film - Film adaptation
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Since that time, few directors have attempted to put everything in a novel into a film. Finally, both Greek mythology and the Bible have been adapted frequently.
Twelve Monkeys deriving from La Jetée). Consequently, novelizations are quite often changed from the films as they appear in theaters. Novelization can build up characters and incidents for commercial reasons (e.g.
On the one hand, theatrical adaptation does not involve as many interpolations or elisions as novel adaptation, but, on the other, the demands of scenery and possibilities of motion frequently entail changes from one medium to the other. Sometimes, the adaptive process can continue after one translation.
The creators of the Gulliver miniseries interpolated a sanity trial to reflect the ongoing scholarly debate over whether or not Gulliver himself is sane at the conclusion of Book IV. Blade Runner) may self-consciously invoke the older era of film by the use of voice over, such devices have been used less and less with time. There have been several nominees for non plus ultra of inventive adaptation, including the Roland Joffe adaptation of The Scarlet Letter with explicit sex between Hester Prynn and the minister and Native American attacks on Salem (changes introduced, according to Joffe, to increase the market and to make an entirely new morality tale out of the novel).
Both John Sayles and Ingmar Bergman write their film ideas as novels before they begin producing them as films, although neither director has allowed these prose treatments to be published. Finally, films have inspired and been adapted into plays. The American television variety show Saturday Night Live has been the origin of a number of films, beginning with The Blues Brothers, which began as a one-off performance by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.
Additionally, and far more controversially, film makers will invent new characters or create stories that were not present in the source material at all. This is especially true when a novel is part of a literary saga.
Fibber McGee, Life with Father and Superman, which was a serial on radio before being adapted to film). Comic book characters, particularly superheroes, have long been adapted into film, beginning in the 1940s with Saturday movie serials aimed at children. Pretty Baby, directed by Louis Malle), and movies have adapted movies (e.g.
Homer s works have been adapted multiple times in several nations. Additionally, adaptations of television shows will offer the viewer the opportunity to see the television show s characters without broadcast restrictions.
In the adaptation of The X Files to film, for example, greater effects and a longer plotline were involved. For example, movie studios will commission novelizations of their popular titles or sell the rights to their titles to publishing houses.
Bean s Holiday. Radio narratives have also provided the basis of film adaptation. Doom traded in religious elements of the video games for scientific plot elements and openly parodied the game s first person shooter gameplay, and the setting of Super Mario Bros.
Some film theorists have argued that a director should be entirely unconcerned with the source, as a novel is a novel, while a film is a film, and the two works of art must be seen as separate entities. Both Ingmar Bergman (notably with Fanny and Alexander, but with other films as well) and Lars von Trier have created long television films that they then recut for international distribution. Even segments of television shows have been adapted into feature films.
Dialog-heavy stories and fantastic stories from radio also adapted to film (e.g. The most recent of these Saturday Night Live originated films is a case of double television origin: Fat Albert, which began with an impression of another television show based on the comedy routine of Bill Cosby.
The success of these films has also led to other comic books not necessarily about superheroes being adapted for the big screen, such as Ghost World (2001), American Splendor (2003), Sin City (2005) and 300 (2007). The adaptation process for comics is different from that of novels. A television mini-series of Gulliver s Travels changed the sexes of characters, made some vanish, and changed the character of Master Bates from a single three sentence obscene pun into a major character and the film s villain.
The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy, for example, began as a radio series for the BBC and then became a novel which was adapted to film. Mel Brooks The Producers was a film that was adapted into a Broadway musical and then adapted again into a film. Feature films are occasionally created from television series or television segments.
Because the movie studio anticipated a female audience for the film and had Meryl Streep for the role, Helen became a significant part of the film. Not only are there film versions of all of Shakespeare s plays, but there are multiple versions of many of them, and there are films adapted from Shakespeare s plays very loosely (such as West Side Story, Kiss Me, Kate, O, and 10 Things I Hate about You, as well as Akira Kurosawa s adaptations in Throne of Blood and Ran). Similarly, hit Broadway plays are frequently adapted, whether from musicals or dramas.
