#because like. I absolutely hate when modern shakespeare adaptations put every character whose involved in politics in a business suit

[dgcatanisiri]

The key to any good adaption is understanding a certain set of things.

1. Don’t be afraid to update the source material. Yes, even if it’s “timeless.”

All media is a product of its time, so you need to recognize that what worked for the original will not necessarily translate for the new audience. If a basic conceit of your product is a certain societal mindset is the norm (just, for example, that “homosexuality is inherently bad,” or “transgender people are inherently hilarious,” or “a woman’s place is unquestionably in the home”), you’re probably best off just packing it in then and there, it’s not going to work. Society evolves, times change, and while we can let these things slide for media that is older, we do not extend this same slack to media made now.

There’s a reason that a lot of stagings of something like Taming of the Shrew, or more modern adaptations like Kiss Me Kate or 10 Things I Hate About You, will often twist what is, on the page, Kate’s “tameness” being a show for the sake of winning the wager, that she is merely performing what is expected of her, while still maintaining her own independence and attitude, and that she has learned that she could use this performance to make Petruchio do as she wanted, or even that the both of them are in on it and have found an equal in the other - in the 15th century, “taming” a “shrew” was considered how one was supposed to be, that a woman was supposed to be subservient to her husband, and that her being so brash and bold from the start was already pushing the values of Shakespeare’s original audience. 

And this is the case of adapting something even as recent as ten, fifteen, twenty years ago - society has changed, and it’s recognized that what was seen as acceptable then was actually punching down at marginalized groups. That’s not funny. Comedy is the quickest genre to age, and the most likely to age poorly. Look at any given 90s romcom and you’ll notice a LOT of issues - the heteronormativity, where no one is gay (aside from MAYBE a single token character), the cast is mostly white - there may, at most, be a black best friend who may or may not be paired up with someone who literally exists for the purpose of arm candy, and you might spot an extra or two in the background, and they’ll use words that we now recognize as slurs so casually you’ll have to go back to realize yeah, they actually said that. And that’s not even scratching the surface.

When it comes to coming to an old piece of media and deciding “I want to do this again,” you absolutely MUST recognize what is no longer acceptable. And if the baseline concept of your selected media is something unacceptable, put aside the dream, this will not end well for you if you attempt to go through with it.

2. Recognize what works and what doesn’t for your medium.

This is something more for straightforward adaptations - book to movie, movie to TV show, stage to screen, etc. A change in medium is going to require a change to the material. It just is. This is why, for example, straight adaptations of video games are extremely hard to pull off - you’re changing an interactive media to a noninteractive one, and, in a lot of cases, that guts the core investment. It’s one thing to play Lara Croft as she raids the tombs, doing the platforming and puzzle challenges yourself. But as a movie, just taking any given game and making a direct 1:1 reshoot, you’re basically just watching her do the same thing with no involvement yourself, and, as a result, you end up watching a glorified cutscene.

It’s the same with stage to screen. Theatre is a medium of its own, with its own internal logic, rules, and structure. In theatre, a character can address the audience, it’s accepted. It doesn’t quite work as well on screen. (For further expansion, there’s a segment of Lindsay Ellis’s video essay on Mel Brooks and The Ethics of Satire that discusses how this works for the stage version of The Producers, but fizzled out in the 2006 film adaptation.) This is often a problem in film adaptations of stage musicals, that the directors don’t know what to focus on or how to film a large group of people, dancing and singing, so, while there’s some general competence, a lot of the film directors don’t have the same eye for them that they would in a straightforward dialogue-driven movie. Stopping the dramatic interaction between two people for what is, in effect, a symbolic struggle as they exchange heated high notes throws off the momentum of a director who knows how to stage the actors and move the camera in a direct argument, but gets confused when both parties dance across the soundstage all through the scene.

Likewise, books allow the audience to understand what is going through a character’s head during a scene, we are able to hear their thoughts and recognize what they’re doing without the character ever speaking a word. That is a luxury film’s nature doesn’t offer. Voice overs are a frequent way around this, but that too is limiting, generally forcing the film into a single viewpoint, which may not be how the narrative was structured. So this is where establishing dialogue has to be included.

This can be a problem, though, as the screenwriter may have a different style than the original writer, so, instead of transplanting dialogue, they have to come up with their own words, which can often end up just being an exposition dump. It can be done, but it is a tightrope walk.

3. Understand what can and can’t be cut.

A frequent problem of adaptations, especially to film, is that they are drawing on source material that maybe be, in a direct, 1:1 adaptation of the original, too long for a modern adaptation. This is a frequent issue with the Harry Potter adaptations, for example, where to cover all of the events of just the first book, would probably have clocked in at three and a half, even four hours, and they only got longer from there. Some things just had to go.

Which is a problem, because for the most part, if something is in the source material, it is there for a reason. Foreshadowing, character establishment, worldbuilding, whatever, there is a reason that any content is included in the first place. 

