CHAPTER 9
ADAPTATION FROM ART OR LIFE
ADAPTING FROM LITERATURE
There is a constantly growing supply of plays, novels, and short stories that might adapt well to the screen. Libraries and the Internet have an amazing range of offerings, and someone somewhere has already analyzed, indexed, or published (by characters, subject, or theme) the very thing you are interested in. All you need to do is find it. Short stories, for example, are indexed by theme.
The short story is a favorite source of material for both short and full-length films. Like all good literature, it can be a quicksand to the unwary, for the magic of language can seduce the filmmaker into assuming the story will make an equally fine film. Effective adaptation may actually be impossible if the author's writing style and literary form have no cinematic equivalency. A story relying on a subtly ironic storytelling voice, for instance, might be a bad choice because there is no such thing as ironic photography or recording.
Effective literature never automatically contains the basis for a good film. Most of the criteria for judging material for an adaptation remain the same as those used to assess any script:
- Does it tell its tale through externally visible, behavioral means?
- Does it have interesting, well-developed characters?
- Is it contained and specific in settings?
- Are the situations interesting and realizable?
- Is there an interesting major conflict, and is it dramatized rather than internal?
- Does the conflict imply interesting metaphors?
- Does the piece have a strong thematic purpose?
- Is the thematic purpose one you can relate to strongly?
- Can you invent a cinematic equivalency for the story's literary values?
- Can you afford to do it?
- Is the copyright available?
FAITHFUL ADAPTATION
Any well-known work comes with strings attached. Should J.D. Salinger personally hand you the rights to The Catcher in the Rye, you would not have a free hand at adaptation. Because the book has touched so many people, meeting their expectations would be well nigh impossible. For this reason alone, literature adapted to the screen almost always disappoints its fans. Other works, long or short, may pose narrative or stylistic problems that can only be solved through radically altering the form suggested by the original. For instance, John Korty's version of John Updike's five-and-a-half-page story “The Music School” takes a story that happens contemplatively inside a man's mind, develops it into interwoven events, and propels them upon a musical theme of increasing texture and confidence. The result is a short film gem no less profound than Updike's extremely compressed original, a good deal more accessible, and yet true to the original's spirit.
Karel Reisz's 1981 screen version of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, however, suffers badly. Fowles' novels tend to overflow with ideas, and this one more than any. The movie version, although scripted by the supremely intelligent Harold Pinter, is forced by time limitations to strip away most of the sociological and philosophical speculation by which the novel assesses the 19th century against its 20th-century offspring. Like most adaptations, the movie concentrates on plot and action at the expense of discourse and emerges with a bad case of malnutrition.
FREE ADAPTATION
A more fertile union of literature and screen can happen when, instead of processing literary or theatrical icons, the filmmaker uses aspects of a written work to seed a fully autonomous film. Inventive, original cinema takes what it needs from anything and everything, while great novels or plays processed for the screen are always diminished—like paintings made into tablecloths. Godard's groundbreaking movies of the 1960s included free adaptations of theater or sociology, works by Alberto Moravia and Guy de Maupassant, and most interestingly, transformations of pulp fiction. The Quentin Tarantino movie Pulp Fiction (1995), however, adopts the style and values of pulp fiction without apparently having anything in its back pocket beyond style. Its undoubted professionalism and panache lead to an emptiness and an exaltation of what it wants us to laugh at.
USING LITERATURE OR ACTUALITY AS A SPRINGBOARD
When you take over a story framework (from a literary work or from a life situation) and substitute your own choice of main elements, an entirely new work can emerge because everything else, including the main issues, will be affected. In the search to integrate all the parts, the work will inevitably evolve and begin to impose its own demands that the writer must satisfy. Elements you might alter could be:
Characters: Placing a new character in any situation creates pressure for new outcomes (and therefore a changed destiny). Strong characters can steer a story to new conclusions that, in turn, express a different resolution and meaning.
Situations and conflicts: Changed characters almost certainly generate changes in the events and changes in some or all of the main conflicts.
