Back to the Source : Four movies, four books--how the art of literary adaptation was served this summer

Adaptations have enriched Hollywood’s bloodstream since the nickelodeons fed off the dime novel. In the ‘30s, Liberty magazine or Collier’s or the Saturday Evening Post overflowed with stories by the first rank of American writers, virtually there for the taking. And the movies took them by the dozens.

For more tony properties--ones that could be counted on to bring Oscars for their casts and Thalbergs for their producers--Hollywood reached to its bookshelves and pulled down inspiration willy-nilly, from “Gone With the Wind” and “Wuthering Heights” to “The Godfather” and “Out of Africa.”

We’ve gotten a little out of the habit of literary adaptations lately, ever since old movies became the literature of fascinated young filmmakers-- old movies, old television shows, old comic books. Recently it’s new movies; blockbusters we hadn’t even had a chance to forget were turned into sequels, each of them noisier, bloodier and less imaginative than the original. It’s been some summer.

Finally, it seems that the action-adventure sequel has cycled out, at least for the moment. And while we catch our breath in relief, a quartet of movies has made the summer more interesting, all of them from notable books: “Quick Change,” “Presumed Innocent,” “Wild At Heart” and “After Dark, My Sweet.”

Page to screen is a delicate matter. How much needs to be invented? How much infidelity to the original will readers stand for? How many memorable characters must be sacrificed to keep the narrative line going? These are a few of the questions four screenwriters faced as they brought these very different novels to the screen.

“Quick Change’s” author, Jay Cronley, possesses a cracked and wild humor, he draws real characters whose outlook is about a quarter-inch away from surreal. His wit is all the more pungent because his heroes are frequently outlaws; they may not brandish guns, but they are unquestionably outlaws of the spirit.

Cronley concocted a grand scheme for his “Quick Change” sweethearts, Grimm and Phyllis, and their dim cohort Lackey--the film’s Bill Murray, Geena Davis and Randy Quaid. The novel’s trio gets away with its ingenious Manhattan bank robbery, just barely makes it through the city’s everyday booby traps to the plane, gets fleeced en route to England and doggedly starts all over again. In Cronley’s fatalistic view, it’s a sort of tongue-in-cheek paean to American persistence.

In the novel the three are definitely no better than they should be. Raffish is too delicate a word; Grimm is a petty criminal--with class; the tone is a little like “Breaking In” or even “The Hot Rock,” although Grimm is as resourceful as “The Hot Rock’s” gang was terminally inept.

Howard Franklin, who adapted the movie, was obviously drawn to Cronley’s dialogue, so seductively cadenced it speaks to you right from the page and so uncannily close to Murray’s own deadpan voice that it might have been written for him. So the question for Franklin became how far from the straight and narrow could these anti-heroes be allowed to stray, and how much of Cronley’s picaresque characters and narrative meandering could the audience absorb?

Franklin has jettisoned major points of the original story, including its final quarter; he’s tidied up Grimm’s background--he’s now a disillusioned city planner--and made a pass at making Grimm’s robbery a final act of protest toward a city Grimm considers morally bankrupt.

These are big changes, and co-directors Franklin and Murray have come up with wild new improvisations on inner city madness in the cityscape section, yet the feeling from the movie is that it’s Cronley’s people you’re meeting up there, in all their nutty glory. The book and the movie remain separate yet equally funny; you leave the movie wanting to read more of the author, at the same time your appetite is whetted for more from these debuting directors, together or separately.

With “Presumed Innocent,” screenwriter Frank Pierson and director Alan J. Pakula, who shares the writing credit, had their work cut out for them. Scott Turow’s novel on the unalterable weight and workings of the law had been the must-read of 1987, so a certain portion of the audience would be in on the ending. The trick would be to hold them in spite of what they already knew; to de-emphasize the mystery part of the murder and concentrate on the ironic workings of justice, and to make the reading audience feel that “their” characters were in the best possible hands. (In this respect, obscure material is far easier to work from; there’s at least room to maneuver without being thought a defiler of the temple.)

“Presumed Innocent” is not a case where hacking cuts were made in the novel; it’s more like extremely skillful cosmetic surgery. As one audience member has already noted in an acerbic letter to The Times, Carolyn Polhemus, the pivotal siren of the piece, was made 10 or 12 years younger, the better to be played by Greta Scacchi, while her teen-age son and his minor plot contributions were jettisoned completely.

