By Todd Leopold
CNN

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — It was one of the greatest humanitarian acts in history.

At the beginning of World War II, as the Nazis tightened their grip on Europe, the U.S. government allowed millions of Jews to resettle from their homes in Poland and Russia to southeastern Alaska, along the panhandle.

Two million Jews had died at the hands of the Nazi scourge, but millions more were saved as the Federal District of Sitka, Alaska, became the new Jewish homeland — all the more important when the fledgling State of Israel went down to defeat in 1948.

However, 60 years later, Sitka is about to be returned to local jurisdiction, and the island’s Jews — including a noted detective, Meyer Landsman — are wondering where to go next. The Jewish people, forever rootless, will have to wander some more.

Landsman’s got other problems, too. He’s rootless himself, biding his time in a seedy hotel. There’s the body that turned up in a nearby room, a onetime chess prodigy who appears to have major connections with some big shots — machers, in the local Yiddish lingo. There’s his ex-wife, now his boss — at least until the department is disbanded — and his partner, a half-Jewish, half-Tlingit named Berko who’s far more responsible than Landsman.

And there are a host of old enemies with long memories, particularly when Landsman decides to root around the dead chess player’s case.

Landsman’s world is fiction, of course, a product of Michael Chabon’s imagination. Chabon’s new book, “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” (HarperCollins), combines Landsman’s hard-boiled detective’s terrain with the landscape of alternate history, one in which world events take a startling turn. (Gallery: The “what-ifs” of alt-history)

The story is rooted in fact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chabon (“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”) observes.

Chabon had written an article about the decline of Yiddish, and the reaction to the piece — some of it very negative — “got me thinking about … a possible, but nonexistent, imaginary Yiddish-speaking place in the modern world,” he says in an interview at CNN Center.

In the article, he noted an actual plan by Franklin Roosevelt’s Interior secretary, Harold Ickes, to create a refuge for European Jews in Alaska, still 20 years from statehood. In reality, the plan was squelched thanks to the opposition of Alaska delegate Anthony Dimond, but in the “Yiddish Policemen’s” world, Dimond is conveniently killed off and the plan goes forward.

A bit of Raymond Chandler, a dash of Isaac Babel

Chabon’s Federal District of Sitka is a land of tall apartment blocks and grimy streets, as if “Hong Kong had moved to the other side of the Pacific Ocean,” he says.

The novel is peppered with clever conceits. The book’s black hats, as in villains, are actual “black hats,” a slang term for ultra-Orthodox Jews. The characters are fond of Filipino doughnuts, a twist on the Jewish taste for Chinese food. The place names of Russian Alaska are an apt companion to the Eastern European surnames of Chabon’s Jews, and then there are throwaway bits — such as in the Sitka of 2001, Orson Welles did release a version of “Heart of Darkness.”

Doing a genre novel — or several at once, as “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” is part detective story, part alt-history, part modern Jewish folktale — isn’t considered the natural turf for a so-called literary writer like Chabon, but the author — who has been vocal in support of genre fiction — makes no apologies for the work.

“I only ever try to write in genres that I love … I love hard-boiled detective novels, I love fantasy, I love science fiction,” he says. “It feels like a natural impulse to want to integrate that passion that I have as a reader into my writing. I didn’t see a good reason not to. … And to say that there’s something inherently inferior about the mystery genre is just silly.”

In writing “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” Chabon says, the key was re-reading Raymond Chandler, creator of L.A. detective Philip Marlowe and a distinctive tough-guy style, as well as the Russian-Jewish short story writer Isaac Babel, “whose use of simile and metaphor strangely echoed Chandler,” he says.

Babel also had a “clear-eyed view of violence. … There’s a kinship there between Chandler and Babel, and that’s what helped me kind-of forge the voice for this novel,” Chabon says.

But, he adds, “the whole novel is itself a simile. It’s setting up a series of semblances and mirrorings of the world we live in, so it seemed almost necessary, not just from a stylistic point of view but from a thematic point of view.” Chabon’s layered themes include reason’s conflict with religious extremism, an idea that comes to the fore as the novel progresses.

‘If only,’ not ‘what if’

Holding a mirror to our world is a common theme of alternate histories, and Chabon says he is fond of the type in general. The noted comic-book fan — he co-wrote “Spider-Man 2″ — cites two favorites: the “what-if” scenarios often proposed in the Superman comics, and an issue of National Lampoon that celebrated John F. Kennedy’s fifth inaugural with the cover line, “JFK’s First 6,000 Days.”

“I read and re-read that a dozen times,” he says. “It had an undertone of poignance. … It was like a perpetual November 21, 1963. America never went through any of the turbulence of the ’60s. … It was the opposite of most counterfactual fiction, which tends to present the catastrophic — what if the bad things happened. … This was presenting an ‘if only,’ not a ‘what if.’ ”

Which is not to say “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” is presenting a better — or worse — future. There is a darkness in the book, Chabon observes. But there’s also the idea that millions of people were saved from the death camps.

“I’m certainly not presenting the world of this novel as ‘it would have been better this way.’ It’s a dark world, and the Jews of Sitka are on the brink of the abyss,” he says. “But there is a certain ‘if only’ quality.”

“The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” has earned mostly admiring reviews. ” ‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’ builds upon the achievement of ‘Kavalier & Clay,’ ” wrote the notoriously hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times.

Reaction from the public has been positive and even put him on The New York Times’ hardcover bestseller list, a rarified place for any author. “I feel like the book has been embraced,” says Chabon.

Perhaps the only people concerned about the book’s subject matter are some Jews, who have asked Chabon if the book isn’t, well, “too Jewish.”

“It reminds me of when my first novel, ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,’ came out … and everybody in Pittsburgh said, ‘Are you crazy? Why would you set a novel in Pittsburgh? Who’s going to want to read a novel about Pittsburgh?’ ” he laughs. “The reason we read fiction is know what it would be like to really be someone else. … That kind of transport across time and place is the magic of fiction.”

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/06/28/michael.chabon/index.html

Adapt This

Fiction Into Film

By Phillip Lopate

A COMEDY OF REMARRIAGE: THE PLOT SO FAR

The relationship between novels and movies is such a seemingly tired subject that one can be forgiven for yawning at its mention. This soporific quality derives in part from the many high school and college English courses that dutifully explore film adaptations of novels as a means of killing two birds with one stone and luring a visually besotted generation back to reading. Then there are the countless film-studies courses that approach it from their end. At professional conferences, armies of academics present papers singling out the filmic treatment of x or y novel. Usually, the comparison is made to the detriment of the movie, which is seen as crasser and cruder—recalling the New Yorker cartoon Alfred Hitchcock recounted to François Truffaut that showed two goats eating film cans, one remarking to the other, “Personally, I liked the book better.” Film is treated as the dumb blonde of media. Sometimes, however, the older medium, with its elitist pretensions, is viewed as corrupting the more innocent, populist folk art. Let us see whether we can bring some fresh air to this stale topic.

