Literary fiction and memoir present specific challenges that screenwriters and producers navigate differently

The Page and the Screen

LOS ANGELES — The conventional wisdom that “the book is always better” contains a partial truth: literary fiction and memoir are often better as books precisely because they use capabilities specific to the form — interiority, prose style, narrative time, the reader’s imaginative participation — that film and television cannot replicate directly. The adaptation challenge is not to transfer the book to the screen but to find a cinematic equivalent for what the book does, which is a different and more demanding task.

The most successful adaptations of complex literary fiction are often significant departures from their source material. Coppola’s The Godfather, Kubrick’s The Shining, Fincher’s Gone Girl, and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival all departed substantially from their source novels in structure, emphasis, or event, producing works that are independently successful rather than faithful reproductions. The faithfulness that some readers demand of adaptations is often precisely what produces unsuccessful films — screenplays that dutifully include everything the novel contains without translating any of it into cinematic terms.

The Craft Problem

Novels convey interiority through prose: we know what characters think and feel through direct access to their consciousness. Screenplays convey interiority through behaviour, dialogue, expression, and implication — indirect methods that require the adaptation to find external expressions for internal states that the novel simply tells us. When a novel’s most important content is what characters think rather than what they do, the adaptation faces a fundamental structural problem that no amount of craft fully resolves.

Memoir presents different challenges: the episodic, digressive, temporally non-linear structure of much literary memoir resists the three-act structure that most commercial screenplays use. Successful memoir adaptations — Wild, The Glass Castle, Educated (in development) — tend to impose narrative structure that the memoir itself lacks, selecting from the source material rather than including it comprehensively.

Rights and Development

Literary adaptation rights are competitive and expensive for highly commercial properties. The option agreement — a payment for the exclusive right to adapt a work within a defined period — is the standard instrument. Option periods typically run 12-18 months with renewal provisions. The WGA Minimum Basic Agreement sets floors for adaptation payments to writers. The rights negotiation is separate and involves the underlying rights holder, usually the author or publisher. Many options are taken, most are not exercised, and the gap between an optioned book and a produced film is wider and longer than most observers understand from the outside.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com