Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016

This article explores the reasons why screenwriting and the adapted screenplay have been marginalized or ignored in adaptation studies, and, conversely, foregrounds processes of remediation that have been neglected by scholars of screenplay studies. It aims to question why both academia and audiences choose to compartmentalize the act of screenwriting, the screenplay text and the screenwriters themselves as existing on the periphery of film generally, and adaptation specifically. It also demonstrates the many ways that the fields of study of adaptation theory and screenplay theory can mutually benefit from sharing and overlapping ideas in a knowledge exchange concerning the liminality of the adapted screenplay. This is made possible thanks to notable progress made in recent years in both fields of study, particularly concerning authorship, intertextuality and industrial process of remediation. This approach will consider how the relationship between the adapted screenplay and film questions received notions of authorship in adaptation, and refocuses the reader on the many film practitioners involved in adaptation, of which the screenwriter is just one. In doing so, it will highlight the importance of this ‘liminal’ phase in order to transcend compare-contrast discourses. By analysing each of these elements of the adapted screenplay it will also become possible to consider aspects of adaptation that progress beyond preoccupations with source literature and/or the faithfulness of the adapted film text.

Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for The Social Network perfectly illustrates Linda Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation as a two-step process beginning in (re-)interpretation and concluding in (re-)creation. Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, slightly rearranged, comprises the spine of Sorkin’s script. Sorkin’s deletions, additions and rearrangements significantly re-create the novel. By reframing the events detailing the creation of Facebook as depositions given over a single day, Sorkin condenses the novel’s two years’ events into an easily understood narrative spanning a single day. Sorkin’s addition of transitional scenes further clarifies the relationship of events for viewers as does his subtle but pervasive use of repetition. All of these changes re-create Mezrich’s loosely told, omniscient narration as a dramatic narrative sufficiently different enough for Sorkin to claim it as his own original work.

Warner Brothers’ efforts to launch the Caped Crusader into his own blockbuster movie franchise were infamously fraught and turbulent. It took more than ten years of screenplay development, involving numerous writers, producers and executives, before Batman (1989) was green lit with Tim Burton in the director’s chair. Even then, battles continued to rage over the material, and redrafting carried on throughout the shoot. Warren Skaaren was the script doctor brought in by the studio to rescue the project. His role has been a matter of conjecture and controversy. This article explores Skaaren’s personal archive stored at the University of Texas at Austin to shed new light on what transpired in the final phases of pre-production and the tussles that went on even as the cameras rolled. It analyses the contribution of Skaaren and others in shaping the screenplay, questions some of the myths that have grown up about the script and argues for the importance of the production to screenplay studies as a particularly well-documented example of a highly complex, even chaotic adaptation, which nevertheless resulted in a commercially and critically successful film.

This discussion explores the ways in which screenwriter, Jonathan Myerson, adapts the Prologue and six of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, for two 30-minute animated episodes, commissioned by the BBC in the United Kingdom, principally for educational broadcast. The analysis demonstrates how the distinctive characteristics of the animation vocabulary – metamorphosis, condensation, anthropomorphism, choreography, fabrication, performance, sound, etc. – are used as screenwriting tools, essentially distilling and translating Chaucer’s text into a concentrated visual dramaturgy. Myerson’s interpretation of the text fully exploits animation as a transubstantiation language in 2D and 3D, and enables animation to reveal and exemplify Chaucer’s wit, themes and outlook.

Graeme Simsion’s internationally best-selling novel, The Rosie Project (2013a), began life as a romantic comedy script that nobody wanted. One year later, having ‘reverse adapted’ his screenplay into a novel, The Rosie Project (2013a) was on the New York Times best-selling list and swiftly sold to 40 territories around the world. This article, based on my discussions with screenwriter and author Graeme Simsion, and informed by my own practice-led research into ‘reverse adaptation’, will examine this little discussed manifestation of screen adaptation. What are the creative challenges facing the screenwriter in taking on the ‘opposite’ of a traditional adaptation? How do professional and industrial conditions differ for the screenwriter undertaking a reverse adaptation? Why even begin a reverse adaptation? This article also briefly contextualizes reverse adaptation as belonging to the greater contemporary ‘ecology’ of transmedia adaption, and places it in relation to the commercial novelization.

The Broken Circle Breakdown is one of the most successful theatre plays (2008) in recent years in Flanders. The film adaptation (2012) by Felix Van Groeningen was even more successful. Nevertheless, theatre play, screenplay and the final film differ considerably. This essay aims to reconstruct the genetic evolution of the screen idea from stage play to script to film. It tries to elucidate the dramaturgical choices made by the playwrights, screenwriters and last but in this case certainly not least, the editor, and how this influenced a shift from the tragic (play) towards the melodramatic (film). The adaptation thus can be described as what Jacques Rancière has called a ‘thwarted fable’.

This article uses an intransitive model of adaptation, whereby texts adapt (themselves) rather than get adapted by others, to set adaptation, the tendency of texts to change to attract new audiences, against authorship, the tendency of other hands to constrain these changes through moral and legal sanctions. Although the conflict between adaptation and authorship may seem absolute, the Hollywood film-making industry, especially in its highly ambivalent treatment of writers, offers numerous possibilities for complicating the relationship between adaptation and authorship. The article considers the cases of Charles Dickens, William Faulkner and Charlie Chan to raise questions about authorship, and proposes a model of authorship as a collaborative, adaptive performance created, ratified and policed by the authorship industry rather than an existential fact.