Great Adaptations
GREAT ADAPTATIONS
A vast majority of Academy Award-winning Best Pictures, television movies of the week, and mini-series are adaptations, watched by millions of people globally. Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling examines the technical methods of adapting novels, short stories, plays, life stories, magazine articles, blogs, comic books, graphic novels and videogames from one medium to another, focusing on the screenplay. Written in a clear and succinct style, perfect for intermediate and advanced screenwriting students, Great Adaptations explores topics essential to fully appreciating the creative, historical, and sociological aspects of the adaptation process. It also provides up-to-date, practical advice on the legalities of acquiring rights and optioning and selling adaptations, and is inclusive of a diverse variety of perspectives that will inspire and challenge students and practitioners alike.
Alexis Krasilovsky is Professor of Screenwriting and Media Theory and Criticism at California State University, Northridge, teaching courses in Screenplay Adaptation and Film as Literature. Krasilovsky is a member of the Writers Guild of America, West, and is writer/director of the award-winning global documentaries Women Behind the Camera (2007) and Let Them Eat Cake (2014). She is also author of Women Behind the Camera: Conversations with Camerawomen (1997), and co-author of Shooting Women: Behind the Camera, Around the World (2015). Krasilovsky’s narrative film, Blood (1976), was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times as “in its stream-of-consciousness way, more powerful than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.” Visit Alexis Krasilovsky’s website at www.alexiskrasilovsky.com
GREAT ADAPTATIONS
Screenwriting and Global Storytelling
Alexis Krasilovsky
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Alexis Krasilovsky
The right of Alexis Krasilovsky to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-94917-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-94918-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66926-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by HWA Text and Data Management, London
Contents
FOREWORD
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART I:
INTRODUCING ADAPTATION
Chapter 1 Creative Issues: Where Do Ideas Come From?
Chapter 2 Career Issues: Writers’ and Producers’ Standpoints
Chapter 3 The Ethics and Aesthetics of Adaptation
PART II:
APPLYING SCREENPLAY PRINCIPLES TO ADAPTATION
Chapter 4 Plot
Chapter 5 Setting
Chapter 6 Characters and Character Relationships
Chapter 7 Dialogue
Chapter 8 Structure: Heroes and Heroines – Where Are We Going?
PART III:
A SURVIVAL GUIDE TO ADAPTATION
Chapter 9 The Process
PART IV:
RENEWING THE SPIRIT IN MYTHS AND FAIRY TALES
Chapter 10 Fairy Tale Factors: From Spindle to Kindle
Chapter 11 The Beasts: From Cocteau to Cable
PART V:
GLOBAL STORYTELLING REVISITED
Chapter 12 Stories without Borders
Chapter 13 Regional vs. International Perspectives: Universalizing Regional Stories
PART VI:
MODERN PERSPECTIVES ON ROMANCE
Chapter 14 Love and Romance Adaptations
PART VII:
BRINGING UP THE CLASSICS
Chapter 15 From Ancient Greece to Hollywood and Nollywood
Chapter 16 Chunhyang, Orpheus, and Other Myths
Chapter 17 Keeping It Literary in China
PART VIII:
EMBRACING AND RETHINKING STRUCTURE
Chapter 18 Timing the Times
Chapter 19 Alternative Focus Topics for the Story of Malcolm X
PART IX:
CENSORSHIP
Chapter 20 Retelling, Limited
PART X:
FUTURE ADAPTATIONS
Chapter 21 Future Adaptations
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Foreword
On Adaptation
The Columbia University professor Sidney Morgenbesser used to compare the three leading schools of philosophy to the three leading schools of umpiring the game of baseball. Picture a man in black standing behind the home plate. Here are the ways he decides what is a strike, and what isn’t:
• One: I call them as I see them.
• Two: I call them as they are.
• Three: They are because I call them.
In some ways, the work of a screenwriter adapting a book is not at all unlike the work of Morgenbesser’s umpire:
• One: I call them as I see them. Meaning: I look for the truth of the book, its essence rare – and I work to preserve that truth even as I sell everything else down the river. I here think of that pre-eminent adapter of literary novels, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Howard’s End, The Remains of the Day, The Golden Bowl) who would read the book, then put it utterly aside, and refrain from opening it during the entire process of writing and rewriting the screenplay.
• Two: I call them as they are. Meaning: I just take the book and make it a movie, simple. Perhaps the greatest exponent of this approach was John Huston, who adapted Hammett’s Maltese Falcon in the most literal sense. As Huston described it, and I quote “You simply take apart two copies of the book, paste the pages, and cross out what you don’t like.”
