This collection of essays originated in the observation that the study of literature-to-film adaptation has generally overlooked the actual process through which a source text is transformed into a motion picture. This process includes in particular the central role of the screenplay. The increasing attention to intertextual and intermedial influences in adaptation over the last two decades provides an opportunity to highlight the most consistent and crucial example of intertextuality at work, namely, the writing of the transmedial screenplay. Literature-to-film adaptation involves the textual transposition of a single-track medium of published writing into a document that embraces the scenic structure and dramatic codes of the multitrack medium of film. The composition of the screenplay illuminates the evolution of ideas that will determine the film production's relationship to its source text. In this introduction I describe the multiple roles and significance of the adapted screenplay and its history, as well as its centrality to the collaborative authorship that is at the heart of film adaptation. Focusing on the screenplay in adaptation necessarily foregrounds issues of authorship in a theoretical environment that has been weighted toward semiotics, poststructuralism, and broadly conceived influences of cultural intertextuality. The fragile status of authorship in the shifting landscape of adaptation theory is specifically addressed in the final section of this introduction.

The two previously published essays and ten original ones in this collection each emphasize some aspect of the process of film adaptation as it can be traced from the source text and adapted screenplay through the film's production, exhibition, and reception. The four parts of the book are organized around the three dominant arrangements for adaptive screenwriters in English-language cinema:

1. The screenwriter in service to an activist producer or established auteur;
2. The screenwriter and director as one and the same individual; or
3. The screenwriter and director in a variety of other collaborative relationships.

Although not all the chapters place major emphasis on the screenplay in adaptation, all do consider some aspect of the adaptive process as such. The case studies chosen for discussion also represent both cultural diversity and diversity in critical approaches to adaptation. A focus on authorship, however, remains a touchstone throughout the collection.

Historically, the adapted screenplay has been viewed only as an interim step in the binary focus on the source literature (usually the novel) and on the film. The script has been deemed merely a skeletal blueprint for the adapted film and thus unworthy of serious consideration in its own right. There are several reasons for this binary critical emphasis, beginning with the essential point that a work of fiction or drama typically has a single author and a readily consumable existence in published form, just as an adapted film can be recognized as a finished entity on screen. The adapted screenplay, however, has had no comparable existence as a finished artifact for public consumption (with the exception of published transcripts). Interest in the adapted screenplay mainly follows from an initial critical or public interest in the adapted film. But whereas the audience of an adapted film might rush to purchase copies of the source text (underscoring an adapted film's direct value to publishers), a much smaller readership will seek the film transcript, and only a tiny group will seek a late screenplay draft or shooting script, assuming such is even available. Other reasons for disregarding the screenplay in adaptation study include the multiple revisions a script undergoes during development (at times by different hands), Hollywood's traditional low regard for the screenwriter generally, and a resistance to any sort of transposition of esteemed canonic literature (the "hallowed word") to another medium, especially one that has been associated with mass entertainment.

In respect to this last issue, the adaptation of high-profile best-sellers to the screen can prove as controversial as the adaptation of literary classics. In the recent adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code, the film version was criticized for softening the book's main thematic thrust, namely, that since antiquity, conservatives within the Catholic Church have suppressed the role of women, including the role of Mary Magdalene, with whom Jesus may have sired children to produce a still extant lineage. Did film director Ron Howard (who at an early point worked with other producers and the screenwriter) already commit to deemphasizing that theme to stem possible boycotts and thus increase ticket sales? Often overlooked but also notable in this regard is that modern writers and directors tied to studio support are frequently asked to work with studio promotional departments to consider a film's marketing in relation to its final story construction. The who and why surrounding the process of adaptation at the screenwriting stage, then, can begin to answer these kinds of preproduction questions and issues. Meanwhile, the closed fixation only on literary source and finished film both in journalistic reviews and scholarly study has often shown an indifference to the evolving intentions of producers, writers, and directors and their shifting balance of input and authority.

In scholarly and trade publications, several articles and a few chapters in collections over the years have given some attention to specific cases of adapted screenplays (see especially Literature/Film Quarterly, in publication since 1973), although the script per se has received little extended treatment as the key step in the process of adaptation. Excluding the numerous how-to texts on screenwriting and marketing and at least two recent manuals on writing adaptations, only a handful of publications on the subject of screenwriting and screenwriters have mentioned adaptation even casually. Adaptation study as a whole has, however, received considerable academic focus, with no fewer than eleven books on the subject appearing since 1996, and three more from Robert Stam in 2005 alone. Kamilla Elliott, in her introduction to the collection Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), notes that "recent critics rightly protest novel and film studies' neglect of . . . screenplays" (6). Overall, then, the growing interest in the theory and critical assessment of adaptation supports the need for a closer look at the screenplay/screenwriter and writer-director collaboration in the genesis of adaptation.

For the moviegoing public in general, the screenplay has largely remained no more visible than a category on film credits or on film awards lists. In awards ceremonies that include recognition of the screenplay, the scriptwriter stands in for a document that few ever see or read. Those who have tracked down the screenplay have usually had to locate specialty libraries, vendors, or Internet sources, only then to have to rely either on an uncertain script draft dating or on a film's verbatim transcript, which is the version typically published when a feature screenplay is offered as a book. Such transcripts imitate the finished film in standard or nonstandard script form on the page and hence reveal little of the process of adaptation. To uncover that process requires comparing the completed film with the last script draft prior to shooting. Also helpful in understanding the process of adaptation are interviews with or commentaries from the principal figures responsible for a film—producers, writers, directors, and actors. Although such commentaries are often largely anecdotal, their increasing availability through publications, the Internet, DVD supplementary material, and television commentary has made investigating the adaptation process and the centerpiece screenplay more than ever viable.

