Abstract
The screenwriting process, by means of which adaptation occurs and through which adaptations are created, is restricted to a marginal niche within the already marginalized field of adaptation studies. This process is a fundamental and essential component in film adaptations, yet it is too often ignored in our scholarship. This chapter, which considers screenwriting’s formative role in the process of film adaptation, calls for much greater attention to it within adaptation studies. It uses Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975) to illustrate how screenwriters approach adaptation and how multiple variant drafts document and record the incremental, creative, and fluid process of adaptation. These documents can deepen and even transform our understanding of movies and adaptation.
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Notes
- 1.
A Double Indemnity script dated 25 November 1943 was published by the University of California Press in 2000 with an introduction by Jeffrey Meyers. A script for The Man Who Would Be King dated 15 November 1974 has also been published, but that facsimile printing does not list a press or publication date.
- 2.
At this stage the characters used Cain’s names, but their surnames were eventually changed in the film to Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson. The archives establish when and why those changes occurred. There was a Walter Huff listed in the Los Angeles phone book, and moreover he was an insurance salesman, so to protect the studio from possible lawsuits, the Paramount legal office instructed the screenwriters to change his surname (which they did by 11 October). There was also a single Nirdlinger household in the LA city directory, so the lawyers required a name change for Phyllis too. A memo dated 24 September approved Dietrichson from a list of names Wilder submitted (Paramount 100.f-1264).
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Glance, J.C. (2023). Periphery and Process: Tracing Adaptation Through Screenplays. In: Leitch, T. (eds) The Scandal of Adaptation. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14153-9_13
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