ADAPTATION
Since it was invented, cinema has had an important relationship to adaptation. Filmmakers have long sought inspiration for their work in stories, novels, plays, historical events, and other kinds of subjects, just as writers in other mediums have done. This began in the silent era and continues to this day. Adaptation has always been an essential part of film storytelling.
Partly, this is a commercial consideration. Works written and released in previous forms may guarantee at least some audience members, those familiar with the story as a novel or piece of short fiction. However, adaptation also lends cinema credibility; as an art form, it was routinely dismissed as little more than popular entertainment for much of its early history, and adapting celebrated works by prestigious authors was a way for filmmakers to gain legitimacy as serious art. To the extent that film is taken seriously as an art form today (we are studying it in colleges, after all), adaptations have played no small part in getting it there. During the silent era, adaptation was essential in shaping film running times as we have come to expect them. For much of the first period of silent cinema, many films ran ten to twenty minutes, and often less, but in the second half of the silent era, films got much longer, more closely approximating the two-hour running time we expect today. According to David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, “The shift to multiple-reel film was part of an intentional attempt to improve profits by making the film appear to be a quality product. The exhibitors created such an image by improving their theaters and service, and, consequently, they sought a film which could be effectively advertised as a ‘feature.’ One of the ways to insure that a film would succeed was to adapt a prior success – a play or novel. But because the producers wanted to claim that they were true to the source (the standard of fidelity operated here), a problem developed: these adaptations, sometimes starring famous players from legitimate theater, could not easily be crammed into the constrictive one-reel length. As a result, the adaptation of famous works became a major cause in the lengthening of the film into the multiple-reeler.” In this way, cinema and literature worked together to codify storytelling norms and conventions that filmmakers follow and audiences expect today.
However, adaptation is also very complicated. Filmmakers are often put in an impossible position when adapting work from other mediums; think about the prospect of adapting a novel for a moment, especially if that novel is quite popular and the film adaptation is eagerly anticipated. The expectations are very high—audiences want to see the film adaptation adhere to the story that they know and love. Tension arises: the filmmakers want to tell their own story in a medium with very specific requirements, and yet, they have to reconcile these needs with the demands of the original story and its built-in audience.
LANGUAGE VS. VISUALS
We want to think a bit about how film adaptation works at a practical level. The most common way we think of adaptation is like this:
The mediums are different. The most obvious difference is that novels/literature rely on language to express their ideas, but cinema is visual. This means that film is going to rely on different storytelling techniques than literature, and filmmakers use different tools. In many ways, this is the central division between the two mediums, and something that critics have spent much of their time trying to understand when studying film adaptation. According to influential writer Andre Bazin, “On the screen, technique naturally plays a much more important role than in a novel, for example, since the written language is more or less stable while the cinematographic image has been profoundly modified since its beginnings.” Words are bound by their meaning; images can contain a number of simultaneous meanings that are highly subject to interpretation.
Any understanding of film adaptation requires sensitivity to how filmmakers use the stylistic and storytelling tools available to them. Critic David Bordwell is careful to remind us that “filmmakers expend enormous energies on making things look a certain way and not others. A poetics of cinema can make us more sensitive to the films we see, encouraging us to recognize the skill, and sometimes the brilliance, of the people who make them.”
I want to walk through an example of adaptation in practice that illustrates the process of decision making that goes into bringing a written story into a visual medium. In order to do this, I want to examine the first chapter of George V. Higgins’s novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, written in 1970, and the film adaptation of the same title, released in 1973 and directed by Peter Yates. Higgins’s crime story is set in Boston and follows a group of criminals as they desperately try to avoid being murdered or sold out to the police by their fellow gangsters. Higgins’s novel is also extraordinarily influential for its dialogue, which is finely crafted to capture the authentic voices of his working class men. There are no grand pronouncements, no lofty speeches that threaten violence, no lapses into metaphor or literariness. Instead, there is just plain, ordinary, authentic, rough, real language. It is a novel with very little expository description of locations or actions, and the sentences that move the players around are terse and direct. For example, this is the opening of Chapter 2: “The strawberry ice cream soda and the dark green Charger R/T arrived in the stocky man’s vision almost simultaneously. The waitress went away and he watched the car travel slowly past the stores and stop at the far end of the parking lot. He unwrapped the plastic straw and began without haste to drink the soda. The driver of the car remained inside.” Higgins tells you what happens without embellishment; these lines read more like stage directions for actors, the kind you might find in a play script or a screenplay, than the kind of literary prose you might expect to see in a novel. Another paragraph of equally restrained description follows, immediately thereafter, Chapter 2 gives way almost entirely to dialogue, a conversation between Eddie Coyle (whom Higgins refers to as “the stocky man”) and Dave Foley, the Treasury Agent. Higgins refocuses the novel onto speech—it is essentially a series of conversations among the various intersecting players.