First, it may be necessary to question the received wisdom. One such premise is that it is easier to make a fine film out of a mediocre novel than out of a superior one, because the adapter will feel less reverent toward the source material. (In reality, a screenwriter who has had to adapt a weak novel can tell you that inheriting a lousy plot and thin characters does not make the job any easier.) A short list, barely scratching the surface, of beautiful films made from superior novels includes Mouchette (1967), Diary of a Country Priest (1951), The Leopard (1963), The Life of Oharu (1952), Pather Panchali (1955), Greed (1924), Day of Wrath (1943), Floating Clouds (1955), Little Women (1933, 1994), Wise Blood (1979), How Green Was My Valley (1941), Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), The Scarlet Letter (1927), Double Indemnity (1944), Nana (1926), The House of Mirth (1918, 2000), The Heiress (1949), Les Enfants terribles (1950), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Key (1958), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), Contempt (1963) . . . Even superlative novels that had seemed unfilmable, because of heft, canonical status, or interiority—I am thinking of Great Expectations, The Trial, Remembrance of Things Past,Wuthering Heights, War and Peace, Don Quixote, Madame Bovary—have yielded creditable versions, which at least partly succeed.

Another received truth is that the way to make a vivid adaptation is to cut loose from the novel as soon as possible. Some screenwriters boast that they read the novel once, then never go back to it, and there are directors (such as John Ford with The Grapes of Wrath [1940]) who say they never read the novel at all. There may be some egoprotecting here: Jean-Luc Godard was being a bit disingenuous in dismissing his source for Contempt, Alberto Moravia’s A Ghost at Noon, as a mediocre novel to read on a train, thereby downplaying the psychological dynamics he had borrowed from the author. But for every instance in which a rough, indifferent attitude (or the pretense of one) toward the source material resulted in a successful film, there are plenty of others in which the screenwriter and/or director took the original very seriously, such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who used the pages of Graciliano Ramos’s novel as the shooting script for his beautiful Barren Lives (1963).

READY FOR THEIR CLOSE-UPS: HYPERNATURALISTS

The most famous example of a filmmaker refusing to acknowledge any dividing line between novels and movies or to relinquish devotion to his source material is Erich von Stroheim. The tragedy of Greed—that his nine-and-ahalf- hour version of Frank Norris’s McTeague was whittled down by the studio to roughly two hours and its original negative destroyed—has become the central, cautionary myth regarding adaptations, like Icarus flying too near the sun or some medieval alchemist perishing in an attempt to convert lead into gold. But we could just as easily view Greed (even in its butchered form) as an exemplary model of adaptation. It is generally assumed that Stroheim went about trying to film the novel paragraph by paragraph—and indeed, there are many direct correspondences of that kind—but the truth is somewhat more complicated, as Jonathan Rosenbaum usefully notes in James Naremore’s collection Film Adaptation (2000): “In fact, Stroheim got so far inside the spirit and texture of the original that, like any good Method actor, he was able to generate his own material out of it: almost the first fifth of the published script of Greed, nearly sixty pages, describes incidents invented by Stroheim that occur prior to the action at the beginning of the novel.”

Anyone who has seen Greed—either in its 1924 studio release or in Rick Schmidlin’s fascinating 1999 four-hour restoration, which incorporates recently discovered production stills and dialogue cards—can attest to its thick texture of background objects, signs, faces, and clothing, all of which generate a poignantly convincing material atmosphere, brick by brick. Anyone who reads Norris’s novel will notice his similar fondness for amassing physical detail. Norris’s mentor in naturalist fiction was Émile Zola, who also loved to pile up the detail and to roam, like a tracking camera, over his chosen milieux. (See, for instance, the marvelous department-store descriptions in The Ladies’ Delight.) If Flaubert, as has frequently been observed, could be said to have anticipated crosscutting in the agricultural-fair sequence in Madame Bovary, Zola was even more important to the movies as avatar and inspiration. More than sixty adaptations of Zola novels have been made since 1902, when Ferdinand Zecca adapted L’Assommoir. But Zola’s usefulness to directors has been more than just as source. First, his descriptions convey the constant flow of life, such as has also been conveyed in documentaries and city symphonies from Lumière on, and which is the right and the privilege of the camera eye. Second, Zola’s penchant for deterministic fatalism channels that flow and gives it a narrative point. Jean Renoir, grand master of conveying a cinematic river of life that seems to spill out beyond the frame and lap around his fatalistic protagonists (Toni [1935], The Human Beast [1938]), acknowledged his debt to Zola not only by adapting several of his novels but by stating outright: “I believe that the so-called realist film is a child of the naturalist school.” And: “One usually takes Zola as a purely realist author . . . but what interests me in Zola is his poetry.”

This filmic discovery of the poetic resources in naturalistic realism, which derived from Zola, was so important to ’30s French auteurs such as Renoir, Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier, Jacques Feyder, Pierre Chenal, and Jean Grémillon that their works were even grouped under the name poetic realism. Dudley Andrew, in his splendid study of this school, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (1995), is quick to point out the debt that classic French cinema owes to novelists of the ’30s (think Simenon) when he speaks of “the evasive quality of ‘atmosphere’ that stands as an intermediate term between literature and cinema. Although atmosphere at one time may have belonged more properly to the poetic and the painterly arts rather than to the novel, which was considered the medium of social analysis and intrigue, in the 1930s atmosphere had descended like a cloud on the narrative arts of novel and film.”

AN EXPECTED TWIST: AVANT-GARDE STYLIZATION

The bane of many filmed novels is the episodic, that hurrying-along effort to cram in so many scenes from the book that high points get flattened and details blur. One strategy to circumvent that pitfall has been a highly stylized, austere, antinaturalistic approach. In Not Reconciled (1965), the first of many rigorous features by the duo Jean- Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Heinrich Böll’s Billiards at Half-Past Nine was used as the inspiration for a film about how a bourgeois German family copes with the period before, during, and after the Nazi regime. Rather than pack in as many sensational incidents as possible to capture a story spanning several decades, the filmmakers slow down their fifty-five minutes by patiently recapturing unhurried moments of being (such as a man smoking a cigarette on a stairwell or sitting down to his customary breakfast at a hotel), which achieves the Bazinian ideal of ontological reality. The result is a masterly contemplation of the way daily life goes on in the midst of historical upheaval. The Straub-Huillet team also adapted Kafka’s Amerika (as Class Relations [1984]) and Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily (as Sicily! [1999]) and made two features from Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò (From the Clouds to the Resistance [1979] and These Encounters of Theirs [2006]), in both cases filming Pavese’s elaborate dialogues word for word.

Manoel de Oliveira, in Doomed Love (1979), filmed the famous nineteenth-century Portuguese novel of the same name by Camilo Castelo Branco, more or less in its entirety, by having a narrator speak voluminous voice-over texts when the actors are quiet. This method imposes an intentionally static rhythm, as the actors are obliged to stand around while the voice-over unfurls, though sometimes the camera goes its own way, tracking to a window, for example. The somber delivery of long, formal speeches by nonprofessional actors violates film adaptation’s received wisdom, which states that a novel’s dialogue must be recast and abbreviated so as to sound as natural as possible coming from the actors’ mouths. Yet somehow the results are mesmerizing. Oliveira explained that he found himself “making a film from a romantic work—but this work operates on two distinct levels. One is superficial, anecdotal, sentimental, and very explicit; the other is much more profound. I didn’t wish to remain with the first level. . . . Since I was adapting a work of literature to an audiovisual medium—a work of great beauty, moreover—I thought it would be legitimate to concentrate on the text, the words, and then let the images have a more serene form.” Oliveira subsequently refined his filmed-novel technique with Francisca (1981), based on Agustina Bessa-Luis’s novel, and Valley of Abraham (1993), loosely based on Madame Bovary. All of these experiments stubbornly resist that article of faith Avoid at all costs “the literary”; and in the process, they challenge that quasireligious dogma of film studies The visual must take precedence over the verbal.

