The Film That Almost Was: John Fowles’s “The Black Thumb” and His Collaboration with David Tringham

When first considering the relationship between the author John Fowles and the adaptation of his work, it is interesting to remember that this novelist’s writing career was launched not with the sale of his manuscript The Collector to American publisher, Jonathan Cape, but instead on the contingent purchase of the film rights to that novel that accompanied the publication deal. As Fowles notes in his journal entry of July 4, 1962, James Kinross, director and literary manager negotiating with the publisher, made this contingency clear in his original offer letter for The Collector, explaining, “I have had to allow them a 10% interest in any possible stage or film rights, but under the circumstances this is fair enough, since in return, they guarantee to give the book extensive publicity. … Normally we don’t encourage publishers to take this stand, but the circumstances are rather exceptional with fiction taking such a beating these days.”¹ Indeed, the doleful state of British fiction in the 1960s and 1970s was no secret to anyone at the time. John Barth had famously stated that the novel was “exhausted”² in 1967; and B. S. Johnson reflected that the role of the storyteller appeared to have been taken up by the cinema.³ Fowles’s willingness to see his works on screen, large or small, is therefore not surprising; rather, it should be viewed as a pragmatic reaction to the circumstances faced by an aspiring writer in a rather bleak vocational landscape.

However, by 1974, the year in which Fowles and David Tringham began their collaboration on the work that will be the focus of this essay, Fowles was no longer in such a tenuous financial position. After the huge box office success of William Wyler’s The Collector (US, 1965), the author was able to turn his attention to writing full time; his novels and short stories going on to yield numerous adaptations for large- and small-screen audiences: from the infamous The Magus (UK, 1965) directed by Guy Green, and for which Fowles—perhaps imprudently with hindsight given the disappointing result—insisted he write the screenplay, to the star-studded and critically acclaimed The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz, US, 1981) with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

By the time Fowles and Tringham were about to embark on the film that never was, Fowles was an established and, at least in the US, a highly respected author. As Sarah Lyall notes in her obituary for the author,

For whatever reason—he always said it was because he was mistrusted by the British literary establishment he had rejected—Mr. Fowles was always far more celebrated, both critically and popularly, in the United States than he was in his native country. In America, his books became mainstays of college literature courses while managing to achieve that rare combination: admiring reviews from serious-minded critics and best-selling sales in the stores. … Not so in England.⁴

The focus of this essay, therefore, does not follow what Thomas Leitch characterizes as “the one-to-one case study that takes a single novel or play or story as a privileged context for its film adaptation.”⁵ Indeed, as Leitch points out in his article, the study of the adaptation genre itself yields interesting insights into both the author (both novelist and screenwriter) and the audience, and should not be focused entirely on the relationship between the privileged original work and the adaptation of that work. This study is unable to pursue an analysis of the relationship between the origin and transformed adaptation quite simply because the adaptation never made it to the screen. Instead, this examination will consider the equally fascinating progression of the author’s screenplay to the director’s revised version, an adaptation that provides a rare insight into the creative process of the author and the resulting work. “The Black Thumb,” as it emerges after Tringham’s adaptation of the work, is a remarkable departure from the author’s well-established artistic trajectory.

Fowles wrote the half-hour...