2,000 words by Monday

It's essay time for my Literature and Cinema course.  I'm answering a question on Charlie Kaufman's brilliant  script for the Spike Jones movie Adaptation.  The question is:

Explore the ways in which Adaptation addresses questions of origin and originality,creation and creativity.

So, lots of room to explore some ideas.  Too much room?  We'll see by Monday.  Right now I'm lost in the swamp of too many texts.  But I'll follow these paths (at least).

In Film adaptation and its discontents: from Gone with the wind to The passion of The Christ, David Leitch has written that;

“ … adaptation study has drastically limited its horizons by its insistence on treating source texts as canonical authoritative discourse or readerly works rather than internally persuasive discourse or writerly texts … [leading to] the primary lesson of film adaptation: that texts remain alive only to the extent that they can be re-written and that to experience a text in all its power requires each reader to rewrite it.'

and 

“ … we need to re-frame the assumption that … source texts cannot be rewritten … as a new assumption: source texts must be rewritten; we cannot help rewriting them.” 

There's a worked example given by Brett Westbrook in his essay Being Adaptation: The Resistance to Theory 

Take, for example, the 1964 film My Fair Ladydirected by George Cukor.  This film musical was based on the stage musical with lyrics and music by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe, based on a straight (i.e. non-musical) play by George Bernard Shaw, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, based on a Greek legend.  Out of all of these ‘texts” which is the pre-cursor text for the screenplay writer [credited as Lerner], for the director, for the performers, for the audience?

I tried the same for Adaptation.  Here's what I came up with:

The 2004 Film Adaptation directed by Spike Jones, written by Charles [and Donald] Kaufman based on the non-fiction book, The Orchid Thief written by Susan Orlean; developed from her New Yorker articles inspired by an article by [unknown] journalist working for the Miami Herald reporting a real event in 1994.  Add in Jonathan Demme and Edward Braxton, producers who gave the screenplay writing task to Charlie Kaufman.

Both Kaufman and Orlean cite / quote from The Origin Of The Species by Charles Darwin, published in 1858 – 4 years after Alfred Russell Wallace’s tentative paper got there first.

It's hard to pinpoint 'the original'.  Maybe we waste time by attempting to do so in this inter-textual world of ours.

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