SLOW DISSOLVE: THE STIGMA OF THE LITERARY

Being story-hungry, the cinema looked from its first, silent days to novels and plays for raw material. At the same time, defenders of this young, insecure medium were eager to assert that it had its own unique qualities, thereby putting forward a program of “pure cinema” and, in so doing, distancing it from the older media. The original sin, so to speak, was for film to ape the theater. Gilbert Seldes argued in 1929 that “not one single essential of the movies has ever been favorably affected by the stage; the stage has contributed nothing lasting to the movies; there isn’t a single item of cinema technique which requires the experience of the stage; and every good thing in the movies has been accomplished either in profound indifference to the stage, or against the experience of the stage.” The advent of talkies made the theatrical menace more palpable, by opening the floodgates to stage adaptations, and there were many highbrow writers on film, such as Rudolf Arnheim, who thought that sound spelled the death of cinema as an art form.

As it turns out, they were wrong. Talk, lots of talk, even combined with a theatrically inflected mise-enscène, led to many extraordinary movies, from Marcel Pagnol, Sasha Guitry, George Cukor, Jean Cocteau, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Orson Welles (who confessed he was always more interested in words than in images) down to Erich Rohmer, John Cassavetes, Woody Allen, and Alain Resnais, with his recent “film-theatre.” My point here is that a fear of language tainting the screen’s noble essence expanded from the theater as the principal villain to the literary per se, including novels, short stories, and a harderto- define gestalt. When James Agee, in praising Vittorio De Sica’s Neorealist Shoeshine (1946) to the skies, qualified his enthusiasm by saying, “Such feeling for form as there is, is more literary than cinematic,” it is not entirely clear to me what he meant by calling the director’s approach literary, but the tone of reproach is unmistakable.

Two forms of snobbery and prestige are involved here: the cinematic and the literary. Novels originally brought cultural cachet to movies. Classics and established novels of the day have always enjoyed the marketing advantage of being presold, familiar names, and the number of novels adapted for higher-budgeted, Oscar-friendly pictures (from Gone with the Wind [1939] to Memoirs of a Geisha [2005]) is much greater than for lower-budgeted ones. It was this built-in prestige attached to novels that raised the hackles of those Cahiers du cinéma critics in the ’50s, who would go on to constitute the New Wave. Truffaut’s attack on the French cinema’s “tradition of quality,” by which he meant lush, creamy films such as Christian- Jaque’s Charterhouse of Parma (1948) and Claude Autant- Lara’s The Red and the Black (1954), was also a veiled critique of the whole practice of drawing films from respected novels, which seemed insufficiently risky or personal. Of course, this hostility was suspended when, for instance, an auteur they admired, Robert Bresson, adapted Georges Bernanos. And Truffaut went on to reverse himself in his own directorial career by making many loving pictures drawn from novels, such as Jules and Jim (1962) and Two English Girls (1971). But some of the bad odor surrounding literary adaptations has remained. Even now, there are auteurs such as Otar Iosseliani who go on record that they will never engage in such a “stinking practice” as filming a novel: To be a true auteur, in their eyes, is to write and film an original screenplay.

In line with this antiliterary sentiment is a mistrust of two other devices frequently used in adaptations: voiceover and flashback. Screenwriting teachers tag these as forms of cheating and caving in to uncinematic practice. (This in spite of the many visually virtuosic films, from Citizen Kane [1941] to Goodfellas [1990] to Kill Bill [2003], that employ one or both techniques.) Sarah Kozloff, in her excellent book Invisible Storytellers (1988), analyzes the prejudice: “Obviously it is this emotional legacy of aversion to sound in general that provides the bedrock for all complaints against a particular use of the sound-track— voice-over narration. If one believes that all true film art lies in the images, then verbal narration is automatically illegitimate.” Kozloff also connects this aversion with another prejudice, this one derived from Henry James’s practice and so dear to writing workshops: Show, don’t tell. She writes: “Granted that voiceover narration adds a certain slant, or even definite bias, to a film—why is this bad?”

When an adaptation is criticized for being literary, it may also be a matter of sets, costumes, and overall smugness. In filmbuff circles, we learn to scoff at PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre and Merchant Ivory adaptations of classic novels as stuffy— meaning, visually uninventive. There is often something drearily mechanical about the way each scene from a Trollope or Brönte novel gets broken down into establishing shot, two-shot, and sneering or teary reaction shot, the adaption “genre” as coercive in its emotional signals as soap opera. On the other hand, Merchant Ivory made some subtle, astringent film adaptations, such as Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990) and A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998), and British television rises above its own cozy-adaptation formula occasionally, as in Bleak House (1985) and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (2005).

It may seem like a jump to go from film to television, but these days so many projects start in one medium and end in the other that the distinction becomes almost academic. Generally, one looks to television more and more for the transposition of a novelistic mind-set to film or videotape. I realized this with a shock when, some years ago, I saw a miniseries, From Here to Eternity (1979), with Natalie Wood, that came much closer to the feeling of the James Jones novel, thanks to its relaxed unfolding over several nights, than had the overheated, Oscar-winning movie version directed by Fred Zinneman in 1953. Edgar Reitz’s remarkable 1984 Heimat series, made for German TV, has all the qualities of a great thousand-page novel, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s monumental Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) is another model in this regard. For that matter, any television series with a developing story, be it The Sopranos or Gilmore Girls, allows more scope for the novelistically shaded, progress-and-regress evolution of its characters than a feature film, where the main character is expected to be “transformed” in one way only, usually positive. Television drama allows the writer to slip the noose of the three-act structure, and all the Robert McKee/Syd Field prescriptions for plot points, and to invite a more leisurely, discursive, novelistic sense of time.

Some filmmakers persistently exhibit a novelistic temperament. Luchino Visconti, after adapting Giovanni Verga, James M. Cain, Thomas Mann, and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, had plans before he died to film Mann’s Buddenbrooks as well as Proust. Stanley Kubrick seemed always to require a novel to get his cinematic juices flowing. Not only did Mikio Naruse turn again and again to Fumiko Hayashi and Yasunari Kawabata for source material, but even his original screenplays continued to deemphasize the dramatic in favor of novelistic atmosphere and the patient accumulation of behavioral patterns. Of course, the influence flows the other way, too: Hardly a major novelist in the last hundred years has not been profoundly influenced by the movies.

THE PLOT THICKENS: INFIDELITIES

George Bluestone’s Novels into Film, which first appeared in 1957, is the ur-text of film-adaptation studies and the source of many of its received truths. Though dated (it is drawn from American movies between 1935 and 1950, when the Production Code still exerted a puritanical influence), it does raise key questions, and I have to admire the thoroughness with which Bluestone draws the parameters of a then-new field. He summarizes the difference between the production of novels and films as follows: “The reputable novel, generally speaking, has been supported by a small, literate audience, has been produced by an individual writer, and has remained relatively free of rigid censorship. The film, on the other hand, has been supported by a mass audience, produced co-operatively under industrial conditions, and restricted by a self-imposed Production Code.”

Bluestone’s method is to “assess the key additions, deletions, and alterations revealed in the film and center on certain significant implications which seemed to follow from the remnants of, and deviations from, the novel.” This plodding, backand- forth comparative approach has at least the merit of clarity, and it leads him to some conclusions that are still valid, up to a point: that movies privilege plot at the expense of character; that they play down anticlerical, sexually experimental, and politically activist elements to ensure the largest audience; and that they gravitate toward happy, triumphal, redemptive endings. Bluestone quotes a study showing that 40 percent of the film adaptations sampled were altered to give them a romantic, happy ending. I doubt the figure would be that high today, but studio executives remain in thrall to the falsely redemptive. Still, since Bluestone many film scholars have argued that a happy ending tacked on as the last minute of a feature does not negate all the feelings of anxiety and pessimism that preceded it. The happy ending is a convention that audiences know to take with a grain of salt.

