From concept to finished draft–a nuts-and-bolts approach to adaptations

Aspiring and established screenwriters everywhere, take note! This down-to-earth guide is the first to clearly articulate the craft of adaptation. Drawing on his own experience and on fourteen years of teaching, screenwriter Richard Krevolin presents his proven five-step process for adapting anything–from novels and short stories to newspaper articles and poems–into a screenplay. Used by thousands of novelists, playwrights, poets, and journalists around the country, this can’t-miss process features practical advice on how to break down a story into its essential components, as well as utilizes case studies of successful adaptations. Krevolin also provides an insider’s view of working and surviving within the Hollywood system–covering the legal issues, interviewing studio insiders on what they are looking for, and offering tips from established screenwriters who specialize in adaptations.

• Outlines a series of stages that help you structure your story to fit the needs of a 120-page screenplay
• Explains how to adapt anything for Hollywood, from a single sentence story idea all the way to a thousand-page novel
• Advises on the tricky subject of just how faithful your adaptation should be
• Features helpful hints from Hollywood bigwigs–award-winning television writer Larry Brody; screenwriter and script reader Henry Jones; screenwriter and author Robin Russin; screenwriter and author Simon Rose; and more

Federico FelliniOCOs script for perhaps the most famous unmade film in Italian cinema, The Journey of G. Mastorna (1965/6), is published here for the first time in full English translation. It offers the reader a remarkable insight into FelliniOCOs creative process and his fascination with human mortality and the great mystery of death. Written in collaboration with Dino Buzzati, Brunello Rondi, and Bernardino Zapponi, the project was ultimately abandoned for a number of reasons, including FelliniOCOs near death, although it continued to inhabit his creative imagination and the landscape of his films for the rest of his career.

Marcus Perryman has written two supporting essays which discuss the reasons why the film was never made, compare it to the two other films in the trilogy La Dolce Vita and 8cents, and analyze the script in the light of ItOCOs a Wonderful Life and Fredric BrownOCOs sci-fi novel What Mad Universe. In doing so he opens up an entire world of connections to FelliniOCOs other films, writers and collaborators. It should be essential reading for students and academics studying FelliniOCOs work."

Red River (1947) is one of Howard Hawks' near-perfect films. A sweeping, fast-moving Western, it's stunningly shot and stars John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in complex roles set off by typically fine ensemble acting. In her study, Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues explores the thematic complexity of "Red River" as well as its historical resonances and its place in film history. She focuses particular attention on the actors' contributions and on "Red River"'s relationship to other Hawks classics.

A quintessential work of 1960s European art cinema, "L'Annee derniere a Marienbad "("Last Year in Marienbad, "1961) was a collaboration between director Alain Resnais and 'New Novel" enfant terrible Alain Robbe-Grillet. Three people, known only by their initials, move through the sprawling luxury of a mysterious hotel and its ornamental gardens. Perhaps M is A's husband and X her lover. Perhaps '"last year," A promised X she would leave with him. Or is there something more terrible in the past? An abstract thriller, a love story, a philosophical puzzle, the film's deviations are, for Jean-Louis Leutrat, as complex as those of the human heart.

This study examines "Rome Open City" and its place in Roberto Rossellini's career. The film is based on events that took place in Nazi occupied Italy 1944, one year before the film was made. The author argues that the film has value both as a commerorative piece and as a documentary record.

Paring a novel into a two-hour film is an arduous task for even the best screenwriters and directors. Often the resulting movies are far removed from the novel, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable. Stanley Kubrick's adaptations have consistently been among the best Hollywood has to offer. Kubrick's film adaptations of three novels - ""Lolita"", ""The Shining"" and ""Full Metal Jacket"" - are analyzed in this work. The primary focus is on the alterations in the characters and narrative structure, with additional attention to style, scope, pace, mood and meaning. Kubrick's adaptations simplify, impose a new visuality, reduce violence, and render the moral slant more conventional.

