The Adaptation Industry

The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation

Simone Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136660238
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

Adaptation constitutes the driving force of contemporary culture, with stories adapted across an array of media formats. However, adaptation studies has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis, in particular with compare-and-contrast studies of individual novel and film pairings. This has left almost completely unexamined crucial questions of how adaptations come to be made, what are the industries with the greatest stake in making them, and who the decision-makers are in the adaptation process. The Adaptation Industry re-imagines adaptation not as an abstract process, but as a material industry. It presents the adaptation industry as a cultural economy of six interlocking institutions, stakeholders and decision-makers all engaged in the actual business of adapting texts: authors; agents; publishers; book prize committees; scriptwriters; and screen producers and distributors. Through trading in intellectual property rights to cultural works, these six nodal points in the adaptation network are tightly interlinked, with success for one party potentially auguring for success in other spheres. But marked rivalries between these institutional forces also exist, with competition characterizing every aspect of the adaptation process. This book constructs an overdue sociology of contemporary literary adaptation, never losing sight of the material and institutional dimensions of this powerful process.

1 What Are You Working On?

The Expanding Role of the Author in an Era of Cross-media Adaptation

Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal

I’d still own the film rights and be working on the sequel.

(Elvis Costello, ‘Everyday I Write the Book’, 1983)

All great songs are written by great song-writing partnerships like Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lennon and McCartney, Strummer and Jones. This is written by a combination of Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins.

—(Elvis Costello introducing ‘Everyday I Write the Book’ on UK Channel 4 TV show The Tube, November 1983)¹

When confronted by the vast, industrialised, complexly interdependent nature of the adaptation system as sketched in this book’s Introduction, it is tempting to seek reassurance and intellectual certainty by returning to the comfortingly familiar figure of the Author. Here, surely, is any adaptation’s irrefutable point of origin – finite, individualised and conveniently open to interrogation – and hence the optimal starting point for an intuitively humanist rather than bloodlessly systemic explanation of the adaptation phenomenon. Such an impulse to consecrate the Author as adaptation’s fountain-head fits easily with lingering Romantic conceptions of the Author as self-generative creative genius and truth-telling sage to a debased and profit-hungry society – the quintessential artist motivated by desire for posterity’s renown rather than by the sordidly mercantile wrangling of Grub Street. Such author-centric conceptions have, perhaps oddly, long remained particularly prevalent in the sphere of adaptation studies.² This is no doubt in part because of myriad adapted literary authors’ disavowals of any financial or administrative interest in the making of screen adaptations of their work. From their published comments, it seems such authors prefer instead to follow Ernest Hemingway’s famed advice to any literary author whose work was being adapted:

the best way for a writer to deal with Hollywood [is] to arrange a rendezvous with the movie men at the California state line: ‘you throw them your book, they throw you the money, then you jump into your car and drive like hell back to where you came from’.

(Phillips, 1980: 6; cited in Cordaiy, 2007: 35; Donadio, 2007)³

An almost exact contemporary echo of this standard posture of authorial disavowal is found in a recent article in the UK’s Observer newspaper describing the typical role of authors in the making of screen adaptations of their work: ‘Normally when an author works with a film-maker, they just sign on the dotted line and then shake hands, before they are told, “Thank you very much. See you at the premiere”’ (Thorpe, 2010).⁴ Thus patted patronisingly on the head, authors are thrown the table scraps of artistic kudos before the entertainment machine gets down to business.

