You Can’t Fight the System, Man
The art of adapting a story for film is about much more than changes in plot or dialogue. As we discussed last week, film adaptations are multifaceted, with layers of context that lie outside of the source material. These outside contexts can often prove to be more illuminating when analyzing a film than any discussion about fidelity to the original work. For instance, how could one analyze 2001: A Space Odyssey as solely an adaptation of the short story it’s inspired by? One would have to ignore the real world geopolitical developments that give the film it’s weight, the goings-on of the world news at the time of the movie’s release, the success of the director’s past works, and countless other factors that contribute to how we, the audience, understand the film.
These contexts can be either freeing or limiting to the director, who in modern film analysis has taken on the role of a band’s frontman, the author of a film’s story. This analysis of a film as a work of art and its director the primary artist involved is known as auteur theory, and it has come to embody much of what we consider contemporary film analysis. This theory has its advantages and its drawbacks, and we’ll be looking at both of these today. One of the main things that works against the auteur theory though, is the acknowledgement of film history and the realities of the film industry. No matter how visionary the director is, they’ll be releasing their art in the context of what the studio allows, and in the shadow of the works that came before. In this sense, film makers are always adapting, whether it’s the conventions of a genre or the work of a novelist, their stories are never created in a vacuum.
This idea of authorship within film opens up what feels like a Russian nesting doll of questions that don’t lead to many answers. Some will argue there are simply too many creators involved in making a movie, too many restraints on a director to crown them the sole visionary behind a cinematic work of art. This argument is valid, and certainly the subject is still being debated to this day. Yet in the past half century or more, we as audience and critics have handed that crown to the directors, elevating them to a creative level they may never have conceived of themselves. So for the rest of this article, let’s stick with the mainstream acceptance of auteur theory and look at how the director-as-author interpretation informs our analysis of adaptation.
It Happened One Night debuted in 1934, eight years after talkies, as they were called, had made their feature film debut. Directed by Frank Capra, it is widely considered the first screwball comedy, with the possible exception of Bombshell which premiered a year prior. Screwball comedies serve as a spiritual predecessor to the modern romantic comedy, and you’ll find they hit many of the same beats. This isn’t to say romantic comedies hadn’t existed before It Happened, Capra had started his sound picture career with one in 1929, when he directed The Younger Generation, the story of a Jewish social-climber who hides his roots to hold on to his wealthy WASP girlfriend. Clearly, Capra was familiar with creating a romantic comedy, but while his previous work was mostly silent and adapted from a play, It Happened would be dialogue heavy, and adapted from a short story. This context changes things quite significantly for the director.
In the process of adapting the original short story, Night Bus by Samuel Hopkins Adams, Capra was tasked with bringing the quick witted love story from page to screen. Here, fidelity doesn’t really matter much, and in fact many of the contextual elements of adaptation don’t really apply, as It Happened is one of the few films that can be called the first of it’s kind in a way. What’s important about this film is the way the director, and the screenwriter Robert Riskin, were able to create a work of art that would stand apart from it’s contemporaries in such a way that it couldn’t be defined in terms of the genres of the 1930s. Capra and Riskin helped to define the idea of screwball comedy, and in doing so created a type of film that resonated with audiences, a type of film that reflected the cultural and economic tensions of the time.
Something interesting to note about It Happened, from the auteur theory perspective, is some of the behind the scenes context of the film. In the years preceding the film’s release, Capra and Riskin were gaining respect as a writer-director duo, yet they were stuck working for Columbia Pictures, a studio known for B movies that weren’t much to write home about. It was tough for Columbia to draw big name actors for their roles, and landing stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert for It Happened was in itself quite an achievement for the studio. Colbert even demanded double her normal salary, as she had years earlier vowed never to work with Capra, who directed her first feature film, For the Love of Mike, which majorly flopped at the box office. The starlet had no expectations for the movie’s success, so much so she didn’t even show up when she won the Oscar for Best Actress. As it happened, It Happened One Night swept Oscar Night for 1934, winning Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Writing, effectively skyrocketing Columbia, and all the individuals involved, to the greatest heights of Hollywood.
All of this is to say, Capra didn’t have total control over the film, though he might have thought he did. It took the work of all the individual award winners in order to claim that Best Picture title. In the case of It Happened, it’s hard to argue that Riskin’s magnificently sharp script didn’t play a major role in its success. The two would go on to open their own independent production studio after their success, seeking more creative control. The collaboration was short lived however, after Riskin grew tired of Capra getting all the credit for their films. Famously, Riskin is said to have held up a stack of blank pages and told his colleague to “Put the famous Capra touch on that!”. While there’s no doubt that both of them were vital for the success of It Happened, their relationship shows the strains that auteur theory and the elevation of the director had on the creative process, even since the 30s.
