Authors And Adaptation

Provides advice for aspiring screenwriters on how to write scripts for television and motion pictures, including what topics are popular, how to rework scenes, and how to sell screenplays in Hollywood.

Books in Motion addresses the hybrid, interstitial field of film adaptation. The introductory essay integrates a retrospective survey of the development of adaptation studies with a forceful argument about their centrality to any history of culture—any discussion, that is, of the transformation and transmission of texts and meanings in and across cultures. The thirteen especially composed essays that follow, organised into four sections headed ‘Paradoxes of Fidelity’, ‘Authors, Auteurs, Adaptation’, ‘Contexts, Intertexts, Adaptation’ and ‘Beyond Adaptation’, variously illustrate that claim by problematising the notion of fidelity, highlighting the role played by adaptation in relation to changing concepts of authorship and auteurism, exploring the extent to which the intelligibility of film adaptations is dependent on contextual and intertextual factors, and making a claim for the need to transcend any narrowly-defined concept of adaptation in the study of adaptation. Discussion ranges from adaptations of established classics like A Tale of Two Cities, Frankenstein, Henry V, Le temps retrouvé, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, ‘The Dead’ or Wuthering Heights, to contemporary (popular) texts/films like Bridget Jones’s Diary, Fools, The Governess, High Fidelity, The Hours, The Orchid Thief/Adaptation, the work of Doris Dörrie, the first Harry Potter novel/film, or the adaptations made by Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Walt Disney. This book will appeal to both a specialised readership and to those accessing the dynamic field of adaptation studies for the first time.

Readers of Santiago and Mike Resnick's other exciting and evocative novels know that the galaxy's Inner Frontier is filled with some mighty dangerous characters, such as the Iceman, the Mouse, Merlin, the Yankee Clipper, the Mock Turtle, and more. But we'll bet you didn't know that the most dangerous person on the Frontier, perhaps the most dangerous human or alien who ever lived, is a frightened little six-year-old girl who wishes she was anyone else. Come meet her, and her one friend, and her multitude of enemies, in the pages of Soothsayer, the first book of the Oracle Trilogy - and experience an adventure similar in tone both to Santiago and to Josh Whedon's TV series Firefly (and its follow-up movie Serenity). Mike Resnick is the winner of 5 Hugos (from a record 37 nominations), as well as dozens of other major awards all across the world, and was the Worldcon Guest of Honor in 2012.

Selling Your Screenplay is a step-by-step guide to getting your screenplay sold and produced. Learn how to get your script into the hands of the producers and directors who can turn your story into a movie.

Originally published: New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981.

From All Quiet on the Western Front, the Academy Award-winning "Best Picture" of 1929-1930, to Dances with Wolves, the 1991 winner, many of Hollywood's most popular and enduring movies have been screen adaptations of written work, including novels, stories, and plays. In this practical, hands-on guide, veteran TV and screenwriter Ben Brady unlocks the secrets of the adaptation process, showing aspiring writers and writing teachers how to turn any kind of narrative material into workable, salable screenplays for film and television. Step by step, Brady guides novice screenwriters to the completion of a professional screenplay. He begins with an incisive discussion of how to evaluate a written work's potential as a screenplay. Then he discusses each step of the writing process, showing how to identify the plot and premise of the play, develop character, treatment, and dialogue, and handle camera language and format. Brady illustrates each of these points by developing and writing a complete screenplay of the novel Claire Serrat within the text. With these tools, beginning screenwriters can draw on the rich resources of words in print to create exciting screenplays for film and television. Written in vivid, entertaining prose, the book will be equally useful in the classroom or at the kitchen table, wherever enterprising writers ply their craft.