ART OF ADAPTATIONArt of Adaptation
www.cayle.ca The art of adaptation – of knowing where you are. Tim Holt to Walter Huston, in Treasure Of Sierra Madre, when asked: “any place you intent on going” replied “all the same to me”. It doesn’t matter to me where I am, either, now that I have Hannah, my new lap dog, I mean ‘top’. We can do so many things together. She is a perfect companion.. she is playing Beowulf, I'm writing the blog, have downloaded clips for a teaser edit of one of the short films I’ve done in order to transfer it to the website. Hannah has an edit program. She's full of surprises! In My Documents is the file and drafts of Lost Souls, a screen play which a friend and excellent story editor said could also be a play...but for me it is a movie, because it is about the movies, about the descent into fantasy-life. My character, the one I hope to play is a writer, a novelist, and in the script she reads to people in a retirement home, which she is checking out as the possible ‘home’ to place her Alzheimer's deteriorating Mother in. But Hannah aside, or beside me, it is still necessary to know the landscape you are inhabiting: A few years ago I addressed the Writers Circle at The Arts and Letters Club on the subject of Adaptation, adapting from one medium to another. I had worked with Anne Tait, (legendary casting director and now producer of a major motion picture IRON ROAD, soon to be released) to create a screenplay from her Stage Play YEATS IN LOVE. Some many years ago, Henry Jaglom hired me to write a screenplay from the massive continuous novel that Anais Nin wrote over decades: THE CITIES OF THE INTERIOR. So I know how “that border-crossing feeling” can make a fool out of you.As a kid I loved the Walt Disney hour, each week it was thrilling to discover which LAND we were going to be taken to. My favorite was FANTASYLAND, though TOMORROW LAND and ADVENTURE LAND also beckoned. Now I think of the different venues for telling a story as MOVIE LAND, BOOK LAND, TV LAND. Each with their own unique atmospheres and environments. As an actor , my rule of thumb is that I usually start work on any script or character from PLACE: The first question I ask is 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. Raymond Chandler defined 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”. One can avail one 'self 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”. I'm looking forward to seeing ATONEMENT, I read the book and of course we're hearing that the movie has done an excellent job of making what would appear to be a difficult transfer to the screen. Director David Weaver (Moon Palace, Siblings, Century Hotel) “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. E.g. 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. Clement Virgo on LIE WITH ME, which was adapted from the novel by his wife said 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. I had a small part in the film, which involved a two day shoot playing one of the Aunts at a wedding scene. The set had a curious sexual energy, a kind of simmering languor, the environment of the story that was created by the Director's awareness of where he was. And this is what a good director does. He creates the world that the actors need to live in. Virgo's latest film POOR BOYS GAME is a very different canvas – interestingly a man's world, brutal in its demands, as this director explores and creates universes for us. Moving on to BOOK LAND: Elaine Newton, whose book review sessions, my Mother has been attending for years talking about Saul Bellow as “the mongrel voice of America, the melting pot culture” described Chicago as Saul Bellow's NOVEL PLACE: “ I am an American, Chicago born” 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”. I reread Bellow's Humbolt's Gift while working on COLLECTED STORIES as Delmore Schwartz, was the early love affair my character Ruth Steiner talks about and subsequently is written about by her protégé causing Ruth to believe she has been ripped off : her voice appropriated by the ambitious Lisa. Schwartz was the wunderkind who rocked the 50ies with his remarkable short story IN DREAMS THERE IS RESPONSIBILITY: a young man watches a movie in which he sees the relationship between his parents form and jumps up in horrified response to scream at the screen that they shouldn't marry. PLACE on place and levels of emotional intensity that were considered revolutionary by his fellow writers. In the wonderful film ADAPTATION, 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”. 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." My mentor, Anais Nin tried to influence what she considered to be a male model in CITIES OF THE INTERIOR by introducing her continuous novel that spanned decades, (whose characters, coincidently (?) 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 D.H. Lawrence who made their innovations, but still in a more male sensibility. 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 parameters 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 savvy audience member, the inimitable casting director Karen Hazzard, was heard to retort: “A film, then where were the goddamn close ups..hello"
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