lecturas de fin de semana [ 58 ] / el negocio de la adaptación de obras literarias al cine

Interesantísimo el artículo “Movie Deals", que publica la edición de esta semana de The New Yorkk Times Book Review sobre la realización de alianzas estratégicas entre las industrias editorial y cinematográfica para hacer sistemáticamente algo que se ha hecho de manera dispersa desde que el cine era muy joven: la realización de películas basadas en obras literarias.

Estas alianzas son mucho más fáciles ahora que la tendencia en la industria es hacia la conformación de grandes grupos, muchos de los cuales tienen un carácter multimedia —es decir, que intervienen en sectores afines como la televisión, la radio, la edición de libros y de publicaciones periódicas, la publicidad, la música o Internet—. Sin lugar a dudas la adaptación de obras literarias al cine les da a éstas una visibilidad enorme que termina jalonando sus ventas, llevándolas en algunos casos a entrar a las listas de los best sellers y a ubicarse incluso por encima de las novedades de la temporada.

Uno de los casos que más me ha llamado la atención recientemente es el de la película Capote, que hizo que se dispararan las ventas tanto de la biografía que hizo Gerald Clarke del escritor norteamericano como de A sangre fría y de algunos de sus otros libros. El perfume, Memorias de una Geisha, Alatriste, Tristram Shandy o El amor en los tiempos del cólera son otros casos recientes en los que la adaptación cinematográfica de una obra literaria que ha sido publicada varios años atrás termina reviviendo el interés por ésta.

Movie Deals

By Rachel Donadio

It’s high season for Oscar bait, and multiplexes are filled with literary adaptations, including the Coen brothers’ bloody take on Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” and Mike Newell’s film of Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera.” Coming later this fall are big-screen versions of Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” Philip Pullman’s “Golden Compass” and Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” among others.

Literary writers have gone west in search of greater fame and fortune at least since the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and books have long inspired films. But today, some publishers are going directly into the movie business themselves. Last month, HarperCollins, a division of News Corp., announced a partnership with Sharp Independent to develop movies based on HarperCollins books. Meanwhile, Random House Inc. has teamed up with Focus Features to co-produce two to three movies a year based on fiction and nonfiction from its dozen imprints. Its first collaboration, “Reservation Road,” directed by Terry George and based on John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel, played in theaters this fall.

These partnerships give publishers a bigger piece of the action than traditional film rights deals, which generally bring them little more than a publicity boost for tie-in editions. Now, Random House and HarperCollins will get a cut of the box office sales, as well as revenue from DVDs, cable TV and other media. And the authors involved will get more say in choosing screenwriters, actors and directors.

Some worry that the increasingly cozy relationship between Hollywood and publishing companies is changing expectations of literary success — and may even be changing the way novelists approach their work. These days, “most writers feel a book isn’t worthy unless it’s made into a film,” Annie Proulx said in June at a literary festival in Capri, discussing the experience of having her short story “Brokeback Mountain” adapted for the big screen. “I think people are writing their books with an eye toward wanting them to be made into a film,” she said, a development she found “dispiriting.” But interviews with a number of novelists who have worked with Hollywood suggest that the situation may be more complicated, and that the process might have given them not just a big payday but some helpful insights into storytelling.

Novelists and the movie business haven’t always been so friendly. “When I first went out to Hollywood I got the sense it was better not to mention I was a novelist,” said John Sayles, who published stories in The Atlantic Monthly and wrote a novel, “Union Dues,” that was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978 before he became a screenwriter and director. In addition to directing his own scripts for films like “Matewan,” “Lone Star” and “Honeydripper,” coming in December, he has written some 40 screenplays for other directors. Studios, Sayles quickly learned, saw novelists as “those pesky people who complain about the movie after it’s made or ‘make us waste $100,000 writing the first draft before we get a professional to take care of it.’” A lot of novelists, he said, “just take the money and run, or a lot of them take the money and complain.”

