Adaptation

[Richard]

I wrote this last night, but it doesn't seem to have turned up on Yahoo, so 
I'm sending it again. (I've also corrected a couple of significant factual 
mistakes in the original for which I blame attempting to think straight at 
after 4am.)

At 23:28 28/11/2005 , Jen wrote:

>I'd just finished watching "Chariots of Fire" (a good movie?)

(Sorry about the OT moment, but you asked for it.) :-)

For fear of being dubbed an iconoclast (in the original meaning of the 
word...), I found it a load of pretentious twaddle. Maybe it's just because 
I can't STAND the music and it really turned me off the whole film. 
Furthermore,  sportsmen beating the odds has been the subject of far too 
many movies (most of them better than CoF) and as I find athletics in 
particular utterly boring, there is very little about CoF that would entice 
me to watch it again.

Just an opinion. :-)

>What makes an adaptation work? I got called a literalist because I didn't 
>think POA had enough plot in it to say grace over. Isn't plot important?

Depends on what you mean by "plot". As it happens, while the fandom was 
always very pre-occupied with how GoF might be made into a single movie, I 
was always much more concerned about PoA: it's the most tightly-plotted of 
the books and, partially because of that, my favourite. I had reservations 
about how Kloves might unravel the various elements and then re-combine 
them to make a movie of bearable length, given that about half of the book 
would have to be cut.

Cuaron made his choices of what the movie was about and Kloves (apparently) 
went about re-writing the script to make it fit that vision. To paraphrase 
what I've said recently, for most fans, PoA is about WMPP and because 
Cuaron saw it differently, many fans consider the plot slight, because 
well, it's not about what they want it to be about. I have some problems 
with the adaptation, but unlike many, that doesn't cause me to dismiss the 
film out of hand. Again, as I've said recently, one of the things I admire 
about both PoA and GoF is that the directors have tried to tell the 
cinematically (regrettably, on occasion let down by Kloves's klunky 
writing) rather than attempting to retell the same story in the same linear 
fashion.

More in a moment.

>And my point about these films in the earlier post was, with so many 
>threads in each book, how can HP ever be adequately adapted?

By choosing which threads to include, and which to overlook. Much of the 
pleasure in reading the books is what the fandom terms "foreshadowing" (a 
term I generally don't like when it's used nine times out of ten, but 
that's a different discussion) - with the movies, that's a bit difficult, 
because from one movie to the next, the team doesn't know exactly what's 
going to get dropped. For instance, Kloves apparently didn't start working 
on the script for OotP until last Christmas, when GoF was 2/3 into its 
shoot and no director had been chosen yet. It's fairly difficult to work on 
a movie serial in such circumstances.

To take a very specific example, I can think of several ways to tell the 
story of CoS without having Dobby there at all. The character annoys the 
hell out of me, and his cinematic representation even more so. At the time 
of writing the script, nobody had any idea that the entire House-Elf 
sub-plot would be cut from GoF, while Dobby's presence (and his journey) 
was largely set up in the book to pave the way for Winky and SPEW. I have a 
niggling suspicion at the back of my mind that Kreacher will be cut from 
OotP as well. Under the circumstances, Dobby's presence in CoS makes no 
sense at all in terms of the whole series. Ditto for the Map (which has 
caused oh-so-many-arguments) in PoA.

As most of us have said, on this list or elsewhere (and I assume ALL of us 
think), that attempting to adapt an series which involves this many 
characters and events before the source material has been completed is pure 
lunacy. I don't have a problem with individual instalments being handled by 
different directors (I am hugely in favour of it, actually), but I do have 
a problem directly with JKR for not having the basic decency to let Kloves, 
Heyman and the directors know what they need to know about the series' end 
game.

To answer your question most directly, though, five years ago, I said that 
the way to adapt the Potter books is to make a TV series, one season per 
book, with each season as long as it needs to be. I stand by that statement.

