Authoring a film adaptation of a literary source not only requires a media conversion but also a transformation as a result of the differing dramatic demands of cinema. The most critical central step in this transformation of a literary source to the screen is the writing of the screenplay. The screenplay usually serves to recruit producers, director, and actors; to attract capital investment; and to give focus to the conception and production of the film project. Often undergoing multiple revisions prior to production, the screenplay represents the crucial decisions of writer and director that will determine how and to what end the film will imitate or depart from its original source. Authorship in Film Adaptation is an accessible, provocative text that opens up new areas of discussion on the central process of adaptation surrounding the screenplay and screenwriter-director collaboration. In contrast to narrow binary comparisons of literary source text and film, the twelve essays in this collection also give attention to the underappreciated role of the screenplay and film pre-production that can signal the primary intention for a film. Divided into four parts, this collection looks first at the role of Hollywood's activist producers and major auteurs such as Hitchcock and Kubrick as they worked with screenwriters to formulate their audio-visual goals. The second part offers case studies of Devil in a Blue Dress and The Sweet Hereafter, for which the directors wrote their own adapted screenplays. Considering the variety of writer-director working relationships that are possible, Part III focuses on adaptations that alter genre, time, and place, and Part IV investigates adaptations that alter stories of romance, sexuality, and ethnicity.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief “Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times “Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal

A lively discussion of costume dramas to women's films, Shelley Cobb investigates the practice of adaptation in contemporary films made by women. The figure of the woman author comes to the fore as a key site for the representation of women's agency and the authority of the woman filmmaker.

Provides advice for aspiring screenwriters on how to write scripts for television and motion pictures, including what topics are popular, how to rework scenes, and how to sell screenplays in Hollywood.

Examining films about writers and acts of writing, The Writer on Film brilliantly refreshes some of the well-worn 'adaptation' debates by inviting film and literature to engage with each other trenchantly and anew – through acts of explicit configuration not adaptation.

Books in Motion addresses the hybrid, interstitial field of film adaptation. The introductory essay integrates a retrospective survey of the development of adaptation studies with a forceful argument about their centrality to any history of culture—any discussion, that is, of the transformation and transmission of texts and meanings in and across cultures. The thirteen especially composed essays that follow, organised into four sections headed ‘Paradoxes of Fidelity’, ‘Authors, Auteurs, Adaptation’, ‘Contexts, Intertexts, Adaptation’ and ‘Beyond Adaptation’, variously illustrate that claim by problematising the notion of fidelity, highlighting the role played by adaptation in relation to changing concepts of authorship and auteurism, exploring the extent to which the intelligibility of film adaptations is dependent on contextual and intertextual factors, and making a claim for the need to transcend any narrowly-defined concept of adaptation in the study of adaptation. Discussion ranges from adaptations of established classics like A Tale of Two Cities, Frankenstein, Henry V, Le temps retrouvé, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, ‘The Dead’ or Wuthering Heights, to contemporary (popular) texts/films like Bridget Jones’s Diary, Fools, The Governess, High Fidelity, The Hours, The Orchid Thief/Adaptation, the work of Doris Dörrie, the first Harry Potter novel/film, or the adaptations made by Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Walt Disney. This book will appeal to both a specialised readership and to those accessing the dynamic field of adaptation studies for the first time.

“You're hooked, you feel every cut, grope up every cliff, swallow water with every spill of the canoe, sweat with every draw of the bowstring. Wholly absorbing [and] dramatic.”—Harper's Magazine The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance. Praise for Deliverance “Once read, never forgotten.”—Newport News Daily Press “A tour de force . . . How a man acts when shot by an arrow, what it feels like to scale a cliff or to capsize, the ironic psychology of fear: these things are conveyed with remarkable descriptive writing.”—The New Republic “Freshly and intensely alive . . . with questions that haunt modern urban man.”—Southern Review “A fine and honest book that hits the reader's mind with the sting of a baseball just caught in the hand.”—The Nation “[James Dickey's] language has descriptive power not often matched in contemporary American writing.”—Time “A harrowing trip few readers will forget.”—Asheville Citizen-Times "A novel that will curl your toes . . . Dickey's canoe rides to the limits of dramatic tension."—New York Times Book Review "A brilliant and breathtaking adventure."—The New Yorker