That's a good idea: Story to screen II.I

When the great studios ruled the earth, their appetite for stories was immense. Hack writers were practically chained to desks, grinding out ideas and treatments. A typical studio needed to churn out 100 movies a year. Stars demanded vehicles; quotas of genre pictures were required; all the time a weather eye had to be kept on the prevailing climate of the market.

Hollywood may no longer be the sausage factory it once was, but the industry is still greedy for fodder. There may be more reliance on a few blockbusters to bring in the profits, but there is a huge market for straight-to-DVD movies, drive-in exploitation-flicks and the TV movie has replaced the B-movie and at times rivals the theatrical product. And I'm not even going to think about Bollywood, which churns out 900 films a year.

I suppose the bulk of movies are based on the efforts of story-writers or come from novels, short stories and plays. But it's interesting to look at some of the other sources.

First, a word on books and plays. Many of them are aimed at the cinema when they are written. Much popular fiction is influenced by film, thrillers especially. Look at the Constant Gardener:

• Plot - thriller with a conscience, very much the vogue.
• Exotic locations
• Hero and heroine crying out for star actors
• Good cast of well-defined character parts
• Add to these that Le Carre knows that any novel of his is almost certain to be taken up by TV or cinema.

The same could be said of Elmore Leonard today and Chandler and Cain in former times. I hear that Forrest Carter sent the galley proofs of his Gone to Texas to Clint Eastwood, who bought it immediately and turned it into The Outlaw Josey Wales.

There was a time when comic books were thought fit only for transposition to TV, but it was probably Superman that demonstrated their cinematic potential. Since then we've had Batman, Spiderman and others that I can't bring to mind, nor do I wish to.

TV itself seems to have been taken up with enthusiasm of late, especially since The Fugitive with Harrison Ford. The Dukes of Hazzard, Miami Vice are a couple of examples. I suppose the idea is to cash in on the nostalgia of the older generation and try to capture the younger with modern thrills and spills.

Historical events - or a version of them - has always provided useful source material for the movies, one of the earliest being Birth of a Nation. More recently we have had The Alamo. I single this film out, partly because of the excellent portrayal of Davy Crockett by Billy Bob Thornton, but mainly because of its attempt to be more faithful to historical fact. This is a recent trend. The 1946 John Ford film, My Darling Clementine, purports to be an account of the gunfight at the OK corral, and while, in my opinion, by far the best movie on the subject in cinematic terms, is a complete joke as far as historical facts go. Ford claimed to have got the 'facts' from Wyatt Earp himself, which hardly boosts confidence anyway. Compare it with Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, still dubious, but at least they got the brothers in the right order of age and death.

The biography is an offshoot of the above and has always been popular. Like the historical film it appeals to those who wish to 'learn' as well as be entertained. These are the same people who claim to watch television for the news and documentaries. Biopics seem to come in waves. In fact movies always seem to come in waves of some sort as producers follow apparent trends in the market. Warner Brothers did Ehrlich, Pasteur, Zola and Juarez (the last three vehicles for the histrionic talents of Paul Muni). And very recently we've had Ed Murrow and Truman Capote.

A lot of people justify a trip to the pictures by telling themselves the film is 'educational'. Let them try Cromwell, Richard Harris' impersonation of the great man. I suppose it got the gist of the story, but when you see the Lords and Commons sitting in the same chamber you do wonder where they got their information from.

If history's not your thing, there's always myth - Robin Hood, King Arthur, the Greek myths, which Ray Harryhausen had such fun with. Most recent, I suppose, Troy. I don't care what the critics said, I thought it was pretty good. Brad Pitt can't help being pretty, he's bloody good. Now Tom Cruise has imploded, I predict Brad will be the next Clint. Mark my words.

So what other sources have we got. Johnny English was based on an advert (does the same apply to Transfformers?); Road to Perdition came from a graphic novel, which seems to be the way to get your story on screen these days - see also Sin City and History of Violence; The Charge of the Light Brigade was inspired by a poem, Convoy by a song; and famously It's a Wonderful Life derives from a Christmas card. Die Hard 4.0 derives from a newspapaer article.

Oh, and let's not forget the franchises, not a word I recall being used 20 years ago, it was just sequels then - Bond, Die Hard, Jaws, etc. The remakes - The Lady Killers, Alfie . . .The trends - the spate of gangster films after The Godfather; serial killer films after Silence of the Lambs; ghost stories after Truly, Madly, Deeply. It's nothing new. There were many films about ghosts, angels, etc during world War II.

Roger Corman made a fortune and many, many careers in the exploitation business.

In Sunset Boulevard Bill Holden's writer complains about the way one of his stories was treated. 'The last one I did was about Okies in the dust bowl. You'd never know because when it reached the screen it took place on a PT boat.' I plan to talk about the evolution of an idea from story to finished movie another time, but some of the greatest are based on original stories, including Sunset Boulevard itself.

