keeper" could still have been explained had another piece of information been included:

Sirius here played a trick on [Snape] which nearly killed him ... [he] thought it would be ’ er ’ amusing, to tell Snape all he had to do was prod the knot on the tree-trunk with a long stick, and he'd be able to get in after me ... if he'd got as far as this house, he'd have met a fully grown werewolf. 52

The knowledge that Sirius Black, at sixteen, sent a fellow classmate to his death without remorse (later saying it was just a prank), would have gone a long way to explaining why of the "few" who "knew where [the Potters] were", he was the most likely suspect: " ˜ Sirius Black showed he was capable of murder at the age of sixteen,' [Snape] breathed. ˜You haven't forgotten that, Headmaster? You haven't forgotten that he once tried to kill me ?' " 53 And although this might be considered a deviation from the central plot, or potentially slow exposition in a genre where showing is prized above telling , film as a visual medium allows for both to happen at once. This enlightening bit of back-story could easily have been accompanied by either a flashback or a montage of images, illustrating what was being said. However, this did not happen, and unfortunately, it is not the most important piece of information left out of the final film, by far.

The fact that Remus Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black, and James Potter are the same Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs who created the map Harry is coincidentally given by his friends is never mentioned, even when ample opportunity arises ’ as seen in the following comparative examples:

Prisoner of Azkaban (the book):

"I happen to know that this map was confiscated by Mr. Filch many years ago. Yes, I know it's a map' [Lupin] said, as Harry and Ron looked amazed. 54

Prisoner of Azkaban (the film):

PROFESSOR LUPIN I don't know how this map came to be in your possession, Harry, but I'm astounded that you didn't turn it in....

Harry walks silently. 55

While this might seem a small, relatively unimportant piece of information, it would only be considered so in isolation. However, this is not so. The connection of each man to his nickname not only solidifies the reality of their once close friendship, but it also connects each to his animal form and the fact that three became Animagi for the fourth: "My three friends could hardly fail to notice that I disappeared once a month ... I was terrified they would desert me ... [but] they didn't desert me at all. ... They became Animagi ... They couldn't keep me company as humans, so they kept me company as animals. A werewolf is only a danger to people." 56

The connection to Animagi is important because of the role that each man's form plays in the overall story. Peter Pettigrew is able to fake his own death and hide for twelve years as Ron's pet rat; Sirius Black is able to both keep his sanity while in and finally escape from Azkaban as a large dog; and Harry is able to discover and reclaim a part of his father, which he finds within himself, when his Patronus takes on the form of his father's stag. And while the first two are obvious in the film without the nickname connection, the fact that James Potter was an Animagus is not, and therefore the significance of Harry's Patronus is lost. This is particularly ironic considering that it is James Potter as Prongs who is arguably the link between the opinions of the fans already stated as to the main storyline of the book, and director Alfonso Cuarón's interpretation: "It has to do with Harry coming to terms with his male energy, his father and what his father is." 57

The absence of this information is notable not only because it details exactly "what his father is", but also because the information was there in the shooting script, but still didn't make it to the final cut:

PROFESSOR LUPIN Before I go, tell me about your Patronus.

HARRY Well. At first I thought it was a horse, or perhaps a unicorn, but I think it was ’

PROFESSOR LUPIN A stag.

PROFESSOR LUPIN Your father used to transform into one. That's how he was able to keep me company when I became... sick. ... There are stories about him and your mother, you know. Some are even true. But I think it's safe to say, in the end you'll know them best by getting to know yourself. 58

As the final cut of the film is decided on by the director (and the editor, at his direction), it is particularly peculiar that none of the dialogue in this excerpt ’ all of which would go towards emphasizing Cuarón's apparent vision ’ appears in the finished version. This would not be a problem were it not for the fact that in losing these aspects of the story, the viewer is treated to a film that is incomplete ’ not only in and of itself, but also as a part of the ongoing series.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