Designed for philosophers as well as readers with no particular philosophical background, the essays in this lively book are grouped into four amusing acts.

Act One looks at the four Seinfeld characters through a philosophical lens and includes "Jerry and Socrates: The Examined Life"?

Act Two examines historical philosophers from a Seinfeldian standpoint and offers "Plato or Nietzsche? Time, Essence, and Eternal Recurrence in Seinfeld".

Act Three, "Untimely Meditations by the Water Cooler", explores philosophical issues raised by the show, such as, "Is it rational for George to do the opposite"?

And Act Four, "Is There Anything Wrong with That?", discusses ethical problems of everyday life using Seinfeld as a basis.

Seinfeld and Philosophy also provides a guide to Seinfeld episodes and a chronological list of the philosophers cited in this book.

Hanif Kureishi's cinematic storytelling embraces a wide spectrum of characters from all classes and nationalities, depicting them with compassion, humour and relish, though never fighting shy of controversy. This volume comprises four of Kureishi's screenplays. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) Omar is a restless young Asian man, caring for his alcoholic father in the hustling London of the mid-1980s. His uncle, a keen Thatcherite, offers Omar an entrepreneurial opportunity to revamp a dingy laundrette, and ambitious Omar rolls up his sleeves, enlisting the assistance of his old school-friend Johnny, who has since fallen in with a gang of neo-fascists. Omar and Johnny soon form an unlikely alliance that leads to business success, as well as other, more intimate surprises. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) 1980s London, and Sammy and Rosie share an 'open' marriage, strings of lovers, and a bohemian existence amidst inner-city turmoil. Sammy's father, Rafi, formerly a government minister in India, visits London as racial tensions rise with the death of a woman in a police raid. Rafi offers Sammy financial assistance if the couple will leave their 'war zone' behind them and produce grandchildren. But Rafi's own shady past threatens to haunt him. London Kills Me (1991) A weekend in the lives of homeless Clint and his pal Muffdiver, youthful veterans of the streets of London, whose chief source of income derives from selling drugs to the wealthier denizens of Notting Hill. But what Clint wants more than anything else is a proper job, and he's been promised a position as a waiter in a restaurant - on the condition that he can come up with a pair of 'sensible' shoes. My Son the Fanatic (1997) Parvez is a Pakistani cab driver in a northern industrial town who chauffeurs young prostitute Bettina. Their gentle friendship grows more tender as Parvez's home life starts to crumble, his son Farid embracing a fundamentalist sect of Islam and rejecting his father's values. When Farid then involves himself with a group committed to purging the town of corruption, Parvez is compelled to choose where his loyalties lie.

The Unfilmed Original Screenplay of an American classic.
This is a landmark volume of the epic, original film script written by Lorraine Hansberry, adapted from her stage play. But movie audiences did not know that nearly a third of her powerful screenplay had been cut. This edition restores all of these deletions and delivers the screenplay that is true to Hansberry's vision.

The work of acclaimed German artist Christoph Schlingensief spans three decades and a diverse range of fields, including, film, television, activism, opera, and theatre. "Christoph Schlingensief: Art Without Borders" is the first book to be published in English on Schlingensief's groundbreaking, politically engaged body of work. Leading scholars in the field offer a critical assessment of Schlingensief's hybrid practice, and an interview with Schlingensief himself provides the reader with insight into past and present projects. The book will be an essential resource for artists, curators, students, and academics in the fields of theater and performance studies, film studies, cultural studies, German studies, political activism, and art history.

The popular success in 1967 of The Graduate was immediate and total; at the time, only Gone with the Wind and The Sound of Music were bigger box-office winners. Yet such phenomenal success came at a price: On the film's 40th anniversary, director Mike Nichols claimed that The Graduate had been ""whipped away"" by a young audience hungry for countercultural documents. This study, the first monograph on The Graduate, explores how popular and subsequent critical reception deflected a full understanding of the film's complex point of view, which satirizes everything in its path--especially Benjamin and Elaine, its young ""heroes."" The text explores how the film offers not the happy ending some imagine, but a corrosive and satirical vision of humanity.

