Introduction
Adapting short stories or novels into films is a mug's game. Those who loved the book are likely to be more critical of the film version than they would be of an original story. As critic Christian Metz points out: "The reader of the novel, following the characteristic and singular paths of desire, has already gone through a whole process of clothing the words he has read in images, and when he sees the film, he would like to find the same images... But the reader of the novel will not always find his film, since what he has before him is now somebody else's phantasy, a thing rarely sympathetic..." [1] Those who didn't like the book, on the other hand, are not likely to be interested in a film version, while those who did not read the book are likely to be indifferent to it.
Still, adaptation from literary sources has been a traditional means of generating cinematic material since the beginnings of the film industry. There are strong arguments for doing this: a popular book will draw large audiences, whose members harbour hopes (however misplaced) of recreating the pleasure they got from their original reading the book. Regardless of the popularity of the literary source, a writer or director may feel that it has strong elements (an interesting story which hasn't been seen before or a unique character) which are worth the attempt to make it into a film.
In this article, I will look at three of Robert Altman's film adaptations: The Long Goodbye, based on Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel; The Player, adapted by author Michael Tolkin from his 1988 novel; and a group of Raymond Carver's short stories which were filmed as Short Cuts (working title: L. A. Short Cuts), screenplay by Altman and Frank Barhydt. This examination will hopefully bring out some of the issues of adapting films from literary sources, as well as some of the ways Altman found to deal with them.
The Long Goodbye is a hard-boiled detective novel which starts with hero Philip Marlowe investigating the death of his friend in a cheap Mexican hotel, a confession of the murder of his wife next to his body. Just as this seems to peter out, Marlowe is approached to babysit a famous writer, who may become violent when he's on an alcoholic bender, and protect his beautiful wife.
The Player is about a Hollywood studio executive who has been getting increasingly hostile postcards from a writer who, he comes to believe, he had met months earlier and promised to meet but never got back to. The executive, Griffin Mill, meets and kills a writer he believes was responsible for the postcards; the rest of the film deals with his efforts to evade responsibility for the crime, as well as continue his filmmaking career, which is jeopardised by a political struggle for control of the studio where he works.
The nine stories and poem written by Raymond Carver which make up the spine of Short Cuts are brief explorations of simple but telling episodes in people's lives. In an introduction to a volume which collected the stories (which had originally been published in different volumes), Altman claims that what appealed to him about Carver's stories was that they "capture the wonderful ideosyncrasies of human behaviour, the ideosyncracies that exist amid the randomness of life's experiences. And human behaviour, filled with all its mystery and inspiration, has always fascinated me." [2]
Sometimes, the plots were simple, almost mundane: a couple is asked to look after the apartment of their wealthier neighbours ("Neighbors"), for instance, or a casual remark by one of her customers prompts the husband of a waitress to nag her to lose weight ("They're Not Your Husband"). Sometimes, the stories are haunting in their evocation of the depths of human feeling: a woman is estranged from her husband when she finds that, on a fishing trip, he and his buddies ignored a corpse floating in the river near them for a day and a half before reporting it to the police ("So Much Water So Close To Home"), for example, or a couple whose son is hit by a car and dies just before his seventh birthday receives harassing phone calls ("A Small, Good Thing").
Beginnings
The first few minutes of a film, like the opening pages of a book, have to hook the participant enough to make him or her want to stay with the work. If you are not able to pique the participant's interest in what happens next, he or she will put the book down or lose interest in the film, in the worst case being moved to walk out.
Literary works have an advantage over films in that the reader does not necessarily expect an immediate story. A writer can spend the first few pages of a novel exploring a setting, a relationship or even an intellectual idea which will set the stage for the action to follow. A film can begin by conveying such things, but generally must initiate the plot early on and develop them in tandem with the developing story (often in mise en scene or dialogue).
A case in point is Altman's adaptation of The Long Goodbye. The film has a slam-bang opening, with Terry Lennox showing up on detective Philip Marlowe's doorstep asking to be taken to Tijuana. Lennox's wife is dead, and soon he will be too, an apparent suicide in a lonely Mexican village. Soon after, a mobster shows up and tries to convince Marlowe not to pursue an investigation (naturally, he does).
