Everything. You have to take what you’ve labored on and make it shorter so that it is marketable. Through a process of selection, you must choose only those elements of your characters and story that are essential to your book and that work well visually for the film or television medium. You may be thinking, your asking me to turn my book inside out, start it at the end and then gut the story and characters to fit proper format for the medium? If I do that, I will lose the entirety of my book, my characters and story will be a shallow framework of the whole. It will not be as good. Does that ring a bell in your mind? People attending a film as the closing credits roll get up from their theatre seats and say “Good film, but I read the book and it was much much better!” The reason they say this is because they often are not getting all of the content that was in the original work. Choices had to be made to fit the work into the intended medium.
I am telling this to you because, if you choose to start your story at the end and you want to convert your book for film or television, you will have to make specific choices as to what you will include and what you will cut in your adaptation. That’s the bad news if there is any. A lot of writers complain that they can’t fit their book inside that framework. We talked about cinema, what about television, as we have said, the requirements there are a bit more rigid. If you want to convert your novel into a teleplay for a made for TV film with a two hour run time, that will convert to approximately eighty eight pages to take account for commercials and bumpers. For an hour-long show it is actually forty three to forty four pages.
(Catalano speaks to seminar administrator)
How am I doing on time so far? Okay, great.
(Audience member asks: “Is there any correlation between how many screen pages are contained in one of my novel pages.)
My guess, is there is going to be more than one screen page for each novel page for those pages of your book that you choose to adapt. But it really depends on how you choose to take what you have written in your book and place it within the screenplay.
In your book, you may have an elaborate description of a particular event, which takes, up most of your page. In the screen version, you may just take that same section and describe it in a sentence or two. Think about the opening of Gone with the Wind (1939) how the book opens:
Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
Chapter 1
Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin — that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.
Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, her father’s plantation, that bright April afternoon of 1861, she made a pretty picture. Her new green flowered-muslin dress spread its twelve yards of billowing material over her hoops and exactly matched the flat-heeled green morocco slippers her father had recently brought her from Atlanta. The dress set off to perfection the seventeen-inch waist, the smallest in three counties, and the tightly fitting basque showed breasts well matured for her sixteen years. But for all the modesty of her spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon and the quietness of small white hands folded in her lap, her true self was poorly concealed. The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother’s gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own.
On either side of her, the twins lounged easily in their chairs, squinting at the sunlight through tall mint-garnished glasses as they laughed and talked, their long legs, booted to the knee and thick with saddle muscles, crossed negligently. Nineteen years old, six feet two inches tall, long of bone and hard of muscle, with sunburned faces and deep auburn hair, their eyes merry and arrogant, their bodies clothed in identical blue coats and mustard-colored breeches, they were as much alike as two bolls of cotton.
Outside, the late afternoon sun slanted down in the yard, throwing into gleaming brightness the dogwood trees that were solid masses of white blossoms against the background of new green. The twins’ horses were hitched in the driveway, big animals, red as their masters’ hair; and around the horses’ legs quarreled the pack of lean, nervous possum hounds that accompanied Stuart and Brent wherever they went. A little aloof, as became an aristocrat, lay a black-spotted carriage dog, muzzle on paws, patiently waiting for the boys to go home to supper.
Between the hounds and the horses and the twins there was a kinship deeper than that of their constant companionship. They were all healthy, thoughtless young animals, sleek, graceful, high-spirited, the boys as mettlesome as the horses they rode, mettlesome and dangerous but, withal, sweet-tempered to those who knew how to handle them.
Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books. Life in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still new and, according to the standards of Augusta, Savannah and Charleston, a little crude. The more sedate and older sections of the South looked down their noses at the up-country Georgians, but here in north Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no shame, provided a man was smart in the things that mattered. And raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.
In these accomplishments the twins excelled, and they were equally outstanding in their notorious inability to learn anything contained between the covers of books. Their family had more money, more horses, more slaves than any one else in the County, but the boys had less grammar than most of their poor Cracker neighbors.
