PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATLICA

FACULTAD DE LETRAS
Licenciatura en Letras Inglesas
English Language II
Academic Writing Module
M.A Kaulen
Pablo Lpez

How Filmmakers have created Screen Plays

Literature has played a core role in the creation of films and audio-visual projects
due to the necessity to have a reliable story which has to be re-written in order to
construct the script of the film. With the intention of making this possible, it is very
important to consider the function of adaptation to fill the gap between the original,
written text and its assessment on the screen. However, adaptation can be considered as
a negative methodology because many parts of the narrative text cannot be included,
even losing a lot of extra ideas or secondary information. For that reason, the director or
the writer of the script must be sensible in order to make an important decision: which
parts of the narrative text they have to include.
The art of filming is part of the early twentieth century, differently from adaptation
which did not begin with the industry of films when the cinema appeared as a new
approach to entertainment, but with the representation of canonical narrative texts in
order to be shown in the theatre. Nevertheless, the idea of adapting a narrative text to a
script is applied for both types of arts since it is necessary to represent certain topics
that directors or writers have based on contemporary or old literature. The result of this
is that the narrative text cannot be represented as a whole because nobody could stand
watching a film for two hours or more than that; as a result, it is necessary to
summarize the text chosen, but without losing the main idea that the author of the
narrative text wanted to express. Therefore, we need to comprehend that adaptation
means an adequacy of formats, in which a source format literary text is
accommodated into another format film , and also this will have losses or reductions,
or even constraints which would unbalance its identity, characteristics and autonomy, but

it is essential that the text is subordinated to the realization of the film because films
have to be the compressed part of the book to capture the attention of the viewers.
The analysis of adaptation has a previous value and it is given for the author of
the narrative text. The objective of a film director is to find that value, because it is the
way to keep on the main idea of the narrative text. Consequently, the director has to be
able to separate the main ideas from the secondary ones or choose what can be included
or deleted. The idea of this is not to kill the narrative text with thoughts or beliefs of the
director instead of the author of that text, such as the case of Mr. Memory of Alfred
Hitchcock, in which he used to show his metaphor related to the moral order with words
like fidelity or adultery, without a real dimension in the analysis of the text. Otherwise,
there are cases of some director who try to get close to the literary text and follow every
component of it and, in this case, these directors get far away from the value of the
source book.
The implication of analysing the adaptation has sense when it is based on classical
texts, whose plays deal with different places and eras which show the authenticity of
farther realities. Nonetheless, it is essential to have in mind that these plays were
performed in the theatre and considered canonical literature, which means that the
structure of a script was already made and this plays can be conserved as they were. For
instance, Shakespeares plays were very famous in his time, because they showed the
reality of Europe, giving a good piece of information about history. For that reason, this
play scripts are quite easy to represent, for example the film Looking for Richard,
directed and acted by Al Pacino, can be appreciated that the film structure is as well as
the text, because it is not hard to lose the main idea and its core in drama texts.
In conclusion, adaptation is a way to have a script from a literary text to represent
it in a film where the director of the film has to find the main structure of that text in
order to get close to the intention of the author. However, it is important that the director
tries to consider some of his ideas in the realization of his film because if he follows all
the structure, it can be very stressing in terms of watching the film and catch the
attention of viewers. Following the previous idea, canonical literature can be the
exception because its form is pre-adapted and it can be easily represented. To finish,
adaptation is not a negative procedure, but a methodology to adequate one format into
another.