• Three: They are because I call them. This assumes a kind of reverse influence, one that would have delighted Borges and inflamed Harold Bloom. That the screenplay not only adapts the book, but in some sense changes it forever. Can one really read the pages of Harper Lee except through the spectacles of Horton Foote? As a thought experiment: close your eyes and say the words ‘Atticus Finch.’ Can you do that without seeing Gregory Peck?
This, then, is the paradox of adaptation. The adaptation leaves the book untouched: the copy of Moby-Dick on my nightstand written before the movies were invented, was widely read even as Ray Bradbury’s adaptation was being filmed, and will exist when all the celluloid in the world has turned back into dust.
But the adaptation also transforms the book. Rips the binding, shreds the pages, pulps them, and by wild alchemy transforms them into light, flickering light. The adaptation can betray the book, but it can also bring it to life for audiences far larger than those who frequent libraries and bookstores. The adaptation can change peoples’ lives – in a way that the best films, the best books, always have. The power to make us realize that the world is far more troubling, and far more beautiful, than is conventionally sold to us, is what books and films do best. And more: the great adaptation will often complete the circle — lead the viewer back to the book, make the introduction, and
then gently close the door from the outside.
— Howard A. Rodman
President, Writers Guild of America West
Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Artistic Director, Sundance Screenwriting Labs
Preface
Adaptations have been my passion ever since childhood, first manifesting at the end of a graduate seminar on Dante’s The Divine Comedy at Yale University. I was an undergraduate, over my head. I didn’t think I could write papers in Italian (although I’d done just that at the University of Florence the year before), but I had the chutzpah to think I could turn it into a film, with each rung of hell shot on a different platform of the New York subways. Little did I know, I’d left the filter holder out of the Bolex camera when filming in the woods, streaking purgatory with a thick vertical stripe that didn’t even match the tree trunks – although the storyline was still cohesive.
A dozen films later and finally in the Writers Guild, I’ve grown a bit more confident about both my filmmaking and my writing. Inspired by the passion for adaptations of master filmmakers like Truffaut and Kurosawa, I’ve shared the craft and alchemy of transforming literature into film and television with my students at California State University, Northridge for over twenty years. But while students from Australia, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Senegal, and Thailand have flocked to southern California eager for a break in Hollywood, there are actually more films made per year in India’s Bollywood and Nigeria’s Nollywood than what we make in the United States. And some of my international students – particularly from China, France, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, and Peru – study with the intent of bringing back our lessons to their home countries.
After traveling to film festivals in 25 countries with my last two films – both global in scope – I’ve learned to broaden my scope of how adaptations should be taught. But I grew up thinking that Hollywood was the center of the film world. Ford, Hawkes, and Welles were the canon, and if we wanted to go international, we could add Renoir. Whether the works of Western masters or the product of studios that we called “sausage factories,” most of the films had storylines that borrowed from the plot summaries of tried and true literary and dramatic work from America and Europe, relying on Aristotle for structure.
By the time I started studying film in the late 1960s, my generation felt that experimental cinema was all that mattered, and that kowtowing to narrative formulas meant selling out. Our main role model for such endeavors was Jean-Luc Godard. As for Aristotle, as my feminist consciousness grew, I was surprised to discover that Aristotle thought of women as the flower pots in which male semen would bloom;1 I couldn’t help but also question whether his thinking about plots was also antiquated. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, when I began to write and direct global documentaries, that I fully realized the provincialism of my Yale education.
“Global” means more than high-budget action films with mega-stars distributed in markets all over the world, or a way of raising funds from different countries for another blockbuster. It can also be an approach to international filmmaking honoring other cultures – not just as angry alternative cinema that screens in hip college courses, art houses, and festivals in Europe. For example, in Caméra Arabe (1987) Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine says,
For me, the Third World is England, France, the U.S. I’m the First World. I’ve been here for seven thousand years.2
While it can be fascinating to study the significance of trade routes of the Black Sea region dating back to the first millennium BC or earlier to the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, and to trace how that impacts the economics of action films distributed globally from Hollywood (and the international co-production financing currently behind it), what I find more pertinent to global study is the crisscrossing of other cultures and their potential for global resonance today. No longer can the one-size-fits-all “Hero’s Journey” be the only template for storytelling. As Robert Cooper points out in his book The Breaking of Nations, “what we consider universal values are not so universal.”3
Going back to Ancient Greece as the creative bedrock isn’t far enough, knowing that tragedy may have made its way from Indonesia across the trade routes to Madagascar, and only later up to Aristotle’s home turf. Trans-Pacific trade routes from Asia to the Americas also carried stories with them. The trade route across the Black Sea that gave rise to the story of Jason in search of the Golden Fleece,4 which is a bedrock story of the “Hero’s Journey,” is just one of many trade routes that brought cultural, religious, and economic changes to various regions of the world, and along with them, more stories. But let’s not call these “other” stories; we need to transcend being someone’s “other” in today’s world.
