The Problem of Adaptation

What’s involved in bringing a novel to the screen? Later this year, Walden Media and Disney are screening C.S. Lewis’ classic children’s story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in a theatre near you. When December 9, 2005 rolls around, it will have been no mean feat to mount such an ambitious production. The Harry Potter movies each present similar difficulties, as will the Tom Hanks version of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code; and The Lord of the Rings was perhaps the Mother Of All Adaptations.

Now, we could dissect the various merits of books remaining books rather than being adapted for the screen, stage or radio; but that’s a rabbit trail I won’t here pursue. Neither will I attempt to justify films in general.

As both an artist and critic, I appreciate most art forms for their own sake, and in the same way that musical composers offer up “variations on a theme by” other composers—or that painters present art “inspired by” a familiar story—I find it perfectly natural that a film director would want to translate a favorite book to the cinematic form.

In the present economic climate, of course, movie studios are very anxious to back cinematic properties that will allow the opportunity to “presell” films; hence the recent spate of remakes, superhero flicks and adaptations. Producers are looking for built-in audiences, which really help opening weekend boxoffice figures.

So how does the process work? I recently spoke with Paul McCusker, who adapted The Chronicles of Narnia for the radio. His experience sheds some insight not only into the general problem of literary adaptation, but also into the specific issues facing Disney and Walden Media in bringing Narnia to the silver screen.

The primary issue, McCusker says, is knowing both the source material and your own artform. In McCusker’s case, when he began work on the Narnia series, he’d already been working in radio drama since 1987. “I’d had ten years experience doing audio drama,” he says. “So when I sat down with the novels, the artistic process was very clean. I went page by page and I dramatized what should be dramatized and I narrated what I couldn’t dramatize. And that was my rule of thumb. I would let Lewis speak for himself.”

Now, if that sounds a bit simple, bear in mind that knowing what works as narration and what works as drama is much easier for a seasoned veteran than it might be for a greenhorn. It almost becomes instinctive, in the same way that a Major League shortstop doesn’t need to think much about how to turn a double play. At some point, training and experience translate into finely-honed reactions.

And because of the quality of Lewis’ writing, the process was particularly smooth for McCusker. “It was only in The Magician’s Nephew,” he says, “that I had to actually create dialogue where Lewis had not. In [the original] narrative, it was not important to hear what was said, but in a radio drama you needed it.” And how do you put words in the mouths of Lewis’ characters? Very carefully, says McCusker. He never invented “anything theological or purposely Christian” for them to say. “I would have really bristled against that,” he adds.

He nonetheless acknowledges that his adaptation necessarily reflects something of his own artistic sensibilities. It’s unavoidable, he says. “To translate from a book to an audio drama meant that I had to filter it. While I was determined not to make unnecessary changes, I still had to make modifications in order to accomodate the format of the audio drama. So really what you hope for is that you’ve caught the spirit of the thing”—the same goal that Peter Jackson and his screenwriters stated as their objective with The Lord of the Rings.

Ironically, as McCusker’s project headed into postproduction, word started coming in about Narnia film projects. “We heard that there were various studios that were having a go at it, but were failing. They were basically trying to Hollywoodize it”—dropping the book’s themes in favor of those more to the liking of Hollywood marketeers. “So we kind of watched with some interest to see what would happen, and wondered if anybody would ever get it right.” In February, McCusker and representatives from thirty other influential Christian media outlets were flown to Disney’s studios for an advance look at the project and a discussion with the director, Andrew Adamson. McCusker was very impressed.

“At no point did they say, ‘We are going to do everything that we can to maintain the Christian messages of this story.’ And you know what? They would have been wrong to say that. What they said was, ‘We are going to everything we can do—we are doing everything—to maintain these stories and their themes.’ And that’s all they said. But for me that’s reassuring because C.S. Lewis himself did not view the stories necessarily as an evangelistic tool. And I think people are getting lost in some of that.”

Now, McCusker makes no bones that the world view at Focus on the Family Radio Theatre differs from Disney’s. “We’re out to do radio drama that has a Christian world view,” he says—“but not necessarily to drag people kicking and screaming into the Kingdom.” So artistically, he found his own priorities and ethos echoed by Walden and Disney. “The reality is: Lewis told some great stories, and that’s what we respected by agreeing to do them. We’re not out to proseletize. So our attitude was the same as Lewis’—let the stories speak for themselves. If people get the Christian messages, fine. If they don’t, fine. They’ve still had some good stories.” Adamson, who is also a Christian, said almost exactly the same thing in a satellite uplink at ComicCon in San Diego last week.

This is not say that McCusker—or Adamson—advocates a scene-for-scene, word-for-word presentation of the original story. “That would be boring,” McCusker points out. “It wouldn’t be a good movie. The reading experience versus the viewing experience is so substantially different.”