It is the screenplay, not the source text, that is the most direct foundation and fulcrum for any adapted film. As the film's narrative springboard, it guides the screen choices for story structure, characterization, motifs, themes, and genre. It indicates what will or will not be used from the source, including what is to be altered or invented, and in what settings and tonal register. Because the modern adapted screenplay at the point of input from the director includes so many key decisions relative to the source, it remains the essential conceptual and creative bible for the film's construction. The writing births the overriding narrative that all the filmmaking participants serve during production. Unlike the original source text, which can be read at the reader's pace, the screenplay is the directive for the film performance in a designated time frame. Whatever alterations are made during shooting and editing, the adapted screenplay as it exists just before production starts is the most prescriptive guide to the film in the mind's eye of writer and director.

An adapted screenplay that is recognizable for its quality increases the likelihood that a successful film might be made. This belief is associated with the Hollywood truism that you can make a bad film from a good script but you can't make a good film from a bad script. A director may have the benefit of the screenplay and the source text for consideration in production, but script quality, irrespective of the quality of the source text, remains essential for production. In adaptive film projects, the lack of a relatively complete screenplay when production begins can cause great anxiety on the set and hurt the quality of the finished product. Since modern directors work out the transmediation of their source text in the screenplay (usually in conjunction with the adaptive scriptwriter), their interpretation of the literary property and its presentation is already largely decided on. Virtually all of Alfred Hitchcock's films were rather loose adaptations, but he was known for adhering closely during shooting to his finished scripts. Other auteur directors, such as John Ford and Robert Altman, have a reputation for improvising even adapted scripts on the set, although the script remains the jumping-off point for innovation, thus necessitating script rewrites after the fact to accommodate changes made along the way.

The basic format of narrative film scripts conveys their practical specificity. Their goal is to portray drama through concrete descriptive passages and character dialogue within individual scenes, which are designated as either interior or exterior locations. Scenes form the building blocks of sequences and story or character arcs that make up the larger sections or "acts" of the narrative. Because Hollywood scripts are usually written to fit within exhibitors' preferred two-hour maximum running time (120 script pages), as well as to appeal to mass audiences, efficiency and clarity in story and characterization have been standard practice. The adapted screenplay usually pares down dialogue and avoids metaphorical style in description. All of this is intended to set a mood and tone, as well as tell a story in the eventual service of an audiovisual design. The expressive language of fiction in paragraph and chapter form describes circumstances, attitudes, and feelings that readers are left to invoke ("imagine") directly for themselves, while the screenplay is structured to work in the service of a narrative that is read in the moving scenic terms of imaging for the camera. The screenplay must organize and telegraph audiovisual codes to directors, actors, and technicians for the sake of production. The script format thus appears intrusive to a reader, and its written style is less intimate and rich than fiction. It points to the potential specificity and power of fully realized, framed, and mobile iconic imagery ready for editing. The page layout and story elements of the adapted script demonstrate its media-transformational function for the performance of film narrative.

Unlike the solitary, imaginative origin of most fiction (however informed by a cultural milieu), the composition of an adapted screenplay takes place not only under the shadow of myriad narrative expectations but in a complex environment of business, industrial, and artistic considerations. Some version of a screenplay must answer in preproduction to a producer and director. It is usually required by a producer not only to generate specific project funding but also to initiate the attachment to the production of other above-the-line personnel, including the director, director of photography, and stars. Screenplays determine specific production budgets and can also leverage immediate capital from speculative investors, from upfront theatrical distribution deals, and from potential DVD sales for a film, including possible ancillary product contracts. The director, meanwhile, mandates the script required for performance and editing needs. This script presumes its eventual technical and aesthetic performance in an audiovisual space of specific time, pacing, and place. As the central narrative cog in all three stages of film production, the screenplay determines the contributions of the hundreds of individuals who typically work on any given project.

Given its many functions, then, there tend to at least two main versions of a script. In the preproduction stage, there is first the one that helps bring together budget resources and key personnel, and then the one that is coordinated by the director for production. In modern film development, William Goldman observes,

There are two entirely different versions of any screenplay. There is stuff that is written before the film is a go project, and there is what's written once the movie is actually going to be shot. And sometimes they have very little to do with each other. The purpose of the earlier version is to make it happen. The purpose of the latter version or versions is to be as supportive to your director as you can.

Goldman's also last sentence points up the service role that the Hollywood screenwriter plays in relation to the producer and director. Once the director approves the final draft, that screenplay is arranged into a shooting script for production, and notations on this script during shooting become the continuity script.

In one case, Stanley Kubrick, who wanted to work through his own extended visual conception for the adaptation of Arthur Clarke's The Sentinel, first composed a 40,000-word descriptive prose piece with Clarke in preparation for their writing the initial screenplay for what became 2001. Kubrick sought to fully develop the visual details that would be indicative of an atmosphere and mood for his largely style-driven narrative. This circumstance also highlights how some later auteurs, who often locate and purchase their own source material, already have some connection to the source material and some intention in relation to it, which they continue to develop throughout the scriptwriting stage. Directors use the screenwriting stage of development in collaboration with the writer to invent and refine their story and image conceptions. The scripting process may even suggest a whole new unity of narrative emphasis and meaning, or at least may encourage a director to see further possibilities for cinematic forms of storytelling. How a critical analyst interprets the information provided by a late script draft can therefore make all the difference not only in assigning specific authorship to the quantity and degree of intended source alterations but also to recognizing how the initial screenplay conception may have been altered by performative and technical factors in the production and postproduction stages. A critic's familiarity with a late script can enhance awareness of where the subsequent production soared beyond its original scripted intent, became waylaid, or simply changed direction.

The scholarly study of the screenplay in Hollywood studio cinema has already helped shed light on some well-known examples of scriptwriting confusion. For instance, a famous controversy has surrounded what transpired in the writing of the original script for Citizen Kane. Although not technically an adaptation, since the life of William Randolph Hearst had not been published in a biography used directly in the writing of the screenplay, the film nevertheless played fast and loose with the life story of a living person (and the producers had to negotiate screenplay changes because of it, owing to the threat of a lawsuit). Long a matter of contention among film critics over screenplay authorship between Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, the puzzle seems largely now to be laid to rest. As Tom Stempel writes in Framework:

While Mankiewicz had the energy and the early enthusiasm to whip out a lengthy first draft (the two written on his own at 250 and then at 325 pages that provide the basic structure for the eventual film), he did not necessarily have the dedication to do the fine-tuning any script required. Welles, on the other hand, did not necessarily have the patience to do all the creative work required on a first draft, but was brilliant as an editor/rewrite man. As a screenwriting collaboration, they were well matched.

