Principles Of Adaptation For Film And Television

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.

"Asking why adaptation has been seen as more problematic to theorize than other humanities subjects, and why it has been more theoretically problematic in the humanities than it has been in the sciences and social sciences, Theorizing Adaptation seeks to both explicate and redress "the problem of theorizing adaptation" through a metacritical history of theorizing adaptation from the late seventeenth century to the present, a metatheoretical theory of the relationship between theorization and adaptation in the humanities, and analysis of the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation. The history finds that adaptation was not always the bad theoretical object that it increasingly became from the late eighteenth century: in earlier centuries, adaptation was celebrated and valued as a means of aesthetic and cultural progress. Tracing the falling fortunes of adaptation under theorization, the history reveals that there have always been dissenting voices valorizing adaptation. Adaptation studies can learn from history not only how to theorize adaptation more positively, but also to consider "the problem of theorization" for adaptation. Metatheoretical analysis of what theorization and adaptation are and how they function in the humanities finds that they are rival, overlapping, inimical processes, each seeking to remake culture -- and each other -- in their images. It is not simply the case that adaptation has to adapt to theorization: rather, theorization needs to adapt to and through adaptation. The final section attends to the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation, analyzing how tiny pieces of rhetoric have constructed adaptation's relationship to theorization, and turning to figurative rhetoric, or figuration, as a third process that has can mediate between adaptation and theorization and refigure their relationship. Moreover, particular rhetorical figures can redress particular problems in adaptation studies and open new ways to theorize adaptation studies"--

By considering D.H. Lawrence’s stories through the lens of critically neglected short films, this book provides a fresh, forward-looking approach to Lawrence studies which engages with current adaptation theory to reflect on the evolving critical reception of the author’s tales.

A Theory of Adaptation explores the continuous development of creative adaptation, and argues that the practice of adapting is central to the story-telling imagination. Linda Hutcheon develops a theory of adaptation through a range of media, from film and opera, to video games, pop music and theme parks, analysing the breadth, scope and creative possibilities within each. This new edition is supplemented by a new preface from the author, discussing both new adaptive forms/platforms and recent critical developments in the study of adaptation. It also features an illuminating new epilogue from Siobhan O’Flynn, focusing on adaptation in the context of digital media. She considers the impact of transmedia practices and properties on the form and practice of adaptation, as well as studying the extension of game narrative across media platforms, fan-based adaptation (from Twitter and Facebook to home movies), and the adaptation of books to digital formats. A Theory of Adaptation is the ideal guide to this ever evolving field of study and is essential reading for anyone interested in adaptation in the context of literary and media studies.

Narratology has been conceived from its earliest days as a project that transcends disciplines and media. The essays gathered here address the question of how narrative migrates, mutates, and creates meaning as it is expressed across various media.ø Dividing the inquiry into five areas: face-to-face narrative, still pictures, moving pictures, music, and digital media, Narrative across Media investigates how the intrinsic properties of the supporting medium shape the form of narrative and affect the narrative experience. Unlike other interdisciplinary approaches to narrative studies, all of which have tended to concentrate on narrative across language-supported fields, this unique collection provides a much-needed analysis of how narrative operates when expressed through visual, gestural, electronic, and musical means. In doing so, the collection redefines the act of storytelling. Although the fields of media and narrative studies have been invigorated by a variety of theoretical approaches, this volume seeks to avoid a dominant theoretical bias by providing instead a collection of concrete studies that inspire a direct look at texts rather than relying on a particular theory of interpretation. A contribution to both narrative and media studies, Narrative across Media is the first attempt to bridge the two disciplines.

While film and television seem to be closely allied screen media, our feature films and television series have seldom been successfully adapted across those screens. In fact, rather than functioning as portals, those allied media often seem, quite literally, screens that filter out something that made the source work so popular in its original form. Differences in budget, running times, cast, viewing habits, screen size and shape all come into play, and this volume’s aim is to track a number of popular texts in the course of their adaptive journeys across the screens in order to sketch the workings of that cross-media adaptation. For its specific examples, the volume draws on a single genre—science fiction—not only because it is one of the most popular today in either film or television, but also because it is arguably the most self-conscious of contemporary genres, and thus one that most obviously frames the terms of these technological adaptations. The essays included here mine that reflexive character, in both highly successful and in failed efforts at cross-media adaption, to help us understand what film and television achieve in screening science fiction, and to reveal some of the key issues involved in all of our efforts to navigate the various screens that have become part of contemporary culture.

In New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation, editor Betty Kaklamanidou defiantly claims that "all films are adaptations." The wide-ranging chapters included in this book highlight the growing and evolving relevance of the field of adaptation studies and its many branding subfields. Armed with a wealth of methodologies, theoretical concepts, and sophisticated paradigms of case-studies analyses of the past, these scholars expand the field to new and exciting realms. With chapters on data, television, music, visuality, and transnationalism, this anthology aims to complement the literature of the field by asking answers to outstanding questions while proposing new ones: Whose stories have been adapted in the last few decades? Are films that are based on "true stories" simply adaptations of those real events? How do transnational adaptations differ from adaptations that target the same national audiences as the texts they adapt? What do long-running TV shows actually adapt when their source is a single book or novel? To attempt to answer these questions, New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation is organized in three parts. Part 1, "External Influences on Adaptation," delves into matters surrounding film adaptations without primarily focusing on textual analysis of the final cinematic product. Part 2, "Millennial TV and Franchise Adaptations," demonstrates that the contemporary television landscape has become fruitful terrain for adaptation studies. Part 3, "ElasTEXTity and Adaptation," explores different thematic approaches to adaptation studies and how adaptation extends beyond traditional media. Spanning media and the globe, contributors complement their research with tools from sociology, psychoanalysis, gender studies, race studies, translation studies, and political science. Kaklamanidou makes it clear that adaptation is vital to sharing important stories and mythologies, as well as passing knowledge to new generations. The aim of this anthology is to open up the field of adaptation studies by revisiting the object of analysis and proposing alternative ways of looking at it. Scholars of cultural, gender, film, literary, and adaptation studies will find this collection innovative and thought-provoking.

Classic and new essays examining the historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationships between theater and film.