Artistic issues aside, the real complication in adapting a work like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia is dealing with the property’s estate. Things get very tricky when performance rights can be valued at millions of dollars. Fortunately, in the case of Narnia, the primary concern is artistic integrity, and oversight of projects falls directly into the hands of Douglas Gresham, C.S. Lewis’ stepson through his marriage to Joy Davidman.

Getting Gresham’s attention, and therefore the estate’s attention, has largely to do with reputation. “In 1996 we had contacted the Lewis estate—actually earlier than that; it might have been 1995—to see if we could get permission to do it,” says McCusker. “And the initial answer was, ‘No.’ I think they had some competing or conflicting agreements, so they said no. But we didn’t know that. We actually thought, ‘Oh, they think we’re going to Hollywoodize it.’”

But McCusker didn’t give up, and it was well that he didn’t. Gresham was still promoting the project. “He championed us because he knew that we would stay true to the books—that we weren’t going to fiddle around with Lewis’ work. He was very concerned about that. He knew the quality of our work not only through our other award-winning radio theatre programs, but also through the the children’s program we do called Adventures in Odyssey.” So when the estate cleared the rights, the project was greenlighted.

The Lewis estate was attracted to Walden Media’s film project for similar reasons. Walden had already established a reputation of producing high-quality, faithful literary adaptations like Holes. And Gresham is minding shop on the film production in much the same way that he did for McCusker.

“Douglas Gresham got involved from the get-go. We developed a really good relationship with him. He’s a good guy. I remember in the studio, I had made a classic mistake in a scene where some archers were going to fire some arrows. And you see? I just used the word I shouldn’t have used. They were going to shoot arrows, and in the I had dialogue one of the commanders yelling, ‘Fire!’ And Doug said, ‘This is actually wrong. Fire is the word that you use for something that actually uses fire, like a pistol or rifle. You’re applying fire to the cannon, to that kind of weaponry. But you would never say fire with archery.’ And I had never thought of that. So we went back and changed it. He corrected us on details of the world of Narnia, where, as I had read the books, I had either misunderstood something or needed to get the pronunciation right.”

We can be thankful that Douglas Gresham has taken on the daunting task of overseeing these adaptations for the sake of his stepfather’s art. And we can be grateful that artists like McCusker and Adamson—and Peter Jackson, among so many others—have also taken great pains to faithfully present their own “variations on a theme.”

Into The West

My name is Greg, and I’m a Westernaholic. My recreational fixes include The Western Encyclodpedia and Ramon Adams’ dictionary, Western Words.

As long as I can remember, I’ve been addicted to Westerns. While raised on TV oaters and movies, my first obsession was the Lewis and Clark expedition, and I read Clark’s journals when I was 8 or 9. I reproduced, by hand, a wall-sized map of the expedition, “aged” the paper and decoupaged it onto an enormous piece of blow-torched plywood.

The first real literary rush I got was from Zane Grey’s Rogue River Feud, and when I later read A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, I didn’t see how Western literature could get any better.

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” aside, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fueled my cinematic imagination until Jeremiah Johnson came along; and then the Real Deal came to TV: James Michener’s Centennial. I would later be consumed with the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, thrill to the opening sequence, humor and characterizations of Silverado, and cheer when Eastwood’s masterpiece Unforgiven won Best Picture; but time and again I have returned to the first seven episodes of Centennial to relive the fictional tale of Pasquinel and McKeag.

Now, I know I’ve got this addiction, and although I’ve got it mostly under control, I know I’ll always be an addict. I don’t need temptations like Into the West. And I swore I’d resist the temptation this time around. It would have been easy, too, if TNT hadn’t made the series inescapable, running each new episode on multiple nights, and airing the new ones back-to-back with the previous ones. So I have to confess. I’ve indulged again, against my best intentions. I know this isn’t good for me.

The real problem with addictions, of course, is that the addict is never a connoisseur. We’ll watch The Quick and the Dead or read Riders of the Purple Sage as soon as anything else. You all know what I mean, don’t you? So I have to also confess that, once I uncorked Into the West, I’d have kept watching it whether it were a masterpiece or a dog. I’m happy to report, I guess, that it’s somewhere in between.

What made Centennial at least a partial classic was its firm rooting in one story and one locale, more or less. Michener’s fictive setting and characters were able to capture the broad scope of the American West without the interference of an addict’s distracting knowledge of every Western variety and vintage. “Facts” can often get in the way of enjoyment.

Unfortunately, Into the West wants it both ways. Like Centennial, it wants to follow the various members of two loosely-knit families, one white and one Indian; but it also insists on placing these fictional characters at every single major event in the history of the West. This creates five problems.

