Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling

Alexis Krasilovsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317363583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling is the Second Place Winner in the 2019 International Writers Awards!

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 screenwriters alike.

Please follow the link below to a short excerpt from an interview with Carole Dean about Great Adaptations:

https://fromtheheartproductions.com/getting-creative-when-creating-great-adaptations/

Part I

Introducing Adaptation

Welcome to the world of adaptation! While the movie Adaptation (USA, 2002), written by Charlie Kaufman, refers to the Darwinian principle of adaptation as well as a screenwriter’s struggles to write one, this book will focus on the writing process. It’s not just about adapting novels or nonfiction to film, however: writers also work in television; we write webisodes and novelizations. For our source materials, we look at short stories, manga, comic strips, biographies, plays, and a variety of other media – sometimes more than one at a time. Great Adaptations includes both faithful and loose examples: Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl (USA, 2015), for example, not only faithfully renders most of the storyline of the original graphic novel, but animates the drawings of its teenage protagonist who is a would-be cartoonist. At the other end of the spectrum, the Coen Brothers were so loose with O Brother, Where Art Thou? (UK/France/UK, 2000) that they claimed not to have even read Homer’s Odyssey. In between are all the gradations of the spectrum, from faithful biopics like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (USA/Japan, 1992) which combines some of the real-life characters for dramatic purposes to Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (UK/USA/India, 2004), a loose adaptation that keeps Jane Austen’s English storyline mostly intact, but sets it in a postcolonial jetsetter’s world between Amritsar, Los Angeles, and London.

Because so many writers are influenced by other stories, including their own, even when primarily concerned with adapting one short story, play, or novel, Great Adaptations also explores the references to myths, fairy tales, biblical, classical plots and characters, popular culture, and personal history that give many adaptations their zing, whether it’s Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello giving another dimension to Sean Parker in The Social Network (USA, 2010), written by Aaron Sorkin, or the biblical references that help make the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (USA, 1999) so memorable.

Part V, “Global Storytelling Revisited,” explores regional and international storytelling in both recent films and classics. For example, in Japanese cinema, we examine how Kenji Mizoguchi based his cinematic masterpiece, Ugetsu (Japan, 1953), not only on ancient Chinese ghost stories, but on a French short story by de Maupassant, and how Akira Kurosawa strengthened his adaptation of King Lear by overlapping it with a legendary account of a Japanese feudal lord in the making of Ran (Japan, 1985). There are also twenty-seven adaptations of Murasaki Shikibu’s great eleventh century novel, The Tale of Genji, ranging from anime television series, girl comics, and an all-female musical to a loosely adapted film set in Portugal. Some of the adaptations in this book are meant for international audiences and transcend boundaries, while others are meant to honor national literatures by those who are most familiar with its classics and best sellers.

Figure 1.1 Bride and Prejudice (UK/USA/India, 2004). Paul Mayeda Berges’ and Gurinder Chadha’s screenplay updates Jane Austen’s 1813 novel without sacrificing its class issues. Image courtesy of Miramax. Produced by Pathé Pictures International (in association with UK Film Council, Kintop Pictures, Bend It Films, and Inside Track Films)

When asked if he had a special feeling for books, critic-turned-filmmaker François Truffaut answered, “No. I love them and films equally, but how I love them!” As an example, Truffaut gave the example that his feeling of love for Citizen Kane (USA, 1941) “is expressed in that scene in The 400 Blows where Antoine lights a candle before the picture of Balzac.”¹ My book lights candles for many of the great authors of this world: Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Angela Carter (UK), Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (India), Janet Frame (New Zealand), Yu Hua (China), Stieg Larsson (Sweden), Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Naguib Mifouz (Egypt), Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), and Alice Walker (USA) – to name but a few. Furthermore, graphic novels, manga, musicals, television, webisodes, and even amusement park rides like Pirates of the Caribbean can inspire work in adaptation. Let’s be open to learning from them all.

ONE

Creative Issues

Where Do Ideas Come From?