Prewriting Your Screenplay cements all the bricks of a story's foundations together and forms a single, organic story-growing technique, starting with a blank slate. It shows writers how to design each element so that they perfectly interlock together like pieces of a puzzle, creating a stronger story foundation that does not leave gaps and holes for readers to find. This construction process is performed one piece at a time, one character at a time, building and incorporating each element into the whole. The book provides a clear-cut set of lessons that teaches how to construct that story base around concepts as individual as the writer's personal opinions, helping to foster an individual writer's voice. It also features end-of-chapter exercises that offer step-by-step guidance in applying each lesson, providing screenwriters with a concrete approach to building a strong foundation for a screenplay. This is the quintessential book for all writers taking their first steps towards developing a screenplay from nothing, getting them over that first monumental hump, resulting in a well-formulated story concept that is cohesive and professional.

Most movies include a love story, whether it is the central story or a subplot, and knowing how to write a believable relationship is essential to any writer's skill set. Discover the rules and laws of nature at play in a compelling love story and learn and master them. Broken into four sections, The Heart of the Film identifies the critical features of love story development, and explores every variation of this structure as well as a diverse array of relationships and types of love. Author Cynthia Whitcomb has sold over 70 feature-length screenplays and shares the keys to her success in The Heart of the Film, drawing on classic and modern films as well as her own extensive experience.

The Screenwriter's Path takes a comprehensive approach to learning how to write a screenplay-allowing the writer to use it as both a reference and a guide in constructing a script. A tenured professor of screenwriting at Emerson College in Boston, author Diane Lake has 20 years' experience writing screenplays for major studios and was a co-writer of the Academy-award winning film Frida. The book sets out a unique approach to story structure and characterization that takes writers, step by step, to a completed screenplay, and it is full of practical advice on what to do with the finished script to get it seen by the right people. By demystifying the process of writing a screenplay, Lake empowers any writer to bring their vision to the screen.

Love in the Post (2013) is inspired by Jacques Derrida s book The Post Card. Like the book, the film plays with fact and fiction, weaving together the stories of a scholar of literature and a film director, alongside insights from critics and philosophers. Theo Marks works in a university department that is soon to be closed. His wife Sophie, enigmatic and distant, is in analysis. Filmmaker Joanna struggles to make a film about The Post Card. These people are set on a collision course prompted by a series of letters that will change their lives. The film features a never before seen interview with Derrida, alongside contributions from Geoffrey Bennington, Ellen Burt, Catherin Malabou, J. Hillis Miller and Samuel Weber. Alongside the original screenplay, Martin McQuillan provides an extended commentary on Derrida s original text, the film and its making. Joanna Callaghan reflects on her practice as a filmmaker and her engagement with philosophy as a director. The volume concludes with interviews between McQuillan and five leading Derrida scholars."

This modern film classic, an extraordinary tale of hope and survival inside a maximum security prison, follows the complex twenty-year relationship between two convicts who have little in common--except friendship. Based on the novella Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, director/screenwriter Frank Darabont's film, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, was nominated for seven Academy Awards(R), including Best Picture and Best Screenplay and has been named one of the 100 Best Films of All Time by the American Film Institute.

The Newmarket Shooting Script Series(R) book includes: Introductions by Stephen King and Frank Darabont Complete shooting script Analysis of script-to-screen changes Behind-the-scenes photos Storyboards Complete cast and crew credits "Memo from the Trenches" by Frank Darabont

Shakespeare is everywhere in contemporary media culture. This book explores the reasons for this dissemination and reassemblage. Ranging widely over American TV drama, it discusses the use of citations in Westworld and The Wire, demonstrating how they tap into but also transform Shakespeare's preferred themes and concerns. It then examines the presentation of female presidents in shows such as Commander in Chief and House of Cards, revealing how they are modelled on figures of female sovereignty from his plays. Finally, it analyses the specifically Shakespearean dramaturgy of Deadwood and The Americans. Ultimately, the book brings into focus the way serial TV drama appropriates Shakespeare in order to give voice to the unfinished business of the American cultural imaginary. -- .

