Book to Screen:

General Introduction to the Theories 

Why adapt?∣Process of adaptation

Differences between a novel and its filmic adaptations∣Theories

In Reading the Movies, William Costanzo notes that it has been estimated that a third of all films ever made were adapted from novels. If you count other literary forms, such as drama or short stories, that estimate might well be 65 percent or more. 

Why adapt?

Why does Hollywood (and the British film industry) rely so heavily on adaptation?  There are two simple answers.  First, novels have a built-in audience.  Think of the Harry Potter movies.  Literally millions of children (and quite a few adults, myself included) waited with bated breath to see the films.  That translates into “big box office” (which means a lot of money).  The second reason is that the story is told.  The material is there; it “just” needs to be adapted.  But this process, as you'll see, isn't as easy as it sounds.

There are a number of theories of novel adaptation for the screen, but I'm just going to quickly cover a few of them to give you a spring board.  If you're terribly interested in the topic, there's a bibliography posted here. 

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Process of adaptation

Most screenwriters are absolutely not scholars, and frankly, don't have a “theory” from which to work.  These theories are all pretty much artificial constructs provided by scholars after the fact.  I can assure you, a film maker's bottom line is telling a good story in order to make money!  Okay, maybe they have lofty ideals that I'm ignoring, but money is what makes Hollywood work, so a working screen writer can't ignore “the bottom line.”

To give you an example, in David Trottier's The Screenwriter's Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting and Selling your Script, he writes the following three steps to adaptation:

1)    Read the novel...for an understanding of the essential story, the relationships, the goal, the need, the primary conflict and the subtext.

2)    Identify the five to ten best scenes.  These are the basis for your script.

3)    Write an original script.

He then adds that a “script cannot hope to cover all the internal conflict that the novel does, nor can it include all the subplots that a long novel can.  Novels often emphasize theme and character.  They are often reflective, but movies move.  These are all the reasons why novel lovers often hate movie versions.” (Trottier, 23).

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Differences between a novel and its filmic adaptations

But this shouldn't stop us from viewing films adapted from novels, but we should understand that they are a different art form, and they are really something independent from the book.

One of the reasons why so much must be lost in the adaptation is time.  A novel can be quite long and involved--often running to over 300 pages.  (Or even longer.  The latest Harry Potter was a whopping 870 pages!)  But the average film is around 90-120 minutes.  And each minute of screen time on average is one page of screenplay.  So the average screenplay runs 90-120 pages, and a lot of that is white space!  So right there you can see the problem.  Much has to be cut!

But there's another major difference. On its homepage, Masterpiece Theater, a leader in adapting classic novels to the screen, has this to say about the process: “The major difference between books and film is that visual images stimulate our perceptions directly, while written words can do this indirectly. Reading the word chair requires a kind of mental "translation" that viewing a picture of a chair does not. Film is a more sensory experience than reading -- besides verbal language, there is also color, movement, and sound.”

And there are other problems as well: “Film also does not allow us the same freedom a novel does -- to interact with the plot or characters by imagining them in our minds. For some viewers, this is often the most frustrating aspect of turning a novel into a film.” (Masterpiece Theater). 

And inevitably I find, they cut my favorite scene of the book!  There have been very few adaptations I've enjoyed as much as the novel.  Two that come to mind are A Room with a View and Three Days of the Condor (based on James Grady's novel Six Days of the Condor). 

In Reading the Movies, Costanzo quotes George Bluestone, one of the first scholars of film adaptations of literature. Bluestone's theory is that the filmmaker is an independent artist, "not a translator for an established author, but a new author in his own right."

It was Bluestone who wrote: “An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.” (“The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film).

Thinkers like Bluestone agree that a literal translation of a book is often foolish -- even, some have said, a "betrayal" of the original work. Instead, the filmmaker has to refashion the spirit of the story with his or her own vision and tools.

But the theory of adaptation is a large question in academia.  In April 2003 Oxford University held a conference, “Reading Screens: From text to film, TV and new media” which raised the following questions:

·       What is lost and what is gained in the passage from page to screen?

·       How can literary theory and film theory enable us to ‘read' screen adaptations?

·       How are screen adaptations affected by modes of production and reception?

·       What effect will new technologies have on writing and reading literature?

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Theories

So, now on to some theory: Morris Beja in Film and Literature, (New York: Longman, 1977) sees two major "schools" of adaptation, and admits that they are oversimplified in his presentation:

 1)    The screenwriter believes that integrity of the original work be preserved, and therefore that it should not be tampered with and should in fact be uppermost in the adapter''s mind.

 2)    The screenwriter believes that it''s proper and in fact necessary to adapt the original work freely, in order to create -- in the different medium that is now being employed -- a new, different work of art with its own integrity.

 Michael Klein and Gillian Parker discuss adaptation theories in The English Novel and the Movies, (NY: Ungar, 1981).

 They see three types of adaptation:

1)    "most films of classic novels attempt to give the impression of being faithful, that is, literal, translations"

2)    "retains the core of the structure of the narrative, while significantly re-interpreting, or in some cases de-constructing, the source text"

 3)    "regards the source merely as raw material, as simply the occasion for an original work" (They cite Francis Ford Coppola''s Apocalypse Now as an example, for it drew freely on Joseph Conrad''s Heart of Darkness.  I would add Amy Heckerling''s Clueless as an example with which you are more likely familiar, for she drew on Jane Austen''s Emma.  Another example would be Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate about You which was freely adapted from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.  Say the first title fast, and you can “hear” the Shakespeare title. )

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Sources:

“Adaptation: From Novel to Film,” Masterpiece Theater Homepage. 14 Feb 2005, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/learningresources/fic_adaptation.html

Beja, Morris. Film and Literature, New York: Longman, 1977.

Costanzo, William V.  Reading the Movies: Twelve Great Films on Video and How to Teach Them.  National Council of Teachers of English, 1992.

Klein, Michael and Gillian Parker. The English Novel and the Movies, New York: Ungar, 1981.

Trottier, David. The Screenwriter's Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting and Selling your Script, 3/e.  Los Angeles: Silman-James P, 1998.