I want you to get a look at this in action, so I’ve included a PDF of the first chapter of the novel, which will look familiar to you, because several portions of the chapter appear in Yates’s film. Read the chapter, and then check back in here.
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Welcome back. So, you probably noticed a couple of things. Higgins refers to Eddie as “the stocky man” throughout the chapter, and we only learn his name in the novel a few chapters in. Higgins himself doesn’t apply the name Coyle to the character until halfway through the book, using “Coyle said,” and “Coyle walked in,” things like that. We can speculate about why that is in class, but it’s a notable decision on the part of the author. He likewise always says “Jackie Brown,” never just “Jackie” or “Brown”—always the two together.
Here’s the conversation between Jackie Brown (Steven Keats) and Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) from the film. Watch it and compare/contrast it to Higgins’s chapter. Click the video at right to play the clip.
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First off, it should be clear how little description Higgins offers. We have little sense, from reading the chapter, where the scene is actually taking place. Minor context clues like the presence of “coffee” indicates that this is probably a diner or a restaurant of some kind, as does the small detail that the two men are sitting across from each other. However, Higgins doesn’t even mention a table! We have to guess. Think about the process of adaptation for a moment. You’re Paul Monash, the screenwriter, and you have to set this scene somewhere. So, you choose a lunch counter—one problem solved. But now, imagine you’re Peter Yates, the director. You have to put the characters in a physical location. The lunch counter becomes real. So, you choose to open the sequence with a few shots that establish the food, showing Eddie getting something to eat and placing it on his tray, then walking to sit down. That way, you give the viewers some details to hang on to—they know where they are. Higgins doesn’t do any of that. Has Yates, in some fundamental way, made a mistake of adaptation here? Has he violated some valuable principle? Should he have begun the scene at the table, with Jackie Brown and Eddie sitting across from each other, as the novel begins? Maybe. Maybe not.
Let’s pay attention to the dialogue, as well. Jackie Brown’s first line in the book, after a few words that introduce him, is: “I can get your pieces probably by tomorrow night.” But listen carefully to what the movie Jackie Brown says: “I can get your pieces by tomorrow night.” Monash’s screenplay has eliminated the word “probably” from the line. This change has enormous ramifications—it makes Jackie Brown seem much more certain about his ability to deliver, and potentially plays up an essential character trait: his overconfidence. The next line in the book is “I can get you, probably, six pieces.” Movie Jackie Brown says the same lines. However, think about the difference in the way you read the line in the book versus the way that Keats delivers it. Is the way he says it the way you heard it in your head? Keats has made the line real, making an imaginary intonation real through the sound of a voice. Who’s to say that Jackie Brown’s voice sounds like that? Who’s to say that’s the coat he wears? Who’s to say that’s what his hair looks like?
You can ask these kinds of questions into infinity. But, let’s stay on track, trying to evaluate the differences and similarities between the scene in the novel and the scene in the film. In general, the scene in the film progresses the way it does in Higgins’s book, but some of the sections of dialogue are leapt over. Monash’s screenplay has largely adhered to the lines themselves, occasionally removing a word here, a word there, but mostly sticking to the way the characters speak in the book. He will skip entire sections of dialogue, though, perhaps thinking that the film’s lines have already made the point, with no need to repeat ideas unnecessarily. The sequence ends on a similar button: Higgins’s final line is “His expression changed: he smiled.” In the film, Yates holds on Jackie Brown, and Keats smiles. Then, Yates cuts to a new scene. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (novel and film) illustrates the complexity of adaptation. Novels are driven by certain demands, and films are driven by others. Filmmakers must think about how they are going to bring words on a page into the real world, and must decide whether they want to adhere to or fundamentally alter the novel’s storytelling. Yates and Monash do a bit of both in their film adaptation of Higgins’s book.
This example should demonstrate the process of adapting a text for the screen. It requires a series of decisions on behalf of the filmmakers, including the writers, directors, actors, and other collaborators. Comparing and contrasting the original text with the film version can be a valuable way to gain insight into those storytelling decisions as filmmakers try to make the written word into visual representation.
