Super Size Me is the major problem of American adaptations of content originating elsewhere.  The wonderful Austrailian series, The Slap is a good example.

In the original series, a conglomeration of friends and relatives are bonded as family.  They come together for Hector’s 40th birthday.

A young overindulged child, Hugo, is insufferable during the day, ruining other’s toys and finally swinging a cricket bat at another child’s head.

Harry (not the child’s father) picks Hugo up and when Hugo kicks him, Harry slaps the boy. Rosie, Hugo’s mom, goes ballistic. The aftermath of the slap tears the family apart.

In the original, Hector is a low-level city administrator, stalled in his job. He’s feeling his age and fantasizes about their young babysitter.  In the American version, he upgraded to architect and city planner, but still idealizes the babysitter.

His wife, Aisha, is a veterinarian with a small practice.  In the American version, she is promoted to a medical doctor and head of a successful clinic.

Rosie, Hugo’s mom, is a stay at home hippy mom and lives in a ramshackle home with husband, Garry, a failed artist/painter working as a laborer. In the American version, she lives in an artistically expensive bohemian home with husband, Garry a successful well-known artist/painter.

Hector, in the Australian version, is a mechanic and car salesman. He is the slapper. In the American version, he is a rare auto dealer.

It is as if American writers and showrunners believe conflict is intensified and the dramatic stakes are raised if the characters are high-status individuals. The American version flopped while the Australian version garnered a variety of awards, deservedly so.

All you need to know about the Super Size Me phenomena is the American remake of  Los Misterios de Laura, The Mysteries of Laura.  In the South American series, the heroine is a frumpy middle-aged Columbo-like female detective called Laura Pero (Laura the Hound). In the American series she is played by a glamorous, Debra Messing named Laura Diamond. In one episode, the slender curvaceous Messing swims in a $1300 bathing suit at a spa she is surveilling.

My advice to American Broadcasters is “get real” and stop Super Sizing. It doesn’t improve the story and in most cases ruins it!

A producer I’ve worked with often over the last few years has a continuing question in his work: how do we stay true to the original source material and create a good cinematic adaptation?

I believe a writer/producer/director needs only to honor the emotional truth of an adapted work.  Facts, “what really happened”, ancillary characters, and chronology can all be altered or shifted in service of portraying the emotional core of the story on screen.

Your job is to tell what is MOST TRUE about the character and story.  Lots of things might be true or were true over time, but that’s not a movie.  Life is chaotic, contradictory, and confusing.  Film is not.

That doesn’t mean it’s okay to disregard key factual elements of the story for no reason. Hue to the original story structure until it gets in the way of the emotional through line. Then, toss out anything that detracts from what the film is meant to convey at its heart.

It’s rather like a fish.  All the disparate elements have to support the spine. All creatives choices must connect directly to the emotional core.  Ancillary characters might need to be eliminated or combined, facts might need to be ignored or glossed over, chronology might need to be shifted. All the story “bones” must directly connect with the film’s “spine”.  Concentrate on what is most true. Leave the rest behind.

The way to determine the emotional core of the film is to find what is at the center of the protagonist’s emotional journey. Drawing a Character Map will help you do this.  Click HERE

If you’re on Pinterest, why not follow my Pinterest board full of useful writing advice? It will be updated weekly, so you can keep track if you ever need an excellent video essay, or some relevant advice to whatever problems you are facing. You can always drop me a line at [email protected] with the subject “Ask Laurie” and I will do my best to answer it. I might even include it in an upcoming edition of Writing Advice Wednesday!

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Michael Ondaatje:  I spent six years writing the book, The English Patient, the last two years of which were spent creating the only structure I thought it could have. So to turn around and dismantle that structure and put the head where the tail was… There’s no way I could have been objective and known what should go, what should stay.

WD:  Were you involved in the initial script development?

MO:  Quite a lot. Anthony Minghella, Saul Zaentz and I met every time there was a draft, and I think we worked well and adventurously together. The script felt “new,” and was not a “shadow” of the book. Because all three of us were working on something new it was a much more exciting project. I was amazed, right from the beginning, how Anthony got the voices, when Barnes meets Katherine and says, “Of course, I know your mother,” that sense of class knowledge of each other was caught perfectly. In any case, each time there was a new draft, we would meet up. It was a real education in terms of how a script gets tighter and tighter. Film is much tougher. I don’t think I could write a great chapter and then give it up because of the book’s overall time limitations, as you sometimes must do with entire scenes in film. That’s like a bad joke for a writer.