Period: One can tell an old story in a modern setting, as Leonard Bernstein did by adapting Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to a New York setting in the musical show West Side Story.
Settings: New characters demand their own settings to express what is particular to them. Changes of class, changes of region, or changes of occupation all have far-reaching consequences. A change of setting will produce changed pressures on the characters.
Point of view: In The Wide Sargasso Sea, novelist Jean Rhys reinterprets the situation in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre by taking the viewpoint of the mad, imprisoned Mrs. Rochester. A radically different story arises from Rhys' outrage at the injustices suffered by neglected wives, something she personally experienced during her early years in Paris. Any story that draws you emotionally into its web is capable of being reinterpreted, especially if you want to contest the meanings drawn by the original author.
Thematic purpose: You might keep similar characters but adjust the situations to produce a different thematic outcome. Here you may be attracted to interpreting the same events differently.
You are surrounded by rich resources for storytelling. You can legitimately borrow and adapt from any source, providing the new entity gains its own entire identity and purpose. If it remains visibly, identifiably indebted to a copyrighted source, you must, of course, obtain permission as described in a later section.
Your feeling should no longer be “Help, I don't have any stories to tell” but instead, “What is the basis for my choices and adaptations?” and “Why do I like this particular story so much?” Whatever causes a deep response in you throws light on your underlying storyteller's identity. Growing self-knowledge will draw into your work whatever else fascinates you. The aim is to design a vehicle freighted with personal significance so that you become possessed by it, answering to characters, events, and situations that propel themselves forward to their own conclusion. Indeed, the sign of an effectively rigorous writing process is that your characters detach themselves from their originals and become autonomous within their own world.
COPYRIGHT CLEARANCE
If you make an adaptation bearing a likeness to its original, you must procure the legal right to use it. Copyright law is changed periodically. In the United States you can obtain current information from the Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20559. Many works first published 56 years ago or more are old enough to be in the public domain, but do not assume this without careful inquiry, preferably through a copyright lawyer. The laws are extremely complicated, especially concerning a literary property's clearance in other countries.
ACTOR-CENTERED FILMS AND THEIR SCRIPTS
Another potential influence on the script is the cast. This source of help will be explored in depth later, but this chapter would be incomplete without establishing the importance of actors' personalities and traits to an existing idea or script. Look at it this way: Your vision reaches the audience through what you put on the screen, and most of this will be the human presence. The credibility and quality of that human presence makes or breaks any film, yet seldom is the individuality of the very actors who bring it alive allowed to modify the text. Invariably, unless a powerful star is involved, the actors must adapt to the text. This is because most films are manufactured in a unidirectional process, and actors are fitted to a finished and funded script. This is neither desirable nor true for the low-budget filmmaker.
Actors whose effortless-looking performances we take for granted arrive on the screen through a rigorous apprenticeship and ruthless winnowing process. But beginning or low-budget filmmakers must try to match this professionalism using actors with little or no experience. Most try doing this by following the industry's assembly line operation, though there's really something already wrong with professional norms. Jessica Lange, a film actress as professional as they come, has deplored the lack of rehearsal time in which to reach into the emotional life of her characters (see her interview in American Film, June 1987). So anyone using inexperienced actors, or non-actors, can hardly bring together people unknown to each other and unfamiliar with the process of filming and expect them to be relaxed and focused in their roles. You need an induction process that will bring anxiety levels down and build an ensemble able to be playful in its seriousness.
For the inexperienced cast, there's an urgent need to explore and interact, so the prudent director plans time and activities through which cast and script can evolve. Careful and intensive rehearsal is a must. Use intelligent discussion and improv work to explore the ideas and emotional transitions in the script and to liberate that magic quality of spontaneity.
Here is a scripting method that uses human beings as well as the computer. Though nontraditional, it is increasingly used and with significant results.