Another factor that is obvious in this historic if nonsimultaneous "collaboration" is the assumption during the writing by both Mankiewicz and Welles that Orson would play the main role. It may be assumed that Welles's script editing in particular was oriented not only to story conflation but to the fine-tuning of the dialogue that he and his colleagues among the Mercury Theatre cast would deliver.

Specific challenges for adaptive writers and filmmakers usually include ways to visualize the fiction narrator's exposition, metaphors, and interior character observations and their thought processes, all of which help to convey story tone as well as character psychology. The determination of filmic equivalents for some or all of these fictional devices is part of the craft and art of the adaptation process. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the constant screenwriter on the Ismael Merchant and James Ivory producer-director team, wrote several publicly successful and close adaptations of heritage literature (particularly by Henry James and E. M. Forster). She has observed that she sometimes changes and also typically cuts even the dialogue in novels down to about one-fourth, noting that "dialogue in a novel is always full of artifice" and is therefore often unwieldy in the mouths of actors on the screen. The exchange or alteration of certain literary for filmic devices in adaptation is thus a given, and the screenwriter and director must make choices in this regard either to enhance cinematic drama or to address unforeseen production issues.

These issuees frequently involve casting and performance, which can change a screenplay in all three stages of production. Casting actors, of course, is not determined by the screenwriter unless the writer also happens to have a producer or director role in the film. American cinema offers numerous examples of adapted scripts that have been written and produced with certain performers in mind. It is also true that best-sellers have been written with a movie version and a film star in mind, as in the case of John Grisham's novel The Pelican Brief. The author projected Julia Roberts for the lead role in the inevitable film adaptation, and the screen rights were also purchased before the novel was actually written. Furthermore, of course, the attachment of "bankable" stars to a production after the adapted script is completed can push certain roles in certain directions on the set to the point that character and story directions are significantly changed.

Adaptations also typically have more limited options in the casting of lead characters because of the expectations of audiences relative to the given character profiles in the source text. Close matching can bring success, as attested to by the definitive performances of leads Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme), who miror the physiognomy of their characters and convincingly project their traits just as described in the novel. Certain actors may have the look of a fictional character but lack the affect, while others may not look the part detailed in the source but may nevertheless succeed in capturing the inner life of the character in the film role. An example of the latter is the full-figured version of Renee Zellweger as Ruby in Cold Mountain (2003, Anthony Minghella), who was critically praised for her energetic portrayal of this supporting role. The character Ruby, however, is described in Charles Frazier's novel as "broad-nosed," "frail chested," and "corded through the neck and arms." Another example is that of Denzel Washington, whom writer-director Carl Franklin brought in for the role of detective Easy Rawlins in his adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). The lead actor felt that his characterization of Rawlins should be more active and skilled than in the novel or in Franklin's initial screenplay, and the director agreed and made adjustments to script and film. Whether an actor's performance is attuned to the adapted script or the script is adjusted to the actor depends finally on the director's intent in relation to the source text.

Adaptive screenplays and films face the inevitable question of their specific orientation to their source, and there is no simple answer about what is appropriate that could possibly satisfy all readers and audiences. In critical approaches, the direct matching of the content of a literary source with its film version may serve useful descriptive goals concerning transmediation, but it has also long encouraged an evaluative form of "fidelity criticism" that has necessarily privileged the original literary work, particularly literary classics, to the detriment of the cinematic "derivation." The versatility of the visual and sound palette available to screenwriters and filmmakers, however, can provide a wealth of alternative ways to convey the intricacies of the source text, and therefore disobliges a simplistic comparative cataloging across the two media. In this line of thought, critical writing on film adaptation has frequently suggested that the screenplay and film should mainly seek to capture "the essence" of the source text through audiovisual "equivalents." Because exact iconic images of fiction in film are impossible (owing to the variations of each fiction reader's particular imagination) and in any case are likely to fail dramatically (owing to film's need to establish its own "live" scenic rhythms as opposed to literary ones), it is essential to locate the goal that any particular adaptation sets for itself. To this end, the screenplay can reveal the transformational decisions that account for a change in medium, as well as the initial story and dialogue alterations that point to the conceptual goal of the film adaptation.

The issue of authorial intent, therefore, must be a part of any discussion of fidelity in adaptation. One way that critics and theorists of adaptation have repeatedly addressed this issue of allegiance has been to assign labels to what is usually presented as three levels of a film's distance from its source. Most of these labels, which have been used over the years, offer some variation on the following terminology:

1. A literal or close reading (such as the Ishmael Merchant-James Ivory adaptation of Howard's End, with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as writer);
2. A general correspondence (such as Anthony Minghella's highly sensitive screenwriter-director "reading" of Michael Ondaatje's poetic and lengthy novel The English Patient); or
3. A distant referencing (as in the Coen brothers' tacit borrowing from Homer's The Odyssey for O Brother, Where Art Thou?).

Although such descriptive categories can be used to help readers and viewers appreciate the film adaptation's intention and its right to go its own way, any preoccupation with fidelity to the literary original and its presumed superiority also tends to constrain the discussion of each film's immersion in its own particular cultural and historical moment. Part of the comedic point in the Coen brothers' Depression-era comedy (released in 2000) is that mundane and narrow-minded facts of life surrounding antiheroes in the twentieth century can unsettle the gravity of ancient heroic epics such as The Odyssey. In contrast, serious costume dramas, including Howard's End and The English Patient, can succeed in speaking to the present through the sheer realistic credibility of the characters and issues represented in their particular historical circumstances.

