How do you adapt a novel, play, fact book, or what have you for film use?
Or, to put it another way, how do you translate a printed work into script form?
The big issue is of course relative complexity. A novel may run 500 pages or more. Most films must be squeezed into 90 minutes running time. Cutting—often, drastic cutting—therefore becomes essential.
Thus, consider a novel we’ll call Monster. Told in first person, it runs 13 chapters, 255 pages. Each chapter is comprised of one segment of present action, another of flashback background material. More than 20 characters are developed.
How might you approach the adaptation of Monster to film form, so far as the script is concerned? There are three major possibilities to consider:
1. You can follow the book.
2. You can work from key scenes.
3. You can construct an original screenplay based on the book.
To a considerable degree, each of these procedures overlaps the others. Yet each in its way is also separate and distinct, with individual strengths and weaknesses, advantages and flaws, to the point that each rates individual attention.
1. You can follow the book.
Wild are the anguished cries of critics outraged by the fact that a given film—which is to say, a given script—doesn’t follow the book.
These ladies and gentlemen might not scream quite so loudly, however, were they themselves confronted by the problems of adaptation.
Take Monster, for example. Much of its impact is gained from its meshing of present and past. Chapter 1’s flashback carries us to a point 263 days before the present action. But the gap narrows, chapter by chapter, until, in Chapter 12, the flashback ends just prior to the present action of Chapter 1. Chapter 13 melds both past and present in a final wrap-up.
Do I need to tell you that any attempt to approximate this pattern on the screen can lead only to total audience confusion?
Further, Monster is a taut, suspenseful story—perhaps too much so, for each unit of past and of present builds to a stomach-knotting climax.
How can this be handled in a film? True, it works well enough on paper, where transitions and the first-person central character’s introspections provide sufficient change of pace and release of tension to balance the climaxes’ mounting suspense and rising action. But development of 25 separate major crises is impossible in 90 minutes running time. To attempt it is to assure a crowded, jerky, melodramatic botch of a picture—and this without even considering the problem of how to introduce and build 20-odd characters.
The only solution, obviously, is to cut, cut, cut. The question is—cut what?
This is a Gordian knot without a sword. Whatever choice you make will unquestionably be wrong in the eyes of some; and odds are you can’t conceivably blue-pencil enough to bring the picture within acceptable length, unless you resort to some version or other of procedures 2 or 3, as described below.
2. You can work from key scenes.
At the opposite extreme from slavishly following the book lies this approach. It has Writer shuffling the book’s pages in search of scenes which appeal to him as colorful, dramatic, and at least indicative of the author’s concept and story line. These he arranges in some sort of climactic order (not necessarily that followed in the book), then builds bridging passages between them, using either materials which the book provides or which he himself develops.
In the case of Monster, Writer might very well decide to build his script in a straight time line, ignoring such of the book’s alternating flashbacks as he cannot juggle to fit the straight-line concept. For an opening, he picks a luridly esoteric scene in which a sex-oriented satanist cult is meeting. Male and female leads are both in attendance, with Male lusting after Female. But she refuses him—she won’t betray her aging husband.
A scene in which Male Lead swims across a lake at night to murder Husband follows. Then, one in which he discovers that Female Lead, now his wife, has tricked him into committing the murder, simultaneously incriminating him in such a manner that he’s doomed to be her slave for all time to come.
Further developments see Female Lead slay a fellow-cultist. Realizing he’s next in line, Male Lead sets about to commit a series of fake lust killings, in the course of which he can also murder Female Lead; and so on.
His key scenes chosen, Writer now sets about bridging the gaps between them in such a manner as to give the final product some sense of continuity and logic. Thus, he decides that the incriminating evidence against Male Lead will unknowingly be held by Female Lead’s younger sister, a girl as innocent as Female Lead is evil.
This touch particularly pleases Writer, since he recognizes that the characters in the original novel are too distasteful and perverted to serve as hero and heroine in any film of consequence. By playing Sister as heroine, he can in effect make the picture one long chase, with both Male and Female Leads secretly trying to kill her, complete even unto a quick save at the climax.
It’s not hard to see why many viewers will find this filmed version of Monster unsatisfactory. In effect, they’ve been given a whole new picture—one with little resemblance to the novel save for the characters and buckets of blood.
Shall we draw a kindly veil and move on to our final approach?
3. You can construct an original screenplay based on the book.
This technique follows the line laid out in Chapter 7. To make a film script of Monster, attack the adaptation as if you were putting together an original screenplay. That is, start by nailing down what you consider to be the story’s premise. (“What if a man sets out to fake a series of lust murders to mask his killing of his wife—and then discovers he’s actually a real lust murderer at heart?”)
Next, decide on a point of view. (The novel stays with the murderer himself. But is that best? Would it be better to use the angle of the wife, for instance? Or a psychiatrist? Or a detective?)
Now, lay out a starting lineup. (“Unable longer to endure the harassment inflicted on him by his evil, sadistically domineering wife, Celeste, Blair Hilliard determines to kill her, masking the slaying with a series of fake lust murders. But can he succeed when his arch-foe, mysterious cult chief Master Satan, refuses to stay dead?”)
