![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Why does the market favour adaptations?
Feb. 8th, 2011 02:12 pmI'm reading one of the suggested books for Textual Transformations, "Adaptations, From Text to Screen, Screen to Text". I picked it because apparently there's only the two relevant chapters. Which I have now read. But I think there's more relevant bits later, and also there's a chapter on Batman, so I'll be reading on in a bit.
There's a lot of good questions asked and suggestions made about the purpose of adaptation, how and why it transforms texts between written and filmed forms. But there's also a glaring absence of a question, one that's pretty much its own answer.
It asks 'Why does the market favour adaptations?' and goes on to make complicated theories about buying cultural capital and nostalgia and why people like the literary canon and so on. But if you rephrase it the question is simply 'Why does the market favour making films of things that are already popular?' And, well, duh.
Classics, the canon, whatever you want to call it, it's a big and contested list. The things lit teachers choose for classes are the literary canon, so it shifts all the time. But there's classics that are books that, once written, just kept on selling forever. Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare, they're big echoing names with adaptations out the wazoo, but they're also books you can still buy off the average bookshop shelf, because they keep selling. The why of that is interesting. The why of making such texts into films? Not particularly complicated.
If something is popular in one form, they'll make it into another to see if that works too. See for examples Star Wars, and Doctor Who. Film, television, theatre, audioplays, audiobooks, print books, graphic novels, monthly magazines, behind the scenes books, linear games, computer games, branching stories, RPG rulebooks... I've probably missed some formats even. Like the distinction between script books, book-of-the-films, and tv tie in fiction. Shading, of course, into unauthorised (odd word, is authored without authority) fan products, fanfiction, fan art. Oh, poster, postcards, picture books, I forgot those. Stickers. Toys. It's endless, really, the forms we'll adapt story into to get more out of it.
Why the market does this is the proven track record of profitability. Especially when the route goes from cheaper methods of production, like novels or comics, up to the most expensive, big budget movies. You want to know you have an audience, and something that has not only become popular (bestsellers do that) but remained so (classics do that) will have an audience by the time you finish your (long lead time from greenlight through development and filming) film. And if the film does well you have a happy little feedback loop of changing formats, built in audience already proven.
Now the interesting bit is what a particular adaptation concludes is the part that will bring its audience with it. What it considers useful and valuable. Some adaptations will try and take a text and make it conform to known genre patterns, expected and of proven appeal. Other adaptations will try and look for what makes the existing audience value that particular text. Somehow mash the two together and you get both existing and new audience, which is golden.
It has a bit also about adaptations that take a text and try and make it more feminist, less racist, etc etc. Actually no, it looks like that chapter is about trying and failing to do that, by making it more 'Hollywood'. So that's a crunch of two motives, making it fit established (known to sell) patterns and trying to get more of the good stuff from a text.
I want to throw some fanfic studies at these oh-so-sincere cogitations on adaptation, because half the things they're giving big words to are the old fanfic tension, 'more of' and 'more from'. If you want a 'faithful' adaptation you're a 'more of' fan artist. If you want to update it or fix the racism you're a 'more from'. See, we have the words, and they're not polysyllabic. (It doesn't help that one of their suggested definitions is 'transformation' to mean an adaptation that sticks as close to the text as possible, when obviously OTW and all suggests a rather more, er, transformative transformation is how we usually use the word).
It has however won mass brownie points by mentioning Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers got namechecked and the Poacher concept got some paragraph. So it has some knowing of our side of the force.
... if I spend the whole semester putting Shakespeare and all his adaptations into the categories 'more of' and 'more from' I'm probably not going to get a very good grade out of it. Bother. Must do some of that paying attention stuff...
That 'more of' and 'more from' tension probably helps explain another phenomenon mentioned here, people who buy the book of the film, the classic literature the film was adapted from, and then don't finish reading it. It'll be the same reasons we don't always like tie-in literature. Doesn't fill in the gaps we're interested in, has a different interpretation of the characters than we wanted, not close enough to canon... and it's only the lit version of 'canon' that makes them all puzzled about why people wouldn't automatically see the book was better. People go looking for what they want, more of it and more from it, and if the book isn't giving it, why should they stick with it? And let's face it, a lot of classic lit turns out, on close inspection, to be racist, classist, and never have heard of feminism, often for the fair enough reason that feminism had not in fact happened yet. Half the time I read stuff for class and it's great for illustrating the problematic nature of older ideologies, and hence letting you spot it closer to home, but it's bugger all fun for actually reading. Why is this puzzling to anyone?
