Be that as it may, treatments are a reality of the industry. You may be asked to write one. You may even get paid to write one.
It’s also possible to render a treatment useful, to make it a tool, like an outline. But you must approach the treatment cautiously, aware of its limitations.
There are two ways to think of a film treatment:
l Articulating your story—what you know of your story before actually finishing it—to yourself.
l Pitching the story’s potential to someone else.
The first is a working document. The second is a sales document.
A story is bound to change, to thicken and deepen, perhaps change radically, in the process of writing the screenplay. So a treatment (or an outline, for that matter) is a snapshot of what you know about your story and its shape at any given time.
Some writers spend a great deal of time on their treatments before setting to the work of writing the screenplay. I wonder if they aren’t expending energy better spent on writing scenes.
Some writers do no treatment or outline at all and simply jump in.
That can be exhilarating and terrifying.
If you think of a treatment as a private document, a working doc-ument, then its utility—for the writing—is manifest. It becomes an organizing tool for all the random and disparate notes you have taken on the project.
But it is very different if you are talking to the world rather than talking to yourself.
If you persist in writing screenplays, likely you will be asked to compose a treatment of your story. Sometimes a treatment will be the first paid step in a work-for-hire contract. Though more often it is a less formal (and unpaid) document done as part of a pitch to a pro-ducer or a studio in order to interest them in writing you a check to write the screenplay.
It’s important to realize that any treatment you write for public con-sumption that describes the story prior to the actual writing of the screenplay is a marketing document, not a working document.
Remember that the sales document treatment needs to accomplish two things: convey your passion for the subject and inspire the reader to appreciate the potential of the imagined film. It needs to interest a reader who knows nothing about your story.
Remember that the working document treatment needs to help you through the work of composing the screenplay. It needs to phrase the unknown well, to pose questions, to leave space for discovery. It needs to interest (and challenge) you.
Bear this dichotomy in mind. And realize that rarely does a treatment accomplish both tasks—selling and working document. Think why you are writing a treatment, consider the purpose and the audience.
And never forget that a treatment—of either variety—is not a screenplay. The problem with a treatment is that it forces you to tell.
Not enact. It can never have the same impact as characters in motion.
ON ADAPTATION
Bearing in mind the ideas of narrative structure outlined above, you could say that all screenwriting is an act of adaptation. Even with an original idea, you are adapting the raw material of the fable into the construct of a screenplay. But what of adaptation of an existing work?
Of someone else’s fable? How are these ideas useful?
The majority of screenplays written are original to the author. But the majority of films made these days are based upon novels, comic books, older films, or newspaper articles. Why are so many films adaptations?
The answer returns us to one of the points made at the outset. Hollywood is driven by fear. And one way to minimize the risk associated with putting a film into production is to be able to point to a track record. The novel was a success. The comic book has a following. The earlier version of the film was a classic. An adaptation comes with a pedigree.
Certainly there are a great many original films being made in long–form television, as independent features, and by individuals on a micro–budget. But even if your hoped for market is one of these
alternative outlets, the chances are, if you succeed in finding any place in the film industry, or if you are already in the industry, you will be asked to adapt someone else’s story. It therefore behooves us to think a bit about adaptation.
What’s the difference between an original screenplay and an adap-tation? The most obvious answer has to do with personal stake, with passion. That is, the original is seen as an order higher than the adaptation because the fable comes from some mysterious, deep place within the author’s imagination. It strikes us as having greater authenticity since it originates with the writer.
And it is true, the original story requires an initial leap into the void to imagine the fable.
But, I would argue, even when the work is an adaptation “work–
for–hire,” the screenwriter appropriates the source material, and the fable acquires just as great a level of importance and passion as the fully original idea. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to write it.
The real difference between a wholly original screenplay and one adapted from existing material lies in the author’s proprietary, not cre-ative, relation to the fable being adapted into a screenplay construct.
It’s still a fable. And the tasks of inhabiting that fable and articulating a story from it are the same.
As a result, all that is said in this book about the making of a screen-play obtains both for fully original and for adapted works. The things you need to consider, the questions you need to ask, the procedures to prepare, and most importantly, the ways in which character and plot interact are all the same.
That said, there are a few ideas specific to adaptation that we should consider.
Types of Adaptation Adaptations come in several flavors:
l The Prestige Adaptation. A classic or popular book is adapted with a fair degree of fidelity. Think Out of Africa, The Color Purple, and Under the Volcano. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings would be examples of this type that are both prestigious and popular.
l The Straight Up Adaptation. The book is relatively unknown, or is an obscure genre piece, or a work of nonfiction. The film is more important than the source. Think Social Network, Slumdog Millionaire, or Die Hard (yes, that was an adaptation).
l Adaptation as Reimagining. The writer takes the source material as the starting point for what is essentially an original vision. Think Prospero’s Books and Apocalypse Now.
These three general types map to a spectrum of fidelity. The first (and to a degree, the second) would be what I call a transposition—where the goal is to adapt the source material in such a way that the most salient features are still there, still visible. It is recognizably an adaptation. It’s still Amadeus. The third is what I would term a transformation. Here the source material is, to one degree or another, left behind. Sometimes, the source material vanishes. You’d have to be told that the filmmaker was adapting an existing story. For instance, My Own Private Idaho is in part an updated version of Shakespeare’s Henry plays.