Moving on from the genre-defining genesis of screwball comedies, let’s take a look at one of it’s countless progenies, the 1973 Paper Moon, a film that is in many ways an homage to Capra’s most celebrated work. Director Peter Bogdanovich had just two years ago released The Last Picture Show to commercial success and critical acclaim, kickstarting his directorial career and establishing his signature black and white style. Both The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon are conspicuously filmed without color, a stylistic choice that separated him from his early 70s contemporaries, and conjures a sentiment of nostalgia harkening back to the Capra era of Hollywood. Paper Moon, while following in the footsteps of It Happened One Night, is a markedly different film in two ways — temporally and in terms of narrative.
Let’s start with the more obvious difference, the plot of Paper Moon is, obviously, different from It Happened, but the ways it differs are of some intrigue. They both feature a male-female lead duo traveling the American landscape by car, they’re both set in the 1930s amidst the Great Depression, and they both resolve their plots with a reunion of their two main characters. So what differences are important here? Well most importantly, Bogdanovich’s leads are not romantically involved, instead they have a father-daughter relationship, and the film heavily implies the two are indeed related by blood, though it never explicitly acknowledges this. This is one of the key distinctions with some thematic implications; Moze and Addie, the leads of Paper Moon, can be seen as symbolic of Bogdanovich’s relationship with the screwball comedies he draws so much inspiration from. The unwillingness to admit that relationship might say something about how the director feels about this forgone era of cinema.
Which brings us to the temporal distance between Bogdanovich’s love letter and the classic screwball comedies of the 30’s. Almost 40 years have passed since the debut of It Happened, and screwball comedy as a genre had come and gone in that span. Bogdanovich himself was born in 1939, when the genre was already reaching the end of its “classic period”. Yet as a student and enthusiast of film he clearly found a fondness for the genre that’s heyday he had just missed out on by virtue of birth date. By the 1970s, numerous waves of social change in America had changed how the public looked back on the media of the 30s. Bogdanovich was now in a position as a director to pay homage to a type of movie he loved, while imbuing it with the nuanced social critique that the original screwball comedies couldn’t, or perhaps chose purposefully not to, include.
The idea of criticizing the past can be a way of acknowledging how far society has come, but for Bogdanovich it also serves as an indictment of the films of a bygone era. The most obvious way Bogdanovich uses Paper Moon as a critique of the 30s comes in the character of Imogene, an impoverished African-American maid who works for the insufferable harlot Trixie Delight (played by Madeline Khan). Imogene gets paid almost nothing for back breaking work and was never able to get a proper education back home down south. Humanizing a black character, and using her to show the disparity of opportunity and treatment during Depression times is something the filmmakers of the 30s never would have considered. But this is the 70s, this is post-Civil Rights Movement, and Bogdanovich takes the opportunity to reflect on the past and make a 1930s movie with modern sensibilities.
Paper Moon excellently highlights Bogdanovich’s style, and it puts front and center the themes that he would explore throughout his career. The film is tinged with nostalgia for another era, but Bogdanovich likes to take a sledgehammer to the rose tinted glasses we tend to view it in. Here, there is no humanizing portrayal of the American aristocracy like you’d find in It Happened One Night. There is only poverty, desperation, con men, hustlers, orphans and corruption to be found here. Though the film ends on a lighter note, its contents display a pessimistic realism that looks to rewrite the fairy tales early Hollywood was built upon.
Before Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich was already on a war path. Tearing down cultural myths is how he hit the big time, with 1971’s The Last Picture Show, a scathing take America’s idealized view of the 1950’s. Bogdanovich serves as writer and director, and as someone who grew up as a teenager in a small town in the 50s, it’s clear that Last Picture Show was a highly personal project. Here makes the choice to shoot in black and white, which he would do again in Paper Moon, but not in his other features, perhaps emphasizing something important about these two particular films.
The rest of this blog will be delving some of Bogdanovich’s works through the lens of auteur theory, so let’s look at what makes Last Picture Show the perfect example of the director’s ethos. Much of what applied to Paper Moon applies here too, but importantly, this is the director’s debut feature film, and the film that would ultimately define his legacy. The Last Picture Show is at it’s core, about life as a young adult in small town America during the 50s, and how bleak that existence truly is. It was a bold move for Bogdanovich, as up to this point the 50s had largely been portrayed in American media as an idyllic time for Christian values and the nuclear family. It was a time before hippies were smoking reefer and protesting, before blacks started talking about civil rights, and before we were drafting lower-class teenagers to fight in Vietnam.