It was for this precise reason that Stuart and Brent were idling on the porch of Tara this April afternoon. They had just been expelled from the University of Georgia, the fourth university that had thrown them out in two years; and their older brothers, Tom and Boyd, had come home with them, because they refused to remain at an institution where the twins were not welcome. Stuart and Brent considered their latest expulsion a fine joke, and Scarlett, who had not willingly opened a book since leaving the Fayetteville Female Academy the year before, thought it just as amusing as they did.
“I know you two don’t care about being expelled, or Tom either,” she said. “But what about Boyd? He’s kind of set on getting an education, and you two have pulled him out of the University of Virginia and Alabama and South Carolina and now Georgia. He’ll never get finished at this rate.”
“Oh, he can read law in Judge Parmalee’s office over in Fayetteville,” answered Brent carelessly. “Besides, it don’t matter much. We’d have had to come home before the term was out anyway.”
“Why?”
“The war, goose! The war’s going to start any day, and you don’t suppose any of us would stay in college with a war going on, do you?”
“You know there isn’t going to be any war,” said Scarlett, bored. “It’s all just talk. Why, Ashley Wilkes and his father told Pa just last week that our commissioners in Washington would come to — to — an — amicable agreement with Mr. Lincoln about the Confederacy. And anyway, the Yankees are too scared of us to fight. There won’t be any war, and I’m tired of hearing about it.”
“Not going to be any war!” cried the twins indignantly, as though
they had been defrauded.
“Why, honey, of course there’s going to be a war,” said Stuart. “The Yankees may be scared of us, but after the way General Beauregard shelled them out of Fort Sumter day before yesterday, they’ll have to fight or stand branded as cowards before the whole world. Why, the Confederacy —”
Scarlett made a mouth of bored impatience.
“If you say ‘war’ just once more, I’ll go in the house and shut the door. I’ve never gotten so tired of any one word in my life as ‘war,’ unless it’s ‘secession.’
The screenplay version of it approaches the same material in shorter more concise way:
Gone With the Wind written by Barbara Keon, Ben Hecht, Oliver H.P. Garrett, John William Van Druten, Jo Swerling, Sidney Howard
Chapter 1 Scarlett’s Jealousy
(Tara is the beautiful homeland of Scarlett, who is now talking with the twins, Brent and Stew, at the Doorstep.)
BRENT
What do we care if we were expelled from college, Scarlett. The war is going to start any day now so we would have left college anyhow.
STEW
Oh, isn’t it exciting, Scarlett? You know those poor Yankees actually want a war?
BRENT
We’ll show ‘em.
SCARLETT
Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk is spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides, there isn’t going to be any war.
BRENT
Not going to be any war?
STEW
Ah, buddy, of course there’s going to be a war.
SCARLETT
If either of you boys says “war” just once again, I’ll go in the house and slam the door.
BRENT
But Scarlett honey..
STEW
Don’t you want us to have a war?
BRENT
Wait a minute, Scarlett...
STEW
We’ll talk about this...
BRENT
No please, we’ll do anything you say...
SCARLETT
Well- but remember I warned you.
What you do with your particular book is really up to you. However, don’t think of it as cutting from your novel, think instead of selection. You are selecting those portions of your work that will be fit the medium that you are intending to place your story and characters into. You will bring over as much as you need to. Remember that when we write, the creative process (like painting) is a solitary one. We sit in front of our laptops or yellow pads and we take what is in our imagination and put it down. This process is very much like painting. However, once it is completed, our work gets handed over to directors, actors, sometimes other writers and designers who take what we have created and add to it. This is probably why writers try to put as much as they can into a screenplay because they want the artistic input that follows to be as well informed as possible. We write in the detail because we want our vision to remain in intact. This is understandable but often a fruitless effort. The best we can do is write a compelling story with interesting characters and hope that most of what we put in is kept. But there is no guarantee and the more you write in will not make a difference. Film and Television are collaborative arts and there will always be the collective input of directors, writers and designers to you work. It is the nature of the creative process. And there is also the audience to consider.
23
WHO IS YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE?
