<return to Articles & Interviews main page

THE FILM/LITERATURE LINK
Part One: Before Zanuck

By Bob Yehling

(Note: The relationship between film and literature has never been more prominent than today, thanks to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. A four-part series on the historical relationship and its modern-day applications.)

Since cinema’s inception in the 1890s, nearly all movies have been derived from three principal sources: Books, Plays, and Original Screenplays.

The history of literature and film goes all the way back to 1902, when French producer/director Georges Melies created the world’s first special effects science fiction film, Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon) by borrowing storyline material and key elements of setting and transportation (namely, the cannon-blasted space capsule) from three books – Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and A Trip Around It, and H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon. From these works, Melies created a 14-minute film heavy on atmospherics, wonder and adventure that bordered between realistic and fantasical – the three core elements of any good science fiction book.

Prior to Melies’ time, cinema as dictated by Thomas Edison in the United States, Auguste and Philippe Lumiere in France and R.K. Paul in England had consisted of slice-of-life scenarios or the most basic, one-scene stories that listed 30 seconds to five minutes.

Besides pioneering special effects – an enormous achievement for which everyone right down to Star Wars maven George Lucas and Lord of the Rings mastermind Peter Jackson thank him – Melies pioneered book adaptation. Le Voyage Dans La Lune was the first movie to take literary material and mold it into a three-act motion picture. Most 19th and 20th century novels have six or seven noteworthy movements of dramatic and narrative transition, like symphonies, but they are structured in three or four acts. Melies understood that a movie set to three acts would create the necessary elements to present a story:

Act One: The overture/opening that hooks the viewer (reader) into the story and presents the main characters and plot (conflict) to be undertaken (resolved);

Act Two: The full development and enrichment of the plot, characters, adventures and conflicts that make up the story; and

Act Three: Bringing to resolution and conclusion the plot and how it impacted the characters.

In Le Voyage Dans La Lune, Melies’ acts broke down as follows:

Act One: Scientists gather and announce a trip to the moon. After much fanfare, they blast off in a cannon-fired capsule.

Act Two: Adventures on the moon, underground cave discoveries, battle with and capture by Selenite inhabitants; daring escape.

Act Three: Blast-off from Moon, splashdown at home; hero’s welcome.
Melies went on to make more than 500 films, the last 100 of which were of equal or greater story-telling complexity than Le Voyage Dans La Lune. Sadly, only 90 of his films were preserved; most were lost to fire or damage. However, his mastery at taking three marvelous, related science-fiction stories and adapting them to the fledgling cinematic art form established a relationship between literature and film that is the most symbiotic and profitable interaction of creative arts.

LITERATURE IN CINEMA B.Z. (Before Zanuck)
During the Silent Film Era, only a select few books were adapted to motion pictures. The reason was simple: Books are powered by dialogue, and silent film actors and actresses did not speak. Whenever books were adapted, key pieces of dialogue were put on title cards that ran below the live action on screen; these title cards and their verbiage increased as the film industry matured, and as audiences became more sophisticated and wanted to see full cinematic stories rather than slice-of-life “flickers.” It was left to the actors and actresses to completely re-enact the characters, and audiences to interpret what was said, implied and meant by facial and body gestures. The ability of the silent actors to accomplish this attested to their excellence.

Books came into their own as sources of cinematic material because of the advent of sound. Immediately after entertainer Al Jolson made spoken dialogue and music fashionable in The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool in 1927-28, studios and the movie theaters they owned and controlled made a mass conversion to sound; by 1930, three-quarters of the country’s theaters were wired for sound, and the silent film was reduced to a couple of late issues by the Little Tramp, Charlie Chaplin. Location shooting, a staple of the Silent Era, was effectively ceased, as studios were forced to shoot on sound stages to deal with the cumbersome, primitive early sound equipment. The other big change came with the actors themselves: The vast majority of silent actors, used to expressing with their eyes, faces and physical gestures, could not adapt to stiff, wooden stage acting. When they had to speak, some of their voices simply did not match up with the public’s perception of their personalities. The biggest victim was Clara Bow, who went from the world-famous “It Girl” – the flapper-girl, Charleston-dancing, fast-living symbol of the Roaring Twenties – to an out-of-work actress when her spoken voice revealed a thick Brooklyn street accent at distinct odds with her sultry, peppy, light-as-a-feather on-screen persona. Consequently, Hollywood studios populated their movies with Broadway stars that knew how to deliver spoken lines and music.

Film directors – all Silent Era veterans themselves – hadn’t yet figured out how to integrate spoken dialogue and scene-by-scene movement from their casts. Furthermore, they were encumbered by studio bosses who insisted that they fill the actors’ mouths with words and/or songs, and restrict their movements to a minimum. The problem was the sound equipment: It was so primitive that the slightest spontaneous movement, or walk out of a microphone’s immediate range, would ruin the scene and require a re-take. When you watch movies from the early 1930s, even Academy Award winners like Grand Hotel, notice how immobile the actors appear on their very obvious studio sets while words fire out of their mouths like swarming machine gun nests.