Sometimes ideas come from our real life experiences or other forms of creativity. For example, Robert James Waller’s best-selling novel, The Bridges of Madison County, which later became a film (USA, 1995) and a Broadway musical (2014), may have begun with photographs of covered bridges that he shot while on leave from teaching business, coupled with a song he had written about a woman named Francesca, who would become the novel’s protagonist.²

At other times, ideas pop into our heads while dreaming or meditating. Maybe that’s because in those states we are relaxed and open enough to let our stories rise to the surface; we can train ourselves to be more receptive to these. Describing the Tibetan practice of lucid dreaming, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche states:³

Some images or traces are burned deeply into us by powerful reactions while others, resulting from superficial experiences, leave only a faint residue. Our consciousness, like the light of a projector, illuminates the traces that have been stimulated and they manifest as the images and experiences of the dream. We string them together like a film, as this is the way our psyches work to make meaning, resulting in a narrative constructed from conditioned tendencies and habitual identities: the dream.

Whether we first identify ideas and storylines in our dreams or while wide awake, Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human claims that “the principles of good storytelling … are coded in the DNA of our species and won’t change until human nature does.”⁴

Psychologist Carl Jung believed that archetypes are also inherited.⁵ Perhaps in part that’s why there are almost two thousand versions of “Cinderella,” including European, African, Asian, and American variations complete with deceased mother, a slipper, and a fairy godmother (or magical animal) that helps Cinderella wed her prince. We will explore film adaptations of myths and fairy tales in Part IV; however, it is important to state up front that these stories which are so basic to our lives can, in fact, morph frequently to serve the moral imperatives of a given society or its counter-culture. If the idea for your film comes from a novel, play, manga, or other source, you are still likely to filter it through your own consciousness and filmic style if you live in a society that treasures individual perspective.

In West Africa griots – males and females – were the official storytellers. They told stories and fortunes, recited history, and played the bala; female griots also braided hair. These were not trivial pastimes: It was said that every time a griot died, a library died with him. To be a griot was an inherited position in society: you could not be a griot if your great-great-grandparent wasn’t one. The griots of fifteenth-century Mali were so powerfully elite that the emperor could not kill a griot for giving him a less than favorable fortune. The griot tradition continues today in the form of African rock bands that are the current craze in Africa, Europe, and other continents; however, the griot rule of inheritance changed with Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese novelist and filmmaker, known as the father of African cinema. Although his ancestors were fishermen, not griots, Sembène claimed that the new medium of film justified new storytellers, hence new griots.

Today it is possible for almost anyone in the U.S. to go to film school – although it can be prohibitively expensive for the poor without scholarships or bank loans, and it has become increasingly harder to get into classes in state universities. You may not learn to play the bala to accompany your story-telling, but you can learn Final Draft, digital cinematography, and Final Cut Pro to get your stories out. However, one of the ways that the griot tradition is extremely important to U.S. filmmaking is its emphasis on the oral tradition. Mark Twain, bidialectal because of his friendship with both white and black children when he was growing up, is widely considered as the first “real” American author, for writing stories based on his childhood experiences.⁶ It’s very possible that the griot tradition has in that way made a profound influence on American literature as a whole. Oral storytelling – or pitching – is also key to how film and television projects often get their financing.

To excel as an original filmmaker, the way in which ideas are translated to the screen must be invented anew. Senegalese writer/director Djibril Diop Mambéty’s film Hyenas (Hyènes, Senegal/Switzerland/France, 1992) an adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, which was originally set in Switzerland,⁷ satirizes consumerism in Africa. Mambéty credits his grandmother, and storytelling grandmothers in general, for the imperative to tell a story in a new and refreshing manner “for it to last forever”:

…The grammar that wants you to tell things in this or that way: Grandma herself allows us to betray the grammar. That is, the ABC’s we learn in film school can be utterly transformed, and grandma wants us to always reinvent the grammar … Like Don Gormas says in Le Cid: “Go, fly, and avenge me.”⁸

One of the worst problems of adaptations is that they can be stifling. Contemplating film adaptations, Student Edward Bowden asked, “If one is not creating something new – a new way of looking at things, a new voice, new questions – is it really a creation?”⁹ While creating adaptations is dependent on pre-existing work, we need to honor the spirit of that work, not just regurgitate its storyline and dialogue. That can require being less faithful than Francis Ford Coppola was when he adapted Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (USA, 1974): the dialogue, that flowed so beautifully on the pages of the novel, felt as long-winded and artificial as Robert Redford felt miscast. Adaptation calls for a close relationship with the original author, but you don’t want to be slavishly married to the book. It may mean divorcing yourself from the material you’re adapting in order to discover your own voice in the process; that fresh perspective can be the key towards involving your audience.

Gender and ethnicity can play into this process of self-discovery. As Hélène Cixous first stated in 1975:

Every woman has known the torture of beginning to speak aloud, heart...