Arts and Letters Club, Writers Circle. ADAPTATION

Had the pleasure of addressing the Writers Circle at the Arts and Letters Club about adapting from one medium to another. Having worked with Anne Tait to create a screenplay from her stage play Yeats in Love and presently working with Michael Mortensen, to take his novella Mrs. Harper to a feature script, and some years ago creating a first draft sceenplay for Henry Jaglom based on the continuous novel Cities Of The Interior by Anais Nin, I have experienced crossing those borders and exploring the boundaries of each medium.

I've come to see it almost like the old Walt Disney World series, where at the top of the show you would find out if you were going to Fantasy Land, Tomorrow land, Adventure land.

Movie land. Book land. TV Land. Each with their atmosphere, unique environment. As an actor I usually start work on any script or character from PLACE: Where am I?
One course for actors recently advertised: “not for beginner actors but would be appropriate for actors making the transition from stage to film/television”.

The medium defines how we give and get the message.

Movie Land was recently beautiflly defined for me by Jerome Charyn's book MOVIE LAND, which I have alluded to previously: his description of how those 'shadows on the wall' captured our hearts and minds, from childhood and sold us on the Hollywood culture and the marketing of America.

Raymond Chandler's quote (in Movie land) that defines Film as being closer to music than Literature or Theatre: "...its finest effects can be independent of precise meaning, that its transitions can be more eloquent that its high lit scenes, and that its dissolves and camera movements which cannot be censored, are often far more emotionally effective than its plots, which can”.

This certainly raises the challenges of transiting from one land to another. As the country Western song says: “That border crossing feeling makes a fool out of a man”.

The traveler in this world can avail themself of numerous screen writing seminars and books and tips that tell us how to win that Academy Award winning lottery ticket to the Stars. Handy tips like how to take “a 400 page novel to a 110 page screenplay by capturing the essence and spirit of the story, the through-line and major sub-plot of the story and viciously cutting everything else. . Develop your outline, treatment or beat sheet accordingly. “Show, don’t tell!” - a sounding board to which thoughts can be voiced aloud, express the character’s dilemma or internal world through action in the external world”.

Director David Weaver (Moon Palace, Siblings, Century Hotel) moderated a discussion on screenwriting at LIFT:

“PLOT CHARACTER THEME are the elemental connections. Character is TV – the people you welcome into your home every week. Plot is mechanics. Theme is what its about and defines every moment and should be reflected in Title, visuals, persistent images. Eg Godfather: every scene is about family and the father/son relationship.
For the actor it gives you where to pitch it, but without theme its sketch comedy versus film”.

He advises that you must find the ‘thematic” of the story.

Heard Clement Virgo last night talk about his latest film Lie With me, which was adapted from the novel by his wife. The novel had no back story for the lovers and was a series of vignettes. In adapting it for the screen, they developed families and resonating similar back stories for the two characters.

BOOK LAND:
Elaine Newton, at the Jewish Bookfair described Chicago as Saul Bellows NOVEL PLACE and quotes him “ I am an American, Chicago born” as “the mongrel voice of America, the melting pot culture”.

Bellow she says, “in expressing thoughts and feelings voluminously on the page and believing that the purpose of literature is to raise moral values has created:
ART that which is Fundamental, Enduring, Essential”

In the wonderful film ADAPTION, Nicolas Cage and Nicolas Cage (as twin screenwriting bro’s) agonizes about how to adapt a book about orchids to a movie. He gets advice from the screenwriting guru Robert McKee:

“A screenplay without conflict or crisis will bore you to death. You need the drama. WOW in the end and you’ve got them. Your characters must change and change must come from them”.

Today the New York Times memorialized John Fowles, the British writer “whose teasing, multilayered fiction explored the tensions between free will and the constraints of society, even as it played with traditional novelistic conventions and challenged readers to find their own interpretations”…” Fowles's success in the marketplace derives from his great skill as a storyteller," wrote Ellen Pifer in the "Dictionary of Literary Biography: "Remarkably, he manages to sustain such effects at the same time that, as an experimental writer testing conventional assumptions about reality, he examines and parodies the traditional devices of storytelling."

Anais Nin tried to influence what she considered to be a male model for the novel by introducing her continuous novel that spanned decades, whose characters, Lillian, Sabina and Djuna’s initials give us LSD and Nin’s streaming consciousness gives us a window into the soul of female sexuality and sensibility. Her influences, Henry Miller and DH Lawrence who made their innovations.

It seems that the greatest works play havoc with the rules but always there is the PLACE and when you inhabit that place, that land of book or movie or TV, you get to explore the perameters and avail yourself of the uniqueness of that landscape..to tell the story.

As artists we are often asked to adapt – our novel to screenplay, our life to a TV series, our character to a medium where the close up takes the place of the wide shot of Theatre. I was recently in a play that the Director had conceptualized as a film. One saavy audience member was heard to retort: “A film, then where were the goddamn close ups..hello"!