POE AND CORMAN
Producer-director Roger Corman claims never to have lost money on a film he produced. Corman is one of the most important figures in American exploitation and B-movie history. Starting out as a producer-director in the late 1950s, Corman really arrived when he was looking for an easy film formula to appeal to drive-in movie audiences. He knew that his films might have a better chance at being successful if he could draw upon something with an existing reputation, so he settled on trying to adapt short stories by Edgar Allan Poe into film versions. Corman, ever shrewd, chose Poe because his work was old enough that it had fallen into the public domain, and Corman would not have to pay to secure the copyright to the stories—he could take the names of Poe’s stories and make whatever movies he wanted out of them, while guaranteeing at least some audience familiarity with the subject matter. He made a number of these Poe adaptations for American International Pictures, according to Callum Waddell: “the independent production house American International Pictures initiated the decade with a series of Roger Corman-directed films that mimicked the period horror formula of Britain’s Hammer Studio: The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and The Premature Burial (1962).”
Corman’s first Poe adaptation, House of Usher (1960) demonstrates his approach to exploring Poe’s work through the cinema. As a writer, Poe has one tool available to him to convey the story, evoke its mood, and explore his characters: language. That leads to passages like this, which opens “The Fall of the House of Usher”:
“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was --but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me --upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain --upon the bleak walls --upon the vacant eye-like windows --upon a few rank sedges --and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees --with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium --the bitter lapse into everyday life-the hideous dropping off of the reveller upon opium --the bitter lapse into everyday life --the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart --an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it --I paused to think --what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down --but with a shudder even more thrilling than before --upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows. Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country --a letter from him --which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness --of a mental disorder which oppressed him --and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said --it the apparent heart that went with his request --which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.”
As director, Corman has a crucial task—take the mood evoked by Poe’s language and bring it into the visual space using the camera, color, costume, set design, lighting, editing, music, sound effects, and the performers. Examine these images from House of Usher; compare and contrast them with words and ideas you see generated in Poe’s description of the house quoted above, where he establishes the mood of the story.
You should see Corman’s commitment to Poe’s gothic mood. The images suggest the gloominess of the setting; the lighting frequently creates shadows; the colors evoke blood and terror; the actors hold back madness in their eyes; the compositions are cluttered with furniture to create unease. These visual techniques clearly establish how Corman sees Poe’s language manifest in images.
At right, you’ll see a commentary for a sequence from House of Usher in which I draw further attention to how Corman brings Poe’s story to the screen. Watch it and think about the scene’s relationship to the original written work. I illustrate how the elements of cinematic style express some of Poe’s ideas.
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Corman largely brings the story to life by following Poe’s story and including his characters, but also respects Poe’s tone and mood through his visual approach. Adaptation is never an easy task, but Corman’s version of Poe’s story demonstrates how filmmakers endeavor to literalize the written word in images; this is the first task of any adapter—how to tell the story visually. Throughout the semester, we will examine this process in action and also begin to complicate it through exploration of various adaptations.
clip quiz - adaptation
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
SMOOTH TALK (1988, Chopra)
Read the attached page of the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and compare it to the clip from the film adaptation, Smooth Talk. What three details appear in both? Story excerpt here. |
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IT: CHAPTER ONE (2018, Muschietti)
In any film adaptation, filmmakers must find ways to make what is written visual; that means they have to make choices, taking ideas from the imaginary to the concrete. Review the passage from Stephen King’s novel It and watch the accompanying clip of the scene from the 2017 film adaptation. What choices do the filmmakers bring to their version? How do they make what King describes into something we can see? From Stephen King's novel: “There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light in there was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing. It was a clown, like in the circus or on TV. In fact he looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her?—George was never really sure of the gender) horn on Howdy Doody Saturday mornings—Buffalo Bob was just about the only one who could understand Clarabell, and that always cracked George up. The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell.” |
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THE GREAT GATSBY (2013, Luhrmann)
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby features a number of scenes set at the lavish parties thrown by the title character. In this clip from one of the film adaptations of the novel, the parties appear on screen; how does this scene communicate the feeling of excitement and wonder of Gatsby’s wild spending on his guests? |
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NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007, Coens)
How does this clip from No Country For Old Men illustrate the dialogue from the pages of Cormac McCarthy’s novel? What depth of characterization does it add to the things the characters say? Novel excerpt here. |
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Nightmare Alley (1947) and adaptation
Based on the novel by the same title by William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1947, Goulding) is made in the period following World War II, when the category it is usually classified into, film noir, was really hitting its stride. Noir is a term that was retroactively applied to describe a collection of films mostly made in Hollywood in the postwar period that focused on dark themes of crime and despair, two ideas that certainly describe the film version of Nightmare Alley. In it, carnival worker Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power) tempts the universe’s hand by becoming a mentalist con man with the help of several of his fellow circus denizens, but gets in over his head when he tries to professionalize his operation with the help of an unscrupulous psychologist who ultimately double crosses him.
