Film adaptation

Film adaptation is the process of using another artform as the basis of a film.

Adaptation introduces complications in audience perception and aesthetics. The most obvious and common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a film, but film adaptation includes the use of non-fiction (including journalism), autobiography, comic book, scripture, plays, and even other films. From the earliest days of cinema, adaptation has been nearly as common as the development of original screenplays.

Novel adaptations

Novels are frequently adapted for films. For the most part, these adaptations attempt either to appeal to an existing commercial audience (the adaptation of best sellers) or to tap into the innovation and novelty of a less well known author. Inevitably, the question of "faithfulness" arises, and the more high profile the source novel, the more insistent are the questions of faithfulness.

Sergei Eisenstein noted that the novels of Charles Dickens were filmed more often than any material except the Bible, and he explained this by Dickens's style. According to Eisenstein, a good source novel contains a great deal of action and extensive physical description. Novels that feature internal struggles and intellectual debate are difficult to film, but novels that offer descriptions of scenery and which posit their debates in plotting are easy to film. Since Eisenstein's time, film theorists have pointed out that film's tools and fiction's tools are radically different. While film can achieve metaphor, it is difficult and time consuming to do so (with symbolism being more common). Additionally, stream of consciousness and internal monologues can only be filmed by means of intrusive and illusion-breaking techniques (such as voice overs). Therefore, novelists such as Stephen King and Michael Crichton, who concentrate on action and externals, are readier for film than Graham Swift or James Joyce would be. At the same time, film has the ability to employ slow motion, time lapse, and, most essentially, montage — techniques that have no fictional equivalent. Finally, theorists have pointed out that cinema is an event rather than a document. Cinema takes place in time, and time is the ultimate syntax of film. Readers can slow down and ponder, can flip back and forth, and always have the speeches and adjectives to build up the novels they read, while film must roll forward at a particular rate. (Indeed, as abstract expressionism distinguished painting from photography, the pressures of films may have aided in the rise of novels of interiority and time shifting in contemporary artistic fiction or limited the use of such devices in commercial fiction.)

Erich von Stroheim attempted a literal adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague in 1924 with his film, Greed. The resulting film was over sixteen hours long. A cut of the film only eight hours long, then one running to four hours, appeared. Finally, the studio itself cut the film to around two hours, resulting in a finished product that was entirely incoherent. Since that time, few directors have been foolish enough to attempt to put everything in a novel into a film. Therefore, elision is nearly mandatory. In some cases, however, film adaptations will also interpolate scenes. This is especially true when a novel is part of a literary saga. Incidents or quotes from later or earlier novels will be inserted into a single film. Additionally, and far more controversially, film makers will invent new characters or create stories that were not present in the source material at all. There have been several nominees for non plus ultra of inventive adaptation, including the Ronald Jaffe adaptation of The Scarlet Letter with explicit sex between Hester Prynn and the minister and Native American attacks on Salem. At nearly the same time, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders was creatively adapted to make it a romance. A television mini-series of Gulliver's Travels changed the sexes of characters, made some vanish, and changed the character of Master Bates from a single 3 sentence obscene pun into a villain. The Charlie Kaufman and "Donald Kaufman" penned "Adaptation" was an intentional satire and commentary on the process of film adaptation itself.

Change in adaptation is essential, but how much is always a balance. Some film theorists have argued that a director should be entirely unconcerned with the source, as a novel is a novel, while a film is a film, and the two works of art must be seen as separate entities. Since a transcription of a novel into film is impossible, even holding up a goal of "accuracy" is absurd. Others argue that what a film adaptation does is change to fit (literally, adapt), and the film must be accurate to either the effect (aesthetics) of a novel or the theme of the novel or the message of the novel and that the film maker must introduce changes where necessary to fit the demands of time and to maximize faithfulness along one of these axes.

Theatrical adaptation

In addition to adaptation from novels, films frequently use plays as their sources. William Shakespeare has been called the most popular screenwriter in Hollywood. Not only are there film versions of all of Shakespeare's plays, but there are multiple versions of many of them, and there are films adapted from Shakespeare's plays very loosely (such as West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate, O, and Ten Things I Hate About You, as well as Akira Kurosawa's adaptations in Throne of Blood and Ran). Similarly, hit Broadway plays are frequently adapted, whether from musicals or dramas. On the one hand, theatrical adaptation does not involve as many interpolations or elisions as novel adaptation, but, on the other, the demands of scenery and possibilities of motion frequently entail changes from one medium to the other. Film critics will often mention if an adapted play has a static camera.

Adaptations from other sources

Documentary films have been made from reportage, as have dramatic films (e.g. All the President's Men), and several films have been made from epic poetry. Homer's works have been adapted multiple times in several nations. Finally, both Greek mythology and the Bible have been adapted frequently. In these cases, the audience already knows the story well, and so the adaptation will de-emphasize elements of suspense and concentrate instead on detail and phrasing. The specifics of the acting take precedence over cinematic techniques.

Reverse adaptation

Popular films have been adapted into both novels and plays. Many movie studios commission novelizations of their popular titles or sell the rights to their titles to publishing houses. These novelized films will frequently be written on assignment (i.e. hack writing), and will sometimes be written by authors who have only an early script as their source. Consequently, novelizations are quite often changed from the films as they appear in theaters. There have been, however, a few instances of novelists who have worked from their own screenplays to create novels at nearly the same time as a film. Both Arthur C. Clarke, with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Graham Greene, with The Third Man, have worked from their own film ideas to a novel form.

Finally, films have inspired and been adapted into plays. The most recent incidence of this is Spamalot, which is a Broadway play based on Monty Python films. Although not truly a case of artistic adaptation, there have been rare examples of films inspiring or creating religions, such as the new emphasis on Jedi religion coming from the Star Wars films, which themselves adapted other films (notably Hidden Fortress).

Adaptations

• Snow Falling on Cedars (film)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (film)
• October Sky (based on Rocket Boys)
• Harry Potter (movie)
• Lord of the Rings (movie)
• A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Cat in the Hat