All three recent adaptations—Howard's End, The English Patient, and O Brother—were critically and commercially successful films despite differing degrees of closeness to and different relationship with their literary source. Interestingly, all three also show an extremely tight association between writer and director in each project's conception (especially in the case of Minghella, who assumed both roles). Each writer was closely allied with each director's intention and in addition had a thorough grounding in film tradition. The Coen brothers took their title, historical moment, and tone for their film from writer-director Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1942), in which the line "O brother, where art thou?" occurs. Certainly, the quality and success of many adapted films have been rooted in a strong writer-director team approach, such as that between Martin Ritt and Irving Ravetch/Harriett Frank, Jr., or Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes. The recognition of the potential power of cinema is also observable among those who have a particularly strong personal devotion to rendering a literary source. Some examples are actress Emma Thompson's script for Sense and Sensibility (1995, Ang Lee) and Christopher Hampton's screenplay rendition of his already adapted stage version of Dangerous Liaisons (1988, Stephen Frears) from the period novel by Choderlos de Laclos. Furthermore, because all of the adaptations mentioned above were well received by critics and audiences, very few negative criticisms regarding lack of fidelity to source resulted. On the contrary, a renewed appreciation of, or at least attention to, the source material was the typical consequence. The film adaptation's tendency to create or reenergize public interest in the literary source, and through this renewed interest to spark a wider discussion of the aesthetic force and cultural meanings of the page and screen texts and their temporal contexts, reinforces the intermedial as well as historiographic dimensions of adaptation study.

Classical Hollywood and the Adapted Screenplay

The major studios of classical Hollywood had story departments with a stable of writers who were usually assigned to adaptation projects according to their genre experience. Robert Wise observed, "In my time, all the major studios had story departments to cover all the established and upcoming books. They provided directors with all the information they needed, like synopses." Studio directors didn't have to actually read their sources for adaptation, especially in the rush to produce the many films demanded by the studios' exhibitors prior to 1948. Furthermore, the formulation of and final say on a script seldom began and ended with the story department, which answered to the studio head or to the production manager in the studio system. As independent-minded director Frank Capra wrote in a letter to the New York Times in 1939, "about six producers today pass upon ninety percent of the scripts and cut and edit about ninety percent of the pictures."

Thomas Schatz points out that David Selznick, while at MGM with Irving Thalberg, closely oversaw and proved the viability of filming classics as major productions in the 1930s, and he successfully produced several while there. Even in cases where a studio sought out a specific writing talent to adapt a literary work, studios continued to rule the process. At Columbia, noted screenwriter Budd Schulberg explained why he did not write the final script used to adapt his own 1947 novel, The Harder They Fall.

I had a fight with Harry Cohn about that, not the first or last. I had done the book on my farm in Bucks County, and I had also done the screen adaptation there. He insisted that if I did the screenplay, I must do it at the studio. . . . I really had left Hollywood because I couldn't stand that routine. It just did not fit my method of work. I said I would do the screenplay at the farm and then come out for conferences. . . . One thing I couldn't stand about that system was that there was a secretarial Pool that typed up the pages, about four or five a day, as you wrote. They would send those pages right up to the front office. The writer could not look at the work and turn it in when it was ready. The front office was more or less looking over your shoulder every step of the way. That's counterproductive to any real creativity. I refused to work under that system, so I didn't get to do the script.

Schulberg had a reputation for doing extensive and intensive hands-on research for his screenplays because he felt compelled by the sociopolitical realities of the American experience. His realist scenario for On the Waterfront (1954) was based partly on Malcolm Johnson's Pulitzer prize-winning articles on crime on the New York waterfront, but also on months of Schulberg's own research, which included attending longshoremen union meetings and anti-crime commission hearings. He also insisted that the film's director, Elia Kazan, and actor Marlon Brando join him in spending extended time on the docks with the longshoremen before shooting started. It was as if Schulberg were preparing a nonfiction exposé on the subject while simultaneously building a script. All of this explains why his Academy Award for On the Waterfront was in the category of Story and Screenplay rather than Original Screenplay. In his study of screenplay documents, Tom Stempel further discovered that the film's legendary taxicab scene, reputed to have been improvised by Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger, appeared in an early Schulberg draft, "closer to its final form in the film than almost any other scene." Stempel also observes the irony related to this Schulberg and Kazan film: "the best screenplay to come out of the HUAC investigations was written by a screenwriter [and a director] who had testified." Schulberg's leftist ideological bent, in any case, did not make him an easy fit with Hollywood's producer-driven and studio image-driven system of the time.

George Bluestone's landmark academic study, Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema (1957), considers two adaptations from popular sources and three from classic literature, including The Grapes of Wrath. He points out that whatever the cultural status of the source, cinema can find its own methods for creating quality and significance. However, in noting how linguistic metaphors can be accomplished in film only when "they arise naturally from the setting," he also shows limitations in his recognition of film's rhetorical arsenal. Nevertheless, his observations are generally wide-ranging and informative of collaborative, industrial, and political realities in Hollywood adaptation. He remarks on the way director John Ford and his cinematographer Gregg Toland created objective details for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) that were not in the novel (or the screenplay) in order to heighten character and story in the film. But he notes also that the strongest sociopolitical commentary in Steinbeck's novel is missing from the film, and that Darryl Zanuck at Fox was so concerned about investor resistance to the production of The Grapes of Wrath that he announced it under another title, Highway 66. Bluestone also makes several references to the film's screenwriter, Nunnally Johnson, and his many contributions, including structural changes that provided a stronger story line, better pacing, and a greater unity for the film. Writer Johnson said, for example, that he moved Ma's speech and "chose it for his curtain line because he considered it the 'real' spirit of Steinbeck's book," and in fact the novelist had no public qualms with the filmmakers' results. As for director Ford, he glibly claimed not to have read the novel at all, which, if true, means that his visual interpretations were based almost entirely on his feel of the story from the script. Bluestone's book is not inclined to theory, but its practical realization of the industrial and creative process that is cinema, including his willingness to add the screenwriter's name alongside the director's, does recognize the screenplay's significance.

