Take a classic novel or a play and turn it into a film. Sounds easy. But there have been some major mistakes on the way to the silver screen, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent.
There's that great quote: "Hey, this guy Shakespeare's good - sign him up". Perhaps Sam Goldwyn really did say it. If he didn't, well he should have. Hollywood big shots figured out early on in the movie business that the public love a story. Should that story already exist between the covers of a book, so much the better, as there's nothing like a famous novel for conferring respectability.
And after all, it was old Sam who produced the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights directed by William Wyler. No, the idea of transferring books to the screen is far from recent. Within a year of being published in Berlin, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, had been honourably and impressively adapted. Starring Lew Ayres, it also took the 1930 Best Picture Oscar. Admittedly, few novels since have made it to the Big Screen quite as quickly.
But that guy Shakespeare certainly knew how to spin a yarn, as did Charles Dickens. Both have kept adaptors and screen-writers busy. Then, aside from versatile characters such as Budd "On the Waterfront" Schulberg, it was often insinuated that screen-writers were merely hacks and failed writers devoid of original ideas.
It's no surprise the 19th-century novel is a favoured, and well-worked mine. You want adventure? Check out Alexandre Dumas - and lots have, judging by the variations of The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask. You want good dialogue? Few professional screen-writers can go far wrong if they're working with Jane Austen. Searching for plain old intrigue and doomed romance? Relax, all of European literature is passively waiting to be pillaged by screen-writers possessing varying levels of competence.
Just spare a thought though, for poor Thomas Hardy, probably still trying to recover from John Schlesinger's 1967 ham-fisted assault on Far From the Madding Crowd, although Hardy did fare slightly better in 1979 when Roman Polanski set his sights on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, or better make that Tess herself - as played by Nastassja Kinski.
Among the legions of novels maltreated by film-makers, it is difficult to think of a major work as poorly served as Henry James's majestically sophisticated tale of calculation and failed idealism, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Mangled into a casually modern sadomasochistic romp played in fancy dress, it staggered under director Jane Campion. This 1996 disaster illustrated exactly how wrong an adaptation could go - even more wrong than David Lean's blatantly-missing-the-point version of Pasternak's Dr Zhivago, which not even the talents of Rod Steiger and Tom Courtenay could salvage.
The current batch of movies about to battle for Oscars might leave one thinking that all the film-makers have simply reached for the nearest book. Sometimes, though, the wildest gamble secures victory. Peter Jackson has been both responsible and creative with his ambitious handling of Tolkien's powerfully visual epic, The Lord of the Rings. Even the purists would have to concede Jackson is performing miracles, and will be forgiven the difficulties with the Ents, the talking trees.
The screenplay by playwright Christopher Hampton of Graham Greene's The Quiet American is superb - as is the beautifully shot, beautifully acted and subtle film. Hardly surprising, given Hampton's elegantly judged screenplay of Choderlos de Laclos's 18th-century novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Hampton wisely bypassed his play and returned to the text to create one of the finest adaptations yet filmed, Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons. If there was any justice - or artistic merit in the coming Oscar fest - the best film would be decided between The Quiet American, The Pianist and The Lord of the Rings, with Michael Caine (The Quiet American) deservedly taking best actor.
But relatively little of this is about justice or genuine artistic merit. About Schmidt appears to have been conceived as a vehicle for Jack Nicholson, and the familiar collection of stock facial expressions he brings to most roles. Packaged accordingly, the movie is described as being based on the novel by Louis Begley. It was published in the US in 1996 but not in Britain until after the hugely hyped film was released. It is a very poor novel; flatly written, laboured, inconsistent, populated by unconvincing characters.
But wait, there is something interesting afoot - the only thing the movie has in common with the novel is the title - everything else has been changed, including Schmidt's first name. The Nicholson character is "Warren" Schmidt, a retired insurance actuary in Omaha, Nebraska, who despises his wife and whose whingeing "past her prime" daughter is about to wed the drop-out son of weirdo divorcee mother (brilliantly played by Kathy Bates). His poor, house-proud wife dies suddenly. "Warren" takes to telling his story by letter to a six-year-old black boy in Africa and tours about in a giant camper before heading for Colorado and his daughter's wedding.
In the novel, "Albert" Schmidt is a snobbish Manhattan lawyer grieving his loved wife. His smart, go-getter daughter is about to marry a young lawyer from Schmidt's old firm. Dad is none to pleased. It is all very predictable - except that Albert then gets involved in a highly sexual relationship with a 20-year-old waitress who continues to have sex with an oddball who ends up becoming Albert's nurse after Albert has a car crash. Confused? Good.
Begley's novel has embarrassing literary pretensions, the movie, though bogus, has none. But pretension, laboured effect and a general worthiness dominates the suffocating experience that is The Hours. Based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer prize-winning novel published in 1999 which itself draws heavily on the life of Virginia Woolf as well as her struggle to write the novel Mrs Dalloway, The Hours has a difficult triple narrative. The best writing in the novel is in the Woolf sequences. These passages are among the strongest in the film, except where the dialogue between Leonard and Virginia is stagy and overly wordy. David Hare's screenplay is also guilty of being too modern. Still, there are fine set-pieces, such as the scenes featuring Woolf and her housekeeper, and particularly Vanessa Bell's visit to Woolf at Richmond.