As with the third film, the fourth in the Harry Potter series invites a more detailed discussion on the difficulties and competing interests involved in adapting a book to a film. Fortunately for this essay, most of the issues raised in this discussion differ significantly from those presented in each previous film. One reason for this difference was the inclusion of a new director, filmmaker Mike Newell of Four Weddings and a Funeral fame, who, in his own words, had "never made a film like this before and [had] never made a film even a quarter as big as this before." 59 Unlike the other films in the series thus far, this film presented a directorial challenge even before shooting began. At 636 pages, Goblet of Fire is more than double the size of Prisoner of Azkaban (the longest of the previous three), and Warner Bros. Studio originally intended to split the story in half, shooting the two films back to back, and releasing them close together ’ similar to what had been done for the second and third films of the Matrix trilogy. 60 Mike Newell, however, thought this unnecessary: "As far as I'm concerned it's absolutely possible to do it in one. I think it would be slightly embarrassing to do it in two." 61

Aiming to avoid this, Newell pitched his conception of the story to the producers; "I said to them, I said, I can only make this if you will agree that what we're making is a thriller and we will ruthlessly take out stuff that doesn't go to that' 62 later adding that the whole point of the story was that the villain "needs one tiny, tiny little thing from the boy: three drops of blood." 63 As the first British director in the series, Mike Newell felt that he had the insider expertise necessary to bring an authenticity to the films that they were previously lacking ’ particularly in regards to the British school system: "It wasn't possible for them to get that right. They'd never been to such a school' 64 Newell said, further explaining:

I went through this sort of education. ... I wasn't at a boarding school ... but there's an enormous body of literature books ... and I had read all of those, and I'd been to a school just like it where you were beaten with a cane. I remember some of the teachers being really quite violent ... and it had a headmaster of whom one was likely terrified and then a descending order of authority figures, and then there was... and then there was us. ... I don't see how anybody who hadn't gone through that, who wasn't English, could possibly have suspected that. 65

There are two facets of this quote that require further examination, the first being Newell's view of Hogwarts as being just like all of the typical British boarding schools he never attended. Shaun Hately, author of the essay Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Context of the British Public Schools , writes that "Hogwarts is not a perfect exemplar of the Public School tradition ’ while there is a substantial influence, it cannot be assumed that Hogwarts always follows Public School traditions." 66 Further on in the paper, in discussing corporal punishment, Hately demonstrates that "At Hogwarts, such methods seem to have fallen into disuse' 67 citing a quotation from the first book in the Harry Potter series; "Oh yes... Hard work and pain are the best teachers if you ask me... It's just a pity they let the old punishments die out." 68

Additional evidence presents itself in the book from which Newell made his own adaptation, when Professor Moody transfigures a student into a ferret and proceeds to bounce him up and down, catching the attention of Professor McGonagall:

"Moody, we never use Transfiguration as a punishment!" said Professor McGonagall weakly. "Surely Professor Dumbledore told you that?"

"He might've mentioned it, yeah' said Moody, scratching his chin unconcernedly, "but I thought a good sharp shock ”"

"We give detentions, Moody! Or speak to the offender's Head of House!" 69

To J.K. Rowling, the "worst, shabbiest thing you can do" as a teacher "[is] bully children' 70 and corporal punishment has no place in Harry's world. And yet Newell, who admits that even real English schools have changed now, still felt the need to "[rewrite] a scene to add a glint of schoolboy mischievousness and the corporal punishment it provokes, in which dour Professor Snape ... bonks Harry and Ron in the head with a book for goofing off during a study period." 71 Snape does not appear at all in the scene in the shooting script for the film, 72 so it is obvious that this was a directorial decision. His selection is also unfortunate for the fact that his character is not one to be considered slapstick, nor is his hatred of Harry something in which to find comic relief. However, this twisted characterization appears to be a sort of specialty of Newell's, which is the second facet of the previous long quotation in need of examination.

As with the school he runs, Newell has also assigned headmaster Albus Dumbledore to a role in the film that is not in keeping with any other information readily available about him. His idea of Dumbledore as "a headmaster of whom one [is] likely terrified' 73 is directly at odds with J.K. Rowling's assertion that Dumbledore is instead "the epitome of goodness." 74 Indeed, Hately's essay specifies how the character "as presented in the Harry Potter books seems to fit neatly into the mould of the great benevolent public school Headmaster' 75 and as James A. Morone wrote in his article Cultural Phenomena: Dumbledore's Message , "[he] practically awards bonus points for breaking the rules' 76 citing this quotation from Chamber of Secrets as proof: "I seem to remember telling you both that I would have to expel you if you broke any more school rules ... Which goes to show that the best of us must sometimes eat our words." 77