The book, by way of contrast, begins with Marlowe meeting Lennox and becoming the man's irregular drinking partner. The relationship isn't particularly close, and reasons for Marlowe's feeling of loyalty to him are obscure. The film, which skips over the first 25 pages of the novel, reduces this complex relationship to a single sentence of dialogue ("He was my friend.").
Short Cuts presented a different problem: how to connect 22 diverse characters, many of whom would never actually meet during the film. Altman's solution was to invent the idea that the area in which the film takes place was being sprayed with Malthion to fight a Med-fly infestation. All of the characters are somehow involved in this event: one is a pilot of one of the helicopters which sprays the area; another is a newscaster who editorializes about it; another is a mother who worries about what the chemical's presence in her pool will mean for her son's health; and so on.
Tying the diverse characters to a single event allows us to place them within the same general physical space (in this case, the suburbs of Los Angeles). More than this, however, it shows us that they are all part of the conceptual space of the created universe of the film; as they pursue their various interests, we know that they are all moving the esthetic purposes of the filmmaker forward. (This is, of course, not the first time Altman has used this device. Both Nashville and Pret-a-Porter begin with many of the major characters being stuck in traffic jams, converging on the cities in which the main action of the films will take place.)
Perhaps the most ambitious opening belongs to Altman's adaptation of The Player, which starts with a shot which lasts just over eight minutes, including the following elements: fading in on the office of the head of a movie studio and dollying out the front door; the main character, Griffin Mill, driving into the parking lot; following the studio security chief who is talking about old films; Mill taking story pitches (which we see through his office window); executives walking through the parking lot talking about hiring Larry Levy to compete with Mill for a top job at the studio, and; the intern getting hit by a car after he has picked up the mail, revealing a postcard which sets the plot in motion. This opening shot compresses the dual purposes of the opening sequences of many of Altman's other films: introducing the main characters and plotlines which will be developed in the rest of the film.
Point of View and Character
One advantage literature has over film is that it can explore the interior workings of a character's mind. Because film is a visual medium, it cannot directly show the audience what is going on in the head of a character; it can only show how a character behaves, from which the audience will hopefully be able to infer what the character is thinking.
The Long Goodbye, for instance, is told in the first person; the narrator is Philip Marlowe. He has a wry, cynical take on the characters around him, but he also seems to have compassion for the disadvantaged, both of which color the reader's view of what happens in the novel. Leigh Brackett's screenplay does not attempt to replicate this at all, contenting itself with recreating the plot of the novel. In this way, some of Marlowe's cleverest observations (and Chandler's wonderful prose, especially his colourful use of metaphor) are absent from the film: Marlowe's famous observation that "I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split," [3] for instance, or his admission that "I could be wetter than a drowned kitten." [4]
Although Brackett did not choose this route, some screenwriters attempt to reproduce a character's interior monologue in voice over narration, a device which quickly became a cliche of hardboiled detective films. Voice over can be an effective way of letting the audience in on a character's thoughts; unfortunately, too often it is used to bridge scenes which otherwise do not logically flow together (in violation of Professional Writer's Rule Number Thirty-two: show, don't tell). It's very tempting to use voice over dialogue to plaster over holes in a narrative, a temptation writers should. (The other major use of voice over narration is to reinforce the action in the film by, essentially, telling us what we have just seen; I have always felt this was pointlessly redundant, showing a lack of faith in the filmmaker to get his or her point across or in the audience to understand it.)
The Player is not told in the first person, but it is clearly told from the point of view of studio executive Griffin Mill. Mill appears in every scene. Moreover, author Tolkin often dips into his consciousness to give readers the chance to listen in on what he is thinking. In the film, Mill's character is at the centre of every scene, privileging his point of view in a way similar to the novel.
