True Event Adaptation

Scripting Real Lives

Davinia Thornley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319973210
• eBook ISBN: 9783319973227
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

These essays all—in various ways—address the relationship between adaptation, "true events, " and cultural memory. They ask (and frequently answer) the question: how do we script stories about real events that are often still fresh in our memories and may involve living people? True Event Adaptation: Scripting Real Lives contains essays from scholars committed to interrogating historical and current hard-hitting events, traumas, and truths through various media. Each essay goes beyond general discussion of adaptation and media to engage with the specifics of adapting true life events—addressing pertinent and controversial questions around scriptwriting, representation, ethics, memory, forms of history, and methodological interventions. Written for readers interested in how memory works on culture as well as screenwriting choices, the collection offers new perspectives on historical media and commercial media that is currently being produced, as well as on media created by the book's contributors themselves.

Part IScripting Real Lives in the Past

© The Author(s) 2018

Davinia Thornley (ed.)True Event AdaptationPalgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97322-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Scripting Real Lives

Davinia Thornley¹

(1)

Department of Media, Film and Communication, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Davinia Thornley

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Cultural memoryTrue eventsReal lifeAdaptationThomas LeitchAudiences

End Abstract

In True Event Adaptation: Scripting Real Lives, the authors each—in various ways—address the relationship between adaptation, “true events,” and cultural memory. They ask (and frequently answer) the question: How do we tell stories about events that are often still fresh in our memories and may involve living people? This is the core theme of the book and undergirds each chapter’s thesis.

While Thomas Leitch’s book, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents , retains its reputation as a primary text in the field of adaptation studies, True Event Adaptation works to address Leitch’s call to future scholars to “focus less on texts and more on textualizing (the process by which some intertexts become sanctified as texts while others do not) and textuality (the institutional characteristics that mark some texts, but not others, as texts).” All of the authors in True Event Adaptation were selected because their work begins from Leitch’s premise of removing or decreasing the attention paid to source texts: instead allowing readers to understand adaptation as the “work-in-progress of institutional practices of rewriting” (Leitch, 302–303). Throughout each chapter, the focus is on the interplay between the event and the finished piece (whether film, television show, web series, etc.), rather than necessarily any written “source” text—although these may also appear. To point to some specific examples from among the chapters: Redvall’s use of interviews and observational studies, my own and Russo’s mentions of court reports and press coverage, and Meneghello’s archival research. Instead, the book asks: What does it mean to deal with the inherent instability of remembered events, particularly when people involved in those events may still be alive and, necessarily, still connected to what happened? True Event Adaptation renegotiates previous understandings of the relationship between real-life events and cultural memory.

The contributors in True Event Adaptation have come from quite disparate backgrounds, yet they are all united by a similar interest: unpicking notions of history and the “truth,” as it pertains to adaptations; in fact, several present unique and groundbreaking methods for examining these concepts (Meneghello’s “artwork history,” Roura’s online confessionals, Leotta’s perspective on the “brand(ing)” of an auteur, or McVeigh’s ongoing interviews with practitioners, for example). All the authors also demonstrate cross-disciplinarity: both methodologically (e.g., employing practice-based and archival research, industry interviews, and textual analysis) and theoretically (e.g., through the application of literature and theoretical insights from several disciplines, such as history, literary/aesthetic theory, and organizational analysis, in addition to film and media studies). In putting this collection together, it was important to challenge the unquestioned reliance on textual analysis that dominates adaptation studies (and, more broadly, the other humanities subjects that feed into this area, as mentioned above). As hinted at in Kyle Miekle’s recent LFQ article ¹ on the importance of recognizing adaptation’s audiences, many scholars of adaptation unthinkingly rely on texts/textual analysis. Important questions need to be asked about the ‘top down’ and/or singular aspects of textual analysis, a process that—by default—relies on one person’s vision, thereby undercutting any notion of equitable collaborative engagement. This occurs even when the events in question—in particular, such social crises as political corruption, acts of war/terrorism, genital mutilation, and serial shootings, etc. addressed in this book—patently demand a different type of interaction.