INTEGRATING THE CAST INTO THE SCRIPT
Some distinguished directors already write in an unconventional, actor-centered way, foremost among them Bergman, who does not favor the screenplay:
If … I were to reproduce in words what happens in the film I have conceived, I would be forced to write a bulky book of little readable value and great nuisance. I have neither the talent nor the patience for a heroic exercise of that kind. Besides, such a procedure would kill all creative joy for both me and the artists. (Introduction, Four Stories by Ingmar Bergman, New York: Doubleday, 1977)
Bergman develops his films from an annotated short story. For Cries and Whispers (1972) he supplied notes about the artistic approach, intended characters and their situations, settings, and time period. There are also fragments from Agnes' diary, details of a dream, and the dialogue and narrative of the events. Bergman hands these materials to all participating, and the developmental work begins from a thorough discussion and assimilation of their possibilities. Much of the creation of characters and action then lies with actors whose careers and talents (and children!) Bergman has been instrumental in developing.
In the United States, actor-director John Cassavetes also gave primacy to his actors, either having them improvise completely, as in Shadows (1959), or basing a written script on structured improvisations as he did in A Woman Under the Influence (1974). “The emotion was improvised,” he said. “But the lines were written.”
Alain Tanner, a Swiss director who came to feature films through television documentaries, has gradually evolved his fiction works toward the spontaneity of his documentary beginnings. For Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976) he showed photos of his chosen cast to writing collaborator John Berger. The associations Berger made with each face became the basis for a script (Figure 9-1). In his later film In the White City (1985) Tanner used no script at all, relying instead upon the ability of his fine actors to improvise on a framework of specified ideas. This takes expertise all around.
In Britain, Mike Leigh's films started out with bittersweet comedy but have developed into a darker criticism of English life. High Hopes (1988) and Life is Sweet (1991) are comedies of character that make a poignant critique of English working class powers of adaptation and survival when the mainstays of dignity— work and a place in the order of things—begin to disappear. Naked (1993) projects an apocalyptic vision of characters lost and in torment in a London where the have-nots roam the streets like hungry, wounded wolves. Leigh comes from the theater and bases his work on particular actors. His results show none of the hesitancy of pacing, bouts of self-consciously bravura acting, or the uncertainty of structure visible in the work of Cassavetes and other improv-based filmmakers.
Before you line up behind any particular creed, it may be useful to glance at some fundamentals of modern realistic cinema. If the object is to create believable life on the screen and to expose credible contemporary issues, there must not only be viable ideas and situations, but above all, credible characters. Today's audience has spent upwards of 18,000 hours watching the screen and is expert at judging acting. People are quite unmoved by the representational styles that audiences loved years ago. So unless an actor finds an adequate emotional identification with his character, we will reject his performance, and with it, much or all of the film.
Unsophisticated or untrained actors tend to model their performances not on life but on ideas gleaned from other admired actors. They will signify a character's feelings and “perform” at the mass audience they imagine existing just beyond the camera lens. The director must develop strategies for each actor to
break through to something true. Their particular qualities and limitations should guide how you realize your authorial intentions. Even your intentions may need rethinking if they are to align with the intrinsic and highly visible qualities of your cast.
As a developing director you must, as a matter of survival, give first priority to developing your actors' potentials. Good film acting looks like being, not like acting at all. Your film can survive indifferent film technique, but nothing can rescue it from lousy acting—not good color, not good music, not good photography, not good editing. None of these—separately or combined—can change the true state of consciousness and the inherent human qualities you cannot avoid capturing, documentary fashion, with your camera.
A SCRIPT DEVELOPED FROM ACTORS IMPROVISING
Let us imagine you are going to make a film about the conflicts and paradoxes in a young man leaving home, and you want to show it as an ordeal by fire. It is possible and even desirable to begin without a full-fledged script. Leaving home is so universal that most cast members will have strong feelings on the subject. You decide to find an interesting cast, knowing that each actor's ideas are going to be engaged in developing your thematic concerns. John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974) began this way. Cassavetes and his wife, actress Gena Rowlands, who plays the wife in the film, were interested in what happens in an Italian-American blue collar family when the ideas of women's liberation penetrate the home. The wife becomes aware that her role as wife and mother is preventing her from growing into an autonomous adult. The resulting script was founded on the experiences and personalities of the players. Uneven as the movie is, Gena Rowlands' performance is disturbingly memorable.