Bluestone comes down hard on Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949) for its overly moralizing frame story of Flaubert’s trial. Today, our greater interest in auteurs might incline us to give more leeway to Minnelli (or Renoir, also lambasted for his Madame Bovary [1933]) and find intriguing a director’s separate treatment of the Flaubert novel. There are also dividends in the way of individual performances: Both Anna Karenina adaptations made with Greta Garbo, of 1927 and 1935, dropped the Kitty-Levin story, as Bluestone charges, but Garbo brings something new to our understanding of Tolstoy’s heroine, a weary, angelic forbearance, perhaps, just as Jennifer Jones’s ardent, dreamy, self-righteous Emma Bovary (the actress still dewy from her triumph in The Song of Bernadette [1943]) captures a piece of that moral sleepwalker’s ambiguous character in the Minnelli film. In short, it is possible for an adaptation to “betray” its source plot-wise and at the same time contain elements that augment our appreciation of the original.

Why even speak of betrayal when we can view these deviations as alternate paths that the novel might have taken, alternate lives it might have lived? The novelist pauses indecisively to consider whether to deal the heroine a happy or unhappy fate and chooses in the end a miserable one, but the alternative joyful, romantic one is like a shadow buried in the body of the text; the film adaptation helpfully uncovers it. The same holds for vulgarity. As a sometime novelist, I have often fantasized that one of my novels would be adapted to the screen and made much tawdrier, in ways that my refined good taste had regretfully prevented me from indulging.

We cannot avoid raising the whole issue of faithfulness when novels are made into films: Is it a foolish expectation or a valid one? Over twenty years ago, Dudley Andrew called for a moratorium on criticism that narrowly applies “the discourse of fidelity.” An entirely sensible position. And yet, after we have mouthed for the millionth time those platitudes about how each film needs to function as an autonomous artwork, about how fidelity to the spirit rather than to the letter is important, about the inevitability and even necessity of change from one medium to another, about the film adaptation being perforce no more than a digest appropriating some of the characters and plotlines for its own ends, might there still not be something unstoppably human in our hope that beloved novels be rendered faithfully on-screen, or at least not distorted beyond recognition? I am of two minds here.

On the one hand, I think it silly to regard the novel as a frail, endangered species that must be protected from the brutal movie producer’s hunting knife. I agree with André Bazin when he questions the sacrosanct, historically recent notion of “the untouchability of a work of art.” Every screenplay, after all, is an adaptation of something or other, a pastiche of experience and quotation. If a film delights audiences, maybe that should be the end of the matter. There are many stimulating movie adaptations that use novels merely as a point of departure, radically updating the plot, such as I Walked with a Zombie (1943; taken from Jane Eyre), Apocalypse Now (1979; from Heart of Darkness), Clueless (1995; from Emma), Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005; from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), and Pola X (1999; from Pierre).

On the other hand, the problem of fidelity seems more acute when the film adaptation presents itself as faithfully following the book. In such cases, I admit, I am personally appalled by certain adaptations. What bothers me about the 1963 movie version of Tom Jones (one of my favorite novels) is not that Tony Richardson tried to find modern analogues for Fielding’s parodic humor but that his silent-comedy speed-up shtick is cheap and patronizing. Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996) drifts so far from the spirit of its model that I cannot help agreeing with Cynthia Ozick that it “perverts” James, even as I tell myself that it is perfectly valid for Campion, an auteur in her own right, to make the story more relevant by turning it into a Generation X erotic thriller. In sum, I do not think we can ever wholly discard concerns about fidelity, but we need a more sophisticated approach.

The recent collection of essays Film Adaptation attempts just that. The good part is that the various film scholars and critics are open and receptive to experimental, nonindustry product, and they challenge the old literary-cinematic dichotomy; the discouraging part is that they tend to do this by putting everything through the theoretical strainer of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Genette. Adaptation studies are freed from the onus of fidelity, only to be chained to the wagons of dialogism and intertextuality. Fassbinder is quoted as saying that his film adaptations constitute “an unequivocal and single-minded questioning of the piece of literature and its language.” In other words, a film adaptation should be the filmmaker’s critique of the novel. So we have evolved from the notion of the filmmaker as the barbarian at the gates of literature to that of the filmmaker as the postmodernist critic deconstructing it. I suppose it’s an improvement.

Film adaptations are like biographies, in that even if the writer starts out sympathetic toward the subject, a time may come when deference turns to hostility, by having to live in such close, subservient contact with another intelligence. Welles’s 1962 version of The Trial is both a superb spatial recasting of the novel and an insouciant repudiation of a kind of spiritual anguish with which the filmmaker seems to have been fundamentally at odds from the beginning.

The judgments we make of film adaptations must always be placed in historical context and in the light of changing fashions. Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, which seemed revolutionary when it appeared because of its sympathy for the common man, now looks rhetorically inflated, almost like a piece of socialist realism, with its camera shots tilting to the clouded sky. (Also, there are so many better Fords that we don’t need to protect this one.) Roger Vadim’s Dangerous Liaisons (1959), which transposed Laclos’s classic to contemporary France, seemed the height of raciness when it first appeared; now it is memorable mostly for its Thelonious Monk score. Greed and Doomed Love still have the freshness of their lunatic integrity. Recently, I saw The Painted Veil (2006), a movie directed by John Curran from a W. Somerset Maugham novel. It is a competent and affecting picture, with a terrific performance by Naomi Watts as the beautiful, shallow, adulterous wife of an idealistic doctor, who is transformed by her husband’s death. Many film critics tempered their praise by calling it “old-fashioned,” and indeed it is, not only because the adultery-in-the-colonial-tropics story and the theme of sacrifice seem fussy for today’s audiences but also because the craftsmanship of the adaptation is so unobtrusively intelligent. The Painted Veil is criticized as old-fashioned for making human sense of a now-dusty Maugham novel that was just the rage in the ’20s and ’30s.

A PROPOSAL: MOVIES CAN THINK

When someone like Bluestone states that “the cinema exhibits a stubborn antipathy to novels” (a claim I resist), I think that what lies at the bottom of this assertion is the idea that movies cannot think. “Or rather,” writes Bluestone, “the film, having only arrangements of space to work with, cannot render thought, for the moment thought is externalized it is no longer thought.” Leaving aside the exception of the essay film, which assuredly and overtly does think, I have to say that when I am in thrall to a sublime film masterpiece, such as Max Ophüls’s 1953 The Earrings of Madame de . . . or Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1952 Ugetsu (both, by the way, literary adaptations), I experience it as a continuous flow of consciousness—observant, melancholy, detached, worldly, commenting . . . in essence, thought. Perhaps I am being simpleminded here, and missing some subtle nuance. Bluestone argues that film “can show us characters thinking, feeling, and speaking, but it cannot show us their thoughts and feelings. A film is not thought; it is perceived.” His confident assurance that film “is incapable of depicting consciousness” is partly based on the idea that metaphors cannot be rendered on-screen, because the camera turns all phenomena into fact. I consider this an overly literalist understanding of the way metaphor operates. Similarly, I would take exception to the French aesthetician Etienne Souriau when he argues that films are incapable of inhabiting one character’s point of view, the way novels can, and that they therefore lack interiority. Film is capable of much more subjective interiority than these thinkers will allow. Even Siegfried Kracauer, who in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) peddles the old malarkey about language being the enemy of the cinematic, allows that “inwardness” is possible in films, concluding: “In general, the differences between the formal properties of film and novel are only differences in degrees.”