However, his character has been somewhat altered in the transition from book to film. In the novel, for instance, Mill is not sure from the outset that David Kahane, the writer he kills, is the writer who has been sending him the threatening postcards. Ultimately, it doesn't matter: he finds a bizarre rationalization for the crime: "How long would it take this gesture of appeasement carried on the scent of that bloodless death to reach the Writer? Stuffing a body under a car in Pasadena to convince someone to leave you alone is a complicated message... Griffin drove to the studio, hoping he had addressed this message correctly. He had sent something by slow mail, but he was certain it would arrive." [5]
Again, because we cannot enter Mill's head via film, only see his actions, this idea of killing Kahane to send a message to the Writer would be a very difficult thing to portray. In the film, Kahane taunts Mill in the parking lot about Larry Levy taking over his job at the studio; as Mill kills him, Mill frantically shouts "Keep it to yourself, god damn it, keep it to yourself." [6]. This makes the motive for the killing much less abstract, much more concrete, much more cinematic.
This may seem like a small detail, but changing Mill's motivation for his fatal attack on Kahane changes the way we view Mill's character. He seems quite callous in the novel, a feeling accentuated by the fact that he strangles Kahane to death. In the film, on the other hand, the murder is more a crime of passion, done in the heat of the moment when Mill is under great pressure (he beats Kahane's head against the pavement a couple of times, leaving the unconscious Kahane to drown in a small puddle of water, a seemingly less premeditated act). It's easier for us to sympathize with Mill's actions in the film, because who hasn't ever feared losing his or her job?
The accumulation of such small changes makes Mill a much more sympathetic character in the film than he was in the book. In one scene in the novel, the writer shoots out Mill's rear window, prompting the following outburst: "I'm alive you piece of shit, you fucking dogshit writer, you fucking loser, try to kill me, you fucking asshole, try to kill me, you don't fucking know, you don't fucking know who I am you cheap wimp limp dick, you pussy, I'm the killer, I'm the killer." [7] Such profane sentiments distance the reader from the character.
In the film, Mill gets a fax in his car which tells him to look under his coat, where he finds a deadly snake (a much more interesting, because less cliched, threat than a gunshot). Shaken, he pulls the car over to the side of the road and beats the snake to death with his umbrella. He then visits June, the girlfriend of the writer he has killed (a woman to whom he is attracted); Mill is highly shaken and vulnerable. As played by actor Tim Robbins, he is a most appealing character.
Inevitably, internal processes portrayed in a book must be externalized for film; the writer should be aware of how this affects the portrayal of characters.
Raymond Carver's short stories contain a variety of different points of view; some are told in the first person, others in the third. The film version is strictly third person. This change often affects how the audience relates to the events on the screen; this is shown by how Altman adapted the story "So Much Water So Close To Home."
Carver's original story was told from the point of view of one of the fishermen's wives, Claire. It takes place when her husband comes home a day early from his fishing trip; he makes love to her, then slowly tells her of finding the corpse in the water and ignoring it while continuing to fish. Claire is the moral centre of the story: as the details of the weekend come out, she becomes more and more disgusted with her husband, eventually coming to the conclusion that their marriage has been irrevocably changed by his callous, selfish behaviour, although she cannot articulate why or how.
The film actually shows us the events which are only referred to after the fact in the short story, and we are not privy to Claire's internal emotional responses, although they are effectively communicated in the performance. This minimizes the effect of Claire's internal struggle, as well as the work's moral judgment of the fishermen's behaviour (although the audience is still welcome to form its own moral judgments). This is a good example of a general difference between the two media which writers moving between them should always keep in mind: literature is best when it portrays the subjective world of experience while film works best when it portrays the objective world of what can be directly seen.
On a more practical level, characters may have to be cut from a film for reasons as theoretical as limiting the number of people an audience must keep track of to as prosaic as keeping the budget down by limiting the number of actors who have to be paid. Sometimes, a character's function within a story can be dispensed with entirely: the writer's wife in The Long Goodbye, for instance, first meets Marlowe through the intermediary of her husband's literary agent in the novel, while she asks to meet him herself in the film. The agent's role was cut. Sometimes, a film character combines the characteristics or storytelling functions of more than one character in a novel.
In most cases, because the main character is the main focus of a film, taking the time to develop a lot of secondary characters is not considered good screenwriting technique. However, as important as limiting the number of characters in a film can be, it comes with a cost: over-simplifying an author's intent.
