Judging a Movie by Its Cover

Eileen Atkins describes a moment near and dear to the heart of every screenwriter, especially a screenwriter who’s just adapted a difficult novel (in this case, Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”). It occurred after an early screening of the movie.

“Three people were walking behind me,” Atkins says. “Very ordinary, obviously not actors or anything to do with the business, about in their late 20s. And one young man said to a man and a woman, ‘I can’t believe it. I enjoyed it, and I could follow it. It’s easy, isn’t it? It’s just about these people’s lives, isn’t it?’ ”

Well, yes, it’s just about these people’s lives. What these ordinary people no doubt expected from a literary adaptation was something abstruse, costume-heavy, dull. And certainly through the years, these expectations have been shared by executives in Hollywood.

“I remember years ago, when I first came to town after ‘My Brilliant Career,’ ” says Australian director Gillian Armstrong (“Little Women” and Peter Carey’s “Oscar & Lucinda,” due Dec. 31). “I used to meet studio executives who were all literature graduates, and they used to say, ‘Oh, my God, “Sense and Sensibility” is my favorite book, but no one could ever make a film of it.’

“There’s been an enormous change. People used to say, ‘Absolutely not, no way.’ The notion of a book into film seemed to be something that was stuffy and very small and art house. Thankfully, with the success of ‘Little Women’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ that’s changed.”

Not to mention “The English Patient.” In fact, the climate has changed not only for the classics but for contemporary literary fiction as well. Director-screenwriter Paul Schrader (“The Last Temptation of Christ,” Russell Banks’ “Affliction”) says one begot the other.

“The safest way to get a prestige film is obviously Austen or James, but the next thing to do is to get a prestigious American author,” he says. “Then you can have a contemporary writer, whether it’s Jane Smiley or Russell Banks or Rick Moody. It began with the older English classics and then moved over here.”

Notice Schrader does not include such frequently adapted authors as John Grisham and Stephen King.

“They’ve been doing John Grisham books and fantasy novels for some time, and no one talks about adapting literary books in that case,” he says. “So the word ‘literary’ here is synonymous with ‘difficult.’ They’re not premise-driven, they’re not black-and-white morality, they’re not simplistic problems or solutions. And that all of a sudden makes them difficult.”

A number of such adaptations have recently made it to the screen, including “L.A. Confidential” (from a James Ellroy novel), “A Thousand Acres” (Jane Smiley), “Washington Square” (Henry James), “The Wings of the Dove” (James again) and “The Ice Storm” (Rick Moody).

The list continues during the holidays with “The Sweet Hereafter” (Russell Banks), “Butcher Boy” (Patrick McCabe) and “Great Expectations” (Charles Dickens).

And on the horizon: Liam Neeson stars early next year with Geoffrey Rush in Bille August’s version of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” Director Anthony Minghella (“The English Patient”) has announced that he will adapt Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain.” Screenwriter Laura Jones (“A Thousand Acres,” “The Portrait of a Lady”) is adapting Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes.” Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter”) will be doing William Trevor’s “Felicia’s Journey.” The pet project of Curtis Hanson (“L.A. Confidential”) is M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Gastronomical Me.” Gillian Armstrong is working on Somerset Maugham’s “The Painted Veil.”

On it goes. Why? Or why now? Some insist that Hollywood has always been a member of the Book of the Month Club.

“Hollywood has always gotten product from books,” says screenwriter Carol Doyle (“Washington Square”). “Original material is difficult to come by. It’s not a mistake that the writer’s category of the Academy Award nominations is divided. There are five nominations for adaptations, and five nominations for original.”

But others, including producer-screenwriter James Schamus (“Sense and Sensibility,” “The Ice Storm”), are surprised at how much heat there is surrounding literary adaptations that have no obvious selling point--that are, in Schrader’s words, “difficult.” And Hollywood is paying attention, for a number of reasons.

“There are two things,” Schamus says. “One is they’re being made for a price. And two, films that on the face of them seem like totally commercial movies tend to have those faces pretty much flat on the ground within the first weekend, unless they’re really extraordinary. There’s been such a wave the last few summers of huge Hollywood things, and many of them were really fun, big Hollywood movies, but you can only take so many of those. The formula seemed great, but it was just a formula, it wasn’t a movie.”

In other words, Hollywood has been spending lots of money on movies that don’t make money. According to Schamus, the studios are also spending lots of money on movies that never get made:

“Certainly one of the things that literary adaptations have going for them is that Hollywood is coming out of a very intense cycle of spec script purchases, which were kind of like the Dutch tulip market of the 17th century. People were spending wildly on spec scripts, and bills were coming due and very few films were made off of them.”

Schamus also points out that the audience is “graying”--getting older, more mature--and therefore might be more inclined to watch a movie about people’s lives. There is also a larger audience abroad than there used to be for blockbusters and serious films alike; “Sense and Sensibility,” for example, did two-thirds of its business overseas. And there are more venues: video and a slowly increasing number of art-house screens that service places other than big cities. Finally, there’s been an influx of foreign directors--Ang Lee (“Sense and Sensibility,” “The Ice Storm”), Alfonso Cuaron (“A Little Princess,” “Great Expectations”)--who constitute what Schamus calls a “diverse and heterogeneous talent community that finds little niches to express themselves in.”