The issue of the character and characterization of Dumbledore is a difficult one for numerous reasons. The choice of actor to play the role is very much tied up in that ’ especially because it was made twice. Richard Harris, a veteran of over seventy films, was initially cast in the role, which he played for the first two films. Critics wrote that his selection "was perfection; he had that twinkle in his eye and he conveyed that Dumbledore was as solid as a rock and as wise as readers of J.K. Rowling knew him to be. There was a certainty about him." 78

However, when Richard Harris passed away shortly before principal photography was to begin on the third film, a new Dumbledore had to be found. Michael Gambon made his Dumbledore debut in Prisoner of Azkaban , and his performance in both it and Goblet of Fire has garnered several comments ’ though, unfortunately, few have been complimentary: "I have to say that I thought Gambon's performance lacked some of the warmth and humour that Harris provided." 79 Newell, on the other hand, thought he was perfect:

I think that he had not wanted to be the same figure that Richard Harris had been, a figure of enormous Olympian authority who's never caught on the hop. He wanted something to do, simply because he isn't Richard Harris, and what he found in this one is that Dumbledore is fallible, not omnipotent, and indeed is behind the game. A great deal of what he does is about being inadequate rather than super-adequate, which is obviously much more interesting to play. 80

More interesting to play, perhaps, but woefully inaccurate. Even leaving aside the fact that if Gambon did not want to be the same figure Richard Harris had been, his decision to take over the role seems suspect; Dumbledore has been known throughout the series for being the only one Voldemort has ever feared. However, as de Forest points out:

for this fear to be plausible, Dumbledore needs to appear sharp-witted and not cross the line from affable eccentric to preposterous crackpot. ... How can [Newell] expect us to believe that anyone in the wizarding world reveres a panicky, absentminded grump who ... impulsively attacks his favourite student, throttling little Harry about the shoulders and neck? 81

And to Newell's argument that a fallible, inadequate, and behind-the-game Dumbledore creates a more interesting and more humanized mentor for Harry, M.Y. Simms asks in her essay Action! Harry Potter from the Page to the Screen :

Why would the greatest wizard in the world suddenly appear to suffer from chronic anxiety? I understand that things got serious in Goblet of Fire, but consider this: would Yoda, Merlin, Gandalf or Obi-Wan have freaked out when things got serious and danger loomed? ... I think not. ... Where did the ˜magic' of Dumbledore go? 82

In fact, far from being behind-the-game, J.K. Rowling's Dumbledore continues to run steadily ahead, even at the end of Goblet of Fire , after Harry's confrontation with Voldemort has already taken place:

"He said that my blood would make him stronger than if he'd used someone else's' Harry told Dumbledore. "... And he was right ” he could touch me without hurting himself, he touched my face."

For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore's eyes. 83

Unfortunately, one repercussion from Newell's decision to have Gambon portray Dumbledore in this mistaken manner ’ a decision that is proved to be directorial rather than scriptural, due to the calmer version of the character evidenced in the shooting script 84 ’ is more detrimental than having raised the ire of fans; that being the effect it will have on the next installment of the franchise.

One of the main issues that Harry must deal with in the fifth book is his relationship with Dumbledore and how it has, inexplicably (to him), become estranged. This separation, or distance, that Harry feels causes him great distress as he wonders why the headmaster doesn't seem to care about him anymore. This leads to continued misunderstandings which result in the death of a main character and the discovery of a prophecy. Unfortunately, due to the portrayal of these relationships in the fourth movie, Harry would be unlikely to wonder if the headmaster cared about him in the first place, nor would it really matter to him either way. And the revelation given to Harry at the end, that Dumbledore "cared about [him] too much" and did all he had done because he "acted exactly as Voldemort expects [the] fools who love to act' 85 would scarce be believable from Gambon's discredited caricature. Of course, as Newell has not even read the fifth book, his failure to set it up properly is unfortunately explained.

