Adapting to Hollywood

The warm December sunshine that fell on Beverly Hills flowed through the windows of the Four Seasons Hotel and landed on E. Annie Proulx. The author shaded her eyes. Almost everything about the place, the weather, the enormous fresh flowers, the uniformed doormen, the minions from Miramax were all about as far away as one could get from the bleak Newfoundland coastline, the wild storms and twisted psyches that defined her Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1993 novel, “The Shipping News.”

Hollywood, of course, harbors its own kind of peril. Its history is littered with the souls of wounded writers who, like Proulx, have sold film rights to their books. Filmmakers could have chewed up her imaginative prose and spit out “sentimental mush,” she said. Sensible and uncompromising, Proulx previewed the rough cut before coming to town for the movie’s premiere. What she saw pleased her. The novel’s quirky wit and intelligence, its authentic atmosphere and awkward love story--it was all there, Proulx thought.

Screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs, in turn, was relieved by her reaction. He had been recruited for “The Shipping News” by director Lasse Hallstrom (with whom he’d worked on “Chocolat”) after other directors and writers, including Laura Jones, Ron Bass and Beth Henley, had tried their own versions of Proulx’s dense and layered novel. In awe of her talent, Jacobs knew he still had to make the script his own. He had rearranged, expanded and added scenes, compressed time, dropped characters without consulting her.

“The producer called me and said Annie loved it,” Jacobs said. “I have to say I got misty-eyed.”

The writers’ mutual relief illustrates the lessons novelists and filmmakers have learned about adapting novels into films: Sometimes it’s best to keep their distance and hope it all works out in the end. Somehow.

The process of turning novels into movies is an “inexact science,” said Linda Goldstein Knowlton, a co-producer of “The Shipping News,” which opened on Christmas Day. “When it happens, it happens,” she said.

Getting there, novelists and filmmakers said, can be delicate and harrowing.

After participating in various ways in eight adaptations of his novels for film (“Phantoms”) and TV (“Mr. Murder”), author Dean Koontz said he has given up on film. In a book, he said, “the writer is the final arbiter. In film, that is not anywhere close to the case. There’s always one megalomaniac in the group, someone with enough power to distort what’s going on.” He said he has amassed a collection of “horror stories” he’s saving for a memoir.

Unlike filmmakers whose work is part of a collaborative effort, novelists labor alone, noted director Phillip Noyce (“The Bone Collector,” “Patriot Games”). Novelists “spend their lives preoccupied with the human condition. We spend our lives caught up in a whole host of other issues led by the politics of the system,” he said.

Noyce said he starts with a story that grips him, one whose characters he’d like to live with for a few years. The quagmire, he said, comes with the attempt to distill the essence of the novel--a medium that depends on dense, often contradictory language--into roughly 120 minutes of visuals.

The more popular the book, the higher the stakes, he said. No one wants disappointed fans. And too often that’s been the case recently with critically and commercially unsuccessful adaptations of such novels as “All the Pretty Horses” and “Snow Falling on Cedars.” A similar fate could await “Shipping News,” which opened to only mixed reviews.

Noyce is just finishing an adaptation of the 1958 classic “The Quiet American” by Graham Greene. “In the six years of developing the screenplay I was daily persecuted by the thought we should do anything to pollute Greene’s original thesis,” he said. “Every decision in terms of adapting the book was based on the question, ‘Would this be acceptable to the Graham Greene lover?’”

Some movies such as “The Godfather” are widely acknowledged to outshine the original work. More often, though, it seems authors are disappointed. “If they just cash the check, it’s usually a happier experience,” said film critic and historian David Thompson. From the author’s point of view, they can’t lose. If the movie succeeds, they benefit from the publicity; if it fails, they can say they had nothing to do with it.

Yet others, lured by the money or the possibility of boosted book sales, can’t resist getting involved. Also, Thomson said, “A lot of novelists are terribly in love with the idea of movies. They lead lonely lives. They’re intrigued by meeting all these famous people.”

Not Proulx. “Let’s put it this way,” she said, “[the film industry] is no more interesting than cattle auctions, or sorghum growing, or any occupation, except that it looms so large in our American cultural consciousness. I find it interesting, but it’s not a thing that drives me.”

At 65, she is a friendly, no-nonsense woman whose cropped hair, gray sweater and black pants look almost monastic. Proulx doesn’t see many movies. She said the last movie she saw before “The Shipping News” was “the Julian Schnabel film” (“Before Night Falls”).

Proulx sold film rights to “The Shipping News” for about $500,000 in 1992, even before it was published. The only condition she had was that the film be shot in Newfoundland, a request the initial studio TriStar rejected. Producer Knowlton, who bird-dogged the project from start to finish, insisted on the remote location.

