International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Introduction: Adapting to Adaptations

Author(s): Brian Attebery
Source: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Vol. 24, No. 3 (89) (2013), pp. 394-398
Published by: International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24352962
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 Introduction: Adapting to Adaptations

Brian Attebery

' 1 HE THEME OF THE 34TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE FANTASTIC

in the Arts, held in Orlando in March of 2013, was Fantastic Transformations,
Adaptations and Audiences. Guests of honor included scholar Constance
Penley, who did some of the first work on fan communities and their trans
formation of film and television into unauthorized new texts; Kij Johnson,
who has written not only fine fantasy and science fiction but also game scripts
and comics; and the ubiquitous Neil Gaiman, who travels gracefully among
various media and genres and has been involved in adapting his own work
for tv and the movies. Many of the papers at the Conference testified to the
importance of studying adaptation and cross-media publication and invoked
a number of theories of adaptation and what is often now called "remedia
tion" (a wonderfully slippery term that suggests both transplanting from one
medium to another and remedying what is missing in one form with expres
sion in another). This issue of JFA includes something from each of the three
guests as well as articles that arguably intersect with their work.
At the end of 2013, a pair of movie releases complicated and darkened
the picture of adaptation from book to film. One was the second installment
of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, which is J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit on perfor
mance-enhancing drugs: bloated, clumsy, and full of roid-rage. The other was
Saving Mister Banks, a fictionalized account of the negotiations between author
P. L. Travers and studio head Walt Disney over the adaption of Travers's
Mary Poppins. The film, made by Disney Studios, implies that Travers should
have simply let Disney take over and transform her book and character as
they wished. Despite a nuanced portrayal by Emma Thompson as Travers, the
film reinforces the notion that the author did not know what she was doing
and that, as adaptation theory suggests, we should let go of the notions of the
primacy of and faithfulness to an original text and simply view each as an equal
partner in an intertextual dialogue.

Vol. 24, No. 3, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Copyright © 2013, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

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 Introduction • 395

All well and good, but what if the adaptation is inferior on its own terms,
as an aesthetic object and as an act of expression? We need a theory of bad
adaptation, which I am by no means qualified to formulate, but I'll make a few
suggestions here.
There are movies far worse than The Hobbit or Mary Poppins, and some
of them come from good source material. In the field of fantasy, for instance,
there is the Sci-Fi Channel (as it was then called) and its inept production of
Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, about which Le Guin has written
with fine wit and anger. Even worse was a movie that did not even dare call
itself The Dark Is Rising, though it was originally billed as an adaptation of
Susan Cooper's classic novel, but rather ended up being called The Seeker.
Both Le Guin and Cooper expected changes to their work. Le Guin
had had good luck with a 1979 PBS dramatization of her novel The Lathe of
Heaven, and Cooper, who co-wrote the play and film Foxfire based on Eliot
Wigginton's compilations of Appalachian folk tradition, was well aware of the
artistic choices that must be made in translating ideas from one medium and
genre to another. But the product in these cases was simply bad. The televised
Legend of Earthsea was a great disappointment to fans of the book, although a
few viewers who had not read it found value in the special effects and some of
the acting. Seeker was a critical and commercial flop. In both cases the adap
tors presumed to lecture the writers on what they really intended:

"Miss Le Guin [sic] was not involved in the development of the material
or the making of the film, but we've been very, very honest to the books,"
explains director Rob Lieberman. "We've tried to capture all the levels of
spiritualism, emotional content and metaphorical messages. Throughout the
whole piece, I saw it as having a great duality of spirituality versus paganism
and wizardry, male and female duality. The final moments of the film culmi
nate in the union of all that and represent two different belief systems in this
world, and that's what Ursula intended to make a statement about. The only
thing that saves this Earthsea universe is the union of those two beliefs." (Sci
Fi Dec 2004, quoted in Le Guin)

In other words, we know what Le Guin meant to do. We have kindly remedied
her mistakes.
In the case of The Seeker, I can only guess that the screenwriter and direc
tor sat down together and made a list of everything people loved about The
Dark Is Rising:

Its atmosphere of hushed anticipation and mystery.