Yet even this semi-facetious account of the hapless author’s brush-off – ‘See you at the premiere’ – should give us pause, indicating as it does that the author’s role has not in fact ceased with the handing over of the book and collecting of money but is, rather, incorporated into the highest profile marketing event for any feature film: the celebrity-studded red-carpet premiere. If authors are genuinely redundant to the adaptation economy, as commonly averred by authors themselves, why habitually solicit their involvement in such a film-centric event? The remark points up the fact that contemporary literary authorship, far from standing outside the adaptation economy, is in truth fundamentally a construct of that same economy. Whether specific authors choose to conform fully to its lineaments or not, the role of contemporary authorship can only be understood in the context of the book industry’s enmeshment, since the late decades of the twentieth century, within a globalised and conglomerate-dominated media landscape (Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 83). In such a converged system for producing and valorising the printed word, adaptation can no longer be considered merely a serendipitous but unlikely afterthought for a minority of already successful books. Rather, the possibility of multipurposing any particular content package across myriad simultaneous media formats has come to underpin the structural logic of the media industries and is consciously anticipated, stage-managed and pursued at every stage of a book’s pre- and post-publication life (Murray, 2006; 2007b).

In such an environment, the author emerges as both the creative and commercial anchorperson for content franchises based upon their work. Commercially, authors (increasingly in collaboration with their agents, as explored in Chapter 2) license and exploit the proliferating range of primary and subsidiary rights spun out of book properties (Brouillette, 2007: 65; Squires, 2007: 25). While at the more abstractly cultural level, authors function as creative spokespersons and aesthetic guarantors for such trans-format media franchises – reassuring existing and potential audiences of an adaptation’s artistic bona fides. As this last point suggests, these superficially distinct commercial and cultural roles are, in reality, constantly blurring, as authorial imprimatur becomes itself part of the marketing arsenal for a major-release film or big-budget television adaptation. The trend towards heavyweight literary authors being credited as executive producers on screen adaptations of their works (explored further in Chapter 4) encapsulates the convergent commercial and creative dynamics at play; such authors maintain significant leverage over script and casting decisions, while often also negotiating a percentage of the film’s profits in lieu of – or in addition to – their payment for film rights. In many ways such a creative overseer role has, perhaps counterintuitively, proven easier for adapted literary fiction authors to cultivate than for mass-market or genre fiction authors. Successive waves of Arnoldian, Leavisite and New Critical approaches to the teaching of literary fiction have deeply embedded (albeit often covertly) Romantic conceptions of author–genius and inculcated a lingering distaste or even (as outlined in the Introduction) a cultivated ignorance of the commercial realities of the book trade.⁵ In such a public climate, it matters more to film marketing and publicity what a Philip Roth thinks of the latest screen adaptation of his work than a Dan Brown.

This rhetorically denied but latently enduring Romanticist undercurrent in twentieth-century literary theory provides illuminating insight into how, in the distinct but cognate field of adaptation studies, fidelity criticism has been able to maintain such an obdurate hold. Serving no production-related purpose, the ritual appearance of the author at the adapted film’s premiere can only be explained by the authorial imprimatur and creative blessing that the author presence is intended to bestow upon the adapted text. That is to say, Romantic myths of semi-divine and socially autonomous authorial genius are here being invoked by the adaptation industry itself to disguise its own operations. The adaptation industry by such means works insistently to cover its tracks – avidly playing into the cult of the celebrity literary author for its own commercial self-interest, but ever ready to point away from its own interventions. It thus encourages audiences and critics to conceive of adaptation as a process of dematerialised texts arising almost spontaneously from the twin creative visionaries of Author and auteurist Director (cinema studies’ own Romanticist construct). Through such acts of strategic self-effacement, the adaptation system manages, paradoxically, to reinscribe its power – at its most pervasive when least perceived.

