Authorship in Film Adaptation

8. The Three Faces of Lolita, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Adaptation

in 1962, the catholic legion of decency was bound to condemn Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the story of a middle-aged pedophile who marries a widow, loses her, and then becomes the lover of his adolescent stepdaughter. Thirty-six years later, Adrian Lyne’s 1998 remake confronted a number of the same problems that Kubrick faced in terms of adaptation, censorship, and distribution. The two film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita do not exactly follow the old sexist adage about women—the beautiful ones aren’t faithful and the faithful ones aren’t beautiful. In fact, Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film was neither particularly beautiful nor faithful, at least in superficial terms. Robert Stam has questioned the legitimacy of the entire concept, arguing that “we need to be less concerned with inchoate notions of ‘fidelity’ and to give more attention to dialogical responses—to readings, critiques, interpretations, and rewritings of prior material.”¹ When Kubrick released Lolita, the film’s audiences, critics, and would-be censors could not agree on how true to the novel Kubrick’s version was, but fidelity was not the most pressing issue at the time. Kinky sex was the sticking point for many readers and viewers, and although some “felt cheated that the erotic weight wasn’t in the story,” Production Code arbiters objected to its supposed tawdriness.² Lolita’s path from novel to film was riddled with compromises and accommodations, beginning with the decision of collaborators Stanley Kubrick and James Harris to move the production from the United States to England, where artistic freedom and financial advantages kept Kubrick for the remainder of his career. Kubrick and Harris had worked successfully together on Paths of Glory and then on Spartacus, a project they took over to buy their way “out of a five-picture contract [they] had with Kirk [Douglas].”³ Kubrick wanted to film Lolita because he viewed it as one of the great love 8 THE THREE FACES OF LOLITA, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE ADAPTATION /////////////////////////////////////////// Rebecca Bell-Metereau 204 rebecca bell-metereau stories of the twentieth century, so he and Harris purchased the film rights.⁴ At a publicity luncheon, Nabokov met Harris, who was introduced to him as the purchaser of Lolita, and Nabokov, assuming he had simply bought a copy of the book, told him, “I hope you enjoy reading it.”⁵ Later, Kubrick commissioned Nabokov as screenwriter, then took Nabokov’s 400-page script and used only about twenty percent of it, according to Nabokov. Nevertheless , Nabokov did not publicly condemn the film, even claiming that he was envious of some of Kubrick’s ideas. Moreover, Nabokov himself received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the film was widely acknowledged as a cinematic masterpiece. Nabokov eventually published his edited original screenplay, “not as a pettish refutation of a munificent film but purely as a vivacious variant of an old novel.”⁶ Fast-forward to 1998, when Adrian Lyne’s worshipful attempt to be both beautiful and faithful resulted in a film described by one critic as “a particularly somber episode of The Red Shoe Diaries,” a comment referring to the gloom of romantic sentimentality and the soft pornographic atmosphere that characterize Lyne’s revisioning of the tale.⁷ Lyne took pains to be more faithful to the novel, but in the view of many critics his efforts came to life somewhat anemically, under the double shadow of Nabokov’s original masterpiece and Kubrick’s groundbreaking adaptation. In the commentary track on the DVD, Lyne scrupulously avoids referring to Nabokov or Kubrick, calling the 1962 work simply “the other film,” in the way a betrayed wife might refer to “the other woman.”⁸ Stephen Schiff, Lyne’s screenwriter, seems equally reluctant to acknowledge any anxiety of influence, stating that he “didn’t look at the screenplay Nabokov wrote” since he “wanted to be influenced no more by his take on himself than by Kubrick’s take on him.”⁹ Schiff also states that most of his company “actually looked upon the Kubrick version as a kind of ‘what not to do.’”¹⁰ Schiff became the screenwriter for the project after Lyne decided not to use the contemporary version by James Dearden (Lyne’s screenwriter for Fatal Attraction), the production company had rejected Pinter’s “fluent” yet “icy and off-putting” script, and David Mamet had been hired and fired.¹¹ Because of his relative inexperience , Schiff had the virtue of...