Not, I have always said, primarily because it offers more screen time, but 
because of the episodic nature of the plots - this requires an episodic 
adaptation. The main advantage in terms of time is that because it would be 
*shown* over a period of months, the adaptation would have an easier way 
with what is one of the most difficult things to convey in the movies' 
limited running time: the passage of the school year.

>I am very happy about a lot of things in GOF, but so many things had to be 
>left out, how will the next film stand without the deep connection to 
>Serius that was formed in GOF? That connection changed so completely from 
>GOF to OOTP.

Well, I had a problem with the Harry-Sirius relationship in the *book* 
anyway, mainly between the end of PoA and the start of GoF. Why Harry 
considers Sirius a more important correspondent for advice than Dumbledore 
is something which always baffled me. How they became so close (as far as 
Harry is concerned) despite spending just a few moments together feels 
strained to me. Their relationship in GoF was pretty fully formed at the 
beginning, and didn't really undergo any change or deepening by the end of 
that book. Their interactions at the beginning of OotP were on more or less 
on the same level as they were at the end of PoA.

I therefore see no problem with Movie!OotP taking off where we left the 
relationship, with Sirius' only GoF appearance.

>I know there are plenty of ways to suggest things but at some point, don't 
>we need a little depiction of things? Was Chris Columbus' major fault that 
>he was a literalist? That he made little set pieces put together with 
>soaring music? He was unimaginative? Or slavishly devoted to JKR's work as 
>it stood?

A bit of all of the above, but I suspect that his main problem was that he 
was simply terrified of the fans' reactions if he'd changed too much. He 
needed the fans on his side to sell not only the movie, but the concept of 
the franchise, because obviously the core audience would be the books' 
readers. Once the franchise was under way, the fans would have made up 
their minds about whether or not to see further movies. In that respect, he 
did the job Warners expected of him.

>Cuaron was lyrical but perhaps he could have cut out one or two little 
>vanities to include a bit more time in the Shrieking Shack? I will be the 
>first to admit I do not know how to evaluate these films if I am not 
>supposed to care about the plot.

Like I said above, the issue is, to an extent, that what you think is the 
plot isn't what Cuaron thinks the plot is. Cuaron told the story he wanted 
to tell in the way he wanted to tell it, and I'm more than satisfied with 
both. I have no problem with you (and others) not sharing that view, but I 
will continue to enthuse about mine. :-)

A more general comment on adaptation on which to finish and think about. 
When adapting a popular or well-known text, there is the possibility of 
borrowing the concept of "negative space"  from the representational arts 
(which consists of representing not the object in question, but by 
representing *everything else*, so for instance, rather than drawing a 
table, you draw, in precise detail, the space around it, leaving a perfect 
table-shaped hole - it still a table, but by inference rather than reference).

In cinematic terms, there are several approaches. In a simplistic 
understanding, for instance, you don't show your main protagonist at all - 
the whole movie is seen "though his eyes", fairly literally. (Several 
movies have been made that way; I can't think of any which have been 
successful.)

In a more complex understanding of the concept, you *assume* that your 
audience knows the source material, and rather than attempt to tell the 
same story, you tell a side-story, or just a sketch of the main story, 
focusing on smaller elements which aren't so big in the original story: you 
leave the audience to make up the plot for themselves and fill in the gaps 
according to their own understanding of the source material.

Alternatively, you do what Charlie Kaufman did a couple of years ago: when 
tasked with adapting the book "The Orchid Thief" (about which the word 
"unadaptable" was used quite freely), he wrote a movie about the process of 
adapting the book, which nevertheless presents the story of the book in 
"negative space", by very pointedly NOT presenting the story... And thus I 
come full circle, changing the subject title of this message to the movie's 
title.

--
Richard, who was only drawn to thinking about "Adaptation" because he's 
just been watching an interview/acting masterclass with Nicolas Cage on TV, 
which went into some detail about that movie.