For that reason, Broadway plays, musicals and original pieces built around entertainers like Jolson became de rigeur. By 1932, as audiences poured into theaters by the tens of millions each week, they grew tired of the novelty of re-adapting colorful Broadway shows for the still black-and-white screen. They demanded more and more sophisticated material – and the studios had no one yet capable of penning original scenarios with sound. Thus, for purely financial reasons – to keep the suddenly juggernaut filmmaking industry going, to keep fresh new product in the theaters – producers Samuel L. Goldwyn of Goldwyn Pictures, Irving Thalberg of MGM, David O. Selznick of RKO and Daryl F. Zanuck of Warner Bros. turned en masse to another source of material – literature. It was the mother lode for cinema, a source as vital to filmmaking as crude oil is to the civilized world.

Literature offered the perfect solution for the fledgling Studio Era of the early 1930s: plenty of dialogue for the actors, storylines to develop into three-act filmmaking that became formulaic (always preferred by the profit-mongering studio bosses), and an endless supply of movie subjects. The latter was of utmost importance: Unlike today’s cinematic climate, in which major studios and partnering production companies make fewer than 200 new pictures a year (not including independent filmmakers), the major studios of the 1930s produced an average of 500 to 600 films annually. The early Studio Era producers had to serve weekly film attendances that peaked at 110 million – 75% of the U.S. population at the time, and nearly four times the weekly attendance in 2005. The major studios owned theater chains that had to be continually serviced with product, and, as previously mentioned, audiences wanted good, compelling stories with plot, character development and resonant themes in their dramas, romances, adventures, mysteries, hard-boiled crime stories, comedies and even emerging sci-fi and special effects movies like RKO’s King Kong. What better place to turn but to the world’s great books?

The first Studio Era producers approached the matter of adaptation in different ways. Thalberg, MGM’s wunderkind producer who created the Studio Era mentality of control-from-the-top before he died in 1937 at age 36, was hands-on in every step of the process. Thus, he would buy the rights to adapt a book to the big screen, then turn it loose to his stable of screenwriters. One writer would adapt setting and identify the book’s key scenes to be shot (with Thalberg’s supervision), another would develop characterization, a third would work with dialogue, and a fourth would sew the pieces together. It seems like a sure-fire way to lose the spirit of the author’s story and message, but it accomplished Thalberg’s two biggest goals: 1) To keep his writers compartmentalized in areas of specialty; and 2) To maintain complete control over the direction of the project by not allowing any scenarist to adapt an entire book. Once the scenario was assembled, Thalberg would hand it off to a director and say, “Shoot it as written;” it was hardly the director-as-auteur climate of today’s cinema. Books such as Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz were adapted to film in this manner.

Goldwyn was a more meticulous filmmaker than Thalberg, for one simple reason: His studio only produced a few movies each year, unlike the MGM juggernaut that was cranking out one new feature per week. Goldwyn was as dictatorial as Thalberg, but he did rely more on his directors and actors to utilize their skills in adapting stories and characters. He also took uncharacteristic approaches to create literature from ideas, which led him through a string of box-office successes in the 1930s and his signature piece in the 1940s, The Best Years of Our Lives. When his wife, Frances, pointed out a Time magazine article about World War II soldiers returning for one-month furloughs after as many as 30 months overseas, Goldwyn hired famed novelist MacKinlay Kantor to create a screenplay from the article. Kantor proceeded to write an entire novel, which Goldwyn and another screenwriter, Robert Sherwood, then sheared down into screen form. The result was one of the greatest “coming home” stories of all time – and a most unique way of adapting literature. Goldwyn’s approach borrowed somewhat from MGM, which commissioned authors like Booth Tarkington, Carl Sandburg and Rose Franken to create novels out of thin air, with one caveat – that they be immediately convertible into motion pictures. Some books were made into pictures; some remained only in print form; many never saw the light of day.
(Three decades later, new Paramount Pictures chief Robert Evans harkened back to this era when he quarantined a pair of young writers, Erich Segal and Mario Puzo, on the Paramount lot and told them to make something of promising story outlines they’d presented him. The result was Love Story and The Godfather, two movies that ignited a resurgence in movie attendances in the 1970s and launched the modern blockbuster era.)

Some studios asked existing novelists to adapt their own books. The reasoning was simple: If someone could write a book, why couldn’t they write a screenplay? And who better to write that screenplay than the originator of the story? Yet, this approach met with decidedly mixed results. One of the first great novelists to find success in Hollywood was William Faulkner, whose ability to compose scenes and people them with truly down home characters whose individual stories carried universal themes converted well to cinema – especially when he was writing the scenarios. Faulkner spent ten years developing and maintaining a nice balancing act between writing novels and writing screenplays. He paved the way for others to follow…if they could make the switch.