What's not as easily explained is his failure in setting up even his own film, as he did read the fourth book in preparation. 86 As one critic wrote:

If the film version of [Prisoner of Azkaban] was missing some major plot points, and therefore felt like it was missing a vital organ or two, this one was like finding a skeleton that had been stripped of every conceivable scrap of flesh, leaving only the bare bones behind. Many character motivations were fuzzy at best; my mother, who hadn't read the book, had a million questions for me after we left the theatre. 87

But perhaps this weakness can be understood in reading Newell's approach to creating the film, in his own words: "What you do is you pack it with references and suggestions and so forth which, of course, you have taken from the book. So that a reader coming to the film goes, "Oh, I see. I get it. They did it that way." 88 The idea that fans would be appeased by a few references to aspects of the book, no matter what the quality of storytelling, is problematic at best, insulting at worst, and condescending either way. "The movie ticks through critical plot points like it's checking them off a list' 89 writes Anita Burkam in the article From Page to Screen: Mike Newell's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ; "All that's missing is reasonably paced and plotted moviemaking." 90 That, and the so-called "human truth" that Newell apparently prized above all else: "You become more interested in [Harry's] interior processes, his emotions, than just what goes on' Newell asserts, 91 though it is difficult to understand why he is convinced of this when he, as director, seems more interested in what he can do with Harry's external world than in how to express the character's internal one. "It's one of the most powerful and dramatic scenes' 92 producer David Heyman says, in praise of Newell's work. And which scene is he talking about? The maze in the third task, which, as Dumbledore mysteriously informs each champion, changes people? The graveyard where Harry watches Voldemort's rebirth, duels with him, and comes face to face with the ghost-like shades of his long-dead parents?

No, of course not, that would make sense . Instead, as Heyman clarifies, "We departed from the book a little bit in the sense that the dragon breaks free of the chain that ties him and it leads to a dramatic chase through Hogwarts. Let's just say it doesn't necessarily meet the happiest of ends." 93 Never mind the fact that, as no one dies and Harry completes the task successfully, it does actually meet the happiest of ends, Heyman is talking about a scene in which Harry faces off with the dragon during the first task of the Triwizard Tournament. This is a scene which takes exactly two pages in the book (which includes the detailed description necessary of the medium), but in the film, it clocks in at nearly three minutes ’ a ridiculously long length of time on screen, particularly for Newell, who has said that "all of [these effects] would count for nothing if [audiences] simply didn't feel it." 94

Yet, as de Forest notes, "when a film jumps wildly from scene to scene, frantically flinging in new characters and situations willy-nilly, the seeds of authentic emotional reaction don't have time to be sown and flourish naturally ... the natural rhythm of reaction is massacred." 95 All of this leads to an ending of equal ruination, in what de Forest terms "a thrown-together mess of a conclusion. It seems unsure whether to end on a hopeful note, a tragic note, a portentous note, a humorous note or a poignant note, so it compromises by fizzling out with a flat uncertainty. ˜Everything's going to change now, isn't it?' asks Hermione. Yup. Sure is. Well. Will you sign my yearbook?" 96

While several critics enjoyed the film ’ and several film audiences, too ’ the question of whether or not Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was a good film is not the one that is asked in this essay. Instead, the question of whether or not it was a good film of the book must be considered, and while Mike Newell's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire might be considered a fun, and even wild ride of a film, it remains on the surface, granting only a superficial and distorted glimpse into the story of Harry's fourth year. J.K. Rowling's Dumbledore warned; "You have to make a choice between what is right, and what is easy." 97 It is unfortunate that Mike Newell did not heed this advice.

Harry Potter and the End of This Essay (2007)

"Books have one of the highest ratios of conversion from development to film of any source, including original screenplays' 98 and yet the process of adapting the Harry Potter book series into films is unique in many ways. Perhaps the most important cause of its uniqueness is the fact that the seven book series is being adapted one novel after the other, and yet the seven book series is not yet complete. With the intense secrecy surrounding the story and revelations still to come from the original author, filmmakers must attempt to adapt each of these films from an incomplete overall source text. This only heightens the difficulty and the scrutiny that are already present in the adaptation process. That is why the question of fidelity, though it "cannot be considered a valid yardstick with which to judge any adaptation' 99 must figure in more heavily than it might otherwise. John Tibbetts and James Welsh wrote that "movies do not ˜ruin' books, but merely misrepresent them' 100 as "the accumulation of minor details can create a markedly different experience between a book and a film' 101 and while usually that may not create any problems, Mike Newell's Dumbledore aptly demonstrates that in an ongoing ’ and unfinished ’ series, certain changes have far-reaching effects.