First, it stretches credibility. How likely is it, for instance, that Jacob Wheeler would ride with Jedediah Smith, later own property on the American River when the gold rush of ‘49 breaks out, and still live to visit the battlefield at the Little Bighorn, where he believes his son has died? As a Viet Nam vet once commented to me about Apocalypse Now, “Sure, everything in there happened at some time. But would one person have seen all that? No.”

Second, the characters aren’t allowed to behave realistically. There isn’t time to allow them that. A perfect example would be the aforementioned visit of Jacob Wheeler to the Dakotas after Custer’s defeat. There he just “happens” to meet two more of the series’ extended white family, Clara and Robert Wheeler, who both have direct connections to Jacob’s family. Yet the three Wheelers never discuss the family, which strikes me as incredibly odd. After all, this series is about family, isn’t it? But the characters themselves aren’t allowed to care much about the issue. Instead, Jacob waxes philosophical about mythologizing and legend-making—which, of course, the series is also about.

Third, the series doesn’t fictionalize events in the way that Centennial did; instead, it attempts to replicate them, and it either can’t or won’t, because it also wants to mythologize. The most glaring example in the series so far is the battle at the Little Bighorn itself. While any recreation of a historic event is bound to have its problems, this battle has been staged so well in other films, including Little Big Man, that Into the West’s version is bound to suffer by comparison. But didn’t the writers, producers and director ever bother to visit or at least study the original site of the battle? It galls to see the climactic fight occur in a bowl on the plains. The voiceover tells us it was a ridge, but the visuals say otherwise.

Fourth, the series tends to lecture and “educate” more than it tells a story. For instance, it’s terribly interesting to see how wheelwrights worked, and to see how a rocker-box was constructed. When a bear nearly removes Jed Smith's scalp and Jacob Wheeler is commanded to stitch it back on, we can say, “Yup, that’s how it was.” It’s even fascinating to contemplate glass-plate photographs being destroyed during an assault on a peaceful Indian village. But such historical lessons, knit loosely together, do not necessarily make good narrative.

Fifth, the series never manages to provide enough focus to the plethora of historical events it covers to make any one of them very satisfying. By contrast, Centenntial made the shrewd move of picking a handful of fictionalized events to portray, such as a cattle drive, and fashioned a self-contained story around each event. Into the West’s approach is more scattershot. An excellent narrative, for instance, could certainly be crafted around the Pony Express or the building of the first cross-continental railroad. But these events are covered piecemeal, merely as part of the over-arching metanarrative, and no real sub-story for either emerges. (The one exception comes in the series’ final episode, which gives almost the entire two hours to the massacre at Wounded Knee. But the exception only proves that series doesn’t know how to do drama right, either.)

Curiously, despite its faults, the series manages to serve up some pretty brave choices. It’s refreshing, for instance, to see the term “Manifest Destiny” surface as an episode title, and the subject of the well-meaning but misguided Indian schools typically gets short shrift in Western portrayals. If only one or more of these subjects had been really well-developed, the series might have risen above the Western equivalent of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine.

Many of the performances do rise above the material, however. Irene Bedard as Jacob Wheeler’s half-breed daughter Margaret Light Shines is particularly good, and Rachael Leigh Cook and Warren Kole manage some real chemistry as Clara and Robert. It’s also good to see the underutilized Russell Means, Wes Studi and Graham Greene in the series (though they are again underutilized). The production values of the series are quite high also, and the series mostly gets its chronology right, if these Lakota roam quite a bit bigger territory than they historically did.

When all is said and done, though, the series manages mostly to be merely a so-so meditation on how, a century or more after the events portrayed, our nation has learned to lose or disregard the faith that drove Western expansion while finally learning to respect, even admire, the faith of our native peoples. But is that really progress? I mean, if the faith of the Lakota deserves respect—and yes, it does—why shouldn’t the faith of Jacob Wheeler’s father deserve just as much? Is it only the faith of the unfortunate victims that matters? Why can Loved By the Buffalo miraculously take on the pain of others while white Christians only inflict misery? Mysticism is most appealing, apparently, when it’s someone else’s.

Such an approach may be entertaining; but it is not only bad history, it’s bad sociology. It’s reverse cultural myopia. The mistakes of the past are not best assuaged with new ones. We should be able to have our triple-malt Scotch and drink it too, so to speak.

The really good news for Westernaholics, of course, is that Into the West delivers the fix it needs to. Is it as good as Centennial at Centennial’s best? No. Is it better than Centennial at Centennial’s worst? Oh, yes. Much better.

And will Into the West be the first real Western rush for some future addict? I bet it will. I just bet.