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

Why adapt? Well, I've already said what I think is the main reason - the need for ideas. But I'd like to muse awhile on some of the other reasons why books and plays, especially are transmuted in movies.

Hollywood likes to cash in on success. If anything, or anyone, is a hit, you can be sure that a movie will follow. As soon as The Da Vinci Code became the phenomenon it was, the only question was how soon the film would come out. With a book like that, you can dispense with the whole advertising budget.

Gone With the Wind, The Bridges of Madison County, Bridget Jones' Diary.

This process can sometimes get something onto the screen that wouldn't have had a hope had it not achieved success elsewhere. Alan Bennett's plays come to mind. I doubt very much if The Madness of King George or The History Boys would have impressed producers as original screenplays.

I mentioned a person being a 'hit', and thereby inspiring a film. Ali and Ray are recent examples of this. singers are particularly popular subjects, because you get the songs and that leads to another market. Al Jolson, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis are among the dozens treated to a biopic.

Even songwriters and composers from Lizst to Cole Porter have received the honour.

I can't think of any actors off-hand who've had a film devoted to them. Hang on, Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. But lookalikes turn up from time to time. I remember 'James Cagney' in The Cotton Club. In Gods and Monsters the whole cast of The Bride of Frankenstein turn up. Interestingly, that is one of the few films directed to a film director, James Whale. It seems that you have to be a really bad director, like Ed Wood, to merit a film of your own.

But there was The Aviator. (I'm obviously making this up as I go along, and what's more I'm getting into a hell of a mess trying to use bullet points, which I shall now dispense with. And I don't care that I've ended a sentence with a preposition).

To continue. It's not always about money. Sam Goldwyn, for example, liked a bit of class, with a capital K. Just as he like to fill his mansions with works of art, probably bought according to their surface area, every now and again he would make a film that he thought would make those snobby intellectuals out there sit up and take notice. Wuthering Heights and Arrowsmith were from serious novels and demonstrated how difficult it is to make that transition while being 'faithful'.

Pygmalion and The Little Foxes were more successful, because a play is halfway to a film anyway. I remember, with respect to the latter film, that GBS tried to puncture Sam's pretensions when He said, 'The difference between us, Mr Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art, while I am only interested in money.' Sarcastic old bastard, and if I've quoted him correctly, he put the 'onlys' in the wrong place.

Putting it on record. Maybe we are seeing a little more altruism. I'm sure there are producers and directors out there who genuinely want to record great performances, such as Edithe Evans in The Importance of Being Earnest, or make a great work of literature or drama more readily available to the wider public. Olivier and Branagh are great apostles of Shakespeare and take - or persuade others to take - financial risks to put him on celluloid. I've no doubt that there was a touch of arrogance as well, or a desire for some sort of immortality, when Olivier filmed Richard III.

Whether or not this leads to a decent film is another matter. Olivier's record is pretty varied. His Othello, for example, was unashamedly a filmed record of a stage play, not quite a view from the front seat of the stalls, but nearly so. Richard III is more cinematic, but still very studio-bound and processional until the final battle. On the other hand, Hamlet is almost like a film noir and seems to me the most cinematic. Some say too cinematic, with the camera roving around gloomy corridors, wasting time that could have been used to save some of the ruthlessly pruned text.

Henry V is the most experimental, cleverly opening out from a re-created Globe Theatre, to studio sets, to the open locations for Agincourt, and then reversing the process.

Orson Welles, who had two stabs at Shakespeare himself (Chimes at Midnight and Othello), was not impressed. He said that most Shakespeare films were like films of a cricket match. (Why did he say 'cricket match' and not 'boxing match'?). I think he was being a bit unfair on the efforts of Olivier, Branagh and Zefferelli, Mankiewicz and Polanski, but he does highlight the dangers. Frankly, when I think of Hamlet, Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar and MacBeth, he was being very unfair.

I feel the urge to mention Rio Bravo at this point. The legend is that Howard Hawks made this as a riposte to High Noon; that Zinnemann's film was leftist propaganda, that Gary cooper was duped by commie infiltrators and needed to be debunked. Now, you have to be pretty rich or self-important to make a film as a reply to another, especially when that other had been made about 8 years before and probably forgotten by the paying public. It was all publicity, wasn't it? It was, I accept, a different take on an old situation, but no more. And, it was a lousy film. It's odd - when John Carpenter made a 'Howard Hawks' film, Assault on Precinct 13, he did a better job than Hawks himself.

One last reason for adapting. Simple respect. You've got to be a top, respected director/producer to do this. And here I take my hat off to John Huston, who made Moby Dick and The Red Badge of Courage, both pretty good movies from classic novels. Huston was a man of many talents, a painter, a writer, a film-maker (not to mention boxer, lover, liar and all-round cad), a man I could listen to for hours. I've no doubt he loved those books and wished he had written them. But they were perfect vehicles for movies - if you were not too respectful to the originals. I think he did a pretty good job. I've often wondered: Did Huston make the films because he wasn't good enough to write the books; or, did he make the films because the authors didn't have the opportunity to do so themselves?

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.

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.