Adapting Endings from Book to Screen

Last Pages, Last Shots

Armelle Parey, Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Armelle Parey, Shannon Wells-Lassagne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429536557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

This book offers a new perspective on adaptation of books to the screen; by focusing on endings, new light is shed on this key facet of film and television studies. The authors look at a broad range of case studies from different genres, eras, countries and formats to analyse literary and cinematic traditions, technical considerations and ideological issues involved in film and television adaptions.

The investigation covers both the ideological implications of changes made in adapting the final pages to the screen, as well as the aesthetic stance taken in modifying (or on the contrary, maintaining) the ending of the source text. By including writings on both film and television adaptations, this book examines the array of possibilities for the closure of an adapted narrative, focusing both on the specificities of film and different television forms (miniseries and ongoing television narratives) and at the same time suggesting the commonalities of these audiovisual forms in their closing moments.

Adapting Endings from Book to Screen will be of interest to all scholars working in media studies, film and television studies, and adaptation studies.

Part I
Creating an ending

An adaptor’s approach to closure

1
Structuring story

Beginnings and endings

An interview with Michael Eaton

Michael Eaton has written for screens small and large, for the radio and for the stage, and has won several awards for his work. In this interview, he uses examples from his own career – adapting Great Expectations for the stage for the West Yorkshire Playhouse, adapting Murder on the Orient Express for the streaming audio service Audible, as well as writing fictions based on real events, either as drama-documentaries (Shipman, ITV; Shoot to Kill, YTV) or original screenplays (Signs and Wonders, BBC; Fellow Traveller, HBO/BBC/BFI) – to flesh out his own approach to screenwriting and highlight the importance of story structure and character in determining how a narrative should end. In this wide-ranging interview, his discussion of his work both in drama and in criticism (notably his book on Roman Polanski’s Chinatown for BFI’s “Film Classics” collection) and the work of others touches on several points that recur in the rest of our volume, from the fundamental differences in story structure between serialized and non-serialized adaptation to the profound link between beginnings and endings. His perspective as a practitioner is valuable in its insights into the screenwriting and production process.

The interview, conducted on May 17, 2019 by Shannon Wells-Lassagne, has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

SWL: Could you tell us about your understanding of narratives […]?

ME: Yes, […] to me, all stories are ultimately based on the same structures as rites of passage, where a character moves from one status in society to another status, but through great difficulty, because you have to leave behind the first status and … you’re separated from that status but you’re not yet part of the one that you’re going to […] and so there’s a period where you’re neither status A nor status B, which anthropologists have called les marges or liminality or the liminal zone or the liminal period, and that to me is the space of story, because your main character – not all your characters, but your main protagonist – goes on a journey from one status to another status; and that [journey is] propelled by a lack, by something that they need, whether they know it or not. I mean obviously, in apparently simple stories like heist movies, the “lack” is the gold, or the jewelry, or whatever. That’s what the character thinks they’re after. But probably what they more likely are after is comradeship, or something that they don’t realize. In that journey, things can – things need to go wrong. If Romeo and Juliet fell in love, and the Montagues and Capulets said, “Oh, this feud of ours has been ridiculous, we’ve got two kids in love with each other; let’s just get this over with and see them get married,” that’d be lovely for Romeo and Juliet, but it wouldn’t be much of a story. Because the movement through life, the sociological movement through life, is fraught with difficulty and danger, and you can’t just want to occupy the new status.

SWL: And how do you end that story? How do you think you come to an ending?

ME: Well, in an ending the protagonist or protagonists have made that transition to another state. Now that state may of course – in Shakespearean tragedy, though not always in classical tragedy, that state may be death. That’s a movement from life to death. But usually there’s also a movement from lack of knowledge to knowledge. Macbeth dies, sure, like everyone else around him – but before he dies, he realizes what a complete waste of effort this has been, and he learns a lot about life, before he dies. […]

SWL: Could you talk about adapting Great Expectations (West Yorkshire Theatre) and the problem of the ending of Great Expectations?

