"Why read the book when I can just rent the movie?" From Zack Morris to Mike Seaver to Eddie Haskell, this line of thinking has been the anthem of sitcom slackers and real-world rebels ever since the "Based on the Novel by" first appeared in the opening credits. The rest, as they say, was history, but it would be sheer folly to think that the link between literature and film began and ended with an easy answer for middle school book reports. Fact is, much as we like to separate the two genres and even pit them against each other, books and movies are getting tighter than Jack Nicholson's jawline when he had to announce "Crash" for Best Picture. Speaking of which, of the 15 films represented in the acting categories at this year's Academy Awards, nine of those movies were rooted in some sort of literary work, be it a novel, a short story, or a graphic novel. But as every Shawn Hunter knows, you can't judge a book - or its film interpretation - by its cover. Said senior and filmmaker Rebecca Katz, currently on domestic study at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts: "As a filmmaker, you always have make decisions on what to include, what to add, or what not to include [when adapting a book to film]." So just how does someone go from "Red Alert" to "Dr. Strangelove"? The Daily breaks down the process of flipping from page to projector. "Sense and Sensibility": Choosing the right source material
Every adaptation has to start somewhere, so selecting the right literary text to adapt is a key factor in the ultimate success of the film incarnation. But the criteria for this selection aren't as clear as one might think. "If you think about the great films in Hollywood or even international cinema history, for the most part, they're not produced on the basis of adaptation of great literary works," said Lee Edelman, English Department Chair and a professor whose classes often deal with the analysis of the "filmic medium." In fact, some of the greatest works of film have drawn on a distinctly poorer class of literature. "One thinks of the genre, for instance, of film noir," said Edelman, "which, for the most part, took pulp fiction stories and yet made them into cinematic masterpieces. Or one thinks of the texts that [famed director Alfred] Hitchcock based his films on; none of them were great literary works." Similarly, Associate French Professor Brigitte Lane notes that while great 19th-century novels like Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" are still amongst the most popular sources for French film adapters, newer movies have expanded the pool of source material that they reference. "The more recent ones" said Lane, "have tended to go out of what I would call established literature. In other words, it goes much more in the direction of detective novels, thrillers." So how will a director know when he's stumbled across a worthwhile piece of literature on which to base his next project? Tufts senior and alum of the Perspectives class "Contemporary Fiction in Film" Telly Kousakis identified two major factors in assessing a work's adaptability: "The things that I think you should stay true to are plot and character, and those are the things that should really stand out...We see movies, and we imagine books, so the things that we can actually see are the things that we should take from source materials." However, a filmmaker's choice to work from an adapted - as opposed to an original - screenplay isn't always a matter of finding good source material. Freshman Nicholas Moy, a member of Howard Woolf's "Making Movies" Ex College class who performed an analysis on the adaptation of Nick Hornby's novels to film, described a different pressure: "Some [novels] are more difficult [to adapt] than others. I would say that the most difficult are the more popular books, because there's such a high expectation, and the director has to be worried about the audience's reaction." Of course, like so many things in Hollywood, sometimes the selection of a source material just comes down to the hard, cold facts of dollars and cents. "There [are] a lot of sleazy producers out there that will see a popular book like 'The DaVinci Code,'" said senior and filmmaker Jordan Levie, who is currently working on a film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's "Fortitude." "On a financial level, it makes sense for them to make a movie of that ["The Da Vinci Code"], because it was such a vastly popular book that there's gonna be an audience for the movie...and I don't know if that's the right way to go into an adaptation. You hope that whoever they hire to do it has a morally intellectual interest in it."