This chapter seeks to explore the neo-Romantic celebration of literary authorship within the context of the contemporary Anglophone adaptation industry. Its first part traces the various theories and constructions of authorship dominant in the academy during this book’s focus period of 1980 onwards, and seeks to explain how the mainstreaming of poststructuralist theories of the ‘death of the author’ was able to occur contemporaneously with the seemingly contradictory celebritisation of literary authorship both in the culture broadly as well as – amazingly – inside the academy itself. The chapter’s middle and third sections work to ground these larger theoretical debates about the shifting nature of authorship in the empirical realities of the adaptation industry, examining the various ways in which the evolving ‘author function’ has left its impress upon book industries’ rights management practices, and upon the spheres of screen industry scriptwriting, marketing and publicity (Foucault, 2006 [1969]: 284). Academic analyses reinforcing polarised views of either an all-conquering cult of celebrity authorship, or of authors sacrificed upon the altar of Hollywood profit-mongering fail to do justice to the nuances and complexities of the author’s role in the contemporary adaptation economy. As Bourdieu foresaw, authors still work within a predetermined cultural field over whose characteristics they have limited control, but the various strategic ‘plays’ they may make within this given context allow them a significant degree of individual – and collective – agency. The revival of the (never entirely dispelled) Romantic sanctification of authorship has been avidly cultivated by an adaptation industry whose very existence would – at first glance – seem to disprove it. The anomaly confronting analysts of the contemporary adaptation industry is that the drift towards author-centrism, the proliferation of rights management regimes, and the global reach of conglomerate media should have proven so harmonious a blend.

Conceptualising Authorship

During the late decades of the twentieth century, three diverse modes for conceptualising authorship were in the ascendant. These arose principally from academic debates about the nature of authorship, but were energised and popularised by contact with broader cultural currents. For the sake of schematic simplicity, I have summarised them in what follows as, respectively, the post-structuralist school of ‘the death of the author’, book history’s recovery of the late-nineteenth-/early-twentieth-century professionalisation of authorship, and cultural and media studies-inspired analyses of the contemporary celebrity author. However, in practice much overlap and multiple cross-currents exist between these three ostensibly distinct schools, and some critical names attributed here to one school could well find other aspects of their work as easily attributed to another in a different context. Nevertheless, it is productive to untangle these three distinctive theoretical and methodological threads from the tangled skein of late-twentieth-century understandings of authorship as they constitute the necessary intellectual background to the reconfiguring of the author’s role in the contemporary adaptation economy which we are now witnessing.

The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes’ seminal and much anthologised essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1986 [1968]) deserves its prominent place in studies of authorship if only for its key analytical insight in prising apart the sociocultural construct of the Author from the biological being who writes any given literary work (49). By critically identifying the resultant sanctified Author as the creation of regimes of culture and legal institutions, Barthes was able to adumbrate how the figure of the Author has been invoked in Western culture as a seemingly stable and individualised point of origin for a text (49). In his suggestive – if frustratingly vague – formulations, the invention of the Author serves ‘to impose a break’ on meaning (53). This, Barthes alleges, has enabled the (French) literary-critical establishment – his main target throughout the essay – to engage in a relentlessly biographical form of criticism ‘tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions’, all the while claiming to bracket off the search for authorial intention as a critical fallacy (50). For Barthes, this has had the deleterious effect of closing down the innate polysemy of all literary texts in order to buttress the authority of literary critics’ own orthodox readings. The overdue dethroning of this institutionally created ‘Author-God’ is thus, for Barthes, the necessary first step in celebrating instead ‘language itself’ and, through this manoeuvre, the newly liberated reader (53, 50). Stripped of the anti-establishment revolutionary rhetoric characteristic of the time and place in which the essay was written, it is easy to perceive in retrospect that the liberation of the ordinary reader could, in often the same institutional settings, slip easily into the elevation of the Theorist as super-reader and surrogate hermeneutic authority.

