Tuesday, October 28, 2008

The adaptation obsession

On his Artful Writer blog, Craig Mazin examines the apparent preference in Hollywood for adaptations rather than original screenplays.
Books aren’t written to be movies. They’re written to be books. Same for plays and graphic novels and epic songs and video games. They are their own ends. They are, for better or worse, completed works of art.

Screenplays are not. Screenplays are transitional art. They are a theory, an imagining…but of something else.

I’ll argue that studios and producers are occasionally seduced by the notion of adaptation because it grounds them and their risk in something that is very real and permanent.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous12:42 am

    It's hardly a new phenomenon, it's existed in Hollywood right from the early days.

    Look at some of the great Hitchcock films: Psycho, Rebecca, Vertigo etc. All book adaptations.

    Then there's the play adaptations like His Girl Friday.

    Yes it's risk averse but then again it's money for old rope by building on something that is proven in another field.

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