Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Like so many film teachers of my generation, I was trained in literary studies and drifted into film studies through a mixture of infatuation and happenstance . Given my background and interests, film adaptation would have seemed a logical focus for my work.But I was slow to come to the study of adaptation . I was convinced that George Bluestone had said everything necessary on the subject years before. I agreed with Dudley Andrew’s implication that adaptation study as it was currently practiced wasn’t especially interesting.And I didn’t realize that anyone since Bluestone had added anything significant to the debate between medium-specific theorists who focused, as Seymour Chatman put it, on what novels could do that films couldn’t (and vice versa) and reviewers for whom the book was always better. I owe my interest in adaptation to Barbara Gates and Jim Welsh. In thanking Jim, the founding editor of Literature/Film Quarterly for over three decades ,I echo the thanks of dozens of scholars he has encouraged to take a closer look at books and movies. Although the citations in this volume duly record some of my debts to the leading theorists of adaptation since Bluestone—Brian McFarlane, Deborah Cartmell, Imelda Whelehan, Robert Ray, Robert Stam, James Naremore, Sarah Cardwell, Kamilla Elliott—I remain convinced that Jim has worked harder than anyone else for a longer period to keep interest in adaptation studies alive, and I’m proud that, for nearly twenty years, my own work has had the benefit of his midwifery. Five years ago, Barbara Gates encouraged me to join her in team-teaching a course in adaptations of Victorian novels, even though she knew that I had no appetite for either team-teaching or adaptation. Midway through the term, she urged me to apply with her to the Salzburg Seminar’s Session 403, From Page to Screen, and then withdrew her own application so that it would not compete with mine. Her extraordinary generosity paid me rich dividends at Salzburg, where I joined a group of sixty scholars and filmmakers taught by Steven Bach, Peter Lilienthal, Gerald Rafshoon, Richard Schickel, and David Thacker. I can never repay the debts I incurred at the session, but I’d like to record my obligation to the fellow students from whom I learned the most: Martina Anzinger, Mireia Aragay, Slawomir Bobowski, Derek Chase, Karen Diehl, Lindiwe Dovey, Scott Eyman, Lynn Higgins, Michael Kitson, Irina Makoveeva, Sohail Malik, Margaret McCarthy, Mohi-Ud-Din Mirza, Manjiri Prabhu, Tatiana Smorodinska, and Alexie Tcheuyap. On my return to America , Slawomir Bobowski, Mireia Aragay, and Lynn Higgins offered me the opportunity to try my hand at three essays—“The Word Made Film,” Studia Filmoznawcze 25 (2004); “The Adapter as Auteur: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Disney,” Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004); and “Post-Literary Adaptation,” PostScript 23, no. 3 (summer 2004)— which, variously revised and expanded, became the bases of chapters 3, 10, and 11 of this book. In the meantime Kathryn Osenlund had kindly invited me to give the keynote presentation at the Pennsylvania College Educators Association and introduced me to John Desmond and Peter Hawkes,whose passion for the subject spurred my own. In response I pressed many friends to help me during annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Literature/ Film Association. I’m particularly obliged to Richard Allen, Lesley Brill, Linda Costanzo Cahir, David Kranz, Peter Lev, Nancy Mellerski, Walter Metz, Sarah Miles Watts, and Donald Whaley for helping me identify and analyze heretofore neglected problems in adaptation. At the University of Delaware, students in my graduate course on adaptation offered me a laboratory for my ideas and provided a constant stream of intellectual challenges.And two of my PhD students,David DeMare Stivers and Kathleen Newell,helped me work out problems with my chapter on adaptation and auteurism. It was a special honor to work with Kate on her prize-winning dissertation, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Adaptation,” at the same time that I was pondering many of the same questions on my own. The greater part of this book was drafted during a sabbatical leave I was awarded for 2004–5. Cheryl Kingan introduced me to the mysteries of Walt Disney World, and Allison Thibert-Bragg provided a timely and welcome bit of lastminute help. Of the many people who helped bring the book to press, I am especially...