Adaptation: Ode to and Perils thereof

When Fox Pictures purchased The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief in 1997, a then little-known screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, got the nod to write the script. In the minds of the executives who hired him, it was a straight adaptation job. Except that Kaufman didn't write the adaptation. Why? Because he kind of lost his way. He claims he didn't understand the book and got a terrible case of writer's block. So, instead, he invented an alter ego - a brother named Donald - and wrote ADAPTATION, a movie about writing an adaptation of The Orchid Thief. He went so far as to dedicate the script to his non-existent brother, Donald.

He was sure he'd committed professional suicide. Instead, ADAPTATION was fast-tracked and went on to be a spectacular critical and commercial success - and made Charlie Kaufman a household name!

Randy and I each went through the process of adapting a famous author's work in our second year, as screenwriting students, at Boston University's Film School. It was the equivalent of our thesis project. Randy adapted Gore Vidal's Burr, a tour de force historical work about American legend and/or fiend Aaron Burr. I adapted Inshallah, a great, rambling novel about the war in Lebanon by the late Italian war correspondent and novelist Oriana Fallaci. After teaming up as the Script Sages in 2003, we were contacted by several minor authors about adapting their work and each time declined.

Adapting is a tricky business. The boundaries get blurred very quickly. That's what made ADAPTATION such a great movie. When I graduated from BU, I didn't want all the effort I'd put into adapting Inshallah to be for naught...so I took matters into my own hands. My ignorance of how the process works didn't prevent me from directly contacting Ms. Fallaci's publishers and making an impromptu - uninvited - visit at their New York offices. I remember taking the Chinese bus into Manhattan and marching into the publishers' office to have a word with Ms. Fallaci's gorgeous publicity assistant. I did my 30-second pitch with her right there. "I've written a great adaptation of Ms. Fallaci's novel. I think this could be a great movie. I just graduated film school and have some contacts. I think this is the moment for this to be made into a film."

She was very polite. Then, I was shown the door. I persisted. I sent the script to Ms. Fallaci's New York apartment. I continued to write letters and knock on doors.

Then, my new wife told me a FedEx package from Italy had arrived. I thought that I'd broken the sound barrier. Fallaci loved me. The Italians loved me. We were going to make a movie. Instead, it was a "cease and desist" letter from the office of Ms. Fallaci's attorney in Milan. It essentially told me that the option had been purchased, that my repeated overtures to Ms. Fallaci and her representatives were very troubling, and how the hell had I gotten her unlisted New York address anyway...

To make sure they got their point across, they faxed a copy of the "cease and decease" letter to my BU Film School professor and mentor who promptly called me on the phone. "Who the hell does she think she is Ernest F------ Hemingway?!" Steve Geller, who had himself lived in Italy and was familiar with the scene there, screeched into the phone.

Randy's experience adapating Burr was less contentious but also concluded in a similiar dead end. The aforementioned Steve Geller knew Gore Vidal from his Italy days (Vidal has and continues to reside in Italy). He gave Randy Vidal's address, and he wrote to him to see if he'd to look at the adaptation. Vidal agreed and liked what he read. He recommended Randy send it to his agent at CAA. For a fresh-out-of-school writer this seemed to be the dream shot. Alas, CAA quickly (though very politely) noted that the rights to Burr were owned by ABC/Disney, and they had no intention of doing anything with it. And so that was that.

The brushes with literary giants were exhilirating, but in the end it's pointless to adapt something if you don't have the rights. It's only an exercise, which can be a great learning tool, but, practically speaking, won't get you very far. So no matter how much you love the latest Dan Brown novel, forget it. And if one of those minor writers contacts you to adapt something, as with the post on spec writing, make sure you get paid to do the adaptation. Even if you love the project, you wouldn't be able to do much with a script that you wrote if the author of the original material backed away from the project. Of course, anything in the public domain is fair game, so if you think a Shakespeare play is dying to be updated you're on firmer ground there.

Still, even with the benefit of hindsight, I'm not sure I would do it all that differently. I don't believe I was acting like Donald, Kaufman's egomaniacal brother in ADAPTATION, though my ignorance should have caused me to be somewhat more humble in my approach. The point is adaptation is a tricky business. It's hard to get it right on paper. It's hard to get it right with executives at studios. It's hard not to offend the author at some point in the process. Even Charlie Kaufman didn't get it right...except that is in ADAPTATION.