Capstone Week 7: I Am Legend and Scene Setters

My latest loan-books haven’t arrived yet, including Talk the Talk, but I’ve managed to find an e-book of Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. I’ve realized I’m almost through my list of research materials, maybe already finished with it, and I have no idea where the time’s gone. I do think I’ve learned the state of thought on adaptation, and the basics of the technique, although there are probably more specific approaches I’m failing to notice.

I also, incidentally, watched I Am Legend this week, and my roommate was incensed enough by its state as a bad adaptation that he made me watch The Last Man on Earth, the ‘60s Vincent Price adaptation of the same novel. From watching both and talking them over with him, I’m sure that The Last Man is a much more faithful adaptation, but I like Will Smith’s hunting-deer-in-the-city version, and I think Price’s is very silly and nestled in the pulp tradition. And the original ending of I Am Legend, I learned as a kid, was replaced after it sunk with test audiences - no longer would the twist be that the monsters were also people and they considered the protagonist to be the boogeyman (hence the title), but that the main character sacrificed himself to save aaall humanity and became a legend.

I’ve learned that sometimes bad adaptation choices, the kind that stamp on the important points and key meanings of the story instead of the supporting details and moving parts of it, aren’t really in the writer’s hands at all.

I can't look at this without thinking about The Flintstones.

Moving onto the book, most of the chapters are about specific works or kinds of work, like “The Word Made Film” (Passion of the Christ) or “Entry-Level Dickens”. The most important chapter, in my survey, has been “The Adapter as Auteur”, in that it has a philosophy no other books seem to. The idea of the chapter, quickly, is that there have historically been auteurs and “metteurs-en-scène” (236), the people who merely create the scenes based on the literary work of other people, taking all of the meaning built by others and ushering it forth in a slightly different form. This was a distinction in the early days of French cinema that applied to directors more than screenwriters, but the idea of adaptation-as-beneath-us still underlied it.

Yet, Leitch points out, we don't really think of Hitchcock as an adapter, even though "Among his fourteen films before his breakout thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), only two—The Ring (1927) and Champagne (1928)—were based on original screenplays" (237). Hitchcock isn't regarded as a hack writer or someone who merely sets the scene for an already-determined story, and he's not alone in that. Adaptation involves in it the opportunity to put something of yourself into the finished product, and ironically, if you don't, people will be more likely to think you're slacking off. After all, anyone can transcribe stuff that's already written, right?

Interestingly, for Leitch this conflict extends past the audience and into the adapter's relationship with the author, and he brings up Kubrick to show that his rise to prominence was influenced by his "increasingly skilled infighting [on] ... Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)." (240) More than that, Kubrick had found a style of adaptation that he stuck to consistently, in which all of the works he turned into film became part of a recognizable strain, and were translated not just into movies but into Kubrick movies.

It never occurred to me to think of it that way, but if I could figure out how to make something into a Johnson movie, I think I'd be golden. I'm pretty sure that only comes with experience in the form, though.

Speaking of that, I realized I've never shown a picture of an alien from Blindsight, so here's a stuffed one someone made on DeviantART:

For once, a monster that's Lovecraftian because of its personality and internal workings more than its startle factor without giving up any of the tentacled space-terror. Who says there's no such thing as a happy middle?

Work Cited

Leitch, T. (2009). Film adaptation and its discontents: from Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. JHU Press.