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.”