Authorship in Film Adaptation

Part III: WRITER AND DIRECTOR COLLABORATIONS: ADDRESSING GENRE, HISTORY, AND REMAKES

PART III /////////////////////////////////////////// WRITER AND DIRECTOR COLLABORATIONS: ADDRESSING GENRE, HISTORY, AND REMAKES The best answer to that problem [story conference strategies] is to work with your friends, because no matter how much moxie you’ve got, if you’re with a guy who is fundamentally not congenial to your point of view, or if he’s worried about what somebody else is going to think, it just doesn’t matter. So if you can side-step such things, it’s best to work with people you know and trust— and who know and trust you—and to work from that vantage point. There are going to be disagreements, for sure. But there is also mutual respect. —Robert Towne, The Craft of the Screenwriter THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK The most frequent pattern of adaptive screenwriter and director collaboration since the studio era entails a separate writer and a director (not necessarily an auteur). The working relationship of these individuals may fall under one of several diverse arrangements, as reflected in the individual studies of English-language films presented in Part III. The first four chapters explore either obtrusive narrative approaches to film adaptations or intriguing remakes of adaptations. The next four chapters address either unique variations in producer-writer-director dynamics of authorship or collaborations particularly concerned with marginalized populations and their points of view. These two groups of studies suggest the diversity of current collaborative approaches to film authorship in adaptation. The astutely named film, Adaptation (2002), is unusual in that the adapting writer, Charlie Kaufman, is also a co-executive producer on this film, which Jonathan Demme produced and Spike Jonze directed. For this film, very loosely based on the nonfiction book by Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief, Kaufman did numerous script revisions (evident in the unpublished script, which is archived at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles), and a very close collaboration between writer and director in the latter stages of script development was required. In Chapter 6, Frank P. Tomasulo constructs a sophisticated analysis of this recent project, which he finds to be a self-reflexive, postmodernist take on the nonfiction source material. Tomasulo’s chapter explores the complex and layered thematic and cinematic thinking that went into this transformation. Among the many different intentions that may prevail in an adaptation is the updating of older fiction and drama to comment on more immediate cultural circumstances. Barton Palmer in Chapter 7 analyzes the alternation of time frames as a significant factor in screenwriter Harold Pinter’s and director Karel Reisz’s film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Palmer details their radical cinematic approach to the nineteenth-century story with a contemporary narrative perspective found in John Fowles’s novel. Palmer’s discussion of the narrative framing of the story from novel to film illuminates this bold experiment in cinema’s capabilities vis-à-vis the literary source. In Chapter 8, Rebecca Bell-Metereau takes on the two very different film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov’s ironic but controversial novel Lolita (1955). Her informed discussion details Kubrick’s experience with Nabokov’s own screenplay , as well as with movie censors in 1962, when his film was finally released. Director Adrianne Lyne’s version of 1998 had problems with the public’s response to a romanticized form of pedophilia. Bell-Metereau explains the many complexities surrounding the characters and tone of the novel and the different characterizations and thematic, structural, and stylistic approaches of the film versions. She registers a closing concern with both adaptations. In Chapter 9, Mark Gallagher’s comprehensive study of the American film Traffic, a “remake” of the British television miniseries Traffik, includes a compelling discussion of the effect of changing the story’s international setting. The adapted screenplay, by Stephen Gaghan, and the film, directed by Steven Soderbergh , demonstrate the radically different cultural, economic, and political orientations of the two works, in part resulting from a change in locations from the South Asian and European settings in the British TV miniseries to Mexican and U.S. settings in the American film. Gallagher also emphasizes the unique politics of the American “war on drugs” in light of the personal tragedy of drug addiction for obsessed American consumers and their families. 160 writer and director collaborations ...