At one point in The Long Goodbye, for instance, Marlowe has to find the writer, who he believes is drying out at a quack doctor's place. In the novel, he investigates three possibilities; in the film, he zeroes in on the right place, saying in dialogue that the other two were dead ends. In the novel, Chandler portrays a sleazy, but seldom seen aspect of life in Los Angeles; the film glosses over this in order to make the plot more direct.
Time and Setting
Choosing a book to adapt into a film, it isn't necessary to limit yourself to modern works (otherwise there would be no Shakespearean movie industry-within-the-industry), nor is it necessary to limit yourself to considering works set in the place where you live. You can do a wonderful straight period adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, for instance, or you can set it in present-day LA and create the equally entertaining Clueless.
The reason filmmakers can do this is that the best literary works reveal universal characteristics of human nature and experience. Emma's take on romantic yearnings is not specific to its time or place. The important thing is that a modern audience can identify with the characters and the theme speaks to modern conditions of life. (Keep in mind, though, that some works are too closely identified with the time and place in which they were written: I cannot imagine an adaptation of Solzhenitzen's The Gulag Archipelago set in Las Vegas. Even when dealing with a work which contains universals, subjects should always be chosen with sensitivity towards their content...)
There can be good reasons to retain the setting of a literary work in a film version. Altman's adaptation of Richard Hooker's novel M*A*S*H, for instance, remained set in the Korean War, even though it was intended as a comment on the Vietnam War which was then raging. Keeping the original setting allowed audiences to maintain a distance from the events of the film which made it easier for them to assimilate its point; setting the film in Vietnam may have alienated audiences by making Altman's satiric intent too obvious.
Even where settings can be altered with relative ease, other elements may be affected by the transposition. The Long Goodbye, for instance, was set in the year it was written: 1952. Altman's film version is set in 1972, the year the film was made. On one level, this is perfectly acceptable: Chandler's world of mobsters, corrupt officials and the bored and dangerous wealthy is equally believable in either time period. On the other hand, a small part of the story was affected by the change.
In the novel, the wife of the writer wears a medallion given to her by a veteran of World War II. It turns out that the medallion was given to her by Marlowe's friend (who, at the time, was going by another name), a fact which ties her to the first murder in the book. This fact wouldn't make sense in the film version: the characters weren't old enough to have been involved in WW II. Screenwriter Brackett could have updated the device to refer to Vietnam, but he chose to drop this sub-plot altogether.
In a similar vein, although some of the stories which made up Short Cuts had been written as far back as the 1960s, the film was set in the 1990s, which sometimes required cutting out some events. In the short story "Vitamins," for instance, a really uncomfortable scene where a man is making a crude pass at another man's date ends with the man taking out a box containing the ear of a man he killed in Vietnam, destroying any possibility that the date could have lead to a tryst later on. Although the scene remains more or less intact in the film, the ear (something of a punchline in the original story) has been lost.
Complexity
It is something of a commonplace to point out that the average half hour television newscast contains as much verbal information as the average front page of a daily newspaper. Even allowing for the information content of the visuals on a newscast, it should be clear that the amount of information available in a visual medium like television (or film) is much smaller than that available in short stories or novels in a print medium.
The Long Goodbye typifies the Hollywood approach to dealing with this fundamental problem of adaptation: simplify. As screenwriter Brackett explained, "we were faced with a technical problem of this enormous book, which was the longest Chandler ever wrote. It's tremendously involuted and convoluted. If you did it the way he wrote it, you would have a five hour film." [8] Novelist and screenwriter Peter Lefcourt describes the process of this type of adaptation: "You make choices. Film has its own grammar; you have to look at the whole pace of it, and take anything out, however texturally rich, that slows it down too much." [9] In The Long Goodbye, characters and sub-plots (in short, anything which does not directly contribute to the forward motion of the most basic story) disappear. Unfortunately, so does Chandler's prose. Limiting the screenplay to a barebones rendition of the plot invariably bleeds the film of much that made the original literary work so appealing. [10]
Filmmaker Luis Bunuel described this problem brilliantly when he wrote: "On several occasions, both American and European producers have suggested I tackle a film version of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, a novel set in Cuernavaca. I've read the book many times but cannot come up with a solution for the cinema. If you confine yourself to the action, it's hopelessly banal, because everything important takes place within the main character, and how can inner conflicts be translated into effective images on the screen?" [11] Coming from a filmmaker who made a career of translating the inner conflicts of characters into effective images on the screen, this is a testament to the difficulty of the process of adaptation in general (and Lowry's novel in particular).