Today's Hollywood screenplays have a uniform appearance, but it has not always been this way. The earliest film writing used theatrical plays and prose fiction as models, and the silent cinemas of Germany, Russia and the United States all developed their own traditions, culminating in the unique 'screen poetry' of Carl Mayer. Hollywood studios adapted to writing for sound in different ways, while European author-directors such as Ingmar Bergman made film writing as personal a form of expression as poetry. Later, American writers as diverse as William Goldman, David Mamet and Charlie Kaufman showed that the screen writer could be as important and distinctive a figure as any director, while today's digital technology is transforming screenwriting once again. Steven Price traces the history of the screenplay, illustrating its transformations with detailed discussion of a wide range of examples from the beginnings of cinema to the present day.

Have you written the script for the next box office blockbuster or hit TV show and just need the right agent to sell it? Not sure whether to accept an if-come deal or a script commitment? Debating which manager is the right choice to steer your career? Well, worry no more... How to Manage Your Agent is a fun, friendly guide to the world of literary representation. Enter the inner sanctums of Hollywood's power-brokers and learn how they influence what pitches get bought, what projects get sold, and which writers get hired. Find tips from top-level executives, agents, managers, producers, and writers to help you maximize your own representation and kick your career into overdrive! You'll learn: * How agents prioritize their client list... and ways to guarantee you're at the top * When to approach new representation... and what you need to capture their interest * Hollywood's secret buying schedule... and how to ensure you're on it * The truth about packaging... where it helps and when it hurts * Which agents are best for you... and where to find them * Advice on acing your first agent meeting... and why so many writers blow it * Managers' tricks for creating buzz... and when to use them yourself * How to fire your agent... without killing your career * When you don't need representation... and how to succeed without it The value of good representation is undeniable-especially in a world where agents and managers control which projects (and careers) live or die. How to Manage Your Agent puts you on the inside track to get your work the attention it deserves!

Winner 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
In an important publishing event, Samuel French, in cooperation with the Thornton Wilder estate is pleased to release the playwright's definitive version of "Our Town." This edition of the play differs only slightly from previous acting editions, yet it presents "Our Town" as Thornton Wilder wished it to be performed. Described by Edward Albee as ..".the greatest American play ever written," the story follows the small town of Grover's Corners through three acts: "Daily Life," "Love and Marriage," and "Death and Eternity." Narrated by a stage manager and performed with minimal props and sets, audiences follow the Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry, and eventually-in one of the most famous scenes in American theatre-die. Thornton Wilder's final word on how he wanted his play performed is an invaluable addition to the American stage and to the libraries of theatre lovers internationally.

The development of a film screenplay is a complex and collaborative process, beginning with an initial story and continuing through drafting and financing to the start of the shoot. And yet the best ways of understanding and managing this process have never been properly studied. The Screenplay Business is the first book to do exactly that, addressing such questions as:

• How do film scripts get written, and what are the tensions between creativity and business?
• How can the team of the writer, producer, director and development executive work together most effectively?

The Screenplay Business presents a theoretical and practical framework for understanding the business of independent script development, and encompasses ideas about creativity, motivation, managing creative people, value chains, and MBA leadership theories.

This book will help producers and writers to nurture their stories through the long development process to the screen. It explains the international film business, and contains new research and extensive interviews with leading industry figures, including practical advice on how to run script meetings and handle notes; how to build a sustainable business; and how to understand what "really" happens when a script is written.

The Screenplay Business is a new key text for academics and students researching film and media, and indispensable reading for anyone working in film screenplay development today.