By finding an interested cast and by posing the right questions, it is possible to draw out their interests and residual experience of life. When you turn up interesting and credible situations, you can have your cast experimentally play them out. As this happens, consistent characters begin to emerge from each player, and in emerging, they demand greater clarity and background. You and your cast will find your attention turning from ideas to character development, from character development inevitably to situations, and from situations and characters to the specific past events—personal, cultural, political—that seeded each character's present. Gradually you form a world out of the tensions and conflicts, and the world belongs to everyone taking part because each has had a hand in its creation.
A ship with several oarsmen needs a firm hand on the tiller. Directing a project of this nature takes subtlety, patience, and the authority to make binding decisions. Dramatically the results may be a mixed bag, but at the very least this process is a tremendous way of building rapport among cast and director. The cast tends to retain what is successful by consensus, so that what began as improvisation gradually metamorphoses into a mutually agreed text. This is truly fascinating, for this surely rediscovers how folk drama was produced for hundreds of years.
Another more open-ended method is to start, not from a social theme or idea, but from a mood or from the personality and potential of individual cast members. If “character is fate,” let your characters develop their fates. By getting each to generate an absorbing character and by letting situations grow out of the clashes and alliances of these characters, themes and issues inevitably suggest themselves. A project like this is good for a theater company used to working together, or as a follow-up film project when the cast and director have come to trust each other and want to go on working together (not always the case!).
Though there are only 36 basic dramatic situations in the world, there is no limit to possible interactions among characters. Alternatively, both characters and issues might be developed from the nature and resonance of a particular location, say a deserted gravel pit, the waiting room in an underground car park, or a street market. Very potent is the site of an historical event, such as a field where strikers were gunned down or the house where a woman who had apocalyptic visions grew up.
Experiments of this kind are excellent for building the cast's confidence to play scripted or unscripted parts with unselfconscious abandonment and giving them the daring to act upon intuition—all priceless commodities. Playful work of this nature generates energy and ideas, and when the dramatic output is rounded up and analyzed, a longer work can be structured. Firm guidance is imperative or the results will lack integration and fail to make any recognizable statement. This is true for all improv-generated ideas. Techniques useful for this kind of work appear throughout Part 5: Preproduction and particularly in Chapter 21, “Learning about Acting.”
THE VIDEO NOVEL: AN IMPROV APPROACH
Just as the theater in England was once revitalized when local companies turned their backs on cocktail plays in favor of more explosive local issues, it now seems possible that local fiction might emerge to begin producing the modern equivalent of the regional novel. Amber Films has done this in the industrial north of England (www.amber-online.com/html/index.html) with their films Eden Valley (1994) and Like Father (2001).
In America as elsewhere, there are a host of obstacles standing in the way of this, but the main one is the sheer lack of proficiency in filmmaking outside the few metropolitan areas where films are produced. Most regional film production remains imitative and third-rate. A few first-rate contemporary voices would send distributors rushing to invest in a new source of product, and make no mistake, they need it. With ever more channels, not to mention the inevitability of movies on demand through the Internet, the people of the world want to see themselves, not just Hollywood forever.
The most likely point of origin is city theatres producing works of contemporary social and political criticism and having a fairly stable ensemble. It has been done before. Both the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the fine actress Hanna Schygulla, who played in his Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), emerged from such an institution, the Munich action-theater, which later became the anti-theater. The company made no fewer than six of Fassbinder's early films together, and his astonishingly prolific and creative film career was plainly rooted in the experience of creating instant theater from contemporary personal or political issues.
If it can be done in Munich, why not elsewhere? Of course, there will always be many arguments against a grassroots screen drama movement. Funding, distribution, the continuity of the ensemble, and homogeneity of vision are all difficult to sustain. Rather than debate these points, I will just point out a possible niche for an enterprising group, given that the means of production are now within reach.
