Screen Adaptations

I

Introduction

Screen Adaptations, the dramatization of literary works for cinema or television. Film and television development executives favour literary adaptations because the reputation of a highly regarded book guarantees public recognition for the screen version and makes it easier to market. The film adaptation process begins with the producer paying the author or copyright owner an initial fee to “option” the title for a finite period. The producer then has time to raise finance for the film’s production, and has first option to purchase the full exclusive film rights to the story. In exchange for the fee, the author or copyright holder generally relinquishes creative control of the story to the film-maker.

For the author of the original work, the process can be a dispiriting one. Screen dramas are visual, temporal entities that by nature cannot reproduce the subtleties and complexities of literary works. The differences between the two mediums often mean that entire scenes, plot-lines, and characters are cut, and that actors cast may not match the author’s own interpretation of the characters they play. In popular films, the literary qualities of a novel can be grossly simplified to such an extent that the film bears little resemblance to the original. As the English author John Le Carré put it after viewing an adaptation of one of his novels: “It’s like taking a cow and boiling it down to an Oxo cube.”

It could reasonably be argued that the best outcome for the novelist is that the film adaptation should be markedly different from the source, so that it does not detract from the original book. In 1979 the American film director Francis Ford Coppola brought his own, unique interpretation to the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness by transposing its narrative to the Vietnam War. In such a way, as a new and individual interpretation by the director, the film or television drama exists in its own right. On the other hand, some of the finest literary adaptations succeed because their makers have painstakingly endeavoured to remain true to the original work. This is particularly the case with period drama, where the viewer typically expects the adapter to render the atmosphere, nuance, and period detail of a classic novel faithfully. Ultimately, however, whether the film is a success or not, an inferior film can do little to tarnish the reputation of a novel or play of quality. As the English author Graham Swift has said, “For me, the page will always be bigger than the screen…The book was there first and is there now.”

II

History

A

Cinema

In the late 19th century, the earliest efforts by film-makers documented episodes from real life. However, as the medium grew and directors began to explore its potential for more sophisticated storytelling, there was a need for ready-made source material. A historical novel (1896) by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, set in Rome during the reign of Nero, was the source for the first full-length feature film Quo Vadis? (1912), directed in Italy by Enrico Guazzoni. Its success inspired D. W. Griffith to adapt Thomas Dixon’s American Civil War novel The Clansman into the three-hour epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). The first cut by Austrian-American director Erich von Stroheim of Greed (1924), based on the novel McTeague by Frank Norris, at over seven hours in length was remarkable for its faithfulness to its source, and its realism and attention to detail. It was deemed unreleasable by its producers MGM and cut to two hours, losing much of the story’s continuity and coherence.

In Britain among notable early silent adaptations were a morally didactic version (1916) of Tom Brown's Schooldays from the novel by Thomas Hughes and the final silent film of Alfred Hitchcock, The Manxman (1929), a melodrama adapted from the novel of the Isle of Man by Hall Caine. With the coming of sound, in the 1930s several of Hitchcock’s British thrillers were derived from espionage fiction, including The 39 Steps (1935), a version of the novel by John Buchan, while his first film for Hollywood was a starkly atmospheric rendering (1940) of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. Throughout his career, Hitchcock rarely drew on original screenplays, and among his most inspired and individual adaptations were Vertigo (1958) from the French novel D'Entre les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac and Psycho (1960), based on the novel by Robert Bloch.

In Hollywood the epic American Civil War romance Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell provided director Victor Fleming with ideal material for lavish escapism in 1939, while a more social realist approach was taken by John Ford with his 1940 version of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, albeit with a more optimistic ending than the original novel.

A short story by Graham Greene (“The Basement Room”) was worked into a nuanced study of the adult world through a child’s eyes as The Fallen Idol (1948) by Carol Reed, although the pair’s next and most fruitful work together, the influential European film noir The Third Man (1949), was written first for the screen and afterward published as a short story. Greene was a film critic for The Spectator and his novels were strongly imbued with cinematic qualities, yet of the 18 Greene adaptations none matched the accomplishment of the above two films and Brighton Rock (1947, Boulting Brothers).

Outstanding among a succession of Charles Dickens film adaptations in the 1940s and 1950s were Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) by David Lean, which boldly captured the atmosphere of Dickens’s London. In 1939 Sherlock Holmes, played by Basil Rathbone, made the transition from page to screen in two 20th Century-Fox films that remained faithful to the late 19th-century setting of the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, although later Holmes films by Universal anachronistically transported the Victorian detective to the 20th century.

Among notable adaptations from stage to screen, Laurence Olivier recognized the patriotic power of Henry V (1944) during World War II, and made definitive film versions of Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955), while Kiss Me Kate (1953) put a musical spin on The Taming of the Shrew with the songs of Cole Porter and West Side Story (1961) transported Romeo and Juliet to modern-day New York. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw was adapted first in Britain in 1938, then in 1964 by George Cukor as the musical My Fair Lady from the Lerner and Loewe Broadway production. Significant African-American adaptations included the 1959 film of the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess and A Raisin in the Sun (1961), from the play by Lorraine Hansberry, the first by an African-American woman to have been produced on Broadway.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, many of Hollywood’s finest films were based on plays. Cukor successfully brought Philip Barry’s Broadway hit The Philadelphia Story to the screen in 1940, and two undoubted high points of stage-to-screen adaptation were achieved in the 1951 film by Elia Kazan of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams and the 1966 screen version by Mike Nichols of the Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The best of Hollywood musicals is also represented in The Sound of Music (1965), from the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage show, and Cabaret (1972), based on the Broadway musical of the writings of Christopher Isherwood.

