Literature in the Age of the Screenplay.
PEN New England, in partnership with the Coolidge Corner Theatre

What can movies do that novels can't, and vice-versa? What goes into the process of transforming fiction to screenplay? How does a novel's author react to, and learn from, the process of having his or her work adapted for the screen?

Panelists talked about their work and about how novels relate to film and vice-versa. They also showed clips of their work. Panelists were novelists Dennis Lehane, Margot Livesey and Scoot Heim, and filmmakers Maureen Foley and Jan Egleson. The moderator was Joseph Finder.

Thoughts:

Film vs novels: films reach us on more than one level, pour themselves into more than one sense. We experience them, rather than read them, and we do so on many levels. We hear the dialogue, we see the scenes, the production design, the costume design, the way the actors move in the dimensions. We sense the moods of the colors and light, the way the scenes are lit, the way in which they are framed, the cinematography. We hear the music, we both hear and sense the sound effects, we grasp the story arc, the character's arc, the actors' bodies, their height, weight, hair and eye color, the sound of their voices, the inflections they bring to the words, the interpretations of the script. The emotional level, the emotional level that that combination of elements allows you to experience, or manipulates you to experience.

All these elements bring the novel/screenplay to life, but only THAT life, that one life which excludes all other possible lives that you might have imagined from the pages of the book, without all the added input.

The more sophisticated audiences become, the harder it gets to get them to suspend their disbelief, and to enter the film. This is not so difficult with a novel.

In a script, you don't have to describe everything that's going on within a scene, such as what the character is wearing, or what they're passing on the way to where they're going, or how they get there, etc, because in a film, you see that, plus it's all built by the other people who work on the film, i.e. the production designer, the costumer designer, the gaffer, the cinematographer, etc. You do need that in a novel, in order to *imagine* that same scene within your head.

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Random:

Got the new 15 inch Powerbook today. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Can make my own commercials with it, as well as family videos. The tool is the thing.

Got reinspired on the whole screenplay thing, and can see how much film effects me. Want to make the novel into the film.

12/03/2003 11:07 PM
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© 2003 m. lucas