But Bluestone would have it that they are fundamentally at odds, impossible to cross-pollinate, like “apples and oranges.” He writes: “What is peculiarly filmic and what is peculiarly novelistic cannot be converted without destroying an integral part of each. That is why Proust and Joyce would seem as absurd on film as Chaplin would in print.” I don’t know about Joyce (although John Huston’s The Dead [1987] is a pretty good film) or Chaplin (who wrote a decent autobiography), but Proust has been well served in recent years. I am thinking of producer Paolo Branco’s commissioning of various auteurs to adapt different volumes of Proust, which led to Raoul Ruiz’s amazing Time Regained (1999) and Chantal Akerman’s superb The Captive (2000). What Ruiz does is take soundings of the Proust novel and reorganize them into a symphonic whole. He also boldly challenges the Bluestone assertion that “the novel has three tenses; the film has only one” by transporting a seated Marcel, as a spectator, into his own re-created memories. Proust mixes up past and present, dream self and real self, and this is what Ruiz does, too, with his thoughtful cross sections or samplings of Proust’s text.

I have been arguing that novels and films have more in common than is generally asserted. Perhaps they are like one of those screwball-comedy couples, analyzed in Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), who marry, divorce, and then, understanding that despite past infidelities they are better off together, submit to the comedy of remarriage. Kracauer’s maxim is suggestive: “Like film, the novel aspires to endlessness.” Once we understand that there is no limit to the intellectual or artistic complexity of which films are capable, we will be in a better position to appreciate the past and potential symbioses between the novel and the cinema.

Phillip Lopate edited the Library of America’s anthology American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now (2006).

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/200703/255

Reflections

By James Ivory, Elmore Leonard, Tracy Chevalier, Patrick McGrath, Jerry Stahl, Michael Tolkin, Susanna Moore, Time Krabbe, Irvine Welsh, Barry Gifford, Alexander Payne, Myla Goldberg, and Frederic Raphael

JAMES IVORY

Adapting a work of fiction can have its disappointments for a director. Presumably, when you set out to turn a favorite novel into a film, it’s mostly because of the wonderful scenes that you look forward to shooting; taken all together, they are the reason for making the film in the first place. Once committed to the project, you duly transfer the scenes to the screenplay, and in pleasurable anticipation, you round up the right actors. But, it turns out during shooting, despite all your enthusiasm and planning, you discover too late that you have not carefully thought through one of these favorite scenes, and you end up defeated by it. A good example of this is the famous sequence in the novel—not the film—Howards End, when the insufferable Charles Wilcox (played in the film by James Wilby), driving through the English countryside with his father’s fiancée, Margaret Schlegel (played by Emma Thompson), whom he hates, runs over a dog. This event is described by E. M. Forster as being no more than a bump under the heavy car and a fast-receding scream as a child runs out of her cottage. Margaret, at once aware that something is wrong, asks Charles, “What was that?” Looking back from the open Edwardian touring car, she can just see the wailing child crouching over something at the edge of the road. She commands Charles to stop the car. “It was nothing,” he replies, then tells the chauffeur to step on the gas. “We must have brushed a cat.” But Margaret is sure that it was not nothing, and she tells Charles again to stop the car. Charles ignores this, and the driver goes faster. It being an open car, Margaret stands up in it and leaps out, onto the grass verge, as Charles shouts at this woman in revolt, “What will my father say?”

All of this was shot—though a bit scrappily, as we had waited until the end of the day—when the sun was sinking, and we felt pressed to get done before we lost the light. Thompson’s stunt double threw herself again and again out of the moving car, and we went back a hundred yards or so to the cottage, child, and “dead” dog in order to shoot the moment the big wheel struck it. But how do you shoot that? Who wants to run over a dog, and what English film crew would be prepared to do that for even the cruelest and most insensitive director? What audience, anywhere, could stand to see a dog crushed to death? Yet how could we tell our story without seeing that bad moment? All the most clever editing later on could not solve our problem, nor could putting howls of anguish from dog and child on the sound track, nor could all our messing about with expensive special effects that, in 1991, were in their technical infancy. We could produce no believable image of a dog being run over and did not really want to.

In the end, we threw the scene away, yet it is one of the most dramatic confrontations in the novel. It should have been as thrilling on the screen as on the page. But I hadn’t thought it all through. Luckily, in the film Howards End, we were able to introduce all sorts of nice things that had not been in Forster’s novel, so perhaps the car scene was not missed by many people. Since then, I have done eight more features, not all of them adaptations; in half of these, there have been comparable lapses of thinking something through. If none were comparable in importance to that of the bungled Forster passage, my disappointment and anger with myself afterward were never less. Every director has to be his own devil’s advocate every step of the way. Enthusiasm isn’t enough.

ELMORE LEONARD

Writing a novel is one of my great pleasures—writing to find out what the book is about, writing to please myself as long as my publisher likes my work—but I have seldom enjoyed writing screenplays. Whether an adaptation of one of my books or an original, it seems always to become work and not much fun. I suppose that’s because it has to be revised so many times to meet everyone’s perception of what the story is about.

After reading my screenplay based on Glitz, the first novel of mine to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, a studio executive said to me, “All you’ve done is adapt the book, scene for scene.” I said, “Yes?” He said, “You don’t have to be a screenwriter to do that.” I think what he was saying is that the screenwriter is obliged to revise scenes and dialogue, change things around, whether he feels the need to or not.

I was fired from another picture after writing several drafts because, as the producer at MGM put it, “You’re too close to the forest to see the trees.” What did that mean—that I didn’t understand my own book? The same words were used to take the screenwriter, played by Robert Redford, off the picture he was working on in The Way We Were. I think, though, my view of the trees might have come before Redford’s, so I can’t really accuse the producer of stealing the analogy. A week later, I was hired on again and wrote what I was told to write. It wasn’t a good picture.

With high hopes, and thinking I would be good at it, I must have written a dozen or more features, some produced, some not. The only successful one, Mr. Majestyk, was written as an original for producer Walter Mirisch—the book came later. It’s been paying residuals for thirty-three years.

In 1993, Bill Friedkin asked me to write a picture with him, and we had a pretty good time getting the script going, but I don’t think either of us cared enough about the story to take it beyond the first draft, now on a shelf somewhere at Paramount. Friedkin married Sherry Lansing, and I went home. It was the last screenplay I wrote. I don’t remember the title but seem to recall it was a pretty good one.

Several of Elmore Leonard’s novels have been made into films, such as 52 Pick-Up (1986), Get Shorty (1995), and Jackie Brown (1997).

• • • • •

TRACY CHEVALIER

I didn’t write Girl with a Pearl Earring expecting it to be made into a film. However, three years after its publication, I found myself in Luxembourg on a film set that had originally been built for a movie whose setting was Venice. Replace the Venetian arches with rectangular windows, spray-paint on a little textured brick, and bingo—it passed for Holland. Watching it being filmed was a surreal experience. All the private ideas I’d had about the settings of my book were suddenly, brutally public, with cast and crew crawling over them, measuring and moving, pulling and prodding. I kept wondering whether eventually they would pull so hard the story and characters would fall apart and I’d be caught out as a fraud. It was strange, too, to see that my scribbling had spawned a whole industry of Vermeer experts—there were reproductions of his and other Dutch paintings tacked up everywhere in the production offices, and books strewn about that I myself had read for research. When I first walked onto the set of Vermeer’s house, I immediately thought, “No, no, this is far too big— they would never have had this kind of space.” However, once I saw just how much equipment and how many people were needed to film each shot, I understood.