Having recognized the limitations film has when compared to literature, the screenwriter must find cinematic equivalents of literary effects. Altman is a master at this. The Carver stories which make up Short Cuts, for instance, are completely self-contained; the characters do not meet and there is no indication that any of them know each other. For the film, Altman has brought characters from different stories together. Thus, the person who accidentally hits a child with his car in "A Small, Good Thing" is combined with the waitress character from "They're Not Your Husband."
Carver's stories are about the role random chance plays in our lives. While this remains at the centre of Altman's Short Cuts, there is also a sense that human beings live in a web of connections with each other, that the person who is the faceless catalyst for events in one person's life has a life of his or her own. This also gives the film a needed coherence which it likely would not have had if the stories had remained separate.
In addition, we have a greater sense of the complexity of human beings because, unlike in the short stories, many of the characters we see in the film appear in more than one context. In one story, for instance, a character who has just picked up a girl with his friend, for no apparent reason starts hitting her in the head with a rock. In the film, the character is combined with the character who is humiliated in a bar when a black man crudely tries to pick up his wife (changed from his girlfriend in the original story); we also see his sexual longing and frustration in a number of different scenes throughout the film. Thus, although his violent outburst is still unexpected, it is motivated.
In these ways, Altman's film offers a more complex view of life than Carver's original stories.
In order to make the relationships work, Altman felt he had to change the setting of the film: "One of the reasons we transposed the settings from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California was that we wanted to place the action in a vast suburban setting so that it would be fortuitous for the characters to meet. There were logistical considerations as well, but we wanted linkages to be accidental. The setting is untapped Los Angeles, which is also Carver country, not Hollywood or Beverly Hills -- but Downey, Watts, Compton, Pomona, Glendale -- the American suburbia, the names you hear about on freeway reports." [12] This suggests that individual changes made in the process of adaptation have ramifications for the whole work, and should be conceived with the overall effect which the filmmaker is attempting to convey.
Perhaps Altman's most ambitious adaptation was for Tolkin's The Player: the film has a complex self-referentiality which is only barely hinted at in the book. This self-referentiality begins with the eight minute opening shot, which starts with a clapper board coming down and somebody shouting "Action!" [13] From the opening seconds of the film, Altman reminds the audience that they are watching a film. In a later segment of the opening shot, security chief Walter Stuckel, talking to the intern, makes direct reference to the type of shot we're in the middle of witnessing:
WALTER STUCKEL
The pictures these days are all MTV -- cut, cut, cut, cut. The opening shot of Welles' Touch of Evil was six and a half minutes long.
INTERN
Six and a half minutes, Walter?
STUCKEL
Well, three or four, anyway. He set up the whole picture with that one tracking shot. [14]
The dialogue is full of self-reference. Sometimes, as in the above conversation, the dialogue cleverly reflects what is happening in the story.
At other times, the self-reference becomes an ironic comment on the action in the film. After Mill has killed Kahane and started romancing his girlfriend, she asks him: "In movies, you can't have thieves as heroes, can you?" When Mill tells her about Hollywood's long history of gangster films, she replies, "Yes, but they have to suffer for their crimes, don't they?" [15] This becomes the fundamental question of the second half of the film: will Mill be caught and punished, or will he get away with the writer's murder, not suffering for his crimes? Another example occurs when Mill takes June, Kahane's girlfriend, to a spa for a romantic weekend: she rapturously asks him, "Do places like this really exist?" He replies: "Only in the movies." [16]
The Player also contains a variety of visual self-references, especially in the form of the writer's postcards and old movie posters. Early in the film, Mill, rooting in his secretary's desk looking for her phone log, briefly lingers over a postcard for They Made Me a Criminal, an ironic foreshadowing of the crime he will commit. After Detective Avery interviews Mill for any information he might have about Kahane's murder, the camera holds on a close-up of a poster for a film called Murder in the Big House. The relationship between action and self-reference often becomes complex. One of the posters shown in the film is for "M -- the worst crime of all!" When Mill takes June to the spa, he is referred to as "Mister M," in dialogue and in a place card on his table.