Five new videos

I called in a local 'buy and sell' shop today to see what was going cheap. The owner is selling off videos at £1, sometimes 50p, and I hoped to pick up some classics for next to nothing. His DVDs are still too expensive. This is what I bought:

• Hamlet - Kenneth Branagh version. The whole text! Spot the celebrity.
• Gladiator - surprisingly, I didn't own a copy. It's obviously over-rated. Just a combined remake of Spartacus and The Fall of the Roman Empire.
• Great Balls of Fire - story of Jerry Lee Lewis. Dennis Quaid fantastic, even plays the piano well enough for some close-ups. Great songs, or should I say one great song repeated with variations? Lewis was an arrogant, self-absorbed prat really. What kind of a haircut was that? Racist bastard as well, I'm told. I've lent this to a friend who's a fan. Slips into 'musical' mode occasionally, when the music stops being studio sessions or concerts, and provides the background for a song and dance act.
• The Commitments - better, grittier, prefer the music. But still just another Full Monty, or Brassed Off or Billy Elliott. Fouled-mouthed, fucking underclass trying to better themselves. Calendar Girls was in the same vein, but 'nicer'. I went to see CG a couple of years ago, because it seemed like a safe bet as birthday present for a lady friend. Gangs of New York might have been a bit dodgy. The cinema was full of female couples, middle-aged daughters with their mothers, all feeling terribly daring.
• Legends of the Fall - Hopkins, Pitt, Zwick directing (who did Glory). Must be worth a look.

Pardon me: I.II

I suppose what I was saying in my previous post is that you cannot take a poached egg and turn it into an omelette. What they have in common is the egg. What the film and the book have common is an idea, a story, a concept, a purpose.

I think it was Nick Hornby's hero, in High Fidelity, who said that Merchant and Ivory make films for people who don't like movies, but can't be bothered to read the book. In earlier times, Anthony Asquith was a highly regarded British film director, precisely because he took safe, theatrical projects and transferred them to the screen. No doubt they were useful for schoolchildren studying Pygmalion or French without Tears. While I am forever grateful to him for preserving Edith Evans and her handbag for posterity, as well as Michael Redgrave in The Winslow Boy. But he's still an anonymous technician. So was John Cromwell, described by David Thomson as 'a deft, self-effacing director who was especially sensitive to women and respectful of novels and plays.' Ever heard of him?

I presume you have heard of Howard Hawks. If not, then goodbye and farewell, you fair Spanish ladies. His approach to adaptation was a little different. For example, as the story goes, he went on a hunting trip with Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper. In the evening the three men sat round the campfire, drinking whisky and swapping manly yarns. Hawks boasted that he could take Hemingway's worst book and turn it into a great film. I have a feeling that Hemingway would have been reluctant to nominate any of his works as bad, let alone the worst, but Hawks had his own nomination to hand. To Have and Have Not became the quintessential Hawks film when he kept the title and the location and threw out the rest.

It's common complaint of authors that Hollywood defiles and prostitutes the beloved offspring of their pen and soul. Mind you, I expect the man who wrote Everybody Comes to Rick's had no complaints about its transformation into Casablanca. Depends on his contract, I suppose. And I can't but feel that Old Will would have loved the the credit on 1929's The Taming of the Shrew, which says, 'By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.'

Adaptation is not confined to the cinema. Shakespeare stole most of his plots and Verdi adapted Shakespeare into opera. Pride and Prejudice was rewritten for the stage in the nineteenth century and it is this dramatisation which formed the basis for Olivier's film.

Think about Pygmalion. Once upon a time there was a Greek myth. Like all Greek myths it is one of the basic plots: boy meets girl, opposites attract, boy loses girl, etc. It gave Bernard Shaw the idea for a play and he gave the educated members of his audience the pleasure of recognising the meaning of the title. The Coen Brothers did something similar by announcing that Oh, Brother, Where art Thou? was based on Homer's Odyssey. Can you spot the references? As for Pygmalion, it became a film, complete with happier, Hollywood ending. the film was adapted as a stage musical, renamed My Fair Lady (an improvement) and that musical into a film. Recently, Mel Brooks' The Producers was revamped as a stage musical, and now inevitably it's a movie again.

Lists

I have a friend who claims to see many parallels between two of his favourite films, namely One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Searchers. I couldn't really follow him and thought I would check it out on the internet. What did I find? Millions of hits, but no information at all, because where the two films were mentioned together it was merely because they were both on somebody's 'my favourite films' list.

I even found someone who'd compiled his 'hundred greatest films' - and put a star against the ones he'd actually seen.

Nick Hornby, in High Fidelity, had great fun with this male tendency to compile lists. It usually is a male affliction, unless you count shopping lists. I've heard that, like hobbies, collecting and general buffery, it's a vestige of our hunter-gatherer days. No doubt that gives a little sense of pride to the nerds and anoraks who are particularly prone to the syndrome.

I like to think that lists are like diaries, or blogs, and photograph albums. They are a way of hanging on to the fleeting little pleasures of life. Or maybe a way of fitting the the vagaries of knowledge and experience into a satisfactory framework.

