Writing 101: Adapting Prose Story to Screenplay - Part Two

Once I made the decision to adapt my short story - Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken - as a no-frills, just-to-see-if-I-can-do-this screenplay, I had to start thinking about the story’s structure and how best to approach it so it works well as a movie.

One of the reasons for choosing this story instead of, say, my thinly-disguised recollections about my first time with a woman, was its simplicity. It is, in essence, a long flashback (with a dream sequence tacked on for good measure) set in June of 1983 during the main character’s/narrator’s last hours as a high school student, with a frame story set in what was “present day” in 1998.

Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken has several built-in advantages that make it fairly easy to adapt, at least in theory. It has only a small set of main characters. There’s Jim, the narrator, a college professor and best-selling author in the frame story, and a Harvard-bound high school senior in the main body of the story. There’s Mark, his best friend since fifth grade and, in his adult incarnation, a successful real estate agent. There are several minor characters who Jim encounters in the hallways and classrooms of his high school. There’s a funeral parlor receptionist.

And, of course, there’s Marty, also known as Martina Elizabeth Reynaud, the daughter of British immigrants and the girl Jim has loved - from afar - throughout much of his high school years.

The plot is also simple (I wish I were so conceited that I could say elegantly simple, but I’ll settle for “simple”): Almost 15 years after graduation, a successful Stephen Ambrose-like historian gets the news that his high school crush has been killed in an automobile accident. Shaken by the news, he reminisces about his last day of high school and how he couldn’t bring himself to tell this girl that he had feelings for her. The main part of the story is that flashback, with a sad little coda set a few days after the historian gets the bad news.

As I said a few days ago, I thought my screenplay would be somewhat easy to write in sequence, but after several abortive attempts to “start at the beginning and finish at the end,” I had to start at the story’s emotional climax, in a sequence I have labeled the Music Department Corridor Scene.

Now, you may be wondering if, since the story is so simple in structure and plot, the screenplay is perfectly faithful to the original source. This question, of course, is the most common when the subject of book-to-film adaptations comes up in conversations with avid readers. After all, the comment most often heard when a movie such as The Hunt for Red October or The Da Vinci Code is released is Well, it’s good, but it’s not as good as the book.

Of course, before I read up on the concept of adapting prose to screenplay format, I always wondered why movies based on novels almost always differ from the source. Events are switched around or omitted. Some characters either are composites or left out entirely. Dialog is altered. Settings are changed. Sometimes, even endings are altered dramatically.

After reading Syd Field’s Screenplay, however, I now understand why this phenomenon occurs. It’s not that a screenplay’s author is trying to remove flaws from a prose writer’s material or change things simply for the sake of changing them. It’s simply that the nature of the film medium is vastly different from that of literature.

A movie, in order to be produced within a certain budget and be watched by the average moviegoer, has to have an average running time of two hours. It must be produced with a careful eye on production costs, which means that casting, location shooting, set creation, costumes, music clearances, catering, special effects and all the post-production processes often dictate abridgement or re-inventing of a novel’s plot and ending to make the movie affordable to produce.

Additionally, in “action movies” based on novels, directors and producers often alter endings to make them more exciting. That’s why we see the Great White Shark in Jaws doing that jump-on-the-Orca attack at the climax of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster, or why every one of the Tom Clancy adaptations have such drastically different conclusions from the books.

So are there any such drastic changes in the screenplay version of Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken?

Thematically, no. The scene I am working on now only has a few variations in the dialogue between the characters, and one of the persons who had almost an inconsequental role in the prose story has a bit more to do in the screenplay version.

Yet, for all that, the fact is that changes have, indeed, been made. I didn’t make them because I was thinking Oh, this is going to cost the producers a lot of money when this is filmed. Fields and all the screenplay gurus will tell you that you should never write your first draft with self-imposed limitations that reduce the scope of your original vision. You’re the screenwriter, so unless you are also the director and/or self-producing, costs, sets and casting issues should not come into play at this early state of the adaptation process.