All of the opulent details—the paintings hanging everywhere, the dishes, the furniture, the food—blend into the background. When watching the film, we focus on Scarlett Johansson’s face, not the authentic blue-and-white delftware that some assistant worked so hard to locate. The production designer had designed a spectacular room full of pornography for the house of Vermeer’s patron, van Ruijven; yet it doesn’t even get a look-in on-screen and ended up on the cutting-room floor.

That was another surprise: how many changes were made in the editing. Whole subplots and characters were shed, and with them some of the subtleties of characterization and ambiguities in relationships. What it gained, however, was a focused, driven plot. The changes didn’t bother me. Books—even simple, spare ones like Girl—shuttle back and forth in time, repeat themselves, go in and out of their characters’ heads, and leave gaps for the reader to fill in. No wonder the storytelling has to be different.

Besides, I’m used to other people transposing what I write. After all, that is what a reader does to books. I wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring for readers to interpret and make their own. When I published it, I also let it go. I can’t control what readers think or how they picture scenes and characters; nor do I want to. Last time I bought gas, the DVD of Girl was on sale next to the cash register. Seeing my Girl while I pumped gas was a shock, but luckily she’s no longer mine, and it made me smile more than wince.

PATRICK MCGRATH

Spider, my second novel, would seem on its face my least likely candidate for adaptation to the screen. The eponymous antihero is a floridly psychotic schizophrenic prematurely discharged from a top-security mental hospital, and his thinking, to put it mildly, is bizarre. He is unable to edit reality, nor can he see that the edifice of delusion he has constructed to account for his traumatized childhood is liable at any moment to collapse. This strange, fragile creature wanders the desolate places of the East End of London while his faltering mind attempts with growing desperation to cling to a few last shreds of coherence. He writes it all down in a little notebook, and the notebook is the novel.

It is hardly the stuff of cinema. Not much happens in the present, and what happened in the past is of questionable reliability. Cinematic imagery is loaded with authority: An event occurs on-screen, and you tend to accept it. How then to communicate the idea that what you are seeing did not happen but that its significance lies in the fact that a character believes it did, in order to conceal from himself what really happened? The only answer I could find was voice-over.

The script took six months to write. It quickly found a producer in Catherine Bailey and a star in Ralph Fiennes, but the search for a director lasted years, until David Cronenberg read it. Things moved fast after that. The changes he wanted were minimal. It was all excising, and the script got thinner and thinner. “Don’t worry,” he told me, “I’ll film slow.” The voice-overs had to go, and strangely, nothing was lost. All that suffering, all the hell seething in Spider’s sick soul: It was there in Fiennes’s eyes. But Spider’s interiority remained problematic in that nobody knew what they could trust, until Cronenberg hit on the solution. He asked me to flag each scene according to the psychological territory Spider was occupying at the time. I came up with four distinct designations: Reality, Memory, Infected Memory, and Hallucination. With these flags in place, the director, the director of photography, the actors, and the crew all now understood what was going on in Spider’s mind at any given moment.

The work went forward smoothly, but the money was hell—the reverse, as Cronenberg wryly remarked, of the usual Hollywood situation. The financing of this low-budget independent turned into a twisted tale of gothic proportions, far darker than Spider itself. Three weeks before principal photography, the backers backed out, but Bailey refused to give up. The finished film was submitted to Cannes and accepted into competition, one of the twenty-two official entries out of the thousands that had been submitted. Being at Cannes was an intoxicating experience for this writer, but Spider didn’t win. The Palme d’Or that year went to Polanski for The Pianist.

JERRY STAHL

For some, adaptation is a genre. For others, it’s a lifestyle choice. The decision to hand over one’s own work to strangers packs all manner of trepidation: They’ll fuck it up, I’ll look like an idiot, and If it’s a great movie, no one will remember it was a book being just the first three that come to mind. But imagine, if you will, the extra and mutant joy engendered when the work in question is not just your book but your life. So that, for whatever six-figure agreement your agent can wheedle, you hand over the details that define your identity to strangers. Hoping—not unlike, one suspects, a young mom who trades her baby for crack—that somehow the short-term gain won’t result in long-term torment. In my case, the book in question was Permanent Midnight. Your basic junkie saga. Which I handed over with very little persuasion to a team of cinema experts.

The first-time director and screenwriter was a talented Mormon fellow who had never actually done narcotics. A minor drawback, which resulted, as I recall, in the odd expository nugget like this in the original script: “Jerry shoots up and gets the munchies.” Because, really, nothing whets the appetite for snacks like geezing Mexican tar in your neck.

That being said, there is a certain cleansing sting to the experience of seeing celebrities re-enact the worst moments of your life nine feet high. The trick, for those of you on the fence about surrendering your own book to Hollywood, is to become friends with the movie star. Happily, Ben Stiller proved to be a warm, astute, open-minded, and genius-level actor. And by genius I mean that he let me rewrite a bunch of his lines and insert a voice-over. Plus I was hired on as “needle wrangler.”

In the end, it was a life-changing experience. Then again, it wasn’t my life anymore anyway.

Jerry Stahl’s memoir, Permanent Midnight (Warner, 1995), was adapted for the screen in 1998. He is the author of three novels and a story collection, Love Without, just published by Grove Press.

• • • • •

MICHAEL TOLKIN

My second novel, Among the Dead, was published in 1993, a year after the release of Robert Altman’s adaptation of my first novel, The Player. I could have adapted the new book for the movies, but I refused, as I did with my third novel, Under Radar. Setting aside what I might have made from selling the rights to those novels or from writing the scripts, and then from the bonuses if the movies had been produced, the decision not to sell the books cost me money from book sales, and not only those books that would have been sold with the release of the films. Just the announcements, when the books were published, that I was turning them into films would have increased foreign sales and generated better money for the paperback rights. I said no to protect my idea of literature, and I ended up losing cash and readers, without gaining any laurels. It’s a relief to have no one to blame but oneself.

Among the Dead, about a man who misses the flight that crashes while carrying his wife and daughter, started as a notion for a television movie, but sometime after the original inspiration, I read an article about a plane crash in central California. The plane had landed nose first after a long, straight dive, and asked about the condition of the bodies, an FAA investigator said that what was left in the cockpit had the “consistency of strawberry jam.” A movie could never achieve the vibrations of that phrase, so I started writing the book. I put the plane-crash tale away for a few years to finish the novel of The Player and returned to it during the filming of the movie. By then, I was already a little disappointed by how easy it was to write the script, after the novel was optioned, and by how much of what had given me maniacal pleasure while writing the novel was lost in the movie. That pleasure is still the reason I write novels—to stay inside the mind of someone living through the catastrophe of his life. If writing novels was going to be a discipline or practice that I could get better at, and not just a speculative venture in which I was safest repeating a formula that could lead to movie sales, I wanted, at least until I was secure about the differences, or no longer interested in the differences, to write novels without shaping them for film, even, to adjust a thought of Rothko’s, to produce something that was intelligible only to myself.

I might have been wrong. I might have been indulgently vain. The critics didn’t care, or know, about my vow of chastity, and too many assumed that the Hollywood- satire guy, the one who wrote not the novel of but the screenplay for The Player, was now writing strange treatments for unlikely movies. I was working too hard for acceptance as a literary writer instead of ignoring the issue completely.