The novel was published in 1946, just the year before the film adaptation was released, and captures the anxiety and uncertainty of the immediate postwar moment, when men like Stan were reentering society after fighting overseas. The actual temporal setting of the film is kept ambiguous, and the war is never mentioned; at the same time, audiences seeing Nightmare Alley in 1947 would no doubt have had the war on their minds, even at the subconscious level.
One of the novel’s structuring devices is the ominous threat of The Geek, a carnival attraction in which a desperate man, often an alcoholic at the end of his rope, is cajoled into biting the heads off of live chickens for the amusement of paying customers. The novel sets up this terrible, pathetic character at the circus where Stan works deliberately; in a story that is all about the idea of fate, and whether an individual can avoid theirs, the use of The Geek as a foreshadowing device tells us where Stan is headed from the very beginning. The film version likewise uses this device, with dread-inducing signs of Stan’s fate hanging over the narrative. In one image early on, Stan walks beneath a sign advertising The Geek attraction; in another moment, the man’s maddened shrieks drift onto the soundtrack while Stan decides what to do next at a pivotal moment in the narrative.
In the novel, the tarot cards read by the fortune teller Zeena (played in the film by Joan Blondell) play an equally significant role in raising the themes of fate and destiny. Gresham uses the cards to title each one of his chapters, but the film doesn’t go quite so far as to label its scenes with figures like The Hanged Man. However, the tarot cards do make repeated appearances, an ever-present reminder of Stan’s tempting fate. They become a visual icon that reminds the audience of the stakes of the narrative, continually emphasizing where he is heading at the end of the story.
Noir films were all about darkness and despair, which they manifested through their visual design above all, in addition to their discomfiting themes. Nightmare Alley is no exception, with its repeated use of high contrast lighting and dark shadows to portray a dangerous, threatening world that is likely to treat its characters harshly. Some of the darkest, most aggressively designed images come in the offices of Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), the psychiatrist who initially joins the newly rechristened Great Stanton in his swindling of the Chicago wealthy and powerful, before eventually revealing herself to be a duplicitous, vicious con artist herself.
In noir films, the universe tends to punish its characters for stepping outside of their prescribed societal roles; Stan’s a working class man, and his reaching above his station to trick working people at first, and then the rich, into giving him their money brings about severe consequences. After his final con is exposed and Lilith, his erstwhile partner, steals his money and threatens to have him committed, he has to go on the run, where he becomes an alcoholic himself, on the way down to total despair and eventually, Geekdom. When he finally drags himself into the carnival in the film’s penultimate scene, he eagerly accepts the job the circus owner offers him: “Mister, I was born for it.”
That’s where the novel ends. In the 1947 film version of Nightmare Alley, Stan’s journey isn’t over, though. Ultimately a con artist who reached too high, this film version’s Stan is more naïve than truly malevolent. He’s not a bad guy—he just loses himself in the desire for wealth and power. That’s why, unlike the novel, the film lets him off the hook. When he has a similar meltdown as anonymous Geek earlier in the film, running wild and screaming, his wife and former partner Molly (Coleen Gray), a sweet and innocent women, recognizes his voice and rescues him from his fate as a Geek. She’ll nurse him back to health, the film suggests in its final moments. All Stan really needs is the love of a good woman.
Giving Stan a chance at redemption significantly alters the meaning of the original novel, of course; in Gresham’s work, the universe is cruel and harsh, but in the 1947 adaptation, there’s a little ray of hope. This kind of thing happens all the time in adaptation. The viewer has to be the one to decide whether that sort of change really matters.
This is the process of adaptation. Together, the film crew and the actors create a version of the original story for the cinema that carries some kind of meaning. It might be the same as in the original text, but it also may differ.
Directors of film adaptations of short stories, novels, or other forms of literature are faced with a series of decisions—what to include, what to exclude, what to expand, what to trim, what color, what actor, what shirt, what car, what house, what camera shot, what piece of music, and on and on. It’s not easy.