This strategy was almost entirely invented for the film. There are only two self-referential elements in the book. In the first, after the murder, the writer calls Mill, insisting that they meet. Mill gets the message in a screening room; he is told it is from Joe Gillis, who is described as "the writer who moves in with Gloria Swanson" in the film Sunset Boulevard. [17] In the book, we are not made aware of the fact that Gillis is actually killed by Swanson in the opening scene of the film. This scene was kept for the film, but, perhaps because the filmmakers didn't trust audiences to have much of a memory for film history, the connection to the action of The Player was made more explicit.
The other self-referential moment in the book comes in a fantasy where Mill wonders what will happen to his story:
Someone would buy the rights to the story, once they were both in jail. It would be a movie, it was the sort of morality play that television liked to put on, they'd spread it out over two nights, they'd make a big meal of the trial. Monday night, the affair with June and the murder of Kahane. Tuesday night, the brilliant work by Susan Avery. All the cat-and-mouse games with her, they'd be good for a half hour of screen time. what would they start with? Griffin would begin the show with Kahane's pitch. How would they construct the first meeting with June, what would the jury think happened? They'd have to show him meeting June before he killed Kahane. He'd have to have slept with June before the murder too. The phone call from June telling him that Kahane was at the movies. The trip to Pasadena -- would they include the Japanese piano bar? That would make a nice scene, thought Griffin, although it was possibly too subtle for television. And who would play Griffin? Michael Douglas? Val Kilmer would be terrific, thought Griffin, he could play the office politician, the smarm, the manipulator. Or John Malkovich? He could play the paranoid... [18]
The interiority of this passage obviously made it difficult to translate directly to the screen. However, Altman often manages to use his film referencing to allude to Mill's interior emotional state. Asked to come in to the Pasadena police station to talk to Detective Avery, Mill becomes increasingly flustered, acting like the guilty man he is. The scene starts with one of the detectives talking about Tod Browning's film, Freaks; it ends with a close-up of Mill, sweating as the police officers laugh at his behaviour. On the soundtrack, somebody is saying, "One of us. One of us." over and over; the famous line from Freaks lets us in on Mill's sense of his great discomfort with the events unfolding around him.
In any case, Altman took a device which was only superficially explored in the book and made it the central strategy of the film. [19] In so doing, he created a much richer and more complex artistic work.
Endings
Just as a strong beginning is an important way to involve an audience in a film, a strong ending is an important way to create a positive impression of the film as the audience leaves the theatre.
With his ensemble films, Altman invariably has one scene towards the end which brings all the characters together, a scene which mirrors that of the opening scene of the film. The football game in M*A*S*H is one example. In Short Cuts, we quickly see the reactions of most of the main characters to an earthquake; this is both a reminder that all the stories are happening in the same physical and conceptual universe, and emblematic of the randomness of events in the film.
Altman doesn't hesitate to take liberties with the endings of the stories he adapts, to mixed effect. In Chandler's version of The Long Goodbye, for instance, it turns out that Marlowe's friend Terry Lennox faked his own death in a cowardly attempt to evade the consequences of his wife's murder (which was probably committed by his former lover, the writer's wife -- one can never be sure with Chandler). This evasion may have been the cause of two other deaths, but Lennox wasn't directly responsible for them. In the final scene of the novel, Lennox goes to Marlowe's office to explain what happened before he permanently disappears.
In Altman's film version, Marlowe tracks Lennox down in Mexico, a change which gives the detective a more active role in solving the mystery. Despite Marlowe's insistence throughout the film that Lennox couldn't have committed the murder, it turns out that he did, absconding with a quarter of a million dollars of mob money. Without any indication of how deep their friendship was, we have no way of knowing how Marlowe could have so misjudged Lennox. Confronted with this truth, Marlowe does the obvious thing: he shoots Lennox to death and calmly walks away.