Then Proulx turned her attention to new writing projects, including “Close Range: Wyoming Stories.” One of the stories, “Brokeback Mountain,” the tale of doomed love between two cowboys, has been turned into a screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. She is now finishing a novel about the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles called “That Old Ace in the Hole,” a story that she says is about “windmills and hog farms” and doubts will attract many filmmakers.

Proulx acknowledged she is not a team player and said she had neither the time nor the desire to participate in filming “The Shipping News.” “I didn’t read any of the screenplays. I didn’t visit the set. I didn’t meet with Lasse Hallstrom or any of the actors,” she said.

Nor did she brood about it. “There’s no point to that. There’s nothing I could do. But I was concerned.” She said Knowlton kept her periodically informed, but she still had no idea how the film would turn out.

After almost decade, she said watching the rough cut was like seeing the story for the first time. “Some of the characters took on a kind of depth that wasn’t spelled out in the book,” she said. Kevin Spacey, who plays Quoyle, infused a sense of stoic endurance into the character who, she said, is a man “drowning in his own inadequacy and lack of control over circumstances and events.”

Proulx was particularly pleased that the film captured the awkward, wry nature of the love story between Quoyle and schoolteacher Wavey (Julianne Moore). “It wasn’t Hollywood,” she said. “It could have been drenched in chocolate sauce.”

Though critics might quibble, Proulx believes screenwriter Jacobs constructed a tapestry from the book that stands on its own. “Even the things that aren’t there are there in a strange kind of way,” she said. “There’s a reference or two that conjures up the event in the book for people who’ve read it and know.”

Author John Irving, who adapted his novel “The Cider House Rules” for the screen, said “The Shipping News” presents a forbidding challenge partly because there is more atmosphere than plot. “It’s hard to make a whole movie around that landscape and sort of interior melancholy of characters,” he said.

Indeed, the project itself developed a complex chronology of its own. Over the years, the script moved from TriStar to Columbia to Miramax. Laura Jones wrote the first draft before Hallstrom signed on as director, Knowlton said. Hallstrom wanted to try another voice and hired Beth Henley. Ron Bass (“Rain Man”) said he drafted a script “that seemed to make everyone happy at Columbia, where it was at the time Lasse came on.” He doesn’t know why it was dropped.

Fred Schepisi replaced Hallstrom, who had taken another project, and Schepisi rehired Jones, Knowlton said. “At that point, she continued, John Travolta got involved. Then Billy Bob Thornton came on to star and direct, and he brought [screenwriter] Tom Epperson. That didn’t quite jibe with the studio. Then we went back to Lasse, who became available.”

Different problems arose with each draft, she said. “Sometimes, they wouldn’t get the humor. Sometimes, they wouldn’t quite get the love story. Each director had their own issue. Each studio had their own issue.”

Screenwriter Jacobs hadn’t read the book until Hallstrom sent it to him. After they looked at the other drafts, he said they decided to return to the novel. “I went to his house in upstate New York and we just kind of sat down, kicked off our shoes and talked about things that had moved us in the book, images that we found powerful,” he said. The image of Quoyle’s father throwing the boy in the water would become the opening scene and a visual metaphor that recurs throughout the film.

Jacobs, 47, an earnest man in wire-rimmed glasses and turtleneck, said he deliberately didn’t ask to meet Proulx while he was writing. “I was so in awe of her talent that I thought in some ways it was not a bad thing. I needed that independence. I had to give myself that confidence. I had to give myself that freedom,” he said.

Similarly, Irving spent 13 years with four directors adapting his novel “The Cider House Rules” before finally clicking with director Hallstrom. In his 1999 memoir, “My Movie Business,” he chronicled the experience, which taught him, he said, to be ruthless with his own material. “Being literal to something in another form can be deadly,” he said.

Irving received an Oscar for the 1999 screenplay. He said he grew to love filmmaking mostly through his friendship with Hallstrom and producer Richard Gladstein. “We knew we would work together again, and what we would work together on was almost immaterial.” They are now adapting Irving’s novel “The Fourth Hand,” which was dedicated to them.

Hallstrom, Irving said, has “great control of the tone of the film, what in cinematic terms is equivalent to the writer’s tone of voice. We do a lot of talking about that. It’s hard to analyze what it is. It’s never entirely serious. Never entirely comic. There’s always an edge of some ending sadness behind even the funniest moments.”

Likewise, Jacobs said the mix of tones was one reason he and Hallstrom were both attracted to “The Shipping News.” “It has broad comedy to grotesque dark humor coexisting with serious drama and magical realism,” he said.

Jacobs and Hallstrom are collaborating on adapting the David Liss murder mystery “Conspiracy of Paper,” set in 1720 London at the birth of the stock exchange.

Although Proulx said she’s sure they know what they’re doing, she still doesn’t understand quite how. “It’s better if I don’t know, in fact,” she said about screenwriting. “I might be tempted to try it.”