That was a huge “if.” Great 1920s novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Zelda) spent six years in Hollywood, working on various scripts; among others, he was a contributor to the new MGM studios’ smashing breakout picture in 1925, Ben-Hur. However, Fitzgerald found the truncated storytelling format of a movie scenario, and top-down studio demands, too constricting for his style. He went to Hollywood to make that ever-elusive fortune, but departed without any significant credits as a screenwriter.

Likewise, Ernest Hemingway realized early on that his fiercely independent, irascible personality and complete inability to work in concert with others would render him toothless and creatively exhausted if he tried to write scenarios. However, because he was a best-selling author of books whose crisp, sparsely worded storytelling and exact dialogue were ideal source materials for cinema – not to mention the willingness of his fan base to watch visual portrayals of the stories – Hemingway’s books became Hollywood favorites. That gave him considerable clout, and he used it: He insisted that his friend and masterful adaptor of his male protagonists, Gary Cooper, play the lead in two of his works, To Have And Have Not and For Whom The Bell Tolls. It didn’t hurt that Cooper was Hollywood’s top box-office draw of the 1930s and 1940s. For the latter picture, he also demanded that Paramount cast rising starlet Ingrid Bergman. One after another, Hemingway’s books became movies. He never wrote a word of the scenarios, though he shared in approving them.

One of today’s greatest crime and mystery authors, Elmore Leonard, picked up where Hemingway left off. Leonard has written more than 40 books, most of them best-sellers. His combination of wit, crisp storytelling, fast pacing and incisive dialogue – the most incisive of any author living today – makes his works easily adaptable. Like Hemingway, his stories pivot on three qualities: Dialogue, compelling characters, and great tales told in the fewest possible words. One can almost transfer a Leonard novel to a screenplay format in a single stroke; Hollywood producers and directors love this man because his dialogue creates and defines his characters. His characters are even film buffs; the marriage could not be more complete. As Leonard says, “I let the writers write. I tell stories.” Among the more than 20 movies that have been made from Leonard’s books – often with him as a writer and/or an executive producer – are Get Shorty, Be Cool and Out of Time. He is one of three living writers whose book sales and movie grosses have each topped more than $200 million. The other two? Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. Leonard learned from Hemingway’s sparsity.

Then there were producers who simply said to authors: Give me your book, and I will faithfully adapt it. David O. Selznick approached the conversion of books with the same assembly-line methods as his former MGM production head, Thalberg, but he was more attentive to the details of the story and much more honoring to the author. When he purchased the rights to Gone With The Wind in 1936, he promised author Margaret Mitchell he would remain faithful to the story. For three years, he burned through ten screenwriters and almost as many directors to adapt the story of Scarlett & Rhett according to Mitchell, firing any screenwriter or director who dared to brush their personal touch on the book. What resulted was a four-hour, 692-master-scene tour de force that cost an astonishing (for 1939) $4 million, brought Technicolor into vogue and set industry standards in storytelling, acting, costuming, staging and overall presentation. As an astonished and delighted Mitchell herself said afterward, the only scenes from the book that Selznick chose not to use weren’t that significant to the overall story. So thrilled was Selznick by the public response (When adjusted for inflation and modern ticket prices, Gone With The Wind’s worldwide gross tops $3 billion in 2005 dollars, the all-time leader), he gave the equally happy Mitchell a $50,000 bonus atop her $50,000 rights fee – an unheard of gesture. Selznick’s faithful portrayal of Mitchell’s Civil War novel sent a message through the Hollywood studio system: The era of literature in film had arrived
.
Besides Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz, the third major adaptation of 1939 was Daphne DuMaurier’s novel, Rebecca. The book, one of the nation’s top best-sellers between 1935-40, was optioned by RKO – the same studio that had released King Kong. An impressive young British director, Alfred Hitchcock, was assigned the project and masterfully saw it through, remaining faithful to DuMaurier’s plotting and tone while focusing on the most compelling scenes in the book. He also inserted some prototypical Hitchcock intrigue and shadow into lead characters Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, further endearing the public to the Academy Award-winning film.

However, other forms of literary adaptation combined with the silver screen to make Rebecca one of the first examples of multi-media novel treatment. Prior to the film’s release, Ladies Home Journal serialized the novel word-for-word, priming the cinematic pump for its 4 million readers. Then, Mercury Radio master voice Orson Welles, fresh off the War of the Worlds reading that created a national panic, performed a radio adaptation for tens of millions of listeners. RKO was so impressed with Welles’ ability to interpret and dramatize literature that they signed him on as a producer-director: His first picture for the studio was the immortal Citizen Kane.

NEXT: Daryl F. Zanuck changes the relationship between authors and Hollywood forever.