If Bogdanovich’s ethos is to flip cultural perceptions on their head, he did so masterfully with Last Picture Show, but let’s look at how he did it. The black and white stylistic choice is most obvious, turning days of sunshine into greyscale malaise and creating an already-dead feeling throughout the movie. Interestingly, the choice to shoot without color was actually Orson Welles’ idea, who told Bogdanovich it would better bring out the actors’ performances. This suggests an almost accidental thematic marriage between style and plot, but no matter how it came about, the black and white elevates the film’s main ideas.
The plot itself is an almost heretical perversion of a more stereotypical coming of age story. Last Picture Show is filled with graphic nudity, taboo sex scenes, absent or downright malicious parents, and even allusions to homosexuality. The film isn’t exactly Leave it to Beaver. Bogdanovich juxtaposes these very critical theory 1970s elements with a directorial style that draws heavily from Howard Hawks and John Ford, directors whose films would come to define the era Last Picture Show. Wearing his influences on his sleeve, Bogdanovich manages to marry the disparate parts seamlessly, creating a film that, like Paper Moon, feels like it could have debuted in the period the period piece takes place in.
With all this said, it feels wrong to keep gawking at Bogdanovich as the sole auteur behind the success of his works. Just as Capra had a great writer behind him, Bogdanovich had great talents all over his sets, from actors to set designers to the ghosts of directors he emulated. While Bogdanovich has claimed the black and white to be Welles’ idea, he also said the choice was inspired by John Ford’s films, and his camera movements were directly emulating Ford’s. Is the film directing brilliance then or simply a practice in copying the right people? It’s hard to say, and many credit Bogdanovich’s wife and production designer on the movie, Polly Platt, with creating the all important atmosphere that in some senses define Last Picture Show. In this case, like most all others, authorship is complicated.
The final film we’ll look at is Bogdanovich’s 1990 sequel to The Last Picture Show, Texasville. 19 years later in real time, 33 years later in the film’s world, the audience gets to check back in on the fate of Picture Show’s characters. This time, it’s in color, which seems more appropriate for the 1984 setting of the film. Here, Bogdanovich gets to tackle a whole new set of themes, with the same characters, in a sense adapting his first major success for newer times, somewhat ironically given that first success was a look to the past.
Texasville is brighter than its predecessor in both color and tone, which fits well thematically. The story is less about the bleakness of small town living, more so it is a story of time passing. Bogdanovich is older now, the actors are older now, and we the audience have aged with them. A teen who saw The Last Picture Show and identified with the high-stakes melodrama is now in their 30s, and likely looks back on that time in their own life as overly dramatic and serious. That’s not to say Texasville doesn’t have serious moments, but it is by and large a more whimsical take, with little of the soul-crushing moments that defined Last Picture Show.
This tone however, may not have been Bogdanovich’s true intent with Texasville. He complained in interviews about meddling from the studio, forcing him to recut the movie. In doing so, he had to consider his audience as well; had the 1990 audience even seen Last Picture Show? Were they even aware that this was a sequel? And so Bogdanovich was pigeon holed, forced to make a movie that works as both a stand alone feature and a conclusion to a saga that started almost two decades ago. And this leads us to a critical question with auteur theory. If a director is forced to change his or her movie, can we really think of them as the “author” of this work? Especially today, when most box office hits are largely the work of a studio, with franchises and spin-offs planned years in advance, is the director doing that much more than pointing a camera?
Like most questions, the answer is, “it depends”. Bogdanovich still wrote, produced, and directed this film, just as he did Last Picture Show, and again, his authorship is in question, even more so this time around. Films are a collaborative art form, there is no Van Gogh that paints every detail, no Shakespeare to dictate every line. It was rather kind of the French to credit film directors with the role of auteur. But in many, perhaps most cases, the theory just has too many holes. By virtue of the filmmaking process, films need money to get made, and that money only gets secured through Hollywood studios. It is an institution that has stood for over a century now, and it likely isn’t changing anytime soon. Bogdanovich and the New Hollywood types can tell New™ types of stories all they want, as long as they do it within the system. You can make a film that declares death to the the old ways of the industry, but the industry itself stands, and it’s hard to be an auteur in an industry.
