The book on adapting

Finding the key to effectively adapting a novel into a screenplay can be something of a mystery, so it seems appropriate that Nicholas Meyer was hired to turn Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” into a script. After all, Meyer is best known for turning his own novel “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” into a successful film, and that tale told of the greatest sleuth of them all, Sherlock Holmes.

In addition to his many writing and directing credits -- including helming two chapters in the “Star Trek” saga, “The Wrath of Khan” (1982) and “The Undiscovered Country” (1991) -- Meyer wrote half a dozen novels, and he clearly understands the pitfalls that face a writer adapting a well-known piece of fiction. “The more important or beloved or significant the book is, the more you have an obligation to try to do it some kind of justice,” he observes. And with those works, he adds, “it will be more difficult to do it justice. People are going to be paying attention.”

Gazillions of Harry Potter readers can attest to that, being able to recite chapter and verse any variation from the popular book series in its transition to the big screen. And things can get even trickier when the assignment is a prize-winning work of literary fiction, such as “The Human Stain,” written by one of the most heralded novelists of our time. “You have to split the difference between respect on the one hand and the kind of flexibility that may border on what some may call irreverence on the other,” Meyer notes. “It will be simplified, but with luck and determination and maybe even skill it will not be simplistic.”

Simply put, “The Human Stain” is about Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), an erudite college professor in his early 70s whose long, illustrious career comes to an abrupt halt when he is accused of making a racist remark in class. In the aftermath of his disgrace, Coleman embarks on an impetuous affair with a much younger working-class woman (Nicole Kidman), becomes friends with a neighboring writer (Gary Sinise), and a shocking secret is revealed. (That’s all you’re going to learn about it here, so feel free to read on.)

Directed by Robert Benton, the film opens Oct. 3, a little more than two years after Meyer was approached to write the screenplay. Once he signed on, the first thing Meyer did was to “make an outline of the book, a couple of sentences for every page. This is a way of memorizing the book and also of internalizing it, making it mine in a way.”

Turning to an entry in the 28-page outline that comprises his overview of the novel, he reads, “Page 164, Faunia’s destiny is to be a stepdaughter.’ That’s the summary of something that happens on that page. Once I’ve got this, then I can go through and read the book again in sort of shorthand and say, ‘What do I need?’ ” Meyer thoughtfully likens the process of turning a novel into a screenplay to “a translation. And it’s also a transposition, like taking it from one musical key to another.”

While writing the script, it was of course necessary for Meyer to rearrange certain scenes from Roth’s novel, eliminate others and create some that didn’t exist. “The novelist is juggling a million balls, and he has all the time in the world to catch each one,” he says. “I have 115, 120 pages, and I won’t be able to catch every one, so I can’t toss them all. Everything about adapting a novel, no matter what your aesthetic goal, no matter what you owe to the novel, is a process of elimination. How much can you combine? How much can you do without?”

Meyer didn’t talk to Roth about “The Human Stain” and was not present on the day Roth visited the film set. “Someone there had the temerity to ask him if he had read the screenplay,” Meyer relates, “and he said no. When I was told this, and I got over being hurt and relieved -- not necessarily in that order -- I thought, ‘Well, sure, why does he want to see Mrs. Meyer’s oldest [mess] up what he wrote?’ Then I thought about it some more, and I understood. He got it the way he wanted it in the novel.” When it was Meyer’s turn, “I got it the way I wanted it in the script.”

In doing so, Meyer changed characters as well as events, and this is most notable in his treatment of Nathan Zuckerman (Sinise). Thought of as the author’s alter ego, Zuckerman has played a role in eight Roth novels since first appearing in 1979’s “The Ghost Writer.” The line between fact and fiction seems especially obscured in “The Human Stain,” which finds Zuckerman, like Roth, an aging writer living in relative seclusion and recovering from a bout of prostate cancer that has left him impotent. Meyer kept the parts about cancer and seclusion but opted to remake Nathan as a notably younger man.