ME: Yes, that’s interesting. I mean, Pip’s story is a story of moving from lack of knowledge to knowledge, it’s also a story of moving from delusion to reality. When Magwitch returns, Pip learns that it’s not Miss Havisham who is his benefactor, but this criminal – even though Magwitch is a much better person than Miss Havisham ever was. […] Magwitch’s money has turned Pip into a terrible idle jack – an upper-class wannabe twit. So first he rebels against this knowledge that his money has come from this low source. But what I also find interesting is that his delusions actually last much longer than the realization that Magwitch is his benefactor, because when he comes to, after his illness, he still has the illusion that he could marry Biddy, so clearly … Pip’s journey is a movement from being deluded to being enlightened, if you like. The last delusion is about Estella, whether he could have Estella. Dickens had originally written this ending where after many years, he’s walking in London down Piccadilly with Joe’s son, Little Pip, who he’s like the uncle of, Joe and Biddy’s son, and he comes across Estella, as a chance meeting, and they part, presumably never to see each other again. And his friend, [Edward] Bulwer-Lytton – […] asked him to write a happy ending.¹ The [second] ending that Dickens wrote is definitely in my opinion a much better ending, but it can’t be said to be happy, and it can’t be said to resolve all of Pip’s problems. […] The great thing about the new ending is that Pip goes back to the scene of […] Satis House, where Miss Havisham lived and where he first met Estella, so actually from a locational point of view, it’s much more satisfying. Some posh street in London has nothing to do with the previous story at all. He goes back and sees Estella there, and he says:

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.²

Now, you’re not going to tell me that’s a straightforwardly happy ending, or an entirely resolved ending! But nevertheless, we’ve got to say that Pip has gone on a great movement, not only socially, from being the possible apprentice of a blacksmith to being a man […] about town, he’s also progressed in his knowledge about his own situation, and about his own previous delusions. So in the novel there are three Pips: the little Pip as a boy, there’s Pip […] in young manhood, and there’s the narrator of the story, the first-person narrator, who is writing from a position after these events have taken place. But – obviously, when you’re adapting it, you can’t have the third Pip. You have to make the audience the third Pip.

SWL: So what’s really fascinating about what you were saying [is] the location, that the location is satisfying.

ME: I think so, yeah.

SWL: So is there a sense of progress, but also return?

ME: Well, if you think about ritual in traditional societies, […] the structure there was that for instance, as in the Torres Strait islands when a boy first felt hairs on his chin, that was the time when he was ready to be initiated, so when there were a group of people of that age, they were taken out of the village, into a special place in the bush, where for a period of time, about three months, they were initiated into what it means to be a man in that society. And that includes practical stuff, you know, about how to do gardening and fishing; and it includes moral stuff – you’re not supposed to go on someone else’s land or steal from people. But it also involves theological stuff: the things that you’ve been taught as a kid actually are not true, the real secret stuff you’ve got to know is revealed. And that’s very physically arduous. […] so they’ve left their status as children, gone to a different place; when they’re finished, they’re brought back as men, so they’re coming back to the same place, but they’re coming back in a different way. When Dorothy goes back to [Kansas], at the end [of The Wizard Of Oz (1939)], she says, “There’s no place like home,” we’re not supposed to think she’s come back in the same way she was when she left. Nobody’s going to kick Dorothy around anymore, she’s been through the adventures in Oz. She might be back in Kansas, but she’s not that same little girl who nobody believes, and whose imagination is quashed … she’s been over the rainbow. […] What’s she going to do now? […] The point being, she returns to the same place, but in a different way.

SWL: So speaking of endings, I was wondering when you’re adapting, do you ever feel tempted to change an ending? For a new audience, for a new time, for a new medium?