So you need to find ways to either condense or work around things - going back to Harry Potter, as a character, while he’d had his uses in the books, Peeves’s contribution to the overall tapestry of the series was small enough that he could be removed. Same with a character like Professor Binns, whose largest contribution was the exposition of the Chamber of Secrets, could have that shunted over to a character like Professor McGonagall, with no need to hire another actor for one scene and account for this character later (this later came into play with characters like Professor Trelawney, who appeared in all the books after her introduction, but not every film). 

The runtime makes a difference, especially given how much we see movies try to have as many showing per day as they can - the shorter the film, the more times it can be shown. So you need to know what can go and what can be condensed. 

But this can backfire - cutting a scene can often remove important context and characterization, even if it’s short or small. Star Trek, the 09 film, cut a scene between young James Kirk and his older brother. Now, it’s not really that important in this adaptation that Kirk has an older brother, so on paper, yeah, this scene getting cut made sense. BUT this scene featured Kirk’s older brother walking out because of the abuse being inflicted on them by “Uncle Frank,” and how he intended to sell their father’s car, how Frank was denying James Kirk a sense of being who he was, telling him “You’re no one.” This is what leads to the reckless theft of said car that did make it into the final cut, and made that joyride less into a moment of “fuck the man, I do what I want,” and more of a moment of declaration of him trying to find himself (and makes this kid shouting to the robo-cop “My name is James Tiberius Kirk!” less of a cutesy way of getting in the character’s full name and more a way of, again, showing him declaring who he is.) It also shows James Kirk’s desire for justice and fairness for people, a VERY important element for this character, showing him standing up for his older brother, ostensibly someone who should be standing up for him instead. This is a pretty big characterization moment that got cut, presumably because the casual audience didn’t know that Kirk had an older brother.

I realize that this is using a cut scene from the film script and not a direct adaptation, but I think that’s an important thing to bring up anyway, given that Star Trek 09 was an adaptation of a three year TV series - of course they had to condense, launch arcs that successive movies could pick up, all of that. But they still needed to establish these characters. By cutting this scene, you lose that core nugget of Kirk’s character, and we’re left with reckless asshole Kirk, the character a lot of people thought didn’t deserve the center chair by the end of the movie because moments like this didn’t make the final cut.

Know your story, know your characters, and understand how to keep their core identities while still cutting the things you can’t keep, because of medium changes or runtime concerns.

4. What new elements are you bringing to the table?

If you’re making a new adaptation of something, WHY are you making it? What is the benefit of not just a new version of old material, but even what makes YOU the correct storyteller?

Let’s give another example here. Let’s say that I am given the green light to go for a new adaptation of... oh, let’s say Superman’s early years, we’re ten years out from the end of Smallville, surely someone’s gonna start kicking that around eventually, let’s go with it here and now. My requirements are to keep the baseline of Smallville for a new show - high school Clark Kent, no flights, no tights to start with, developing, growing powers, friendship with Lex Luthor, same core cast to start with (so Clark, Pete, Chloe, Lana, Whitney, Lex, Lionel, Martha, and Jonathan), basically start the series fresh from the point of the original series’s pilot. How I go from there is up to me, re: how much/how little to incorporate from later in the series, when powers develop and in what order, when to introduce other characters... I just basically have to start fresh with the same components of Smallville that the original had.

So when given these components, I feel it is my obligation to create a new picture with them, because to just retread the old material, updates to the time and cast notwithstanding, is saying I don’t see this as worth doing anything different. And if that’s the case, why bother? It is incumbent on me to do different things with these pieces - maybe in this version, Lana’s a lesbian and dating Chloe, which mostly puts to bed the Clark-Lana relationship (or maybe she briefly uses Clark as a beard to cover her attraction). Whitney can become a part of the core cast, instead of being like the only opening credits characters who never learns Clark’s secret. Pete’s known about Clark’s powers for years. The meteor freaks ...okay, no, I’m calling them ‘metahumans’ from the start here, are going to be a more persistent element to the central struggle - none of the convenient karmic killing, Clark has to deal with the consequences of these characters having enhanced abilities, not just have them conveniently fall down and break their neck or something. Lex ends up brought into the core group, and it becomes a central conflict of his character arc that he may actually have the potential to not be the ultimate villain - this is an adaptation, it’s entirely possible that Lex being the bad guy is NOT a foregone conclusion, especially if one wants to take the moral of “nothing is written in stone, there is no fate.”

...shit, now I actually WANT to do this version...

See, that’s taking the same pieces and making a new picture with them. Because if you’re just going to redo the original, just let the original air in place of your new thing, because you have made no effort to change anything other than the bare minimum. Hell, even Smallville brought something new to the table by creating Chloe Sullivan, who did not exist in Superman media before, but has since appeared sporadically in the comics. 

Don’t just tell the same old story to tell the same old story. Bring something new to the table. If you’re really lucky, you may just add something that becomes so definitive to the franchise, when people talk about it later, they’ll wonder why it wasn’t there to begin with - another DC hero example, look at Batman the Animated Series, without which we would not have either Harley Quinn or Victor Fries’s tragic backstory, yet now both are considered iconic and core to the franchise and the character, respectively.