Start Your Story at the End
LET ME ASK all of you this question. All of you sitting here today – if I were to say to you, the particular novel that you have in your back pocket – what is your target audience? Also I will not allow you to say “general.” What audience is the best fit for your work?
(Audience member: “And you can’t answer general?”) Right.
Let me help you a bit. You could say something like… adults eighteen to thirty… or adults eighteen to twenty three Let’s talk about the age ranges that advertising agencies use when planning marketing campaigns:
12 – 17
18 – 24
25 – 34
35 – 44
45 – 54
55 – 64
65+
What about gender – do you feel your work is a better fit with women or men or does it matter? Now we’re writers here today, not advertising agencies. But there is something that we can learn from this. I think it is important for you to know who the audience is for your work. Who is the most likely cross section of people that would be interested in what you are writing about? Some of you may be thinking, I just want to write a story and great characters – that will be enough for me. But I think you need to have an idea of who might be interested in your type of story. Why? Because it will be a question that will be asked somewhere down the line if it is considered for publication or production as a film or television. So now I’m asking you again. What audience is the best fit for your work?
(Audience member: “I have a woman’s story but it is best suited for a general audience.”)
Okay, so it’s a woman’s story – that would probably have more appeal to women than men? Is that correct?
(Audience member: “Yes, I think so…”)
I feel like an attorney cross-examining someone.
(Audience laughter)
Sir?
(Audience member: “My work is kind of a middle class drama also general and can appeal to both men and women in the 25 to 45 age range.)
Okay, excellent. Now there is no science to this. But I think it’s important that you know where your work fits into to the over all picture. This will make your job of selecting what will or won’t work when you convert it over to a screenplay. It will also provide you with an answer if someone sitting across a desk at a pitch, or a reading asks you where it fits in. You can answer it with confidence. This understanding also will help you focus on “where” to take your screenplay once it is written. For example, if your work is a “woman’s story” it might be a great fit for Lifetime Television or the WE channel. Why? Because Lifetime’s base is women 18-49 – that’s what their programming is most effective reaching. That might be a perfect place for your project to be developed. Then your thinking I want my project to be a major motion picture reaching millions of people. But know that a cable network like Lifetime reaches approximately 99 million viewers. Not bad…
I don’t want you to leave this seminar thinking all I wanted to talk about was making your books into movie trailers and selling to specific markets. But as writers, in order for us to “play” in this world we are dependent upon others to buy and develop our works. So, selling or marketing whatever you want to call it is always going to be part of it unless you are planning to write your screenplay and just placing in on shelf in your living room. If you were a painter, you could paint your painting and then hang it up on the wall in your living room and then sit down with a glass of wine, look at it and enjoy it. But your script needs to be produced and that’s where the selling comes in. We all write, and that’s a given. But every once in a while, we get that phone call, letter or email when someone wants to read what we have created. That’s why it’s so important to know what we have and where it fits in. If that call comes from Lifetime, you kind of know then where you are going. If it’s USA Network instead of Lifetime, you know that USC skews more toward male viewer and therefor their programming has more adventures, crime shows and action series. Once you know this, you don’t rewrite your script, you just select and highlight different parts of it. It’s what car salesmen do when you go into a showroom.
This is going to sound sexist but it is not intended to be that way.
(Audience laughter)
If a man enters the showroom and asks about tires, engine size and performance, the salesperson will focus on the mechanical and performance aspects of the vehicle. If a woman enters the showroom and sits in the seats, the salesperson will talk about safety, cup holders,
comfort and economy. It’s the same car, nothing has changed but which areas the salesperson highlights in his or her presentation. Now back to writing.
24
START YOUR STORY AT THE END
Start Your Story at the End
THIS IS WHAT you are going to do when you go home tomorrow.
Start your screenplay at the pivotal moment (at the end) that connects your reader to your characters and story.
Develop a plan to select those moments within your story to include in the screenplay. Those moments should be integral to your characters and story and collectively make your screenplay no longer than 110-120 pages long for film or 88 pages for a made for television movie.
Once you have completed your screenplay calculate who the audience is for this work. What is their age, gender and interests so you will know where to bring you screenplay when it is complete.
Book to Screen Page 11