While the reader’s indignation is understandable, it’s also a tellingly naive view of big studio moviemaking; she sees no reason why the seductress couldn’t be in

her early 40s, as she is in the book, gaining the depth that those 10 years of living might have given her. A major studio film with a wife and a mistress both in their 40s? What does she take Hollywood for, romantic France?

Next, it was crucial that audiences have the maximum empathy with Bonnie Bedelia’s Barbara Sabich, deeply wounded by her knowledge of her husband’s ongoing affair with the alluring Polhemus. To cut her character closer to the upper middle-class American norm, out went the book’s idea that she had money of her own. Instead of Barbara volunteering her trust fund to finance her husband’s trial, the Sabiches mortgage their house to pay the legal fees.

The book’s in-depth characterization of this wife--analytical, ferociously intelligent, facing her doctorate in mathematics, “weird” in the eyes of most people outside her family--has only been suggested. It’s left for Bedelia to fill in her psychological profile and she’s done so with equally ferocious intelligence. There’s no question that Barbara Sabich has been made less cerebral, somewhat less complex and more balanced; however in terms of the film’s final emotional equilibrium, it’s a smart adjustment.

In the precarious matter of keeping an audience’s sympathy, the screenwriters cannily opted for Sabich togetherness in the wake of the trial, rather than the book’s trial separation. Then, most critically, they switched characters in the grand finale, a change that made it infinitely more cinematic and personal. In the novel these dark matters are told to a peripheral character, a device that only works on paper--do that in a film, keep the camera away from the characters’ faces and the moment is fatally distanced.

Of all these movies, “Presumed Innocent” has been made as nearly congruent with its original novel as possible in a film. As for those who found Harrison Ford’s playing of prosecutor Rusty Sabich too tightly reined in, there are dozens of citations from the book to suggest he’s exactly on target. The novel is written in Sabich’s first-person; one of author Turow’s most telling glimpses of the man himself is the scene as Sabich’s mother is dying of cancer. It is the supposedly cool and aloof Barbara who is able to be there for her, keeping up a running murmur of comfort, while Sabich comments that “I, as ever, was too full of private grief to make my own approach.”

Wrangles over “Wild at Heart” are probably going to break up dinner parties until the next great movie controversy comes along, but if you’re curious to know how David Lynch could make a boring film, part of the answer lies in Barry Gifford’s novel, the other part with Lynch himself. Lynch’s inventiveness has seemed inexhaustible, yet “Wild at Heart” finds him running in place, his darkly comic vision turned into exhibitionistic silliness. One can only hope it’s a very short phase.

In any case, novelist-biographer-poet-editor-essayist Gifford finds Lynch the “perfect cinematic translator” for his mini-novel, the first quarter of “The Sailor and Lula Novels” due out early next year. Gifford’s road saga is almost solid dialogue, the salty cracker conversation of 20-year-old Lula Pace Fortune and her 23-year-old lover Sailor Ripley, on the run from her mom and his parole board. Glued together in perfect, dippy harmony they juke their way through New Orleans and the South to a dead end in Big Tuna, Tex.

They are Sail and Peanut to each other, although on the printed page, Lula doesn’t know if she completely enjoys his calling her “peanut” so much: “Puts me so far down on the food chain.” Lula is never quite this cracklingly aware on screen; Lynch never gives us enough examples to back up Sailor’s claim that she has a really odd mind.

On screen she’s simply a fool for love--or “Love Me Tender”--and she and Sailor seem so disaffected, so jaded that, in spite of the heroic work of Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage, they can’t give the film the center it needs to keep us amused and interested. The book doesn’t have one either, but it’s able to coast for a while on its funny, funky peapatch dialogue, until even interest in that splutters out.

Lynch, who did the adaptation himself, tries to give the lassitude of the narrative a little push, then he gets sidetracked adding eye-popping embellishments to the baroque characters along the way. Thus if Gifford gives us Auntie Rootie’s slightly deteriorating son Dell, Lynch gives Dell matchbook-size cockroaches in his underwear and Lynch-only-knows-where-else-besides, then casts Crispin Glover to get the maximum weirdness from this moment.