Adaptations of both classic and popular literature have consistently dominated the world of Hollywood's award-winning films. Historically, the great majority of Academy Award-winning films have been adaptations. But the Motion Picture Academy did not consistently distinguish two categories of adapted versus original writing, partly owing to a tendency also to award the best story (not necessarily from a literary source). The Academy had had separate awards for Best Writing: Adaptation and Best Original Story since 1931, but those categories were ambiguous as to whether the person responsible for an original story might have also helped on the screenplay, and whether a winning screenplay in this category was necessarily also adapted. The titles for the three writing awards in 1942 were Best Original Motion Picture Story, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Screenplay (Adaptation). The category of Best Motion Picture Story was finally discarded in 1957, which marked the clear modern distinction between either an original or an adapted screenwriting award category. The distinction between the two awards concerns whether or not a screenplay is based on previously published material. In copyright law, an adaptation is defined as a "derivation that recasts, transforms or adapts a previous work," which already suggests the varied forms that adaptation may take. In any case, the adapted screenplay finally gained a clear award status, whether it originated from published news reports, popular fiction, or classic literary sources. The dominance of popular material for adaptations is reflected in the number of chapters in this book that are concerned with such sources.

Of greatest overall significance here is that the Academy Award for an adaptation is given to a screenplay and not to a film—there is no Oscar category for Best Adapted Motion Picture. This recognizes the distinct nature of the art of adaptive writing versus original scriptwriting, as well as the importance of the screenplay-writing stage in the adaptation process. Whether the predominance of film adaptations that win Best Film awards suggests more about the advantage of films based on already familiar stories and characters in Academy voters' minds or about the willingness of producers to back, and major directors to shoot, "presold" material is unclear. The focus on the screenplay in the competition involving adapted films, however, is a salient point, for the screenplay has always been a crucial aspect of motion picture adaptation, whether it has been recognized as such or not. In fact, one of the reasons for considering Academy Awards in this discussion is the paucity of other forms of significant evidence regarding the viewing public's historical assessment of adapted screenplays.

New Wave Auteurism and the New Hollywood Aftermath

The French New Wave critics and filmmakers, who began work in the middle of the 1950s and continued on through the 1960s, considered film a kind of extension of creative literary authorship that used the camera instead of the pen. Canonic literature, as it was complacently adapted and filmed in France up until this time in what François Truffaut called the "tradition of quality," was to be replaced by original scripts and films, or at least by more creative, "auteurist" adaptations. André Bazin commented specifically on the adaptation of quality literature versus popular textual sources: "The more important and decisive the literary qualities of the work, the more the adaptation disturbs its equilibrium, the more it needs a creative talent to reconstruct it on a new equilibrium not indeed identical with, but the equivalent of, the old one." This notion of equivalency in adaptation calls attention to cinema's particular need to do certain things differently in the transmediation from literature. Furthermore, the auteurists' central attack (mounted by Truffaut's 1954 essay La politique des auteurs) was not on adaptation in general so much as on its frequent tendency toward a complacent style and passive allegiance to literary sources. Several films by New Wave directors were in fact adaptations, including Truffaut's Jules and Jim (from the novel by Henri-Pierre Roche) and Jean-Luc Godard's Masculine-Feminine (from the story by Guy de Mauppasant). The New Wave challenge did succeed in shifting the emphasis in Western critical thinking from the literary source text and its dominant status in adaptation to the film work in the hands of a creative director—and particularly a writer-director—whose style and personal vision were of primary importance. The French auteur theory accented the director's inspiration through a unique mise-en-scène that was directly borrowed or adapted from literature, and thus advanced the message of film modernism and its self-conscious experimentation with form as an ingredient of narrative and theme.

Because auteur theory touted the artistry of film as a medium that was culturally as significant as literature, New Wave critics created their own pantheon of great directors, and also called attention to hitherto underappreciated Hollywood film genres in which some of those directors worked. These genres included the film noir, the suspense thriller, the disenfranchised youth film, the thoughtful Western, and the comedy. One of the distinguishing features of so-called auteur directors, in fact, was their sole engagement with, or more frequently an active collaboration in, the composition of the screenplay, including those adapted from a previous source. Alfred Hitchcock, who virtually created the genre of the suspense thriller, not only depended on published sources for his films but also took a strong hand with his hired screenwriters in every one. The French cineastes also noted that auteur directors, including Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann, among several others, asserted some degree of creative independence from mainstream Hollywood studio filmmaking even as they worked in and around it. The auteur theory was as much about originality and resistance to conservative standardization as it was about directorial inspiration and vision. This meant going further than simply creating a new artistic initiative, a romance of the great artist. There was an ideological leaning in the realist theory of Bazin and in the progressive and socially engaged writing and filmmaking of those such as Truffaut and particularly Jean Luc Godard. Their contributions to the academic and cultural appreciation of cinema as art, as something more than casual entertainment for the whole family, encouraged a more sophisticated film audience and greatly influenced public attitudes toward film. But the focus on the director's dominance in the 1960s, which followed the producer's dominance in the Hollywood studio era, still did not raise the status of the writer per se. This circumstance perpetuated the relevancy of the Hollywood joke about the Polish actress who slept with the screenwriter.

One aspect of the eventual rejection of auteurism by American film critics such as Richard Corliss had to do with the overemphasis on the director at the expense of the screenwriter, for which Corliss makes a strong case in his book, The Hollywood Screenwriters. In part a challenge to Andrew Sarris's cataloguing of great directors, Corliss traces the extensive contributions of many writers during the studio era that repeatedly put their stamp on major Hollywood films, including adaptations. There were many screenwriters in this category, including Samson Raphaelson (who wrote for Ernst Lubitsch), Garson Kanin (who could be said to have written for Judy Holliday and the Tracy-Hepburn combo), Jules Furthman (who wrote for Howard Hawks), and Ben Hecht (who wrote for virtually everyone who was a someone). Considering the director's role, Corliss was inclined to observe that Hollywood directors were essentially "interpretive artists" unless they also wrote their own films. Nor did Corliss feel that auteur critics in France or Hollywood were really adhering to the notion that auteurism was mainly about style: "visual style is not auteur criticism's major interest. The auteurist is really writing about theme criticism. And themes—as expressed through plot, characterization and dialogue—belong primarily to the writer." If Corliss was on shaky ground here, he did ultimately recognize that the best Hollywood films resulted "from the productive intersection of a strong writer and a strong director—and often a strong actor—exploring mutually sympathetic themes and moods." But the efforts of Corliss to boost the recognition of screenwriters had little lasting effect, especially within the narrow rubric of writer versus director as auteur.

