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From Page to Screen Gone With the Wind, From Here to Eternity, Schindler's List, Dances With Wolves, Te Bridge on the River Kwai — all Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards, all adaptations from novels of the same name. But what makes a great flm adaptation? Faithfulness to the original literary work? Cinematic vision or innovation? Some combination of the two? Members of Louisville's growing flm community consider the possibilities: Ryan Daly, founding member of the Louisville Film Society and director of the local Flyover Film Festival, compares the outcomes of various approaches: "In cinema there are classic flms adapted from littleread novels, books popularized by way of screenplay. Te Maltese Falcon, Te Princess Bride and Forrest Gump come to mind," he says. "On the other hand, there are the less successful, sometimes disastrous, adaptations of the high school-assigned reading list. Take the movie version of Milan Kudera's Te Unbearable Lightness of Being — unbearable indeed! Or Tim Burton's CGI LSD-by-wayof-ADHD Alice in Wonderland. Even Baz Luhrmann's bourgeoisie rogue Te Great Gatsby fell fat, old chap. "Successes lie more in the faithful adaptations of literary classics: To Kill a Mockingbird, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kenneth Branagh's take on Hamlet, Terry Gilliam's stab at the good doctor's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. "Te fnest adaptation, in my opinion, is Tod Browning's Dracula from 1931. Tough not the frst attempt to render the Count on celluloid (that'd be F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu from 1922), Browning gave us a Dracula (Bela Lugosi) inspiring countless (haha!) subsequent vampire flms. Mind you, Browning hailed from Louisville." Gill Holland, coproducer of the Sundancewinning flm Hurricane Streets and president of the NuLu Business Association, quickly identifed Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, directed by Milos Forman, as his choice for how to put book to flm. "In my 20s, I liked Kesey's book, but I am not sure it is a great book. But what a movie!" Holland says. "What is important in adapting a flm is not how much one stayed true to the original, but how much one captures the essence of the original. Just like it takes a bilingual poet to translate poetry, Milos Forman put all the words on a page into a blender and made one of the best flms ever. From the technical prowess of the creative team to the anti-authoritarian statement so timely when produced and still resonant, no wonder Cuckoo's Nest is one of only three movies (It Happened One Night, Te Silence of the Lambs) to win all fve big Oscars (picture, director, actor, actress, screenplay)." Kiley Lane Parker, flmmaker and founder of the multimedia and consulting frm By Lynnell Edwards Illustration by Madpixel staying true to both the original and the new creation? It's a tough task and I believe Silence of the Lambs succeeds beautifully. "I saw the flm and read the book when I was still in high school, and I was well aware of what (screenwriter) Ted Tally brought to the script and what he left on the pages of Harris' book. In both, we are instantly sympathetic toward Clarice Starling, fascinated by Hannibal Lecter, and terrifed of Jame Gumb (Bufalo Bill). Tally created a script that kept the complexity of these characters, their wants and needs, and chose visually interesting and intellectually stimulating scenes from the book that provided an unending tension throughout the flm. It became its own story while staying true to the original." With the Oscars looming, we asked local flmmakers why some great books turn into great movies — and others fop on flm. ParkerLane, recalls a transformative flm adapted from a favorite author: "As a Stephen King fan, Stand by Me never fails to bring me to tears and evoke the same feelings I had when I read the book for the frst time. Adapted in 1986 from King's novella Te Body (also known as Fall From Innocence), Stand by Me is a tale about a group of friends on a quest to fnd the body of a dead boy. Director Rob Reiner, who also directed adaptations of King's Misery and another one of my top fve favorites of all time, Te Princess Bride, seems to realize the importance of keeping these favored stories intact by staying true to the literary genesis from which they came." Film producer Laura Morton Mattingly was moved by both Tomas Harris' novel and Jonathan Demme's flm of the same name: Silence of the Lambs. " When adapting a literary work for the screen, I can only imagine the tremendous amount of choices to be made in getting to the fnal script," Mattingly says. "How do you create an original piece of art based on another's work, For William Mapother, actor and co-founder of the online flm-investment marketplace Slated, form drives function, though sometimes an adaptation hits a home run. "Every narrative form has its own inherent advantage — for example, the internal for novels, dialogue for plays and the external (movement) for movies," says Mapother, who most recently starred in the Sundance Awardwinning Another Earth. "Tis has produced the general rule for adaptations: Te better the book, the worse the movie, and vice versa. (Stanley Kubrick explained: 'Great writers are embarrassed by plot.') So, let's set aside the debate about which criteria to use (most difcult book to adapt, best book, degree of faithfulness to the source, etc.). Across all reasonable criteria for best adaptation, Te Godfather receives the highest average score. It's a great flm, period. And it's recognizable as both an adaptation and a work of its own. And it so improves upon the source material that the book seems almost a novelization of the movie. (Author Mario Puzo also co-wrote the screenplay.) And it became a touchstone for adaptations. And, yes, it has Brando." 2.14 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 89