Authorship in Film Adaptation

INTRODUCTION: THE SCREENPLAY AND AUTHORSHIP IN ADAPTATION

this collection of essays originated in the observation that the study of literature-to-film adaptation has generally overlooked the actual process through which a source text is transformed into a motion picture . This process includes in particular the central role of the screenplay. The increasing attention to intertextual and intermedial influences in adaptation over the last two decades provides an opportunity to highlight the most consistent and crucial example of intertextuality at work, namely, the writing of the transmedial screenplay. Literature-to-film adaptation involves the textual transposition of a single-track medium of published writing into a document that embraces the scenic structure and dramatic codes of the multitrack medium of film. The composition of the screenplay illuminates the evolution of ideas that will determine the film production’s relationship to its source text. In this introduction I describe the multiple roles and significance of the adapted screenplay and its history, as well as its centrality to the collaborative authorship that is at the heart of film adaptation. Focusing on the screenplay in adaptation necessarily foregrounds issues of authorship in a theoretical environment that has been weighted toward semiotics, poststructuralism , and broadly conceived influences of cultural intertextuality. The fragile status of authorship in the shifting landscape of adaptation theory is specifically addressed in the final section of this introduction. The two previously published essays and ten original ones in this collection each emphasize some aspect of the process of film adaptation as it can be traced from the source text and adapted screenplay through the film’s production, exhibition, and reception. The four parts of the book are organized around the three dominant arrangements for adaptive screenwriters in English-language cinema: INTRODUCTION: THE SCREENPLAY AND AUTHORSHIP IN ADAPTATION //////////////////////////////////////// Jack Boozer 2 introduction 1. The screenwriter in service to an activist producer or established auteur; 2. The screenwriter and director as one and the same individual; or 3. The screenwriter and director in a variety of other collaborative relationships . Although not all the chapters place major emphasis on the screenplay in adaptation, all do consider some aspect of the adaptive process as such. The case studies chosen for discussion also represent both cultural diversity and diversity in critical approaches to adaptation. A focus on authorship, however , remains a touchstone throughout the collection. Historically, the adapted screenplay has been viewed only as an interim step in the binary focus on the source literature (usually the novel) and on the film. The script has been deemed merely a skeletal blueprint for the adapted film and thus unworthy of serious consideration in its own right. There are several reasons for this binary critical emphasis, beginning with the essential point that a work of fiction or drama typically has a single author and a readily consumable existence in published form, just as an adapted film can be recognized as a finished entity on screen. The adapted screenplay, however, has had no comparable existence as a finished artifact for public consumption (with the exception of published transcripts). Interest in the adapted screenplay mainly follows from an initial critical or public interest in the adapted film. But whereas the audience of an adapted film might rush to purchase copies of the source text (underscoring an adapted film’s direct value to publishers ), a much smaller readership will seek the film transcript, and only a tiny group will seek a late screenplay draft or shooting script, assuming such is even available. Other reasons for disregarding the screenplay in adaptation study include the multiple revisions a script undergoes during development (at times by different hands), Hollywood’s traditional low regard for the screenwriter generally, and a resistance to any sort of transposition of esteemed canonic literature (the “hallowed word”) to another medium, especially one that has been associated with mass entertainment. In respect to this last issue, the adaptation of high-profile best-sellers to the screen can prove as controversial as the adaptation of literary classics. In the recent adaptation of Dan Brown’s best-selling mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code, the film version was criticized for softening the book’s main thematic thrust, namely, that since antiquity, conservatives within the Catholic Church have suppressed the role of women, including the role of Mary Magdalene , with whom Jesus may have sired children to produce a still extant introduction 3 lineage. Did film director Ron Howard (who at an...