There's a lot of good questions asked and suggestions made about the purpose of adaptation, how and why it transforms texts between written and filmed forms. But there's also a glaring absence of a question, one that's pretty much its own answer.
It asks 'Why does the market favour adaptations?' and goes on to make complicated theories about buying cultural capital and nostalgia and why people like the literary canon and so on. But if you rephrase it the question is simply 'Why does the market favour making films of things that are already popular?' And, well, duh.
Classics, the canon, whatever you want to call it, it's a big and contested list. The things lit teachers choose for classes are the literary canon, so it shifts all the time. But there's classics that are books that, once written, just kept on selling forever. Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare, they're big echoing names with adaptations out the wazoo, but they're also books you can still buy off the average bookshop shelf, because they keep selling. The why of that is interesting. The why of making such texts into films? Not particularly complicated.
If something is popular in one form, they'll make it into another to see if that works too. See for examples Star Wars, and Doctor Who. Film, television, theatre, audioplays, audiobooks, print books, graphic novels, monthly magazines, behind the scenes books, linear games, computer games, branching stories, RPG rulebooks... I've probably missed some formats even. Like the distinction between script books, book-of-the-films, and tv tie in fiction. Shading, of course, into unauthorised (odd word, is authored without authority) fan products, fanfiction, fan art. Oh, poster, postcards, picture books, I forgot those. Stickers. Toys. It's endless, really, the forms we'll adapt story into to get more out of it.
Why the market does this is the proven track record of profitability. Especially when the route goes from cheaper methods of production, like novels or comics, up to the most expensive, big budget movies. You want to know you have an audience, and something that has not only become popular (bestsellers do that) but remained so (classics do that) will have an audience by the time you finish your (long lead time from greenlight through development and filming) film. And if the film does well you have a happy little feedback loop of changing formats, built in audience already proven.
Now the interesting bit is what a particular adaptation concludes is the part that will bring its audience with it. What it considers useful and valuable. Some adaptations will try and take a text and make it conform to known genre patterns, expected and of proven appeal. Other adaptations will try and look for what makes the existing audience value that particular text. Somehow mash the two together and you get both existing and new audience, which is golden.
It has a bit also about adaptations that take a text and try and make it more feminist, less racist, etc etc. Actually no, it looks like that chapter is about trying and failing to do that, by making it more 'Hollywood'. So that's a crunch of two motives, making it fit established (known to sell) patterns and trying to get more of the good stuff from a text.
I want to throw some fanfic studies at these oh-so-sincere cogitations on adaptation, because half the things they're giving big words to are the old fanfic tension, 'more of' and 'more from'. If you want a 'faithful' adaptation you're a 'more of' fan artist. If you want to update it or fix the racism you're a 'more from'. See, we have the words, and they're not polysyllabic. (It doesn't help that one of their suggested definitions is 'transformation' to mean an adaptation that sticks as close to the text as possible, when obviously OTW and all suggests a rather more, er, transformative transformation is how we usually use the word).
It has however won mass brownie points by mentioning Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers got namechecked and the Poacher concept got some paragraph. So it has some knowing of our side of the force.
... if I spend the whole semester putting Shakespeare and all his adaptations into the categories 'more of' and 'more from' I'm probably not going to get a very good grade out of it. Bother. Must do some of that paying attention stuff...
That 'more of' and 'more from' tension probably helps explain another phenomenon mentioned here, people who buy the book of the film, the classic literature the film was adapted from, and then don't finish reading it. It'll be the same reasons we don't always like tie-in literature. Doesn't fill in the gaps we're interested in, has a different interpretation of the characters than we wanted, not close enough to canon... and it's only the lit version of 'canon' that makes them all puzzled about why people wouldn't automatically see the book was better. People go looking for what they want, more of it and more from it, and if the book isn't giving it, why should they stick with it? And let's face it, a lot of classic lit turns out, on close inspection, to be racist, classist, and never have heard of feminism, often for the fair enough reason that feminism had not in fact happened yet. Half the time I read stuff for class and it's great for illustrating the problematic nature of older ideologies, and hence letting you spot it closer to home, but it's bugger all fun for actually reading. Why is this puzzling to anyone?