Best adapted screenplay will be a tough competition at Oscars

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MCT) - The Academy Award for best adapted screenplay used to go to glorified stenographers who had extracted ideas and dialogue from existing novels or plays. Meanwhile, a group of presumably more creative writers would compete for best original screenplay.

But in an era when budgets have skyrocketed and a movie that doesn't have a familiar title can bankrupt a studio faster than you can say "Gigli," adapted screenplays are more important than ever. To cash in on a ticket buyer's fleeting instant of name recognition, movies are now based on video games, graphic novels, sitcoms and even songs.

Which means that the screenwriter often does more than just transcribe the source material.

This year, the credible contenders for best adapted screenplay show a great range of creative license. "Revolutionary Road" and "The Reader" are relatively straightforward adaptations of well-regarded novels. "Doubt" and "Frost/Nixon" were expanded into movie scripts by the authors of the tightly focused plays. "Slumdog Millionaire" takes some significant liberties with the source novel, which was titled "Q&A." And "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" spins an almost three-hour movie from a 20-page short story that takes place in a different city and century.

Last week, two Oscar-winning screenwriters spoke about the challenges of adapting existing material. In the case of John Patrick Shanley, an Academy Award winner for "Moonstruck," the source material was his own play, "Doubt." The movie version stars Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Shanley's Tony Award-winning play has only four characters: an aging nun, the priest she suspects of having an improper relationship with an altar boy, an idealistic young nun and the boy's pragmatic mother. Shanley said in a phone interview that he agonized over how to make it into an effective movie.

"Years ago, plays like 'The Miracle Worker' or 'Stalag 17' had dozens of characters, so you could easily turn them into films," he said. "But when you write a play in modern American theater, you tend to have very few characters, because that's the economics of it. Relatively recent plays, like "Proof" or "Crimes of the Heart," are conceived in such a spare way that they are harder to expand into successful films.

"I had to wake myself up from the hypnosis of theater and realize it would be weird not to portray the kid that these clerics are fighting over, it would be weird not to depict the congregation or what's going on in the convent. This is natural and good information to give the audience. Once I realized that, it was easier to make it into a movie."

Shanley has been on both sides of the adaptation process. He has sold scripts to Hollywood producers but stipulated that they could not change his work without his permission. Yet he adapted the novel "Congo" without ever meeting with the original writer, Michael Crichton.

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For "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," screenwriter Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump") didn't have to worry about appeasing the original author. It is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died in 1940. Roth said in a phone interview that movie versions of the story, about a man who ages backward from senility to infancy, have been in development for decades, with dozens of scripts bouncing around Hollywood.

Roth's script is only slightly closer to the original story than "Clueless" was to "Emma." The Fitzgerald story takes place in Baltimore in the 19th century; the film take place in New Orleans in the 20th. Roth said that "Benjamin Button" was not a beloved and untouchable work of art like "The Great Gatsby," so he felt free to make changes.

He wanted it to be more of an adventure story, like a Jack London novel, and to encompass the lifespan of his own parents, who died while he was structuring the script. Then Hurricane Katrina and some tax incentives from Louisiana convinced Roth, director David Fincher and star Brad Pitt that New Orleans would be a fruitful place to set the story.

Roth said he had wrestled with conflicts between literal truth and dramatic truth in his adaptations for "Munich," "The Insider" and "The Good Shepherd."

"You have a moral responsibility to be close to the reality of the story," he said, "but your first job is to be a dramatist, not a documentarian. A good writer can retain a thematic truth inside a story when the facts or particulars are changed."

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© 2008, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.