LARB Digital Edition: Film and the Art of Adaptation: Issue #18

By Los Angeles Review of Books

More so than any other art form, film relies on collaboration. The essays in this collection, Film and the Art of Adaptation,” consider a range of contemporary films inspired by celebrated works of American literature, including Baz Luhrmann's spectacular take on The Great Gatsby and James Franco's faithful transposition of As I Lay Dying.

Ruth Yeazell considers the difficulty of representing the interior life of one of Henry James’s orphaned children in Updating What Maisie Knew,” while Len Gutkin’s sassy pan, A Beatnik Animal House,” shows how John Krokidas’s adolescent romp Kill Your Darlings butchers the murder that launched the Beat movement. Lowry Pressly’s discussion of Steve McQueen’s humane and heartbreaking 12 Years A Slave defends McQueen from charges of sadism in his adaptation of Solomon Northup’s little-read slave narrative. Rounding out the collection is Jerry Christensen’s take down of historian Ben Urwand’s controversial book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler.

From adaptation to collaboration, these six essays illuminate how writers, directors, and actors work together across yawning gaps in time and space to bring history and literature to the silver screen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781940660042

Book preview

Table of Contents

Merve Emre — Introduction

Caleb Smith — A Spectacle in Love: Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

Ruth Yeazell — Updating What Maisie Knew

Len Gutkin — A Beatnik Animal House: John Krokidas’s Kill Your Darlings

Lowry Pressly — 12 Years A Slave: On Humane Suffering

Merve Emre — Adapting As I Lay Dying: An Interview with James Franco and Matt Rager

Jerry Christensen — Competition Over Collaboration

Los Angeles Review of Books - Digital Editions - Film and the Art of Collaboration

Los Angeles Review of Books

Los Angeles, California

© 2013 by Los Angeles Review of Books

First edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Logo design by Ted Perez & Associates

Megan Cotts

Art Director

Introduction

More so than any other art form, film relies on collaboration. The essays in this collection, Film and the Art of Adaptation, consider a range of contemporary films that were inspired by celebrated works of American literature. From our roundtable on The Great Gatsby, Caleb Smith’s gorgeous essay A Spectacle in Love meditates on Gatsby’s pecuniary love for Daisy and, in turn, director Baz Luhrmann’s love for Fitzgerald’s novel. Ruth Yeazell considers the difficulty of representing the interior life of one of Henry James’s orphaned children in "Updating What Maisie Knew, while Len Gutkin’s sassy pan, A Beatnik Animal House," shows how John Krokidas’s adolescent romp Kill Your Darlings butchers the murder that launched the Beat movement. Lowry Pressly’s discussion of Steve McQueen’s humane and heartbreaking 12 Years A Slave defends McQueen from charges of sadism in his adaptation of Solomon Northup’s little-read slave narrative. Moving even deeper into the South, Merve Emre interviews James Franco and Matt Rager, the collaborators who brought to life Faulkner’s modernist masterpiece As I Lay Dying and lived to tell the tale. Rounding out the collection is Jerry Christensen’s take down of historian Ben Urwand’s controversial book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. In a work of breathtaking scope, Christensen not only picks apart Urwand’s thesis — that the Hollywood studio system was complicit with the Third Reich — but also rewrites Urwand’s history for him, sketching how the overlapping activities of many regulatory and artistic institutions changed film production in the lead-up to World War II. From adaptation to collaboration, these six essays illuminate how writers, directors, and actors work together across yawning gaps in time and space to bring history and literature to the silver screen. 

Merve Emre

Film Editor

Los Angeles Review of Books

A Spectacle in Love: Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

By Caleb Smith

ONE OF THE STRANGEST THINGS about Baz Luhrmann’s spectacle is that it really does seem to be in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sad, beautiful little novel. Most of the dialogue is taken right from the book, and the filmmakers use the lamest of all cinematic tricks, the voiceover, to bring in long reveries in prose by Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway. In the movie’s conceit, the ex-bond trader, suffering from alcoholism, insomnia, and other maladies of the spirit, has repaired to a treatment facility in the Midwest. His therapist, a grandfatherly amateur gardener, encourages Carraway to do some writing. Why not? It might soothe his nerves. Following the doctor’s advice, our narrator begins to recall a summer of mystery and dissolution in jazz-age New York City. And thus, improbably, Luhrmann’s fantastic carnival of a 3-D movie turns out to be, in part, a story about the typing and correction of a manuscript. In the recollection of violence and loss, a lovely book is made.

But love, in The Great Gatsby, is not the same as fidelity. What gets loved is some distortion of the object, some projection of the self. And Luhrmann does take a few liberties with the text. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have, but in a movie that otherwise stays so close to its source, in substance if not in style, small changes are conspicuous. I noticed, for instance, that Luhrmann left out two of my favorite passages: the ones where Carraway and Gatsby talk about Daisy Buchanan’s voice. In the first, Carraway is asking himself what Gatsby likes so much about this girl. It’s a tough question! He comes around to this answer: I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song. In this line, as elsewhere, Carraway imagines himself as a kind of analyst, interpreting Gatsby’s desire. He concludes that Gatsby hears, in Daisy’s voice, a living presence which is not his own invention, not over-dreamed but real, essential, belonging to his beloved and justifying his extravagant devotion.

Meanwhile Fitzgerald, behind the scenes, is plotting to show how Carraway’s interpretation is itself an invention, casting his own fantasies, like shadows, onto the screen of Gatsby’s character. When Gatsby hears Daisy’s voice, as a matter of fact, he doesn’t hear a deathless song. In the second of my favorite passages, he gives his own account: Her voice is full of money. Now here is a demystifying interpretation. All of the fluctuating, feverish, immortal music that Carraway wants to hear, or wants Gatsby to be hearing, in Daisy’s voice—all that glitter is exposed as the naked appeal of cash. It’s not Daisy herself. Daisy herself is just a cipher. She is the medium through which money becomes so gorgeous and so feminized that men begin to dream about possessing it in a