And so it goes, as you move on through your story, step by step … determining beginning, middle, end … writing a story treatment … breaking the treatment down into a step outline … building up a first draft master scene script …
Will this prove easy? Hardly. For where Monster the novel may capture thoughts, develop interior monologues, range through years of flashbacked time and the whole United States, and explore an infinity of bypaths and subplots, you the scriptwriter can’t afford such.
Instead, you must reduce the mass to filmable dimensions. Which is to say, you must decide which of the maze of potential story lines you wish to follow … which characters should be built up, which jettisoned … which relationships offer most potential … which scenes hold greatest dramatic strength … which incidents must be devised and incorporated to draw the various bits together.
Flashbacks? In essence, they constitute someone remembering in the present something which happened in the past. Unless that remembrance is vital to the story, you very well may skip them entirely.
If, on the other hand, a flashback’s content must of necessity be included, you may (a) reduce it to dialogue references—that is, let someone reveal the essential data verbally, or (b) play it out as a dramatized incident, dissolving from present to past and letting the characters involved live through the experience, then dissolving back to the present.
As a general rule, however, it’s wise to avoid flashbacks wherever possible, simply because they bring your story’s forward movement to a halt. This may either bore or confuse your viewers. In consequence, most of the time, it’s better to stick with present action: what’s happening now.
Yet the task with which Monster confronts you is relatively simple, compared with that which faced the writers of the scripts for such books as Gone With the Wind, War and Peace, Out of Africa, Dune, Clockwork Orange, and a hundred others.
Clearly enough, too, the three plans of attack I’ve outlined are far from exclusive. At one time or another, on any adaptation, you’ll jump from tight adherence to the original here to working from key scenes there, to drawing out a premise and starting lineup from your material elsewhere in order to tie otherwise disparate elements together. And that’s fine too. As I’ve said so many times, the big thing is to get the job done.
Over and beyond broad reformulations such as those discussed so far, the question of what details to cut always arises.
The answer is, cut facts—whole incidents, if need be. Why? Because the heart of any film is feeling.
This is diametrically opposite to the tendency of most beginners. Faced with a series of seven incidents centering on a boy’s or girl’s departure, the new writer invariably will try to crowd all in.
What he should be doing instead is asking himself one vital question: What dominant feeling is the novel’s author trying to convey through the incidents? Passion? Poignancy? Relief? Or what?
Thus, suppose it soon becomes apparent that Girl feels poignancy, Boy relief, at their impending separation.
Obviously, seven scenes aren’t necessary to convey this. All Writer needs to do is write—or rewrite—one to make clear the characters’ divergent feelings, and he can move on again with pages saved.
Of course, this is not to say that cutting is necessarily the writer’s only problem. Indeed, the opposite may be the case, as when he finds himself forced to expand a short story to fill 90 minutes. Yet that too can be managed—witness the brilliant work of Dudley Nichols in expanding Ernest Haycox’s Collier’s story into the classic Stagecoach, the Mark Hellinger adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, or any of the many expansions of Stephen King’s tales of terror. The issue is merely one of taking the original story as a springboard, then building a broader work upon it.
Play adaptation? It offers its own headaches. Trapped within the limits of the proscenium arch or arena staging, relying heavily on dialogue for its effects, the play’s thrust is far different from that of film. To adapt it for screen use demands a willingness to cut it loose from the stage’s confines and conventions … open it up to a wider sweep of action and of setting. Too slavish adherence to the playwright’s conception can only destroy it.
Adaptation of factual material—a biography, say, or an account of some sort of adventure, discovery, or expedition? Your main problem quite possibly will be avoidance of that overdramatization which embarrasses and infuriates participants, heirs, and assigns. Wives of departed heroes rarely enjoy seeing their husbands portrayed as leering rakes; scientists cringe when colleagues kid them about the simplism or inaccuracy of filmed laboratory techniques; and no tough cop likes it when his buddies in the squad room play their own version of his deeds of derring-do.
I wish I had remedies for all such headaches. Too often, unfortunately, the writer is trapped between producer demands and subject sensitivities. Your biggest assets in such situations are a real determination to give your subject a straight count; honest sympathy for survivors; a willingness to develop your people as warts-and-all human beings, and enough of a sense of humor to incorporate such immortal lines as the one I picked up from a detective describing a blood-curdling shoot-out: “Warning shots, hell! I was just plain missin’!”
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One final thought: Whatever your adaptation assignment, often the result will be a script—and film—which on the surface shows little relationship to the material from which it’s taken; and viewers and media alike—and, quite possibly, the original author—will rave at the way you’ve “corrupted” the work.
Yet if you’ve done an honest job and played in luck, without too much interference from actors or director or front office or elsewhere, quite possibly you will have created a work which not only holds firm to the spirit of the original, but actually offers better entertainment.
If, on the other hand, you try to cling too tightly to chapter and verse of your source material, you very well may end up with a script which never quite jells: a straggly thing replete with loose ends, abortive scenes, jerky development, and characters who never quicken.
On that thought, we’ll move on to another subject: the story conference, the writer and his people.
Read it. It’s vital!