In addition to European influences, which included the French New Wave, and the demise of the hegemonic studio system and the censorship codes that survived into the 1950s, perhaps the greatest impact on writers and directors and their cultural status was felt from the historical events of the late 1960s, which also awakened America's social and political consciousness. The assassinations of key national leaders and the growing terror of the Vietnam War, along with the civil rights movement and the women's movement, which gained momentum throughout that decade, all added up to what some called a counterculture revolution, and one that the quickly dubbed "New Hollywood" took an important part in. Its launch date is usually assigned to the 1967 release of director Arthur Penn's generic hybrid Bonnie and Clyde, for which writers David Newman and Robert Benton received a National Society of Film Critics' Award for Best Adaptation. Novelists and screenwriters continued to lack power in the production system, though Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather made him an obvious choice to work with writer-director Francis Ford Coppola on the adaptations that became the main Godfather films. The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II (1972 and 1974), garnered a Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay award (alongside Coppola's award for Best Director in 1974), which recognized both their strong stylistic and storytelling achievements. These films also showed a new angle on the treatment of the violent mafia—the underbelly of capitalism based on "family" allegiances. The new appreciation for originality in American film style, content, and genre that had begun in the late 1960s encouraged yet more flexible and innovatively cinematic adaptations of challenging literary sources. Much of what has apparently attracted modern talent to adaptation, after all, has not been so much literary sophistication in the source, which can be an obstacle to visual treatment, but something in the narrative that has immediate, significant cultural relevancy.

In 1975, the Best Adapted Screenplay award went to Laurence Hauben and Bo Goldman for transforming Ken Kesey's novel and its follow-up Broadway play, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to the big screen. The film's screenwriters and director Milos Forman take full advantage of opportunities to open the novel up and to convert its internal narrator's primary metaphor of the mythical "Combine"—systemic institutional oppression—into more realistic forms. Forman's earlier Czechoslovakian film Fireman's Ball (1967) presented a metaphor for a system of political oppression that had been internalized by an entire nation, which partly explains the choice of Foreman to direct Cuckoo's Nest. Beyond the latter film's political theme, Foreman and writers Goldman and Hauben also created a screen text that can be read for its time as a comment on individual inspiration and passion in filmmaking over and against the forces of timidity and middle-brow conventionalism that had dominated mainstream Hollywood productions up until the advent of the New Hollywood movement. The work of Michael Douglas as producer on Cuckoo's Nest (and on some seventeen other films that followed), moreover, is a reminder of some of the major contributions of producers, whose unwavering belief in the cultural importance of certain projects made their realization possible.

A few producers should be recognized based on their track record relative to the New Wave guidelines of an original orchestration of talent that is determined to move beyond complacent commercial cinema. Saul Zaentz, for example, produced major film adaptations such as Amadeus (1984), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and The English Patient (1996). Producers, whether working inside or outside studios, are usually the ones who initiate the purchase of screen rights to published material, along with the hiring of writers and directors to create the screen adaptation. An alternative case, however, is when a screenwriter or a potential director develops a strong adaptation only to realize an unwillingness on the part of financial backers until the cultural moment seems right for such a project. For example, the script for Brokeback Mountain (adapted from E. Annie Proulx's short story) was shopped around by writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for four years until it was made and eventually won the Oscar for Best Film in 2005. Larry McMurtry was also credited as an executive producer.

There are always larger industrial and audience factors at work in the entertainment business, and these factors can have an impact on the kinds of adaptations that are green-lighted for production in Hollywood. The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw exploding costs for films, a resulting drop in the output of big- and middle-budget films, and the financial necessity for big opening weekends across the cineplexes of America. The need for huge film openings also added to the gross inflation in film costs by requiring massive marketing campaigns that increasingly exceeded the production costs of the movie. The level of financial risk in a single major film could make or break studios and consequently put tremendous pressure on the few writers and directors who were finding their work to be commercially viable. Adding to this was the fact that most of the Hollywood studios had become absorbed into huge conglomerates, which created further levels of administrative approval. Ironically, this situation may have helped the number of adaptations being considered for major backing, but it did not generally advance the quality of what was being produced. If film marketers felt a little safer with adaptations, the conservative strategy to increase the number of sequels and remakes left adaptive writers yet narrower options for creativity. More recently, conglomerates in the new millennium look particularly to adapted screenplays and films that may have strong potential for sequels (called "tent-pole" projects). Commercially, too, the exploding market in DVD sales of movies has enriched the media conglomerates while leaving directors and particularly writers, whose entire screenplay may be offered on a DVD, with small compensation. The lucrative post-theatrical market in DVDs now outgrosses most theatrical box office, and the designation of who receives these profits remains contentious, particularly for creative talent.

The contrast between adapted films that become commercial blockbusters and those that garner Best Adapted Screenplay awards is very revealing of the dimensions of the Hollywood world of adaptation projects. This has become even more pronounced in recent decades. Peter Benchley scripted his own best-seller Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg) along with Carl Gottlieb, and the movie became the top box-office grosser of that year, while the Adapted Screenplay award winner was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In 1986, the top box-office hit was based on an article written and then adapted by Ehud Yonay, Jim Cash, and Jack Epps for Top Gun (Tony Scott). The Best Adapted Script award that year went to Ruth Jhabvala for A Room with a View (James Ivory), based on E. M. Forster's novel. In 1993, Spielberg co-wrote with Michael Crichton an adaptation of the novelist's best-seller, Jurassic Park, while the Best Adapted Screenplay award went to Steven Zaillian for his script for Schindler's List (Spielberg). In 2002, the top-grossing film was Spider-Man (Sam Raima), based on the Marvel comic book series, while the Best Adapted Screenplay award went to Ranald Harwood for The Pianist (Roman Polanski), based on the World War II Warsaw memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman. These contrasting examples are not overly selective for any given year, and they show the continued prominence of adapted material in the industry and its power with viewers, whether for mass appeal or for films more likely to be associated with aesthetic quality and social insight as viewed by the Academy.