Its vivid evocation of a particular place and time: rural England in the 1960s.
Its complex characterization, especially of the one-time ally and then

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396 • Introduction

betrayer of the Light called the Walker.

Its depiction of a large, loving family that is both outside the main magical
conflict and utterly necessary to the hero's ultimate victory.
Its use of English folk tradition to unearth, in archaeological fashion, the
pagan midwinter celebration underlying modern Christmas.
Its delicate balance between childhood and maturity and magical and mun
dane worlds.

Then the filmmakers said, "We won't do any of that!"

The problem in both cases is not that the adaptations were not faithful;
it's that they were shoddy.
So what causes a project to go wrong, rather than, as in Jackson's and
co-screenwriters Phillipa Boyens's and Fran Walsh's extended edition of Lord
of the Rings, mostly right? What's the difference between these and films that
actually eclipse their source material, like Gone with the Wind or Casablanca or
Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which tightens and
intensifies J. K. Rowling's novel?
Here's my theory. Bad adaptation second-guesses its source material and
its creator(s). Bad adaptation pays no attention to the audience's reactions to
the original. Remakes of previous adaptations that don't look at the source are
nearly always disasters (e.g., the 2002 film of The Lathe of Heaven that aimed
only at dumbing down the earlier PBS version). Adaptations go wrong when
they try too hard to be faithful and don't exploit the potential of the new
medium, but they go even more badly astray when the adaptors do not love
the source. In the case of Mary Poppins, I would claim that the charms of the
film are outweighed by the fact that it now prevents new readers of Travers's
novels from appreciating her quirky, unsettling vision. I liked the movie when
it came out, but I already knew the books and knew that there was much more
substance there. I thought Julie Andrews strove mightily to overcome serious
miscasting, and found the songs to range from blandly inoffensive to actively
irksome (I know that not everyone agrees with me). My students these days
actively dislike the book's lead character and are unprepared for its complex
tone—tart and tender and comic and frightening—and its mythic resonances,
which the Disney people evidently were either deaf to or actively disliked.
One would never know that the smiling technicolor Poppins derives from a
character who is quite literally a demigoddess, and an alarming one at that.
A totally self-indulgent game is to bypass the actual filmmakers and
assemble an imaginary cast and crew for the movie that should have been.
My ideal Mary Poppins is directed by Michael Powell—shall we say in 1948,
shoehorning the production between his afterlife fantasy Stairway to Heaven
and his dark fairy tale The Red Shoes? The screenwriter is Robert Pirosh, an
adaptable Hollywood writer who contributed to the Marx Brothers' A Night

