On Novel Adaptations

 Several years ago, by reading Tolkien, Rowling, Martin that novels ought not to be put on the silver screen because two and a half hours (even three) leaves too little time.  For example, in Harry Potter 4 the writers skip the entire narrative about the house elves’ revolt.  We can view these side plots as smaller than the main arcs, sure, but should Tom Bombadill have appeared in the Hobbit?  Granted Tolkien stated with the Hobbit that he simply wanted to write a long novel to see whether he could do it and thus the Hobbit rambles like the Picareque novels of the late Renaissance with which, as a professor of Old English, Tolkien would have familiarized himself and may have taught.

Meanwhile, then we have two television shows about serial killers Dr. Hannibal Lecter and (nearly a physician who left medical school top of his class) Dexter Morgan.  In both shows we observe the TV writers going off script of the novels.  For example, in one of the later Dexter novels, once Jeff Lindsay has made apparent that he has written a serious of dark comedies, Morgan’s step-son, Cody, approaches Morgan about the latter training him as a serial killer with his step-daughter, Astrid, choosing to go along in order to protect her younger brother not unlike the way in which Debra Morgan protects Dexter Morgan once she discovers what he is.  

However, because Showtime had decided that they wanted more of the thriller mood which the first novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter creates, they ignored much of the later material.  Similarly in Hannibal much material either not present in the novels or in a different chronological order appears in the television show.  For example, Dr. Lecter is at large when the journalist Freddy Lounds, now a woman, gets lit on fire whereas in the Silence of the Lambs Dr. Lecter resides at the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane.  Or Dr. Chilton gets heavily maimed in Hannibal and yet again no harm has come to Dr. Chilton in Silence of the Lambs until Dr. Lecter tells Clarise Starling from some tropical location where apparently Lecter has tracked Chilton that “I am having an old friend for dinner.”

The point for Creative Writing students—particularly novelists who wish to retain an agent and then have Hollywood create “an option” to turn the work into a film or television program (though they use the word, “option,” because a studio might buy the rights and never actually adapt the work) is: take a pay cut, which your agent will hate, in order to retain all creative rights so that they cannot fuck with your work—and they will if they can.

Also insist that you attend the meetings that the casting director attends.  Insist that your producers and director retain a permissive casting director.  I have created a short list for my own pentalogy.

1. Sasha Lane as the protagonist Miniya Pemba Messina Orma (b. Jenay Jackson)

2. Erik King as Miniya’s widowed father, Reggie Jackson.

3. For Simone Garangioux who has died long before the diagesis, that actress will appear quite sparingly and probably, according to the convention, in Black and White Flashback.

4. Ayo Edebiri as Miniya’s lover, Adelaide because she can pull off the grief that could be germaine to Lane but given that we need Lane for the revolutionary outrage, Edebiri will pull off the grief on camera once Miniya goes to Africa and thence through Spain to the British Isles, Western Europe and back again over a period of a couple of years.

5. Jaime Murray: I don’t know how we want to cast her but she will be neither a “white hat” nor a “black hat” but as in Dexter a “grey hat” with those shark-like dark eyes, the pale beautiful skin and the jet black hair like my Irish aunts.  Murray is a Scottish surname despite the actor’s highly posh English accent.