Film Adaptation

This course will explore the transformation of literary texts onto the big screen of motion pictures.  Adaptation is an act of re-visioning, a way of expanding the reach of a given story while still upholding its unique, immutable grace and power.

That’s easier said than done. The screenwriter who is tasked with an adaptation reads that source text with an eagle eye for all that is embedded therein. They don’t need to be utterly faithful to the source. In fact, they can’t be. But the source is a holistic entity, a product of another literary mind (and soul). It’s a gestalt that demands respect and thoughtful creative interpretation. And like all strong works of art, it contains beautiful secrets, some of which good screenwriters will find and preserve.

And they must. Half of the feature films made in America are adaptations. Many of their sources are already beloved. Those that aren’t, deserve the wider audience that film can bring. All story forms have adapted each other since Pyramus and Thisbe sprung from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, later to inspire Romeo and Julie and West Side Story. Adaptation is how stories continue to inspire humans across time. It is therefore a core skill of the screenwriter’s art and livelihood.

Adaptation is a reflex of mind.  We “see” what we read, and we “read” what we see.

I have a dream.  I tell you about it.  Already, I’m adapting my own inner life into a spoken version of a dream I have salvaged from the chaos of dreaming.  And yet I’m compelled to relate that dream to you because it had some gravitational pull that made the story of that story well worth the telling.

To adapt any story for film is to make its original content visible and audible, through dialogue, behavior, theme and visual metaphor. It is to take the reflective and make it active, show more and talk less, imbed theme in plot, turn ideas and symbols into images, expand or condense it as needed, shape its new timeframe, and emphasize story at least as much as character.

Every source must be approached using different rules of engagement.  Literature, plays, and true-life stories all resist the morphology of adaptation in unique ways. But the great equalizer is film’s deliberately kinesthetic structure. Character and structure are one in the same. And movies must move. This is a process of translating the char