Interestingly, most of these calculations are about numbers. Few people suggest that the studios’ wary embrace of literary material has much to do with Oscar considerations, let alone art. They may have been embarrassed by last year’s near shutout in the best picture category, but they’re still concentrating on big-ticket items. After all, that’s where the money is. They’ll develop literary projects “for a price” in their art divisions or let the independents have them.

“The middle has kind of dropped out,” says Schrader, echoing the conventional wisdom that, with few exceptions, there’s no place for a $20-million to $30-million movie. “And those movies that studios traditionally made for award prestige value, they have let those fall into the domain of the independents, which of course are not so independent. ‘Independent’ more often than not is a euphemism for a small studio.”

So despite the increased interest, it’s still tough to get these movies made. Hanson says the only reason he was allowed to make “L.A. Confidential” was because of the clout he had earned from directing such commercial successes as “The River Wild” and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” Armstrong says it took her six years to get “Oscar & Lucinda” off the ground, and it still might be in limbo if not for the fact that Ralph Fiennes was attached.

Armstrong says he stuck with it and took a huge pay cut. As this story illustrates, some stars have become as bored with the summer extravaganzas as audiences are and are willing to make sacrifices to help get these projects made.

As movie pyrotechnics have increased, so has “a hunger for a more humanistic tradition” in actors, says International Creative Management’s Robert Newman, who represents such cutting-edge directors as Atom Egoyan and Danny Boyle (Irving Welsh’s “Trainspotting”).

“Strong literature plays right into that,” he says. “I think you’re going to find these rich, complex characterizations that actors are going to be involved in.”

Of course, the same holds true for directors. Shooting actors flailing against a blue screen is not very satisfying. Nor is marshaling an army of stuntmen and computer animators. Nor is working from a screenplay written by committee.

“Somebody sits down, a knowledgeable, imaginative person, spends years on a book,” says Ang Lee. “It’s richer, the text and the subtext. We write a movie, there’s nothing in the structure; it’s a typical two-hour structure. It could be poor.”

“I consider my skills are that of a storyteller, so I’m always out there looking for a great story to tell,” Armstrong says. “The odd thing has been in the last 10 years or so, when I find something that’s compelling, original, unpredictable, not formula, has heart, passion, content, so often those pieces have come from a book. Obviously, the person who sits down and sweats three to four years over a novel puts a lot more into the journey.”

In fact, literary material speaks to some directors in a way that original screenplays do not.

“After seven independent features that were based on my original material, I really felt that the type of characters and situations I was drawn to were becoming predictable, and it was important to surprise myself and extend myself,” Egoyan says. “ ‘The Sweet Hereafter’ offered a really vivid portrait of a small community, which is quite outside my experience. And it also offered a whole series of moral questions that were beyond the scope of my other films. I felt that there was enough to connect me to the material that I could do an adaptation that could be true to Russell’s vision and I could make [it] personal at the same time.”

The key word here is “personal.” Egoyan says that after his previous film, “Exotica,” he was besieged by original screenplays, some of which were good but none of which he could put his own stamp on.

He tried to develop a project at Warner Bros. called “Deep Sleep,” in which he attempted “to bend a screenplay into my own sensibility”--and found that he couldn’t. Now he says he’s told his agent that he’s interested only in reading books and offering his services as an adapter and director.

Hanson and screenwriter Hossein Amini (“Jude,” “The Wings of the Dove”) had similar experiences with their respective projects. Hanson says that “L.A. Confidential” is his most personal movie because Ellroy is “telling a story set in the same city that I grew up in and dovetails with certain ambitions that I’ve had in terms of telling an L.A. story.”

Amini says: “I just got very attached to the projects because the books touch so many parts of you, and you almost re-explore that when you’re writing an adaptation. It does allow you to explore other lives, and you can’t help putting a lot of yourself into it.”

But putting yourself into this material has its pitfalls. Some of these books are very well known, and adapters risk alienating the very people who know them well and will pay to see them on screen.

“There’s the terrible burden of all those people who I run into at functions who say, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see the film. It’s my favorite book,’ ” Armstrong says. “You live in terror of all their expectations and all their personal visions of the story.”

Carol Doyle says you can’t worry about that (although she had the advantage of adapting an author who, long dead, can’t complain): “As a writer, you can’t be aware of anyone’s expectations. You can read something, you can get your feeling about it, you can then share it with the people who are going to pay the money, and they can say either yea or nay.”

Sometimes, radical books call for radical measures. For example, Hanson streamlined Ellroy’s convoluted plot considerably, eliminating some characters and combining others. Amini had to invent many scenes for “Wings of the Dove” because the novel is internal, nearly without scenes, and he took the added liberty of imposing a film noir sensibility on the material “because it had that sort of a triangle and these people who love each other but end up hurting and eventually destroying each other.”

Certainly no one departed from the text more than Egoyan. In some ways, “The Sweet Hereafter,” which is composed of four first-person narratives, forced him to. He boldly introduced a pied piper theme “that wasn’t in the book but gives the film a lyricism and a sense of light that I think makes the film more accessible than one would think from a description of the story.”

After all, it’s about what happens to a community after a bus full of kids crashes into a lake. It’s just about these people’s lives.