For those trying to become established as screenwriters, to write a noncontract script based on someone else's published work means having money to buy at least a timed "option" on a source "property," and possibly also the money to secure the full rights. This usually requires the kind of track record and financial risk most individuals outside the Hollywood money loop cannot afford. McGilligan reflects on this: "The niches for personal expression, as Walter Hill notes . . . have dwindled. Young writer-directors can find a sanctuary with smaller, independent films, but Hollywood writers, as always, have to trust in bigger financing, an empathetic producer, fortitude, and luck." Add to this the sheer reduction in the number of theatrical films made in Hollywood, as well as the radical current decline in feature films made for network television, and any inclination toward risk and originality in adaptation seems to have been reduced for all but a few producer-writer-director stalwarts. They too must find sufficient inspiration in literary sources to devote significant chunks of their lives and perhaps their livelihood to the effort. The screenplay thus takes its place in a world of Hollywood cinema that remains predominantly a complex entertainment business in which only extraordinary efforts by gifted collaborators have succeeded on occasion in raising it to a level of artistic as well as cultural power.

Theories of Structuralisms and the Disappearing Author

The influence of the auteur theory began to wane with the academic rise of semiotics and structuralism. Semiotics declared the centrality of the sign and sign systems (the signifier and the signified) that could be applied to visual media as well as written language. The increased emphasis on referentiality and the problem with the notion of representation in visual communication, which Christian Metz partly formalized in the notion of the "imaginary signifier" in cinema, shifted attention from the "speaker" or writer and director to the act of language/sign usage in communication and its meaning. Interest turned also to structuralist approaches based in cultural anthropology. Structuralism accented narrative formulas and cultural constructions (often in Levi-Straussian binary patterns of opposition) that worked both within language or signs and across audiovisual media. Structuralist theory tended to trace cultural influences and patterns in broad historical strokes. Writers and directors had not presumably invented so much as recontextualized what was already ingrained in cultural history. More relevant to adaptation, deconstructionist Jacque Derrida pushed structuralism to poststructuralist dimensions by observing not only that any sense of an original is impugned through a variety of cultural factors from the outset but also that the original may be enhanced by a "copy" (or adaptation) through a fresh reading, which suggests a full circularity of influences. Roland Barthes attacked the status of authorship directly in his 1968 essay, "The Death of the Author." He also reified the work of critical interpretation in relation to the source under study, as if every literary source were only a reinterpretation of earlier sources, including critical ones. Michel Foucault's essay, "What is an Author?" (1969), further insisted on reduced attention to a singular "author-function" and raised additional "suspicions . . . concerning the . . . creative role of the subject." Julia Kristeva, borrowing from M. M. Bakhtin's universalist realm of direct and indirect discursive influences subsumed under the term dialogism, further developed the idea she named "intertextuality," which challenged the prestige of prior sources as opposed to the realm of discourse that circulates around them. Broad intertextual approaches increase the emphasis on the array of possible cultural and industrial influences on an author and text. Taken as a whole, then, this multiple-front, evolving theory had the effect of leveling the playing field between any "high culture" presumptions of the literary source contrasted with the film adaptation that followed it. Further, however, the theoretical extreme led by Barthes and Derrida belittled the role of all authorship by reducing source novel writers, and screenwriters and directors by implication, to invisibility or mere "author-functions" in a galaxy full of textual influences and cultural signifiers.

Poststructuralism's challenge to the idea of the unified subject and the unified text remains current. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as well as Bakhtin's reading of fiction and criticism further questioned the possibility of subject or author autonomy, and thus the discrete individuality of any author's narrative and style. Robert Stam explains further:

The Bakhtinian "proto-structuralist" conception of the author as the orchestrator of pre-existing discourses, along with Foucault's downgrading of the author in favor of a "pervasive anonymity of discourse," opened the way to a non-originary approach to all arts. Bakhtin's attitude toward the literary author as inhabiting "inter-individual territory" suggested a devalorization of artistic "originality" . . . adaptation becomes simply another "zone" on a larger and more variegated map.

In contradistinction to approaches emphasizing unity and originality, then, poststructuralism has emphasized rather the gaps and fissures that are a part of the "subject" and the artifact, and (along with "proto-structuralism") the multivocality of influences that shape both. In all of this Stam notes Bakhtin's modification of theoretical language that allows at least for "inter-individual territory," but where subjective authorship would seem to remain of modest consequence.

Literature and film as well as language translation theorists, however, have begun to raise questions about the total erasure of the individual creative voice. Issues of personal style continue to exist alongside issues of personal worldview within specific historical eras. In his essay, "The Unauthorized Auteur Today" (1993), Dudley Andrew challenged dogmatic theorizations of adaptation that slammed the door on all claims of authorship. He had already suggested in an earlier chapter on adaptation that "[i]t will no longer do to let theorists settle things with a priori arguments. We need to study the films themselves as acts of discourse. We need to be sensitive to that discourse and to the forces that motivate it." The implied sense of a possible personal as well as cultural "motivation" in the process of adaptation resides here. Similarly, in Mireia Aragay's recent collection, Books in Motion, she observes that "a redefined notion of auteurism has become a central focus in recent writing on adaptation." Intertextual study can reveal both the screenwriter's struggle for a creative take on preexisting literary materials and the collaborative process tied to the director who seeks to put his or her particular reading on the screen. An adapted film begins as a screenplay transformation of a source, and eventually becomes a film derivation from that screenplay. Recognizing this specificity of textual stages not only confirms adaptation's intertextual status but can also point more precisely to the contributions of key individuals and their most significant impact along the way. Tracing generic, institutional, ideological, and cultural influences need not entirely displace considerations of key creative decisions by individuals most directly responsible for a film. Those broader influences, if considered only in isolation, may miss the way they are finally filtered through the specific interpretations of producers, writers, and directors. Has the deterioration of the subject position in poststructuralism and postmodernity reached the point of total concession by all to a complete erasure of creative inspiration and dedicated conviction of purpose?

