Jane Austen in Hollywood

Introduction: Watching Ourselves Watching

Introduction Watching Ourselves Watching Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield The past few years have seen a proliferation ofJane Austen adaptations. Between 1970 and 1986, seven feature-length films or television miniseries, all British, were produced based on Austen novels; in the years 1995 and 1996, however, six additional adaptations appeared, half of them originating in Hollywood and the rest influenced by it. The boom started in the United Kingdom in September 1995 with the "wet-T-shirt-Darcy" Pride and Prejudice miniseries written by Andrew Davies, and crossed the Atlantic in December with the opening ofEmma Thompson's high-profile adaptation ofSense and Sensibility. The success of both these productions lifted the art-house film Persuasion (written by Nick Dear and released in late September but previously aired on British television in April 1995) out of potential obSCUrity and brought a new-and older-audience to Amy Heckerling's Hollywood film from earlier in the summer Uuly), an updating of Emma entitled Clueless. The next year, 1996, was the big one for fans of Austen in the United States. Pride and Prejudice came to the Arts and Entertainment Network (A&E) inJanuary, and in the same month Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility enjoyed much wider U.s. distribution. It was also The Year of Emma. l In July 1996, Gwyneth Paltrow appeared as Austen's beautiful heroine for Hollywood's Miramax Films, written and directed by Douglas McGrath, and, in November, Britain's Meridian Broadcasting produced Andrew Davies's telefilm for lTV starring Kate Beckinsale (which came to A&E in February 1997). With such competition, the BBC, which had been developing its own miniseries of the novel, put its plans "on hold for the foreseeable future" (Sawyer). As a result of the manifold productions, Jane Austen has become even more popular. Publishers have brought out tie-in editions of the novels, Emma Thompson and Nick Dear have published their screenplays, Sue Birtwistle 2 Troost and Greenfield and Susie Conklin have written two heavily illustrated books deSigned to accompany writer Davies's adaptations: The Making ofPride and Prejudice and The Making ofjane AustensEmma. 2 Membership in the Jane Austen Society of North America QASNA) jumped 50 percent over the course of 1996 alone (4,000 members as of September 1997), and Austen-L, an E-mail list based at McGill University in Canada, has more than 600 subscribers. The interest in Austen and in adapting her novels has, of course, been operative all through this century. Andrew Wright describes attempts to set Pride and Prejudice to music, to rewrite the book for the stage, and so forth, and he lists more than sixty radio, television, film, and stage productions of Austen's various works between 1900 and 1975. If the recent phenomenon has seemed more intense, one must credit, first of all, the technology that allows such intensity. In the early 1970s, global culture was not so tightly meshed as it is now nor could the marketing practices be so efficient. For instance, the only possible place on U.S. television for such BBC versions of Austen as the 1971 Sense and Sensibility or the 1972 Emma was public television's Masterpiece Theatre. Neither series, indeed, crossed the Atlantic. In the 1990s, however, the TV adaptations can sell not only through PBS but also the Arts and Entertainment Network (the telefilm ofNorthanger Abbey of 1986, a controversial production, was the first to combine American and British resources-the BBC and A&E). Also, the current films have an established habit of video renting and buying on which to rely. For example, the BBC sold 200,000 video copies of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice within a year of the first airing (Nichols), 50,000 of them in the first week (Davies). The adaptations before 1986 did not have these cultural practices so well established . After all, prior to the 1980s, few homes had VCRs in them.3 Technological changes have also enhanced the opportunities for hyping the films. The television and Hollywood publicity machines have become very good both at appealing to a niche audience, in ways that Deborah Kaplan explores in her essay in this volume, and at expanding that niche. Specialized TV networks, instant books of the screenplays and of the filming process , videocassettes, CDs of the soundtracks, and official websites all collaborate to allow those enamored ofAusten to indulge their taste further, and at the same time, these hot spots can spark and then expand even a mild interest. Idling through the World Wide...