Adapting the Novel for the Screen
Part II
From time to time, writers may tire.
But we never retire.
This is not true, however, for university professors.
I left the film school faculty at UCLA in 2018 after forty spectacular years mentoring wonderful new writers. Since then, I have been busier than ever with my own writing and various side hustles, among them script analyst, providing detailed notes to writers regarding their in-progress drafts.
Currently, among my clients is a writer adapting a novel for the screen.
With the release just last week of my new novel Deadpan, the nexus between literature and screenplays is very much on my mind.
The notes I gave this client apply not only to him, but writers everywhere in every form, format, and platform, and those are just the forms.
I urged him to remember that novel is the novel, and the movie is the movie.
In writing the screenplay, what a writer owes the novel is: nothing.
A screenwriter’s creditor is not the novel that is being adapted but the audience that will watch the movie. What is owed to them is the best movie the writer can write.