Still, while fidelity holds more importance in this case than in others, "changes made by the screenwriter and director might not necessarily destroy the original. In the best adaptations, narratives are translated and effectively transformed into the medium of film." 102 With the seventh, and last, Harry Potter novel being released this summer, perhaps the remaining films will have a better chance of achieving this transformation.

Mireia Aragay writes in Reflection to Refraction: Adaptation Studies Then and Now , that the real aim of adaptation is

to trade upon the memory of the novel, a memory that can derive from actual reading, or, as is more likely with a classic of literature, a generally circulated cultural memory. The adaptation consumes this memory, aiming to efface it with the presence of its own images. The successful adaptation is the one that is able to replace the memory of the novel. 103

Although Harry Potter is not widely considered a classic of literature, the same philosophy can apply. An adaptation must be more than a filmed novel, without compromising the text it is meant to represent. A good film does not make a good adaptation, and though the Harry Potter film series had a promising start, future directors would do well to keep those words in mind. Notes 1. Cartmell, "Shakespeare on Screen' 33.

2. Tibbetts and Welsh, Novels Into Film , 279.

3. Havens, Genius Behind Buffy , 24.

4. Elrick, "Chris Columbus talks¦."

5. McNamara, "When Steve Met Harry."

6. Elrick, "Chris Columbus talks¦."

7. Hopkins, "Behind the Scenes¦."

8. McNamara, "When Steve Met Harry."

9. Vander Ark, "The Ages of Snape and the Marauders."

10. Rowling, Philosopher's Stone , 102.

11. Millman, "To Sir, With Love' 43.

12. Rowling, "Edinburgh Book Festival."

13. Scholastic editor Arthur Levine, suggested that Rowling change the title of the book for its American release as he felt it was "too esoteric' and the change would convey "more immediately the sense of magic that's in the book" (Heiberger). This, despite the fact that the Philosopher's Stone is an object of legend, often found in myth and folklore (Anderson), and referred to in many areas of study, including religion, alchemy, the occult ¦ while the Sorcerer's Stone means nothing.

14. Hennigan, "Films ¦ Philosopher's Stone ."

15. Krevolin, How to Adapt¦ , 52.

16. Aragay, "Reflection to Refraction' 20.

17. Cartmell and Whelehan, "Fidelity Debate' 37.

18. Ebert, "Sorcerer's Stone."

19. Kloves, Sorcerer's Stone, 22.

20. Ibid., 43.

21. Ibid., 55-56.

22. Krevolin, How to Adapt¦ , 54.

23. Gupta, Re-Reading Harry Potter , 143.

24. Nel, "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bored."

25. Mzimba, "Conversation with¦."

26. Nel, "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bored."

27. Butler, " Potter has the stuff¦."

28. Spelling, "Leaving School' 44.

29. Elrick, "Chris Columbus talks¦."

30. Spelling, "Leaving School' 44.

31. "Y tu Harry¦' 22.

32. Ibid, 19.

34. Spelling, "Leaving School' 44.

35. Puig, "Harry hits his teens."

36. Nazarro, "The New Magician' 39.

37. Puig, "Harry hits his teens."

38. Nazarro, "The New Magician' 38.

39. Trout, "Alfonso Cuarón Interview."

40. de Forest, "Fractured Fairy Tale."