ME: Well, I’m trying to think…. […] I think there are some times where I’ve thought that a story had ended, and it doesn’t need to go on any further. Sometimes in a novel a story can go on after what would be a satisfying ending dramatically. […] I think sometimes those things that happen after the ending, you might be able to put them in, seed them in before…. Talking of other people’s work rather than my own, there’s another good story along the lines of the Great Expectations one, about the ending of Chinatown (1974), because I wrote a monograph about it. […] [Director Roman] Polanski was very dissatisfied with [the screenwriter] Robert Towne’s original ending, and in fact, the Faye Dunaway character, Mrs. Mulwray, apparently survives in the first-draft script, and I assume – I have not seen that version of the script, but I assume – that Jake manages to save her.³ Whereas Polanski said, “No, she’s got to die.” Noah Cross, her father, is a much more powerful figure than the protagonist Jake Gittes, and the whole point of the story is that the more Jake tries to save her, the more he makes things worse for her. But also Robert Evans, who was the producer – because it was shortly after the Sharon Tate murders⁴ – said that Roman Polanski thought that blondes have to die in Hollywood. But nonetheless, from the point of that story, in terms of the central character, Jake Gittes, […] Polanski’s instincts there were true: it’s Jake’s tragedy that when he tries to do something good, it just makes matters worse. And to uncover a conspiracy, a hornet’s nest – you’re probably better to have left it. Also – in terms of location – the other thing that Polanski said was that there had been no scenes in Chinatown. Chinatown’s a metaphor, as you know, in the film, [meaning] somewhere that you don’t know what’s going on. Jake used to be a LAPD cop, and his former colleague, Escobar, they worked in Chinatown together, and there’s one point where they say they never knew what was really happening there – best to leave things alone. That’s the metaphor of Chinatown. But Polanski actually wanted that last scene to physically be set in Chinatown. So at the last minute they built a big Chinatown set at Paramount to film – and again, I think his instincts were correct – so that the metaphor was actualized. Because there’s a lot of people who might not have picked up on the sophistication of that metaphor, and it’s a beautiful metaphor. But it only exists in Jake’s backstory – we never see him as a cop in Chinatown.

SWL: You’ve written for radio, TV miniseries, and so on. I was wondering, in terms of endings, in the serial form, you have to end several times….

ME: You’ve always got to construct that story, not only from beginning to end, but you’ve also got to construct arcs in each episode, where you’re leaving your main character at the end of each episode: it looks like they’re going to succeed, but we know things they don’t, or it looks like they are at their lowest ebb, but how are they going to get out of it? At the same time, you’ve got to structure the beginning, middle, and end within each episode as well for the overall story.

SWL: So when you were working on Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, for an audio drama, how do you do that with an adaptation, with a novel that has different divisions?

ME: With that one, the Agatha Christie estate, who run these things, called for an extremely faithful adaptation, and I think part of the idea for that was that the film was coming out, the recent film with Kenneth Branagh, and that version had made some changes. Not in terms of dénouement, but I think the estate wanted the audio version to be faithful to the original. I mean, I never wanted to change the ending. I’m sure most people actually know the ending, but it’s actually very good, […] how Poirot is perturbed, that it’s only when he twigs, [SPOILER ALERT!] “It’s all of them” – that he arrives at the solution. The difficulty with that story, I think, is how Poirot first realizes all these people are connected to the kidnapping and murder of the girl back in America, and that’s the motivation for them murdering. It’s very visual – he finds a clue on a charred piece of paper. That might work visually, but … it’s difficult to convey through sound alone; nevertheless, I stuck rigidly to the brief, there. When I first wanted to do it, I thought about changing the third-person narrator (they wanted a narrator); I considered putting the narration in the voice of Poirot himself, and they didn’t like that, so I had to go back to the original voice of the novel. It wasn’t a hard gig in that sense, because it was dramatizing what was already there. The difficulty that you would have normally with that, and this is why the new platforms [streaming audio or video, like Audible] are in many ways a real blessing, [is this]: […] when they first offered me that gig, I said to them, “how many epis...