I have my own film lists, which I might share one day, but I thought I would compile one which uses the different criteria I notice others using, which give a different result from what I would otherwise produce.

I am thinking of criteria like primacy, recency, snobbery, prejudice, nostalgia, politics, etc. I'll talk about primacy first, where else. Later.

Who the hell is 'they'?

Re-making the Dam Busters

It takes a brave man to re-make a much-loved classic of the cinema. No matter what their faults and limitations might be, we rarely accept that the new version is anything other than a poor imitation. And even though they may be aimed at a completely new audience, which has never heard of the original, they never seem to work.

Recently we've had The Ladykillers, War of the Worlds and Alfie. No doubt they are all well-made, no doubt they all made money, but will they ever, unlike the originals, be anything more than a footnote in film history?

Is The Maltese Falcon not an exception, some might ask? Not so. It was indeed preceded by two forgettable attempts to film Hammett's novel, but it did not enter cinema's canon until John Huston took on the project and a happy combination of star, support actors, script, camerawork and direction, and what can only be described as zeitgeist, came together at the precise moment to produce a kind of perfection, which it is impossible to recreate.

But Peter Jackson is to produce a new version of The Dam Busters (and call it The Dambusters). Obviously the man does not learn. His recent new take on King Kong had all the advantages of modern cinema, especially CGI, but still failed to deliver the impact of the 1933 original, for all its naivety and clunky special effects.

But to remake The Dam Busters is more than brave. It's foolhardy. Jackson may be a New Zealander, but we'll still be on the watch for American attempts to steal our British glory. A thousand armchair military historians will comb the film for inaccuracies, and it will be compared scene for scene with the earlier film and at best given grudging praise by amateur and professional critics alike.

In Lincolnshire, of course, we feel we own Bomber Command, and to interfere with the myth of the raid is akin to querying some 'fact' about the Alamo with a Texan. I grew up being told to look out for the shot of Lincoln cathedral in the film, and my own children always had RAF Scampton pointed out as we passed it in the car

The 1954 film was very much of its time, and thoroughly British. Understated, proud (in a polite way) and aimed at an audience that had lived through the dark days of a decade before. It was methodical, almost documentary in style and shot in monochrome. I always think of World War II as a war fought in black and white. Spielberg thinks the same way and Saving Private Ryan's colour is so muted it hardly seems to exist. I hear that Clint Eastwood's Flags of our Fathers is similar. This technique was not used in, say, Memphis Belle and I think this is one reason why the film did not work for me, for all it's accuracy and historical detail.

Back to 1954. The film avoid histrionics and sentimentality, but it still stirs deep, powerful emotions in its audience. Michael Redgrave's body language, stiff and awkward, hints at Wallis' fear of failure, his boyish enthusiasm in success and his final rush of guilt. Richard Todd's brisk professionalism hides Gibson's loneliness in command, a post forbidding any real friendship but that of a dog. So often it is a mere detail or simple image that triggers the tears: the brief, silent thought on Gibson's face when a plane is shot down before he orders the next crew to go in; the dead dog's leash lying useless in his in-tray; Wallis rolling up his trouser legs before wading into the sea to retrieve fragments of his shattered bomb.

It's very irritating that so much of the debate about Mr Jackson's project has been over 'Nigger's' name. Personally, I wouldn't change it, because I'm sick of the current climate in Britain, so desperate to be sensitive, so keen to avoid offense. But then again, I wouldn't care too much if it were to be changed. Even the most true-to-life films are full of alterations to history. Characters are amalgamated, events eliminated or simplified. If you want the facts, you find them in documentaries or non-fiction books. Sometimes it takes fiction to show the truth.

I would not alter one scene of the original film, which is a masterpiece - I use that word in its strict sense - a thoroughly professional work about a thoroughly professional operation. But there's no denying its historical inaccuracies. I am not talking about dogs' names, or who had the idea of setting lights under the fuselage to estimate height, or whether the bombs were spherical or cylindrical. Nor even about the rather unpleasant nature of Gibson's character. The real question is over the success or otherwise of the raid itself.

Although the film ends on a poignant, melancholy note, it gives the impression that the raid was successful. Unfortunately it wasn't - maybe it wasn't. The results were well below what had been expected. Only two of the three target dams were breached. Water production was restored within six weeks. Other sources of power were found and the dams were repaired within eleven weeks. One thousand civilian Germans were killed, along with many Ukrainian POWs and slave workers. Not to mention our own terrible losses - eight planes lost out of nineteen, 53 men dead, 3 captured, out of 113.

Only in hindsight can consolation be found. It was obviously great propaganda and, no doubt, boosted morale - I always find that concept patronising. The enemy diverted precious manpower to guarding the dams, etc. (But they still had enough left to take over Italy when Mussolini fell).

As I said before, facts are facts and truth is truth. The truth here is, as always, in man, in humankind, the answer to the sphinx's riddle. The film is about victory, moral, Pyrrhic, but victory. That potent mix of brains, leadership, discipline, self-sacrifice and raw, stupid courage.

It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do.