From the late 1950s, a new wave of British film-makers, inspired by the “angry young man” trend in theatre and literature, rejected convention and adapted plays and novels that dealt with contemporary social issues. Among the most incendiary was Look Back in Anger (1958), directed by Tony Richardson from the play by John Osborne. The first of the James Bond films based on the novels of Ian Fleming, Dr. No was seen in 1962, while in 1971 Stanley Kubrick released a controversial adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange, and then withdrew it from distribution in response to the adverse reaction to its explicit violence. In America the release of the film (1962) of the Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which dealt with race relations in the Depression-era South, coincided with the civil rights movement’s increasingly vociferous demands for an end to racial oppression.

In the United States, some of the most high-profile adaptations of the 1970s and 1980s were of popular contemporary novels, such as Mario Puzo’s mafia saga The Godfather, which was given greater dimension by Francis Ford Coppola (1972, sequels 1974, 1990), and Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1975) and The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1985), both by Steven Spielberg. A successful novel was no guarantee of box-office success however, as was later proved by the notorious failure of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) by Brian de Palma, from the novel by Tom Wolfe.

From the 1980s, prestige costume dramas based on the literary classics found favour with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. At the forefront of this trend was the British-based partnership Merchant-Ivory, who produced accomplished adaptations particularly of Henry James and E. M. Forster. One of the most powerful adaptations of Shakespeare came from Kenneth Branagh, who co-starred with his then wife Emma Thompson in Henry V (1989). Thompson herself went on to craft an intelligent screenplay of Sense and Sensibility (1995) by Jane Austen, another much adapted author. As an antidote to such gentility, in 1992 Spike Lee based his biopic of Malcolm X on the black activist’s autobiography as told to author Alex Haley, and an audacious film of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, a garish novel about Edinburgh junkies, was a cult success in 1996. That same year Anthony Minghella evoked Hollywood’s golden age with his emotive epic The English Patient, based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje.

As cinema entered its second century, producers of adaptations continued to trade on the reputation of successful modern plays and novels, as well as the classics. In 2001 big-budget renditions of the Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien dominated the box office, Chicago (2001) reinvigorated the genre of the stage-to-screen musical, while the reputedly unfilmable novel Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne was finally brought to the screen, if only in spirit rather than substance, by English director Michael Winterbottom in A Cock and Bull Story (2005). There remains one classic 20th-century novel that has proved elusive to film producers due to its author’s refusal to sell the rights—The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger.

B

Television

From its inception the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) adapted literary classics for the airwaves. Among its earliest productions was the 1937 broadcast of Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. In 1960 it presented a monumental royal history by dramatizing five of Shakespeare’s plays, and it returned to the national poet for its 1978-1985 Shakespeare cycle.

After the arrival of commercial competition in the 1950s, the serial became the predominant form, and the BBC increasingly looked to classic texts for material. Among landmark BBC productions were the 1967, 26-part serialization of The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, and the 12-part I, Claudius (1976), from the books by Robert Graves.

Prior to the 1980s, television drama was studio-bound and shot on videotape. Brideshead Revisited (1981, ITV), a sumptuous adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel, ushered in a new era of more prestigious dramas, shot on location, and on film. Also in this mould were The Jewel in the Crown (1984, ITV) from the novels of Paul Scott and the BBC’s Fortunes of War (1987), based on the writings of Olivia Manning.

Genre fiction, such as the detective and spy story, also became staple fare. ITV dramatized Conan Doyle’s stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-1985), with Jeremy Brett in the title role, and there was also the popular long-running ITV series Inspector Morse (1987-2000) starring John Thaw and based on Colin Dexter’s novels, and Inspector Wexford (1987-2000), originally created by Ruth Rendell. The BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) was the first of several acclaimed John Le Carré adaptations by the corporation.

The classic serial was revitalized in the 1990s with the emergence of Andrew Davies, Britain’s foremost adapter of period fiction. Among his finest work has been Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Dickens’s Bleak House (2005). Television drama has also increasingly drawn on the contemporary novel for material, with notable adaptations including Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990) by Jeanette Winterson and The Line of Beauty (2006) by Alan Hollinghurst.

In the United States, adaptations were first introduced by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which has showed imports of British productions under the banner Masterpiece Theatre since 1971. This paved the way for popular mini-series such as Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), adapted from the bestselling novel by Irwin Shaw. Its considerable success was surpassed by a landmark serialization of Roots on eight consecutive nights in 1977, the Alex Haley saga chronicling the chapter of slavery in American history, which broke ratings records and cemented the place of the serial drama form in the US schedules. Subsequent popular adaptations have included the Western series Lonesome Dove (1989), from the book by Larry McMurtry, The Women of Brewster Place (1989), from the novel by Gloria Naylor, and a popular children’s version of Gulliver's Travels (1996) by Jonathan Swift.