41. Turan, "Prisoner of Azkaban."

42. Nazarro, "Alfonso Cuarón Interview."

43. Z, "Elegantly Woven Tapestry."

45. Rowling, Prisoner of Azkaban , 257-68.

46. Z, "Elegantly Woven Tapestry."

47. Kelly Parker, e-mail message to author, 12 April 2007.

48. Puig, "Harry hits his teens."

49. Rowling, Prisoner of Azkaban , 152.

50. Ibid., 271.

51. Kloves, Prisoner of Azkaban .

52. Rowling, Prisoner of Azkaban , 261.

53. Ibid., 286.

54. Ibid., 213.

55. Kloves, Prisoner of Azkaban , 80.

56. Rowling, Prisoner of Azkaban , 259-60.

57. Nazarro, "The New Magician' 38.

58. Kloves, Prisoner of Azkaban , 125.

59. Fischer, "Exclusive Interview."

61. Geri, "News: Mike Newell¦."

62. Fischer, "Exclusive Interview."

63. Ibid., "Interview: Mike Newell."

64. Associated Press, "Newell puts the Brit¦."

65. Fischer, "Exclusive Interview."

66. Hately, "Hogwarts School of¦."

68. Rowling, Philosopher's Stone , 181.

69. Ibid., Goblet of Fire , 182.

70. Fraser, Conversations with J.K. Rowling , 21.

71. Associated Press, "Newell puts the Brit¦."

72. Kloves, Goblet of Fire , 66-67.

73. Fischer, "Exclusive Interview."

74. Solomon, "J.K. Rowling Interview."

75. Hately, "Hogwarts School of¦."

76. Morone, "Cultural Phenomena."

77. Rowling, Chamber of Secrets , 243.

78. Simms, "Action! Harry Potter¦."

79. Aloi, "Grown Up Magic."

80. Whitehead, "Interview: Mike Newell¦."

81. Witherwings, "Fractured Fairy Tale."

82. Simms, "Action! Harry Potter¦."

83. Rowling, Goblet of Fire , 604.

84. Kloves, Goblet of Fire , 32.

85. Rowling, Order of the Phoenix , 739.

86. Fischer, "Exclusive Interview."

87. Moondaughter, "Under the Microscope."

88. Geri, "Newell discusses¦."

89. Burkam, "From Page to Screen."

92. Geri, "Update: Heyman talks¦."

94. Nathan, "This boy¦' 90.

95. Witherwings, "Fractured Fairy Tale."

97. Rowling, Goblet of Fire , 628.

98. Hopkins, "Behind the Scenes¦."

99. Aragay, "Reflection to Refraction' 20.

100. Tibbetts and Welsh, Novels Into Film , xvii.

101. Nel, "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bored."

102. Tibbetts and Welsh, Novels Into Film , xx.

103. Aragay, "Reflection to Refraction' 20.

Bibliography

Aloi, Peg. "Grown Up Magic." Witch Cinema 19, 5 June 2004. http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_article.html?a=usma&id=8491 .

Anderson, Hans Christian. "The Philosopher's Stone (1859)." Hans Christian Anderson: Fairy Tales and Stories . 25 September 2006: http://hca.gilead.org.il/p_stone.html .

Aragay, Mireia. "Reflection to Refraction: Adaptation Studies Then and Now." Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship . Ed. Mireia Aragay. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 11-34.

Associated Press. "Newell puts the Brit back in Harry Potter ." MSNBC , 21 November 2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10054009 .

Burkam, Anita L. "From Page to Screen: Mike Newell's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." The Horn Book, Inc . http://www.hbook.com/resources/films/harrypotter4.asp .

Butler, Robert W. " Potter has the stuff but not the spirit." The Kansas City Star . 23 November 2001.

Cartmell, Deborah. "The Shakespeare On Screen Industry." Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text . Eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. London: Routledge, 1999. 29-37.

Cartmell, Deborah and Whelehan, Imelda. "Harry Potter and the Fidelity Debate." Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship . Ed. Mireia Aragay. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 37-49.

Ebert, Roger. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." RogerEbert.com: Movie Reviews , 16 November 2001. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20011116/REVIEWS/111160301/1023 .

Elrick, Ted. "Chris Columbus talks about directing Harry Potter ." DGA Magazine: Directors Guild of America 27:5, January 2003. http://www.dga.org/news/v27_5/feat_columbus.php3 .

Fischer, Paul. "Exclusive Interview: Mike Newell for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ." Dark Horizons 24, October 2005). http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/goblet1.php .

”””. "Interview: Mike Newell for Mona Lisa Smile and Harry Potter 4 ." Dark Horizons 9, December 2003. http://www.darkhorizons.com/news03/mona2.php .

Fraser, Lindsey. Conversations with J.K. Rowling . New York: Scholastic Press, 2001.

Geri. "Newell discusses the challenges of ˜ Harry Potter '." HPANA , 30 November 2004. http://www.hpana.com/news.18430.html .

