Several years ago I wrote a short story, Queen For A Day, about an awkward young gay man from a small town who comes to the big city looking for love and romance. More recently, I was inspired to turn it into a screenplay. Since I am the author of the story, I presumed I would have no trouble turning my ideas into a workable script. Simple, right? Wrong. What worked well on the page as fiction quickly proved elusive in a screenplay.

The story started as a comedy about a boy named Lennie who has a penchant for trying on his mother’s dresses. In the original story, there are hints of Lennie’s dysfunctional family background, but the protagonist’s aims are very here-and-now--he wants to make friends and win an amateur drag contest. What the story conveys easily, and what the first drafts of the screenplay didn’t, were Lennie’s internal pains and struggles with himself.

Many screenwriters and filmmakers have grappled with transplanting a successful story from page or stage onto the screen. In most cases, the wisdom seems to be that in order to bring the essence of a work onto the screen, it helps first to understand the differences between the genres, and what makes each work on its particular level and not on any another.

Studios are always on the look-out for salable scripts, and those that come from best-selling books or popular, award-winning plays would seem to have a jump on the market. Many classic books have been made into films: The Great Gatsby has been turned into a film not once but three times (1925, 1949 & 1974, or roughly every 25 years since its publication). Despite having a solid plot-line and good story structure, none of the film versions has achieved a success comparable to that of the book And the element that makes that book most notable - its language - has notbeen translated to screen.

A best-selling book, however, is not always a guarantee of a successful film, though often a successful film will promote sales for an otherwise little-known book. Without making too large a generalization, the rule of thumb for translating books into films seems to be this: the better the book, the worse the film, and conversely, the worse the book, the better the film.

Interestingly, The English Patient seems to have gotten around this problem. Created from a poetic-prose text, its scriptwriters managed to convey nuances of the book’s language without getting stuck in its density. Think of the scene in the sandstorm where Almásy and Katherine are trapped in the car: “Let me tell you about wind,” he says, describing the many types of windstorms as the wind whips around the vehicle, burying them in darkness. Similarly, the plot of the film is far easier to follow than the book’s. In the book, the characters’ inner struggles are the main event, while the plot lies buried beneath a great deal of literary sorcery. By making the war the central conflict, the film deftly carves out both plot and characters equally, one emerging naturally from the other, with neither taking an upper hand. Although both are brilliant examples of story-telling, the film can be an exhilarating experience enjoyed in under three hours, while the book demands months of intense reading.

Both of these texts, a classic in its way, had a devoted following before becoming films, but not necessarily a following that would make for a film audience. The producers of both The Great Gatsby may have forgotten that a best-selling classic has built up its reputation (and sales) over time, while a book on the New York Times best-seller list often has a short-lived, but very immediate popularity that will spill right over into the theatre if it’s brought off well.

Jaws the film gambled on the popular success of Jaws the book. The same is true of The Godfather and a good many other popular hits of the day. Both of these films picked up where the books left off and, while both films are still popular today, their literary sources have largely been left behind--not necessarily because they are bad books, though that may be part of it, but to a great extent because their filmic counterparts have outdone them for both immediacy and vividness of impact. Without making too large a generalization, the rule of thumb for translating books seems to be this: the better the book, the worse the film, and conversely, the worse the book, the better the film.

The more literary the book, the more likely it is that its content will concentrate on the inner lives of the characters--their psychology--rather than external plot events. External events occurring in real (book) time take on the largest part of their significance in the hearts and minds of the characters rather than elsewhere. There is just as firm a “show-don’t-tell” rule to fiction as there is to film, though it manifests itself in other ways because the characters in books are primarily engaged in dealing with internal conflicts. A book’s character’s biggest obstacle is usually his or her own inner nature, rather than, say, a great white shark, a sinking ship, or an evil empire. The problem for most novel adaptations, then, would seem to be one of externalizing inner conflicts--something Freud had a lot to say about--and making them visible for all to see.

One recent adaptation should by rights never have made it to film, simply because the book’s action is entirely internal and would have been deemed unfilmable by anyone with any sense. Fortunately, filmmakers are often little short of lunatics, and for that reason we have a remarkable film version of an extraordinary novel, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Rather than merely recreating the meandering hallucinatory scenes of Burroughs’s almost plotless prose, Cronenberg chose instead to weave the narrative of Burroughs’s eventful personal life (homosexual, writer, drug addict, private investigator and murderer, to list a few of his accomplishments) in with the scenes and characters of the novel. 

The result is startling. Where the novel takes place completely in the mind of Burroughs’s drug-addicted protagonist, Cronenberg places Burroughs (renamed Weller) himself at the centre of the film. To externalize the protagonist/writer’s inner conflicts, the film utilizes a truly bizarre character in the form of a talking cockroach-typewriter, a sort of Chatty Cathy id to the main character. By being completely free with the content of the novel, and using it as a springboard for his own creative imagination, Cronenberg reinvented the book in a thoroughly fresh and unique way.

Stage plays, too, often seem especially moribund on screen. Though they would seem to be closer in lineage to screenplays than are novels, the stylistic differences still manage to weigh them down. All that dialogue just doesn’t work on screen. Like novels, plays exist in a world of their own, with unique needs, rules and aspirations. If the conflict in fiction is internal, and the conflict in film is largely external, stage plays exist in another realm, that of the inter-personal. To make another generalization, classic stage plays often deal with relationship crises of one sort or another: Hamlet is pissed-off with his mother and step-father; Romeo loves Juliet, etc. And what do these characters do about their situations? Like most of us, they talk about them--endlessly. Plays are much more often about not taking action--at least until it’s almost too late.

There are two ways filmmakers deal with stage adaptations. In the first case, the film becomes a document of the text/performance (e.g. Streetcar.) Sometimes this is successful, though often it creates a “museum” piece, with all that entails. In the second case, the film reinvents the play. One play that has seen both treatments is O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Because the O’Neill estate does not allow substantial textual changes to his work, it’s do-or-die for any filmmaker wanting to work with them.

Sidney Lumet’s 1962 version faithfully captures what is admittedly a very long, arduous play about a woman succumbing to drug addiction, with some very strong performances to recommend it. There is little to suggest that we’re watching a film rather than a play, however, apart from a couple of interesting camera moves at crucial points, which clearly announce that we are looking at the characters through a camera, as though the director suddenly grew self-conscious about letting the work take over the film. David Wellington’s brilliant version, on the other hand, while equally long, never forgets for a moment that it is a film and not a play. The camera lovingly lingers on body parts--the twitching, convulsive hands of a drug addict--and on the beautiful period furniture of the house in which the characters are trapped, adding other dimensions to all those words, words, words! The result is a much more intimate portrait, as well as an enjoyable-albeit-tragic film, of a disintegrating family trapped in a sterile environment.

All this reflecting helped me to see my adaptation troubles were not unique. I wanted to maintain the integrity of the original story, while still drawing my audience in, and without sacrificing my character’s inner life. Twenty drafts and four titles later I carved out a back-story that became the new main story which gave my protagonist the aim of winning back his father’s affection lost over an argument about his “lifestyle”. The film, to be shot next month, is now called My Heart Belongs To Daddy.

Interestingly, my writerly inclinations still find the original story of a young man dealing with his inner fears more compelling than the one of his need for familial redemption. My filmmaking inclinations, however, know that this new version will play much better on-screen.