The other two narrative layers concern a depressed, pregnant mother of one in a 1949 US suburb - changed to 1951 for the film. Laura Brown is preoccupied and seeks comfort in reading Mrs Dalloway. It is her husband's birthday. Her little boy is suffering the weight of her despair. Julianne Moore is about the best actress around although she gets stiff competition from Toni Colette in a minor role as a pastiche 1950s housewife neighbour, Kitty, on her way to hospital for investigative surgery. Laura's 1950s kitchen resembles a stage set and even Moore is tested to offset the arch direction.
The entire movie staggers under Philip Glass's poundingly obvious piano score, which is intended to indicate tension.
As in the novel, the contemporary New York sequences are stilted. Meryl Streep plays Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by her one-time lover, Richard, a poet now dying of AIDS. She is planning a party for him and sets off to buy flowers. For so long the actress of self re-invention, Streep gets her share of the nerves and the stress, but few of the better lines. Nicole Kidman's staring, preoccupied, at times, deranged Woolf has some fine moments. But could anyone really glide that steadily into a strongly flowing river? Gestures, poses, doors opening, heads rested on pillows, three "meaningful kisses" orchestrated by each of the three female leads - these scenes are used throughout in triplicate to emphasis the triple narrative. Admirable but contrived, Stephen Daldry's heavy handed working of The Hours, all technique, surface detail and no feeling, is rather like revisiting Short Cuts, Robert Altman's messy treatment of nine Raymond Carver short stories loudly transplanted to Los Angeles settings.
The Hours made vital a return to its source - a source also used in Marleen Gorris's intelligent and stylish Mrs Dalloway. Released in 1997, it is very well made and makes good use of time shifts. Vanessa Redgrave uses her habitual crazed smile to wonderful effect in the title role. The film engages in a way The Hours does not. It also brought to mind the excellent film version of Pat Barker's Regeneration.
Page and screen are different mediums, reverential adaptation is not essential. Sally Potter had immense fun in her daft and lively version of Woolf's fantasy novel, Orlando, in 1992. For all its horror, David Cronenberg's 1996 suitably explicit version of J.G. Ballard's pornographic masterpiece, Crash, sustained the amorality of what is a deeply profound polemic.
Interestingly, another Ballard masterpiece, Empire of the Sun, given a Steven Spielberg treatment in 1987, three years after its publication, loses the detached tone that rendered the original so moving. Equally Polanski's awesome achievement, The Pianist, is far superior to Spielberg's 1993 Schindler's List, based on Thomas Keneally's factional 1982 Booker winner, Schindler's Ark.
Surefooted adaptations in the hands of good directors can prove wonderful. Thaddeus O'Sullivan's starkly exquisite December Bride, alerted readers to Sam Hanna Bell's beautiful though forgotten novel. Gillian Armstrong's 1997 version of Peter Carey's complex and eccentric Booker winner, Oscar And Lucinda, captures the strangeness, the comedy and the unsentimental pathos of the story.
Another deftly adapted Booker winner is The Remains of the Day. Few recent films can match Fred Schepisi's sensitively unsentimental rendering of Graham Swift's multi-voiced Booker-winning Last Orders that admittedly came complete with wonderful dialogue. It is far more satisfying than the 1992 attempt to film Swift's masterful third novel, Waterland. But then Volker Schlöndorff's brave 1979 film of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, didn't quite work either.
If in doubt in the face of a complex text, opt for set pieces, as did the canny makers of CATCH-22. Terence Davies' 1998 version of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, followed suit. It saw X-Files refugee, Gillian Anderson, come of age with a dazzlingly multi-nuanced performance. For admirers of Wharton, it more than compensated for Martin Scorsese's overblown lunge at The Age of Innocence.
But film adaptations do not have to be based on period fiction to triumph. Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter by US writer Russell Banks inspired two of the finest films of recent years.
Can a movie prove superior to the original novel? Well E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News made a better film than it did a novel - although it had won the Pulitzer prize.
Adaptation, a good thing or a bad? Charles Kaufman's entertaining and original Adaptation is a joy - raucous, funny, and surprisingly true to Susan Orlean's original, witty and learned book, The Orchid Thief (1998) that developed from New Yorker investigative journalism.
That Kaufman could frame the entire story, that rests on a bizarre misfit genius called John Laroche and his antics, within Kaufman's nervous breakdown, problems with writer's block, his hair, weight, sexual failures and the problem of having scored with Being John Malkovich, is astonishing.
But then so is Adaptation. It is virtuoso entertainment looking at many things - flowers, history, success, ambition - and above all, life. At its heart is Laroche, a brutally poetic individual who not only chases his obsessions, he exhausts them, while the Kaufman character is a Woody Allen-like Everyman.
Despite Orlean being transformed into a sex and drug addicted potential killer, there is a mad honesty, energy and likeable ego about Adaptation. And it is living, breathing, crazy and original, it wrests terrific comic performances from Nicholas Cage, a liberated Meryl Streep and a mesmeric Chris Cooper. No it won't linger in the memory as will The Quiet American or The Pianist, but it definitely outclasses a film as laboured as The Hours, or one as fake and as emotionally bereft as About Schmidt.