The Art of Adaptation with Dr. Marlene Goldman
Have you ever wanted to try your hand at screenwriting? A screenplay is a form of writing meant to go beyond the page and onto the screen. But what is the process of writing such a medium? Through our FROM PAGE TO SCREEN Series, you will be introduced to screenwriting concepts, genres, and screenwriters so you can learn how to take the first step in creating something for the big screen.
The Art of Adaptation with Dr. Marlene Goldman
While some screenwriters may decide to write their own original stories for the screen, others take on the task of adapting stories from one medium to another. Short stories, novels, and plays can all make amazing sources for film. But how does one go about taking a story from its initial form and making it into something ready for the screen? We met with Dr. Marlene Goldman, a writer, filmmaker, and professor at the University of Toronto, to learn about this fascinating form of writing.
Dr. Marlene Goldman has adapted three short stories into short films, including her short film, “Piano Lessons”, based on Alice Munro’s “In Sight of the Lake”, the Margaret Atwood short story “Torching the Dusties”, and her most recent short film, “Mani Pedi”, which is adapted from a short story by Souvankham Thammavongsa. However, Goldman did not start her career as a screenwriter.
“The impetus to shift from what I normally do, which is write academic scholarly texts, came because I finished a book on Alzheimer’s and dementia and the people who really helped me, caregivers and people coping with dementia, weren’t able to access a scholarly book,” she told us.
Working as part of a SSHRC Partnership Grant called Aging, Communication, and Technology, Goldman saw many people relying on arts-based scholarship to transform research into accessible plays and short films and decided to try this herself.
Goldman says “The joke is that I knew that I was going to write a really, really bad screenplay. I had no experience directing, so I did smart things. I lowered my expectations and I said ‘Okay, I’ll probably write something really bad, but one thing I know that I can do is take in feedback and rewrite because I’m a learner and I hang out with students.’ And the other thing I did was I teamed up with an experienced director for my first two projects. So, I had great mentors.”
Choosing the story you want to portray through the art of film is an important part of the adaptation process. Goldman said, in her case, it felt as though the stories chose her. For her first film, Goldman chose an Alice Munro short story that offered a first-person account of dementia, an uncommon perspective in most stories with similar themes, and decided that she wanted to make it accessible through the art of film. For Goldman, these themes are very important, as she explains, “my work is generally about what it is like to live with a disability or experience the sudden onset of a disability.”
Goldman believes that film is an important medium to tell these stories through because it is a medium that travels. Her films have been translated to be shown in different countries. Some of her films have been used in classrooms to educate people on dementia and vision impairments.
“Films don’t live in a library, you don’t need a library card, you don’t need access to a journal, so they’re for everyone,” she tells us.
Once you’ve found a story you connect with and a purpose for bringing it to life through film, you must acquire the rights to adapt it, which is not always an easy process. In order to get the rights, you will need to get in contact with the author’s agent.
When it comes to making short films, the reality is most do not make money. However, in the art of adaptation, this can be beneficial for acquiring the rights to turn the stories into films.
“When I was arranging the rights initially for the first three films, I obtained non-exclusive rights,” Goldman tells us. A non-exclusive license is the right to use something on a non-exclusive basis, meaning the owner can allow someone else to create something with it as well.
“I promised, and it came to pass, that I made no money. These films were in the gift economy and I raised the funds through agencies like the CINB. These were, I would say, labors of love. They call them passion projects,” Goldman explains.
Goldman believes it is important to know that you cannot simply step up to people like Munro or Atwood and assume they will provide you with rights to their stories. She says, “you have to find a way to do it and my way was to work in the gift economy.”
Once you have acquired the rights to a story, you can begin the screenplay. Goldman begins by deciding who is going to tell the story, since there is no longer a narrator. She says, “Screenwriting is funny. You have to show everything and people don’t have access the way that they do in a story to the inner subjective thoughts of a character.”
She tells us that you also need to decide what the most important moments of a character’s journey are from the source material. These are the beats that you are going to need to hit during your screenplay.
Goldman also believes it is extremely important that she accurately depicts the communities she is representing on the screen. She does a lot of research before and during the screenwriting process. “I want to put these people in a real world and I want to get that world right,” she shares.
When it comes to the art of adaptation in film, Goldman believes there is an unwritten rule to respect the author of the original work and the integrity of the original story. This doesn’t mean that you can’t make changes. In fact, in her own adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “Torching the Dusties”, Goldman made a significant change in her screenplay by having a woman rescue a man rather than the other way around as depicted in the source text.
“This is a little weird, but because this is going to leave the page and be carried by the bodies of actors, one unwritten rule is to think about what happens when a story is embodied and who’s going to be represented and how,” she says. “So, I think there’s an unwritten rule to think of the ethics of adaptation. And in the case of the Atwood story, the ethics of representation said to me ‘do I want to reinstall a male rescuer figure or what would happen if I made a woman agential?’ And to me those had different ethical ramifications. The unwritten rule is ‘what are the ethics of making people see a real human being do these things?’”
There are some challenges that a writer may face with this form of screenwriting. Goldman warns that if people have already read the source text, then likely that is what they are going to be thinking of when they watch your adaptation. This is especially important to keep in mind when making changes to the original story. She tells us, “I think when you’re making a change to a text, it really needs to be ethically motivated because why change something just to change it?”
Goldman has some advice for anyone looking to try their hand at writing an adaptation. “Just be prepared to do many drafts,” she says. “Be prepared to realize there’s lots of different ways to get to a goal. And, so, you don’t necessarily want to get too attached to earlier, or even later drafts, with particular tactics or even with pieces of dialogue.”
Goldman also recommends having someone that you can show your work to and gain feedback from.
“I think it’s been helpful for me to show my work, and not necessarily be taking in exactly what people say, but to realize when readers have questions about things that that’s a good place to wonder why they’re questioning those things,” she shares.
Goldman has found the most helpful thing for her was to find someone who could act as a mirror for her writing.
“Get someone to read your work who isn’t saying this is good and this is bad. What you want is someone to really be able to really reflect as clear as possible what it is you’ve done,” she says, “And also find someone to celebrate the act of writing because I think you need food as a writer, as an artist, and this society does not give it.”
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Thank you to Dr. Marlene Goldman for sharing her knowledge and experience on the art of adaptation in screenwriting.
Jamie Bardocz is a writer, social media specialist, and film enthusiast from Southern Ontario.
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