For example, Africans may have travelled to the Americas from the Mali Empire – whose Timbuktu was a major center of learning with 25,000 students at its height5 – as early as the fourteenth century, two hundred years before Columbus.6 Think of the ramifications of the African Ink Road, the Silk Road, and other trade routes to the underlying interconnectedness between countries and continents,7 centuries before the instantaneous exchanges of the internet. The Indonesians are also thought to have sailed back and forth to South America many times between 5000 and 1500 BC, which has additional transcultural and transnational implications. Looking further back, recent anthropological discoveries trace the migration of East Africans to Europe, Asia, and the Americas, making our world far more “global” than ever before considered.
Both as a professor and as a writer, I take immense pleasure in stretching boundaries, whether they pertain to hybrid genres, or morphing from manga to feature, from feature to musical, or from television in one country to television in another, or digging into transnational influences. Boundary-stretching is a practice that has inspired many writers and is sometimes a factor of their universal appeal. For example, José Emilio Pacheco, the Mexican author who won the Cervantes Prize in Spain, wrote a poem in Spanish that included “American poet Ezra Pound’s translation of Japanese version of an ancient Chinese poem,” as well as contributing to the screenplay of the Mexican film, El Lugar Sin Limites (Hell Without Borders, Ripstein, 1987), based on José Donoso’s novel, set in Chile. The poem, published in his collection Miro la Tierra (I Look at the Earth) was Pacheco’s reaction to the Mexico City earthquake, universalizing a tragic theme.
By studying Bengali poets, novelists, and filmmakers recommended by Trina Lahiri, a screenwriter friend in Kolkata, the world of adaptation opened up, full of exciting transmigrations of influence. Knowing what to glean from your adventures in intertextuality and tapping into the myths and story-telling techniques that are the bedrock of a myriad of cultures are secrets to success in screenwriting for today’s world.
This book exists to honor diverse cultures rather than to insist that there is only one way to approach storytelling – the overly formulaic Western way. And in the West, the storytelling contributions of women and minorities are enriching our perspective. By addressing the collective spirit of our times and the coexistence of globalization with national identities, I hope to show that adaptations have the power to ultimately contribute to world peace.
Los Angeles, California
March 10, 2017
Notes
1 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. by Arthur Platt (London: Aeterna Press, 2015). As discussed in Caroline Whitbeck, “Theories of Sex Differences,” in Women and Philosophy by Carol C. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976).
2 Youssef Chahine, interview in “Caméra Arabe: The Young Arab Cinema,” special features DVD, Asfar al-sath Halfaouine: Child of the terraces, directed by Ferid Boughedir (New York: Kino on Video, 2003).
3 Robert Cooper, quoted in Steven Erlanger, “Are Western Values Losing Their Sway?” New York Times, September 12, 2015.
4 Antoine Faivre, The Golden Fleece and Alchemy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 19
93).
5 “Lost Library of Timbuktu,” Understanding Slavery Initiative, accessed Ma 30, 2017, www.understandingslavery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=378&Itemid=233.
6 While many of Ivan Van Sertima’s claims in They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 1976) have been contested, other sources discuss the possibility of Emperor Abukari II of Mali giving up his throne in order to lead an expedition across the Atlantic Ocean in the fourteenth century, such as: The Legacy of Timbuktu: Wonders of the Written Word, International Museum of Muslim Cultures in partnership with the Mamma Haidara Memorial Library, November 28, 2006.
7 Such as the “migration of myths between the Mediterranean and Indonesia by way of Arabia … in the pre-Islamic period.” Carl Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, trans. by Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 136.
Acknowledgments
Writing this book would not have been possible without the support of California State University, Northridge, where I’ve taught screenplay adaptation and film as literature for over two decades, and my students, whose passion and scholarship challenged us all to expand our knowledge of this subject. My profound thanks to two of CSUN’s Department of Cinema and Television Arts Chairs: Dr. John Schultheiss for helping me to make the transition from teaching film production (and screenwriting) to teaching media theory and criticism (and screenwriting), and Prof. Jon Stahl for encouraging me to experiment by adding television and new media studies during my recent years of teaching screenplay adaptation. Both Schultheiss and Stahl facilitated my travel to festivals and conferences around the world, which strongly strengthened my global approach to adaptation. A research fellowship from the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media and Communication enabled me to further expand my global exploration of adaptation, and a sabbatical from the university enabled me to complete the manuscript. Some of the many international film festivals which screened my film, Women Behind the Camera, also broadened my mind to films from other countries, particularly the International Film Festival of India (Goa), the Female Eye Film Festival (Toronto, Canada), and the Flying Broom International Film Festival (Ankara, Turkey).