For example, William Kennedy s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Ironweed, had a very small section with a prostitute named Helen. Many successful comic book series last for several decades and have featured several variations of the characters in that time.
The Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman penned Adaptation., credited as an adaptation of the novel The Orchid Thief, was an intentional satire and commentary on the process of film adaptation itself. Therefore, elision is nearly mandatory. In some cases, however, film adaptations will also interpolate scenes or invent characters.
In the heyday of radio, radio segments, like television segments today, translated to film on several occasions, usually as shorts. Laurence Olivier consciously imitated the arch with his Henry V (1944), having the camera begin to move and to use color stock after the prologue, indicating the passage from physical to imaginative space.
These additions (nudity, profanity, explicit drug use, explicit violence) are only rarely a featured adaptive addition (film versions of procedurals such as Miami Vice are most inclined to such additions as featured adaptations). Because the film makers are adapting established characters with expected behaviors, introducing obviously non-broadcast elements may alienate a core audience At the same time, some theatrically released films are adaptations of television mini-series events. Some films have been made based on photographs (e.g.
When source novels have exposition or digressions from the author s own voice, a film adaptation may create a commenting, chorus-like character to provide what could not be filmed otherwise. to market a card or computer game, to promote the publisher s saga of novels, or to create continuity between films in a series) There have been instances of novelists who have worked from their own screenplays to create novels at nearly the same time as a film.
All of these cases of outrageous or unfaithful adaptation were interpretations of the source work. When national film boards and state controlled television networks co-exist, film makers can sometimes create very long films for television that they may adapt solely for time for theatrical release.
Both Arthur C. The resulting film was over sixteen hours long.
Since a transcription of a novel into film is impossible, even holding up a goal of accuracy is absurd. Early on, film makers would rely upon voice over for a main character s thoughts, but, while some films (e.g.
Joffe argued that his changes were a recasting and revitalizing of Hawthorne s point. Superman (1978) and Batman (1989) are two later successful movie adaptations of famous comic book characters.
A cut of the film only eight hours long, then one running to four hours, appeared. In Japan films based on video games are more prevalent due to the popularity of animation, which allows certain games to be adapted more cheaply and faithfully than in live action.
From the earliest days of cinema, adaptation has been nearly as common as the development of original screenplays. Novels are frequently adapted for films. The second X-Men film was loosely based on the graphic novel X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills and Spider-Man 2 was based on the storyline Spider-Man No More! and the third film on the storyline Dark Phoenix Saga.
Films based on such series usually try to capture the back story and “spirit” of the character instead of adapting a particular storyline. In these cases, the film will either offer a longer storyline than the usual television program s format or will offer expanded production values.
Most amount to nothing more than cheap cash-ins that as often as not have little to do with the game at all, or completely change the game s characters. Others argue that what a film adaptation does is change to fit (literally, adapt), and the film must be accurate to either the effect (aesthetics) of a novel or the theme of the novel or the message of the novel and that the film maker must introduce changes where necessary to fit the demands of time and to maximize faithfulness along one of these axes. Films sometimes use plays as their sources.
An Inconvenient Truth is Al Gore s documentary film about climate change. Inevitably, the question of faithfulness arises, and the more high profile the source novel, the more insistent are the questions of fidelity. Erich von Stroheim attempted a literal adaptation of Frank Norris s novel McTeague in 1924 with his film, Greed.
At nearly the same time, Daniel Defoe s Moll Flanders was creatively adapted to make it a romance. It is a film adaptation of a Keynote multimedia presentation and is an adaptation, therefore, of a lecture.
however, a number of films have become successful with general audiences (such as Mortal Kombat, and Silent Hill ) with a few subject to critical acceptance (notably Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children). In the early 2000s, blockbusters such as X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002) ) have led to dozens of superhero films.
