Adaptations

Dracula (Norton Critical Editions)

Dracula is one of the few horror books to be honored by inclusion in the Norton Critical Edition series. (The others are Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, Heart of Darkness, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Metamorphosis.) This 100th-anniversary edition includes not only the complete authoritative text of the novel with illuminating footnotes, but also four contextual essays, five reviews from the time of publication, five articles on dramatic and film variations, and seven selections from literary and academic criticism. Nina Auerbach of the University of Pennsylvania (author of Our Vampires, Ourselves) and horror scholar David J. Skal (author of Hollywood Gothic, The Monster Show, and Screams of Reason) are the editors of the volume. Especially fascinating are excerpts from materials that Bram Stoker consulted in his research for the book, and his working papers over the several years he was composing it. The selection of criticism includes essays on how Dracula deals with female sexuality, gender inversion, homoerotic elements, and Victorian fears of "reverse colonization" by politically turbulent Transylvania.

The aristocratic vampire that haunts the Transylvanian countryside has captivated readers' imaginations since it was first published in 1897. Hindle asserts that Dracula depicts an embattled man's struggle to recover his "deepest sense of himself as a man", making it the "ultimate terror myth".

Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen: 35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films

An Eclectic Collection of Fiction That Inspired Film

Memento, All About Eve, Rear Window, Rashomon, and 2001: A Space Odyssey are all well-known and much-loved movies, but what is perhaps a lesser-known fact is that all of them began their lives as short stories. Adaptations gathers together 35 pieces that have been the basis for films, many from giants of American literature (Hemingway, Fitzgerald) and many that have not been in print for decades (the stories that inspired Bringing Up Baby, Meet John Doe, and All About Eve).

Categorized by genre, and featuring movies by master directors such as Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Frank Capra, and John Ford, as well as relative newcomers such as Chris Eyre and Christopher Nolan, Adaptations offers insight into the process of turning a short story into a screenplay, one that, when successful, doesn’t take drastic liberties with the text upon which it is based, but doesn’t mirror its source material too closely either. The stories and movies featured in Adaptations include:

•Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report,” which became the 2002 blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise

•“The Harvey Pekar Name Story” by reclusive graphic artist Harvey Pekar, whose life was the inspiration for American Splendor, winner of the 2003 Sundance Grand Jury Prize

•Hagar Wilde’s “Bringing Up Baby,” the basis of the classic film Bringing Up Baby, anthologized here for the first time ever

•“The Swimmer” by John Cheever, an example of a highly regarded story that many feared might prove unadaptable

•The predecessor to the beloved holiday classic A Christmas Story, “Red Ryder Nails the Hammond Kid” by Jean Shepherd

Whether you’re a fiction reader or a film buff, Adaptations is your behind-the-scenes look at the sometimes difficult, sometimes brilliantly successful process from the printed page to the big screen.

The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco

The Shawshank Redemption: The Shooting Script (Newmarket Shooting Script Series)

The first book in the Newmarket Shooting Script Series reissued with new material to coincide with the Warner Bros. theatrical re-release and special 10th anniversary DVD launch of this modern classic.

This expanded edition draws from the many new extras that are being created for the DVD, including 90 minutes of commentary by Darabont, documentary material on the making of the film, and a tribute parody of the film.

Nominated for 7 Academy Awards®, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, The Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, is an extraordinary tale of hope and survival inside a maximum security prison. Based on a Stephen King novella, Frank Darabont's screenplay follows the complex twenty-year relationship between two convicts who have little in common—except friendship.

Darabont personally wrote and/or assembled all of the content in The Shawshank Redemption: The Shooting Script, as follows:

• Introductions by King and Darabont on the movie's genesis
• The shooting script in its original form ("the one I wrote, the one Castle Rock decided to make, the one my cast and crew dealt with every day")
• Detailed analysis of script-to-screen changes (26 pages) showing why and how scenes were cut, and how some scenes were handled technically
• Two storyboard sequences, with commentary
• Stills section (35 photos)
• Afterword by Darabont about his experience in Hollywood ("It took me nine years of saving, struggling, and honing my craft before I started making my living as a writer.")
• 35 b/w photos, plus storyboards

Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature

This concise and readable new text for courses in Film Adaptation or Film and Literature introduces students to the art of adapting works of literature for film. Adaptation describes the interwoven histories of literature and film, presents key analytical approaches to adaptation, and provides an in-depth overview of adaptations of novels, short stories, plays, nonfiction, and animation. The book concludes with an analysis of why adaptations sometimes fail.

The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact And Fiction Into Film (Owl Books)

Gone With the Wind

Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of an American Classic.

Published in the spring of 1936, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was an immediate and overwhelming success; millions of copies were sold in its first year alone. By the time the film opened on December 15, 1939, the anticipation and excitement were so great that the city of Atlanta declared the day an official holiday. Since then, more than 300 million people have seen the film and every year hundreds of thousands of copies of the novel are sold in dozens of languages.

This lavishly illustrated book is the ultimate behind-the-scenes history of the novel, the film, and the phenomenon of Gone With the Wind. It includes wonderful anecdotes, original quotes from the stars and the directors souvenir programs from the original premiere, many rare never-before published photographs, and more, from the smell of the smoke and the heat of the flames during the filming of the "burning of Atlanta" sequence to the soft touch of the red dust at the location Tara; from the fangue on the faces of cast and crew after grueling months of shooting to the thrill of premiere night, you will experience the unfolding drama as if you were there.

Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry

In Happily Ever After, Jack Zipes addresses his ongoing concern with the socialization of children, the impact of the fairy tale on children and adults, and the future development of the fairy tale as film. As a result of analyzing the historical trajectory of storytelling and the literary fairy tale, the essays in Happily Ever After move from the sixteenth century to the present, between different cultures and societies, and from specific analyses to general syntheses. Zipes demonstrates how Straparola's 16th-century Puss in Boots tale is related to Disney's 1922 film version. He examines the narrative structure of Hansel and Gretel as a rationalization for child abuse, tracing the same theme in Collad's novel Pinocchio and its Disney film version. He concludes by examining how we have come full circle from the early oral tradition in light of the rise of storytelling throughout the world. Underscoring all these essays is the question that all fairy tales raise: what does it take to bring about happiness? Is happiness only to be found in fairy tales?

The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation

The Practice of Writing

English author, literary critic, and Birmingham professor David Lodge has given us a thoughtful collection of essays on writing, serving as an end-of-century bookend for E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. But given the particular century in which Lodge writes, he doesn't stop with prose but also considers stage and television work--he adapted Martin Chuzzlewit for the BBC-- giving the book its greatest strength. Lodge's range runs from academic musings to television scripts, a breadth worthy of any scribe here on the disparate, millennial cusp.

When it comes to the craft of writing, bestselling novelist David Lodge finds much to celebrate, analyze, and confess. In this absorbing collection of seventeen essays he ponders the work of writers he particularly admires, current and past trends in literary style, and the mechanics of the craft itself. Revealing, enlightening pieces on Graham Greene, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess are interspersed with personal reflections on Lodge's own artistic and technical struggles. His insights into the contemporary world of publishing, and mass culture in general, are both trenchant and refreshing. As entertaining as it is edifying, this collection of fine writing about writing will prove valuable to students of the art as well as to Lodge's many, loyal readers who wish to know more about his own work.