Frequently anthologised as a pair with Barthes’s essay, Michel Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ (2006 [1969]) has been labelled a ‘riposte’ to his contemporary (Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 81). Yet in truth Foucault shares many of Barthes’ key tenets, in particular the idea that cleaving of ‘the author function’ from the biological writer constitutes an undergirding principle of post-Gutenbergian hyper-individualised and capitalist print culture (284). However, unlike Barthes’s quasi-mystical and notably de-historicised prose, Foucault specifically links the rise of the Author to the rise of ‘strict rules concerning authors’ rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters’, a link which has since been empirically substantiated in much greater detail by book historians and historians of ideas (285).⁶ For Foucault, the utility of the author function within institutionalised literary criticism lies in its power to classify, valorise and hierarchise a range of textual discourses, and thus to provide the conceptual ordering system essential for sustaining any academic discipline (especially, one might add, one with such shallow institutional roots as non-Classical literary studies) (284; Biriotti and Miller, 1993: 4). Invoking an originative Author permits critics to project onto historical writers a singular creative ‘design’ or conveniently unified psychology which can rationalise groupings of even formally diverse and aesthetically uneven bodies of work (286). Like Barthes, Foucault is highly attuned to the strategic disciplinary ends to which the usefully protean author figure can be put. Buttressing the institutional positions and consequent cultural authority of establishment literary critics, the author function effectively ‘limits, excludes and chooses’ from amongst the array of possible readerly interpretations of any instance of print communication (290).

Re-encountering Barthes’ and Foucault’s essays not in an 1990s undergraduate literary theory tutorial where I first read them, but from my current perspective as a print culture and adaptation studies scholar, most striking is their insistently dematerialised viewpoint. Both posit authors almost solely as sites of hermeneutic and aesthetic confrontation between literary critics, not as creative professionals with artistic and commercial motivations of their own. In fact, from the exclusively Francophone and predominantly historical examples scattered throughout both essays, it is clear that Barthes and Foucault conceive of authors principally as both dead and canonised, granting these theorists’ conceptual schemas limited scope for understanding the deliberate self-fashioning of contemporary literary authors. Also striking in revisiting these texts is the way in which the atomised, liquid, ‘liberated’ textual polysemy both theorists celebrate uncannily resembles the quite distinct way in which the largely stable and unitary book of Gutenbergian print culture has fractured into a panoply of intellectual property (IP) rights. The fact that these rights can be sold, licensed or otherwise exploited by outside parties under ever-proliferating IP regimes in the interests of profit generation and authorial image management fundamentally undercuts the pervasive anti-bourgeois, anticapitalist rhetoric of both essays.⁷ In the event, it was not so much meaning that multiplied infinitely, but the legal regimes to prescribe and control authorised use of book-derived content. Finally, Foucault foresaw that the socially constructed role of the author function would continue to modify along with its host culture, even predicting that ‘the author function will disappear’ (291). Quite the contrary, it has been largely through corralling the IP (intellectual property) rights arising from their work, specifically through the hiring of literary agents, that authors (admittedly the minority of the most critically and commercially successful) have been able to firmly entrench their position in the creative industries. From this newly powerful cultural vantage point, they have been invited ceaselessly to pronounce upon the ‘correct’ interpretation of their texts – this time not via the posthumous proxy of the ventriloquising literary critic but in person through the expanding apparatus of the celebrity-focussed media industries and a burgeoning ‘meet the author’ culture (Todd, 2006: 29).

Professionalising Authorship

A second approach to conceptualising authorship, starkly opposed to post-structuralist edicts, has also developed over the course of the last 30 years. Largely coalescing around the interdisciplinary academic field known as the history of the book, such research takes a staunchly empiricist (and often specifically bibliographical and archive-oriented) tack in its quest to reconstruct the intermeshing material, legal and institutional circumstances surrounding the rise of authorship as a profession in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the first quarter of the twentieth. Although book history traces one line of its intellectual ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. What Are You Working On?: The Expanding Role of the Author in an Era of Cross-media Adaptation
• 2. World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers in the Contemporary Mediasphere
• 3. Making Words Go Further: Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks as Engine Rooms of Adaptation
• 4. The Novel Beyond the Book: Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
• 5. Best Adapted Screenwriter?: The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter in the Contemporary Adaptation Industry
• 6. Cultivating the Reader: Producer and Distributor Strategies for Converting Readers into Audiences
• Afterword: Restive Audiences and Adaptation Futures
• Notes
• References
• Index