> My question, though, is why >bother to adapt a book--especially a familiar one--if you're going to >alter it so radically? The filmmakers seem to have completely >misunderstood Hawthorne, if indeed they cared at all. There are three main reasons why so many (Hollywood-)films are adaptions of litterary works: 1. If the book is well known, you get a lot of goodwill from the ticket-buyers 2. You get a ready-made story with charachters, plot, scenes and dialog, and need not spent $$$$$$$ on developing a story that makes sense. 3. The filmmakers get artistic inspiration from the original work. If a film is to be an "succesfull" adaption, the last criteria must be present, if not dominant, and an adaption from discourse to discourse will fail as an art-work. One must extract a story-level out of the originally discourse try to place this in a new discource. It's the essens of the novel/short story that must be captured, not the book it self. Film and litterature are basically different media, and you can't say something in a different media without saying something different. Look at Coppolas "Apocalypse Now"; different time, different place, different scenes and characthers, but still a masterfull adaption. And then look at the new adaption of the same novel ("Heart of Darkness") but now titled the same as the book, and copyed much more directly. It fails completly. Ingvald Bergsagel ***************** Ingvald Bergsagel Rostedsgate 9 0178 OSLO, NORWAY Tlf:22113552 ***************** http://www.media.uio.no/Redaksjonen/Ingvald/Ingvald.html ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]