You've won a Tony Award... or a Pulitzer Prize... or both...
But what happens when Hollywood calls?
FROM BROADWAY to the BACK LOT
Adapting Other People's Work
“Having the experience of taking someone else’s work, where you have to both honor it, and destroy it, to make it your own.” — Pippin Parker
The writers offer their perspectives on the obligations and intricacies of adapting material they didn’t initially create; making it work for film while staying true to the concept, and dealing with producers, the studios and the original author.
John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation) “All a successful production is, is when everyone is telling the same story.”
David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole) "I was asked to adapt a book called Inkheart. The author was part of the process. She was a producer… I didn’t want to wreck it, because I knew there were millions of kids that loved this book. And if it sucked, it was my fault… In the first draft, I was incredibly loyal to the book… And the producers hated it. Because it was too close to the book… So I totally re-imagined it… The first email I got was from the author saying, ‘Oh my god, I love this part. I wish it was in the book.’ She went crazy over all the stuff I made up.
Donald Margulies (Dinner with Friends) “I adapted Jeffrey Eugenides’ great novel Middlesex for HBO, a book I really respected. A huge Whitman’s Sampler of a novel. There were so many strands of that book that you could just pluck out. I had a wonderful time just sort of shattering the book, then creating a new structure for it."
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In the Next Issue: NOT YOUR PARENT’S VAST WASTELAND
A conversation between DENIS LEARY (Rescue Me) and TERENCE WINTER (Boardwalk Empire). Cable television has become populated by a coterie of characters who are often, at their best flawed, and at their most interesting, reprehensible. Two of the most complex anti-heroes on the “small screen” have been Leary’s Tommy Gavin and Winter’s “Nucky” Thompson. Both shows have captivated audiences the way movies used to, and broadcast TV never dared.
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Writing NY
How the Big Apple Inspires and Informs the Movies
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Advisory Committee
John Markus
James Schamus
Michael Winship
Developed and produced by
Jeffrey Altshuler
This Issue
Edited by Maxwell Anderson
Production Services provided by
Vidco.
