MassMedia: Print Media: Adapting a Story from Novel to Film [VID] (W7-P4) Fa15

In adaptation studies, adaptation is the process of a story changing as it moves from one form to another. Example: Harry Potter books to Harry Potter films. It could also be from a video game to a film, from a play to a film, etc.

One of the key concepts in adaptation studies is infidelity. Infidelity is a measure of how different an adaptation is from the original source. How different is the film from the novel, for example?

For those writers who adapt stories from novel to film, they face a challenge. How to get the story from a 300 page novel to a 90 page/minute script? Scenes have to be excluded, characters have to combined, etc.

Which is better? The book or the movie? Is that a fair question to ask? There seems to be bias to always choosing the book.

Very often when adaptation scholars look at infidelity their attention is put on what is left out, but not why it is left out? James Patterson's novel Kiss the Girls was adapted into a 1997 film. While the novel addressed issues of race and included an interracial romance, the film adaptation did not. Why?  For answers to this, see Hart, W. B., (2012). The case of the missing interracial romance.

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