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 Introduction • 397

at the Opera and to The Wizard of Oz and co-wrote the 1942 1 Married a
Witch. For original songs, we have a newly teamed pair of songwriters named
Michael Flanders and Donald Swann; they haven't yet produced such great
songs as "Have Some Madeira, M'Dear," and "The Reluctant Cannibal," but
let's give the young guys a chance. Most importantly, Mary Poppins is played
by Beatrice Lillie. Lillie was a comedienne who combined broad humor with
a serious, slightly offended demeanor. Her looks were odd: sharp nose, long
chin, button eyes—very much like Mary Shepard's illustrations of the Poppins
books, in fact. She excelled at sending up sentimental culture: look on the web
for audio or video recordings of her performance of "There Are Fairies at the
Bottom of My Garden." Sung in what she called her "mezzanine soprano,"
the Victorian song, a favorite of her mother's, becomes a riotous and rather
bawdy send-up of everything twee and precious. Most importantly, she was P.
L. Travers's own choice for the role. The old gal did know what she was doing.
My version would not have made as much money as the Disney film, but
it might well have been a classic work of fantasy and a fit companion piece
to the original book, rather than a barrier to entry. Ultimately what we ask of
adaptation is that it invite audiences to look beyond the text at hand toward
other versions, other crystallizations. Every reading of a text is, after all, an
interpretation—a translation. Adaptation opens the way for further adapta
tion; if some members of the audience try their own transformations, the world
is made richer, as when John Milton wrote his famous piece of Bible fan-fic,
"Paradise Lost."
We start the issue off with Neil Gaiman's Guest of Honor address, accom
panied by Peter Straub's moving introduction. The published title of the talk
was "The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography," although it
isn't really about that at all, except where it is. It's about the power of stories
and the uses of genre and ultimately about the fact that, as Gaiman says, read
ers and writers are collaborators and co-creators, no matter what the genre or
the medium.
Kij Johnson did not give a speech, so in order to suggest her contributions
to the Conference and to the various genres she employs, I subsequently posed
ten questions and she kindly agreed to answer them. Our email conversation
is reproduced here, following ICFA President Sydney Duncan's introduction
to Johnson's reading. Constance Penley's scholar's address was primarily a tour
of her recent collaborative Melrose Place project that can't be reproduced here.
Instead, we offer a transcript of the fascinating and wide-ranging conversa
tion that took place earlier between Penley and Karen Hellekson, along with
Hellekson's introduction to the luncheon address.
Anca Rosu's essay "Food Fantasies in George R. R. Martin" concerns a
text that is multiply immersed in issues of adaptation. Each of the installments
in Martin's saga is in some ways an adaptation of those that preceded it: each

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398 ■ Introduction

converses with and changes the meanings of its predecessors. In addition,

because HBO began its dramatization midway through the publication of the
books, the TV series necessarily intervenes in the reception and probably the
composition of the final volumes, especially because Martin, who spent several
years as a TV writer before returning to the world of print, has been actively
involved in the production. Rosu's article does not discuss the televised ver
sion of Martin's fantasy. Her interest is in food as a form of social discourse
and cultural expression, and though television would seem to offer a richer
sensory experience than words, it is less effective in conveying taste and touch.
For those, we would need to turn to another kind of adaptation mentioned by
Rosu: the spin-off cookbooks.
Gina Wisker's essay concerns a writer who is now best known for novels
and stories adapted for film by Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Roeg. Wisker
does not look directly at any of those works by Daphne du Maurier: Jamaica
Inn, "Don't Look Now," "The Birds," or Rebecca, but at the less-familiar time
travel narratives "Split Second" and The House on the Strand. Simply calling
them time-travel narratives already suggests something of their intertextual
ity. Any such story, says Wisker, necessarily adapts H. G. Wells's The Time
Machine and other previous time fictions as well as interacting with scientific
and poetic investigations of the way we perceive ourselves in time. The con
versation now includes not only Du Marier but also Audrey Niffenegger and
Stephen Hawking and Doctor Who. And, as only storytelling can do, it loops
back into the past to pick up Mark Twain and T. S. Eliot and Albert Einstein.
As Wisker suggests, stories are our time machines.
Greg Conley's article on Algernon Blackwood asks, more or less, "When is
a horror story not a horror story?" The answer, according to Blackwood's "The
Willows" and "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" is when the dangerous alien
entities are not malevolent but instead are motivated by an evolution-driven
morality that is radically unlike that of humans. I suspect that this perspective
might be applicable to other Blackwood stories as well, including one called
"Ancient Sorceries," the inspiration for the 1942 film Cat People. In that
case, the most important elements of the fiction crossed over into the movie
unscathed, and might account for the movie's distinctive mixture of horror
and allure.

Works Cited
Le Guin, Ursula K. "Earthsea Miniseries: A Reply to Some Statements Made
by the Film-Makers of the Earthsea Miniseries Before it was Shown."
Ursula K. Le Gum's Website 13 Nov 2004. Web. 12 Feb 2014.

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