WD:  I run into so many people who, when they hear I’m involved with the film, say, “Oh, I loved the book.” And I get this sinking feeling, not out of disrespect to the movie, but that somehow they’re not going to see the book, not even a version of the book. They’ll see something that grew out of it.

MO: I feel the film has become something quite distinct, with its own DNA.

Read the full article HERE

The just completed Thrillerfest — think  Comic-Con for thriller authors and their fans —   featured a lecture that caught my eye. Sleepers author Lorenzo Carcaterra chose the 10 best thriller films made from books, the 10 worst, and the 10 he most wants to see get made.

Carcaterra’s Sleepers was turned into a hit film by Barry Levinson, and most of his subsequent thrillers are under option by studios and big producers.  His latest, Midnight Angels — an art history thriller set in Florence — was just published by Ballantine and is just being shopped now. Carcaterra cautioned that his  lists (culled with the help of other authors and editors) were subjective, guaranteed to stir rancor, and maybe a frivolous exercise. So I say, what’s wrong with a little subjectivity, rancor, and frivolity on a summer Sunday morning?

The 10 Best:  The Bourne Trilogy, Silence of the Lambs, Day of the Jackal, 3 Days of the Condor, The Manchurian Candidate, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Getaway (Steve McQueen version), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The French Connection, Patriot Games and Marathon Man (the last two tie for 10th).

The 10 Worst: The Getaway (Alec Baldwin version),  The Eiger Sanction, The Osterman Weekend, The Manchurian Candidate (Denzel Washington version), The Sum of All Fears, The Da Vinci Code, Hannibal Rising, The Chamber, Hostage, Heat (the William Goldman novel adapted into a Burt Reynolds pic). Carcaterra hated the Richard Chamberlain TV adaptation of The Bourne Identity so much, he gave it dishonorable mention.

The 10 That Should Be Made: The Vince Flynn-written series about government operative Mitch Rapp (CBS Films is trying to make Consent to Kill, hoping Gerard Butler or Matthew Fox will star for Antoine Fuqua); Brad Thor ‘s Scot Horvath series;  Lee Child’s series on hulking drifter Jack Reacher (last I recall, Cruise/Wagner had the rights, and while Reacher might be the top selling thriller protagonist without a film series, little has happened to get a film like The Killing Floor made); James Rollins’ Sigma Force series, William Diehl’s The Hunt, Bill Granger’s The November Man, Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Alon series, any of  Matthew Pearl’s novels that include The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow and The Last Dickens;  Christopher Reich’s Numbered Account; and PD James’ Innocent Blood and Jack Higgins’ Luciano’s Luck (tied for 10th).

Carcaterra put numerous authors on the best and the worst lists, including author Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series, the Jim Thompson novel The Getaway (Carcaterra thought McQueen’s Doc McCoy was the personification of cool while Baldwin was too pretty)  Tom Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series and William Goldman. Carcaterra  considers Goldman’s Marathon Man to be one of the best adaptations ever, but he’s friends with Goldman, and the author/screenwriter suggested his own work, Heat, for the bad list). What becomes clear from Carcaterra’s experience is that the best adaptations are the ones where the screenwriter/director has the guts to tear apart the book to serve the film, even if a superstar author (think Clancy in Patriot Games or Anne Rice at the start of Interview with the Vampire) kicks and screams. The other make or break variable is the impact of actors who can use their influence to screw things up, or elevate the film.  On Sleepers, Carcaterra said  when they got Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, the scenes for their characters escalated and made the movie much better.

“The Bourne Identity film is much better than the book, and when Tony Gilroy was asked to write, he told them he didn’t care for the book,” Carcaterra said. “He finally said the only part that interested him was an assassin who didn’t know who he was, wanted to find out, but didn’t want to kill. Of course, to find out, he has to kill.  It was a troubled shoot, a lot of reshoots, but that core idea and the script started what has become the best thriller book series. I put all three into the same category because they’re all so good.”

