No need to adapt

WITH all due respect to the newly triumphant Democrats, 2006 may well become known as the Year of the Original Screenplay.

Screenwriters have fielded a strapping squad of powerful, idiosyncratic original works that collectively seem to represent the culmination of the post9/11 creative incubation period. There’s just more heaviness to their stories -- ones that are deeply felt and personal but that also resonate with national and global moods.

“In this moment, it would be very hard to make a movie that wasn’t acutely aware of the chaos and complexities of people sharing the same geographical space but not the same spiritual space, the same privileges, the same ideals, the same languages,” says writer-director Anthony Minghella, who’s just written his first original screenplay in 15 years, “Breaking and Entering,” and who has won Oscar nods for adapting the novels “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “The English Patient.”

“That’s the urgency of our time,” Minghella continues, “and any writer who’s starting from a blank page is inevitably going to be contemplating this.”

It’s not just the extremely literal tragedies depicted in Paul Greengrass’ and Andrea Berloff’s elegiac scripts for “United 93” and “World Trade Center” that carry this extra weight. In both dramatic and comedic ways, “Babel” (Guillermo Arriaga), “Little Miss Sunshine” (Michael Arndt), “Volver” (Pedro Almodovar), “The Pursuit of Happyness” (Steven Conrad), “Bobby” (Emilio Estevez), “The Queen” (Peter Morgan), “Stranger Than Fiction” (Zach Helm) and “Catch a Fire” (Shawn Slovo) -- Oscar contenders all -- roil with enough loss, anguish, outrage, dislocation, desperation and isolation to sound like an early U2 song. (You may notice something else consistent about these original screenplays: Each has a single credited writer.)

“If there’s a passing fashion for this, I’m delighted,” says Morgan, who’s also likely to get an adapted nomination this year for “The Last King of Scotland,” co-scripted with Jeremy Brock. “I like to think it’s a return to ‘70s-style filmmaking. In the last two or three years there’s been a real explosion of filmmakers making more adult, sophisticated, intelligent stuff.”

Arndt adds that screenplays are acting more like novels. “It’s very heartening to see films that make the effort to go out and understand how the world actually works,” he says. “That’s always been the mission of novels. As a medium, screenplays are less conducive to that sort of exploration of the broader world. I think it’s great now that screenwriters in the post-9/11 era are ambitious enough to want to go out into the world and describe it in a way that a novelist would.”

The recent malaise in original screenplays can be partially attributed to a Hollywood system obsessed with creating marketable products, often by turning to preexisting material -- magazine articles, plays, video games, novels, old TV shows, nonfiction books, other films -- for inspiration.

“Scripts don’t get movies made,” says Christopher McQuarrie, who won the best original screenplay in 1995 for “The Usual Suspects.” “What makes a movie now is a package, a brand, a remake or some preexisting material. A graphic novel that has sold 30,000 copies is considered more bankable than a well-written story no one’s heard of before. The strong showing of adaptations might have its roots in [this]. With more adaptations, you’ll have a bigger pool from which to draw the five ‘best.’ ”

Arndt points out that the weight accorded novels or other prepublished material just goes with the territory. “It’s pretty depressing for people who are trying to write directly for the screen,” he says, “because anyone can buy the rights to a book, and you immediately have more prestige or credibility than you do with an original screenplay.”

“If you were to write ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as an original script,” he adds, “you would have a harder time getting people to take it seriously.”

It’s an odd dynamic for these writers, most of whom prefer to write originals. “A lot of writers think that they have a gallon of ink, and every writer is afraid he’s going to run out of that gallon of ink,” says Arriaga, who has turned down many offers to adapt books and remakes. “Of course, I’m very scared that it will happen to me. So if I only have one gallon of ink I’d prefer to write things that I really believe in. I’d never hesitate to write an original, because it’s the only thing I know how to do.”

Jay Fernandez writes the Scriptland feature every Wednesday in Calendar.