Not a very productive week, overall. My ILL requests arrived, and I was going to pick them up on Saturday, but I had work for exactly as long as the library was open, and I couldn’t get someone else to pick them up for me since they’d have to show the helpdesk my ID. (It doesn’t help that they’ve doubled my hours.) Having learned that the Sunday hours are a lot laxer than I remembered, I’ve received two of them now, How to adapt anything into a screenplay and Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes.
Without any correspondence from Doctorow, and knowing most of his work is under a NoDerivatives license anyway, I decided I needed to find something else to make into a script. Unfortunately, almost everything in the public domain worth adapting has already been done, and a lot of the people who should reasonably be copyright-free (like Lovecraft) still have tenuous claimants despite all of the adaptations. Some authors like Olaf Stapledon seem to be in the public domain in their countries, but not here (which is terrible because a film of Last and First Men sounds like the best cinematic idea of the year), and for others no one can really tell and people seem to be using other metrics besides actual copyright law. It’s a horrible mess.
What surprised me, while I was doing all of this frantic running around, is that Creative Commons isn’t actually much better than copyright. It’s in the blood of the major to champion systems like CC, and I used to think that it was naturally going to be the light at the end of the tunnel for copyright trouble, but… Well, nearly every licensed work I could find worth working with was under a “NoDerivatives” license that barred any actual creative usage. Admittedly coming from someone who likes derivative fiction as much as any other kind, if not slightly more, this is childish and misses the entire reason people fight copyright. We didn’t want Tarzan of the Apes copyright-free so we could read it on our iPads without paying, we wanted it so we could make movies about Tarzan! Saying people can distribute it however they like but must not make anything in, of, or around it is an attempt to get famous and build fandom without accepting the consequences of accomplishing either of those things.
Besides, saying that it’s fine for people to share your work is a nicety at this point, given there’s no actual way to make people pay if they’re monomaniacally devoted to copying that floppy. If CC were the dominant means of copyright control and not an idealistic underdog struggling for donations, I think most of the futurists and up-and-comers would find similar reasons to criticize it, if only because that’s their natural response to anything in power.
Anyway. In my search I narrowed my options down to two, Doctorow’s Little Brother and Peter Watts’ Blindsight. I’ve read both of them, but the former was already turned into a play, and it’s for teenagers more than adults, so I chose Watts. Blindsight is actually a really great story, although it’s more grim and philosophical than colorful and wondrous, and I’m going to need to take steps to make it clear that this isn’t a space slasher film because the characters seem designed for that kind of story. Everything’s certainly cramped and neurotic, and first contact only makes it worse.
How to adapt anything into a screenplay is a broad text, and it’s mostly about adapting things into three-act Hollywood screenplays - Krevolin’s philosophy appears as early as page 10, with his cardinal rules: “You owe nothing to the original text!” and “If it makes for a good story, it stays. / If not, it must be trashed!” He characterizes screenwriting as a very trimmed-down mode of writing, where only the bare necessities make it into the final work, which is a good point, and he’s also of the opinion that many pieces of fiction are actually in the wrong media entirely for their purposes, which I think is a fascinating reaction. His actual thoughts on how far an adaptor should go seem much more reasonable than his initial rule - “just look at how well O Brother, Where Art Thou? Played with The Odyssey and yet still did not betray its essence… so, yes, you can alter [the source] in any way you need to, but don’t lose the essence that drew you to the material in the first place” (174) - and I plan to keep that in mind when trying to tell the story of the p-zombies from beyond Pluto.
My copy of Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes has an ILL paper-slip over the cover, which charmingly lists the AUTHOR as “Tom Weaver; Tom Weaver; Tom Weaver”, as if it’s trying to summon him. The book’s a compilation of fifty or sixty separate interviews with people from the black-and-white low-budget days of pulpy SF filmmaking, but given how thick the volume is I’m going to need to review the directors interviewed specifically and look for the ones I’m coming the closest to emulating here.
Work Cited
Krevolin, R. W. (2003). How to adapt anything into a screenplay. Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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