Anything Gifford has done, Lynch has done one better--or wilder and he has held the patent on grotesquerie since “Eraserhead” in 1978. In “Blue Velvet,” one could ascribe a certain political subversiveness to Lynch’s vision of rot beneath the surface of Reagan’s perfect white-picket fence America. This time the embellishments seem like a kid’s gross-out contest: a lot of spilled brains, a dog running off with a severed arm while its owner flops after it; the cockroaches; the arc of a shotgunned head before it squishes onto the ground and no discernible purpose to any of this filigree.

In Gifford’s eyes Lynch may be his perfect cinematic translator, but it may not go both ways: the loose weave of Gifford’s prose, his fondness for bizarre anecdotes and characters may be more encouragement than Lynch needs. Especially when the director’s only weapon against rampant evil seems to be spun sugar, hyper-romanticism (well, maybe irono-romanticism) and “The Wizard of Oz.”

Jim Thompson’s unrelenting novels have come to be synonymous with film noir , particularly the dark side of the “sunny” Eisenhower era; for all their popularity it’s been said they leave no comfortable place for a reader to sit. Thompson’s yarns are frequently told in the first person, a person you’d think twice about before you’d be left alone with him.

So, how to make a film from the point of view of a character roughly as stable as quicksand? In what era to set it? Are Thompson’s books so irrevocably anchored to their time that they can only be made as kitschy period pieces, full of Venetian blind shadows and bias-cut dresses? These were some of the questions Robert Redlin and co-writer/director James Foley wrestled with in adapting “After Dark, My Sweet,” one of Thompson’s marginally less nihilistic books.

There seems to be no problem moving “After Dark’s” three desert dwellers into the present: the narrator, unbalanced ex-boxer Collie (Jason Patric); the self-destructive widow Fay (Rachel Ward); and the small-potatoes con man Doc (Bruce Dern.) The very cliche of the desert’s timelessness works in the movie’s favor. Actually, what sets Thompson apart from his cohorts in noir , Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, is Thompson’s trick of setting action in an unidentifiable, unnamed town and in a state of mind rather than a season.

Novelist-screenwriter Donald E. Westlake, who wrote “The Stepfather,” the novel of “The Hot Rock” and the forthcoming adaptation of Thompson’s “The Grifters,” said in a radio interview recently that at the end of a day of working on “The Grifters” the question he asked himself was always, “Does it sound like Jim Thompson?”

“After Dark, My Sweet” does. It has good, tough imaginative additions that could have come straight from Thompson’s pages, but didn’t: those frowsy date palm trees, for example, in back of Fay’s stucco ranch house. At the same time, they are eloquent witnesses to her dead husband’s dotty get-rich-quick schemes and they provide Collie with his one real taste of accomplishment, getting those trees “working” again. The adapters have been scrupulous too, as they weeded out period slang, not to lose the biting metallic flavor of Thompson’s dialogue.

The biggest challenge was empathy. Film noir with its classic, world-weary narrator, its loners and its dames, all selling each other out at dizzying speed, means to keep us at arm’s length and it succeeds. But with a child kidnapping at the center of its plot, if “After Dark, My Sweet” is to work with audience members at all, it must have one character for them to hope for. Unlikely though it seems, that person becomes Jason Patric’s Collie, boxing’s lethal Kid Collins.

Like “Presumed Innocent’s” Rusty Sabich, but on the other end of the physical spectrum, Collie comes alive through a performance of consummate intensity. To read the book is to see that Patric has internalized everything Thompson has written about this sweet, maybe dangerous escaped mental patient who in the final paroxysms becomes the film’s moral center. “After Dark, My Sweet” is a complex, extraordinarily generous complement to its source and the kaleidoscopic brilliance and intelligence of Patric’s work is at its heart. We’ll have more major books-into-films between now and Christmas: Carrie Fisher’s “Postcards from the Edge,” for director Mike Nichols; Nicolas Pileggi’s “Wiseguys,” which has become “Good Fellas,” for Martin Scorsese; Larry McMurtry’s “Texasville” for Peter Bogdanovich; another Jim Thompson work, “The Grifters,” for director Stephen Frears; Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” for Brian De Palma and Peter Viertel’s “White Hunter, Black Heart,” for Clint Eastwood.

Books and films are separate art forms and it’s useless to wish that one would perform the other’s high-wire act. But when all’s right with the heavens, movies that grow from books seem to have an extra layer of subtlety and resonance. When you see one that has, stop for a minute to think about the work of the adapter, an artist working with respect, compassion, wit, humanity and the sharpest razor this side of Sweeney Todd.