So, the first question to ask is why are you adapting a book? Are you trying to represent the book in film? Are you constrained by the mate-rial’s provenance, with a mandate to remain as faithful as possible? Or are you using the source material as an excuse for original work?
Fidelity
Fidelity is not a virtue when adapting a novel into a screenplay. That is to say, if you strive for a one-to-one correspondence between the source material and what is in the screenplay you are doomed to failure.
The forms are just too different. Every adaptation takes liberties.
You will always have to modify (and invent) dialogue, condense the plot, perhaps combine characters. You will always have to invent new action, new scenes. You will undoubtedly have to leave things out.
In adapting Under the Volcano I combined two characters. Actually, in the final script, you could say I killed off a fairly major character.
It was a big change. And it was the reason John Huston liked my first draft and asked me to work on a revision.
I was asked many times how I could dare to take a cult classic like Under the Volcano and make so many changes. My response was to quote Malcolm Lowry—the author of Under the Volcano—who wrote a screenplay based on Tender Is the Night. When he handed his draft to a producer he said, “We’ve left out enough for a Puccini opera, but here it is.” Lowry himself understood that adapting a novel requires major changes and omissions.
The reasons a novel cannot be simply transcribed into screenplay format are many and various. A book is full of things that cannot be accurately adapted to screen. Style, use of time, perhaps even tone.
The fact of a narrating voice. The use of point of view. The simple fact that films are apprehended—immediate—whereas novels are compre-hended over time. You can puzzle over a passage in a novel, pause, reread, go back, read again. A film moves relentlessly forward.
Your task is to burrow through the thing in your hand—the construct that is the published book—and try to recreate the fable, that larger-than-fiction realm of possible story elements from which the author crafted this particular construct. You are not adapting the aesthetic
whole of the construct. You are adapting the fable of the construct, using select elements of the existing articulation, inventing others.
The goal of the “faithful” adaptation is not to be literally true to every aspect of the novel. It is to locate and transpose to film that por-tion of the complex work without which it would no longer be recog-nizable as the work.
The first task of adaptation is an act of literary criticism. You have to figure out—to your own satisfaction—the thematic and story center of the object that you are adapting. What makes it what it is?
I would argue that what is most essential in an adaptation is trying to be true to the author’s intent, not his writing. His writing is specific to the novel.
Transformation
When using a supplied work as a jumping off point for a radical trans-formation, the source material is almost incidental. It should be seen as the engine and excuse for what is essentially an original work. For example: Ran (King Lear), Apocalypse Now (Heart of Darkness), Clueless (Emma), and West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet).
These types of adaptations do the same thing as a transposition.
They return to the fable of the original novel. The difference is that they have only a glancing relation to the novel as construct. They may take only one or two elements from the underlying story, or they may dispense with the novel except as a loose outline for event and plot.
The same questions apply when doing a transformative adaptation.
The difference is in emphasis. Rather than looking for the ways in which the source material will be rendered visible and useful, you are looking for ways to diverge from the original construct, perhaps even from the originating fable.
A transformation may actually contravene the author’s original intent. Compare Disney’s The Little Mermaid to Anderson’s original. Or it may be that the theme is the only recognizable thing that remains.
Take for example Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness or (even more tan-gentially) O Brother, Where Art Thou/The Odyssey.
Narrative Time versus Story Time
One of the most significant differences between a novel and a film lies in the manipulation of time. In a novel, each sentence of a paragraph can refer to a different time. Take, for instance, the following:
Cecelia arrived in New York, filled with expectation, shortly after the failure of her second marriage. Now she is homeless and alone.
This paragraph refers to three different times. But it does not do so in chronological order. That is, the first time is when she arrived, the second is her second marriage’s failure, and only the third is present tense. It refers to past, distant past, and present, in that order.
There is a collision, in this paragraph, between what literary crit-ics would call narrative time—the order in which it is told—and story time—the order in which it actually happened (in the fable).
Novels allow great flexibility in moving from one time to another.
It is a very trivial thing to manipulate story time. With a single sen-tence the narrative time may jump backward (or forward) by decades.
One chapter can be in the present tense of the narrative voice, the next chapter generations before, the third leaping into the future. In a novel there is almost always a considered collision between story time and narrative time.
In film, narrative time and story time are usually the same.
Exceptions made for extremely nonlinear films, or for films whose entire premise is the manipulation of time (such as Memento).
Even when a film is built on flashbacks, it is usually the case that there are only two times between which the film alternates. And, I would argue, each time seems to be, when we are in it, the present tense of the film. A great example would be Godfather II, which alternates between two distinct stories, one set in the 1920s of Vito Corleone’s early life up to his revenge killing of the man who killed his father and brother, and the other set in the 1950s, following Michael Corleone’s unraveling the mystery of a failed assassina-tion attempt (among other things). The two stories are linked only in theme, not narratively, or even cinematically. And when we move between them we move—fully—into that story’s present tense.