"High Fidelity": Staying true or going new
So once you've picked your text to work from, how will you go about translating that work into a new film medium? "Almost always, there's a source of heated debate about the degree to which they're either faithful to the literary text or accomplished works of cinema as opposed to good transposition," said Edelman, and any bookworm who has ever decried the impurity of a film adaptation knows exactly what he's talking about. But no matter how much you favored the original "Pride & Prejudice" over Joe Wright's 2005 remake, the strength of the text alone is not enough to guarantee a movie adaptation's success. "What [necessarily] makes a good film is a good filmmaker," said Edelman. "What is important about that is a good filmmaker needs to be able to bring her or his own vision to the material. And if the compulsion to honor the particularity of a widely respected literary text inhibits the filmmaker, the filmmaker is likely to do less than her or his best work." "It's just finding the right balance between being faithful to the themes and finding a way to do it on film," said Levie. But finding that balance is a lot harder than it sounds. "Being true to the story can be different in so many ways," said Katz, citing the conflicting opinions she and her "Making Movies" classmates had last spring when they attempted to adapt a Fernando Sorrentino short story. Even when there's only one person in charge of the adapting process, a quick survey of the commentators interviewed showed a vast range of opinions on the proper approach to literary adaptations. "In my opinion, the definition of a film that is faithful to a literary piece of work is that the message of the film come out as...clear as the book carried it," said Lane. Katz herself pointed to what she felt was a successful adaptation of Michael Cunningham's novel, "The Hours" into a 2003 Oscar-nominated film. "I think it really helps when the author of the piece of literature is part of the screenwriting process, because it helps to get at what the writer was trying to get at." Said Moy: "Factually...the characters should be the same, but the characters' personalities are open to interpretation." "I think that one should stay true to the story, the plot," said Kousakis, "Stay true to the characters. Not necessarily stay true to style." Levie introduced yet another method. "What I did is I just farmed out the actual dialogue from the [Vonnegut] piece itself," said Levie. "Then you sort of get this skeletal breakdown of what you started with, and you can then read it along and decide where are the holes that you need to fill that the author was originally filling." Levie explains that his approach to adapting in this case was conservative. "My whole thing about adaptation is attempting to be as close to the original as possible without taking away from the thing as a film." Levie admits, however, that his particular approach to his Vonnegut adaptation is not the only possible translation. "I just don't think there's any one way to go about it. I think there needs to be emphasis on the fact that every adaptation is gonna be done in a different way. There are certain people out there who, like me, don't really feel like they have that much authority yet and aren't willing to take a concept and walk away with it."
"Brokeback Mountain": Judging the movie against the cover
Wherever a filmmaker falls on the spectrum of loyalty to the original text, however, he'll never be able to find the elusive proportion of fidelity to innovation that will please all of the original work's fans. Lane elucidates this conundrum: "The reader projects on the text that he or she reads part of oneself, of one's imagination. Images will call on a different imagination. In other words, the deciphering of a written text and the deciphering of images - in a film, in a cartoon, or even painting - it's different." Take, for instance, the case of what was arguably the most talked-about movie of last year, the controversial "Brokeback Mountain" based on Annie Proulx's 1997 short story. Although we know that the Academy obviously didn't think the movie stacked up favorably against its original screenplay-based competition, how do Tufts movie buffs think the film fared as an adapted work? "'Brokeback Mountain' was really good," said Kousakis, "because although it was completely different than the story was, it had as distinctive a voice as the story did...which I think is the most important thing when you're really looking at it: not necessarily how true can the movie be to the book, but...making its own distinct thing with the same story rather than trying to evoke the same specific things from the book." Edelman, however, was of a somewhat different opinion. "[Proulx's] story seemed to be very successful in its own terms as a short story...I understood that it was an important film socially and historically; I didn't think it was a particularly outstanding film in its medium. So I guess I would say, in this case - as in most cases where you [adapt] a successful piece of literature - the work of literature came out ahead of the film. "The film is much more sentimental than the short story. One of the interesting things about the film is that it tries to capture some of the spareness in the relation in the narrative of the relationship between Ennis and Jack in Proulx's short story by the spareness with which it evokes the landscape around them. But when it presents the relationship of the two men with each other, it tends to succumb to the intense temptation of sentimentalizing the relationship that the short story takes such pains to avoid."
"Brave New World": The final frontier of adaptations
But pros and cons of adapting aside, both Kousakis and Lane pointed to trends in international and domestic cinema indicating a totally new way of looking at the process of adaptation. "There has been an evolution in a different direction recently, certainly in France," said Lane, "which is the introduction of the kind of inter-texuality references to other works of cinema and also cartooning [like in the 2001 international hit, 'Amelie']." Lane adds: "What's been happening in France is that the directors take the American models...they keep the archetypal models, but they keep the content to adjust it to a French cultural reality." But the French aren't the only ones borrowing from American cinema; Kousakis notes that American filmmakers are recycling their own works with increasing frequency. "I think it's really interesting," said Kousakis, "that now we've gotten to the point where we're not happy adapting literature into films; now we have to adapt films into other films ? la 'Ocean's 11.' If it didn't work the first time, make it better this time."