This ending is unsatisfying on a couple of different levels. For one thing, cold-blooded killing is inconsistent with Marlowe's character. For another, Chandler's universe is one of corruption where justice is intermittent and uncertain. By making Marlowe an avenging angel, Altman suggests that there is, in fact, a moral principle at work in the universe, even if it is the personal morality of one man.
Complicating this view of the ending is the fact that Altman's aim in the film, according to Steve Swires, could be read as "the satirization of the genre of the private-eye film, [which he accomplished] by placing the conventions of the forties in direct conflict with the realities of the seventies." [20] To take one example, this clash was clearly visible in the short scenes where Marlowe greets his neighbours, a New Agey group of women who are likely lesbians (scenes which do not appear in Brackett's screenplay). Making Marlowe a killer is, by this reasoning, an act of demythologizing the detective-hero.
Brackett offers a simpler explanation for the ending (which she wrote before Altman agreed to direct the film): that the novel's ending was too inconclusive. "You feel that Marlowe has been wounded in his most sensitive heart, as it were --" Brackett commented, "he's trusted this man as his friend; the friend has betrayed him. What do you do? We said let's just face up to it. He kills him." [21] This is, of course, straight out of Syd Field, who says that the story of a film cannot be satisfactorily resolved by anything other than the hero's efforts.
Still, the original ending of the novel, with an essentially good man unable to do anything about evil, seems much more powerful than Brackett's traditional reading of film heroics or Altman's satiric deconstruction of them.
The ending of The Player is, I think, far more effective. The climax of the novel occurs when Mill is asked to be in a lineup for the murder of David Kahane; when the witness cannot identify him, he walks out of the police station knowing he will get away with the murder. Six months later, Larry Levy, Mills nemesis, has taken over the studio, Mill is the head of his own production company, he has married a woman who drives the same car as the dead writer's girlfriend (an unnecessarily coy reference) and the writer drops him a postcard saying he's happily moved out of Los Angeles and left the business. In short, although interesting, everything after the lineup is anti-climactic, and the book peters out to a relatively weak conclusion.
Not so the film. After the murder, Andy Civella and Tom Oakley pitch an idea to Mill for a film called Habeus Corpus, a scene similar to one in the book. In the film, however, their roles are expanded; Mill is contemptuous of the pitch, but brings it to the studio head's attention because he thinks he can saddle rival Larry Levy with what he believes will be a failure. (It is one of the gentler ironies of the film that, despite occasionally talking about film as an art form, Mill is responsible for Habeus Corpus getting made because of the political infighting at the studio.)
Oakley, the screenwriter/director insists on two conditions: no stars and an ending where the heroine dies. "She's dead. Because that's the reality -- the innocent die." [22] During the pitch, Civella suggests Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts for the leads; although Oakley disagrees, when, after walking away from the lineup a free man in the film, we return to Mill's life a year later, Willis and Roberts are shown to have been cast as the leads in the film-within-the-film.
This greatly irritates Bonnie Sherow, who thinks the director and producer have sold out their vision. After being fired by Levy, she goes to the head of the studio -- Griffin Mill -- to plead her case. She had been Mills' lover: the affair ended before the book began, but in the film she was dumped by Mill when he became interested in the dead writer's girlfriend. (This change made the conflict between them more direct, more cinematic.) In the final sequence of the film, she ends up sitting on the steps of the studio head's office, out of a job, spurned by Mill and bleeding from a fall.
On his way home, Mill gets a call on his speaker phone from the writer, who tells Mill he's been working on a new script:
WRITER
Alright, it's a Hollywood story, Griff, a real thriller. It's about a shitbag producer studio exec who murders a writer who he thinks is harassing him. Problem is, he kills the wrong writer. Now he has to deal with blackmail as well as the cops. But here's the catch -- the son of a bitch gets away with it... It's a Hollywood ending, Griff. He marries the dead writer's girl and they live happily ever after.
MILL
Can you guarantee a happy ending?
WRITER
If the price is right...
MILL
What do you call this thing, anyway?
WRITER
The Player.
MILL
The Player. I like that. [23]
Basically, the writer has pitched the story of the film we have just seen.