Let us take an example. During the last 20 years in Chicago, where I live, the steel industry has gone silent, and the hardworking ethnic communities that clustered around it have gone through a period of unemployment. They participated in the American Dream for two or three generations, and now heavy industry and the notion of real work being mills and factories has all but died. What happens to such people? What happens to their sons and daughters? What happens when people whose sense of virtue was founded in hard, dirty labor now have no more “man's work” in the offing? How do they explain their losses? This is a story being repeated all over the industrialized Western world as it changes from a manufacturing to an information society. Such people and their fate are of wide significance and also of wide interest. It is not hard to find out about them, for their survivors have ample time for the researcher.
At first sight it seems more of a Barbara Kopple documentary subject, but when you begin to read articles and interviews, to visit with union leaders, local historians, doctors, and clergymen, as well as with the unemployed steelworkers and their families, you find that the story is diffuse and complicated. Some of the men still live on false hope. Some drink too much. Some, to keep up their work ethic, have taken meaningless jobs that pay a fraction of what they once earned. The wives now go to work, and the family dynamic has changed. The young people either stay because for one reason or another they cannot leave, or they go off to college, leaving their parents' decaying neighborhood ever farther away, yet feeling guilty for betraying their embittered, once-proud parents.
Here is a situation with many possibilities, indeed so many things happening that the only way to select is to decide which are especially interesting and make a dramatic construct out of those. What we begin to see is perhaps a representative family whose members are composites inspired by people we met and who left an indelible impression. We make up a list of key events in the life of a composite fictional family, which span many years. Covering half a lifetime is something that fiction can do rather well. Here are some key events:
- Father loses job
- Believes his skills will soon be needed elsewhere
- No job comes, no job can be found
- Scenes of mounting economic and emotional pressure in the family
- Mother finds a job as a checkout clerk at a supermarket
- Daughter begins going to a college downtown
- Daughter becomes increasingly critical of her family and its assumptions
- Son drops out of high school and hangs out on street corners, identifying more and more with racist gang messages of revenge and hatred
We have built up a series of pressures. Now we urgently need ideas about how these pressures will resolve, what kind of contortions this family and this bereaved community are going to suffer, and what “coming out the other side” may mean. A fictionalized treatment of these very real circumstances must, therefore, have an element of prediction to propose to its audience, a prediction about the way human beings handle slow-motion catastrophe.
Becoming a social analyst or prophet is an exciting job to give yourself. Do it well and you will arouse much interest, but you'll need the abilities (or the help) of journalist, sociologist, documentarian, or novelist to make it work. But look what is already available: a host of characters to play minor roles; a landscape of windswept, rusting factories and rows of peeling houses; and a circuit of bars, dance halls, and ethnic churches with their weddings, christenings, and funerals. Sound too depressing? Then go to the amateur comedian contests and make Dad into an aspiring stand-up comic. The community where you are going to film has all sorts of regular activities to use as a backdrop, and within the wide bounds of the possible, you can make the characters do and be anything you want.
Actually, people who lose their jobs, provided they are resilient, sometimes say afterward when they have found a new life, “That was awful and it hurt, but looking back it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” It's important when telling stories to offer hope, and this resolution is indeed hopeful. One way to sugar the pill is to use the genre of comedy. Many recent British comedies have been set in similar surroundings and use humor to deal with serious situations. Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet (1990), Mark Herman's Brassed Off (1996), Peter Cattaneo's The Full Monty (1997), and Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliot (2000) have all been about local characters in failing rust belt settings. Indeed, The Full Monty was so successful and so universal in its appeal that its central idea has been recycled as a musical about steelworkers in upstate New York.
What is happening in your area that needs to be understood? A rash of teenage suicides? A cult? A new and dangerous form of racing? A cosmetician who has found a way to get rich quick? A UFO society? An archeological hoax by a hitherto reputable academic? A sexual purity movement among teenagers? Industrial espionage? An aging beauty queen who has run away with her priest? A computer nerd reorganizing the town's bank accounts for no personal profit?
Among novelists there have always been committed regionalists. You could become one. You could reach out to inhabit interesting, broadly significant local situations that can be filled out from imagination and experience. Newspapers, magazines, and bookshops are full of models, and you need only to choose well from the local storehouse. Intelligently realized, the deeply local subject becomes the truly universal one.