Most often this is because few people take the video game industry seriously and do not treat the movie adaptation as a serious project. Nevertheless, drastic deviation has been the reason video games movies have failed; Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, whilst based on an ever-changing line of alternate universe role-playing games, did not emphasise in such an obvious way as the games the concepts familiar to players.
In these cases, the audience already knows the story well, and so the adaptation will de-emphasize elements of suspense and concentrate instead on detail and phrasing. When a film s screenplay is original, it can also be the source of derivative works such as novels and plays. Film adaptation is the transfer of a written work to a feature film.
Likewise, Batman Begins owes many of its elements to Miller s Batman: Year One and the film s sequel, The Dark Knight, uses subplots from Batman: The Long Halloween. Video games have also been adapted into films, beginning in the late 1990s, although movies closely related to the computer and video game industries had been done previously, such as Tron and The Wizard, but only after the release of several movies based on well-known brands has this genre become recognized in its own right. Films based on video games tend to carry a reputation of being lower budgeted B movies and rarely receive the appreciation of either film critics or fans of the games on which they are based. William Shakespeare has been called the most popular screenwriter in Hollywood.
Film critics will often mention if an adapted play has a static camera or emulates a proscenium arch. In a rare case of a film being adapted from a stage musical adaptation of a film, in 2005 the film adaptation of the stage musical based on Mel Brooks classic comedy film The Producers was released. .
Occasionally aspects of the characters and their origins are simplified or modernized. Self-contained graphic novels, and miniseries many of which do not feature superheroes, can be adapted more directly, such as in the case of Road to Perdition (2002) or V for Vendetta (2006). Thus, in the adaptation of John Fowles s The French Lieutenant s Woman, the director created a contemporary Englishman in a romance with a woman to offer up the ironic and scholarly voice that Fowles provided in the novel, and the film version of Laurence Sterne s unfilmable novel, Tristram Shandy had the main actor speak in his own voice, as an actor, to emulate the narrator s ironic and metafictional voice in the novel.
Many films have been made from epic poetry. Given the anticipated audience for a film, the screenwriter, director, or movie studio may wish to increase character time or invent new characters.
Many films and anime Original Video Animations (OVAs) based on popular games such as Final Fantasy, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Pokémon have been released this way. Deviation from the source material is inevitable, as a strict adaptation of a game will often work against its film counterpart. In these cases, adaptation is a form of criticism and recreation, as well as translation. Change in adaptation is essential and practically unavoidable, mandated both by the constraints of time and medium, but how much is always a balance.
Incidents or quotes from later or earlier novels will be inserted into a single film. These novelized films will frequently be written on assignment, and will sometimes be written by authors who have only an early script as their source.
In particular, Robert Rodriguez did not use a screenplay for Sin City but utilized actual panels from writer/artist Frank Miller s series as storyboards to create what Rodriguez regards as a translation rather than an adaptation. Furthermore, some films based on long-running franchises use particular storylines from the franchise as a basis for a plot. It is a type of derivative work. A common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a film, but film adaptation includes the use of non-fiction (including journalism), autobiography, comic book, scripture, plays, and even other films.
was radically changed from a light, cartoonish adventure to that of a camp parodied dark, dystopian thriller such as Blade Runner. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times believe video games are inherently inferior to film and literature and that Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control. Documentary films have been made from reportage, as have dramatic films (e.g. All the President s Men, and, most recently, Miracle, which was adapted from a deadline written book after the 1980 miracle on ice ).
Rowan Atkinson has starred in three British films that originated on television: Johnny English, Bean and its sequel Mr. For the most part, these adaptations attempt either to appeal to an existing commercial audience (the adaptation of best sellers and the prestige adaptation of works) or to tap into the innovation and novelty of a less well known author.
Finally, the studio itself cut the film to around two hours, resulting in a finished product that was entirely incoherent. John Waters s films have been successfully mounted as plays; both Hairspray and Cry-Baby have been adapted, and other films have spurred subsequent theatrical adaptations.
Spamalot is a Broadway play based on Monty Python films.