To complete the confusion between film and reality, Mill drives up to a Hollywood-beautiful house, where a very pregnant June is waiting to greet him. They exchange the following witticism:
JUNE
What too you so long?
GRIFFIN
The traffic was a bitch.
MUSIC UP as the lovers hug. [24]
As it turns out, these are precisely the same lines spoken by Roberts and Willis at the end of the film-within-the-film. Film and reality have come to completely mirror each other.
There are a couple of different ways to read the ending to the film version of The Player. Explaining the elements needed to make a film commercially successful, Mill states: "Suspense. Laughter. Violence...hope. Heart. Nudity. Sex. Happy endings...especially happy endings." [25] The Player seems to have the quintessential Hollywood happy ending: the hero gets the girl, the nice home and the job he wanted. Perfect.
Except that Bonnie Sherow, the closest thing to an innocent in the film, has lost her job, her lover and any shred of dignity she had; meanwhile, Mill's happy ending means he has gotten away with the murder of David Kahane, who, whatever faults he may have had, probably didn't deserve that fate. As Oakley pointed out, the reality is that innocent people die.
Conclusion
There is no single "correct" way to adapt a literary source. Paul Mazursky and Peter Greenaway have both adapted Shakespeare's The Tempest, yet their two films could not be more different. Adaptation is always a delicate balancing act between the sensibility of the writer, as portrayed in the original novel or short stories, and that of the director. As Altman describes it: "Writing and directing are both acts of discovery. In the end, the film is there and the stories are there and one hopes there is fruitful interaction. Yet in directing Short Cuts, certain things came straight out of my own sensibility, which has its differences, and this is as it should be. I know Ray Carver would have understood that I had to go beyond just paying tribute. Something new happened in the film, and maybe that's the truest form of respect." [26]
Most often, the result of adapting a literary work is a diminution of the original in favour of cinematic effect. It is a tribute to the great skill of Robert Altman that he has managed, on more than one occasion, to make a film which was more complex than its literary source.
Notes
1) Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Celia Britton et al, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 112.
2) Robert Altman, "Collaborating with Carver," introduction to Raymond Carver, Short Cuts (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1993, 7.
3) Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 98.
4) ibid, 139.
5) Michael Tolkin, The Player [novel] (New York: Vintage Contemporaries Edition, 1988), 37.
6) Michael Tolkin, The Player [screenplay] (first draft, 04/20/1989), 30.
7) Tolkin, The Player [screenplay], 66.
8) Steven Swires, "Leigh Brackett: Journeyman Plumber," in Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s, Pat McGilligan, ed. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991), 23.
9) Tod Lippy, "Writing The Dreyfus Affair: A Talk with Peter Lefcourt, in Scenario (V2 N4, Winter, 1996), 150.
10) The worst example of this reliance on story to the detriment of the adaptation occurs in Gus van Zant's adaptation of Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The original cult novel was full of digressions, asides, philosophical musings and bonus parables. The film version, concentrating solely on the improbable workings of the plot, managed to lose everything which was charming or creative about the novel.
11) Luis Bunuel, My Last Sigh (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 194.
12) Altman, "Collaborating with Carver," 9.
13) Robert Altman, The Player, screenplay by Michael Tolkin (Fine Line Features, 1992).
14) ibid.
15) ibid.
16) ibid.
17) Tolkin, The Player [novel], 62.
18) ibid, 166/167.
19) The only comparable situation is Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. Burgess' novel contains a lot of literary references, including references to his own writings. Kubrick decided to fill the film version with cinematic references (including the infamous scene of violence choreographed to the song "Singing in the Rain"). In terms of self-reference, Kubrick has a long tracking shot through a record store which ends with the main character holding a copy of the soundtrack album for Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The examples of Clockwork Orange and The Player indicate that complex literary effects can, with the application of a little creative genius, be effectively rendered in cinematic terms.
20) Swires, "Leigh Brackett," 24.
21) ibid.
22) Tolkin, The Player [film].
23) ibid.
24) ibid.
25) ibid.
26) Altman, "Collaborating with Carver," 10.
This article first appeared in Creative Screenwriting, Volume 4, Number 3, Fall 1997.
