Story Adaptation
These days, it seems like everyone in Hollywood is adapting a novel, play, or musical for the screen. While some of these remakes and redos are purely for monetary gain, adaptations can often give a writer a fantastic literary jumping off point. In this guide, we’ll discuss what exactly goes into adapting a previous work for the screen, and why so many people do it.
Get ready to get knowledgeable, friends!
Getting the Rights, Right
So you’ve found a book, video game, short story, or comic that you just absolutely love. You love it so much you want to bring it to the big screen. Great. The world is waiting.
The only thing you have to consider now is: do you have the rights to do so?
Most artists don’t like to deal with the technical and business side of writing, but when it comes to adaptation, it’s essential that you understand what you’re getting into before you throw your blood, sweat and tears into a 120 page script.
Before you start, ask yourself this question:
Who Controls the Rights to the work you want to Adapt?
A: Someone big and important (a bestselling author, a famous organization, a Hollywood studio) owns the rights. If this is the case, there’s really no fighting it – this story isn’t available. I’m all for sticking it to The Man, but if The Man has billions of dollars and wants to adapt it himself, you’ve got a big problem. One of the easiest ways to find out if someone big and important owns the rights is to Google the title of what you want to adapt with the words rights (Ex: “Alice in Wonderland + rights”). This doesn’t always provide answers, but you can bet if someone already has their velvet gloves all over a work, it’ll be there.
B: The author owns the rights and is not willing to negotiate with you. If you know the author of the work you want to adapt, chances are you can find contact information for them. If you inquire about their interest in optioning the rights of the work for film adaptation and they send you an unequivocal “no”…well, there you have it. They don’t want to share.
C: The author owns the rights and is willing to negotiate on an option or even handing the rights over to you completely. Once you’ve contacted the author/owner of the work and find out they are open to the idea, it’s now time to decide if you want to go this complicated process alone, or hire a lawyer. The reason a lot of people go the lawyer route is because if even a stitch of paperwork is out of place when it’s time to go into production, the whole project can get derailed. If you feel confident in your research and bargaining capabilities, then you could certainly try to acquire the rights yourself – just remember, a handshake is great when it comes to friendship, but when it comes to money…get it in writing.
D: The work you want to adapt is in the Public Domain. Basically, PD means that the author’s copywrite of the material has expired, and it’s just floating around to be interpreted. Shakespeare’s works and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales are two examples of things that are now in the Public Domain. THIS is a great site to teach you about when and how something goes into PD, and THIS is a great list of works currently ripe for the taking.
We all know you’re a fabulous storyteller, but before you start devoting yourself to a masterpiece, make sure you’ve done the first and most important part of any adaptation – fighting for the right to have the rights.
What Is Adaptation?
The handy Webster’s dictionary describes adaptation as “a written work that has been recast in a new form”, as well as “a positive characteristic of an organism that has been favored by natural selection.”
Now, you might think the second definition is purely for scientists, but that is not so! Whenever a work is adapted from one form to another, it is usually the “characteristic…that has been favored by natural selection” that maintains from one genre to another. When Brokeback Mountain was adapted from a short story into a feature film, certain aspects had to be changed, but the love story between Ennis and Jack was the most important (“most favorable”) characteristic in the story, and so it showed up in both the prose and the film.
When we adapt, we must pick and choose the enduring themes, characters, and/or messages.
Okay, so let’s back up a bit and get real basic. When we adapt, we are actively taking a previous work and turning it into something new – but not so new it’s completely unrecognizable in it’s second form. Brokeback Mountain was a short story that was adapted into a movie. Hairspray was a B movie adapted into a Broadway musical adapted into a mainstream film starring John Travolta in really frightening drag. American Psycho was a book adapted into a film starring the always hot Christian Bale that is now in talks to be turned into a Broadway musical (seriously).
The amount of things out there to adapt are staggering, so if there isn’t a play or short story that interests you, don’t worry. There are always fairy tales (public domain, which means it costs nothing to adapt them!), poems, real life stories, comic books, video games, lyrics…basically, you can adapt anything – all you have to do is decide what the lifeblood is of the thing you’re adapting, and include it in your version.
Why Adapt?
With so many people telling the writing community, “show me something I’ve never seen before!” you’re probably wondering why anyone trying to make a dent in Hollywood would consider an adaptation. Well, there are reasons. Awesome reasons. Reasons that could make you a very rich writer.
The first reason to consider doing an adaptation? A built-in fan base. The movie adaptation of Twilight just opened this weekend (11.23.08), and you can bet the legions of rabid teenage fans cultivated through the novels helped the mediocre-at-best film soar at the box office. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter if an adaptation is good, if people recognize a story they’ve loved for years, they’ll pay money to see it.
Films based off of comics are a great example. What little boy or girl hasn’t flipped through the pages of Batman or Iron Man and wished the pictures would come to life?
If the first incarnation of a story is successful, most people assume the new version will be just as great. Obviously, this isn’t always the case, but there’s just something about Superman, Harry Potter, and the CareBears that is so fantastic to us that we’ll never grow tired of seeing reincarnations.
Another great reason to adapt? The hard parts are done for you. You already know how the story ends. You know all the important plot points. Even if you change things a good deal, you’ve got a tried and true base to work off of, and a rock solid story trajectory is what all writers desire.
The third reason you might consider adapting is the excitement of bringing a story you’ve loved forever to life. Sharing a childhood fairytale your mother read to you every year or the first coming of age tale that ever spoke to you with a new audience is a powerful way to communicate. Chances are, if you fell in love with it, other people will too.
Now that we’ve sung the praises of adaptation, are there any reasons you might not want to do it? Well, one of the biggest practicality issues is acquiring rights. If your story is in the public domain, than you should be able to take it and run with it, but if someone still owns the rights to the story you want to adapt, it can be expensive and time consuming to get them to option them over to you. Sites like THIS ONE help you find out if the story you want is available for free.
Another issue to think about is the reverse of the positive “built in fan base.” If you adapt a well-known and well-loved story, your audience is going to be constantly holding your version up to the original. They’ll judge you and rate you and if your story doesn’t stand up to their standards or memory, you could be forced to deal with the dreaded backlash. The recent film The Golden Compass is a good example of a fan base railing against a movie they felt bastardized the original novel.
When it comes to deciding to adapt, the impulse has to come from the writer herself. Adapting has it’s own patch of weeds, but if your love of a certain story is strong enough, the process can be monumentally rewarding.