Or, I might have been right at the time. Rothko made this point about the artist’s private intelligibility: “Society benefits every time an individual improves his own adjustment to the world. . . . How far a single impulse can extend its effect is unpredictable.” I had the impulse to write without the distracting possibililty of adapting for the screen and failing. But I know the anticipation of failing, and that agony is the greater distraction. So The Return of the Player was published, and now, after Altman’s death, I’m thinking about the movie, and what it might be, how to make a film that isn’t a sequel in tone or style to the Altman film. I’m thinking about how to keep it closer to the book, and by this I mean, how to put a book on-screen without losing the strawberry jam.

Michael Tolkin is a filmmaker and novelist. His adaptation of his novel The Player (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988) received the 1993 Edgar award for best motion-picture screenplay.

• • • • •

SUSANNA MOORE

It never occurred to me that my novel In the Cut might one day be made into a movie. A friend had sent the manuscript to a Hollywood book agent, who said that the story was so offensive that he not only could not represent it but recommended that it never be published. So my expectations were not high. Consequently, some months later, when Nicole Kidman offered to buy the film rights, I was surprised. My first meeting was with Nicole and the director Jane Campion. Jane made it clear that, no matter how much work I might do on the screenplay, in the end it would be necessary for her to write her own draft. I thought that a very good idea.

As a young woman, my first serious job was script reader for Jack Nicholson, and I very quickly learned that the importuning and anxious writer of a book or treatment is extremely tiresome, if not detrimental, in the long and often delicate development of a script. After writing a first draft of a script for In the Cut, I was relieved to put the work into Jane’s hands. Relieved that she was determined to make it her own. We wrote a second draft together, and then she wrote a third draft alone. It was a sophisticated and satisfying arrangement.

Susanna Moore is the author of In the Cut (Knopf, 1995), which was made into a film in 2003. Her most recent novel is The Big Girls (Knopf, 2007).

• • • • •

TIM KRABBÉ

If you liked the book, don’t see the film. Why let the images that the words stirred up be overruled by some director? No matter how painstakingly a writer describes his heroine, each reader sees her differently. But on the screen, everybody sees Sandra Bullock. As the goat said after it had eaten a few reels of film, “I like the book better.” The book is always better—but why? Perhaps because films cost more and must cater to a wider audience.

A few of my books have been made into films, and I’ve been lucky—two of them, The Vanishing and The Cave, turned out to be very good. The Vanishing, however, a Dutch-French production directed by George Sluizer in 1988, met with an unusual fate: In 1993, it was Hollybowdlerized by 20th Century Fox into a new version with the same director, the same title, but without the story. For one thing, the Dutch title of my novella, Het Gouden Ei (The Golden Egg), refers to the nightmare the hero and the heroine must share before they can be reunited. This came out very well in the original film, but in the remake: no eggs, nightmares, or reunions. It’s as if the studio said: Very good, this Titanic story of yours, we’re going to make it into a movie. Only we can’t have the ship sink—the audience might not like that. So out went the story. They kept just the wrappings—a vanished girl and a sociopath.

But I must admit: I like some films better than the books. It was a long time before it finally occurred to me why: I had seen those films before I read the books. The order is all that matters— when you hear people tell a story that you already know, they will always tell wrong. But why read the book at all? Why let the fantasies the images stirred up be overruled by some writer?

If you liked the film, don’t read the book.

Tim Krabbé is an author of short stories and novels, as well as four books about chess. His novels include The Cave (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), The Rider (Bloomsbury, 2002), and, most recently, Delay (Bloomsbury, 2005). He adapted The Golden Egg (1984), for the film The Vanishing (1988).

• • • • •

IRVINE WELSH

I haven’t had an extensive background in working from book to film. I’ve had two of my own books, Trainspotting and Acid House, adapted in this manner. Now, I’m on the other side of the fence, being in the process of adapting Alan Warner’s novel The Man Who Walks for the screen.

John Hodge’s adaptation of Trainspotting is a marvelous display of screenwriting: totally empathetic to the spirit of the book, yet completely cinematic. It works because it uses many of the book’s obviously filmic strengths: slangy dialogue, action and comedy sequences, and a then-taboo subject dealt with matter-of-factly. To that it adds, in voice-over, the commentary of a compelling narrator, giving an insight into his interior world and thus allowing the novelistic aspect to come through.

The simple act of condensing around ten hours of filmable material into 90 to 120 minutes inevitably means that compromises have to be made. Screenwriting, compared to novel writing, is cave painting. You want the images that stand out boldest and tell the story. The HBO series The Wire is often referred to as “novelistic.” In some ways, I feel that the series or miniseries may be the best way for the novel to be adapted for the screen.

But shorter formats mean making choices. In the opening chapters of The Man Who Walks, the protagonist beats up a bus driver who attempts to perform fellatio on him and then threatens an old couple who want to have sex with him. Both scenes, in the context of the novel, are rich, evocative, and highly memorable. In the adaptation to film, only one is necessary to show that he is sexually dysfunctional and has a fight-or-flight response when faced with (at least conventional) sex. Every scene in a film (as space is limited) must have a narrative purpose, where the novel can be more about pure aesthetics.

But that’s the terrible choice you have to make—leaving out some of your favorite scenes from one of your most loved books.

BARRY GIFFORD

In 1995, when David Lynch, who had directed the film version of my novel Wild at Heart and also had directed my plays Tricks and Blackout for a television production entitled Hotel Room, came to me and asked me to write with him the screenplay for a new film, I could hardly say no. After all, Wild at Heart had won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and propelled the book onto best-seller lists all over the world. Besides, we were good friends by now.

David had optioned for film my novel Night People, and we had talked for a year or more about how that could be done, but nothing happened. (He told me his daughter, Jennifer, wanted to play one of the two lesbian serial killers.) He fell in love with a couple of sentences in the book in particular, one of which is one woman saying to another, “We’re just a couple of Apaches ridin’ wild on the lost highway.” What did it mean? he wanted to know. What was the deeper meaning of the phrase lost highway? He had an idea for a story. What if one day, a person woke up and he was another person? An entirely different person from the person he had been the day before. OK, I said, that’s Kafka, “The Metamorphosis.” But we did not want this person to turn into an insect. So that’s what we had to start with: a title, Lost Highway; a sentence from close to the end of Night People (“You and me, mister, we can really out-ugly them sumbitches, can’t we?”); the notion of irrefutable change; and a vision Dave had about someone receiving videotapes of his life from an unknown source, something he had thought of following the wrap of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Now all we had to do was make a coherent story out of this.

David once explained the effect he was after: “You know that feeling you get when you’ve just gotten back from the dry cleaners a pair of slacks, Dacron slacks, and you reach your hand in a pocket, and you feel those fuzzy sandwiches with your fingers? Well, that’s the feeling I’m looking for.” I just nodded and replied, “OK, Dave, I know exactly what you mean.” I kept this incident in mind while he and I sat across from each other and puzzled out the scenario for Lost Highway, which I like to call Orpheus and Eurydice Meet Double Indemnity. We made it work—at least for each other—and I love the result, fuzzy sandwiches and all.