These days, Sayles said, his fiction writing is just a “hobby,” as well as a place to experiment. A novel allows for many different points of view, he noted, while in film, there are basically three: omniscient (“the shot of the house from the outside at night”), the protagonist’s (“in the closet as the chain saw cuts through”) and the antagonist’s (“through the hockey mask of the crazed killer”). And novels can expand where film has to compress. Right now, Sayles is writing a book that started as a screenplay — until he realized he’d never raise the money to produce something set in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. (“I need a good Writers Guild strike to get a novel done,” he said.)

Other novelists say film work has given them a different sense of narrative possibilities. Schwartz, who wrote the screenplay for “Reservation Road,” said film writing had had a “disinhibiting” effect on his fiction, inspiring him to cut between scenes in a “slightly more aggressive” way. Michael Ondaatje, whose novel “The English Patient” became an Oscar-winning film, said his own experience on several documentary projects had taught him about the power of seemingly small decisions. “I recognized how intricate and microscopically small the art of editing is,” he said. “You cut something that’s the twentieth of a frame and you can make a difference in the pacing.”

Diane Johnson, whose novels include “Le Divorce” and “Le Mariage,” said her screenwriting work had given her a stronger sense of structure. Stanley Kubrick, who hired her to write the script based on Stephen King’s novel “The Shining,” was an elaborate outliner. His insistence on “getting the structure in place before you actually move to the details of a scene carried over into novel writing in a good way,” she said. “I’m not sure that novel writing in turn helps you as a screenwriter,” she added. “I think it’s more the other way.”

A film deal also helped Tom Perrotta’s career as a novelist, if not quite in the way some detractors think. When his novel “Election” was published in 1998, he said, “I got a lot of reviews that said, ‘He wrote this to be a movie,’” an idea he calls “laughable.” In fact, he had written the book years earlier, but it sat in a drawer until someone connected him with a film producer, who showed it to the director Alexander Payne, who optioned the film rights, which in turn led to a book contract. Since then, he’s had no trouble having his novels published — or filmed. He was a co-writer of the screenplay for the film based on his novel “Little Children” and has also been hired to write the film version of his new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher.” “Writing screenplays,” he said, “has the paradoxical effect of making me a more literary writer, much more conscious of what I can do in a novel that I can’t do in a script: the ease of a flashback within a flashback, how you can have immediate access to any event in your character’s life.”

Some writers, however, insist that having their novels turned into movies has hardly affected their writing at all. “I make work that is pretty resistant to being filmed, and if the film community cares to try, that’s fine with me and indicates fortitude on their part,” said Rick Moody, whose novel “The Ice Storm” was adapted by Ang Lee. “But I don’t think about the movie business while I am composing novels and stories.” Although he was in touch with the director and producer during filming, Moody said he tried to follow Hemingway’s advice, which he summarized as follows: “Drive to the border of California, throw your book over the fence. When they throw the money back over the fence, collect the money and drive home.”

Chuck Palahniuk also says he’s happy just to sit back while the filmmakers do their work. Palahniuk was working as a mechanic when his 1996 novel “Fight Club” was made into a film directed by David Fincher. “I only quit my job ... because my phone rang with personal calls all day, and I couldn’t get my real work done,” he said in an e-mail message. “On the day ‘Fight Club’ started filming, my agent sent dozens of white roses to the garage where I worked — that kind of botched my standing among the other mechanics.” In August, he traveled to New York to watch Clark Gregg shoot a film based on his novel “Choke.” “It was interesting to see everyone’s interpretation,” Palahniuk said. “Beyond that, I ate my weight in location catering and ogled during the nude scenes.”

In a recent essay for Nextbook.org, Bruce Jay Friedman summed up what may be the healthiest attitude to the hit-or-miss fiction-to-film experience. He loved “The Heartbreak Kid,” Neil Simon and Elaine May’s 1972 adaptation of his story “A Change of Plan,” about a man who falls in love with another woman on his honeymoon. But he hasn’t yet seen the Farrelly brothers’ remake, which stars Ben Stiller and was released last month. “Once again,” Friedman wrote, “there is very little for me to do except to watch the movie, take full credit for anything that’s exceptional, and to deny involvement with any parts that aren’t.”