”””. "News: Mike Newell won't split ˜ Goblet of Fire '." HPANA , 30 January 2004. http://www.hpana.com/news.17863.26.html .

”””. "Update: Heyman talks about first task and Fiennes." HPANA , 11 Oct. 2005. http://www.hpana.com/news.18913.html .

Gupta, Suman. Re-Reading Harry Potter . New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets . Directed by Christopher Columbus. Burbank: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2002.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire . Directed by Mike Newell. Burbank: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2005.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone . Directed by Chris Columbus. Burbank: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2001.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban . Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Burbank: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004.

Hately, Shaun. "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Context of the British Public Schools." HP InkPot , 13 December 2005. http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/shaun_hately/HSOWAWATBPS01.html .

Havens, Candace. Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy . Dallas: BenBella Books, 2003.

Heiberger, Sara. "Harry Potter and the Editor's Pen." Brown Alumni Magazine Online , November/December 2001. http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/storydetail.cfm?ID=421 .

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Harry Potter Essays

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Lynda A. Hall Department of English and Comparative Literature Chapman University, Orange, CA [email protected]

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Comparing and Contrasting "A Christmas Carol" Book and Movie Adaptation

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What makes The Wild Robot so alluring?

The captivating and emotional animated film is an adaptation of peter brown’s beloved children's novel.

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It's said to be one of those rare films that both kids and adults can enjoy — or at the very least, make sure you have a good cry together.

The Wild Robot  is the latest movie from DreamWorks Animation. It follows a robot that is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island as it learns to adapt to its new surroundings and build relationships with the natural world, even becoming the unlikely adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling.

It is based on author Peter Brown's award-winning and New York Times bestselling novel of the same name, first published in 2016. Today on  Commotion , Montreal illustrator and avid Wild Robot enthusiast Arizona O'Neill joins guest host Ali Hassan to get into whether the film adaptation of the popular children's book lives up to fans' expectations.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts .

Interview with Arizona O'Neill produced by Stuart Berman.

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Call for Papers for Adaptation: Literature, Film, and Culture Area Southwest Popular / American Culture Association

Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 46th annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels. 

The Adaptation: Literature, Film, and Culture area invites you to submit proposals for presentations that critically engage with the subject of adaptation. While the term “adaptation” most commonly refers to a film based upon or inspired by a novel (or the process of developing such a film), proposals for adaptations involving other media as source texts or final products are also welcome (for example, adaptations that involve art, theater, music, dance, television shows, video games, photographs, or comic books). Topics for paper proposals include, but are not limited to:

· adaptations of classic works.                                   · the process of adaptation.  · contemporary adaptations.              · ethics of adaptation.  · theories of adaptation.      · adaptation and audience engagement. · source texts with multiple adaptations.  · adaptation and aesthetics.                 · representations of culture in adaptations.  · adaptations across generations. · cross-cultural adaptations. · adaptations and the film industry.

All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at  https://swpaca.org/app

Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words. Including a brief bio in the body of the proposal form is encouraged, but not required.   

For information on how to submit a proposal for a roundtable or a multi-paper panel, please view the FAQs and Tips page on the conference website.   

SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due January 1, 2025.  SWPACA also offers travel fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students. For more information, visit  https://swpaca.org/graduate-student-paper-awards/ .

Registration and travel information for the conference will be available at  https://swpaca.org/albuquerque-conference/ .  As in 2024, the conference will be held at the Marriott Albuquerque (2101 Louisiana Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM 87110), which boasts free parking and close proximity to dining, shopping, and other delights. 

In addition, please check out the organization’s peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy , at  http://journaldialogue.org/ .

For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit  https://swpaca.org/subject-areas/ .

If you have any questions about the Adaptation: Literature, Film, and Culture  area, please contact its Area Chair, Amy S. Fatzinger, Ph.D., University of Arizona ([email protected]). If you have general questions about the conference, please contact us at  [email protected] , and a member of the executive team will get back to you.

This will be a fully in-person conference. If you’re looking for an online option to present your work, keep an eye out for details about the 2025 SWPACA Summer Salon, a completely virtual conference to take place in June 2025. However, do keep in mind that the Summer Salon is a smaller conference with limited presentation slots and no student funding assistance.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Amy S. Fatzinger, PhD