To translate one art form into another is an age old custom.

More than 50 percent of current feature length films produced for the screen and television are adaptations of other materials such as novels, plays, short stories and nonfiction journalism.  In the beginning of film history that number was closer to 100 percent. The earliest surviving American feature, a 1912 silent film, is an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Richard III." In 1915, D.W. Griffith adapted the controversial novel, "The Clansmen," into the groundbreaking, and equally controversial, motion picture Birth of a Nation. Today, countless books are turned into movies and, in turn, movies are often turned back into books. The film Adaptation blurs the line, turning a nonfiction book about a larger-than-life character into a fictional adventure. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman gives up the endless struggle for the perfect adaptation, instead adapting the world to serve his screenplay and his passions as a writer.

Chaucer and Shakespeare based many of their poems and plays on old prose histories. Shakespeare's works, in turn, have inspired musicians such as Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Elgar. Composers such as Verdi, Bloch and Britten have composed operas based on his plays. Artists Hogarth and Blake have found inspiration for their painting in his words. In films, the works of Shakepeare have successfully been translated to the visual medium, ranging from faithful adaptations such as Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet, to the recent adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. And it was Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that inspired the Broadway musical West Side Story, which once again was translated from stage into film.

To adapt means to transpose from one medium to another. It is the ability to make fit or suitable by changing, or adjusting. Modifying something to create a change in structure, function, and form, which produces a better adjustment.

A novel is a novel. A play is a play. A screenplay is a screenplay. It is not a filmed novel or a filmed stage play. They are two different forms. You are changing one form into another. You are writing a screenplay based on other material.

In essence, you are still writing an original screenplay. And you must approach it in the same way. Adapting a novel, book, play, or article into a screenplay is the same as writing an original screenplay. Adaptation must be viewed as an original screenplay. It only starts from the novel, book, play, article or song. That is source material. The starting point. Nothing more.

The screenplay must provide visualisation of the action that can be captured on film. When you adapt from another medium it must be a visual experience. That is your job as screenwriter. You must remain true only to the integrity of the source material.

Adapting another form of writing to the screen means finding cinematic equivalents in the original piece.  Remember that a screenplay is a story told with pictures, placed within the context of dramatic structure.

You have 120 pages to tell your story and have to choose your events carefully so they highlight and illustrate the screenplay with good visual and dramatic components.

The screenplay should be based on the dramatic needs of the story. Source material is source material. It is the starting point. Not an end in itself.

problems of adaptation
One of the greatest differences is that of single and multiple authorship. There is a huge gap between single authorship of a novel and the collaborative teamwork that exists in creating a film from another medium.

The novel, like sculpture, a musical composition, or a painting is usually the work of an individual creative artist. The novelist, as the sole creator of his work, controls selection and omission, and determines where the emphasis lies.

Film requires the co-operation of many craftsmen and technicians, working together as a team - a production unit.

Another major difference is the time factor. Film is generally limited to two hours. Novels can continue as long as the author pleases. The average novel is approximately twice as long as the average screenplay.

There are many legal problems in adaptation.  The screenwriter must always obtain permission to write the screenplay, that means getting the rights from the people involved, and negotiating with the publishing company, representative, agent or with the author.

adapting from another medium
When you want to adapt from another medium you have to:

Find and develop dramatic structure.
Find action - physical or emotional - for the viewers to watch.
Find ways of visualising the story.
Find ways to answer the question: How does this show on the screen?

You only have 120 pages to tell your story. Choose events carefully to highlight and illustrate the screenplay with good visual and dramatic elements.

The fine art of adaptation is not being true to the original.

An adaptation is always an original screenplay.

adapting novels

A novel usually takes place inside the character's head. A play deals with the language of dramatic action. A screenplay deals with externals, with details - the ticking of a clock, a child playing in an empty street, a car turning the corner. Up to 25% of all feature films have been literary adaptations.

A novel usually deals with the internal life of someone, the character's thoughts, feelings, emotions, and memories occurring within the mindscape of dramatic action. In a novel you can write the same scene in a sentence, a paragraph, a page, or chapter, describing the internal dialogue, the thoughts, feelings, and impressions of the character.

A novel usually takes place inside the character's head. The novelist conveys his narrative thought through the use of verbal language. The screenwriter conveys narrative thought through visual and verbal means.   The novelist will write: A woman entered the room. The screenwriter must show a specific woman enter a specific room. 

Because film is a visual medium and tells us much more than the novel possibly could about the physical nature of people, places and things, the filmmaker is more limited than the novelist in the images he presents, but has much more control over how his audience receives such images.

adapting poetry and song lyrics

Poetry and song lyrics are defined as writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound and rhythm.

The meaning comes from the literal meaning of the words and what those words suggest by imagery and symbolism. That kind of imagery in the stage directions of a screenplay is useless in the film.

Imagery may help the director to understand the writer's intention, but most directors pay little attention to the literary quality of the stage directions. Imagery in dialogue will seem unreal and literary against the realistic background of the film.

The impact of language in poetry occurs through the rhythmic arrangement of the words. There is not much point, except to salve the writer's ego, to put the dialogue in too distinctive a rhythm or to write the stage directions in a poetic rhythm. Rhythmical narration has occasionally been used in film, but its use is very formal. It seems contrived and artificial to modern audiences.

adapting magazine or newspaper articles

In screenwriting you go from the general to the specific, you find the story first, then collect facts. In journalism, you go from specific to general; you collect the facts first, then find the story. Approach it from the screenwriter's point of view. What is the story about? Who's the main character? What's the ending? When you answer these questions, you can lay it out in dramatic structure.

adapting prose

Prose is the ordinary language of speaking and writing and it appears in a variety of forms. The essay is a collection of ideas expressed in words. The emphasis is on the facts, some of which can be shown on the screen, and abstract ideas, which generally is difficult to visualise.

Films are about objects - human and otherwise - and about their actions. It is not the best medium for abstract ideas.

adapting short stories and non-fiction

These stories usually deal with some kind of activity on a limited scale. The activity and the characters, either fictional or real, can be shown on the screen, but the characters' interior states of mind which can be expressed easily in stories, cannot be expressed directly on the screen. Because of the short length of stories and articles, they may work adequately as short films, but may have to be developed and added to work as longer films.

adapting stage plays

Closer to films. The dramatic structure of the play has a beginning, middle, and end. The action in the theatre is stylised. We accept the unreality of the action as representation of reality. We know that events will occur on stage in much shorter amount of time than in real life.  Because of this stylisation of action, we will also accept a stylisation of language, either in the poetic forms of the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, and Moliere or in the expressive prose of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

Filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway, Joel and Ethan Coen, Sam Raimi, Derek Jarman, Tim Burton, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, Neil Jordan and David Lynch are great visionaries who stylise the dramatic action of their respective stories.

We also accept stylisation and action in television, which is why many stage plays work better on television than they do as films.

Because films show us photographs of not only real people, but also real things and places, we except a greater degree of realism in the dialogue and action in a film.

A play is told in words, and thoughts, feelings, and events are described in dialogue on a stage locked within the boundaries of the proscenium arch. A play deals with the language of dramatic action.

adapting comic strips

The form of writing that is closest to screenwriting. Comic strips and films combine action and dialogue. The comic strip writer must try to find the balance between the two. Pictures in comic strips do not move, so we can spend as much time as we want reading the words and pictures. Films move, and they have to be clear enough both visually and aurally that we can understand them as they go past.

The technique of writing for comic strips have been used by filmmakers to storyboard the screenplay.

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