“I wasn’t sure how dramatically compelling it was to have two old men in this story,” he explains. “It seemed to me a somewhat redundant dynamic. I thought that if Nathan was younger, it would be an effective counterpoint to Coleman, whose life is largely behind him.”

But it’s not just Coleman’s story that he brought into sharper focus this way. In Meyer’s version of “The Human Stain,” Nathan is more in the forefront of the goings-on. “Nathan is very much an observer [in the book], but that’s not very dramatic,” Meyer notes. “Nathan is trying to write a second novel, but he’s blocked. He’s impotent. And there’s Coleman, this older man, this rather vital life force, who’s just gotten a second lease on life through his relationship with Faunia [Kidman].” When asked if anyone has questioned the liberty he took in de-aging Nathan, Meyer replies cautiously, “Not so far.”

In restructuring the narrative, one thing Meyer did right away was move a glimpse of the story’s climax to the very beginning. “I knew I was going to start it with the car crash,” he reveals. “It’s a big hook to get us going.” As to the question of giving away too much too soon, he recalls a lesson learned from a playwriting teacher at the University of Iowa -- indeed, a recent talk with Meyer, 57, at his Pacific Palisades home is liberally sprinkled with references to myriad cultural sources. “He asked, ‘Why does Macbeth start with a clap of thunder? It’s a good way to get your attention.’ ”

Similarly, Meyer figured that if the film version of “The Human Stain” begins with a car crash, “the audience will want to find out what happened. Why did it happen? And then we’ll tell that story. The process of drama is to ask the question, raise as much suspense as possible leading up to the answer of the question -- and when the question’s answered, the people can go home.”

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How the novel’s characters catch up at dinner -- with a screenwriter’s alteration of the text

In this scene, which takes place relatively early in the film, Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) has invited Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) to join him and Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman) at a restaurant for dinner. In writing the scene, screenwriter Nicholas Meyer took liberties with Philip Roth’s novel, both thematic and literal.

For one thing, Meyer made Nathan a younger, more central figure than he is in the book. “I thought it would be interesting if Nathan was a younger man, with his own issues, his own crisis,” he says. In both the book and the novel, Nathan serves as the story’s narrator, but Meyer sets up more of a contrast between Nathan and Coleman while maintaining the close friendship the men develop. In the book, Coleman briefly introduces Nathan to his lover, Faunia, at the dairy where she works (this scene plays out without Nathan in the film). Then Nathan doesn’t see Faunia again until close to the end, when he encounters her and Coleman at a classical music concert.

Once Meyer decided to involve Nathan more directly in what was chiefly Coleman’s story, “You think, ‘How many pages has it been since we saw Nathan? Is he ever going to meet Faunia, or is she just going to be an abstraction to him?’ Eventually Nathan is going to write a book about this, and if he doesn’t meet Faunia until the concert, that seems very late in the day. So you try to figure out when and how Nathan could wind up meeting her.”

The dinner scene presented the perfect opportunity for Meyer, although when Coleman and Faunia dine out in the book, Nathan is not present.

“It makes sense for Coleman to invite Nathan to the restaurant,” Meyer claims of his alteration to the original text.

“Nathan is his friend, and Coleman wants him to meet his girlfriend. And of course, it’s just the kind of thing that would make Faunia nuts,” Meyer adds, “so it has some additional dramatic value.”

Faunia’s behavior further underscores this: She barely acknowledges Nathan and soon storms out of the restaurant.

“She’s already angry with Coleman for bringing her to this fancy place [because she sees it as drawing attention to their class difference],” Meyer continues. “Nathan is yet one more instance of Coleman doing something that really [irritates] her. It’s a visceral response. “ It’s just a brief exchange, yet each of the three characters is further clarified for the audience. “It is part of the elegant economics of dramatic writing,” Meyer explains, “How many birds can you kill with one stone? When you’re writing a play or a movie, you have a limited amount of time, and you have to make every line and every incident perform double if not triple duty, to justify its being there.”