Carcaterra said it was smart to change James Grady’s 6 Days of the Condor: “Whether it was a screenwriter economizing or a producer short of cash, it was a better title and the tightened time line helped the movie.” He said the David Fincher adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo likely won’t come close to the darkness of the Swedish film that he feels will be tough to improve. Carcaterra worked on TV shows with Sonny Grosso, one of the two cops in The French Connection. Grosso  told him that William Friedkin didn’t even read the book when he first met the cops, but studied them closely. “He was interested in these two cowboys on the streets, and the details of the case got sketched over,” Carcaterra said. “The chase scene was invented, the subway shooting scene didn’t happened. And when Sonny told Friedkin that shooting that Frenchman in the back wouldn’t happen because cops don’t shoot fleeing suspects in the back, Friedkin said, this guy killed five people, and the crowd will go nuts. He was absolutely right.”

Carcaterra said The Da Vinci Code suffered from reverence to Dan Brown’s huge bestseller and the fear of turning off the book’s huge fan base. Angels & Demons was a much better film, Carcaterra said, because the screenwriting and plotting were bolder.

Authors who get script approval can often hamper a screen adaptation, unless it is someone like Elmore Leonard, who wrote so many scripts himself that he knows what works on the screen and isn’t precious about his prose.  “Authors like Elmore realize it’s unseemly to complain, when you consider how much we get paid. When Sydney Pollack mentioned to John Grisham he hoped they hadn’t messed up The Firm, Grisham  said ‘if you did, you’ll never hear it from me.’ Anne Rice took out full page ads about the casting of Interview with the Vampire, until maybe somebody explained her backend definition, and suddenly she was ecstatic,” Carcaterra said. “Adapting books into movies is a hard job that becomes impossible with an author standing over your shoulder who doesn’t understand the process. Authors get paid very well, and so you have to take the money and shut up.”

An interviewer asked Updike, about his writing routine: You’ve said that it was fairly easy to write the Rabbit books. Do you write methodically? Do you have a schedule that you stick to?

John Updike answered: “Since I’ve gone to some trouble not to teach, and not to have any other employment, I have no reason not to go to my desk after breakfast and work there until lunch. So I work three or four hours in the morning, and it’s not all covering blank paper with beautiful phrases. You begin by answering a letter or two. There’s a lot of junk in your life. There’s a letter. And most people have junk in their lives.

“But I try to give about three hours to the project at hand and to move it along. There’s a danger if you don’t move it along steadily that you’re going to forget what it’s about, so you must keep in touch with it I figure. So once embarked, yes, I do try to stick to a schedule. I’ve been maintaining this schedule off and on — well, really since I moved up to Ipswich in ’57.”

“It’s a long time to be doing one thing. I don’t know how to retire. I don’t know how to get off the horse, though. I still like to do it. I still love books coming out. I love the smell of glue and the shiny look of the jacket and the type, and to see your own scribbles turned into more or less impeccable type. It’s still a great thrill for me, so I will probably persevere a little longer, but I do think maybe the time has come for me to be a little less compulsive, and maybe (slow down) the book-a-year technique, which has been basically the way I’ve operated.”

The interviewer commented:  “We’ve spoken to a number of writers who said they wrote a certain number of pages every day. There’s a lot to be said for having a routine you can’t run away from.”

Updike answered: “Right. It saves you from giving up.”

This interview is from the excellent website Daily Routines. I think this interview is incredibly instructive. Updike was a full time writer and only wrote three to four hours a day (including doing what he terms administrative junk). Consistently working, even only one hour day, will make you incredibly productive. It doesn’t seem like much, but over time it adds up.

That’s why my book The One Hour Screenwriter is so useful. It shows you exactly how to structure those writing hours to get the most out of them and move your script along. Like Updike, don’t give up! Just keep writing!

A film of Rabbit, Run was made in 1970. It was not a popular success. There were a few other adaptations of his work for TV, but his biggest cinematic success was The Witches Of Eastwick (starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer).

Why did so few of Updike’s works translate effectively to the screen? Because his books are largely interior– filled with a character’s thoughts, feelings and insights. His characters’ rich inner lives are what make his novels so evocative. In a film adaptation, the screenwriter must make those internal moments external and active.

When looking for a novel to adapt, look for a story that has a strong external narrative. Find a story in which a character’s actions lead to specific external consequences with real impact and which effect important transformation in the character or others. Find stories in which emotion, meaning and insight can be portrayed through action. No matter how brilliant the book, no matter how many awards it’s won no matter how popular it is– if the book doesn’t have dramatic, observable and impactful action it is not a good candidate for a movie adaptation.

The cliche is that second-rate books make first-rate movies and first-rate books make second-rate movies. Deeply-felt interior novels make delicious reading but simply do not translate to the screen.