As editor of this collection, I recognize the loaded stance I am taking, but I do so both as a product of my own epistemological positioning ² and as an outgrowth of the work I have been given to shepherd here. All these essays are attempting to find new ways of engaging old adaptive questions. Their outcomes mean scholars in the disciplines of film and media studies, screenwriting studies, and English/literary studies will need to, in turn, recognize and grapple with concepts that may feel unwieldly and imprecise. What does it mean for a director to become part of his/her own brand? How do we try to present the unrepresentable and—more to the point—should we even try? In aiming for more exact terminology do we, in fact, lose sight of the humanity at stake in any true event? My hope is that True Event Adaptation is immediately useful in reorienting questions about cultural memory, about the importance of cultural context , to a central place in the current critical debates around adaptation. I also intend the anthology to be practical, as academics, media makers, and media professionals can apply these findings in their future teaching and research, productions, and reviews.

True Event Adaptation is chronologically ordered, within each part, by the release date of the media discussed. Part I contains essays that follow the true event adaptation process from a remove, i.e., academics writing about an historical adaptation that they were not involved with. That said, each author still has “skin in the game,” so to speak, and this is evidenced by both their theses and methods. Patrick Cattrysse begins this anthology using Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American , and the 1958 eponymous film as case studies. Building on his earlier work, he shows how adapting historical materials (facts) and adapting literary materials (fiction) involves both similar and dissimilar features, and why therefore it makes sense to suggest that both “types of adaptations” could be studied using the same (or similar) analytical tools and methods. He addresses these questions in three parts: (1) adaptation as an end-product, (2) adaptation as a process, and (3) a study of the possible systemic relations between end-product and process and, in doing so, highlights how Greene’s (admittedly ambiguous) intentions for the novel were ultimately undermined by CIA [then OSS] interference and influence in the film.

Alfio Leotta investigates Big Wednesday (1978), a cult surfing film directed by John Milius. Milius was the creative vision behind such instantly recognizable films as Conan the Barbarian (director; 1982), Dirty Harry (screenwriter; 1971), and Apocalypse Now (screenwriter; 1979). Leotta’s essay on Milius’ directorial persona provides a different perspective on authorship: breathing new life into a theoretical concept dearly in need of refreshing. In Milius’ uncanny ability to transform true events into the mythic story of Big Wednesday, which led in turn to an ongoing “brand” of sorts, the director built a robust “autobiographical self” that functioned at both the “textual and intertextual level” in unique, sometimes opportunistic, but always intriguing ways.

In my own topical essay, I write “around” the notion of an unrepresentable event, the Aramoana massacre, or the 1990 New Zealand shooting of thirteen adults and children by one from their own community. In doing so, I come strongly down on the side of those historians, such as Leitch, Huw Marsh, and Graham Huggan, that recognize the value of the present for re-readings of the past, rather than viewing one particular reading as more appropriate or proper than another, as does a scholar such as Kamila Elliott. My piece also asks if it is even possible to not essentialize those whom have experienced such horrors, going on to argue that in such cases “recursive retreats” into a form of essentialism are not only unavoidable but—often—necessary. Further, I would go so far as to suggest that academics’ (and media professionals’) insistence on always knowing—a kind of panoptic, insatiable, “need to know” impulse that we venerate above all other epistemological precepts—often provides the very conditions for the essentialism we profess to dismiss and/or despise.

Part II contains essays similar to those above, but where the media are still being produced at present and/or the author met with creatives involved in the making. Margaret McVeigh’s piece again touches on the loaded notion of how to (or whether to?) represent the unpresentable; in her case, she interviewed Jocelyn Saab, a lauded Egyptian journalist and documentary maker. When Saab turned to a frontline crisis much closer to home, in Egyptian homes—in this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Scripting Real Lives in the Past
• Part II. Scripting Real Lives in the Present
• Part III. Scripting Real Lives for the Future
• Back Matter