A Slow Leap 

Adapting drama from Stage to Screen

The Theatre Poster

Having an interesting time toying with this phenomena. The fact that I have what many people refer to as a very 'cinematic' theatre piece that is crying out to be a 'Road Movie'. I have been thinking for some time now about taking the 'simple' step of adapting the piece for the screen. In a fit of wild optimism on Friday evening I discussed the idea with Jenine and planned to 'do the adaptation tomorrow.'

What a joke.

Apart from the mind-numbing tedium of reformatting from Word to Final Draft, there is also the small matter of the visualised world of the drama. The fact is that for stage you can pretty much establish the setting and let the actor and director discover the minutiae of the staging and blocking and delivery and other performance accents that help bring the audience in. You make some suggestions of course, and if they are 'true' to the production then they will survive, but this is by no means sacrosanct for even the most 'respectful' creative collaborators.

This is no longer the case in a screenplay. In a screenplay you are writing a hybrid of novelistic narrative, with explicit visual description, character subtext and attitudes where appropriate, and a low-level media-literate technical outline of pertinent camera moves and transitions. These can take a long time to reveal themselves and even longer to make them valuable or remotely useful to a reader.

In the case of a screenplay of course, your dear reader is a producer, a director or an actor and they all come to the text not with an open mind and a willingness to be delighted, but with a clear set of expectations of their own performance in relation to their interpretations. All of this they each are projecting onto the page with a cool and cursory commitment.

In fact Jenine is notorious for ignoring all of the carefully considered stage directions that I in my naivety think are going to make the job of the director so much easier in my stage plays. I dread to think how she is going to scoff at my conservative camera moves and considered settings.

And so after five hours of labouring at the keyboard I had adapted eight pages of an existing 'cinematic' theatre script into what is probably going to become four pages of shootable action. Then when I sat back and scanned the result I was instantly aware of the mundanity of my visualisation.

For example, where I have the camera pulling out of a close up on a Euro Disney scene that becomes a postcard on a telephone table in the hallway of a small and overstuffed bachelor apartment, I can imagine Jenine opting for a crash zoom through a letterbox to arrive through a series of staggering edits to a low angle shot up the flaring nostrils on the frosty face of the character who is instantly devastated by the arrival of yet another pictorial insult to his lonely existence.

And there in lies the fun and games of this kind of collaboration. Whereas most of the 'creative' work, the  origination and development of the drama and the action and dialogue that are the ramparts of successful theatre, these are only the very basic basis of the work that has to take place when the successful theatre piece attempts the leap from stage to screen.

It a slow leap that can take five hours to realise three minutes that fail to hit its mark on the page, but when the right eyes are viewing not the technical text on the page, but are seeing the possibilities on the screen, then you know you are in good company and in safe hands.

That's how I feel with Jenine. I know that no matter how mundane my visual suggestions, she will find a way to translate my technical tedium into transcendental manifestations of on-screen fabulousness. Which means that tomorrow I can spend less time on visualing the scene and more time adapting the actual drama.

And then of course, I can look forward to doing the writer's trick of smiling at the post-production praise and muttering into my glass at celebratory cocktail parties, 'yes, thank you, it's all in the writing of course.'