Having accepted the convincing theoretical case for a greater balance and more active intercourse between source and adapted texts, the tendency to highlight any variety of cultural influences while overlooking the stage of personal or interpersonal authorship remains troubling. Must we forget that in the end, it is always certain individuals who write a novel or a screenplay and who direct actors and films? And while the majority of their decisions may be recognized as resulting from larger historical and cultural contexts, and from certain guiding perspectives adapted from the source, that the primary talent in a given film adaptation can also serve as very specific individual antennae of interpretation that may be more than the sum of those larger influences? Whatever remains of the creative subject and individual inspiration and effort implies a particular voice, and not necessarily only a culturally mimetic one. Contemporary conditions of mass mediation have certainly altered the process of psychological and social development related to individual identity. Important recent adaptations such as To Die For (1995) and Adaptation (2002) in fact take these very themes of the media-absorbed and degraded personal reality of the individual as their primary subject. If poststructuralism signals the death of the unified subject and text in a welter of cultural influences, and if postmodernism emphasizes reality's absorption into commercial and political mediations that leave the subject exteriorized and hollowed out, then neither theory would seem capable of doing more than reconfirming the power of larger forces already at work. What remains of the subject's "expressive voice" may be only the final resistant echoes of real cultural memory no longer able to make connections even with its own most personally and deeply felt experiences. Does this leave adaptation study with only so many cycles of textual borrowing and transference where no personal agency remains? Certainly, great cinema is not solely individual expression, but neither does it seem only a summary mirror of cultural forces.

There is a reason why so many case studies look to issues of authorship for understanding. The closer one gets to a work, the more the particulars of story treatment, visual style, performance, tone, pacing, scoring, editing, and themes become recognizable as a series of decisions attributable to individuals. And this applies equally to adaptation study. Just as an adapted film can change an entire cultural view of a source—such as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) "updating" Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness—so too can special efforts by individuals such as Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick change the way we look at the balance between literary source and adapted film. As we step back from the aesthetic particulars of a work, it is possible to see larger circumstances and trends affecting whole groups of films. Both macro- and microperspectives for critical interpretation are useful, and there is no reason to disparage one for the other. Hence, Foucault's ideas on author functions can be seen as his analytical distance from the daily reality and personal efforts of those caught up in the pressurized circus of adaptive screenwriting and film production, where certain decisions may breach as well as follow larger cultural norms. Significant theorists and writer-directors alike are usually reactive to culture in the sense that they can bring something unique to it and also, perchance, modify its direction. Certainly, the history of film includes its changing pantheon of theorists as well as filmmakers, however divergent their functions and methods.

In the Hollywood filmmaking contexts and constraints of rights and contracts, institutional structures of production and branding, and the assignment of screen credits, creative talent can ultimately choose either a lazy approach of audience exploitation through cultural clichés, spectacle, and commercial reification or look instead toward a careful cultural observation, uniqueness of expression, and cultural engagement. Surely it is individuals and their dedication of energy to something illuminative in film that makes the latter happen. Successful transformations such as Million Dollar Baby (2004, Clint Eastwood), which Paul Haggis adapted from an "F. X. Toole" short story (and just after the author's death), thematizes singular dedication to class mobility and a specific kind of fulfillment. This confirms a fundamental American myth, but one that is also placed by these authors against very specific gender, class, and racial stereotypes. The film was also made for $30 million and grossed $100.4 million within five months, figures suggesting that its particular message and aesthetic, as driven home by the personal commitment of its makers, have communicated something universal to audiences (not to mention the implication in its box-office success that art and commerce need not be mutually exclusive). Part of the significance of narrative film writing and production resides in its potential to reach millions worldwide, and thus to make a difference in ways and at levels that literature has been unable to achieve.

Nevertheless, the two narrative media share in what can be, as several theorists have already suggested, a largely beneficial synergy. And this synergy is often most in evidence through the intertextual script that links them. As I have attempted to demonstrate, the adapted screenplay asserts the main parameters and direction of authorial intention, whatever the final outcome on the big screen may be. Bazin wrote in 1948 that the public impact of films was greater than novels at myth-making, and he noted also the way film adaptations reinforce rather than eliminate the relevancy of drama and the novel. There appears to be a longing for the audiovisual image in the descriptive suggestion of the word, and a longing for the word to describe the full immediacy of the film image. A critical approach to adaptation that recognizes authorial desire through the script intertext as well as the film can reveal—like the many sketches a sculptor might draw in preparation for completing a statue—the significant stages of smaller decisions that finally add up to the whole.

Beyond formalistic or poststructuralist cross-textual analyses, then, there should also be room in the equation for consideration of the adaptive writer's and director's orchestration of voice and desire in cinema short of an overly romanticized auteurism. Stam reinforces this view in his comments on authorship:

Auteur studies now tend to see a director's work not as the expression of individual genius but rather as the site of encounter of a biography, an intertext, an institutional context, and a historical moment . . . they [directors, and to this I would add screenwriters] "orchestrate" pre-existing voices, ideologies, and discourses, without losing an overall shaping role . . . a director's work can be both personal and mediated by extrapersonal elements such as genre, technology, studios, and the linguistic procedures of the medium.

A revised contemporary sensitivity to adaptive film authorship would therefore also include the environments of all three texts—literary, script intertext, and film. All three can be sites of personal and cultural struggle and perhaps revelation. We look to locate and recognize both definitive individual voices and extrapersonal contexts when they show themselves across the developmental writing stages of adaptation, as well as on through the multitrack dimensionality and enunciating voice of the completed film. The chapters that follow, using a variety of methods in their engagements with specific examples, work to recognize and interpret what is most significant and meaningful in the many procedural stages and forms of adaptation represented here.