I was chatting with a friend who noted that two films she wants to see at the moment are adaptations.  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button started life as a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald, published first in Colliers Magazine.  The Reader was initially an award winning novel by Bernhard Schlink.  Which begs a few questions.  Like: how can a short story and a whole novel both be adapted in such a way to end up with a feature length film?

Simple answer is that the short story will have been expanded, and the novel condensed.  It’s more interesting to pursue another line of enquiry though: in what ways has the source material been adapted to realise it in screen form?  Shortening or lengthening a story are the very least of the choices involved in translating from one artform to another.

Check out these versions of the same song, by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and Joni Mitchell.  The words are the same, but the arrangements are very different.  Both are of their time, the LHR version emerging from jazz hipster argot in the fifties, Joni’s picking up the same threads for the therapy-prone seventies.  I’ve also got — but YouTube hasn’t — a late nineties version by Jazzonia, featuring a rap from Grandmaster Melle Mel, the melody carried by a flute and the lyrics delivered by a female singer in a fashion worthy of one of Jerry Springer’s more sanity-divergent guests.

Which is the ‘real’ version of the song?  It’s a pointless question, and the same applies to the distinctions between screen and prose versions of the same story.  What appeals to a particular writer or director in translating a book to screen could be anything from the protagonist’s character arc to the moral dilemma at the story’s core.  Bringing that to visual life requires thinking about the whole in a new way, the better to serve what’s interesting in the original.

On this site you’ll find my adaptation of classic horror yarn The Monkey’s Paw.  I saw in it the potential for a spot of high adventure in the Flashman tradition, changing the backdrop of the story to the Boxer Rebellion in Hong Kong as an excuse for some feats of derring-do that catapult the viewer into the action straightaway before the slower burn of the narrative kicks in.  Rather that, I thought, than stick with the original’s tried-and-tested prose solution for the supernatural story of having one of the characters relate a tale of unspeakable goings on to another.  Fine on the page, not much fun on screen.

At some level, every story is a form of adaptation.  I’ve recently written a speech to be delivered by a former world champion sportsman.  It draws heavily on his life history, and the substance of it is factually correct.  More importantly, it has a rise and fall that owes more to dramatic structure than the haphazard flow of events that life itself tends to present, the better for the audience to empathise with the speaker as he relates his ups and downs, and what he’s learned from them.  We relish pattern, and from pattern deduce meaning.  One of the writer’s jobs is to pattern their material in such a way that the meaning derived by the audience is the one s/he intends.

Ultimately, an adaptation rests on its ability to convey the theme/s that the filmmakers value in the source material.  Which is why the more pedantic viewer gets upset when favoured moments don’t appear onscreen, and characters are rolled into one another if it turns out they serve similar functions that might as well be performed by one actor than several.  But really, isn’t that what we all do?  The same pedant, when relating his or her life story, highlights some episodes at the expense of others, and relegates some friends and relative to the sidelines when they were crucial to the teller’s success in whatever endeavour they’re telling you about.  Whether we call ourselves writers or not, we’re all adapting our experience into varying degrees of fiction.