Working with David is, for me, a great treat, because I know that as the director he’s going to add an extra dimension to whatever we come up with on the page. Visually, it will take one giant step beyond. This gives me the confidence to let everything loose, a great privilege for a writer. Both Lynch and I believe that films are, or should be, as dreams. When you enter the movie theater, the “real” world is shut out. Now you are in the thrall of the filmmakers, you must surrender and allow the film’s images to wash over you, to drown you for two hours or so. And David is relentless in his imagery. Lost Highway, like Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, especially, is filled with unforgettable images. And we are set in a place, a city, a landscape, that is neither here nor there, a timeless form, presented within a nonlinear structure—a Möbius strip, curling back and under, running parallel to itself before again becoming connected, only there’s a kind of coda— but that’s how it goes with psychogenic fugues. Figure it out for yourself, you’ll feel better later; and if you don’t figure it out, you’ll feel even better, trust us.

My friend Vinnie Deserio once said that the reason Dave and I work so well together is that he takes the ordinary and makes it seem extraordinary, and I take the extraordinary and make it seem ordinary. Maybe so; it sounds goods, anyway. But there are no easy explanations for what occurs in Lost Highway or Eraserhead, nor should there be. When you go on a journey with David Lynch, it’s a trip you’ve never been on before. Time to fasten your seat belt, as Bette Davis so memorably instructed (words by Joseph Mankiewicz) in All About Eve, because there is no speed limit on the lost highway.

ALEXANDER PAYNE

My screenwriting professor at UCLA used to ask us, “When adapting a piece of literature, what do you owe the original writer?” We were trained to call out in unison, “Nothing!” Yes, one is adapting because one admires the original, but one is creating a piece of cinema, and adapting often means marauding. “I’ll take you and you and you, and the rest of you can die,” says the screenwriter. “And I’m adding this and this and changing this and this. But it’s for your own good.” One way my coscreenwriter and I adapt is to read the novel a few times, make a few notes, and then rarely refer to it again, creating the screenplay largely from memory. Also, I am attracted to a piece of fiction as a source for a film precisely because I wish to have a dialogue with it. The only unforgivable sin is to remove something’s teeth; one should not subvert the original.

Good literature succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. Good cinema succeeds on terms exclusive to cinema. The better the book, the more literary, the more the screenwriter must alter, adapt, or simply jettison the source material in order to conceive a work of cinema, although I very much enjoy the challenge of creating cinematic equivalents to literary effects. The less literary the book— the more it recounts simply what the characters say and do—the easier the film adaptation may be, the more faithful, but now the screenwriter must invent elements that make the film more cinematic. Movies that, due to the perceived expectations of the “fan base,” are slavishly faithful to the best sellers on which they are based, amount to filmed books on tape.

Julio Cortázar said something to the effect that the novel wins by decision, while the short story wins by knockout. In general, narrative film resembles the short story more than the novel in its search for economy and the expectation that its elements are to achieve a singular effect at the end. The best way that cinema can approach the enviable, superior scope of a novel is to use cinematic means to suggest more incident and more emotion than are actually shown. Great cinema always involves the viewer in the creation of the narrative, by designing elements that are to resonate in the viewer’s mind—you tell them two plus two, but you don’t tell them four—and this is especially true when attempting an expansive, novelistic story. Another useful tool is voice-over, which many deride as uncinematic, but which I feel, when well used, is one of the greatest contributions of the sound era and clearly helps cinema approach fiction’s first person.

MYLA GOLDBERG

The process of adapting a book to film is so complex and so fraught and 99 percent of the time so disappointing that when a director manages not to make a mess of it, it’s rightly viewed as an impressive achievement—unless the director is Stanley Kubrick. He pulled off this transcendental act of translation with such habitual aplomb that he made superlative adaptations seem like the norm rather than the cinematic equivalent of winning the lottery. Kubrick knew that the process of adaptation was one of permutation; his job was to find the visual analogues that would breathe cinematic life into literary devices. Too many directors suffer from the lazy notion that finding a good book to adapt makes their jobs as filmmakers easier. Kubrick embraced the notion that film adaptation is as demanding a creative and imaginative task as writing the book itself. Case in point: The Shining, which is not only a masterful feat of adaptation but one of the scariest movies ever made. The majority of the film’s most striking moments are solely Kubrick’s inventions, the book’s literary ideas used as jumping-off points for cinematic pyrotechnics. The psychologically scarring climax of the film, in which an ax-wielding Jack Torrance chases his son into a massive hedge maze, is all Kubrick’s. In Stephen King’s version, there is no maze, only a haunted hotel topiary, and Kubrick’s ax is refashioned from the book’s more obscure and less viscerally terrifying roque mallet. In each instance, Kubrick took the gist of the idea and transformed it into something that would pack a stronger visual punch. The most devastating example of this is the manuscript that Jack toils over as he becomes infected with the malevolent spirit of the hotel. In a masterful feat of literary-cinematic titration, Kubrick converts the play being written by the Jack Torrance of King’s novel into a filmic icon of artistic insanity that doubles as the best-ever representation of writer’s block run horribly amok. Of writer’s block run horribly amok. Of writer’s block run horribly . .

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

In adaptation, the basic material is spelled out ahead of time; the better the book, or play, the more respect it seems to warrant. For this reason, it is often more enjoyable to work on material that falls short of excellence. Piety is not of the essence: More bad films have been made from masterpieces than from potboilers.

In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, I had never read the basic material, a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, who is best known for the sexual ring cycle filmed by Max Ophüls as La Ronde. The original Traumnovelle (Dream Novella) is set in fin de siècle Vienna. My first question to Stanley Kubrick was whether he wanted to do the film in period. I was not surprised by the answer no, which I did not question: He was the Master. However, as in the game of bridge, so in the arts and applied arts—the biggest mistake is often made at trick 1. Buñuel’s adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour is remarkable in its intercutting of (again fin de siècle) past and present. The switches in time make the issue of periodic consistency irrelevant. When it came to Eyes Wide Shut, admiration for SK impelled me to believe that he was likely to be right in transposing both time and place, from old Vienna to today’s New York.

All adaptation from uncinematic sources is a form of translation. Since my classical education was based on translating chunks of English classics into the styles of great Greek and Roman writers and translating the latter into English, I was inadvertently schooled in some of the skills needed to go from original text to screenplay. Vladimir Nabokov, of all people, argued for literal equivalence as the only honest form of translation. He attempted this in his curious Eugene Onegin. In cinema, literal translation is never possible: The logic of a picture language is essentially different from that of print. In the case of Traumnovelle, there was an added complication: The entire text reads like the description of a dream.

The problem of translation from a different era and a different language was compounded by the need to invest the piece with the vivid intangibility of dream life. The difficulty was that film does not leave the same room for imagination as text. The orgy scene, for manifest example, is presented quite tersely by Schnitzler: He relies on the reader’s fanciful complicity when it comes to sexual transgression. Kubrick wanted to shock, but in the context of the market, he felt obliged to put on a naughty show. He dared not do what Bergman did in Persona: rely on one character simply telling another what happened. In Eyes Wide Shut, even when Nicole Kidman is telling Tom Cruise of her sexual experience with a stranger, Kubrick felt obliged (not on my suggestion) to cut away to a flashback. Illustration does not always illustrate; it can also deprive the audience of the urge to imagine. The essence of the erotic in cinema is the seduction of the viewer into complicity. Kubrick’s literalism excludes the audience; balked from dreaming along with the spirit of Dream Novella, critics woke up to its implausibility and absurdity, both of which may be everynight ingredients of the dreamworld but here defied translation to the screen. Since Kubrick did not wish his film to be stained, as one might say, by my contribution, he weakened the dialogue and hampered its possibilities, by recourse, when it came to the married couple’s exchanges, to the most unreliable of all “realistic” methods: improvisation by actors who do their brave best to be revealingly loquacious but have nothing of interest to say.

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/200703/256